Chris Hedges's Blog, page 345

The Raging Crisis Hitting Trump’s Base the Hardest

President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to declare a national emergency if Congress refuses to pony up $5.7 billion to build the “great, great wall” he promised his base during the 2016 election campaign.  In an apocalyptic televised address early in January, he even warned — falsely, as fact checkers revealed during the speech — that a tsunami of hard-core criminals and drugs was sweeping across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Fabricating national emergencies is unconscionable, especially when there are real ones requiring urgent attention.

Here’s an example: since 1999, 400,000 Americans have died from overdoses of opioids, including pain medications obtained legally through prescriptions or illegally, as well as from heroin, an illicit opioid.  The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that prescription medications were involved in 218,000 of those fatalities.

Even the president labeled opioid addiction a “public health emergency” after a commission he appointed in March 2017 issued a report detailing its horrific consequences.  Trump’s efforts led Congress to allocate $6 billion to combat the crisis in 2018 and 2019, and the president sought another $7 billion for 2019.   Since then, however, his attention has turned to the “emergency” along the border with Mexico, the equivalent, by comparison, of a gnat bite on an elephant.

His initial urgency regarding the opioid epidemic seems to have dissipated, though not his propensity for making false claims.  At a May 2018 rally, for instance, he declared that, thanks to the $6 billion, “the numbers are way down.”   If the president meant overdose deaths, however, his claim was blatantly false.  Data from the CDC show that, between 2016 and 2017, prescription opioid overdose deaths decreased by a mere 58 from 17,087 to 17,029.  As for overdose deaths from opioids of all sorts (whether legal and doctor-prescribed or illegal, as with heroin), they increased by 12%.

Congressional critics charge that the commission’s raft of recommendations hasn’t been implemented energetically, noting in particular Trump’s proposed $340-million cut to the budget of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which coordinates the government’s anti-opioid campaign.  And given the scale of the epidemic, experts maintain that $6 billion over two years doesn’t come close to what’s needed to make a real difference.

The Toll Taken on Trump’s Base

High-voltage opioid painkillers were once derisively labeled “hillbilly heroin,” but that moniker has become archaic and misleading.  While the misuse of such medications tends to be proportionately higher among the poor and in areas with high unemployment, it now spans classes and regions.  In the late 1990s, the surge in overdose deaths did start in economically depressed rural communities and small towns — in Appalachia in particular.  Since then, however, the crisis has spread to suburbs and cities across the country.

Still, a strong correlation does exist between opioid addiction, overdose death rates, and economic distress, especially in small towns and rural regions, including Maine’s logging communities, areas reliant on commercial fishing, and Appalachian coal towns.  In rural New Hampshire, where I spend part of the year, it doesn’t take long to start hearing about, or meeting, people whose lives have been upended by opioid addiction.  Such communities were the first victims of the epidemic because their economic decline produced despair, hopelessness, and diminished self-worth.  Moreover, plenty of people suffered chronic pain, whether from workplace accidents or physically demanding jobs.

President Trump ought to be particularly attentive to the country’s raging opioid addiction.  Many of the hardest hit places are home to the very voters who helped elect him.  During the 2016 presidential campaign, he presented himself as their champion, bemoaning the hardships of factory workers, miners, loggers, and others zapped by layoffs or wage cuts and living in communities in which the better-paying jobs on which they had depended, often for generations, were disappearing.

Staggering Statistics

Data from the National Institutes of Health reveal that overdose deaths from all categories of opioid drugs — legal and illegal — soared from 10,000 in 1999 to 49,068 in 2017, with the numbers consistently higher for men.  But heroin fatalities (15,958 in 2017) must be included in the mix because the use of that drug and of prescription opioids has become intertwined.

Although less than 5% of those who misuse opioid pain medications drift to heroin, nearly 80% of heroin users start by misusing opioids.  In addition, both people hooked on such painkillers and recreational users often combine them with heroin to boost their highs.

Addicts tend to rely on heroin only when they can no longer afford to buy opioids but are still desperate to feed their habit and so stave off “dope sickness.” (Its wrenching withdrawal symptoms include nausea, chills, and diarrhea, as well as extreme anxiety and panic attacks.)  Heroin dealers charge a fraction per fix of what illicit suppliers of the popular oxycodone– and hydrocodone-based analgesics demand per pill.

Consider Oxycontin.  An 80-milligram pill costs about $6.00 at a pharmacy, but as much as $80 on the street.  Compare that to the $15-$20 that will get you a hit of heroin.  The price difference matters.  Many opioid addicts end up putting the bulk of their earnings into purchasing the pills illegally, depleting their savings accounts.  As a result, some end up resorting to selling personal possessions or even stolen machinery parts, piping, and copperwiring (for which there’s a large black market).

Unfortunately, even the 49,068 deaths in 2017 don’t provide the full picture.  Additional fatalities result from combining painkillers with cocaine (4,184) or benzodiazepines (roughly 9,000).  Add those into the mix and the total number of lives lost to the epidemic in this country reached 62,252 in 2017, the last year for which we have complete data.  That figure soars higher yet if you include the nearly 16,000 deaths resulting from heroin.

To put the total number of opioid-related fatalities in perspective consider this: vehicular accidents killed 40,100 people in 2017. The decade-long Vietnam War resulted in 58,220 American deaths.  More than five times as many Americans died from opioid-powered painkillers in 2017 alone as in the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

As for the economic consequences, a 2017 report by the president’s Council of Economic Advisors pegged the total costs of the crisis, including medical services, lost earnings and productivity, and law enforcement, at $504 billion in 2015.

In other words, unlike what’s happening on the southern border, this isn’t a faux emergency.

The Pathway to Crisis

In nineteenth-century America, opiates were widely prescribed to treat many afflictions: pain from wounds or injuries sustained by Civil War veterans, menstrual cramps, asthma, anxiety, even babies’ teething pains.  But as doctors became more aware of a growing wave of addiction, the federal government imposed restrictive regulations on such medicines, culminating in the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act.

Though that legislation didn’t fully stamp out opiate use, it did mark a turning point.  Medical opinion would not revert to a favorable view of such drugs until the 1970s, after which numerous opioid painkillers hit the market.  The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approved Lortab in 1982, Vicodin in 1983, MS Contin in 1987, and Percocet in 1999.  Fentanyl was first introduced in 1959 and its skin patch variant received official approval in 1990 for the treatment of acute pain.

The current epidemic didn’t start revving up until Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, developed Oxycontin, an oxycodone-based painkiller.  Following FDA approval in December 1996, it became available, in varying strengths ranging from 10 to 160 milligrams. Compared to previous opioid treatments, Oxycontin was in a league of its own when it came to its potency.  Doctors quickly started prescribing it, not a few with stunning abandon: in one instance 335,000 prescriptions over eight years.  Within five years of its appearance, prescriptions had skyrocketed from 670,000 to 6.2 million.

Purdue claimed that Oxy, as it came to be known, was special and better than its predecessors because it worked through an extended, 12-hour time release, which would effectively eliminate addiction: the drug would neither provide a quick high nor have to be taken as often.  In fact, the drug’s efficacy often petered out well short of the touted timespan.  Purdue became aware of this but stuck to its claim.

By 2001, Oxycontin sales surpassed $1 billion a year.  The boom was not spontaneous, but owed much to Purdue’s zealous product promotion.  An army of sales representatives, deployed after being trained to convince doctors of the drug’s safety and efficacy, often offered those same doctors free meals, holiday gifts, trinkets, junkets, and more.  Those sales agents did not lack for incentive; they received hefty bonuses pegged to their success. Top performers raked in more than their annual salaries in extra cash.

Purdue also trained thousands of doctors, nurses, and pharmacists at numerous conclaves in beautiful venues — all organized and paid for by the company — to spread the word that Oxy was effective and safe, not only against the extreme pain produced by surgery or terminal illness but also more mundane varieties of pain caused, for instance, by back injuries or arthritis.

The strategy proved wildly successful.  Sales revenues climbed because the pill was widely prescribed not just by those treating terminally ill patients, but also by family doctors who were already responsible for nearly half of all Oxycontin prescriptions by 2003.

The Devastation Becomes Undeniable

Doctors increasingly prescribed Oxy to treat pain (often from work-related injuries) and their patients quickly became addicted.   Gripped by the drug, some feigned continuing pain in a frantic effort to get fresh supplies.  “Doctor shopping” became common as well.   Others stole pills from relatives or friends or bought them from illegal dealers, including those selling through the Internet at, among other places, social media sites like Facebook.  Addicts also snorted pulverized pills or liquefied them and injected them intravenously, risking Hepatitis B or C or HIV/AIDS from shared needles.  Still others turned to heroin.

Obviously, not everyone who took Oxycontin for pain got hooked, let alone died from an overdose.  But when addiction did strike, it could ruin lives, as some addicts even fed their habit through petty crime or prostitution.  The children of addicts often suffered from neglect or mistreatment as well — an estimated 676,000 of them in 2016 —  or became the responsibility of grandparents or ended up in foster care.

As the evidence of a disaster mounted, some intrepid doctors, along with the relatives of people who had died from overdoses, started sounding the alarm.  But Purdue had a formidable PR machine, the big bucks needed to hire top-flight attorneys, and the determination to fight back.  As for clout in Washington, the company’s wealth and access to power far exceeded anything its adversaries could muster.

Yet as the addiction wave began to sweep the country and the death toll rose, medical researchers began highlighting the risks posed by Oxy and questioning its efficacy compared to less potent opioids.  The FDA, the Justice Department, and the attorneys general of various states also began to pay attention.  In 2007, following charges that it had failed to provide adequate warnings about the risk of addiction, Purdue paid $634.5 million as part of a plea deal with the feds.  Three of its senior employees were fined a total of $34.5 million, which Purdue covered (though they avoided jail time).  The company itself did not cop to any wrongdoing.

Numerous states also initiated lawsuits against the company, insisting that it was aware of the dangers of Oxycontin addiction but made misleading or false claims to deny or downplay the risks.  In 2007, Purdue negotiated a $19.5 million settlement with 25 states and the District of Columbia, again without admitting to any wrongdoing.  In 2015, it settled with Kentucky for $24 million.  In 2018, six more states initiated lawsuits against the company.

In 2010, the FDA approved an addiction-resistant — that is, harder to snort or inject — version of Oxy and the original version was pulled from the market.  As part of its legal settlements, Purdue also agreed to stop pitching opioid medications to physicians and slashed its sales staff.

Lest you feel any sympathy for the embattled pharmaceutical giant, know this: by 2001, addiction to oxycodone (the active agent in Oxycontin) had already increased five-fold.  Yet Purdue and its experts-for-hire downplayed the danger and kept promoting the drug vigorously.  According to a Justice Department report, the company also knew early on that the drug was being snorted or liquefied and injected, but did not think it useful to divulge news of the abuse.  It also sat on evidence its own investigators amassed on the criminal trafficking of Oxy and on cases of doctors or drugstores dispensing it recklessly.

As for those fines, they amounted to chump change for the company, which by 2017 had amassed $35 billion in revenue, largely from Oxycontin sales in the United States and elsewhere.  And the Sackler family?  None of its members were ever charged, let alone convicted of anything; and, with a net worth of $14 billion, in 2015 they first made the Forbes list of the 20 wealthiest families in America.

Someone nabbed for a non-violent drug offense or even shoplifting could face years of jail time, but the titans of a company responsible for a public health disaster have gotten a remarkable pass.

What Next?

The current opioid crisis transcends Purdue.  For one thing, there are numerous, widely prescribed opioid medications out there besides Oxy, even though the number of annual prescriptions for opioid painkillers has actually declined since 2012.  According to a report issued by the Surgeon General, they totaled 289 million in that year compared to 76 million in 1991.  The CDC reports that they had fallen to 191 million in 2017.  But as the agency notes, that still makes for a stunning 58.7 prescriptions for every 100 people in the United States, which remains peerless in the global consumption of opioid pain medications.

Since perhaps 2013, another problem has amplified the opioid crisis: the abuse, illicit manufacture, and smuggling of Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid analgesic whose potency exceeds morphine’s by 50 to 100 times and oxycodone’s by a factor of 1.5.  A two-milligram dose can prove fatal.

Deaths linked to synthetic opioids, mainly Fentanyl, reached 29,406 in 2017, a nearly six-fold increase since 2014.  The CDC found that Fentanyl was implicated in at least three-fifths of opioid overdose fatalities in 10 states during the last half of 2016 alone.  The drug’s wallop and widespread availability from illicit Internet sites only heightens the risk of addiction and fatalities. Meanwhile, heroin overdose deaths, which started to increase sharply at about the same time as opioid-related fatalities, reached 15,958 in 2017 — a three-fold increase from 2014.

To make matters worse, there are numerous Fentanyl analogs, including 3-Methylfentanyl, four times more powerful than Fentanyl itself.  Though its illegal manufacture dates to the 1970s, it has recently made a comeback on the street and via the Internet.  Then there’s Carfentanil. Used to tranquilize elephants and other large animals, it’s 100 times stronger than Fentanyl and it, too, has begun to make its deadly mark.  In the first half of 2017, Carfentanil-related deaths nearly doubled, reaching 815.  Just how deadly is it?  For sedating an adult elephant, the safe dose is 13 milligrams.  Just .05 milligrams will kill a human being, scientists warn.

Those two drugs and other Fentanyl analogs are manufactured and trafficked illegally to underground networks in the United States or directly to individual users.  China has become a key source of such illegal shipments.  Contrary to President Trump’s claim — as part of his pitch for his “big, fat, beautiful wall” — only a small proportion of such illicit opioid drugs, including heroin, are ever carried across the border into the United States by undocumented immigrants.  The bulk of what enters through Mexico comes hidden in vehicles that cross at legal entry points.  There are many other modes of smuggling as well.  A Senate report found that the U.S. postal service has become an unwitting conduit, as have commercial carriers like FedEx and UPS.  Illicit sellers also operate through Internet sites and the Dark Web.  When it comes to such drugs, a wall will make no difference.

The opioid crisis has now entered an even more dangerous phase.  Doctor-prescribed opioid pain killers are no longer its main driver, and even when they are, they’re often combined with cocaine or benzodiazepines.   Moreover, in 2016, illicit Fentanyl and heroin accounted for two-thirds of opioid-related deaths.  Illicitly produced and trafficked Fentanyl and Carfentanil and their chemical kin may, in the end, dwarf the Oxycontin catastrophe.

And newer forms of high-potency painkillers will undoubtedly emerge as well.  Take Dsuvia, which received FDA approval late in 2018 amid considerable controversy created by fears of addiction.  It’s 500 times stronger than morphine and 10 times as potent as Fentanyl. How long before Dsuvia produces its own addiction and illegal trafficking problem?

No Easy Fix

The opioid emergency requires a multi-faceted and sustained solution.  Addiction treatment would have to become better in quality and more equitably available.  Because opioid misuse and addiction are particularly prevalent in parts of the country suffering from job cuts and low incomes, they would have to become a focal point for public investment and job retraining.  The shape-shifting inflow of opioids from abroad would have to be stanched through measures that went beyond punishment.  Corporations that endanger public health through their negligence and chicanery would have to face more than a rap on the knuckles.

In addition, a political order rigged by money and lobbyists would have to be revamped.  From 2000 through 2018, companies making pharmaceuticals and health products spent a total of $3.8 billion lobbying in Washington, employing 1,407 lobbyists, not a few of whom had once worked in various capacities in the federal government, including as members of Congress.  In 2018 alone, the amount devoted to lobbying just by the pharmaceutical firms that were among the top ten spenders came to $58 million — and that doesn’t count the $21.8 million mustered by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents drug and biotech companies.

Given the scale, multiple causes, and consequences of the opioid crisis, the $6 billion earmarked for it isn’t remotely sufficient, while the moves the Trump administration and the Republican Party have made to cripple the Affordable Care Act will only hurt the effort. Meanwhile, every day, 130 people in the United States die from opioid overdoses and 70% of those battling addiction don’t receive long-term treatment, even though the necessary medicines are available.

So, Mr. President, if you want to tackle a genuine national emergency and are eager to spend another $5.7 billion or far more on a project that will, in the end, make you look better to everybody, including your base, take on the opioid epidemic — and forget that useless wall.

Senate Reasserts Foreign Policy Role, Reshapes Trump Agenda

WASHINGTON — Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, his allies in Congress are quietly trying to influence and even reshape his “America First” foreign policy agenda.

The Republican-led Senate is reasserting itself as a check on Trump’s instincts, while individual GOP lawmakers are seeking sway — defense hawks vying with noninterventionists — over policy in the Middle East, Latin America and beyond.

Within one recent week, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio led a group of lawmakers to the White House encouraging Trump to back Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as the interim president. Trump tweeted his support. Days earlier, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was at the White House reinforcing Trump’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

The result can often seem like a foreign policy in flux, zigzagging from bold pronouncements to more measured actions as “a number of different voices on the Hill are trying to put their imprint on the policy,” said Brian Katulis, a former Clinton administration national security adviser now at the Center for American Progress.

“It’s sort of this great improvisation directed by the president of the United States, that doesn’t really follow any of the notes or sheets of music,” Katulis said. “Like he’s making things up as he goes along.”

Setting the tone in the Senate, the first bill of the new year reaffirms sanctions on Syrian officials involved in war crimes and soon will include an amendment taking the unusual step of signaling opposition to Trump’s plan to withdraw troops from Syria and Afghanistan.

Pushed forward by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the legislation also is driving a political wedge dividing Democrats, particularly those running for president in 2020, over the troop withdrawal and a separate provision supporting Israel.

Rubio, who led the floor debate and is emerging as a foreign policy leader, said the vote was about ensuring that senators and the legislative branch “play our rightful role in the setting of American foreign policy.”

“It is important that the Senate be on the right side of this issue so that we can hope to influence future actions and policies before they are taken, and we can help change them once they have been taken in places headed in the wrong direction,” Rubio said.

Next up, McConnell is promising a debate on the importance of NATO, as Trump re-evaluates the U.S.’s long-standing commitment to its allies in Europe.

“NATO deserves the Senate’s support,” McConnell said.

Danielle Pletka, a senior vice president at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said lawmakers are doing exactly what they should — asserting themselves as a separate but equal branch of government that has been largely dormant on foreign policy.

“It’s abnormal for members of Congress to be as disengaged as they have been,” she said. “This is a return to normal.”

Trump rode a populist wave to the White House with an “America First” approach focused on rebuilding the United States and bringing U.S. troops home, rather than funding wars overseas.

It’s an instinct that fits more neatly into Paul’s noninterventionist wing, which rose to prominence with the tea party, rather than the worldview of traditional foreign policy conservatives such as McConnell, Rubio and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Gaveling that divide is the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, GOP Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, who took over from outspoken Trump critic Bob Corker of Tennessee, who retired.

Risch said “don’t read too much into” the first vote of the new Congress, saying lawmakers aren’t necessarily sending any message or asserting themselves any more than usual.

“I think the Congress recognizes when it comes to construction and implementation of foreign policy, the Founding Fathers gave both the legislative branch and the executive branch a role,” he said. “And it isn’t really clearly defined as to who’s got the upper hand.”

Unlike the first years of the administration, when Republicans tested how publicly to oppose the president, often with mixed results, senators now seem to prefer softer diplomacy and private meetings to shape his policies.

Paul said after meeting with Trump in mid-January that no other president in recent history has taken steps as bold as Trump to disentangle the United States from wars.

“We live for the day that somebody will stand up and say, ‘I’m going to change history,'” Paul told reporters at the time. “You’re really seeing one of the extraordinary things.”

A week later, Rubio and a group of lawmakers from Florida were at the White House urging Trump to support the opposition leader in Venezuela over embattled President Nicholas Maduro.

Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott said the president was in listening mode and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said the administration has been “very open to speaking to us.”

Trump tweeted his support the next day for the South American nation’s opposition leader.

As Trump develops his plan to withdraw troops from Syria and now Afghanistan, the conversations continue.

McConnell talks with the president often. Traditional GOP hawks, including Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa, were among a group of House and Senate Republicans who met with Trump at the White House shortly after he announced his decision for the Syria withdrawal.

Ernst told Iowa reporters this past week that she disagreed with his assessment that the Islamic State group had been defeated in Syria, She said she “will continue to do so when I believe what we’re getting from the intelligence community is different from what advisers are giving to the president.”

___

Associated Press writer David Pitt in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

Racist Photo Prompts Candidates to Address Issue

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The Latest on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and a racist photo in a 1984 yearbook (all times local):

6:15 p.m.

Democratic presidential hopefuls are getting their first major test on how they will address racial tensions that have polarized American life.

A racist photo tied to Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam from his days in medical school has prompted them to deal with the question.

Nearly every major declared and potential Democratic candidate called for Northam’s resignation after the disclosure of the yearbook photo, which shows one person in blackface and another hooded in white Klan regalia.

Their reactions came before Northam said during a news conference Saturday that he was not in the photo on his page of the 1984 yearbook.

A prominent Democratic strategist, Symone Sanders, says candidates already face challenges explaining their own records on racially fraught matters and now must deal with the Northam issue.

___

6 p.m.

Virginia’s attorney general is calling for Gov. Ralph Northam to resign.

Mark Herring said in a statement Saturday that it’s no longer possible for Northam to “lead our Commonwealth.”

Herring is the latest prominent Democrat to call for the Democratic governor to step down. Others calling for Northam’s resignation include the Virginia Democratic Party, the state House Democratic Caucus and many Democratic candidates for president.

Herring’s statement followed Northam’s press conference at which he denied being in a medical school yearbook photo that shows a person in blackface standing next to someone in a Ku Klux Klan costume.

Northam, however, admitted to wearing blackface as Michael Jackson at a dance contest.

___

5 p.m.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has admitted to wearing blackface while dressing up like Michael Jackson at a dance contest around the time he was in medical school.

Northam made the admission Saturday at a press conference where he denied being in a photo that shows a man in blackface standing next to someone in a Ku Klux Klan costume.

That image appeared alongside photos of Northam in his medical school yearbook in 1984 and has sparked a torrent of calls for his resignation.

The Democratic governor said he darkened his face with “a little bit” of shoe polish for his Michael Jackson costume at a 1984 San Antonio talent show.

Northam said he regrets that he didn’t understand “the harmful legacy of an action like that.”

___

5 p.m.

A man who went to medical school with Ralph Northam says he also didn’t buy the class’s 1984 yearbook or see it until decades after it was published.

Walt Broadnax is one of two black students who graduated with Northam. He said by phone Saturday that students submitted photos for someone else to lay out.

Broadnax saw his yearbook page for the first time Saturday. He said it turned out how he intended with photos of family and a woman he was dating.

Broadnax defended Northam and said he’s not a racist. He said he believes Northam’s statement that he wasn’t in the photo of a man in blackface standing next to someone in a KKK costume.

He said the school never would have tolerated someone going to a party in blackface.

___

4:20 p.m.

Virginia’s lieutenant governor says the state needs leaders who can unite people and “help us rise to the better angels of our nature.”

If Gov. Ralph Northam were to resign, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax would become the second African-American governor of Virginia.

In his statement issued Saturday, Fairfax doesn’t call for Northam to resign because of racist photos on Northam’s 1984 yearbook profile page.

But Fairfax does say that he “cannot condone actions from (the governor’s) past” that at least “suggest a comfort with Virginia’s darker history of white supremacy, racial stereotyping and intimidation.”

Northam said Saturday that he hadn’t seen photos of one person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan until someone showed them to him Friday. He says he won’t resign despite widespread calls that he step aside and let Fairfax lead Virginia.

___

3 p.m.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has vowed to remain in office despite widespread calls for his resignation after a racist photo surfaced in his yearbook page from more than 30 years ago.

Northam said at a news conference Saturday that he had prematurely apologized for appearing in a picture of a person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit. The photo appeared in his 1984 medical school yearbook.

The Democratic governor said Saturday that he, in fact, was not in the photo and had never even seen the yearbook until Friday.

His refusal to resign signals a potential bruising fight between Northam and his former supporters. Leaders in both parties have repeatedly urged Northam to resign, saying he’s lost the public’s trust.

___

1:35 p.m.

The president of Eastern Virginia Medical School says a racist photo that appears in the 1984 student yearbook is “shockingly abhorrent.”

In a statement on the school’s website, President Richard Homan said the photo of one person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan hood is “absolutely antithetical” to the school’s principles, morals and values.

The photo was on the profile page of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who says he believes he’s not one of the men in the picture.

Homan also apologized for “past transgressions of your trust.” He said he’ll convene a meeting of leadership and others to address the issue. ___

12:50 p.m.

North Carolina’s governor is calling on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to resign because of a photograph on Northam’s yearbook profile page.

In an emailed statement, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said the photograph is both reprehensible and deeply disappointing. He said the photo comes “with pain beyond what many of us can even understand.”

Cooper called Northam’s resignation “the only way forward.”

A photo from a 1984 medical school yearbook surfaced Friday, showing a person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. The photo was on Northam’s profile page.

Northam was scheduled to speak publicly Saturday afternoon. ___

12:25 p.m.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a photograph on Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s yearbook profile page “racist and contrary to fundamental American values.”

She said Saturday via Twitter that she is joining her colleagues in Virginia in calling for Northam “to do the right thing” so that the people in Virginia can heal and move on.

The Virginia Democratic Party on Saturday called on Northam to resign after the photo from a 1984 medical school yearbook surfaced Friday. The photo shows a person in blackface and another wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood.

Northam was scheduled to speak to the public Saturday afternoon.

___

11:35 a.m.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is planning a news conference where he’s expected to say he’s not resigning and believes he was not in a racist picture featured in his 1984 medical yearbook.

Northam’s office on Saturday said the 2:30 p.m. news conference would take place at the Executive Mansion.

Northam is calling Democrats ahead of the news conference to try and shore up support. A wide swath of Democrats and Republicans have called on Northam to resign after he apologized Friday for appearing in a photo in which one person is dressed in blackface and another is wearing a full Ku Klux Klan uniform.

But Northam said he now believes he was not in the picture and can prove that it wasn’t him, said state Sen. Louise Lucas. ___

10:45 a.m.

A Virginia Democrat who has spoken with Gov. Ralph Northam has told The Associated Press that the governor now does not believe he was in a racist picture in his 1984 medical yearbook and has no immediate plans to resign.

The Democrat was not authorized to speak on the record to detail a private conversation.

Northam is calling state lawmakers Saturday to try and gain support so he can remain in office, the Democrat said.

Northam has faced a torrent of criticism and calls for his resignation after a photo surfaced from decades ago that showed two people in racist costumes: One person is dressed in blackface, and another is wearing a full Ku Klux Klan uniform.The photo appeared in Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook. On Friday, Northam apologized for appearing in the photo.

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10:30 a.m.

Top Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly are calling on Gov. Ralph Northam to resign after he acknowledged appearing in a photo wearing a racist costume.

House Speaker Kirk Cox and Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment said Saturday the governor had lost the public’s confidence, and it is in the state’s best interests for him to step down.

The Republicans join a growing chorus of elected officials in Virginia and elsewhere calling for Northam’s resignation.

Northam apologized Friday for appearing in a photo in which one person is dressed in blackface and another is wearing a full Ku Klux Klan uniform, but has not said he will resign. The photo appeared in his 1984 medical school yearbook.

___

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appears to have almost no choice but to resign after losing support from virtually the entire state Democratic party and other key allies, who urged the governor to leave office because of a racist photo in which he appeared more than 30 years ago.

The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, the state House Democratic Caucus and the state Senate Democratic Caucus all called on Northam to resign late Friday, along with several key progressive groups that have been some of the governor’s closest political allies.

Their calls for Northam to step down came in a wave late Friday, after the Democrat had apologized for appearing in a photo in which one person is dressed in blackface and another is wearing a full Ku Klux Klan uniform. The photo appeared in his 1984 medical school yearbook.

Freezing Inmates Desperate for Heat at Federal Detention Center in Brooklyn

More than a thousand people incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., say they have been locked in freezing cells for a week. Activists and inmates’ family members gathered outside the federal facility on Saturday to demand humane conditions.

A power outage has left the jail’s more than 1,600 inmates to endure this week’s brutal cold snap without light or heat. Because they are also without computers, inmates have been unable to contact loved ones, renew medical prescriptions or email attorneys for help. Jail cells do not have electrical power, according to federal defender Deirdre von Dornum, who visited the facility on Friday night. Inmates are also not being let into common areas.

“In the past hour I have gotten 11 calls,” said Rachel Bass, a paralegal with the Federal Defenders of New York. She said people were experiencing congestion. “People are frantic. They’re really, really scared. They don’t have extra blankets. They don’t have access to the commissary to buy an extra sweatshirt.” (There was not enough electricity for the commissary to be open.)

“The pitch black has made it significantly more agonizing for them,” von Dornum said.

Rally outside MDC Brooklyn, where we first reported poor heating and a power issue that has kept inmates confined to cold cells without lights since Sunday. Inmates pound windows as a brass band plays and people chant outside. pic.twitter.com/5FMGQpSpaF

— Annie Correal (@anniecorreal) February 2, 2019

The scene outside MDC Brooklyn pic.twitter.com/bkxSkAozZS

— Gideon Orion Oliver (@gideonoliver) February 2, 2019

This mother has not heard from her son since Wednesday – he is caged waiting for a trial with new babies at home. These are our people inside being treated less than human. This is a stain and a shame on our nation. #MDC #letthemfree pic.twitter.com/aykPMlNGKt

— Katie Unger

Ending the American Tragedy of Mass Incarceration

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“Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

Review by Richard Blaustein / LARB

“Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration”

A book by Greg Berman and Julian Adler

Nearly one in a 100 adult Americans is behind bars. That means approximately 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States. The U.S. has more people imprisoned than India and China combined, and the U.S. per capita incarceration rate is eight and five times higher than Germany and Australia, respectively. Norway and Los Angeles have about the same population, yet Norway has roughly 3,000 people incarcerated, while Los Angeles has 50,000.

These are some of the background facts offered by Greg Berman, director, and Julian Adler, director of policy and research, of the New York–based Center for Court Innovation, in their cogent book, “Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration.” While concern about mass incarceration has been increasing and various state, municipal, and nongovernmental programs promote imprisonment alternatives, Berman and Adler underscore that judges, prosecutors, and police officers generally have a constrained array of choices for the accused. Stiff 1990s and 2000s sentencing laws are still in place that also incline prosecutors to charge defendants with felonies. The result is that “[t]he United States locks up more of its citizens than any other country on earth.” Moreover, Berman and Adler stress that undue jailings and prison terms are “accelerants of human misery” because individuals are often traumatized while incarcerated and become entrenched with distrust for the halls of justice. “If you are poor or mentally ill or struggling to keep your family together, when you enter, the chances are that all of these conditions will be markedly worse when you come out,” Berman and Adler write.

Click here to read long excerpts from “Start Here” at Google Books.

The challenges for reducing mass incarceration are complicated and nuanced, and Berman and Adler offer a smoothly written survey of the background conditions and the responses that different jurisdictions and advocacy groups are trying—for example, risk analysis for detention and sentencing decisions; cognitive therapy programs for accused or convicted offenders with aggressive or addictive traits; raising awareness within the judiciary of counterproductive fees and fines; and alternative legal venues for drug users and young adults. They state and restate that it will take sustained effort on many fronts and gradual cultural shifts, but that there are enough effective responses and instances of culture change to demonstrate that significantly reducing incarceration can be done.

Another cross-cutting truism that Berman and Adler reiterate is that treating the accused with a humane touch can make a huge difference. How a defendant subjectively experiences the criminal justice system will affect his or her future behavior; empathic corrective treatment can go far in raising an individual’s ability to handle future life challenges in a law-abiding manner. “In our experience, the best way to change the behavior of defendants is by creating caring relationships with social workers, judges, mentors, clergy, family members, employers, and others,” Berman and Adler write. “Almost no one transforms their life without positive connections with their fellow human beings.”

Indeed, reformers are trying to address defendants’ hardening experience with courts and law enforcement. Berman and Adler point to the “procedural justice” approach, seminally articulated by Yale law professor Tom Tyler in “Why People Obey the Law.” Its major thrust is “that defendants who experience a justice process that they perceive to be fair and transparent are more likely to be law-abiding in the future.” Berman and Adler further enunciate four key procedural justice criteria that the accused should feel as they go through the criminal justice process:

voice (were you given a chance to tell your side of the story?); respect (were you treated with dignity?); neutrality (did you perceive decision makers as unbiased and trustworthy?); and understanding (did you understand your rights, obligations and the decisions that were made about you?).

The authors describe how Victoria Pratt, at the time the Chief Judge of Newark’s Municipal Court, presided over a problem-solving court and the program created to offer defendants meaningful alternatives to sentences involving jail or fines: Newark Community Solutions. In an effort to alleviate social issues exacerbated by the community’s contact with the criminal justice system, Judge Pratt employed procedural justice and nontraditional sentences in a setting marked by recidivism, unpayable fines, and distressing and dangerous incarceration conditions at the city’s notorious Green Street jail. “I just get on the bench and treat people the way I would want my family members to be treated,” Pratt says.

Berman and Adler’s organization, the Center for Court Innovation, helped set up Newark Community Solutions, as well as the Brooklyn alternative court Red Hook Community Justice Center, whose judge, Alex Calabrese, is similarly noted for his articulate interaction with defendants. As part of its operations, the Red Hook Justice Center also “links thousands of defendants to social services and community restitution projects in lieu of jail and fines.”

The book’s narrative is especially vivid when Berman and Adler discuss specific proactive programs in different states that target different at-risk populations. For example, there is innovation even in the difficult area of domestic violence, typified by Iowa’s ACTV (Achieving Change Through Value-Based Behavior) program that focuses on coping skills and features a nonjudgmental elicitation as to what the offenders most value. In the case managers’ experience, the offenders are surprisingly clear that children, family, spirituality, and work are standout priorities. “A lot of them have just never been asked what’s important to them, and then a lot of them don’t know how to live a life in service of those values,” says Amie Zarling, the Iowa State University forensic psychologist who developed ACTV. While the rigorous 24-session ACTV program had a relatively high drop-out rate, the state’s review found that incidents of domestic violence dropped by two-thirds among those who completed ACTV relative to those enrolled in standard treatment programs, and a violent crime re-offense rate of eight percent compared to 23 percent.

Another interesting program is Seattle’s LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) program by which law enforcement officers who confront individuals with signs of drug abuse can direct them to service providers, avoiding booking and incarceration. LEAD’s staffers work with many challenging individuals, often homeless or suffering mental illness, yet, as Berman and Adler point out, “research to date does show that LEAD participants are significantly less likely to be rearrested than those in a control group.”

To no one’s surprise, drugs loom large, but Berman and Adler point out that, contrary to common wisdom, drug convictions do not make up the bulk of U.S. incarceration. Nonviolent drug crimes account for about 16 percent of state-level imprisonment cases while violent offenses predominate at 53.2 percent, according to a 2014 study the authors cite. However, what is a violent offense is dubious, and Berman and Adler offer robbery, the top charge of 180,000 state prisoners, as a murky example, as reflected in the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics definition — “Robbery is the completed or attempted theft, directly from a person, of property or cash by force or threat of force, with or without a weapon, and with or without injury.” More to the point, the authors mention that six out of 10 defendants test positive for illegal drugs at the time of arrest, underscoring that problems with drugs figure significantly with mass incarceration.

This has been appreciated for years, and in 1989 Miami legal advocates, including then state attorney Janet Reno, instituted the first of the drug treatment courts, specialized courts with judges schooled in addiction who can prescribe drug treatment and other options for defendants in lieu of imprisonment. The drug court idea has proved attractive, and Berman and Adler report that the nation’s 3,000 drug courts are now in every state. The social science research supports their efficacy, with a 2011 Department of Justice–funded study finding that over an 18-month period, drug court participants were one-third less likely to succumb to drug use and committed less than half the criminal acts than a comparative group of defendants steered through regular criminal justice processing. Yet, drug courts are not connecting with enough individuals, and Berman and Adler cite a 2008 study that “as few as 3.8 percent of potentially treatable arrestees are participating in a drug court.”

Jailing those awaiting trial or who cannot pay penalty fees is another bloating and tragic aspect of mass incarceration. In contrast to prisons, where individuals typically go for longer than one-year sentences, people are placed in jail for shorter misdemeanor sentences or because they have been denied bail or cannot pay bail and punitive fines. The authors cite that 60 percent of the U.S. jail population is awaiting trial — that is, before a court has determined guilt or innocence. The population rotated into prison is also huge: 11.5 million were admitted to jail in 2014 while in the same year, state and federal prisons combined admitted 700,000 individuals. Berman and Adler further point to federal statistics reporting that from 1980 to 2008, “the number of inmates housed in a local jail on any given day in the United States increased by 426 percent (from 184,000 to 785,500).” Of course, there is the human cost, with jails being overcrowded and dangerous, and many people have their lives and finances significantly impaired with just short stays.

Perhaps most distressing is the common situation in which poor people get roped into fines, even for infractions, that they do not have the financial means to pay for and so end up in jail. Ferguson, Missouri, and the ensuing federal report brought this to national attention. “In St. Louis, recent events have exposed a toxic relationship between communities of color and local government, much of it driven by the insight that the justice system was using fees and fines to balance budgets,” Berman and Adler write.

In all jurisdictions, it will take a culture change and keen attention on the part of judges to redress the injustice of jailing poor people for inability to pay fines. Berman and Adler quote Newark Judge Pratt recounting the absurdity of a prosecutor calling for a 50-dollar fine for a defendant that came to court with only one shoe. “It’s my job as the judge to ensure that the interests of justice are met. It doesn’t serve the interest of justice to give somebody a fine they can’t pay and not give them a way to pay it.”

Yet, there is some significant change occurring, and Berman and Adler point to the example of New York City’s Rikers Island jail, where inmates are geographically separated from support and historically subject to horrendous conditions. New York City has cut the Rikers Island population to 10,000 down from 20,000, and the authors describe the current politics and consensus to eventually close the jail. Berman and Adler also discuss Washington, D.C., with the D.C. jail population 50 percent below capacity, and nine out of ten defendants “released (either on their own recognizance or with supervision) while their cases are pending.” The DC justice system employs risk analysis, which has gained currency and sophistication nationwide, so that judges can tailor the release conditions for each defendant.

Toward the end of the book, Berman and Adler focus on state-wide initiatives for reducing mass incarceration. Many state governments, burdened with huge costs, look to reverse the mass incarceration trend by adding drug courts, treatment and job training programs, and other measures. According to Berman and Adler, the progress is bipartisan, as demonstrated by reform in states run with conservative governors and legislatures, such as Georgia, Utah, and Mississippi. This is all the more critical, given the back-and-forth revision of proposed federal sentencing reform and an acting and nominated new attorney general, whose sympathies for reducing imprisonment are dubious.

A particular challenge for states is to not reverse reform when there is an instance of a parolee committing a horrible crime. When this occurs, the response has on occasion been stricter sentencing and revised laws, some of which are eponymous laws, named after a victim, such as Megan’s Law. This puts reforming legislators and open-minded prosecutors in tight binds. “[T]he immediate aftermath of a unique tragedy may not be the best time to construct new frameworks that will govern how thousands of future cases will be handled,” Berman and Adler write.

For example, they contrast Utah’s and Arkansas’s responses to similar events. Utah, on the one hand, resisted reversing its successful program to reduce incarceration in 2016 after Salt Lake City police officer Doug Barney was killed by a parolee who absconded from a prescribed drug treatment program. Arkansas, on the other hand, reversed its reformed incarceration program, passed in 2011, after a recurrent offender and parolee murdered a young man. The result: “[T]he parole boards shut the door […] [and] Arkansas now has the second-fastest rate of prison growth in the country.” Berman and Adler are emphatic that these reverses are counterproductive and hurt many who would abide by the terms of their release.

Adding critical nuance, “Start Here” frequently brings up racial injustice, poverty, and other social concerns, highlighting the significant criticism for risk analysis, as it relies heavily on history of defendants, who might very well have faced incidental or systematic racism in their past criminal justice encounters. The authors also offer balanced prescriptions throughout, such as the last chapter’s three overarching fronts for change: crime prevention in communities; treat with respect everyone involved in the criminal justice system; and expand the array of sanctions available for judges. Although the book’s prescriptions are more of a collection of compelling responses than a road map, “Start Here” contains articulate discussions and narratives that yield a vision for a future United States that will not stand out for its distressing mass incarceration.

Richard Blaustein is a freelance journalist writing on science, environmental and legal developments.

The Media’s Pro-Israel Bias Echoes Coverage of Apartheid

When apartheid reigned in South Africa, Western media commentary frequently suggested that if a one person, one vote system were adopted, black South Africans would massacre whites, oppress them or force them to flee. The same line of thinking can today be found in media discussions of Israel/Palestine, with warnings that Israelis and Palestinians sharing a single, democratic country would lead to Palestinians slaughtering Jewish people or driving them out. Such analyses reveal the racist assumption that black people and Arabs are too prone to irrational violence to be trusted with democracy.

A New York Times (9/20/81) article by Richard Neely said that, if the United States pressured South Africa to adopt a one person, one vote system, America might be “helping to precipitate a race war of all against all.” That Neely’s primary concern was violence carried out by black people was clear when his article went on to say that

certainly the lives of the 740,000 Asians in South Africa would be jeopardized under any one-man one-vote constitution, which can be altered by parliament, if the experience of either Kenya or Uganda is indicative.

William Safire wrote in the New York Times (8/7/86) that one person, one vote,

means majority rule, and nonwhites are the overwhelming majority in South Africa. That means an end to white government as the Afrikaners have known it for three centuries; that means the same kind of black rule that exists elsewhere in Africa, and most white South Africans would rather remain the oppressors than become the oppressed.

Safire was either unable or unwilling to conceive of the possibility that black people might not oppress white people, even though there were scant examples of that happening compared to voluminous cases of whites oppressing blacks.

In the Times (7/20/85), John O’Sullivan criticized anti-apartheid voices in the West that he thought were being insufficiently patient with the pace of change in South Africa:

What accounts for the grudging, almost hostile reception for the reforms in the West? The laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage, for instance, were considered major offenses against human dignity until they were repealed; they were then dismissed as likely to affect very few people. It is almost as if some of apartheid’s critics do not want to see it eroded peacefully. They want a dramatic conclusion, a bloodbath in which the wicked perish.

The suggestion was that calling for a rapid end to apartheid was tantamount to calling for white South Africans to be slaughtered en masse.

A piece in the Wall Street Journal (10/30/85) by Karen Elliott House was conscious of the parallel between South Africa and Israel/Palestine, albeit in a twisted way:

The US also should drop its insistence that the white government negotiate with terrorists. It’s hypocritical to ask South Africa to negotiate with the African National Congress, which vows the violent overthrow of the white government, when the US doesn’t press Israel to negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization, because it vows the destruction of Israel….

The more the US insists on negotiations with the ANC, the more it strengthens the violent extreme and undermines the moderate middle….

Once the US insists the ANC is the legitimate voice of black Africans, then the ANC becomes the only group with whom the Pretoria government can negotiate if it wants to retain some measure of international approval and investment. Yet the ANC has made it clear it isn’t interested in sharing power, just seizing power.

House closed with: “The US shouldn’t participate in schemes that simply transfer power from one racial group to another, while still guaranteeing no protection for the individual—regardless of color.” “Transfer[ing] power from one racial group to another,” in this formulation, meant moving from a system where only one ethnicity could vote to a democratic system where all ethnicities could vote.

Israel/Palestine

Predictions of mass violence against whites by blacks in South Africa proved false. Nor, despite some emigration, has there been a mass exodus of white South Africans; their population has declined by some 13 percent since the first free election in 1994. But this has not stopped media pundits from making equivalent claims about Israel/Palestine: claiming that a one-state solution for Israel/Palestine—that is, a single multiethnic, democratic state, comprising the West Bank, Gaza, Jerusalem and pre-1967 Israel, in which all citizens are equal, regardless of ethnicity or religion—is bound to lead to a widespread slaughter of Jewish people.

Tony Bayfield argued in the Guardian (3/23/05) that if “the Jews of Israel” were to be “swallowed up as a minority in a binational entity—Judaism would, I believe, also cease to exist, except perhaps for a tiny remnant of Jews.” In Bayfield’s view, Palestinians are such savages that an attempt to have them live as equals with Israelis would somehow wipe out virtually the whole of the Jewish faith—across the entire world.

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin wrote in (4/29/14) wrote that endorsements of the one-state solution “amount to calls for genocide.” She quotes Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Central Committee of the Palestinian group Fatah, saying:

We must return to the option of one Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea…. The only solution before us is the historic solution presented by Fatah in 1968.

Rubin went on to say: “How would he obtain his one-state solution? When you ‘drive Israel’ into the sea, you must destroy the Jewish state and its Jewish citizens.” Her use of quotation marks is odd, since Tirawi did not say anything about “driv[ing]” anyone into the sea, nor did he discuss “destroy[ing]…Jewish citizens.”

Rubin later cited passages from the PLO’s 1968 charter, the 1968 solution to which Tirawi refers, which mentions liberating Palestine and “armed struggle”—a right to which Palestinians are entitled under international law—but does not say the group plans to “destroy…Jewish citizens” or “drive” people into the sea, let alone carry out a genocide. Yet Rubin proceeded to call the idea of having a single, binational state across all of historic Palestine “incitement to violence and admiration for eradication of the Jewish people (genocide, that is).”

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (2/15/17) argued that it would be a “disaster for the Jewish state and the Jewish people” if the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank made “the separation of Israelis and Palestinians in a two-state solution impossible.” The headline of his column, “President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?” echoed this notion that Jews and Palestinians sharing the same land as equals would be an apocalyptic danger to all Jewish people across the globe, presumably including the large numbers of them who are anti-Zionist.

A Times editorial (2/15/17) published a day later didn’t invoke the specter of Palestinian violence as directly as Friedman, but it described Trump as “dangerously” questioning the idea of a two-state solution, warning of the likely consequences of a one-state solution:

Israel would be confronted with a miserable choice: to give up being a Jewish state—or to give up being a democratic state by denying full voting rights to Palestinians.

What exactly would be “miserable” about a multiethnic state with equal rights for all was left unsaid.

Whether in South Africa or Israel/Palestine, the argument has been the same: Hypothetical threats posed by the oppressed to their oppressors justify continued subjugation.

Activists Call for Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s Resignation

Democratic Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is facing intensifying demands for his resignation from all sides on Saturday after a photo from his medical school days surfaced on Friday exposed “uninhibited” racist behavior from his past.

While the image shows one person in blackface standing next to another individual in a Ku Klux Klan uniform, Northam on Friday apologized for the photo but did not divulge which of the two people might be him nor tender his resignation. “I am ready to do the hard work of regaining your trust,” Northam said.

But racial justice groups, civil rights leaders, and fellow Democrats are among those saying that an apology won’t be enough and that Northam should step aside immediately.

“If Gov. Northam is in the photo that surfaced today he should immediately offer the people of Virginia his resignation,” said Our Revolution president Nina Turner on Friday. “All elected officials are held to the highest standards and this photo is beneath that of any elected office, and especially that of a governor. This photo makes light of one of the darkest times in our nation’s history and is offensive to the millions of people who were tortured, brutalized, and held against their will for hundreds of years. There is no excuse for such repugnant behavior.”

On the first day of #BlackHistoryMonth, Northam should accept responsibility & resign paving the way for Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax to become the second African American governor in Virginia’s history. That is the type of restorative justice that our nation cries out for at this time https://t.co/twRh9hANeZ

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) February 2, 2019

“Though it brings us no joy to do so,” said the members of the Democratic State House in a letter, “we must call for Governor Northam’s resignation.”

BREAKING: Gov. Ralph Northam yearbook page shows blackface and Klan photohttps://t.co/6A89ejp5Ho

— The Virginian-Pilot (@virginianpilot) February 1, 2019

The NAACP has also called for Northam to step down.

“Black face in any manner is always racist and never okay,” said the group’s president and CEO, Derrick Johnson. “No matter the party affiliation, we can not stand for such behavior, which is why the NAACP is calling for the resignation of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.”

In a statement attached to a petition, the advocacy group Color of Change called the governor “not fit to represent the people of Virginia” and said his resignation must come “immediately”:

The photos alone are enough to prove that Governor Northam is not fit to represent the people of Virginia, but the implications are even greater. This isn’t just a one off incident, but part of a disturbing history that includes him going by the name “coonman” — a racial slur — in high school. Though he won’t admit whether he was in Blackface or dressed as the klansman, both are unacceptable.

The fact that he was at this party at all demonstrates, at minimum, a stunning lack of judgment and calls into question his values and integrity. We know that when these types of degrading characterizations rule the day, it reinforces biases that have a devastating impact on our communities. The real-world consequences of normalizing these tropes include inferior medical treatment, harsher sentencing by judges, and a higher likelihood of being shot by police.

“We demand his resignation now,” the group continued. “Black people are not a costume and our country’s racist history is not a light-hearted game. Blackface, previously considered an art form in this country, stereotypes and dehumanizes Black people, characterizing us as inferior and incapable. Paired with the man dressed in KKK garb, this yearbook page illustrates a disgusting display of uninhibited racism.”

Russia to Pull Plug on Nuclear Arms Pact After U.S. Does Same

MOSCOW — Following in the footsteps of the U.S., Russia will abandon a centerpiece nuclear arms treaty but will only deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles if Washington does so, President Vladimir Putin said Saturday.

U.S. President Donald Trump accused Moscow on Friday of violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with “impunity” by deploying banned missiles. Trump said in a statement that the U.S. will “move forward” with developing its own military response options to Russia’s new land-based cruise missiles that could target Western Europe.

Moscow has strongly denied any breaches and accused Washington of making false accusations in order to justify its pullout.

The collapse of the INF Treaty has raised fears of a repeat of a Cold War showdown in the 1980s, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union both deployed intermediate-range missiles on the continent. Such weapons were seen as particularly destabilizing as they only take a few minutes to reach their targets, leaving no time for decision-makers and raising the likelihood of a global nuclear conflict over a false launch warning.

After the U.S. gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the treaty in six months, Putin said Russia would do the same. He ordered the development of new land-based intermediate-range weapons, but emphasized that Russia won’t deploy them in the European part of the country or elsewhere unless the U.S. does so.

“We will respond quid pro quo,” Putin said. “Our American partners have announced they were suspending their participation in the treaty and will do the same. They have announced they will conduct research and development, and we will act accordingly.”

The U.S. has accused Russia of developing and deploying a cruise missile that violates provisions of the pact that ban production, testing and deployment of land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (310 to 3,410 miles).

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the treaty would terminate in six months unless Russia accepts U.S. demands that it verifiably destroy the cruise missiles that Washington claims are in violation. NATO allies have strongly backed Washington and urged Moscow to save the treaty by returning to compliance.

But Russia has categorically rejected the U.S. claims of violation, charging that the missile, which is part of the Iskander-M missile system, has a maximum range of 480 kilometers (298 miles). Russian officials claimed the U.S. assertions about the alleged breach of the pact by Moscow were intended to shift the blame for the pact’s demise to Russia.

The Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday released a satellite image of what it described as new production facilities at the U.S. missile maker Raytheon’s plant in Tucson, Arizona, noting that their expansion began in 2017 as the Congress authorized spending for the development of intermediate-range missiles.

“The character and the timing of the works provide an irrefutable proof that the U.S. administration had decided to pull out of the INF treaty years before making unfounded claims of Russian violations,” it said.

Putin has argued it makes no sense for Russia to deploy a ground-based cruise missile violating the treaty because it has such weapons on ships and aircraft, which aren’t banned by the pact.

Speaking Saturday in a televised meeting with his foreign and defense ministers, Putin instructed the military to work on developing new land-based weapons that were previously forbidden by the INF treaty. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Putin that they would include a land-based version of the Kalibr ship-based cruise missile and a new hypersonic intermediate-range ballistic missile.

Putin emphasized that such new weapons won’t be deployed unless the U.S. does so.

“Russia will not station intermediate-range weapons in Europe or other regions until similar U.S. weapons appear in those regions,” he said.

The Russian leader said Moscow remains open to talks with Washington, but added it would be up to the U.S. to take the first step.

“Let’s wait until our partners are mature enough to conduct an equal and substantive dialogue on those issues,” he said.

At the same time, Putin told his ministers that he would like to review the progress on building other prospective weapons that don’t fall under the INF treaty, including the intercontinental Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle and the Poseidon underwater nuclear-powered drone.

He noted Shoigu’s report that a key stage in testing of the Poseidon was completed several days ago. The drone is designed to carry a heavy nuclear weapon that could cause a devastating tsunami wave.

The Russian leader last year unveiled an array of new nuclear weapons, including the Avangard and the Poseidon, saying that they can’t be intercepted.

Putin also noted during Saturday’s meeting that he would like the military to prepare a response to the possible deployment of weapons in space.

The Pentagon’s new strategy unveiled last month calls for a new array of space-based sensors and other high-tech systems to more quickly detect and shoot down incoming missiles.

Putin instructed the military to make sure the research and development works on new weapons don’t swell military spending. He said the military must reconfigure the existing defense budget to find money for the new weapons.

“We must not and will not be drawn into a costly arms race,” he said.

___

Deb Riechmann, Robert Burns, Matthew Lee and Lynn Berry in Washington contributed to this report.

Detainee on Hunger Strike Details Force-Feeding

Three times a day, a 22-year-old Indian man on a hunger strike says, he is dragged from his cell in a Texas immigration detention center, his feet scraping the floor as he goes. He’s put on a bed where he says his arms and legs are strapped down and a group of people force-feed him by pouring liquid into tubes pushed through his nose.

The man is among a group of nine detainees in the El Paso facility who immigration officials acknowledged Friday are being hydrated and fed against their will under court orders. That’s up from six men who were being fed through nasal tubes Wednesday when The Associated Press first reported on the force-feeding.

“They tie us on the force-feeding bed, and then they put a lot of liquid into the tubes, and the pressure is immense so we end up vomiting it out,” said the man, who called the AP Friday from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility where he is being held. “We can’t talk properly, and we can’t breathe properly. The pipe is not an easy process, but they try to push it down our noses and throats.”

Speaking through an interpreter, the hunger striker interviewed by the AP said he has lost 50 pounds since he began refusing food more than a month ago after coming to the United States seeking asylum. AP is only using his last name, Singh, out of family concerns for his safety in the U.S. and India. He said he is refusing food to protest guards’ unfair treatment of him and other Punjabis, who he said are being denied bond while other detainees from other countries were allowed out.

In a statement, ICE said it fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion without interference.

“ICE does not retaliate in any way against hunger strikers. ICE explains the negative health effects of not eating to our detainees. For their health and safety, ICE closely monitors the food and water intake of those detainees identified as being on a hunger strike,” the agency said.

The AP’s reports on the force-feeding have garnered international headlines and angry responses from policymakers and human rights advocates.

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat, visited some of the men after the initial reports, tweeting afterward that their situation is “unacceptable.”

“El Paso and our country are better than this,” she said.

Human Rights Watch published a dispatch Friday describing force-feeding as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

Hunger strikes among immigrant detainees are uncommon, and court orders authorizing force-feeding are rare, said an ICE official. Although the agency doesn’t keep statistics on this, attorneys, advocates and ICE staffers who AP spoke with did not recall a situation at an immigration detention site where it has come to this.

Detainees, their attorneys and advocates have said that up to 30 men have been on hunger strikes over the last month. According to ICE, 10 detainees from India and Nicaragua who are being held at the El Paso detention site have refused nine consecutive meals — the immigration agency’s benchmark for when to start calling refusal to eat a hunger strike.

Another four detainees are on hunger strikes in the agency’s Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco areas of responsibility, agency spokeswoman Leticia Zamarripa said. She did not say whether they were being force-fed.

Singh said he came to the United States in August of last year along with his cousin, seeking to escape violence in his home state of Punjab in India. Court records show he was arrested near El Paso and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. His uncle, Amrit Singh, said that his asylum claim had been denied.

Singh, the hunger striker, and a volunteer who has visited the facility said that the men have been requesting pillows to elevate their heads when the liquid nutrition is administered through their noses because the material backs up and causes them pain.

Nathan Craig, a volunteer with the nonprofit group Advocate Visitors with Immigrants in Detention, told the AP that one of the men he spoke with has a thyroid condition and has not been receiving his medicine.

“Both of the men I spoke to personally have visible trouble walking, they are frail and they are receiving by IV liquids, something like three times a day,” Craig said after an earlier visit.

Singh said they’re not getting the help they’ve requested.

“We keep asking them on a daily basis for the pillows, but we don’t have the pillows yet,” Singh said. “They don’t give us wheelchairs, despite the fact that we are so weak. They drag us on our feet.”

The International Red Cross, American Medical Association and World Medical Association condemn force-feeding hunger strikers as unethical.

Virginia Governor Apologizes for Racist Photo, Says He Won’t Resign

RICHMOND, Va.—Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam apologized on Friday for a racist photo in which he appeared more than 30 years ago, but said he did not intend to heed calls to resign from both Republicans and prominent fellow Democrats, including several presidential hopefuls.

The yearbook images were first published Friday by the conservative news outlet Big League Politics. The Virginian-Pilot later obtained a copy from Eastern Virginia Medical School, which Northam attended. The photo shows two people looking at the camera — one in blackface wearing a hat, bow tie and plaid pants; the other in a full Ku Klux Klan robe.

An Associated Press reporter saw the yearbook page and confirmed its authenticity at the medical school.

In his first apology, issued in a written statement Friday night, Northam called the costume he wore “clearly racist and offensive,” but he didn’t say which one he had worn.

He later issued a video statement saying he was “deeply sorry” but still committed to serving the “remainder of my term.”

“I accept responsibility for my past actions and I am ready to do the hard work of regaining your trust,” Northam said.

Northam’s political viability hinges on whether he can maintain support among the state’s black pastors, officials and state lawmakers, many of whom have long personal relationships with the governor since he first ran for state Senate in 2007.

The Virginia Legislative Black Caucus issued a statement late Friday saying “we feel complete betrayal” and are “still processing” the pictures.

“What has been revealed is disgusting, reprehensible and offensive,” the statement said.

Others said there was no question he should step down. Among them: Democratic presidential hopefuls Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren; newly elected Democratic U.S. Reps. Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia; the NAACP and Planned Parenthood.

State Sen. Louise Lucas of Portsmouth, a close ally of Northam and longtime African-American lawmaker, described a hastily called conference call with black leaders around the state as “intense,” her voice breaking, but did not elaborate.

Northam spent years actively courting the black community in the lead up to his 2017 gubernatorial run, building relationships that helped him win both the primary and the general election. He’s a member of a predominantly black church on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where he grew up.

“It’s a matter of relationships and trust. That’s not something that you build overnight,” Northam told the AP during a 2017 campaign stop while describing his relationship with the black community.

Northam, a folksy pediatric neurologist who is personal friends with many GOP lawmakers, has recently come under fire from Republicans who have accused him of backing infanticide after he said he supported a bill loosening restrictions on late-term abortions.

Last week, Florida’s secretary of state resigned after photos from a 2005 Halloween party showed him in blackface while dressed as a Hurricane Katrina victim.

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Associated Press writer Ben Finley contributed to this report.