Chris Hedges's Blog, page 376

Resistance Is the Supreme Act of Faith

Becket: It is not for me to win you round. I have only to say no to you.

King: But you must be logical, Becket!

Becket: No. That isn’t necessary, my liege. We must only do—absurdly—what we have been given to do—fight to the end.

—From the play “Becket,” by Jean Anouilh

The struggle against the monstrous radical evil that dominates our lives—an evil that is swiftly despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction, stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms, waging endless war and solidifying the obscene wealth of an oligarchic elite at our expense—will be fought only with the belief that resistance, however futile, insignificant and even self-defeating it may appear, can set in motion moral and spiritual forces that radiate outward to inspire others, including those who come after us. It is, in essence, an act of faith. Nothing less than this faith will sustain us. We resist not because we will succeed, but because it is right. Resistance is the supreme act of faith.

During the Vietnam War, on the afternoon of May 17, 1968, nine Catholics, including two brothers, the radical priests Phil and Dan Berrigan, entered the draft board in Catonsville, Md., and seized Selective Service records. They carted them outside to the parking lot in metal trash cans and set them on fire with homemade napalm—the recipe was from the Special Forces Handbook of the U.S. Army. The men and women, many of whom were or had been members of Catholic religious orders, stood and prayed around the bonfire until they were arrested. They were protesting not only the war but, as Dan Berrigan wrote, “every major presumption underlying American life.” They acted, and eventually went to prison, Berrigan went on, “to set in motion spiritual rhythms whose outward influences are, in the nature of things, simply immeasurable.”

The group’s statement read:

Our apologies good friends

for the fracture of good order the burning of paper

instead of children the angering of the orderlies

in the front parlor of the charnel house

We could not so help us God do otherwise

For we are sick at heart

Our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children. …

We say: Killing is disorder

life and gentleness and community and unselfishness

is the only order we recognize. …

How long must the world’s resources

be raped in the service of legalized murder?

When at what point will you say no to this war?

We have chosen to say

with the gift of our liberty

if necessary our lives:

the violence stops here

the death stops here

the suppression of the truth stops here

this war stops here. …

The Catonsville protest sparked a wave of break-ins at draft boards in which files were burned, mutilated, stolen or destroyed. The Selective Service, in the first eight months of 1970 alone, recorded 271 “antidraft occurrences” at draft boards across the country.

The nature, power and cost of civil disobedience, along with the understanding that confronting evil is the highest form of spirituality, is the subject of the play “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” written by Dan Berrigan. Transport Group will present a production of the play at the Abrons Arts Center in New York City from Jan. 16 to Feb. 23. It will be performed with three actors, one of whom is my wife, Eunice Wong. Our daughter was baptized by Dan Berrigan (1921-2016).

The men and women who became known as the Catonsville Nine pleaded guilty to the charges leveled against them—theft and destruction of property of the U.S. government and “disrupting the official activities” of the Selective Service. The Catonsville Nine used the court to indict the now-omnipotent war machine, which as Berrigan wrote “has come to include the court process that serves it.” The courts, the presidency and the Congress, he noted, have calcified and turned to stone. “The ‘separation of powers’ is proving a fiction; ball and joint, the functions of power are fusing, like the bones of an aged body,” he wrote.

“For you cannot set up a court in the Kingdom of the Blind, to condemn those who see; a court presided over by those who would pluck out the eyes of men and call it rehabilitation,” Berrigan continued.

The defendants in the Catonsville Nine trial declined to question or challenge any potential jurors during the selection process. Later they would use their testimony not to attempt to prove their innocence—they freely admitted they were guilty of the prosecution’s narrow charges—but to put the nation on trial. They argued that to abide by a higher law they must confront the law. Breaking the law was a function of conscience.

“The law, as presently revered and taught and enforced, is becoming an enticement to lawlessness,” Dan Berrigan wrote in his book of essays, “No Bars to Manhood.” “Lawyers and laws and courts and penal systems are nearly immobile before a shaken society, which is making civil disobedience a civil (I dare say a religious) duty. The law is aligning itself more and more with forms of power whose existence is placed more and more in question. … So if they would obey the law, [people] are being forced, in the present crucial instance, either to disobey God or to disobey the law of humanity.”

“The courts, up to the U.S. Supreme Court itself, are unwilling, especially in wartime, to consider seriously the moral and legal questions of war itself,” Berrigan wrote. “So we felt that civilized [people] must seek to use the courtroom in order to achieve some public audibility about who we were and what we were about. The issues raised by the war—issues of constitutionality and morality of the war, of free speech and freedom of protest—might thereby be separated from our personal or corporate fates.”

The law, Berrigan saw, is used to strengthen “a corporate system bent in the direction of more and more American hegemony abroad, more and more firmly imbedded poverty and racism at home.” This capitalist machine, he said, had to be “taken apart, built over again.” The Nine understood that it was “spiritually absurd and suicidal to be pretending to help the poor at home while we bombed the poor abroad.” Mass incarceration and widespread poverty were the inevitable results of endless war and unchecked militarism. If this militarism was not curbed—and it has not been curbed—the Nine predicted it would exacerbate racism among dispossessed whites, expand lethal, militarized police forces and transform the Congress, the judiciary, the presidency and the press into handmaidens of the corporate state. The trajectory, Dan Berrigan wrote, would lead to “an interlocking dance of death, a celebration of horror.”

The Catonsville Nine were indifferent to their fate. “We were obliged in fact to attain some kind of personal liberation before acting at all,” Berrigan wrote, “a certain spiritual detachment from the fact of prison.” They did not expect miracles. They were not deceived by the roller coaster of emotional highs and lows that characterize a consumer culture. Patience, as the Vietnamese in Hanoi told Dan Berrigan, “is a revolutionary virtue.” It was the truth that was on trial. The point of civil disobedience, Berrigan said, is not that people will agree or even follow. It is that such actions foster among the wider population “a deepened consciousness.”

“Still,” Berrigan wrote in his autobiography, “this or that court, no matter what its crimes against justice, its stacked cards, its vindictive blindness, would never succeed in closing the dossier on conscience. And this was exactly our hope. Time would work in its imperceptible way, mysterious, invisible; other lives would be touched as the stories of the courageous and nonviolent were heard, often by word of mouth only. Time taking its own sweet time, so to speak, the motion and motive of a larger soul.”

The Berrigans, who identified as religious radicals, had little use for liberals. Liberals, they said, addressed only small, moral fragments and used their pet causes, in most cases, not to bring about systemic change, but for self-adulation. Liberals often saw wars or social injustices as isolated evils whose end would restore harmony.

“But the consciousness of the radical man is integrated,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “He knows that everything leads to everything else. So while he works for the end of the war, for the end of poverty, or for the end of American racism, he knows that every war is symptomatic of every other war. Vietnam to Laos and on to Thailand, and across the world to Guatemala, and across all wars to his own heart.”

“Our act was aimed, as our statement tried to make clear, at every major presumption underlying American life today,” he wrote. “Our act was in the strictest sense a conspiracy; that is to say, we had agreed together to attack the working assumptions of American life. Our act was a denial that American institutions were presently functioning in a way that good men [and women] could approve or sanction. We were denying that the law, medicine, education, and systems of social welfare (and, above all, the military-paramilitary styles and objectives that rule and overrule and control these others) were serving the people, were including the needy, or might be expected to change in accord with changing needs, that these could enlist or embody the sources of good men [and women]—imagination, moral suppleness, pragmatism, or compassion.”

Phil Berrigan (1923-2002), a highly decorated infantry officer who fought in Europe in World War II, was the driving force behind the Catonsville Nine. He had already broken into a draft board office in the Baltimore Customs House in October 1967 with three other protesters—they would become known as the Baltimore Four—and poured blood over draft files. The event was well publicized. He and the artist Thomas P. Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four, were awaiting sentencing for their Baltimore action when they participated in the act at Catonsville. Phil Berrigan and Lewis knew that their participation in Catonsville meant their sentences for the Baltimore protest would be harsher. But they understood that resistance cannot be reactive. It must be proactive. Phil Berrigan convinced his brother Dan to join the protest at Catonsville at a time when Dan believed that his work was “standing by the students [protesters] in their travail; nothing more.” “In comparison with him,” Dan wrote of Phil, “I was a coddled egg indeed.” But Dan Berrigan knew that “if I delayed too long, I would never find the courage to say no” to the war.

It was clear, Dan Berrigan wrote, that the government “would allow men like myself to do what we were doing almost indefinitely; to sign statements, to picket, to support resisters in court. Even if they did pick us up, it was the government who were choosing the victim and the time and place of prosecution. The initiative was entirely in their hands. But in the plan under discussion, the situation was entirely reversed. A few men [and women] were declaring that the initiative of actions and passion belonged to the peaceable and the resisting.”

The Berrigans excoriated the church hierarchy for sacralizing the nation, the government, capitalism, the military and the war. They argued that the fusion of secular and religious authority would kill the church as a religious institution. The archbishop of New York at the time, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, in one example, sprinkled holy water on B-52 bombers and blessed the warplanes before their missions in Vietnam. He described the conflict as a “war for civilization” and “Christ’s war against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam.”

Phil Berrigan, the first priest to go to jail for protesting the war, celebrated Mass for his fellow prisoners. The services were, for the first time, well attended. The cardinal of Baltimore, in response, stripped Phil Berrigan of his priestly functions. The Masses celebrated later by an assigned outsider were boycotted by the prisoners. “There seemed to be some connection, too subtle for those in power to grasp, quite lucid to the imprisoned, between the Eucharist and a priest who was a fellow prisoner,” Dan Berrigan wrote.

“In sum, in a time of crisis, the Church had waited on the culture,” Dan Berrigan wrote in “No Bars to Manhood.” “When the war-making society had completed its case against a nonviolent, protesting priest, the Church moved against him too, sacred overkill added to secular. Indeed, Christ made common cause with Caesar; religion preached a new crusade, a dubious and savage war. The Church all but disappeared into the legions.” Those of faith, Berrigan wrote, should be content to “live and die ‘outside the walls’; they are men [and women] without a country and a church. They can flee the nation or languish in jail; the curse of the inquisitor will penetrate the jails to strike them there.”

It has been 50 years since Catonsville. And yet, often unheard and unheralded, the steadfast drumbeat of nonviolent religious protest against the war machine continues. Elizabeth McAlister, of Jonah House in Baltimore and the widow of Phil Berrigan, along with the Jesuit priest Steve Kelly and Catholic Worker Movement members Carmen Trotta, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy (the granddaughter of Catholic Worker Movement co-founder Dorothy Day), Mark Colville and Patrick O’Neill, will be put on trial next spring for trespassing onto the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Marys, Ga., to protest our nuclear weapons arsenal.

The activists entered the base on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who thundered against the “triple evils of militarism, racism and materialism.” They carried hammers and baby bottles of their own blood to defile the nuclear weapons storage bunkers. The Kings Bay naval facility is the largest nuclear submarine base in the world. Five of the group were released on bond and are forced to wear ankle monitors. McAlister, who turned 79 last month in jail, and Kelly remain incarcerated in the Glynn County Detention Center.

Dan Berrigan reflected on the burning of the Catonsville draft records in “To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography”:

The act was pitiful, a tiny flare amid the consuming fires of war. But Catonsville was like a firebreak, a small fire lit, to contain and conquer a greater. …

For the remainder of our lives, the fires would burn and burn, in hearts and minds, in draft boards, in prisons and courts. A new fire, new as a Pentecost, flared up in eyes deadened and hopeless. …

“Nothing can be done!” How often we had heard that gasp: the last of the human, of soul, of freedom. Indeed, something could be done; and was. And would be.

We had removed an abomination from the Earth. It was as though, across the land, a series of signal fires had been lighted. The first was no larger than a gleam of an eye. But hill to hill, slowly at first, then like a wildfire, leaping interstices and valleys, the fires flared. …

In the following years, some seventy draft boards were entered across the land. Their contents variously shredded, sacked, hidden out of sight, burned, scattered to the winds. In one case, the files were mailed back to their owners, with a note urging that the inductee refuse to serve.

That morning! We stood in the breach of birth. We could know nothing. Would something follow, would our act speak to others, awaken their resolve? We knew only the bare bones of consequence. …

The act was done. We sat in custody in the back room of the Catonsville Post Office, weak with relief, grinning like virtuous gargoyles. Three or four FBI honchos entered portentously. Their leader, a jut-jawed paradigm, surveyed us from the doorway. His eagle eye lit on Philip. He roared out: “Him again! Good God, I’m changing my religion!”

I could think of no greater tribute to my brother.

Los Angeles Hires Substitutes in Preparation for Teacher Strike

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reportedly hired about 400 substitute teachers to work while teachers are on strike for better pay and classroom resources. Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), said that after 20 months of bargaining, the union’s 34,000 members are prepared to strike beginning Jan. 10.

“We have hired substitutes,” Austin Beutner, the district superintendent, told the Los Angeles Daily News, “We have made plans as to alternate curriculums for days that there is a strike but our goal is to make sure schools are safe and open so kids continue to learn. My concern first and foremost is the safety and well being of our students.”

The union struck back at Beutner—a former investment banker with no experience in education leadership prior to his hiring in May—for failing to offer teachers a contract that met their requests. “It is outrageously irresponsible for Supt. Austin Beutner to force this strike when the district holds $1.9 billion in reserves and it is even more irresponsible to think that 400 substitutes can educate more than 600,000 students,” UTLA said in a statement Friday.

“The people Beutner says he hired will never replace the hard-working LAUSD teachers and substitutes who have dedicated their lives to LAUSD,” the union added.

Teachers are concerned that Beutner will issue cuts to the district while resources are funneled to privately managed charter schools. Critics worry that privatization, which is supported by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, allows schools to pursue the interests of the corporations that run them with little public oversight.

“First, the politicians intentionally defund our schools, then they demonize educators, and then they say that so-called ‘school choice’ is the only solution. Every year, LAUSD loses $600 million to charters,” said UTLA Secretary Arlene Inouye. “We have the money in California for an amazing school system—we have the most billionaires of any state in the country. But we also have the most inequality,” Inouye said.

While some parents expressed frustration about the interruption to the school year, others, like Jenna Schwartz, the PTA president at Colfax Charter Elementary in North Hollywood, said that they support the teachers. “Everything [teachers are] asking for is for us. It benefits us,” she said. “They want smaller classroom sizes. They want less testing. I’m keeping my kids home. We don’t cross picket lines.”

Schwartz’s daughter, Zoe, who is in fifth grade, said that she and her 37 classmates experience difficulty during classes because the room is so crowded it is hard for students to see the whiteboard.

It is unclear who was hired to teach during the strike, because the union represents about 2,000 substitutes, who will also be picketing. “We believe that it is illegal for the district to hire people outside our bargaining unit to teach in LAUSD classrooms,” UTLA said in a statement.

“I don’t know where these subs came from. Our local subs, they’re not going to cross picket lines,” Schwartz said.

The teachers union has listed several demand on its website, including smaller class sizes, more nurses and librarians, more arts education, fair wages and less emphasis on testing. “Years of underfunding, the unregulated growth of the charter industry, and district neglect have starved our schools of necessary resources,” the union said in a statement.

According to LAUSD, students will still be expected to attend school during the strike and meal programs for low-income students will not change. A pamphlet from the district on preparing for a strike advised parents to simplify the strike into a two-sided argument: “You can tell your children that sometimes adults have disagreements so they need to get together to talk about it, and work together to find solutions. Conversations about a strike should be personalized to the age of the child. Assure your children that they didn’t do anything wrong.”

Outgoing Chief of Staff Kelly: Trump Backed Away From Wall Months Ago

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump long ago backed away from his campaign pledge to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, his outgoing chief of staff said, as the president’s demand for “border security” funding triggered a partial government shutdown with no end in sight.

John Kelly, who will leave his post Wednesday after a tumultuous 17 months in the job, said in an exit interview with the Los Angeles Times that Trump abandoned the notion of “a solid concrete wall early on in the administration.” It marked the starkest admission yet by the president’s inner circle that his signature campaign pledge, which sparked fervent chants of “build that wall” during Trump’s rallies and is now at the center of a budgetary standoff, would not be fulfilled as advertised.

“To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said, adding the mix of technological enhancements and “steel slat” barriers the president now wants along the border resulted from conversations with law enforcement professionals.

The partial shutdown began Dec. 22 after Trump bowed to conservative demands that he fight to make good on his vow and secure funding for the wall before Republicans lose control of the House on Wednesday. Democrats have remained committed to blocking the president’s priority, and with neither side engaging in substantive negotiation, the effect of the partial shutdown was set to spread and to extend into the new year.

In August 2015 during his presidential campaign, Trump made his expectations for the border explicitly clear, as he parried criticism from rival Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor.

“Jeb Bush just talked about my border proposal to build a ‘fence,'” he tweeted. “It’s not a fence, Jeb, it’s a WALL, and there’s a BIG difference!”

But on Sunday White House counselor Kellyanne Conway called discussion of the apparent contradiction “a silly semantic argument.”

“There may be a wall in some places, there may be steel slats, there may be technological enhancements,” Conway told “Fox News Sunday.” ”But only saying ‘wall or no wall’ is being very disingenuous and turning a complete blind eye to what is a crisis at the border.”

Meanwhile, neither side appeared ready to budge off its negotiating position. The two sides have had little direct contact during the stalemate, and Trump did not ask Republicans, who hold a monopoly on power in Washington until Thursday, to keep Congress in session.

Talks have been at a stalemate for more than a week, after Democrats said the White House offered to accept $2.5 billion for border security. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told Vice President Mike Pence that it wasn’t acceptable, nor was it guaranteed that Trump, under intense pressure from his conservative base to fulfill his signature campaign promise, would settle for that amount.

Conway claimed Sunday that “the president has already compromised” by dropping his request for the wall from $25 billion, and she called on Democrats to return to the negotiating table.

“It is with them,” she said, explaining why Trump was not reaching out to Democrats.

Democrats maintain that they have already presented the White House with three options to end the shutdown, none of which fund the wall, and insist that it’s Trump’s move.

“At this point, it’s clear the White House doesn’t know what they want when it comes to border security,” said Justin Goodman, Schumer’s spokesman. “While one White House official says they’re willing to compromise, another says the president is holding firm at no less than $5 billion for the wall. Meanwhile, the president tweets blaming everyone but himself for a shutdown he called for more than 25 times.”

After canceling a vacation to his private Florida club, Trump spent the weekend at the White House. He has remained out of the public eye since returning early Thursday from a 29-hour trip to visit U.S. troops in Iraq, instead taking to Twitter to attack Democrats. He also moved to defend himself from criticism that he couldn’t deliver on the wall while the GOP controlled both the House and Senate.

“For those that naively ask why didn’t the Republicans get approval to build the Wall over the last year, it is because IN THE SENATE WE NEED 10 DEMOCRAT VOTES, and they will gives us “NONE” for Border Security!,” he tweeted. “Now we have to do it the hard way, with a Shutdown.”

Trump had lunch Sunday with Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said he hoped to end the shutdown by offering Democrats incentives to get them to vote for wall funding.

“To my Democratic friends, there will never be a deal without wall funding,” Graham said on CNN before the meeting with the president.

Graham proposed to help two groups of immigrants get approval to continue living in the U.S: about 700,000 young “Dreamers” brought into the U.S. illegally as children and about 400,000 people receiving temporary protected status because they are from countries struggling with natural disasters or armed conflicts. He also said the compromise should include changes in federal law to discourage people from trying to enter the U.S. illegally.

“Democrats have a chance here to work with me and others, including the president, to bring legal status to people who have very uncertain lives,” Graham said.

After meeting with the president, Graham said Trump was “open-minded” about a broader immigration agreement, saying the impasse presented an opportunity to address issues beyond the border wall. But a previous attempt to reach a compromise that addressed the status of Dreamers broke down last year as a result of escalating White House demands.

As he called for Democrats to negotiate, Trump brushed off criticism that his administration bore any responsibility for the recent deaths of two migrant children in Border Patrol custody. Trump claimed the deaths were “strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally.” His comments on Twitter came as his Homeland Security secretary met with medical professionals and ordered policy changes meant to better protect children detained at the border.

Trump earlier had upped the brinkmanship by threatening anew to close the border with Mexico to press Congress to cave to his demand for money to pay for a wall. Democrats are vowing to pass legislation restoring the government as soon as they take control of the House on Thursday, but that won’t accomplish anything unless Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate go along with it.

The shutdown is forcing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors to stay home or work without pay.

___

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking in Washington contributed to this report.

Minimum Wage Rising in 20 States and Numerous Cities

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — At Granny Shaffer’s restaurant in Joplin, Missouri, owner Mike Wiggins is reprinting the menus to reflect the 5, 10 or 20 cents added to each item.

A two-egg breakfast will cost an extra dime, at $7.39. The price of a three-piece fried chicken dinner will go up 20 cents, to $8.78. The reason: Missouri’s minimum wage is rising.

Wiggins said the price hikes are necessary to help offset an estimated $10,000 to $12,000 in additional annual pay to his staff as a result of a new minimum wage law taking effect Tuesday.

“For us it’s very simple. There’s no big pot of money out there to get the money out of” for the required pay raises, Wiggins said.

New minimum wage requirements will take effect in 20 states and nearly two dozen cities around the start of the new year, affecting millions of workers. The state wage hikes range from an extra nickel per hour in Alaska to a $1-an-hour bump in Maine, Massachusetts and for California employers with more than 25 workers.

Seattle’s largest employers will have to pay workers at least $16 an hour starting Tuesday. In New York City, many businesses will have to pay at least $15 an hour as of Monday. That’s more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

A variety of other new state laws also take effect Tuesday . Those include revisions to sexual harassment policies stemming from the #MeToo movement, restrictions on gun sales following deadly mass shootings and revamped criminal penalties as officials readjust the balance between punishment and rehabilitation.

The state and local wage laws come amid a multi-year push by unions and liberal advocacy groups to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nationwide. Few are there yet, but many states have ratcheted up wages through phased-in laws and adjustments for inflation.

In Arkansas and Missouri, voters this fall approved ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage after state legislators did not. In Missouri, the minimum wage will rise from $7.85 to $8.60 an hour on Tuesday as the first of five annual increases that will take it to $12 an hour by 2023.

At Granny Shafffer’s in Joplin, waitress Shawna Green will see her base pay go up. But she has mixed emotions about it.

“We’ll have regulars, and they will notice, and they will bring it to our attention, like it’s our fault and our doings” that menu prices are increasing, she said. “They’ll back off on something, and it’s usually their tips, or they don’t come as often.”

Economic studies on minimum wage increases have shown that some workers do benefit, while others might see their work hours reduced. Businesses may place a higher value on experienced workers, making it more challenging for entry-level employees to find jobs.

Seattle, the fastest-growing large city in the U.S., has been at the forefront of the movement for higher minimum wages. A local ordinance raised the minimum wage to as much as $11 an hour in 2015, then as much as $13 in 2016, depending on the size of the employer and whether it provided health insurance.

A series of studies by the University of Washington has produced evolving conclusions.

In May, the researchers determined that Seattle’s initial increase to $11 an hour had an insignificant effect on employment but that the hike to $13 an hour resulted in “a large drop in employment.” They said the higher minimum wage led to a 6.9 percent decline in the hours worked for those earning under $19 an hour, resulting in a net reduction in paychecks.

In October, however, those same researchers reached a contrasting conclusion. They said Seattle workers employed at low wages experienced a modest reduction in hours worked after the minimum wage increased, but nonetheless saw a net increase in average pretax earnings of $10 a week. That gain generally went to those who already had been working more hours while those who had been working less saw no significant change in their overall earnings.

Both supporters and opponents of higher minimum wages have pointed to the Seattle studies.

The federal minimum wage was last raised in 2009. Since then, 29 states, the District of Columbia and dozens of other cities and counties have set minimum wages above the federal floor. Some have repeatedly raised their rates.

“The federal minimum wage has really become irrelevant,” said Michael Saltsman, managing director of the Employment Policies Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group that receives funding from businesses and opposes minimum wage increases.

The new state minimum wage laws could affect about 5.3 million workers who are currently earning less than the new standards, according to the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, based in Washington, D.C. That equates to almost 8 percent of the workforce in those 20 states but doesn’t account for additional minimum wage increases in some cities.

Advocates credit the trend toward higher minimum wages to the “Fight for $15,” a national movement that has used protests and rallies to push for higher wages for workers in fast food, child care, airlines and other sectors.

“It may not have motivated every lawmaker to agree that we should go to $15,” said David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute. “But it’s motivated many of them to accept that we need higher minimum wages than we currently have in much of the country.”

Raymond Chandler, American Hard-Boiled

“The Annotated Big Sleep”
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“The Annotated Big Sleep”

A book by Raymond Chandler, annotated and edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean Rizzuto

“ ‘The Big Sleep doesn’t,’ ” Jonathan Lethem writes in the foreword to “The Annotated Big Sleep.” “It never even nods. Flip the book open anywhere and it winks, leers, bristles, sulks, and sneers—in every line. …” That’s a pretty good review of the greatest private eye novel ever, written 79 years after its publication. If you’re looking for an excuse to reread it or if you’ve ever wondered why the reputation of Raymond Chandler and his first novel endures, start here.

Footnotes are probably the last thing Chandler envisioned for any of his novels, but the notes by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson and Anthony Dean Rizzuto—all writers and editors and fans—form a companion to “The Big Sleep,” offering background, context and color.  

I don’t at all mind the interruptions that discuss Chandler’s education at Dulwich College in London (where one of his classmates was P.G. Wodehouse), his adventures in Hollywood screenwriting or the leisurely strolls through Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles. (“As part of the research for this edition, the editors abandoned their cars and tried to follow Marlowe’s footsteps, to no avail.” Alas, they made it only part of the way as their path was blocked by “a corporate, multi-story shopping mall at Hollywood and Highland.” There’s got to be a metaphor in that.)  

This “Big Sleep” isn’t just annotated. It’s illustrated with covers of Chandler’s first editions, movie posters from the Marlowe books, the only known photo of Chandler with the man who created and perfected the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett (you will spot them immediately: the only writers in the photo not looking into the camera), and photos of real locations that serve as crime scenes in the book. My favorite is of Malibu Pier—to paraphrase Burt Lancaster in “Atlantic City,” the Pacific Ocean was really something back then.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Annotated Big Sleep” at Google Books.

It’s a pleasure to revisit the tight, hard-boiled (and I would like to see this overused phrase retired from American lexicon) dialogue, such as these jewels from Marlowe:

“I’m unmarried because I don’t like policemen’s wives.”

“I was fired. For insubordination. I test very high on insubordination.”

“Once outside the law, you’re all the way outside.” (Though I question the wisdom of this statement. Which of us hasn’t been outside the law at one time or another?)

The following aren’t from “The Big Sleep,” but the annotators quote them, and I can’t resist mentioning them:

From “Farewell My Lovely”: “I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin.”

From “The High Window”: “On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.”

The modern American hard-boiled writing style popularized in the 1930s—and I swear I’ll never use that term again—is supposedly based on American speech. Yes, but we don’t really talk like the characters in Chandler’s books. We only wish we did.

One of the delights of reading “The Big Sleep” again is being reminded of all the ways in which it differs from the mystery/crime pulp culture it helped bring into the American mainstream. For instance, the trench coat. Bogart made it iconic in Howard Hawks’ film version of “The Big Sleep”; he seems to have worn the same one in “Casablanca.” But the annotators note that the Marlowe of the book wore it “not for fashion but because it’s raining.” There’s no mention of the famous fedora and, unlike the legion of private eyes who followed him, Marlowe was smart enough not to carry a gun (he did keep one in the glove box of his car).  

Another key point is that, despite Chandler’s acknowledged debt to Hammett, Marlowe isn’t a clone of “The Maltese Falcon’s” Sam Spade. (Of course, also portrayed by Bogart in John Huston’s film adaptation.)  Marlowe’s “not the stereotypical hard-boiled detective”—and I swear never to use that term again—“but he puts on the identity when it suits him. It doesn’t always suit him.”

I’m grateful to “The Annotated Big Sleep” for finally explaining who killed the chauffeur Owen Taylor, a character whose murder goes unexplained in the movie—though I’ll be damned if I can remember why he was killed—and then for making clear that plot is not the issue with Chandler. As Marlowe wryly observed in “The Big Sleep,” “I’m not Sherlock Holmes.” (I’ll figure out the plot to “Inception” and “Mulholland Drive” before I ever solve “The Big Sleep.”)

Chandler’s atmosphere is not for everyone. In his “Lectures on American Literature,” Jorge Luis Borges sniffed that “The atmosphere in these stories [Chandler and Hammett] is disagreeable.” It sure is. As Wilfrid Sheed wrote, “Chandler had a foreigner’s sense of the strangeness of America,” and this went double for Los Angeles, a city that was still taking shape and was a little strange to just about everyone. You expect evil to ooze out of the gutters of New York and Chicago, and even Hammett’s San Francisco, but it took a truly poetic sensibility to see it in the decadence of the sun-washed streets and hills of L.A., a city he once described as “having all the personality of a paper cup.” Sheed again: “Chandler could not describe a laundromat without freighting it with corruption and menace.”

Hill, Jackson and Rizzuto make clear Chandler’s immense debt to Ernest Hemingway, whom he regarded as the greatest American novelist—namely short, brushstroke sentences and vivid compressed language. (No less than Evelyn Waugh thought Chandler to be America’s greatest novelist, and W.H. Auden would surely have seconded that. T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood would also have ranked him near the top. It’s even been said that Albert Camus’ style in “The Stranger” was influenced by Hemingway and Chandler.)

Hemingway dismissed satires of his work, writing, “The greater the work of literature, the easier the work to parody.” Maybe. At any rate, Hemingway is surely the most parodied American writer. Chandler, who well may be the second most parodied, was having a little fun—God knows, a rare impulse for him, and, in his own way repaying the debt when he wrote this, inspired by Papa’s story, “Big Two-Hearted River”: “Hank unscrewed the top of the toothpaste tube, thinking of the day he had unscrewed the lid of the coffee jar, down on the Pukauuk River when he was trout fishing. There are larches there, too. It was a damned good river, and the trout had been damned good trout. They liked being hooked. Everything had been good except the coffee, which had been lousy. He made it Watson’s way, boiling it for two and a half hours in his knapsack. It had tasted like hell. It had tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man.”  

Let’s be generous and assume that S.J. Perelman intended an homage to Chandler with his piece in The New Yorker, “Farewell My Lovely Appetizer”: “Her bosom was heaving, and it looked even better that way … a thin gallot with stooping shoulders was being very busy reading a paper outside the store. … He hadn’t been there an hour ago, but then, of course, neither had I.”

To my ear, the best comic Chandler was from Steve Martin and Carl Reiner in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.” Sample: “It was the kind of place where rich men went to meet rich women to make rich babies.”

Mickey Spillane once told an interviewer, “If Thomas Mann sold, I’d write like Thomas Mann.” I think Sarah Palin with a laptop could come closer to Thomas Mann than Mickey Spillane (though I think the Mick envied Tom for the title, “Death in Venice”), but I also don’t think that Mann could have written good crime stories. It’s tougher than it seems. Raymond Chandler wrote better than Mickey Spillane or maybe Thomas Mann and possibly as well as John Banville, who, in his novels about the Dublin coroner Quirke, written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, tries his damnedest to write like Chandler.

Banville would seem to be an odd choice to write a Philip Marlowe novel, and not just because he can lay claim to being the greatest living novelist in the English language. In a 2008 issue of Bookforum, Banville wrote about his love of pulp but dismissed Chandler: “I consider the Marlowe books forced and even a touch sentimental for all their elegance and wit and wonderful sheen. … Chandler perhaps labored too long and too hard at effecting the transmutation of life’s raw material into deathless prose.”

Sentimentality is a strange charge to make by an author whose Irish protagonist Quirke indulges in Jameson-soaked self-pity about three times in a novel. But Banville must have had a change of heart about Chandler over the next couple of years. Why else would he write a Marlowe novel—“The Black-Eyed Blonde”—in a feat of what The Guardian called “literary ventriloquism,” and why try so hard to re-create Chandler’s prose? And he did a good job: His Marlowe, talking to us in Chandler’s familiar first person, tells us:

“Her hair was blonde and her eyes were black, black and deep as a mountain lake, the lids exquisitely tapered at their outer corners. A blonde with black eyes—that’s not a combination you get very often.”

That’s Chandler’s rhythm, cadence and punctuation. Perfect.

“Sometimes I think I should lay off cigarettes for good, but if I did that, I’d have no hobbies except chess, and I keep beating myself at chess.”

“A guy came in who looked so much like Gary Cooper that it couldn’t have been him.” It might have been funnier if he’d used Bogart, but Cooper works fine.

“She was one of those women whose sister would be beautiful, though she just missed it herself.”

That a novelist of Banville’s prestige would take on Marlowe is perhaps the greatest indicator of Chandler’s influence. Chandler’s oeuvre is meager for a crime writer or really any prominent writer: just six novels, a couple of story collections, the film script for Billy Wilder’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity,” some dialogue for Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” and a very famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” which defined the American hard-boiled (I’m sorry, but there are just no synonyms for this) style, and gave us and Martin Scorsese the phrase “mean streets.” No other American writer has had so much effect with so little output.

For millions around the world, many of whom don’t even read mystery or crime stories, he defined a genre, a city and a style.

As the annotators write, “ ‘Noir’ hadn’t been invented when Raymond Chandler was writing these stories, except to the extent that he, with other hard-boiled writers”—absolute promise, will never use again—“was inventing it himself.” Chandler has had many imitators but no real heirs. He didn’t invent his genre (and I’m not going to say hard-boiled again), but in perfecting it, he exhausted it, though in “Gun, With Occasional Music,” Jonathan Lethem has grafted the American detective story to sci-fi and done a creditable job of replicating Chandleresque dialogue—more of a tribute, really, than a parody. Lethem’s private eye gets strong-armed by a killer kangaroo (don’t ask, just read the book):

“So you and Danny are real cozy, right? So you can get a message back to him?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell him next time he wants to talk to me, don’t send a marsupial.”

As Lethem’s writing indicates, the real echoes of Chandler are found not in modern crime fiction but in serious writers such as Haruki Murakami (“Philip Marlowe is Chandler’s fantasy, but he’s real to me”), film (from Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” to that screwball mutation, the Coen brothers’ “The Big Lebowski”), and even poetry. The late Alabama poet Diann Blakely borrowed the title of Chandler’s second-best novel for her 2000 collection of noirish-themed verse, “Farewell, My Lovelies.” And this is from Margaret Atwood’s “In Love With Raymond Chandler,” in which Atwood captures Chandler’s genius for mise-en-scène: “I think of his sofas, stuffed to roundness, satin-covered, pale blue like the eyes of his cold blond unbodied murderous women, beating very slowly, like the hearts of hibernating crocodiles. …”

“I’m not going to write the great American novel,” Chandler once said. But he did write a great novel about America.

The Shameless Illegal Stunts the GOP Pulled in North Carolina

For years, Republicans in North Carolina have tried to roll back voter rights in the interest of “preventing fraud.”

But now, one of their own — Republican Mark Harris in the state’s 9th congressional district — stands credibly accused of paying a consultant who may have stolen or altered absentee ballots cast for his opponent. Officials have refused to certify the vote.

As we press for accountability, it’s important that we also seek moral and factual clarity about voting more generally.

In the month after the November elections, claims of so-called “voter fraud” seem to have reached a dizzying new level. Some politicians have even implied that counting votes equates to stealing an election.

But counting every vote in any election is a legal and moral obligation. On the other hand, any attempt to secretly steal ballots — like in Bladen County, North Carolina, where residents reported strangers coming to their door and demanding their ballots — isn’t just shameless. It’s also illegal.

Those who perpetrated this scheme in Bladen County must be held accountable. As importantly, these crimes must not be used to justify the kind of racially discriminatory voting restrictions that some Republican legislators have pushed in the name of preventing “voter fraud.”

Most veteran voters know, and every first-time voter must learn, that the Voting Rights Act was one of the great victories of the civil rights movement. In addition to protecting voters who’d been brutalized and barricaded from the ballot box, the law served as a national affirmation of a clear moral truth: It’s wrong to keep people from exercising their right to vote.

Tragically, attempts to keep political power away from African Americans and other groups endure. When arch-conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted one of the most important protections in the Voting Rights Act in 2013, legislators across the old Confederacy enacted new voting restrictions and drew new voting districts.

These more recent voter suppression laws have been described by a federal court as “targeting African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

When those who defend voter suppression laws refuse to acknowledge that those laws are designed to influence election outcomes by preventing people from voting, we must be democracy’s moral compass.

And when they say restrictive voter ID laws and other barriers to the ballot are necessary to stop “voter fraud,” we must call it what it is — voter suppression. The kind of “fraud” they talk about — someone voting under another person’s name or voting when they’re not legally eligible to do so — almost never happens.

Every vote matters, and every eligible vote should always be counted. That’s how we know who won.

To suggest that black voters and Democrats are somehow stealing elections through “voter fraud” is to suggest that there’s something sinister about taking the time needed to count each and every vote, as President Trump and others claimed during ballot counts in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona.

Unfortunately, some have suggested that the delayed certification in North Carolina is somehow a sign that Democrats want to “try and steal an election” there, too — even when available evidence suggests that, if anything, it was supporters of the Republicans who tried to steal the election.

What is stealing an election is keeping people from voting.

Regardless of political affiliation, our public officials must embrace these truths. As the late Senator Edward Kennedy once said, “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

So let us press on for morality in our processes and unburdened participation in our democracy — not just for a few, but for all.

N. Korean Leader Calls for More Talks With South in New Year

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sent a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Sunday calling for more peace talks between the leaders in the new year following their active engagement in 2018, South Korea’s presidential office said.

Moon’s office said Kim also expressed regret that he couldn’t make a planned visit to Seoul, South Korea’s capital, by the end of December as pledged by the leaders during their last summit in September in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The Blue House didn’t fully disclose Kim’s letter.

Moon later thanked Kim for his “warm” letter in a tweeted message and said without elaborating that Kim expressed strong willingness to carry out the agreements he made this year during a series of inter-Korean summits and a historic June meeting with President Donald Trump.

“There will still be a lot of difficulties ahead,” Moon said in his message. “However, our hearts will become more open if we put in that much effort. There’s no change in our heart about welcoming Chairman Kim (to the South).”

The tweet also included a photo that showed a ruby-colored folder emblazoned with the seal of Pyongyang’s powerful State Affairs Commission and the top part of Kim’s letter, which started with: “Dear your excellency President Moon Jae-in. Our meeting in Pyongyang feels like yesterday but about 100 days have already passed and now we are at the close of an unforgettable 2018.”

Through three summits between Moon and Kim this year, the Koreas agreed to a variety of goodwill gestures and vowed to resume economic cooperation when possible, voicing optimism that international sanctions could end to allow such activity.

The rivals have also taken steps to reduce their conventional military threat, such as removing mines and firearms from the border village of Panmunjom, destroying some front-line guard posts and creating buffer zones along their land and sea boundaries and a no-fly zone above the border.

“Chairman Kim said that the leaders by meeting three times in a single year and implementing bold measures to overcome the long period of conflict lifted our (Korean) nation from military tension and war fears,” Kim Eui-kyeom, Moon’s spokesman, said in a televised briefing.

“Chairman Kim said he will keep a close eye on the situation and expressed strong will to visit Seoul. … Chairman Kim also expressed his intentions to meet President Moon frequently again in 2019 to advance discussions on the Korean Peninsula’s peace and prosperity and discuss issues on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the spokesman said.

Moon’s office did not reveal how Kim Jong Un’s letter was delivered or whether he made any comments about his planned second summit with Trump in 2019.

The letter comes days before Kim is expected to address North Koreans in a New Year’s speech that North Korean leaders traditionally use to announce major policy decisions and goals.

Kim used his New Year’s speech a year ago to initiate diplomacy with Seoul and Washington, which led to his meetings with Moon and a historic June summit with Trump. In his meetings with Moon and Trump, Kim signed on to vague statements calling for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when or how it would occur.

Post-summit nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang quickly settled into a stalemate as the countries struggled between the sequencing of the North’s disarmament and the removal of U.S.-led international sanctions against the North. There continue to be doubts about whether Kim will ever voluntarily relinquish his nukes, which he may see as his strongest guarantee of survival.

Kim and Trump are trying to arrange a second summit in early 2019.

Is Saudi Arabia Hiring Sudanese Children to Fight in Yemen?

David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times caused an international stir by estimating that 20 percent of Sudanese fighters in Yemen may be 13 to 17, i.e., child soldiers. The percentage may be as high as 40%.

That these child soldiers appear to have been paid for by Saudi Arabia at a time when, because of the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia is in bad odor anyway, contributed to the sensation. Virtually every Arabic newspaper and news site is leading with the Times story.

Opposition to the U.S. role in supporting Saudi Arabia and its allies in the war on Yemen’s Houthi rebels has grown, as the U.N. has announced that 10 million Yemenis out of 28 million are in danger of starving to death if the war goes on.

That the Saudi commanders were too afraid to go anywhere near the front in Yemen and just gave cell phones to Yemeni commanders, according to Kirkpatrick, underlines that there are very few Saudi or UAE ground troops in Yemen, since the Saudi strategy is to bombard safely from the air and to do so indiscriminately, without regard for human welfare.

Sudan, a country of 40 million with a GDP of only $110 bn., is said to have 10,000 fighters in Yemen, with the first contingent entering at Aden in October of 2015, about six months after the Saudis launched their air war on Yemen.

The vast majority of these fighters are not regular army troops but Janjawid mercenaries from Darfur (“Rapid Support Forces”) whose salaries are paid by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir is said to have demanded from these Gulf countries $2 billion for every 1,000 Sudanese troops deployed in Yemen.

As the Sudanese economy has been hit by high rates of inflation this year, provoking anti-government crowd action in the past few weeks, the attraction of having Gulf money come over for Sudanese participation in the Yemen War has grown.

Last spring, the Houthi rebels killed “dozens” of the Sudanese mercenaries in a single engagement.

As a result, parliamentarians and families of dead or wounded fighters put pressure on the government to withdraw from the war.

In late May, 2018, Sudan’s SUNA reported that Minister of Defence Lt.-Gen Awad Mohamed Ahmed Bin Auf reaffirmed Sudan’s commitment to contributing army troops to the Yemen War, after having told parliament earlier that month that his government was reevaluating its commitments.

During May, did money come in from the Gulf sufficient to change Lt.-Gen. Bin Auf’s mind?

Sudan Radio reported on 5 June 2018 that Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir visited Saudi Arabia to discuss the issue of Sudanese troops fighting in Yemen as part of a coalition force attempting to roll back the Houthi militia. (-BBC Monitoring). Bashir must have known about the Fur child soldiers Saudi was deploying.

On Nov. 11, the Houthis said that they had captured dozens of Sudanese irregulars.

On Nov. 13, 2018,some 20 Sudanese fighters from the irregular Sudanese force, called ‘Rapid Support Force,’ were killed and over 100 wounded when they were struck by a Houthi missile near the port of Hudeidah. Dabanga noted that “Sudanese press were informed that 17 bodies of RSF fighters participating in the Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen have arrived in Nyala, capital of South Darfur, on Sunday.”

This report probably concerns the child soldiers, since the unit is clearly an irregular one and the soldiers were from Darfur. That is, the 20 dead were likely Fur child soldiers.

 

Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Ago May Be Warning for Today

Forensic geologists have revisited the scene of one of the world’s great massacres to identify the means of death. The victims of the Permian era die-off found themselves increasingly in hot water, to die of overheating or suffocation.

That is, in a rapidly warming globe, marine animals simply could not gasp fast enough to take in the increasingly limited dissolved oxygen. So they died in their billions.

It happened at the close of the Permian Era 252 million years ago: the planet’s worst single mass extinction event so far, in which up to 90% of marine species perished and 70% of land animals succumbed.

And if the scientists who have reconstructed this epic event are right, then the prime cause of mass death and destruction was a dramatic rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide which raised tropical ocean temperatures by about 10°C [18 F].

Tropical species could move away from the equatorial zones to find cooler waters and a breathing space. Species adapted to cooler waters had nowhere to go.

Flee or Perish

“Very few marine organisms stayed in the same habitats they were living in,” said Curtis Deutsch, an oceanographer at the University of Washington. “It was either flee or perish.”

And his co-author and colleague Justin Penn sees a warning for today – in which temperatures have begun to rise in response to profligate combustion of fossil fuels – in a desperate moment long ago. He said:

“Under a business-as-usual emissions scenario, by 2100, warming in the upper ocean will have approached 20% of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 will reach between 35% and 50%. This study highlights the potential for a mass extinction arising from a similar mechanism under anthropogenic climate change.”

This latest study is unlikely to close the case: carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere has been proposed before, but other teams have suggested dramatic ozone loss in the upper atmosphere as a prime cause of death. Other candidate killers include increasingly acidic oceans, the mass release of metal and sulphide toxins, or the complete lack of oxygen.

Geologists work on the principle that the present is key to the past: it follows that what happened in the past could also be a guide to what might happen in the future, which is why climate scientists, in particular, attach huge importance to research into ancient atmospheres.

So to build up a picture of what may have happened, Penn and his colleagues report in the journal Science that they matched computer models of animal metabolisms and ocean conditions with the fossil evidence from the boundary of the Permian and Triassic periods. And they claim the first computer-based prediction that could be directly tested against the evidence from the shells and bones of creatures preserved in strata laid down 252 million years ago.

From that, they were able to reconstruct the pattern of obliteration. Massive volcanic lava flows in what is now Siberia deposited colossal volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As ocean temperatures rose, the seas began to lose up to 80% of their dissolved oxygen. About half of the deep ocean seafloor became completely anoxic (without oxygen). What is now known as “the Great Dying” began.

The researchers checked their temperature and oxygen readings on what they knew of 61 modern marine species – sharks, crustaceans, corals, molluscs and bony fish – all classes of creature that evolved under conditions similar to the Permian.

No Certain Parallel

Those hit the hardest were the most sensitive to oxygen that lived far from the tropics. Tropical species were already adapted to high temperatures and low oxygen, and had somewhere to move to: they fared better.

It is not at all certain that conditions at the close of the Permian Period provide a parallel to the planet today. Most of the land surface then was one huge supercontinent, there were no mammals, grasses or flowering plants, and the forests – and thus the traffic between atmosphere and life – would have been very different.

“But even if it represents an extreme case, the lesson is clear,” writes Lee Kump, an earth scientist at Penn State University in the U.S., in a commentary in Science.

“Continued or accelerated fossil fuel burning presents a risk that must be reversed or mitigated so that we can avoid a fate anything like the end-Permian.”

California Officer’s Killing Reignites Sanctuary Law Fight

SAN FRANCISCO—A man suspected of killing a California policeman was in the U.S. illegally and captured while planning to flee to his native Mexico, a sheriff said as he all but blamed the state’s sanctuary law for the officer’s death.

A two-day statewide manhunt ended Friday with the arrest of Gustavo Perez Arriaga, who came out with his hands up as a SWAT team prepared to raid a home in Bakersfield, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of where Cpl. Ronil Singh was shot before dawn Wednesday.

Singh had pulled over a suspected drunken driver in the small town of Newman when he was fatally wounded and managed to fire back but didn’t hit the attacker, authorities have said.

A resident who saw the driver get behind the wheel flagged down Singh and heard the gunshots minutes later, Stanislaus County sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Letras told the Modesto Bee newspaper.

Sheriff Adam Christianson, who led the investigation, blamed California’s sanctuary law for preventing local authorities from reporting Perez Arriaga to U.S. immigration officials for deportation after two previous drunken driving arrests.

“We can’t ignore the fact that this could have been preventable,” Christianson told reporters, asking why the state was “providing sanctuary for criminals (and) gang members. It’s a conversation we need to have.”

Perez Arriaga crossed the border in Arizona several years ago and had worked a variety of jobs as a laborer, including at several dairies. The 33-year-old had gang affiliations and multiple Facebook pages with different names, Christianson said.

The shooting came as the political fight over immigration has intensified, with President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats at odds over funding for a border wall that has forced a partial government shutdown.

Trump tweeted about Singh’s killing Thursday, saying it was “time to get tough on Border Security. Build the Wall!”

California’s statewide sanctuary law limits cooperation between local authorities and U.S. immigration officials and has drawn scorn from the Trump administration. It includes more than 800 exceptions for violent crimes and felonies and bars police from asking people about their citizenship status.

Gov. Jerry Brown has said the law strikes a balance between protecting families and ensuring consequences for serious criminals. His spokesman said Friday that if the suspect was a known gang member, police could have informed federal authorities.

“California law fully permits the sharing of information on dangerous gang members,” spokesman Evan Westrup said.

Former state Sen. Kevin de Leon, the Democrat who wrote the legislation, said it’s “highly irresponsible” to blame the law for the officer’s death.

“The type of tone and attitude that Sheriff Christianson has taken instills fear and panic in all immigrant communities” that could make people afraid to report crimes, de Leon told KNX-AM radio in Los Angeles.

Authorities have arrested seven other people, including Perez Arriaga’s brothers, 25-year-old Adrian Virgen and 34-year-old Conrado Virgen Mendoza; his girlfriend, 30-year-old Ana Leyde Cervantes; and a co-worker, 27-year-old Erik Razo Quiroz, authorities said. Three people were arrested at the home near Bakersfield.

All are accused of helping Perez Arriaga, who’s expected to be arraigned on charges Wednesday, authorities said.

Singh, 33, was also an immigrant, coming legally from his native Fiji to fulfill his dream of becoming an officer, authorities said. Singh had a newborn son and joined the 12-officer Newman police force in 2011.

Newman Police Chief Randy Richardson called him a patriot.

“This is a man that loved his country. This is a man that worked hard for what he believed in. He believed in this community,” the chief said at a community vigil Friday night honoring Singh.

Hundreds of residents, friends, relatives and fellow officers attended the candlelight memorial, where many cried and some spoke emotionally about the officer.

“Ronil loved his job,” said Reggie Singh, holding his brother’s 5-month-old son.

___

Associated Press writers Daisy Nguyen in San Francisco, Amanda Lee Myers in Los Angeles and Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento contributed to this report.