Chris Hedges's Blog, page 535

Protesters Heckle Mitch McConnell in Kentucky Restaurant Parking Lot

Less than two weeks after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao—who is married to the Republican senator—were confronted by protesters over the Trump administration’s family separation policy, McConnell faced another crowd of critics in a parking lot of a Louisville, Kentucky, restaurant.

According to a video posted to Facebook and a report by the Washington Post, as McConnell and two companions exited the Bristol Bar & Grille and walked toward their vehicle on Saturday, a group of Democratic Socialists and other protesters chanted “vote you out” and “abolish ICE.” Referencing the administration’s family separation policy, some shouted, “Where are the children?” and “Where are the babies, Mitch?”

The protesters had been tipped off about McConnell’s lunch location on social media while hundreds of people demonstrated nearby outside Louisville’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office.

Although the Democratic Socialists of Louisville confirmed that three people from the crowd are members of the political group, the chapter said the person who called McConnell a “turtle head” and shouted, “We know where you live, Mitch,” is not a member of the organization.

“This person is not a DSA member, nor do we know who he is or what he meant by that statement,” the chapter wrote in an email to the Post. “We believe it is a reference to peacefully protesting in front of McConnell’s house, which is a regular occurrence in Louisville. However, we cannot speak more to the comment because it did not come from our organization or our members.”

Asked to respond to the encounter, McConnell spokesman David Popp told the Post, “If the Leader comments on being called a fascist and a supporter of ICE by a small handful of extremist protesters then I will let you know.”

The event is just the latest example of people publicly confronting key figures within the Trump administration and the Republican Party. Recently, critics of the family separation policy drove Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen out of a D.C. restaurant and demonstrated outside her Alexandria, Virginia home. Protests over the policy were also held outside the apartment complex of Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, who was called a “fascist” by a patron at another restaurant.

Additionally, the owner of a Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her establishment and ahead of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s resignation, a woman reprimanded him at yet another restaurant because, as she later wrote, “This man is directly and significantly harming my child’s—and every child’s—health and future with decisions to roll back environmental regulations for the benefit of big corporations, while he uses taxpayer money to fund a lavish lifestyle.”

BMW: Tariffs Mean Higher Prices in China for U.S.-Made SUVs

FRANKFURT, Germany—Automaker BMW says it will have to raise prices on the U.S.-built SUVs it sells in China due to higher tariffs.

China raised the import tax on cars from the United States to 40 percent in retaliation for higher tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by President Donald Trump.

The dpa news agency reported that the Munich-based company said Monday it is “not in a position to completely absorb the tariff increases.”

BMW builds key SUV models in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where it employs 10,000 people. Those vehicles are exported to 140 countries, making BMW the largest U.S. auto exporter.

Trump has imposed tariffs to counter what he says are unfair trading practices that include Chinese requirements that U.S. firms transfer key technology as the price of doing business.

Fuel-Price Protests Set Off Looting, Killing in Haiti’s Capital

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Looters pillaged burned and vandalized shops in Haiti’s capital Sunday following two days of violent protests over the government’s attempt to raise fuel prices.

Journalists saw young men stripping shelves bare in some supermarkets that were charred from the protests. Several bodies lay among debris scattered in the streets.

With the situation still chaotic, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince on Sunday warned U.S. citizens to shelter in place. It noted that many airline flights had been cancelled and said, “The airport has limited food and water available.”

“Telecommunications services, including Internet and phone lines, have been affected throughout Haiti,” the embassy added. “It may be difficult to reach people through normal communication methods.”

American Airlines, which had canceled 10 flights since Saturday, said three of its planes had left Sunday from Port-au-Prince and the northern city of Cap-Haitien bound for Miami and New York. Dozens of people remained stranded at the airport in Port-au-Prince, unable to return to their hotels or other accommodations due to the blockage of streets and lack of transportation.

The cancellation of flights stranded church groups and volunteers from a number of U.S. states, including South Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Alabama.

Chapin United Methodist Church in South Carolina posted online that its mission team was safe but stranded. Marcy Kenny, assimilation minister for the church, told The State newspaper that the group hoped the unrest would abate enough for them to safely make it to the airport.

A North Carolina doctor and his son were part of another medical mission group that was unable to leave. Shelley Collins told WRAL-TV that her husband, James, and their son made it to an airport but could not fly out.

Police Director-General Michel-Ange Gedeon ordered officers to crack down on what he called “bandits who disturb the peace and security of the country.”

At least three people were killed in protests Friday, and police said the bodies of four people were found Sunday in the streets of the Delmas district, though they didn’t say if that was related to the protests.

The government on Saturday scrapped plans to raise fuel prices. [Truthdig editor’s note: Other news agencies reported that the planned increase for gasoline had been 38 percent; diesel fuel, 47 percent; and kerosene, 51 percent.]

British Woman Dies in Latest Nerve Agent Poisoning Case

LONDON — A woman who was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent in southwest England died Sunday, eight days after police think she touched a contaminated item that has not been found.

London’s Metropolitan Police force said detectives had become a homicide investigation with 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess’s death at a hospital in Salisbury. She and her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley, 45, were admitted June 30 after falling ill a few miles away in Amesbury; Rowley remains in critical condition.

Tests at Britain’s defense research laboratory showed the pair was exposed to Novichok, the same type of nerve agent used to poison a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury in March. Police suspect Rowley and Sturgess handled a discarded item from the first attack, though they have not determined for certain that the two cases are linked.

Britain blames the Russian state for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter — an allegation Moscow strongly denies.

Prime Minister Theresa May said she was “appalled and shocked” by Sturgess’s death.

“Police and security officials are working urgently to establish the facts of this incident, which is now being treated as murder,” May said.

Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, Britain’s top anti-terrorism police officer, said the death “has only served to strengthen our resolve” to find those responsible.

More than 100 detectives have been working alongside local officers to locate a small vial or other container thought to have held the nerve agent that sickened the two. Officials say the search and cleanup operation will take weeks or even month.

Counterterrorism police are also studying roughly 1,300 hours of closed circuit television footage in hopes of finding clues about the couple’s activities in the hours before they became violently ill.

The British defense lab determined earlier that Novichok, a type of nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, was used on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer once convicted in his homeland of spying for Britain.

The 67-year-old ex-agent was living in Salisbury, a cathedral city 90 miles (145 kilometers) southwest of London, when he was struck down along with his daughter, Yulia, who was visiting him.

They spent weeks in critical condition, but have both been discharged from Salisbury District Hospital, the same hospital where Sturgess died.

The Skripal case, which Metropolitan Police detectives are investigating as attempted murder, sparked a diplomatic crisis between Russia and the West, including the expulsion of hundreds of diplomats from both sides.

Police say the nerve agent that sickened Rowley and Sturgess was the same type that almost killed the Skripals, but scientists haven’t been able to tell whether it was from the same batch.

The latest poisonings have further inflamed tensions between London and Moscow. U.K. Home Secretary Sajid Javid has demanded Russia provide information, saying it is unacceptable “for our streets, our parks, our towns to be dumping grounds for poison.”

Confirmation from authorities Wednesday that two British citizens were exposed to Novichok shook residents around Salisbury, who thought a months-long cleanup had removed any threat from the powerful nerve agent.

Kier Pritchard, head of the county police force in Wiltshire, acknowledged that Sturgess’s death “is likely to raise the level of concern in Amesbury and Salisbury.”

But he said health authorities continued to assert the risk to the public was low. Police say they don’t think Sturgess and Rowley visited any of the locations decontaminated after the Skripals’ poisoning.

Hospital officials said late Saturday that a number of people including a police officer had sought medical advice in the last week but had been found not to need any treatment.

John Glen, the Conservative Party legislator for the region, said the new poisoning has threatened an economic rebound from the slowdown caused by the attack on the Skripals.

“We need to establish quickly what they came into contact with and where,” he said. “The sentiment in the city is frustration, we want to get back to normal.”

The Con of Diversity

In 1970, when black students occupied the dean’s office at Harvard Divinity School to protest against the absence of African-American scholars on the school’s faculty, the white administration was forced to respond and interview black candidates. It asked James Cone, the greatest theologian of his generation, to come to Cambridge, Mass., for a meeting. But the white power structure had no intention of offering Cone a job. To be black, in its eyes, was bad enough. To be black, brilliant and fiercely independent was unpalatable. And so the job was given to a pliable African-American candidate who had never written a book, a condition that would remain unchanged for the more than three decades he taught at Harvard.

Harvard got what it wanted. Mediocrity in the name of diversity. It was a classic example of how the white power structure plays people of color. It decides whom to promote and whom to silence. When then-Maj. Colin Powell helped cover up the 1968 massacre of some 500 civilians at My Lai in Vietnam he was assured a glittering career in the Army. When Barack Obama proved obedient to the Chicago political machine, Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment he was promoted to the U.S. Senate and the presidency.

Diversity in the hands of the white power elites—political and corporate—is an advertising gimmick. A new face, a brand, gets pushed out front, accompanied by the lavish financial rewards that come with serving the white power structure, as long as the game is played. There is no shortage of women (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile), Latinos (Tom Perez and Marco Rubio) or blacks (Vernon Jordan, Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson) who sell their souls for a taste of power.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy” writes that “Barack Obama is directly responsible for the rise of a crop of black writers and journalists who achieved prominence during his two terms.” But this was true only for those black writers like Coates and Michael Eric Dyson who were obsequious cheerleaders for Obama. If, like Cornel West, you were black and criticized Obama you were isolated and attacked by Obama surrogates as a race traitor.

“For those who didn’t support Obama it was the lonely time,” said Glen Ford, the executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, when we spoke recently. “It’s like A.D. and B.C. Before Obama time, my politics reflected that of a black commentator, probably within a respectable black political spectrum. I’m looking at a fax, ‘NAACP September 8, 2007. NAACP regional leader.’ I got this after giving a keynote speech in Little Rock, Ark., in commemoration of the events in Little Rock in ’57. You see what I’m saying? I could do that, even as late as 2007. Then Obama happened. It was a wonderful time for people who endorsed Obama. If you didn’t endorse Obama, you were verboten in the community. All of a sudden you were ostracized.”

The absence of genuine political content in our national discourse has degraded it to one between racists and people who don’t want to be identified as racists. The only winners in this self-destructive cat fight are corporations such as Goldman Sachs, whose interests no American can vote against, along with elite institutions dedicated to perpetuating the plutocracy. Drew G. Faust, the first woman president of Harvard University, whose appointment represented a triumph for diversity, upon her retirement was appointed to the board of Goldman Sachs, a role for which she will receive compensation totaling over half a million dollars a year. A new and “diverse” group of Democratic Party candidates, over half of whom have been recruited from the military, the CIA, the National Security Council and the State Department, is hoping to rise to political power based on the old con.

“It’s an insult to the organized movements of people these institutions claim to want to include,” Ford said. “These institutions write the script. It’s their drama. They choose the actors, whatever black, brown, yellow, red faces they want.”

“I don’t think a black left should be investing any political capital or energy into getting Barack Obamas into a Harvard,” Ford said, “or believing it can transform Harvard or any of these ruling-class universities from the inside out, any more than it can transform the Democratic Party from the inside out.”

Ford points out that “diversity” has been substituted by the white power elites for “affirmative action.” And, he argues, diversity and affirmative action are radically different. The replacement of affirmative action with diversity, he says, effectively “negates African-American history as a legal basis for redress.”

Once the Supreme Court in its 1978 Bakke decision outlawed “quotas” for racial minorities, ruling institutions were freed from having to establish affirmative action programs that would have guaranteed a space for those traditionally excluded. The Trump administration’s recent reversal of an Obama-era policy that called on universities to consider race as a factor in admissions is an attempt to eradicate even diversity. President Trump and his racist enablers, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are resegregating America.

“You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair … ,” President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965 to the graduating class of Howard University. “This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Johnson’s call, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr., was swiftly sabotaged by white, liberal elites, who divorced racial justice from economic justice. White liberals could live with laws prohibiting segregation but not with giving up some of their financial and social privilege.

“White liberals are not seeking justice,” Ford said. “They’re seeking absolution. Anything that absolves them of responsibility for what this society has done, they welcome it. They’re hungry for it.”

“The legal, as well as moral, basis for affirmative action lay in the culpability of the United States and all of its layers of government in the enslavement and Jim Crow ‘hobbling’ of African-Americans—a unique history of oppression of a specific people that requires institutional redress,” Ford has written. “Otherwise, the legacies of these crimes will reproduce themselves, in mutating forms, into infinity. Once the specificity of the Black American grievance was abandoned, affirmative action became a general catch-all of various historical wrongs. Stripped of its core, affirmative action morphed into ‘diversity,’ a vessel for various aggrieved groups that was politically versatile (and especially useful to the emerging Black deal makers of electoral and corporate politics), but no longer rooted in Black realities. The affirmative action of Dr. King and President Johnson was a species of reparations, a form of redress for specific and eminently documentable harms done to African Americans, as a people. It was understood as a social debt owed to a defined class.”

“ ‘Diversity,’ ” Ford wrote, “recognizes no such debt to a particular people, or to any people at all. Rather, its legal basis is the ‘compelling interest’ of public institutions in a diversified student body (or faculty).”

Diversity does not force the white power structure to address racial injustice or produce results within the black underclass. This feint to diversity was abetted, Ford points out, by black elitists who found positions for themselves in the power structure in exchange for walking away from the poor and marginalized.

Ford calls these black elitists “representationalists” who “want to see some black people represented in all sectors of leadership, in all sectors of society. They want black scientists. They want black movie stars. They want black scholars at Harvard. They want blacks on Wall Street. But it’s just representation. That’s it.”

The plague of diversity lies at the core of our political dysfunction. The Democratic Party embraces it. Donald Trump’s Republican Party repudiates it. But as a policy it is a diversion. Diversity has done little to ameliorate the suffering of the black underclass. Most blacks are worse off than when King marched in Selma. African-Americans have lost over half of their wealth since the financial collapse of 2008 because of falling homeownership rates and job loss. They have the highest rate of poverty at 27.4 percent, followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent. And 45.8 percent of black children under 6 live in poverty, compared with 14.5 percent of white children in that age group. Forty percent of the nation’s homeless are African-Americans although blacks make up only 13 percent of our population. African-Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites.

Diversity does not halt the stripping away of our civil liberties, the assault on our ecosystem or the punishing effects of mandated austerity and deindustrialization. It does not confront imperialism. Diversity is part of the mechanics of colonialism. A genuine revolutionary, Patrice Lumumba, was replaced with the pliant and corrupt Mobutu Sese Seko. Both were black. But one fought the colonial tyrants and the other served them. A political agenda built solely around “diversity” is a smokescreen for injustice.

The victory by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the powerful Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary in Brooklyn last month is not a victory for diversity, although Ocasio-Cortez is a woman of color. It is a victory of political substance over the empty rhetoric of the Democratic Party. Ocasio-Cortez defied the party establishment as an avowed member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She could not even get a pre-election endorsement from Bernie Sanders, her mentor. She calls for Medicare for all, the abolishment of ICE, a federal jobs program and an end to the wars in the Middle East and has denounced Israel’s massacre of unarmed Palestinians. She stands for something. And it is only when we stand for something, including reparations for African-Americans, that we have a chance to dismantle corporate tyranny.

“I’ve always felt, in the early ’60s when I was just a kid, that the silent partner, sometimes reluctant although still a partner, in the civil rights movement were the corporations who wanted a unified market,” Ford said. “Jim Crow was a big anomaly in terms of creating a more unified market in the United States. You can’t have an Atlanta skyline, with its magnificent elevators, with Jim Crow. Not only would Atlanta not be an international city, it couldn’t be a national city with Jim Crow. The corporate forces wanted to break down Jim Crow and explicit color discrimination. It standardized the market. This is what capitalists do. The Democratic Party is not behaving any differently than the corporations over the past 50 years.”

“I’m not worried by the Trump phenomenon,” Ford said. “That doesn’t scare me. It’s disconcerting. But it doesn’t scare me. I’m far more afraid of the space that it gives to the corporatists. It’s to their advantage. Trump defines the white man’s party’s space. It’s big. It’s no joke. It can win presidential elections. It can win again. It needs money from corporate Republicans, but it doesn’t need anything else from them. The white man’s party more clearly defines the space the Democrats claim. It’s everybody who is not an overt racist.”

“I don’t think Trump will ever beat Obama’s records in terms of deportation,” Ford went on. “We should be fighting U.S. immigration policy. But that isn’t Trump. We should be organizing against Amazon taking over a whole city. But that isn’t Trump. Will Trump’s next pick for the Supreme Court be different from any pick that a Republican would make? In fact, because he’s crazy, he might fuck up and make a bad pick for himself. He ain’t deep enough to pick the worst guy. He hasn’t read the Federalist Papers.”

California, Long a Holdout, Adopts Mass Immigration Hearings

SAN DIEGO — A federal judge was irritated when an attorney for dozens of people charged with crossing the border illegally asked for more time to meet with clients before setting bond.

It was pushing 5 p.m. on a Friday in May, and the judge in San Diego was wrestling with a surge in her caseload that resulted from the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” policy to prosecute everyone who enters the country illegally.

“It’s been a long week,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Nita Stormes said, suggesting that the court needed more judges and public defenders.

On Monday, the court will try to curb the caseload by assigning a judge to oversee misdemeanor immigration cases and holding large, group hearings that critics call assembly-line justice. The move puts California in line with other border states, and it captures the strain that zero tolerance has put on federal courts, particularly in the nation’s most populous state, which has long resisted mass hearings for illegal border crossing.

Immigration cases were light for the first few months of the year in the Southern District of California. There were no illegal-entry cases in February, only four in March and 16 in April, according to the clerk’s office. But when zero tolerance took full effect, the caseload skyrocketed to 513 in May and 821 in June.

Those numbers pale when compared to other border districts that have been doing mass hearings for years. The Southern District of Texas’ four border-area courts handled nearly 9,500 illegal-entry cases in the eight weeks after zero tolerance took full effect, though those courts saw their numbers balloon too. The District of Arizona carried more than three times California’s number of cases in May.

The mass hearings can be traced back to December 2005, when the Border Patrol introduced “Operation Streamline” in Del Rio, Texas, to prosecute every illegal entry. Over the next three years, the practice spread to every federal court district along the border except California, whose federal prosecutors argued that scarce resources could be better spent going after smuggling networks and repeat crossers with serious criminal histories.

In Tucson, Arizona, a judge sees up to 75 defendants a day, about five to seven at a time, in hearings that last about two hours. The immigrants show up in the clothes they wore when they were arrested, wearing headphones for translation.

In the McAllen, Texas, federal courthouse 73 people who were cuffed at the ankles lined up in six rows of wood benches. They pleaded guilty at the same time in a morning session last month. About two-thirds were sentenced to the few days of time served. The rest got between 10 and 60 days because they had been previously deported or had criminal convictions.

Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney in San Diego when Streamline began until 2007, said zero-tolerance programs are “ultimately ineffective,” saying they boost conviction numbers but don’t have a proportionate impact on reducing crime.

“The sentences become much shorter to the point where everyone is getting time served or a few weeks in custody, and they’re turned around and come back in again,” she said. “At the end of the day, the system grinds down to a halt and things start deteriorating.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has held up Streamline as a model, was the first attorney general to seriously challenge California’s position. In May, he announced that the Homeland Security Department would refer every arrest for prosecution, which led to widespread separation of children from their parents. Adam Braverman, the newly appointed U.S. attorney in San Diego, had no room to push back.

When prosecutors in California began trying more cases in May, Chief District Judge Barry Moskowitz formed a committee of attorneys and government agencies to minimize the impact, writing that the increased load would cause “strains, issues and problems.”

The court has struggled to get people X-rayed for safety reasons, attorneys say. Jail space has been lacking, requiring some defendants to be housed at jails in Santa Ana and San Bernardino — at least an hour’s drive away — and some in San Luis, Arizona, a nearly four-hour drive from San Diego. Court often runs beyond business hours, once lasting until 10 p.m.

The U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego said in a statement that it was “committed to securing the border and enforcing criminal immigration laws in a way that respects due process and the dignity of all involved.”

The office noted that other districts along the border — in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas — have operated this way for about a decade. Prosecutors from San Diego visited Tucson last month for a firsthand look.

Defense attorneys object to the new court. Reuben Camper Cahn, executive director of Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc., called it separate but unequal and compared it to slavery tribunals.

“They will appear in chains … their cases will be heard en masse,” he wrote the chief judge.

“In this moment, all of us — citizens, lawyers, jurists — must seek the better angels of our nature to navigate the challenges presented,” Cahn wrote last month. “If the Court does this, it will surely reject the (Justice Department’s) abhorrent proposal.”

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Associated Press Writer Astrid Galvan in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Rescue of Remaining Thai Boys Could Take 4 Days

MAE SAI, Thailand — The Latest on the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave in northern Thailand (all times local):

2:10 a.m.

Officials say it could take up to four days to complete the rescue of eight boys and their soccer coach from inside a northern Thailand cave.

Authorities temporarily stopped their efforts Monday to replenish air tanks along the cave’s treacherous exit route.

Expert divers on Sunday managed to get four of the 12 boys to safety. They were quickly transported to a hospital in the town of Chiang Rai, the provincial capital.

The names of the rescued boys were not released.

Rescuers have been navigating a dangerous and complicated plan to get the children out under the threat of heavy rain and rising water underground.

The entire group had been trapped for more than two weeks.

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12:25 a.m.

The California tunnel company run by Elon Musk is continuing to maintain a presence at the Thai cave where several boys and their soccer coach are awaiting rescue.

Sam Teller, spokesman for Boring Co., said Sunday that the company has four engineers who are “offering support in any way the government deems useful.”

Musk tweeted early Saturday that he was working with a team from his Space X rocket company to build a “tiny kid-size submarine” to transport the children.

But Saturday night, he tweeted that the cave was now closed for the rescue by divers.

“Will continue testing in LA in case needed later or somewhere else in the future,” he wrote.

Musk says the sub would be light enough to be carried by two divers and small enough to get through narrow cave gaps.

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9:15 p.m.

The official heading the operation to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from a cave in northern Thailand says the operation is going “better than expected.”

Chiang Rai provincial acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn made the comment at a news conference Sunday evening after rescuers extracted four of the boys from the cave where they had been trapped for more than two weeks. Narongsak said the four were then taken to a hospital. Their condition was not immediately clear.

Narongsak said the healthiest have been taken out first, and the next phase of the operation would start in 10-20 hours.

He said that 13 foreign and five Thai divers were taking part in the rescue and that two divers would accompany each boy as they’re gradually extracted.

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8:05 p.m.

Thai navy SEALs say rescuers have taken four members of a youth soccer team out of the cave where they had been trapped for more than two weeks, part of an operation to rescue the 12 boys and their coach.

The operation to rescue the boys, ages 11-16, and their 25-year-old coach by having them dive out of the flooded cave began Sunday morning, with expert divers entering the sprawling complex for the complicated and dangerous mission.

Chiang Rai province acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn, who is heading the operation, said that 13 foreign and five Thai divers were taking part in the rescue and that two divers would accompany each boy as they’re gradually extracted.

The operation began at 10 a.m. Shortly before 8 p.m., the SEALs reported on their official Facebook page that four had been rescued.

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7:15 p.m.

Two ambulances have left from a cave in northern Thailand, hours after an operation began to rescue 12 youth soccer players and their coach.

The ambulances were seen Sunday evening, but it was unclear who was inside them.

Chiang Rai province acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn, who is heading the operation, said earlier Sunday that 13 foreign and five Thai divers were taking part in the rescue and two divers will accompany each boy as they’re gradually extracted. He said the operation began at 10 a.m., and it will take at least 11 hours for the first person to be taken out of the cave.

The boys and their coach became stranded when they went exploring in the cave after a practice game June 23. Monsoon flooding cut off their escape and prevented rescuers from finding them for almost 10 days.

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6:50 p.m.

Thai authorities say it is unknown when the first group of boys trapped in a flooded cave will begin their dive out of the cave, the key part of a rescue operation underway.

In a statement released late Sunday afternoon, Chiang Rai acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn says “divers will work with medics in the cave to assess the boys’ health before determining who will come out first.”

He added: “They cannot decide how many of them will be able to come out for the first operation. Based on the complexity and difficulty of the cave environment it is unknown how long it might take and how many children would exit the cave.”

The rescue operation began at 10 a.m. Sunday when expert divers entered the cave. Trips from the entrance to where the team is trapped and back to the entrance take about 11 hours.

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2:30 p.m.

The Thai navy SEALs, who have been spearheading the rescue effort for the 12 boys and their soccer coach, have posted a photo on their Facebook page with a vow to bring the trapped team home from a flooded cave.

The unit says in a message: “We, the Thai team and the international team, will bring the Wild Boars home.” That’s the name of the young boys’ team.

The risky diving operation to bring them out has started and the first boy is expected to be out of the cave around 9 p.m. Sunday (10 a.m. ET) at the earliest. Rescuers say it may take 2-4 days for the entire team to reach safety, depending on conditions inside the cave.

The local governor in charge of the rescue says the mission was launched Sunday morning because floodwaters inside the cave are at their lowest level in days and rains forecast to hit the region risk flooding the cave again.

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12 noon

A Thai army commander says the ongoing rescue of 12 boys and their coach could take 2-4 days depending on conditions inside the partially flooded cave.

According to Maj. Gen. Chalongchai Chaiyakam, the 13 “will continuously come out in approximately 2-4 days, which all may change depending on weather and water conditions.”

The governor in charge of the operation says two divers will accompany each boy as they are gradually extracted. The operation began at 10 a.m. and he said it would take at least 11 hours for the first person to be rescued.

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11:35 a.m.

The Thai official in charge of the rescue of 12 boys and their soccer coach says they’re physically ready and mentally determined for their extraction now underway from a partially flooded cave.

Chiang Rai acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn says 13 ambulances and helicopters in two separate locations are ready to transport them to hospitals. The first is expected to reach safety at 9 p.m. Sunday (10 a.m. ET) at the earliest.

Narongsak says the rescue mission was launched because floodwaters inside the cave are at their most optimal level.

He says: “If we keep on waiting and the rains come in the next three or four days, our readiness will decrease.”

He also says the families of the boys have been informed about the risky mission.

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10:40 a.m.

A Thai governor says the operation to bring out 12 schoolboys and their soccer coach from deep inside a cave where they have been trapped for two weeks has begun.

The acting Chiang Rai governor has told reporters “today is D-Day” with 13 foreigner and five Thai divers taking part in the rescue.

He says the divers went in at 10 a.m. and the boys will gradually come out accompanied by two divers each. He says the earliest they will come out is 9 p.m. Sunday (10 a.m. ET).

The only way to bring them out is by navigating dark and tight passageways filled with muddy water and strong currents, as well as oxygen-depleted air.

Experienced cave rescue experts consider an underwater escape a last resort, especially with people untrained in diving, as the boys are. The path out is considered especially complicated because of twists and turns in narrow flooded passages.

But the governor supervising the mission said earlier that mild weather and falling water levels over the last few days had created optimal conditions for an underwater evacuation that won’t last if it rains again.

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8:30 a.m.

Thai authorities have asked media to leave the area around the entrance of the cave where 12 boys and their soccer coach have been trapped for two weeks, fueling speculation that a rescue mission could be imminent.

Dozens of divers have arrived at the cave on Sunday morning.

Thai officials said Saturday they are worried that heavy monsoon rain could soon make the job even more difficult and they may need to quickly rescue the boys and the soccer coach from a partially flooded cave by helping them make risky dives to safety.

The boys, ages 11-16, and their 25-year-old became stranded when they went exploring in the cave after a practice game. Monsoon flooding cut off their escape and prevented rescuers from finding them for almost 10 days.

After New York’s Electoral Upset, Eyes Turn to Massachusetts

BOSTON—Ayanna Pressley knew it was going to be tough mounting a primary challenge to an incumbent Democratic congressman in Massachusetts, a state that often rewards politicians with near-lifetime jobs.

Then someone Pressley counts as a friend—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—stunned the New York Democratic establishment, and the nation, with her primary victory last month over 10-term U.S. Rep. Joe Crowley.

Suddenly, the 44-year-old black Boston city councilor’s efforts to unseat U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano—another longtime white, male, middle-aged politician—in the state’s Sept. 4 primary seems less far-fetched.

“Alex and her race is an inspiring one because it challenges conventional wisdom and narratives about who has a right to run and when, and who can win,” Pressley said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to be disruptive in our democracy and our policy-making and how we run and win elections.”

The Massachusetts contest is yet another reminder of the rifts tearing at the Democratic Party, with more liberal, often younger voters calling for a newer, more diverse leadership.

Capuano, 66, said he understands the urge among some for new faces.

“If that’s what people want. That’s fine. That’s not new: ‘Throw the bums out’ is in pretty much every campaign ever,’” he told the AP. “As a generic statement, that’s one thing. It’s a different thing when you take that generic statement and apply it to individuals.”

One challenge for Democratic voters in the state’s 7th Congressional District may be finding policy differences between the two. Capuano is among the most liberal House members, not leaving much room on the left for Pressley.

It’s a point Capuano, first elected to the House in 1998, has tried to hammer home, pointing to his high ratings with progressive groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, Planned Parenthood and the AFL-CIO.

“My record is pretty clear. I’m one of the most progressive members of Congress and have been since I got here,” Capuano said. “I think I’ve effectively represented every constituent group in this district.”

Pressley said the argument that she and Capuano will vote the same way misses a bigger point about leadership and building coalitions—a philosophy she said she’s used during her years at City Hall to address issues like schools, transportation and public safety.

“This is Massachusetts. Every Democrat is going to vote the same way,” Pressley said. “The hate that is coming out of this White House will not be defeated by a reliable vote on the floor of Congress. The hate coming out of this White House will be defeated by a movement and a coalition.”

Paul Watanabe, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, says the nation’s unsettled political times mean few free rides anymore for incumbents facing challenges from within their parties—a reality he said Capuano understands.

“Mike Capuano did not need a wake-up call like this to take this race seriously. I think he’s taking it as a serious challenge and Ayanna Pressley is determined to try to do in Massachusetts what was accomplished in New York,” Watanabe said.

“The lesson of the 2016 election at the highest level is all things are possible.”

Capuano has a fundraising edge. His campaign said he collected $680,000 in the past three months, bringing his cash total to $1.4 million. Pressley raised $370,000 during the same period, her campaign said.

One issue where there might be a sliver of daylight between the two is on the future of the federal government’s chief immigration enforcement agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE.

Pressley has called for defunding the agency. Capuano said he voted against the creation of ICE, but thinks changing policies is more important.

The district—redrawn in 2011 to become Massachusetts’ first “minority-majority” district—includes a wide swath of Boston and about half of Cambridge as well as portions of neighboring Chelsea, Everett, Randolph, Somerville and Milton. It includes both Cambridge’s Kendall Square—experiencing a white-hot development boom—and the neighborhood of Roxbury, the center of Boston’s traditionally black community. If elected, Pressley, who has served on the city council since 2010, would be the only black member of the state’s congressional delegation.

Clarrissa Croppers, co-owner the Frugal Bookstore in Roxbury, said gentrification, particularly the price of housing, is one of her top issues.

“I understand that they want to clean up the area, but I don’t want them to clean out the people who’ve been here for so long,” the 37-year-old said.

“I’m going to vote for (Pressley); she’s been a supporter of my business before she ran,” Croppers added. “I’ve not ever seen Mike come in here. You will see him closer to election time. They want to come out, shake hands and do photos, but where were you months and years before?”

Pressley’s campaign is also a challenge to an unwritten “wait your turn” rule in the Massachusetts Democratic Party, where incumbents can hang onto seats for decades with few if any serious competitors.

The last successful Democratic primary challenge in Massachusetts came in 2014, when Seth Moulton defeated incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. John Tierney in the state’s 6th Congressional District.

Pressley is aware she’s bucking a tide.

“My mother did not raise me to ask for permission to lead,” she said.

Local N.Y. Media Wrongly Pushes for Gang Databases

The New York Post defends (6/16/18) NYPD’s gang database.

When President Donald Trump rails against alleged immigrant gang members as “animals,” as he did last month, he’s reducing complex (and highly political) issues—like the presence of MS-13 in the United States—to a fearsome cartoon of snarling packs of subhuman marauders. Vintage Trump, right? But local media, nowadays lionized as a check on Trump, resort to the same strategy, playing fast and loose with the inflammatory term “gang” and deferring time and time again to questionable police tactics.

As FAIR’s Adam Johnson wrote two years ago (“Media Convict Scores of ‘Gang Members’ on NYPD’s Say-So—No Trials Necessary,” 5/2/16), local dailies in New York City were instrumental in convicting alleged gang members in the court of public opinion before anyone had ever even seen a judge. Most other local media outlets took the same approach, never bothering to ask if the scores of people arrested and perp-walked by police as violent gang members could actually be innocent, or unfairly swept up by a police department (in)famous for its dragnet approach to public safety.

On the gang sweeps, the New York Daily News led the way with its  2015 “Gangs of New York—and How Close You Live to Them” special feature (12/13/15), which included a map purporting to show “where gangs and crews operate,” based on data provided by the NYPD. It’s little surprise, then, that after community legal advocates criticized large-scale gang raids, leading to public hearings questioning the tactics, the News’ editorial board quickly sided with police on a key tool: so-called gang databases.

The Daily News (6/15/18) asks critics to quit picking on the New York Police Department.

Editorializing in favor of a database kept by the NYPD that no one knows they’re on—and therefore cannot challenge their inclusion in—the News (6/15/18) shrugged off community concerns as “alarmism,” and called the collection of people on the database (some as young as 13 when added to it) “good police work.” The editorial headline “Ganging Up on Police: The NYPD’s Gang Database Is a Solid Investigative Tool” told readers it was the police who were under attack, and conferred legitimacy on a shadowy database that the News‘ own reporting (6/12/18) suggests can negatively impact people for years.

Local police gang databases can present serious legal implications for those marked as gang members, such as increased bail, harsher sentencing, erosion of presumption of innocence and even increased chances of deportation.

Lawyers and activists have suspected local gang database information is shared with federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), sometimes even putting people trying to avoid gangs on the deportation block (New Yorker, 1/1/18). In fact, a new report released on the same day that Trump made his “animals” comment says that gang designations have led to increased deportations of young immigrants in New York. The report also points to “media coverage in certain outlets” that have “exacerbated the view of MS-13 as a dangerous, invading army of foreigners,” thus “sowing fear around the country.” Are these concerns alarmist? Or, as the New York Post‘s editorial board headlined, “utterly ridiculous” (6/16/18)?

For News and Post readers, the editorial board positions must have sounded awfully familiar: They were almost indistinguishable from the police department’s position, which was published by the News (6/12/18) the day before key hearings by the New York City Council.

Despite a later apology, the Daily News doesn’t seem to have learned from this editorial mistake (8/13/13).

Not just the editorials but the whole scenario should feel familiar, since we’ve been here before. Nearly five years ago, as the NYPD was being criticized by community and legal groups over its Stop and Frisk program, the News‘ editorial board (8/13/13) sided with the police department, predicting “the ravages of lawlessness and bloodshed” if police efforts were curtailed. That didn’t happen, and the News, three years later, apologized on its pages (“We Were Wrong: Ending Stop and Frisk Did Not End Stopping Crime,” 8/8/16).

You’d think after being so spectacularly wrong on Stop and Frisk, the News would take the lesson to be more skeptical and wary about police practices. Alas, no, the editorial instinct is the same: support the police department to the point of echoing its talking points.

The News and Post couldn’t even bring themselves to follow even the most basic journalistic practice of asking for more information. There are still essential questions around the database and the actual impact of gangs left unanswered. The NYPD and the News, for example, claim the database currently has only about 17,500 New Yorkers listed. However, a Freedom of Information request by CUNY Law School’s Babe Howell suggests over 42,000 names, based on information she received from the police department itself.

The NYPD and the News say that about half of all shootings in the city are “gang-related”—which would include suspected shooters and victims that the police allege to be gang members. However, seen in the broader context of New York City, which is experiencing record low crime, “gang-related” crime accounts for 1.7 percent of overall crime. The numbers get even lower for “gang-motivated” crime—crime done in the interests of a gang, according to police—which is at less than 0.1 percent (The Intercept, 6/11/18).

Then there is the key argument over whether the NYPD should have arbitrary power over designating who, in fact, is in a gang. The criteria police use is remarkably loose: simply “associating” with gang members, living in certain neighborhoods,  having certain tattoos and even wearing certain colors. With criteria like these, which scream guilt by association, it’s hardly surprising that 99 percent of people added to the list are non-white.

With remarkable disparities over how far-reaching the database really is, the extent to which gang violence actually affects the city, as well as the central question of who is actually in a gang, the editorial position of two of the city’s major newspapers would seem, at the very least, premature.

There is, of course, nothing to lose for members of the News‘ editorial board. As I wrote earlier this year in Injustice Today (now The Appeal), there are no measures of accountability for media when they support destructive police policies. While some media outlets may apologize years after the policies have upended people’s lives, they are free to continually support more potentially destructive policies in the future.

I have been one of many organizers pushing back against the database and the NYPD’s gang sweeps. And, in fairness, the News did publish my opinion piece (6/13/18) on the gang database. But that doesn’t amount to balance in their pages when both the reporting and editorial weight is thrown behind the police, time and time again.

For the New York Post (6/26/18), a killing that happened while the NYPD had a gang database proves the need for a gang database.

A recent, horrendous killing of a 15-year-old Bronx boy by alleged gang members could make media coverage worse.

The Post (6/26/18) has already jumped on the story to make the point that his death “proves we need an NYPD gang database.” Three years ago, the Post  (5/31/15) similarly spotlighted fatal shooting cases to make the case that New York City should bring back Stop and Frisk. What the Post wanted then, as it does now, is to unleash the police—who it says has been “handcuffed” by the advocacy of “radicals” and “cop-haters”—to do whatever it wants.

While the teen’s killing has rightly stirred outrage on social media and in the community, is the answer to ramp up aggressive police enforcement? The Post presents the false choice that in order to prevent violence, the police must be enabled in a way that could lead to further injustices. In the 2007 report “Gang Wars: The Failure of Enforcement Tactics and the Need for Effective Public Safety Strategies,” Judith Greene and Kevin Pranis wrote about the failures of gang suppression efforts across the country to actually reduce gang violence.

The way media might further intensify police gang tactics could impact a growing national conversation and empower the most dangerous elements of the Trump administration. Last year, after a string of brutal killings in Long Island, reportedly by MS-13, it was Trump’s Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions who arrived to declare war on gangs.

Much of this is happening as activists are making some headway in challenging anti-gang tactics. Activists in Chicago, where a Guatemalan immigrant was arrested by ICE last year after being incorrectly identified as a gang member, recently filed a class action lawsuit challenging the Chicago police department’s gang database for being inaccurate and discriminatory. In Los Angeles, where California’s gang database was found to have 1-year old babies listed, activists and lawyers recently won a federal ruling barring police from imposing damaging gang injunctions, a civil court-ordered restraining order that restricts where certain residents can go, who they can be seen with and even what they can wear.

Locally, the Daily News and New York Post want their readers to simply trust law enforcement. History may be repeating itself, with many people’s lives likely to be impacted. Either way, New York City’s editorial boards are happy to go along for the ride.

Iran: Trump’s Tweets Have Added $10 a Barrel to Cost of Oil

Iran’s official for the Organization of Petroleum Countries, Governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, was quoted by the Iranian Press last week as directly taking aim at President Trump for roiling the oil markets with his Twitter activity: “Your tweets have increased the prices by at least $10. Please stop this method.”

Investors and buyers are jittery, worried about what prices per barrel will be like six months out. Lots of imponderables go into the price. The world produces about 99 million barrels a day. If even a million barrels a day goes off the market because of political turmoil (like in Libya and Venezuela), it has a disproportionate impact on prices. This year, world demand is likely to be up by over a million barrels a day. And, political turmoil and other factors could reduce supply.

Iran exports about 2.5 million barrels a day. Take that off the market, or any substantial part of it, and demand is higher than supply, equaling rising prices.

Hence Trump’s tweets can put up the price up.

Moreover, Trump’s brinkmanship with Iran has led the hardliners in Iran to threaten to close the Straits of Hormuz to shipping if Iran is crushed. They can’t actually do this, I have been assured by U.S. Navy officers, but as I said, oil markets are jittery and often put up prices for reasons that seem to me silly.

The episode is full of ironies. Trump has a thing about gasoline prices, probably remembering how everyone hated Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s during the oil price spike. But he can’t help wanting to strong-arm Iran and undo the 2015 nuclear deal, just because it was a signature achievement of Barack Obama. If Obama had jumped in a river to save children from drowning, Trump would hire hit men to track them down and shoot them now.

So he is, as usual, his own worst enemy, producing the opposite of what he is aiming for.

In fact, Trump is a one-man inflation-machine. The trade wars he is picking will cause consumers to have to pay more for automobiles and lots of other commodities. His own voting base will suffer most because they probably shop in Walmart, the chief marketing agent in the U.S. for the goods produced by the Chinese Communist Party.