Chris Hedges's Blog, page 630

‘The China Hustle’ Scares Up Empty Factories, False Profits for Investors

“What is capitalism? Is it an economic system, or is it an apparatus that we can use to make more money for ourselves and take more money from others?” Dan David, activist short-seller and CIO of FG Alpha Management, asks this question early on in Jed Rothstein’s new documentary, “The China Hustle,” in select theaters Mar. 30. “I think at its heart it rewards those who work hard. But it also rewards those who are willing to take advantage of others.”

David occupies the center of this David-and-Goliath tale of financial fraud in China that costs American investors billions. With an economic growth rate averaging 6 percent over the past ten years, China has become a magnet for U.S. investors betting on reverse takeovers, a process by which foreign companies trade on the exchange by merging an existing Chinese company with a nearly defunct listed entity, circumventing the complications and costs of an IPO.

Such companies are not subject to SEC regulation, but rather to China’s regulatory body, the SAIC, which has no statutes against defrauding foreigners. So when David traveled to China to visit some of these companies, he found paper mills with non-working machinery, defunct factories, empty warehouses and a handful of staffers at a company which, on paper, was doing hundreds of millions in business. He began publishing his findings—but not before shorting their stock (betting on it to drop).

“It’s hard,” David says of his efforts to document fraudulent companies. “What we do is not legal in China. You can’t stand across a street and count trucks coming in and out of the property ’cause there’s no such thing as public property. It’s all owned by the government.”

At the center of the scandal is a banking sector that specializes in reverse takeovers. The two featured in the movie are Roth Capital Partners, famous for wild investors’ weekends with rock concerts and dancing girls, and Rodman & Renshaw Capital Group, which cultivates a more refined profile, touting high-powered Washington figures like the company’s former chairman, Gen. Wesley Clark, who is interviewed in the movie. As questions raise ethical concerns about the behavior of Rodman & Renshaw under Clark’s tenure, he finally grows agitated and stomps out of the interview.

“He says in the film that he didn’t have anything to do with setting up these deals, and when he heard about them he urged people in Rodman & Renshaw to stop. And I take him at his word,” Rothstein says. “My reasoning for including Gen. Clark in the film is I think one of the problems in our financial world is the ability of companies like Rodman to rent the credibility of figures like Gen. Clark and a lot of other political celebrities who speak at these events.”

David agrees with Rothstein, but he feels that Clark is getting off easy. “He freely admits that at some point he knew something was wrong and he said: ‘Hey, cut this stuff out,’ and left. So why is it me going to Congress and talking to these people? Why isn’t it the guy who ran for president and knows people down there?”

When David took the matter to Capitol Hill, he naively anticipated swift action by lawmakers to protect investors. Instead, he was admonished for undertaking such a large initiative. Suggesting a hearing in both the Senate Finance and Banking Committees, he was politely rebuffed. So David offered up a plan for an asterisk and warning placed next to dubious listings, which would enable investors to decide on their own.

“They couldn’t even get that done. I was amazed. It was daunting enough for me to realize I was fighting a country. Then I realized I was fighting two countries, one of them my own.” David sighs, shaking his head. “This is a fraud people don’t know about. They’ve stolen from pension funds, they’ve stolen from 401Ks. So how does it affect you when your teachers’ funds are being stolen—tens of millions at a time? Because most teachers’ pension funds are underfunded and when they have to get re-funded your property tax goes up. The state employee fund is underfunded, and when it’s got to get re-funded your taxes go up for the state.”

Like David, Rothstein sees a solution in regulations that encourage transparency and accountability, anathema to lawmakers in the current climate. “A tax code that is more equitable would be a start. Keeping in place a lot of the requirements for transparency and accountability in banking, especially dealing with international stocks, having some mechanisms to ensure that stocks listed on U.S. exchange—the laws that govern our financial market here—can apply to those stocks.”

While an appetite for banking regulations can be found among leaders on the left, Rothstein has yet to see similar leanings among Independent and Republican lawmakers. But in David, a Republican candidate for Pennsylvania Congressional District 4, he may have found his man.

“I’ve got all kinds of things I care about in this country,” David says. “Some care about abortion, some care about immigration, some care about health care. But if you can’t fix this, what good are you?”

David will run as a single-issue candidate, but Rothstein sees the problem in a greater context that calls into question the very nature of our economic culture. “The income inequality gap is growing and a lot of it has to do with the reward given to capital over labor,” he concludes. “That’s the bigger argument coming out of this—can we have capitalism that plays by rules that are more fair?”

Walking with Marita Growing Thunder and the Young Revolutionaries Among Us

Social justice activism is a calling. It can be a rewarding path, full of adrenaline highs, radical transformation and hard-earned achievements. It also can be a tiresome, dangerous and lonely path. For the emerging cohort of youth activists of our day, we must place our supportive hands firmly behind them, protecting them, bolstering them and feeding their righteous fires with fuel, ensuring their principled convictions continue burning brightly.

Growing Thunder

For 80 miles across Montana, 19-year-old college student Marita Growing Thunder walked through cold temperatures, and a mix of wind and rain, on a march to raise awareness of the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women. Growing Thunder, a citizen of the Fort Peck Assiniboine Sioux tribe, completed the trek over the course of four days during her spring break from college classes. On each day, she wore a different ribbon skirt, a contemporary version of the traditional ribbon dress worn by Assiniboine women at the turn of the 19th century.

“You wear (a ribbon skirt) to be your honest, true self,” Growing Thunder said, in an interview with the Missoulian.

Growing Thunder is a soft-spoken young woman, wise beyond her years. A freshman at the University of Montana, her commitment to activism reaches back to her high school experience. As a high school senior, Growing Thunder devoted herself to a year-long arts advocacy project called “Save Our Sisters,” which involved sewing and wearing a new ribbon skirt or dress for every day of the school year to raise awareness of missing and murdered indigenous women. She organized the first annual Save Our Sisters walk during her senior year in March 2017, taking the 80-mile journey for the first time.

The walk is in its second year and cuts through the Flathead Indian Reservation, home of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, where Growing Thunder has lived since she was in kindergarten. But the daily ribbon skirts, which she still wears as a college student, the walk and her overall cause, is much deeper than one might see from the outside. The epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women has affected Growing Thunder and her family directly.

According to a 2008 U.S. Department of Justice report, Native American women are murdered at 10 times the national rate in some parts of the country. In Montana, where Native Americans comprise 3 percent of the population, five of Growing Thunder’s aunts were murdered.

“I never got to know them,” Growing Thunder told me in a conversation earlier this week. “I know who they are, though. I see pictures, I hear stories every single day. My activism and this walk has so much to do with them.”

While her cause is noble, her work has also been emotionally and spiritually taxing.

Growing Thunder’s four-day walk runs through rural Montana where tensions run high between Native American and non-Native American communities. During her walk last year as a high school senior, hostile white men drove by at different times, some waving their middle fingers, others shouting expletives and racial slurs. This year, on her second day of the walk, a group of young men drove by, and she was spit on.

“This guy slowed in his car, and in the back, another guy rolled down the window. He went out of his way to spit so far at us, and it scared me,” Growing Thunder said. “It took a while to process. It was really shocking.”

Growing Thunder had others walking alongside her during the incident. They regrouped and continued to walk. While physically drained at the end of each day, Growing Thunder was consistent in her expression of gratitude for the support the walk received from community members.

One especially high honor for Growing Thunder was the gift of an eagle feather from an elder. “I’m a guest here (among the Salish and Kootenai), so it’s that much more of an honor for me.”

Marita Growing Thunder (third from left) and others who joined her on the second annual Save Our Sisters walk on the last day of the 80-mile trek. (Marita Growing Thunder)

During the four-day journey, Growing Thunder walked with interchanging groups of youth, women and men, Native and non-Native. During some stretches of the walk, groups as small as six walked alongside her, and on one stretch, she was joined by a group of 100 Native youth who were attending a youth summit in the area.

And though some situations on the walk triggered fear and anxiousness in Growing Thunder, other situations reminded her of the benevolence of fellow human beings. She described one situation where she was pleasantly surprised to receive support from where she least expected it.

“There was a truck that pulled up slowly, and it had a giant Trump-Pence sticker on it. They rolled down their window, wanting to know more about what we were doing,” Growing Thunder said. “We stepped forward toward the car together. Our strength is in numbers,” she affirmed.

To her surprise, the exchange was friendly and supportive. “That happened a couple of times,” she said. “In a split second, my fearful thoughts changed, and I saw somebody human. That was healing in itself, and especially in a place that has been so hostile to my family and to other Native people.”

Back on the University of Montana campus, Growing Thunder often walks alone, standing out among her peers in a brightly colored, floor-length ribbon skirt. She remains committed to her cause, while also taking deliberate actions to prioritize self-care.

Growing Thunder hikes the local trails after classes, she prays and she writes poetry. And sewing new ribbon skirt creations continues to be a creative outlet and a healing process for her. Sewing and activism have become a way of life.

“I try my best to be balanced,” she told me. “But of course, there’s always times where you hit a wall, and something throws you off.”

Marita Growing Thunder wearing one of the ribbon skirts she sewed in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous women. (Save Our Sisters / Facebook)

Many youth activists like Growing Thunder continue to endure struggles and bear burdens that many of us do not see. They are determined to shape a better future for their generation, and the generations that follow them. They push and they bend radically toward justice in ways that older generations may not have the idealism or the energy to do.

“No child should have to live without their mother,” said Growing Thunder, on her commitment to advocate for justice for missing and murdered indigenous women. “I can’t imagine my life without my mother or my sisters here with me. Speaking up about this issue is so important.”

To learn more about the Save Our Sisters and Marita Growing Thunder’s efforts, visit the Save Our Sisters webpage here.

Mr. Fish: The Definition of Subversion (Audio)

In this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” host and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer speaks with Dwayne Booth, the political cartoonist known as Mr. Fish, whose work has been featured in many publications, including Truthdig, Harper’s and LA Weekly.

Scheer and Booth discuss the history of Booth’s art form and the struggle to keep the editorial cartooning industry alive.

During their conversation, Booth tells Scheer that his profession is in decline because fewer people understand and appreciate history now. Asked what it’s like to be the best in a field that is disappearing, Booth responds, “Lonely, very lonely.”

“I keep doing it because … I’m good at it and I understand that language,” Booth explains. “It’s a way to communicate as honestly as one can. Because when you have images, it’s very difficult to create abstract notions that are actually false. You are using real images and you are using depictions of real things, which are statements of fact by virtue of the fact that they look like real things. So that’s the language I have chosen to use.”

Booth currently teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He is featured in the documentary “Mr. Fish: Cartooning From the Deep End,” and his recent book, “And Then the World Blew Up,” includes essays and hundreds of cartoons with his take on the direction of United States politics.

Listen to the interview in the player above and see the full transcript on Truthdig on Saturday. Find past episodes of “Scheer Intelligence” here.

—Posted by Eric Ortiz

Widow of Orlando Nightclub Gunman Acquitted

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The widow of the gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay Orlando nightclub was acquitted Friday of helping to plot the attack and lying to the FBI afterward — a rare and stinging defeat for the U.S. government in a terrorism case.

Noor Salman, 31, sobbed upon hearing the jury’s verdict of not guilty of obstruction and providing material support to a terrorist organization, charges that could have brought life in prison. Her family gasped each time the words “not guilty” were pronounced.

On the other side of the courtroom, the families of the victims of the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting sat stone-faced and silent.

Within hours of the verdict, Salman was released from jail and got into a waiting car without answering questions.

“Noor is so grateful. Her belief in the process was shown. She wants to get back to her son,” defense attorney Linda Moreno said. Family spokeswoman Susan Clary said Salman’s family “always thought that Noor was the first victim” of her husband, Omar Mateen.

Relying heavily on an alleged confession from Salman, federal prosecutors had charged that she and Mateen had scouted out potential targets together — including Disney World’s shopping and entertainment complex — and that she knew he was buying ammunition for his AR-15 assault-style rifle for a jihadi attack.

The government contended also that she knew Mateen had a sick fascination with violent jihadi videos and an affinity for Islamic State group websites, and that she gave him a “green light to commit terrorism.”

But the defense portrayed her as an easily manipulated woman with a low IQ and argued that she signed a false confession because she was tired after extensive questioning and feared losing her young son.

And in a blow to prosecutors’ case, the FBI itself found that receipts and cellphone signals showed the couple were nowhere near the Pulse on the day Salman said they were.

Prosecutors introduced no online posts, texts or any other evidence that Salman supported ISIS, struggling to counter her attorneys’ portrayal of her as a simple, sweet mother who loves her 5-year-old son, romance novels and the cartoon character Hello Kitty.

After the verdict, prosecutors said they were disappointed and took no questions.

“Noor Salman should never have been on trial,” said Ahmed Bedier, a civil rights advocate and the president of United Voices of America. “Let this verdict serve as a message to law enforcement and prosecutors who railroad and persecute innocent people on little evidence, the people of this great nation will not allow it.”

David Weinstein, a Miami defense attorney not involved in the case, said the lack of a recorded confession from Salman probably influenced the jury, which was shown only a written statement.

“As much as we don’t want to admit it, this is the age of the cellphone. It’s ingrained in the minds of jurors, if it’s not recorded, it didn’t happen,” Weinstein said.

Prosecutors had also accused Salman of obstructing the investigation by lying to the FBI. She falsely claimed that her husband didn’t use the internet in their home, that he had deactivated his Facebook account years earlier, that he had one gun when he had three, and that he wasn’t radicalized, they said.

But the defense said that Salman, who was born in California to Palestinian parents, was abused and cheated on by her husband and that he concealed much of his life from her.

Defense attorney Charles Swift argued there was no way Salman knew that her husband would attack the nightclub because even he didn’t know it until moments before.

According to prosecutors, Mateen intended to attack Disney World’s shopping and entertainment complex by hiding a gun in a stroller but became spooked by police and chose a new target.

Mateen, the American-born son of Afghan immigrants, was killed by police in the nightclub attack.

___

This story has been corrected to show that Bedier is with United Voices of America.

Forget Tribalism, Disavow Politics and Stand Up for Inclusive Justice

I’m writing this article specifically to the next generation of activists who have been moved into action and feel compelled to make a difference. I sincerely hope you don’t read this write-up as a lecture or some type of pious admonition; rather, I hope you take this missive as a friendly counsel from someone who entered into a life of political activism with the same energy and passion that you are currently feeling. The path you choose to take is up to you, all of us gain wisdom through many trials and errors. My aim is to pass on observations that I’ve made throughout my years with the hope that you reflect on what you are reading as you chart your path forward.

The first counsel is to disavow tribalism. We emerged from the womb without any sense of our differences; hatred and aversion to those who don’t look or act like us are imbued in our souls by the brokenness of this world. If we hope to mend our planet and heal the scars of the past, we can only do so by reverting back as much as possible to the innocence of our youth. We live in a time where innumerable demagogues are being pushed to the forefront by the establishment in order to splinter us into islands of separable grievances. Do not pay attention to these firebrands; in front of cameras they speak against injustice only to get paid by the very system they pretend to be against.

I, too, fell for this most cunning deception. There was a time I walked about demeaning all “white” people and cursing Republicans. But after witnessing broken “white” people from South Carolina to Colorado and residing next to the forgotten masses in multiple states across America, it finally dawned on me that suffering is not limited to color, gender, or belief system. My eye opening moment occurred while I was living in a homeless shelter in Greenville, South Carolina. It was there that I saw a seven-year-old “white” girl living in the same mission with a diverse sea of humanity made equal by the menace of poverty. At that exact moment, I shed tribalism and realized that we are truly in this together. We are not labels. That is why I keep putting quote marks around the terms black and white when describing people. The video at the bottom of this article was inspired by my two year journey of hardship that led me to disavow labels.

The second counsel is tied in directly to the first. Do not let politics distract you from your purpose. There was a time I used to view this world through the left/right divide. Now I realize that politics itself is the problem. When we glom on to political labels and attach ourselves to partisan ideologies, we allow the establishment to shatter us into encampments. The only people who thrive in this hyper partisan paradigm are professionals in the politico-media complex and their corporate masters who make fortunes through our disunion. The rest of us, who keep viewing politics as a sport, are getting pillaged by the very personalities we keep cheer leading for.

Why do you think they call us their base? Democrats and Republicans have us so chained to the duopoly that they arrogantly insult us as they condition us vote for the lesser of two evils. We should all wake up to this one overriding fact; people who prosper through the status quo will never deliver the change we have been waiting for. My bet is on you, the next generation; I pray that you stop being played for suckers and refuse to be bamboozled by the establishment. Many of you know this already; when it comes to policies, there is not an iota of a difference between the two parties. They differ in their methodologies but in the end both sides of the aisle are colluding to bleed our nation and our planet.

In order to distract us from this truth, corporate shills keep coming up with endless ways to stir us into anger, incite us with outrage and pit us against one another. Neither party has any interest in fixing the issues that confront us nor do they have any intention of alleviating the suffering of the world; their incentive is to further injustice and to make money as we hurt. Parties exist to sustain themselves by stepping on the rest of us. It is an act of self-harm to vote or believe in either party, they have proven for more than a century that their cardinal agendas are to serve their corporate masters, amass wealth and consolidate clout as they pay lip service to justice.

These two parties are aided and abetted by almost every lever of power; government, mainstream media, academia and beyond have been co-opted by the vast wealth of the global oligarchy. They are paid handsomely to cater to your indulgences and differences, this is why they keep politicizing everything and trying their hardest to inject hatred into the universe. Their quest is to convince you that answers are found through politics when in truth their path only lead to more problems.

Discount anyone who talks about social justice if they do not speak about economic inequalities. They want you to hack at branches while disregarding the root of iniquities. Economic imbalances are at the core of most of society’s ills. Crime, drug abuse, broken families, homelessness, suicides and high incarceration, in large part, can be traced back to the hopelessness that hunger and poverty inculcate in the minds of those who struggle in indigence. A vast majority of Americans are one or two paychecks away from insolvency and destitution; our nation has been turned into a vast pyramid scheme where wealth is transferred from the many who languish to the few who flourish. Focus like a laser on this issue and pay no attention to frauds who try to convince you that your enemy are people who are struggling just like you.

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by Julian Vigo















America Remains Drunk on Power



by Eric Ortiz

Do not let leeches in D.C. and ticks in the media-entertainment complex use you as stage props and billboards. For the first time in America’s history, your generation will be worse off than your parents. The lucky few who are able to go to college face the bleak prospect of graduating with a hundred thousand dollar debt only to be employed as Uber drivers or Starbucks baristas. The American dream is getting snuffed out by the greed of the neo-aristocracy who are intent on coming after our marrows after they bled us to the bone in 2008. Since the Great Recession, the wealth of the 1 percent has skyrocketed while the bottom 99 percent’s share of the economic pie has dwindled. Wages have stagnated as more and more Americans are driven to working multiple jobs just to keep up with the rent. In this continuing fleecing of our nation and the planet as a whole, Democrats and Republicans are equally complicit.

Steer clear from the cult of personality too many in my generation and prior have become. Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the endless stream of empty suits who keep being paraded by mainstream media are nothing more than mannequins of the corporate state. Disregard politics and pay attention to policies that both parties keep enacting. Don’t let wedge issues distract you from the economic theft that is taking place. If we have any hope to stop this ongoing larceny and the crimes against humanity that are being committed by the military-financial complex, it’s only if we come together as a people and demand a government that works for us. This article is not so much advising you as much as I am placing my faith  in your generation. Don’t be like us, be better than us and find a way to disavow politics and stand up for inclusive justice. #PostTribalGeneration

No one is greater than the other; we are all the greater when we love and help one another.

This video was recorded during my stay at a mission in Wellington, Colorado. Through hardship I learned to disregard labels and realized the value of unity in the face of injustice. Do not get caught up on the title. The message is profound if you listen to it.

Teacher ‘Rebellion’ Spreads to Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY—A teacher rebellion that started in the hills of West Virginia spread like a prairie fire to Oklahoma this week and now threatens to reach the desert in Arizona.

In the deep red state of Oklahoma, the Republican-led Legislature approved money for teacher raises and more school funding, even hiking taxes on the vaunted oil and gas industry to do it. Republican Governor Mary Fallin rushed to sign the measures into law Thursday.

Oklahoma teachers were inspired by West Virginia, another red state where a 9-day strike led to 5-percent teacher raises. Oklahoma teachers haven’t had a raise in a decade of Republican control and they won raises of between 15 and 18 percent. Now, teachers in Arizona thronged their GOP-run Capitol this week, demanding a 20 percent teacher pay hike.

“West Virginia woke us up,” Arizona Educators Association President Joe Thomas told a cheering crowd at a protest this week in Phoenix.

In Oklahoma, the tax hikes on cigarettes, fuel and oil and gas production will be enough for raises averaging about $6,100 annually, as well as funding boosts for schools, support personnel and state workers.

Oklahoma ranks 47th in the nation in public school revenue per student, nearly $3,000 below the national average, while its average teacher salary of $45,276 ranks 49th, according to the most recent statistics from the National Education Association.

“A lot of teachers are just tired of the promises,” said Alberto Morejon, a junior high history teacher from Stillwater, Oklahoma, who launched a teacher walkout page on Facebook that quickly reached more than 70,000 followers.

Many GOP-led states are feeling the pushback after years of tax cuts that have slashed funding for core government services such as public schools, said Lily Garcia, president of the teachers union NEA, .

“It has been an unmitigated disaster, and it’s now coming home to roost on all those folks who blindly cut taxes, not caring how that was going to impact communities,” said Garcia.

The reversal on tax cuts in Oklahoma was particularly stunning, because lawmakers there included a hike on the normally sacrosanct energy industry, increasing the production tax on oil and natural gas from 2 percent to 5 percent. In the Legislature, where lawmakers needed a three-fourth’s majority in both bodies to pass a new tax, the House voted even as billionaire oil baron Harold Hamm, the chairman and CEO of Continental Resources, glared at them from the gallery.

Fallin, who in 2014 signed into law tax cuts on both income and energy production, signed the measures quickly with a hope of averting statewide school closures. Earlier, she praised bipartisan support of the package and said she hopes the teacher walkouts scheduled to start on Monday will instead become a one-day rally for education.

“That’ll be up to the teachers, but I hope that they can come up here, say ‘thank you’ on Monday and go back to the classrooms,” Fallin said.

In both Arizona and Oklahoma, teachers are mulling whether the current offer from the Legislature is enough to avert a work stoppage. The union in Oklahoma was demanding $75 million in new funding for education, and is expected to get $50 million under the plan.

While some Oklahoma school administrators and board members are giddy over the infusion of new cash, many rank-and-file teachers are demanding that all of their needs are met before they agree to stop a walkout.

“They need to fund our schools better, and until that happens, we’re going to walk out,” said Adrien Gates, an elementary school teacher in Norman. “We need to take this all the way. Otherwise we’re settling.”

___

Associated Press reporter Melissa Daniels contributed to this report from Phoenix.

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Follow Sean Murphy at www.twitter.com/apseanmurphy

Californians to Take Their Coffee With a Cancer Warning

LOS ANGELES—A Los Angeles judge has determined that coffee companies must [use] an ominous cancer warning label because of a chemical produced in the roasting process.

Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said Wednesday that Starbucks and other companies failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any risks. He ruled in an earlier phase of trial that companies hadn’t shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.

The Council for Education and Research on Toxics, a nonprofit group, sued Starbucks and 90 other companies under a state law that requires warnings on a wide range of chemicals that can cause cancer. One is acrylamide, a carcinogen present in coffee.

“Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving … that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health,” Berle wrote in his proposed ruling.

The coffee industry had claimed the chemical was present at harmless levels and should be exempt from the law because it results naturally from the cooking process that makes beans flavorful. It also argued coffee was good for the body.

The ruling came despite eased concerns in recent years about the possible dangers of coffee, with some studies finding health benefits. In 2016, the International Agency for Research on Cancer — the cancer agency of the World Health Organization — moved coffee off its “possible carcinogen” list.

The lawsuit was brought under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, passed by voters in 1986. It allows private citizens, advocacy groups and attorneys to sue on behalf of the state and collect a portion of civil penalties.

The law has been credited with reducing chemicals that cause cancer and birth defects, such as lead in hair dyes, mercury in nasal sprays and arsenic in bottled water. But it’s also been widely criticized for abuses by lawyers shaking down businesses for quick settlements.

“Coffee has been shown, over and over again, to be a healthy beverage,” said William Murray, president and CEO of the National Coffee Association, in reaction to the decision. He argued the lawsuit “does nothing to improve public health.”

The lawsuit has been brewing for eight years and is still not over. A third phase of trial will determine civil penalties of up to $2,500 per person exposed each day over eight years, an astronomical figure in a state of 40 million that appears unlikely to be imposed.

Attorney Raphael Metzger, who brought the lawsuit and drinks a few cups of coffee daily, wants the industry to remove the chemical from its process. Coffee companies have said that’s not feasible.

“Getting it out is better for public health than leaving it in and warning people,” he said.

Metzger’s client brought a similar case later taken up by the state attorney general that resulted in potato-chip makers agreeing in 2008 to pay $3 million and remove acrylamide from their products.

The chip-makers opted to do that rather than post cancer warnings like those that are found, and largely ignored, throughout California.

Parking garages have signs warning of chemical dangers that can cause cancer, birth defects and other reproductive harm. They note carbon monoxide and gas and diesel exhaust is present and that people should not to linger longer than necessary.

Many coffee companies have already posted warnings saying acrylamide is found in coffee. However, many are posted in places not easily visible like below counters where cream and sugar are available.

The judge has given the defense a couple weeks to file objections to the proposed ruling before he makes it final. California judges can reverse their tentative rulings, but rarely do.

About a dozen of the defendants in the case have previously settled and agreed to post warnings, Metzger said. With some defendants dismissed or affiliated with larger companies about 50 defendants remain.

Among the latest to settle was 7-Eleven, which agreed to pay $900,000. BP West Coast Products, which operates gas station convenience stores, agreed to pay $675,000.

Even at Starbucks shops where the labels are posted, many coffee drinkers are unaware of them.

Afternoon coffee drinkers at one shop in Los Angeles said they might look into the warning or give drinking coffee a second thought, but the cup of joe was likely to win out.

“I just don’t think it would stop me,” said Jen Bitterman, a digital marketing technologist. “I love the taste, I love the ritual, I love the high, the energy, and I think I’m addicted to it.”

Darlington Ibekwe, a lawyer in Los Angeles, said a cancer warning would be annoying but wouldn’t stop him from treating himself to three lattes a week.

“It’s like cigarettes. Like, damn, now I’ve got to see this?” he said. “Dude, I’m enjoying my coffee.”

___

Associated Press writer Amanda Lee Myers in Los Angeles and AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee contributed to this story.

Defendants Acquitted After Using a ‘Climate Necessity’ Defense

On March 27, 13 defendants went into the West Roxbury District courthouse to answer charges related to their arrests protesting the West Roxbury Massachusetts Lateral Pipeline. They expected to have charges against them reduced to civil infractions — the equivalent of a parking ticket. While finding no grounds to deny that motion from the prosecution, the judge chose to let each defendant testify briefly on the necessity of their actions.

The defendants collectively presented a powerful and comprehensive argument for why it was necessary to engage in civil disobedience to stop the imminent local and global harms of this fracked gas pipeline. Following their testimony, the judge acquitted ALL the defendants by reason of necessity.

While defendants in this case were still denied a jury trial and the possibility of presenting a full necessity defense, this was the first time that we know of that defendants were acquitted based on climate necessity. The defendants told the story of the campaign against the West Roxbury Lateral Pipeline and how their actions were justified by the threat of climate change.

Lawyers for the 13 activists suggested there may even have been a “cause and effect” – that charges were reduced in order to avoid the trial for which the defendants, their legal team, eight expert witnesses, and many supporters had prepared.

Activists said they were disappointed that they would not get the chance to present their case to a jury of their peers, but not disheartened. “The attempt to take these cases to trial was a long shot,” said Marla Marcum, co-founder of the Climate Disobedience Center and a spokesperson for the group. “As climate activists in 2018, we know that long shots and moral imagination are some of the most promising tools for culture-shifting transformation.”

With the judge dismissing the charges, the campaign was a success even without the trial. As Nathan Phillips, a professor in the Earth and Environment Department at Boston University and one of the defendants, said “We forced Spectra to admit to the judge that they did not have and do not have a safety plan for the West Roxbury Lateral pipeline and likely any projects going forward.”

The result in this case is an important part of building power to fight the fossil fuel industry. Climate justice advocates told their story not just in court but from the way they created their protest, which included “Digging Mass Graves” to highlight the dangers of climate change.

“What we stood for is true, and that truth is in the process of coming to light, regardless of the fact that the system is unable to fully hear it right now,” said Karenna Gore, daughter of former Vice President Al Gore and Director of the Center for Earth Ethics of at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Activists continued to tell their story after the protest. See this blog from Tim DeChristopher, and by Rev. Lara Hoke. The participants consistently made the point that they restated before the court — there is an urgent necessity to stop building carbon infrastructure as climate change will kill millions of people and cause immense environmental damage.

This protest and refusal to accept a plea bargain built the movement’s power and demonstrated the violence of carbon energy infrastructure projects.

The defendants were among roughly 200 protesters who had been arrested as part of a massive campaign against this pipeline, beginning in mid 2015. Initially concerned with local  safety– the risk of locating a high pressure facility in a densely-populated neighborhood and across the street from an active blasting quarry—protesters gained support from Boston Mayor Walsh and the entire Boston City Council, Congressman Lynch, Senators Markey and Warren, State Representative Coppinger and State Senator Rush, as well as residents and officials from the Town of Dedham through which the pipeline also runs.

This is not just one protest but part of a national resistance movement for climate justice with activists taking action across the country to stop carbon energy infrastructure and extraction of oil and gas. We urge you to share this report so tens of thousands of people will see principled climate disobedience actions as one kind of necessary leadership in a time when our regulatory systems and our government are owned by the fossil fuel industry. We hope this action will inspire more people to take direct action, risk arrest, and pursue novel legal strategies.

The Climate Disobedience Center provides a guide for activists on how to use the tool of the necessity defense in climate cases. It defines climate necessity as: “The climate necessity defense is an argument made by a criminal defendant to justify action taken on behalf of the planet. It’s offered by activists who have been arrested for protesting fossil fuel extraction and government inaction on climate policy.” [Emphasis in original] The necessity defense is a long-time defense used in civil disobedience cases where activists argue that their violation of the law should not result in conviction because they were acting out of necessity to prevent a greater harm. In climate cases, the argument is the impacts of climate change are so serious that breaking the law is necessary to avert them.

The trial was supported by Climate Disobedience Center, the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Climate Defense Project, and 198 Methods.

For more information visit the Climate Disobedience Center and Stop the West Roxbury Lateral. The above report is based in part on the press release from the defendants.

At Least 12 States Will Sue to Block a Census Question on Citizenship Status

Democratic attorneys general in at least 12 states have announced that they will bring legal action to try to stop the Trump administration from adding a question on citizenship to the 2020 U.S. census. Opponents of the question say it would decrease responses from both undocumented and legal immigrants. Some critics have suggested that the administration wants to add the question to reduce the population count in Democratic areas that are home to large numbers of immigrants.

The move is in response to the administration’s announcement Tuesday that it will include a question on the census that asks whether respondents are American citizens, a question that has not appeared on the questionnaires since 1950.

The Hill reports:

An undercount could put at risk billions of dollars in federal aid, in programs ranging from health care to education and even law enforcement funding for some states. Figures from the census are used to allocate federal money through programs across the government. …

Research shows that more than 60 percent of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States live in just 20 metro areas across the country. Twelve of those 20 metro areas are in blue states that backed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by wide margins in the 2016 presidential election.

More than a million undocumented immigrants live in the New York area, and a million more live in Los Angeles, according to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center. Chicago, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver and four California metro areas all have between 100,000 and 400,000 undocumented immigrant residents.

“The census is supposed to count everyone,” said Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts. “This is a blatant and illegal attempt by the Trump administration to undermine that goal, which will result in an undercount of the population and threaten federal funding for our state and cities.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who has said he will lead the multi-state effort against the new census question, echoed Healey’s sentiment in a statement, writing: “This move directly targets states like New York that have large, thriving immigrant populations—threatening billions of dollars in federal funding for New York as well as fair representation in Congress and the electoral college.”

California state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has announced that he too will file a suit to stop the question, said: “We’re hoping that [what] we do is win this lawsuit, remove a very biased question from the census and then do everything we can to get people to participate.” Becerra and California Secretary of State Alex Padilla co-authored an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle about the lawsuit.

The Constitution requires that every resident of the U.S. be counted in the decennial census, regardless of whether they are citizens. The data is used to redraw boundaries for political districts, school boards and House seats, and to allocate federal grants and subsidies to where the need is greatest.

Kathay Feng, the executive director of California Common Cause and a leader for nonpartisan reformation of California’s redistricting process, spoke to Ian Masters on the widely broadcast radio talk show “Background Briefing” about the new census question. She said:

“There’s a huge demographic change [happening] in this country. One way for a particular party, and I’m just going to say it, the Republican Party, to fight that demographic change is by making sure that only certain people can participate … by adding a citizenship question, we can either scare off other people from filling it out, or create such a skewed result that now that number that comes from each state … can reflect the number that some people would like to see, which is a portion.”

She added that “when you start to skew that way, what you do is you have really foreclosed a huge population of people.”

Legal experts say it is not yet clear whether the states will be successful in challenging the question in court.

The Politics of Cheating

Cheating isn’t winning. We try to teach this to our children, but politics provides the opposite lesson.

Political cheating allows those who engage in it to amass far more power than they have a right to in a constitutional democracy. Its most sophisticated form isn’t ballot-box stuffing but the use of indirect means by those in authority to perpetuate themselves in office.

Within 48 hours, Americans were offered two fast courses in the politics of cheating.

Late Monday, the Trump administration—acting against the advice of six previous Census Bureau directors, Republicans and Democrats alike—moved to add to the 2020 census a query about a respondent’s citizenship status.

And on Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a case that turns on whether Maryland’s gerrymandered district boundaries deprive Republicans of fair representation in Congress.

In both cases, the courts should act to defend our republican democracy. On the census controversy, Congress could also provide a remedy. But most Republicans are likely to be quite happy with the distortions that the citizenship question could introduce into our decennial head count.

There’s a reason why the formal census has not asked about citizenship since 1950, and why it is an especially bad idea to reintroduce it now.

Response rates to the census in lower-income neighborhoods have long been a challenge, and immigrants in the country illegally have worried that answering the questionnaire could endanger their status, despite legal guarantees of confidentiality. Even legal immigrants have shared these worries.

Such concerns have increased exponentially with President Trump targeting undocumented immigrants with a proud and public ferocity.

The undercounting of immigrants would create a twofold injustice. It would tilt representation at all levels of government away from places with large populations of Latinos and other immigrants (often Metropolitan and Democratic-leaning) and overrepresent white, rural regions and states. And it would short-change undercounted areas when it comes to federal funds, since many programs operate on formulas based on the census.

In the Trump era, there is an irony here since one legitimate concern in locales with high levels of recent immigration is that their public services are often strained. Cutting money from such jurisdictions only increases the burdens on local taxpayers, native born and immigrant.

The maneuver is all the more problematic because Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross chose to include the request for information on citizenship in the face of objections from career Census Bureau officials. The lateness of his decision means the citizenship question will not be subjected to the Bureau’s usual extensive testing for the effect of new inquiries on the accuracy of the overall count.

This is one key contention of the lawsuit from California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who said Ross’ decision was “arbitrary and capricious.” He’s right. California is one of at least 12 states trying to block the move.

And political cheating at its purest and most obvious is gerrymandering, drawing district lines to maximize your party’s representation in legislative bodies and minimize the number of seats your opponents can win.

Because so many of the state legislatures that drew district lines after the 2010 Census were controlled by Republicans, an end to gerrymandering now would be especially challenging to the GOP. So opposing gerrymandering has come to be seen as a partisan, Democratic issue.

But it’s not. The addition of the Maryland case to a docket that already includes a challenge to an outlandish GOP gerrymander in Wisconsin is a reminder that both parties can suffer from this practice.

In Maryland, a formerly Republican district based in the rural and western parts of the state was chopped up, its pieces redistributed in a way that reduced the GOP to only one seat in the state’s eight-member House delegation.

Linking Maryland and Wisconsin could allow the Supreme Court to rule against gerrymandering nationwide in a thoroughly non-partisan way. And the Wisconsin litigants provided an objective formula for judging when district lines are plainly unfair. Justice Stephen Breyer’s suggestion Wednesday that the court kick the matter into a later term is worth pursuing only if it could lead to a comprehensive ruling against gerrymandering.

Attacks on judicial activism are a staple on the right. The increasingly aggressive activism of conservative judges has made this a live concern on the left as well. But when elected officials use their power to make it ever harder for their opponents to win elections—exactly what’s happening with the census and gerrymandering—the courts have an obligation to serve as democracy’s last line of defense.