Tuesday, July 7, 2020
Chelsea Manning’s Jailer Is Running For Congress -- As A Democrat
James Averhart confined the Iraq War whistleblower to a tiny cell 23 hours a day -- and now could end up as the Democratic Party’s nominee in Alabama
Andrew Perez
Jul 7
As Democrats campaign against “tough on crime” policies and for criminal justice reform, the party may end up with a congressional nominee who confined former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to an 8-by-6-foot cell at least 23 hours a day.
James Averhart, who is competing in a July 14 run-off election for an Alabama congressional seat, also oversaw a Bush-era military push to track down and punish veterans who deserted the Vietnam War -- an initiative seen as an attempt to discourage soldiers from deserting during the Iraq War.
Averhart, who served as Chief Warrant Officer Five in the U.S. Marine corps, has a solid chance of being the Democratic nominee in the open-seat election in Alabama’s Republican-leaning first congressional district. Professor Kiani Gardner won 44 percent of votes in the March 3 primary contest, while Averhart received 40 percent.
The Democratic Party has sought out veterans to run for red seats in recent years, and the party has increasingly aligned itself with national security officials associated with harsh defense policies. Former deputy CIA director Avril Haines, who helped limit accountability for the agency's torture program, is leading the foreign policy and national security transition team for former Vice President Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
In the Alabama race, Averhart became a candidate after overseeing the brig at Quantico, Va., where Manning was held between July 2010 and April 2011. Manning was arrested in May 2010 and charged by the government with 22 counts for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks. The troves of files included a video documenting a U.S. helicopter massacre in Iraq that killed a dozen people, and military intelligence assessment briefs on hundreds of people detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The terms of Manning’s pre-trial imprisonment at Quantico were extremely harsh. She was characterized as a maximum security prisoner and a Prevention of Injury (POI) assignment, both of which carried heavy restrictions.
According to a report from Glenn Greenwald in December 2010, Manning was held at "in intensive solitary confinement" -- completely isolated in a cell all but one hour a day, prohibited from exercising in her cell, and denied the right to have a pillow or sheets.
Amnesty International detailed additional restrictions in a January 2011 letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Manning was checked on by guards every five minutes, prohibited from sleeping during the day, and could only sleep in her underwear at night. Manning was kept on POI assignment after her psychiatrist said it wasn’t necessary, according to the group, which said the treatment appeared to violate her human rights. Manning was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in April 2011.
“Averhart and his successor rejected psychiatrists' nearly weekly recommendations to ease the restrictions that kept Manning in an 8-by-6-foot cell at least 23 hours a day,” the Associated Press wrote in 2012.
According to Courthouse News, Averhart put Manning on suicide watch three times despite the recommendations of her psychiatrist. “Suicide watch forced Manning to strip naked, put on a rough smock and sleep on a special mattress and a blanket,” the news service wrote.
The Marines’ chief of corrections specifically criticized Averhart for twice failing to remove Manning from suicide watch for several days after a psychiatrist’s recommendation.
Averhart argued that vague regulatory wording -- "When prisoners are no longer considered to be suicide risks by a medical officer, they shall be returned to appropriate quarters” -- gave him “the opportunity to evaluate” when to release Manning from suicide watch.
In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She attempted suicide twice in 2016, the second time after she was placed in solitary confinement. Former President Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in 2017, days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Unfortunately, Manning’s freedom was only temporary.
She was jailed by the Trump administration last year for refusing to testify before a grand jury about WikiLeaks, briefly released, and jailed again for refusing to cooperate with the grand jury. In March, days after Manning made another attempt on her life, a federal judge announced he had ordered the government to release her and had dismissed the grand jury.
Averhart, who retired from active duty in 2017, also previously led the Marine Corps Absentee Collection Center. In that capacity, he directed an effort to track down Vietnam War deserters by reopening cold cases. They located at least 33 Vietnam-era deserters between 2004 and 2006. The campaign was perceived as an effort to discourage soldiers from deserting during the Iraq War.
"My view is that the Marines are trying to send a message to people in the ranks today that they, too, will be required to participate in a war, whether they think it's illegal or immoral," Louis Font, a lawyer for one ex-Marine accused of deserting during Vietnam, told USA Today in 2006.
Let the Rich Pay for the Crisis
By Katu Arkonada on July 4, 2020
https://www.resumen-english.org/2020/07/let-the-rich-pay-for-the-crisis/
After the economic crisis of 2008, there was a sector that not only recovered quickly but continued to grow exponentially, the luxury goods sector. While a large part of the population saw their social and labor rights cut back, the occupation of 5-star hotels, the sale of real estate by luxury firms such as Engel & Völkers, or the purchase of products such as expensive watches, jewelry or art, increased by over 10 percent annually.
This obscene indicator sums up very well what the 2008 crisis meant for humanity.
The way out of the crisis was paid for by the social majorities for the benefit of an elite. The losses were socialized, through the purchase of the debt of the private banks with the objective of not collapsing the international financial system, and the profits were privatized. Other large companies such as General Electric or General Motors were rescued, without the State, after saving these companies, imposing any clause for the recovery of jobs. And when some of those jobs were recovered, it was with infinitely worse wage conditions than before the crisis.
Today, when the worst of the pandemic and the health crisis may be over, we are on the verge of a global economic crisis, probably stronger and deeper than that of 2008.
The World Trade Organization has estimated that the world economy could contract by as much as 18.5 percent, and the International Monetary Fund’s April report estimates that regional GDP could fall by 5.2 percent, up from 5 percent in the 1930s after the 1929 New York Stock Exchange crash and certainly larger than the 2 percent after 2008.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that exports raw materials and manufactured products, the ILO estimates that more than 10 million people will lose their jobs as a result of the pandemic, and ECLAC in its report “The Social Challenge in the Time of Covid-19” calculates an increase in poverty of 4.4 percentage points that translates into an additional 28.7 million poor people (to reach 214.7 million people) and an increase in extreme poverty of 2.6 percentage points, bringing the total to 83.4 million people in the region.
In addition to all this, there is the oil crisis, with a drop in production of 10 million barrels and the collapse of prices which, although already in recovery, will not reach those of 2019 by the end of 2020, according to the International Energy Agency.
If we add to this the structural crisis in the form of climate change that we are experiencing, with an increase in annual carbon dioxide emissions of more than 50 gigatons (each gigaton is equivalent to one billion tons), the result is devastating: accelerated melting of the poles at the same time as the sea level rises, and an increase in the average global temperature of between 1.2 and 1.3 °C over the next five years, which brings us closer to the dreaded limit of more than 2 °C of the average temperature of the planet above the pre-industrial period.
For all the above reasons, the debate on the capitalist mode of production is becoming increasingly urgent, but without positions, as we are used to reading about everything that has to do with the development model. The countries of the South not only have the right, but also the obligation, to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, doing so in a balance between the growth to which the countries of the North had access, and the rights of nature on a finite planet that does not have much more of itself to give
The global coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a crisis that was already looming on the horizon, that of an unsustainable mode of production, especially in the countries of the North, which also do not want to transfer technology, as a partial payment of the ecological debt they have with the South for the exploitation of their peoples, people, and natural resources for centuries. If we also add to the equation the variable of the financialization of the economy, with less and less production of tangible goods, and more economic speculation, the combination is explosive, and above all, unsustainable.
But if anything good comes out of this pandemic, it is the return of the State, the break between broad layers of the middle class of the cultural consensus installed by neoliberalism that the State was not necessary and that the less State, the more efficient it is. It is going to be very difficult for the defenders of neoliberal globalization in crisis to defend that the common goods, especially health, should not be in the hands of the State in order to guarantee universal access in the best possible conditions for its population.
There is the crack to break the neoliberal consensus, still hegemonic from the cultural point of view. The need for the return of the State. And after installing this new consensus, it is necessary to take a new step: that the crisis is not paid by the usual ones, those from below, the most humble. Let those at the top pay for the economic crisis that is coming. Let the rich pay for the crisis.
The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes
BY
MATT BRUENIG
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/racial-wealth-gap-redistribution
In light of the recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, there has been renewed discussion of the racial wealth gap and how to close it (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annie Lowrey). I have written on this topic many times in the past (I, II, III, IV). One thing I have tried to emphasize over the years, which I will do again here in a different way, is that due to the extremely concentrated wealth distribution in the United States, the racial wealth gap is almost entirely about the upper classes in each racial group. I say this not to imply that it is unimportant, but rather because this fact must be grappled with upfront if we are going to make a serious effort to close the racial wealth gap.
If you take the net worth of all white households and divide it by the number of white households, you get $900,600. If you do the same thing for black households, you get $140,000. The difference between these figures — $770,600 — is the best representation of the overall racial wealth gap. That is how much more wealth black people would need per household to have as much wealth as white people have per household.
But overall statistics can be misleading. If you decompose both of these bars into deciles, what you find is that nearly all white wealth is owned by the top 10 percent of white households just as nearly all black wealth is owned by the top 10 percent of black households. The lower and middle deciles of each racial group own virtually none of their racial group’s wealth.
What this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people.
One way to illustrate this point (h/t Sam Tobin-Hochstadt) is to see what would happen to the overall racial wealth gap if we entirely closed the wealth gap that exists between the bottom 90 percent of each racial group. Put differently: What would happen to mean black wealth if the bottom 90 percent of black families were given the exact same per-household wealth as the bottom 90 percent of white families?
The answer is that mean black wealth would rise from $140,000 to $311,100. The overall racial wealth gap would thus decline from $760,600 to $589,500, a fall of 22.5 percent. This means that even after you have completely closed the racial wealth gap between the bottom 90 percent of each race, 77.5 percent of the overall racial wealth gap still remains, which is to say that the disparity between the top deciles in each race drives over three-fourths of the racial wealth gap.
In much of the popular discourse on the racial wealth gap, the emphasis is on the median white household and the median black household. To understand how misguided this emphasis is, we can do exactly what we did above but for the bottom 50 percent of each race. After topping off the current bottom 50 percent of black families so that they have as much wealth per household as the current bottom 50 percent of white families, mean black wealth rises by $23,100, cutting the racial wealth gap by 3 percent.
What this shows is that 97 percent of the overall racial wealth gap is driven by households above the median of each racial group. This explains why you can produce shocking conclusions that show a relatively small amount of money can dramatically reduce the (median) racial wealth difference: it is not that hard to get two groups who own relatively little to own the same amount of relatively little. But such measures would not make much of a dent in the overall racial wealth gap.
In my mind, this information should force us to be more clear about what exactly we are trying to achieve when we talk about closing the racial wealth gap. If we are trying to make the black wealth distribution match the white wealth distribution, then fixing the racial wealth gap mostly involves redistributing a lot of wealth between the white and black upper classes. That’s where the wealth is, and so that’s where the wealth gap is.
If we are just trying to make it so the “everyday black family” (defined by the median) looks like the “everyday white family,” then that costs very little (0.5 percent of the national wealth) because it ignores all the people who own meaningful amounts of wealth.
Both ideas seem a bit ridiculous in different ways, the first idea because it’s essentially a squabble between the upper classes, the second idea because it does nothing to really cut down on overall racial wealth inequality. The way through this bind is, of course, to acknowledge that racial capitalism has concentrated almost all of the national wealth in the hands of a small number of white families and that the proper course of action is to redistribute that wealth to the multiracial lower and working classes, tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/racial-wealth-gap-redistribution
In light of the recent resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, there has been renewed discussion of the racial wealth gap and how to close it (Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annie Lowrey). I have written on this topic many times in the past (I, II, III, IV). One thing I have tried to emphasize over the years, which I will do again here in a different way, is that due to the extremely concentrated wealth distribution in the United States, the racial wealth gap is almost entirely about the upper classes in each racial group. I say this not to imply that it is unimportant, but rather because this fact must be grappled with upfront if we are going to make a serious effort to close the racial wealth gap.
If you take the net worth of all white households and divide it by the number of white households, you get $900,600. If you do the same thing for black households, you get $140,000. The difference between these figures — $770,600 — is the best representation of the overall racial wealth gap. That is how much more wealth black people would need per household to have as much wealth as white people have per household.
But overall statistics can be misleading. If you decompose both of these bars into deciles, what you find is that nearly all white wealth is owned by the top 10 percent of white households just as nearly all black wealth is owned by the top 10 percent of black households. The lower and middle deciles of each racial group own virtually none of their racial group’s wealth.
What this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people.
One way to illustrate this point (h/t Sam Tobin-Hochstadt) is to see what would happen to the overall racial wealth gap if we entirely closed the wealth gap that exists between the bottom 90 percent of each racial group. Put differently: What would happen to mean black wealth if the bottom 90 percent of black families were given the exact same per-household wealth as the bottom 90 percent of white families?
The answer is that mean black wealth would rise from $140,000 to $311,100. The overall racial wealth gap would thus decline from $760,600 to $589,500, a fall of 22.5 percent. This means that even after you have completely closed the racial wealth gap between the bottom 90 percent of each race, 77.5 percent of the overall racial wealth gap still remains, which is to say that the disparity between the top deciles in each race drives over three-fourths of the racial wealth gap.
In much of the popular discourse on the racial wealth gap, the emphasis is on the median white household and the median black household. To understand how misguided this emphasis is, we can do exactly what we did above but for the bottom 50 percent of each race. After topping off the current bottom 50 percent of black families so that they have as much wealth per household as the current bottom 50 percent of white families, mean black wealth rises by $23,100, cutting the racial wealth gap by 3 percent.
What this shows is that 97 percent of the overall racial wealth gap is driven by households above the median of each racial group. This explains why you can produce shocking conclusions that show a relatively small amount of money can dramatically reduce the (median) racial wealth difference: it is not that hard to get two groups who own relatively little to own the same amount of relatively little. But such measures would not make much of a dent in the overall racial wealth gap.
In my mind, this information should force us to be more clear about what exactly we are trying to achieve when we talk about closing the racial wealth gap. If we are trying to make the black wealth distribution match the white wealth distribution, then fixing the racial wealth gap mostly involves redistributing a lot of wealth between the white and black upper classes. That’s where the wealth is, and so that’s where the wealth gap is.
If we are just trying to make it so the “everyday black family” (defined by the median) looks like the “everyday white family,” then that costs very little (0.5 percent of the national wealth) because it ignores all the people who own meaningful amounts of wealth.
Both ideas seem a bit ridiculous in different ways, the first idea because it’s essentially a squabble between the upper classes, the second idea because it does nothing to really cut down on overall racial wealth inequality. The way through this bind is, of course, to acknowledge that racial capitalism has concentrated almost all of the national wealth in the hands of a small number of white families and that the proper course of action is to redistribute that wealth to the multiracial lower and working classes, tackling both racial and class inequality simultaneously.
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