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By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog.August 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/trumps-golden-era-of-energy-is-turning-to-lead/
It was just over a year ago that President Trump announced, “The golden era of American energy is now underway,” saying that his policies focused on exploiting oil, gas, and coal were “unleashing energy dominance.”
What a difference a year makes. On July 10, the Financial Times ran an article with a headline that asked, “Is the party finally over for U.S. oil and gas?” And there is no doubt that it has been quite a party for the last decade. At least, for the fracking executives who have enriched themselves while losing hundreds of billions of dollars investors gave them to produce oil and gas. Meanwhile, profits never materialized.
Lately, prospects for the broader fossil fuel industry look more like lead than gold.
For starters, the oil and gas industry in America is facing an era of losses, bankruptcies, canceled projects, and declining demand. It is highly likely that history will show that this point in time was the beginning of the golden era of renewable energy and the decline of the fossil fuel industry.
Fracked Shale Oil And Gas Industry Failing
President Trump’s 2016 campaign was backed heavily by the oil and gas industry, with strong support from fracking CEOs like Continental Resources’ Harold Hamm. The story of record American oil production due to fracking was even being touted by President Obama, who rightfully took credit for the fracking boom that occurred on his watch. That’s despite President Trump recently taking credit for it as well.
But as we have documented over the last two years at DeSmog, the fracked oil industry has been a financial failure for more than the past decade. The industry produced record amounts of oil and gas but lost huge sums of money in the process. And now even industry leaders are admitting the U.S. oil industry has already peaked, a little more than a year after President Trump declared the beginning of the “golden era.”
In extensively detailing the failures of the shale oil and gas industry, The New York Times recently noted, “The industry’s decline may be just beginning.” It cites industry analysts’ predictions that as many as 250 oil and gas companies could file for bankruptcy by the end of 2021.
The U.S. fracking boom gave President Trump and many others the confidence to talk about unleashing America’s energy dominance. Yet today, the industry is a financial disaster, and even its leaders are admitting its best days are behind it.
Declining Demand For ‘Freedom Gas’
Weeks after President Trump’s “golden era” statement, the U.S. Department of Energy put out a now-famous press release touting the future of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports and referring to LNG as “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom.”
America is awash in natural gas from the fracking boom. That includes the gas that shale drillers intentionally sought out, as well as the large amounts of “associated gas” that comes from fracked oil wells. Due to this oversupply, at times the price for natural gas in the Permian region of Texas has gone negative.
With so much cheap natural gas in America, the industry has been racing to build out hugely expensive LNG export terminals and the supporting infrastructure needed to export this gas to the world. However, as DeSmog reported in May, the U.S. is just one of many countries flushing the global market with LNG, and the economics here no longer pencil out.
This year, global buyers are canceling orders for U.S. LNG, leading natural gas producers in America to seek out storage for the gas they can’t sell. And now the U.S. natural gas market is facing a storage crisis just like the one that ended up driving U.S. oil prices negative in April. According to The Wall Street Journal, Goldman Sachs recently told its clients that the U.S. could run out of gas storage capacity by October.
A new report from Global Energy Monitor is warning of a “gas bubble.” The industry is certainly facing long-term troubles. The Wall Street Journal recently summed up the U.S. gas problem: “There is simply too much of it.”
New Pipelines Face Increasing Challenges
New pipelines to move oil and gas were part of the rush to take advantage of the expected golden era of energy in America. However, oil and gas industry finances, combined with ongoing legal challenges from activists, mean the pipeline industry has also taken some serious blows recently.
The news for U.S. pipeline comparies was so bad in early July that The New York Times asked, “Is This the End of New Pipelines?”
On July 5, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy — the two firms behind the proposed $8 billion Atlantic Coast pipeline that would have brought fracked gas from West Virginia to North Carolina and Virginia — announced they were canceling the project. The companies cited ongoing legal challenges from activists who have opposed the pipeline for the past six years as the reason for the decision.
However, Dominion Energy has since sold its pipeline business to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and is planning major investments in renewable energy. These moves indicate that the cancelation might have also been a financial decision and not one driven solely by opposition from activists.
In early July, a federal judge also ordered the shutdown of the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) until the U.S. Army of Corps of Engineers conducts a comprehensive environmental review for the pipeline’s impacts. But the U.S. Appeals Court since ruled on July 14 that the pipeline can operate until the legal issues are resolved. DAPL is owned by Energy Transfer, whose CEO, Kelcey Warren, recently held a fundraiser for President Trump.
The Keystone XL pipeline also lost another legal battle that will further delay its potential completion, in a situation that has broader implications for the pipeline industry. In May, the state of New York rejected the proposed Williams pipeline, which would have brought fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York.
This certainly doesn’t look like a golden era for new oil and gas pipelines in the U.S., despite multiple efforts by President Trump to ease their construction.
U.S. Coal Industry Declining Rapidly
In 2018 President Trump declared that “the coal industry is back.” In reality, the U.S. coal industry is trapped in a death spiral. Coal is in even worse shape than the oil and gas industries, leading to headlines such as, “Are We Witnessing the Death of Coal?”
Year-to-date U.S. coal production is down almost 27 percent compared to last year. Furthermore, government projections show that, for the first time, renewables are on track to power more of the U.S. than coal in 2020. With such a steep decline, the U.S. coal industry has experienced a wave of bankruptcies under Trump.
Perhaps the best indication of how poorly the U.S. coal industry is doing comes from utility companies which are choosing to close coal power plants, sometimes years ahead of schedule — and replace them with cheaper renewable energy sources.
Even outside of considering the climate impacts, the economics of using coal for electricity in the U.S. do not make sense going forward.
The End Of An Era
Despite President Trump’s policies and ongoing rhetoric, the U.S. fossil fuel industries are in decline and serious financial trouble. At the same time, the costs for wind and solar power and energy storage have fallen dramatically, making them competitive with fossil fuels for power generation.
Perhaps the strongest indicator of the troubles facing the fossil fuel industries is the fact that this scenario has unfolded under perhaps the most fossil fuel-friendly president in history. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is run by a former coal lobbyist; yet the coal industry is still failing. This administration continues to repeal environmental, health, and safety regulations to help the oil and gas industry — although the courts are blocking some of those efforts. The oil and gas industry continues to spend generously on advertising campaigns selling the false idea that natural gas is “clean energy” and a climate solution.
The fossil fuel industries still retain significant power in U.S. politics, both nationally and in many energy-producing states, but even that power can no longer hide the painful economics facing these industries — no matter what President Trump says.
By Hamilton Nolan, In These Times.August 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/child-care-workers-now-have-a-huge-new-union/
It Only Took 17 Years.
A 17-year organizing campaign in California culminated this week in the successful unionization of 45,000 child care providers—the largest single union election America has seen in years. The campaign is a tangible achievement that brings together union power, political might, and social justice battles for racial and gender equality. Now, the hard part begins.
Child Care Providers United (CCPU), the umbrella group now representing workers across the state, is a joint project of several powerful SEIU and AFSCME locals in California. Those unions divided up the state by counties, and workers will be members of either SEIU or AFSCME depending on where they live, as well as being members of CCPU.
The stage for this week’s vote was set last fall, when California governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation that granted bargaining rights to child care providers, who had previously been legally ineligible for unionization. Getting the law changed took 16 years, during which time it made it to the governor’s desk twice, but was vetoed—once by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and again by Jerry Brown. In the months since Newsom signed the bill, the unions used the networks they had already created over the past two decades to administer the election. The vote, announced yesterday, was 97% in favor of the new union.
The road to winning the union was so long that it has seen multiple generations participate. Miren Algorri, a child care provider in San Diego, first became involved because her mother, who was in the same line of work, was active in the campaign from the very beginning. “She would go to meetings, and I would stay behind and take care of the children,” Algorri said. When her mother retired, she carried on—and lasted long enough to see her years of work pay off.
“It’s taken so long because the work that we do has always been minimized and infantilized,” Algorri said. “It’s because of the way society has seen child care from the very beginning of this country. The foundation was women of color caring for children. Doing work that, according to society, doesn’t require any skills.” The industry’s workforce in California is mostly women and about three-fourths people of color, according to the union.
Though the bulk of the 17-year campaign was focused on the primary goal of winning the legal right to collective bargaining, it also allowed a disparate statewide workforce to organize and fight for their own issues along the way. (The group had a large pool of dues-paying members even before the law was changed last year.) Although CCPU is brand new as a formal union, it already boasts thousands of members who are seasoned in labor organizing and political lobbying. That will likely come in handy as the group moves into its next phase: negotiating a contract with the state of California.
Providers who care for low-income children receive a set reimbursement rate from the state, and raising that figure is one of the top priorities in bargaining. Algorri said that in San Diego, she is paid $234 a week to care for an infant for up to 60 hours, and she is obligated to pay her assistants at least the local minimum wage of $13 per hour. That means she can often end up making less than minimum wage herself. She also wants a good healthcare plan, which almost all child care providers lack, as well as some way to save for retirement. “I have been working for 23 years. I have not earned one day of sick leave, and pretty much I don’t have a retirement plan,” she said. “We don’t want a red carpet. Just a decent living.”
Max Arias, the executive director of SEIU 99, one of the unions behind CCPU, said that the coronavirus pandemic, which struck while the union election was still underway, offered a chance for child care workers to organize to fend off any budget cuts, and to fight to get proper personal protective equipment (PPE). The pandemic has also highlighted the fact that these child care workers are absolutely vital to not only reopening schools, but keeping the entire economy running. Providers have continued to work throughout the pandemic in large part to provide care to the children of other essential workers, so that they can work as well. If child care work becomes economically untenable, the entire system could grind to a halt.
“Providers will play an outsize role [in school reopening]. A lot of parents are going to need support,” said Arias, whose union already represents thousands of school employees. He ticked off the immediate needs: funding for livable wages and healthcare for child care providers, and for adequate PPE to keep them safe and operational. “If we’re going to reopen the economy, the status quo funding that exists is not enough,” he said, adding that California needs a tax on billionaires, something that he believes the public would support at this moment. Until then, the child care providers will fight for themselves. They are already building a bargaining team, and Arias said that he hopes to have a contract in place within a year, given the urgency of the situation.
The sheer number of CCPU members, and their established connections with the highest level of state officials and national unions, means that they will be a force in California politics for years to come. They also represent one of the most meaningful instances of material progress in labor power for low-wage workers of color in years.
For the moment, they have earned the right to simply savor their victory. Miren Algorri brings up a taco shop in her area that has a sign reading, “Patience is the essence of good Mexican cuisine.”
“It’s the same with us,” she said. “We’ve cultivated that quality over the years.”
By Kathy Kelly, Voices for Creative Nonviolence.August 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/yemen-a-torrent-of-suffering-in-a-time-of-siege/
“When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!”
When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”
— Bertolt Brecht
In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death.
Cataclysmic conditions afflict Yemen as people try to cope with rampant diseases, the spread of COVID-19, flooding, literal swarms of locusts, rising displacement, destroyed infrastructure and a collapsed economy. Yet war rages, bombs continue to fall, and desperation fuels more crimes.
The highest-paying jobs available to many Yemeni men and boys require a willingness to kill and maim one another, by joining militias or armed groups which seemingly never run out of weapons. Nor does the Saudi-Led Coalition (SLC) which kills and maims civilians; instead, it deters relief shipments and destroys crucial infrastructure with weapons it imports from Western countries.
The aerial attacks displace traumatized survivors into swelling, often lethal refugee camps. Amid the wreckage of factories, fisheries, roads, sewage and sanitation facilities, schools and hospitals, Yemenis search in vain for employment and, increasingly, for food and water. The Saudi-Led-Coalition’s blockade, also enabled by Western training and weapons, makes it impossible for Yemenis to restore a functioning economy.
Even foreign aid can become punitive. In March, 2020, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) decided to suspend most aid for Yemenis living in areas controlled by the Houthis.
Scott Paul, who leads Oxfam America’s humanitarian policy advocacy, strongly criticized this callous decision to compound the misery imposed on vulnerable people in Yemen. “In future years,” he wrote, “scholars will study USAID’s suspension as a paradigmatic example of a donor’s exploitation and misuse of humanitarian principles.”
As the evil-doing in Yemen comes “like falling rain,” so do the cries of “Stop!” from millions of people all over the world. Here’s some of what’s been happening:
U.S. legislators in both the House of Representatives and the Senate voted to block the sale of billions of dollars in weapons and maintenance to Saudi Arabia and its allies. But President Trump vetoed the bill in 2019.
Canada’s legislators declared a moratorium on weapon sales to the Saudis. But the Canadian government has resumed selling weapons to the Saudis, claiming the moratorium only pertained to the creation of new contracts, not existing ones.
The United Kingdom suspended military sales to Saudi Arabia because of human rights violations, but the UK’s international trade secretary nevertheless resumed weapon sales saying the 516 charges of Saudi human rights violations are all isolated incidents and don’t present a pattern of abuse.
French NGOs and human rights advocates urged their government to scale back on weapon sales to the Saudi-led coalition, but reports on 2019 weapon sales revealed the French government sold 1.4 billion Euros worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
British campaigners opposing weapon transfers to the Saudi-led Coalition have exposed how the British Navy gave the Saudi Navy training in tactics essential to the devastating Yemen blockade.
In Canada, Spain, France and Italy, laborers opposed to the ongoing war refused to load weapons onto ships sailing to Saudi Arabia. Rights groups track the passage of trains and ships carrying these weapons.
On top of all this, reports produced by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and the International Commission of the Red Cross repeatedly expose the SLC’s human rights violations.
Yet this international outcry clamoring for an end to the war is still being drowned out by the voices of military contractors with well-paid lobbyists plying powerful elites in Western governments. Their concern is simply for the profits to be reaped and the competitive sales to be scored.
In 2019 Lockheed Martin’s total sales reached nearly 60 billion dollars, the best year on record for the world’s largest “defense” contractor. Before stepping down as CEO, Marillyn Hewson predicted demand from the Pentagon and U.S. allies would generate an uptake between $6.2 billion and $6.4 billion in net earnings for the company in 2020 sales.
Hewson’s words, spoken calmly, drown out the cries of Yemeni children whose bodies were torn apart by just one of Lockheed Martin’s bombs.
In August of 2018, bombs manufactured by Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin fell on Yemen like summer rain. On August 9, 2018, a missile blasted a school bus in Yemen, killing forty children and injuring many others.
Photos showed badly injured children still carrying UNICEF blue backpacks, given to them that morning as gifts. Other photos showed surviving children helping prepare graves for their schoolmates. One photo showed a piece of the bomb protruding from the wreckage with the number MK82 clearly stamped on it. That number on the shrapnel helped identify Lockheed Martin as the manufacturer.
The psychological damage being inflicted on these children is incalculable. “My son is really hurt from the inside,” said a parent whose child was severely wounded by the bombing. “We try to talk to him to feel better and we can’t stop ourselves from crying.”
The cries against war in Yemen also fall like rain and whatever thunder accompanies the rain is distant, summer thunder. Yet, if we cooperate with war making elites, the most horrible storms will be unleashed. We must learn–and quickly–to make a torrent of our mingled cries and, as the prophet Amos demanded, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
By Maureen Murphy, ScheerPost.com.August 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/crisis-in-portland-did-not-start-with-trumps-shock-troops/
And Likely Won’t End As They Leave.
A first-person account of more than two months of street protests shows more similarities than differences between Democrat and Republican treatment of legitimate activism, and media divisions that center white actions over those taken by people of color.
By now, you’ve very likely seen startling footage of armed federal officers storming through the streets of downtown Portland and abducting protesters with unmarked vehicles. Maybe you’ve watched the live streams of them indiscriminately lobbing tear gas into crowds of people calmly standing on the sidewalk. Perhaps you saw a gruesome photo of critically injured young man, struck in the face by a munition while holding a speaker over his head.
Since then, several others have been hit in the face by impact munitions and flash bangs, and there exists extensive footage, photos, and firsthand accounts of the mayhem being unleashed by over a hundred officers from various divisions of the Department of Homeland Security dispatched to my city by the Trump Administration — ostensibly to quell violence but really to incite it. Oregon governor Kate Brown and Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler have condemned this behavior, and Portland has garnered international attention for the ongoing clashes between feds and protesters.
Finally, this morning you may have heard that Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced the federal “tactical teams” will begin a “phased withdrawal” from the state’s biggest city.
Having witnessed this all unfold, both in person and via social media, I’d like to share how the overall narrative has given an often inaccurate portrayal of what has been happening. Portland is not under siege by anyone other than our own police, under the control of our elected officials, and the federal officers have only escalated the crisis, not ignited it. Mayor Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, has sat idly by while the Portland police have employed similar military-style methods for which he has condemned DHS’ camouflaged ground troops.
Additionally, the media uproar has largely centered harm committed against white people at the hands of federal agents, when such harm, and much worse, has been disproportionately directed at people of color in our communities for many years. For context, I think it’s relevant to start from the beginning to explain how we got to where we are now.
On Wednesday, May 27th, longtime local activist Danialle James began an occupation of Portland’s Justice Center in downtown Portland in response to the murder of George Floyd. The Justice Center (JC) is an ironic name for a building that serves as the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) central precinct and headquarters, and the Multnomah County Detention Center. This building sits directly across the street from the federal Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse.
As outrage over Floyd’s murder spread over the following days, nonviolent demonstrations popped up across town. On that Friday, protesters converged on downtown and the Justice Center. There were reports of riots and looting, and the Apple and Louis Vuitton stores were broken into. Police claim protesters tried to ignite the Justice Center and they responded to this alleged threat with force and arrests. Wheeler tweeted “ENOUGH,” in regards to the looting and imposed a citywide curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
There was a lot of criticism and division between “peaceful” and “violent” protesters that was further perpetuated by the mayor and police. For example, the mayor repeatedly tweeted claims that vandalism and violence were occurring, questionably alleging that protesters threatened the safety of inmates and employees in the Justice Center. These allegations were echoed by police via Twitter.
Protests continued through the weekend in spite of the curfew, with demonstrations growing in size each day. Portland police deployed SWAT units Saturday night and arrested 48 people. Sunday followed suit, with multiple demonstrations across the city eventually converging at the Justice Center. Police declared an unlawful assembly just before midnight, alleging “projectiles” were being thrown at officers. (The PPB has frequently used Twitter to demonstrate items allegedly thrown at officers, ranging from plastic water bottles to a half-eaten apple and several cans of White Claw.)
The police responded with flash bangs and tear gas. Wheeler called upon the governor to send in the National Guard, citing property destruction. Brown initially refused, but a few days later allowed the National Guard to assist in indirect operations.
Tear gas was used pretty much every night that week by the PPB. One night, the same officers who kneeled with protesters tear gassed them later in the evening. I was tear gassed while literally standing on the sidewalk blocking the view while my friend peed behind a locked porta potty, both of us completely oblivious to whatever caused the dispersal. This was while an entirely nonviolent rally was being held in Chapman Square, with speakers commenting on racism and police brutality in Portland. There were many people milling in the streets, some dancing to music from cars parked in the road.
After the rally, hundreds of people again descended on the Justice Center, a few blocks away. The crowd was huge. PPB claimed people were throwing various projectiles at officers, and declared an unlawful assembly. Shortly thereafter, without sufficient time for a crowd that large to disperse even if it wanted to, a can of tear gas was shot so high into the air we thought it was a firework. Several canisters followed, one landing at my friend’s foot. I am unable to properly articulate the volume of tear gas used; this night has been dubbed “Tear Gas Tuesday” due to the large amount deployed.
Every night tear gas was used, police claimed projectiles were being thrown at them. The “projectiles” are all documented on the PPB Twitter account, and I think my favorite ridiculous assertion made there is that they had to intervene because someone threw a hard-boiled egg at them.
The city erected a fence around the Justice Center, allegedly to “protect the people housed in the building” (i.e., people being detained in jail). Protecting the “Sacred Fence,” as it was jokingly dubbed, became a running police excuse for munitions deployment. Any actions that could be described as tampering with the fence resulted in threats of “crowd control munitions” and arrest. Protesters started to refer to the mayor as “Tear Gas Ted” and “War Crime Wheeler,”as tear gas is banned for use in war under several international conventions to which the United States is a signatory. While this was happening, the mayor frequently commended the PPB.
After that week of nightly gassings, a request by Don’t Shoot Portland, a local police accountability and civil rights nonprofit founded by activist Teressa Raiford, to restrain PPB’s use of tear gas was granted by a federal judge. However, the injunction was only for two weeks and allowed for use if there was “credible threat to life or safety.”
On June 10, the city was due to adopt the annual budget, as protesters and local activists called for the city to defund the PPB by at least $50 million. In the end, Portland’s City Council passed a budget that cut specific law enforcement roles, trimming about $15 million from the PPB. Not long after this, the acting chief of police stepped down. She had been in the role for less than a year.
Nightly protests continued across town. I want to emphasize that, by and large, these demonstrations were nonviolent. I’d argue that even if they weren’t, the police response was disproportionate to the crimes they claimed people were committing.
Holding off on tear gas for a while, police instead chose to forcibly arrest and beat people with batons. They also indiscriminately fired rubber bullets, pepper balls, pellet grenades, and similar “nonlethal” munitions, aiming at heads and faces and shooting through the fence. They deployed a gas solvent they claimed wasn’t tear gas, but seemed very similar to tear gas. They hid on the east side of the bridges, across the Willamette River from downtown, to arrest people. They denied people they arrested access to toilet paper and menstrual products. They arrested journalists and told them their press passes didn’t matter. And, finally, they eventually started using tear gas again.
This went on all throughout the month of June. Towards the end of the month, the tear gas restraining order was edited to include other crowd control and impact munitions. A state law was passed by the Oregon Legislature requiring police to warn protesters before deploying munitions, and that a riot must be declared in order to use tear gas. A lot more “riots” started being declared following the passage of this law. It gave PPB a loophole to exploit, and they did so aggressively.
Around this time, Trump signed an executive order to address the unlawful removal of statues and monuments deemed racist or otherwise upholding white supremacy. Federal officers started to become more visible in Portland directly following this order.
July 4 drew a massive crowd to the JC, which by that point had become the central rallying point for demonstrations due to the direct confrontation with police. Prior to the holiday, protests had not reached the size they had been in the first couple weeks for some time. Your typical Fourth of July events were happening in a park directly across from the courthouse; people were grilling hot dogs, someone was passing around cheap beer, and fireworks were set off in the park. Laser pointers were directed at the courthouse and JC.
The police declared a riot, citing the fireworks, and deployed tear gas. A lot of tear gas.The crowd moved away at first, but held their ground until more and more canisters filled the park. I think this is one of the first nights federal officers were documented as actively contributing to crowd dispersal.
I was standing about a block away from a line of police, when the person I was with turned to me and asked if I could see that they were arresting people. I couldn’t. Then this person pointed out that a block to our south, there was a line of US Marshals. (This was the moment I realized how desperately I needed a new glasses prescription.) We were broken off from the larger group of protesters, which is a highly risky situation to be in, so we left. As we were leaving, we saw more and more camouflage-clad officers filling the streets. I remember crossing the bridge and turning around to see huge clouds of smoke and gas billowing around where we had just been.
The next few nights were similar, with federal officers and PPB working in tandem. There is substantial documentation of their coordination. PPB Deputy Chief Chris Davis claimed local police had no authority over federal officers, and that they had separate policies and procedures governing them. Regardless of these claims, there were nights where on one side of the river PPB was beating the shit out of protesters while federal officers gassed them on the other. Any attempts by PPB to distance themselves from the actions of federal officers are disingenuous and gaslighting every person who has been brutalized by them in the past two months. There is video and photographic evidence of PPB and federal officers working together.
The current national outrage centers around a handful of events. First, on July 11, Donavan La Bella, 26, was struck in the face by an impact munition launched by a US Marshal while holding a speaker over his head. This shattered the bones in his face and skull. A few days later, video footage showed federal officers detaining a protester while refusing to provide their names, identification of any kind, or any information whatsoever. The officers put the person into an unmarked vehicle and drove away.
Unconfirmed stories have circulated that some who are detained in this way are driven around for an indefinite period of time while blindfolded, taken into a building and questioned, and then released without charges. There are even whispers circling Twitter about federal officers raping at least one person they detained, while a “Wall of Moms” protester told reporters she was sexually assualted by a US Marshal who arrested her on charges of assaulting an officer. Regardless, just from what has been documented plainly, the federal officers either don’t understand the Fourth Amendment and/or choose to ignore its mandates.
As they continued to fire tear gas and munitions every night, the “quelling” Trump claimed they would bring has only engendered further rage against his machine: People who had not protested before, people who haven’t been out there consistently for the 60+ days this had already been going on, now began showing up in droves, upwards of 2000 a night. And, increasingly, some of white Portland finally is experiencing what Black, Indigenous, and other Portlanders of color have been experiencing for much longer.
What gets the most attention is often illuminating. A single Black mother started these protests with her occupation of the Justice Center but it is the mothers who are garnering national attention and support are the predominantly white “Mom Bloc” or “Wall of Moms.” A naked non-Black person went viral in leftist spaces for their standoff with cops while Black women and femmes went viral in alt-right groups for their calls for abolition.
It’s not that the contributions of the “Naked Athena” or “Mom Bloc” aren’t important, it’s that the media is centering white and non-Black people when it focuses on them. You cannot protest fascism without protesting racism.
Misogynoir has been an ongoing problem in Portland activist spaces and in the press coverage of the protests. Federal officers kidnapping people in vans is not new, but people were okay with it until it was happening to white people. Police tear gassing moms is not new, but people were okay with it until it was happening to a group of mostly white women.
These protests have always been about Black Lives Matter and the mainstream media’s narrative that centers whiteness and engenders outrage over harm being done to white moms, white veterans, and white youth ignores the centuries of abuse that Black and Indigenous moms, veterans, and youth have suffered at the hands of police and the United States government.
Alternatively, there have recently been several articles criticizing the “white spectacle” of the Portland protests, claiming that white-led violence draws away from the Black Lives Matter movement. These critiques ignore all of the Black anti-fascist activists, anarchists, and abolitionists (calling for an end to policing and mass incarceration) involved in the protests.
Portland is one of the whitest cities in the country, and absolutely there have been issues around whiteness that have emerged during the past two months of protests. It is all a lot more nuanced, however, than what has been illustrated by the majority of op-eds and news articles.
Black people are not a monolith; portraying them as uninvolved in the protests is inaccurate and erasive. It is harmful and dangerous to vilify these protests as only white-led riots. This narrative erases Black protesters and guilts white people into staying home, leaving people on the ground more vulnerable to police violence.
The demands of the protests have not changed since the beginning and center on upholding that Black lives matter by defunding the police and investing in communities. The police will not be defunded by people asking nicely. Portland City Council had the opportunity to meet the demand of removing $50 million from the Portland Police budget and they chose not to. So, as often chanted by protesters, “no justice, no peace.”
What these articles also miss is that there is a wealth of political education through direct action happening right now. The Wall of Moms (WOM) turned over their group administration to Black and Indigenous women, in a statement acknowledging that Black mothers have always been at the forefront of calls for police accountability. Riot Ribs — a mutual aid group that started out as one former Black Panther with a grill and desire to feed anyone who was hungry and became a network of volunteers feeding others, even while being inundated with tear gas — similarly turned over leadership to Don’t Shoot Portland in an effort to expand their ability to partner with other mutual aid networks and distribute resources.
(As it was announced today that state police will replace some federal ones, new divisions emerged, however, including an ugly split between the WOM and Dont Shoot Portland. The latter cited examples of the former silencing Black women and putting them in dangerous and vulnerable positions on the ground. WOM leadership says their focus is the feds, not BLM, which is disappointing, to say the least.)
In general, there has been an outpouring of community action and redistribution of resources. Demonstrations have varied — from a “brunch” at the mayor’s condo where demonstrators danced in the street and listened to the city council meeting that included the police budget vote, to marches led by elementary and middle schoolers. There have been vigils for local Black women lost to violence, one for Shai’India Harris murdered by domestic violence and another for Tete Gulley, who was killed in what her family and friends suspect as a lynching that PPB did not investigate due to “lack of public interest.” There have been rallies centering on local politics, with speakers calling for greater accountability and action from city officials.
Now, due to the guarantee of harm to anyone protesting downtown, there are workshops and meetups to create protective gear, collect safety and medical items to be distributed, and discuss how to combat the trauma from being assaulted by police. Every night at Lownsdale Park, across from the JC, there is free food, water, clothing, medical supplies, hygiene products, safety gear, and people taking care of each other. The parents and veterans who are showing up nightly are putting their bodies on the frontline to protect protesters.
This level of community action and care happening on a huge scale is, I think, scary to both the local police and federal officers. Their attacks on these mutual aid networks are revelatory in their cruelty; they’ve slashed water bottles, pepper sprayed Riot Ribs’ grills, destroyed the medical tent, attacked identified press and medics, and pursued a slew of other gross tactics aimed at dismantling these community-built systems and resources.
Ithink it is important to always reflect and be critical of whose mission is served when being critical of protesters. Who benefits from direct action and community care being portrayed as violence? What is gained by police when white, able-bodied protesters are told to go home? Whose narrative is perpetuated when you spread the narrative of “peaceful protester” versus “rioter”?
These arguments benefit the police and federal officers and enable them to continue to commit harm by convincing people not to show up or support folks on the ground. They also posit mutual aid and resource sharing as dangerous, rather than a display of radical care and support.
This entire situation is rapidly evolving. Over the weekend, protesters and journalists suspected that new chemical agents were being unleashed for crowd dispersal. It was discovered that the officers have been monitoring live streams from people on the ground at protests, calling into question the safety and security of these recordings. The beloved Riot Ribs has dissolved due to threats of violence from a volunteer who sought to profit from the mutual aid establishment, halting the planned partnership with Don’t Shoot.
The city of Portland is fining the federal government $500 every 15 minutes that the fence outside of the federal courthouse sits there without the required permit, because it blocks a bike lane. ACLU legal observers walk around downtown in gas masks, which are sold out citywide. PPB is continuing to make a fool of itself on social media by furnishing claims about the danger presented by protesters that are easily proven false. Nationally, Trump is sending more officers to Portland, and has threatened to send them to Chicago, Oakland, New York City, Detroit, and Baltimore; all cities with greater racial diversity than Portland. The Wall of Moms and Don’t Shoot are suing the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department.
The demonstrations in Portland don’t show any signs of stopping or slowing down, and on July 25 a call to action to join Portland in asserting that Black lives matter and denouncing the presence of federal officers spurred protests in cities across the country including Eugene, Richmond, Oakland, Austin, Omaha and Seattle. Seattle protesters set fire to the construction site of a planned youth detention center, while in Oakland a fire was set in the lobby of the Alameda County federal courthouse.
Despite the announcement this morning that the federal officers will withdraw from Portland if certain “conditions” are met, all signs point to increasing demonstrations and action in the name of the Black Lives Matter movement and against the deployment of federal officers to U.S. cities.
By Kevin Zeese, Popular Resistance.August 1, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/law-enforcement-exposed-massive-blue-leaks-police-pentagon-papers/
In an email message, Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of the Intercept reports, “Hundreds of thousands of files from the FBI and local police departments have been leaked, exposing serious abuses of power by law enforcement.” She writes, Blue Leaks “are like the Pentagon Papers for U.S. law enforcement.” The leaks show how political activists are targeted and monitored on social media, that there is widespread racial bias by police and that police exaggerate threats by antifa to justify violence against protesters.
Micah Lee, a DDoSecrets’ advisory board member, wrote about the Blue Leak documents on July 15, describing it as 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data with 116 million rows of data taken from 251 different law enforcement websites by the hacktivist collective Anonymous. The data was mostly taken from fusion center websites. Some of the hacked websites are from “local police departments, police training organizations, members-only associations for cops or retired FBI agents, and law enforcement groups specifically dedicated to investigating organized retail crime, drug trafficking, and working with industry.”
The documents cover from 2007 to June 14, 2020, exposing 700,000 law enforcement agents. In response to the leak, Twitter permanently suspended the DDoSecrets Twitter account and blocked all links to ddosecrets.com, then Reddit banned the r/blueleaks forum and German authorities seized a server belonging to DDoSecrets that was hosting BlueLeaks data.
The Intercept has only begun to write stories on these massive leaks. Excerpts from the stories are published below. The stories reveal law enforcement officers targeting political activists in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd and how police exaggerated threats from protesters to justify violence.
The Blue Leaks series is one example of internal documents involving police being exposed. Last week, ProPublica published documents involving thousands of civilian complaints against police in New York City that had been kept secret for decades. The documents had been ordered to stay secret by a NYC judge but ProPublica was not a party to that litigation so they were not restrained by the court. The documents have enabled reports that let the public know who are the NYPD officers with the worst records of abusive actions. This is a new era where people are seeking transparency regarding police actions and if the government is not transparent, then the democratized media will force transparency.
The summaries below from the Intercept only present highlights. We urge people to read the original articles and to follow this developing story on The Intercept. Popular Resistance will continue to report on the Blue Leaks documents and other documents showing police abuses.
On July 25, Ryan Devereaux wrote “Before Portland, Trump’s Shock Troops Went After Border Activists.” The subheadline explained the story:
“The purported threat of antifa was long used to justify militarized targeting of immigration activists. Now it’s being used against protesters in Portland.”
The article begins with a focus on Kaji Douša of the New Sanctuary Movement, a senior pastor at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City, who describes how the images seen in Portland of troops in unmarked vans seizing protesters is not new to her.
DouÅ¡a “has a growing stack of internal DHS documents, produced in ongoing litigation surrounding the agency’s surveillance of her and dozens of lawyers, journalists, and asylum advocates who were targeted in a sweeping DHS spying operation during the 2018 midterm elections. ‘We were perceived to be radicals,’ DouÅ¡a told The Intercept. ‘A lot of white people turned away because it wasn’t them, but now that it’s them in Portland, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, this is crazy.’”
The article goes on to describe “a trove of law enforcement documents that were recently hacked and posted online under the title Blue Leaks. The leaked documents reveal several instances in recent years of the Department of Homeland Security and its subagencies circulating warnings about a dangerous anarchist or antifa element constituting a domestic terrorist threat . . . which set the stage for the federal law enforcement campaign the president is now seeking to take nationwide.”
Anarchists have long been presented as a dangerous terrorist threat in the United States going back more than a century. President Trump used the term as a 2020 election tool for his ‘law and order’ image campaign, which has actually spread chaos and disorder. The Intercept describes how the antifa threat has been built out by federal law enforcement in a public relations campaign, writing, “Last May, the FBI circulated a report, later leaked to Yahoo News and included in the BlueLeaks cache, titled ‘Anarchist Extremists Very Likely Increasing Targeting of US Government Entities in Arizona, Increasing Risk of Armed Conflict.’ As Yahoo News noted in its coverage, which included interviews with individuals included in the document, ‘almost all of the evidence cited in the report involved nonviolent protest activity.'”
The Intercept continues, “The antifa-anarchist boogeyman that has haunted the minds of the nation’s border and immigration agencies for the past three and a half years has now gone national. According to a leaked DHS document obtained by Lawfare, the same office of intelligence and analysis that described ‘anti-fascist (ANTIFA) anarchist extremists’ as domestic terrorists in 2018 is now collecting intelligence for federal law enforcement operations in Portland.”
Ten days before that article, Devereaux wrote, “Leaked Documents Show Police Knew Far-Right Extremists Were the Real Threat at Protests, Not ‘Antifa.'” The article shows the police manufactured antifa-fear even though they were well aware that the real problem was violent, right-wing protesters like the boogaloo movement, which seeks armed confrontation with police to trigger a civil war.
As the national uprising against race-based police violence grew, President Trump and Attorney General Barr put out a false story claiming that “antifa” were domestic terrorists and threatened to use law enforcement against them as was done in the failed ‘war on terror.’
The Intercept analyzed nearly 300 Blue Leak documents that reference “antifa.” Devereaux summarized the truth found in the Blue Leak documents writing, “while the White House beat the drum for a crackdown on a leaderless movement on the left, law enforcement offices across the country were sharing detailed reports of far-right extremists seeking to attack the protesters and police during the country’s historic demonstrations, a trove of newly leaked documents reveals.”
The article quotes Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project who told the Intercept, “Throughout the documents you see counterterrorism agencies using extremism so broadly as to mean virtually anything that encompasses dissent. There are instances in which people engaging in white supremacist violence get the benefit of the doubt as potential lone offenders, while people of color and those who dissent against government injustice are smeared as threats with guilt by association.”
This faulty analysis by law enforcement reinforces the view that police are racist, i.e. they assume Black protesters are violent even if they do not display violence, but armed white protesters are nonviolent. It is this upside-down world that has led to the nationwide uprising against racist police violence.
Examples of the biased view of law enforcement were stories about bricks being planted alongside march routes of protesters. The Intercept reported that the Department of Homeland Security circulated a tweet to law enforcement agencies across the country that claimed antifa was stashing bricks to “fuel protests.” Many of us in the movement who saw videos of bricks being planted assumed it was provocateurs trying to push protests toward property damage and violence.
Our reaction was it was infiltration by police or right-wingers. The protest movements are mostly nonviolent and property damage typically comes from infiltrators. In fact, there is a long history of police infiltration of antifa. And, this week it came out that a white supremacist was very likely behind the property damage during the protests in Minnesota after the killing of George Floyd. This is not surprising as infiltration is the norm against US political movements, usually by police but also by corporate interests and right-wing groups.
The brick-planting intelligence made its way to a law enforcement fusion center in Maine. The Intercept reports, last week, “Mainer magazine tracked down the original source of the tweet: a far-right, pro-Trump biker who goes by the name ‘the Wolfman,’ who claimed that Facebook kept deleting his brick-planting evidence ‘because they are BLM supporters.'”
Despite the lack of evidence, Trump continues to push the false story of antifa as terrorists, not the white supremacists, e.g. Trump tweeted a quote from “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade: “I don’t see any indication that there were any white supremist [sic] groups mixing in. This is an ANTIFA Organization. It seems that the first time we saw it in a major way was Occupy Wall Street. It’s the same mindset” on June 1 when Trump added “TRUE!” in his retweet. That day, Trump said he would mobilize the military against protesters and federal militarized police used tear gas and rubber bullets to clear Lafayette Park so Trump could walk across the street to hold a bible upside down in front of St. John’s Church.
While Trump and Barr were falsely calling antifa a terrorist organization (not only does it not use terror tactics, it is not an organization but an ideology against fascism), the Intercept reported thatHomeland Security shared with the White House and federal and local law enforcement agencies information on the actions of armed right-wing groups:
“’A series of Telegram accounts linked to a wider network of paramilitary far-right extremists have indicated that ongoing disturbances are spreading America’s police forces thin, making this the ideal time to strike with a strategic attack,’ the agency reported in a round-up of intelligence reports coming in from around the country, published the following morning. ‘One account, with thousands of followers and links to several neo-Nazi terror groups like The Base and the Nordic Resistance Movement, called for attacks on critical infrastructure.’ The agency noted that Twitter had recently removed a fake antifa account “created by a known white supremacist group” that had issued a call to violence.”
Trump and Barr ignoring these reports on violent and armed right-wing organizations has led to a misdirection of police resources and the creation of false news in the media that antifa is the problem. This serves Trump’s political needs for a left-wing boogeyman to scare voters but it does not serve the purpose of creating security or smart policing.
Writers Mara Hvistendahl and Sam Biddle wrote, “Homeland Security Worries COVID-19 Masks Are Breaking Facial Recognition, Leaked Document Shows.” The subheadline describes how COVID-19 public health measures undermine the ability of police to identify people,
The rapid global spread and persistent threat of the coronavirus has presented an obvious roadblock to facial recognition’s similar global expansion.
The article begins by highlighting the contradiction between doctors and pandemic experts urging people to wear face masks to stop the spread of the pandemic-virus, noting that Homeland Security has the “opposite concern, according to an ‘intelligence note’ found among the BlueLeaks trove of law enforcement documents: Masks are breaking police facial recognition.”
With protesters suddenly covering their faces to avoid illness, facial recognition is failing. The technology already has limitations and problems with accuracy. Some cities banned the technology because of its inaccuracy especially when it comes to people from communities of color.
The article describes a May 22 intelligence note from the “DHS Intelligence Enterprise Counterterrorism Mission Center in conjunction with a variety of other agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, [which] ‘examines the potential impacts that widespread use of protective masks could have on security operations that incorporate face recognition systems — such as video cameras, image processing hardware and software, and image recognition algorithms — to monitor public spaces during the ongoing Covid-19 public health emergency and in the months after the pandemic subsides.'”
The Minnesota Fusion Center distributed the notice on May 26 as the uprising in response to the killing of George Floyd was developing. The notice exposed the warped analysis of law enforcement agents about “adversaries” of the United States avoiding facial recognition writing, “We assess violent extremists and other criminals who have historically maintained an interest in avoiding face recognition are likely to opportunistically seize upon public safety measures recommending the wearing of face masks to hinder the effectiveness of face recognition systems in public spaces by security partners.” It is almost laughable that police analyze face masks in this was while they concede “we have no specific information that violent extremists or other criminals in the United States are using protective face coverings to conduct attacks, some of these entities have previously expressed interest in avoiding face recognition and promulgated simple instructions to conceal one’s identity, both prior to and during the current Covid-19 pandemic.”
Another counterterrorism note dated May 22 states, “We assess face recognition systems used to support security operations in public spaces will be less effective while widespread public use of facemasks, including partial and full-face covering, is practiced by the public to limit the spread of Covid-19.” Protesters wearing facemasks before the pandemic faced arrest in some local jurisdictions for violating laws that banned face masks. Some of these laws were designed against the Ku Klux Klan but were used against protesters exercising First Amendment rights, so you can imagine how the pandemic has turned the tables on law enforcement and their new facial recognition technology.
Ironically, the Homeland Security memos also point to people in the US using tactics from the Hong Kong protests where people shined lasers into cameras and wore face masks to prevent police identification. This is ironic because the Hong Kong protest movement, which seeks independence from China, is heavily funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy and is allied with far-right anti-China US politicians. The leaders of it have been exposed as US political tools but liberals in the US are still confused. Other lessons that US protesters have learned from the NED-funded Hong Kong movement are using umbrellas and leaf blowers to protect from pepper spray.
Facial recognition technology is flawed, controversial and many believe it should be banned. Homeland Security and Customs have been pushing for it to be used more widely but in December, following public outcry, they walked back plans to make facial recognition mandatory in airports.
The rampant police violence against people exercising their First Amendment rights and people of color needs to be understood. Getting to the truth will require transparency, which law enforcement and government officials oppose. They keep this information secret because if people knew the truth, then the uprising against militarized and racist police violence would escalate. There is an urgent need to get control of policing in the United States. Police need to be transparent, de-militarized and controlled by the people in the communities that they operate in.
