Thursday, August 27, 2020
Chris Hedges: How Corporate Tyranny Works
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/08/25/chris-hedges-how-corporate-tyranny-works/
The persecution of the attorney Steven Donziger is a grim illustration of what happens when we confront the real centers of power, masked and unacknowledged by the divisive cant from the Trump White House or the sentimental drivel of the Democratic Party. Those, like Donziger, who name and fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable see the judiciary, the press and the institutions of government unite to crucify them.
“It’s been a long battle, 27 years,” Donziger said when I reached him by phone in his apartment in Manhattan.
Donziger, who has been fighting polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador, has been under house arrest in Manhattan for a year. He will go to trial in federal court in New York on Sept. 9 on contempt of court charges, which could see him jailed for six months. Ever since he won a multibillion-dollar judgment in 2011 against the oil giant Chevron, the multinational has come after him personally through litigation that threatens to destroy him economically, professionally and personally.
“Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger,” Chevron wrote in an internal memo in 2009, as reviewed by Courthouse News.
“It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other nonindigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”
“By the time I went down there in the early 1990s, many people had died, cancer rates were skyrocketing according to several independent health evaluations, people were really hurting. There was zero regard for the lives of the local people by Texaco. I was a very young lawyer back in 1993 when I first went to Ecuador. It was like looking at an apocalyptic scene. There was oil on the roads. People were living in abject poverty. They had no shoes. They would get oil on their feet when they walked along the roads. The oil pollution had permeated every aspect of daily life. It was in the food supply. It was in the water supply. It was in the air. The average person there would get exposed multiple times a day to very harmful, cancer-causing toxins, with foreseeable results.”
“I, with other lawyers, filed a lawsuit in New York against Texaco. The reason we filed in New York was because Texaco’s headquarters were in New York in 1993. The decisions to pollute in Ecuador, to play God to the people of Ecuador, were made in New York. We sued in New York. Texaco tried to get the case back to Ecuador where they had never been held accountable, where they knew the indigenous peoples had no money or resources to find lawyers.”
‘It Went Down to Ecuador’
“They thought it would just go away,” said Donziger. “Over a 10-year period, we battled to get a jury trial in the United States. Ultimately, they won that part of the battle. It went down to Ecuador.”
“We started working with a team of Ecuadoran lawyers in the early 2000s. We went forward with the lawsuit. We produced voluminous scientific and testimonial evidence, showing that they caused probably the world’s worst oil pollution. It was called the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ by locals and experts. They dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic waste. They did it deliberately to save money. This was unlike the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which was a terrible accident, even though it was a product of horrendous negligence by BP. This was done by design to pollute, knowing that people would die, and that indigenous groups would be decimated, and that this beautiful part of the Amazon would be destroyed.”
The refusal to abide by even minimal environmental regulations saved Texaco an estimated $3 on every barrel of oil produced over 26 years (1964-1992), according to Amazon Watch, or an estimated extra $5 billion in revenue. The hundreds of waste pits the company eventually abandoned in Ecuador, on average, contain 200 times the contamination allowed by typical global standards.
“They tried to grind us down using classic corporate defense tactics,” Donziger said of the legal war. “They filed thousands of motions. We stood strong. We had a great legal team of Ecuadorian lawyers.”
In the end, they won a stunning victory, a rare moment of accountability for first-world conglomerates who rape the environment of developing nations by exploiting weak, corrupt governments.
“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries. That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”
Chevron, as the evidence mounted against it, sold their assets in Ecuador and left the country. The corporation threatened the plaintiffs with a “lifetime of litigation” if they attempted to collect, and, according to internal Chevron memos, launched a legal and media campaign that has cost an estimated $2 billion to prevent payment of the settlement and to demonize and destroy Donziger.
Donziger came to his epic battle against Chevron through journalism. “I was a journalist on my college newspaper,” he said of his time as a history major at American University. “My first job out of college was as a journalist with [United Press International]. I worked for UPI in Washington. They were strong in Latin America. I traveled to Managua in 1983 or 1984, I don’t remember exactly, and found work in the UPI bureau. I was 23 years old. I worked in the UPI bureau in Managua during the Sandinista era.”
He left UPI after a year in Managua but stayed on in Nicaragua to work as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as The Fort Lauderdale News, The Toronto Star and The Atlanta Constitution. He spent about three years as a reporter before going to Harvard Law School. When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, he worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C. He documented Iraqi civilian casualties in Iraq following the first Gulf War that became a report adopted by the United Nations.
A classmate at law school was from Ecuador. His classmate’s father organized a trip in April 1993 for lawyers and medical professionals to look at the contamination caused by the oil extraction in the Amazon. That trip, which Donziger joined, spawned the suit against Texaco. He would make more than 250 trips to Ecuador over the next two decades.
“Journalism significantly shaped my views and skill set,” he said. “It was vital to allowing my work to be successful. From the beginning this was a unique litigation, for many reasons, but one of the reasons was we, as a team, decided to work across multiple platforms. If we only saw this case as a lawsuit we would never win.”
“Chevron controlled the legal system in Ecuador with their influence. We needed to operate across different platforms, including engaging with the media and carrying out significant public education. Most Ecuadoreans, other than those who lived in the region, knew nothing about the pollution that had been happening in their country. We carried out zealous advocacy in the public arena. We realized that the indigenous people would never get a fair trial in Ecuador if they did not illuminate what had happened to them and get public support.”
Both the judge who oversaw its lawsuit against Donziger for “racketeering” and Chevron itself “claim that this type of activity is wrong,” he said.
“The irony is that what we were doing is what the big oil companies have always done. They always operate in the public relations domain, lobbying Congress to pass legislation to extinguish various legal claims, meeting political leaders behind the scenes. They operate across every platform they can find to exercise their power. We were smart enough to meet them toe-to-toe wherever they were operating and neutralize their ability to undermine the fairness of the trial. That’s how they operate. They try to control court systems.”
“My journalism [experience] sensitized me to injustice. It allowed me to understand the media. I knew how to write press releases, which matters when you do a public case like this. I knew how to work across different platforms to mobilize positive energy around the case. Human rights work involves, first and foremost, justice for victims. But equally important is accountability for the perpetrators. The fact that I am detained shows how far we’ve come and how much risk Chevron feels. It’s not a sign we lost. It’s the opposite.”
Chevron Went Back to New York Court
Chevron, which had left Ecuador, went back to the New York court, where Donziger had originally filed the lawsuit before Chevron got a change of venue to Ecuador, and sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
In effect, “They sued me as a civil racketeer, under a civil RICO statute for $60 billion,” he said. “That was the largest amount of money an American individual ever had been sued for. This began a 10-year campaign to demonize me by Chevron and by its judicial allies.”
Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, has hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. The oil giant dropped its demand for financial damages weeks before the RICO trial, which would have necessitated a jury trial. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, decided the RICO case alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, relocated to the U.S. by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.
“[Kaplan] wouldn’t allow me to bring in any environmental evidence that the Ecuadorian courts had used to find Chevron liable,” Donziger said. “He wouldn’t let me testify on my own behalf on direct. He allowed Chevron to use secret witnesses whose identities he wouldn’t reveal to me. He tried to treat it like a national-security kind of case to try to demonize me. Because Chevron’s whole strategy is to demonize [me] as a way to distract attention from its environmental crimes in Ecuador. And Judge Kaplan, who knows all the tricks in the books because he used to work for [tobacco company] Brown & Williamson, when he was [an attorney with the law firm of] Paul, Weiss. He knows the tobacco industry playbook that they used for years and years and continue to use. And he worked with the Chevron lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to implement them against me without a jury. And there was nothing I could do about it.”
(Paul, Weiss is a large law firm that currently advises Chevron on its $13 billion purchase of another energy company.)
‘Like a Goat Tethered to a Stake’
John Keker, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.” In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud.
He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with criminal contempt for this principled stance, as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron.
When his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer were ignored by the U.S. attorney’s office for over five years, Judge Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.
“The last thing any of them wants is for a group of ordinary citizens to see what has happened to Steven Donziger,” Rick Friedman, one of Donziger’s attorneys, said of Chevron.Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Loretta Preska, a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, to hear the case. Chevron is a major donor to the Federalist Society. Preska, in a show of bias, already has said the charges against Donziger appear to be “very strong,” according to Courthouse News. In May, she disallowed him from having his charges heard by a jury.
Preska’s fealty to corporate power was previously on public display in 2013 when she imposed a 10-year sentence, the maximum allowed under a plea deal, on Jeremy Hammond, the activist who hacked into Stratfor, a private security firm. Hammond made public a barrage of damning internal emails and exposed the email address and password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Preska, despite the conflict of interest, refused to recuse herself. The 10-year sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking.
Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on a misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.
Trial Without Jury Scheduled on Sept. 9
Donziger is scheduled to go to trial without a jury on Sept. 9 in New York City for contempt. Preska will preside over the trial. There has not been a criminal trial in Manhattan federal court since March because of the pandemic. Donziger’s trial would be the first, although hundreds of other defendants facing far more serious felony charges are waiting in jails, infested with COVID-19, for a trial date. Donziger’s four pro bono lawyers said they do not want to risk their lives by traveling to New York during the pandemic for what is a misdemeanor offense.
“The judgment against Chevron Corporation in Ecuador was the product of fraud, bribery and corruption,” Sean Comey, Senior Advisor – External Affairs Chevron Corporation said when I asked the corporation to comment on the case. “Steven Donziger is a proven liar and an adjudicated racketeer. He committed criminal acts in the U.S. and abroad in pursuit of his extortion scheme in the Ecuadorian courts. Donziger’s continuing lawlessness is now a matter for prosecutors and the U.S. courts to decide. Chevron is not involved in Donziger’s criminal prosecution.”
The flagrant corruption and misuse of the legal system to abjectly serve corporate interests in the Donziger case illustrates the deep decay within our judiciary and democratic institutions, one that was abetted by Democratic administrations that stacked the courts with corporate lawyers — Kaplan was appointed by Bill Clinton — and President Donald Trump, who has elevated ideologues selected by the Federalist Society to the federal bench. Ruling after ruling in Donziger’s case has ignored or grossly distorted the law on behalf of Chevron to ensure that Donziger will be prosecuted, sent to prison and remain in debt for life — all while the $9.5 billion settlement is never paid to aid the people harmed in Ecuador.
The International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the international committee of the National Lawyers Guild issued a letter signed by more than 70 organizations calling the persecution of Donziger an “attack on the rule of law.” The letter said his house arrest was “unprecedented” and charged that he was being targeted for what it called “one of the most important corporate accountability and human rights cases of our time.” The letter accused Kaplan of “violating basic notions of fairness in the judicial process that lie at the core of the rule of law.”
“We cannot allow the rule of law to be upended by corporate interests and a highly biased federal judge seeking to destroy the willpower of one lawyer who has already withstood decades of brutal litigation and scathing personal and professional attacks,” the letter read.
Killing the Story
Chevron has also used its clout and advertising dollars to keep the story from being reported in numerous media outlets.
“Based on where this story is trending, we have launched a full offensive to kill it or redirect it,” an Aug. 10, 2010, internal memo from Chevron reads concerning a potential report on the case being done by the Fox News bureau in Miami.
“In addition to working through the Miami bureau, we have reached out to more senior news folks at Fox News, both in NY (through Dana) and in WDC (through Greg Mueller). So, we are trying to attack this story on multiple fronts. To this end, Kent is set to talk to John Stack and Sean Smith who both reside at Fox News in NY at 1:30 today. Finally, if need be, I think we may need to pull the JSW card with Roger Ailes. We have checked John’s availability to place a call to Roger, but his first availability is tomorrow afternoon.”
From 2010 to 2018, John S. Watson was the CEO and chairman of the Chevron Corporation.
The story was killed.
Another internal memo lays out the steps, also ultimately successful, to prevent a similar story from appearing in GQ magazine. The memo suggests that Chevron work “with the Columbia Journalism Review (that ran the rebuke of 60 minutes) and the Media Research Center to expose any degree of bias by GQ and raise alerts about the reporting techniques prior to the story’s publication.”
The memo recommends letting the magazine know that it will face legal action if the story runs and calls on Chevron investigators to “conduct further due diligence on reporter.” Chevron has also hired reporters to produce fake pieces of journalism that peddle the corporation’s propaganda on fake news sites it runs.
The New York Times magazine earlier this year considered a story about Donziger and then dropped it. The newspaper runs its own ad agency called T Brand Studio. Chevron is a major client, meaning The New York Times, through T Brand Studio, produces ads for Chevron.
Jake Silverstein, editor of the magazine, when asked to comment said by email: “It was one of several stories William [Langewiesche] considered writing for us in the past year, one that ultimately we decided not to assign. Many factors go into our decisions about what to assign, and none of them ever include who is or is not a client of T Brand Studio or any other part of the paper’s advertising business.”
Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor, said, when I reached him by email, that the idea that the magazine piece on Donziger was killed because Chevron is a major advertiser is “a ridiculous claim.” He added, “I didn’t even know Chevron worked with T Brand [Studio].”
But that Chevron has invested tremendous resources to kill stories about this case is indisputable given the detailed campaigns to block coverage outlined in its own internal memos.
“I’ve experienced this multiple times with media over the past 10 to 15 years,” Donziger said. “An entity will start writing the story, spend a lot of time on it, then the reporter disappears. The story doesn’t run.”
While The Nation, The Intercept and Courthouse News Service have reported on Donziger’s current legal battle, no major mainstream publication has touched it.
“Corporate influence over our federal judiciary has increased dramatically in recent years,” Donziger said. “This firm [Chevron] has captured an element of power from the government and deployed it against a human rights activist.”
Front Line Defenders issued a report in 2019 that found that 300 human rights activists had been murdered in 31 countries, more than two-thirds in Latin America. Of those killed, 40 percent fought for land rights, indigenous peoples and environmental justice.
“What’s shocking to a lot of people is that this is now happening in the United States,” Donziger said. “I don’t mean murder, but death by a thousand cuts. Chevron does not want me to be a lawyer anymore, at a minimum. They don’t want me advocating even as a nonlawyer. They want to silence me. They want to kill every story they can. They’d rather have no story about this case than even a positive story about their side. They don’t want people to know about it. They want to erase it from people’s thought process.
“I cannot get a fair trial with a judge appointed by Judge Kaplan rather than though the random assignment process,” he lamented. “I cannot get a fair trial with a prosecutor whose law firm [has worked] for Chevron. These are egregious conflicts of interest. Its misconduct on a grand scale. I’ve been locked up four times as long as the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer for criminal contempt in New York. Anyone who cares about the rule of law should be appalled.”
As Party of Climate Denial Meets, Wildfires Rage and Hurricanes Target Gulf Coast
Their insistence on making a bonfire of the environment means their convention has to compete with disaster scenarios in California and the Gulf of Mexico.
by
Juan Cole
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/25/party-climate-denial-meets-wildfires-rage-and-hurricanes-target-gulf-coast
One of the speakers at the Republican National Convention on Monday evening was Nikki Haley, formerly Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, who helped usher the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and who slammed Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal. Haley when pressed will admit that the climate is changing, but she means that the way you might observe that clouds are going by in the sky all the time. She does not believe we need to swing into action immediately to forestall global catastrophe. Her boss, Trump, called the climate emergency a Chinese hoax and doesn’t think we are burning enough coal or drilling enough petroleum.
Don Trump Jr. called climate activist Greta Thunberg a “marketing gimmick.” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) actually sponsored a pledge never to raise taxes to fight the climate emergency.
Monday’s convention was full of ironies. It had to be held virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump has allowed to get out of hand. Over 5 million Americans have fallen ill, nearly 180,000 have been killed by it, and we are still seeing a thousand deaths a day and some 50,000 new cases a day. These tragic statistics are the direct result of national government inaction and ineptitude. Even countries that barely have a functioning government have done loads better in dealing with the virus than the US.
Trump promised that the pandemic would go away like a miracle in April, or that the heat of the summer would kill it. He insisted on pushing against mask-wearing, and for opening bars and restaurants around the country even when the rate of transmission was higher than 1, the cut-off according to the Centers for Disease Control.
So that the convention has to be held online is the fault of one man, Donald J. Trump.
And as this gathering of climate change denialists goes on air, mother nature is slapping them around. Not only have they fumbled their way into a massive death toll, equaling three Vietnam Wars with regard to American casualties, but their insistence on making a bonfire of the environment means their convention has to compete with disaster scenarios in California and the Gulf of Mexico.
In California, Anne C. Mulkern at Scientific American reports, unprecedented wildfires are tearing through a million square miles of forest, leaving a blackened dystopia the size of Rhode Island in their wake. There are nearly two dozen of these conflagrations. A quarter of a million people have had to be evacuated or are preparing urgently to leave. Two of the fires are among the largest in the history of the state.
250,000 Americans.
Hundreds of homes are gone.
Critics will point out that forest fires are natural. This is true. We’ve always had them. This is true. Some trees even depend on them to procreate. All true.
The frequency, severity, and extent of these fires, is, however, extraordinary and there is nothing natural about that. This calamity is in some part the result of human beings driving gasoline cars and heating their buildings with coal and gas and engaging in high-carbon farming and building construction. These activities have added to the problem by some significant percentage points. Again, the climate emergency doesn’t cause the fires and there would be some even under normal circumstances. It exacerbates them.
An article published last year this time in the scientific journal Earth’s Future says:
Since the early 1970s, California’s annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018. This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest‐fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming. Warming effects were also apparent in the fall by enhancing the odds that fuels are dry when strong fall wind events occur. The ability of dry fuels to promote large fires is nonlinear, which has allowed warming to become increasingly impactful. Human‐caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and North Coast, and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades.
The average surface temperature in California has skyrocketed by 1.8 degrees F. since 1980, according to a UCLA study reported at by Mulkern at Climate Wire. At the same time, there is 30% less precipitation. More heat and more dryness equals more and bigger wildfires.
On Aug. 16, the temperature in Death Valley reached 130 degrees F., probably the highest ever recorded on earth (that temperature was supposedly reached once before in 1913, but the instrumentation wasn’t as good then). Need I add, this is not a good sign?
Then there is the Hurricane Laura situation faced by residents of Louisiana or Texas. It is moving slowly over some of the hottest water on earth, and hot water feeds the strength of hurricanes. It could get up to 110 mph and become the strongest storm to hit that part of the coast in fifteen years. Some fear it could make landfall as a Category 3 Hurricane.
WWLTV: “Tropical Storm Laura enters Gulf of Mexico”
The strength of hurricanes is increased as they move over warm water. Moreover, warm water is associated with more humidity, making for heavier rains. Then, warm water expands, and warm weather melts ice, increasing sea level. That makes storm surges higher. The world’s oceans are being rapidly heated by the 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide that human beings spew into the atmosphere every year.
Most of the people at the Republican National Convention are closely tied to Big Oil and Big Coal, and most of them are conspiring to incinerate or drown your children and grandchildren. You can dance around the facts in Congress and maybe pick up some support for bad policy with a clever speech. But if you put heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, it will increase wildfires and hurricanes, and no crafted turn of phrase will turn them back.
The Republican Party cannot solve the climate emergency just as it cannot solve the pandemic. It is about making money for its billionaire clientele, not about delivering better lives to working Americans.
Four Things We Must Do to Save the Post Office From Trump-GOP Attack
The stakes could not be higher.
by
Robert Reich
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/25/four-things-we-must-do-save-post-office-trump-gop-attack
It’s no secret Donald Trump will do anything to hold on to power. His latest strategy is to sabotage the United States Postal Service, courtesy of his handpicked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
A Republican mega donor with no postal experience, DeJoy instituted sweeping measures that have caused massive mail delays across the country. As national outrage reached a fever pitch, DeJoy announced he would delay policy changes that slow down mail delivery, until after the election.
But the USPS is still very much under attack.
DeJoy’s statement is nothing more than empty rhetoric. He didn’t even list which policies he would postpone. One of the few policies he did mention was overtime pay, which he said would be paid “as needed,” but guess who decides what’s needed? He does.
DeJoy also needs to repair the damage he’s already done. He told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi he has “no intention” of replacing removed mailboxes and sorting machines, and instructed USPS employees to not reconnect or reinstall the sorting machines.
And nothing is forcing DeJoy to follow through even on his weak promises. If the past three and a half years have shown us anything, it’s that we can never count on Trump officials to follow through on their promises.
Trump openly admitted he was sabotaging the post office to stop people from voting. Now his political stooge postmaster general is basically saying “trust me.”
Sorry, Mr. DeJoy, we don’t trust you.
Congress must step in and do four things to protect the Postal Service and the integrity of mail-in voting before it’s too late:
1. Provide needed funding for the Postal Service in the next COVID-19 relief bill.
2. Force DeJoy to repair all the damage he’s already caused, returning the USPS back to full capacity.
3. Fully investigate DeJoy‘s conflicts of interest. DeJoy still has at least a $30 million stake in his former company XPO Logistics, which directly competes with the Postal Service — putting him in a position to profit directly from any loss of Postal Service customers.
4. Pass legislation specifically blocking the Postal Service from instituting any changes that would slow mail delivery in the lead-up to November.
Trump and DeJoy will stop at nothing to sabotage the USPS and steal the election — and there’s no telling the damage Trump will wreak if he’s able to swindle a second term.
Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121 and demand your representatives take these urgent steps to save the USPS and protect the election. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
As Israeli Bombing of Gaza Continues, US Media Show Little Interest
Mainstream outlets are largely ignoring the IDF's near-daily attacks, which began in early August.
by
Brett Wilkins, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/25/israeli-bombing-gaza-continues-us-media-show-little-interest
Israeli air and ground forces continued to attack Gaza Monday while continuing to tighten a devastating blockade on the besieged territory. The latest bombing, ostensibly targeting Hamas, has been occurring nearly daily since August 6, and has largely been ignored by the U.S. corporate media.
Over the past few weeks, balloon-borne incendiary and explosive devices, as well as some rockets, have been launched from Gaza into Israel, causing dozens of mostly small brushfires that have harmed no one.
Haaretz reports Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warplanes and tanks struck what it said were "Hamas military posts and underground infrastructure" in densely-populated Gaza "in response to explosive balloons" launched into Israeli territory.
The Palestinian news agency WAFA reports the IDF attacks targeted an area east of the town of al-Qarara, in Khan Younis. Israel also bombarded an agricultural area near the Sufa border crossing with artillery fire, destroying property but causing no casualties.
Al Jazeera reports Israel is also tightening its crippling economic blockade on Gaza, prohibiting the importation of fuel for the territory's only power plant. On August 10, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz ordered the closure of the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza, part of an effort to deprive its people of fuel in retaliation for the balloon and rocket attacks. The crossing is the sole point of entry for goods between Israel and Gaza.
Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said that the attacks from Gaza "will first and foremost harm the residents of the Gaza Strip, its economic growth, and the attempts to improve the civilian situation of its residents."
According to Haaretz, power outages caused by the fuel shortage have left residents with only a few hours of daily electricity. Photos posted on Twitter and other social media show children sleeping on the floor in the summer heat due to lack of air conditioning.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, responded to the Israeli fuel cutoff by calling on "all concerned parties to maintain a supply of electricity that is sufficient to meet the basic needs of the civilian population," citing "14 years of an illegal blockade and the socio-economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic."
"The closure of the power plant has caused the power feed to decline to two or three hours per day, followed by 20 hours of interruption," UNRWA said in a press release. "Such poor power feed will negatively impact the wellbeing and safety of the people of Gaza. It will also have devastating effects on Gaza's vital services, including hospitals, thus putting the lives and health of nearly 2 million people, including 1.4 million registered Palestinian refugees, at risk."
Hamas, the militant Palestinian resistance group, recently admitted to launching missiles at Israel in response to the IDF attacks.
"[Hamas] is ready to stop any Israeli aggression toward Palestinians," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in an August 21 press release. "[Israel] must end its violations, stop the ongoing escalation, and end the 14-year-old siege imposed on Gaza."
The 2 million people of Gaza—more than half of whom live in poverty, according to the United Nations—have been subjected to a brutal blockade since 2007 over acts of Palestinian resistance, including rocket attacks against Israel. Although Israel ended its illegal 38-year occupation and settler colonization of Gaza in 2005, it maintains a physical and economic stranglehold on the enclave. Israel has launched three major wars against Gaza since 2008, killing and wounding thousands of civilians while destroying much of the territory and displacing many thousands more.
The privation suffered by the people of Gaza has been so severe that human rights activists often refer to it as the "world's largest open-air prison," a description echoed by world leaders including former British Prime Minister David Cameron.
As the latest Israeli attack on Gaza continues, U.S. media have been accused of largely ignoring the assault. "U.S. corporate media, focused on the coronavirus and election coverage, have shown little interest in the renewed violence in the Middle East," wrote Alan MacLeod for the media monitor group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) late last week. "Searching for Gaza on the websites of NBC News, CNN, MSNBC and PBS elicits no relevant results. Nor has Fox News addressed the bombing, although it did find time to cover the archaeological discovery of an old soap factory in Israel's Negev Desert."
"The reporting on the latest round of attacks on Gaza follows the patterns we have often remarked on," MacLeod added, "downplaying Palestinian suffering and viewing the conflict from an Israeli state perspective."
The new Israeli attacks on Gaza are occurring as U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visits Israel, where he raised eyebrows and ire by recording a speech in Jerusalem to be aired during the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Tuesday. Pompeo's move defies tradition—and perhaps more than that, according to some appalled career diplomats.
"It's just shredding the Hatch Act," one anonymous current U.S. diplomat told the Associated Press, referring to a federal law banning government employees from political activity while on the job.
"This is really a bridge too far," concurred former U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield. "Pompeo is clearly ensuring the State Department is politicized by using his position to carry out what is basically a partisan mission."
President Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by relocating the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018, drawing widespread condemnation not only in the Middle East but around the world. The U.S. remains Israel's largest benefactor by far, providing around $3.8 billion in annual military aid, as well as diplomatic cover for what prominent international critics call Israeli crimes including illegal occupation and settler colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as aggression in Gaza, and ethnic cleansing and apartheid in the occupied territories.
NY Attorney General Files Federal Lawsuit, Demanding Trump and DeJoy Reverse 'Authoritarian' Changes Made to USPS
"During this critical time, Americans deserve better than a mail slow-down rooted in political gamesmanship."
by
Julia Conley, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/25/ny-attorney-general-files-federal-lawsuit-demanding-trump-and-dejoy-reverse
Accusing President Donald Trump of "authoritarian actions," New York Attorney General Letitia James on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit against his administration over its changes to the U.S. Postal Service.
The state of New York was joined by Hawaii, New Jersey, and the cities of New York and San Francisco in the legal challenge.
On social media, James condemned the disruption of mail delivery across the U.S., pointing to its "life-threatening impacts" on people who need medications, pensions, and paychecks, as well as its expected impact on the general election.
"This USPS slowdown is nothing more than a voter suppression tactic," James said in a statement. "Yet, this time, these authoritarian actions are not only jeopardizing our democracy and fundamental right to vote, but the immediate health and financial well-being of Americans across the nation."
With millions of Americans expected to vote by mail this year to avoid spreading the coronavirus at in-person polling places, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's elimination of overtime hours, removal of mailboxes and mail-sorting machines, and slashing of post office hours has been denounced by civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers in recent weeks.
The lawsuit led by New York State comes a day after DeJoy, a Republican megadonor, testified before the House Oversight Committee, admitting to lawmakers that he knew little about how the agency he oversees operates and refusing to cooperate with requests for documents about the changes he's made.
In the lawsuit, James raised alarm over Trump's open and emphatic attempts to undermine the mail service at the same time that the president was baselessly claiming that an election conducted largely by mail would yield a fraudulent result.
"Changes in USPS operations are in line with President Donald Trump's repeated and public statements in opposition to mail-in voting and his intent to impair the delivery of mailed ballots by cutting off the resources needed for the USPS to operate," James said, "because mailed ballots would specifically harm Republicans' abilities to win elections, even going so far as to make clear last month in a tweet that 'Republicans, in particular, cannot let this happen!'"
Other officials involved in the lawsuit described how people in their cities and states have already been negatively impacted by DeJoy's changes, and how the election could be undermined by the sabotage of mail delivery.
"Now more than ever San Franciscans are relying on the USPS to deliver critical services, like medication, legal services, and election mail," tweeted San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera.
"Countless people in New Jersey and across the nation, including some of our most vulnerable citizens, rely on the mail for prescription drugs and other things that help them survive," said New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal. "During this critical time, Americans deserve better than a mail slow-down rooted in political gamesmanship."
Following public pressure, DeJoy said last week that he would suspend further changes to the mail service until after the Nov. 3 election, but when speaking to lawmakers on Monday he declined to commit to reversing the changes already made.
James and the coalition of law enforcement officials joining the lawsuit are calling on the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia to "vacate all the recent changes made by the USPS and halt the USPS from further implementing the changes on the grounds that they violate statutory and constitutional law."
"No individual, organization, entity, or elected official is above the law," tweeted James. "Period."
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