Capitalism Is Covid's Best Friend

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-ZwN83Y5wc&ab_channel=SecularTalk

Why You Should Never Say "I Hate The State" w/ Peter Joseph

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX10ESUS4kM&ab_channel=RonPlacone

Earth On Track To Lose Most Clouds & Rain

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnof8cULFfs&ab_channel=MomentOfClaritywithLeeCamp

Moneybags for Billionaires, Body Bags for Workers: Organizing in the Time of Pandemics

In 2020, COVID and the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police revealed the extent to which people of color and the entire working class is confronting the economic injustice and racism of a political system stacked in favor of elites.

October 10, 2020 Sheri Davis Faulkner and Marilyn Sneiderman NEW LABOR FORUM




https://portside.org/2020-10-10/moneybags-billionaires-body-bags-workers-organizing-time-pandemics




The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the degree to which late capitalism is broken, from the failure of supply chains to manufacture and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE), to a health care system unable to address a pandemic, to state unemployment systems that are incapable of processing millions of new employment claims. Rampant state violence and the unabated harms inflicted on communities of color by highly militarized, unionized police forces nationwide revealed the depths of structural racism. These conditions amplified demands by progressive educators, racial justice and community organizations for #PoliceFreeSchools, and calls to “Defund the Police.” Labor’s response and lack of response to these twin pandemics demonstrate both the weakened state of the labor movement, and the urgency for its revival. And the successes and failures of organized labor to confront these challenges offer some clues as to what labor must do now.

Before the pandemic hit, the president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association wrote to the president of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) urging the union not to support Black Lives Matter (#BLM) at School Week (originally founded during the 2017-2018 school year). He asserted that #BLM made policing more dangerous and “his members less safe.” In her response to the allegations she centered the needs of her members’ students and the families they serve. She stated, “there is no evidence that increased police presence in schools improves school safety. Indeed, in many cases, it causes harm . . . [and] leads to greater student alienation and more threatening school climate.”[1] BTU demonstrated the type of community/labor response and leadership that has been pushing the labor movement to address the racism and racial tensions within its own ranks. #BLM political education in schools, communities, and worker justice organizations across the nation undergird the uprisings sweeping across the globe and challenge long held beliefs that using collective power to shield police from accountability, as union members, is no longer acceptable. Where unions and community/racial justice partners had organized before the pandemic—notably the teacher strikes and campaigns that involved bargaining for the common good—were indeed the same places that advanced the most creative and strategic work. The organizers/members involved in these campaigns already had an analysis of who was behind the curtain, profiting from the racism, violence, and poverty in many of our communities, particularly communities of color.

As we face pandemic-related austerity and mass unemployment, while police departments in many cities account for 30 percent or more of municipal budgets,[2] it’s clearer than ever why social justice organizations and unions need to combine forces to advance the interests of working-class communities. Unions are increasingly viewed as essential to a revitalized democracy and foundational to a more equal, decent, and humane society. But a labor movement mainly focused on defensive, bread-and-butter issues has proven itself incapable of fulfilling this larger role of transforming our society. Those unions that, prior to the pandemic and the expanding Black Lives Matter movement, were conducting broader campaigns aimed at winning structural change offer lessons of particular value in the post-pandemic environment. They demonstrate growing commitments to intersectional approaches where worker justice organizations fight for complex remedies meant to address problems identified by workers and communities, especially those most marginalized and severely impacted by interlocking oppressions.[3] These approaches show up as standing coalitions that have a broader analysis that includes race and gender and leads to bigger demands that benefit “the common good,” not just their members.
Covid-19 Pandemic

However, working-class people and people of color normally cannot entirely avoid defensive battles, and the Covid-19 pandemic made defensive measures especially urgent. “Frontline workers”—among them, grocery, pharmacy, public transit workers—took action early in the wake of Covid-19 to protect themselves and their families by demanding PPE at the workplace, and paid leave when they were ill. With a virus that spreads easily through close contact, and families having to provide every meal due to school closures, the risk of exposure in the service sector increased dramatically. “Frontlines” that are typically invisible were on full display when meatpackers and warehouse workers, who maintain the supply chain, publicized their working conditions. In this way, the public came to see the risks these workers were enduring and the life or death decisions they were suddenly forced to make.

Workers quickly realized that “essential” actually meant “expendable” or “sacrificial,” particularly for workers with fewer choices, less financial security, and scant worker protections. As cases continued to rise, it became increasingly clear that Black and brown communities, and especially women workers were being hit the hardest by the virus and the economic fallout. The systems of racialized capitalism and the reliance on patriarchal systems that feminize and undervalue care, service, and domestic work to justify low wages for women and people of color became more visible as the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths continued to soar. Healthcare, public transit, grocery, warehouse, factory, agriculture, homecare workers, and many more were expected to risk their health and that of their loved ones by continuing to work without PPE such as masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer. In addition to working in unsafe environments, they lacked the necessary childcare support needed, since preschools were closed, yet they were still expected to work. Coincidently, these are the very workers, who without collective bargaining rights, tend to have the least protections and industry regulations. Workers quickly realized that “essential” actually meant “expendable” or “sacrificial,” particularly for workers with fewer choices, less financial security, and scant worker protections.

These were the same workers who faced more difficulty in receiving unemployment payments or federal stimulus money. As unemployment applications exceeded 36 million by mid-May,[4] and desperately needed stimulus checks of up to $1,200 trickled out, many people were unable to benefit from this meager relief. These people included undocumented workers, immigrants without social security numbers, U.S. citizens married to immigrants without a social security number, those who owed child support, even those behind on student and other bank loans.[5] Amalgamated Foundation, the AFL-CIO, and national labor networks like the National Domestic Workers Alliance, launched national fundraising efforts to support workers, especially those excluded from relief and protections. These collective efforts helped to quickly established the Frontline Workers Fund, Worker Solidarity Fund, and the Coronavirus Care Fund to support workers most in need.[6] If workers did not see the value of being members of worker justice organizations and networks before, they should now. Jobs with Justice was one of the first to launch their Worker Solidarity Fund, quickly raising over $200,000 in the first round by asking supporters to donate their stimulus checks for redistribution to local coalitions for mutual aid funds. Additionally, by the end of May more than $3.5 million in grantmaking was disbursed to funds focusing on gig workers, immigrant workers, and organizations supporting expanded unemployment insurance and paid leave.
Moving from Defense to Demands for Reform

Those unions that had waged broader battles in coalition with communities and allied organizations before the pandemic were better positioned to move quickly to confront the longstanding injustices laid bare by the pandemic. How did these groups reframe and regroup with a broader vision and align with allies to take on those profiting? While addressing the urgent needs of food, housing, and healthcare for the unemployed, labor had to simultaneously develop strategies and power to be able to direct a relief plan for families and communities in the face of impending austerity measures brought on by the retracting economy. Of course educators—having focused on mini-pandemics facing their school communities, including violence, underfunding, lead in water, and homelessness—led the way by quickly activating their coalitions and networks to come up with strategic demands that would impact communities across the nation. Many of these educators had recently gone on strike and saw their contract negotiations as rightfully connected to broader demands for economic and racial justice, rather than merely fights for wages and benefits. Those unions that had waged broader battles in coalition with communities and allied organizations before the pandemic were better positioned to move quickly to confront the longstanding injustices laid bare by the pandemic.

During 2019, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), centered the homelessness of nearly 20,000 students in their contract demands as well as identifying structural racism as a central feature in the underfunding of public education. When the Chicago municipal government claimed “broke,” the CTU pointed to the financialization of the city budget and the priority status of private developers to demonstrate that Chicago was #BrokeOnPurpose, having agreed to fund major development and projects in high-wealth communities. The same day the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the CTU, SEIU Healthcare, [and] Grassroots Collaborative . . . announced a comprehensive list of “common good demands” and Covid-19 relief legislation.

The same day the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the CTU, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare, Grassroots Collaborative, and a coalition of other unions, community groups, and state and local elected officials announced a comprehensive list of “common good demands” and Covid-19 relief legislation.7 Demands included fifteen additional days of paid time off, free accessible testing, meal delivery strategies for struggling families, access to free broadband internet and computers, a moratorium on evictions and mortgage payments. The coalition’s Covid-19 relief demands predated the governor’s stay-at-home order by nearly ten days. The next day United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) also released “common good demands,” in addition to calling on the L.A. superintendent to close all public and charter schools, they called on the “state and federal government to immediately release funds to support our vulnerable student and family populations,” a disaster stipend for parents to care for children, housing for unhoused, and debt/rent/mortgage forgiveness among other demands. The Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) and BTU pushed even more expansive platforms including a moratorium on utility shut-offs and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detentions, and deportations. . . . United Teachers of Los Angeles . . . called on the “state and federal government to immediately release funds to support our vulnerable student and family populations,” a disaster stipend for parents to care for children, housing for unhoused, and debt/rent/mortgage forgiveness . . .

The commonality between the CTU, UTLA, and MTA goes well beyond being educator unions. Together with racial justice and community organizations, they built broad coalitions with women, particularly women of color in senior leadership, many of whom helped shape Bargaining for the Common Good[8] strategies and are members of the WILL Empower[9] (Women Innovating Labor Leadership) network. Using this expanded bargaining framework, they insist on bargaining with the ultimate decision makers and taking bold actions to set broad and inclusive negotiation tables. Dealing with the financialization of our economy, they take fights directly to the private equity (PE) firms and big banks that are strangling our municipal and state budgets with fees and other extractions. Furthermore, in 2020 UTLA elected their first woman of color president, Cecily Myart-Cruz; the same fierceness they brought to the coronavirus fight translated to the campaign for police-free schools. UTLA’s policy-making body overwhelmingly endorsed a call to eliminate the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) school police and shift funding to student needs, including counselors, psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and pupil services, and attendance counselors.[10] Myart-Cruz became the first Afro-Latinx UTLA president on the same day LAUSD voted to defund their school police budget by 35 percent.
Healthcare Workers

Union and non-union nurses across the nation posted Facebook and Instagram videos recounting their horrifying experiences with the nonstop flow of incoming patients with severe symptoms, having to reuse multiple times the N-95 masks issued by employers, and use trash bags as protective gowns while cities and states clamored for additional supplies. The rallying cry was that their employers were forcing them to engage in practices that would have gotten them fired a month prior. Nursing homes were some of the first and hardest hit sites. In early April, SEIU Healthcare threatened to strike and won wage increase demands of $15 per hour at more than forty facilities in the Chicago area. In addition, they demanded and won hazard pay and paid leave for Covid-19-related illness and quarantine for the duration of the pandemic. . . . SEIU Healthcare threatened to strike and won wage increase demands of $15 per hour at more than 40 facilities in the Chicago area; [plus] hazard pay and paid leave for Covid-19 related illness and quarantine for the duration of the pandemic.

Healthcare workers demanded better patient care and worker protections and had been striking for it pre-Covid-19. In fact, their demands foreshadowed some of the healthcare system challenges brought to light during the height of Covid-19. In Seattle, 8,500 nurses with SEIU Healthcare 1199NW went on strike in January 2020 and were then locked out by Swedish Hospital, part of the “not-for-profit” Providence Health System.[11] They were demanding better staffing and rejected having to use substandard equipment to care for patients. In Chicago, Illinois 2,000 nurses joined another 6,50012 in California, Arizona, and Florida, all members of National Nurses United who voted to strike over nurse-to-patient ratios in late 2019.

A Chicago nurse complained that the nurses faced “unsafe working conditions daily” and that “units often borrow supplies, equipment, and even staff from one another just to make ends meet.” In March 2019, 10,000 nurses of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA)[13] voted to strike but reached an agreement that fell short of what many members believed they had the power to win, specifically on issues of understaffing. How many lives could we have saved if the concerns raised by women, people of color, and immigrant-dominated workforces had been taken seriously and addressed? Rather than focusing narrowly on actions to suppress wages, the spotlight should be on the PE firms represented on the boards and the venture capital arms[14] of many of the non-profit/private hospitals that also cry “broke” in bargaining.
Factories, the Invisible Frontline

As state and local governments begged for PPE for “essential” health care workers and ventilators for Covid-19 patients, GE workers represented by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) protested potential layoffs for 2,600 workers demanding to make much needed ventilators.[15] Workplace protests increased quickly to amplify concerns about the lack of protections and paid leave for workers exposed and sick. After dragging his feet on using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to address sorely needed PPE and ventilators, the U.S. president did, however, issue an executive order citing the DPA in an effort to support employers in the meatpacking industry remaining open or reopening. In early April, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union reported twenty deaths directly to the administration and explained that nearly “5000 workers have been hospitalized or are showing symptoms” in the plants. They called on the administration to “increase worker testing,” provide “priority access to PPE,” “halt line speed waivers” (waivers that remove regulations on the speed of production), “mandate social distancing,” and “isolate workers with symptoms or positive tests for Covid-19.”

The UFCW reported this to the same administration that supported the largest U.S. ICE raid in 2019 in poultry plants in Morton, Mississippi where 680 workers were arrested and detained—devastating families and communities where workers’ children were suddenly left unattended. As a first response to this unnatural disaster, Mississippi Resiste and other worker justice groups took an unprecedented approach by calling on seasoned organizers throughout the South and the rest of the nation to come and mobilize those impacted by the raids for a comprehensive response. This intersectional approach revealed the cruelty of racist and sexist employers, who used immigration raids as a tool to suppress worker organizing. Koch Foods settled a $3.75 million lawsuit[16] for racial discrimination, national origin discrimination, and sexual harassment against Latinx workers, in 2018. Framing the ICE raid more broadly demonstrated how the administration worked with an employer to actively retaliate against immigrant workers in this poultry factory. It also revealed that the treatment of workers who are “essential” for maintaining the food supply are, however,
“expendable” when they organize for justice predates Covid-19. When organizing is the response to a man-made disaster, long-term structural changes are possible.
Coronavirus Capitalism

With “travel bans” and “stay-at-home” orders, the tourism sector, including airlines, hotels, and restaurants, has been decimated, but PE and Wall Street worked quickly to secure their own relief. Hotel owners demanded federal relief while laying off workers, who are largely women, people of color, and immigrants.[17] J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, and other big banks took advantage of Paycheck Protection Program relief legislation collecting $10 billion in fees to process small business loans, with minimal regulation and fewer restrictions than usual.[18]

Rarely do unions bargain directly with PE firms because these firms often hide behind the companies they own and control. However, the UFCW Local 400 in the Washington, D.C./Maryland area did not simply bargain on behalf of 25,000 members with Albertsons-Safeway,[19] they took the fight to the real parent company, Cerberus Capital Management, which was pulling the strings to cut pension and health care contributions,[20] and the local won without having to strike in March 2020. More unions are learning to identify and target common enemies to make them more visible as decision-makers while also bringing consumers and impacted communities into an expanded bargaining framework. As relief packages were developed in the early stages of Covid-19, the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE) advised state and local elected officials to “go on offense” to ensure tax dollars go toward the relief projects needed versus billions in fees to Wall Street.[21] . . . [T]he UFCW Local 400 in the Washington, D.C./Maryland area did not simply bargain on behalf of 25,000 members with Albertsons-Safeway, they took the fight to the real parent company, Cerberus Capital Management . . .

While consumer and worker abuses continue to be documented at Wells Fargo, instead of addressing the needs of workers contractingCovid-19 in call centers, their executives lobbied to loosen regulations. Social activist Naomi Klein describes these types of actions as “coronavirus capitalism,” where seemingly “impossible ideas become possible . . . predatory ideas designed to further enrich the wealthy . . . [leave]the most vulnerable further exposed.”[22]

The most egregious example of “coronavirus capitalism” is Amazon, the largest employer in the world that has amassed so much power and market share that it functions much like a utility. With increased demand for home deliveries, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the wealthiest human in the world, personally profited by $24 billion. Yet, Amazon’s initial response to worker concerns over the lack of protections was to change the company policy to include fourteen days paid leave for those with proof of a positive Covid-19 test and unlimited unpaid leave for those indicating exposure. At the same time, access to testing was limited; Amazon did not make tests available to employees, nor did this behemoth corporation inform workers about locations where employees had tested positive. In response, workers in N.Y.C., Chicago, and Detroit staged multiple strikes while thousands of workers around the country refused to go into work to protest Amazon’s neglectful practices that continued to put communities at risk in the chase for market domination. Amazon was one of the first corporations to declare it stands in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter, yet its record with Black workers says otherwise. Amazon fired and demeaned Christian Smalls, a Black worker who organized the walkout in Staten Island, seemingly in retaliation for his organizing. Amazon contracts with police nationwide to sell Rekognition, technology for facial recognition, which the ACLU 2018 report warned was racially biased and produced “false matches.”[23] More recent investigations suggest Rekognition may not only be used to track and suppress protestors against racial injustice, but that Amazon also shares footage from Ring, the video-doorbell app, with the police, ICE, and has been actively courting the military.[24]
The Future of Workers Is Now

Hope for the future will be found in challenging the biggest and most powerful corporations, Wall Street, and the interests of the super-rich, over their role in bankrupting governments, driving inequality, and investing in racist ideologies that are destroying democracy. Bargaining for Common Good is one example of a way forward. Educators in Chicago; St. Paul, Minnesota; Los Angeles; Massachusetts; and around the country pivoted quickly with strong long-time allies to go on offense and link worker, racial justice, and community issues as one and the same. Signs of hope are also with the janitors in Minnesota who highlighted climate and racial justice among their contract demands; and the Communications Workers of America who have been engaging their members in an indepth training called “Take on Wall Street.”[25] Taking this work a step further, Bargaining for the Common Good is building out an interactive map of the contract expirations for over 5 million workers[26] overlaid with big organizing and budget/revenue campaigns. This map will allow a broad alignment of economic and racial justice groups to develop overarching common good demands that span sectors and geographies and synchronize bargaining, revenue, and organizing campaigns across the United States. . . . Bargaining for the Common Good is building out an interactive map of the contract expirations for over 5 million workers overlaid with big organizing and budget/revenue campaigns.

The multi stakeholder approach to Amazon is another example. In the Amazon organizing, activists are building an alliance not just to counter the miserable conditions of workers—but challenging Amazon as a monopoly, tax avoider, and enabler of mass surveillance. Athena is advocating not only for public and corporate policy changes, but is addressing . . . labor rights, surveillance, environmental justice, monopoly power, racial justice, city infrastructure, and more.

Athena, a new national coalition of forty activist organizations, including unions, worker centers, and community-based organizations, emerged in 2019 with a clear analysis and plan to take on Amazon. This coalition draws upon diverse voices and perspectives representing a spectrum of worker justice movement leaders, researchers, and activists including a significant number of women of color strategists. Athena organized worker actions at multiple warehouses, pushed for public and corporate policies, and supported grassroots work to shutdown the N.Y.C. headquarters when Amazon refused worker protections. Athena is advocating not only for public and corporate policy changes, but is addressing nearly every issue Amazon touches—labor rights, surveillance, environmental justice, monopoly power, racial justice, city infrastructure, and more.

Other examples include using technology to advance worker organizing and visibility for marginalized workers by meeting them on the platforms they use daily. Organizations like United for Respect have ramped up their use of technology to grow their membership and develop member leaders, while Amazon is praised for technological advances that undermine worker protections and increase community surveillance. The “robots are coming” framing of the Future of Work serves corporations like Amazon; technology is not inherently the enemy of workers. When technological advances are in the service of more just and safer workplaces and communities, the “future of workers” is much brighter. Our hope for a better state of labor in 2021 and beyond lies in supporting both the theory and practice of campaigns that are about real transformational change and big vision, rather than with those hoping to merely survive another day. We need to meet the economy where it is, and with the power that refuses to allow our movement to be siloed any longer.
Notes

1. See https://blacklivesmatteratschool.com/2020/02/13/a-response-to-the-boston-police-unionattack-on-black-lives-matter-at-school-thisis-a-movement-for-equity-inclusion-and-theuplifting-of-black-students/.
2. See https://costofpolice.org/.
3. See https://forgeorganizing.org/article/we-want-bread-and-housing-too-bargaining-commongood-intersectional-feminist-strategy.
4. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/economy/coronavirus-unemploymentclaims.html.
5. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanguina/2020/04/21/5-reasons-you-wont-get-stimuluscheck/#12f1aef448fd.
6. See https://www.jwj.org/solidarityfund.
7. See https://www.ctulocal1.org/posts/ctu-allieslay-out-common-good-platform-to-protect-students-families-workers-as-coronavirus-threat-spreads/.
8. See https://www.bargainingforthecommongood.org/.
9. See http://willempower.org/.
10. See https://www.utla.net/news/utla-statementlausd-vote-defund-school-police-budget-35.
11. See https://prospect.org/labor/seattle-nurses-strike-and-get-locked-out/.
12. See https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/us/nurse-strike.html.
13. See https://www.leftvoice.org/nurses-have-the-power-to-strike-and-win.
14. See https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/providence-ventures-closes-on-second-150m-health-care-fund-300775045.html.
15. See https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2020/04/ge-workers-protest-demand-make-ventilators.
16. See https://archive.thinkprogress.org/ice-raidsfollow-massive-sexual-harassment-settlementmississippi-plant-koch-foods-d95eb2720f67/.
17. See https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2020/05/05/paycheck-protection-forworkers-should-not-be-redirected-to-hotel-ownersoperators-and-investors/#6ac1263e2133.
18. See https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840678984/small-business-rescue-earned-banks-10-billion-in-fees.
19. See http://www.ufcw400.org/2020/03/05/safeway-workers-approve-strong-new-contractavoid-strike/.
20. See http://www.ufcw400.org/2019/11/06/report-private-equity-greed-threatens-safewayworkers-retirement/.
21. See https://medium.com/breaking-down-thesystem/collective-bargaining-with-wall-streetand-direct-fed-lending-4150ec3088f.
22. See https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-capitalism/.
23. See https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/amazon-racial-justice-worker-organizing-union.
24. See https://theintercept.com/2020/06/03/amazon-police-racism-tech-black-lives-matter/.
25. See https://cwa-union.org/national-issues/economic-justice-democracy/take-on-wall-street.
26. See https://www.bargainingforthecommongood.org/mapping-landing/.

Voting Rights Advocates Demand Officials Do More to Stop Voter Intimidation

Voting rights groups are demanding local officials do more to protect voters from intimidation by right wing extremists enlisted by President Trump to suppress the vote. The most likely targets will be polls in communities of color in swing states.

October 10, 2020 Steven Rosenfeld VOTING BOOTH/IMI



https://portside.org/2020-10-10/voting-rights-advocates-demand-officials-do-more-stop-voter-intimidation




For weeks police and private intelligence circles have predicted “coming violence” from right-wing vigilantes at some polling places in presidential battleground states. But President Trump’s debate message to a white power group to “stand back and stand by,” despite his retraction, has turned online chatter among extremists into organizing actions targeting Election Day, according to the FBI’s former counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi.

“What we are seeing include calls for civil war, race-based conflict, and for increased acquisition of weapons,” said Figliuzzi, speaking at an October 2 briefing by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on voter intimidation threats and responses. “Right-wing extremist groups, including QAnon, Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys and violent militia groups, are all using the language of violent conflict in both their public and in their private communications online.”

“They are also calling for a physical response and presence at the polling places,” he said. “The specter of people who are violent in nature and have violent agendas, and often come armed with long guns, is becoming a very real possibility.”

The Lawyers’ Committee briefing suggested that recent incidents where Trump supporters have badgered voters and election officials in blue epicenters may be signs of bigger trouble as Election Day nears. Both parties have stepped up recruitment of partisan poll watchers and, in Trump’s case, voting vigilantes.

While the committee’s briefing emphasized there were laws protecting voters from last-minute electioneering and intimidation, as well as rules that regulate what partisan observers can and cannot do at election sites, its message was that public officials must speak out more forcefully to reject voter intimidation at polls or in the streets, and say how authorities would respond should it occur.

“One step that election officials can make is to make clear the campaign-free zone that applies in their states,” Kristen Clarke, the Lawyers’ Committee’s president and executive director, said, referring to the buffer zone that surrounds polling places or buildings with voting sites inside, where supporters of candidates and causes cannot campaign. “In every state there is a certain perimeter in which electioneering activity is prohibited, and [in] which intimidating activity would also be prohibited.”

“Officials often do a good job promoting the time and date for elections, and what’s on the ballot,” Clarke said, referring to the public information campaigns that have increased since Labor Day. “Going one step further to make clear that no intimidation is allowed within a certain zone outside the doors of a polling site would be one small step.”

Local and state prosecutors should take strong stances condemning any menacing presence at polls, she added, especially since the U.S. Department of Justice has abdicated that role under Trump. “This may be a moment where we lean on state and local law enforcement to step into those gaps.”

“There is also a tremendous role to play for law enforcement leaders in terms of messaging,” agreed Kenneth Polite, former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, speaking at the same briefing. His recommendation included “making public statements that emphasize… their commitment to protecting these constitutional rights, including their roles of protecting [against], evaluating and prosecuting this type of intimidation.”

The week after the Lawyers’ Committee’s briefing saw some officials beginning to speak out. On October 6, the attorneys general of Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada, all Democrats, held a video press conference where they condemned Trump’s call for unofficial poll watchers and vowed to prosecute voter intimidation. Other recent news reports have noted that local election administrators and police have been reevaluating their security plans.

Not a Normal Election

There were many reasons behind today’s worries about voter intimidation that set 2020 apart from threats of election violence in the recent past, the committee’s experts said. Foremost was Trump’s role as an “instigator or radicalizer” with his attacks on the voting process and calls for supporters to confront what Trump said would be cheating by Democrats. Another factor was in 2018 the Republican National Committee was freed from a decades-old federal consent decree that barred it from using voter suppression tactics. And another was scenes from Midwestern states where right-wing zealots brought military-style guns into statehouses while protesting government-ordered COVID-19 precautions.

The most likely targets for voter intimidation were not polling places randomly chosen from the 100,000-plus voting sites that will be open on Election Day, November 3, the experts said. The targets would likely be polling places in communities of color in swing states, they said, especially in locales where anti-police brutality protests and Black Lives Matter rallies have occurred.

The fact that these settings have residents who distrust the police adds a complicating layer when it comes to how authorities will intervene should legal electioneering cross the line into illegal voter intimidation, disturbing the peace or criminal violence. Police have more authority than election officials to respond if threatening behavior or violence arises at polls or in the streets, but many voters in communities of color don’t want to ask the police for help—or believe that the police will protect them—voting rights advocates said.

“It’s one thing to say we need folks [waiting to vote] to be tougher. It’s another thing to say, ‘Who is going to protect you?’” said Jorge Vasquez Jr., Power and Democracy Program director for the nonprofit civil rights law firm Advancement Project. “[If] you’re a Black or a Brown voter, and you see how Black or Brown people are being treated by law enforcement, you would understand that you’re really talking about [a situation in which your]… life may be on the line in a way that it hasn’t been in the past.”

Gray Zones

Vasquez has been meeting with local police in six swing states—Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia and Florida—to try to set some ground rules in communities of color before Election Day. His efforts to get police to negotiate and sign memorandums of understanding about how they will engage with voters this fall had similarities to those of protest organizers engaging with law enforcement before holding rallies and demonstrations.

The problem facing both voting rights advocates and officials is not people respectfully exercising their First Amendment rights, but rather with dealing with provocateurs who disrupt events and seek to provoke a police response that interrupts others from exercising those rights, Edward Maguire, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University, recently told NPR. “Police know how to handle peaceful protests. The harder part is when you have that gray zone in between, where you have protests that are largely peaceful, but you have people who are behaving in a violent or destructive manner.”

When it comes to campaigning and voting on Election Day, there can be several gray zones. The first is where one person’s actions in support of a cause—called electioneering—are legal but may be intimidating to others who don’t share their views or ideology. Then there are clearly intimidating actions that likely violate election or criminal codes, if those actions were being monitored and those laws were being enforced. But people in opposing political parties and local authorities may not see or judge the same actions the same way.

There are a series of state and federal laws that protect voters. The most obvious are buffer zones around the entrances to polls where electioneering is not allowed. These distances are specified in state law and vary, from 10 feet in Pennsylvania, to 40 feet in Virginia, to 100 feet in Wisconsin and Michigan, to 150 feet in Florida and Georgia. There are state and federal laws barring voter intimidation, rules governing the conduct of partisan observers in election sites, and laws outlawing any election-related violence. (On the other hand, it is legal to bring guns into polls in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, gun control groups have reported.)

There were two recent widely reported instances of Trump supporters badgering voters and election officials that illustrate the clear lines and ambiguities that arise as voters and authorities respond to loud but legal electioneering, and to what one seasoned observer concluded was illegal voter intimidation.

A clear line was seen in Philadelphia, where Trump supporters demanded to observe the start of early voting at a satellite voting center just before 2020’s first televised presidential debate. Perhaps the gambit was a stunt to give Trump fodder to smear the city’s elections, which he did. But local election officials told the Trump supporters that they could not stay because they had not followed the process to become credentialed partisan observers.

A blurrier line emerged during the first weekend of early voting in Fairfax County, Virginia. In that diverse Washington, D.C., suburb, a caravan of Trump supporters drove into the parking lot where voters were lined up at the county’s government center, some revving their engines, which upset some voters. A small band of Trump supporters got out of their cars and trucks and converged at a plaza near the entrance, where they waved banners and cheered for Trump. Some voters who felt intimidated alerted officials, who came out, spoke to the campaigners, and then opened the government center so voters could wait inside in the hallways.

“There are two factors that go on that you should be thinking about,” said Kevin Kennedy, who was Wisconsin’s top statewide election official from 1982 to 2016 and a lawyer. “There’s the electioneering factor, which is trying to influence voting. ‘Don’t vote for that jerk,’ ‘Vote for this party,’ or whatever. And in Wisconsin, that [electioneering] stops 100 feet from the entrance of any building containing a polling place with the exception of a sign on private property.”

“The second factor is you cannot interfere with the orderly conduct of the election,” he said. “The general definition of disorderly conduct is something that tends to disturb the peace or create an issue… I would say that driving a truck through a parking lot [to disrupt waiting voters], even if you are more than 100 feet away, would probably qualify [as intimidation]. The question then is resource allocation for law enforcement.”

Kennedy’s last point highlights another gray zone that affects when and where police might step in—if they were present or were called upon to do so.

Election officials have narrower authority than the police to deal with bad behavior as it moves from the polls to the street. Kennedy concluded that Trump supporters toying with Fairfax County voters outside of Virginia’s 40-foot electioneering boundary was illegal voter intimidation, but it did not prompt arrests. Since the incident, county officials are seeking to extend the buffer zone to 150 feet.

“We need individuals to use their discretion in a way that promotes democracy,” said the Advancement Project’s Vasquez. “I’ve seen in 2018 in Florida, voters come with horses waving an American flag where there are people with long lines, similar to the pickup trucks [in Fairfax County]. It is fact-specific and looking at the totality of the circumstances.”

What Kind of Police Presence?

How visible police should be at polls, especially in communities in color, is a complicated question.

“The polling station has historically been a militarized space for Black voters,” said Jeralyn Cave, Vasquez’s colleague and Advancement Project spokeswoman, citing America’s history of white vigilantes, segregation, Jim Crow and recent partisan voter suppression.

“So many people [police] don’t want to use their discretion as it relates to elections,” Vasquez said. “But any other time, they are willing to use their discretion. Most recently, I think what we could compare it to is we have millions of people storming the street to practice their First Amendment right to peaceful[ly] protest [police brutality]. And we have some police officers who are deciding that, ‘You know what, you guys are in a group during a pandemic, and we’re going to use our discretion to either charge you with something or not charge you with something.’”

The question, then, becomes one of nuance. What can government officials do now to assure voters in battleground states that voting this fall will be safe? Vasquez has been trying to negotiate ground rules with police in communities of color in swing states. But as of October 2, Cave said that no law enforcement agency had signed any memorandum of understanding.

Other voting rights advocates, such as the Lawyers’ Committee’s Clarke, did not want to see more police at polling places.

“In no uncertain terms, we object to the presence of law enforcement at the polls,” she said at the same briefing where Figliuzzi described the growing threats from right-wing militants. “We observed in Wisconsin, officials resorting to using the National Guard to fill in gaps as they worked with insufficient numbers of poll workers. Many of them were in plain clothes. We’re very concerned about any further efforts to activate law enforcement in any further fashion at polling sites, particularly in the communities with large numbers of voters of color.”

Figliuzzi replied by listing some “warning signs and indicators” to look out for.

“One would be the presence of federal agents of any kind deployed to polling sites, which might, as you heard, be a specific violation of law,” he said. (Armed federal agents and military personnel are not permitted at polls, despite Trump’s claims.)

“Secondly, I would be particularly vigilant for any reports that off-duty police officers have been hired by any private organization, or an organization that may be linked to a particular campaign, to conduct some kind of so-called security or monitoring,” he said. “That would be very troubling, particularly since many [police and sheriff] departments are canceling all off-duty work, or other duty work, because of the concerns about the polling place [on Election Day].”

But there were low-key roles that police could play to keep poll settings orderly.

“We don’t want to call out [oppose] perimeter security, parking lot traffic management type things that will get people in and out safely,” Figliuzzi said. “But [we] want to watch for the warning signs that would tell us that something is amiss with the presence of law enforcement.”

The Lawyers’ Committee briefing ended by imploring government officials, not just election administrators, not only to be more vocal about protecting the health of voters during a pandemic, but also to publicly state their commitment to voter safety in swing states. Journalists, too, should pressure state and local officials, they said. The panel’s experts did not trust the federal Department of Justice’s efforts to protect voters.

“Reporters should feel free to ask their law enforcement leaders—[police] chiefs, sheriffs, state officials—will you be setting up a command post or joint operation unit with law enforcement and federal partners for the election?” Figliuzzi said. “Will you be issuing press releases that remind people what the law is and what is permitted? Will you be engaging in proactive dialogue through your intelligence officers with known leaders of activists or groups? Will you be considering designated protest areas away from the polling place?”

What should voters do if they face intimidating actions at the polls or in the street?

“You never want anyone to be confrontational. And do document what is happening,” Vasquez said. “Know who to contact. Certainly, contact Advancement Project’s national office with any questions you have. Reach out to us on social media. We’ll help you assess the situation and find a plan through it. But at this point, the best thing you can tell anyone is ‘Don’t be confrontational.’”

“It’s not your place to necessarily be confrontational,” he emphasized. “But it is your place in being able to safely cast a ballot.”

Trump’s Minnesota Visit had Him Acting Like a Proud Boy

Amid “white power” chants and maskless rallies, the President spreads hate (and likely COVID-19) during Minnesota fundraiser and campaign rally.

October 10, 2020 Sarah Lahm THE PROGRESSIVE




https://portside.org/2020-10-10/trumps-minnesota-visit-had-him-acting-proud-boy




When President Trump visited Duluth, Minnesota, recently, he left more than a possible exposure to the coronavirus in his wake. He unleashed a new wave of racist expression and violence.

Trump flew to Minnesota to attend both a campaign rally and a private fundraiser on September 30, the day after his contentious debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden. In that debate, Trump was not only unwilling to denounce white supremacy, but he also drew condemnation for saying that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by,” rather than cease operations immediately.

The Proud Boys is a hate group aligned with the racist alt-right, according to watchdog organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Trump later claimed he doesn’t know who the Proud Boys are—a notion as alarming, perhaps, as his unwillingness to clearly reject their actions and ideology. Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris might have said it best when she characterized Trump’s debate performance as a “dog whistle through a bullhorn.”

Somehow, after a summer of uprisings and unrest in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, Trump still can’t find the words to condemn violent, racist, and misogynistic groups like the Proud Boys.

He carried his belligerence with him to Minnesota on September 30, just hours before he was diagnosed with the coronavirus. Trump has made it very clear that he intends to become the first Republican to carry Minnesota since Richard Nixon won the state in the 1972 presidential election.

And he apparently plans to do so by acting—in terms of his public rhetoric, anyway—like a Proud Boy.

Trump’s first post-debate stop in Minnesota was at a private home in Shorewood, a wealthy suburb west of Minneapolis. There, forty Trump supporters, some paying $100,000 to attend, mingled with the President at the home of a local business owner.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, a Republican whose state has seen a huge increase in COVID-19 cases recently, was reportedly in attendance.

Trump then flew to northern Minnesota to hold a rally at the Duluth International Airport. What followed was a racist, xenophobic display, captured most shockingly, perhaps, by Trump’s declaration that, “Biden will turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.”

All the refugees Biden will let in, Trump told the crowd of chanting supporters, will “overwhelm public services.” Never mind, of course, that he was soon to be treated to a round of socialized health care at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center due to his COVID-19 diagnosis.

We could look away, and chalk Trump’s continued attacks on Minnesota’s refugee community up to little more than a campaign shtick designed to rile up his base of supporters.

But that would be a terrible mistake. In the hours after Trump’s rally, when he had long since departed for the taxpayer-funded confines of the White House, numerous attacks against women and the media were reported in Minnesota.

Here is a taste of what Minnesotans were left to deal in the wake of Trump’s visit:

Dymanh Chhoun, a photojournalist for the local CBS affiliate, was getting ready to cover the Duluth rally when a Trump supporter punched him. The confrontation occurred as Biden and Trump supporters squared off before the rally began.

Earlier this summer, Chhoun was sprayed with tear gas while filming protests in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. His eyes scrunched up in pain, Chhoun kept his camera focused on a man, later identified as a member of a white supremacist group, who was seen breaking windows and inciting violence aross from the police department’s Third Precinct station.

Later, Duluth’s Democratic mayor, Emily Larson, reported that a group of vehicles bearing Trump flags attempted to “bully and intimidate” her on Friday, two days after the President’s campaign stop.

On the day Trump appeared in Duluth, Larson had referred to him as a “white supremacist” bent on putting area residents in harm’s way by carrying on with a maskless public rally in the middle of a pandemic. Her concern was later validated by Trump’s positive coronavirus test, as well as the lingering uncertainty around exactly when he became aware of it.

Then, on October 1, Qorsho Hassan, Minnesota’s current Teacher of the Year, reported that she had been in Duluth just days before Trump’s rally. While there, she said in a statement, a group of white men in a pickup truck circled around her, shouting “white power” and Trump campaign slogans.

These incidents follow Trump’s appearance in Bemidji, Minnesota, on September 25. There, he stopped at nothing to stoke racist fears, asking the crowd gathered before him if they were “having a good time” with Minnesota’s refugees.

Outlets including Rolling Stone also reported that Trump expressed glee at the Bemidji rally over the way NBC journalist Ali Veshi was hit by a rubber bullet while reporting on the unrest in Minneapolis during the summer.

Trump called Veshi’s injury a “beautiful thing,” according to a New York Times report. But his rhetoric, like Veshi’s encounter with the rubber bullet, is anything but beautiful.

Crumbling Case Against Assange Shows Weakness of “Hacking” Charges Related to Whistleblowing

The charge against Assange is about establishing legal precedent to charge publishers with conspiring with their sources, something that so far the U.S. government has failed to do because of the First Amendment.

October 10, 2020 Micah Lee THE INTERCEPT




https://portside.org/2020-10-10/crumbling-case-against-assange-shows-weakness-hacking-charges-related-whistleblowing




By 2013, the Obama administration had concluded that it could not charge WikiLeaks or Julian Assange with crimes related to publishing classified documents — documents that showed, among other things, evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan — without criminalizing investigative journalism itself. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department called this the “New York Times problem,” because if WikiLeaks and Assange were criminals for publishing classified information, the New York Times would be just as guilty.

Five years later, in 2018, the Trump Administration indicted Assange anyway. But, rather than charging him with espionage for publishing classified information, they charged him with a computer crime, later adding 17 counts of espionage in a superseding May 2019 indictment.

The computer charges claimed that, in 2010, Assange conspired with his source, Chelsea Manning, to crack an account on a Windows computer in her military base, and that the “primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information.” The account enabled internet file transfers using a protocol known as FTP.

New testimony from the third week of Assange’s extradition trial makes it increasingly clear that this hacking charge is incredibly flimsy. The alleged hacking not only didn’t happen, according to expert testimony at Manning’s court martial hearing in 2013 and again at Assange’s extradition trial last week, but it also couldn’t have happened.

The new testimony, reported earlier this week by investigative news site Shadowproof, also shows that Manning already had authorized access to, and the ability to exfiltrate, all of the documents that she was accused of leaking — without receiving any technical help from WikiLeaks.

The government’s hacking case appears to be rooted entirely in a few offhand remarks in what it says are chat logs between Manning and Assange discussing password cracking — a topic that other soldiers at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, where Manning was stationed, were also actively interested in.

The indictment claims that around March 8, 2010, after Manning had already downloaded everything she leaked to WikiLeaks other than the State Department cables, the whistleblower provided Assange with part of a “password hash” for the FTP account and Assange agreed to try to help crack it. A password hash is effectively an encrypted representation of a password from which, in some cases, it’s possible to recover the original.

Manning already had authorized access to all of the documents she was planning to leak to WikiLeaks, including the State Department cables, and cracking this password would not have given her any more access or otherwise helped her with her whistleblowing activities. At most, it might have helped her hide her tracks, but even that is not very likely. I suspect she was just interested in password cracking.

Assange, however, never cracked the password.

That’s it. That’s what the government’s entire computer crime case against Assange is based on: a brief discussion about cracking a password, which never actually happened, between a publisher and his source.

Therefore, the charge is not actually about hacking — it’s about establishing legal precedent to charge publishers with conspiring with their sources, something that so far the U.S. government has failed to do because of the First Amendment.

As Shadowproof points out: In June 2013, at Manning’s court martial hearing, David Shaver, a special agent for the Army Computer Crimes Investigating Unit, testified that Manning only provided Assange with part of the password hash and that, with only that part, it’s not possible to recover the original password. It would be like trying to make a cappuccino without any espresso; Assange was missing a key ingredient.

Last week at Assange’s extradition trial, Patrick Eller, a former Command Digital Forensics Examiner at the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, further discredited the computer crime charge, according to Shadowproof.

Eller confirmed Shaver’s 2013 testimony that Manning didn’t provide Assange with enough information to crack the password. He pointed out, “The only set of documents named in the indictment that Manning sent after the alleged password cracking attempt were the State Department cables,” and that “Manning had authorized access to these documents.”

Eller also said that other soldiers at Manning’s Army base in Iraq were regularly trying to crack administrator passwords on military computers in order to install programs that they weren’t authorized to install. “While she” — Manning — “was discussing rainbow tables and password hashes in the Jabber chat” — with Assange — “she was also discussing the same topics with her colleagues. This, and the other factors previously highlighted, may indicate that the hash cracking topic was unrelated to leaking documents.”

I’m not a fan of Julian Assange, particularly since his unethical actions and lies he’s told since the 2016 U.S. election. But I am a proponent of a strong free press, and his case is critically important for the future of journalism in this country.

Journalists have relationships with their sources. These relationships are not criminal conspiracies. Even if a source ends up breaking a law by providing the journalist with classified information, the journalist did not commit a felony by receiving it and publishing it.

Whether or not you believe Assange is a journalist is beside the point. The New York Times just published groundbreaking revelations from two decades of Donald Trump’s taxes showing obscene tax avoidance, massive fraud, and hundreds of millions of dollars of debt.

Trump would like nothing more than to charge the New York Times itself, and individual journalists that reported that story, with felonies for conspiring with their source. This is why the precedent in Assange’s case is so important: If Assange loses, the Justice Department will have established new legal tactics with which to go after publishers for conspiring with their sources.