Breaking barricades, braving repression, farmers reach Indian capital Delhi

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvwkCkJ_u2c&feature=emb_logo&ab_channel=PeoplesDispatch

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal on the Possibility of Progressive Legislation in 2021

Why are we putting so much money into law enforcement when we need money that helps people have opportunity? We can increase our spending on critical areas, we can ensure people have health care, education, good living wage jobs.




November 28, 2020 Rich Smith THE STRANGER




https://portside.org/2020-11-28/congresswoman-pramila-jayapal-possibility-progressive-legislation-2021




We'll have to wait for all the votes to be counted, but on Friday afternoon Seattle Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal felt confident that she won more votes than any other member of Congress for the second time in a row. "I checked some of the likely ones, and I haven't found a member who has more votes yet," she said over the phone.

This didn't come up on the call, but so far House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pulled in a little over 280,100 votes this year. Jayapal has earned over 386,300 votes. Just sayin'.

In any event, there's a lot of hot talk about the 2020 election results. Who should we blame credit for the Biden/Harris victory? Which issues may or may not have contributed to Democratic losses down-ballot? And what legislation could possibly emerge from a Biden administration with a split Senate and a bloodied House? As the potential next solo chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, I asked Jayapal for her take on the intra-party battle and her plan for what's next.

Before we talk about how progressive Democrats can govern next session, we need to reckon with the results of the election and what they mean in terms of a “mandate.” Conor Lamb told the New York Times, “The American people just showed us in massive numbers, generally, which side of these issues that they are on. They sent us a Republican Senate and a Democratic president; we’re going to have to do things that we can compromise over.” To what extent do you buy that assessment?

My read is we still are a very divided country. You can’t deny that we are. But at the same time, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris really do have a mandate to deliver for working people and the most vulnerable. Remember when we passed the $15 minimum wage, and everyone called us radical and far left for doing that? Well, Florida just passed a $15 minimum wage with a supermajority of votes, and Florida just voted for Donald Trump. Many things called ‘far left’ or ‘radical policies’ are just about honoring the people, and making it so people have the opportunity to work 40 hours a week and still take care of their families, and have health care, and have good union jobs.

Lamb also said “defunding the police” and “banning fracking” are unpopular and unrealistic, and progressives in the Democratic Party shouldn’t support these measures because they’re killing the Democratic majority. The polling evidence seems to support his view: people don’t like the phrase “defund the police” for instance, but they do like police reforms. Where do you fall on adopting the language of movements for progressive policy?

I think that the Black Lives Matter movement and all the movements that took to the streets in the wake of George Floyd’s death were responding to a legacy of discrimination and anti-Blackness in law enforcement, and there is understandable fury in that. And anyone who thinks you should or can control a movement in the streets, which usually erupts as a result of extreme injustice, doesn’t understand movements.

Few members of Congress ran on “defund the police” as a slogan—if any, I’m still looking for any evidence of someone who did. But we know the Republicans will take all kinds of slogans and use them against us. We know socialism was used against Teddy Roosevelt and every president after him. The question is what is our response. What are our values? What are we fighting for?

I’ll tell you the most compelling thing I heard from two people who lost their races. One was Cameron Webb in West Virginia. He said, “Yeah, they spent millions attacking me, claiming I wanted to defund the police.” But what he did was he leaned into the message, and he took it on hard. He’s a Black man, and they got a picture of him kneeling, but he said that was something he felt was very important to do for the history of racism. He got some sheriffs to endorse him, but he also talked openly about racism in this country and the murder of George Floyd. The other was Max Rose in New York. His district is Staten Island. A lot of cops live there. As of this morning, Trump was winning the district by 14 points. The turnout from Trump voters was extremely high, which was not the case in 2018. And he said, “Yeah, I marched with Black Lives Matter protesters, but I also voted for the impeachment of Donald Trump. I don’t regret either of those things. They’re not why I lost this race.” Just like [moderate Democrats] don’t want to be told not to say something or do something, they can’t tell other people who run their districts not to say or do something.

What would you suggest those moderate members do when Republicans target them with these attacks?

Everyone’s giving advice for other peoples’ districts, and I think that’s not something we should do. But I do think in general that leaning into the message is really important. But then the other part is, what is the message that you’re giving to people? He said at the end of the day ‘defund’ was third or fourth on the list of things that people voted for. So he was running on Covid, he was running on economic relief, and he put a lot of time into organizing on the ground.

We need to continue to realize that Trump was in districts one-and-a-half years ago, organizing on the ground. The Trump campaign was sending out flyers in multiple languages long before many Democrats or the Democratic party was. The DCCC did a lot of good new work this time, thanks to many of us who advocated for things like sending out flyers and advertising in different media and in different languages, but we were late to the game. For decades we said we’ve needed to speak to Black voters, to Latina voters, to API voters, but, again, we were late to the game.

We need to invest in year-round organizing. That’s one of the things I’m really proud of. I don’t know how many Members of Congress run a year-round organizing campaign from the day after the election. Most members keep a fundraiser on staff, but they don’t keep an organizer on staff. They don’t continue to organize their volunteers like we do. At the end of the cycle, we trained up 600 of our volunteers, and they made 140,000 phone calls into Pennsylvania on behalf of Biden and Harris. I think there are different ways to build leadership year-round, and we should take advantage of them. We have a platform to organize, and we should use it.

Decisions about police funding mostly happen on the municipal and county level, so what role can Congress play in this conversation about funding the police?

There’s so much more work we can do around decriminalizing people, which is very much tied into law enforcement because they’re the ones arresting people and putting them in jail. So if you’re talking about the criminal justice system, we’re talking about eliminating cash bail and legalizing marijuana across the country. And the way the system works now, people who are ex-felons are barred from everything for life. We have to reduce the number of people going into jails, and when they come out of prisons we have to actually help people get back on their feet.

We also have to shut off the school-to-prison pipeline. I was just talking to the new president of the National Education Association, Becky Pringle, the first Black woman to lead a major union in the country. She was talking about how we’re putting kids into a system that we know is going to discriminate against them from the very beginning. We’re saying, 'Go into the systemically racist system,' and then we’re saying, 'Oh, how did you end up in jail?' And so we’ve got to fundamentally shift that system and how public education is delivered and who delivers it.

I was also talking to Bishop Barber about poverty this morning. We were talking about how poverty and the lack of opportunity is a driving force—and that’s what the whole defund movement is trying to get at. Why are we putting so much money into law enforcement when we need so much money in these fundamental systems that help people have opportunity? We can increase our spending on critical areas, we can ensure people have health care, education, good living wage jobs. Those are the upstream pieces that will actually allow us to make sure people have opportunity.

Could you give a few realistic examples of legislation that will pass in a 50-50 + Harris senate, and a few that can pass in a 52-48 senate with Republicans in control?

I think $15 minimum wage can pass, given what I said about Florida. I think we could pass a big infrastructure package—a really bold one, even with a split Senate, because it’s very popular across the country. That infrastructure bill could have a lot of green energy and renewable energy pieces to it, but it would also have schools infrastructure and water systems infrastructure.

I believe we can pass some real education pieces. We have to reverse everything that Betsey DeVos has done, and we have several bills that expand funding for public schools.

Administratively, Joe Biden can cancel pieces of college debt, and that would be beneficial for everyone across the country—white, Black, and brown. Just imagine what would happen there in terms of economic stimulus. But I also think we could make two- and four-year college free up to a certain amount. That probably requires a solid majority in the Senate, but maybe we can get some of it with a split Senate.

Do you have much faith in those executive orders happening, given the conservative skew of some of these courts?

I think there are lots of lawyers who look at that stuff, but the thing is—if Mitch McConnell is going to obstruct everything, then Biden should use his administrative powers, because people are hurting across the country. There’s a million new unemployment claims. People don’t have jobs. They don’t have housing—and by the way, we could invest in housing and take on homelessness in a split Senate, too—and so I absolutely think he should do it.

Did you talk to AOC after she said she could just as soon start a homestead than run again? If so, what did you tell her and what did you say? She’s expressing a kind of pessimism about the possibility for necessary progressive change.

I’ve talked to her in the past of course, but I didn’t talk to her about that. Look, I’ve been an organizer for 30 years, and I really believe that the change that we’re seeking is transformative, but because it’s transformative it’s extremely difficult. It takes a while, and I don’t get discouraged easily. And when I do, I think about all the people who fought so long they gave their lives and their families’ lives and just kept going, kept organizing.

A lot of enraged Seattleites are jealous about the power the Freedom caucus wields with Republicans in the House, and they’d like to see the Congressional Progressive Caucus wield power the same way. If you become the sole chair, are you going to wield power in Congress like that?

We hate the Freedom caucus. I totally reject any comparison to the Freedom caucus. We are about the government stepping in to provide opportunity, and the Freedom caucus is about ripping apart government and staring through every lens of cruelty you can imagine. [The Congressional Progressive Caucus] just passed a set of reforms I’m excited about that took a lot of work, and that will help us be a more unified bloc of votes, and make us more member-driven, and give leadership to different parts of the caucus. But recognize—if we don’t have the Senate, then it becomes very difficult to pass things, and then we have to use an inside/outside strategy like the one I was part of when we got Obama to agree to DACA. We may have to be the wind behind the sails that helps Joe Biden and Kamala Harris deliver change through executive action if we can’t do it legislatively.

The Actual Effects of Enhanced Unemployment Benefits

Overwhelming evidence supports quite a different bedtime story—one that calls for far more humane unemployment policies.




November 28, 2020 John Miller DOLLARS AND SENSE




https://portside.org/2020-11-28/actual-effects-enhanced-unemployment-benefits





The latest attempt to defy common sense is a study by Yale economists that purportedly finds the $600 federal enhancement to jobless benefits hasn’t affected the incentive to work. But the study offers limited evidence for this conclusion, which is contradicted by other data and real-world evidence.
—Editorial Board, “Economists vs. Common Sense: If you pay people not to work, fewer will work. Except at Yale, it seems,” Wall Street Journal, August 2, 2020.

A Republican cabal in the U.S. Senate has pledged to never renew the weekly $600 unemployment bonus that offered a lifeline to more than 25 million Americans as they weathered the economic devastation of the Covid-19 crisis. In the words of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, the only way an extension of the $600 benefit would make it through the Senate is “over my dead body.” The House of Representatives passed the extension of the $600 benefit in May (as part of the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Solutions, or HEROES, Act).

Republican opposition to $600 a week in enhanced unemployment benefits is fueled by their unwillingness to ease the draconian effects of the false choice between working and not working when there is no job to be had, and reinforced by the supposed “common sense” propagated by the Wall Street Journal editors, among others.

This is all pretty rich, especially coming from Graham, a senator who voted to raise his own salary three times (and who currently receives an annual salary of $174,000) and from the editors of the Wall Street Journal, who are far removed from the everyday world of Main Street common sense. The editors’ “bedtime story”—to use a phrase from former Senior Advisor to the Treasury Department Ernie Tedeschi—makes little sense in an economy mired in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s. And the loss of much-needed benefits only adds to the sleepless nights of those who are suffering the worst.

Overwhelming evidence supports quite a different bedtime story—one that calls for far more humane unemployment policies.
What Republican Nightmares Are Made Of

It is true. Many of the unemployed workers who received an extra $600 a week through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which was passed by Congress in March 2020, received more money than they had earned while working. Peter Ganong and two other University of Chicago economists found that was the case for about three-quarters (76%) of workers receiving weekly $600 payments and full state unemployment compensation from April through July. But Marokey Sawo and Michelle Evermore of the National Employment Law Project calculated that for just 40% of unemployed workers their benefits were greater than their previous total compensation (the sum of their wages and benefits). The intent of the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) program was to provide unemployment benefits that would fully replace the missing wages of unemployed workers. State unemployment compensation typically replaces about 40% to 45% of an unemployed worker’s prior earnings, though benefits vary from state to state. With state employment agencies not up to the task of determining and distributing benefits that would match an unemployed worker’s lost wages, Congress settled on adding a fixed benefit of $600 a week. The $600 weekly bonus payment (along with regular unemployment insurance benefits) would just replace the median weekly pay of U.S. workers, which is around $1,000. But the weekly $600 payment also pushed the total benefits of lower-income workers above their previous wages (or replaced more than 100% of their wages).

The FPUC benefits were critical to the survival of a range of workers. While the bulk of the $600 bonus went to unemployed workers receiving state unemployment benefits, workers who had exhausted their state unemployment benefits also received FPUC payments. So, too, did business owners and the self-employed, who received additional assistance from other CARES Act programs. But the $600 weekly FPUC payments ceased at the end of July and have yet to be renewed.
At Odds with the Evidence

The study conducted by the Yale economists that caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal editors is more credible than they suggest. The economists’ conclusion that enhanced unemployment benefits have not led to fewer people looking for work has not been “contradicted by other data” as the editors claim. Multiple studies, using a variety of data sets, have confirmed that enhanced unemployment benefits, even those that exceeded the previous wages of the recipient, have not led to a decrease in the number of people looking for work, or increased the number of the unemployed. (Vice Chair of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC), Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, has summarized five of these studies, including the Yale Study, on the JEC website, jec.senate.gov; see sidebar.)

Let’s look at a few of these studies, beginning with the Yale Study. Economists Dana Scott and Joseph Atlonji and several of their colleagues examined the weekly data from Homebase, a scheduling and timesheet system used by restaurants, bars, retail stores, and other service-sector businesses. They conclude that “the expansion in UI [Unemployment Insurance] replacement rates did not increase layoffs at the outset of the pandemic or discourage workers from returning to their jobs over time.” The Wall Street Journal editors have clearly misread the Yale study, for the authors never claimed that their findings hold in all economic settings. The Yale authors emphasize that, “our results do not speak to the disemployment effects of UI generosity during more normal times, which is the subject of a vast literature.”

In another study, Ernie Tedeschi, now Managing Director and Policy Economist at Evercore ISI, a financial consulting firm, examined Current Population Survey data (which is a key source for labor force statistics) for evidence that the effects of the ratio of unemployment benefits to previous wages had affected the likelihood that workers left a job or accepted a new one. He found no such evidence. Like the authors of the Yale Study, Tedeschi makes clear that his results are specific to the pandemic economy. He writes: “If the economy were at full employment, if there was no pandemic, and if the FPUC were permanent rather than a temporary component of the UI system, I’d expect an effect.”

Finally, Ioana Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, and her co-authors, examined data on job listings and applications from the online platform Glassdoor from January to June 2020. They found that, after the unemployment bonus began in March, job applications stayed “relatively stable,” job openings continued to decrease, and the ratio of applications per vacancy rose. They concluded that, “Employers who rely on online applications are not experiencing increased difficulties in finding applicants for their jobs after the CARES Act, which was a key concern with increasing benefits by $600 a week.”
An Alternative Bedtime Story

Our alternative bedtime story begins this way: No matter how hard they search, unemployed workers can’t find jobs that don’t exist. The major cause of today’s high unemployment is the lack of jobs, not workers who have stopped searching for work and have left jobs unfilled. By the end of July, there were still 11.1 million fewer jobs in the U.S. economy than there had been prior to the pandemic in January 2020.

Renewing the FPUC supplemental unemployment benefits would boost spending and create jobs. Economist Mark Zandi from Moody’s Analytics estimates that $1 of renewed unemployment benefits would increase economic output by $1.64—a multiplier effect or bang for the buck that exceeds that of most forms of government spending. Harvard economists Marco Di Maggio and Amir Kerman calculate an even bigger effect, a $1.90 increase in output for each dollar of additional unemployment benefits. Extending the $600 a week enhanced benefit would have protected 1.7 to 2.8 million jobs and lowered the unemployment rate by between 1.1 and 1.8 percentage points, according to rough estimates from the JEC. Workers will continue to return to work even if their unemployment benefits with the $600 a week FPUC supplement exceeds their previous wages. Tedeschi found that 70% of the unemployment insurance recipients who returned to work in June had been receiving unemployment benefits that were greater than their prior wages.

It makes sense, daresay, common sense: A job, even in today’s economy, is more secure than enhanced unemployment benefits, and over time will pay more than unemployment insurance benefits. State unemployment benefits expire in less than a year, and in most states they expire within 39 weeks. Our bedtime story, unlike the Wall Street Journal editors’ “common sense,” is consistent with the available evidence. And it supports generous unemployment insurance benefits that will contribute to a more robust economic recovery and actually help people get a good night’s sleep.

GREEK GENERAL STRIKE AGAINST ATTACKS ON RIGHT TO DEMONSTRATE

By Katerina Selin, WSWS.

November 28, 2020



https://popularresistance.org/greek-general-strike-against-attacks-on-right-to-demonstrate/



And Devastating Coronavirus Policy.

The mood in the international working class is strained to the breaking point. As millions of people were demonstrating against the government across India on Thursday, tens of thousands of public sector workers and employees in Greece also went on a nationwide 24-hour general strike.

They were protesting against the devastating coronavirus policies and demanded better protective measures, the confiscation of private hospitals, mass hiring of health workers and salary increases. This week, the total number of infections in Greece exceeded the 100,000 mark and the death toll rose to over 2,000. Given the overcrowded intensive care units in northern Greece, patients had to be transported to Athens by a special flight for the first time.

The strike was also directed against the authoritarian attacks of the state in the spirit of the military junta, which brutally ruled the country from 1967 to 1974 with the support of NATO. Demonstrators demanded the immediate withdrawal of the draft for a new labour law that would abolish the eight-hour day and drastically restrict the right to strike and demonstrate.

While the General Confederation of Trade Unions (GSEE) collaborates closely with the government during the pandemic, the Public Services Union (ADEDY) and the Public Hospitals Union (POEDIN) had called for the strike to try and keep the resistance under control. In addition to doctors, nurses and public employees, transport workers, dockworkers, journalists, teachers and cultural workers also took part in the strike. Ports, the subways and the electric train in Athens stood still. Strikers from all over the country gathered in front of hospitals, observing the coronavirus safety measures.

In downtown Athens, small rallies were held in front of the Labour Ministry and the Health Ministry. A large police force was deployed to intimidate the protesters.

Athenian artists rode in a motorcycle protest convoy past the hospitals to the Health Ministry. “Police everywhere—intensive care beds nowhere” and “Money for health, not for Aegean Airlines [largest Greek airline]” were written on their posters. With these slogans, they denounced the class politics of the government, which is putting vast sums into big business and increasing the repressive powers of the state, while the public health system is falling apart.

Air traffic controllers also wanted to down tools but were prevented from doing so by court order shortly before the strike began. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation had gone to court against the strike in the aviation industry and was granted an injunction. The airlines celebrated and announced flights would operate normally.

In the last weeks and months workers, students and young people had taken to the streets against the government under the right-wing conservative New Democracy (Nea Dimokratia, ND). In early April, at the beginning of the pandemic, doctors and nurses protested nationwide. In the summer, thousands demonstrated against the massive restrictions on the right to demonstrate. In September and October, thousands of students occupied over 700 schools, demanding huge investments in education rather than the military.

In mid-November, hospital workers again organised protest actions as part of a “National Action Day for Health.” Students at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki occupied the rector’s office to draw attention to the dangerous conditions in their student residences. They demanded mass tests, better cleaning and safety measures against COVID-19. The Health Ministry ignored the demands and sent in the police instead to suppress the protests.

The growing strikes and protests by the Greek working class and youth raise fundamental political questions. Few countries in recent years have experienced as many general strikes as Greece. Whenever the pressure becomes too great and the wrath of the workers threatens to break out uncontrollably, the unions resort to general strikes and ensure that resistance is channeled into a dead end. They deliberately prevent a European-wide and the international unification of the struggles, although the pandemic makes a worldwide response by the working class necessary.

The general strike covered only the civil service and was limited by the organisers to a purely national framework. The calls for the strike by the trade unions and pseudo-left organisations associated with them, such as the Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Antarsya alliance, contain no reference to the international situation, nor make an appeal to the European working class or demand the closure of all non-essential production with payment of full wages to protect all workers from the virus. The union officials do not articulate the interests of the workers but speak for prosperous sections of the middle classes who fear a revolutionary movement of the working class like the devil fears holy water.

It is significant that Syriza, the largest pseudo-left organisation in Greece and nominal leader of the parliamentary opposition, has effectively blacked out the general strike. There was no official strike call, let alone a statement by party leader Alexis Tsipras on Twitter or YouTube. Tsipras hurries from one hospital to the next to have his picture taken with doctors and nurses and to pretend to support them. But Greek workers know only too well what these false statements and empty phrases mean. They experienced it first-hand when Syriza, with Tsipras as prime minister, implemented the austerity dictates of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank when in government for four years. Syriza imposed massive cuts in health, education and social services.

Now, the pseudo-left party essentially acts as a loyal parliamentary opposition. On Thursday, the day of the general strike, Syriza representative Giorgos Katrougalos met with Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, who informed him about the new strategic partnership with the United Arab Emirates. Katrougalos, who was himself Foreign Minister in 2019 and who implemented drastic pension cuts in 2015 as Labour Minister, welcomed the cooperation with the Emirates. When he criticised the government, he did so from the right. A foreign policy “strategy” was lacking and “clear red lines” against neighbouring Turkey were needed, the Syriza politician said. Both sides agree on the need for a more aggressive imperialist policy, which of course requires billions in arms expenditures.

On the domestic front, too, Syriza and the unions agree in essence with the government’s course and play a key role in pushing through the deadly herd immunity policy against enormous resistance.

Although the pandemic situation in Greece is currently on a knife-edge, the government wants to gradually lift the lockdown on December 7. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Education Minister Niki Kerameos declared that the first thing to do was to reopen schools. In an interview with RealNews, Kerameos again claimed that children were less likely to be affected by the virus. Elementary schools had only been closed to limit social mixing and traffic by parents, he said.

Children are to be brought back to classrooms in the middle of winter, despite exploding coronavirus numbers, so that their parents are available for the job market. At the same time, the government has hardly spent any money to make distance learning technically and financially feasible for all students.

The dangerous reopening of schools is also supported by the teachers’ union OLME, which wants to link it only to certain safety precautions. In its call for a strike, OLME demands more education spending and the “necessary measures for running open schools under safe health conditions.” During the demonstration, the trade unionist P. Saraidari criticised the government for not carrying out mass tests and increasing staff, but said, “We believe that schools must be open, with safeguards.”

Syriza uses the cynical argument of child welfare to promote open “safe” schools, criticising the government for having “no plan” for education. “The school closures shows the bankruptcy of the Ministry of Education,” Syriza’s parliamentary group on education wrote in a statement in early November. Because of the “social discrimination” in the pandemic, “we must all try not to alienate children from the educational and social environment of the school and to return students to in-person classes under safe and educational conditions.” While Syriza speaks of “social discrimination,” the organisation was responsible for trampling on “child welfare” with its austerity policies and stole the future from a whole generation of young people.

The second wave of the pandemic finds a society that has been destroyed by the EU’s austerity dictates over the past ten years. While Greece’s oligarchs withdraw to their yachts and luxury villas, rejoicing in their rising share prices, most families are defenceless and at the mercy of the pandemic. Death, unemployment, low wages, poverty pensions, lack of prospects—this is the bleak reality that drives masses of people to the barricades again and again.

But a real struggle for social equality and the containment of the pandemic requires that Greek workers and youth go beyond the framework of the worn-out trade union nostrums and form their own rank-and-file safety committees, independent of all bourgeois and pseudo-left organisations and unite across national borders. Workers and young people need a socialist programme to settle accounts with the criminal coronavirus policy worldwide. Big business and the banks must be expropriated, capitalist governments overthrown in the fight for a society that puts health and life before the profits of the oligarchs.

‘REFUSING TO SERVE IN THE ARMY IS MY SMALL ACT OF MAKING CHANGE’

By Oren Ziv, +972 Magazine.

November 28, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/refusing-to-serve-in-the-army-is-my-small-act-of-making-change/



Hallel Rabin Spent 56 Days In Military Prison For Refusing To Serve In The IDF.

Now she opens up about her time behind bars, conversations with her fellow inmates, and talking to young Israelis about the occupation.

As Hallel Rabin stood before the IDF conscientious objectors committee two weeks ago, the military body that decides whether or not she would be sent back to prison for refusing to serve in the army, she was asked the strangest of questions: “Would you agree to wear the army uniform if it were pink?”

“I don’t have an issue with the color,” she responded, “I have an issue with wearing an army uniform — regardless of the army.” A conscientious objector, Rabin was still in military prison for refusing to serve due to the army’s occupation policies. On November 20, Rabin’s fourth stint in military prison came to an end; a day later the army officially gave her the discharge she had wanted. She served a total of 56 days behind bars.

Rabin, 19, from Kibbutz Harduf in northern Israel, was first imprisoned in August after appearing before the committee to appeal for an exemption. She was tried and sentenced to two different periods of incarceration, including during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Upon her release last week, Rabin thought she would be going home for a brief stint before another sentencing. But when she turned on her phone, she received a message from her attorney, Adv. Asaf Weitzen, who informed her that the committee had accepted her request and that she was being released.

As she told Orly Noy in October, Rabin was raised by a mother who taught civics, and began asking herself questions about the reality in Israel from a young age. By the age of 15 she knew she wouldn’t be able to enlist in the army, since doing so goes “against my most basic ideals, and that I cannot support such violent policies.”

Less than a week after her release, Rabin has yet to get used to life outside prison. She wakes up every day at six, as is required on the inside, and answers the hundreds of messages she regularly receives from across the world. I met her this week in Harduf for a conversation about refusing to serve in the army, her time behind bars, and the possibility of talking to young Israelis about refusal.

How did you end up in prison? What did your refusal look like?

“On the day of my enlistment, I arrived at the conscription base knowing that I was going to jail. That was my goal, but I didn’t really understand how to go about it. I started the conscription process but did not know whom to turn to [to refuse]. I sat down on a chair and loudly proclaimed: “I need you to bring someone who will know to tell me what to do. I am a conscientious objector and I need to go to prison and I will not become a soldier.

“Finally, a nice woman took me to an office where I signed a paper saying I was refusing to serve. I found it amusing that my goal was to go to jail, and that once I was there I would be in the right place.”

Rabin was initially sentenced to seven days and was sent to the women’s ward of Prison Six, a military prison in northern Israel. “It was the longest, most exhausting day of my life,” she recounts. “It took me three days to understand what was going on, how to respond [to the prison authorities], how to get around. I learned fast.”

What was your time in jail like?

“It was a crazy experience. I was in a cell with a Border Police officer, a woman who served at a checkpoint, two women who refused to serve as surveillance monitoring operators, one woman who had attacked her commander, and a military police officer who went AWOL. We were six in total.

“The first question they asked me was ‘why are you here?’ I told them, hesitantly, ‘I am a conscientious objector.’ They immediately began asking all the well-known questions: ‘Are you a leftist? Are you pro-Palestinian?’ During my first sentence I learned how to live as a conscientious objector. Every time there was a new group of girls or I went back [to prison], the subject would stir controversy and a great deal of discussion.”

Did the soldiers and commanders in jail talk to you about your decision to refuse?

“There is not one soldier who didn’t hear my story. Even the commanders were interested. There was one officer who told me that she appreciates my decision and even praised me. That was one of the important conversations I had — someone from inside the system understood why I did what I did and had an appreciation for it.

“I didn’t fight with anyone in jail. It was practice for my ego, for my ability to have a conversation, for my ability to be socially flexible. To be in a position in which people disagree with me and in which I feel uncomfortable — almost threatened — but to be okay with that.”

Rabin was released after five days and sent home, where she spent the next 2.5 weeks. “It takes longer to get used to home. In jail there is order in everything, then all of a sudden you’re released. It’s confusing,” she says. “The hardest thing about going back home is returning to jail.”

When she returned to the conscription base in Tel Hashomer, she was sentenced to another two weeks in prison — one week for refusal to serve and another for absenteeism. Like other conscientious objectors, after each stint in prison she received another summons to the base and was repeatedly sentenced.

How did you pass the time?

“I read eight books, including ‘Feminism is for Everybody’ [by bell hooks] and ‘Nonviolence Explained to My Children’ [by Jacques Semelin]. My friends Hillel and Tamar, also conscientious objectors, told me half-jokingly that my homework was to find similarities between feminism and conscientious objection.”

Before her third stint in jail, Rabin decided to go public about her refusal with the help of Mesarvot, a grassroots network that brings together individuals and groups who refuse to enlist in the IDF in protest of the occupation. “At first, I hoped that there wouldn’t be any good reason for me to turn to the media. I had hoped to be discharged by the conscientious objectors committee. I thought it would all come to an end after my first sentence,” she explains.

Even before her enlistment date, Rabin tried to approach the conscience objectors committee, which promptly rejected her request for an exemption. During her first period of incarceration, she filed an appeal and waited for the military to return with its reasons for jailing her. When the arguments were late in coming, she decided to go to the media. After her third time in prison, Mesarvot organized a demonstration in support of Rabin outside the conscription base. She was sentenced to 25 days. Between the third and fourth incarceration periods, Rabin was scheduled to have her second hearing before the IDF conscientious objectors committee.

What was the difference between the first and second committee?

“The second time around was longer, they went deep into the details. The first committee asked me questions to try and prove that my refusal was political and based on conscientious objection rather than on pacifism [the IDF has historically made a distinction between conscripts who can prove they are “non-political pacifists,” and those who refuse to serve over what the army deems “political” reasons, such as specific opposition to the Israeli occupation. Despite the difficulties of doing so, conscripts who can prove they are the former have a higher chance of receiving exemptions].

“In the second committee hearing they asked me why I wasn’t wearing my army uniform. I explained that I had come from my home and that in any case I had refused to enlist as a conscientious objector, which is why I never received a uniform in the first place. Even if they demanded I wear it, I would never put on a uniform. They are trying to understand whether your refusal is political or driven by pacifism, how you respond to situations of violence, and what your lifestyle looks like.”

What did you say?

“I was more prepared [the second time around]. Fifty days in prison, daily conversations on the topic, and interviews with the media helped me explain myself.

“I said that I was not willing to take part in any way in a system whose very essence is based on fighting and violent oppression. I believe that this needs to change, and this is my way to make change. This is my small act. I added that I have been vegetarian my entire life, buy second-hand clothing, and am against exploitation, capitalism, and sexism.”

Did you feel that the committee understood that a pacifist objector who opposes violence will also be against the occupation?

“It upsets them. It’s hard for them. They are four members of the army and a civics professor. All of them are 50 years old or older and have dedicated their lives to reaching high positions [in the IDF], and I’m a 19-year-old girl who tells them ‘this is not okay.’ I am sure that it is personally hard for them. I would not enlist in the Swiss army, but I live here and am supposed to serve in the army that commits these acts. I oppose the occupation because it is violent, oppressive, and racist.”

During her second committee hearing, the members showed Rabin a photo of herself taking part in the Mesarvot protest outside the conscription base, which took place just before she was jailed for the third time. The photo showed her holding a sign that read “Mesarvot” [Hebrew for the feminine form of “refusers”] and “Refusing the occupation is democracy.”

“They asked me what the sign meant,” Rabin says. “I said that it is legitimate to oppose issues that have turned into taboo subjects — that opposing them is democratic.”

Activists in Mesarvot told +972 that over the past half year, the conscientious objectors committee has made it much harder to receive an exemption on conscientious grounds as well as to receive explanations when requests for discharge are denied. The organization hopes that Rabin’s discharge will bring about a change in this policy.

Do you feel it is possible to talk to teenagers about the occupation?

“It’s not about age. I don’t need to wait until half my life is behind me to fight for my principles… it is not a bad thing that I say out loud that going to the conscientious objectors committee is a legitimate option and that it is possible to think for oneself. Even prison isn’t bad. It is exhausting but I did not leave with a feeling of anxiety or wanting to die.”

What kind of responses did you receive after your release?

“A lot of people reached out from Israel and across the world. Some people cursed me. Others wrote that [my refusal] was inspirational and brings hope that there are teenagers who stand up for what they believe. Palestinians also wrote to me after [my story] was published in Turkey. Someone from Tulkarem wrote that he appreciates my act and hopes that one day we’ll drink coffee together and talk about life.”

DEMONSTRATORS RALLY AGAINST FRENCH SECURITY BILL IN PARIS

By Sputnik News.

November 28, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/demonstrators-rally-against-french-security-bill-in-paris/




French parliament late on Tuesday passed a bill on global security, criminalising the publication of images of police officers online, despite the recent riots against the legislation being criticised for possibly infringing on the freedom of the press.

Live from Paris as protesters rally against the ‘Global Security’ bill in France.

Article 24 of the bill, which has come under especial criticism as it makes it illegal to distribute videos and photos identifying law enforcement officers and thereby violate their “physical or mental integrity,” was approved by the parliament, against the backdrop of demonstrations over the past week.

Critics of the legislation have said say it may hamper the functions of mass media to cover protests and inform the population, while also violating freedom of expression.

In turn, French Prime Minister Jean Castex said on Twitter that the government has never had any intention to undermine freedoms of press and expression, and added that he would refer the bill’s controversial Article 24 to the country’s Constitutional Court.

Follow Sputnik feed to find out more.

CALL TO STOP SHUTTING OFF PEOPLE’S POWER FOR GOOD

By Greg Harmon, Deceleration.

November 28, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/call-to-stop-shutting-off-peoples-power-for-good/



Disconnects By CPS Energy Have Doubled During CEO Paula Gold-Williams’ Tenure.

And there are still no promises of reform.

Across San Antonio, the virus was hunting. Food insecurity was high. Mass layoffs and terminations rolled on. And it was hot. Hundred-degree days scorched much of July.

Yet the lights and air conditioners—for the first time in many, many summers—were staying on reliably for rich and poor alike across the city. Every side of town. Every block. For thousands of poor families across the city who routinely struggle to keep up with their utility payments, this was perhaps the one gift of a deadly pandemic: a pause on forced electricity disconnections for nonpayment.

Since the pandemic struck, however, these disconnections—up to nearly 100,000 some years—have been on hold. Across the country, utilities like City-owned CPS Energy—some voluntarily, most by decree—prioritized human wellbeing over profit.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg and City Council members, faced with the compounding tragedy that is the virus and its disproportionate punishment of poor folks and people of color (locally, Latinx communities most of all), have pledged to build a new world—a post-COVID world beyond the structural racism and economic oppression that made San Antonio, the most racially and economically segregated large US city, particularly vulnerable to the virus.

In an attempt to force the issue, nearly two dozen community organizations penned an Open Letter to Mayor Ron Nirenberg and the City Council last month. Top of the list of recommended policy reforms intended to spur recovery from the impact of COVID-19 was a call for the elimination of disconnections as policy for any residents at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line.

It was a letter I submitted on the group’s behalf.

Here’s the relevant excerpt:

End the Policy of Utility Disconnections for Most Vulnerable Families

Until the novel coronavirus appeared in San Antonio, CPS Energy was cutting power to roughly 100,000 households and businesses every year for non-payment. While disconnections are currently paused in response to the economic crisis that has followed the COVID-19 pandemic, other city-owned utilities have begun returning to disconnecting power to the most vulnerable households for non-payment, and it’s just a matter of time before CPS Energy returns to their former behavior. To give ratepayers more security than a 30-day warning, we call on CPS Energy to publicly commit to ending disconnections until, at least, February 2021.

CPS must eliminate completely the policy of disconnections for nonpayment for all households at or below 200% of the poverty level. Additionally, we call for a third-party audit of existing payment assistance programs and a study of the potential impacts of rate-structure changes that could significantly reduce the costs to overburdened lower-income neighborhoods. We note that CPS Energy enacted a temporary pause on disconnections in the early days of this pandemic–the same day Councilmembers called for such a pause. While Council members have historically resisted engagement with CPS Energy because of power distinctions set in the Charter agreement, the Mayor and Council have a tremendous amount of political authority to set our energy agenda when they choose to use it.
Support The Call For Ending Disconnections At Action Network.

This movement for the elimination of disconnections as policy was spurred along, in part, by revelations about the sizable scale of suffering involved.

As a colleague of mine working as a Democracy & Clean Energy intern at the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, Shaneal Harun filed a state open records request with CPS in February to find out how common these disconnections were. The answer, it turns out, is very.

Though CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams consistently downplays the numbers involved, the utility disconnects power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses per year. I first wrote about the disconnections for San Antonio Report in July (republished here at Deceleration).

At that point I hadn’t noticed how significantly different the numbers were under each CEO.

While state unemployment rates declined year by year from 8.3 percent in 2010 to 3.5 percent in 2019, it has been under Gold-Williams’s watch over these last few years that disconnects have soared.

Milton Lee served as CPS CEO from 2002 to 2010. During this time disconnects hovered around 50,000 per year.

CEO Doyle Beneby reduced disconnections for nonpayment during his tenure from 2010 to 2015, keeping them under 50,000 until the year of his departure, when they leapt to 72,000. (Beneby left CPS in September, 2015. He was named CEO of New Generation Power International on October 1, 2015.)

Shutoffs remained unusually high in 2017 at 75,131, but hit a new peak under Gold-Williams at 99,908 in 2018 before starting to slow in 2019 with 53,391 total disconnections for nonpayment.

Harun originally sought records dating back to 2000, but CPS Legal Services Attorney Stacey Cormican wrote that no data existed prior to 2003 “due to a change in our reporting hardware and software.”

Harun was not entirely surprised by what they found.

“Some of the numbers I saw, such as the number of summer shutoffs across ZIP Codes, certainly surprised me in relation to CPS Energy’s claims that they don’t perform shutoffs during extreme weather conditions such as heat waves,” they said. “Other numbers were less surprising, [reflecting] the existing inequities in San Antonio.”

Given the amount of time Harun spent researching the utility’s board of trustees during their time with the Sierra Club, Harun even may have expected worse.

“I found that the current Trustees reflected, at best, an ideological slant towards corporate interests and corporate style governance and, at worst, substantial ties to halls of power populated by the most powerful actors in San Antonio—oil and gas, real estate, and other industrial interests in particular,” they said.

So far, the coalition’s Open Letter and call for an end to disconnects has made hardly a ripple in the local political fabric.

The only response from Council came in an automated confirmation of receipt from the office of District 7 Councilmember Ana Sandoval. The mayor’s office is aware of the letter but has yet to respond publicly to its contents.

As a new wave of COVID-19 is manifesting, utilities around the country, from Alabama to Colorado and beyond, have returned to policies of disconnections for nonpayment, according to another colleague, Mary Anne Hitt, the Sierra Club’s national director of campaigns, writing in The Hill. With apparent disinterest marking most of the elected leadership in San Antonio, there is no reason to hope that we are headed to any changes in CPS’s disconnection policies, even as Gold-Williams promises to bring a rate increase request to Council next year.

CPS also hasn’t responded to the call for an end to disconnects. However, last month, about two weeks after the Open Letter was released, Gold-Williams pledged the moratorium on disconnections would remain through the end of the year.

True, Gold-Williams may be considered otherwise occupied, having her job (and last remaining coal plant) under threat by a recall petition likely advancing to the 2021 ballot. To this immediate personal threat, she has taking to bashing climate-action advocates while standing alongside heads of the San Antonio Chamber, where she herself briefly served as chair before resigning under public pressure.

Those organized for climate action as part of the Recall CPS petition she dismisses as advancing “an ideology” rather than a critical policy shift supported by international climate science and San Antonio’s own Climate Action and Adaptation Plan (PDF).

With stirring echoes of San Antonio, Hitt assesses the COVID-era national utility landscape this way:


Some are still sinking billions of dollars into botched nuclear plants and want to spend billions more on gas infrastructure that will be uncompetitive in less than a decade. Others are similarly holding onto coal, chasing nuclear and gas and sticking families with the bill. And as these companies dump billions into polluting projects and shut off power to low-income families, their CEOs are taking home multi-million dollar salaries.

Though COVID-scolded CPS executives went without bonuses this year, Gold-Williams’s take home in 2019 was $930,669, according to the San Antonio Report, making her (by a long way) San Antonio’s highest-paid employee.

At the other end of the economic spectrum are those hundreds of thousands being punished by by CPS’s business-as-usual cutoffs, expected soon to make a return.

Considering that three people live in an average San Antonio household, it would follow that in 2018 roughly 300,000 people were cut off by CPS at some point in the year from a source of refrigeration for foods and medicine, light to study by at night, and air conditioning to stay healthy/alive. That is, if most of those disconnections were homes rather than businesses, which seems likely.

That’s 300,000 in a city of 1,500,000.

The summer-month cutoffs are certainly particularly cruel, but in a city where residents in upper-income ZIP Codes tend to outlive those in historically neglected Southside communities by decades, the practice of stripping power from those struggling to improve their lot is unconscionable whatever time of year.

What city can prosper like this?

What Council committed to dismantling structural violence can permit it?

As the call for reform at the Action Network states:


The impact of COVID-19 has laid bare San Antonio’s glaring income and health disparities between white residents and people of color. A raft of factors are behind these grim inequities: exposure to air pollution from fossil-fueled car and truck traffic; lack of access to greenspace and healthy food; redlining and racist development patterns and policing; rising temperatures driven by the engines of climate change and dirty power plants; and zoning that permits industrial operations near schools and neighborhoods.

Eliminating disconnections is just the first step toward elevating those long alienated from political power in the City. We’ll see how deep our leaders evolving public commitment to resisting racism as a public health threat really is in the months ahead.