https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzQLi-ZnNLs
Saturday, March 27, 2021
Friday, March 26, 2021
WESTERN MEDIA: PROSECUTING COUP LEADERS IS WORSE THAN LEADING A COUP
By Joe Emersberger, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
March 25, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/western-media-prosecuting-bolivian-coup-leaders-is-worse-than-leading-a-coup/
One can imagine an editor of the London-based Guardian (3/17/21) shaking her head sadly as she typed the headline: “Cycle of Retribution Takes Bolivia’s Ex-President From Palace to Prison Cell.” The subhead told readers, “Jeanine Áñez’s government once sought to jail the country’s former leader Evo Morales for terrorism and sedition—now she faces the same charges.”
The Guardian article by Tom Phillips wants us to lament an alleged incapacity of Bolivian governments to stop persecuting opponents once they take office. We are told that Áñez’s government did it, and that now the government of President Luis Arce (elected in a landslide win on October 18, 2020) is also doing it.
The article’s premise is a lie, and the liberal Guardian has hardly been the only outlet spreading it, with help from Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), whom Philips quoted. A team effort between Western media and NGOs like HRW often reinforces the views of the US government (FAIR.org, 8/23/18, 8/31/18, 5/31/2o, 11/3/18).
Áñez was a US-backed dictator installed after a military coup sent democratically elected President Evo Morales fleeing Bolivia for his life on November 10, 2019. Once in power, Áñez immediately promised security forces legal immunity as they massacred dozens of protesters. She is now charged with terrorism (in addition to sedition and criminal conspiracy) over her attempt to keep power by terrorizing the public. Her arrest is good news to people who support democracy and human rights.
But now, as when the coup took place in 2019, the most obvious conclusions are evaded when they are incompatible with US foreign policy (FAIR.org, 11/11/19). It should surprise nobody that US officials have made statements depicting her arrest as political persecution.
Fighting To Spring An Ex-Dictator
In downgrading the coup that installed Áñez to a mere allegation made against Áñez, Reuters (3/13/21), the Financial Times (3/13/21), the Washington Post (3/13/21), CNN (3/15/21) and Canada’s National Post (3/13/21) have all run articles quoting HRW’s Vivanco criticizing her arrest. CNN quoted him:
The arrest warrants against Añez and her ministers do not contain any evidence that they have committed the crime of “terrorism.” For this reason, they generate well-founded doubts that it is a process based on political motives.
The Washington Post article, whose headline alleged a “crackdown on opposition,” used a shorter version of the same quote from Vivanco.
While all the articles described the coup as an allegation, CNN stands out for getting the most ridiculous with its denialism:
Then-head of the Bolivian Armed Forces, Cmdr. Williams Kaliman, asked Morales to step down to restore stability and peace; Morales acquiesced on November 10 “for the good of Bolivia.”
But political allies maintain he was removed from power as part of a coup orchestrated by conservatives, including Áñez.
Did Kaliman need to be filmed putting a gun directly to Morales’ head for CNN to admit it was a coup?
Adding to the disinformation loop from his own platform on Twitter, Vivanco spread an Americas Quarterly op-ed by Raul Peñaranda (3/16/21) that denounced the arrest of Áñez. Peñaranda once said that Bolivia’s democracy was “saved” the day Morales was overthrown, and his recent op-ed depicts the November 2019 coup as a legal transfer of power.
In 2019, the military publicly “urged” Morales to resign, as both the military and police made clear they would not protect him from violent right-wing protesters, some of whom ransacked his house. Áñez, a right-wing senator whose party received only 4% of the national vote in the 2019 legislative elections, had the presidential sash placed on her by military men, while lawmakers from Evo Morales’ party (Movimineto al Socialismo, or MAS), the majority in the legislature, were absent: some in hiding, others refusing to attend without guarantees of their safety and their families’.
Ignoring all that, the Guardian article by Tom Philips refers to “claims the former senator [Áñez] was involved in plotting the right-wing coup that Bolivia’s current government claims brought her to power.” (My emphasis.) Editors are usually big fans of concision. The highlighted words should have been deleted. An added benefit would have been accuracy.
Of course, it’s easier to deny that Áñez was involved in plotting the coup that put her in power (hardly a stretch) if you do not even accept that a coup took place. Reuters placed scare quotes around the word “coup” in headlines about Áñez’s arrest: “Bolivian Ex-President Áñez Begins Four-Month Detention Over ‘Coup’ Allegations” (3/16/21); “ Bolivian Ex-President Áñez Begins Jail Term as Rights Groups Slam ‘Coup’ Probe” (3/14/21).
Reuters (3/14/21) and CNN (3/15/21) also uncritically reported the thoroughly debunked pretext for the coup. CNN reported, “Though an international audit would later find the results the 2019 election could not be validated because of ‘serious irregularities,’ [Morales] declared himself the winner, prompting massive protests around the country.” (The “international audit” is the OAS’s widely debunked report.) Reuters simply stated that the Organization of America States (OAS) “was an official monitor of the 2019 election and had found it fraudulent.”
Cycle Of Dishonesty
The coup was incited by transparently dishonest claims repeatedly made by OAS monitors about the presidential election won by Morales on October 20, 2019. Three days after the election, they claimed there was a “drastic,” “inexplicable” and “hard to explain” increase in Morales’ lead in the vote count (FAIR.org, 12/17/19).
The Washington, DC–based Center for Economic and Policy Research immediately pointed out that this was utter nonsense. But in the crucial months following Morales’ ouster, outlets like Reuters constantly shielded the OAS from devastating criticism. Eventually, expert criticism of the OAS continually mounted and disrupted the media silence. Details from the election results in 2020, in which Evo Morales’ party triumphed by an even greater margin than in 2019, further exposed OAS dishonesty.
Like Reuters, the widely quoted Jose Miguel Vivanco of HRW spread fraud claims when it mattered most in 2019. The day after the election won by Morales, Vivanco tweeted in Spanish that “everything indicates that [Evo Morales] intends to steal the election.” As late as December 2019, HRW executive director Ken Roth was also promoting OAS claims without the slightest trace of scepticism. Months into the murderous illegitimate rule of Áñez, Vivanco explicitly referred to Bolivia as a “democracy.” He did so in a Spanish-language interview with BrujulaDigital (5/15/20), an outlet edited by Raul Peñaranda, the coup supporter whose Americas Quarterly op-ed Vivanco recently promoted on Twitter. Meanwhile, on Twitter, Vivanco constantly refers to the governments of President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua–two democratically elected presidents the US government wants overthrown–as “dictaduras” (dictatorships).
The New York Times editorial board openly supported the coup that ousted Morales in 2019:
The forced ouster of an elected leader is by definition a setback to democracy, and so a moment of risk. But when a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done, and what remains is to hope that Mr. Morales goes peacefully into exile in Mexico and to help Bolivia restore its wounded democracy.
So predictably enough, a Times article (3/12/21) about the recent Áñez arrest referred vaguely to the utterly debunked OAS fraud claims (“a contested vote count”) and took the same kind of dishonest stance as HRW and other Western media by equating a US-backed dictatorship to a democratically elected government whose ouster the US supported: “Both Mr. Morales and Ms. Añez used the judiciary to go after their critics.”
The Washington Post editorial board (3/18/21) came out with a wild defense of Añez, headlined: “The Bolivian Government Is on a Lawless Course. Its Democracy Must Be Preserved.” Most ominously, the editorial said, “The Biden administration should lead a regional effort to preserve democratic stability in this long-suffering country, lest crisis turn into catastrophe.” Informed people may laugh at this for a few seconds–until they remember that Bolivia’s people could eventually face lethal US sanctions for daring to hold murderers to account. Left unchallenged, that’s the catastrophe that propaganda like this could bring about.
Brutal dictators supported by Washington have no reason to doubt that establishment journalists and big NGOs will try very hard to keep them out of jail. Removing the threat of US -backed coups from the world will involve a constant struggle against Western media and the sources they present to us as reliable.
COLECTIVO COULD BECOME THE LARGEST UNIONIZED COFFEE CHAIN
By Alice Herman, In These Times.
March 25, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/colectivo-could-become-the-largest-unionized-coffee-chain/
Workers At The Coffee Chain Are Resisting An Aggressive Union-Busting Campaign In Their Fight To Organize.
On March 8, Lauretta Archibald marked her three-year anniversary as a baker for Colectivo Coffee Roasters, an upscale Midwestern coffee chain based in Milwaukee and Chicago.
In her years at Colectivo, Archibald had been responsible for making artisan bread in bulk, sometimes baking 1,000 loaves a night. It was arduous work, and Archibald says that she did not always have the support — or even materials — that she needed: the bakery was understaffed for stretches of time, there weren’t enough cooling racks and one of the ovens leaked the smell of gas through the kitchen.
When workers at the coffee chain first announced their plan to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Archibald — who eventually became a strong supporter of the union — wasn’t sure how she felt about the idea. “I didn’t know enough about unions to really say one or the other.” Still, she says, “I knew that something had to change.”
Workers say that last-minute scheduling, chronically broken equipment, and rapid expansion of the company brand spurred the union drive — while issues around Colectivo’s handling of Covid-19 popularized the campaign.
Now, Colectivo’s staff of about 375 workers faces an election that will decide the fate of a union drive nearly a year in the making, with ballots due on March 30 and counted in the first week of April. If the campaign is successful, the workers will make history: the industry is almost entirely unorganized, and Colectivo would become the largest unionized coffee chain in the country. But as bakers, warehouse workers and baristas mobilize support for the union, the company has responded with open hostility, hiring the Labor Relations Institute (LRI) — a well-known union buster — during the campaign.
“There are paid staff meetings where they’re asking us, individually, to vote no,” says Caroline Fortin, a shift lead at a location in Chicago. “So they’re very explicit.”
In These Times has also obtained copies of anti-union emails, “vote no” stickers and anti-union flyers drafted by Colectivo.
Management communications have invoked the anti-labor trope that unionization invites a harmful “third party” into the fold, and charge that the IBEW should not be representing the coffee workers. (In fact, most historic trade unions now represent a wide range of professions; many members of the United Auto Workers, for example, work in the nonprofit sector.)
One email from management goes so far as to highlight the high rate of attrition from the company for pro-union workers. “Of the 18 original organizing committee members, 10 remain employed today,” reads the email. The email goes on to list union organizers by job title and work location, with red slashes through those who no longer work at Colectivo.
Indeed, workers say that the anti-union campaign has gone beyond propaganda and disinformation.
When the union drive went public in August 2020, Zoe Muellner, a café worker, attached her signature to a letter notifying Colectivo of the plan to organize. She says that after the letter was released, upper management — with whom she interacted regularly as a barista trainer — stopped answering her emails and cut social ties.
A career barista, Muellner had worked in the coffee industry for six years — and Colectivo, for two — when the company cut her position as a trainer in October 2020.
“I asked if that meant I was done with the company in general, or if I could essentially take a demotion as a café coworker until they needed me back on in my position. And they said there were no positions available for me … but go ahead and file for unemployment, kid.”
Muellner and the union say the layoff amounts to retaliation.
Also in October 2020, Robert Penner — a specialized machine operator in the Milwaukee warehouse — was abruptly let go. Penner had taken part in “union talk” since 2019, and like Muellner, had come out in public support of the campaign in early fall of 2020.
Penner says that the company requested that he come back on board following a voluntary pandemic-related furlough in the summer — but before his first shift back, he was told that Colectivo no longer needed him. Since his departure, the company has resorted to filling Penner’s position with baristas.
“They were pulling in café workers who weren’t trained to work in the warehouse,” says Kait Dessoffy, a shift lead at a Chicago café.
Archibald says that she had a similar experience after speaking up at an anti-union meeting held by an LRI representative.
“Me and another coworker specifically, we challenged everything he said,” Archibald says. “After that night, that guy knew we were for the union.”
In the weeks following the anti-union meeting, she noticed changes at work. Archibald was required to quickly train her coworkers in braiding Challah bread — a job that was formerly one of her specialties. At the time, Archibald thought it was “weird” that managers had requested to inspect her coworkers’ practice loaves. “Normally, when we did practice stuff, it was really just practice,” she says. In retrospect, she believes management was getting things in line for her departure.
About six weeks ago, Archibald was abruptly moved off of her usual duties and instead instructed to prepare English muffins, a job for which she says she was never properly trained. She adds that management rapidly increased the number of biscuits she was required to bake — 400 one night, then 500, then 900.
“It felt like they were setting me up, you know, hoping I fail,” she explains.
Finally, on March 16, Archibald reports that she was fired for taking a smoke break. She left Colectivo just a week after her three-year anniversary with the company.
LRI, whose website brags that the firm “literally wrote the book in countering union organizing campaigns,” has been identified by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) as one of the largest union-busting firms in the United States. The company made a popular debut in the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary “American Factory,” which follows a union-busting campaign by a Fuyao Glass Company factory in Ohio.
According to company disclosures to the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS), Colectivo pays LRI $375 an hour for services retained.
Even absent the involvement of a “labor consulting firm” like LRI, employer retaliation is endemic in union campaigns. In 41.5% of union elections in the United States, employers receive Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges— and surveys of labor organizations suggest that the number of instances of employer aggression during union campaigns is much higher.
The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which was passed by the House of Representatives on March 9, attempts to curb this kind of union busting by banning “captive audience” meetings and instating stricter penalties for retaliatory firings.
In total, Colectivo has received six ULP allegations alleging retaliation and coercion during the ongoing union drive.
Still, union-busting tactics are not always straightforward, and can be difficult to prove. One Colectivo barista says that she has faced a subtler form of retaliation for her involvement with the campaign.
“I’ve always been, like, an over apologizer-type of person,” says Hillary Laskonis, a barista at Colectivo, explaining why her leadership in the campaign came as a surprise to some. “I think the owners take the whole thing personally.”
Laskonis says that managers have pulled her aside for multiple tense and vaguely disciplinary meetings. Recently, she says managers warned her that they had received multiple complaints about her attitude and performance. This took Laskonis, a Colectivo barista of three years, by surprise.
“[The meeting] was framed all around my mental health, and ‘what can we do to help you succeed, because you’re clearly struggling,’ and all this.” Coupled with the accusation that a coworker had been complaining about her, Laskonis says that the managers’ apparent concern for her mental wellbeing led her to question herself.
“It wasn’t until I talked to the other [union] members on a group chat,” says Laskonis, “that I was able to realize that, like, I was so majorly gaslit at a corporate level.”
Colectivo management did not respond to multiple requests for comment about allegations of misconduct by workers, but instead said in a statement, “We and our and leadership team recognize the complexity of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and turned to professionals who specialize in the law to ensure the company and its co-workers are fully informed.”
Workers, meanwhile, say that solidarity among staff has remained strong during the campaign, allowing them to continue to organize despite the ongoing anti-union rhetoric and activity.
“I think perhaps what management doesn’t realize about these [anti-union] meetings, or maybe about their staff, is that we’re really smart — we’re together. We are more than capable of forming our own opinions about our working conditions,” says Dessoffy.
“We work in service,” they add, “We know when someone is gaslighting us.”
THE RURAL SOUTH LOST 13 HOSPITALS IN 2020
By Olivia Paschal, Facing South.
March 25, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/the-rural-south-lost-13-hospitals-in-2020/
For the Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center, the last straw was the COVID-19 pandemic, which strained the critical access hospital’s already-precarious finances past the breaking point. In Florida, two hospitals closed inpatient non-emergency services after being bought out by the HCA hospital chain. In Tennessee and West Virginia, financial problems combined with the strain of the pandemic led two more rural hospitals to shut their doors.
Of the 20 rural hospitals that closed in 2020, 13 were in the South, according to data from the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which defines a closed hospital as one that no longer offers inpatient services. Tennessee was the Southern state most affected, losing four rural hospitals last year alone.
“One person mentioned that right now, the nearest hospital is 25 miles away. And the community is deflated and angry, because it feels like nobody cares if they die,” said Kinika Young, the senior director of health policy and advocacy at the Tennessee Justice Center, which last fall conducted a phone survey of rural communities that had lost or were at risk of losing a hospital.
Rural health care providers in the South, and across the nation, warned from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that they were financially vulnerable, as Facing South reported a year ago. “It is becoming absolutely dire,” Maggie Elehwany, then the government affairs and policy vice president for the National Association of Rural Hospitals, said at the time.
The factors that lead rural hospitals to close are complex, and they can vary from community to community. Rural communities themselves are diverse in population, needs, and infrastructure. “There’s just all kinds of ways, from the demographics to the economics to the existing infrastructure to the geography, that will make needs differ,” said George Pink, a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Health Policy and Management and a senior research fellow at the Sheps Center. Because of this, he said, there’s no silver bullet policy solution that will fix rural health care’s precarity problem. Instead, he said, it will take a combination of federal and state policy initiatives, and more research on what works and what doesn’t.
The South’s rural hospitals have long been among the most vulnerable to closure, in part because the region’s rural populations have particularly high rates of poverty and uninsurance. There are racial disparities, too: A 2015 Sheps Center report found that hospitals were more likely to close entirely, with no outpatient care provided, in markets with higher proportions of Black patients. Just five Southern states have expanded Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program for people living in poverty, which many advocates believe is one of the most effective steps a state can take to avoid losing rural health access.
“In states that have expanded Medicaid, the rate of rural hospital closures is six times less than in states that haven’t expanded,” said Young, citing findings from a 2018 study. “Positioning Medicaid expansion as a potential solution to the struggles that rural hospitals are facing has been a big rallying cry” for groups like the Tennessee Justice Center, she said.
The American Rescue Plan, the COVID-19 stimulus package signed into law earlier this month, incentivizes states that have not yet expanded Medicaid to do so by increasing their reimbursement from the federal government for two years. An National Law Review analysis of the legislation found the slight increase probably won’t be enough incentive for non-expansion states to expand Medicaid. “However, ballot initiatives, a change in the governor’s mansion, or change in control of the state legislature could lead additional states to Medicaid expansion,” it said.
In Tennessee, the legislature tried to overhaul the state’s Medicaid program by getting approval from the Trump administration back in January to receive Medicaid dollars through a block grant, giving the state a fixed annual payment rather than open-ended funding in exchange for greater flexibility over the program. It’s an approach favored by conservatives who believe that states freed from strict federal oversight can find ways to provide care more efficiently. But that approval could be rescinded under Biden. And many advocates would rather see the certainty of expansion anyway. The money provided under the block grant approach “just doesn’t add up” to funding available under an expanded Medicaid program, Young said.
There are three basic sets of factors that tend to make rural hospitals vulnerable to closure, Pink said. First, there are market factors, when a hospital serves a shrinking or highly uninsured population. Then there are hospital factors, when hospitals struggle to recruit or retain employees, contend with old buildings and/or equipment, or struggle with fraud or safety concerns.
“The most important, though, is the financial bucket,” Pink said. “These hospitals, what they have in common is they tend to have high rates of charity care, of bad debt, they may have substantially high levels of debt, they generally have low profitability over a long period of time, and they just literally run out of cash.”
The pandemic exacerbated these long-term financial factors. Many states required hospitals to cancel or postpone elective surgeries and other outpatient and primary care visits, which typically make up a major part of hospital revenue streams. Expenses increased because hospitals had to purchase personal protective equipment and ventilators, and in some cases hire temporary staff when others were in quarantine. And hospitals ran out of cash.
Four of the 13 rural Southern hospitals that closed in 2020 cited financial difficulties worsened by COVID-19 as a reason for shutting their doors.
These closures will have long-term effects. In many rural communities, hospitals are a primary employer. They support businesses, families, and sometimes the entire economic infrastructure of a rural community.
“When a hospital closes in a rural community, that’s it. The people in the community don’t have a lot of other options, typically, that they can replace that care with. They’re then traveling 15, 20, 30 miles,” said Pink.
Young with the Tennessee Justice Center said that the closures tend to have a domino effect. Some of the people her group spoke to during the fall phone survey said that businesses were considering leaving their county, and that even preventative care services were less accessible now that the hospital was gone, she said.
“People in rural communities don’t want to be forgotten. They have been hit hard by the pandemic because of the geographic isolation and the fact that they were already dealing with lower incomes and less access to care,” she said. “When you add a pandemic on top of that, they’re basically at their breaking point, and they’re looking to their leaders for help, for attention.”
Boot Camps For Crushing Democracy
Records show right-wing groups have used their conferences to teach Republican lawmakers how to gerrymander their states and suppress voting rights.
Emma Rindlisbacher
Mar 26
South Dakota boasts stringent voter ID laws and a recent review of its legislative districts show a “persistent Republican advantage” thanks to gerrymandering. The uneven playing field has helped South Dakota garner national headlines for its right wing legislation, such as laws attacking the separation of church and state.
The state’s Republican lawmakers didn’t come up with these policies by themselves. National organizations have been actively coaching its lawmakers on how to best take advantage of redistricting and deflect claims that voting restrictions are discriminatory, according to documents obtained by The Daily Poster through a public records request.
One of the groups, Wallbuilders, made a name for itself promoting legislation on issues such as displaying religious symbols on state property. But at Wallbuilders’ 2018 Profamily Legislative Network conference in Dallas, Texas, attendees were also taught about the legal validity of restrictive voting laws, according to documents describing the event obtained by The Daily Poster.
The other group, ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council, taught a South Dakota legislator on how to best gerrymander state districts at its 2019 conference in Austin. According to documents describing the event, one of the attendees found that the conference “provided a lot of good and useful information on redistricting and ways to reduce the risk of lawsuits.”
Usually the subject matter of such invite-only conferences is shielded from public view. But both events were highlighted in a monthly “Legislator Update” newsletter produced by the South Dakota Legislative Research Council, a group of nonpartisan staffers who work in South Dakota’s state house. The publication is intended for South Dakota lawmakers, according to a description on the front page of each issue. The Daily Poster obtained copies of the newsletter using a public records request.
Such materials demonstrate how right-wing groups are working hand in hand with Republican lawmakers to strip voting rights and proper representation from the public, in order to safeguard these politicians’ elected positions and facilitate these organizations’ extremist goals.
Wallbuilders’ Attack on Voting Rights
Wallbuilders is an evangelical group that got its start publishing history books that claimed, falsely, that the founding fathers opposed the separation of church and state. The group was created in 1988 by David Barton, an author listed as one of Time’s most influential evangelicals. Barton has been described as a proponent of christian nationalism, a political ideology that seeks to enshrine a fundamentalist version of Christianity in state and federal law.
In 1998, Barton expanded Wallbuilders to launch the Profamily Legislative Network, an advocacy group that holds a yearly conference for “conservative pro-family” state legislators. The group’s website lists “conservative fiscal policies,” “abortion,” and “public morality” as some of the issues the group covers.
But the Legislator Update newsletters suggest the Wallbuilders’ advocacy extends to counseling lawmakers on restricting voting rights.
According to one of the reports, South Dakota Republican State Rep. Sue Peterson attended the Wallbuilders’ 2018 Profamily Legislative Network conference in Dallas. And as Peterson noted in the newsletter, her takeaway from the conference was that “the media gives the impression that laws passed to ensure safe and fair elections are discriminatory, but most all [sic] have held up to court challenges.”
Wallbuilders did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Legal experts dispute the claim that courts are permissive about policies that restrict the right to vote. “That’s a big overstatement,” said Michael Li, senior council at the Brennan Center.
“Any number of laws from Texas’ voter ID law to North Carolina’s aggressive omnibus elections law have been struck down by courts and modified as a result,” Li said. “The Texas voter ID law is a great example. It was one of the most restrictive in the nation but became much fairer as a result of litigation. States sometimes win cases or win on appeal. But these cases show they don’t have carte blanche to do whatever they want.”
But for those who follow right-wing groups like Wallbuilders, their increased focus on voting rights is cause for concern. “Conservative evangelicals have a vision for America,” said Rob Boston, a senior advisor at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Increasingly, they are advocating voter suppression as a way to keep Republicans in power, even if most Americans don’t support them.”
ALEC and Gerrymandering
The Legislator Update newsletters show that at least two South Dakota lawmakers attended ALEC conferences in 2018 and 2019, where part of the focus was on limiting lawsuits in the wake of implementing controversial redistricting plans.
In 2019, Republican Jim Stalzer, then a state senator and currently a state representative, attended ALEC’s conference in Austin, Texas. According to the Legislative Update newsletter, “Senator Stalzer also mentioned the meeting provided a lot of good and useful information on redistricting and ways to reduce the risk of lawsuits.”
“The primary things that it covered were the types of things one should do, i.e. following county lines, city boundaries, and natural political boundaries,” Stalzer told The Daily Poster when asked about the ALEC conference. “South Dakota was one of the few states that didn’t get sued last time because we did try to use natural boundaries.”
ALEC could not be reached for comment.
According to an AP analysis, South Dakota’s legislative districts have been gerrymandered to provide an ongoing benefit to Republican candidates.” (Gerrymandering occurs when the boundaries of legislative districts are drawn to give one party an advantage in elections.)
With the South Dakota legislature set to redraw its districts this year, there is concern that the process may unfairly advantage Republican politicians once again.
“As a legislator who served in a gerrymandered district, I think it’s important to make sure politics and partisanship are not involved in the redistricting process,” said Dan Ahlers, a former Democratic member of South Dakota’s state house and a one-time nominee for Congress. “It has also been used to silence minorities in South Dakota. If you look at the northeast side of Rapid City, there’s a predominantly Native American neighborhood that was chopped up into three districts. That wasn’t done by accident.”
South Dakota’s legislative districts are drawn by a partisan commission. Six of the seven members of the Senate’s 2021 redistricting committee are Republican, as are seven of the eight members of the House’s 2021 redistricting committee.
South Dakota Republican state senator Jim Bolin, a member of the redistricting committee, told The Daily Poster that the South Dakota constitution required legislators to set the district boundaries themselves.
“It’s like any committee in the legislature: It’s based on partisan balance,” said Bolin. “There are only three Democrats in the South Dakota senate."
“Here's the thing about South Dakota,” said Bolin. “Some states are becoming more liberal; South Dakota is becoming more conservative. There are people moving here because they want to be in a red state.”
But many people believe the state’s redistricting efforts shouldn’t be left up to partisan committees.
“The Constitution [of South Dakota] currently allows legislators to draw their own districts,” said Amy Scott-Stoltz, the coalition director of Drawn Together South Dakota, an anti-gerrymandering group. “We believe this is a conflict of interest. Politicians should not choose their voters, voters should choose their elected officials.”
The South Dakota legislature began the redistricting process earlier this month, ahead of a December deadline. Drawn Together South Dakota is working on a ballot initiative that would be on the ballot in 2022, which would require the districts to be redrawn by a nonpartisan commission, Scott-Stoltz told The Daily Poster. But the organization faces a steep uphill battle against national groups like ALEC.
At ALEC’s 2019 conference, those who attended were told to treat redistricting as a “political adult blood sport,” according to a recording of the conference obtained by Slate. Legislators were advised to destroy evidence and to include provisions to allow their legislatures to defend their redistricting plans in court, should their states’ attorneys general decline to take the case.
Keeping Their Bedfellows In Power
The importance of voting restrictions to right wing groups has only grown in recent years. Shortly after the 2020 presidential election, Wallbuilders’ founder, Barton, was one of many right wing leaders who promoted the lie that the election had yet to be decided. For its part, ALEC teamed up with other right wing-groups to ramp up its efforts to push voting restrictions in the wake of Biden’s inauguration.
Organizations like ALEC and Wallbuilders work to pass laws by providing legal templates and other material to state legislators who often work part time or who don’t have their own staff.
“ALEC is a clearinghouse of legislative ideas and bills that are distributed to legislators in multiple states,” said David Daley, a senior fellow for FairVote. "When you see the same type of legislation burbling up across multiple states, ALEC is often the brains behind it."
The ALEC conferences South Dakota state lawmakers attended, for example, weren’t just focused on redistricting. At ALEC’s 2018 annual meeting in New Orleans, legislators discussed issues ranging from “electronic recycling [and] school safety” to culture war issues such as the “freedom to associate in [an] age of intimidation,” according to one of the Legislator Update newsletters. And at the 2019 conference in Austin, legislators discussed topics like “the current state of drug abuse, national popular vote, [and] local government lawsuits against the states,” according to the newsletter.
Wallbuilders is another group that helps lawmakers pass bills to further their conservative agenda.
As noted in one of the South Dakota newsletters, Republican State Sen. Phil Jensen also attended the organization's 2018 Profamily Legislative Network conference in Dallas, describing the event as the “most relevant and informative legislative conference he has attended.” Part of the appeal for Jenson: two “new ideas” for legislation to introduce in South Dakota -- a law to mandate prominently posting the slogan “In God We Trust” on state buildings, and a resolution declaring an annual Christian week.
After attending the conference, Sen. Jensen sponsored legislation to put the slogan “In God We Trust” in state buildings such as schools in South Dakota. Although the legislation was criticized as violating the first amendment, it passed in 2019.
By promoting policies that restrict the right to vote, groups like ALEC and Wallbuilders can shield legislators from the political consequences of passing such extreme policies.
“When conservatives try and discount the importance of these maps,” said Daley, “they're saying something else behind closed doors. They are impressing upon conservative lawmakers that there is nothing that they do that is more important than drawing maps and devising laws about the kind of access to the vote people have.”
Passing Med4All On State Level Seeing Support In Washington
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f05HBlG3rw
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)