09 September 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The central government has a duty, based in the ninth and 14th amendments, to safeguard the civil liberties of its citizens against any threat to them.
Well, not exactly nothing. This is an interesting unlimbering by the Department of Justice. From the Washington Post:
The Justice Department is exploring “all options” to challenge Texas’s restrictive abortion law, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday, as he vowed to provide support to abortion clinics that are “under attack” in the state and to protect those seeking and providing reproductive health services. The move by the nation’s top law enforcement official comes just days after the Supreme Court refused to block a Texas abortion statute that bans the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. The court’s action stands as the most serious threat to Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling establishing a right to abortion, in nearly 50 years.
I know that some people have been frustrated by what appears to be Merrick Garland’s dilatory approach to investigating the former president* and all the rest of the staff from Camp Runamuck. I feel much the same way. But, if the DOJ acts on this, it’s a very encouraging development. If Garland decides to give Greg Abbott in Texas a little taste of what Eisenhower gave Orval Faubus in 1957, or what the Kennedy brothers gave Ross Barnett in 1962, that’s all to the good. It’s past time that the “federal” part of federalism gets exercised again. The central government has a duty, based in the ninth and 14th amendments, to safeguard the civil liberties of its citizens against any threat to them, including those posed by state governments and state governors. As Dolores Barclay told history.com:
Eisenhower was boxed into a corner and reached a point where he had to show the power of the federal government and chop off continued insurrection of southern segregationists. His decision was decidedly political—to maintain federal power—and to ensure that Brown was enforced.
It’s time to flex that power again. Even the shadow-docket card trick from the Supreme Court allows that, theoretically anyway, the right to privacy and the right to terminate a pregnancy that is derived from it both remain intact. The ridiculously gerrymandered statehouses and the fanatical ideologues in the governor’s offices have left the administration, and the central government, no choice but to defend that right against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The department's Technical Assistance Response Unit operates a drone fleet that was announced in 2018. (photo: Uli Seit/NYT)
Two decades after the attack on New York City, the Police Department is using counterterrorism tools and tactics to combat routine street crime.
But the truth was more complicated: Mr. Reyes had first been identified by the New York Police Department’s powerful facial recognition software as it analyzed surveillance video of the crime.
His guilty plea this year was not solely the result of keen-eyed detectives practicing old school police work. Instead, it was part of the sprawling legacy of one of the city’s darkest days.
Since Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger publicly refuted Trump's voter-fraud claims, he and his family have endured months of frequent death threats and other intimidation. (photo: Dustin Chambers/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: Trump Made Fun of Georgia Election Officials for Receiving Death Threats
Election officials and their families are living with threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts, interviews and documents reveal. The campaign of fear, sparked by Trump's voter-fraud falsehoods, threatens the U.S. electoral system.
A week earlier, Tricia Raffensperger, wife of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, had received another anonymous text: “We plan for the death of you and your family every day.”
That followed an April 5 text warning. A family member, the texter told her, was “going to have a very unfortunate incident.”
Those messages, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the continuing barrage of threats and intimidation against election officials and their families months after former U.S. President Donald Trump’s November election defeat. While reports of threats against Georgia officials emerged in the heated weeks after the voting, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen election workers and top officials – and a review of disturbing texts, voicemails and emails that they and their families received – reveal the previously hidden breadth and severity of the menacing tactics.
Trump’s relentless false claims that the vote was “rigged” against him sparked a campaign to terrorize election officials nationwide – from senior officials such as Raffensperger to the lowest-level local election workers. The intimidation has been particularly severe in Georgia, where Raffensperger and other Republican election officials refuted Trump’s stolen-election claims. The ongoing harassment could have far-reaching implications for future elections by making the already difficult task of recruiting staff and poll workers much harder, election officials say.
In an exclusive interview, Tricia Raffensperger spoke publicly for the first time about the threats of violence to her family and shared the menacing text messages with Reuters.
The Raffenspergers – Tricia, 65, and Brad, 66 – began receiving death threats almost immediately after Trump’s surprise loss in Georgia, long a Republican bastion. Tricia Raffensperger started taking precautions. She canceled regular weekly visits in her home with two grandchildren, ages 3 and 5 – the children of her eldest son, Brenton, who died from a drug overdose in 2018.
“I couldn’t have them come to my house anymore,” she said. “You don’t know if these people are actually going to act on this stuff.”
In late November, the family went into hiding for nearly a week after intruders broke into the home of the Raffenspergers’ widowed daughter-in-law, an incident the family believed was intended to intimidate them. That evening, people who identified themselves to police as Oath Keepers – a far-right militia group that has supported Trump’s bid to overturn the election – were found outside the Raffenspergers’ home, according to Tricia Raffensperger and two sources with direct knowledge of the family’s ordeal. Neither incident has been previously reported.
“Brad and I didn’t feel like we could protect ourselves,” she said, explaining the decision to flee their home.
Brad Raffensperger told Reuters in a statement that “vitriol and threats are an unfortunate, but expected, part of public service. But my family should be left alone.”
Trump’s baseless voter-fraud accusations have had dark consequences for U.S. election leaders and workers, especially in contested states such as Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Some have faced protests at their homes or been followed in their cars. Many have received death threats.
Some, like Raffensperger, are senior officials who publicly refused to bow to Trump’s demands to alter the election outcome. In Georgia, people went into hiding in at least three cases, including the Raffenspergers. Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, told Reuters she continues to receive death threats. Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson – a Democrat who faced armed protesters outside her home in December – is also still getting threats, her spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.
But many others whose lives have been threatened were low- or mid-level workers, just doing their jobs. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric could reverberate into the 2022 midterm congressional elections and the 2024 presidential vote by making election workers targets of threatened or actual violence. Many election offices will lose critical employees with years or decades of experience, predicts David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.
“This is deeply troubling,” Becker said.
Carlos Nelson, elections supervisor for Ware County in southeastern Georgia, shares that fear. “These are people who work for little or no money, 12 to 14 hours a day on Election Day,” Nelson said. “If we lose good poll workers, that’s when we’re going to lose democracy.”
In Georgia, Trump faces an investigation into alleged election interference, the only known criminal inquiry into his attempts to overturn the 2020 vote.
Trump spokesman Jason Miller did not respond to Reuters’ questions about the ongoing harassment of election workers, including why Trump has not forcefully denounced the torrent of threats being made in his name.
‘Disturbing and sickening’
The intimidation in Georgia has gone well beyond Raffensperger and his family. Election workers - from local volunteers to senior administrators - continue enduring regular harassing phone calls and emails, according to interviews with election workers and the Reuters review of texts, emails and audio files provided by Georgia officials.
One email, sent on Jan. 2 to officials in nearly a dozen counties, threatened to bomb polling sites: “No one at these places will be spared unless and until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS again.” The specific text of the threat has not been previously reported. The email, a state election official said, was forwarded to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which declined to comment for this story.
In Georgia, threatening violence against a poll officer is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $100,000. Making death threats is a separate crime carrying up to five years in prison and a $1,000 fine.
Criminal law specialists say the widespread threats could increase the legal jeopardy for Trump in the Georgia investigation. That inquiry is led by the top prosecutor in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta. District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, is probing whether Trump illegally interfered with Georgia’s 2020 election.
Among other matters, investigators are examining a Jan. 2 call in which Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his Georgia loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Willis said in a Feb. 10 letter that her office would also investigate “any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration.”
That statement suggests Willis may be examining whether Trump, or others acting with him, solicited or encouraged death threats against election officials, said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. Such intimidation could fit into a possible racketeering probe into Trump if the threats were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the election, said Clint Rucker, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney and former Fulton County prosecutor.
Since launching her inquiry in February, Willis has added several high-profile attorneys to her team, including a leading racketeering expert, to assist on cases including the Trump probe, Reuters reported on March 6.
“I think there’s going to be a big-picture look at all of it,” said Rucker, a Democrat, who once prosecuted a high-profile racketeering case with Willis.
Fulton County District Attorney spokesman Jeff DiSantis did not respond to requests for comment on the office’s inquiries into election-related threats of violence.
In April, two investigators from Willis’ office met with Fulton County’s elections director, Richard Barron, who oversaw elections in a region that overwhelmingly backed Biden for president. Trump frequently targeted the county, claiming without evidence that election workers there destroyed hundreds of thousands of ballots.
During the hour-long meeting, which has not been previously reported, investigators sought information on threats against Barron and his staff, Barron said. Barron’s office had saved every harassing message – hundreds of them – and shared them with investigators.
Barron said his staff is made up almost entirely of Black election workers. “The racial slurs were disturbing and sickening,” he said of the threats.
‘You deserve to hang’
Among those targeted was Barron’s registration chief, Ralph Jones, 56, who oversaw the county’s mail-in ballot operation and has worked on Georgia elections for more than three decades, including senior roles.
Jones said callers left him death threats, including one shortly after the November election who called him a “n-----” who should be shot. Another threatened to kill him by dragging his body around with a truck. “It was unbelievable: your life being threatened just because you’re doing your job,” he said.
Jones, born and raised in Atlanta, said he had experienced racism – but nothing like this. He recalled how one night after the election, strangers showed up at his house. They identified themselves as new neighbors, he said. Jones knew no one had moved into the neighborhood and didn’t open the door. After that, he told his wife each morning to lock the door before he went to work. “My primary focus was to make sure that no harm came to my family and staff,” he said.
His boss, Barron, who is white, faced even more intimidation. At a Dec. 5 rally – ahead of a runoff election in Georgia that would determine control of the U.S. Senate – Trump showed a video clip of Barron and accused him and his staff of committing a “crime,” alleging they tampered with ballots. After the rally, Barron was bombarded with threats. “I underestimated how hard he was going to push that narrative and just keep pushing it,” Barron said of Trump.
Between Christmas and early January, Barron received nearly 150 hateful calls, many accusing him of treason or saying he should die, according to Barron and a Reuters review of some of the phone messages.
“You actually deserve to hang by your goddamn, soy boy, skinny-ass neck,” said a woman in one voicemail, using a slang term for an effeminate man. Another caller wanted him banished to China: “That’s where you belong, in communist China, because you’re a crook.”
Police were posted outside Barron’s house and office after he received a detailed threat in late December in which the caller said he would kill Barron by firing squad.
“It seemed like we were descending into this third-world mentality,” said Barron, 54, who has worked in elections for 22 years and volunteered as an election observer overseas. “I never expected that out of this country.”
Barron’s office is bracing for more abuse during an upcoming audit of the county’s 147,000 absentee ballots cast in November. A judge on May 21 ordered the review, granting a request by plaintiffs claiming fraud in Fulton County. The details of the review are still being litigated, but it may be supervised by Barron’s office. It won’t change the results, which were certified months ago. But it reflects the lasting impact of Trump’s election falsehoods.
Fulton County recently sought a dismissal of the case. Trump responded in a May 28 statement with more baseless allegations of a conspiracy to steal the election, saying county officials are fighting the review “because they know the vote was corrupt and the audit will show it.”
Trump’s disinformation campaign also shook election workers in Paulding County, outside Atlanta. Deidre Holden, the county elections director, was finishing preparations ahead of Georgia’s January Senate runoffs when an email caught her eye. The subject line read: “F_UCKING HEAR THIS PAULDING COUNTY OR D!E.”
The message, reviewed by Reuters, threatened to blow up all of the county’s polling sites. At least 10 other counties received the same email. “We’ll make the Boston bombings look like child’s play,” the message said in an apparent reference to the 2013 extremist attack on the Boston Marathon that killed three and injured hundreds.
“This sh_t is rigged,” the email said. “Until Trump is guaranteed to be POTUS until 2024 like he should be, we will bring death and destruction to defend this country if needed and get our voices heard.”
Holden forwarded the message to local police and contacted the state elections director in Raffensperger’s office. Officials at the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were also alerted. “I’ve never had to deal with anything like this,” said Holden, who’s served as elections supervisor for 14 years. “It was frightening.”
As Georgia girds for elections in 2022 – including votes for governor and the secretary of state – election supervisors say they fear high numbers of the temporary workers who staff polling sites won’t return for future votes because they want to avoid harassment.
Vanessa Montgomery, 58, is among those who may not come back. In the Jan. 5 Georgia runoffs for two U.S. Senate seats, Montgomery was a polling manager in the city of Taylorsville. The stakes were huge: Both seats were won by Democrats, giving the party control of the Senate.
When polls closed that night, she set off to deliver ballots to an elections office in Bartow County, a predominantly white, Republican district in northwestern Georgia. Montgomery, who is Black, was traveling with her daughter, also a poll worker hired temporarily for the election.
On a dark, rural two-lane road, they noticed they were being followed by an SUV.
“I was trying to stay calm because I wanted to make sure we both were safe,” she recalled in an interview. “What were they trying to do, actually? Were they trying to hit us and take the information and destroy the ballots?”
Montgomery called 911 as her daughter sped towards town with the SUV nearly running them off the road, she said. They were followed for about 25 minutes. The dispatcher helped guide them to a parking lot, where officers met and escorted them to the election office. She declined to file a police report, and the incident was not investigated.
She said the scare triggered a panic attack, her first since serving as a U.S. Army officer decades ago in Bosnia, where she witnessed people killed by exploding landmines. Months later, Montgomery says she still suffers panic attacks from the incident and may stop working elections altogether.
Her manager, Joseph Kirk, the Bartow County elections supervisor, said Montgomery is one of his most reliable poll workers. Kirk now worries that the ugly reaction to Trump’s loss will make it harder to retain and hire the staff needed to run elections smoothly across America.
“I’m very concerned, after what we saw last year, we’re going to lose a lot of institutional knowledge nationwide,” he said.
Threats of murder
For Georgia’s top election officials, the intimidation has been especially personal and pointed.
In early May, Gabriel Sterling’s phone buzzed at 2:36 a.m. Five months had passed since the Georgia election office that he helps to lead had declared Biden the winner. The caller ranted that Sterling, the chief operating officer for Secretary of State Raffensperger, should go to prison for “rigging” the election against Trump.
“This stuff has continued,” said Sterling, 50, a Republican who drew national attention in December by denouncing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as false and dangerous. “It’s continued for all of us.”
Raffensperger’s deputy, Jordan Fuchs, says she has faced frequent death threats since November. Her personal and work cell phone numbers have been posted online by a Trump supporter who encourages people to harass her, she said. In April, she received a vulgar photo of a male body part.
“I don’t think any of us anticipated this level of nastiness,” said Fuchs, 31, who grew up in a conservative Christian family and has worked for years to help elect Republicans.
In an interview, she said the most alarming threats came in late November when Trump called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people.” Death threats started pouring in, some calling for public hangings. Some of the threats were so detailed, the FBI began monitoring a list of people who were suspected of making them, said a source with direct knowledge of the matter.
In mid-December, a website titled “Enemies of the People” appeared online, posting the personal information of Raffensperger, Fuchs and Sterling, including home addresses. Crosshairs were superimposed over their photos. The FBI on Dec. 23 linked the website to Iran, citing “highly credible information indicating Iranian cyber actors” were responsible for the site. A spokesperson for Iran’s mission to the United Nations called the FBI’s claim “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Police parked an empty cruiser outside Sterling’s house to deter attackers, Sterling said. Fuchs said she stayed at friends’ houses as a precaution.
Sterling publicly rebuked Trump, pleading with the former president to stop attacking Georgia’s election process. “Someone’s going to get killed,” he said as he gripped the podium during an emotional Dec. 1 news conference.
A month later, five people died and more than a hundred police officers were injured when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, demanding that Congress overturn the election.
The threats against Raffensperger and his family began right after the election.
Tricia Raffensperger detailed one that came from a sender who created a phony email address using her husband’s name to make the text message appear like it came from him.
“I married a sickening whore. I wish you were dead,” it read. Another text called her a “bitch” and included vulgar sexual insults. Raffensperger’s family and staff viewed the messages as an effort to coerce him to resign.
At the time, Georgia’s two Republican U.S. senators had called on Raffensperger to step down, criticizing his management of the elections as an “embarrassment” as the vote count showed Trump narrowly trailing Biden in Georgia.
Raffensperger’s refusal to overturn the 2020 results has left him ostracized by fellow Republicans. As Raffensperger seeks re-election next year as secretary of state, Trump has endorsed his Republican challenger, U.S. Congressman Jody Hice, who has supported Trump’s baseless fraud claims.
Hice’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the threats against Georgia election officials and the reason he backs Trump’s false fraud allegations.
The threats worsened in late November, Tricia Raffensperger said, after unidentified people broke into the home of her daughter-in-law – the widow of the Raffenspergers’ dead son. The daughter-in-law returned home with her children to find the lights on, the garage door pulled up, and the door to the house open.
“Items in the house had been moved around, but nothing was taken,” said a report on the break-in from the Suwanee Police Department.
In response to the threats, the Georgia State Patrol assigned a security detail to the Raffenspergers. One officer was parked in their driveway. The other followed the secretary of state wherever he went.
Later that evening, as Brad Raffensperger left to get dinner for the family, he and his state police guard spotted three cars with out-of-state license plates in front of the family’s home in an Atlanta suburb. The officer guarding the house confronted the people and asked them to identify themselves, Tricia Raffensperger said.
The strangers said they were members of the Oath Keepers, the militia group. They gave the officer what the Raffenspergers considered a nonsensical reason for being there – to protect the area from Black Lives Matter protesters they had heard would be there. The officer told them to leave, Tricia Raffensperger said, which they did.
A Georgia State Patrol spokesperson said no formal report was generated on the incident and no arrests were made while providing security for the Raffenspergers.
The break-in and encounter with the far-right extremists prompted the Raffenspergers, their children and grandchildren to escape to a hotel in an undisclosed location, Tricia said. The family intended to stay away from home for more than a week, she said. They returned after four days, however, when a stranger at the hotel recognized her husband, making their effort to stay in hiding seem futile.
“He’s probably the only secretary of state that everybody knows,” Tricia Raffensperger said.
Her voice trembled as she described her continuing fears for her grandchildren and other relatives. “I hesitate to say this because I’m afraid someone might use it against me,” she said, referring to the death of her son, Brenton. “But, you know, I have lost a child, and I don’t ever want to go through that again.”
Joe Biden. (photo: Calla Kessler/NYT)
There is no point in being timid. After decades of chronic underinvestment in American human and physical capital, and 20 years of war that consumed U.S. blood and treasure and destabilized the Middle East, we need a course correction. Biden, like Ronald Reagan, wants to give it to us. And, to echo Donald Trump, what the hell does he (or we) have to lose?
Biden was the stealth contender in 2020 – the person everyone thought they knew well after his decades in public life, the candidate no one feared. The nice guy, even if you didn’t agree with him. Now, at 78, presiding over tiny, fragile House and Senate majorities that could disappear at any time in the next 18 months, he is finally the boss –the decider, as George W. Bush called himself. And Biden has decided America needs a reboot.
Still in the thick of COVID-19
The next few weeks will be crucial to his success or failure. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has already made his stand (on the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page): After supporting the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan in March and $1.2 trillion for physical infrastructure last month, he says he can’t support $3.5 trillion “or anywhere near that level of additional spending,” the price tag on the 10-year spending bill Biden and Democrats have teed up next.
To be fair to Manchin, his op-ed was published last Thursday, the day before a disheartening jobs report that showed 235,000 jobs were added in August – compared with the 750,000 economists expected and the 943,000 added in July.
Clearly we are not out of the COVID woods. Daily coronavirus infections on Labor Day 2021 were four times higher than they were on Labor Day 2020. Daily deaths are almost twice as high. And yet, nearly 9 million people – gig workers, independent contractors and the self-employed – lost all unemployment benefits on Labor Day when a special pandemic program for them expired. More than 2 million lost a pandemic-era $300 a week increase in state unemployment insurance.
An eviction moratorium expired July 31, though more than 6 million renters are behind on their rent. And schools and day care centers are in flux about their plans, leaving families in the lurch – one possible reason for the shocking August jobs shortfall. So it's hard to argue people don't still need help.
Still, Biden is not on a roll. His poll numbers have plummeted since the traumatic U.S. exit from Afghanistan, persistent pockets of COVID vaccine resistance, rampant spread of the delta variant, and a stalled out recovery.
At the seven-month mark, according to ABC News-Washington Post polling, Biden is one of only three presidents since Harry Truman with an approval rating below 50%. The others were Gerald Ford, who pardoned Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, and Trump, who around that time was dealing with hurricanes and rising tensions with North Korea, arguing that businesses had a right to discriminate against gay people, and cutting off the broadly popular DACA program allowing many undocumented people brought to the United States as children to get permits to legally stay in the United States.
Biden has a few advantages those presidents did not have. The Afghanistan departure was chaotic, tragic and widely panned, but majorities in polls still say it was time to leave – and the subject overall is not top of mind for voters.
The rest of Biden's agenda tracks with the health and economic issues most people consider important, including stimulus checks and child tax credit increases in the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan Senate infrastructure package awaiting House approval, and the new $3.5 trillion package that needs the votes of every single Democratic senator (including Manchin) plus Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaking 51st vote.
Biden budget priorities are his values
Is that a lot of money? Will it feed inflation and the national debt? It’s all a matter of perspective. You didn’t hear Republicans in past years fretting about how their huge tax cuts drove up the deficit and debt. You didn’t see Bush 43 trying to pay for his long wars or his Medicare prescription drug program. The Affordable Care Act signed by President Barack Obama, by contrast, was designed to reduce the deficit.
This week Democrats are looking at raising taxes on corporations and households with incomes over $400,000 to help finance their $3.5 trillion plan. That’s popular. So are the proposals themselves – including paid family leave, child care subsidies, free pre-K and community college, help for DACA recipients, steps to fight and manage climate change, extending a temporary expansion of child tax credits, expansions of ACA coverage and home care for the disabled and elderly, and new dental, vision and hearing plans under Medicare.
“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget and I will tell you what you value,” Biden said in 2013. His own budget embodies values and goals shared by Democrats across the party spectrum. It's hard to imagine it won't pass in some form they can all celebrate.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie described Biden on Sunday as stubborn. He was talking about Afghanistan and he didn’t mean it as a compliment, but I took it that way. Biden is stubborn on everything at this point in his life. Any trouble he may cause or get into will be what the late John Lewis called "good trouble," the kind that is necessary for progress.
People cheer as they watch the removal of the Lee statue, the largest Confederate monument in Richmond. (photo: Crixell Matthews/VPM)
Despite its massive size, it was lifted from its pedestal in one piece and is headed for storage. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, was there as the statue came down and appeared pleased by its removal. A crowd also chanted and cheered as the statue of Lee — atop a horse — was lifted into the air by a crane.
Northam announced plans to remove the statue in June 2020 during nightly racial justice protests in Richmond after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, but that plan was held up by lawsuits, including one from a group of residents from Richmond's historic Monument Avenue that wanted to keep the 40-foot-tall memorial intact. Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court decided to bring it down.
In the decades following its construction in 1890, the statue became a focal point for a wealthy, all-white neighborhood; Lee was later joined by statues to other Confederate leaders. In 1996, a statue of Black tennis champion Arthur Ashe was added to the avenue despite serious opposition under the direction of then-Gov. Douglas Wilder, the first Black person to serve as governor of any state since Reconstruction.
Lee's statue was the largest Confederate monument in the city of Richmond and one of the largest in the country. Nearly every other Confederate statue in Virginia's capital was removed last summer, either by protesters or the city itself at the request of Mayor Levar Stoney.
Activists have celebrated the removal of the monument but have noted it was only one of the demands they've made. They said they'll continue calling for major structural reforms to the state's criminal justice system.
Officials said the graffiti-covered pedestal will remain in place while discussions continue about the future of Monument Avenue.
Favelas and condos decimate nature as they creep ever higher up the foothills of the Andes Mountains. (photo: Kurt Hollander/Jacobin)
Cali, Colombia, is among the most unequal cities in the world. The story of its inequality is written in its architecture, replete with sprawling favelas, fortified luxury homes, and intimidating bunkers that belong to cartel bosses and police alike.
Colombia has been at war with itself for over fifty years. The government has been fighting guerrillas while mostly ignoring (or even aiding) heavily armed criminal organizations that produce and distribute cocaine and also terrorize marginal communities in a bid to appropriate their land. The violence of these armed groups has produced some of the largest numbers of internal refugees in the world. Over the past several decades, Cali, the third largest city in the country and the center of cocaine production, has absorbed a huge number of these displaced people, mostly of Afro-Colombian or Indigenous descent, exacerbating the already extreme levels of poverty, inequality, and crime that exist in the city.
Architecture of Inequality
The architecture of Cali is rooted in the city’s deep inequality. In Cali, a family’s social status is often measured by the height of its home. People in Cali thus tend to pile brick and cement cubes one on top of the other, regardless of the risks from earthquakes or from faulty design. Each floor added is a step up the social ladder, worth any possible safety risk.
Following their US counterparts, high-rise condos remain a dream of the Colombian middle classes and are proliferating throughout Cali. Their construction entails the leveling of nature, especially in the foothills of the Andes Mountains running along the western part of the city. Though these lush green hills which give the city their beauty are usually protected, unscrupulous real estate developers cut through bureaucratic restrictions to build gated high-rise condos there anyway, desecrating the landscape.
At the same time, favelas have also spread out vertically on many hills surrounding the city, creating architectural eyesores as well as unsanitary, precarious, and violent social conditions.
Club Colombia
In the 1970s, the southern part of Cali, especially neighborhoods such as Ciudad JardÃn, blessed with wide avenues, large parks, and big houses modeled on American suburbia, became the most sought-after residential areas, far from the urban blight of the overpopulated, congested, crime-ridden neighborhoods in the low-rent areas of the city. The architecture in these exclusive neighborhoods, however, designed for defense against the lower classes (electric fences, high gates and security outposts), is inevitably ugly.
Ugly architecture in Cali became supercharged from the 1970s, when billions of dollars of cocaine profits from the Cali Cartel fell like snow upon the city. In the ’80s, at the height of the Cali Cartel, the cocaine kings invaded exclusive residential neighborhoods, such as Ciudad Jardin, in the south of the city, buying up luxurious houses or constructing mansions next door. These constructions were most notable for the quantity of classical columns, fabulous indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and imported marble floors, walls, and ceilings, shiny symbols of wealth and success well worth risking imprisonment.
Although the nouveau riche usually dump money into their homes to show off their newly acquired status, in Cali these luxury homes have mostly been hidden behind high, fortified walls. Even the internal walls of the homes themselves were extra thick to allow for hidden passageways and walk-in safes for storing gold, jewels, cash, and cocaine. (As legend has it, many of the workers hired to build these secret spaces were murdered before they could give the information to the authorities.)
Spending immense sums of money in real estate and construction was not only a quick way to climb the social ladder, it was also the best way to launder illegal profits. Much of the money to be laundered was moved around the city by a fleet of armored vehicles registered to a cash transport company legally owned by the Cali Cartel. More than just transporting dirty money, these nearly impenetrable blockhouses on wheels were the perfect way to bring large consignments of cocaine and weapons in and out of the city as well.
Despite being among the wealthiest inhabitants in the city and the owners of soccer teams, a bank, and a chain of drug stores, the capos of the Cali Cartel were nonetheless barred from entering the highest circle of caleño society — in particular, Club Colombia, an elite social club which caters to the city’s crème de la crème. Founded in 1930 and inspired by the Jockey Club of Bogotá, Club Colombia boasts a membership that comes from the original European families of the city, including the owners of the sugar plantations and industry (the cartel of the other white powder) that still control most of Cali’s formal economy and culture.
Stung by the rejection of high society, the Cali Cartel bosses went ahead and built an exact copy of Club Colombia, in record time and with an unlimited budget, which came to be known as the Cali Cartel Bunker. Besides several family homes (where armed members of the Cartel lived), the main building was a fifty-meter-high stone structure with bulletproof windows, a heliport on its roof, and an underground parking lot for twenty cars with secret tunnels (one of which led to a lake in a nearby park). The whole complex was ringed by a six-meter-high outer wall watched over by closed-circuit cameras.
With the fall of the Cali Cartel and the imprisonment of the capos, the government found itself the owner of over one thousand houses, apartments, lots, and giant fincas in and around Cali confiscated from narcos, including the Cali Cartel Bunker. Twenty-five of these properties in Cali are currently up for sale. The confiscated properties, however, are not a very attractive investment. Most of the buildings are by now decrepit thanks to long-term neglect, while others have been invaded and used as homes or businesses. (The Cali Cartel Bunker currently houses an elite police unit.) Even properties that are in good shape don’t attract buyers when put up for auction at bargain-basement prices, as potential buyers fear that the former owners, many of them finishing up long sentences in US or Colombian prisons, will return some day and demand the deeds be signed back over to them.
The National Center for Narcotics (DNE), for decades in charge of administering all properties confiscated from narcos, turned out to itself be a criminal organization. Dozens of public functionaries, including ex-directors of the DNE and congressmen, kept around one hundred properties off the list for their own benefit, charging minimal rents or signing over deeds in exchange for hefty bribes, which they then invested in luxury homes in Miami and Cartagena. The DNE was eventually shut down in 2014, and its ex-directors and several congressmen imprisoned for corruption.
Bunker Culture
There are several other bunkers that define the urban landscape in Cali. Government administration buildings, courthouses, prisons, police stations, and military bases, which is to say, the whole social architecture of detention and incarceration in the city, are all modeled after fortified bunkers. Hidden behind high walls protected by turrets, camouflaged to blend into the city’s sprawl when seen from the air, these cement blockhouses are less Brutalist than brutal.
Indeed, of all architectural structures, these urban bunkers are perhaps the ugliest, designed to strike terror in the hearts of citizens well aware of the many thousands of innocent people who “disappear” into these structures, never to be seen again. These bunkers, however, are perhaps a more honest form of architecture; designing colorful, shiny new government buildings for state torture would be truly hideous.
Within Cali, there are two Palacios de Justicia where the government metes out punishment to the city’s criminals. The oldest and grandest, also known as the National Palace, a five-story construction designed in Louis XVI style in 1928 by Belgian architect Joseph Maertens, with majestic balconies and bronze domes on the roof, is one of Cali’s most emblematic and elegant buildings. The Bunker de Justicia, a thirteen-floor concrete monolith built in the 1980s with tiny windows set into a cement blockhouse, resembles nothing so much as a prison.
A monolithic Bunker de Justicia 2 is slated to be built on the razed ground of what was until recently the working-class barrio of El Calvario, populated by modest Colombian homes with faded pastel colors and art deco details on functional shoebox constructions. Thanks to total government neglect, the last two decades have seen the neighborhood deteriorate into a major center for drug distribution. Dealers of basuco, the cheapest and most addictive form of cocaine, took over several abandoned buildings and fortified them, sealing off the windows and doors.
The long-term neglect and ultimate destruction of this traditional working-class neighborhood is part of an ongoing process of gentrification in Cali. El Calvario ended up being completely demolished in 2019 (a giant basuco bunker was the last building standing) to make room for a future upscale mall and condos. In Colombia, “urban renewal” is the architectural equivalent of social cleansing, whereby whole working-class neighborhoods have been “disappeared.”
Offensive Architecture
Some of Cali’s ugly architecture has met with violent criticism. In 2007, the main police station in the center of the city was blown to bits by a car bomb, attributed to an urban guerilla group. One police officer was killed and forty-two were injured by the blast. Since then, a giant tank parked on the street leading into a police station in the center of the city has become part of the city’s anti-anti-architecture. In 2008, the Bunker de Justicia was rocked by a car bomb attributed to leftist guerillas, leaving four dead and twenty-six wounded. During the national strike protests this year, several government buildings were attacked and many police stations were vandalized and burned to the ground.
During the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, companies like Ford allowed domestic police and military to set up clandestine detention centers within their factories, which served as bases to torture and kill union leaders and student activists. Today, police in Cali have created similarly ad hoc spaces in which to illegally corral hundreds of protesters rounded up during peaceful protests. At the upscale mall El Exito (“Success”), the car park — off-limits to all press and human rights observers — was littered with bullet casings and had blood stains on the wall.
Malls in general can be seen as militarized outposts of the United States’ formal economy, fortified blockhouses in which imported products are sold at high prices with the profits expatriated, which is of course part of the reason the Colombian economy is doing so poorly. The fact that many of these exclusive malls selling US imported goods were vandalized during the protests indicates something of the regard in which they are held by locals.
More than mere criticism, the vandalism of government buildings and malls in Cali, especially during the national strike, are protests against the social inequalities, corruption, and state-sponsored violence that takes place within the walls of these buildings. In Cali, the crimes of architecture are those committed not against good taste but rather against nature, marginalized communities, and the working class.
An evacuated resident wades through high water following a flash flood as Tropical Storm Henri makes landfall in Helmetta, New Jersey, Aug. 22, 2021. (photo: Tom Brenner/AFP/Getty Images)
Climate change, caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, is supercharging heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires fueled by drought, and extreme precipitation that causes flooding. Those phenomena have killed at least 388 people in the U.S. since June.
The unprecedented summer of climate-fueled tragedy has hit people who previously considered themselves immune to climate risk and has overwhelmed seasoned survivors of such disasters who say this is the worst summer they've experienced — it also comes as Democrats in Washington work to enact legislation that would address its root causes. The political window for such action, however, is closing.
With the midterms looming, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, linchpin vote connected with multiple coal firms, called for a "strategic pause" on that legislation last week. Meanwhile, the rest of the party barnstorms the country to raise support for the bill. "It sounds like a lot of money... but it is what we spend in five years fighting forest fires," Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), hardly a liberal firebrand himself, told constituents in Clear Creek.
Bernie Sanders is also traveling the country, and the White House is driving the message with senior advisor and former Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond promoting action on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday and President Biden directly tying the devastation wrought by Ida to climate change and the need to take decisive action.
"Super storms are going to come and they're going to come more ferociously," Biden said while visiting Louisiana Friday "This isn't about being a Democrat or a Republican. We're Americans and we'll get through this together."
As reported by The Washington Post:
Americans' growing sense of vulnerability is palpable. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Florida's Emergency Management Division, has never known a summer as packed with crises as this one.
The question, he wonders, is whether this calamitous season will mark a turning point in public opinion that finally forces political leaders to act. "If not," Fugate asked, "what will it take?"
Even seasoned survivors say that recent disasters are the worst they've ever experienced. People who never considered themselves at risk from climate change are suddenly waking up to floodwaters outside their windows and smoke in their skies, wondering if anywhere is safe.
The true test of this summer's significance will be in whether the United States can meaningfully curb its planet-warming emissions — and fast.
The nation's most ambitious plan to address climate change and adapt to its impacts — Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget bill — is now in jeopardy after Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) called for a "strategic pause" on the legislation Thursday, citing concern over the price tag. The proposal to institute renewable energy requirements for power companies, impose import fees on polluters and provide generous support for electric vehicles cannot pass without Manchin's vote.
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment