04 December 21
A Good Start Will Be Super-Important This Month
Last month saw big loses for RSN, big for our organization anyway.
Step number one in turning it around in December will be a good start.
Who can help give RSN an early boost?
Thanks to all in advance.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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04 December 21
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Six a.m. and the city is only faintly enlightened. My early jobs as a dishwasher and parking lot attendant began at 6 a.m. and I remember this dimness well. It changed my life. I stayed home at night and went to bed early and postponed debauchery to my mid-twenties and then, at the age of 27, I got a job on the 5 a.m. shift and postponed it again. A dear friend of mine, whose parents subsidized her fully, went out late one night and fell in with some fascinating strangers who introduced her to hashish and some other substance and she fell into a psychotic state and had to be hospitalized and spent some time in a drug program where she met more fascinating troubled people and it changed her life. She never found a vocation. Instead, she became fascinated by her own disability and made a career of being troubled, married a troubled man who abused her, and today she’s in a nursing home somewhere, a faint replica of the witty woman she once was, and I am waiting for the coffee to brew so I can get back to work on a novel. Early to bed and early to rise makes for a life that, if not wealthy and wise, is at least pleasant and sensible.
The kitchen is dark because our friend Terry is sleeping in the guest room, which is just off the kitchen. She’s in town to play in The Nutcracker ballet, a difficult part that she’s played a thousand times so she has it down cold and can enjoy the comedy of the orchestra pit, the squawks and squeaks of the reeds, the smirks of the strings when the smart-aleck violinist screws up, the grimaces and snickers at the conductor who can’t conduct his way out of a paper sack, and she comes home and gives us a hilarious close-up account. To the audience, it may be pure magic, the Sugar Plum Fairy and all, but in the pit, it’s a human comedy.
I don’t turn the light on. I can hear the coffee dripping. I deliberate whether I shall go to church at 10 a.m. and it seems that I shall not; I am not in a proper frame of mind, being still exultant over beating Wisconsin. We were down 10-3 at halftime but the defense held and we won 23-13. Wisconsin has been kicking us around for years, thanks to their Teutonic culture, so this victory means a lot, sort of like D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge. I shouldn’t walk into church with this baggage. My sins are selfishness and ingratitude and animosity, and in the early morning, I’m very aware of my loved ones asleep in other rooms and am thankful for the cardiologist who implanted the defibrillator in my upper left chest, but I’m not ready to give up animosity.
I have two enemies, one in Fargo and one in Minneapolis, and I intend to forgive them someday but the defibrillator is postponing that day, and so I hope for them to have wagered their homes and retirement accounts on the Badgers of Wisconsin, a sure bet, and watched Minnesota march to victory, and heard the debt collectors pull up in the driveway, and hours later found themselves sleeping off a bad drunk in the bus depot with no place to go but their great aunt Flossie’s in Wausau, the one with the German shepherd Rolf and the picture of Joe McCarthy on the bedroom wall and the Victrola with the 78 of Wagner’s The Ride of the Valkyries.
And then I pour my coffee and turn on a light and pick up a pen and write, “Minnesota beat Wisconsin Saturday so hope is restored, the heart is lightened, and I am ready to enter the darkness of December unafraid.” And the rest is easy as pumpkin pie.
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Sen. Bernie Sanders is asking the White House to cut back a big Medicare premium hike set to take effect in weeks and tied to a pricey Alzheimer’s drug whose benefits have been widely questioned
In a letter Friday to President Joe Biden, the Vermont Independent called on the president to act immediately to prevent the portion of an “outrageous increase” in Medicare premiums that's attributable to Aduhelm, a newly approved Alzheimer's medicine from drugmaker Biogen, priced at $56,000 a year.
If Biden agreed and found a way to do it, a planned January increase of $21.60 a month to Medicare's “Part B” premium for outpatient care would be slashed closer to $10. The monthly premium for 2022 would drop from $170.10 to about $159.
Biden's massive social agenda legislation takes significant steps to curb prescription drug costs, but Democrats are running the risk that seniors smarting from one of the biggest increases ever in Medicare premiums will turn against them in the 2022 midterm elections. That increase would claw back a big chunk of next year's Social Security cost-of-living allowance, a boost of about $92 a month for the average retired worker, to help cover rising prices for gas and food.
“Biogen’s $56,000 price of Aduhelm is the poster child for how dysfunctional our prescription drug pricing system has become,” Sanders wrote to Biden. “The notion that one pharmaceutical company can raise the price of one drug so much that it could negatively impact 57 million senior citizens and the future of Medicare is beyond absurd. With Democrats in control of the White House, the House and the Senate we cannot let that happen.” A copy of the letter was provided to The Associated Press.
There was no immediate comment from the White House. Biden is planning a speech Monday on the prescription drug provisions of his legislation, including an annual cap of $2,000 on out-of-pocket costs for Medicare recipients, $35 monthly copays for insulin, inflation rebates that would also help people with private insurance, and the first-ever Medicare-negotiated prices. The catch is that those benefits will phase in over time and the Medicare premium hike would hit after the New Year. It's not clear if Biden will address the premiums.
The boost in premiums “could not come at a worse time for older Americans all over this country who are struggling economically," Sanders wrote.
The jump of $21.60 a month is the biggest increase ever for Medicare premiums in dollar terms, although not percentage-wise. As recently as August, the Medicare Trustees’ report had projected a smaller increase of $10 from the current $148.50. Medicare said it had to boost the rate higher to set aside a contingency fund in case the program formally approves coverage for Aduhelm.
Alzheimer’s is a progressive neurological disease with no known cure, affecting about 6 million Americans, the vast majority old enough to qualify for Medicare.
Aduhelm is the first Alzheimer’s medication in nearly 20 years, although it doesn’t cure the disease. The Food and Drug Administration approved the drug this summer, determining that Aduhelm's ability to reduce clumps of plaque in the brain is likely to slow dementia. That decision was highly controversial, since the FDA overrode its own outside advisers. Many experts say Aduhelm's benefit has not been clearly demonstrated. The Department of Veterans Affairs declined to list the medicine on its roster of approved drugs.
Medicare has begun a formal assessment to determine whether it should cover the drug, and a final decision isn’t likely until at least the spring. For now, Medicare is deciding on a case-by-case basis whether to pay for Aduhelm.
Sanders asked Biden to order Medicare to hold off on approving coverage of Aduhelm until there is scientific consensus about its benefits.
Biogen has defended its pricing, saying it looked carefully at costs of advanced medications to treat cancer and other conditions. A nonprofit think tank focused on drug pricing pegged Adulhelm’s actual value at between $3,000 and $8,400 per year — not $56,000 — based on its unproven benefits.
Stanley McChrystal. (photo: Luke Sharrett/NYT)
McChrystal’s new book is so stuffed with mendacity and banality that it serves as an exposé on America’s generals after 9/11.
McChrystal was removed from his command by President Barack Obama but afterward created a thriving consulting firm and often appears on TV to talk about war and politics. His new book is intended to be a primer for corporate leaders trying to navigate the perils of doing business in America. The conceit is straightforward: Hello, I am a retired four-star general who bravely led troops into battle, and I can tell you everything you need to know about managing risk.
There is a lot that McChrystal might teach us, because he was responsible for a series of consequential errors from which valuable lessons could be learned. Those errors include the concoction of a plan in 2009 to defeat the Taliban insurgency by flooding Afghanistan with as many as 80,000 additional U.S. soldiers. This was the kind of troops-and-money strategy that succeeded mainly in killing lots of civilians and helping the Taliban return to power.
On a less catastrophic scale, McChrystal actively participated in the cover-up of the friendly fire killing of NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, whose 2004 death the Pentagon initially blamed on the Taliban, knowing that this was untrue. McChrystal also took the ill-advised risk of allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to embed with his entourage on a trip around Europe, and the resulting article, which conveyed the general’s disdain for America’s elected leaders, led to his early retirement in 2010.
I am not arguing that McChrystal should abstain from writing about risk or suggesting that he didn’t have wartime successes. A book that intelligently drew from both sides of his military career could be useful. But that is not the book McChrystal chose to write, and for that we should be grateful, because he has instead provided us with a far more important document. “Risk” is stuffed with so many displays of dishonesty, ignorance, and banality that it’s the ultimate self-own for a generation of generals who led America into disaster after 9/11 — and profited from it.
With his new book, McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower.
Fighting the Truth
There is a basic question to ask before buying a general’s advice book: Why are we listening to this guy?
America treats its generals as revered proxies for its ordinary soldiers, loving them even though the wars they’ve presided over have been catastrophic. There has been more than $14 trillion in defense spending since 9/11, more than 7,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at least several hundred thousand civilians killed (which is a conservative estimate). Throughout these calamities, the generals lied about what was happening, telling Congress and the American public that things were going well when they knew it wasn’t true. The breathtaking scale of their deceit was revealed in classified documents that the Washington Post published in an award-winning 2019 series titled “At War With the Truth.”
Their failures have occurred outside the battlefield too.
One of the most venerated generals of recent times is James Mattis, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and went on to become President Donald Trump’s first defense secretary. Before joining the Trump administration, Mattis was on the board of directors of Theranos to provide advice on “building elite teams.” He received an annual stipend of $150,000 and continued to defend Theranos even after the Wall Street Journal revealed in 2015 that the company’s blood-testing machines were fraudulent. Testifying in September at the trial of the company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, Mattis avidly threw her under the bus, saying that he was “disappointed at the level of transparency from Ms. Holmes.”
A different type of flameout happened to retired Gen. David Petraeus, another famous commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan who served as Obama’s director of the CIA. Petraeus didn’t last long at Langley because he was having an affair with his biographer and shared classified information with her. The tradecraft he employed to covertly communicate with her was amateurish: They used the drafts folder in a shared Gmail account. And while in Afghanistan, his military aides were excluded from helicopter trips so that his secret girlfriend could ride along. Petraeus resigned from the CIA and pleaded guilty to mishandling classified information, but he’s still respected and has a lucrative partnership at KKR, a private equity firm.
One more item from the annals of generals gone bad:
There’s retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser until it was realized that he had deceived Vice President Mike Pence about his contacts with a Russian diplomat. After pleading guilty to lying to the FBI, Flynn became a star of the QAnon conspiracy crowd and called for America to have one religion (no prizes for guessing which one). His leap into the world of the unhinged is not unique. Retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who served 10 tours in Afghanistan and led the Joint Special Operations Command, is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire and has described the state’s governor, also a Republican, as a “Chinese communist sympathizer.”
You get the point. Putting aside the conspiracy theories, corporate frauds, and the sharing of classified documents with persons not authorized to receive them (your girlfriend), there is little evidence that the experience gained by generals translates into business acumen. In fact, there is evidence that companies with military officers on their boards have worse outcomes than their competitors. It’s hard to imagine two cultures more different. In the military, a general can order the court-martial of a subordinate for disobeying orders. In the corporate world, Elon Musk is powerful, but he can’t send lazy workers to prison. The skills used to organize a sales team for another round of cold calls are not what you need to lead Delta Force operators into mortal combat. And lest we forget, the U.S. military has a culture of sexual assault and harassment that has resisted decades of reform efforts.
Gladwell for Dummies
McChrystal appears to have the distinction of making more money from his military service than any U.S. general of his generation.
According to a recent investigation by the Washington Post, McChrystal has served as a board member or adviser to at least 10 companies since leaving the military. He was paid more than $1 million for serving on the board of just one firm, Navistar International, which also paid $50 million to the government to settle accusations that it fraudulently overcharged the Marine Corps for armored vehicles. McChrystal also drew $70,000 for a single speech at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and $50,000 for an engagement at California Polytechnic State University. Both are public institutions not known to be awash with funds.
The engine of McChrystal’s business endeavors is his eponymous McChrystal Group, which has more than 50 employees and provides consulting services to corporate and government clients. While “Risk” is written in the first person, McChrystal has a co-author, Anna Butrico, who is an associate at his firm. References to the firm are scattered throughout the book, and its acknowledgments section gives credit to about a dozen employees who provided ideas and assistance. The book is prominently featured on the website of McChrystal Group.
The book is dishonest because it ignores or distorts the risks undertaken by McChrystal that failed. This includes the Tillman episode but most crucially the disastrous war strategies in Afghanistan and Iraq. While there are boastful passages about military missions in Iraq that are portrayed as successful — special forces would “identify and engage enemy fighters with stunning speed,” McChrystal claims — the abundant errors made there are basically unmentioned. More to the point, the handful of pages about Afghanistan skate past colossal failures in which McChrystal was deeply complicit. Violent raids by forces under his command are described only as creating “extraordinary political controversy” because they were “antithetical to the Afghan culture.” Nowhere does McChrystal admit the actual reason for the controversy: U.S. and Afghan forces killed an unconscionable number of civilians, and in some instances, the violence constituted war crimes.
Much of the book is not lies, just utter banality. It is a torrent of platitudes like this: “Fear of change is only natural — adaptability requires the ability, willingness, and, I’d argue, courage to dare to become something different.” Or this assemblage of clichés: “Knowing that transformation is inevitable, we can ensure that we’re asking the right questions of ourselves and our teams to calibrate to our new reality in order to be successful in an increasingly digitized world.” And this insight: “Against the greatest threats, winning is most often the product of teamwork.”
The book moves from one bromide to another with eighth grade-level graphics, and one of its key messages is perplexing from a grammatical perspective: that “the greatest risk to us — is us.” It evokes famous events or personalities to make points that are manifestly self-evident, with references to the Alamo, Google, Apollo 13, Aunt Jemima, Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph Goebbels, Blockbuster, Enron, Lehman Brothers, “The Wizard of Oz,” the Bay of Pigs, Greta Thunberg, Napster, Gettysburg, the Maginot Line, Coco Chanel, Hurricane Katrina, and the Fosbury Flop, among others. One can imagine McChrystal’s agent pitching the germ of this book as “Malcolm Gladwell for Dummies.”
Manufacturing Fame
It’s harmless, you might think. What could be so terrible about a retired general making a few bucks with potted wisdom from West Point and the Sunni Triangle? We can even enjoy a cynical laugh, if we wish, watching a grift come to life as corporate executives make bulk purchases of “Risk” and do calisthenics at dawn with Navy SEALs hired by McChrystal Group. The gullible marks get what they deserve, which is nothing. But I can’t steer my thoughts away from the sacrifices of the soldiers and civilians I met while covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think few of them are pleased or amused by the ease with which fortune and fame are showered on generals who got so many people killed and maimed. Many would regard it as an injustice.
The villain in this story isn’t really McChrystal or his book. He’s doing what Americans are encouraged to do: Swim toward available commercial opportunities and make as much money as you can without breaking the law. Maybe he doesn’t need all that extra cash — generals can receive more than $250,000 in annual retirement pay, after all — but how many people would turn down the partnerships and board seats that are offered to former generals?
The deeper problem, I think, is the adulation that McChrystal and other military leaders get from media organizations. They manufacture the fame that is so misplaced. Here, for instance, is a partial list of the outlets that gave fawning coverage to the rollout of “Risk”: Axios, CNN, PBS, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, MSNBC, NPR, CBS News, Yahoo Finance, and Foreign Policy. It seems that there was just one news outlet in the U.S. that published a critical take — the National Review, with an article by military veteran Bing West that was scathingly headlined “A General Who Failed in War Assesses Risk.”
Haitian migrants use a dam to cross to and from the United States from Mexico, September 17, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
The world was shocked by images of Haitians whipped by U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback as they sought refuge. Thousands were soon deported, but dozens are now detained in an ICE jail in New Mexico where they face inhumane conditions and lack access to legal services. We speak with a lawyer who describes medical neglect, deteriorating mental and physical health, and poor treatment by the staff. “They cannot get the basic tools and have the basic human contact that they need to save their own lives,” says immigration attorney Allegra Love of the El Paso Immigration Collaborative.
Most of the Haitian asylum seekers were mass deported by the Biden administration but some are still being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, jails. Human rights advocates have raised alarm about dozens now held at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, New Mexico, about an hour southeast of Albuquerque, where they say asylum seekers are facing abuse and medical neglect. Advocates have also reported asylum seekers have had limited access to legal services and say many of their requests to be released to stay with family members or sponsors while their cases are resolved have been denied.
The jail is managed by the for-profit private prison corporation CoreCivic. Earlier this year, Torrance actually failed its annual government inspection over severe understaffing, unsanitary and other unsafe conditions. Torrance also saw a massive COVID-19 outbreak and was sued in May by several asylum seekers after guards pepper-sprayed them for launching a peaceful hunger strike last year protesting inhumane conditions. For more, we’re joined in Santa Fe, New Mexico, by immigration attorney Allegra Love of the El Paso Immigration Collaborative. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Allegra. If you can describe who the Haitian asylum-seekers are in the Torrance facility in Estancia and what is happening to them now.
ALLEGRA LOVE: Good morning. The people being held at the Torrance facility in Estancia, New Mexico, are we think between 60 and 80 of the men who we first saw in camps under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas. For reasons that no one has made clear to me, in spite of the fact that I am their lawyer, at least 45 of those people’s lawyer, we have not been told why they were chosen to be put in this detention center and were spared the expulsion flights that thousands and thousands of their countrymen were subjected to. So they are there ostensibly seeking asylum and being held for an administrative hearing for them to be removed to Haiti.
Most of my clients were put into the detention facility around September 21st so they have been there over two months at this point. We are receiving complaints about food, water, treatment by the staff. And probably scariest to me, we are receiving really, really sincere complaints across the board of medical neglect and people’s physical and mental health deteriorating inside of this facility rapidly.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to read a statement from one of the Haitians you are trying to assist at Torrance. This is from a 25-year-old Haitian man who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. He wrote, “If I don’t have an attorney I think that they can deport me. I don’t know what asylum is. I wasn’t allowed to speak. Nobody explained anything and they just told me I was supposed to have an attorney. I don’t want to go back to Haiti. I can’t go back. My family member was killed and his house was burned. My mom has just been crying because I cannot go back. If I go back I can’t even leave the airport.” Talk more about this situation and what has to be done now, Allegra.
ALLEGRA LOVE: You have to imagine that this is not a detention facility that is next to a big city, next to a place where there’s lots of law firms, next to a place where there’s a law school who can help all these people. This is in the middle of the barren New Mexico desert and there are not a lot of lawyers who can help these people with their cases. Asylum cases are intense. Very, very legally complicated. Very, very evidence-heavy claims that you need sincere legal assistance to help.
For a lot of the gentlemen who are detained in that facility, it took us between September 27th was when I first contacted the government to November 12th to speak with them for the first time in person. So when this person, my client says “I don’t know what asylum is,” he is being sincere. He has not spoken in his own language to someone who is on his side and can help him understand the extremely grave legal process that he is going through. But when he said that, he may have already been through one or two hearings in front of an immigration judge, who is actually 300 miles away in El Paso, and talked with him over video and is rapidly trying to remove him from the country and is indifferent to the fact that he has not been able to secure any legal counsel or any even explanation of what asylum is.
Detention—I am never going to say—there’s really no conditions for me that depriving an asylum seeker of their liberty is going to work for me, but it certainly does not work when they cannot get the basic tools and have the basic human contact that they need to save their own lives. And that is what we have in this extremely remote and extremely rural detention center in New Mexico.
AMY GOODMAN: Allegra, can you talk about CoreCivic, this private for-profit detention prison company that is running this facility, that failed an inspection this past year?
ALLEGRA LOVE: CoreCivic is one of the biggest private prison corporations in the United States that profits off of ICE keeping immigrant bodies inside of this detention center. Interestingly enough, during the Trump administration, because of the border closures and because of the pandemic, by the end of 2020, right before Trump left office, there was less than a dozen people inside of this detention facility which meant an enormous loss of profit, to certain extent, to these corporations. Now, we are watching the Biden administration repopulate this rural detention center with immigrants and it is hard not to conclude that this is to bolster corporate profit.
What is really, really alarming about Torrance is it was one of three facilities in the United States that failed their inspection this summer. Failing an inspection is an externally difficult thing to do. I think your program probably does widespread coverage about how terrible immigration detention is, yet most facilities actually pass their inspections and Torrance failed. Yet, our president and this administration is choosing to repopulate this facility that has not met the standard for caring for human life. They are repopulating it with extremely vulnerable people, extremely vulnerable Haitians. It is part of a deterrent strategy. It is part of a strategy to make sure that more Haitians don’t attempt to come into this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Allegra Love, we will continue to cover this issue. It is so critical. Immigration attorney with the El Paso Immigration Collaborative speaking to us from Santa Fe, New Mexico today.
Eva Bruns speaks at a news conference in Spanish Lake, Missouri, Nov. 11, 2021, calling for a more thorough investigation of the death of her son, 28-year-old Justin King. (photo: Jim Salter/AP)
Justin King was shot Nov. 3 in the small town of Bourbon, Missouri, by his neighbor. King's family said he was killed in "cold blood."
Justin King, a 28-year-old Black and Filipino man, was shot Nov. 3 at 11:45 a.m. in the small town of Bourbon, located about 73 miles southwest of St. Louis.
Police say he was shot by the owner of a home he was trying to break into, but witnesses and family members say he was shot in "cold blood" by a man he called his friend.
King succumbed to his wounds at the scene. The 42-year-old white neighbor who shot him was taken into custody and later released.
The Crawford County Sheriff's Department said King was shot "after forcing entry into a neighboring residence where an altercation took place." The homeowner "feared for his life" and shot King, the department said in a news release.
The department said evidence, video surveillance and statements "preliminarily corroborate the homeowner's account of the events."
But family members of King and five people who live in the trailer park told NBC News they doubt that narrative.
Three neighbors told NBC News the shooter was a man who had expressed a desire to kill someone, has a history of violence and was known to use racial epithets. Several neighbors said King and the shooter were friends.
Nimrod Chapel Jr., the president of the Missouri NAACP, who is representing the King family, said Justin King was shot outside the neighbor's home and had not entered it, contrary to the sheriff's account.
"The only person that says it's a home invasion is the guy that shot my son," King's father, John King, told NBC News. "And all the neighbors are saying, 'No, you shot him in cold blood outside.'"
"He had no shirt on, only pajama bottoms. So how was he a threat?" John King said. "Justin was shot in cold blood outside in broad daylight."
Under Missouri's "castle doctrine" law, individuals are allowed to use deadly force against intruders without the duty to retreat, based on the notion that their home is "their castle."
The shooter, whose name has not been made public and who is not facing charges, did not reply to NBC News' request for comment.
Neighbors described King as a happy-go-lucky man who always offered a helping hand. He had moved to Bourbon from St. Louis recently to be close to his 9-year-old daughter, Harlee.
Lesa Stiller, the manager of the trailer park, said she saw King outside heading toward the neighbor's trailer moments before the shooting. All of a sudden, she heard a "pop, pop, pop."
"And right at that last pop, I saw Justin slowly stagger backwards real slow with his hands up in the air," near the outdoor front steps of the shooter's trailer, Stiller recalled. She noted that she didn't see King enter the trailer itself and that King and the shooter lived across from each other.
"I heard him say, 'I thought we were friends.' And [the neighbor] said, 'We were!' and he just slowly walked back," she said.
Another neighbor, Katie Bosek, described King as "a gentle man who helped everybody." She said he helped her search for her dogs that went missing the same day as the shooting. Later that day, King and the neighbor who shot him worked together to fix her car, she said.
"They both got under the hood together. They're just cutting it up laughing as they're doing it," she said.
She claimed she saw King and the neighbor walk off together. She said she heard three gunshots about 15 minutes later and rushed to the window to see King lying on the ground.
Trina Willson, who lives several trailers behind the shooter, said: "He knew Justin. You would think that if your friend was coming into your house, you'd be like, 'Hey, man, what are you doing?' Why do you automatically resort to pulling out a gun and shooting him? How can this even possibly go down as self-defense?"
Chapel noted that the neighbor and King had cameras at their homes. Police have not released any video footage from the incident to the public or the family but said they have "viewed all videos at our disposal." The Crawford County Sheriff's Department said it intends to share the footage "upon the final case review by the county prosecutor."
King's death has torn apart the close-knit community in the small town of Bourbon, home to 1,600 residents.
"It's been crazy here since that. We've never had nothing like that in this little small town since I've been here in 20 years," Earl McCoy, another neighbor, said. "We take care of each other in here. It's been eerily quiet here. It was like a ghost town."
A history of threatening violence and racist language
Three people who live in the park said the neighbor who shot King had threatened violence before.
Stiller said the neighbor was known to show off his gun — including once at a party she threw on Oct. 30.
"He never went anywhere without that .32 in his belt," she said.
Bosek recalled that King told her months before the shooting that the neighbor had threatened to shoot him.
"Justin came over about two months prior to all this happening. He was like, 'You know he threatened to shoot me? Yeah, that dude threatened to shoot me,'" she said. "Justin was such a good guy. He would always forgive people and keep going back."
McCoy said the shooter "had guns all over his house."
"The last time I talked to [the neighbor] was at a party on Halloween when he showed everybody his little pistol," McCoy said. "He said, 'I don't fight no more; I shoot motherf------.'"
King's father believes the shooting was an act of "racially motivated hate" and said his son was the only Black person in that trailer community.
Two neighbors also said the shooter was known to use racial slurs.
"He was always open with the N-word. He never said 'Black man,'" Stiller said.
"He would blurt [racial epithets] out. He wouldn't call it to Justin if he was standing around me and Justin because he knows I'd knock his a-- off," McCoy said.
The neighbor who shot King has a criminal record involving violence. He was arrested in June 2017 and charged with second-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon while intoxicated, both felonies, according to court records.
Court records do not show if those charges were dismissed. The Crawford County court clerk declined to comment, and the Crawford County prosecutor's office did not respond to NBC News' request for comment on those charges.
Federal law generally prohibits people from possessing firearms if they have been convicted of a felony, according to Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Further, Missouri also prohibits possession of a firearm by any person convicted of a felony under Missouri law.
Outrage over the handling of the case
John King said he was outraged to see sheriff's deputies escorting the shooter back to his trailer the day after his son's death.
The family, along with local activists, are calling out the sheriff's department and demanding a thorough investigation.
"I feel, like, betrayed by all the police," King’s mother, Eva Bruns, said. "They're not being fair. I don't know if it's because of color or because of the way the killer is."
"In the investigation, nothing has been done," she said. "Twenty-four hours later and he's out of jail. I don't know what kind of justice that is."
Crawford County Sheriff Darin Layman said in a statement that all the information shared thus far in the case is "accurate in relation to our investigation and findings."
"Our office has not uncovered any evidence to support the idea that this was a racially motivated incident," he said. "We have contacted the FBI regarding this investigation and requested their assistance in processing a portion of the evidence collected."
The FBI in Missouri declined to comment on the case.
Now the family is focusing on getting answers on what happened in the build-up to King's death.
"The family wants to make sure that whoever is responsible for the death of their son is held accountable," Chapel, the King family’s lawyer, said. "But right now we just settle for the disclosure of the truth."
So far, no lawsuit has been filed in the case, but Chapel said, "I wouldn't rule anything out at this point."
A statewide issue of failing to investigate the deaths of Black men
Chapel said the lack of action in King's case is part of a statewide problem when it comes to investigating the deaths of African Americans, pointing to the cases of Tory Sanders and Derontae Martin.
Sanders, 28, a Black inmate at a rural jail, died in May 2017 under similar circumstances to George Floyd, after a white law enforcement officer pressed his knee on his neck, according to a wrongful death suit filed by his family. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt declined to file charges in his death.
Martin, 19, was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head on April 25 at the home of a white man who had posted racist memes on social media. Authorities concluded that he died by suicide, but in July, a jury of six people ruled during a coroner's inquest hearing that Martin was killed by violence.
"That's Jim Crow justice," Chapel said. "This is a statewide issue. In Justin's case, they allege that there's an investigation, but then they produce the results of the investigation before the investigation is complete. What kind of police work is that?"
Missouri's NAACP chapter issued a travel advisory in 2017 that remains in effect today warning people to travel with caution in the state because "race, gender and color-based crimes have a long history in Missouri."
"What Missouri needs is to have some federal oversight to ensure that law enforcement is trying to treat people in the way that the Constitution demands, whether you're the alleged perpetrator of a crime or victim of a crime — that you have the same rights regardless of skin color," Chapel said.
On Nov. 16, the Crawford County Sheriff's Department said the investigation into King's death is still open and evidence is being processed and sent off for lab analysis. The department also said an informal case review was conducted with the Crawford County prosecutor's office, and there will be follow-ups with witnesses and evidence collection.
Xiomara Castro, wife of former president Manuel Zelaya who was ousted in a right-wing coup, won Honduras's recent presidential elections. (photo: Facebook)
Xiomara Castro won Honduras’s presidency pledging to tax wealth, expand the welfare state, and end the country’s “failed neoliberal model.” Her win was also a defeat for the US, which backed a coup that overthrew her husband Manuel Zelaya 12 years ago.
This past week, the socialist Castro won the Honduran presidency in a landslide, ending twelve years of right-wing rule in the country and becoming its first female president in the process. That Castro won on a platform to tax wealth, create a new welfare payment for the poor and elderly, and overhaul the country’s “failed neoliberal model” is significant enough. But Castro’s win is also a symbolic reversal of the US-backed right-wing coup that threw her husband, Manuel Zelaya, from power twelve years ago.
How to Win Enemies and Alienate Business
A well-off landowner from an elite family who won on the centrist Liberal Party ticket, Zelaya had been no radical. Believed to have supported anti-leftist death squads in the 1980s, once in power he backed Honduras’s entry into the neoliberal Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) despite vehement grassroots opposition to it in the country, and continued the country’s traditional military cooperation with Washington, winning praise from US military leadership.
Though he’d moved left over the course of his term — upping teacher pay, providing free lunches at public schools, topping up pensions, and abolishing school fees — even his populist moves had a firm ceiling. While he raised the minimum wage by 60 percent, it stayed at poverty level, and didn’t apply to workers in the maquiladora export industry, a neoliberal business model created to draw in foreign investment. Not that it mattered: Being forced to lose even a cent of profit to their grossly underpaid workers was an outrage to the Honduran business elite. With Zelaya pairing these moves with an increasing use of leftist rhetoric, he lost the support of his own party, and the Honduran right plotted to move against him.
Meanwhile, in Washington, despite playing ball with the US elite, Zelaya’s cardinal sin was forging closer relations with left-wing Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who visited Honduras for the first time in 2008. Under Zelaya, Honduras entered Petrocaribe, Venezuela’s program for selling subsidized oil to friendly governments, and joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the People of Our America (ALBA) trade bloc, an embryonic leftist counterweight to US-led, neoliberal free trade in the hemisphere. Zelaya called the latter “an act of freedom,” adding, provocatively, that he was “taking a step toward becoming a government of the center left, and if anyone dislikes this, well just remove the word ‘center’ and keep the second one.”
This was a step too far. Though Zelaya had cast his pivot to Chávez as a pragmatic move, born of frustration with the “moderate offers” of support from rich countries, he also took a swipe at the “decades-long relationship of dominance by the United States.” The move inflamed conservative fears in the country and anger among the US Right. “If President Zelaya wants to be an ally of our enemies, let him think about what might be the consequences of his actions and words,” Otto Reich, a former diplomat to the region under George W. Bush, told the press in 2008.
The pretext for Zelaya’s removal was his move in early 2009 to hold a nonbinding referendum on rewriting the country’s twenty-six-year-old constitution, ostensibly to reflect the “substantial and significant changes” that had taken place in Honduras. Zelaya’s insistence on holding the vote, a power grab in his critics’ eyes, put him at odds with the courts, the legislature (his own party included), and military leaders, who refused to defy the courts by lending their resources to carrying it out. The matter soon spiraled into a crisis that saw Zelaya remove two top military officials, thirty-six others resign in protest, and calls from the Honduran establishment to boycott the vote — all of it culminating in the June morning where soldiers occupied the capital and military leaders escorted Zelaya, at gunpoint, to a plane out of the country.
Making the Coup Stick
There’s no doubt Zelaya’s brinkmanship fed the crisis that ended in his own ouster. But before you side with the coup plotters, consider a few things. For one, there’s the fact that this abrogation of a democratic constitution came in response to not just a referendum whose victory was far from assured, but a nonbinding one.
Second, let’s allow that the worst thing Zelaya was accused of plotting — to change the constitution to allow himself a second term — is eminently reasonable. While not uncommon in Latin America, a single term for a national leader is comparatively restrictive in the global context, and as we’ll see, the Honduran elite changed their mind about this in a few short years. The charges also didn’t make sense: With a presidential election set only five months after the referendum was due to be held, there was little possibility the constitution could be amended in time to keep Zelaya in power (which he’d have to win a second election to secure anyway).
Nor is Honduras’s constitution some kind of sacred, untouchable document. It had been serially rewritten over the twentieth century, and the version Zelaya was operating under had been written by the country’s military dictatorship in 1982, with preserving the power of the armed forces expressly in mind: it established a weak executive and an unusually independent military hierarchy, and split the country into military regions commanded by military officials. The constitution had also been amended 130 times by decree in the intervening decades. (And if you think there’s something automatically out-of-bounds about rewriting an antiquated constitution against the wishes of a conservative political establishment, ask yourself if you feel the same way about calls to overhaul the gridlocked US political system and reform its right-wing Supreme Court).
The outrageous act sparked outrage across the hemisphere. Even US officials acknowledged the flagrantly despotic nature of the coup. “On the one instance, we’re talking about conducting a survey, a nonbinding survey; in the other instance, we’re talking about the forcible removal of a president from a country,” one anonymous official told the New York Times.
Nevertheless, military ties run thicker than any democratic commitments in Washington, and US policymakers could never be too hostile toward the coup plotters their own military had trained. (“It would be difficult for us, with our training, to have a relationship with a leftist government,” said an army lawyer.)
In the same Times report, anonymous members of the newly elected Barack Obama administration admitted to the Times that, before Zelaya’s removal, they had discussed with the military legal methods to “remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that.” On its way out of the country, the military plane carrying Zelaya to his exile stopped at a Honduran air base US troops used as a headquarters, supposedly to refuel; the military denied US personnel knew about the flight, despite officially sharing air traffic control duties at the site.
Once it happened, and in the days, weeks, and months ahead, the administration toed a careful line, issuing stern words of general disapproval while assiduously taking care not to undermine the ouster. They avoided calling it a military coup (which would have automatically triggered a legally mandated withdrawal of aid) and refused to condemn what was happening in the country — including repression of Zelaya supporters that involved mass arrests, torture, and killings — and Obama avoided meeting with Zelaya as he furiously lobbied in Washington, all while the administration dragged its feet on fully punishing the coup plotters.
As Washington ran out the clock, Honduras’s neighbors lost their patience. The Union of South American Nations, including US allies, unanimously declared it wouldn’t recognize a government elected under the coup government, while Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva joined hands with Mexican president Felipe Calderón, a conservative Bush ally, to say the same. The United States, meanwhile, worked to block the Organization of American States (OAS) from following Lula and Calderón’s lead.
Hillary Clinton would later boast in her autobiography of trying to block Zelaya’s return to office behind the scenes, strategizing with regional allies to “ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot.” She justified the coup government’s repressive curfew and denounced his attempts to reenter the country, and her State Department pressured OAS officials to sideline him and work with the coup leaders.
Clinton wasn’t stupid. The country’s US ambassador had warned her in advance that the coup would happen and unambiguously told her it was “an illegal and unconstitutional coup,” and Clinton’s friend and underling Anne-Marie Slaughter urged her to declare it as such. But the coup government quickly hired former Clintonites as lobbyists to legitimize its democratic overthrow, used by Clinton to open communications with the interim president, whom the administration ended up advising and even editing the speeches of.
Despite loudly claiming to have punished the government, in reality, Washington kept the money flowing to Honduras, including from a development agency Clinton herself was chairing. Meanwhile, the close relationship between the two countries’ militaries proved a boon to the coup plotters. We now know that an active military official met with them the night before they acted, while a retired official helped the coup government lobby Washington after the fact.
In the end, Washington negotiated an agreement that required congressional approval of Zelaya’s return to power. When Congress of course rejected this, the Obama administration quickly said it would recognize the results of the upcoming elections anyway, isolating it from virtually the entire planet. In an election clouded by government repression and a voter boycott that saw turnout drop, and which not even half of voters viewed as legitimate, Pepe Lobo, a right-wing businessman and rancher, beat Zelaya’s vice president by sixteen points.
“The United States was the only country that maintained an ambassador in Honduras and was extremely helpful in eventually finding a path out of the crisis,” he said later.
Horror and Blowback
Whatever anyone thinks of Zelaya and his halting reform program, his ouster set off a more-than-decade-long nightmare for the country.
The Lobo government, filled with military officials who had presided over the coup, moved immediately to roll back Zelaya’s achievements. He pulled Honduras out of ALBA, gutted a wage increase meant to take effect at the start of the year, weakened labor laws, shelved Zelaya’s land reform plans, and announced privatization plans for the education and health care sectors. Declaring his government bankrupt early on, Lobo took out an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and imposed the neoliberal policies demanded in return, with more borrowing to come later.
Hardly a Scandinavian paradise before the coup, Honduran social and economic indicators have plummeted in the years since. Economic growth, unemployment, and poverty all worsened, while inequality sharply rose and violence against LGBT activists exploded. Organized crime has enjoyed a boom period, as has drug trafficking, with both Lobo and his right-wing successor, president of the congress Juan Orlando Hernández, facing serious accusations of personally working to get cocaine onto US streets.
Hondurans’ resistance to this neoliberal agenda faced more of the violent repression started by the coup government. Striking teachers, and the parents and students who lent them solidarity, were met with tear gas, beatings, and even murder. Eight journalists were killed in the new government’s first six months alone, along with ten opposition activists.
Death squads returned to the country, picking off environmentalists, indigenous land activists, and any other “terrorists” standing in the way of the rapacious business interests unleashed by the government. With more than 120 killed between 2010 and 2017, the country has consistently ranked at the top of the list of most dangerous countries to be an environmental activist. The victims include Berta Cáceres, the famed activist murdered in her home in 2016 after her name ended up on a military hit list and who blamed Clinton before her death for enabling a “counterinsurgency” on behalf of “international capital.”
This state violence was directly facilitated by Washington in another way as well: the hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid that’s been funneled to military and police under post-coup governments, some of it in a plan expressly designed and sold by Joe Biden when he was vice president, and which Biden has used as a model during his own administration. Given that it’s these very “security forces” that are responsible for the violence toward and terrorization of ordinary Hondurans, the move has been entirely counterproductive, to the extent that we take its stated goals at face value.
Meanwhile, once in power, the Honduran right seemed determined to become exactly what it once accused Zelaya of being. After winning the 2013 presidential election, Hernández and the same politicians who cried despotism over Zelaya’s attempt to amend the constitution’s single-term limit did just that, with the assent of a supreme court that suddenly did a 180 on the issue. Then, in 2017, Hernández won a second term in an election riddled with irregularities, to the point that even the right-wing, Washington-friendly OAS called for new elections. This time, the US State Department wasted little time in warmly congratulating Hernández on his victory.
None of it had bothered Washington. Even as bodies like the United Nations and European Union and other Latin American nations called the 2009 election illegitimate, Clinton had termed it “free and fair” and declared the following January that the crisis had “been managed to a successful conclusion” and “done without violence.” Full US aid was restarted, and the Obama administration worked to get Honduras back in the OAS. As violence in the country continued to skyrocket, assistance from Washington was always forthcoming. In fact, the US military expanded its presence in the country, with three new military bases.
But in a lesson worth mulling over for any aspiring liberal White House technocrats, it wasn’t just Honduras that felt the reverberations of the 2009 coup. The disruption, repression, and violence it fostered within Honduras has been and still is a major push factor in the waves of northward migration that, down the line, have fed a rolling series of domestic crises in the United States: first under Obama and now under Biden, whose inability to stem the flow of desperate people coming to the border — and whose inhumane, Donald Trump–lite response to their arrival — has become the biggest political liability of his presidency.
But the biggest US loser of the coup was, ironically, Hillary Clinton herself. Despite excising the incriminating passage about Zelaya from later reissues of her book, the matter nevertheless became one of many campaign issues in the 2016 Democratic primary that helped dent enthusiasm for the candidate come election day. Meanwhile, the human displacement unleashed by the coup she aided had also fed the growth of virulent, anti-immigrant sentiment, contributing directly to the rise of her opponent, Trump, who snatched away her presidential hopes.
Doing the right thing seven years earlier might have benefited her politically. Instead, Clinton, who did more than most people to make sure the coup and the rightist government that followed were legitimized, was left serially complaining about how unfair it was she lost her own election.
A Breeze of Change
Castro’s win only goes a small, albeit powerfully symbolic, way toward correcting the injustices of the 2009 coup. A defeat of the repressive, anti-democratic right-wing bloc that’s ruled the country since Zelaya’s removal is just the first step, and no easy feat. Now comes the even more difficult feat of governing, where Castro will have to work with a likely divided congress and a state bureaucracy shaped by and aligned with her opposition, all of which will limit what she can do.
Still, her victory is another sign of the dramatic change currently sweeping Latin America, which has already seen leftists win the presidency in Peru, and where upcoming contests in Chile — now rewriting its own constitution — and, further down the line, Brazil, could do the same. For those in the region who want to protect their land and waters from a ravenous business sector, end the widespread practice of murder with impunity, and control and benefit from their own resources, these are heartening sights.
After her husband had already been deposed at gunpoint, Castro had lost twice, once as a presidential candidate in 2013, then as vice president in 2017. Her win reminds us that, even in the murderous landscape of Latin American politics, setbacks and defeats aren’t permanent, however heartbreaking. Sometimes, wrongs can be righted.
The number of monarch butterflies migrating to California spiked this winter after years of historic lows. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Those numbers have plummeted by more than 99% in recent years.
"The last few years we've had less than 30,000 butterflies," biologist Emma Pelton said. "Last year, we actually dropped below 2,000 butterflies. So really an order of magnitude change in a short time period."
Pelton works with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and says pesticides and habitat loss play a role in that decline.
But this year, the numbers are starting to pick up. Biologists and volunteers across California have already counted more than 100,000 monarchs.
Richard Rachman is the coordinator for the Xerces Society's annual Thanksgiving monarch count in Los Angeles County, and has been buoyed by the numbers.
"It's kind of magical to just be in this closed-in woodland, and then all of a sudden, poof! You're just like a Disneyland fairy princess surrounded by butterflies," he said.
Connie Day is a volunteer that works with Rachman, and met him at Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica to conduct an early morning count last week.
They went out while it was still dark and the butterflies were quiet and not fluttering.
"It's really hard to count them when they're moving," Day said.
"You know, when you first see them, they look like the trees are dripping. And when they begin to flutter, we have people come and see them for the first time, and they gasp.
"I mean, I gasp, and I've been doing it for a long time."
Day said they had seen around 200 monarchs there in past weeks and the duo found more than 100 near the beach that morning.
The count continues until December 5, and so far this year's numbers are encouraging overall. But Pelton says it's too early to know what is causing this resurgence.
"Nature has given us a second chance ... But I do think we're in really dangerous territory," she said.
"The population has really never been so low as it has the last three years.
"I think this is really good reason to take heart that there might still be time to make a difference."
Pelton says if you live in the western U.S., you can help by planting native milkweed and flowers in your yard.
A small act that could give a big boost to the monarchs.
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