27 January 22
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Senate Republicans invoking the cause of “states’ rights” united in a filibuster to block reforms. The question now is what can be done about it.
Last week, Senate Republicans invoking the cause of “states’ rights” united in a filibuster to block democratic reforms, including the effort to revive the Voting Rights Act. They were empowered to do so by the decision of two wayward Democratic senators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — to protect the filibuster, choosing obstruction over reforms they claim to support. The 50 Republicans voting against reform represent 41 million fewer voters than the 50 Democrats who support reform.
For African Americans, the Republican commitment to rig the rules for the minority is particularly ominous. “States’ rights” was the cover story used by the Southern plantation class after the Civil War to suppress the Black vote and impose apartheid — legal segregation — on the South. Today, “states’ rights” is used to justify systematic Republican efforts to make it harder to vote, particularly in urban areas with high numbers of Blacks and other people of color.
For African Americans, freedom, citizenship and the right to vote are inextricably linked. With the victory of the Union in the Civil War, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were passed — freeing the slaves, requiring equal protection under the law, and protecting the right to vote. Those rights were trampled by segregation. It took 100 years and the civil rights movement to end segregation and pass the Voting Rights Act.
Now we witness a reaction once more as Republicans seek to suppress the vote. Once more they invoke states’ rights to oppose federal efforts to protect this basic right.
The question now is what can be done about it. This is not a time for the wringing of hands, for giving up. It is a time to act.
The Biden administration still has statutory authority under what is left of the Voting Rights Act — as well as constitutional authority — to protect the right to vote. As attorney Gerald Griggs argued, the president could issue executive orders to empower the Justice Department to send in federal monitors in states that are sued by the Justice Department for violating the right to vote. The attorney general could file suit against states violating the Voting Rights Act and order suspension of all tests and devices that abridge the right to vote. The attorney general could use the enforcement power of the Voting Rights Act to prevent state officials from undertaking voter purges or efforts to impede the casting or tabulation of the vote.
These laws are on the books. It is time to set up a special task force to ensure that they are enforced.
But judicial action is not sufficient. In the end, we won the right to vote — and passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — not because the Constitution demanded it, or the courts ordered it.
We won because people marched, demonstrated, and risked their lives to demand the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act was passed in the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C., but it was won on the bridge in Selma, Alabama. Lyndon Johnson and Congress were reacting to a demand that could no longer be ignored.
We need street heat. Manchin struts around Washington rationalizing his vote against support for families with children, against paid family leave, against lower prescription drug prices, against tuition-free community college. He represents one of the poorest states in the union, in dire need of investment and reform. He needs to be reminded where he comes from — and who he is supposed to represent. We need street heat with a huge march in the streets in West Virginia.
And we need street heat on the anniversary of Selma. Pundits say people don’t care about the right to vote. Republicans, they argue, can filibuster it and pay no price at the polls. To change that, citizens of conscience must mobilize once more — going back to Selma — and then across the 50 states to demand that the right to vote be protected.
The stakes are very high. Minority rule mocks democracy. It is corrosive, undermining the legitimacy of our government. It is destructive, allowing the few to pocket the gold while the many get the shaft. Now is the time for the majority to make their voices heard.
Voting rights!
Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo in Washington, D.C., in April 2021. (photo: Erin Schaff/Getty)
What’s next in the Senate, now that Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down.
That task joins a long list of priorities: Democrats have to pass a bill on government funding by February 18 in order to avoid a government shutdown; they are trying to complete work on an update to the Electoral Count Act and a bill aimed at increasing the US’s competitiveness with China in the next few weeks; and they hope to restart talks on their massive climate and social spending initiative, the Build Back Better Act, in time to pass at least part of it before the 2022 midterms.
That’s a lot. Fortunately for Democrats, seating a new justice on the Supreme Court could be the easiest of their many tasks.
Here’s how the process would work logistically: First, President Joe Biden will have to nominate an appointee to take Breyer’s seat. Once he does, the process can move relatively quickly in the Senate — think back to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s expedited confirmation in October 2020. Former President Donald Trump announced Barrett’s nomination on September 26 and the Senate confirmed her on October 26. This was one of the fastest confirmations in history — typically, the process takes a little over two months on average — but there’s no reason Democrats can’t replicate Republicans’ strategy here.
Because Supreme Court nominees only need a simple majority to be confirmed, Democrats are able to unilaterally move through any appointment with their 50-person majority and the help of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote. The main issue they’ll have to address is maintaining party unity on the nominee, since they’d need every vote in order to confirm a justice if Republicans don’t support the pick.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin (D-IL) have yet to provide details about when this process could get underway, though both have said they intend to handle it quickly once it does. As CNN reported, Democrats are expected to weigh a new nominee before the end of the Supreme Court’s term this summer.
“President Biden’s nominee will receive a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and will be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed,” Schumer said in a Wednesday statement. There’s plenty of precedent for Democrats to do just that.
There’s precedent for a speedy confirmation process
Lawmakers need look no further than the last Supreme Court confirmation process for an example of how quickly the Senate is able to approve a nominee if the votes are there.
In the fall of 2020, Republicans were able to hold a confirmation hearing for Justice Amy Coney Barrett within a few weeks of her nomination. It’s a process Democrats could well emulate for whoever Biden decides to nominate, holding a confirmation hearing, committee vote, and Senate vote in quick succession.
Because of how narrow their majority is, and the even split of Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee, there could be some extra steps needed to advance Biden’s nominee to a floor vote if the committee’s approval vote ends in a tie. Essentially, Schumer could bypass the tie in the committee, and hold a procedural vote regarding floor consideration of the nomination, which can pass with a simple majority. But even with that step, the confirmation process is still one that could move pretty quickly.
“There’s nothing that technically stops the Democrats from moving at breakneck speed to confirm a successor to Justice Breyer,” says George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder.
The vote hinges on Democratic unity
As has been the case with numerous bills, a vote on the Supreme Court nominee will depend on Democratic unity since the party has such a narrow majority.
All 50 members would need to back the nominee in order for them to advance if no Republicans vote in favor. So far, Democrats have stuck together on most of Biden’s appointees, with the exception of a handful of picks including former Office of Management and Budget nominee Neera Tanden, who Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) opposed.
Any opposition from moderate Democratic lawmakers like Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to this Supreme Court pick could potentially derail the nominee, though this outcome seems unlikely given how united Democrats have been on Biden’s choices up to this point.
Last year, the Senate confirmed 40 of Biden’s judicial nominees, the most any recent president has seen in their first year. Those nominees brought more diversity to the bench, and included a number of women, people of color, and public defenders.
Biden previously pledged to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, a promise that multiple lawmakers pushed for him to deliver on with this nomination. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has reported, one of the potential contenders is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed to the DC Circuit Court last year. Jackson was confirmed by a 53-44 majority at the time, a sign that she would likely have solid support if she were the Supreme Court nominee as well.
Senators would ideally be able to advance a Supreme Court confirmation while also working on legislative priorities like the Build Back Better Act. But it’s likely that the confirmation process will delay action on bills because of how much of senators’ time and focus it will draw. As was the case with Trump’s impeachment trial in January 2021, expect lawmakers to say they’ll be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” In reality, however, there will probably be trade-offs, especially given that lawmakers are likely to make getting a new Democratic nominee onto the Supreme Court a main priority.
Portland police officers chase demonstrators. (photo: Nathan Howard/Getty)
Department of Justice decries a cover-up of the “offensive” Power Point, as activist sue Portland cops alleging a “campaign of violence” against protesters
The mea culpa comes days after the feds formally rebuked the Portland Police Bureau for covering up its use of a Proud Boys meme in training materials. A slide from a crowd-control PowerPoint developed for Portland police featured the “Prayer of the Alt Knight” — a meme showing a riot cop bashing a long-haired citizen, with an overlay of text that reads, in part: “Woe be unto you, dirty hippy… I shall send among you, My humble servants with hat, and with bat; That they may christen your heads with hickory, And anoint your faces with pepper spray.”
(The meme is linked to the “Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights,” identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as the “tactical defense arm” of the Proud Boys, the violent, far-right “Western chauvinist” group.)
The slide made headlines when it was released by Mayor Ted Wheeler’s office — despite the city attempting to bury the news by releasing it on the Friday afternoon before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.
For the bureau’s critics, the slide gave lie to longstanding claims by PPB officials to have “zero opinion about the ideology or politics or speech” of protesters. In recent years, Portland has emerged as a rift zone, where the nation’s ideological divisions erupt violently in the streets. But rather than acting the part of neutral peace-keepers between right- and the left-wing factions, PPB officers often appear to welcome extremists like the Proud Boys as informal allies.
Lawyers for the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department blasted the city — both for the offensive content of the training, and for hiding the PowerPoint from Uncle Sam. “The City should have reported these [riot] training materials when they were developed, as required,” insists a letter sent to the city attorney and police chief last week. The materials were delivered to the feds on Jan. 14.
The Portland police have been under federal supervision for nearly a decade. The Justice Department found in 2012 that Portland police had engaged “in a pattern or practice of using excessive force” — in particular against those with mental illness. The bureau’s violent policing of Portland’s racial-justice protests, involving more than 6,000 uses of force in 2020 alone, caused PPB to fall out of compliance with its reform agreement with DOJ last year. Federal overseers have called out the bureau for an unconstitutional reliance on violence and a leadership that broadly sees “all force as justified.”
The Justice Department makes clear that problems with the PPB training extend beyond a single slide, and that the full, 110-slide deck features “training slides that have varying degrees of offensive content, incorrect guidance, and false or misleading information.” It adds that the government would have made “substantial edits” or rejected the training materials outright had it been made aware of them.
The DOJ lawyers add that “the existence of these [riot] training materials might have materially impacted our assessments of the City’s compliance” with federal oversight, because the training of crowd-control officers was “central to our 2021 annual compliance report” as well as to ongoing mediation.
The DOJ letter acidly denounces the city’s decision to keep the materials under wraps. “Some PPB and City employees knew or should have known about these materials for years,” it insists. “The City Attorney’s Office has reportedly known about them since at least September 2021.” In his apologetic response, City Attorney Taylor writes that he had planned to turn over the training slides as part of the city’s annual disclosures to the Justice Department later this month.
In Portland’s odd system of government, the mayor doubles as the police commissioner. Wheeler has said he was “disgusted” by the inclusion of the hippie-bashing slide. But his office said that the document had not been released to “protect the integrity” of an internal police investigation that started last September when the slide surfaced — as part of litigation against the Portland Police Bureau for alleged widespread brutality against protesters. (Despite having months to investigate, the police say they have no clear leads on who added the Proud Boy meme to the police training.)
“A Complete Lack Of Accountability”
The mayor’s office said it only made the slide public to get out in front of a legal filing in that brutality case, which has now been submitted to federal court. The motion in suit filed by the activist group Don’t Shoot Portland seeks class-action status “to hold PPB responsible for its violent and unlawful conduct against an estimated tens of thousands” of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The suit accuses PPB of unconstitutionally punishing entire crowds for the law-breaking actions of a few individuals, and of viewpoint discrimination against protesters who demanded police accountability. Citing the 6,000 uses of force as well as nearly 300 deployments of tear gas in the summer and fall of 2020, the lawsuit decries a politically motivated police “campaign of violence” against demonstrators.
“Ample evidence suggests that the PPB’s response to left-wing protests against white supremacy and police violence was motivated by the PPB’s strong disagreement with the message of those protests,” the motion alleges. “PPB’s violent response to those demonstrating against white supremacy and police brutality,” it adds, “is starkly contrasted by its… more favorable treatment of right-wing, neo-fascist, white supremacist demonstrators.”
The motion insists that Portland cops were “motivated by the goal of silencing advocates for police reform,” and it alleges that police tactics were so excessive that they would “chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in the [constitutionally] protected activity” of street protest. The document rebukes Portland police officers for repeatedly turning the streets of downtown into “a war zone with only one active army – the PPB – chasing fleeing civilians.”
Taking aim at PPB leadership as well as riot cops, the litigation decries “a complete lack of accountability” for officers who engaged in violence. A deposition of a PPB commander accompanying the lawsuit reveals that — across more than a dozen nights of protest from May through September 2020 — not a single officer was disciplined for excessive use of force.
The lawsuit also highlights two uses of force that a federal judge ruled violated a restraining order to protect protesters, resulting in federal contempt findings against PPB. But neither case resulted in discipline by the bureau.
An exchange in the deposition of the police commander speaks volumes to PPB’s view of itself as beyond reproach:
Lawyer: Does the City have concerns about making findings that are in direct contradiction to a federal court judge?
PPB Commander: No.
Juan Chavez, a civil rights attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, is one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case. He denounces PPB for “failures of training, failures of policy, and failures of accountability.” Most outrageous, he insists, PPB has engaged in unconstitutional collective punishment of crowds of protesters — with tear gas, bull rushes, baton strikes, etc — when many had done nothing to justify that violence.
The fourth amendment standard for use of force, Chavez insists, is highly specific, requiring probable cause for each act of police violence and “each person they use force against.” Chavez elaborates that PPB, itself, has admitted to a practice of collective punishment: “We saw this time and time again in their own reporting,” Chavez says, paraphrasing the reports: “‘The crowd was hostile’; ‘The crowd was anti-police’; ‘The crowd was chanting ACAB’” (an acronym meaning all cops are bastards). Time and again, PPB officers were making the case “that an entire crowd now had generated the amount of legal justification to use force against them,” Chavez says. “And that’s just not how the Constitution is enforced.”
Chavez hastens to add that the aim of the class-action lawsuit is not to recover monetary damages, rather for the court to hand down “an enforceable order” against police violence. Chavez hopes that would curb PPB’s brutality going forward but also “validate the experience of tens of thousands of people who were injured in the street. They were told ‘PPB is following the law’ — when we know they know they weren’t.”
'The American dream may be coming apart at the seams, but the glory of The Greatest is in full flower.' (photo: Getty)
Heroes? When I was a kid, among my heroes — and I was joined in this by so many Americans — was Jackie Robinson. Yes, he was the first Black ballplayer to break into the segregated major leagues. But the main thing for me was that he was the stellar second baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers and I was a mad Dodgers fan. My dad grew up in Brooklyn, so no surprise there.
But as my favorite sportswriter, TomDispatch‘s jock culture correspondent Robert Lipsyte, author most recently of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, reminds us today, we now live in a distinctly Jackie Robinson-less world. The splits in a post- (or is it… sigh… pre-Trumpian) America have grown so great that heroes go distinctly unshared among us.
In this century, my own all-American heroes — the people who have revealed to us what a national (in)security state we really live in — are anything but universally agreed upon. If they were, Edward Snowden, who first gave us a sense of just how far-flung the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans was, would still be living here, not in Moscow (of all places). And Daniel Hale, the former Air Force intelligence analyst who revealed to The Intercept information about the devastating U.S. drone-killing programs of our global war on terror, would have been hailed as a hero rather than sentenced to almost four years in jail. (“How could it be considered honorable of me,” he said, “to continuously have laid in wait for the next opportunity to kill unsuspecting persons who, more often than not, are posing no danger to me or any other person at the time?”) Having watched drone strikes in Afghanistan like the final one of the Afghan War in which a Hellfire missile slaughtered 10 civilians, including seven children, he testified in court: “I believe that it is wrong to kill, but it is especially wrong to kill the defenseless.”
I mean, tell me that’s not heroic. But I know all too well that he’s no hero to so many Americans. As Lipsyte suggests, our last all-American hero may have been Muhammad Ali and that tells us all too much about our riven American world today.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Other than, I guess, Abraham Lincoln or Jesus Christ, the current go-to-guy for a quick symbolic fix of history, spirituality, and spectacle is that heavyweight boxer who called himself The Greatest. Somehow, he’s now right up there with two other once super-polarizing figures — the greatest American president and the greatest Christian of all time.
I’ve been wondering lately just how Ali actually reached such heights. There are plenty of people alive today who once hated him and yet, in American popular culture, he’s now a secular saint.
He would only have been 80 years old on January 17th. He died in 2016 at 74. While Lincoln and Christ were dramatically killed in their prime, Ali’s life began fading away before our eyes while he was still in his thirties. That was when he gradually began losing his voice (and oh, what a voice it was!), his mobility, and his expressive affect, first from the pummeling that boxing gave him and then from Parkinson’s Disease.
I rarely refuse interview requests about him. As one of a diminishing group of old, mostly white male journalists who knew Clay before he was champion, I feel an obligation to help set straight a willfully misinterpreted biography. I’m also always curious about why strangers are so fascinated by Ali and who they think he really was.
In recent years, they’ve ranged from the documentary king Ken Burns to an eighth-grader from California named Harmony. Like most of the scores of others, their questions were remarkably sharp and well-prepared, although most of them lean toward the Ali industry’s common image of him as a fiery social warrior who arrived fully formed at a time in need of just such a hero.
That image is easier than dealing with his early espousal of a separatist cult preaching that white people were devils genetically created by an evil scientist. On Allah’s chosen day of retribution, went the dogma of the Nation of Islam cult to which he then belonged, the Mother of Planes would bomb all but the righteous, who were to be spirited away. It was also easier than remembering Ali’s repudiation of his early mentor, Malcolm X. Ali chose the Nation’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, over him, a betrayal that may have doomed Malcolm to assassination.
Years after leaving the sect and converting to orthodox Islam, Ali offered a far more measured message. While he still gave the Nation of Islam credit for offering him a black-is-beautiful message at a time of low self-esteem and persecution, he also said definitively that “color doesn’t make a man a devil. It’s the heart and soul and mind that count. What’s on the outside is only decoration.”
And he admitted that he had made a mistake in turning his back on Malcolm, partly in fear for his own life.
The Operatic Life
I’ve always thought that Ali’s journey from youthful ignorance to a hard-earned enlightenment was one of the most inspiring stories in the history of sports, perhaps even a kind of morality play or, at the least, an opera.
And so, I was hardly surprised last month, on the same day I answered an Austrian journalist’s emailed Ali questions, to learn that, thanks to Covid-19, Opera Las Vegas had indeed postponed the opening of a new opera, “Approaching Ali.”
Meanwhile, the Ali Center in Louisville was sponsoring a star-studded virtual event celebrating what would have been his 80th birthday. And the Smithsonian Channel announced a new two-hour documentary, Cassius X: Becoming Ali, about the five-year “spiritual and ideological journey” in which, from 1959 to 1964, that callow young boxer was transformed into a world champion. (And, yes, I’m a talking head in it, along with Burns’s eight-hour epic and too many others.)
All of this leaves us with the question of how Ali — or at least a version of Ali — became the Last American Hero. The American dream may be coming apart at the seams, but the glory of The Greatest is in full flower and still growing. Why?
The simplest answer – and the most discouraging – may be the right one. There is no one else. In the age of Trump, the Hero Pool has dried up, if at least you ignore the endless movie characters based on comic book super people (or creatures). Even my own childhood fave, Superman, who early in his career battled the Nazis, has lost his dominance.
In America, the terrible tribalization of the Trump era has made it almost impossible to consider any kind of consensus hero worship in any genre (Dr. King, Dr. Fauci, Dr. Who?) while culture was becoming as politicized as politics. The usual default for hero worship, sports, has turned into an all-star disaster area and perhaps a leading reason for the idol abyss of the present moment.
A Roster of Hyped (and Then Discredited) Heroes
Lately, almost every sport has contributed a major disappointment in the form of a hyped hero who came up all too short. Recently and typically, the popular golfer Phil Mickelson was one of a group of PGA pros who signed up for a lucrative tournament in Saudi Arabia (with its murderous regime) at about the same time the number-one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, was trying unsuccessfully to stay and play in Australia while unvaxxed.
As we inched toward the February 13th Super Bowl, many began rooting not for but against fan darling Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers who turned out to be another unvaxxed slickster. When the Pittsburgh Steelers were eliminated from the playoffs, their long-time superstar quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was relieved of a full-scale moral review, but he won’t be able to avoid it when he becomes a candidate for the Hall of Fame.
Among the sportswriters who vote for the future immortals, baseball has similarly had a long-simmering argument over the moral qualifications for its Hall of Fame candidates. And that, as it happens, offers a controversy all its own. Since induction brings a substantial boost in sideshow income, isn’t it a conflict of interest for so-called journalists to reward their subjects that way?
In any case, the argument over qualifications seems to have boiled down to skirmishes between the Moralists, who can’t abide the likes of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, or Curt Schilling, all of whom have been accused of using performance enhancing drugs, and the Analytics, who believe that only statistics should be the basis for such final judgments. (Allegations of drug use or bad behavior be damned.)
Such arguments have devalued the very idea of a Hall of Fame because the statistically minded sportswriters come across as mindless boosters hiding behind numbers, while the Moralists seem like all-too-tiresome finger-pointers. How do you get heroes out of that?
The answer is: you don’t. So you go back to Ali, who was stripped of his heavyweight title in 1967 after refusing to be drafted into the Vietnam-era Army for religious reasons. It’s always worth recalling that he was not penalized by some federal agency or central governing sports body, but rather by scores of politically appointed local boxing commissions.
Hero and Villain
Ali immediately became both hero and villain, celebrated for a principled stand against the Vietnam War (“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam after so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?… I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong”), vilified for rejecting his country’s call of duty, and sentenced to five years in jail for refusing induction, later overturned by the Supreme Court. The passion of those 55-year-old reactions to Ali’s draft avoidance were echoed in 2016, several weeks after his death when, in one of sports’ most symbolic acts, Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem before a pro football game and instead took a knee.
As that season unfolded and Kaepernick became a right-wing target, it seemed as though the San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback would prove a worthy successor to Ali as an all-American hero-in-chief. He, too, was clearly taking a personally dangerous and politically principled stand and his avowed purpose — to call attention to discrimination against people of color — seemed unassailable.
But even as Ali remained a secular saint, Kaepernick would be maligned and smoothly sideswiped. He really wasn’t such a good quarterback, it was said (although he had led his team to the Super Bowl), and anyway he was nothing but a pawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most damaging for Kaepernick, I think, was the lack of white support, especially among other National Football League players. (Black support wasn’t so widespread, either.) Ali, of course, never lost the favor of the millions of young white fans against the draft.
Ali’s herohood remains unsullied, especially because it’s been sanitized. The fearsome social warrior of 1967 came, in the end, to be celebrated as something of a teddy bear.
Ringing the Wrong Bell
The issue of neutering a feared social warrior has been covered most trenchantly by Thomas Hauser, the lawyer and novelist who is Ali’s most exhaustive and reliable chronicler. His description of Ali as “a beacon of hope for oppressed people all over the world” as well as “the embodiment of love” whose “dreams inspired the world,” has clearly led to his antipathy toward what he sees as the relentless commercialization of Ali. No example of this was more symbolic than his appearance at the New York Stock Exchange on December 31, 1999. Hauser says he thought Ali should have celebrated that millennial moment “at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to draw attention to the plight of the disadvantaged.”
Ali, according to Hauser, was, however, adept at avoiding making rich white people feel guilty or even uncomfortable. The cruelest Ali had ever been publicly was to his most formidable opponent, Joe Frazier, a Black man — calling him a “gorilla,” while mocking his nose, lips, and skin.
“In real life,” writes Hauser, “Ali played the race card against Frazier in a particularly mean-spirited way. For the entertainment of white America, he labeled Joe as ugly and dumb. And at the same time, speaking to Black America, he branded Frazier an Uncle Tom, turning him into an object of derision and scorn within the Black community.”
One of the harshest observers of Ali’s commodification, Mike Marqusee, author of Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties, broadened such a critique by writing:
“Ali’s power in the third world grew precisely because he was a symbol of defiance against racism and the use of United States military power abroad. And those issues are very much alive today; so, it means a lot to the powers that be if Ali can be used to suggest to the rest of the world that they aren’t problems anymore. [Ali’s] history is now being plundered and deliberately obscured to sell commercial products and, more significantly, ideas.”
No wonder I looked for hope in Harmony. After the Zoom interview and some follow-up e-mails, I asked the California eighth grader if she and her project colleagues would answer two short questions: Based on your research, what do you think Ali should be remembered for now? Is that the same thing you might have thought before you did your research?
Generously, Harmony offered the views of her classmate, Yaseen, who wrote that he thinks “Ali should be remembered for being arguably the most iconic athlete of all time and as a hero because he taught young Black people that they could do anything and he should also be remembered for the positivity and love he spread in his life.” Before researching his life, he had merely thought that Ali “was a good boxer.”
That was positive. And then, the day that Yaseen’s tribute arrived, part of a weekend that would include my birthday, as well as Ali’s and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, a request arrived from a Purdue University graduate student for information about Superman’s role in American culture. Many years ago, I had been involved in a TV show that peripherally addressed that subject. Of course, I agreed to answer his questions and started plowing through old notes where I found a reference to a 1978 DC comic book called “Superman vs. Muhammad Ali” in which the two team up to defeat an alien invasion of America.
My heart raced at that. Alien invasion? We’re in the middle of one right now. They’re called greedy, gutless Republicans and they seem to be winning. And worse yet, they have a hero whose seedy charisma and shamelessness is enough to inflame his nervous and needy followers.
Spoiler alert: in the comic, the good guys win and Ali shouts, “Superman, WE are the greatest!”
And it’s true. Unlike Trump, the champ was willing to share the glory. What more can we expect from a “hero” these days?
To commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, Marlow Stern spoke with Sidney Zoltak about his family's story of survival. (photo: Handout)
To commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day, Marlow Stern spoke with Sidney Zoltak about his family’s story of survival, why you shouldn’t be a bystander, and ignorant anti-vaxxers.
When Nancy Pelosi required members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said it was akin to “a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star… put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.” Upon learning that Washington, D.C., would be requiring proof of vaccination to patronize its businesses, Republican Rep. Warren Davidson tweeted an image of a Nazi document with the caption, “This has been done before. #DoNotComply.” And just last weekend, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a notorious anti-vaxxer, likened COVID vaccine mandates to the plight of Anne Frank.
All of this is infuriating to Holocaust survivor Sidney Zoltak.
“It takes an awful lot of what we would call chutzpah, because anybody who did not live through German occupation in Europe for any length of time would not know what the Holocaust was. Among my community of 7,000 Jews, less than 70 survived. And among the survivors, none of them were my classmates or friends,” he remembers.
“They use the Holocaust because of hate,” Zoltak adds. “They want to say something negative about the Jews, and they use the Holocaust.”
Zoltak, 90, was only 10 years old when the Nazis invaded his Polish hometown of Siemiatycze. The Jews were rounded up, segregated in a ghetto, and eventually sent to Treblinka—an extermination camp responsible for the deaths of 900,000 Jews. Zoltak’s family avoided that fate by escaping the ghetto through barbed wire and going on the run, hiding wherever they could.
One day, their family came across a barn belonging to a poor Polish Catholic family, where a young shepherd boy recognized Sidney’s mother, Henia.
“The shepherd boy’s sister had bought a coat at my parents’ shop. My mother was kind to her, she thought, because she gave her a coat to take home that wasn’t fully paid for,” he explains. “She did a kind gesture as a human being and the daughter did not forget the kindness of my mother, and reciprocated, taking us in and hiding us for 14 months. That was no small thing to do—to risk your lives in order to hide people that you didn’t even know just because you bought a coat from them. But for them, it was enough.”
The Zoltaks spent the final seven months in an underground bunker attached to the barn, without seeing daylight.
“We would go out at night to get fresh air, occasionally—and often, in the bunker, we could not breathe any air,” he recalls. “There’s nothing that I can compare it to, and I’m certainly not going to compare it to going through the COVID-19 pandemic. My aim was to live another day, and I did anything I could in order to live. My mother was the driving force. She gave us courage. She would say, ‘Surviving is the most important thing for us. We have to survive.’”
The town of Siemiatycze was finally liberated in 1944, but 13-year-old Sidney and his family returned to their home to find that they were no longer welcome by the townspeople. They spent the next four years in displaced-persons camps, where Sidney’s father died. Sidney says he was regularly harassed and beaten by the non-Jewish kids in the camps but would nevertheless work all day and take classes at night. He eventually settled in Montreal, where he still lives with his wife and two sons.
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Zoltak is one of many survivors taking part in #DONTBEABYSTANDER, a social media campaign spearheaded by the Claims Conference and Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, to commemorate the “Righteous Among the Nations”—or brave non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, like the Krynski family who took in the Zoltaks.
“We knew who the perpetrators were, and we talk about the ones who participated in the actual killing and genocide, but hardly ever do we speak about the other contributors to the enormity of the genocide that happened—six million Jews,” says Zoltak. “One of the main contributors was indifference. If the perpetrators did some killing, and the rest of the world didn’t do much to stop it, why would they want to stop? We need to stop the hate. If there wasn’t any hate, there would be no reason for the killing.”
For the last several decades, Zoltak has traveled the world lecturing students about the horrors of the Holocaust, and why it must never happen again. He’s also served as part of a number of organizations, including the Child Survivors-Hidden Children’s Federation, the Montreal Holocaust Centre, and the Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Canada. In 2013, he penned a memoir about his tragic ordeal, My Silent Pledge: A Journey of Struggle, Survival … Remembrance, and appeared in the documentary Righteous Reunion: A Survivor Reunites With His Rescuer, capturing the days in Poland he spent reuniting with Zigmund Krynski, the shepherd boy who helped rescue his family.
“My son Larry, in 2019, decided to continue the relationship with both families,” Zoltak explains. “He wanted his children to meet the children of the Polish-Catholic family, the Krynskis, and we went to Poland for two days and they met us. We talked together, had a reunion. Right now, we talk on the telephone. And when we see each other we say, ‘We’re not just people who know each other. We feel like family to each other.’ If two families, one Jewish and one Polish, can feel that way at this point, then a lot of others can do the same thing.”
“To this day, I’m in contact with the grandson of [Zigmund],” he continues. “If I don’t call him, he calls me. We feel to each other like family. We carry no hate, no grudges, and feel a closeness to each other as human beings. Therefore, I think it’s a beautiful ending.”
A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper taking part in Operation Lone Star patrols the Rio Grande at the U.S.-Mexico border in McAllen, Texas, March 23, 2021. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
A Texas judge ruled that the state’s arrests of migrants caught crossing the border is an unconstitutional encroachment on federal authority.
For nearly a year, a patchwork of state police troopers, members of the Texas National Guard, and local law enforcement agencies operating under Abbott’s orders have delivered thousands of undocumented men arrested on state trespassing charges into a shadow legal system rife with problems, lawyers for Jesus Alberto Guzman Curipoma argued in a January 13 hearing before District Judge Jan Soifer. Despite being housed within the Texas criminal justice apparatus, Abbott’s operation is expressly designed to prosecute migrants and migrants alone, the defense attorneys told the Travis County judge, thus undermining bedrock constitutional principles that delegate immigration enforcement to the federal government.
In a filing ahead of the hearing, Travis County District Attorney José Garza told the court that he agreed with Guzman’s constitutional claims and that his office would not put on a defense for the state in the case. “After careful consideration, the State agrees that Applicant’s prosecution for criminal trespass as part of Operation Lone Star violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution and represents an impermissible attempt to intrude on federal immigration policy,” Garza said. A private attorney contracted by Kinney County, where Guzman was arrested, argued that Soifer did not have jurisdiction over the case and told the court that he received a text message during the hearing from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office urging him to halt the proceedings.
Both efforts failed to convince Soifer, who became the first Texas judge to rule that the governor’s program is unconstitutional. The ruling set off a flurry of legal filings throughout the state, marking what could be the beginning of a major legal battle in the weeks ahead. The following day, January 14, Texas RioGrande Legal Aid filed a writ before the Travis County Court on behalf of more than 400 clients claiming violations of their constitutional rights as a result of Operation Lone Star. By January 17, Brent Smith, the attorney for Kinney County, had appealed Soifer’s ruling, informing the court that he would seek a trial in the case. Garza’s office filed a motion to dismiss the appeal the following day.
An engineer with no criminal record currently seeking asylum in the U.S., Guzman was arrested in a Kinney County rail yard in rural West Texas on September 17. His nearly five-hour hearing was conducted virtually. When the judge finally rendered her decision, he pressed his palms together in a gesture of grateful prayer.
Guzman was jailed for nearly a month as result of Operation Lone Star, much of that time after his family had posted bail, and remained under court supervision heading into the hearing. Paxton, too, vowed to appeal the ruling in Guzman’s case, though so far that has not happened. In a tweet, the state attorney general framed the judge’s ruling in political terms, casting Garza as an operator dispatched by billionaire George Soros and Soifer as his liberal enabler; the judge previously served as chair of the Travis County Democratic Party, and the district attorney was elected in the wake of the George Floyd protests with vows to rein in police abuses.
Guzman’s attorneys contend that because the attorney general failed to intervene in the case while it was being litigated, he has no legal standing to appeal. The lawyers, Angelica Cogliano and Addy Miró, have spent the past seven months representing clients swept up in Abbott’s border blitz. In joint interviews, the defense attorneys said that while the Travis County District Attorney’s Office deserves credit for refusing to defend the governor’s operation, that credit should be tempered by the facts.
“I know everybody’s trying to turn this into political theater, but on its face this is a horrific program, and their duty is to do the right thing,” Cogliano told The Intercept. “It’s impressive, but it’s also right.”
Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March. Since then, the governor, citing a state-level disaster declaration, has drastically ramped up the program to include 10,000 state troopers in the Texas Department of Public Safety and members of the Texas National Guard.
From his announcement of his candidacy through the kickoff of his reelection campaign earlier this month, Abbott has put the border at the center of his messaging, arguing that the federal government has lost control of the U.S.-Mexico divide under President Joe Biden and that Texas has been forced to respond. Bolstered by $3 billion in border security spending that the Texas Legislature approved last year, Lone Star is the operational centerpiece of that effort.
DPS Director Steven McCraw said at an event in Austin last week that under the governor’s program, his troopers have arrested more than 10,000 undocumented immigrants in the past nine months. Whether those arrests are doing anything to achieve Operation Lone Star’s stated objective is up for debate. In November, the Wall Street Journal reported that just 3 percent of the roughly 1,500 individuals arrested in the operation by that point had actually been convicted and that of 170 cases that were resolved, roughly 70 percent “were dismissed, declined or otherwise dropped, in some instances for lack of evidence.” In fact, in some cases, lawyers noted that a client’s processing through Operation Lone Star gave them an opportunity to stay in the country and pursue their asylum claim on U.S. soil, whereas the Trump-era mandatory federal expulsion programs that the Biden administration continues to enforce would not.
Legal concerns over the implementation of Operation Lone Star have exploded in recent months. In September, a network of Texas defense attorneys discovered a major constitutional failing of the program: Hundreds of men — Operation Lone Star exclusively targets men — arrested as a result of the governor’s program were being held on state-level criminal trespassing charges without access to counsel. Cogliano and Miró were among that group of attorneys. At one point, their office phone number was circulated inside the Briscoe Unit, a state prison in South Texas that Abbott cleared out for Operation Lone Star prisoners. The pair estimated that they received more than 300 calls in a matter of two hours. Within a week, that number soared into the thousands.
The voices on the other end of the line repeatedly described having paid their bond only to remain in jail for days, weeks, even months. “Everybody started calling our office,” Miró said. Guzman was among those callers, reaching out in early October, more than two weeks after his family posted cash bail in his case. Like others prosecuted under Operation Lone Star, Guzman was apprehended by DPS troopers, charged with misdemeanor trespassing under state law, and transferred to state custody; this stands in contrast with the federal charges, processing, and detention that would normally result from an undocumented migrant’s encounter with a Border Patrol agent.
As the lawyers dug deeper into Guzman’s case and others like it, what they found shocked them. The rural counties where Operation Lone Star arrests were taking place were at best incapable — and in some cases seemingly unwilling — of providing the bare minimums of due process in response to the deluge of low-level cases brought on by the governor’s campaign. “They are completely backlogged,” Miró said. Obtaining basic public documents like a probable cause affidavit proved virtually impossible. The men in custody were routinely presented with plea deals, written in English and without translation, and encouraged to sign. Hearings were sometimes held en masse, outdoors, in a parking lot.
The defense attorneys also observed a pattern, later corroborated by video evidence, of DPS troopers leading individuals onto private property and then arresting them for trespassing.
“Even as criminal defense attorneys that deal with the criminal justice system every day, this boggled our minds,” Cogliano said of the scope of the constitutional and civil rights violations embodied in Operation Lone Star. “We’ve never had a client pay cash bail anywhere in the state or country that was charged with any kind of crime that didn’t get out of jail when he posted the cash bail, or where we got pushback about letting him out of jail when he paid cash bail.”
Guzman’s lawyers were particularly alarmed by what happened after his family posted bond on September 20. Typically, if state or local authorities take an undocumented person into custody on the border and the federal government wants to begin deportation proceedings against them, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will place what’s known as a “detainer” on the individual. Federal deportation officers will then have 48 hours to retrieve that person. In Guzman’s case, a detainer did not appear until after that window had closed and his bond had been paid. What’s more, according to an affidavit Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe submitted in July, ICE informed his office that even when detainers were issued, the agency would not be picking up individuals arrested on trespassing charges alone.
“They needed to let him go,” Miró said. Guzman remained in state custody until October 10, when he was driven to an ICE facility in San Antonio. In early November, after being transferred to the South Texas Detention Complex, a for-profit immigration jail, Guzman was granted bond in his immigration case. Who exactly facilitated the initial drive that delivered Guzman from state to federal custody, which Miró and Cogliano argue was a clear violation of Texas law, remains unclear. “We tried to find this out,” Cogliano said. “Nobody will admit it.”
Though he was out of jail, Guzman remained under court supervision with an open case. He wanted to fight the charges, so the two attorneys sought a trial in Kinney County in late December. “Everybody looked at us weird — like, ‘What?’” Miró said. Prior to Operation Lone Star, Kinney County hadn’t held a trial in seven years. “Nobody knew what to do with us,” Miró said. The lawyers decided to take the case elsewhere.
Cogliano noted that under Texas law, habeas corpus claims — in which an individual calls upon the government to justify its continued deprivation of their liberty before a judge — can be heard anywhere in the state, not just the jurisdiction where the arrest in question took place, and so the pair filed Guzman’s claim in Travis County, home to the state capital, Austin. “Everyone’s been saying we were creative, and it’s not. It’s just allowed,” Cogliano said. “It’s not like we twisted anything. It’s black-letter law.”
While defense attorneys in Texas have challenged Abbott’s program in the courts, Democrats in Congress have called for a federal response to the governor’s operation.
In October, Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro and more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding an investigation into Operation Lone Star and arguing, like the lawyers in Guzman’s case, that the governor’s campaign likely violated the supremacy clause of the Constitution.
Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the Texas Fair Defense Project, with support from more than 100 legal organizations, echoed that demand in a complaint to the Justice Department that described Operation Lone Star as “riddled with civil rights violations.”
The advocacy groups added that in Kinney County, local officials have explored hiring private contractors with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan to bolster Operation Lone Star and encouraged armed militias to join in the effort. “By fostering governmental relationships with armed vigilante groups that seek to target migrants, Kinney County leadership is discriminating against migrants,” the groups wrote. “These efforts increase the chances of violence against Black and Brown individuals in Kinney County. If effectuated, they will continue to lead to unlawful and discriminatory actions on the basis of race and national origin by vigilante groups functioning as state actors.”
A parallel federal deployment of National Guard members to the Texas border, separate from Operation Lone Star, has also drawn extensive concern in recent weeks following an Army Times investigation that revealed widespread problems involving troops assigned to the mission, including arrests, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, DUIs, and a pattern of mysterious deaths and suicides. In a subcommittee hearing in Washington last week, Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso, which is home to the Fort Bliss Army base, described the reports as “shocking” and “deeply alarming.”
For Eric Gamino, an assistant professor of criminology and justice studies at California State University, Northridge, Operation Lone Star is following a familiar script.
Nine years ago, Gamino was a police officer participating in then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s Operation Strong Safety, another deployment of state and local police to deter migrants from crossing the border, while at the same time finishing a dissertation on race, policing, and immigration in South Texas. As part of his doctoral research, Gamino’s supervisors agreed to allow him to document his job and interview his colleagues so long as he used pseudonyms for his subjects (a common practice in academic social research). Conducted from 2012 through 2015, a span that included the beginning of the ongoing influx of unaccompanied Central American children into the Rio Grande Valley, Gamino’s interviews and firsthand experience became the basis of a paper that was published in March of last year and a forthcoming book.
A lifelong resident of South Texas with more than decade of experience on patrol, Gamino’s work traces the long history of politicized policing deployments to his region of the country, from Operation Border Star to Operation Drawbridge to Operation Linebacker to Operation Strong Safety. “You look at the terminology that’s utilized; it’s this narrative that there’s this onslaught,” Gamino told The Intercept. This narrative is the basis for a performance of border theater that in Gamino’s experience plays out on two stages: The first, where politicians like Abbott perform, is public facing. The second, where Gamino spent his time as a participant and observer in Operation Strong Safety, is not.
Within this backstage setting, Gamino found a widespread view among his fellow officers that an operation pitched as a massive, critical quasi-military campaign to secure the border was fundamentally just another avenue for overtime, one that entailed sitting in a patrol car parked along the Rio Grande for hours on end, doing nothing. In his paper, Gamino describes a pre-shift roll call in which his supervisor acknowledged that officers had taken to calling the detail “Operation Netflix,” on account of all the streaming they were doing. The supervisor warned the officers not to fall asleep on the job because there were politicians in town, which meant that there were media in town as well. “Last thing you want them to do is catch you asleep while working Operation Strong Safety,” he said. According to Gamino’s account, the warning did little to stop the streaming and sleeping underway.
When officers did encounter undocumented migrants in Operation Strong Safety, Gamino writes, they had a choice: call Border Patrol or don’t. Some would. Some wouldn’t. The “overwhelming majority” of migrants Gamino encountered were Central Americans, mostly mothers and kids, fleeing a myriad of factors. “Violence, poverty, political instability, all these things,” he said. “All they wanted was just a chance to apply or seek asylum here in the U.S.”
What sets Operation Lone Star apart from its historical antecedents is the fact that the discretion Gamino had as an officer is now gone. State and local law enforcement officers are now making arrests themselves, and the arrestees are being funneled into the Texas criminal justice system. “With Lone Star, they upped the ante,” Gamino said. He added: “It doesn’t surprise me because Gov. Abbott is up for reelection.”
Like the initiatives that came before, Gamino argued, the point of Operation Lone Star is not the stated objective, it’s the storytelling. He described it as “the same poison in a differently labeled bottle.” In his paper, Gamino recounts the visits from lawmakers based outside the Rio Grande Valley during the so-called surge of unaccompanied minors in 2014, with Republicans doing their obligatory ride-alongs with border law enforcement officers and Democrats visiting the local migrant shelters.
“I see it as a borderland resident,” Gamino said. “You have these politicians that parachute to the Valley do their little one-day tour, do their little photo op, do their little press conference, and then what happens? They either fly back to Austin or they fly back to Washington, D.C.”
Through his research, Gamino argues that border theater is not only ineffective, but also a waste of taxpayer money that could be better spent assisting the local communities and nonprofits that provide aid in the face of an obvious humanitarian crisis. “Who ends up losing is these Central American asylum-seekers who have a legitimate case,” he said. “It gets overshadowed by the whole optics of border life.”
Residents protest a fracking site. (photo: AP)
Findings are result of first major study into link between premature death in older people and unconventional drilling
Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades with at least 17.6 million people now living within one kilometer of an active well.
Compared with traditional drilling, unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is linked to higher levels of exposure to toxic air pollution and poor water quality, as well as noise and light pollution which can be harmful to human health. The impact of fossil fuel extraction – including by unconventional methods – has disproportionately affected low income communities and people of color.
Researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied the health records of 15 million people on Medicare, the health insurance program that includes at least 95% of Americans aged 65 and older, living in all significant drilling regions from 2001 to 2015. They also gathered data on about 2.5m oil and gas wells covering leading exploration states, from Montana to Texas and Pennsylvania.
The closer people live to an oil and gas operation, the higher the risk of dying prematurely, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and demographic factors such as gender and race, according to the study published in Nature Energy.
Residents most adversely affected are those living nearby and downwind, suggesting toxic airborne contaminants emitted from UOGD sites probably contributed to higher mortality rates. Exposure to toxins associated with unconventional drilling such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides and radioactive materials are linked to a wide range of life-threatening medical conditions.
“Our findings suggest the importance of considering the potential health dangers of situating UOGD near or upwind of people’s homes,” said Longxiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health and the study’s lead author.
Overall, elderly residents living near these wells have about 2.5% higher mortality rates than those living far away compared with 3.5% for those who are also downwind. This would mean thousands of premature deaths linked to the oil and gas boom, though the peer-reviewed study does not include estimates of lives lost.
This is the first major study into the link between premature death in older people and unconventional oil and gas drilling activities, and the first to examine the importance of wind direction. As of 2015, more than 100,000 onshore UOGD wells have been drilled, with many clustered around densely populated residential areas.
“Although UOGD is a major industrial activity in the US, very little is known about its public health impacts. Our study is the first to link mortality to UOGD-related air pollutant exposures,” said Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences and senior author of the study.
It builds on previous studies that have found residents living near these sites are significantly more likely to suffer prenatal complications, cancers and respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.
As unconventional oil and gas exploration continues apace further research is needed to understand the causal links between living nearby or downwind and adverse health effects, the authors conclude.
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