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Kirk responded by telling the audience member that violence wasn’t advisable, but not for any legal, moral, or ethical reasons. Instead, he said, referring to the Biden Administration, “We are living under fascism. We are living under this tyranny. But if you think for a second that they’re not wanting you to all of a sudden get to that next level where they’re going to say, ‘OK, we need Patriot Act 2.0.’ If you think that, you know, Waco is bad, wait until you see what they want to do next. What I’m saying is that we have a very fragile balance right now at our current time where we must exhaust every single peaceful means possible.”
The event at which this exchange took place sounds like a one-off gathering of violent right-wing lunatics, something that was relatively common after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But it’s not quite that simple. There are a lot of people who seem ready to take up arms. Significant minorities in both the Republican and Democratic parties support the use of violence against their political opposites.
According to a study done jointly by the Hoover Institution, the University of Maryland, and Louisiana State University, at least 20 percent of Americans are “quite willing” to use violence against members of the opposite political party. And 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats said political violence is “at least a little bit justified.” Those figures are up from 35 percent and 37 percent respectively before the 2020 election.
Among more ideological partisans, the numbers were even more startling. Among those identifying themselves as “very liberal,” 26 percent advocated violence against conservatives. Among those identifying themselves as “very conservative,” 16 percent advocated violence against liberals. Another nine percent of both “liberals” and “conservatives” respectively said that violence was “a little bit justified” to advance their political views.
A more recent poll is even more alarming. According to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative, Washington-DC based think tank, 36 percent of Americans agree with the statement, “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” That figure breaks out as 56 percent of Republicans, 35 percent of independents, and 22 percent of Democrats.
Survey participants say that demonstrations around the country have reinforced advocates of violence on both sides. They view clashes over the past two years in Portland, Oregon; Kenosha, Wisconsin; and Louisville, Kentucky; and an armed right-wing protest at the state capitol in Michigan as examples proving their point that “the other side” is out of control and that violence is the only response to violence.
Certainly, we’ve gone through periods of political violence throughout US history. White supremacist militias used violence against abolitionist voters in states across the country in 1860 to keep them from voting for Abraham Lincoln. In 1921, a white mob burned down the entire black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, killing around 300 people. In 1968, enormous crowds fought police, the National Guard, and each other, over the Vietnam War, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights. Many scholars rank 1968 as the most violent year of the 20th century.
So are we headed toward a year like 1968? I would actually feel more comfortable if what the country is facing today was in response to an unpopular war and if the battle lines were more clearly drawn between activists and the police; 1968 seems quaint now. What we’re seeing today, though, is deeply partisan. It’s angry, hate-filled, and in many cases racist. We can’t trust law enforcement to keep the peace. The cops are more trigger-happy than in any other western country, and the FBI, especially, entraps people all the time to pad their arrest numbers.
There’s no easy or quick solution. We’re heading into rough waters. We can’t count on enlightened political leadership. We can’t count on bipartisanship. We can’t count on those public servants hired to keep the peace. I know that in business school they teach you that “hope is not a strategy.” But all I can do is keep my fingers crossed.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Kyle Rittenhouse has become a right-wing celebrity. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: J.D. Vance's Empathy for Kyle Rittenhouse Is Revolting
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense team continued to make its case in court Wednesday, calling Rittenhouse himself to testify. Now 18 years old, Rittenhouse was 17 when he went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, during last summer’s racial justice protests with his AR-15-style rifle. He faces homicide and weapons charges for fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. He has pleaded not guilty.
At one point, Kyle Rittenhouse broke down in tears while on the stand. He admitted to using deadly force but claimed self-defense and denied intending to kill his victims during cross-examination from prosecutor Thomas Binger.
THOMAS BINGER: I don’t understand. You said you were going to bring the gun to protect yourself. So you thought you were going to be in danger, right?
KYLE RITTENHOUSE: I didn’t think I would be put into a situation where I would have to defend myself.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, trial Judge Bruce Schroeder continued to make headlines after he repeatedly sided with the defense, while excoriating prosecutors. At one point, while the prosecutor questioned Rittenhouse, Judge Schroeder chastised Binger for asking about testimony he said was out of bounds.
MARK RICHARDS: Your Honor, Mr. Binger is either forgetting court’s rulings or attempting to provoke a mistrial in this matter. He knows he can’t go into this, and he’s asking the questions. I ask the court to strongly admonish him. And the next time it happens, I’ll be asking for a mistrial with prejudice. He’s an experienced attorney, and he knows better.
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: Mr. Binger?
THOMAS BINGER: Personally, Your Honor, this was the subject of a motion. I’m well aware of that. And the court left the door open. This —
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: For me! Not for you!
AMY GOODMAN: When the prosecution tried to show video evidence of Rittenhouse fatally shooting his first victim, the judge appeared to support the defense’s attempt to stop him using him a pinch and zoom function, claiming it could insert additional pixels.
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: This is high risk. And, to me, if — to me, if you insert more data into an area of space — well, you’re, what, wagging your head no.
THOMAS BINGER: There’s no proof in —
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: Tell me where I’m wrong.
THOMAS BINGER: There’s no proof in this record that we’re doing that, Your Honor.
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: I didn’t say there was proof of it. I said you have the burden of proof. You’re the proponent of the exhibit, and you need to tell me that it’s reliable.
THOMAS BINGER: The exhibit is already in evidence, Your Honor.
JUDGE BRUCE SCHROEDER: That I know.
AMY GOODMAN: The judge would not allow the pinch and zoom function of the iPad unless an expert testified that pixels weren’t being added. Meanwhile, the judge’s cellphone went off while the court was in session and played a ringtone for the song “God Bless the U.S.A.” by Lee Greenwood, which is the opening song played at Donald Trump’s rallies.
COREY CHIRAFISI: And if the court makes a finding that the actions that I had talked about — [phone ringing] — were done in bad faith.
AMY GOODMAN: Rittenhouse’s defense team has now asked for a mistrial with prejudice in the case, and if one is granted, Rittenhouse cannot be retried. But the judge did not immediately rule on the request and said jury deliberations could begin on Monday.
One other key point that came up this week during the trial, a pathologist testified that Kyle Rittenhouse’s victim Joseph Rosenbaum was shot four times by someone who was within four feet of him. He also testified Rosenbaum was first wounded in the groin and then in the hand and thigh as he faced Rittenhouse, and then was shot in the head and in the back.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Bree Newsome Bass is with us. She’s an artist and antiracist activist. In 2015, after the massacre of eight African American parishioners and their pastor by the white supremacist at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Bree scaled the 30-foot flagpole at the South Carolina state Capitol and removed the Confederate flag. Yesterday she was tweeting the trial nonstop. And with us in New York, Elie Mystal is with The Nation. He’s its justice correspondent, author of the magazine’s monthly column “Objection!” He wrote about this case in a piece headlined “I Hope Everyone Is Prepared for Kyle Rittenhouse to Go Free.”
You wrote that before the trial, Elie. Talk about why you think this is going to be the case.
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, Amy, I don’t have a crystal ball, all right? What I know is the law, and what I know is what white people are willing to do to defend white supremacy. If you look at this judge, if you look at his pretrial motions, if you look at his pretrial decisions in this case — remember, Rittenhouse has been in and around the jail since he shot those people in Wisconsin last summer. So, if you look at all the decisions that Bruce Schroeder has made, they have been heavily balanced and weighted towards Rittenhouse, towards his defense. I see very few neutral decisions in his history. What we have is a judge who, from my perspective, has pre-judged the trial in favor of Rittenhouse and has decided — again, even at the pretrial stage — to use every bit of his power to put his thumb on the scale towards Rittenhouse’s side. And that was obvious before the trial started.
I think now that the trial is going on, it’s a little even more obvious to people how hostile he is to the prosecution, how much he’s taking Rittenhouse’s side and how he is slanting the whole case. He’s basically not allowing the prosecution to put on its case against Rittenhouse. It’s almost like he wants the prosecution to put on a different case against Rittenhouse, and already has determined the man is — that the boy is not guilty. So, that’s why I said — that’s why I was able to say two weeks ago the boy was going to walk. And nothing that’s happened in the trial so far has changed my opinion on that.
AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of not being able to refer to the men who were killed and the other one who was repeatedly shot as “victims,” though they could be referred to as “looters” or “arsonists,” if the defense proved that?
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, so, here’s the thing, Amy. Any one of his decisions, you could defend, right? Any one of his decisions, if you take it in isolation, makes sense. But this is actually one of the things that racists do, right? It’s one of the fights that we always have trying to explain what racism is to people, because if you look at individual decisions, individual decisions, you can say, like, “Oh, well, that wasn’t racially biased,” or “That decision wasn’t racially biased,” but when you put them in — when you look at them all together, when you look at the totality of his decisions — right?
So, it’s not just saying that these people can’t be called victims. Look, legally speaking, they were victims of homicide. That’s just a fact. But fine, you want to say they can’t be called victims because of the nature of the self-defense? All right, you can kind of defend that decision. But then he says they can be called looters, rioters and arsonists, which is ridiculous. The surviving victim hasn’t been charged with looting, rioting or arson. So, calling him a victim is just factually inaccurate — so, calling him a rioter is just factually inaccurate. So, you see what I’m saying?
When you put the one and one together, you end up with two. When you put one plus one plus one plus one plus one together, you end up with five. And that’s what Schroeder is. He has made a series of decisions. Each one perhaps may be individually defensible, but, in totality, lead to the impression of a biased, racist judge, with his Trump rally cellphone, that is trying to get Rittenhouse a walk.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Bree Newsome Bass into this conversation. Bree, you were tweeting up a storm yesterday. On Wednesday, you tweeted, “Nothing says 'safety … security' in the USA like a teenage white boy roaming around with an assault rifle. Can’t imagine why folks in the street might react to that.” Talk about this broader context of why Rittenhouse was in Kenosha, where he doesn’t live — he lives in another state, in Illinois — and carrying this AR-15 at the age of 17.
BREE NEWSOME BASS: Yeah, well, this kind of goes back to Elie’s point — right? — of who gets to assert victimhood, who gets to assert self-defense. So, we know that, I mean, even apart from the long history of collaboration between police forces, white supremacist organizations and white militias, we have a very recent history of this, as well. We’ve had situations where police kill someone, there is protesting, and then, in addition to the police presence in the street, which is a problem, we have white militia groups showing up, white supremacist organizations showing up. We saw that in Ferguson, we saw that in Minneapolis, and we saw that in Kenosha. And I think one of the things that is being kind of glossed over here is the fact that that is exactly the element that Kyle Rittenhouse belongs to. I know that it can’t be introduced as evidence in the court, but we all know that he was at a bar during this time that he was on release from jail, with Proud Boys buying him drinks as an underaged person, right? So, that is the larger reality.
The other thing that I think is important is that the history of judges who are sympathetic to white supremacists has a very long history, as well. One of the moments that really struck me yesterday was when the prosecutor was questioning Rittenhouse on his knowledge of ammunition and brought up the issue of hollow-point bullets, and the judge actually interrupted and testified. I mean, he — you know, Elie can maybe correct it for me if I’m incorrect — I’m not a legal expert — but it certainly seemed to me like the judge was testifying in Rittenhouse’s place and tried to make it seem like the prosecutor was incorrect in the way that he was discussing ammunition. The judge seemed to be trying to downplay the extra lethality of hollow-point bullets. So, that is the larger context.
And I also think that we can’t separate — even though the jury has to do so, we, as the public, we, as the larger society, cannot separate what is happening in Wisconsin from what is happening in Georgia with the Ahmaud Arbery case, what is happening in Charlottesville, where residents of Virginia are suing the Nazis and white supremacists who descended on their city in 2017, and doing so through a civil court because they feel like the larger legal system has not really done enough to address what happened there, as well. This is also happening as people storm school board meetings trying to strip Black texts and Black history from the school curriculum. This is happening as there’s the attack on voting rights. All of this is a context that is informing what’s happening in that courtroom.
AMY GOODMAN: Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post in an op-ed, “Conservatives quickly raised much of the $2 million for Rittenhouse’s bail. After he was released, Rittenhouse went to a bar wearing a T-shirt that said 'Free as F—-,' where he posed for pictures flashing a white power sign and was 'serenaded' with the anthem of the Proud Boys, the violent radical right-wing group.” Bree, this isn’t being raised in the trial.
BREE NEWSOME BASS: Exactly. And, I mean, again, I think — I’m not a legal expert, I will acknowledge that, but I completely agree, from my observation, that the judge is entirely biased. I don’t see how that is not relevant, because if the issue is his state of mind at the time that he is shooting at these people, then I feel like all of these things point to his state of mind. I think that if the jury is aware of that, that’s certainly going to place him, you know, breaking down on the stand — I don’t know if there were actually tears, but I think that places that in a separate context, because I think, you know, wearing a T-shirt like that, drinking at a bar with white supremacists doesn’t really reflect somebody who is remorseful or maybe even feeling trauma from these events. I think all of that is relevant.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about not only the Rittenhouse trial but the trial of the three white men who are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery — father and son. The father in the case was a former police officer and investigator, this happening in Georgia. Elie Mystal, if you can talk about both trials?
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. So, that trial is going a little bit better, in part because the judge isn’t so clearly biased towards the white murderers in that case. Now, I don’t think the judge has done everything he could to advance the cause of justice in that case.
In the Arbery situation, there is a jury that is — you know, a jury, so 12 active members, four alternates. That’s 16 people. Only one of those jurors is Black. Now, that’s weird because in Brunswick, Georgia, where the trial is taking place, that county is 26% Black. The defense attorneys, while excluding — using their peremptory challenges to exclude Black jurors and exclude Black jurors, said that that jury — that what he needed to defend his clients, the people who lynched Ahmaud Arbery, was that his jury needed more bubbas. Bubbas. And he defined “bubbas” as white men over 40 with no college education.
The judge said that he saw evidence of intentional racial discrimination in the jury selection, but denied the plaintiff’s motion to — the prosecution’s motion to reseat the jury, which was in his power to do, because he said that he was bound to accept the disingenuous answers offered by the defense. He was not bound to do that. He could have — that’s why we had the challenge. He could have, in his discretion, resat the jury. But no, no, no, the judge decided that the 15-to-1 jury in a 26% Black county, that that was OK, and let the trial go forward.
AMY GOODMAN: Your final take, Bree Newsome Bass, on the Ahmaud Arbery case? You have the father in the case admitting that he saw Ahmaud Arbery, he did not see him commit a crime, and that he was like a, I think he called it, a trapped rat.
BREE NEWSOME BASS: Again, I think that the overall question here is: Who is entitled to justice? What does justice even mean in a system that was established to strip Black people of their humanity and for the greater part of its history has never really held white people accountable for murdering Black people? Who is entitled to self-defense? I mean, again, was Ahmaud entitled to self-defense? Was he entitled to freedom of movement?
And the fact that we have cases of people being killed on camera or in broad daylight and we’re not sure if justice can be carried out because the race of the defendant, because of the dynamics in the legal system, speaks to the larger issue that I think a lot of times people don’t want to touch on, because whether the outcome — whether both people are convicted in these cases, Rittenhouse or the McMichaels and Bryan in Georgia, we have not addressed this larger issue of justice. And I think that’s the point that myself, that the larger abolitionist movement is constantly raising, that the legal system itself is the affront to the notion of justice, from the policing to the judge to the jury process to the way that the prison system is carried out.
AMY GOODMAN: And also, Elie Mystal, in the Ahmaud Arbery case — and, we have to say, in both cases, you only have one person of color, in both the Georgia case, the Ahmaud Arbery case — he is not on trial, he is the one who was murdered — and in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, one person of color on the jury, and the revelation in Georgia that while the father and son said they were making a so-called citizen’s arrest, the police at the scene at the time said they never mentioned anything like that.
ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. Look, well, first, partially because citizen’s arrests aren’t a thing. Like, that’s somebody who’s watched too many movies. There’s no such — that’s a kidnapping, is what that was called. And so, yeah, when the police actually showed up, they didn’t say, like, “Well, we were trying to kidnap the boy, and he ran.” Like, because that would — right? But the police let them go, let’s not forget, in both of these cases. In both of these cases, the murderers stood over the dead bodies, and the police were like, “Yeah, go home. Good job.”
As Bree is saying, the rot goes deep. It’s not just these two murderers. It’s not just these two lynchers. It’s not just these two judges. It’s not just these few defense attorneys. It is the entire system that is rotted to its core. And when you try to get people to lock in on that, when you try to get people to dial in and think about real systemic changes to this system to bring justice to more people in the country, they say, “Oh my god! But Toni Morrison’s Beloved is, like, in the school. Like, oh my god, I don’t want to vote for that.” That’s where we’re at.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think will happen if there are not guilty verdicts?
ELIE MYSTAL: People will be angry for a while, and Black people will protest, and white people will tell us we’re protesting the wrong way and hurting our own cause. Sorry, I mean, like that, it’s frustrating. What will happen is that there will be protests. There will be anger. We will be told that we’re doing it wrong. Nobody will come — no laws will change. Nothing will change. Nothing will happen. And then, later down the line, somebody — after Democrats get curb-stomped in a midterm election, someone will say, like, “Well, it was just those Black Lives Matter protests. That’s really what got us.” And the cycle will continue.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, let’s remember that in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse, he was there and killed the anti-police brutality protesters who were protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake. In this final response, Elie, if you can talk about what has happened to the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times?
ELIE MYSTAL: Absolutely nothing has happened to the police officer. He wasn’t disciplined by his department. He wasn’t charged by the state of Wisconsin. So, the same prosecutors that are — I don’t want to say “fumbling,” but the same prosecutors that are having a little bit of difficulty convicting Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t even try to convict the police officer.
Then, it was — then, the case was reviewed by the Department of Justice, under Merrick Garland — not Bill Barr, not Jeff Sessions, not John Ashcroft; Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s pick to be attorney general — and Merrick Garland decided that no charges should be pressed, there was nothing — no civil rights charges should be pressed against the officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back. So, that man just got away with it. That man is just free — he’s back on the force, with his gun, just free to shoot other people in the back that he finds.
AMY GOODMAN: And Jacob Blake is paralyzed. Elie Mystal, I want to thank you for being with us, writes for The Nation. We’ll link to your piece — your pieces. We’ll link to the one, “I Hope Everyone Is Prepared for Kyle Rittenhouse to Go Free.” And Bree Newsome Bass, artist and antiracist activist.
Coming up, we go to the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow to speak with British journalist George Monbiot and British climate scientist Kevin Anderson. Stay with us.
Twin Cities DSA members Aisha Chughtai (pictured) and Jason Chavez both handily beat their opponents for open seats on the Minneapolis City Council. (photo: Brad Sigal)
For many on the Left, last week’s elections came like a gut punch. But zoom out beyond the high-profile races cable news pundits fixated on, and Tuesday saw many significant victories for left-wing candidates and policies.
Maybe the biggest wins came in the Massachusetts city of Somerville, where four of Boston DSA’s seven-person-strong slate for city council won, with Charlotte Kelly and Willie Burnley Jr winning two at-large elections and J. T. Scott and Ben Ewen-Campen securing reelection. It falls short of DSA’s ambition to make it the country’s first socialist-majority city but puts the city in a better position to deal with its affordable housing crisis.
The victory of these self-described “sidewalk socialists” builds on a wave that began in 2017, when Our Revolution, the organization formed from the ashes of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, ran five candidates for the council and endorsed four incumbents, with all nine winning. That included Scott and Ewen-Campen, Boston DSA members at the time. Socialists took it home elsewhere in Massachusetts, too, with Kendra Hicks winning her campaign for Boston City Council, and Quinton Zondervan winning reelection to the Cambridge City Council.
In Minneapolis, all three Twin Cities DSA members running for the thirteen-member city council won their races. Jason Chavez and Aisha Chughtai both handily beat their opponents for open seats, while Robin Wonsley Worlobah beat a sitting Green Party incumbent and narrowly edged out a third opponent who’d been endorsed by the Star Tribune. Though much of the conversation focused on policing in the city — and the winners backed the failed ballot measure to replace the city’s police with a department of public safety — these candidates identified housing affordability as a key issue for constituents.
The town of Hamden similarly elected Connecticut’s first socialist slate in sixty years, with all three Central Connecticut DSA members running for office coming out on top. Abdul Osmanu and Justin Farmer won election and reelection, respectively, to the town council, while Mariam Khan became the town board of education’s youngest-ever member.
More high-profile were the socialist wins in New York. There, Alexa Avilés won the Thirty-Eighth District seat for the New York City Council, and Tiffany Cabán won the Twenty-Second District seat representing Astoria, only two years after a recount reversed her fortunes and left her fifty-five votes short of the Democratic nomination for Queens district attorney. The two will make up only a fraction of the body’s fifty-one members but represent a growing socialist foothold in one of the country’s most politically powerful states.
Elsewhere in the state, in Ithaca, two of the local DSA chapter–endorsed common council candidates running on the Solidarity Slate won their seats: longtime local activist and organizer Phoebe Brown and Ithaca DSA member Jorge DeFendini. In Rochester, two DSA-endorsed candidates on the “People’s Slate” put together by Black Lives Matter activists won seats on the nine-member city council, along with three Democratic incumbents.
Democrats similarly swept the Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, council races, where the DSA-endorsed Anita Prizio won reelection with 54 percent of the vote. Xander Orenstein, also backed by DSA, became the first nonbinary member of the US judiciary by winning their seat on the county’s Magisterial District Court, where they’ve pledged to use their power to protect tenants from eviction.
It wasn’t only blue states. The DSA-endorsed Danny Nowell won his race for town council in the North Carolina town of Carrboro, while Richie Floyd, teacher and Pinellas County DSA member, edged out his opponent by two points to take a seat on the St. Petersburg City Council. Through grassroots organizing and small-dollar fundraising, Floyd out-fundraised and beat a former councilman who received funding from PACs and developers; Floyd had run on a pledge to improve public housing and strengthen tenants’ rights.
Wins for Progressives
Beyond socialists and candidates endorsed by them, progressives notched wins, too, perhaps most notably Michelle Wu in the Boston mayoral race. Though Wu, a protégé of Elizabeth Warren, is no socialist, she ran on a platform of rent control; a municipal Green New Deal; free public transport; police reform; and replacing the city’s unaccountable, developer-focused development agency with a city planning department.
Wu, who served the last seven years on the Boston City Council, won with 64 percent of the vote by cobbling together a different winning coalition than previous successful mayoral candidates, beating a centrist opponent married to a real estate developer.
Des Moines, Iowa, saw Black Liberation Movement activist and first-time candidate Indira Sheumaker run and win on a platform of moving resources away from police department toward a broader definition of public safety, defeating a two-term incumbent on the city council. In Dayton, Ohio, the city commission saw two candidates, Shenise Turner-Sloss and Darryl Fairchild, win while advancing progressive ideas for the city: participatory budgets, reimagining public safety and policing, municipal broadband, and a program putting vacant and abandoned properties in community hands.
Though decarceral candidates and measures have had mixed success recently, progressive prosecutors have won several victories. Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner cruised to a second term by a more than two-to-one margin against a tough-on-crime Republican challenger. In Manhattan, civil rights lawyer Alvin Bragg became its first black attorney general, promising leniency for low-level crimes and protection for tenants and workers. Elsewhere, a slate of progressive judges won in Allegheny and Missoula Counties, though they were held off by incumbents in Atlanta.
Ballot Measures
Finally, looking beyond the individuals elected to office, long-standing left-wing policy wish lists were advanced through ballot measures across the country.
To be sure, there were high-profile defeats, with Minneapolis’s public safety department measure maybe the most notable. Voters in Bellingham, Washington, also rejected two of four measures that were endorsed by DSA, namely a rent control measure and one requiring employers to pay $4-an-hour hazard pay and compensate workers for sudden schedule changes. (The measures banning facial recognition and predictive technology for police and banning city funds from discouraging unionization passed, however.)
But these were arguably outnumbered by the major victories. Tucson — the hometown of Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, famous for gleefully voting against raising the federal minimum wage to $15 earlier this year — voted 65 percent in favor of gradually raising its minimum wage to that figure. It’s the second Arizona city to do so after Flagstaff and adds to the more than seventy cities, counties, and states that raised their minimum wage in 2021, a record number since the Fight for $15 movement began in 2012.
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, voters backed separate rent control ballot measures. Minneapolis’s merely authorizes the city council to draft a rent control ordinance, an increasingly likely possibility with the victory of three socialists to the council (though rent control is opposed by its current mayor). St. Paul, on the other hand, put a strict 3 percent yearly cap on most rent increases that won’t change with inflation. The measures were fiercely opposed by businesses, landlords, and the wider real estate industry.
And while Minneapolis’s public safety department idea was shot down, measures enacted elsewhere will advance the cause of combating mass incarceration. Austin residents defeated a measure that would have poured up to $600 million into the city’s police department over five years, mandating two police officers for every one thousand residents, with a whopping 69 percent voting against it (DSA endorsed the “no” vote). Detroit voters decriminalized hallucinogenic mushrooms and entheogenic plants, and measures decriminalizing marijuana in Ohio were approved and defeated by seven different cities each.
The Struggle Continues
Like any election, Tuesday’s results were full of bitter disappointments for the Left. Yet there is much to be encouraged by in the results, which approved measures and handed power to candidates all over the country focused on rolling back mass incarceration and dealing with a growing housing affordability crisis, among others.
And despite high-profile defeats in recent years — from Bernie Sanders and India Walton, to, not long ago, the now victorious Tiffany Cabán — Tuesday’s results show that the socialist left is continuing to incrementally grow its presence in the halls of power. The Sanders and Walton races reflected bold plays to take power from the top end first, inspiring and pathbreaking insurgent campaigns that the Left should keep pursuing. But the patient, gradual work of building power from the bottom up is carrying on apace.
President Biden has said he believes his son Beau died of cancer that was linked to exposure to burn pits during his deployment to Iraq. (photo: Getty)
The pits were common at U.S. bases during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Dangerous materials from electronics to human waste were doused in fuel and set ablaze.
The open-air pits were common at U.S. military bases during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dangerous materials from electronics and vehicles to human waste were regularly doused in jet fuel and set ablaze, spewing toxic fumes and carcinogens into the air.
A senior administration official said the issue is personal to President Joe Biden. Biden has said he believes his son Beau died of cancer that was linked to exposure to burn pits during his deployment to Iraq.
"He volunteered to join the National Guard at age 32 because he thought he had an obligation to go," Biden said at a Service Employees International Union convention in 2019. "And because of exposure to burn pits, in my view, I can't prove it yet, he came back with stage 4 glioblastoma."
In August, the Department of Veterans Affairs began processing claims for veterans suffering from asthma, rhinitis and sinusitis based on exposure to the pits.
Now the VA will use the same model to examine whether burn pits and environmental hazards can be linked to other illnesses, including constrictive bronchiolitis, lung cancers and rare respiratory cancers, such as squamous cell carcinoma of the larynx or the trachea and salivary gland-type tumors of the trachea.
Biden has directed the VA to complete a review of the rare cancers and provide recommendations within 90 days about whether more diseases or conditions can be labeled as having possible service connections.
An administration official said the goal is to shorten the decision-making process for adding more conditions as being possibly linked to burn pit exposure so veterans can get the services and benefits they need.
The new Biden administration effort does not specifically include glioblastoma or other cancers not associated with the lungs, the throat and the respiratory system.
The Biden administration has already created registries to track veterans who believe they were exposed to burn pits and other carcinogens. An administration official said tens of thousands of veterans have registered.
In an exclusive interview before the new effort was announced, VA Secretary Denis McDonough said the U.S. needs to do more for service members who have been exposed to burn pits since the start of the first Gulf War in 1991.
"I have said I consider it a failing of the United States government, until now, during those 30 years, that it's only now under President Biden that we've even begun to cover [some of those] conditions," he said. "The biggest challenge there is proving the scientific connection between those chemicals and that cancer. And I'm duty-bound by the law to have a firm connection there. So that's the biggest challenge."
He urged veterans to register to find possible clusters.
"What I'm saying is: Let's look at all these cases together," he said. "Let's find out everybody in the burn pit registry who were deployed together and use data science and analytics to inform this decision that we just talked about, the correlation.
"If it's a close call, we're going to resolve those in favor of the vet."
The administration also plans to conduct more outreach to veterans and service members preparing to transition, provide more training for VA health care providers and staff members and speed the development of the Individual Longitudinal Exposure Record, which is how the Pentagon and the VA track, record and assess exposure to potentially hazardous substances.
"We have veterans with terminal cancers who believe that these exposures in theater are responsible for their cancers," McDonough said. "I take it very personally that we resolve those questions with urgency, with due haste, because they don't have the luxury of time."
The Covid-19 has added an extra element of concern for workers seeking to protect their pregnancy on the job. (photo: Tetra Images)
According to recent research, two-thirds of US workers are being denied adjustments on account of their pregnancy
But it didn’t work.
“Out of the blue, when I was about seven months pregnant, my employer reassigned me from a low-risk area with low exposure risk, to a high-risk area,” said Jennifer, who requested to withhold her last name due to privacy concerns. “I made it very clear to them that I wanted to continue working, that I just needed safety measures to prevent me from getting ill, and they were actually less safety measures than they had given a male doctor that I worked with who had an autoimmune condition.”
Instead of providing her with accommodations to her work that would reflect her pregnancy, her managers held a meeting at which Jennifer claims she was told she was no good to them pregnant, and that she should take unpaid family medical leave as she was going to be replaced by a non-pregnant worker. She had worked at the employer for five years.
“I went home that night and I just cried,” she added. “I had no idea what I was going to do because I was actually a high-risk pregnancy and needed health insurance.”
Due to the pandemic, Jennifer’s husband wasn’t working as often, and her family relied on her income and health insurance. At seven months pregnant during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving to find another job wasn’t immediately an option.
She was able to receive a note from her OB/GYN confirming to her employer that her pregnancy was high-risk, and demanded accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Though her employer provided some accommodations in response, she still felt exposed to Covid-19 at work. After her pregnancy, Jennifer opted to find another job, despite taking a pay cut to do so, for fear she would be forced out or intimidated from her position in retaliation by her employer.
Jennifer is far from alone in America.
According to a recent research brief conducted by the legal advocacy non-profit, A Better Balance, approximately two-thirds of pregnant workers are being denied work accommodations under current federal law, either forcing these workers out of their jobs or putting them and their pregnancy at risk.
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, pregnant workers with medical needs, but not disabilities, are left unprotected to prevent pregnancy complications. The burden is placed on individual pregnant workers to prove someone else in their workplace received similar accommodations in order to receive them.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the issues facing women in the workplace, including a lack of any mandated paid maternity leave, high childcare costs and a lack of access to childcare, and women, particularly women of color, have been disproportionately affected by job losses and jobs recovery for women.
In September 2021, more than 300,000 women in the US left the workforce. More than 26,000 jobs were lost in September 2021 for women, while men gained 220,000 jobs. The wage gap between men and women through 2020 was 83 cents to $1, with Black women paid 64 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latino women paid 57 cents for every dollar paid to white men. Over 12.6 million women and girls in the US had no health insurance coverage through 2020.
Federal legislation to require employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees for pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, passed in the House of Representatives in May 2021 with bipartisan support, but has not yet received a vote in the Senate.
“We need one clear, federal standard to ensure that all pregnant workers are entitled to this basic protection,” said Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance. “Far too many have been and continue to be forced off the job because their employers refuse to provide them the modest accommodations they need to stay healthy and the pandemic has exacerbated the dire nature of this situation.”
In a recent report published by the National Women’s Law Center, the most common occupations for pregnant workers, registered nurses, teachers, cashiers, retail workers, servers, are often low-paid and require physically demanding job duties. Black and Latino pregnant workers are disproportionately in low-paid jobs where workers are forced to stand for long periods of time, make repetitive motions and are exposed to disease or infections.
Elizabeth Rocha worked at an Amazon warehouse in Tracy, California, when she found out she was pregnant in March 2016. Due to morning sickness and the physically demanding nature of her job, she informed her management immediately. Two weeks into working, she was pushed to take an unpaid leave of absence to get medication for morning sickness.
As her pregnancy progressed, Rocha requested to be stationed near a restroom, but management didn’t move her. Then she started getting written up for time off task because she was using the restroom frequently, and she was constantly forced to stow heavy items.
She tried to obtain a stool to help her stow items, but was told a different department needed it more, and her requests to have her rate lowered were dismissed. Two weeks before she was scheduled for maternity leave, her accommodation for a 10-minute bathroom break once an hour was finally approved, but she was put on a stowing station with heavy, bulk items like gaming systems, cat litter and fertilizer.
After returning from maternity leave in early 2017, Rocha was eventually fired due to too many write-ups for missing her rate.
“I thought I was having trouble because it was my first pregnancy and I didn’t know what to expect, so I didn’t want to cause too much trouble or ask for too much,” said Rocha. “At about four months in the pregnancy and on I would only get sick on the days that I would work. I know now that was due to stress and anxiety from fear of being written up and fired.”
Former tour guide Gue Gue had never considered herself particularly political until the bloodbath on the streets in the wake of the coup in Myanmar. Now she's in a clandestine rebel training camp. (photo: Facebook)
The members of the resistance vow to fight the “final battle” against military rule. Their utterly changed worlds since the February coup paint a portrait of sacrifice and resolve in a Burmese generation who, unlike their parents, grew up in a world of smartphones and greater political freedoms. Many are willing to pay any price to overthrow a government they say threatens to take them back to a darker past.
There was no option for general anesthesia to put her under, so Gue Gue was conscious for the operation. The former tour guide, a stylish 26-year-old who listed her interests on Facebook as “Traveling, Adaptive Hiking, Dance, Writing, Gymnastics, Fashion Photography, Listening to Music, and Reading,” tried to keep her mind focused on all the work she had yet to do and not the surgery. “They were cutting the muscle like we are chopping pork,” said a friend who was there.
Gue Gue had no regrets, she said later, except about the jagged red mark left behind. “I really don’t want any scars!” she said, laughing. “After the revolution, I’ll go and remove my scar with a laser.”
Only a few weeks earlier, on an April evening, Gue Gue had slipped out of her family home in Mandalay, an ancient royal city careening into the 21st century, with shiny new malls, snappily dressed students and hipster cafes. Carrying a single change of clothes, she left behind the home where she had lived with her parents as the baby, the youngest daughter, well-loved and comfortable.
She was going to fight the junta, and not just with words.
Since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup on Feb. 1, toppling the civilian government, Gue Gue had seen many of her peers killed by troops on the streets of her hometown as they chanted democracy slogans. Hopes that the international community would respond to the military’s mounting brutality with practical action had fizzled. For her, and thousands like her, the only option was force.
“I have family. I have dreams. I have things that I want to achieve. I want to travel. I want to write. I want to study,” Gue Gue said a few weeks before her operation in the jungle, in the first of a series of interviews over several months. Two other people, and video and photo footage shared with Reuters, confirmed the outline and many of the details of her story.
Because she still hasn’t healed from her ad hoc surgery, she hasn’t yet been involved in any fighting. But she says she is ready. “I sacrificed all this and joined this training with only one ambition: that we must win.”
Two faces of the resistance
The men and women rebelling against Myanmar’s junta vow to be the last generation to live under the boot of the country’s military. This, they say, is the “final battle” to root out the army, which has been the most powerful institution in the country since it became an independent nation in 1948. The military has withstood popular uprisings and civil war for decades, including the mass uprising in 1988 that led to the emergence of Aung San Suu Kyi as a human rights icon.
It is a fight that has in a few short months made guerrilla fighters of university lecturers, day laborers, I.T. workers, students and artists and forced countless young men and women into a life on the run.
Some, like Gue Gue, who had never considered herself particularly political until the bloodbath on the streets in the wake of the coup, are in clandestine rebel training camps. Hundreds of armed outfits have popped up across the country, according to an October report by the International Crisis Group, many calling themselves People’s Defense Forces (PDFs). A famous poet formed one. Beauty queens and actresses who were wanted by the authorities for supporting the protests re-emerged on social media in areas controlled by armed groups, posting pictures with rifles slung over their shoulders.
Others, like a skinny 32-year-old librarian named Tayzar San, have been hiding in cities, organizing clandestine demonstrations, funneling money to striking workers and strategizing. A young man who once spent his spare time buried in books – as often Burmese romance novels as nonfiction political tracts – he now lives out of a backpack, moving from apartment to apartment to evade the authorities who have put a $5,600 bounty on his head. By September, he said, he hadn’t seen his wife and daughter in seven months.
The utterly changed worlds of Gue Gue and Tayzar San paint a portrait of sacrifice and resolve in a young Burmese generation who, unlike their parents, grew up in a world of smartphones and greater political freedoms. Many are willing to pay any price, including their lives, to overthrow a junta that they say threatens to take them back to a darker past.
Speaking in October, army chief and coup leader Min Aung Hlaing said the junta, which has vowed to hold elections within two years, was working on a five-point plan to reach a “true union based on democracy and federalism.” He said the leadership was working to “change the country peacefully.” In a message to Reuters responding to detailed questions, the junta’s “True News” information unit said, “We have no plan to answer meaningless questions.”
At stake is the fate of a country of 55 million people that once looked to be on its way to becoming Asia’s newest semi-democratic state, a nation on the crossroads of India and China rich with natural resources, considered a frontier market for foreign investors and a keystone in U.S-led efforts to counter Chinese power in Southeast Asia.
It is one of the bloodiest chapters yet in a decades-long struggle to shrug off a series of military dictators who have waged some of the world’s longest-running civil wars, displaced millions of people and consigned multiple generations to poverty and dashed dreams.
Since Myanmar, then Burma, won independence from colonial Britain seven decades ago, it has known less than 25 years of civilian governance. Successive juntas ruled the country from 1962 until 2011, when Gen. Than Shwe appeared to step back and hand limited powers to a civilian government.
It was a managed process that reserved vast political influence under the constitution for the military. Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been imprisoned in her home for 15 years, was freed to participate in elections and, in 2015, won them.
In the years following, Suu Kyi drew criticism for standing by the military as they carried out what the United Nations termed a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya Muslim minority. Testifying in the Hague, where Myanmar faces charges at the International Criminal Court, she admitted that war crimes may have been committed but denied genocide, saying Rohingya had “exaggerated” the extent of abuses against them.
But her government made some steps toward weakening military power and attracting foreign investment. The Myanmar kyat became Asia’s best-performing currency, and the World Bank was predicting economic growth in the country despite the COVID-19 pandemic.
That all came to an end in the early hours of February 1, when Min Aung Hlaing had Suu Kyi and her leadership arrested and declared a direct return to military rule, sparking mass street protests.
More than 1,200 people are now dead after brutal crackdowns by junta troops, according to the rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, or AAPP, which has been monitoring casualties. Hundreds have also been killed by the resistance, according to the junta and local media reports, with fledgling guerrilla outfits assassinating suspected informers and troops and bombing infrastructure of the regime. Towns and villages across the country, including the formerly peaceful central heartlands, have become battlegrounds between soldiers and resistance fighters.
A group of elected lawmakers was sworn into parliament, remotely, while on the run days after the coup, and a parallel civilian government was formed in April.
In an interview with Reuters in October, junta finance minister Aung Naing Oo said the army was “upholding peace and security despite attempts to escalate violence. … Our security forces have a job to do. They cannot sacrifice the safety of the majority for the violence and destruction of those who wish to destroy Myanmar.” He said the government was working well and “the worst is behind us… we will surely succeed as a united country.”
Longtime activists like Bo Kyi, a co-founder of the AAPP, believe the regime is ripe to be toppled. He spent seven years in prison for his role in the 1988 protests. Back then, there were no mobile phones, no social media or free local media outlets. People were arrested for handing out pamphlets. The uprising was brutally crushed, like every attempt to overthrow the military in its history.
But the new generation at the forefront of the uprising today has grown up in a different world, Bo Kyi said. They have creative ideas and sophisticated political understanding. They are trying to forge unity between the country’s myriad ethnic groups. Smartphones and internet access have made it harder for the military to hide its actions. On social media, acts of brutality go viral in minutes, although internet shutdowns and retaliation by troops on citizen journalists have reduced the quantity of footage getting out.
Nonetheless, citizens have filmed troops looting homes and businesses, taking potshots at protesters and dragging their bodies through the streets. They filmed the tiny body of one of the youngest victims, 6-year-old Khin Myo Chit, blood seeping through her Mickey Mouse shorts as she died in her father’s arms. For the first time, there have been hundreds of defections from the armed forces. Dozens of diplomats stationed at embassies across the world have refused to represent the junta, and it has been unable to gain representation at the U.N.
“All this did not happen before,” Bo Kyi said. “This can be the last fight of the people who have suffered for so long against the military.”
Others fear a descent into further bloodletting and all-out civil war. The People’s Defense Forces, a loose coalition of anti-coup armed groups with only a nascent overarching leadership structure and limited resources, are waging asymmetric warfare against a 300,000-strong military armed by China and Russia.
The librarian
On the morning of the coup, Tayzar San, seeing the internet had been shut down, went out and bought a radio. He was prepared. He had been reading the signs of political strife, and they augured badly. Several days earlier, he had asked in a Facebook post if the country was cursed.
“No matter what, we must overcome it all,” he wrote.
Born in 1988 in a remote village in Myanmar’s Sagaing Division, smack in the center of the country, Tayzar San grew up watching his father covertly listening to radio programs by foreign broadcasters, one of the only sources of reliable news, as the ruling military tightly controlled the local media. His father, a schoolteacher, had taken part in anti-junta protests as a young monk, and their home was filled with books about the country’s politics and history.
Tayzar San developed an early love for reading. His dream was to become a librarian, he said. But he went to study medicine at a university in Mandalay, the nearest major city.
He graduated with a medical degree three years into the military’s reforms. After university, he married Aye Aye Mon, a classmate with a thick black bob and glasses, drawn to her by their shared love of reading. They had a baby girl, Lone Ma Lay. Opportunities were open to him that would have been impossible for his parents’ generation. With friends in Mandalay, he opened a free library. As executive director, he hosted political talks and organized training for civil society groups on democratic institutions, federalism and the country’s complicated peace process.
The morning of Feb. 1, Tayzar San and his friends spontaneously converged on the library. They commiserated. Some wept. “We said we could not let this just happen. We have to do what we can,” he said.
They pulled together a statement from 53 civil society groups, most of them Mandalay-based, condemning the coup. The next day, doctors walked out of government-run hospitals, refusing to work under the military. It was the start of the civil disobedience movement, a country-wide refusal of hundreds of thousands of people to work for the military, from railway workers to immigration officials.
Three days after the coup, Tayzar San and his friends gathered outside the medical university holding signs reading “Protect democracy,” “People’s protest against military rule” and “Respect the people’s votes.” They dispersed quickly, but minutes later police grabbed four of the young men, Tayzar San’s close friends. They were later charged under three sections including a colonial-era law criminalizing causing “public alarm” and face several years in prison.
Their defiance helped set off a wave of protests across the country.
Tayzar San realized he had to split up from his family, in case the military went after him, and, a few days later, said goodbye to his wife and baby daughter. He began to organize daily protests. Often at the front of the crowd and shouting into the megaphone, he cut a distinctive figure with his skinny frame, huge thick-rimmed glasses and broad grin.
On Facebook, where he had quickly grown a massive following, he wrote gentle, encouraging messages, calling on people to take to the streets, “Don’t look for a leader, don’t wait… All the people in the community, please come out.” During interviews he projected an easy calm, as quick to laugh at the military as condemn it.
He came close to arrest more than once. Fleeing a crackdown on a street protest in early March, he took refuge in a hotel but was almost caught when soldiers from the 99th Light Infantry Division surrounded the building. With a small group, he went up to the roof and climbed onto neighboring buildings to escape, balancing on air-conditioning units and clinging to water pipes, even as soldiers opened fire from below, he said later. It was like something out of “the action movies,” he said. He made it to safety after residents hid them in an apartment. Efforts by Reuters to reach the unit’s commander via the military weren’t successful.
By mid-April, a poster was circulating in Mandalay and online advertising a $5,600 reward for Tayzar San’s capture and handover to authorities. He continued to lead demonstrations, but more rarely, appearing every few days and then slipping back into the maze of Mandalay apartments.
Between his constant moves and the internet shutdown, it was hard to reach him. But interviewed over a shaky connection from a safehouse in April, he spoke with the same unwavering optimism of his protest rhetoric, peppering his speech with hopeful aphorisms – “It is never darker than at midnight” – and downplaying the magnitude of his difficulties with giggles.
Asked about how security forces appeared to be targeting him personally, he said: “It is fine. I will do what I have to do. They have tried to put fear in us. … We will just continue what we want to do.”
A week and a half later, he said, security forces turned up outside his home in Mandalay. He was long gone, and his wife and daughter weren’t home. But soldiers and police broke down the locked door and demolished the place, including his book collection.
The jungle
Since its independence from Britain, Myanmar has not known a year of peace. A multitude of armed groups, ranging from powerful organizations controlling semi-autonomous areas in ethnic regions to government-backed militias and traditional people’s armies, have been active for decades.
The military has long justified its power by casting itself as the sole unifying force able to hold the disparate nation together. In recent years, several areas of fighting had subsided. But they flared up again after the coup as some of the most powerful outfits, including the Karen National Union, one of the country’s oldest and biggest ethnic armed groups, expressed solidarity with the protesters and allowed thousands to seek shelter in their territories. Some offered military training.
Some of the new armed outfits emerged from neighborhood security teams formed during the protest crackdowns. They sought to arm themselves in response to attacks, a move justified by the ousted civilian leadership in a March 14 statement that broke with a long tradition of nonviolence made famous by Suu Kyi. The statement called the military a “terrorist organization” and said all citizens had the “right to retaliate in self-defense.” Under detention, Suu Kyi hasn’t commented on the repudiation of nonviolence, but she said she would never go against the will of the people.
The parallel civilian government said it aimed to unite the armed units into a single force, but had limited control over the ground operations. “It’s impractical for us to say to those villages, communities, ‘Defend like that, defend like that,’” Dr. Sasa, a spokesman for the government, said in an interview. “We are not there physically.”
Sasa, who fled the capital in the days after the coup, has become a high-profile leader with a millions-strong following on social media. Daily, he posts photos of himself – meeting international officials, or in camouflage from his jungle hideout – along with statements and inspirational messages.
The parallel government is walking a tightrope between domestic and foreign audiences. Democratic nations sympathetic to the anti-coup movement such as Britain and the United States have called for a peaceful solution to the crisis. The parallel government’s call has complicated its diplomatic efforts, the International Crisis Group think tank said in its October report.
The military has termed both the parallel government and the resistance fighters “terrorists” and threatened people who contact them with imprisonment.
In April, after the long overnight bus ride from Mandalay, Gue Gue and her friends were shepherded by their contacts to an old school in a village close to the jungle. They slept on top of school desks while they waited to be taken to what they were told was a nearby training ground. One of the friends, who is also from Mandalay and asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said Gue Gue was the first woman to go for the training there.
“They told me that they don’t accept women, because they haven’t prepared anything,” Gue Gue said. “‘It will be so tiring,’ they said. I told them: ‘I don’t care whether it is tiring. I must join.’”
From there, they traveled to the training camp, the location of which Reuters is not disclosing for security reasons. Dozens of people were already there, Gue Gue said, and more kept arriving, including several more women. One roomed with Gue Gue and they became close friends. Together, they built up the camp. Even the toilets had to be made from scratch. They drank the water from a local river. Food was bland – mostly boiled rice and instant noodles.
On the phone, she said she realized she had never done anything truly difficult in her life before. “I never dreamed that I would be sleeping in a roofless shelter or using a makeshift toilet,” she said.
In late May, she posted a picture on Facebook. “Even though I am having a rough time out there, I’m still happy and trying my best for my country,” she wrote. “But I do cry sometimes when I miss my friends and family… (PS – the following photo is me sitting on the toilet that I built by my own for the very first time in my life).”
The days were long and tiring. Wake-up was at 4 a.m., followed by 10 laps of the football field, more exercises, a breakfast of instant noodles or rice, and training in military strategy, how to handle guns and how to forage for food in the jungle. It was a test for urbanites used to opening the fridge and tucking into “fancy snacks” at will, her friend said. But the new recruits built up an easy camaraderie, sharing stories of how their lives had been “turned upside down” by the coup, watching sunsets by the river and playing guitar in the evenings.
After her surgery, Gue Gue was in pain and could barely walk, her friend said. She had been charged with managing four groups, a total of 40 people, she said, and given a new title, roughly equivalent to the rank of lieutenant, but she mostly oversaw office and logistical work. Some of her comrades were volunteering to go to the front lines. A friend named Aung said Gue Gue video-called him. She showed him some of the weapons in the camp but lamented that there were so few.
Then, in mid-August, she fell out of contact. Messages and calls from Reuters went unanswered. The internet connection in the region came and went. But fighting between junta troops and PDF forces like hers had intensified. There were reports of dozens of deaths on both sides.
Sacrifice
After raiding Tayzar San’s home in Mandalay, troops began, in June, targeting the remote village where he was born, a cluster of about 100 houses in Wetlet township on the plains of the Mu River. It was a quiet and peaceful place where Tayzar San’s relatives had rice farms and banana plantations.
In one raid, more than 100 soldiers pulled up in trucks, arriving first at the farms on the outskirts and detaining five people to use as human shields, local media reported. The troops made them walk in front as they marched into the village, bound for Tayzar San’s parents’ house, the local media reported. One man who tried to run away was shot but survived.
“They came to my village about six times in one week,” Tayzar San said. “They came looking for me.” He said the soldiers took motorbikes from the village and money and clothes from his family’s house but didn’t find his parents, who had also gone into hiding. Talking to him later, he said, his parents told him, “Don’t worry about us, you just continue to do what you’re doing.”
At first, he said, he was wracked with guilt over the raids. But he tried not to let the crackdown dent his defiance. “The villagers are not scared. They run away when the raid happens, but then they come back once they are gone. … We should not be scared of this. This is the true face of the junta. We need to know that and continue our resolution.”
But the isolation was taking a toll. He stopped going out or seeing people beyond a small and trusted circle. It was becoming impossible to attend protests. At one demonstration in June, he tried to disguise himself so as not to attract attention, taking off his trademark glasses and shaving his head. It didn’t work; he was mobbed.
Confined indoors, he spent most of his time on Zoom meetings, speaking to other activists, helping organize protests. When he had time, he said, he listened to songs on his phone, mostly Myanmar traditional folk music heavy on xylophones and gongs.
He longed for his family. “They are so many miles away from me now,” he said quietly in September.
Both of his parents and his wife had survived bouts of COVID-19 in the months since the coup. His wife fell severely ill – she needed an oxygen cylinder and friends struggled to find one. She found one and survived, but Tayzar San said he had to fight the urge to leave his hiding place to be with her.
His daughter, who turned 2 in his absence, was at that stage of babyhood where she was learning new things every day. He was missing it all.
Aye Aye Mon said she and their daughter watched Tayzar San’s video interviews. “My kid says: ‘Daddy is only living inside the TV. Why hasn’t he come out yet? He should come out,’” she said. Aye Aye Mon added: “I don’t blame him at all... I will try to keep myself safe and we will meet again in a better situation.”
Each day has brought more news of arrests. Often, the authorities detained relatives of protest leaders, including children. Tayzar San said he had imagined all the worst possible outcomes.
“The main thing is that we will never calm down or back off in this revolution for any reason,” he said. “I might have to sacrifice my life, my freedom and my family.”
“Our camp is moving”
After weeks of silence, in early September Gue Gue sent a short message to Reuters. “Currently I am so busy as our camp is moving.” The fighters had heard news that the military was searching for their base and left in a hurry at the end of August.
“The situation has become worse,” she said over the phone a few days later, as the line cut in and out and monsoon rain hammered in the background.
It was painful to leave all they had built behind, she said. The fighters didn’t have enough guns to defend the camp from attack.
“We were kind of scared and can’t wait to fight them back,” Gue Gue’s friend said. “We prepared everything; we said goodbye to our closest friends, just in case I’m killed or something.”
Gue Gue’s wound from the surgery has been slow to heal. The doctors told her it was slightly infected. If the situation improved, she said, she would go to a proper hospital to have it looked at. In the meantime, she was taking painkillers.
Two of the people from her training group had been killed in a clash with junta troops, Gue Gue said, while another had his leg amputated. Though she had a gun, she was still waiting to fight because of her injury. Her friend said Gue Gue isn’t likely to go to the front lines until she has recovered.
Like Tayzar San, she worries about sympathy for the anti-coup movement fading or the public being forced into submission as the long fight grinds on. But, like him, she is resolute. When she feels low, she said, she runs in the fields in the rain or listens to music, anthems of peace, freedom and homecoming.
In October, she watched from the camp as people posted pictures on social media of Thadingyut, the festival of lights at which Burmese light candles and lanterns under the full moon and celebrate at pagodas.
“I don’t want the people to forget about the young people who are sacrificing their lives on the ground,” Gue Gue said by phone. “We’re still here.”
Yale University's Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation. (photo: iStock)
It remains the most famous line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” — and yes, of course, you know what it is:
“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”In a sense, that sums up America’s water problems described so vividly, if painfully, by TomDispatch regular Rajan Menon, if, sadly enough, you were to amend that final line to read “nor any fit to drink.” That would, unfortunately, fit the situation in Flint, Michigan, for years, and in other problem areas in the United States where the water supply is still polluted today.
And let me add one note that saddens me in this context: water can be so beautiful, so inspiring in life. What a shame to turn it into a poison of one sort or another. It has, in fact, played a striking role in my own life. I’ve been a swimmer since I was a boy and in my grown-up years swam in fresh water in the summer and otherwise did laps in a pool (until the coronavirus left me uncomfortable taking a subway to an old gym and locker room daily). Water was the one environment where I found I could stop being me, stop fretting about today and tomorrow. Water was where my brain would wander and I would often discover, to my amazement, what it had been thinking about without giving me a clue. Titles, for instance, for TomDispatch pieces I had yet to write and hadn’t even realized I was considering writing, would suddenly float into my head while I swam. For a man who was generally anything but spiritual, that was indeed an experience to savor.
Sadly, there’s another side to water, one that’s anything but ethereal, one that shouldn’t even be part of life in a country as wealthy and powerful as this one — if, that is, its top priority were the care of its citizens. No such luck, I’m afraid, as Menon makes all too clear.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
When it comes to basic water supplies, that’s hardly an outlandish thought. After all, back in 2015, our government, along with other members of the United Nations, embraced the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, the sixth of which is universal access to safe drinking water. Despite modest progress globally — 71% of the world’s population lacked that simple necessity then, “only” 61% today — nearly 900 million people still don’t have it. Of course, the overwhelming majority of them live in the poorest countries on this planet.
The United States, however, has the world’s largest economy, the fifth-highest per-capita income, and is a technological powerhouse. How, then, could the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) have given our water infrastructure (pipes, pumping stations, reservoirs, and purification and recycling facilities) a shocking C- grade in their 2021 “report card”? How to explain why Yale University’s Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. only 26th globally when it comes to the quality of its drinking water and sanitation?
Worse yet, two million Americans still have no running water and indoor plumbing. Native Americans are 19 times more likely to lack this rudimentary amenity than Whites; Latinos and African Americans, twice as likely. On average, Americans use 82 gallons of water daily; Navajos, seven — or the equivalent of about five flushes of a toilet. Moreover, many Native Americans must drive miles to fetch fresh water, making regular handwashing, a basic precaution during the Covid-19 pandemic, just one more hardship.
“Safe” Water
Washington and Philadelphia are just two of the many American cities whose water-distribution systems, some of them wooden, contain pipes that predate the Civil War. Naturally, time has taken its toll. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports that water mains, especially such old ones, rupture 240,000 times annually, while “trillions of gallons” of potable water worth $2.6 billion seep from leaky pipes, and “billions of gallons of raw sewage” pollute the surface water that provides 61% of our supply. Fixing busted pipes, which break at the rate of one every two minutes nationally, has cost nearly $70 billion since 2000.
The U.S. has 2.2 million miles of waterpipes, which are, on average, 45 years old. The EPA’s 2015 estimate for overhauling such an aging system of piping was $473 billion, or $23.7 billion annually over 20 years — in other words, anything but chump change. Still, compared to the way Congress allots money to the U.S. military for its endless losing wars and eternal build-ups of weaponry, it couldn’t be more modest. After all, the Pentagon’s latest budget request was for $715 billion, to which the House Armed Services Committee added $25.5 billion, unsolicited, as did its Senate counterpart. Self-styled congressional budget hawks never complain about our military spending, even though it exceeds that of the next 11 countries combined. So, $23.7 billion annually to renovate an antediluvian water system? That shouldn’t be a problem, right?
It turns out, though, that it is. The federal government’s share of total investment in updating water infrastructure plunged from nearly-two-thirds in 1977 to less than a tenth of that by 2019. With state and local governments under increasing financial pressure, the funding shortfall for modernizing the water infrastructure could reach a staggering $434 billion by 2029.
Considering where the American water system already falls utterly short, a contrarian could counter that it’s not a big deal for a mere two million people in a country of 333 million not to have water directly piped into their homes. But in the wealthiest country on earth? Really? And a lack of easy access to water is hardly the only problem. A substantial number of Americans are drinking (and cooking with) contaminated supplies of it. A 2017 investigation found that 63 million of them had done so at least once during the previous 10 years, or nearly a fifth of the population.
This finding wasn’t an outlier. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) discovered that, “in 2015 alone, there were more than 80,000 reported violations of the Safe Water Drinking Act by community water systems” that served nearly 77 million people. And of the total number of violations, 12,000, traced to water providers serving 27 million people, were health-related (rather than monitoring and reporting infractions). There’s more. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that 21 million consumers received water that didn’t meet federal standards; and Time reported that 30 million did in 2019.
The Flint Saga and Beyond
Occasionally, stories about unsafe drinking water do make the headlines, as happened with Flint, Michigan. Once a prosperous city, Flint was slammed by a post-1970s wave of de-industrialization in the Midwest and now has a poverty rate of nearly 39% (and 54% of its population is Black). By 2013, facing its massive budget deficit, a commission appointed by the governor devised a cost-saving measure. The city’s water supply would be switched to the Flint River, pending construction of new supply lines from Lake Huron. That river, however, had long been contaminated by waste from factories, paper mills, and meatpacking plants along its shore, as well as untreated sewage.
Residents began complaining that their water smelled and tasted bad, but were regularly reassured that it was safe. Testing, however, revealed lead levels that far exceeded the EPA-stipulated maximum because the water hadn’t been treated with anti-corrosion additives to counter contamination. (There is, in fact, no “safe” level for lead, a toxic metal, but the EPA requires remedial action if 10% of water samples show concentrations exceeding 15 ppb, or parts per billion.) Flint’s water also contained trihalomethane, a carcinogen, as well as dangerous E. coli and legionella bacteria. A scandal ensued.
Flint, as it turned out, wasn’t alone. The NRDC reported this year that “dozens of cities have been found to have dangerous levels of elevated lead” in their water. Another of its studies concluded that the drinking water of 186 million people (56% of Americans) had more than one part per billion of lead, the maximum recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and that 61 million Americans used bottled water from sources that exceeded the Food and Drug Administration’s five ppb maximum, while lead levels in the water of seven million others exceeded the 15-ppb EPA threshold for mandatory corrective measures.
In 1986, Congress banned the future use of pipes that weren’t “lead free,” but didn’t require the replacement of existing ones. Even today, as many as 12 million lead pipes still serve households in this country and scientists generally regard the EPA’s lead limit as far too lax and its testing requirements and reporting standards as too permissive. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that local governments and utility companies have regularly opposed tougher regulations for lead-pipe replacement.
Eliminating lead water pipes entirely in this country would cost up to $50 billion. Though that’s a lot of money, it’s hardly unaffordable. In fact, the American Jobs Plan proposed $45 billion for that task, though the separate bipartisan infrastructure bill cut it to $15 billion — again illustrating that penny pinching applies to threats to Americans’ day-to-day well-being, but not to our militarized conception of national security.
Other Contaminants
Lead isn’t the sole contaminant in our drinking water.
- In farming communities in California’s Central Valley and in the San Joaquin Valley, increasing amounts of uranium — associated with kidney damage and a greater risk of cancer — have turned up in the local drinking water, including private wells, which aren’t regulated by the EPA, but are used by migrant workers. A 2015 Associated Press investigation found that a quarter of San Joaquin Valley households were then using drinking water from private wells containing “dangerous amounts of uranium.” Moreover, one in 10 of the Valley’s community water systems contained uranium levels that exceeded federal and state limits — and there’s no reason to believe that has changed in the last six years.
- The rise in fertilizer use — fivefold since the 1950s — to boost crop yields and its runoff has increased the nitrate levels in drinking water. High levels of nitrates, which have been linked to various forms of cancer, birth defects, and thyroid disease, have been found in 4,000 public water systems in 10 states supplying 45 million people, especially in the West and Midwest. In more than half of these places, the contamination seems only to be increasing. The EPA’s maximum concentration level for nitrates is 10 milligrams per liter, but studies reveal that the risk of birth defects and cancer increase even when people consume water containing half that amount.
- Arsenic, a known carcinogen, is another hazard. A 2020 Columbia University study found that, though the average concentration of arsenic in the water supply, nationwide, fell by 10% between 2006 and 2011, concentrations exceeding the EPA’s maximum of 0.01 milligrams per liter were far more likely in smaller communities that use groundwater and are disproportionately Hispanic. A U.S. Geological Survey report, which focused on wells providing drinking water, noted that there were “dangerously high levels of arsenic, potentially exposing 2.1 million people” to health risks in more than half of all states.
- Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in numerous products, including non-stick cookware, pizza boxes, firefighting foam, and waterproof apparel. However, they remain unregulated by the EPA despite being associated with a range of health risks. Worse yet, these “forever chemicals” take thousands of years to break down. Scientists estimate that the tap water of 200 million Americans contains PFAS concentrations that put them at risk.
The Bad News for 2021
Since the early nineteenth century, enormous progress has been made toward providing Americans with abundant, clean water. And water-borne diseases like cholera, which still kills close to 100,000 people worldwide every year, and typhoid, which claims as many as 161,000, have essentially been eliminated in this country (though there are still 16 million annual cases of acute gastroenteritis traceable to contaminated water). So, yes, water in the U.S. is generally fit to drink, but given this country’s economic and technological resources, it’s scandalous that the problems that remain haven’t at least been substantially mitigated.
To understand such a failure, just consider our politics, which, in the wake of recent elections, only seem to be growing worse by the day.
Since the 1980s, the public sphere has been dominated by a narrative that portrays just about anything the government does, other than profligate spending on the U.S. military, as financially reckless, intrusive, and counterproductive. Instead of creating a compelling message to persuade Americans that many valued public benefits, ranging from land grant colleges, the Internet, Social Security, and Medicare to the national highway system and medical research breakthroughs, owe much to government policies, too many Democrats continue to run scared, fearful of being labeled “big-government-tax-and-spend liberals.”
Add to this the outsized political influence that big money exercises through copious campaign contributions — all but limitless thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions — and pricey lobbyists. (Yes, unions and public interest groups lobby, too, but for each dollar they spend, corporations spend $34.)
Companies that, for instance, produce perchlorate, a chemical found in U.S. water supplies that’s used in rocket fuel and munitions and is harmful to iodine-deficient pregnant women and fetuses, have paid lobbyists to fight stricter regulations for years. Not coincidentally, the EPA, which has been monitoring perchlorate since 2001, has yet to set mandatory limits on it for drinking water, though it continues to consider a “roadmap” for doing so. Similarly, the seven largest producers of PFAS spent $61 million in 2019 and 2020 on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. In 2018, there were only two firms lobbying against tougher PFAS regulations; a year later that number had increased to 14.
The EPA sets maximum drinking water levels for 90 substances, but hasn’t (except in a few instances where Congress mandated that it do so) added more since 1996 even though its “Drinking Water Contaminant Candidate List” now contains nearly 100 additional substances. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Companies that oppose tougher regulations have political access and clout. Political appointees to important EPA posts often hail from those very industries or the lobbying groups they bankroll. Scientists paid by industries have weighed in, lending an aura of legitimacy to special-interest pleading.
Water policy is rife with scientific complexity, but the legislation and regulations that shape it are hashed out in the political arena. There, the deck is increasingly stacked — and not in favor of the average consumer. If the Republicans take back Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024, my small suggestion: have a nice cool glass of ice water and relax. What could possibly go wrong?
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Rajan Menon, a TomDispatch regular, is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author, most recently, of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention.
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