12 August 21
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
It sure looks as if Jan. 6, and the entire Trump presidency, were planned and funded by oligarchs in the shadows
onald Trump and his allies and followers were involved in a conspiracy against American democracy, the Constitution, the general welfare and the rule of law. Trump may have been president by title, but not in spirit or through his actions. At almost every opportunity he betrayed the presidential oath and worked to undermine the United States and its interests.
The examples are legion: Trump was elected with the help of a hostile foreign power and appeared to do its leader's bidding throughout his presidency. Trump engaged in acts of democide against the American people through sabotage and willful neglect in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of more than 600,000 people in America. He was impeached twice — something unprecedented in American history — for crimes against democracy and the Constitution.
Donald Trump was grossly corrupt as president, using the office to enrich himself, his family and his political allies.
Trump and his regime debased America's democracy and political culture, elevating neofascism and white supremacy in an attempt to create a new form of apartheid. The damage Trumpism caused to American society has created a full-blown political and social crisis. Matters are so dire that many observers, including President Biden, have described the Age of Trump and beyond as the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
Of course there were also the events of Jan. 6, with Donald Trump's coup attempt and his followers' lethal attack on the Capitol.
What new information have we learned? Trump's coup attempt came much closer to succeeding than was known even several weeks ago. The coup attempt was not "amateurish" or a joke. Trump and his allies' attempts to overthrow American democracy were entirely in earnest. Trump's followers who overran the Capitol should not be described as a "mob." At least some of them were organized, dedicated and well-financed, as well as zealously loyal.
The danger that Trump would invoke martial law and declare himself president for life after his defeat by Joe Biden was so great that the country's senior military leaders were preparing to stop him.
Last week it was revealed that Jeffrey Clark, a Trump loyalist within the Justice Department, attempted to pressure acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to declare that there were "irregularities" in the votes in key battleground states such as Georgia, where Trump had narrowly lost to Biden.
On CNN's "State of the Union" last weekend, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said that testimony from Rosen and another Justice Department official had "lifted the lid on 'frightening' maneuverings at the department after November's election." Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told CNN's Manu Raju he was struck by "how close the country came to total catastrophe" in the last days of Trump's presidency. According to CNN, Clark "drafted a letter that he asked Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators to say they should convene to examine irregularities in the election." The New York Times has reported that Clark's letter suggested the Georgia legislature should void Biden's victory in the state, while falsely claiming the Justice Department was investigating allegations of fraud. CNN's report on Durbin's Sunday interview continues:
The Illinois senator said that he was surprised by "just how directly, personally involved the President was, the pressure he was putting on Jeffrey Rosen." He added: "It was real, very real. And it was very specific. This President's not subtle when he wants something, the former President. He is not subtle when he wants something."
Asked by Bash whether Trump tried to get Rosen to overturn election results, Durbin replied: "It was not that direct, but he was asking him to do certain things related to states' election returns, which he refused to do."
The New York Times has reported that Rosen "told investigators from the inspector general's office about five encounters with Mr. Clark, including one in late December during which his deputy admitted to meeting with Mr. Trump and pledged that he would not do so again." Clark reportedly urged Rosen and other DOJ officials on several occasions "to falsely assert that continuing voter fraud investigations cast doubt on the election results."
For those who choose to see the truth, there is nothing "shocking" or "revelatory" about what is now known about Donald Trump and his agents' attempt to overthrow American democracy.
Trump and his agents and followers repeatedly said in public that they would not respect the results of the election if he did not win. From the beginning of his presidential campaign in 2015 and throughout his presidency, Trump and his movement have publicly and repeatedly displayed their contempt for democracy.
While the mainstream news media is now trying to present itself as sounding the alarm in defense of democracy, too many in the media spent the last five years downplaying the Trump regime's existential danger to the country.
In his role as chief law enforcement officer of the United States, Joe Biden should declare that investigating and punishing Donald Trump and his regime's crimes against democracy are a national priority. Attorney General Merrick Garland should initiate a full investigation of Trump and his regime's many crimes as well.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that either Biden or Garland will do that. In a new op-ed for the Washington Post, the constitutional law experts Laurence Tribe, Barbara McQuade and Joyce White Vance warn that "failing to investigate Trump just to demonstrate objectivity would itself be a political decision — and a grave mistake. If we are to maintain our democracy and respect for the rule of law, efforts to overturn a fair election simply cannot be tolerated, and Trump's conduct must be investigated."
To fully expose and unravel the conspiracy to overthrow American democracy — in which Jan. 6 was just one element — will require that investigators follow the money.
Jane Mayer of the New Yorker has already begun that necessary work. In her new essay "The Big Money Behind the Big Lie," Mayer details how a small number of billionaires and elite right-wing interest groups and activists are working across the country to overthrow America's multiracial democracy.
She offers this context about the Arizona "audit," a model for the methods these neofascist oligarchs hope to use to overthrow democracy:
Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump's claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona's Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state's audit as a "domino," and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere….
Mayer reports that the Arizona audit was "fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country's wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money groups, whose donors may remain anonymous but are clearly linked to influential right-wing think tanks and interest groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), "have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote."
The nonprofit groups behind the Big Lie, Mayer reports, have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an obscure Milwaukee tax-exempt organization that supports "radical challenges to election rules — a tactic once relegated to the far right." Since 2012, the Bradley foundation has spent $18 million, Mayer says, supporting right-wing groups pushing to restrict voting rights.
It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. ...
For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote "election integrity," starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona. It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will "help bring all these strings" of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, "I've had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long."
The campaign against multiracial democracy involves multiple fronts on which culture-war issues — in this case, the white right's moral panic over "critical race theory" — are a powerful tool for mobilizing white "conservatives" and other neofascists. At Popular Information, Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria expose the money and networks behind this most recent battle, noting that the attack on CRT "didn't happen on its own":
Rather, there is a constellation of non-profit groups and media outlets that are systematically injecting CRT into our politics. In 2020, most people had never heard of CRT. In 2021, a chorus of voices on the right insists it is an existential threat to the country.
A Popular Information investigation reveals that many of the entities behind the CRT panic share a common funding source: The Thomas W. Smith Foundation.
The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has no website and its namesake founder keeps a low public profile. Thomas W. Smith is based in Boca Raton, Florida, and founded a hedge fund called Prescott Investors in 1973. In 2008, the New York Times reported that The Thomas W. Smith Foundation was "dedicated to supporting free markets."
Legum and Zekeria report that Smith personally "opposes all efforts to increase diversity at powerful institutions and laments the introduction of curriculum about the historical treatment of Black people."
These big-money financiers of the plot against America benefit from a system of laws that allows them to evade taxes and conceal their resources. America's extreme inequalities of race, income and wealth are reflections of long-standing systemic and other forms of institutional racism and simultaneously a means through which such systems and outcomes are maintained, protected and advanced.
In a recent interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, sociologist Brooke Harrington discusses her research into the views and actions of ultra-wealthy individuals, who wield, she says, a transnational, unaccountable power. ... They regard states as playthings. The law is their marionette. They interfere in democratic processes and legislative processes":
They gave me a picture of what the world looks like to not just Fascist leaders, but to the larger group to which Fascist leaders belong: people who've purchased complete impunity, for whom the rule of law and the boundaries of nation states are just a set of shopping opportunities. If you can't find what you want at one shop, you just move on to the next. ...
This matters because in the 21st century, Fascism cannot exist without an offshore system: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, all of them depend on it. If you want to get to a Fascist in the 21st century, you turn off the money taps and those money taps are not in their home nations, they are overseas, in offshore financial centers.
The spread of fascism, Harrington says, "is funded in large part by a strain of offshore financial networks, like the ones that were behind Brexit and behind the Trump campaign." Neoliberalism (a nicer word for "gangster capitalism") cannot entirely be separated from neofascism and the assault on multiracial democracy, if one seeks to understand America's democracy crisis. Those forces are in a symbiotic relationship.
In a new essay at Boston Review, economist Prabhat Patnaik explores this further:
As the old prop of trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. The solution came in the form of an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements.
This dynamic has played out in countries around the world, from the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump in the United States.…
The neofascist assault on democracy is a last-ditch effort on the part of neoliberal capitalism to rescue itself from crisis. To escape this state of affairs, world public opinion has to be mobilized decisively against neoliberalism, and the support of global democratic movements has to be garnered. Only then will this breeding ground for neofascism at last be undone.
The American neofascist movement is a very well-funded hydra. Pro-democracy forces must of course be focused on the immediate goal of defeating the Republican Party in the 2022 and 2024 elections, which will be an uphill battle. But America's pro-democracy forces must also understand that these are battles in a longer cultural, political and social war that has been fought for decades, with no end in sight.
Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. (photo: Zak Bennett/AFP)
Yes, he’s trying hard: We have registered over 560,000 deaths so far — the second highest toll in the world after the United States’ — and the Delta variant is on its way. From the beginning, the president sabotaged attempts to curb the transmission of the virus, sponsored ineffective treatments, helped to disseminate fake news and allowed, through his negligence, another variant of the virus to spread.
But even Mr. Bolsonaro couldn’t crack Brazilians’ unbreakable love of vaccines. Despite everything — deaths, economic disaster, untold suffering — we haven’t succumbed to despair. Instead, we remain among the world’s most passionate enthusiasts for inoculation.
Sen. Rand Paul. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/The Washington Post)
An aide to the Kentucky Republican said he prepared the disclosure last year and only recently learned that it was never transmitted
en. Rand Paul revealed Wednesday that his wife bought stock in Gilead Sciences — which makes an antiviral drug used to treat covid-19 — on Feb. 26, 2020, before the threat from the coronavirus was fully understood by the public and before it was classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization.
The disclosure, in a filing with the Senate, came 16 months after the 45-day reporting deadline set forth in the Stock Act, which is designed to combat insider trading.
Experts in corporate and securities law said the investment, and especially the delayed reporting of it, undermined trust in government and raised questions about whether the Kentucky Republican’s family had sought to profit from nonpublic information about the looming health emergency and plans by the U.S. government to combat it. Several senators sold large amounts of stocks in January or February of last year, prompting a handful of insider-trading probes. Most of those investigations concluded in the spring of 2020, according to notifications from the Justice Department to lawmakers under scrutiny.
“The senator ought to have an explanation for the trade and, more importantly, why it took him almost a year and a half to discover it from his wife,” said James D. Cox, a professor of law at Duke University.
Kelsey Cooper, a spokeswoman for Paul, said the senator completed a reporting form for his wife’s investment last year but learned only recently, while preparing an annual disclosure, that the form had not been transmitted. He sought guidance from the Senate Ethics Committee, she said, and filed the supplemental report Wednesday along with the annual disclosure, which was due in May and submitted three months late.
She also said Paul’s wife, Kelley, an author and former communications consultant, lost money on the investment, which she made with her own earnings. The purchase was of between $1,000 and $15,000 of stock in Gilead, which makes the antiviral drug known as remdesivir. The company’s stock was worth $74.70 per share on the day of the purchase and rose above $80 in March. It has since fluctuated and was worth $69.84 on the day of Paul’s disclosure more than a year later.
The drug was initially invented as a hepatitis C drug a decade ago and tested for possible use against other infectious diseases, such as Ebola. Remdesivir gained emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration in May of last year and was administered to then-President Donald Trump when he was sick with covid-19 in October, before it gained full approval. Results of a WHO-sponsored study released later that month raised doubts about the drug’s effectiveness, prompting the international agency to recommend against its use as a treatment for covid-19.
That marked a reversal from its original position, laid out on Feb. 24, 2020 — two days before Kelley Paul’s purchase — by a WHO assistant director general, who described remdesivir as the only known drug that “may have real efficacy” in treating the novel virus. The National Institutes of Health began a clinical trial the next day. The drug brought in $2.8 billion for Gilead last year.
The existence of public information causing Gilead’s stock to rise, said Joshua Mitts, an expert in securities law at Columbia University, doesn’t rule out the possibility that the senator gained additional knowledge in private. Paul is a member of the Senate health committee, which in January hosted Trump administration officials for a briefing on the coronavirus.
“Not everything about the product was necessarily clear from existing announcements,” Mitts said. “There could have been information about interest that certain individuals within the administration may have had in the product, or that hospitals here in the U.S. were already loading up.”
Cooper said the senator attended no briefings on covid-19. Eight days after his wife invested in the company behind the antiviral drug thought to be effective against covid-19, Paul cast the lone vote in the Senate against $8.3 billion in emergency spending to combat the emerging outbreak.
Jordan Libowitz, communications director for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the flurry of media reports about possible insider trading by members of Congress during the reporting window for his wife’s purchase should have made the senator all the more attentive to disclosure rules.
“One would think he would make sure all of his reporting was on the up and up,” Libowitz said.
Paul, an ophthalmologist who in March 2020 became the first U.S. senator to test positive for the virus, has since clashed with federal health authorities over masks and other tools to mitigate spread of the virus.
Cars are stopped before re-entering the U.S. from Canada in Detroit on Monday. Canada opened its borders to U.S. citizens who can provide proof of vaccination and a negative Covid-19 test. (photo: Matthew Hatcher/Getty)
Speaking Spanish in public and "shockingly arbitrary" traffic stops disproportionately expose Latinos to unfair border patrol scrutiny, according to the ACLU of Michigan.
wo House Democrats are demanding answers from the Biden administration after a recent report accused Border patrol agents in Michigan of targeting state residents of Latin American origin from 2012 to 2019.
The two representatives, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, have asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to address the “serious allegations of discrimination by Michigan Customs and Border Patrol agents” spanning across multiple administrations. The ACLU report was published in March.
CBP’s statewide activity “produces few tangible results related to its officially mandated mission in Michigan," the lawmakers' Aug. 4 letter stated, adding the report " found that agents “routinely spend their time and resources targeting people of Latin American origin who are long-term Michigan residents.”
While only 5.3 of the state’s overall population identify as Hispanic, over 96 percent of individuals apprehended by CBP across the entire state—even in encounters unrelated to illegal border crossing—were described as non-white. Yet data from more than 13,000 daily apprehension logs obtained by the report's authors show that more than 70 percent of those who were apprehended in the process of entering the U.S. from Canada — or who entered without inspection — were either Canadian or European.
Speaking Spanish should not be “arrestable offense”
According to the report, “in 19.2 percent of roving patrol and transit check arrests, the fact that a person is speaking Spanish or some other foreign language is used as the basis for establishing reasonable suspicion,” which is what border patrol agents need to justify their intervention.
There are also “lots of cases in which neighbors are reporting neighbors” for speaking Spanish in public, Boyce said.
“Speaking Spanish in public is not, and should never be, a suspicious thing to do or an arrestable offense. But yet that’s what you see actually initiating these enforcement accounts,” Geoffrey Alan Boyce, an academic director at Earlham College’s border studies program and one of the report’s main authors, told NBC News. “I think it’s just really a dangerous set of practices for the border patrol to be responding to.”
The ACLU also found that the border patrol agents engage “in racial profiling and the overpolicing” of Michigan’s communities of color by using “complexion codes” to describe those who have been apprehended. According to the report, more than 96 percent of those apprehended are reported as being “Black,” “Dark Brown,” “Dark,” “Light Brown,” “Medium Brown,” “Medium” or “Yellow.”
Kris Grogan, a spokesperson for the Customs and Border Protection agency, said via email that agency policy prohibits the “consideration of race or ethnicity in law enforcement, investigation, and screening activities, in all but the most exceptional circumstances,” adding that they are “fully committed to the fair, impartial and respectful treatment of all members of the trade and traveling public.”
Border patrol stops based on people’s reactions
Border patrol agents detained more people (nearly 64 percent) for routine traffic stops and reasons other than for border violations, according to the report. In an overwhelming majority of these cases, agents cited a person’s alleged reaction to seeing a marked border patrol agent or vehicle as a basis for suspicion, a practice Boyce described as “shockingly arbitrary and contradictory.”
An evaluation of narratives included in certain records shows that no matter how drivers of color reacted — whether they looked and acknowledged an agent or whether they didn’t, and whether they speeded up or slowed down — the action was recorded as “suspicious” and was used to justify an investigatory vehicle stop, according to the report’s conclusions.
Border patrol agents justify their interventions outside the immediate U.S.-Canada border through their broad interpretation of the “100-mile zone,” which they claim gives them the authority to conduct warrantless vehicle searches within 100 miles of any international border or waterway. Based on this, the immigration agency claims that the entire state of Michigan falls within this 100-mile zone.
CBP's Grogan stated that border patrol agents in Michigan conduct "enforcement actions away from the immediate border in direct support of border enforcement efforts and as a means of preventing trafficking, smuggling and other criminal organizations from exploiting our public and private transportation infrastructure to travel to the interior of the United States."
"These operations serve as a vital component of the U.S. Border Patrol’s national security efforts," the spokesperson said.
While the central mission of Michigan Customs and Border Protection is to apprehend people trying to cross into the U.S. from Canada without authorization, data shows that the vast majority of their encounters were unrelated to illegal crossings from Canada.
“If you were not born in the United States, that by definition, means you crossed a border at some point in the past. But that doesn’t mean you crossed in Michigan, that doesn’t mean you crossed unlawfully,” Boyce said. “Lots of people naturalize; their immigration status changes as they’re just going about their lives.”
Thousands of daily apprehension logs also show that 33 percent of the people arrested by border patrol agents in Michigan were U.S. citizens. Additionally, nearly 13 percent of all noncitizens apprehended were found to have some kind of lawful immigration status allowing them to live in the U.S.
Boyce said that a combination of practices allow agents to operate “through widespread and routine racial profiling, targeting people of Latin American origin or appearance and who are overheard speaking Spanish.”
Marquette history professor Athan Theoharis in 1991, surrounded by newspaper clippings and FBI files he used for his research. (photo: Jim Gehrz/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
Only recently, almost four decades after his death, I discovered that my father still liked to have some of his friends call him “major.” That was his ultimate rank in what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, not the U.S. Air Force, for which he volunteered within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (He would, symbolically enough, die on Pearl Harbor Day in 1983.) Here was the strange thing, though: in our family life, my father essentially refused to discuss his wartime experiences as operations officer for the First Air Commandos in Burma. In the 1950s, he would even take me to World War II movies and sit without comment through those endless scenes of American glory and triumph, while I assumed that I was seeing World War II as he experienced it. But except for angrily denouncing a local grocer as a “war profiteer” (who knew why?) and refusing to take his family to a Japanese restaurant, his war — with the rarest of exceptions — was forbidden territory in the years when I grew up. Of course, male silence was then treated as a heroic trait. Perhaps, however, as Kelly Denton-Borhaug suggested recently at TomDispatch, my father had experienced some version of “moral injury” in World War II. All these years later, I simply don’t know. But perhaps in some silent fashion, even though he fought in “the good war,” he led me to the antiwar stance that I’ve taken when it comes to America’s wars, from Vietnam on.
In that context, I’m struck today by TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis’s description of her own father, Athan Theoharis, a man who did crucial research on the crimes of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. In a recent New York Times obituary, Richard Sandomir described him as “a pre-eminent historian of the F.B.I. whose indefatigable research into the agency’s formerly unobtainable files produced revelations about decades of civil liberties abuses under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.” Today, Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, offers a moving reminder of what an anything-but-silent and deeply involved father could teach his daughter about a country some of whose politicians were perfectly capable — in his time as in ours — of considering tossing democracy into the nearest toilet, of a world in which a major political party could move remarkably easily toward stolen elections and autocracy.
And there was one more thing that Athan Theoharis could offer her: that parents can use their own life experience to lead their children into at least the idea of a better world.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
y father, Athan G. Theoharis, passed away on July 3rd. A leading expert on the FBI, he was responsible for exposing the bureau’s widespread abuses of power. He was a loyal husband, dedicated father, scholar, civil libertarian, and voting-rights advocate with an indefatigable commitment to defending democracy. He schooled his children (and anyone who would listen, including scholars, journalists, and activists from a striking variety of political perspectives) to understand one thing above all: how hard the powers-that-be will work to maintain that power and how willing they are to subvert democracy in the process. His life is a reminder that much of American politics in 2021 is, in so many ways, nothing new.
He grew up poor in Milwaukee, the son of an undocumented Greek immigrant who ran a diner out of the first floor of his home. He returned to his hometown in 1969 as a professor of American history at Marquette University. There, he would take part in political campaigns and local democratic efforts and, of course, raise my siblings and me. After he retired as a professor — committed as he was to opening up space for new scholars and researchers — he remained involved with the Wisconsin ACLU and its campaigns to protect democracy and civil liberties. He became the chair of the board and (how appropriate given this moment of voter-suppression laws) worked to oppose the 2011 Wisconsin voter ID law, while aiding the recall campaign against then-Governor Scott Walker.
Although it seems long ago, in many ways that battle over democracy in America’s Dairyland set the scene for the Trump years and the national crisis unfolding around us now. In 2010, Wisconsin Republicans, fueled in part by a rising Tea Party Movement and having gained control of the state legislature and governorship, immediately passed a host of anti-democratic laws, while instituting regressive economic policies. This in a state that had once been a beacon of American democratic experimentation.
As anyone who visited our family would have learned on a driving tour my parents loved to offer, Milwaukee had a first-class park system because of its (rare) history of socialist mayors. Although Wisconsin was also home to that notorious anti-communist of the 1950s Senator Joseph McCarthy, and also the John Birch Society, it had striking progressive roots. However, in 2011, at a hearing on the state Senate’s version of that voter ID law, one political-science expert testified that “this version of the bill is more restrictive than any bill we’ve had in the past… Indeed, if this bill passes, it would be the most restrictive in the United States.”
That same year, a major campaign to recall Governor Walker began, partially in response to an “austerity budget” aimed at poor Wisconsinites. It would slash pensions and health benefits for public-sector workers and impose new statewide restrictions on union collective bargaining. When that budget was first introduced, Democratic legislators — and this should sound familiar, given recent events in Texas — fled the state to stave off a vote in its senate, while thousands of protestors besieged the capitol building in Madison. For a moment, Wisconsin commanded the attention of the nation.
That recall campaign unfolded over 18 long, bitter months, with Walker eventually holding onto his governorship. Mitt Romney, then on the presidential campaign trail, lauded him for his “sound fiscal policies” and swore that his victory over the recall would “echo beyond the borders of Wisconsin.” And he was right.
More than just a win for a beleaguered politician, the Wisconsin experience signaled a growing anti-democratic strain within the Republican Party and American politics coupled with an extreme economic ideology that benefited the rich and powerful. Even then — in the years when Donald Trump was no more than a businessman and TV show host — that ideology was already masquerading as populism. And in doing so, it echoed the development of so-called welfare reform more than a decade earlier, when former Governor Tommy Thompson’s “Wisconsin model” laid the basis for ending welfare as Americans knew it.
My father watched the fallout from these events with grave concern. For more than 50 years, he had researched and exposed how the FBI’s surveillance programs threatened civil liberties and weakened democratic expression. He knew what was possible when the levers of government power were in the wrong hands and recognized the emergence of the attack on democracy earlier than most. He taught us that wherever you were was ground zero when it came to voting rights and, sadly enough, the truth of this has only become clearer since his passing. Indeed, right now, amid a wave of voter suppression laws unseen since Reconstruction and the continued obstructionism in Congress, the fight for democracy is everywhere and, whether we like it or not, we’re all on the frontlines now.
A Multi-Racial Democracy from Below
American history is punctuated by eras of dramatic democratic expansion but also of backlash, especially in response to any encouragement of a multiracial electorate coming together to lift society from the bottom up. In the wake of the Civil War, Reconstruction was a first great elaboration of American democracy. To this day, it remains the most radical experiment in popular government since the founding of the republic. After 250 years of slavery, the share of Black men eligible to vote across the South jumped from 0.5% in 1866 to 80.5% just two years later. In many of the former Confederate states, this, in turn, at least briefly inaugurated a sea change in political representation. In 1868, for instance, 33 Black state legislators were elected in Georgia.
Alongside those newly emancipated and enfranchised voters were many poor white sharecroppers and tenant farmers who, in the rubble of the slavocracy, were ready to exercise real political power for the first time. In a number of state legislatures, fusion coalitions of Blacks and poor whites advanced visionary new policies from the expansion of labor and healthcare rights to education reform. The development of public education was particularly significant for the four million Blacks just then emerging from slavery, as well as for poor whites who had been all but barred from school by the former white ruling elite.
If Reconstruction could be called a second American revolution, the Southern aristocracy and the Democratic Party of that era would soon enough set off a vicious counterrevolution, bloody in both word and deed. A violent divide-and-conquer campaign led by informally state-sanctioned paramilitary groups, especially the newly created Ku Klux Klan (headed by a former Confederate general) terrorized Blacks and whites. Meanwhile, those fusion state governments were broken up and, even though the 15th Amendment couldn’t be repealed, new voter suppression laws were implemented, including poll taxes, lengthened residency requirements, and literacy tests.
What’s often left out of this story is that many of those tactics had first been perfected in the North in response to waves of immigrants from Europe and beyond. Between the Civil War and World War I, 25 million people emigrated to this country. In many Northern states, this rising population of foreign-born, urban poor seemed to threaten the political status quo. As a result, nativist and anti-poor voter suppression laws, including new registration requirements, property stipulations, and voter-roll purges spread widely across the North. For years, white Southern reactionaries studied and borrowed from such anti-democratic trailblazing in states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
Reflecting on this record, historian Gregory Downs has written that “when Americans treat voter disfranchisement as a regional, racial exception, they sustain their faith that the true national story is one of progressive expansion of voter rights. But turn-of-the-20th-century disfranchisement was not a regional or a racial story; it was a national one.” Then as now, it was about protecting the power of a class of wealthy, white Americans in the face of an urge from below for a multiracial democracy.
Echoes from that era could be heard half a century later in the reaction of Republicans and Southern Democrats to the Civil Rights Movement. In the South, since Jim Crow voter suppression had disenfranchised entire generations of Blacks, disproportionately living in poverty, civil-rights reforms threatened what some saw as a “natural social order.” Elsewhere across the country, fears arose that legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would empower poor people across the board. Two Republican congressmen from Michigan and Indiana, for instance, introduced a sham alternative to it that would have allowed states to use literacy tests in election season, a time-honored proxy for restricting the votes of the poor.
Such extremist politicians typically — and it should still sound all too familiar today — couched their opposition to the Voting Rights Act in terms of ensuring “voter integrity” and preventing “voter fraud.” Beneath such rhetoric, of course, lay an underlying fear of what broad democratic participation could mean for their political and economic interests. During his governorship of California in the late 1960s, Ronald Reagan first began connecting mass enfranchisement and welfare with the specter of poor people destroying American democracy. His future staffer Pat Buchanan highlighted a growing consensus in the Republican Party when he said, “The saving grace of the GOP in national elections has been the political apathy, the lethargy, of the welfare class. It simply does not bother to register to vote.”
President Reagan’s hyper-racialized caricature of the “welfare queen” has endured all these decades later, cementing the lie that the poor don’t care about democracy and stoking fears of a changing multiracial electorate. And while it may be true that a sizable portion of eligible poor and low-income voters don’t vote, it’s not because of indifference. Indeed, a recent report from the Poor People’s Campaign, which I co-chair, shows that typical reasons for lower voter participation among the poor are illness, disability, time and transportation issues, and a basic belief that too few politicians speak to their needs, ensuring that their votes simply don’t matter. This last point is especially important because, as the voter suppression tactics of the previous century have evolved into present-day full-scale attacks on voting rights, their concerns have proven anything but unfounded.
The Chaos We Have Sown
In 2013, in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the Section 5 preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act. That section had placed certain districts with histories of racist voter suppression under federal jurisdiction, requiring them to submit to the Department of Justice any planned changes in their voting laws. Since then, there’s been a deluge of voter-suppression laws across the country.
After a multi-racial coalition of voters elected America’s first Black president, 2011 stood as the modern watershed for voter suppression with 19 restrictive laws passed in 14 states. (Barack Obama would nevertheless be reelected the next year.) Today, we’re at a new low point. Six months into 2021, a total of nearly 400 laws meant to obstruct the right to vote have been introduced across the country. So far, 18 states, ranging from Alabama and Arkansas to Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, have passed 30 of them, including an omnibus bill signed into law in Georgia in March. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, it “targets Black voters with uncanny accuracy.”
At this very moment, one major front in the battle over voting rights is still unfolding in Texas. There, the state Senate recently passed a massive “voter integrity” bill that would, among other things, ban 24-hour and drive-through voting, add new ID requirements, and criminalize election workers who don’t follow the onerous new rules. The bill would also grant new powers to partisan poll watchers, raising the possibility of far-right militia groups legally monitoring polling stations. Texas House Democrats fled the state before a vote could be introduced and now remain in Washington, D.C., in exile, awaiting the end of the special session called by Republican Governor Greg Abbott and possible federal action.
Those state legislators arrived in D.C. the same day President Biden gave a national address in Philadelphia on voting rights. His rhetoric was certainly impassioned, and he has since affirmed his support for both the For the People Act and for restoring the full power of the Voting Rights Act, which would indeed expand access to the ballot, while placing more political power in the hands of people of color and the poor. And yet he has offered little when it comes to developing an actual strategy for getting that done. Instead, he continues to insist that he is not in favor of ending the filibuster in the Senate, even though it’s the chief impediment to federal action on the subject. He argues instead that such a move would only throw Congress “into chaos.”
Reverend William Barber, my co-chair in the Poor People’s Campaign, recently laid out the hypocrisy of the president’s “support” for voting rights, even as he justifies inaction on the filibuster:
“President Biden, I have no doubt you care and desire to do right, but, as a clergy person, let me say pastorally, when you say ending the filibuster will create chaos that obscures the fact that the filibuster is facilitating chaos. The filibuster caused chaos with anti-slavery legislation, labor rights, women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights, and it once again is causing policy chaos by allowing a minority to obstruct justice. The filibuster has already been used to stop your goal of $15/hr. living wage. We believe the filibuster should end. But, at the very least, no one should ever say the filibuster is preventing chaos.”
As Barber notes, the filibuster is also obstructing urgent policy struggles around better wages and healthcare, immigration reform, and the large-scale infrastructure plan that the Biden administration has worked so hard to create. Action on these issues would dramatically improve the lives of millions of poor and low-income Americans and is precisely what a majority of voters support and extremists are so eager to block through voter suppression. That’s why there’s been a recent upsurge of grassroots actions meant to connect the fight for democracy, including voting rights, with economic justice and the abolition of the filibuster. This includes a season of non-violent moral direct action, including a March for Democracy and a Rally in Texas organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, because its members understand that what’s really underway in this country is a struggle between democracy and potential autocracy or, as Martin Luther King once put it, between community and chaos.
Our own choice is the sort of community where everyone has an equal voice in our democracy and, honestly, in that I believe I am simply following in my father’s footsteps.
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.
Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us? What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.
This 40-year-old woman says she was held captive and repeatedly raped by 15 Eritrean soldiers over a period of a week in a remote village near the Eritrea border. (photo: Ben Curtis/AP)
"All of these forces from the very beginning, everywhere, and for a long period of time felt it was perfectly OK with them to perpetrate these crimes because they clearly felt they could do so with impunity, nothing holding them back," Donatella Rovera told The Associated Press.
She would not speculate on whether any leader gave the signal to rape, which the report says was intended to humiliate both the women and their Tigrayan ethnic group. In her years of work investigating atrocities around the world, these are some of the worst, Rovera said.
More than 1,200 cases of sexual violence were documented by health centers in Tigray between February and April alone, Amnesty said. No one knows the real toll during the nine-month conflict, as most of the health facilities across the region of 6 million people were looted or destroyed.
These numbers are likely a "small fraction" of the reality, Amnesty said. It interviewed 63 women, along with health workers.
A dozen women described being held for days or weeks while being raped multiple times, usually by several men. And 12 other women said they were raped in front of family members. Five women said they were pregnant at the time they were assaulted. Two said they had nails, gravel and shrapnel shoved into their vaginas.
"I don't know if they realized I was a person," one woman told Amnesty, describing how she was attacked in her home by three men. She was four months pregnant at the time.
The AP separately has spoken with women who described being gang-raped by combatants allied with the Ethiopian military, notably soldiers from neighboring Eritrea but also fighters with the neighboring Amhara region.
Amnesty has not received allegations against Tigray forces, who regained control of much of the Tigray region in late June and have since crossed into the Amhara and Afar regions in what they call an attempt to break the blockade on their land and pressure Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to step down.
While Ethiopian and allied forces retreated from much of Tigray in June, some remain in western Tigray, and Ethiopia's government on Tuesday essentially abandoned its unilateral cease-fire as Abiy called all able citizens to fight.
The Amnesty report calls for accountability for the sexual violence during the conflict, saying rape and sexual slavery constitute war crimes. Many women in Tigray now live with the physical and mental effects of the assaults including HIV infections and continued bleeding, it said.
Ethiopia's government has not responded to the report, Rovera said. A spokesman for the attorney general's office did not respond to a request for an update Wednesday on any investigations.
Earlier this year, the government said three soldiers had been convicted and 25 others indicted for rape and other acts of sexual violence. But Amnesty said no information has been made available about those trials or other measures to bring perpetrators to justice.
Ethiopia's government has not allowed human rights researchers into the Tigray region, though a joint investigation into alleged atrocities is underway by the United Nations human rights office and the government-created Ethiopian Human Rights Commission.
The habitat of the gentle sea cow has been ravaged by coastal development. (photo: Ullstein Bild/Getty)
2021 is already the deadliest year on record for Florida manatees. Scientists and activists are scrambling to avert further disaster
n a bright morning in July, a crowd gathered on a boat ramp in St Augustine, Florida, awaiting the arrival of a young male manatee named Gerard. The marshy Matanzas River gently flowed around oyster beds and sawgrass islands as biologists organized their equipment. Nearby about a dozen onlookers paced by the shore, waiting to catch a glimpse of Gerard’s return to the wild following weeks of captivity.
Earlier in spring, beachgoers discovered Gerard stranded and sunbaked in Palm Coast, about 25 miles south of St Augustine, on the Atlantic Ocean. Samaritans draped wet towels over the feeble marine mammal, keeping him cool and shaded from the subtropical sun, as a rescue team raced to the scene. Gravely thin, Gerard was transported to Jacksonville Zoo, where he spent the next 10 weeks in critical care until he was plump enough to re-enter the wild.
Gerard was one of the lucky ones.
Hundreds of Florida manatees have died this year along the state’s east coast in what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has labeled an “unusual mortality event”. At least 881 manatees have died in Florida since January, far exceeding the annual average of 578 deaths between 2015 and 2020.
Ground zero for the sudden uptick in deaths is the Indian River Lagoon, a 156-mile-long estuary that serves as a seasonal habitat for thousands of manatees. Decades of water pollution from farming and real estate development has pushed the ecosystem to the brink, causing the manatees to perish from an almost entirely manmade disaster: famine.
The current manatee crisis is “just a symptom of a system under extreme stress”, says Duane de Freese, executive director of the Indian River Lagoon Estuary Program, an agency that works to protect the waterway.
Now, scientists and activists are scrambling to avert further disaster.
A disturbing diagnosis
Last December, Martine de Wit puzzled over a troubling trend: manatees were dying at an alarming rate on the east coast of Florida. De Wit, a veterinarian who necropsies manatees for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), attributed the deaths to stress caused by cold snaps that brought freezing temperatures to the Sunshine State. Despite their pudgy appearance, manatees lack blubber and are highly sensitive to cold. When temperatures drop below 68 degrees, they sometimes stop eating, begin to thin and crowd around in pockets of warm water.
But as temperatures rose in January, manatee deaths continued to climb. And by the first week of February, de Wit made a new diagnosis. Tissue samples taken from the gaunt carcasses delivered to her lab in St Petersburg showed atrophy in vital organs –telltale signs of starvation.
“They were severely emaciated,” de Wit said. Some were 40 percent below their expected body weight. The damage “was not something we have seen before on this scale in these large animals.”
By late April, after more than 696 manatees had died, federal officials stepped in to investigate and respond to the crisis.
During summer months, manatees venture as far north as New England for food. By winter, many manatees historically returned to the warm waters and abundant forage of Florida’s rivers, springs and coastal lagoons – habitats now frequented by people – following routes passed down over generations.
Some manatees still winter in these warm-water edens but thousands now find shelter in the tepid discharge of coastal power plants, including those in the Indian River Lagoon.
“When we put in power plants, we complicated the situation because we provided warm-water sources that aren’t necessarily in the best places [for manatees],” said Mike Walsh, co-director of aquatic animal health at the University of Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
Generations of manatees have learned to return to these locations, Walsh said, where algal blooms and overgrazing have decimated seagrass coverage. Frigid temperatures can leave them trapped by invisible walls of cold water with next to nothing to eat. Malnourished manatees burn through vital body fat. Nursing calves drain their mothers dry. Some manatees survive the winter too weak to fully recover, and food supply is sparse for those who make it.
“Everything has been compromised,” Walsh said. “They don’t have enough to get by.”
Fields of seagrass suffocated by human development
Seagrass meadows once spanned nearly 80,000 acres in the Indian River Lagoon, where they serve as a cornerstone of one of the country’s most biodiverse estuaries. Their roots hold sediment in place, improving water quality and sequestering carbon.
These habitats suffered from coastal developments, which today expel some 2.5 million pounds of nitrogen and phosphorus into the estuary every year from septic tanks, lawns and farms. Meanwhile decades of organic matter has settled to the bottom as muck, a gooey substance that leaches nutrients into the water column.
“Basically all of the system has been declared impaired because the nutrient loads are too high,” said Charles Jacoby, an environmental scientist at the St John’s River water management district.
Combined nutrient loads can nourish intense algal blooms that block out sunlight and kill seagrass. A superbloom resembling pea soup in 2011 ushered in a devastating decade for the Indian River Lagoon. Nearly 46,000 acres of seagrass have disappeared as a result of these blooms.
In 2013, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection began a 15-year plan to address the damage in the Indian River Lagoon by dredging to remove muck, improving stormwater treatment and connecting homes that use leaky septic tanks to the sewer system.
“There’s no silver bullet unfortunately,” Jacoby said. “It’s going to take a lot of different efforts.”
Tour boats driving manatees from critical refuge
On the official emblem of Crystal River, a city on Florida’s Gulf Coast, there’s a banner reading “Home of the Manatee” that spirals around the image of a well-fed sea cow. The mammal is more than a mascot for the city – it’s an industry. Winter months bring hundreds of manatees to the warm, spring-fed waters of the Kings Bay Manatee Refuge. The only place in the country where people can legally swim with manatees, the refuge permits dozens of companies to offer tours to people eager for up-close encounters with the gentle giants.
On a sunny morning in June, Mike and Stacy Dunn boarded a pontoon boat for a trip around the bay. Only a few dozen manatees remain in Kings Bay this time of year, most of them nursing mothers and calves, so the Dunns take summer months off from the tour company they’ve operated for 12 years to avoid disturbing the sea cows. The Dunns know the bay better than most and volunteer as scouts for injured animals.
As the Dunns idled through the crystalline canals around Kings Bay, they passed fistfuls of slender seagrass uprooted by boat propellers or grazing marine life. These signs of abundance were all but absent a decade ago, when thick layers of muck and algae caked the bay. Manatees became so desperate for food, the Dunns watched them nearly sink a small island by munching on the foundation of roots to the serrated sawgrass.
Even the offseason brings crowds to Kings Bay, allowing some tours to operate year round. Nearby, a group of about ten people swam face down, buoyed by floating noodles and snorkels to the sky, as they approached a submerged sea cow. Swimmers are meant to practice “passive observance,” according to FWC guidelines, but the Dunns said not all tours enforce a no-contact policy.
For Pat Rose, executive director of the nonprofit Save the Manatee, Crystal River is both a model and cautionary tale for manatee conservation. Kings Bay is a critical refuge and the seagrass restoration project shows how resources can help improve manatee habitats. But the barrage of activity in the bay can distress the sea cows.
“It’s creating a lot of harassment and driving manatees out,” he said. As manatee populations rebounded, Florida failed to find more sanctuaries for the species. He worries the sea cows will always teeter on the edge of collapse without designated habitats.
A ‘bittersweet’ release, perhaps to face another famine
Gerard, the 600-pound rehabilitated manatee, arrived at the St Augustine boat ramp in the back of a box truck. In the bed of a nearby pickup, Monica Ross, a research scientist from the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, prepared wildlife tracking equipment. For the next year, Ross and her team hope to monitor Gerard’s migration and feeding patterns using a satellite tracking tag that buoys behind the manatee like a fishing bobber and transmits his location.
By monitoring tagged manatees, Ross can document where they feed and how they use natural warm-water refuges. This data may guide protection plans for critical winter habitats. As energy production shifts away from fossil fuels, questions remain about how manatees will respond – and where they will go – when power plants, like those in the Indian River Lagoon, close down.
Seven people hauled Gerard out of the box truck on a blue stretcher and doused him with buckets of water. Having gained more than 100 pounds at Jacksonville Zoo, Gerard assumed the ovate shape of bread dough, formless but robust, the picture of fitness for a young sea cow. Once Ross tethered the tag to a belt around his tail, the team lowered the manatee into the turbid Matanzas River, where he disappeared beneath the surface save for the bobber trailing behind him.
The crowd cheered and shouted farewells, but for Ross the release was “bittersweet”. She worries Gerard will eventually head south to the Indian River Lagoon, where he’ll likely face another winter famine.
“Normally, when you release an animal, you’re very happy,” she said. “But we’re very concerned about what he’s going to have to deal with this winter.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
