27 September 20
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26 September 20
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Charles Pierce | The DOJ's Claims of Discarded Ballots Are Yet Another Storm Cloud Forming Over the 2020 Election
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "And let the weird shit begin. It seems that surreality is beginning to gather like storm clouds around the 2020 election. On Thursday, the Department of Justice, acting through the U.S. Attorney for middle Pennsylvania, dropped a press release about nine 'discarded' military ballots. All nine ballots, the DOJ release said, were cast for the president*."
I suspect this isn't anywhere near as strange as it's going to get.
nd let the weird shit begin.
It seems that surreality is beginning to gather like storm clouds around the 2020 election. On Thursday, the Department of Justice, acting through the U.S. Attorney for middle Pennsylvania, dropped a press release about nine "discarded" military ballots. All nine ballots, the DOJ release said, were cast for the president*. Later, the DOJ put out an amended release that said seven of the ballots were cast for the president*. But, as we learn from Politico, the very fact that the DOJ announced that it was looking into how the ballots were dropped has set off alarm bells in the minds of election-law experts.
Election experts were bewildered at the few details included within the press releases and the unorthodox manner in which they were announced, and were troubled by the fact that the Justice Department said the ballots had been cast for the president. “It is hard to express how illegitimate the press release is. That’s the problem,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School, said in an interview, noting that it wasn’t necessarily bad that the department was investigating.“It is really improper for DOJ to be putting out a press release with partial facts,” Levitt continued. “And it is career-endingly improper to designate the candidate for whom the votes are cast. There is no federal statute on which the identity of the preferred candidate depends.”
Suspicions ran even higher when it became apparent that the White House had known in advance about the discarded ballots. Administration prevaricator Kayleigh McEnany talked about them at her Thursday briefing, which took place before the first DOJ release appeared. And the president* himself seemed to refer to them on his regular spot on Fox News's Three Dolts On A Divan Thursday morning.
“This is both bizarre and disturbing — U.S. Attorney’s Offices don’t issue reports on pending investigations— and certainly not reports so blatantly contrived to provide political ballast for a sitting President’s campaign narrative,” David Laufman, a DOJ veteran, tweeted about the press release.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, three trays of undelivered mail, which included several absentee ballots, were found in a ditch in Outagamie County, north of Appleton. The U.S. Postal Inspectors are on the case. From the Appleton Post-Crescent:
Postal Service spokesman Francis Pilon would not comment specifically on when or where the mail was found, or how many absentee ballots were recovered, but confirmed Thursday an investigation is underway. “We are aware of some mail including absentee ballots recovered in Greenville, Outagamie County earlier this week,” he said. “The U.S. Postal Service is investigating this matter, and we are unable to comment further at this time.He would not elaborate on whether the ballots were completed and being returned to election officials or were being mailed to voters for completion.
Given how hinky things have become with the USPS, I don't know if I'm buying any innocent explanations any more. The president*'s campaign is now clearly based partly on a narrative in which mail-in voting is unreliable, if not fundamentally corrupt. Weird press releases about discarded ballots and trays of undelivered mail in a ditch are both episodes that serve that narrative. And, I suspect, this isn't anywhere near as strange as it's going to get.
Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
Trump Says He Won't Commit to Leaving Office if He Loses the Election Because of a "Ballot Scam"
Katelyn Burns, Vox
Burns writes: "President Donald Trump's reelection campaign is looking less like a run for office and more like an operation to justify disputing the election result in the event Trump loses the election in November."
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Protesters at Jefferson Square Park in downtown Louisville on Thursday. Protesters say they will keep pushing for racial justice. (photo: Andrew Cenci/Guardian/UK)
'It's Not Going to Stop': Four Months on, They're Still Marching for Breonna Taylor
Josh Wood, Guardian UK
Wood writes: "For more than 120 days now, protesters have been gathering in downtown Louisville's Jefferson Square Park calling for racial justice and charges against the officers involved in the police killing of Breonna Taylor."
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A security contractor frisks a detainee ahead of a deportation flight. (photo: Getty Images)
How Trump Is Privatizing the US Immigration System
Maurizio Guerrero, In These Times
Guerrero writes: "Using the pandemic as an excuse, the Trump administration has all but canceled immigration to the United States. But while the president cracked down on families seeking asylum from life-threatening conditions, he's still allowed big industries to hire low-wage laborers from other countries."
The administration is allowing industries to directly control guest worker programs.
sing the pandemic as an excuse, the Trump administration has all but canceled immigration to the United States. But while the president cracked down on families seeking asylum from life-threatening conditions, he’s still allowed big industries to hire low-wage laborers from other countries. Under the H2 visa program, record numbers are entering the country, recruited directly by industries such as meat-processing and agriculture, which determine who gets into the country and for how long.
In practical terms, a part of the U.S. immigration system has been privatized, says Rachel Micah-Jones, executive director of Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, a civil group that advocates for Mexican migrant laborers. “The guest worker programs are controlled by companies and employers. They decide who gets in the country and who doesn’t,” she says.
“There’s a transition in the U.S.,” Micah-Jones adds, which means an ever-expanding use by corporations of the H2 programs while avenues for immigrants to apply for their own visas are shrinking. “That’s very concerning because we see in these programs a tremendous amount of discrimination in terms of age, sex and country of origin.”
Through the H2 program, laborers are bound by law to work only for the employer that recruits them; they cannot bring their families along or, eventually, apply for permanent residency. Corporations in labor-intensive industries such as farming, forestry, food-processing, landscaping, tourism and construction even decide if a worker can come back to the U.S. in the future.
And abuse by employers is rife within the H2 programs. An April 2020 survey among 100 H2‑A visa holders (agricultural laborers) detected widespread discrimination, sexual harassment, wage theft and health and safety violations by employers. The survey, conducted by Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, found that all the workers experienced at least one serious legal violation, and 94% suffered three or more. It is “startling,” concluded the report, the “lack of recourse” for guest laborers to denounce abuse.
Despite their well-documented exploitation, low-wage guest workers have never been so crucial for the labor-intensive industries in the United States.
More than 204,000 foreigners obtained H2‑A visas in the fiscal year 2019, a record number. There are no limits on how many people can enter the United States with this visa, and that number has steadily increased since at least 1992. The H2‑B visas, for low-wage workers in nonagricultural industries such as food-processing, also increased in 2019, to 97,623, its highest number in a decade.
Benito, an H2‑A visa holder, was recruited in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico to harvest eggplants, chiles, peppers and cucumbers in Lake Park, Georgia for nine months. For six weeks in May and June, Benito (a pseudonym used to protect him from potential repercussions from his employer) and some 100 Mexicans harvested and packed vegetables during 16-hour shifts without overtime pay and only every other Sunday off. They are expected to labor as intensely in October and November. The rest of their 9‑month period, these crews work for 10 hours a day with some Sundays off, says Benito in Spanish over the phone. He has come three times to the United States with an H2‑A visa.
Benito has also seen discrimination in the hiring process firsthand. He was the only one hired from his hometown, although several of his neighbors also applied for jobs. Some were rejected because of their age; others because “they did not work hard enough,” says Benito. He has learned that companies blacklist workers who do not fulfill their expectations — like working without complaining for 16 hours a day for several weeks. “Many applicants do not make the cut,” he explains. “It is because they do not satisfy the bosses’ requisites.”
Unlike U.S. citizens or even undocumented immigrants, guest workers (the vast majority of whom are enlisted in impoverished communities in Mexico, followed by Jamaica, Guatemala and South Africa) do not enjoy the most fundamental protection of a labor market in a democratic society — the ability to switch jobs if they are mistreated.
“Guest workers have been compared to modern-day indentured servants,” states the Immigrant Justice Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that combats discrimination and promotes human rights. “But unlike the indentured servants of old, today’s guest workers have no prospect of becoming U.S. citizens.”
Preference for exploitable workers
While the number of guest workers under the H2 programs is surging, the Trump administration has suspended both employment-based and family-based immigrant visas, even for relatives of U.S. citizens. With the excuse of shielding the country from the coronavirus, the federal government has also canceled applications for nonimmigrant visas for visitors, students and skilled workers.
The pandemic made transparent a trend that was already intensifying during the Trump administration. The United States issued 625,344 immigrant visas in 2016 before Trump took office; last year, it granted 462,422. In July 2017, it issued 42,550 immigrant visas. As of July, that number was down to 4,412. Meanwhile, H2 visas are soaring.
The demand for H2‑B workers was so high even before the pandemic that the program reached its yearly cap on February 18. The Department of Homeland Security announced that it would grant 35,000 extra H2‑B visas but reversed course after anti-immigrant groups’ criticisms.
The Trump administration, however, did make substantive changes to the H2 programs. Since April, it has allowed companies to retain these laborers for longer than the three-year maximum. The purported objective was to “maintain the integrity in our food supply” during the pandemic, despite the enormous health costs paid by workers, most of them people of color.
As of July, 86 workers in meat and poultry processing facilities had died of Covid-19, out of 16,233 cases in 239 facilities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among cases where race and ethnicity was reported, 87% were racial or ethnic minorities. In some farms, all workers have contracted the coronavirus. The severity of Covid-19 among agricultural workers could be grossly undercounted. Benito has seen “five or six” of his co-workers with Covid-19 symptoms being quarantined and treated in-house in Park Lake, with no wages. Several more, he says, have continued to work when sick to avoid losing income.
Additionally, the wide use of these programs depresses the wages in the industries that capitalize on them, contends the Southern Poverty Law Center. The programs provide companies with lots of control over the labor market. They also give the Trump administration the chance to restrict immigration while assuring cheap labor for corporations.
“The administration has also used the Covid-19 outbreak to pursue policy changes that it has sought to implement for many years,” according to a May report by the American Immigration Council, a non-partisan think tank. These changes include a near elimination of asylum at the southern border and a reduction of family-based immigration. “While these policy changes have been described as temporary in nature, they may remain in place into 2021,” stated the report.
These measures have been coupled with a resumption of deportations of undocumented immigrant workers, even amid the health emergency.
Meanwhile, corporations are pressuring both the Trump administration and Congress to keep incrementing the number of visas for guest workers. The agribusiness sector, which includes a large variety of sectors such as crop, livestock and meat producers, tobacco, food manufacturers, and stores, spent $140 million in lobbying efforts last year, spearheaded by more than 1,000, according to OpenSe crets .org, a nonpartisan nonprofit that track money in politics. The meat-processing industry spent $4.5 million.
Legislators’ aides told Micah-Jones that private interests are continually pressuring them. “They hear every day from these companies,” she recounts. Without a voice in the United States political system, guest workers depend on civil society organizations to push for fair conditions. These groups face “very well-resourced business associations and companies who like the guest worker program because it gives them the power,” Micah-Jones says. “It gives them a lot of control over workers’ lives.”
Bureau of Land Management Acting Director William Perry Pendley spent much of his career as an attorney challenging the agency he would eventually lead. (photo: Matthew Brown/AP)
Federal Judge Ousts Trump's Top Public Lands Chief
Kirk Siegler, NPR
Siegler writes: "A federal judge in Montana has ousted President Trump's top public lands official. The ruling blocks William Perry Pendley from continuing to serve as the temporary head of the Bureau of Land Management, a post he has held for more than a year."
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A Zapatista woman. (photo: Flickr)
Call for Solidarity After Paramilitaries Burn Zapatista Coffee Harvest in Chiapas
Theresa Church, Global Justice Ecology Project
Church writes: "Two weeks ago in Zapatista territory, paramilitaries linked to the ruling party in Mexico looted and burned two Zapatista warehouses which stored this year's coffee harvest."
ear friends,Two weeks ago in Zapatista territory, paramilitaries linked to the ruling party in Mexico looted and burned two Zapatista warehouses which stored this year’s coffee harvest. This is the latest in an accelerating series of attacks on the Zapatista project since the current administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) took office.
Many of you will remember that in 2017 as Trump took office, the Zapatistas sent four tons of their coffee harvest to migrant and other communities in struggle in the United States as an organizing resource. Now we need to organize our own coffee solidarity effort—not only to help recover the cost of the lost harvest, but to show there is widespread solidarity with the Zapatista project.
The Zapatistas have been one of few voices to denounce AMLO’s purportedly “progressive” government for doubling down on previous administrations’ socially and environmentally destructive capitalist mega-projects. These policies have dispossessed hundreds of thousands of their land and resources and made indigenous and other communities resisting such projects the target of state and paramilitary repression. It is important to note that one of the principal investors in these mega-projects is the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock [more information below].
Support the Zapatista project, a project that has not only created a horizon of dignified self-organization that has inspired all of us, but also shown profound and far-reaching solidarity with our own struggles. Solidarity means acting from the knowledge that in the face of destruction and dispossession, our best resource is each other!
Show your support:
- Make a donation, no matter how small.
- Circulate this campaign far and wide.
- Read the articles below and stay informed.
- Organize with your friends and neighbors to pressure the Mexican government to stop the war on the Zapatistas. Please let us know if any actions or activities you create at zapatistasnoestansolxs@solidarityfrombelow.org and we will post them to www.solidarityfrombelow.org.
- If you did not receive this email from zapatistasnoestansolxs@gmail.com, write that email with the subject line “add me” and we’ll make sure you receive updates!
More information:
Luis Hernández Navarro: Arde Chiapas/ Chiapas on Fire
Gilberto López y Rivas: Alto a la guerra contra el EZLN! / Stop the War on the Zapatistas!
Sign-on letter in Rebelión: ¡Alto a las agresiones contra las y los zapatistas!
Context:
Despite the unfolding of multiple crises in Mexico around the pandemic response and economic shutdown of 2020, the purportedly “progressive” López Obrador administration has accelerated the capital-intensive and resource extraction-based megaprojects that have been lurching along since the late 1980s amidst the fierce resistance of indigenous peoples and other organized communities against the ecological destruction, population displacement, and territorial re-ordering they imply.
The Zapatistas and the National Indigenous Congress warned early on that the AMLO’s mega-project makeover (the same projects under a different name) would threaten not only their own self-governing communities, but any remaining alternatives to the capitalist destruction that has ceded half the national territory to multinational mining companies, spawned narco-paramilitary forces all over the country to clear coveted territories of community resistance, and made Mexico the most violent country in the world.
Indeed, AMLO’s administration has prioritized precisely those projects affecting southern Mexico—the tourist “Mayan Train” that would penetrate the forests, bioreserves, and indigenous territories of Campeche, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Chiapas; the “Trans-oceanic Corridor” which will harness and industrialize the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca to connect the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico; and the conversion of collective landholdings and the biodiverse forests of the southeast into sites of agro-industrial production.
We must note here that barely a year ago, the Zapatistas unexpectedly announced the creation of 7 new caracoles (centers of self-government, of which there were already 5) and 11 new Centers of Autonomous Zapatista Rebellion and Resistance (in addition to the 27 already existing autonomous municipalities),making a total of 43 self-governing entities in the state of Chiapas.
As of the 2019 deployment of AMLO’s newly formed National Guard, Chiapas is now the most militarized state in the country. Then in May of this year, López Obrador authorized the presence of the military on the streets of Mexico for the next five years to take charge of “domestic security”. The counter-insurgency role inherent in this deployment has been accompanied by the increase in paramilitary activity which, in Chiapas and elsewhere, plays the ground game of looting and burning, harassing and terrorizing local communities in the attempt to dismantle the social fabric which sustains collective resolve and resistance. In a clear attempt to further militarize the situation, a new wave of coordinated slander against the Zapatistas has hit Mexico’s airwaves, attempting to tie the EZLN to organized crime—a preposterous claim that would be laughable were its aim not the violent elimination of tens of thousands of Zapatistas for the benefit of the “Mayan Train’s” primary investor and the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock. Not coincidentally, the construction contract for the section of the “Mayan Train” that is to run through Chiapas was granted to the army itself.
The López Obrador government dreams of pulling off what neither the administrations of the far-right PAN nor the institutionalized mafia of the PRI could: the destruction of the largest anti-capitalist resistance in the Americas that has worked ceaselessly below and to the left to create an example of a different world where we can all decide what life is for and create the organization and infrastructure to sustain it.
Help keep the Zapatista resistance alive—we all need them as a light and a source of courage for our own emerging struggles, fighting to come up through the cracks of a collapsing capitalism.
Youth climate activists at a protest. (photo: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)
Worldwide Climate Activists Protest to Demand Urgent Action
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Worldwide young environmental activists demonstrated on Friday to claim urgent action against climate change, marching for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic began."
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