30 September 20
Final Day - We Surely Need a Good One
This is the last day of the month and we are not even close to where we need to be. But we have made up a lot of ground in the past few days and we do have a chance to keep it close.
Stop for just a moment and throw something in the hat.
In peace and solidarity.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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29 September 20
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Matt Taibbi | Revenge of the Money Launderers
Matt Taibbi, Substack
Taibbi writes: "On December 11, 2012, U.S. Justice Department officials called a press conference in Brooklyn."
The "FinCen files" story reveals: getting caught doesn't stop banks from taking dirty money. It may even encourage them
The key players were once and future bank lawyer Lanny Breuer (disguised at the time as Barack Obama’s Assistant Attorney General in charge of the DOJ’s Criminal Division), and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and future Attorney General. The duo revealed that HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, had agreed to a $1.9 billion settlement for years of money-laundering offenses.
An alphabet soup of regulatory agencies was represented that day, from the Justice Department, to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Treasury, the New York County District Attorney, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, among others.
The regulators outlined a slew of admissions, with HSBC’s headline offense being the laundering of $881 million for Central and South American drug outfits, including the infamous Sinaloa cartel.
The laundering was so brazen, regulators said, the bank’s Mexican subsidiary had developed “specially shaped boxes” for cartels to pack with cash and slide through teller windows. The seemingly massive fine reflected serious offenses, including violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA).
The next years would follow up with a flurry of similar settlements extracting sizable-sounding fees from other transnational banks for laundering money on behalf of terrorists, sanctioned businesses, mobsters, drug dealers, and other malefactors. Firms like JP Morgan Chase ($1.7 billion), Standard Chartered ($300 million), and Deutsche Bank ($258 million) were soon announcing settlements either for laundering, sanctions violations, or both.
Even seasoned financial reporters accustomed to seeing soft-touch settlements scratched their heads at some of the deals. In the case of HSBC, the stiffest penalty doled out to any individual for the biggest drug-money-laundering case in history — during which time HSBC had become the “preferred financial institution” of drug traffickers, according to the Justice Department — involved an agreement to “partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior executives.” If bankers can’t get time for washing money for people who put torture videos on the internet, what can they get time for?
When I did a story on the case in early 2013, I found the HSBC settlement was the latest step in a dizzying, decade-plus cycle of offenses and ignored reprimands, involving multiple regulatory bodies. The number of times HSBC had blown off compliance orders seemed too absurd to be real. In one stretch between 2005 and 2006, the bank received (and, apparently, ignored) 30 formal warnings just from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Prosecutors insisted the deferred prosecution settlements slapped on companies like HSBC, Standard Chartered, and JP Morgan Chase were tougher than jail terms. The deals would place banks in a permanent state of quasi-arrest, with regulators granted enormous supervisory power and serious charges pre-filed and hanging over the firms going forward.
As one federal investigator put it to me back then, “This way, we have them by the short ones.”
Fast-forward eight years. On September 20th, a combination of Buzzfeed and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the details of a major document leak highlighting a decade of money-laundering incidents, involving hundreds of billions of dollars and a number of the world’s biggest banks. The leak centered on a cache of over two thousand “suspicious activity reports,” or SARs, filed by those banks to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a regulatory arm of the U.S. Treasury.
Though the ICIJ was also behind the release of the Panama Papers, investigative editor Michael Hudson told me he believes the FinCen leak is “the most important” project they’ve worked on. Instead of being about one group of actors, or one jurisdiction, these revelations span the banking sector as a whole.
“It shows the widest set of problems,” he says.
The story has been covered around the world, but some press accounts particularly here in the States seem to have missed the punchline, i.e. that the banks figuring most prominently in the FinCen leak are exactly the same institutions paraded before the public as subjects of “message-sending” punishments back in 2012-2014.
HSBC, for instance, continued to take in questionable money through 2012 and beyond, including $30 million from Hong Kong accounts related to a Ponzi scheme called World Capital Market. WCM was suspected of bilking “investors” — most of them ordinary people scraping together five or ten thousand dollars and throwing them at false promises of guaranteed returns — of nearly $80 million.
The leaked records show HSBC flagged the account as suspicious as early as 2013, but continued to take the money from this and a wide variety of other dicey accounts. Although regulators saw all of this information, the Department of Justice not only didn’t take action, it announced in 2017 that HSBC had “lived up to all of its commitments” and agreed to file a motion to lift the deferred prosecution deal.
A similar pattern held with JP Morgan Chase, which in 2013 was hit with a cease and desist order over “systemic deficiencies” in its money-laundering controls, yet continued to do business with rogue accounts, including some infamous and obvious ones. To give some sense of the sums involved, JPM made roughly a half-billion dollars just servicing the accounts for con artist Bernie Madoff.
As far back as 2006, JP Morgan Chase knew enough to pull its own money out of investments in hedge funds tied to Madoff, but never told investors, and continued to manage his accounts for years. The bank ultimately settled with the government over the Madoff episode in 2014, after the 2013 “cease and desist” order, while continuing to manage money for other malodorous accounts — including, according to the ICIJ, more than $1 billion for Jho Low, the fugitive financier behind Malaysia’s infamous 1MDB fund.
In a detail that should infuriate the #Resistance crowd, Jamie Dimon’s bank also continued to do business in huge sums for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort even after Manafort stepped down in scandal, and even after the bank flagged Manafort’s accounts. From the ICIJ report:
JPMorgan also processed more than $50 million in payments over a decade, the records show, for Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump. The bank shuttled at least $6.9 million in Manafort transactions in the 14 months after he resigned from the campaign amid a swirl of money laundering and corruption allegations spawning from his work with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
“If you look at the cases where they tried to punish and deter the big banks, the headline-making efforts just haven’t worked,” says Hudson. “In the aftermath of these supposed crackdowns, the banks continued to move money in staggering amounts, for powerful and dangerous characters.”
“The big takeaway is, the system just doesn’t work,” adds former federal prosecutor Paul Pelletier. “I think these SARs represent about $2 trillion in suspicious transactions, and nearly all of it went through. And this is just a small fraction of the overall amount of money.”
According to Hudson, the FinCen files represent about two-tenths of one percent of the suspicious activity reports filed between 2011 and 2017.
In the aftermath of the HSBC deal in 2012, money laundering cases began to attract a fair amount of press attention. HSBC’s case even became one of the subjects for Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s “Dirty Money” series:
At the time, there was an expectation that these stories could be told in the past tense, because firms like HSBC had been busted. The FinCen leaks show the opposite. The settlements may actually have been an accelerant, allowing for the appearance of regulation, while alerting banks to broader weaknesses that encouraged more brazen behavior going forward. We may have to change the way we think about “dirty money,” from being an outside contaminant, to endemic to the system at its core.
Public legend about movement of ill-gotten cash usually centers on crooks sitting under ceiling fans in tropical locales, receiving mysterious wire transfers in places outside the physical reach of American regulators, like Vanuatu, Panama, or the British Virgin Islands. The FinCen leaks make clear the real hub of money laundering is in what Hudson calls the “choke point” of New York, where the world’s largest financial institutions have streamlined the process of moving shady money.
SARs don’t always indicate a crime. They’re the regulatory equivalent of a call to police to check something out that doesn’t add up. Bank monitors who compile them might be spotting something in their account rolls like high numbers of cash transactions, large numbers of wire transfers to a country where the customer doesn’t do business, etc.
The requirement to produce these reports creates a cat-and-mouse game for banks. Every time compliance officers discover derogatory information that leads to an account being closed, it’s a direct hit to a bank’s revenues. On the other hand, to keep regulators off their backs, banks have to be seen to be doing all they can to sniff out illegalities. Therefore there’s an incentive for banks to cycle through creative ways of looking like they’re engaging in compliance, without actually doing so.
A bank might create sizable AML departments, but pad them with inexperienced, entry-level employees incapable of spotting problems (see here for the HSBC example I wrote about years ago). A firm may hire a top-of-the-line department head, but not give him or her real resources. Required hiring boxes may be checked, but the company may non-report or under-report problems. Companies may even generate huge numbers of suspicious activity reports while leaving key data like names or addresses missing.
In a different scenario, reports are filed too late for action to be taken. SARs are supposed to be filed within 30 days, for instance, but the FinCen documents were filed to the government an average of 166 days after the initial detection of a potential problem.
In another stalling method, banks informally agree not to close suspicious accounts until a certain number of SARs have accrued. When the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations looked at HSBC in 2012, for instance, they found internal emails from bank executives suggesting that HSBC’s Mexico operations had settled on a policy of not closing accounts until four SARs had been filed.
When the company’s chief compliance officer found out about its subsidiary HMEX’s standard, he wrote, in a bemused tone, “4 SARs seems awfully indulgent, even by local standards.” HMEX later cut the standard to two SARs, which seems to be the exception rather than the rule. In the FinCen leaks, companies are seen repeatedly filing reports about the same actor, each time implying they’ve dug just enough to write a report, but never quite enough to actually close the account.
Of course, in banking, size matters. “Maybe the bank looks at a wire transfer and says, ‘This smells.’ Do that in a $12,000 transaction, and they’ll kick you out of the bank,” says Pelletier. “Do it at $12 million, and they’ll let it go.”
What’s unique about this leak it shows bad behavior the banks actually reported. As one former investigator put it this week, “This is the stuff they actually have a suspicious activity report for!” That banks keep taking the money is bad, but the fact that regulators keep receiving the reports and letting shady transactions slide makes the dirty-money problem a bizarre symbiosis of private rapaciousness and (at best) governmental apathy.
While credit card companies are able to detect fraud and banks are able to detect suspicious activity thanks to technological advances, the government lacks the same capability, in part perhaps because the reporting system is not automated. Since it’s a crime to leak a “SAR” — you “literally have to steal one” to make one public, as one former investigator puts it — they’ve rarely been seen by the public. The ICIJ has now put them on display:
The government receives millions of these written reports, which often appear to reflect a fair amount of person-hours of research by the bank. However, the government lacks what one investigator described to me as an “AI-type test” for passive review of this material, and lacks the personnel to go through it all individually.
At best, a federal investigator may go through the SAR database to check an individual or company already targeted in another probe. This particular batch of SARs seems to have been gathered as part of a congressional investigation into Russian interference, for instance. The rest of the reports are fated to be memory-holed by overwhelmed regulators.
What do you get in this seeming worst-case scenario, when banks pretend to monitor, and regulators pretend to collect the monitoring? A short list of some of the messes found in the FinCen docs:
— In one ridiculous case, Deutsche Bank’s New York branch processed $2.6 billion and $700 million, respectively, for a pair of companies called Ergoinvest and Chadborg trade. Both companies declared annual incomes of $35,000, and the statements for both firms bear the signature of the same obscure dentist in Belgium, who claims he doesn’t even own a car. Yet the money kept rolling through! The companies earned British registrations through “formation agencies” located in the Baltics, where investigators have found a rat’s nest of problems in recent years. Deutsche Bank, the originator of 62% of the leaked SARs (perhaps reflecting the focus of the Russia investigation that produced the FinCen docs), moved at least $150 billion just from one small Tallinn-based bank, Danske Estonia, for instance.
— Ukrainian Ihor Kolomoisky was the subject of raids by federal investigators earlier this summer, and has been profiled in colorful news reports that read like movie scripts. In one piece, he allegedly dropped crayfish meat by remote control into a tank to be devoured by sharks in the middle of a meeting, as a Dr. Evil-style intimidation tactic.
The crux of accusations by prosecutors is that Kolomoisky employed gangland tactics at home (including using “armed goons” to take over an oil company), then funneled the money to places like the States, to be invested in legit vehicles like real estate. This is exactly the kind of person the SAR process is designed to identify and disqualify quickly. Nonetheless, the FinCen files show Deutsche Bank, which had entered into a settlement deal in 2015 for moving over $11 billion in suspicious transactions, moved at least $240 million for a Kolomoisky-connected account at exactly that time, between 2015 and 2016.
— Even as Russian aluminum baron Oleg Deripaska garnered enormous media attention in recent years, including during the Russiagate furor, he continued to move money freely through the American banking system. The FinCen files contain a total of 58 SARs related to Deripaska, issued between 1997 and 2017, covering an amazing $12.41 billion in transactions. The Bank of New York Mellon flagged 16 transactions involving a Deripaska subsidiary company called Mallow Capital, but apparently kept doing business. To quote the ICIJ, “Mellon said Mallow Capital appeared to be a shell company operating in a high-risk area with no known legitimate business purpose. In 2012 and 2013, Mallow sent itself nearly $420 million using different British Virgin Islands addresses and different banks…”
The FinCen leaks highlight two major weaknesses of the regulatory system. One is the longstanding absence of a requirement that anyone opening a U.S. account name a “beneficial owner,” i.e. who is really controlling the account. The other is correspondent banking. Banks in the U.S. are required to “know your customer” in addition to monitoring and reporting domestic accounts. Still, any foreign bank with a license may open “correspondent” accounts in those same regulated Western banks. A lot of the worst instances catalogued in the FinCen leaks involve these correspondent accounts, opened in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, etc.
In the long run, the regulatory system ends up serving as a de facto partner for banks that all but admit they’re taking in money from Ponzi schemers, mobsters, drug lords, and rogue states.
This is a “feature, not a bug” problem. Going back to the years after the crash, regulators spoke often about the need to carefully construct settlements, so that even repeat offenders might remain viable.
In late 2012, for instance, at a press conference announcing a market manipulation settlement for the Swiss Bank UBS, Breuer told reporters, "Our goal here is not to destroy a major financial institution."
"This is a bank that has broken the law before," a reporter said that day. "So why not be tougher?"
"I don't know what tougher means," Breuer answered.
Some time later, then-Attorney General Eric Holder gave a video message on the theme, “There is no such thing as Too Big to Jail.” While insisting “no one is above the law,” Holder pointed out that some criminal charges carried automatic regulatory penalties that “may even trigger the loss of that institution’s charter.” This, he implied, is not always a good thing.
This issue had come up at the HSBC press conference the previous year, when Breuer said, “had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US.”
For that reason, Holder insisted, regulators often “must go the extra mile to coordinate closely with the regulators who oversee these institutions’ day-to-day operations.”
Translated, this meant the Justice Department was crafting punishments to make sure banks landed on their feet and remained functional as American businesses, even in the face of public reprimand.
A typical settlement involved a fine that sounded large but was really equal to months or weeks of profit, with penalties in some cases also being deductible, so taxpayers could share in the joys of paying a bank’s debt to society. In other words, settlements were designed not to hurt too much, but just the right amount.
Even a “record” harsh settlement doled out to the French bank BNP-Paribas in 2014 for sanctions violations, which included a rare plea to a real criminal charge in addition to a $9 billion penalty, only incurred a one-year exile from U.S. dollar transactions. Even when throwing the proverbial book at firms, regulators made sure to pave clear roads to redemption.
This was not necessarily a bad thing. There’s no reason why anyone should want systemically-important institutions (who are often major employers) to be wiped off the face of the earth, willy-nilly. The problem is that if you completely remove the threat of a lost charter, it signals to everyone that regulators will tolerate even open repeat violations. In this light, even a “tough” public punishment becomes a license to steal.
Hudson, for instance, notes that announcements of many of the biggest money laundering settlements involving the firms in the FinCen files were accompanied by jumps in the company’s share prices. HSBC’s shares rose in London and Hong Kong after the 2012 settlement, and even BNP’s criminal plea deal prompted a 3.6% jump in share price. Markets see the settlements as seals of approval going forward, and “send the signal that the regulators are looking to do a deal,” Hudson says.
The irony of all this is that the Trump era has seen much gnashing of teeth over America’s withdrawal from global bureaucracies like the Paris Agreement, the “Open Skies” arms control treaty, the Iran deal, and other conventions. Meanwhile, in the one place we want an isolationist-style wall, around the Federal Reserve-connected American banking system, barriers are wearing away. Only in crime, it seems, is America becoming more global in outlook.
Protesters in Colorado. (photo: Jade Crosbie/Liberation News)
They Protested at a Police Station. They're Charged With Trying to Kidnap Cops.
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes: "The July 3 protest in Aurora, Colorado, seemed, at least on the surface, like just another of the hundreds of racial justice protests that have swept the nation this year."
An “occupation”-style protest over the killing of a Black man in Colorado sparked huge charges—and a whirlwind of wild allegations.
Demonstrators sat outside a police station chanting and playing music. Although they said they wouldn’t leave until their demands were met, the protesters were cleared out by police around 4:30 a.m.
But several of the protest leaders are facing felony attempted kidnapping charges for allegedly imprisoning police officers in their own precinct during the protest—charges their fellow activists are calling absurd.
Lillian House, Joel Northam, and Whitney “Eliza” Lucero are among a group of Denver-area activists facing a slate of charges related to their protest activities this summer. Local prosecutors say the activists tried to kidnap police by holding a short-lived “occupation”-style protest outside the precinct and blocking its doors. But activists allege a crackdown on the most visible members of their movement, leading to terrifying SWAT arrests and the threat of years in prison.
“This characterization that someone quote-unquote kidnapped officers is absolutely ridiculous,” Ryan Hamby, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Marxist group with which House, Northam, and Lucero are affiliated, told The Daily Beast.
“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious,” he added.
The July 3 protest was one of many that called for the termination of officers involved in the killing of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died in Aurora Police custody last year. McClain was not accused of any crime but became the subject of police suspicion while walking home from the convenience store when someone called 911 to report him “look[ing] sketchy.” Police placed McClain in a now-banned chokehold, causing him to vomit and lose consciousness. Paramedics later injected him with the sedative ketamine.
An autopsy did not conclusively identify a single cause of death, and two of the three arresting officers have not been fired. The third arresting officer was fired for responding “ha ha” to pictures of other officers re-enacting and mocking McClain’s death. (That officer is suing the city over his termination.)
The firings of the police who re-enacted McClain’s death were announced July 3, the same day as the protest outside the police precinct where demonstrators believed the remaining officers worked. Media reports—and even police tweets from most of the night—characterize the demonstration as peaceful, with some 600 protesters sitting around. Police ordered protesters to disperse at 2:30 a.m., tweeted a half-hour later that protesters were throwing things, and had cleared out the site by 4:30, the Denver Post reported at the time.
But a statement from the Adams County district attorney this month accused protesters of holding cops hostage. Protesters “prevented 18 officers inside from leaving the building by barricading entrances and securing doors with wires, ropes, boards, picnic tables and sandbags,” the statement read. (The district attorney was unavailable for comment. In a call with Denver’s 9News, defendant Lillian House said she was unaware of the alleged barricade.)
Those allegations come alongside serious criminal charges for six protest leaders, including three who are accused of attempted kidnapping, inciting a riot, and inciting a riot by giving commands, all of which are felonies.
The protesters and prosecutors both point to a mid-protest phone call between activist Lillian House and Aurora’s interim police chief Vanessa Wilson, which House broadcast to protesters over a microphone. House called on Wilson to fire the remaining officers involved in McClain’s death; Wilson said she didn’t have the authority to do that but thanked the protesters for not trying to enter the precinct.
“I appreciate that you haven’t breached the building and I hope that you continue to keep that promise,” Wilson said.
Activists like Hamby have pointed to the call as evidence that protesters stayed within their rights.
“Like, why would you even say that?” Hamby said of Wilson’s call. “She’s basically admitting on the phone that we have not done any of the things that they’re now claiming we did in this affidavit.”
On the phone call, House, who is also accused of a felony count of attempting to influence a public servant, affirmed that the protesters wouldn’t enter the building. But they wouldn’t leave, either, until the two remaining officers in McClain’s killing were fired.
“I just want to make it perfectly crystal clear that everyone here has agreed that we are going to sit here,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere. We’re not going in, we’re not going out, we’re sure not going out, and neither are these pigs that are inside the building. So we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re standing here.” (The protesters did, in fact, reportedly leave before sunrise, when police advanced on them.)
House’s statements appear to be part of the basis for the prosecution’s claims that the protest was actually a kidnapping attempt. What followed, fellow activists allege, was a heavy-handed roundup of the protest’s most visible faces.
Hamby, who organizes with House, Northam, and Lucero, claimed the busts were an attempt to “strike fear into organizers, strike fear into the movement.”
House and Lucero were arrested by multiple squad cars—House while driving and Lucero while in her apartment—and detained in jail for eight days, Hamby said. Fellow organizers have accused corrections officers of verbally abusing the two women and failing to provide adequate COVID-19 protections. Another protester, John “Russel” Ruch, was followed from his home in unmarked cars and scooped up in a Home Depot parking lot around dawn by officers who gave him “no information” about the cause for his arrest, Hamby claimed.
In the most aggressive instance, multiple organizers claimed a SWAT team showed up to arrest protester Joel Northam, allegedly banging on the door and refusing to slide a warrant underneath. Aurora Police did not return a request for comment.
“He was on the phone with a lawyer the entire time, and the lawyer ended up telling him, ‘You need to comply with what they’re saying,’” Hamby said. “Because at that point we were worried that they were going to bust down the door and kill him.”
If convicted on all counts, the activists accused of attempted kidnapping could face decades in prison. The charges come as other activists associated with Black Lives Matter protests face heavy-handed charges, including a Utah protester who faced life in prison for allegedly purchasing paint that was used in a demonstration (the most aggressive charging enhancements in that case have since been dropped).
Hamby said protesters planned on further mobilizing around a call to drop the charges. “If anything, the fight-back will be strengthened and emboldened,” he said.
Protesters pick up signs as they rally against President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett on September 27 in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. (photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images)
The Case for Senate Democrats to Boycott Amy Coney Barrett's Confirmation Hearing
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "Multiple Senate Democrats are already refusing meetings with President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, and there's now a growing call for them to take another step to question the legitimacy of the process: boycotting the confirmation hearing."
“The takeaway is that this is an illegitimate process.”
“I think that boycotting the hearing should continue to be on the table,” Demand Justice chief counsel Chris Kang tells Vox. “I think the takeaway is that this is an illegitimate process.”
Demand Justice, a progressive group dedicated to combating Trump’s remaking of the federal judiciary, is among those urging Senate Democrats to consider this option as Republicans try to rush through a confirmation for Judge Amy Coney Barrett in the coming weeks. As the Washington Post’s Seung Min Kim and Paul Kane report, however, the move could also backfire and enable Republicans to simply advance her nomination even more quickly, with little fanfare.
But much like lawmakers’ decisions not to meet with Barrett, the idea is that such an act would highlight how abnormal the current process is, particularly since a recent hearing with Justice Brett Kavanaugh didn’t deter many Republicans from voting the same way they would have otherwise.
“If the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh did not change any votes, neither will these hearings,” writes Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to then-Sen. Harry Reid, in a New York Times op-ed.
Senate Republicans, after all, are moving ahead with this nomination despite the impending election and claims they made in 2016 about not confirming a judge during an election year.
Demand Justice is dedicated to opposing Barrett and pushing Senate Democrats to consider a wide range of tactics as they navigate the Supreme Court fight in the short term and the long term.
The procedural tactics available to Democrats, admittedly, are “probably not as robust as people think” in the near term, Kang said.
In an interview with Vox, Kang laid out what these options include, how Demand Justice is pressing lawmakers before the hearings, and what Democrats should consider (court-packing) if they retake the upper chamber and White House. Read the conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, below.
Li Zhou
Let’s start with the short term. Could you talk about the procedural tools that Senate Democrats have to oppose the Supreme Court nomination right now?
Chris Kang
So I think that the literal procedural tools are still to be determined and probably not as robust as people think.
I do think that there are some things like objections to unanimous consent agreements that will be deployed closer to the time of a floor vote, and not something that necessarily make sense now. [Note: Because the Senate largely runs on unanimous consent, if one senator objects to an action that’s taking place, they are able to delay it from happening and slow the chamber’s productivity.]
But I think what we’re really looking for from Senate Democrats more than specific parliamentary tactics is how are Democrats going to show that this is an illegitimate process, that this is an illegitimate nominee. And so there are some things that there’s no question Democrats can do, like not taking courtesy meetings.
I think that boycotting the hearing should continue to be on the table.
Li Zhou
What do you see as the takeaway, if Democrats go that route of boycotting the hearing altogether?
Chris Kang
I think the takeaway is that this is an illegitimate process, it’s not a legitimate [nomination], and it shouldn’t be dignified as such.
I think there are some competing arguments for what Democrats could gain through a committee process or a committee hearing. But I think a lot of those run through the idea that this is business as usual. And so, again, I know that boycotting is a high bar to ask and ... candidly, I don’t expect that to happen. But I think that it should continue to be on the table. I think all options should be on the table for how they’re going to think about highlighting this sham process and this illegitimate nominee.
And so I think that has to be something; they have to show up in some way.
I don’t think the Democrats can just show up and question a nominee as if it were normal. So, you know, if you’re not going to boycott the hearing, fine, but then show up in a different way. And let’s highlight to the American people just what’s at stake and how this is different.
Li Zhou
What is your response to concerns that Democrats would be missing an opportunity to question Judge Amy Coney Barrett and make their case against her if they boycott the hearing?
Chris Kang
A nomination so close to the election is simply illegitimate, and Democrats should consider all options to highlight that.
For example, [Senate Minority] Leader [Chuck] Schumer is refusing to meet with Barrett. Others, including Senators [Jeff] Merkley, [Mazie] Hirono, [Richard] Blumenthal, and [Kirsten] Gillibrand, are refusing as well, and this is the kind of demonstration we need.
Boycotting the hearing could cut either way, but if Democrats do attend, we’ll be looking to them to show that this is not a normal hearing or business as usual.
Li Zhou
At this point, do you think that Senate Democrats should more explicitly commit to court-packing?
Chris Kang
I don’t know if Senate Democrats as a caucus need to do that per se. I will say that they have to start looking ahead.
I mean, right now, our focus is on stopping this nomination, and building the voice and the power to demonstrate to Senate Republicans what is at stake here for them. But at the end of the day, if we are not successful, I definitely think Democrats need to be thinking about what is the logical response when Republicans steal two Supreme Court seats in the span of four years and completely undermine our democracy and the legitimacy of the institution itself.
And so from our perspective, we think that Supreme Court expansion is the only way to restore balance. And it absolutely should be on the table. I think that Leader Schumer has done a good job of making clear that all options are on the table. I think that that will continue to be the posture right now.
Related
Court-packing, Democrats’ nuclear option for the Supreme Court, explained
But I understand if not every member wants to make this about — this debate should not be about court expansion, this debate should be about the Republicans pushing through a nominee who’s about to strike down the Affordable Care Act. So I think that just as that is Demand Justice’s message in this fight, I understand that that will likely be the Senate Democrats’ message in this fight. But I do think that the specter of court expansion has to be something that more and more Democrats will be forced to think about more seriously in the weeks to come.
Li Zhou
Could you talk a little bit more about some of the implications of court-packing? We talk about it a lot in terms of how it would change the makeup of the Court, but could you walk through some of the other potential benefits?
Chris Kang
I will say the part about the makeup of the Court is an important one, because I do think, at its core, we’re talking about restoring balance to the Court, and I realize balance may be in the eye of the beholder. But we’re at a point now where the Supreme Court looks like it’s an anti-democratic institution. The Democratic presidential candidates have won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, and yet Republican appointees have been the majority on the Supreme Court for more than 50 years now.
But then also ... the caseload for the Supreme Court has gone down dramatically over time, and I do think that it’ll be important for the courts to think about, like, why is that? What is driving that? And would having additional justices help the Court resolve some of these important legal disputes that it currently isn’t? I do think that adding more justices would be important.
I also think there’s nothing magical about nine [justices]. I’ve never seen any study, any analysis, any theory about why nine is the right number. Look at the other appellate courts throughout the country. And, you know, all of them but one has more than nine members. I think that there’s no reason not to have more justices who also could bring, I think the other thing I would say is bringing a diversity of perspectives to the Court I think is incredibly important. Like the number of prosecutors on the Supreme Court, I think, is four. But I do know that there has not been a Supreme Court justice who’s represented criminal defendants since Thurgood Marshall retired.
That is a critically important aspect of the Court as you think about this moment in criminal justice reform and police reform, as you think about how the Supreme Court refuses to take up issues like qualified immunity and how it considers other racial justice issues.
Having more balanced professional experience would be important, and then also, obviously, the Supreme Court does not look anything like our country. And so I think having more seats will also provide an opportunity to bring more racial and gender diversity to the Court. And, again, the perspectives of more Americans on the Court.
It’s a democratic institution, and it should reflect the people that it serves. I think that that is one of the sort of undersold problems with President Trump’s judicial nominees, that he is undermining the legitimacy of an entire branch of government when his appointees are the least racially diverse in a generation and still don’t come anywhere close to gender parity.
Li Zhou
I know you said nine is not necessarily a magical number. If court-packing were to move forward, what number of justices do you think would be the right number?
Chris Kang
In my opinion, I think 13 is the right number if they’re going to move forward with essentially stealing another seat from the next Democratic president.
I guess we could wait and see. I think this whole conversation is predicated, of course, on former Vice President Joe Biden becoming president. So if that’s the case, then this is a seat that by all precedent should be filled by him, and so the idea that Republicans would have stolen two seats in four years I think requires two seats to be added for each of those. And so that’s why I think the right answer is 13.
Li Zhou
What do you make of the argument that if Democrats move forward with this that, down the line, you’re going to see Republicans effectively do the same?
Chris Kang
To that, I would say that Republicans already have done it.
Republicans changed the size of the Supreme Court in 2016 to eight, and then they changed it again to nine in 2017, all in an exercise of raw political power. And so I do think it’s possible that Republicans might retaliate in turn. But I also don’t know that the possible threat shouldn’t be enough to stop Democrats from doing what’s necessary now.
And it’s sort of again, I mean, necessary in terms of restoring legitimacy to the Supreme Court. Especially injecting the raw partisan politics into the Supreme Court right now, I would suspect, makes Chief Justice Roberts very nervous, as somebody who tries to — I don’t think he’s right in this — but he projects that there are no Trump judges and no Obama judges. And yet here we are, in the midst of the closing weeks of an election season, I mean, votes are actually already being cast, watching Donald Trump and Republicans ram through a nominee to put on his Court.
The whole specter of the legitimacy of the Court is under a cloud. And I think that Democrats have to respond, I think that the Democrats, if Republicans are going to cheat or steal, I don’t think that Democrats can just let that go and hope it doesn’t happen again.
It’s happened now twice in four years, and there has to be some response, there has to be something to deter, or else it will keep happening again. So I think that argument is somewhat overstated. I also will say, like, a big, big picture, as you think about what Supreme Court reform could look like, the other thing that we’ve talked about is term limits.
And if you had term limits, that would have the potential of lowering the temperature on a lot of this, and really having a chance to sort of take away the politicization and sort of the political timing a lot of justices make when it comes to retiring, so that could be a longer-term solution.
Li Zhou
Between term limits and adding more justices to the Court, do you see one of those as being, just from a legislative perspective, more of a first step and more of an accessible thing for lawmakers to do?
Chris Kang
Well, I think that the one thing that is clear is that Congress has the power to change the number of seats on the Supreme Court. It’s done it seven times in history. And so from that perspective, I think that it’s easier.
I think that there are term-limit proposals that can be done in legislation. But I think there’s some people who don’t. I think that may be a different question that Congress will have to consider as it figures out which proposal to implement and how to proceed with that.
Li Zhou
On either of those, I’m wondering if you think ultimately that Senate Democrats will have the political will to get something done and the numbers to do it, given the fact that some of the potential newcomers might end up taking more moderate stances.
Chris Kang
I will say that I think it’s far too early to consider the political feasibility of this. We haven’t seen just how badly this could turn out for Republicans going so far against the will and the views of their constituents.
So one, this could have a bigger difference in terms of the outcome in November. But two, we’re talking about all of this in a hypothetical. I think that if a nominee actually were rammed through, I think the politics start to change.
If that justice then becomes the deciding vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act, I think the politics change. I think that we can’t project too much based on the sentiment right now, about what’s possible. But I do think this conversation is already sort of taking off in a different direction.
We have the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee talking about this as the next step, and he’s somebody who has the power to set the agenda and legislation. I think that this political conversation is only beginning.
Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: B&T)
How Trump's 2016 Campaign Used Facebook to Target and Deter 3.5 Million Black Voters: Report
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., The Root
Crockett writes: "Trump's 2016 campaign used every trick possible to steal the election. When he wasn't using Russian interference in the actual election, his campaign targeted some 3.5 million Black voters and tried to suppress their vote."
According to British news outlet Channel 4, Trump’s campaign compiled data of some 200 million voters and then divided them into eight different groups. One category was named “Deterrence” and had some 3.5 million Black voters.
From Salon:
The leak shows that the campaign disproportionately targeted Black voters in its “deterrence” strategy aimed at lowering voter turnout among likely supporters of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. More than 60% of people on the list in Georgia were Black, for example, even though Black people are around one-third of the state population. Black people made up 46% of the “Deterrence” list in North Carolina even though they make up just 22% of the population. In Wisconsin, Black voters made up 17% of the “Deterrence” list, even though just 5.4% of the state’s population is Black.
In all, about 54% of the people on the “Deterrence” list were people of color, according to Channel 4. Other categories of voters that the campaign sought to turn out were “overwhelmingly white.”
The people on the list were described publicly by Trump’s top data scientists as people the campaign hoped “don’t show up to vote.” The campaign worked with the controversial British data firm Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, to compile the data, which was used to target certain Facebook ads to voters. Voters on the “Deterrence” list were targeted with negative ads attacking Hillary Clinton.
And that isn’t all, Trump’s campaign spent some $44 million on Facebook ads, almost $20 million more than Clinton, and his voter targeting with social media has been noted as one of the key reasons for his Electoral College victory, which, Salon notes, “rested on narrow wins in a few states where Democratic turnout was down.”
According to the news exposé, the Trump campaign pushed out some six million versions of “highly targeted messages” that, with the help of an insurgent at Facebook, targeted specific voters. Some of the ads were “dark posts,” which aired and then disappeared from users’ feeds.
The Trump campaign has denied targeting Black voters and Brad Parscale, who may or may not be on an involuntary psychiatric hold and ran Trump’s digital operations in 2016, told PBS with “100%” certainty that the campaign “did not run any campaigns that targeted even African Americans.”
But that, like everything involved with Trump’s campaign, is bullshit. According to the investigation, those on the “Deterrence” list were targeted with anti-Clinton ads especially focusing on her 1990s comments about young Black men being “super predators,” which was later viewed as the impetus for the assault on young Black men and mass incarceration.
“Cambridge Analytica acknowledged in a document obtained by the outlet that the video targeted African Americans,” Salon reports.
“The thing that’s shocking-slash-troubling about this is that there’s this category of suppression,” Jamal Watkins, the vice president of the NAACP, told Channel 4. “That ‘Deterrence’ part. So, we use data — similar to voter file data — but it’s to motivate, persuade and encourage folks to participate. We don’t use the data to say who can we deter and keep at home. That just seems — fundamentally, it’s a shift from the notion of democracy.”
Facebook, which doesn’t give AF how its platform is used, has not “fully disclosed their role” in the ad campaign and has called on a crackdown of “suppressive ads.”
“Since 2016, elections have changed and so has Facebook — what happened with Cambridge Analytica couldn’t happen today,” a Facebook spokesperson told Channel 4. “We have 35,000 people working to ensure the integrity of our platform, created a political ads library … and have protected more than 200 elections worldwide. We also have rules prohibiting voter suppression and are running the largest voter information campaign in American history.”
And despite Trump losing the Black vote by more than 80 points, Clinton lost several states, most notably Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that Democrats had previously carried for decades.
“It’s not ‘may the best candidate win’ at that point, it’s ‘may the best well-funded machine suppress voters and keep them at home, thereby rigging the election so that someone can win,’” Watkins added.
Two National Guard soldiers escort a Black man in East St. Louis, Illinois, du
Two National Guard soldiers escort a Black man in East St. Louis, Illinois, during the tense days leading up to the race riot that launched the Red Summer in 1917. (photo: Getty Images)
John Feffer | The Mobster-in-Chief: Will the November Election Be Decided in the Streets?
John Feffer, TomDispatch
Feffer writes: "The white mobs didn't care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity."
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: As ever, when John Feffer has a piece at this site, I remind you that, should you be willing to donate $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can get a signed, personalized copy of his gripping dystopian novel, Frostlands, the second volume in his must-read Splinterlands series (that only grows more relevant in this splintering, melting age of The Donald). And in this grim moment, every dollar you give this site is crucial to keeping it going and so, believe me, deeply appreciated. If you have the urge, check out our donation page before you read about our Mobster-in-Chief. Tom]
It’s odd. These days as right-wing “militias” multiply -- that is, armed groups of whites taking to the streets of our cities to protect Donald Trump, white supremacy, and god knows what else -- I always think to myself: if such groups were Black, what would they be called? And you know the answer to that question perfectly well. They would be called “gangs.” But gangs, of course, sounds so much less romantic and constitutional than “militias,” right?
So militias it evidently is (even in the mainstream media). And in a nation whose president defended a militia-loving teenager who killed two protesters with an AR-15-style assault rifle (while the pundits Trump watches on Fox News praised the murderer), in a nation that leads the world by a country mile when it comes to civilians who own guns (including battlefield-style weaponry), a militia-ized future is not so hard to imagine -- especially given American history thus far. If you doubt that for a second, then check out the latest piece by TomDispatch regular, Foreign Policy in Focus columnist, and author of the Splinterlands series of dystopian novels John Feffer. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Mobster-in-Chief
Will the November Election Be Decided in the Streets?
It was the prelude to what civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson would ultimately call Red Summer. The “red” referred to the blood that ran in the streets. The “summer” actually referred to the months from April to October 1919, when violence against African Americans peaked in this country.
In reality, though, that Red Summer stretched across six long years, beginning in East St. Louis in 1917 and ending with the destruction of the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. During that time, white mobs killed thousands of Blacks in 26 cities, including Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In 1921, in a slaughter that has been well documented, white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroyed the country’s wealthiest African American community (“Black Wall Street,” as it was then known), burning down more than 1,000 houses as well as churches, schools, and even a hospital.
During this period of violence, the mobs sometimes cooperated with the authorities. Just as often, however, they ignored the police, even breaking through jail walls with sledgehammers to gain access to Black detainees whom they executed in unspeakable ways. In Tulsa, for example, that campaign of murder and mayhem began only after the local sheriff refused to hand over a Black teenager accused of sexual assault.
Although white America repressed the memories of Red Summer for many decades, that shameful chapter of our history has gained renewed scrutiny in this era of Black Lives Matter. The Tulsa massacre, for instance, features prominently in the recent Watchmen series on HBO and several documentaries are in the works for its centennial anniversary in 2021. Other recent documentaries have chronicled killings that took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I in Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
But memories of that Red Summer are resurfacing for another, more ominous reason.
White mobs have once again moved out of the shadows and into the limelight during this Trump moment. Militia movements and right-wing extremists are starting to turn out in force to intimidate racial justice and anti-Trump demonstrators. Predominantly white and often explicitly racist, these groups now regularly use social media to threaten their adversaries. This election season, they’re gearing up to defend their president with an astonishing degree of support from Republican Party regulars.
According to a January 2020 survey by political scientist Larry Bartels, most Republicans believe “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” More than 40% agree that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” In a recent essay on his survey’s findings, Bartels concludes that ethnic antagonism “has a substantial negative effect on Republicans’ commitment to democracy.”
As the 2020 election nears, that party is also desperately trying to flip the script by using fear of “their mobs” and “Antifa terrorists” to drive its base to the polls. “We have a Marxist mob perpetrate historic levels of violence & disorder in major American cities,” tweeted Florida Senator Marco Rubio in response to the Democratic National Convention in August. Not to be outdone, the president promptly said: “I’m the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos.”
Of course, this country has no such Marxist mobs. The only real groups of vigilantes with a demonstrated history of violence and the guns to back up their threats congregate on the far right. The white supremacist Atomwaffen Division, for instance, has been linked to at least five killings since 2017. In late May and early June, members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois conducted two ambushes of police officers and security personnel, killing two of them and injuring three more. Over the summer, as far-right organizations spread the meme “All Lives Splatter” around the internet, dozens of right-wingers drove vehicles of every sort into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The prospect of far-right vigilantes or “militias” heading into the streets to contest the results of the November election has even mainstream institutions worried. “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between January 1 and May 8, 2020,” reports the centrist think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If President Trump loses the election, some extremists may use violence because they believe -- however incorrectly -- that there was fraud or that the election of Democratic candidate Joe Biden will undermine their extremist objectives.”
As the violence of Red Summer demonstrated, such acts were once a mainstay of American life. Indeed, the not-so-hidden history of this country has featured periodic explosions of mob violence. Racial justice activists rightly call for the radical reform of police departments. As November approaches, however, uniformed representatives of the state are hardly the only perpetrators of racist violence. Beware the white mobs, militias, and posses that are desperate to establish their own brand of justice.
Mob History
When Donald Trump paints a picture of lawlessness sweeping through the United States, he’s effectively accusing the institutions of government of not doing their jobs. In a September 2nd memo, the Trump administration laid out its charges:
“For the past few months, several State and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers of Federal law enforcement assistance.”
As president, Donald Trump has refused to take responsibility for anything, not the more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, not the pandemic-induced economic collapse, and certainly not the racial injustices that prompted this summer’s wave of protests. Simultaneously above the law and outside it, the president consistently portrays himself as a populist leader who must battle the elite and its “deep state.” With conspiracy-tinged tirades about Democrat-run cities failing to enforce the law, he has already symbolically put himself at the head of a mob -- for this is just how such groups justified their extra-legal actions throughout our history.
The right-wing racists who currently bear arms in defense of the president are part of a long tradition of Americans resorting to vigilantism when they believe the law is not protecting their interests. Whether it was the displacement and massacre of Native Americans, the horrors that slaveowners inflicted on African Americans, the wave of lynching that followed Reconstruction, the bloodletting of Red Summer around World War I, the murders conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, or even everyday resistance to federal policies like school desegregation, gangs of Americans have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands on behalf of white supremacy.
To be sure, mobs are hardly responsible for all the racist ills of this country. America has always been a place of institutional racism and violence. Slavery, after all, was legal until 1865. The U.S. government and its military did the bulk of the dispossessing of Native Americans. Police departments cooperated early on with the Ku Klux Klan and today’s police officers continue to kill a disproportionate number of African Americans. Mobs have eagerly cooperated with state institutions on the basis of shared racism. But they have also stood at the ready to enforce the dictates of white supremacy even when the police and other guardians of order treat everyone equally before the law.
The mob has occupied an unusually prominent place in our history because Americans have cultivated a unique hostility toward the state and its institutions that goes back to the early years of the Republic. As historian Michael Pfeifer notes in his groundbreaking book, The Roots of Rough Justice, the violent libertarianism associated with the American Revolution and the subsequent lack of a strong, centralized state gave rise to mob violence that gathered force before the Civil War. He writes,
“Antebellum advocates of vigilantism in the Midwest, South, and West drew on Anglo-American and American revolutionary traditions of community violence that suggested that citizens might reclaim the functions of government when legal institutions could not provide sufficient protections to persons or their property.”
Those mobs didn’t necessarily think of themselves as anti-democratic. Rather, they imagined that they were improving on democracy. As Pfeifer points out, many of the vigilante outfits that targeted minorities practiced democratic procedures of a sort. Some adopted bylaws and even elected their own leaders. They held mock trials and votes on what punishments to mete out: hanging or burning alive.
Such mobs functioned both as a parallel military and, to a certain extent, a parallel state.
The two, in fact, went hand in hand. German sociologist Max Weber famously defined the state as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, but that was the German tradition. In the United States, particularly during its first 150 years, the state only aspired to possess such a monopoly.
Instead, a rough form of frontier justice often prevailed. Before and just after the American Revolution, even whites were its targets, but increasingly its victims were people of color. Slave owners, slave patrols, and ad hoc mobs dispensed justice throughout antebellum America and the tradition of “Judge Lynch” continued long after the abolition of slavery. The pushing of the frontier westward involved not only the Army’s killing of Native Americans but extrajudicial violence by bands of settlers. Historian Benjamin Madley estimates that the Native population in California declined by more than 80% between 1846 and 1873, with as many as 16,000 killings in 370-plus massacres. This “winning” of the West also involved the widespread lynching of Latinos.
The “Right” to Bear Arms
Mobs were able to dispense frontier justice not only thanks to a strong libertarian tradition and a weak state, but also because of the widespread availability of guns. Coming out of the Civil War, this country developed a distinct gun culture sustained by a surge in firearm production. Gun prices fell and so guns fell into the hands of more and more citizens.
Mobs used firearms in the infamous Draft Riot in New York in 1863, which ended up targeting the city’s Black community, and in New Orleans in 1866 when enraged whites attacked a meeting of Republicans determined to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. In their drive westward, settlers favored Winchester rifles with magazines that could fire 15 rounds, giving them a staggering advantage over the people they were displacing. Early gun control laws seldom prevented whites from acquiring firearms because they were mainly designed to keep guns out of the hands of Blacks and other racial minorities.
Even today, widespread gun ownership distinguishes the United States from every other country. Approximately 40% of American households own one or more firearms, a figure that has remained remarkably consistent for the last 50 years. If you look at guns per capita, the United States ranks number one in the world at 120 firearms per 100 civilians. The next country on the list, war-torn Yemen, comes in a distant second with 52 per hundred. With more guns than people within its borders, it’s no wonder that the federal government has often struggled to maintain its monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force.
Gun enthusiasts have erroneously enlisted the Constitution to justify this extreme democracy of firepower. To guard against tyrannical federal behavior, the Second Amendment of the Constitution preserved the right of state militias to bear arms. However, organizations like the National Rifle Association have campaigned for years to reinterpret that amendment as giving any individual the right to bear arms.
That has, in turn, provided ammunition for both the “castle doctrine” (the right to use armed force to defend one’s own home) and “stand your ground” laws (the right to use force in “self-defense”). Armed extremist groups now imagine themselves as nothing less than the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated Militia” with a constitutionally given “right” to own weapons and defend themselves against the federal government (or anyone else they disapprove of).
Improbably enough, for the last four years, the head of the federal government has become one of their chief supporters.
Donald Trump: Leader of the Pack
Long before becoming president, Donald Trump was already acting as if he were the head of a lynch mob. In 1989, he published full-page ads in the New York Times and three other local papers calling for New York City to reinstate the death penalty in response to a brutal gang rape in Central Park. He swore that the city was then “ruled by the law of the streets” and that “muggers and murderers... should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”
It was language distinctly reminiscent of white mobs bitter about the failure of local law enforcement to execute Blacks accused of crimes. Like many of their predecessors, the accused Black and Latino teenagers were, in the end, found to be quite innocent of the crime. After a long legal struggle, the Central Park Five (as they came to be known) were released from prison. Trump has never apologized for his campaign to kill innocent people.
When he ran for president, he quickly moved beyond mere “law and order” rhetoric. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump deliberately cultivated a following among armed extremists. At a rally in North Carolina, for instance, he warned of what might happen to the Supreme Court if Hillary Clinton were to win.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he lamented. Then he added in his typically confused and elliptical manner of speaking: “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know.” He was, in other words, suggesting that followers with guns could do something about Clinton’s choices by shooting her or her judicial picks.
Throughout that campaign season, he regularly retweeted white supremacist claims and memes. At the time, it was estimated that more than 60% of the accounts he was retweeting had links to white supremacists. At his rallies, he encouraged his supporters to get “rough” with protesters.
As president, he’s continued to side with the mob. He infamously refused to denounce neo-Nazis gathering in Charlottesville in August 2017, applauded the armed demonstrators who demanded the reopening of the economy in the pandemic spring of 2020, and defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August.
Trump has stood up for the Confederate flag, Confederate statues, and keeping the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases. In a recent speech denouncing school curricula that teach about slavery and other unsavory aspects of our history, he pledged to erect a statue of a slaveowner in a project he’s been promoting -- building a National Garden of American Heroes park. The current administration has cultivated direct links to white nationalists through disgraced figures like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, as well as current advisers like Stephen Miller.
In his reelection bid, Trump pointedly held his first pandemic rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he excoriated Democrats who “want to take away your guns through the repeal of your Second Amendment” and “left-wing radicals [who] burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police officers.” In a literal whitewashing of history, he made no mention of the White mobs that had looted businesses and destroyed property in that very city in 1921.
Trump’s exhortations to his followers over the heads of state and local officials appeal to the mob belief that citizens must reclaim the functions of government, if necessary through force. Right-wing militias explicitly embrace that history. The “Three Percenters,” a militia movement that emerged in 2008 after the election of Barack Obama, purports to protect Americans from tyrannical government. Their name derives from the inaccurate belief that only 3% of Americans took up arms to fight the British empire in the eighteenth century.
Of course, three percent of Americans are not now members of such militias and White nationalist movements, but their numbers are on the rise. White nationalist groups increased from 100 in 2017 to 155 in 2019. The several hundred militia groups now in existence probably have a total of 15,000 to 20,000 members, including an increasing number of veterans with combat experience. Far from a homogeneous force, some are focused on patrolling the southern border and targeting the undocumented. Others are obsessed with resisting the federal government, even in a few cases opposing Trump’s various power grabs.
West Virginia University professor John Temple argues, in fact, that not all right-wing militias hold extremist views. “I have listened to many hours of ‘patriot’ conversations that didn’t sound all that different from what you would hear during a typical evening on Fox News,” he writes. “Many seemed to have joined the cause for social reasons, or because they liked guns, or because they wanted to be part of something they saw as historic and grandiose -- not because their views were far more radical than those of typical right-leaning Americans.”
This is not exactly reassuring, since the politics of right-leaning, Fox News-watching Americans have grown more extreme. With nearly half of the Republicans surveyed by Larry Bartels prepared to take the law into their own hands, Trump has nearly succeeded in transforming his party into a mob of vigilantes.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that the president is a law-and-order candidate. He flourishes in chaos and routinely flouts the law. By siding with right-wing militias and their ilk, he daily undermines the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence.
The debate over defunding the police must be seen in this context. In a country awash in guns and grassroots racism, with a major party flirting with mob violence, getting rid of police departments would be akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire of uncontained extremism. Sure, local law enforcement needs major reforms, massive civic oversight, and right-sized budgets. Police departments must be purged of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The Pentagon has to stop supplying the cops with military-grade weaponry.
But remember: the police can be reformed. What was once an all-white force now better reflects America’s diversity. The mob, by definition, is not subject to reforms or any oversight whatsoever.
This is no time to permit the return of frontier justice administered by white mobs and a lawless president, especially with a critical election looming. Mob violence has often accompanied elections in the past, with rival factions fighting over the results, as in the street battles of 1874 in New Orleans between Republican integrationists and racist Democrats. Like nineteenth-century Louisiana, the struggle this November is not just about Democrats versus Republicans. It’s about the rule of law versus racist vigilantism.
White supremacy is not going to give up its hold on power without a fight. If you thought you’d seen real American carnage in Trump’s four years in office, prepare yourself for the chaotic aftermath of the November election. The mob is itching to take the law into its own hands one more time on behalf of its very own mobster-in-chief.
John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, 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.
David Choquehuanca was Bolivian foreign minister from 2006 to 2017 and is vice-presidential candidate for the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Bolivia's Socialist VP Candidate: "The Coup Against Evo Morales Was Driven by Multinationals and the Organization of American States"
Denis Rogatyuk, Bruno Sommer Catalan and David Choquehuanca, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Bolivia is finally set to hold repeat presidential elections next month, with polls suggesting MAS candidate Luis Arce is set to restore the socialist government ousted in last November's coup."
His running mate David Choquehuanca told Jacobin about the repression MAS has faced and how the party intends to make sure that Bolivians’ democratic choice is upheld.
ith barely three weeks left until Bolivia’s rerun general election, the campaigns of both the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and its right-wing opponents are entering full stride. So far, the campaigns of the two main right-wing presidential candidates, Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Camacho, have largely focused on staking out ground as the main challenger to MAS, boasting of the role they played in toppling Evo Morales’s government in last November’s coup d’état. But while they have pursued a smear campaign against MAS in the run-up to the October 18 vote — and even denounced mismanagement by postcoup president Jeanine Áñez — they are yet to present any concrete proposals on how to bring Bolivia back from the brink of socioeconomic collapse.
On September 17, Áñez announced that she was dropping out of the presidential race, in a move widely seen as driven by polls showing the lead that MAS enjoys over the divided pro-coup forces. Indeed, a recent poll for right-wing newspaper Página Siete shows that MAS’s presidential candidate Luis “Lucho” Arce is currently set to win the election outright in the first round, with 40.3 percent support; he is followed by Carlos Mesa on 26.2 percent and Fernando Camacho on 14.4 percent. These scores echo the results of a study conducted by the think tank CELAG in June; decisively, a ten-point lead would allow Arce to avoid a runoff, so long as the top candidate takes at least 40 percent of the popular vote.
The ramifications of Áñez’s withdrawal are still unknown. The support she currently holds is likely to be transferred to either Camacho or Mesa — boosting the latter’s chances of preventing a MAS victory in the first round. Yet any endorsement she or her ministers give also carries the political deadweight of almost a year of economic mismanagement, immense corruption, and state terrorism against the country’s social movements.
It has long been speculated that a fair and transparent election is unlikely. Áñez’s government has postponed the contest three times already, and the Organization of American States (OAS) showed already in last October’s contest that it is determined to ensure that MAS does not win. We can expect voter suppression in MAS-voting rural areas, as well as among Bolivians living abroad in Brazil and Argentina. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic also has unpredictable ramifications for voter turnout.
The MAS pick for vice president is David Choquehuanca, who served as Bolivia’s foreign minister from 2006 to 2017 and as secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). Running mate to former economy minister Arce, Choquehuanca is recognized as a historic Aymara trade union leader and a leading proponent of suma qamaña (“good living”) political thought among MAS leaders. He sat down with Jacobin’s Denis Rogatyuk and Bruno Sommer to discuss the election and his party’s agenda for government.
BSC: We understand that racism and the issue of white supremacy have traditionally been serious problems in Bolivian society, since the time of the invasion and colonization by the Spanish. Recently, we have witnessed attacks against the indigenous population in regions such as Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, by far-right paramilitaries as well as by civic leaders such as Rómulo Calvo of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee. How will MAS respond to this when it returns to power — and why do you think that even some people who themselves have indigenous roots are involved in these attacks?
DC: First, I’ll say that in the language of ancient, ancestral cultures, the word “race” does not exist. There was no racism in ancient cultures, in the culture of life, in our Abya Yala — that’s what our continent is called. There was no discrimination and division on this basis.
The word “race” came with colonialism and the invasion. Many think that we are inferior to Europeans — but that thought has been imposed upon us. We think that those that live in the countryside are inferior to those in the city, that whites are superior to nonwhites, because colonialism has infected us with hatred and individualism. The Church itself says that we cannot have land because we do not have a soul. That colonialist way of thinking is powerful.
Colonialism is based on domination and exploitation. To a lesser or greater degree, there is racism everywhere, and we have to fight against it everywhere. Through the media and through education, they have made us feel ashamed of the best that we have to offer. Many have been forced to change their last name to have access to certain spaces. That is why the peoples of the world struggle against colonialism.
DR: How would you assess the state of the social movements at this moment? Can unions and other activist organizations join with MAS to defeat the regime in October’s elections?
DC: In Bolivia, the social movements have never stopped fighting. Some workers had to go into hiding, many were detained, persecuted, disappeared, and there have been violations of all manner of human rights. But the social movements have been building their unity, little by little, and gradually losing their fear.
In the 1970s, under the dictatorship there was a lot of abuse, violation of human rights, and a lot of corruption, pushing our country into debt. None of our rights were guaranteed. That was until women miners decided to go on a hunger strike: they decided to sacrifice themselves to recover our democracy, and this lit the spark for our people to mobilize. That was how we managed to recover our democracy.
Then came a popular government [of Hernán Siles Zuazo, 1982–85], but people wanted it to solve all the problems that had built up —and do it overnight. That government’s mandate was cut short and then came the dark page of neoliberalism. That meant twenty years during which our strategic state companies and many of our natural resources were handed over to transnationals.
The people, tired of all that, decided for a change. In 2005 a government arrived in power with an indigenous man — Evo Morales — at its head. For fourteen years, we managed to build stability, economic growth, overcome illiteracy, increase our GDP. We can thus speak of the great achievements of what we have called the democratic revolution, the process of decolonization.
We were beginning to industrialize our natural resources, we wanted to industrialize our lithium, we were taking the first steps to industrialize our gas, and suddenly the transnationals began to organize a coup d’état. The other day one of Tesla’s representatives said it: “We have organized the coup with the United States government, and if we feel like it, we can intervene at any time in any other country.”
They are no longer even hiding it. And we know that this coup has been planned jointly with Luis Almagro, secretary-general of the Organization of American States.
We also have to recognize that in our administration we neglected the promotion of new leaders — and that was true not only in Bolivia, but across our region. But now the social movements are beginning to combine their forces again, and leaders are springing up like mushrooms all over the place, especially among young men and women. Power does not have to be an instrument of abuse — it has to be used to help people, to resolve problems, to govern. Our peoples are once again organizing, combining their forces, above all in the indigenous peasant movement.
This is not just a matter of participating in elections, of recovering our democracy — it goes much further than that. It is about defending our rights to education, health, basic services, freedom of expression, mobilizing our strength. And again, this is being revived from the grassroots.
DR: In the event that the de facto government refuses to hold the elections in October or postpones them again, what do you think the Bolivian people’s reaction will be? How can MAS prepare for this?
DC: I don’t think they will dare to postpone the elections again. [In August] the indigenous peasant movement mobilized because the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) unilaterally changed the election date, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext. What the social movements have demanded is that the law be respected, that our political Constitution be respected, that the elections be guaranteed, because we need authorities elected by the people. No one is going to accept ones imposed by force. We need legitimate authorities, democratically and peacefully elected by the people, without violence — that’s what the Bolivian people want.
When the people mobilized, the TSE thought twice and decided to set the date of the elections through another law. It had lost credibility, so the people asked for guarantors such as the United Nations, the European Union, even the Church. In this new law that calls for elections on October 18, sanctions have also been established stipulating penalties for anyone who tries to postpone the elections again.
Our neighbors, the international community, want us to have elections. Social organizations, the people, the youth, are organizing themselves to participate in this contest, and these elections have to be a festival of democracy. The TSE has to guarantee transparent, democratic, and peaceful elections, and the winning candidate — no matter who it is — must be respected.
DR: During Evo Morales’s government, it was impressive to see how Bolivia rose to the international stage defending the rights of Mother Earth, helping in the construction of the Patria Grande (“Common Motherland”), and actively challenging the Western world on this front. How do you think Bolivian foreign policy will evolve once MAS returns to power, and what international allies can Bolivia really trust?
DC: We must always respond to what our peoples feel — the last word must always be with them. No leader should believe himself above the people. When we begin to develop proposals, it will be by listening to them. And what they want is Latin American integration — they do not want more division.
Our continent has been disintegrated, dismembered by colonialism. It has divided us and pursued the systematic looting of our natural resources. That is why we are in poor conditions, and that is why we want integration.
We have been part of building Unasur [a bloc for Latin-American unity]. It aims to allow us to speak as equals with other spaces of integration such as the European Union. If we want to sit alone with the EU as Bolivia, they will not listen to us; but if we sit together as Unasur, as a region, they will not only listen to us, but also respect us.
Not only have we promoted integration spaces like Unasur, but also CELAC [the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States]. We need to build, to unite, to get up and stand up for ourselves.
The problem of poverty is global, the energy crisis is global, and we need to face it globally. That is why integration is important. But we have also brought forward proposals that start out from our ancient roots, from resistance like that of Pachamama [Mother Earth], which has withstood five hundred years [of colonial rule].
We took the Pachamama proposal to the United Nations. There, we told the UN the Earth thinks, has eyes, listens, speaks. They immediately said: “But who are these people, telling us that the Earth thinks?” But since we proposed this on behalf of a state, they were forced to schedule it on the UN agenda. And we managed to convince the community of nations.
In 2009, we achieved a universal resolution declaring our Pachamama as Mother Earth. April 22 became International Mother Earth Day — that day, the Earth ceases to be an object, it becomes Mother Earth, it becomes a subject of law. On that basis, the UN has begun to work on defending its rights.
Human beings, plants, and animals are also raised by Mother Earth. That is why we seek harmony with nature, and we managed to incorporate this into the UN’s 2030 Agenda. Now it says: it will no longer be possible to achieve the objectives of sustainable development if we do not take into account the need for such harmony. And we opened up spaces so that indigenous people could be heard by governments.
BSC: What kind of political and economic changes would translate the ideology of kapak ñam (“living well”) in a new MAS government?
DC: We indigenous peoples have our path of noble integration, known as kapak ñam. Kapak means a person who lives well; ñam means path. We have decided no longer to walk the roads of the North, of the development that has led to destruction and generated poverty and inequality.
That is why when global leaders meet in social forums and say that “another world is possible,” we indigenous peoples say that our world is possible. Our way is possible because ours has resisted — we still have our kapak ñam. There have been five hundred years of deceit, lies, intrigue, division, uncertainty, darkness. We want to return to the path of light, of truth, of respect for nature.
“Living well” is a global proposal faced with the global crisis of capitalism and one that also relates to our wiphala [rainbow-colored flag]. This is not a flag for a people with borders, for the Aymara, for the Mayan, or for Japanese. Rather, it is the codification of the rainbow, of inclusion, of integration. Each little square is the same, and it tells us that we all complement each other — the architect is not superior or inferior to the bricklayer, the woman is not inferior or superior to the man. It tells us that we are all alike and all different at the same time.
When we talk about “living well,” we are talking about our return to the ayllu [“community”], to the path of balance. There is disorder, the world and us are unbalanced, we are sick, we have been infected by greed, individualism, hatred, racism. “Living well” is saying that we need to heal ourselves, that we need to cast off egocentrism, Eurocentrism, and anthropocentrism.
In 2015 we assumed the presidency of the Group of 77 and China, and we organized a meeting with presidents, ministers, and scientists from more than 130 countries. There, we analyzed the global disorder, the environmental, energy, and financial crisis. And among the conclusions we reached was the need to build a new world order, starting from the South, based on social justice. When we lift our wiphalas we are saying that we want integration, we want unity, we want peace, we want harmony.
Plastic bottles makes up almost one sixth of the world's annual plastic production. (photo: Jeff M
Plastic bottles makes up almost one sixth of the world's annual plastic production. (photo: Jeff Morgan/Alamy
New Super-Enzyme Eats Plastic Bottles Six Times Faster
Damian Carrington, Guardian UK
Carrington writes: "A super-enzyme that degrades plastic bottles six times faster than before has been created by scientists and could be used for recycling within a year or two."
Breakthrough that builds on plastic-eating bugs first discovered by Japan in 2016 promises to enable full recycling
The super-enzyme, derived from bacteria that naturally evolved the ability to eat plastic, enables the full recycling of the bottles. Scientists believe combining it with enzymes that break down cotton could also allow mixed-fabric clothing to be recycled. Today, millions of tonnes of such clothing is either dumped in landfill or incinerated.
Plastic pollution has contaminated the whole planet, from the Arctic to the deepest oceans, and people are now known to consume and breathe microplastic particles. It is currently very difficult to break down plastic bottles into their chemical constituents in order to make new ones from old, meaning more new plastic is being created from oil each year.
The super-enzyme was engineered by linking two separate enzymes, both of which were found in the plastic-eating bug discovered at a Japanese waste site in 2016. The researchers revealed an engineered version of the first enzyme in 2018, which started breaking down the plastic in a few days. But the super-enzyme gets to work six times faster.
“When we linked the enzymes, rather unexpectedly, we got a dramatic increase in activity,“ said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “This is a trajectory towards trying to make faster enzymes that are more industrially relevant. But it’s also one of those stories about learning from nature, and then bringing it into the lab.”
French company Carbios revealed a different enzyme in April, originally discovered in a compost heap of leaves, that degrades 90% of plastic bottles within 10 hours, but requires heating above 70C.
The new super-enzyme works at room temperature, and McGeehan said combining different approaches could speed progress towards commercial use: “If we can make better, faster enzymes by linking them together and provide them to companies like Carbios, and work in partnership, we could start doing this within the next year or two.”
The 2018 work had determined that the structure of one enzyme, called PETase, can attack the hard, crystalline surface of plastic bottles. They found, by accident, that one mutant version worked 20% faster. The new study analysed a second enzyme also found in the Japanese bacteria that doubles the speed of the breakdown of the chemical groups liberated by the first enzyme.
Bacteria that break down natural polymers like cellulose have evolved this twin approach over millions of years. The scientists thought by connecting the two enzymes together, it might increase the speed of degradation, and enable them to work more closely together.
The linked super-enzyme would be impossible for a bacterium to create, as the molecule would be too large. So the scientists connected the two enzymes in the laboratory and saw a further tripling of the speed. The new research by scientists at the University of Portsmouth and four US institutions is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team is now examining how the enzymes can be tweaked to make them work even faster still. “There’s huge potential,” said McGeehan. “We’ve got several hundred in the lab that we’re currently sticking together.” A £1m testing centre is now being built in Portsmouth and Carbios is currently building a plant in Lyon.
Combining the plastic-eating enzymes with existing ones that break down natural fibres could allow mixed materials to be fully recycled, McGeehan said. “Mixed fabrics [of polyester and cotton] are really tricky to recycle. We’ve been speaking to some of the big fashion companies that produce these textiles, because they’re really struggling at the moment.”
Campaigners say reducing the use of plastic is key. Those working on recycling say that strong, lightweight materials like plastic are very useful and that true recycling is part of the solution to the pollution problem.
Researchers have also been successful in finding bugs that eat other plastics such as polyurethane, which is widely used but rarely recycled. When polyurethane breaks down it can release toxic chemicals that would kill most bacteria, but the bug identified actually uses the material as food to power the process.
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