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25 October 20
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Reader Supported News
Burning of Minneapolis Police Station Was Right-Wing Violence
Andy Mannix, Star Tribune
Mannix writes: "Feds say Texas adherent of far-right group fired on precinct building, conspired with cop killer to ignite civil war."
n the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday.
A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s death while in police custody.
Ivan Harrison Hunter, a 26-year-old from Boerne, Texas, is charged with one count of interstate travel to incite a riot for his alleged role in ramping up violence during the protests in Minneapolis on May 27 and 28. According to charges, Hunter, wearing a skull mask and tactical gear, shot 13 rounds at the south Minneapolis police headquarters while people were inside. He also looted and helped set the building ablaze, according to the complaint, which was filed Monday under seal.
Unrest flared throughout Minneapolis following Floyd’s death, which was captured on a bystander’s cellphone video, causing Gov. Tim Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard. As police clashed with protesters, Hunter and other members of the Boogaloo Bois discussed in private Facebook messages their plans to travel to Minneapolis and rally at the Cub Foods near the Third Precinct building, according to federal court documents. One of the people Hunter coordinated with posted publicly to social media: “Lock and load boys. Boog flags are in the air, and the national network is going off,” the complaint states.
Two hours after the police precinct was set on fire, Hunter texted with another Boogaloo member in California, a man named Steven Carrillo.
“Go for police buildings,” Hunter told Carrillo, according to charging documents.
“I did better lol,” Carrillo replied. A few hours earlier, Carrillo had killed a Federal Protective Services officer in Oakland, Calif., according to criminal charges filed against him in California.
On June 1, Hunter asked Carrillo for money, explaining he needed to “be in the woods for a bit,” and Carrillo sent him $200 via a cash app.
Five days later, Carrillo shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Cruz when authorities tried to arrest him, according to charges filed in California. Authorities say he then stole a car and wrote “Boog” on the hood “in what appeared to be his own blood.”
A couple of days later, during police protests in Austin, Texas, police pulled over a truck after seeing three men in tactical gear and carrying guns drive away in it. Hunter, in the front passenger seat, wore six loaded banana magazines for an AK-47-style assault rifle on his tactical vest, according federal authorities. The two other men had AR-15 magazines affixed to their vests. The officers found an AK-47-style rifle and two AR-15 rifles on the rear seat of the vehicle, a pistol next to the driver’s seat and another pistol in the center console.
Hunter denied he owned any of the weapons found in the vehicle. He did, according to the complaint, volunteer that he was the leader of the Boogaloo Bois in South Texas and that he was present in Minneapolis when the Third Precinct was set on fire. Police seized the guns and let Hunter and the others go.
Hunter had bragged about his role in the Minneapolis riots on Facebook, publicly proclaiming, “I helped the community burn down that police station” and “I didn’t’ [sic] protest peacefully Dude … Want something to change? Start risking felonies for what is good.”
“The BLM protesters in Minneapolis loved me [sic] fireteam and I,” he wrote on June 11. According to the complaint, “fire team” is a reference to a group he started with Carrillo “that responds with violence if the police try to take their guns away.”
“Hunter also referred to himself as a ‘terrorist,’ ” the complaint states.
A confidential informant told police that Hunter planned to “go down shooting” if authorities closed in. He didn’t. They arrested him without incident in San Antonio, Texas, this week, and he made his first court appearance Thursday.
Hunter is the third member of the Boogaloo Bois, a loose-knit group intent on igniting a second American civil war, to be charged in Minneapolis as a result of the unrest that followed Floyd’s death.
Michael Robert Solomon and Benjamin Ryan Teeter were indicted in September with conspiracy to provide material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.
Mike Pence. (photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: White House Chief of Staff Concedes
That Trump Admin Has Given Up Containing the Virus.
Pence Should Quarantine After Coronavirus Exposure. He's Going to Keep Campaigning Instead.
Aaron Rupar, Vox
Rupar writes: "On Saturday evening, news broke of yet another coronavirus case cluster at the White House - this one involving aides to Vice President Mike Pence. Pence himself was exposed, but he doesn't plan to let the outbreak get in the way of his campaigning."
READ MORE
Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Erin Schaff/Getty)
Barrett Often Rules for Police in Excessive Force Cases
Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley, Reuters
Excerpt: "In her three years as a federal appeals court judge, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has consistently sided with police or prison guards accused of using excessive force, a Reuters review of cases she was involved in shows."
n her three years as a federal appeals court judge, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has consistently sided with police or prison guards accused of using excessive force, a Reuters review of cases she was involved in shows.
Barrett, Republican President Donald Trump’s third nominee to the high court, has written opinions or been a part of three-judge panels that have ruled in favor of defendants in 11 of 12 cases in which law enforcement was accused of using excessive force in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to vote to confirm Barrett, a judge on the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the lifetime position on Monday, cementing a 6-3 conservative majority.
While her Senate confirmation hearings here focused attention on how she might rule on cases related to abortion, Obamacare and elections, the Reuters review illustrates Barrett's record on police use of force at a time of reckoning in the United States.
There has been a wave of protests nationwide - and abroad - since May 25 when a Black man George Floyd died at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, just one in a long string of killings that civil rights advocates say are evidence of racial bias in the criminal justice system.
“Her record also makes clear she is predisposed to side with law enforcement in the context of excessive force cases,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which opposes Barrett’s confirmation.
Other groups that advocate for reform of the criminal justice system say she has written some encouraging rulings, with an overall record that is mixed. Barrett could not be reached for comment.
SUPPORT FOR QUALIFIED IMMUNITY
In five cases, the panel on which Barrett took part considered a request by police or corrections officers to be shielded from the lawsuits alleging excessive force through a controversial legal defense known as qualified immunity. The court granted those requests in four of the five cases.
A Reuters investigation published two weeks before Floyd’s death found that the immunity defense, created by the Supreme Court 50 years ago, has been making it easier for cops to kill or injure civilians with impunity. The report showed that federal appellate courts have been granting police immunity at increasing rates in recent years. Read the Reuters reporting here: here
Barrett, who was appointed to the appeals court by Trump in 2017, wrote a ruling in July that said Green Bay, Wisconsin officers who shot and killed a suicidal man who had threatened them with a knife did not use excessive force in violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits illegal searches and seizures.
She was also part of rulings that overturned lower court decisions against Indianapolis police officers. In one, a federal judge had denied qualified immunity to officers in the case of shoplifting suspect Terrell Day, who died while handcuffed after telling officers he was having trouble breathing.
Barrett dissented from a 7th Circuit panel decision in 2019 to revive a lawsuit against prison guards at an Illinois prison for firing warning shots over a dining hall to help break up a fight, injuring several inmates.
She has also handled requests for qualified immunity outside of the excessive force context.
Barrett last year threw out a lawsuit by three Black men who sued Chicago cops for pulling them over while investigating a drive-by shooting near a school. The men, who had nothing to do with the shooting, said they were targeted because of their race, citing the “racialized nature of the mockery and threats” made by one of the officers. The driver, Marcus Torry, told the cops that he was complying because he feared police brutality.
Barrett granted the officers qualified immunity because it was not “clearly established” that the officers’ actions were unreasonable, noting that the plaintiffs matched the description of the suspects “in number, race and car color.”
In other cases, she has shown a willingness to side with plaintiffs.
In 2019, she wrote a ruling rejecting immunity for a police officer who used false statements in making the case against a murder suspect. She also joined a ruling denying immunity for officers who were accused of falsifying evidence that caused a man to be jailed for two years.
“I don’t think we can draw definite conclusions about how Judge Barrett would approach qualified immunity once she’s on the Supreme Court,” said Jay Schweikert, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, which is campaigning against qualified immunity. “Her decisions all look like reasonable applications of existing precedent.”
Demonstrators protest the police shooting that killed Marcellis Stinnette and wounded his girlfriend, Tafara Williams, in Waukegan, Illinois, on 22 October. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Illinois Shooting: Protests After Police Kill Black Teenager and Wound Woman
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A Black woman who was shot and wounded inside a vehicle by a police officer who also fatally shot her 19-year-old boyfriend told about 200 people gathered at an emotional rally in suburban Chicago on Saturday that she was fighting 'to be strong' for her son."
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This is the paradox of our current situation: that in the name of freedom, we've actually adopted a liberal utopian ideology which is a barrier to the achievement of real freedom. (photo: Andrés Gómez Tarazona/Flickr)
David Harvey | Socialists Must Be the Champions of Freedom
David Harvey, Jacobin
Harvey writes: "The topic of freedom was raised when I was giving some talks in Peru. The students there were very interested in the question: 'Does socialism require a surrender of individual freedom?'"
Right-wing propaganda claims that socialism is the enemy of individual freedom. The exact opposite is true: socialists work to create the material conditions under which people can truly be free, without the rigid constraints capitalism imposes on their lives.
he topic of freedom was raised when I was giving some talks in Peru. The students there were very interested in the question: “Does socialism require a surrender of individual freedom?”
The right wing has managed to appropriate the concept of freedom as its own and to use it as a weapon in class struggle against socialists. The subservience of the individual to state control imposed by socialism or communism is something to be avoided, they said, at all costs.
My reply was that we should not give up on the idea of individual freedom as being part of what an emancipatory socialist project is about. The achievement of individual liberties and freedoms is, I argued, a central aim of such emancipatory projects. But that achievement requires collectively building a society where each one of us has adequate life chances and life possibilities to realize each one of our own potentialities.
Marx and Freedom
Marx had a few interesting things to say on this topic. One of them is that “the realm of freedom begins when the realm of necessity is left behind.” Freedom means nothing if you don’t have enough to eat, if you are denied access to adequate healthcare, housing, transportation, education, and the like. The role of socialism is to provide those basic necessities so that then people are free to do exactly what they want.
The endpoint of a socialist transition is a world in which individual capacities and powers are liberated entirely from wants, needs, and other political and social constraints. Rather than conceding that the right wing has a monopoly over the notion of individual freedom, we need to reclaim the idea of freedom for socialism itself.
But Marx also pointed out that freedom is a double-edged sword. Laborers in a capitalist society, he says, are free in a double sense. They can freely offer their labor power to whomsoever they want in the labor market. They can offer it on whatever conditions of contract they can freely negotiate.
But they are at the same time un-free, because they have been “freed” from any control over or access to the means of production. They have, therefore, to surrender their labor power to the capitalist in order to live.
This constitutes their double-edged freedom. For Marx this is the central contradiction of freedom under capitalism. In the chapter on the working day in Capital, he puts it this way: the capitalist is free to say to the laborer: “I want to employ you at the lowest wage possible for the largest number of hours possible doing exactly the work I specify. That is what I demand of you when I hire you.” And the capitalist is free to do that in a market society because, as we know, market society is about bidding about this and bidding about that.
On the other hand, the worker is also free to say, “You don’t have a right to make me work 14 hours a day. You don’t have a right to do anything you like with my labor power, particularly if that shortens my life and endangers my health and well-being. I am only willing to do a fair day’s work at a fair day’s wage.”
Given the nature of a market society, both the capitalist and the worker are right in terms of what they’re demanding. So, says Marx, they are both equally right by the law of exchanges that dominate in the market. Between equal rights, he then says, force decides. Class struggle between capital and labor decides the issue. The outcome rests on the power relation between capital and labor which can at some point turn coercive and violent.
A Double-Edged Sword
This idea of freedom as a double-edged sword is very important to look at in more detail. One of the best elaborations on the topic is an essay by Karl Polanyi. In his book The Great Transformation, Polanyi says that there are good forms of freedom and bad forms of freedom.
Among the bad forms of freedom that he listed were the freedoms to exploit one’s fellows without limit; the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurate service to the community; the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit; the freedom to profit from public calamities or naturally induced calamities, some of which are secretly engineered for private advantage.
But, Polanyi continues, the market economy under which these freedoms throve also produced freedoms we prize highly: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s own job.
While we may cherish these freedoms for their own sake, they are, to a large extent, by-products of the same economy that is also responsible for the evil freedoms. Polanyi’s answer to this duality makes for some very strange reading, given the current hegemony of neoliberal thinking and the way in which freedom is presented to us by existing political power.
He writes about it this way: “The passing of the market economy” — that is, getting beyond the market economy — “can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom.” Now, that’s a pretty shocking statement — to say that the real freedom begins after we leave the market economy behind. He continues:
Juridical and actual freedom can be made more wider and more general than ever before. Regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all — freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right, extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself. Thus, will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all. Such a society can afford to be both just and free.
Freedom Without Justice
Now, this idea of a society based upon justice and freedom, justice and liberty, seems to me to have been the political agenda of the student movement of the 1960s and the so-called ’68 generation. There was a widespread demand for both justice and freedom: freedom from the coercion of the state, freedom from coercion imposed by corporate capital, freedom from market coercions but also tempered by the demand for social justice.
The capitalist political response to this in the 1970s was interesting. It entailed working through these demands and, in effect, saying: “We give in to you on the freedoms (though with some caveats) but you forget the justice.”
Giving in on the freedoms was circumscribed. It meant for the most part freedom of choice in the market. The free market and freedom from state regulation were the answers to the question of freedom. But just forget about the justice. That would be delivered by market competition, which was supposedly so organized as to assure that everyone would get their just deserts. The effect, however, was to unleash many of the evil freedoms (e.g. the exploitation of others) in the name of the virtuous freedoms.
This turn was something that Polanyi clearly recognized. The passage to the future that he envisaged is blocked by a moral obstacle, he observed, and the moral obstacle was something which he called “liberal utopianism.” I think we still face the problems posed by this liberal utopianism. It’s an ideology which is pervasive in the media and in political discourses.
The liberal utopianism of, say, the Democratic Party is one of the things that stands in the way of the achievement of real freedom. “Planning and control,” Polanyi wrote, “are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Free enterprise and private ownership are declared to be the essentials of freedom.” This was what the main ideologists of the neoliberalism put forward.
Beyond the Market
To me, this is one of the key issues of our time. Are we going to go beyond the limited freedoms of the market and the regulation of our lives by the laws of supply and demand, or are we going to accept, as Margaret Thatcher put it, that there is no alternative? We become free of state control but slaves of the market. To this there is no alternative, beyond this there is no freedom. This is what the right wing preaches, and this is what many people have come to believe.
This is the paradox of our current situation: that in the name of freedom, we’ve actually adopted a liberal utopian ideology which is a barrier to the achievement of real freedom. I do not think it is a world of freedom when somebody who wants to get an education has to pay an immense amount of money for it and has student debt stretching way, way into their future.
In Britain, a large proportion of the housing provision in the 1960s was in the public sector; it was social housing. When I was growing up, that social housing was the basic provision of a necessity at a reasonably low cost. Then Margaret Thatcher came along and privatized it all, and said, basically: “You will be much freer if you own your property and you can actually become part of a property-owning democracy.”
And so, instead of 60 percent of the housing being in the public sector, we suddenly go to a situation where only about 20 percent — or maybe even less — of the housing is in the public sector. Housing becomes a commodity, and commodity then becomes a part of speculative activity. To the degree that it becomes a vehicle of speculation, the price of the property goes up, and you get a rising cost of housing with no actual increase in direct provision.
We are building cities, building housing, in a way which provides tremendous freedom for the upper classes at the same time as it actually produces un-freedom for the rest of the population. This is what I think is meant when Marx made that famous comment: that the realm of necessity actually has to be overcome in order for the realm of freedom to be achieved.
The Realm of Freedom
This is the way in which market freedoms limit the possibilities, and from that standpoint, I think that the socialist perspective is to do as Polanyi suggests; that is, we collectivize the question of access to freedom, access to housing. We turn it away from being something which is simply in the market to being something in the public domain. Housing in the public domain is our slogan. This is one of the basic ideas of socialism in the contemporary system — to put things in the public domain.
It is often said that in order to achieve socialism, we have to surrender our individuality and we have to give up something. Well, to some degree, yes, that might be true; but there is, as Polanyi insisted, a greater freedom to be achieved when we go beyond the cruel realities of individualized market freedoms.
I read Marx as saying the task is to maximize the realm of individual freedom, but that can only happen when the realm of necessity is taken care of. The task of a socialist society is not to regulate everything that goes on in society; not at all. The task of a socialist society is to make sure that all of the basic necessities are taken care of — freely provided — so that people can then do exactly what they want when they want.
If you ask everybody right now, “How much free time do you have?” the typical answer is “I have almost no free time whatsoever. It’s all taken up with this, that, and everything else.” If real freedom is a world in which we have free time to do whatever we want, then the socialist emancipatory project proposes that as central to its political mission. This is something that we can and must all work towards.
Israel's army said troops responded to an incident north of Ramallah after rocks were hurled at an army vehicle. (photo: Alaa Badarneh/EPA/EFE)
Palestinian Teen Dies After Being 'Beaten by Israeli Soldiers'
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "A Palestinian teenager has died of his injuries after being beaten by Israeli forces near the town of Turmus-Ayya northeast of Ramallah, according to several Palestinian news outlets."
Director of medical centre says Snobar died of neck injuries sustained while being beaten by Israeli forces.
The Palestinian health ministry said that Amer Abedalrahim Snobar arrived at the hospital after being “severely beaten on the neck”.
Ahmed al-Bitawi, director of the Palestine Medical Complex, confirmed to Palestinian news outlets on Sunday morning that Snobar died as a result of injuries sustained from an attack by Israeli forces.
“There were visible signs of beatings on Snobar’s neck,” Bitawi said.
The medical centre reported that the injuries to Snobar’s neck were consistent with being beaten with the butts of Israeli soldiers’ rifles.
In a statement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) accused Israeli troops of “a monstrous act of brutality against a defenceless young man whose only crime was being Palestinian”.
Senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi said in the statement that Sanouber had been “bludgeoned” by Israeli troops.
Snobar hailed from the village of Yatma, south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus.
Members of a medical NGO team told local Palestinian news outlets they tried to perform cardiac resuscitation on Snobar before transferring him to the medical centre.
Israel’s army said troops responded to an incident north of Ramallah after rocks were hurled at an army vehicle.
Troops “in the area were dispatched to the scene and searched the area for assailants” the army statement said.
“Initial details suggest that upon the arrival of the troops… the two suspects tried to escape by foot,” it said. “While fleeing, one of the suspects apparently lost consciousness, collapsed and hit his head. The suspect was not beaten by IDF troops.”
In a statement, the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) said Snobar’s murder will be a “curse that will continue to haunt Arab traitors” – in reference to the recent normalisation deals by the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan.
“The response to this heinous crime is to withdraw the recognition of the Zionist entity and all agreements that resulted from it, and the formation of a unified national leadership capable of leading popular resistance against the Zionist occupation,” the statement said.
Researchers have discovered a link between air pollution, food delivery and plastic waste. (photo: Sorapop/iStock/Getty Images)
How Air Pollution, Food Delivery and Plastic Waste Are Connected
Tiffany Duong, EcoWatch
Duong writes: "Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have discovered a link between air pollution, food delivery and plastic waste."
esearchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have discovered a link between air pollution, food delivery and plastic waste.
In a study published in Nature Human Behavior, the researchers found that the more polluted air outside is, the more likely office employees are to use food delivery services. This, in turn, increases the waste produced from single-use food packaging and bags.
"While we see more research on the impact plastic pollution is having on the natural environment, there has been less work trying to understand the human behaviour that drives plastic pollution," Alberto Salvo, one of the study's authors, said in an NUS news release. "This is where our study seeks to contribute – finding a strong causal link between air pollution and plastic waste through the demand for food delivery."
The study surveyed the lunch choices of 251 office workers for 11 workdays each in three Chinese cities known for having levels of smog – Beijing, Shenyang and Shijiazhuang, the release explained. They also looked at data from an online food delivery platform with over 350,000 users. By comparing both datasets with air pollution data during the lunch hour, NUS researchers found that employees were 43% more likely to order food delivery when there was a 100 μg m–3 increase in particulate matter pollution (PM2.5), International Business Times (IBT) reported. By contrast, the general public was 7.2% more likely to use food delivery services with the same increase in air pollution.
PM is the most common indicator for air pollution, and includes nitrates, ammonia, sulfate, mineral dust and black carbon, the news report explained. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), PM affects more people than any other pollutant, and PM2.5, or fine particulate matter less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, can penetrate the lung barrier and enter the blood system. Chronic exposure to particles contributes to the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and lung cancer, the WHO said.
During the lunchtime periods surveyed by NUS researchers, PM2.5 levels were often well above the 24-hour U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standard of 35 μg/m³, making pollution highly visible, the NUS release said.
"Faced with smog or haze outside, a typical office worker at lunchtime can avoid exposure only by ordering food to be delivered to his or her doorstep," said NUS researcher Chu Junhong in the NUS release.
Chu also explained in the release why air pollution seemed to have a smaller impact on food delivery in the general public than in workers, because people try to avoid the outdoors on a polluted day by using a home kitchen or eating at a cafeteria within their office building.
In a second part of the study, office workers submitted photos of their lunches, which researchers used to quantify the amount of disposable plastic in different dining choices, explained an NUS Business School video.
Not surprisingly, researchers found that delivered meals used more plastic than meals eaten in restaurants. The average delivered meal used an average of 2.8 single-use plastic items or an estimated 54 grams of plastic, the video explained. By comparison, the average restaurant meal used an average of 6.6 grams of plastic, usually in the form of chopstick sleeves or bottles.
COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem by increasing the demand for delivered meals, which are usually packaged in plastic, the video explained.
According to the research, if all of China were exposed to a 100 μg/m³ PM2.5 increase in air pollution, the same as Beijing regularly experiences, 2.5 million more meals would be delivered daily, creating a total of five million more plastic food containers and plastic bags, reported Science Times.
NUS Researcher Liu Haoming said, "Individuals protect themselves from – and show their distaste for – air pollution by ordering food delivery which often comes in plastic packaging," in the NUS release.
IBT concluded that the study shows how people inadvertently contribute to the increasing plastic waste issues because they are trying to avoid air pollution. Liu added in the NUS release that the study makes it evident that "air pollution control can reduce plastic waste."
The findings could apply to other polluted developing nation-cities, such as Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Vietnam, he said in the release.
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