16 October 20
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16 October 20
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Jesse Jackson | Donald Trump Was Complicit in the Plot to Kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "Political rhetoric can incite. Incendiary posturing can trigger those who carry matches. We've now seen this play out dramatically in Michigan."
Right-wing domestic terrorism doesn’t fester in a vacuum.
Last week, six men, members of a right-wing militia group calling themselves the Wolverine Watchmen, were arrested and charged with plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan before the November elections. Seven others were charged under Michigan’s anti-terrorism law for allegedly seeking to recruit an army of 200 to storm the Michigan Capitol and ignite a “civil war.”
The plot went far beyond the Facebook bluster. The defendants, according to the complaint, held “field training exercises,” purchased a taser for use in the kidnapping, tested an explosive device, possessed and trained with firearms, and conducted surveillance of Whitmer’s vacation home, and of a bridge that might be blown up to impede police response.
One argued that they should put the governor on trial for treason. Another allegedly urged: “Snatch and grab man. Grab the f**** governor. Just grab the b****. Because at that point ... it’s over.” Another suggested, “Have one person go to her house. Knock on the door and when she answers it just cap her.”
This right-wing domestic terrorism doesn’t fester in a vacuum. Faced with the pandemic, Gov. Whitmer acted to protect the citizens of her state, closing down private facilities, requiring the wearing of masks and social distancing. She pushed publicly for needed protective equipment in the face of the federal government’s disarray.
Donald Trump, who seems to be threatened by strong women leaders, repeatedly called her out personally. Republicans in the state legislature called her a “tyrant” and railed against her actions, though most Michigan residents supported her efforts to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
The festering anger broke out in a stunning demonstration in April when a large rally, featuring Trump posters, swastikas, Confederate flags, Hawaiian shirts (symbol of the anti-government “boogaloo” movement) surrounded the capitol. Men in fatigues carrying assault rifles filled the galleries of the Capitol yelling threats at the legislators below. According to police, NRA-promoted “open carry” laws left them powerless to stop them.
The Republican speaker of the House said, “There’s nothing more American than people coming together to ensure their voices are being heard.” Trump responded not by criticizing the demonstrators, but by tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.”
Though Trump chose not to create national standards and left the states to operate on their own, he continued to criticize Whitmer and others for not opening their economies faster. He spewed out tweets as though he was an adolescent shooting spitballs when the teacher’s back is turned.
Only he isn’t an adolescent; he’s president of the United States. And his incendiary words incite.
Republican legislators in the state took up Trump’s follies, joining in scorning masks as oppressive, and denouncing the governor in harsh terms, calling her actions to stop the spread of the pandemic “tyrannical,” comparing them to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, labeling her a dictator. Signs like “tyrants get the rope,” “Ditch the Witch” and “Heil Whitler” began to appear alongside Confederate flags and calls to “Let us free from tyranny.”
A Republican leader in the Senate joined with the armed demonstrators in a rally. One of those on the stage was later indicted as part of the plot against the governor.
Asked to denounce white supremacy and the right-wing militia Proud Boys in the first presidential debate, Trump memorably called on them to “stand back and stand by.” The Proud Boys took that as a mandate and a slogan. The plotters were emboldened.
When the plot came out, Whitmer drew the inescapable connections: “When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit. When they stoke and contribute to hate speech, they are complicit.”
“Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups,” Whitmer said, noting that those who were plotting to kidnap her had “heard the president’s words not as a rebuke but as a rallying cry — as a call to action.”
Rather than apologize, the head of the state Republican Party released a letter criticizing Whitmer for not warning legislators about the plot. Trump complained that she hadn’t thanked him for the work of the FBI, and sniped once more at her, “Gov. Whitmer of Michigan has done a terrible job. She locked down her state for everyone, except her husband’s boating activities.”
As a former Trump Homeland Security official, Miles Taylor, has argued, “[T]he president’s rhetoric has served as a loaded gun for those groups who have since taken his words as sort of permission to do what they’re doing.”
American politics is often bare-fisted. In the heat of a campaign, rhetoric can get overheated. When the country is as polarized as this one, the rhetoric can go over the top. But responsible leaders seek to bring us together, not drive us apart; they appeal to the better angels of our character, not our worst fears or prejudices. They try to find ways to reach out to those who are alienated or fearful.
What a leader cannot do is fan their hatred or appear to give them permission for violence.
In this July 29, 2020 file photo, a demonstrator is pepper sprayed shortly before being arrested during a Black Lives Matter protest at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)
Oakland, Portland Sue Over Use of Federal Agents at Protests
Gillian Flaccus, Associated Press
Flaccus writes: "The cities of Oakland and Portland, Oregon have sued the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department, alleging that the agencies are overstepping constitutional limits in their use of federal law enforcement officers to tamp down on protests."
The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, cites the deployment of U.S. agents this summer to quell protests in Portland and alleges the U.S. Marshals Service unlawfully deputized dozens of local Portland police officers as federal agents despite objections from city officials. The federal deputations have meant protesters arrested by local police could face federal charges, which generally carry stiffer penalties.
The use of federal agents in these ways is a major shift in policy and threatens the independence of local law enforcement, according to the lawsuit. The complaint cites the anti-commandeering doctrine of the Tenth Amendment, which says that the federal government cannot require states or state officials to adopt or enforce federal law.
In a statement Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security criticized the lawsuit.
“Yet again, dangerous politicians and fringe special interest groups have ginned up a meritless lawsuit. They aim to harm President Trump and distract from his law and order agenda,” the department said. “Department of Homeland Security have acted entirely lawfully. Instead of condemning the violence we are seeing across the country, these politicians focus on scoring cheap political points to the detriment of the American people.”
In the past, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf has been a vocal defender of the administration’s response to the civil unrest in Portland
The Trump administration says the work of the federal agents is limited to federal property but the lawsuit says “the activities in cities such as Portland instead reveal a distinct and meaningful policy shift to use federal enforcement to unilaterally step in and replace local law enforcement departments that do not subscribe to the President’s view of domestic ‘law and order.’”
The allegations of constitutional overreach focus on the federal government’s actions in Portland but Oakland joined the lawsuit because of concerns that the Trump administration might send U.S. agents to Oakland or deputize police officers there as well, court papers show.
Protests over racial injustice and police brutality have roiled both U.S. West cities since the death of George Floyd and drawn attacks from President Donald Trump, who threatened to send federal resources to restore law and order.
In Portland, the Trump administration sent dozens of U.S. agents to the city in July to guard a federal courthouse that had become a target of protesters, but those agents clashed with protesters blocks from the courthouse on several occasions. The state of Oregon sued over allegations that federal agents swept up protesters in unmarked cars without identifying themselves.
U.S. Attorney for Oregon Billy J. Williams said in late September that more than 80 people had been charged with federal crimes related to the protests.
Last month, Portland agreed to have about five dozen of its police officers deputized as federal agents by the Marshals Service in advance of a rally planned in the city by the right-wing group Proud Boys. The city anticipated potential clashes between left- and right-wing protesters. Troopers from the Oregon State Police and a local sheriff’s department were also deputized.
City leaders have since said that they believed the police officers would only be federally deputized for that weekend and sought to cancel the agreement after the rally was over. But the U.S. Attorney for Oregon and the Marshals Service have refused to cancel the deputization, which officially expires on Dec. 31.
The lawsuit also alleges that the U.S. government has illegally erected a fence around the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse, which is federal property, against the city’s wishes. The fence blocks a major bike thoroughfare that is city property, according to Portland officials.
Supporters and staffers watch the Republican National Convention on TV in August in Rancho Bernardo, California. (photo: Ariana Drehsler/Getty)
In Defiance of a State Order, California Republicans Say They Plan to Keep Collecting Ballots Via Unauthorized Boxes
Caroline O'Donovan and Salvador Hernandez, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "Ordered to pull its unauthorized ballot boxes from locations in at least four California counties earlier this week, the state GOP says it plans to continue collecting ballots via the unofficial drop boxes."
lawyer representing California’s Republican Party said in a letter Wednesday that it plans to continue collecting ballots in controversial unofficial ballot boxes placed at businesses and party headquarters throughout the state in defiance of a cease-and-desist order by the state's attorney general, whose office confirmed receiving the letter.
"Voters have decided, for themselves, that they trust the staff and volunteers at their local political Party headquarters, or their church, or a business that they patronize, to securely deliver their completed [vote-by-mail] ballot to the appropriate election official,” said the letter, which was first shared by CBS News.
In at least four counties in Southern California, the state GOP recently placed unauthorized ballot drop boxes — some of which were wrongly labeled as official or authorized ballot drop boxes — in churches, businesses, and party headquarters.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said at a press conference Monday that the use of unauthorized drop boxes to collect ballots is not permitted. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra warned that his office would consider pursuing civil or criminal action against people engaging in or encouraging the use of fraudulent ballot boxes.
The GOP is arguing that there is no difference between the use of unauthorized ballot boxes and ballot collection, sometimes called ballot harvesting, the process by which ballots are picked up and delivered by third parties, which became legal in California in 2016.
But the California authorities say that’s not true; the law requires the person entrusted to deliver the ballots to sign the envelope. When the ballots are dropped in an unofficial ballot collection box, officials argue, they are not signed by anyone at the time.
The California GOP’s general counsel, Thomas Hiltachk, told CBS News that stickers saying the party’s ballot drop boxes were “authorized” had been placed there in error. He said in his letter to the attorney general that going forward the unauthorized drop boxes would not be inaccurately labeled and would be secured indoors, rather than outdoors.
The secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the GOP will be permitted to replace its ballot boxes.
The state party also did not respond to a request for comment on this update, but it told BuzzFeed News on Monday that it did not plan to comply with the state’s order to remove the boxes.
Some of the boxes, however, were removed, including several in Fresno County and one outside a Catholic church in Simi Valley, California, according to people who had seen them.
Pastor Jerry Cook of Freedom’s Way Baptist Church in Los Angeles County encouraged his congregation to use the unauthorized ballot box the California GOP delivered to his church, which was removed earlier this week. In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Cook was asked by a parishioner why he agreed to place one of the boxes at the church and encouraged the congregation to use it when it wasn’t an official ballot box.
“The ballot box came from the California GOP. It’s been in the news as of late,” Cook wrote on Tuesday. “The GOP has taken the ‘authorizes’ sticker off and replaced it with Ballot Box. But by this Thursday (per our Secretary of State) the box will be returned.”
Cook did not respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.
Fresno County GOP President Fred Vanderhoof — who had distributed some of the boxes to businesses, including smog testing shops, gun clubs, and camping stores, before collecting them on Monday — said he wasn’t sure how long it would take before the GOP started replacing the unauthorized ballot boxes in Fresno County. A list of the locations of the unauthorized drop boxes was removed from the Fresno County GOP's website earlier this week and has not been replaced.
"We are looking into it,” Vanderhoof told BuzzFeed News. “We have to talk to our attorneys and get some direction on that. It may take one day. It may take several days.”
Vanderhoof said any ballots he collected were returned to the election committee but declined to say specifically where.
In the letter to the attorney general’s office, attorneys for the California Republican Party said the ballots collected in the boxes had been “delivered timely to the appropriate election official as the law commands.”
On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump weighed in on the dispute via Twitter, saying, “See you in court!” He encouraged supporters in New York and Illinois to follow the California GOP’s example.
Supporters of Al Gore and George W. Bush gather in front of the Supreme Court in December, 2000. (photo: Manny Ceneta/Getty)
To Stop an Electoral Coup, Study What Went Wrong in the 2000 Florida Recount
Jane McAlevey, Jacobin
Excerpt: "As the possibility of Donald Trump trying to undemocratically snatch the 2020 presidential election seems increasingly likely, we should look to a previous successful attempt by Republicans to seize the presidency while the Democratic Party all but stood by helplessly: the 2000 election's Florida recount."
Donald Trump has made clear his determination to cling to office regardless of the election result — and there’s no sign from leading Democrats that they’re willing to put up a fight.
There’s a real danger that our country could plunge head first into a new version of Florida 2000, when Al Gore and the Democratic Party leadership handed George W. Bush the presidency by placing its faith in the courts and the legal process — and by refusing to support mass mobilizations demanding that every vote be counted.
As union organizer and strategist Jane McAlevey explains in her 2014 memoir Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, the success of the Republicans’ coup was not inevitable. And it’s not inevitable that they succeed again this November. To that end, Jacobin is reprinting McAlevey’s first-hand account of Florida 2000 and its lessons for today, with permission from Verso Books.
— Eric Blanc
he message hit my pager about midnight. I was watching the 2000 presidential election returns on my neighbor’s TV. (I didn’t own a TV; I hate those things). The men with the weird toupees who feed television “news” to the nation had called Florida for Al Gore. Then for George Bush. That’s when my pager went off: “don’t call DC, don’t call headquarters, get next plane to West Palm Beach airport. immediately. don’t call us. rent car, go to Hilton.”
I had never seen a page quite like that and don’t believe I ever will again. I looked at the pager, then at the TV, where confounded anchors were stammering about Florida, then back at the pager. Then I put the pager down, picked up the phone, and booked the next flight to West Palm Beach. Before the sun was up I was on my way.
The place I was leaving was Stamford, Connecticut, where I was running a pilot organizing project for the AFL-CIO. When you work as national staff for either the AFL-CIO or one of its member unions, you can expect to periodically get “pulled” from whatever merely urgent thing you are doing to some other thing that is actually dire. The practice can be overused by people buried in Washington offices who are convinced that everything on their desk is of utmost importance and who have forgotten how disruptive it is to real organizing of flesh-and-blood workers. But in this case, there wasn’t anything more important anywhere, the presidential election was on the line.
The West Palm Beach Hilton was all hustle and bustle, jacked-up adrenaline, and frayed nerves. All the senior organizers from the AFL-CIO were converging on the place, which became the union command center in the battle for Florida. We were the Special Ops: people who knew how to hit the ground running, how to turn on a dime from one task to another, how to press the pedal to the metal and also how to wait — to “zig and zag,” in organizer shop talk.
The first person I saw there was Kirk Adams, head of the AFL-CIO National Organizing Department.
“Hey, McAlevey, no, I don’t know the assignment yet, don’t talk to me, I am too busy trying to figure it out, be ready to roll when I do.”
West Palm Beach County was the land of the butterfly ballot and the hanging chad. Butterfly ballots were punch card ballots with the candidates and issues displayed on both sides of a single line of numbered voting marks — an arrangement especially liable to misinterpretation by people with poor vision, such as the elderly. Hanging chads were tiny bits of paper that should have fallen out of the ballots when voters punched in their choice of candidate but hadn’t, leaving a trail of ambiguity that could be used to obscure the intent of the voter. Thousands of ballots were being discounted or contested due to this rather archaic paper voting system.
Late in the day our plan took shape. Each of the senior staff would be given a team of organizers, and we would start knocking on doors and collecting affidavits from people who would swear under oath that they had meant to vote for Gore but, confused by the butterfly ballot, had accidentally voted for Bush or Pat Buchanan. Other teams were dispatched to grocery stores, and some were sent to a candlelight “protest” vigil.
I was given a team of twelve organizers, an attorney or two, a van, and a stack of maps indicating our assigned condominium complexes, mostly inhabited by senior citizens, and we raced off to collect affidavits. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
An Unexpected, Unmobilized Outpouring of Rage
From the first complex we hit until we were pulled off the assignment a few days later, it was hard to find an elderly voter who hadn’t screwed up the ballot or didn’t want to make a sworn statement. These places were full of funny, highly educated, cranky New York Jews. I was a New Yorker myself, with a partly Jewish upbringing, and these people felt like home to me. I adored them.
And they were really pissed off, especially the ones who thought they had accidentally voted for Pat Buchanan (“the SS guard,” they called him). There were holocaust survivors, and sons and daughters of holocaust survivors.
What’s more, many of these folks had been union members in the Northeast before retiring. You would knock on their door and it was as if they had been sitting there impatiently wondering when the union would finally show up.
Soon there were long lines in the community rooms, because we hadn’t anticipated such an outpouring. These folks could hardly stand up, there were walkers all around, but no one was leaving until they’d all met the lawyer, told their stories, and filled in the affidavits. And they were ready to do much more than that. Affidavits? Lawyers? Hell, these people were furious.
I reported this every morning and evening at the debrief meetings for lead organizers. “So when can we actually mobilize them, put these wonderful angry senior citizens into the streets and on camera?” I would ask.
But we didn’t do anything of the sort.
Instead, we did the candlelight vigil, which was an awful, badly organized affair, just the kind of event that makes me crazy. First, because it could have been huge, and second, because everyone who came was bored — a good recipe for how to get motivated, angry people to stay home the next time they get a flyer.
But it got worse. Big-shot politicians from across the land were starting to show up, and they all came to the vigil to calm people down. It was a mind-blowing thing to watch. Were these guys idiots, did they want to lose, or what?
Don’t Rock the Titanic
I heard someone from the press mention that Jesse Jackson was coming in two days to do his own rally and march. Hmm. Why hadn’t we heard of that?
Then, later that night, during the regular debriefing on legal updates on the recount and the next day’s assignments, a higher-up said, “Jessie Jackson is coming to do a big march. We won’t be participating in it.”
I thought I had heard him wrong: “Um, sorry, can you repeat that?”
“The Gore campaign has made the decision that this is not the image they want. They don’t want to protest. They don’t want to rock the boat. They don’t want to seem like they don’t have faith in the legal system. And they definitely don’t want to possibly alienate the Jews — you know, it’s Jackson — so we are not mobilizing for it.”
While my heart was sinking my head was exploding. The American electoral process is breaking up like the Titanic and we don’t want to rock the boat?
“I’m sorry, something doesn’t seem quite right here. As the person leading a field team in largely Jewish senior complexes, and, frankly, as someone raised by Jews, I can tell you that we need to take people into the streets. We need to let them express their anger. Republicans are starting to hold little rallies demanding that Democrats not be allowed to ‘steal’ the election. We need to either support this rally or do our own or both.”
I also knew that to turn them out would require some resources, beginning with transportation from each condo complex. Most of these people didn’t drive or didn’t like to drive, which was why they lived in the condos, but that also meant they were generally home where we could find them.
We had an instant mobilization in waiting; we could have 30,000 people in the streets in two days. I knew that the only outfit in Florida with the money, staff and experience to make this happen was organized labor.
What was on the table here was more than a rally. It was a question of what sort of power was going to be brought to bear on a defining national crisis. The Gore people not only wanted to project a nice image, they wanted to be nice. They wanted everyone to go home and hand everything over to something called “the legal process.”
This was ridiculous, because when and how and where this went to court was deeply political. Al Gore himself appeared to actually believe that if he could politely demonstrate that more Floridians had voted for him than for Bush, the “democratic system” would award him the election.
Gore was right in the sense that he had won the state. There were other Democratic Party honchos who were not so naive, but they lived in a world where you deal with these things behind closed doors.
They were completely unprepared for the hyper-charged political street theater exploding in Florida, and couldn’t understand the difference between a narrowly conceived legal strategy and a mass mobilization direct action strategy. They thought there was no difference.
That was the Democratic Party. We were organized labor. We didn’t represent the candidate. We represented thousands of union workers whose votes were being stolen, and millions more who would suffer if the whole damn election was stolen. We knew how to mobilize and we had the resources to do it. We had the Florida voter lists. We had the computers. We had an army of smart people on the ground, ready to go.
And we had a base of literally millions of really angry people. We could have had buses of senior citizens chasing Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state and the Bush campaign’s hatchet woman, all over the state — a Seniors Truth Commission of lovely, smart, appealing, telegenic elders lined up with their walkers outside every single meeting Harris was in and camped outside her house at night while she slept. “Don’t Let the Republicans Steal Votes from Your Grandparents.”
All they needed was a top-notch lead organizer and an experienced field team, a lawyer, a communications team: in short, exactly the big support we had on hand. They could have operated twenty-four/seven, like in a strike. Unions know how to do strikes, don’t they?
That moment, when we could have supported the Jesse Jackson rally and didn’t, could have organized something of our own and didn’t, was the turning point, the moment when the Gore campaign and their unquestioning AFL-CIO cohort snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
And by the way, it wasn’t like I was a big fan of the contemporary Jesse Jackson. But Jackson could turn people out and give a good speech — the same one he’d been giving for thirty years. The fact that our choice was between joining a rally led by Jesse Jackson and not doing anything at all was beyond pathetic.
Oh, well. All that was at stake was an endless war in Afghanistan, an unprovoked war on Iraq, American torture, warrantless wiretapping, eight years of doing nothing on global warming, not to mention a relentless class war against workers and their unions, all building up to a second Great Depression. No big deal.
A Legal Dispute, Not a Political Fight
The rally was the next day. We were prohibited from mobilizing or from showing up in any union identifiable clothing, and we were discouraged from attending at all. Only ten thousand people attended, which was not the momentum we needed (or could have generated).
What made it even worse was that this was the biggest event in the entire debacle of what would always be referred to as “Gore v. Bush” — a legal dispute. All we were there to do was collect affidavits for lawyers.
It was perhaps excusable that Gore’s political team, mired in the limitations of electoral politics, would think like that. But I was with the unions. The working people who go toe-to-toe with the bosses using every tool in the shed: strikes, pickets, boycotts, blockades, sit-ins, workplace actions of all kinds, expressions of international solidarity, and more.
A presidential election was being stolen. General strikes have been called for less.
Karl Rove and the Republicans were not nearly as naive. They were bringing their people into the street in an escalating series of demonstrations. They actually understood what was happening. I remember vainly pointing this out at a nightly debrief, but was reminded, as I was reminded several times a day, that Gore “didn’t want that image.”
Meanwhile, our legal game plan was sputtering along. Enough affidavits and irregularities had been found to trigger what were called “one percent precinct tests” in Palm Beach and soon after in Broward counties. Elections officers would randomly pull a sample of one percent of the ballots. Teams from both the Democratic and Republican parties would review each ballot and challenge the vote if they felt there was evidence that the vote had not been counted as the voter intended. If the number of challenges crossed a certain threshold, the county would move to a full recount.
When it was announced that that Palm Beach County was going to a full recount, half of the labor organizers were sent to Broward County to replicate the affidavit operation we had honed in Palm Beach, and the other half was assigned to be at the Palm Beach tables actually recounting the votes in Palm Beach. I was among the latter.
Most of my colleagues on the first Democratic counting team felt as if they were right at the wellspring of history. But counting ballots by hand was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to mobilize the base.
Naively, for a minute I’d actually believed that we, the national AFL-CIO, might break with the Democratic Party and run our own field operation in Florida. Once I realized how ridiculous that was, that our field operation would have to operate in a vacuum of Democratic Party strategy, and that counting was where the action was, counting I would go.
The Count Begins
We arrived for the first day of counting in Palm Beach to a mob of TV cameras — filming a Republican rally. Angry white men, mostly, and some white women, with flags and placards that said “Gore is a Sore Loser” and “Don’t Let Them Steal the Election.” Their plan was to be as intimidating as possible to those of us walking in to begin the recount, and of course to grab media headlines on their message of Gore stealing the election.
It was like walking the gauntlet of Operation Rescue, the violent anti-choice group that blocks entrances to family planning clinics and harasses the women trying to get in. This was high political theater.
“The whole world is watching” is of course a cliché, but for us it was a true one. We worked in teams: two counters and one observer to a team, two teams to a table. The Democratic counters sat opposite the Republicans, with the observers on either end. The allegedly neutral observer would hold up a ballot which we counters were prohibited from touching.
We were supposed to call out “Gore” or “Bush” or “neither.” Otherwise, there was absolutely no talking in the room, and we had to maintain poker faces.
During the breaks, I tried to size up the opposition. The Bush counters were overwhelmingly young white men with crew cuts. I am blue-eyed and blond, and a crowd of white people is not something that automatically gives me the creeps, but these guys did. The word that came to mind was Aryan. In my mind I was in a world war; these were the friggin’ Nazis. Our side was quite the opposite. New Labor was as much a rainbow then as it is today. On the AFL-CIO’s Democratic team, people who looked like me were a minority.
We didn’t get to talk until lunchtime. Back at the counting tables, as we waited for someone to bring more ballots, out of the blue, the Aryan across from me whipped out a camera and aimed it at me. Didn’t say a word, just snapped my photo.
It took me a minute to realize that the Republicans had had a lunch meeting, too. This picture taking must have been the upshot, because a bunch of them now had small cameras, and when they thought no officials were looking they’d whip them out and start snapping close-ups of us.
At the end of the day — one of those days when you hardly breathe, when you thank God that at some point your body will just take over for you and breathe on its own — the same young Aryan came up to me just outside the counting room and started laughing and pointing with his friends, and taking more photos. I left as quickly as I could for the evening debriefing. Somewhere in the blur of events that night we heard that Broward County was close to winning a recount, too. Miami-Dade still had a long way to go.
The next day the Republican Operation Rescue-esque crowd in front of the counting facility was even bigger. I kept pointing this out to my higher-ups, but really, I had given in to the fact that all we were going to do was count ballots, and thus ultimately we would lose. The whole carnival was surreal enough, but knowing this in my bones added a ghostly sheen to it.
As we walked in to take our seats for day two of the count, I saw the same gaggle of Aryan boys. They were staring, trying to be intimidating, but I ignored them. When I sat down, one at the table behind mine called for my attention, and when I turned he snapped a close-up of my face.
I shot my hand up to get the attention of he Democratic floor leader and said, “This guy needs to stop taking pictures.” But then I stopped protesting. Clearly, the crew-cut gang would do anything they could think of to stop or slow the counting.
We thought Gore had actually won, so we wanted to continue, and they didn’t. This room was the only place in the nation where votes were being hand-counted, and in every stack of cards ballots, Gore was winning. We knew it, and our opponents knew it.
After the lunch break, I noticed that each of the Aryans had a book sticking out of his back pocket. I strained to catch the title: The Christian Militant’s Bible. That night I began to freak out about the whole thing — the stupid Democratic Party, the stupid AFL-CIO, the Aryan cult, the whole package. I was feeling very alone and needed to talk. I called my dear friend Valerie and her boyfriend up in New York City. When I mentioned the Aryans and their weird Bibles, they said James Ridgeway at the Village Voice wrote a lot about the religious Right and promised to get me hooked up with him the next day.
Next, Broward County hit the magic number in the one-percent precinct test, triggering a full recount there too. Miami-Dade County was beginning to look like recount number three. Shit was starting to fly in Florida; it was increasingly obvious that Al Gore had actually won the state, although no one was saying this in public. You knew it if you were on the counting teams, going to evening debrief and reviewing everything you could remember from every hanging chad you had examined that day.
The Republicans clearly understood that if enough ballots were recounted in Florida, Al Gore would be president. We were about one week into counting and three weeks past the election. We’d just had the “no one is going home for Thanksgiving” meeting. Tensions were definitely rising.
Meanwhile, the Republicans were executing all the plays the Democrats should have used. They had rallies every day in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade, angry marches demanding that the “Gore-Loser” team stop trying to “steal the elections.” They had a message, they stayed on it, and they were driving it.
The next morning, James Ridgeway called to inform me that the Christian Militants were indeed a right-wing cult, a sort of softer version of the Aryan Nation. Great. I headed for the recount.
Security was super tight. All the counters had to wear security badges and wait in a holding area until allegedly neutral staff were at their stations on the floor and the cops opened the sealed counting room.
Just before they let us in, the Christian militant who had been taking all the pictures of me got right in my face and said, “We know who you are. You have a horse and your father is retired and lives in upstate New York. Can’t wait to photograph you today.”
You have to remember that this was 2000, that Timothy McVeigh had blown up the Oklahoma Federal Building just five years before. I was rattled, but I put it out of my head and walked to my table.
With Broward and Palm Beach in full recount, our sights were fixed on Miami-Dade County, where, our evening debriefs told us, a 1 percent precinct test would soon begin. The Democrats and Republicans were supposed to each assign a team of two counters to the decisive one-percent precinct test in Miami-Dade. That night I got a call from Joe Alvarez, a Cuban American in the top echelon of the AFL-CIO.
“Jane, we have decided to make you one of our counters for Miami-Dade. Hey, Jane, fucking win it. Check out of your hotel in Palm Beach, get in your car, there’s a room at a hotel in Miami for you. Get there tomorrow and take everything. You are not coming back to Palm Beach, you are going to Miami with me and we are going to win.”
When I got to Miami that night, I felt like I was on steroids. I sat up in the hotel alone, knowing I needed a good night’s sleep and wasn’t going to get it. I turned on the TV and immediately got sick of watching news. Gladiators was on the pay-per-view movie channel. I watched it. I even watched it a few more times while I was stuck in Miami. To this day, Gladiators is the only blood-and-guts action movie I have ever seen.
In the morning we traveled in a van with darkened windows. We turned the corner to the courthouse and there were more TV cameras, more cops and security, and more sheer chaos than I had ever seen. But there was total silence in the counting room, under a bank of who knows how many TV cameras.
It felt like those famous chess tournaments with one little table in a big room, a tense silence, and a crowd behind red ropes staring at your every twitch. We won the 1 percent precinct count test.
The Republicans had clearly never considered counting ballots the be-all and end-all of their strategy, and now they launched the blitzkrieg they had prepared. They were staging actions across Florida, driving the same, well-honed message about the “Gore-Loser ticket stealing the election.” I was spending the first day of the count as a Democratic floor team leader.
As we returned from lunch, the Republicans suddenly launched their coup de grâce. We heard loud shouting and noises outside the counting room, and then a bunch of guys rampaged in, throwing tables and chairs, making it impossible to continue.
Counting was indefinitely suspended. The media could talk of nothing but the “chaos” in Florida. The US Supreme Court stepped in and took the case out of the hands of the Florida court.
The Gore people were flipping out because, guess what, they hadn’t planned it this way. They’d imagined they were involved in a civilized legal proceeding, that they were going to “win the case” methodically by recounting the votes, that the law was going to keep the matter local, away from the Supreme Court where things didn’t look so good.
But oh wait, the Republicans have this whole direct action thing, working in perfect sync with their legal action.
I got another call; I can’t even remember who it was.
“Hey Jane, you get to do what you wanted to all along! We need a big rally in Miami fast, because this legal thing isn’t working.”
“Um, you can’t actually make a big rally happen now. We blew it. Mass mobilizations can’t be turned on and off like that. When we landed in Florida, we could have done it, raised people’s expectations that we could win, built the momentum, the whole bit. Not now, it’s too late, the right wing has the momentum.”
Within hours, the only coup in the history of the United States was complete.
Movement Moments Don’t Last Forever
Once you have been organizing for enough years, and seen enough efforts succeed and fail, you realize that there are “movement moments.”
These happen when large numbers of people are willing to drop what they are doing, forget that the utility bill won’t be paid on time or that they will miss their favorite TV shows or their daughter’s soccer games or their gym session or whatever, forget about how many hours of sleep they think they need every night, and go do some stuff they would never have imagined they could — like facing down cops or bosses or Aryan Republicans carrying The Christian Militants Bible, or talking to TV cameras, or approaching total strangers about their concerns, or rounding up their neighbors to go to an event with something real at stake instead of the weekly bridge game.
People get in this unusual state either because they are truly pissed off and there is no other option, or because for some reason the horizon of what they think they are capable of achieving suddenly expands — or, most likely, a combination of both.
Florida in early November 2000 was a such a moment. People were willing to leave their daily grind and step into history to defend their democracy, on a scale that could be called massive without exaggeration. And what a wonderful and unlikely crazy quilt of people they were.
But movement moments don’t last forever, and it is much easier to snuff them out than to keep them lit. Everything depends on optimism: the optimism organizers call “raised expectations.” And one key to keeping expectations raised is to respect the passions and desires of people who are not full-time organizers and political junkies, who have complicated and overwhelming lives they are trying to hold together, full of obligations they are putting aside for a moment for the sake of a collective goal.
The Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO leadership smothered the movement moment in Florida, snuffed it right out. The state was Gore’s to lose, and the absolute determination with which the labor elite and the Democratic Party leadership crushed their own constituents’ desire to express their political passions cost us the election.
Over the course of a few years, GM Lordstown went from employing 4,500 people to essentially none. (photo: CBS)
'It's All Fake': Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Promises Ring Hollow in Midwest
Michael Sainato, Guardian UK
Sainato writes: "Workers are feeling abandoned and betrayed after promises on the campaign trail to boost factory jobs fell woefully short."
Workers are feeling abandoned and betrayed after promises on the campaign trail to boost factory jobs fell woefully short
didn’t back down from my promises – and I’ve kept every single one,” Donald Trump told the Republican national convention in August as he campaigned for a second term. As the election nears, some of America’s hard-hit manufacturing workers are not convinced.
Shannon Mulcahy of Whitestown, Indiana, voted for Trump in the last election. This time his rival Joe Biden will get her vote. For 18 years she worked at the Rexnord steel bearings plant in Indianapolis before it shut down in 2017, moving operations to Mexico. Mulcahy was one of 300 workers who lost their jobs.
Trump publicly criticized the plant’s closure in 2016 and 2017, blaming the decision on the Obama administration and threatening to increase taxes on products made by companies like Rexnord in retaliation for moving jobs abroad. But in 2018 the company cited $55m in savings from US tax reform in the wake of Trump’s tax cuts in December 2017.
Mulcahy said she feels betrayed by the jobs promises Trump made throughout his 2016 election campaign. Since losing her job, Mulcahy has struggled with depression while trying to find other work. She’s managed to find a new job, though it pays significantly lower than what she was making at the plant.
“There are a lot of plant closings he could have stopped. He talked the talk everyone wanted to hear about saving jobs. I don’t see him saving any jobs,” said Mulcahy. “I think it’s all fake. It’s all a campaign thing. He’s telling people what they want to hear.”
Trump won the 2016 election in part with his promise to keep manufacturing jobs like Mulcahy’s in the US. A promise that helped him win former Democratic voters across the midwest’s manufacturing states.
Those promises have done little to turn around the long-term decline of manufacturing in the US. The US gained roughly 500,000 manufacturing jobs between 2016 and 2019, according to an analysis by the Economics Policy Institute. Trump’s trade wars hurt manufacturing but then came the coronavirus pandemic. Even after adding 66,000 manufacturing jobs in September, the sector is still 647,000 jobs short of where it was in February before the pandemic hit the US.
In the meantime, nearly 1,800 US factories disappeared between 2016 and 2018, including several high-profile plants throughout midwestern swing states that were key to Trump’s election win.
Few people have had such a close view of the decline of manufacturing in the US as Chuck Jones. Jones worked at the Rexnord plant in Indiana for over 40 years, and also served as president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents workers at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, where Trump has repeatedly claimed he saved jobs from being outsourced to Mexico.
Carrier shut down a factory in Huntington, Indiana, in 2017 resulting in the loss of 700 jobs as work moved to Mexico. Several assembly lines at the Indianapolis plant were also sent abroad, resulting in the loss of more than 600 jobs in 2017 and 2018.
Trump blamed Jones personally for Carrier exporting jobs to Mexico.
“We put up a hell of a fight as far as rallies, protests, and trying to get the word out. Trump picked up on it. He kept on mentioning Carrier during his campaign speeches and claiming if he was president, it wouldn’t happen,” said Jones.
“Almost four years into his term, he hasn’t proved at all he brought jobs back. There’s the biggest trade deficit with China in history,” added Jones. “People have to open their eyes up and realize he isn’t what he said he was. He’s had four years to prove it. Why in the hell would anybody vote for him again under those circumstances.”
In Burlington, Iowa, Robert Morrison was forced to take early retirement when the steam turbine factory operated by Siemens where he worked for over 30 years shut down and moved production overseas in January 2019. One hundred and twenty-five workers were laid off due to the closure.
“We reached out to President Trump and sent letters, emails, made phone calls. The White House official response to the email I sent was that this was a state or local matter and there was nothing they could do,” said Morrison. “We were abandoned and betrayed, not only by Siemens, but also by President Trump.”
In Ohio, annual job growth declined from 36,200 jobs in 2016 to 3,700 in 2019. In July 2017, Trump held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, claiming the General Motors jobs in the area were “coming back”, and told his supporters: “Don’t move, don’t sell your house.”
On the day Trump was inaugurated, 20 January 2017, GM cut 2,000 jobs at its Lordstown plant in Ohio. The next year General Motors announced it would shut down its Lordstown plant for good as part of a plan to cut another 14,000 jobs in the US. The news came even as GM received a tax windfall of $157m in the first three months of 2018 due to Trump’s tax cuts, which Trump and the company had praised as a job creator.
“Promises were made, promises were broken,” said Timothy O’Hara, a former UAW Local 1112 president and retired GM worker who worked at the plant for 41 years. “I ended up selling my house and moved to Kentucky. It was ironic that was what Trump said not to do, hundreds of members of UAW Local 1112 members who worked at the GM plant ended up having to do it because they moved all across the country to keep working with General Motors.”
In September 2020, during a campaign stop in Lordstown, Ohio, Trump falsely claimed the area’s economy was “booming”. Lordstown Motors, which bought the plant and is producing electric truck vehicles, is slowly rolling out job opportunities with plans to employ 500 workers by the end of 2020. GM’s Lordstown plant employed 4,500 people in 2017.
“They can talk about how it’s going to be something good for the Mahoning Valley, to the little extent it will be, but it won’t be the same as the jobs lost when GM closed that facility,” added O’Hara.
Chuckie Denison took early retirement when the Lordstown plant shut down, the third plant closure he experienced while working at General Motors for 20 years.
His fiancee, Cheryl, relocated to Tennessee to continue working for General Motors while Denison is currently trying to sell their house in Lordstown.
“My family is still split up,” said Denison. “So far Trump has done nothing but lie to the people around the midwest, the US, and the entire world about Lordstown.”
Shtayyeh's comments reflected the sense of desperation on the Palestinian side after a series of U.S. moves that have left them weakened and isolated. (photo: Reuters)
'God Help Us' if Trump Wins Re-Election, Palestinian PM Says
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has said a Donald Trump victory in the upcoming presidential elections in the United States will be disastrous for his people - and the world at large."
Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh says it will be disastrous for his people and the world US president is re-elected next month.
alestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has said a Donald Trump victory in the upcoming presidential elections in the United States will be disastrous for his people – and the world at large.
In comments made during a meeting with European legislators on Tuesday, Shtayyeh said the last four years of the Trump administration have greatly harmed the Palestinians.
“If we are going to live another four years with President Trump, God help us, God help you and God help the whole world,” the prime minister said, repeating comments he made a day earlier in a virtual address to the European Parliament. The comments were also posted on his Facebook page.
“If things are going to change in the United States, I think this will reflect itself directly on the Palestinian-Israeli relationship,” Shtayyeh said, referring to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden winning the November 3 polls. “And it will reflect itself also on the bilateral Palestinian-American relationship.”
Trump and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Palestinians have traditionally refrained from taking an explicit public position in US presidential elections.
Shtayyeh’s comments reflected a sense of desperation on the Palestinian side after a series of controversial moves by Washington, including the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and the subsequent relocation of the embassy there. At the time, Palestinian leaders, who see occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, said the US was no longer an honest broker in negotiations.
Following that, the US closed down the Palestinian Liberation Organization mission offices in Washington in response to the Palestinian Authority’s refusal to enter into US-led talks with Israel.
Trump also cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid to the Palestinians, and earlier this year issued a so-called “Middle East plan” that was outright rejected by the Palestinians as too favourable towards the US’s staunch ally, Israel.
It envisions the Israeli annexation of large swaths of the occupied West Bank including illegal Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley, giving Israel a permanent eastern border along the Jordan River.
The Trump administration has also said it no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal, reversing decades of US policy – a move condemned by Palestinians and rights groups.
More recently, Trump’s administration has also persuaded two Arab Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel and pushed other Arab nations to follow suit.
The deals announced in August were slammed by the Palestinians as grave betrayals by the Arab states, further undermining their efforts to achieve self-determination. They also undercut the traditional Arab consensus that recognition of Israel only come in return for an independent Palestinian state.
For now, the majority of Arab states say they remain committed to the Arab Peace Initiative – which calls for Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Palestinian territories occupied after 1967 in exchange for peace and the full establishment of relations.
A staff member of Tokyo Electric Power Company measures radiation levels around the storage tanks of radiation-contaminated water at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima prefecture. (photo: AFP)
Reports: Japan to Release Fukushima's Contaminated Water Into Sea
Yuka Obayashi and Kaori Kaneko, Reuters
Excerpt: "Nearly a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan's government has decided to release over one million tonnes of contaminated water into the sea, media reports said on Friday, with a formal announcement expected to be made later this month."
The decision is expected to rankle neighbouring countries like South Korea, which has already stepped up radiation tests of food from Japan, and further devastate the fishing industry in Fukushima that has battled against such a move for years.
The disposal of contaminated water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has been a longstanding problem for Japan as it proceeds with an decades-long decommissioning project. Nearly 1.2 million tonnes of contaminated water are currently stored in huge tanks at the facility.
The plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc <9501.T>, suffered multiple nuclear meltdowns after a 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
On Friday, Japan's industry minister Hiroshi Kajiyama said no decision had been made on the disposal of the water yet, but the government aims to make one quickly.
"To prevent any delays in the decommissioning process, we need to make a decision quickly," he told a news conference.
He did not give any further details, including a time-frame.
The Asahi newspaper reported that any such release is expected to take at around two years to prepare, as the site's irradiated water first needs to pass through a filtration process before it can be further diluted with seawater and finally released into the ocean.
In 2018, Tokyo Electric apologised after admitting its filtration systems had not removed all dangerous material from the water, collected from the cooling pipes used to keep fuel cores from melting when the plant was crippled.
It has said it plans to remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that is hard to separate and is considered to be relatively harmless.
It is common practice for nuclear plants around the world to release water that contain traces of tritium into the ocean.
In April, a team sent by the International Atomic Energy Agency to review contaminated water issues at the Fukushima site said the options for water disposal outlined by an advisory committee in Japan - vapour release and discharges to the sea – were both technically feasible. The IAEA said both options were used by operating nuclear plants.
Last week, Japanese fish industry representatives urged the government to not allow the release of contaminated water from the Fukushima plant into the sea, saying it would undo years of work to restore their reputation.
South Korea has retained a ban on imports of seafood from the Fukushima region that was imposed after the nuclear disaster and summoned a senior Japanese embassy official last year to explain how Tokyo planned to deal with the Fukushima water problem.
During Tokyo's bid to host the Olympic Games in 2013, then-prime minister Shinzo Abe told members of the International Olympic Committee that the Fukushima facility was "under control".
The Games have been delayed to 2021 because of the pandemic and some events are due to be held as close as 60 km (35 miles) from the wrecked plant.
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