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Jesse Jackson | Senate Runoffs in Georgia Offer a Clear Choice
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "The races will be determined by whether Georgia's voters choose to embrace and build a New South coalition or revert to the Old South."
n Jan. 5, Georgia will hold a run-off election for both of its Senate seats. The races capture national attention because control of the Senate is at stake. If the two Democratic challengers, Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. both win, the Senate will be effectively split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. If one or both lose, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell will retain his ability to obstruct the incoming president.
The races will be determined by whether Georgia’s voters choose to embrace and build a New South coalition or revert to the Old South. Georgia has been changing ever since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The civil rights movement was anchored in Georgia, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, the pastor at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Julian Bond and John Lewis, historic leaders of that movement, also came from Atlanta.
After the civil rights movement transformed our laws, Georgia began to change. Major businesses like CNN located in Atlanta, the city “too busy to hate.” Professional football and baseball teams could thrive, once their teams were integrated. Blacks and whites played together in college sports like football, with fans divided by the color of the jerseys, not the color of the players’ skin.
In recent years, Georgia has grown in population, in diversity and in sophistication. Blacks, Latinos and Asians grew in number. The college educated flocked to the Atlanta suburbs. This year, for the first time since 1992, a Democrat, Joe Biden, won the state in the presidential campaign, by a margin of less than 15,000 votes.
Biden’s victory was a fusion victory. African American registration soared, in significant part due to the work of Stacy Abrams who most thought lost the 2018 governor’s race only because of brazen voter suppression. The young, single women, the college educated, Latinos all joined in Biden’s winning coalition. They had to brave long lines and overcome Georgia’s notorious efforts to suppress their votes. Over 4.9 million voted, a new record, with 4 million voting early.
Now the choice facing Georgia is stark: between the sitting Republican senators peddling racial fears and yesterday and the Democratic challengers representing hope and tomorrow.
Both Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are multimillionaires. (Loeffler is the wealthiest politician in Washington.) Both were caught moving large stock transactions in the wake of secret briefings on the pandemic. Both support Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Both oppose expanding Medicaid. Loeffler described herself in her ads as “to the right of Attila the Hun.” She touted her endorsement by Q-Anon believer running for the Congress. She was denounced as a “greedy insider” seeking to “profit off the pandemic” by her Republican opponent in the primaries.
Loeffler is challenged by Reverend Raphael Warnock, the distinguished pastor at Dr. King’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He favors common sense in dealing with the pandemic, and bold action to put people back to work. He calls for defending the Affordable Care Act and its protections of pre-existing conditions and seeks to add a public option that will help lower prices and provide real choices. He’d vote to raise the minimum wage, to pass the rescue plan vital to workers in the pandemic, and to invest in rebuilding America.
Millions will be poured into these two run-offs. Neither Perdue nor Loeffler is popular, so both will feature negative ads designed to drive up doubts about their opponents. Loeffler has already sunk a million dollars into two attack ads labeling Warnock as “anti-American” and part of the “radical left.” Perdue has charged his opponent, Jon Ossoff, with everything from being a socialist to being a pawn of the Chinese communists.
They are following the playbook of Donald Trump: sow fear, feed racial divisions, and distract workers from the reality that they and the Republicans in the Senate stand in the way of making this economy work for working people. Or as Rev. Warnock summarized, “If you don’t really have an agenda for working families, I guess you have to distract working families.”
Despite all the mud, Georgians will have a clear choice. Will they respond to those sowing fear or those raising hopes? Will they side with those seeking to divide us or those seeking to bring us together? Will they support those who would revert back to the Old South or those who would continue its progress into the New South? The vote on Jan. 5 will tell us much about Georgia, about the New South, and about America’s ability to deal with the crises we face.
Jonathan Pollard. (photo: Getty Images)
Jonathan Pollard, Who Sold Cold War Secrets to Israel, Completes Parole
Matthew S. Schwartz, NPR
Schwartz writes: "One of the most prolific spies in modern American history, who delivered hundreds of classified American documents to Israeli intelligence during the waning years of the Cold War, is now a free man."
READ MORE
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
A Republican Judge Just Tore Into Trump's Election Lawyers for Their Incompetence
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "Trump's lawyers asked a judge to disenfranchise nearly 7 million voters. It ended badly for Trump."
ast Tuesday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared in federal court for the first time in 30 years, representing the Trump campaign in its efforts to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in that state.
It was a disaster for Giuliani. The one-time mayor and senior federal prosecutor struggled to articulate what, exactly, was the basis of Trump’s legal claims. And he admitted that he was unfamiliar with basic legal terms such as “strict scrutiny,” one of the rudimentary vocabulary terms taught to every law student during their introduction to constitutional law.
On Saturday evening, Judge Matthew Brann released his opinion in this suit, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, and the judge did not pull punches. Brann didn’t just reject the Trump campaign’s legal arguments, he mocked the campaign for its inability to present a coherent argument — or to provide any legal support whatsoever for crucial elements on their claims.
Referring to the Trump campaign’s primary legal argument, Brann writes that “this claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent.” And that’s just one of many scathing lines from a judge who is clearly frustrated with the incompetent lawyering on display in his courtroom.
It’s worth noting that, while Brann was appointed to the federal bench by Democratic President Barack Obama, the judge held multiple leadership positions within the Republican Party. Obama frequently had to strike deals with Republican senators to appoint GOP judges, in order to prevent those senators from blocking Obama’s other nominees.
Indeed, one person who appears particularly impressed with Brann’s conservative street cred is Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), who released a statement shortly after Brann’s decision was handed down congratulating President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. “With today’s decision by Judge Matthew Brann, a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist, to dismiss the Trump campaign’s lawsuit,” Toomey said in his statement, “President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania.”
Trump could potentially appeal Brann’s decision, and claims that he will. But, given the weakness of his campaign’s arguments, which Brann repeatedly points out, such an appeal is unlikely to prevail.
Trump wanted to disenfranchise millions of voters
The Trump campaign’s main argument challenges an email that Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar sent to county-level voting officials, encouraging those officials to “provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected,” so that those voters can be notified that they made an error while submitting those ballots, and will have the opportunity to cure that error.
As it turns out, not all counties took this advice. The Trump campaign claims that Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, notified voters that they needed to cure errors in their absentee ballots, while county officials in Republican-leaning counties did not. Thus, the campaign claims, absentee ballots cast in Biden-friendly Philadelphia were more likely to be counted than ballots cast in more Trump-friendly regions of the state — and this discrepancy amounts to unconstitutional discrimination.
But the campaign seeks an extreme remedy for this alleged violation: It asked Judge Brann to forbid the state from certifying the results of its 2020 election. Because some small number of Trump voters allegedly had a harder time voting than some Biden voters, the Trump campaign effectively asks Brann to disenfranchise the entire state of Pennsylvania —something Brann explicitly refuses to do.
As Brann writes, “Prohibiting certification of the election results would not reinstate the Individual Plaintiffs’ right to vote. It would simply deny more than 6.8 million people their right to vote.”
If the Trump campaign were correct that Pennsylvania violated the Constitution by only notifying some voters of the need to cure errors in their absentee ballots, then the proper remedy is to give all voters who needed to cure their ballots an opportunity to do so. It’s not to disenfranchise millions. “The answer to invalidated ballots,” Brann writes, “is not to invalidate millions more.”
Brann’s opinion repeatedly slams Trump’s lawyers for incompetence
Judicial opinions are typically staid documents that avoid direct criticism of legal advocates — both as a professional courtesy and because judges typically want to avoid giving the impression that their disregard for a particular lawyer may have influenced their decision. But Judge Brann clearly believes that Trump’s lawyers behaved egregiously in his courtroom, and that this conduct is worth noting repeatedly in his opinion.
Early in his opinion, Brann summarizes the lawsuit in ten damning words: “Plaintiffs ask this Court to disenfranchise almost seven million voters.” The mere fact that Trump’s lawyers would even request such as thing is audacious. As Brann notes, “this Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated.”
And yet, Trump’s lawyers did not come to court with any evidence or legal authorities that could justify such a result. “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption,” Brann writes. But “that has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”
Brann also spends an entire section of his opinion describing the game of musical chairs that Trump’s lawyers appeared to play while they were actively litigating the Boockvar case. “Plaintiffs have made multiple attempts at amending the pleadings, and have had attorneys both appear and withdraw in a matter of seventy-two hours,” he writes. On the eve of oral argument, Trump attempted to replace his entire legal team. Giuliani was added to the team on the same day as the hearing where the former New York City mayor appeared unfamiliar with basic aspects of the case.
At other points in his opinion, Brann calls out the Trump legal team’s inability to explain essential parts of their legal argument. In order to bring a case in federal court, for example, a plaintiff must show that they were injured in some way by the defendant — a requirement known as “standing.” Yet, as Brann writes, “the standing inquiry as to the Trump Campaign is particularly nebulous because neither in the [campaign’s amended complaint] nor in its briefing does the Trump Campaign clearly assert what its alleged injury is.”
That led Judge Brann to “embark on an extensive project of examining almost every case cited to by Plaintiffs to piece together the theory of standing as to this Plaintiff – the Trump Campaign.”
Thus, despite the harsh rhetoric in his opinion, Brann was extraordinarily generous to the Trump campaign and its lawyers. Rather than simply taking the incompetent arguments that were presented to him and rejecting them out of hand, the judge took the time to construct a coherent version of Trump’s arguments — and then he rejected that better version.
I could continue to beat this horse, but it’s already dead. Election law professor Rick Hasen said of Giuliani’s appearance in Brann’s courtroom, “I’ve never seen worse lawyering in an election law case in my life.” And Brann’s opinion makes it clear just how bad the Trump campaign’s lawyering was.
An inmate from El Paso county detention facility prepares to load bodies into a refrigerated temporary morgue in Texas on 16 November. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
El Paso Inmates Help Move Bodies Into Morgues as Covid Deaths Soar
Trisha Garcia, Guardian UK
Garcia writes: "In footage which spread rapidly on social media, nine inmates wearing the striped jumpers of the El Paso county jail helped move bodies into mobile morgues."
Use of inmates ‘temporary’ until Texas national guard able to help, said sheriff’s office, as facilities in area overwhelmed
n footage which spread rapidly on social media, nine inmates wearing the striped jumpers of the El Paso county jail helped move bodies into mobile morgues.
“Having to use inmates tells the story of how short-handed we must be,” El Paso county judge Ricardo Samaniego told local media, as he struggled to cope with the rising tide of Covid-19 in the west Texas city on the border with Mexico.
The sheriff’s office said the use of the inmates began on 9 November, on a volunteer basis. El Paso county said the inmates were tested and provided with personal protective equipment by the medical examiner’s office, and would face a two-week quarantine once the program was over. They were being paid $2 an hour.
“It was just a temporary focus, and we’re waiting for the Texas national guard to help us out with that,” said Samaniego, in response to outcry on social media over the use of inmates rather than trained medical professionals.
A spokeswoman for the El Paso county sheriff’s office told the Guardian the inmates’ work would “end when the national guard arrives”. Samaniego, however, wasn’t sure those troops were coming.
“It has not been confirmed that they would be able to take over the demand that we have at this time,” he said.
The El Paso county public health department has confirmed more than 800 deaths since March. Another 400 are under investigation. El Paso has called in more mobile morgues in recent days, up from six to 10.
Authorities in El Paso fear a dire situation could get much worse. Facilities are overwhelmed: 1,100 people are hospitalized with Covid-19.
In an emotional, nearly hour-long video on Facebook, Lawanna Rivers, a nurse who came to Texas to help, described the dire situation.
“The only way that those patients was coming out of that pit was in a body bag,” she said, referring to the the Covid unit where she was woking. “I am not OK from an emotional mental standpoint.”
Rivers claimed intensive care treatment at University medical center (UMC) was not aggressive enough to save lives.
“This hospital’s policy was they only get three rounds of CPR, which was only six minutes, this out of all the codes we had – there is not a single patient that made it,” Rivers said.
El Paso was her fifth assignment during the pandemic. Close to tears, she said working there had left her more “emotionally scarred” than working in New York, which was the world’s worst hotspot for infections in early spring.
In a statement, UMC said: “After watching the video, while we cannot fully verify the events expressed, we empathize and sympathize with the difficult, physical and emotional toll that this pandemic takes on thousands of healthcare workers here and throughout our country.
“This particular travel nurse was at UMC briefly to help El Paso confront the surge of Covid-19 patients.”
Rivers chose to leave her assignment early and return home to her family.
Behind the numbers lie thousands of names. Jojo Sanchez was one. A 74-year-old former emergency medical technician who became an emergency room technician, he lost his battle with Covid-19 on 12 November at Del Sol medical center, where he had helped so many.
“He watched so many of us grow up and he had a shoebox of photos from people that worked there from way back,” said Barbara Yoon, a co-worker. “He was everyone’s grandfather.”
Sanchez battled Covid-19 for three weeks. His family was not allowed to visit. His friends from the ER stopped by frequently, so he wasn’t alone.
“It is a bittersweet ending to a man that was truly loved,” Yoon said.
It is not known if Sanchez contracted Covid-19 while working in the ER. His wife and granddaughter also tested positive. After a brief stint in hospital, his wife is recovering at home. His granddaughter experienced mild symptoms.
UMC is just a few miles from the state’s border with New Mexico, where the governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, has reimplemented a stay-at-home order. New Mexico has seen just over 70,000 cases since the pandemic began. El Paso county alone has recorded about 7,000 more than that.
Samaniego recently issued a stay-at-home order. It was quickly challenged by the mayor, Dee Margo, who appealed to the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. The attorney general ruled the shutdown illegal, only for it to be confirmed in state court, then overturned again on appeal. El Pasoans were left confused.
“There were businesses that shut down while others remained open,” said Debbie Mendez, an El Paso mother. “If there is no stability with city officials, the citizens of El Paso will basically do whatever they want and Covid cases will continue to rise.”
One west El Paso gym was among businesses which decided to stay open, even after the state court ruled Samaniego’s stay-at-home order could be enforced by police. In a statement accompanying a fundraising account, the owners of Sun City Athletics claimed to have received two warnings and two citations. Citations are up to $500 each. The GoFundMe amassed more than $4,000 in less than two days. After the appeals court struck down the order, the gym said it would refund all donations.
El Paso is faring much worse than Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, the four largest cities in Texas. They have a combined 34,391 active cases among 10.6 million residents. On Wednesday this week, El Paso reported 34,819 active cases among its 840,000 residents.
About 83% of the population of El Paso is Hispanic, a significant amount living in multi-generational households. According to data provided by the public health department, 93% of roughly 77,000 people who have tested positive since March are Hispanic.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that Latinos are nearly twice as likely to develop diabetes as white Americans. According to the El Paso health department, diabetes and hypertension are two of the leading underlying conditions present in residents who have tested positive for Covid-19. In El Paso, patients with underlying conditions make up 97% of the death toll.
Sharing the tip of west Texas with the Fort Bliss army base, El Paso is also home to a significant military population. According to the Department of Defense, the base cannot release Covid case numbers due to national security.
But signs point to the outbreak affecting military families. Fort Bliss has announced new guidelines for those on post, including a 10ft social distancing guideline, not 6ft as suggested by the CDC. Furthermore, a second outbreak since March was recently reported at the Ambrosio Guillen Texas State Veterans Home (AGVH), in north-east El Paso.
Two veterans from the home have recently died. One was a famed El Paso author, Leon Metz. The other was Otis Ramey, a beloved husband, father and grandfather. According to Ramey’s granddaughter, the two men were roommates.
The pandemic has halted funerals with military honors.
And at funeral homes across El Paso, social distancing and capacity limits apply. But as the mobile morgues fill up, some families are experiencing a four-week delay before they can even bury their loved ones.
Election personnel count ballots in Atlanta. (photo: Audra Melton/NYT)
Trump Campaign Requests Recount of Hand-Recounted Results in Georgia, Which Is Unlikely to Change Outcome
Michelle Ye Hee Lee, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The Trump campaign on Saturday requested a formal recount of the 5 million presidential votes in Georgia in an apparent effort to exhaust its options for challenging the result in a state that narrowly backed President-elect Joe Biden."
Biden’s victory in Georgia was certified Friday by the secretary of state and governor after a painstaking audit that involved a manual hand recount. It found no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities that would change the outcome of the race. But because Biden’s margin of victory was less than 0.5 percent of votes cast, the losing candidate can request a recount of the results under state law.
Election officials are now set to rescan the ballots that they reviewed during the hand recount. The rescanning of ballots through counting machines will probably take less time than the week-long audit, which was the largest of its kind in U.S. history in terms of ballots manually recounted. Officials across the state had anticipated Trump’s request and have been preparing equipment and staff to respond accordingly.
But the machine recount will probably, in some ways, pose greater logistical and financial challenges to county election officials, who have been laboring virtually nonstop since the Nov. 3 election amid challenging circumstances such as the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, local and state elections officials are busy preparing for upcoming special elections, including the two U.S. Senate runoff elections in January.
Georgia state law does not require the campaign to pay for the recount, meaning the state’s taxpayers are set to finance the recount for the second time.
“Today, the Trump campaign filed a petition for recount in Georgia,” the Trump campaign said in a statement released Saturday night. “We are focused on ensuring that every aspect of Georgia State Law and the U.S. Constitution are followed so that every legal vote is counted.”
The Trump campaign said it continues to “insist on an honest recount in Georgia, which has to include signature matching and other vital safeguards,” and it again alleged, without evidence, that “illegal ballots” were counted.
But the signatures for mail ballots in Georgia have already been verified twice to ensure that each voter only voted once, according to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has fiercely rejected claims from Trump and other Georgia Republicans questioning the integrity of the election in his state.
A City of Tulsa employee power-washes a Black Lives Matter mural that protesters painted in front of City Hall. (photo: Ian Maule/Tulsa World/AP)
The Defacement and Destruction of Black Lives Matter Murals
Victor Luckerson, The New Yorker
Luckerson writes: "In Tulsa and other U.S. cities, street art that served as a summer rallying cry is now under threat from vandals, pro-police groups, and local governments."
n a recent Saturday in downtown Tulsa, beneath the glittering glass windows of City Hall, about a dozen people descended on Second Street with blue tarps, black clothes, and a very familiar shade of yellow paint. The tarps served as stencils, outlining three large block letters on the street as they were unfurled. A woman in the group carried a white bucket toward the first letter and dolloped splashes of yellow across the dark asphalt. Behind her, a team wielding rollers smoothed the paint into a legible font. As the second letter began to take shape, a siren pierced the air, and a large white pickup truck, emblazoned with the logo of the Tulsa Police Department, zoomed toward the group. It was followed by a police cruiser—and then another. “This is an unlawful assembly,” a speaker on the truck boomed. “If you do not clear the street now, you’re going to be arrested.”
A half-dozen police officers suddenly arrived, approaching the protesters as they finished the third letter and began peeling away the tarps. The officers formed a phalanx in a crosswalk, blocking off the street. Behind them, a group of about ten white men armed with rifles and bulletproof vests appeared, as if summoned. The men, apparently members of an out-of-town militia, stood by in silence. Many of them wore bandannas that obscured their faces, and they told demonstrators who questioned their presence that they were on hand to “keep the peace.” The police focussed on the people armed with paint, not the ones armed with guns. As a familiar chant from the roiling summer protests—“Whose streets?” “Our streets!”—briefly drowned out the officers’ commands, the protesters completed a mural that spelled out “BLM” in bright-yellow letters.
It was Tulsa’s second large-scale Black Lives Matter mural but the first to warrant an immediate crackdown by the Tulsa Police Department and an armed militia. Three people were arrested on the scene, and officers quickly began searching for more suspects. Mayor G. T. Bynum, who had praised the original street art as a “beautiful mural” with an important message, quickly issued a statement: “Vandalism of public property is not a peaceful protest. It is a criminal act.”
Since the killing of George Floyd, in May, many cities have embraced Black Lives Matter murals as a symbol of their commitment to racial justice. Tulsa was informally among them, with an unauthorized but widely celebrated mural painted on its historic Greenwood Avenue. But a national backlash this fall, galvanized in part by the fractious political climate surrounding the 2020 election, has spread rapidly. And Tulsa—not entirely on purpose but now with undeniable conviction—has leapt to the forefront of the effort. “The police department knows that the city and the political establishment have its back,” Jess Eddy, one of the people arrested at the City Hall protest, told me. “And so they feel emboldened to crack down.”
The Black Lives Matter murals that now adorn streets in more than seventy U.S. cities emerged not as a form of protest but as a form of government P.R. In Washington, D.C., the first rendition of the famous yellow letters was painted by the District of Columbia Department of Public Works, under the direction of Mayor Muriel Bowser. The mural design quickly spread to cities in deep-blue states, like Sacramento, California, and deep-red ones, like Birmingham, Alabama, where local officials blessed the projects. In Tulsa, the creation of a Black Lives Matter mural took on increased urgency after President Donald Trump announced that he would hold his first campaign rally since the onset of the pandemic here, during the weekend of Juneteenth. The city government, expecting large-scale protests against Trump, seemed unlikely to permit any message that could be construed as political.
The day before Trump’s arrival, about fifty artists painted a street mural without city approval, writing “Black Lives Matter” across Tulsa’s Greenwood Avenue in the pre-dawn hours of Juneteenth. The choice of location carried historical resonance. In 1921, Greenwood Avenue was the epicenter of Black wealth in Tulsa; it was also the staging ground for a violent massacre in which white mobs destroyed more than twelve hundred homes and businesses in the neighborhood and killed as many as three hundred people. In October, an unmarked mass grave that held eleven coffins was found in a local cemetery during a search for victims. Today, a single block of Greenwood remains occupied by local Black entrepreneurs, some of whom can trace their heritage back to the massacre.
Seeing a message of solidarity at such a tumultuous moment excited many neighborhood business owners and residents. “I was happy to see it,” Tori Tyson, who has owned Blow Out Hair Studio on Greenwood Avenue for fourteen years, told me. “It brought young people, old people, Black kids, white kids, different people together, and they had a conversation.” The mural became a community attraction, a site for high-school graduation photos and snapshots with newborn children. On June 20th, people danced atop the letters during an impromptu block party, shortly after the President left the city. An aerial shot of the mural appeared on the home page of the Times’ Web site and on countless social-media feeds. “It’s kind of like a badge of honor,” Nehemiah Frank, the editor-in-chief of a local news outlet called the Black Wall Street Times, said. “To leave the mural there says that we recognize, as a city, that Black lives have not always mattered to the Tulsa government, but today we’re gonna change that narrative.”
Even as the murals spread to more and more cities, though, a variety of rhetorical and legal attacks were levelled against them. On July 1st, President Trump called Black Lives Matter murals “a symbol of hate,” after the city of New York placed one in front of Trump Tower. Later that month, Bob Jack, the chair of the Tulsa County Republican Party, told the Tulsa World that he wanted to paint a “Back the Blue” mural just south of where the President had held his rally. Jack wrote a letter to city officials asking whether such a mural would be permitted. Members of a pro-police Facebook group called Back the Blue Tulsa brought similar questions to a local city councillor. The gambit seemed less focussed on expanding freedom of expression than restricting the expression that was happening in Greenwood.
The conservative outcry was effective. Within weeks of the Republican protests, Mayor Bynum scheduled the mural removal for August 3rd. That morning, road crews were greeted by a sea of cardboard boxes installed on the street by protesters. They represented the tombstones of Black people who had died at the hands of state-sanctioned violence, from 1921 massacre victims to Terence Crutcher, an unarmed man who was killed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016. Jess Eddy, a co-founder of Whites Against Racism, a group that tries to engage white allies in the fight for racial justice, slept beside the mural overnight as a volunteer watchman. “Whenever Black bodies come into an encounter with police, there’s an increased chance of violence,” he told me. “Therefore, as a white man, I have a responsibility to be in between that.” On that day, the mural stayed.
The matter was not settled, though. After efforts to convert the street to private ownership failed, it ultimately fell on city officials to decide whether to keep the mural. The most straightforward solution would have been to adopt it as a form of government speech, explicitly endorsing its message. Here, there was precedent. In Washington, D.C., a conservative legal-advocacy group had argued that the city violated its First Amendment rights when the organization was not allowed to paint a competing mural (“Because No One Is Above the Law!”) on city streets. City attorneys argued that the Black Lives Matter mural was a government message, not a public forum. When activists added “= Defund the Police” to the mural in a similar font, the city argued that this had also been accepted as government speech, comparing it to a donated art installation. (The case is pending in U.S. District Court.)
Most councillors in Tulsa rejected that idea. “It was illegally put on the road by an activist,” Connie Dodson said at a public-works committee meeting in August. “If we adopt that as government speech, we’re adopting that criminal offense.” Two councillors who supported the mural, Vanessa Hall-Harper and Kara Joy McKee, proposed removing it next spring, when a repaving of Greenwood Avenue was already planned. Other councillors insisted that the removal happen immediately. “Time is of essence for me and for many of my constituents,” Phil Lakin, a council member who represents a district on the southernmost edge of Tulsa, more than ten miles from the mural, said. The council recommended that the repaving of a single block of Greenwood Avenue be moved up by five months, to October. However, the responsibility for directing crews to start removing the mural ultimately fell to Mayor Bynum. “You cannot tell one group we’re not allowing public messages to be displayed on city streets,” Bynum told me in an interview, “but I’m going to look the other way while this other one was on this street and just allow it to be there.”
When Tori Tyson arrived at her hair salon before dawn on October 5th, wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt imprinted with the American flag, she expected to see the mural one last time. But the work crews had begun grinding up the pavement at 4:15 a.m. By the time she unlocked the door to her salon, the entire street had already been pulverized, the words Black Lives Matter ground into yellow-specked gravel and poured into a dump truck. Tyson stood outside her front window and watched as Tulsa became the first major city in the U.S. to remove a Black Lives Matter mural. “I was not surprised in Tulsa but hurt, because the world is watching us,” she told me later. “It’s embarrassing.”
Despite the mayor’s insistence on objectivity, Tulsa’s handling of murals has hardly been impartial. In August, as the city council deliberated on whether to remove the Greenwood Avenue mural, someone painted a thin blue line clean across its bright yellow letters. Police made no effort to investigate the vandalism. Later, after someone spray-painted “BLM” in yellow paint on the spot where the mural had existed, police officers questioned area business owners and the city parked a security van on the street for round-the-clock surveillance. (A Tulsa Police Department spokeswoman denied that officers investigated the incident, but multiple entrepreneurs on the street said, and video footage from a local news station indicates, that they did.) Bynum told me that the police department regularly investigates attacks on “lawful murals,” and noted that the one on Greenwood was illegal. However, after a legal Black Lives Matter mural painted on a local building was repeatedly vandalized this fall, and the owner of the property filed a police report, the department failed to assign an officer to the case for more than a month.
Vandalism has been a problem for Black Lives Matter murals not only in Tulsa but across the nation. In Ithaca, New York, a mural was doused in black paint, on October 4th. In Pittsburgh, in late September, two men shot paintballs at a downtown Black Lives Matter mural, while one of them wore a Trump hat and a sweatshirt with a Confederate-flag design. At the University of North Carolina, Asheville, e-mails threatened violence if the college’s mural was not removed, prompting a campus lockdown. A street mural painted in East Nashville on October 17th was marred by burnout tire tracks the next day.
In some of these communities, police tried to identify and arrest the murals’ vandals; in Tulsa, officers portrayed Black Lives Matter, both the message and the movement, as a threat. On the Saturday when protesters painted the mural in front of City Hall, a separate march in support of law enforcement was held nearby. Several officers participated, including Wendell Franklin, the Tulsa chief of police, and Chris Witt, a lieutenant on the force. At the start of that rally, Witt warned pro-police demonstrators that Black Lives Matter protesters might try to approach them in the street. “I need you not to panic—don’t run,” he said. “These officers are going to come up to form a line in front of you to protect you.”
When the pro-police demonstrators marched near the Black Lives Matter protest, though, the protesters applauded them and their right to peaceably assemble. Frank, the editor of the Black Wall Street Times, who helped organize the protest, encouraged the applause. Later, when some B.L.M. protesters began an anti-police chant, after the mural was painted, Frank cut them off with his megaphone. He said that, despite the day’s optics, he wanted to avoid a dichotomy between pro-police and anti-police protesters. “I don’t want people to think that the police are the ones that are the targets,” he told me. “The target is ending systemic racism and eradicating white-supremacist ideas from the American culture.”
Since the painting of the Black Lives Matter mural in front of City Hall, the city’s practice of selective enforcement has intensified. During the City Hall protest, Jess Eddy, the Whites Against Racism founder, was immediately arrested for breach of the peace, after officers said that he refused to leave the street. When police spotted a woman several blocks away with yellow paint on her clothes, they chased her down and arrested her. She now faces felony charges for malicious injury to property, a crime punishable by up to thirty days in jail. The Tulsa Police Department put a photo on Facebook of four masked people painting the street, asking followers to contact Crime Stoppers with information. The Tulsa County district attorney has declined to pursue state charges, saying that his office’s resources are better used targeting violent crime. Tulsa police, though, continued to search for whoever recently spray-painted “BLM” in other parts of downtown Tulsa. “They’re hiding their racism behind the law,” Frank said.
Today, both Second Street and Greenwood Avenue are again blank canvasses. Two hours after the mural was painted in front of City Hall, a government cleaning crew washed away the paint, the remnants pooling in milky yellow puddles by the sewer grates. No city officials have provided any information about the white militiamen who stood behind the police during the protest. The fight over the murals has galvanized the people protecting them as much as it has angered the people so desperate to see them gone. When the original mural was vandalized with a thin blue line, local residents restored it within hours. “Time after time, that mural brought the community together, and it was beautiful,” Briana Shea, who helped organize the painting of the Greenwood Avenue mural on Juneteenth, told me. Shea has been working with a foundation that honors Terence Crutcher, the 2016 shooting victim, to paint a series of identical murals in church parking lots around the city. And, since the police enforced their crackdown at City Hall, people have also started painting murals in their own neighborhood driveways. In the coming months, Shea hopes to paint a hundred of the murals on private property around Tulsa. While the city seeks to punish people for writing the words, the spirit of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” cannot be erased, even if the words are washed away, paved over, and criminalized.
A demonstrator outside the congress building in Guatemala City during clashes between police and protesters on Saturday. (photo: Al Jazeera)
Guatemala's Congress Burns Amid Mass Protest
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Guatemalans have taken to the streets for a national protest in rejection of President Alejandro Giammattei, and to demand that he veto the controversial general budget for 2021, approved by lawmakers on November 18."
A fire broke out at the Congress in the capital city, though the main protest groups maintain that the people have continued to demonstrate peacefully in the central square which is surrounded by riot police. They warn that infiltrated groups have burned down the Congress, serving as a distraction from the popular calls in rejection of corruption.
Police and riot forces began detaining people in the evening, including Guatemalan lawyer, ngrid Medina, shown being detained on live video.
On social media, various social organizations and citizens have been calling for people to go to all the squares of the country this Saturday and express their rejection of the Giammattei Government.
The ‘Ya Basta Oficial’ initiative published a series of COVID-19 prevention measures to take during Saturday's protest.
The Association for Research and Social Studies (ASIES), in a tweet, made clear its "indignation and energetic protest" with the way in which the budget for 2021 was approved, "as well as the levels of indebtedness that are assumed with this and that compromise the future of the country.”
The Human Rights Ombudsman, for its part, called on the police forces to avoid repression and respect free expression of thought.
On Friday, the Vice President of Guatemala, Guillermo Castillo, asked President Giammattei to both present their resignation letter, because "things are not good." In particular, he did not agree with the way in which the expenditure plan for the coming year was endorsed.
According to what was approved by the deputies, 65 percent of the budget for expenditures for next year will be used for the operation of the Government, 20 percent for investment and 15 percent for the payment of debts.
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