15 November 20
We Must Have at Least a Shoestring Budget
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15 November 20
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Al Franken | Good Luck, President-Elect Biden. You'll Need It.
Al Franken, Los Angeles Times
Franken writes: "While Trump has sought to exploit divisions along racial, religious and philosophical lines - stoking grievances, suspicion and sometimes violence - Biden keeps telling us he wants to bring Americans together. Good!"
he careful observer will notice that Joe Biden’s approach to leadership is very different from Donald Trump’s. While Trump has sought to exploit divisions along racial, religious and philosophical lines — stoking grievances, suspicion and sometimes violence — Biden keeps telling us he wants to bring Americans together. Good!
Also, good luck!
If you’re reading this, chances are very good that on election night you were shocked and depressed at how close the race was. If you’re among those who believe that the election has been stolen from the real winner, then you are almost certainly not reading this. That’s because Americans are divided into two completely different information universes. And that’s a problem.
In 1995, I wrote a book that called Rush Limbaugh “a Big Fat Idiot.” While the book was satiric, its intent was entirely serious. Limbaugh had been first to exploit a little-noticed repeal of the Fairness Doctrine by the Federal Communications Commission. Adopted in 1949, the rule required broadcasters to present controversial issues in a fair and balanced manner. The doctrine’s repeal in 1987 cleared the way for disreputable broadcasters to present manifestly dishonest and unbalanced content, and Rush, it turned out, had a real talent for just that kind of thing.
Before long, Limbaugh had attracted an audience of 20 million a day by spewing wildly racist, xenophobic and sexist bile and wildly untrue twaddle about everything from climate to tobacco to the number of murders committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Like Father Coughlin, who regaled his millions of loyal radio listeners with anti-Semitic and isolationist propaganda in the lead-up to World War II, Limbaugh became a huge political force. After the 1994 midterms, when House Republicans were swept into the majority for the first time in 40 years, the new speaker, Newt Gingrich, named Rush an honorary member of the class of 1995.
It’s no coincidence that this year, Trump honored Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which had been previously awarded to the likes of Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Apollo 13 astronauts. Without Limbaugh, there would be no President Trump.
A true master of radio, Limbaugh had a short-lived TV show. But its producer, Roger Ailes, would go on to be the impresario of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, whose slogan, ironically, would echo the language of the Fairness Doctrine. In fact, when Fox sued me in 2003 to stop the publication of “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them — A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” the judge told Fox’s lawyers that their slogan, like their case, was “wholly without merit.”
Purporting to provide a balance to the liberal mainstream media, Fox built a huge, rabid audience by relentlessly attacking Democratic administrations and functioning as state TV for President Trump. From “Fox and Friends” in the morning through its prime-time lineup with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, Fox and its commentators have slavishly (and tragically) echoed this lazy and irresponsible nut job. Early in the pandemic, Hannity told his audience that the coronavirus was a hoax. Ingraham’s audience learned that the left was “weaponizing coronavirus fears.” Nothing has more starkly underscored the gulf created by America’s two information universes than the refusal by Trump supporters to wear masks in public places.
But while denizens of the more sober, rational universe can sample Fox and see for themselves what that right-wing universe looks like, the internet and social media platforms have created a more opaque world for far more extreme and untethered worldviews to fester and grow.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former Breitbart News executive chairman who lately literally called for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s head, ran Trump’s 2016 campaign. The Twitter phenomenon QAnon has followers who are winning seats in Congress. And Facebook’s algorithms make sure to maximize the time its 2.7 billion users stay on the platform. Are you activated by particularly vile content? Then we’ll give you more of it! Whatever keeps you on, so we can sell more advertising. That’s our business plan!
Four years ago, many Americans were puzzled to learn that a not-small number of Trump supporters believed that a not-small number of Democrats were blood-sucking pedophiles holding children captive in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. This fall, when YouGov put specific QAnon allegations to voters in a survey, fully half of Trump supporters said they thought Democrats were involved in elite sex-trafficking rings, while another third said they weren’t sure.
Going into election day, Democrats, independents and Republican Lincoln Project types were convinced by polls that Biden was poised to win a mandate to restore some normalcy and competence to our governance. To draw on the expertise and professionalism of those who have dedicated their lives to public service. To include more citizens from all walks of life to address systemic racism and economic inequality. And to look to science to conquer the coronavirus.
Last Tuesday, Joe Biden received more votes for president than any candidate in our nation’s history. Then again, Donald Trump received the second most. In his speech Saturday night, the president-elect reached out to Trump supporters, imploring all Americans to “put away the harsh rhetoric” and to end “this grim era of demonization.”
What, do you suppose, are the chances of that?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Getty Images)
AOC Asks if It's 'Too Socialist' to Want More Stimulus Relief for Americans
Matthew Allen, TheGrio
Allen writes: "The New York congresswoman called for stimulus checks, mortgage relief, rent forgiveness and small business support among other items."
As the country struggles with a second coronavirus wave, families are grappling with the likelihood that restrictions on public life and business closures will go into effect.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in Washington remain at a standstill on additional stimulus spending to prop up workers and the economy, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) of New York isn’t happy about it.
The Democratic representative took to Twitter to plead that Americans are in need of another stimulus check, rent forgiveness and mortgage relief, among other requests, to address the ongoing health crisis and offset an unstable economic environment.
“Can we please get people stimulus checks and mortgage relief and rent forgiveness and small business support and free testing and hazard pay and healthcare for the uninsured (& underinsured) in the middle of a pandemic or is that too socialist too?” AOC wrote.
Republicans, and some Democrats, have slammed members of the left-wing of the Democratic Party for promoting ideas they say are cloaked in socialism. “Medicare for All,” a universal health care proposal championed by Bernie Sanders, the independent senator of Vermont who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in the last two election cycles, has been criticized for its potential to eliminate the private care industry.
President Donald Trump on the campaign trail accused now President-elect Joe Biden of allowing party members to incorporate socialism into policy during an October rally in Iowa.
“Biden has made a corrupt bargain in exchange for his party’s nomination,” Trump said. “He has handed control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists like his vice-presidential candidate.”
On Saturday, Trump called for Congress to put together a coronavirus relief bill saying in a tweet that it “Needs Democrats support. Make it big and focused.”
Many citizens received coronavirus relief checks of up to $1,200 earlier this year after Trump signed the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion emergency spending package intended to blunt the economic downturn spurred by stay-at-home and lockdown orders at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The stimulus measure included aid for non-essential businesses that were ordered to temporarily limit or shut down operations. This threw the country into a recession and the unemployment rate from record low levels into the double digits after tens of millions of workers were laid off.
Lawmakers have spent months negotiating another stimulus bill, though negotiators were not able to overcome disagreements before the November election. Both sides remain at a deadlock on what to include in another spending package as coronavirus case counts climb to record levels.
In addition, theGrio reported in April that 95% of Black business owners were denied aid for small businesses.
According to Newsweek, Congress has until Dec. 11 to approve a spending bill for the next federal budget, otherwise their will be another government shutdown.
Trump supporters rally as opposing views clash during the march. (photo: Carol Guzy/NPR)
After Thousands of Trump Supporters Rally in DC, Violence Erupts When Night Falls
Marissa J. Lang, Michael E. Miller, Peter Jamison, Justin Wm. Moyer, Clarence Williams, Peter Hermann, Fredrick Kunkle and John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Activists spewed profanity and shouted threats, threw punches and launched bottles."
resident Trump’s supporters had celebrated for hours on Saturday, waving their MAGA flags and blaring “God Bless the U.S.A.” as they gathered in Washington to falsely claim that the election had been stolen from the man they adore. The crowd had even reveled in a personal visit from Trump, who passed by in his motorcade, smiling and waving.
But that was before the people who oppose their hero showed up and the mood shifted, growing angrier as 300 or so counterprotesters delivered a message the president’s most ardent backers were unwilling to hear: The election is over. Trump lost.
On stark display in the nation’s capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.
While much of the day unfolded peacefully, brief but intense clashes erupted throughout. Activists spewed profanity and shouted threats, threw punches and launched bottles. On both sides, people were bloodied, and at least 20 were arrested, including four whose allegiances remain unknown on gun charges. The chaos also left two officers injured.
When darkness fell, the counterprotesters triggered more mayhem as they harassed Trump’s advocates, stealing red hats and flags and lighting them on fire. Scuffles continued into the night as the provocateurs overturned the tables of vendors who had been selling pro-Trump gear and set off dozens of fireworks, prompting police to pepper-spray them.
At 8 p.m., violence broke out five blocks east of the White House between the president’s supporters, who wielded batons, and his black-clad detractors, many of whom had participated in racial justice rallies throughout the summer. As the groups approached the same intersection, they charged each other, brawling for several minutes before police arrived and cleared the area.
In the melee, a D.C. fire official said, a man in his 20s was stabbed in the back and taken to the hospital with serious injuries.
Hours later, with midnight approaching, a group of marchers unfurled a massive “TRUMP LAW AND ORDER” banner and laid it atop Black Lives Matter Plaza. Afterward, they carried it as close as they could get to a White House barricaded behind rows of high steel fencing.
Tensions bled into early Sunday morning, when an argument exploded between a small group of counterprotesters and a man holding a Trump flag as he hung from on a pole. Suddenly, police tackled two people in a crosswalk, slamming them to the street.
The daytime demonstrations were urged on by Trump, who refuses to concede to Joe Biden or allow a formal transition to begin. On Saturday morning, as the president’s devotees remained in D.C. to fight for him, he headed to Trump National Golf Club in the Virginia suburbs for a round.
After a week in which more than 750,000 Americans were diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, almost none of his backers wore masks. Among their ranks were white nationalists, conspiracy theorists and far-right activists carrying signs demanding action that was already being taken: “Count the legal votes.”
Trump had thrilled them when his motorcade appeared on Pennsylvania Avenue shortly after 10 a.m., prompting fans to scramble to the side of Freedom Plaza to catch a glimpse.
“He drove right past me. I saw him. He waved right past me,” one man said as he tried to collect himself.
A group of women huddled around a phone, looking at a video of Trump’s appearance near a Walt Whitman quote inscribed in the stone beneath them: “The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him.”
Then the appearance of counterprotesters sparked bursts of conflict, though they could have become far more violent had police not worked to keep the feuding sides separate. When a small group holding bright orange “Refuse Fascism” posters arrived at the edge of Freedom Plaza, they were almost immediately surrounded by Trump fans shouting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” into their faces.
The women leading the tiny march fought their way up 14th Street, repeatedly breaking out of the crowd, only to be engulfed again.
“Trump, pack your s---! You’re illegitimate!” they yelled into their megaphone.
One pro-Trump man attempted to gouge the opposition with a flag bearing the president’s name. Another grabbed a woman’s neon orange poster and hit her with it.
When the women made it to the barrier set up by police across the street, Trump supporters filled the entire intersection, blocking them. Police arrived on bikes and, after several minutes, moved the crowd back. Shortly after, the group began singing the national anthem.
Nearby, on the street beside inscriptions from Abraham Lincoln recognizing the District as a place of freedom, people piled atop a U-Haul truck with a flag of a gun and the words “Come and take it.”
Later, near Union Station, another altercation broke out.
Roland Biser, a 69-year-old Pentagon employee who had attended a pro-Trump rally, was driving home when he said he saw a young man throw a rock at a group of Trump supporters. The rock grazed a woman, he said, and may have hit someone else.
Biser pulled over as a crowd quickly surrounded the young man and three others with him, all of whom were Black. Nearly a hundred Trump supporters quickly surrounded them before a dozen U.S. Capitol Police officers rushed in and separated the groups.
As police escorted the four young men away, the crowd taunted them, chanting “U.S.A.!”
“I didn’t do anything!” said one of them, who had been handcuffed. The 21-year-old D.C. resident insisted that it was the Trump supporters who had come after him.
A few minutes later, police removed the cuffs off and let him go.
A family of four on Capital Bikeshare bikes — the father with an American flag tied around his neck like a cape — were cut off by a line of counterprotesters as they tried to leave a tense scene outside the Supreme Court about 1 p.m.
“Get out of our city!” a young woman in black yelled.
“You lost, losers!” shouted a man.
The father and his teenage son began to chant “U.S.A.!” and raised their fists as police officers surrounded the family and pushed them out of the crowd.
“Why would you bring your kids here? It’s dangerous,” observed a man nearby, a helmet on his head and respirator hanging around his neck.
On a day when the president’s supporters touted a vast array of falsehoods, his spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, offered perhaps the most ludicrous.
“More than one MILLION marchers for President @realDonaldTrump descend on the swamp in support,” she tweeted, vastly exaggerating the crowd size.
Hours before the official rally began, the Trump believers had started gathering Saturday morning at Freedom Plaza.
“They think we’re stupid,” a young White man with a microphone told the crowd. “They’re underestimating The Donald. They’re underestimating The Donald’s supporters.”
“They’re stupid!” a young White woman replied.
Speakers who addressed the aggrieved legions included Alex Jones, a discredited conspiracy theorist most famous for tormenting the families of school shooting victims, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a recently elected congresswoman from Georgia who has promoted QAnon, which falsely alleges that famous Democrats belong to a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
Among the rallygoers were members of the Proud Boys, an extremist group known for their black-and-yellow garb and endorsements of violence. Some wore flak jackets and helmets. “Stand Back, Stand By,” read several of their shirts, referencing the president’s directive to them during a September debate.
As conservative speakers at Freedom Plaza derided the news media, including Fox News, the Proud Boys marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, leading hundreds in chants of “F--- antifa!” and shouting down stray opponents who yelled “Black lives matter!”
“All lives matter!” they screamed back.
Marching with them was D.C. resident Justin Anthony, who waved a satirical sign that read, “Sue anyone who did not vote for this great American.”
He led chants to the tune of “Count only Trump votes” and danced around in a large mock police uniform with the name “Officer Pudge” on its badge.
Almost no one got it, he said. They joined in, asked for pictures, cheered.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “Like, they really don’t see how insane this is.”
Near the Supreme Court, a line of riot police stood facing a few dozen protesters resting homemade shields on the ground as a MAGA throng chanted and churned behind them.
“F--- antifa!” they shouted in unison.
“Who’s antifa?” one Trump supporter wondered.
“I don’t know,” another responded. “But they don’t like her!”
Snippets of speeches from the court’s steps floated over the crowd between roaring cheers. Listeners climbed trees on the Capitol grounds, where they hung onto trunks and flipped off counterprotesters with their free hands.
A woman standing next to a barricade prayed over a well-worn Bible, an American flag sticking out of her purse.
On the other side of the police line, behind the line of homemade shields stamped with the letters BLM, a man with a cane also hunched over a book: “Black Reconstruction in America,” by W.E.B. Du Bois.
At midday, along the east end of Freedom Plaza, a lone counterprotester stood on the sidewalk holding a sign that read “Trump is the fraud.” He wore a gray cloth mask.
A succession of Trump supporters approached the curb, unmasked, to offer their opinions of his solitary demonstration.
“Why didn’t your mother abort you?” one screamed. “You’re mentally disturbed, and you’re a coward, and you’re a f-----. I hope you get AIDS."
“I just feel strongly about the disinformation that’s being peddled on the Internet about fraud in this election,” said the counterprotester, a 40-year-old D.C. man who declined to give his name because he is a federal employee and feared repercussions at work.
As a thin film of sweat formed on his face, an elderly woman in red MAGA gear paused and stared at him sadly.
“We feel bad for you that you can’t see the truth,” she said.
“I feel the same way about you,” he replied.
The Bridge of the Americas connects Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Trump Officials Unveil New US Citizenship Test, as Advocates Worry It Is Too Long, Difficult and Politicized
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS
Montoya-Galvez writes: "Immigrants seeking to become U.S. citizens will soon be required to answer more questions about American history and politics as part of a revised civics test announced Friday by the U.S. immigration services agency."
READ MORE
Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)
'They Know Their Vote Matters': The Georgia Senate Runoffs Battle Is Already On
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK
McGreal writes: "Donald Trump may have forced a recount of the votes in Georgia that helped end his presidency, but the activists who organized the surge in turnout that helped defeat him have already turned their attention to two elections that will decide who controls the US Senate and the course of Joe Biden's presidency."
Tens of millions of dollars are pouring in to the Georgia runoff races, which can be expected to draw Biden back to the campaign trail as voters have the opportunity to make history by defeating the state’s two Republican senators to give the new president control of both houses of Congress.
Traditionally, turnout has been low for runoff elections and that has favoured Republicans. But the presidential race in Georgia has already turned conventional political wisdom on its head. A concerted get out the vote campaign over recent years, combined with a surge of political engagement by younger people over demands for racial justice, narrowly swung the state for Biden.
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter in Atlanta, expects the Senate runoffs to also be close and the result to hang on turnout. He said that Trump’s defeat in Georgia has shown Democratic voters the power of their ballot in what was once a Republican stronghold, and he will use that to keep them engaged with the Senate elections.
“Black voters in particular really had an impact on this race. There’s some black voters that may not have believed in their power to flip this state, but now they believe and so there’s even more voters that can motivated to come out. Because now more than ever, they know that their vote matters, that they’ve got power. So there’s all that momentum,” he said.
Democrats are mobilising support for two very different candidates. The Rev Raphael Warnock is pastor of Atlanta’s renowned Ebenezer Baptist church where Martin Luther King preached in the 1960s. If he wins, Warnock would be the first black US senator from Georgia.
“I think Warnock’s going to drive the turnout,” said Joshua Meddaugh, chair of the social sciences department at Clayton State University, a mostly black college in metro Atlanta. “He is a monster candidate. He is incredibly well liked. He is charming and well received and an easy person to get behind. There are going to be some of those moderate Republicans, maybe some of those religious values Republicans, that he’ll be able to draw.”
On the other hand, Meddaugh expects Warnock’s opponent, the sitting Republican senator Kelly Loeffler, to struggle because of her loyalty to Trump and association with conspiracy theory groups such as QAnon.
Still, it’s likely to be close. Warnock came out on top last week with 33% of the vote. Loeffler took 26%. If the votes for rival Democrats and Republicans among the 18 other contenders on that ballot go to their respective parties in the runoff they each win about 49% with the balance of Libertarian, Green and independent voters up in the air.
In the parallel race, Democrat Jon Ossoff came close to removing the incumbent Republican, David Perdue, who fell just short of an outright win with 49.7%. Ossoff took 48% with the difference won by a Libertarian party candidate who now drops out of the race.
Ossoff lacks Warnock’s charisma but proved effective at rattling Perdue during a debate before the first election over his refusal to take coronavirus seriously and because he is under federal investigation for insider trading. Perdue refused to attend a second debate.
Activists who spent months and years getting out the vote in Georgia credit Stacey Abrams, the former candidate who many in the state believe was robbed of victory in the election for governor two years ago by Republican voter suppression, with mobilising a cadre of voters that paid off for Biden including in middle-class suburbs and among young people.
Helen Butler, leader of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, said a surge in younger voters was significant in deciding the presidential election in Georgia.
“We targeted young people, 18 to 35, to make sure they turned out and by all of the information we have thus far, it shows that their demographics turned in record numbers,” she said.
Butler attributed the increased turnout in part to the surge in Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis in May.
“For the young people, it was a driving factor because they now understand that if you’re going to have great policing policy, if you’re going to have the right people employed, that those positions are elected. Your judges, your district attorneys, your sheriffs, and your mayors who appoint the police chiefs. They understand that getting people who understand their situations will assist in making the change that they want to do,” she said.
Albright said his organisation will focus on specific policies, not the broad issue of giving Biden a Democratic-run Senate.
“It can’t just be about we want to control the Senate. Somebody who’s not engaged is going to ask why they should care about that. We have got to say we’ve got to control the Senate because healthcare is on the line, because the Voting Rights Act is on the line, because racial justice and whether or not police officers and district attorneys are able to continue to get qualified immunity when they kill black folks, that’s on the line,” he said.
Butler gave the example of the supreme court hearing that could see the end Obamacare and rob low-income families of affordable health coverage. “That will definitely be on people’s mind. If the court should overturn the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, a lot of people will lose coverage. They’ll lose protection for pre-existing conditions and young folks won’t be able to stay on their parent’s insurance plans until 26,” she said.
Becky Butler, who leads Necessary Trouble, a name that plays on the late Georgia congressman John Lewis’s mantra to cause “good trouble”, said a large increase in absentee balloting played an important part in swinging Georgia against Trump and that she will focus on encouraging those who voted before to immediately register to vote by mail again.
“We go for especially those counties that are rich in Democrats that are deeply, deeply blue. And we do our best to make sure that those frequent voters are hit, and also that we try even harder to engage the infrequent voters, which is what Stacey Abrams taught us,” she said.
Meddaugh said that runoff races usually favour Republicans but this could be different. “You’re going to hear a lot of energy and positivity coming from the left and that we have a chance here to flip the Senate and we have two strong candidates. What that does usually when there’s one side that’s so energised, it actually de-energises the other side. Maybe some Trump supporters were pretty bummed that they didn’t win so they’re not going to come out again. That’s pretty common,” he said.
For all that, Albright worries that Republicans still have one advantage through their control of Georgia statewide offices: the ability to suppress voter turnout and effectively rig the election.
“We need to be very much on the lookout for voter suppression now that the Republicans have seen what our power looks likes,” he said. “My suspicion is that we’re going to see an increase so we are going to be vigilant about that over the next over the next couple of months.”
As cruise ship companies went bust, little attention has been given over to one of the more peculiar yet indicative ways in which the sector has been rerouted: the "quarantine ship." (photo: Unsplash)
Italy Has Turned Cruise Liners Into Jails for Migrants
Richard Brodie, Jacobin
Brodie writes: "With Italy's tourist sector sunk by the pandemic, authorities are now hiring cruise ships as floating jails for refugees."
ow do you make a prison?
We like to imagine things being built from scratch. Perhaps stone and mortar heaped up by little computer game figurines, or Lego building blocks piled high. Most of the time, we have a simple idea of how our world is constructed, falling back on the games we played as children. Maybe this was occasionally the case when colonizers built their outposts. Perhaps they, too, were children once. But today’s world is already too built up for such endeavors — too full of things. Capitalists prefer to use what they find lying around, rather than invest in start-ups.
On the Mediterranean island of Sicily, the material at hand was the cruise ship — and the prison it has been converted into is the so-called quarantine ship, on which newly arriving immigrants are forcibly kept. These new prisons are the single piece of technology that most succinctly sums up the transformations underway in Italy’s COVID-19 capitalism. Doubtless, other islands and continents have their own landmarks strewn across the landscape of contagion, from the New York hotel rooms packed with the homeless, to the food warehouses of central Nigeria. (And to each monument, its resistance: the lawsuits being filed in US courts, or the looting of stockpiles by Nigerian protesters).
The Sicilian case can, even so, be used to open up some wider questions about what’s going on in this surreal border moment in history, how capitalism is reacting, and what forms of resistance we are witnessing. For years, working-class Africans and Asians have hammered on the gates of Europe to readdress the balance in global inequalities. The articulate call for freedom that reverberates from the borders is not hard to hear: one need only block out the deafening silence of our current barbarism.
So, what I will attempt to show, here, is that the resistance to the authoritarianism unleashed by the pandemic does have a side that can be supported by progressive forces — that is, without being dragged into the pitfalls of repudiating scientific evidence, casting aside our masks and our principles. It provides a way to hold onto the thought that perhaps, at the end of all this, our governments might build something other than prisons.
From Cruise Ships To Floating Prisons
One of the first media stories that lifted the pandemic beyond China’s borders (a long ten months ago) was the quarantining of the Diamond Princess. This British-owned cruise ship was quarantined at the port of Okinawa, Japan in early February, with almost four thousand passengers and crew on board. Over the following month, one-fifth of the passengers were infected and gradually flown off to their respective countries or disembarked at port (the crew were less fortunate and less mobile). There were fourteen deaths. This was followed by other mass outbreaks on cruise ships: the Rotterdam, the Zaandam, the Ruby Princess, and the Greg Mortimer — all luxury holiday vessels that helped spread the virus around the world. The last of these was probably responsible for half the cases in Australia.
Alongside the many criticisms made of how the Japanese authorities blocked everyone on board, leading to unnecessary deaths, it quickly became clear that cruise holidays would be one of the first markets to be axed in the name of human survival. Or rather, that the perils were so clear that tourists would soon disappear — and the invisible hand of the market would do its work. The sector sank. The cruise companies had, recently, began to hoist hopes of a new start to their ventures — but the second wave dashed such vanities.
Leaving aside the glee one may draw from the shipowners’ misfortune, cruise holidays also provide an extraordinary symbol of our contemporary crisis. They bring the generational divide — a far wealthier older generation with expendable capital — into collision with the hypermobile internationalism of contemporary capitalism. The same hypermobility, that is, which brought us just-in-time logistics operations, international art fairs, and (as the Marxist geographer David Harvey has rightly pointed out) the pandemic itself.
The cruise holiday’s disappearance was marked by a “traumatic” event: holidaymakers being held in quarantine on the ships. Indeed, journalists focused on passengers’ complaints and the sight of the upper classes roughing it onboard, while paying much less attention to the thousands of crew members trapped in cramped conditions. And as the cruise companies went bust and photographs of the new ship graveyards circulated on the internet, replete with the watery tears of the World Economic Forum and Saudi princes, far fewer words have been given over to one of the more peculiar yet indicative ways in which the sector has been rerouted: the “quarantine ship.”
The Italian government first landed on the idea of using ships to quarantine newly arrived migrants from Africa back in May, when the ferry liner Moby Zazà was sequestered for this purpose and docked near the island of Lampedusa with several hundred people trapped on board. Since then, two cruise companies — GNV and SNAV — have won public tenders to provide a small fleet of cruise ships employed to quarantine hundreds of people at a time. The companies are being paid around €100 per person, per day for this service: over €1 million a month per ship.
Those on board — mostly from Tunisia, but also Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Libya, Syria, and across West Africa — have experienced widely varying living conditions in isolation. Some of the ships have doctors and lawyers on board. Less fortunate passengers have seen only guards, crew, and police dogs. Newly arriving migrants, having already passed through the hell and high water of the Libyan war and the Mediterranean Sea, are trapped on board for a month or more, in conditions that potentially favor rather than prevent contagion. Even more extraordinarily, several cases have been brought to light of asylum seekers being sent from centers on mainland Italy to the quarantine ships, whether as a prevention against contagion or simply to punish those who rebel.
Perhaps we might more aptly baptize such vessels “temporary prison ships” or even “floating hot spots.” This last phrase is especially appropriate given that a few years ago the Italian government proposed that the so-called EU border “hot spot” centers (for the mass identification and detention of newly arriving immigrants, experimented on Italian and Greek islands) be set up on ships — naming them “floating hot spots,” no less. The idea was dumped by the EU for infringing on just one too many human rights. But in love, war, and pandemic, anything goes. Here’s a short transcription of a video made by a young Ghanaian man removed by the Red Cross from his refugee hostel in the middle of the night:
Last Sunday they bring people, say that they want to test us for COVID-19 . . . they tell me, they said I have positive. They take me from Roma to Palermo . . . I was asking my camp people — who tell me I am positive — so tell me, where is my positive document? They couldn’t show me . . . So now everyone in Roma with coronavirus, they are going to collect them on the ship? They quarantine me in Palermo, now we are in the Bari seaport, right now. Since they brought me here, no medicine, I couldn’t see doctor with my face . . . Try your best, and post [this video] to everywhere, so that the Italian leaders can also play it, to hear it, to fight for we the immigrants.
Luxury Containers
The use of luxury structures as centers of confinement is familiar to recent immigrants in Italy — and indeed to anyone (of whatever politics) who has followed the development of the Italian asylum system. It is extremely common for asylum seekers to be housed in government-funded (but privately run) hostels in former hotels, whether in the mountains or on the beach. Again, we very often find that these buildings have a lackluster history of Mafia-ish building speculation, rickety funding programs, market failure, and, finally, reconversion into hostels for asylum seekers. Or, to be a little less diplomatic, temporary housing for poor blacks.
Failed beach resorts and ski chalets were not the only businesses to be propped up: you also find a range of failed old people’s homes, failed foster homes, failed student halls, etc. Furthermore, over the years the hotel-turned-camp has become the unwitting symbol of the far-right’s smear campaign against the African working class. Labeled as feckless, lazy, and presumptuous, for years asylum seekers’ protests for basic amenities (Wi-Fi, decent food, medical attention) were reported under headlines such as “Migrants Refuse 5* Hotel” or “We Want WiFi! Hotel Not Good Enough For Migrants” and similar.
This kind of conversion of large housing structures from holiday homes/vessels into prisons/sites of confinement — floating or otherwise — represents a moment in what we might call “capitalist restructuring,” in which fixed capital has to be put to new uses. Following the Italian recession of 2012, these hostels and other containers were filled with the proletariat castoff (in one way or another) by the concurrent Arab Spring. The “quarantine ships” provide another moment of such restructuring. This is representative of the kind of response we are seeing, and probably will continue to see, to the global recession of 2020: not cuts and austerity, but active investment and reconversion of industries, in spurts of booming and busting that follow the contractions and spasms of waves of contagion. So much for the ways of capital.
The question hanging over all of this, however, is to what extent this new world of things can be reshaped toward greater freedom, and not less. Mothballed factories can often be reopened, so long as the appropriate use is found. Moments of restructuring are not maneuvered by divine forces, but by ideas and the capacity of human beings to act upon those ideas. In the quarantine ships, we find the enactment of a particular idea of containment and the reconversion of luxury capital to those ends. It privileges containment as prison, over containment as community.
But what if the capital of luxury could be converted into a common luxury? What if the rusty wreckage of today could become the raw material of tomorrow’s visionary futures? The very idea around which these prisons are being formed is the kernel of revolutionary thought: isolation, exodus, the commune. For every Robinson Crusoe (isolated by accident), there is a Maroon community (isolated by choice!). There was and still is a choice about the direction that the current moment of restructuring takes.
The fixed capital of old sectors now laid into the waste bin of history — luxury cruise ships, packed shopping malls, packed anything really — can be put to new uses of many kinds. What we have seen with the “quarantine ships” is the expression of an authoritarian tendency that has prevailed over a utopian one. The idea of isolation has been interpreted as a prison rather than a holiday, as Lord of the Flies rather than Never Never Land.
Michel Foucault noted these two opposing tendencies some four decades ago when he wrote: “The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society.” And what if — as the Zapatistas have suggested in their reaction to the pandemic — the disciplined society was not that of an authoritarian disciplining, but rather one in which we ourselves have taken responsibility? What if instead of trying to force people to stay in a place of violence, we could instead make a site of quarantine so full of care, of luxury, of fulfilled desires, that no one wanted to leave it?
The type of society I am alluding to is one that we have mentioned already: the holiday resort. OK, perhaps not the holiday resort as such — not Princess Cruises or the Four Seasons. Maybe capitalism still hasn’t managed to provide us with a true holiday. But perhaps even this minute form of utopia, the utopia of not working, of minibars and sun loungers, of exotic locations and intimate company, contains a small, tarnished vision of freedom.
Diving for Freedom
Perhaps it seems fanciful, even in bad taste, to discuss the utopian potential of containment amid a pandemic. Even more so to ponder such possibilities for Europe’s most exploited and least free population, the recently arrived working-class Africans and Asians aboard these ships. But the drive for freedom is there — rearing its head despite all the odds.
Migrants have broken out and evaded every prison designed to contain them. People have run away from quarantine centers on land, leading to manhunts for Arabs in the forests of Sicily’s mountain ranges. There have been mass breakouts at the militarized “hub” in Villa Sikania, where an Ethiopian man was killed by a speeding car as he ran from the gates. They have fought with the police on board the quarantine ships, they — “the Tunisian heroes” as a Moroccan comrade has dubbed them — have burnt their beds in the detention centers. They have swallowed razor blades to protest their watery imprisonment and impending deportation. Like the young Ghanaian man quoted above, they have reached out to leaders and formed alliances with activists.
Some have even dived overboard to reach dry ground. At least one man on board the Moby Zazà, the very first quarantine ship, died in the effort — if we needed reminding that the flight from containment can be a fight to the death.
This is not the first time that people rescued from the Mediterranean route have later drowned at sea, desperately trying to reach the shore or another ship. There can be few examples so horrendous of the fatality of freedom, of the sheer necessity of breaking away. But the tragedy and desperation of these deaths remove nothing from the impulse for freedom that they express. It is a recognition of what is at stake in this moment of capitalist restructuring.
Calls for freedom during the pandemic — and movements against the restrictive measures imposed by governments — have been dominated by a very different tone. Every country (or at least the ones I am familiar with) has its own version of the movement against lockdowns, enforced mask-wearing, and so on. Is this the same impulse for freedom? Do such movements represent the same acknowledgment of capital’s new turn? Is resistance to the quarantine ships the same as resistance to bans on alcohol sales or mass consumption in shopping malls?
I think not. Not so much for any of the “political” connotations of the no-mask movement in the United States (associated with Trumpism), nor because one urges a return to a bland consumerism while the other sheds light on the darker, carceral corners of European civilization. But rather, because they deal with very different levels of freedom, with different consequences for people’s lives.
In a society characterized by an authoritarian turn, everyone moves down a step on the scale of human rights. Those who had all their rights recognized and guaranteed find themselves with a few small tears at the edges of their personal constitutional charter. Those who were further down the ladder perhaps find themselves less free, crammed into makeshift lodgings, forced to renege on aspects of their autonomy. Those who were already clasping to the bottom rung of the ladder, however, now find themselves cast into gray zones of legality, their every freedom arbitrarily removed without reason or rhyme. And it is in these gray zones that capital makes its earliest advances when it restructures. It begins here, and works its way up.
Forget the mask-dodgers and their irrationality: the resistance we should be looking at is that of the fugitives from our new prisons.
Wolves standing in the woods on a cold winter day. (photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Wildlife Organizations Challenge Trump Administration Delisting of Wolves
The Center for Biological Diversity
Excerpt: "A coalition of wildlife conservation groups today notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of its intent to file a lawsuit challenging the recent decision to strip gray wolves of Endangered Species Act protection across nearly all the lower 48 states."
Legal Step Challenges Trump Administration’s Removal of Gray Wolf Protection
The challenged delisting rule, which becomes effective Jan. 4, will permit trophy hunting and trapping of wolves again in the Great Lakes states. Delisting will slow or completely halt recovery of wolves in most of their former range. The new rule excludes Mexican gray wolves, which are listed separately under the Endangered Species Act.
“The Trump administration shut the door to wolf recovery, even as the science shows that wolves are too imperiled and ecologically important to abandon,” said Collette Adkins, carnivore conservation director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’re taking the fight to the courts, and I’m confident we can restore the Endangered Species Act’s lifesaving protections for gray wolves across the nation.”
“The decision to remove critical protections for still-recovering gray wolves is dangerously short-sighted, especially in the face of an extinction and biodiversity crisis,” said Bonnie Rice, senior representative for Sierra Club's Our Wild America Campaign. “We should be putting more effort into coexistence with wolves and reinstating endangered species protections critical for their full recovery.”
Today’s notice letter states that removal of the gray wolf’s federal protection is unlawful because the species has not recovered in the Pacific Northwest, the southern Rockies and elsewhere that scientists identify as “significant” habitat for the wolf.
The notice letter also asserts that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision contradicts the most current science regarding wolf conservation and taxonomy and ignores concerns raised in peer reviews by the nation’s top wolf scientists.
“It’s perverse to declare wolves fully recovered when they exist in only a fraction of their historic range,” said Adkins. “I’m hopeful that the court will set things right, but in the meantime hundreds of wolves will die, and it will take years to undo the damage done. It’s heartbreaking and senseless.”
Six conservation groups represented by Earthjustice — the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, Oregon Wild, National Parks Conservation Association and the Humane Society of the United States — sent today’s notice letter.
The Endangered Species Act requires that the coalition now wait 60 days before filing its lawsuit with the court.
Background
Congress stripped wolves in Idaho and Montana of protections in 2011, and the Fish and Wildlife Service removed protection from Wyoming wolves in 2017. This led to the killing of thousands of wolves and halted further recovery in those northern Rocky Mountain states.
The agency also removed protection from gray wolves in the Great Lakes region in 2011, allowing trophy hunting and trapping seasons in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, but the courts restored protection there in 2014.
Unlike the previous rules, the most recent delisting rule removes protection from all gray wolves in the lower 48, except for Mexican gray wolves. It was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 3 and becomes effective 60 days later.
