24 January 21
Panic Mode Over Minimal Funding
What is now a serious shortfall in funding for January can be erased quite easily with a few decent days of fundraising. Easily.
Completely ignoring fundraising got us here, reasonable donations will absolutely get us out.
With urgency … right now!
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24 January 21
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Bess Levin | Surprise: Trump Left Biden With a Vaccine Distribution Plan That's Basically a Xerox Copy of His Bare Ass
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "Something you probably came to realize over the last four years was that Donald Trump was not a good president."
“Got ya, suckuh. I did nothing!”
In fact some might go so far as to say he was one of the worst presidents in U.S. history, a claim that fact-checkers standing by tell us is...100% accurate. Unfortunately, Trump’s badness wasn‘t eradicated the day he left office; instead, its effects will linger like a viral plague, or a ticking time bomb, or a series of booby traps spread around the federal government for God knows how long, which Joe Biden now has to clean up. Starting with: the fact that the Trump administration apparently left its successor with no COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan whatsoever.
CNN reports that within hours of the new president being sworn in on Wednesday, sources revealed that “one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of vaccine distribution strategy” under Trump, despite the fact that multiple drugs had already been approved. “There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch,” a person familiar with the matter told CNN, with another adding that the reaction upon learning they would have to start from “square one” was: “Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence.”
Last week, just when it looked like Team Trump couldn’t possibly do a worse job handling the pandemic if it tried—and putting Champ and Major in front of the coronavirus task force would’ve been a better idea—it emerged that despite the Health and Human Services Department announcing that the federal government would start releasing COVID-19 doses that had been held in reserve for second shots, no such reserve existed. Many states are now saying that they’re running out of doses, and thousands of people have had their appointments canceled. (Naturally, the Trump administration blamed the situation on states supposedly having unrealistic expectations for how many doses were on the way.)
Biden has said he wants to get 100 million shots into Americans’ arms within his first 100 days in office, a gargantuan task that obviously would have been made slightly easier had his predecessor spent his last two months in office focused on the deadly virus rather than trying to overturn the results of the election. While Trump was attempting a coup, the U.S. was barreling toward 400,000 COVID-19 deaths, a figure that now stands at 407,000 and counting. Shortly after taking the oath of office, Biden signed an executive order requiring masks on federal property, in addition to reversing Trump’s wildly petty decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. On Wednesday night White House press secretary Jen Psaki said, “The issue that [the president] wakes up every day focused on is getting the pandemic under control,” which in normal times would go without saying, but given his predecessor’s history of effectively ignoring the crisis from the start except to suggest that people inject bleach into their veins, it apparently had to be said.
On Thursday, Biden is expected to sign another batch of pandemic-related executive orders, including directing companies to ramp up manufacturing of supplies for vaccines, testing, and PPE for health care workers. Speaking to reporters, Jeff Zients, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, said that the administration expected the situation it was walking into to be bad, but never expected it to be this bad, even considering Trump’s historic level of incompetence. “What we’re inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined,” Zients said.
Meanwhile, the gang at Fox News is incensed that Biden hasn’t thanked “Donald Trump and the Trump administration for what they did.”
Security measures in place around the Capitol before inauguration of Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 18, 2021. (photo: Ron Haviv/VII/Redux/The Intercept)
Capitol Attack Was Culmination of Generations of Far-Right Extremism
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Devereaux writes: "While all presidential transitions are historic, pervasive fear of political violence and a militarized government response to those concerns set this transfer of power apart."
But an expanded war on terror would threaten legitimate resistance to state violence.
he flag over the Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hung at half-staff Sunday. Set atop a hill overlooking the Susquehanna River, the entrance was guarded by police in riot gear. Lower down, at the street level, intersections were blocked by law enforcement vehicles. On each of the Capitol’s four sides, camouflaged National Guardsmen in masks clutched rifles to their chests. A handful of stocky, middle-aged men with wraparound sunglasses lingered about. Whether they were cops or militia was unclear. If they were trying to keep a low profile, their efforts were falling short.
Police officers on horseback rode down the middle of North 3rd Street, past Sammy’s Authentic Italian Restaurant and Old Town Deli, toward Liberty Street. The horses’ hooves clacked against the pavement. A young couple sat on stoop taking it all in. Between them was their 3-year-old boy, dressed in a winter coat and light-up sneakers. The man was 27, and the woman was 20; both were Black and lifelong residents of the city. They asked that their names not be used in a story. Given that rioters carrying Confederate flags had just laid siege to the nation’s Capitol, leaving five people dead, and that law enforcement in Harrisburg was bracing for similar acts of insurrection, it felt like a reasonable request.
“It’s crazy,” the woman told me, as she looked out at the armed forces occupying her city’s streets. The man agreed: “It’s just shocking that all of this comes after a presidential election.”
Like just about everywhere else in the country, Harrisburg was touched by last summer’s protests against police brutality and killings. The demonstrations cast a new light on the city’s unique history. In the mid-19th century, the area of Harrisburg where the Capitol now sits was known as the Old Eighth Ward: a Black cultural hub and the city’s most diverse area. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, it transformed into a hotbed of abolitionist activism, and Harrisburg, in turn, became a vital juncture on the Underground Railroad. Following the Civil War, the government invoked eminent domain and took the land that the ward was built on, wiping away the vibrant multicultural community to make way for the Capitol complex. Last summer, a long-running effort to correct the record and officially recognize the Old Eighth’s existence succeeded, with a monument to the ward unveiled on Juneteenth. The ceremony took place against the backdrop of protests in the city, which to many were the historical extension of abolitionist struggle that the Old Eighth was known for. Though the demonstrations drew a response from local authorities, the man said, it looked nothing like the militarized posture the city was now witnessing.
“We don’t know if this is it, if it’s just getting started, if it’s over,” he said, adding that everyone had seen the footage from Washington, D.C. “People that reside here want to know: Is that going to be a possibility here?”
The question hung over the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency. While all presidential transitions are historic, pervasive fear of political violence and a militarized government response to those concerns set this transfer of power apart. In the wake of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, federal law enforcement warned of armed Trump loyalists descending on all 50 states. In Richmond, Virginia, the feared rallies would coincide with a Second Amendment event that last year drew 20,000 mostly gun-toting demonstrators. But when the day finally came, little happened. Because of the pandemic, organizers had already planned to gather in a caravan of cars, and many local militias backed out all together in the wake of the January 6 siege; at least one militia leader reportedly bowed out because he was a member of the National Guard and he’d been called to Washington, D.C.
In the end, fewer than 200 demonstrators turned up in the streets. Among the most vocal was Mike Dunn, the leader of a Virginia-based crew of Boogaloo Bois whose nicknames included “Ice,” “Goose,” “Zulu,” and “Shadow.” Too young to remember the September 11 attacks or the invasion of Iraq, the Gen Z militia commander had nonetheless absorbed the look of a post-9/11 tactical warrior. Rifle in hand, Dunn spoke with the conviction of a 20-year-old convinced of his own worldview. He made a point of telling reporters that he wasn’t like the members of the Proud Boys circulating through the crowd. The neo-fascist Trump supporters were “boot-licking, statist cucks,” Dunn said. A Proud Boy who was selling T-shirts responded by saying that the Boogaloo Bois — a loose network of individuals and groups broadly devoted to armed confrontation with the state — were nothing but “anarchists.” With a pistol stuffed down the front of his pants and an American flag gaiter wrapped around his face, the Proud Boy, who said he attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C., became visibly agitated when asked why violence seemed to follow his organization wherever it went. Later that day, the man was filmed sexually harassing a journalist; by the evening, his purported identity was circulating online.
The lackluster attendance in Richmond was seen in cities across the country. The armed pro-Trump rallies never materialized. But while the week mercifully concluded without any significant acts of violence, the fact remained that 25,000 troops were deployed to Washington, D.C., with a mission to stave off a right-wing insurgency loyal to the embattled president that included and recruited from current and former law enforcement and members of the military. Fueled by the myth that the election had been stolen, it was a movement that just two weeks earlier executed the first successful mass breach of the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812. Now there was a “green zone,” a callback to the U.S. military’s fortified zone of operations during the occupation of Iraq, in the heart of America’s capital.
Whether all of that militarization and effort, coupled with waves of siege-related arrests across the country, prevented further violence is difficult to say. What is clear is the conditions that led to this historic state of affairs did not evaporate when Joe Biden took office Wednesday morning. Historians and extremism experts who spoke to The Intercept in the run-up to the inauguration situated the Trump years in a longer story of contestation in the U.S. They linked Trump’s border and immigration policies, justified as they were on the purported threat posed by hordes of foreigners, to the right-wing violence that was seen in cities across the country and to decades of war abroad. They pointed to the 1990s, when bloody exchanges between the federal government and the far right culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing, as a potential model for understanding the years ahead. And they tied the Capitol insurrection to last summer’s historic protests against police brutality, warning that the creation of an expanded war on terror in the name of countering domestic terrorism would pose a direct threat to the movement that carried those demonstrations.
“There’s a profound historical change taking place in the United States,” said Yale University historian Greg Grandin. In 2019, Grandin published “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” a sweeping Pulitzer Prize-winning analysis of the historical conditions that gave rise to the Trump years. Grandin argues that from the outset, frontier wars — from the genocidal Indian Wars, to the blood-soaked creation of the U.S.-Mexico border, to the building of a global empire through campaigns of military conquest around the world — provided a “release valve” for the nation’s various internal conflicts. That mechanism, which turns on a notion of “freedom as freedom from restraint,” no longer functions as it once did. Undermined by the transparent hollowness of the Iraq War, the Great Recession, and other factors, the project of channeling the nation’s internal conflicts into messianic campaigns on distant fields of battle has collapsed, according to Grandin, and now the wars are coming home.
“Trump’s whole presidency confirmed that argument, and the fact that it’s wrapping up now with a green zone in Washington, D.C., is pretty amazing,” Grandin said. “Climate change, the disaster of the wars, the economic restructuring of the global economy — all of these things have limited the United States’ ability to channel that kind of extremism outwards.” In the past, Grandin explained, the U.S. has been able to avoid social revolution through political realignments within the two-party system. Economic exploitation of the developing world, wealth extraction, and war “all were part of process in which the U.S. could use foreign policy in order to organize domestic politics.”
“That’s no longer possible,” Grandin said. “We’ll see how Biden handles it.”
For Daryl Johnson, the attack on the U.S. Capitol was shocking but not surprising. The right-wing violence that followed Trump’s ascent to the White House — not just the siege, but the Charlottesville white power riot, the massacre of Mexicans and Mexican Americans at an El Paso Walmart, and the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue, among other incidents — was part of a movement he had been following since he was a teenager.
Johnson was working as a counterintelligence analyst in the U.S. Army when Timothy McVeigh, himself an Army veteran, launched his attack on the federal government in Oklahoma City in 1995. Given his lifelong interest in domestic terrorism, Johnson requested and received a transfer to a detail where he could work on the issue full time. From there, he moved to a similar beat at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Then, in 2004, the newly created Department of Homeland Security came calling.
The Bush administration initially resisted the massive reordering of the national security apparatus — the largest since President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947, which restructured the Pentagon and established the CIA — but eventually came around to the idea. Signing the legislation that would bring more than 20 agencies together under one roof in November 2002, George W. Bush said, “Because terrorists are targeting America, the front of the new war is here in America.” In an attempt to prevent the kind failures that preceded 9/11, one of the core objectives of Homeland Security was the fusion and dissemination of terrorism-related intelligence. That mission fell to the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, or I&A, where Johnson was assigned.
In some ways, Johnson said, the office was hamstrung from the start. The creation of DHS had set off turf battles within the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. The FBI, then led by Robert Mueller, was none too interested in giving up ground as the nation’s premier agency investigating terrorism. The bureau blocked an effort by DHS’s new Immigration and Customs Enforcement office to take part in counterterrorism funding investigations, and when the agency considered using the word “investigation” in its title, Mueller reportedly responded, “Over my dead body.” Despite its high-stakes counterterrorism mandate, I&A to this day has no investigative authority, and the office’s work relies heavily on open source research.
Johnson spent his first year as I&A’s lone analyst tracking domestic terrorism. When he was granted the resources to bring on some full-time colleagues in 2007, he went on a “hiring spree,” adding five new analysts to the domestic terror desk. By 2008, the new team was up running, just in time for the election of Barack Obama. The analysts witnessed an explosion in far-right activity online. Johnson documented the observations in an April 2009 report, which detailed how the election of the first Black president had invigorated the extremist right. The report drew several parallels to conditions in the 1990s, when McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing, concluding that a combination of the economic downturn, anxieties over immigration and gun control, and active recruitment of military and law enforcement on the far right were making for a highly combustible situation. The document leaked and all hell broke loose. Republicans howled that Obama was weaponizing DHS against conservatives and veterans. The report was retracted a week after it was published. Johnson was driven out of the department, and his team was gutted.
Problems at I&A have persisted in the years since. In September, the former head of I&A filed a whistleblower complaint accusing the former acting secretary of DHS, Chad Wolf, and his deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, of pressuring the office to downplay intelligence of threats from the far right and emphasize threats from the left in a manner that would be more consistent with White House talking points. Wolf, who was illegitimately serving in his role to begin with, abruptly stepped down from his post following the siege on the Capitol. He exited the position just days before the inauguration, having never provided a briefing on the role homeland security analysis did or did not play in the run-up to the assault.
As the Biden administration takes office, Johnson, who now runs a private security consultancy firm, is once again looking to the 1990s as a potential model for what might come next. The former homeland security analyst expects that the fallout from January 6 will play out a bit like the fallout from the Oklahoma City bombing: Lawmakers will call for a crackdown on right-wing extremist groups and those sympathetic to the movement will make decisions about how serious they really are. “You’re going to have a certain segment of them walking away, being scared off by what happened,” Johnson told me, and there will be a segment who do the opposite. “People that are going to be drawn to this movement over the next four years are going to be more hardcore, true believers who are content on continuing.”
To tip the balance away from further violence, Johnson favors a massive campaign aimed at “discrediting the lies and disinformation that have occurred over this past year, not only regarding the presidential election and the voter fraud and everything, but also the coronavirus.” Republicans, in particular, would need to carry that message. “These people won’t believe the Democrats,” Johnson said. “They believe that they’re evil.”
As for longer-term solutions, Johnson supports ramped-up state and local programs to educate government officials on right-wing extremism, outreach in schools, and better monitoring of extremist content by social media companies. He cautions, however, that actions like the recent purging of the right-wing social media platform Parler can have the opposite of the intended effect. “Yeah, that’s a quick, fast, easy least expensive option, but it may further the problem,” he said. Within law enforcement and the military, Johnson said “there needs to be a paradigm shift” away from treating extremism in the ranks as a First Amendment issue and toward treating it as an operational security and insider threat issue. Officers and service members may have a right to hate, but they are also entrusted with special powers and authorities including the deprivation of life and liberty. “It really calls into question these people’s ability to be objective, to be equitable in enforcing the laws, when they have these extremist beliefs,” Johnson said. “You’ve got to send a message that these types of First Amendment protected speech have consequences.”
Johnson takes no satisfaction in the fact that he and his team’s 2009 analysis was correct. “I was just doing my job, and I was experienced and knowledgeable about what I was talking about,” he said. “I just wish the message would have been taken more seriously 10 years ago, because we would be in a better place today.”
As the sun went down on Trump’s final night in office, a quiet settled on the intersection of East Capitol and 3rd Street in southeast D.C. Passersby paused at the police line that ran from street corner to street corner, snapping photos of the building that two weeks before was overrun by the president’s mob. Joggers and cyclists took advantage of the closed streets. A trio of young guardsmen took a cigarette break in a back alley. A tour bus idled in the road; transportation for the troops. A woman carried pizza to those on duty.
The morning that followed was cold and windy. Trump trudged across the White House lawn and boarded Marine One, taking off at approximately 8:18. a.m., bound for Andrews Air Force Base and on to Florida.
The former president left behind a city under heavy military occupation. Navigating the fortified perimeter encircling the Capitol — manned by thousands of well-armed National Guardsmen, Capitol and Metropolitan Police, and a noticeable number of Border Patrol agents — I made my way to the green zone. Set behind a tall steel fence, the homeland security checkpoint featured rows of tables where Transportation Security Administration agents searched through entrants’ bags. I was asked to leave my gas mask behind but was permitted to hold onto my goggles and KN95 masks. I cleared the checkpoint, passing a uniformed Secret Service agent with a thin blue line patch fixed to his sleeve. Blocks away, journalists were gathering at Black Lives Matter Plaza. The White House and the Washington Monument were visible in the distance. Access to Lafayette Square, where Trump’s forces were infamously deployed against racial justice protesters, was cut off.
The plaza was christened last summer, with the movement’s name painted on the pavement in giant yellow letters. Lingering graffiti on the surrounding buildings bearing the slogans of the summer uprising offered an additional reminder that the change in administrations comes less than a year after the largest civil rights protests in the history of the country.
Robin D.G. Kelley, an American history professor at UCLA, said he’s been thinking a lot about the relationship between the protests and the Capitol riot. The author of several books exploring the history of social movements and race in the United States, Kelley’s forthcoming title, “Black Bodies Swinging: An American Postmortem,” aims to provide a “genealogy of the Black Spring protests of 2020 by way of a deep examination of state-sanctioned racialized violence and a history of resistance.”
In the wake of the siege, Kelley said he’s been particularly focused on the relationship between the police, the military, and conventional notions of radicalization. “I’m really thinking hard about the notion of a thin blue line, and what does it mean when the very forces that many of us were fighting in June are the forces that ended up trying to take the capital?” he told me. Kelley sees the Capitol insurrection not as a backlash so much as an ongoing historical pattern of right-wing violence responding to moments of pressure from the left. “I actually think they’re responses to insurgency,” he said — the insurgency, in this case, being a historic mass movement challenging the power and role of the police in American society.
The Trump administration’s exit from power was without a doubt a positive development, Kelley said. “I do feel relieved,” he said, adding that the past four years were bigger than the president alone. “All the people around Trump, everyone that he brought in, they’re all unhinged,” Kelley said. “They’re all the worst expression of racial, capitalist violence.” At the same time, the historian said the Biden-Harris administration carries its own kind of risks, especially for the movement that was in the streets last summer. Should the Biden administration expand law enforcement authorities in the name of some new war on domestic terrorism, Kelley explained, history tells us to expect to see those authorities eventually used against individuals and organizations who challenge the power of the police.
“Domestic anti-terrorism legislation and executive orders will make it much harder and create even greater dangers for a lot of us doing this work,” Kelley said. “We have to be really, really careful to resist that, and not just resist it over issues of free speech and civil liberties — that’s important — but just resist it for political reasons, because the left is always a victim of this kind of counterterror.” He added: “I’m also terrified, and I say this honestly, that we’re going to basically breathe a sigh of relief and come to the conclusion that their election was the struggle, rather than creating the conditions to continue to struggle.”
When millions of people marched through the streets last summer, often in the face of tear gas and police crackdowns, they were challenging institutions that did not pack up and leave with Trump. Since then, Kelley said, there has been a concerning “demobilization” of organizing around police and state violence. He attributed the slowdown to multiple factors, including a “political calculus” on the part of some activists and organizations heading into the presidential election, and the enormous challenge of organizing in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. Kelley now worries that the downturn in organizing, coupled with the Biden-Harris victory and the spectacle of right-wing violence at the Capitol, could make that demobilization permanent. “What we end up doing is demobilizing the very anti-fascist movements that many of us were in the streets fighting for this summer,” he said. “And then re-mobilizing it against these mobs by giving the state a pass.”
The challenge in a post-Trump United States is “reminding people that there’s a long history of racism, and it doesn’t come from white men with horns. It comes largely from state policy and a long history, and a deep history, that we have to contest,” Kelley said. Otherwise, he said, “I fear that the summer of 2020 is going to be forgotten.”
People clash with police Saturday during a protest in St. Petersburg, Russia, against the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. (photo: Dmitri Lovetsky/AP)
Protests Swell Across Russia Calling for the Release of Kremlin Critic Alexei Navalny
Jason Breslow, NPR
Breslow writes: "Tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets in protest on Saturday to demand the release of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, braving the threat of mass arrests in what were some of the largest demonstrations against the Kremlin in years."
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An activist in opposition to the death penalty protests outside the US penitentiary in Terre Haute. (photo: Bryan Woolston/Reuters)
35 Democrats Urge Biden to Commute Sentences of All 49 Federal Death Row Prisoners
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "Led by two prominent African American congresswomen, 35 Democrats have urged Joe Biden to commute the sentences of all 49 federal prisoners left on death row - days after the Trump administration finished its rush to kill 13 such prisoners."
Early last Saturday Dustin Higgs, 48, became the last of those prisoners to be killed, after Trump lifted a long-standing moratorium on federal executions. Biden entered the White House on Wednesday.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, of the 49 people still on federal death row, 21 are white, 20 are black, seven are Latino and one is Asian.
Among those prisoners is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of planting pressure-cooker bombs on the route of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, killing three and injuring 264. His death sentence was overturned last year, a decision that is now before the supreme court.
In a letter sent to Biden on Friday, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Cori Bush of Missouri led lawmakers in calling on Biden “to take swift, decisive action”.
“Commuting the death sentences of those on death row and ensuring that each person is provided with an adequate and unique re-sentencing process is a crucial first step in remedying this grave injustice,” they said.
The representatives said they looked forward to the new administration enacting “just and restorative policies that will meaningfully transform our criminal legal system for the better”.
Addressing Biden, they wrote: “By exercising your clemency power, you can ensure that there would be no one left on death row to kill.”
Such a gesture, they said, would be “an unprecedented – but necessary – action to reverse systemic injustices and restore America’s moral standing.”
Pressley has been consistently outspoken in her opposition to capital punishment. In July 2019, soon after Trump attorney general Bill Barr announced the lifting of a 16-year moratorium on federal executions, the Massachusetts Democrat proposed legislation to “prohibit the imposition of the death penalty for any violation of federal law, and for other purposes”.
“The death penalty has no place in a just society,” Pressley said then.
But by the time Trump left office, he had overseen the most executions by a US president in more than a century.
Among those supporting the new appeal is Kelley Henry, a supervising assistant federal public defender based in Nashville and an attorney for Lisa Montgomery, who on 12 January became the first woman killed by the US government in nearly 70 years.
“Congress is right,” Kelley told CNN on Friday. “President Biden must go further than just not carrying out executions and should immediately commute all federal death sentences.
“When the supreme court, without any explanation, vacates lower court stays to allow the execution of a woman whose mental illness leaves her with no understanding of why she is being executed, we know the federal death penalty system is broken beyond repair.”
New White House press secretary Jen Psaki would not be drawn on specific plans to address the federal death penalty.
“The president, as you know, has stated his opposition to the death penalty in the past,” Psaki said. “That remains his view. I don’t have anything more for you in terms of future actions or mechanisms, though.”
Karen Bass of California, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York were among other well-known names to sign the letter to the new president.
Appealing to Biden in December, Pressley said: “With a stroke of a pen, you can stop all federal executions."
A medical worker collects a swab sample from a child at a COVID-19 testing site in Shijiazhuang, the capital of north China's Hebei Province, January 20, 2021. (photo: Xinhua/Zhu Xudong/Getty Images)
China Builds Massive Detention Camp to Control COVID
Grace Qi, CBS News
Qi writes: "China is rushing to build a massive quarantine camp with more than 4,000 isolation suites in Hebei Province, a region just outside Beijing at the center of a resurgent coronavirus epidemic."
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Sunday Song: Nina Simone | Sinnerman
Nina Simone, YouTube
Excerpt: "Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?"
Poet, performing artist, activist Nina Simone, July 1965 (photo: Chitty/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on that day
We got to run to the rock
Please hide me, I run to the rock
Please hide me, run to the rock
Please hide here
All on that day
But the rock cried out
I can't hide you, the rock cried out
I can't hide you, the rock cried out
I ain't gonna hide you there
All on that day
I said rock
What's the matter with you rock?
Don't you see I need you, rock?
Good Lord, Lord
All on that day
So I run to the river
It was bleedin', I run to the sea
It was bleedin', I run to the sea
It was bleedin', all on that day
So I run to the river
It was boilin', I run to the sea
It was boilin', I run to the sea
It was boilin', all on that day
So I run to the Lord
Please hide me, Lord
Don't you see me prayin'?
Don't you see me down here prayin'?
But the Lord said
Go to the Devil, the Lord said
Go to the Devil
He said go to the Devil
All on that day
So I ran to the Devil
He was waitin', I ran to the Devil
He was waitin', ran to the Devil
He was waitin', all on that day
I cried, power, power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Well, I run to the river
It was boilin', I run to the sea
It was boilin', I run to the sea
It was boilin', all on that day
So I ran to the Lord
I said Lord, hide me
Please hide me
Please help me, all on that day
He said, hide?
Where were you?
When you oughta have been prayin'
I said Lord, Lord
Hear me prayin', Lord, Lord
Hear me prayin', Lord, Lord
Hear me prayin', all on that day
Sinnerman, you oughta be prayin'
Outghta be prayin', sinnerman
Oughta be prayin', all on that day
Up come power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
(Power, Lord)
Hold down (power, Lord)
Go down (power, Lord)
Kingdom (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Power (power, Lord)
Na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Na-na-na, na-na-na-na
Woah, ho
Ha-ha-ha-ha
Ha-ha-ha-ha, oh Lord
Nu, nu, nu
No-no-no-no, ma-na-na-na-na, don't you know I need you Lord?
Don't you know that I need you?
Don't you know that I need you?
Oh, Lord
Wait
Oh, Lord
Oh, Lord, Lord
President Joe Biden signs his first executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, in Washington. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Biden Pumps the Brakes on More Than 100 Trump Environmental Policy Decisions
Monica Samayoa and Bradley W. Parks, OPB
Excerpt: "The Biden administration has laid out a roadmap for undoing many of the environmental actions of his predecessor, some of which were approved or enacted within the past six months."
Many of Donald Trump’s actions on endangered species, energy, hazardous chemicals and more are on hold as President Joe Biden takes office.
President Joe Biden, hours after he was sworn in Wednesday, issued an executive order to start a process that could lead to amendments or even reversals of many of Donald Trump’s nearly 200 environmental policy decisions.
The president’s order pauses implementation of more than 100 policies while they are under review. Many of them directly affect the Pacific Northwest, and some unraveled compromises that took years, even decades, to reach.
“It’s gonna take some time for the agencies to undo all the damage Trump did, but we will see changes here in the Northwest,” said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper. “It’s not guaranteed that Biden’s going to be a great environmental president, and we need to keep the pressure on.”
Biden also vowed to ensure that the United States rejoins the Paris Climate Accord.
Western Environmental Law Center Wildlands Program director and staff attorney Susan Jane Brown said the process of a new administration reviewing current policies to make sure they are consistent with their own priorities is normal, but that the president will have to do more than sign executive orders to make changes.
“What it will take to rollback the rollback is more process, more rulemaking,” Brown said. “There are a series of steps that have to take place.”
Brown said that process could take months or even years to finish, but also includes the opportunity for public comment.
NEPA
One of the major policies under review is the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which the Trump administration altered last summer. It eliminated environmental impact reports for certain projects and shortened the amount of time these evaluations must be under review. It also reduced the opportunities for public input.
Brown said that Oregon has not seen the full impact of these changes yet, but that it’s only a matter of time.
“In the meantime we are falling further and further behind on the real work that needs to get done,” Brown said. “It’s just disappointing, it’s a missed opportunity frankly because we have to focus on fixing rather than building.”
Lawson Fite, the general counsel for the American Forest Resource Council, said he is optimistic that a thorough review of the policies will reaffirm most if not all of the actions under review.
“We’re hoping for a successful Biden administration and want results in Oregon that support our rural communities and that encourage sustainable activities like forestry,” Fite said.
Energy
Many of the Trump administration’s actions on energy sought to expand use and extraction of coal, oil and natural gas.
Notably, the administration scissored out of the Clean Water Act a provision that allowed state and tribal governments to reject federal permit decisions on fossil fuel projects. It’s a power that’s been used locally to stop coal projects and the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas pipeline and export terminal.
“That’s a very important state power that the Trump administration tried to take away,” said VandenHeuvel with Columbia Riverkeeper.
Emissions standards, fuel-efficient vehicle regulations, fossil fuels transport — all of those and more are on the table for review.
Wildlife
The Trump administration loosened restrictions on grazing, oil and gas drilling, and mining on greater sage grouse habitat across the Intermountain West. That decision threatens to spoil a deal reached in 2015 to protect the grouse while keeping the bird off the federal endangered species list, but it will be relatively easy to overturn.
Trump also used his final weeks in office to issue a raft of Endangered Species Act decisions that left Northwest wildlife without protections they’ve had for decades.
Populations for the northern spotted owl in Washington, Oregon and Northern California and monarch butterfly across the West have steadily declined. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has said both species warrant more protections, but declined to grant them at the end of last year. Adding to that, the administration chopped the owl’s critical habitat protections by 3.4 million acres in January.
The agency removed the gray wolf from the federal endangered species list entirely, which conservation organizations have called premature. Gray wolves have regained feeble footholds in many states, but are without significant protection in some.
Each of those decisions faces legal challenges.
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