19 January 21
I'm 73 and still working because I can't afford to retire. I just donated $30 and I urge everyone to squeeze something out of their wallets to pitch in! We need RSN!
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
19 January 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Martin Luther King III | My Father, Martin Luther King Jr., Had Another Dream
Martin Luther King III, The New York Times
King III writes: "As we celebrate the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. today - with just a few days until a new administration takes office - we must think about the message he would have for our country and our leadership at this moment."
If he saw the issues of poverty and income inequality that exist today, he would be greatly disappointed.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who wants to stop Democrats from banning guns on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, walks to a vote where she was detained at the metal detector on Jan. 12. (photo: Katherine Frey/)
GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert Gave Capitol Tour to 'Large' Group Before the Riots, Democratic Lawmaker Says
Andrea Salcedo, The Washington Post
Salcedo writes: "Amid a push to investigate whether any GOP lawmakers aided rioters at the Capitol, several Democrats last week accused an unnamed House Republican of leading groups on 'reconnaissance' tours of the building before the Jan. 6 attack."
Now, two Democratic lawmakers say they personally saw one Republican — Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado — with a “large” group in a tunnel connected to the Capitol days before the attempted insurrection that left four rioters and one police officer dead.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) said on Monday that he and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) had both seen Boebert in the tunnel outside the Cannon House Office Building with a group sometime in the three days before the riots. He said he didn’t know who was in the group or if anyone with Boebert later participated in the attack.
“Congressman [John] Yarmuth refreshed my recollection yesterday,” Cohen told Jim Sciutto on “CNN Newsroom.” “We saw Boebert taking a group of people for a tour sometime after the 3rd and before the 6th. … Now whether these people were people that were involved in the insurrection or not, I do not know.”
Boebert, a gun rights advocate with links to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, called Cohen’s remarks “false” and “slanderous” in a letter sent to the congressman on Monday, which she also shared on Twitter. Boebert said she had taken a number of family members into the Capitol on Jan. 2 for a tour and Jan. 3 to take pictures on the day she was sworn into office, but had not given any other tours.
“I haven’t given a tour of the U.S. Capitol in the 117th Congress to anyone but family,” Boebert said on Twitter.
Neither Cohen nor Boebert’s offices immediately responded to messages from The Washington Post early on Tuesday.
Cohen’s claims are the latest tumultuous episode for Boebert, whose spokesman resigned after the Jan. 6 riots as she faced blowback for voting against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory and for tweeting about the location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the attack. Dozens of Colorado lawmakers have also demanded her resignation.
Last week, a group of Democrats asked congressional security officials to investigate “suspicious behavior and access given to visitors” one day before the Jan. 6 attack. In the days before the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building, the Democrats said, lawmakers and their staffers witnessed an “extremely high number of outside groups” touring the Capitol, which closed its doors to the public in March as a coronavirus precaution.
On Jan. 12, without naming anyone, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) said she saw her colleagues leading “reconnaissance” tours a day ahead of the Capitol riots. Then, a day later, Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), echoed Sherrill’s allegations in an interview with MSNBC where also without disclosing any names he said a GOP lawmaker had given protesters a tour of the Capitol on Jan. 5.
Although Maloney didn’t name her in his interview, Boebert on Thursday denied she had had anything to do with the incident. Boebert sent a letter to Maloney last week accusing him of implying that she was the House member who had given tours to “insurrectionists,” and said she had been subject to “death threats and hundreds of vile phone calls and emails” as a result.
On Monday, Cohen became the first Democrat to accuse Boebert of leading a tour of the Capitol before the riots.
Cohen told CNN said he was walking in a tunnel with Yarmuth when he saw Boebert leading a “large” crowd, noting the circumstances of the encounter were not clear to him.
“She was a freshman. She might have had a large number of people coming to be with her on this historic occasion and just wanting to give them the opportunity to have a tour,” Cohen told CNN.
A spokesperson with Cohen told the network he has not reported the incident to the FBI or Capitol Police. The FBI and Capitol Police did not immediately respond to a message from The Post late on Monday.
Christopher Schuler, a spokesman for Yarmuth, echoed Cohen’s story, saying Yarmuth was walking through the Cannon Tunnel back to his office on either Jan. 3 or 4 when he spotted Boebert walking “in the direction of the Capitol” surrounded by a group. Schuler added Yarmuth is unsure whether the group of people was actually with Boebert.
“While congressman Yarmuth remembers there was a group of people around congresswoman Boebert, he has no knowledge of who they were or if they were with her,” Schuler said in an email. “He simply exchanged greetings with a new colleague and continued on his way.”
In the letter to Cohen, Boebert said it was unfortunate that the congressman would tie her family’s visit to the Capitol to commemorate her swearing-in to the Capitol riots, highlighting that only her young children, husband, mother, aunt and uncle accompanied her those two days. Near the end of the letter, on which Boebert also cc’d Sherrill and Maloney, the congresswoman added that her family and her staff had received several threats following Cohen’s remarks.
“In the future, if you have concerns about my actions, as a fellow Member of Congress, please speak with me before making baseless and dangerous allegations,” Boebert said in the letter. “This basic professional courtesy would have allowed you to avoid the embarrassment of being caught in a dangerous lie that has compromised the safety of a Congresswoman, her family, and her staff.”
Members of the National Guard gather at the US Capitol as the House of Representatives prepares to begin the voting process on a resolution demanding U.S. vice president Pence and the cabinet remove President Trump from office, in Washington. (photo: Erin Scott/Reuters)
2 National Guard Members Removed From Biden Inauguration Over Militia Ties
James LaPorta and Michael Balsamo, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Two U.S. Army National Guard members are being removed from the security mission to secure Joe Biden's presidential inauguration. A U.S. Army official and a senior U.S. intelligence official say the two National Guard members have been found to have ties to fringe right group militias."
Riley June Williams. (photo: ITV)
ALSO SEE: The FBI Is Investigating Whether a Capitol
Rioter Stole Nancy Pelosi's Laptop to Sell to Russia
Woman Accused of Trying to Sell Pelosi Laptop to Russians Arrested
Jordan Williams, The Hill
Williams writes: "A woman who the FBI says took a laptop belonging to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol and tried to sell it to Russians has been arrested."
Riley June Williams was arrested on Monday in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, according to a listing on the Justice Department’s website tracking arrests made in connection to the siege.
Williams is charged with knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, as well as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds.
The FBI said in a court filing on Sunday that a witness identifying himself as a former romantic partner told the bureau that Williams “intended to send the computer device to a friend in Russia, who then planned to sell the device to SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service.”
The transfer fell through for unknown reasons, and Williams either still has the computer or destroyed it.
The witness also showed the FBI video of Williams apparently stealing the laptop.
Williams's arrest is one of more than 100 made so far in connection with the riot that led to five deaths, including that of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.
Rioters storming the Capitol earlier this month accessed Pelosi’s office. The Speaker's deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, said after the riot that a laptop used for presentations was stolen. It’s still unclear whether that was the laptop authorities said Williams took.
The NYPD carrying off a protester on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (photo: Bruce Schaff/Gothamist)
NYPD Criticized After Arresting Dozens at Martin Luther King Day March
Lexi Lonas, The Hill
Lonas writes: "The New York Police Department has received backlash after dozens of arrests were made during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day march Monday."
Videos were posted online of clashes between the police and protesters at night during the march with an activist claiming the police were “attacking protesters at City Hall Park.”
There were 29 people arrested during the protest and 11 officers were injured, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told NY1. The officers did not sustain serious injuries.
The protest was the “antithesis of what Martin Luther King stood for," Shea told NY1, according to The New York Post. “On such a day that we’re honoring Martin Luther King, [we have] demonstrations that consist of violence, throwing bottles, breaking property, calling for the death of officers [and] to burn the city down.”
The protesters are facing charges for disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and blocking a roadway.
Jordan Plaza, a protester at the march, told The New York Times that protesters weren’t “approaching the police in a violent manner” and that the police “ randomly surged.”
The protest was to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and to call for racial and social justice.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit on Jan. 14 against the NYPD for their handling of the racial justice protests over the summer. Many believe that police around the country used an excessive amount of force to handle the protests in the summer.
A march for the Uyghur people. (photo: Current Affairs)
How the Left Can Oppose the Uyghur Genocide
Rebecca Ruth Gould, Current Affairs
Gould writes: "Since 2017 the Uyghur people - the largest ethnic group of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China - have been systematically detained in secret concentration camps, tortured, forced to work against their will, and coercively re-educated by the Chinese state in order to erase their Muslim identities and distinctive cultural heritage."
READ MORE
Clearing up the damage from Trump's environmental policies will take some time. (image: Grist)
Trump's Unintended Legacy: A Fiery Climate Resistance
Shannon Osaka and Kate Yoder, Grist
Excerpt: "When President Donald Trump moved into the White House in early 2017, those worried about the quickening pace of climate change had every right to be terrified."
How the climate movement came of age under Trump.
After all, on the campaign trail, Trump had hollered about pulling out of the Paris climate agreement and reviving the coal industry, as well as banning Muslims from entering the United States and “locking up” Hillary Clinton.
It wasn’t just bluster. Trump tried to do all of that, and much more. The former reality TV star and real estate mogul, with his thumb hovering over the “Tweet” button, presided over a frenetic presidential term marked by impeachments, walls, and travel bans — four years that were as poisonous for the country as they were for the climate.
Under Trump and his polluter-friendly appointees, the Environmental Protection Agency rolled back hundreds of rules intended to clean up the country’s air and water and curtail greenhouse gas emissions — which could result in almost 1.8 billion metric tons of extra carbon dioxide flowing into the atmosphere over the next 15 years. (That’s equivalent to one year’s worth of emissions from the country’s power generation.) Trump made good on his campaign promise, making America the only country in the world to abandon the landmark Paris Agreement after adopting it, ceding the international stage to players like the European Union and China. And all this amid three of the top five warmest years on record, record-breaking hurricanes, and devastating wildfires.
To be sure, past Republican presidents also loosened many environmental protections. But they didn’t do it on the same scale as Trump. “Trump’s appointees were more openly contemptuous of environmentalists than any Republican environmental appointees at least since Ronald Reagan,” said Adam Rome, an environmental historian at the University at Buffalo. Trump didn’t just destroy environmental protections — he bragged about it, while calling climate change a hoax created by China, saying “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” and giving the green light to controversial oil drilling and pipeline projects.
With Trump expected to leave office on Wednesday, President-elect Joe Biden has promised to return to the Paris accord on his first day in office. But clearing up the rest of the damage will take time. And time, unfortunately, is in short supply. To avoid warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius or (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), as required by the Paris Agreement, the U.S. needs to zero out its emissions by the year 2050. According to one analyst, before Trump, the U.S. would have needed emissions to drop 4.5 percent each year to reach that goal; after Trump, it will be more like 5.5 percent. The difference isn’t trivial: In a world where it took a devastating pandemic to cut the world’s emissions by only 7 percent last year, every metric ton of CO2 matters.
Trump, however, will leave another legacy behind when he departs the White House. In the past four years, climate activism has catapulted into the mainstream. Riding on the waves of what has been called the “American resistance” movement against Trump, it went from a movement associated with pipeline protests, university divestment, and more niche concerns to grabbing major headlines. Youth-led activist groups like the Sunrise Movement and Zero Hour sprang up seemingly overnight — staging marches, occupying Congressional offices, and confronting presidential candidates. Abroad, a Swedish teenager named Greta Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest the lack of action on global warming, inspiring teenagers around the world to do the same. In London, thousands of protestors from “Extinction Rebellion” stopped traffic, chained themselves to fences, and brought Tube stations to a screeching halt.
Not that all of this activism was simply a backlash against Trump. Raging wildfires, record-breaking hurricane seasons, and scorching heat waves have also vaulted climate change into the public’s consciousness. But it’s hard to imagine it occurring without him. “When a political system is in place that is not open to people to push for change from within the system, they go outside of it,” said Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. “They march in the street, they yell in the street, they do sit-ins. It makes a lot of sense when you have an administration that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is real.”
Now, however, these newly emboldened activists are facing a new reality: What will happen to the movement when the world’s loudest climate denier is no longer in the White House?
Natalie Sweet’s first-ever protest was the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the pink-hatted national rally held the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Sweet was in eighth grade at the time and drove to the protest from New York City with her family.
She was already starting to get political. “What Trump’s election did for me was show how high up racism and prejudice can be in politics,” she said. “That really propelled me forward.”
Sweet, now 17, serves as the communications director for Zero Hour and is emblematic of many teenagers who spent their high school years protesting Trump. Most got their first taste of politics at the Women’s March or at the March for Our Lives — the massive demonstrations against gun violence held in the wake of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida — then pivoted to protesting inaction on global warming. “They were the first children of ‘the resistance,’” Fisher said. “They came out originally around other issues but then started to see the importance of climate change.”
Young people turned to protest as they started to believe that the political system was failing them, said Hava Gordon, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Denver. Before Thunberg was famous, back in the summer of 2018, she was just a lone teenager protesting outside the Swedish Parliament. She went on to inspire millions of young people worldwide to skip school and take to the streets, cursing about climate change (“Maybe if it was called ‘Father Earth’ you’d actually give a shit!” one protest sign read) and calling for urgent action.
Gordon said they didn’t want to “wait their turn” to have a voice in politics — and that the dysfunction of the Trump administration had revealed that waiting wasn’t an option anyway. So they adopted an attitude of “‘we’re not gonna wait to be acculturated into this political machine, because it’s totally broken.’”
In some ways, these protests mirrored those in the past, with calls to “listen to the science,” giant blow-up Earth balloons, and signs about saving polar bears. But the most recent demonstrations have also been markedly different, shaped by concerns that go well beyond climate change and the future of Arctic sea ice. The new generation doesn’t just want to stop global warming — they want a plan that creates millions of jobs and builds a new, non-polluting economy. In 2018, activists with the Sunrise Movement held a widely covered sit-in in the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanding a “Green New Deal” — a legislative agenda that would cut carbon emissions while also providing jobs to every American, a $15 minimum wage, and universal health care. The idea soon turned into a rallying cry.
For a long time, the label of “environmentalist” didn’t comfortably fit activists who were more concerned with racism and human health than polar bears and endangered species. “People have been trying for decades to make environmental justice a bigger issue, and to build alliances that go beyond the traditional concerns of social justice activists on the one hand, and climate activists or environmental activists on the other,” said Rome, the historian. The coalition for a Green New Deal managed to do what previous generations of environmental activists could not: join union workers, health care advocates, and community leaders together for a common goal, one that was intertwined with concerns around social justice and equality.
Fisher, the University of Maryland sociologist who has spent the last four years interviewing activists about their reasons for protesting, says that the emphasis on race and equality has been growing — even as some of the backlash against Trump is waning. According to Fisher’s data, in April 2017, when 200,000 people took part in the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C., 47 percent of participants said they were protesting partly for “equality”; 56 percent said they were there because of Trump. By last April, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced most Earth Day celebrations and climate protests online, the number of people who said they were participating for equality had jumped to 57 percent. The president, meanwhile, was only motivating 28 percent of respondents to turn out. “I think people have become a bit inured about the outrageousness that is Trump,” Fisher said.
Over the three years between the surveys, there were plenty of other reasons to protest runaway global warming — including an onslaught of climate-charged disasters that were hard to ignore. In 2017 alone, Hurricane Harvey submerged Houston in 50 inches of rain, the worst rainstorm in U.S. history; the monster storm known as Irma was deemed the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record; and Hurricane Maria became the deadliest storm in almost 20 years, killing thousands in Puerto Rico. The flame-ridden West saw its worst wildfires in recorded history last year, burning down thousands of buildings and choking swaths of the country in smoke. The country sizzled through deadly heat waves year after year, sea levels steadily rose, and changing weather patterns parched the continental United States, half of which is now experiencing drought.
It felt as if we were already beginning to live through passages of a dystopian work of climate fiction. The world seemed to be teetering into the new, scary era that scientists had been warning was coming for decades — and continued to warn about in harrowing reports, such as the 1.5 degrees C report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United States’ Fourth National Climate Assessment, which both came out in 2018.
The Trump administration, in character, tried to bury the assessment by releasing it on Black Friday. And what did the U.S. president have to say about his own administration’s report? “I don’t believe it.”
The horror show in the White House, in tandem with extreme weather catastrophes throughout the world, might have managed to scare more than just young Americans into caring about the climate. A record percentage of the public now grasps that our planet is overheating, and more than a quarter are alarmed about the crisis — double what it was five years ago, before Trump was elected. Climate change became a concern for CEOs and Wall Street as well as for younger Republicans. “They don’t necessarily care about nature, they’re not necessarily tree huggers, but they recognize one of the great challenges of the 21st century is building a sustainable economy and a sustainable society,” Rome said.
Many business leaders, he said, “couldn’t stomach Trump’s denialism.” Corporate executives said that withdrawing from the Paris Agreement was bad for business; automakers sided with California when Trump challenged the state’s stricter fuel efficiency rules. As the federal government backslid on climate, corporate pledges to go “net-zero” emissions starting pouring in (with varying degrees of legitimacy).
Corporations alone won’t save us, Rome said, but they are “certainly a sign that there’s a larger awareness out in the world that these challenges are real and they’re not going away.”
Will all this momentum end up inspiring legislation? In early January, run-off elections in Georgia that sent two Democrats to the Senate provided the start of an answer: After Biden’s inauguration, his party will be in control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency — a trifecta not seen since President Barack Obama stepped into the White House over a decade ago. Given the extremely narrow margin in the Senate (Democrats hold 50 seats, including two independents, giving them the slimmest edge possible over their Republican counterparts), Biden will not be able to pass anything close to the $2 trillion climate plan he envisioned. But he will, by fits and starts, be able to get some legislation through.
There is some concern that, with a friendly face in the White House, some of the activism that has marked the past four years will begin to trickle away. It’s hard to imagine hundreds of thousands of people turning out for a “March for Science” during a Biden presidency, as they did during Trump’s. Protests and organizing, after all, come in cycles: When activists’ preferred party is in power, they have fewer reasons to take to the streets.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the momentum behind climate action will fade. “Activism exists on a spectrum,” Fisher said. Organizers can attack a problem from the “outside” — staging a sit-in, for example, or protesting a much-disliked political candidate — or from the “inside,” through lobbying elected officials and joining political campaigns. Many of the climate groups that have emerged over the past four years began on the outside, and then began inching, slowly, toward the inside. “Environmental groups have for years used this kind of combination of tactics,” Fisher said.
Along the way, organizations like the Sunrise Movement have accumulated more political power and media attention than would have previously been thought possible. Last spring, just a year and a half after Sunrise’s sit-in, its co-founder, Varshini Prakash, served on a task force to help the Biden campaign refine its climate plan, rubbing shoulders (via Zoom) with Washington insiders and former Secretary of State John Kerry. But the group intends to keep playing the role of outside agitator as well, and Prakash has said that they will hold the new president accountable. “Our role is to say these campaign promises are great, but we need you to act upon them from day one,” Prakash told Reuters in December.
Some things in the next four years won’t change much. Thunberg will probably continue to skip school — and maybe even college — on Fridays. And even after the best efforts of the Biden administration, it is likely that the U.S. will still not be on track to cut its emissions enough to reach the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius. (According to the nonprofit Climate Action Tracker, only a handful of countries in the world, including India, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, are on track to do their part in hitting that mark.)
But Trump’s strange, turbulent, and destructive years in office have given the climate movement something that it didn’t have before: a unified foundation on which to build, and a message that could resonate well beyond those concerned about “the planet” in the abstract.
“If the movement can show that as a fast-food worker, you should be concerned about climate change and all the things that propel it,” Gordon said, “that’s a huge victory.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.