18 January 21
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18 January 21
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Review, "MLK/FBI"
Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
Hornaday writes: "In the exquisitely constructed, deeply unnerving 'MLK/FBI,' filmmaker Sam Pollard takes viewers behind the looking glass into the shadowy world of governmental surveillance during the mid-century civil rights movement, a program of spying, infiltration and harassment that reached its perverse apotheosis with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with Martin Luther King, Jr."
Since King’s assassination in 1968, White America has embraced him as one of the nation’s great moral leaders. But in this meticulously constructed narrative, which centers on FBI files that are scheduled to be declassified in 2027, Pollard reminds viewers that, at the time of his death, King was anything but universally admired. By the time he came out against the Vietnam War and began linking race and class via the Poor People’s Campaign, Hoover’s years-long campaign to peg King as a Communist had taken hold. Archival footage of anti-King demonstrators spouting lies they’ve uncritically accepted about the Baptist minister bear an uncanny resemblance to scenes of Americans who today believe that Democrats and their leaders worship Satan, traffic children and stole the 2020 election.
In fact, part of “MLK/FBI’s” great value is in showing us the structural realities of white supremacy, paternalistic authoritarianism and the ability of popular culture to distort public opinion that still hold dangerously true. But its power lies in resuscitating the past with vivid, immersive immediacy. Using mostly black-and-white news footage and bringing his sensitive, precise gifts as an editor to bear (Pollard has edited several of Spike Lee’s movies), the filmmaker invites the audience to watch King morph before our eyes from a self-effacing 26-year-old preacher to a man who was both defiant and wary in his final months.
Defiant, wary but far from perfect, as “MLK/FBI” takes pains to address head-on. Using interviews with such firsthand witnesses as Andrew Young, Clarence Jones and former FBI special agent Charles Knox, Pollard delves into the history of Hoover’s career with the federal law enforcement agency, his quest to root out Communists and the path that took him to King's door and, eventually, bedroom. Once Hoover discovered that King was having extramarital affairs, he became even more single-minded, tapping the activist’s phone lines, bugging his house and placing informants in proximity. When King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Hoover redoubled his efforts, culminating in the notorious tape and anonymous letter sent to Coretta Scott King, obliquely suggesting that her husband kill himself.
The facts of Hoover’s persecution of King — while so many murders of civil rights workers were going un-investigated by the FBI — are sobering enough. But with the help of historians Beverly Gage and Donna Murch, Pollard makes a far more complex and damning case that Hoover’s obsession wasn't aberrant, but an expression of shame and ambivalence around his own sexuality, as well as the embodiment of messages America had long been steeped in, fusing African American political aspirations with sexual threat. And, as historian David Garrow observes, trenchantly, the hounding of King was business as usual at the FBI, which was “fundamentally a part of the existing mainstream political order.”
Wisely, Pollard keeps these voices off-screen for most of “MLK/FBI,” allowing the images to tell the story until he gracefully introduces his interlocutors in the epilogue. The result is a film that does more than impart facts, or even tell a story: It builds a world, and once we’re in it, takes us on a potent and unforgettable emotional journey.
National Guard troops reinforce security around the U.S. Capitol ahead of expected protests leading up to President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2021, following the deadly attack on Congress by a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
FBI Vetting Guard Troops in DC Amid Fears of Insider Attack
Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press
Baldor writes: "U.S. defense officials say they are worried about an insider attack or other threat from service members involved in securing President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, prompting the FBI to vet all of the 25,000 National Guard troops coming into Washington for the event."
The massive undertaking reflects the extraordinary security concerns that have gripped Washington following the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. And it underscores fears that some of the very people assigned to protect the city over the next several days could present a threat to the incoming president and other VIPs in attendance.
Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told The Associated Press on Sunday that officials are conscious of the potential threat, and he warned commanders to be on the lookout for any problems within their ranks as the inauguration approaches. So far, however, he and other leaders say they have seen no evidence of any threats, and officials said the vetting hadn’t flagged any issues that they were aware of.
”We’re continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation,” McCarthy said in an interview after he and other military leaders went through an exhaustive, three-hour security drill in preparation for Wednesday’s inauguration. He said Guard members are also getting training on how to identify potential insider threats.
About 25,000 members of the National Guard are streaming into Washington from across the country — at least two and a half times the number for previous inaugurals. And while the military routinely reviews service members for extremist connections, the FBI screening is in addition to any previous monitoring.
Multiple officials said the process began as the first Guard troops began deploying to D.C. more than a week ago. And they said it is slated to be complete by Wednesday. Several officials discussed military planning on condition of anonymity.
“The question is, is that all of them? Are there others?” said McCarthy. “We need to be conscious of it and we need to put all of the mechanisms in place to thoroughly vet these men and women who would support any operations like this.”
In a situation like this one, FBI vetting would involve running peoples’ names through databases and watchlists maintained by the bureau to see if anything alarming comes up. That could include involvement in prior investigations or terrorism-related concerns, said David Gomez, a former FBI national security supervisor in Seattle.
Insider threats have been a persistent law enforcement priority in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But in most cases, the threats are from homegrown insurgents radicalized by al-Qaida, the Islamic State group or similar groups. In contrast, the threats against Biden’s inauguration have been fueled by supporters of President Donald Trump, far-right militants, white supremacists and other radical groups. Many believe Trump’s baseless accusations that the election was stolen from him, a claim that has been refuted by many courts, the Justice Department and Republican officials in key battleground states.
The insurrection at the Capitol began after Trump made incendiary remarks at the Jan. 6 rally. According to McCarthy, service members from across the military were at that rally, but it’s not clear how many were there or who may have participated in the breach at the Capitol. So far only a couple of current active-duty or National Guard members have been arrested in connection with the Capitol assault, which left five people dead. The dead included a Capitol Police officer and a woman shot by police as she climbed through a window in a door near the House chamber.
Gen. Daniel R. Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, has been meeting with Guard troops as they arrive in D.C. and as they gather downtown. He said he believes there are good processes in place to identify any potential threats.
“If there’s any indication that any of our soldiers or airmen are expressing things that are extremist views, it’s either handed over to law enforcement or dealt with the chain of command immediately,” he said.
The insider threat, however, was just one of the security concerns voiced by officials on Sunday, as dozens of military, National Guard, law enforcement and Washington, D.C., officials and commanders went through a security rehearsal in northern Virginia. As many as three dozen leaders lined tables that ringed a massive color-coded map of D.C. reflected onto the floor. Behind them were dozens more National Guard officers and staff, with their eyes trained on additional maps and charts displayed on the wall.
The Secret Service is in charge of event security, but there is a wide variety of military and law enforcement personnel involved, ranging from the National Guard and the FBI to Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, U.S. Capitol Police and U.S. Park Police.
Commanders went over every aspect of the city’s complicated security lockdown, with McCarthy and others peppering them with questions about how the troops will respond in any scenario and how well they can communicate with the other enforcement agencies scattered around the city.
Hokanson said he believes his troops have been adequately equipped and prepared, and that they are rehearsing as much as they can to be prepared for any contingency.
The major security concern is an attack by armed groups of individuals, as well as planted explosives and other devices. McCarthy said intelligence reports suggest that groups are organizing armed rallies leading up to Inauguration Day, and possibly after that.
The bulk of the Guard members will be armed. And McCarthy said units are going through repeated drills to practice when and how to use force and how to work quickly with law enforcement partners. Law enforcement officers would make any arrests.
He said Guard units are going through “constant mental repetitions of looking at the map and talking through scenarios with leaders so they understand their task and purpose, they know their routes, they know where they’re friendly, adjacent units are, they have the appropriate frequencies to communicate with their law enforcement partners.”
The key goal, he said, is for America’s transfer of power to happen without incident.
“This is a national priority. We have to be successful as an institution,” said McCarthy. “We want to send the message to everyone in the United States and for the rest of the world that we can do this safely and peacefully.”
Jeff Bezos. (photo: David Ryder/Getty Images)
Liz Theoharis | The Earth Does Not Belong to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s True Legacy
Liz Theoharis, TomDispatch
Theoharis writes: "The best hope of successfully navigating the crises of 2021 and beyond must involve King’s dream of building a multi-racial fusion movement to reconstruct society from the bottom up."
Only one thing truly hurt him at a gut level, and it wasn’t the endangerment of his vice president in a Capitol attacked by a rabid mob sporting the Confederate flag, MAGA hats, and anti-Semitic T-shirts. Nor, believe it or not, was it even the threat of being the first president in American history to be impeached twice; nor having Deutsche Bank (which kept him afloat for years) and other major corporate entities suddenly sever ties with him; nor even having one of his major financial supporters, Sheldon Adelson, die on him. For Donald Trump, the biggest blow of last week was reportedly the Professional Golfers’ Association, or P.G.A., announcement that it was taking its 2022 championship match away from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. In other words, the man who had visited golf courses more than 300 times during his presidency had suddenly become the golf equivalent of an undocumented immigrant and, according to those close to him, that truly “gutted” him.
As to what gutted so many other Americans in the last year, ranging from evictions to job loss, racism to death by Covid-19, this president could clearly have cared less and the eternally richer billionaires of this country didn’t seem to give much of a damn either; nor, in fact, did his wife Melania who, in what may have been her final message from the White House, vaguely bemoaned violence on Capitol Hill only after she had fiercely bemoaned her own treatment by unnamed critics (“salacious gossip, unwarranted personal attacks, and false and misleading accusations on me”).
As it happens, with just days left in Trump’s presidency, the self-proclaimed richest, most awesome superpower on planet Earth is now a basket case of the first order and a symbol around the globe of what not to do in a pandemic. As even the Washington “swamp” deserts Donald Trump, Joe Biden and crew face a hell on Earth of a kind that TomDispatch regular Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and author of Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor, lays out vividly on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Earth Does Not Belong to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s True Legacy
2020 will go down as the deadliest year in American history, significantly due to the devastation delivered by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, count in nearly two trillion dollars in damage from climate events (many caused by, or heightened by, intensifying global warming), a surge of incidents of police violence inflicted on Black and Native peoples, and millions more Americans joining the ranks of the poor even as small numbers of billionaires soared ever further into the financial heavens. And it’s already obvious that 2021 is likely to prove another harrowing year.
In the first weeks of January alone, Covid-19 deaths have risen to unprecedented levels; record turnout elected Georgia’s first Black and Jewish Senators in a runoff where race-baiting, red-baiting, and voter suppression were still alive and well; and a racist, white nationalist mob swarmed the Capitol emboldened by the president, as well as senators, representatives, and other officials, in an attempt to subvert and possibly take down our democratic system. The January 6th attack on that building was by no means a singular event (in a country where local officials have in recent years been similarly threatened). It did, however, highlight dramatically the growing menace of illiberal and anti-democratic forces building in power. And one thing is guaranteed: its impact will hit the poor and people of color most strikingly. Social media and news reports suggest that, with an emboldened white supremacist movement on the rise, more such attacks are being planned.
Many have claimed that those rioters (and the president’s infamous “base” more generally) were all, in essence, poor, working-class white people. In reality, however, among those who have led such racist attacks are business leaders, executives, and multimillionaires. As author Sarah Smash writes, “’Poor uneducated whites’ are neither the base/majority nor the explanation for Trumpism: stories now abound of middle-class and even affluent white insurrectionists leading and joining the hateful charge at the U.S. Capitol.”
Indeed, it would be better to take a more careful look at the rich and powerful, as the storming of the Capitol on January 6th once again exposes the Make America Great Again movement for the sort of fake populism that has, in these years, served elites all too “richly.” And the more we learn about that coordinated astroturf assault, the more the dark money that lay behind its origins all these years comes to light.
Questions Must Be Raised
Eleven months into the pandemic, we are living through the most unequal recession in modern American history. For the poor and precarious, this last year was a nightmare that dwarfed the 2007-2008 recession. Between March and October, nearly 67 million people lost work. This month alone about 20 million of them are collecting unemployment. By the end of 2020, one in five adults with children reported that, at times, they didn’t have enough to eat, while one in five renters were behind on their payments and faced the threat of eviction during the winter months of a still rampant virus.
At the same time, the wealth of America’s 651 billionaires increased by more than $1 trillion to a total of about $4 trillion. At the start of 2020, Jeff Bezos was the only American with a net worth of more than $100 billion. By the end of the year, he was joined by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk — and just last week Elon Musk passed Bezos as the richest person in the world.
A look at the wealthiest of wealthy Americans reveals a cross-section of industry — from the leaders of tech companies like Amazon and Facebook to the top executives of financial institutions like Berkshire Hathaway and Quicken Loans to those heading retail giants like Walmart and Nike, all of which collectively employ millions of workers. At Amazon, where the median pay is about $35,000 a year, Bezos could have distributed the $71.4 billion he made in the last pandemic year to his own endangered workers and he would still have had well more than $100 billion left.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness put it this way:
“Never before has America seen such an accumulation of wealth in so few hands. As tens of millions of Americans suffer from the health and economic ravages of this pandemic, a few hundred billionaires add to their massive fortunes. Their profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major Covid relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches.”
This last point is especially damning since the first and largest Covid-19 relief bill, the CARES Act, handed out billions of dollars worth of benefits to the upper-middle-class, the rich, and corporations. Most of us will only remember the $1,200 checks that went to some of those in need, but the bill also included provisions that favored the already well-off, including higher corporate interest deductions, flexible corporate loss rules, increased charitable tax deductions, and big tax breaks for the super-rich. Other parts of the CARES Act like the Paycheck Protection Program, as well as significant allocations to universities and hospitals, gave generously to large corporations and the wealthiest of institutions.
Direct payments and other measures in that bill did help many everyday people for a short period of time and yet Senate Republicans stonewalled long after those benefits had expired. When they finally relented in December, Mitch McConnell, knowing full well all that he had secured for the rich in the spring, craftily shot down proposed $2,000 checks for individuals as “socialism for the rich,” even though they would have disproportionately benefited low-and-middle-income Americans. Now, as the Biden transition team lays the groundwork for another major relief bill, conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia has already threatened that he would “absolutely not” vote for such $2,000 checks.
Of course, the acceleration of inequality and tepid policy solutions to poverty are hardly unique to the United States. This year, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index recorded a 31% increase in wealth among the 500 richest people in the world, the largest single-year gain in the list’s history. Meanwhile, the United Nations Development Programme projected that the long-term effects of Covid-19 could force 207 million more people across the globe into extreme poverty. That, in turn, would bring the official U.N. count of those making less than two dollars a day to more than a billion, or a little less than one-seventh of the world’s population — and, mind you, that’s at the onset of a decade that promises escalating economic dislocation, mass migration, and climate crisis.
A World of Superfluous Wealth and Deadening Poverty
This week, President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn into office and inherit a crisis that demands bold action. He has already said that on day one he will commit his administration to confronting the pandemic, the recession, systemic racism, and climate change. Four months ago, during an event with the Poor People’s Campaign, he also told an audience of more than a million people that “together we can carry on Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which is based on a simple, moral truth: that we’re all created in the image of God and everyone is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect.” He concluded by promising that “ending poverty will not just be an aspiration, it will be a theory of change to build a new economy that includes everyone.”
For this to be possible, however, the Biden administration will need to reject the supremacy of austerity and the ideology of scarcity. It will instead have to invest in an economy that guarantees health care, housing, food, water, and decent work for all its citizens. This will, of course, require imagining the sort of restructuring of our society that would, no doubt, be the work of a generation or more. But it could at least begin with an honest accounting of the actual abundance so unequally hoarded in the bank accounts, stock, and real estate holdings of this country’s richest people and the coffers of the Pentagon and the industrial complex that engulfs it, followed naturally by a plan to share it all so much more fairly.
On the anniversary of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. (who, had he not been assassinated, would have been 92 years old this January 15th), it is only fitting to share these still timely and prophetic words of his:
“God has left enough (and to spare) in this world for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and God never intended for some of his children to live in inordinate superfluous wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty. And somehow, I believe that God made it all… I believe firmly that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. I don’t think it belongs to Mr. Rockefeller. I don’t think it belongs to Mr. Ford. I think the earth is the Lord’s, and since we didn’t make these things by ourselves, we must share them with each other. And I think this is the only way we are going to solve the basic problems and the restructuring of our society which I think is so desperately needed.”
Exchange Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos for Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Ford, and King’s words couldn’t be more timely, could they?
Honoring Dr. King
After all, every January, students, workers, and community members sign up for service projects to celebrate King’s birthday. In fact, MLK Day is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service, when people paint schools, clean up trash, serve lunch to the hungry, and so much more. Over the last few decades, the spirit of volunteerism has become inextricably linked in the American imagination to King’s life and this year will be no exception. Today, amid unprecedented social, political, economic, and health upheaval, and the need to mask and social distance, even President-elect Biden’s inaugural committee is organizing a day of service.
In October 1983, as Congress considered the creation of MLK Day, Meldrim Thompson, Jr., the former Republican governor of New Hampshire, privately pleaded with President Ronald Reagan to veto any such legislation, calling Dr. King a “man of immoral character” with “well established” communist connections. Reagan (in what today would be true Trumpian fashion) replied, “On the national holiday you mentioned, I have the reservations you have, but here the perception of too many people is based on an image, not reality. Indeed, to them, the perception is reality.”
Reagan’s noxious remarks remind us that Dr. King was once considered a profound threat to the established order. The reality of Dr. King’s radical life has over time been almost unrecognizably smoothed over into an image that, so many years later, even Reagan, even Trump, might applaud. By casting Dr. King as an apolitical champion of charity, however, Americans have whitewashed not just his legacy, but that of the Black freedom struggle he helped lead, which broke Jim Crow, thanks to the most militant kinds of organizing.
Through a wicked transmutation of history, those with the most money and power in society are now allowed to use his name as a bulwark against the collective action of poor and dispossessed people, propping themselves up instead. Today, with carefully excerpted texts like “everyone can be great, because everyone can serve” as proof, King’s words are all too often manipulated to sanctify a truly superficial response to the burning crises of systemic racism, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and so much more. Yet even a cursory glance at the historical record should remind us all that King represented an incendiary reality in terms of the America of his time (and, sadly, of ours, too) and that there was nothing corporate-friendly about his image.
Fifty-three years ago, in his sermon “Where Do We Go from Here,” he spoke clearly to the question of corporate service, charity, and the kind of truth-telling action he had committed his life to:
“We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the iron ore?’ You begin to ask the question, ‘Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?’ These are the words that must be said.”
On the anniversary of his birth, may others keep asking such questions and remind us, as the Biden era begins, that the Earth does not belong to Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or the white supremacists who laid siege to the U.S. Capitol. The nation must have the moral courage to carry on the work of Reverend King. After all, the best hope of successfully navigating the crises of 2021 and beyond must involve King’s dream of building a multi-racial fusion movement to reconstruct society from the bottom up.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Liz Theoharis, a TomDispatch regular, is a theologian, ordained minister, and anti-poverty activist. Co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, she is the author of Always With Us?: What Jesus Really Said About the Poor. Follow her on Twitter at @liztheo.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., yells at journalists after setting off the metal detector outside the doors to the House of Representatives Chamber on Jan. 12. Twitter suspended the newly elected lawmaker's account temporarily on Sunday. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Trump’s Twitter and
Facebook Bans Are Working
Twitter Suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Account
Bill Chappell, NPR
Chappell writes: "Twitter locked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of her account on the social media platform on Sunday, citing violations of a company policy that it recently used to remove thousands of QAnon-related accounts. The suspension is in effect for 12 hours."
Greene has repeatedly endorsed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which has sought to portray President Trump as being undermined by a deep-state cabal.
When reached on Sunday, a Twitter spokesperson told NPR that the Georgia Republican's account "has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy."
The company's policy was updated after the recent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — a deadly event during which Greene and others were seen not wearing face masks in a secure room where a crowd of people were sheltering.
Greene's account is still viewable to the public. The newly elected representative's most recent messages on the platform repeat false claims that elections that resulted in Trump's defeat and key Republican losses in the Senate were flawed. Key election officials in Georgia, she said, had been "begged by Republicans to fix our elections."
Twitter affixed a warning notice to Greene's message about the recent national election stating, "This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can't be replied to, Retweeted or liked to a risk of violence." Those limits on engagement were introduced as part of the social media company's new approach to messages that are deemed to violate its civic integrity policy.
On Tuesday, Twitter announced that it has suspended more than 70,000 accounts that were used to share content about QAnon.
Rebekah Jones in her office at the Florida Department of Health before she was fired in May. The state has issued a warrant for her arrest, but has not said what charges she faces. (photo: Rebekah Jones/Tampa Bay Times)
Florida Analyst Who Clashed With Governor Over Covid Data Faces Arrest
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "Rebekah Jones, the founder of Florida’s coronavirus database who has clashed publicly with Governor Ron DeSantis in a dispute over data manipulation, said she would surrender on Sunday after a warrant was issued for her arrest."
Rebekah Jones, who clashed publicly with Ron DeSantis in a dispute over data manipulation, said she would turn herself in
ebekah Jones, the founder of Florida’s coronavirus database who has clashed publicly with Governor Ron DeSantis in a dispute over data manipulation, said she would surrender on Sunday after a warrant was issued for her arrest.
The state department of law enforcement said it would not reveal details of the allegations against the 31-year-old data analyst until she was in custody. The agency had been investigating allegations Jones illegally accessed a state messaging system and staged an armed raid at her Tallahassee home last month.
Jones, who was fired by the Florida department of health in May for insubordination after claiming she was ordered to censor and manipulate information on the database she founded and managed, said she was told the charge was unrelated to that investigation, and accused DeSantis of retaliation.
“The governor will not win his war on science and free speech,” she said in tweets that also confirmed her intention to turn herself in to police on Sunday night. “He will not silence those who speak out.”
The episode prolongs a bitter dispute that began last year when Jones claimed she was told to change data to support the Republican governor’s plan to reopen the state economy despite soaring Covid-19 cases.
Jones was fired by health officials and DeSantis was swift with his own retribution, subjecting Jones to a public character assassination and dismissing her as an insubordinate and disgruntled former employee.
Since her dismissal she has continued to amass and disseminate state Covid-19 information online, maintaining a rival to the official database and more recently compiling and publishing information on cases in Florida schools.
Jones’s December arrest followed an allegation by the Florida health department that an unknown person or persons hacked into a state system used to send emergency communications and sent an unauthorised message to members of a team responsible for coordinating public health and medical response.
The message urged recipients to “speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don’t have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it’s too late”.
On Saturday, Jones said a law enforcement search of computer equipment seized during the raid on her home in December “found no evidence of a message”.
She conceded that “police did find documents I received/downloaded from sources in the state, or something of that nature” but insisted the “crime” was not related to the original warrant.
In her most recent tweet, posted on Sunday lunchtime, Jones said she was “censored by the state of Florida until further notice”.
Jones posted a video of the 7 December raid and said police pointed guns at her children. Her family have since moved out of Florida for safety, she said. A Florida judge is mulling her request for the return of seized computer equipment.
On Sunday, Florida reported 11,093 new cases of coronavirus for a total of 1,571,279, and 135 deaths, bringing that toll to 24,515.
A resident washes a road after gunmen killed two female judges working for the Supreme Court in the capital. (photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP)
Two Afghan Female Judges Shot Dead in Kabul Ambush
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Two female judges have been killed by unknown gunmen in an ambush early on Sunday in Afghanistan’s capital."
Afghan officials blame the Taliban for the attacks, an accusation the armed group denies.
The attack on the Supreme Court judges took place as they were driving to work, Ahmad Fahim Qaweem, a court spokesman, said. Kabul police confirmed the attack.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack and spokesman for the Taliban armed group Zabihullah Mujahid said the group was not responsible.
Violence has surged across Afghanistan in recent months despite ongoing peace talks between the Taliban and government – especially in Kabul where a new trend of targeted killings aimed at high-profile figures has sown fear in the city.
The latest attack comes two days after the Pentagon announced it cut American troop levels in Afghanistan to 2,500, the lowest in nearly two decades.
High-profile killings
More than 200 female judges work for the country’s top court, Qaweem said.
Afghanistan’s Supreme Court was a target in February 2017 when a suicide bomb in its car park killed at least 20 court employees and wounded 41.
In recent months, several prominent Afghans – including politicians, journalists, activists, doctors and prosecutors – have been assassinated in often brazen daytime attacks in Kabul and other cities.
Afghan officials have blamed the Taliban for the attacks, a charge the militia has denied. Some of these killings have been claimed by the ISIL (ISIS) armed group.
Earlier this month, the US military for the first time directly accused the Taliban of orchestrating the attacks.
“The Taliban’s campaign of unclaimed attacks and targeted killings of government officials, civil society leaders & journalists must … cease for peace to succeed,” Colonel Sonny Leggett, a spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, said on Twitter.
A power plant emits smoke and vapor in Eschweiler, Germany, on Saturday. (photo: Oliver Berg/DPA/AFP/Getty Images)
Should Fossil Fuels Be Treated Like Nuclear Weapons?
Greta Moran, Slate
Moran writes: "Activists, policy experts, and academics are beginning to push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, modeled off its predecessor on nuclear weapons."
A few major cities seem to think so.
or decades, the potential for a nuclear catastrophe felt like a waking threat, just around the corner. Then, in 1968, many of the nations once responsible for pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war collectively agreed to reverse course, signing the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Member nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to end the stockpiling of nuclear weapons and eventually move toward full disarmament. While it didn’t end the threat of nuclear weapons overnight, this framework helped set in motion a new era. Today, the global arsenal of nuclear weapons is a fifth of what it was during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s.
Half a century later, the nations once stockpiling nuclear weapons are now stockpiling fossil fuels, which are already upending life on Earth as we know it. That’s why a group of activists, policy experts, and academics are beginning to push for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, modeled off its predecessor on nuclear weapons. Both treaties are rooted in the idea that “there are certain technologies and certain substances that pose such a global risk to humanity that we have an obligation to address that risk together,” explained Carroll Muffett, the president of the Center for International Environmental Law. Muffett is on the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative, which officially launched in September.
In mid-December, the New York City Council held a virtual hearing to consider endorsing a resolution for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could become the second city in the world to do so, following Vancouver, Canada—assuming another city doesn’t get there first. The Los Angeles City Council is poised to endorse the treaty, and Barcelona, Spain, has also introduced a similar resolution. By adopting the treaty, cities could build momentum for a multinational agreement to wind down the dangerous production of fossil fuels—not just curbing emissions—in a similar approach to the global disarmament of nuclear weapons.
“New fossil fuel projects are coming online, even as the world already has more fossil fuels developed than it can possibly extract while staying below 1.5 degrees,” said Muffett. “And so the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty emerged from the recognition that the world is facing a threat of truly global, historical proportion.”
The treaty calls for a fossil fuel phaseout to happen in three key ways: 1) nonproliferation, where countries end the expansion and exploration of fossil fuel production; 2) global disarmament, where cities deplete existing fossil fuel stockpiles by decommissioning old fossil fuel infrastructure and removing subsidies; and 3) a peaceful, just transition to renewable and low-carbon energy.
It is envisioned as a complement to the Paris Agreement, which commits to limiting global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, and ideally below 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above those levels. The landmark agreement sets to achieve these goals largely through greenhouse gas emissions cuts without putting the onus on countries to curb the production of fossil fuels—even though fossil fuel use is the world’s primary source of carbon dioxide emissions.
“I was absolutely shocked the first time I sat down and went through the Paris accords and searched for the words oil, gas, coal, and fossil fuels. They don’t exist,” said Tzeporah Berman, a longtime Canadian activist who is the international program director at Stand.earth and also a member of the Steering Committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty initiative.
This omission is discussed in the recent “Production Gap” report, a collaboration between research institutions and the U.N. Environment Program that highlights the discrepancy between countries’ climate commitments and the ongoing production of fossil fuels. Last year’s report, released in December, found that in order to keep the world below 1.5 degrees C of additional warming, countries will need to decrease fossil fuel production by 6 percent every year. And even though fossil fuel production was curbed by 7 percent in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report warns that “countries are still planning to produce far more fossil fuels by 2030.”
Berman points out that this gap isn’t solely the failure of the Paris accords; many climate laws and policies consistently overlook the supply side of the equation. “I mean, look at even our climate champions, California, Canada, Norway—they’re all in fossil fuel production at this moment in history,” said Berman. Despite aggressive emissions goals, all of these governments continue to build new fossil fuel infrastructure, investing more deeply in the substances they have pledged to nearly eliminate from the economy.
“The theory of climate policy for 30 years since Kyoto has been that if we can reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase the price of carbon, the market itself will constrain production,” said Bergman. “That’s not happening fast enough. And the markets are distorted today by governments continuing to increase subsidies to the fossil fuel industry: billions and billions of dollars.”
Most recently, the majority of energy-related stimulus spending money by G-20 nations has been invested in fossil fuels, continuing to lock in dangerous levels of emissions. “As of November 2020, G20 governments had committed USD 233 billion to activities that support fossil fuel production and consumption,” the “Production Gap” report states. That’s compared with the only U.S.$146 billion invested in renewable energy by G-20 nations. By explicitly addressing the supply side of the climate crisis, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty offers a way for countries to shift course.
The ultimate goal is for the treaty to become a multinational cooperative agreement in which wealthier nations with the longest histories of fossil fuel production can be the first movers. Meena Raman, who is based in Malaysia and leads the climate program for the international advocacy organization Third World Network, notes that it’s especially important for this global framework to facilitate a just transition to clean energy: “It’s really about assisting developing countries to move in that direction that needs to happen, and for developed countries to stop it, phase out, and power down.”
The United States, the largest oil and gas producer in the world, is in a position to become a first mover. As President-elect Joe Biden moves to rejoin the Paris Agreement—which the United States officially left in November—he will also have an opportunity to put the country on a pathway to phasing out fossil fuels. There’s a lot the Biden administration could do to this end, Muffett said, including directing the Department of the Interior to halt fossil fuel lease sales and permitting, directing the Environmental Protection Agency to develop more stringent greenhouse gas emissions rules, and reinstating the crude oil export ban.
Assuming Congress could get on board, the United States could also pass its own resolution to facilitate a national phaseout of fossil fuel production as a precursor to a multinational treaty. Until then, states and cities can play a crucial role, just as they did in passing resolutions building upon the 1968 treaty to encourage further negotiation and steps toward disarmament—a history Muffett reminded New York City Council members of last month.
“In 1979, faced with the existential threat of nuclear weapons, New York City took a stand and called on the U.S. and other nations to end the escalating nuclear arms race that threatened humanity with nuclear annihilation,” said Muffett. “New York has the opportunity and the urgent responsibility to show that same leadership today.”
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