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05 February 21
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David Sirota and Andrew Perez | The Washington Post Deserves 324 Billion Pinocchios for Its Attacks on Bernie Sanders
David Sirota and Andrew Perez, Jacobin
Excerpt: "For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders's left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos's newspaper's recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos."
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders’s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos’s newspaper’s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
eff Bezos this week announced that he is stepping down from his job running Amazon in order to focus more on his other assets, including the Washington Post. Less than twenty-four hours later, his newspaper’s chief “fact checker” Glenn Kessler published a screed attacking Bezos’s highest-profile political opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for mentioning that Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law benefited rich people and large corporations.
This might seem like a simple example of a pundit knowing exactly who pays his salary, but in this case, the pundit in question has his own axe to grind. Kessler is the scion of a fossil fuel baron, which means he has an interest in defending tax cuts that were a particularly big financial windfall for oil companies, including the one linked to his family, according to Kessler’s own newspaper.
At a time when Americans’ trust in media has plummeted, Kessler is a perfect illustration of how the cottage industry of fact-checking has turned itself into a system of Orwellian misinformation — one that uses fact-o-meters and Pinocchios to insist that war is peace and ignorance is strength.
Rather than clarifying reality, fact-checking is routinely used to hide the truth and shield the powerful from accountability — it has helped politicians hide their votes to cut Social Security; let health care industry lobbyists distort statistics about medical bankruptcies and Medicare for All; and abetted Wall Street’s efforts to downplay bank bailouts.
Now, comes the crescendo: The newspaper owned by a man worth $180 billion is deploying fact-checking to try to revise the entire history of the tax cuts that enriched his retail conglomerate. And what a coincidence — the revision is happening just as the tax policy may be revisited by a new Democratic president.
Not surprisingly, this particular broadside is being directed at Sanders, arguably the most prominent critic of Bezos and Amazon in all of American politics. He introduced legislation to shame the company for its labor practices, he successfully pressured the company to raise its workers’ wages, and has championed legislation to tax billionaires.
Bezos’s company has responded by attacking the Vermont senator — and now his newspaper is trying to reinforce those attacks under the deceptive guise of fact-checking, all as it warns readers on every story that democracy dies in darkness.
324 Billion Pinocchios
At issue is Sanders’s innocuous water-is-wet comment on CNN this week, in which he correctly said “my Republican colleagues voted for almost $2 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations.”
These aren’t controversial comments at all — and yet Kessler jumped at the chance to award Sanders’s indisputable statement “three Pinocchios” because “the share of the tax cuts for the top 1 percent was not as much as the share they pay in taxes” and because “most people would see an overall reduction in taxes.”
In essence, Sanders was declared a liar because some serfs received a few crumbs, which supposedly proves that most of the loaf didn’t go to the nobility.
Kessler’s entire line of argument deserves about 324 billion Pinocchios — one for each dollar that flowed to the richest fifth of the country in just 2020 alone, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The group’s analysis shows that almost three-quarters of the tax cuts flowed to that cohort.
Those findings echoed data from the Tax Foundation, which noted that “the income group that will see the largest increase in after-tax income in 2018 is the top 1 percent.”
The Tax Policy Center similarly reported that tax cuts boosted the income of the richest households eight times more than they boosted the income of the poorest households. The center projected the lowest quintile of earners, comprising 27 percent of Americans, would see an average tax cut of $60, while the top 0.1 percent of earners would receive an average tax cut of $193,000.
Oh, and within a year of the tax cut bill’s passage, twice as many major corporations were paying a zero effective tax rate — and that included Amazon, the retail giant founded by the Washington Post’s owner.
If those sources don’t adequately underscore Kessler’s mendacity, then just go to the Washington Post’s own reporting when the tax cuts were moving through Congress in 2017. Back then, the newspaper’s journalists accurately reported:
• “Most of the benefits go to the wealthy and large corporations.”
• In a piece headlined “9 Ways Trump’s Tax Plan Is a Gift to the Rich,” the Post reported that “it gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.”
• In a report entitled “The Trump Tax Cuts Would Be the Most Insane Giveaway to the Rich Ever,” the Post reprinted this shocking table and pointed out that by 2027: “The top 1 percent would get 79.7 percent of all the Trump tax cuts at that point. To put that in perspective, the even more rarefied top 0.1 percent, who make an average of a few million dollars a year, would receive almost twice as many dollars worth of tax cuts as the bottom 99 percent would combined.”
Kessler accidentally admitted some of this in his fact-check demonizing Sanders. At one point, he acknowledged that “the biggest beneficiaries of the pass-through deduction were the top 5 percent of individual taxpayers.” But he predicated his Sanders slander on the idea that “any broad-based tax cut is going to mostly benefit the wealthy because they already pay a large share of income taxes.” He added: “In any broad-based tax cut, the wealthy will end up with more money from tax cuts because they already pay a larger share of taxes.”
Those latter points are actually correct — they prove the veracity of Sanders’s assertion by explaining precisely how the Trump tax cuts delivered a disproportionate amount of the tax breaks to the rich. Trump’s bill deliberately slashed marginal tax rates, which then funneled money up the income ladder, just as the Vermont senator said.
The implication from Kessler is that tax reforms can only disproportionately benefit the wealthy — as if regressive marginal rate cuts are the only possible tax policy. Fact-check: false.
Kessler quite obviously likes regressive tax cuts — he approves of legislation that enriches his fellow aristocrats, and look, he has every right to hold that grotesque view. However, just because he likes tax policy that mostly enriches wealthy people, that doesn’t mean a lawmaker is lying when he says that such a tax policy does indeed enrich the affluent.
Kessler is entitled to his own opinions — but he shouldn’t be given a platform to abjectly lie about facts and slander public officials just because he does not like them. And at minimum, if he is given that platform, it shouldn’t be one emblazoned with the “fact-checking” emblem.
“This Is An Important Institution”
This gets to the real issue here — the systemic problem is less the hideous anti-tax zealotry, and more the machine that is constantly laundering such ideology and presenting it as fact.
If a pundit wants to write an op-ed defending regressive reductions in tax rates and criticizing a senator, that’s fine. But something far more sinister happened here.
In this episode, we saw that the newspaper owned by one of the world’s richest men was not publishing an op-ed branded as one pundit’s opinion — instead, the paper knowingly shrouded hard-edged, fact-free, billionaire-defending ideology in the cloak of just-the-facts-ma’am impartiality right on its news pages. And this wasn’t this some one-off — a report last year from Monash University researcher Andrew Moshirnia documented Kessler’s long track record of ever-more-unhinged and inaccurate diatribes.
These dogmatic polemics were all published under the banner of dispassionate fact-checking, as Post editors berate reporters for expressing their opinions and enforce rigid social media guidelines in order to project an air of objectivity.
Couple Kessler’s latest tirade with the Post’s skewed reporting and editorials on the economic debate in Congress, and the decidedly not objective message from Bezos’s megaphone is loud, deliberate, and self-serving: Giving starving people $2,000 (or $1,400) checks gratuitously benefits people who supposedly don’t need money, but handing the richest sliver of the country hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks is a pragmatic, common-sense policy that deserves the fact-checker’s coveted seal of approval.
Of course, this doesn’t mean Bezos is calling Kessler (or anyone else) ordering them to write things. But clearly, try-hards like Kessler know who they work for and aim to please the boss — even if everyone in the media industry feigns fainting spells anytime anyone even hints that there might be a connection between a newspaper owner’s agenda and the newspaper’s coverage (remember this fake controversy over Sanders’s obviously true statement?).
In the case of the Post, the link between owner and newsroom is out in the open: Bezos reportedly meets with Post executives, shares business advice with Bob Woodward, and has insinuated that he purchased the newspaper for more than just business reasons.
“I said to myself, ‘If this were a financially upside down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,” he said about buying the paper. “But as soon as I started thinking about it that way, it was like, ‘This is an important institution.’ It is the newspaper in the capital city in the most important country in the world.”
As an instrument of influence in the seat of government, Bezos’s newspaper does not want to be brutally honest with its readers about its devotion to Kessler’s hatred of the Left in general and Sanders in specific. The newspaper does not have the guts or the integrity to just admit it is paying a pundit — not a Joe Friday-esque fact-checker, but a Fox News–style opinionist — to make extremist and highly subjective arguments about who should benefit from public policies.
Being forthright about that might undermine the Post’s brand, and thereby risk influence and credibility. And so instead, Bezos’s newspaper is trying to smuggle the extremism into the discourse and into readers’ minds by stuffing it into the costume of objective “fact-checking.”
That kind of slimy subterfuge is wildly, offensively dishonest — especially because the particular disguise is so powerful.
Today, any news outlet with a legacy brand can slap the phrase “fact-check” on any pundit’s pile of disingenuous horseshit and it will inevitably appear in an attack ad and whip around social media as allegedly ironclad proof that something is true or false. And in the 24 / 7 new cycle’s miasma of disinformation, these nuggets of “fact-checking” are seen as the rare signal in the noise — the last bits of verified truth that can be unquestionably trusted.
But Kessler and his ilk prove that much fact-checking absolutely cannot be relied on. Preying on the public’s understandable desperation for some reliable arbiter of truth, these bad-faith actors have turned the entire “fact-checking” brand into the misinformation era’s single most deceitful weapon of all.
The old saying used to be that there were “lies, damn lies, and statistics” — but in today’s dystopia, there are lies, damn lies, and fact-checking.
Workers salvage oil canisters from the wreckage of a vehicle oil store hit by Saudi-led airstrikes last July in Sanaa, Yemen. The U.S. said Thursday it will no longer back the Saudi-led military offensive. (photo: Hani Mohammed/AP)
Biden Administration Ends US Support of Saudi-Led Offensive in Yemen
Mark Katkov, NPR
Katkov writes: "President Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. will no longer support offensive military operations led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, reversing a policy started by the Obama administration and continued by the Trump administration despite widespread accusations of Saudi war crimes."
resident Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. will no longer support offensive military operations led by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, reversing a policy started by the Obama administration and continued by the Trump administration despite widespread accusations of Saudi war crimes.
"The war has to end," Biden said at the U.S. State Department in his first foreign policy address as president. The administration also named a veteran diplomat, Tim Lenderking, as special envoy for Yemen to pursue a diplomatic solution to the war.
The policy reversal comes after years of fighting which has left the impoverished nation the world's worst humanitarian disaster, according to the United Nations.
What began as an internal power struggle quickly became a proxy war between Iran and Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are battling for regional dominance.
Houthi rebels, named for the tribe of the movement's founder, captured the capital Sanaa in 2014, expelling the deeply unpopular government of Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi to the south of the country. The Houthis are followers of a branch of Shiite Islam and receive weapons and other support from Iran.
A coalition of Gulf states, supported by the U.S., France and U.K., started launching airstrikes in 2015 and landed ground forces in August of that year. . Fighting has continued for more than five years with periodic cease-fires; Yemeni forces fighting the Houthis have split into at least two factions. Hadi has spent most of the war in Saudi Arabia.
Gulf state forces have been widely accused of attacks on non-military targets, such as hospitals and weddings. The UAE withdrew its troops in 2019 after international criticism of its conduct.
U.S. support to the coalition over the course of the war has included inflight refueling of Saudi warplanes, which a U.S. official told NPR ended in 2018, and the sale of precision bombs dropped on Yemeni targets. The official said the U.S. continues to offer "limited intel for the defense of Saudi Arabia, as well as training on how to avoid civilian casualties.
The humanitarian cost
Yemen is one of the Arab world's poorest nations and the war has had a devastating impact on its people. The United Nations estimates Yemen war dead at 233,000 people, mostly from "indirect causes."
The aid agency Islamic Relief USA says more than 20 million Yemenis are at risk of famine and that child malnutrition is among the world's worst, stunting the growth of an estimated five million children. Saudi and Houthi maritime embargos of Yemen have prevented shipments of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies.
The coronavirus pandemic is "out of control" there, according to the United Nations because of the collapse of health care institutions. The U.N. Children's Fund says Yemen is at risk of "an imminent catastrophe."
Marjorie Taylor Greene in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. (photo: Carol Guzy/Shutterstock)
House Votes to Remove Republican Extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene From Committee Roles
Daniel Strauss, Guardian UK
Strauss writes: "The US House of Representatives has voted to strip the extremist Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia of her committee assignments, in a stark rebuke over her incendiary and racist statements."
Vote largely along party lines serves as rebuke over congresswoman’s incendiary and racist statements
Greene has been a stated supporter of the QAnon myth, for years pushing unfounded conspiracy theories and lies that included racist and antisemitic tropes.
The vote split largely along party lines, with 230 voting in favor and 199 voting against. Just 11 Republicans, including Adam Kinzinger and Brian Fitzpatrick, joined with Democrats to strip Greene of her positions on the House budget and education and labor committees.
Just before the vote, the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the chamber, delivered an impassioned speech against Greene’s hostile behavior towards other lawmakers.
He displayed a poster of an image that Greene had posted on Facebook that showed her holding an AR-15 with the set of the progressive lawmakers in Congress known as “the Squad” in the background. The poster read: “Squad’s worst nightmare”.
“The squad’s worst enemy. AR-15 in hand,” Hoyer said as he pointed to the text on the poster, an apparent threat to the Democratic congresswomen, who include Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. “I have never, ever seen that before.”
A day earlier, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, the top congressional Republican, had declined to take action against Greene, despite wider pressure from members of Congress to push some kind of punitive measure for uncovered past statements and social media posts.
These included supporting the assassination of Democratic members of Congress, denying that a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, and perpetuating the myth that the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018 was faked.
In a private meeting with her colleagues on Wednesday night, Greene received a standing ovation for apologizing for her association with QAnon.
On Thursday, Greene addressed her past statements under the threat of losing a significant proportion of her legislative power. She stressed that she now believed “school shootings are absolutely real”, that they should be taken seriously, and that “9/11 absolutely happened”.
She portrayed her descent into conspiracy theories as a misguided period in her life that was over when she realized the falseness of the movement.
“I never once during my entire campaign said QAnon. I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign,” Greene said. Until her Thursday speech, Greene had not publicly denied any of her past statements and avoided having to address them directly.
In December, after she was elected, Greene praised a tweet promoting the QAnon movement.
Democrats have been pushing for Greene to either be expelled from Congress or severely punished if she should stay. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, has called Greene’s past comments “looney lies”.
In arguing that Greene should lose her assignments, Democrats pointed to the now former congressman Steve King of Iowa, a Republican, who lost his committee assignments after associating with neo-Nazis and making racist statements for years.
On Thursday, the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat, argued that Greene was not entitled to her committee postings.
“Serving on a committee is not a right, it is a privilege and when someone encourages violence against a member they should lose that privilege,” McGovern said.
After Greene’s speech, McGovern signaled that it was insufficient.
“I stand here today still deeply, deeply troubled and offended by the things that she has posted and said and still not apologized for,” McGovern said.
Republicans largely refrained from defending Greene’s previous comments directly and instead argued that taking away her committee appointments would establish a slippery slope.
Austin Scott of Georgia skeptically asked during a floor speech whether Democrats would stop with Greene if successful.
“We know better. We know better,” Scott said of his Republican colleagues.
Tom Cole of Oklahoma, McGovern’s Republican counterpart on the rules committee, argued that taking away Greene’s committees “opens up troubling questions about how we judge future members of Congress”.
Democrats want to lift banking restrictions on the cannabis industry. (photo: iStock)
In Boost for Cannabis Industry, Democrats Look to Allow Access to Banking
Justin Wingerter, The Denver Post
Wingerter writes: "Colorado's cannabis industry has been forced to deal primarily in cash for years due to banking restrictions that pot advocates and banking lobbyists say put shops, growers and others at risk of theft. The industry is now cautiously optimistic this year that, with Democrats in power in Washington, its eight years of trying to lift those restrictions on banks and credit unions will pay off."
Because marijuana remains an illicit drug under federal law — and banking the proceeds of illicit drug sales is a federal crime — credit unions and banks are limited in their ability to work with cannabis companies, and take risks when doing so. As a result, the large and growing marijuana industry still remains cash-only, seven years after legalization in Colorado.
“We’ve got people who are still dealing in cash; we’ve got employees still being paid in cash. It’s just totally irresponsible,” said Chuck Smith, CEO of the cannabis company BellRock Brands and board president at Colorado Leads, a coalition of cannabis companies in the state.
Colorado dispensaries sold $175 million worth of products in November alone, pushing the industry’s annual revenue to $2 billion for the first time last year.
“Most cannabis companies in Colorado are banked at this point, but that’s just a basic checking account,” said Truman Bradley, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, a trade association. “There’s no merchant processing, really, and that’s very difficult. I’m talking debit cards, credit cards, that kind of thing. The services that do exist leave a bit to be desired.”
The Secure and Fair Enforcement Banking Act, or SAFE Banking Act, has been introduced every Congress since 2013 by Rep. Ed Perlmutter, an Arvada Democrat, to lift restrictions on banking cannabis proceeds. It has passed the House on a bipartisan basis several times but has never passed the Senate. With Democrats in control of the federal government, and even more states permissive of cannabis use after the 2020 election, Perlmutter says the time may be now.
“I thought we were going to get it passed last (Congress), but I’m pretty confident we are going to get it passed this time,” the congressman told The Post in an interview, “whether it’s as a standalone piece of legislation, or it could potentially be part of some bigger package.”
Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, will sponsor the Senate version of the bill, as he has in years past, according to his spokeswoman. But the senator to watch is Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and incoming chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He replaced Sen. Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican who declined for years to hold a committee vote on the bill.
“It matters who is setting the agenda,” said Ryan Donovan, a lobbyist for the Credit Union National Association, which supports the bill. “With just that simple change from Crapo to Brown, different issues are going to come before the Senate Banking Committee than in the past and this is one of those issues that could have a greater chance of being considered.”
Brown’s office did not answer directly when asked if the senator will hold a hearing, but said Congress needs to find ways to grant the cannabis industry access to banking. Brown also is working to ensure communities of color most impacted by the war on drugs are able to participate in the cannabis economy and banking system, according to his office.
“Sherrod Brown and I talked about this last session,” Perlmutter said. “He knows that this is a high priority for me; he and I talked about it. I haven’t talked to him about it yet in this session but I certainly will.”
Not everyone who tracks the SAFE Banking Act expects Brown to advocate for it. Luke Niforatos, executive vice president at Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes national legalization and the SAFE Banking Act, believes pro-marijuana advocates are overly confident.
“Every year is ‘the marijuana industry’s year.’ No matter what happens, it’s always the quote-unquote best time to legalize, they say. So, I’m never surprised when, at the start of every session of Congress, they say it’s going to be a big year. Typically it’s rejected,” Niforatos said, adding that SAM “feels very good right now” about the Senate’s willingness to block the bill.
“We feel like the focus of the Banking Committee is really going to be on things that matter to the American people, especially during COVID,” he said. “The idea that the marijuana industry is going to get a blanket banking giveaway, continue to boost their Big Tobacco investments and enrich their investors — I just don’t think that’s going to be a big priority for the Democratic leadership.” Critics of the bill predict it will lead to large Wall Street investments in cannabis.
Aaron Stetter, a lobbyist for Independent Community Bankers of America, which supports the SAFE Banking Act, disagrees. Not only has Brown shown support for marijuana banking, so too has the top Republican on the Banking Committee, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, he notes.
“In the past I think some of these efforts might have been wishful thinking, but we do, with the new makeup of the Senate, really feel that it has a good chance of getting across the finish line,” Stetter said.
Perlmutter says he plans to move fast, beginning with a re-introduction of the bill, followed by either consideration in the House Financial Services Committee, which Perlmutter is a member of, or a direct vote on the House floor. Then all eyes will be on Brown and the Senate.
“I think it will receive a much friendlier reception in the Senate Banking Committee and get to the floor of the Senate relatively quickly by congressional standards — that means, in six months,” said Don Childears, CEO of the Colorado Bankers Association, which supports it.
“I do think it is probable that it will be enacted later this year,” he added.
Federal officers prepare to disperse the crowd of protesters outside the Multnomah County Justice Center on July 17, in Portland. (photo: Mason Trinca/Getty)
New Law Requires Federal Agents to Identify Themselves to Protesters
Kate Oh, ACLU
Oh writes: "When people took to the streets this year to protest racial injustice and police brutality against Black people, they faced a repressive, violent response from local police and federal agents."
Secret police forces patrolling our neighborhoods in response to protests is unacceptable.
Some of these agents arrived with militarized uniforms, riot gear, and weapons, but, notably, no visible name labels, badges, or even insignia marking their government agency. Congress just put a stop to this corrosive and undemocratic secrecy, requiring federal agents to identify themselves.
Tucked inside the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 6395), which just became law, is a new requirement for federal military and civilian law enforcement personnel involved in the federal government’s response to a “civil disturbance” to wear visible identification of themselves and the name of the government entity employing them. That’s good news, because requiring such identification should be a no-brainer in a democracy. When government employees are interacting with members of the public and exercising government authority, such as the power to arrest people, the public should have the right to know who the employees are and which agency employs them.
Furthermore, when government personnel engage in wrongdoing, such as attacking protesters, one of the first steps in holding them accountable is knowing who they are. It’s no surprise that rights-violating law enforcement would want to obscure their name plate and badge number before committing some unethical or even illegal act. Impeding transparency blocks oversight and accountability.
What the nation witnessed in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon underscores the vital need for the legislation. In Portland, incognito federal officers who refused to identify themselves snatched civilians off the street and whisked them away in unmarked vehicles. Only later did U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Marshals Service reveal that they were involved. In our nation’s capital, the Trump administration swarmed the city with heavily-armed, unidentified officers with unclear governmental affiliations. When asked by journalists to give their names or specific governmental affiliation, these federal officers refused.
The resulting images provoked outcries of our government resorting to the kinds of unaccountable “secret police” used by authoritarian regimes to silence dissidents and terrify ordinary citizens into submission. Protesters and security experts also flagged that the unidentified government forces’ appearances can be practically indistinguishable from the kinds of right-wing armed extremists that have, among other things, shot racial justice protesters on the streets of Kenosha, plotted to kidnap Michigan’s governor, and engaged in violent clashes around the country. This creates the risk that members of the public will treat law enforcement agents as illegitimate armed vigilantes, or defer to vigilantes who are posing as law enforcement.
In an important step forward for government transparency and accountability, lawmakers like Rep. Houlahan and Sens. Murphy and Schumer heeded the calls for reform and sought to ensure that a new identification requirement would be part of the final defense bill. Thankfully, they were successful.
Even with this provision poised for enactment, additional reform is still urgently needed at all levels of government. For example, it is always better to have the officer’s name displayed rather than allowing a non-name identifier, such as a badge number, to be used as a substitute. Names are usually easier to remember than numbers or letters, thus making it easier for people to later identify and report officers. The current exceptions to the new identification requirement should also be narrowed.
Still, the message that Congress is sending to the executive branch and enshrining into statute is unmistakable: Secret police forces patrolling our neighborhoods in response to protests and other mass gatherings, in anonymity and shielded from accountability, are unacceptable. They do not belong in a democracy such as the United States.
When the next president takes office this month, his administration should affirm the principle as it implements the new law in the strongest possible manner — and keep its goal of a transparent and accountable government in mind as it works with Congress and civil society to respond to the inequities highlighted by the recent protests.
Police take protesters into custody during a protest demanding the release of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in Moscow, Russia, January 23, 2021. (photo: Sefa Karacan/Getty)
Russia Moves to Stifle Dissent After Poisoned Putin Critic Alexey Navalny Is Sentenced
Robert Mackey, The Intercept
Mackey writes: "Protesters demanded the release of Navalny, who used a court appearance to warn Russia's president that he would go down in history as, 'Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.'"
housands of protesters risked arrest in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Tuesday, defying a heavy police presence to voice their fury at the sentencing of Alexey Navalny, the anticorruption activist who survived an assassination attempt and then tricked a Russian intelligence agent into confessing that he had poisoned him with a nerve agent.
Despite a security crackdown in the wake of mass demonstrations across Russia since Navalny was arrested, during which thousands have been beaten or detained, an estimated 2,000 protesters marched through central Moscow, chanting for the release of the opposition leader, the resignation of President Vladimir Putin and demanding a “Russia without Putin.”
A feed on the Russian messaging app Telegram called “Live From the Paddy Wagon,” documented the wave of arrests, at least 1145 in Moscow alone, according to the human rights group OVD-Info.
The Russian news app Baza collected video evidence of police brutality against dissenters, including one cornered group that was beaten while chanting “We are not armed.”
Reporters who filmed the assaults were also clubbed.
The crackdown by the riot police in Moscow had started outside the court even before the verdict was delivered. Among those detained for merely standing there on Tuesday was Dmitry Markov, a popular iPhone photographer who documented his time in the police station on Instagram.
The mass detentions and brutality were clearly intended to act as a deterrent, and many of those arrested at a protest for Navalny on Sunday, including journalists, have been forced to endure harsh conditions in detention.
Reporters outside the country following live streams of the protests on Tuesday night noticed that some men detained as protesters were suddenly released by the police, at least one after uttering what appeared to be a pass phrase likely indicating that he was an undercover agent.
Navalny, whose meticulously researched investigations of corruption allegations against Putin and his allies have enraged the Kremlin, was sentenced to more than two and a half years in a penal colony on the astounding charge of violating his parole by not reporting to the authorities in person while he was receiving life-saving treatment in Berlin following the poisoning.
The European Court of Human Rights previously ruled that Navalny’s original conviction for fraud in 2014, for which he was on parole, was “fundamentally unfair” and politically motivated, since it was intended “to silence a government critic and prevent him from engaging in political activities.” Navalny was barred from running for president in 2018 because of the conviction.
As the Human Rights Watch lawyer Damelya Aitkhozhina noted, Navalny argued in court that, until he was poisoned, he had diligently reported twice a month, in compliance with the terms of his probation, and sent notification of his whereabouts in Germany as soon as he came out of a coma.
As he recovered abroad, Navalny embarrassed the Kremlin by placing a prank call to a Russian intelligence agent who had been identified as his poisoner by the investigative group Bellingcat and tricked the man into detailing the botched effort to kill him. The agent, who thought he was speaking to a superior officer rather than his victim, explained that he had broken into Navalny’s hotel room and coated his underwear with novichok, a neurotoxin developed in the Soviet Union. The same nerve agent was used by Russian intelligence agents to poison a former spy and his daughter in Britain in 2018.
After he was arrested on his return to Moscow last month, Navalny’s anticorruption foundation released a new documentary in which he presented evidence that a $1.3 billion palace intended for Putin’s retirement had been built with pilfered state funds, featuring drone video of the compound and a computer visualization of its lavish interior.
While state-controlled television channels refuse to air Navalny’s charges, the documentary (with English subtitles that can be turned on by clicking the closed-caption icon) has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube in just two weeks.
One of the most striking features of the film is the frequently sardonic and relentlessly upbeat tone with which Navalny lays out the case against Putin, refusing to betray any fear, even as the lingering effects of the poison can be seen on his wizened face and in the visible scar on his throat from the ventilator that helped him breathe while comatose.
It was with that same tone that he delivered a scathing denunciation of Putin in a 16-minute statement to the court on Tuesday. Some of his remarks were posted on Twitter with English subtitles by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a news service financed by the United States Congress to promote democracy abroad.
His arrest, Navalny told the court, was illegal, and entirely motivated by Putin’s “hatred and fear,” according to an English translation of Navalny’s complete remarks by Meduza, a Russian exile news site.
“I mortally offended him by surviving. I survived thanks to good people, thanks to pilots and doctors. And then I committed an even more serious offense: I didn’t run and hide,” Navalny said. “Then something truly terrifying happened: I participated in the investigation of my own poisoning, and we proved, in fact, that Putin, using Russia’s Federal Security Service, was responsible for this attempted murder. And that’s driving this thieving little man in his bunker out of his mind. He’s simply going insane as a result.”
Calling Putin as “just a bureaucrat who was accidentally appointed to his position,” Navalny described the president as a man terrified of facing him in a fair election. “He’s never participated in any debates or campaigned in an election. Murder is the only way he knows how to fight,” Navalny said.
Contrasting Putin with two of Russia’s most famous rulers, Navalny added: “He’ll go down in history as nothing but a poisoner. We all remember ‘Alexander the Liberator’ and ‘Yaroslav the Wise.’ Well, now we’ll have ‘Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner.'”
The activist then urged his fellow citizens to refuse to be afraid of their ruler. “I’m standing here, guarded by the police, and the National Guard is out there with half of Moscow cordoned off. All this because that small man in a bunker is losing his mind,” Navalny said. “The main thing in this whole trial isn’t what happens to me. Locking me up isn’t difficult. What matters most is why this is happening. This is happening to intimidate large numbers of people. They’re imprisoning one person to frighten millions.”
“I hope very much that people won’t look at this trial as a signal that they should be more afraid,” he added. “This isn’t a demonstration of strength — it’s a show of weakness. You can’t lock up millions and hundreds of thousands of people. I hope very much that people will realize this. And they will. Because you can’t lock up the whole country.”
After Navalny was sentenced and taken from the courtroom, Michael McFaul, who served as the United States ambassador to Russia during the Obama Administration, drew attention to a letter his foundation sent to President Joe Biden last week. The letter was sent “to encourage the United States to sanction corrupt Russian allies of President Putin,” and included a detailed list of 35 prominent Russian officials and businessmen.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
AOC, Sanders, and Blumenauer Press Biden
to Declare a 'Climate Emergency'
Shannon Osaka, Grist
Osaka writes: "In his first 15 days in office, President Joe
Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, pledged to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies from the federal government, and started the process of unwinding Trump's disastrous environmental legacy. And now a trio of Democratic lawmakers wants Biden to declare a 'climate emergency' as soon as possible."
Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, along with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, introduced legislation on Thursday that would require Biden make such a declaration. The bill compares the action needed on the climate crisis to the wartime mobilization during World War II and urges Biden to declare an emergency under the National Emergencies Act, thus unlocking more than 100 additional presidential powers to tackle the crisis. “It’s past time that a climate emergency is declared,” Blumenauer said in a statement. “This bill can finally get it done.”
The proposed legislation follows a statement last week by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who urged Biden to declare an emergency to bypass Republican heel-dragging in Congress. “If there ever was an emergency, climate change is one,” Schumer said.
The U.S. wouldn’t be the first country to call climate change a crisis. To date, 38 countries around the world — including Japan, New Zealand, and the European Union — have declared similar “climate emergencies.” But most of those declarations have been symbolic resolutions, and so haven’t come with any additional tools to address the overheating planet.
In the U.S., however, the National Emergencies Act could give Biden real powers: The president could use the declaration to reinstitute a ban on crude oil exports, send emergency aid packages to states, or even redirect billions of dollars of funding away from defense projects and toward the production of renewable energy. President Trump tried to use the act in 2019 to funnel money from the Pentagon to his project to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, but was rebuffed by the courts and Congress.
These would be big, sweeping actions, but they also might upset Republican members of Congress, who are already criticizing Biden’s spree of executive orders as presidential overreach and whose support Biden might need to tackle some of his other legislative goals. Some have also argued that, even when done with the best of intentions, declaring a national emergency serves as an end-run around the democratic process.
The bill looks like a long shot at the moment, given both the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate and the fact that its only purpose is to encourage Biden to use his presidential powers. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a similar resolution in 2019 that won support from many senators and representatives but never came up to a vote in the Democratic-controlled House. Still, the new bill may serve as a potent symbol — a sign that there is growing pressure on Biden to act swiftly on climate change, whether Republicans like it or not.
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