17 February 21
Got a message, and a $15 donation from a person whose spouse is out of work and is experiencing seriously hard times. We had to give that donation back. Love someone who would do that.
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16 February 21
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The NAACP Just Sued Trump, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for the Capitol Riots
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "A Democratic member of Congress invoked Reconstruction-era anti-Ku Klux Klan laws in a lawsuit filed along with the NAACP against former President Donald Trump, his lawyer, and the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers right-wing extremist groups."
he lawsuit alleges former President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the two extremist groups “plotted, coordinated, and executed a common plan to prevent Congress from discharging its official duties."
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that Trump, lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the two groups "plotted, coordinated, and executed a common plan to prevent Congress from discharging its official duties in certifying the results of the presidential election."
Rep. Bennie Thompson alleges he suffered emotional distress as a result of the Capitol riot. The 14-term Mississippi congressman and chair of the House Homeland Security Committee is seeking a jury trial, and compensatory and punitive damages.
“January 6th was one of the most shameful days in our country’s history, and it was instigated by the President himself,” Thompson said in a statement Tuesday. “His gleeful support of violent white supremacists led to a breach of the Capitol that put my life, and that of my colleagues, in grave danger. It is by the slimmest of luck that the outcome was not deadlier.”
“Failure to [hold Trump accountable] will only invite this type of authoritarianism for the anti-democratic forces on the far right that are so intent on destroying our country,” Thompson added.
The lawsuit was filed by the NAACP and the law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers and Toll. Other members of Congress including Reps. Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey intend to sign on as plaintiffs “in the coming days and weeks,” according to Cohen Milstein. Coleman, a cancer survivor, tested positive for COVID-19 days after hiding in a crowded room at the Capitol along with her maskless GOP colleagues.
The 32-page complaint alleges that Trump and Giuliani "engaged in a concerted campaign to misinform their supporters and the public” on the outcome of the election, and that Trump “acted beyond the outer perimeter of his official duties and therefore is susceptible to suit in his personal capacity.”
Giuliani is currently facing a different lawsuit seeking $2 billion in damages filed against him by Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, two voting technology vendors, for his baseless claims that those companies helped rig the 2020 election in President Joe Biden’s favor.
Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives last month and acquitted by the Senate on Saturday, after 50 Democrats and seven Republicans voted guilty but failed to hit the two-thirds threshold required for conviction.
But Trump is already under investigation in Georgia for his alleged attempts to influence Republcian elected officials to overturn the election in his favor in that state. He is also under investigation in New York for his business affairs.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump, argued Saturday that he could still be held liable for the riot and other matters in court.
“President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he’s in office, as an ordinary citizen, unless the statute of limitations has run,” McConnell said. “He didn’t get away with anything yet. We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation.”
A medic loads a patient with COVID-19 symptoms into an ambulance in Austin, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
Despite the Pandemic, Republicans Are Fighting Paid Sick Leave All Over the Country
Walker Bragman, Jacobin
Bragman writes: "Under the guise of helping businesses, the GOP is working to bar medical leave mandates in state by state across the country."
ennsylvania state Rep. Seth Grove introduced legislation last month to block cities and municipalities from imposing paid sick leave requirements on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases are raging throughout his state and the country. Last week, local news media reported that the Republican lawmaker was now quarantining after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and awaiting test results.
Grove’s preemption bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing war over stripping worker protections that continues to be fought in statehouses and Congress, even as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control. With Democrats in Washington preparing to drop paid sick leave from President Joe Biden’s first COVID-19 relief bill, potentially leaving eighty-seven million workers without protection, the responsibility for providing the benefit to workers now falls squarely on states — the very place the war has been waged for the last decade.
Paid sick leave statutes require businesses to provide employees with medical leave for ailments and injuries. Grove has been pushing for legislation to bar localities from imposing such requirements since 2013. His latest bill, reintroducing the measure, would be retroactive to 2015 — the year Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed laws mandating paid sick leave.
Pittsburgh’s ordinance, which mandated forty hours of paid leave to eligible employees, was challenged in court and has only been in effect since March 2020. After the state Supreme Court upheld Pittsburgh’s statute in July 2019, Grove reacted with frustration to the ruling.
“If Pittsburgh and Philly want to be San Francisco, they can just go to San Francisco,” he said at the time.
But Pittsburgh remained committed to its position.
In December, Congress declined to extend the federally mandated paid sick leave under the Families First Coronavirus Relief Act. In response, Pittsburgh’s city council passed a supplementary, temporary ordinance requiring employers with fifty or more employees to grant up to an additional two weeks of paid leave to workers exposed to COVID-19. The measure had the support of local unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776.
The Rise of Preemption
The fight over paid sick leave goes back decades. Proponents of paid sick leave, like the National Partnership for Women and Families and the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, point to studies indicating that paid sick leave leads to healthier, more productive workplaces. Moreover, they argue, preemption laws are inherently anti-democratic since they prevent self-governance.
Preemption advocates argue that laws restricting paid sick leave mandates are necessary to maintain a reliable flow of business and protect jobs and employers. On his website, Grove advertises his support for preemption on these grounds.
“Pennsylvania has the second highest number of local government entities in the United States,” his site reads. “If each one had their own local labor laws, it would be impossible for businesses to operate in Pennsylvania and comply with over 2,000 different laws…. Local governments should be focused on public safety, infrastructure, zoning and recreation, not socialist policies meant to harm the free market.”
Preemption laws are an increasingly popular tool among corporate-friendly lawmakers and business lobby groups to combat a surge of progressive grassroots activism at the local level. Their application spans multiple issues. Preemption laws have been used to block local gun regulations, minimum wage hikes, and bans on fracking and plastic bags. Thirty-eight states, including California, have preempted localities from regulating the gig economy — specifically stipulating that certain kinds of workers must be considered independent contractors, so they don’t receive protections guaranteed to employees.
In 2004, Georgia was the first state in the country to adopt a paid sick leave preemption law — and remained the only state to have such a law on the books for many years. That situation changed with the 2010 midterms.
That year, the GOP flipped twenty state legislative chambers, bringing a total of fifty-three under its control. Because those gains happened in a census year, before the once-a-decade redistricting process, the party was able to build up its advantage in subsequent elections. By 2017, Republicans controlled more than 80 percent of the state legislative chambers nationwide.
The impact on employee safeguards has been staggering. Only six states and DC currently have no laws preempting worker rights in some way.
This trend has left workers largely at the mercy of their employers. A stunning 25 percent of private industry workers have no access to paid sick leave, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unsurprisingly, the highest proportion of affected workers are low-wage earners. Sixty-seven percent of earners in the lowest-wage segment do not have access to paid sick leave, compared to five percent in the highest-wage segment.
As the Urban Institute pointed out in an October 2020 report, there was a 2012 push for paid sick leave by Democratic Party leaders and local advocates in Orange County, Florida, after it was identified that 45 percent of workers in the county did not have access to paid sick leave. The Latinx community was disproportionately affected, with 56 percent lacking such benefits through their employers — and that number rose to 73 percent for Latinx workers in the hospitality industry.
However, the sick leave effort was ultimately unsuccessful, with corporate lobbyists pouring money into the fight and stalling the ballot measure long enough for the state to pass a preemption statute.
Today, many Orange County workers — including a sizable contingent of its Latinx workforce — face the pandemic without the protection of paid leave.
Much of the preemption push has been led by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a well-known industry organization made up of corporate lobbyists and about a quarter of all state lawmakers. Grove himself is ALEC’s Pennsylvania chair.
ALEC is known for distributing so-called model bills around the country and getting them enacted into law. After Wisconsin’s newly elected Republican governor, Scott Walker, signed a paid sick leave preemption bill in 2011 — a move targeted at Milwaukee, the only city in his state to mandate paid sick leave — ALEC used the legislation as one of its model bills.
Grassroots Momentum for Paid Sick Leave
The efforts to enact paid sick leave preemption laws have been remarkably successful. In total, twenty-three states now have such statutes, and other states like North Dakota are considering them. Still, grassroots momentum for paid sick leave remains strong and the momentum favors greater worker protections.
In 2006, San Francisco became the first US city to mandate paid sick leave. Since then, many other localities have followed its example. By 2018, thirty-five cities or counties and eleven states had paid sick leave laws on the books — up from twenty-five the year before.
With the expiration of the federal paid sick leave mandate, the Virginia and New Mexico state legislatures are each considering enacting paid sick leave laws. Meanwhile, in Florida, Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to restore the ability of local governments to enact paid sick leave.
Pressing their advantage from their court victories on paid sick leave, Democrats in Pennsylvania have sought to roll back preemption laws against local minimum wage hikes.
But while these battles wage, the pandemic rages on and many elected leaders remain unwilling to lock down. As of this month, more than 463,000 Americans have died from COVID.
Uncontrolled viral spread is fostering the evolution of new strains of the virus since every new infection is an opportunity to mutate. These new strains may be responsible for reinfections and vaccine resistance is emerging.
Policies like paid sick leave, which would keep people home, could prove essential to coming out on the other side of the pandemic.
A protester wears a mask in the shape of corn, during a march against Monsanto in Mexico City. (photo: Stringer Mexico/Reuters)
Monsanto Owner and US Officials Pressured Mexico to Drop Glyphosate Ban
Carey Gillam, Guardian UK
Gillam writes: "Internal government emails reveal Monsanto owner Bayer AG and industry lobbyist CropLife America have been working closely with US officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning its intended ban on glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer that is the key ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkillers."
Internal government emails show actions similar to those by Bayer and lobbyists to kill a proposed ban in Thailand in 2019
nternal government emails reveal Monsanto owner Bayer AG and industry lobbyist CropLife America have been working closely with US officials to pressure Mexico into abandoning its intended ban on glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer that is the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkillers.
The moves to protect glyphosate shipments to Mexico have played out over the last 18 months, a period in which Bayer was negotiating an $11bn settlement of legal claims brought by people in the US who say they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma due to exposure to the company’s glyphosate-based products.
The pressure on Mexico is similar to actions Bayer and chemical industry lobbyists took to kill a glyphosate ban planned by Thailand in 2019. Thailand officials had also cited concerns for public health in seeking to ban the weedkiller, but reversed course after US threats about trade disruption.
So far the collaborative campaign to get the Mexican government to reverse its policy does not appear to be working.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has given farmers until 2024 to stop using glyphosate. On 31 December, the country published a “final decree” calling not only for the end of the use of glyphosate but also a phase-out of the planting and consumption of genetically engineered corn, which farmers often spray with glyphosate, a practice that often leaves residues of the pesticide in finished food products.
The moves are for the “purpose of contributing to food security and sovereignty” and “the health of Mexican men and women”, according to the Mexican government.
But Mexico’s concern for the health of its citizens has triggered fear in the United States for the health of agricultural exports, especially Bayer’s glyphosate products.
The emails reviewed by the Guardian come from the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) and other US agencies. They detail worry and frustration with Mexico’s position. One email makes a reference to staff within López Obrador’s administration as “vocal anti-biotechnology activists”, and another email states that Mexico’s health agency (Cofepris) is “becoming a big time problem”.
Internal USTR communications lay out how the agrochemical industry is “pushing” for the US to “fold this issue” into the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade deal that went into effect 1 July. The records then show the USTR does exactly that, telling Mexico its actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops raise concerns “regarding compliance” with USMCA.
Citing discussions with CropLife, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) joined in the effort, discussing in an inter-agency email “how we could use USMCA to work through these issues”.
The documents about the Mexico matter were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and shared with the Guardian.
“We’re seeing more and more how the pesticide industry uses the US government to aggressively push its agenda on the international stage and quash any attempt by people in other countries to take control of their food supply,” said Nathan Donley, a biologist with the CBD conservation group.
Building alarm
The records show alarm starting to grow in the latter part of 2019 after Mexico said it was refusing imports of glyphosate from China. In denying a permit for an import shipment, Mexican officials cited the “precautionary principle”, which generally refers to a policy of erring on the side of caution in dealing with substances for which there is scientific concern or dispute over safety.
An email from Stephanie Murphy, Bayer’s government affairs executive, to Leslie Yang, USTR’s director for international trade and environmental policy, noted the rejection of the glyphosate shipment and said Mexico was “alleging that ‘glyphosate represents a high environmental risk, given the credible presumption that is use can cause serious environmental damage and irreversible health damage …”
Murphy asked if she could “discuss the situation further” with USTR and see if there was “an opportunity for engagement given USMCA”. She said the industry lobbying group CropLife America was reaching out to the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) and Bayer executives were “working closely with FAS” at the American embassy in Mexico.
“As of today, Bayer has not been impacted on imports”, but the company expected problems ahead, Murphy warned ina 5 December 2019 email.
A meeting between US and Mexican officials was held in January 2020 and a USTR “briefing paper”, prepared as guidance for the meeting, included the glyphosate issue as a key concern to be discussed with Luz María de la Mora, Mexico’s undersecretary for foreign trade. The paper specified as one talking point the United States’ concern that the rejection of glyphosate imports was done “without a clear scientific justification”.
In February 2020, Bayer’s Murphy again reached out to the USTR’s Yang, forwarding information she said was gleaned from a meeting in which Mexico’s ministry of environment and natural resources “claims to have scientific evidence about the dangerous effects of glyphosate, and also plans to conduct a study particular for Mexico, with assistance from international organizations”.
By March, Mexico’s actions on glyphosate and genetically engineered crops needed “urgent attention”, according to a letter sent from Chris Novak, CropLife president, to Robert Lighthizer, USTR’s ambassador, copying the heads of the USDA and the EPA. Mexico’s actions were “incompatible with Mexico’s obligations under USMCA”, according to the CropLife letter.
CropLife is funded by Bayer and other agrochemical companies.
Bayer’s Murphy followed that correspondence up with more emails to USTR’s Yang about a need for “high level political engagement”.
Then in May, Lighthizer wrote to Graciela Márquez Colín, Mexico’s minister of economy, saying the GMO crop and glyphosate issues threatened to undermine “the strength of our bilateral relationship”.
CropLife’s Novak sent an August 2020 letter thanking government officials for “all your assistance” but said more was needed as Mexico has “virtually ceased processing registrations of new pesticide products”.
More than glyphosate sales at risk
Throughout the months of email correspondence, industry executives told US government officials that they feared restricting glyphosate would lead to limits on other pesticides and could set a precedent for other countries to do the same. Mexico may also reduce the levels of pesticide residues allowed in food, industry executives warned.
“If Mexico extends the precautionary principle” to pesticide residue levels in food, “$20bn in US annual agricultural exports to Mexico will be jeopardized”, Novak wrote to US officials.
Corn and soybeans exports to Mexico would be particularly at risk if the country stopped allowing glyphosate residues in food, according to the communications between industry and the USTR.
The agrochemical industry and US regulators maintain pesticide levels in food are not harmful, but many scientists disagree and say even trace amounts can be dangerous.
Mexico is a key US trading partner, accounting for $614.5bn in total goods imported and exported in 2019. Key exports to Mexico include about $3bn in corn exports. Given that roughly 90% of US corn production is genetically engineered, the ban on GMO corn would be a big blow to US farmers.
It is unclear if the efforts to push Mexico to change its policy position are still under way within the new Biden administration. The USTR did not respond to a request for comment.
Bayer also declined to answer questions about the company’s actions regarding Mexico, but said glyphosate and genetically modified crops are safe and Mexico’s restrictions would “cause major disruptions” for Mexican farmers and would impact food security in Mexico.
A spokesman for the EPA said the agency regularly engages with officials in Mexico and “has not taken any regulatory actions against Mexico’s decisions on glyphosate or GMO corn”. The agency has offered to share its scientific findings with Mexico’s government, the spokesman said.
CropLife’s Novak told the Guardian that Mexico’s actions to ban glyphosate set “a dangerous precedent” that ignores farmer needs and “undermines the integrity of scientific standards as the foundation for global trade”.
Police respond to protests against the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley on September 17, 2017, in St. Louis, Missouri. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
St. Louis to Pay $5 Million to Black Cop Who Was Beaten by Officers While Undercover as a Protestor
Ishena Robinson, The Root
Robinson writes: "Taxpayers in St. Louis have ended up holding the bag for the actions of local police officers accused of beating and severely injuring one of their fellow cops during a 2017 protest."
St. Louis Officer Luther Hall has secured a $5 million settlement agreement in his lawsuit against the city, related to his alleged assault by members of the St. Louis Police Department while he was working undercover as a demonstrator during protests against police violence.
The irony is real.
KSDK News reports that the settlement agreement was signed by St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, as well as Lt. Col. Lawrence O’Toole and Sgt. Joseph Marcantano of the police department. The city now has 45 days to hand over payment to Hall.
From KSDK:
In his civil lawsuit against the city, Hall claimed Krewson made a comment about how he had messed up his “cute face,” during an elevator ride following the attack and later denied knowing about the assault.
He also claimed fellow officers tried to cover up the beating, during which Hall — a 22-year veteran of the police force — was kicked in the face, leaving him unable to eat.
He also suffered a tailbone injury and a 2-centimeter laceration above one of his lips. He also had surgery to repair herniated discs in his neck and back, according to the lawsuit.
He also accused Marcantano of participating in the beating, getting promoted to sergeant afterwards.
According to KSDK, other citizens have filed lawsuits against the city claiming that police used unjustified force against them during protests that took place in St. Louis in September 2017, after former police officer Jason Stockley was acquitted for the killing of a Black man. However, those cases are still pending and somehow I doubt they will also result in a million-dollar payout.
Meanwhile, the federal cases for three officers who were indicted on charges related to their roles in the alleged assault of Hall are still making their way through the courts. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, officers Christopher Myers, Dustin Boone, and Steven Korte are facing charges that they deprived Hall of his civil rights by arresting him without probable cause at the protest and using unreasonable force to take him into custody. Their criminal trial is set to begin on March 15, and the prosecutors’ findings seem to show that the officers were eager to brutalize demonstrators who were exercising their right to assembly and make their voices heard. The sickening frivolity just came back to bite the cops because they went after one of their own.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“Let’s whoop some ass,” Officer Christopher Myers wrote, according to texts obtained by federal agents. Later, he added: “The bosses are being a little more lenient with the use of force by us.”
“The more the merrier!!!” Officer Dustin Boone wrote. “It’s going to be fun beating the hell out of these sheads once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart … Just fpeople up when they don’t act right!”
On the third night of protests, the two officers confronted a middle-age Black protester named Luther Hall. Hall later told authorities his hands were raised when someone grabbed him from behind and slammed him into the ground face first. Then, Hall said, he was struck by police batons and boots. He required spinal surgery, and for weeks struggled to eat through a bruised jaw.
Boone and Myers, as well as Randy Hays and Bailey Colletta—two cops who have already pleaded guilty to charges related to the beating as well as lying to the FBI and a federal grand jury—have since left the St. Louis Police Department.
Both Hall and Korte still work on the same force.
Jennifer Lopez sings before Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20. (photo: Jonathan Newton/WP)
Ariel Dorfman | How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times: A Journey Into the Heart of a Language We Need Now More Than Ever
Ariel Dorfman, TomDispatch
Dorfman writes: "When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden's inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival."
Over these last few years, here’s a problem that’s sometimes bothered me: how to translate Donald Trump — whether, in his initial presidency-launching moments in 2015 when he was fulminating about those Mexican “rapists” or, in his final weeks in the Oval Office, as he tweeted furiously about that “fake election”? Sadly enough, it evidently wasn’t a problem for 74 million Americans, though the number of them still speaking Trumpese seems to be dwindling.
Perhaps my problem was that I’ve never been good at foreign languages. I used to say that, at the height of my ability to speak French (and that was when I was young and had a French girlfriend), I could get into any conversation and out of none. In Chinese, which I also studied once in my life, I’ve never forgotten trying to describe something to an old Chinese man — possibly almost as old as I am now! — and having him sweetly and politely suggest that, next time, I might try using tones. (Since Chinese is, of course, a tonal language, he was telling me all I needed to know about my linguistic skills.)
In the years before TomDispatch, when I was a book editor, those minimalist skills of mine always left me with the deepest admiration for translators. What a talent — to be able to usher someone like me into other vibrant worlds that I would never have had access to. In those years, for instance, I published the work of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano (translated from the Spanish by that wonderful old lefty Cedric Belfrage). If you don’t believe just how magical that world of wonder they welcomed me into was, then check out Galeano’s three volume series I published in English in those years on the history of the Americas from the first creation myth to what was then late last night: Memory of Fire: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Centuries of the Wind.
Or for that matter check out any of the works of another author I once had translated and published, Ariel Dorfman, who has, in these years, become a TomDispatch regular and a translator par excellence of this strange world we all now live in. Today, he offers us a little lesson in language skills when it comes to the Spanish that’s so much a part of our American world and yet, in Trumpese, was officially banished, along with the Muslims the president also hated with a passion. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
How Spanish Can Help Us Survive Viral Times
A Journey into the Heart of a Language We Need Now More Than Ever
“Una nación bajo Diós, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos.”
hen Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.
A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.
Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.
It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.
It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.
Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.
That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.
Words of Aliento for Our Current Struggle
Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)
It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.
Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”
Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.
In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in a conspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.
As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive. We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.
Here Comes the Sun, But Let It Be for All
As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.
Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.
Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.
It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.
In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.
There Is No Unidad Without Struggle
Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.
Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.
For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.
Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.
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.
Ariel Dorfman, a TomDispatch regular, is the Chilean-American author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes, the children’s story, The Rabbits Rebellion, and a forthcoming novel about the Apocalypse, The Compensation Bureau. He lives with his wife in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a distinguished emeritus professor of literature at Duke University.
Mohamed Soltan, a U.S. citizen who spent nearly two years in an Egyptian prison, was released and returned to the United States in May 2015. (photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/WP)
Defying Biden Administration, Egypt Again Arrests Relatives of Egyptian American Activist
Sudarsan Raghavan, The Washington Post
Raghavan writes: "Egyptian security forces raided the homes of six relatives of an outspoken Egyptian American activist, arresting and imprisoning two cousins in defiance of calls by the Biden administration for the Egyptian government to improve its human rights record, rights advocates said Tuesday."
The targeting of the relatives of Mohamed Soltan, a human rights defender who lives in Northern Virginia, marks the latest attempt by the government of President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi to silence its critics living abroad, according to political opponents of the former military chief.
Sunday’s arrests came about three months after five of Soltan’s relatives were released from prison, days after Joe Biden won the presidency. They had been forcibly taken from their homes in June after Soltan filed a lawsuit in the United States against former Egyptian prime minister Hazem el-Beblawi for his role in torturing Soltan when he was imprisoned in Egypt.
Biden highlighted the case during the presidential campaign, tweeting that torturing Egyptian activists and “threatening their families is unacceptable.” He also warned of “no more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator,’ ” referring to Sissi by a term that former president Donald Trump once used for him.
By going after Soltan’s relatives again, as well as the relatives of other foreign-based critics in recent days, the Sissi government appears to be challenging the Biden administration and its efforts to make human rights a foreign policy priority once again for the United States, activists and analysts said. It also underscores the uncomfortable relationship that is emerging between Sissi and the new White House.
“For Sissi, the big difference is that in Trump he had a president ready to do special favors for him,” said Michele Dunne, Middle East program director at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “And he does not have that with Biden.”
Egypt’s State Information Service did not respond to a request for comment. Nor were there answers to questions sent to the Interior Ministry and state security organs through the Foreign Press Center, according to protocol.
Under Trump, Sissi was handed invitations to the White House that helped strengthen his grip inside Egypt, and his human rights misdeeds were mostly ignored publicly. The government’s abuses skyrocketed during the Trump era.
So far, the tone is significantly different under Biden. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has publicly denounced arrests of Egyptian human rights activists. Congressional Democrats last month created the Egypt Human Rights caucus, vowing to rebalance the U.S. relationship with Egypt with a focus on holding the Sissi government accountable for human rights abuses, corruption and mistreatment of American citizens.
Diplomatically, too, the Biden administration has indicated that the special relationship the United States has had with Egypt since the signing of a 1979 peace treaty with Israel could be less special in the years to come. For decades, Egypt has received billions in U.S. military aid, regardless of its human rights record or authoritarianism. But with a Democratic-controlled Congress, this aid could become subject to more conditions or reduced, Dunne said.
After Biden won office, Sissi congratulated him in a statement, saying he was looking forward to working with Biden and hoped to “boost the strategic bilateral relations” between Egypt and the United States. But as of Tuesday, the two leaders have yet to speak directly. Egypt also did not make the cut in the first 31 calls Blinken made to his counterparts overseas.
“It seems that Sissi and his regime are nervous about these changes and unsure how to handle them,” Dunne said. “Aside from investing in new lobbyists in Washington, Sissi seems to be tacking back and forth between appeasing and bullying tactics. For example, releasing Mohamed Soltan’s relatives back in November and now arresting them again.”
Mohamed Lotfy, executive director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, said Trump normalized the idea in Egypt that human rights and democracy are no longer important. That, he added, “has emboldened people like Sissi, or other rulers elsewhere, to not care and not take seriously calls for democratic reforms.”
Sissi has demonstrated no willingness “to show a new face, or turn a new page,” Lotfy added. In early November, the courts ordered the release of about 400 prisoners, mostly jailed for anti-government protests. But none were actually released, and instead many were charged in new cases.
Also in November, security forces arrested three human rights activists working for the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a prominent rights group. They were released only after an international outcry from Blinken, Western governments and Hollywood celebrities.
“We saw an escalation, perhaps to test the waters, to see what the reactions would be” from the Biden administration, Lotfy said. “Or maybe it was a warning shot, to say, ‘We are still here.’ ”
A recent report citing anonymous Egyptian government officials in Mada Masr, a highly respected independent media outlet, suggests that a tug of war is unfolding inside the government on how to deal with the Biden administration. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry wants to ease up on human rights abuses to curry favor with Washington, but some figures in the powerful security and intelligence organs want to quash political opponents’ hopes that they can capitalize on Biden’s presidency, the report said.
Sunday’s arrests appear to be another escalation. About 2 a.m., plainclothes security forces raided the homes of Soltan’s relatives in the northern cities of Alexandria and Mounofiya, according to a statement Tuesday from the Freedom Initiative, a prisoners’ advocacy group that Soltan heads.
His cousins Moustafa and Khairi Soltan were immediately detained, while a third cousin, Ahmed Soltan, was questioned about his communications with Mohamed Soltan, the statement said. Ahmed Soltan, whose leg was in a cast from a previous injury, was ordered to turn himself in to authorities once his cast was removed. Moustafa and Ahmed Soltan were previously arrested in the June raid.
Other relatives were also questioned and were instructed to tell three other cousins that they were wanted by state security officials, the statement said.
Soltan, in a text message, said he thought his relatives were targeted again possibly because of his role in supporting the Egypt Human Rights Caucus. Pro-government and state-run media outlets have repeatedly attacked Soltan.
The government, he added, could be sending a “challenge signal to Biden on the back of my family.” It also could be “a way of creating a problem to solicit engagement” from the Biden administration, allowing the Sissi government to “resolve” the problem it had created, Soltan added.
In recent days, the government has targeted other Egyptians abroad. At least three relatives of Aly Mahdy, an activist who was granted asylum in Chicago, were arrested after he called last month for Egyptians to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Jan. 25, 2011, revolution that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, the statement said.
Last week, Taqadum al-Khatib, an Egyptian academic based in Germany, said security forces had raided his family home and interrogated his parents about his pro-democracy activism.
“I believe the [Sissi] regime will be seen on the wrong side of history,” Khatib tweeted last week.
'The debate is about more than just rhetoric; it's about how people should feel about climate change.' (photo: Arctic-Images/Corbis)
Do We Need More Scary Climate Change Articles? Maybe.
Kate Yoder, Grist
Yoder writes: "Fires blaze across continents, seas submerge cities, deserts swallow up farmland - there's no shortage of terrifying things about climate change."
But does forcing people to confront all these horrible scenes (and worse, the unknowables to come) actually get people to do something about it? It’s become a hotly debated issue among those who care about climate change.
Every time a bleak, adrenaline-inducing article goes viral, the so-called “hope vs. fear” dispute rages on Twitter. The most recent conversation starter was Elizabeth Weil’s intimate profile in ProPublica of Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist whose death-spiraling dread was taking over his life — his whole family’s life, really.
With the title “The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try,” the piece was bound to get attention — and criticism. Why not highlight a more productive way to cope with the climate crisis? people asked. Weil seemed to anticipate this debate, which has remained contentious at least since David Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth” made a splash in 2017. Near the end of the piece, Weil asks, “How do you describe an intolerable problem in a way that listeners — even you, dear reader — will truly let in?”
It’s a tough question, and experts are split over the right response. “Some people believe that we should emphasize the risks and generate fear and that many people are not scared enough yet,” said Jennifer Marlon, a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “And then other people think we really need to just focus on solutions.”
The debate is about more than just rhetoric; it’s about how people should feel about climate change. “When we’re specifically trying to promote action on climate, we know that one of the best ways to do that is to emotionally engage people in it,” Marlon said. The problem is, reading lots of scary articles might make one person take to the streets in protest, but lead someone else to disengage and shut down. There are an infinite variety of ways to respond to and talk about the climate crisis.
Studies have come to wildly different conclusions. One paper will proclaim that “Fear Won’t Do It” for motivating action on climate change; another will say the exact opposite. The research about hope is similarly mixed. Some studies have suggested that optimistic messages could prod people to behave in more climate-friendly ways and increase support for climate policies, but others found that hopeful appeals actually lowered people’s motivation to reduce emissions.
“It’s really cut down the middle,” said Joshua Ettinger, a PhD student studying public support for climate action at the University of Oxford. “You have study after study finding conflicting results.”
Ettinger’s new research, published in the journal Climatic Change, suggests that the whole “hope vs. fear” argument might be overblown. For the experiment, 500 Americans were shown different videos meant to evoke either hopeful or fearful reactions to climate change. (One group got a message along the lines of “Humanity can stop climate change and create a better world for all!”; the others heard, “Unless we take major action, humanity is doomed.”) While both videos evoked the intended emotions, in the end, neither one altered people’s willingness to change their behavior or participate in climate activism.
“We’re so caught up in how a single message captures the narrative,” Ettinger said, but “we shouldn’t necessarily assume that a single piece of content is going to dramatically influence people.”
Americans are not a monolithic mass; they respond to global warming with alarm, concern, caution, denial, and everything in between, sometimes all in the same day. A 2017 article argued against making broad, simplistic assertions about how specific emotions will change people’s response to the climate crisis. Emotions are powerful, but they’re not “simple levers to be pulled,” the authors argued. Still, Marlon said, there are patterns in how people respond.
Some research suggests that while fear can prompt us to spring into action, hope actually gives us something to do. In other words, alarming and optimistic messages could simply be two sides of the same coin.
Margaret Klein Salamon, the founder of The Climate Mobilization, argues that “telling the whole, frightening truth” is a powerful asset for the climate movement that could unlock “tremendous potential for transformation” — provided that it’s paired with an ambitious, heroic solution. Her organization calls for “an all-hands-on-deck effort to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and safely draw down excess carbon from the atmosphere at emergency speed.”
This attitude is reflected in different ways across the spectrum of activist groups: While Extinction Rebellion focuses on doom, groups like the Sunrise Movement, inspired by the Green New Deal, emphasize an optimistic narrative about jobs and justice. What they share is a driving sense of urgency.
Salamon sees fear as a useful tool, an innate, protective mechanism that demands a response. The terror you feel when someone yells “snake!” shakes you out of complacency and primes you to spring into action … even if that action is simply running away.
“I don’t see how we could possibly achieve the scale of transformation we need if there’s not a shared national understanding that this is an existential threat, that this is a terrible danger,” Salamon said. “If people don’t think that, why would they change their lives? Why would they be part of a political movement? It’s always struck me as kind of an odd position, that somehow we can accomplish huge-scale change but without ever really telling the public the truth.”
Too much doom and gloom, however, can backfire, leading people to deny threats and ignore distressing facts. People are rightfully concerned about exaggeration and “the kind of doomism that says there’s nothing we can do to stop climate change,” Ettinger said. According to a recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 14 percent of Americans think it’s too late to do anything about climate change (for the record, it isn’t).
A number of studies suggest that fear-based messages are persuasive and can change people’s behavior, particularly when they’re paired with messages that empower people to take action rather than wallow in misery. Marlon has found that what gives people hope around climate change is seeing others take action. That could be a neighbor putting up solar panels, a friend talking about climate change, or Swedish activist Greta Thunberg skipping school in protest of government inaction.
One recent study found that people who had heard of Thunberg said they were more likely to participate in activism, a phenomenon called the “Greta effect.” “You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” Thunberg told European leaders in 2019. “Then you are acting like spoiled irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something that you have to earn.”
Despite all the debate over hope and fear, the mix of messages people are hearing about the climate crisis seems to be resonating with a growing share of the public.
Watching a single video or reading a single article isn’t likely to have a lasting effect on people, Marlon said, but “the slow and steady drip, drip, drip of messages” is, along with people seeing change with their own eyes. Today, more than a quarter of Americans are alarmed about the climate crisis, twice as high as it was five years ago. “The messaging is working,” Marlon said. “And there are lots of emotions mixed up in there, but we’re going in the right direction.”
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