29 March 21
Off that Couch and Help Out … Yes You!
We have overwhelming numbers in our favor. What we need “you” to say is, “yes me.” I’ll be the one. It’s never fair, it’s never ideal or perfect. The only way to make it work is reject failure and take responsibility.
Yes you. Who is better suited?
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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29 March 21
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Reader Supported News
Andy Borowitz | Georgia Governor Declares Water a Gateway Drug That Leads to Voting
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes:
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
aising the ante in his ongoing battle with the aqueous substance, Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, has declared water “a gateway drug that leads to voting.”
“We’ve consulted a lot of studies on this,” he said. “People are much more likely to vote if they are under the influence of water.”
The governor said that he was considering a number of measures to address water addiction, including stiffer penalties for voting while quenching.
In his starkest warning, Kemp told those who traffic in the banned liquid, “We’re coming after you,” and promised prison time for anyone combining hydrogen and oxygen in illegal water labs.
Dr. Anthony Fauci. (photo: Getty Images)
Fauci Warns US Is in 'Danger of a Surge' as COVID-19 Cases Increase
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone
Wade writes: "Although cases of Covid-19 had been trending downward in the United States, experts are warning that we are now in a precarious place after cases nationwide ticked up this past week by 12 percent as 30 states plus D.C. reported a rise in infections."
He explained that the increase in infections is likely “because of things like spring break and pulling back on mitigation methods”
lthough cases of Covid-19 had been trending downward in the United States, experts are warning that we are now in a precarious place after cases nationwide ticked up this past week by 12 percent as 30 states plus D.C. reported a rise in infections.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, explained on Face the Nation, that often when cases decline and reach a plateau — like they have in the U.S. over the past month — there is a surge.
“Once you stay at that plateau, you’re really in danger of a surge coming up,” Fauci warned. “And unfortunately, that’s what we’re starting to see. We got stuck at around 50,000 new cases per day, which went up to 60,000 the other day. And that’s really a risk.”
So why are we seeing an increase after a period of decline? It’s a combination of factors. Yes, variants are playing a role, Fauci said, but it’s also a result of Americans traveling more and states and local governments easing public health measures.
“What we’re likely seeing is because of things like spring break and pulling back on the mitigation methods that you’ve seen. Now, several states have done that. I believe it’s premature,” Fauci said.
Our one hope, other than continuing to follow commonsense measures like distancing and masking, is vaccines. The United States has been vaccinating people at an impressive pace, up to 3.5 million vaccinations each day now. If that continues, we may have more opportunities for gathering and socialization, with precautions, sometime in the summer.
“There are 50 million people in this country that are fully vaccinated. That’s a lot of people, and every day we get more and more,” Fauci said. “I would expect that as we get through the summer — late spring, early summer — there’s going to be a relaxation where you’re going to have more and more people who will be allowed into baseball parks, very likely separated with seating, very likely continuing to wear masks.”
Fauci made sure to emphasize that even as we vaccinate more people, masks will still be necessary, especially for children, who he says will likely not be vaccinated until early 2022. But we are not out of danger yet. As Fauci told a reporter at a White House briefing this week, “When I’m often asked, ‘Are we turning the corner?’ My response is really more like, ‘We’re at the corner.’ “
Border wall. (photo: Guillermo Arias/Getty Images)
Biden's Border Shrug Isn't Nearly Enough
Ruben Navarrette Jr., The Daily Beast
Navarrette writes: "He's right that this isn't a new challenge, but dead wrong to pretend that what's happening now is business as usual-and to treat immigration first and foremost as a 'problem.'"
n the U.S.-Mexico border, as in the never-ending debate over U.S. immigration policy, every day is Groundhog Day.
Our immigration dialogue is stalled. Unlike debates over the death penalty or same-sex marriage, it never seems to evolve or take on fresh nuance. It’s more like the shouting matches about abortion or gun control, where people are cemented in their position and make the same arguments over and over again.
While what’s happening now is, in fact, uniquely intense, Americans aren’t seeing anything on the U.S.-Mexico border that they haven’t seen before or that we won’t see again—and that second point at least came through loud and clear Thursday in President Joe Biden’s first news conference.
Many of the questions had to do with the current border crisis. Tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors—most of them from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—are fleeing chaos, instability and violence and showing up unannounced at the U.S.-Mexico border. They’re doing all that because they hope to qualify for asylum. A lot of presidents spend their first appearance before the White House press corps simply saying what the media would like to hear, or what the public wants to hear. Biden deserves credit for doing something more valuable. He seized the opportunity to say what needed to be said.
Like this, in responding to a question about how far he’ll go, as president, in tackling a number of challenges his administration is facing:
“The other problems we’re talking about, from immigration to guns and the other things you mentioned, are long-term problems; they’ve been around a long time.”
And this, about how Biden plans to resolve the “tension” between telling would-be refugees not to come to the United States, and the fact that many of those who have already left claim that they’re coming because they see Biden “as a moral, decent man” who will let them in the door—or at least give them a fair hearing as to why they have “credible fear” that prevents them from returning to their home countries:
“Nothing has changed. As many people came: 28-percent increase in children to the border in my administration; 31 percent in the last year of... in 2019, before the pandemic, in the Trump administration. It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.”
Biden is correct that the challenge posed by immigration—and the related issue of asylum—dates back a long time.
The question of how Americans should deal with unexpected guests left big footprints on the 20th century. The Immigration Act of 1924 was intended to keep out Asians, Italians, Greeks, Eastern European Jews and others. The Truman Directive of 1945 was an executive order by the 33rd president to allow Jewish refugees to seek safe haven in the United States, albeit one that came a decade too late to save millions of Jews killed by the Nazis. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened up the immigration system by eliminating the national origins quota system established in the 1920s to benefit the English, Irish, and Germans. And more than 20 years later, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.
But, personally, as the grandson of a Mexican immigrant who came here as a boy from Chihuahua during the Mexican Revolution—legally because there were not yet laws to keep him out—I would dispute the suggestion that immigration is a “problem.” It’s more like a blessing and the special sauce that, time and again, makes America great.
While Biden was half-right about that part, he was fully wrong on at least three other points.
First, the president implied that what’s going on right now at the border is anything approaching normal. Think tanks, the media, and immigration authorities disagree. They say the projected surge for this year will be larger than ever and that unaccompanied minors are arriving at the border at rates that far outpace the administration’s ability to provide the resources to care for them. In fact, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said recently that U.S. officials are on-pace to encounter more people at the border "than we have in the last 20 years."
Second, Biden was also off-base when he said that this “happens every single, solitary year.” A surge happened in 2014 and 2019, but it didn’t happen to any measurable degree in the five years in between or in the two years since. Sure, immigration from Mexico happens “every single, solitary year” as people looking for work migrate north for greater economic opportunities. But what’s happening at the border is not that. The arrivals are asylum-seekers being pushed out of Central America, not immigrants from Mexico being pulled into the United States by the promise of a job.
Finally, while Biden didn’t use the exact word “seasonal” in describing the surges, that’s what he implied when he said they tend to happen “in the winter months of January, February, March.” In fact, both the 2014 and 2019 surges began in the spring and peaked in the summer. When the house is on fire, you jump out a window immediately. You don’t wait until the weather improves.
Still, thanks to Biden, many Americans may now have a better understanding about the paradox at the heart of the current border crisis. It’s the same, but it’s also different.
Setting aside the ugly tendency to refer to migrants as some sort of plague or tide, this is like a global pandemic in the sense that every day is “Blursday” because it’s the same and monotonous. And yet given that the health crisis is a once-in-a-century event, there are going to be aspects of it that are totally unique and different from anything we’ve seen before.
Whether Americans are hollering about immigration, or debating refugee policy, it all has such a familiar ring. It feels like we’ve heard all the arguments before, and we’re repeating ourselves. Even the counter-arguments have a déjà vu quality. Nothing gets through. No one is persuaded to look at the issue in a different way. And so nothing changes.
The question of how we treat the stranger is too important, and much too urgent, for reruns and retreads. We need a fresh look, one that starts with being honest about what’s happening and how we got here and a consensus about where we want to go. That’s not just for the good of the thousands of people who are coming to our door. It’s also for the good of a country that—as places go—is just remarkable enough for them to risk their lives for a chance to call it their own.
Rayford Burke as a young man. (photo: Emily Baxter)
An All-White Jury Sent Rayford Burke to Death Row. Will North Carolina's Efforts to Make Amends Be Enough?
Jacob Biba, The Intercept
Biba writes: "The murder weapon was never recovered, and no physical evidence tied Burke to the shooting, yet he was charged with murder."
n the early spring of 1993, an all-white jury in Statesville, North Carolina, sentenced Rayford Burke, a 35-year-old Black man, to death. Burke was the ninth man sent to death row in North Carolina that year — 23 more were to follow — and his fate was decided quickly. It took less than two hours for jurors to agree that Burke deserved to die.
Later that April Fools’ Day, a juror spoke to a reporter from the Charlotte Observer about the emotional toll the trial took. “This whole thing has scared us to death,” one jury member said. “Now that it’s all over, we think about the one he was acquitted for.”
Three years earlier, Burke had been charged with second-degree murder. He was acquitted the following year, despite testimony from Timothy Morrison, a witness who came forward claiming that he saw Burke with a shotgun outside the Busy Bee Lounge, where the shooting had occurred. Two months later, Morrison, working as a paid confidential informant, was shot to death in the kitchen of a reputed drug house. When police learned that Burke was at the scene, they turned to him as a suspect.
The murder weapon was never recovered, and no physical evidence tied Burke to the shooting, yet he was charged with murder. At trial, witnesses offered conflicting statements and testimony that contradicted one another and previous statements that they made immediately after Morrison’s death. To convince jurors that Burke killed Morrison as an act of revenge, prosecutors relied on now-disputed evidence suggesting that Burke threatened Morrison’s life in the weeks leading up to his murder.
Today, 137 people are on death row in North Carolina. Seventy-three are Black men, and like Burke, more than half were sent there between 1990 and 2000, a decade when North Carolina’s criminal justice system was rife with systemic racism. From racial bias in jury selection to outright racist tropes used by prosecutors to stoke fear — the juror who spoke to the Charlotte Observer admitted to waking up screaming from nightmares — the racial bias of the death penalty was so blatant and routine that state legislators in 2009 forced a reckoning with the state’s racist past by enacting the Racial Justice Act. The law, which was short-lived, gave death row prisoners the opportunity to have their sentences reduced to life in prison without parole if they could prove that race played a “significant factor” in their case. They could even present statistical evidence of racial bias from across the state and region in support of their claims.
Burke was among more than 100 people on death row who sought relief under the RJA. Passed by Democrats, the RJA was ultimately weakened, then repealed in 2013 by Republicans who believed that the law signified the end of capital punishment in the state — but not before four people had their sentences reduced. They were sent back to death row after the RJA’s repeal. Following a yearslong legal battle to get his RJA claim heard despite the law’s repeal, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled last summer that Burke’s claims under the RJA could move forward. A few months later, the four people who had previously won relief under the RJA were once again resentenced to life in prison.
Burke’s case comes amid renewed efforts by North Carolina to address decades of racial bias in its criminal justice system, prompted by last summer’s racial justice uprising. It reveals the limitations of the state’s Racial Justice Act for someone like Burke, who nearly 30 years after his conviction maintains his innocence. While he’s pursuing an RJA claim, he said he’s not interested in the reduction of his sentence that could result from it. For Burke, relief would be nothing short of a new trial, which he may get if he can prove that prosecutors struck Black jurors on the basis of their race, in violation of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Batson v. Kentucky, a claim he filed as an amendment to his RJA claim.
As a result of the state Supreme Court’s ruling, Burke will receive evidentiary hearings on both his Batson claim and his original RJA claim. The outcome of his Batson claim could set a major precedent in the state, where the Supreme Court has never found that a prosecutor improperly removed a juror of color based on their race.
If the Batson claim does not result in a new trial in state court, however, he plans to withdraw his original RJA claim, he said. Doing so would force a judge to rule on a petition for a writ of habeas corpus that he filed in federal court in 2012, on the basis of potentially exculpatory evidence that his attorney discovered years after his conviction, which could result in a new trial. No date has been set for his evidentiary hearings, and because of the pandemic, the timeline is still uncertain. Burke, who tested positive for Covid-19 in February, is growing impatient.
Civil Rights Backlash
Burke, 63, came of age during the civil rights movement, which, paradoxically, gave rise to the white backlash that ultimately led to the resurgence of capital punishment in North Carolina. “The correlation with the civil rights movement and its aftermath is hard to ignore,” writes Seth Kotch in his book “Lethal State: A History of the Death Penalty in North Carolina.”
Kotch, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, describes the death penalty in his book as “a persistent avatar of white rage.” He said in an interview that North Carolina allowed the death penalty to languish during the 1960s and the civil rights movement, only to jump back full tilt when the Supreme Court effectively banned the death penalty in its 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia. “I think now, the death penalty is definitely a symbol of the racial bias in our criminal justice system, and as a symbol, it’s used by anti-death penalty activists to try to abolish it,” Kotch said. “But I think in the 1970s it was a symbol of racial bias in a way that was very appealing to segregationists and others who felt the federal government was interfering with their way of life. I do think that mass incarceration is the story of the ’90s, but only because it was new. And what was kind of consistent, both as a symbol and as a very real way of using crime as a tool of racial repression, was the death penalty.”
Though the death penalty has fallen in and out of favor in North Carolina since the 1930s, its use, according to Kotch, was always seen as “an appropriate way” of killing Black people who posed “a threat to white society.” And though today there’s a disproportionate population of Black male death row prisoners in North Carolina, the racial bias of the death penalty is even more obvious when one looks not at the race of those sentenced to death but at the race of the victim. Between 1980 and 2007, researchers found that a death sentence was three times more likely when the murder victim was white.
Frank Baumgartner, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, finds that the likelihood of being sentenced to death increases if the victim is white, which presents a “statistical fluke” because homicides don’t typically cross racial lines. “So the white perpetrators suffer from the fact that their victims are white because having a white victim is a big indicator that you’re more likely to get the death penalty,” Baumgartner said. “And the Black perpetrators benefit from the fact that the vast majority of their victims are Black. And Black lives don’t matter as much with regards to the death penalty. However, when you cross racial lines, and the white person kills a Black person, there’s almost no chance whatsoever that they’ll get the death penalty. And when the Black person kills a white person, the chances go way up.”
Though Burke was convicted of killing Morrison, a Black man, Burke and his family believe that in many ways, his conviction and sentence were a continuation of the Busy Bee case, which involved a white victim. “I feel like he wasn’t tried for the murder of Tim Morrison,” Burke’s sister, Barbara Bowman, told the Charlotte Observer after the trial. “He was tried for the murder of Calvin Royal.”
Baumgartner said that location and history are also important factors: Controlling for population and homicide rate, the disparity among counties can be traced to the county’s history of Jim Crow-era lynchings and poverty rate as well as the percentage of the population in that county that is Black. “The racial dynamic is very damning in that it shows the death penalty is associated with a really ugly history of racism, institutional racism, and lynchings,” he said. In these counties, especially in the 1990s when death sentences surged, the “avatar of white rage” was unmasked even further.
Baumgartner finds that timing, too, is just as critical. In 1993, when Burke was convicted and sentenced to death, North Carolina sent 32 people to death row, a number that was topped only in 1995, when the state sentenced 34 people to death. “It was like a race to the top in terms of who could be tougher on crime across the political parties,” Baumgartner said. The term “superpredator” caught on, and states began mandating juvenile life without parole, he said. In North Carolina, sentencing reform in the 1990s proved to have a lasting impact, according to Baumgartner, because it created the punishment of life without the possibility of parole. At the same time that it reduced sentences for the lowest-level crimes, it increased sentences for higher-level crimes. The violent habitual felon laws, North Carolina’s version of the three strikes law, also took effect in 1994. Today in North Carolina, 80 percent of people serving life without parole as a violent habitual felon are Black.
But in 2001, a series of death penalty reforms started rolling out, ranging from open discovery rights and prosecutorial discretion to the creation of the Office of Indigent Defense Services and a life without parole option. These reforms effectively reduced the number of people sentenced to death in the 2000s until today. But these reforms weren’t retroactive and did not directly address the racial bias of the criminal justice system. Today, concerns about lethal injection protocols and racial bias have led to a suspension of executions. North Carolina hasn’t executed anyone since 2006, yet death sentences, however sparingly, are still being sought after by prosecutors and handed down by juries.
Whitewashed Juries
When Burke walked into Jesse Wilson’s home on January 23, 1992, he recalled catching a glance of a few men smoking crack in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman lounged in a raggedy chair, drinking from a bottle of liquor. Burke poured some for himself, took a sip, and then heard a scuffle in the kitchen, he said in an interview. A man then rushed into the living room and said, “Look out — he’s got a gun,” before the first shot was fired. “We were in a crack house,” Burke said. “You don’t stand around anywhere when there’s shooting going on, much less a crack house. So I turned and I ran, too.” When he reached the front door, he bumped into Wilson, who was standing in the doorway. Burke slipped outside. Two more shots were fired. Burke ran to his girlfriend’s car and hopped into the passenger seat, and the couple sped away.
He did not see Morrison that day, he said. At the time, Burke was pursuing a civil lawsuit seeking $20.5 million from the city of Statesville and $500,000 from each of the Statesville Police Department officers who investigated the Busy Bee case. He said in an interview that if he had seen Morrison, he would have sought a statement from him to bolster his case.
Wilson and two other men — Burke’s cousin and another man with severe memory impairment from a prior head injury — testified against Burke at trial. Burke’s cousin and the third man said that Burke and Morrison fought in the kitchen and that Burke pulled a small-caliber gun out of his pocket and shot Morrison. But witnesses for the defense disputed that testimony. Peggy Ramseur, who, just like Morrison, had testified against Burke in the Busy Bee case, told the court that she spent time with Wilson following Morrison’s death and that Wilson admitted to her that he did not see the shooting take place. She also testified that she had spent time with Burke after the Busy Bee trial and sensed no ill will from him as a result of her testimony against him. Another witness also testified that Wilson didn’t know what happened, and Burke and two other witnesses testified that the shooting occurred nearly two hours earlier than reported. These inconsistencies didn’t faze the jury.
In death penalty cases, juries are already stacked in favor of the prosecutors: If you’re against the death penalty, you won’t be seated on a jury. And if you’re a person of color, the odds that you would land on a jury were especially low in the 1990s, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Batson. Researchers from Michigan State University, looking at jury strikes between 1990 and 2010, found that prosecutors in Iredell County, where Burke was tried, were three times more likely to strike Black jurors from capital cases. Today, nearly half of all prisoners on death row were sent there by all-white juries or juries with only one person of color.
Burke faced an all-white jury even though more than one-third of Statesville’s population in the 1990s was Black. For prosecutors, that was not a problem. Prosecutor Deborah Brown told jurors, “When we picked you to sit on this jury, we picked you as representatives of this whole community. And you come from all different parts of this community. And as you sit here, you are the voice and you are the conscience of this community.”
The prosecutors went on to stoke white fear. Throughout the course of Burke’s trial, they alluded to other violent acts he was accused of, including the Busy Bee shooting, for which he was acquitted, and an assault charge and conviction for shooting a woman in the leg, which he maintains he did not do. Prosecutors even referred to him as a “big black bull” — a description that a defense witness gave of Burke earlier in the trial — during closing arguments. “Fear, dehumanizing, racializing, and portraying a person as a bull or a predator or as an animal, that’s what it was all about,” said Baumgartner.
Gretchen Engel, executive director of the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, North Carolina, and one of Burke’s post-conviction attorneys, said the use of that animal imagery paired with evidence of threats that Burke purportedly made toward Morrison fueled the fear even further. “If you looked at the trial record, you see the state really going through acrobatics to really find a witness that they can get to testify about that,” said Engel. Prosecutors attempted to call two witnesses to testify that Morrison was scared of Burke, but the judge wouldn’t allow it. They were, however, able to call two officers from the Statesville Police Department and the county’s victim-witness coordinator to testify to threats that Burke and his family allegedly made against Morrison through the victim’s girlfriend and uncle. “And it ends up being like triple hearsay,” said Engel. “And it’s all about making this ‘big black bull’ seem threatening and fearsome, and it’s really playing to longstanding tropes about African Americans.”
Prosecutors needed this evidence, Brown told the judge, citing how critical it was to prove motive and premeditation. “And they did need it for death,” said Engel. “That’s how they were going to get that all-white jury to kill him and convict him of first-degree murder.”
Patricia Bruce, who prosecuted Burke in both the Busy Bee and Morrison cases, died in 2019. Brown went on to become a district court judge in North Carolina and vacated her seat in November. She could not be reached for comment.
During Burke’s post-conviction appeals, his attorney discovered that trial prosecutors had withheld evidence that showed Burke had never communicated threats through the victim’s uncle. In an affidavit after trial, Morrison’s girlfriend also stated that no threats were made. She even said she was interviewed by four people from the district attorney’s office and police department before the trial and conveyed the same message. In 2011, a state court denied Burke’s motion for appropriate relief on this claim. Though the court accepted his allegations as true, they said the disclosure of this evidence wouldn’t have affected Burke’s trial or sentencing. This new evidence is now the basis of Burke’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus in a federal district court, which could lead to an evidentiary hearing and a new trial but is on hold until his claims under the RJA are resolved.
A Significant Factor
In June of 2020, just after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Cheri Beasley, the then-chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, addressed the protests that were sweeping the state. “In our courts, African Americans are more harshly treated, more severely punished, and more likely to be presumed guilty,” she said. “There are many ways to create change in the world, but one thing is apparent: The young people who are protesting every day have made clear that they do not intend to live in a world in which they are denied justice and equality like the generations before them.”
A few days later, North Carolina’s Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, ruled that the RJA’s retroactive repeal was unconstitutional and that Burke’s claim, along with the claim of another Black man on death row from Iredell County, Andrew Ramseur, could proceed. Ramseur was convicted of killing two white people in a Statesville gas station in 2007 and was sentenced to death in 2010. After the shooting, some white community members posted comments online calling for Ramseur to be lynched.
In her majority opinion in State v. Robinson, Beasley, who lost by 401 votes to Republican Paul Newby in the November election, documented North Carolina’s sordid history of race discrimination in jury selection and Batson’s failure to halt that trend. “Although the Supreme Court’s ruling in Batson and subsequent decisions sought to eliminate discrimination through the use of peremptory challenges, this Court has never held that a prosecutor intentionally discriminated against a juror of color,” Beasley wrote. “The RJA was the General Assembly’s recognition of Batson’s ineffectiveness in this state.”
Also over the summer, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper established the North Carolina Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice. The 24-member task force is poised to address the systemic racism that’s plagued the state’s criminal justice system for decades. In December, the task force released 124 recommendations for promoting racial equity in law enforcement agencies and the courts.
For Burke, however, all this is likely too late.
“It ain’t just about being white or Black, but I do believe, if I were a white man, I would have gotten a much better trial than what I received,” Burke said. “Particularly with the evidence I have now, I would have more than likely gotten a new trial by now and been at home by now.”
“But to the Dead, One Only Owes the Truth”
During closing arguments, Bruce, the prosecutor, referenced Voltaire: “One owes respect to the living. But to the dead, one owes only the truth.” Today, Burke’s focus is on getting a new trial to expose the truth before he’s dead.
Though Burke would prefer to get a new trial based on exculpatory evidence, he understands that a race-based claim may be his best, and only, shot. “Batson holds them accountable for the racial disparities during the jury selection process, but that doesn’t make them explain why they lied like they did,” Burke said.
If the Batson claim doesn’t prove fruitful in state court, he will turn to the federal courts to potentially give him a new trial under his habeas claim.
He knows the new evidence related to the hearsay threats doesn’t prove his innocence, but he’s confident it shows that prosecutors lied and conspired against him. “It doesn’t exonerate me in the sense that DNA would or some other trace evidence like that,” Burke said. “But it’s powerful enough to get the job done if I can get back in a courtroom. It’s powerful enough to bring out the truth.”
While the RJA’s attempt to address racial bias in the death penalty is unprecedented, it does fall short for someone like Burke, who maintains his innocence and is not interested in having his sentence commuted to life without parole. “I am a little bit concerned,” Baumgartner said, “about the idea of commuting the sentences of over a hundred people, and they simply go to general population with a punishment of death by casket, rather than death by lethal injection, and we forget about them.”
Debt Collective rally. (photo: Facebook)
If You Want Student Loan Debt Cancellation, the Time to Act Is Here
Umme Hoque, In These Times
Excerpt: "The Debt Collective is embarking on a week of action to tell the Biden administration that it's time to cancel every cent of student debt."
n March 18, the Biden administration’s Department of Education announced that it will cancel $1 billion in federal student loan debt held by 72,000 borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit universities. These students received subprime educations and worthless degrees, and then were burdened with debt often in the tens of thousands of dollars — all while predatory companies and their investors made millions.
The only reason this debt is now being cancelled is because debtors got organized. In 2015, students from for-profit, now defunct Corinthian Colleges Inc. launched the country’s first student debt strike, refusing to pay their loans because they had been scammed by their school. First, they fought the Obama administration, and then the Trump administration. As a direct result of these efforts, this latest victory means the U.S. government has been forced to abolish nearly $2 billion dollars in debt to date.
Now, we need to continue what they started. We must fight to make sure that all $1.7 trillion of student debt is cancelled. We have a window to make history. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) said on March 12 after the massive American Rescue Plan was passed, “[I]f you care about student debt cancellation, it is go time for you. You need to mobilize, and now is the time to organize to create political pressure.”
And we are. From March 29 through April 4, debtors and our allies will be taking part in the Debt Collective’s week of action to cancel ALL student loan debt. Events are planned in New York City, Chicago, Albuquerque, Denver, Knoxville, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and many more across the country. We believe that now is the time to get involved and take to the physical and digital streets, because we can’t sit back and wait for elected officials to act on their own. We have to push them by holding events, rallies, marches, phone banks and other actions to create pressure and grow our fight.
While corporations and the rich get bailed out when they face crises, nothing is ever simply handed to the working class. But we can win — if we organize together. Every progressive policy in this country was fought for: it took the civil rights movement to inch this country closer to racial justice; women marched and took action to win right to vote, and it’s only thanks to workers striking and taking militant action that we have an 8‑hour workday and weekends. Debt cancellation is no different. Debtors must unite to have our voices heard and our demands met.
President Biden campaigned on a promise to forgive $10,000 of student loan debt for everyone, along with more relief for select borrowers. That’s a positive step, but his plan still leaves out millions of people and doesn’t address the root of the crisis.
It’s time to cancel all student loan debt and build a pathway to tuition-free college. Cancelling $10,000 or even $50,000 (the amount advocated by Democrats including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren) is better than nothing, but if that’s all Biden does, he will leave tens of millions of Americans drowning in debt. Fortunately, Biden can cancel all federal student loan debt right now using the authority he holds from the Higher Education Act.
Higher education in the United States is fundamentally broken. Federal and state governments are slashing education budgets, and tuition costs are ballooning. Between 2008 and 2018, tuition exploded by 37%, and university costs grew by nearly 25% — but states spent, on average, 20% less on higher education. Meanwhile, the costs of rent and electricity continue to increase while the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour remains stagnant.
The math is simple: there’s a gap, and it’s being filled by debt. Over the past 10 years, the amount of student loans increased by more than 100%. Some point to the government’s existing loan repayment and forgiveness programs as solutions for this overwhelming debt crisis. But, in spite of millions of applicants, only 32 people have qualified for income based cancellation.
Let’s go back to the 72,000 defrauded students who will benefit from the disappearance of that $1 billion of debt. Sadly, countless others are still suffering: 90% of borrowers who were scammed by their schools say they were denied relief. The federal government’s current fixes simply don’t work.
A diverse coalition of voters supported Biden in his presidential campaign because this country requires deep transformation, and because he committed to cancelling some student debt. I’m a South Asian Muslim from a working class family, and I currently hold over $70,000 in student debt. The last thing I want to see is a return to “normal” that endangers our communities and the tattered thread of democracy we still possess. It’s time to address the actual problems that created the crisis we’re in right now. Doing so will help working people from all walks of life.
Organizing around debt has taught me how widespread this problem is. People whisper it to me quietly, as if they are the only ones struggling, when student loan debt actually impacts a huge number of us: teachers, nurses, grocery store workers, artists, web developers, researchers, journalists, people who never graduated, unemployed people. And those who don’t have this debt? Many of them did before, so they know how hard they worked to pay it off and why no one else should have to — or they know someone who does who is suffering: their sister, brother, child or cousin.
Debt shouldn’t be our shameful secret. It can be our collective power and shared struggle. When an issue affects 45 million people, it isn’t an individual error. We did what we are all told to do: go to school, try to get a degree, and then try to find a well-paying job. But the system isn’t designed to actually work for working people.
Student loan debt is a racial justice issue. The largest burden of debt is held by Black and brown people. A deep legacy of structural racism in this country has denied these communities the chance to build intergenerational wealth, so they must take on more loans to go to school. Once in the workforce, Black and brown people tend to make less. First you start with nothing, and then you are penalized for trying to improve your life. This is probably why 40% of Black voters said they won’t vote for a candidate who opposes eliminating student loan debt.
Student loan debt is also an intergenerational issue, because now six million people between the ages of 50 – 64 and 870,000 people over the age of 65 still hold student loan debt. For retirees, instead of relaxing after a life of hard work, they’re having their social security garnished over student debt payments they defaulted on because they were too poor to pay.
Finally, student loan debt is an economic justice issue. Rich people don’t have to borrow to go to college, but almost everyone else does. Student loan debt heavily impacts poorer states and regions, both rural and urban. For instance, residents of Tennessee, where there will be two protests next week, have over $29 billion in debt.
No wonder full scale debt cancellation is supported by a majority of voters, across political parties. Debt cancellation is the deeply needed stimulus that our country wants and needs. It would put billions of dollars into our economy and create thousands of jobs. It’s so impactful that polling shows 1 in 5 Republican voters have said they’d consider voting for Democrats if Biden cancelled debt.
We can be certain that the banks and loan companies are not whispering in shame about how many lives they’ve destroyed. Instead, they’re proclaiming that their profits matter most, releasing farcical reports with dubious data about how cancelling student loan debt won’t help poor people, and lobbying their way to billions more in subsidies for themselves and their bottom lines.
If they feel no remorse for manipulating and continuing to exploit 45 million of us, why should we feel shame for taking on debt to improve our lives and our communities? Instead, let’s organize together to cancel our current debts and ensure future generations don’t have to suffer like this.
Next week, debtors and our allies will come together online and offline, in cities and Zoom rooms across the country. We will have marches and rallies, assemblies of debtors sharing stories, banner drops and other actions.
Every action will look a bit different. But each of them will be powerful, because anytime people come together to change things, we are one step closer to justice and liberation.
Myanmar military. (photo: Getty Images)
US Suspends Trade Engagement With Myanmar Until "Return of a Democratically Elected Government"
Justine Coleman, The Hill
Coleman writes: "The United States suspended trade engagement with Myanmar on Monday after the country experienced its most deadly crackdown of protests since the military coup in February."
U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai announced the suspension of U.S. collaboration with Myanmar, which the administration refers to as Burma, through the 2013 Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) “effective immediately,” according to a release from her office.
The office’s statement indicated that the suspension will stay in place “until the return of a democratically elected government.”
“The United States supports the people of Burma in their efforts to restore a democratically elected government, which has been the foundation of Burma’s economic growth and reform,” Tai said in the statement. “The United States strongly condemns the Burmese security forces’ brutal violence against civilians.”
“The killing of peaceful protestors, students, workers, labor leaders, medics, and children has shocked the conscience of the international community,” she added. “These actions are a direct assault on the country’s transition to democracy and the efforts of the Burmese people to achieve a peaceful and prosperous future.”
Under the TIFA, Myanmar’s government had committed to working with the U.S. to back labor rights, economic reforms, development and trade integration. But the USTR noted that reports have surfaced that the Myanmar junta has gone after trade unions and workers for participating in pro-democracy demonstrations.
Myanmar’s military launched a coup against the government led by Aung San Suu Kyi on Feb. 1 in response to the November election results that gave Suu Kyi’s party major wins. Military leaders have claimed the election was affected by fraud, but the country’s election commission dismissed those allegations.
Protesters have taken to the streets in response to the coup, resulting in crackdowns, including on Saturday when more than 100 people were killed in the deadliest day of demonstrations so far and on Sunday when forces fired at a funeral for one of the protest victims.
President Biden’s administration has already instituted sanctions against Burmese generals, their families and businesses with connections to the military. The U.S. also redirected $42.4 million in assistance away from Myanmar.
“A strong and unified message emerging from the United States has been essential, in our view, to encouraging other countries to join us and pressing for an immediate return to democracy,” the president said last month.
Jose Gonzalez with bracelets accrued during trips to the hospital. (photo: Al Seib/Rex/Shutterstock)
'I Felt I Killed My Children': Lead Poisons California Community - and Fills Kids' Teeth
Brian Osgood, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "A battery recycling plant blanketed Latino communities with chemicals - and thousands of properties remain toxic."
or years, Terry Gonzalez-Cano encouraged her children to get outside and play in the dirt. “I grew up doing everything outside, and I encouraged my kids to do the same thing. We played in the backyard, we gardened,” she said. “I thought I was being a good mother by forcing them to spend time outside.”
Gonzalez-Cano, 48, didn’t know that, for decades, the Exide lead battery recycling plant in the neighboring Los Angeles-area city of Vernon had blanketed blue-collar Latino communities with layer after layer of lead and cancer-causing arsenic.
In June 2015, the soil on her property in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights was tested for lead by the California department of toxic substances control. Gonzalez-Cano said the results had come back in April 2016, 10 months after her property had been tested: her home had more than double the 80 parts per million (ppm) that California deems acceptable. At her father’s home a block away, where she and her brother spent countless hours playing in the backyard when they were children, the number averaged over 800ppm. One neighbor’s soil tested so high that it surpassed the 1,000ppm required to qualify as toxic waste.
“When I found out, I couldn’t breathe,” said Gonzalez-Cano. “I felt like I was the worst mother in the world. I felt that I had killed my children.”
Sitting next to her on the couch at her home recently, her brother Jose Gonzalez emptied a plastic bag full of bracelets from his dozens of trips to the hospital for sinus cancer on to the floor. “Here’s Exide’s legacy,” he said. “I thought I was staying fit when I used to play football in the mud. I didn’t know it, but I was poisoning myself.”
Six years after their property was tested, the siblings say that the state has not given them even a prospective timeline for when their property will be cleaned up. They worry about the damage that has already been done, and the health problems they and their families may have that will only manifest with time.
The evidence of the plant’s contamination is not just in the soil of local homes, but in the teeth of the children who inhabit them. A 2019 study found high levels of lead in the teeth of local children, indicating long-term exposure that was passed along to many while they were still in their mother’s wombs. “Mothers in these communities are exposed, and they pass that exposure on to their children before they’re even born,” said Jill Johnston, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California who authored the study.
Despite its nearly 100-year presence, many in the community had never heard of Exide until less than a decade ago, although community organizers had been protesting against the plant and demanding action for many years. The company could not be reached for comment.
“This was a facility with a long history of violations,” said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the UCLA School of Law’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. “But the regulatory system sees these facilities as serving an important purpose” – about 11m used lead batteries were processed by the smelting plant on an annual basis – “and this gives these companies leverage, even when they’re violating the law.”
Idalmis Vaquero, a Boyle Heights resident and volunteer with Communities for a Better Environment, said that, when she first heard about Exide in 2013, she was shocked they hadn’t been shut down by regulatory agencies. “They knew for years and did nothing. I realized that they weren’t interested in protecting us. They were interested in protecting Exide,” she said.
Many residents expressed skepticism that the pollution would have gone on as long as it did if their neighborhood looked different. “Because we’re working-class and Latino, we’re not a priority,” Terry Gonzalez-Cano stated flatly. She had to sell her father’s home in part to cover medical bills.
The plant was shuttered in 2015 as part of an agreement with the US Department of Justice that allowed Exide to avoid criminal prosecution for a litany of emissions and hazardous waste violations, although the department promised the company would be financially responsible for the cleanup. The enormous plant now stands derelict, covered with a white sheet meant to stop toxins from escaping.
At least 7,800 properties in the area have dangerous levels of lead contamination. About 3,200 are considered the most affected, but so far only 2,407 have been cleaned, and a damning report by the California state auditor found that the rest of that initial, most-dangerous batch are not expected to be cleaned until August 2022, over a year behind schedule.
The state has not given any timeline for the remainder, leaving thousands of families with few options but to tell their children not to play in dirt that has been infected with toxins for decades. “They tell us to stay home to stay safe from Covid-19,” said Rossmery Zayas, a community organizer. “But for us, home isn’t safe. There’s no escaping the contamination.”
Kids are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning, and once exposed, the effects on their development can be devastating, such as learning disabilities, fatigue and seizures. Lead poisoning can also cause premature births and slowed growth in toddlers. Yet with the exception of a single childcare center, between May 2018 and May 2020, the state toxic substances department had not cleaned any “childcare centers, parks, or schools”. The department said that about 10 remained to be cleaned.
The California auditor blasted it for careless mistakes that “put the children and other at-risk individuals who spend time at these properties at unnecessary risk of the serious consequences of lead poisoning”.
“This is the largest residential cleanup of its kind in California,” the toxic substances department told the Guardian in an email. “We have listened to the heartbreaking stories from residents of the communities surrounding Exide and know they are dealing with the negative impacts from contamination from nearly a century of smelting activity.”
The department said it had implemented a handful of recommendations from the auditor’s report meant to speed up operations and allow for the expeditious decontamination of sensitive locations frequented by children.
But residents and activists are unimpressed. Some worry that as officials clean individual parcels instead of cleaning up block by block, properties risk being recontaminated when the wind blows dust from properties that have yet to be cleaned on to those that have been. Johnston from USC also said it was “highly unlikely” that the 1.7-mile radius cleanup area accurately captured the full extent of Exide’s contamination.
“I don’t believe that for a second,” said mark! Lopez, an organizer with East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. “But that’s the last thing the state wants to hear. They’re strapped for cash, and they want to put this behind them and move on. But we’ll still be living here with the effects.”
The community’s morale was dealt yet another blow last year when a Delaware bankruptcy court ruled that Exide could walk away from the property without financing the remaining cleanup costs, despite the government’s assurances otherwise.
It has left California taxpayers on the hook for the cleanup effort that could surpass $650m, a decision the state has vowed to fight.
Residents are unanimous in their own verdict: disgust.
“We were told Exide was going to pay to clean up its mess,” said Pastor John Moretta of Resurrection church in Boyle Heights. “But they’re getting off scot-free. We feel betrayed.”
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