02 April 21
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David Sirota and Andrew Perez | The Right Wing of the Democratic Party Is Playing Hardball. The Left Wing Is Not.
David Sirota and Andrew Perez, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Conservatives in the Democratic Party are willing to go to the mat for the rich, to the point of threatening to take down Joe Biden's infrastructure and climate plan. But the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball for the working class."
arlier this month, progressive lawmakers refused to withhold their votes on must-pass COVID-19 stimulus legislation until the bill included a $15 minimum wage. A few weeks later, conservative Democratic lawmakers are now threatening to withhold their votes on must-pass infrastructure legislation until the bill includes large tax cuts for the wealthy.
The contrast in tactics spotlights a decisive asymmetry in congressional politics right now: the right wing of the Democratic Party is willing to play hardball on behalf of the affluent, to the point of threatening to take down one of President Joe Biden’s signature legislative initiatives, an infrastructure and climate plan he will detail on Wednesday.
By contrast, the left wing of the party has not yet been willing to play the same kind of hardball on behalf of the working class — and that refusal ultimately helped kill a promised wage hike in the recent pandemic aid bill and could similarly imperil other progressive priorities.
“Does Not Have a Position”
The tax issue revolves around federal write-offs for state and local taxes — colloquially called SALT deductions. Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited such deductions to $10,000. The move was perceived as a mean-spirited shot at blue states, which often have higher state and local levies to fund more robust public services. But on the merits, the policy serves to limit tax deductions primarily for higher-income households.
As the Daily Poster reported back in January, congressional Democrats in states like New York and New Jersey have been pushing for a repeal of the SALT deduction caps. Biden declined to include the SALT cap repeal in the American Rescue Plan.
If the SALT cap was fully repealed, nearly all — 96 percent — of the tax benefits would flow to the top quintile of earners, and more than half of the benefits would go to the top 1 percent of earners, according to data from the Brookings Institution. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation found that the majority of the benefits of a SALT cap repeal would flow to households earning more than $1 million.
On its face, the notion of passing a massive tax cut for the wealthy — one that would reportedly cost $139 billion over two years — should sound wildly offensive after Democrats spent so much time over the past few months debating whether to cut off COVID-19 survival checks to individuals who earned more than $50,000 in 2019, because some conservative Democrats were allegedly concerned that cash might go to some people who don’t need it.
But amazingly, despite the regressivity of eliminating the SALT deductions — and even though there are progressive alternatives to fix some of the purported problems with the SALT cap — progressive lawmakers are split on the idea of a repeal.
Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Tuesday her caucus “does not have a position” on the tax breaks, according to Aída Chávez, a reporter for the Nation.
Some progressives, such as New York Reps. Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman, support the repeal, in solidarity with other lawmakers in their states. But New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voted against repealing the SALT caps in late 2019, citing data showing that it would primarily enrich the wealthy — and she continues to oppose a repeal.
Now, three conservative Democrats — Reps. Bill Pascrell and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and New York Rep. Tom Suozzi — are saying they will vote against any tax-related legislation that does not eliminate the caps, according to Washington Post reporter Jeff Stein.
Their position could threaten Biden’s ambitious new plan to spend $2 trillion to improve the nation’s roads, bridges, rail lines, and utilities. The White House intends to fund the program through new tax hikes, including raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent for the next fifteen years. In a narrowly divided House — currently split 219-211 — those three Democratic votes could prove decisive.
“No SALT, no deal,” Suozzi said in a press release Tuesday. “I am not going to support any change in the tax code unless there is a restoration of the SALT deduction. The cap on the SALT deduction has been a body blow to New York and middle-class families in New York.”
Actually Wielding Power
Whatever side of the issue you may be on, one thing is clear: this trio of lawmakers is leveraging their position and demonstrating how Congress actually works.
All the press releases, tweets, cable TV appearances, and fancy Washington titles can trick the casual observer into thinking rank-and-file lawmakers have all sorts of levers of power — but in reality, most members of Congress have very little real-world legislative power other than their vote. The more narrowly divided the House, the more power each individual lawmaker has, because congressional leaders need their votes to pass legislation.
In this situation, three relatively obscure, low-profile legislators who are not major social media brands are utilizing that power to defend the interests of the wealthy. Sure, it’s grotesque — but in terms of pure power politics, they are taking a stand and seizing a spot at the negotiating table not by merely tweeting about it or making vague promises to “push” for something but by wielding their voting power to try to force the Biden White House and the congressional leadership to deal with the issue in a bill the party sees as a necessity.
This is the opposite of what congressional progressives did on the minimum wage during the debate over the American rescue plan.
Progressive lawmakers sent a letter asking Vice President Kamala Harris to ignore the Senate parliamentarian’s advice and allow a $15 minimum wage to stay in the bill. But they never drew a line in the sand and said they would be — or would even consider — withholding their votes on the bill if a $15 minimum wage was excluded.
And because they didn’t wield power in the way conservative Democrats are wielding power on SALT deductions, the Biden White House knew these progressives could be ignored and the $15 minimum wage was eliminated from the legislation.
If that wasn’t bad enough, after the $15 minimum wage was killed, Jayapal gave cover to Biden by insisting after the fact that he is still “committed” to the wage hike, even though he didn’t lift a finger to make it happen when it had its best chance under Senate reconciliation rules.
How To Be at the Table, Rather Than on the Menu
Last week, progressive lawmakers got a special, feel-good meeting with White House chief of staff Ron Klain to talk about the $15 minimum wage. While he reportedly reiterated Biden’s commitment to a wage hike, there has been no indication out of Washington yet that Democrats have a real plan to pass such a measure.
The only hint of a plan to raise the wage so far is not encouraging. The Intercept reported Monday that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is considering attaching the $15 minimum wage measure to Biden’s new infrastructure package — legislation that will likely be passed under the budget reconciliation process by a simple majority vote, as the American Rescue Plan was.
However, just last month, Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough said that in her opinion, a $15 minimum wage increase did not comply with reconciliation rules. Instead of ignoring that opinion or simply replacing her, Senate Democrats took the measure out of their bill. Then, eight Democrats joined Republicans to reject an amendment to add the minimum wage measure back to the bill, helping create a new precedent excluding minimum wage hikes from reconciliation legislation.
Schumer now insists he sees some “glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time: The new legislation is focused on infrastructure, and setting wages is directly related to the budget impact of any infrastructure spending,” according to the Intercept.
But unless the whole Democratic caucus in the Senate is now committed to supporting the overall infrastructure package with a wage hike — no matter what the parliamentarian says — Schumer’s idea should be considered a way to make it look like Democrats are fighting to pass a $15 minimum wage without ever actually using their power to make it happen.
As we wrote last week, the best chance Democrats have to pass a $15 minimum wage starts with eliminating the filibuster. Short of that, progressive lawmakers can talk all they want about how important it is to finally raise the minimum wage, but until they start threatening to vote down must-pass legislation — or actively doing so — no one will take their demands seriously.
This isn’t rocket science. This is negotiation 101. Whether a labor-management tussle, a business pact, or a legislative debate, if you aren’t willing to condition support for a final deal on a set of clear demands, then your demands will likely be ignored.
Conservative Democrats fighting for tax cuts for their wealthy donors seem to understand this. Progressive Democrats who say they are for a $15 minimum wage but never made firm demands either did not understand this or were willing to sacrifice their stated priority for the good stuff in the final bill.
Maybe that latter decision is justifiable, maybe not. But until progressives are willing to play the same kind of hardball as their conservative Democratic opponents, they should expect to continue being on the menu, not at the table — and the $15 minimum wage will probably remain in limbo.
Retired Minneapolis police sergeant David Pleoger. (photo: Getty)
Chauvin's Supervisor Says There Was No Justification to Keep Knee on George Floyd's Neck
Chris McGreal, Guardian UK
McGreal writes: "Derek Chauvin's police supervisor has told his murder trial that there was no justification for the officer to keep his knee on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes."
Sgt David Pleoger tells trial that Chauvin and the other officers should have stopped using force once Floyd stopped resisting
Sgt David Pleoger, who arrived at the scene shortly after Floyd was taken away by ambulance, said that Chauvin and other officers holding down the 46-year-old Black man should have stopped using force once Floyd stopped resisting.
“When Mr Floyd was no longer offering up any resistance to the officers they could have ended their restraint,” he said.
Video recording showed that Chauvin kept pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck even after the detained man pleaded that he could not breathe and then stopped moving. Two other officers were also holding Floyd down.
Chauvin, 45, who is white, has denied charges of second- and third-degree murder, and manslaughter, over Floyd’s death. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charge.
Pleoger is among a number of officers expected to be called as witnesses for the prosecution including the chief of the Minneapolis police department, Medaria Arradondo, who, in a highly unusual move, will give evidence against his own former officer. Arradondo fired Chauvin shortly after Floyd’s death.
Pleoger was alerted to concerns about the arrest by a 911 emergency operator and called Chauvin on his cellphone.
In the conversation, Chauvin can be heard saying: “We just had to hold a guy down. He was going crazy.”
The supervisor then headed to the scene to determine whether an appropriate level of force has been used. Pleoger said that the first he became aware that Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck was when one of the other officers suggested he ask Chauvin about it. Even then, he said, Chauvin did not reveal its full extent.
Pleoger said all police officers are trained that if a suspect is restrained with handcuffs on the ground, they should be turned on to their side as soon as possible because of the danger of “positional asphyxia”.
“If they are left on chest or stomachs for too long, their breathing can be compromised,” he said.
Floyd was kept in a prone position throughout despite his evident difficulty breathing.
Earlier on Thursday, Floyd’s girlfriend told the trial that the couple shared an addiction to opioid painkillers that they struggled to overcome in the weeks before his death.
Courteney Ross said that Floyd had been clean for a while after she took him to hospital when he overdosed, but that he started using again about two weeks before his arrest by Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer, last May.
The bulk of Ross’s often tearful testimony on the fourth day of the trial focused on the pair’s opioid use, as the prosecution sought to head off defense claims that Floyd was killed by drugs because he had opioids and methamphetamine in his system.
Ross’s account helps establish that Floyd built up a tolerance to opioids, and that the relatively small amount recorded in the official autopsy would not have been enough to kill him.
The prosecution is also seeking to undermine defense claims that the level of force used by Chauvin in kneeling on Floyd’s neck for about nine minutes was justified because the detained man was high on drugs.
Ross, who dated Floyd for about three years, said they both became hooked after being prescribed opioids to treat chronic pain. “We got addicted and we both tried to break that addiction many times,” she said.
Ross said sports injuries led to Floyd’s addiction to prescription pills obtained legally before the pair started buying black market drugs, including from Maurice Hall, the man who was in the car with Floyd at the time of his death.
These included oxycodone pills, including the powerful prescription opioid OxyContin.
Chauvin’s defense has claimed Floyd was overdosing at the time and that it contributed to his death from heart failure.
The state medical examiner’s report on Floyd’s death recorded that he had the powerful opioid fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system when he died, but it did not list them as a cause of his death.
On Thursday, Derek Smith, the first paramedic on the scene, said that when he arrived he saw three police officers on top of Floyd but no one giving medical treatment. “He wasn’t moving. I didn’t see any chest rise or fall,” he said.
The paramedic tried to find a pulse in Floyd’s neck but could not find one.
The trial continues.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-FL, addresses the crowd during a President Donald Trump campaign rally at the Ocala International Airport, Friday, Oct. 16, 2020, in Ocala, Florida. (photo: AP)
Matt Gaetz Was the Only Member of Congress to Vote No on 2017 Human Trafficking Bill
Amy Sherman, PolitiFact
Sherman writes:
.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s vote against a human trafficking bill back in 2017 is popping up on social media following a New York Times report that federal authorities are investigating whether Gaetz violated human trafficking laws.
The New York Times reported based on unnamed sources that the Justice Department is investigating whether Gaetz, a Florida Republican, had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and paid for her to travel with him. The newspaper reported that the investigation started during the final months of the Trump administration and is part of a broader investigation into a Gaetz ally, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector in Seminole County who was indicted on charges including sex trafficking. Gaetz has not been charged.
Gaetz said on Twitter and told the New York Times, Axios and Fox News that the allegations are false and are part of an effort to extort $25 million from him and his family.
A Facebook post used the popular "how it started, how it’s going" meme to juxtapose the Justice Department investigation with Gaetz’s past vote on a bill in Congress.
How it started: "Matt Gaetz defends lone no vote on anti-human trafficking bill."
How it’s going: "The DOJ is reportedly investigating whether Rep. Matt Gaetz had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and violated sex-trafficking laws," taken from a Business Insider headline.
The Facebook post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
In this case, it’s accurate to say that Gaetz was the only member to vote against such a measure in 2017. The Facebook post could be interpreted to suggest that his 2017 vote led to or is somehow tied to the Justice Department investigation, but that isn’t proven, and it’s not the focus of our fact-check.
Gaetz really was the only vote against an anti-human trafficking bill that Trump signed into law. The reason he offered at the time was not on the bill’s substance, but in favor of limiting government.
The Combating Human Trafficking in Commercial Vehicles Act passed the Senate by unanimous consent in September 2017. When the House passed the bill in December 2017, Gaetz was the only no vote. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law in January 2018.
The bill directed the Transportation Department to designate an official to coordinate human trafficking prevention efforts and called for establishing an advisory committee on human trafficking. The committee submitted a 128-page report in July 2019 that included recommendations to combat human trafficking.
Following coverage of his vote in his home newspaper, the Northwest Florida Daily News, Gaetz went on Facebook live to explain his opposition. Gaetz called the bill "mission creep" and an "expansion of the federal government" beyond what is in the Constitution.
Gaetz said when a proposed bill creates a new government entity or board, his office scrutinizes the legislation.
"Unless there is an overwhelming, compelling reason that our existing agencies in the federal government can't handle that problem, I vote no because voters in Northwest Florida did not send me to Washington to go and create more federal government," Gaetz said. "If anything, we should be abolishing a lot of the agencies at the federal level like the Department of Education, like the EPA and sending that power back to our state governments."
However, Gaetz said it is important to combat human trafficking — and said when he was in the state Legislaure he worked to make it easier for prosecutors to bring cases against human traffickers. We contacted Gaetz’s congressional office to ask them to point to a bill he appeared to reference but did not receive a reply by our deadline.
Our ruling
A Facebook post said Gaetz was the lone vote in the House against an anti-human trafficking bill.
In 2017, Gaetz was the lone vote against a bill that directed federal officials to take steps to combat human trafficking, including the creation of an advisory committee. Gaetz said that combating human trafficking was important, but he was against creating a new federal entity to do so.
We rate this statement True.
Demonstrators march past a McDonald's restaurant during a protest calling for a $15-an-hour nationwide minimum wage in Chicago, Illinois, in 2016. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
'Fight for $15' Files Charges Against McDonald's for Illegally Spying on Workers
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
Excerpt: "The fast food labor activist campaign Fight for has filed an unfair labor practice charge against McDonald's, accusing the company of illegally spying on its workers."
Labor activists are accusing McDonald's of violating labor law by spying on employees' social media activities.
On Thursday, the National Fast Food Workers Union, a branch of the Service Employees International Union, which heads the Fight for $15 campaign filed the charge with the National Labor Relations Board, which accuses McDonald's of engaging in "unlawful surveillance of workers and union organizers participating in the Fight for $15 campaign, using tactics including extensive monitoring of social media activity." The charge follows an investigation by Motherboard that revealed how McDonald's intelligence team was spying on employees involved in the Fight for $15 movement, labeling them a security threat.
Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, it is illegal for employers to interfere with workers' right to engage in concerted activities, form unions, and organize, and illegal for employers to surveil or create the impression of surveillance of these activities.
"We believe there’s a clear violation of the [labor law], which prohibits interference with employees' union activity and their right to act in a coordinated way," said Daniel Rosenthal, the attorney for Fight For $15 who filed the charge.
Fight for $15 hopes that an investigation by the NLRB will shed more light on how the company keeps track of workers who are involved in labor activism.
"McDonald’s didn’t need to spy on us," Rita Blalock, a McDonald's worker in Raleigh, North Carolina, told Motherboard. "Our message has been out in the open from the start: Pay us enough so we don’t have to rely on food stamps to get by and respect our right to join together in a union."
After an unfair labor practice charge is filed with the NLRB, the agency conducts an investigation to determine whether the charge has merit and can request an investigatory subpoena to gather evidence from an employer, which typically includes internal documents, emails, and other communications.
In this case, if the NLRB finds sufficient evidence that McDonald's broke the law, it will issue a formal complaint and McDonald's will have the opportunity to settle. If the company chooses not to settle, it will face a hearing before an administrative judge and can be required to post notices at its worksites informing workers of their rights to organize free from retaliation. This process can take months or even years.
In February, Motherboard revealed that McDonald's employs a secretive intelligence team to monitor employees, including by using social media monitoring tools, in an attempt to keep tabs on labor organizers, as well as try to identify workers involved in labor activism, and who they are working with to organize strikes, protests, or attempt to form unions.
“The important thing about this is that this surveillance is being done by McDonald's Corp rather than its franchises," Rosenthal said. "This supports the position the Fight for $15 has taken since the movement started that labor relations are coordinated and controlled by McDonalds."
For years, McDonald's has refused to sit down at the bargaining table with McDonald's workers to discuss concerns ranging from pay to sexual harassment, claiming that workers are not their employees, but those of their franchises. The National Labor Relations Board has previously issued two decisions that found it was illegal for employers to spy on workers' organizing on social media, including a 2019 decision that it was illegal for a company to spy on its pro-union workers' members-only Facebook page. These cases could be used as precedent for the agency's McDonald's investigation.
The filing lists 21 McDonald's locations in 13 states where Fight For $15 protests have occurred since October 2020 that may have been targeted by McDonald's surveillance program.
An Oncor Electric Delivery crew works on restoring power to a neighborhood following the winter storm that passed through Texas, on Feb. 18, 2021, in Odessa, Texas. (photo: Eli Hartman/AP)
Texas Officials Circulated Climate Skeptic's Talking Points on Power Failures During Storm
Josh Lederman, NBC News
Lederman writes:
Alex Epstein, author of "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," blamed failures on the state's embrace of wind and solar energy.
s millions of Texans went without power for days during February's devastating storm, Texas oil and gas regulators were circulating talking points from a noted climate skeptic blaming system failures on the state's embrace of wind and solar energy, emails obtained by NBC News show.
The talking points from Alex Epstein, author of "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," made their way to the Texas governor's office and to the state's oil and gas regulator, known as the Railroad Commission of Texas. One commissioner amplified the talking points on Twitter, while another commissioner's aide forwarded them to top Texas oil and gas lobbyists.
The talking points said there was a lesson to learn from the Texas crisis: that wind and solar power are "often useless when you need them most."
In fact, independent fact-checkers have repeatedly said the state's failure to weatherize, along with its disconnection from the national grid, triggered a domino effect that forced the massive blackouts as power plants went offline. The biggest losses of generation came from natural gas; failing wind power played only a minimal role.
Still, the narrative about frozen wind turbines quickly took hold, particularly in far-right media, as Texas regulators and other elected officials took to television and Twitter to blame renewable energy for the failures. Gov. Greg Abbott asserted on Fox News' "Hannity" that "our wind and our solar got shut down."
Less than 12 hours earlier, talking points from Epstein had landed in the inbox of Luis Saenz, Abbott's chief of staff.
"Here's the bottom line: The root cause of the TX blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy," Epstein wrote to Saenz.
Epstein, who runs what he calls a "for-profit think tank" called the Center for Industrial Progress, is a staunch advocate for continuing use of fossil fuels who has repeatedly cast doubt on whether there's a scientific consensus about climate change. He describes himself as a consultant on energy messaging and runs a subscription service for pro-fossil fuel talking points.
Saenz, who emails show was invited to a weekly Zoom briefing with Epstein the day of Abbott's Fox News interview, didn't respond to an inquiry about whether he attended the briefing or passed the talking points along to Abbott.
Epstein's talking points were among hundreds of pages of emails from the governor's office and the Railroad Commission obtained by the watchdog group Documented and provided to NBC News.
The emails cast light on what climate advocates and good-governance groups have long decried as a cozy and inappropriately collaborative relationship among Texas elected officials and regulators, lobbyists for industry and proponents of fossil fuels. Despite its name, the Railroad Commission no longer deals with trains and instead regulates oil, gas and coal.
"For an elected regulator to immediately finger-point a particular resource lends the appearance of confirming a prejudice against that resource, particularly when the facts suggest that multiple resources failed in the cold — particularly natural gas," said Cheryl LaFleur, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
On the same day Epstein's talking points arrived at Abbott's office, Epstein tweeted his top-line points, calling wind and solar "unreliables." Wayne Christian, a member of the Railroad Commission, soon retweeted them to his followers.
Christian followed up by issuing a statement warning about the "dangers of relying too heavily on unreliable, intermittent forms of electric generation like wind and solar to meet the energy needs for thirty-million Texans."
And the following week, when his next memo went out on Feb. 22, Epstein singled Christian out for praise, crediting him with having written a "great line": "Had TX been using 100% renewables, we would have had 100% blackouts."
Christian confirmed in an email that he was a member of Epstein's "Energy Talking Points" service. He disputed that he ever based his public comments on the talking points, saying he has been "vocally opposed to using subsidies to pick winners and losers in energy since being sworn in."
"The issue isn't the existence of renewable energy, but that it has displaced reliable generation," Christian said.
Epstein's talking points also made their way on Feb. 22 to Kate Zaykowski, a spokeswoman for Railroad Commission member Jim Wright and a former employee of a powerful lobbying group, the Texas Oil & Gas Association.
Zaykowski forwarded them to three Texas oil and gas lobbying groups, including her former employer, with a note saying: "Talking points from Alex Epstein. Not sure if y'all call in to his calls but wanted to see what he sent out today."
"Thank you!" responded Lauren Clay, communications director for the Texas Oil & Gas Association, who didn't respond to a request for comment.
Zaykowski said that the commission gets "messages from lots of places" and that Epstein was just "one of many people talking about the winter storm in Texas that week." She said she didn't recall whether she passed the talking points on to Wright, her boss. She said she generally finds Epstein credible.
Epstein's argument about why reliance on solar and wind power are to blame for the Texas crisis is not without nuance.
Wind and solar are known as "intermittent" energy sources, because they don't generate electricity 24 hours a day, meaning the electric grid must pull from other sources when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Epstein argues that policies that mandate or subsidize renewable energy in Texas and nationwide have led to the construction of fewer coal, gas and nuclear plants, which could be ramped up to handle a surge in demand like the one during the frigid winter storm.
It's a remarkably similar argument to the one Wright used Feb. 26 in an interview with BIC Magazine, an energy industry journal, in which he blamed "quotas" for the use of wind and solar energy in Texas.
"We need to look at how we are allowing renewables that access onto the grid and maybe not allow that to happen," Wright said in the interview. He didn't respond to a request for comment this week.
Epstein said in an email that his talking points are "a free service I offer pro-energy, pro-freedom elected officials who are interested in my views on energy policy and messaging."
He said his diagnosis of what went wrong in Texas "has proved correct."
"Anything a recipient of my Energy Talking Points uses is solely based on whether they agree with it," Epstein said.
Jeanine Áñez arrives to jail on March 15, 2021, in La Paz, Bolivia. (photo: Gaston Brito/Getty)
Bolivia's Coup Plotters Will Finally Face Court for Their Campaign of Terror
Cindy Forster, Jacobin
Forster writes: "When Jeanine Áñez claimed the presidency following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, she unleashed a campaign of terror in a bid to maintain power and stifle dissent. With the Movement Toward Socialism now back in office after last year's democratic elections, the government is finally taking the 'interim' president and her closest associates to court."
ast week, Bolivian president Luis Arce made his first state visit. He traveled to Mexico, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador condemned the coup of 2019 in Bolivia. Jointly, the two heads of state called on the Organization of American States (OAS), the organization that promoted the coup, “to respect democracy and not intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign countries.”
The fight for sovereignty continues today in Bolivia — as it does in Mexico — even after progressive government has been democratically returned to power after a general election last year. Former “interim” president Jeanine Áñez, as well as some of her closest associates, were arrested by Bolivian police last month, charged for crimes while in power. For the OAS and many in the international press, these arrests have been willfully misconstrued as revenge from the governing party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). But the violence of the coup regime demands to be brought to justice, and this is rightfully what is finally occurring.
When Jeanine Áñez’s regime ousted former president Evo Morales in November 2019, it wrought violence across the country. Protests in support of Morales seeking to protect his presidency were met with torture and bullets in an effort to consolidate a right-wing government.
At the massacres of Sacaba and Senkata, thirty-six people were killed. These particular massacres were investigated and condemned by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which began the painstaking process of securing permission from the interim government to undertake a proper investigation and to propose a path toward reparation for the victims. Less eminent attention has been given to smaller massacres, individual deaths, at least one thousand arrests, and over eight hundred injuries caused by the de facto regime. Anyone who had the fortitude could watch the bloodshed on their cellphones, being filmed by citizens since reporters had been largely silenced through terror.
Since the first days of the coup, indigenous groups, the urban poor, international human rights organizations, and others have been demanding that the perpetrators be brought to justice. Indeed, this demand was critical to returning the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) to power with a majority of 55 percent at last October’s general election.
On March 13 in the early hours of the morning, Áñez was finally found and arrested by an elite unit of the police force. Also arrested were several former ministers and ex-commanders of the security forces. By March 15, nine charges had been filed against Áñez including usurpation of the presidency, the matter of an improperly contracted credit of 24 million dollars from the International Monetary Fund, and Supreme Decree 4200 that criminalized civil liberties using the pandemic as a pretext. The Senate, for its part, has brought twenty-two investigations against coup regime authorities for alleged illegal actions while in office.
Since the arrest, testimonies of people tortured, shot, and pistol-whipped over the course of Áñez’s time in power, as well as filmed evidence of the de facto government’s violence, have been aired on progressive media and government channels. One clip on the news showed a woman with a red COVID-19 mask congratulating Áñez for “the coup.” They were seated with others at a conference table in an elegant room, and Áñez said nothing to contest the use of the word “coup.” Another clip showed her minister of interior reviewing armored vehicles in a central plaza at night. Someone was surreptitiously taping him as he said in a low voice, “These are the ones that fired in Senkata, right?”
“To Be Indigenous, for Them It’s a Crime”
The woman who launched the criminal lawsuit against the heads of the coup government is Lidia Patty. She filed a case against several figures, among them a key leader of right-wing paramilitary initiatives, Luis Fernando Camacho; the sinister Arturo Murillo; the former head of police; and Áñez’s former minister and personal assistant, Yerko Núñez.
An indigenous Quechua woman and elected senator in the last MAS government, Patty was among those who refused to resign with the coup. On March 15, Patty spoke on public radio and television networks: “There were tortures, protesters had their fingers cut off. Women in the protests were man-handled by the soldiers, their intimate parts groped — just like in colonial times. In the jail cells, our sisters were raped.”
She spoke of the coup regime’s racism toward indigenous and peasant representatives in parliament, where they were told, “you are our domestics” and “go home to your kitchens.”
When she left office after finishing her term in 2020, Patty chose to file the lawsuit as a private citizen against Áñez.
“They wanted to shut down parliament,” which had a two-thirds MAS majority. “After the coup against the president, they aimed to pull off a coup against parliament.” MAS assembly members were finally able to force their way into the building, then “legislators slept on the floor of assembly for seven days. If we had failed to do that, we, too, would have been accomplices of the coup.” She returns to the present: “We cannot let them do this again. I am not persecuting anyone, what I want is justice.”
Standing Up to the OAS
In response to the lawsuits against Áñez and her associates, the OAS has reacted in a manner that, for anyone who has followed Bolivian politics in recent years, will not be surprising. In an effort to draw a false equivalence, it announced that it would be launching an international investigation into corruption of both the Áñez government and the previous Morales government. Furthermore, it insisted that the entire Bolivian justice system should be overhauled by international actors.
The corruption charges are certainly true with reference to the coup regime, but not in the case of the Morales regime. Indeed, it was under Morales that corruption was prosecuted and its eradication was central to the platform of the 2019 MAS campaign.
The MAS Senate majority is increasingly outraged by what it terms OAS “interventionism,” and has registered a formal complaint. Moreover, on March 16, Bolivian minister of Justice Iván Lima announced the government’s intention to file charges against the OAS’s head, Luis Almagro, due to his failure to respect OAS conventions signed with Bolivia.
A few days later, one member of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal urged his fellow members to disinvite the OAS from conducting an observer mission during the second round of gubernatorial elections. Salvador Romero, the Áñez-appointed head of the electoral court, roundly rejected the idea.
For their part, progressive Latin American governments are working to strengthen non-interventionist diplomacy. Mexico and Argentina, as well as Latin America’s block of ten progressive nations (the Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America and the Caribbean, or ALBA for short), and Parlasur — the parliamentary body of the Mercosur trade block — have all raised their voices in defense of Bolivia’s elected MAS government. They argue that the OAS’s false claims of fraud opened the door to the bloody coup regime of Jeanine Áñez.
The international right wing and its Bolivian partners have been fueling the fires of alleged fraud for almost a decade. Repetition of the unproven allegations is gospel among many in the middle sectors. Eight expert studies from US universities — including ones commissioned by the New York Times and headlined by the Washington Post — assert that there is no basis for claiming fraud in the last two national elections in Bolivia.
The Right often accuses its enemies of the crimes that it itself commits. Its demonization of Evo Morales is carnivalesque, and it now claims that he is plotting to unleash a civil war so he can return to the presidency. If history is any guide, we know that it is the United States, with the OAS as its puppet, that is responsible for instigating civil wars. Their man in Bolivia is planted at the helm of the electoral court, Salvador Romero.
As Inocencia Franco of the Bartolina Sisa women’s federation in the lowland community of Yacuiba has put it: “We have shed our blood for this democracy.” Though it is peace that people are after, they are also ready to defend if need be their new democratically elected president, Luis Arce. “Every community is on an emergency footing, and we will stand strong.”
President Joe Biden. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Biden's Infrastructure Plan Would Replace Every Lead Pipe in America
Brendan Morrow, The Week
Morrow writes:
he White House has unveiled the details of President Biden's major new infrastructure and climate plan, which includes the elimination of every lead pipe in the United States.
The White House detailed the roughly $2 trillion American Jobs Plan proposal on Wednesday, and its many components include replacing "100 percent of the nation's lead pipes and service lines," a statement said. The plan calls for an investment of $45 billion toward this goal of reducing lead exposure in homes, schools, and childcare facilities.
"It's just plain wrong that in the United States of America today, millions of children still receive their water through lead service pipes," Biden said on Twitter. "It's long past time we fix that.'"
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are between six and 10 million lead service lines in the United States, and "in homes with lead pipes that connect the home to the water main, also known as lead services lines, these pipes are typically the most significant source of lead in the water."
Other notable details from the plan include ensuring every American has access to high-speed broadband Internet, and building, retrofitting, or renovating around 2 million homes and housing units, The Washington Post reports. More broadly, the plan is seeking to rebuild the country's infrastructure including highways and bridges, and the investment would translate "into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads," according to The New York Times. It also includes $100 billion to "bolster the country's electric grid and phase out fossil fuels," the Post reports.
Biden is expected to discuss the plan in a speech on Wednesday afternoon. Read more details about the proposal at The Washington Post.
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