06 April 21
We Have a Great Readership … and a Serious Problem
I don’t think we have a great readership, I know for a fact that we do. They are prestigious, influential, creatively gifted and deeply concerned about the social and political landscape.
We also have a — serious problem. Simply put, funding the organization is too difficult. Certainly far more difficult than it needs to be.
We can do better, and now would be a damn good time.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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06 April 21
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Juan Cole | Over Objections of Dem Hawks, Biden Agrees to Indirect Talks With Iran in Vienna to Return to the 2015 Nuclear Deal
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "AFP reports that an arrangement was reached at Friday's teleconference in Vienna between the current signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to mediate indirect talks between Iran and the United States next week."
FP reports that an arrangement was reached at Friday’s teleconference in Vienna between the current signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to mediate indirect talks between Iran and the United States next week.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the US had agreed to participate in the discussions with an eye toward a “mutual” return to the treaty. He said that it is not envisioned that the US and Iran will speak directly at this stage, but that the US remains open to such direct talks.
The US and Iran will have representatives physically present in Vienna on Tuesday. The current signatories will form two working groups to formulate proposals for the reintegration of the US and Iran. European Union diplomatic chief Josep Borrell will take proposals back and forth between Iran and the US. Since each side has been unwilling to make the first concession, the Europeans will attempt to identify a series of simultaneous steps Washington and Tehran can jointly announce.
Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke of “choreographed steps.” According to IRNA, he said that Tuesday’s meeting would aim to “quickly finalize the lifting of sanctions and enact nuclear measures by designing a way to lift all sanctions and then suspend the measures Iran had taken to compensate [for the sanctions].” He said that Iran and the United States will not meet: “It is unnecessary.”
I find it interesting that Iranian state media, when speaking of the US breach of the accord in 2018, said that “Donald Trump exited it” rather than blaming America in general. They didn’t call him “former president Donald Trump,” either. They also referred to the need to lift “the sanctions of the Trump era,” not implicating President Biden in them.
Washington does not expect an imminent breakthrough but rather a hard slog. The Russian attendee, Mikhail Ulyanov (director of the non-proliferation unit in the foreign ministry), said, “The sentiment is that we are on a good path, but that the road to be traveled will not be easy and will necessitate intensive efforts. The parties seem ready for that.”
The Biden administration says that it wants to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal, which the odious Trump breached after the US had signed it in 2015. Biden has, however, kept in place the punitive economic and financial blockade on Iran’s economy put in place by Trump from May, 2018, when he broke the agreement despite Iran’s scrupulous adherence to its terms up until then. After being strangled by Trump for a year, Iran began going out of compliance with the terms of the treaty in relatively minor ways.
Iran insists that the US must drop its unilateral sanctions before it will go back to complying with the treaty. The Biden administration had said that Iran must come into compliance before any sanctions will be lifted.
So the situation was frozen.
That is dangerous. First, the United States is actively strangling Iran’s economy for no good reason. A naval blockade is an act of war. The US is doing to Iran exactly what a naval blockade does, and there is a danger, as nuclear expert Joe Cirincione cogently argues, of the situation spiraling out of control. In fact, the odious Trump’s assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January, 2020, could have led to war. The Iran-backed attacks on Gulf oil tankers flagged by the United Arab Emirates and on the major refinery at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia are part of this drumbeat that could easily lead to hostilities.
Second, hard liners on both sides could derail the diplomatic process. Iran has presidential elections in June, and the centrist government of Hassan Rouhani is expected to be succeeded by one much more xenophobic and suspicious of US motives. Biden has been under pressure by Iran hawks (i.e. warmongers) in his own party such as Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and one reason the Biden team put off taking steps to restore the JCPOA was that they wanted to get their foreign policy team confirmed by the senate first. The longer a return to the agreement is put off, however, the more opportunity hard liners will have to disrupt the diplomacy, and the greater the danger of a US-Iran clash.
The Biden team, after dithering for a precious two months, seems suddenly to have come to this realization.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks to the media on March 25. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images)
Ruling by Senate Parliamentarian Opens Up Potential Pathway for Democrats
Kelsey Snell, NPR
Snell writes: "A new decision from the U.S. Senate's nonpartisan parliamentarian means Democrats could advance more of President Biden's agenda without the support of Republicans."
new decision from the U.S. Senate's nonpartisan parliamentarian means Democrats could advance more of President Biden's agenda without the support of Republicans.
The official's interpretation of Senate budget rules would allow the use of the reconciliation process more than once in a fiscal year, and it is viewed by Democrats as a possible strategy for moving top policy priorities with a simple majority, since getting the needed 10 Republican votes in a 50-50 Senate has proved difficult.
Details are still unclear as to how Democratic leaders might use the additional chance to pass budget-related policies.
"The Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions," Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement Monday. "While no decisions have been made on a legislative path forward using Section 304 and some parameters still need to be worked out, the Parliamentarian's opinion is an important step forward that this key pathway is available to Democrats if needed."
Democrats have been vague about those additional parameters and the potential limitations that might come with this legislative pathway. The ruling appears to mean a majority party could revise budgets more than once in a fiscal year — each time giving them access to reconciliation instructions.
The decision comes as Democrats take up Biden's more than $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which he unveiled last week.
Some moderate Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have balked at its plan to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. (Manchin favors a smaller hike.) Party leaders have not released any legislative text or final details of the policies Biden outlined in his proposal, nor have they said how they would work to ensure that there would be unanimous support among Senate Democrats, something that would be necessary to pass the bill without any Republican support.
The parliamentarian's ruling could allow Democrats to break big packages, like Biden's infrastructure plan, into smaller pieces. That could potentially make it easier to pass elements of the sweeping agenda, by enticing Republicans to support some of its policies.
But using reconciliation also limits what elements can be in a bill. Earlier this year, the parliamentarian ruled that a federal minimum wage increase did not fit in the rules.
ICE. (photo: Soohee Cho/The Intercept/DVIDS)
LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE
Sam Biddle, The Intercept
Biddle writes: "The popular legal research and data brokerage firm LexisNexis signed a $16.8 million contract to sell information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to documents shared with The Intercept."
The company signed a contract with an ICE division that plays a key role in deportations.
he popular legal research and data brokerage firm LexisNexis signed a $16.8 million contract to sell information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to documents shared with The Intercept. The deal is already drawing fire from critics and comes less than two years after the company downplayed its ties to ICE, claiming it was “not working with them to build data infrastructure to assist their efforts.”
Though LexisNexis is perhaps best known for its role as a powerful scholarly and legal research tool, the company also caters to the immensely lucrative “risk” industry, providing, it says, 10,000 different data points on hundreds of millions of people to companies like financial institutions and insurance companies who want to, say, flag individuals with a history of fraud. LexisNexis Risk Solutions is also marketed to law enforcement agencies, offering “advanced analytics to generate quality investigative leads, produce actionable intelligence and drive informed decisions” — in other words, to find and arrest people.
The LexisNexis ICE deal appears to be providing a replacement for CLEAR, a risk industry service operated by Thomson Reuters that has been crucial to ICE’s deportation efforts. In February, the Washington Post noted that the CLEAR contract was expiring and that it was “unclear whether the Biden administration will renew the deal or award a new contract.”
LexisNexis’s February 25 ICE contract was shared with The Intercept by Mijente, a Latinx advocacy organization that has criticized links between ICE and tech companies it says are profiting from human rights abuses, including LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. The contract shows LexisNexis will provide Homeland Security investigators access to billions of different records containing personal data aggregated from a wide array of public and private sources, including credit history, bankruptcy records, license plate images, and cellular subscriber information. The company will also provide analytical tools that can help police connect these vast stores of data to the right person.
Though the contract is light on details, other ICE documents suggest how the LexisNexis database will be put to use. A notice posted before the contract was awarded asked for a database that could “assist the ICE mission of conducting criminal investigations” and come with “a robust analytical research tool for … in-depth exploration of persons of interest and vehicles,” including what it called a “License Plate Reader Subscription.”
LexisNexis Risk Solutions spokesperson Jennifer Richman declined to say exactly what categories of data the company would provide ICE under the new contract, or what policies, if any, will govern how agency agency uses it, but said, “Our tool contains data primarily from public government records. The principal non-public data is authorized by Congress for such uses in the Drivers Privacy Protection Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act statutes.”
ICE did not return a request for comment.
The listing indicated the database would be used by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations agency. While HSI is tasked with investigating border-related criminal activities beyond immigration violations, the office frequently works to raid and arrest undocumented people alongside ICE’s deportation office, Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO. A 2019 report from the Brennan Center for Justice described HSI as having “quietly become the backbone of the White House’s immigration enforcement apparatus. Its operations increasingly focus on investigating civil immigration violations, facilitating deportations carried out by ERO, and conducting surveillance of First Amendment-protected expression.” In 2018, The Intercept reported on an HSI raid of a Tennessee meatpacking plant that left scores of undocumented workers detained and hundreds of local children too scared to attend school the following day.
Department of Homeland Security budget documents show that ICE has used LexisNexis databases since at least 2016 through the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, a division of ERO that assists in “locating aliens convicted of criminal offenses and other aliens who are amenable to removal,” including “those who are unlawfully present in the United States.”
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the enormity of the dossiers LexisNexis creates about citizens and undocumented persons alike. While you can at least attempt to use countermeasures against surveillance technologies like facial recognition or phone tracking, it’s exceedingly difficult to participate in modern society without generating computerized records of the sort that LexisNexis obtains and packages for resale. The company’s databases offer an oceanic computerized view of a person’s existence; by consolidating records of where you’ve lived, where you’ve worked, what you’ve purchased, your debts, run-ins with the law, family members, driving history, and thousands of other types of breadcrumbs, even people particularly diligent about their privacy can be identified and tracked through this sort of digital mosaic. LexisNexis has gone even further than merely aggregating all this data: The company claims it holds 283 million distinct individual dossiers of 99.99% accuracy tied to “LexIDs,” unique identification codes that make pulling all the material collected about a person that much easier. For an undocumented immigrant in the United States, the hazard of such a database is clear.
For those seeking to surveil large populations, the scope of the data sold by LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters is equally clear and explains why both firms are listed as official data “partners” of Palantir, a software company whose catalog includes products designed to track down individuals by feasting on enormous datasets. This partnership lets law enforcement investigators ingest material from the companies’ databases directly into Palantir data-mining software, allowing agencies to more seamlessly spy on migrants or round them up for deportation. “I compare what they provide to the blood that flows through the circulation system,” explained City University of New York law professor and scholar of government data access systems Sarah Lamdan. “What would Palantir be able to do without these data flows? Nothing. Without all their data, the software is worthless.” Asked for specifics of the company’s relationship with Palantir, the LexisNexis spokesperson told The Intercept only that its parent company RELX was an early investor in Palantir and that “LexisNexis Risk Solutions does not have an operational relationship with Palantir.”
And yet compared with Palantir, which eagerly sells its powerful software to clients like ICE and the National Security Agency, Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis have managed to largely avoid an ugly public association with controversial government surveillance and immigration practices. They have protected their reputations in part by claiming that even though LexisNexis may contract with ICE, it’s not enabling the crackdowns and arrests that have made the agency infamous but actually helping ICE’s detainees defend their legal rights. In 2019, after hundreds of law professors, students, and librarians signed a petition calling for Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis to cease contracting with ICE, LexisNexis sent a mass email to law school faculty defending their record and seeming to deny that their service helps put people in jail. Describing this claim as “misinformation,” the LexisNexis email, which was shared with The Intercept, stated: “We are not providing jail-booking data to ICE and are not working with them to build data infrastructure to assist their efforts. … LexisNexis and RELX does not play a key ‘role in fueling the surveillance, imprisonment, and deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants a year.” (Emphasis in the original.) The email stated that “one of our competitors” was responsible for how “ICE supports its core data needs.” It went on to argue that, far from harming immigrants, LexisNexis is actually in the business of empowering them: Through its existing relationship with ICE, “detainees are provided access to an extensive electronic library of legal materials … that enable detainees to better understand their rights and prepare their immigration cases.”
The notion that LexisNexis is somehow more meaningfully in the business of keeping immigrants free rather than detained has little purchase with the company’s critics. Jacinta Gonzalez, field director of Mijente, told The Intercept that LexisNexis’s ICE contract fills the same purpose as CLEAR. Like CLEAR, LexisNexis provides an agency widely accused of systemic human rights abuses with the data it needs to locate people with little if any oversight, a system that’s at once invisible, difficult to comprehend, and near impossible to avoid. Even in locales where so-called sanctuary laws aim to protect undocumented immigrants, these vast privatized databases create a computerized climate of intense fear and paranoia for undocumented people, Gonzalez said. “You might be in a city where your local politician is trying to tell you, ‘Don’t worry, you’re welcome here,’ but then ICE can get your address from a data broker and go directly to your house and try to deport you,” Gonzalez explained. “Your state might be down to give you a driver’s license, but that information might get into the hands of a data broker. You might feel like you’re in a life or death situation and have to go to the hospital, but you’re concerned that if you can’t pay your bill a collection agency is going to share that information with ICE.”
Richman, the LexisNexis spokesperson, told The Intercept that “the contract complies with the new policies set out in President Biden’s Executive Order 13993 of January 21, which revised Civil Immigration Enforcement Policies and Priorities and the corresponding DHS interim guidelines” and that “these policies, effective immediately, emphasize a respect for human rights, and focus on threats to national security, public safety, and security at the border.” But Gonzalez says it would be naive to think ICE is somehow a lesser menace to undocumented communities with Donald Trump out of power. “At the end of the day, ICE is still made up by the same agents, by the same field office directors, by the same administrators. … I think that it is really important for people to understand that, as long as ICE continues to have so many agents and so many resources, that they’re going to have to have someone to terrorize.”
Demonstrators take part in a sit-in protest as Gov. Brian Kemp holds a press conference on March 22, 2021. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)
All Eyes Are on Georgia. Again.
Nolan D. McCaskill and Zach Montellaro, POLITICO
Excerpt: "When Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign, he dubbed it the 'battle for the soul of the nation.' Locals argue that battle is being waged in Georgia as the rest of the country looks on."
For Georgians, the new voting law is the epitome of voter suppression — or it’s the embodiment of election integrity.
hen Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign, he dubbed it the “battle for the soul of the nation.” Locals argue that battle is being waged in Georgia as the rest of the country looks on.
Democrats now control all of Washington, after Biden won Georgia and both Senate seats here flipped in January. But Republicans still run all the levers of state government here, and they’re rallying behind a sweeping new election law that could tilt the political pendulum back in their column in 2022, when nine statewide executive offices and a high-profile Senate race will be on the ballot.
SB 202, signed into law by GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in late March, is either the epitome of voter suppression or the embodiment of election integrity — depending on whom you ask. Biden decried the law as “Jim Crow in the 21st century,” though the final product didn’t restrict voting as much as some of the headline-grabbing early legislative proposals.
The clash over SB 202 is thrusting Georgia back into the national spotlight after a tumultuous year: Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, was killed by white vigilantes. Rayshard Brooks, another Black man, was shot to death by police. Former President Donald Trump pressured local election officials to overturn his loss here. Then there was the March massacre targeting Asian Americans, and, less than two weeks ago, the arrest of a Black state legislator protesting the new law under the gold dome of Georgia’s state capitol.
The fight over the future of elections in Georgia — and, some say, the soul of the nation — is playing out on multiple fronts, materializing as not only a political battle but also a legal battle, a legislative battle and a moral battle. And now, as businesses from Coke to Delta condemn the law, and Republicans threaten to retaliate by zapping their tax breaks, it’s become a corporate battle, too.
On Friday, the sports world got involved, when Major League Baseball pulled its All-Star Game and its draft out of the state. But not everyone, including Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, agrees that boycotts are the answer.
What’s happening here is being duplicated across the country — Georgia is among the 47 states where legislators have introduced more than 360 restrictive voting bills, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice — and elected officials and voters across the country are paying attention.
“We are the test once again for what happens and where this leads us down the road,” said Khadijah Abdur-Rahman, a Democratic Fulton County commissioner.
‘Mad, angry as hell’
Abdur-Rahman represents the largest district, land-wise, in the county. Her constituents run the gamut from working class, single-parent households and people who need affordable housing assistance, to upper-middle-class Black families. It’s a heavily Democratic district, but Republicans comprise about 15 percent of it, including a sprinkling of Black Republicans who the commissioner says believe the law is unnecessary.
On a Sunday afternoon, Abdur-Rahman sat in her downtown Atlanta office, talking to a reporter. On the coat rack hung a pair of purple boxing gloves, a reminder to Abdur-Rahman to never stop fighting for her constituents.
The day before, she was putting that principle to work, rallying outside City Hall, where the top row of steps was barricaded by the Atlanta Police.
Dozens of people were in attendance, wearing face masks and carrying signs that read “Jim Crow 2.0” and “Stop voter suppression,” a mix of white, Black and brown protesters. There were young adults and those with silver hair, including an elderly white woman in a wheelchair holding a lengthy sign highlighting the number of Republican state senators (34) and representatives (100) who “voted for white supremacy & fascism.”
A DJ set up shop while a seemingly endless roster of speakers let loose for more than two hours.
It was a rally, yes, but it also felt like a combination of church, a protest and a concert. Protesters chanted, “You about to lose yo’ job,” a pointed message to Kemp, who is up for reelection next year.
Abdur-Rahman took to the stage in the opening minutes of the rally.
“I can go to the ATM machine and use my card after hours, but I gotta vote between banker hours?” she shouted into the microphone. “It doesn’t make any sense. So what I say to you is, 'I’m mad, I’m angry as hell, and we are coming together!'”
‘It’s just trying to make Republicans look bad’
At a barbecue joint in northeast Atlanta, two older white men sat at a table talking about Covid-19, China and congressional Democrats’ sweeping election reform bill. People would illegally vote 20 times if voter ID requirements weren’t in place, one of the men said, as his companion nodded in agreement.
But when approached by a reporter, their conversation ended abruptly, and they high-tailed it out of the restaurant.
Across the country, Republicans’ views on voting have shifted dramatically. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that 48 percent of Republicans said everything possible should be done to make it easy to vote. But a new Pew Research Center survey published last week found that just 28 percent of Republicans felt that way. And more than 6 in 10 Republicans also said changing election rules to make it easier to register and vote would make elections less secure.
Republicans here say election integrity is a top concern for their constituents in Georgia.
“My constituents wanted it. They did. I hope that helps. Thank you,” sputtered state Rep. Mike Cheokas, a Republican, before hanging up the phone.
Others argue Democrats are stirring the pot to rally their own voters and score political points.
“Nobody’s stopping any Blacks [from voting]. Nobody’s stopping Black churches [from doing Souls to the Polls events],” Kathleen Thorman, chair of the Gordon County Republican Party, told POLITICO.
“Everybody wants everyone to vote that’s a registered voter, that’s a legal voter,” she said. “This attack has no merit. It’s ludicrous. It’s just trying to make Republicans look bad.”
We didn’t get everything that we wanted'
Democrats who weren’t in the trenches here wrote off Georgia a long time ago. They didn't see the state as being anywhere within striking distance for them. But after Democrats swept the presidential election and two Senate runoffs, the state has become the center of the political universe in the U.S.
“This is who Georgia is, and we’re gonna continue to push forward and bring the rest of the country along with us,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), who represents the late John Lewis’ district in Congress and became the first Black woman elected to lead the state Democratic Party in 2019.
But now, Georgia Democrats’ biggest crusade is against SB 202, which will, among other things, reduce the time frame in which voters can request absentee ballots, requires an ID number or photocopy of an ID to request and return ballots, shortens the runoff period (which subsequently shortens the early voting window) — and prohibits anyone but poll workers from distributing water to voters waiting in line. The law, dubbed the “Election Integrity Act of 2021,” would also give the Republican-controlled state legislature more authority over the State Election Board.
Kemp quickly signed the bill into law on March 25 behind closed doors, flanked by six white men posed next to a portrait of a slave plantation. That image did not go unnoticed.
“It’s certainly symbolic of what he did, trying to take us back to those times on the plantation by signing that legislation,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said in an interview. “That’s representational of the Old South. The New South was represented on Nov. 3 and Jan. 5, when we elected President Biden in Georgia and when we elected two United States senators. … The New South will not be defeated.”
Tensions were further inflamed when Democratic state Rep. Park Cannon, a Black woman, was arrested by white law enforcement officers after knocking on Kemp’s door during the signing.
The entire episode is further galvanizing Black women across the state who have played key roles for years as organizers. In interviews, Black women here argue Republicans backed SB 202 because the state’s younger, increasingly diverse demographic makeup is threatening their hold on power. But rather than change the Republican Party’s policies to attract a diverse coalition of voters, they said, Republicans simply changed the rules under the guise of election integrity.
At the rally outside City Hall, Karli Swift, a Black woman with braids, glasses and a gray shirt emblazoned with Stacey Abrams’ face held aloft a poster with a message printed in big, bold, black letters: “F*ck around & find out — GA Black women,” it read in all-caps. A photo of her poster later went viral.
A couple days later, at a table inside a Black-owned, members-only club called The Gathering Spot, Swift, a corporate lawyer who has worked for Democratic campaigns in the past, talked about what prompted her to show up that day.
“I was mad, tired,” Swift recalled. “It’s a sentiment that I think a lot of Georgians feel. Not even just Georgians.”
Georgia Republicans, she said, “passed a law that’s terrible. At the end of the day, it’s not going to help them get more voters, either, and then they have lit a fire under Democrats in Georgia. It’s like a lose-lose situation. I don’t know what they were thinking.”
You’re not capable of getting out to vote'
Republicans, for their part, insist the previous system was ripe for fraud and lament that the new law doesn't go far enough. (Election officials have said there is no evidence that fraud occurred in the presidential race or Senate runoffs.)
“We didn’t get everything that we wanted, but it’s a really good start,” Jason Thompson, a Republican national committeeman from Georgia, said in an interview. “The trust in our elections system in Georgia was really at an all-time low.”
Kerry Luedke, the chair of the Cherokee County Republican Party, wrote in an email that her party was planning on sending thank-you notes to legislators who supported the bill, along with having a rally and social media campaign “to explain the facts of the legislation.”
“If I was somebody living in the Black community, I would be so insulted that people are basically telling me that I’m not capable of getting out to vote, and I’m not capable of getting an ID to vote. I would be so insulted,” said Thorman, the Gordon County GOP chair.
“[Democrats are] saying: ‘You’re not smart enough, you’re not sharp enough, you’re not capable of getting out to vote,’” Thorman added.
Voting laws have animated voters on both sides of the aisle, albeit for very different reasons. Democrats commend Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, for standing up to Trump’s attempts to overturn his election loss — but say he’s since caved to members of his party. On the other hand, he’s fallen deeply out of favor with conservatives.
“There’s no way in hell I’d ever vote for him again,” said Pamela Reardon, the co-founder and vice president of Metro Atlanta Republicans. Of Republican Geoff Duncan, she added: “I like to say, ‘Duncan is done.’ He is the lieutenant governor. He’s done.”
Democracy is good for business'
It’s unclear what, if any, legal action the Biden administration will take. Biden has said that protecting voting rights was something the Justice Department was examining.
When pressed for more information, the White House referred questions to the DOJ. “We are aware of the law, but [have] no further comment,” a DOJ spokesperson told POLITICO.
Meanwhile, Democrats and voting-rights groups have filed at least three separate lawsuits in federal court, and congressional Democrats are vowing to continue pushing for passage of legislation to expand voting access and address hate crimes. But it’s not clear how the litigation will play out in court. And Congress is unlikely to pass sweeping voting rights legislation without Senate Democrats first nuking the filibuster to allow bills to pass with a simple majority.
Voting rights advocates say they will educate voters on the new law and help them obtain valid ID in case they’re forced to play by Republicans’ new rules in the 2022 midterms — when Kemp, Duncan, Raffensperger and Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock will all be on the ballot. And at the same time, activists are pressuring businesses headquartered in the state to come out against SB 202.
Cliff Albright, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, had a pointed message for the business community: “Democracy is good for business. Voter suppression is not.”
Republicans are threatening to pull the tax credits of corporations that speak out against the new law. But some major corporations are doing just that. In a memo to employees last week, Delta CEO Ed Bastian wrote that “the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.” Alfredo River, president of Coca-Cola’s North America operating unit, in a statement issued by the company, vowed to “continue to work to advance voting rights and access in Georgia and across the country” and acknowledged the company’s “responsibility to protect” and “promote” the right to vote.
Some activists are pushing for a boycott of the state, which has been transformed by the entertainment industry in recent years. But others, from Ossoff to film mogul Tyler Perry, are insisting that a boycott will only hurt Georgians. On Wednesday, Abrams, the former state House minority leader and 2018 gubernatorial candidate who's almost certain to seek a rematch with Kemp next year, released a video, asking outsiders not to boycott the state.
“Black, Latino, AAPI and Native American voters whose votes are the most suppressed under SB 202, are also the most likely the most to be hurt by potential boycotts in Georgia,” she said in the video. “For our friends across the country, please do not boycott us.”
And on Friday, after news broke that the baseball commissioner was pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia, Abrams tweeted, “Disappointed @MLB will move the All-Star Game, but proud of their stance on voting rights.”
‘We are incredibly exhausted’
State Sen. Sheikh Rahman, a Democrat and an immigrant from Bangladesh, represents the most diverse district in the state Senate. His tenure represents many firsts, including the first Asian American state senator, first immigrant state senator and first Muslim legislator in the state.
Rahman said Republicans are scared of people like him. SB 202, he predicted, would “backfire” because Asian American and Pacific Islander voters are “not gonna stay on the sideline.”
Over the final weekend in March, on a cool, gloomy day, local and federal lawmakers — Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), Mark Takano (D-Calif.), Al Green (D-Texas) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) from the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and local Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.) and Williams — took a bus trip mirroring the 27-mile path the alleged shooter, a white man, took to attack three Asian American spas. The suspect killed eight people, including six Asian women. Local law enforcement has not called the killing spree a hate crime.
Elected officials laid fresh flowers outside Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa, which sit across the street from each other in Atlanta. The entrance to Gold Spa was overwhelmed with withered flowers. Soggy signs read “Hate is a virus,” and “Stop Asian Hate.”
“For those of us living in Georgia, we’ve been in the spotlight the last year, and we are incredibly exhausted,” state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat, told POLITICO.
“But all the things that are happening — the voter suppression bill, this shooting and the way that there were attempts to censor the perpetrator and dehumanize the victims, the arrest of Rep. Park Cannon,” Nguyen said, “we are going to remember those things.”
“We are going to use our power to make change,” she continued. “And that change includes going to the ballot box.”
Last Sunday, a similar message seeped into Warnock’s virtual sermon. The freshman senator, who still holds his position as the senior pastor of the famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, stood in the empty sanctuary, preaching about a “governor” in the Bible who was confronted with a decision but failed to listen to a woman about which choice to make.
He never mentioned Kemp’s name, but as he spoke, a photo of the governor signing SB 202 and a video of Cannon’s arrest flashed across the screen.
Warnock told congregants he was talking about politics on a Sunday morning “because your vote is your voice,” and “democracy is the political enactment of a spiritual idea that all of us are children of the living God.”
Voter suppression “is not just a political issue,” Warnock said. “That’s a spiritual issue. That’s a moral issue.”
Then treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen speaks during an event to name President-elect Joe Biden's economic team in Wilmington, Delaware. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Yellen Warns That Slow Vaccine Rollout in Poor Countries Poses Threat to US, Global Economies
Jeff Stein, The Washington Post
Stein writes: "Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday called for speeding up the distribution of coronavirus vaccines in poorer nations, arguing the United States and global economies are threatened by the impact of covid-19 on the developing world."
Republican opposition to treasury secretary’s global initiatives has intensified in recent weeks
reasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Monday called for speeding up the distribution of coronavirus vaccines in poorer nations, arguing the United States and global economies are threatened by the impact of covid-19 on the developing world.
While the United States and other rich countries are hoping for a return to normalcy as soon as this fall, many parts of the developing world are not on pace to have widespread vaccination of their populations until 2023 or 2024. Those countries have largely suffered more devastating economic impacts from covid, in part because they do not have the fiscal capacity to authorize the levels of emergency spending approved in the United States.
In prepared remarks Monday to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs ahead of meetings this week of international finance officials, Yellen called on richer countries to step up both economic and public health assistance to poorer nations reeling from covid. She noted as many as 150 million people across the world risk falling into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis.
“This would be a profound economic tragedy for those countries, one we should care about. But, that’s obvious. What’s less obvious — but equally true — is that this divergence would also be a problem for America," Yellen said. “Our first task must clearly be stopping the virus by ensuring that vaccinations, testing and therapeutics are available as widely as possible."
Still, Yellen’s calls for a forceful global effort face significant head winds. The Biden administration has so far resisted pressure to change intellectual property rules in a way that would allow more countries to produce coronavirus vaccines. Democratic members of Congress and some global health experts have warned that refusing to do so could make it harder to vaccinate billions of people in poorer parts of the world such as in Africa and parts of South America and Asia.
Meanwhile, Republican opposition has intensified in recent weeks to several of Yellen’s global initiatives. GOP lawmakers have in particular criticized Yellen’s push for a global minimum tax on multinational corporations, as well as her support for foreign emergency aid through the International Monetary Fund.
Yellen’s remarks come at a pivotal juncture for her ambitious international agenda. In a reversal from the decision of the Trump administration, the Treasury Department under Yellen will this month authorize a new allocation of an emergency form of aid to developing nations known as “Special Drawing Rights.”
This form of international aid, which does not need congressional approval, would allocate a special currency reserve through the IMF to dozens of countries across the globe. That special currency could then be traded to the United States in exchange for dollars, which would help distressed foreign countries shore up their financial reserves.
The move has sparked a backlash on Capitol Hill, where Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) and John Kennedy (R-La.) criticized the measure as “inappropriate, ineffective, and a wasteful use of taxpayer dollars” that would benefit countries that do not need help, as well as foreign adversaries such as China and Iran. The Treasury Department responded that it would retain the right not to purchase SDRs from foreign countries, such as those being sanctioned by the United States. The department also said there would be no budget cost to the United States from the initial allocation of SDRs.
On top of these efforts, Yellen is pushing for an agreement through the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development on a new global minimum tax. That effort aims to put a floor on taxes internationally to stop corporations from playing nations off each other. Treasury officials have eyed an agreement on international taxes as early as this summer. The Biden administration has cited the effort as central to its proposed international tax hikes, which form a key element of how the White House plans to pay for its $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
The Biden administration’s global tax push has also been extensively criticized by Republicans, who say they worry the United States will allow European countries to tax profitable American tech companies with no significant domestic benefit. “My big concern is that — as part of their desire to be on a ‘let’s be friends’ parade — the Biden administration will give away too much," Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, previously said.
Yellen cited the need for international action on an additional range of issues, including climate change, a digital divide that has exacerbated global inequality, and the danger posed by cybersecurity attacks.
Biden’s treasury secretary compared the daunting task to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, which established the IMF and the basic framework of the global financial system following the devastation of World War II.
“Though it was a different time, I empathize with the enormous weight they faced; the pressure to come together after a global catastrophe in building an enduring and interconnected system aimed at promoting peace and prosperity throughout the world,” Yellen said. “Our current juncture is no less significant.”
Actual number of rapes may be much higher because of the stigma associated with such attacks. (photo: Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)
Ethiopia Accused of Using Rape as a Weapon of War in Tigray as New Evidence Emerges of Massacres
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "The women that have been raped say that the things that they say to them when they were raping them is that they need to change their identity, to either Amharize them or at least leave their Tigrinya status. And then they've come there to cleanse them."
e get an update on how the Ethiopian government has announced Eritrean forces are withdrawing from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where harrowing witness accounts have emerged of Eritrean soldiers killing Tigrayan men and boys and rape being used as weapon of war by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Eritrea entered the Tigray region to support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s military offensive in November targeting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The true death toll from the conflict remains unknown, but researchers recently identified almost 2,000 people killed in 150 massacres by warring factions. CNN senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir, who just returned from reporting on the region, says what started as a “competition for power” has descended into ethnic cleansing. “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,” says Elbagir.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
A warning to our audience: The following segment contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence and disturbing images.
The Ethiopian government has announced Eritrean forces have started withdrawing from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia. Harrowing witness accounts have emerged of Eritrean soldiers killing Tigrayan men and boys and committing acts of sexual violence, including rape against displaced civilians. Eritrea entered the Tigray region to support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s military offensive in November targeting the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. The true death toll from the conflict remains unknown, but researchers recently identified almost 2,000 people killed in 150 massacres by warring factions.
The Biden administration has been pressuring the Ethiopian government to end its military offensive and for Eritrea to withdraw its forces. Biden recently sent Senator Chris Coons to meet with the Ethiopian prime minister, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Rape has also been used as a weapon of war in the Tigray region by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. CNN’s Nima Elbagir recently spoke to one Ethiopian woman who fled to Sudan after being raped.
RAPE SURVIVOR: [translated] He pushed me and said, “You Tigrayans have no history. You have no culture. I can do what I want to you, and no one cares.”
NIMA ELBAGIR: What brought you to the clinic here today?
RAPE SURVIVOR: [translated] I haven’t told anyone, but I’ve been thinking that I’m pregnant from the rape, so I came to check. And I discovered I am.
AMY GOODMAN: Nima Elbagir also spoke to Dr. Tedros Tefera, who’s treating rape survivors who are now living in a refugee camp in Sudan.
DR. TEDROS TEFERA: The women that have been raped say that the things that they say to them when they were raping them is that they need to change their identity, to either Amharize them or at least leave their Tigrinya status. And then they’ve come there to cleanse them. They’ve come there —
NIMA ELBAGIR: Cleanse the bloodline?
DR. TEDROS TEFERA: Cleanse the bloodline, and then get them that they are different. Practically, this has been a genocide of different phases.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the crisis in Ethiopia, we’re now joined by Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, based in London.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Nima. Describe this whole issue of rape as a weapon of war. And describe the region. People are so unfamiliar with it outside that region.
NIMA ELBAGIR: Well, I think probably the best way to explain, in a nutshell, is that this is essentially a conflict for power, between the TPLF, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, who were the dominant party and the ruling party in Ethiopia for almost 30 years, and Abiy Ahmed, who was swept to power when demonstrations toppled that ruling coalition. So, you have an understandable conflict, an existential conflict, between these two once-upon-a-time allies.
But what is happening is that the way that the ethnic numbers break down in Ethiopia, Tigrayans are a minority, but you also already have all these different, disparate groups kind of together in this centralized process. That centralization is what is currently falling apart, because when you bring in militia from other regions — and that’s what the doctor was talking about, about Amharization — when you bring in Amhara ethnic militia, that historically have enmity with Tigray, then that’s what you see. You see ethnic cleansing taking place of a basis of a competition for power. And that is perhaps the problem, is that the world has seen what’s happening in Tigray through that aperture of a competition for power, and has been slow to realize that, as Dr. Tedros says, many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about the women who were coming forward to describe what’s happened to them.
NIMA ELBAGIR: Well, the heartbreak is that many of the women don’t actually feel able to come forward. When we spoke to Dr. Tedros, I asked him how many women had been able to tell him that they had been raped, and he said five — all five of them because they thought they were pregnant. And I asked him, “Well, how many did you suspect, based on the trauma and on the injuries that they presented with?” And he said thousands.
So there are thousands of women who have been through that camp or are still in that camp who are not getting the treatment and the support that they deserve and need, because rape is such an act of psychological and intimate violence, but it’s also an act of communal violence. That’s what the women say, is that they feel that this rape has kind of isolated them within their communities because of the shame and the stigma.
So, for a lot of these women, it is not just the immediate act of rape. It is what that act of violence does. And that is if they’re not pregnant. If they’re pregnant, then that is where a lot of the despair comes in. Dr. Tedros told me that one of the women that he had been trying to seek out, because he had heard she was raped, never actually made it to Hamdayet, to the camp, because she had committed suicide, because her rape had been done in such a public way that she felt unable to continue as part of that community, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain this area — you are Sudanese; you were reporting from the Sudanese-Ethiopian border — and the means of exit refugees have, who are desperately fleeing, being blocked off.
NIMA ELBAGIR: There is currently only one path to safe refuge, which is across the Setit River, which is the geographical border, essentially, between Sudan and Ethiopia. And when you cross the Setit River, you come into Hamdayet camp, and that’s why the reception center is there. And when we were there, what we discovered from speaking to the refugees and also speaking to people stationed at that Hamdayet border, that the Ethiopian forces had arranged themselves in such a manner that this border, that for months had been seeing thousands of people rushing to refuge in Sudan, was now seeing, at best, 12 refugees able to escape Ethiopian forces and cross to safety.
Now, that is, by all definitions, a war crime. Blocking the avenue to safe refuge in a time of war, in a time of humanitarian disaster, is a war crime. The Ethiopian government’s argument is that refugees are able to cross into Addis. But given the ethnic targeting, given what refugees are telling us about being stopped and having their ID checked for their ethnicity and how they’re treated by Eritrean and Ethiopian soldiers when that ID says Tigray, it is unacceptable to believe that going back to Addis is really an option. So, that one safe haven in Sudan is now being blocked off for refugees.
AMY GOODMAN: Nima, I want to turn to your latest report on Ethiopia about a massacre in Tigray. This video was a collaboration between CNN and Amnesty International. Again, a warning: This video contains very disturbing images.
NIMA ELBAGIR: You are watching footage filmed by a soldier-turned-whistleblower, now in hiding. This video was obtained by a pro-Tigray media organization based in the U.S. The video you’re watching will show these Ethiopian soldiers execute these men — a war crime.
The Ethiopian government has waged war against Tigray’s ousted regional leaders for the last five months, with the help of neighboring Eritrea. Ethiopia has implied the atrocities in Tigray are mainly Eritrea’s doing. That’s not true. And here’s why.
We know these are Ethiopian soldiers because of the Ethiopian flag on their shoulders, here and here. Examining details of the stitching, color and camouflage patterns, military experts confirm to us that the uniforms match those of the Ethiopian army. In addition, the soldiers are speaking Amharic, the official language of the Ethiopian federal army, distinct from the local language.
We also know the location by analyzing the video and geolocating the footage. We know it’s in central Tigray by the mountain range and terrain just south of the city of Axum. This model developed by Amnesty International then verifies that location through spatial analysis. You can see the mountain range matches the footage. The captives were moved from where you saw them sitting to here, 1.7 kilometers away. We know that because the video was tracked and mapped, and key geographical features were matched on the basis of a high-resolution satellite image of the site.
By pinpointing the location, CNN was able to speak to local villagers, who confirmed their family members were dragged away by Ethiopian soldiers and have not been seen since. Some believe their loved ones are in this video. You can hear soldiers asking the whistleblower to come closer.
SOLDIER: [translated] Why don’t you get close and film the execution of these?
NIMA ELBAGIR: The wording here is important. “Execution.” This is premeditated. They’ve rounded up these men to kill them. We must warn you: What you’re about to see is horrifying.
SOLDIER: [translated] Walk them down there, shoot him in the back of his head.
NIMA ELBAGIR: “Shoot them in the head,” he says. And they do. Look at the left of your screen. The man shoots. We pause the video just before his victim falls to the ground. And again, another soldier raises his weapon towards the man in the white scarf. The video cuts out, but the next scene tells you what happened to him, to all of them. The soldiers continue to shoot, making sure that there are no survivors.
What you are witnessing is an extrajudicial execution. We counted at least 34 young men at the beginning of this video. All are now presumed dead, their bodies casually flung over the ridge, no attempt to hide what has been done here, no apparent fear of consequences. Their actions are so appalling, we can only show individual frames from the video.
But it doesn’t stop here. You can hear someone saying, “Check that one. That one is not dead. Kill him, or I will come.” The same soldier moves further along the ridge and shoots from close range as other soldiers watch on.
Much of the region remains under an Ethiopian government blackout, but CNN and Amnesty International were able to speak to local villagers and family members who told us that at least 39 men remain missing from the village. One man was able to watch the video and confirm to us that his brother is among the dead depicted here.
Family members continue to search for their loved ones but have been unable to reach this remote area. Their wish to respectfully bury their dead will go unheeded.
Nima Elbagir, CNN, London.
AMY GOODMAN: That report, again, by Nima Elbagir, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN, based in London, produced in collaboration with Amnesty International. Nima, in these last few minutes, you mentioned that the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, before he came into office, this was one of the few issues he addressed. And now President Biden sent Chris Coons, his fellow senator from Delaware, to Ethiopia to meet with the prime minister. What is the U.S. demanding? And do you believe that the Eritreans are pulling out, as has just been announced today?
NIMA ELBAGIR: Well, the U.S. is demanding a timeline, a verified timeline, for the Eritrean pullout. And that’s well and good, but the issue is that the Ethiopians have refused access to the head of the Human Rights Commission at the U.N. and refused access to aid organizations. So, how would you verify the timeline? That hasn’t been made clear.
The other thing that they’re asking for, this is — the U.S.-supported mechanism for investigation is a joint mechanism with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the U.N. And it’s really in that joint mechanism that people are having a lot of concerns. What you’re saying is that a government, whose state actors, as we saw in that video, are committing extrajudicial executions, should be allowed to have influence, let’s say, because the EHRC, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, is a state-appointed body — should have influence on the investigations of their own alleged atrocities. That seems like something that you wouldn’t expect to happen under judicial law in the U.S., so why are you allowing that to happen internationally? It’s clear that President Biden has said, and Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, has said, you know, “We care about human rights. That’s back on the table.” But now it’s about how you are effectively pushing human rights abuses. And that’s the part that there doesn’t really seem to be a clear and concise policy on, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think would be the most effective way to deal now with Ethiopia and with these mass crimes against humanity that you are documenting?
NIMA ELBAGIR: Ethiopia is economically in a lot of trouble. They are seeking support from the World Bank. They’re seeking loans. They’re seeking to leverage those loans. And the World Bank is looking very seriously at giving them these loans.
At a certain point, as an international community, you have to make the statement that human rights abusers, murderers should not be allowed to seek money at the same time. Because who knows where that money will go? That has to be the bigger concern.
So, we have to try and look at what points of leverage exist across the international sphere, and look to cooperate to bring those points of leverage to bear. Nobody says that there is anything bad about America coming back to the table as an arbiter of morality and human rights. It just has to be done effectively and in collaboration with the rest of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Nima Elbagir, I want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning senior international correspondent for CNN. We’re speaking to her in London. She’s just back from Eritrea and Sudan, her recent report headlined “'Two bullets is enough': Analysis of Tigray massacre video raises questions for Ethiopian Army.”
Next up, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated 53 years ago. We’ll hear Dr. King in his own words. Stay with us.
A savanna elephant is seen last year in Kruger National Park, South Africa. Poaching and loss of habitat have increasingly threatened Africa's elephant populations, according to a report released last week. (photo: Jerome Delay/AP)
Separating Elephant Species Shows They Are Closer to Extinction Than Scientists Thought
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The ungrouping of two species of elephant in Africa has shown that the animals are more endangered than previously thought."
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had considered the African forest elephants and savanna elephants a single species that was labeled “vulnerable” because of threats of poaching and habitat loss. The organization recently separated the species, noting that savanna elephants are “endangered” and forest elephants are “critically endangered.”
The number of African forest elephants has fallen by more than 86 percent over a 31-year period, and the population of savanna elephants dropped by more than 60 percent over a 50-year period, according to the IUCN, which rates the global extinction risks to the world’s animals.
Africa has an estimated 415,000 elephants, counting both species, according to the IUCN.
The savanna elephants prefer open plains and are found in habitats across sub-Saharan Africa, with Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe having high numbers. The African forest elephants — smaller in size — mostly occupy the tropical forests of West and Central Africa, with the largest remaining populations found in Gabon and Congo Republic.
In Gabon, the fight against elephant poaching “is more than just fighting for nature. It’s fighting for the stability of our country,” said Lee White, Gabon’s minister of water and forests.
“We have seen countries like Central African Republic, where poachers became bandits, became rebels and destabilized the whole country,” White said, blaming the bulk of poaching and ivory trafficking on international groups.
“Eighty to 90 percent of our ivory goes to Nigeria and ends up funding Boko Haram [rebels]. So it’s very much a cross-border fight against organized crime and even against terrorism,” he said.
The battle to protect Gabon’s forest elephants is a war, he said. “We have transformed biologists into warriors,” White said. “We have transformed people who signed up to watch elephants and work with nature and the national parks into soldiers who have gone to war for the survival of the elephants.”
Criminal networks working with corrupt officials are a significant problem in central and western Africa, said Rudi van Aarde of the University of Pretoria zoology department.
“Most of the ivory that leaves this continent for Asia is from central and western Africa. The population is suffering more because of the illegal trade in ivory instead of environmental issues like deforestation,” van Aarde said.
Elephant poaching south of the Sahara rose sharply from 2008 to 2012. A worrying trend is that a substantial amount of that poaching occurred in East and Southern Africa, where an estimated 100,000 savanna elephants were killed in northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania, during that time, he said.
Bruno Oberle, director general of the IUCN, said the organization’s new classification shows the dramatic decline of the animals and the urgency work needed.
“Africa’s elephants play key roles in ecosystems, economies and in our collective imagination all over the world,” Oberle said. “We must urgently put an end to poaching and ensure that sufficient suitable habitat for both forest and savanna elephants is conserved.”
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