14 April 21
Early Alarm on Donations Today!
It’s early but we have very few donations so far. We need a few of you to come through. It really is very important.
Please. Thank you.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
14 April 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Robert Reich | Republican 'Attacks' on Corporations Over Voting Rights Bills Are a Hypocritical Sham
Robert Reich, Guardian UK
Reich writes: "For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits."
The deal between big business and government – donations in return for low taxes or none – remains absolutely unchanged
or four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.
The deal has proven beneficial to both sides, although not to the American public. Campaign spending has soared while corporate taxes have shriveled.
In the 1950s, corporations accounted for about 40% of federal revenue. Today, they contribute a meager 7%. Last year, more than 50 of the largest US companies paid no federal income taxes at all. Many haven’t paid taxes for years.
Both parties have been in on this deal although the GOP has been the bigger player. Yet since Donald Trump issued his big lie about the fraudulence of the 2020 election, corporate America has had a few qualms about the GOP.
After the storming of the Capitol, dozens of giant corporations said they would no longer donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to the certification of Biden electors on the basis of the big lie.
Then came the GOP’s wave of restrictive state voting laws, premised on the same big lie. Georgia’s are among the most egregious. The chief executive of Coca-Cola, headquartered in the peach tree state, calls those laws “wrong” and “a step backward”. The chief executive of Delta Airlines, Georgia’s largest employer, says they’re “unacceptable”. Major League Baseball decided to take its annual All-Star Game away from the home of the Atlanta Braves.
These criticisms have unleashed a rare firestorm of anti-corporate Republican indignation. The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, warns corporations of unspecified “serious consequences” for speaking out. Republicans are moving to revoke MLB’s antitrust status. Georgia Republicans threaten to punish Delta by repealing a state tax credit for jet fuel.
“Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations and antitrust?” asks the Florida senator Marco Rubio.
Why? For the same reason Willie Sutton gave when asked why he robbed banks: that’s where the money is.
McConnell told reporters corporations should “stay out of politics” but then qualified his remark: “I’m not talking about political contributions.” Of course not. Republicans have long championed “corporate speech” when it comes in the form of campaign cash – just not as criticism.
Talk about hypocrisy. McConnell was the top recipient of corporate money in the 2020 election cycle and has a long history of battling attempts to limit it. In 2010, he hailed the supreme court’s Citizens United ruling, which struck down limits on corporate political donations, on the dubious grounds that corporations are “people” under the first amendment to the constitution.
“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” McConnell said at the time. Hint: he wasn’t referring to poor Black people.
It’s hypocrisy squared. The growing tsunami of corporate campaign money suppresses votes indirectly by drowning out all other voices. Republicans are in the grotesque position of calling on corporations to continue bribing politicians as long as they don’t criticize Republicans for suppressing votes directly.
The hypocrisy flows in the other direction as well. The Delta chief criticized the GOP’s voter suppression in Georgia but the company continues to bankroll Republicans. Its Pac contributed $1,725,956 in the 2020 election, more than $1m of which went to federal candidates, mostly Republicans. Oh, and Delta hasn’t paid federal taxes for years.
Don’t let the spat fool you. The basic deal between the GOP and corporate America is still very much alive.
Which is why, despite record-low corporate taxes, congressional Republicans are feigning outrage at Joe Biden’s plan to have corporations pay for his $2tn infrastructure proposal. Biden isn’t even seeking to raise the corporate tax rate as high as it was before the Trump tax cut, yet not a single Republicans will support it.
A few Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, don’t want to raise corporate taxes as high as Biden does either. Yet almost two-thirds of Americans support the idea.
The basic deal between American corporations and American politicians has been a terrible deal for America. Which is why a piece of legislation entitled the For the People Act, passed by the House and co-sponsored in the Senate by every Democratic senator except Manchin, is so important. It would both stop states from suppressing votes and also move the country toward public financing of elections, thereby reducing politicians’ dependence on corporate cash.
Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won’t, as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians.
Katie Wright, mother of Daunte, broke into tears Tuesday recounting her last conversation with her son, who called her for advice after being pulled over by police. An officer shot him shortly after. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Daunte Wright Was an 'Amazing, Loving Kid'
'I Never Imagined This': Daunte Wright's Family Calls for Accountability
Becky Sullivan, NPR
Sullivan writes: "In their first public press conference, the family of Daunte Wright, the 20-year-old Black man shot and killed by police in Brooklyn Center, Minn., expressed grief and anger, called for accountability, and questioned why police felt the need to use any force on their son."
Katie Wright, Daunte's mother, recounted the phone call she had with her son when he called to ask for advice after police pulled him over. She said he told her he'd been pulled over due to air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror, a minor violation of law in Minnesota. Police officials have since said the reason for the stop was expired registration tags.
"I never imagined this was what was going to happen," she said, breaking into tears. "That was the last time I've heard from my son. And I've had no explanation since then."
Police shot Daunte Wright during a traffic stop on Sunday. Officials say that after the officers pulled him over, they discovered an outstanding warrant stemming from misdemeanor charges and attempted arrest. Wright slipped free of the officer attempting to handcuff him, then was shot by a second officer.
Police officials described Wright's death as an "accident," saying the officer, Kim Potter, mistakenly drew her handgun instead of her Taser. Body camera footage of the shooting shows Potter shouting "Taser!" before she fires.
"They could have gave him a ticket for that. But when it's Black people in America, they engage in the most use of force, and it ends up with deadly consequences," said Benjamin Crump, an attorney who is representing both families.
At the news conference, Wright's family was joined by Crump and several family members of George Floyd.
They stood together under the light April snow outside the Hennepin County Courthouse, where inside, the trial of fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who faces three counts in Floyd's death, is nearing its closing arguments.
The Floyds and the Wrights are two families now linked by death by police encounter, both mourning Black men who were the victims of officers' use of force, 10 months and 12 miles apart.
"Can you blame Daunte for being terrified as a Black man in custody of police, when you just watched here in Minneapolis George Floyd being murdered at the hands of the very same police?" said George's nephew Brandon Floyd.
Both families called for consequences for Potter, a 26-year veteran of the force. She resigned Tuesday along with the city's police chief, Tim Gannon.
Naisha Wright, Daunte's aunt, said her resignation was "great," but she hoped to see more. "Put her in jail, like they would do any one of us," she said. "They would put us into that jail cell. [Firing a Taser] would be no 'accident.' It would be murder."
Philonise Floyd, George Floyd's brother, spent Monday giving testimony in the trial of the man accused of murdering his brother. He described their childhood and their shared grief at their mother's funeral, and cried when shown a photo of George with their mother.
"It's a shame. The world is traumatized watching another African-American man being slain," he said, evoking the name of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old Black man shot in the back while laying down by a police officer at the Fruitvale station in Oakland. The officer later said he'd meant to use his Taser.
"There was no need to even Tase him," Philonise Floyd said of both men.
The officer who killed Grant, Johannes Mehserle, was charged with second-degree murder and was ultimately convicted of manslaughter. Other Taser confusion cases have resulted in less or no jail time for the officers involved. In a 2018 case in Kansas, charges were dismissed. In Pennsylvania, the county district attorney declined to file charges at all, saying the officer was "honest but mistaken" about his intention to use his Taser. The victim in that case, who survived, is now pursuing a civil suit.
"After 26 years, you would think that you know what side your gun is on and what side your Taser is on. You know the weight of your gun, and you know the weight of the Taser. You know the gun is black, you know the Taser is gonna have some reflective color on it. And so it is unacceptable," Crump said.
Though Brooklyn Center is in Hennepin County, the case is currently in the hands of neighboring Washington County. The county attorney there plans to have charges drafted imminently, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The mayor of Brooklyn Center, Mike Elliott, has called for the case to be transferred to the state attorney general.
'America is the emperor of weaponry.' (photo: iStock)
Tom Engelhardt | Slaughter Central: The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "We're a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we've known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come."
y the time you read this piece, it will already be out of date. The reason’s simple enough. No matter what mayhem I describe, with so much all-American weaponry in this world of ours, there’s no way to keep up. Often, despite the headlines that go with mass killings here, there’s almost no way even to know.
On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers on the planet — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — are all located in the United States.
Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons makers and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on a planetary scale, right down to the latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at the cost of at least $100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is slated to be “the length of a bowling lane” and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will someday be capable of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of thousands of people each. (And the Air Force is planning to order 600 of them.)
By the end of this decade, that new ICBM is slated to join an unequaled American nuclear arsenal of — at this moment — 3,800 warheads. And with that in mind, let’s back up a moment.
Have Gun — Will Travel
Before we head abroad or think more about weaponry fit to destroy the planet (or at least human life on it), let’s just start right here at home. After all, we live in a country whose citizens are armed to their all-too-labile fingertips with more guns of every advanced sort than might once have been imaginable. The figures are stunning. Even before the pandemic hit and gun purchases soared to record levels — about 23 million of them (a 64% increase over 2019 sales) — American civilians were reported to possess almost 400 million firearms. That adds up to about 40% of all such weaponry in the hands of civilians globally, or more than the next 25 countries combined.
And if that doesn’t stagger you, note that the versions of those weapons in public hands are becoming ever more militarized and powerful, ever more AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, not .22s. And keep in mind as well that, over the years, the death toll from those weapons in this country has grown staggeringly large. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, “More Americans have died from guns just since 1975, including suicides, murders and accidents (more than 1.5 million), than in all the wars in United States history, dating back to the Revolutionary War (about 1.4 million).”
In my childhood, one of my favorite TV programs was called Have Gun — Will Travel. Its central character was a highly romanticized armed mercenary in the Old West and its theme song — still lodged in my head (where so much else is unlodging these days) — began:
“Have gun will travel is the card of a man.
A knight without armor in a savage land.
His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.
A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”
Staggering numbers of Americans are now ever grimmer versions of Paladin. Thanks to a largely unregulated gun industry, they’re armed like no other citizenry on the planet, not even — in a distant second place — the civilians of Yemen, a country torn by endless war. That TV show’s title could now be slapped on our whole culture, whether we’re talking about our modern-day Paladins traveling to a set of Atlanta spas; a chain grocery store in Boulder, Colorado; a real-estate office in Orange, California; a convenience store near Baltimore; or a home in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Remember how the National Rifle Association has always defended the right of Americans to own weapons at least in part by citing this country’s hunting tradition? Well, these days, startling numbers of Americans, armed to the teeth, have joined that hunting crew. Their game of choice isn’t deer or even wolves and grizzly bears, but that ultimate prey, other human beings — and all too often themselves. (In 2020, not only did a record nearly 20,000 Americans die from gun violence, but another 24,000 used guns to commit suicide.)
As the rate of Covid-19 vaccination began to rise to remarkable levels in this country and ever more public places reopened, the first mass public killings (defined as four or more deaths in a public place) of the pandemic period — in Atlanta and Boulder — hit the news big-time. The thought, however, that the American urge to use weapons in a murderous fashion had in any way lessened or been laid to rest, even briefly, thanks to Covid-19, proved a fantasy of the first order.
At a time when so many public places like schools were closed or their use limited indeed, if you took as your measuring point not mass public killings but mass shootings (defined as four or more people wounded or killed), the pandemic year of 2020 proved to be a record 12 months of armed chaos. In fact, such mass shootings actually surged by 47%. As USA Today recounted, “In 2020, the United States reported 611 mass shooting events that resulted in 513 deaths and 2,543 injuries. In 2019, there were 417 mass shootings with 465 deaths and 1,707 injured.” In addition, in that same year, according to projections based on FBI data, there were 4,000 to 5,000 more gun murders than usual, mainly in inner-city communities of color.
In the first 73 days of Joe Biden’s presidency, there were five mass shootings and more than 10,000 gun-violence deaths. In the Covid-19 era, this has been the model the world’s “most exceptional” nation (as American politicians of both parties used to love to call this country) has set for the rest of the planet. Put another way, so far in 2020 and 2021, there have been two pandemics in America, Covid-19 and guns.
And though the weaponization of our citizenry and the carnage that’s gone with it certainly gets attention — President Biden only recently called it “an international embarrassment” — here’s the strange thing: when reporting on such a binge of killings and the weapons industry that stokes it, few here think to include the deaths and other injuries for which the American military has been responsible via its “forever wars” of this century outside our own borders. Nor do they consider the massive U.S. weapons deliveries and sales to other countries that often enough lead to the same. In other words, a full picture of all-American carnage has — to use an apt phrase — remained missing in action.
Cornering the Arms Market
In fact, internationally, things are hardly less mind-boggling when it comes to this country and weaponry. As with its armed citizenry, when it comes to arming other countries, Washington is without peer. It’s the weapons dealer of choice across much of the world. Yes, the U.S. gun industry that makes all those rifles for this country also sells plenty of them abroad and, in the Trump years, such sales were only made easier to complete (as was the selling of U.S. unmanned aerial drones to “less stable governments”). When it comes to semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 or even grenades and flamethrowers, this country’s arms makers no longer even need State Department licenses, just far easier-to-get Commerce Department ones, to complete such sales, even to particularly abusive nations. As a result, to take one example, semi-automatic pistol exports abroad rose 148% in 2020.
But what I’m particularly thinking about here are the big-ticket items that those five leading weapons makers of the military-industrial complex eternally produce. On the subject of the sale of jet fighters like the F-16 and F-35, tanks and other armored vehicles, submarines (as well as anti-submarine weaponry), and devastating bombs and missiles, among other things, we leave our “near-peer” competitors as well as our weapons-making allies in the dust. Washington is the largest supplier to 20 of the 40 major arms importers on the planet.
When it comes to delivering the weapons of war, the U.S. leads all its competitors in a historic fashion, especially in the war-torn and devastated Middle East. There, between 2015 and 2019, it gobbled up nearly half of the arms market. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia was its largest customer, which, of course, only further stoked the brutal civil war in Yemen, where U.S. weapons are responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. As Pentagon expert William Hartung wrote of those years, U.S. arms deliveries to the region added up to “nearly three times the arms Russia supplied to MENA [the Middle East and North Africa], five times what France contributed, 10 times what the United Kingdom exported, and 16 times China’s contribution.” (And often enough, as in Iraq and Yemen, some of those weapons end up falling into the hands of those the U.S. opposes.)
In fact, in 2020, this country’s arms sales abroad rose a further 2.8% to $178 billion. The U.S. now supplies no fewer than 96 countries with weaponry and controls 37% of the global arms market (with, for example, Lockheed Martin alone taking in $47.2 billion in such sales in 2018, followed by the four other giant U.S. weapons makers and, in sixth place, the British defense firm BAE).
This remains the definition of mayhem-to-come, the international version of that spike in domestic arms sales and the killings that went with it. After all, in these years, deaths due to American arms in countries like Afghanistan and Yemen have grown strikingly. And to take just one more example, arms, ammunition, and equipment sold to or given to the brutal regime of Rodrigo Duterte for the Philippine military and constabulary have typically led to deaths (especially in its “war on drugs”) that no one’s counting up.
And yet, even combined with the dead here at home, all of this weapons-based slaughter hardly adds up to a full record when it comes to the U.S. as a global mass-killing machine.
Far, Far from Home
After all, this country has a historic 800 or so military bases around the world and nearly 200,000 military personnel stationed abroad (about 60,000 in the Middle East alone). It has a drone-assassination program that extends from Afghanistan across the Greater Middle East to Africa, a series of “forever wars” and associated conflicts fought over that same expanse, and a Navy with major aircraft carrier task forces patrolling the high seas. In other words, in this century, it’s been responsible for largely uncounted but remarkable numbers of dead and wounded human beings. Or put another way, it’s been a mass-shooting machine abroad.
Unlike in the United States, however, there’s little way to offer figures on those dead. To take one example, Brown University’s invaluable Costs of War Project has estimated that, from the beginning of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 to late 2019, 801,000 people, perhaps 40% of them civilians, were killed in Washington’s war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Of course, not all of those by any means were killed by the U.S. military. In fact, some were even American soldiers and contractors. Still, the figures are obviously sizeable. (To take but one very focused example, from December 2001 to December 2013 at TomDispatch, I was counting up civilian wedding parties taken down by U.S. air power in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. I came up with eight well-documented ones with a death toll of nearly 300, including brides, grooms, musicians, and revelers.)
Similarly, last December, Neta Crawford of the Costs of War Project released a report on the rising number of Afghan civilians who had died from U.S. air strikes in the Trump years. She found that in 2019, for instance, “airstrikes killed 700 civilians — more civilians than in any other year since the beginning of the war.” Overall, the documented civilian dead from American air strikes in the war years is in the many thousands, the wounded higher yet. (And, of course, those figures don’t include the dead from Afghan air strikes with U.S.-supplied aircraft.) And mind you, that’s just civilians mistaken for Taliban or other enemy forces.
Similarly, thousands more civilians were killed by American air strikes across the rest of the Greater Middle East and northern Africa. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which followed U.S. drone strikes for years, estimated that, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, by 2019 such attacks had killed “between 8,500 and 12,000 people, including as many as 1,700 civilians — 400 of whom were children.”
And that, of course, is just to begin to count the dead in America’s conflicts of this era. Or thought of another way, in this century, the U.S. military has been a kind of global Paladin. Its motto could obviously be “have gun, will travel” and its forces and those allied to it (and often supplied with American arms) have certainly killed staggering numbers of people in conflicts that have devastated communities across a significant part of the planet, while displacing an estimated 37 million people.
Now, return to those Americans gunned down in this country and think of all of this as a single weaponized, well-woven fabric, a single American gun culture that spans the globe, as well as a three-part killing machine of the first order. Much as mass shootings and public killings can sometimes dominate the news here, a full sense of the damage done by the weaponization of our culture seldom comes into focus. When it does, the United States looks like slaughter central.
Or as that song from Have Gun — Will Travel ended:
Paladin, Paladin,
Where do you roam?
Paladin, Paladin,
Far, far from home.
Far, far from home — and close, close to home — indeed.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Police body camera footage that prosecutors say shows Federico Klein clashing with police at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (photo: DOJ)
Prosecutors Lost a Bid to Keep a Former Trump Official Charged in the Capitol Riot in Jail
Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed
Tillman writes: "A former Trump administration appointee charged with clashing with police during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol will be allowed to go home, a judge ruled Monday, denying prosecutors' request to keep him behind bars."
The judge called the decision to reverse an earlier ruling and allow Federico Klein to go home a "close" one.
former Trump administration appointee charged with clashing with police during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol will be allowed to go home, a judge ruled Monday, denying prosecutors' request to keep him behind bars.
Federico Klein's alleged actions on Jan. 6 were "deeply troubling" and revealed "some propensity for violence, as well as a blatant disregard for the law," US District Judge John Bates in Washington, DC, wrote. Klein, 42, is facing an eight-count indictment, including multiple felony charges for assaulting and interfering with police at the Capitol and trying to obstruct Congress from certifying the results of the presidential election.
But Bates found that other factors weighed in favor of releasing Klein as his case goes forward, including the lack of evidence that he planned for violence or took a leadership role; the fact that prosecutors hadn't objected to release for other Capitol riot defendants charged with assaulting police; and Klein's minimal past criminal history.
"Klein’s conduct was forceful, relentless, and defiant, but his confrontations with law enforcement were considerably less violent than many others that day, and the record does not establish that he intended to injure others," Bates wrote.
Klein, who lives in Annandale, Virginia, has been in jail since his arrest on March 4 and will now be released to home detention. That means he can only leave his house for work, education, medical appointments, religious observances, court dates and meetings with his lawyer, and a small number of other preapproved reasons.
The decision in Klein's case is the latest setback for the US attorney's office in Washington after the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit issued an opinion late last month that made it harder for prosecutors to successfully argue for pretrial detention in Capitol riot cases. Bates reversed a federal magistrate judge who had ordered Klein to stay in jail, finding that the DC Circuit's March 26 decision in the case of alleged Capitol rioters Eric Munchel and Lisa Eisenhart — which set precedent that federal district judges such as Bates must follow going forward — "impacts the analysis."
Prosecutors have withdrawn detention requests in some cases in the weeks since the DC Circuit issued the opinion in the Munchel case, particularly for defendants who aren't charged with assaulting police or taking a leadership role in planning for violence on Jan. 6.
Klein had worked in the Office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs and was still employed at the State Department when he allegedly participated in the insurrection. According to charging papers, Klein joined a mob of people who gathered at the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol and attempted to push through a line of police officers protecting one of the entrances to the building. Prosecutors presented screenshots from police body cameras that they said showed him using a riot shield to shove against officers and also to wedge a door open. They alleged that other open-source videos from the scene recorded Klein calling to the crowd behind him, "We need fresh people, we need fresh people."
Prosecutors argued that Klein's former position and the fact that he'd held top secret security clearance meant he was a danger to the community because he'd shown a "contempt" for the oath he took to defend the US Constitution. That argument proved persuasive before US Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui last month; Faruqui said that Klein had "sworn an oath to protect then switched sides."
But Bates wasn't convinced that Klein's past role in the Trump administration hurt his case for release now. Klein's alleged actions on Jan. 6 were "troubling" and represented a "substantial and deeply concerning breach of trust," Bates wrote, but the judge wasn't clear how his previous job "heightens" his dangerousness going forward. Bates noted there was no suggestion by the government that Klein might try to abuse classified information he previously had access to and no evidence that he was affiliated with extremist groups.
Bates cited other cases involving alleged Capitol rioters charged with hitting or deploying a Taser against police — and where there also wasn't evidence of advance planning — in which prosecutors didn't argue for detention. Those other cases didn't involve the same "duration of force" alleged in Klein's case, the judge wrote, but noted that Klein's "most forceful conduct was directed to advancing and maintaining the mob’s position in the tunnel, not toward inflicting injury."
"He does not pose no continuing danger, as he contends, given his demonstrated willingness to use force to advance his personal beliefs over legitimate government objectives," Bates wrote. "But what future risk he does present can be mitigated with supervision and other strict conditions on his release."
In addition to home detention, Klein will be prohibited from going to the Capitol grounds, attending any political protests, contacting anyone else accused of participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and possessing any firearms or weapons. He'll also be subject to GPS monitoring.
Bates did ding Klein for arguing that his conduct on Jan. 6 wasn't as serious as other defendants because he didn't actually make it inside the Capitol, calling that argument "nonsensical."
A spokesperson for the US attorney's office declined to comment. Klein's attorney Stanley Woodward Jr. did not immediately return a request for comment.
Odessa Kelly, a congressional candidate and community organizer from East Nashville, Tennessee. (photo: Eric England)
The Progressive Group That Helped Bring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress Is Launching Its First Primary Challenge of 2022
Addy Baird, BuzzFeed
Baird writes: "Odessa Kelly, 39, is taking on an incumbent Democrat in Tennessee. She would be the first openly gay Black woman elected to Congress."
he progressives who helped defeat three Democratic incumbents in the last three years and brought Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress have their first Democratic target for next year’s election, and a chosen candidate to take him down.
Justice Democrats is launching Odessa Kelly’s campaign against Rep. Jim Cooper, setting up a primary fight between a community organizer from East Nashville, Tennessee, and the moderate Blue Dog incumbent.
Kelly cofounded the group Stand Up Nashville, a nonprofit focused on “equitable, inclusive, and democratic” economic development in the city, while Cooper has represented Tennessee’s 5th District since 2003 and represented the 4th District from 1983 to 1995.
“It shouldn’t take 40 years to get something good done,” Kelly said during a recent interview with BuzzFeed News. “Representative Cooper has had decades in Congress, and we don’t know what he’s done. When you look at what I’ve done for Nashville, I’ve got receipts.”
If elected, Kelly would also be the first openly gay Black woman to be elected to Congress, something she said she wasn’t even aware of until proofreading the press release announcing her candidacy. “That’s so dope,” she said with a laugh when asked about it. “I’m an openly gay person, a Black woman, a mother. Those are part of me.”
“As someone who has spent her life as a public servant and a community organizer, Odessa Kelly is exactly the kind of Democrat we need in Congress,” Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement shared with BuzzFeed News. “Our grassroots movement has shocked the nation in two cycles and we are prepared to do it again. It’s time to usher in a new generation of progressive leadership into the Democratic Party.”
Kelly’s early campaign mirrors those that have been successful for Justice Democrats in recent years, after the group helped skyrocket Ocasio-Cortez to victory over former Rep. Jim Crowley in 2018. In 2020, the group had similar successes with Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, who knocked off former Democratic Reps. Eliot Engel and Lacy Clay. Several other high profile challengers, including Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Alex Morse in Massachusetts, and Jessica Cisneros in Texas, came close but ultimately fell short.
“The biggest thing I’ve taken from other Justice Democrats candidates is the validation of what we feel as everyday regular people is correct,” Kelly said. She added that she appreciates that Justice Democrats candidates are often, like her, from community organizing backgrounds with long histories of working in their districts. “That’s where we’ve been missing the mark, especially on the congressional level.”
Kelly’s campaign launch comes after a tumultuous year for Nashville. “We’ve been through it,” she said. “In this past year alone, we’ve had a tornado, a pandemic, a bombing, and a flood.”
Recovering from those disasters and addressing poverty in the district will take a concerted effort, she said, including focusing on Medicare for All, housing justice, and Green New Deal union jobs.
Kelly said that she specifies not just the Green New Deal (which she called “hip hop to Congress compared to a lot of the old songs we’ve been playing”), but Green New Deal union jobs for a reason. “The union has been a way for us to [have] a pathway out of poverty,” she said. “And it’s a way for us to do it again.”
Cooper is a member of the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition. In a press release Monday, Justice Democrats branded Cooper as “Republican-lite” and hit him for supporting the Balanced Budget Amendment as recently as 2019, which would cut funding for safety net programs, as well as 2012 legislation to raise the Social Security age and cut Medicare and Medicaid. He was, as the group noted, one of just 11 Democrats who voted against former President Barack Obama’s stimulus package in 2009.
In her campaign to unseat Cooper, Kelly says she plans to aggressively organize in the district and work to turn out voters who historically have not consistently shown up to the polls, a strategy that worked for Bush last year.
“I am of that community where you traditionally see a lot of people who don’t vote,” she said, adding that she’s excited to get outside and get to work. “I’ve been in the house a whole year. I cannot wait to knock doors. I can’t wait to do phone banks.”
COVID 19 Vaccine. (photo: Brian Intagna/AP)
Bolivia Launches International Campaign to Free COVID-19 Vaccine Patents
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's Foreign Affairs Minister Rogelio Mayta on Tuesday launched an international campaign for the patent release of COVID-19 vaccines so that worldwide nations have equitable access to the drugs."
Bolivia will also urge rich countries that have hoarded vaccines to hand over their extra doses to the people who need them the most.
The proposal, which will be presented to the international community at the Ibero-American Summit to be held on April 21 in Andorra, aims to facilitate access to COVID-19 vaccines for the poorest countries.
According to scientists, 70 percent of the world's population must be immunized to halt the COVID-19 spread. Otherwise, new variations will continue to appear and the pandemic will last for years.
"Pharmaceuticals must release patents so that vaccines can be manufactured everywhere. That will be the fastest way to vaccinate all of our people," Mayta recalled.
The international campaign will also urge rich countries that have hoarded vaccines to hand over their extra doses to the people who need them the most.
"All countries are experiencing an unprecedented crisis. Health and life rights must be a priority in international cooperation," Mayta added.
In January, Bolivia started its vaccination campaign immunizing health personnel, people with kidney disease and cancer, and the elderly.
Firefighters watch flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California, in August 2020. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
California Is Poised for a Catastrophic Fire Season. Experts Say Its Plan Isn't Nearly Enough
Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Singh writes: "Bracing for another year of severe, destructive fires, California's governor on Tuesday approved a half-a-billion dollar emergency funding plan to prepare for the looming wildfire season."
The state has furnished half a billion dollars in emergency funding as drought sets stage for megafires
racing for another year of severe, destructive fires, California’s governor on Tuesday approved a half-a-billion dollar emergency funding plan to prepare for the looming wildfire season. The state, which saw its worst fire season on record last year, is descending deep into a drought that portends even more megablazes this year.
But experts say that while the huge spending plan is a start, it isn’t nearly enough to avert the crisis ahead.
“We are in a very deep hole that we’re gonna have to dig ourselves out of,” said Chris Field, climate scientist at Stanford University.
Global heating has brought more frequent, extreme droughts and heat waves to California, drying out the landscape and fueling larger, more destructive fires in recent years. Last year, the state saw five of the six largest fires in state history, after a lack of rain and a heat wave dried out fire-fueling vegetation across the region’s wildlands. This year is tied for the third-driest year in state history – and the desiccated landscape is primed to burn. “We’re definitely looking at a serious challenge ahead,” Field said.
As the state heads into its dry, summer season, its reservoirs remain at about half capacity. The region is so dry that the chamise plants that cover the state’s chaparral landscape didn’t sprout or flower this year in some locations. Instead, the highly flammable vegetation has already started to dry out – transforming into kindling that could invite more destructive fires, earlier than usual.
Facing high odds of an intense fire season to come, Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that state leaders would allocate $536m to hire more firefighters, improve forest management efforts, thin out fire-fueling vegetation and make homes more fire-resistant.
The state would have to adapt quickly to changing climate, and more fire, the governor said when he signed the proposal into law on Tuesday.
“This is a down payment, not the totality of our efforts,” he said at a press conference in Butte county, which has been devasted by recent fires – including 2018’s devastating Camp fire. “We’re investing a historic amount of money in preparation of this year’s fire season.”
Already this year, California has seen more than 1,160 fires burn 3,304 acres across the state. Over the past five years, an average of about 550 acres burned during the same time period.
The plan “is a step in the right direction”, said Don Hankins, a pyrogeographer and Plains Miwok fire expert at California State University, Chico. Hankins, along with other indigenous fire experts and researchers in California, has been pushing state leaders to direct more funds and resources toward prescribed burning – using small controlled burns to clear out fire-fueling vegetation, renew the soil and prevent bigger, runaway wildfires. Hundreds of tribes across California used prescribed burns for thousands of years until European settlers outlawed the practice.
Hankins said he was heartened that the state’s fire plan had earmarked money for prescribed burning – but he said it left out key details. For instance, since the majority of forests in California are managed by the federal government, rather than the state, California’s plans to ramp up prescribed burning will be largely contingent on the US government for funding and staffing. And while the plan promises partnership with “tribal entities”, it’s short on details about how, exactly, the partnership would work.
Moreover, because Californians banned prescribed burning for more than a century, Hankins said it would take a much bigger investment to burn through the backlog. In Western Australia, where the local government has reinstated and adapted Aboriginal burning practices, about half the fire budget is spent on prescribed burning.
An estimated 4.5m to 12m acres used to burn annually in California in pre-colonial times, though much of that fire was less intense and intentionally set, coaxed away from areas where people lived. “That’s a lot more than the 4m acres than burned last year,” Hankins said. The state’s current goal of treating at least 100,000 acres with prescribed fire by 2025 “is good – it’s a start. But it won’t be nearly enough.”
The plan also sets aside $25m to grant food to low-income homeowners to fund the updates and renovations needed to fireproof their homes. “Of course, it’s good – but the question is how far will this money go?” said Stephanie Pincetl, a professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability who specializes in the intersection of urban planning and environmental policy.
Although updates to “harden” homes against fires can save lives, such improvements will need to be maintained over time. Since many low-income residents cannot afford fire insurance or even get coverage because the risk of fires in their area is so high, periodic home updates will be untenable for many. Moreover, for many low-income residents, navigating the government paperwork to apply for grants could be inaccessible, she said. “So again, this is a nice start, but how successful it’ll be is all in the details.”
Adapting to a drier, hotter climate and learning how to live with fire will require a lot of time, and a massive financial investment – one that leaders and fire researchers agree will be worth it. “For every dollar we spend on wildfire prevention, our state saves $6 to $7 in damage,” the state senate leader, Toni Atkins, said when the plan was unveiled last week.
But, said Field, “we shouldn’t think that just because the funding has been allocated that the problems have been solved. This is going to be a long-term problem that’s going to take continuing investment.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.