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26 May 21
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Paul Krugman | The Banality of Democratic Collapse
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "America's democratic experiment may well be nearing its end."
merica’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end. That’s not hyperbole; it’s obvious to anyone following the political scene. Republicans might take power legitimately; they might win through pervasive voter suppression; G.O.P. legislators might simply refuse to certify Democratic electoral votes and declare Donald Trump or his political heir the winner. However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.
But how did we get here? We read every day about the rage of the Republican base, which overwhelmingly believes, based on nothing, that the 2020 election was stolen, and extremists in Congress, who insist that being required to wear a face mask is the equivalent of the Holocaust.
I’d argue, however, that focusing on the insanity can hinder our understanding of how all of this became possible. Conspiracy theorizing is hardly a new thing in our national life; Richard Hofstadter wrote “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” back in 1964. White rage has been a powerful force at least since the civil rights movement.
The investigation led by the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., has spanned more than two years, and its focus has shifted over time. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Prosecutor in Trump Criminal Probe Convenes Grand Jury to Hear Evidence, Weigh Potential Charges
Shayna Jacobs and David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Manhattan's district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development."
The panel was convened recently and will sit three days a week for six months. It is likely to hear several matters — not just the Trump case — during its term, which is longer than a traditional New York state grand-jury assignment, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Generally, special grand juries such as this are convened to participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.
The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance thinks he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump, by someone potentially close to him or by his company.
Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar with the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation.
The district attorney also is examining the compensation provided to top Trump Organization executives, people familiar with the matter have said.
In a statement issued Tuesday evening, Trump called the seating of the grand jury “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”
“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said. “Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”
A spokesman for Vance (D) declined to comment.
Although grand juries with extended terms can hear cases out of order and to varying levels of completion, it is likely that Trump-related testimony in the secret proceeding has already begun, said one of the people familiar with the matter.
Adam S. Miller, who served as deputy bureau chief of the Major Economic Crimes Bureau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office before entering private practice in 2011, said such a “special grand jury” is “certainly not an uncommon thing to do with a large, technical and complicated investigation.”
“It’s really for very complicated cases that have a lot of information for a grand jury to digest,” Miller said, noting that a special grand jury’s term can be extended with a judge’s approval.
It is unclear whether prosecutors working under Vance intend to go through the entirety of their grand-jury presentation at once or if the proceeding may be interrupted for the panel to review other cases between hearing from witnesses about the Trump Organization and its business dealings.
It is also unclear when or even whether the grand jury will be asked to consider returning any indictments. Prosecutors handling cases such as this one can choose to present charges for the grand jury to consider — or not. A prosecutor’s grand-jury strategy is often a closely kept secret and can be subject to change.
Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who is now a professor at New York Law School, said that such investigations are always formally overseen by grand juries. In the early stages, prosecutors may use a grand jury’s power just to subpoena documents without offering charges for consideration.
Roiphe said the recent step of seating a long-term panel shows that Vance’s investigation has progressed to the point that prosecutors will visit the grand jury, present evidence and witnesses, and potentially ask that charges be considered. Prosecutors were unlikely to take that step without believing they had evidence to show there was probable cause to believe someone had committed a crime, she said.
“The prosecutors are convinced they have a case. That’s at least how I read it,” Roiphe added.
Trump is facing two investigations of his business practices in New York. Both appear to have begun with the same man: Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and attack dog, who turned on Trump after pleading guilty to making hush-money payoffs on Trump’s behalf and lying to Congress.
Vance’s criminal investigation began in 2018, after Cohen pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the hush-money payoffs, made in the last days of the 2016 campaign to women who said they had affairs with Trump years earlier — allegations the former president denies. Vance’s investigation soon expanded, as the district attorney sought to examine millions of pages of Trump’s tax records.
Separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) began a civil investigation of the Trump Organization in 2019 prompted by Cohen’s testimony to Congress, where he said Trump had misled lenders and tax authorities with manipulated valuations of his assets. Asset values were inflated at times when the company was seeking favorable loan interest rates and were deflated to reduce tax liability, Cohen has alleged. He has been interviewed extensively by Vance’s team, which has added a decorated former federal prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, to help with the Trump case.
In recent months, the two investigations have appeared to converge. Both sets of investigators have sought documents related to a Trump estate in suburban New York, according to court records and people familiar with the efforts, where the then-future president obtained a $21 million tax break by agreeing to give up development rights, and a tower in Chicago where Trump’s lenders forgave $100 million of debt.
Another sign of convergence: James’s office said last week that its long-running civil probe had also spawned a criminal investigation, now being run in coordination with Vance.
The state attorney general’s office did not explain what inspired the criminal inquiry, but veterans of the office said such shifts often are triggered by evidence that indicates a defendant intended to break the law.
Trump has attacked both investigations, pointing to comments by James during her 2018 election campaign in which she called him an “illegitimate president” and promised to investigate his family business. Trump has never been criminally charged. No former U.S. president has ever been charged with a crime.
The Washington Post previously reported that Vance’s office has been trying to pressure the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, into cooperating against his boss, a person familiar with the strategy confirmed. Weisselberg is said to know the ins and outs of every business transaction at the company over the course of his decades in employment there.
A lawyer for Weisselberg declined to comment when reached Tuesday.
Anne Robinson, a cousin of Jimmie Lee Jackson, stands for a portrait after recalling memories of what happened the night Jackson was shot by an Alabama state trooper on Feb. 18, 1965 in Marion, Alabama. (photo: Jessica Koscielniak/USA Today)
Javonte Anderson | 'First Martyr of the Voting Rights Movement': How a Black Man's Death in 1965 Changed American History
Javonte Anderson, USA Today
Anderson writes: "Like George Floyd, Jimmie Lee Jackson's killing by police inspired a movement. His death led to equal voting rights, but his name has been forgotten."
e lay on the pavement with a bullet wound in his stomach, engulfed in chaos and darkness.
It was 1965. A year soon scarred by social and political upheaval: The assassination of Malcolm X. Bloody Sunday. The Vietnam War. The Watts Riots.
Jimmie Lee Jackson would see none of it.
The 26-year-old showed up the night of Feb. 18 in Marion, Alabama, where hundreds of people had gathered to march in protest of the arrest of a local civil rights activist. When police and state troopers intervened to break up the march, the scene outside Zion United Methodist Church turned violent.
Fists. Feet. Nightsticks. Bottles. Cattle prods. And a single shot from an Alabama state trooper's revolver that ripped through Jackson’s stomach as he tried to shield his mother from the attacks.
His death eight days later altered the course of American history. It united activists in Marion and Selma, making their combined campaigns for desegregation and voting rights powerful enough to resonate around the world.
Yet Jackson's name is little more than a footnote in time.
"It was the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson that provoked the march from Selma to Montgomery," said John Lewis, a civil rights icon and U.S. congressman, in 2007. "It was his death and his blood that gave us the Voting Rights Act of 1965."
As the nation nears one year since the death of George Floyd, who inspired another national outcry for racial equality, USA TODAY looks at Jackson's story to understand why he is a forgotten martyr of the civil rights movement.
USA TODAY inspected hundreds of unredacted FBI files that few have seen, along with court records and newspaper accounts from the 1960s that illustrate the racial tension in central Alabama in the weeks leading up to Jackson's death.
We also interviewed dozens of historians, eyewitnesses, local citizens and relatives of Jackson to reconstruct what happened the night Jackson was fatally shot and to shed light on who he was as a person, why his legacy is overshadowed and how his death in 1965 is connected to the racial reckoning America experienced last year.
Fifty-five years after Jackson’s death, in a city more than a thousand miles north, another Black man lay motionless on the pavement. This time, his life was draining under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis.
The death of 46-year-old Floyd ignited a movement of its own.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans nationwide poured into the streets to protest racial inequality, police violence and the systems that perpetuate racism decades after the civil rights movement.
Floyd’s name echoed through every major American city and indeed, around the world, along with the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter.” Every movement has a catalyst, the person, place or situation that moves people to action. In 2020, it was Floyd. In 1965, it was Jackson.
But with Jackson, almost no one says his name.
An ordinary man in the segregated South
BEFORE A BULLET ripped through Jackson’s body, he was just an ordinary man. He once chopped wood for a living, earning $6 a day. He was a deacon at a local Baptist church and worked at the county hospital. And like many other Black folks living in the rural Deep South, he was frustrated with segregation and being denied the right to vote.
Jimmie Lee and his little sister, Emma Jean Jackson, grew up in a shotgun shack on the edge of a stream.
After Jimmie Lee's father died in a car accident, his grandfather, Cager Lee, became his father figure. And as Lee aged, he relied on Jimmie Lee, whom he called "Bunky," for transportation.
"My grandfather depended on him so much," said Evelyn Rogers, one of Jimmie Lee’s cousins.
"Bunky, take me to town. Bunky, I need to go to the store. Bunky, I need to go to this person's house."
After Jimmie Lee’s death, few details about him emerged. In this era, the media didn’t explore the personal lives of regular Black men who were killed by police. Therefore, the story of Jimmie Lee’s life has been largely lost to time as the family members closest to him have died. His sister and closest living relative, Emma, declined to be interviewed for this story.
But USA TODAY interviewed several other relatives to get a glimpse into who Jimmie Lee was.
Rogers recalled Jimmie Lee as a modest man who cared most about taking care of his family. "He was a very simple guy," she said.
Cousin Anne Robinson, now 75, remembers his beautiful smile and how Jimmie Lee let her and Emma borrow his 1963 green and white Chevy so they could learn how to drive.
"He just always liked to help people,” she said.
A day filled with tension
JIMMIE LEE JACKSON was shot on a February day filled with all the classic ingredients for mayhem in the Deep South: segregation and mounting racial tensions, Black folks daring to push back against inequality, police officers steadfast on enforcing the status quo and civil rights leaders hoping to bring national attention to bear on Alabama.
In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had arrived in nearby Selma to electrify the voting rights campaign. Central Alabama was one of the worst places in America when it came to suppressing Black votes.
Poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation tactics enforced by police all but ensured that only white people voted. Government records show that in 1960, less than 1% of African Americans in Dallas County, where Selma is located, were registered to vote even though they comprised more than half the county population. Black voters accounted for just 2% in Perry County, where Marion is located, despite representing nearly two-thirds of the county population.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and local groups, including the Perry County Civic Justice League, had been focused on voter registration campaigns for months. But the arrival of King and other national civil rights figures both energized local protests and agitated law enforcement.
Black residents were chafing against an Alabama political system that didn't want to yield to racial integration. They marched. They sat in the “whites only” areas at movie theaters and restaurants. They boycotted businesses. The tension was mounting.
In early February, two weeks before Jackson was shot, hundreds of students walked out of a Marion high school to protest segregation, starting a three-week boycott of school.
Police were hauling Black youths off to state prison camps by the busload.
The newspaper in Alabama's state capital noted the unprecedented number of arrests made in Selma and Marion.
"800 More Arrested As Tension Builds," a Montgomery Advertiser front-page headline on Feb. 4, 1965, read.
The jails were overflowing with Black people, said Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights leader who worked in Selma at the time. "We wouldn't let up. We kept marching, kept the pressure on. We were breaking the system of local government."
On the morning of Feb. 18, 1965, FBI agents were on the ground, monitoring the civil rights protest activity in Marion. Seldom-seen notes agents made on their reports and dozens of eyewitness testimonies help re-create the day’s events.
"Negroes came out of church with a half-dozen picket signs," an FBI agent wrote at 10:56 a.m. "125 Negroes crossed the street, going north by the courthouse. They stopped and walked back, and were stopped … by the Chief of Police."
That morning, police arrested James Orange, an activist key to SCLC’s voter registration efforts in central Alabama, for encouraging students to join a march.
Activists learned that a group of Ku Klux Klansmen planned to lynch Orange while he was in police custody, Lafayette said. So organizers planned a nighttime march from the church to the jail for his protection.
However, Marion Police Chief T.O. Harris learned more civil rights leaders were coming from Selma, and "they planned to put on a show that night." So he and Perry County Sheriff William Loftis sought help from Alabama state troopers.
As the sun fell, the mood began to shift. Hundreds of Black people poured into Zion United church shortly before 7 p.m. They raised their voices in song; the melody wafting out of the red brick and wooden steepled church caught the ear of FBI agent Archibald Riley as he peered through a second-story window in a building across the street.
"Singing was louder than other nights," Riley noted.
Inside the church, a packed sanctuary listened to a fiery address from the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a civil rights leader and King's right-hand man. The congregation then prepared to march one block north to the jail to protest Orange's arrest.
Before the congregation exited the building, scores of police officers surrounded the church outside. One Alabama state trooper estimated there were 100 fellow officers on the scene. Assuming the protest would "get out of hand," the chief of police and sheriff already planned to stop the march before it got too far from the church, according to Chief Harris.
At about 9:25 p.m., the church's double doors opened wide, and the marchers emerged walking side by side in pairs.
They headed north toward the jail, walking past the bus station, where they were confronted by a police blockade. The police chief addressed the marchers over a bull horn.
"Chief Harris advised the Negroes that they were in an unlawful assembly and for them to disperse and go home or back to the church," a FBI agent noted.
Face to face with police officers and directed to disperse, the Rev. James Dobynes, one of the protest leaders, knelt to pray. As he prayed, the first blow was delivered: Dobynes was struck with a nightstick. More police officers and troopers followed suit, striking protesters with billy clubs. The chaos had begun.
Robinson, Jackson's cousin, tensed up as she recalled a memory she's long tried to bury. Robinson was 18 the night of the melee, but she remembers vividly the harrowing moment when officers began flailing their nightsticks.
"N------! What are you doing n------! It's illegal. You're not supposed to be here," Robinson recalled officers yelling.
"And then next thing you know, after that you hear bam, bam, bam, bam," she said, imitating the officers swinging their clubs.
“People were screaming, hollering, jumping over fences, jumping in ditches trying to get away.” It was dark, Robinson said. And unlike every other night, "the streetlights were not on.”
Police tried to force marchers back inside the church, but some fled into Mack's Cafe, a hangout next door. Amid the fray outside, Jackson's 82-year-old grandfather was attacked.
Lee was standing behind the church when a "man with clubs" came around and said, "n---- go home," he told the New York Times days after the assault.
"They hauled me off and hit me and knocked me to the street and kicked me," Lee told the newspaper. "It was hard to take for an old man whose bones are dry like cane."
Lee then sought refuge inside Mack's Cafe.
What happened next varies depending on who you ask and whose written account you believe. What’s certain is that dozens of marchers were bludgeoned and hospitalized that night, including Jackson’s grandfather and mother. Jackson was the only person killed.
Jackson had just finished his shift at the county hospital and was headed to the church to pick up his mother and grandfather, Rogers said.
Jackson told the FBI days after he was shot, while still in the hospital, that he initially went into Mack's Cafe to help get his grandfather to the hospital. As they were leaving the cafe, he said, two troopers forced them back inside and struck Jackson on the side, his arms and his head with their clubs.
Emma Jackson told the FBI she saw her brother enter the cafe to help their grandfather and she saw the troopers force them back inside. She said Jimmie Lee Jackson then stood near the counter and cigarette machine. He was visibly upset, so his sister "kept talking to (him) to calm him down."
"But he did not appear as if he were going to cause trouble," she told the FBI.
Jackson told the FBI he was drinking from a bottle when he saw a trooper hitting his mother. He went to assist his mother, but his sister held him back. Jackson recalled standing near the doorway when he was shot in the stomach by a trooper. He then ran out of the cafe. Several troopers followed and beat him with their nightsticks before he collapsed a few yards away.
Most eyewitnesses corroborated Jackson’s version of events, agreeing that he and his grandfather were pushed back into the cafe while trying to leave. Once inside, police began beating Black folks with their billy clubs. A scuffle ensued between Jackson’s mother and the police. One eyewitness said they saw Jackson’s mother, who was later hospitalized with a head injury, clubbed on the head. Shortly thereafter, several eyewitnesses said they heard a gunshot.
But police had a different version of events.
In a written statement provided to the FBI, state trooper B.J. Hoots said police entered Mack's Cafe because a group of African American people were throwing bricks and bottles at them. Fellow trooper James Bonard Fowler shot Jackson only after Jackson grabbed Fowler's gun inside the holster, "apparently trying to get it out."
Fowler said Jackson hit him twice over the head with a bottle while trying to pry his firearm out of the holster. Fowler staggered backward as the two tussled, pulling his gun free from the holster, and the gun fired when Jackson struck his hand with the bottle, he said.
No civilian witnesses reported seeing Jackson struggling to take Fowler’s firearm away.
Jackson was admitted to the Black hospital in Selma hours after being shot. He died eight days later.
The hidden figure of voting rights
OFF A NARROW, two-lane state highway, in an unmarked gravesite that blends in with the surrounding trees, one tombstone stands out. It sits atop a seven-layer bed of bricks, flanked by two wreaths of red flowers. An image of Jesus is carved into the large gray headstone, but it's marred by several bullet holes. Here, on the outskirts of Marion, Jackson is buried with the rest of his family.
"It was really a tragedy," Jackson’s cousin Evelyn Rogers said. "Here's someone who has never been in trouble. All he did was work and take care of his mother.”
A few miles from his gravesite, in downtown Marion, Jackson's legacy is visible for all to see. A historical marker stands on the lawn of the Perry County courthouse.
"Jimmie Lee Jackson, Voting Rights Martyr," it reads on one side.
"Jackson's Death Led To 'Bloody Sunday' March," the other side says.
Across the street, at the Zion United Methodist Church, Jackson's face is engraved on another memorial plaque. These permanent markers represent his enduring legacy.
“He was the first martyr of the voting rights movement,” said Albert Turner Jr., a Perry County commissioner. “Anytime (Black people) go to the polls and have a right to exercise their vote, it’s because of what happened in this little town of Marion.”
Ironically, Jackson and Marion have been overshadowed by the very march his death inspired.
One key reason Selma has long obscured Marion is because there was no video footage to capture the violence that occurred the night Jackson was shot. The police chief banned photographers and reporters from using lights or flashbulbs.
"There's no footage of that night," Turner said. "They intentionally shot out all the lights. They intentionally destroyed every camera of news media that was there."
The reporters and photographers present the night of Jackson’s shooting were harassed and beaten for trying to do their jobs. One NBC reporter was hospitalized after being struck in the head with a nightstick, according to FBI reports. Another reporter from United Press International received a blow to the back of the head and was hit five times in the face after taking two flash pictures with his camera.
Jackson had two funerals: one in Selma, and one in Marion. Thousands of people attended both services. But at his funeral in his hometown on March 3, 1965, Jackson's place in history would be spelled out clearly by the preeminent leader of the civil rights movement.
Speaking from a lectern just a few feet away from Jackson's casket, King called Jackson "a martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity."
A crowd of hundreds of people, stretched along an Alabama highway, walked 3 miles in the rain to bury Jackson.
Black people were angry. Many of the Black farmers in Marion wanted to arm themselves and turn to violence, said Lafayette, one of activists working in Selma. In fact, civil rights leaders canceled a march in Marion after Jackson’s death because they feared it wouldn’t be peaceful.
“They didn’t think our nonviolent approach worked after seeing what happened to Jimmie,” Lafayette said. “We feared they would come to the march with their guns, and that could have been ugly.”
But Jackson's death galvanized hundreds more people to become active participants in the movement. Some people wanted to march from Marion to the state capital, Montgomery, and lay Jackson’s body on the capitol steps for segregationist Gov. George Wallace to see. Leaders eventually abandoned that plan and settled on a march, without Jackson’s body, from Selma to Montgomery.
On March 7, little more than a week after Jackson died, about 600 demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma until they reached the steel-arched Edmund Pettus Bridge that stretched across the Alabama River.
Led by Lewis and Hosea Williams, a civil rights activist who was there in place of King, demonstrators were met with brutal force from state troopers and local police. They were attacked with clubs and tear-gassed by officers wearing helmets and gas masks.
The video footage and images from that day shocked the country and led to the passage of a landmark federal law, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination at the voting booth.
Bloody Sunday secured Selma's place in the civil rights movement. But it also overshadowed the brutality in Marion that claimed Jackson's life.
“Everyone saw what happened on that bridge,” Turner said. “No one saw what happened to Jimmie and what happened in Marion. Out of sight, out of mind.”
From the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter
AFTER A WHILE, they all began to blur together. Michael Jackson, 57, can't recall the names, just a few hazy details surrounding their deaths. The name of the Black man who was shot in his back by a police officer escapes him. The young man who was shot while carrying a cellphone, too.
Michael Jackson's recollection may be overwhelmed by the onslaught of police violence, but every time he hears about a Black man killed by law enforcement, it stirs up memories of one person.
"Every time I see this across the country, I do think of Jimmie Lee Jackson," said Michael Jackson. The men are not related.
For decades, no one could prove who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson. The FBI files had been sealed. Then in 2004, Fowler admitted to a reporter from the Anniston (Alabama) Star that he was the shooter. Michael Jackson, who was just elected as the state's second African American district attorney, led the charge to prosecute Fowler.
At age 77, Fowler pleaded guilty to misdemeanor manslaughter but insisted that he acted in self-defense. Fowler, who told a reporter in 2005 that "Black people fared better when they stayed in their place," was sentenced to six months in state prison.
"To think that Jimmie Lee was killed almost 60 years ago, and here we are today still talking about the same thing," Michael Jackson said.
Watching the uprising after Floyd's death crystallized the parallels with the civil rights movement, said Margaret Burnham, a professor of law and Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Project director.
"What Jimmie Lee Jackson's death did was it galvanized and catapulted an already organized national community around civil rights to come out and say no more and push even harder for voting rights," she said.
"In that sense, it's similar to what occurred after George Floyd's death in May of 2020," she said, where an already organized community was able to take members' concerns to a higher national and global level because of the spotlight the incident shone on Minneapolis.
"Both the Jimmie Lee killing and the George Floyd killing were sparks in a dry forest."
Today, because Black people are able to vote freely, they hold esteemed political offices that were unimaginable decades ago, said Michael Jackson.
"There is no me, no (Barack) Obama or Vice President (Kamala) Harris without Jimmie," Michael Jackson said.
Selma's symbolic role in the civil rights movement is set in stone. But the complete story of how Black people earned equal voting rights can't be authored without Jimmie Lee Jackson and what transpired in Marion the night he was shot.
In many ways, the legacy of Selma stands on the shoulders of Marion.
"I don't care how many times you holler Selma," Turner said, sitting in his Perry County Courthouse office, which is across the street from where Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot.
"You got to ask yourself, what are y'all doing down there on the bridge? Why are you crossing the bridge?
"Selma has its part in it. But you have to go back to the beginning of the book. If you don't read the beginning of the book, you can't get the full story. The reason that they were marching on Bloody Sunday was because of what happened here."
Billionaire Jeff Bezos. (photo: David Ryder/Getty Images)
DC Attorney General Sues Amazon on Antitrust Grounds, Alleges It Illegally Raises Prices
Lauren Feiner and Annie Palmer, CNBC News
Excerpt: "Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine announced Tuesday he's suing Amazon on antitrust grounds, alleging the company's practices have unfairly raised prices for consumers and suppressed innovation."
ashington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine announced Tuesday he’s suing Amazon on antitrust grounds, alleging the company’s practices have unfairly raised prices for consumers and suppressed innovation.
Racine is seeking to end what he alleges is Amazon’s illegal use of price agreements to edge out competition; the lawsuit also asks for damages and penalties to deter similar conduct. The suit asks the court to stop what it calls Amazon’s ability to harm competition through a variety of remedies as needed, which could include structural relief, often referred to as a form of breakup.
Shares of Amazon barely moved on the announcement, down 1% as of Tuesday afternoon.
The lawsuit, filed in D.C. Superior Court, alleges Amazon illegally maintained monopoly power by using contract provisions to prevent third-party sellers on its platform from offering their products for lower prices on other platforms. The attorney general’s office claimed the contracts create “an artificially high price floor across the online retail marketplace,” according to a press release. The AG claimed these agreements ultimately harm both consumers and third-party sellers by reducing competition, innovation and choice.
Amazon requires third-party sellers who want to do business on the online marketplace to abide by its business solutions agreement. Until 2019, Amazon included a clause in that document, referred to as a “price parity provision,” which prohibited sellers from offering their products on a competitor’s online marketplace at a lower price than what their products sold for on Amazon.
Amazon quietly removed that provision in March 2019 amid growing antitrust scrutiny.
According to the complaint, even after Amazon removed the pricing parity provision from its agreement with third-party sellers, it added a nearly identical clause, referred to as its “fair pricing policy.” The fair pricing policy enables Amazon to “impose sanctions” on a seller that offers their product for a lower price on a competing online marketplace.
In an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “The Exchange,” Racine said Amazon pulled a “bait and switch” with the pricing clauses in response to pressure from Congress.
An Amazon spokesperson said Tuesday in a statement: “The DC Attorney General has it exactly backwards — sellers set their own prices for the products they offer in our store. Amazon takes pride in the fact that we offer low prices across the broadest selection, and like any store we reserve the right not to highlight offers to customers that are not priced competitively. The relief the AG seeks would force Amazon to feature higher prices to customers, oddly going against core objectives of antitrust law.”
Amazon’s pricing agreements were also a topic of scrutiny in the House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust’s sweeping 400-plus-page report, issued last fall. Lawmakers agreed that Amazon uses its dominant position in e-commerce as leverage with third-party sellers to require they adhere to “most favored nation” clauses.
Racine said his lawsuit zeroes in on the MFN clauses because he saw them as “a clear policy that results in higher prices to third-party sellers.”
“We know that those clauses are disfavored in law, particularly when a company like Amazon has monopoly power,” Racine said. “And we know that in the past, Amazon has been criticized for those types of clauses.”
The lawsuit comes months after federal and state enforcers filed antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook.
Both of those lawsuits involved large coalitions of states banding together, but Tuesday’s action comes from Racine’s office alone.
Racine said on a call with reporters Tuesday that the MFN topic was one he felt his office could take on on its own. It’s common for states to work together or with federal enforcers on antitrust claims, especially on those involving well-resourced companies, due to the sheer amount of work involved in bringing such suits. But Racine said the MFN issue is “sufficiently discrete” that his office could take it on alone.
Still, he didn’t rule out the possibility of other states or federal enforcers getting involved, saying it’s common for others to join or bring their own claims once one state files a lawsuit. But he did not indicate any knowledge of such plans.
Amazon’s third-party marketplace, made up of millions of merchants, has become a critical part of Amazon’s e-commerce business. The marketplace now accounts for more than half of Amazon’s overall sales.
Israeli security forces rush into the Aqsa mosque compound on May 21, 2021. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)
Israeli Police Target Palestinian Journalists at Al Aqsa Mosque
Oren Ziv, The Intercept
Ziv writes: "Journalists at the Jerusalem holy site documented police arbitrarily denying access, delivering beatings, and firing on reporters with rubber-coated bullets."
n May 7, as tensions mounted in Jerusalem, a Palestinian photojournalist at Al Aqsa Mosque, in the Old City, trained his video camera on an Israeli police officer. The police had begun their incursions into the site as protests against evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem were growing. The Palestinian journalist at Al Aqsa filmed as the police officer yelled a threat — “One more time and I’ll break your cameras — get out!” — then lunged, causing the journalist to drop their camera.
In another video, police are seen attacking another Palestinian journalist, even as the reporter is telling them that he has authorization to be at the compound. And last Friday, police beat Ahmad Gharabli, a Palestinian photojournalist with Agence France-Presse, with a baton.
“I arrived to cover the Friday prayers at the mosque, as usual,” said Gharabli, a veteran, award-winning photojournalist. “One police officer started beating me with a baton, even though I had identified myself as a journalist. I kept filming throughout his assault. He beat me with the baton eight times, on my knee and legs. Another officer pressed the barrel of his rifle into my back.” The attack was intense enough that the following day Gharabli underwent a medical exam; there were no fractures, but his legs remain dotted with bruises.
Gharabli and the other journalists are far from alone. While Israeli and international members of the press have also been attacked, Palestinian journalists have been targeted disproportionately: At least 15 journalists have been wounded by Israeli forces since the beginning of May, of whom 13 are Palestinian. Along with other restrictions imposed by Israeli authorities, the attacks, say press advocates, hamper press freedoms in what has become a major flashpoint for violence surrounding Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Over the past month, as Palestinians continued protesting the imminent expulsion of Palestinian families from Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, police assaults on journalists have increased, according to the Union of Journalists in Israel.
“Lately, we have witnessed a worrying increase in the number and frequency of violent attacks against the press, both by security forces and citizens,” the union said in a statement. “Journalists and photographers who are sent by their newsrooms to cover events are finding themselves to be a direct target of violence, often to the point of physical attacks. We demand Israeli police to ensure the safety of journalists, and to give clear orders to officers at the scene to allow all media teams to do their jobs and ensure the freedom of the press.”
The Aqsa compound has long been recognized as a tinderbox in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also known as Haram al-Sharif, it is the third holiest site in Islam. According to a status quo agreement, non-Muslims can visit the site, which is under Muslim administration, but cannot pray there. Increasingly, the status quo is under threat: Right-wing Jewish Israelis have been making sometimes state-backed encroachments on the site, which is considered the holiest in Judaism because it is where both ancient holy temples stood.
Tensions were already high when an Israeli raid of Al Aqsa stirred up mass unrest in Jerusalem. Journalists who set out to cover the Aqsa compound complain of increased brutality inside the compound’s walls. Several Palestinian journalists I spoke to said they had been harassed or attacked at Damascus Gate, a famed entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, or amid Sheikh Jarrah itself, but that the attacks were most intense inside the Aqsa compound, away from international observers and foreign press.
“Why are they not letting us do our job?” said Faiz Abu Rmeleh, a Palestinian photographer with the Turkish Anadolu Agency. “We are documenting their actions, and they are afraid of that. In Al Aqsa, police feel emboldened to use more force.” He added, “They do not want any photos to come out. Outside, you can speak with the police chief, but when police are inside Al Aqsa, you cannot talk to anyone. Nothing helps. They are like robots — only shoving and beating.”
The Aqsa mosque compound is supposed to be considered a public space of religious importance. A “waqf,” or Islamic trust, manages the site, with Israel conducting external security by agreement.
Palestinian journalists I spoke to complained of capricious decisions by Israeli police controlling access through the gates. Israeli police have repeatedly prevented journalists from entering with cameras. A police source said that this prohibition was meant to “avoid provocations,” though it is unclear what the legal basis for this is. Because of the restrictions, journalists sometimes cannot enter the compound with flak jackets and helmets, as is customary. Other times, however, police seem to allow journalists to enter the compound with all their equipment.
Responding to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the Israeli police said security forces work to ensure public safety while allowing for freedom of the press. “Over the past few weeks, Israeli police have been acting with reinforcements across the country to prevent incidents of violence and disruptions of law and order, to ensure the security and safety of the public and to allow the press to cover events freely, despite the complexity with which police and journalists have to deal with at these events,” the spokesperson said. “Accordingly, every complaint filed with police that raises suspicion of unlawful conduct is investigated professionally and thoroughly with the goal of uncovering the truth and convicting those involved.”
Palestinian journalists at the compound, though, feel targeted just for being there. Abu Rmeleh, the Anadolu photojournalist, said he was attacked by police three times this month at the compound. “In a single night, 10 journalists were assaulted by Israeli police,” he said. “This shows that this isn’t a problem with where the journalist was standing or what they were doing, but that this is a police policy.” (Abu Rmeleh is a colleague of mine at Activestills, a collective of Palestinian and Israeli photojournalists.)
That night, the evening of May 7, police mostly wounded Palestinian journalists by firing rubber-coated bullets, including at Abu Rmeleh. “I was far away from the police officers, who had taken over the entire area, and there weren’t any protesters throwing stones,” he said. “When the officers shot my leg, I was with three other photographers. They didn’t fire at someone else and hit me by accident. We were carrying our cameras, and it was clear that we were journalists.”
Asked about the May 7 attack, the police spokesperson cited unrest around the mosque and said the security forces were trying to restore order to ensure both religious and press freedom. “Many of the rioters at the scene were holding cameras and documenting police, in an attempt to create a journalistic façade that would seemingly allow them to move freely, but unfortunately this act was abused more than once to interfere with and harm police,” the spokesperson said. “Regarding allegations of unlawful use of force, these should be investigated and dealt with by the designated authorities.”
Three days later, on May 10, when Jewish Israelis marked Jerusalem Day, celebrating Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in 1967’s Six-Day War, police officers again assaulted Abu Rmeleh, this time beating him along with another Palestinian journalist. “Police had raided the medical clinic” at the Aqsa compound, Abu Rmeleh said. “There were lots of wounded worshippers there. When we got close, the officers were just leaving. ‘You are in my way,’ one of them told me as he began beating me. ‘I’m a journalist,’ I replied, and showed him my press badge, but it did not help.” The assault stopped only when another police officer, who recognized the two journalists, came over and ushered them away.
Abu Rmeleh was assaulted by police again last Friday, at the same event where Gharabli was attacked. “They pushed me, and one officer told me, ‘I will arrest you’ when I was filming Gharabli,” he said, referring to a video he was taking of the attack on his colleague. “The officer asked me: ‘Did you film this?’ I said: ‘Yes, I’m a journalist’ — and that’s when he threatened to arrest me.”
For Abu Rmeleh, the treatment hasn’t stopped him from pushing to do his job. “They act with impunity and think it will deter us from showing up to document,” he said. “But it doesn’t. On the contrary.”
Demonstrators clash with riot police at Portal De Las Americas in Bogotá on May 22, 2021. (photo: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images)
Colombia's Ruling Class Is Getting Desperate
Hasan Dodwell and Nick MacWilliam, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The latest round of protests against Colombia's right-wing government has seen a brutal crackdown, leading to at least 43 deaths. But the mass movement against neoliberalism and state violence is only growing stronger."
n April 28, Colombian trade unions and social movements staged a new round of paro nacional (national strike) protests, the latest in an ongoing series of mobilizations to address the litany of problems impacting Colombian society.
Opposition to a planned tax reform — which strike organizers said would unfairly target the middle and working classes in what is one of Latin America’s most unequal countries — was the central issue, particularly in the context of the global pandemic, which has pushed an estimated five million Colombians out of work. Calls to repeal the tax reform were aligned with longer-running demands around growing poverty levels, addressing the human rights crisis affecting much of the country, and properly advancing the implementation of the 2016 peace agreement.
Since the national strike movement was launched in November 2019, protesters have become accustomed to the police crackdowns of President Iván Duque’s right-wing administration. Yet, even by recent standards, the spread and duration of the violence unleashed since April 28 has been extreme. For over three weeks of daily protests across Colombia, Colombian security forces — especially the notorious riot police unit, the Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (ESMAD) — have committed massive human rights violations as Duque’s government seeks to suppress anger toward his government.
As befits the camera phone era, social media has told the story of Colombia’s social revolt. Thousands of images and videos have spread virtually, with several standing out for their exhibitions of social unity or poignant solidarity: mothers bearing improvised shields join youthful protesters on the front line to face off against militarized police; statues of colonizers are toppled and replaced with the likenesses of victims of state violence; music, art, and dance energize crowds whose voices rise as one to demand a fairer Colombia.
While the official organization of the national strike movement comes from trade unions together with peasant, indigenous, and other established social organizations, the protests have been characterized by the mobilization of young Colombians from poor urban neighborhoods. In cities across the country, most notably in Cali, this new generation of political protesters have become the so-called front line resisting ever-increasing levels of police brutality.
Social media has also exposed the horrific violence inflicted on protesters by security forces. In one harrowing video, as four ESMAD agents drag her into a police station in Popayán, seventeen-year-old Alison Meléndez shouts that they are removing her trousers. The next day, after reporting they had sexually assaulted her, she took her life. Footage filmed in the town of Madrid in Cundinamarca shows a tear gas canister fired at protesters from an armored police vehicle. The projectile hit twenty-four-year-old Brayan Niño in the face, killing him despite the efforts of those around him.
By May 18, Colombian human rights organizations had registered security forces’ apparent responsibility for more than 2,300 acts of violence, 43 killings (including four minors), 18 sexual assaults, and 30 cases of eye injuries. Men in plain clothes have been filmed firing at protesters as uniformed police officers stand alongside them and do nothing, particularly alarming given Colombia’s long history of state collusion with paramilitary terror.
There has been widespread international condemnation of the Colombian government’s response to the protests. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it had witnessed the use of “excessive force,” while the US Embassy in Bogotá called for “restraint” from Colombian police to avoid “additional loss of life.”
Fifty-five members of US Congress signed a letter calling the human rights situation “out of control,” while British and Irish trade unions demanded justice for victims of police violence. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has requested permission from the Colombian government to investigate abuses. For its part, the British government, which has training programs with the Colombian police, has not directly criticized the state violence.
Opposition to the planned tax reform comes at a time when more than five million people are estimated to have lost their main source of income due to the global pandemic and poverty levels increasing to over 40 percent. Coronavirus has particularly impacted the many Colombians eking out a living in the large informal sector, which accounts for roughly half of the labor force in roles such as transport workers, domestic staff, and street vendors.
National lockdowns, coupled with an absence of state support, pushed many Colombians into even deeper conditions of precarity. Although Duque repealed the tax reform after five days of intense unrest, it was far too late. His government had spilled too much blood.
In the midst of the killings and brutal violence being carried out by state agents, far from calling for the abuses to come to an end, government officials repeatedly issued stigmatizing statements against the protesters. On May 3, defense minister Diego Molano said, “Colombia faces the terrorist threat of criminal organizations,” while vice president Martha Ramírez implied that Indigenous organizations were funded by illegal drug money.
The use of smears to delegitimize popular movements is by no means a new tactic — trade unionists and activists have long been labelled “guerrillas” or “terrorists.” During the recent weeks, however, and in the context of a peace agreement now signed with the country’s largest and oldest guerrilla organization, the attempts to stigmatize appear to have largely strengthened the resolve of the protesters.
Anger over economic injustice sits alongside major concern for human rights and peace. The 2016 peace agreement brought the curtain down on decades of armed conflict between the Colombian state and the FARC. The peace process has seen important advances, such as the FARC’s reformation as a political party and the development of an internationally acclaimed transitional justice system that has begun investigating crimes committed during the conflict.
In one of its most significant findings so far, it found that between 2002 and 2008 — during the government of former president Álvaro Uribe — the Colombian military murdered 6,402 civilians and falsely presented them as guerrillas killed in combat.
Since its inception, however, the Colombian right has made efforts to undermine the peace process. Indeed, Uribe, who continues to wield significant political power and whose support for Duque was fundamental to his successful presidential campaign, has been the lead voice in that opposition.
Duque’s electoral campaign was based on antagonism to the peace agreement and a promise to make fundamental changes. Since 2018, when Duque was elected, Colombia has depended on a political movement hostile to the peace process. The protests have given voice to a major rejection of the ongoing influence of uribismo in Colombian politics and its attacks on human rights and peace.
Furthermore, since the agreement was signed, more than one thousand social activists and community leaders have been murdered across Colombia, with violence concentrated in regions historically impacted by conflict, structural poverty, and state abandonment. The FARC’s agreed withdrawal created power vacuums in areas the state has failed to secure. Paramilitaries and other illegal armed groups now vie to exert control over territories or illicit economies, targeting local leaders and displacing entire communities.
Additionally, more than 270 FARC former combatants have been murdered since putting down their weapons. The UN Verification Mission in Colombia warns that violence toward social activists and former combatants is the main threat to the peace process. The Duque government, however, has sought to downplay the human rights crisis and denies that killings reflect a systematic targeting of specific groups.
With elections scheduled in 2022, the protests could prove pivotal in determining who takes the presidency. The pro-peace movement enters electoral campaigning in a position of strength, but whether it will be able to successfully coalesce around a single candidate could prove decisive. Left candidate and 2018 runner-up Gustavo Petro currently leads the polls, and his supporters will be confident that the intensity of the protests reflects a widespread desire to fundamentally reshape Colombia’s social, political, and economic model.
The multitude of factors underpinning popular discontent in Colombia has now exploded to the fore. In meetings on May 10 and 16 with government officials, the National Strike Committee presented demands to resolve the crisis, including an immediate end to the violence. Human rights organizations have called for drastic police reform, which involves removing police jurisdiction from the Ministry of Defense and disbanding the ESMAD. However, with the Duque government still committing flagrant human rights abuses, there is little indication a resolution is close. The Colombian people have shown they do not plan to back down any time soon.
A giant slab of ice has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea. (photo: The Courier)
World's Largest Iceberg Breaks Off From Antarctica
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "A massive chunk of ice broke off of Antarctica this month, and it is now the largest iceberg in the world."
The iceberg, known as A-76, was first spotted by a British Antarctic Survey researcher May 13. It was then confirmed by the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC) the next day using images from the Sentinel-1A satellite.
"New giant #iceberg breaking away from the Ronne Ice Shelf," researcher Keith Makinson announced on Twitter.
The iceberg first broke off from the western edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf, which is located in Antarctica's Weddell Sea, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). It is 89 nautical miles long by 14 nautical miles wide, according to USNIC, and has an area of 1,668 square miles, according to Reuters. To put that in perspective, it is larger than both the Spanish island of Mallorca, at 1,405 square miles, and the state of Rhode Island, at 1,034 square miles. It is also almost six times larger than New York City, HuffPost calculated.
The iceberg's size makes it the largest in the world, according to the ESA. It dwarfs the A-23A iceberg, which is also floating in the Weddell Sea and is around 3,880 square kilometers (approximately 1,498 square miles).
While the iceberg is large in size, its calving isn't necessarily a big deal from a climate perspective. In fact, iceberg calving can be a natural part of an ice shelf's cycle, as long as the ice shelf gains as much mass through snowfall as it loses to icebergs.
"Even relatively large calving events, where tabular ice chunks the size of Manhattan or bigger calve from the seaward front of the shelf, can be considered normal if the ice sheet is in overall balance," NASA explained.
The Ronne Ice Shelf is the second largest in Antarctica, according to HuffPost. It and another ice shelf, the Ross Ice Shelf, have "behaved in a stable, quasi-periodic fashion" for the past 100 years or more, University of Colorado at Boulder research glaciologist Ted Scambos told Reuters.
He said he did not think the calving had anything to do with the climate crisis. However, some ice shelves near the Antarctic Peninsula are disintegrating rapidly, which may be because of rising temperatures, Reuters explained.
While A-76's calving is part of a natural cycle, that doesn't mean it wasn't surprising.
"We could watch them for years and they won't do anything and elsewhere there will be this perfectly solid ice shelf that will suddenly collapse unexpectedly," Christopher Readinger, the lead analyst for the USNIC's Antarctic team, told HuffPost.
The iceberg will now eventually melt and break into smaller pieces. It will not contribute to sea level rise, because the Ronne Ice Shelf was already floating on the ocean, Scambos told Reuters.
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