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The Defeat of Benjamin Netanyahu
Ruth Margalit, The New Yorker
Margalit writes: "Israel's longest-serving Prime Minister has dragged the country ever rightward, abandoning the peace process and imperiling its very democracy."
n 2002, three years after losing the Israeli premiership, Benjamin Netanyahu went on a popular television show and spoke of a political comeback. His interviewer was a telegenic broadcaster with gelled black hair named Yair Lapid. “When you left,” Lapid began, “there were people who cried and said they would kill themselves, and there were others who said they would leave the country if you were ever elected again. Do you know why you elicit such strong reactions in people?”
“In some, yes,” Netanyahu replied. He first took office in 1996, a year after a Jewish extremist assassinated the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for spearheading the Oslo Accords. A month before the assassination, Netanyahu took part in a demonstration, in Jerusalem, in which protesters chanted “Death to Rabin.” In his interview with Lapid, he allowed that he might have had a hand in the rising tensions, calling Rabin’s murder a “terrible trauma.” There was, in his answer then, a rare modicum of self-reflection that he would have done well to revisit in recent days, as similar forces of incitement and violence reëmerged.
At one point in their interview, Lapid asked Netanyahu, “Do you intend to be the next Prime Minister of Israel, yes or no?” “The answer is yes,” Netanyahu said. It took him years to position himself as the undisputed leader of an increasingly hawkish and nationalist Likud. A key moment came in 2005 when, while serving as finance minister in a government headed by Ariel Sharon, also of Likud, Netanyahu publicly quit his position over Sharon’s decision to pull Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip. By 2009, Sharon had suffered a major stroke, and his replacement, Ehud Olmert, mired in corruption investigations, had announced that he was stepping down from the Prime Minister’s seat. After elections that year, Netanyahu returned to the premiership and felt immediate pressure from the Obama Administration to renew peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He did so reluctantly, at one point making a landmark speech in which he expressed support for a two-state solution. But his heart never seemed to be in it. With time, he turned his back on the issue and instead focussed inward, on perceived “enemies from within”: human-rights groups, N.G.O.s.
By whipping up populist rage against so-called Israeli élites—of which he was decidedly one—Netanyahu presided over an increasingly sectarian and divided country. He managed to cling to power for twelve years, becoming Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister. But four inconclusive election cycles in the past two years have led to political gridlock and increasing public fury. Last week, Lapid—by now a seasoned centrist politician with hair as white as Netanyahu’s—announced that he had managed to form a working coalition with Naftali Bennett, the pro-settler leader of a small ultranationalist party, and six other parties. On Sunday, this new government was set to be sworn in after a vote in parliament. Bennett, who was once Netanyahu’s chief of staff, will serve as Prime Minister, with Lapid set to replace him in 2023.
Their coalition is one of extremely unlikely allies. In many cases, they are united only by their disdain for Netanyahu. The group includes a nationalist party led by a Russian émigré; a hawkish new right-wing party; two decidedly left-wing parties, respectively headed by a woman and an openly gay man; and, for the first time ever in an Israeli coalition, an Arab party. To form what is known in Israel as the “change government” required a leap of faith on the part of all the party leaders. It also meant that Bennett broke his campaign promise that he would not strike a deal to form a unity government with Lapid, or participate in the establishment of a government headed by him. And so, Bennett, who will serve as Israel’s first religious, kippa-wearing Prime Minister, has become something of a pariah among the ultra-Orthodox, who have had representation in most coalitions since the late nineteen-seventies. In response, a flyer began to circulate in right-wing circles depicting a Photoshopped Bennett in an Arab kaffiyeh, with the words “The Liar” written above—an image eerily reminiscent of doctored posters of Rabin in the days leading up to his murder.
Despite his earlier reflections on Rabin, Netanyahu has fuelled many of the threats against the incoming coalition members. Anshel Pfeffer, the author of “Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu,” told me, “He can’t accept the fact that the Israeli public has turned him down, and he personally believes that without him Israel is destined for disaster.” In a Facebook post on June 4th, Netanyahu railed against homespun “spies”—a thinly veiled attack against Bennett and another lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, who, like Bennett, had served as his close aide. A day later, Israel’s head of internal security services issued a stern and extraordinary warning against inciting political violence. He did not mention Netanyahu by name, but the implication was clear. A day after the warning, Netanyahu went on the airwaves and called Arab politicians serving in the new government “supporters of terrorism.” Several right-wing lawmakers have now received a security detail as protesters made death threats against them and their families for joining the new government. Olmert, who served as Prime Minister from 2006 to 2009, told me, “The division of Israeli society, the fact that rabbis, acting on Bibi’s orders, are calling Knesset members traitors, the incitement against Arabs—that’s a situation I don’t recall ever happening in the history of Israel.”
For all of Netanyahu’s dismissal of the new coalition, it was formed as a direct result of his governance. Under a government that delegitimized any form of dissent, traditional concepts of left and right have become somewhat meaningless. Lapid himself hinted at these changing political terms when I interviewed him back in 2018. When I pointed out the apparent paradox between his growing popularity in Israel and the country’s right-leaning turn, he did not see a contradiction. “When people ask about my party, I say that we’re a national-liberal party,” he said. “That defines us much more than left, right, or center.” He went on, adding, “The real political fight is between populists and responsible leaders.”
That Netanyahu and his supporters have taken to branding hard-right politicians in treasonous terms once reserved for peacenik leaders shows the rightward drift of Israeli politics under his governance. It also exposes the extent to which fealty to him has become synonymous with fealty to the country. During his years in power, Netanyahu oversaw a flourishing economy, led by a booming high-tech sector, and made Israel a world leader in coronavirus vaccinations—two unequivocal accomplishments. (It is worth pointing out the rising levels of inequality as a consequence of the former, and the country’s robust socialized health system as a key factor in terms of the latter.) But by consolidating a right-wing majority—and using it to incite a backlash against entire segments of the public and to attack the legitimacy and independence of democratic institutions, chief among them the judiciary and the press—he has done damage to Israeli democracy that may be long-lasting. Netanyahu “created three Jewish peoples in a single country—one in the territories and two, traitors and rightists, inside Israel,” Zvi Bar’el, a columnist for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote last week. The country’s political culture has become one that virtually excludes its Arab citizens, who comprise an estimated twenty per cent of the population. This became evident with the passing, in 2018, of a law enshrining Israel’s status as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”—not one of all its citizens.
Yet perhaps nothing has been more momentous than Netanyahu’s abandonment of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. For years, Israeli leaders spoke of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as a temporary reality, an uncomfortable step on the path toward a two-state solution. Netanyahu has not only stopped talking that way but, under his rule, Jewish settlements in the West Bank have flourished: there are now nearly half a million settlers living there, not including East Jerusalem, according to some estimates—roughly three times the number when Netanyahu first took office. This reality makes drawing a contiguous Palestinian state extremely difficult. With Israel’s recent signing of normalization agreements with countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco, Arab countries no longer demand an independent Palestinian state as a precondition for diplomatic ties with Israel. Because of Netanyahu, “The vision of a two-state solution is clinically dead,” Aida Touma-Sliman, a lawmaker from the Joint List alliance of predominantly Arab parties, told me this week. “If you measure a politician by their ability to implement a vision, he succeeded—and that’s what makes him so dangerous.”
With Netanyahu’s refusal to halt settlement construction in the West Bank and his open defiance of U.S. calls to revive peace talks—warning against “a peace based on illusions”—his relationship with Obama quickly soured. It reached a nadir in 2015, with Netanyahu’s increasingly desperate maneuvering against a nuclear agreement with Iran. That year, as Netanyahu warned the United States Congress that the deal being negotiated under Obama to curb Iran’s nuclear program was a “very bad” one, Netanyahu became the first foreign leader in recent memory to speak in front of a U.S. legislative body against the wishes and in opposition to the policies of a sitting President. In this, and in his subsequent embrace of Donald Trump, Netanyahu discarded Israel’s tradition of bipartisanship in its dealings with the United States. Netanyahu speaks English “with a Republican accent,” as the saying goes in Israel. Such realignment with the Republican Party could be a lasting damage of the Netanyahu years for Israel, as elements within the Democratic Party have, in the intervening years, begun to question their party’s long-standing support for the country and its military. Yet most Israelis believed Netanyahu’s rhetoric that the Iran nuclear deal endangered Israel—even as Iran has, since Trump pulled out of the accord, stockpiled twelve times more enriched uranium than the terms of the agreement permitted. Dan Meridor, a former minister of intelligence and atomic energy in Likud, told me, “In the public consciousness, Bibi has stopped Iran’s nuclear enrichment, whereas in reality it’s the opposite.”
On both the occupied territories and Iran, the new government is unlikely to sway much from Netanyahu’s positions. Bennett has talked openly about annexing much of the West Bank—a step even Netanyahu was hesitant to take. He has also been a vocal critic of the Iran nuclear agreement. (Lapid’s views are more nuanced: he initially opposed the agreement but later said that it was a mistake for the U.S. to exit it unilaterally.) Instead, the new government is most likely to diverge from Netanyahu’s by attempting to re-instill trust in Israel’s leading institutions. Since 2019, Netanyahu has served as Prime Minister while also being under indictment for breach of trust, accepting bribes, and committing fraud. One of the cases against him concerns allegations, which he denies, that he sought favorable coverage from the married main shareholders of a company that owns a leading news site in Israel, in exchange for giving the couple regulatory benefits. His trial, which began last year, has tainted key government appointments with the suggestion of conflict of interest, as some worry Netanyahu could try influencing them to affect the proceedings. Last year, just as his trial opened, Netanyahu named one of his most loyal lieutenants to the ministry of public security, which oversees the police. The incoming coalition will be free of such conflicts. It can move quickly by appointing nonpartisan professionals to agencies that had until now been filled with Netanyahu cronies. As Amnon Abramovich, a commentator for Channel 12, told me, “This government will be measured not so much by what it does as by what it prevents.”
Where does this leave Bibi? By all indications, Netanyahu will start out as an aggressive leader of the opposition, in the hopes that the new government will falter quickly. According to reports, the coalition agreement states that the government will collapse unless it can pass a budget in its first hundred days. Already, Netanyahu’s Cabinet has postponed to next week a contentious nationalist parade through the streets of Jerusalem’s Old City—a move seen by the incoming government as intended to stir tensions with the Muslim population. If the coalition manages to hold and to pass a budget, Netanyahu may well feel the urge to take advantage of the perks of private life. “He’ll go on a long lecture tour and the temptation to get into that style where his rich friends are paying for him the whole time and he gets six figures for speaking gigs will be massive,” Pfeffer, Netanyahu’s unofficial biographer, said. In order to enjoy that, however, Netanyahu may first have to resign from parliament, a move that could hinder his chances of another political comeback. And that—as almost everyone I spoke to believes—is already on his mind.
A Trump supporter holds a 'Stop the Steal' sign in Denver, Colorado, on 6 January. (photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
How Republicans Came to Embrace the Big Lie of a Stolen Election
Sam Levine, Guardian UK
Levine writes: "The way Republicans have pushed the myth marks a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections, experts say."
ust a few days after the polls closed in Florida’s 2018 general election, Rick Scott, then the state’s governor, held a press conference outside the governor’s mansion and made a stunning accusation.
Scott was running for a US Senate seat, and as more votes were counted, his lead was dwindling. Targeting two of the state’s most Democratic-leaning counties, Scott said there was “rampant fraud”.
“Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening. Their goal is to mysteriously keep finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want,” he said, directing the state’s law enforcement agency to investigate. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.”
Scott eventually won the election, and his comments eventually faded. But the episode offered an alarming glimpse of the direction the Republican party was turning.
A little over two years later, fanned repeatedly by Donald Trump throughout 2020, the myth of a stolen American election has shifted from a fringe idea to one being embraced by the Republican party. The so-called big lie – the idea that the election was stolen from Trump - has transformed from a tactical strategy to a guiding ideology.
For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.
Supporting the idea of a stolen election has become a new kind of litmus test for Republican officeholders.
Republican election officials in Georgia and Nevada who have stood up for the integrity of the 2020 election results have been denounced by fellow Republicans. Republican lawmakers across the US have made pilgrimages to visit and champion an unprecedented inquiry into ballots in Arizona, which experts see as a thinly veiled effort to undermine confidence in the election. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans in the US House voted to overturn the results of the November election absent any evidence of voter fraud and after government officials said the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history”.
“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.
The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.
“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”
The effort to undermine the election results appears to be working. A majority of Republicans, and a quarter of all Americans, believe Trump is the “true president”, according to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll. Sixty-one per cent of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump, the same poll showed.
Rohn Bishop, the chairman of the local Republican party in Fond du Lac county in Wisconsin, said it was damaging to have such widespread uncertainty about the results of elections and was generally supportive of efforts to restore confidence. But he noted his dismay that Republicans continued to push lies about the election. He noted that the Republican party of Waukesha county, a bastion of GOP voters, recently hosted a screening of a film backed by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and prominent election conspiracist, that pushed false claims of fraud.
“We need to win back those suburban Republican voters that Waukesha county used to turn out, not keep poking them in the eye by forcing down their throat more of this election stuff, Trump stuff they don’t want to hear,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for Republican elected officials to tell the base the truth. That would help.”
Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian who studies elections, noted that there was a long history in America of using fraud as an excuse to push back on gains in enfranchisement among Black and other minority voters. White voters are becoming a smaller share of the US electorate, data shows. “There are definitely echoes of this now,” he said. “There has always been an inclination to see new voters of different ethnicities or appearance as agents, or unwitting agents of fraud.”
Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican operative in Florida who is now retired, said the lies about the election provided a kind of cover for those unable to concede they were a shrinking minority in the population.
“In the past, party elders, party leaders … exploited the crazies in order to win elections and then largely ignored them after the elections,” he said. “What has happened since then is that Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. He not only let them out, he affirmed them and provoked them. And so now they’re running wild and they are legitimatizing these delusions.”
While there have been other nastily contested elections in US history – President Rutherford B Hayes was labeled “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency” after the contested election in 1876 – both Keyssar and Foley said it was difficult to find a comparison to what was happening now.
“We’ve never had that. We’ve never had McCarthyism-style fabrication of a conspiracy theory applied to the process of counting votes … I would say it’s especially dangerous when it’s the electoral process,” Foley said. “Because it’s the electoral process that ultimately allows for self-government. When the mechanisms of self-government kind of get taken over by a kind of McCarthyism, that’s very troubling.”
Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
Apple Is Said to Have Turned Over Data on Trump's White House Counsel in 2018
Michael S. Schmidt and Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Excerpt: "Apple told Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, last month that the Justice Department had subpoenaed information about an account that belonged to him in February 2018, and that the government barred the company from telling him at the time, according to two people briefed on the matter."
Mr. McGahn’s wife received a similar notice from Apple, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were scrutinizing, nor whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus. In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.
Young unaccompanied migrants wait for their turn for processing inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility. (photo: Dario Lopez-Mills/AP)
Shocking Video Shows Officer Tasering Teenage Refugee From Honduras at Children's Shelter in Texas
AUTHORFOUR
he Biden administration has vowed to take a compassionate approach to migrants and asylum seekers who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border after fleeing violence, poverty and persecution. But Vice President Harris drew outrage Monday when she told them, quote, “not to come” during a news conference on her trip to Guatemala to address to root causes of migration. Harris has also come under fire for not yet visiting the U.S.-Mexico border. She was questioned Tuesday by NBC News anchor Lester Holt.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: So, this whole — this whole — this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.
LESTER HOLT: You haven’t been to the border.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: And I haven’t been to Europe. And, I mean, I don’t — I don’t understand the point that you’re making.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a damning new investigation by Reveal examines what happens to migrant children who arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border and are placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR, and held in federally funded shelters.
Reveal found more than 80 children were turned over from these shelters to local law enforcement when they engaged in behavior common for kids, especially those who have been through trauma. Many were arrested for fighting, breaking property, or mental health crises.
In one case, Reveal tracked a boy who left Honduras to seek asylum in the U.S., who was in a shelter in San Antonio, Texas, when staff there called 911 to report he had broken some bins and bed frames. Bodycam footage obtained by Reveal shows a Bexar County sheriff deputy tasering the 16-year-old.
A warning: The video is disturbing, but the boy’s grandmother wants it to be seen, so Reveal published it, and we show part of it to you now. You can hear the deputy speaking English to the boy, who speaks Spanish. The boy is tying the drawstring on his pants when he’s tased for about 35 seconds straight.
DEPUTY PATRICK DIVERS: All right, ready? I’m going to tase this kid.
NARRATION: Divers spoke to the boy in English.
DEPUTY PATRICK DIVERS: Hey, step out of the way. Stand up!
NARRATION: Divers doesn’t tell the boy he’s under arrest.
DEPUTY PATRICK DIVERS: Turn around!
DEPUTY HAROLD SCHNEIDER: Turn around now!
CHILD: Aah! [translated] Stop!
NARRATION: Divers shocks the child for about 35 seconds.
CHILD: [translated] Where are you going to take me? Where are you going to take me? Tell me where you’re taking me!
DEPUTY HAROLD SCHNEIDER: El stupido.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s body-camera footage of a sheriff in San Antonio, Texas, tasering a boy held in a federally funded shelter. The child remains in custody now.
For more, we’re joined by Aura Bogado. She’s senior investigative reporter at Reveal, who has long covered immigration, including the conditions of detained migrant kids. Her new investigation with Laura C. Morel is headlined “’I’m going to tase this kid’: Government shelters are turning refugee children over to police.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Aura. Talk about this particular situation, where this boy is held. Supposedly, moving them from Custom and Border Patrol facilities to ORR is supposed to be more humane. But then they bring in the police, and they tase them?
AURA BOGADO: Right. A lot of people within the federal government will usually refer to ICE and Border Patrol as enforcement, and ORR, which really is an agency that should be a household name by now, those are more social workers.
And so, these are children, minors, you know, under the age of 18, who are put in shelters. They’re not accused of any crime, etc. And they’re supposed to be put there, under a federal consent decree, and be taken care of in the least restrictive kind of facility until they can be released without unnecessary delay. We found over and over again that a lot of children are kept beyond a few weeks or beyond a few months and are transferred around for different reasons.
We sued the government for the records regarding, you know, just basic facts about the treatment of children, how long they’re kept inside. We got about 300,000 records last year. And based on that, we started noticing that a lot of children were being discharged to law enforcement. And so we went, you know, locale by locale, and started asking for more records. We got a lot more records.
In this particularly egregious case, we saw, as the audience just saw, that a child was tased soon after shelter staff called 911. And the local sheriffs there, which is the Bexar County sheriffs, you know, one of the deputies deployed a Taser, speaking to the child in English although the child primarily speaks Spanish. And this is a child who’s also fleeing some pretty intense violence in Honduras. He is pretty scared to go back. We were able to confirm his identity and also track down his family. And as you mentioned, they did think that it was important for people here in the United States to see this and to know how some children are treated in custody.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Aura, in this particular case, you were also able to talk to someone — Julie Tamez, I believe — who was listed in the records as the child’s lead case manager. What did she tell you?
AURA BOGADO: Yes, it’s very rare to be able to speak with people who work in shelters that the government — really, that’s part of the operation. And some of that is understandable. You want to be able to protect the rights and privacy of children. But we just — we cold-called the shelter, the number that we had. I was able to speak with her for some while. And she expressed a lot of regret for what happened. She was very sorry. She wanted the family to know that she was sorry for what happened that day.
This was a very sort of different attitude than what we see later on in some of the video, where she’s sort of, you know, going back and forth and talking with the deputies, suggesting that the child may be a hit man, of which we have no evidence of. You know, she told us by phone that she didn’t mean to suggest that he was a killer, but that he had been placed somewhere where sometimes killers are placed. So, it was an interesting disclosure on her end.
But it’s rare to be able to speak with people who work in shelters, and even rarer to be able to see the inside of a shelter and see what these places are like. This isn’t exactly an unannounced visit from a legislator, but actual bodycam footage, and so we were able to sort of see the inside of the kinds of places that we do a lot to get information about and is often described to us either in records or by children who have been there in the past. In this rare case, we were able to sort of see the inside from this bodycam footage.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And some people might say, well, maybe this was a unique case of a law enforcement person gone rogue here. But you were able to find records that there’s been at least 19 police interventions with children. Could you talk about some — whether this is an unusual or outlier case or whether there’s a pattern?
AURA BOGADO: Well, we know that at least 84 children have been turned over from shelters to local law enforcement. We did a lot to try and get records from individual police departments, individual sheriff’s departments, and we were able to get 19 records, including the case of this child.
What we found, over and over and over again, is that children are charged with misdemeanors. We only found one felony charge in everything that we saw. That was a federal, I believe, assault charge — I’m sorry, a felony assault charge. And that was dismissed. So, over and over again, the cases are dismissed.
The idea that a child, particularly a refugee child, someone who is fleeing violence and is a minor and has special rights under international law and U.S. law, would then be subjected to arrest for something like fighting or, in this case, allegedly breaking some plastic bins and some bed frames, that seems highly unusual, I think, to anybody that either has kids or has — we’ve all been kids. You know, a lot of young people fight. That is not necessarily unusual for any population. And so, we see that while this may be really egregious in terms of the level of force that was used, these arrests themselves are not that uncommon.
And again, this is an agency that is funding these shelters with our money, with taxpayer money. And we can see that some of the treatment results in being handed over to a different agency, which is not a federal agency but a local law enforcement agency. Often kids are just sent back into the system, into a different shelter. But, unfortunately, this kind of arrest, even for a misdemeanor, breaking a plastic bin, can result in a negative effect on an individual immigration case.
AMY GOODMAN: And very briefly — I mean, this happened before the Biden administration came in. But you requested information from Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. ORR is run by HHS. He didn’t respond to your media requests. Can you talk about, for example, what happens with this boy and other kids? They can be moved from one of these shelters to another, and then, ultimately, when they age out, they’re deported?
AURA BOGADO: Yeah. You know, children are in this agency, as you said, until the age of 18. They then become adults and are often taken by ICE and put into adult detention and deported afterwards.
We did try, over and over and over again, to get not only comment from the department and from Secretary Becerra, but we also repeatedly said we were willing to share the video ahead of publication. This goes back to some while. And over and over again, the agency either stonewalled us or told us that they won’t comment because they don’t comment about anything to do with anonymous allegations.
Our investigation is not based on anonymous allegations. Our investigation is based on data from that very department, that we unfortunately had to litigate for, under federal information Records Act. And then the local information that we received was also legitimately obtained from individual law enforcement. There’s nothing anonymous here. These aren’t allegations.
We think also that the video speaks for itself, and there is a strong public interest in knowing what happened. And as a reporter, I feel that there is a strong public interest in this agency and Secretary Becerra responding for what happened here.
AMY GOODMAN: Aura Bogado, we want to thank you for being with us, senior investigative reporter at Reveal, co-author of the new article, which we’ll link to at democracynow.org, “’I’m going to tase this kid’: Government shelters are turning refugee children over to police.” Oh, and congratulations, Aura, for recently winning the Hillman Prize for web journalism.
Los Angeles citizens wait in line at a food bank. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Don't Just Send People Money During a Pandemic - Do It All the Time
Jim Pugh, In These Times
Pugh writes: "The evidence is in: Sending out direct cash payments has been a full-blown success - and we can't afford to stop."
t’s become almost a cliché in the politics of Washington, D.C.: Every time someone proposes expanding a social program or creating a new one, scores of politicians, lobbyists and so-called economic “experts” will pop up to tell you that it will cost too much and we can’t afford it. Somehow, money is never an issue when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations or increasing our military budget, but programs that support everyday people are just too damn expensive.
A new analysis from the University of Michigan on the impact of recent stimulus payments adds to a growing body of evidence that shows when it comes to direct cash assistance programs, cost is not a prohibitive issue. In fact, for social programs like these, we may be unable to afford not to do them.
According to the analysis, which looked at data from the Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, in the weeks following the stimulus check payments in December 2020 and March 2021, households across the country saw a significant decrease in their material hardship. American families reported increased food security, a greater ability to pay for household expenses and less anxiety. This effect was particularly pronounced in low-income households and households with children — in the six weeks following the passage of the December 2020 Covid relief bill, amongst families with children, the rate of not having enough to eat fell by 21% and the rate of having difficulty paying for household expenses fell by 24%. These rates dropped again by 23% and 31%, respectively, following the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March 2021.
These findings align with the results of a previous analysis in 2017 from the Roosevelt Institute which looked into various programs that provided direct, unconditional cash to individuals in the United States and Canada, such as the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend and the Eastern Band of Cherokees casino dividend program. Both of these analyses show the same dynamic: when people receive money with no strings attached, they spend it on the things they need, leading them to live healthier, less anxious lives.
While these outcomes are certainly beneficial for recipients in the immediate term, the broader implications of these changes are just as important. When people don’t have food or are living in poverty, it’s not just a burden on them — it’s a burden on all of society. These conditions are directly tied to poorer health outcomes, which puts a drain on our nation’s healthcare system. Poor people are more likely to turn to crime as a means of supporting themselves. Those in poverty may require continued support from our inadequate existing social welfare programs, relying on programs like food stamps, housing assistance and disability insurance to barely make ends meet.
The social implications of poverty are even more pronounced among children, where its impact on cognitive development and educational opportunities may alter their life trajectories. Living in a financially stable household and getting enough to eat could mean the difference between having opportunities later in life and getting trapped in a low-income job with no prospects for advancement.
When considering the aggregate impact of poverty on our society, the results are staggering. A 2018 analysis in the Social Work Research journal found that childhood poverty alone costs our society more than $1 trillion every year from a combination of lost productivity, increased health and crime costs, and increased costs as a result of childhood homelessness and maltreatment.
To accurately assess the cost of social programs, we should be comparing the required expenditures to the expected savings from poverty reduction. A good example is the recent expansion of the child tax credit — described as a “guaranteed income for families”—which is set to provide up to $300 per child per month for kids under the age of six and $250 per child per month for kids between six and seventeen starting in July. The Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation expects this expansion to cost $110 billion for the year, while the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities projects that the program will decrease child poverty by more than 40%. Well, 40% of $1 trillion is $400 billion, which means the savings from this expansion are over three times the amount spent.
There’s good reason to think that the latest round of stimulus checks will also yield positive long-term returns, as people teeter between regaining their financial footing and slipping into poverty. “This money is going towards all the bills that weren’t paid during the time we had to take off,” according to Sandy Lash, a single mother in Fort Wayne, Indiana who relied on the stimulus payments to make it through the pandemic. “Receiving these checks will enable [us] to make a difference and move up to where we don’t have to struggle anymore.”
This presents our society with a clear choice: Do we allow increasing poverty and financial precarity to continue to drain away our society’s resources? Or do we make the investment now to create a secure and productive population through programs providing direct cash to families? An immediate first step would be to make the expanded child tax credit, which is set to expire after this year, a permanent, ongoing program. Beyond that, establishing a full, national guaranteed income program that provides monthly payments to all Americans — such as the one proposed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib through her Automatic BOOST to Communities Act—could pay massive dividends down the road by fully eliminating material poverty in the United States.
It’s not hard to see which of these approaches is the more affordable one.
Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)
Colombia's Government Has Declared War on Protesters
Seth Wulsin, Jacobin
Wulsin writes: "After six weeks of massive protests against neoliberalism and state violence in Colombia, right-wing president Iván Duque is relying on brute force to stay in power."
ix weeks into Colombia’s general strike, protesters have won significant victories while bearing the brunt of a brutal crackdown by state and paramilitary forces. Five members of President Iván Duque’s cabinet have stepped down or been replaced. Duque withdrew his regressive tax bill that sparked the protests as well as a controversial health bill and the proposal to pay billions for Lockheed Martin war jets in the midst of the worst health and economic crises Colombia has faced in decades. A movement has consolidated with a clear focus on the government’s sabotaging of the peace accords with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and continued overseeing of massive inequality, which has become intolerable for large segments of the population.
Duque and his political party have shown their inability or unwillingness to respond to the protesters’ demands, which reflect Colombia’s corruption and neo-feudal inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. A third wave of the coronavirus claimed over fifteen thousand lives in May and kept ICUs at near 100 percent capacity in Colombia’s major cities. Security forces have catalyzed enormous shows of solidarity with the general strike through their vicious attacks on peaceful protesters.
More than forty demonstrators have been summarily executed by state and parastate armed forces, with Human Rights Watch receiving sixty-three credible reports of deaths during the protests, two of which were police. Human rights groups Temblores and Indepaz have reported more than 2,000 documented cases of police brutality, more than 1,600 arbitrary detentions, 25 confirmed sexual assaults, 65 eye injuries, and 346 forced disappearances of protesters since the general strike began, with Indigenous, Afro, and poor communities the primary targets of repression.
Miguel Ceballos was the high commissioner for peace and government representative in pre-negotiations with the National Strike Committee until he resigned on May 22. Ceballos was widely criticized in the human rights community for undermining the peace process on behalf of the government. President Duque named Juan Camilo Restrepo to replace Ceballos as peace commissioner. Restrepo was the president of Augura, a banana producer trade association, when it donated $33 million Colombian pesos to the campaign against the 2016 peace accords. Augura is known for direct support of paramilitary groups, and numerous board members are considered supporters or direct participants in paramilitary organizations operating in Antioquia.
The Duque administration has repeatedly sabotaged their own government’s pre-negotiations with the Strike Committee representing protesters, refusing to provide guarantees of basic rights to protesters while ramping up the militarized crackdown — the continuation of a long tradition in Colombia of responding to social mobilization with state and parastate repression.
Lucía González, a leading member of Colombia’s Truth Commission that was formed as part of the peace accords between the government and the FARC, put it bluntly in late May when she spoke of
a state that is anti-reform, that has criminalized every attempt to deepen democracy, whatever the form, eliminating union activists, human rights leaders, stigmatizing mobilizations, criminalizing the leaders of the mobilizations, with the goal of guaranteeing a status quo and avoiding any kind of reform that results from their demands. It is a state that protects the elites and the privileges of certain sectors against the rights of others. It is a state by the elites, for the elites.
Cali has been the epicenter of state and parastate violence since the beginning of the general strike. A May 23 report released by the organization Justicia y Paz on the situation in Cali describes a particularly horrifying iteration of González’s analysis: on May 2, Cali’s Center of Municipal Administration was used as a center of clandestine operations, and protesters were taken there and detained in basements before being transported elsewhere in trucks. The report described mass graves in two municipalities outside Cali, the Mulaló area of Yumbo and the Guacarí area of Buga, where bodies of disappeared protesters have allegedly been dumped from trucks used by police.
The reports from Buga describe executions of young protesters who were reported as disappeared. Some who survived the executions were later found in health centers with gunshot wounds, and are now in hiding and facing death threats.
The report also describes the formation of armed paramilitary groups under protection of police operating out of the upscale Ciudad Jardín district in Cali. Ciudad Jardín was the site of armed attacks by wealthy neighborhood residents, accompanied by police, on unarmed Indigenous marchers. During the May 9 attacks, at least eight participants in the march sustained gunshot wounds at the hands of the armed civilians.
There are now reports of casas de pique in Ciudad Jardín, a term used to describe the clandestine centers used by paramilitary groups in the region to detain, torture, kill, and often dismember the bodies of their victims. Currently 120 people are reported as disappeared from the Cali protests since April 28.
Alfredo Molano Jimeno reported in El Espectador on May 24 that medical brigades serving protesters in Cali are being targeted by professional assassins and security forces. Medical workers have reported that they are now removing the identifying marks that they traditionally wear in conflict zones to avoid being targeted. Numerous medical workers have reported that they were informed that a bounty had been offered for the murder of health volunteers caring for protesters in Cali, and have described being targeted by police and civilians.
On May 25, Argentine human rights lawyer Juan Grabois, who arrived in Colombia with the International Commission of Solidarity and Human Rights to monitor human rights abuses, was denied entry, detained, and then deported later that day. Human rights observers already in the country have been targeted by police and armed civilians throughout the general strike. The Duque government denied or delayed the requests of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to come to Colombia to monitor the human rights situation, before finally capitulating this past week to pressure from international groups, including the US government.
The IACHR has met with government and civil groups all week, and Duque announced a superficial police reform bill the day the commission arrived in Bogotá. Temblores, Indepaz, and Paiis presented a devastating report to the IACHR commission detailing a long list of confirmed state-backed atrocities.
The Duque regime has embarked on a multipronged communications strategy designed to stigmatize the largely peaceful protests as acts of terrorism internally, and to present a picture of rigorous institutional protocol to the international community. The campaign has produced mixed results, thanks to the wide circulation of images and videos showing the scope of state brutality. The failure of both approaches does not seem to have deterred the Duque administration and their Centro Democrático Party from doubling down on the dirty war they have unleashed on the protests.
Álvaro Uribe, Colombia’s former right-wing president and Duque’s political patron, has used his Twitter platform to support violence against protesters and promote a neo-Nazi theory of “dissipated molecular revolution” that claims protest is inherently an act of civil war requiring a militarized state response. While Twitter removed a tweet of Uribe’s early in the general strike for “glorifying violence,” the social media network has since allowed him to use it as his command center, from which he sends messages invoking the language of terrorism and counterinsurgency to police and paramilitary groups that continue to maim, torture, rape, and kill protesters.
A recent Invamer poll showed Uribe and Duque with disapproval ratings of 73 percent and 76 percent, respectively, underscoring the weakness of their political position in advance of next year’s general elections, with center-left opposition leader Gustavo Petro leading presidential candidates by a comfortable margin in all recent polls. The moral and political bankruptcy of the Centro Democrático Party, with its deep and well-documented ties to narco-paramilitarism, stands in stark contrast to the youth-driven movement that has metastasized into the most significant and widespread social uprising Colombia has seen in the past seventy years.
On May 27, Duque appeared at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, with former ambassador and former USAID director Mark Green, claiming to respect peaceful protests and the rule of law, and having zero tolerance for police abuses. At the same time, he couldn’t resist echoing an English-language campaign-style faux-interview video released days earlier, where he blamed the entire uprising and ensuing violence on Petro and shadowy subversive forces seeking to undermine his presidency.
The next day, Marta Lucía Ramírez, vice president and acting foreign minister, met with US secretary of state Antony Blinken to continue the attempted charm offensive. (She was conspicuously unable to secure a meeting with Vice President Harris.) Meanwhile, in the Siloé neighborhood of Cali, an off-duty investigator for the investigative division of the attorney general’s office killed two young protesters at a roadblock from his motorcycle in a drive-by shooting. The shooter was then captured and killed by other protesters.
The human rights group Justapaz sent out an alert that evening denouncing plainclothes paramilitary shooters in Siloé targeting medical workers who were attending to the fourteen protesters already injured by gunfire that evening. That night, Duque appeared across town in Ciudad Jardín — the same exclusive Cali neighborhood that has served as base of operations for paramilitary groups attacking protesters — where he greeted wealthy residents with hugs and announced for the third time in two weeks his intention to deploy maximum military force to retake Cali from the protesters. He has already militarized eight departments of the country — effectively a third of Colombia — in response to protests.
Duque fell out of US favor soon after members of his government meddled in the 2020 US presidential elections on behalf of the wrong guy. But Washington has long been forgiving of the transgressions of far-right narco-regimes considered strategic to US interests, and the United States needs to shore up its foothold in Colombia more than ever in advance of a likely impending leftward political shift in current right-wing strongholds like Brazil and Chile. Given this week’s victory of socialist candidate Pedro Castillo in Peru’s presidential election, it is conceivable that within a year or two, the vast majority of South American countries will be led by left-leaning governments — a dramatic turnaround from the recent wave of extreme-right neoliberalism and protofascism that has ravaged the region.
The question is whether the United States will continue to support repressive Colombian governments like Duque’s regardless of their human rights abuses. Such support is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of mounting media focus on their recent atrocities. But the United States has never been afraid to support attacks on democracy in the region, including in recent years in Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay.
If anything, it would be a surprise to see the United States just sit by and let their number one South American ally slip into the sinister hands of social democracy. Conditions on the ground in Colombia, however, might leave them with no choice.
Activists rallying for protection of the Menominee River. (photo: OWR)
"We Do This for the Water": Indigenous Organizers Defend Menominee River
Carol Amour, In These Times
Amour writes: "Indigenous water protectors confront massive mining companies, building community on the way."
he Menominee River forms Wisconsin’s Northeastern border with Michigan, winding for about 120 miles and opening into Lake Michigan’s Green Bay. About thirty-five miles from the mouth of the river sits the proposed location of the Back Forty Mine, a project by the Canadian mining company, Aquila Resources. The open pit mine that the company intends to dig out of land a mere 150 feet from the Menominee River in Michigan would be deeper than the height of the tallest building in Wisconsin, at 750 feet. The proposed mine will extract gold and sulfide from the banks of the river.
Opponents of the mining project warn that sulfide wastes will pollute the Menominee River, which provides the spawning grounds for one of the largest populations of lake sturgeon in the Lake Michigan basin. Moreover, the proposed mining site sits on the original tribal homeland of the Menominee Nation, whose sacred place of origin lies at the mouth of the Menominee River. Sturgeon also have great cultural significance to the Menominee, whose reservation is currently located about 85 miles southwest of the proposed mine site.
And although the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality initially granted Aquila permission to build on that location, the company’s ability to begin mining has been stalled — possibly for good. Ruling in favor of the Menominee Nation, on January 5, a Michigan Administrative Law Judge revoked Aquila’s permit for an open pit mine. The decision was based largely on Aquila’s lack of information on the projected environmental impact of the Back Forty Mine and the dangers of cultural desecration to sacred sites in the homeland of the Menominee.
Guy Reiter, a key player in the Menominee’s opposition to the mine, doesn’t believe the threat is gone forever.
“I’ve heard our elders say that as long as there are minerals on the ground … there will always be a threat.”
However, Reiter added, the specific threat posed by Aquila Resources and the Back Forty Mine may be weakening substantially.
“Right now, Aquila is on the ropes,” said Reiter. “The administration change is helping [too], and there’s more tribal folks in positions at the EPA. Having Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, as the Interior Secretary helps us, too.”
I spoke with Guy Reiter, an enrolled member of the Menominee Nation, at an eighty acre farm on his reservation.
“You can see our green house over there,” said Reiter. “In the fields back there, we’re growing hemp, all kinds of corn, and everything. We got a small little garden up here. We call this place Menīkānaehkem.”
Reiter is the Executive Director of Menīkānaehkem—pronounced men-ee-KAHN-ah-kem, and meaning community rebuilders — an organization that addresses food sovereignty, hosts a youth program, works on revitalizing language and culture, promotes energy sovereignty with solar panels and tiny houses, protects the land and water, and helps bring awareness to the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Leading up to the latest ruling against the Back Forty Mine, many other groups and individuals joined in opposition to Aquila. Among those organizations was The Front 40 group in Michigan, which was key in informing the public of threats posed by the Back Forty Mine and organizing community members to block its construction. In total, over 2,000 individuals wrote letters to the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) — with 98 percent opposing the mine.
In addition, 350 concerned citizens attended a public hearing held by the DEQ in 2016, most speaking against the mine. The Marinette County Board voted 28 – 0 to oppose the mine, citing concerns over long term leaching of acid producing wastes into the groundwater and the river, and risks to human health and the environment in Wisconsin and Michigan. Freshwater Future, an environmentalist organization that advocates for the protection of the great lakes, awarded The Front 40 group a Freshwater Hero Award in 2017 for their efforts.
Reiter attributes the campaign’s success to the fact that it was composed of a coalition of organizations and organizers.
“There’s a lot of sharing amongst groups,” says Reiter. “We do like a bi-weekly call where there’s tribes [and] organizations. We’ve been staying in communication since the beginning of this thing, and we’re still chatting back and forth. I think everybody understands that we can be more effective if we’re all on the same page and working together.”
Tina Van Zile, the Environmental Director for the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Tribe, is one of those collaborators. The Mole Lake reservation is connected to the Menominee reservation by the Wolf River; environmental threats to one necessarily impact the other. A recent threat near Mole Lake by Badger Minerals, a mining company, for example, would have also affected the Menominee Nation — in each case, Van Zile and Reiter worked together to protect the land.
“We’re so connected to our environment,” says Van Zile. That’s always first for us. Our culture goes hand and hand with the environment, especially our wild rice.”
Reiter says that many of the indigenous opponents of the project are trained organizers and possess skills he hopes to share with others. The Native Organizers Alliance training provided tools such as power mapping and meeting facilitation strategies, he explained.
“We’re eventually going to be branching out and we want to give people the tools to do whatever they’re working on in their community … All of us have so many things going on in our communities that we need to do something about. We can’t sit around and wait for somebody to save us — we’ve got to save ourselves.
“The Back Forty Mine is what got me involved in all this. We were meeting with people and talking about how we could help our community. We were just trying to figure things out.”
When the Back Forty Mine came up, they started to meet every week. Soon they started to gain traction. More and more people came to their presentations, offering to help.
“When we first started to stand against this mine, we were scrambling to think about what to do. ‘What should we do first?’ And there was this list about a mile long,” says Reiter.
“But then our elders said, ‘well, we should let the River know, and let Spirit know what we’re going to do.’ So we organized the sacred water walk from our beautiful Keshena Falls all the way up to the mine site. It was 126 miles, and we did that with the late grandma Josephine Mandamin — she was a major supporter and she was my mentor,” Reiter explains.
In April 2016, they walked from the birthplace of their nation, the mouth of the Menominee River. Sturgeon were migrating at the same time.
“Sometimes [the sturgeon] would breech and look at us, like acknowledge us that we were walking. It was a real moment — it was like a confirmation of what we were doing.
“Grandma Josephine has always told us that this isn’t a protest. ‘You’re not carrying signs. You’re not being loud even. You’re supposed to be thinking about why you’re here, and what you’re doing.’ And when we passed the water back and forth, she would tell us to say, ‘We do this for the water.’ It was things like that that made it way more spiritual than just walking. After it was all done, we realized that we had basically rewalked our creation story. We had walked in the footsteps of that creation story.”
One of the groups the Menominee worked with made effective use of that cultural connection in a successful lawsuit against Aquila. Earthjustice, with headquarters in San Francisco and a network of offices across the United States, represented the Tribe, when they filed suit to challenge the company’s permits. At the heart of that lawsuit was the threat the proposed mine posed to cultural and sacred sites of the Tribe. Said Reiter, “When that Michigan judge denied the Back Forty Project a wetlands permit, he said that the mine would damage nearby cultural and historic resources.
“Sulfide mining is the dirtiest of all mining. It pollutes absolutely … You add water and sulfide together, you’re going to get acidic drainage— that stuff just doesn’t go away,” Reiter says.
“They try to tout jobs, and they try to say how environmentally friendly they are, because they have investors, and they have to say those things for them to get money.”
Van Zile adds, “You can’t just go to the Aquila resources website for information … They try to make it sound like they are protectors of the environment. The facts just don’t bear that out.”
Reiter adds, “I always think it’s important to make sure that we’re operating out of love and that we’re operating from a place of strength, and not of fear. The companies will have fear, and they’ll try to drum up fear and make it seem like you’re the enemy and all that and they’ll get some politicians that will be right on their side and do the exact same thing.
“But if you come from a place of centeredness and big heartedness, you’ll know exactly what to do and when to do it. And sometimes, you know, if you can be proactive rather than reactive it’s very helpful. If you can get out ahead of ‘em in a couple different areas, it’ll only help you. And always be conscious of burnout too. You’ve always got to be healthy mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.”
Tina Van Zile agrees.
“We’re not just here to make noise … You have to ask yourself what kind of place are we leaving for our children. I want to know at the end of the day that I’ve done everything I could. We have what we have because of what our ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Are we going to be proud of what we did?”
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