11 June 21
Can Anyone Help With a Donation, Please?
We are way behind where we should be at this point in the month. Really because only a precious few of you are donating. The rest are not, but certainly could at any time.
Now would be a great time.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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11 June 21
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Eugene Robinson | Joe Manchin Retreats to Fantasyland and Sticks America With the Consequences
Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post
Robinson writes:
en. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has the right to live in a make-believe wonderland if he so chooses. But his party and his nation will pay a terrible price for his hallucinations about the nature of today’s Republican Party. And even this sacrifice might not guarantee that Manchin can hold on to support back home.
Manchin’s declaration Sunday that he will vote against sweeping legislation to guarantee voting rights nationwide and that he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate” the Senate filibuster is a huge blow to President Biden’s hopes of enacting his ambitious agenda. There’s no way to spin this as anything other than awful.
Manchin’s decision is a catastrophe not just for this particular bill, though he has almost certainly doomed the legislation. A senior administration official told me Monday that “none of this is a surprise to those who have heard Manchin’s views” and that the White House will continue working to “make progress notwithstanding the difficult challenges in front of us, including a 50-vote Senate.” But thanks to Manchin’s decision, Biden doesn’t even have a 50-vote Senate for what many Democrats see as an existential fight against the GOP’s attempt to gain and keep power through voter suppression. The 49 Senate votes left after Manchin’s defection will take Biden and the Democrats precisely nowhere.
Worse, Manchin is asking Democrats to respond to ruthlessness with delusion. In an op-ed in the West Virginia paper the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said he will oppose the For the People Act, passed by the House in March, because it has no Republican support. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy,” he wrote.
Manchin did say he supports another proposed House bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would essentially restore provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act forbidding some states to change election laws without obtaining preclearance from the Justice Department. The original preclearance rules were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
But Manchin wants this, too, to win bipartisan support. Unless Manchin changes his position on the filibuster, 10 Republican senators would have to cross the aisle and join with Democrats. So far, there is one — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The other nine must be in some parallel dimension, visible only to Manchin, where all the leprechauns, tooth fairies and unicorns are hiding.
Inconveniently for Manchin’s fantasies of unity, the fact is that one of our major parties — the one Manchin ostensibly belongs to — believes in guaranteeing access to the polls for all eligible voters, making political donations more transparent, tightening ethics rules for members of Congress and ensuring that congressional districts are drawn fairly. The other party doesn’t want to do any of those things, because Republicans see these reforms as threatening the GOP’s ability to win national elections with the support of a minority of voters.
Trump’s incoherent policies so robbed the GOP of any consistent philosophy that last year’s national convention did not even attempt to produce a party platform. Republicans have replaced ideological litmus tests with pledges of loyalty to the former president. Opposing efforts to expand and guarantee voting rights appears to be the one policy idea they can all agree on.
Look, I understand the reality of Manchin’s situation. He is himself a political unicorn — a Democrat sent to the Senate by one of the most Republican states in the country. But insisting on bipartisanship in all things might not be a magical talisman against defeat.
A new survey of 600 likely 2022 general election voters from West Virginia commissioned by End Citizens United, a Democratic group advocating for passage of the For the People Act, and conducted by the polling firm ALG Research shows that Manchin is viewed favorably by 43 percent of voters and unfavorably by 50 percent. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.)
One poll question suggests a contradiction that implies the limits of Manchin’s dedication to defying political gravity, both at home and in Washington. The self-identified non-conservative Democrats who provide Manchin’s strongest base of support, with 59 percent viewing him favorably, are also the most skeptical of the filibuster Manchin has pledged himself to protect. Twenty percent of them say the filibuster should be eliminated, and another 45 percent say it should be reformed. Forty-three percent of West Virginians overall say the filibuster should remain unchanged.
That is just one poll, and Manchin’s history of winning suggests he knows his state. But even Manchin has to hold on to his strongest supporters. Blocking Biden’s agenda and allowing GOP voter suppression are not stances that will help him win his next election or change Washington’s increasingly twisted laws of politics. In this fairy tale, Manchin is setting himself up to be the villain.
Trump's Attorney General William Barr. (photo: Getty)
Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Focused on Democrats in Congress
Katie Benner, Nicholas Fandos, Michael S. Schmidt and Adam Goldman, The New York Times
Excerpt: "As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor."
The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.
All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had been subpoenaed.
Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.
Police in riot gear face off environmental activists at the Line 3 pipeline pumping station near the Itasca State Park, Minnesota, June 7, 2021. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP)
Emails: Cops Using Facebook to Target Line 3 Protest Leaders
Molly Taft, Gizmodo
Taft writes: "Protests against Enbridge's Line 3 have been ramping up in Minnesota - and so has the response from authorities."
Documents from a Minnesota sheriff's office show police used social media posts to charge leaders of the peaceful Line 3 protest movement.
rotests against Enbridge’s Line 3 have been ramping up in Minnesota—and so has the response from authorities. A video went viral this week of a Department of Homeland Security helicopter sandblasting protesters following mass arrests. But some police tactics are far less visible while causing long-term hardship.
Much like the Dakota Access protests in 2016, social media has become central to getting the word out about the pipeline’s opposition, with leaders livestreaming or posting about their opposition. Police, however, have turned to social media to target activist leaders and, in some cases, charge them with crimes, according to public records obtained by Earther.
The records, which include thousands of emails and documents from Enbridge, local law enforcement, and state authorities spanning from 2019 to 2021, show that sheriff’s officers in one Minnesota county at the epicenter of the fight over the pipeline have used social media activity on at least one occasion to target key protesters weeks or months after protests take place with trumped up charges.
The Line 3 pipeline project, if completed, would carry 760,000 barrels of heavy crude from tar sands fields in Canada into the U.S. The current project is technically a replacement to an existing line originally built in the 1960s, and Minnesota is the last stretch of construction remaining on the replacement project. Controversially, the Line 3 replacement goes through new territory in Minnesota, including the Fond du Lac reservation and several treaty lands of Ojibwe bands. Indigenous groups have led the opposition while police have worked closely with—and, in some cases, been reimbursed by—Enbridge for the past few years to prepare for large-scale civil unrest during the pipeline’s construction.
On January 9, a few hundred people gathered at a Line 3 construction site in Aitkin County, one of the first places in Minnesota where construction started up on the pipeline in December. Local news reports show footage of a peaceful gathering of chanting and singing; eight people were arrested for trespassing, Minnesota Public Radio reported, after they did not disperse following police orders.
But summonses Earther obtained from the Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office show that police used videos streamed and posted to Facebook to charge high-profile leaders in the Line 3 movement with several misdemeanor counts, including harassment, trespass, unlawful assembly, and public nuisance. These charges were filed January 27, two weeks after the actual protest occurred. (Charges against protesters arrested on the scene, separate summonses show, were filed two days later.)
Two charges for the January 9 protest that used livestreamed video as a basis were filed against some of the most visible Indigenous women leaders of the anti-Line 3 movement, including Winona LaDuke, arguably the most central figure in the opposition, and Tania Aubid, who went on a hunger strike in March to protest the pipeline. Another summons related to a charge of aiding and abetting trespassing was sent to organizer Shanai Matteson in late May, more than five months later, based on her Facebook activity and a livestreamed video also available on Facebook. Per Matteson’s summons, an officer watched a livestream recording of a separate January 9 event where Matteson encouraged protesters to be arrested “if that’s what it comes to today,” and offered resources for jail support. Matteson told Earther that she did not even attend the January 9 protest at the pipeline site.
“You think, ‘oh, I can just change my Facebook settings,’” said Marian Moore, another organizer who was at the January 9 protest. “But then I can’t reach people who aren’t my friends. It feels creepy, and weird.”
Some of the protesters charged were on the cops’ radar before the January 9 event even took place. In an email sent to a citizen discussing a separate incident on a Line 3 site in December, Aitkin County Sheriff Daniel Guida said that he’d asked a pipeline worker to stop harassing Aubid at a separate protest.
“I don’t appreciate her violent speech and blatant lies towards my office,” Guida wrote in the email. “Today she said I had white hatred groups on my payroll and was directing them to harass Indians. ... If she only knew how hard I’ve fought to protect her rights.”
In an email, Guida told Earther that Aubid “has apologized to me for attacking me on camera. She has been very nice off camera. I appreciate her energy towards things she is passionate for and I am a friend of her family and hope to continue being one. One Anishinaabe core value is Gwekwaadiziwin (Honesty) and I hope our interactions can be based on truths.”
Aubid was later charged with gross misdemeanor harassment that police allege happened at the January 9 protest, which the summons says was caught on livestream. While her summons does not note the specifics for her harassment charge, the statement says that officers observed Aubid on the livestream telling construction workers “get nervous little boy. You don’t belong here.” LaDuke was also charged with harassment. Her summons states that she and Aubid were “disrupting the construction workers” at the site, with no specifics.
Guida said that “everyone has their own opinion what constitutes harassment (victim) and my office does investigations to those complaints” and that charging decisions are made by county attorneys.
In late January, just a few days before the charges for LaDuke and Aubid were filed, Guida was looped in by a city administrator on an email to Mattheson after she was denied a permit for an outdoor community gathering unrelated to Line 3. In response to her questions as to why she was denied an outdoor permit for a public education gathering that would follow covid-19 guidelines, Guida told her that she had been “directly involved with unlawful assemblies,” and that the city “has every right to use that against you, but they did not.”
“I’ve been part of rallies and marches, and other public advocacy against Line 3,” Matteson wrote back. “I’ve never been cited or prosecuted for unlawful assembly or any other illegal activities associated with it.”
In response, Guida told Matteson that her activity had been “documented, recorded, and very well might result in criminal charges. Because you didn’t get arrested or a citation does not mean the act is not illegal. And not being dealt with immediately does not mean it will not happen.” Guida told Earther that Matteson was already under investigation for the January 9 charges when he sent this email.
Matteson said that the conspiracy charges against her—which were filed right before large actions organized by Line 3 opposition for early this month, including one event where more than 200 people were arrested—mean she could face up to a year in jail and thousands of dollars in fines. “They’re trying to hold me responsible as an organizer,” she said of the January 9 events. “I’m not one of the movement leaders, but I do a lot of organizing and have lots of public opinions, and I live here and have lots of ties in the community. They want us discredited and criminalized in the community.”
At Matteson’s first appearance on Wednesday, a judge set a contested hearing date for October. Matteson was released on her own recognizance with the caveat that she not communicate with any Enbridge employee or be near any pipeline worksite, significantly hampering her opportunities for organizing in the summer.
Monitoring social media for Line 3 protesters appears to be part of a broader effort by Aitkin County officials. Other emails show that on January 13, a week after the Capitol Hill riots, Guida wrote a mass email to county staff about civil unrest and social media.
“We all have anxiety about demonstration groups coming to Aitkin County, as well as the rapidly changing events in the USA,” Guida wrote. “ … Over the last year, a large part of my time has been dedicated to predicting energy and planning on how to deescalate that energy to protect our community. A critical factor in that process is early intervention.”
Guida then laid out a table of more than two dozen events, most of them posted on Facebook and scheduled for January and February, with information on the locations, hosts, and estimated number of attendees. Among them were four Line 3 pipeline protests, including a “Salsa Tuesdays” event that told recipients to “come and stand and salsa for the rivers, our water.”
“I have added a list of the upcoming demonstrations so you can see this has turned into a normal thing for Law Enforcement across the state,” Guida added.
He told Earther that he “regularly update[s] my staff with upcoming events, so they can be prepared and ready to keep the peace.” He also added that most of the arrests in his county have been “very peaceful,” and that “another Anishinaabe core value Mnaadendimowin (Respect) has been very evident toward the people on both sides of this issue.” But as more attention is being paid to how cops are treating protesters on the ground this summer, it remains to be seen how they’ll keep up their attack online on organizers’ main line of communication.
“It’s quote-unquote understandable that [police] are following orders to remove people from Enbridge’s right-of-way,” said Moore. “It is a whole other kettle of fish for them to be proactively preventing organizing to inform people about the egregious actions that this corporation is taking.”
Rep. Cori Bush, D-MO. (photo: Paul Morigi/Getty)
Cori Bush Demands FBI Data on Her Protest Activity
Akela Lacy, The Intercept
Lacy writes: "At a House hearing on Thursday, Cori Bush confronted FBI Director Christopher Wray over the bureau's ongoing surveillance of protesters for racial justice."
t a House Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., asked FBI Director Christopher Wray for information the bureau had collected on her work as an organizer and activist before her time in Congress. In 2014 and 2017, Bush protested in Ferguson, Missouri, and St. Louis — after police killed 18-year-old Michael Brown and after a judge found the officer who killed 24-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith not guilty, respectively — and the FBI is known to have collected data on several of the demonstrations in which she participated.
On June 4, Bush sent a letter to Wray requesting that the bureau deliver access to all information it had collected on her protest and organizing activities before Wray’s scheduled testimony on Thursday. Her office said the inspector general for the Department of Justice responded Thursday to a different letter she sent in February, asking about the disparate treatment of protesters last summer and the people who participated in the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. According to Bush’s office, the inspector general’s review is pending.
“Public reporting leaves little doubt that the FBI did, in fact, investigate and surveil those who were protesting for racial justice against police brutality,” Bush wrote. “I was one such protester.” She had not received a response by Thursday morning.
“When can I expect to hear back from the bureau regarding that information?” Bush asked Wray at Thursday’s hearing, referring to the data the FBI had compiled on her protest activity. Wray replied that he had only recently learned about the letter, that the bureau receives thousands of requests for files, and that he would have his staff follow up to help her understand how the process works. Bush went on to ask him whether the bureau had deputized federal agents and law enforcement agents in response to civil unrest last summer; if the FBI was authorized to use force in response to the Capitol attacks; and why Wray had stated, earlier in the hearing, that the FBI doesn’t surveil First Amendment protests when there is ample evidence to the contrary.
Federal authorities have long surveilled and infiltrated activist movements in the United States, with a particular focus on Black social justice and civil rights organizers, including Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter. As The Intercept reported in 2015, the Department of Homeland Security has routinely monitored activists since the 2014 uprising in Ferguson. The FBI’s counterterrorism division identified a fictional “black identity extremism” movement as a threat until as recently as 2017, and it warned that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” drove “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will likely serve as justification for such violence.”
The practice continued last summer, when the FBI flew an advanced spy plane over Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. — the same vehicle they used to surveil protests in Baltimore after police killed Freddie Gray in 2015. Meanwhile, the agency says it does not monitor “First Amendment-protected activities” without a tip or open investigation; the bureau cited that as a reason it did not catch social media activity related to planning the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.
“For so long we’ve been criminalized and intimidated,” Bush said. “And I’ve watched this. And I’m one of those people. I have a unique position now to be able to ask those hard and key questions that nobody else can ask the director the same way that I can — coming directly from the movement and still being very much a part of that same movement.” Bush said she was targeted as an activist “quite a bit” and believes that she was under surveillance, adding that “the FBI has this history of surveilling Black activists and protesters and civil rights leaders.”
To further suppress protests for racial justice, federal and local governments have also resorted to stacking criminal charges against activists to increase their penalties and passing new laws to criminalize specific kinds of demonstrations. Earlier this year, dozens of states introduced anti-protest laws designed to crack down on protests against police brutality, and some states rebranded “anti-terror” bills to apply to activities associated with protests for Black lives. In April, Florida adopted some of the most chilling anti-protest legislation in the country: a new law granting civil immunity to a person who drives their car through a crowd of protesters. As The Intercept reported last month, much of the push behind such legislation was driven by law enforcement groups.
Hundreds of people who participated in protests last summer were charged with high-level felonies, including charges of terrorism for several teenagers. In October, federal agents arrested Anthony Smith, an influential activist in West Philadelphia known for helping topple a statue of former mayor and Philadelphia Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo, claiming that he had “aided and abetted” in the arson of a police car in May. In July, Smith had been a lead plaintiff in a civil rights suit against the city after police shot rubber-tipped bullets at protesters and tear-gassed hundreds of demonstrators marching through an enclosed tunnel. Smith was released from pretrial detention after local activists organized a petition and sent more than 70 letters of support to the judge in Smith’s case. His trial is pending.
“I remain concerned that many law enforcement agencies continue to characterize Black protestors as a threat to public safety rather than as citizens who are more than justified in exercising their First Amendment right to organize and voice their grievances,” Bush wrote, pointing to the bureau’s past use of the term “black identity extremism.” She added that she would introduce legislation to “correct the Bureau’s excesses, if necessary.”
Bush said she couldn’t yet discuss specifics of the legislation, but her office is working on a protester’s bill of rights, similar to local proposals in Missouri. “We know that we want to protect our protesters and curb any intimidation tactics,” Bush said, noting that states across the country, including Missouri, introduced or passed anti-protest legislation this year.
“Rather than using last year as an opportunity for the racial reckoning that it should have been, lawmakers we saw all across this country proposed, and then they passed, all of these dozens of punitive measures to prevent protest instead of actually dealing with what was the real issue,” Bush said. “Where is the police accountability? We’re not protesting because we don’t have anything else to do. We’re protesting because we’re trying to save Black life. So where are those measures?” Bush said she and Missouri state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge, who also came out of the activist movement in Ferguson, spoke out against similar proposals in Missouri, and the bills died in session.
Following the January attacks on the Capitol, Bush introduced a resolution calling on the House Ethics Committee to investigate whether members of Congress violated their oath of office in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “It’s not going away, but we’re not at the point where we’re able to move that the way I would like to see it move,” Bush said. Given that the Senate couldn’t pass a bipartisan commission to investigate the attacks, she said, the resolution is more important than ever, but its chances of moving are bleak. “We won’t let it go. But we saw how hard it is to even get the commission passed.”
When people call the movement fighting for Black lives a “terrorist organization,” Bush said, “it couldn’t be further from the truth. When the truth is that white supremacist groups have been behind over 60 percent of the attacks last year. The real threat that we need to take seriously, they don’t want to touch.” On top of that, she said, “We have to be very clear that the bureau has a white supremacy problem in their ranks.” The FBI has long been aware of the issue of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, The Intercept has reported.
At the hearing on Thursday, House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., asked Wray if the bureau was conducting an internal review “to root out white supremacy and other extremist ideology” or if it would commit to doing so. Wray said the bureau takes the “insider threat” very seriously and would provide Nadler with more information on existing procedures and related internal review processes.
Bush told The Intercept that she didn’t know before coming to Congress that she could request this kind of information, and many activists still don’t realize that they can do so. She added that she wants people to know that they can call her office if they need help with a public records request.
“You gotta push back against what seems like this system of intimidation and suppression,” Bush said. “The more we do this, they will have to do something.”
Inmates in the yard at Arizona State Prison-Kingman in Mohave County. (photo: Patrick Breen/AP)
This Is How Hard It Is to Vote After You've Left Prison
Trone Dowd, VICE
Dowd writes: "Over 5 million Americans have lost their right to vote because they've served time in prison."
hen Chandrea McNealy was charged with drug possession in 2006, at the age of 18, the long-term consequences of the felony never crossed her young mind.
But as she got older, and especially when she became a mother, she began to realize how hard it would be to reacclimate to normal life after spending nine months in a Florida jail. It took five years before she found an employer who’d give her a job so that she could support her children, make rent, and pay off the fees and fines associated with her incarceration.
“It was at a Subway,” McNealy, now 34, told VICE News. “They took a chance on me and I worked at that Subway for four to five years. I held on to that job for dear life, and it didn’t even cover the bills.” And on top of all that, she realized, she was now barred from voting until her prison debts were paid off.
McNealy is one of 5.17 million Americans who, because they served time in prison, have had their right to vote stripped away, according to The Sentencing Project. It’s a phenomenon that disproportionately affects people of color; one out of 16 Black Americans has lost the right to vote, compared to one out of every 56 non-Black Americans.
Getting those rights back can feel impossible for people who are already struggling after regaining their freedom. Some states require the formerly incarcerated to pay off their restitution fees first, even as they’re trying to find a job or secure affordable housing. Other states require a direct plea to their state’s governor, whose judgment and mercy can be fickle.
“I felt horrible,” McNealy continued. “It makes you feel like the mistakes you made before you even thought about having children are now going to cause your children to suffer. It makes you wonder why—I served my time, I served my debt to society. Why can't we move on now?”
Eric Harris of Iowa City, Iowa, said he’s been a news junkie his entire life and always prided himself as someone who stays up on current events. But a two-year prison sentence for marijuana possession in 1999 meant he could never vote on the national and local issues he read about. For many years, Iowa barred all people with felony convictions from voting even after they served their time. If they wanted their rights reinstated, formerly incarcerated Iowans had to directly petition the governor, who would decide who gets them on a case-by-case basis.
“I thought about it from time to time, and it was kind of just kind of painful,” Harris said. “It was like, ‘Well, I can't vote, I can't do this, I can't do that. Then I'm just going to stay in the streets, because I don't feel like I'm a part of this country.’”
Feeling apart from the rest of society plays a huge role in recidivism, according to Gicola Lane, the statewide organizer for FreeHearts, a Tennessee organization advocating for local voter restoration laws. She’s worked with hundreds of people hoping to get their rights back since joining the organization in 2016 and knows that voter rights are just another obstacle for a portion of the population already dealing with so many other issues.
“When you’re unable to vote, on top of all those other issues like the hardships of searching for a job and housing, it just reinforces the feeling of being a second-class citizen that a lot of people express feeling after being released,” Lane said.
Frustrated by the many barriers to his reintegration, Harris returned to his former, illicit lifestyle, which eventually earned him another felony conviction in 2014, this time for eluding the police in his car. He narrowly avoided another stint in prison and instead spent the next four years under supervision while turning his life around for good. He made a conscious effort to make better decisions.
“When they tried to send me to prison in 2014, that was it,” he explained. “I was like, ‘I can’t do this. I have kids to raise, I can’t be in jail.’ So I decided to stop hanging out with certain people to get my life cleaned up, watch my surroundings, not go out to clubs and stuff like that. I just tried to stay away from all the bad elements.”
But by the time he’d decided to turn things around, he’d already spent 24 years of his life unable to vote.
So, after his supervised release was up in 2018, Harris decided to take direct action. He wrote an op-ed in the Des Moines Register in 2020, advocating for restoration of voting rights for felons like himself. He teamed up with organizations like the Iowa ACLU and sat for interviews with news outlets across the country, pushing the issue both nationally and at home.
His efforts, alongside many others in a similar position in Iowa, were eventually rewarded: In August 2020, Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, signed an executive order restoring voting rights to felons convicted of most crimes except murder and manslaughter.
Harris compared watching Reynolds sign the order to watching your favorite team win the Super Bowl. He felt the same excitement that November, when he cast his ballot for the first time ever.
“On the day that it was time to go vote, I took my son with me,” he said. “The climate in this country from 2016 on was pretty bad. So I felt like I did my job. I could finally exercise my rights as an American citizen and vote to get racist people out of the White House.”
Iowa is one of several states that has had a change of heart on the question of voting rights for former felons voting. Since 2016, several states have changed their disenfranchisement laws so that they affect fewer people, or have made it easier to get your rights restored after you’ve served your time. Kentucky, Virginia, Florida, Nevada, and Alabama have all passed laws responding to demands to return voting rights to formerly incarcerated people.
“Theoretically, these changes impact millions of people, but in reality it doesn’t mean these people are voting,” Bowie said. “A lot of states still have complicated processes. And even the ones that don’t, misinformation about how the laws used to work still persists among impacted communities. And even worse, secretaries of state, particularly in states where they don't really like the fact that the laws are getting more relaxed, will not train registrars properly.”
After prison, many people also feel a stronger sense of the impact elected leaders and policies can have on society, and the inability to vote means an inability to mold the kind of future they want for themselves and their loved ones.
“Being incarcerated is an experience of having the state control every aspect of your life 24/7,” Blair Bowie, an attorney and legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center in Washington, D.C., said. “These are people who uniquely understand the power of government, and its impacts on people's lives. They're not under some misimpression that we can just go off and live in vacuums and ignore government. They know firsthand how important it is to exercise what levers we have over our democratic process.”
McNealy was especially interested in voting in local races, where she knew the outcomes would shape her children’s lives every day. “I wasn’t even trying to vote for the president; I was trying to vote for the people who sit on the district of the school board and the people who sit on the police commission. Those people […] play a big role in the things that happen in our community for our children. I wanted to be part of voting on who made those decisions, and I couldn’t be part of that.”
In 2017, Alabama passed a law narrowing the list of felony convictions barring offenders from polls, but several counties have hindered the process of granting former felons their rights back. Morgan County, for example, was still denying thousands of formerly incarcerated newly eligible voters as recently as last year because Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill refused to fund efforts to keep registrars throughout the state informed on the change in policy.
And nagging issues like restitution fees owed to the state and other financial burdens like public defender dues and outstanding fines also keep rehabilitated citizens from voting years after their release. In Tennessee and Florida, these fees must be paid off for the formerly incarcerated to regain their voting rights.
In Florida, pro-felon voting rights groups heavily contested the requirement to pay off prison fees, but a federal court eventually upheld the law despite objections by voting rights advocates and judges in lower courts.
McNealy said she was one of those unlucky people plagued by lingering fees related to her prison sentence in Florida. Owing more than $2,000 in fees to the state after her release in 2008 didn’t just keep her from voting: As long as she had an outstanding balance, Florida law also barred her from taking the state test required to become a nurse.
Luckily, this May, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition helped her cover the entirety of her debt. McNealy not only get her voting rights back, she also got a state-ordered exemption that allowed her to take the test needed to become a nurse.
“It was a life-changing moment,” she said. “I could finally step into the career that I've always wanted to step into. It's like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders.”
Unfortunately, for organizations like the Restoration Coalition in Florida and Free Hearts in Tennessee, covering the exorbitant fees can be a struggle to cover through fundraising.
“In 2020, of course, people were really amped up because we had this presidential election, they saw that there was this potential voting block that could change things, and so people wanted to donate to the cause,” Free Hearts’ Lane said.
“But when you don’t have an election right in front of you, sometimes it slows down the fundraising. And our funds can get depleted fast because some of these court costs and restitution are just so expensive.”
Alonzo Malone, 60, says it still bothers him that he didn’t get to vote for the country’s first Black president both times Barack Obama ran for office. The Bardstown, Kentucky, native lost his right to vote after spending eight years in prison for writing bad checks to cover his child support dues as he struggled to find employment.
After he was released in 2000, his financial troubles picked up right where they left off: To apply for his right to vote, he’d first have to scrounge up the cash to pay the $70 application fee.
While $70 might seem trivial to the average working American, Malone said coming up with the cash was next to impossible. Because employers were reluctant to hire someone with a felony on his record, he resorted to working day-labor odd jobs and restaurant gigs to barely make ends meet.
“I was maybe making $70 or $80 a day,” he said. “When you take the taxes from that, take out bus fare, then money to buy something to eat, I barely had money to put together. Because then I would have to save money throughout the weeks in order to put it all together and pay rent at the end of the month.”
And when he did manage to pull his pennies together to apply, his attempts to move on with his life were met with repeated rejection. He was denied his right to vote five times over 17 years and four Kentucky gubernatorial administrations.
“I felt like I was nothing, like I didn’t exist,” he told VICE News. “I was the Invisible Man with a scarlet ‘F’ on my forehead.”
There was a spark of hope in 2015 when, in his final month in office, then Gov. Steve Beshear signed an executive order restoring voting rights to thousands of felons who completed their sentences. But then, Beshear’s Republican successor, Gov. Matt Bevin, repealed that executive order.
Malone petitioned Bevin, who finally restored his right to vote in 2018, just a year shy of his reelection campaign. But when Bevin was up for reelection, Malone voted for current Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, son of Steve, who within days of being elected restored voting rights to more than 140,000 non-violent felons.
Today, Malone is a pastor at the New Christian Church in Louisville, and he has a bachelor’s degree in business, as well as a Culinary Arts degree. He runs his own catering service and said he takes pride in being a workaholic.
“In the last three or four years, there’s been an upward progression, and I’m so thankful,” he said. “Even though they told me I would never have my right to vote back, I just kept on believing that I could. It’s a reminder to myself that if I keep pressing on, anything is possible.”
For Malone, regaining the ability to vote not only provided him the second chance he was looking for after prison, it gave him hope in all other aspects of his life.
“I made some mistakes in life, but my heart is good.”
Pedro Castillo in Lima, Peru, June 7, 2021. (photo: Luka Gonzales/AFP)
Left-Wing Trade Unionist Pedro Castillo Will Be President of Peru
Nicolas Allen, Jacobin
Allen writes: "Peru was the birthplace of neoliberal populism under Alberto Fujimori. Now Pedro Castillo, a socialist trade unionist from an indigenous background, has won its presidency."
ven as the last votes are still being tallied in Peru’s nail-biter elections, it looks like left-wing presidential contender Pedro Castillo will hold on to his narrow lead over right-wing opponent Keiko Fujimori. The Organization of American States has already declared the elections clean and fair, and despite Fujimori’s repeated accusations of voter fraud, there is little appetite in Peru to follow her lead. The 7.7 percent drop on the Lima Stock Exchange seems to confirm what everyone else knows: Pedro Castillo will be the Republic of Peru’s next president.
As the dust settles on an election cycle marked by anti-communist hysteria, questions are now turning to what a future Castillo government might look like. Peru has never had a president that remotely resembled Castillo — an indigenous, left-wing trade unionist. The only immediate comparisons, the policy-driven progressive politician Verónika Mendoza or the nationalist former president Ollanta Humala, actually only underline just how shocking it will be to see someone of Castillo’s social and political background in the Government Palace.
Fueling a general climate of uncertainty is the fact that Peru currently has the world’s highest official COVID-19 death toll, and has seen an 11 percent contraction of the economy and a 10 percent rise in poverty in just the last year. If the country’s acute social and economic crisis was a decisive factor in Castillo’s victory, it also will be posing questions about the incoming administration’s ability to govern — a question compounded by uncertainty over the composition of the future administration, Castillo’s uneasy relationship with his own party, Perú Libre, and how he will stand up to a majority opposition in Congress.
With so many question marks hanging over the future of Peru, there are still important takeaways from Castillo’s historic win that provide some indication of where the country may be headed, the battles that await his administration, and the strategies Castillo should pursue to turn the unprecedented left-wing triumph at the ballot box into a popular victory for the Peruvian people.
The Unlikeliest of Victors
On a purely symbolic level, it would be hard to overstate the impact of Castillo’s win. On the one hand, it comes on the heels of a conservative restoration in Ecuador and a general sense of disorientation among large parts of the Latin American left. However, with neighboring Chile and Colombia already marking a countertendency and the possibility of a new cycle of radical politics in the region, a Castillo government represents a major shot in the arm for a left-wing resurgence.
While Castillo held high-profile talks with progressive former heads of state like Uruguay’s José “Pepe” Mujica and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, he was careful on the campaign trail to downplay the question of foreign policy and regional integration (unlike Humala, who in 2011 successfully ran on a “Pink Tide” ticket). Partly a rearguard attempt to defuse right-wing attack campaigns — ”Venezuela” is a favorite hobbyhorse of the Peruvian press — Castillo made the elections squarely about the invisible Peruvian majority neglected by the nation’s political class.
In that same sense, Castillo’s candidacy amounted to a referendum on that class’s complete disconnect from popular concerns as a whole. The phrase, repeated ad nauseam, that “no one saw Castillo coming” actually became a self-indictment of the Peruvian right, whose erstwhile effective neoliberal populism — incarnated in the figure of former leader Alberto Fujimori — has completely crumbled in the wake of the region’s second neoliberal crisis.
Castillo, only the second president in modern Peru to come from the country’s interior provinces, heads a growing movement that could be called the “revenge of the regions.” As electoral analysts were quick to point out, he scored crushing victories in sixteen of the countries rural departments (states) where the social composition is heavily peasant and/or indigenous.
No doubt a reflection of his being branded the candidate for “deep Peru,” Castillo’s support (80 percent or above) in such regions as Ayacucho, Cusco, and Puno reflects a critical political shift. A detailed analysis of voting trends shows that his support tracks closest in those parts of Peru where extractive industries have been booming at the same time as poverty has also skyrocketed. In other words, as reflected in his campaign slogan, “No more poor people in a rich country,” and his stated intent to bankroll major public spending through taxation of mining industries, Castillo’s political project lies along one of the country’s major socioeconomic fault lines.
Though somewhat less tangible in political terms, a “regionalized” government carries profound historical implications that go to the heart of Peru’s national identity. From the original “myth of the Inca” — promising a redemptive reunification of the body politic and the overturning of colonial fragmentation — to José Carlos Mariátegui’s insistence that the “indigenous question” lies at the heart of the country’s overarching economic model, the conservative bent of Peru’s Lima-centered national project has always been haunted by the prospects of just such a “tempest in the Andes,” as Peruvian author Luis Valcárcel called it.
If Castillo’s presidency represents a historic first in terms of breaking the national barrier for regional political movements, there are still outstanding questions about what this would mean in terms of governance (absent a new plurinational constitution). In fact, Castillo’s twelve-page plan for government is generally short on details. Rightly or wrongly, this has been part of his success: putting forward a political vision centered around social mobilization and accumulated working-class power rather than technocratic quick fixes. Anahà Durand Guevara, Mendoza’s former political strategist and current member of Castillo’s technical team, cogently acknowledged this: whereas Mendoza’s progressive campaign was sometimes heavy on technical details, the immediacy of Castillo’s slogans for land reform and a new constitution played into a sense of popular empowerment on the campaign trail.
This, too, speaks to one of the other invisible sectors that promises to take center stage with a Castillo presidency. Anyone who has ever traveled throughout Peru will have recognized an important discrepancy between the country’s conservative reputation and the pervasiveness of social protest. According to Latinobarómetro, Peru is second only to Bolivia in terms of the percent of mobilized citizens participating in protests, whether it be through strike actions in the mining sector, local challenges to the abuses of the extractive industry, public sector protests around education and health, or large-scale demonstrations against endemic corruption. The combination of neoliberal precarity and regional fragmentation has long prevented these movements from cohering into a credible threat to the system, but, with Castillo, they may begin to play a major role in national politics.
A Crisis of the Peruvian Political Class
With all the virtues that Castillo possesses, it is hard to deny that the elections could have gone a different way had Keiko Fujimori not been his opponent. Peru’s most unpopular politician, the far-right candidate narrowly squeezed through the first-round elections with just 13 percent of the vote, beating out establishment-preferred candidate Hernando de Soto.
Deliberately avoiding policy talk in lieu of anti-communist scaremongering, Fujimori managed to rally reluctant liberal and center-right sectors of the political class to her side. With her electoral base in Lima and the neighboring Callao District, together home to 40 percent of the country’s population, she nearly managed to carry the elections through a combination of patronage systems tied to her Fuerza Popular party and a relentless campaign of red-baiting that still enjoys traction among diverse social groups — from the frenzied Cold War optics of Peru’s ruling elites to urban popular sectors who associate left-wing politics with terrorism and criminality.
Fujimori’s defeat may spell the end of a right-wing political tradition that was already in crisis. First-round elections were indeed marked by increased fragmentation on the Right: the other leading candidates, Rafael López Aliaga and De Soto, are both Fujimori-adjacent politicians who under other circumstances wouldn’t have rivaled the mantle of the Fujimori clan. But the waning legitimacy of Fujimorismo — seen as the standard-bearer for institutional corruption and political impasse from her position in Congress — is part of a broader crisis of representation in Peru, where mercurial political parties and ephemeral party alliances are the norm.
Even in defeat, and with unprecedented party fragmentation in Congress, the political establishment as a whole and the conservative sector in particular will still hold a majority of legislative seats. In a semi-presidential system where power vacillates between parliament and the executive, Castillo will face a major uphill battle in promoting his reformist program — chief among them being the call for a Constituent Assembly for a new constitution. Moreover, at the time of writing, Congress has called an express session to pass a constitutional reform that would disallow the cuestión de confianza — the recourse available to the executive to dissolve Congress should it issue two votes of no confidence on a bill of national significance.
Peru’s Congress is the national legislature with the highest public disapproval rating in all of Latin America. In fact, the institution itself could be said to be the tip of the iceberg of what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic crisis”: systemic levels of dysfunction affecting all levels of society.
Recent protest movements have indeed taken congressional corruption as their main target, even giving former president MartÃn Vizcarra the popular mandate to dissolve the obstructionist legislature. But the sudden eruption of a national figure like Castillo might be enough to push the latent apolitical tendencies of anti-corruption sentiment toward a more systemic questioning of the country’s political model, connecting the dots between privatized extractive industries, deregulated markets, and widespread cronyism.
A Left-Wing Governing Alliance?
Following initial trepidations, Castillo’s Perú Libre and Mendoza’s Nuevo Perú, forged a vital electoral alliance that proved successful on the campaign trail. Drawing from Mendoza’s inner circle, Castillo was able in the final stretch of the campaign to put out a more robust governing program and announce an accomplished team of policy experts.
It remains to be seen if that electoral alliance can be carried over into a unified left-wing administration. Castillo will need the support of Mendoza’s Nuevo Perú and other left-wing parties not only to assemble his administration and broaden his political base but to assist in forming a progressive voting bloc in Congress.
One of the key figures around Castillo, both on the campaign trail and in the future government, is Pedro Francke, a former World Bank economist and adviser to Mendoza who has largely been credited with softening the soon-to-be president’s talking points on political economy. While promoting the protection of national industry, economic reactivation through targeted public investment, and renegotiating mining concessions, Francke has also been clear that a Castillo government will not nationalize industries, the independent national bank, or engage in price or currency controls.
While Francke’s reformist economic program paid dividends on the campaign trail, it may also put Castillo at odds with his own party leader, Vladimir Cerrón. Castillo’s relationship with Perú Libre is delicate after making the decision to distance himself from some of the party’s more radical platform positions; however, Castillo will need to maintain their support if he hopes to have any chance of pursuing his legislative agenda in Congress, where Perú Libre has the largest bloc of seats.
We’ll soon see what type of balance Castillo will strike, between the more radical program of Perú Libre or the reform-minded advances of Francke and other experts from Mendoza’s circle. A sober assessment of the political terrain would begin by recognizing that the moderated campaign platform put forward by Castillo was just enough to convince some anti-Fujimori voters that he is not an extremist — which is to say, they may not even necessarily support the platform itself.
More importantly, Castillo still has a long way to go to consolidate power. Pending tasks like building up a real party infrastructure with mass participation should be on the top of the agenda. Likewise, stabilizing the economy and reactivating growth will be vital for Castillo’s campaign promises of employment stimulus and increased spending in public services like education and health care. But just how far a Castillo government can go in implementing a radical economic program will depend to a large extent on how far Peruvian society itself is prepared to go along with him.
As Mike Davis and others have claimed, Peru was the birthplace of “neoliberal populism” under Alberto Fujimori. Whatever is to follow, that this far-right version of neoliberalism — and Fujimori’s political heiress — was dealt a decisive blow by an avowed leftist is a triumph worth celebrating.
A marijuana growing operation in Colorado. (photo: Getty)
The Federal Marijuana Ban Is Contributing to Climate Change
Peter Weber, The Week
Weber writes: "Cannabis is the most energy-intensive crop in the U.S."
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