30 June 22
This has been a very bad month for donations, one of the worst in years. It isn’t very likely we will make up the deficit on the final day.
We can however with a good effort keep it close.
We need that effort now.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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29 June 22
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Democrats can’t fix the past. But the least they can do is learn from it – and change course accordingly
There is much blame to go around, and the bulk of it rests on the shoulders of the right-wing anti-abortion movement that sprung out of the white supremacist movement that fought to maintain Jim Crow and school segregation. The racist, misogynist Religious Right gained tremendous power within the Republican party; the Republican party proved itself willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way; and as a result, Americans are now living in an undemocratic nation of reactionary minority rule.
But the Democratic party hasn’t done enough to help itself, its supporters, and women more broadly.
There are a great many points where Democrats could have kept the country on the rails. Chief among them is in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when Al Gore won the popular vote, but the supreme court, along partisan lines, installed George W Bush as president. If the reverse had happened – if our arcane Electoral College system had put a Democratic loser in office over a Republican who won more votes – rest assured that the Republican party would have gotten rid of that undemocratic institution as soon as it had the chance.
Democrats, though, did nothing – even though “one person, one vote” is likely how most Americans believe our system works, and is an easy advocacy line. When Obama took office, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. In the states, Democrats controlled more legislatures than Republicans did; more states had a Democratic trifecta (Democratic governors plus both state legislative bodies) than a Republican one. There was a brief moment here to get a lot done in the name of both democracy and women’s rights: get rid of the undemocratic Electoral College; codify Roe; rescind the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal Medicaid dollars from funding abortions for poor women, and the Helms Amendment, which bars US funding from paying for abortions for women overseas. Advocates asked the Obama administration to do all of that; they did none.
If there is one moment that portended all of what we’re seeing today, it was Bush v. Gore in 2001. Democrats had a chance to correct it. They had a base that was livid about what had happened, and a country primed to accept a “one person, one vote” rule for elections. And despite a huge win in 2008, they did absolutely nothing to prevent such an undemocratic result from happening again.
Two years after Obama’s big win, Republicans swept the midterms in what remains one of the most significant shifts in American political power in the last century. It wasn’t just standard Republican candidates who won – it was Tea Party enthusiasts, right-wing extremists, conspiracy nuts, hardcore misogynists and unrepentant racists, all of whom set the state for Trump’s rise and his eventual party takeover. Once in power, they focused on restricting abortion rights, passing hundreds of laws and imposing a smorgasbord of new restrictions.
They have controlled both chambers of the legislature in more than half of US states ever since.
Once in power, Republicans focused on keeping themselves there, democracy be damned. They scaled up efforts to restrict voting rights, carefully calibrating their laws to decrease Democratic turnout – that is, to make it harder for people of color to vote. They used whatever power they had to deliver for their constituents – not stuff like healthcare or poverty alleviation that people might actually need, but the culture war stuff that satisfied a punitive desire to screw over perceived enemies.
Democrats, on the other hand, made endless compromises.
When supreme court justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016, Barack Obama was still the president, and he had the right to appoint a judge to fill Scalia’s seat. The Republican Party, though, had control of the Senate and blocked him, claiming that, because it was an election year, the American people had the right to pick the president who would pick the next Supreme Court judge. They did not apply this same rule to themselves just four years later, when Trump was in the same position – he appointed Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And while some Democrats complained, they certainly did not play hardball; Sen. Dianne Feinstein even applauded Barrett’s speedy and illegitimate confirmation hearings.
And Donald Trump, of course, lost the popular vote; millions more American voted for Hillary Clinton. But, thanks to an Electoral College system kept in place despite its long-apparent flaws, the majority lost in 2016. We all know what happened next.
In early May, a draft of the supreme court opinion to overturn Roe leaked to the press. It was a shock, but not a total surprise – supreme court watchers and reproductive rights advocates had been warning that this particular court was ready and willing to overturn Roe, and that they might use the Dobbs case to do it.
But even with that heads up, the day the Dobbs opinion was published, Democrats seemed to be caught flat-footed. Democrats offered poems and made fundraising pleas. They asked us to vote – even though we did, in huge numbers, in 2016 and 2018 and 2020; even though three million more Americans voted for the Democratic nominee in 2016 than the Republican one.
Only a small handful of Democrats, led most notably by Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, suggested anything even remotely resembling an innovative response. And even they seemed to be coming up with it on the fly.
The unfortunate reality is that there is no immediate perfect solution for the problem at hand. The supreme court has struck down basic rights for women, giving conservative states enormous control over women’s bodies. Even a federal law codifying Roe is vulnerable to Republican takeover, and tricky to pass given the current make-up of Congress and the fact that the slim Democratic majority in the senate includes conservative Democrats Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema.
But that doesn’t mean there is nothing Democrats can do. Joe Biden, for example, could make securing abortion rights for as many women as possible his number-one priority; he could rescind federal amendments that limit abortion access; he could give permission for clinics to open on federal lands; he could go to the mat for medication abortion availability; he could be clear that he will expand the court and end the filibuster.
Instead, he’s setting off on a national tour to remind Americans that they think he’s to blame for inflation.
Voting for Democrats matters. One problem that Democrats are currently facing is that they simply don’t have enough of a majority to get done what their base wants, and they have two feckless narcissists with Ds next their names who are hampering the party’s agenda. The midterms matter; more Democrats in office means more opportunities to pass laws that protect women and human rights more generally.
But that doesn’t mean Democrats powerless now, or that they have any right to pin the blame on voters. At the very least, Democrats should take a look at what has happened since 2001, and recognize the situation for the emergency that it is. Most of the conservative judges on the court – most of the judges who just overturned Roe v. Wade – were appointed by presidents who initially lost the popular vote but took office anyway. This has happened twice in just 20 years.
Abortion rights and democracy go hand in a hand. A nation is not democratic if half of its population do not have basic rights, let alone equal rights. As the US faces a series of crises of democracy, from an attempted coup to a hostile takeover by a reactionary minority to an unprecedented rollback of civil rights, there is a straight line that runs from Bush v Gore to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health.
Democrats can’t fix the past. But the least they can do is learn from it – and change course accordingly.
The win by Delia Ramirez highlights the importance of getting involved and supporting progressive candidates who don't accept PAC or corporate $$$.
She won the primary against lots of outside funding because of GRASSROOTS action. Look at the vote totals!
Primaries are important!
Volunteering to support progressive candidates matters.
excerpts:
Progressive Delia Ramirez Defeats Billionaire PAC Money to Win Illinois Primary
"Billionaires and their super PACs are spending millions to defeat progressive candidates," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Ramirez. "They have the money, but we've got the people."
"Tonight, the Illinois 3rd Congressional District has spoken—we are rooted and we are ready," Ramirez said after she was officially declared the winner. As of this writing, Ramirez leads Villegas by a margin of 65.8% to 23.7%.
Democratic Majority for Israel, a billionaire-funded political action committee with ties to AIPAC, spent more than $157,000 on the race in an attempt to defeat Ramirez, a Medicare for All and Green New Deal supporter endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Rep. Chuy García (D-Ill.), and other prominent progressives.
Ramirez also faced opposition spending from the Mainstream Democrats PAC, a group funded by billionaire LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. The organization has invested heavily to beat insurgent progressives and boost right-wing Democrats—including Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas)—in midterm primary races across the country, with mixed success.
The Charter Schools Action Fund and the National Association of Realtors also delved into the race on Villegas' side.
"In our corrupt political system, billionaires and their super PACs are spending millions to defeat progressive candidates," Sanders said earlier this week. "They want a 'two party' system in which everyone is owned by wealthy donors. They have the money, but we've got the people."
Ramirez, who vowed to reject corporate PAC money, benefited from significant outside spending by progressive groups such as the Working Families Party, which poured nearly $638,000 into the race on her behalf.
"Delia Ramirez has already proven what a Working Families Democrat can do in office, and now she's going to bring that leadership to Congress," Natalia Salgado, director of federal affairs at the Working Families Party, said in a statement late Tuesday. "In just three years as a state legislator, she led successful efforts to codify abortion rights, pass Medicaid coverage for everyone over 42, and secure hundreds of millions of dollars in rental and mortgage relief for people across Illinois."
We got here because voters allowed it!
40 Reasons the GOP Is a Clear and Present Danger to US Democracy
The Democratic Party has a winning message: "Stop dangerous extremists."
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/26/40-reasons-gop-clear-and-present-danger-us-democracy
Viktoriya and another neighbor were raped by Russian soldiers, who also killed two men, including her neighbor's husband, and destroyed several homes. (photo: Nicole Tung/NYT)
Women who were attacked in a village near Kyiv yearn for justice. “I want them to be punished,” said one victim. But Ukrainian officials face daunting challenges in prosecuting such crimes.
Russian troops arrived in her two-street village, near the Kyiv suburb of Borodianka, in early March. Soon afterward, she said, two of them raped her and a neighbor, killed two men, including her neighbor’s husband, and destroyed several homes.
“If you do not think about it all, you can live,” Viktoriya said in an interview in the village on a recent rainy day. “But it is certainly not forgotten.”
She is cooperating with prosecutors because she said she wants the perpetrators to feel the “lifelong pain” they left her with. “I want them to be punished,” she said.
Whether they ever will be is uncertain and may take years to determine. Rapes were among the many atrocities Russian troops inflicted on Ukrainian civilians during weeks of occupation in the Kyiv suburbs and elsewhere. But the challenges of prosecuting the assaults are daunting: Evidence is limited, and the victims are traumatized and sometimes reluctant to testify about their assault, if they even report it at all. The accused soldiers have mostly disappeared.
Ukrainian prosecutors say they are investigating thousands of war crimes, including execution-style killings and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians. Among them, “dozens” involve rapes, said Kateryna Duchenko, who oversees rape cases at the office of Ukraine’s general prosecutor — a low percentage that represents only a fraction of the suffering. The oldest victim was 82 years old, she said.
Still, the Ukrainian authorities are trying to seek justice for episodes of sexual violence. Last Thursday, in a different case from Viktoriya’s, prosecutors opened the first trial of rape as a war crime. At a closed hearing at a court in Kyiv, they charged a Russian soldier with breaking into a home in Bohdanivka, a village east of the capital, raping a woman in the presence of her child and murdering her husband. The assault took place the day after Viktoriya and her neighbor say that they were raped in their village on the other side of Kyiv.
The soldier on trial, Mikhail Romanov, 32, was identified by investigators using social media, according to news media reports, and the survivor recognized him. He is being tried in absentia, but the case will nevertheless send an important signal to victims of wartime sexual violence, said Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher on Ukraine at Human Rights Watch.
“It shows that the government is serious about prosecuting rape cases,” she said.
Russian forces retreated from the areas surrounding Kyiv, including Viktoriya’s village, throughout March. In the weeks that followed, Ukrainian authorities were inundated with accounts of atrocities, according to Lyudmyla Denisova, who was serving as the country’s top human rights advocate at the time. From April 1 until May 15, her office’s psychological help hotline received 1,500 calls from people seeking assistance to cope with sexual crimes, torture and abuse, said Oleksandra Kvitko, who manages the hotline.
“A mother called to report that her 9-month-old had been raped with a candle,” Ms. Kvitko said. “They tied the mother up and forced her to watch.” The mother had called saying that she wanted to take her child and jump out of the window. Ms. Kvitko said it was her job to give the mother a reason to live.
The hotline has registered hundreds of calls about rape, but many of the victims were in a state of fragile mental health, Ms. Kvitko said, and were not ready to provide official testimony to the authorities.
To investigate rapes, prosecutors collect whatever physical evidence is available and take testimony from the victim. A medical examination can also serve as evidence, but when rapes occur on occupied territories, an exam is often not possible immediately, and if enough time passes, it may not produce traces of a violent sexual encounter.
In the absence of DNA matches, prosecutors try to rely on other forensic evidence — such as torn clothing, and evidence of cuts and bruises on the victim.
Even when it is possible to determine a perpetrator’s identity, most of them are not in Ukrainian custody, as was the case with Mr. Romanov, the Russian soldier who was put on trial last week.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment on Mr. Romanov’s case. It has denied allegations that its soldiers commit war crimes.
Viktoriya, 42, and several neighbors provided accounts of the night of the assault to The New York Times on condition that only their first names be used. Viktoriya asked that her village not be named because there are so few people in it that outsiders would be able to identify her, and she feared harassment.
On the night of March 8, Viktoriya said, there was a knock at her door. Three Russian soldiers came in, reeking of alcohol.
They forced Viktoriya to accompany them to a neighboring house, where they had planned to take away another woman, but they decided she was “too chubby,” she said.
The drunken trio took her down the village road to a third house, where a neighbor named Valentyna lived with her daughter, Natasha, 43; Natasha’s husband, Oleksandr; and their 15-year-old son.
When Oleksandr opened the door, the soldiers asked for his wife. “I’m also Russian,” he protested, telling them that he had been born and raised in Crimea. Viktoriya watched as he pleaded with them to take him instead.
One of the soldiers shot him in his doorway, she said.
The soldiers marched Viktoriya and Natasha at gunpoint to the home the Russians were using as their headquarters. A soldier named Oleg took Natasha, Viktoriya said, and one named Danya took her. “When he was leading me there, I asked how old he was,’’ she said. “He said he was 19 years old.”
“I told him my son was 19,” she said. Oleg, the commander who assaulted Natasha, was 21.
Viktoriya said that she had asked Danya if he had a girlfriend. He replied that he did, that she was 17, and that he had never had sex with her.
“He was so cruel, he treated me not as a woman, as a mother, but as a prostitute,” Viktoriya said. “He raped me, and in front of my eyes, they killed Oleksandr so cruelly. I hated them so much. I wish they would die along with Putin.”
In an interview in the entrance to the house where Oleksandr was killed, Valentyna said that her daughter had returned in the early morning hours, looking for her son. She wasn’t able to say much.
“She was like a stone, she walled herself off,” Valentyna said.
The family buried Oleksandr in their backyard, near a birch sapling. Valentyna had bought one tree for each family member, expecting them to grow for years before any of them died.
Police investigators came to exhume the body a month later, and the women gave statements about what had happened to them that they hope will lead to a trial. Prosecutors confirmed that they were investigating the assaults as well as Oleksandr’s murder. A neighbor, Viktor, confirmed to The Times that Viktoriya had come to his house that night and told him that she had been raped. He said she stayed until the Russians left — fearing the soldiers would search for her in her home.
Natasha’s relatives convinced her to leave the village with her son. She is in temporary accommodation now in a small Austrian town where neither of them speak the language. She is in touch with a Ukrainian psychologist, a fellow refugee, with whom she speaks daily.
Her mother, Valentyna, lives alone now, except for her goats, chickens, and cats. The Russians killed her dog on March 19, 10 days before they retreated from the village. Despite the conservatism and stigma in Ukraine over rape, she encouraged Viktoriya and her own daughter to speak to a reporter about what had happened to them.
Viktoriya has remained in the village, living on the same road where she was held at gunpoint. Signs of the occupation are still present. Outside a home near the village entrance, someone had painted a stark white V, a symbol of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nearby, another fence bore an inexpertly painted “CCCP,” the Cyrillic acronym for “USSR.”
But along the rest of the road, the signs are plaintive appeals for mercy from the Russian soldiers: “People live here.” “Children.” “Elderly.”
Viktoriya said that she didn’t want to leave Ukraine without her husband, who, as a man of military age, cannot leave the country until the end of the war. It was difficult remaining in the village, she said, because everyone knew what had happened to her. She believes that those who left during the war and returned have blamed the ones who stayed for the destruction.
“This war was supposed to reconcile the people, and they got worse,” she said. “This war broke everyone’s psyche.”
She has resumed smoking, which she said she had quit before the war. She is also taking sedatives. She hopes her tormentors will be punished. But no trial, she said, will be able to answer the questions she still asks:
“Why do they have such aggression against our people? Why did they come here, burn people out of their homes, and bring grief?”
Some miscarriages can look very much like abortions. (photo: iStock/WP)
Women will bleed to death on their bathroom floors if they are afraid to get medical care
I sat in my sunny bathroom above a toilet full of urine and stared at the object in my right hand in denial. This couldn’t be happening. This was going to ruin my life. Or at least the near-term plans I’d made for it.
You’d be forgiven if you think I’m describing the day I found out I had an unwanted pregnancy. I’m not. In that same spot, about two months earlier, I’d been overjoyed when I’d peed on a stick and gotten a positive pregnancy test. Which is why, on this afternoon, what I held filled me with horror.
There was blood on the toilet paper.
I called my husband in a panic. I called my doctor in an even bigger panic. She reassured me that it was probably nothing. I’d had an ultrasound just two days earlier, and everything looked perfect. My husband and I had been giddy at the sight of the dancing little fetus on the screen. And we were comforted by the conventional wisdom that a good ultrasound after 10 weeks is almost as good as holding a baby, since the risk of losing a pregnancy drops to the low single digits once you’ve passed this milestone.
But as the day went on, events worsened. By bedtime, I was cramping and passing clots. We called the doctor again. The after-hours nurse told us the best we could do was go to the ER.
By the time we arrived, I knew in my heart that my pregnancy was ending. As we walked through the sliding doors, I pulled my baseball cap low over my eyes to hide my tears from the roomful of strangers and stepped up to the triage counter. I leaned forward and said in a flat, husky whisper, barely holding back the sobs, “I think I’m having a miscarriage.”
Unfortunately for everyone that night, at that same moment a pedestrian who had been hit by a truck arrived in the ER, and we were sent to the orange plastic chairs to wait. Realizing that the woman sure sounded as if she was going to live, I angrily blurted to my husband that I hated her for cutting the line. (Please consider: I didn’t really mean it, and I wasn’t at my best.) By the time they called my name, it felt as if a taloned beast had taken a firm hold of my womb and was pulling it floorward. And just as I stood up, I felt a sudden gush and watched in terror as blood soaked my jeans from my hips to my knees.
I remember the next half-hour in a nightmarish series of clips. The nurse hustling me into the room and closing the door as I screamed and strangers gawked. My husband helping her yank my blood-soaked jeans off my legs as they lay me back on the exam table. The doctor bustling in and saying that she couldn’t diagnose a miscarriage until they found a fetus outside my body. The nurse and doctor poking around the clots of gore that surrounded me on the bed until I heard the nurse say quietly, “I found it.” The doctor holding up a little pink blob the size of half my pinkie and dropping it in a plastic specimen cup.
For most women, what comes next is that you clean yourself up, get dressed and go home to sort out your grief. But my miscarriage wasn’t typical. When we got to the clean-yourself-up-and-get-dressed part, I discovered that I was so drenched in blood that the hospital rags they gave me were utterly useless. As soon as I wiped the blood away, more took its place. And it just kept coming. We called the nurse back in. She took one look at the bed, left the room and returned rapidly with the doctor. I was experiencing an incomplete miscarriage, bleeding uncontrollably.
The doctor ordered an emergency dilation and curettage, or D&C, a clean-out procedure that’s essentially the same as an abortion. On the way to the OR, I continued to bleed so heavily that the pre-op nurses couldn’t even discern my external anatomy. The surgeon discovered that a significant amount of tissue had failed to detach from my uterine wall, hence the bleeding. She removed it, the bleeding stopped, and I was allowed to proceed to the go-home-and-grieve step.
In a frustrating epilogue, doctors were never able to determine why my miscarriage happened. Against medical probability, my healthy pregnancy simply tanked. Sometimes, even in our era of modern medicine, these things just happen with no proof of what went wrong.
This story has become a long-buried, sad chapter in my life. I went on to have three healthy babies. But since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, making real the possibility of fetal-assault laws being applied to women who present at emergency rooms with miscarriage symptoms, I’ve been troubled by a chilling thought: If I had that same miscarriage today in the wrong part of the United States — or if I were poor or a woman of color — would I be under suspicion of ending my own pregnancy?
The fact is that no one can tell a medical abortion (one that is accomplished with prescription medication) from many types of miscarriage. Both generally present with escalating bleeding, cramping and the eventual passing of the products of conception. Currently, there is no empirical way to say whether an expelled pregnancy was medically induced or unfortunate happenstance. All doctors have to go on is the patient’s medical history and the story she tells them herself.
All she has is her word.
As of this moment, at least a half-dozen states either ban self-managed abortion or do not exempt pregnant women from prosecution under fetal harm laws. These laws, enacted with the intention of providing justice for women who lose wanted pregnancies because they are victims of violence, could be perverted to instead make women themselves the criminals.
What would the facts of my miscarriage look like to a not-so-unbiased stranger? Would the triage nurse see my baseball cap-hidden eyes as a sign of despair or deviousness? My hoarse whisper as someone straining to retain her composure or defiant gruffness? Would the staff see my complaints about the traffic-accident victim as exactly the type of selfish coldness that a person indifferent to the health of her pregnancy would display? How about the perfect ultrasound just days earlier? Or the fact that the first time a medical professional saw me, I was already covered in blood? Or the subsequent medical reports that found no clear reason for my pregnancy loss?
My doctor would back me up, surely, I thought. But then I remembered I had left this maternity practice because they could never keep their patients straight. Nobody ever knew me or why I was there. They were so overworked that the official cause of my first miscarriage (this was my second) was still listed as unknown because someone forgot to update my chart. So to a detached observer, it would sure seem as if I’d had two pregnancies suddenly end under similar circumstances. If they looked at my employment history, they’d also see that I’d received a promotion that year. And if they talked to people at a reunion I’d attended shortly before I became pregnant, they’d say that I loudly, drunkenly and repeatedly declared that having kids right now would be a disaster for me.
Would all of this be enough to raise suspicion?
I can’t begin to describe what the days following a miscarriage are like to a couple who desperately wanted that baby. It is abject grieving. It is a roaring hellscape of pain and lost dreams. Imagine having to prove to the law that you didn’t do this to yourself while your ears are still ringing from the explosion. At a time when a woman needs the most compassion, treating her as a suspect would be inhuman.
I am worried for American women when I consider the complications I had from my miscarriage. In rare circumstances, a woman undergoing a medical abortion could experience the same complications. I needed immediate medical help, and so would she. But would she be too afraid of getting in trouble to go to the hospital?
This is how women bleed to death on their bathroom floors.
Today, I am as stunned as most of the world that America has taken this giant step backward. Women should not be put in the position of defending things that their bodies do naturally or fear getting that care because their reproductive decisions began outside current restrictions. Some things should remain between a woman, her doctor and her toilet.
Cell phone tower. (photo: Getty Images)
Prosecutors allege that Adrian Pena, 48, of Del Rio, Texas, later lied about having used the law enforcement tool, a service operated by Securus Technologies, Inc.
Prosecutors say that Pena used the Securus tool to search cell phone location data for many people whom he knew and for their spouses. Pena allegedly uploaded fraudulent documents to the Securus system and certified that the documents were official in order to retrieve the data, prosecutors said.
Securus Technologies’ cell phone location data has been the subject of controversy in the past. The company provides phone services to jails and prisons. According to the digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, it also collects cell phone location information on all Americans, which it then shares with law enforcement.
Senator Ron Wyden — an Oregon Democrat who is known for his commitment to privacy issues — sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2018, demanding that the agency investigate Securus. Wyden also sent letters to the major phone carriers asking them to disclose which third parties they share customer information with.
“I recently learned that Securus Technologies, a major provider of correctional-facility telephone services purchased real time location information from major wireless carriers and provided that information via a self-service web portal to the government for nothing more than the legal equivalent of a pinky promise,” Wyden wrote to then-FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai. “This practice skirts wireless carrier’s legal obligation to be the sole conduit by which government conducts surveillance of Americans’ phone records and needlessly exposes millions of Americans to potential abuse and surveillance by the government.”
A spokesperson for Securus Technologies said the company supports efforts to protect individual data. The company discontinued the tool in question more than four years ago, the spokesperson said.
“Even when operable, it was only available to users who were granted authorization by a law enforcement agency or facility,” the spokesperson said. “The tool was engineered with safeguards and security protocols, but we also relied on the integrity of law enforcement to operate it ethically. All of this preceded our aggressive, multi-year transformation, and we wouldn’t and won’t provide the service ever again, period.”
In 2019, DOJ’s Antitrust Division blocked Securus from merging with a similar company providing telecommunications support to inmates.
“Securus and ICS have a history of competing aggressively to win state and local contracts by offering better financial terms, lower calling rates, and more innovative technology and service,” Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said at the time.
Pena allegedly lied to investigators about his use of the Securus service for personal reasons, prosecutors said, going so far as to draft an affidavit in the name of one of the individuals whose information he searched. Prosecutors said Pena persuaded that person to sign the affidavit, which falsely stated Pena had been given unlimited access to that individual’s personal cell phone information.
Pena has been charged with 11 counts of obtaining confidential phone records, two counts of false statements and one count of falsification of a record. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for each count of obtaining confidential phone records, up to five years in prison for each count of false statements and up to 20 years in prison for falsification of a record.
CyberScoop could not immediately locate an attorney for Pena.
A blow-up figure lies on the ground as the Declaration for American Democracy coalition hosts a rally calling on the Senate to pass the For the People Act, outside the Supreme Court in Washington, June 9, 2021. (photo: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Ardoin v. Robinson could foreshadow a new age of widespread racial gerrymandering.
Under these maps, Black voters will control just one of Louisiana’s six congressional seats, despite the fact that African Americans make up nearly a third of the state’s population. Thus, the Court’s decision in Ardoin v. Robinson means that Black people will have half as much congressional representation as they would enjoy under maps where Black voters have as much opportunity to elect their own preferred candidate as white people in Louisiana.
A federal trial court, applying longstanding Supreme Court precedents holding that the Voting Rights Act does not permit such racial gerrymanders, issued a preliminary injunction temporarily striking down the Louisiana maps and ordering the state legislature to draw new ones that include two Black-majority districts. Notably, a very conservative panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied the state’s request to stay the trial court’s decision — a sign that Louisiana’s maps were such a clear violation of the Voting Rights Act that even one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country could not find a good reason to disturb the trial court’s decision.
As the Fifth Circuit explained, current law typically forbids maps that dilute a particular racial group’s voting power, at least when that group is “sufficiently large and compact to form a majority” in additional congressional districts, when it “votes cohesively” and when “whites tend to vote as a bloc” to defeat the minority group’s preferred candidates.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 along party lines to stay the trial court’s injunction, effectively reinstating the gerrymandered maps. The Court’s order is only one page, and it provides no substantive explanation of why the Court’s Republican appointees voted to effectively strip Black Louisianans of half of their representation in the US House of Representatives.
The Supreme Court’s order in Ardoin does, however, contain a hint about what might be going on in the conservative justices’ heads: It references a decision from last winter involving a similar case out of Alabama.
Last February, the Court handed down an order in Merrill v. Milligan that temporarily reinstated maps in Alabama that a panel of three federal judges determined were illegally racially gerrymandered. Under those maps, Black voters have a real shot at determining who represents only one of Alabama’s seven districts — or 14 percent of those districts. Meanwhile, African Americans make up about 27 percent of the state’s population. So the Alabama maps, much like the Louisiana maps that the Court just temporarily reinstated in Ardoin, give Black people about half as much representation as they should have based on their share of the state’s total population.
The Court will hear oral arguments in the Merrill case in October, and then it will decide whether to make its temporary order in that case permanent — allowing Alabama to use its racially gerrymandered map until the next redistricting cycle begins in the 2030s.
In March, moreover, the Court voted to strike down Wisconsin’s state legislative maps, warning that those maps may have given too much influence to Black voters. That decision suggested that, before a state may voluntarily decide to add an additional Black-majority district, it must consider “whether a race-neutral alternative that did not add [one more] black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”
The Court’s new order in Ardoin states that the justices will hold onto the Louisiana case “pending this Court’s decision” in Merrill. The Court, in other words, appears to view Ardoin and Merrill as very similar cases, and it most likely plans to hand down a new rule governing racial gerrymandering cases that will resolve both cases.
Taken together, the Court’s orders in Merrill, Ardoin, and the Wisconsin case suggest that the justices are skeptical of current rules, which provide fairly robust protections against racial gerrymandering, and plan to replace those rules with a new regime that is likely less friendly to Black voters — and most likely to minority voters generally. None of these three orders was particularly well explained, but the pattern is that, in each case, the Court ruled against efforts to draw maps that expand Black political power.
It is unclear what this new regime will look like — again, none of the Court’s three recent racial gerrymandering decisions are particularly fleshed out. And it’s at least theoretically possible that the Court’s final decision in Merrill will uphold current law and strike down Alabama’s maps.
But the Court’s Republican majority is notoriously hostile to voting rights plaintiffs and to the Voting Rights Act in particular. So the future of American election law is likely to be much more hostile to Black (and other minority) interests than current law.
Maria Ressa announced in a speech in Hawaii, Tuesday, June 28, 2022, that the Philippine government is affirming a previous order to shut down Rappler, the news website she co-founded. (photo: Hakon Mosvold Larsen/AP)
The Philippines' Securities and Exchange Commission affirmed its earlier decision to revoke the certificates of incorporation of Rappler, Ressa said while speaking at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
"Part of the reason I didn't have much sleep last night is because we essentially got a shutdown order," Ressa told the audience.
Last year, Ressa became the first Filipino and she and Russian Dmitry Muratov became the first working journalists in more than 80 years to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
She was a featured speaker at this week's East-West Center's International Media Conference.
The order is dated June 28 and reaffirms the earlier decision to revoke the certificates of incorporation of Rappler Inc. and Rappler Holdings Corp., Rappler said in a statement. "We are entitled to appeal this decision and will do so, especially since the proceedings were highly irregular," the statement said.
"We're not shutting down," Ressa said. "Well, I'm not supposed to say that."
No announcements about the decision appeared on the Philippines Securities and Exchange website before business hours in the Philippines, where it was already Wednesday.
The AP was not able to immediately reach Ressa in Honolulu.
She co-founded Rappler in 2012. The website is one of several news agencies deemed critical of Duterte's policies.
Since taking office in 2016, Duterte has openly lambasted journalists who write unfavorable stories about him. He has particularly bristled at critical coverage of his anti-drug campaign, which has left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead and drawn international condemnation.
President-elect Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and Vice President-elect Sara Duterte — Duterte's daughter — take office Thursday after winning landslide victories in last month's elections.
Ressa was convicted of libel and has remained free on bail while the case is on appeal.
The Philippines' Securities and Exchange Commission revoked Rappler's license over what it ruled was a breach of the ban on foreign ownership and control of media outlets.
Tesla. (photo: AP)
is among a list of companies that have been criticized by some big institutional investors for failing to disclose their environmental footprints through global reporting standards, Bloomberg News reported.
What Happened: Some institutional investors including Amundi SA, Aviva Plc, and Nuveen — with over $31 trillion in assets — have called on Elon Musk-led Tesla, energy giants Saudi Aramco, Exxon Mobil Corp
XOM-2.97%+ Free Alerts , as well as Glencore Plc, Volvo Group, and others to report climate, water and forest impacts through CDP.
UK-based CDP is a nonprofit that helps companies and cities disclose their environmental impact and whose disclosure system is used by more than 13,000 companies.
“Climate change, deforestation and water security present material risks to investments,” the report said.
“Companies that are failing to disclose their impact risk trailing behind their competitors in their access to capital.”
ADDED:
CDP
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