23 October 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Let us not give up hope.
Let us not give up hope.
Let us not minimize the problems before us.
Let us not mythologize the past.
Let us not embrace cynicism.
Let us not deny reality.
Let us not demonize one another.
Let us not paper over injustice.
We are living in a time of great turmoil. Our democracy is being undermined at its core, from within. Our constitutional order is being threatened by politicians who betray their oath to support and defend it. Meanwhile, our planet's livability for our species is being jeopardized by our actions. We have long understood what needs to be done, and we’re not doing it nearly fast enough.
We know that you in the Steady community are aware of the existential perils we face. Our wonderful discussion forums are full of your thoughtful and thought-provoking opinions, beliefs, and ruminations. We hear in your words our collective fears, our challenges, and also our avenues for action.
We worry. We wonder. We wrestle with what we can do to help, to fix, to heal.
How does one remain focused amid swirling eddies?
How do we find balance in a world out off kilter?
How can we be steady in the chaos of the moment?
Steadiness is not weakness.
Over the course of my career, I have found that many of the fiercest fighters for truth and justice have been the steadiest. Dr. Martin Luther King was steady. Nelson Mandela was steady. So was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I have seen steadiness save lives — from soldiers regrouping in the chaos of war, from first responders administering aid in the panic of disasters, from teachers exuding patience with struggling students.
Steadiness is not passivity.
As we look at the wide scope of history, we can see that making steady headway requires times for agitation. For anger. For energy. For mass mobilizations. For new thinking. Steadiness is built on action.
Finally, steadiness is certainly not capitulation.
We should recognize that one of the most effective weapons autocrats can deploy is the power of exhaustion. They bet that by wearing down opposition through an escalation of outrage they can instill widespread hopelessness. And that this hopelessness will spread and become endemic. They want you to believe that the system is inexorably rigged. That nothing you can do matters. That as you zoom out in your mind and try to wrap it around a bigger picture, you will come to a realization of your own futility.
But that is not what the bigger picture teaches. Steady drumbeats of progress can propel us forward. We have seen that in the fight for justice in America. Consider what our country was at its founding, and what we are now — despite all our faults. This progress came at immense cost and through moments of great energy, activity, and tragedy. It required a bloody civil war. It survived the violent steps backward of Jim Crow. It emerged from women who marched for the vote. It was spurred at Stonewall.
The fight for a better world will never be over, because we will always face new challenges, including ones we cannot predict at this time. We will also always find more that needs mending. There will always be people struggling to be free. But there will also be a will to struggle for freedom. We can find hope in the courage of Ukraine and the protesters in Iran, particularly women and girls.
We are facing a midterm election in which everything feels like it is at stake. And indeed it is. It is why now should be a time to get out the vote. To remind each other of the starkness of the choices we face.
At the same time, we should remember that the search for a more perfect nation, like the journey for a healthier world, is not measured only in election seasons. It is an accumulation of all the choices we make and the roles we seek.
Steadiness is recognizing that the struggle will always continue, but it should also always be accompanied by hope.
Salman Rushdie pictured in 2017. The author was stabbed in the neck and torso as he came on stage to give a talk on artistic freedom on 12 August. (photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Full extent of injuries from ‘brutal attack’ on Satanic Verses author in New York state in August revealed
The 75-year-old author, who received death threats from Iran in the 1980s after his novel The Satanic Verses was published, was stabbed in the neck and torso as he came on stage to give a talk on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution on 12 August.
Until now, the full extent of Rushdie’s injuries had been unclear. But in an interview with Spain’s El País, Andrew Wylie explained how serious and life-changing the attack had been.
“[His wounds] were profound, but he’s [also] lost the sight of one eye,” said Wylie. “He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso. So, it was a brutal attack.”
The agent declined to say whether Rushdie was still in hospital, saying the most important thing was that the writer was going to live.
Wylie also said he and Rushdie had talked about the possibility of such an attack in the past. “The principal danger that he faced so many years after the fatwa was imposed is from a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking [him],” he said.
“So, you can’t protect against that because it’s totally unexpected and illogical. It was like John Lennon[’s murder].
Elsewhere in the interview, Wylie said the world was going through “a very troubled period” – not least in the US. “I think nationalism is on the rise, a sort of fundamentalist right is on the rise … From Italy to … Europe, Latin America and the US, where … half the country seems to think that Joe Biden stole the election from Donald Trump. And they admire this man who is not only completely incompetent and a liar and a crook, but just a farce. It’s ridiculous.”
Asked how he felt about the fact that Maus – the Pulitzer-prize-winning graphic novel by another of his authors, Art Spiegelman – had been banned in some US schools, Wylie said: “You know, that’s the religious right behaving as they behave. It’s ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. It’s shameful. But it’s a big force in the country now.”
The man accused of stabbing Rushdie pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges when he appeared in court on 18 August.
Hadi Matar, 24, was arraigned during a brief hearing in Chautauqua county district court on an indictment returned by a grand jury that charged him with one count of second-degree attempted murder and one count of second-degree assault.
Two weeks before the attack, Rushdie had told an interviewer that he felt his life was “very normal again” and that fears of an attack were a thing of the past.
READ MORE
'When you've been through the things I've been through, most things don't seem that insurmountable.' (photo: Camila Falquez/Guardian UK/Maximilian)
Nihilist, anarchist, idealist, troubled young transperson crying out for help: when a 22-year-old US military analyst leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents, everyone thought they knew why. They were wrong, she says. This is what really happened
Everything about Manning on that afternoon of 8 February 2010 – her name, her gender, her anonymity, her freedom – is provisional and shortly to change. Three months later, she’ll be in a cage in Kuwait. Three years after that, she’ll be starting a 35-year prison sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Meanwhile, the wider consequences of her actions that day will, depending on your view, topple governments; endanger lives; protect lives; uphold democracy; compromise global diplomacy; change the world in no measurable way whatsoever; or – Manning’s least favourite interpretation – boil down to a cry for help from a troubled young transperson seeking the care she required. Today, sitting across the table from me in an office in Brooklyn, Manning is tiny, fierce, dressed all in black with long blond hair, and vibrating with enough nervous energy to power the lights. “Are we recording?” she says as her eyes skim the room. For the space of our 90-minute encounter, she will seem only partially present, each question yanking her back to some unseen site of contest where she must defend herself against endless and wide-ranging charges.
The memoir is called README.txt, a misleadingly clunky title (it refers to the file name she used for the leaks) for a highly entertaining book that, while telling the story of why and how Manning leaked the data, gives equal space to her origins in Oklahoma, a complex and traumatic family story creating the conditions for all her subsequent decisions. It’s a terrific read, full of unexpected turns and details that counter many of the assumptions made about Manning at the time. In the wake of her arrest, she was characterised by the US government as, variously, a nihilist, an anarchist, an idealist and an ideologue. Three days into her trial in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents revealing how the US government spied on its own citizens, something, Manning notes drily in the book, that only damaged her image further. “I support Ed generally, but on a personal level, the timing was difficult for me,” she writes. Snowden emerged as the grownup, the credible whistleblower to Manning’s loose cannon, “hero” to her “bad leaker”. Compared with Snowden, Manning was young, inexperienced and, because she was in prison, unable to defend herself in interviews. When, at the end of the trial, a photo surfaced of Manning wearing a blond wig and eye makeup, it delivered to her critics a further made-for-TV narrative: she had a secret she couldn’t tell, so she told a nation’s secrets.
Manning, now 34, snorts mirthlessly at this interpretation. “People tried to say, ‘Oh, this all happened because you were trans.’ It’s like, no; it’s because I was a data scientist who had way too much information and was actually trying to do my job, and realised that continuing on like this is not sustainable. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
She is talking about the raw data it was her job to harvest and analyse in Iraq, and that, within weeks of arrival, she came to feel was being dishonestly reported to the American people by the military. Manning speaks quickly, in a way that seems linked both to her talent for processing large amounts of complex information and to a more basic need to scuttle past black spots of memory. She was in prison for seven years before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, a chunk of that time spent in Quantico military prison, in solitary confinement. She tried to kill herself twice during that jail term and a third time, in 2019, when she returned to prison, this time for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Julian Assange. That refusal was an incredible piece of self-sacrifice, blowing a final hole in the idea that she was driven by mental turbulence, not principle. “I’m very frustrated by that even to this day,” she says, adding that there are a number of diagnoses on her Wikipedia page that are misidentified PTSD. “Gender dysphoria’s not on the radar any more; it’s been treated, or some would go so far as to say ‘cured’. All the other diagnoses were just untreated, unidentified, complex post traumatic stress syndrome. That is my sole diagnosis.”
Manning wrote the book to restore a sense of nuance to a story that, over the years, she feels has been seized on by one pressure group or another seeking to use her to fortify their cause. It has left her with a tendency to find a hidden agenda in even the blandest statement, which gives rise to occasionally comic misunderstandings. When I say the book is very good, she looks concerned and says, “I’ve spoken a lot about commodification in the digital age, and everything’s a product now, and everything has to be sponsored, from people on TikTok and Instagram, to the entirety of society where it feels like every single interaction you have has a monetary transaction or value to it.”
There’s a short pause. No, I – I just meant that I thought it was a good read. Entertaining. Manning looks fleetingly blank. “OK.”
The irony of making journalists sign NDAs to read the manuscript (it is watermarked on every page to discourage leaks) isn’t lost on her. She gives a whaddya-gonna-do shrug. “Ownership of something you can copy still seems absurd to me, especially in the NFT era. My publisher’s not happy with me for saying that. Which I understand. But I do find it a little silly.”
It is hard to imagine what Manning’s life consists of these days. Before the pandemic, she was doing speaking events mainly at the invitation of students, but lockdown put paid to that. She has some consulting gigs with tech and security firms, “on the AI side – nuanced and complex opinions on crypto-applications and post-crypto currency,” she says. She lives alone, in Brooklyn, where her social life revolves around the music scene – she has always been a big music person; as a teenager, Napster was her gateway to online culture.
Last August, she popped up as a guest DJ at Elsewhere, a huge club in Brooklyn where she wore light-up cat ears and played a set including Britney Spears remixes and the theme from Succession. She has, perhaps, the worst form of celebrity, one that guarantees intrusion and wild gossip – earlier this year, she was rumoured to be dating Canadian musician (and Elon Musk’s ex) Grimes, something she won’t dignify with comment – but one that doesn’t deliver any perks or income. “I’m not an actor or a movie star,” she says. “Even YouTubers make more money than me.”
Still, two years after her release from Fort Leavenworth, she had won some kind of equilibrium and was starting to rebuild a life. All that ended in 2019, when she was subpoenaed to testify in front of a grand jury about her interactions with Assange. She refused, and was sent back to prison. Given everything she’d been through, this was, surely, a very difficult decision to make? Manning looks indignant to the point of outrage. “Not hard at all.”
I’m amazed, I say, not least because in the book, she appears to be no fan of Assange’s, characterising his faction within WikiLeaks as the less “responsible” of the original cohort of hackers. (She won’t be drawn on her personal dealings with Assange, nor on the legal fight he currently faces.) “No,” she says. “The grand jury process is a screwed-up process and regardless of whether it’s activists on the frontline or if it’s journalists, I’m not going to participate in that.”
But the cost to you personally –
“Oh, when you’ve already spent seven years in prison, 18 months is just ... ”
She fades out. Surely, I suggest, having already served time makes the prospect of a return to jail even worse, particularly in light of your PTSD? “No. I – ” Her voice trembles and her eyes fill with tears. “OK, I’m going to get real intense here.” Manning’s voice lowers, loudens and becomes very harsh, as if she is forcing out an unbearable truth. “I struggle every day with the world out here,” she says. There is a long pause. “I have a lot of trouble with this world, this so-called free world, compared with the life that I had in prison.”
Why? “I struggle with the fact that ... I don’t know what tomorrow brings out here. I feel less supported than I did in both the military and in prison. In prison I know that I have housing; I know that I have healthcare; I know that I have food. I don’t feel as secure here. And people are so detached. There is no community. People don’t talk to each other. People don’t say hi to you. People are suspicious of each other.” Her voice rises to a peak. “There’s more community in a prison than there is out here! And that says a lot about how fucked-up our world is right now. I struggle with it every day.”
Manning was released from a detention centre in Virginia in March 2020, a year after she was imprisoned, when the grand jury’s investigation expired and her testimony was no longer required. To have that much fight in her, to remain true to her principles in the face of such cost, is admirable to the point of baffling. It stems from optimism, she says, and I believe her. “I know that community is possible, because I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it in the worst places that you can possibly imagine. Whenever humanity is pushed to the edge, I see the best, so I know it’s there.”
If there is a strand unifying all the contrasts that have governed Chelsea Manning’s life, it is her dislike – consistent and to the point of perversity – of orthodoxies of any kind. She won’t be owned by a single group, no matter how sympathetic to her cause. During her trial, the old lefties and free-speech campaigners who turned up to support her pissed her off when they disrupted the courtroom and annoyed the judge. In the book, she calls out elements of the radical transparency crowd at WikiLeaks, including Assange, for being “troll-y” and “nihilist”. She breaks rank with elements of the trans community – at the time of her arrest, she was still living as a gay man – by deadnaming herself in the memoir. There is, she believes, too much emphasis placed on identity at the expense of other considerations. “That’s not how I think. I have things that I care about, I have positions that I hold, and I feel like especially in the online era, you find an identity and you fit your beliefs to your identity, which is not how I work at all.”
The fact is, she writes, she didn’t join the military to advance an ideological agenda, or to help the enemy, or to cause chaos for its own sake. She joined for the reasons so many people do: because she was lost, unemployed, directionless and wanted to impress her father, a US navy veteran who she claims bullied her relentlessly as a child for being a “sissy”. “Essentially: trying to get my father to respect me again. That was the largest part, I think.”
She also hoped the rigours of military life would quell her gender dysphoria; “thinking it’s better to try to tamp down on that, which is basically what most trans people did in the early 2000s.” And it did die down, under the weight of the crushing physical demands of basic training. Then training ended and “I was like, oh, crap. It’s still there.”
After acing the aptitude tests, Manning was posted to army intelligence and, at 22, found herself deployed in Iraq as part of the graduating class of the 2007 recruitment surge. The shock was immense. Along with other analysts, she was housed in a converted basketball court in the green zone, providing direct support to frontline troops by anticipating enemy movement. She was very good at her job. She was also horrified and depressed, fielding graphic raw images from the battlefield. One night, a clerical error made by a special operations unit – they used an old address for a target – resulted in the death of a group of Iraqi civilians. “I blamed myself in part because I left my desk to go eat. I shouldn’t have left.” If she hadn’t been absent, she says, “I could’ve solved this.” She felt powerless, and angry, and guilty. She wondered if there was anything she could do.
The assumption about whistleblowers is that the bravery it takes and the self-sacrifice it entails require a confidence bordering on narcissism. To call out systems as large as the US military, there has to be, surely, something wrong with you. The fact that Chelsea Manning was so young when she uploaded the incident reports and significant activity logs to WikiLeaks isn’t irrelevant; risk assessment at that age isn’t what it is a decade later. To Manning, analysing the data, precedent suggested that the consequences might not be too dire. Forty years earlier, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing the US government’s lies about Vietnam, he escaped a jail term. More recently, Thomas Drake, a whistleblower who in 2006 communicated with journalists about inefficiency and fraud at the NSA, had been sanctioned but not imprisoned. Manning’s assumption was that she’d face dishonourable discharge. She believed it was worth it. As she writes in the book, when she left Barnes & Noble that day after uploading the files, it made her “feel like I’d done something, that I’d relieved my conscience a little. I felt a duty to my fellow humans to do this, to make the world understand more about what I knew was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan every day, to understand what the true casualty numbers were.”
Manning wanted to apprise the American public of several things: how badly the Iraq war was going; and that the secrecy around it was designed to save face, not a security measure to protect the national interest. A year later, similar concerns propelled her to leak a huge cache of diplomatic cables from the US Department of State. (That leak would reveal nothing so starkly as how porous and pathetic US government cybersecurity was that a low-ranking 22-year-old analyst could access and disseminate the data.) The question remains less one of whether or not Manning was justified in her actions as why, of the hundreds of intelligence and other officers with access to the same information, she was the one to break rank. There was in her background a “kernel” of belief in the theory of radical transparency, “but it was very specific to music. It was very Napster-era. It was around pirating music, or films.” Before joining the military, she’d engaged in some internet activism, targeting evangelical churches by trolling their discussion groups, but this was largely recreational at a time when early internet culture was, as she says, “a playground”, rather than the “toxic cesspools of extreme rightwing ideologies it became”.
She has vaguely anti-authoritarian roots on both sides of her family. Her mother, Susan, was Welsh, from a large, working-class family in Haverfordwest. Her father, Brian, is from a Catholic family from the midwest, with a strong libertarian streak. Manning’s parents met in a pub in Wales in the mid-1970s, where her father was stationed with the US Navy. They married and moved back to the US, winding up in Oklahoma where her father found a job as an electronic data processor for the Hertz Corporation.
It was a comfortable, middle-class home. It was also violent. Both Manning’s parents were alcoholics; her father frequently “beat the crap” out of her, she writes, sometimes for no apparent reason, but often triggered, Manning believes, by what he perceived to be his son’s effeminate behaviour. Her mother was gentler, but also zoned out on alcohol and “incapable of behaving like an adult. She never learned to drive or to balance a chequebook, and her alcoholism eventually made it even more difficult for her to function in the world.” There was at least one suicide attempt, when Manning found her mother passed out half-naked in the hallway. After her parents split up in her early teens, she followed her mother to Wales for a short, unhappy period before returning to the US. If there is a scorched-earth mentality in her thinking, it has been born of necessity. Less apparent is how she built and maintained her considerable confidence. At school, she was an academic high performer who felt cleverer than her classmates. After being introduced to computers aged six, she almost immediately started doing basic-level programming. Still, looking at the whole picture, I suggest, it wasn’t exactly a background to foster self-esteem.
“Well, it was very advantageous,” Manning says. “I was a middle-class white boy in Oklahoma.”
Right, but your memoir describes you as a child of alcoholics growing up in a violent home. “Very typical, though, in that region. But yeah, being trans in particular ... ” She tapers off. “But for being trans, I would’ve been on the path to going to Harvard.”
Manning is resistant to narratives that dead-end in victimhood. She spent years in therapy fighting to recover from the guilt of “abandoning” her mother when she returned to the US from Wales. “I’ve come to recognise that I was in a co-dependent relationship and had to do something different.” Her mother died in 2020. She has no idea where her father is. “We tried to track him down for the book, but he’s very mercurial.” In her late teens, Manning says, her father kicked her out of the house and she lived in her car for a while, selling bootleg Adobe software out of a parking lot. It wasn’t long after that she joined the military. “When you’ve been through the things I’ve been through, most things don’t seem that insurmountable,” she says.
Politically, several important things happened in Manning’s childhood. In 1993, when she was five, the US government sent troops into a hostage situation in Waco, Texas, bungling the mission and killing 76 people, including 25 children. Manning’s father jumped instantly into the “government’s-going-to-take-your-guns mentality”, she says, a position she despises. “It’s an excuse, a rallying call for something deeper and much more sinister. A significant amount of the libertarian strain of American politics is deeply connected to this air of superiority among upper-middle-class white men.” Nonetheless, from a young age Manning learned to maintain a measure of scepticism in relation to the US government, one that she never entirely lost.
The other political influence during her formative years was the gay rights movement. As a 10-year-old, Manning kissed a boy called Sid. Sid kissed back, before calling Manning a faggot. “I didn’t even know what gay meant at that point,” she writes, “and I bet the kids calling me that didn’t really, either. It was just a bad thing, we all thought, the worst insult you could use. I just wanted the whole thing to go away.” Her gender dysphoria was so deeply suppressed at that point that she simply assumed, with a sinking heart, that she was gay in a state where “homosexual sex” would be a criminal offence until 2003. Five years later, while Manning was learning to be an intelligence analyst at Fort Drum, New York, the voters of California passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage.
This was a huge moment for Manning in terms of both her mental health and her belief in systems of government. “My whole life, I’d been told that things were always going to get better,” she writes, “that the system was set up with checks and balances, that liberal society meant slow but steady ‘progress’ toward democratic inclusion.” The passing of Proposition 8 blew that vision apart. “It wasn’t just a repudiation of that promise. It wasn’t even just a national tragedy. It was a personal rejection of me, and millions of other queer people, as human beings.”
To Manning’s detractors, her leaking of the Iraq reports, and later the Afghan war logs and diplomatic cables, was an expression of monstrous arrogance; at best an overreaction to the normal chaos of war by a naive young recruit, at worst a bad-faith action designed to aid the enemy. After uploading the files, nothing happened for a long time, then everything happened at once. WikiLeaks released the reports to the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and other media partners. The military began an inquiry. As Manning felt the net closing in, she worried about her fellow analysts coming under suspicion – she had acted entirely alone – and effectively confessed to an anonymous contact online, whom she suspected had links to the FBI and she imagined, correctly, would turn her in. Less than a week later, two agents from the Army Criminal Investigation Division turned up to question Manning, accompanied by civilians from the state department and the FBI. She was immediately arrested and transported from Iraq to Kuwait, where she was imprisoned, under canvas, in a makeshift jail made entirely of metal bars. In other words a cage, where she would spend several months. “A tyre cage, we called it. Built in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I remember because that was the only piece of writing on it. It was a brain-melting experience.” She was stripped down to the most basic shadow of humanity. “Food. Water. Cool. My reptilian needs were the primary driver.” Meanwhile the guards goaded her about her next move. “Maybe they’ll send you to Cuba, or Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti,” she recalls them saying. “We do bad things there.”
Instead, Manning was conveyed to Quantico, a military prison in Virginia that at first struck her as an improvement. “It’s funny because people say, ‘Your time in Quantico was very bad.’ But the initial thoughts I was having in Quantico were: ‘I’m in the United States! Hot and cold running water! Air-conditioning!’” The relief didn’t last long. Manning was held in solitary confinement, harassed constantly with rules – she wasn’t permitted to lie down during the day and any attempt to do so would result in barked orders to sit up again. She was on suicide watch, and as a result was denied pillows or bedding she might use to harm herself. She was not permitted to exercise in her cell or to meet other prisoners. She was entirely isolated in Quantico for nine months, an experience the UN later ruled was “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture”. Meanwhile, military doctors diagnosed her with depression, anxiety and gender dysphoria, all of which were used by her defence team when, three years later, she finally came to military trial.
Of the 22 counts with which Manning was charged, she pleaded guilty to 10 and was found guilty on a further seven, among them six counts of espionage. She was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment, escaping life without parole only because the judge rejected the government’s most serious accusation – that Manning had given information to the enemy. In the event, she was found not guilty of treason. The single note of relief for Manning was that, with the trial over, she could finally come out as trans without compromising her case. She could also start legal proceedings to compel prison authorities to permit her to have hormone treatment in jail. Pretrial, she had started signing some letters “Breanna Manning”. Now, in Fort Leavenworth, she decided“Chelsea” was the right name. “It was a neighbourhood in Manhattan full of dance clubs where queer people could feel totally at home and normal and welcome,” she writes. She put out a statement via her lawyer. Then she knuckled down to spend what she assumed would be the next 30 years in military prison.
In fact, when President Obama commuted Manning’s sentence in 2017 – he pointed to the apology she’d read out in court as evidence of her contrition – with time served she would end up spending another four years inside before release. Her experiences at Fort Leavenworth had been a combination of deep depression and suicidal thoughts – exacerbated, according to Manning, by the destabilising effect of the hormones the government allowed her to start taking in 2015 – and what she characterises as a surprisingly peaceable existence. An individual as birdlike as Manning taking female hormones in a male prison would, one imagines, have been at risk of attack. In fact, she says, she had almost no problems; a couple of fights, that’s it. “You have to remember I was pretty sociable in prison. People knew me and I got to know people.” She helped other prisoners with their legal problems. She became a popular inmate. “People stopped seeing me as a trans person; they saw me. I could hear it sometimes – oh, well, you’re different.” These days, Manning says, the fact of being trans “feels like such a minor thing in my life. Like: I went through this transition period and it was very difficult and I needed access to care, and once I got care I’ve been able to function as an adult and not really think about this stuff. It very rarely comes up.”
And so she tries, again, to rebuild a life for herself. The speaking income hasn’t really recovered post-Covid, but she is about to embark on a multi-city book tour and relishes the prospect of meeting and debating with people. She receives hundreds of letters a year, occasionally hateful, mainly admiring. Reading her book put me in mind of Regeneration, Pat Barker’s novel of the first world war and the best encapsulation of PTSD I’ve read. I ask if she has read it and she looks bemused, eyes skimming the room, before going off on a diatribe about the US military’s “psychology of lethality”.
I try once more to discover a shred of hesitation, doubt or regret at any of the events of the last 12 years. In your place, I say, given the extremes of your circumstance, a different personality would have gone into retreat. Manning looks taken aback that, analysing the data, anyone could reach this conclusion. “That’s not me!”
READ MORE
Men in military gear were among the thousands who flocked to the capitol in Richmond, Virginia. (photo: Vice)
Hint: It might offend a swath of their voters.
I sat down with Ben to ask him about one piece of his film: Why Republicans in Washington blocked the Pentagon from studying extremism in the ranks, and what they have to gain by politicizing the problem.
Your film makes it pretty clear that the problem of extremism in the military is not small and not rare. But how did it happen that alarm bells are going off, extremists are coming out of the military armed and trained, and elected officials say shut down the investigation?
Service people and veterans are being arrested at a much higher rate than they have been in the last decade for extremist activities. But nobody wants to actually deal with this at a political level. Republicans are saying this isn’t a big issue. The reality is, not only is it an identifiable problem, but it’s also something that they won’t even provide more money to investigate. It’s becoming sort of a plot point, fodder for Fox News and OANN, where they say the Democrats are calling our service men and women extremists and the woke mobs are after them.
Former President Donald Trump said during a presidential debate, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” These are his voters. Is it the case that Republicans paying too much attention to extremists offends the base?
That’s exactly what it is. Even more, if you malign Democrats for questioning this supposed extremism problem, it’ll look good for your voters. You’re seen as standing by the troops (against the left). We were in Congress for a vote to shut down any more investigation of extremism in the military. That vote was to make a political point. It’s getting politically weaponized.
That’s a savvy political play—until people get hurt or killed.
And I think people forget: Historically we know that extremism and criminal acts to do with extremism have shot up after every single major American war. This goes back to the Civil War. And if you look at something like Operation Desert Storm, Timothy McVeigh was a decorated veteran. And he was responsible for the bombing of the Oklahoma City building that killed 168 people. There were 163 people with military backgrounds that were involved in Jan. 6. The numbers don’t lie, you know? There is an issue.
Is there a line running from extremism in the military to Republicans’ refusal to deal with the problem and what we saw on Jan. 6?
I think this is what happens when you cynically weaponize something without thinking about the repercussions. Republicans are kicking people into a frenzy about vilifying the military, when nobody is trying to do that. And I make it very clear that the great majority of servicemen and women and veterans are not engaged in extremism. But we know when they do, they’re incredibly effective. There’s a reason why 15,000 to 20,000 veterans have joined right-wing militia groups. It’s not fiction.
I think to some extent the Republicans know that. The fact that they’re refusing to look at Jan. 6, they’re still pushing Stop the Steal, all while ignoring the extremism coming out of the military, shows you that they’re really not too bothered by politicizing it and ignoring dangerous facts.
T.W.I.S.™ Notes
Trumpism is full employment for the American judiciary. This Week in Subpoenas… MAGA! (Man, Are Gavels Audible!)
- Bueller?
The January 6 committee still hasn’t served former President Donald Trump with his subpoena because… they can’t find a lawyer to accept it on his behalf.
- War room on cell block D
By the time this newsletter hits your inbox, Trump adviser and three-shirts-to-the-wind democracy-undoer Steve Bannon should be before a federal judge in D.C. hearing his sentence for two counts of contempt. Bannon blew off two January 6 committee subpoenas and hoped to turn his trial into a circus, but was blocked by a judge from doing that. He’s now facing a prosecutor-recommended six-month prison term and a $200,000 fine. We’ll see what the judge says.
No one is hoping JFK returns to reinstateTrump as president by Thanksgiving more than Steve Bannon. No matter what happens here, Bannon is in WAY more trouble in New York, where he’s been charged with five counts of money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud around the alleged We Build the Wall scam. Trump already pardoned Bannon on federal charges, but if he’s convicted in New York, even Trump can’t help him.
- Do you really want to send that?
Coup lawyer John Eastman’s “sent” box continues to be a deep well of coup evidence. A federal judge in California found that four more of Eastman’s emails contain evidence of probable federal crimes, this time by Donald Trump himself. Eastman’s been trying to shield these emails from the January 6 committee by claiming attorney-client privilege. But you can’t do that if your conversations contain evidence of crimes.
This ruling isn’t a guilty verdict, just a finding that the emails can’t stay hidden. But the bottom line from Judge David O. Carter: They show that Trump knew several statements he filed in Georgia court alleging voter fraud was false, but he signed them anyway.
- Fraud guarantee
Meanwhile, who has other coup lawyer Cleta Mitchell tapped to train her army of poll watchers on election integrity? Why, it’s John Eastman! More on this election subversion stuff in Arizona below.
- Key Lago
A modest proposal: Watergate is tired, and “-gates” are dead. All presidential scandals are “-Lagos” now. Stay tuned for a future “laptop-Lago,” probably.
On the matter of the O.G. “Lago,” it looks like the feds have the goods they need to charge Trump with obstruction. No decisions, or recommendations to AG Merrick Garland, have been made, apparently.
–This week in sedition
The first Oath Keeper to plead guilty and flip in the federal seditious conspiracy case testified in court this week. Jason Dolan, an Oath Keeper from Florida, told the jury that when he stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, the Oath Keepers were prepared to fight the United States. Dolan testified he believed the militia was working to stop Joe Biden’s election and to “take up arms if we had to.” Asked by prosecutors if he was being figurative in messages where he discussed fighting the U.S. government, Dolan said, “No. I meant it literally.”
– It’s about ethics
Remember Jeffrey Clark, the guy who offered to take over the DOJ for Donald Trump’s coup plot? Leave Jeffrey Clark alone, says Jeffrey Clark.
– Tiny stickers for everyone
We have a long way to go before it’s clear how, or if, Georgia Republicans’ post-2020 suppression laws making it harder to vote will affect the midterms. For now, early turnout is going gangbusters. The first week of early voting smashed 2018 midterm numbers by 84 percent and nearly reached early turnout for the 2020 presidential election. Get it, Georgia!
– Prepping for chaos
It looks like conspiracy uncle and Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson is already preparing for a possible recount in his tight reelection race against Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. But guess who he’s paying to rep him in that fight? The same guy who compiled the list of fake electors Johnson tried to have passed to Veep Mike Pence on Jan. 6. Such a small world!
Poison early, poison often
Donald Trump is already hard at work trying to soil the 2022 midterms. VICE’s David Gilbert has the story on Trump boosting conspiracy posts from Melody Jennings, founder of the conspiracy group Clean Elections USA. It’s just one of the groups already staking out ballot drop boxes and making wild allegations of fraud. She’s appeared on multiple QAnon shows, and Trump is right there to amplify the signal.
Meanwhile the Arizona secretary of state’s office referred a poll watcher in Maricopa County to the state attorney general and DOJ for possible voter intimidation. The voter complained they were approached and followed while trying to drop off a ballot. It’s going great so far!
Thou shalt have no fraud before me
Police bodycam video has blown open the story of how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sicced police on convicted felons he accuses of voter fraud, even after his government gave them clearance to vote. The people in this video are the first targets of DeSantis’ new Office of Election Crimes, which he conjured after declaring the 2020 election clean and well-run. They’re also the latest example of DeSantis using state power to intimidate his enemies and fuel his national political rise. For other recent examples, see Disney and migrants.
It’s notable that DeSantis’ Office of Election Crimes started with mostly Black felons and not, say, these people at the Villages or these ones coercing old folks. Watch out for coverage of this issue from VICE News.
“If I lose in November, I don’t know if it’s safe for me to stay in this state.” - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, explaining the extremist threat in her state to VICE’s Ben Makuch.
A day that could live in infamy — Mark your democracy calendar for Dec. 7. That’s when the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Moore v Harper, the case bringing infamous “independent state legislature” theory to the brink. I’ll have more to say about this case soon. But it threatens to give Trumpist-aligned state legislatures unilateral say over elections. That could push governors and even the courts out of disputes on everything from redistricting to recounts. The opportunities for anti-democratic malfeasance from Trumpist-controlled legislatures become irresistible.
Mule-er she wrote — Who would have guessed that the conspiracy group behind the blockbuster BS documentary 2000 Mules could potentially be shady? The Arizona attorney general’s office told the feds to take a close look at True the Vote after a bunch of “questionable interactions” by the group. Seems TTV assured AZ authorities they would hand over geolocation evidence of massive voter fraud and then… never did. The AG’s office also said the group went public with claims of evidence they’d never handed over, and even urged the IRS to take a look at the nonprofit’s finances.
READ MORE
Jerome Powell. (image: Intelligencer/Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
The net worth of the poorer half of U.S. households — while still modest — is now far higher than it’s ever been.
Indeed, the bottom 50 percent’s wealth was so low that it is barely visible on the chart. Moreover, it had stayed modest since 1989 — even as the net worth of the top 10 percent of Americans had zoomed upwards, more than tripling.
But the CBO’s report only provided these figures through 2019. What’s happened since then, during the years of the pandemic? Surely the situation must be even more dire today, after the last several years of high inflation. Just listen to what the Washington Post said in September following the Federal Reserve’s most recent big interest-rate hike:
Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said more increases are likely — and they will hurt, slowing growth and weakening the labor market. Unfortunately, there is no other good option.
Inflation must be stopped. Mr. Powell stressed that Americans are already suffering from rising prices, and low-income people have been hit the hardest.
So let’s take a look at this graph from the Fed, which shows only the net worth of the bottom 50 percent of households and runs from 1989 until the second quarter of 2022:
Startlingly, measured by this metric, the last several years have not been an economic disaster at all for the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households. Indeed, they’ve arguably been the best time during the past 30 years. That’s not to say that America’s poorer people are living in clover — they’re not. But in this way it is a clear improvement on the past: The net worth of the poorer 50 percent has doubled since the first quarter of 2020 and is now far higher than it’s ever been in U.S. history.
The story the graph tells is straightforward and, until recently, quite grim. The U.S. economy is twice the size it was in 1989, so you’d expect the net worth of the bottom 50 percent to have gradually increased during this period until it, too, doubled.
That isn’t what happened. At its start in 1989, the combined net worth of the poorer 50 percent was $1.7 trillion in current dollars. It slowly crept upward during Bill Clinton’s administration to $2.3 trillion in today’s money.
But it went nowhere during most of George W. Bush’s presidency.
Then, during the Great Recession caused by the implosion of the housing bubble, the net worth of the poorer 50 percent plunged along with home prices. Then it slowly crept back up until the first quarter of 2020. Since then it has zoomed skyward and is now over $4 trillion. (The Fed is measuring this somewhat differently than the CBO did, but the overall direction is the same in both data sets.)
The improved financial situation of Americans also shows up in other data. In 2013, only 50 percent of Americans reported that they could come up with $400 to cover an emergency expense, such as fixing a broken car. Now 68 percent do (although this figure is not inflation-adjusted, so $400 today is not the same as in 2013).
So why and how did this happened? And what does it mean?
First of all, wages have not been decimated in real terms by inflation. That is, even as prices have gone up, wages have mostly kept pace. The real median wage actually increased sharply at the beginning of the pandemic; it has since fallen sharply and is now almost exactly the same as during the first quarter of 2020. (The increase was not quite as significant as it appears — it was partly due to the huge spike in lower-wage workers losing their job at the start of the pandemic. Hence the decrease in the median wage, as unemployment dropped, is also not as significant.)
Perhaps half the increase in wealth is due to an increase in housing equity — thanks both to the run-up in home prices and inflation reducing the value of fixed-rate mortgages. The federal government also provided a great deal of financial support to the bottom 50 percent via the 2020 CARES Act, expanded unemployment benefits and the 2021 Child Tax Credit, and more. Together with low unemployment and increased worker leverage, that’s most of the explanation.
Thus we have a tale of two competing stories.
According to the Washington Post and many other media outlets, “low-income people have been hit the hardest” by recent inflation, and we must slow the economy (and lower wages and hike unemployment) for their benefit.
According to the actual numbers, these are good times for many, many Americans in the poorer 50 percent. That doesn’t mean that millions aren’t struggling, but the financial prospects for most were even worse in the past in a lower-inflation world, a situation that did not excite the warm concern of the corporate media. What we should concentrate on now is keeping the streak going, not bludgeoning the workforce into submission.
What happens next — and whether the modest increase in financial security that has accrued to the bottom 50 percent over the past two years endures — will largely depend on which story we believe. As of now, the people at the top of U.S. politics are going for the one not based on actual numbers.
READ MORE
In this file photo dated Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2020, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson waves at the media as he leaves 10 Downing Street in London. (photo: Matt Dunham/AP)
While Johnson has not yet publicly declared whether he is running again for Conservative Party leader and prime minister, some of his backers have already called for his return. And some critics have raised the question: How could Johnson serve as leader again when lawmakers are still investigating him?
Johnson was forced to resign as prime minister in July following an avalanche of resignations by members of his cabinet, who said they could no longer support a leader so entrenched in scandals — most notably “Partygate,” a series of gatherings held at Downing Street and other government buildings as Johnson’s government asked Britons not to socialize amid stringent coronavirus lockdowns.
After reports emerged of the gatherings, Johnson repeatedly told Parliament that his office had followed the coronavirus lockdown guidance, saying in December 2021: “The guidance was followed and the rules were followed at all times.” In January, Johnson apologized in Parliament, admitting he had attended one “bring your own booze” event in Downing Street.
Two major government investigations were opened into the gatherings and Johnson’s remarks: One from the senior civil servant Sue Gray, and another from the House of Commons Privileges Committee. Gray concluded that there was “a serious failure” of leadership in Johnson’s government, while the parliamentary committee is expected to hear evidence and compile a report in late autumn or winter this year.
The London Metropolitan Police also opened an investigation, announcing in April that Johnson, his wife, Carrie, and former finance minister Rishi Sunak had broken lockdown rules and had to pay a $65 fine. (Sunak on Sunday announced he is running for prime minister.)
The mandate of the committee — made up of four lawmakers from the Conservative Party, two from the opposition Labour Party and one from the Scottish National Party — is to investigate allegations that a lawmaker has committed contempt of Parliament.
After an investigation, they could recommend sanctions on the lawmaker to members of Parliament, who would decide whether to impose them.
Sanctions could include suspending Johnson or removing him from Parliament. That could mean he would once again be forced to resign as prime minister should he run and be reinstalled.
Ministers who knowingly mislead the House of Commons are usually expected to resign, according to government documentation.
It remains uncertain whether Johnson will get the backing he needs to make the ballot: Candidates must collect 100 nominations from fellow lawmakers by 2 p.m. Monday to stand a chance. If more than one contender reaches the requirement, members of Parliament will select two to be put to an online vote by party members, with the results expected Oct. 28.
Dominic Raab, who served as deputy prime minister and foreign secretary under Johnson, told BBC radio Saturday that while he respects Johnson, he is hesitant about the timing of his potential return to office, given that the committee is set to hear evidence for its investigation next month.
“There’s going to be oral testimony from people from Number 10,” Raab said. “I just can’t see in practice how the new prime minister, in office latest next Friday, could give the country the attention, the focus that it needs and at the same time be giving testimony and be answering all of those questions.”
Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, slammed the prospect of Johnson’s return.
“To go from the kamikaze budget under Liz Truss back to a man that his own party has declared is unfit for office, is the most powerful argument you could possibly have for a general election,” he said Friday.
READ MORE
Although it appears that the DOE is eager to control the growing e-waste problem, a deeper look reveals that businesses and nations dealing in electrical and electronic goods are attempting to slow down the implementation of the rule. (photo: MaxPixel)
The longer the implementation is delayed, the larger the pile of e-waste the country will have to eventually deal with, as the country’s electronics and electrical market experiences a massive boom.
It took the government nearly 10 years to introduce the E-waste Management Rule, on June 10, 2021, after the first draft was created in 2011. The Department of Environment (DOE) set itself a goal of managing at least 50% of its e-waste in five years and 10% in the first year.
It also took steps to set up a reliable recycling system at the Bangabandhu Hi-Tech Park in Kaliakair, Gazipur, shortly after the rule was introduced. The World Bank was also planning to invest roughly BDT 20 billion($196 million) in the project.
The WTO, which reviewed the rules during the draft phase, raised issues with a number of aspects after the rules were published, including the reduced standard for lead in the rule.
A number of countries that have a large electrical goods market in Bangladesh are reportedly lobbying WTO for a one-year delay in the implementation of the rule as well as relaxations on a number of fronts.
So far, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has managed to host a single meeting since the rule was introduced, in January this year, with government officials, business associations, national and international companies and research groups present.
“E-waste is not currently on the priority list of DOE. We are rather busy with plastic pollution and others,” said Abdullah Al Mamun, deputy director of the waste and chemical management division under the Department of Environment.
Meanwhile, mobile phones, computers and home appliances all experience record sales across the nation, adding to the growing pile of e-waste, which is a massive hazard to the environment and the people of Bangladesh.
According to a 2010 report of the Environment and Social Development Organization, more than 15% of child workers in Bangladesh die during and after the effects of e-waste recycling each year, and more than 83% are exposed to toxic substances, become sick and live with long-term illness.
The delay in implementing the rule further deprives the Bangladesh government of potential revenue earnings.
“Ninety-seven percent of e-waste which is going to landfills is actually hazardously collected by unauthorized people who send them to Singapore and other countries that have recycling capacity,” said Abul Kalam Azad, managing director of Azizu Recycling and E-Waste Company Ltd.
“As a result, neither do we gain from recycling e-waste nor does the government receive proper taxes,” he added.
Another recycling company, JR Recycling Solutions Ltd., entered a partnership with the government under a public-private arrangement. The managing director of the company, MA Hossain, said the process has slowed down due to the failure to implement the rule.
Why this inactivity for a year?
Although it appears that the DOE is eager to control the growing e-waste problem, a deeper look reveals that businesses and nations dealing in electrical and electronic goods are attempting to slow down the implementation of the rule.
“We sent the draft rule to WTO because the rule required the manufacturer and importer to collect and manage e-waste,” said Md Hafizur Rahman, director general of the Ministry of Commerce WTO cell.
“In 2018, we once received a report advising us to remove a few substances from the list. But after the publication of the gazette, we heard about new things. We responded to both.”
In the E-Waste Management Rule 2021, the DOE has limited the use of heavy metals and substances including lead, mercury, chromium VI, polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs), polybrominated biphenyl ethers (PBDEs), di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), butyl benzyl phthalate (BBP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and diisobutyl phthalate (DIBP) up to 0.1%. The use of cadmium has been limited up to 0.01%.
The rule roughly states that manufacturers and importers of certain electronic products will be liable for limiting the use of these 10 substances. Also, they must work to collect e-waste that comes out of their brands, and help to scrap the goods in a way that the environment is not degraded.
Section 15, subsection 1, of the 2010 Environment Law says manufacturers and importers will be fined if they fail to follow the rule.
The rules Bangladesh has set follow the same list and standard of hazardous substances that the European Union follows for e-waste management.
According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2017, Europe was the world’s second-largest e-waste producer in 2017 with 12.3 million tons of e-waste and a 3-5% annual growth rate. Europe also has the highest collection rate (35%) of e-waste collection.
The principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR) is a big part of how European countries handle e-waste. EPR emphasizes that the manufacturing companies of electrical or electronic devices are responsible for them, even after they have been sold.
This is a key part of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive of the European Union, which says that it is the responsibility of the producer to handle the collection and recycling of those items.
Bangladesh is a major importer of electronic goods. Countries such as China, Russia, the U.S., Japan, South Korea and many more have thriving businesses here.
“These countries think this rule may hamper their business. That’s why they are asking for some relaxation,” said Hafizur Rahman of the WTO cell. The additional secretary of Bangladesh’s government said he believed the WTO had dropped the matter, as it had not given any further feedback after the last letter Bangladesh sent earlier this year.
Mongabay emailed the WTO headquarters via the Bangladesh Embassy in Geneva, inquiring whether the matter had been resolved. The email also asked whether the WTO advised maintaining the same demands on producer countries like the European Union. Mongabay had not received a reply by publication time.
Section 14, Subsection 2, of the rule allows companies to take as long as five years to fully comply with the standards set in the rule.
“And the government can give more time if they feel it is necessary,” said Mirza Shawkat Ali, another DOE director.
The cost of delaying implementation
Rowson Mamtaz, a professor of civil engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET),was one of the pioneer researchers in this field and worked on setting the rule. The goals set in the rule were based on a baseline study conducted by BUET and the DOE in 2018.
“The Department of Environment [DOE] has wanted a rule for managing e-waste for a long time not just because of the environmental hazards, but also because it has the potential to earn money,” she said.
The baseline study found that Bangladesh produced0.31 million tons of e-waste (not considering shipbreaking as e-waste) at a 20% growth rate.
If Bangladesh had started managing e-waste in 2021, it would have faced around 0.54 million tons of e-waste. If the country had begun this year, it would be facing 0.64 million tons.
Four years from now, the DOE will have to handle 1.33 million tons, including accumulated e-waste from past years. The report added that only 3% of waste is recycled, so the actual number could be higher than projected.
In 2012, research by the International Labor Office (ILO) showed that chemicals of primary concern in e-waste have an adverse impact on human health. It may cause diseases like cancer, asthma, nervous breakdowns, hearing problems, visual problems, infant mortality and disabilities and more. It also causes air pollution, water pollution, land pollution and is a threat to wildlife.
This article was originally published on MongaBay
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.