12 May 21
The Larger Donors Are Missing This Month
The average donation for May is way below what it’s been all year. That appears to be the most significant factor in this month’s difficulties.
Some larger donors have checked in but nothing like last month or the preceding months.
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Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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12 May 21
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FRANTICALLY TRYING TO GET YOUR ATTENTION ON DONATIONS! — A vexing struggle to pull in the small number of donations we need to meet the monthly expenses for Reader Supported News. Who out there can come through for Reader Supported News? Seriously. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News
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More Than 100 Republicans Are Threatening to Form a Third Party if the GOP Does Not Make Certain Changes
Zach Montague, The New York Times
Montague writes:
ore than 100 Republicans, including some former elected officials, are preparing to release a letter this week threatening to form a third party if the Republican Party does not make certain changes, according to an organizer of the effort.
The statement is expected to take aim at former President Donald J. Trump’s stranglehold on Republicans, which signatories to the document have deemed unconscionable.
“When in our democratic republic, forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism arise, it is the patriotic duty of citizens to act collectively in defense of liberty and justice,” reads the preamble to the full statement, which is expected to be released on Thursday.
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Palestinians evacuate a building targeted by Israeli warplanes conducting airstrikes in various parts of Gaza Strip, in Gaza City, Gaza on May 11, 2021. (photo: Mustafa Hassona/Getty)
Murtaza Hussain | States Can't Control the Narrative on Israel-Palestine Anymore
Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept
Hussain writes: "Since the first two Palestinian intifadas, camera phones and social media have changed the landscape of global outrage."
hen Israeli troops stormed the Aqsa mosque compound last week during Ramadan prayers, much of the world vicariously experienced the raid as it took place. Raw video footage of soldiers storming through screaming crowds — with stun grenades exploding as congregants ran for safety — was transmitted globally at the speed of information.
The provocative attack on a site considered holy to billions of people triggered an almost immediate reaction, not just among international media and online, but at the diplomatic level as well. Within a day of the incident, U.S. lawmakers, European states, and even Arab governments that have good relations with Israel were publicly condemning the assault and demanding de-escalation. These actors were themselves reacting to the pressure coming, or expected, from their own populations, much of whom had livestreamed the events or seen clips of the social media videos.
Rather than reading relatively controlled textual accounts in the morning paper the next day, ordinary people the world over witnessed the violent scenes blow-by-blow. Images distributed on social media of several attempts by Israel to evict Palestinians from their homes in the historic Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem had kicked off the tensions earlier in the week. On Monday, videos of Israeli throngs at holy sites cheering the chaos while singing far-right anthems flew around the internet. Now, footage of violence in mixed Arab-Jewish cities across Israel is spreading, along with the aftermaths of Israeli air strikes in Gaza. The emotional impact of literally viewing these scenes as they happen cannot be underestimated.
“Due to technology, ordinary Palestinians now have the ability to broadcast their stories without the filter of a media that is highly biased against them,” said Yousef Munayyer, nonresident senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, a nonpartisan research institute. “We are seeing this on many different platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, where Palestinians of the younger generation are sharing their voices and experiences with as many people as possible.”
The internet has so deeply enveloped all aspects of our culture that it’s hard to recall that we are still in the early phases of a digital revolution. Estimates hold that by mid-decade, around 75 percent of people on Earth will have a smartphone. Being able to capture high-resolution videos and instantaneously send them out to the world is placing a level of broadcasting power once monopolized by outlets like CNN in the pockets of almost everyone.
The political impact of this change has already helped reshape politics across the world and has become a critical variable during armed conflicts. The pure strength of weaponry was for so long alone as the prime determinant in conflicts, but now extraordinarily powerful states also have to worry about teenagers with 200-gram microcomputers — as Israel is seeing today.
“I think we have been seeing the importance of this for a number of years now,” said Munayyer. “The state of Israel, and states in general, now have a much harder time using traditional tools to control the narrative of events.”
A sad reflection of the sheer length of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it has continued over several information revolutions. When early waves of Jewish settlers began arriving in Mandatory Palestine in the late 19th century, people were still understanding the world through print media and telegrams, later giving way to newsreels. That frame of reference has since transformed several times over. Throughout the 20th century, as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians escalated, scenes of shootings, bombings, and forced displacement were transmitted to the world first by newspapers, then radio stations, network television channels, and now, in perhaps the biggest revolution yet, instantaneously by participants themselves through unedited cellphone video.
In the Mideast conflict, Israel’s decadeslong occupation has been punctuated by two mass Palestinian uprisings, known as intifadas. The current tensions — over Sheikh Jarrah and Al Aqsa Mosque — are raising the specter of a third in which, for Palestinians, the implications of the new information environment cannot be overstated. The next major phase of the conflict may take place in the streets of Jerusalem and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, but the narrative war between Israelis, Palestinians, and their respective global diasporas will be fought just as much in cyberspace.
For the Israelis, this narrative war is hugely important, not least because of the role of the U.S., its most important political and military supporter. The U.S., through military aid, pays for about a fifth of the Israeli defense budget and acts as a bulwark against international action, in the United Nations and other fora, aimed at Israel.
During the first and second intifadas, the Israel-Palestine conflict was depicted to a global audience largely from an Israeli perspective. Should a third uprising break out, raw footage like that broadcast during the raids on Al Aqsa Mosque are likely to trigger immediate reactions from the global public that are favorable to the Palestinians, as well as from American lawmakers who have grown bolder in their condemnation of Israeli actions.
The Mideast conflict had lately subsided as an international issue, but the wave of Israeli actions captured on social media stoked outrage and pushed it back into the headlines. “Many people had been thinking recently that the Israel-Palestine issue was falling off the agenda,” Munayyer said, “but now we are seeing the scale of mobilization throughout the land and globally.”
The ability of cameraphones and social media to push an issue to the fore has been witnessed beyond Israel-Palestine. Social media has helped opposition movements in other parts of the world build support and promote their causes, including Black Lives Matter, Syrian revolutionaries, democracy activists in places like Myanmar as well as Hong Kong, and, more darkly, Islamic extremists and far-right nationalist groups across the world.
States still wield a lot of power in this information war, but attempts to counteract social media with state-driven online messaging tend to be viewed as inorganic, leaving them at a disadvantage in an information environment where authenticity is key.
A recent U.S. Army War College report spelled out the magnitude of this transformation, which has accelerated as the internet has grown more powerful and become as much a visual medium as a textual one.
“In the modern era, broadcast television has been tightly controlled from its inception by political and commercial elites who wish to shape public discourse and protect the audience from messages they find harmful or unprofitable,” the report stated. “The digital revolution exploded this top-down model. Vastly more individuals and groups across the globe now have access to inexpensive cameras, sophisticated visual media tools, and a virtually free delivery system on the Internet.”
As a result, the report’s authors continued, “The dominance of state and industrial information producers has receded, and a new crop of visual communicators has swept aside the old rules and relationships.”
As Israel carries out military operations, many of which result in the deaths of Palestinian civilians, including airstrikes on the Gaza Strip that killed at least five children, the visceral impact of the rest of the world seeing the results in real time may make it politically difficult for even its friends to support it in the years ahead.
Still, rather than decentralized protocols controlled by no one, social media platforms are themselves profit-making entities vulnerable to political pressure, just like old media institutions. During the Sheikh Jarrah protests, pro-Palestinian users complained of mass takedowns of their online content.
“It has helped without a doubt that today ordinary Palestinians are able to share their stories with the rest of the world on social media,” said Marwa Fatafta, the Middle East and North Africa policy manager at Access Now, a digital rights organization. “Everyone knows what is happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now and that is because of social media, but unfortunately, whenever things reach a certain peak, what we see are these mass takedowns of content.”
Fatafta added, “These companies need to provide transparency about their decisions on restricting content, particularly during these extremely critical times.”
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Former officer Derek Chauvin. (photo: Hennepin County Jail)
Judge's Ruling Paves Way for Longer Sentence for Derek Chauvin in George Floyd's Death
Janelle Griffith, NBC News
Griffith writes: "A Minnesota judge has ruled that there were aggravating factors in the death of George Floyd, paving the way for a longer sentence for Derek Chauvin."
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January 6th riot at the US Capitol. (photo: Getty)
In Exclusive Jailhouse Letter, Capitol Riot Defendant Explains Motives, Remains Boastful
Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica
Excerpt: "In a letter sent from behind bars, a key defendant in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol said he and fellow inmates have bonded in jail, and boasted that those attacking the building could have overthrown the government if they had wanted."
The material obtained by ProPublica sheds light on the radicalization of a Jan. 6 defendant whom prosecutors have characterized as a “serious danger ... not only to his family and Congress, but to the entire system of justice.”
n a letter sent from behind bars, a key defendant in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol said he and fellow inmates have bonded in jail, and boasted that those attacking the building could have overthrown the government if they had wanted.
The letter is signed “the 1/6ers” and expresses no remorse for the assault on the Capitol, in which five people died. While no names appeared on it, ProPublica was able to determine, through interviews with his family and a review of his correspondence from jail, that it was penned by Guy Reffitt, a member of the Three Percenter right-wing militant group accused of participating in the riot. The letter said the inmates arrested for their role in the attack regularly recite the Pledge of Allegiance inside the Washington, D.C. jail and sing the national anthem “all in unison, loud and proud most everyday.”
“January 6th was nothing short of a satirical way to overthrow a government,” said the letter, written by hand on yellow lined paper. “If overthrow was the quest, it would have no doubt been overthrown.”
The letter sent to ProPublica is believed to be one of the first public statements from a Jan. 6 rioter currently in detention. ProPublica also obtained text messages with Reffitt’s family and was able to ask a few questions of him via text from the D.C. Jail, with his wife, Nicole Reffitt, acting as a relay. Guy Reffitt declined to participate in a fuller interview on the advice of his lawyer, his wife said.
Reffitt faces a variety of charges, including obstructing an official proceeding, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years. He is awaiting trial and has pleaded not guilty. In text messages he sent last month to his wife, Reffitt said he was resigning from the Texas Three Percenters.
Last week, Reffitt told ProPublica via his wife that more than 30 people arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack had discussed the letter while in custody. He said that the “1/6ers” are “not organized” and that there are “no leaders,” just “people chatting about things” because they are “stuck here together.”
Reffitt said that the suspects communicate with one another with what are known as “kites,” jailhouse slang for messages passed from cell to cell. They are also able to socialize during the two hours a day they’re let out of their cells. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Those detained in connection with the Capitol siege have been treated by D.C. officials as “maximum security” prisoners and kept in restrictive housing, according to media reports. Three defendants that Nicole Reffitt said she understood to be parties to the letter denied any knowledge of it when contacted by ProPublica. One of them said he became friends with Guy Reffitt inside the D.C. Jail, but had been moved to another unit by the time the letter was penned.
Nicole Reffitt said she helped her husband write the letter and solicit support through phone calls and a jailhouse messaging app inmates are allowed to use periodically to communicate with the outside world. The D.C. Jail has held dozens of defendants in connection with the riot, on charges ranging from obstructing an official proceeding to assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon.
The letter counters the notion that there was a “plan” or “conspiracy” to take down Congress on Jan. 6, blaming much of the violence on “isolated overly emotional individuals.” It suggests that their actions were meant to put the country on notice: “The people clearly are not happy,” Guy Reffitt said in response to questions sent through his wife.
“Ask the Capitol Police for [their] opinion of how it could have been,” the letter says. “They are grateful it wasn’t a real insurrection complete with mind, body and soul.”
Reffitt had a moment of notoriety in late January when it became public that his son had contacted the FBI to report him roughly two weeks before the riot. In text messages reviewed by ProPublica, Reffitt asked his wife for a list of presidents so that the group could use it to create cell names. Reffitt now resides in a cell he has dubbed “the Garfield suite,” named after the 20th U.S. president, James A. Garfield.
ProPublica reporters visited Reffitt’s family in Wylie, Texas, a Dallas suburb, and interviewed Nicole Reffitt and their two daughters. The reporters also met with the Reffitts’ son, Jackson Reffitt, who had reported concerns about his father’s activities to the FBI. Jackson Reffitt said the bureau did not follow up until the Capitol was under siege. The FBI did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica.
The family shared group text message chats from the past year and some of their correspondence with Guy Reffitt during his more than three months in jail.
The material sheds light on the radicalization of Reffitt, whom federal prosecutors characterized in a court filing as a “serious danger ... not only to his family and Congress, but to the entire system of justice.”
Reffitt, 48, worked most of his adult life on oil rigs, an occupation that took him and sometimes his family around the world, including three years in Malaysia. But when the coronavirus hit in 2020, work dried up and he intensified his political activity, focusing on the Black Lives Matter movement, which he viewed as destructive.
Reffitt saw his actions on Jan. 6 as a critical step in protecting his wife and kids from what he viewed as a decades-long American slide toward “tyranny,” according to his text messages.
“We watch the people of other countries rise up against authoritarianism and think, how sad they must be to want freedom and liberty so much,” the letter said. “Here, the more you try to divide, bend or even break America. The more The Republic of The People will stand indivisible and resolute.”
Reffitt’s son covertly recorded conversations with his father that have shown up in court filings as evidence that Reffitt came to the Capitol armed and with violent intentions.
“You’ll find out that I had every constitutional right to carry a weapon and take over the Congress, as we tried to do,” he said in one recording, according to a transcript in court files. Jackson Reffitt, 18, has since moved out of the family home and is raising money to support himself and his schooling.
In another excerpt in court files, Guy Reffitt was blunt: “I did bring a weapon on property that we own. Federal grounds or not. The law is written, but it doesn’t mean it’s right law. The people that were around me were all carrying too.”
Reffitt’s wife and daughters said his statements were more benign than they sound — that Reffitt is notorious for his hyperbole and left the Capitol when he learned rioters had made it inside. Nicole Reffitt said she has long referred to her husband teasingly as “Queenie” because of his flair for the dramatic. Prosecutors have not accused him of entering the Capitol building or hurting anyone.
In their most recent filing, prosecutors added new evidence to their case against Guy Reffitt. They obtained a recording of a Jan. 10 Zoom meeting involving Reffitt and two other Three Percenters. In it, Reffitt allegedly said he helped lead the charge on the Capitol with a .40-caliber pistol at his side, at one point telling a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was firing nonlethal rounds at him, “Sorry, darling. You better get a bigger damn gun.”
Reffitt went on to describe how the group might be able to disable a social media company’s servers by using a sniper rifle to disable the generators at a nearby Texas facility. According to court records, he said attacking the servers would “make them feel it back” in Washington, D.C. He added: “Then they won’t know we’re coming next time.”
In court filings, his lawyer said that prosecutors have “relied on bragging” and that none of the government’s video or photographs from the Capitol show Reffitt to be armed. Reffitt has not been charged with a gun crime.
The letter expressed hope that the events of Jan. 6 wouldn’t need to be repeated: “I hope that was the only day in American history we would without doubt, feel the need to notify our government, they have transgressed much too far.”
Several experts on extremism reviewed the letter for ProPublica and had differing views of its implications.
“I tend to look at this letter as a person puffing themself up,” said Jason Blazakis, a former senior counterterrorism official at the Department of State.
Peter Simi, an associate professor at Chapman University in Southern California, found the language in the letter more alarming, especially in how it characterizes the Jan. 6 riot as inevitable.
“I would interpret it as a threat. You can say it’s thinly veiled, but I don’t think it’s that thinly veiled,” Simi said. “This is the preamble — what you saw on the 6th. More is coming ... If you thought the 6th was bad, just wait and see.”
The Meet and Greet
As Reffitt struggled to find work in the spring of 2020, he spent hours watching Fox News and getting angry over the Black Lives Matter protests, his family said. His teenage children supported the movement; Reffitt viewed it as “bullshit,” according to his texts. One argument with his son ended with Reffitt throwing a coffee mug across the room. About a week later, Jackson Reffitt went to march in a BLM rally in Wylie. His father went armed, the family said, standing guard outside the suburb’s Olde City Park.
Around that time, Guy Reffitt was introduced to the Three Percenters, a decentralized anti-government movement. The group, which takes its name from the myth that only three percent of the population fought the British in the American Revolution, is credited with popularizing the militia movement by framing it in more palatable, patriotic terms.
Nicole Reffitt recalled a “meet and greet” in June, with about 20 members coming to the Reffitt home for a barbecue.
After some awkward small talk, the conversation turned to “what everyone could do,” she said. Who had military experience? Who had a license to carry? Who knew how to stop a bleed? Someone took notes to be sent up the chain of command.
Guy Reffitt was enthralled. Afterwards, he began doing what he called “intel," doing background checks on new recruits. His wife was relieved he seemed to have a sense of purpose.
In August, Reffitt drove to a BLM demonstration in Mississippi, hoping to surveil a particular activist. The family said that Reffitt intended to place a GPS tracking device on the man’s car. He abandoned the plan when he wasn’t sure he had the right vehicle.
Nicole Reffitt said she was alarmed when she found multiple license plates in the bed of her husband’s pickup truck. She said her husband told her he used them to make sure he wasn’t being tracked. “I was like, ‘What the fuck? What are we doing?’” she said. “He told me to go to work and keep my business to myself.”
After then-President Donald Trump lost his bid for reelection, Guy Reffitt began to sequester himself in the front room of his suburban brick home, glued to Newsmax as it reported theories of how the vote was rigged.
On Dec. 19, Reffitt found a new obsession, his family said, when Trump tweeted: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
From then on, Reffitt’s texts bounced between plans for shopping and cooking prime rib for Christmas and talk of going to D.C. to “shock the world.”
“It’s the government that is going to be destroyed in this fight,” Reffitt texted his family on Dec. 21. “Congress has made fatal mistakes this time.”
Feeling “paranoid” about his father, Jackson Reffitt sent in a tip via the FBI website. He said he wrote that his father was a militia member who made threatening statements about public officials and kept talking about doing “something big.”
Full Battle Rattle
After Christmas, Guy Reffitt firmed up plans to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally. His family said he planned to bring weapons, which was unsurprising; they said he went most everywhere armed. Nicole Reffitt told ProPublica her husband promised to disassemble the weapons to comply with Washington, D.C., laws. His defense attorney has argued that there is no evidence that he “carried a loaded firearm.”
But according to court records, on Dec. 28, Guy messaged an unnamed individual. “I don’t think unarmed will be the case this time,” he said. “I will be in full battle rattle. If that’s a law I break, so be it, but I won’t do it alone.”
When he left to drive to Washington, he told his family, “If everything works out, I’ll see you again,” in what Nicole said was a typically melodramatic goodbye.
“I love ALL of you with ALL of my heart and soul,” he texted on the morning of Jan. 6. “This is for our country and for ALL OF YOU and your kids.”
Jackson Reffitt came home to find his mother and sister transfixed by the television as protestors pushed past police lines. “What the hell?” he recalled asking. “Is dad there?” The screen showed police in the Senate chambers, guns drawn.
“Your father is there,” his mother responded.
Finally acting on Jackson Reffitt’s earlier tip, an FBI agent called him to set up a meeting.
Two days later, Guy Reffitt came home, eager to boast. His son decided to record him. Jackson Reffitt met with the FBI agent the following week.
In the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 16, a squad of more than a dozen officers rolled up to the Reffitt home, armed for a SWAT raid, according to his family and footage from their neighbor’s security camera. A mobile battering ram idled in front of their house as the officers tossed flash-bang grenades. The family clambered out, some still in their underwear.
Guy Reffitt went without resistance, assuring the kids that the federal agents were only doing their jobs. He was expecting to be arrested by then, his family said, and even laughed with an officer who accompanied him to the bathroom after he’d been handcuffed.
As he was being carted off in the back of a police vehicle, he yelled out the window: “I didn’t ask for this!”
He has been behind bars since.
On April 22, Reffitt messaged his wife a note of encouragement.
“You are superstars to more than half the country,” he wrote. “There’s no going back now.”
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Workers drive-through to protest for a $15 dollar hourly minimun wage outside a McDonald's restaurant in East Los Angeles. (photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP)
McDonald's Workers Will Strike for $15 an Hour in 15 Cities
Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
Excerpt: "Striking cashiers and cooks say there's an easy solution to McDonald's labor shortage: a minimum wage."
cDonald's cashiers and cooks in 15 U.S. cities will strike on May 19—a day before the fast-food behemoth's annual shareholder meeting—to demand McDonald's pay all of its workers at least $15 an hour amid a national labor shortage in the fast food industry.
In recent months, McDonald's stores have become desperate for employees, offering workers bonuses and incentives to sign up for a job. One store in Fayetteville, North Carolina is offering a $500 sign on bonus, according to a poster viewed by Motherboard. An owner of 60 McDonald's franchises in Florida is paying job applicants $50 just to show up for an interview. In one recent viral TikTok, a McDonald's customer rolled up at a drive thru to find a sign that read, "We are short-staffed. Please be patient with the staff that did show up. No one wants to work anymore." Republican lawmakers are blaming the labor shortage on the Coronavirus relief bill and generous unemployment benefits.
Striking workers around the country, who are part of the Fight For $15 movement, say McDonald's has an easy solution to this labor shortage: it can simply raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour at all of their stores. The company's sales are booming, thanks to demand for faster drive-thru orders. McDonald's recently announced that it earned $5 billion in profits in 2020, and paid shareholders nearly $4 billion in dividends.
"We know McDonald's is gathering for its shareholders meeting to discuss what straws we use, what bags we use, how much we get paid," Terrence Wise, a McDonald's department manager in Kansas City, Missouri, who has worked in the fast food industry for 22 years told Motherboard.
"The one thing that’s missing is our voice" he continued. "We made them that $5 billion in profit last year. There wouldn’t be shares to divide if we weren’t making burgers and McFlurries. Our message to shareholders on May 19 is you don't have to wait on legislation. You can pay us $15 an hour now, that should be the floor."
On the day of the strike, workers will be walking off the job in Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Kansas City, St Louis, Houston, Milwaukee and other cities. McDonald's workers have been organizing for $15 an hour minimum wage legislation since 2012, when they launched the Fight for $15 movement.
“Our first responsibility is to hardworking restaurant crew, and we respect and appreciate their dedication to serve millions of customers daily,” a statement from McDonald’s USA said. “It’s the responsibility of federal and local government to set minimum wage, and we’re open to dialogue so that any changes meet the needs of thousands of hardworking restaurant employees and the 2,000 McDonald’s independent owner/operators who run small businesses.”
In late April, on an earnings call, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski and president Joseph Erlinger suggested that a McDonald's wage increase could be coming soon, in response to a question about labor shortages.
"I think one of the things that we are thinking about...is in our company-owned restaurants, how do we think about what the pay and benefits package need to look like for us to make sure that we're able to get the people that we need," Kempczinski said.
"We're working through what some changes in our company-owned restaurants might look like from a wages and compensation perspective," Erlinger added.
Earlier this year, a Motherboard investigation revealed that McDonald's has a secret intel team that has spied on its workers in the Fight for $15 campaign for years using social media monitoring tools, labelling the group at a security threat. In response, the Fight for $15 movement, which is backed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), filed federal charges against McDonald's, for "unlawful surveillance of workers and union organizers participating in the Fight for $15 campaign, using tactics including extensive monitoring of social media activity." An investigation is ongoing.
Earlier this year, progressive Democrats tried to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by including the wage hike in the federal coronavirus relief bill, but Republicans and moderate Democrats stood in the way.
Despite decades of experience, Wise, the Kansas City McDonald's worker, earns $15.75 an hour and receives no health care benefits or paid sick days as a McDonald's manager, and says it's barely enough to scrape by and support his three teenage daughters in Kansas City.
"Our stores are making record profits during the pandemic and we're short-staffed," Wise continued. "We're pissed off. McDonald's has had the opportunity to do what's right."
On May 19, striking workers will also demand that McDonald's withdraw its membership from the National Restaurant Association (NRA) and the International Franchise Association (IRA), which have spent more than $3.2 million lobbying Congress against the federal minimum wage increase since 2019, according to federal lobbying reports.
In 2019, McDonald's promised to stop lobbying against local, state, and federal minimum wage increases, but has continued to play a part in these efforts by retaining its membership to these two powerful business associations.
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Protesters make the three-finger salute during a demonstration against the military coup in downtown Yangon on May 6. (photo: Getty)
Myanmar's Coup Is Uniting a Country Riven by Ethnic Divisions. Will It Last?
Jen Kirby, Vox
Kirby writes: "Protesters and activists faced a reckoning about Myanmar's past decade of civilian rule. Now they say they are fighting for a real federal democracy."
u Thit has a table in a corner by the window in her home. She no longer sits there at night. “You never know when the bullets will fly,” she says.
She fears the Myanmar military might shoot at random. At 8 pm, when people still bang pots and pans in protest, security forces will sometimes fire at the sounds — with slingshots, stones, bullets.
Su Thit, a pseudonym she is using for her safety, lives in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city. She began protesting in early February, when demonstrators swarmed the streets in defiance of a military coup that toppled the country’s quasi-democratic government and detained its civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Su Thit, 30, lived abroad but returned to Myanmar in the past decade when the country, with a new constitution, began to ease into civilian rule. She wanted to be a small part of that future. She supported Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), and, like the rest of her family, she voted for the party in the elections last November.
When the military claimed voter fraud in that election to justify its takeover of the civilian government, she knew it was a lie. When the military began massacring protesters, she knew her purpose — to be a small part of Myanmar’s future — would now require something different. Out on the streets, among the mass of protesters, she felt motivated.
“We began to understand that it will be a long road,” Su Thit says. “It would not be finished in one week or one month.”
Just a little more than three months since the coup, Su Thit’s belief in a long road is bearing out. The Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) — professionals and civil servants who refused to work — and street protests have turned into something much more sustained.
“Everyone is against the military,” Wathone, a 27-year-old protester in Yangon, said, using a pseudonym that he says means “rain”; it used to be his pen name when he wrote poetry as a teen.
“If there was no coup,” Wathone added, “we wouldn’t have this kind of unity.”
This unrelenting opposition to Myanmar’s military has brought together people of different classes, ages, and most importantly, ethnic and religious groups — many of whom have been marginalized and brutalized by Myanmar’s military, some for the entire life of the country.
“We have our own common enemy,” said Moon Nay Lin, a spokesperson for the Kachin Women’s Association Thailand, an advocacy and human rights organization to help those in Kachin state, where an insurgent movement has been at war with the state on and off for decades.
“All of the people from Burma, including the ethnic people, are the same feeling on military,” Moon Nay Lin added, referring to Myanmar by its former name.
The coalition that has formed against the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is called, has also forced the country to reckon with what should, or could, replace it. At first, the protesters called for the release of political detainees and the restoration of democracy. Now they want something radically different.
“The call is much bigger now,” said Wai Hnin Pwint Thon, an activist with Burma Campaign UK. They want to see the military dictatorship fall; they want to see the 2008 constitution — which ushered in Myanmar’s civilian government but kept ultimate authority in the military’s hands — abolished for good. They want to establish a federal democratic union with equal rights and equal treatment for all.
“That’s why people are very determined to get rid of this military, once and for all, because we don’t want to go back to this situation in another 10 years' time,” Wai Hnin added.
This determination has, against dangerous and unfathomably difficult odds, lent the movement a kind of desperate optimism. Protesters, advocates, and ethnic civil society groups inside and outside Myanmar believe the struggle is winnable, although they realize it’s unlikely to happen with nonviolent protests alone.
For now, Su Thit avoids the table by the window and makes sure her phone is clear of any social media if she goes outside. She still helps organize protests, small ones, where people converge quickly in one location, and just as quickly disappear.
This is daily life in Myanmar, a country convulsing toward revolution. “I think we can still win,” Su Thit said. “It’s just that I’m not too sure how — and how long will it take.”
The great awakening that gave the protests life
Ashley Wai, a 20-year-old former medical student in Yangon, used to believe Aung San Suu Kyi would take care of everything. She trusted her, as did most people she knew. “We thought everything she did was right,” she said.
Suu Kyi is an almost mythical figure in Myanmar. She is the daughter of the man who helped win the country’s independence, and the country’s pro-democracy champion, put under house arrest by the military from 1989 until 2010.
So when Suu Kyi defended the military’s brutal operations in Rakhine state against Rohingya Muslims there — operations a United Nations report found were carried out with “genocidal intent” — Wai supported them. She thought the military was defending her from invaders. She called the Rohingya “Bengalis” — a conspiracy theory that suggests the Rohingya are foreigners and unauthorized immigrants.
When the coup happened, Wai joined protests calling for Suu Kyi to be freed. But something felt wrong. She started to see the military’s shocking violence at these protests, the so-called defenders of the nation turning their weapons on their own people. She started learning about the military’s history, her country’s history. A mentor in the movement told her to read a book about the Rohingya genocide.
“Why didn’t I know? Why was I silent when they did the same in Rakhine? Why didn’t I know? Why was I so stupid?” she said she asks herself, over and over.
In early February, Wai publicly apologized for the treatment of the Rohingya people, and for her ignorance. It was scary, she said, and a few friends turned against her. But she is also ashamed and angry for having done nothing before. For her, this fight to build a new country is part awakening, part atonement.
Wai’s experience is an extreme example of the kind of revelation that has happened among many young protesters, especially among the majority Bamar ethnic group. “Some of us were brainwashed,” Wathone, the protester in Yangon, said. “But now everyone understands what the Rohingya feel, what the ethnic groups feel.”
Myanmar’s military has had some degree of control since the country gained independence in 1948. In the late 1980s, protests kicked off by students built a pro-democracy movement where Suu Kyi rose to prominence, and which tried to challenge the military’s grip.
In the decade that followed, Myanmar remained cut off from the world. The repressive regime became a political and economic pariah in the West, and the US placed hefty sanctions on the country for years. In 2008, the Tatmadaw adopted a new constitution with some small democratic openings. In 2015, Suu Kyi won the elections and became the de facto civilian leader. In response, the US lifted those sanctions.
The military retained significant power under the new arrangement. Suu Kyi, too, also deferred to the Tatmadaw, most notably in its campaign against the Rohingya. She referred to evidence of atrocities as “fake news” and framed the crackdown as operations against terrorism. And in 2019, she defended Myanmar against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, Netherlands.
And many of her biggest supporters, especially those in the Bamar majority like Ashley Wai, deferred to her.
Myanmar is an ethnically diverse state, but minority ethnic groups have been long marginalized and, like the Rohingya, face discrimination, structural racism, and often violence. The military, throughout its history, used this to its advantage, framing these groups as a threat to the country that necessitated a strong military response.
“The military has based its profits and power on perpetuating eternal ethnic conflict in the country, because that was its very rationale for its existence,” said David Brenner, a lecturer in conflict and security at the University of Sussex and author of Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands.
Many supporters of Suu Kyi and the NLD who believed in democracy and distrusted military rule didn’t necessarily reject a role for the military. A thread of chauvinism ran through it all, and tightly controlled information — or outright misinformation — meant people didn’t fully understand the scale and relentless of the military’s violence against some groups.
Nickey Diamond, a human rights advocate with Fortify Rights, said that, especially when it came to the Rohingya, they were framed as “an external threat like Islamic terrorism.”
The coup has dramatically shaken that faith. “Many of them have changed their opinion after what they have seen, the true color of military,” Su Thit said. “They were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know that. This could actually happen in other areas as well. And it happened to us.’”
That has led to public apologies like Wai’s, regrets and admonitions flooding Facebook and other social media networks of young protesters and activists. “We did apologize to Rohingya people, to ethnic people,” Wathone said. “Now we understand what you have suffered. We will no longer discriminate; we will no longer ignore your identity.”
Feelings about Aung San Suu Kyi are much more complicated, and some protesters I spoke to still see her as doing her best against the military. She’s a figure they still admire and honor, even if, perhaps, a new generation is rising up. Ashley Wai told me, “I hate her because I loved her so much.”
But on the military, the feelings are clear: “People are very united,” said Wai Wai Nu, a Rohingya and founder of the Women’s Peace Network, which advocates for human rights and democracy in Myanmar. “They started to realize the suffering of the Rohingya, the Kachin, Karen, Rakhine, all of these things were true. In the past, they did not believe they were true, but now they started to realize that if this could happen to us, for this community, it could be worse.”
The civil wars and ethnic conflicts they had ignored or disbelieved had come to Yangon and Mandalay, their own cities. And when that happened, protesters turned to the ethnic armed organizations themselves for protection.
Unity, but with wariness attached
Nickey Diamond fled from Yangon in mid-March. His work on human rights had always made him a target, but the danger only intensified after the coup. He sought haven from the Karen National Union, a political organization representing the Karen people, which operates in eastern Myanmar, in the jungle borderlands with Thailand. The conflict there, which has existed in some form since 1948, is sometimes called the world’s longest-running civil war.
Diamond, who asked to use his English name, is not alone; as the military escalated its crackdown in cities like Yangon, protesters, activists, and members of the Civil Disobedience Movement fled to areas held or defended by armed ethnic organizations. These groups are now sheltering them and providing them food. They are also, in some cases, providing military training, to prepare them to fight the junta. These groups are providing this aid as the Myanmar military is continuing to target these areas with air strikes and other attacks, displacing civilians and forcing some to flee, such as ethnic Karen trying to escape into Thailand.
This is not a new role for these groups. “There is a history of ethnic armed groups looking after these young Bamar activists,” said Jenny Hedström, associate senior lecturer in war studies at the Swedish Defense University. During the student uprising in late 1980s and ’90s, protesters also escaped to territories controlled by ethnic armed organizations. There, they sought refuge, food, and training.
But the refuge and support they provided to pro-democracy activists did not necessarily translate to a change in status for the ethnic minority groups, including during the transition to democracy under the leadership of the NLD. That has made those groups a bit wary this time around.
“The sense that I get the most is of excitement and potential new mindset — but also huge mistrust and fear that are they going to be used once again,” said Mabrur Ahmed, founder and director of Restless Beings, a UK-based human rights group that works closely with Rohingya communities.
He said there is genuine hope for reform and a belief in a new Myanmar and in reconciliation. “But 60 years of division and 60 years of racial and ethnic vitriol don’t go away overnight,” Ahmed added.
It’s a complicated calculus: On the one hand, there is a long history of distrust to overcome. On the other, all share the common enemy of the Tatmadaw.
Naw Wah Ku Shee, director of the Karen Peace Support Network, an organization that works with ethnic Karen civil society groups in Myanmar and Thailand, told me that they really do see a change, especially among the younger generations. “They apologize about what’s happened in the past and that they have been silent,” she said. “They have ignored what’s happening to the suffering of other ethnic people, and they’re sorry for what’s happened.”
But wariness and skepticism still exist. The big question is how deep this push for accountability and reconciliation will go — and whether it’s a lasting shift or one driven by necessity against that common enemy.
Naw Wah Ku Shee said ethnic minorities have felt betrayed before, but she also believes this moment is different. “The brutality of the Burma military is even worse,” she said. “Our first priority is to end this military dictatorship, which is why we need to work together.”
It has not been a perfect relationship so far. Myanmar has many ethnic groups and armed ethnic organizations, and some have been much more openly supportive of the protest movement than others. Early on, some protesters criticized the armed ethnic groups for failing to come to the defense of the movement sooner, which had echoes of both chauvinism and hypocrisy.
That has changed as ethnic groups have sheltered and fed and offered assistance to protesters — and that support is shared and celebrated among the social networks of protesters, something that didn’t happen during the pro-democracy movement in the late ’80s and ’90s. That visibility has created a shift, Kim Jolliffe, an independent researcher who studies security and human rights in Myanmar, said, “both in terms of realizing quite how bad the military is, but also that the armed groups are genuinely doing something for political change — and are actually trying to fight against dictatorship.”
Still, as Ahmed said, there’s a lot going on — confronting a complicated ethnic history while waging a revolt against the perpetrators of it. But the armed ethnic groups are also in a position of relative strength. They are the ones with the weapons and the experience fighting the Tatmadaw. And what they have been fighting for, a federal democracy, is finally a demand of the protesters themselves.
“There has never been this kind of chance before,” Naw Wah Ku Shee said.
The movement is united against the military. But what comes next?
The movement has been clear that its goal is the creation of a federal democracy. But how to get there, how inclusive it would actually be, and what victory over the Tatmadaw would even look like — no one has the answers yet.
Ousted NLD lawmakers have reconstituted as the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw (CRPH — Pyidaungsu Hluttaw is the name of Myanmar’s legislature) and have since formed a parallel National Unity Government (NUG) that includes some members of the protest movement and ethnic organizations. The NUG has promised to create a new constitution built on the idea of Myanmar as a federal democracy, which may hold the promise of giving a stake to ethnic minority and religious groups.
The CRPH, and its NUG, is the body that’s advocating for Myanmar’s democracy movement with the international community. But members of the Civil Disobedience Movement and other younger activists expressed some skepticism about whether the NUG was really as committed to the idea of an inclusive, federal democracy. At the same time, in an otherwise leaderless and diverse movement, they have risen to the top.
Many see the CRPH and NUG as using the right rhetoric, but as failing to give real decision-making power to ethnic groups, or at least stakeholders in those communities that have a lot of clout. Others I spoke to criticized the body for failing to fully condemn the treatment of ethnic minorities in the past, including the Rohingya. One cabinet minister has issued a public apology to the Rohingya, but as Wai Wai Nu pointed out, government officials have not yet adopted an official policy on the Rohingya. (The CRPH did not respond to an emailed request for comment.)
Htuu Lou Rae, a UK-based member of of the Anti-Junta Mass Movement, said that he and other members are working to try to pressure the CRPH and NUG to be more inclusive, including of working-class people.
Many see the NUG as a reshuffled version of the NLD, just with people who didn’t have power during Aung San Suu Kyi’s leadership of the party now in charge. “It’s difficult because, is the CPRH just a version of the NLD? And I think that’s where the doubt comes in. It’s not that the NLD is necessarily not wanted, it’s just — is that what the people want?” Ahmed said.
Some activists also fear this new government will strike some sort of deal with the military that would keep them in power. “We’re starting to worry that the federal democracy that the CRPH is describing will look like what was under the 2008 military coup, but with a civilian government in control of the military,” Htuu Lou Rea said.
Others told me that defeating the military remains the main goal — and next comes the difficult reckoning with what would replace it. “There needs to be a lot of work after the fall of the dictatorship, we’re not fooled by, ‘Oh, there’s unity now, and everything will be okay.’ It’s a start,” Wai Hnin, with Burma Campaign UK, said.
“Nonviolence is maybe not working”
Almost all the people I spoke to, especially those inside the country, are preparing for more bloodshed.
Many I spoke with are proud of the nonviolent origins of the movement, but they recognize that status is tenuous. The Civil Disobedience Movement has lasted for months, but there is real worry over how long people can continue to resist, especially civil servants and other workers who do not have money saved up. “They are barely surviving,” said Tin Tin Nyo of the Burmese Women’s Union.
Others see this uprising turning into something else. “Even though we understand that nonviolence is the answer, nonviolence is maybe not working,” Wathone, the protester in Yangon, said. “So we need some armed resistance.”
Wathone was in a safe house when we spoke via an encrypted app, with the phone connection going in and out. He didn’t think he could stay there long. He knows colleagues who have been arrested, others who have been interrogated, hands tied behind their backs, and stripped of their money and their phones. He always makes sure he has an escape route from his apartment. If security forces were to crash through his door, he would go out the window and down a ladder, though if it couldn’t hold him, or if he fell, he would be dead.
Other protesters I spoke with also said they believe an armed revolution is the only way out. But what role they see themselves playing in such a revolution is less clear. Su Thit told me that she would support a revolution with communications and logistics, but that she could not kill. Ashley Wai has asthma, and worries that might make it physically difficult to fight. But she also does not want to stay and hide.
“They realize they cannot win this fight with their bare hands,” Tin Tin Nyo said.
Others are more skeptical that the military can be defeated or excised from Myanmar altogether. “The problem is that whatever solution you come up with, you have to include the military, whether you like it or not,” said Harn Yawnghwe, executive director of Euro-Burma. “Because they are the ones with all the guns and are in the strongest position right now.”
Experts and advocates I spoke to said the Myanmar military, especially if it had to fight widespread resistance, could be weakened and stretched thin through a war of attrition. But Harn Yawnghe said he feared such an outcome would lead to chaos and make Myanmar vulnerable to its powerful neighbors — like China — that might get drawn in.
Many are also looking to the international community for support. Experts and advocates I spoke to believe an arms embargo and more aggressive sanctions could weaken the Myanmar military. “They have a lot to lose: their power, their business, their everything. It’s the public who has nothing to lose, not them,” Wai Wai Nu said.
Yet they also understand the limits of international support.
Wathone said that many protesters talk about when the United States will come and intervene. He tells them it’s just a fantasy story. “We only have us. We can only save each other,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been telling them every day.”
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The thickness of the stratosphere has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found. (photo: Alamy)
Climate Emissions Shrinking the Stratosphere, Scientists Reveal
Damian Carrington, Guardian UK
Carrington writes: "Humanity's enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed."
Exclusive: Thinning indicates profound impact of humans and could affect satellites and GPS
umanity’s enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are shrinking the stratosphere, a new study has revealed.
The thickness of the atmospheric layer has contracted by 400 metres since the 1980s, the researchers found, and will thin by about another kilometre by 2080 without major cuts in emissions. The changes have the potential to affect satellite operations, the GPS navigation system and radio communications.
The discovery is the latest to show the profound impact of humans on the planet. In April, scientists showed that the climate crisis had shifted the Earth’s axis as the massive melting of glaciers redistributes weight around the globe.
The stratosphere extends from about 20km to 60km above the Earth’s surface. Below is the troposphere, in which humans live, and here carbon dioxide heats and expands the air. This pushes up the lower boundary of the stratosphere. But, in addition, when CO2 enters the stratosphere it actually cools the air, causing it to contract.
The shrinking stratosphere is a stark signal of the climate emergency and the planetary-scale influence that humanity now exerts, according to Juan Añel, at the University of Vigo, Ourense in Spain and part of the research team. “It is shocking,” he said. “This proves we are messing with the atmosphere up to 60 kilometres.”
Scientists already knew the troposphere was growing in height as carbon emissions rose and had hypothesised that the stratosphere was shrinking. But the new study is the first to demonstrate this and shows it has been contracting around the globe since at least the 1980s, when satellite data was first gathered.
The ozone layer that absorbs UV rays from the sun is in the stratosphere and researchers had thought ozone losses in recent decades could be to blame for the shrinking. Less ozone means less heating in the stratosphere. But the new research shows it is the rise of CO2 that is behind the steady contraction of the stratosphere, not ozone levels, which started to rebound after the 1989 Montreal treaty banned CFCs.
The study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reached its conclusions using the small set of satellite observations taken since the 1980s in combination with multiple climate models, which included the complex chemical interactions that occur in the atmosphere.
“It may affect satellite trajectories, orbital life-times, and retrievals […] the propagation of radio waves, and eventually the overall performance of the Global Positioning System and other space-based navigational systems,” the researchers said.
Prof Paul Williams, at the University of Reading in the UK, who was not involved in the new research, said: “This study finds the first observational evidence of stratosphere contraction and shows that the cause is in fact our greenhouse gas emissions rather than ozone.”
“Some scientists have started calling the upper atmosphere the ‘ignorosphere’ because it is so poorly studied,” he said. “This new paper will strengthen the case for better observations of this distant but critically important part of the atmosphere.”
“It is remarkable that we are still discovering new aspects of climate change after decades of research,” said Williams, whose own research has shown that the climate crisis could triple the amount of severe turbulence experienced by air travellers. “It makes me wonder what other changes our emissions are inflicting on the atmosphere that we haven’t discovered yet.”
The dominance of humanity activities on the planet has led scientists to recommend the declaration of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
Among the suggested markers of the Anthropocene are the radioactive elements scattered by nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s and domestic chicken bones, thanks to the surge in poultry production after the second world war. Other scientists have suggested widespread plastic pollution as a marker of a plastic age, to follow the bronze and iron ages.
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