Archive for category: RAMPART MAG

Statement of a resister against deadly injustice inside a St Louis jail

Rampant is deeply honored to amplify these words from a participant in an unfolding rebellion against horrific conditions in a St. Louis jail. On February 6, over one hundred prisoners at Saint Louis Justice Center took over a section of the jail in protest. A stone’s throw from the place where Mike Brown’s murder ignited a new chapter in the long movement against state violence and anti-Blackness, the authors of this resistance to premature death reveal deplorable abuses inside detention. They also demonstrate a refusal to let human life be treated as disposable that needs to spread far beyond prison walls. Republished with gratitude to Expo St Louis and NoName.

On the morning of Tuesday, December 29, 2020 around 10am CT, myself (Cortez Easterwood-Bey IMN #6694) and more than 50 other inmates on at least two floors within Missouri’s Saint Louis Justice Center (CJC), stood together in solidarity outside of our cells as a form of peaceful protest to exercise our 1st Amendment right to free speech in a peaceful attempt to voice our grievances to be heard by CJC management that have gone unanswered after months (anywhere from 2-6 months or more) of following the established procedures for filing complaints and grievances. We recently learned from sympathetic guards/correctional officers (hereafter referred to as CO(s)), that these complaint and grievance forms rarely go past the CO whom the form was given to, let alone to their supervisor nor an outside entity or CJC official. Our peaceful protest was unequally matched with resistance by CJC staff akin to the pre-Civil Rights Movement — we were subjected to tear gas, hosed down with strong water, and placed face down in inches of said but now contaminated water in order to be handcuffed, transferred to the known dilapidated Medium Security Institution (MSI) nicknamed the “Workhouse”, and placed “in the hole” without proper heat, dry clothing and new face masks. All this because we were trying to tell jail staff and management that we don’t want to DIE, we are hungry, we want proper ventilation, we are tired of being cold without being given winter clothing, we want proper PPE for COVID-19, we are tired of being price gouged in the commissary and vending machines, we want the mandated six “recs” per day, and we want visits from family and friends since there is a glass barrier between them and the inmates. How long do we inmates have to go without before one stops adhering to socially acceptable civil norms when they are blatantly and continously being denied such — not only the ability to live but also other basic [prison] rights such as the ability to breathe uncontaminated air?

Our peaceful protest was unequally matched with resistance by CJC staff akin to the pre-Civil Rights Movement

Because of this incident, jail staff have threatened to destroy and discard our personal belongings, religious and otherwise, as punishment. Their purported excuse for this action is because of the tear gas they used has contaminated said belongings. So, we will no longer have our legal documents nor anything we or our family or friends purchased for us — food, clothing, toiletries, religious documents/books/items, photos, etc. This is our punishment for asking not to be infected with covid and to have proper and adequate food, PPE, etc.?

To my knowledge, there are at least 12 lawsuits filed by other inmates due to the outcome and actions of jail staff at CJC for this initially “peaceful protest” that has been quelled by correctional officials so the media and public are kept unaware.

On New Years Eve, there were already 51 of us in the hole in one “pod”, which is supposed to hold a maximum of 60 people pre-pandemic, that were healthy and uninfected with Covid. However, prison staff decided to add 11more inmates, some of whom were visibly infected with covid!

This is genocide.

Prior to this peaceful protest that is now being reported as a “riot”, there were 24 inmates in my pod KNOWN TO BE INFECTED with covid by jail staff, but instead of properly quarantining them, they kept them in the pod and with their cell mates in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell. 24 infected inmates soon turned into almost 50 infected inmates in less than 48 hours!!! Thats over 90% of the inmates housed in ONE pod of 60 persons!!! Further, COs are telling us that not only are they NOT going to test us but such testing is voluntary even if the inmate is visibly exhibiting the classic symptoms of a covid infection. When those of us who are healthy request to be tested for covid, we are denied and persons from the detention center regardless of their covid status are continuously mixed in with the uninfected population within the actual jail/CJC, which houses over 800 inmates and more than 60% of those are currently visibly and audibly infected with covid and are probably not getting proper/adequate medical attention.

Many of us have not yet gone to trial. There is at least one inmate who has been locked up at CJC for FIVE YEARS without going to trial. So how is it that the St. Louis Justice Center staff are allowed to be our judge, jury and now executioner during this deadly pandemic???

We don’t want to DIE from SARS COVID-19, especially not at the hands of correctional staff. We are tired of being purposely exposed to other inmates and detainees who visibly have covid. Jail staff won’t test inmates but claim that current pod members have been exposed to covid even though we have not been tested during the entire arrest and detention process yet COs are constantly placing untested people, healthy or infected, in a jail cell, pod or holding area, with healthy people.

How is it that the St. Louis Justice Center staff are allowed to be our judge, jury and now executioner during this deadly pandemic???

Even though we are inmates and regardless of whether we have been found guilty of a crime we may or may not have committed, our request is not unreasonable. This IS genocide. We are being treated like the Jews during Hitler’s regime. Instead of Germany we are in America. And the jail is being ran much like the concentration camps. But because we are black and brown and don’t ft the historical standard of American beauty, we are treated less than. We are being treated worse than George Floyd. Instead of one officer with his knee on one Black man’s neck for almost 8 minutes, we have several officers and agents of the Missouri, and more specifically the CJC, who are knowingly not following the COVID guidelines and protocols set forth by the CDC and US Department of Justice.

We are HUNGRY. We are pleading for not only proper nutrition but portion sizes that are befitting of an adult male. The lack of proper and adequate sustenance is known to weaken the immune system, thus making any person more susceptible to any disease but especially the highly contagious covid virus. We get the same chunk of bread-like cake for every meal (breakfast, lunch and dinner). I have been in CJC for almost two months and have yet to be given any fruit, have only once been given a “salad” that consisted of three tightly stuck together pieces of lettuce and one sliver of a shredded carrot. Our vegetables, if we are given them, consist of canned corn or green beans. The commissary and vending machines (in the facility or online for purchase by our family and friends to send to us, which is received bi-weekly) consists mostly of highly processed and junk/snack foods that are grossly overpriced compared to the Missouri prisons and normal retail outlets accessible to most American citizens.

We are tired of being COLD when the temperatures outside are also cold. The COs verbally refuse to turn the heat up, even in the detention/holding facility, citing they are trying to keep all from getting covid. We have not been given proper clothing to deal with such temperatures within the actual facility. Most of the world is struggling financially so there are very few of us who are recently detained during this pandemic whose family can even afford to purchase a thermal top or bottom or thicker socks via the online commissary. The inmates are not working, and many of us newly detained have not worked during this pandemic, but even if we had we either don’t have access to those funds and/or have depleted them in our attempts to purchase food from the commissary and vending machines after we are given our “trays” (breakfast, lunch or dinner) that barely have portions nor nutrients acceptable for a 10 year old child let alone a grown man.

We need our RECREATION BREAKS to stay mentally and physically healthy. Per correctional guidelines, inmates are to be given six (6) recreation hours per day. Since I have been detained at CJC, we get less than 3 and its mostly at the discretion of the guards with seemingly no set time periods or systematic adherence to the standard CDC guidelines. For example, one or more pods are let out of their cells between 7a-9a for 45min, then around 3p for another 45min, and maybe around 11p for 15-20min. To myself and others, these actions by CJC-MSI staff seem like an effort to not fully perform the duties for which they are getting paid to perform in accordance with standard operating procedures and CDC and DOJ covid guidelines and protocols. I have found that if I want to exercise (push-ups, etc) in my cell or during rec, I must do so in the morning rec so I have enough time to take a shower. I save my commissary/vending and phone calls for the afternoon rec. All this because we’re not given 6 recs sessions/hours, time is short and we may not get the 3rd/last rec that is much shorter on time and at a time where business calls cannot be made.

We need INFORMATION to research our cases.We have not or only sporadically been given access to the jail’s law library during recs. There are also only six tablets provided to one or more pods housing 60+ people. These tablets are supposed to allow us access to the jail’s law library and also, for a fee, be able to communicate with our family and friends via text messaging who have a SmartJailMail account. Most of the times, said tablets are inoperable because they weren’t charged properly between recs and/or will not hold a charge. Further, the tablets do not allow for video chatting with anyone.

We need to SEE our loved ones. The CJC website says visitation is allowed and special allowances for such may be made to family members or friends who reside out-of-town. However, this is a lie. All inmates have been told that there is no visitation due to covid despite the fact that in the visitation area at CJC the inmates are separated from the visitors by a glass partition and wall.

We need but are not given proper PPE. Yet COs are walking around in what appears to be hazmat suits. Inmates are only given a standard face mask bi-weekly. Many don’t have one because it broke, became dirty, wet, etc. Payphones, vending machines, tablets, etc. are not sanitized after each use and tables, common areas, etc.are not sanitized after each rec. We need more types of PPE (gloves, N95 masks, face shields, etc.) to protect us against our cellmate who is infected with covid whom the COs purposely place in our cells and refuse to remove healthy inmates or quarantine the infected ones in a separate area or facility.

I personally was NEVER tested for covid during my entire arrest and lockup experience (October 14, 2020 to present). Not given a temperature check, covid test kit nor nose swab, nor blood check. I have been denied my repeated requests for such. After my arrest, I was placed in the detention/holding facility attached to CJC. I was denied access to a shower and clean clothing for at least 2 weeks. It wasn’t until I had an outside person to contact my parole officer and a visit was made that I was given a shower, notified of why I was arrested, given a standard jumpsuit and thin (and too small) footwear, and then transferred to the jail-side of CJC. During my time in holding, officers were constantly moving detainees in and out of the holding area I was in, especially during the day. The area was not cleaned nor sanitized. I was not given any PPE during that time. All of this escalated my exposure to this deadly and highly contagious covid virus.

My detainment in the jail side of CJC has been, for the most part, no different to my initial detainment, as indicated above. How is it that not only do I have to protect myself against violence from much younger inmates, I now have to be strategically conscious of protecting my desire to continue to live and breathe unencumbered by a deadly pandemic-level worldwide virus because correctional staff intentionally place me and others in dangerous and hazardous conditions which further lends us to intentionally get covid in a short time frame, in some inmates’ cases this happens within 24 hours of their cellmate or they themselves being exposed to another inmate or guard who is handling them after dealing with a previous inmate(s) who’s visibly and knowingly infected. We are only given a basic face mask ever 2 weeks. No gloves or other PPE is given nor can we have any mailed to us by our family nor friends. How can we socially distance in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell with no ventilation in an open plan/air facility that is kept cold and we are denied and not provided with additional clothing (jackets, gloves, hats, etc.) nor blankets. How can those of us who are not sick stay healthy if we are not given nutritious and portions that sustain us. Yes we are inmates yet many of us have not yet been tried for our supposed crimes. Many of us also have families that we cannot see, barely are able to talk to because their funds are running low or are non-existent for us to call them collect or message them via SmartJailMail.

We feel like POWs in a foreign land in hostile territory. Because of our blackness/ancestral ties to Africa or Latin America, we are being treated less than human. We are dying at CJC in unheard of numbers and being intentionally infected at alarming rates.

In my homeland that is the civilized country of America…THIS IS GENOCIDE!

To stay informed on updates and support text ExpoStl to 31966

The post This Is Genocide appeared first on Rampant.

The inauguration of Joe Biden arrives with the liberal establishment proclaiming the need for unity. But unity is not what we want.

Biden’s inauguration was a paean to national unity. “To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.” The president used the word “unity” seven times in his address, urging us to “come together” and “renew the nation.” Speaker after speaker sounded the same note.

But unity is not inherently good, and division is not inherently bad.

Of course, there are certain “divisions” that we need to oppose. The ruling class wants to divide working people along lines of race, sex, gender, nationality, etc., in spite of the interests we share. These divisions hurt working people and help the ruling class maintain their power over us. In company with Marx we should say, “Workers of the world unite!”

But there are other “divisions” within our society that cannot be met with calls for unity. The divisions between the exploiters from the exploited, and between the oppressors from the oppressed, need to be underlined so that everyone can pick a side. These divisions were not created by us. Conflicting class interests exist whether we recognize them or not. Those who own the means of production or who do their bidding (billionaires, CEO’s, hedge fund managers, big pharma, the police, etc.) have material interests that are antithetical to those of the rest of the population. What is good for them is not good for us, and what is good for us is not good for them.

Liberal cliches about unity obscure our situation. They suggest that the problems of this country are somehow the result of people failing to work together to resolve shared problems, and therefore that the solution is to find common ground. But we share no common cause with the bosses, the billionaires, the exploiters, and oppressors. The police should be abolished, the nazis should be run off the street, and the billionaires should have their wealth stripped from them. Racism, inequality, and the politics of Trumpism are not unfortunate aberrations of the system but belong to its core functioning.

In the face of a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and the growth of racist far-right extremism, what we need is not more unity, but sharper division, properly drawn.

The post Against Unity appeared first on Rampant.

A researcher of far-right activity discusses the forces behind the pro-Trump mob at the Capitol and the challenges ahead for combating a growing fascist movement.

What forces were behind yesterday’s events at the Capitol? Who were the main players, what do they represent, how was it all planned?

Yesterday we saw neo-Nazis, confederate apologists, Three Percenters and other militias, America First Groypers, QAnon media figures, local conservative media personalities, Christian nationalists, the Proud Boys and other Trump supporters converge on the Capitol. Many of them consider themselves to be part of a modern Patriot Movement, as reflected in the memes they posted in the days working up to the 6^th. These memes framed the day of the event as a moment of reckoning, often by referencing the American Revolution, and more nebulously, “the oncoming storm.” Together these represent the dominant factions on the American right which are likely to take part in future insurrections across the U.S.

The Reopen America protests that took place last spring were a point of convergence for far-right movements, conspiracy-driven ideology, and the Constitutional Sheriffs movement. The Facebook groups that were used to plan those Reopen America protests later gave birth to another form of digital organizing which we saw at play both yesterday and on election day: Stop the Steal groups. For example, across Indiana and Southern Illinois we saw county-based Stop the Steal groups coalesce with Trump Train event-planning groups and the Proud Boys. This convergence provided the structure and organization necessary to carry out a nation-wide car caravan to D.C. to mobilize Donald Trump’s supporters. In fact, many of those who attended tagged each other on public Facebook posts. While Facebook was a space for coordination, Parler (a social media app) offered a platform to market events for January 6^th and to discuss plans to carry weapons to D.C. and to other state capitals. With the structure and marketing in place, websites like TheDonald.win conferred a feeling of official sanction on yesterday’s attempted coup. This site was created in the wake of the ban on r/TheDonald, a subreddit for Trump supporters which predictably got banned because of violent hate speech and fascist trolls. Functioning as reddit for the far right, TheDonald.win circulated the conspiracy theories about a “stolen election” and QAnon propaganda that mobilized Trump’s core base of supporters. All of these sites carried a single narrative in common: Donald Trump was calling on his supporters to rally to his cause on January 6^th in D.C.

In the lead up to yesterday some antifascist organizers attempted to raise the alarm. Can you talk some about that?

What you saw yesterday happened in spite of a massive undertaking by antifascist and antiracist activists across the U.S. to prevent violence. This involved weeks of data collection for doxxing, reaching out to organizations on the ground in our communities that would be impacted by right-wing violence, contacting local businesses and government officials in D.C. to warn them about the possibility of a far-right occupation, and threat assessments to gauge the level of turnout for militant right events in cities across the US. At the regional level, we received dozens of tips from community organizations in the Midwest concerned by the increase in white supremacist flyering in the weeks leading up to yesterday’s attempted coup. From this information, we assessed what our local far right networks looked like, what their weaknesses were and made contact with other groups in our region who were noticing similar trends. To disrupt fascist activity in local spaces and make the participants and their intentions hyper-visible, we strategically released information in the days leading up to January 6th. This is an example of how community-based, grassroots information networks coupled with antifascist research can help keep people safe at both local and national levels.

These actions likely mitigated the violence to a certain extent, particularly with the shutdown of Harry’s Bar, the famed Proud Boys hangout in D.C. This began with doxxes during the last week of December. The Proud Boys’ have a bevy of new members since the former president told them to “stand back and stand by”. To give you an idea here: Indiana had one working chapter of the Proud Boys last year, now it has three. One in Indianapolis, one in Fort Wayne and a fledgling chapter in Richmond, some of whom have close ties to GOP politics in Vigo County. Researchers across multiple states worked around the clock and they successfully identified Proud Boys who had been hiding in plain sight in their communities. The doxxes roll on. And Proud Boys will continue to lose their jobs.

A lot of us called everyone we knew in D.C. to let them know how bad it was going to get. Just as an example: flyers found in Midwest Stop the Steal and Trump Train Facebook groups that indicated the plan for January 6^th was going to be something like an occupation. They were telling their members to bring camping equipment, food and waste disposal supplies, etc. Yet others bragged about the Proud Boys running “security” for their events. Other group chats within websites like MyMilitia and Parler suggested that members of the militant right were planning to bring long guns into D.C. We now know for a fact from photos that some of the putschists brought handguns into downtown D.C. Our researchers called up the D.C. Mayor’s office hoping to bring that to their attention, but they hung up on us before we could get a word in edgewise. Calls to hotels and restaurants fared better, workers sounded like they wanted their employers to hear how serious this was. The message was clear, what we were seeing indicated that the far right was going to storm the city and occupy space. But the response, in many cases was the same thing we’ve seen when informing locals about neo-Nazi recruitment, a shrug and a “it’ll never happen here”. Journalist Talia Jane summed it up best, “This crowd probably wouldn’t have been so big if all the hotels decided to choose safety over money.”

The election of Joe Biden obviously did not undermine the confidence of the burgeoning fascist movement. In some ways the events of yesterday were a rehearsal and an organizing opportunity for their side. How are the the far right thinking about the Biden presidency. What is their perspective?

The image of Biden differs based on what groups you’re looking at. Most of what I’ve seen from right wing networks about Biden accuses him of being a pedophile—as right-wing conspiracy podcaster and political candidate Blake Monroe claimed on his podcast RedPill1776. In alt-right spheres Biden’s leadership is seen as laughable, per the moniker “sleepy Joe”. They believe their work will continue during his presidency and do not feel that he is a threat to white nationalism nor to their aim to create an America First party. The more extremist views come from QAnon, for whom Biden is a reptilian tool of the devil.

In Biden’s speech he appealed to the “sense of order” and the stability and decency of the American state. Do you think Biden at all enables the far right with his overtures.

Biden’s anodyne appeals to stability and order may seem calming, but they are designed to protect civil society values, not fight against American fascism. His appeals to “order” and a mythological American past free from white supremacist violence speak to this issue directly. Biden’s rhetoric hinges on the phrase “this isn’t who we are.” Some have commented that this is a contradiction. The problem is that it’s actually very consistent with the back-and-forth between State power and armed vigilantes that has protected white racial domination throughout US history. In this way, Biden’s rhetoric is neither progressive nor antithetical to violent far-right extremism. This “hands across the aisle” strategy ostensibly designed to make things “go back to normal” is just appeasement in an expensive suit. At this point, gestures to bipartisanship are not just ill-advised, they’re negligent given that many Trump allies like Matt Gaetz have actively contributed to the mainstreaming of white nationalism. Just last night, after the coup, Gaetz claimed that some of the rioters were not Trump supporters but members “of the terrorist group antifa” dressed in sheep’s clothing, which is a complete fabrication. Rebuilding alliances with a radicalized GOP is complicity with fascism and it will lead to more far right violence down the road.

Why do you think the police were so hands-off? How much of this is due to any sympathies with the movement among the front-line officers.

As numerous studies have shown, policing cultures in the U.S. are irredeemably violent. Police destroyed water and medical supplies at protests in Asheville. They stood by yesterday as Trump supporters stole equipment from AP journalists and fashioned nooses out of camera wires. They beat and maimed journalists covering the George Floyd Rebellions. Yet today’s response by the Capitol police were muted at best. And it took three hours for the National Guard to be summoned. As Joy Ann Reid remarked yesterday, “white Americans aren’t afraid of the cops. White Americans are never afraid of the cops even when they’re committing an insurrection.” The most vicious State violence is reserved for those who flout the racialized, gendered and class-based order, often solely through their existence. But if you’re a white man, the police might just move the metal barricades aside so you and your Treason Caucus buddies can storm and loot the Capitol building.

Since 2016, the U.S. has seen an emerging coalition of militant right-wing groups from the Groypers, to the Proud Boys, to militias, to neo-Nazis, all laying the groundwork for an emergent fascist third party. Many of their members, in the Midwest, are also active-duty service members, EMTs, and members of the police. These organizations were designed as the tools of a white supremacist state that relied on slave patrols and strike breakers to police its racial and class hierarchies. Theirs is not a failure to properly vet their candidates. It’s by design, and part of a policing culture that prizes authoritarian masculinity, socializes officers through racist and sexist work cultures, and protects abusers. Given this, it should come as little surprise that the police have stood back and stood by as white supremacist mobs flooded US streets. They’ve granted violent neo-fascist groups leeway while gassing, beating, shooting and maiming activists and journalists. All in the name of “following orders”.

What do you expect to happen on inauguration day?

Under the cover of yesterday’s failed D.C. coup, dozens of right-wing extremist groups mounted insurrections across the US to varying degrees of success. One of our research branches also located evidence that a group terming themselves Patriot Action for America planned a militia insurrection for the days leading up to the inauguration which would have required them to gather en masse and surround government buildings to disrupt their workings. Their site has since been taken down. But yet others particularly far-right aligned 501c3s and Stop the Steal Facebook groups are organizing events for the days between the 17^th and the 20^th.

A radicalized far right poses a threat to the president-elect, his cabinet and their transition teams. During the tenure of Donald Trump we have had bombings, shootings, stabbings, militia assaults, the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, vehicular attacks on pedestrians and an uncontrolled pandemic. Yesterday’s attempted coup included a shooting, a foiled bomb plot at both the RNC and DNC, and a potential data breach if rumors about some of the perpetrators gaining access to officials’ computers is to be believed. The US is extremely unstable at present and is likely to remain so for Biden’s tenure as president. Given that the militant right was allowed to storm the Capitol building, our researchers believe this may inspire attacks on the executive branch which will cause further instability.

What should we expect from the far right going forward, and what kind of movement do we need to build?

The far right is primed for war. And not the kind of Civil War that Americans have been conditioned to see through the folksy prism of Ken Burns documentaries, Star Wars Rebel Alliance analogies or the bombast of Marvel movies. This will be a long and drawn out fifth column insurgency. To be very frank, we should expect more stochastic terrorism, more targeting of political figures for harassment and violence by the far right, and yet more political candidates who will seek to appeal to a Trumpist base beyond this presidency.

There are also some crucial problems with the way we treat violent extremism. We need new paradigms that will allow us to study and address the very real issue of those who commit acts of violence as a result of being radicalized by conspiracy theories online. Given the emerging details about the Nashville bombing and some of the vehicular attacks this summer, we are seeing people who are radicalized in conspiracy networks but are not necessarily affiliated with extremist organizations commit violent acts. We need new language to talk about this. Addressing these forms of violence will be a difficult task and one with different requirements than tackling white nationalist organizations with more concrete structures and cells. I highly recommend that those seeking to understand the complexities of this issue should follow Sarah Hightower (@nezumi_ningen) on twitter.

In terms of community-level organizing, if we want to push US politics toward the left we need a multifaceted approach. To begin, we need to amplify and support local independent journalists doing investigative reporting. Over the past year they’ve needed body armor, better cameras, bail and bill payments. Media titans like Gannett simply don’t provide good coverage of these events and frame their stories through the lens of both-sideism. With many journalists on the front lines this year, our research team has gained a far more nuanced picture of the movements and activities of far-right groups than we’ve had previously.
And this gets at something else desperately needed in this moment. The election of a new president does not mean the far right is going away, so we must build a sustained campaign against fascism. A diversity of tactics is required to push the US toward the left. Biden will seek to apply a centrist approach to the problem of American racist fascism that focuses on diversity rhetoric, civility politics and the first amendment as a sanction for hate speech. We must hold Biden accountable by demanding the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore and strengthen the protections stripped from the VRA three years ago. Together, we must work to put an end to qualified immunity which has prevented so many violent police from facing justice in the court system. We cannot depend on politicians who break bread with fascists to crush American fascism. Community solidarity, collective work and direct action will get us through the next four years. On this, Talia Lavin writes, “Dismantling the rise of fascism is best not left to lone vigilantes, nor to the punitive mechanisms of the state, but to people working together to stamp out hate wherever it arises.”

The post Behind The Far Right Mob appeared first on Rampant.

Biden’s transition team and cabinet appointments so far shows that he is not planning for a new New Deal but for his presidency to be pro-corporate, imperialist, and anti-worker onslaught.

In the past few weeks Joe Biden has made important decisions that will shape what his presidency will look like. He has made cabinet appointments, named a transition team, and been advised by a group of national security experts. Biden’s picks give us a glimpse of the tone that this presidency is going to take. There was speculation that his cabinet would be a progressive one: Bernie Sanders even said that the Biden administration could be the most progressive since that of FDR. But now we have seen the first of Biden’s appointments, and we have some sense of what his administration will be like. And it is clear that the idea that he is preparing for some FDR-type New Deal was never based in fact.

Biden has made clear by his appointments so far that he is far more interested in the same neoliberal policies that have driven down living conditions for working people for the last forty years and that created the conditions for the rise of Trump and Trumpism than he is in progressive reforms like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, defunding the police, and forgiving student loans. Despite the hopes of many progressives, Biden’s cabinet and transition team is full of neoliberals, corporate lobbyists, CEOs, tech execs, Republican lawmakers, warmongers, and enablers of empire. Even still, there are some on the left who, letting their hopes cloud their vision, have characterized Biden’s appointments as progressive. But a closer interrogation suggests that his future cabinet will be anything but.

Biden’s appointments have also been touted as being more inclusive and diverse, including a higher percentage of women, people of color, and people who identify as LGBTQ+. But despite the emphasis on the diversity of Biden’s appointments, as Briahna Joy Gray points out, there is less emphasis on “whether or not these individuals represent the interests of the group they are assumed to represent because of what they look like.” What difference does it make if one of your immigration advisors is a Latina woman if she has a history of defending mass deportations and family separations?

With over four hundred people on his transition team and dozens of cabinet appointments, the list below is just a sampling of a few people from each respective team that represent larger trends of Wall Street, neoliberal, antilabor, and prowar appointees to Biden’s administration. In order for us to fight for necessary measures to improve the lives of millions of workers and save the planet amid a climate emergency we need to be honest about what we are up against.

Transition Team Immigration Advisor

Cecilia Muñoz: Muñoz is most known for her role in the mass deportation of immigrants. As Obama’s top immigration advisor Muñoz justified harsh immigration enforcement policies. She helped direct the Obama administration’s deportation of thousands of Central American children, its family separations, and its decision to terminate an executive order that would have halted deportations.

Secretary of State Nominee

Antony Blinken: Blinken is a former deputy secretary of state. Blinken has made a career of advocating disastrous wars abroad while helping Silicon Valley and finance capital profit off them. He supported the devastating invasion of Iraq when he was a top Senate aide to Biden from 2003 to 2004 and the 2011 invasion of Libya. He also advocated more aggressive military intervention against Syria. In more recent years Blinken has served as a consultant for corporations in the finance, technology, and arms industries. In 2017, for example, he cofounded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm that aided Silicon Valley start-ups to land contracts at the Pentagon.

Chief of Staff

Ron Klain: Klain was Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president. Klain is a longtime venture capitalist, making money in the casino of finance capital.

Treasury Secretary Nominee

Janet Yellen: Yellen is a former chair of the Federal Reserve. Yellen has a long history of supporting free trade, which has had deleterious results for workers. Though some progressives like the Yellen pick, her technocratic market solutions have always favored free trade. Also, student debt was a key topic in the 2020 election cycle, but Yellen has not said that she will support forgiving student debt, something she could do as treasury secretary.

Climate Czar

John Kerry: Kerry is a former secretary of state. He does not support the Green New Deal. He voted in 2002 to give George Bush the authority to use military force in Iraq, then doubled down on that vote in 2004. The war in Iraq was an environmental and climate disaster. It led to a spike in carbon dioxide emissions, and its use of toxic munitions led to widespread poisoning of the Iraqi environment and caused untold genetic damage among the Iraqi population. Kerry also supported US military intervention in Libya. Before, Libya had one of the highest living standards in Africa, but after the invasion Libya has become a failed state. During his time as a senator he consistently voted on the annual National Defense Authorization acts. The United States military is one of the biggest polluters on the planet: It consumes more hydrocarbons than 140 countries combined. It also emits more CO2e and consumes more liquid fuels than most countries. Kerry is known for leading US negotiations for the Paris Accords and for his climate change agenda called the World War Zero coalition. While the EU and other signatories to the Paris accords were pushing for legally binding measures to cut emissions, Kerry was key in pushing against the accords having legally binding measures. Any agreement that is not legally binding has no teeth and is wholly inadequate to solve the climate crisis we face. And even if they had been legally binding, the measures he advocated were inadequate to avoid the two degrees Celsius of warming that the IPCC called “catastrophic.” Additionally, both the Paris Accords and the World War Zero Coalition rely heavily on market-based solutions that have failed already.

Department of State Transition Team

Tom Sullivan: Sullivan is a longtime Amazon lobbyist with no government experience. Amazon’s lobbying efforts often focus on beating back regulations that negatively affect their profits.

Department of Labor Transition Team

Biden’s Department of Labor transition team is made up by the usual suspects who served under Obama (like team lead Chris Lu, as well as Patricia Smith, Seth Harris, Deborah Greenfield, Seema Nanda, Raj Nayak, Tanya Goldman) and the large national unions (Lynn Rhinehart, Jessica Chu, Shaun O’Brien). This can’t be seen as a marker of any progressive shift but rather a return to the Democrat playbook of winning commitment from labor while giving nothing in return, as during Obama’s eight years. Seth Harris is a good example of this.

Seth Harris: Harris is a lobbyist who worked for Dentons’ Public Policy and Regulations practice. Dentons’ has a lengthy history of antilabor litigation, including defending employers against wage-hour class actions, wrongful terminations, and individual claims of discrimination. Harris’s role at Dentons’ was to help businesses fight against regulations. In another assault on labor, Harris published a paper for the neoliberal Hamilton Project proposing the creation of a new legal category of workers called “independent workers,” which would make workers more easily exploitable by gig companies.

Department of Justice

Though peppered with a small handful of liberal law professors, NGOs, and one labor union (NEA), the majority of the Department of Justice transition team are corporate lawyers. There are also no progressive prosecutors and no public defenders. Two of the firms included represent Trump, including in his election challenges.

Matthew Axelrod works for a firm called Linklaters and specializes in defending corporations and executives from DOJ investigations and regulation violations.

Danielle Conley works for a firm called WilmerHale and specializes in defending corporations from litigation. She also has helped various firms and universities defend against sexual assault civil suits. She has been criticized by victims and advocates as assisting universities in avoiding blame for covering up instances of sexual violence.

Rajesh Dee was the general counsel for the National Security Agency under Obama and defended the NSA’s practices of warrantless wiretapping.

Shirleitha Franklin specializes in defending corporations against class action lawsuits due to corporate medical malpractice, defective design in automobiles, and mass chemical exposure. She works for the firm, Jones Day, that represented Big Tobacco and that was the White House counsel for Donald Trump from 2016 to 2017.

Neil MacBride is known for helping fossil fuel companies like Exxon get past environmental regulations and sanctions, drawing criticism from the Sunrise Movement.

Brian Nelson was chief advisor for Kamala Harris when she was California Attorney General and helped her with many of the items we listed in Kamala Harris’s History.

Head of the Office of Management and Budget

Neera Tanden: Biden named Tanden as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. Tanden is the president and CEO of the neoliberal think tank Center for American Progress. Tanden is opposed to Medicare for All and has argued to make drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Tanden once wrote in an email, “We have a deficit, they have a lot of oil,” suggesting that the United States take Libya’s oil as repayment for overthrowing their president. Tanden was also criticized for revealing the identity of an anonymous victim of sexual harassment in a company staff meeting. Tanden’s has also raised concerns for actions including physically assaulting staff member Faiz Shakir after he asked Hillary Clinton a question about the Iraq War and censuring writers in her organization for mentioning topics related to Palestine.

Office of Management and Budget Transition Team

Bridget Dooling: Dooling works at the right-wing, Koch brothers–funded Regulatory Studies Center, which produces papers that defend the deregulation of the fossil fuel industry.

Brandon Belford: Belford is an executive at Lyft, Inc. During his time at Lyft, the company fought alongside Uber to undermine US labor law. Lyft, along with other gig companies like Uber, spent tens of millions of dollars pushing for antilabor laws like Proposition 22, a California ballot measure that would override state law requiring gig economy companies to treat workers as employees. Biden said he opposed Proposition 22 yet named executives of a number of gig economy companies that pushed the hardest to pass it.

Divya Kumaraiah: Kumaraiah is an executive at Airbnb. During her time at Airbnb, the company bypassed tax and regulatory obligations, which precipitated rent inflation and gentrification.

Intelligence “Community” Transition Team

Matt Olsen: Olsen comes from Uber technologies, the company leading the campaign for legislation like Proposition 22.

Environmental Protection Agency Transition Team

Michael McCabe: McCabe is a former Dupont Chemical executive. He worked as a consultant for Dupont Chemical during a time when they were fighting regulations on the chemical industry. McCabe led Dupont’s defense against the regulation of a chemical called C8, which has been linked to cancer, liver damage, and lowering fertility.

Pentagon Transition Team

Kathleen Hicks: Hicks is the Henry Kissinger Chair at warmongering think tank Center for Strategic International Studies. Hicks opens her podcast thanking its sponsors: weapons corporations BAE, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.

Hicks is not unique. Over one-third of Biden’s Pentagon transition team come from organizations, corporations, or think tanks that directly receive money from the weapons industry.

Head of White House Office of Public Engagement

Cedric Richmond: Richmond is one of the top Democratic recipients of fossil fuel industry money. He received around $341,000 from donors in the oil and gas industry during his ten-year tenure in Congress, the fifth highest among House Democrats. Richmond joined Republicans to vote to increase fossil-fuel exports and promote pipeline development. He also voted against placing pollution limits on fracking and voted for Republican legislation restraining federal fracking regulations.

Deputy Chief of Staff

Jennifer O’Malley Dillon: Dillon was the cofounder of a firm that represents Big Pharma and private equity firms.

Counselor to the President

Steve Ricchetti: Ricchetti was a former pharmaceutical insurance lobbyist and is a current opponent of Medicare for All.

Transition Advisory Board

Bob McDonald: former chairman, president, and CEO of Procter & Gamble. Proctor and Gamble have a long history of being one of the worst polluters on the planet and have been accused of tax fraud and using child labor.

Cindy McCain: McCain is Widow of Republican senator John McCain and the chair of Hensley & Co. Immigrant Rights groups in Arizona led a boycott against Hensley & Co for the latter’s support of Arizona SB 1070, which at the time of passage was the broadest and strictest anti-immigration measure passed in the United States.

Tech Industry Task Force

Eric Schmidt: Schmidt used to be CEO of Google. Google has faced all sorts of criticisms including helping military and intelligence agencies spy on citizens using Google Earth.

National Security Experts Giving Transition Team Briefings

Lloyd Austin: Austin is a retired General who helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that cost over three trillion dollars, killed over 1 million Iraqis, displaced over three million people, and injured millions more.

Tony Blinken: Blinken is a former deputy secretary of the state. See above.

Stanley McChrystal: McChrystal is a former army general. He systematized mass killings and detention of suspected insurgents in Iraq. He also led Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing a kill list and deadly night raids in what journalist Jeremy Scahill called a “merciless killing campaign” in the Middle East. McChrystal also has a long history of overseeing and condoning horrific torture tactics.

William McRaven: McRaven was a former navy admiral. McRaven was an architect of Obama’s extrajudicial assassination policy. He also advocated the military strike on al-Majalah in Yemen in 2009 that killed forty-one civilians, including fourteen women and twenty-two children. McRaven also planned a night raid on an Afghan wedding party that killed the bride, the groom, and the groom’s mother.

Samantha Power: Power is a former United Nations ambassador. Power is most known for popularizing the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which was used to justify a number of imperialistic military adventures abroad, including the Iraq War and the bombing of both Syria and Libya, among others.

Avril Haines: Haines is a former CIA deputy. She is also a member of the Center for a New American Society, a think tank funded by weapons contractors. Haines supported Trump’s controversial nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. It was well known at the time that Haspel was involved in the operations of CIA secret black sites. Haspel also admitted her role in destroying torture videotapes by CIA interrogators. She was one of the architects of the legal justification for Obama’s targeted assassination kill list. Haines also worked for shadowy datamining firm Palantir, and she is known for intimidating journalists and assisting the NSA in domestic spying.

Nicholas Burns: Burns was the undersecretary of state for political affairs for George W. Bush. While serving in the Bush Administration Burns was a staunch supporter of Bush’s war in Iraq. Burns also has attacked whistleblower Edward Snowden and called him a “traitor.”

David Cohen: Cohen was a deputy director of the CIA. Cohen was an architect of the sanctions on Iran and Russia. Sanctions in Iran have been devastating, collectively punishing the Iranian people by increasing unemployment, creating medicine shortages, and causing skyrocketing inflation. Sanctions in Iran have also exacerbated the COVID-19 outbreak.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield: Thomas-Greenfield was the US assistant secretary of state for African affairs. She was a supporter of George W. Bush’s neocolonial Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). MCA privileged US corporations in Africa and enabled the exploitation of African economies.

Bob Work: Work was a deputy of secretary of defense under the Obama and Trump administrations. Between 2013 and 2014 he was the CEO of the Center for a New American Security, which receives funds from weapons manufacturers and has long advocated for increased military spending.

The post Biden’s Corporate Cabinet: A Breakdown appeared first on Rampant.

A new study shows that Black people die at a higher rate in a normal year than the rate of white people dying from the pandemic this year. In this interview, the author of the research explains its significance.

The fact that African Americans have suffered and died disproportionately during the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely discussed in the popular press. Less discussed, and more surprising, is the fact that Black mortality in the best of times is worse than white mortality even in the worst of times. “Excess Black mortality,” as demographers call it, is a normal feature of capitalism in the United States. But what if we treated it as a crisis on par with COVID-19? What if, overwhelmed by the enormity and urgency of the problem, we said, Everything must stop—schools, restaurants, businesses, church, public transportation—until we find a way for things to continue without prolonging, and so worsening, the crisis? What if we put ourselves on a war footing. That is, what if we did not think of ourselves as acting in normal times, or as bound by familiar assumptions about how things have to work. What if we were prepared to do whatever it takes to end the crisis, even to the point of upending our lives, as our lives have all been upended by the COVID-19 pandemic? That is the question raised by recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Anton Ford of Rampant interviews the the author of that study, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field.

Your study asks how the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic compares to that of racial inequality in the United States. Could you tell us what you found?

I set out to answer the question, how many white people would have to die from the COVID-19 pandemic—through whatever pathways: COVID itself, delayed medical care, economic deprivation—for white mortality in 2020 to look like Black mortality in a normal year?

And, in fact, instead of asking about a typical year, I took the best ever Black mortality as my basis of comparison. That was in 2014, before the worst of the opioid crisis pushed mortality higher for the next several years (for Black people and white people).

And the other thing I should say is that I’m talking about age-adjusted mortality. In any given year, white people die at a higher rate than Black people overall—because the white population is about a decade older. But when you compare people who are the same ages, in general, Black mortality is substantially higher.

So I asked, how many extra white deaths would there have to be this year for age-adjusted white mortality to spike up to these best-ever, 2014 Black mortality rates?

The answer I found was, about 400,000. To come to that answer, I actually did two versions of the thought experiment, because it matters what age we imagine these extra deaths are happening at. Since it’s hard to know what the age pattern of excess mortality in 2020 will be, I tried imagining that these excess deaths follow the age pattern of direct COVID-19 deaths and that they follow the overall age pattern of mortality in a typical year. These two versions of the thought experiment gave me similar estimates, about 400,000 to 420,000.

I also asked how many extra white deaths there would have to be for white life expectancy—the average lifespan, or, on average, how old people are when they die—to plummet down to the best-ever Black level, also from 2014. This would take more deaths because deaths at relatively old ages don’t affect life expectancy all that much. And here, it makes more difference which particular thought experiment you choose about how old people are when they die from the pandemic. For white life expectancy in 2020 to fall to the best recorded Black life expectancy, I estimated that the pandemic would need to kill between about 700,000 and 1 million white people.

To put that in perspective, the most recent CDC estimate as I’m answering this uses data up to November 7. It shows almost 120,000 COVID deaths among non-Hispanic whites so far. These numbers are very likely to skyrocket over the next several weeks, but it would still be truly shocking if they reached 400,000.

And that tells you that, even if the Black population had somehow been immune to the coronavirus in 2020, we would expect white mortality in 2020 to still be lower than Black mortality this year—in fact, lower than Black mortality has ever been.

Meanwhile, as we all know, the pandemic actually has hit people of color hardest—the gulf between Black, Indigenous, and immigrant populations on one hand and the white population on the other will be much starker this year.

The comparison between the lethality of COVID-19 and racial inequality is in many ways surprising. These might seem like apples and oranges. What prompted you to draw the comparison?

There’s a literal answer to this (what path led me to construct this comparison?) and a substantive answer (why do I think this comparison is meaningful?).

The literal answer stems with some research I did a few years ago with two great social scientists, Chris Muller and James Feigenbaum. We were looking at infectious disease mortality in US cities in the early twentieth century, when infectious disease spread wantonly—people died all the time of things like tuberculosis, flu; lots of babies died of diarrhea.

We ended up discovering that the infectious disease mortality that urban whites had during the 1918 flu pandemic—which was really, really high, like, almost literally off-the-charts mortality compared to every other year—was still less than the infectious disease mortality that all other urban residents experienced every single year in that era.

This stunned us. We actually didn’t believe it. We checked the data a million different ways: changing around what counts as an infectious disease when some of the records were ambiguous; changing which cities we looked at; adjusting for age or not adjusting for age—whatever we did, we found the same thing. That result is real.

This really affected how I think about the scale of racial inequality in that era. In my line of work, as a mortality demographer, we talk all the time about the 1918 flu as this unique, unprecedented event. Realizing that the same mortality level was just the typical, year-in, year-out experience for people of color in that era was shocking to me.

And the substantive answer?

The reason this comparison is so important to me is that pandemics are intimately connected with social action. We do an awful lot to stop them.

It can seem strange to say that when we are living through the horror of completely inadequate action to stop the pandemic. We’re up to 185,000 confirmed COVID deaths, which means a much higher number in reality, and in a phase where the deaths are accelerating. And, more than nine months in, we still have PPE shortages for essential workers; indoor dining, bars, gyms, and weddings are seeding super-spreader events all over; there’s no national agreement about masks; there’s no national data infrastructure to guide decision-making on a local level; there’s no infusion of resources to schools and other essential buildings to improve their ventilation; there’s no transfers of wealth to make it livable for people to stay home safely rather than return to unsafe workplaces. So it seems strange to say that we do a lot to stop pandemics. And yet.

The speed with which we have changed our basic assumptions about how we should live right now—it’s really incredible. For me, it was about ten days in March that upended all of my assumptions about the next, let’s say, two years of my life. My workplace transformed how we do our work. Kids in my city are in school remotely. From the perspective of today, with the reality of the pandemic, it’s astonishing how little we’ve done—but from the perspective of February, it’s astonishing how much we’ve changed.

And, actually, a lot of polls, especially relatively early on, showed that people generally wanted more restrictions and worried that things would open up too quickly. The polarization around COVID control is dramatic, but it shouldn’t obscure how high the level of agreement actually is that we should be living really differently right now.

So the question that poses for me is: what if we took racism as seriously as we take the pandemic?

My study is telling us that racism is associated with more deaths every year than white people are likely to experience from the pandemic this year. What if we reacted with the same level of urgency, the same willingness to let go of expectations about how things work, or doing things the way we’ve always done them, and instead had the starting point: what do we need to do to stop this?

Were you surprised by the results of your study?

Oh yes. Even with the hindsight of having been so surprised when I found the same thing about the 1918 flu. Even then, I really did not expect this. It’s staggering to me.

To a layperson, the data may seem abstract. But what you are talking about—what your graphs represent—are people whose lives have been cut short. What are the consequences of “excess Black mortality” in human terms?

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how much of the meaning we make from our lives depends on how our lives unfurl in time. Getting the time to pursue our own projects, to see ourselves change and grow, getting to see the people we love change—the things that make for a meaningful life really get their meaning from how they extend over our lives and our loved ones’ lives. Cutting someone’s life short robs them and the people they love of that meaning. And when we do it so disproportionately to a population that we also intensively segregate, we’re concentrating that theft and the experience of grief in a devastating way. It’s a really horrific thing.

And the losses aren’t just to that person, or even just to their loved ones. Because we’re social creatures and we’re creatures who learn so well, aging gives us different kinds of perspectives on the world. It’s not just a cliché to talk about aging bringing the possibility of wisdom. I think it’s actually something deep about what kind of organisms we are. So cutting all these lives short is also a huge cultural loss. I feel a little ambivalent about talking about it that way, to be honest, because I never want to distract from the fact that the biggest, most profound loss is to the person whose life was taken. But I think it can also be important to name the harm fully. These early deaths are robbing all of us of the effects that the people killed too soon should have had on the world.

Mortality is one index of well-being, but there are others. Would you expect the results to be similar if you looked at other indices, such as wealth?

Yeah. The comparison would have to be different, but the idea that a massive disaster for the white population might still not be as bad as the typical experience for the Black population—that will show up for a lot of outcomes. White unemployment and underemployment, at its Great Recession peak, was similar to historically low Black levels shortly before the recession.

Wealth is actually where you see the starkest gaps. Black family wealth at its peak, right before the Great Recession, was less than half of what white family wealth was decades earlier. White family wealth fell during the recession, certainly—and the value it fell to was larger than Black family wealth at its peak, by a factor of around 4.5. That’s an incredible difference that affects every aspect of your life—where you can live, what kind of education you and your kids can get, what kind of health care you can access in an emergency, whether you can retire.

What kind of criticism have you received—from those on right and from those on the left?

From the right, the main critique is that I assume that the excessive death rates of African Americans compared to white Americans reflect racism. They will typically note that Asian American and Latinx populations in the United States live longer on average than whites do and ask rhetorically, does that mean that relatively high white mortality shows that there is racism against whites?

These critics are correct that population disparities are complex and can reflect many different things. In the case of populations with a lot of immigrants (and children of immigrants), one thing they reflect is that immigrants tend to be a healthy group of people on average, because immigrating is often really hard and not everyone can manage it. And another thing they reflect is that there are some key ways that US culture is distinctly unhealthy, and coming from another culture might protect you from some of that.

But when you’re making a Black/white comparison, you’re looking at a disparity in a very distinct context. If your society takes one group of people and confines them to the worst jobs, won’t sell or rent them housing in safer neighborhoods with better funded schools and more opportunities, puts its most toxic pollution in the neighborhoods where they do live, has a state apparatus that directs routine violence against them and behaves as though that’s normal, has many of its medical and social service workers treat them with hostility and contempt, and has, over many generations, locked them out of accumulating wealth that gives a cushion against economic insecurity . . . if your society does all that and then you turn around and see that the same group of people doesn’t live very long, your starting assumption should be that those choices are why. It’s specifically when we look at the Black/white disparity that our starting assumption should be: this gap reflects racism. And that’s because everything we know about health maps onto some way that Black people have been disadvantaged in the United States.

From the left, I get a different objection. A lot of people have a really visceral reaction against the idea that we’ve done a lot to shut down COVID. And, like I said, I get it—it’s jarring in the context that we have done so little, relative to what’s needed.

But the question I want to put back to those critics (all of whom, so far, have been white) is this: Take stock of how different your life is right now compared to, let’s say, February because of efforts to stop COVID spread. Your efforts, your loved ones’ efforts, your employer’s and your local government’s efforts. Your list is going to look really different depending on your class position and the specific nature of your job, but even if you’re, say, a school worker working in person, I suspect there is a lot on your list.

Now take stock of how different your life is compared with what you imagine it would be if you, your loved ones, and your government made no effort to stop racism—due to whatever efforts you, and they, have taken.

For most people who ask me this, there’s no comparison. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of the people asking. But it’s a way to put in perspective what I mean that we have embraced disruption to stop COVID while we, as a society, have been absolutely unwilling to embrace disruption to fight racism. We try to fit antiracist initiatives into the margins of how things work (“Let’s do an antiracist training at work!”) instead of asking, what do we need to change to stop this?

The last thing I want to say about this particular critique is that I do think there is a danger of letting the intense polarization around COVID containment keep us from recognizing how much has changed. And one thing I think is helpful about the comparison to the 1918 pandemic, actually, is that you can see both sides of this. Virus control was intensely polarizing then, too. People rebelled against supposedly authoritarian mask mandates and lockdowns then, too, and a lot of lives were lost because governments let businesses like theaters open up earlier than they should have. Yet that pandemic also introduced profound changes in daily life at the time and enduring changes in medicine, architecture, all kinds of things. Both are true. Polarization and hostility isn’t a sign that nothing has changed—not in 1918, not in the Civil Rights Movement, not in 2020.

And the reason it’s dangerous to only see the hostility is that it exaggerates our sense of continuity in the status quo. But if you’re on the left, one of the biggest lessons of this year should be that the limits of the possibilities people will entertain can change very fast sometimes. New contexts will upend our assumptions about what’s reasonable the way COVID changed an awful lot of assumptions about, for example, what kinds of education are good enough for now or what kind of travel is expendable. And social movements will change what seems reasonable, too. I live in Minneapolis, so the embrace of defunding the police, broadly, and police abolition among a smaller group, really stands out to me.

It matters to know that basic assumptions can change for a big part of the populace very fast, because otherwise we develop tunnel vision; we limit our own imaginations before we start. Something I keep thinking about is that we’re on a path of accelerating climate change, just as much as an accelerating pandemic. I think some years ahead will feel more like the past than 2020 did, but I also think it’s quite possible that we will look back on 2019 as the last year of a former version of normal. I don’t know. But it seems like one of core tasks of the left in this context is to articulate some compelling visions of what things could look like. And it seems to me that having a good imagination requires you to see both sides, to imagine the pandemic response we could have had that wouldn’t be treating us all as so brutally expendable, but also to recognize that we’ve already seen a mass embrace of some real sacrifices to keep each other safe.

You live in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered by the police, and where protests have sparked the most widespread and sustained series of demonstrations in US history. Did this have an impact on how you were thinking about inequality in mortality?

I actually did the first, very rough draft of my analysis on May 25, the day Floyd was killed. I learned of his death the next morning, and I put aside my analysis for a while because I was taken up with protesting. And then because of the protests I dropped everything for a couple of weeks to do a fast analysis of lifetime lost to police violence in the United States. I came back to this project comparing racism to COVID in early June and finished the final version in early August, so the whole thing was written in this context where my city, and specifically my neighborhood, Seward, were having a lot of conversations about the alternative to policing and the long-term organizing strategy to get there. I think that influenced what I wanted to do with what I found—not just say, “Look how bad racism is,” but say, “We could do something about this, and we must.”

You conclude by expressing the hope that the results of your study might help reframe debates about things like reparations, defunding the police, universal social programs, desegregation of schools and neighborhoods, increased wages and workplace democracy. You write that you hope to move “away from which transformations will be politically tenable to, simply, which transformations will be effective in preventing harms associated with racism.” Could you say more about the hoped-for reframing?

If our starting point is “how do we keep society operating basically the way it has been, but tweak it to reduce racism,” we will still have profound inequality in how long we get to live. We will probably still have Black people experiencing a level of early death that matches white people’s COVID experience, every year because the racial inequality is built too deeply into how our economy, our state, and our culture work for that to be effective.

What I was thinking when I wrote that conclusion was that sometimes we talk ourselves out of even dreaming of what we should have. But what if our starting assumption was not that things will be roughly as they are, and most people will never accept any different, and we have to fit our goals into that box, but instead, we just asked: what will it take to prevent these deaths?
Then we would be having a conversation about mass redistribution of wealth, about reorganizing workplaces, about intense environmental cleanups, about mass training of a new generation of health workers who are embedded in the communities they serve. And we would face intense opposition to all those things. But we would be honest about what’s required, and we would pose the same question we ask, aghast, about the COVID protections we should have, but don’t: how can this not be worth it?

The post Deadlier Than a Pandemic appeared first on Rampant.

Mutual Aid work in this Chicago neighborhood is forging new communities amid the pandemic and the antiracist rebellion. Rampant interviewed the organizers for a window into their ongoing project.

In the unfolding economic and social crises, communities have formed mutual aid networks across the country. In this interview Rampant’s Dana Blanchard talks with members of McKinley Park Mutual Aid (MPMA) in Chicago, formed earlier this year. Mutual aid, as organized by groups like MPMA, differs from charity work in that it centers an understanding that it is the system that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability and not individuals or individual choices. Collective responses are required to address systemic failures, especially in times of acute crisis like we are experiencing in 2020. In this crisis the support from existing state institutions has been completely inadequate and unable to meet the many needs of our communities over the last six months. In the absence of institutional support, communities have come together to provide collectively organized aid for themselves, people helping people in whatever way they can.

We hope that this interview sheds light on the work of local mutual aid groups and can serve as a tool for those doing this work in their own parts of Chicago and beyond. At the end we have included MPMA’s core values as a reference for readers.

Dana Blanchard: Can you talk about your work and how you all came together?

Tovia: We got started because somebody, I don’t know who, made a Google Form in Chicago for anybody in the city who was interested in some kind of support during COVID or participating in some kind of support. Then whoever made that sorted people into groups geographically and made email lists. I saw that on Facebook or somewhere and filled it out. Then I got an email with thirty other people in McKinley Park who were interested. From there we just met on Zoom. Of those original people maybe only three or four of them are still actively in the group, but it was like this seed that allowed it all to get started.

From there we started meeting regularly on Wednesdays. The group has had people come and go but there has been a pretty consistent number of about ten core folks and around ten to fifteen very involved members. What we’ve done has also evolved over the course of our existence, based on the needs that we’ve learned about from the neighborhood.

The first thing we did was just set up a Google voice number and an email address and start handing out fliers. And at first we were just doing grocery deliveries like for folks who either couldn’t pay for groceries or weren’t safe to leave their homes. We’ve continued to do that but have identified that that’s not actually the greatest need because there are a lot of other organizations that have filled the need for food, and that has been incredible to see.

For example, there are many free fridges around the neighborhood and groups like Neighbors for Environmental Justice doing food distributions. What has been a lot more pressing has been financial assistance. We started getting rent requests and requests for people to get help paying bills and we realized we didn’t really have money to do that kind of support. We asked ourselves: can we do this? We decided to try and raise money, and it worked. People donated a lot of money, and it has pretty much all been folks in the neighborhood who have donated. For the most part it’s all been small, individual donations. We just have a Venmo account so we get to see all the names of people who donate and many of them are people in our group and our neighbors and names that we recognize.

Now the primary function of our group is helping with rent and bills. We’ve also decided collectively to not be just distributing money, that our work is more than that. Even though helping people pay their bills is really core to what we do and we recognize that if some people in the neighborhood have money and other people need it, it should go to people who need it, we also see the value that comes from creating a community that is accessible and safe for everyone. We’ve thought about ways that we could create that community ethos and culture in McKinley Park.

That meant supporting the Black Lives Matter uprisings when they began and trying to think about what that means in McKinley Park and as residents how we could actually create a neighborhood that supports Black lives. We see this work as not just actively supporting Black Lives Matter organizers in other parts of the city, but also what the movement would look like here in McKinley Park.

Caroline: We started as a really direct response to the pandemic and the economic disparity we saw. All of us saw how close we were to people who were struggling. It was a really big awakening for the entire city, and the whole nation, but specifically for the people involved in this group. That led us to pooling the resources within our community and redistributing to the people who are in need. As we started to develop our values we saw that it is really a kind of short-term investment, helping people short-term, quickly, as a one-off investment in our community to help people in need. That’s so important to what we do, but when you think about these core values of caring and creating a safe environment, it expands to a much bigger picture and more long-term things that we need to work on.

Dana Blanchard: I would love to talk more about that—the connections between the antiracist rebellions this summer and the work of mutual aid networks. How is your work connected to the fight against systemic racism? I know you all have been out at events around CPAC and Black Lives Matter, and COVID has exposed and exacerbated racism and inequality. Mutual aid work obviously intersects with fighting systemic inequality in a major way.

Matthew: We need to be engaged in having conversations within our group about what the neighborhood is like and what the experiences are like specifically within McKinley Park for POC at large and Black people more specifically. Those conversations led us to discussing our values, especially around the different protests that were happening. We had a large discussion about where our values are aligned and that led us to doing what I would call solidarity building. This meant going to CPAC events and going to Black Lives Matter events and building coalition with other groups in the neighborhood who are engaged in that work.

But it also meant doing the campaign around neighborhood signs. We worked with a local printer to design these Black Lives Matter in McKinley Park window signs that are designed to have some similarities to the We Call Police signs that we have seen around. We came to the park on a weekend and began distributing those signs. We wanted to have an event to distribute those signs where we could engage with people in the park and have conversations with them around this issue. We distributed these signs as a way to interrupt the We Call Police narrative and to support the idea that we don’t need to call the police. Calling the police often creates more harm than good for our neighbors and for our community members, and especially for those most marginalized within McKinley Park.

We want to encourage safety through cooperation and through working together, and through advocating for things like access to mental health, access to resources, access to jobs, access to money, rather than advocating for calling the police to keep us safe.

Caroline: When we think about a safe environment where people are able to reach their full potential we all need to think about a whole spectrum of things, and that includes making sure that people in our neighborhood know that Black lives matter here in McKinley Park.

Even if the only resource you have right now in the work is a poster we made for you, and all you can do is put that in your window, that means something to the people here who are walking on our streets and enjoying the park. Reaching people on a broader basis around true community building is important.

Dana Blanchard: Speaking of the importance of window signs, the We Call Police and Back the Blue signs are a huge problem in our neighborhood. There are certain blocks that are very intimidating, I would imagine, for people of color in our neighborhood.

Matthew: One of the things that it means to be involved in mutual is to understand your interconnectedness and to understand that even though we are connected we don’t have equity in this neighborhood. It was really important for us to acknowledge the strong police presence and pro-cop presence in the neighborhood and counter it in whatever way we could. It also means acknowledging that Black community members might not feel safe in our neighborhood, and that needs to change.

Dana Blanchard: Let’s talk a bit more about how mutual aid is political work. I want to ask you about the Black Panthers because I feel like a lot of people are looking to the Black Panthers as a model for connecting community-based mutual aid work and political work fighting inequality and racism. They had this short motto: “build and dismantle,” this idea of simultaneously building a vision for the communities you want while dismantling the systems of oppression. Can you speak to what this idea of build and dismantle means in your work and also if there are any historical models or current movement organizations that you see as good examples of connecting mutual aid work and political work?

Tovia: Actually we found that a lot of the people in the group are organizers in other spaces. It’s been really beautiful to see the ways that has come into the group, that people have different experiences with organizing, and models, and resources and skills. We have some people who are immigration rights organizers, we have some union folks and people from other movement spaces. We’re also really intentional about language justice and having everything we share in Spanish at the minimum. We also try to have it in Mandarin as well, and all our written materials in Mandarin.

These different movements show up in many indirect ways. We allow the group to be formed and shaped by the people who make it up and by the experiences and values and brilliance of each one of us. Contemporarily it’s actually been really cool to do mutual aid because there are people all over the city doing it. We’ve drawn a lot from groups that are working in other neighborhoods, and that’s been really helpful.

And we’ve been able to connect folks. We sometimes get requests from people who don’t live in McKinley Park, and we’ve thought a lot about what it means to have borders when many of us believe borders can be harmful. Even though we are based in McKinley Park we have fulfilled a lot of requests for people beyond our neighborhood, like in Brighton Park for example, which is deeply connected to us.

In the beginning, before we’d raised much money we got money from a Bridgeport group, who was willing to pay rent for folks in McKinley Park. When there are people who are pretty far outside our neighborhood, we’ll try to connect them to a local mutual aid group, and we’ll often do the work of reaching out to their local mutual aid group and figuring out what their resources are and what we can do to help. We think it is actually more effective for people to be connected to somewhere local if possible.

There are both the historical models and all of the things that are happening right now around us that we’re drawing from as a group.

Matthew: There’s a through-line that I’d never considered before until just now with the work of the Black Panthers and even the work of an organization like Act Up. We are part of a community and we have identified a disparity and a need for care during a time of crisis, and as a community we want to respond. We are both trying to fill that need for care while also identifying the power systems that create need and work against them. These systems of power are not only ignoring the need for that care, but also exacerbating it. We must dismantle those power systems or at least hold them accountable.

Dana Blanchard: I’d love to expand on this a bit more. What is the relationship between providing mutual aid and care and both challenging the current systems of power and building alternative systems that challenge the status quo?

Amanda: The relationship is that providing for people’s needs means understanding the gaps that exist. This work has laid bare the gaps between what is needed and what these systems are not providing for us. Folks can’t pay their utilities, folks can’t pay their rent or get groceries, and they are not getting help from the system. I think this is related to something that we heard a lot around the uprisings this past summer: “We take care of us, we protect us.” We can see more clearly in these times that we are not being protected by cops, we are not being protected by the government, and the government is not providing relief for things like rent or food for people who need it.

The first thing in our work is that we see in real life where these gaps are in these systems and we understand that we got us. When we need to pull together we do, and I think that happened in a really beautiful way around the uprisings. There have been so many instances in which we could just completely do without certain systems, in which people realize we could instead rely on our own networks to take care of us. This provides a window into what that could look like, and that is going to disturb the stability of the systems and lead to people questioning those systems and why we have them.

One example is when people ask things like Well, if we don’t have cops, who is going to keep us safe? But we see what happens when the cops are the ones that are inflicting violence, and we’re the ones actually taking care of each other. We’re forming our own teams of medics, we’re forming our own teams of people to provide safety and physical barriers to those who are being targeted with violence.

On a smaller scale these are efforts of imagination in what things could be like instead of what we have now. Once we start imagining what it can look like, that starts to threaten systems because we start to question why things are done this way in the first place.

Dana Blanchard: Community-building and mutual aid work can be really hard. How do you all sustain yourselves? How do you see building relationships and connecting with each other as a way to sustain your work? Finally, I would love it if you could speak to your vision for McKinley Park that is different from where we are now, because I also think that imagining a better future can also help sustain our work today. This is really coming back to that idea of building something new while we dismantle what is rotten and the hopefulness at the heart of mutual aid work.

Latham: In terms of how we sustain ourselves I think we do really try to share the work; it’s one of our community agreements and one of our core values. We share the workload but we also care for each other and make space for people to take time and space when they need to. That feels incredibly sustainable. While there’s all this ugliness around us in the world, there’s also been a lot of beauty coming together and generosity and people feeling really called to support one another, to do kind things for total strangers.

In some ways it’s been somewhat easy to organize our work because we have been able to call on our communities and they have shown up. We’ll see how long that lasts. Will that last beyond the crisis of the pandemic and the uprisings? We all are hopeful that our work can be sustained. It will need to be.

Matthew: The collective work of mutual aid is really baked into how we organize and how we operate. We are non-hierarchical; we don’t have a defined leadership. For example, every meeting we rotate the job of facilitator. At the start of every meeting we talk about taking space, sharing space, about stepping in and stepping out, and making sure you’re contributing but not burning out. We have members who are starting school or need to take a step back, and it’s not about just allowing them to do that, but also looking for how we can help support them and collectively work as a team. This is one of the things that personally gives me a lot of joy in our work. I remember the first time we saw each other in person. It felt so joyful, and it felt so restorative. Also making those same kinds of connections with different organizations in the neighborhood is really restorative.

Tovia: I remember the first meeting that we had on Zoom back in late March and the first go-around we had was why people wanted to be there. Many people shared things like “I feel helpless,” and “I’m here because it feels good to do something,” and it was clear then and still is now that people are in the group not only to care for others but also to be cared for themselves.

I have thought wow, if something happens to me or I get sick I have fifteen people who live within a few blocks of me who I trust deeply to be there. I think it’s personally and collectively sustaining to have so many new friends in the neighborhood. I run into people now in the park and we say hello and know each other.

In terms of how we sustain the work collectively we’ve also been really intentional about how we deal with harm in the group. That was something that unexpectedly came up a few months into organizing the group. There was somebody who had been an active participant who we felt had caused harm.

They wrote an article for a neighborhood publication that seemed to glorify people who were defending property during the uprisings and that felt harmful to people in our group. There had been interpersonal things, too, where they had been sort of mansplaining and being inappropriate with people in the group. We tried to have a restorative justice circle where everybody had space to share how that had made them feel. And I think that sort of process sustains the group because we know that there’s accountability and trust among one another, and that people are invested in trying to address harm when it happens. And so that is part of the sustainability of the group; it’s the way that we operate, the way that we treat each other, our shared ethos.

We created a restorative process, and that became part of the group. We collectively created principles and values that we operate by and when new folks join, we share that with them.

A lot of the sustainability has been the investment in operating. In other words, building the group in the way that we want the world around us to operate. And when we’re building that little tiny world of organizers we try to build on our core values knowing that it replicates itself outside. It’s like a ripple effect.

Caroline: Our goal is to create a network of people as a mutual aid network. Each person that we meet, each volunteer, each person we help is a huge win for us in growing that network. I would like to see our network continue to expand to include this entire neighborhood. The McKinley Park I want to live in is one without those little invisible borders that we create. By bringing people together and getting to know each other, we get to see that those are meaningless, harmful borders that we create. We are trying to dismantle those invisible things that keep us from seeing how close we all are to each other. Building those connections to each other will help us overcome these crises, and that is the hope.

McKinley Park Mutual Aid Core Values:

Mutual aid and resource sharing

We exist to care for our neighbors through material, structural, and emotional support.

We recognize and tap into the strengths and assets already within our community.

We share responsibility and leadership.

Creative re-envisioning of community safety and care

Our work is a direct response to racism, capitalism, and other forms of systemic oppression.

Institutions and governments are not keeping us safe. We believe safety can come from creative responses to community and systemic problems.

We trust each other and we move at the speed of trust.

We intentionally build trust with one another.

We prioritize shared humanity over privatized wealth and property.

Mutual Respect

We strive to make our spaces accessible and inclusive.

We believe everyone has something to contribute.

We make and hold space for the diversity of our communities and their experiences.

We meet people where they are at.

Centering the needs and experiences of impacted communities

We strive to be inclusive of historically excluded communities/individuals, especially our BIPOC neighbors as well as undocumented, disabled, queer, trans, and those experiencing homelessness.

We recognize our own privilege and work together to align our work to address the root causes of systemic oppression.

We reduce harm and commit to accountability.

We do not call the police on one another.

We commit to our own learning and growth to better support one another.

We assume best intentions, and attend to impact.

We strive to develop policies and practices that ensure the safety of the most marginalized.

We see this as a living document that grows along with us.

Find out more about McKinley Park Mutual Aid on their Facebook page.

The post We Take Care of Us appeared first on Rampant.

The recent rebellion in Philly against the police murder of Walter Wallace Jr. is rooted in struggles of the past and reflects the uprisings of the future.

This summer we took part in a rebellion across the country against racism and police brutality. Now, the nationwide scope of protest has diminished. However, since then we’ve seen more localized rebellions in Kenosha, and Chicago around the shooting of Latrell Allen, and around the release of the video in Rochester. Philly is the most recent. In that context, what’s going on with Philly?

The past weeks in Philly we have seen pretty significant rebellions around the police murder of Walter Wallace, about five blocks west of where I join you from. It’s important to understand that Philadelphia saw some of the most militant reactions nationwide to the killing of George Floyd. There was mass rebellion in Philadelphia that lasted several days and in June the National Guard was here.

This all takes place in the backdrop of a much longer shift in radical politics in the city, which goes back to around 2015, though it’s also bound up with much longer trajectory. We’re talking about a small group of organizers who were out there trying to raise hell around the police killing of Brandon Tate-Brown in late 2014 and 2015. As Ferguson and Baltimore were popping off we in Philly were struggling over this one particular case.

The militancy of those struggles, even if they were relatively small scale, really broke open the city, which has been a city of long-term resistance, a city in which Black struggles have been crucial, in which brutality and mass murder by the police, like in the case of the MOVE bombing, have been essential to understanding the political context.

In a way, Philly was primed to respond to the killing of George Floyd, and it did. I’ve never seen anything like what we saw in Philly on May 30th and into June. Not even during the Oscar Grant rebellions in Oakland—which was where I cut my teeth politically—did I see that scale of rebellion, looting, and mass resistance.

Now what’s happening today is interesting because it’s obviously more localized. We’re seeing a city and a population that’s really just had enough, that has a level of clarity around what the police do, that knows perfectly well that we don’t need to even entertain the lies about “Did he have a knife?” or that the police were just trying to do their job and keep people safe. We know that’s not true.

We know that police are trained cowards, who are taught from day one to put their life above anyone else’s life. This is why they shot and killed Walter Wallace. He was on a block full of people—neighbors, family members, none of them were trying to kill him because they didn’t think he was that big of a risk to their well-being. It was the police who decided to kill him, to fire fourteen shots.

We know that police are trained cowards.

You are seeing in the city that people just don’t buy the bullshit anymore, and they’re buying it less and less by the day. While the first night of protest we saw that the police were restrained by the police commissioner, who took a political beating back in June over the use of force, the use of teargas, rubber bullets, and extreme levels of brutality, they weren’t going be held back forever. They came back on the second night and really just beat the piss out of people for fun, because this is what the pigs do.

They thought they would get away with it like they always get away with it. But, as you probably have seen, there’s now a viral video of them smashing the windows out of a car, beating the passengers, and tearing a two-year-old child out of the arms of his mother. They then tried to take credit for rescuing him, saying that he was found wandering barefoot, which is an absolute lie. And then everyone saw the truth revealed, which is further confirmation of the embarrassment that the police represent, and that they are really just lying thugs who are out to protect themselves and no one else.

This, as a lot of other people have pointed out, is a deeply white supremacist and colonial idea that says: “The people that I’m brutalizing, I’m actually rescuing them. This baby whose windows I smashed out, who I stole away from his mother, I’m actually here to protect him.”

This is the veneer that policing has always had. No matter how bad the violence that is inflicted by the police on communities, they’re told they just need more police, and the police are really there to protect them. Policing is a form of psychological and physical abuse. And people really are just not buying it anymore.

What do you think has led to that level of clarity? I ask because in varying ways around the country, we’ve seen a shift towards people talking about defunding and even abolishing the police, seeing the institution as a problem in itself, not as something to reform. So in Philly, like you said, people have had enough and there’s this clarity. What do you think has led to that? Is it the ongoing organizing? Is it the national radicalization? Is it just people seeing it?

The first thing is that we live in a moment of global revolt and rebellion. This has been going on for well over a decade in the United States. I think the uprisings in Oakland in 2009 really helped kick things off, the Occupy movement followed just a couple years later, Black Lives Matter a couple years after that. You have this escalating spiral of struggles across the country, pin-balling around, and people are becoming more radical and they’re developing a better understanding of theory and seeing more of the way that theory plays out in practice.

They’re seeing that they have power in the streets, they’re seeing that struggles lead to actual change and transformation. This is all the context of what we now see occurring amid a devastating economic crisis and the continued impoverishment of not only poor communities of color, but also the indebtedness of students and the absence of a horizon of how to get out of this situation. This is the generation leading the George Floyd revolts, who are nineteen, twenty, twenty-one years old. They have grown up with nothing but Black death at the hands of police, economic crisis, no options, and no future. The fact that they are rebelling should not surprise us.

These spirals of struggle move across the country, radicalize here and there, and bring us up to the level that we’ve reached. You can see this in the words of Kandace Montgomery, an abolitionist organizer with the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis who said: “In 2015 [when Jamar Clarke was killed] . . . we were clear about the problem. Now we are clear about the solution.” This is why you have this really astounding uniformity of calls to abolish, or at the very least defund, the police. These calls are not brand new—they’ve been emerging over the past few years, but the fact that this is what people are reaching for in this moment of struggle says a lot about the level of consciousness that’s developed over the past ten years.

We just had a national presidential election that offered a choice between an openly racist president and a more veiled racist vice president in Joe Biden, who campaigned on a law and order, shoot-them-in-the leg version of police reform. So those are the choices, and there’s rebellion in Philadelphia where there’s still a National Guard presence and where the Democratic mayor only just lifted a curfew. What does all this say about the current political situation and context both in Philly and nationally?

When Gramsci talks about a time of monsters, this is what he’s talking about. While I’m not even a Bernie stan, it’s clear that we could have had a Bernie. Instead, who do we get in the context of mass, nationwide anti-police rebellion? A segregationist and a cop. This was the Democratic ticket.

This is a time of monsters because it’s a moment in which we know which way history is pointing, but on some level that path is blocked. Now, while it’s blocked on the level of formal politics, it’s not blocked in the streets. In the streets, things are moving forward by leaps and bounds, and I think that’s precisely what matters.

These struggles will explode no matter who is in power. There are ways that having Trump in power sets off struggles by drawing more left-liberals into struggle and radicalizing them to play a crucial role in a growing coalition of resistance. But there are ways that when Obama was in power, for example, we had the eruption of Black Lives Matter because of the dashed hopes and the crushed expectations. Nothing is going to change under Joe Biden; nothing would really change under Donald Trump. So that collision with reality has a shocking and radicalizing effect on people who realize that there’s nothing left but the streets.

We know that in 2021, police murder is going to be the story, and we know that because it is an old story. If you look at the history of mass resistance in this country, that resistance is almost always driven by Black and brown people, almost always against the police, almost always sparked by police murder. Why? Because the police are founded on that great betrayal of the Black struggle by poor whites at the end of slavery, those who chose the Klan instead of multiracial equality. Instead of abolition-democracy, they opted for white terror.

So we should not be surprised that now, more than 150 years later, we’re looking at the same forces playing out in the same way, because these are historical questions that we haven’t yet dealt with.

You mentioned a continuity of organizing in Philly. What would you say about the connection between what’s going on currently and the struggle around MOVE? Of course, the MOVE house was about four blocks from the shooting of Walter Wallace.

The MOVE struggle and the struggle around Mumia, not to mention other struggles like the struggle for freedom for Russell Maroon Shoatz, are essential to understanding the political landscape in Philadelphia. They’ve provided it with a radical backbone that leans toward two opposing poles. One is a level of kind of mass fear. It was just in 1985 when the City of Philadelphia dropped a bomb on West Philly, killed scores of people, and burned down the city block. That’s not that long ago; everyone remembers it. Even when I moved to Philly a decade ago and started organizing, people were like, “Thank you for doing this, this is amazing. But you’re all gonna get yourselves killed.” That fear is deeply embedded in the psyche. At the same time the recognition of what the police in the city actually stand for is undeniable.

And so you have a situation that gives rise to a willingness to engage in mass resistance. There are lots of material dynamics that play into this: who’s in charge, how it’s played out, and the way that these struggles are able to coalesce. You can see an escalating spiral beginning with struggles around Brandon Tate-Brown, in which small groups of people were constantly in the streets, constantly confronting the police commissioner. Bear in mind that this was Charles Ramsey, Obama’s top cop, the person in charge of the twenty-first-century policing reform report, who advocated civilian oversight and transparency but wouldn’t even tell us who killed Brandon Tate-Brown, who wouldn’t even give us that basic level information, wouldn’t release the video until we fought in the streets to get that, and until we frankly embarrassed him.

These are the cycles, the spirals of struggle. Around the same time, we had a solidarity rally with the Baltimore rebellion. That was the biggest thing Philly had seen in a decade. Thousands of people showed up, took over the streets, blocked the highway, and fought the police. They realized that what’s happening in Baltimore was exactly the same thing, essentially it is Philly’s twin city, and so we see it happen here, we see it happen there.

There were Black cops in 1890 and it didn’t make a difference.

The years since have seen just a consistency to this struggle, not just for demands for a better way of living and for equality, but a struggle against this consistency of police brutality. Philly, we should bear in mind, is a place that had an integrated police force in the 1890s. Du Bois wrote about this. There were Black cops in 1890 and it didn’t make a difference. There was so-called community policing in the 1940s and 1950s, and it didn’t make a difference.

I feel the realization that radical change is necessary is deeply embedded in the psyche of the city of Philadelphia.

So one of the strategic orientations that came out of the past wave of Black Lives Matter organizing is electing progressive prosecutors. Philly has Larry Krasner, who I think is considered one of the best examples of that. What is Krasner doing in this current rebellion and how has he oriented himself?

Absolutely nothing. Dead silence. I think it’s not hard to figure out why Larry Krasner won’t say anything about this until after the election. And even then, I’m not sure what he will say. He’s been very willing in recent weeks to assume a radical anti-Trump stance and to say he’ll prosecute people who show up at the polls to intimidate voters, and that’s fine. But there’s been dead silence on Walter Wallace. I say this as someone who’s pretty balanced in the sense that I think it’s good thing that Larry Krasner is in the DA’s office. We’ve seen hundreds if not thousands of people not sitting in jail as a result of that election, and we’ve seen important experiments in diversion and other strategies for keeping people out of prison, for not arresting people for certain crimes, and for decriminalization. These things are hugely important.

On the material level of movements, it’s been crucially important that, for example, when Occupy ICE was happening, all the people who were arrested were released within two hours with only citations. This is materially important for our movements and has made a huge difference. So I don’t think it’s about denouncing the district attorney. Though Krasner is also someone who’s sending people to jail and who’s not taking a strong enough position when it comes to people like Mumia. What we need to be thinking about is how to operate in a context in which things are getting easier in a certain way, but when it comes to the George Floyd rebellions, for example, the district attorney’s office is insisting on drawing a hard line between protestors and looters and prosecuting looters and releasing protestors. This is a division that, especially if we care about class unity and the unity of this class struggle, we have to refuse 100 percent.

But I think the question is less do we like or dislike Larry Krasner than it is: what does his presence in the DA’s office mean for people? Moving forward we need to push to have all charges dropped from May and June, and there may be some leverage for that after the presidential election.

Looting in Philly and elsewhere, like in Chicago, has been a major, divisive political question in which liberals want to divide the “good protestors” from the “bad protestors”, and people want to say, “Oh, that’s not the protest.” We at Rampant have written about this quite a bit as far as the viability and necessity of defending looting as a political tactic. What do you think the left should say around this specific question and what’s at stake?

I think a lot is at stake. The first thing I’ll say is the same thing I would say around debates around property destruction and violence in general as a tactic. There are certain people who approach social movements on the assumption that if they don’t want these tactics and they win the argument about them they’ll go away.

The reality is people are going to loot. In moments of mass uprising people are going to take things. We are obligated to start from an understanding that that’s going to happen regardless. It’s not like we can make it go away. And yet there are those people who say, “Well, looting makes us look really bad.” Well no, once we start from the understanding that it’s inevitable, a force of nature, you realize that what makes you look bad is not looting. What makes it look bad is losing an argument about whether or not this is something that should happen.

What makes it look bad is when people within the movement are denouncing other people for looting. This is what makes us lose these debates. However, if people stood together and said, “You know what? We’re not going to criticize people who are engaged in certain tactics during these moments of mass uprising in which our concern is the murder of this Black man.” And at that point, the debate goes away. The media of course will still run with it, and they’ll try to discredit people and the movement, but it doesn’t have the same effect.

People are managing the narrative pretty well in the movements now where people are correctly pointing out that Walmart doesn’t belong to us, Best Buy doesn’t belong to us. These big box stores are part of an oppressive capitalist system, and we know that they are stealing from us and stealing people’s labor every day. We shouldn’t give a shit about whether or not they’re looted and could even say that the direct redistribution of goods from them is probably a good thing in this context, under a pandemic, when people are not working and can’t access those things.

The debate does get a little more complex on 52nd Street, two blocks away from here, where some small stores were looted. If you ask people on the block, you hear very different opinions. On one hand, that’s a neighborhood store, it’s owned by this or that person. On the other hand, people will say, “I don’t know who that person is. I know that they racially profile me when I go in there.” And people will ask if those resources are really being dedicated to the community? These are complicated debates.

But the idea that there’s a uniform response to those debates within poor communities of color is just not true. What needs to happen and what does happen are people negotiating these questions in the streets and within movements, when people, for example, try to alert people to locations that should be left alone.

You know, there was an Indigenous youth center in Minneapolis that got smashed up during the rebellions. That didn’t lead people to denounce the looters, but it did lead to them to say, “No, let’s not do this. We’ll have a fundraiser,” and the America Indian Movement engaged in community patrols to help keep an eye on people’s safety.

Dealing with these things within movements is possible and necessary. But the main danger of course—that’s being actively stoked by the police, by the state, and its spokespeople—is that it is used to divide the movement. This has been incredibly dangerous, and in some cases, very effective.

You talked about the radicalization and cycles of resistance moving in leaps and bounds, particularly now. What do you see as the next jump? What’s the way forward, and what do we have to do?

These struggles have been, as everyone knows, popping off everywhere. One of the defining features of the George Floyd rebellions was their contagious ability to spread to the point where we see statues of colonizers being torn down in England as a result. One thing that is undeniably true about the history of Black struggles against the police in the United States is that you don’t know what’s going to set it off. There are all these structural reasons why this was a tinderbox ready to explode. But you never know when the explosion’s going to happen.

It’s going to be an incredibly dangerous time as the old world dies.

We do know that the powder and the spark are even more available today. In January when Joe Biden is in office he’s not going to do a fucking thing to change this deep-seated reality. We know that the history of police reform is the history of reforming the image of the police, not what they actually do. And we know that there is no way to reform away the actual function of the police, which is a repressive, brutal function. That is inevitable, and under this system it’s going to continue.

This continuity is the backdrop to a situation in which people’s lives aren’t getting better, in which there’s a continuing pandemic, and the economic crisis is deepening. People are ready to go at the drop of a hat. We’re going to see an escalation of these struggles, and that’s a good thing.

We also know that the far right is going to be engaging in organized and sporadic violence. It’s going to be an incredibly dangerous time as the old world dies.

The post There’s Nothing Left but the Streets appeared first on Rampant.

Theories of modern fascism need to be updated to show its American origins, the centrality of racism, and how it needs to be defeated in the streets.

The presidency of Donald Trump has helped relegitimize domestic fascist ideas largely confined to the fringes of American politics for the last six decades. Along with armed public spectacles and rallies to Unite the Right, fascist militants have grown more confident and organized. Their ideas are buoyed by state-sponsored concentration camps, ICE raids on immigrant families, Blue Lives Matter propaganda campaigns, and the vilification of “anarchist jurisdictions” where the left has made gains in the streets, workplaces, and voting booths. Even an election defeat for Trump could serve as a clarion call for escalated fascist violence against the Black liberation struggle and the rest of the left. Regardless of who ultimately occupies the Oval Office, combatting the emerging movement of American fascism will remain an urgent task for the coming period.

An analysis of modern American fascism must look beyond the early waves in Europe during the interwar period. Back then, Marxists and other revolutionaries made indispensable contributions to our understandings of fascism’s roots, its class character, and its relationship to imperialism and capitalist decay. But theory was nothing without an effective strategy to smash the war machine of fascism. And it had to be constantly revised to fit the real experience of fascism in power. As Ernest Mandel noted in 1969, “The history of the rise of fascism is thus at the same time the history of the inadequacy of the dominant theory of fascism.”^⁠¹

Just as German fascism differed from the Italian and Spanish, we should not expect today’s fascist movements to be rank regurgitations of European movements from a century ago. In the midst of the McCarthyite witchhunts, James Cannon admonished those “who will not recognize incipient American fascism until it obliges them by assuming the ‘classic’ European form.” That would be a catastrophic error to repeat..

Whether Donald Trump deserves the label of fascist is beside the point. Instead of tit-for-tat comparisons with Hitler or Mussolini, we should situate American fascism in the current global context: ISIS and fascist reaction in the Middle East, Jair Bolsonaro’s followers in Brazil, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India, and the scads of rats’ nests across Europe itself.

Starting points

The subjugation of revolutionary socialist struggles after the First World War throughout Europe gave rise to a new form of state reaction and violence. It differed qualitatively from the antidemocratic, authoritarian, and conservative states of Europe’s moribund ruling classes. Instead, the rise of fascism meant total barbarism on an industrial scale never before witnessed. The normal capitalist dynamics of imperialism, racism, nationalism, and exploitation were maximized. The core of fascism’s hyper-centralized state power and ideology was the aggressive, unadulterated reconsolidation of bourgeois rule. Genocide and global war weren’t arbitrary outcomes, but the rationale of fascism itself.

Socialists were among its first victims. Their analysis from jail cells, in exile, and struggling for their lives, remain sharply insightful, essential to our analyses of fascism today. During its infancy, Antonio Gramsci identified fascism as “the attempt to resolve the problems of production and exchange with machine-guns and pistol-shots.”^⁠² Later, Marxists noted its specific reactionary character in the context of half-made or defeated revolutions of the working-classes. Additionally, fascism was a mass movement of the ruined middle-classes who ruthlessly employed bloody terror to destroy every vestige of working-class organization and power. Ultimately, fascist power represented the vulgar power of big capital, stripped of all pretense to democracy and decorum. ^⁠³

There are important congruities between today’s fascist reaction and that of the interwar period. The Arab Spring and subsequent revolutionary struggles showed—on a global scale—that revolutions of the poor and oppressed are possible. Dictators and reactionary states in country after country faced existential crises. In the US, the Occupy movement radically challenged the obscene inequality essential to American capitalism. And the movement for Black lives, building on the long arc of the Black liberation struggle, threatened to literally burn down the institutions of American racism. Capitalists around the world trembled before a new global left that spread revolutions without reverence for borders.

Likewise, global capitalism has entered an epoch of profound crisis. Forced migration, climate disaster, and rapidly declining profitability has left capitalists around the world scrambling for control and legitimacy. US unemployment has reached staggering levels. And a global pandemic amplifies deep social crisis in schools, communities, workplaces, and households to excruciating levels.

Sadly, mass organizations of the working-class were long ago destroyed, dissolved, or absorbed into the Democratic Party. Only one in ten workers in the United States are part of a union today, and there is no hint of a social-democratic or labor party, however meagre. Still, since the Arab Spring and Occupy movement, important new organizations and networks of the oppressed and working-class have been painstakingly built. And, today, there are more people involved in that broad social movement—unapologetically Black, queer, feminist, and revolutionary—than in a generation.

Meanwhile, coal baron has-beens, libertarian cretins, and fascist organizations have been far too successful at cohering a movement of the declassed, the dim, and the despicable. They train in militias and police departments for violence that is meted out against us in the streets. Donald Trump’s presidency was only the most public spectacle of the more perverse, homicidal fascist project to destroy our social movements, organizations, and hope for liberation.

Antifascism must be a forceful principal of all our struggles, which are already under assault. We must mobilize and defeat the fascist movement in its formative stage. And, like the revolutionaries of Russia, Germany, Spain, and Italy, we must update our theories of fascism. The four theses below aim to add to our analysis in order to more effectively resist and defeat fascism in the United States before it is too late.

Four updated theses

1. American racism is a principal component of modern fascism.

The racist terror unleashed on Black people and poor whites throughout the American South obliterated the impressive gains the working class made during the Reconstruction era. The vicious reaction to Reconstruction spawned numerous protofascist organizations of business owners, politicians, and racist vigilantes. Their redemption of white supremacy helped thrust the American state westward in an orgy of industrialization, railroad profiteering, and bloodletting. Indigenous nations in the path of Manifest Destiny faced apocalyptic ruin.

Klan terror and state-directed pogroms were the practical component of the modern American racist ideology of eugenics. The pseudo-science functioned to explain, normalize, and legitimize the deep inequalities of American capitalism with racist myths. Indeed, eugenics inspired the early fascist movement with the practical and ideological core of its racial hierarchy and antisemitism.

The early analysis of fascism by European Marxists largely underestimated the centrality of racist ideology to the fascist movement in the interwar period. Because anti-Jewish pogroms had long been a practice of Europe’s old feudal reactionaries, antisemitism was not initially understood as uniquely fascist. Nor did they sufficiently theorize the racialized character of twentieth-century antisemitism and its relationship to racism broadly.

But, eugenics refashioned antiquated antisemitism with modern racial ideology. No longer were Jews simply a religious group or even a merchant class. Instead, Jews were recast as an allegedly inferior race. Indeed, the fascist project of race-making left few Europeans unmarked as degenerate races, despite their apparent whiteness. Today, fascist racism is wielded against Muslims in India or even immigrant workers from Eastern Europe.

American racism is a principal component of modern, international fascism. It is the ideological justification for national identities, borders, and the deep social inequalities endemic to capitalism. Fascism aims to deepen the chasms of racial differentiations in the interest of repressive, homogeneous nation-states.

2. Cops are the most organized and effective force of fascist reaction.

The most important organizations of modern American fascism are police departments in cities across the United States. With massive bank roles and criminal syndicates like the Fraternal Order of Police that immunize them from accountability, police forces have emerged as violent, independent political actors. Across the board, they endorsed Donald Trump’s campaign and rigorously defend their worst atrocities. Organized, self-conscious fascists have identified police departments as a sympathetic arena for action and recruitment. As a report from the Brennan Center for Justice has outlined:

Since 2000, law enforcement officials with alleged connections to white supremacist groups or far-right militant activities have been exposed in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere. Research organizations have uncovered hundreds of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials participating in racist, nativist, and sexist social media activity, which demonstrates that overt bias is far too common. These officers’ racist activities are often known within their departments, but only result in disciplinary action or termination if they trigger public scandals.^⁠⁴

Because so much analysis has focused on homicidal “lone-actors” and their mass-shooting rampages, today’s fascist movement appears unintelligible, factionalized, and incoherent. But the rise of fascism was never a coherent, linear process. Rather, it involved intense political struggles within its various organizations. During the summer of 1934, Hitler waged a violent “blood purge” campaign against the Nazi’s own Brownshirts paramilitary wing in order to consolidate power. We should not underestimate the level of organization and coherence of today’s movement, even with its fetish with bizarre conspiracy theories and fratboy nonsense.

In terms of sheer racist terror and brutality—often with explicit fascist influence—police departments have become the most systematic and organized wing of modern American fascism. Of course, this should surprise no one; the roots of modern police extend back to the southern slavocracy and its brutal liquidation of Black power during Reconstruction.

But police continue to have profound social power and support among broad layers of the American state. Joe Biden, along with Democratic mayors, city councils, and so-called progressive Black politicians, continue to funnel ungodly amounts of money and legitimacy into police departments across the country.

That’s why the demand to defund police is not just an important demand of the movement for Black lives, but a fundamentally antifascist one as well.

3. Balkanization is a war of racism.

During the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević and other fascist warlords waged campaigns of ethnic cleansing throughout the Balkans in central Europe. The diverse peoples of the former Yugoslavia were systematically turned against one another based on artificial inventions of race and ethnicity. Racist ideology and warfare carved the region into a series of nation-states in a process called balkanization. Today’s fascist movements explicitly seek to provoke a similar process of balkanization in the United States and elsewhere.

This is different from early fascism. Then, fascists attempted to galvanize a reinvigorated, if mythical, national identity to reclaim the lost fortunes of colonialism. Naked imperial violence was an immediate effect of fascism’s first wave.

Like pre-war European monarchs, the fossil fuel barons of American capital and their military ventures in the Middle East appear withered and humiliated; a washed-up superpower that now negotiates with the Taliban. Rather than Afghanistan or Iraq, American fascism is obsessed with militarizing its own national borders and repressing the struggle for Black liberation in the streets. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is bent on the occupation, incineration, and forced capitalist development of the Amazon basin. Modi continues to lay siege to Kashmir, the most dangerous and most densely militarized place on the planet.

Today’s fascism is less concerned with securing colonies outside of its own national borders. Instead, modern fascism’s project is the Balkanization of regional, cultural, religious, racial, and ethnic identities within the existing nation-state. The goal is a program of nationalist economic development based on the plunder of natural resources. This violent reshaping of national identity relies on policing, displacement, internal colonialism, and occupation. Its logic is genocide.

4. Power in the streets

The most important practical guide to the fight against fascism remain Leon Trotsky’s urgent appeals for an united front of all organizations of the oppressed and working class. Yet, there are undeniable obstacles for a united front approach in the US today. We have no mass social democratic party, let alone a mass revolutionary party.

And workplace organization remains scattered. Teachers and public sector workers can strike powerful ideological blows over the allocation of resources; schools or police. Amazon workers have massive power against the obscene wealth and priorities of capitalists like Jeff Bezos. But the growth of the fascist right has implications much wider than the workplace and the battleground is often elsewhere.

Clearly, the movement for Black lives will continue to be the sharpest knife in the campaign against fascism. The cops will murder more people. There will be more rebellions. And fascists will try to capitalize on racist reaction. Our power in the streets cannot be conceded. Wherever fascists attempt to gather and organize, we must mobilize to confront, intimidate, humiliate, and drive them back into their ratholes. Neither Joe Biden nor the national or local Democratic Party functionaries and officials will do it for us.

Only our broad social movement—inspired by the Arab Spring and Occupy, trained on the streets in the movement for Black lives, distraught over Donald Trump, and electrified by recent mass protests in Nigeria and Poland—can defeat fascism in the US and abroad.

¹Leon Trotsky, The Struggle against Fascism, 1st ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 11.

²Antonio Gramscio, “On Fascism,” in Marxists in Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the Inter-War Period, ed. David Beetham (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019), 82.

³See Mike Taber and John Riddell, “Introduction” in Fighting Fascism: How to Struggle and How to Win, Clara Zetkin, ed. Mike Taber and John Riddell (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

⁴Michael German, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement,” August 27, 2020, https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidden-plain-sight-racism-white-supremacy-and-far-right-militancy-law.

⁵Leon Trotsky, Fascism, Stalinism, and the United Front (London: Bookmarks, 1989), 41.

The post Four Theses on American Fascism appeared first on Rampant.

Kamala Harris has a record of siding with big business and against innocent people locked in the carceral system. Here is a list.

The nomination of Kamala Harris as a vice presidential candidate of a major party reflects that in this country some things have changed. She has also immediately become a target of a host of racist and sexist attacks by Trump and the right.

Harris has cultivated somewhat of an image as a progressive reformer in her first term as senator. However, her career demonstrates a different picture of status quo politics and carceral-based reform.

As Derecka Purnell wrote recently in the Guardian, “We have seen her break color barriers and shatter glass ceilings, even though poor, Black women have felt and swept the falling shards.” This contradiction deserves contemplation. Especially as we approach an election in the midst of intensifying conflicts in the streets over systemic racism and state violence.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in a New Yorker column that is essential reading, “The movement has revealed the scale of protest that will be necessary if Biden and Harris win and fail to live up to their lofty promises. . . . We may have just experienced the largest participation in marches and protests in U.S. history under Trump, but we would be remiss to forget that Black Lives Matter erupted as a movement during Obama’s Presidency.”

Knowing Harris’s history can only strengthen the ongoing fight necessary to win liberation and end racism and sexism.

Prisons and Punishment

2004: As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris resisted efforts to moderate California’s three-strikes law. At the time California’s harsh sentencing policy was one of the nation’s most punitive, imposing life sentences for a third “strike” that could be any minor felony. While thousands languished for twenty-five years or longer for minor crimes like drug possession, shoplifting, and forgery, Harris urged voters to reject Proposition 66, a ballot initiative that would have limited third strikes to violent felonies. Obviously life sentences are cruel and in California they contributed to astronomical rates of incarceration.

2004: Harris proposed her own weaker reform of three-strikes sentencing, eliminating just some grounds for third strikes.

2011: As California Attorney General, Harris joined governor Jerry Brown in obstructing Brown v. Plata. Despite the state’s prison construction boom, the Supreme Court found California’s overcrowded conditions cruel and unusual, violating the eighth amendment rights of people incarcerated there. But Harris and Brown worked so hard to subvert the high court’s command to reduce the prison population that some legal scholars labeled their efforts contemptuous.

2011: Harris supported a truancy law that charged parents with a criminal misdemeanor if their kids missed more than 10 percent of school days without a valid excuse. Parents of chronically truant children faced fines up to $2,000 and even up to a year of jail time. This law, like many Harris went to bat for, disproportionality impacted communities of color.

2012: Harris fought against efforts to eliminate solitary confinement in the state of California. As many as eighty thousandfederal and state prisoners in the United States are held in cells for twenty-two and a half hours of daily isolation. When California inmates brought a suit over the state’s use of solitary confinement, Harris tried to dismiss it.

2014: Harris’s office fought against orders to grant early release to nonviolent offenders, arguing the state could not afford to lose prisoners as a source of cheap labor for collecting trash, maintaining parks, and even fighting wildfires.

2018: Harris applauded the Koch brothers–backed First Step Act. CoreCivic, the nation’s largest for-profit prison contractor was also a fan of the bipartisan bill. While democrats touted the legislation’s modest concessions toward shorter sentences and programing inside prisons, opponents of the said the bill: “contains what Michelle Alexander has aptly termed the Newest Jim Crow–harmful technology and an expansion of the carceral state that will disproportionately impact Black and brown people’s freedom.”

Police Misconduct

2010: Harris refused to turn over to defense lawyers the names of police officers with arrest records or misconduct histories whose trial testimony had helped to convict defendants.

2015: Harris opposed Assembly Bill 86, which would have required the attorney general’s office to appoint independent prosecutors to investigate fatal shootings by police.

The Wrongfully Convicted

2011–2017: Harris regularly resisted innocence claims, often using jurisdictional arguments or technicalities as weapons to keep innocent people in jail. The cases of Maurice Caldwell, Daniel Larsen, George Gage, and Kevin Cooper are probably the four most high-profile examples of this. Larsen received a three-strikes sentence of twenty-seven years in prison on a concealed weapon charge. The conviction was overturned for lack of evidence eleven years later. But Harris managed to keep Larsen in jail, arguing he was too late in filing necessary paperwork.

2011–2017: Harris’s DA and AG offices fought against paying compensation to Californians who were wrongfully convicted.

Cash Bail

2004: Despite speaking out against cash bail in 2020, Harris was no champion of the cause during her time as San Francisco’s district attorney. Harris supported raising cash bail costs, sparking a fight with the city’s public defender and defense attorneys who argued the measures would disproportionately harm the poor. San Francisco now has the second highest bail schedule in the nation.

2016: Gary Welchen, an indigent Sacramento resident sued Harris as attorney general for her role in implementing money bail. With the help of Equal Justice Under Law, the suit argued that money bail inflicts an unconstitutional penalty on poverty. Harris denied that cash bail was a wealth-based system and filed a motion to dismiss the case that argued extensively in defense of bail.

The Death Penalty

2004–2017: Harris has campaigned on her personal opposition to capital punishment from the beginning of her career in law enforcement. But she refused to take critical action in the cases of people on death row.

2014: When a federal judge declared California’s death penalty unconstitutional, it could have laid a foundation for statewide abolition. But Harris defied a substantial petition drive and appealed the ruling. As this case made its way through the federal courts, Harris defended the death penalty. The decision was subsequently overturned.

Immigration

2008: Harris spoke out in support of a city policy that required law enforcement to report undocumented juveniles to ICE, regardless of whether they were actually convicted of a crime. In the first year after the policy was implemented over a hundredjuveniles were referred to federal authorities. One of them was a fourteen-year-old who faced deportation after he brought a BB gun to school.

Health Care

2019: After initially supporting Medicare for All (M4A) and claiming in a June 2019 primary debate that she would abolish profit-driven private insurance, she swiftly walked back her support for M4A and reversed her claim, saying she misunderstood the question. Then she came out with her own plan which expanded private insurers’ role in health care.

2019: Harris’s health care plan called for the further privatization of Medicare.

2020: As twelve million people in the United States lost their health insurance in the pandemic-driven economic crisis, Harris continued to support private insurance at the expense of Medicare for All.

Civil Liberties

2010: Harris responded slowly and inadequately to a police crime-lab scandal that may have tainted evidence in numerous drug cases.

2011: Harris opposed Assembly Bill 639, a 2011 bill restraining the practice of civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture allows police to seize money, property, and cars under a simple suspicion of being used for criminal activity. One study found that in 2014 law enforcement took more stuff from people through civil forfeiture than all other criminals stole in reported burglaries combined. Harris’s opposition to Assembly Bill 639 puts her squarely on the side of a system that effectively legalizes police robbery.

2015: Harris sponsored a bill that let police seize assets from suspects before even filing charges. Civil forfeitures in California came to $50 million that year.

DNA Testing

2011: Harris was a big supporter of familial DNA searches, an invasive police technique used by forensics experts to see whether a potential suspect has any relatives in the criminal database. California’s familial DNA testing is particularly invasive as it allows the police to collect and preserve DNA from anyone who is arrested even if they are not charged with a crime. The ACLU argues this process “puts an offender’s entire family under scrutiny.” In 2011 Harris increased the funding to double the number of familial searches.

2018: But Harris was an opponent to DNA testing when it came to a case that would have likely freed an Black man from death row. As attorney general Harris refused advanced DNA testing that would have likely cleared Kevin Cooper, who has maintained his innocence through decades of struggle for his freedom. In 2018 a New York Times op-ed on the case went viral and Harris expressed regret for her role keeping Cooper in prison though by then as a senator she could no longer take direct action.

Sexual Abuse

2004–2011: Harris protected serial rapists. Harris’s predecessor in the San Francisco district attorney’s office collected files on sex abusers within the Catholic clergy. But when she was elected to this office, Harris refused to share these files with victims. When child abuse survivors called her office requesting help, they described feeling like “office policy was we can’t provide you with anything.” Harris has always been vocal about sex crimes and child exploitation but she declined to take on the Catholic Church, one of San Francisco’s most powerful political institutions.

Friends in High Places

2011: Harris has a history of corrupt dealings with the gas and electric company PG&E, the company that burned down an entire neighborhood through negligence, killing eight. When the town’s mayor asked Harris to bring charges against PG&E for illegal cooperation between the company and regulators, Harris ignored it. After years of shielding the company from accountability, PG&E’s political consultants helped Harris run her presidential campaign.

2011–2014: Harris accepted donations from both Donald and Ivanka Trump during her campaigns for California attorney general.

2013: Harris overruled her own office’s recommendation to prosecute Steve Mnuchin’s bank for predatory lending during the housing crisis. As a result, no one at his bank faced prosecution and no one got their homes back. Harris not only allowed Mnuchin’s OneWest bank to get away with fraudulent lending and foreclosure practices that broke the law over a thousand times, ruining thousands of lives, but she also later tried to bury the evidence. Steve Mnuchin later returned the favor by donating to her Senate campaign.

2013: Harris refused to investigate the exploitative practices of multilevel marketing scheme Herbalife. Herbalife specifically targets Latinx communities. When the League of United Latin American Citizens and others pleaded with Harris to investigate Herbalife, she declined.

2020: During her 2020 presidential bid, Harris’s campaign had more billionaire donors than the three frontrunners (Biden, Sanders, and Warren) combined.

Trans Rights

2015: Harris sought to block gender affirming surgery for a transgender person in prison. A federal judge had granted permission for the surgery, recognizing that to deny it would impose cruel and unusual punishment. Harris appealed the decision and sought a stay, arguing the procedure was “medically unnecessary” and would pose too much confusion over whether to force the person to stay in a men’s prison or transfer her to a women’s prison. She won her surgery and parole, no thanks to Harris.

Sex Worker Rights

2008: Harris opposed Proposition K, a ballot measure sex workers put forward to end arrests for prostitution in San Francisco. Harris said of the bill, “I think it is completely ridiculous, just in case there is any ambiguity about my position. . . . It would put a welcome mat out for pimps and prostitutes to come on into San Francisco.”

2015: Harris opposed legalization of sex work. A sex workers’ rights organization sued Harris and other California law enforcement, challenging the state’s sex solicitation law in a federal court. Harris filed a motion to dismiss that eventually succeeded in burying the case.

2016: As California’s attorney general, Harris, on two separate occasions, brought criminal charges against Backpage.com, a classified ads website that helped sex workers find work. Sex workers opposed Harris’s campaign against Backpage because they said the platform provided them more control over the conditions of their work. In the Senate, Harris played a role in crafting legislation to target Backpage and sponsored federal bills that led to the site’s seizure. According to some sex workers, the shutdown of Backpage forced them back into more dangerous forms of sex work.

Legalization of Marijuana

2004–2011: As district attorney, Harris oversaw over nineteen hundred marijuana convictions in San Francisco, a number that was higher than her predecessor.

2010: Harris opposed Proposition 19, a state initiative to legalize and tax marijuana for adults over twenty-one. She called it a “flawed public policy.”

2011–2017: Harris opposed the legalization of marijuana for recreational use during her years as a prosecutor.

2014: When a number of states petitioned to take marijuana off the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s list of most dangerous substances, Harris opted to not join.

Student Loan Forgiveness

2020: Harris opposes student debt forgiveness plans that completely eliminate student debt.

Foreign Policy

2017: Harris voted in favor of legislation to bundle together sanctions against North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

2017: Harris refused to cosponsor Senate bill S.2016, No Unconstitutional Strike against North Korea Act.

2017: Harris supported the Countering Iran’s Destabilizing Activities Act, which deepened sanctions on Iran. The act was even too provocative for John Kerry, who said it would be dangerous because it would alienate Iranian people from any negotiations with the United States. This bill allowed Trump to impose sanctions on Iran that violated the nuclear deal.

2018: Harris voted for and heralded the passage of the $677 billion National Defense Authorization Act, the largest military budget the world had ever seen. It was larger than the next seven largest military budgets around the world combined. The budget included billions of dollars more in funding than the Trump administration requested. This vote was a clear indication that Harris supports a more belligerent US militarism.

2019: Harris opposed the peace process of the Korean Peninsula. South Koreans overwhelmingly supported the Trump–Kim summit while only 11 percent saw it in a negative light. Harris presented the peace process as an example of Trump’s closeness with dictators despite it being desired by South Koreans as de-escalation of the conflict.

2019: While calling for the end of the war in Afghanistan, Harris supports maintaining a military presence there.

2019: While claiming the need to “re-evaluate the relationship,” Harris told the Council on Foreign Relations that Saudi Arabia is an important ally and said she would not end the long-standing special relationship with the monarchy despite its complete lack of democracy, its repression against women, and its slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi. She referenced mutual areas of interest including counterterrorism. The Saudi–US partnership on counterterrorism has played a role in some of the most belligerent acts of our times, including the horrendous military intervention in Yemen, protracted intervention in Syria, and ongoing provocations towards Iran.

2019: Harris supported continued escalation of the war in Syria when Trump unilaterally announced withdraw of troops..

2020: Harris has failed to support Senator Markley’s bill to prohibit unauthorized United States military intervention into Venezuela.

Palestine

2016: At an AIPAC speech in 2017, Harris cited her biracial background as a reason for supporting sending tens of billions in military aid to Israel. But interracial marriages between Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza with Israeli citizens are illegal in Israel.

2017: Harris met with Benjamin Netanyahu the day after Netanyahu announced a plan to expel forty thousand African migrants from Israel. Netanyahu branded them as “infiltrators” who pose a threat to Israel’s “Jewish Character.” Politicians across the political spectrum, including those from Netanyahu’s own party, have held anti-Black protests and referred to African immigrants in Israel as a “cancer,” “emitting a bad stench,” and “likely to cause all kinds of diseases.” In her meeting with Netanyahu she completely ignored Israel’s sanctioned anti-Black racism.

2017: Harris cosponsored Senate Resolution 6, which objected to a UN Security Council resolution adopted in 2016 that declared Israeli settlements a violation of international law. She has proudly pointed out that this was the first resolution she cosponsored as a senator.

2018: At the 2018 AIPAC Policy Conference Harris boasted: “As I child, I never sold Girl Scout Cookies, I went around with a Jewish National Fund box collecting funds to plant trees in Israel.” The Jewish National Fund has directly participated in land theft and ethnic cleansing campaigns targeting Palestinians and Bedouins.

The post Kamala Harris’s History: A List appeared first on Rampant.

Chicago police shot someone on the South Side last night. By looting downtown, protesters are addressing the root cause of police violence

Last night, the notoriously racist, brutal, and corrupt Chicago Police Department shot another young Black man in the city’s South Side. Community members, outraged at the city’s most violent gang, mobilized into the streets to confront the cops. Later, Chicago’s most elite retail and residential district was the target for protest and a proletarian shopping spree. As she did in response to massive protests for George Floyd months ago, mayor Lori Lightfoot ordered the Loop’s draw bridges up, shut down public transportation, and glutted the downtown with riot police to round up whoever may have been stranded there.

The sky-high rents for luxurious living on the Magnificent Mile rank just behind New York City’s Fifth Avenue and Beverly Hills’s Rodeo Drive. The Magnificent Mile is the most vulgar, audacious, display of the city’s wealth that most of us never have the opportunity to enjoy.

While well-heeled white tourists flock to the district’s extravagant retail stores, Black Chicagoans are regularly harassed and run out of downtown by police.

No wonder it was a target for anger and protest in a city where cops routinely brutalize people in the city’s Black neighborhoods. Indeed, the splendor of the Magnificent Mile is coated in the sweat and blood of generations of poor and working-class Chicagoans.

Media untruths

Local news this morning performs familiar contortions of language trying to cast the night’s resurgence of antiracist rebellion as another expression of senseless so-called violence. The Tribune and Block Club want readers to disdain looting just like our mayor condescendingly shakes her head at the recent murder of Chicago rapper FBG Duck. But this condemnation is absurdly selective.

CBS News reports that police arrived in Englewood yesterday afternoon on reports of “a person with a gun.” On this vague basis, in a city where mere gun possession is highly scrutinized but not in itself necessarily illegal, police then cornered a twenty-year-old in an alley who they say “matched the description they were given.” For anyone who reads the local news, this phrase painfully recalls so many instances of police terror in which all young Black men resemble the criminalized figure police viscously pursue. While the young man fled for his life, police claim he also managed to fire a gun at officers. This is another frequent refrain that often is later shown to be utter police fabrication. What is clear is that multiple officers fired their weapons, critically wounding the unnamed victim they have since taken into custody at the hospital where he remains in “unknown condition.”

Reporters and local politicians may fail to express any outrage at the obvious source of the violence in this scene, the Chicago police, but Engelwood residents gathered in the aftermath to decry the all too familiar events. Their collective protest met a flood of heavily-armed police who set about beating people and arresting two among the crowd it referred to as “very hostile.”

Unmentioned in weeks of breathless coverage of shootings tragically claiming lives of Black Chicagoans as young as infants is the also murderous violence of systematic disinvestment that has ravaged communities like Engelwood, leaving informal networks and economies as some of the only means of survival available to many. They want us to fill in the spaces they deliberately leave blank with racist victim-blaming because sharing the opulence expropriated from poor and working Chicagoans is simply unthinkable to the police and politicians who guard it.

The Merciless Mile

Following the Great Depression and World War II, real estate robber barons bought up property throughout the city’s Near North Side. Buoyed by new zoning laws and the aid of mayor Richard J. Daley, the moguls devised a plan for an elite shopping and entertainment district for the city’s wealthy and powerful.

But first, they needed to clear poor people from the area, where the numbers of Black families were dramatically increasing. In 1940, there were less than 5,200 Black residents living in the city’s Near North Side. Ten years later, that number more than tripled. By 1952, more than three and a half city blocks were changing from white to Black every week. Harvey Zorbaugh, an apologist for segregation from the Chicago school of sociology called these areas a “jungle of human wreckage.” He wrote in his book The Gold Coast and the Slum:

Into the slum there drift, for similar reasons, a larger number of men and women derelicts, users of opium, drunkards, the “queer,” criminals and outcasts, men and women of unstable or problematical character who want to get away from their own communities to a place where they will not be known, or who are forced out and down into the slum by failure or unwillingness to adjust themselves elsewhere.^[1]

Eventually, the Illinois State Housing Board approved their plan and made the first purchase of land in the summer of 1958. In the following years, the Chicago Land Clearance Commission spent millions of local and federal dollars to rid the area of the poor families who called it home. The so-called urban renewal project was an apocalyptic disaster for nearly one thousand families forced out of the neighborhood.

The scheme was a windfall for the city’s real estate developers, architectural magnates, and business tycoons. And, over the next decade, Arthur Rubloff and other real estate developers acquired more land at cut-rate prices, financed by the city and federal governments. More people were forced out of their homes.

Today, many of these buildings boast private armies to protect their fortresses. In their shadows segregated communities starved of COVID testing or care send essential workers to the most exposed jobs stocking and cleaning and waiting on Macy’s and Block 37’s bottom lines.

Mayor Lightfoot promises to heap more repression on Black Chicagoans who once called the Magnificent Mile home. When she claims “this was an assault on our city,” her words directly invert reality. In the light of the full picture the local elite work to obscure, the only thing surprising about the rising rebellion is that it has been such a long time coming.

^[1] Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 132.

The post All Power to the Looters appeared first on Rampant.