Archive for category: TRUTHOUT

In the weeks remaining before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Donald Trump is taking actions — including aiding and abetting murder — to prevent his successor from pursuing diplomacy with Iran.

On November 27, Israel assassinated Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist. International law expert Richard Falk called it “an outrageous act of state terrorism.” Although the Israeli government has not claimed credit for the illegal killing, there is little doubt of its culpability. Trump implicitly praised the assassination, retweeting a comment by Israeli journalist and intelligence expert Yossi Melman that the killing was a “major psychological and professional blow” to Iran. This was an “implicit approval if there ever was one,” according to Sina Toossi, a senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council.

The Israel Defense Forces have been ordered to prepare for a possible U.S. military attack on Iran before Trump’s term ends, senior Israeli officials told Axios. They expect “a very sensitive period” leading up to Biden’s inauguration.

In mid-November, Trump requested plans to attack Iran’s Natanz nuclear power facility but was reportedly talked out of it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and strategized about Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and several countries in the Gulf to discuss Iran.

During Pompeo’s visit to the Gulf, the U.S. Central Command announced that B-52 strategic bombers carried out a “short-notice, long-range mission into the Middle East to deter aggression and reassure U.S. partners and allies.” 

And in an unusual move, the U.S. military sent the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Nimitz back to the Gulf region following the assassination of Fakhrizadeh.

“All options are on the table,” State Department officials who were traveling with Pompeo told reporters.

Trump Appears to Have Outsourced His Iran Policy to Israel

Israeli leaders think Iran poses an existential threat to Israel’s existence, in spite of the fact that Iran has never attacked Israel or any other country in the last 200 years. In fact, Israel is the only Middle East country that has nuclear weapons and it refuses to join the new UN International Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

At Netanyahu’s urging, Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, which was preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And in January, the Trump administration illegally assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani. Shortly before that assassination, Pompeo followed the same pattern — traveling and meetings with U.S. allies in the region, according to Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi.

The Iran nuclear agreement is embodied in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), negotiated during the Obama administration between Iran, the U.S., France, U.K., Russia, China, Germany and the European Union. Iran, which has consistently maintained that its nuclear program is only intended for peaceful purposes, agreed to restrict its uranium enrichment and other nuclear activities. In return, it received relief from the punishing U.S. sanctions. The UN International Atomic Energy Agency certified several times that Iran was complying with its obligations under the agreement. Nevertheless, Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed the sanctions against Iran.

One year after the U.S. withdrawal, Iran began to pull back from its commitments under the JCPOA, which allows a party to abandon its obligations if another party is in noncompliance. Trump intensified the sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy, impoverished 82 million Iranians and hindered its ability to respond to the pandemic. With his campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran, Trump has waged economic warfare against the Iranian people.

In mid-November, Trump requested plans to attack Iran’s Natanz nuclear power facility but was reportedly talked out of it.

As Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has suggested, it appears that Trump has outsourced much of his Middle East policy to Israel, which has led to the worst relations between the U.S. and Iran in 40 years.

Trump spent his entire presidency enabling Israel’s illegal oppression of the Palestinians, with self-identified evangelicals Pompeo and Mike Pence driving Trump’s Israel policy. Christian Zionists believe there will be no second coming of Jesus until the Temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt, and that is more likely to happen if the Temple Mount remains under Jewish rather than Palestinian control.

To enable Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, the Trump administration illegally declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, defended unlawful Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, supported Israel’s illegal annexation of 30 percent of the occupied West Bank and illegally recognized Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights.

It is becoming clear that Trump aims to cater to Israel’s agenda until he leaves office.

U.S. and Israel Try to Bait Iran to Retaliate and Lead to Middle East War

Hopefully, Iran will resist the apparent U.S.-Israeli attempt to provoke it into retaliating for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and thereby provide Trump with a pretext to launch a retaliatory strike, which would ignite a war in the Middle East. The U.S. military already has more than 40,000 troops in the region on high alert.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani pledged to respond to the assassination of Fakhrizadeh at the “proper time.” Rouhani said, “The Iranian nation is smarter than falling into the trap of the Zionists. They are thinking to create chaos.” The day after the assassination, Iran’s parliament unanimously voted to end future UN inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites. The inspections had confirmed that Iran was in compliance with the JCPOA. Terminating them could spell an end to the nuclear deal.

We must pressure Congress to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. The consequences to the Middle East and the entire world would be catastrophic.

Nevertheless, Zarif hopes Biden will improve relations between Iran and the United States. But hard-liners, who won recent elections and are slated to pick up additional seats in Iran’s parliament in February, could doom any rapprochement with the United States. CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold note that this leaves only a four-month window for negotiations after Biden is inaugurated.

“US & Israel efforts to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program have now morphed into Trump & Netanyahu sabotaging the next US President,” tweeted Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council. “They are trying to goad Iran into provocations & accelerating nuclear work-exactly what they claim to oppose. Their real fear is US & Iran talking”

Much to Netanyahu’s chagrin, Biden has said he wants to return the United States to the Iran nuclear deal, albeit with preconditions. Tony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for secretary of state, indicated the incoming administration will pursue a policy of uncritical support for Israel. In spite of the mandates in the Leahy Law and the Arms Export Control Act, Blinken stated that Biden “would not tie military assistance to Israel to any political decisions that it makes. Period. Full stop.” The U.S. government supports Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory with $3.8 billion in annual military aid, in spite of Israel’s war crimes.

It is becoming clear that Trump aims to cater to Israel’s agenda until he leaves office.

Blinken made that statement in a briefing to the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMI), a U.S.-based advocacy group that pushes the Democratic Party to adopt pro-Israel policies. “DMI was manufactured to ensure that Democrats would not stray too far from the pro-Israel party line,” Richard Silverstein wrote at Tikun Olam. “The group has regularly acted as an enforcer within the Party when candidates espouse positions considered anti-Israel.”

It is up to Congress, as well as civil society, to prevent the Biden administration from continuing the U.S. policy of caving to Israel’s demands — a practice that not only deepens the oppression of the Palestinians but could also actively imperil the national security of the United States.

Meanwhile, we must pressure Congress to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. The consequences to the Middle East and the entire world would be catastrophic.

Demonstrators and police clashed during the 21N commemorative demonstrations against the government of president Ivan Duque at Universidad Nacional de Colombia on November 21 2020, in Bogota, Colombia.

The following is an extract from the Introduction to The Global Police State, a new book by William I. Robinson that was released early this fall by Pluto Press.

In her novel Everything is Known, Liza Elliott describes a future dystopia where five global mega corporations, dubbed Affiliations, rule the planet. “Infested with the inescapable surveillance industry, the five global Affiliations manipulated Big Data to commodify and commercialize all human activity for profit.” The Affiliations had subordinated states to their domination: “George Orwell got it wrong. Big Brother did not come from a totalitarian state, but from a totalitarian non-state.” Big Data was “a relentless cybernetic grandmaster who with sneaky eyes and listening ears spied on everything: your clothes, your friends, recording every word you spoke or wrote. It kept account of all this and more to amass the info power it needed to control the market, the heartbeat of the money economy.” The world’s population had become divided into three segregated social clusters, the members of the Core, the Peripherals, and the Outliers who comprised a majority of humanity:

Outliers were the discarded people. If they could not function in the Affiliation run world, they were cast off. Their lives, such as they happened, were their own fault. There would never be sympathy. They scrounged out a life with the dregs, the overruns, and the un-sellable excesses from the opulent Core and stark Periphery. Some worked unpredictable marginal field-labor jobs while others scrounged in the leftovers, the scraps, and the trash.

The world Elliott describes could well be, with not much of a stretch, a portrait of the one we live in. The unprecedented concentration of capital at the global level has cemented the financial power of a transnational corporate elite that uses its economic power to wield political influence and control states. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion, more than half the GDP of the entire planet. That same year, the richest one percent of humanity, led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. It is this mass of downcast humanity that make up Elliott’s Peripherals and Outliers, what in the pages to follow are referred to as surplus humanity.

Yet the technical infrastructure of the twenty-first century is producing the resources in which a political and economic system very different from the global capitalism in which we live could be achieved. Through popular political control of the new technologies we could collectively transform our world for the better. Machines are accomplishing tasks that were unimaginable a decade ago. As Srnicek and Williams remind us, the internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard, bringing global participative democracy closer than ever to existence. Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing all portend a world where the scarcity of many products might be overcome. New forms of computer simulation could rejuvenate economic planning and give us the ability to direct economies rationally in unprecedented ways. The newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated. Clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production. And new medical technologies not only enable a longer, healthier life, but also make possible new experiments with gender and sexual identity.

If we are to free ourselves through these new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, however, we would first need to overthrow the oppressive and archaic social relations of global capitalism. At a time when both fascism and socialism again appear to be on the agenda around the world, it behooves us to study the system of global capitalism, less as an intellectual exercise in itself than in order to struggle against its depredations with a view towards replacing it with one that can avert catastrophe and meet the material and spiritual needs of humanity. Rather than serving to liberate humanity, the new technologies are being applied at this time by the agents of this system to bring about a global police state.

While I am hardly the first to talk about a police state, I mean in this book considerably more than what we typically associate with a police state — police and military repression, authoritarian government, the suppression of civil liberties and human rights. Certainly, we see this, and more, around the world. In this study, however, I want to develop the concept of global police state to identify more broadly the emerging character of the global economy and society as a repressive totality whose logic is as much economic and cultural as it is political. By global police state I refer to three interrelated developments.

First is the ever more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression and warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the real and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment. The methods of control include sealing out the surplus population through border and other containment walls, deportation regimes, mass incarceration and spatial apartheid, alongside omnipresent new systems of state and private surveillance and criminalization of the poor and working classes. They also include the deadly new modalities of policing and repression made possible by applications of digitalization and fourth industrial revolution technologies. The global police state brings all of global society into what in Pentagon jargon is called “battlespace,” concentrated in the world’s megacities that are now home to more than half of humanity.

Second is how the global economy is itself based more and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation — what I term militarized accumulation, or accumulation by repression. If it is evident that unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ubiquitous systems of social control and repression, it has become equally evident that quite apart from political considerations, the ruling groups have acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as a means of accumulation. As war and state-sponsored violence become increasingly privatized, the interests of a broad array of capitalist groups shift the political, social, and ideological climate towards generating and sustaining social conflict — such as in the Middle East — and in expanding systems of warfare, repression, surveillance and social control. The bogus wars against drugs, terror, immigrants and refugees are enormously profitable enterprises. We are now living in a veritable global war economy.

And third is the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as twenty-first century fascism, or even in a broader sense, as totalitarian. The increasing influence around the world of neo-fascist, authoritarian, and rightwing populist parties and movements, symbolized above all by Trumpism in the United States, has sparked a flurry of debate on whether fascism is again on the rise. There has been a sharp polarization around the world between insurgent left and popular forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far Right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies.

A project of twenty-first century fascism is on the ascent in the civil societies of many countries around the world. The project has made significant advances in recent years in its competition to win state power, and in some cases, it has gained a foothold in the capitalist state. At the same time a neo-fascist culture appears to be emerging through militarism, misogyny, extreme masculinization and racism. Such a culture generates a climate conducive to mass violence, often directed against the racially oppressed, ethnically persecuted, women, and poor, vulnerable communities. But a fascist outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not a fascist project manages to congeal is entirely contingent on how the struggle among social and political forces unfolds in the coming years.

This global police state is emerging at a time when world capitalism descends into a crisis that is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the sheer scale of the means of violence that is now deployed around the world. In the first instance, the global police state is a story of control and repression of the poor and working classes. There are growing movements against the many expressions of global police state — mass incarceration, police violence, U.S.-led wars around the world, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, the repression of environmental justice activists.

Yet often these movements are based on moral appeal to social justice, which by itself begets, at best, mild reform. If these movements are to attack the global police state in its jugular vein, they must identify global capitalism as the driver of the systems of social control and repression that they are combating. This book attempts to do just that. It sets out to identify the contemporary dynamics of capitalist transformation and the novel forms that are emerging. This concept of a global police state allows us to specify how the economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological and military dimensions of this transformation….

I offer a “big picture” of the emerging global police state in a short book that is eminently readable. The book may startle many readers and make them angry. I trust the work will serve as a warning to the dystopic future that is upon us. More importantly, by exposing the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, I hope it will contribute to the struggles to bring about an alternative future based on human freedom and liberation. We do face a crisis of humanity. The destruction under global capitalism of the social fabric worldwide and the extreme alienation of labor, our very species being, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how to recover our humanity. It is in the nature of our species to work together to assure our collective existence. But the capitalist system that throws up a global police state turns such cooperation into a process of destruction for masses of humanity as we are made to compete with one another to survive. Crises of values, identity, meaning, and community ensue.

If we are to recover our humanity we must — contra capital — re-embed ourselves in relations of reciprocity and mutual well-being. [What are] the prospects for a renewal of emancipatory projects around the world? [We must] face [the] challenge of revitalizing a Left that could help bring about an ecological socialist future. Once we have exposed the brutal world of global capitalist inequality and exploitation the most urgent matter becomes how we can move forward toward greater social justice.

President Trump speaks in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on November 24, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

In spite of the fact that the transition for President-elect Joe Biden has begun, President Donald Trump still refuses to acknowledge his election loss, going so far as posting seriously flawed polling data on his Twitter account that wrongly suggests the American people don’t want him to concede.

Trump formally announced he was “recommending” that General Services Administration (GSA) head Emily Murphy “do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols” to begin the transition process for President-elect Biden on Monday evening. But it was clear from comments he made later on that he has not given up his quest to contest the results of the presidential election.

On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that he and his legal team had a “big lawsuit” planned which would “[spell] out in great detail all of the ballot fraud and more.” So far, however, nearly all of Trump’s legal filings alleging fraud have been dismissed, with judges pointing to the lack of proof of fraud or election rigging of any kind. There’s no sign or proof from Trump that this new lawsuit would be any different.

Trump continued to share questionable justifications for why he shouldn’t acknowledge his election loss. On Tuesday evening, for example, the president tweeted the results from a highly biased Newsmax viewer poll.

Such polls are not scientific — their samples are biased because they rely on those already viewing the content to give their opinions, rather than seeking out a random sample of individuals to get a true understanding of how the public at large feels.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Newsmax viewer poll found that 98.9 percent of those surveyed did not want Trump to concede the race. Trump shared the results of the poll on his Twitter account without context to create the impression that it was a legitimate scientifically conducted poll.

“Should President Trump concede to Biden? Poll Results: No: 190,593 (98.9%) Yes: 2,181 (1.1%),” Trump tweeted out.

Should President Trump concede to Biden? Poll Results: No: 190,593 (98.9%) Yes: 2,181 (1.1%) Total Votes: 192,774. @gregkellyusa @newsmax For the good of our Country we must prevail!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2020

“For the good of our Country we must prevail!” Trump added.

In fact, most of the electorate wants Trump to concede. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released this week found that 58 percent of Americans think Trump should acknowledge his election loss, and Biden’s win. Within that same poll, 61 percent of respondents said that the mail-in ballot system was fair, and 57 percent said there was no systemic fraud in the election overall.

However, it’s far more likely that Trump will never concede, according to those who work close to him. White House officials speaking anonymously to USA Today revealed that getting Trump to agree to a transition was in itself an endeavor that required convincing. It may be the closest Trump gets to ever conceding, those aides suggested.

Indeed, late on Tuesday night, Trump told his followers on Twitter that his agreeing to a transition didn’t mean he was admitting he lost.

“What does GSA being allowed to preliminarily work with the Dems have to do with continuing to pursue our various cases on what will go down as the most corrupt election in American political history?” Trump said. Without citing any proof that the election was fraudulent, Trump went on to say that he will “never concede” the race.

According to the most recent numbers, Biden’s win over Trump is quite decisive. The president-elect received more than 80 million votes overall, over 6 million more than what Trump received. According to state election returns, Biden also won the Electoral College by a margin of 306 to Trump’s 232.

NBC live stream of U.S. President Donald Trump's town hall event outdoors in Miami, Florida, on October 15, 2020.

Rachel Bruner: “I thought you were afraid of nobody and nothing.”
Nero Wolfe: “Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.”
—Rex Stout, The Doorbell Rang

Close to 73 million people voted for President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and millions of these voters believe his false claims that the election was stolen. The hashtag “#StoptheSteal” has been tweeted a couple million times, and several thousand Trump supporters recently gathered in Washington, D.C., for a “Million MAGA March.”

The event prompted White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to tweet that a million people marched in support of the president, echoing claims of a previous Trump press secretary, Sean Spicer, who, back in January 2017, wildly exaggerated the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Former counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s claim as a simple matter of “alternative facts.”

Why do so many Americans accept Trump’s claims of electoral fraud or his spokespersons’ blatantly false assertions as truth? Widespread distrust of the news media is at least part of the answer. Well before the 2020 election season began, Trump spent much of his presidency demonizing the press as “the enemy of the people” and dismissing any reporting, reporters or news outlets he disliked as “fake news.”

Distrust of the News

These attacks undoubtedly contributed to much of the public’s growing distrust of the news media. Although 2020 surveys by the Pew Research Center and the Reuters Institute show that distrust is widespread and to some degree independent of party affiliation or socioeconomic status, skepticism of the media is most pronounced on the right. For example, conservatives are more likely to than liberals to embrace conspiratorial explanations for biased media performance: As Pew reported, 60 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents cited “a desire to mislead audiences” as a “major reason why significant mistakes make their way into news stories,” compared with about a third of Democrats who feel that way.

Many Trump supporters have also been adamantly critical of big tech companies — including Facebook, Twitter and Google — for what they interpret as censorship of stories that favor conservatives and biased algorithms that marginalize conservative perspectives. Facebook’s decision to suppress a poorly sourced and largely unsubstantiated New York Post exposé about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings stands as a case in point, but additional examples are plentiful.

Distrust of establishment media has led Trump’s supporters and other conservatives to immerse themselves in an echo chamber of overtly partisan right-wing media, including outlets such as Fox News, One America News, Newsmax and Breitbart. As Anthony DiMaggio has shown, the “echo chamber” effect of immersion in partisan media is much stronger on the right than on the left; conservative political views and Republican Party affiliation are extremely strong predictors of Fox News consumption.

The fact that right-wing media relentlessly complain about the bias and duplicity of the rest of the corporate media only deepens the distrust that led conservatives to embrace partisan right-wing media in the first place. The conservative pivot to hyper-partisan news sources is actually ironic, because many of these outlets were founded and are run by billionaire oligarchs who maximize their profits by fanning the flames of discontent while covertly lobbying for policies that maintain the status quo.

Beyond the Right’s Conspiracy Theories

Like novelist Rex Stout’s ace fictional detective Nero Wolfe, news critics of all political persuasions need the agility to “dodge folly without backing into fear.” Skepticism about the corporate news media and global digital platforms such as Google and Facebook is absolutely warranted. But Trump supporters are fundamentally misguided about what’s wrong with these media — especially when some critics assert, without evidence, that news outlets simply fabricate stories to mislead the public.

Skepticism about the corporate news media and Google and Facebook is absolutely warranted. But Trump supporters are fundamentally misguided about what’s wrong with these media.

Conspiratorial explanations that link news slant to the self-interest and partisan bias of editors and journalists — or even aggregates of those individual interests and biases — fail to explain the political power of news or to identify the foundations on which far more fundamental forms of news slant are built. Understanding the establishment media’s deepest biases, not to mention the power of news more generally, requires a structural analysis of journalism, including the economic imperatives, institutional constraints, professional values and social relationships that shape the production of every news story.

This structural perspective has been championed by sociologists such as Gaye Tuchman and Herbert Gans. In her pioneering 1978 study of the social factors that shape the production of news stories, “Making News,” Tuchman observed that news is oriented to discrete, novel events rather than ongoing systemic issues. Thus, “news” is typically about what went wrong today, rather than what goes wrong every day. This perspective has real consequences for coverage of topics such as institutionalized racism or social movements that aim to expose and oppose power relationships that might otherwise be taken for granted as “natural.”

In his 1979 book, Deciding What’s News, Gans picked up and developed Tuchman’s critique, noting, for example, how news professionals often engage in “built-in anticipatory avoidance” to reduce the impact of pressures from advertisers, government agencies and officials, interest groups and peers. Gans observed how forms of anticipatory avoidance reinforced journalists’ preference for featuring the viewpoints of already powerful public figures while avoiding sources that evoke dissent or lack such authority. As others have since summarized, “news” as understood by the establishment press tends to be about what those in power say and do.

These simple but profound insights help to explain why the establishment press does such a poor job of informing the public about the issues that Project Censored highlights in its listing of the year’s most important but underreported news stories. This year’s story list, which we helped to produce, exposes the corporate news media’s deficiencies when it comes to reporting on systemic social problems, including the disappearance or murder of Indigenous women and girls, the deadly consequences of enduring economic inequality, the erosion of workers’ rights and attacks on freedom of expression — as well as important solutions-oriented reporting on voting, banking and access to affordable medicines. Each of these crucial news stories has been well-covered by the independent press but either marginalized or ignored altogether by corporate news media.

The corporate media’s ideological commitments and structural biases are more clearly illuminated by an analysis of topics they systemically ignore or report only in passing, than by critiques that blame the political predispositions of individual reporters and specific media organizations or promote conspiratorial explanations. As Tuchman wrote, “The power to keep an occurrence out of the news is power over the news.”

How then do we avoid folly without bumping into fear? We should defend the media from the irrational attacks of people like Trump and his followers. We should fight hard for the First Amendment rights of reporters and news organizations. But, at the same time, we should critique the corporate news media’s counter-democratic, profit-driven logic and tendency to ignore systematic social injustice.

Trump wants journalists to serve his interests, but the press should serve the public interest. Whereas Trump and many of his most vocal supporters appear to oppose any form of journalism (and rational, fact-based inquiry, more generally) that conflicts with their ideological fantasies, we advocate a critique of the nation’s establishment news media grounded in the core values of journalism as a profession. As the Society of Professional Journalists advocates, ethical journalism should seek truth and report it, minimize harm, act independently, and be accountable and transparent.

When corporate news media make good on these ideals, we should reward them with our attention and our trust; when they fail to do so, we should voice our concerns, withhold our support, and redouble our efforts to invigorate the public’s knowledge of — and demand for — high-quality, independent alternatives to both the corporate and partisan right-wing versions of news that otherwise set narrow agendas for what and who counts as important and newsworthy in the United States.

At least 37 transgender and gender nonconforming people were violently killed in 2020, according to a Human Rights Campaign report

At least 37 transgender and gender nonconforming people were violently killed in 2020, making it the deadliest year for trans and gender nonconforming people on record, according to a new Human Rights Campaign report. Of those killed, 22 were Black, and seven were Latinx. More than 200 trans and gender nonconforming people have lost their lives to violence since 2013, when HRC began recording and reporting violence toward trans people. The media often perpetuates systemic discrimination by covering trans and gender nonconforming people “when we’re celebrities or when we’re dead,” says Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative at the Human Rights Campaign, noting that the true number of deaths is likely much higher. “It is important that the media counteract some of the negative imagery around us by telling stories that uplift our community, that provide a more holistic view of who we are.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Nina Pop, Marilyn Cazares, Tony McDade — just a few of the names of the 37 transgender and gender nonconforming people violently killed in 2020, the deadliest year for trans and gender nonconforming people on record, this according to a new report from Human Rights Campaign. It’s the highest number of deaths since the HRC started recording and reporting this type of violence in 2013. Twenty-two of those who were killed were Black; seven were Latinx.

Human Rights Campaign Foundation president Alphonso David said, quote, “This grim milestone proves what we have long known: this violence is an epidemic. Each one of the lives we lost was someone ripped from their family, their friends and their community by an act of senseless violence, often driven by bigotry and transphobia and inflamed by the rhetoric of those who oppose our progress,” he said.

More than 200 trans and gender nonconforming people have lost their lives to violence since 2013. Two-thirds of those killed have been Black women.

For more on this devastating study, we go to Atlanta, Georgia, where we’re joined by Tori Cooper, Human Rights Campaign director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!, Tori. Start off by talking about what you found in this devastating report.

TORI COOPER: Good morning, and thank you so much for having me.

There are so many things that we found in this report. We found, as you noted already, that the majority of the deaths have been Black and Brown trans women. That’s really, really unfortunate. And we are also finding that with Black and Brown trans women, often they’re being killed by people who they know.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And these numbers, Tori, are likely an underreport of the deadly violence targeting transgender and gender nonconforming people. Could you talk about how police actually are cataloguing these and reporting these?

TORI COOPER: So, as a Black trans women, many of us in the community believe these numbers are terribly low. And in part it’s because police will tell a story, they will talk about a death in a way that’s truthful — and by “truthful,” I mean perhaps the person’s legal identification still has an “M” versus an “F” — and so, they’re telling stories truthfully, but they’re not telling stories not accurately, when they discount or, what we call, deadname people and use them by their birth name rather than their chosen name. We know that this happens, and this is a separate issue. There are legal consequences to this. Certainly, there are reporting consequences, as well. But we believe that that’s one of the things that contributes to terribly low numbers and inaccurate counts. And then, in addition to that, families are not always as welcoming and understanding about a person’s gender identity. So that certainly plays a part in getting an accurate — a more accurate count, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Tori, if you could talk about that point you first made? You said “killed by people they know.”

TORI COOPER: So, I use the word “relationship.” Yes, what we have found out is that the majority of the Black and Brown trans women who have been killed this year, Black and Latinx, they had some kind of relationship with the person. It may have been a social media person. There was one or two accounts where folks are believed to have been killed by people they went to school with and perhaps had lost contact with over a number of years. So they were in some relationship, the social media. They could have been in an amorous relationship, boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Whatever the relationship, there was some way that they knew each other prior. And as trans women, particularly as Black trans women, if we cannot trust people that we know and that we’re in relationship with, then it really takes away all sense of safety, and it makes us feel even more vulnerable.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the case of Iyanna Dior, a Black trans woman who was brutally beaten by a mob in Saint Paul, Minnesota, back in June? How often are these — are these situations even investigated? And are some trans people often afraid of reporting such attacks to the police?

TORI COOPER: Iyanna Dior’s case is, unfortunately, not as uncommon as we would like to think. And now, I do not know her personally, so I will make sure to say that, but I did reach out to her several times, and we communicated, and through my work at HRC, as well.

But with Iyanna Dior’s case, from my understanding, there was a simple small tap of a car vehicle, and that escalated into basically a group jumping on her and beating her up inside of a store. Not only was she not protected by the folks who worked at the store, but as folks realized her gender identity, more and more folks ganged up on her, really for no reason at all.

And what that is, is it’s kind of emblematic, symbolic of how we, as trans and gender nonconforming folks — how we’re kind of ganged up on in society. This young lady appeared to be minding her own business. It was an accident, a small accident, that didn’t create any significant damage. And yet these folks, not only did they beat her up gang style — they just ganged up on her — but then they videotaped it and played it on social media for others’ entertainment. As trans people, we feel that our lives are displayed and our victimization is displayed for other people’s entertainment all the time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the role of the media and how we could have a more positive impact on combating these incidents of violence?

TORI COOPER: Significant role of the media. Quite often what has happened is the media talks about trans and nonconforming people when we’re celebrities or when we’re dead. And the truth is, most of us lie in extremes — from somewhere in between those two extremes. And so, it is important for the media not just to tell — as with any other marginalized group, may I add that also. It’s important that the media tell our stories in a way that is truthful and accurate. It is important that the media counteract some of the negative imagery around us by telling stories that uplift our community, that provide a more holistic view of who we are — I like to say, that add color to the picture of trans and nonbinary people. That’s really, really important.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Tori, Sarah McBride is a trans woman who was elected to the Delaware state Legislature, might be the first trans — openly transgender state senator in the United States. She wrote a book about her life experience. Her book is called Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, and it has a foreword by Joe Biden, the new president-elect of the United States. Can you talk about what you want to see this new administration do, and what you think the old one — the effect of Trump?

TORI COOPER: So, I’m so excited for Sarah. And may I respectfully correct you: She isn’t perhaps the first out trans person elected to Congress; she is the first out trans person elected to Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: State legislature.

TORI COOPER: So we’re incredibly proud of her — state legislator, thank you. So, she is — we are very, very proud of her at the Human Rights Campaign, and also proud of her in the trans community.

So, what we expect from her as part of the Legislature, and also from the Biden-Harris administration, is really to hold them accountable. Joe Biden, in a recent speech, was the first to acknowledge transgender folks. Joe Biden released a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, which was November 20th. And so, we believe that we now — beginning in January, will now be under the administration that is the most supportive of trans, nonbinary and all other queer folks.

What we believe is we’re going to hold them accountable, so that they not only enact hate crime legislation, new hate crime legislation, but enforce hate crime legislation that’s already on the books. We believe that there will now be policies that will be inclusive of trans folks, again, being able to join the military. There will be protections in the workplace and in education. We believe that there will be more of a sense of equity when it comes to legislation.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Tori. Thanks so much. Human Rights Campaign director of community engagement. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Clergy with signs hold a rally calling for congress to pass feral relief outside of the Ronald Regan State Building on May 15, 2020, in Los Angeles, California.

To forestall the nation’s ongoing plunge into financial devastation as some crucial relief programs expire and others are recklessly terminated by the Trump administration, economists are calling for a $3 trillion debt-financed coronavirus stimulus package that includes enhanced unemployment benefits, robust fiscal aid to state and local governments, nutrition assistance, and other safety net expansions.

In a detailed memo released Tuesday morning amid a backdrop of surging hunger, a looming eviction crisis, and an intensifying pandemic that has taken more than 250,000 lives in the U.S., Economic Policy Institute research director Josh Bivens implores Congress to “use debt, go big, and stay big, and be very slow when turning off fiscal support.”

Pointing to federal government’s timid response to the financial collapse of 2008-2009 as a cautionary tale, Bivens argued that “roughly $3 trillion in debt-financed fiscal support now, with the first $2 trillion hitting the economy between now and mid-2022,” is necessary to avoid another crushingly slow recovery and “ensure a return to a high-pressure, low-unemployment labor market by mid-2022.”

“The Senate’s failure to provide crucial relief and recovery aid has left families without a lifeline and will severely damage prospects for recovery,” Bivens said in a statement. “Policymakers must prioritize a high-pressure labor market characterized by low unemployment and strong public investments.”

Specifically, Bivens calls on Congress to approve a relief package containing, at minimum:

A $600-per-week federal boost to unemployment benefits until mid-2022;
$500 billion at an annualized rate in aid to state and local governments;
$100 billion at an annualized rate for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and rental assistance; and
“Public investments in early child care and education and in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions that ramp up immediately and reach peak levels of $400 billion annually by the fourth quarter of 2021.”

Emphasizing the importance of funding the relief package with debt rather than taxation, Bivens writes that “the point of federal spending now is to boost aggregate demand growth (spending by households, businesses, and governments), so financing this support with taxes would make it less effective.”

Bivens also stressed the need for sustained fiscal support instead of relief that expires before the economy has fully recovered.

“Policymakers should not phase out funding too quickly and must continue fiscal support through the end of 2024,” said Bivens. “We have to be careful not to think of this as jumpstarting an engine and instead think of it like towing a car out of a rough patch to smoother ground. If large fiscal support is removed quickly, the fiscal contraction can overwhelm private sources of growth and tip the economy back into recession.”

A comprehensive blueprint for relief and real recovery, by @joshbivens_DC @EconomicPolicy https://t.co/0mSM386eyM pic.twitter.com/mYVR48faDf

— John Schmitt (@jschmittwdc) November 24, 2020

While the economic case for a strong relief package appears unimpeachable — officials at the Federal Reserve have issued similar calls for a large stimulus — major political obstacles remain in the way of passage of bold legislation, particularly during a lame-duck session in which austerity-obsessed Republicans remain in control of the Senate.

President-elect Joe Biden has voiced support for passage of coronavirus relief during the lame-duck period before he takes office in January — when Democrats have an opportunity to take back the Senate with a pair of Georgia run-offs — but recent talks between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Democratic leaders have yielded little indication of progress toward an agreement.

“People across the country are going hungry, Covid is set to explode, and Mitch McConnell dismissed the Senate last week,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted Monday, referring to the Republican leader’s decision to adjourn the Senate for Thanksgiving recess without passing additional relief.

“I don’t know how these people can sleep at night,” said the New York Democrat. “I really don’t.”

Since Congress passed the $3.5 trillion CARES Act in March, persistent Republican obstruction has prevented another large spending package from advancing despite deteriorating economic conditions and soaring coronavirus cases nationwide. On December 26, the day after Christmas, an estimated 12 million Americans will lose unemployment insurance if Congress fails to extend key CARES Act jobless programs.

“Senate Republicans are failing the American people,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.). “Families will not be able to survive the holiday season and some of the darkest days of this pandemic without relief.”

Mike Pompeo greets someone as he exits a plane

The alarming possibility of a military attack on Iran — a nation that has long been in the sights of war hawks in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel — was immediately invoked by foreign policy analysts Monday following reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in secret late Sunday with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

First divulged by unnamed Israeli officials and publicly denied Monday morning by the Saudi foreign minister, the reported covert meeting in Neom, Saudi Arabia comes on the heels of news last week that U.S. President Donald Trump asked his senior advisers for options to bomb Iran’s primary nuclear energy site, prompting Iran to vow a “crushing response” to any attack.

Trump’s request for military strike options came days after he lost the presidential election to Joe Biden, who has pledged to act quickly to reenter the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump violated in May of 2018. Contrary to baseless and ongoing allegations by the U.S. and Israel, Iran says it is not developing and has no plans to develop nuclear weapons — a claim U.N. inspectors have repeatedly verified in recent years.

The context of the Trump administration’s aggressive posturing and militaristic threats against Iran fueled critics’ concerns following word of the secret meeting between MbS, Netanyahu, and Pompeo, which was also reportedly attended by Yossi Cohen, director of the Israeli spy agency Mossad.

“It is extremely alarming that the warmongers most reliant on Trump’s blank checks are secretly meeting in the middle of the night as the clock nearly runs out on the Trump administration,” tweeted foreign policy analyst Omar Baddar. “Do they have Iran in the crosshairs?”

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, echoed Baddar’s fears and raised the additional concern that the “actual target” of the meeting was “the incoming Biden team, with the aim of deterring the U.S. from seeking diplomacy with Tehran.”

So Netanyahu secretly visited Saudi Arabia yesterday…

Are Bibi and the Saudis preparing an attack against Iran? Is it a psyop aimed at goading Iran into war?

Or is the actual target the incoming Biden team, with the aim of deterring the US from seeking diplomacy with Tehran? https://t.co/XNZkpjZqVW

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) November 23, 2020

Despite the public denial by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan — who tweeted early Monday that “the only officials present” at the meeting “were American and Saudi” — unnamed Saudi officials told the Wall Street Journal that Netanyahu attended the meeting with Pompeo and MbS.

Among the topics discussed at the hours-long meeting, according to the Journal, were Iran and normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Both Netanyahu and Pompeo refused to comment on the meeting, but neither denied that it took place.

ABSOLUTELY rare Israeli flight direct to new Saudi mega-city Neom on Red Sea shore

It was Bibi’s ex-fav bizjet t7-cpx. Back to Tel Aviv after 5 hours on ground pic.twitter.com/Ty9aedYbsK

— avi scharf (@avischarf) November 23, 2020

Joe Cirincione, a distinguished fellow at the Quincy Institute, warned in an op-ed last week that while unlikely, an attack on Iran by either the U.S. or Israel is a possibility worth taking seriously and guarding against.

“A member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, Settlements Minister Tzahi Hanegbi, flatly predicted in early November that Israel will attack Iran if Joe Biden is elected president,” Cirincione pointed out. “Ominously, the U.S. Central Command announced… that it moved a detachment of F-16 fighter-bombers from Germany to the UAE, across the Gulf from Iran.”

Returning the U.S. to compliance with the Iran nuclear agreement, argued Cirincione, “would allow the United States to establish a more robust relationship with Iran with regular contacts — as was the case during the Obama administration — that would reduce the risks of conflicts that could escalate, intended or unintended, into a war that would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look trivial in comparison.”

People stand in line at a food distribution event ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on November 20, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.

Back in May, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the HEROES Act. It was aimed at delivering trillions of dollars of additional federal funds to support health care systems, unemployment benefits, housing assistance, nutritional programs, as well as money to keep cities and states, public transit systems, schools, and other vital infrastructure functioning. Since then, the House has passed several updated versions of the Act.

And yet, with Trump and the Senate GOP hostile to federal programs that they misleadingly claim will benefit only “blue states and cities,” the HEROES Act has languished. Through the late spring and summer, the GOP apparently hoped the pandemic would simply vanish, and the tens of millions of unemployed people would all be able to return to work. Opposing expanded unemployment systems, senators such as Lindsey Graham argued that support-oriented measures would sabotage the labor market by providing people with disincentives to re-enter the workforce. Once it became clear that the pandemic wouldn’t simply vanish of its own accord, the GOP pivoted, and, embracing much smaller financial stimulus packages, reframed its opposition to the HEROES Act as fiscal responsibility in the face of a Democratic legislative effort to use the pandemic as an excuse to fund all of the party’s favorite programs. Thus, legislative stalemate.

As a result, in the last weeks of 2020, absent quick congressional action and with the pandemic raging worse than ever, millions of Americans are staring into an economic abyss. Somewhere in the region of 12 million people — millions of them gig workers who don’t qualify, in normal times, for unemployment; and millions more who are now considered to be long-term unemployed and who, again, in normal times would have maxed out their unemployment benefits — will lose their financial lifelines next month.

Unpack the economic morass, however, and the predicament of low-income Americans is far worse than just a congressional inability to extend COVID-era unemployment benefits. The last nine months have peeled back the veneer on a society so vastly unequal — both as compared to earlier moments in U.S. history and as compared to every other advanced industrial democracy on Earth today — that it no longer has either the ability or the will to do right by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Three billionaires now possess the same amount of wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, somewhere in the region of 13 million households that rent their homes are at risk of eviction once eviction moratoriums end over the coming months. If this tsunami of evictions does occur, it will be on an even larger scale than the housing displacement that followed the 2008 financial collapse, and will add to a homelessness crisis in America of a magnitude no other developed country comes close to experiencing.

Of course, it’s not only on the housing front that low-income Americans are at risk.

Over the past four years, despite low unemployment numbers prior to the pandemic, many of the health insurance coverage advances that occurred after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 were rolled back by a relentless Trump administration campaign to sabotage the ACA. In 2016, according to Kaiser Family Foundation estimates, 26.7 million Americans were uninsured. By the end of 2019, that number had grown to 29.2 million. This was still far lower than the 46.8 million uninsured at the time of the ACA’s passage, but the warning signs are clearly there: There has been a recent acceleration in the number of uninsured. In fact, several think tanks and health care advocacy groups have estimated that the longer the pandemic lasts, the more American families will lose their health insurance. The estimates range from a low of nearly three million workers losing insurance as they lose their jobs to a high of 8.5 million people ending up uninsured.

Making this health situation even more precarious, groups monitoring hunger and food insecurity in the U.S. have reported extreme spikes in the numbers of Americans who struggle to put enough food on the table. Earlier this year, that number was thought to be about 37 million. Today, it is 54 million, or one in six Americans. Seventeen million of these are children. Food banks around the country are reporting unprecedented demand.

But the crisis goes far beyond these statistics. Precarious access to housing, medical care and food is magnified by structural crises in the environments that poor Americans live in.

From one city to the next, absent a congressionally funded rescue package, public transit systems — which are disproportionately relied on by poor people and people of color — are collapsing in on themselves. In New York City, the MTA is proposing unprecedented cuts, which will likely lead to nearly 10,000 fewer transit employees and a 40 percent reduction in services. In San Francisco, many bus routes have been permanently canceled. In Los Angeles, which invested billions of dollars in a new subway system over the last decade, train and bus routes are being slashed around the city.

And from one state to the next, because of the lack of new dollars flowing in from Congress, legislators are pushing stark cut-to-the-bone budgets for K-12 schools and for public higher education institutions. After-school programs and special education programs are being stripped down to bare essentials. Again, disproportionately, these impact lower-income residents who are most reliant on state services, and least able to seek out alternatives once those services start to fail. Educational inequality has been worsened by the fact that insufficient support has been provided for lower-income students to engage in remote learning; low-income children have the least access to computers, to internet access, and to space in which to study remotely.

These crises ought not to be viewed separately from each other. They are overlapping disasters, made far worse by congressional dysfunction, with consequences that, cumulatively, will prove devastating to many tens of millions of Americans over the coming years.

Aircraft fly in formation over the USS Nimitz in the Pacific Ocean, June 2, 2020, while the aircraft carrier is underway for a composite training unit exercise.

War: what is it good for? Apparently, in Washington’s world of think tanks, the answer is: the bottom line.

In fact, as the Biden presidency approaches, an era of great-power competition between the United States and China is already taken for granted inside the Washington Beltway. Much less well known are the financial incentives that lurk behind so many of the voices clamoring for an ever-more-militarized response to China in the Pacific. We’re talking about groups that carefully avoid the problems such an approach will provoke when it comes to the real security of the United States or the planet. A new cold war is likely to be dangerous and costly in an America gripped by a pandemic, its infrastructure weakened, and so many of its citizens in dire economic straits. Still, for foreign lobbyists, Pentagon contractors, and Washington’s many influential think tanks, a “rising China” means only one thing: rising profits.

Defense contractors and foreign governments are spending millions of dollars annually funding establishment think tanks (sometimes in secret) in ways that will help set the foreign-policy agenda in the Biden years. In doing so, they gain a distinctly unfair advantage when it comes to influencing that policy, especially which future tools of war this country should invest in and how it should use them.

Not surprisingly, many of the top think tank recipients of foreign funding are also top recipients of funding from this country’s major weapons makers. The result: an ecosystem in which those giant outfits and some of the countries that will use their weaponry now play major roles in bankrolling the creation of the very rationales for those future sales. It’s a remarkably closed system that works like a dream if you happen to be a giant weapons firm or a major think tank. Right now, that system is helping accelerate the further militarization of the whole Indo-Pacific region.

In the Pacific, Japan finds itself facing an increasingly tough set of choices when it comes to its most significant military alliance (with the United States) and its most important economic partnership (with China). A growing U.S. presence in the region aimed at counterbalancing China will allow Japan to remain officially neutral, even as it reaps the benefits of both partnerships.

To walk that tightrope (along with the defense contractors that will benefit financially from the further militarization of the region), Japan spends heavily to influence thinking in Washington. Recent reports from the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Initiative (FITI), where the authors of this piece work, reveal just how countries like Japan and giant arms firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing functionally purchase an inside track on a think tank market that’s hard at work creating future foreign-policy options for this country’s elite.

How to Make a Think Tank Think

Take the prominent think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which houses programs focused on the “China threat” and East Asian “security.” Its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which gets funding from the governments of Japan and the Philippines, welcomes contributions “from all governments in Asia, as well as corporate and foundation support.”

Unsurprisingly, the program also paints a picture of Japan as central “to preserving the liberal international order” in the face of the dangers of an “increasingly assertive China.” It also highlights that country’s role as Washington’s maritime security partner in the region. There’s no question that Japan is indeed an important ally of Washington. Still, positioning its government as a lynchpin in the international peace (or war) process seems a dubious proposition at best.

CSIS is anything but alone when it comes to the moneyed interests pushing Washington to invest ever more in what now passes for “security” in the Pacific region. A FITI report on Japanese operations in the U.S., for instance, reveals at least 3,209 lobbying activities in 2019 alone, as various lobbyists hired by that country and registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act targeted both Congress and think tanks like CSIS on behalf of the Japanese government. Such firms, in fact, raked in more than $30 million from that government last year alone. From 2014 to 2019, Japan was also the largest East Asian donor to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks. The results of such investments have been obvious when it comes to both the products of those think tanks and congressional policies.

Think tank recipients of Japanese funding are numerous and, because that country is such a staunch ally of Washington, its government can be more open about its activities than is typical. Projects like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “China Risk and China Opportunity for the U.S.-Japan Alliance,” funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are now the norm inside the Beltway. You won’t be surprised to learn that the think tank scholars working on such projects almost inevitably end up highlighting Japan’s integral role in countering “the China threat” in the influential studies they produce. That threat itself, of course, is rarely questioned. Instead, its dangers and the need to confront them are invariably reinforced.

Another Carnegie Endowment study, “Bolstering the Alliance Amid China’s Military Resurgence,” is typical in that regard. It’s filled with warnings about China’s growing military power — never mind that, in 2019, the United States spent nearly triple what China did on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Like so many similarly funded projects inside the Beltway, this one recommended further growth in military cooperation between the U.S. and Japan. Important as well, it claimed, was developing “the capability to wage combined multidomain joint operations” which “would require accelerating operational response times to enhance firepower.”

The Carnegie project lists its funding and, as it turns out, that foundation has taken in at least $825,000 from Japan and approximately the same amount from defense contractors and U.S. government sources over the past six years. And Carnegie’s recommendations recently came to fruition when the Trump administration announced the second-largest sale of U.S. weaponry to Japan, worth more than $23 billion worth.

If the Japanese government has a stake in funding such think tanks to get what it wants, so does the defense industry. The top 50 think tanks have received more than $1 billion from the U.S. government and defense contractors over those same six years. Such contractors alone lobby Congress to the tune of more than $20 million each election cycle. Combine such sums with Japanese funding (not to speak of the money spent by other governments that desire policy influence in Washington) and you have a confluence of interests that propels U.S. military expenditures and the sale of weapons globally on a mind-boggling scale.

A Defense Build-Up Is the Order of the Day

An April 2020 report on the “Future of US-Japan Defense Collaboration” by the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security offers a typical example of how such pro-militarization interests are promoted. That report, produced in partnership with the Japanese embassy, begins with the premise that “the United States and Japan must accelerate and intensify their long-standing military and defense-focused coordination and collaboration.”

Specifically, it urges the United States to “take measures to incentivize Japan to work with Lockheed Martin on the F-2 replacement program,” known as the F-3. (The F-2 Support Fighter is the jet Lockheed developed and produced in partnership with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for the Japanese Defense Forces.) While the report does acknowledge its partnership with the embassy of Japan, it fails to acknowledge that Lockheed donated three quarters of a million dollars to the influential Atlantic Council between 2014 and 2019 and that Japan generally prefers to produce its own military equipment domestically.

The Atlantic Council report continues to recommend the F-3 as the proper replacement for the F-2, “despite political challenges, technology-transfer concerns,” and “frustration from all parties” involved. This recommendation comes at a time when Japan has increasingly sought to develop its own defense industry. Generally speaking, no matter the Japanese embassy’s support for the Atlantic Council, that country’s military is eager to develop a new stealth fighter of its own without the help of either Lockheed Martin or Boeing. While both companies wish to stay involved in the behemoth project, the Atlantic Council specifically advocates only for Lockheed, which just happens to have contributed more than three times what Boeing did to that think tank’s coffers.

A 2019 report by the Hudson Institute on the Japan-U.S. alliance echoed similar sentiments, outlining a security context in which Japan and the United States should focus continually on deterring “aggression by China.” To do so, the report suggested, American-made ground-launched missiles (GCLMs) were one of several potential weapons Japan would need in order to prepare a robust “defense” strategy against China. Notably, the first American GCLM test since the United States withdrew from the Cold War era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 used a Lockheed Martin Mark 41 Launch System and Raytheon’s Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missile. The Hudson Institute had not only received at least $270,000 from Japan between 2014 and 2018, but also a minimum of $100,000 from Lockheed Martin.

In 2020, CSIS organized an unofficial working group for industry professionals and government officials that it called the CSIS Alliance Interoperability Series to discuss the development of the future F-3 fighter jet. While Japanese and American defense contractors fight for the revenue that will come from its production, the think tank claims that American, Japanese, and Australian industry representatives and officials will “consider the political-military and technical issues that the F-3 debate raises.” Such working groups are far from rare and offer think tanks incredible access to key decision-makers who often happen to be their benefactors as well.

All told, between 2014 and 2019, CSIS received at least $5 million from the U.S. government and Pentagon contractors, including at least $400,000 from Lockheed Martin and more than $200,000 from Boeing. In this fashion, a privileged think tank elite has cajoled its way into the inner circles of policy formation (and it matters little whether we’re talking about the Trump administration or the future Biden one). Think about it for a moment: possibly the most crucial relationship on the planet between what looks like a rising and a falling great power (in a world that desperately needs their cooperation) is being significantly influenced by experts and officials invested in the industry guaranteed to militarize that very relationship and create a twenty-first-century version of the Cold War.

Any administration, in other words, lives in something like an echo chamber that continually affirms the need for a yet greater defense build-up led by those who would gain most from it.

Profiting From Great Power Competition

Japan is singled out in this analysis because the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, where we work, had striking access to its influence data. There are, however, many other nations with defense agendas in the Indo-Pacific region who act similarly. As a Norwegian think tank document put it, “Funding powerful think tanks is one way to gain such access, and some think tanks in Washington are openly conveying that they can service only those foreign governments that provide funding.” A Japanese official publicly noted that such funding of U.S. think tanks “is an investment.” You can’t put it much more bluntly or accurately than that.

Foreign governments and the defense industry debate the nitty-gritty of how best to arm a region whose continued militarization is accepted as a given. The need to stand up to the Chinese “aggressor” is a foregone conclusion of most thought leaders in Washington. They ought, of course, to be weighing and debating the entire security picture, including the potential future devastation of climate change, rather than simply piling yet more weaponry atop the outdated tools of war.

To be sure, think tanks don’t make U.S. foreign policy, nor do foreign lobbyists and defense contractors. But their money, distributed in copious amounts, does buy them crucial seats at that policymaking table, while dissenters are generally left out in the cold.

What’s the solution? For starters, a little transparency in Washington foreign-policy-making circles would be useful so that the public can be made more aware of the conflicts of interest that rule the roost when it comes to China policy. All think tanks should be required to publicly disclose their donors and funders. At least the Atlantic Council and CSIS report their funders by levels of donations and note certain sponsors of events or reports (a basic level of transparency that makes a piece like this possible). Such a standard of transparency should minimally be practiced by all think tanks, including prominent organizations like the American Enterprise Institute and the Earth Institute, neither of which releases any information about its funders, to highlight potential conflicts of interests.

Without transparency, the defense contractors and foreign governments that donate to think tanks help create foreign-policy thinking in which this world is, above all, in constant need of more weapons systems. This only increases military tensions globally, while helping to perpetuate the interests and profits of a defense industry that is, in truth, antithetical to the interests of most Americans, so many of whom would prefer diplomatic, peaceful, and coordinated solutions to the challenges of a rising China.

Unfortunately, as foreign policy is now made, a rising China is also guaranteed to lift all boats (submarines, aircraft carriers, and surface ships) as well as fighter planes aiding the military-industrial complex on a planet increasingly at war with itself.

A masked person stands in front of a van covered in a sign reading "DETENTION IS DEADLY"

“Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu,” Truthout’s Kelly Hayes talks with Eric, an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity about the escalating COVID-19 outbreak at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, where some imprisoned people have launched a hunger strike over unsafe, unlivable conditions.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about things you should know if you want to change the world. I’m your host, Kelly Hayes. By the end of the year, COVID-19 will be the third leading cause of death in the United States. In the wake of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box, people in the U.S. are grappling with the second wave of COVID-19, or in some cases, ignoring the problem and contributing to the spread. Some of us are lucky enough to work at home, while others are forced to mask up, sanitize and do their best to navigate the viral gauntlet. But tragically, some people in the U.S. are not allowed to take even the most minimal precautions to protect themselves from a virus that has already killed more than a million people. The plight of imprisoned people during the pandemic is not a popular discussion right now, but it is an essential one, which is why we will be devoting this episode, and some upcoming episodes, to the COVID-19 crisis in jails, prisons and immigration detention centers, and what we can do about it.

For those of us who are careful, who don’t leave home without a mask and a face shield, who use hand sanitizer every time we touch a surface outside, or who maybe even get our groceries delivered, it might be tough to imagine being trapped in a building where the virus is rampant, trying not to touch anything, knowing you don’t have hand sanitizer or soap. Now, imagine that the building is packed full of people, and a lot of them are sick, and you don’t have a mask. You can’t leave, or even decide where you’re going to stand or rest. The rooms are small and the hallways are narrow, and there is no way to keep your distance. The building is poorly ventilated and there’s black mold all over on the walls, so the longer you’re there, the more you’re hurting your lungs, making yourself more susceptible to the virus. It’s dark, it’s dirty, and you know the virus is hanging in the air and on surfaces throughout the building. People are getting sick. You can see them, you can hear them, but you can’t help them and you can’t leave.

That’s what life is like for people living in jails, detention centers and prisons during this pandemic.

I know a lot of you turn away from discussion of what’s happening in prisons even in the best of times. We have been conditioned to look away and to forget. We have also been conditioned to see ourselves as being different from imprisoned people. I have frequently heard people say, for example, that they don’t approve of the conditions or approve of the practices in U.S. prisons, but that the thing to do is not wind up there. “I wouldn’t do something to wind up in prison,” is something I have heard from people many times. So before we dive into today’s discussion of what’s happening in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran, California, I want to say a few words about how we relate to the people inside.

I have no trouble relating to people inside prisons, but I know that’s not everyone. I don’t have any illusions that I am any better than people ensnared by the system. I have broken the law many times over the years, and not always for the sake of justice. I spent the better part of my 20’s grappling with a misdiagnosed mental illness, I was in and out of institutions, and I broke many, many laws. Eventually, I got the right diagnosis and the right medication and things started to change in a big way, but for nearly a decade, there were countless occasions on which I could have been sent to prison for the things I was doing, even though I was mostly only hurting myself. In my 30’s, which are now coming to a close, I have taken a lot of legal risks for the sake of causes I believe in, and I have been very aware of my proximity to incarceration during that time as well. I don’t really see a moral distinction between those different versions of me winding up dead in a cage, but I know the world does. I also know that people tend to exceptionalize activists, as though our criminalization is different, and we’re somehow better than other people who face charges. I believe, for example, that if I staged an act of protest today and went to prison, a lot of people would advocate for me. There would be a #FreeKelly campaign on Twitter, and I am not getting down on that, because I am extremely grateful and please do get me out if they ever come for me — seriously, I will be counting on you all. But please also understand that the Kelly in her mid-20s, who could not function in the world, who could not stop hurting herself, who experienced homelessness, who couldn’t hold down a job, whose mental illness made her hard to deal with — there would have been no campaign to free her, and she deserved to live too. One of my primary struggles during that time was an addiction to heroin. But after getting the right psych meds, it was infinitely easier for me to avoid hard drugs, so I was able to begin the process of rebuilding my life, and twelve years later, here I am, talking to you.

But that very lucky turn of events isn’t how most stories like mine end. Keeley Schenwar, for example, did not get her happy ending. Keeley was the beloved sister of one of my best friends, Maya Schenwar. Keeley was a vibrant, passionate person and she was brave. The stories Maya told me about Keeley when she was in prison and rehab, sticking up for other people who were being bullied or abused, or smuggling an injured animal into the facility to care for it, I felt like I knew her. And when we finally met, and I saw the joy in my friend’s eyes when she was able to put her arm around her sister at a party, in the free world, I thought I was seeing another story like mine — someone who had been kicked around by this world, but who was going to make it. I was so happy for my friend, and happy for Keeley. But it didn’t end that way.

Keeley’s memorial service was the last social event I attended before the pandemic. I watched my friend weep as she talked about Keeley’s love of animals, her kindness, and how brave she was in defending others. Keeley kept trying to get well, but she had been locked up so many times and endured so much violence, from the state, from people and also from the medical system.

There’s a lot of confusion in this country about treatment and care, as they relate to punishment and drug use, and this is especially important now as the Biden administration approaches. One thing Keeley and I agreed on was that what passes for treatment in the U.S. is usually just another form of incarceration. The conflation of punishment with treatment has led to a culture of violence against people criminalized for mental illness and addiction, and that culture manifests itself in many ways. It turns hospitals into prisons, and it sometimes conjures notions of “care” around torture facilities that don’t even attempt treatments of any kind. The California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran California is one such place. There is no treatment at Corcoran, or CSATF, as it’s often called. It is a brutal prison, through and through. There is also no meaningful activity of any kind for imprisoned people. There are no masks, there is black mold everywhere, there is no way for prisoners to physically distance themselves and COVID-19 is rampant.

We have so much to reckon with in this country, and even those who are inclined to embrace those reckonings may struggle to do so now, with COVID-19 beating down our doors. But we cannot abandon the people in those buildings. Our society created the framework for this atrocity just like the trenches of World War I created perfect incubation zones for the 1918 flu. Our society has built a system of millions of cages, where conditions were already so bad that years were being stripped years off of people’s lives, and we have shuffled people through that system. The United States created a system of disposal that’s now part of a perfect storm. Because while it may feel as though prisons exist in some state of separation from the rest of society, they do not. Guards are vectors, and they very effectively redistribute the disease in our communities. COVID-19 is being manufactured on a grand scale inside jails, prisons and detention centers. In the case of jails, people are being cycled in and out of their communities, causing further spread, but in all facilities, you have guards who are bringing the disease back to their neighbors and communities. In many cases, they are the only vectors.

There are countries that have emptied out entire prisons during this crisis. They didn’t do that because they discovered Mariame Kaba’s work and became prison abolitionists. They did it because they knew they could not afford to create manufacturing centers for the disease.

So these are just some things I want to ask you to think about as we hear from today’s guest, Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity. Because I know that a lot of you skip over stories about what’s happening in prisons, and you may even distance yourself emotionally from what’s happening inside, but I am asking you not to do that this time. I am asking you to empathize, and if you have trouble imagining yourself in their shoes, or relating to what they’re going through, think about me. Think about Keeley. And ask yourself what must be done, for the sake of the people locked in those cages, and for the sake of your own humanity.

[Musical interlude]

KH: Today’s guest is Eric, who is an organizer with Oakland Abolition and Solidarity in Oakland, California. Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been providing long term support for people trapped inside the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, which is the largest prison facility in the state of California. Eric, what can you tell us about what’s happening at the prison?

Eric: Cases at CSATF have been hovering around 500 positive cases for about three weeks. And we know that this is likely a kind of understatement of the crisis for two reasons. Basically one is that [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] CDCR moves cases to the quote “resolved” category after two weeks without retesting people. And the second reason is the rate of false negatives that we know about, even in testing on the outside. The yard in which the outbreak began, D Yard, there are two people on hunger strike, and today will be day 17 of that hunger strike. Toward the beginning of the outbreak, they were very fed up and shocked by the handling of the crisis by the institution. And they decided to take action.

KH: Whenever I talk to people experiencing a particular crisis in a prison, whether it’s a natural disaster or an outbreak of disease, I pretty much always hear that conditions were already very bad, and even potentially deadly, prior to whatever disaster unfolded. Can you tell us a bit about what people in CSATF were already up against?

E: Absolutely. Yeah. So there’s kind of two answers to that one being like the, before COVID “normal,” before this current outbreak. So before COVID, I mean, going back several years, there has been unresolved leaks, across this facility, and that’s something that Oakland Abolition and Solidarity has been tracking for a long time, as well as people’s various attempts to address that situation through grievances and legal means.

So tons of leaking across the facility, the hunger strikers are now housed, they were moved recently. They’re now housed in a leaky facility, and those leaky facilities almost always precipitate black mold. So that’s the kind of before COVID situation. After COVID, and I’ll get to this when I talk about their second demand, a little more, but basically prisons respond to crises by taking stuff away like that is. That is always their go-to solution and often their only solution. So despite the fact that guards are sort of constantly bringing COVID-19 in and out. In fact, in California, they’re like the sort of only possible vector, since visiting has been, there has been no visiting since the very beginning of the pandemic. And across various facilities, people like people have across the system lost access to programming, classes, anything like anything that the state will call rehabilitation, is basically gone down to bare minimum quality of life resources, which after this outbreak started in CSATF, had been curtailed even further.

KH: People talk about comorbidities and how you are more likely to die of COVID-19 if you have diabetes or various disabilities. We know there are many, many disabled and chronically ill people in prison, but the conditions you are describing really create their own potentially fatal vulnerabilities.

E: Yeah, absolutely. You know, before the outbreak, I mean prison in general, but the black mold specifically has basically rendered people immunocompromised across the facility in ways that are likely undiagnosed.

KH: So how are the people who are on hunger strike holding up?

E: Psychologically, remarkably well, sort of maintaining a lot of energy, a lot of regular communication and a lot of. A lot of spirit, a lot of like, they’re feeling the fight in, in a big way. Physically their health is taking a toll they’ve each, at least two of the three have developed a skin condition all over their body, which they attribute more to the poor air in the facility and to the lack of access to showers more than they do to the hunger strike itself. But you know, no doubt, that kind of a toll on the body isn’t helpful. And we know that not eating is likely taking a toll on their immune system. Which is especially scary considering that outbreak.

KH: So we know that a number of groups that are advocating for imprisoned people right now are making demands, and we will have links to some of that work in the show notes of this episode on our website, but I want to ask: what are the specific demands that the prisoners on hunger strike at CSATF are making?

E: The prisoners who were on hunger strike have made three demands of the facility, and then kind of one, one like big statement, which I’ll get to at the end, but these demands are also a helpful lens into what people across the facility are experiencing. So the first demanded universal and voluntary testing. So the institution has, since about the time of the beginning of the hunger strike, about 80 percent of the facility has been tested, but there are two issues with this. One is that people are often not given their own results until up to a week after testing. And two, very often tests are carried out very forcefully and violently, and without the kind of attention to consent that we would associate with like normal, regular medical professionalism. So this has led people across the facility to be sort of reticent to get tested and wary of being forced into circumstances where they’re tested and it’s in this sort of severely uncomfortable way. So this is why it’s like universal access to voluntary testing and not just universal testing, cause we know how these facilities treat or dehumanize people who it’s meant to be treating medically. Another reason this is important is because it’s like that having the information about one’s own status allows people to make actual decisions about their safety, about their distancing practices, about the ways that they engage with other people. The institution has been moving people a lot, around the facility in really, really inexplicable ways and ways that have demonstrably put people at risk and exposed new people to the virus. So people just having the basic knowledge about their own status in order to make those decisions for themselves, or at least to know what their risk level and risk factors are.

So yeah, pretty, pretty bare minimum.

KH: I have heard a lot of reports about that kind of moving around of prisoners you describe. Alan Mills, who’s with the Uptown People’s Law Center told a story on the show in April about how a prisoner in Stateville prison here in Illinois contracted COVID-19, and then somehow frustrated the staff while being quarantined, so they just put him in solitary, which led to everyone who was in solitary at that time contracting the virus. Like, this was an entirely predictable outcome and an undeniable act of violence.

E: Yeah, and so people have no control and often no knowledge of things like that happening.

KH: So what was the second demand that the hunger strikers are making?

E: So demand number two is to restore safe programming. Like we call programming basically anything that happens in prison that’s relatively positive. That’s like not sitting alone in a cell, so classes, rehabilitative activities, quote unquote “sports,” these are things that people have not had access to for a long time, but the sort of issue is beyond that. Like the first step towards safe programming is the restoration of like bare minimum quality of life stuff, like telephone calls with loved ones, regular access to showers and regular access to commissary stores and packages. And the stores and packages are survival necessities specifically because the food situation at CSATF is absolutely egregious. People are getting like tiny silver dollar pancakes and a radish for breakfast, a few crackers and some cheese for lunch, and a boiled potato for dinner. That’s like one little snapshot of a day’s worth of food at CSATF. So people have to, like for survival, supplement their diets with quarterly packages that they can get from families and supporters on the outside, and commissary, neither of which they have had access to for at least a month now.

KH: I don’t think most people who have not been incarcerated, or had a loved one incarcerated, understand the importance of commissary access. Prisons do not give people what they need to stay nourished, they do not give people what they need to stay warm — to even get a tiny fraction of their needs met, prisoners need commissary funds and access.

E: It is so unacceptable and, even when, oh, cleaning supplies, that’s the other thing. That’s one thing that after the hunger strikes started, and after we started to apply some pressure on the outside with phone zaps, we did see some return of access to cleaning supplies. Albeit like really watered down and really sporadic. But that’s another part of their demand that they have basically. And that’s, again, it goes back to like health autonomy, and like the ability of people to like keep themselves safe.

The third demand is mechanisms for transparency. So we’ve talked already about people needing to be informed of their own status when all this testing is happening. CDCR also needs to also be in regular communication with people inside and their families about what is going on about why, like, why these movements are happening.

Like we know that we know that early last week, several people with positive cases were moved into F yard. And they were there for about four hours and then moved out with the officials claiming that it was a mistake for them to have been there. But now there’s a huge outbreak in F facility where, where I know people whose loved ones now are positive for COVID. So no there’s been no accountability and no communication with people on the outside about what’s happening. So CDCR needs to explain these movements. And explain its overall plan for restoring better conditions and getting the outbreak under control. And we think that video visiting is a good way to create some actual transparency and visibility to what’s happening inside. It’s not likely that it’s safe to restore in prison visiting, although that’s an ultimate goal, video visiting will allow people to sort of safely communicate with their loved ones and report what’s happening.

KH: I think so many of us are in a constant state of anxiety. We have our masks, our hand sanitizer, our face shields, we get things delivered when we can, and we are avoiding other people like the plague because we think they might actually have the plague. What do you think those of us who are really caught up in our own fears and anxieties need to understand about how people in prison are experiencing this moment?

E: I think that it’s difficult to imagine how much being in prison can or does ratchet up the kind of paranoia that we’re just getting used to on the outside about the surfaces that we touch, about sanitizing our hands, about the people that we come in contact with. Imagine having no control. Imagine having no ability to be more than six feet away from someone, or no ability to control the amount of people and the sort of status of people that you’re exposed to on a daily basis. And this, in addition to all the other background conditions that we’ve described, so basically to know that you’re in this situation where COVID-19 is everywhere and have zero empowerment to do anything about it and to constantly held in that kind of precarity.

KH: I don’t think most people understand that submersion, that total evacuation of autonomy, and what that means when your environment is barbaric and in a constant state of deterioration.

E: Yeah, absolutely. And it is like, COVID-19 is just another kind of node in this systemic just the, the way that people’s autonomy is like absolutely violated and consistently violated by prison, like COVID-19 is just another aspect of that — like a new way for institutions to keep people scared disempowered and in danger.

KH: So there’s a new administration around the corner, and a lot of us are hopeful that we will finally see a coherent response to COVID-19 from the federal government. But unfortunately, the mass expansion of the prison industrial complex and the torturous conditions of the system were not invented by the Trump administration. The nightmarish system that created a perfect framework for incubating this disease has been a bipartisan project, and Biden and Harris have both been extreme purveyors of carceral violence. While I believe I will have a better chance of not dying of COVID-19 under a Biden administration, I am not sure how quickly anything will change for people inside the prison industrial complex, or if it will. Is there any real discussion among the prisoners about whether Trump’s exit will change anything for them, or are folks just kind of trying to survive the winter?

E: That’s a really good question. I think in a lot of ways people are just trying to survive the winter. I think the biggest danger of moving into a Biden administration is that people will be less apt to pay attention to things like this. And I think like there’s not to my knowledge, any signs of improvement. And I think like what new restrictions and safety measures we see on the outside, like it takes people looking really hard and creating accountability just to make sure they happen at all on the inside. And I think one of the talking points that the hunger strikers have been emphasizing is that if this were any other kind of situation where human beings were in danger, these facilities would be evacuated, would be like absolutely emptied out. Because they’re incubators of COVID-19, because they’re supercharging this pandemic that we’re supposedly contending with and supposedly trying to get rid of prisons, our prisons are amplifying that virus. So the call is to free them all and to evacuate these places. But yeah, there’s that, that often feels a long way off.

KH: It really can. But here, in this moment, I feel like we still have a lot of decisions to make, and that in each of those decisions, there is potential. Like the decision people made to listen to this entire podcast, even though this is a tough subject that they could easily sort of divide from themselves and dismiss. That’s a decision, and that decision might make something else possible, like them looking up y’alls website or checking out the show notes for ways to get involved, or even just reading up more on the subject. We all have so many choices to make that can lead us places, and that can lead us to people, people who share our values, or at least one value — one that’s enough to galvanize us. Because whatever else we all like or don’t like about each other, we are all locked in a battle over what life and death mean. And I think there are so many ways to show up for that fight, and advocating for the people this system is telling you to forget, is a really essential way to do that.

Things are going to get worse before they get better, and we know that, but trauma doesn’t always break people. When people work together to survive a crisis, and to keep other people alive during a crisis, it can strengthen their bonds, and their determination and their values. That could happen. Or we could become more insular, more detached from each other’s fates, and we could wind up setting up the lowest bar imaginable, because Trump, as a point of comparison, makes it very easy to do that. My feeling, in this moment, is that our choices, our organizing, and the things we make and share and build in this moment, will help drive those outcomes. We could come through this winter valuing life more, and valuing each other more, and making bigger demands than ever. We could, as my young friend Bresha Meadows says, “care more and more about what happens to people over time, not less and less.” I really think the way that we handle this crisis is going to dictate so much that comes after. So I am so grateful for everything that you all are doing, Eric, to support imprisoned people who are fighting for themselves right now. And really for all of us, because that’s a fight for all of our humanity.

E: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much for saying that. Yeah, I think, you know where the hope is, is in that notion of collective survival. And like, and we have to, like if we’re going to get through this and like you say, if we’re going to get through this with our humanity, I mean, we have to see people inside as, as us because they are us, and that’s something that so many people are sort of inculturated against. The dividing line between inside and out in this, is this well-maintained political force that, that keeps us from having this kind of solidarity or sense of collective survival. And, and I’m glad to see that there could be hope of breaking that down. And I appreciate you so much, you know, putting, putting this under the, under the magnifying glass.

KH: Well, if you all want to learn more about this struggle and what you can do to support, we are going to have some materials to check out on our website, so please do get involved, in whatever way that you can, and please remember that the crisis we are talking about today is just one of many, and that there is probably a similar crisis playing out at a facility near you. There may already be organizers like Eric, who are already working on it, whose efforts you can join. If not, there are a lot of tools and resources out there to learn from, in terms of how to support people who are trying to survive inside of jails, prisons and detention centers and we will hook you up with as much as we can in the show notes.

Eric, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

E: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been, it’s been a real pleasure and an honor.

KH: And I want to say to anyone imprisoned in the path of this disease, if you can hear or ready this: we haven’t given up, and we won’t. I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember, that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

Organizing Resources:

Can you make a call or send an email? Organizers with the Chicago Community Bond Fund are calling on the Cook County State’s Attorney and Chief Judge to take bold action to reduce the number of people incarcerated in Cook County Jail. Current incarceration rates and practices at the facility are putting thousands of people at risk, both in and outside the facility. You can find call-in and email scripts here.

Want to demand the release of people in ICE custody? Detention Watch Network’s #FreeThemAll: Toolkit to Support Local Demands for Mass Release of People in ICE Custody is a “working toolkit to help guide and support the work of organizations and individuals looking to demand the release of people in ICE custody.”

Want to take action? The American Friends Services Committee will be hosting a week of action to #FreeThemAll from December 10 through December 18 with events and actions for people to plug into across the country. Resources will also be available for people who would like to organize their action. You can learn more here.

Want to learn more about Oakland Abolition & Solidarity? You can read more about their work here.

Must-Read Articles:

Report Finds Over 100 Rebellions in Jails and Prisons Over COVID Conditions

Hunger Strike Enters Third Week at California’s Largest Prison

Books:

Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better by Maya Schenwar

Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms by Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law

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