Elon Musk ought to be in jail.

The drug-addled engineer, space cadet, and failing auto magnate is apparently on a PR tour trying to exonerate himself for the crimes he's done for the Trump regime. And the legacy media seem inclined to let him off the hook with puff pieces that treat his DOGE rampage as well-meaning.

I'm not that forgiving. The guy is a sociopath with money, not actually an uncommon type in this this country. Think anti-union industrialist Henry Clay Frick or anti-semitic car maker Henry Ford.

Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times (gift link) makes an overwhelming moral case against the guy: 

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death ... Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

... Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad P.R. for the world’s richest man to take food and medicine from the world’s poorest children. The Post reported that he hadn’t foreseen “the intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.”

...If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he’s engendered. Musk’s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character — a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he’s seen for the rest of his public life.

Public policy professor Donald Moynihan evaluates Musk's rampage from the perspective of a student of government: 

Presidents shouldn't put people with drug problems in charge of our government ... Musk has real achievements in running large organizations. Thats the case for Musk being given a big role in government. The case against handing Musk control of government was also pretty strong however. The Twitter model of downsizing that Musk promised to bring to government was always doomed to fail, reflecting ignorance of how federal spending actually works.

If we are just learning the extent of Musk’s drug use, his addiction to social media and the damage that it has done has been plain for years. ...

... Musk’s drug and social media consumption disconnect him from reality, feeding what appears to be an underlying tendency towards paranoia and conspiracy theories. The interaction effect between the two appear to be deeply unhealthy for him. But they are also deeply bad for everyone else since he is making literal life-or-death decisions.

For example, the most persuasive reason why Musk decided to eliminate USAID appears to be that he believed social media conspiracy theories that it was full of criminals. And so now USAID no longer exists, and credible estimates suggest that 300,000 people have died as a result, two-thirds of them children.

This man had no business in government; we suffer from having elected a chief executive who may be even less a responsible actor than Musk himself. And now Trump finds Musk a liability in opinion polls.

Musk is not a rational actor, and rationality is a pretty basic value for managing public services. I don’t know how much of this is the drugs, the media bubble he has created, or underlying personality issues, but it is clear a) it has gotten worse, and b) he has no business making decisions that affect the lives of others....

Musk has been enabled. ... Musk is a source of money and power for his friends, and a threat to his enemies. He was Trump’s biggest funder, and turned X into a Republican propaganda machine. ...

Media sycophancy doesn't help:

... I am glad he is out of government, to be sure. But spare me the fawning profiles of his business genius at this moment. Some of the coverage notes that DOGE was less than successful, and did not achieve its goals, but rarely focuses on the harm caused.

If you are unable to bring accountability to the richest man in the world fucking up our government, then you are a PR flack, not a journalist.

Now the whole Elon withdrawal from the White House thing may just be a feint, covering the ongoing theft of our data by his incel groupies spread out inside the government. But there's no question Elon is feeling a sad over being branded the smartest moron around. (Except perhaps Trump?)

Meanwhile, the good people of the Teslatakedown are doing our best to give Elon Musk a tiny bit of his deserts. Make that car company toxic! If there were justice, he'd have a lot of reparations to make.

Never again is now. .. Justice takes sides.

Jemar Tisby, an historian of the justice struggle in Black America, reports from a pilgrimage to Manzanar National Historic Site with the Asian American Center at Fuller Seminary. The Seminary is an evangelical Christian institution which aims to work broadly to encourage awareness of global human diversity. That is, these are ordinary Americans, not Bible-thumping Republican Christian Nationalists.

Tisby's little film (12 minutes) is a fine introduction to the last occasion on which an American government disappeared citizens using the Alien Enemies Act.

Realtime apocalypse: alongside the devastation, the politics

Magazine journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff brings perspective to the Los Angeles hell fire. 

California's Fires Show How Climate Will Destabilize Our Politics and Daily Life

... Over the past few decades, we’ve spent most of our national focus thinking about climate change as a technology and economic challenge. Can we move away from fossil fuels and adopt renewables at a fast enough pace to change the arc of warming? How can we use tax incentives and industrial policy to drive the adoption of electrical vehicles faster? How can we better create batteries and power storage solutions to smooth out the variability of solar and wind energy? How quickly will the cost of solar panels continue to fall? How do we impose more appropriate costs on carbon?

... But the California fires underscore how, as we actually begin to live the effects of even that “better-than-it-could-have-been” era of warming, the tech and economic challenge is going to take a backseat to a bigger crisis. We are unprepared for how climate is about to be the main driver of our politics, nationally and internationally.

Climate change isn't just one more political priority on our already over-crowded list of national to-dos. It is a threat multiplier that affects every single other priority already on it, from the air we breathe to the food we eat to how much we pay for a house.

So much of the world is about to either have too much water or not enough. And that’s going to change and destabilize everything in our political calculations. 

The globe’s changing climate is about to put an enormous number of people in motion—people who find their homes increasingly unlivable, their local economies in collapse, or their houses simply destroyed.

Already, we’re seeing between 20 million and 30 million people a year displaced worldwide by climate disasters, from droughts and desertification to hurricanes and typhoons. In 2018, the World Bank estimated that just three regions — Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia — will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. That’s an enormous number of people in motion in the world. Others have pegged that number even higher: A 2020 study by the Institute for Economics & Peace figured there might be 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050.

... It’s been easy to overlook how much of our current national angst over immigration and the border is a story of how climate change is already destabilizing Central America. While there’s been a lot of attention to how drugs and gang violence have driven much of the migration to the US southern border, that flow is also heavily affected by climate. “Farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests and often affecting consecutive growing seasons,” the US Institute of Peace wrote in 2022. “Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”...

... Moreover, this is not a problem that stops at our borders.

... What happens when major cities and urban areas in the US simply become unlivable, too hot, too dry—or, even, entirely dry? [We're seeing in L.A.]

... Think of what this means for internal migration, political representation, dysfunction, taxes. Think of what this means for workforce talent and economic development.

Individuals may very well make choices to live in uninsurable places — the lure of a beachfront house is strong! — but that’s going to be a much harder sell for companies.

Thirteen million people represent, in the roughest math, somewhere between 20 and 30 electoral votes and seats in the US House of Representatives that may shift in the years ahead simply because of shifting climates.

... We don’t really know what will happen in the years ahead because we don’t understand what happens when you pile all these risks on top of one another. ... 

...We’re entering some really rocky waters. As I quoted former US intelligence leader Sue Gordon saying a few weeks ago: “Our institutions are not keeping up with the turn of the Earth, and they’re being devalued in the moment,” she told me. “Society requires government, yet we’re running out of the structures that make it work.”

As I often say, go read it all.

I sometimes muse that some shock will come to us here in the USofA that knocks us sideways and drives us toward more responsible humanity -- about climate, in politics, in sharing our unparalleled wealth. Instead we have given ourselves Donald and his merry band of cruel crooks and con men. Yet our better impulses persist. Ain't humanity great? The L.A. fire will produce heroes -- and knaves (looters?) -- that's who we are.

#MerryStrikemas #strikeseason

Just a random sample of the worker activism bursting out all over this Friday before Christmas:

From the Starbucks baristas: 

 

 

From Amazon Teamsters workers who know better than their Trumpist leader ...

The UFW leads mushroom workers in Washington State; I remember a UFW mushroom strike in Gilroy.

Hospitality workers from UniteHERE march outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco:

A message for the season:

All news is local somewhere

Click to enlarge

The Queens Daily Eagle news story continues:

... The trial was overseen by another man from the World’s Borough, Justice Juan Merchan, who was raised in Jackson Heights.

Despite their shared hometown, Trump had no love for his fellow Queens man following the trial’s conclusion on Thursday.

“This was a disgrace,” Trump said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.” ...

Despite the conviction, Trump was released on his own recognizance Thursday, being spared a trip to Rikers Island, the home of the city’s notorious jail complex which happens to be part of the same borough the former president was raised in.

Good to see that Queens still has its own local rag.

Department of strange bedfellows

When you are up against the threat of fascism, you have to be willing to inhabit, always uncomfortably, a big tent. 

So these days, I find myself listening to and cheering on Never Trump folks at The Bulwark and elsewhere. They are stalwart at working to defeat Trump and MAGA and they have suffered for their determination. They have lost their tribe; that is a terrible human injury.

Yet they believe so many things I find appalling ... They think Ronald Reagan was a hero of human freedom; I think he was the butcher of Central American aspirations for justice and democracy. They think it's somehow morally wrong to forgive student debt; I think this policy is simply making whole people who've been victims of a con. They applaud Joe Biden's support for Israel's war on Palestinians; I think he's lost the moral thread.

And perhaps most counter-factually in my view, they think the racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd's murder-by-cop was mass violence unleashed. That's just hooey. According to the international Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), researchers concluded that these events, largely inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, were "overwhelmingly peaceful."

The vast majority of demonstration events associated with the BLM movement are non-violent. In more than 93% of all demonstrations connected to the movement, demonstrators have not engaged in violence or destructive activity. Peaceful protests are reported in over 2,400 distinct locations around the country. Violent demonstrations, meanwhile, have been limited to fewer than 220 locations — under 10% of the areas that experienced peaceful protests. In many urban areas like Portland, Oregon, for example, which has seen sustained unrest since Floyd’s killing, violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed throughout the city.

Sure, there were a few places where there was considerable violence -- in addition to a few blocks of Portland, Kenosha comes to mind. 

And there were quite a few locations where polices forces, angry at seeing their free use of excessive force challenged, reacted to protesters with violence of their own. Remember Martin Gugino, the 76-year-old white protester who had his skull cracked by Buffalo police? After video of the incident went viral, two officers were suspended, but eventually returned to duties as if nothing had happened. 

Via El Tecolote

All this is preface for a bit of unfinished business that's become current business here in the Mission. 

A hilltop San Francisco intersection will soon bear the name of Sean Monterrosa to honor the legacy and contributions of the 22-year-old man killed in 2020 by a Vallejo police officer. 

On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors adopted a resolution to honor Monterrosa with a commemorative street name at Park Street and Holly Park Circle in the Bernal Heights neighborhood where he grew up. Several neighbors and residents wrote to the board to express their support. 

“Sean Monterrosa had a bright, beautiful, and limitless life ahead of him,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen, a co-sponsor of the resolution. “The passing of this item will help the community heal, serve as a positive beacon for Black and brown youth for whom Sean was a mentor, and remind our city of his great contributions.” 

Monterrosa was killed in a Walgreens parking lot in Vallejo on June 2, 2020, by Det. Jarrett Tonn, who fired five rounds from a Colt M4 Commando rifle from the backseat of an unmarked police truck, records show. A single bullet struck Monterrosa in the back of the head. Tonn told investigators that he mistook a hammer in Monterrosa’s sweatshirt for a gun.

The Vallejo police fired Tonn; he was later reinstated. No charges were filed against Tonn; evidence surrounding the killing did not survive handling by Vallejo Police Department.

That this killing happened in Vallejo should be little surprise according to KQED: 

Between 2010 and late 2020, Vallejo police officers killed 19 people, the second-highest rate among America’s 100 largest police forces.

Can I be excused for knowing with certainty that most of the violence of the summer of 2020 was not done by the supporters of Black Lives Matter? 

Can I work on the same team with people who've imbibed a completely different reality in which mobs trashed America? Faced with the danger to us all, I have to.

25 cents for justice

If you happen to meet up with me in person, ask me if I've still got any Pauli Murray quarters to share. We reacted to the news that the U.S. Mint had issued quarters commemorating the Black, gender-ambiguous, legal thinker, civil rights campaigner, and Episcopal priest by ordering a supply. 

Murray died in 1985, but her example and work lives on. The text on the coin reads "A Song in a Weary Throat," referring to Murray's posthumous autobiography.

These coins would never have been issued in a Republican administration; sometimes it is the tiny cultural shifts that point to our potential as a country.

On power for change

Let's close out 2023 with some inspiration. Sure, there's plenty out there that's awful and scary; think particularly of the resurgence of the Orange Con Man and his legion of vicious acolytes and scam artists. But there is much to celebrate as well.

Sherrilyn Ifill served as the President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) from 2013 to 2022. She knows what it is to struggle for justice for and with people who are granted none. And she came out of her role with a vision:

... I have come to believe that we are facing such strong opposition precisely because we have won so much.

In the decades following the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women’s movement, we have effectively reset the cultural, social, and political life of this country from the patriarchal and white supremacist standards that dominated American life in the early 1950s. Now we are seeing the backlash. 

Why are they banning The Diary of Anne Frank and books about Rosa Parks? (Yes!) Because they understand that empathy is one of the strongest, most consequential tools in a democracy. We all bore witness to that fact when millions of people took to the streets in the middle of a pandemic after seeing the torture and murder of George Floyd. That video generated the largest civil rights demonstrations in this country’s history. The protests were multiracial. They occurred in all fifty states and then around the world.  

That display of power, that burgeoning swell of solidarity, also generated the fear that has motivated recent efforts to ban books and undermine protests—including a Florida law that would grant immunity to motorists who drive into crowds of protesters.

The recent upsurge in voter suppression bills is likewise a response to the resilience that voters showed in 2020, especially Black voters, who cast the last ballot in the presidential primary in Harris County, Texas, at 1 AM and stood on line in Fulton County, Georgia, for nine hours to vote early in the general election. Georgia’s Republicans soon after passed a law criminalizing the provision of refreshments to people standing on line to vote. (It was subsequently narrowed by a federal judge.)

It is critical for us to understand that this wave of repression is a response to our demonstrations of power. We must not prematurely abandon the actions that have so frightened our opponents. This is not the time to give up empathy or solidarity, to stop voting or marching or organizing.

... we need to pursue power, and when we have power we need to be prepared to make transformative change. I hope we’ll see this in the coming years. We must be prepared to leave behind traditions and policies that have not served us as a democracy, whether that means reforming long-standing rules that inhibit effective representation in the Senate, or adding seats to the Supreme Court, or reimagining public safety to address police brutality and racism, or adopting a guaranteed national income, or pursuing new models of public education.

Progressive people often seem averse to the pursuit of power. It is as though we think “power” is a bad word. We think it unseemly. We worry, perhaps appropriately, about how power can corrupt and harm. But that is what happens when people abuse their power. It is not power’s natural tendency. 

We must believe enough in our own integrity to trust ourselves with power. “Power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, and "love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."

We must pursue power to implement the demands of justice, and the justice that we seek must correct that which stands against love. I pray, encourage, and entreat you to join me and so many others who are committed to this struggle. I know that we can win, but only if we truly engage the fight.

It is right for democratic people (small "d") to work for more democratic power to increase justice. And it requires power to implement more justice. Unionized workers know this. Demonstrators who take to the streets know this. Many election campaigners know this. There's nothing else to do but to engage.

A simple homily from a great

For a long time, and perhaps still, anyone listing the greats of the National Basketball Association would quickly name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Now 76, and having overcome several health challenges, he's still doing what he's done since retiring at 42: working for a better world. 

These days, Abdul-Jabbar writes a carefully constructed newsletter which is well worth your time. Here's an example of the sort of message he posts.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. – Jesus, Luke 6:31 and Matthew 7:12

This quote is often referred to as The Golden Rule because almost all religions and philosophies can be distilled into this one universal idea. To follow this is to have achieved full potential as a human being. There are hundreds of similar sayings from every religion and most philosophers throughout history, many from hundreds of years before Jesus or the Bible. (For a comprehensive list, check out The Golden Rule Project.) For example:

• “Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BCE), Analects 15:23 (Confucianism)

• “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.” Tripitaka Udanavarga 5:18 (Buddhism)

• “Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you.” Socrates

• “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others that which you wish for yourself.” The Prophet Muhammad Hadith (Islam)

The reason I chose to highlight the [Christian] biblical version over the other variations is that most of the others approach the concept as a warning about what not to do. But the biblical quote frames it so that we should diligently “do unto others,” meaning not just avoid harming, but intentionally going out and doing good. The Islamic admonishment— “Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others that which you wish for yourself.”—has that same vibe. One should wish for others what we would want. But that still stops short of actively doing. That little difference is what makes the biblical teaching the most challenging to follow.

So simple—yet, so hard. Sudoku for the soul. The main challenge to living by this teaching is that we can MacGyver it whenever the going gets tough. We find a sneaky workaround that allows us to ignore the rule, but still feel virtuous: “That person hurt me, therefore they don’t deserve my doing unto them.” “That person doesn’t follow the teaching so why should I follow it with them?” And so forth. We’re ingenious when it comes to tricking ourselves.

The thing is, the teaching doesn’t say “do unto some others” or “do unto deserving others.” Just others. That’s the point. By following the teaching, two practical things happen: First, you are overcoming your own biases and emotional roadblocks to become a better person. This will lift a lot of burdens from you and make you happier. Second, through your selfless example, you are helping to create a world in which everyone follows this teaching. You’re creating “others'“ who will also do unto you.

Sadly, this is the most popular and least followed teaching. Part of the reason is that many people can’t distinguish between doing unto others and imposing on others. Doing unto others is to treat others as they wish to be treated. However, some prefer to impose their beliefs and value systems on others instead. Which would be the opposite of the teaching. The goal of these people is not to do good, but to feel good about themselves.

I think of this quote whenever my pettiness, ego, stubbornness, or biases nudge me to be rude, dismissive, or even cruel. To deliberately inflict emotional pain on another is shameful. It is a transgression we have all committed, but to pull out a Richard Wilbur quote I recently wrote about, “The past is never past redeeming.”

We can do better unto ourselves. We must do better unto others.

Yes, Abdul-Jabbar also has plenty of opinions about how the powerful act in the world, always tending to highlight both the need for more justice and striving for more peace. He's still a great among us.

Music in the park

This summer Golden Gate Park has showcased random musicians in random locations, doing their thing for and with random passersby ... like me.

 

It's been a good summer, despite the gray and fog. Enjoy the holiday weekend!

Marching on in faith

Monday, August 28, is the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, remembered today for Dr. King's "I have a dream ..." proclamation. There will be commemorations, congratulations, and calls for renewed energy in the incomplete struggle for the freedom of all.

Inevitably looking back 60 years, we telescope events and markers of the Civil Rights movement era which actually spread from the late 1940s through at least 1968. The great march was not an end point, but perhaps a pivot point; what had been many localized eruptions became unequivocally national afterwards. A broad movement coalition was formed for the day; this won the grudging attention of the ruling Democratic Party powers-that-be ... and change followed.

Professor Peniel E. Joseph of UT-Austin describes the context. 

No major civil rights legislation passed in 1963, but it was the most important year in the decade that transformed America.... The forces that fueled segregation and racial hierarchy in America — and the forces that galvanized the political resistance to both — sped up that year. 

... The March for Jobs and Freedom, announced July 2, forged a new consensus across partisan divides by linking American traditions of freedom and democracy with the Black movement’s aspirational notions of dignity and citizenship.... Bayard Rustin — a Black, gay and radical social democrat who spent time in prison as a conscientious objector during World War II — led the organizing of the March On Washington at the behest of A. Philip Randolph, the legendary founder and labor leader who served as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin endured vicious homophobia within and outside of the movement. ...

Yet Rustin endured, making a final unstoppable comeback within movement circles through his ingenuous organizing skills that helped ensure the eclectic coalition of religious, labor, student, civil rights, business and civic groups were all there in Washington, equipped with buses, portable toilets, sandwiches, water fountains, chairs for dignitaries and more....

That's how a social movement gets things done: broad coalitions enabled by competent logistics. Or so I believe.

The minister of my Buffalo, NY, Episcopal parish attended; his daughter and I were envious. But supportive white northerners didn't think this was anything to take kids to -- sixteen years old was less mature in 1963 than it is today. In a distanced sense, far away parents knew the freedom struggle was no picnic, that violent pushback was always a possibility. As it was. As it is.

Ten years ago, in 2013, another commemoration of the great march took place in Washington. Via Religious News Service, comes this affirmation of the faith from those participants.

Edith Lee-Payne explains: "... it means to me - as a person of faith - a re-dedication that with God all things are possible. ... we knew that sometimes God takes us through some things ... [God] takes us through them to get us where God wants us to be."

The question is, who counts?

In 1857, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger B Taney set the stage for the violent sectional conflict that we call the Civil War by baldly ruling that some people could not possess the full rights of human kind within the United States.

[African Americans] had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

Taney's legal atrocity was overturned by blood, by 618,000 deaths, roughly 260,000 fighting for the Confederacy, 360,000 for the Union. We think of our times as uniquely partisan. We think of Abraham Lincoln as a wise patriarch, whose best angels looked beyond his immediate battles. And that's a truth. But we should remember, Lincoln was a peacemaker by way of the sword. The cause of human freedom evoked violent defense. Our tradition is not comforting.

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” 2nd Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

Our rogue, rightwing, results-oriented, Republican Supreme Court is in the process of imposing a series of legal rulings which undermine the humanity of their political opponents no less than Taney attempted in his day.

• Last year, the Dobbs decision allowed states to force pregnancy (and consequently child raising) on women who might have aborted an unplanned, unwanted fetus. States quickly undermined medical provision for all kinds of maternal healthcare. By now, we now have a year's evidence that pregnant women are more likely to die in states with abortion bans.

• On Thursday, the Court outlawed attempts to overcome the effects of past and ongoing racial discrimination in college admissions, by asserting against all evidence that white supremacy is a thing of the past. As too ample experience in California has demonstrated, the affirmative action ban amounts to kicking Black people when they are down.

• On Friday, the Court decided that a Presidential attempt to reduce the burden of loans taken out by students to pay for often dubious "education" could not proceed. Because ... well, because it can. Wouldn't want the young and poor getting educated.

• And further, the Court decided that some lady who didn't want to make websites for same-sex weddings (which no one had asked her to make) was within her free speech rights to discriminate against LGBTQ couples. So much for public accommodation laws requiring businesses to treat all customers equally, what the student Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s sat-in at lunch counters for.

For all the surrounding legal google-de-guck, these decisions announce, as once did Taney, that women, Black people (again), other people of color, young people, and queers have no rights that old white men (one honorary) are bound to respect.

Are we going to put up with this? We are the majority. We kick the system until people in power fix it.

The people can take it to the pols

This is likely to be a nasty week framed by upcoming Supreme Court decisions, most likely killing the remnants of affirmative action, affirming that religious bigotry deserves protection from the claims of gay rights in public accommodations, and denying the government's effort to forgive student loans which are made and administered by the government. Not pretty.

With a 6-3 -- mostly wingnut -- Supreme Court majority, we're on track for a lot of Junes when the hits to equality, progress, and freedom keep on coming.

What's particularly difficult about these blows coming from the Court is that we are not used to visualizing what our democratic actions can do now that the right wing project to pack the court has succeeded. 

When the political actors are elected officials, either legislative or executive, we know what to do. Here progressive community organizations in San Francisco pressure the Board and Mayor not to dump the burden of the city's economic woes on neighborhood services.

June 26, 2023

But what to do when the offenders are robed and reserved judicial priests in a marble palace in DC?

We are NOT helpless:

• We can attend to the amazing history lessons in democratic Constitutional interpretation delivered by new Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson; she's charting a course for a better judicial direction.

• We can keep calling out the blatant corruption of the worst of them. This palling with wealthy litigants stuff has been a long time practice (gift link) of conservative judges. They need to be shamed.

• We can goose our elected officials to take Court corruption seriously. It's not clear what electeds can do -- but we can make it clear we elect them to figure that out. This sometimes works.

• And though we'll be told direct agitation is useless, it doesn't hurt. I have friends who still have their t-shirts from marches on the Court for civil rights and gay marriage. Folks got arrested; sometimes a useful tactic. The justices will say they've closed their ears, but direct action keeps them listening. A majority of them still think they should be respected and liked. They aren't and won't be so long as the only rights they recognize are those of white Christian billionaires.

Demand Justice seems a good advocacy group making concrete proposals for court reform. 

The Court has already crashed in public esteem since it allowed states to outlaw reproductive health care. It can fall further. This matters.

Do we know what to do about people who scare and harm?

Bill Keller was the executive editor of the New York Times from July 2003 until September 2011. For those of us who thought the GW Bush administration's Iraq invasion was an immoral disaster, Keller, an establishment war hawk with the power to define the public narrative, was a major public enemy.  It didn't seem to bode well when Keller landed in 2014 at The Marshall Project:

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We have an impact on the system through journalism, rendering it more fair, effective, transparent and humane.

That's a bit boosterish. But Marshall Project journalism does a good job of professionally raising up what America does in the prisons to a wide public. Their output gets read, which is saying something in an arena we usually would prefer not to gaze at.

Keller has shared what he learned in five years getting that project off the ground in a slim book, What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
 
He's candid about his learning curve on the job.

My crash course in criminal justice taught me that this country imprisons people more copiously than almost any other place on earth. Some countries, including China and North Korea, do not fully disclose their prison populations, so America may not actually hold the dubious distinction of first place. But there is ample justification for calling what we do in America "mass incarceration." ...

This perfectly captures the tone of this book -- measured, careful, accurate to a fault, designed to lower the temperature about a topic that arouses passions.

As if writing a longform magazine article, Keller explores through close observation and gentle on-scene interviews the fraught realities of sentencing, race, drugs in prisons, violence -- and life after release, prison education, and what incarceration does to the jailers. He makes a diligent effort to study and apply what academic study of prisons has suggested. He describes Nordic systems of corrections, which center helping offenders learn to live normal civilian lives though practice while still inside. And he raises up US experiments on the same lines. There's even a short chapter on women's experiences in the system.

Maybe what conversation about the US prison system most needs is less yelling, more deliberate humanity. This is a useful little book if that's a right prescription for readers not struggling in the immediate horror. If, for good and tangible reasons, the prison system presents as a screaming injustice that destroys people, families and communities -- as it does to too many Americans -- Keller will seem bland, too comfortable, and too complacent.

What I'm sure Keller would agree on is that ending mass incarceration is going to require all of us. Keller's take is at least smart and kind. That's not nothing. This is a useful little introductory book.

• • •

It feels apprriate that I'm writing up What's Prison For? the week that Donald J Trump received his federal felony indictments. Can the United States actually put away the old con man? The best discussion I've encountered of this came in a podcast discussion between former US Attorney Joyce Vance and former Republican operative Steve Schmidt. He asked the question that lurks for all of us: if Trump is convicted, "is he going to prison?" Vance said "no" with a clear explanation that I haven't met elsewhere. Whatever happens, by statute, Donald Trump will be accompanied by his Secret Service detail for the rest of his life -- it's just not happening that the system will lock up the whole entourage.  We'll have to see how it all plays out ...

Casualties of war-by-peaceful means

The quashing of a panel at the journalistic free speech organization PEN America's World Voices Festival that had included ex-patriot Russians has unleashed a kerfuffle among the commentariat. Two Ukrainians, arriving to participate in another panel about their experiences as writers in the military resistance to Russia's invasion, said they could not speak if the first panel with the Russians went ahead. PEN acceded to their demand and erased the panel that had included the Russians from the proceedings. 

And many liberal US intellectuals felt they had to have an opinion. I want to leap into that fray.

High-end media accounts -- New York Times, The Atlantic -- treat this as an instance of "cancel culture." I think that is wrong. 

What happened here is an instance of forceful, nonviolent, war-by-peaceful means colliding with a culture that has forgotten the compromises raised up by life and death struggles. There's a genuine boycott on ...

Ukraine asks and demands that its soldiers, and by extension its partisans and friends, participate in that boycott of all people and things Russian. By invading a neighboring country and committing atrocities against its population, Russia has broken the compact of civilization between peoples and states. Ukrainians fight their war of resistance -- but they also aim to shame and stigmatize in the interest of a vision of justice.

This is not fair to Russian individuals, perhaps especially those likely to turn up at a PEN conference. These people are not part of Putin's war machine. But this sort of unfairness is exactly how boycotts work. Often those harmed are among the least guilty, either for lack of power or lack of intent to commit the offense that inspires the boycott. But they are also the ones who can be moved to destabilize a situation because they can feel shame.

Let's remember the boycott of South Africa which contributed to the end of that country's apartheid regime. For decades, the Black-led African National Congress called for the rest of the world to boycott and stigmatize white minority rule. Materially it was hard to tell whether this hurt. But when I worked with anti-racist newspapers in the country in 1990, it was abundantly clear which part of the worldwide effort was making a dent among privileged whites: the sports boycott. South African teams were barred from the Olympics and other international competitions. This stung and sapped support for maintaining white rule, even and especially among its white beneficiaries. There was grievance -- sure; but also exhaustion with pariah status. That's how well targeted, rigorously applied, boycotts work.

I don't fault Ukraine for pushing a Russian culture boycott. They are fighting extinction of their hopes and country with every tool they have got.

Yascha Mounk, speaking for highbrow Western liberalism, thinks PEN's decision to cave denigrated a proper concern for respect for each individual.

... a person’s moral standing is not defined by their nationality. There can be no collective guilt by virtue of wrongful birth. ...

This is a powerful and hopeful principle -- but a right of self-defense for an invaded society is also a vital principle, especially those aspects of that defense that are not physically violent. As far as we know, Ukraine is not randomly killings its local remnant of Russia supporters, though the longer this goes on the more danger there is of tit-for-tat murder. (Yes, I know; being unjustly stigmatized and shamed is painful to individuals. So is being killed.) 

A consequence of the cancellation of PEN's panel with the Russians was that the writer Masha Gessen resigned as the organization's vice president. They (Gessen uses they/them) had been supposed to moderate that event. No sensible person disputes Gessen's human rights bona fides.

Gessen, who immigrated from the former Soviet Union as a teenager in 1981 and holds both Russian and American citizenship, has been a prominent critical voice in Russia, where they returned in 1991 to work as a journalist. Their books include “The Man Without a Face,” a 2012 biography of Vladimir Putin, and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017. In 2013, Gessen moved back to the United States with their family, citing growing persecution of L.G.B.T.Q. people.

But Gessen has been one of the most nuanced commentators here:

Gessen emphasized that they remained a member of PEN, and remained committed to the Russian Independent Media Archive, which they spearheaded. The decision to cancel the panel, Gessen said, “was a mistake, not a malicious act.”

“My objection is not to the Ukrainian participants’ demand,” Gessen said. “They are fighting a defensive war by all means available to them. My issue is solely with PEN’s response."

The whole kerfuffle is a reminder to me that worthy Western non-profits, even ambitious ones like PEN, are profoundly unable to navigate principled struggles where something more than funding is on the line. Most have not needed to be. But we live in times when we must grapple with these contradictions.

Celebrate Mothers' Day

This Mother’s Day, National Bail Out will be freeing as many Black Mamas and caregivers as possible so that they can come home to their families and communities. Why not help out?

Giants for whom nonviolence was no game

I skim a daily email of headlines from the Los Angeles Times (a surprisingly good newspaper which I would recommend to anyone interested in California doings.) Today this picture and squib occupied the section that publication calls "From the archives."

James Peck of New York who was on one of the two Freedom Rider buses is attacked at the bus station in Birmingham, Ala. ...The other bus was burned in Anniston, Ala., en route to Birmingham. (Underwood Archives / Getty Images)

On May 4, 1961, the first Freedom Ride—a political protest against the segregation of interstate bus travel in the South—began as a group of white and Black Americans departed Washington, D.C., on buses bound for New Orleans.

Along the way, the Freedom Riders encountered violence, most severely in Alabama. On May 14, upon stopping outside Anniston to change a slashed tire, one bus was firebombed and the Freedom Riders were beaten.

After arriving in Birmingham, the second bus was similarly attacked and the passengers were beaten. In both cases, law enforcement was suspiciously late in responding.

Jim Peck never entirely recovered from that beating, though his cracked skull and smashed face never stopped him. I knew him a little in New York City in the early 1970s when he was a fixture at the War Resisters League office, around the corner from the Catholic Worker where I was part of the community. He seemed a quiet man who labored doggedly in a corner, mostly on encouraging resistance to paying taxes for war.

Yet the unassuming Peck was a giant in the broad struggle for justice. In the 1930s, Peck agitated for labor rights; during World War II he was imprisoned for refusing the draft; in the 1950s he campaigned against the Cold War nuclear arms build-up; in the 1960s, he opposed America's Vietnam incursion as well as struggling for civil rights; in the 1970s, he joined campaigns against nuclear energy and militarism in all its forms. Reading his Wikipedia entry is exhausting, but I highly recommend it. His was a life well lived. It is a catalogue of costly witness -- assaults, beatings, jailings and unfailing commitment. The entry says he was arrested some 60 times for acting on his convictions -- I suspect that may be an undercount.

What stands out about Jim and the other giants of the 20th century American nonviolent left who he worked alongside -- AJ Muste, Bayard Rustin, Barbara Deming, Dave Dellinger, Grace Paley, Joan Nestle, David McReynolds -- was that their agitation was not performative. This was no game. Splashy, yes! Theatrical, yes! Aggressive, yes! But above all rooted in a willingness to risk and experience personal material and physical sacrifice to embody principles greater than themselves. They were at odds with their society and country. They could not live any other way.

No justice for Banko Brown

And I thought that "stand your ground laws" were a thing in gun-crazed Republican states like Florida. Broad legal permission to kill in "self-defense" was how George Zimmerman got away with the murder of Travon Martin. But apparently under San Francisco D.A. Brooke Jenkins' regime, we may have such a rule in San Francisco.

Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony, the Walgreens security guard who shot Banko Brown at the store last week, was released without charges. The Chronicle reports:

On Monday, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement that “the evidence clearly shows that the suspect believed he was in mortal danger and acted in self-defense.” ....

“We reviewed witness statements, statements from the suspect, and video footage of the incident and it does not meet the People’s burden to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that the suspect is guilty of a crime. We cannot bring forward charges when there is credible evidence of reasonable self-defense,” Jenkins said in a statement. “Doing so would be unethical and create false hope for a successful prosecution.”

In the incident that led to Brown’s killing, “both threats of force and physical force were used,” she told The Chronicle, declining to divulge further details including whether Brown was allegedly armed. ...

Without further explanation, it sure seems that an armed security guard has a license to shoot an accused shoplifter. The cops seem to endorse that conclusion:

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said Friday that the shooting was “a shoplift that went bad. The person that was shot was allegedly shoplifting and it was a confrontation and the shooting happened from there.”

The Brown family and Banko's friends deserve more answers from the city. This homeless transgender youth was not anonymous in his world. He had friends, a lot of friends. A crowd held a vigil in his memory on Monday outside the Market Street store.

They recalled Brown as a kind and dedicated member of San Francisco’s transgender community, who’d worked extensively with the Young Women’s Freedom Center, which works to reduce the incarceration of young women and transgender youth.

Brown “was a connector,” said Julia Arroyo, the center’s executive director.

“He was constantly doing outreach, bringing people into YWFC,” she said. Brown struggled with housing, often feeling unsafe in city shelters or other programs, she said, and often said he wanted to be housed with other transgender San Franciscans.

There wasn't enough sanctuary in this famously liberal city for this unhoused youth ...

Ah, yes -- the wonderful world of foundation funding

In a new article from Tom Dispatch, Erudite Partner marks tax season with a graceful, and highly readable, explainer about how our annual duels with the IRS feed our misconceptions about how positive change comes about.

A Deal With the Devil: Non-Profit Status and Political Action 

 ... For many ... of us, it’s time to pat ourselves on the back for the charitable donations we made to tax-deductible organizations in 2022. Time to pat ourselves on the back for being clever and generous enough to “do well by doing good,” right? Time, perhaps, to wonder why, even when we give to organizations seeking radical change, the IRS still rewards us with a tax deduction. Do the feds really support organized opposition to, for example, the military-industrial complex? Or is there more to the story of what my students sometimes refer to as the “nonprofit-industrial complex”?

... am I suggesting that we shouldn’t give money to non-profits, because we often don’t really benefit from the tax deduction? Absolutely not. I’m saying that when we donate, we shouldn’t do it because of the tax deduction. We should do it, if we can, because it supports activities crucial to our own and the long-term survival and even flourishing of so many other people. ...

Read all about it.

San Romero de las Americas

On March 24, 1980, Oscar Romero, the Catholic archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated by a right-wing death squad as he celebrated a commemorative mass for the mother of one of his people. Romero's offense? He condemned violence done to the poor in an oligarchic society on the verge of civil war. The political instigators of his murder remained unpunished and even went on to capture the Salvadoran government.

The oppressed people of Central America venerated the fallen archbishop as a saint in their hearts; Pope Francis officially canonized Romero in 2018.

A single shot felled Romero as he delivered his homily (thanks to the Jesuit magazine America for this bit of text.)

This holy Mass, the Eucharist, is itself an act of faith. With Christian faith we know that at this moment the wheaten host is changed into the body of the Lord who offered himself for the world's redemption and in that chalice the wine is transformed into the blood that was the price of salvation. May this body immolated and this blood sacrificed for humans nourish us also, so that we may give our body and our blood to suffering and to pain—like Christ, not for self, but to impart notions of justice and peace to our people.

¡Oscar Romero presente!