O Google foi obrigado a desativar o sistema de análise de dados que estava usando para desenvolver um mecanismo de busca censurado para a China, segundo apurações do Intercept. A atitude da empresa se deu após reclamações internas de empregados da área de privacidade, que alegaram não ter obtido acesso às informações sobre o projeto.
O racha interno sobre o sistema teve enormes desdobramentos e praticamente encerrou o trabalho na ferramenta de pesquisa censurada, conhecida como Dragonfly [“Libélula”], segundo duas fontes que conheciam os planos. O incidente representa um duro golpe para os altos executivos do Google, inclusive para seu CEO, Sundar Pichai, que nos últimos dois anos havia tornado o projeto chinês uma de suas prioridades.
A disputa teve início em meados de agosto, quando o Intercept revelou que empregados do Google que trabalhavam no projeto Dragonfly vinham usando um website com sede em Pequim para desenvolver listas negras para a ferramenta de pesquisa censurada. Ela teria sido programada para bloquear amplas categorias de informação relacionadas a direitos humanos, democracia e protestos pacíficos, em conformidade com as rígidas regras de censura aplicadas pelo governo autoritário do Partido Comunista da China.
O website 265.com, sediado em Pequim, é um serviço de diretório da web – índice de site organizado por categorias, não por palavras-chave – que alega ser “a página mais usada da China”. O Google comprou o site em 2008 de Cai Wensheng, um empreendedor local bilionário. Em língua chinesa, o 265.com oferece aos visitantes atualizações de notícias, informações sobre mercados financeiros, horóscopo e anúncios de promoções de passagens aéreas e diárias de hotel. Ele também inclui uma função de busca que permite pesquisar sites, imagens e vídeos. As buscas inseridas no 265.com, porém, são redirecionadas para o Baidu, a ferramenta de pesquisa mais popular na China e o principal concorrente do Google no país. Como o Intercept noticiou em agosto, aparentemente o Google usou o 265.com como “honeypot” (uma espécie de chamariz) para sua pesquisa de mercado, armazenando informações sobre as pesquisas dos usuários chineses antes de encaminhá-las para o Baidu.
De acordo com duas fontes do Google, os engenheiros que trabalhavam no projeto Dragonfly conseguiram obter grandes conjuntos de dados contendo buscas que os chineses inseriam na ferramenta de pesquisa do 265.com. Pelo menos um dos engenheiros conseguiu uma chave necessária para acessar uma “interface de programação de aplicações” (API na sigla original) associada ao 265.com, e a utilizou para coletar dados de pesquisa do site. Os integrantes da equipe de privacidade do Google, porém, não foram informados sobre o uso do 265.com.
Vários grupos de engenheiros agora foram completamente removidos do projeto Dragonfly e instruídos a desviar suas atenções da China.Os engenheiros usaram os dados que extraíram do 265.com para descobrir mais sobre o tipo de coisa que os habitantes da China continental costumam procurar em mandarim. Isso os ajudou a criar um protótipo do Dragonfly. Eles usaram as amostras de buscas do 265.com, por exemplo, para analisar listas dos sites que os chineses veriam se digitassem no Google a mesma palavra ou expressão. Eles então empregaram uma ferramenta que chamaram “BeaconTower” [“torre do farol”] para verificar se algum dos sites listados nos resultados de pesquisa do Google seria bloqueado pelo sistema chinês de censura da internet, conhecido como Grande Firewall. Por meio desse processo, os engenheiros compilaram uma lista de milhares de sites banidos, que integraram à plataforma de pesquisa do Dragonfly para que ela eliminasse os links para sites proibidos na China, tais como o da enciclopédia online Wikipédia e o da emissora britânica de notícias BBC.
Pelo protocolo normal da empresa, a análise de buscas feitas pelos usuários está sujeita a sérias restrições e deveria ser avaliada pela área de privacidade, cujo trabalho é proteger os direitos dos usuários. A equipe de privacidade, porém, só soube do acesso aos dados do 265.com depois da revelação feita pelo Intercept, e seus integrantes ficaram “muito irritados”, segundo uma fonte do Google. Os funcionários confrontaram os executivos responsáveis pela gestão do projeto Dragonfly. Na sequência de uma série de discussões, segundo duas fontes, teria sido dito aos engenheiros do Google que eles não estavam mais autorizados a continuar usando os dados do 265.com para ajudar no desenvolvimento do Dragonfly, o que teve consequências graves para o projeto.
“Os dados do 265 eram essenciais para o Dragonfly”, disse uma fonte. “O acesso aos dados agora foi suspenso, o que interrompeu o avanço.”
Nas últimas semanas, as equipes que estão trabalhando no Dragonfly receberam ordens para usar outros conjuntos de dados. Elas não estão mais coletando resultados de buscas da China continental. Em vez disso, agora estão analisando buscas “chinesas globais” inseridas no Google por pessoas que vivem em países como os Estados Unidos e a Malásia. Essas pesquisas são qualitativamente diferentes daquelas originadas de dentro da própria China, o que torna praticamente impossível aprimorar a precisão dos resultados. É significativo que diversos grupos de engenheiros agora tenham sido completamente removidos do projeto Dragonfly, recebido ordens para deixarem de se concentrar na China e trabalharem em projetos relacionados a Índia, Rússia, Oriente Médio e Brasil.
Os registros mostram que o 265.com ainda está hospedado nos servidores do Google, mas seu endereço físico está listado sob o nome de Beijing Guxiang Information and Technology Co., empresa sediada no terceiro andar de um prédio de escritórios no distrito de Haidian, no noroeste de Pequim. O 265.com é operado como subsidiário do Google, mas diferentemente da maior parte dos sites de propriedade da empresa – como o YouTube e o Google.com – não é bloqueado na China e pode ser acessado livremente pelas pessoas no país, usando qualquer navegador de internet padrão.
A disputa interna no Google sobre o acesso aos dados do 265.com não foi o primeiro episódio em que informações importantes relacionadas ao projeto Dragonfly foram ocultadas da área de privacidade da empresa. O Intercept noticiou em novembro que empregados das áreas de privacidade e segurança que trabalhavam no projeto haviam sido deixados de fora de reuniões importantes e sentiam que estavam sendo afastados pelos superiores. Yonatan Zunger, um ex-empregado que passou 14 anos no Google, foi um dos principais engenheiros da empresa, trabalhou no projeto Dragonfly por vários meses durante o ano passado e declarou que o projeto estava cercado de extremo sigilo e era tratado de uma forma “altamente incomum” desde o princípio. Scott Beaumont, líder do Google na China e arquiteto-chave do projeto Dragonfly, “não considerava que as áreas de segurança, privacidade e assessoria jurídica deveriam poder questionar suas decisões de produto”, segundo Zunger, “e mantinha uma relação abertamente conflituosa com elas – bem fora do padrão Google.”
Na semana passada, Pichai, CEO do Google, compareceu ao Congresso dos EUA, onde enfrentou perguntas sobre o Dragonfly. Pichai declarou que “nesse momento” não havia planos para o lançamento da ferramenta de pesquisa, mas se recusou a desconsiderar a possibilidade para o futuro. O Google originalmente pretendia lançar o Dragonfly entre janeiro e abril de 2019. No entanto, os vazamentos sobre o plano e a resistência extraordinária que ele encontrou interna e externamente parecem ter forçado os executivos da companhia a engavetá-lo pelo menos no curto prazo, segundo duas fontes familiarizadas com o projeto.
O Google não respondeu aos pedidos de comentários sobre esta matéria.
Tradução: Deborah Leão
The post Projeto secreto chinês do Google estaria praticamente encerrado depois dos conflitos internos appeared first on The Intercept.
Entrei em Direito na USP. E, como em todos os anos, as tradicionais atividades da semana de recepção aos calouros são patrocinadas por escritórios de advocacia cobiçados pelos estudantes da Faculdade de Direito do Largo São Francisco, a Sanfran. Em 2018, porém, a festa foi diferente: ela incluiu 138 cotistas pela primeira vez. Eu estava entre eles. E foi durante uma visita a um desses escritórios que tivemos uma prévia do racismo que viveríamos ao longo do primeiro semestre.
Num prédio estilo neoclássico forrado de mármore na imponente avenida Faria Lima, em São Paulo, percebi rapidamente os padrões sociais do mundo jurídico. Entre lanches e recados tipo “veja como somos legais, temos happy hour às sextas”, um rosto negro em tom questionador finalmente fez a pergunta que todos queríamos fazer: “por que não tem negros trabalhando aqui?”
E nós, que pela primeira vez ocupamos em números expressivos a mesma faculdade que há 167 anos impediu o advogado negro Luiz Gama de obter o seu diploma, recebemos como resposta um rosto branco assustado e a fatídica resposta: “talvez seja porque os negros não tenham interesse”.
Hoje, menos de 1% dos advogados são negros, segundo um levantamento feito em mais de mil escritórios no Brasil. Isso sem falar das diferentes oportunidades aos negros e negras de pele clara, como eu, e aos de pele retinta, que têm ainda mais dificuldade de se inserir no mercado de trabalho. Então será mesmo que as pessoas negras não querem trabalhar em nenhum desses escritórios? Eu garanto que não.
‘Tentou e não conseguiu’A vida na faculdade é uma prévia exata do que encontramos nos grandes escritórios elitistas. Há uma dificuldade da comunidade acadêmica de entender a diversidade social que agora ocupa a primeira faculdade brasileira.
Dá para entender: a USP foi a última das 10 maiores universidades brasileiras a adotar as cotas. E só o fez após sofrer pressão do movimento negro, com a intenção de se afastar da imagem negativa de ser a única grande instituição pública do país a não aderir ao bem-sucedido modelo que inseriu 150 mil negros nas universidades públicas.
Eu sou um destes alunos. Negro, da periferia e cotista da Sanfran. Nasci e vivi toda a minha vida no Itaim Paulista, último bairro do extremo leste de São Paulo. No ensino fundamental, frequentei uma escola que já foi considerada uma das piores do estado. Tive um ensino médio conturbado. Foi em 2016, quando ocupamos a nossa escola exigindo a instauração da CPI da merenda na Assembleia Legislativa do Estado de São Paulo, que abri os meus olhos para as universidades públicas e tive o sonho de um dia estar entre os melhores, os da classe média, os filhos dos ricos, os futuros dirigentes do país.
Mas a minha condição ficou nítida na Cervejada do XI, evento realizado no dia do aniversário da Sanfran, em 11 de agosto. É uma comemoração tradicional entre os alunos, que ocupam o Largo São Francisco, onde fica a faculdade, em uma festa cercada por grades para não ser acessada por quem está de fora. O ritmo da bateria da faculdade embalava o ufanismo das tradições e, de cima de um trio elétrico, alunos puxavam o canto:
“Essa é a escola que todos desejam, mas poucos conseguem entrar. Mostra que tentou, e não conseguiu, então vai para a puta que pariu.”
Imediatamente senti que, mesmo sendo hoje aluno da Sanfran, a música me doía muito. Me machucava porque ela não foi simplesmente criada para provocar os ricos que foram para as universidades concorrentes, como PUC ou Mackenzie, mas para deixar nítido que a USP jamais deve ser popular. A música cantada por poucos privilegiados era um ataque a todos os meus amigos que choraram por não poder viver um sonho como esse e a todos aqueles que nem se chegaram a sonhar.
Logo no início do ano, passei a morar na Casa do Estudante da São Francisco, um prédio na Av. São João que desde 1949 recebe alguns dos estudantes da faculdade. A moradia, que pertence ao Centro Acadêmico XI de Agosto, tem um passado imponente. Ela recebia os estudantes das famílias mais ricas do interior – entre eles o presidente Michel Temer. Hoje, porém, a Casa enfrenta a deterioração de anos de abandono e está superlotada. Nós – os cotistas – precisamos dividir quartos com outros quatro calouros, enquanto os estudantes mais velhos ocupavam quartos individualmente.
Na Sanfran, assim como no resto da sociedade, basta você ser um homem branco para ser ouvido. São várias as situações em que alunas foram taxadas de problematizadoras ao questionarem as frequentes interrupções que as suas colegas sofrem quando falam. E nós, cotistas, somos chamados de “radicais”: quando, por exemplo, cobramos uma retratação pública de um caso de racismo ocorrido durante uma assembleia dos estudantes. Em casos assim, somos nós que temos que nos explicar para a faculdade – e não o racista.
Dentro da sala de aula, a minha autoestima foi colocada à prova já no primeiro semestre: a USP criou uma comissão para acompanhar o desempenho dos alunos cotistas. A existência dessa comissão só contribuiu para que a minha insegurança nutrisse a inevitável “síndrome do impostor”. Será que dou conta de participar dos debates? Será que tenho inglês suficiente para entender essa bibliografia do curso? Será que estou pronto pra tudo isso depois de tanto esforço para entrar? Foram inúmeras as vezes em que me senti – e ainda me sinto – receoso em participar dos debates ou em simplesmente aproveitar o sol das arcadas que limitam o prédio.
Mas eu burlei as estatísticas. A primeira vez que subi ao palco foi cheio de inseguranças para apresentar um seminário. Na segunda, foi para deixar fora dele o ministro do Supremo Tribunal Federal Ricardo Lewandowski, que também é professor da São Francisco. Desta vez, era o filho da diarista que pedia o microfone. Assumi a fala para divulgar a campanha da reforma da Casa do Estudante e desafiei o ministro a abrir mão dos seus privilégios do Judiciário para ajudar a custear a Casa. O STF, vale lembrar, autorizou um reajuste de 16,38% sobre seus próprios salários, que subiram de R$ 33,7 mil para R$ 39,2 mil com a sanção do aumento pelo presidente Michel Temer, gerando um custo de até R$ 4 bilhões para o país.
Pedi ao ministro que entregasse três meses de seu auxílio-moradia, de mais de R$ 4 mil, para o fundo que custeará a reforma da Casa do Estudante. Enquanto gesticulava para que eu parasse de falar, Lewandowski começou a se aproximar de mim até o instante em que ficamos frente à frente. No momento, então, falei: “mas o mais importante mesmo, Vossa Excelência, é que você não está mais dando aula apenas para os filhos dos seus colegas juízes. Hoje, você também dá aula para o filho e filha do porteiro e da empregada”.
O ex-presidente do STF, então, usou todo o tempo que restava de aula para defender os penduricalhos, pois, segundo o magistrado, “um juiz não pode ter salário de fome”.
O cara da periferia na USPA minha breve experiência como ‘franciscano’ não traz nenhuma novidade. Ela mostra que os processos racistas e elitistas estão enraizados, tanto nos alunos quanto nos professores.
Mas, claro, há avanços. Um deles é a fundação do jornal da faculdade, o Chico, que está sendo germinado ao mesmo tempo por mim, filho da diarista e por um colega que é filho do professor, além de outras estudantes. Será o espaço para envolver todo o tipo de conhecimento e experiência que a academia não costuma dar voz: o meu. O jornal será um território livre, diferente dos julgamentos dos professores e de alguns alunos. Também há o Coletivo Negro Quilombo Oxê, criado pelos alunos negros da faculdade em 2014. Diante das novas caras negras presentes no dia a dia da universidade, é possível perceber a animação de alguns dos veteranos.
Em um encontro do Quilombo no início do ano, ouvi de um membro já formado: “se na periferia você é o cara da USP, na USP você é o cara da periferia”. Não precisei completar o primeiro ano para perceber que é verdade. Uma vez na USP, ser negro e ter consciência do que somos e representamos, ao mesmo tempo que procuramos nos encaixar nos espaços, seja qual for o tom de pele negra que me veste, é uma tarefa mais difícil do que tentar decifrar os jargões do Direito.
The post O cara da periferia na USP: o meu primeiro ano como cotista na Faculdade de Direito mais elitista do Brasil appeared first on The Intercept.
St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch’s 27-year tenure was marked most famously by his failure to win an indictment of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014. He didn’t know it at the time, but that moment, and his hostile press conference announcing the decision, inspired a nationwide effort to reform prosecutorial offices by running criminal justice reformers to serve as district attorneys, not just public defenders.
In the summer of 2018, that movement eventually swallowed up McCulloch, when reformer Wesley Bell beat him in a primary.
But winning the office and reforming the system are two different tasks, and now Bell is facing extraordinary resistance from dogmatic front-line prosecutors — even before he has been sworn in.
This week, prosecutors in the office took the unusual step of voting in secret to join a police union.
At a meeting on Monday with the St. Louis Police Officers Association, or SPLOA, prosecutors and investigators rushed a vote to join the labor union known for representing cops who have brutalized and murdered civilians. The group has encouraged targeting people who oppose its defense of those cops, once tweeting an article listing 46 St. Louis-area businesses that signed a letter protesting the acquittal of cop Jason Stockley in the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith. The tweet, later deleted, read: “For what it’s worth … a list of STL businesses that hate cops and sympathize with vandals, brought to you by a tabloid birdcage liner that hates cops and sympathizes with vandals.”
The move to unionize with police officers “is unheard of,” Sergeant Heather Taylor told The Intercept. She’s president of the Ethical Society of Police, or ESOP, a group of majority black police officers founded to address race-based discrimination in the community and within the county police department.
“When it’s all said and done, it’s about race,” Taylor said. “We can sugarcoat it all we want. They’ve been under Bob McCulloch for almost 30 years, and they’ve never come together to unionize. Suddenly, when Wesley Bell wins, the people voted him in over McCulloch — unanimously — and suddenly they want to become a union.”
McCulloch’s spokesperson Ed Magee told The Intercept that his boss did not push the unionization effort. “The office is not involved in that in any way,” he said. “Everything was done through other people. Our office, the administration of this office had nothing to do with it.”
In Philadelphia, after reformer Larry Krasner took over as district attorney, he fired a number of intransigent prosecutors. Magee said the prosecutors in St. Louis were trying to avoid a similar fate.
In an interview with St. Louis Public Radio, McCulloch said the move came out of concern among his staff that Bell would either clean house or keep them from moving up. He said the idea didn’t come up when he was in office because “they knew I’d been an advocate for my employees as long as I’ve been there.”
A columnist for the St. Louis American, a weekly newspaper geared toward the city’s black community, condemned the alliance between prosecutors and the police, writing, “The St. Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA) is a ‘labor union’ in the same way the Ku Klux Klan is a ‘fraternal organization.’ The description is technically correct as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.”
Beyond racial motivations, Taylor said, the move is part of a clear pattern of attempts across the country to circumvent incoming progressive officials.
“You look at what happened in Wisconsin. You have a governor coming in and all of his abilities, they’re trying to strip his abilities before he gets there. But he’s been elected by the people to be there,” Taylor explained.
“You don’t want him to make the changes that are necessary. And the reality probably is that some of them need to go. Some of them probably shouldn’t be in those jobs anymore. And these old philosophies under Bob McCulloch haven’t done much to bring these communities together.”
The SPLOA endorsed McCulloch over Bell — as did many other regional unions — and the group has been at odds with the ESP for decades, mostly over issues of race in the community, Taylor explained.
“The issues that are prevalent in St. Louis County that are race-based, the issues that Wesley Bell ran on — change and ending cash bail and reform in the criminal justice system — from a prosecutor’s standpoint are very different, vastly different from what McCulloch was about,” she said.
The American Civil Liberties Union released a statement strongly condemning Monday’s vote, citing “serious ethical conflicts” and an “abdication of the responsibility” of prosecuting attorneys who choose to “place themselves under direct governing authority of the police union.”
“There is nothing wrong with them becoming a union. That’s a great thing,” Taylor said. “But you want to unionize with police officers. … It smells rotten. You’re expecting prosecutors as it is to turn a blind eye when they’re prosecuting cops. And that is difficult, as we know — we see the stories all around the country — the issues with even presenting cases against cops and winning those cases. So what’s going to happen when a case has been presented, and St. Louis County has to prosecute one of their own?”
Indeed, police officers are well-known to lie with abandon on the witness stand. Krasner’s office refuses to call to the stand officers known to be fabulists and/or racists. But a prosecutor who is in a union with the officer whom he is charged with questioning on the stand has a clear conflict at play.
“Especially a police association where they’ve had four officers recently indicted for a federal crime?” Taylor said. “Why choose a police association that defended an officer that shot another officer in St. Louis city? Why choose a police association that had officers that brutally beat another officer? And all of these things are about race. All of those issues and those complications there were about race.”
Bell, the first black man to be elected to the office, ran on ending mass incarceration by eliminating cash bail, finding alternatives to imprisonment, and reforming the way prosecutors handle police shootings. He said he supports his future colleagues’ right to organize, despite the move raising “some questions” as far as conflicts of interest with the police. His office didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
McCulloch is well-known in St. Louis County for his deep familial ties to the police community — both he and Bell are the sons of officers — and faced criticism since the 1990s for his failure to indict police who killed black men.
“Is it OK for defense attorneys to join as well? Because the prosecutors are there. Is the POA going to accept defense attorneys as well? That would be interesting to see,” Taylor said. “Why choose police officers? Why not choose a carpenters’ union? Why not choose the electricians?”
The post Before Criminal Justice Reformer Is Even Sworn In, St. Louis Prosecutors Have Joined a Police Union appeared first on The Intercept.
Depois de nove anos trabalhando com crianças com atraso de desenvolvimento, autismo e problemas de fala em escolas públicas de ensino básico em Austin, no Texas, uma fonoaudióloga foi obrigada a deixar o emprego depois de se recusar a prometer “não estar boicotando, vir a boicotar” nem “realizar qualquer ato com o propósito de causar danos econômicos” a Israel. Ela entrou com uma ação judicial na última segunda-feira em um tribunal federal do Texas, alegando uma violação à sua liberdade de expressão.
Especialista em linguagem infantil, Bahia Amawi é cidadã dos Estados Unidos, onde obteve um mestrado em Fonoaudiologia em 1999. Desde então, ela trabalha com crianças com dificuldades no desenvolvimento da linguagem (ver vídeo abaixo). Amawi nasceu na Áustria e mora há 30 anos nos EUA, fala três línguas fluentemente – inglês, alemão e árabe – e tem quatro filhos americanos.
Ela começou a prestar serviços para o Distrito Escolar Independente de Pflugerville em 2009 – do qual Austin faz parte – na avaliação e apoio a crianças de 3 a 11 anos da crescente comunidade de imigrantes de língua árabe da região. Todo ano seu contrato era renovado sem nenhum problema.
Neste ano, porém, tudo mudou. No dia 13 de agosto, como de costume, o distrito escolar enviou a Amawi o mesmo contrato que vinha sendo assinado anualmente desde 2009.
Mas a fonoaudióloga notou uma nova e surpreendente cláusula: ela deveria declarar “não estar boicotando Israel”, “não vir a boicotar Israel durante o período contratual” e não realizar qualquer ato “com o propósito de penalizar, causar danos econômicos ou limitar as relações comerciais com Israel ou com qualquer pessoa ou entidade que atue em território israelense ou nos territórios controlados por Israel”.
O linguajar da declaração que Amawi precisava assinar para continuar trabalhando parece uma imitação da obra de George Orwell – ou da política macartista. Tal “juramento de lealdade” deveria provocar calafrios em qualquer cidadão americano.
Contrato recebido pela fonoaudióloga em que ela devia alegar “não estar boicotando Israel” e “não vir a boicotar Israel durante o período contratual”.
Além de não poder boicotar empresas que operam em Israel, Amawi não poderia sequer se abster de consumir produtos de empresas israelenses que operam na Cisjordânia (um “território controlado por Israel”). É possível que ela não pudesse nem manifestar apoio a um boicote, pois isso poderia ser considerado um discurso “com o propósito de penalizar, causar danos econômicos ou limitar as relações comerciais com Israel”.
Independentemente de nossa posição sobre o conflito israelo-palestino, é preciso reconhecer que o boicote como forma de pressão pelo o fim da ocupação israelense é um movimento global legítimo, inspirado no boicote dos anos 1980 contra a África do Sul que ajudou a acabar com o apartheid. O movimento é tão popular que já chegou até ao Congresso americano – dois parlamentares americanos recém-eleitos apoiam-no abertamente – e à grande mídia, onde sionistas como o grupo Peace Now e o escritor judeu Peter Beinart já defenderam o boicote a empresas israelenses que operam nos territórios ocupados.
A declaração em favor de Israel era a única exigência de teor político no contrato enviado a Amawi. Nenhuma cláusula mencionava crianças – proibindo-a de manifestar apoio a pedófilos, por exemplo – nem exigia um juramento de lealdade política ao país onde mora e trabalha: os Estados Unidos da América.
Ou seja, para prestar serviços para o estado do Texas, qualquer cidadão pode criticar e agir contra os interesses dos EUA, defender causas prejudiciais às crianças americanas e até apoiar um boicote a outras unidades da federação, como o que foi organizado contra a Carolina do Norte em 2017 em protesto contra as leis homofóbicas do estado. Para continuar trabalhando, Amawi teria toda a liberdade do mundo para fazer campanha contra seu próprio país, boicotar qualquer estado ou cidade americana e agir contra os interesses de qualquer Estado do planeta – exceto os de Israel.
Amawi acabou não assinando o contrato por motivos de consciência, já que, em conjunto com sua família (e como muitas pessoas no mundo), ela havia decidido deixar de comprar produtos israelenses em protesto contra décadas de ocupação israelense em Gaza e na Cisjordânia.
Amawi é fonoaudióloga e mãe de quatro filhos, e não uma líder política. Ela simplesmente decidiu, como consumidora, apoiar o boicote a empresas israelenses que operam em Israel ou na Cisjordânia. Às vezes ela também participa de atos pacíficos em defesa da autodeterminação dos palestinos, e isso inclui o boicote global pelo fim da ocupação israelense.
Amawi conta sua história ao Intercept neste vídeo:
Vídeo de Kelly West
Por conta disso, Amawi informou sua supervisora de que não poderia assinar o contrato. “O que minha posição política pessoal [sobre Israel e a Palestina] tem a ver com meu trabalho como fonoaudióloga?”, pergunta ela em uma reclamação endereçada ao distrito escolar.
Sua supervisora prometeu procurar uma maneira de contornar o problema, mas acabou concluindo que não havia saída: ou ela assinava o termo de compromisso, ou o distrito estaria legalmente impossibilitado de contratá-la.
Até onde se sabe, Amawi é a única fonoaudióloga infantil do distrito que fala árabe. Consequentemente, a não renovação de seu contrato pode deixar dezenas de crianças com dificuldades de fala sem o acompanhamento de um profissional.
O termo de compromisso “anti-BDS” (sigla da campanha global por sanções contra Israel) foi incluído no contrato de Amawi depois da entrada em vigor de uma lei estadual que tratava especificamente de Israel. Aprovada pelos deputados (por 131 votos a 0) e senadores texanos (25 votos a 4) no dia 2 de maio de 2017, ela foi sancionada dois dias depois pelo governador republicano Greg Abbott.
O texto da lei é tão abrangente, que algumas vítimas do furacão Harvey, que devastou o sudoeste do Texas no fim de 2017, ficaram sabendo que só receberiam ajuda caso se comprometessem a nunca boicotar Israel. A exigência deixou as vítimas desesperadas e confusas, sem saber o que suas opiniões sobre Israel e a Palestina tinham a ver com o direito a receber assistência do governo de seu próprio país.
O Texas foi o 17º estado americano a proibir o apoio de prestadores de serviços ao boicote contra Israel. Hoje em dia, leis como essa já existem em 26 estados – inclusive em redutos democratas como Nova York, Califórnia e Nova Jersey –, e estão sendo debatidas em outros 13.
Este mapa criado pela Palestine Legal mostra até que ponto os juramentos de lealdade a Israel se disseminaram nos EUA. Os estados em vermelho já dispõem de leis antiboicote, e, nos estados em azul-escuro, há projetos de lei similares em tramitação. Já nos estados em cinza, não há legislação sobre o tema.
Fonte: Palestine Legal
A grande maioria dos cidadãos americanos, portanto, está oficialmente proibida de apoiar um boicote contra Israel, sob pena de sanções ou limitações impostas por seus estados. E os (relativamente) poucos americanos que ainda estão livres para formar uma opinião sobre esse polêmico debate sem ser punidos podem perder essa liberdade em breve, quando a censura chegar a seus estados.
Uma das primeiras unidades da federação a impor essas restrições à liberdade de expressão foi Nova York. Em 2016, o governador democrata Andrew Cuomo decretou que todos os órgãos estaduais sob seu controle rompessem contratos com empresas ou organizações pró-boicote. “Se você boicota Israel, Nova York vai boicotar você”, tuitou Cuomo, repetindo a ameaça que fizera anteriormente em um artigo publicado no Washington Post.
Seguindo os passos de Cuomo, dos republicanos do Texas e de vários outros governos estaduais de ambos os partidos, o Congresso dos EUA, pressionado pelo Comitê Israelense-Americano de Assuntos Públicos, já está considerando leis de abrangência nacional para punir americanos pelo delito de boicotar Israel. Em julho do ano passado, um grupo de 43 senadores – 29 republicanos e 14 democratas – manifestou apoiou à chamada “Lei Antiboicote de Israel”, proposta pelo senador democrata Benjamin Cardin. Se o projeto de lei for aprovado, a participação em qualquer boicote internacional contra Israel será crime.
Quando a União Americana de Liberdades Civis (ACLU, na sigla em inglês) emitiu um comunicado condenando veementemente a proposta de Cardin, considerada pela entidade um ataque aos direitos fundamentais de liberdade de expressão, “punindo indivíduos apenas por suas crenças políticas”, vários senadores retiraram seu apoio.
Mas agora, como noticiado pelo Intercept na semana passada, uma versão modificada do projeto de lei voltou ao Congresso e pode ser votada antes do fim do mandato atual. “Cardin está tentando incluir uma lei antiboicote em um projeto orçamentário no apagar das luzes do mandato”, diz a reportagem.
A ACLU também condenou o novo projeto de lei, afirmando que “sua intenção, assim como a das leis estaduais em que está baseada, contraria o espírito e a letra do princípio de liberdade de expressão e associação garantido pela Primeira Emenda.” A organização chegou a publicar um apelo à população para pressionar o Congresso a rejeitar o projeto de lei.
“Seria ilegal decidir que apenas progressistas – ou conservadores – possam receber o seguro-desemprego. É evidente a natureza inconstitucional da atitude do governo do Texas no caso de Bahia Amawi.”“A nova versão da lei deixa claro que as pessoas não podem ser presas por participar de um boicote, mas deixa uma brecha para sanções financeiras contra quem participar ou promover um boicote contra Israel”, afirma a ACLU.
É difícil imaginar um ataque mais perigoso do que esse à livre expressão de ideias. Tanto à esquerda quanto à direita, ninguém que se diz defensor da liberdade de expressão pode silenciar diante de uma agressão tão clara e concertada contra direitos tão básicos.
Algumas pessoas fazem uma ideia errada da Primeira Emenda, dizendo que ela proíbe apenas que o Estado puna um indivíduo por se exprimir, mas não impede o condicionamento de ajudas estatais e a contratação de serviços à não expressão de certas opiniões. Com raras e restritas exceções, a Justiça americana já determinou repetidas vezes que a Primeira Emenda proíbe essa prática. Seria ilegal, por exemplo, decidir que apenas progressistas – ou conservadores – possam receber o seguro-desemprego. Portanto, é evidente a natureza inconstitucional da atitude do governo do Texas no caso de Bahia Amawi.
Imaginem que, em vez de ser obrigada pelo Estado a prometer não boicotar Israel para continuar trabalhando, Amawi fosse forçada a jurar nunca defender a causa LGBT; não se envolver em campanhas e organizações contrárias ou a favor do desarmamento (como a Associação Nacional de Rifles) ou do aborto (como a Planned Parenthood); nunca assinar veículos como o Vox ou o Daily Caller ou jamais participar de boicotes contra Irã, Coreia do Norte, Venezuela, Cuba ou Rússia por discordar das políticas desses governos.
Em vários desses casos, a atitude tirânica do governo seria clara para todos os lados do espectro político. Lara Friedman, presidente da Fundação para a Paz no Oriente Médio, alerta: “O mesmo princípio poderia ser reaproveitado para excluir indivíduos e grupos ligados a qualquer causa ou organização política – seja ela de direita ou de esquerda – julgada indesejável pela maioria parlamentar ou pelo chefe do Executivo.”
“Boicotes econômicos com o objetivo de produzir mudanças políticas estão enraizados na história americana, a começar pelo boicote da colônia ao chá britânico. Mais tarde, a estratégia foi usada pelo Movimento por Direitos Civis em seu combate contra o racismo. A Suprema Corte já reconheceu que boicotes não violentos em nome dos direitos civis constituem ‘uma forma de discurso ou conduta que está sob a proteção da 1ª e da 14ª Emenda’”, explica o texto da ação judicial de Amawi.
Como se pode justificar que, como condição para trabalhar com crianças com atraso de desenvolvimento e problemas de fala, Amawi seja coagida pelo Estado a contrariar sua própria consciência e crenças políticas comprando produtos de um país que ela – e a ONU – acredita estar violenta e ilegalmente ocupando territórios que não lhe pertencem? Concordemos ou não com sua posição política sobre o conflito israelo-palestino, todo americano que acredita minimamente na importância da liberdade de expressão deveria condenar este ataque contra os direitos de Amawi e de outros americanos oprimidos pela censura pró-Israel.
Apesar disso, uma série de especialistas que sempre posaram de baluartes da liberdade de expressão – como Jonathan Chait, Bill Maher, Bari Weiss e os extravagantes renegados da chamada “dark web intelectual” – silenciam quando a censura é direcionada aos críticos de Israel. Houve algumas exceções, como um tuíte de Chait sobre o projeto de lei de Cardin (“O BDS é terrível, mas criminalizá-lo é insano e inconstitucional”) e uma crítica de Weiss a Israel por impedir a entrada no país de um judeu americano favorável ao boicote.
Por causa de um discurso pró-Palestina, Marc Lamont Hill foi demitido da CNN e ameaçado de exoneração pelo presidente do conselho da Universidade Temple, mas não se ouviu nenhuma palavra de protesto desses intelectuais. Eles também silenciaram quando a Universidade de Illinois cancelou a contratação do professor palestino-americano Steven Salaita pelo “crime” de condenar o bombardeio de Gaza por parte de Israel – uma decisão que acabou custando caro à universidade.
“Um verdadeiro defensor da liberdade de expressão também protesta quando os direitos de seus adversários são cerceados.”Como o Intercept já noticiou diversas vezes, as vítimas mais frequentes da censura universitária não são polemistas conservadores, e sim ativistas pró-palestinos. A maior dessas ameaças à liberdade de expressão no mundo é direcionada aos críticos de Israel, sejam eles cidadãos franceses presos por usar camisetas de apoio ao boicote, ativistas canadenses ameaçados de processo ou entidades britânicas proibidas de boicotar Israel.
Trocando em miúdos, para ser digno de crédito, alguém que se diz defensor da liberdade de expressão deve se opor aos constantes ataques contra os direitos de livre expressão e associação orquestrados para proteger o governo israelense de toda e qualquer crítica. Aqueles que se manifestam apenas quando seus aliados são afetados nada mais são do que hipócritas. Um verdadeiro defensor da liberdade de expressão também protesta – e talvez até com mais veemência – quando os direitos de seus adversários são cerceados.
Aqueles que ficam em silêncio enquanto Bahia Amawi é obrigada a renunciar a uma carreira que construiu com muito esforço só por se recusar a trair suas próprias ideias – deixando crianças sem o acompanhamento profissional necessário – podem ser chamados de muita coisa, mas não de “defensores da liberdade de expressão”.
Tradução: Bernardo Tonasse
The post Fonoaudióloga americana se recusa a fazer juramento pró-Israel e perde o emprego appeared first on The Intercept.
Despite assurances from President Donald Trump that the Islamic State is no more, the U.S.-led battle to oust the militant group from its last Syrian stronghold has intensified in recent weeks.
Amid heavy fighting between the Kurdish-led, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and hardened Islamic State fighters, scores of civilians and prisoners have been killed by American airstrikes in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, according to sources on the ground.
As part of that campaign, U.S. warplanes bombed a hospital in the village of Al Shaafah late last month, killing patients and the families of medical personnel working there. The hospital was “reduced to only stones and a huge crater in the middle,” an ISIS fighter said in an interview.
Two senior U.S. diplomats with knowledge of the fight against ISIS who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity confirmed the airstrike on the hospital. One of them maintained that it was justified and legal. He said the ISIS soldiers were firing at coalition forces from the hospital, making it a legitimate target.
On Wednesday, Trump announced a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, tweeting: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” What Trump’s announcement means for the aerial campaign against ISIS remains unclear. On Thursday morning Reuters reported that American airstrikes against ISIS would be ending, citing unnamed U.S. officials. Pentagon spokesperson Com. Rebecca Rebarich, however, said in a statement, “As long as there are U.S. troops on the ground, we will conduct air and artillery strikes in support of our forces. We will not speculate on future operations.”
The reality of ISIS’s demise, however, is far more complex. It’s true that the militant group, which once controlled a wide swath of land stretching from Syria to Iraq, has been significantly weakened. But it still controls some pockets of land in eastern and northeastern Syria, and over the last few weeks, it has waged fierce battles against U.S.-backed forces while facing sorties from U.S. warplanes in the sky. What’s more, ISIS fighters in Syria are confident that they are still being led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph and ISIS leader whose death has been reported by Iraqi, Russian, and Iranian media. It is unlikely that the militants will give up on their fight with Baghdadi still in power.
Multiple sources have told us about recent airstrikes in eastern Syria that have killed the families of ISIS members, as well as a late-November bombing that killed Kurdish prisoners and dissidents being held by the group. In October 2017, when ISIS began to lose control of its de facto capital, Raqqa, multiple U.S. and British news organizations described the battle there as the group’s “last stand.” But it was largely an orchestrated one. As part of a negotiated withdrawal of Raqqa, the Syrian government provided buses to transport ISIS fighters and their families to towns in Deir al-Zour, a province near the border with Iraq that at the time was, for the most part, under ISIS control.
Last week, Syrian Democratic Forces captured Hajin, which had been the only urban area still under ISIS control in Syria. The remaining pockets of ISIS-held territory are villages in Deir al-Zour, along the Euphrates River. These areas are largely under siege by Syrian government forces on one side and Kurdish forces on the other.
For weeks now, markets in these towns and villages have been barren, leaving local civilians with little food. “Things here are very difficult now,” an injured former ISIS fighter in a village south of Hajin said in an interview.
U.S. planes have been dropping leaflets in the remaining ISIS-controlled areas of Syria. The ISIS fighters and residents of those areas often rip up the leaflets and leave them on the side of the road. One side of a leaflet, an image of which we obtained, shows a soldier in fatigues looking out victorious over the desert as two fighter jets fly toward the horizon. The other side shows a tattered ISIS flag as an ISIS fighter throws down his weapon and retreats. “The Syrian Democratic Forces are coming,” the leaflet reads in Arabic.
The humanitarian situation was worsened by a U.S. air campaign that took place from November 25 to December 1 as part of Operation Roundup, which has targeted the Middle Euphrates River Valley and Iraq-Syria border region. In a December 5 press release, U.S. Central Command disclosed the bombings of ISIS armored vehicles, supply routes, staging positions, and a storage facility, among other military targets. But these airstrikes also have targeted heavily trafficked open-air markets and other civilian areas, according to multiple sources on the ground.
The late November attack on the Al Yarmouk Hospital in the village of Al Shaafah, also near Hajin, was part of that operation. The hospital had patients on the first floor, including captured Kurdish fighters; doctors’ families lived on the second floor. The hospital was hit with a so-called double-tap strike — one bomb, followed soon after by a second at the same location — according to sources on the ground. The monitoring group Airwars reported that between 10 and 45 civilians were killed, based on local news accounts.
The intentional bombing of hospitals and civilian areas during armed conflict is a violation of international law. CENTCOM has said it “is committed to avoiding and in every case minimizing civilian casualties” in bombing campaigns against ISIS. While one U.S. official said the hospital was being used as an ISIS attack site, an ISIS fighter presented an alternative narrative in an interview. While he admitted that his understanding was that ISIS fighters were using the hospital as a meeting point, he said the group had been negotiating with the Syrian Democratic Forces to release the Kurdish fighters in its custody in exchange for opening the single main road out of the region, used to get supplies, for up to nine months. The ISIS fighter, who has knowledge of but was not directly involved in the negotiations, said the group believes the United States did not want the deal to happen and bombed the hospital to kill the Kurdish prisoners, thus eliminating ISIS’s bargaining chip.
We could not independently verify the claims of the U.S. official or people on the ground. The U.S. official evaded questions about the presence of civilians at the hospital. A Defense Department spokesperson did not respond to questions about the hospital bombing.
Radical Al Qaeda-linked preacher Abu Qatada, second right, listens to the renowned jihadi ideologue, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, left, in Amman, Jordan, on Sept. 24, 2014.
Photo: Mohammad Hannon/AP
As ISIS has suffered defeats on the battlefield, it has become increasingly riven by internal conflicts over questions of ideology, as well as allegations of corruption on the part of its leaders, according to three sources with knowledge of the divisions, and internal communications we reviewed. Some religious scholars in towns and villages the group controls have questioned ISIS’s leadership and ideological doctrine, the sources said.
Due to their religious authority, these scholars represent a credible threat to ISIS’s control over the region. In recognition of this threat, ISIS’s secret security service had been imprisoning a number of these dissidents in a large building south of Hajin, three sources closely connected to ISIS said. Also held in that prison were Kurdish fighters captured on the battlefield. According to sources on the ground, a U.S. bombing sortie leveled the prison where the ISIS critics and Kurdish fighters were being held in an airstrike in late November. The Defense Department did not respond to questions on the reports of this bombing.
Among those said to have been killed in the strike were a notorious Austrian militant named Mohamad Mahmoud al-Namsawi, who had been seen in videos taking part in executions, and Yousef Simrin, a Jordanian also known as Abu Yacoub al-Urduni, who was formerly a senior religious official within ISIS. Despite their bloody track records, these men had become internal theological critics of the group.
Some of the other men killed in the recent prison airstrike were former high-ranking members of ISIS’s religious and militant leadership. According to sources, the imprisoned former leaders were accused of “apostasy” for opposing some of the group’s extremist practices, such as excommunicating Muslims for not following ISIS’s strict religious edicts. Others were imprisoned for their alleged communication with Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who is considered one of the key religious scholars behind modern militant Salafi jihadism, an extremist ideology associated with groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Maqdisi was a mentor to Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is credited by some with laying the foundation for ISIS. Maqdisi has also criticized ISIS’s extremism and wanton killing of noncombatant Westerners and Muslims. Maqdisi’s opposition to ISIS and his early refusal of personal overtures to join the group, including from Baghdadi himself, caused the group to label him an apostate.
Still, scores of ISIS militants venerated Maqdisi for his knowledge and history in the global jihadist movement. ISIS’s security services accused many of these fighters of having secret communications with Maqdisi following ISIS’s defeats in Raqqa and Mosul. These men were among the prisoners killed in the U.S. airstrike, according to three sources closely connected to ISIS.
ISIS leadership is also plagued by rumors of corruption, according to three sources in contact with former high-ranking ISIS members. These sources said that Baghdadi had taken at least a dozen women as concubines. This narrative gels with claims that Baghdadi kept American aid worker Kayla Mueller as a sex slave before her 2015 execution. Even as ISIS’s territories erode, the sources said, Baghdadi and others in his circle are also believed to be holding onto small fortunes accumulated through oil smuggling and extortion rackets during the group’s rise.
As the situation worsens for civilians in Syria’s ISIS-occupied towns and villages, the militants appear to be retreating. For weeks now, some of the group’s fighters have traveled to the Iraqi border with cash to bribe their way across, the ISIS fighter said. The plan is to slip as many ISIS fighters back into Iraq as possible before its remaining territory in Syria falls to Syrian government or Kurdish forces, the source said.
But even as remnants of ISIS slip into the desert straddling Syria and Iraq, it is unlikely that this will be the last of them. So long as the region is plagued by sectarianism, dictatorships, and collapsing governments, ISIS is bound to make a comeback, said national security analyst Peter Bergen. “The real issue in the region is not ISIS itself,” Bergen said, “but rather the underlying conditions that produced it.”
The post Despite Assurances From Trump, the U.S. Battle Against ISIS in Eastern Syria Is Far From Over appeared first on The Intercept.
Does the world need another podcast? Probably not. But I find myself needing a free-form space to think through the contours of our historical moment — from the epic social and ecological stakes to the savviest strategies for getting ourselves out of this mess. With that in mind, I recently wrangled two of my most brilliant and busiest friends — author and Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and filmmaker and writer Astra Taylor — around a wooden table at a college radio station to start that conversation. There may have been tequila. There was definitely gallows humor.
More than anything else, we found ourselves getting emotional about labor — about the fact that being a decent human is increasingly being griped about as “emotional labor”; about the Dickensian working conditions suffered by the women boxing up our holiday crap; about the fact that caging children is fast becoming a booming career path; and about the tremendous promise of a different kind of work (and leisure) under a Green New Deal. We also tried to figure out why some things feel too mean — and too meaningful — to say on Twitter.
This is our first pilot for a regular podcast we plan to launch in the new year. We aren’t broadcasting pros, so help us! Please share your thoughts on what you liked, what you loathed (be nice), and any ideas for what else you’d like to hear. We also need a show name! Feel free to make your suggestions in the comments below.
Naomi Klein: I want to ask both of you to just tell people a little bit about yourselves.
Astra Taylor: So, my name is Astra Taylor. I’m a writer, occasional filmmaker. I just finished the film called What is Democracy?. And an organizer — I co-founded a debtors union called The Debt Collective.
NK: What about you, Keeanga?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: I’m Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. I’m the author of two books, “From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation,” and I edited a book titled “How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.” I am also an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University.
NK: Which is where we are. We’re here at Princeton. I’m Naomi Klein. I am also a writer like these two amazing women who happen to be my personal gurus. I’ve been writing books for 20 years. My first book was “No Logo.” My last book was “Battle for Paradise” about Puerto Rico. I wrote a few books in between like “The Shock Doctrine,” “This Changes Everything.” I’m obsessed with climate change. I co-founded a group called The Leap about the need to change in a big way, in a hurry. I also have the first job I’ve had in 20 years. I am the inaugural Gloria Steinem Chair in media culture and feminist studies at Rutgers University.
And we’re here for a bunch of reasons. One of the reasons I’m here is I love these two women dearly. We’re also here because we feel like there’s even though there are so many podcasts, we feel like there’s not enough people occupying the space we’re trying to occupy here around this table and we’re not going to define that. I think that’s going to come out, but what we want to do is to engage with big ideas and news from an unabashedly radical perspective.
Protester: The politician who claims to care about our generation must back a Green New Deal.
News Anchor: U.S. authorities fired tear gas at mostly adult males, but some of it hit women and children.
Woman: They stand over you. They watch you. They holler at you: “Get the work out. Get the work out now, now.”
KYT: We all know that sometimes it’s a wiser idea not to press send on that email and not to go through with your most scathing tweet because you’ll spend the rest of the day dealing with trolls and generally being put into an even fouler mood. So, these are our draft folders. Don’t at me, motherfucker. Naomi, why don’t you start us off?
NK: So I didn’t have that many this week, but there was an article that appeared in The Atlantic that that somebody tagged me in on Twitter because they know I’m interested in this. It was about emotional labor, the idea of emotional labor, and it was an interview with Arlie Hochschild who is the person who coined this term in this book, that she —this really famous sociology text “The Managed Heart,” which came out in 1983. Now, it was an interesting interview with her because it was about how she feels about the way this term that she coined has been used and abused of late, right? I have ambivalent feelings about that because anybody who’s a writer out there puts ideas out and I don’t believe in owning those terms just because you were the first one to use it. But still, it can be very weird when you come up with the term and then you watch it take on this weird life of its own.
So, what she meant when she wrote about it in the first place was the kind of paid labor, paid job where part of your job is to convey and inspire a certain kind of emotion. So, the most famous kind of iconic example of this is the airline attendant, right? So, their job is not just to serve drinks and keep people safe; it’s to smile. it’s to make people calm and feel good and all of that, right? So, part of that per the job is emotional labor, which isn’t actually really remunerated. Most of emotional work is women’s work. But now, this phrase emotional labor has taken on this completely other life and you hear people very resentfully talking about the emotional labor that they have to engage in and they’re referring to things like taking care of their own children or you know, taking care of an elderly parent. And often the reason why it’s resentful is because this work isn’t fairly distributed in society, right?
So, women do more of it than men. In academia professors of color have a lot more to do — taking, you know, emotional responsibility for students of color who are having a hard time in institutions that exclude them. But, I still feel like this phrase is a really slippery slope because — and so, what I was going to was I was going to tweet this article and I think it was something along the lines of, you know, I’m really tired of people complaining about having to be decent human beings and calling it emotional labor.
I think the goal should be for everyone to be a decent human being and for us to take better care of each other and this seems to be part of a trend of like further commodifying our relationships like monetizing our relationships. I don’t want to count my friendships and mentorships and work that I feel is just, well, just not work. It’s not work. It’s just being a human being in the world. So, anyway, I almost tweeted this and then I thought I don’t want to spend the rest of this week fending people off who are accusing me of God-knows-what. So I just didn’t do it and saved it for just a chit-chatting with you ladies.
AT: Well, because also they would, as they pose a rebuttal, see that would be emotional labor that they wouldn’t want to engage in so they’d be doubly upset.
KYT: I mean, I’ve heard it mostly, this, the emotional labor within the context among activists who have talked about it’s usually not teaching white people about something or other. And I understand part of that, but then there’s there’s an aspect of it which is, well, that that’s what activists do, right? Activists are engaged in the process not of necessarily teaching but that this is part of what we do in terms of trying to get people to think differently about different things in the world.
And to me, I don’t know, it says something about the phrase or think about things in terms of how neoliberalism creeps into unsuspecting places like activism. And to me, that’s a kind of expression of that.
AT: I mean, I think this will be a theme of this episode, this issue of work and it’s also it’s like we don’t have — all work is alienated labor. So, if someone’s asking you to perform emotional labor then it must be in this must be oppressive, right? Because your sense of what work is, is a negative one. But I’m always conflicted in activist context about that point because it’s like well, yeah, it is true. There’s this, you know, you have to constantly engage in the act of like political education and trying to, you know, explain to people things that you wish they already got. And yet, that is, that’s the work of activism. And that’s not alienated labor, necessarily.
KYT: Who else will do it?
NK: But also, it’s okay to take a break from it. You know, it’s okay to take a break. It’s okay to seek fair redistribution of that labor. I do have a lot of time for that fatigue of just constantly doing that work and there should be the freedom to walk away. And a lot of people approach it with entitlement, as we all know like, you know, people just demand definitions and explanations. And I mean, just like ignore that, right? You have to ignore that to get through the day. But one of the points that Hochschild makes in this interview is like if you’re feeling that playing with your kids is emotional labor, then there’s a bigger problem in your life, you know. And so then, what we need to get at is why people feel so incredibly stressed that every part of life, including the parts of life that are supposed to be joyful and not monetized, are feeling so taxing.
AT: Right, and if you feel, if you’re smiling at your partner and you feel equivalent to a stewardess who has to smile at the like asshole guy in first class, like there’s something wrong with your partnership. You’re married to the wrong guy.
NK: You’ve got a bigger problem than the distribution of emotional labor. I’m going to pass the drafts baton to Astra. What are you — what have you got in there?
AT: I had more — I had a few this week. Well, one was I finished a book that I’ve been working on for a year.
KYT: Congratulations.
AT: Thank you. And so, I had this moment where I was like, I actually loaded up the Twitter. I was going to write, “I finished my book,” and then I stopped myself because I felt like I would be bragging.
NK: I mean, I love that about you, Astra, because you’re so not built for 2018. Keeanga also finished a book. I don’t remember her bragging about it on Twitter.
KY: Facebook.
NK: You bragged on Facebook? Okay.
AT: Facebook’s more like friends. Twitter’s more into the void, you know.
KYT: But I did finish a book.
AT: Congratulations. But I also thought, then not only should I tweet about finishing it, but maybe I should tweet about like the days where I just sat at my desk in a pile of like cold coffee cups and candy wrappers and only wrote, you know, a paragraph. Like shouldn’t I tweet, not just the culmination, but the struggle?
NK: I think you should both tweet more about having finished your books. And I know that your publishers would agree.
AT: I should have tweeted.
NK: It’s not too late. You can tweet right now. But yes, the drafts folder. What have you got in your drafts folder, Keeanga?
KYT: So, as has been brought up, I did finish book last week and it means that probably, for the first time in I don’t know, maybe 10 years. I’ve been able to read what I’ve wanted to read. And so, I picked up a book “Heavy” by Kiese Laymon. I laid on my couch for about 5 hours and read the book, almost cover to cover, and I haven’t read a book like that in years where, you know, not just that I had a block of time to read but that I couldn’t actually put the book down. This is, you know, this is a memoir, almost a coming-of-age story for a Black teenager in Mississippi in the 1980s and 1990s. And I think it’s one of the few books that has come out that articulates some of the experience of what I would refer to as a post-Black Revolution generation. And by that I mean young Black people who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s whose parents lived through and were radicalized by the 1960s. The book is fascinating.
AT: So, why didn’t you tweet about it, though?
KYT: It was too much. Especially, you know, Twitter is for short, quick thoughts and the book is so layered. It is heavy. There was too much to say about it.
[music]
AT: So, the idea is that each week on the show, we’re going to bring a discussion about what we feel is imperative to us, to the listeners, the world; something that has irritated us, inspired us; something we think is really important and we want to ask questions that we don’t see being asked other places, bring a little bit of a anti-capitalist analysis to things. So, these are our moments of angry rants, hopeful rants, reflections. And Naomi, do you want to kick us off? What have you been thinking about this week?
NK: So, I’ve been obsessing over the past couple of weeks about the idea of a Green New Deal.
AT: Last couple weeks?
NK: So for a good decade now, but the latest incarnation of my obsession is this kind of surprise, right, that came out after the midterms because during the midterms, climate change was not a big issue. At least, if you followed the elections via mainstream media, it didn’t seem to be like a definitive issue that people were voting on particularly. It was more about health care and other important issues.
But immediately after the election, you saw basically young people declare a state of emergency. Young activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young people from The Sunrise Movement, which is a relatively new group — it’s a climate change focused group led by young people in university and high school, as well. And the first demand was for politicians to pledge not to take money from fossil fuel companies. And then it extended from there for the Democrats to use their majority in Congress to declare a state of emergency about climate change and to introduce a bold response to it, which they were calling a Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited them in and this was heresy, you know, for an incoming congresswoman to visit activists occupying the Speaker’s — the Speaker-to-be’s office.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: But it’s inevitable that we are going to create jobs. It’s inevitable that we’re going to create industry, and it’s inevitable that we can use the transition to a hundred percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America.
NK: What she’s trying to do is get a select committee, created in Congress, on a Green New Deal and they would spend the next year consulting with movements, consulting with sub-national governments, cities, states, academics, real experts in the field to come up with a plan for what that would look like. And so, it’s sort of inspired by the original New Deal in the 1930s, but focused on the need to get to a hundred percent renewables very, very quickly, but doing so in a way that, as it says in her resolution, would virtually eliminate poverty in the United States, would prioritize frontline communities — the communities that have the dirtiest industry in their backyards, which is invariably communities of color, almost invariably. So, those would be the communities that would get some of the important jobs in this green transition. It would also not leave workers behind who work in the fossil fuel industry and so on.
So, I mean what’s exciting about this to me is that, you know, we know that there’s not going to be any major legislation introduced by the Democrats in the next couple of years. And that’s really scary from a climate change perspective because we just can’t lose these next two years. So, what’s exciting to me about this is that it makes use of the next two years to get into a position where, in 2021, there could be a new government that hits the ground running with a plan that is elected on this as its platform, right?
Because, you know, when Trump was elected, the really scary part of it — and there were lots of very, very, very scary parts of it — but from a climate change perspective what we all knew was that we could not lose these next four years because we just heard from the IPCC, which is the body representing the amalgamation of hundreds of climate scientists who come up with a sort of consensus document to advise governments around the world. They produced a report a couple of months ago that said that we have 12 years, a mere 12 years to reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 45 percent So, that doesn’t mean we start in 12 years. We have to have gotten it done in 12 years.
AT: And they say, right, in the very beginning like —
NK: Unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.
AT: Yeah, not just some science magic.
NK: No, no, I mean like agriculture, transportation, building. I mean, they name it, right? So, that’s why a New Deal frame is so important because usually when neoliberals talk about climate change, it’s like well, we just need to tax. You know, we just need, we need cap-and-trade. We need a tax. And that’s wrong from a scientific perspective, right? Like, that’s not going to do it, you know. It requires industrial transformation of the kind we’ve not seen since the second World War. But the other piece of it is look at what is happening in France, right? We have had for so long an unjust response to climate change. So, we have to do something about climate change so let’s just make you know, people pay more at the pump which is what Emmanuel Macron, like the neoliberal politician extraordinaire, that’s what he’s doing and there’s an uprising in France. And what people are saying is climate action, I think the exact phrases that I heard was, “Climate action is for rich people who can afford to care about the end of the world. We have to care about the end of the month,” right? And that dichotomy between like the people who have daily economic concerns, which is overwhelmingly most people, and this idea that caring about the fate of our —
KYT: Well that’s how Trump frames it.
NK: Exactly, yeah. He says, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not true, but I’m not going to sacrifice all those jobs. And the Green New Deal frame is let’s create millions of jobs, right? And let’s make sure they’re living wage jobs. Let’s make sure they’re unionized jobs. And let’s break this idea that responding to climate change is going to cause working people to suffer. In fact, it’s the opposite. We can create services, better services, better jobs and it’s not about you know, averting pain in the future. It’s about improving lives right now. So, I’m super excited about this. You know, I’m a little bit like the girl who cried “Last chance to save the world,” you know. I’ve written variations on this column before but I really do believe this is sort of — making this happen is our last chance to avert really catastrophic climate change.
AT: So, I have like two questions I’d love to hear your thoughts on about it. I’d just love to hear you reflect on this because one thing, is okay, there can be a way of pitching this that’s like we can all be richer in the sense of you know, there’s abundance. We can have better lives. We can have more free time. You know, we can have a planet that’s habitable where a Green New Deal means investment. It means more jobs. It means growth, right? So, in other words, we are kind of saving capitalism or also, a real Green New Deal would be a profound transformation. Does that make sense?
NK: No, it does make sense. It does make sense. And it is a challenge because I think that this incoming class in Congress is pretty radical, but they’re not going all the way there in terms of the challenge that this poses to really a consumer lifestyle right?
AT: Because the New Deal invented, I mean, it like sort of created the consumer lifestyle in a way. Like that was a sort of mid-20th Century, right, where consumption is — I mean, even FDR said something like, you know, in the future, we’re going to pay more attention to the consumer than the producer. I mean, it helped inaugurate, you know, the system that’s gotten US in here. So, is this going to undo that and build something new?
NK: Well, first I would just say that part of what’s exciting about it is that it isn’t drafted yet, right? And the idea is really to talk to the people who are most impacted by the transition, most impacted by climate change, the experts who know the most and come up with a plan. And what I know is that there is no way to lower emissions by the amount that we need to lower it without confronting the logic of endless growth, right?
So, there are things we can have more of — there’s an abundance in certain kinds of activities, including caring for each other, which is part of the reason why this emotional labor thing grates at me so much, like this resenting of like the work of caring for each other. Because I also think that’s kind of low-carbon work that should be part of any kind of Green New Deal, like recognized and valorized. We have to live differently. So, I think we are in this moment where we’re sort of willing to add but not subtract like we do need to consume less energy and it can’t just be about sort of feeding the wheel of overconsumption and creating more disposable income. But I mean, Keeanga, you’re the historian and you know the failures of the old New Deal, of the original New Deal. So, what are you feeling about this language?
KYT: Well, I think there are two things that it can introduce. One is that the New Deal, in some respects, was a response from the political establishment to kind of offset more radical demands. So, that’s for certain. In the U.S., we get the New Deal, which is a kind of reform movement that is seen as a way to save the system, but that institutes major reforms in the lives of ordinary Americans, which really introduces the idea of a welfare state as incomplete as it actually was. But we also recognize the limits of that. The main one being it cut out Black people.
NK: And women and migrants.
KYT: Right, so in the 1960s, you get an attempt to try to recoup some of that with the Great Society but all of these — and one of the things that is important — are precipitated by mass social movement and upheaval. And so, that’s a little bit different and interesting with the situation today. There has been a kind of nascent development of climate activism, you know, so we’ve seen like really large marches in the last year. We’ve seen the attempts to organize on a mass level around these issues that has not necessarily developed into large, self-sustaining organization. And so I think ultimately, what makes the difference as to whether or not the Democratic Party would take this up as a serious issue in the next election has to do with the development of that movement. The lack of real discussion around this, even from the Democrats in the midterms, I think, you know, speaks to the complicating factors.
The fossil fuel industry is very bipartisan in its approach to —
NK: Which is another key part of this is, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s demands — the creation of the select committee and that no politician who takes fossil fuel money should be able to be on it, which rules out basically —
KYT: Everyone.
NK: Almost everyone.
KYT: Yeah, and that’s the complicating factor but you know, that’s good. But that’s why we have to — there has to be independent organizing around this in order to make it real. They’re not going to do it on their own.
AT: Yeah, which brings me to — So, the question, another thing I thought was interesting there was your idea — I don’t know if it was your proposal or you’d heard it from movements, but that there could be a constituent assembly, some outside force that then is working on this and flushing out this bill maybe state-by-state, municipality-by-municipality, so that, by 2020, it’s like this is done and it’s actually has democratic legitimacy. And reading that ,I thought that was so exciting. I was like ready to go.
NK: That was me just getting carried away.
KYT: I think it’s nice. That’s not you getting carried away. That’s what will actually be necessary in order to make this happen.
AT: Yeah, and so, I think that’s that piece because you go yeah, the New Deal but yeah, there was labor militancy, you know. Or the Civil Rights Movement —
[crosstalk]
NK: The New Deal was improvisational. They kept having to add stuff, right, because it wasn’t working. It didn’t actually pull the U.S. out of depression. It wasn’t until the second World War and then you had this massive transformation, you know and stimulus of the economy through trillions —
KYT: And the growth of the consumer society.
AT: Yeah, but I think that constituent assembly idea is really good. Like, I don’t see that as being carried away. I see that as the thing —
NK: No, I’m just saying that it didn’t come from like — but I agree. I agree. It’s absolutely essential. I don’t actually believe this select committee, you know, I don’t think it will probably be created. I think they’ll be some sort of compromise and it will be absolutely necessary to have that outside pressure. And I think there’s just enough sort of inside legitimacy now with this cohort in Congress to actually kick the movements in the butt, right, to get extremely concrete towards creating a people’s platform. And then the message is you cannot be a progressive running in 2020 that isn’t running on this platform, right? And that means that it has to come, not just from the climate movement, it has to come from many different movements coming together.
[protesters singing]
Woman: So, I’m here with one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, Varshini Prakash.
Varshini Prakash: So, we are amazed and inspired by hundreds of young people taking action. We had three simultaneous sit-ins. We had 46 simultaneous lobby visits this morning. It is clear that the momentum, the inspiration amongst young people is only growing for the real solutions to the climate crisis.
Woman: And what are the stakes? What happens if we don’t act?
VP: I mean the stakes are everything. It’s the water we drink. It’s the air we breathe. It’s the safety and security of the places that we call home. It’s about whether my generation and the generations that come after me get to live out our lives in peace and dignity or in a world that is quickly and rapidly falling into chaos and destruction.
[protesters singing]
NK: I mean what’s appealing about this framework is that it can grow, right? I mean there’s a lot that fits inside it and you know, everything is ultimately linked to where we live — the earth, the planet, right? Including the fact that a lot more people are having to move because where they live has become uninhabitable for a variety of reasons. So, Keeanga, this relates to something that has been on your mind this week.
KYT: I wanted to take up this ongoing issue of the crisis on the southern border in the United States.
News Anchor: What started as a peaceful march turned into chaos.
News Anchor: President Trump is defending the use of tear gas on migrants who rushed at a major border crossing and attempted to get into the U.S. illegally.
News Anchor: Well, migrants staying south of the border are giving President Trump an ultimatum: let them into the country or pay for their return home.
News Anchor: Over at Friendship Park, more razor wire installed lining the top of the border fence. Barriers also topped with razor wire, sending a strong signal to the caravan just on the other side.
Woman: They’re at the beach so they don’t have — at night, it gets very cold now, so they don’t have any roof under their heads. So, the sleeping bags, the blankets, the food, toys for children. It’s a necessity at the moment.
KYT: And part of that is you know, in the Trump news cycle, I think that we become so used to moving on from an issue when it’s fallen out of the mainstream media’s news cycle. But, I think that it’s important to bring attention — continue to keep attention — on what is an ongoing crisis at the border. There was the news about the tear gas that was fired at migrants in Tijuana and for weeks, there have been six thousand migrants, mostly from Central America, who have been staying at an abandoned sports complex in Tijuana in complete squalor.
The Trump Administration is only processing around 40 people a day who are applying for asylum status and so when people, you know “charge the border,” which was the pretext for firing tear gas at them, what the context within which that was happening was that people had been in these conditions for weeks now. 40 people a day being processed means that there’s something like a 5-week wait in order to get your application looked at and so, out of desperation people did charge the border. And the second part of that is the ongoing detention of young people — of children, really.
What I don’t know if people know is that there are literally tens of thousands of other young people and children who continue to be detained in camps along the border. There [are] 14,000 migrant children who are under the control of the United States. The largest camp is in Texas. It’s the Tornillo camp that has 2,300 children inside and I just wanted to bring that particular camp up because I think it exemplifies the lack of plan that the Trump Administration has and it speaks to the brutality of the policy.
This is a camp in which people who have been — agencies that have been contracted to provide services within it or prohibited by those contracts to speaking to the media. They are prohibited to speak publicly in general about the conditions that exist within the detention centers and they’re prohibited to speak specifically about children that they encountered. And probably the most insidious part of this arrangement is that children who are detained by the U.S. government are entitled to legal representation by the United States government, but the office that coordinates that also employs the lawyers who represent these children. And so, the contract that they use to employ legal assistance says that they are not allowed to sue the U.S. government for the release of these young people or they will lose their funding.
AT: Hold on. So, their employer?
KYT: Yes.
AT: So there’s basically a major conflict of interest.
KYT: There is a complete and total conflict of interest, yes. So, the Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for finding nonprofit legal organizations to represent the young people who were being held in detention and part of the agreement when they contract with these organizations is that those organizations are not permitted to sue the U.S. government for the release of detained migrants’ children. These practices are allowed to persist in secrecy. These kids have no access to the public. This creates the conditions for all sorts of nefarious things to happen when you also consider or factor into that the Trump Administration waived the requirement, at this particular detention center, the requirement for background checks for the staff people who work there.
AT: It’s funny because we’re recording at Princeton and just the other day, a friend was telling me about how she came to school here a decade ago. And the first week, her first week on campus, she engaged in a work slowdown at the campus bookstore. So, she would pretend to buy all this stuff and then ring it up really slowly and then go “Oh no, I need to return it,” right? So just the slow down and that’s the techniques that they’re using at the border. The state is using this technique of a work slowdown, right.
And it’s like a weaponization of bureaucracy that we don’t really have a word to describe this because I also see it in my organizing with debtors when they’re engaging with the Department of Education or with other, you know, authorities where it’s like the bureaucracy is designed in such a way to prevent people from ever enacting their rights, right? And yet, you’re allowed to submit that first form, right. And it needs a name because it’s a technique.
And you know, it’s analogous to this kind of slowdown that you know also, I don’t think the left uses enough.
NK: The thing that I find just so terrifying about this is just that this can still be going on and that there are thousands of young people detained. And that moment of horror of just like this shall not pass, you know, not on our watch and just really heroic activism on a large scale. Like there’s lots of organizers who are still organizing and are still doing incredible work, but that moment of just sort of mass refusal that has passed, right? And not only that, but then they went on the offensive during the midterms and decided to make the defining mobilizing issue for Republicans the so-called migrant caravan, right?
AT: It didn’t do as well as they thought, though.
KYT: It cost them.
NK: It cost them and that’s important to highlight, I think.
KYT: Yes, it’s fallen. We shouldn’t interpret it falling out of the news cycle as people no longer care about it or that the sense of empathy and horror no longer exists. But it is — it does feel like a continuing shock and awe strategy of the Trump Administration that you’re constantly inundated with so many crises that it’s difficult to keep up with them. The normalization of creating detention camps in the middle of the desert and not just the normalization but creating the actual apparatus, and the tools, and the techniques, and the logics, and all of that that go into establishing this is something to keep track of, and something to talk about, and to continue to reference.
NK: I mean the other thing that that becomes clear the longer this goes on is that this is a for-profit business, right?
KYT: Absolutely.
NK: It’s a business model and the longer it exists as a business model, the harder it is to dismantle, right, because then you have stakeholders who are protecting their market. These are privatized detention centers — converted Walmart’s and so on. People are getting really, really rich off this. And this was always, you know, I’m old enough to have — you know, like we covered the incredibly privatized invasion of Iraq, right, and companies like Halliburton, and Blackwater, and all of them were seeing this as you know, war as a market for them. Parts of war have always been privatized, including the weapons, but parts of that particular invasion were privatized that had never been privatized before, including the construction of bases and so on. And all of those contractors are interested in getting into the immigration detention market, the construction of walls, and so on.
KYT: So, that’s the other part. I mean, that’s another big part of the the story. The New York Times did a fascinating article about Southwest Key, the so-called charity that is responsible for building — well, they’re not actually building, they’re renting detention centers across border areas and becoming rich even though it’s a charity, that actually people are building their careers on the detention of these kids.
AT: But how do we switch that frame, right, because it’s like the cliche is they’re taking our jobs, right? That it’s a, you know, a jobs issue, but it’s like no, it’s actually growth industry for some people. Like the idea of two billion climate refugees by 2100, which is a number that’s —
KYT: It’s job creation.
AT: It’s like job creation for border patrol and for detention centers. You know, so it’s also stuff like what kind of work? Where is the moral line?
[music]
NK: Sure, it’s creating jobs. It is true that if Trump got his wall, it would create jobs. It is true that trading with Saudi Arabia creates jobs. It is true that boiling the planet creates jobs, and I really do think we are going to have to have some tough conversations with labor about — we sometimes say that you know, the labor movement knows how to add but not subtract, right? Like we can create huge numbers of jobs in this great transition, but we will have to subtract.
And we have to have a conversation about work which recognizes that not all work is of equal value, right? And there’s some kinds of work that is simply not okay, right? It is not okay to have a job creation program by building a wall with Mexico. It is not okay any more than it’s okay to have job creation locking up children. Like, we have to talk about morality in this and values. And this is a little bit TBD in the building movement department.
KYT: Well, we’re talking about work.
AT: I know it’s a perfect segue here.
KYT: That brings us to Astra.
AT: I mean, I think this really is the theme that unites, you know, what both of you are talking about, which is yeah, what is what is work? What kind of labor do we want to see in the world? I mean, yeah climate change when we’ve killed all the pollinators, there will be a whole new professional field there for, you know, human pollinators going plant by plant. It’s already happening in parts of China and other areas where you know —
NK: What?
AT: Yeah, human beings being paid $19 a day to pollinate plants because there are no more insects. Job creation. Get rid of those insects. They’re taking our jobs.
NK: That’s like a whole — this is like a whole new take on worker bee or has everybody already made that joke?
AT: I just made that joke. You heard it here first. No, I mean, yeah, so I’ve been thinking I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about work and, you know, technology for a few years. And so, I was in Toronto about a year ago and I was ordering my organic rice bowl as I like to do. And this is man in a suit in front of me was just like holding his phone and he was like, oh my God, how did the phone know that my order was going to be done 20 minutes early? And the girl was like because I sent you a message, right? It was just this moment where like he is so eager to believe that a robot had overseen the whole thing and was like that much quinoa, that much kale, you know, he didn’t want to see the human being there. And so now I’m just constantly like — it’s like changed my vision and I’m like, wow, the human labor that is being erased and being obscured.
NK: Astra, you’re very humble, but you did coin a phrase.
AT: I coined a phrase: faux-tomation. So, like fake automation — F-A-U-X, right? And to kind of describe this process like when work is being hidden. And I was looking for historical antecedents and I was like, okay, Jefferson’s dumbwaiter, which if it was made today would totally be a smart waiter, right? Because it’s all about hiding the labor that went into you know, bringing the food to the table. And so, there’s still this like race and gender dynamic because so much of the invisible work, especially connected to technology is done overseas. It’s in the Philippines. It’s in India.
So, there are more people working to clean up social media sites, content moderators basically digital janitors than there are actual employees of Facebook and Google. So, that’s just like one dramatic example of all this invisible labor. So, you know, and why I have been obsessed with this—it’s about the way that these processes are presented as inevitable. So, there’s an ideological component and there’s like the real component because yeah, there’s like magic technology. It’s true. But then there’s the way that these phrases like “robots are taking our jobs” give agency to technology that the technology doesn’t possess like actually capitalists are investing in technology to make workers weaker, more exploited, to speed up the work, to de-skill the work, right? Like nothing is inevitable.
You know, we really have to challenge the way that we talk about work, the way that we value work, and you know to recognize that it’s something that we make. And I just think for me, the work issue is at the front and center of the Green New Deal stuff. It’s obviously, you know, our assumption that like there’s just a finite number of jobs and immigrants are taking them is total bullshit just challenging all of these assumptions about work and labor that are being peddled, you know.
NK: So, why do we keep hearing this idea that work is disappearing, that robots are taking over, if it’s not true?
AT: Well, we’ve been hearing it for a long time, like it’s a story that goes back.
KYT: But isn’t automation, I mean isn’t there a reality?
AT: Yes, but automation — so for example, the World Bank has its 2019 report on the state of the world and this year’s was on jobs. And from what I can tell, reading economists and reading these sort of summaries of the evidence, is jobs haven’t disappeared; jobs have changed. And so, I think we also need — this technology what it does is it speeds up work, it de-skills work, it spies on employees, right? It monitors their movements. AI is the thing. There’s this software that’s called Call Miner and it’s the software that’s listening to the person at the call center and it’s monitoring their voice, and their tone, and their every word, and you know, it’s making them work in a certain way that’s more efficient. It’s making sure that they don’t let the person off the phone.
So, it’s so much of this technology it’s not automating jobs and getting rid of them. It’s allowing the employers to extract more value and it’s making work a lot shittier in the process and basically like this is also what the World Bank is saying, you know, it’s saying yeah, we’re not seeing the mass disappearance of jobs. We’re seeing jobs get more precarious, more informal. But jobs aren’t going away.
NK: And more organized sectors are being replaced with less organized sectors. Like I mean, Amazon is — they want, they’re opening stores with no tellers, right? But they’re a huge employer. They’re one of the worst employers in the world.
AT: And the people that’re employed — the people they employ, we can’t see, right? Again, it’s obscuring. It’s like those people who are racing around their warehouses or their fulfillment centers.
KYT: Oh, no.
AT: Yes, that’s what they’re called. They don’t have warehouses. You know, there are people working but we don’t see them. I don’t know and it’s also why — why call it automation? Like if we check out our own groceries, like that’s not automated. I’m just doing the work.
[music]
AT: Alright, everyone. So, if this show hasn’t been dark enough for you, this is your moment. This is our dystopia check-in. For our dystopia check-in, we want to highlight some of the you know, creeping dystopia, or maybe it’s already present and there’s a lot. It’s hard to pick. We are going to talk about XPO Logistics, a nightmare company that maybe you’ve heard of, maybe you haven’t. I really wanted us to talk about this because I read a story in New York Times. There’s also, their podcast, The Daily, did a special episode on this and it was one of these stories were it’s not something that I didn’t know but the way that it was told really affected me.
Woman: I call it modern-day slavery with a little pay. That’s what I call it. If it’s too hot in there, that prolongs the day. You know, if you’re hot, you’re exhausted, you’re dehydrated, you can’t push out as much work. So they still punish you.
AT: And so it’s one of these invisible companies. They do logistics, 12-billion-dollar company. And basically, the chances are if you use a cell phone on the northeast, specifically a Verizon phone that this company has shipped something to you. And reading the story, I just kept having the phrase “dark satanic mills,” right? Like we are in this retro future. It’s so high-tech. They’re putting these computers, tiny little computers into boxes, shipping them overnight and yet the work conditions, are just, you know, something out of Dickens, like 120 degrees, no air conditioning, 12-14 hour shifts, and women working the line, lifting heavy boxes, and basically like having miscarriages left and right. So, there’s story of five different women in the course of a month or two.
And a woman telling her supervisor she’s not feeling good and having cardiac arrest and dying on the job. And the supervisor not allowing the employees to perform CPR or to stop work, basically saying work has got to go out, putting some emergency cones around her body and making the work go on. In Tennessee, in 2017. And I just — I had this moment where I was like, I can’t buy anything ever again, right, like I’m done. I’m making paper-mache gifts. I’m getting the macrame out and like I’m never ordering anything because it’s this whole instant delivery like you got-to-have-it-tomorrow framework. Because what this company does is it provides that service to companies that are trying to compete with Amazon. Last week, there was also a story about Amazon warehouse and women having miscarriages on the factory floor from lifting heavy boxes, right? So, it’s just like —
NK: I mean, we don’t have to go back to Dickens, though. Like, this is the way that, this is work conditions in the factories that produce those products now, right, in the Philippines, in China, in Indonesia. And that has been the case for you know, 25 years or so, right? Where you know, I heard stories 20 years ago from 18-year-old workers in the Philippines and Indonesia who were putting together computers and cell phones and the rest of it. And you know, they were peeing into bags under their workstations because they weren’t — and they were experiencing all kinds of reproductive stress. And so, it’s like now —
KYT: It’s the integration of the U.S. into the global economy, actually.
AT: Yeah, I thought of your book.
NK: Production, delivery, all of it, right, the whole just-in-time production chain.
AT: And they’re subcontractors. I mean, you write about this in “No Logo,” right, these companies that are like, you know, again, because who’s heard of this company, right?
NK: It isn’t Amazon. It doesn’t have a supermarket that you can boycott or yeah, which is why you need to just not buy anything.
AT: Which is why I’m going to paper-mache.
KYT: Brent Simon, who is a historian at Temple, wrote a book a couple of years ago called “The Hamlet Fire” that is organized around this idea of the cheap and the way that cheap has come to dominate U.S. society both labor, but also more generally. And how it almost creates a feedback loop which is to say that the degradation of work and the cheapening of labor creates a stable market for the production of cheap goods, the stuff that makes up American consumption and that’s part of the dynamic, I think, that we’re experiencing.
AT: You’re making me feel like when you say like, we’re so harried, right, and we want this cheap stuff. It’s like, you know, so then going back to the Green New Deal, if we let this go — because there’s this idea [of] we all just want convenience, but it’s like, or do we need convenience? Because we don’t have the time, like we’re not time-rich. So, therefore —
KYT: It’s all connected.
AT: It’s all connected, right? So, this is where I’m like right, the vision of a better life that needs to be articulated in order for something like the Green New Deal to really capture people’s imagination like has to address these kinds of things as well.
NK: Yeah, it has to address, I mean this idea that this is actually delivering happiness. So, if that’s true, then why are there record use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications and why —
KYT: And the growth of death by despair.
NK: Death by despair. I mean, whatever it is, it isn’t working even though it’s called the American Dream, it’s not.
AT: And what’d George Carlin say, it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
NK: Okay, that’s our show. Thanks for tuning in. This episode was produced by Julia Furlan with research and production support from Dina Sayedahmed. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. We recorded the show at WPRB Princeton. Joshua Becker was our engineer.
New York Times article referenced in this podcast:
Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Natalie Kitroeff, October 2018
The post A Podcast in the Making: Getting Emotional About Labor appeared first on The Intercept.
On January 30, 2017, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced that the Pentagon had conducted a “very successful” special operations raid against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. The raid resulted in the deaths of “an estimated 14 AQAP members” and one U.S. service member, later identified as Navy Seal William “Ryan” Owens, Spicer said.
A Pentagon spokesperson briefed reporters on the operation the same day, also saying that the raid had killed 14 Al Qaeda operatives. In the weeks that followed, the raid would become the subject of tremendous controversy, as conflicting media reports debated whether it had yielded significant intelligence, as the administration claimed, and whether it had killed an intended high-level target. But when it came to the death toll, the initial press coverage largely parroted the administration’s estimate.
But according to a classified report by the Joint Special Operations Command Center for Counterterrorism Studies, the Pentagon privately assessed that the raid had killed more than twice as many people as it had initially said.
“The battle damage assessment (BDA) included approximately 35 enemy killed in action (EKIA) and one ZU-23 anti-aircraft weapon destroyed,” according to a heavily redacted copy of the report obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act. The operation also “resulted in one friendly KIA,” meaning someone “killed in action,” presumably Owens, “with minimal civilian casualties,” the report notes.
Those numbers contradict on-the-ground reporting, which found that most of the dead were villagers who mistook the SEALs for members of a Yemeni rebel group known as the Houthis, their local adversaries. Those killed included at least six women and 10 children under the age of 13, residents said. In the days after the raid, the Pentagon admitted “regrettably that civilian non-combatants were likely killed,” but did not update its casualty estimate. Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich told The Intercept by email that the figure of 35 enemy dead was the result of a lengthier formal assessment.
“There is not a discrepancy between the two numbers,” Rebarich wrote. “The initial reports were 14 enemy killed in action (EKIA). This was discussed publicly by Pentagon spokesman Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, on January 30, a little more than a day after the operation. A more [thorough] assessment was conducted, as part of the formal after action report, where it was determined 35 enemy combatants were killed during the operation.”
It is unclear how the Pentagon came up with either number. The estimate of 35 enemy fighters killed in action differs significantly from independent estimates of the death toll, even when women and children are included. Villagers in al-Ghayil gave the Bureau of Investigative Journalism a list of 25 names of residents killed in the raid, nine of whom were said to be children under the age of 13. Human Rights Watch collected a list of 23 names and ages of villagers who had died; a witness told the group that two other people had also died, but he could not remember their names.
The list of the dead provided by AQAP included eight additional men and a handful of children who were not on the lists supplied by villagers or known to be residents of the village, with the men identified only by noms de guerre. Taken together, those numbers suggest that a death toll as high as 35 could be possible, but only if the Pentagon counted women and children as “enemies.”
Among the dead was 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki, the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and radical cleric who the Obama administration claimed had an operational role in Al Qaeda. Al-Awlaki’s son Abdulrahman — who was not accused of being affiliated with Al Qaeda — was killed in a drone strike at the age of 16 shortly after his father’s death, but the Obama administration later said that he was not the target.
“Nearly two years have passed since the raid in Bayda raised concerns regarding U.S. compliance with international rules to take all necessary measures to minimize civilian loss, but the importance of thorough investigations and transparent findings has not waned,” said Kristine Beckerle, a Yemen researcher for Human Rights Watch. “Transparency as to what went so very wrong that nine children were killed is important for those children’s relatives, as well as those who find themselves in the crosshairs of U.S. action in the future — a real reckoning with past errors could help push the adoption of measures to avoid civilian losses like those suffered in Yemen.”
The Intercept also obtained a redacted copy of a classified memo on civilian casualties from the raid, which says, “We assess there were between 4 and 12 non-combatant casualties, however the exact number is indeterminable.”
The memo also echoes earlier Pentagon assertions that U.S. forces were “engaged” by “both male and female combatants,” but the claim that women took up arms is disputed. All the witnesses of the attack interviewed by The Intercept last year denied that women joined the fight, with one describing it as “eib” — shameful. They said it was impractical for women to fire guns while they held small children.
The Intercept filed its freedom of information request on March 13, 2017, seeking documents about the operation. Two days later, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar request to the Defense, State, and Justice departments seeking, among other things, “after-action assessments of civilian or bystander casualties of the raid.” Despite a legal battle that has lasted more than a year and resulted in the release of dozens of documents, however, the ACLU has not yet received a copy of the after-action report obtained by The Intercept.
“The government has obscured basic facts about this tragic raid, including its legal and factual basis, who was killed, and why. Its disclosures so far have been inadequate and now appear selective,” Anna Diakun, a fellow at the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept by email. “This administration has consistently chosen secrecy over transparency, all while dramatically expanding its use of lethal force, with devastating consequences for civilians.”
The Intercept also obtained internal emails announcing Owens’s death, as well as what appears to be an undated draft statement from the DOD public affairs office announcing the raid.
“U.S. forces conducted a successful and effective raid of an al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula Headquarters in the Shabwah Governate, Yemen, Jan. 28. The operation resulted in the death/detainment of xx AQAP members,” the statement read, with the “xx” presumably to be filled in after the fact. “The raid also resulted in the capture of valuable exploitable intelligence materials that we are confident will provide insight into the planning of future terror plots.”
The report also shows that the Joint Special Operations Command was keenly aware of the optics of the raid, which, in addition to Owens’s death, wounded three U.S. servicemembers and killed and wounded many Yemenis, including a woman who was nine months pregnant and was shot in the stomach; local doctors performed an emergency caesarean section, but the baby died.
“Unfortunately, the media did not characterize the mission in a successful light,” the report notes. “The media described the raid as killing dozens of civilians and resulting in one death and the destruction of a $70 million dollar [sic] aircraft. The new U.S. administration was seen as brash and unconcerned with U.S. military or Yemeni lives.”
The post Pentagon Says 35 Killed in Trump’s First Yemen Raid — More Than Twice as Many as Previously Reported appeared first on The Intercept.
In the fall of 2001, lawmakers in Cook County, Georgia voted to raise taxes for the coming year. The $1.75 million hike passed “unanimously but reluctantly,” according to the Adel News Tribune, which cited large expenditures in the name of law and order. There was the opening of the new county jail, requiring new staff and equipment, but, more significantly, the previous spring Adel had seen its first death penalty trial in a generation. The weeklong trial of 20-year-old Devonia Inman for the killing of a single mother named Donna Brown “quadrupled the Superior Court budget,” according to the newspaper. The sequestered jurors were housed in a motel, fed three meals a day, and escorted by police at all times. Now, close on the heels of Inman’s conviction, the county faced the prospect of yet another capital trial.
Kirk Gordon was Adel’s police chief at the time. “You’re not going to find many smaller counties that’s going after the death penalty if they can get by with life,” he says. “The cost of a big trial can bankrupt a county.” But 2001 was no ordinary year in Adel. A string of murders had recently gripped the small rural town, stirring fear, anxiety, and collective cries for justice. The first was the murder of Donna Brown, who was shot in a Taco Bell parking lot in September 1998, for which Inman stood trial. The second, in April 2000, was the brutal killing of an Indian immigrant named Shailesh Patel, a crime that remains unsolved — and largely forgotten in Adel today. The third was a brazen double murder committed in broad daylight in the fall of 2000. In that case, a man named Hercules Brown had been arrested for killing two beloved members of the community — William Carroll Bennett and his employee, Rebecca Browning — at a popular grocery store and lunch spot, Bennett’s Cash and Carry. As Inman’s trial came to a close — ultimately ending in a life sentence — Hercules was facing his own capital trial.
Prosecutors had every reason to feel confident that they could win a death sentence this time. The state had come close to sending Inman to death row, despite its relatively weak case — in their first vote during deliberations, nearly half the jurors favored the death penalty. By comparison, the evidence against Hercules was airtight. What’s more, the Bennett family wanted the death penalty — and Bennett’s older brother, Buck, was one of the county commissioners who voted to make sure there was money in the budget.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Yet it would never come to pass. Shortly before his trial was set to begin in 2002, Hercules cut a plea deal with prosecutors. In exchange for a life sentence, he would divulge a piece of evidence that had eluded the Georgia Bureau of Investigation: the identity of his accomplice, whom Hercules had long refused to name. The man, 23-year-old Wesley Mason, had remained on the streets for more than a year, much to the anger and dismay of Adel’s residents. In one of several outraged columns, News Tribune editor-in-chief Ann Knight chided the GBI for leaving the town vulnerable to a killer on the loose, calling on Adel residents to make their voices heard. “Do you want the next crime victim to be you or your father, your grandfather, maybe your wife?”
After giving up Mason, Hercules swiftly went from protecting his co-defendant to pinning everything on him. It had been Mason’s idea to rob the store, Hercules said, and it was Mason who attacked both Bennett and Browning with a baseball bat. Although Hercules admitted that he grabbed the store’s cash register — throwing it at two eyewitnesses immediately following the crime — he implied that this, too, had been Mason’s idea. But Mason, who had initially denied being there at all, told GBI agent Jamy Steinberg the opposite: It was Hercules who committed the murders, beating both Bennett and Browning to death, completely out of the blue.
There is no indication in the available records that anyone sought to determine who actually committed the grisly crime. The lack of clarity still distresses Bennett’s widow, Gail, who left Adel following her husband’s death. “Which one did what, I have no idea,” she says about Mason and Hercules. “It frustrates you, because you don’t know. You don’t.”
With Hercules headed to prison for life in May 2002, it was Mason who now faced a possible death sentence. It would be up to his appointed defense attorneys to prove that Mason was the less culpable party, that only Hercules was capable of such heinous acts. This would mean finding out whatever they could about Hercules’s history of violence, a search that would soon raise new questions about other murders in Adel.
Photo: GBI
Defense attorney Josh Moore works in a large office building in the heart of Atlanta that is home to the State Bar of Georgia. On a weekday in 2017, he sat at his desk, surrounded by case files, a drawing by his young son hanging on the wall. As the appellate director of the Office of the Georgia Capital Defender, Moore has spent more than 15 years trying to save his clients from death row — including Wesley Mason, back in 2003. As Moore recalls, Mason insisted that although he was present when Bennett and Browning were murdered, he had no idea that Hercules would go on a killing spree and he did not participate in the violence. “So the question was, how much of it was Wesley Mason and how much of it was Hercules Brown?” Moore recalls. The answer would be key to keeping his client off death row.
“I quickly recognized that a deeper understanding of Hercules Brown was critical to our defense,” Moore says. He drove the three hours south to Adel on I-75. Almost immediately he began to hear stories about how Hercules was the person responsible for the murder of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell in 1998 — and that the wrong man had gone to prison for life. The rumors were “rampant,” Moore recalls, but he could not get anyone to go on the record. “Everybody was saying that this is what happened. And everyone was saying, as is typical in a place like Adel, they didn’t want to talk about it.”
Indeed, while Mason had no violent criminal history, Hercules’s recent past was checkered with violent incidents. In June 1999, he was accused of attacking a woman — the mother of a drug dealer — by pulling her out of a car and kicking her in the head. “It looked like she had been in a fight with Mike Tyson,” former Adel police Officer Tim Balch recalled. But the case was never prosecuted because the woman declined to cooperate. In July 2000, Hercules was accused of knocking a man on a bicycle to the ground and wailing on him until witnesses restrained him. The man was hospitalized for three days. Hercules was sentenced to 12 months of probation.
A yearbook photo of Hercules Brown from Cook County High School.
Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept
And just weeks before the murders of Bennett and Browning, in September 2000 Hercules was arrested again — for an attempted robbery at another grocery store less than a mile from Bennett’s. Balch had received word from a confidential informant that the robbery was about to go down; he made a beeline to the market and spotted Hercules driving his blue Cadillac. After pulling him over and searching the car, Balch found crack cocaine, a 40-caliber pistol, and in the trunk, a black cloth cap with two eyeholes cut into it — a makeshift mask not unlike the one that had been found in Donna Brown’s car in 1998.
But as he had in the past, Hercules was able to escape consequence thanks to one person: his mother, Lucinda Brown. When Balch arrived with him at the police station, Lucinda was already there. She began “cussing me out about how her son would never have done any of this,” he recalled. Balch is not easily intimidated. But he held his tongue. Lucinda was well-known among local cops and prosecutors — and well-respected among Adel’s mostly white leadership. As a top employee at the Division of Family and Children Services, officers like Balch relied on Lucinda to help them solve child abuse cases. She was not shy about intervening when her son got in trouble. The dynamic “led to a lot of…problems,” Balch said. Hercules was quickly released.
That Hercules was not locked up then haunts Gail Bennett. She’s certain that he should have been jailed — and likely long before the attempted robbery. If police had ever considered him seriously as a suspect for the earlier murders in Adel, she believes that her husband would still be alive. “Starting with the Taco Bell [murder] on forward, as much stuff as Hercules had gotten into, yes, I thoroughly believe it could have been prevented,” she said.
Josh Moore soon began to suspect the same thing. In fact, the more time he spent investigating, the more he heard that Hercules might be responsible for yet another murder. “There was another case too,” he said. As he recalls, it was “maybe an Indian fellow who got murdered, maybe a television or an air conditioner smashed over his head.” And in fact Shailesh Patel had been beaten and murdered seven months before the killings at Bennett’s grocery. “I heard that very quickly too,” Moore said. “That’s what people were saying about Hercules, that he had committed … those two murders prior to the Bennett murder.”
Moore’s familiarity with Patel’s murder stood in sharp contrast to much of Adel today. Although most longtime residents recall the era between the murder at Taco Bell and the killings of Bennett and Browning as a terrifying time, many people have only a faint memory of Patel’s death — if they have any at all.
There was little Moore could do to probe the Patel case, which remained open. But since it was closed, documents relating to the murder of Donna Brown should be public record. “I started aggressively investigating the Taco Bell case,” he said. He didn’t get far. Not long after he’d sent an open records request seeking the GBI’s investigative file, Moore’s inquiry was shut down — by the lawyer appointed alongside him to defend Mason.
A police sketch of Wesley Mason.
Image: GBI
The lawyer, Clark Landrum, was not a defense attorney but a full-time prosecutor from a neighboring judicial district. That a prosecutor would be tapped to lead a capital defense team may be startling, but Moore says this was par for the course in South Georgia. “I grew up in Georgia, but I’m an outsider when you go down to Cook County,” he explains. “This is not a place where the judicial system runs in any kind of recognizable way to most lawyers.”
According to Moore, Landrum wrote him a formal letter demanding that he stop his investigation. “It turned into a huge conflict between us because I basically said, ‘I’m not willing to do that. I don’t really care what you’re saying, I’m going to go ahead and investigate this because my allegiance is to my client.’” Stunned and disturbed by Landrum’s behavior, Moore turned to the judge in the case to ask that Landrum be removed. “That turned into a big ugly brawl too,” he said.
As Moore prepared to meet the judge, accompanied by Mason and his mother, he recalls seeing Landrum leaving the office of Bob Ellis, the same prosecutor who convicted Devonia Inman for the murder at Taco Bell — and who would now prosecute Mason. Inside chambers, noting that there was “a difference of opinion” between the two lawyers assigned to Mason’s case, the judge chose to remove Moore instead of Landrum.
That is not what Mason wanted, Moore said. “The family had no faith in Clark Landrum at all and didn’t want him representing Wesley.” Moore stood firm: He and another lawyer from Atlanta would be taking the case pro bono, and that was final. The judge retorted that they’d better not ask for any money for their defense, because he wouldn’t give them a dime.
Over email, Landrum described the incident differently. Moore was “difficult to supervise,” he claimed, and would interview witnesses and then refuse to share any information with him. But he denied trying to stop Moore from looking into the Taco Bell case. “That is ridiculous,” he wrote.
Moore prevailed in taking over the case — but his investigation into Hercules’ involvement in the Taco Bell murder quickly came to an end when Mason was offered a deal for life in prison. He took it. The message was clear: Between the GBI and the prosecutors in Cook County, nobody wanted Moore to revisit the murder of Donna Brown. “As you have seen, I’m sure, in looking into this again,” he says, “a lot of doors close in your face.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Devonia Inman was just beginning his life sentence in 2002 when he wrote a letter to the fledgling Georgia Innocence Project, pleading for help. “We started looking at his case very early on and have stayed with his case,” said Aimee Maxwell, the group’s founding executive director. To Maxwell, who has since left the GIP, the case immediately stood out for all the wrong reasons — the lack of any physical evidence tying Inman to the crime and the confounding stories offered by a parade of witnesses who either recanted or had something to gain from testifying against him. “It was very telling who the witnesses were,” she said. “You can’t figure out when they’re telling the truth. Do you really want [them] to put a man in prison for life without parole? That’s the shocking thing — and it could have possibly been death.”
Maxwell began a hunt for evidence that could be tested for DNA. Tape lifts with fingerprints recovered from Donna Brown’s car that might have contained skin cells suitable for testing had disappeared, she said. But one key piece of evidence still existed: the makeshift mask recovered from her car. In March 2011, Maxwell got the go-ahead to have it tested.
Just two months later, DNA testing linked the mask to a single source: Hercules Brown.
Photo: GBI
The revelation all but confirmed what many in Adel had long suspected: The real killer in the Taco Bell murder was Hercules — and the state had imprisoned the wrong man. To Maxwell, it was clearly grounds for Inman to receive a new trial.
As the GIP lawyers in Atlanta geared up to make the case to Judge L.A. McConnell — the same judge who presided over Inman’s original trial — down in Cook County, few had heard about the DNA. No story ran in the Adel News Tribune. Nonetheless, one man who had been a key player in Inman’s conviction had received the news: Tim Eidson, the assistant district attorney who helped send Inman to prison for life.
Eidson was no longer a prosecutor by this time. He had moved on to head the public defender’s office in neighboring Cordele, later becoming a sort of roving defense attorney, based in Alabama and representing clients all over South Georgia. In an office in Douglas, Georgia, in the fall of 2016, Eidson recalled hearing about the DNA. “Now I know that my ex-wife called me one day,” he said. “She was kind of in a tizzy because they had got a call from someone and she says, ‘Do you remember that mask you found?’ I said yeah. ‘Well they found that it had Hercules Brown’s DNA in it … and they’re saying that he might have been involved in the Taco Bell murder.’”
There was good reason for Eidson’s ex-wife to have heard the news before him: Hercules had killed her uncle. In a typical small-town connection, Eidson had once been married to William Carroll Bennett’s niece. They had recently divorced when Eidson got the phone call in 2000 that Bennett had been beaten to death. “I was like, ‘Lord have mercy,’ because I knew him. … I knew his entire family.”
Like Gail Bennett, who believes that Hercules should have been arrested for the murder of Donna Brown at Taco Bell, other members of the Bennett family were upset by the implications of the DNA. Yet Eidson maintains that, although “we had our suspicions at the time,” there was never enough evidence to indict Hercules. Lucinda Brown had provided an alibi for her son, after all, and she was well-respected in the community. Besides, Eidson said, the DNA evidence merely linked Hercules to the crime. It did not mean Inman was innocent. If the state had known there was DNA on the mask matching Hercules, Eidson said, “his name would have been there along with Devonia Inman.”
Yet Eidson and Ellis had convicted Inman by arguing that he alone had committed the crime. The DNA was compelling evidence that they had gotten it wrong — and that Inman deserved a new trial.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
In January 2014, Maxwell traveled to Adel for an evidentiary hearing before Judge McConnell. She felt confident.
After the DNA results from the mask came back, GBI agent Jamy Steinberg, who with Adel Police Department detective Jimmy Hill led the investigation into the murder at Taco Bell, had gone to see Hercules in prison. In a recorded interview in June 2011, Hercules denied any involvement in Donna Brown’s murder and ever wearing the mask containing his DNA. He also denied knowing Inman. “Steinberg explained to Brown that the only profile shown in the mask was his and that DNA was very specific and if somebody else tried it on, it would show their profile as well,” Steinberg wrote in his report, adding that Hercules said “he did not remember anything about it; it had been a long time.”
Maxwell was thrilled with the interview. “It was this genius interrogation because they gave [Hercules] all the outs; he took none of them,” she said. “They backed him into a corner and he has no place to go. He can’t come back now and explain, ‘Oh, well, yeah, you know we were best friends and we were hanging out that night and, oh yeah, I had this makeshift mask that I was using, but I loaned it to him.’ He can’t do any of that now.”
At trial, Inman’s attorneys had sought to admit evidence showing that, during their investigation into Donna Brown’s murder, police had been repeatedly told that Hercules was responsible for the crime. But prosecutors balked, insisting that the allegations were unreliable and should be excluded. McConnell had agreed, ruling that absent any solid link between Hercules and the crime, speculation about his involvement would be kept from the jury. Now, standing in the Cook County courthouse, Maxwell argued that the DNA was precisely that link. “That’s the witness that tells us the truth. That’s the one piece of evidence that tells us who was actually there.”
In response, the state did an about-face. “The evidence was never that Mr. Inman acted alone,” prosecutor Jess Hornsby argued, completely contradicting the state’s theory at trial. The DNA did “nothing to exonerate Mr. Inman,” he said. “All that does is possibly implicate another person that may have been involved.”
In all, the hearing did not go particularly well. The transcripts suggest that Maxwell’s argument was scattered and rushed, and the state fought at every turn to keep additional witnesses off the stand. They included Kwame Spaulding, the jailhouse informant who previously testified that Inman had confessed to him while the two were locked up together. Now, Spaulding said he had been coerced into making this claim, through promises that the GBI would get him released. “I mean, he was telling me he’ll let me go home and he was telling me stuff to say about the man,” Spaulding said, presumably referring to Steinberg, who had taken his statement back in 1999.
Kwame Spaulding’s note to jailers claiming he had information for the GBI about Donna Brown’s murder.
Image: GBI
Maxwell also sought to call Virginia Tatem, the witness who at trial had been so adamant that she had seen Inman driving Brown’s car the night of her murder (and whose claims about what she had seen were far-fetched at best). Maxwell wanted to ask Tatem whether she had ever received the $5,000 offered by Taco Bell for information. Tatum refused to answer any questions.
Finally, there was Hercules Brown. Not surprisingly, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Steinberg’s testimony was terse. Maxwell wanted to know if he’d done any further investigation after learning that Hercules’s DNA was found on the mask.
“There’s been no additional investigative acts after that,” he replied.
“Did you compare the latent fingerprints [from the crime scene] which did not match my client to Mr. Brown?” she followed up.
“I just answered that question,” Steinberg said.
Steinberg has been similarly testy toward others who have questioned his work. In the wake of the murders of Bennett and Browning, Gail Bennett wrote a letter to the editor of the Adel News Tribune, complaining that she had been unable to get any answers from the GBI about its hunt for Hercules’s accomplice. Steinberg met with the family soon afterward. “He was very ugly,” Gail said. “He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t have to tell you anything.’”
If Judge McConnell was more interested in the implications of the DNA evidence than Steinberg appeared to be, he did not seem motivated to do much about it. While his decision to hold the hearing in the first place was an important step — plenty of trial judges deny such hearings when it comes to questionable convictions won in their courtrooms — it would not matter in the end. McConnell sided with the state and denied Inman a new trial — and he asked the DA to pen his ruling for him.
Photo: GBI
The eight-page ruling endorses the state’s revisionist history — adopting prosecutors’ new theory of the crime — and faulted the GIP for not offering additional evidence linking Hercules to the crime, the very evidence that McConnell had barred from Inman’s original trial. “At the hearing, Defendant presented no evidence that would implicate Hercules Brown as the killer other than the DNA on the ski mask,” it reads. The ruling acknowledged that “the DNA on the ski mask is not irrelevant,” but concluded that it was not significant enough to “produce a different verdict” if Inman was granted a new trial.
In its appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, the GIP argued that the shifting theory of the crime was improper. The law does not allow the state to charge a person with one crime and then argue at trial or on appeal that he is responsible for an entirely different crime — a legal disconnect known as a fatal variance. The state had charged Inman as solely responsible for the robbery and murder of Donna Brown, but with Hercules’s DNA found on the ski mask they now argued that there were multiple people involved in the crime. That convenient shift essentially denied Inman the right to effectively defend himself.
But like McConnell, the Georgia Supreme Court shrugged off the argument. On December 19, 2014, it rejected Inman’s appeal. Maxwell was bewildered and devastated. “I pretty much think about this case almost every day, and I can’t figure out how I lost it,” she said. “I can’t believe that this young man … is in prison for the rest of his life based on a bunch of liars.”
Down in Adel, people were mostly unaffected by the ruling. News of the DNA match to Hercules didn’t even make the local paper until after The Intercept began its investigation into the case in 2015. To Charles Shiver, longtime reporter and editor of the News Tribune, the discovery of Hercules’s DNA on the mask had been “kind of disturbing to me,” but he deferred to the conclusions of the court. “I mean, I can’t second-guess the judge,” he said.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
It wasn’t long after Maxwell’s loss before the Georgia Supreme Court that Jessica Cino stopped by her office to discuss a case.
Cino, now 40 and an assistant dean at the Georgia State University College of Law, grew up in a poor family in rural Kansas. She didn’t know anything about the criminal justice system or its failures until she went to college, when she took a class on the death penalty that changed the course of her life. “I was profoundly disturbed for the entire semester,” she recalls. It “opened my eyes to this hidden system of justice that I had no idea even existed.” Where she once hoped to become an actor, she instead applied to law school, winning a scholarship to the University of Miami based in part on her determination to open an innocence project at the school, which she did. After graduation she went to work at a silk-stocking firm in San Francisco, where she spent much of her time working on capital cases that the firm took on pro bono and developing an expertise in forensics and DNA evidence.
It was one of those pro bono cases that woke her up to the real-world injustices of the system. Her firm had taken on the case of a black man named Cory Maye who faced execution after being wrongfully convicted for shooting a white police officer in Mississippi. During a hearing in the case, Cino remembers seeing for the first time a dramatic representation of a racial divide in the justice system. The courthouse in Hattiesburg was an old-fashioned, two-tiered courtroom, complete with a gallery where black attendees were once forced to sit before integration. But that day, the courtroom was segregated anyway. When she walked in, she said, “all of the people who supported the officer and his family and the prosecutor were all white; they were all on one side of the courtroom. And then, Cory’s supporters were mostly African-Americans, so they were on the other side.”
Later, when Cino was offered a job at GSU, she jumped at the opportunity. She knew how badly the South needed skilled death penalty lawyers. After arriving in Atlanta in 2009, she quickly developed a relationship with the GIP.
On the day Cino stopped by to chat with Maxwell, she had a different case on her mind. But Maxwell had just lost Inman’s appeal. “She started telling me about the case. It sounded horrendous,” she said. Maxwell told her about the court rulings and the DNA evidence that pointed to a clear miscarriage of justice. That the Georgia Supreme Court had basically turned its back meant that Inman was out of meaningful options to challenge his conviction. “I think even my own notions of how the criminal justice system worked and how pivotal DNA evidence is in cases was tested,” she said. It wasn’t like anyone was asking the state to just set Inman free, Cino thought, only that he deserved a new trial, based on the DNA. After all, if jurors had known about it in 2001, it is hard to imagine that they would have convicted him.
Maxwell sent Cino a copy of the trial transcript. She devoured it. “I would just keep turning the page and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. How did this guy get convicted?’” she recalls. The miscarriage of justice was so clear, she knew she had to do something. If she didn’t, she remembers thinking, it would alter the way she thought of herself as a lawyer. “This is a case that cries out for people to look at and to re-examine, and I wouldn’t be able to just walk away from it.”
That July, Cino and a research assistant packed into her silver convertible Mini Cooper and headed out from Atlanta, driving more than three hours southeast to meet Inman in the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. She wanted to get a read on him. “I’ve met a lot of guys behind bars over the years. Some of them are totally trying to bullshit me, some of them are brutally honest and candid about their history,” she said. “So I wanted to go and just size him up and see what he had to say about the case, but also, how sincere was he?”
Photo: Jan Banning/Panos via Redux
At the prison, she spent an hour talking with Inman. She would return four more times over the next few months. He was clearly “seriously depressed” and living under horrible circumstances. And she believed him when he said he did not kill Donna Brown. “When he started talking about the case, it rang true.” He told her about his run-ins with the law in California and about his rocky relationships with women, and how he’d gotten into an argument with his girlfriend, Christy Lima, on the night of the murder. “So he was forthcoming with all of that, but he was adamant … that he did not kill Donna Brown and that he had never killed anybody.”
He also expressed remorse about not taking more seriously the state’s case against him. “He was just so sure that a jury wouldn’t convict him,” she said. “That’s sort of where, I think even emotionally, his development stopped. He very much just relives the two to three weeks surrounding the Taco Bell crime every single day of his life, and that’s what he focuses on.”
Talking to Inman is not easy. More often than not his voice is flat and he is despairing about his circumstances. He doesn’t understand why no one believes him, particularly since the DNA evidence points to Hercules Brown, a man Inman insists he did not know, except by reputation. Without any good answers, Inman lives in a perpetual melancholic loop, reliving often minute details about what was going on in the weeks and hours before the Taco Bell murder and punishing himself with a string of what-ifs.
He returns to the same set of memories over and over: how Marquetta Thomas, Lima’s sister, was not at home most of that evening; how a car had arrived at the house late that night, shining its bright lights through the windows, possibly dropping someone off. And he remembers playing outside in the dirt with his young son earlier that afternoon and how his son pleaded with him not to leave. “I kind of feel bad when I think about it now because it’s like he was really trying to tell me something that he seen, I guess. It was like, I’m gonna go away for a long time,” he recalled. “If you look at the way he was crying, because he was really crying, he was holding my shirt and wouldn’t let go.”
Inman has not seen his son in more than 20 years. And there is a good chance that he might never see him again — not free in the world, at least — unless Cino can find a way to convince the courts that Inman is innocent. She is determined to do so and since 2015, has spent hundreds of hours working on his case.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
At the heart of Inman’s predicament is a problem that many Americans do not understand. For all of the rights offered to people accused of crimes, there is no right that explicitly protects a person against a wrongful conviction. The Constitution is mostly silent on this point, concerned instead with whether a defendant received a fair trial. Did you have minimally competent lawyers? Were you able to cross-examine the state’s witnesses? Barring any violations of due process, the system is satisfied — even if the wrong person is convicted.
“I think one of the biggest myths about the criminal justice system and the way it functions is that most of the time we get it right, but in the slim chance we get it wrong, we’ll be able to correct it down the road,” says Cino. “That’s just not true. That’s not true on any level.” In many ways it is a rigged system. “Once you’re convicted, it’s meant to keep you there. It is not meant to re-examine your case, no matter the circumstances” — say, if a victim or witness recants, or if a jailhouse snitch was proven to be unreliable. “The system is designed to keep you wherever they put you once they convict you,” she says. “That’s why there’s that presumption of innocence before you get convicted, but once you’re convicted, it’s a presumption of guilty, and that is almost impossible to undo.”
The rise of DNA evidence has helped some — but has also lulled people into a belief that it is able to rectify all wrongs. DNA is only available in a fraction of cases. In many, it has proven critical in correcting miscarriages of justice — for example, in rape cases in which a person has misidentified their attacker. But as Inman learned the hard way, even when DNA is available, it is only as good as the people considering it. Often, the state fights against testing DNA, then denies its significance when it is matched to another person. And, like McConnell, many judges will decline to grant a new trial, even when forensic evidence points to a wrongful conviction.
This harsh reality has left Inman with little legal recourse. His best shot is a true Hail Mary pass: a writ of habeas corpus based on actual innocence — what amounts to a legal unicorn. But in order to create the best odds, Cino would have to find a constitutional violation in the case — that Inman’s previous lawyers were deficient, for example, or that prosecutors failed to turn over important evidence — to serve as the basis for the appeal. “It’s a shot in the dark,” she says. But she is determined to try and has wrangled a pro bono legal team from one of Atlanta’s prestige firms, Troutman Sanders, to help her.
Cino constantly worries about the case and wonders if she’ll actually be able to help Inman. “Because whenever I talk to him on the phone…he always asks me, ‘What are the chances of me getting out? Do I have a good chance?’ He wants to be optimistic,” she says. “The lawyer in me knows the reality of what he faces.” So she’s caught, trying to “manage his expectations without crushing his last hope.” She wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating, worrying about Inman’s case, as well as Inman himself. “I don’t know what it’s like for him day to day in prison, let alone day to day in prison where you’re an innocent man,” she says. “I can’t imagine that. Then, to have your one chance [at freedom] be so slight, I feel horrible as…a human being that this is how bad this system is.”
But there is one thing that could help Inman’s case almost immediately, Cino says: “You would need Hercules Brown to come forward and admit to the crime and also say that Devonia didn’t have a role in it.”
In the three years since we began working on this story, we have written numerous letters to Hercules in prison. He has responded just once, in July 2016. He did not explicitly deny committing the murder of Donna Brown, but wrote, “I don’t have any thing to say about Devonia Inman nor his conviction or any thing pertaining to his case.” If Hercules continues to stay silent, it seems likely that the truth behind the Adel murders will remain untold.
On a Sunday afternoon in 2017 we finally got in touch with Hercules’s mother, Lucinda Brown. We had hoped to ask her about the alibi she had provided for Hercules, and how she felt about the many rumors about her son. Over the phone, we asked her if she could help us sort out the truth of the matter. Not surprisingly, she refused. “You’ll never know what’s true and what’s not,” she said. “So I don’t have anything to give you.”
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A murder in the small southern town of Adel, Georgia, sent Devonia Inman to jail 20 years ago. He was accused of robbing and shooting a woman named Donna Brown in a Taco Bell parking lot. He swore he was innocent and there were good reasons to believe him. And while he awaited trial, three more brutal killings took place in Adel. Did police get the wrong man?
Jordan Smith: Okay, quick. I want you to think back. Think back to 20 years ago. It was 1998. A different world. Phones with antennas, cargo pants, meeting your friend at the gate at the airport. You’ve done a lot in the last 20 years. Think about that. Everything you’ve accomplished. Maybe you finished school, or got married, or had a baby. Maybe that baby graduated high school and is now in college.
Liliana Segura: 20 years is a long time. A marriage, a career.
Jordan Smith: But 20 years is a whole other experience if you’re spending that time in prison.
Devonia Inman: My depression is more about being incarcerated. They really don’t, they really can’t give me pills for that.
Liliana Segura: And insisting the whole time that you’re innocent.
Devonia Inman: Cause no matter what, every time I wake up, I’m still going to feel the same way. Like I’m not supposed to be here.
Liliana Segura: In 1998, a brutal murder shocked the small southern town of Adel, Georgia. A guy named Devonia Inman was arrested and tried for that murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Devonia Inman: This is like- it’s worser than an old folks home to me. The reason is, you’re waiting to get old. You know, it’s like, it’s the most miserable-est life you can ever possibly go through. I’d rather be dead or a bum on the street than be in prison.
Liliana Segura: We’re gonna tell you about the murder that sent Inman to prison. We’ve looked into it. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened. And we’ve found quite a few problems with the investigation. They’re the kinds of problems that can eventually lead to a new trial. Maybe even an exoneration. But that hasn’t happened for Devonia Inman. And that makes Inman sad. It makes him angry. But mostly he’s just really fucking depressed.
Devonia Inman: I remember my son wanted me to, you know, cause I usually take him riding on the bicycle.
Liliana Segura: This is Inman talking about the day the murder happened. That day plays on a loop in his mind. He thinks that maybe, if he’d just stayed with his son, none of this would have happened.
Devonia Inman: If you, you know, look at the way he was crying, because he was really crying, he was like holding my shirt and wouldn’t let go. I’m like, “I’ll come back and talk to you later on. I’ll come and get you later on.” He was just crying, saying,”No, no, no.”.
Liliana Segura: Inman’s son is an adult now. Inman hasn’t seen him in 20 years.
Jordan Smith: Wrongful convictions are tragic, often infuriatingly so. And wrongful conviction stories — we’ve written a lot of them and they never get any easier, because lives are ruined and justice is rarely served. And there’s something else that happens when someone is sent to prison for a crime they didn’t commit, especially when that crime is murder. It means the real killer is still out there and it means the real killer sometimes kills again, and again, and again.
Liliana Segura: From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. Welcome to Murderville, Georgia. Starting in 1998, a series of brutal, brutal murders ended up with four people dead, two men in jail, and one of the craziest stories we’ve ever reported on, from beginning to end.
Liliana Segura: And the craziest part? Even though the state of Georgia has seen the evidence of Devonia Inman’s innocence, even though nearly every witness against him has recanted, many going out of their way to tell the state that they lied, none of that seems to matter.
Jordan Smith: In all likelihood, Devonia Inman will spend the rest of his life in prison. We wanted to understand how this could happen. How could an investigation this shoddy—and a case this weak—end in a conviction and a life sentence? We also want to know why the state doesn’t care, even after evidence turned up that would exonerate Inman. The state might not care, but we hope that you will.
Liliana Segura: September 18, 1998 was a Friday. Donna Brown was on her third day as the new assistant manager at the Taco Bell in Adel. Adel is a very small town in South Georgia. About three hours south of Atlanta, 40 miles from the Florida line. It’s not quite the middle of nowhere, but close. More like the kind of place you pass through on your way somewhere else.
Jordan Smith: Brown was white, 40, a single mom. According to news reports, she knew how to fish and how to shoot a gun. And she worked hard to take care of her seven-year-old son Matthew, who was the center of her world. Before heading into work that evening, she put on her uniform: navy blue pants. A white, collared, short-sleeved shirt tucked into them. A green name tag, shaped like a chili pepper, pinned to the left side of her shirt. On either side of her collar she wore a small pin: on one side an angel, the other side a dove. Those were her additions.
Liliana Segura: By all accounts it was an ordinary night. Until the end of the shift. Just after 2 a.m., a call came into the Adel police department. It was an employee at the Huddle House restaurant on West 4th Street, next door to the Taco Bell. She didn’t identify herself on the call. There’s something strange in the parking lot of the Taco Bell. Somebody is lying down in the middle of it. Maybe they passed out, drunk? Minutes later the cops arrived.
Jordan Smith: It wasn’t a drunk passed out in the middle of the lot. It was Donna Brown. She was lying in the parking lot face up with her arms splayed out to the side. Her head was in a puddle of blood. There was a hole where her right eye used to be and a .44-caliber bullet lodged deep in her brain. We went to see the Taco Bell. We were with an attorney named Jessica Cino. She’s gotten pretty involved with Devonia Inman’s case. Actually, she’s obsessed by his plight. She’s the one who brought this story to our attention. She learned about Inman’s case from the Georgia Innocence Project, more than three years ago. Cino is certain he is innocent and she’s determined to prove it.
Jordan Smith: So, okay, so here we are in the parking lot. It’s a pretty, you know, typical looking Taco Bell that fronts a sort of state highway. Let’s just talk about what happened to Donna Brown, what time of night it was, and where she ended up.
Jessica Cino: So it was the early morning hours of September 19. She was locking up, we’re talking like, you know, one in the morning, and she was closing with two employees.
Liliana Segura: That night Brown was working with a couple of teenagers, Robin Carter and LarRisha Chapman. They’re all supposed to leave together, but Brown couldn’t get the time cards to clock out properly. She probably didn’t want to be the boss who makes everyone wait on her. So she tells the young women to go on home.
Jessica Cino: So those two women leave.
Liliana Segura: Carter’s boyfriend picked her up around 12:45 am. Chapman waited on the curb until her boyfriend came, around 1:00 am.
Jessica Cino: And she then proceeds to shut down the store and leave by herself, which was actually against Taco Bell protocol at that time.
Jordan Smith: Taco Bell protocol: At the end of the night, the manager counts all the money and then either locks it up in the safe or calls the cops for an escort to the bank to make a night deposit. There was about $1700 in the cash register that night. Donna Brown figured out the time card thing and decided to take the cash to the bank. She did not call the cops.
Jessica Cino: She exits through a side door into the parking lot and presumably immediately encounters her murderer. There’s parking spaces on either side, there’s parking spaces right up against the restaurant and then there’s parking spaces on the opposite side of that, and so her body is just found in the middle of the parking lot between where cars would park.
Jordan Smith: There were weeds growing along the edge of parking lot. They were tamped down, like somebody had been lying there, waiting. The police later said they thought Donna Brown was already lying on her back when she was shot at very close range. The cops arrived just minutes later. Brown was dead. The money was gone and so was her car.
Murder is always shocking. And it was even more shocking for a quiet little town like Adel, which only has about 5,000 people. By morning, news of the crime was already making its way around town.
Let’s take a second to talk about Adel. This is our “talking about Adel” music. Adel was founded in the late 1800s. The land used to belong to Native Americans before it was overtaken by slave plantations.
Liliana Segura: For a long time, cotton was king. But later, it was timber and turpentine – and eventually tobacco. Today, a lot of the jobs are service related. The town was built along the Georgia Southern and Florida Railways. The tracks still run through Adel. And they divide the town — Adel’s black community on the west side of the tracks, whites over on the east side.
Jordan Smith: The town is equal parts black and white. But it’s sharply split, including in how it sees itself. Black people we’ve spoken with say racism is a problem. White people seem almost surprised at the question.
Today Interstate-75 brings traffic through. Driving down from Atlanta you know you’re getting close when you see a series of eye-popping religious billboards. There’s one with Jesus backed by a military battalion. Another seems open to interpretation, but it features a bunch of zombies. Most of the town sits east of the highway. What remains on the west is your basic highway exit: a motel, an I-HOP, a truck stop, a WalMart, and the Taco Bell where Donna Brown was killed.
Liliana Segura: One of the first cops to arrive that night was a man named Tim Balch.
Tim Balch: Hi, I’m Tim.
Jordan Smith: Nice to meet you.
Liliana Segura: Liliana.
Tim Balch: Liana?
Jordan Smith: Liliana.
Liliana Segura: Liliana, nice to meet you.
Tim Balch: Okay, okay, good to meet you.
Liliana Segura: Thanks for meeting us.
Jordan Smith: Yea, I appreciate it.
Liliana Segura: Balch isn’t a cop anymore. But he spent five years as an Adel police officer and then another eight as a deputy in the county sheriff’s department. He has a buzz cut, lots of tattoos and drives a Hummer.
Jordan Smith: We’re in AJ’s Country Kitchen, a small diner on the north side of town that serves up Southern comfort food. It’s in an old house the color of butter, and open for breakfast and lunch six days a week. It sits on the city’s main drag, Hutchinson Avenue. It’s just blocks from the police station and the fire station, the library and the weekly paper, which is the oldest business in Cook County. But even so, downtown Adel feels like a place that has seen better days. There are a lot of empty storefronts and it’s quiet, even in the middle of the afternoon.
Jordan Smith: Did you like policing here, or what, you know, what’s it like?
Tim Balch: With Adel, it’s only like 5,500 people here, so you get to kind of bump into a lot of the people. You go to a restaurant, you know, and they see you, and especially being an out-of-towner, you got noticed that much faster so that a lot more people would engage you faster than if you were just Johnny off the street that they knew for years and years.
Liliana Segura: This can be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on who you are. But at its best, Adel’s the kind of town where the cops will make sure you get home okay after you’ve worked the night shift. The night Donna Brown died, they escorted managers from three other restaurants to the bank.
Tim Balch: You know, “can we get an escort to the bank?”, and we’d go over there. We’d escort them, which means basically we drive behind them when they go up there and do their nightly deposit. They drop it in. Contrast in the mornings, we would come and sit outside like AJ’s here, City Cafe, Dave’s Diner, all these little diners, and when the girls would come in to open up, we’d sit outside and make sure that they were fine going in, and once they gave us the thumbs up, we’d take off and go.
Liliana Segura: Tim Balch knew Donna Brown. That’s something that comes with small town policing too.
Tim Balch: I had worked in Clinch County prior to coming over here, and she was the manager at Hardee’s over in Homerville, Georgia, and just always very nice, very nice. I mean, any time that we would come in, she would stop what she was doing, come over, talk with us. Then, one night I was over here at Taco Bell, and I saw her, and I was like, “Hey, what are you up to?” And she said, “Oh, well, I’m manager of Taco Bell now.”
Liliana Segura: When Balch got called in, there didn’t seem to be much to do. He went to the Taco Bell to guard the crime scene.
Tim Balch: I think the chief was there, and of course, our investigator is not set up to handle a murder, so they turn all that kind of stuff over to Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and they had their crime scene truck there very quickly.
Jordan Smith: The Georgia Bureau of Investigation—the GBI. They’d always come when there was a big case. Not just in Adel, but throughout rural Georgia. And that’s because the local departments don’t have the forensic labs or manpower to solve big, complicated crimes. Tim Balch told us that the GBI usually did things very methodically and by the book. Usually.
Liliana Segura: So, until now, the story is pretty straightforward. Brutal murder, small town cops, state investigators. But this is where things start to get weird. Like, after police found Donna Brown’s car, they did pretty much nothing. They didn’t talk to any witnesses. They didn’t even file a report about what the scene looked like. Apparently, this was typical.
Jordan Smith: The Adel police department was small. There was only one detective, a man named Jimmy Hill. And nowhere near the resources to handle a serious crime like murder. That’s why the local cops called in the GBI. But the GBI is supposed to work with the local cops. In Adel, at least, the cops didn’t do much until the GBI showed up. They didn’t talk to witnesses, they didn’t write reports. It was a sign of the way the investigation would go. Basic things got bungled, or overlooked, or ignored.
Liliana Segura: Around 4:00 am, investigators found Donna Brown’s car. It had been left in the parking lot of an abandoned Pizza Hut, not far from the Taco Bell. Brown’s purse was in the trunk. Her keys were wedged between the driver’s seat and the door. The GBI team lifted prints from the car. They have never been matched to anyone. There were tire tracks that indicated a single vehicle had recently entered the lot. Presumably they belonged to Brown’s car, but there’s nothing in the GBI report that shows anybody ever tried to confirm it. And there was a shoe print in some dirt near the car, but nobody tried to figure out what size it was or even compare it to the shoes of any suspect. Maybe worst of all though, is that they apparently missed the key piece of evidence altogether. Even though it was clearly visible in the crime scene photos. A homemade mask cut from a pair of gray sweatpants. You can see it on the passenger seat.
Jordan Smith: Around 11:00 am Saturday morning, Jamy Steinberg, the lead investigator for GBI, interviewed Robin Carter, one of the girls who was working with Donna Brown the night she died. We called her during one of our trips to Adel.
Robin Carter: I remember washing dishes because that was one of my first nights closing. Because I wasn’t a regular closer and I believe that was, that was probably one of the only nights I closed and I was stuck in the back washing dishes.
Jordan Smith: Carter doesn’t remember much about that night, but she remembers that Donna Brown sent her and the other girl, LarRisha Chapman, home.
Jordan Smith: Right. And then, so what d- do you remember what you saw of LarRisha outside? Like, because you got picked up first, right?
Robin Carter: We were both outside waiting for our rides. My boyfriend picked me up and her boyfriend, I think it was her boyfriend. I think I left before her. I left from- I believe I left from the parking lot when my boyfriend picked me up.
Jordan Smith: While Steinberg was interviewing Carter, a GBI investigator and Adel’s chief of police went to talk to LarRisha Chapman. Chapman also said it had been a normal night. She’d hung around the parking lot waiting for her boyfriend. He picked her up just before 1:00 am. There was nothing unusual or suspicious. We couldn’t reach Chapman and a bunch of other people refused to talk with us, like Adel police investigator Jimmy Hill.
Jordan Smith: Is this Chief Deputy Hill?
Jimmy Hill: Yes, ma’am.
Jordan Smith: Well, hey. This is Jordan Smith. It’s great to hear your voice. How are you doing?
Jimmy Hill: I’m doing fine.
Jordan Smith: So we’ve been trying to get in touch with you because we’ve been working on a-
Jimmy Hill: Isn’t it a clue when I don’t return your call I don’t intend to talk to you?
Jordan Smith: Well, no, not necessarily.
Jimmy Hill: Well, I’m not talking to you.
Jordan Smith: Well, can you tell me why not?
Jimmy Hill: Yes, because I don’t want to talk to you.
Jordan Smith: But I mean is there-
Jimmy Hill: Now you have a nice day.
Jordan Smith: And Jamy Steinberg, the GBI investigator.
Liliana Segura: My colleague and I are in town looking into this old case you worked on, the 1998 murder of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell and we’re hoping that we might be able to meet with you and kind of maybe ask you some of your recollections about that case.
Jamy Steinberg: No ma’am, I’m not going to discuss the case. It’s been adjudicated. I’m not going to talk to you about it.
Jordan Smith: It seems they couldn’t be bothered with questions about a case they consider closed. There were a lot of people who did talk to us, though. And the Georgia Bureau of Investigation put together an enormous file. Plus there are trial transcripts. We’ve been looking at this case for three years and the more we’ve looked at it, the more it seems like the GBI just blew it. For one thing, even though there was no evidence that pointed to the killer’s race, they only interviewed young black men. People like Zach Payne, a low-level drug-dealer they interviewed the night of the murder and whose testimony turned out to be critical, even though he told investigators right off the bat that he knew nothing about the murder at the Taco Bell. We talked to him on the phone.
Zach Payne: Listen, I don’t wanna mess nothing up. What I need to do is go look in the newspapers and get my memory back right.
Liliana Segura: We don’t know exactly what Zach Payne was like 20 years ago, but we talked to him for a long, long time and honestly, he was so rambling, incoherent, and, frankly, paranoid, we could hardly follow the conversation, let alone take any of it as truth. But whether or not he was more reliable back in 1998, what Payne told investigators became the basis for the entire case. There was a man named Devonia Inman, he told them. Payne didn’t know him very well. But once, Inman had pointed a gun at him. Payne thought he’d be ‘very capable’ of committing this crime. Just to reiterate: a weird small-time drug dealer says he knows nothing about the crime, so the police focus their entire investigation on a man he mentions.
Jordan Smith: On September 21, 1998, two days after Donna Brown was murdered, Adel police officers arrested Devonia Inman at his aunt’s house for a probation violation. Here’s how he remembers it:
Devonia Inman: We was walking in the middle of the street, like on Monday, the day they came and arrested me. So, we were just walking. I didn’t think that it was for no murder or anything like that because I never committed no murder. I didn’t have no idea, so I didn’t have anything to hide, so I got in the back of the police car. They only asked me to talk to me. That’s what he said in front of everybody. He was like, “Do you mind if we question you or take you downtown and question you” and I’m like, “sure.” I got in the back of the police car.
Jordan Smith: They took Inman to the city jail, a five-minute drive from the parking lot where Donna Brown was shot. It was the last time Inman was free. A GBI agent asked to search Inman’s aunt’s house to see if there was a gun there. Inman’s aunt said no. Later that same evening, the investigators went to see Inman’s girlfriend, Christy Swain. The house at 412 Wildwood was just across the interstate from the Taco Bell. Swain had just moved there with her two sisters. Inman was there a lot. Steinberg from the GBI asked Swain if they could search her house for a gun. She said she’d only seen Inman with a gun once, but she said they could look. They didn’t find anything. Steinberg asked her where Inman was on Friday night. He was with her, she said, at the home on Wildwood, all night.
We caught up with her recently. She now lives in Ohio, back with her family. She’s had a hard time, struggling to raise seven kids. Her name is now Christy Lima.
Christy Lima: Okay, well I am Christy, Christy Lima. I’m Devonia’s ex-girlfriend, during that time. He was living with me during that time. Do you want me to tell what happened that day?
Liliana Segura: Lima was 19 years old. A single mom. She did what she could to get by. Sometimes she stripped at parties for extra cash. She says back then she told Jimmy Hill, the Adel police investigator, that she and Inman had gotten into a fight the night Donna Brown died. After they made up, he stayed home with her all night. He was watching her baby.
Christy Lima: I got ready to go to bed, and my son, Justice, woke up. So Devonia came back there, he got my baby, and basically he kept my baby all night. I mean, he didn’t ever leave out the house, like I was telling them before, how can he leave when he had my son all night, because the next morning my mom came over and he was still asleep on the couch with my son.
Jordan Smith: Steinberg was still interviewing her that night, when her two sisters came home. One of them agreed with what she said, but the other one, Marquetta Thomas, had more to say. Later that night, Thomas ended up at the Adel police station. She sat down with Steinberg and another GBI agent. She told them Inman had talked about “jacking and robbing” people in Adel. She also said she thought her sister would lie to protect him.
Jamy Steinberg: Let’s talk about Devonia first, has Devonia spoken of armed robbery plans or committing armed robberies or anything like that in the past?
Marquetta Thomas: Yes…
Jamy Steinberg: Tell us a little bit about that.
Marquetta Thomas: He’s- I just- always talking about he wants to rob a bank or a store…
Liliana Segura: In this police video of the interview, Marquetta Thomas sits in front of a desk. She’s wearing her uniform from Waffle House. Her hair is cropped short and dyed blonde. She wears wire-rimmed glasses. She uses her hands a lot when she talks.
Jamy Steinberg: How big was the gun?
Marquetta Thomas: About this big, not that big.
Jordan Smith: The following day, an Adel police officer interviewed Inman in jail. He told Inman that people were saying he’d killed Donna Brown. Inman denied it and said he’d never had a gun. But the next day, during a second interrogation, Inman admitted that he’d once borrowed a gun from his uncle. It was a .38 caliber revolver. Inman also told the cops what his girlfriend had already told them, that he’d been at her house the whole night. In case you missed that, Inman said he’d had a .38. The gun that killed Donna Brown was a .44. It’s not the same kind of gun.
Liliana Segura: Marquetta Thomas was eager to talk to us. She’s the sister of Inman’s then-girlfriend, Christy Lima, and she’s the one who told the cops she thought Inman could have killed Donna Brown. These days Thomas wears her hair long. She doesn’t dye it anymore. The day we met her, she had it in neat braids pulled back in a ponytail. It was July, but she wore long pants and a red sweater vest, along with a silver bowtie.
Marquetta Thomas: I’m Marquetta Thomas.
Jordan Smith: Nice to meet you.
Marquetta Thomas: Nice to meet you too.
Liliana Segura: Hi.
Marquetta Thomas: How you doing?
Liliana Segura: Good.
Marquetta Thomas: Marquetta.
Liliana Segura: I’m Liliana. It’s nice to meet you.
Marquetta Thomas: Nice to meet you.
Liliana Segura: Thomas lives in Baldwin, Georgia, a town two hours north of Atlanta and roughly half the size of Adel. She moved there after spending 14 years in prison for robbery. Her house is literally five minutes from where she did her time. One of the first things she told us: she really hated Devonia Inman.
Jordan Smith: I gather at the time you didn’t think much of him?
Marquetta Thomas: No, I really didn’t. Basically me and my two sisters, my baby sister Christian, my older sister, Tamekia. We were all staying in a subdivision called Dellwood Acres. I think it was like behind McDonald’s and like half of I-75, we were like under the underpass.
Liliana Segura: She says the night Donna Brown was killed, Inman was at their house, fighting with her sister.
Marquetta Thomas: My older sister had a blue station wagon. So later on that night, probably after midnight, maybe one or two o’clock in the morning we heard this big pop. We thought it was a gunshot. We looked out the windows, we didn’t see anybody, but when we went out the next morning, he had like literally stabbed all four of my sister’s tires, and that was the only vehicle for all of us, so I had a big, disgusted hate for him. Then the next day he pops up with groceries and diapers like nothing ever happened. I’m like, “Are you serious?” My sister’s like, “Yeah, I love him. Let him in.” I was like, “No, he’s not coming in.” So they end up going outside on the porch, and I end up leaving, because I didn’t want to be in the same household.
Jordan Smith: She told the cops a different story.
Marquetta Thomas: They were asking had we seen him that prior night or was he with us. That’s when I lied and was like, “Nope, he wasn’t there,” but he actually was beating up my sister that night. But the fight and the arguing, that probably happened around like, between 9, 10, 10:30, 11, whatnot.
Liliana Segura: But that same evening?
Marquetta Thomas: Yes. That’s basically his alibi. I don’t know why they didn’t correlate and put that together, because he was at our house beating up my sister.
Jordan Smith: She was mad at him for beating her sister, for slashing their tires. And the cops, they just kept harassing her.
Marquetta Thomas: I was working third shift at Waffle House, and probably a few nights later, the detectives or Adel police, whoever it was, they came to my job and started questioning me and asking me questions. They were asking like everybody that was riding through the neighborhood. I think I was either in the parking lot at Waffle House or getting ready to walk out, and they just swarmed in, like two or three cops. They were like, “Get in, we need to talk to you.” And then they started telling me about the lady that was killed and the car abandoned or whatnot, and have I heard or seen. I’m like, “Why would you ask or question me?” Like, you know what I’m saying? So, I can’t really remember like chronologically how it happened and what times, but they were like questioning me for about two weeks straight. They would come to my job, they would come to my house, they went to my mom’s. They was harassing our whole family.
Finally I was just like, “Yeah, Devonia probably did it,” because I was really angry and bitter at him. I literally hate him for beating on my baby sister.
Jordan Smith: It was a stupid, hateful lie to tell. But she just wanted the cops to leave her alone. And she wasn’t the only one with a wild story.
Liliana Segura: Wrongful convictions are never about just one thing. A lot of the time it’s a combination of factors: bad evidence, like junk forensics, or unreliable eyewitness identification. But a lot of the time, it starts with investigators who fail to do their job. They decide on a suspect and get tunnel vision. That’s what happened in this case. Some witnesses started changing their stories. Others had obvious reasons to testify against Devonia Inman that had nothing to do with whether or not he was guilty. None of that seemed to matter.
Jordan Smith: There was LarRisha Chapman. The other teenager who was working with Donna Brown the night she died. At first she told the GBI that nothing unusual happened at Taco Bell that night. Then, under pressure, she changed her story, said that while waiting for her ride that night she heard Devonia Inman’s voice coming from some weeds near the parking lot. Then, she took that back on the witness stand at Inman’s trial. And when the local paper offered a five-thousand dollar reward for information about the murder, a newspaper carrier came out with a completely implausible story about hearing a gunshot and seeing a black man speeding away. And then there was the jailhouse snitch, who told a GBI investigator that he and Inman had briefly shared a cell and that Inman had confessed to him. After revealing this “new information,” the snitch quickly asked the investigator if he might get released early for providing the damning testimony.
On January 11, 1999, four months after Donna Brown died, a Cook County grand jury indicted Devonia Inman for her murder. Soon after, district attorney Bob Ellis announced that he would seek the death penalty for Inman.
Liliana Segura: Just to recap, here’s the state’s case: the drug dealer who said he once saw Inman with a gun. The newspaper carrier. A teenager with a changing story. A snitch who wants out of jail bad. And Thomas, who said Inman talked about robbing people. She was about to change her story too. Devonia Inman swore he was innocent and no physical evidence tied him to the crime. No eyewitnesses, a bullet that didn’t match the gun. Early on, Marquetta Thomas tried to take back her story.
Marquetta Thomas: I was like, “He didn’t do it, yo.” And they just, they never paid any attention. I took the whole, I recanted the whole statement in court under oath. So I don’t see how that wasn’t applied to his case or a new hearing or whatever he was supposed to have or overturn his case or whatever. I did it way before getting sent to prison. Nobody would listen to me. They’re dirty, crooked, sheisty like all the movies and things I’ve seen coming up A&E and all this stuff. They are very corrupt and I think they were just looking to pin the crime on somebody to make their job lighter, easier, and I was a pawn in their game that they used. You know, I don’t know if they- Their interrogation tactics, like I’m not going to say they were forced, but it was coerced. It was verbal coercion, because they would say, “Wasn’t this this?” and I just kind of agreed. You know what I’m saying? So, I guess the story started getting formulated with bits and pieces they were telling me and I just fused the story together to get him out the picture.
Liliana Segura: She has an idea what Devonia Inman’s life is like now. She spent 14 years in prison and her son is serving an 80-year sentence. She thinks about Inman all the time.
Marquetta Thomas: Every time I talk to my son. Every time I open my refrigerator, because the liberties of just being free and walking in the grass barefoot or being allowed to open my own refrigerator when I want, when I hear a collect call on the phone from my son from a correctional institute.
Liliana Segura: Thomas has tried to take back her story about Inman killing Donna Brown a bunch of times and she’s not the only one. Over the last 20 years just about every one of the state’s witnesses has recanted.
Jordan Smith: And that’s not all. Ten years after Inman was convicted, investigators got proof that he is innocent and that the state’s theory of the case was wrong. The mask the cops missed when searching Donna Brown’s car? It had DNA on it and it wasn’t Devonia Inman’s. It was the DNA of another man. A man the cops had ignored during their investigation, even when they were told that he’d killed Donna Brown. A man who went on to murder at least two other people in Adel.
Liliana Segura: In the next episode, remember what we said before about wrongful convictions? That the real killer goes free? Yeah, we’re gonna talk about that. And how, even as Devonia Inman went on trial for his life, the case against him was unraveling. Meanwhile, the murders in Adel continued.
Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. Can’t wait for more episodes? You can binge listen to the entire season ad-free now on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.
The post Episode One: Murder at Taco Bell appeared first on The Intercept.
Entre as poucas ideias que Jair Bolsonaro apresentou em sua campanha, o bordão “pró-emprego” via facilitação da vida do empregador tem sido uma constante. No Programa Roda Viva, ela já havia dito que “é difícil ser patrão no Brasil”, o que repetiu semana passada, acrescentando um advérbio: “hoje em dia, é muito difícil ser patrão no Brasil”.
A frase logo viralizou entre seus opositores como uma mistura de “eu avisei” ou “bem feito”: o “pobre” que votou no candidato irá se “ferrar” e perder direitos. Desse modo, a esquerda, que defende os direitos dos trabalhadores, denunciava que o futuro presidente estaria do lado dos chefes e dos empresários — e não do povo.
Só que, infelizmente, a ética popular do trabalho não é tão lógica quanto a gente gostaria, já que no Brasil uma grande parte da população sonha ser patrão ou se vê como patrão. Num país em que a maioria da população está na informalidade ou trabalha por conta própria, a esquerda acabou falando para uma parcela restrita que trabalha com carteira assinada. Para toda uma outra multidão, Bolsonaro acertou em cheio, acionando uma linguagem que faz sentido no imaginário popular.
No entanto, apesar disso, Bolsonaro irá se dar mal com o povo. Eu explico o porquê de minha aposta ao final da coluna. Antes, eu gostaria de contar umas histórias sobre patrões.
‘Prefiro ser escravo de mim mesmo’Em um antigo camelódromo de Porto Alegre, onde fiz pesquisa etnográfica por seis anos, meu amigo Chico era empregado de seu sogro, para quem viajava ao Paraguai com o objetivo de buscar mercadorias. Quando chegava em Ciudad del Este, ele imediatamente contratava um “laranja” — o Maico, de uns 16 anos — que atravessava a fronteira com parte de suas sacolas em troca de US$ 7. Chico dizia-me com orgulho: “aqui eu quem mando” e exigia que o menino o chamasse de “patrão”, sempre passando ordens ríspidas e dizendo que ele era “lerdo” e que não sabia trabalhar. Para minha surpresa, de repente, Maico — que permanecia de cabeça baixa por todo o trajeto — subcontratou um outro laranja, agora de uns 12 anos, a quem deu US$ 2 e a quem também mandava e desmandava.
Quem conhece o cotidiano de muitos mercados informais urbanos sabe que histórias como essas não são exceção. Muitos ambulantes fazem de tudo para ter um empregado, e empregados, por sua vez, fazem de tudo para ter seu próprio ponto — e tudo isso pode ser sintetizado no que uma vez Chico me disse: “Se é para ser escravo, prefiro ser escravo de mim mesmo”.
Existem muitas razões que explicam esse processo que, à primeira vista, remete a um neoliberalismo “cru” (como eu chamei em meu livro) aplicado nos andares de baixo num mercado selvagem de todos contra todos. A racionalidade neoliberal, nos termos de Dardot e Laval, estaria nesses “sujeitos-empresa” que individualizam o sucesso e o fracasso por meio da narrativa meritocrática. O livro A Razão Neoliberal, de Verónica Gago, avança nesse ponto de vista “desde baixo”, mostrando que ambulantes argentinos, mesmo com táticas de resistência, sucumbem à lógica da exploração.
Apesar de eu concordar com essa interpretação, entendo que ela não dá conta de toda a complexidade da história da precariedade, da segregação e da marginalização do Brasil. O neoliberalismo — acredito eu — acirra (mais do que cria) uma lógica pré-existente de resistência à exploração por parte de grupos marginalizados brasileiros, que se recusam a ter patrão.
Na história de Chico, havia uma cadeia hierárquica de exploração de muitos “patrões” na qual ninguém aguentava ser humilhado, e a maneira de lidar com isso era repassando a humilhação (é o que chamamos nas ciências sociais de a natureza reprodutiva da violência). Aí parece-me fundamental entender o papel do autorrespeito que o trabalho por si próprio proporciona, como uma espécie de antídoto contra a humilhação da subordinação. É bom também lembrar o peso de poder simbólico que a palavra “patrão” e “patroa” tem no Brasil.
O antropólogo Roberto DaMatta, no final dos anos 1970, chamava atenção para como o caráter antidemocrático do Brasil produzia um universo de pobres invisíveis, de “ninguéns”, e que se posicionar em uma cadeia hierárquica — como a de Chico — é se tornar “pessoa”: ou seja, existir e ser reconhecido em meio a uma sociedade estratificada em que o Estado de Direito funciona para poucos.
Claudia Fonseca, em seu livro já clássico Família, Fofoca e Honra, escreveu com base em uma etnografia feita em uma comunidade pobre nos anos 1980:
é na área do emprego que o orgulho pessoal [honra] é mais manifesto (…) Por que os empregos assalariados [entre pessoas de baixa renda] são tão desprezados? (…) Autodefesa, já que muitos já foram rechaçados com brutalidade por parte de um patrão (…) Viver de oito a dez horas por dia na evocação constante de sua inferioridade em nada contribui para enaltecer a própria imagem, e o salário, realmente irrisório, não compensa a falta de satisfação pessoal. (…) O sonho de todo homem é ser trabalhador autônomo que ganha pouco, mas sente-se independente. (…) A humilhação sentida por essas pessoas em praticamente todos seus contatos com a classe média não se traduz em uma revolta coletiva. Não se sente compaixão pelos explorados.
Em linhas gerais, ser autônomo e, principalmente, ser patrão são uma forma de reivindicar a existência, quebrar a invisibilidade que impera em empregos degradantes e ter poder em uma sociedade hierárquica.
Mas eu gostaria de findar essa parte do texto com mais um caso, que é o oposto de tudo narrado até agora. É a simples e direta história do Magaiver, que mora em uma das comunidades mais pobres de Porto Alegre, onde absolutamente ninguém é trabalhador assalariado. Depois de três décadas na informalidade, idas e vindas entre “empregos de merda” e bicos de “faz-tudo”, aos 45 anos de idade, ele conseguiu um emprego de carteira assinada como garçom no restaurante do Tribunal Regional da 4ª Região. “As pessoas me chamam pelo nome” — conta ele com a expressão de quem não cabe em si de tanto orgulho. Recebe salário que considera justo, plano de saúde, dentista, férias e décimo terceiro. Ele permanece no emprego já há quatro anos. Ponto final.
‘O trabalhador vai ter que escolher entre mais direitos ou emprego’Bolsonaro não percebeu, mas o trabalhador já fez a sua escolha — e há tempos: ou mais direitos ou informalidade. O que ele propõe para gerar empregos é flexibilizar ainda mais legislação trabalhista. A proposta pode fazer brilhar os olhos de muitos aspirantes a patrões, como Chico, que votou convicto em Bolsonaro na esperança de um dia reverter seu próprio destino subalterno. O problema é que a fórmula neoliberal de Bolsonaro não se sustenta porque as pessoas aprenderam que “se é para ser escravo, é melhor ser escravos de si próprio”.
Uma das consequências da flexibilização é justamente mais informalidade, como ocorreu com a reforma trabalhista de Michel Temer que, com a promessa de diminuir o problema, jogou 1,7 milhões de pessoas na economia informal em 2017, segundo dados do IBGE.
O Brasil precisa não apenas de mais empregos, mas bons empregos, que sejam capazes de resgatar a dignidade, a identidade e o autovalor dos trabalhadores. Como gerar esses empregos é um debate inesgotável, plural e sempre urgente no campo progressista. Uma parte grande dos setores de centro-esquerda, encarnada em projetos do PT, PDT e PCdoB, defende o fortalecimento do desenvolvimentismo e da indústria nacional.
Mas há também outros importantes debates emergindo, como o encabeçado pela professora Tatiana Roque, que entende que o pleno emprego não existe num horizonte próximo e que, portanto, a ala progressista precisa tomar vantagem dessa massa um tanto “avessa à lógica do capital” e propor novas mecanismos de seguridade aos trabalhadores informais, autônomos e microempreendedores, que hoje são esquecidos — quando não rechaçados — pela narrativa da esquerda.
Apesar de existir um mundo a discutir nesta área, ainda resta uma certeza: a de que Bolsonaro está errado. Querendo ou não, a saída está na história do Magaiver: mais proteção social ou nada.
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Donald Trump is intellectually, emotionally, and ethically unsuited for positions of public responsibility. The Atlantic argued this in an editorial published just before the 2016 presidential election, and I tried to document it in more than 150 installments through the election year.
This reality means that, for people whose principles date to any era before Trump’s, serving under him brings daily reminders of the impossible choices the great economist Albert O. Hirschman laid out in his book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Each day they stay with this regime, they can tell themselves that they are steering events in a less disastrous direction than if they had not been there. And each day they stay with this regime, they are inevitably more compromised and soiled.
Until today, the Trump appointee who had made the best of this doomed predicament was James Mattis, retired four-star Marine Corps general and Trump’s first secretary of defense. I have known Mattis for decades; have disagreed with him on many points of policy; but have always respected his integrity and independence of intellect and character. In my judgment, he had made two consequential missteps in his long career. One was agreeing, after his retirement from the Marine Corps five years ago, to serve on the board of directors of Theranos, the failed (and apparently fraudulent) blood-testing startup firm headed by Elizabeth Holmes. The other was his apparent complaisance with Donald Trump’s diktat just before the mid-term elections that thousands of U.S. troops deploy to southern Texas to “defend” the United States against the supposed menace of the Central American “caravan.”
We all make mistakes. I’ve made many. And overall I shared the gratitude many people felt that Mattis—experienced, erudite, with the modest and understated bearing that bespeaks true confidence (and is in the starkest possible contrast to Trump himself)—was in the national-security chain of command, an “adult in the room” serving as a buffer between the impulses of Trump and the actions of the world’s strongest military. He was continuing his service to the nation, its allies, and the world—words I write sincerely, with no air-quotes distance or edge.
And as of today, we know that episodes like the “caravan” charade were part of Mattis’s long game, the smaller compromises he accepted in order to maintain his important role.
That is over now. Mattis has had enough. Trump put out a preemptive tweet trying to spin Mattis’s departure as “retiring, with distinction.” In fact, it was as pointed a resignation-on-principle by a Cabinet member as we have seen in modern times. “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote. “Because you have the right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”
The closest thing we have seen to this in the post-World War II era came in 1980, when Cyrus Vance, then the secretary of state, resigned out of disagreement with Jimmy Carter’s approval of a mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran. “You would not be well served in the coming weeks and months by a secretary of state who could not offer you the public backing you need on an issue and decision of such extraordinary importance,” Vance wrote to Carter, ”no matter how firm I remain in my support on other issues, as I do, or how loyal I am to you as our leader.” One remarkable aspect of Vance’s statement, at the time, is that he offered it before anyone knew whether the rescue mission would succeed or fail. (It failed, when some rescue helicopters broke down. Vance first delivered his news to Carter in private, before news of the raid came out.) A remarkable aspect of it in retrospect is how careful Vance was to express his respect for Carter’s judgment and leadership on other issues—something James Mattis did not even pretend to do, not even with one word.
James Mattis has done his best. He did much better than others of the group Trump once called “my generals.” Unlike H.R. McMaster, he did not give up too much of his pre-Trump reputation. Unlike John Kelly, he did not reveal parts of his character that will lastingly damage his reputation. Unlike Michael Flynn .. well, unlike….
The onus is not with “my generals” any more, or with “the adults in the room.” It is with the body that has check-and-balance power over an out-of-control executive.
Donald Trump is dangerous and unfit for office. Nearly every member of the House of Representatives knows this. I bet that every single senator does. History’s eyes are on them, as are the world’s right now. The longer they pretend not to see, the greater the contempt they will earn—and the danger they will invite.
Barack Obama has sometimes struggled to find his political footing since leaving office, even though he’s more popular and more in demand by Democrats than at any point since 2008. He’d been challenged by a very deliberate decision he made to steer clear of direct confrontation with Donald Trump for a year and a half, aware that a fight is always exactly what Trump is looking for. Why help him turn out the Republican base?
Behind the scenes, Obama had been much more active and forceful, meeting with top Democrats and mentoring up and coming Democrats, including most of the expected 2020 presidential candidates. Then, in September, he unleashed an intense argument against Trump and carried that forward with considerable effect through the midterms, which produced a blue wave that devastated Republicans nationally, and locally. But since then, he’s been eager to move past the Trump dynamic again and address bigger, less personal politics.
[Read: Barack Obama and Donald Trump Can’t Stand Each Other]
The answer he’s found to accomplish this: redistricting reform. On Thursday night, Obama announced a major shift in the politics of his post-presidency, folding his Organizing for Action group into the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
The consolidation focuses and directs Obama’s political activity and fundraising for a cause that has become a major focus since he left the White House: gerrymandering reform.
It ends the six-year existence of OFA, formed out of the pieces of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, which at times struggled to find footing with a clear mission. The Chicago-based group will cease to exist.
“People want common sense gun safety laws, Congress ignores it. People want compressive immigration reform, Congress ignores it,” Obama said in a call with top supporters on Thursday night. “The single most important thing that could be done at the grassroots level over the next few years is to make sure the rules of the road are fair. If we do that, I think we’ll do the right thing.”
[Read: Barack Obama Makes the Case Against Trump]
OFA was initially set up as a vehicle to provide pressure for Obama’s agenda in his second term. The group had been ready to close down entirely two years ago, had Hillary Clinton won.
Trump’s election gave the group new life, and over 2017, it became a nexus for a range of newly formed resistance groups to train in organizing, particularly in last summer’s fight to defeat Obamacare repeal. Then in 2018, the group—which had always insisted it wasn’t about electoral politics—shifted into organizing for Democrats running in the midterms.
Meanwhile, Obama had put more energy into the redistricting reform group he backed and recruited his friend and former Attorney General Eric Holder to chair.
The merger now will create a “joint force that is focused on this issue of singular importance,” Obama said on Thursday.
[Read: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s War on Gerrymandering Is Just Beginning]
The merging of the organizations will begin almost immediately, building off a working relationship the groups formed during the 2018 midterms. Eager to get Obama voters engaged on the esoteric issue of redistricting, the NDRC tapped the OFA list, hosting multiple virtual house party nights, and helping rouse the most die-hard supporters of the former president to vote on the issue and spread the word.
The results of the midterms were good news for the effort: Democrats flipped nearly 400 state legislature seats, and eight overall chambers, in addition to eating away at several Republican super majorities. Those wins, along with the governor’s races that the Democrats flipped, put the party in much stronger shape ahead of the 2020 census and the next round of drawing the electoral maps in 2021.
Holder, who will remain chairing the group as he considers whether to launch a 2020 campaign himself (Thursday, he’d only say that he’s thinking about it and will make a decision by early 2019), called the merger “a way to maximize the incredible impact that OFA has had in the past and continue it into the future—this is a natural extension of the work we’ve been doing over the past year.”
The bulked up NDRC will be the main outlet for Obama’s fundraising and political involvement over the next two years, with him returning to the sidelines and staying out of the fray until the 2020 elections.
Holder said Obama has landed on redistricting reform as his central political cause as a way to get more action on climate change, gun control and health care. He argued that those would move if the state legislatures and House districts elect members who are more representative of the voting public than the current lines allow.
“If you say, ‘The Obama legacy will then be focused on redistricting,’ that’s the mechanism by which the things the Obama presidency were about will be preserved,” Holder said.
The issue of gerrymandering has exploded in politics in the last two years, in part due to moves like the Wisconsin and Michigan legislatures moving after the November elections to cut back the powers of the Democrats who won. Both states are heavily gerrymandered, giving Republicans major advantages in winning elections that are disproportionate to voter turnout.
Not every OFA supporter will move to redistricting. Over the next few months, OFA officials will work to pair members who prioritize other issues with groups that focus on those.
Holder will hold his own conference call with OFA supporters on Jan. 7 to begin providing details of the merger.
For almost two full years, James Mattis has provided the nation with a collective security blanket—and national-security-minded Republicans with a credible excuse. Whatever outrageous or weird or even suspicious things President Donald Trump might do, Mattis was at the head of the order of battle: an American through and through, untainted and uncompromised.
Now Mattis has quit. His letter of resignation stated explicitly that the secretary and the president disagreed about “treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors.” It omitted the customary courtesies to the president: no statement that it was an honor to serve him, no words about common purposes, not even a final “Respectfully yours” before the signature.
What to make of Mattis’s challenge and warning?
So long as Mattis stayed on the job, Republicans in Congress could indulge the hope that responsible people remained in charge of the nation’s security. That hope has now been repudiated by the very person in whom the hope was placed. It’s James Mattis himself who is telling you that the president does not treat allies with respect, does not have a clear-eyed view of malign actors and strategic competitors.
In Syria, the United States is abandoning Kurdish comrades-in-arms who trusted America’s word. The U.S. is now preparing to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Brussels on December 4 to insult the European Union on its home ground. Trump has egged on Brexit, dangling a (completely false) hope of a speedy U.S.-U.K. free-trade treaty to encourage hard-line Brexiteers to crash out of the EU in March without a transitional treaty. Meanwhile, sanctions are being lifted on the enterprises of Paul Manafort’s former patron Oleg Deripaska, even as the U.S. continues to wage trade war not only upon China, but against Canada, the U.K., and the European Union as well.
From the beginning of the administration, its more normal members have sought to present Donald Trump’s instincts as somehow consistent with American policy since 1945, somehow a version of normal U.S. leadership. “America First doesn’t mean America alone,” wrote Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster in a joint op-ed in May 2017. “It is a commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests while also fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners.”
But it turns out none of that is true. Donald Trump is not even a little bit concerned about cooperation and relationships. He holds his own word notoriously worthless, and he sees no problem in doing the same to the nation’s. His “America First” may not mean “America alone”—but only because his America is now disturbingly and mysteriously beholden to cash-rich counterparts: Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia.
Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?
Exits: Secretary of Defense James Mattis is resigning, after conflicts with President Donald Trump over the current direction of the administration’s foreign policy. His resignation letter—which you can read in full here—addresses the problem head-on: “I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours.” His departure ends what may be one of the strangest single stints in Trump’s cabinet, writes David A. Graham. Elsewhere: Outgoing Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s fiery exit interview isn’t kind to her progressive critics.
Weinstein on Trial: A judge on the New York Supreme Court announced Thursday that Harvey Weinstein will face trial in 2019 for the five criminal charges brought against him after numerous women accused the fallen entertainment mogul of sexual assault and rape. The continuation of Weinstein’s case was unexpected, writes Megan Garber, but the sure-to-be-chaotic trial will be critical in informing the future of the #MeToo movement.
Food Stamps: The White House and the Department of Agriculture are moving to tighten time limits and work requirements for people who receive food stamps. But safety-net research suggests that the new policy won’t really lead to an increase in employment among low-income people, will just drive people deeper into poverty, and may deepen existing racial inequalities despite being race-neutral on its face.
—Haley Weiss and Shan Wang
Snapshot
In December of 1968, the Apollo 8 crew reached the moon’s far side and encountered a view no human had seen before: the Earth from above, against the gray lunar surface. The now-famous image inspired an explosion of literary interpretations, including a masterful Don DeLillo short story, which you can read here. “The view is endlessly fulfilling,” DeLillo writes. “It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.” (Illustration by Delcan & Company)Evening ReadThe promise of self-driving cars has generated a lot of hype in recent years. Alexis Madrigal breaks down the seven key obstacles that stand between us and our autonomous-vehicle utopia:
Self-driving cars are coming. Tech giants such as Uber and Alphabet have bet on it, as have old-school car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors. But even as Google’s sister company Waymo prepares to launch its self-driving-car service and automakers prototype vehicles with various levels of artificial intelligence, there are some who believe that the autonomous future has been oversold—that even if driverless cars are coming, it won’t be as fast, or as smooth, as we’ve been led to think. The skeptics come from different disciplines inside and out of the technology and automotive industries, and each has a different bear case against self-driving cars. Add them up and you have a guide to all the ways our autonomous future might not materialize.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. Shortly after the Senate voted last week to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Pentagon revealed that it was still owed $331 million from Saudi Arabia and this country.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. The chairman of this Chinese tech company finally spoke publicly this week, amidst growing suspicions over the corporation’s business practices and relationship with the Chinese government.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. A controversial trial in this European country concluded yesterday with two immigrants’-rights activists being sentenced to jail time ahead of a strict new immigration law that will take effect in January.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: united arab emirates/ Huawei / France
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
“Your dragon display is only marginally acceptable at Halloween,” an anonymous neighbor wrote in all caps about Diana Rowland’s inflatable-dragon nativity scene. So Rowland got more inflatable dragons.
The Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his Boring Company tunnel cost $10 million per mile to build. If that’s true, it could be a big deal for public transit.
Next up in the CityLab University series: Meet 15 people who changed how we plan, design, think about, and live in cities.
The U.S. has added 10,000 dollar-store locations since 2001. Though these “small box” retailers carry only a limited stock of prepared foods, they’re now feeding more people than grocery chains like Whole Foods. But some towns and cities are trying to push back.
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On Thursday, December 20, Secretary of Defense James Mattis submitted a letter of resignation to President Donald Trump. “Because you have the right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects,” he wrote, “I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” The full text of the letter is reproduced below.
Dear Mr. President:
I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defense of our citizens and our ideals.
I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong US global influence.
One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. NATO’s 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.
Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions—to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.
My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.
Because you have the right to a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department’s interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February. Further, that a full transition to a new Secretary of Defense occurs well in advance of the transition of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September in order to ensure stability within the Department.
I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 DoD civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.
I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.
James N. Mattis
In today’s look back at the year’s best Atlantic politics stories, we’re sharing a deep dive on President Donald Trump’s elusive immigration adviser, an exploration of the Democratic Party’s ideological trajectory, and a look at the “white men’s club” leading America’s largest cities.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back tomorrow with more standout stories to finish up the year.
— Elaine Godfrey, Madeleine Carlisle, and Olivia Paschal
(Paul Spella / The Atlantic*)
Stephen Miller: Trump’s Right-Hand Troll
McKay Coppins
“In the campy TV drama that is Donald Trump’s Washington, Miller has carved out an enigmatic role. He lurks in the background for weeks at a time, only to emerge with crucial cameos in the most explosive episodes.” → Read on.
Don’t Bet on Comprehensive Immigration Reform in the New Congress
Priscilla Alvarez
“Three words—comprehensive immigration reform—have plagued Congress for decades. Bills get introduced. Bills fail. This cycle is likely to replay itself in the 116th Congress, and will possibly expose divisions within the Democratic Party.” → Read on
White Men Are Running America’s Biggest Cities
Russell Berman
“America’s largest urban centers are its bastions of diversity and progressive politics—most are overwhelmingly Democratic, and in many of them, whites no longer make up a majority of the population. But that diversity is not represented in City Hall. Of the 15 most populous cities in the United States, all but three are led by white male mayors.” → Read on.
(Kristen Norman)
The Fight for Iowa’s White Working-Class Soul
Elaine Godfrey
“I grew up in Burlington, Iowa, just south of the first district, and Finkenauer reminded me of the people I grew up with—the way she says ‘tellin’’ and ‘workin’’ and talks about her ‘grampa.’ But the race also intrigued me: Every politician wants to demonstrate a oneness with their constituents, but there is something uncanny about watching a candidate perform her statehood when you’re from the same state.” → Read on.
How Far Have the Democrats Moved to the Left?
David A. Graham
“The 2016 candidate who did the most to push the Democratic Party leftward may not have been Sanders but Trump.” → Read on.
*In the Stephen Miller collage, illustrations Courtesy of Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District / The Chronicle / Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post / Getty / Pablo Martinez / AP
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Updated on December 20 at 7:35 p.m. ET
Secretary of Defense James Mattis is resigning over conflicts with President Donald Trump concerning American policy overseas—the highest-profile official to quit the administration over disagreements of principle with the president.
In a resignation letter, Mattis laid out a series of differences with Trump, who he said deserved to have a secretary of defense who was aligned with him. Mattis cited the importance of international alliances and partnerships, constraining Russia, and maintaining an American military presence overseas. By the standard of resignation letters, which typically flatter a president and avoid direct conflict, the missive is a scathing rebuke.
“I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,” Mattis wrote. “It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions—to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies.”
The news comes a day after Trump said that U.S. troops would leave Syria, a move the Pentagon opposed. The president announced Mattis’s exit in a tweet. “General Jim Mattis will be retiring, with distinction, at the end of February, after having served my Administration as Secretary of Defense for the past two years,” Trump wrote. “A new Secretary of Defense will be named shortly. I greatly thank Jim for his service!”
The question now facing both U.S. and foreign leaders is plain: Who will constrain Trump? Mattis was one of the few remaining officials who seemed able to twist the president’s arm out of his most rash and unwise decisions and impulses.
“Mattis is the last brake on a president that makes major life-and-death decisions by whim without reading, deliberation, or any thought as to consequences and risks,” said a senior U.S. national-security official on Thursday, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk freely. “The saving grace is that this president has not been tested by a major national-security crisis. But it will come, and when it does, we are fucked.”
While the administration has seen heavy turnover, there have been few resignations on principle, despite Trump’s frequent departures from norms. It’s also exceedingly rare for senior officials in any administration to resign in protest. There had been frequent speculation that Mattis might leave the Pentagon after some of Trump’s previous actions. The economic adviser Gary Cohn resigned over his disagreements with Trump about tariffs.
Mattis’s resignation brings to an end the single strangest stint in Trump’s inner orbit. Mattis was always a misfit: a westerner in a team of East Coast types, a veteran among mostly civilians, an ascetic among the profligate, an institutionalist among nihilists, a lifelong public servant among political climbers and businessmen, an aphorist serving a logorrheic president.
Yet Mattis put together one of the steadiest and most successful tenures of any Trump official, and managed to stay largely untainted by the dysfunction that has marked the administration and tarnished many aides. Mattis might be the only top official to emerge with his reputation enhanced. Nonetheless, the chaos of the Trump administration and his own differences of opinion with the president mean that Mattis’s accomplishments largely consisted of protecting the status quo—he was a defense secretary who spent most of his term on the defensive.
Mattis retired from a decorated career in the Marines—capped by a stint leading Central Command—in 2013, but he was pulled out of retirement to join the Trump administration in late 2016. The president-elect, spurned by many traditional Cabinet candidates, sought current and ex-military leaders, including Mattis, John Kelly, and Michael Flynn, to join his team. In Mattis’s case, he required a congressional waiver to serve as the head of the Pentagon, because he hadn’t been retired the minimum seven years.
Trump was particularly drawn to Mattis, who had an archive of colorful quotes—“I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all”—and a colorful nickname, “Mad Dog.” It took months of Trump using the nickname before Mattis made clear he detested it.
Another of Mattis’s nicknames was “The Warrior Monk,” and in the Trump administration, it was the monastic, rather than militaristic, Mattis who predominated. Inevitably, this brought the Pentagon into conflict with the White House. Mattis reportedly stuck with the job out of a sense of duty, hoping that his presence could avoid catastrophe and war.
[Read: ]James Mattis has somehow stayed on Trump’s good side
A prime example of the tension was NATO. Mattis, despite his long military career, is a believer in diplomacy, telling Congress in 2013, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.” But Trump had little understanding of or use for the alliance. According to Bob Woodward’s Fear, Mattis joined with several other advisers in February 2017 to convince the president of its importance.
“If you didn’t have NATO, you would have to invent it,” Mattis said, according to Woodward. “There’s no way Russia could win a war if they took on NATO.” Trump seemed to be persuaded, Woodward reported. “You can have your NATO,” the president told Mattis. The administration would support the alliance, “but you become the rent collector.”
Mattis became a sort of ambassador at large to Europe, repeatedly placed in the role of reassuring allies about America’s steadiness and fidelity to its commitments, and cleaning up after Trump’s lovefests with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Elsewhere around the globe, Mattis exerted a similarly constraining influence on Trump. He worked with other aides to try to convince Trump not to end a free-trade agreement with South Korea, worked to convince Trump that a military strike against North Korea was unwise, and argued forcefully against American withdrawal from the Korean peninsula.
Mattis pursued a similar strategy in Syria: neither pull back nor escalate. According to Woodward, Trump called Mattis in April 2017, following a chemical attack by the Syrian regime, and demanded that the U.S. military kill Bashar al-Assad. Woodward reports that Mattis told an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” In the end, Trump launched only limited air strikes. A year later, when the president announced that he wanted a full withdrawal of American troops from Syria, military advisers talked him down from that, too.
In Afghanistan, Mattis was actually able to convince Trump to send more troops. But the secretary was not always able to prevail. Though he was an outspoken critic of the Iranian regime, he came to a grudging belief that the nuclear deal negotiated under former President Barack Obama was worth preserving. Along with then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others, Mattis helped convince Trump not to trash the Iran deal, but ran out of luck in spring 2018, when the president tore it up.
Mattis and Trump viewed matters differently stateside, too. A notable flare-up came over allowing transgender members of the armed services. Mattis sided with an Obama-era decision to open the branches up to transgender members. Trump was opposed, and while Mattis was on vacation, Trump tweeted that he was going to bar them from serving. Thanks to Trump’s failure to consult with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the total lack of specificity in his announcements, the Pentagon was able to postpone the order for months, ultimately landing on a result that curtailed transgender Americans’ service but granted Mattis leeway to implement rules as he saw fit.
Following a visit to France for Bastille Day in 2017, Trump became entranced by the idea of a massive military parade through Washington. Mattis’s Pentagon, skeptical of the idea, managed to slow-walk it; in summer 2018, someone leaked a $92 million estimate for the cost of the display, though Mattis publicly disputed that. Trump eventually kicked the can down the road, postponing the event until at least 2019.
[Read: Trump gives an order too vague for his generals to obey]
How was Mattis able to survive so long despite his differences with Trump? Woodward offered this formula: “Avoid the confrontation, demonstrate respect and deference, proceed smartly with business, travel as much as possible, get and stay out of town.” Mattis benefited from Trump’s tendency to view the military as a solution to all problems, which gave the Pentagon easy chances to shine. Mattis was also highly popular—with military leaders, members of Congress, and the pundit class—which gave him some protection, and fairly press-averse, minimizing the risk that he’d steal the spotlight from the president and thus alienate him.
For a long time, this worked. And then it didn’t. By summer 2018, there were reports that Mattis was more and more sidelined from White House policy discussions. Tillerson, Mattis’s ally, had finally been fired in March, and Trump had a much better rapport with his replacement, Mike Pompeo. The State Department began to eclipse the Pentagon.
Then came the Woodward book, which depicted Mattis as not only slow-walking the president’s directives but also being privately dismissive and sneering about him, saying he had the understanding of a fifth or sixth grader. Mattis denied the quotes attributed to him in the book, but Woodward has a reputation for accuracy, and his account echoed the evident tension between the defense secretary and the president.
In mid-October, Trump appeared on 60 Minutes, where he told Lesley Stahl that though “I like General Mattis,” he believed he knew more about NATO than his defense secretary. Trump hinted at Mattis’s impending exit as well.
“I think he’s sort of a Democrat, if you wanna know the truth,” Trump said. “But General Mattis is a good guy. We get along very well. He may leave. I mean, at some point, everybody leaves. Everybody. People leave. That’s Washington.”
Nonetheless, Mattis had managed to outlast a secretary of state; two national-security advisers; two White House chiefs of staff; secretaries of health and human services, the interior, and veterans’ affairs; and heads of the CIA and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. In part because Mattis seemed to spend so much of his time working to constrain Trump, it’s not yet clear what legacy he will leave at the Pentagon.
Mattis’s departure will send an immediate shudder through both Washington and foreign capitals. The president will be hard-pressed to find a replacement who will instill confidence in Congress and the ranks of the military while still maintaining an effective relationship with the White House. Meanwhile, Mattis’s exit could even further strain relations with American allies, who have seen him as a calming influence and for whom he has often served as a direct conduit. In the end, Mattis proved to be the Trump administration’s most effective diplomat, whether negotiating the fraught internal battles of the administration or speaking to foreign leaders.
The friction between Mattis and Trump no doubt wore on both the president and the secretary. According to Woodward, Mattis once told friends, “Secretaries of defense don’t always get to choose the president they work for.” As Mattis’s resignation demonstrates, however, he eventually realized he could choose not to work for Trump.
Yara Bayoumy contributed reporting.
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Observing antidemocratic “power grabs” by state Republicans, George Packer writes that “the corruption of the Republican Party in the Trump era seemed to set in with breathtaking speed. In fact, it took more than a half century to reach the point where faced with a choice between democracy and power, the party chose the latter.”
To understand how the party of Lincoln became the party of Trump, Alex Wagner spoke with Packer on this week’s Radio Atlantic. Listen to hear Packer describe the three “insurgencies” that explain the transformation of the GOP over the past half century. An ideological revolution that began with Barry Goldwater became a coup for power with Newt Gingrich (a.k.a. “The Man Who Broke Politics”). Afterwards, moderate Republicans became an endangered species, the Tea Party emerged as a major force, and Trump’s brand of corrosive politics became, Packer says, “inevitable.”
VoicesLast week, after a marathon of debate, Congress passed another Farm Bill. To explain exactly what’s in the mammoth $867 billion package, it might be easier to describe what’s not in it. Between assistance for farmers, offsets for the ongoing agricultural trade war with China, hemp subsidies, and a reauthorization of most of the country’s food assistance programs for low-income people, the Farm Bill is truly a kitchen-sink endeavor. But what’s missing from the legislation is just as important: It doesn’t include tighter work requirements for people who receive food stamps.
That wasn’t for lack of trying. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue kicked off 2018 by signaling that the department was moving toward stricter eligibility for people in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which would require more people to work to receive benefits, a position that has been championed by President Donald Trump and conservative stalwarts in Congress. But, as Trump’s own trade war with China disrupted the livelihood of farmers in America, the necessity of passing the bill and its agricultural safety-net programs outweighed the rhetorical importance of SNAP work requirements, leading to a relatively uncontroversial final bill that sailed through both chambers with bipartisan support.
But the White House might get to have it both ways. On Thursday, the Agriculture Department announced that it would be proposing a rule to curtail exactly how many people can receive food stamps without working, a rule similar to one that Republican lawmakers intended to place in the Farm Bill itself. Assuming the rule is implemented after a 60-day comment period, it would net Purdue and Trump much of what they wanted in the way of tighter work requirements for SNAP. And it would do so by executive authority, potentially removing significant numbers of people from the American safety net on the whim of the executive branch alone.
The rule would work by tightening a waiver that’s present in the SNAP program under existing law. Technically, for able-bodied people ages 18 to 49 with no dependents, the program already does require them to work or engage in job training to continue to receive benefits for more than three months at a time. But, reflecting the realities of structural poverty and the administrative burden for states of that time limit, SNAP allows states to request waivers for some counties and cities under certain conditions. Currently, under one of those waivers, in places where the unemployment rate is 20 percent higher than the national rate, states can effectively remove time limits and the work requirement. Most states over the past decade have used this option liberally, and many people, especially in economically depressed areas, have received food stamps who otherwise wouldn’t be able to. According to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, somewhere close to 40 percent of Americans live in places where states have SNAP waivers in effect.
For the White House, this situation runs counter to the purpose of the SNAP program. “It’s evident that there are able-bodied adults without dependents who are on the food-stamp program, who we believe it is in their best interests, and their families’ best interests, to move into an independent lifestyle,” Perdue said in January. In the fact sheet announcing the rule fulfilling Perdue’s preference, the USDA announced that “in 2016 there were 3.8 million individual [able-bodied adults without dependents] on the SNAP rolls, with 2.8 million (or almost 74 percent) of them not working.” Citing the strong economy and a low unemployment rate, the fact sheet argues that even under the waiver threshold, where counties with unemployment at least 20 percent higher than the national average qualify, the minimum end of that range is still somewhere near 5 percent unemployment, a mark approaching “full employment.”
The proposed rule reflects this argument. It would require that local unemployment rise above a floor of 7 percent before the 20 percent provision kicks in. With the current unemployment rate, practically the rule would mean that only counties and cities with more than 7 percent unemployment could have work requirements for able-bodied adults waived after three months of enrollment.
The research on the safety net predicts that what will follow such a rule will not be an increase in employment among low-income people, but an increase in deep poverty. Most people who can work do work, and perhaps especially under the “natural employment” scenario the Trump administration envisions as the floor for long-term food support, those people who can’t find or secure jobs are not likely out of a job solely because they lack motivation. And, as has been argued when state governments have attempted to implement more work requirements and eligibility restrictions on SNAP and other safety-net programs like Medicaid, the stated logic of work requirements is largely self-defeating. The requirements are already burdensome and curtail the ability of the program to prepare people for work. “The SNAP program already has work requirements,” according to a brief from the liberal Center for American Progress, “which in reality function as harsh time limits for unemployed and underemployed workers, as well as people who face serious barriers to work.”
According to opponents of the proposed USDA rule, it’s a naked power play, one that uses anti-welfare rhetoric to inflame existing racial disparities in wealth and employment. A statement from Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says, “the Administration is now proposing to implement, through executive action, what it failed to secure through legislation.” With respect to the inherent racial disparities at play, the statement reads: “People of color would be at particular risk, given their much higher unemployment rates and continued racial discrimination in labor markets.”
In all, the proposed rule does fit in recent uses of executive action to make sharp cuts to the safety net, public welfare, and public health even as public opinion is clearly in favor of the provision of those services. Under Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, states have been given guidance allowing work requirements to be tacked on to state Medicaid programs, although that directive has been tied up in courts. Earlier this year, under Secretary Ben Carson, the Department of Housing and Urban Development attempted to triple the minimum rents for federally subsidized housing to combat what it called “perverse incentives, including discouraging these families from earning more income and becoming self-sufficient.” Carson walked back that plan this summer.
It’s possible that the new rule from the USDA could be gummed up in a similar way to those policies, but clearly they all represent a presidential paradigm that will use any tools at hand to kick people off the safety net. And, even after an election in which concern for public programs helped drive record numbers of people to the polls in a “blue wave” election for Democrats, the message to those voters from the White House is that their does not matter.
Just in time for Christmas, the Trump administration has announced its intention to strip nutrition support from hundreds of thousands of poor adults. The change is meant to encourage work, the administration said. “Long-term reliance on government assistance has never been part of the American dream,” Sonny Perdue, the secretary of agriculture, argued in a press release. “As we make benefits available to those who truly need them, we must also encourage participants to take proactive steps toward self-sufficiency. Moving people to work is common-sense policy, particularly at a time when the unemployment rate is at a generational low.”
But it is unclear whether making the safety net harder to access would improve the country’s labor-force participation rate, or how many people it would spur to find work. And it is clear that the kind of change proposed might make the country’s deep-poverty crisis worse, while punishing already struggling individuals.
As it is, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) requires able-bodied adults without dependent kids to work or engage in job training, and restricts them to three months of benefits every three years if they cannot do so. But states can exempt adults in areas with high unemployment rates from that three-in-three rule. The proposed change would bar states from offering that exemption unless the local unemployment rate is more than 7 percent, The Washington Post reports, which would cut an estimated 800,000 people from the program and save the government an estimated $15 billion over a 10-year window.
[Read: Trump proposes food stamp work requirements he couldn’t get through Congress]
Would the change get America’s unemployed poor back on the job? Perhaps on the margins. Studies show that work requirements can increase employment rates and do spur some workers to find a job faster. But they also show that those employment increases are often “modest, and [fade] over time.” Nor do the policies do much to reduce poverty or improve the longer-run employment situation of the people subject to them.
Many lower-income Americans face multiple arduous barriers to getting a job. They might have an undiagnosed disability, substance-use or mental-health issues, or a medical condition. They might struggle to find child care, or live in a remote area where work is hard to come by and transportation is expensive. They might have language or literacy challenges. The average income of SNAP recipients affected by Donald Trump’s proposed rule change falls at one-third of the poverty line, meaning just a few hundred dollars a month. For those individuals, destitution is often the main barrier to finding employment.
Nonprofit or government programs that help such adults with subsidized jobs, intensive work training, or education programs have proved successful. But the Trump administration has not offered to pair its punitive measure with increased funds for job training or government-funded jobs—nor are states generous in providing such services to SNAP participants.
[Read: The Farm Bill’s threat to food security]
“The administration may portray its proposal as a reasonable ‘work requirement,’” argues Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. But “most states don’t offer these people any job, training opportunity, or slot in a work program, and people who are ‘playing by the rules’ and looking hard for a job are cut off nonetheless. Moreover, the history of the three-month cut-off shows that some people who should qualify for an exemption from it because they suffer from a significant health condition often don’t get one.”
As a general point, a stingier and more punitive safety net is associated with more poverty—and not necessarily with more work. The United States’ labor-force participation rate among adults is lower than it is in many countries with far more generous safety nets, among them Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Iceland, Canada, and Germany. And its poverty rates are higher.
What is certain is that the changes, if enacted, would punish many of those worst-off in the labor market. The proposal would “diminish food assistance for unemployed and underemployed people in areas with insufficient jobs, undo long-settled regulations, cynically attempt to end run Congress, and increase hunger and nutrition-related diseases,” argues Jim Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.
[Read: The messy relationship between food stamps and health]
The policy would also amplify existing inequalities. Black Americans, for instance, face significant discrimination in hiring; their unemployment rates are often double those of white Americans. Though race-neutral on its face, the initiative would disproportionately impact communities of color. It would likely also make the country’s deep-poverty crisis worse, by leaving hundreds of thousands more of the country’s poorest individuals with no government assistance at all.
What would increase labor-force participation rates and help more lower-income Americans find work? There are dozens of evidence-based policies with far less cruel effects: subsidizing child care, bolstering the minimum wage, increasing or expanding the earned income-tax credit, funding transitional-employment programs, financing work-training initiatives, and creating direct employment schemes.
One other thing that gets people to work? Taxing inheritances and estates. A year ago, of course, the Republican Congress and the Trump administration slashed taxes on wealthy heirs.
On December 21, 1968, three humans climbed atop a massive rocket and left our planet for a six-day, round-trip journey to our nearest companion in the solar system, the moon. During the Apollo 8 mission, NASA astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders flew hundreds of thousands of miles across translunar space, becoming the first human beings to see the entirety of the Earth at once with their own eyes. They orbited the moon 10 times, and came within 70 miles of the surface, taking dozens of photographs, including one of the most famous and powerful images in human history, Earthrise, a compelling view of our home world, vibrant and colorful, contrasted against the forbidding blackness of space and the challenging landscape of the moon. Fifty years ago, Apollo 8 set the stage for Apollo 11, when men would first set foot on the moon, seven months later.
Claire McCaskill has two words for her progressive critics: “Shut up.”
In a Thursday interview with The New York Times, the outgoing Missouri senator described her frustration—among other grievances—that some of her fellow Democrats saw her as too quiet on the issue of abortion during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
“Really? This is hard,” McCaskill said of running as a Democrat in a red state. “I have been standing in the breach for women’s rights as it relates to reproductive freedom for all of my adult life, and the fact that these [critics] didn’t realize that and just be quiet, roll up their sleeves, and work their ass off for me was beyond irritating.”
McCaskill’s comments help illustrate one of the central dilemmas facing the Democratic Party: To maintain and expand its congressional majority, should the party fully embrace progressivism and all its tenets? Or should it accept the idea that the definition of “Democrat” might be slightly different in every state? Answering these questions is crucial as Democrats begin to flex their legislative muscle in the House—and as they position themselves for the 2020 elections.
McCaskill, who served 12 years in the U.S. Senate before she lost to Josh Hawley, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, in November, has a reputation as a moderate—someone who prioritizes bipartisanship, and is always positioned smack-dab in the middle of charts plotting the ideology of members of Congress.
Throughout her tenure, McCaskill has consistently voted to protect abortion access, but because Missouri has many antiabortion voters, she mostly avoids talking about it on the campaign trail. Recently, though, the issue has become particularly fraught for her.
During the recent confirmation process for President Donald Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominee, red-state Democrats such as McCaskill and North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp spent weeks deliberating over how to vote. Conservatives in their states supported Kavanaugh, but progressives feared his confirmation would spell the end of Roe v. Wade and abortion access in America. “No matter how I vote, there’s going to be a lot of people who are not going to be happy with it,” McCaskill said at the time. The Missouri Democrat ultimately voted against Kavanaugh, but not because of abortion or the sexual-assault allegations against him. Instead, McCaskill said she voted no because of an email Kavanaugh had written to a colleague in 2002, which seemed to suggest that he thought there were “constitutional problems” with limiting campaign contributions to candidates.
“There are some voters that the only issue they care about is outlawing all abortions, and there are other voters that the only issue they care about is keeping access to abortion legal,” McCaskill told reporters ahead of the Senate vote. “What is more common is a large number of people concerned about ‘dark money.’”
In June, as part of an effort to erase some of the gains Republicans had made in the 2016 election, the Missouri Democratic Party had altered its platform to welcome Democrats who oppose abortion. McCaskill, for her part, praised the move. But almost immediately, progressives and abortion-rights activists both inside and outside the state began to protest. By August, Missouri Democrats had removed the provision.
McCaskill’s openness to antiabortion Democrats has earned her criticism from those in her party who argue that all its members should be unapologetically pro-choice. But the senator says she worries that without empowering moderates, Democrats will never regain a majority in both chambers of Congress. “This demand for purity, this looking down your nose at people who want to compromise, is a recipe for disaster for the Democrats,” she told NPR in November. “Will we ever get to a majority in the Senate again, much less to 60, if we do not have some moderates in our party?”
[Read: The 2018 midterms could kill the American moderate for good]
Others go even further—and say that the party should support only full-throated progressives to be successful. Shortly after winning their elections in November, incoming Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan announced that they would work with Justice Democrats, a progressive political-action committee, to recruit working-class candidates to challenge more conservative Democrats in the House.
The move—which some Democrats have characterized as a progressive purity test—could foreshadow problems in the next Congress and in future elections, with passionate progressives attempting to steer the direction of the party. And to some Democrats, it appears to disregard the lessons of the midterms: Nearly all the candidates who flipped seats from red to blue are political moderates. These Democrats believe their party won a House majority in November not because of outspoken progressives like Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated the prominent Democrat Joe Crowley in a primary in June, but because of pragmatist Democrats who ran in red districts and emerged victorious. People a lot like Claire McCaskill.
“God love her,” McCaskill said of Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, “but I hope she listens to the people who defeated Republicans, because it’s the people who defeated Republicans in this election that we need to be emulating.”
Progressives, she said, “need to remember who their friends are and not make it more difficult for their friends.”
“The only reasonably prudent decision would be to stop this chaos now.”
That was Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Harvey Weinstein, in a document filed to the New York Supreme Court, making the argument that the criminal case against his client should be dismissed.
Weinstein is currently facing five criminal charges stemming from the allegations that he forcibly performed oral sex on a woman in 2006 and raped a woman in a hotel room in 2013. The judge presiding over the case, James Burke, has apparently decided that “chaos” is an insufficient reason to have those claims dismissed out of hand. At a hearing on Thursday, Burke ruled instead that the Manhattan district attorney’s case will continue: Weinstein will face trial in 2019.
The decision—the case not closed, the women’s fight allowed to fight on—came, in some ways, as a surprise. In October, Burke had dismissed one of the initial charges against Weinstein (brought by Lucia Evans, whose allegation that Weinstein had forced oral sex on her was first reported in The New Yorker) on the grounds that a police investigator had concealed evidence from the court that contradicted Evans’s testimony. Media outlets had been reporting, in the run-up to Thursday’s hearing, that the claims against Weinstein were unraveling. “I believe the case is going nowhere,” one former New York Police Department detective told NPR. He was not alone in that assumption: Several outlets, assessing the slings and arrows of the situation, predicted that Burke would throw it all out in Thursday’s hearing, leaving Weinstein to public shame but legal impunity.
Thursday’s ruling instead makes for a more nebulous kind of news: The development here is that there will be more developments in the future. The news is that there is, currently, no neat or tidy news to report, but rather the continuation of what has already been happening. The “chaos”—chaos—will continue.
It’s worth spending a moment, though, in this moment of abiding uncertainty on Brafman’s court-filed insistence: The only reasonably prudent decision would be to stop this chaos now. The claim here isn’t merely about Weinstein; it is also about the way justice, as a means and an end, itself should work. It assumes—insists on—a certain tidiness. It feels sure that justice should be straightforward, and easy, and convenient. It is a profound misreading of things, and not only because the overall course of the Weinstein saga—open secrets; journalistic reports, and then more of them, and then more; public testimonies of women who describe the harm they claim Weinstein brought to their career and reputation and life—is inherently chaotic.
Weinstein’s story is extremely typical in that sense: Most allegations of #MeToo-related abuses, whether prosecuted in court or in public, are chaotic. The chaos, indeed, is part of the point. The testimonies that alleged victims offer very rarely concern single incidents, neatly isolated. Instead, they tend to involve abuses that radiate and insinuate over time, embedding themselves into the mind and the spirit so thoroughly that they can become impossible to excise.
And the claims, as well, typically address systems of abuse, complicated and uncontainable, rather than individual people. Weinstein was enabled for years by a network of people who were invested, financially and otherwise, in his impunity. So were so many other people who have been implicated in #MeToo: Men, almost always men, who have moved through the world wielding their own kind of gravity, and who have assumed that it is simply the lot of others to spin in their orbit. Complexity, because of that, is inherent to these cases. Chaos, because of that, is inevitable. Tidiness, because of that, is an illusion.
The same week of Burke’s latest ruling, CBS made official what had been reported two weeks before: Les Moonves, the storied former head of the network, has been fired for cause after allegations of decades’ worth of sexual impropriety came to light. The upshot of this particular legal finding: Moonves won’t receive any of the $120 million severance that his contract might have afforded him had CBS’s lawyers come to a different conclusion about his departure from the network. The broader story, though, is that an investigation into CBS’s behavior found that the network had effectively been an accomplice to Moonves. As its board acknowledged in a statement sharing the investigation’s findings, “The Company’s historical policies, practices and structures have not reflected a high institutional priority on preventing harassment and retaliation.”
It was an admission borne out by another piece of reporting that came out this week: CBS, it turns out, bending to terms stipulated in the former chief executive’s contract, is paying Moonves’s legal bills—bills that could easily amount to as much as $50 million. Which is to say that as the disgraced executive attempts to defend himself against the claims made against him by the company he once ran, the company is footing the bill. The person and the network, chaotically tangled.
This news came, as it would happen, in the wake of another report about CBS, concerning the actress Eliza Dushku’s experience on the set of the long-running show Bull. The network had come to a financial settlement of $9.5 million with Dushku, The New York Times found, after she accused Bull’s star, Michael Weatherly, of accosting her on set with jokes about rape, threesomes, and the actress’s looks. A crucial element of Dushku’s claim was that the bad behavior, originating with Weatherly but expanding out to others who worked on the show, was insidious: It included, she said, HR representatives and network executives and Bull’s cast and crew—people who, in their own way, were invested in keeping Weatherly satisfied on set. Weatherly set the tone, Dushku suggested; others followed it. The alleged abuse spread. Unavoidable. Uncontainable. As she put it, writing for The Boston Globe:
What is hardest to share is the way he made me feel for 10 to 12 hours per day for weeks. This was classic workplace harassment that became workplace bullying. I was made to feel dread nearly all the time I was in his presence. And this dread continues to come up whenever I think of him and that experience.
Network effects, literally. What Dushku described in her complaints (and what is suggested as well in CBS’s settlement with her) is behavior that could not be neatly quarantined, because the behavior is so much bigger than one person. Her allegations are, in that way, very similar to what the women—more than 80 of them—who have made claims against Weinstein have said: The harms involved are not containable, because the harms involved expand and entangle and abide. Weinstein, the powerful mogul, is at once the cause and the symptom of an epidemic that exists in Hollywood and so profoundly far beyond it. He is an agent of chaos; the only reasonably prudent decision, for the courts and for the public, is to treat him that way.
PARIS—Cold War, the latest feature by the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, is a stormy love story filmed in black and white and set between Poland and Paris during the early 1950s. It is also a film about a time when borders defined lives. Watching it now, at an unsettling time when borders seem to be making a comeback in Europe—with Brexit, namely—confirmed my sense that Pawlikowski is one of the subtlest, most historically astute directors of our time. His great themes are nationalism, exile, and with Cold War, love.
Pawlikowski is best known for the Academy Award–winning Ida (2014), which was set in the 1960s and also filmed in black and white. That film told the story of an orphaned Polish novice who, on the eve of taking her vows to become a nun, discovers she’s Jewish and goes on a road trip in search of her parents’ graves. Ida stirred up a huge amount of controversy in Poland, whose nationalist government is preternaturally sensitive to the question of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
Cold War, which opens on December 21, is something of a response to that controversy in that it explores how culture is used and manipulated for nationalistic ends. It begins with a troupe of impresarios traveling the muddy Polish countryside auditioning singers for a state-run folk ensemble. There, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), a musician and conductor, falls hard for Zula (Joanna Kulig), an impetuous and ambitious singer. The work is loosely based on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents—his ballet-dancer mother and doctor father who married, unmarried, and remarried each other over many years and in several countries, and who died in 1989, just before the Cold War ended.
[Read: The swiftly closing borders of Europe]
“My parents were the inspiration for it because they had a very complicated love life but also a complicated life. They changed countries, husbands, wives, and they kept coming back to each other,” Pawlikowski told me recently. The film “has both things I love: complicated, contradictory characters and a strong historical context, which adds another dimension to everything they do. It’s a time when every decision you make has huge consequences, when everything has a kind of second layer of meaning.”
Pawel Pawlikowski (Lukasz Bak)Cold War is bound to put the lead actors on the map. Critics have compared Kulig’s impassioned performance to that of a young Jeanne Moreau. Pawlikowski has mentioned that he cast Kot—tall, lanky, brooding—as Wiktor because he wanted an actor as handsome as Gregory Peck. With a beautifully underwritten screenplay, Kot communicates deep emotions with few words.
Every shot in the film is framed as perfectly as a photograph. The images and faces of rural Poland have echoes of Roman Vishniac’s work, and the smoky, sexy shots of Paris recall those of Robert Doisneau. Cold War is also a paean to an era when love blossomed without constant communication. “It’s a film I made quite consciously against this current civilization of multiple choice, of meaningless digital noise,” Pawlikowski contended. Music suffuses the film, as does politics: An apparatchik says a dark-haired singer doesn’t look Slavic enough for the ensemble. Government officials urge the group to sing about “our people’s culture” and the fatherland. After Wiktor defects to the West, he trades Polish folk for the jazz clubs of Paris. (Jazz was banned under Stalin.)
In conversation as in his films, Pawlikowski has a kind of spry irony and a keen sense of humor, even about ponderous subjects. He finds it amusing that the real group that inspired the one in Cold War has caught the attention of the current Polish government. “A long time after I made the film, a few months ago, the government suddenly took on the folk ensemble Mazowsze and gave them huge subsidies while cutting subsidies to theaters and other cultural institutions that don’t serve their purpose,” Pawlikowski remarked. “That folklore is the art of the people again. The irony is pretty clear.” Mazowsze sang and danced recently to inaugurate a new airliner for LOT, the Polish national carrier. “My friends said, ‘Your film is on TV, but it’s in color,’” Pawlikowski recalled. “Life catches up.”
[Read: The dark consequences of Poland’s new Holocaust law]
It wasn’t the first time that Pawlikowski had intuited the currents of history. One of his first feature films, Last Resort (2001), is about a young Russian woman who travels to England with her preadolescent son to pursue a love affair that doesn’t pan out. The two of them are left stranded in a forlorn housing tower on the English coast with other asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. “I imagined it as a slightly futuristic film. Then life caught up,” Pawlikowski recalled, considering Europe’s recent migration crises and Brexit. That movie was also somewhat autobiographical. When the director was 14, his mother took him to England, where she’d married a local. He thought he was going on a vacation, but in fact they’d emigrated. “I left Poland without wanting to. I was taken out of my world of school friends without being able to ever come back. It was the Cold War, the Iron Curtain,” he said.
The experience of exile permeates Cold War, which builds on all of Pawlikowski’s previous films, including My Summer of Love (2005), Emily Blunt’s film debut; The Woman in the Fifth (2012), starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas; and documentaries he made for the BBC in the early 1990s. In Dostoevsky’s Travels (1991) (you can watch it here), the director follows Dmitri Dostoevsky, a Leningrad tram driver (and great-grandson of the famed novelist), as he delivers lectures across Europe while trying to hustle up enough money to buy a Mercedes. The piece captures a moment when the Soviet Union had fallen and was on the cusp of capitalism.
For Serbian Epics (1993), Pawlikowski trailed Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who was later convicted of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. (He appealed his conviction, and a final verdict is expected in 2019.) Pawlikowski’s Tripping With Zhirinovsky (1995) follows the Russian ultra-nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, known for his racist statements. “They’re so bloody prescient,” Pawlikowski stated of his documentaries. “Zhirinovsky was so of today; he was a Trumpist long before Trump.”
[Read: Russian lawmaker wants to abolish the letter ‘ы’]
But to go deep, sometimes you have to go home. After living in England for decades, Pawlikowski returned to Warsaw and found the visual language and emotional depth that mark both Ida and Cold War. While working on Ida, he was staying in the Warsaw apartment of his friend Agnieszka Holland, the film and television director. One day he realized, This is the most at home I’ve felt in decades. He bought an apartment just blocks from where he grew up until age 14. “I’m in my area of Warsaw, which has haunted me in my dreams, where my imagination was formed,” Pawlikowski said.
With Ida, and the shift to black and white, he took inspiration from family photo albums. Although Pawlikowski was raised nominally Catholic, while in his teens he learned that his father’s mother had been Jewish. “I have no idea how she survived the war,” he commented. Ida was an art-house hit, but the Polish government didn’t like it. According to Pawlikowski, its attitude was: “‘Look, this film is making waves abroad and won an Oscar, and why is it winning? It’s because it’s anti-Polish, and there’s a big anti-Polish conspiracy, and you know who runs Hollywood, wink wink.’”
But he wasn’t entirely persona non grata. Pawlikowski received Polish state funding to make Cold War, which was a huge box-office success there and is the country’s nomination for the Academy Awards. He also won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival. “They don’t know how to deal with it; it’s hugely popular,” he said of the government’s response to Cold War’s success. “It hits so many chords, including the rediscovery of Polish folk music. It talks about exile, which a lot of Poles know, where you have to creep up or struggle or are dismissed. And then living in an authoritarian country—people remember communism.” Plus, there’s a love story.
Pawlikowski likes it in Warsaw, where he’s part of a tight-knit community of filmmakers and intellectuals—a cultural resistance with a lot at stake. Having filmed much of Cold War in rural Poland, he is acutely aware of the urban-rural divide that’s reshaping politics everywhere. “Most societies are split down the middle, and that’s something new,” he said, making an exception for Putin’s Russia, where the majority is with Putin. “So it’s not just about borders; it’s about a split within ourselves. I’m curious how it will look 30 years from now,” he continued. But in documentary or feature, color or black and white, Pawlikowski has always been prescient.
At an Ohio rally in March, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would leave Syria “very soon.” Discussions within the administration after the remarks ultimately led Trump, by September, to commit to a broader plan to remain in the country to ensure the defeat of Islamic State.
Despite that official recommitment, Trump’s words in Ohio did great damage, notably by eroding trust in and among the Kurdish-dominated forces. Before Ohio, the popularity of the U.S.-backed force was actually growing as it drove out ISIS from much of the country and created a de facto safe zone that Bashar al-Assad would not dare to bomb or attack. Widespread goodwill promised to ease the process of creating local and legitimate alternatives to the extremists and the regime in nearly one-third of Syria.
Trump’s decision on Wednesday to fully and rapidly withdraw troops—estimated at 2,200—from Syria should be seen against this backdrop. The White House explained that the surprise announcement does not signal the end of the global coalition’s campaign against ISIS. But even if the effort continues, the goal of keeping ISIS down just got much harder.
[Read: Trump wanted out of Syria. It’s finally happening.]
For a start, Trump’s claim that ISIS has been defeated is inaccurate. ISIS continues to hold a small but critical pocket of land consisting of a handful of towns along the Euphrates River and the Syrian-Iraqi borders. The campaign to expel the militants from their last stronghold is expected to take a month or two—although the announcement could mean a more aggressive effort that would increase civilian casualties.
Even after the defeat of ISIS in this pocket, the fight will hardly be won. The U.S.-led campaign created new dynamics on the ground, which only the U.S. can now address. For example, U.S. reliance on the Kurdish militia known as the YPG angered Turkey, which views it as an extension of the PKK, the insurgent group that it has been battling in-country for four decades. As the YPG expanded its influence during the fight against ISIS, Ankara shifted its priorities in Syria from backing the opposition in its fight against the regime to aligning with Russia to fight the Kurds.
The timing of Trump’s decision is especially destabilizing, because various parties in the conflict have positioned themselves to attack the areas under YPG control as the campaign against ISIS draws to a close. The end of the campaign means that the U.S. has to work harder, not the opposite, to ensure a peaceful settlement in eastern Syria. Such political support is a fundamental part of finishing the job against ISIS, and this cannot happen without the leverage Washington currently has by being present in Syria.
[Kori Schake: Trump just messed up the one thing he did better than Obama]
So far, the U.S.’s presence has prevented Turkey from clashing with the YPG in eastern Syria, as it did in northwestern Syria with Russian approval. Washington does not have the luxury to limit its goal to defeating ISIS militarily and then pulling out. If it simply leaves, new wars will almost certainly be reignited between Turkey and the YPG, the Arabs and the Kurds, and the opposition and the YPG.
Much of the response to Trump’s decision focused on how the move could enable ISIS to return, but the immediate consequences will extend beyond ISIS: The Syrian conflict, after months of quiet, could be rekindled. The end of fighting in most of the country over the past year was possible because of delicate agreements brokered by Russia and various parties and because of the U.S. commitment to the Syrian Democratic Forces (the alliance of Kurdish, Arab, and Assyrian militias led by the YPG). But the peace is still profoundly fragile.
The nightmarish scenario of a return to all-out violence throughout Syria could directly undermine U.S. interests, including by provoking new waves of refugees and emboldening extremists. At this moment, the forces most active against the Syrian regime are predominantly those linked to ISIS and al-Qaeda, because the moderates have already struck deals with Damascus and Moscow. This means that hard-liners will be well positioned to inherit what remains of the rebellion against the regime.
[Hassan Hassan: ISIS is poised to make a comeback in Syria]
Iraq is a likely victim of the decision, too. Northern Iraq and eastern Syria could now be regarded as one security theater. Even when Syria was stable in the early 2000s, Iraq still suffered from cross-border activities, and U.S. troops had difficulty securing the borders. The situation today is far worse; borders are more porous than ever, and both countries are interdependent from a stability standpoint. If Iraq is important for the U.S., then eastern Syria must also be important.
Americans directly involved in the fight against ISIS understand these challenges, and there has been a broad bipartisan pushback against Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Trump himself blamed the rise of ISIS in 2014 on Barack Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. If what Trump wants is to appeal to his base and claim victory against ISIS, there is another way forward.
The next stage in the fight against ISIS requires more political management than kinetic operations, and the U.S. could benefit from a rebranding of the campaign to better define what it takes to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS in the coming years. This rebranding should involve an announcement to mark the end of one phase of the campaign, namely the territorial defeat of ISIS, and the start of a new phase, which is the long-term effort to build capacity and help locals prevent the return of extremists. The new phase should involve multi-country security support to eradicate ISIS cells and counter its insurgency tactics, a political strategy to manage the transition and resolve differences among competing forces such as Turkey and the Kurds, and economic cooperation to rebuild destroyed areas.
Trump loves branding, and rebranding. Someone should tell him that he can have his rhetoric and stability, too.
Self-driving cars are coming. Tech giants such as Uber and Alphabet have bet on it, as have old-school car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motors. But even as Google’s sister company Waymo prepares to launch its self-driving-car service and automakers prototype vehicles with various levels of artificial intelligence, there are some who believe that the autonomous future has been oversold—that even if driverless cars are coming, it won’t be as fast, or as smooth, as we’ve been led to think. The skeptics come from different disciplines inside and out of the technology and automotive industries, and each has a different bear case against self-driving cars. Add them up and you have a guide to all the ways our autonomous future might not materialize.
Bear Case 1: They Won’t Work Until Cars Are as Smart as Humans
Computers have nowhere near human intelligence. On individual tasks, such as playing Go or identifying some objects in a picture, they can outperform humans, but that skill does not generalize. Proponents of autonomous cars tend to see driving as more like Go: a task that can be accomplished with a far-lower-than-human understanding of the world. But in a duo of essays in 2017, Rodney Brooks, a legendary roboticist and artificial-intelligence researcher who directed the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for a decade, argued against the short-term viability of self-driving cars based on the sheer number of “edge cases,” i.e., unusual circumstances, they’d have to handle.
[Read: The AI that has nothing to learn from humans]
“Even with an appropriate set of guiding principles, there are going to be a lot of perceptual challenges … that are way beyond those that current developers have solved with deep learning networks, and perhaps a lot more automated reasoning than any AI systems have so far been expected to demonstrate,” he wrote. “I suspect that to get this right we will end up wanting our cars to be as intelligent as a human, in order to handle all the edge cases appropriately. ”
He still believes that self-driving cars will one day come to supplant human drivers. “Human driving will probably disappear in the lifetimes of many people reading this,” he wrote. “But it is not going to all happen in the blink of an eye.”
Bear Case 2: They Won’t Work, Because They’ll Get Hacked
Every other computer thing occasionally gets hacked, so it’s a near-certainty that self-driving cars will be hacked, too. The question is whether that intrusion—or the fear of it— will be sufficient to delay or even halt the introduction of autonomous vehicles.
[Read: The banality of the Equifax breach]
The transportation reporter and self-driving car skeptic Christian Wolmar once asked a self-driving-car security specialist named Tim Mackey to lay out the problem. Mackey “believes there will be a seminal event that will stop all the players in the industry in their tracks,” Wolmar wrote. ‘‘We have had it in other areas of computing, such as the big-data hacks and security lapses and it will happen in relation to autonomous cars.” Cars, even ones that don’t drive themselves, have already proved vulnerable to hackers.
The obvious counterargument is that data lapses, hacking, identity theft, and a whole lot of other things have done basically nothing to slow down the consumer internet. A lot of people see these problems and shrug. However, the physical danger that cars pose is far greater, and maybe the norms developed for robots will be different from those prevalent on the internet, legally and otherwise, as the University of Washington legal scholar Ryan Calo has argued.
Bear Case 3: They Won’t Work as a Transportation Service
Right now most companies working on self-driving cars are working on them as the prelude to a self-driving-car service. So you wouldn’t own your car; you’d just get rides from a fleet of robo-cars maintained by Waymo or Uber or Lyft. One reason for that is the current transportation-service companies can’t seem to find their way to profitability. In fact, they keep losing insane amounts of money. Take the driver out of the equation and maybe all of that money saved would put them in the black. At the same time, the equipment that’s mounted on self-driving cars to allow them to adequately convert physical reality into data is extremely expensive. Consumer vehicles with all those lasers and computers on board would be prohibitively expensive. On top of that, the question of calibrating and maintaining all that equipment would be entrusted to people like me, who don’t wash their car for months at a time.
[Read: Will Uber and Lyft become different things?]
Put these factors together and the first step in fully autonomous vehicles that most companies are betting on is to sell robo-car service, not robo-cars.
There is a simple rejoinder to why this might not work. George Hotz, who is himself attempting to build a DIY driving device, has a funny line that sums it up. “They already have this product, it’s called Uber, it works pretty good,” Hotz told The Verge. And what is a robo-car ride if not “a worse Uber”?
Bear Case 4: They Won’t Work, Because You Can’t Prove They’re Safe
Commercial airplanes rely heavily on autopilot, but the autopilot software is considered provably safe because it does not rely on machine-learning algorithms. Such algorithms are harder to test because they rely on statistical techniques that are not deterministic. Several engineers have questioned how self-driving systems based on machine learning could be rigorously screened. “Most people, when they talk about safety, it’s ‘Try not to hit something,’” Phil Koopman, who studies self-driving-car safety at Carnegie Mellon University, told Wired this year. “In the software-safety world, that’s just basic functionality. Real safety is, ‘Does it really work?’ Safety is about the one kid the software might have missed, not about the 99 it didn’t.”
Regulators will ultimately decide if the evidence that self-driving-car companies such as Waymo have compiled of safe operation on roads and in simulations meets some threshold of safety. More deaths caused by autonomous vehicles, such as an Uber’s killing of Elaine Herzberg, seem likely to drive that threshold higher.
Koopman, for one, thinks that new global standards like the ones we have for aviation are needed before self-driving cars can really get on the road, which one imagines would slow down the adoption of the cars worldwide.
Bear Case 5: They’ll Work, But Not Anytime Soon
Last year, Ford announced plans to invest $1 billion in Argo AI, a self-driving-car company. So it was somewhat surprising when Argo’s CEO, Bryan Salesky, posted a pessimistic note about autonomous vehicles on Medium shortly after. “We’re still very much in the early days of making self-driving cars a reality,” he wrote. “Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology.”
In truth, that’s the timeline the less aggressive carmakers have put forth. Most companies expect some version of self-driving cars in the 2020s, but when within the decade is where the disagreement lies.
Bear Case 6: Self-Driving Cars Will Mostly Mean Computer-Assisted Drivers
While Waymo and a few other companies are committed to fully driverless cars or nothing, most major carmakers plan to offer increasing levels of autonomy, bit by bit. That’s GM’s play with the Cadillac Super Cruise. Daimler, Nissan, and Toyota are targeting the early 2020s for incremental autonomy.
[Read: The most important self-driving car announcement yet]
Waymo’s leadership and Aurora’s Chris Urmson worry that disastrous scenarios lie down this path. A car that advertises itself as self-driving “should never require the person in the driver’s seat to drive. That hand back [from machine to human] is the hard part,” Urmson told me last year. “If you want to drive and enjoy driving, God bless you, go have fun, do it. But if you don’t want to drive, it’s not okay for the car to say, ‘I really need you in this moment to do that.’”
Bear Case 7: Self-Driving Cars Will Work, But Make Traffic and Emissions Worse
And finally, what if self-driving works, technically, but the system it creates only “solve[s] the problem of ‘I live in a wealthy suburb but have a horrible car commute and don’t want to drive anymore but also hate trains and buses,’” as the climate advocate Matt Lewis put it. That’s what University of California at Davis researchers warn could happen if people don’t use (electric-powered) self-driving services and instead own (gasoline-powered) self-driving cars. “Sprawl would continue to grow as people seek more affordable housing in the suburbs or the countryside, since they’ll be able to work or sleep in the car on their commute,” the scenario unfolds. Public transportation could spiral downward as ride-hailing services take share from the common infrastructure.
And that’s not an unlikely scenario based on current technological and market trends. “Left to the market and individual choice, the likely outcome is more vehicles, more driving and a slow transition to electric cars,” wrote Dan Sperling, the director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, in his 2018 book, Three Revolutions: Steering Automated, Shared, and Electric Vehicles to a Better Future.
It would certainly be a cruel twist if self-driving cars managed to save lives on the road while contributing to climate catastrophe. But if the past few years of internet history have taught us anything, any technology as powerful and society-shaping as autonomous vehicles will certainly have unintended consequences. And skeptics might just have a handle on what those could be.
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