On Thursday evening, Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, published a post on the website Medium that—
—well, it’s hard to describe what it did, really. Bezos accused the owner of the National Enquirer of “extortion and blackmail,” alleging that the supermarket tabloid threatened to publish revealing photos of Bezos if he did not call off an investigation into its practices. According to an email that Bezos reproduces in full, the incriminating material included a “below-the-belt selfie—otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick’” of Bezos.
This was only one of several emails that Bezos reproduces in the post. He says that they were all sent by executives and attorneys at the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., or AMI.
That is the content of the post, at least. But Bezos’s post did something that has become common in this cultural-political moment. His blog post is, well, a blog post. But it is also so salacious, so bizarrely stimulating, that it overwhelms the thinking brain and presents instead as pure spectacle. In a little more than 2,000 words, Bezos seemed to rip every headline out of the newspaper and bind them in an eternal neon braid: the mighty power of billionaires, the immiseration of American journalism, the thin smudge of porniness that smartphones have layered onto reality—all of that, and President Donald Trump (who is a close friend of David Pecker, AMI’s chief executive), and the corruption and journalist-murdering malice of the Saudi government, which Bezos alleges is wrapped up in his story “for reasons still to be better understood.” Bezos once founded the Everything Store; now he has given us the Everything Story.
Inseparable from this too-much-too-muchness is Bezos’s writing style. Though Bezos employs (through The Washington Post) some of the best editors in journalism, he appears to have used none of them in composing his post. As such, it is choppy, jargon-filled, and a little hard to follow. Bezos lurches between past and present tense. He introduces an aside about the financial success of Amazon, then starts a new paragraph with: “OK, back to their threat to publish intimate photos of me.” He refers to his ownership of the Post not as “complicating” (which is a word), but as a “complexifier” (which isn’t).
Not that the post is unreadable—it is, instead, quite literary. It can feel inescapably Dickensian: AMI’s priapic owner is repeatedly called “Mr. Pecker.” It has the silver-age shabbiness of noir: One of the alleged emails refers to “a photograph of [Lauren Sanchez] smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated oral sex scene.” Sometimes it even gives way to the disorganized, business-school poignancy of George Saunders. Writes Bezos: “My stewardship of the Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.” (We can assume that Bezos is referring to any complexities his ownership of the Post will cause, but the actual grammar of the sentence—and the events of the past year—suggest that time itself can often be a complexifier.)
It is, in short, incredible content. And it’s not entirely wrong to read it as spectacle, because it is spectacle, after all. Refusing to be extorted is the ultimate power move. And it masks what isn’t spectacular here, too. It is ultimately one man’s calculation about how best to protect himself, his family, his reputation.
What is Bezos’s post? It is chatty and confidential. It is overwhelming and oversharing. It reveals how Jeff Bezos thinks, in uncomfortable detail. It is writing that says something about its author while also doing something for its author. It is a set of words on Medium, a fancy blogging platform owned by a billionaire. It is a tale of how once-liberating ideas—about the freedom of the press, the joy of photography, the instantaneousness of the internet—were ultimately contorted and made into playthings of powerful men. A decade ago, blogging heralded a new and “golden era for journalism.” Now it is this.
Before John Dingell was a piece of history, he was a witness to it. Dingell, a teenage congressional page, was on the floor of the U.S. House when President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for a declaration of war on Japan, saying the attack on Pearl Harbor a day earlier made December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.”
Almost exactly 14 years later, Dingell would be back in the House, this time as a lawmaker representing the Detroit area. He stayed for more than 59 years—the longest tenure in congressional history. Dingell would see the Red Scare of the 1950s, the golden age of civil-rights legislation, and the end of the Cold War. He would vote for the passage of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, pushing toward his father’s goal of universal health care. And Dingell would serve with—but never, he would insist, under—11 presidents.
“Dingell has had a hand—a hugely constructive hand—in nearly every major advance in social policy over the past five-plus decades, including civil and voting rights, health, and the environment,” the congressional scholar Norm Ornstein wrote in The Atlantic when Dingell retired in 2015.
[John Dingell: I served in Congress longer than anyone. Here’s how to fix it.]
Dingell’s death Thursday at age 92 ends one of the longest and most eventful stints in American public life. Dingell began hospice care at home in Michigan earlier this month, a year after receiving a prostate-cancer diagnosis. His wife and successor in Congress, Debbie Dingell, told The Detroit News that he remained feisty to the end. “He is John Dingell. He is in charge. Ordering everyone around. Doing it his way,” she said on Wednesday, noting that he even continued to dictate missives for his unexpectedly funny Twitter feed.
If the renown and power of the Dingell family do not match those of dynasties like the Bushes and Adamses, its longevity impresses. John Dingell Sr. was elected to the House in 1932, and stayed in the seat until his death in 1955. John Jr. was not yet 30 at the time. He had enlisted in the Army when he turned 18 and was preparing for the invasion of Japan when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs, a decision he later said saved his life. He ran in the special election to succeed his father and won. Then he ran again in 1956, and every two years after that until 2014, when he decided to retire, calculating (correctly) that Democrats were unlikely to retake the majority that year. So instead, his wife ran, and she has occupied the seat ever since. Because she’s nearly three decades his junior, Debbie could keep the string of Dingells in the House—85 years and counting—going for years to come.
Dingell Sr. was a die-hard New Dealer and Roosevelt supporter, and his son continued that legacy as an old-school social democrat. The father was a particularly avid proponent of universal health care, and his son worked toward that goal over the course of his career, introducing his father’s bill every Congress, even when the idea was dismissed by other Democrats. In the 1960s, he helped push Medicare and Medicaid, and he fought Republican efforts to curtail or privatize the system. When the ACA passed in 2010, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was presiding over the chamber, used a gavel loaned to her by Dingell—who’d used the same one when he oversaw the 1965 passage of Medicare.
Still, Dingell told my colleague Steve Clemons in 2013 that his proudest vote was for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “For the first time, we addressed the problem of seeing that every American had full citizenship,” he said. “I almost lost my job over that ... [but] I think that was the vote that really solved a problem that was eating away at the foundation of our democracy.” (Dingell was perhaps exaggerating: His share of the vote did tumble from 1964 to 1966—from 73 percent down all the way to 63 percent.)
There are advantages to serving for nearly six decades in the House: the sense of being an institution; the respect of colleagues; seniority; and of course the title of “dean of the House,” which Dingell held for a record 20 years—though he also argued, “It ain’t how long, it is how well.” The disadvantage is that one risks outliving one’s era. By the time Dingell left the House, he seemed somewhat out of step with the Democratic Party.
It wasn’t that he had drifted in another direction, but that the party had. The New Deal was history to most of the members of his caucus, and while the party remained committed to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, it had little appetite for large expansions of social welfare. Even the ACA was a narrow, market-based measure. If many Democrats had moved right on entitlements, Dingell’s support for gun rights and opposition to abortion placed him to their right on social issues. (One of Debbie Dingell’s first bills in Congress was a gun-control measure. Asked about her husband’s view, she said, “Let’s just say we don’t talk about this a lot.”)
No incident captured the tension like the 2008 contest for chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Dingell had led the committee from 1981 through the Republican takeover in 1995 and then again beginning in 2007. He had helped write the Endangered Species Act and worked with Representative Henry Waxman to pass the Clean Air Act. But Waxman, who had joined the House 20 years after Dingell and was by then an elder statesman in his own right, challenged Dingell for the gavel in the 111th Congress, arguing that Dingell was too resistant to environmental standards that might hurt the auto manufacturers in his district. Waxman triumphed.
Despite retiring long past the age when most people are content to watch daytime TV and play bridge, Dingell remained engaged in politics. Late in his House tenure, he opened a Twitter account that became surprisingly popular—though given Dingell’s acerbity and knack for a blunt turn of phrase, perhaps this shouldn’t have been a surprise. He remained active on Twitter after leaving office, continuing to singe various public figures (including Howard Schultz and Neil deGrasse Tyson), but most of all President Donald Trump. (December 2017: “I fully support @realDonaldTrump’s interest in space travel to Mars, and I wish him the absolute best in his travels.” January 2019: “The American people wait with bated breath as their idiot president announces something he could have done 35 days ago to avoid this national disgrace of a shutdown. The Art of the Deal.”)
[Read: Was John Dingell the last of the New Deal Democrats?]
Dingell remained engaged in the finer points of politics, too. In a book published in 2018, he laid out a slate of ideas for fixing American politics. In the current system, “sparsely populated, usually conservative states can block legislation supported by a majority of the American people. That’s just plain crazy,” he wrote. He offered a solution particularly enticing to a 59-year U.S. representative: the abolition of the Senate.
“It will take a national movement, starting at the grassroots level, and will require massive organizing, strategic voting, and strong leadership over the course of a generation,” he wrote. “But it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? ‘Abolish the Senate.’ I’m having blue caps printed up with that slogan right now. They will be made in America.”
Dingell even lived to see his brand of politics come back into style in the party. No one quite replicates his mix of positions, but a range of politicians are taking inspiration from the past. The New Deal is back as the model for progressive Democrats’ “Green New Deal.” His style informs politicians such as Senator Sherrod Brown, another pro-labor midwestern liberal, and even politicians who flip his social-democratic approach into democratic socialism. And every time a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate calls for Medicare for all, it will be as though Dingell had never left.
Updated at 9:40 p.m. ET on February 7, 2019.
Jeff Bezos does not often speak publicly about his personal life, his philanthropic endeavors, or the future of Amazon, the company he founded 25 years ago. He doesn’t even make a peep on Amazon’s quarterly earnings calls. But on Thursday, he decided to go to war with the National Enquirer on Medium, accusing the publication of “extortion and blackmail.”
The post is, as my colleague Robinson Meyer put it, bizarrely stimulating. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” Bezos writes in the post, which also contains the text of emails the lawyer for his security consultant allegedly received from executives at American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer. (Neither Amazon nor AMI immediately responded to requests for comment.)
The emails pertain to photos of Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, a woman with whom Bezos reportedly had an affair that led to the end of his marriage. Soon after Bezos and his wife, Mackenzie, announced on Twitter that they were divorcing, the Enquirer published a story alleging that Bezos and Sanchez had had an affair. The Enquirer said that it had tracked them across 40,000 miles, and it published snippets of texts between Sanchez and Bezos.
Soon after the Enquirer’s story was published, President Donald Trump tweeted gleefully that Bezos (whom he called Bozo) was “being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post.” That tweet spurred more speculation about the political relationship between Trump and the Enquirer.
[Read: The other way the National Enquirer helped elect Trump]
Trump has famously claimed that the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, does not cover him fairly. The president and the Enquirer have also shared criticism for warm relationships with Saudi Arabia: According to Bezos, AMI’s emails made the company seem particularly touchy about allegations that the paper has special ties to the Saudi government, and that it gave the Saudi embassy an early copy of an issue devoted to the crown prince.
After the initial story about Sanchez and Bezos was published, Bezos launched an investigation into how the texts were leaked to the Enquirer. This investigation came at a fraught time for AMI: In December, the company admitted to paying hush money to a woman who said she had an affair with Trump in order to quiet the story before the election. AMI’s chief executive, David Pecker, agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors investigating possible breaches of campaign-finance law in exchange for immunity. AMI also said in January it was refinancing its debt; the company is facing falling sales and revenue.
AMI wanted to end Bezos’s inquiry into how they got his texts, Bezos said, and tried to do so by threatening to publish more photos. According to the emails Bezos published, in early February, AMI warned Bezos and his attorneys that the Enquirer was poised to publish pictures of Bezos and Sanchez, including a “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick.’” The Enquirer would agree to not publish those photos, according to an email from Jon Fine, AMI’s deputy general counsel, if Bezos publicly backtracked and said that there was no reason to believe that the Enquirer’s coverage of Bezos and Sanchez was politically motivated.
In the emails, which were sent to Martin D. Singer, who is the litigation counsel for Gavin de Becker, whom Bezos hired to investigate the leak, AMI appears to be extremely concerned about Bezos’s comments about the Enquirer’s reasons for publishing the exposé. “American Media emphatically rejects any assertion that its reporting was instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise,” one email from Fine, the deputy counsel, reads. “We hereby demand that you cease and desist such defamatory conduct immediately. Any further dissemination of these false, vicious, speculative and unsubstantiated statements is done at your client’s peril.”
[Read: Why is the National Enquirer so obsessed with Jeff Bezos?]
It was this email that motivated Bezos to publish the correspondence. On Wednesday, he wrote in the Medium post, the National Enquirer made him an offer they thought he couldn’t refuse. “Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten,” he wrote.
It would be difficult for Bezos to prove that the Enquirer’s emails are actually extortion, said Stuart Green, a law professor at Rutgers University. The law defines extortion as using a threat to obtain a property benefit. So even if Bezos can prove that there were threats made, it will be harder to show that the Enquirer would have obtained something tangible had Bezos agreed to say publicly what AMI wanted him to say. “I guess you could make the argument that a Bezos statement has economic value to the Enquirer,” Green said, but it’s far from an easy case.
It’s unclear why the Enquirer was so worried about Bezos’s allegations. If Pecker had already gotten immunity from prosecutors, he would seemingly have nothing to lose. But the Enquirer essentially ceded typical First Amendment protections in its deal with prosecutors, a decision that Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School, said “essentially signaled the Enquirer is not a real news organization.”
“They are very worried about their reputation,” Levinson said, “so in an effort to be respected they’re engaging in the most disrespectful kind of behavior. That is not the way any real news publication functions—it’s thuggery.”
The paper may be trying to appear more legitimate now. AMI promised it would distribute “written standards” to employees about federal election laws, and is apparently trying to introduce more intense vetting into its properties, which include Ok!, Us Weekly, and In Touch.
Of course, Bezos also gains something by exposing this conversation with the Enquirer, even if he is highlighting the existence of embarrassing and explicit photos. He has been under scrutiny of late for the way Amazon treats its employees. His Medium post portrays him as a victim, and as someone who wants to stand up for legitimate news organizations by supporting The Washington Post and by shedding light on the Enquirer’s shady practices.
That strategic positioning hasn’t gone without notice. As Kristin Kanthak, a professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh, put it on Twitter: “You know we are at a disgusting moment in our nation’s history when the billionaire sending out dick pics is the HERO of the story.”
To get packages to your doorstep in just a day or two, Amazon has built up an enormous real-estate empire. Though the company has been around since the 1990s, its physical footprint has exploded in recent years, nearly tripling from 2014 to 2018. The numbers reveal a remarkable inflection point in the 25-year-old company’s growth. But in spite of its many warehouses, there’s one major industry that Amazon hasn’t yet conquered.
Speaking of Amazon: CEO Jeff Bezos has published a letter, accompanied by revealing email exchanges, accusing the National Enquirer of blackmail (a primer here on this collision of media, national politics, and the personal and public face of the world’s richest man).
Democrats put out an official blueprint for a Green New Deal on Thursday. The plan, released by freshman New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would completely transform just about all facets of the American economy to drastically lower carbon emissions. The bill has virtually no chance of becoming law—it’s dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate—but it’s nevertheless consequential, suggesting that a new crop of Democratic politicians is poised to make mammoth climate bills central to the party’s platform going forward.
There’s nothing quite as pesky—and dangerous—as a hungry mosquito. The buzzing insects love to bite humans, spreading potentially fatal diseases like dengue and Zika in the process. But scientists have found a new way to stop the ravenous bugs: suppressing their appetite. After mosquitoes were fed a drug containing the compound neuropeptide Y, they acted similar to satiated mosquitoes who had already sucked blood. So far, the effect wears off after a couple of days, but it looks to be a promising step.
Evening Reads
(Courtesy of Dustin Theoharis)
Dustin Theoharis was startled to wake up one day and see two police officers standing at the end of his bed. Mistakenly thinking he was armed, they sent 16 bullets coursing through his body:
“Conflicting accounts make the next several seconds fuzzy. Kristopher Rongen, an officer with the Washington State Department of Corrections, has told the story this way: He announced ‘Police, police, show your hands’ in a loud voice, but Theoharis refused to do so. Rongen asked Theoharis whether he had weapons, and Theoharis admitted that he had three—then added ‘right here’ and moved to sweep the floor with his hand. Rongen and the second officer, Aaron Thompson, a detective with the King County Sheriff’s Office, feared that Theoharis was reaching for a gun and opened fire …
Theoharis, meanwhile, says that he didn’t have any guns.”
(Paras Griffin / Getty)
Shortly before last week’s Super Bowl, a well-known rapper was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities in a “targeted operation” in the Atlanta area, for allegedly overstaying his visa (ICE’s statement referred to him as a “United Kingdom national”).
“The rapper’s representatives have now publicly stated that he was brought to the United States at the age of 7. Alleging that he is under 23-hour lockdown, they referred to the arrest as a civil-law violation. Much of their ire rests not just with the circumstances of his arrest, but also with ICE’s framing of Abraham-Joseph’s inherent criminality: The agency did not note that he was brought to the U.S. as a minor (a circumstance many Dreamers share), or that he filed a visa application in 2017. Nor was there any explanation of the rapper’s ethnic background ...”
Urban Developments
(Courtesy of Micromobility Conference / Vin Chandra)
Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing urban dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie and Claire Tran share today’s top stories:
At Silicon Valley’s first Micromobility Conference, a panel of venture capitalists half-kidded about “monetizing walking.” But when it comes to scooters, e-bikes, and more, the industry’s rate of growth is no joke.
Building more affordable housing in innovative metros can help improve the economy, Richard Florida writes: When workers can access good jobs without being burdened by rent, productivity increases.
Every three seconds, someone gets arrested in the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, though, it’s not urban areas that have higher arrest rates. Why are suburban arrest rates rising?
Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Subscribe to the CityLab Daily newsletter.
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It’s Thursday, February 7.
New on the Left: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts unveiled an outline for a “Green New Deal”—a highly ambitious policy package to remake the U.S. economy and cut carbon emissions. The legislation is a nonbinding resolution, meaning that even if it passes, it wouldn’t on its own create any new programs.
Trouble in Virginia: Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have called for an investigation into the sexual-assault allegations against Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax. Meanwhile, yet another state political official has become embroiled in a race-related scandal: Republican state Senate Majority Leader Thomas Norment reportedly helped oversee a yearbook that featured racist photographs and slurs. On this latest podcast episode of Radio Atlantic, Alex Wagner and the staff writers Vann Newkirk and Adam Serwer discuss what’s rotten in the state of Virginia, and what these revelations say about race and politics across the South.
Boxed In: President Donald Trump, with his push for restrictions on immigration and a wall along the southern border, is steering the Republican Party toward the preferences of a small subset of voters, argues Ronald Brownstein. And in so doing, he may be walling off the GOP from the rest of America.
No Thanks!: Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said he won’t show up to testify before the House Judiciary Committee unless he receives assurances that he won’t be subpoenaed. The move comes after the committee allowed Chairman Jerry Nadler to subpoena Whitaker’s testimony should he not appear or answer lawmakers’ questions. Democrats on the committee want to press Whitaker about his conversations with Donald Trump, and about his decision not to recuse himself from the special-counsel investigation.
Snapshot
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts hold a news conference for their proposed "Green New Deal" at the U.S. Capitol. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Ideas From The AtlanticWill Lamar Alexander Turn on Trump? (Jenny Armini)
“Alexander has the stature to help Congress and the country navigate through possible impeachment and removal proceedings. And, as luck would have it, he’s retiring at the end of his term, so he doesn’t have to worry about repercussions from the still Trump-infatuated Republican base.” → Read on.
Cory Booker Is Damned If He Does, Damned If He Doesn’t (Peter Beinart)
“There are important differences—and even more important similarities—between Barack Obama’s announcement for president in 2007 and Cory Booker’s announcement last week. The similarities could sink Booker’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination.” → Read on.
How Globalization Saved the World and Damned the West (Derek Thompson)
“Global capitalism appears to be saving the world and destroying the West, at the same time. I went to Davos to see whether I could resolve the paradox or, in failing to do so, at least drown my ignorance in hot chocolate.” → Read on.
Sherrod Brown, Throwback Democrat (George Packer)
“Instead of a senatorial pin, he wears a canary on the lapel of his union-made-in-Ohio suit. He has been talking about unions, adequate wages and benefits, affordable housing and prescription drugs, access to health care, and unfair trade deals long after it ceased being fashionable, and long before it became fashionable again.” → Read on.
◆Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Making the Green New Deal a 2020 Litmus Test (Ella Nilsen, Vox)
◆Can a ‘Moderate’ Win the 2020 Democratic Primary? (Perry Bacon Jr., FiveThirtyEight)
◆Senator Amy Klobuchar’s Mistreatment of Staff Scared Off Candidates to Manage Her Presidential Bid (Molly Redden and Amanda Terkel, HuffPost)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily, and will be testing some formats throughout the new year. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
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Na última eleição presidencial da França, a candidata de extrema-direita Marine Le Pen ganhou mais de 30% dos votos depois de rebatizar o partido de seu pai, Jean-Marie Le Pen. A Frente Nacional agora se chama Reunião Nacional, e esta é a história de três dos seus apoiadores.
The post Dançando com Le Pen appeared first on The Intercept.
On Wednesday morning, a group of British activists entered Chelmsford Crown Court, about 30 miles northeast of London, carrying backpacks and tote bags stuffed full. The Stansted 15, as the group has become known, had arrived for a sentencing hearing, and some of them had come prepared to face years in jail. In December, the activists were found guilty of committing a terrorism-related offense after they broke into an airport and blocked the departure of a government-chartered plane that was set to deport migrants and asylum-seekers.
But the group need not have packed their bags. Twelve of the defendants received community orders of 12 months with 100 hours of unpaid work and a 12-month exclusion from Stansted Airport, the London airport where their protest took place. Due to health reasons, one of the 12 received a sentence with 20 days of rehabilitation in place of unpaid work. The other three defendants, who had previous convictions of aggravated trespass, received nine-month prison sentences with suspensions of 18 months, meaning they will not be imprisoned unless they commit another offense within that time. They also received 100-250 hours of unpaid work, varying due to personal circumstances, and the same exclusion as their fellow defendants.
As the sentencing hearing ended, the defendants rose to hug. Relief spread through the public gallery, which was so small that it failed to accommodate the family and friends of all 15 defendants (parents were given priority). Outside, hundreds of supporters gathered. People danced in the street; camerapersons trained their lenses on the doors, anxious to capture the activists’ exit.
The Stansted 15 addressed the crowd with a prepared statement: “These terror convictions and the 10-week trial that led to them are an injustice that has profound implications for our lives. The convictions will drastically limit our ability to work, travel, and take part in everyday life. Yet people seeking asylum in this country face worse than this: They are placed in destitution, and their lives in limbo, by the Home Office’s brutal system every single day.”
The Crown Prosecution Service released a statement saying it never suggested that the defendants were terrorists.
The activists aimed to prevent the deportees from being sent back to places where they faced threats of harm and death.On March 28, 2017, the 15 defendants — members of the anti-deportation groups End Deportations and Lesbians and Gays Support the Migrants, whose ages ranged from 27 to 44 years old — cut a hole through a fence at Stansted Airport and approached a Titan Airways Boeing 767. Splitting into two groups, some locked themselves around the plane’s front wheel, while others constructed a pyramid structure out of scaffolding poles under the plane’s left wing and then locked themselves around it.
The flight had been chartered by the Home Office — the government department responsible for immigration, security, and law and order — and was scheduled to deport migrants and asylum-seekers back to Nigeria and Ghana. Instead, the plane remained immobile until the next morning. In grounding the flight, the activists aimed to prevent the deportees from being sent back to places where they faced threats of harm and death. They also wanted to draw attention to the government’s practice of deporting people using private charter flights, where security personnel often outnumber deportees, there is little notice given to asylum-seekers in advance of their deportation, and reports tell of excessive restraint used on passengers.
Originally accused of aggravated trespass, the charges against the activists were later upgraded to intentional disruption of services at an aerodrome, which falls under the “endangering safety at aerodromes” section of the Aviation and Maritime Security Act 1990. Created to fight terrorism, the law comes with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment and had never before been used against peaceful protesters. Amnesty International, concerned about the use of a terrorism-related charge against nonviolent activists, observed the 10-week trial. In December, the Stansted 15 were found guilty, the verdict interpreted by many as a sign of the government criminalizing protest.
The hearing made clear the high cost of both the long trial and the conviction. The courtroom heard of loss of job and educational opportunities and of depression suffered by numerous defendants, including Emma Hughes, who had given birth five weeks earlier; of Nathan Clack’s fear of no longer being able to visit his American partner if the conviction were to cause U.S. authorities to refuse him entry; of how Melanie Strickland, in court against medical advice, was hospitalized for a sepsis-related emergency a week prior and was scheduled to have abdominal surgery the next day.
Given the gravity of the charge, a prison-free sentence hardly means a punishment-free future. In fact, their anxieties were well-founded, according to Raj Chada, a partner from Hodge Jones & Allen, who represented all 15 activists. “They may find it difficult to go into the United States or to other countries,” Chada said. “Some of them have very responsible jobs that will require notification to the authorities.”
They are now appealing, although it may be months before the case reaches the Court of Appeals. Their arguments are manifold: that the case should not have proceeded because it was an inappropriate charge; that Judge Christopher Morgan should have permitted the necessity defense, which states that the action was justified because it was done to prevent harm; that Morgan misinterpreted the law; and that he may have been biased in his summing up of the case to the jury.
How this case, and its use of a terrorism-related law against nonviolent activists, will impact the charges brought against activists in the future remains unclear. And yet, as the courtroom’s packed press section and the mass of supporters in the street showed, many are taking note.
“When a country uses draconian terror legislation against people for peaceful protest, snatches others from their homes in dawn raids, incarcerates them without time limit, and forces them onto planes in the middle of the night, due to take them to places where their lives might be at risk, something is very seriously wrong,” said the Stansted 15 in a statement issued on Wednesday. “Every single one of us should be very worried about our democracy and our future.”
The post Activists Avoid Jail in U.K. After Blocking Plane From Deporting Migrants appeared first on The Intercept.
Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform denounced a major new initiative by Democrats to clean up elections and expand voter participation as a power grab that will corrupt the political process and infringe on the rights of free speech and association.
In nearly apocalyptic terms on Wednesday, Republican committee members took turns laying out the dire consequences of H.R. 1, decrying the consequences of a federal holiday on Election Day, matching public funds for congressional candidates, increasing transparency in campaign finance, and making it easier to register to vote. More stringent disclosure requirements for political spending would encourage partisan monitoring and even doxxing, Republicans argued, citing the Obama-era scandal where the Internal Revenue Service was accused by conservatives of targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
During the Wednesday hearing, several minority members described the bill — an attempt to implement sweeping reforms to the way we finance elections and oversee the executive branch — as “chilling.” Ranking Member Jim Jordan said the bill was designed to benefit the majority by “tilting the playing field in their favor.”
Jordan denounced the bill for requiring states to offer early voting, no-excuse absentee voting, same day voter registration, automatic voter registration, paid leave for federal workers to be poll workers, to allow released felons to vote, to make Election Day a federal holiday, and to have taxpayer contributions finance campaigns.
“So lets take a whack at a little summary here, professor,” Jordan said during his questioning of Bradley Smith, chair of the Institute for Free Speech and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, who testified at the invitation of the minority.
“H.R. 1 requires taxpayers to pay for a holiday on Election Day for government workers. H.R. 1 requires taxpayers to pay for six days of paid leave for government workers who want to be poll workers. H.R. 1 requires taxpayers to pay for politicians’ campaigns. And if those same taxpayers give to some organization, some (c)(4), they can be outed under H.R. 1 so that the left can — or anyone — could harass them or their family.”
“Yes,” Smith said. “Such a deal for the taxpayer, right?”
The bill, sponsored by Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, is the first serious attempt in decades to revamp the model for public financing of presidential campaigns and establish a national program to publicly finance congressional campaigns. It also expands rights and protections for voters; bans senior federal officials from getting private sector perks after they leave office; prohibits senior federal employees from working on issues in which they have financial interests; and strengthens the call for Trump to divest his business holdings and place them in an independent, blind trust. Trump is the only president who hasn’t done so.
Georgia Rep. Jody Hice said in opening remarks that he was “extremely alarmed” by the bill and that while its provision for automatic voter registration “may sound good on the surface,” it would “open the floodgates for fraudulent voting by illegal individuals in this country.”
“It’s virtually 600 pages. Almost every page has issues of great concern,” he said. In just under three minutes, the congressperson referenced “illegals” or being in the country “illegally” nine times.
The bill also equips the Office of Government Ethics with subpoena power and the authority to impose disciplinary action on agencies and employees within the executive branch — “needed teeth,” as the office’s former director Walter Shaub said in written testimony to the committee.
But Jordan and his Republican colleague Rep. Mark Meadows argued that taxpayers shouldn’t have to finance elections, let alone contribute to the campaigns of candidates whom they oppose. Meadows pointed to the fact that his own campaign was largely funded by small individual donors, and that under the measure, he’d get $3.8 million for re-election.
Tennessee Rep. Clay Higgins conceded that the bill might have some worthwhile measures, but said he wanted to see it broken down into smaller components that would suit individual state needs. He also said the bill “resembles Russian government policy.”
Bipartisan legislation to strengthen democratic institutions in ways similar to those outlined in H.R. 1 have already passed at the local and state levels, Karen Hobert Flynn testified. She’s the president of Common Cause, a nonpartisan organization focused on reducing the role of big money in politics. In written testimony to the committee, Flynn cited “more than 20 red, blue and purple states and localities [that have] passed pro-voter democracy reforms, with strong support from Republican, Independent, and Democratic voters.”
Smith said his primary concern with the bill was its infringement on first amendment protections of free speech — wherein political spending is a form of speech. He said the bill would expand the universe of what Congress could regulate as political spending or speech, including ads. And he argued that in public financing there “tend to be avenues for corruption in many ways.”
But in all the concerns raised about voter fraud and abridging freedom of speech by reining in the influence of large donors, the minority never addressed the specter of partisan gerrymandering that’s historically benefited their party, Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley pointed out. The ACLU filed suit last year to challenge gerrymandering in Ohio, citing Jordan’s 4th District as one of seven that were drawn with “borders that defy explanation by any political boundary or geographical feature.” H.R. 1 would put an independent commission in charge of redistricting duties, taking that responsibility away from state legislatures.
“That is really convenient, and rich, and hypocritical,” Pressley said.
“H.R. 1 has been described as a wishlist by the Democrats,” she continued. “Well, you got us there. A wishlist for an inclusive, expanded democracy and electorate.
“Characterizations of H.R. 1 as a power grab — you got us again,” Pressley said, referencing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s comments on the push to make Election Day a federal holiday.
“Guilty,” she said. “We wouldn’t have to grab back the power for the people if through policy you weren’t complicit in, or perpetuating, the disenfranchisement and marginalization of the people. And disproportionately, people of color. And disproportionately, black people.”
Meadows had a heated exchange with Shaub, the former head of the OGE, in which he suggested the latter’s support for an investigative mandate for OGE was politically motivated against President Donald Trump. Meadows cited Shaub’s testimony to an oversight subcommittee in December 2015 in which he said he thought the OGE didn’t need an investigative mandate, expressing shock at Shaub’s change of heart “all of a sudden.”
“No, it’s not all of a sudden at all,” Shaub said. “It’s after watching, for two years, somebody prove to me that the executive branch ethics program is much weaker and much more fragile than I ever thought it was. Frankly, I was naive.”
“I never imagined,” Shaub went on, “a president would come in and refuse to eliminate his conflicts of interest, have appointees who are completely disinterested in government ethics, and have — with all respect — a Congress refuse to exercise oversight over them in that respect.”
Meadows argued that he made the same point in 2015 and Shaub disagreed with him then. “I’ll just say, you were right,” Shaub conceded to laughter. Meadows agreed.
Ohio Rep. Bob Gibbs said that during his time in the state Senate, he helped pass legislation to implement no-excuse absentee ballots and early voting within 30 days before the election. “We don’t have lines anymore, and we don’t need a federal holiday so you can go vote. You got 30 days to go vote. If you can’t vote in 30 days by mail or by absentee, that just raises a lot of interesting questions about your voting — your abilities.”
During her questioning, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked Flynn, “If I want to run a campaign that is entirely funded by corporate political action committees, is there anything that legally prevents me from doing that?”
“No,” Flynn said.
Ocasio-Cortez later pulled out an op-ed Smith authored for the Washington Post titled, “Those payments to women were unseemly. That doesn’t mean they were illegal.”
“Okay, great. So, green light for hush money,” she said. “I can do all sorts of terrible things. It’s totally legal right now for me to pay people off. And that’s considered speech — that money’s considered speech.”
.@AOC: "Let's play a lightning round game. I'm gonna be the bad guy, which I'm sure half the room would agree with, anyway."
"If I want to run a campaign that is entirely funded by corporate PACs, is there anything that legally prevents me from doing that?"@KHobertFlynn: "No." pic.twitter.com/PmMZFZXeJJ
— Frank Dale (@fwdale) February 7, 2019
The post House Republicans Warn That Bill Combating Big Money in Politics “Resembles Russian Government Policy” appeared first on The Intercept.
The 1990s were among the most punishing decades in the recent history of American justice. Zealous prosecutors competed to put the most people behind bars, and politicians were eager to pass new laws to extend sentences. In San Francisco, Terence Hallinan was one of the only prosecutors in America bucking the trend.
A legendary civil rights activist, defense attorney, former city supervisor, and an outspoken advocate for marijuana legalization, Hallinan rode a wave of discontent and squeaked by in his election to become San Francisco district attorney in 1995. He swiftly fired senior prosecutors in order to hire more minorities and reformists. He instructed his deputies to avoid the practice of objecting to a proposed juror for a criminal trial — an unusual stance that weakened the hand of the DA’s office — to avoid empaneling all-white juries.
Sex work, said Hallinan, was a public health problem — not a criminal offense. He quickly made waves by claiming that he would fight for nonviolent offenders to receive social services over jail time and called drug use a victimless crime, an argument that invited contempt from law enforcement officials.
Yet Hallinan — considered one of the “most left-wing politicians in the country” — was expelled in 2003 after just two terms in office, despite San Francisco’s notorious liberal bent. An up-and-coming young career prosecutor named Kamala Harris, running in her first bid for public office, unseated him.
Many in San Francisco view the campaign as a defining moment for Harris, who carefully cultivated a base of support among police officers, domestic violence advocates, wealthy donors, and a diverse range of local officials and community leaders who had bristled at Hallinan’s leftist politics and abrasive style.
Despite starting the race as a relatively unknown candidate against an incumbent viewed as a radical icon, Harris vaulted over Hallinan and easily won a runoff election. The race launched Harris’s political career, which culminated in her announcement last month at a rally in Oakland to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted later, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration.The 2003 race stands apart from the image she has projected in more recent years. Far from the “smart on crime” mantra she touted in her successful bid to become California’s attorney general or promoting her efforts to hold corporations accountable when she ran for the U.S. Senate, Harris’s first campaign reflected familiar tactics in an era of booming mass incarceration.
The Intercept reviewed debate records, news clips, and original campaign materials from the race between Harris, Hallinan, and Bill Fazio, another former prosecutor who ran for the seat. (Harris’s presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Hallinan.)
The 2003 race for San Francisco district attorney showcased a campaign strategy that has become a familiar and at times unseemly dynamic of America’s criminal justice system. Throughout much of the campaign, Harris attacked Hallinan as too weak and ineffective to keep communities safe from dangerous criminals. In contrast, Harris promised to get tough.
In the years leading up to the election, the DA’s office under Hallinan had the lowest felony conviction rates of any county in California. In 2001, the felony conviction rate in San Francisco was as low as 29 percent, far below the state average of 67.5 percent. Hallinan, defending his record, pointed out that his office expanded rehabilitative justice initiatives, diverting drug crimes into alternatives rather than turning to incarceration.
“We have 3,000 people who are in diversion,” Hallinan told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s hell on your conviction rate.”
Cases that are diverted to rehabilitation programs in order to avoid criminal penalties count as a dismissal, resulting in a prosecution loss, the newspaper noted. Moreover, San Francisco’s jury pool is notoriously liberal, Hallinan argued, making convictions even for violent crimes difficult. His office also avoided “three strikes” prosecutions in many cases, to get out of having to seek mandatory life imprisonment for defendants.
If the conviction rate had been measured by actual cases pursued, rather than all cases referred by police, Hallinan said, his office would have had a conviction rate that was relatively similar to Los Angeles and other major cities.
And Hallinan was getting results. Overall, crime rates were plummeting. Violent crime had gone down close to 60 percent in San Francisco since Hallinan took office.
Still, the low conviction rate resulted in headline after headline about San Francisco’s permissive attitude toward crime, a media environment harnessed by the Harris campaign.
In one election flyer sent by the Harris campaign to mailboxes across the city, a tattooed and shirtless man, presumably Latino, is seen gripping a pistol and flashing a gang sign. “Enough Is Enough!” reads the title. Inside the flyer, the Harris campaign argued that Hallinan had failed to keep communities safe from surging gang violence, pointing to his low conviction rate.
Kamala Harris for District Attorney mailer. (Click here to see the full mailer.)
Photo: Lee Fang/The Intercept
“Each one of those cases, those violent cases, represents a victim who deserves to have a district attorney’s office that is competent and that is professional,” Harris argued during a debate on the San Francisco public radio station KQED, sharply critiquing her opponent’s conviction rate record. “And let’s be clear. I’m not running for public defender. We need in our city to have a district attorney who recognizes her responsibility for making sure the consequences occur for serious and violent crime.”
In campaign events across the city, Harris stoked anger at the lack of criminal convictions. In the Mission District, SF Weekly reported on a scene in which Harris sharply criticized Hallinan for failure to prosecute anti-war protesters for property destruction. “It is not progressive to be soft on crime,” Harris said.
“Terence Hallinan is lying to us about his domestic violence record, and women are dying because of it.”Outside the Hall of Justice, the city’s criminal courthouse, Harris campaigned with the mother of Claire Tempongko, a woman slain by her estranged boyfriend. Tempongko, Harris said, had filed police reports that her boyfriend had abused her in violation of his parole. The failure of the DA’s office to act had left Tempongko defenseless, Harris argued.
“Terence Hallinan is lying to us about his domestic violence record,” she said at the event, “and women are dying because of it.”
Hallinan’s supporters, however, charged that Harris was exploiting the tragedy. The prosecutor who handled the domestic violence unit at the time said that she never saw a crucial police report filed by the victim because police had incorrectly labeled it as a drunk-in-public offense, rather than an incident of domestic violence.
Nonetheless, more tough-on-crime campaign advertisements flooded mailboxes around the city.
Kamala Harris for District Attorney flyer. (Click here to see the full mailer.)
Photo: Lee Fang/The Intercept
Inside another mailer, the Harris campaign produced a chart showing Hallinan’s low conviction rate and a list of lenient plea bargains struck by the district attorney. The outside of the mailer included a glossy image of a murder chalk outline, along with the message: “An Outline for Disaster. Which District Attorney has ranked last in convictions for the last eight years?”
The Harris campaign’s message got out to voters in part because she had gained the trust of much San Francisco’s political and donor class, including Vanessa Getty, one of the city’s wealthiest philanthropists. Early in the campaign, the San Francisco Ethics Commission, a city body that oversees local elections, handed Harris the largest fine in its history for breaking fundraising limits. She apologized for the error, but little could stop her fundraising machine.
As SF Weekly noted, Harris’s cash advantage came “from the city’s social and legal elites, people with power and money, people who respond well to Harris’ message that Hallinan is erratic, divisive, and soft on crime.” The Golden Gate Restaurant Association, a lobby group for the dining industry, backed Harris with independent campaign advertisements, and major real estate and professional societies donated to her campaign.
In the end, Harris built a campaign war chest of over $600,000 — twice the amount raised by Hallinan.
Harris also had the benefit of support from the outgoing San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Brown donated to Harris’s 2003 campaign and — without her consent — had worked his connections to raise money for her.
The other two candidates in the race seized on the issue. Though they had once been political allies, the relationship between Hallinan and Brown had soured. Hallinan had begun investigating City Hall officials for corruption, landing cases of graft between municipal officials and developers. Though Hallinan endorsed Brown for re-election in 1999, he showed up at a rally that year for Tom Ammiano, appearing to lend his support to the mayoral challenger.
Brown retaliated by openly mocking Hallinan. He asked California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to step in and prosecute drug dealers, claiming that Hallinan refused to do his job. In an interview, Brown called Hallinan a “son of a bitch [who] should have been recalled” over refusing to prosecute homeless people for public intoxication and defecating in the streets.
In his advocacy for a new approach to homelessness, Hallinan went so far as to hand out soup to homeless people alongside volunteers from Food Not Bombs.Hallinan had indeed taken a liberal policy toward crimes related to homelessness. He notably reversed longstanding city policy around arresting and charging panhandlers. He also sought to clear charges brought against volunteers who had been cited for feeding homeless people, an illegal offense at the time. In his advocacy for a new approach to homelessness, Hallinan went so far as to hand out soup to homeless people alongside volunteers from Food Not Bombs — one of the criminalized groups — outside City Hall. After winning the election as the city’s top prosecutor, he dropped the charges against the volunteers. “This district attorney and this city intend to grapple in a different way with the homeless problem,” Hallinan said.
The Hallinan campaign trumpeted Harris’s ties to Brown, warning that she would not prosecute lingering corruption in the Brown administration. For many, this accusation reeked of sexism. Brown had briefly dated Harris, and she had left him shortly after he won his first mayoral race in 1995. The Fazio campaign hit a similar note, mailing a flyer to San Francisco residents stating that “Kamala accepted two appointments from Willie Brown to high-paying, part-time state boards — including one she had no training for — while being paid $100,000-year as a full-time county employee.”
Brown was known to reward friends and allies. He gave Harris a brand-new BMW and also appointed her to two commissions in state government where, according to SF Weekly, she was paid $400,000 over five years. One of the positions, an appointment to the California Medical Assistance Commission, paid a $99,000 annual salary for attending two meetings a month.
Harris largely brushed off the criticism. “Willie Brown is not going to be around. He’s gone — hello people, move on. If there is corruption, it will be prosecuted. It’s a no-brainer, but let’s please move on,” she said in one interview. “His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing.”
As soon as Hallinan won his seat in 1995, he was viewed as a fox in the henhouse by the San Francisco Police Department.
Hallinan was the city’s most unusual occupant in the DA’s office in its modern history. At age 22, he was charged with felony assault, though later acquitted. He was born to a famous left-wing family. His father, Vincent Hallinan, had defended union leaders over Red Scare-related charges and ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952. Terence Hallinan began his life as an amateur boxer and eventually gravitated to the practice of law.
He participated in civil disobedience protests over racial discrimination at the Palace Hotel and Bank of America, as well as at restaurants and businesses across San Francisco. In 1963, he spent the summer organizing African-American voters in Mississippi. Archival footage of the most iconic 1960s-era protests in the city are filled with appearances by Hallinan, who frequently served as counsel to striking workers, student sit-ins, and anti-war demonstrators. Later in life, he served as a criminal defense attorney to a range of clients, including drug dealers and accused murderers.
For nearly 40 years, it was Hallinan representing clients against San Francisco law enforcement. In at least one occasion, he was the victim of police assault. Now the shoe was on the other foot.
Terence Hallinan confronts the police officer he claims beat his head open while he was trying to help a girl to safety away from the police during a sit-in at San Francisco State College, Calif., on May, 22, 1968.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
During his first campaign for district attorney, Hallinan pledged to crack down on police misconduct. “I will not hesitate to treat them like any other citizen and prosecute them,” he said of the city’s police department after his victory.
In 2002, three off-duty police officers beat two San Francisco men over a bag of fajitas. The incident sparked outrage and Hallinan indicted not only the officers, but also the police department’s top brass, alleging a conspiracy to cover up the crime. The case led to the creation of Proposition H, a successful city ballot measure, crafted in part by Hallinan, to expand oversight over the police department. The case against the police, however, fell apart, with a judge dismissing the charges.
The incident further strained relations between police and the DA’s office. Behind the scenes, Harris courted law enforcement officials, earning the endorsements of the Deputy Sheriffs’ Association, the incumbent sheriff, and a host of former prosecutors. In a recent Politico piece examining the history of the race, Gary Delagnes, a former police union official, remembered Harris coming up to him at a party, poking him in the chest and demanding, “You better endorse me, you better endorse me. You get it?”
The San Francisco police union’s 32-member board voted unanimously to endorse Harris after she advanced to the runoff election. “We should be working together, and she’s committed to that,” announced Chris Cunnie, the Police Officers Association president. “When the district attorney indicts 10 officers in one year, that’s a problem.”
In debates and events following the endorsement, Harris touted the law enforcement support. “We have, at best, a hostile relationship between the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department,” Harris said during a debate with Hallinan on KQED. She stressed her ability to repair relations with the police.
The conservative-leaning editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle cited support from the police and Hallinan’s low conviction rate in its endorsement of Harris. “Harris, for law and order,” the editorial’s headline blared.
Harris carried the runoff election by nearly 13 percent. Though she repeatedly slammed her opponent as soft on crime on the campaign trail, Harris struck a new approach at her inauguration, one that would later define her balanced approach to criminal justice. “Let’s put an end right here to the question about whether we are tough on crime or soft on crime,” she said. “Let’s be smart on crime.”
After taking office, Hallinan’s legacy could be seen throughout Harris’s work in many ways. As DA, her office extended the light-touch approach to most medical marijuana dispensaries and promoted drug-diversion programs. Harris repaired relations with the police department but faced backlash from law enforcement when she declined to seek the death penalty for a gang member convicted of murdering San Francisco police Officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004.
There was also sustained pressure to increase conviction rates and obtain longer sentences. SF Weekly interviewed a number of former prosecutors who said that Harris adopted inflexible charging procedures to look tough on crime in preparation for running for statewide office one day. In her re-election campaign four years later, she was touting a new felony conviction rate record, 67 percent, and a new focus on cracking down on drug dealers, quality of life crimes, and other criminals.
More recently, the landscape for criminal justice reform has changed drastically, with a wave of district attorneys embracing an approach resembling Hallinan’s. Newly elected district attorneys across the country — from St. Louis County’s Wesley Bell to Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner — are now promising to prioritize social justice over doling out brutal sentences and garnering higher conviction rates. There’s even a growing backlash against election season fearmongering on crime. An increasing number of liberals now view electoral penal populism as a factor that contributes to the country’s mass incarceration crisis.
On the campaign trail in 2019, Harris has been recast as an insurgent reformer who spent her entire career fighting against draconian criminal justice enforcement. At her presidential campaign announcement rally, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf opened the event by declaring, “When it was still popular to be ‘tough on crime,’ she was smart on crime.” The crowd cheered and clapped. The history, however, is a little more complicated.
The post In Her First Race, Kamala Harris Campaigned as Tough on Crime — and Unseated the Country’s Most Progressive Prosecutor appeared first on The Intercept.
The first hand of the Green New Deal has been dealt. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., on Thursday unveiled a five-page, nonbinding resolution that frames a 10-year “national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization” to confront the climate crisis.
The plan envisions the creation of millions of “good, high-wage jobs” and will serve to “counteract systemic injustices.”
The resolution sets a framework for legislation to be hashed out over the next two years, and gives Ocasio-Cortez, Markey, and climate groups something to organize around.
Their goal is to meet 100 percent of the demand for power in the U.S. with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” in line with the scientific consensus on climate change, as well as to provide “all people of the United States” with clean air and water, “healthy and affordable food,” high-quality health care, “affordable, safe, and adequate housing,” and economic security.
As part and parcel of this transition, the resolution calls for a federal jobs guarantee, a massive infrastructure build-out, building efficiency upgrades and robust investment in public transit, to name just a few of the measures listed. It would ensure a dignified quality of life for workers and communities that rely on coal, oil, and natural gas jobs (“a fair and just transition”), and says that steps toward reaching zero-emissions — such as building new wind turbines — should not impose on indigenous peoples’ land rights or abuse the power of eminent domain. A full plan, the resolution states, will be developed “in transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses.”
The resolution provides the most detail yet of what Ocasio-Cortez and company mean by a Green New Deal, but it does not map out precisely what a Green New Deal will entail. If the House had created a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, per Ocasio-Cortez’s original resolution, that would have been the two-yearlong mandate of a team of policymakers and experts. In laying the groundwork for an eventual legislative package, the document will create pressure on the select panel created by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in lieu of the one called for by Ocasio-Cortez. Dubbed the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, it will be chaired by Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla.
Pelosi on Thursday morning announced Ocasio-Cortez would not be on that select committee, though she was approached for a seat and declined to join. In a separate interview with Politico, Pelosi mocked the notion of a Green New Deal. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she said. “The green dream or whatever they call it — nobody knows what it is but they’re for it right?”
Ocasio-Cortez, at a press conference unveiling the resolution, was asked repeatedly about Pelosi’s dig, but declined to hit back, saying that Pelosi has long been a climate champion and the term “dream” is a compliment, accurately capturing the scale of the vision, which she compared to the New Deal and Great Society.
The resolution makes clear that the phrase isn’t just a talking point, but connected to a specific set of policy priorities.
A number of powerful Democrats were on hand for the resolution’s announcement, including the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Ron Wyden of Oregon, whose committee has jurisdiction over swaths of a Green New Deal. He pledged to “throw the dirty energy tax relics of yesteryear into the garbage can.”
Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., was also there to show support. The Rules Committee controls what legislation hits the House floor.
Over the last few months, support for the Green New Deal has become a litmus test for 2020 Democratic hopefuls, and the resolution serves dual purposes: to unite lawmakers around the idea of a Green New Deal, and to offer a basic definition of what that means. For 2020 contenders who have conceptually supported the Green New Deal, the resolution makes clear that the phrase isn’t just a talking point, but connected to a specific set of policy priorities. Confirmed and rumored presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Bernie Sanders will be among the nine senators co-sponsoring the resolution. Sixty-four House Democrats will also be co-sponsoring the legislation, including Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Joe Neguse, D-Colo.
“We’re going to be pressuring all of the 2020 contenders to back this resolution,” said Stephen O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, which helped launched the Green New Deal into the national spotlight with its sit-in at Pelosi’s office last November. “That’ll make it clear who’s using the Green New Deal as a buzzword and who’s actually serious about what it entails. For our generation, the difference between the Green New Deal as a buzzword and substantive policy is life and death.” Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year that if massive changes to limit global warming are not undertaken by 2030, the planet will face widespread, catastrophic changes.
On Tuesday, the Sunrise Movement hosted some 500 watch parties around the country for a livestream laying out its next steps to support the resolution. As of Wednesday, the group was in the process of organizing visits to 600 congressional offices nationwide, for constituents to demand that their representatives co-sponsor Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s measure. Supported by Justice Democrats — the group that backed Ocasio-Cortez’s primary run — Sunrise will also be launching a 15-city campaign tour through early primary states.
The resolution’s preamble lays out both the existential threat and expected cost in dollars and lives to the U.S. posed by climate change, as well as “several related crises” facing the United States, including “a 4-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization” and “a large racial wealth divide amounting to a difference of 20 times more wealth between the average white family and the average black family.”
Unlike the original resolution calling for a Select Committee on a Green New Deal — which called for 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 — this one calls for the U.S. to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. The difference is more than semantic, and energy wonks have hotly debated it since Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise, and other groups began pushing the call for the latter in November. While full reliance on renewables would have all energy come from sources such as wind and solar, net-zero entails an openness to so-called negative emissions technologies, a suite of measures ranging from the experimental — like carbon capture and storage, machines to extract carbon from industrial processes and put it underground — to the conventional, like afforestation, or planting trees that suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The phrasing is also a recognition of the fact that certain “hard-to-abate” industries, including steel, transportation, and agriculture, are more difficult to decarbonize than others. Negative emissions are ubiquitous in pathways to capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius created by climate modelers and compiled in the IPCC’s report from last year on reaching that goal. While many negative emissions technologies remain unproven at scale, the resolution states that a Green New Deal will pursue negative emissions “through proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such as land preservation and afforestation.” The resolution further refers broadly to greenhouse gas emissions, not just carbon.
The sheer scale of investment laid out by the Green New Deal also makes it possible to imagine eliminating emissions from those hard-to-abate industries altogether, which the Energy Transitions Commission predicts would cost just 0.5 percent of global GDP by 2050.
Though carefully worded, net-zero by 2030 is a hugely ambitious target — although still the only one remotely consistent with something known as equity pathways pursuant to the amount of carbon the world can continue to emit under a “carbon budget.” That is, the world only has so much carbon left to burn before we cross a certain threshold of warming. The U.S. is what’s called a historical emitter, meaning that we’ve both spewed more greenhouse gasses into the air over time, and as a result have developed more economic capacity to mitigate and adapt to climate change. In equity pathways, historical emitters carry a responsibility to peak and drive down their emissions quicker than the rest of the world, effectively leaving room in the global carbon budget for countries that haven’t collected massive amounts of wealth off coal, oil, and natural gas room to develop — a process that, at least for now, means emitting more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. In the U.N. Framework Conventions on Climate Change, this is known as “common but differentiated responsibility,” although historical emitters — including the U.S. — have consistently tried to contest the meaning of that phrase.
“Global CO2 emissions need to go down about 10 percent per year to meet a 1.5 degree target,” said Peter Erickson, senior scientist at the Stockholm Environmental Institute. “If you take into account that the U.S. is more responsible than any other country for historic emissions, and also one of the wealthiest countries in the world, U.S. emissions need to go down even faster than that.”
The U.S. has a role to play in speeding along the transition off fossil fuels for the rest of the world.The resolution also references the fact that the U.S. — because of its vast resources and contribution to the problem — has a role to play in speeding along the transition off fossil fuels for the rest of the world. Indeed, President Donald Trump bragged in his State of the Union address this week that the United States has become a net-exporter of oil and gas. Fossil fuel companies are continuing to explore for new reserves — mostly for export — in places like the Permian and Appalachian basins, which could have a catastrophic climate impact. Companies being able to exploit those reserves hinges on their ability to build new infrastructure like Liquid National Gas terminals that allow for exports and on continuing to receive generous subsidies. The resolution notes that any Green New Deal in the U.S. will promote “the international exchange of technology, expertise, products, funding, and services, with the aim of making the United States the international leader on climate action, and to help other countries achieve a Green New Deal.”
There’s room for interpretation as to what getting to net-zero could mean for a Green New Deal, and the resolution doesn’t reference any specific regulatory measures, like a ban on new oil and gas exploration or a renewable portfolio standard, a tool states like California have in order to bring down their emissions by requiring utilities to procure a certain amount of their power from renewable sources. Much of the action detailed in the resolution is focused on getting to net-zero by building up the country’s supply of renewable energy, with comparatively less focus on explicitly phasing out fossil fuels — a phrase that, to the chagrin of some environmental activists, does not appear in the resolution’s text.
“We already have an international climate agreement that fails to include the words ‘fossil fuels’; we can’t afford a Green New Deal that does the same,” Oil Change International’s David Turnbull wrote in a statement about the resolution Thursday morning, referencing the Paris Climate Agreement. While generally supportive of the resolution and its goals, Turnbull noted that “the science is clear: If the oil, gas, and coal in currently operating wells and mines is dug up and burned, we will blow well past our climate goals.” Erickson cautioned that any Green New Deal legislation that is eventually produced should seek to explicitly limit fossil fuel production and oversee a managed decline of the industry. “Even if the U.S. was successful at reducing its own emissions but still went on being a fossil fuel producer and exporter, that’s going to flood the global market with coal, oil, and gas. That’s going to undermine global targets and has real emissions consequences,” he said.
A list of frequently asked questions about the resolution provided by Ocasio-Cortez’s office clarified that it “calls for any infrastructure measures before Congress to address climate change and additionally calls for an end to the transfer of pollution overseas.” “This provision goes farther than just calling for a ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure,” the document says, instead tackling “all greenhouse gas emitting and pollution emitting sources in our economy and global trade.”
However the details of legislation eventually shake out, the Green New Deal represents a massive departure from the landmark bill Markey introduced back in 2009 with former Sen. Henry Waxman to create an elaborate cap-and-trade system. That bill passed the House but not the Senate, and the version that was voted on ended up making several compromises to accommodate Republicans and fossil fuel interest groups — including dramatic limitations on the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory authority. With the clock running out to rein in emissions, Green New Deal advocates are eager not to repeat history.
“There’s pieces of the GND that are yet to be defined, and they’ll be defined as the policy is developed,” O’Hanlon said. “The way that we’re ensuring that the legislation is as science and justice demand is by building a grassroots movement all across the country that can make sure that we’re holding all politicians’ feet to the fire.”
Update: February 7, 2019
This story has been updated to include reporting from the resolution’s unveiling outside the Capitol.
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