Do-It-Yourself Democracy

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

18 January 21

 

UCSON – Chris Christie, one of Donald Trump’s countless discarded Kleenexes, declared the obvious. “If insurrection isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is.” Liz Cheney, whose hardline Republican roots run deep, echoed that in stirring terms.

The Capitol assault was no bozo Bastille. America called 911, and no one came. “We came close to half the House nearly dying,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said afterward. She feared Republican colleagues would direct insurgents to Democrats’ hideouts.

When the teargas cleared and Congress resumed certifying votes, Cheney declared: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

Everything, she said, was Trump’s doing: “[He] summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not.”

Yet only a handful a Republicans voted to impeach. Others aimed their wrath at Cheney, not Trump, and sought to remove her as their caucus chair. Polls show that two-thirds of Americans who voted for reelection would do it again.

Ten days later, the enormity of it is sinking in. At one point, The Washington Post reported, a group chanting “Hang Mike Pence” missed seeing the vice president by 60 seconds as the Secret Service spirited him away.

The world watched for hours as thousands overran police, killing one and battering others in a superpower that spends $720 billion a year on “defense.” When the National Guard finally moved in, most had gone, high-fiving and plotting their next move.

Top level officials declined to brief the nation, but reporters pieced together what happened. Mayor Muriel Bowser wanted to protect the Capitol but could only send local police. In Washington, the Pentagon commands the National Guard. Troops were deployed to direct traffic and in the Metro.

Governors of nearby states made urgent, repeated calls to offer Guard units that could have blocked access to the Capitol and arrested assault leaders in flagrante while evidence was fresh, with firsthand witnesses. Generals declined, wary of “the optics.”

Those “optics” will be far worse on Wednesday to a stunned world. America, which symbolized open, unassailable democracy, plans to inaugurate a president shielded by 21,000 armed troops and barricades that make Washington look like Baghdad in 2003.

The institutions held firm, and a second impeachment has a strong chance of barring Trump from public office. But last week presaged a smoldering civil war, likely to flare out of control if enough citizens do not stamp out the embers.

I keep flashing back to the presidential inauguration I covered in 1964 on a break from school to work at the Caracas Daily Journal. Steeped in Latin-America history, with its constant coups and endemic corruption, I was ready for anything.

Venezuela’s first democratic succession was a textbook triumph. Unguarded, Raúl Leoni addressed cheering masses from the Miraflores Palace balcony. A few of us reporters who slipped out behind him worried about snipers. He didn’t.

For mostly internal reasons but also because of the world around it, Venezuela is what it is today. Americans who take democracy for granted need to understand how fragile it can be.

Our public schools, crippled over decades, have produced a cohort of ignoramuses who believe big lies if repeated with crowd-stirring bombast. An entrenched oligarchy exploits this to amass fortunes. Mitch McConnell’s approach to party fealty has been the Republican norm since 2007.

Moronic letters to newspapers absolve Trump and his militias of any blame. One in the Tucson daily called Twitter an anti-conservative “master of deceit” and excoriated other platforms for blocking Parler, which the writer called a legitimate outlet for dissent.

Here are a few recent Parler posts:

• “We need to act like our forefathers and Kill Black and Jewish people (and) Leave no survivors or victims.”


• “After the firing squads with the politicians the teachers are next.”


• “Shoot the police that protect these shitbag senators and then make the senator grovel a bit before capping they ass.”

One Parler post, claiming plans were afoot for a “newsworthy event,” said on Jan. 20 that patriots should start “systematicly” assassinating liberal leaders, liberal activists, BLM leaders and supporters, mainstream media anchors, correspondents and Antifa.

That Tucson letter-writer asserted that Democrats want a one-party dictatorship, ending with a line that reflected our larger challenge: “The American people are forced to learn ‘globalism’ to survive.” That is, we have to live in the real world.

Previous Mort Reports detail worsening crises beyond our borders while America is occupied by trying not to tear itself apart. Republican legislators displayed paralyzing ignorance of global complexities during the House impeachment debate.

Deadly pathogens are the new normal. Climatic calamity outstrips earlier dire predictions. China is muscling us aside. Russia cites America to pronounce democracy dead. Terrorist groups thrive. The “Abraham Accords,” hardly Middle East peace, deepens enmity that imperils Israel. North Korea and Iran now pose far greater threats.

First ridiculed, then widely despised, America has lost its ability to set moral standards in a world that needs them more by the month.

Faced with this, Joe Biden must restore a collapsed economy, halt a plague that kills 4,000 people a day, and quell an insurgency as overworked federal agents hunt down people who should have been arrested when they breached the Capitol perimeter.

The French do a lot of things wrong, but riot police have learned since 1968 how to keep demonstrations from exploding out of control. For “optics,” they hang back out of sight. But at the first sign of violence, they swarm in and herd agitators into paddy wagons.

Their intelligence misses some impending threats. France takes liberté seriously and resists locking up people for what they might do before they do it. But they have an advantage. France’s hunters keep arms but not assault rifles that blast game to smithereens.

In America, a hodgepodge of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies is beyond control. Egged on by Trump, murderous mavericks within their ranks endanger not only citizens but also the thumping majority of good cops trying to do their jobs.

A day before the assault, insurgent leaders toured the Capitol with helpful uniformed police pointing out its warren of chambers and passageways to goons in Halloween getup who were plainly not run-of-the-mill tourists.

A widely circulated photo shows one Capitol cop shepherding a small group of thuggish-looking costumed louts, including that deviant from Phoenix in buffalo horns and body paint. We don’t know why, but Democratic legislators promise to find out.

The menace was clear. Before the Jan. 6 session to confirm the vote, one Democrat told her husband where to find her will. One told his kids not to watch from the gallery. Another wore sneakers. Body armor is a legitimate expense for members of Congress.

Evan Osnos captured the mood in The New Yorker. Since 9/11, he noted, the Capitol has been ringed with security, but last Wednesday any sense of control was gone. A few excerpts:

“The mob quickly overwhelmed the police, broke windows, and forced open doors … They rummaged through drawers and brandished their loot for photographers. A man in a wool Trump hat, with a pom-pom on it, and a rictus of glee, carried off a carved wooden podium bearing the seal of the Speaker of the House …

“I introduced myself to a hopped-up guy walking away from the Senate side of the Capitol, and he said, ‘The New Yorker? Fucking enemy of the people. Why don’t I smash you in your fucking head?’ He made an effort to draw a crowd: ‘Right there in the blue mask! Enemy of the fucking people!’ But the people had other things on their minds, and nobody bothered to join in. Five years after the Trump era began, a physical assault on American democracy felt both shocking and inevitable — a culmination of everything that had been building since 2015.”

True, it is a different America. It is now politically charged to say “on both sides” but some new legislators, Democrats as well as Republicans, overdo rhetoric. Democracy needs decorum and compromise. But simple fiery speech is different from rebellion.

Take Rep. Lauren Boebert, 34, who packs a sidearm, as waitresses and most customers do at her Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado. She supports QAnon and insurrection. Her campaign posters were emblazoned: “FREEDOM.” Roger Cohen tried to interview her for The New York Times, but she had him ejected from the café.

“That’s what freedom may look like in a second Trump term,” he wrote, “more the my-way-or-the-highway muzzle of a Glock than the liberty enshrined by the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Boebert is still trying. She declared Jan. 6 would be “the Republicans’ 1776” and told the House: “Members who … accept the results of this concentrated, coordinated, partisan effort by Democrats — where every fraudulent vote canceled out the vote of an honest American — have sided with the extremist left.” She promises to demand Biden’s impeachment on Jan. 21.

Six days later, she railed at Capitol police who tried to search her bag when her Glock set off an alarm. She stormed past the metal detector along with several other Republicans. Screening, she said, was just another political stunt by Nancy Pelosi.

As any veteran diplomat or correspondent can attest, this sort of blind zealotry is deadly to democracy if unchecked. As the rule of law wanes, institutions crumble. Faithless legislators and public servants need to be hounded out of office — fast.

The 14th Amendment is clear: senators, representatives or other public servants who swear an oath cannot hold any office if they “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against [the United States] or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

On Jan. 6, Republicans repeatedly evoked Abraham Lincoln despite flouting the principles of his Grand Old Party. They called for unity and forgiveness to move forward as they said old Honest Abe would have counseled.

We don’t know how Lincoln might have dealt with today’s crippling impasse. While he sat watching a play, a do-it-yourself dissident with a pistol sneaked up and altered the course of history, as a lynch mob tried to do last week.

Trump’s creeping coup d’état fizzled. Prosecutors circle like sharks as his business empire tanks. Lenders and funders shun him. Twitter, along with other social media, has muzzled him. But his cultists, armed and crazed, aren’t going away.

The shock of last week’s insurrection could jolt America back towards sanity. If not, there is no shortage of wannabe authoritarians eager for a shot at elections in 2024.

Chris Christie chastised Obama in 2011 for saying Republicans thwarted him at every turn: “I mean, cry me a river. Lead and do your job.” Obama finally did with executive orders. That set a precedent for Trump’s fiat by tweet. And here we are today.

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

First in the Union: Illinois Will End Classist and Racist Cash Bail and Regulate Electronic Monitoring

By Isaac Scher, The Intercept

18 January 21

Reformers typically propose predictive algorithms and electronic monitoring as alternatives to money bail. Illinois is different.

ome organizers in Illinois recall getting “laughed out of the room” for supporting the abolition of money bail five years ago. But on January 13, Robert Peters, a longtime advocate for ending cash bail and now a state senator from Chicago, saw his legislative proposal to end money bail pass the General Assembly, along with a comprehensive package of criminal justice reforms written by the state’s Black Caucus. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker has strongly indicated that he will sign the bill, which will make Illinois the first state in the country to end a detention system that is demonstrably racist and classist.

Labor groups, abolitionists, and local nonprofits formed a coalition to end money bail shortly after powerful state players derided activists who argued against money bail in court and led organizing drives throughout the state. Their four-year campaign, which brought pressure against the state and gifted them a close alliance with the Black Caucus, made sweeping reforms thinkable. It was the movement for Black lives and the 2020 uprising that made them inevitable.

The reforms, which would go into effect in January 2023, will avoid the most dangerous pitfalls of quietly emerging “alternatives” to money bail: algorithms that predict peoples’ “risk” and detain those given higher scores, and surveillance devices that track people who maintain legal freedom before trial. These powerful tools are already used in a vast patchwork of jurisdictions across the country. Both are opaque and profitable and have gained prominence among bail reformers in places like California, where a failed effort to end money bail last autumn would have mandated prediction and increased surveillance.

In California and elsewhere, reformers have maintained that algorithmic prediction and “electronic monitoring” constitute safe, effective, and just substitutions for money bail. Advocates and experts say the tools are just as racist and classist as the money-bail system. Now, advocates see Illinois’ victory as reason for cautious optimism about the future of pretrial justice in the state and even nationwide. The bill reduces the reach of the criminal legal system, advocates said. They look beyond the money-bail ban, to the legislation’s unprecedented restrictions on an emerging and largely hidden system of prediction and surveillance.

In large swaths of the country, it is impossible to know how many people live with an electronic monitor. James Kilgore, now a leading expert on the surveillance technology, tried to find answers when he was released from an Illinois prison in 2009. He filed information requests with 35 states, but details were sparse. “When I asked for states’ analyses of their electronic monitoring, they said they didn’t have anything like that,” said Kilgore, a media fellow at the political and economic rights group MediaJustice.

MediaJustice researchers do know that monitoring is primarily leveled against poor, Black, and brown people. Surveillance supervisors frequently prevent monitored people from working jobs that have no fixed location, their 2019 report found, which rules out gig work and day labor opportunities. And other rules and restrictions are so vast that some monitored people see guilty pleas as their only escape. “If electronic monitoring had given me more movement, I probably would have fought the case,” one mother said. “My kids were not getting the healing they needed.”

Once the Illinois reform package takes effect, an oversight board will publish quarterly data on counties’ use of monitoring — a basic move toward democratizing information. Electronic monitoring will become a last resort for the courts too. State prosecutors will bear the burden of proving that an accused person should be monitored, both before the person has been surveilled and after 60 days of surveillance. And in a distinctly remarkable step, any time “served” on an electronic monitor will be subtracted from a court sentence. Advocates like Kilgore say that electronic monitoring “is not an alternative to incarceration, but an alternative form of incarceration.” The Illinois legislation implicitly concurs.

All of this is unprecedented in the United States. “Illinois’ reform is the first of its kind in the country to regulate electronic monitoring,” said Kate Weisburd, an associate law professor at George Washington University. Otherwise, “it’s a bit like the Wild West. It’s expanding, and it’s being used with little restraint or limitation.”

The very companies contracted to produce the technology often write the surveillance rules and restrictions that govern monitored peoples’ lives, Weisburd added. “And it’s not just that they’re writing the rules. They also run the programs. They judge whether a violation occurs.”

Private companies outside the bail industry have been angling to profit from incarceration for years. It is paying off, and the ongoing public health crisis has opened up new markets. In his research, Kilgore has found that the Covid-19 pandemic has further normalized the use of big data and surveillance technologies within the criminal legal system. It’s gaining purchase outside the system, too, as general “contact tracing” technology — and then being fed back into carceral sites at greater rates. In Cook County, where Black residents comprise 70 percent of monitored people but 25 percent of the general populace, there were some tepid efforts to get people out of jail in 2020. As of this week, the county jail population is back to its pre-pandemic total. Electronic monitoring is up more than 50 percent.

“We have expanded the footprint of the carceral state,” Kilgore said, “by supplementing cages with technology.”

As with electronic monitoring, algorithmic prediction is gaining popularity in Illinois and around the country. Known as “risk assessment tools,” the predictive instruments crunch hundreds of thousands of data points on prior defendants to predict whether an accused person in front of the court might be rearrested or skip hearings. An algorithm produces a “risk” score and on that basis recommends that an accused person be released before trial — with or without an electronic monitor — or detained. The algorithms are profiling tools for the 21st century: They process arrest histories, convictions, and missed court dates. Some use data on guilty pleas; others account for whether accused people have owned cellphones.

About 1 in 6 Illinois counties use these tools already. Cook County, home to one of the largest jail populations in the country, uses the Public Safety Assessment, an algorithm owned by former Enron trader John Arnold’s “philanthropy” company Arnold Ventures. Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research, an arm of Arnold Ventures, told The Intercept that algorithmic prediction “can play a positive role in a jurisdiction’s efforts to advance fair and equitable pretrial justice” but is not a necessary component of a just pretrial system.

Many players in the Illinois coalition against money bail wanted to see algorithms fully banned. That wasn’t possible. “Systems stakeholders remain extremely committed to risk assessment tools,” said Sharlyn Grace, executive director of the Chicago Community Bond Fund.

And even after money bail is eliminated, individual judges will continue to have vast power in the process. The legislation says that accused people can be detained pretrial if they might willfully flee from prosecution or if they are “a real and present threat to the safety of a specific, identifiable person.” Judges will decide whether those conditions are met, said Colin Doyle, staff attorney at Harvard Law’s Criminal Justice Policy Program. “A lot will depend on how faithfully judges follow the spirit of these reforms.”

But the bill does chip away at judges’ authority by limiting the function of predictive algorithms, whose release-or-detain recommendations some judges use as established fact, not mere suggestion.

When the “Arnold Tool,” as some call it, was brought to Illinois in 2015, “it was a black box,” Grace said. “So were other tools.” The reform will have data about the algorithms published on a regular basis.

And it will not mandate the use of algorithms, a victory for would-be bail reformers everywhere. Months ago, reformers might have looked to California’s money-bail ban as a model bill. It would have mandated that the tools and kept data private.

In further contrast to California’s reform, the Illinois legislation requires algorithmic calculations to be sent to defense lawyers, who will be able to challenge the predictions. And in all pretrial hearings, the court will start from the presumption that accused people should be released (California’s bill presumed detention).

Every single person accused of a crime in Illinois will potentially be eligible for release, their legal freedom intact. “If this becomes law, Illinois would have some of the strictest restrictions on who can be incarcerated pretrial,” said Doyle.

Previously “virtually anyone accused of anything was eligible for detention without bond,” Grace said. “It should be very hard for the government to take away our freedom. In reality, it was very easy.”