Redish writes: "The Fifth Amendment's guarantee of neutral judicial process before deprivation of liberty cannot function with a weaponized pardon power that enables President Trump, or any president, to circumvent judicial protections of constitutional rights."
Sheriff Joe Arpaio endorsed Donald Trump at a rally in Marshalltown, Iowa, in 2016. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
Why Trump Can't Pardon Arpaio
By Martin H. Redish, The New York Times
25 August 17
t his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, President Trump strongly implied that he would pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who was found guilty in July of criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order against prolonging traffic patrols targeting immigrants. This is not idle presidential chatter: On Thursday morning, CNN reported that the White House has prepared the necessary paperwork, along with talking points for its allies.
This is uncharted territory. Yes, on its face the Constitution’s pardon power would seem unlimited. And past presidents have used it with varying degrees of wisdom, at times in ways that would seem to clash with the courts’ ability to render justice. But the Arpaio case is different: The sheriff was convicted of violating constitutional rights, in defiance of a court order involving racial profiling. Should the president indicate that he does not think Mr. Arpaio should be punished for that, he would signal that governmental agents who violate judicial injunctions are likely to be pardoned, even though their behavior violated constitutional rights, when their illegal actions are consistent with presidential policies.
Many legal scholars argue that the only possible redress is impeachment — itself a politicized, drawn-out process. But there may be another route. If the pardon is challenged in court, we may discover that there are, in fact, limits to the president’s pardon power after all.
NRA Seeks to Mainstream - and Monetize - the Alt-Right's Paranoid, Racist Talking Points
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=37790"><span class="small">Amanda Marcotte, Salon</span></a>
Friday, 25 August 2017 08:42
Marcotte writes: "The 'alt-right' wants America to believe violent radicals are on the attack; the NRA knows paranoia can sell guns."
In an ad for the NRA, Dana Loesch makes a statement that many read as a call for violence against liberals and activists. (photo: CPAC)
NRA Seeks to Mainstream - and Monetize - the Alt-Right's Paranoid, Racist Talking Points
By Amanda Marcotte, Salon
25 August 17
The "alt-right" wants America to believe violent radicals are on the attack; the NRA knows paranoia can sell guns
henever Donald Trump feels like he’s on the ropes, he throws himself a rally in a red state that would make Mussolini feel envious. So it was on Tuesday night in Phoenix, when Trump — furious that the media took issue with his claim that a torch-wielding mob of white supremacists was replete with “fine people” — unleashed a 75-minute rant about his own victimization to a crowd who, despite their immense love for the Bigot-in-Chief, started getting bored and drifted away.
The highlight reel of Trump’s feature-film-length whine demonstrates, yet again, that the president is echoing talking points from the same white supremacist and “alt-right” circles that he struggles to half-heartedly denounce: Monuments to the white supremacist Confederate regime are “our history and heritage,” that white communities need to be “liberated” from violent immigrants, and politicized violence in the streets is being caused not by fascists, but by antifa activists who show up to resist them.
Trump’s conservative audiences are disturbingly comfortable with these talking points, and that’s due to a larger right-wing media infrastructure that has been pushing these notions into more mainstream conservative spaces. Earlier this week, I reported on the role that Tucker Carlson and the Daily Caller are playing in injecting more radical rhetoric into conservative discourse. But the NRA — a gun lobby that in recent years has built its own little media empire through blogs and NRATV — has also played a major role in promoting ideas that used to dwell on the fringes.
“For years, the gun lobby quietly dog-whistled to white supremacists,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In America, which is part of Everytown for Gun Safety. “But as gun sales plummet under this administration, they are now openly trafficking in paranoia and fear, and inciting violence in order to advance an increasingly radical ‘more guns for anyone, anywhere’ agenda to sell more guns.”
Earlier this summer, an NRA recruitment video made by spokeswoman Dana Loesch attracted considerable media attention. Loesch argued, over a backdrop of dramatic music and images of street violence, that the supposedly liberal media was whipping up mobs that “smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding? — ?until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the madness.”
She went on to recommend that well-armed NRA members meet this supposed upsurge of radical violence with “the clenched fist of truth.”
Loesch’s video echoed the arguments of NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, who gave a speech in February at the Conservative Political Action Conference warning about the rise of the “violent left.”
“Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us,” LaPierre said. “If the violent left brings their terror to our communities, our neighborhoods or into our homes, they will be met with the resolve and the strength and the full force of American freedom in the hands of the American people. Among them and behind them are some of the most radical political elements there are. Anarchists, Marxists, communists and the whole rest of the left-wing socialist brigade.”
Remember, this was just a month after the Women’s March, which was the largest demonstration in American history and which resulted in no violence, no property damage and no arrests.
These claims that there’s some surge of left-wing violence that needs to be shut down by the armed vigilance of the right should be familiar to anyone who has followed the rise of the “alt-right” and the youth-oriented white supremacist movement. For months now, “alt-right” figures like Kyle “Based Stickman” Chapman have argued that violent leftists present a physical threat to “free speech” and must be met with violence. “Alt-right” social media feeds are replete with young men bragging about how they can’t wait to assault left-wing protesters — or run them down with cars — all in the thinly veiled disguise of “self-defense.”
This was the excuse that the neo-Nazis and other assorted racists used to justify showing up in Charlottesville with guns, shields and helmets, even though it was obvious to most of the public that they weren’t acting in self-defense so much as deliberately trying to provoke street fights. It’s true that these goons are sometimes met by antifa demonstrators who are ready to rumble, but as counter-protests in both Boston and Charlottesville demonstrated, violent leftists are a tiny majority and not actually a threat that can serve to justify right-wing violence.
On Monday night the president echoed these claims, calling out “antifa” by name and saying they “show up in the helmets and the black masks and they have clubs and everything.” Again, this contains a grain of truth — a small number of armed, masked leftists sometimes show up at counter-protests — but the larger truth is that most progressive protesters are armed with nothing but cardboard signs. It’s really the white supremacists and fascists that are showing up in large numbers with weapons, guns, shields and helmets. As the failed “alt-right” rally in Boston showed, if the far right isn’t allowed to arm itself, its forces frequently won’t bother to show up at all.
As Watts argued, it’s not surprising to see the NRA tap into white-supremacist talking points, and not just because LaPierre and other NRA spokespeople have a long history of pushing racist fantasies in order to scare heartland white folks into buying guns. The truth of the matter is that Trump’s presidency, while ideologically congenial for the gun lobby, is bad for business. In the spring, a “Trump slump” in gun sales was widely reported. The firearms industry’s marketing is largely based around appealing to conservative insecurities. When Democrats are in office — especially, say, a black president — anxious conservatives buy more guns to feel powerful. If a Republican is in charge, conservatives feel less need to shore up their self-esteem with high-powered weaponry.
In recent months, though, gun sales started to rise again, and it’s not hard to see why: Conservatives are responding to a steady drumbeat of warnings — from Trump, from right-wing media, from the NRA — that the country is under assault from criminal gangs and violent leftists, and they need to be ready.
The results of this were all too chillingly on display in Charlottesville as hundreds of white supremacists descended on the city, many of them laden down with expensive weapons. Images like this also provide effective advertising for the gun industry, as the images of gun-wielding wannabe-fascists convince other embittered right-wingers that there’s an exciting movement to join, and all they need to do is lay down a credit card at the nearest gun shop.
Soul Snatchers: How New York City's Criminal Justice System Conspires to Destroy Black and Brown Lives
Friday, 25 August 2017 08:38
King writes: "What I'm about to tell you is the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government sanctioned police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, wrongful convictions, forced testimony, widespread corruption, money, lots of money, and deep, deep, deep soul-snatching psychological abuse in modern American history."
New York Police Department officers. (photo: AP)
Soul Snatchers: How New York City's Criminal Justice System Conspires to Destroy Black and Brown Lives
By Shaun King, Medium
25 August 17
hat I’m about to tell you is the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government sanctioned police brutality, wrongful imprisonment, wrongful convictions, forced testimony, widespread corruption, money, lots of money, and deep, deep, deep soul-snatching psychological abuse in modern American history. I would not have believed it had I not seen it all for myself. The rabbit hole I am about to take you down is deep and twisted. It should lead to the termination of a whole host of officials. Many should be arrested and a comprehensive independent investigation should begin immediately.
I receive hundreds of personal emails about injustice in America every single day. In mid-July, dozens of those emails were about a Bronx teenager named Pedro Hernandez. People all over the country had seen reports from Sarah Wallace of NBC New York or James Ford of Pix 11 on how Hernandez, who was jailed at Rikers Island, was running out of time to be released in time to start college. Hernandez had won awards at Rikers for his leadership and academic performance, and had also been granted a scholarship from the Posse Foundation to enter college this fall. Offered a plea deal from the Bronx DA’s Office to be released for time served, Hernandez did what few people in his position would do?—?he turned down the deal. Accused of shooting Shaun Nardoni, a neighborhood teenager, in the leg on September 1st, 2015, Hernandez was offered a ticket out of Rikers in exchange for admitting he shot Nardoni. The District Attorney even sweetened the pot and pledged to expunge his record in five years if he met all of the terms of his probation. Hernandez still refused to take the deal?—?continuing to pledge that he was completely innocent and would rather take his chances with a jury before admitting to something he didn’t do.
For nearly a week, people emailed me about Pedro’s case before I finally clicked on the link to see what it was all about. Tory Russell, an activist and organizer from St. Louis, who I’d come to know from Ferguson, sent me a direct message on Twitter asking me if I could read the story and support Pedro somehow. I was on vacation with my family and it still took me another three days to finally read the story. I was hooked, but I had questions. As I Googled Pedro’s name and case, I saw several local reports that stated he had been wrongfully arrested and harassed by the NYPD for years. A guard at another facility was actually arrested and charged with criminal assault, endangering the welfare of a child, criminal obstruction of breathing and blood circulation, and harassment after being caught on film brutally beating and choking Pedro. Eight different eyewitnesses had all come forward to state that Pedro was not the shooter. Many even went so far as to identify the actual shooter. Why then, did Pedro remain behind bars? Why did it seem like the NYPD had it out for him? And how could the Bronx DA simultaneously believe that Pedro was safe enough to set free if he took the plea, but so dangerous, that if he didn’t, his bail would be set at an outrageous $250,000 with a stipulation that he not pay the typical 10%, but pay all $250,000?—?effectively ensuring that he’d never get out on bail. That Pedro Hernandez, with the entire deck stacked against him, still refused to take a plea, hooked me.
As I reached out to Pedro’s family, I was immediately struck by something peculiar. I’ve written nearly 1,000 stories about police brutality and misconduct and have interviewed hundreds of families suffering through the consequences of those things. Almost every single one of those families, particularly when they are still in a stage of grief or conflict, without fail, want to speak exclusively about their very specific case. Pedro’s family was different. They immediately wanted me to know that Pedro was not alone, but that he was just one of hundreds of victims whose lives had been turned upside down by officers from the 42nd precinct in the Bronx who were working in close concert with the Bronx District Attorney’s Office. The accusations were so sweeping and broad that I wasn’t sure how to process them.
They went something like this:
“Stop and frisk has been banned, but police in the 42nd precinct are actually doing something far worse. They are setting quotas and goals for the number of people each officer must arrest. If you don’t meet or exceed the quotas, you feel the wrath of your supervisors. Instead of rejecting the quotas, some officers are embracing them and rounding up people, particularly teenage children, for crimes they know good and well they didn’t commit?—?locking them away sometimes for days, weeks, months, or even years at a time?—?then simply dismissing the charges. This isn’t just a few rogue cops, but an entire precinct is doing this and they are partnering with the Bronx District Attorney’s Office to make it happen. With threats, and even brute force, kids are being coerced to identify and testify against people they don’t even know. Officers are terrorizing families, snatching kids out of their beds, not a few times, but dozens of times per child, sometimes arresting them on false charges, sending them to Rikers, then releasing them months later. Cops think they can do anything they want and it appears they can. Pedro is being framed. They tried to frame him over and over again before this case. And other kids are being framed too. And the kids and families who’ve been victimized by this scandal are hollow shells of their former selves. The Police Commissioner, the Comptroller, and the Mayor all know about this and are doing nothing.”
In mid-July, I wasn’t quite sure how much of all of that I believed. Now, I believe all of it –every single bit. How I got here wasn’t easy, but over the next five days I’m going to try to break it all down for you. Saying it all in one piece would be sensory overload. Trust me. The evidence is meticulous, overwhelming and undeniable. I’ll have to start from the beginning and give you the foundation for how any what I’m going to be sharing is even possible. Today is the foundation, the next four parts of this series will not only expose the injustice, but will detail each case, the primary perpetrators, and who in the New York City government was aware that such corruption and brutality took place and did nothing to stop it.
Gentrification and the Increasing “Invisibility” of Police Brutality in New York City
For our Brooklyn apartment, my family of seven currently pays more in monthly rent for what is literally the second smallest of the fifty-five homes my wife and I have lived in between the two of us. The smallest ever was our first New York apartment. The monthly rent here is more than my entire Daily News paycheck. I work three other jobs to cover everything else. As rents have gone up and up and up, the old residents of my neighborhood have been squeezed out. When the cable guy came by to install our Internet and television, I kid you not, he smiled and said “Man, back in the day, I used to sell weed right outside of where your apartment is. Nobody used to wanna live here. It was totally different.”
I’ve come to understand just how right he is. For the fifteen years of my adult life that I called Atlanta home, I met more people who relocated there from New York than anywhere else. When they told me they left New York because the cost of living in Atlanta was so much better, I never quite appreciated what they meant until my family moved up here ourselves. The struggle is real. With what we pay for rent right now, in Atlanta you could live like royalty. Kanye said it best in his track Gossip Files,
How you go to New York?
What, you ain’t never took a tour there?
What, you ain’t know you gotta be rich just to be poor there?
He’s right. My wife and I know school teachers in New York who literally struggle to afford gas money or subway passes. What passes for “nice” in New York, would struggle to pass for that almost anywhere else. The poor and middle class have been pushed to the outer edges of New York City?—?deep into the Bronx or Brownsville and out of the central city of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Gentrification has caused Biggie’s Bed Stuy and Diddy’s Harlem to be heavily peopled by hipster white folk walking dogs and riding bikes. And what that means is that the methods of policing in these areas have changed drastically. Wherever huge numbers of white folk exist, the methods of policing change. Mind you, studies show that a higher percentage of white people actually sell drugs than African Americans, but African Americans are policed and prosecuted for those same drugs in a way that is altogether different for whites. Consequently, neighborhoods that were once hotbeds of aggressive policing just ten or twenty years ago now experience something far more humane from the NYPD?—?giving a few million people that live here the impression that police brutality must no longer exist in New York the way it used to.
It does. Gentrification here means millions of us rarely see police brutality because it doesn’t happen in our neighborhood, but it’s happening, in precincts and districts that the privileged classes rarely visit, and it’s worse than you could ever imagine.
Something Much Worse Than Stop and Frisk: Arrest Quotas
Follow my words here carefully. In 2013, a federal judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, in a 193 page ruling, stated that New York’s horrendous “stop and frisk” police tactic was unconstitutional because it unfairly and disproportionately targeted “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.” She did not rule that “stop and frisk” in and of itself is unconstitutional, but that the way New York was administering it, on the backs of people of color, was. The facts were undeniable, but the practice itself was not overruled.
A staggering 5 million incidents of stop and frisk took place in New York since 2002. Nearly 90% of those stops were of people who were found to be completely innocent. The overwhelming majority of stops, of course, were done against black and Latino residents of the city. When the practice was formally disbanded in New York City after Judge Scheindlin’s decision, it was seen as an enormous victory for police reforms. And it was, but something that is perhaps even more nefarious than stop and frisk unofficially rose up within the NYPD to take its place?—?a crisis of false arrests driven by an unwritten quota system being overseen by precincts across the city.
Just three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, New York City agreed to something that is so scandalous, so huge, that only the incoming presidency of Donald Trump could’ve outshined it. New York City agreed to pay $75 million (that’s $75,000,000) out in a police corruption case that should’ve rocked the city and the nation to its core. They likely chose that date and time on purpose. The case had been in litigation for years and years, but the city chose one of the most fragile, news heavy times in the history of modern American media to drop an absolute bomb. The city admitted that it was forced to dismiss over 900,000 arrests and summonses because they simply didn’t have the evidence to back them. These weren’t 900,000 stops that were made, but 900,000 legal actions accusing people of crimes that they did not commit. They were all bogus. Not 9,000. Not 90,000?—?which seems like an outrageous number, but 900,000. Not only that, but the case actually had its very own deleted email scandal, where almost every single email Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly ever sent was deleted?—?never to be found again. Yeah, really.
Here’s the lawsuit:
Here’s the $75,000,000 settlement with 900,000+ bogus cases.
In the settlement, the NYPD refused to admit that they were using quotas, but did agree that they would send out updated notices to every officer and leader that they are banned. Mind you, that’s already been done many times before. How in the hell does a city accumulate 900,000 false arrests and summonses? I’m glad you asked. Officers within the department have already spelled it out very clearly.
To understand the misconduct, brutality, forced pleas, false witnesses, and corruption that I am about to share, you must first understand the unjust system that police officers themselves have bravely identified as being the root source of it all?—?arrest quotas. Yes, racism and bigotry and white supremacy, conscious or otherwise, are all essential underlying problems with policing in America, but arrest quotas, or the departmental demand that each officer has a certain number of arrests, preferably with certain types of crimes, on the backs of certain types of people, are the vehicle that allows America’s worst instincts to wreck havoc on the lives of everyday people in New York. Gentrification has essentially pushed these horrible practices out of the eyesight of New York’s privileged class and the victory of Stop and Frisk being cut down gave the both city and the NYPD cover for something that is arguably far worse.
The systemic foundation of the next four parts of this series was not set by me, but by heroic, award-winning officers within the NYPD who believed with all of their heart that arrest quotas, imposed on everyday cops by their supervisors, were not only deeply unjust for the hundreds of thousands of New York City residents affected by these quotas who are frequently targeted and arrested without cause, but that the system is poisonous for officers themselves?—?actually breeding the worst instincts of racism, brutality, and corruption from the top down.
What I’m about to say could get slightly wonky, but I’m asking you to look past the legalese and understand that what we are talking about here are amazingly brave cops who put their lives and careers on the line to stand up for what they thought was right by not only speaking out against unjust practices within the department, but by actually suing the NYPD, their supervisors, and the City of New York to expose such things. I’m going to share five different cases with you that involve a combined 15 different NYPD officers who have taken the courageous step of filing suit to prove that the NYPD is illegally using arrest quotas. 13 of these officers are still currently working within the department. These are not jaded cops with an ax to grind. Filing these suits, while insisting on remaining cops within the NYPD, has made their day to day duty within the department a living hell. They’ve been harassed, ridiculed, and blacklisted, but have continued to push through not only because they love their jobs, but because they want to change the department from the inside out.
I’ll start with the most recent case and work my way backwards.
The NYPD 12 v. The City of New York, The Mayor of New York, The Police Commissioner, and the Commanding Officer of Patrol Services
Read their full 49 page lawsuit below. It’s some of the most deeply compelling stuff you’ll ever read. Again, because this lawsuit of twelve courageous officers standing against injustice within their own department broke during the Trump campaign, it appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle. It gets no bigger than this case.
Also, please read “A Black Officer’s Fight Against the NYPD” by Saki Knafo. This article masterfully unpacks the story of Edwin Raymond, who serves as the lead plaintiff in this case as well as many of the painful stories of the eleven other black and Latino officers who tried to do right by changing the department from within, only to suffer serious consequences as a result.
This is the most important lawsuit ever filed against the NYPD. It is currently up for review. Attorneys on the case, and officers who filed as plaintiffs, have each told me that the city has fought and delayed and stalled this case at every turn. The evidence of arrest quotas, and the mistreatment officers received for not meeting them, that they have compiled is both damning and undeniable.
I’ve met personally with seven of the plaintiffs?—?all current NYPD officers. They’ve put their lives on the line by filing this case. These are high-performing cops. They loathe crime and want to make the city safe, but simply put their foot down when they were expected to make arrests and meet quotas whether they saw crime or not. The officers have, of course, recorded extensive evidence of the illegal quota system to back their claims.
Here they are talking about it. You have to see this for yourself.
Here is Sgt. Edwin Raymond speaking at length about the racial quota systems.
These first two lawsuits are from respected police officers within the 42nd Precinct -which will be the focus of this series. The 42nd Precinct is the same crew that we will prove has attempted to frame Pedro Hernandez and so many other children in the community. These lawsuits have helped us understand why. The culture in this precinct is toxic. See how…
Officer Craig Matthews (of the 42nd Precinct) v. New York City & the NYPD
Officer Matthews is not only a 19 year veteran of the NYPD, but has won award after award for his great work?—?including stopping a crazed shooter in Manhattan near the Empire State Building. He was simply unwilling to arrest and charge people from crimes they didn’t commit?—?which is what the quota system in the 42nd Precinct was demanding officers do. When Matthews began reporting to his supervisors that he was being asked to do complete false arrests and meet illegal quotas, the mistreatment began. He tried to work within the system and when that didn’t work, he was finally forced to file this lawsuit exposing the NYPD’s illegal quota system.
See his full lawsuit here. It’s as compelling as it gets.
The US Circuit Court actually upheld his lawsuit. See it here:
Then New York City settled with Officer Matthews, who still works for the department. See that here. This man is a hero.
See a news segment on the settlement and lawsuit here:
Officer Vanessa Hicks (of the 42nd Precinct) v. New York City & the NYPD
In the same precinct as Officer Craig Matthews, Vanessa Hicks was being told that she, too, had to meet the arrest quota or suffer the consequences. She had a strong career in the department, but the NYPD derailed her career after she refused to participate in the quota system with false arrests.
See the full lawsuit here:
Officer Adhyl Polanco v. New York City & The NYPD
Officer Adhyl Polanco, who still works for the NYPD, was a pioneer in exposing quotas, police misconduct, false arrests, and forced/coerced confessions within the NYPD. Like others, he attempted to work within the system and only resorted to filing a lawsuit when his supervisors began to directly threaten his career because he exposed corruption.
See his full lawsuit here:
Officer Adrian Schoolcraft v. The NYPD and The City of New York
You just need to read this case file for yourself. When Officer Adrian Schoolcraft exposed an illegal arrest quota system within the NYPD?—?including extensive evidence of the system from recordings and data collection, he was literally forced to stay in a mental hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Yeah, really. When he fled the city to stay with his father in upstate New York, he recorded the police coming to his father’s house to harass him over and over again. After years of fighting back against the NYPD, the City of New York and Jamaica Hospital finally settled with him.
See the full lawsuit here:
Here is a news video from that year on Officer Schoolcraft’s lawsuit:
All of this is to say that brave officers within the NYPD have made it clear that an illegal quota system, which relies on false arrests, false reports, and false confessions, drives the NYPD. We’re talking about a system that just had to throw out 900,000 bogus cases. This system, which must be exposed and rooted out, is the foundation of poor policing across the city. Police say this. It’s important to point out that because this isn’t a conspiracy theory from an activist or a hit piece from a journalist, today is about allowing the brave officers of the NYPD to describe the most critical problem they have for themselves. In these next four parts, we will show how arrest quotas have literally ruined the lives of family after family in one Bronx community and how the highest officials in the city have bent over backwards to conceal this unjust system. To be clear, this story has heroes, villains, and far too many victims.
Trump Deepens the Racial Divide Again, This Time in Phoenix
Thursday, 24 August 2017 14:29
Cole writes: "After another Stockholm Syndrome performance, on Afghanistan, where he gave the speech National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster wrote for him, Trump on Tuesday returned to form at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona."
President Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump Deepens the Racial Divide Again, This Time in Phoenix
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
24 August 17
fter another Stockholm Syndrome performance, on Afghanistan, where he gave the speech National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster wrote for him, Trump on Tuesday returned to form at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona.
It was a week and a half after Trump discredited himself with two-thirds of the public by saying that the Nazi/Klan invasion of Charlottesville was a problem with “many sides.” It was a week after he said that there were very fine people among the invaders, who killed one young woman, beat a young black man to within an inch of his life, put at least 19 other people in the hospital, and menaced a synagogue and churches.
Despite having upset so much of the country by defending racists and equating them with civic-minded protesters, Trump insisted on going to Phoenix to push his anti-immigrant agenda. In a long, rambling speech full of falsehoods, Trump again equated immigrants with criminals and blamed them for joblessness among whites.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets peacefully to condemn Trump’s comments on Charlottesville. Over 50 people had to be treated for heat-related health problems in the 106 degrees F. weather. In the evening, the police abruptly unleashed tear gas on the crowd, dispersing what was left of it.
Trump again asserted incorrectly that his administration had passed a record amount of legislation. He said he had won Arizona “by a lot.” He won by a low 3.5% (Bush won over Kerry in 2004 in Arizona with a 10.5% margin). His supporters keep saying he is responsible for 1 million jobs added to the economy since January (it is actually a little over 600,000), neglecting to note that that is the smallest number for the first two quarters of any recent year.
If Barack Obama was sardonically referred to as the nation’s “Magical Negro” (Spike Lee’s term for a stock character in American cinema such as in “The Green Mile” or “Bagger Vance”), Trump is the magical WASP, the billionaire with the golden touch, who will make every other white person rich by his special superpowers, who can fail to pass any significant legislation but boast that he outdid Truman and Johnson, and who can fail to achieve a budget bill but conjure a wall out of mere racial hatred to keep Mexicans out. Why, Mike Pence even alleged that ISIL was running away from the Magical WASP, despite the spike in their terrorist attacks worldwide. The Magical WASP, unlike the Magical Negro, won’t provide cross-racial support. In fact, he won’t actually help anyone at all. He is a stingy billionaire and an abrasive politician. He doesn’t actually have special powers and isn’t actually able to help a hero with his quest. He is just a blowhard who spins fairy tales about helping people when he actually prevented their children from getting chemotherapy for their cancer. He is just a cruel mirage, giving hope to poor and working class whites who are too bigoted to take any help from someone like Obama.
Trump hinted broadly that he will pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found in criminal contempt of court for defying a judge’s order to cease unconstitutionally harassing Latinos with no probable cause.
Trump threatened a governmental shutdown if congress did not fund the building of a 2,000-mile-long border wall, dropping his demand that Mexico pay for it. (In a leaked conversation with the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, Trump admitted that it had all along been an unreasonable demand that would not be acceded to, but pleaded with his Mexican counterpart to avoid publicly refusing to pay).
Trump denounced the “crooked” news media as a purveyor of lies and urged the crowd to menace reporters.
This performance sent CNN’s Don Lemon over the edge. Lemon then led a panel discussion of just how unhinged Trump is. Lemon interviewed former top intelligence official James Clapper, he flatly said he thought Trump was unfit for the office and that he worried about this erratic person having access to the nuclear launch codes.
That brought the CNN commentators up short.
Trump rambled on for much of the speech complaining about the media coverage of his conflicting statements on Charlottesville. He neglected to quote his own statements that there had been many sides and that there were very fine people among the white supremacist invaders. He does not understand that when you engage in false equivalencies of that sort, it does not matter if you go on to speak of peace and love and racial inclusion. People forget that Tricky Dick Nixon used to talk about peace, too.
The president said that university administrations that removed confederate statues at night to avoid protests were “weak, weak, weak.” He alleged that Teddy Roosevelt statues were in their sights next.
Trump again pushed the fraud of “clean coal.” Coal power plants put mercury, a nerve poison, into our air, soil and water, affecting our children. They also spew millions of tons of toxic carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, causing global heating that threatens us with desertification, extreme weather, and sea level rise. Trump boasted about having withdrawn the US from the Paris climate accord, which had committed the country to reduce its massive carbon dioxide emissions (5.4 billion metric tons a year, more per capita than any other country in the world aside from tiny Australia).
Meanwhile, Phoenix has heated up so much under the impact of our carbon dioxide emissions, which Trump wants to increase, that planes sometimes can’t take off because it is too hot for the air to provide lift to the wings.
Trump avoided naming Sen. John McCain, who is battling brain cancer, but implicitly slammed him for declining to vote for a health insurance bill that would have kicked 26 million people off of health care. Trump had called the bill “mean,” and had campaigned on providing everyone in the country with affordable health care.
Trump said that the US had miraculously, because of his presidency, suddenly become an energy exporter for the first time in history. The US was the world’s swing producer of petroleum for much of the first half of the twentieth century.
There were 15,000 people in the Phoenix Convention Center to hear Trump, which is a relatively small crowd. But of course the Magical WASP insisted it was an enormous crowd and complained that the crooked media wouldn’t show it on tv.
FOCUS | The Unimaginable Is Now Possible: 100% Renewable Energy. We Can't Settle for Less.
Thursday, 24 August 2017 12:03
McKibben writes: "Sure, being against overheating the planet or melting the ice caps should probably speak for itself - but it doesn't give us a means. So it's important news that the environmental movement seems to be rallying round a new flag. That standard bears a number: 100 percent."
Solar panels. (photo: Solar Power World)
The Unimaginable Is Now Possible: 100% Renewable Energy. We Can't Settle for Less.
By Bill McKibben, In These Times
24 August 17
he knock on environmentalists is that they’ve been better at opposing than proposing. Sure, being against overheating the planet or melting the ice caps should probably speak for itself—but it doesn’t give us a means. So it’s important news that the environmental movement seems to be rallying round a new flag. That standard bears a number: 100 percent.
It’s the call for the rapid conversion of energy systems around the country to 100 percent renewable power—a call for running the United States (and the world) on sun, wind and water. What Medicare for All is to the healthcare debate, or Fight for $15 is to the battle against inequality, 100% Renewable is to the struggle for the planet’s future. It’s how progressives will think about energy going forward—and though it started in northern Europe and Northern California, it’s a call that’s gaining traction outside the obvious green enclaves. In the last few months, cities as diverse as Atlanta and Salt Lake have taken the pledge.
No more half-measures. Barack Obama drove environmentalists crazy with his “all-of-the-above” energy policy, which treated sun and wind as two items on a menu that included coal, gas and oil. That is not good enough. Many scientists tell us that within a decade, at current rates, we’ll likely have put enough carbon in the atmosphere to warm the Earth past the Paris climate targets. Renewables—even the most rapid transition—won’t stop climate change, but getting off fossil fuel now might (there are no longer any guarantees) keep us from the level of damage that would shake civilization.
In any event, we no longer need to go slow: In the last few years, engineers have brought the price of renewables so low that, according to many experts, it would make economic sense to switch over even if fossil fuels weren’t wrecking the Earth. That’s why the appeal of 100% Renewable goes beyond the Left. If you pay a power bill, it’s the common-sense path forward.
To understand why it took a while to get to this point, consider the solar panel. We’ve had this clever device since Bell Labs produced the first model in 1954. Those panels lost 94 percent of the solar energy in conversion and were incredibly expensive to produce, which meant that they didn’t find many uses on planet Earth. In space, however, they were essential. Buzz Aldrin deployed a solar panel on the moon not long after Apollo 11 touched down.
Improvements in efficiency and drops in price came slowly for the next few decades. (Ronald Reagan, you may recall, took down the solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed atop the White House.) But in 1998, with climate fears on the rise, a close election in Germany left the Social Democrats in need of an alliance with the Green Party. The resulting coalition government began moving the country toward renewable energy.
As German demand for solar panels and wind turbines grew, factories across China learned to make the panels ever more cheaply and the price of panels began to plummet, a freefall that continues to this day. Germany now has days where half its power is generated by the sun. In 2017, solar or wind power wins most competitive bids for electric supply: India just announced the closure of dozens of coal mines and the cancellation of plans for new coal-fired generating stations because the low cost of solar power was undercutting fossil fuel. Even in oil-rich Abu Dhabi, free power from the sun is impossible to resist, and massive arrays are going up amidst the oil fields.
One person who noticed the falling prices and improving technology early on was Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere and Energy Program. In 2009, his team published a series of plans showing how the United States could generate all its energy from the sun, the wind and the falling water that produces hydropower. Two years later, Jacobson and a crew of co-conspirators—including actor Mark Ruffalo—launched the Solutions Project to move the idea out of academic journals and into the real world. The group has since published detailed plans for most of the planet’s countries. If you want to know how many acres of south-facing roof you can find in Alabama or how much wind blows across Zimbabwe, these are the folks to ask.
With each passing quarter, the 100 percent target is becoming less an aspirational goal and more the obvious solution. Hell, I spent the spring in some of the poorest parts of Africa where people—for the daily price of enough kerosene to fill a single lamp—were installing solar panels and powering up TVs, radios and LED bulbs. If you can do it in Germany and Ghana, you can do it in Grand Rapids and Gainesville.
Even 72 percent of Republicans want to “accelerate the development of clean energy.” That explains why, for example, the Sierra Club is finding dramatic success with its #ReadyFor100 campaign, which lobbies cities to commit to 100 percent renewable. Sure, the usual suspects, such as Berkeley, Calif., were quick to sign on. But by early summer the U.S. Conference of Mayors had endorsed the drive, and leaders were popping up in unexpected places. Columbia, S.C., Mayor Steve Benjamin put it this way: “It’s not merely an option now; it’s imperative.”
Environmental groups from the Climate Mobilization to Greenpeace to Food and Water Watch are backing the 100 percent target, differing mainly on how quickly we must achieve the transition, with answers ranging from one decade to around three. The right answer, given the state of the planet, is 25 years ago. The second best: as fast as is humanly possible. That means, at least in part, as fast as government can help make it happen. The market will make the transition naturally over time (free sunlight and wind is a hard proposition to beat), but time is the one thing we haven’t got, so subsidies, hard targets and money to help spread the revolution to the poorest parts of the world are all crucial.
That’s why it’s so significant that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in April to propose the first federal 100 percent bill. It won’t pass Congress this year—but as a standard to shape the Democratic Party agenda in 2018 and 2020, it’s critically important.
Congress, however, is not the only legislative body that matters in America. Earlier this year, for instance, the California State Senate passed—by a 2-1 margin—a bill that would take the world’s sixth-largest economy to 100 percent renewable by 2045. Last month, Gov. Jerry Brown, in a bid to recreate the spirit of the Paris climate talks, invited the world’s “sub-national” leaders—governors, mayors, regional administrators—to a San Francisco conference in September 2018.
“Look, it’s up to you and it’s up to me and tens of millions of other people to get it together,” Brown said, as he invited the world to his gathering.
That’s not to say that this fight is going to be easy. Fossil fuel corporations know they’re not the future, yet they’re determined to keep us stuck in the past. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, for example, recently ordered a “study” that, as Democratic senators have pointed out, is “a thinly disguised attempt to promote less economic electric generation technologies, such as coal” by trying to show that intermittent sources of power such as sun and wind make the grid unreliable.
That’s always been the trouble with renewables: The sun sets and the wind dies down. Indeed, one group of academics challenged Mark Jacobson’s calculations this spring partly on these grounds, arguing that unproven techniques of capturing and storing carbon from fossil fuel plants will likely be necessary, as well as continued reliance on nuclear power. Yet technology marches on. Elon Musk’s batteries work in Tesla cars, but scaled up they make it economically feasible for utilities to store the afternoon’s sun for the evening’s electric demand. In May, at an industry confab, one California utility executive put it this way: “The technology has been resolved. How fast do you want to get to 100 percent? That can be done today.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is threatening to impose massive tariffs on solar panels coming into the United States. This could dramatically drive up the price of new U.S. solar installations, and two-thirds of the new arrays expected to come online over the next five years might never be built.
Before that happens, however, the growth in new rooftop installations has already come to what the New York Times has called “a shuddering stop,” because of “a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitols across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners.” Instead of cutting residents a break for helping solve the climate crisis, in state after state utility corporations—led by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Edison Electric Institute (whose political advocacy efforts ratepayers actually underwrite)—are passing legislation that pre-empts “net-metering” laws, which let customers sell their excess power back to the grid. Energy consultant Nancy LaPlaca puts it this way: “Utilities have a great monopoly going and they want to keep it.”
It’s not just right-wing Republicans who oppose renewables. Democrats often support new fossil fuel schemes, in part because they are in thrall to the building trades unions for campaign support. Last fall, days after the mercenaries hired by the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline sicced German shepherds on indigenous protesters, the AFL-CIO (which includes the powerful North America Building Trades Unions) issued a statement supporting the pipeline “as part of a comprehensive energy policy. … Pipeline construction and maintenance provides quality jobs.” Sure enough, Hillary Clinton refused to join Obama in trying to block the pipeline. And, of course, Donald Trump approved the project early in his presidency, shortly after a cheerful meeting with the heads of the building trades unions. The first oil flowed through the pipeline the same afternoon that Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord.
That means, of course, that renewables advocates need to emphasize the jobs that will be created as we move toward sun and wind. Already, more Americans are employed in the solar industry than in coal fields, and the conversion is only just beginning. Sanders and Merkley’s federal 100 percent bill, beyond its generous climate benefits, is expected to produce 4 million new jobs over the coming decades.
And since those jobs aren’t always going to be in the same places as the fossil fuel ones they replace, renewable advocates must also demand a just transition for displaced workers. Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) is a pro-climate and pro-labor group advocating that such workers get a deal like the 1944 G.I. Bill: three years of full wages and benefits, four years of education and retraining, and job placement in community economic development programs. This, by the way, is also a strong reason for a robust social safety net—revolutions come with losers as well as winners.
Environmental justice advocates are also quick to point out that renters and low-income homeowners need to share the economic benefits of the renewables revolution. In Brooklyn, N.Y., and Fresno, Calif., groups like UPROSE and Green for All are working on local solar projects to provide residents with clean energy and good jobs.
Jacqueline Patterson, who heads the NAACP’s environmental justice work, notes that low-income communities need to be cushioned from any cost increases as the market shifts over. “For those communities ‘just transition’ means their bills don’t fluctuate upwards.” In the best of worlds, she adds, “They’re not just a consumer writing a check every month, but they see now a chance to own part of that infrastructure.”
In June, the philanthropic Wallace Global Fund awarded the Standing Rock Sioux a $250,000 prize plus up to a $1 million investment to build renewable energy infrastructure on the reservation, a fitting commemoration to the bravery of water protectors who tried to hold the Dakota pipeline at bay. And a reminder that private foundations will need to play a role in this transition as well.
The political battle for renewables will be hard-fought. In January, the New York Times reported that the Koch brothers have begun to aggressively (and cynically) court minority communities, arguing that they “benefit the most from cheap and abundant fossil fuels.” Their goal is not only to win black voters to the GOP’s energy program, but to stall renewables in majority-black-and-brown cities like Richmond, Calif.
America’s twisted politics may slow the transition to renewables, but other countries are now pushing the pace. In June, for instance, China’s Qinghai Province—a territory the size of Texas—went a week relying on 100 percent renewable energy, a test of grid reliability designed to show that the country could continue its record-breaking pace of wind and solar installation.
China’s not alone. One Friday in April, Great Britain, for the first time since the launch of the Industrial Revolution, managed to meet its power demands without burning one lump of coal. Since 2014, solar production has grown six-fold in Chile, where Santiago’s Metro system recently became the first to run mostly on sun. Holland said this winter that its train system was now entirely powered by the wind, and, in a memorable publicity stunt, strapped its CEO to the blade of a spinning windmill to drive the point home.
These are all good signs—but, set against the rapid disintegration of polar ice caps and the record global temperatures each of the last three years, they still amount to too little. It’s going to take a deeper level of commitment—including turning the U.S. government from an obstacle to an advocate over the next election cycles. That’s doable precisely because the idea of renewable energy is so popular.
“There are a few reasons why 100% Renewable is working—why it’s such a powerful idea,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “People have agency, for one. People who are outraged, alarmed, depressed, filled with despair about climate change—they want to make a difference in ways they can see, so they’re turning to their backyards. Turning to their city, their state, their university. And, it’s exciting—it’s a way to address this not just through dread, but with something that sparks your imagination.”
Sometimes, Brune says, all environmentalists have to rally together to work on the same thing, such as Keystone XL or the Paris accord. “But in this case the politics is as distributed as the solution. It’s people working on thousands of examples of the one idea.” An idea whose time has come.
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t his rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, President Trump strongly implied that he would pardon Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., who was found guilty in July of criminal contempt for defying a judge’s order against prolonging traffic patrols targeting immigrants. This is not idle presidential chatter: On Thursday morning, CNN reported that the White House 
henever Donald Trump feels like he’s on the ropes, he throws himself a rally in a red state that would make Mussolini feel envious. So it was on Tuesday night in Phoenix, when Trump — furious that the media took issue with his claim that a torch-wielding mob of white supremacists was replete with “fine people” — unleashed a 75-minute rant about his own victimization to a crowd who, despite their immense love for the Bigot-in-Chief, 
he knock on environmentalists is that they’ve been better at opposing than proposing. Sure, being against overheating the planet or melting the ice caps should probably speak for itself—but it doesn’t give us a means. So it’s important news that the environmental movement seems to be rallying round a new flag. That standard bears a number: 100 percent.
