Free Ramsey Orta!

For the last two or three years, I have been corresponding with a young man named Ramsey Orta via old-fashioned letters sent in the mail. We don’t use email as he is an inmate in the New York State prison system. He is moved around constantly, and his latest address is the 10th state “correctional facility” to which he has been shipped. I’ve been sending letters to at least five of them.

Ramsey’s name is not a household word, but he is in prison due to the case of Eric Garner, which is. Garner was the 43-year-old African-American who was strangled in 2014 by an NYPD officer using a prohibited chokehold. The arrest was for the alleged crime of selling single cigarettes. A cellphone video of the arrest shows Garner saying “I can’t breathe” 11 times, which did not stop the chokehold that eventually killed him. You can find it easily on YouTube.

Ramsey Orta is the bystander who filmed Garner’s death and posted the video. He’s also the only person connected with that incident ever to spend a day in jail. The cop who caused Garner’s death, Daniel Pantaleo, was never charged and continued to receive his NYPD salary for five years while an “internal investigation” dragged on. Finally, Pantaleo eventually was removed from the force (which caused howls of outrage from the police union). Another officer who stood by and did nothing while Garner died lost a few vacation days; no one else suffered disciplinary action.

Of course, the charge that sent Orta to prison was not “causing embarrassment to the police.” In the summary and call to action below, the history of his video and the NYPD reaction is outlined in more detail, and I won’t repeat that in this introduction. (This 2019 article from The Verge has more.) What I will say is that though I have never met Ramsey in person, I have found him over the years of our communication to be serious, valiant, determined, frank, and resilient far beyond what most of us could manage under similar pressures.

I began to write to him as a show of support for someone whom I consider to be a prisoner of conscience. I believe the details of the specific offenses with which he was accused to be irrelevant. He turned a bright light on NYPD practices, and they are predictably furious about it; prison guards are also cops. Therefore, he needs protection from retaliation, and using an old Amnesty International technique, I began to send him letters to demonstrate that he had people on the outside concerned about his well-being. Amnesty knew that a prisoner facing dire conditions in the world’s dank dungeons were strengthened by the arrival of letters addressed to them from around the world. I used to send letters to South Vietnam, Argentina, Uzbekhistan, Nigeria, and South Africa. Now I send them to upstate New York.

Ramsey answered, and we began to share regularly. I also send him books, and he reads them.

Ramsey’s term is up in July, but according to his testimony some prison guards are unhappy that he may soon slip from their control [see below]. Given the new threat of coronavirus that can thrive in the Petri-dish conditions of a prison, we are calling for people to demand Ramsey’s immediate release. Please read what follows, take the action requested, and pass on this alert to your own networks. Thanks!



Free Ramsey Orta

Ramsey Orta’s life in in imminent danger in New York State prison. Ramsey is the citizen journalist who video recorded the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD. His courage in releasing the video, which went viral, made him a target of the world’s largest militarized police force. Ramsey is the only person connected with Eric Garner’s murder to go to jail, a clear message to whistleblowers. In prison he has been singled out for intimidation and abuse. Now guards are openly threatening his life, saying they will make sure he gets COVID-19 and dies before his July release date. They are also denying him food. Ramsey has fallen sick. We must NOT let them make good on their threats.

Please contact Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has the power to grant Ramsey’s release. Phone: (518) 474-8390 or email here.

Demand: Ramsey Orta’s “immediate release without supervision.”

Background:

Why “Immediate”?

This is a life or death situation. Prison officers have threatened to give Ramsey COVID-19 through an infected guard. They have deprived him of soap, showers, tissue, and cleaning supplies for his cell, even removing his sheets so he has to sleep on a vinyl mattress, on which COVID-19 can live for days. Ramsey was recently in the prison infirmary with a fever, then was returned to his cell where guards have escalated their threats. They have deprived him of food, showing him a food tray and asking him, “Are you hungry?” then saying, “Well eat my d-ck, you m----er f---ing n--er” and taking away the food. They accuse him of being a “snitch” because his Facebook support group is posting about their threats; they have promised he “won’t make it out alive.”

Why “without supervision”?

Ramsey merits prompt release: while in prison, he completed his GED and received certification for a parenting class. He wants to be a good father to his two daughters so that they do not make the mistakes he did, having been raised with grandparents involved in drugs and prostitution. He enrolled in an anger management program and applied for a college program, neither of which he was able to complete because he has been transferred from prison to prison repeatedly and regularly placed in solitary confinement.

Ramsey is quite likely innocent of the main charge against him, weapons possession. He took a plea deal to that charge based on highly suspect evidence: the gun had no bullets or fingerprints, which is inconsistent with the police claim that they caught him placing it into the waistband of a 17-year-old girl. Ramsey wanted to go to trial but was cornered into taking a plea when police threatened to jail his mother, whom the family believes was set up: not only did he fear that she could not endure jail time, but he knew that as an ex-offender, she would be ejected from her home in a public housing project when she got out.

Third, “supervision” would necessarily involve the NYPD, which has targeted Ramsey since he made the video of Eric Garner’s death. Police subsequently surveilled his every move and arrested him on seven occasions, on five of which he was released for lack of evidence. Their influence has reached into the prison system where Ramsey has been under threat from the start: at Riker’s Island, for example, he was offered food containing a greenish-bluish substance that later was tested and found to be rat poison. It is reasonable to conclude that Ramsey’s life will continue to be threatened by the NYPD upon release.

Ramsey’s story must not end in prison. His courageous act enabled an explosion of support for Black Lives Matter and the movement against police abuses. His personal resilience in the face of ongoing harassment is an inspiration. Please email Governor Cuomo here and leave a message at (518) 474-8390 to insist that Ramsey Orta be released.

Tell your friends and networks!

Narco-states near and far

One is a “threat to national security” and traffics drugs. But which one?

[At right: Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH), an inspiring figure for our times]

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declared Venezuela a national security threat and at the beginning of April got Trump to send warships into the Caribbean for “enhanced counter-narcotics operations” targeting that country. The Washington war party has had its heart set on ousting the chavista regime there for years and has sponsored coup attempts, promoted the farcical Juan Guaidó as the “real” president, and imposed crippling sanctions on an already dysfunctional economy. So far, Trump has resisted the siren calls for direct military intervention, but if he feels the need for a quick “victory” for purposes of distraction, the temptation is there.

The latest accusation is that the Nicolás Maduro-led government is colluding with remnants of the Colombian guerrilla movement, FARC, to “flood the United States with cocaine and devastate American communities.” And here I thought cocaine had been around for a while! But I digress.

Not everyone is entirely persuaded about the reasons given for the build-up. The Miami Herald noted:

The shift from considering Maduro “illegitimate” to being publicly labeled a “narco-terrorist” provided a rationale for the military moves, despite government data suggesting Venezuela is not a primary transit country for U.S.-bound cocaine.

Even the cautious Herald recognized the flimsy excuse to deploy “Navy destroyers, Coast Guard cutters, Navy littoral combat ships, helicopters, Navy P-8 patrol aircraft, Air Force E-3 AWACS and E-8 JSTARS,” along with thousands of troops from five different armed forces. If the U.S.

The head of the Southern Command assured reporters just days ago that the build-up is “not aimed at ousting Maduro,” but merely at boosting drug interdiction. Funny how that requires “airborne surveillance, control, and communications” equipment like the E3, which has been seen in action during wars with Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

Under the law variously attributed to John Pilger, Claud Cockburn, and many others (“Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”), we can assume invasion planning is well advanced. Lindsey Graham, for one, doesn’t think we should hold back, writing in the Wall Street Journal April 13:

The U.S. must be willing to intervene in Venezuela the way we did in Grenada.

Graham understands Trump well enough to use the Grenada example, a quick-and-dirty war that boosted Reagan’s standing and cost virtually nothing.

Our friends in Central America

By contrast, Honduras isn’t facing any such harsh treatment. The International Monetary Fund recently made an announcement of support to the Central American country:

Amid heightened needs for healthcare and social spending to protect the well-being of Hondurans, the authorities will access resources in the amount of US$143 million currently available under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) SBA/SCF arrangement approved in July 2019 for a total of US$312 million.

Honduras’ authorities, the IMF notes approvingly, have maintained a steadfast commitment to sound macroeconomic policies over the last years.

These are the same authorities whose “sound” economic management has led to crushing poverty, a quarter of Honduras children suffering from malnutrition and stunted growth, and caravans of citizens fleeing from the most violent cities in the hemisphere. But the moneylenders at the IMF did not seem to notice the other salient point about the Honduran authorities:

Honduran President's brother found guilty of drug trafficking charges

(CNN) The brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was found guilty of trafficking cocaine Friday [17 Oct 2019], according to the US Department of Justice. Juan Antonio Hernández Alvarado, also known as “Tony Hernández,” is facing 30 years to life in prison.

Between 2004 and 2018, Hernández was involved in processing, receiving, transporting and distributing multi-ton loads of cocaine that came to Honduras by plane, boat and, on at least on occasion, by submarine, a federal indictment states. Hernández had access to labs in Honduras and Colombia, where some of the cocaine was stamped “TH” for Tony Hernández. [boutique blow!]

One of the most explosive allegations against Hernández during the 11-day trial was that he funneled the drug money to National Party campaigns “to impact Honduran presidential elections in 2009, 2013, and 2017,” the release said. Between 2010 and 2013, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, helped Hernández with cocaine shipments and delivered a $1 million bribe to the Honduran president during the 2013 national elections in Honduras, according to the Justice Department.

Guzmán is the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel now serving a life sentence in the United States.

The other brother happens to be Honduras’ current president Juan Orlando Hernández, named in the case as an unindicted co-conspirator. But that doesn’t seem to bother the IMF, nor Mr Pompeo, nor his flotilla of Dudley Do-right drug combatants.

Similarly, the Obama-Hillary crew nodded benignly when the Hernández team overthrew the country’s elected president, Manuel Zalaya, in 2009, showing once again, that when we are ignoring the flow of drugs performed by our loyal allies, the United States is admirably bipartisan.

Honduras has long suffered from extreme rates of violence and gang intimidation. Here’s a typical story of a Honduran-born sometime visitor from the U.S.

The moment I land in Tegucigalpa, I know I can’t call attention to myself. I try to not speak too much so I’m not asked where I’m from. I don’t wear any jewelry. I’m not allowed to walk alone from my grandmother’s house to my godson’s house even though it is only four blocks away. I, under no circumstances, am supposed to even think about taking public transportation alone, my family tells me.

My cousins have been held at gunpoint in cabs. During one visit, our flight was so delayed we had to land in the neighboring airport in San Pedro Sula, which is about a six-hour drive from Tegucigalpa. The airline arranged a bus for us with a police escort the whole way because the route was considered too dangerous for a bus full of tourists to travel. I would never buy my godson a pair of expensive sneakers because I don’t want to risk his safety.

Nice place our guys are running.

The U.S. military hardware floating around the Caribbean might well be put to use seizing drug shipments given that they’re making sure nothing of value slips out of Venezuelan beaches. But let’s not delude ourselves that the goal is to cut down cocaine availability to our domestic partyers. They can always consume Honduran-sourced cocaine, which will be plentiful as long as JOH continues to do Washington’s bidding.

The presidential election, like the presidency, degenerates into farce

January, which occurred several years ago, featured a charming set piece known as the Iowa caucuses, the first round of our peculiar presidential sweepstakes, in which various candidates, from the famous to the obscure, display their oratorical wares, their media savvy, and their organizational chops. This year they were subjected, as customary, to all sorts of cringe-worthy and humiliating exercises, much like the Miss Universe and Miss America pageants once forced their aerobically smiling contestants to sing, dance, declaim, sashay, charm, eyelash-bat, and respond to vapid questions with appropriately safe (but not content-free) replies.

I say “once” because though the beauty contests probably still exist, they barely register in our national consciousness, and not just because the tawdry and goofily sexist aspects of the spectacles have become more obvious. They simply no longer respond to modern life. Women don’t just dream of being gorgeous and sitting around doing needlepoint while they await gentleman callers, and men don’t expect them to. The sight of leggy señoritas from the 50 states or 100 nations parading in swimsuits registers as an historical relic, a nostalgia exercise recalling a time when we could pretend that none of these hot babes had ever had sex.

Similarly, the presidential showdown scheduled (for now) for November 3, which used to be the key marker of our nation’s future path, is undergoing a similar slow eclipse. What once offered a quadrennial choice between contesting visions of social goals—the way forward proposed by Johnson versus that of Goldwater, Reagan’s v. Carter’s, Obama’s v. McCain’s—now looms small, almost as an afterthought. The Trumpian slash-and-burn approach to governing has upended long-standing habits and assumptions about how and even what we choose when we line up at the voting booths. Both of the competing camps are now so weakened and disfigured that the event itself feels like an exercise of anticlimactic symbolism.

Take one of the heated debates that dominated the Democrats’ primaries just weeks ago: Medicare for All and how the Federal Government would ever find the money to fund it. Who can deny that this artificial and tendentious argument now makes no sense? The country, even under Donald Trump's haphazard leadership, found a way to promptly create $2 trillion and to pour some hundreds of millions of it into struggling hospitals and unemployment funds. Debate still rages about how to assure that people falling ill with COVID-19 can get the treatment paid for since suddenly universal healthcare—in this case only, of course—is a national priority. If employer-based private insurance premiums rise 40% next year, as some predict, will the GOP hesitate to federalize some healthcare costs if that’s what is needed to drag business from the brink of depression? Will the party platforms to be drawn up this summer even bother to include boilerplate about healthcare financing given that nothing anyone can now say about it matters?

Even voting itself appears less of a solemn exercise of democratic sovereignty than a ratification of popular resignation to the inevitable. The evidence of widespread vote manipulation and tampering is out in the open for all to see. While electoral fraud like ballot stuffing and mass voting by the deceased are nothing new in American politics, computerized shenanigans are a vastly more efficient form while the old Jim Crow tricks are reborn everywhere in myriad varieties. Getting the most votes has less and less to do with assuming office, as at least two of the five most recent presidential contests have demonstrated (with barely a peep of protest). Great swaths of voters can be peremptorily forced off the rolls and out of the voting booths, or alternatively, invited to enter them at the risk of fatal illness as recently occurred in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Even where voting itself proceeds more or less fairly, its presumed policy impact is ever more easily gamed. The politics of New York State, where I live, were upended in 2018 when citizens rallied to dislodge the intransigent minority Republicans. We then succeeded in pushing a range of long overdue legal reforms in 2019, including reforms to criminal law and greater protections for tenants.

But Governor Cuomo has taken advantage of the statewide COVID lock-down to start the process of reversing these gains while simultaneously ramming through hugely unpopular cuts to Medicaid—in the midst of a nationwide medical emergency. Since no one could go to Albany to raise hell, Cuomo, who slams Trump as a would-be king, thus dictated the terms of our state budget and protected his billionaires in the face of massive, but kneecapped, opposition. He even slipped in language that will permit him to cancel the state’s presidential primary now that Bernie is not contesting the nomination. And the sovereign people can’t do shit about it.

Then there is the surreal Biden candidacy. Did we not just weeks ago face, according to our opposition party, a national emergency that merited Trump's impeachment due to his grave crimes against the rule of law? And yet the Democrat establishment along with its loyal, elderly voters have handed off the leadership of this crusade to a bumbling fossil from yesteryear. It would take a AI-equipped supercomputer to find a more complete set of unpopular positions wrapped up in a single individual: support for mass incarceration, gouging by credit card companies, elimination of bankruptcy protection, failed foreign wars, and, just to complete the bonny picture, a credible sexual assault charge. This is hardly the strategic move of an opposition that truly cares about dislodging the current occupant of the White House. Is this the best they can do? Or are they in fact complacent about Mr Trump’s dirty work because they don’t fundamentally object to it?

These phenomena subvert the comforting fantasy that we citizens determine our fates through the ritual of suffrage. Perhaps on some level we only now grasp, with the unwelcome help of a nasty microbe, that conditions have escaped our control and that events gallop furiously forward while we wave our tiny arms at them in vain. And this is just the beginning: as many scientists have pointed out, the impacts of climate change will hit us just like CV-19 and bankruptcy, little by little and then all at once.

Powerlessness, however, is not the same as helplessness. The radical change in our social and economic organization has thrust new actors to center stage, and it would be very interesting to see the Bernie Sanders campaign (for example) pivot away from its current charity-based response to the epidemic toward a more political one, i.e., support for the wildcat strikes breaking out everywhere over things like protective gear, dangerous working conditions, and lack of paid sick leave. Now that we rely on delivery workers, grocery clerks, and warehouse restockers like never before, wouldn’t it be grand if they discovered their power and forced the Jeff Bezoses of the world to stop stockpiling the gold in their Uncle Scrooge palaces and spread some around?

The elections may be hollowed out, but they still occur and can produce surprises. (A society that doesn’t hold them at all is even worse off, to which I can personally attest.) Latin Americans, deeply cynical about what they call the “political class,” nevertheless do not sit around wondering which of the interchangeable suits in the campaign posters are going to improve their lot. They are much less hypnotized by their glorious democratic traditions, such as they are, and more hard-nosed about using direct confrontation to force the hostile ruling pooh-bahs to retreat. It involves 100 times more engagement than a visit to a polling place and often draws appalling levels of repression. It’s slow, dangerous, and not instantly gratifying. It’s also refreshingly free of delusion.

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Bipedal Death Wish and the Feckless “Resistance”

Two historical periods—one recent, one from the history books—come to mind when contemplating the Great Pandemic and its aftermath.

Both demonstrate that when faced with moments of extreme uncertainty, bloody-mindedness, and insouciant incompetence at the top, the first reaction of our bipedal species is . . . abject surrender.

I say the “first” reaction because I do not believe this coronavirus story will be over any time soon but that the seeds are being sown for a long, disruptive slog towards who-knows-what set of outcomes. But in each case of historical parallels, I see that our immediate impulse as Americans is to cling desperately to the habits and comforting illusions of the past while they systematically dissolve, fracture, unwind, dissipate, and collapse before our eyes.

Many are convinced that our current plight originates and is fully embodied in the person of Donald J. Trump and will be swept away once we dispose of him. Large portions of the appalled citizenry, loosely identifying with the Democrat camp, insist that Trump is the cause of inner rot in the body politic rather than merely a suppurating boil that has erupted on its surface. They continue to bleat that said personage’s removal from office is the moment in which we can all sigh with relief. In this happy fantasy, once Sleepy Joe Biden stumbles or is wheeled into office, all will be well with the republic, and we can get back to ignoring “politics” and all that shouting on the cable news shows.

This viewpoint clashes with the evidence of one’s battered senses. The so-called “Resistance” to Trump’s actions consists of Nancy Pelosi stamping her foot and then signing off on pretty much everything Trump demands he get. Their reaction to Trump’s appalling failure to protect American lives is a whiny series of complaints soft-pedaled in some sort of bizarre spirit of national unity, which Trump promptly mocks with insults and slander. (See Biden’s ridiculous backtracking on his very mild criticism of Trump during his Mar. 23 MSNBC interview, one of his few recent sorties from his cave under the Delaware River.)

September 11

The immediate parallel is the Democrat reaction to 9/11 when George Bush’s minority regime (and, not incidentally, the entire intelligence apparatus) blithely ignored evidence of a dangerous Saudi plot, leading to the deaths of several thousand New Yorkers. Instead of holding him to task for it, Democrats promptly fell into line behind his “leadership,” upon which he then led us into the worst debacle of recent times, the criminal conquest of Iraq. Sleepy Joe was 100% behind this abandonment of principle and good sense, which he continues to lie about today. But the country was behind him, and the invasion was popular—for a while. Let us not forget that Bush was re-elected in 2004 in the midst of this disaster, and buyer’s remorse only set in well into his second term.

Some may argue that the country was ferociously united behind Bush and the war-making apparatus and that no one could have stood up to the wave of patriotic fervor that 9/11 unleashed. That’s self-fulfilling prophecy, and of course the fact that no one did stand up to it means that it now looks impossible in retrospect. Here’s a thought experiment: had the Republicans been out of power at the time of that incident, how long would it have taken them to blast President Gore for being asleep at the wheel and exposing Americans to the worst terrorist act in our history? How many episodes of Rush Limbaugh would have been dedicated to reaming him as an incompetent traitor? And how many Democrats would have reluctantly agreed?

Of course, for Democrats to resist the war-promoters, the weapons contractors, and the horny generals who were gearing up to take advantage of the sudden national desire for revenge would have entailed actually being opposed to new military adventures and the accompanying crackdown on civil liberties, which the Democrats were and are not. This, of course, is the real meaning of their supine non-resistance, which will be seen as a permanent fixture of each historical episode treated here, including the one we are now living through.

The ante-bellum 1850s

Another striking parallel with our troubled times can be found in the run-up to the Civil War, which we, deploying our 2020 rearview vision, now see as an inevitable outcome of the clash of competing social and economic systems. But reviewing the events of the years before Fort Sumter, one cannot help but be struck by the consistent habit of the Northern industrial states of ceding ground to Southern demands via the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, right up to the last, failed attempts to placate the slaveowners. The Whigs and later the (Lincoln-era) Republicans looked everywhere to avoid digging in their heels against Southern intransigence on the issue of owning people as property. As historian Carole Emberton wrote, “From the founding of the Republic through 1860, Northerners and Southerners went to great lengths to find a way to make slavery work.”

Northerners wanted desperately to avoid a conflagration that would be bad for business, and (notwithstanding the exception of the minoritarian abolitionist movement) they had no profound objections to chattel slavery itself. They gave in little by little all through the 1850s and ended up having to fight the war anyway. Similarly, today’s Democrat grandees don’t mind giving away the store to billionaire financiers—after all, those guys are their main backers as well as Mitch McConnell’s. Above all, they want to keep things rolling smoothly along as the plutocrat class and the slice of professionals and managers that comprise their support base are doing fine under Trump. Meanwhile, the Joe Bidens and the Nancy Ps don’t have to take responsibility for the system’s massive failings for everyone else. Their troops chant, “Vote Blue, no matter who,” and their loyal followers rush headlong toward the voting booths like pilgrims to Lourdes thirsting for a cure from the holy waters.

Thus, no one beyond a few lonely voices on the dissident websites and online magazines emits a peep of objection when the Democrat-controlled House fails to even raise a bar of non-negotiable demands before signing off on the multi-trillion-dollar corporate giveaway handed to supposedly dangerous and recently impeached Trump. The same guy who should have been removed from office, according to Democrat officialdom, for mishandling $400 million in aid to the Ukraine, now gets a slush fund of 120 times larger, oversight of which he has promised in advance to roundly ignore. Trump now has a huge pot of ready cash with which to do favors for the industries, individual companies, and localities key to his re-election. This Democrat giveaway would look contradictory if the Nancy Ps and the Joe Bs really cared—they don’t.

What we are witnessing is the complete transfer of our polity to the financier class that has stripped the country bare over the last 40 years and reduced us to defenselessness and decay. We will now see just how ruthlessly these New Feudalists will jerk away the remaining remnants of our safety net, criminalize dissent, and gleefully flaunt the totality of their rule. Trump’s clemency of convicted crooks like Illinois Rod Blagojevich and war criminals like Navy Seal Eddie “Kill-Anything-That-Moves” Gallagher are signals to one and all that the guys in charge will take everything, that no rules apply, and that anyone standing in their way is dead meat.

Real resistance will need to reach far beyond voting “blue, no matter who.”

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