Would a transgender police chief solve our problems?

What if a major city facing a crippling upheaval against police abuses were to hire a transgender woman to take over law enforcement? It’s not a crazy idea, notwithstanding the Almodovarian implications, given the budding panic setting in at city halls around the country. What better gesture to the relentless crowds hitting the streets daily to demand radical change than to elevate the maximum symbol of wokeness and gender-bending, identitarian emancipation?

I knew a lot of transgender ladies during the time I ran an AIDS education and support group physically located at the main corner of transgender sex work in Santiago, Chile, and I can attest to the fact that they knew a great deal about how to handle violent men. I would gladly have accepted the services of many of them if I ever needed a bodyguard, and I don’t think that finding a credible candidate from among their ranks to buckle on some enforcement gear and manage the notoriously macho ranks of uniformed officers is a far-fetched notion.

But would it work to neutralize the deep perception of police departments as free-lance armies of occupation? It depends on what you think policing is about in our society as presently constituted. The mainstream view is that their job is peacekeeping, chasing down criminals, and protecting property. Residents of New York’s minority neighborhoods often don’t see it that way because their experience of the cops is permanent petty harassment combined with a surprising lack of competence in actually rooting out the crime that plagues their neighborhoods. A cynical wag might even conclude that eliminating crime isn’t really in a PD’s interest given that a steady stream of offenses keeps the arrest and prosecution numbers high, thus justifying more gear, more personnel, and more public deference.

Then there’s the opposite notion, that police exist to protect the assets and profits of the owner class, and on that score a moment of truth is about to arrive. Our three-month moratorium on evictions here in the city is about to end in a few days, at which time we will see a flood of cases in housing court by landlords seeking to oust non-payers, many of whom are now destitute and have no chance of coughing up $3000, $4000, or $5000 they owe in arrears. Police will be assigned the task of getting these people out of their now illegally occupied homes, and the BLM marchers may well be inspired to show up to express their opinions about what is taking place. At that point, anything could happen.

The marches are now surprisingly popular and draw broad support because they are mostly polite and well-behaved. The TV newscasters here express a fetishistic obsession with their peaceable nature, but when push literally comes to shove, these pious observers may find the tenor and consequences of the debate over what the police should do, when, and toward whom, to be more than a philosophical consideration.

A more immediate question, given that New York City is finalizing its annual spending plan, is how loud will the explosion be when Mayor De Blasio’s cop-worshipping budget proposal gets blasted into outer space. De Blasio originally tried to zero out all summer youth employment funding while not cutting a dime from the NYPD, despite the pandemic-induced plummet in revenues. In a bold attempt to get out in front of the rebellion and call it a parade, he pivoted to a $400 million cut. The latest figure bandied about is a reduction of $1 billion, or 1/6 of the police budget—which would put it back to roughly the spending level of 2013 when De Blasio took office after getting elected as a reformist progressive.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court this week ruled that LGBT persons are included as a protected population under the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so police departments no longer have any grounds to refuse a TG applicant who then could move quickly up the ranks to a supervisory role, perhaps just in time to send out her riot squads to evict one of the black families who cheered our BLM demo last weekend.

If the fight over policing turns into a real, well, fight over policing, we needn’t waste time wondering how the courts are going to feel about that. That’s where the Supremes long ago set the tone by eagerly crippling unions, opening the floodgates to secretive political slush funds, and generally kowtowing to corporate and elite interests. Once the conflict returns to the realm of haves versus have-nots, our courts will be quick to send rent strikers, the jobless, or the destitute packing, no matter who is sharing the beds indoors with whom.

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Police “reform” is a failure because The Police think they are The State: Part 1

An anecdote from post-dictatorship Chile: a guy I knew slightly in Santiago had a job working for the first civilian president after 17 years of dictatorship and secret police terror. Patricio Aylwin was a Christian Democrat who had supported Pinochet’s coup like many “moderates” (equivalent to the mainstream Democrats of our day) and was elected in 1989 after a negotiated transition process that left Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

My friend compiled the news reports of the day and sent a digest in to the president-elect along with the newspapers and magazines. (Aylwin hadn’t yet taken office.) He related to me that the police guards assigned to Aylwin’s home, carabineros (members of the national police who had military rank and whose commander previously sat on the four-man junta along with Pinochet), routinely intercepted the day’s newspapers, casually read whatever they fancied, and thought nothing of leaving the marks of their coffee cups on the president’s personal copies.

It was a minor but telling detail: these low-level police foot soldiers had so little fear of the ire of their ostensible civilian superior that they metaphorically put their feet up on his desk and spat on his carpet. Aylwin didn’t notice (or pretended not to), but the message was clear: our real boss is the guy in uniform, not some wanker politician in a suit.

This made me recall an interview I had with a long-retired military guy who lived around the corner from me in Ñuñoa, Gen. Roberto Viaux, a key figure in two attempted coups before Pinochet’s successful one. Although one of the attempts led to the murder of the Army chief, Viaux’s superior, he was allowed to decamp for exile in Paraguay and later to come back to Chile to live out his retirement.

Viaux was delusional and thought someone was going to come knocking on his door to play a new and heroic role when in fact he had long become a footnote to history. But he explained to me something absolutely central to military thinking: the armed forces and the nation, in the generals’ view, are one and the same. The nation exists if and only if the armed forces exist. In fact, let’s capitalize both: once the Armed Forces are gone, The Nation disappears. The two entities’ essences intermingle in a form of consubstantiality like that of the Three-Person Deity, with citizens relegated to a sort of misty Holy Ghost-ish role.)

Something similar operates in the miasmatic airs of One Police Plaza and not just in New York City. Law enforcement has long abandoned the view that its ranks exist to serve the city—they think they are the city. This was obvious a few years ago during the last “I Can’t Breathe” crisis when Mayor de Blasio made some conciliatory statements about how his own mixed-race son might be viewed by a trigger-happy cop. The police union had a cow over that, and shortly afterward two auxiliary officers were gunned down by a suicidal assailant who may have been angry about police abuses. Hundreds of officers then turned their backs on De Blasio when he spoke at the funeral.

This open act of insubordination made it clear that the ranks of the NYPD respond to their own hierarchy, not to the city that pays their hefty bills (and their overtime and their generous pensions after 20 years of service). It happened again this week when De Blasio’s daughter was arrested at a demonstration and had her bust sheet immediately leaked and circulated on social media by the cops who technically work for her father.

It’s even more obvious when police departments around the country respond to citizen demands for an end to state-sponsored murder by criminalizing their assembly and their speech. (Yeah, yeah, I know, arson and looting—we’re not talking about that.) The idea that someone should attempt to determine the parameters of public life or dare to assert limits on their deployment of the use of force is deeply offensive to their institutional self-concept.

Does this apply to every line officer or beat cop? It doesn’t have to. The belief system flows downward from the top, and the ideological true believers hold sway. I suspect that’s why so few cops of color dare to intervene to stop the white officers who overwhelmingly account for the excessive force abuses. They know who will get back-up from the system and who won’t.

And this is why “reform” of police practices is just a shiny object held out to distract children. Cops don’t need sensitivity training. They need a political revolution that restores them to their true role as public servants with a heavy burden of trust, i.e., the right to use deadly force, and the sanctions that come with misusing it. This change can only come from a restored civilian authority empowered by mass repudiation of the police as army of occupation.

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You’ll Just Die: I Can Walk and Chew Gum at the Same Time!

A friend whom I’ll call Larry was first chastised, then denounced, then told “I want nothing more to do with you” on Facebook for the crime of posting a critical fact about Joe Biden last week.

Here’s why some of us are not going along with the curiously widespread notion that we must suspend our use of reason for the next six months. Believe it or not, tying ourselves to chairs with muzzles placed over our mouths is actually not necessary. Even more shocking news flash: it won’t help defeat Trump in the next election.

Ordering us to do so is not only offensive, but also says tons about the politics of these Democrat-worshiping bullies. In the counter-factual world of Bernie as the nominee, would any of these self-righteous hall monitors restrain themselves about his shortcomings or adopt a monkish silence? On the contrary, they would be screaming from the rooftops about how Sanders MUST move to the right to capture all those wary voters who want to keep paying their health insurance premiums and think Israeli annexation of other people’s land is just the thing.

No, they would never accept an imposed vow of silence for themselves but now puff up in holiness to remind us unruly schoolchildren that there is ONE GOAL that must occupy our collective mind and spirit, which is to send the Evil One packing. Suggesting that Biden is not the ideal standard-bearer to lead us into battle is thus both sacrilege and sedition.

I suspect that a very ample majority, close to 100 percent in fact, of people who post political news of a leftish tendency will pull the lever for stumbling and incoherent Joe, unless they live in a state like mine where it won’t matter, in which case WTF are you talking about? I’m pretty sure Larry is aware of the dangers to peace, the planet, and our polity represented by the raging nut job in the White House.

However, neither Larry nor I plan to go into hibernation for the rest of 2020 and in fact have a few ideas about how to contribute to reversing the dangerous trends accelerated—but hardly invented—by DJT. Oddly, or not, what Mr Biden will actually do after January 2021 never seems to enter the conversation. Why not?

Why is all this finger-wagging about what we must, haveta, gotta do when voting occurs 161 days from now so annoyingly short-sighted? Because it implies and sometimes explicitly states that All Will Be Well once we effect a change of occupancy in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. It accuses skeptics of the heretical belief that something deeper than one individual’s strange sociopathology is bringing us woe. It demands the right to go back to sleep.

Most importantly of all, it demands passivity from now until November.

To take just one example: those of us who actively campaigned for an end to the insurance company death panels standing between us and medical care have a major problem with Joe B. While an ample majority of the country agrees that Wall Street has no business in the provision of healthcare, Biden is beholden to his greedy backers in the rentier class who don’t want to give up their gold-bearing goose. He’s quite explicit about it, assuring one and all that nothing will change, despite the new, pandemic-stimulated attention to the dysfunctional current system. Biden, like Trump, has no interest in a radical overhaul, and Biden, like Trump, lines up with the 1 percenters who are profiting handily while people die and go bankrupt.

Does that make Biden just as bad as Trump? Does that mean it’s irrelevant who wins in November? Actually, some of us are capable of holding two thoughts in our minds simultaneously: Trump is awful, and healthcare delivery has to be changed. Imagine that. And no, we should most definitely NOT keep quiet about it.

But pointing out the alignment of the Democrat mainstream with corporate greed will dissuade low-information voters from hoofing it over to the polls later this year, right? If so, those who decided that Biden was our guy better do something about it other than demanding that the rest of us STFU. Sounds like you have some persuading to do, so perhaps start by communicating with the Biden campaign that he’d better start making more attractive promises instead of announcing that his goal is to turn back the clock to the Obama-normal era.

And incidentally, telling Larry and me to clam up isn’t likely to inhibit the Trump campaign from saying a lot of nasty things about Biden, like for example, how closely tied he is to the Wall Street elite that’s ruining people’s lives. Is that hypocritical gaslighting? Yes. And? Trump ran to the left against Hillary in many policy areas, and Biden has the same vulnerability. Why not repeat a winning strategy?

Biden is a disastrous choice, but the Dem machine made it and now has to live with it. Those who went with the more-of-the-same wing are saddled with a glaringly weak figure who may well win by default because the other guy’s Oz curtain finally has been shredded. A government led by a President Biden will face grave crises on multiple fronts, and he’d better improve on his past record if he doesn’t plan to pave the way for the next Trump, an equally reactionary post-Trumpian figure who will be less deranged and thus more dangerous, knowing as he/she/they will, just how far the American people will line up behind a demagogue.

[to receive alerts of new posts here, send an email to tfrasca@yahoo.com

Yes, Trump is a wannabe tyrant, but Flynn was set up

The FBI, the CIA, and officials in the Obama White House engaged in serious misconduct in the run-up to and the carrying out of the Russiagate investigation. Neither Trump’s demented tweets nor his open disdain for legality change that.

Media outlets that trumpeted Russiagate for three years and still have not engaged in self-criticism over it are now in a tizzy over Attorney General Barr’s instruction to withdraw the charges against Flynn for lying to the FBI. That’s probably judicial overreach, but it pales in comparison with the overreach involved in targeting Flynn in the first place.

Flynn copped to lying to the FBI about his discussions with the Russian ambassador in the days before Trump’s 2017 inauguration. Flynn was to be Trump’s top security official, so the conversation itself was unremarkable. The FBI made a big deal out of it because of other suggestions that the Trump campaign was engaged in a quid pro quo collusion with Vladimir Putin to get himself elected since obviously actually getting Americans to vote for Trump voluntarily was inconceivable, right? Except that a lot of them did, even people who don’t watch broadcasts on RT.

Before exploring what Flynn said that was deemed untruthful, let’s recall that the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon in 1974 started as an attempt by one party in a presidential election to spy on the other side. As Trump complains in his usual calm and restrained fashion, that’s exactly what the Obama-led intelligence agencies did to him. Now for several years, we’ve been told that the FBI had reasonable grounds to suspect something fishy was occurring in Trumpworld. That’s pretty easy to believe because everything about Trumpworld is fishy. But to justify a counterintelligence operation targeting Trump campaign officials, even former ones, in the midst of an election, the FBI had to have pretty solid evidence. Did they?

We now know that the notorious Steele dossier including the discredited pee-tape tale, none of which the FBI could independently verify, was used to obtain warrants to snoop on the Trump campaign. Steele himself peddled its contents to a variety of journalists, most of whom wouldn’t go near it. Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News, however, did publish a story that the FBI was looking into its allegations. Remember that name.

Eli Lake at Commentary explains:

In the wake of the Republican National Convention in July 2016, the FBI launched “Crossfire Hurricane,” a probe of the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia. Over the course of a few months, the bureau sent informants and undercover agents to record five of Trump’s campaign advisers surreptitiously through conversations those informants and undercover agents set up on the FBI’s behalf.

Most significant, at the FBI’s request, was the behavior of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISC granted four successive warrants to eavesdrop electronically on the communications of a low-level Trump foreign-policy adviser named Carter Page. This was a highly unusual step in a matter involving a U.S. citizen because Page was working for the presidential campaign of the party out of power.

To get those warrants approved, the FBI submitted uncorroborated opposition research [the Steele dossier] that had been paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign without fully informing the court about the origins of the information.

. . . In its application for the FISA warrant against Page, the FBI used Isikoff’s Yahoo story as verification of Steele’s reporting. “Which means that the cloud over Trump’s presidency was the product of journalists and G-men using themselves to confirm a falsehood.

This is exactly how Dick Cheney used Judith Miller to get his phony tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction on the front page of the New York Times. That led to the debacle of war. Russiagate threatens to engulf us once again in a new way.

Back to Flynn’s FBI interview: we learned last week through FBI internal emails that the agents sent to talk to him—which he naively thought was a friendly call—pondered whether they should “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” Using a time-honored police tactic, they pretended that the conversation was just a routine chat and did not suggest to Flynn that he was suspected of any crime. Anyone who watches police shows knows that this is a really good way to get yourself charged with one. (N.B. Never talk to the cops without a lawyer, especially if you are innocent.)

Flynn wasn’t in office yet, so he should have been more cautious in discussing Trump’s desires with the Russians, and perhaps he thought the FBI shouldn’t know exactly how much he ventured into policy details on the call while another Administration was still in power. Apparently, he forgot that the FBI guys would be sitting on the transcripts of exactly what he said to the Russian ambassador, which, as a former high-ranking snoop himself, he had to assume. But Flynn never suspected he was being set up.

It’s remarkable how eager erstwhile liberals are to applaud the FBI’s sneaky entrapment tactics given that agency’s long history of repression of social movements. For example, the agency loves to find developmentally challenged immigrants or hapless Muslim believers and manipulate them into thinking they’re staging a terrorist attack. They get to blow open the “plot” and attract lots of great coverage about how they’re protecting America while ignoring the white-collar crime wave that is bankrupting us.

If there is ever a serious mass movement against the direction the country is taking, we can rest assured that the FBI will be front and center infiltrating it, populating it with agents provocateurs to promote violent acts and snare militants, compiling dossiers on supposedly protected political activities, and generally doing the ruling elite’s dirty work. We should not defend them now as one of their dirty tricks comes apart, even if the victim was a reactionary nutcase from Trumpville.

Meanwhile, the potential damage of the Russiagate fantasy and gross bending of the laws by official actors is as yet incalculable. An FBI lawyer stands accused of altering a document used to renew the FISA warrants and is now himself facing the possibility of criminal charges. More investigations are ongoing, one of which has subpoena power to dig around inside the CIA as well as the FBI, both arenas where Trump would love to find dirt.

The Providence Journal in blue-state Rhode Island called the Flynn prosecution a “frame-up” and said Barr was right to drop the charges. Those winds may be shifting. In fact, we may face the prospect of high-profile indictments of elements of the “Deep State” coming out right about the time Americans have to decide between Trump and Biden. Good luck focusing the voters’ minds on Trumps shortcomings then. Instead of railing about Russiagate, Trump may discover it was the best thing that ever happened to him.

There is no opposition to Trump

There is hostility, which is not the same thing.

Opposition implies a critical analysis and an alternative program, that is, an examination of what is being done wrong, why this is so, and what should change. On all three points, the loudest non-Trump voices offer confusion, distraction, and hypocrisy, not leadership around which a movement could cohere.

What is wrong?

A thought experiment: summarize in a brief statement where the Democrat mainstream/Biden campaign thinks Trump and his “team” are going off the rails. If you are finding this hard to do, you’re not alone. There is no consistent message coming from The Opposition that embodies a fundamental attack on Trumpism. Sniping around the edges doesn't count.

Biden most recently attacked Trump for throwing a “temper tantrum” and for failing to expand Obamacare eligibility. He also said Trump was acting like a king. (Obama signing a kill list every Tuesday wasn’t? But I digress.) Elizabeth Warren released a coronavirus plan (of course) and criticized the Trumpians for “a process plagued by confusion, inconsistency, and potential political interference.”

A group of House Democrats put forward their own proposal for a post-COVID economy that “would ask each state to submit a plan on how to reopen businesses and schools in consultation with the Department of Health and Human Services — not just the president’s pulpit.” Nancy Pelosi insisted that her bipartisan “oversight” committee will protect the $2 trillion bailout fund already in Trump’s hands from waste, fraud, and abuse even though House Republicans already say they may turn down the invitation. And just for good measure, Trump announced when he signed the massive financing package Congress sent him that he would swat away carping Nancy like an annoying gnat.

The Democrats’ statements and gestures express distaste for Trump’s grandstanding and dismay at his incompetence. They point out his administration’s lack of planning, administrative disarray, and sloppiness. That’s it—no objection to how Trump is exploiting the crisis to enrich the rentier class and protect corporate looters. That’s because, generally speaking, those are the Democrats’ friends, too.

If Biden/Pelosi/Warren had reservations about what Trump was going to do with the unprecedented pile of money he asked for, they had one chance to impose their conditions: before giving it to him. They didn’t. (Neither did Bernie Sanders although he doesn’t control the House majority.)

Yes, Mitch McConnell and Trump would have had a fit and dashed over to Fox News to accuse the Democrats of wrecking the economy. A real opposition would have said, “And?” Trump needed the bailout desperately; that was their chance to exercise a veto if they had dared. Post hoc complaints are window-dressing to bamboozle naïve voters into thinking that Democrats in Congress were stopping Trump from doing his worst.

For a while, Dems also slammed Trump as an appalling sexual predator, but lo and behold! now that Biden himself has been credibly accused of sexual assault, the indignant feminism so prominently on display during the primaries is nowhere to be seen. Elizabeth Warren, recently the righteous defender of Womanhood, is now so untroubled by the Tara Reade story that she just penned a joint op-ed with Sleepy Joe in the Miami Herald. The fact that Biden employs former Harvey Weinstein flack Anita Dunn attracts no comment from the woke brigades. Corruption, another of Trump's weak spots, could hardly bother a party on the verge of crowning someone with Biden's record of nepotism and corporate shilling.

Why is Trump a disaster?

This is a question Democrats cannot answer because they are complicit. Trump is a disaster because he has accelerated the process of pushing the proceeds of the world’s largest economy further into the hands of the tiny financier elite while they strip what is left of the nation’s productive capacity. He continues the bipartisan policy of rewarding fat-cat crooks with more government welfare. Democrats did the same when they were in office, a bit less obviously, so they have no problem with the process and scarcely criticize it. Yes, they occasionally emit pious rumblings about the sufferings of the downtrodden classes that they still pretend to represent. But they prefer to court suburban Republican voters, convinced that they might be peeled away from Trump, and so avoid unseemly references to social class. The open mockery of Bernie and his supporters is a reflection of this turn to the right and courtship of the professional/managerial class (PMC) voters who object to Trump culturally and stylistically.

By ceding the most dangerous and most obvious of Trump’s many shortcomings, Democrats are left with objections of an aesthetic nature, criticisms of his dumb statements, vainglorious lies, and disrespect of traditions. They can’t answer his nasty mockery because they fear him and his threats to retaliate, and their base is not working people but rather the permanent war-making apparatus, the snooper complex, and the increasingly beleaguered civil service ranks where Trump is carrying out massive purges. Because Democrats don’t represent the majority of average workers and would rather jump off cliffs than call upon them to rise up in protest, they are helpless in the face of the ongoing Trumpian onslaught.

What should change?

Democrat alternatives to current policies are lame, late, and lackluster, and sometimes they are even more conservative than Trump’s. They respond to the massive loss of employer-based health insurance with calls to subsidize the insurance companies rather than pay medical costs directly. Biden answered Trump’s China-baiting over the mishandling of the coronavirus catastrophe with the criticism that he’s a late-comer to the bashing party. The Democrats still can’t admit to the nothingburger of Russiagate and insist that the evil Russkies are plotting to help Trump again in 2020 while the evidence of old-fashioned Jim Crow vote-rigging piles up everywhere. They pretend that the huge blank check they handed to sleazy Trump operatives can somehow be monitored so that it doesn’t enrich the president’s friends but did nothing to ensure that it doesn’t. They plead for assistance to soon-to-be-bankrupt states and cities after giving up any leverage they had to guarantee it. Trump then openly threatens to play favorites and punish states whose governors criticize him.

In short, the Democrat opposition is much more rhetorical than real. Sadly, even Bernie’s consistent criticism falls flat these days as he loyally signs on to the party consensus while trying to push additions and improvements. AOC is a lone voice in the wilderness daring to cast the occasional no vote.

What’s left are endangered and desperate people daring to walk off the job and appealing to their peers for support. We the people are on our own and must find our own way forward without waiting for leadership that doesn’t exist. By shedding illusions to the contrary, we open up new possibilities.

[to receive alerts about posts to this blog, send a message to tfrasca@yahoo.com

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.