What Are The Lessons From The Trump-Backed Insurrection Of January 6?

A year ago today, a fascist mob took over the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C., stunning the country and the entire world. Called to action by Donald Trump and instigated by his false accusation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, the mob stormed the building and briefly stopped the certification of the electoral college votes. The attack would not have been possible without collusion from high-level military, police and security officials. Yet, none of them have been brought to justice. At the same time, Congress formed a special committee on January 6th which has no legal authority to persecute the people responsible for it.

The insurrection was a historic attack on one of the most fundamental tenets of US democracy – the peaceful transition of power between the two ruling class parties.

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Building Collective Power Within Our Organizations

As we imagine an alternative society, we should think about how we will create something more collective, something where all people have a voice. Most of us come from a tradition where a select few make large impactful decisions for social justice organizations. Organizations have practices that at times feel inadequate and inaccessible for all. How do we move more towards a democratic collective process?

These questions come to mind as many movement organizations are wrestling with creating collective democratic power internally. How can processes be more transparent in the organization—and how do we balance that with some need for confidentiality? How do we balance legal obligations/liabilities and honesty?

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US Navy Families In Hawai’i Find Fuel In Their Home Tap Water

The long citizen protest underscoring the dangers from the U.S. Navy’s 80-year-old leaking 20 jet fuel tanks at Red Hill each tank 20 stories tall and holding a total of 225 million gallons of jet fuel came to a head over the weekend with Navy families around the large Pearl Harbor Naval Base being sickened by fuel in their home tap water.  The Navy’s huge jet fuel tank complex is only 100 feet above Honolulu’s water supply and has been leaking with regularity.

The Navy command was slow to alert the community while the State of Hawai’i quickly issued a notice not to drink the water.  Foster Village community members stated that they were  smelling fuel after the November 20, 2021 release of 14,000 gallons of water and fuel from a fire suppression drain line a quarter-mile downhill from the fuel tank farm. 

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Why There Are So Few Whistleblowers

Adam Schiff’s new book, “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could,” makes a strong case for the importance of whistleblowing, particularly in these fractured times.  Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, argues that his committee is “uniquely dependent on whistleblowers” because of the “classified nature” of its work. Without whistleblowers, the congressional intelligence committees would  be “almost completely reliant on the intelligence agencies to self-report,” according to Schiff.  A whistleblower in the intelligence community cannot go to the press, so they must have “access to Congress” or the “whole system fails.”

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Bolivia Remains Relentless Against Coup Plotters

October 20 Bolivia will mark two years since what became the preamble to a violent and bloody coup d’état against former president Evo Morales (2006-2019). On that day, as the people went to the polls to re-elect the indigenous leader, the most extremist fringes of the country’s right-wing began maneuvering from behind the scenes to overthrow the government.

The story of what happened after Election Day is well known. The Organization of American States (OAS) insisted that Morales’ new victory was the result of widespread electoral fraud -although it had no evidence-, thus paving the way for the opposition to take over the Palacio Quemado, the government headquarters.

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‘Business Improvement Districts’ Privatize Policing Of Public Space

Woven into the municipal fabric of the U.S. is a little-known mechanism of privatization and corporate control: the Business Improvement District (BID). In hundreds of urban centers, invisible borders designate zones wherein local governments have granted control of the commons to private interests. Within the bounds of a BID, its corporate operators are empowered to contract for-profit companies to clean streets, make aesthetic and tourism upgrades and, more insidiously, enforce “security” in collaboration with police. In practice, this often results in the exclusion and harassment of populations that businesses find “undesirable” — anyone that is perceived as a threat to consumer activity and profit, and especially the unhoused.

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Reporting A Federal Crime

I tried to report a crime last week.  It was a serious crime, too.  Rather, it was a whole bunch of federal crimes.  It was impossible to find anybody interested.

Let me start at the beginning.  Over the past year, I have developed first-hand knowledge of what I believe is a major international fraud.  The principal is an American citizen who is defrauding investors in a financial technology bank scam based overseas, and the investors include people in the United States and in at least three foreign countries.

I have thousands of pages of evidence, including forged documents, surreptitious recordings of the principal admitting to his crime, and affidavits from his former employees and targets.

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PG&E Charged In California Wildfire Last Year That Killed Four

San Francisco – Pacific Gas & Electric was charged Friday with involuntary manslaughter and other crimes after its equipment sparked a Northern California wildfire that killed four people and destroyed hundreds of homes last year, prosecutors said.

It is the latest legal action against the nation’s largest utility, which pleaded guilty last year to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in a 2018 blaze ignited by its long-neglected electrical grid that nearly destroyed the town of Paradise and became the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century.

Shasta County District Attorney Stephanie Bridgett announced the 31 charges, including 11 felonies, against PG&E, saying it failed to perform its legal duties and that its “failure was reckless and criminally negligent, and it resulted in the death of four people.”

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Jail Killer Drone Operators Instead Of Drone Whistleblowers

For decades the U.S. has been murdering innocent civilians, including U.S. citizens, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali and who knows where else.   Not one person in the military has been held accountable for these criminal acts. Instead, drone whistleblower Daniel Hale is sitting in prison with a 45 month sentence.

 The August 29, 2021 deaths of ten innocent civilians, including seven children, in a family compound in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan by a hellfire missile fired from a U.S. military drone has brought the U.S. assassination program into massive public view.   The photos of the blood-stained walls and the mangled white Toyota in the family compound in densely populated Kabul have gotten incredible attention compared to the 15 years of drone strikes in isolated areas in which hundreds of people attending funerals and wedding parties were killed.

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Healthy Group Accountability: Learning How To Learn

A team of facilitators from our organization, The Wildfire Project, was invited to support a base-building group whose staff was absolutely burnt out. Our first workshop brought their staff together with a volunteer leadership team (from their base) who, until then, had been minimally engaged. Staff shared their overwhelm and laid out their workload. It was clear that unless the whole group took collective ownership and responsibility for the direction of the organization, it would collapse.

We ended that first session together on the other side of that breakthrough: feeling grateful, connected, and on-purpose. But the more difficult work began when we came back together to make that vision of shared leadership real.

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Career Cop Admits Police Are Trained To Lie In Reports

Before the age of computers and body cameras, citizens were forced into court proceedings with an attitude of, “It was my side of the story against the cops. Who do you think the jury is going to believe?” In the age of technology in which we are presently, however, the word of police officers can be called into question. But it is not enough, according to one ex-cop, who says cops are taught precisely how to manipulate police reports for deceptive purposes.

Thomas Nolan spent 27 years on the force as a cop and says he was not a very good beat cop but could write police reports bar none. He was so good at craftily wording police reports other officers inside the Boston Police Department would seek out his assistance in their own reporting.

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Lawmakers Are ‘Horrified’ And Calling For Action On Prison Abuse

Lawmakers and advocates are calling for outside oversight of the Illinois Department of Corrections after a WBEZ investigation revealed a pattern of alleged beatings by guards in an area of Western Illinois Correctional Center where there was no video camera coverage.

The investigation documented nine people who separately accused a group of officers of beating them in the same area. Prison records show staff were aware of a blind spot that lacked cameras and of repeated accusations of violence, but the violence persisted until guards allegedly beat a prisoner named Larry Earvin to death in that same location. Federal prosecutors have charged three guards for the beating.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has declined multiple requests to comment on WBEZ’s investigation or the repeated allegations of abuse. Pritzker’s silence continues a pattern in which his director of prisons has refused to do an interview about staff abuse and accountability despite requests over 2 1/2 years.

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Judge Tosses Frivolous Lawsuit By Heiress Seeking To Destroy The Grayzone

The District of Columbia Superior Court has rejected a frivolous, million-dollar lawsuit claiming libel, defamation, and tortious conspiracy filed by writer Sulome Anderson against The Grayzone’s editor Max Blumenthal and assistant editor Ben Norton.

Judge William M. Jackson’s June 16, 2021 decision put an end to the entitled heiress’ three-year-long campaign to smear and bankrupt The Grayzone with the help of a powerful DC lawyer closely linked to the Israel lobby.

It was a humiliating resolution to a legal assault that threatened to impose a serious chilling effect on independent media and press freedom had it been successful.

Sulome’s suit was triggered by a May 2018 article for The Grayzone by Norton, entitled “Sulome Anderson Admits Her Supposed Hezbollah Source Is ‘Incredibly Unreliable,’” which showed how she published blatant misinformation falsely alleging Iranian attacks on Israel-occupied territory that, if true, could have triggered a regional war.

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Perverted Prison Justice

There are common ways in which the prisoner is stymied in his attempt to file a complaint.  The filing of every form is time sensitive.  So the warden and others will withhold their responses, backdate them, and then send the responses to you so that you only have a day or two to respond.  You can’t possibly get it done in time, so it’s dismissed as “not responsive in a timely fashion.”  You have no recourse because the federal courts have ruled that a prisoner must exhaust the “administrative complaint process” before going to the courts.  But if the complaint is dismissed by the BOP as “not responsive” because of time, you’re out of luck.  And those people who violate the Prison Rape Elimination Act get off scot free.

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The Culture Of Vehicular Attacks: On The Murder Of Deona Marie Erickson

On June 13, a driver attacked a demonstration in Minneapolis, killing Deona Marie Erickson. This is the result of years of right-wing efforts to normalize—and even legalize—vehicular attacks. Now the corporate media has ceased to prioritize covering them, paving the way for more killings. In dialogue with our comrades at  It’s Going Down and on the ground in Minneapolis, we have prepared the following reflections on the implications of this.

Shortly before midnight on June 13, while demonstrators gathered at Lake Street and Girard Avenue to protest the murder of Winston Smith by sheriff’s deputies and US Marshals, a man named Nicholas Kraus drove his SUV into the crowd at high speed, killing Deona Marie Erickson.

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