Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations! 

Charity for the Wealthy!

GOP Tax Plan Would Give 15 of America's Largest Corporations a $236B Tax Cut: Report

By Jake Johnson, December 18, 2017

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/12/18/gop-tax-plan-would-give-15-americas-largest-corporations-236b-tax-cut-report

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1) Man Who Wrongfully Spent 17 Years in Prison in 'Doppelgänger Case' Seeks $1.1 Million
By Christine Hauser, August 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/us/kansas-doppelganger-richard-jones.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Richard A. Jones, left, and Ricky Amos.

Nearly two decades ago, Richard A. Jones was convicted of aggravated robbery after being picked out of a lineup by witnesses who said he stole a cellphone in a Walmart parking lot in Kansas.

But while Mr. Jones, who maintains he is innocent, was serving his 19-year sentence at Lansing Correctional Facility, inmates told him he looked like a prisoner named Ricky.

That resemblance would eventually lead to his freedom.

Last year, a judge threw out Mr. Jones's conviction after the original witnesses were shown side-by-side photographs of the two men and said they could not tell them apart. Now Mr. Jones, 42, is trying to get his life back on track.

On Wednesday, he filed a petition in the 10th Judicial District Court of Kansas, seeking more than $1.1 million in compensation from the state — or about $65,000 for each year of the 17 years he spent in prison for a robbery he said he did not commit, starting when he was 25 years old and a father of two young daughters.

He is also seeking help with tuition, housing and counseling.

"It took a big chunk of my life that I can never get back," Mr. Jones said in an interview on Thursday. "I am just trying to get stable in my everyday life. I am still transitioning."

His daughters are now 24 and 19, he said, and he is a grandfather.

"At that time I was pretty much trying to be responsible as a father," he said. "I was not perfect, but I was a big part of their lives, and when I got incarcerated it was hard for me because I was used to being around for my kids."

"It was a hard pill to swallow," Mr. Jones said.

Richard Ainsworth, Mr. Jones's lawyer, said Thursday that they were hoping for a certificate of innocence and for compensation so he could "finally move forward with his life after spending over 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit."

"This compensation is relatively small given the unfathomable hardship of 17 years of wrongful imprisonment," the petition says.

The petition, reported by The Kansas City Star on Wednesday, is the latest twist in what has been described as the "doppelgänger case," which is set out in court documents that trace the nearly two decades of Mr. Jones's ordeal of arrest, conviction, imprisonment and, finally, freedom.

Mr. Jones's case highlights the flaws in convictions based on eyewitness identification, which is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the United States. Eyewitness identifications play a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing, according to the Midwest Innocence Project, which helped him win release.

In Mr. Jones's case, there was no physical evidence placing him at the scene in the Roeland Park parking lot on May 31, 1999, according to the petition. That day, he was at his home in Kansas City, Mo., cleaning up after a party with his girlfriend and her sisters, the petition said.

But in Roeland Park, across the state border, at 8 p.m. the same day, a man tried to grab a woman's handbag as she got out of her car. She resisted but he escaped with her phone, and she saw the back of his head, she told a detective.

Two other people saw the attack, but the three descriptions ranged from a light-skinned black man to a dark-skinned Hispanic to a tanned white man, the petition said.

The getaway car was traced to a man who said he and friends were in search of money for drugs and picked up a man they barely knew as "Rick." He was shown hundreds of photographs in a database of men with similar names and features, according to the petition, and erroneously chose Mr. Jones as the one he had driven to the parking lot robbery.

Mr. Jones was arrested in April 2000, the petition said. In a lineup, his photograph was the only one among the six images to be that of a light-skinned man.

"Witnesses were presented with no other option but to choose Jones in the lineups as created," said Alice Craig, one of the lawyers and researchers at the University of Kansas School of Law's Project for Innocence who helped win his release.

"None of the other photos matched the description provided by the witnesses," she said in a statement after he was released from prison in June 2017.

During a jury trial, the witnesses, seeing Mr. Jones in person, said they were not sure whether he was the attacker, the petition said. But Mr. Jones was convicted and sent to prison in 2000.

In prison, he was told about Ricky Amos when inmates started confusing the two. "I took it with a grain of salt," Mr. Jones said Thursday.

But an idea started brewing that he thought could help him, once again, assert his innocence. "I knew it was, at that time, it was my only shot," he said. "I could not lose. I had to throw it out there."

Mr. Jones sought the help of the Project for Innocence, and Mr. Amos's photograph was tracked down, the project said.

"They looked like they could have been twins," Chapman Williams, a former intern who had worked on the case at the Project for Innocence, said in 2017. "From there, other pieces of the puzzle began fitting together."

Mr. Amos's address was identified as the place where the getaway car had stopped to pick up "Rick," the petition said. A spokesman for the Johnson County district attorney did not immediately return a call about Mr. Amos and the status of the robbery case.

Mr. Jones filed a motion for postconviction relief, the petition said, and Judge Kevin Moriarty held a hearing last year. Two of the witnesses recanted their identifications.

Judge Moriarty concluded that the court "has no doubt that a jury would not be able to reach a determination that this defendant was guilty, and this court does not believe any reasonable jury could have made such a decision in this case."

On June 7, 2017, Mr. Jones walked free.

"I just want my name to be clear," he said.

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2) Every Generation Gets the Beach Villain It Deserves
By Nellie Bowles, August 30, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/technology/vinod-khosla-beach.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

Martin's Beach. Vinod Khosla bought the land nearby on what he says was a whim, has never spent a single night there, and regrets it enormously.

It sounds simple. For nearly a decade, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been fighting in court to keep the public off a piece of beach that abuts his property on the Pacific coast. What could be more familiar than another case of rich Californian versus the oceangoing citizenry?

But the first thing you need to understand about this absurd war is that it didn't begin with Mr. Khosla buying a beach house. Just south of Half Moon Bay, Mr. Khosla bought an entire beach village — forming a limited liability company that owned the land beneath about 47 cottages, and a little shop that at one point sold ice cream, and the only viable path to the sand.

The next things to understand are that he bought the place on what he says was a whim, has never spent a single night there, and regrets it enormously.

And the last thing — given that the case has wound itself to the Supreme Court, and could upend one of California's most sacred promises to its citizens — is that Mr. Khosla is willing to keep litigating this for the rest of his life and has about $3 billion to spend on it.

Over the years, successive California titans have come up against the vexing fact that the beach cannot be privatized. The State Constitution establishes that property below the mean tide line belongs to the public, and the Coastal Act of 1976 enshrines this, mandating that public access be maximized consistent with (and here is the tricky part) "constitutionally protected rights of private property owners." Mr. Khosla, through his L.L.C., is being sued by a nonprofit called the Surfrider Foundation over the matter of whether a permit is needed to block the road, and the thrust of his defense is that his property rights are being violated.

If every generation in California gets the beach villain it deserves — if the producer David Geffen's battle in Malibu at the turn of the century epitomized the last, Hollywood-based era of wealth creation — then Mr. Khosla is the sandy antagonist of the digital age.

Mr. Geffen, humiliated in the press and shamed by his community, eventually gave up his fight. But Mr. Khosla, who by cofounding Sun Microsystems cemented his place in history as an inventor of the commercial internet, seems immune to criticism. Almost since the day in 2008 that he bought the 53-acre hillside known as Martin's Beach, he has been in court, enduring attacks from multiple parties and crashing through obstacles using every legal tool available. He is driven by an almost manic belief that things must be done right and must be done fair. And somewhere along the line, the State of California triggered him.

Now, by dint of his character, which ticks all the major boxes of the venture capitalist archetype — aggressive, shameless, obsessive and optimistic — Mr. Khosla could disrupt the entire California coastal system. The stakes are both enormous and hilariously low.

If he wins, he could reshape the laws that govern 1,100 miles of shore. And if he loses, all he would be forced to do is apply for a permit to change the hours of operation on a single gate. The legal volleys would undoubtedly continue; Californians do not easily give up a good surf spot. But the last person against whom to wage a war of attrition is Vinod Khosla.

'If This Hadn't Ever Started, I'd Be So Happy'

The tea awaits Mr. Khosla on a bright purple leather coaster. The glass walls of the conference room at Khosla Ventures, his investment firm, are the same shade. The banister too, the sofa downstairs, a hose cord outside, all that exact purple.

Mr. Khosla is on time. He's 63 years old and thin, with close-cropped white hair, and when he pops into his chair he has no interest in small talk. We already know each other. Mr. Khosla is loath to give interviews about Martin's Beach, and it is certainly not in his best interest to do so, given that I've told him for years that he's making a fool of himself with this beach, a place he doesn't even like, and that his quest offends me, a native Californian.

But now Mr. Khosla wants to tell his side. He wants me to know that he is right. And where some shy from conflict, Mr. Khosla seeks it, almost destructively. So he invited me to his purple lair.

"A billionaire is a bad word in this country now," he says, as his tea cools. "And that pains me."

Mr. Khosla has no public relations team, no one sitting in the corner eyeing us — and in Silicon Valley, there always is. Bad publicity, he says, cannot compel him to do anything he does not want to do.

He's wearing black jeans and white-soled slip-on walking shoes. He keeps his body open, friendly, leaning forward, sometimes swaying a bit. He holds long eye contact even as he's moving. He hops out of his chair frequently. Sometimes he feigns ignorance of what all the fuss is about.

"I've never claimed people can't come in from the ocean," he says, seeming to suggest they swim around a rocky promontory. ("No, not death," he says, when I call later to clarify. "Boats.")

Mr. Khosla says he does not even want to triumph. "If I were to ever win in the Supreme Court, I'd be depressed about it," he says. "I support the Coastal Act; I don't want to weaken it by winning. But property rights are even more important."

He does not want the beach at all, really. He does not swim. For fun, he hikes.

"I mean, look, to be honest, I do wish I'd never bought the property," Mr. Khosla says. "In the end, I'm going to end up selling it."

"If this hadn't ever started, I'd be so happy," he adds. "But once you're there in principle, you can't give up principle." He frames the struggle in the Silicon Valley patois of contrarianism. "I'd rather do the right hard things now that I'm in," he says, "than the wrong easy things."

An Old-School Agitator

Early in his career, with Sun and then Juniper Networks, Mr. Khosla helped build the foundation of personal computing and global connectivity. But in more recent years, he has fashioned a new image as Silicon Valley's agitator.

He doesn't golf with the other venture capitalists. He doesn't go to the Rosewood, their luxury hotel watering hole. He says food slows him down, so most days he fasts till dinner. His version of the inspirational Stanford Business School talk was to tell a class of 400 people that fewer than 5 percent of them were going to do relevant things in the end. He has said repeatedly that most venture capitalists are harmful to companies.

"This is why I get unpopular with other V.C.s," he says. "Because I tell them they're not adding any value."

Mr. Khosla's bluntness makes it difficult to find people who take his side of the Martin's Beach battle. Bring his name up around Sand Hill Road, the nexus of venture capital in Menlo Park, Calif., and people grimace. Email the friends he suggested you email, and the responses vary.

"Vinod is deeply principled, and therefore sometimes difficult to work with," Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email. Mr. Khosla has been a mentor and adviser on both companies and is a frequent dining companion. (Mr. Dorsey also fasts until dinner.) "But that comes from a place of putting what he cares about above all else."

Mr. Khosla advocates truth-telling at every juncture, even if it is painful. He calls the book "Lying," by Sam Harris, his philosophy for life. When he started Khosla Ventures in 2004, he put the phrase "I prefer brutal honesty to hypocritical politeness" on the website, and it has always been there. As an example, he brings up thank-you notes and how he instructs his longtime assistant, Ruthie, to handle them.

"When somebody sends me a gift — I get a lot of gifts — I ask Ruthie to not say, 'That was wonderful,'" he says. "If it wasn't, I have her send a nice note back saying, 'Thank you, that was very interesting.'"

Mr. Khosla is obsessed with things being just right. He designed the penholder in one of Khosla Ventures' conference rooms. He designed the door handles. He built the table. "We went through 12 manufacturing processes, and this was a vertical machine wire brush of Douglas fir," he says, rubbing his hands on it.

The grass outside is fescue, and he chose it. There are flowers, and he picked every bulb. Mr. Khosla selected the species of bamboo that grows between them, and he designed the paper towel dispenser in the bathrooms.

Shortly after he points out to me that there are no visible light switches in the building, we climb a set of stairs to the roof, and he jolts when he sees what looks like one of the accursed toggles. But the switch is just to open the glass ceiling, and we ascend to the prairie grass on the roof. (Fescue, thank god.)

This obsessiveness actually works within Silicon Valley, where there is a culture of peculiar perfectionism. When the technology executive Keith Rabois took a job as one of Mr. Khosla's partners, he says, he did so in large part because of the whiteboards.

"I walked in when I was interviewing, and I was like, 'Oh, my god, I'm in love,'" Mr. Rabois recalled. "I've tried to put whiteboards in offices for years, and they always don't clean properly. But in our office, the whiteboards are immaculate. That alone makes me happy. And I knew I could work there every day."

The "beach issue," as it is called internally at Khosla Ventures, has surprisingly not been a problem in the office. "It's an incredible negotiating tool for me," said Samir Kaul, another partner at Khosla Ventures.

When a company was trying to "screw" the firm, Mr. Kaul brought up news articles about the beach at a meeting. "I said: 'My boss is going to the Supreme Court for a beach he's never gone to. We're not posturing here. This guy's not going to settle,'" Mr. Kaul said. "And then I just sat there."

'It's Really, Like, Wow'

Mr. Khosla's legal team now includes Paul Clement, the former United States solicitor general, who since 2000 has appeared before the Supreme Court in more cases than any other lawyer.

His skills are being applied to a dispute that began with the most minor of directives. After buying Martin's Beach, Mr. Khosla was told by the county that he had to either (a) keep open a road that the public used to get to the beach, and not charge more than the 1972-era rate of $2 a car for parking, or (b) apply for a Coastal Development Permit to change access. He chose (c) neither, and was sued by his fellow citizens.

Mr. Khosla went on to sue the California Coastal Commission as an entity and its officers in their personal capacity. He sued the State Lands Commission and San Mateo County, and, again, its officers. He alleged extortion and infringement of his rights. In his view, the government was forcing him to operate a money-losing parking business. In one legal maneuver, he traced the property back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, claiming it supersedes the Coastal Act.

Mr. Khosla won, and for a time closed the gate across the beach road. California's Legislature and governor stepped in to reopen the beach by passing and signing into law legislation to thwart Mr. Khosla. This move required purchasing an easement from him; the State Lands Commission estimated the cost at $360,000, but Mr. Khosla estimated at one point that his loss of privacy was worth at least $30 million. The parties remain at an impasse, and in June, California passed a budget that included language about using eminent domain to take the road if Mr. Khosla does not agree to a price.

After a decade's worth of billable hours, those in legal combat with Mr. Khosla are somewhat awed by his determination.

"All he had to do was apply for a permit to change the gate hours," said Angela Howe, the legal director at the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates beach access causes and is Mr. Khosla's primary antagonist. "It's really, like, wow," she said. "Now, if the Supreme Court takes it up, it could rule about every coastal management program in the United States."

The low point in the conflict was probably in 2012. Mr. Khosla hired guards to stand by the beach access road near a "Do Not Enter" sign, and the police arrested some surfers who hopped over the closed gate. Here was this peculiar billionaire. There were the charismatic surfers. Arrested, they became The Martin's Five. (The charges against them were ultimately dropped.)

Mr. Kaul said that the forces arranged against his colleague simply do not comprehend how much flak he will absorb in his quest to win.

"Here's the thing about Vinod," Mr. Kaul said. "He just doesn't care."

'You Could Say He's Principled'

Mr. Khosla was born in Pune, India, in 1955 and grew up the middle-class son of an army officer. He says his parents accepted his personality early on, though they also learned he could be a liability.

"The priests would effectively say, 'If you donate this much money, God will bless you.' How crooked is that? If I ran into a priest, I'd say, 'Oh, you're a crook,'" Mr. Khosla says, recalling being 12 years old.

After a master's degree in biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he founded the electronic design company Daisy Systems and then, in 1982, Sun Microsystems. The company sold servers and workstations and created Java, the programming language that formed the foundation for much of today's internet. Later, Mr. Khosla nurtured the creation of Juniper Networks, which built the routers and switches upon which the internet flourished.

He became a hero of the political left last decade after investing early and heavily in clean technology, and by funding efforts in biofuel, energy storage and solar. Some of his bets succeeded; others failed spectacularly. He has continued to support and invest in eco-friendly start-ups.

His life plan now is to "reinvent societal infrastructure." He's recently gotten interested in the Yimby movement, a pro-real estate development cause that stands for "yes in my backyard." Mr. Khosla wants to 3D-print houses for the homeless to be installed above parking lots. He sketches this for me on one of the perfect whiteboards.

He wants people to think bigger, he says. Meanwhile, at Martin's Beach, he is pursuing a scorched-earth campaign around whether a gate needs a permit. In February, Mr. Khosla petitioned the Supreme Court to rule on his case, citing the First Amendment and also the Fifth (the takings clause) and 14th (his right to due process). The justices are now deciding whether to hear the case.

One recent cold summer Sunday, the rusty gate stood open. A few yards down, someone was collecting $10 from incoming cars. The cottages of Martin's Beach have windows that are thick with salt from the air; some of the houses are small and modest, with peeling paint, and others are more fixed up. The decks were full of barbecues, wicker furniture and driftwood art.

David Pasternak, 66, was at home making smoked salmon. "If the Supreme Court wants to take the case, they want to go after the California Coastal Act," said Mr. Pasternak, whose family bought the cabin in 1960. "And that's a very serious thing."

He took a sip of pour-over coffee. "What prompted California to pass the Coastal Act was so we didn't end up like the East Coast — miles and miles without access to the water," he said. "We live in a different country here."

On some level, Mr. Pasternak admires Mr. Khosla's conviction.

"He's become the caricature of the rich guy trying to keep people out, and that gives the Coastal Commission a lot of pleasure," Mr. Pasternak said. But, he added, "I don't think he's doing this for money. I really don't think he's doing this out of greed."

"All they said was he has to apply for a permit, and he says, '[Expletive] you, I'm not going to apply at all,'" Mr. Pasternak said. "It's kind of — I mean, he's awfully sure of himself. You could say he's principled."

Part of Mr. Khosla's original argument was that Martin's Beach was seldom used. The spot has become more popular as the case has gotten publicity, but on some days it resembles a ghost town. On a recent visit, the shop was long abandoned, with a rusty door handle that barely sat in its socket.

Mr. Pasternak occasionally gets a knock at his door from beachgoers asking to use the bathroom. The one down at the beach collapsed in a storm. Mr. Khosla was ordered to open the gate, but no one said anything about running water.

A Legacy, Large and Small

Mr. Khosla knows that Martin's Beach has now become part of his legacy — a thing that could make the first paragraph or two of his obituary, up there with helping to birth the internet — but this does not make him want to yield. I ask him why he lets a patch of sand take so much of his day.

"It doesn't, and I don't spend any time on it," he says. "Like, I've spent zero time on it, and I'm not doing press interviews."

And yet I'm across from him. He begins a diatribe about reporters, something I've heard from him before. "My critique of The New York Times is it's all the news we want to print, fit or not. And. …" This goes on.

Later, Mr. Khosla emails me. He wants to summarize what is important to him. It's 2,500 words. I am surprised that so much of it is about his failures.

"I feel I could do the right thing much more caringly and with humility in a much more considerate tone if I could do it over again," he writes. Well — to an extent. This is Vinod Khosla, after all. "I'd still mostly do the same thing."

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3) Under lock and key: I was thrown in solitary and punished for following the warden's orders
by Jason Renard Walker

I have limited space, limited time, and am under heavy scrutiny, so I'll get straight to the point. On August 13, 2018, at 10:00 am, the pod officer, Ms Rangel, had me sent to the "front desk" of my 3-building housing location. Officer Ford-Keith told me some visitors were waiting for me in the administration building, "1 building". She wrote me a pass to go. 

Upon arrival, I was greeted by Captain Gooden; the same captain who was supposed to investigate Lt Estrada and Sgt Gilstrap's role in conspiring to chill my writings via threats of physical harm and disciplinary cases. Instead, he allowed their supervisor to take over and botch my claim. 

I was put in a room where I met a tall, skinny white male in street clothes and a heavyset black male who pretended to sleep the entire time, but was actually reading my body language. The white male introduced himself as "Sergeant Rodgers from Region 2". He never said who the black guy was.

They were supposedly there to reinvestigate an ombudsman complaint filed by a Sidney Altonhoff, concerning an article I wrote about prisoners being denied respite areas during heat distress. 

Apparently, Gooden conducted the initial investigation, but never informed me what the entire ombudsman complaint was based on. And his remedy to solve my issue was sending me to live in the dorms or "two other things" if the unit received another ombudsman complaint on my behalf. The droms actually have hotter living conditions than the buildings. My anecdotal support for the article in question was drawn from a heat stroke incident there. Gooden encouraged me to write him a letter instead of writing a grievance or using the ombudsman. He claimed that route was faster and more effective, but I see it as him trying to keep things off record and away from public scrutiny. Plus, in past investigations, the outcome was the complete opposite. 

Rodgers admitted that, a month prior, he did a heat audit and found that the prison was in compliance, e.g. the water cooler had ice in it, the fans worked, etc. But I note that these audits were rehearsed by Gooden, who I remember coming to the pod around a month ago, looking in the cooler then walking out. I believe he passed the info to Rodgers. 

For the record, around July 10 2018, I attempted to mail out the original copy of the article on denied access to respite areas, but the Security Threat Group (STG) confiscated it from the mailroom, claiming it was gang-related material. To prevent me from knowing that particular article was denied, and to delay me sending out another article, the mailroom supervisor, Ms Arnold, claimed incoming mail from an individual was denied because it contained a letter discussing gang stuff. She even had the denial form filled out stating that the letter was incoming mail. She claimed to have read the letter. 

I spoke to the other mailroom clerk, who told me to appeal it because it was really an article I wrote being sent to the individual talking about heat strokes. I confronted Arnold about this, she claimed she made a mistake. Under pressure, Arnold admitted that the STG office sent her a memo, telling her to deny the article because the words [this section is censored, but from context elsewhere it seems very likely that the censored words are "black panther"] were restricted content.

But what this delay did was give the prison the heads-up on the basis of my claim, which they took advantage of by making a few adjustments, then staging a heat audit to offset the ombudsman complaints that routinely pour in following my published exposés. This same type of denial was previously overturned on appeal in a similar incident, so it seems likely the censorship of the heat article will be overturned as well. Arnold told me that no matter how many times the DRC uphold my appeals, as long as my articles or their titles contain the same words, they will be denied. 

Rodgers said he would investigate my allegations of being denied respite. 

Around 11:40am, me and other prisoners were lined up in front of the law library, waiting for the session to start. Out of nowhere, Lieutenant Ricks, a control freak who is a mirror image of Grace Jones in the movie Mad Max, ordered us to stand on the sidewalk that blocked the protective custody prisoners from coming back from eating. 

The warden and the major told us if we ever get caught standing there, we would be written "out of place" cases and sent home. They also said that the heat was another reason for us not to be there. The place he told us to stand is in a shaded area, has a constant breeze generated from the roof blocking the sun, and every time the education building is opened, fresh air-conditioned wind blows on us, and we aren't obstructing any traffic flow. And we stay cool. 

I explained this to Ricks, who said she didn't care about any orders but her own. I asked her if I could use the education building as a respite area, since standing out in the open exposed me to the humidity, and at the time the air wasn't blowing, so it was humid even in the safe zone. I was told that the only thing I would get was "handcuffs, gas and a beatdown" if I didn't comply. 

Even though the warden told us to contact him if this situation occurred, this request was denied as well. The law library staff, Officer Smith, Officer Nation, Officer Doddy and their supervisor, Wells, are aware of this order, and have previously run off captains who tried what Ricks tried. For one reason or another, they feared confronting Ricks. 

I explained the respite policy to Ricks, but she didn't care. She stated "I don't give a fuck about a policy, you in the penitentiary, dumbass." I asked her to call her supervisor, but instead she called several lower-ranking staff with a camera and a lieutenant. "Now you getting handcuffed, gassed and beatdown, watch," she said with a devilish grin. 

I agreed to stand in the open, but she told me it was too late and that I would be beat into compliance. At this point, Officer Doddy came out of the building to see what was going on. She'd forced the witnessing prisoners to stand far away and face in the other direction so they couldn't see or hear. I knew something was wrong, because she used unusual codes over her radio and never stated the actual problem. I believe this alerted certain individuals. 

Before the camera turned on, I heard the black sergeant tell the other that, when I attempted to put my hands behind my back, to pull me and he would gas me. I believe this was when the "beatdown" would occur. I remained silent and didn't move until my arm was grabbed and handcuffed. 

Moments before I was handcuffed, the black sergeant pulled out a can of gas and pointed it in my face, and right as he was about to pull the trigger, the white lieutenant told him not to gas me. 

On my way to lock-up, Ricks took my mesh bag containing my law library materials, and when it was returned, an entire manilla envelope was gone. 

I received a disciplinary case for refusing to obey an order (refusing to be handcuffed and beaten) and creating a disturbance (requesting respite and refusing to disobey the warden's order). 

This prevents me from qualifying for parole in June 2019, and it has ultimately resulted in making it harder for me to litigate, as I'm constantly having things taken. 

At this time, I'm only allowed to have hygiene items, and if it wasn't for another prisoner smuggling me an envelope and a stamp, I wouldn't have been able to send this out as fast as I did. Please flood the warden's office and the Ombudsman with complaints. This is what they fear and it's starting to have some effect.

Jason Renard Walker #1532092

Telford Unit

3899 Hwy 98

New Boston, TX 75570

[typist's note: you can contact the TDCJ Ombudsman at ombudsman@tdcj.texas.gov, as well as the Telford Unit's management at 903-628-3171 and garth.parker@tdcj.texas.gov ]

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4) Writing the Unions' 'Fight-or-Die Survival Chapter'
The growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts by workers all over the country.
"It is a real challenge to labor leaders to recognize that our strength is in working people — in withholding our labor — and not in the statehouse,"
By Sarah Jaffe, September 2, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/02/opinion/unions-labor-day-strike.html

Riot police trying to prevent protesters from blocking an entrance to the mall at 1st and D Streets in Washington, D.C.

In the past year, the American labor movement was dominated by two things. First, the Janus decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the public sector was essentially "right to work" — meaning, workers covered by union contracts no longer had to pay the costs of their representation. And second, the "Red for Ed" movement, the wave of teacher strikes, mostly in conservative states with few union protections. 

The teachers' uprisings, from West Virginia onward across the country, garnered weeks of front-page news and are no doubt helping to fuel the strikes already happening or pending this fall: Thousands of Washington State teachers are walking the picket lines, and Seattle and Los Angeles teachers voted to authorize their own potential strikes. 

But the underlying story of 2018 is that the growing labor militancy making headlines has its roots in slow, grinding efforts made in recent years by workers constantly denigrated by both major political parties and even written off by much of organized labor itself. Workers are putting in the effort over weeks, months and years to build new unions and to strengthen and reclaim moribund ones, and even to begin to chip away at the wall of new "right to work" laws passed since 2012. Their work has meant a slight uptick in union membership numbers, and a larger one in public approval for unions — suggesting that the more Americans see unions fight, and strike, for what they believe in, the more we want to join them.

In Missouri, a statewide movement put a referendum on a state right-to-work law on the Primary Day ballot. Not only did voters overwhelmingly overturn the law, but the referendum drew more votes than were cast in the party primaries. Missouri's unions and labor organizations such as Jobs With Justice led the fight, but in a state where only about 9 percent of the work force is represented by a union, labor had to mobilize plenty of nonunion workers to reject the right to work law. The coalition relied heavily on black and Latino voters, almost certainly benefiting from organizing efforts in the wake of the 2014 Ferguson uprising.

It's too early to tell whether the Missouri vote is a turning point for labor. But perhaps it's time to look back at the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests as such a point. Though waves of attacks in state after state on public- and private-sector union organizing followed Gov. Scott Walker's successful anti-union Act 10, Wisconsin unions have begun to show their power again. This spring's Red for Ed protests recalled the occupied Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011, and if the Wisconsin public sector has been the bellwether for labor under Janus, there is cause for optimism, if not also a cleareyed assessment of just how hard the work will be.

Amy Mizialko, president of the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association, said that the union has had to win fights — despite being legally barred from bargaining over anything other than cost-of-living raises — by organizing alongside parents and winning the community over to its side on everything from smaller class sizes to more recess for students. 

"Even though Act 10 in many ways felt like and was an ending," Ms. Mizialko said, "it's a chapter in the book, and there are lots more chapters that come after it. That's what members have been saying and feeling for seven and a half years — we're writing the fight-or-die survival chapter, but we're not just interested in surviving. We want it all back." 

Barbara Madeloni, a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association who now works for Labor Notes, a media and organizing project for union activists, said that teachers' organizing under unfriendly legal regimes has inspired organizing across sectors: "Workers are showing each other how to access and use their power — and I expect to see more job actions and strikes as they teach each other." 

Those workers are changing the way union leaders have thought about political power. "It is a real challenge to labor leaders to recognize that our strength is in working people — in withholding our labor — and not in the statehouse," Ms. Madeloni said.

In New York, retail workers at Verizon Wireless took part in a 2016 companywide strike but have had to fight to keep their union — in late August, they defeated a decertification vote. To Colin Hull, a worker in the four-year campaign for the union in a mostly nonunion sector, more than money, it was about taking some of the power back from the company. 

With a newly hostile labor board and courts packed with President Trump's appointees, union members and workers fights will continue to be long and grueling, but they have realized that it is this or giving in to the erosion of their lives.

They are often winning fights against Republicans in power, and their struggles are garnering at least lip service from Democrats considering a presidential run in 2020. But they know that the shift in class power they seek will still, largely, be won in the workplace.

Sarah Jaffe is the author of "Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt."

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5) A Year After Hurricane Harvey, Houston's Poorest Neighborhoods Are Slowest to Recover
By Manny Fernandez, Photographs by Ilana Panich-Linsman, September 3, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/us/hurricane-harvey-houston.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

The home of Monika Houston, 42, remains untouched after being gutted following Hurricane Harvey.

HOUSTON — Hurricane Harvey ruined the little house on Lufkin Street. And ruined it remains, one year later.

Vertical wooden beams for walls. Hard concrete for floors. Lawn mowers where furniture used to be. Holes where the ceiling used to be. Light from a lamp on a stool, and a barricaded window to keep out thieves. Even the twig-and-string angel decoration on the front door — "Home is where you rest your wings" — was askew.

Monika Houston walked around her family's home and said nothing for a long time. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She and her relatives have been unable, in the wake of the powerful storm that drenched Texas last summer, to completely restore both their house and their lives. Ms. Houston, 43, has been living alternately in a trailer on the front lawn, at her family's other Harvey-damaged house down the block, with friends and elsewhere. Outside the trailer were barrels for campfires, set not to stay warm but to keep the mosquitoes away.

What help Ms. Houston's family received from the government, nonprofit groups and volunteers was not enough, and she remains in a state of quasi-homelessness. She pointed to the dusty water-cooler jug by the open front door; inside were rolls of pennies, loose change and a crumpled $2 bill.

"That's our savings," she said as she picked up the jug and slammed it down. "We've never been in a position to save. We've been struggling, trying to hold onto what we have. This is horrible, a year later. I'm not happy. I'm broken. I'm sad. I'm confused. I've lost my way. I'm just as crooked as that angel on that door."

Monika Houston, 43, has been living in a trailer in front of her flooded and gutted home.

Houston and other Texas cities hit hard by Harvey a year ago have made significant progress recuperating from the worst rainstorm in United States history. The piles of debris — nearly 13 million cubic yards of it — are long gone, and many residents are back in their refurbished homes. Billions of dollars in federal aid and donations have helped Texans repair, rebuild and recover.

But this is not uniformly the case, and the exceptions trace a disturbing path of income and race across a state where those dividing lines are often easy to see.

A survey last month showed that 27 percent of Hispanic Texans whose homes were badly damaged reported that those homes remained unsafe to live in, compared to 20 percent of blacks and 11 percent of whites. There were similar disparities with income: 50 percent of lower-income respondents said they weren't getting the help they needed, compared to 32 percent of those with higher incomes, according to the survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation.

In many low-income neighborhoods around Houston, it feels like Harvey struck not last year but last month. Some of Houston's most vulnerable and impoverished residents remain in the early stages of their rebuilding effort and live in the shadows of the widespread perception that Texas has successfully rebounded from the historic flooding.

In the poorest communities, some residents are still living with relatives or friends because their homes remain under repair. Others are living in their flood-damaged or half-repaired homes, struggling in squalid and mold-infested conditions. Still others have moved into trailers and other structures on their property. 

One 84-year-old veteran, Henry Heileman, lived until recently in a shipping container while his home was being worked on. The container, which had been transformed into a mini-apartment with a bathroom, bed and lattice-lined foundation, was roughly 42 feet long and 6 feet wide.

The recovery has been problematic for the African-American and Hispanic families who live in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods for several reasons. The scale of Harvey's devastation and the depths of the social ills that existed in the Houston area before the storm played a role. So did a scattershot recovery that saw some people get the government aid and charity assistance they needed, when they needed it, while others had more difficulty or became entangled in disputes and complications with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"Everything always hits the poor harder than it does everybody else," said John Sharp, the head of the Governor's Commission to Rebuild Texas, which is helping to coordinate the state response to Harvey and to assist local officials and nonprofit groups.

These residents have not struggled in isolation. They have been assisted in the past year by officials and volunteers, but their repairs and recovery stalled for different reasons. Some of them no longer seek out help and suffer privately, ashamed of their living conditions but unable to move forward with their lives. Their housing issues are one of many problems they are confronting post-Harvey. Some are disabled, ill, unemployed or caring for older relatives. Some said they or their relatives are taking medication or undergoing counseling to cope with post-Harvey stress.

"In New Orleans, you could see the remnants of Katrina by the markings of FEMA spray paint on people's homes, and you could see those waterlines," said Amanda K. Edwards, a Houston city councilwoman who has led an effort to identify and knock on the doors of low-income flood victims who have stopped answering phone calls from those trying to assist them. "Those types of visuals are not present here. So it is difficult for people to really appreciate how difficult of a time people are having."

Amanda Edwards, 36, a Houston city councilwoman, drives through neighborhoods that were badly hit during Hurricane Harvey.

Days after the one-year anniversary of Harvey's Texas landfall on Aug. 25, Ms. Edwards drove to the home of a victim in the Houston Gardens neighborhood. She parked in the driveway of a flood-damaged home that, from the outside, appeared in good condition. Ms. Edwards was told that the African-American man inside lives in his home without electricity. As Ms. Edwards stood on the man's doorstep, he called out to her with the door closed, telling her he did not want any visitors.

Nearby, Ms. Edwards was given a tour of Kaverna Moore's gutted home. Ms. Moore, 67, lived in her home for months after Harvey and finally moved in with her son in March. Her repairs stalled after she was denied disaster assistance by FEMA.

She sorted through her papers and pulled out the FEMA denial letter. It was dated September 23, 2017, and stated that she was ineligible because "the damage to your essential personal property was not caused by the disaster." The letter baffles her. She lost her furniture, her carpet, her shoes and her appliances when about 2 feet of floodwater inundated her home. A contractor's estimate to repair the damage to the physical structure, including replacing the sheet rock and installing new doors, was $18,605. She appealed the FEMA denial but never heard back.

She said she has no idea when she will be back in her home. She was waiting for Habitat for Humanity to work on the house.

"I miss my house," Ms. Moore said. "I miss it a whole lot. I come by every day. Check my mail. Sometimes I come and sit on the porch."

  

Kaverna Moore, 67, was living in her gutted and moldy house until March, when she had to have surgery and moved in with her son.

Patricia Crawford waits, too.

Ms. Crawford's house remains under repair while she undergoes cancer treatment. Ms. Crawford, 74, went to live with a friend after Harvey. She moved back into her house — the house she grew up in — in June, before it was ready, then moved out after a few days. Her house remains a work in progress, with unpainted walls and construction padding on the floors, the rooms strewn with power tools. Her bed is still tightly wrapped in plastic.

She received some money from FEMA but was denied other assistance. So she waits, living with another friend and counting on help from relatives and nonprofit groups like the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation.

"It's been hard," Ms. Crawford said one afternoon as she sat on a sofa at her half-finished house. "Have you ever felt like you were just lost? Well, that's the way I feel. I feel lost. My doctor told me that if I didn't stop grieving, she was going to put me in the hospital. But I'm doing better."

Patricia Crawford, 74, visits her home in the Kashmere Gardens neighborhood of Houston.

No local, state or federal agency has been tracking how many people remain displaced after Harvey. It is unclear how many residents are struggling to complete repairs or have had their recovery stall. In the Kashmere Gardens section of northeast Houston — the low-income, predominantly African-American neighborhood along Interstate 610 where Ms. Houston and Ms. Crawford live — Keith Downey, a community leader, estimated that at least 1,500 Harvey victims in the area were not back in their homes.

In the Kaiser and Episcopal survey, based on phone interviews with more than 1,600 adults in 24 Harvey-damaged counties in June and July, three out of 10 residents said their lives were still "very" or "somewhat" disrupted from the storm.

The race and income disparities identified in the survey are likely a result of what existed before the storm, said Elena Marks, president and chief executive of the Episcopal Health Foundation and a former health policy director for the city of Houston. "If you went into the storm with relatively few resources, and then you lost resources, be it income or property or car, it's going to be harder for you to replace it," she said. "The farther behind you were before the storm, the less likely you are to bounce back after the storm."

Local, state and federal officials expressed concern for low-income Harvey victims, but they were unable to explain why so many of them continue to struggle. City officials say there has been no shortage of resources and services for poor residents affected by the storm, including the 14 neighborhood restoration centers the city opened, mostly in low-income areas. FEMA said it has put $4.3 billion into the hands of affected Houstonians.

"There are thousands of families who live in low-income communities, who already were operating at the margins before Harvey, and the storm pushed them down even further," the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, said in an interview. "We want to reassure them that they have not been forgotten."

Mr. Turner, who visited Kashmere Gardens and other neighborhoods to mark the anniversary of Harvey, described the problem as a federal and state issue, citing the $5 billion in federal Community Development Block Grant disaster-recovery funds that were approved for Texas, but that Houston has yet to receive.

"We know that the city is going to receive $1.14 billion dollars in C.D.B.G. funding for housing," Mr. Turner said. "But you can't disperse what you don't have."

Kurt H. Pickering, a spokesman for FEMA in Texas, said the agency had seen no evidence that low-income areas were receiving less support from the agency. He said that federal assistance was designed not to make a person whole after a disaster, but to help start the recovery process. "FEMA does everything possible to assist every family in every way," within the bounds of its regulations, Mr. Pickering said.

In Kashmere Gardens, Ms. Houston ended the tour of her house on Lufkin Street after a few minutes.

"I can't stay in here too long because I start coughing," she said.

She spoke of the past 12 months as a series of disputes and broken promises. She said she felt abandoned by FEMA, contractors, reporters and celebrities who visited the neighborhood and failed to follow up on repairs. "We're no more than 15 minutes from River Oaks," she said, referring to one of the wealthiest areas of Houston. "It's not just the government. Don't nobody care."

Ms. Houston, a former truck driver, walked to the middle of Lufkin and turned around to face the house. The yard with the trailer was cluttered, but the house appeared normal. 

"When you stand here, you would never know what lies behind those walls," she said. "Look at it. You don't even know how broken it is. That's the sad part."

A portrait of Patricia Crawford's parents still hangs in her home, although she is unable to move back.

Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting from Houston.

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6) An Old Sore for Mexico’s Next President: The 43 Missing Students
By Paulina Villegas, September 3, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/world/americas/mexico-missing-students.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

Family members of the students who disappeared four years ago in Iguala, Guerrero, marching in Mexico City last month.CreditCredit

AYOTZINAPA, Mexico — Four years after the disappearance of 43 students in southern Mexico, the case remains unsolved, international human rights groups said Monday, as they called on the next president to conduct a proper investigation.

The case of the missing students prompted global outrage and shook Mexico to its core, plunging President Enrique Peña Nieto’s approval ratings to new lows. At a ceremony on Monday at their school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, representatives from several rights groups said their disappearance had still not been explained.

The official account, disputed by international experts, is that the students were kidnapped by local police officers who turned them over to a drug gang. The gang killed them and burned their bodies in a nearby garbage dump, leaving no remains.

“The commission does not accept that narrative,” said Esmeralda Arosemena de Troitiño, rapporteur for Mexico at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. “No more talk about what they describe as ‘historic truth,’ because it hurts us, it outrages us and the families of the victims simply do not tolerate it.”

Ms. Arosemena said the commission hoped that President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who takes office on Dec. 1, would take advantage of the change in government to open an independent investigation. He defeated the candidate from Mr. Peña Nieto’s party in the July election.

Mr. López Obrador has repeatedly said that he is committed to further investigating the case with the help of international human rights organizations and making sure that “justice is done.”

“The doors of the country will be opened,” he said last month. “There will be no obstruction or obstacles that will keep us from discovering the truth in the Ayotzinapa case.”

The rights groups said a new investigation should examine the role of the federal police and the military in the students’ disappearance, possible obstruction of the investigation by government officials, and accusations that at least 34 of the 129 people arrested in connection with the case had been tortured.

Empty seats with photographs of the missing students at a graduation ceremony.

Representatives from the commission, the United Nations and Mexico’s top human rights agency appeared Monday at Escuela Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos, where the missing students, many of them sons of farmers, were training to become rural teachers in hope of escaping lives of poverty. The male-only school has a history of leftist activism, with students using radical tactics like blocking roads and throwing rocks at police officers.

At the school’s basketball court, 43 empty chairs were lined up behind the podium to represent the missing young men. A crowd of current students invoked the date the students disappeared, chanting: “September the 26th will not be forgotten. Alive they took them, alive we want them back!”

On that night in 2014, about 100 students left the school to hijack several buses for transportation to a march in Mexico City, a longstanding tradition that was mostly tolerated by bus companies and law enforcement officials.

But this time, police officers and other gunmen pursued the stolen buses and opened fire on the students in a coordinated assault in and around the city of Iguala. Six people were killed and dozens wounded. The 43 missing students, who had been pulled off two of the buses, were last seen being taken away by the police. The remains of only one have been identified.

The case became emblematic of the tens of thousands of disappearances during Mexico’s decade-long drug war, bringing protesters into the streets by the thousands and throwing Mr. Peña Nieto’s presidency into crisis.

Last week, ahead of his final state of the union address, Mr. Peña Nieto said in a video released on Twitter that his administration stood by the official findings. He said it was understandable the victims’ parents could not accept the painful truth — a remark that caused indignation among the victims’ families and human rights groups.

International investigators arrived in 2015 at the invitation of the Mexican government. But after they contradicted the official version of events, they said, the government began a campaign of harassment and stonewallingthat made it impossible for them to do their work. The investigators left the following year.

In June, a federal court ordered the Mexican government to investigate the case again, calling the first inquiry “neither prompt, effective, independent nor impartial.” The court ordered that the new investigation be supervised by a truth commission to be led by Mexico’s human rights body and victims’ families, who have already waited years for answers.

“Anger is all I can feel,” said Delfina de la Cruz, mother of Adán Abraham de la Cruz, who was 24 when he went missing. She was at the school on Monday, along with at least one relative of each of the 43 missing students.

“It’s been four years and the government has done nothing,” she said. “All we can hope is for the international experts to help us, because no one else will.”

 

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7) Mediterranean Death Rate Is Highest Since 2015 Migration Crisis
By Patrick Kingsley, September 3, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/world/europe/mediterranean-migrants-deaths.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront

A woman’s body and a migrant who survived were pulled from the Mediterranean Sea by a Spanish agency about 85 miles off the Libyan coast in July.

LONDON — The sea journey between North Africa and Italy is now deadlier than at any point since the peak of the European migration crisis in 2015, even as unauthorized migration along the route has fallen to its lowest level in the same period, according to data released on Monday by the United Nations.

For every 18 migrants who reached Italy by boat during the first seven months of 2018, one person drowned attempting that voyage. The toll is nearly triple the death rate during the period in 2015, and roughly double the rate in 2016, when a record number of migrants landed without authorization in Italy, which for most of the 21st century has been the main port of entry for people hoping to reach Europe by boat.

The United Nations’ announcement was made against a backdrop of heightened political and social tension across Europe, where migration has helped strengthen local economies by increasing consumer demand while also creating additional pressure on state institutions and stoking the popularity of far-right parties and causes. Far-right politicians now share power in Italy and Austria, and have polled unusually well in Sweden and Germany, where thousands of far-right sympathizers rallied in the eastern town of Chemnitz this week in protest over immigration.

The rising Mediterranean death rate is largely due to a spike in shipwrecks that occurred after Matteo Salvini, Italy’s far-right interior minister, barred most rescue vessels from bringing migrants to Italian ports in June, according to a separate analysis by Matteo Villa, a migration specialist at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, a research group in Rome. Around 1,600 migrants died in the Mediterranean in the first seven months of this year.

Migrants on the deck of a Spanish boat after being rescued off the coast of Libya last month.

The arrival rate, which had already plummeted before Mr. Salvini entered office in May because of measures taken by his predecessor, has fallen only slightly under the new minister. An average of 2,200 people have arrived in Italy in each of the three months since Mr. Salvini’s appointment, compared with an average of 2,700 during the three months that preceded it.

That higher rate was around 80 percent below the levels during the peak of the crisis.

Unauthorized migration between Libya and Italy fell markedly last summer, thanks to controversial negotiations between Marco Minniti, Mr. Salvini’s predecessor, and Libyan militias that control the southern Mediterranean smuggling trade. But the death rate did not rise, largely because of the continued presence off the Libyan coast of private rescue boats run by nongovernmental organizations.

Mr. Minniti’s government introduced protocols that deterred those boats from working close to the Libyan coast, and empowered the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept and return more migrants to Libya. But the private boats could still deliver rescued migrants to Italian ports.

That changed in June, days after Mr. Salvini’s appointment, when a boat run by Doctors Without Borders and SOS Mediterranean was forced to sail to Spain after being denied entry to ports in Sicily. Merchant vessels and Italian Navy ships have since also been refused permission to disembark rescued migrants in Italy.

This has left rescue responsibilities almost solely to the Libyan Coast Guard, an informal alliance of badly resourced and poorly trained sailors drawn from competing Libyan militias.

“A major factor contributing to the increased death rate is the decreased search and rescue capacity off the Libyan coast this year compared to the same period last year,” the United Nations refugee agency said in its report.

Mr. Villa described the situation as “a cautionary tale” for European officials who seek to justify countermigration measures with an argument that they are trying to save lives by stopping the smuggling trade.

“If your objective is to reduce the death rate, then you should be very wary of delegating rescue to the Libyan Coast Guard, because they are clearly unable to deal with levels of more than 3,000 departures per month,” Mr. Villa said.

Migration specialists and rights activists have also criticized the policy of returning migrants to Libya, where civil war and the breakdown of law and order have created dangerous conditions for migrants, who are sometimes held for ransom or put to work in slaverylike conditions by the militias who have nominally rescued them.

Fighting in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, has placed thousands of detained migrants at risk, according to Doctors Without Borders, which operates a mission on the Libyan mainland as well as off the Libyan coast.

“Many of the detention centers in Tripoli are on the front line of the fighting, and the latest escalation of violence has left people trapped for days in appalling conditions without food,” Ibrahim Younis, the organization’s head of mission in Libya, wrote in an email.

“Those that have recently managed to escape the detention centers to nearby neighborhoods are at risk of being caught in the crossfire,” Mr. Younis said, adding that local hospitals where the organization refers migrants for secondary care “have stopped discharging patients due to the fact that conditions outside are too dangerous, leaving less and less beds available for new patients.”

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8) Amazon, Following Apple, Reaches $1,000,000,000,000 in Value
By David Streitfeld, September 4, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/amazon-stock-price-1-trillion-value.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is richer, by far, than anyone in the modern world.

SAN FRANCISCO — When Apple’s market value crossed a trillion dollarslast month, the reason was simple: It makes devices that a lot of people are willing to spend a lot of money on.

Now Amazon has become the second American company to cross that once-unimaginable line. Its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, is worth nearly as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett put together.

This time, the explanation is more complicated.

Amazon captures 49 cents of every e-commerce dollar in the United States. It employs more than 550,000 people and generates $178 billion in annual revenue. It sells everything from computing space to peanut butter to appointments with plumbers.

But the thing it has always sold the most — to investors, customers, the media — is excitement.

In the beginning, Amazon was an exciting new way to shop for books: online. Then it was an exciting new way to read (Kindle e-books), an exciting new way to publish (CreateSpace), an exciting new way to power the internet (Amazon Web Services), an exciting new way to get deliveries (Amazon Prime), an exciting new way to make your house a high-tech outpost (Alexa).

Long before Amazon went to Hollywood and began making movies, it was the star of its own show, generating vast amounts of attention just for being Amazon. No company ever managed to turn its lack of profit into such effective drama, or the question of what its next move would be.

Amazon’s search for a second headquarters, the company having run out of room and patience in its hometown, Seattle, set off a nationwide frenzy among politicians. Mr. Bezos even gamified his philanthropic plans, taking to Twitter to solicit advice about what he should do. (One popular recommendation: Pay your warehouse workers more.) Would Amazon collapse, or would it eat the world? It was the corporation-as-reality series, and it’s been a long-running hit.

Public companies usually live under the tyranny of Wall Street, which prizes profits to the exclusion of all else. When Facebook and Twitter recently purged their rolls of fake users and began devoting more effort to cleaning up their acts, Wall Street did not applaud this civic-minded move but pummeled their shares.

Mr. Bezos made clear when Amazon went public in 1997 that he would not work for Wall Street, and the result was a company cast in an entirely different mold. It never feared losing money. In a real sense, there were no consequences for being wrong.

Behind the drama is a relentless and sometimes scary ambition. Amazon is the Jay Gatsby of American companies, believing that tomorrow it will run faster, stretch its arms out farther, fulfill the desires of consumers in ways that no other business possibly could. You will live in Amazon’s world, it says, and you will like it.

The retailer has retained this futuristic luster even as Facebook, Twitter and Google, which touted their own versions of technoparadise, have become suspect. It has retained its allure even as many of its ventures have tanked. Remember Kindle Singles? They were electronic articles hailed as the virtual reinvention of nonfiction. No one even noticed when the program fizzled.

“We like to go down unexplored alleys and see what’s at the end. Sometimes they’re dead ends,” Mr. Bezos said in 2009. “Sometimes they open up into broad avenues and we find something really exciting.”

One of the great benefits for Amazon of this approach is that it is impossible to tell where reality ends and hype — or perhaps even madness — begins.

Take Amazon’s drone program, which it first announced on “60 Minutes.” “I know this looks like science fiction,” Mr. Bezos said, as he showed a film of an unmanned vehicle delivering a package. “It’s not.” He said there were “years of additional work” to be done, but declared himself an optimist. Drone delivery, he predicted, would be a reality in “four, five years.”

That was December 2013. Roughly a million features were written about Amazon and its drones, nearly all with the subtext: Isn’t this the coolest thing ever?

Over the years, the company kept raising the stakes, as if they were not already high enough. Amazon applied a few years ago for a patent for an “aerial fulfillment center” that would float at 45,000 feet. Drones would fly out of it with your order and then glide down to your backyard.

What delivery could possibly be important enough to merit such a crazy system? The patent has a suggestion: “Prepared hot food.” We wanted flying cars, but we got flying burritos instead.

The fulfillment center, which looks in drawings like a blimp tugging a warehouse, has other uses besides delivering dinner. It would drift down to 2,000 feet to what the patent calls “the advertising altitude,” where it would present information “about items and/or services.” Perhaps it will be just like the movie “Blade Runner,” and the floating ads will tout the joys of working in Amazon’s off-world colonies. The patent was granted this summer.

Still not impressed? Earlier this year Amazon got a patent to more or less bomb people with their packages. The drone would drop the burrito or Stephen King blockbuster from a height of as much as 25 feet, in theory cushioning the plunge with an airbag.

Haye Kesteloo, senior editor of the news site DroneDJ, noted that there are many hurdles to routine delivery by drone, even if the vehicles are not being launched from airships. The claimed drone attack on President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela will not help soothe nervous citizens.

Nevertheless, Mr. Kesteloo, like Mr. Bezos, proclaims himself an optimist. “Companies like Amazon will make routine drone deliveries to consumers by 2025,” he said — only twice as far away as promised.

There are reasons to be skeptical about even this schedule. But that’s the magic of Amazon. Even if the drones do not pan out, they have kept attention focused on the company, fulfilling a different part of the business plan. There is scarcely any oxygen left to discuss the more contentious aspects of Amazon, like its scorn for taxes or its plans to capture much of local government purchasing.

“There is no doubt anymore,” said Ron Nussbaum, who runs an investment management fund called Maverick Value in Los Angeles. “The stock always goes up and no one doubts it will keep going up.”

Mr. Nussbaum, who stresses that overall his investments are profitable, might be the last Amazon skeptic. “It’s an honor,” he said.

And an expensive one. Last year, when Amazon crossed $1,000 a share, he started buying “put” options — bets that the stock would decline. One of his puts has dropped 85 percent; another, 92 percent. To get to the $1 trillion valuation, Amazon’s stock crossed the $2,050.27 per share mark on Tuesday.

Mr. Nussbaum is planning to buy more. He thinks people are confusing their impressions of Amazon the company with Amazon as an investment.

“If I fill up your gas tank for $1 but it costs me $2, you can say it’s a great product but it doesn’t make any sense as a company,” he said.

Apple had profits of $48 billion last year. Amazon’s were less than a tenth of that. If profits were all that mattered, Amazon should be worth about $100 billion, the size of United Technologies or Texas Instruments. That is nothing to sneeze at, but nothing to get people excited either.

[How Apple’s $1 trillion valuation dwarfs that of other huge companies.]

Even before Amazon hit $1 trillion, the milestone was old news. There was a poll on Facebook run by a group of young Wall Street investors. The question: Would Amazon or Apple be the first to hit $2 trillion?

The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of Amazon. Dreams will always triumph over devices.

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9) A Black Restaurant Owner Says He Tried Assisting a White Patron in Distress. Police Arrested Him.
By Jan Ransom, September 3, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/nyregion/harlem-restaurant-owner-employees-sue-city-for-wrongful-arrest.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fnyregion&action=click&contentCollection=nyregion&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=sectionfront

Clyde Pemberton, the owner of the restaurant, MIST Harlem, was punched in the chest by a customer and then arrested after employees called 911.

The one place a wealthy black business owner might least expect to be arrested on flimsy charges by the police would be at a popular restaurant he owns in the heart of Harlem.

But that’s what happened to Clyde Pemberton, the owner of MIST Harlem, who along with two of his employees sued the New York Police Department last week in Manhattan federal court for false arrest and violating his civil rights. His lawyers say the entire incident suggested racial bias and was an example of the kind of interactions with law enforcement that often strain the department’s relationship with minority communities.

On June 1, 2017, Dr. Pemberton, a retired psychiatrist, was holding a business meeting at his restaurant when he saw two women leaving the bathroom, dragging a third woman who was visibly unconscious across the room at 10:30 p.m., the complaint states. The women, who were all white, knocked over a stanchion of a rope blocking off a section of the restaurant to customers.

When Dr. Pemberton, now 68, walked over to the women to ask what was wrong and suggested the unconscious woman be placed in a chair, one woman punched him in the chest and referred to him with a racial slur, according to the complaint.

A second woman struck Dr. Pemberton’s employee, Christian Baptiste, in the head with her purse, according to the lawsuit. Employees called 911 as the women continued to yell, push and kick employees, the lawsuit states.

But, shortly after the arrival of the police officers, who were all white, including some from the 28th precinct, a police supervisor spoke with only one of the women before ordering his officers to arrest Dr. Pemberton, Mr. Baptiste, 42, and another employee, Thomas Debnam. They were charged with unlawful imprisonment. The charges against the men were dismissed in November.

One of the arresting officers, Anthony Sengco, wrote in his criminal complaint that he observed Dr. Pemberton, Mr. Baptiste and Mr. Debnam blocking the exit to the restaurant and that the men had stated to him that they were trying to prevent the women from leaving. The men deny that they made any such statements to Mr. Sengco or that they were trying to prevent the women from leaving.

A New York Times investigation earlier this year found that “testilying,” the practice of testifying or providing statements that are untrue is a stubborn issue within the police department.

Dr. Pemberton said he explained that he was the owner of the restaurant and a physician, but that officers never asked him what had happened, and that their supervisor had been hostile, according to the lawsuit.

After spending six hours in custody the men were given a desk appearance and released, according to the lawsuit.

Dr. Pemberton, the lawsuit states, was arrested “for being a conscientious business owner while black,” a reference to the growing list of activities — such as driving while black — that can place someone at risk of being stopped, questioned or arrested by the police.

The men “did nothing wrong, and no reasonable police officer would have believed they did anything wrong,” the lawsuit states. “The NYPD arrested Dr. Pemberton, Mr. Baptiste, and Mr. Debnam not because of their conduct, but because they were there and they are black. Neither their side of the story nor their freedom mattered to the police.”

One of the women was also arrested, according to the lawsuit. She was charged with assault with intent to cause physical injury and other offenses.

“Everything we did was in the right way and approach, and it was overlooked, ignored and disrespected, our rights as human beings,” Mr. Debnam, 32 said in an interview. “There’s a flaw in our system.”

The city’s Law Department will “review the case and respond accordingly,” said the agency’s spokesman Nicholas Paolucci.

Elizabeth Saylor, a civil rights attorney representing the men, said that the officer’s statements were not true and that the men never should have been arrested.

“You don’t just arrest everybody on the scene and sort it out later,” Ms. Saylor said. “They are privileged black men who have money and the resources to fight this, but despite that it deeply affected them.”

They incurred $15,000 in legal fees to defend themselves.

Dr. Pemberton, a green card holder who is a native of Trinidad and Tobago, said he has run into issues while traveling in and out of the country after the arrest and even after the charge was dismissed.

“We thought it was over,” he said, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement continued to stop him in airports.

Dr. Pemberton also said that since the arrest, the police have conducted random checks of his establishment, and have increased their presence there, costing him business. And Mr. Debnam, who had planned on applying to be a teacher, worries now that because of the arrest that his application would be rejected.

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10) Colin Kaepernick’s Nike Campaign Keeps N.F.L. Anthem Kneeling in Spotlight
By Kevin Draper and Ken Belson, September 3, 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/03/sports/kaepernick-nike.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=5&pgtype=sectionfront

Colin Kaepernick tweeted the new Nike advertisement he appears in as part of a new deal with the company.

Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback who inspired a player protest movement but who has been out of a job for more than a year, has signed a new, multiyear deal with Nike that makes him a face of the 30th anniversary of the sports apparel company’s “Just Do It” campaign, Nike confirmed on Monday.

The first advertisement from Nike, one of the league’s top partners, debuted Monday afternoon, when Kaepernick tweeted it, assuring that his activism and the protest movement against racism and social injustice he started would continue to loom over one of the country’s most powerful sports leagues.

[Related: How Colin Kaepernick controls the N.F.L. protest conversation without saying anything]

Nike will produce new Kaepernick apparel, including a shoe and a T-shirt, and if the merchandise sells well, the value of the deal will rival those of other top N.F.L. players, according to people close to the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity because Nike had not formally announced it. Nike will also donate money to Kaepernick’s “Know Your Rights” campaign.

The N.F.L. did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The ad and the campaign, coming a few days before the start of the N.F.L. season on Thursday, is likely to annoy the league’s top executives and its owners. On Thursday, Kaepernick won a victory in his grievance against the league when an arbitrator let his case, in which he accuses the league of conspiring to keep him off the field because of his activism, advance.

A wave of on-field protests has continued, with varying degrees of intensity, since summer 2016, when Kaepernick began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem.

Now, with just one tweet, the former N.F.L. quarterback and Nike have set the world alight, causing a flurry of stories in major publications, inspiring a top trending hashtag across social media and possibly even contributing to a broader decline in the stock market.

Reaction to Kaepernick’s tweet was swift. Almost immediately, “Just Do It” and “Nike” became top trending terms on Twitter in the United States, and by morning the hashtag #NikeBoycott was one of the most used on the social media service. People posted videos and photographs of themselves destroying their Nike apparel in response to the company’s decision to work with Kaepernick. Kaepernick has been a Nike endorser since he entered the N.F.L. in 2011.

Nike’s stock price fell more than two percent in early trading Tuesday. It was the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones industrial average, helping to drag the average to a fall for the first part of the day. While some investors are likely nervous that the company’s decision to prominently feature Kaepernick could inspire a boycott, the stock price of main competitor Adidas was also down more than two percent. The broader stock market downturn was being blamed on worries about tense negotiations over Nafta.

The N.F.L. has struggled to contain the on-field protests, which have also included raised fists and other gestures, which league officials have blamed for dragging down the league. Television ratings have declined and certain segments of the fan base have reacted angrily. President Trump has made the N.F.L. a target for not firing players who refuse to stand for the national anthem.

The protest movement Kaepernick started has been interpreted by some as being disrespectful to the American flag and the military. Political conservatives have widely condemned it. Many of those posting on social media Monday and Tuesday about boycotting Nike or throwing out their Nike gear referenced their connection to and support for the military, even though the players who, like Kaepernick, have protested have made it clear they are not anti-military and some veterans have expressed support for their actions.

The Kaepernick deal could be awkward for the league.

In March, Nike and the N.F.L. announced an extension of an apparel deal through 2028. As part of that deal, Nike supplies 32 teams with game-day uniforms and sideline apparel that features the company’s swoosh logo. When that deal was announced, Brian Rolapp, the NFL’s chief media and business officer, called the company “a longtime and trusted partner” of the league.

Kaepernick and Nike already had an endorsement deal, dating to when he entered the league in 2011, but it was expiring soon and has now been extended.

The new Kaepernick ad features a close-up, black-and-white photograph of his face, with copy that references his kneeling and his belief that his activism is keeping him out of the league.

The ad reads: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”

When asked if Nike had run the campaign by the N.F.L., a spokeswoman, Sandra Carreon-John, responded: “Nike has a longstanding relationship with the N.F.L. and works extensively with the league on all campaigns that use current N.F.L. players and its marks. Colin is not currently employed by an N.F.L. team and has no contractual obligation to the N.F.L.”

The new contract was negotiated by Kaepernick’s lawyers, Mark Geragos and Ben Meiselas, and Nike executives.

Even as the N.F.L. season approaches, the Kaepernick story has continued to dominate the N.F.L. narrative. On Friday, Kaepernick received an ovation from the crowd at the United States Open match between Serena Williams and Venus Williams.

Serena Williams, LeBron James, Odell Beckham Jr., Shaquem Griffin and Lacey Baker are also part of the “Just Do It” anniversary campaign.

Nike’s decision to make new Kaepernick merchandise and to make him the face of a campaign could, if they are successful for the company, undercut the argument from N.F.L. owners that he is bad for business. Previously, Nike stated that it “supports athletes and their right to freedom of expression on issues that are of great importance to our society,” but the company had not used Kaepernick in any recent ad campaigns.

There is reason to believe that Kaepernick, despite not playing, will move merchandise. During the second quarter of 2017, his officially licensed jersey was the 39th-best selling in the league. As an unsigned free agent, he was the only player in the top 50 of those rankings not signed to a team.

With Kaepernick seemingly having little chance of playing in the N.F.L. again, Geragos was eager to try to portray him as something more than a football player.

“I give Nike credit for understanding that he’s not just an athlete, he has become an icon,” Geragos said.

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