Thursday, June 27, 2019

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, THURSDAY, JUNE 27, 2019



#NoKidsIn Cages
Rally & Press Conference

Thursday, June 27
12Noon – 1:00pm

9th Circuit Federal Courthouse
95  7th Street at Mission
(across the street from Federal Building)
San Francisco

Info: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2019/06/25/18824231.php


This Thursday, June 27, starting at 12 noon, we are holding a press conference outside the 9th Circuit Court to denounce the Trump Administration denying migrant children soap and sleep in U.S. detainment centers including concentration camps.

The names of the children who died in American custody will be read aloud and written in chalk on the sidewalk. This is the court determining if the cruel and inhumane Trump policies are constitutional.

We will assemble two wire cages to symbolize the plight of infants and children separated from their families. Inside the cage will be dolls representing the detained toddlers and aluminum foil serving as blankets

Our message is #NoKidsinCages
Indybay posting by Michael Petrilis

Article:
The father and daughter who drowned at the border dove into the river in desperation – June 26, 2019
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/26/father-daughter-who-drowned-border-dove-into-river-desperation/?utm_term=.71dfef03e400

F/U – Tuesday, 6/25, Richmond City Council voted 5 – 2 to NOT renew their contract with Vigilant Solutions!

  Vigilant Solutions is in contract with ICE to provide access to billions of license plate reader scans to help immigration enforcement hunt and track undocumented people and their families, friends and associates. ACLU has documented 9,000 ICE agents with access to Vigilant's LEARN database and 30,000 searches a month.




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End Human Detention Camps Lights for Liberty Worldwide Vigil Protesting U.S. Concentration Camps
Friday, July 12, 2019

Lights for Liberty will organize five main events in El Paso, Texas; Homestead, Florida; San Diego, California; New York City and Washington, D.C.
Look for groups holding protests in your city on that day!

In San Francisco:

Friday, July 12, 2019 at 7 PM – 10 PM
Powell St. Cable Car Turnaround

Photo of migrants detained under the Paso del Norte International Bridge, March 27, 2019.







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Political Prisoners and Assange: Carole Seligman At S.F. Assange Rally
As part of an international action to free Julian Assange, a rally was held on June 12, 2019 at the US Federal Building in San Francisco and Carole Seligman was one of the speakers. She also speaks about imperialist wars and  the cases of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Fumiaki Hoshino.
For more info:
Production of Labor Video Project
www.laborvideo.org 

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Act Now to Save Mumia's Eyesight and to 

Demand His Release!


Tell them to approve Mumia's cataract surgery immediately!


Tell them to release Mumia Abu-Jamal NOW because he can receive better healthcare outside of prison and also because he is an innocent man!
Mumia Abu-Jamal

To: Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, SCI Mahanoy Superintendent Theresa A. Delbalso, Dr. Courtney P. Rodgers

Mumia's vision has rapidly deteriorated. It has been confirmed that Mumia currently suffers conditions that seriously threaten his eyesight. These include glaucoma, a vitreous detachment and cataracts in both eyes. This threat seriously jeopardizes his life and well-being, as well as his journalistic profession.

An outside eye doctor is recommending surgical procedures to remove the cataracts on both eyes, but SCI-Mahanoy Doctor Courtney Rodgers is delaying scheduling the needed examinations and surgeries with Mumia's outside ophthalmologist. Rodgers works for Correct Care Solutions, a notorious for-profit prison and immigration detention medical company that, according to the Project on Government Oversight, has been sued at least 1,395 times with complaints alleging a range of charges, including wrongful death, malpractice and inadequate healthcare.

Meanwhile Mumia faces increasing nerve damage to his eyes. He is unable to read or do other things requiring normal vision. This delay echoes the years of delays Mumia experienced getting treatment for hepatitis C. By the time the DOC was finally forced by Federal Court to treat Mumia with the Hep C cure, it was too late to prevent cirrhosis of the liver.

African Americans are 1.5 times more likely to develop cataracts than the general population and five times more likely to develop related blindness.

Not only is his overall health deteriorating as he is threatened by permanent blindness, his failure now to receive the immediate attention he requires is cruel and unusual punishment, especially as an innocent man who has been unjustly incarcerated for almost four decades.
Furthermore, considering his multiple ailments and the threat of blindness, we demand that Pennsylvania officials allow a real and humane "compassionate release" now, not the "fake compassionate release" of transfers from prison to care facilities that Pennsylvania will only grant when a prisoner is within a year of dying. Mumia's family, friends and supporters are ready now to provide the healthcare Mumia requires if he were home.

Mumia is not alone in enduring these cruel and unusual assaults on the health of those ageing and ill behind prison walls. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, over 130,000 of U.S. prisoners are elderly, a 400 percent increase between 1993 and 2013. Mumia himself has noted the significant number of those confined at his own prison who suffer similar life-threatening illnesses that require immediate attention. Across the nation elderly prisoners experience a torturous journey toward the end of their lives without any "compassionate release." Once again, as we fight for Mumia's right to treatment and for his release, we fight for the freedom of all the imprisoned from mass incarceration's cruel and unusual conditions.

Mumia should be released now not only because he can receive better healthcare outside of prison but also because he is an innocent man!

Take Action:

1.    Sign the petition
2.    Call: Dr. Courtney P Rodgers – (570) 773-7851 and SCI Mahanoy Superintendent Theresa A. Delbalso - (570) 773-2158

3.    Call: Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf – (717) 787-2500; PA DOC Secretary John Wetzel – (717) 728-2573; Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner – (215) 686-8000


Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PA DOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733




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50 years in prison: 
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!

FREE Chip Fitzgerald 
Grandfather, Father, Elder, Friend
former Black Panther 
              
Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald has been in prison since he was locked up 50 years ago. A former member of the Black Panther Party, Chip is now 70 years old, and suffering the consequences of a serious stroke. He depends on a wheelchair for his mobility. He has appeared before the parole board 17 times, but they refuse to release him.

NOW is the time for Chip to come home!

In September 1969, Chip and two other Panthers were stopped by a highway patrolman. During the traffic stop, a shooting broke out, leaving Chip and a police officer both wounded. Chip was arrested a month later and charged with attempted murder of the police and an unrelated murder of a security guard. Though the evidence against him was weak and Chip denied any involvement, he was convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1972, the California Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty. Chip and others on Death Row had their sentences commuted to Life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. All of them became eligible for parole after serving 7 more years. But Chip was rejected for parole, as he has been ever since. 

Parole for Lifers basically stopped under Governors Deukmajian, Wilson, and Davis (1983-2003), resulting in increasing numbers of people in prison and 23 new prisons. People in prison filed lawsuits in federal courts: people were dying as a result of the overcrowding. To rapidly reduce the number of people in prison, the court mandated new parole hearings:
·        for anyone 60 years or older who had served 25 years or more;
·        for anyone convicted before they were 23 years old;
·        for anyone with disabilities 

Chip qualified for a new parole hearing by meeting all three criteria.

But the California Board of Parole Hearings has used other methods to keep Chip locked up. Although the courts ordered that prison rule infractions should not be used in parole considerations, Chip has been denied parole because he had a cellphone.

Throughout his 50 years in prison, Chip has been denied his right to due process – a new parole hearing as ordered by Federal courts. He is now 70, and addressing the challenges of a stroke victim. His recent rules violation of cellphone possession were non-violent and posed no threat to anyone. He has never been found likely to commit any crimes if released to the community – a community of his children, grandchildren, friends and colleagues who are ready to support him and welcome him home.

The California Board of Parole Hearings is holding Chip hostage.

We call on Governor Newsom to release Chip immediately.

What YOU can do to support this campaign to FREE CHIP:


1)   Sign and circulate the petition to FREE Chip. Download it at https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald
Print out the petition and get signatures at your workplace, community meeting, or next social gathering.

2)   Write an email to Governor Newsom's office (sample message at:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iwbP_eQEg2J1T2h-tLKE-Dn2ZfpuLx9MuNv2z605DMc/edit?usp=sharing

3)   Write to Chip: Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald #B27527,
CSP-LAC
P.O. Box 4490
B-4-150
Lancaster, CA 93539

--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/

Free Chip Fitzgerald

https://www.change.org/p/california-free-chip-fitzgerald
We the residents of California are calling for the release of Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, a former member of the Black Panther Party who has served 50 years in the California State prison system. He was first eligible for parole in 1976 and has served more than three times the average sentence ...
https://www.facebook.com/FreeChipFitzgerald/
Free Chip Fitzgerald. 215 likes. Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald was born and raised in Compton, California. In early 1969, he joined the Southern California...
https://sfbayview.com/2018/05/former-black-panther-romaine-chip-fitzgerald-seeks-parole-after-49-years-behind-bars/
by Ann Garrison. On April 26, former Black Panther Herman Bell was released from prison in New York State after 45 years. That leaves at least 10 surviving members of the Black Panther Party behind bars, including Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, who is currently held at the California State Prison-Los Angeles.
https://www.thejerichomovement.com/profile/fitzgerald-romaine-chip
http://souldbananacrew.blogspot.com/2008/06/free-chip-fitzgerald-x-black-panther.html
Not an average day for us at KAOS NETWORK, today was a petition signing for the well known Late black panther ROMAINE " CHIP " FITZGERALD ...

Free Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald! Politischer Gefangener in Kalifornien, USA
http://www.mumia-hoerbuch.de/postamt/Romaine%20%27Chip%27%20Fitzgerald.pdf


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Support Chuck Africa for Parole

Michael Africa Jr. started this petition to Pennsylvania Governor


Charles Sims Africa #AM 4975 has been in prison since age 18. He is now 59 years old and a recovering cancer patient. He has been eligible for parole since 2008 but continually denied because of  his political views.
Charles has 8 codefendants. Two has died in prison, four has been released from prison onto parole. Chuck's sister Debbie Sims Africa is one of the four codefendants released onto parole.
Since coming home from prison, Debbie is thriving. Our community of support has supported Debbie to excel and we are committed to do the same for Chuck so that he can excel as well. 
http://chng.it/Yprs8pXBBp

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Kim Kardashian visits inmate on death row at San Quentin State Prison

By Lee Brown, May 31, 2019
Kim Kardashian at San Quentin State Prison

Kim Kardashian's social justice crusade has taken her to death row.
The reality TV star spent two hours inside a cell in California's San Quentin State Prison, one of the most notorious jails in the US, as part of her latest crusade to free convicted murderer Kevin Cooper, sources confirmed.
"They met for two hours in a cell in the visitors' area of death row — a proper cell with bars," a source said.
The 38-year-old "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star was pictured wearing an all-black jumpsuit as she entered the prison.
"Kim decided to pay a visit so she could have her first face-to-face with the guy she's trying to free," TMZ said.
She left "more convinced than ever he was framed," the site insisted.
The 61-year-old death row inmate was convicted in 1985 of four murders — including two 10-year-old children — but has maintained his innocence.
Kevin CooperCourtesy Photo
Kardashian — who is studying to be a lawyer to help her social justice mission — publicly announced her involvement in Cooper's case last year.
"Governor Brown, can you please test the DNA of Kevin Cooper?" Kardashian tweeted then-California Gov. Jerry Brown last June.
Cooper's advocates have argued that DNA found on a T-shirt that Cooper says he never wore should be retested.
The current governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has ordered that DNA testing, with results yet to be announced, according to TMZ.
Newsom is also a death penalty opponent and has decided to suspend all executions while he is in office.
Earlier this month, it emerged that Kardashian had quietly bankrolled a successful campaign to free 17 federal inmates serving life sentences for low-level drug crimes over the past three months.
https://pagesix.com/2019/05/31/kim-kardashian-visits-inmate-on-death-row-at-san-quentin-state-prison/
Write to:
Kevin Cooper #C-65304 4-EB-82           
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
www.freekevincooper.org



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On Abortion: From Facebook

Best explanation I've heard so far..., Copied from a friend who copied from a friend who copied..., "Last night, I was in a debate about these new abortion laws being passed in red states. My son stepped in with this comment which was a show stopper. One of the best explanations I have read:, , 'Reasonable people can disagree about when a zygote becomes a "human life" - that's a philosophical question. However, regardless of whether or not one believes a fetus is ethically equivalent to an adult, it doesn't obligate a mother to sacrifice her body autonomy for another, innocent or not., , Body autonomy is a critical component of the right to privacy protected by the Constitution, as decided in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), McFall v. Shimp (1978), and of course Roe v. Wade (1973). Consider a scenario where you are a perfect bone marrow match for a child with severe aplastic anemia; no other person on earth is a close enough match to save the child's life, and the child will certainly die without a bone marrow transplant from you. If you decided that you did not want to donate your marrow to save the child, for whatever reason, the state cannot demand the use of any part of your body for something to which you do not consent. It doesn't matter if the procedure required to complete the donation is trivial, or if the rationale for refusing is flimsy and arbitrary, or if the procedure is the only hope the child has to survive, or if the child is a genius or a saint or anything else - the decision to donate must be voluntary to be constitutional. This right is even extended to a person's body after they die; if they did not voluntarily commit to donate their organs while alive, their organs cannot be harvested after death, regardless of how useless those organs are to the deceased or how many lives they would save., , That's the law., , Use of a woman's uterus to save a life is no different from use of her bone marrow to save a life - it must be offered voluntarily. By all means, profess your belief that providing one's uterus to save the child is morally just, and refusing is morally wrong. That is a defensible philosophical position, regardless of who agrees and who disagrees. But legally, it must be the woman's choice to carry out the pregnancy., , She may choose to carry the baby to term. She may choose not to. Either decision could be made for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, or anything in between. But it must be her choice, and protecting the right of body autonomy means the law is on her side. Supporting that precedent is what being pro-choice means.", , Feel free to copy/paste and re-post., y
Sent from my iPhone

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www.amnesty.org
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC STATEMENT
24 June 2019 ASA 35/0587/2019
PHILIPPINES: STOP 'RED-TAGGING', INVESTIGATE KILLINGS OF ACTIVISTS
page1image493940592
Responding to the killings of four Filipino activists over a three-day period, Amnesty International calls on the
Philippine authorities to cease from 'red-tagging' legitimate organizations, or branding them as "communist fronts"which, according to these organizations, have led to increased harassment and attacks by unknown individuals against them. Peaceful activists should not be targeted based on their political views. The authorities must also carry out a prompt, thorough, impartial and effective investigation into the killings, and bring to justice those suspected to
be responsible for the killings. They must take proactive steps to ensure, protect, and promote the human rights of human rights defenders and activists in the country, and guarantee the right to an effective remedy and access to justice to victims and their families.
Local human rights group Karapatan said that two of its staff, 22-year-old Ryan Hubilla and 69-year-old Nelly Bagasala, were gunned down by unidentified persons in Sorsogon City, Sorsogon, on 15 June. The following day, 16 June, farmer-activist Nonoy Palma was shot dead outside his house in San Fernando, Bukidnon, by unknown persons riding a motorcycle. On 17 June, former activist Neptali Morada was driving his motorcycle to the provincial capitol
when he was gunned down by an unknown man in Naga City, Camarines Sur.
Hubilla, Bagasala, Palma and Morada all belonged to 'leftist organizations' that have been 'red-tagged', or named by the government as "legal fronts" for the Communist Party of the Philippines. In a speech in January 2018, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said that he would "go after the legal fronts," referring to groups with alleged ties to the
communist movement, and reiterated his order to the military to "destroy the [communist] apparatus." Many of these groups say that in the wake of such provocative allegations, they have faced increased attacks by unknown individuals, including killings. Out of concern for the safety of their staff, Karapatan and several other groups have filed a court petition seeking information and protection; in fact, Hubilla had been planning to participate as a witness in hearings relating to this petition. Further evidencing the threats being faced by human rights defenders and activists, a group of UN human rights experts issued a statement on 7 June asking the UN to "establish an
independent investigation into human rights violations in the Philippines ... including sustained attacks on people and institutions defending human rights."
Amnesty International calls on the Philippine authorities to fulfil their international obligations to respect, protect, promote and fulfil the rights of human rights defenders and activists, including their rights to life, freedom of
expression, and freedom of peaceful assembly. All these rights are guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which the Philippines is a state party. In particular, Amnesty International calls on the Philippine government to conduct prompt, thorough, impartial and effective investigations into the killings of human rights defenders and activists in the country. Philippine authorities should also publicly instruct their officials to end the harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and activists simply for carrying out human rights work. The authorities should encourage rather than disparage the work of human rights defenders and activists which, in some cases, puts these defenders' lives in danger.
As the human rights situation in the Philippines continues to deteriorate, Amnesty International has called on member states of the UN Human Rights Council to open an independent investigation into human rights violations in the context of the "war on drugs,". This investigation should examine, among other issues, attacks on human rights defenders and activists.
BACKGROUND
According to the human rights group Karapatan, Ryan Hubilla and Nelly Bagasala had been assisting political prisoners, three of whom were released the day before Hubilla and Bagasala were killed, and had been subjected tosurveillance because of their work. Farmers' group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas said that Nonoy Palma was a member of its local chapter. Neptali Morada was a regional coordinator of the group Bagong Alyansang Makabayan
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Amnesty International Public Statement 1

(Bayan) until 2000 and was working as a staff of a former local politician when he was killed; Bayan, however, said that Morada continued to experience surveillance and harassment even after he left the group.
According to media reports, Philippine National Police Chief Gen. Oscar Albayalde has said that he has ordered an investigation into the killings. The reports say that Albayalde has told Karapatan, however, that it has to prove that
both Hubilla and Bagasala are indeed staff of the organization, adding that Karapatan may just be "taking advantage"of the situation by putting the blame on state forces.


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Celebrating the release of Janet and Janine Africa
Take action now to support Jalil A. Muntaqim's release


Jalil A. Muntaqim was a member of the Black Panther Party and has been a political prisoner for 48 years since he was arrested at the age of 19 in 1971. He has been denied parole 11 times since he was first eligible in 2002, and is now scheduled for his 12th parole hearing. Additionally, Jalil has filed to have his sentence commuted to time served by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Visit Jalil's support page, check out his writing and poetry, and Join Critical Resistance in supporting a vibrant intergenerational movement of freedom fighters in demanding his release.

48 years is enough. Write, email, call, and tweet at Governor Cuomo in support of Jalil's commutation and sign this petition demanding his release.

http://freedomarchives.org/Support.Jalil/Campaign.html
Write:
The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of the State of New York
Executive Chamber State Capital Building
Albany, New York 12224

Michelle Alexander – Author, The New Jim Crow
Ed Asner - Actor and Activist
Charles Barron - New York Assemblyman, 60th District
Inez Barron - Counci member, 42nd District, New York City Council
Rosa Clemente - Scholar Activist and 2008 Green Party Vice-Presidential candidate
Patrisse Cullors – Co-Founder Black Lives Matter, Author, Activist
Elena Cohen - President, National Lawyers Guild
"Davey D" Cook - KPFA Hard Knock Radio
Angela Davis - Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Native American historian, writer and feminist
Mike Farrell - Actor and activist
Danny Glover – Actor and activist
Linda Gordon - New York University
Marc Lamont Hill - Temple University
Jamal Joseph - Columbia University
Robin D.G. Kelley - University of California, Los Angeles
Tom Morello - Rage Against the Machine
Imani Perry - Princeton University
Barbara Ransby - University of Illinois, Chicago
Boots Riley - Musician, Filmmaker
Walter Riley - Civil rights attorney
Dylan Rodriguez - University of California, Riverside, President American Studies Association
Maggie Siff, Actor
Heather Ann Thompson - University of Michigan
Cornel West - Harvard University
Institutional affiliations listed for identification purposes only
Call: 1-518-474-8390

Email Gov. Cuomo with this form

Tweet at @NYGovCuomo
Any advocacy or communications to Gov. Cuomo must refer to Jalil as:
ANTHONY JALIL BOTTOM, 77A4283,
Sullivan Correctional Facility,
P.O. Box 116,
Fallsburg, New York 12733-0116




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Painting by Kevin Cooper, an innocent man on San Quentin's death row. www.freekevincooper.org

Decarcerate Louisiana

Declaration of Undersigned Prisoners
We, the undersigned persons, committed to the care and custody of the Louisiana Department of Corrections (LDOC), hereby submit the following declaration and petition bearing witness to inhumane conditions of solitary confinement in the N-1 building at the David Wade Corrections Center (DWCC). 
Our Complaint:
We, the Undersigned Persons, declare under penalty of perjury: 
1.    We, the undersigned, are currently housed in the N-1 building at DWCC, 670 Bell Hill Road, Homer, LA 71040. 
2.    We are aware that the Constitution, under the 8th Amendment, bans cruel and unusual punishments; the Amendment also imposes duties on prison officials who must provide humane conditions of confinement and ensure that inmates receive adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and must take reasonable measures to guarantee the safety of the inmates. 
3.    We are aware that Louisiana prison officials have sworn by LSA-R.S.15:828 to provide humane treatment and rehabilitation to persons committed to its care and to direct efforts to return every person in its custody to the community as promptly as practicable. 
4.    We are confined in a double-bunked six-by-nine foot or 54 square feet cell with another human being 22-hours-a-day and are compelled to endure the degrading experience of being in close proximity of another human being while defecating. 
5.    There are no educational or rehabilitation programs for the majority of prisoners confined in the N-1 building except for a selected few inmates who are soon to be released. 
6.    We get one hour and 30 minutes on the yard and/or gym seven days a week. Each day we walk to the kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which takes about one minute to get there. We are given ten minutes to eat. 
7.    The daily planner for inmates confined in the N-1 building is to provide inmates one hour and 30 minutes on yard or gym; escort inmates to kitchen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to sit and eat for approximately ten minutes each meal; provide a ten minute shower for each cell every day; provide one ten minute phone call per week; confine prisoners in cell 22-hours-a-day. 
8.    When we are taking a shower we are threatened by guards with disciplinary reports if we are not out on time. A typical order is: "if you are not out of shower in ten minutes pack your shit and I'm sending you back to N-2, N-3, or N-4"—a more punitive form of solitary confinement. 
9.    When walking outside to yard, gym or kitchen, guards order us to put our hands behind our back or they'll write us up and send us back to N-2, N-3, N-4. 
10.  When we are sitting at the table eating, guards order us not to talk or they'll write us up and send us back to N-2, N-3, N-4. ) 
11.  Guards are harassing us every day and are threatening to write up disciplinary reports and send us back to a more punitive cellblock (N-2, N-3, N-4) if we question any arbitrary use of authority or even voice an opinion in opposition to the status quo. Also, guards take away good time credits, phone, TV, radio, canteen, and contact visits for talking too loud or not having hands behind back or for any reason they want. We are also threatened with slave labor discipline including isolation (removing mattress from cell from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M.,) strip cell (removing mattress and bedding and stationery from cell for ten to 30 days or longer), food loaf  (taking one's meal for breakfast, lunch, or dinner and mixing it all together into one big mass, bake it in oven and serve it to prisoners for punishment.)
12.  When prison guards write up disciplinary reports and transfer us to the more punitive restrictive solitary confinement in N-2, N-3, N-4 or N-5, guards then enforce an arbitrary rule that gives prisoners the ultimatum of sending all their books and personal property home or let the prison dispose of it. 
13.  Louisiana prison officials charge indigent prisoners (who earn less than four cents an hour) $3.00 for routine requests for healthcare services, $6.00 for emergency medical requests, and $2.00 for each new medical prescription. They wait until our family and friends send us money and take it to pay prisoners' medical bills. 
Our concerns:
14.  How much public monies are appropriated to the LDOC budget and specifically allotted to provide humane treatment and implement the rehabilitation program pursuant to LSA- R.S.15:828? 
15.  Why does Elayn Hunt Correctional Center located in the capitol of Louisiana have so many educational and rehabilitation programs teaching prisoners job and life skills for reentry whereas there are no such programs to engage the majority of prisoners confined in the N-1, N- 2, N-3, and N-4 solitary confinement buildings at DWCC. 
16.  It is customary for Louisiana prison officials and DWCC prison guards to tell inmates confined in the prison's cellblocks to wait until transfer to prison dormitory to participate in programs when in fact there are no such programs available and ready to engage the majority of the state's 34,000 prisoner population. The programs are especially needed for prisoners confined in a six-by-nine foot or 54 square feet cell with another person for 22-or-more-hours-per-day. 
17.  Why can't prisoners use phone and computers every day to communicate with family and peers as part of rehabilitation and staying connected to the community? 
18.  Why do prisoners have to be transferred miles and miles away from loved ones to remote correctional facilities when there are facilities closer to loved ones? 
19.  Why are prison guards allowed to treat prisoners as chattel slaves, confined in cages 22-or-more-hours-per-day, take away phone calls and visitation and canteen at will, and take away earned good time credits for any reason at all without input from family, one's peers and community? 
20.  Why do the outside communities allow prison guards to create hostile living environments and conditions of confinement that leaves prisoners in a state of chattel slavery, stress, anxiety, anger, rage, inner torment, despair, worry, and in a worse condition from when we first entered the prison? 
21.  Why do state governments and/or peers in the community allow racist or bigoted white families who reside in the rural and country parts of Louisiana to run the state's corrections system with impunity? For example, DWCC Warden Jerry Goodwin institutes racist and bigoted corrections policies and practices for the very purpose of oppression, repression, antagonizing and dehumanizing the inmates who will one day be released from prison. 
22.  David Wade Correctional Center Colonel Lonnie Nail, a bigot and a racist, takes his orders from Warden Jerry Goodwin, another racist and bigot. Both Goodwin and Nail influences subordinate corrections officers to act toward prisoners in a racist or bigoted manner and with an arrogant attitude. This creates a hostile living environment and debilitating conditions of confinement for both guards and prisoners and prevents rehabilitation of inmates.
23.  In other industrialized democracies like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, et al, it is reported that no prisoner should be declared beyond reform or redemption without first attempting to rehabilitate them. Punitive or harsh conditions of confinement are not supported because they see the loss of freedom inherent in a prison sentence as punishment enough. One Netherlands official reported that their motto is to start with the idea of "Reintegration back into society on day one" when people are locked up. "You can't make an honest argument that how someone is treated while incarcerated doesn't affect how they behave when they get out," the official added. 
24.  Additionally, some Scandinavian countries have adopted open prison programs without fences or armed guards. Prisoners who prove by their conduct that they can be trusted are placed in a prison resembling a college campus more than a prison. The result is a 20 percent recidivism rate, compared to a 67 percent rate in the United States. 
25.  The National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) in a position statement says: "Prolonged (greater than 15 consecutive days) solitary confinement is cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, and harmful to an individual's health."
 What We Believe: 
26.  We believe that when the greater portion of public monies goes to war and the military, this leaves little funds left for community reinvestment and human development.The people have less access to resources by which to get a better idea of human behavior and rely on higher education instead of prison to solve cultural, social, political, economic problems in the system that may put people at risk to domestic violence and crime as a way to survive and cope with shortcomings in the system. 
27.  We believe that investing public monies in the rehabilitation program LSA-R.S.15:828 to teach prisoners job and life skills will redeem inmates, instill morals, and make incarcerated people productive and fit for society. 
28.  We believe that confining inmates in cellblocks 15-or-more=hours-per-day is immoral, uncivilized, brutalizing, a waste of time and counter-productive to rehabilitation and society's goals of "promoting the general welfare" and "providing a more perfect union with justice for all." 
29.  We believe that corrections officers who prove by their actions that incarcerated people are nothing more than chattel slaves are bucking the laws and creating hardening criminals and these corrections officers are, therefore, a menace to society. 
Our Demands:
30.  We are demanding a public conversation from community activists and civil rights leaders about (1) the historic relationship between chattel slavery, the retaliatory assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the resurrection of slavery written into the 13th Amendment; (2) the historic relationship between the 13th Amendment, the backlash against Reconstruction, Peonage, Convict Leasing, and Slavery; (3) the historic relationship between the 13th Amendment, the War Against Poverty, the War on Drugs, Criminal Justice and Prison Slavery. 
31.  We demand that the Louisiana legislature pass the Decarcerate Louisiana Anti-Slavery and Freedom Liberation Act of 2020 into law and end prison slavery and the warehousing of incarcerated people for the very purpose of repression, oppression, and using prisoners and their families and supporters as a profit center for corporate exploitation and to generate revenue to balance the budget and stimulate the state economy. 
32.  We are demanding that Warden Jerry Goodwin and Colonel Lonnie Nail step down and be replaced by people are deemed excellent public servants in good standing with human rights watchdog groups and civil rights community. 
33.  We are demanding that the LDOC provide public monies to operate state prison dormitories and cellblocks as rehabilitation centers to teach incarcerated people job and life skills five-days-a-week from 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. 
34.  We are demanding that the LDOC release a public statement announcing that "from this day forward it will not support punitive or harsh conditions of confinement," and that "no prisoner should be declared beyond reform or redemption without first attempting to rehabilitate them."
35.  We are demanding that the prison cellblocks be operated as open dormitories (made in part a health clinic and part college campus) so that incarcerated people can have enough space to walk around and socialize, participate in class studies, exercise, use telephone as the need arise. Prisoners are already punished by incarceration so there is no need to punish or further isolate them. Racism and abuse of power will not be tolerated. 
36.  We are demanding an end to unjust policies and practices that impose punishments and deprive incarcerated people of phone calls, visitation, canteen, good time credits, books and other personal property that pose no threat to public safety. 
37.  We are demanding that LDOC provide incarcerated people cellphones and computers to communicate with the public and stay connected to the community. 
38.  We are demanding the right to communicate with reporters to aid and assist incarcerated persons in preparing a press release to communicate to the public Decarcerate Louisiana's vision and mission statements, aims, and plans for moving forward. 
39.  We are demanding the right to participate in the U.S.-European Criminal Justice Innovation Project and share our complaint, concerns, and demands for a humane corrections program. 
40.  We are only demanding the right to enough space to create, to innovate, to excel in learning, to use scientific knowledge to improve our person and place and standing in the free world. The rule of law must support the betterment and uplifting of all humanity. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." 
41.  We demand that the responsibility for prisoner medical care be removed from DOC wardens and place it under the management of the state's health office; increase state health officer staff to better monitor prisoner healthcare and oversee vendor contracts. 
42.  We have a God-given right and responsibility to resist abuse of power from the wrongdoers, to confront unjust authority and oppression, to battle for justice until we achieve our demands for liberation and freedom. 
We, the undersigned, declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. 
Executed on this 28th Day of January 2019. 
Ronald Brooks #385964 
David Johnson #84970 
Freddie Williams #598701 
Earl Hollins #729041 
James Harris #399514 
Tyrone Carter #550354 
Kerry Carter #392013 
Ivo Richardson #317371 
Rondrikus Fulton #354313 
Kentell Simmons #601717 
Jayvonte Pines #470985 
Deandre Miles #629008 
Kenneth P. #340729 
Brandon Ceaser #421453 
Tyronne Ward #330964 
Jermaine Atkins #448421 
Charles Rodgers #320513 
Steve Givens #557854 
Timothy Alfred #502378 
—wsimg.com, January 2019
https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/1f4bce95-7ddd-4b2d-8ee7-d8edf36f394f/downloads/Declaration_of_Undersigned_Prisoners.pdf?ver=1555809786117



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New Prison and Jail Population Figures Released by U.S. Department of Justice

By yearend 2017, the United States prison population had declined by 7.3% since reaching its peak level in 2009, according to new data released by the Department of Justice. The prison population decreases are heavily influenced by a handful of states that have reduced their populations by 30% or more in recent years. However, as of yearend 2017 more than half the states were still experiencing increases in their populations or rates of decline only in the single digits. 
Analysis of the new data by The Sentencing Project reveals that: 
  • The United States remains as the world leader in its rate of incarceration, locking up its citizens at 5-10 times the rate of other industrialized nations. At the current rate of decline it will take 75 years to cut the prison population by 50%.
      
  • The population serving life sentences is now at a record high. One of every seven individuals in prison – 206,000 – is serving life.
      
  • Six states have reduced their prison populations by at least 30% over the past two decades – Alaska, Connecticut, California, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont.  
  • The rate of women's incarceration has been rising at a faster rate than men's since the 1980s, and declines in recent years have been slower than among men.
      
  • Racial disparities in women's incarceration have changed dramatically since the start of the century. Black women were incarcerated at 6 times the rate of white women in 2000, while the 2017 figure is now 1.8 times that rate. These changes have been a function of both a declining number of black women in prison and a rising number of white women. For Hispanic women, the ratio has changed from 1.6 times that of white women in 2000 to 1.4 times in 2017. 
The declines in prison and jail populations reported by the Department of Justice today are encouraging, but still fall far short of what is necessary for meaningful criminal justice reform. In order to take the next step in ending mass incarceration policymakers will need to scale back excessive sentencing for all offenses, a key factor which distinguishes the U.S. from other nations. 

Share This 

[Note: China's population is 1,419,147,756* as of April 26, 2019 with 1,649,804 in prison***; while the population of the USA is 328,792,291 as of April 27, 2019** with 2,121,600 in prison.*** 
*http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/
**https://www.census.gov/popclock/
***https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate]


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Courage to Resist
daniel hale drone activist
Drone vet turned activist facing 50 years for whistle-blowing
Daniel Hale, an Air Force veteran and former US intelligence analyst was arrested May 9th and charged with violating the Espionage Act. Daniel is a well-known anti-drone activist who has spoken out a number of anti-war events and conferences. He's a member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, and he's featured in the documentary "National Bird." For years, Daniel has expressed concern that he'd be targeted by the government.  Learn more.
Hal Muskat
Podcast: "There were US anti-war soldiers all over the world" - Hal Muskat
"I told my command officer that I wasn't going to, I was refusing my orders [to Vietnam] … In his rage, he thought if he court-martialed me, he'd have to stay in the Army past his discharge date." While stationed in Europe, Hal Muskat refused orders to Vietnam and joined the GI Movement, resulting in two court martials. This Courage to Resist podcast was produced in collaboration with the Vietnam Full Disclosure effort of Veterans For Peace. Listen to Hal Muskat's story.





Chelsea Manning returned to jail after brief release; Faces half million dollar fine in addition to another 18 months prison
chelsea manning resists
Since our last newsletter less than two weeks ago, Chelsea Manning was freed from jail when the grand jury investigating Julian Assange and WikiLeaks expired. However, a few days later, she was sent back to jail for refusing to collaborate with a new grand jury on the same subject. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga ordered Chelsea fined $500 every day she is in custody after 30 days and $1,000 every day she is in custody after 60 days -- a possible total of $502,000. Statement from Chelsea's lawyers.
Stand with Reality Winner, rally in DC
chelsea manning resists
June 3, 2019 at 7pm (Monday)
Lafayette Square, Washington DC 
Please join friends and supporters as we raise awareness of the persecution of this young veteran and brave truth teller. This marks two years of imprisonment of Reality for helping to expose hacking attempts on US election systems leading up to the 2016 presidential election. For more info, visit the "Stand with Reality" pages on Twitter or Facebook. Order "Stand with Reality" shirts, banners, and buttons from Left Together protest shirts.



COURAGE TO RESIST ~ SUPPORT THE TROOPS WHO REFUSE TO FIGHT!
484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland, California 94610 ~ 510-488-3559
www.couragetoresist.org ~ facebook.com/couragetoresist
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Funds for Kevin Cooper

https://www.gofundme.com/funds-for-kevin-cooper?member=1994108

For 34 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California. 

Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here . 

In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered  limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison. 

The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, paper, toiletries, supplementary food, and/or phone calls.

Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!





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Don't extradite Assange!

To the government of the UK
Julian Assange, through Wikileaks, has done the world a great service in documenting American war crimes, its spying on allies and other dirty secrets of the world's most powerful regimes, organisations and corporations. This has not endeared him to the American deep state. Both Obama, Clinton and Trump have declared that arresting Julian Assange should be a priority. We have recently received confirmation [1] that he has been charged in secret so as to have him extradited to the USA as soon as he can be arrested. 
Assange's persecution, the persecution of a publisher for publishing information [2] that was truthful and clearly in the interest of the public - and which has been republished in major newspapers around the world - is a danger to freedom of the press everywhere, especially as the USA is asserting a right to arrest and try a non-American who neither is nor was then on American soil. The sentence is already clear: if not the death penalty then life in a supermax prison and ill treatment like Chelsea Manning. The very extradition of Julian Assange to the United States would at the same time mean the final death of freedom of the press in the West. 
The courageous nation of Ecuador has offered Assange political asylum within its London embassy for several years until now. However, under pressure by the USA, the new government has made it clear that they want to drive Assange out of the embassy and into the arms of the waiting police as soon as possible. They have already curtailed his internet and his visitors and turned the heating off, leaving him freezing in a desolate state for the past few months and leading to the rapid decline of his health, breaching UK obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights. Therefore, our demand both to the government of Ecuador and the government of the UK is: don't extradite Assange to the US! Guarantee his human rights, make his stay at the embassy as bearable as possible and enable him to leave the embassy towards a secure country as soon as there are guarantees not to arrest and extradite him. Furthermore, we, as EU voters, encourage European nations to take proactive steps to protect a journalist in danger. The world is still watching.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/16/us/politics/julian-assange-indictment-wikileaks.html
[2] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-concluded-prosecution-of-julian-assange-for-publishing-documents-poses-grave-threats-to-press-freedom/
https://internal.diem25.org/en/petitions/1

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Words of Wisdom

Louis Robinson Jr., 77
Recording secretary for Local 1714 of the United Auto Workers from 1999 to 2018, with the minutes from a meeting of his union's retirees' chapter.

"One mistake the international unions in the United States made was when Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. When he did that, the unions could have brought this country to a standstill. All they had to do was shut down the truck drivers for a month, because then people would not have been able to get the goods they needed. So that was one of the mistakes they made. They didn't come together as organized labor and say: "No. We aren't going for this. Shut the country down." That's what made them weak. They let Reagan get away with what he did. A little while after that, I read an article that said labor is losing its clout, and I noticed over the years that it did. It happened. It doesn't feel good."

[On the occasion of the shut-down of the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant March 6, 2019.]
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/lordstown-general-motors-plant.html

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To: Indiana Department of Corrections

Kevin "Rashid" Johnson Should Have Access to His Personal Property

Petition Text

1. IDOC regulation 02-01-101-VIII must be respected! Kevin Johnson (IDOC# 264847) must be allowed to select from his property the items that he most immediately needs. He has been left without any of the material he requires for contacting his loved ones, his writing (this includes books), his pending litigation, and for his artwork. 
2. Kevin Johnson (IDOC# 264847) should be released into General Population. Prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture. Moreover, he has not committed any infractions.

Sign the petition here:
https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/kevin-rashid-johnson-should-have-access-to-his-personal-property?bucket&source=facebook-share-email-button&time=1547257147&fbclid=IwAR3rjpTZog631Oxv6oqjZmaJQv1GLIMHMuhDaP4g0Xu_EajWwW6X1faBPbE


FOR UPDATES CHECK OUT RASHID'S WEBSITE AT RASHIDMOD.COM
you can also hear a recent interview with Rashid on Final Straw podcast here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/tag/kevin-rashid-johnson/
Write to Rashid:
Kevin Rashid Johnson's writings and artwork have been widely circulated. He is the author of a book,Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense, New Afrikan Black Panther Party, (Kersplebedeb, 2010).

Kevin Johnson D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Rd.
Pendleton, IN 46064-9001
www.rashidmod.com

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Get Malik Out of Ad-Seg


Keith "Malik" Washington is an incarcerated activist who has spoken out on conditions of confinement in Texas prison and beyond:  from issues of toxic water and extreme heat, to physical and sexual abuse of imprisoned people, to religious discrimination and more.  Malik has also been a tireless leader in the movement to #EndPrisonSlavery which gained visibility during nationwide prison strikes in 2016 and 2018.  View his work at comrademalik.com or write him at:

Keith H. Washington
TDC# 1487958
McConnell Unit
3001 S. Emily Drive
Beeville, TX 78102
Friends, it's time to get Malik out of solitary confinement.

Malik has experienced intense, targeted harassment ever since he dared to start speaking against brutal conditions faced by incarcerated people in Texas and nationwide--but over the past few months, prison officials have stepped up their retaliation even more.

In Administrative Segregation (solitary confinement) at McConnell Unit, Malik has experienced frequent humiliating strip searches, medical neglect, mail tampering and censorship, confinement 23 hours a day to a cell that often reached 100+ degrees in the summer, and other daily abuses too numerous to name.  It could not be more clear that they are trying to make an example of him because he is a committed freedom fighter.  So we have to step up.


Who to contact:
TDCJ Executive Director Bryan Collier
Phone: (936)295-6371

Senior Warden Philip Sinfuentes (McConnell Unit)
Phone: (361) 362-2300

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Major George Tillery
MAJOR TILLERY FILES NEW LEGAL PETITION
SEX FOR LIES AND
MANUFACTURED TESTIMONY
April 25, 2018-- The arrest of two young men in Starbucks for the crime of "sitting while black," and the four years prison sentence to rapper Meek Mill for a minor parole violation are racist outrages in Philadelphia, PA that made national news in the past weeks. Yesterday Meek Mills was released on bail after a high profile defense campaign and a Pa Supreme Court decision citing evidence his conviction was based solely on a cop's false testimony.
These events underscore the racism, frame-up, corruption and brutality at the core of the criminal injustice system. Pennsylvania "lifer" Major Tillery's fight for freedom puts a spotlight on the conviction of innocent men with no evidence except the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches who have been coerced and given favors by cops and prosecutors.

Sex for Lies and Manufactured Testimony
For thirty-five years Major Tillery has fought against his 1983 arrest, then conviction and sentence of life imprisonment without parole for an unsolved 1976 pool hall murder and assault. Major Tillery's defense has always been his innocence. The police and prosecution knew Tillery did not commit these crimes. Jailhouse informant Emanuel Claitt gave lying testimony that Tillery was one of the shooters.

In May and June 2016, Emanuel Claitt gave sworn statements that his testimony was a total lie, and that the homicide cops and the prosecutors told him what to say and coached him before trial. Not only was he coerced to lie that Major Tillery was a shooter, but to lie and claim there were no plea deals made in exchange for his testimony. He provided the information about the specific homicide detectives and prosecutors involved in manufacturing his testimony and details about being allowed "sex for lies". In August 2016, Claitt reaffirmed his sworn statements in a videotape, posted on YouTube and on JusticeforMajorTillery.org.

Major Tillery has Fought his Conviction and Advocated for Other Prisoners for over 30 Years

Major Tillery Needs Your Help:


Major Tillery and family

HOW YOU CAN HELP
    Financial Support—Tillery's investigation is ongoing. He badly needs funds to fight for his freedom.
    Go to JPay.com;
    code: Major Tillery AM9786 PADOC

    Tell Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner:
    The Conviction Review Unit should investigate Major Tillery's case. He is innocent. The only evidence at trial was from lying jail house informants who now admit it was false.
    Call: 215-686-8000 or

    Write to:
    Security Processing Center
    Major Tillery AM 9786
    268 Bricker Road
    Bellefonte, PA 16823
    For More Information, Go To: JusticeForMajorTillery.org
    Call/Write:
    Kamilah Iddeen (717) 379-9009, Kamilah29@yahoo.com
    Rachel Wolkenstein (917) 689-4009, RachelWolkenstein@gmail.com




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    ILPDC NEWSLETTER BANNER
      

    On Monday March 4th, 2019 Leonard Peltier was advised that his request for a transfer had been unceremoniously denied by the United States Bureau of Prisons.

    The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee appreciates and thanks the large number of his supporters who took the time to write, call, email, or fax the BOP in support of Leonard's request for a transfer.
    Those of us who have been supporting Leonard's freedom for a number of years are disappointed but resolute to continue pushing for his freedom and until that day, to continue to push for his transfer to be closer to his relatives and the Indigenous Nations who support him.
    44 years is too damn long for an innocent man to be locked up. How can his co-defendants be innocent on the grounds of self-defense but Leonard remains in prison? The time is now for all of us to dig deep and do what we can and what we must to secure freedom for Leonard Peltier before it's too late.
    We need the support of all of you now, more than ever. The ILPDC plans to appeal this denial of his transfer to be closer to his family. We plan to demand he receive appropriate medical care, and to continue to uncover and utilize every legal mechanism to secure his release. To do these things we need money to support the legal work.
    Land of the Brave postcard-page-0

    Please call the ILPDC National office or email us for a copy of the postcard you can send to the White House. We need your help to ask President Trump for Leonard's freedom.
    DONATE 
      
    ©2019 ILPDC | 116 W Osborne Avenue Tampa, FL 33603 

    Powered by
    GoDaddy Email Marketing ®

    Free Leonard Peltier!


    Art by Leonard Peltier
    Write to:
    Leonard Peltier 89637-132
    USP Coleman 1,  P.O. Box 1033
    Coleman, FL 33521

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    Working people are helping to feed the poor hungry corporations! 
    Charity for the Wealthy!

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    1) Emergency Aid for Migrants Badly Divides Democrat
    By Julie Hirschfeild Davis, June 24, 2029
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/politics/migrants-emergency-aid-border.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
    Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called for passage of the emergency aid package, saying that it protects families and "does not fund the administration's failed mass detention policy."CreditCreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times

    WASHINGTON — Congress is trying to rush $4.5 billion in emergency humanitarian aid to the southwestern border while placing new restrictions on President Trump's immigration crackdown, spurred on by disturbing images of suffering migrant families and of children living in squalor in overcrowded detention facilities.
    But with a House vote on the package planned for Tuesday, some Democrats are revolting over the measure, fearing that the aid will be used to carry out Mr. Trump's aggressive tactics, including deportation raids that he has promised will begin within two weeks. Republicans are siding with the White House, which on Monday threatened a veto. They oppose restrictions in the measure that are meant to dictate better standards for facilities that hold migrant children and to bar the money from being used for enforcing immigration law.
    Those twin challenges have left the fate of the bill up in the air, even as evidence of deplorable conditions at the border underscores both the urgent need for the money and the bitter rift over Mr. Trump's policies.
    Officials confirmed Monday that hundreds of migrant children had been transferred out of a Border Patrol station in Clint, Tex., where they did not have soap, toothbrushes, clean clothes or enough food. The move followed detailed reports about the dismal conditions that there were no diapers for toddlers and that children as young as 8 were caring for infants.

    Those reports led to a backlash from elected officials and a rise in donations to immigrant advocacy groups aimed at sending supplies to the shelter. Officials said only 30 children remain in the Clint station, which was intended as a temporary holding center. Children are supposed to be transferred out after 72 hours, but many had been held there for weeks.
    Speaker Nancy Pelosi huddled privately into the evening with concerned Democrats on Monday to try to keep the bill on track, with little time to spare.
    [Read about the differences in the House and Senate bills.]
    "Democrats distrust this president because we have seen his cruel immigration policies and lawless behavior terrorize our constituents," Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said on Monday evening as she pleaded with fellow Democrats to support the package. "That is why we have language to stop transfers of money for immigration raids and detention beds. But we cannot allow our anger at this president to blind us to the horrific conditions at facilities along the border as the agencies run out of money."
    The aid package poses a difficult dilemma for Democrats, who are torn between their desire to champion humanitarian help for migrants and their concern that any money they approve will be used by the Trump administration to advance what they consider to be a fundamentally inhumane set of policies. They are also loath to be seen as the ones holding up soap, diapers and food for babies, keenly aware that Mr. Trump and his team are eager to blame Democrats for the dire conditions.
    "The administration chooses to direct the vast majority of funding toward enforcement, and then cries poverty when it comes to diapers and food," said Heidi Altman, the policy director at the liberal National Immigrant Justice Center. "It's a hostage-taking way of engaging in policy."

    Hispanic-American lawmakers are particularly split; some are arguing that it is crucial to get the aid to agencies and outside groups assisting migrants at the border, while others say they will not be complicit in sending any money to the very departments that have carried out Mr. Trump's harsh initiatives against immigrants.
    "I will not fund another dime to allow ICE to continue its manipulative tactics," Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, said on Monday evening on her way into the meeting in Ms. Pelosi's Capitol office.

    The gathering stretched on for more than an hour as lawmakers aired their differences and complaints about the package. "It's intense," Representative Tony Cárdenas, Democrat of California, said as he emerged from the session, saying he was leaning toward supporting the aid. "No yelling, no screaming, but it's intense."
    Several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the Congressional Progressive Caucus are pushing to attach stricter conditions to the money, including higher humanitarian standards for facilities that hold migrant children.
    But given the urgent nature of the situation facing migrants, some lawmakers, particularly those from districts on the border, said there was no time to hold out for such additions.
    "Are there things I would like to change? Absolutely," said Representative Veronica Escobar, Democrat of Texas, whose El Paso district abuts the border. "But we have a real crisis."

    She said Democrats were trying to advance "a bill that reflects more of our values," but added: "We're running out of time. We all saw what happened in Clint — there's no time."
    Concern about the funding bill swelled over the weekend, after Mr. Trump tweeted on Sunday that he was suspending the raids for two weeks to provide time for a bipartisan compromise on changing asylum laws and closing immigration "loopholes." His abrupt reversal came after Ms. Pelosi telephoned Mr. Trump to ask for a delay.
    Ms. Pelosi praised the postponement, and in a strongly worded statement later on Sunday she called for passage of the emergency aid package, saying that it protects families and "does not fund the administration's failed mass detention policy." It would also do nothing to change asylum laws to meet Mr. Trump's demands.
    "As members of Congress and as Americans, we have a sacred moral responsibility to protect the human rights and the lives of vulnerable children and families," she said. "To do anything less would be an outrageous and unacceptable violation of our oath and our morality."
    But even as the speaker was pressing to advance the bill, dozens of House Democrats were in revolt over it. In separate conference calls on Sunday, more than 30 members of the Progressive Caucus and more than 15 members of the Hispanic Caucus aired their concerns, many of them arguing that the legislation did not set high enough standards for migrant shelters or do enough to block money from going toward enforcement.
    "We all want to address the problems at the border, but we don't know that there are enough sticks in this bill to make sure that the Trump administration actually spends the money the way they're supposed to," said Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington and the co-chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus. "He's creating these crises and then trying to point a finger at Democrats to give him more money, which he then uses for his own purposes."
    Ms. Jayapal said there was no reason to believe that the Trump administration would abide by any restrictions included in the legislation or standards dictated by the measure, given its "lawless" behavior when it came to immigrants.

    The conflict in the House stands in contrast to the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats on a key committee came together last week to approve a $4.6 billion border aid package that contained some limitations to bar the administration from using the resources for enforcement. It would, for instance, prohibit the Office of Refugee Resettlement, the division of the Department of Health and Human Services that houses unaccompanied migrant children, from sharing information with immigration officials about people who take custody of the children.

    The House bill goes further than the Senate legislation in placing restrictions on the money. Facilities that house unaccompanied children would have a slightly shorter time frame — 12 months instead of 14 months — to meet existing legal standards for healthy, sanitary and humane conditions; they would have to allow oversight visits from members of Congress without warning; and the Department of Health and Human Services would have to report a child's death in its custody to Congress within 24 hours.
    Representative Chuck Fleischmann of Tennessee, the senior Republican on the panel overseeing the bill, said he opposed the measure as written by House Democrats. "You will see just about every Republican in the House vote against the Democratic supplemental bill," Mr. Fleischmann said, citing the added restrictions and the lack of funding for back pay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
    And even if they are able to muscle it through, he added, doing so sets up a negotiation to resolve differences with the Senate that will only delay the aid. "The enemy right now is time," said Mr. Fleischmann, who supports the Senate bill.
    "It is agreeable to the White House," he said, "so we have two-thirds of the puzzle complete there."
    The White House on Monday issued a statement threatening that Mr. Trump would veto the House measure because it "does not provide adequate funding to meet the current crisis" and "contains partisan provisions designed to hamstring the administration's border enforcement efforts."

    Ms. Pelosi has told colleagues that while she understands their concerns about the aid measure, its demise in the House would essentially cede the issue to the Senate and its weaker bill, according to people familiar with the conversations who described them on the condition of anonymity.
    But many Democrats are pressing for more. They want to give the administration less time to comply with existing standards for facilities that house children, and to include higher health, nutritional, hygiene and sanitation standards for Customs and Border Protection facilities.
    They would ban for-profit companies from running migrant shelters and would scrap funding for the United States Marshals that is specifically geared toward referring people who entered or re-entered the country illegally for criminal prosecution. And they want stronger prohibitions against sharing the immigration records of people who come forward to take custody of unaccompanied migrant children.
    The measure has also exposed a rift among immigrant advocacy groups, with some of the most liberal organizations actively calling on lawmakers to oppose it and others privately saying the aid, however imperfect, is desperately needed.
    The grass-roots group Indivisible began a social media campaign to urge members of Congress to vote against the legislation as a way of starving "Trump's deportation machine," in a tweet with the hashtag #notonedollar.
    The language echoes that of several liberal Democrats who announced on Friday that they were opposed to the funding bill, saying they could not "in good conscience" back legislation that sent money to Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to "support a fundamentally cruel and broken immigration system."
    "These radicalized, criminal agencies are destroying families and killing innocent children," said a statement by four freshman representatives, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. "It is absolutely unconscionable to even consider giving one more dollar to support this president's deportation force that openly commits human rights abuses and refuses to be held accountable to the American people."

    Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Washington, and Caitlin Dickerson from New York.

    My NYT Comment:

    "It is so crystal clear to me that this government made up of the members of the Democratic and Republican Parties are incapable of providing any urgently needed real solution to this "crisis" since the crisis is wholly manufactured by the U.S. in the first place. The real crisis that must be met is that U.S. capital is, and has been, invading countries all over the world taking control of natural resources leaving the people in those countries to starve, kill each other for survival, or attempt to escape to another place where they can survive. And it started with Manifest Destiny—the white man's right to rule or kill those they thought of as "savages" to take control of the wealth of the land they lived on. Billions have been murdered by capital and their quest for wealth. We are on the verge of history—will humanity learn to live in peace, equality and justice for all or will we all die? The puppet-politicians of capital can't solve this—it's up to us to take control, peacefully and in solidarity with each other, and share the wealth of the world with everyone equally. It's the only solution."
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/politics/migrants-emergency-aid-border.html#commentsContainer&permid=101122141:101122141

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    2) On the Antarctic Ice With Anthony Bourdain
    He didn't come for the food. He wanted to know about our climate research.
    By Angela Zoumplis, June 25, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/opinion/bourdain-antarctica-climate.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

    Anthony Bourdain in 2017.CreditCreditSlaven Vlasic/Getty Images
    In February 2017, I was nearing the end of four months at a remote outpost in Antarctica, gathering data for my Ph.D. thesis. Donald Trump had been inaugurated a month earlier and already the words "climate change" had been purged from the White House website. The mood among the scientists at the bottom of the world had changed drastically. We had been the forefront of studying climate change and suddenly we were being shunted aside.
    Around the last week of our expedition to Lake Hoare, a barren, Martian-like region of the continent, the National Science Foundation, our sponsor, told us that Anthony Bourdain would be arriving to interview us at our field camp for his CNN show "Parts Unknown." A lot of us knew Mr. Bourdain as a chef and foodie, but Antarctica isn't known for its local cuisine. There are no Michelin-starred restaurants there (or any restaurants for that matter) and so amid the excitement, there was also a bit of confusion about his visit.
    After a long, painfully cold day of sampling glacial meltwater to analyze its biological and chemical components, we all huddled around a laptop to prep for his arrival. We watched a clip of his earlier show "No Reservations" in which Mr. Bourdain eats a still-beating cobra heart.

    "I hope he doesn't want to try the penguin," said Rae Spain, the field camp manager. She is known across the continent for her ability to take frozen chicken from 2012 and canned vegetables from an undetermined year and make it into a five-star Indian dish. She would be in charge of the food we would share with Mr. Bourdain and his crew.

    There was plenty of worry that a celebrity like him would have a hard time in Antarctica. It is, after all, the coldest, driest, windiest place on earth. Would he be O.K. sleeping in a tent? Could he endure the food? Water was so scarce at our field camp that we showered only once a week. Would he be cool with that? 
    After binge-watching more episodes of his show, we put our fears to rest. This man had floated down the Congo River while trying to kill and cook a chicken in the dark. He and his crew had been trapped in a hotel in Lebanon in 2006 during fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. He'd gratefully accepted and consumed uncooked warthog anus in Namibia. He'd be perfectly fine in Antarctica.

    Mr. Bourdain, who died a year ago this month, arrived with a calming smile. "Hi, I'm Tony," he said, reaching out for introductions. Most of the initial attempts to socialize on our side involved chats about food. We asked him about eating eyeballs and his best and worst meals. "I can tell you the worst dish by far has been the McNugget," he said. He was easy to talk to. He was curious about us. 
    Rae Spain made an exceptional dinner that night. Mr. Bourdain discovered how she managed to make ridiculously tasty stuff out of very limited ingredients (her secret: an extensive personal collection of spices) but he was more interested in her story. What kept her going down to the ice for 34 years?

    Mr. Bourdain told us he would not be focusing on the behavioral quirks of penguins. Instead he wanted to know about the projects we were working on and why scientists pursue research in such a forbidding place. He was well aware that science and climate research were under threat from the new Trump administration. 
    "The beginning of the 20th century, when scientists and explorers were national heroes, there was a hunger for knowledge and discovery." Mr. Bourdain told us, then added: "Not a good climate for facts, though, we live in today. It's a world that is increasingly hostile to basically everything you're all about." 
    During the day, we ran around a polar desert recording information on warming, glacial melt and flooding to add to a 25-year collection of data that helps us identify trend lines. At night, we heard reports via email of colleagues frantically working to save their data because they feared it would be deleted from government websites. And there at our foldable camp table was Anthony Bourdain, giving us a platform to discuss our research on a highly rated television program. He turned his spotlight on our efforts to collect and analyze data critical to understanding the changing climate.
    "This is sort of the last place on Earth where science seems to be celebrated at every level of society. Where people are making great personal sacrifices in pursuit of knowledge. That sounds quaint where I come from. It's quite wonderful," Mr. Bourdain said to us. "All you need is better press." 
    His show would give us that. Watching "Parts Unknown: Antarctica" was a very hopeful moment for all of us because our painstaking work was being celebrated at a time when climate research was under assault in Washington (and, where, unfortunately, it continues to be).
    At the end of dinner, we convinced Mr. Bourdain to join us out for a walk to a frozen lake and its sandy beach for a game of Frisbee. We handed him a pair of crampons to put over his shoes. "These would be great for getting out of bars," he said as we stumbled our way across the ice. We all sat together on the beach watching the midnight sun go behind a mountain and talking about science and our travels. 
    By the end of his weekend visit to our camp, we had offered to hire him as part of the biology sampling team. He replied that he was sure he'd be fired "for sampling too much of the bacon."
    He hadn't come to Antarctica for the food. When you look back on his shows, you see that he rarely went anywhere just for the food. Food was a common ground. It was a means to conversation. The conversation that weekend was about science, and Anthony Bourdain, who would have turned 63 on Tuesday, was our champion, as he was for so many others.
    Angela Zoumplis is a polar biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

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    3) Guantánamo Case to Test Whether Torture Can Be Put on the Docket
    By Carol Rosenberg, June 24, 2019
    In 2003, at one secret overseas site, a C.I.A. interrogator told an Indonesian prisoner that he would never go to court, because 'we can never let the world know what I have done to you,'"
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/politics/guantanamo-case-to-test-whether-torture-can-be-put-on-the-docket.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
    A Romanian air base that became a critical focus of a European investigation into secret prisons operated by the C.I.A. Lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo Bay are exploring how to get time-served compensation for the men who spent years in the C.I.A.'s secret prison network.CreditCreditVadim Ghirda/Associated Press

    This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
    GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — During the more than three years he spent in C.I.A. prisons before being sent to Guantánamo Bay, Majid Khan says he was hung from his wrists, naked and hooded, for two straight days, causing wild hallucinations.
    Mr. Khan, a confessed Qaeda courier, was held in almost total darkness for a year, fearing he would be drowned in an icy tub and isolated in a cell with bugs that bit him until he bled. In 2004, his second year of C.I.A. detention, the agency "infused" a purée of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus up Mr. Khan's rectum when he went on a hunger strike, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
    Now Mr. Khan and his legal team are pursuing a strategy in an effort to force the United States government to acknowledge what was done to him in a way it never has for any of the detainees who were subjected to torture — and to give him a measure of compensation for it.
    Mr. Khan pleaded guilty at his military tribunal in 2012 to delivering $50,000 of Qaeda money that helped finance the 2003 bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, which killed 11 people, and plotting other, unrealized terrorist attacks. He remains in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, but he has yet to be sentenced because he agreed to become a government witness in return for a chance at leniency.

    As part of the sentencing process, his lawyers are arguing that the treatment Mr. Khan endured in C.I.A. custody also needs to be taken into account and are asking the military judge in the case to grant Mr. Khan time off his prison term as a form of credit for what the C.I.A. did to him.
    The Army judge in the case has agreed to hear arguments from prosecution and defense lawyers at Guantánamo starting July 9 about his authority to provide reparation for the torture the United States government carried out after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    Scott Roehm, the Washington policy director for the Center for Victims of Torture, an advocacy group, said the decision facing Mr. Khan's judge would be "a watershed moment" because of the opportunity to hold the United States legally responsible for the interrogation program after Sept. 11.
    Mr. Khan's case tests "whether the military commissions will grapple seriously and fairly with the United States' legacy of torture," he said.

    The government has signaled that it will fight the request. In a filing last month, prosecutors urged the judge to not call witnesses or hear evidence on what happened to Mr. Khan. They argued that there was no provision for a military commission judge to adopt the practice — used in military court-martials — of granting credit for pretrial punishment, and said Mr. Khan could ask the jury of military officers who would one day sentence him to consider the question.
    Then after sentencing, prosecutors say, Mr. Khan's lawyers can file a clemency petition with the Pentagon official who oversees the Guantánamo court, called the convening authority.
    Although Guantánamo defense lawyers in the capital cases have long sought to, in effect, put the C.I.A. on trial for the years in which it carried out a program of secret detention, 2002 to 2006, the request for credit for pretrial punishment in the Khan case is the first overt effort.
    Now the trial lawyers in the case of the five people charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks are watching how Mr. Khan's sentencing judge, Col. Douglas K. Watkins, handles the question of pretrial punishment with an eye to whether it could influence how much time the accused masterminds of terrorism serve, or whether they are put to death.
    Two lawyers for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the men accused of conspiring in the 2001 attacks, have submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in the Khan case that argues a military judge can do more than give time-served credit for pretrial punishment.

    The lawyers, Maj. Anne Marie Bush of the Air Force and James G. Connell III, wrote "the only appropriate remedy" in Mr. Khan's case "may be dismissal" because of "the incredibly harsh conditions he was held under, the government's intent to cause him suffering and the great length of time under which Mr. Khan was forced to stay in these conditions."

    The death penalty cases being tried at Guantánamo have been in pretrial proceedings for years as the military judges have tried to balance basic due process rights with the insistence of the C.I.A. that aspects of the now-defunct black site program are national security secrets. Chief among them are the identities of the C.I.A. agents and others, such as medical officers, who saw or took part in what went on at the sites where the United States held more than 100 people around the globe.
    In 2003, at one secret overseas site, a C.I.A. interrogator told an Indonesian prisoner "that he would never go to court, because 'we can never let the world know what I have done to you,'" according to a summary of the comprehensive study of the C.I.A. program that was released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2014.
    So far that is true. That prisoner, known as Hambali, a leader of Southeast Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah extremist group, has not been to court since being brought to Guantánamo in September 2006, even though military prosecutors drew up charges against him in 2017.
    The question confronting Colonel Watkins, the Army judge in Mr. Khan's case, also illustrates the hybrid nature of the war court, which blends military and civilian court procedures.
    When Mr. Khan pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in 2012, government and defense lawyers imported a practice used in federal court gangland cases and agreed to postpone sentencing while he turned informant.
    His lawyer said at the time that Mr. Khan was "going to join Team America, do the right thing to make sure that he has a chance for a productive, meaningful life." Mr. Khan's first opportunity to testify as a government witness could come this year at the New York federal retrial of Uzair Paracha, 38, a fellow Pakistani who was caught in the United States and charged with providing material support for terrorism.

    Before then, Mr. Khan's lawyers want to apply the military court-martial practice allowing credit for pretrial punishment, which Chelsea Manning received at her court-martial for leaking sensitive military documents. She got 112 days off her sentence for being held in isolating conditions at a brig in Quantico, Va., before her conviction.

    Credit for pretrial punishment is not, however, mentioned in the Rules for Military Commissions, the war court handbook. But neither is the idea that a Guantánamo prisoner could plead guilty to war crimes and postpone sentencing for years.
    Gary D. Solis, a scholar of military justice, said one section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice "does provide a basis" for providing such credit. But, he said, because the practice is not specifically permitted by the Military Commissions Act, which created the war court, "it's not settled law, and it's a political hazard zone."
    He described the military officers serving as war court judges as a "very conservative bunch" and questioned whether one would have "the nerve" to award the credit, knowing a higher court might reverse the move.
    "In my view, black site time should be two-for-one," said Mr. Solis, who was a judge during his 18 years as a Marine, and for six years ran West Point's Law of War Program. "A trial court ruling that pretrial confinement credit is due for black site time might be just the excuse the appellate court is looking for to come to a similar legal conclusion."
    In the Sept. 11 case, which has no trial date and just obtained its third military judge, defense lawyers are drawing up lists of proposed witnesses to try to disqualify from the trial F.B.I. accounts of confessions at Guantánamo by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the plot, and the four men accused of being his accomplices.
    Like Mr. Khan's lawyers, they want to call witnesses from the black sites to argue what Mr. Mohammed and the others told F.B.I. interrogators in their early days at Guantánamo was the product of C.I.A. "enhanced interrogation techniques," a psychologically engineered program of abuse intended to rob them of free will.

    My NYT Comment:

    "Our courts are still considering the merits of torture. No wonder children are living in squalor inside cages where eight-year-old children are caring for infants, alone, without their parents enduring inconceivable hardship—no diapers, no showers, no soap, no toothbrushes, no healthcare, no warmth, insufficient food and water and no relief! We must remember that this government did this to Kevin Richardson, Antron Mccray, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise and Yusef Salaam—The Central Park Five—in 1989. All innocent children." —Bonnie Weinstein
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/politics/guantanamo-case-to-test-whether-torture-can-be-put-on-the-docket.html#commentsContainer&permid=101123076:101123076

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    4) On the brink: why Russia's healthcare workers are organising
    What would happen if Russia's healthcare system went on strike? An interview with Russian healthcare union leader Andrey Konoval, .June 25, 2019
    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/on-the-brink-why-russias-healthcare-workers-are-organising/

    Healthcare workers in Glazov, Udmurtiya, come out for better wages and conditions, June 2019, 
    Source: Andrey Konoval / Facebook

    Russia's public healthcare system is facing significant problems, and staff are coming out as a result. Ambulance teams in Penza region, central Russia, recently called a work-to-rule action, bringing out more than 100 people in support of better wages and conditions, on the heels of a similar action by Novgorod region ambulance teams.
    This wave of mobilisation is connected to serious overwork, staff cutbacks and shortages - which have arisen as part of the Russian government's "May Decrees" initiative. These decrees, initially signed on the eve of Putin's third inauguration in 2012 and recently updated, are designed to modernise Russia's healthcare and education sectors, transferring financial responsibility to regional units while cutting back on federal grants. At the same time, these decrees linked pay rises for public sector personnel across the country to targets on pay and performance - which ended in significantly increasing workloads for healthcare staff. Naturally, this led to dissatisfaction.
    Russia's Action (Deistvie) trade union was founded in 2012 by healthcare workers from Moscow and Izhevsk, and a 2013 work-to-rule action in the latter brought its first success. Medics in the city organised a slowdown by performing their roles according to official guidelines, in order to show how their system was running on (excessive) overtime. Today, the union has 60 branches across 40 of Russia's 85 regions, and is part of a growing independent trade union movement in the country.
    Andrey Konoval is co-chairman of the Action union. With permission from leading Russian media Znak, we translate Evgeny Senshin's recent interview with Andrey Konoval on official healthcare policy, the challenges facing healthcare workers in Russia, and why the country may be on the brink of an organising wave.
    How would you define the Russian Ministry of Health's policy today?
    Despite fierce criticism from numerous experts, for many years the Ministry of Health has been defending the (pseudo-) insurance model of healthcare in Russia.
    We're talking first about maintaining the role of private insurance companies as a parasitic go-between between the Compulsory Health Insurance (OMS) fund and state healthcare institutions. These companies don't take money from citizens, but for some reason they have the right to say where the money from regional health insurance schemes goes - and these funds come from the state and the compulsory health insurance fund. Meanwhile, it's our opinion that the insurance companies don't offer any real monitoring or control over the quality of healthcare. Instead, they take payments for "services" and fines from health centres, mostly as a result of mistakes in medical applications and documents.
    This is doubly ridiculous. On the one hand, doctors have to deal with pointless paperwork, and on the other, healthcare centres - which are already dealing with a meagre grant situation - lose even more of their funds as a result.
    The only reason, in my opinion, that the Ministry of Health is keeping this system is to continue commercialising healthcare in favour of private businesses. We're not just talking about insurance providers, but private investors, including foreign ones.
    First, the system of compulsory medical insurance gives private companies access to state funds. Minister Veronika Skvortsova has previously stated that she sees her goal as building a national system of healthcare under which state and private organisations have equal access to state funds.
    Second, the current system of compulsory medical insurance is slowly but surely killing public sector healthcare, and dealing with a competitor is always useful. If there are queues in state healthcare institutions, if you need to wait several months for an examination, and then you're offered the chance to do them for a fee, then naturally patients are forced to go private. Objectively speaking, Russia's private medical sector wants patients to fall ill regularly, because that brings in profit. At the same time, the national healthcare system has an opposing aim - a healthy society that doesn't fall ill too often. And here the system of preventative medicine is important, but it's now more or less fallen apart.
    This is why I'd say the following: the Ministry of Health's policies contradict Article 41 of the Russian Constitution, which says that medical assistance in state and local institutions is given free to citizens. Russia needs to move to the state model of financing, which works well in many west European states.
    That's quite a general conclusion. What can you say about the Ministry of Health's current work in terms of the existing model?
    First, it needs to be said that the Ministry of Health's functions have been cut back. In reality, the Ministry of Health doesn't have real levers of control or management in the regions – in order to guarantee the normal financing of healthcare and that all norms and standards are observed. By this, I mean there is a lack of strong management provisions from the Ministry of Health. Tariffs for compulsory medical insurance are calculated at the regional level. And this often leads to underfinancing of the system by regional authorities when you compare it to the norms set at the federal level. This is why you have such a huge financing gap between different regions.
    Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health and federal authorities hand down orders to optimise medical centres in order to fulfill the president's "May Decrees". This has led to a tragic situation for junior personnel in the healthcare system.
    We're talking here about porters and young nurses who have been reassigned as cleaners in order not to raise their wages according to the "May Decrees". This leads to serious labour code violations and impacts the rate of medical assistance, to chaos in terms of who's responsible for what, and to poor staff morale and high staff turnover.
    Regulations over medical personnel's work responsibilities have also been more or less destroyed. Now it's the norm for a district doctor to serve two-to-three districts instead of two. Sometimes it's even worse - a recent example involved a children's clinic in Lyubertsy, Moscow. Over the course of several years, four-five pediatricians served the 12,000 children registered there. The usual standard is 800 children to a single district.
    Our ambulance teams can do 20 call-outs per shift, and this is an extreme workload for staff. A permissible rate would be 11-13 call-outs per shift; for an emergency team - seven. Under this kind of workload, people can't even have breaks to eat, go to the toilet. Meanwhile, in the regions, they're creating unified dispatch services, which could send ambulance teams in one part of the region to the other end of it. As a result, perhaps there'll be less call-outs, but staff will still spend all their time in the ambulances, without even stopping off at their dispatch centres. This all leads to over-exhaustion and stress, and in some cases, even death.
    A young anesthesiologist died at work recently, he'd been working in a hospital in Altai region. It's said that doctors there work "two days on, one day off". But a normal schedule, which would allow a doctor to rest fully, would be to work one day in every three. The local authorities said that an investigation showed that the schedule at this Altai hospital conformed to legislation. But if a lack of personnel and low wages mean that staff are taking time-and-a-half, double shifts or even more, then yes, formally, their work schedule is legal, but people have just had their normal work weeks taken away from them.
    The number of people with two jobs in Russia's health system is shocking, without even talking about overtime on a normal shift. Most guidance on work and medical assistance, including required numbers of personnel at a given institution, are recommendations. They are ignored.
    What's the situation with wages in state medicine today? According to recently published official figures, the hourly rate for medical and social care personnel has risen by 23% - to 259.8 roubles per hour, and 25% for monthly pay, to 40,000 roubles.
    In terms of those average monthly wages published, these numbers are meaningless. Those statistics reflect the average wage for a single person, not a single job. It includes all the overtime that people work, when staff work over the number of permitted hours by taking another job on top of their first, or taking extra responsibilities while receiving the same wages.
    As a result, these figures hide the double or triple overtime that people are having to work in reality.
    As to the hourly rate, I have big doubts as to the veracity of those figures. At that rate, a monthly wage should definitely come to around 40,000 roubles per job, but even the majority of doctors in the regions don't earn that much, without even talking about junior or mid-level staff.
    Russia's Accounts Chamber recently stated that the president's "May Decrees" to raise wages for junior and mid-level staff have not been implemented in 50 out of 85 regions in the country. How has this situation come about? Is it sabotage in the regions or is the president making promises he can't keep?
    For a start, the "May Decrees" never had guaranteed financing. No one understood how much money there really was for their implementation.
    I think the "May Decrees" were thought up in the political apparatus as a more substantive part of the strategy for developing the country. It's even written there that the aim is to "preserve human resources in the public sector". But the ministries that were responsible for implementing the decrees didn't include objective information and then came up with some made-up indicators: by 2018, an average doctor's wage should be 200% of the region's average wage, and for junior and mid-level staff - 100% of the regional average.
    As a result, we saw the huge problems with personnel only increase, because employers and officials turned out to have an interest in cutting the number of healthcare personnel while placing additional workloads on those who were left. And this was done in order to meet the indicators on high average wages for a single individual, rather than a single job.
    It's no surprise that ambulance workers in Penza region, where our union is campaigning for a wage increase, demanded that wages for mid-level staff (physician assistant, nurses and nurse anaesthetist) got 100% of the regional average wage per workload.
    Before our union declared a work-to-rule strike in May, the wages in Penza were 16,000 roubles per workload. This is completely unreasonable money for such a difficult, emotionally and physically draining job. These are poverty wages that can't support normal living standards for workers, not even talking about their families. As a result we've now got a 100% increase for those working in basic ambulance teams, plus an extra payment for emergency teams, but the negotiations are ongoing. Right now our working group's aim is to get 100% of the regional average wage per workload, and this is written in the official strike report.
    How much should medical personnel in the public sector receive, in your opinion?
    Monthly wages in central Russia, that is without regional coefficients (such as in the north), should be at around 45,000-55,000 roubles for doctors, 28,000-38,000 roubles for mid-level personnel, and for junior – 20,000-28,000 roubles.
    But I want to underline the fact that wages are low across the board in Russia. It's not only medics who are underpaid, it's everyone. Healthcare workers are particularly suffering from the state's policies. This isn't about the specifics of the healthcare profession or the fact that its physically difficult work, but that it's highly qualified work that requires up to 10 years of training if we're talking about doctors, as well as constant maintenance of those qualifications throughout your entire working life.
    So far "work-to-rule" strikes have only been used in a few cities. Given the level of tension in society, could this turn into a mass protest?
    The difficult situation facing medical personnel has come about as a result of mismanagement by Russia's federal authorities, so this means that the solutions also lie at the national level.
    I believe that we're on the brink of a broad-based national campaign for changing state policy in the health sector. And this won't only be the efforts of healthcare workers themselves, but an alliance with society, with patients and different civic organisations. Our trade union, at least, is preparing for this campaign. For example, we have a lot of ambulance personnel in our ranks, and so we created a section dedicated to emergency services inside the union. That section is now preparing a programme of national demands for ambulance workers.
    But we're also coming out for everyone – medical personnel, patients, citizens. I don't believe it's correct when there's an attempt to use a broad protest campaign for someone's narrow political project.
    What kind of responsibility do medics have during a work-to-rule action? After all, someone could not receive medical assistance on time, and then their condition could worsen, and someone else could lose their life as a result.
    When we're preparing a work-to-rule action, we work through all the issues beforehand, including preventing negative consequences for patients. Given that a small number of workers are currently involved in work-to-rule actions, there's no threat [of negative consequences].
    A work-to-rule action is set up in such a way that the responsibility for medical assistance lies not with the rank-and-file medical personnel, but department officials, ministries and management of medical institutions. They are the ones who should create the conditions for healthcare workers to carry out their jobs. And we, as a trade union, always inform people if we are preparing an action, and thus give them time for any additional measures. In Penza, we announced the strike a week in advance. And the ambulance station management, for example, brought in nurses from the regional hospital to cover.
    What's more dangerous are sudden outbursts of protest: when doctors can't take anymore, they stand up and leave, and say that they can't take it anymore. But they have a string of patients waiting to see them. You can find videos of this on the internet. It's not independent trade unions which are sabotaging the healthcare system, but the functionaries and elected officials who aren't providing full financing.
    Has your union come under pressure?
    We haven't felt pressure at the national level, but, of course, we feel the pressure of employers and hospital management, who react nervously to the setting up of independent unions and try, at times, to create problems for us or just pressure us psychologically. But for the most part it's people who are already in deep conflict with their employers who come to us. Many of them already know how to defend their rights. And with our media or legal support, these people are often successful at defending themselves, at overcoming their situations. There's also examples where we enter into a constructive dialogue with employers.
    The regional authorities often don't like what we're doing: we create problems for their plans to "optimise" clinics and hospitals. There have been attempts to attack us in the media, where we're accused of "rocking the boat" and risking political stability. The latest trick is to call us "Alexey Navalny's trade union", which, of course, has no basis in reality. We're a member of the Confederation of Labour of Russia, which supports us.
    Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has previously recommended teachers to go into business if they don't like their profession. The same thing could be said about healthcare workers. But unlike teachers, medics have more opportunities – Russia has a whole range of private clinics. Could this be a way out?
    A significant number of medicine graduates have been following Dmitry Medvedev's advice about going into business. Many graduates become salespeople for pharmaceutical companies instead of going into medicine. Another group gets jobs at medical insurance companies, which do not carry out any useful function for society, but just take money from it. Then there's those who do become doctors in the private sector – for example, dentists, plastic surgeons and so on. But naturally, not all graduates go into the private sector because it's not so developed in every region. But I believe that healthcare should preserve its civic function and private medicine should not try and substitute for it.
    All these statements by Medvedev, Tatyana Golikova [Deputy Prime Minister for Social Policy, Labour, Health and Pension Provision] and so on are just outbursts of frustration at their lack of ability and desire to organise normal working conditions in these socially important sectors.
    What's your forecast for Russia's healthcare system in the coming years if nothing changes?
    No one can predict what's goes to happen next. In any case, healthcare requires very serious changes both in the interest of healthcare workers and society as a whole. A mass independent trade union movement – which we still need to build – can help make these changes happen. And this is what the Action trade union has made its main aim. In the past four months, we've more or less tripled our membership, and the number of regions where we're active has reached 40.
    I believe that we're on the brink of a leap forward in organising, and this will help us take the defence of healthcare workers' labour rights and public healthcare to a new level.

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    5) Wayfair employees plan walkout to oppose furniture sales to migrant detention facilities
    By Janelle Nanos, June 25, 2019 [Excerpt]
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wayfair-employees-plan-walkout-to-oppose-furniture-sales-to-migrant-detention-facilities/ar-AADpqkR?ocid=iehp

    Suzanne Kreiter/Globe staff/File 2018 Employees of the Boston-based online housewares giant Wayfair announced Tuesday that they would stage a walkout at the company's Back Bay offices Wednesday.

    Employees of the online housewares giant Wayfair announced Tuesday that they would stage a walkout at the company's Back Bay headquarters on Wednesday to protest its decision to sell furniture to the operators of facilities for migrant children detained at the southern US border.
    Last Wednesday, they learned that a $200,000 order of bedroom furniture had been placed by BCFS, a government contractor that has been managing camps at the border. More than 500 employees signed a letter of protest sent to company executives. When the company refused to change course, employees organized the walkout.
    "Knowing what's going on at the southern border and knowing that Wayfair has the potential to profit from it is pretty scary," said Elizabeth Good, a manager on the engineering team at the company and one of the walkout's two dozen organizers. "I want to work at a company where the standards we hold ourselves to are the same standards that we hold our customers and our partners to." 
    The politically motivated action is taking place at one of Boston's fastest-growing companies, which employs more than 14,000 people globally and processes 100,000 orders a day. It took in revenue of $6.8 billion in 2018.
     The Trump administration has made stopping illegal immigration a signature issue and has been holding thousands of foreign citizens who crossed the US-Mexico border in detention centers. Several facilities are now dangerously crowded, with children living in squalid conditions.
    Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans to house 3,000 to 4,000 unaccompanied children at three emergency shelters near the border. A 1,600-bed shelter was planned for a compound in Carrizo Springs, Texas, that once housed oil field workers.
    So when Wayfair employees noticed an order from BCFS for products destined for Carrizo Springs, they determined a detention facility was the buyer and decided to act. Within hours, a group of 50 workers began drafting a letter to company executives, including cofounders Niraj Shah and Steve Conine and the entire board, outlining their concerns. More than 547 employees signed the letter.
    "This particular order, for over $200,000 worth of bedroom furniture, is destined for Carrizo Springs, Texas, to a facility that will be outfitted to detain up to 3,000 migrant children seeking legal asylum in the United States," the letter said.
    "The practice of detaining children and adults at our Southern border has been condemned since its inception, but since the acceleration of the practice in 2018, and the increase in death and injury that has come with that acceleration, we have seen more vocal condemnation of the practice. We, the undersigned, are writing to you from a place of concern and anger about the atrocities being committed at our Southern border."
    The employees asked the company to cease doing business with BCFS and other contractors and requested that it establish a code of ethics for business-to-business sales that would allow "Wayfair employees to act in accordance with our values."
    "We believe that the current actions of the United States and their contractors at the Southern border do not represent an ethical business partnership Wayfair should choose to be a part of," the letter stated.
    The group sent it Friday and received a response Monday at 6 p.m. 
    In that unsigned letter, company executives said they appreciated the employees' effort to bring the issue to their attention. But as business leaders, they said, "we also believe in the importance of respecting diversity of thought within our organization and across our customer base."
    "As a retailer, it is standard practice to fulfill orders for all customers, and we believe it is our business to sell to any customer who is acting within the laws of the countries within which we operate," the reply said. "We believe all of our stakeholders, employees, customers, investors, and suppliers included are best served by our commitment to fulfill our orders."
    Wayfair confirmed it had responded to the employees but declined to comment further.
    In a town hall meeting Tuesday afternoon, according to a recording provided to the Globe, Conine said he objected to the detention centers and noted that his cofounder, Shah, was raised in a first-generation immigrant family. But to take action as a company against a lawful customer's purchase would be treading on a "slippery slope," he said.
    "The level of your citizenship as citizens is really the appropriate channel to try and attack an issue like this. To pull a business into it — we're not a political entity. We're not trying to take a political side."
    The meeting, attended by more than 500 employees, was heated at times, with staffers pressing Conine on whether he would accede to their requests or force them to walk out.
    "I don't have the answer you're going to want to hear on that," Conine said. "I don't think this is the correct channel to handle this particular issue."
    He did, however, agree to consider establishing a code of ethics for corporate clients and make a donation to an appropriate charity.
    Wayfair's stock ended the day down 5.3 percent as news of the planned walkout spread.
    Dan Hill, head of the crisis-management specialist Hill Impact, of Washington, D.C., said Wayfair's decision was a difficult one.
    "Once you start opening yourselves up to doing evaluations of sales according to public-policy issues, and things that go beyond legal concerns, it becomes very complicated," he said. "Their stockholders aren't going to be OK with them making unilateral decisions based on political skirmishes or public-policy fights."
    Following the corporate response, a Twitter account promoting the @wayfairwalkoutquickly gained nearly 12,000 followers, and customers of the brand began expressing their frustration online.
    Employees plan to walk out of their offices, which are on Copley Square and Boylston Street, on Wednesday at 1:30 p.m.


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     6) When An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother
    There is a connection between my work as a doctor and my work as a mother; it’s just not what most people imagine.
    By Christine Henneberg, June 27, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/opinion/abortion-doctor.html

    CreditCreditSerhiiBobyk/iStock, via Getty Images Plus
    Recently a colleague asked me if I’d had trouble working while I was pregnant.
    “Actually I was fine,” I said. “I know a lot of people have a hard time, but it wasn’t an issue for me.”
    She raised her eyebrows. “Wow. Good for you. I was a mess.”
    We weren’t just talking about nausea and swollen feet and low back pain. She and I are abortion doctors. We routinely perform procedures well into our patients’ second trimester, when the fetus is well-formed and easily recognizable as humanlike, even “life”-like. Baby-like.
    I’ve always been good at compartmentalizing, drawing boundaries between work and the rest of my life. A lot of doctors will tell you this about themselves — if compartmentalization doesn’t come naturally, it’s beaten into you in training. Every time you duck into a hospital closet to cry, someone will tell you some version of: You have to maintain some boundaries. You can’t let it bleed over, you’ll never survive. 

    The truth is that despite being good at compartmentalizing, I was worried that I would be a mess when I became pregnant — and in some ways I was.

    It started when we were still trying. I had yanked out my own IUD without telling my husband, thinking I would surprise him with a positive pregnancy test. After three months and three normal periods, I was convinced I was infertile. I broke down over dinner one night: “It’s not just that I’m worried we can’t have kids,” I told him. “I’m worried about, you know, the reason.”
    “What reason?” he asked.
    “Like some kind of bad karma: the abortion doctor who can’t get pregnant.”
    At the time, the fact that I would even consider such an idea — as though I deserved some type of punishment for the work I do — should have told me that my boundaries weren’t as neat and tidy as I thought.
    A week or two later I took a positive pregnancy test, followed closely by my first ultrasound, which was performed by a colleague at the abortion clinic. I saw the tiny embryo inside me, its first flicker of a heartbeat. Then the fear really began.
    Like any doctor who cares for pregnant women, I have seen miscarriages of all types, in every trimester: The clotted blood a woman thinks is just her late period. Horrible preterm births in the hospital, fluid everywhere, the fetus — perfect and translucent and too tiny to live — slipping between her legs. Stillbirths the week before the due date, the week after. Babies born alive, but so deformed you can’t look — you just hear them gasping for breath.
    I kept waiting for it, any of it, to happen to me. Nothing would’ve surprised me except a pregnancy that was normal, uneventful, routine.

    There was one time when I almost fell apart: I was in my second trimester, performing a 17-week procedure on a patient. The fetus, which is normally extracted in parts, came through the cervix intact. I dropped it in the metal dish and I saw it move, or thought I did. It was all I could do not to run from the procedure room crying.
    That was the only time.
    At first I was nervous about what my patients would think and say when I started showing, but they always expressed genuine happiness for me, even in the midst of their own difficulties. “Girl, you are going to love that baby,” one mother of three said to me as I prepped her for her procedure. A 19-year-old woman, ending her first pregnancy, smiled at me through her tears. “It’s your time,” she said.
    In fact, the hardest moment came long after my daughter was born.
    One day at the clinic, a protester watched me from the sidewalk as I pulled into the parking lot. I felt his eyes on me as I climbed out and opened the trunk to get my bag.
    We keep a stroller in our trunk, like any other parents of an almost-1-year-old.
    Oh, look at that! The man shouted across the lot, the vitriol in his voice coating me like grease. That’s hypocrisy if I ever saw it. The baby killer has a stroller in her trunk. How do you live with yourself? Killing babies in the morning and going home in the evening and putting the baby in the stroller. You are sick!
    I closed the trunk, holding back tears. I walked to the door of the clinic.
    He called after me. Repent! Repent, baby killer!
    How do I continue to do this work?
    The answer is that there is a connection between my work as an abortion doctor and my work as a mother; it’s just not what most people imagine. It’s not a tension or a contradiction to be reconciled. It’s a symbiosis, a harmony.
    I do not mean it’s an easy job. Of course it’s not. There is the protester on the sidewalk. There is the fetus in the dish, the perfect curl of its fingers and toes. Sometimes it reminds me of my daughter — how could it not? But that is precisely the point.

    As a doctor, I can draw a distinction, a boundary, between a fetus and a baby. When I became a mother, I learned that there are no boundaries, really. The moment you become a mother, the moment another heartbeat flickers inside of you, all boundaries fall away. 
    Nevertheless, as mothers, we must all make choices. And we must live with the choices that aren’t ours to make. We can try to compartmentalize. We can try to keep things tidy and acceptable.But in reality, everything is messy: the work of doctors, the work of mothers, and the love of each one of us for our children.
    And yet somebody has to do the work.
    Christine Henneberg is a doctor specializing in women’s health and family planning. She is at work on a memoir.
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     7) Two Women Who Heard E. Jean Carroll’s Account of Being Attacked by Trump Go Public
    By Daniel Victor, June 27, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/jean-carroll-trump-sexual-assault.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

    CreditCreditCraig Ruttle/Associated Press
    Two women in whom E. Jean Carroll confided about having allegedly been sexually attacked by Donald Trump in the 1990s spoke publicly about it for the first time in an interview excerpted on the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” describing the conflicting advice they gave their friend at the time.

    On Wednesday, Megan Twohey, a Times reporter, interviewed Ms. Carroll and the two women, Carol Martin and Lisa Birnbach, who had not been publicly identified until now. It was the first time since the alleged assault that the women had discussed it together.

    In a forthcoming book titled “What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal,” an excerpt from which was published on New York magazine’s website, Ms. Carroll, an advice columnist, accuses Mr. Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s.

    President Trump has forcefully denied the accusation, saying Ms. Carroll was “lying,” that he didn’t know her and that he wouldn’t have assaulted her because “she’s not my type.”
    Portions of the interview were played Thursday on “The Daily,” and a fuller article about Ms. Carroll by Ms. Twohey, Jessica Bennett and Alexandra Alter will follow later in the day. For now, here are the main takeaways from the interview:
    • The two women in whom Ms. Carroll confided were well-known figures in the ’90s world of New York media. Ms. Martin was a news anchor on WCBS-TV in New York from 1975 to 1995. Ms. Birnbach is a writer best known for “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a best seller released in 1981. She has occasionally written for The Times.
    Both knew or had met Mr. Trump during that period: Ms. Birnbach had recently interviewed him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., while Ms. Martin had met him at her news station and had a friend who briefly dated him.
    • When Ms. Carroll told the two women about the alleged attack, they had very different reactions: Ms. Birnbach said she told Ms. Carroll to call the police, while Ms. Martin told Ms. Carroll not to talk about it because Mr. Trump was too powerful. Ultimately, Ms. Carroll, thinking she was partially to blame for the encounter, remained silent about it for decades.
    “I said: Don’t tell anybody. I wouldn’t tell anybody this,” Ms. Martin said.
    • Ms. Carroll eventually stopped believing that what happened to her was her fault, but she does not want to consider herself a victim and does not describe the incident as a rape.

    “Every woman gets to choose her word,” she said. “Every woman gets to choose how she describes it. This is my way of saying it. This is my word. My word is fight. My word is not the victim word.”
    “I have not been raped,” she continued. “Something has not been done to me. I fought.”
    • Ms. Carroll said she originally intended to write a book about touring the country and cheekily asking women if they’d be better off without men. Then accusations against the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein ignited the #MeToo movement, and she realized she needed to reckon with her own experiences. The book morphed to include an account of her own encounters with men, including Mr. Trump.
    • Ms. Carroll said she had no expectation that telling her story would have an impact. At 75 years old, she has come not to expect such stories to come to anything.
    Listen to the episode here.

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     8) Asylum Officers’ Union Says Trump Migration Policy ‘Abandons’ American Tradition
    By Mihir Zaveri, June 26, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/asylum-officers-trump-migrants.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

    CreditCreditJose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters
    A union representing federal asylum officers said in a court filing Wednesday that the Trump administration’s policy forcing migrants to wait in Mexico while their asylum cases are decided risks violating international treaty obligations and “abandons our tradition of providing a safe haven to the persecuted.”
    The union, which represents 2,500 Department of Homeland Security employees, including the asylum officers, said in its filing that the policy, the Migration Protection Protocols, puts migrants in danger because they could face persecution while being forced to wait in Mexico, undermining the purpose of asylum.
    Citing a State Department report, the union said that “impunity for human rights abuses remained a problem” in Mexico. Migrants are at particular risk of being sexually assaulted, it said, and ethnic minorities could face “persecution similar to the persecution they face in their home countries.”

    “Asylum officers are duty bound to protect vulnerable asylum seekers from persecution,” the union said. “They should not be forced to honor departmental directives that are fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our nation and our international and domestic legal obligations.”

    Muhammad Faridi, a lawyer representing the union, Local 1924 of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in an interview that the court filing was significant given the officers’ role in returning migrants to Mexico.
    “These are people working in the background. These are not people opining or expressing their opinions on public policy or litigation matters,” Mr. Faridi said. “It takes something as egregious as the M.P.P., something that is so fundamentally contrary to the moral fabric of our country and international treaty obligations, it’s something like that that brings people to the litigation arena.”
    The filing was a striking rebuke of a central part of President Trump’s immigration strategy, coming from federal employees intimately involved in deciding whether those seeking refuge in the United States should be allowed to stay. As part of a deal with Mexico that Mr. Trump said stopped him from raising tariffs, Mexico committed to work to expand the program, according to the administration.
    The White House did not immediately answer requests seeking comment on the brief on Wednesday night. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
    The administration announced the policy in December, arguing that it would help stop people from using the asylum process to enter the country and remain illegally.

    Mr. Trump had long been angered by policies that temporarily allowed asylum seekers in the United States while they waited for their court hearings. Asylum seekers have also shown up in increasing numbers in the past few months as more Central American migrants traveling through Mexico have arrived at the United States’ border.
    More than 11,000 migrants have been returned to wait in Mexico under the policy, according to senior homeland security officials.
    The Trump administration policy was criticized for putting the migrants at risk, and legal advocates for migrants pointed to a spike in violence and overburdened shelters in Mexican border towns. Several Democratic presidential candidates at Wednesday’s debate said the policy was one of the worst abuses of the Trump administration.
    The administration has said the policy also aims to ease overcrowded border facilities strained by the increase in migrants.
    In a lawsuit filed in February in federal court in San Francisco, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups said the policy violated immigration law.
    A federal district judge, Richard Seeborg, blocked the policy in April, saying that the president did not have the power to enforce it and that it violated immigration laws. Judge Seeborg said the program lacked safeguards to ensure that migrants were not returned to a place where they faced risks.
    The Trump administration appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit, which is based in San Francisco, and on April 12 the court allowed the policy to be enforced while the case is pending.

    The union’s filing Wednesday was a “friend of the court” brief in the case. In the filing, the union traced the United States’ long history of embracing migrants, including Irish immigrants fleeing famine and disease in the mid-1800s and refugees of Communist-dominated countries a century later. The union said the Trump administration’s policy should be blocked.
    “Now, perhaps more than ever, America needs to continue its longstanding tradition of offering protection, freedom, and opportunity to the vulnerable and persecuted,” the union said.

    Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.

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     7) ‘Don’t Talk to Her’: A Glimpse Inside a Troubled Border Station Housing Migrant Children
    By Simon Romero, June 26, 2019
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/us/migrant-children-border-clint-texas.html

    CreditCreditIvan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
    CLINT, Tex. — Children as young as 3 pressed their faces against the windows of one crowded cell holding nearly 20 migrant girls, some sprawled on the floor. Boys gazed through the fencing of a containment zone exposed to the 101-degree heat.
    Customs and Border Protection authorities on Wednesday allowed a group of journalists on a brief, highly controlled tour of the border station in Clint, a farming town near El Paso, hitting back at reports of filthy and abusive conditions for the children detained inside.

    Agents claimed that they were supplying soap and toothbrushes for the children, pointing to shelves with those items in a supply room. (Other shelves held lice repellent shampoo and medical gloves.) They claimed that children held in Clint were not going hungry, pointing to boxes of instant noodles and oatmeal piled near a processing room.
    Still, the agents did not allow the journalists inside any of the cells and prohibited any conversations with the detained children, citing government policies. The agency also barred reporters from bringing cameras or phones inside, threatening to expel anyone who did.
    “Don’t talk to her,” one agent said when a reporter saw one girl, who appeared to be 10 or 11 years old, crying uncontrollably while speaking in Spanish with a relative on a phone in a processing room. “If you ask her anything you’ll be thrown out,” the agent warned.
    The facility in Clint is where Customs and Border Protection agents generally take unaccompanied children who are arrested after crossing the border in the agency’s El Paso sector, which stretches across southern New Mexico and part of West Texas.
    As outrage spread in recent days over the reports about the conditions at Clint, John Sanders, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said he would step down in early July. Authorities also took 249 children housed at Clint to other facilities to relieve overcrowding, but then moved more than 100 children back into the station that had been emptied just days earlier.
    Aaron Hull, the chief patrol agent of the El Paso sector, said his officials were dealing with understaffing, a lack of funding and an increase in migration from Central America.
    “When we catch more aliens than we can turn over, they tend to build up here in the station,” Mr. Hull said.

    Other agents acknowledged that the relatively clean and uncrowded conditions at the facility were much different than in recent weeks, when hundreds of children filled the facility. Matthew Harris, the official in charge of the Clint facility, said that it had been built in 2012 to temporarily detain about 100 people.
    But in recent months, Mr. Harris said, the facility contained more than 700 children at times. The station was designed to detain children for eight to 12 hours, but he said that some children were being held as long as 30 days.
    A 1-year-old was currently being housed at Clint with the mother, who is younger than 18, Mr. Harris said. He added that the youngest infant who had been held at the station was just 15 days old, detained for a week along with the child’s mother.
    Altogether, the border station in Clint looked more like a jail or a makeshift camp than a juvenile detention center. In a processing area with nine cells, children peered through windows at the gun-carrying agents milling about.
    No books, crayons or even pieces of paper could be seen in the cells; no artwork adorned the walls as it does in shelter facilities where migrant children are held for lengthy periods.
    In a place where boys were being held, a caged area that once functioned as the station’s sally port, a television played “Shrek”; a sign on the wall listed indigenous languages spoken by some of the detained children: K’iche’, Poqomam, Garifuna.
    Agents shuffled the journalists through a limited portion of the facility, and pointed to portable toilets and a basketball hoop set up outside on a gravel lot. The agents did not provide access to outside areas where children have been held.

    In a change from previous months, monitors dressed in blue uniforms hired by an outside contractor could be seen supervising some of the children. Mr. Harris, the official in charge of Clint, said that Wednesday, the day of the tour for journalists, was also the monitors’ first day on the job.
    Lawyers who had raised a public alarm after being given access to the station recently had reported that children as young as 8 were caring for infants; they said they saw toddlers with no diapers. But Mr. Harris said that the lawyers had not been allowed to see parts of the facility open to journalists on Wednesday, but were only allowed to speak with children in a conference room.
    The lawyers whose accounts prompted the backlash against conditions in Clint filed an emergency motion Wednesday night seeking immediate inspections of all of the Border Patrol’s facilities in the El Paso and Rio Grande Valley regions of Texas.
    The motion, filed as part of a federal court settlement that set the standard for the care of detained migrant children, also asks that the Border Patrol be held in contempt for their “flagrant and persistent violations” of those rules.
    Earlier in the week, Customs and Border Protection officials had tried to cast doubt on the lawyers’ declarations, with one official who spoke under the condition of anonymity telling journalists in a phone call, “I personally don’t believe those allegations.”
    But in their motion, the lawyers submitted 80 declarations from physicians and lawyers, along with the children interviewed in Clint and in a previous inspection of another facility in the El Paso region. They stated that “children are wearing clothing stained with vomit or breast milk,” and that “babies are being kept in these freezing cold conditions, and some of them have only a diaper and a T-shirt to wear.”
    Dr. Dolly Lucio Sevier, a physician who accompanied the lawyers on their visit, likened the conditions to “torture facilities.”

    The lawyers requested an immediate ruling from Judge Dolly M. Gee of the Central District of California. Their accounts were also shored up on Thursday in a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general obtained by Buzzfeed Newsin which investigators detail many of the same health and safety issues raised by the lawyers who visited Clint.
    Asked about the range of poor conditions to which children were subjected under his watch, Mr. Hull said that some of the claims of wrongdoing were “hurtful.” “We’ve explained time and time again that we need the resources to do the job,” Mr. Hull said.
    The Republican-held Senate on Wednesday approved $4.6 billion in funding for emergency humanitarian aid along the border with Mexico, rejecting House legislation approved a day earlier that set stronger conditions for how the money can be spent.
    The action set up another stalemate over border spending, and continuing uncertainty over how agents on the ground are able to handle the detained children in their care.

    Caitlin Dickerson contributed reporting from New York.

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