'I need you to stand up': Simone Biles asks Biden to 'make some things shake' before 2025

PARDON LEONARD PELTIER

Carl Gibson, AlterNet
November 6, 2024

Simone Biles competes in the floor exercise on the way to a ninth national all-around title at the US Gymnastics championships (ELSA/AFP)

President Joe Biden is getting some encouragement from legendary gymnast Simone Biles to use his last days in the White House wisely.

In a tweet posted on Wednesday afternoon, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist asked Biden to make the most of his lame-duck period, though she notably didn't give him any specific instructions.

"Mr. Biden, I need you to stand up, straighten your back and make some things shake before your departure," Biles tweeted, before concluding with: "xoxo the women in America," with a blue heart emoji.

As the lame-duck president, Biden still controls the executive branch of the federal government for the next 75 days until Jan. 20, 2025, when President-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. And as the outgoing president, all cabinet secretaries of all federal agencies still report to Biden until next January.

While Biden would still need Congress to pass legislation for him to sign into law between now and Jan. 20, Biden still has the power of the pen to sign executive orders that will be in place until Trump takes the oath of office. While Trump has the power to undo executive orders, Biden can still make efforts to frustrate Trump's attempts to reshape the federal government, as he did by strengthening protections for federal workers this spring.

One key component of Project 2025 — which Republicans are now admitting is the Trump agenda — is the gutting of the federal civil service via an executive order known as "Schedule F," which Trump signed in 2020 and Biden promptly rescinded after taking office. That executive order removed protections for federal workers and would allow a president to drastically increase the number of direct presidential appointees from approximately 5,000 to more than 54,000. But in April, Biden announced that he had announced new protections for federal workers "from political interference," perhaps to head off a potential new Schedule F executive order.

"Day in and day out, career civil servants provide the expertise and continuity necessary for our democracy to function. They provide Americans with life-saving and life-changing services and put opportunity within reach for millions," he stated. "That’s why since taking office, I have worked to strengthen, empower, and rebuild our career workforce. This rule is a step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people."

And as the Supreme Court decided in July, presidents are effectively above all laws provided they categorize any potential crime as an "official act." Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor even warned that the immunity ruling would mean that presidents could assassinate political opponents without fear of prosecution, provided they refer to it as an "official act."

"Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency," Sotomayor wrote in her official dissent. "Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

Click here to read Biles' tweet.

 

Remembering Kris Kristofferson: 1936–2024

Hang in there! There's not many of us left.

by Larry Long Posted onOctober 17, 2024

Kristofferson was a kind soul with a courageous heart who sought justice. I first met Kris in the late 1980’s when I was asked to tour with him in Moscow. Kris’s wife was an attorney like my wife Jacqueline whom he called ‘Counselor’ after discovering that she was a Public Defender and lawyer for the American Indian Movement.

We all stayed at the Rossiya Hotel, only blocks from Red Square and traveled together in a bus to perform in venues large and small. Our last show was held in an arena with thousands of Muscovites in attendance. Besides us, there were several Soviet rock bands performing.

Kris Kristofferson & Larry Long performing in Moscow in 1987 | Photo by Jacqueline Long. Copyright Jacqueline Long 2024 | All Rights Reserved

This was in the early days of Perestroika when President Mikhail Gorbachev was beginning to open up the Soviet Union to the world though Glasnost. There were rumblings of local bureaucrats being not happy with the fact that performers from the United States were participating. The entire front row of the arena was filled with police officers seated shoulder to shoulder. When the audience got too loud and enthusiastic the police stood up. And when they did everyone in the arena sat down and quieted.  Then the excitement would peak again… This went on all evening like popcorn popping.

We were the last to perform and all of the bands were running overtime. The audience was excited and anticipating hearing Kris Kristofferson, But the local authorities did not allow us to perform. When this was announced from stage, the crowd went angry and wild. We were all waiting in the dressing room not far from the stage.  We were very disappointed but also trapped backstage.  The only way out was to walk through the crowd of several thousand angry people. There was a back door to the dressing room which led outside, but regretfully it was locked. Kris’s security said ‘to heck with it’. They found a screwdriver and unscrewed the glass off the door, so we could safely climb out and get safely to our bus.

Kristofferson had quit drinking, but members of his band had not. His lead guitarist happened to have a bottle of Vodka and began to passing it around. Kristofferson and I were close friends with the late American Indian Movement performer and songwriter, Floyd Red Crow Westerman. We began making up new verses to one of Red Crow’s songs, which we sang out through the open windows of bus while in route back to the Rossiya Hotel.

CIA, KGB won’t you tap my telephone
There’s something I want you to know
Hey-ya-hey-hey-ya-hey-ya-hey-hey-ya

We had a party going on and didn’t want it to end. Jacqueline and I talked Kris and his band into having the bus driver take us to historic Arbat Street and do some street singing. Jacqueline and I had had a wonderful time there a few months before visiting with the young people who invited us into their homes and talked all night long.  It was the beginning of Perestroika.  There was a sense of wonder and hope for the future.  For us, it was like reliving the mood of the sixties in the United States all over again.  We wanted to share that experience with Kris and his band. When the bus came to a stop at Arbat, we grabbed our instruments and marched down the street singing, but something was terribly wrong. Arbat Street was dead silent with nobody in sight. Unbeknownst to us, it was closed down in preparation for the October Revolution celebrations in the coming days.

“We are Glasnost!  We are Perestroika!”

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere hundreds of people descended upon us when Kris started singing Me & Bobby McGee. We were swept up by this sea of people onto the steps of a small building, which became our stage.  More and more people crowded in.  The eight women in our group who were wives of the band members linked arms and formed a semi-circle in front of the steps in the hopes of keeping the crowd back a few feet.  But that effort began to seem futile as the excitement grew. The crowd began to chant, “We are Glasnost! We are Perestroika!”

While looking beyond the edge of the crowd, I saw that our translator, Sasha, who was also a local environmental activist, was being interrogated by the local police. He looked like he was in trouble. Kris and I worked our way through the crowd and over to him. We discovered that the police had taken Sasha’s internal passport. I told the police that it wasn’t Sasha’s fault that we were there. We simply didn’t know that Arbat Street was shut down in preparation for the October Revolution celebration. The police refused to give Sasha’s identification back and began to take him away.  The crowd kept chanting, “We are Glasnost! We are Perestroika!”

Without hesitation, Kris and I locked arms with Sasha and pulled him away from the police.  The crowd engulfed us and pushed us out the other side, not allowing the police through. We ran to a nearby street and caught a taxi back to the Rossiya Hotel.  The entire band followed suit, diving into cabs.

We brought Sasha up to our room for safety and discussed what to do.  Jacqueline made a legal suggestion and Kris turned to her and said:  “Counselor, we aren’t in Kansas anymore!”  Instead, he decided to use a political maneuver,  He called the Russian event organizers and made clear that he was not going to leave the country until Sasha had his paperwork back and was out of trouble.  KGB agents came to the hotel and we ended up negotiating with them in a bathroom to get the passport back. Since neither they nor we wanted an international incident, the KBG agreed.  Sasha’s identification was returned at 3 in the morning.

Performing in Solidarity with Native Americans 

Six months after returning to the United States I was invited to sing in the Quad Cities on the Mississippi River for the first Soviet American Peace Walk. As I began performing, whom did I see, but Sasha!  He had been marching across the United States with the Walk.  He was OK. The Cold War seemed to be coming to an end.

Kris brought me out to Orange County to perform with his band at a star-studded benefit for the the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.  He asked me to play a ballad on my Native Flute.  He stepped off stage during my performance and listened.  Jacqueline says he just beamed during the song and said to her, “Now Counselor, ain’t that something?”  He was always supportive of his band and other performers.  And they were loyal to him.

That following summer through the leadership of Clyde Bellecourt (American Indian Movement), Mark Tilsen (Black Hills Alliance International Survival Gathering & Tanka Bar Foundation), the City of St. Paul, and myself (Mississippi River Revival) we organized the Two Rivers Cultural Explosion. This two-day gathering was held at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers to honor the Dakota Oyote who had been interned there at a concentration camp throughout the winter following the Dakota-United States War of 1862. Kris Kristofferson graciously donated his services to perform, as did John Trudell and others.

You can view a video of Kris singing Knocking on Heaven’s Door with Larry Kegan, Cousin Melvin James (Lead guitar), Gregory Traxler (Drums), Sid Gasner (Bass), and myself.

Kris Kristofferson was everything you would hope him to be. Simply, one of the best songwriters of our time and an incredible human being. May his songs be forever sung.

Larry Long is an American singer-songwriter who has made his life work the celebration of everyday heroes. Larry has written and performed hundreds of ballads celebrating community and history makers. His work has taken him from rural Alabama to the Lakota communities in South Dakota. He has given musical voice to struggling Midwest farmers, embattled workers, and veterans. He can be reached at larrylong@communitycelebration.org.

 

Indigenous Peoples Day, Some History

by Ted Glick / October 14th, 2024

I was very surprised a few days ago to see the local bank where I have an account displaying a sign outside the front door which referred to what they called, “Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day.” Although I wish the first two words had not been there, it is still a positive thing that they went public in this compromise kind of way.

There’s something personal to me about this day. I’m not Indigenous, am very much of European ancestry, but in 1992 at the time of the 500th anniversary, official celebrations in the US of Columbus’ arrival in the western hemisphere, I took part in a 42 day, water-only Fast for Justice and Peace in the Americas. It was initiated by Brian Willson, Scott Rutherford and Diane Fogliatti, and it went from September 1 to October 12.

The overall message of this action and the much broader movement out of which it emerged was that it was long past time to turn away from all that Christopher Columbus represents—racism, slavery, militarism, imperialism and ecological destruction—and commit ourselves to working for a next 500 years very different than the one experienced between 1492 and 1992. One specific demand was for Columbus Day to be replaced by Indigenous Peoples Day.

There was an Indigenous-led movement that had been taking action over many months in 1991-92 in support of this essential new direction for the USA and other countries in the Americas. The fast was inspired by that movement.

20 years before I had taken part in two long fasts/hunger strikes, one in 1971 for 33 days while in prison for draft resistance and another in 1972, a 40 day, water-only fast to end the war in Indochina.

When I heard about this initiative by Brian, Scott and Diane about a month before it was to begin, it struck a chord in me, and my life circumstances were such that I could join it. Then, toward the end of the fast, Diane Fogliatti came up with an idea for how to continue to build this movement: do an organized fast for 12 days, from October 1 to October, each year going forward. I ended up taking part in this, helping to lead a People’s Fast for Justice loose network which did so from 1993 to 2001. Our two demands were for Columbus Day to be renamed Indigenous Peoples Day and for political prisoner Leonard Peltier to be freed.

Doing some research for this column, I have learned that since 1992 there have been a growing number of localities and states which have officially recognized in some way the second Monday of October as Indigenous Peoples Day, including the states of Alaska, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. What a surprise!

And responding to this upsurge, in 2021 President Joe Biden signed a proclamation in support of Indigenous Peoples Day.

There’s an awful lot of reasons to be anxious or depressed right now, but it is a very positive thing, something for which to be thankful, that Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and elsewhere in the world continue to survive. Even more, they continue to give leadership in the existential battle to prevent cascading ecological and societal devastation and for a very different future in the years to come. La lucha continua!FacebookReddit

Ted Glick works ith Beyond Extreme Energy and is president of 350NJ-Rockland. Past writings and other information, including about Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, two books published by him in 2020 and 2021, can be found at https://tedglick.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/jtglick. Read other articles by Ted.

Amnesty International calls for Biden to free Leonard Peltier

POLITICAL PRISONER OF THE 70'S INDIAN WARS

Renewed calls for Peltier's freedom arrived on Indigenous Peoples' Day.


Amnesty International's call arrived on Indigenous Peoples' Day with the global human rights watchdog again urging the outgoing Democratic president to affix his name granting clemency to the decades-long jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier (seen in FBI's 1976 Ten Most Wanted poster), who turned 80 last month. 

File photo courtesy of FBI/UPI

Oct. 14, 2024 

Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Amnesty International on Monday renewed calls for President Joe Biden to grant clemency to jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who many say is America's longest-serving political prisoner.

The call by Amnesty arrived on Indigenous Peoples' Day with the international human rights watchdog once more urging the outgoing Democratic president to commute the sentence of the decades-long jailed Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who turned 80 last month on Sept. 12, and release him.



Peltier, who was a member of the indigenous American Indian Movement, had been convicted in 1975 of allegedly murdering two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a territory of the Oglala Sioux tribe in South Dakota, in a trial many say was riddled with fraud. Peltier has since maintained his innocence.

Peltier has been jailed for nearly 50 years despite legitimate and ongoing concern over the fairness of his trial decades ago, Amnesty and many others have long since argued.

Joining with Amnesty in its plea for Biden to show mercy has been American tribal nations and its leaders, members of both chambers of Congress including the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee chairman, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, ex-FBI agents, noted Nobel Peace Prize winners and former U.S. Attorney James Reynolds, the very same federal prosecutor who handled Peltier's conviction and later appeals.

In early July, Peltier was denied his most recent parole request after a previous rejection in 2009.

But on Saturday in an open letter to Biden, liberal activist Michael Moore wrote that among 13 actions he feels Biden should take in the few remaining months of his "lame duck" presidency through Jan. 20 is to give Peltier his freedom.

"Mr. President, Leonard Peltier is two years younger than you," Moore opened his letter.

Moore's letter went on to state how Peltier was allegedly "pursued and surveilled by the FBI because of his political engagement. The evidence at his trial included conveniently altered details and a key witness who was coerced into testifying," Moore says. And many agree with his sentiments.

Currently housed in a Florida maximum security prison in regular lockdown, Peltier reportedly requires a walker to move and is blind in one eye from a previous stroke.

But Moore's is only one in a long line of other influential names, which he pointed out included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, members of Congress such as Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as well as actor Robert Redford, the Dali Lama and the late leaders Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela.

Amnesty International has long been part of the Peltier case. Officials observers to Peltier's 1977 trial were sent by Amnesty and, "along with its millions of members and supporters around the globe," has been campaigning on Peltier's behalf for his release.

Peltier in 2004 asked a judge to release certain files that he believed would grant a new trial, contending that he was framed by the U.S. government and would be exonerated if those documents could be publicly released.

In September, an official with Amnesty's U.S. arm went so far as to say the possible grant of presidential clemency for Peltier "could be one step to help mend the fractured relationship" and deep-seated generational mistrust the Native American population has for the U.S. government and "would forever be part of Biden's legacy," among other historical achievements.

"No one should be imprisoned after a trial riddled with uncertainty about its fairness," Justin Mazzola, a researcher with Amnesty International USA, said last month.

"Keeping an 80-year-old man with various health issues locked behind bars for the rest of his life doesn't serve justice," Mazzola wrote. "We hope that President Biden finds it in his heart to release Leonard Peltier as a matter of humanity, mercy, and human rights."

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee's Resolutions Committee in 2022 had unanimously approved a resolution imploring Biden to consider clemency for Peltier.

According to Amnesty, following a review of requests by the White House Counsel's Office and the U.S. Department of Justice, the president had committed to grant clemency and commutation of sentences on a rolling basis rather than do so at the end of Biden's term in January as historically had been the case by prior Oval Office occupants.

But pushback to Biden on that may come from within. The FBI Agents Association "strongly opposed" Peltier's release as Peltier has since maintained his innocence.

In July when Peltier was last denied parole, FBI Director Christopher Wray appeared to write-off any suggestion that Peltier should be granted his freedom despite widespread calls to do so and evidence suggesting alleged FBI impropriety.

Peltier "has been afforded his rights and due process time and again, and repeatedly, the weight of the evidence has supported his conviction and his life sentence," Wray said at the time praising the Parole Commission's decision to deny Peltier's freedom.

Because of Peltier's age and the next parole hearing not until 2039, July's recent parole denial means its likely Peltier will remain incarcerated until his death unless Biden acts before his White House exit following November's presidential election.

Palestine Has Mobilized a Global Movement. For It to Last We Must Get Organized.

By James Kilgore

August 12, 2024

Source: Truthout

Image by Wolfgang Berger



In the weeks after October 7, abolitionist and civil rights activist Angela Davis offered some pointed advice to people on the left during an Al Jazeera interview: “If we are not prepared to think critically about what’s happening in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem … we will not only be unprepared to understand and address the issues emanating from the current crisis; we won’t be able to understand the world around us [and] the many struggles for justice and freedom all over the globe.” She went on to add that, “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we’re talking about imperialism, settler colonialism, transphobia, homophobia, the climate crisis.”

For Palestine solidarity activists in the United States, it could be useful to look more deeply at the history of international solidarity in U.S. movements, particularly in the last three decades. At various points mass mobilizations on global issues have gained a high profile: the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and beyond in 1999-2000, participation in the semi-annual World Social Forums beginning in 2001, the anti-Iraq war movement in the early 2000s, the support for the pro-democracy Arab Spring of 2010, and a series of international responses to austerity budgets and increasing inequality that eventually exploded into Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

Subsequently, the 2010s erupted in reaction to the police-perpetrated killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Samuel DuBose, and dozens of other Black people. Mobilizations in response to these murderous police actions precipitated the formation of Black Lives Matter and culminated in the global reaction to the murder of George Floyd, where 40 countries on every continent except Antarctica took to the streets.

All of this built networks of personal relationships at the grassroots level and left permanent marks in the consciousness of millions, in some cases impacting the agendas of elected officials like “The Squad.” Still, it left a remarkably small residue of organizational infrastructure on which to grow a movement informed by internationalism. Instead, without an organizational center, we face the rise of far right and fascist formations across the globe coupled with the spiritual withering of center-left parties in France, Germany, Britain and of course the Democratic Party in the U.S.

Even more disorienting has been the fall from grace of national liberation movements. The degeneration of the organized global majority countries, in particular the decline of the Non-Aligned Movement with its New International Economic Order, has left an enormous void. National movements and states that people on the left revered in the past, such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa have either descended into webs of corruption, eschewed progressive policies for neoliberal and repressive paradigms, or both.

But the present actions in support of Palestinian liberation have reestablished hope in the possibilities of global solidarity. The hundreds of thousands of people coming onto the streets and social media are a clearcut indicator of belief in the power of collective action and imagination to make change regardless of how overwhelming the odds. While college campuses have been on the forefront of these actions, they have also included a considerable nonstudent cohort, including many Black and Brown people. Moreover, unlike in most U.S.-based campaigns of international solidarity, those directly impacted, namely Palestinians living in the U.S., have played an important leadership role in crafting this movement.

As the struggle continues, we need to contemplate the obvious: “What next?” In doing so, several key questions emerge. The most urgent, of course, is how to bring a halt to the mass murder and, once there is a permanent ceasefire, how to rebuild Gaza, East Jerusalem, and other areas devastated by murderous Zionist offensives. But there is also a need to ask more strategic questions: What have we learned from this situation that can steer us down a liberatory path rather than simply resting until the next eruption? We need a strategy to avoid the decline of activism that has ensued after each of the previous mobilizations.

Over the past few months, I have interviewed several activists who have been involved in prior campaigns of international solidarity. The cohort was intergenerational, though the majority were involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement or the Black liberation struggle during the ‘60s and ‘70s. I asked them to focus on their own experiences and, in particular, offer explanations for the decline of international solidarity within left movements and the failure of more recent mobilizations to gain a permanent foothold.

In our discussions, organizers mentioned five main factors that affected the capacity to sustain internationalism in left movements. Perhaps most frequently noted were the organizational forms that emerged during these protests. These comments fell into two categories: the professionalization of political struggle and the lack of structure and leadership.

The movements of the 1960s and 1970s largely relied on building a grassroots political base. In some cases, members paid dues, while leaders typically received modest pay or none at all. Puerto Rican independence fighter Alfredo Lopez contended that foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, McArthur, Soros — entered the movement space, relabeled it “social justice” and put forward a more moderate agenda. In the words of Chicago activist leader and historian Barbara Ransby, “Social justice becomes a job … where people are under the surveillance of philanthropy.” According to Lopez, these foundations “steered us away from international consciousness.”

Illinois youth development practitioner Posey described this process to Truthout as a “movement capture” which stresses “navigating the 501(c)(3) bureaucracy, not looking at how we connect with others people’s battles against U.S. imperialism.”

Cory Greene is co-founder and healing justice/NTA organizer of H.O.L.L.A., a New York-based community specific and healing justice focused “grassroots youth/community” program. He professes that his organization “stands on the legacy of the Black liberation movement.” He stressed the need for “institutional memory, to know how to pull on your lineages to heal.” He argues that the state and the nonprofit industrial complex has colonized these precious legacies or seriously diluted them.

By the same token, several organizers also believed that the absence of a clear-cut structure often undermined the potential continuity of these movements. Vincent Bevins, in his overview of mass protests in the 2010s, If We Burn, argues that the model adopted by most organizations, based on nonhierarchy, consensus decision-making, spontaneity, and large meetings in public spaces such as Tahrir Square or Zuccotti Park, obstructed the pathway to creating the type of structures, relationship-building and planning required to sustain a movement. Historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz summed it up for Truthout like this: “For the last 30 years I get my hopes up that something is going to happen, and the only thing happening is a sort of anarchism but they didn’t have a program. [They] just talked about getting rid of the state.”

A second, frequently forgotten factor in the decline of international solidarity was the demise of the Soviet Union and the “communist bloc.” While the class nature and political practice of the Soviet Union were often controversial within the left, the existence of a counter pole to Western imperialism was a constant reminder that building a global political power with an anti-capitalist agenda was possible. The foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies included the building of a global solidarity network of nations, funding and political support for left-wing national liberation movements in southern Africa and Central America as well as backing for liberation support work in the U.S. and Europe.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was the continued Soviet backing of a Cuban Revolution that faced an intensive embargo by the U.S. Support from the USSR included $1.7 billion to retool Cuban industrial infrastructure from 1976-80 and military assistance of $4 billion in the mid-1980s. The Cubans themselves, with Soviet support, initiated their own solidarity efforts in southern Africa in the 1970s, sending thousands of troops to Angola to help successfully repel a major offensive of the South African military against Angolan freedom fighters.

Dunbar-Ortiz told Truthout she recalled that the fall of the Soviet Union “scared me to death.” She said some of her leftist friends were overjoyed, but she had worked in international structures like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization where she saw the concrete assistance the Soviet Union was giving to freedom fighters in the global majority countries. In hindsight she added, “I think it had a bigger impact than any of us ever analyzed.”

Thirdly, the U.S. state restructured its domestic and international strategy. Through counterinsurgency programs like COINTELPRO, the government targeted key activists who advanced a radical internationalist agenda with a variety of tactics: assassinations such as the 1969 murder of Chicago Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, infiltration of movement organizations such as the American Indian Movement, Students for a Democratic Society and the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the “legal” framing of political activists like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal.

They also shifted their strategy for imperialist intervention. As former political prisoner David Gilbert highlighted to Truthout, the U.S. opted for a “hybrid” model in which the U.S. supplied weapons and other hardware, but the bulk of the troops in places like Gaza or Iraq come from partner countries in the region. This reduced the extent to which the U.S. population felt the pain of war and quelled desires to protest its continuation. A byproduct of this was a shifting of the international political attention of the left away from the military-industrial complex and the quest for peace. The fall of the Soviet Union instilled false confidence among many activists that the threat of world war would disappear with the weakening of the U.S.’s main enemy.

The fourth issue mentioned was the ideological triumph of a technology driven culture of neoliberalism and individualism. We live in the age of the new robber barons — Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and private equity funds that control much of global society with capital flows, surveillance and consumerist technology. This is reinforced by narratives that encourage the worship of wealth and increased power for internationalized capitalist firms. The media and often our cultural icons promote the narratives of the rich and superrich. Collective and cooperative efforts are seen as unrealistic or futile.

Migrant rights activist Maru Mora-Villalpando stressed to Truthout that the development of free trade agreements and their institutionalization in global bodies like the World Trade Organization promoted and advanced this ideology. In Mexico, for example, the installation of a free market in land ownership via the North American Free Trade Agreement has opened up ownership of Mexican agribusiness to U.S. transnational corporations, undermining local power.

Intimately linked to the advance of the neoliberal model has been the demobilization of organized labor. While we are seeing a resurgence in quarters such as with Amazon, Starbucks and the United Auto Workers, the percent of the U.S. private sector labor force that is unionized plummeted from 20 percent in 1983 to just over 11 percent in 2023. Unions can become important vehicles of internationalism. Most belong to global federations, which in key industries can create structural links that facilitate solidarity actions around boycotts, sanctions and labor issues.

Though certainly all unions do not take such stances, these international ties were highly active during the anti-apartheid movement, with workers often refusing to unload goods coming from or going to South Africa. They also played an important role during Occupy and the general strike in Oakland, California, and even today we see the longshore unions refusing to load and unload ships connected to Israel.

Lastly, interviewees stressed the complexity of solidarity. Ransby noted the importance of asking what “a liberation movement is for, not just what it is against” as well as avoiding the liberal view that “it is their struggle.”

New York attorney and organizer Jindu Obiofuma noted the importance for activists in the U.S. to recognize their positionality. She stressed that solidarity “begins with humility.” For her, in the U.S. this means “decentering what it means to be in the belly of the beast.” She noted a tendency for folks in the West to act as if they are “telling people fighting for liberation in other countries how best to fight for their lives based on principles rooted in their own analyses and experiences.” She stressed that for Western activists, especially white people, solidarity requires setting aside notions of white supremacy and American exceptionalism and “stepping back from yourself, doing what it is that the people you’re in solidarity with tell you to do and understanding that might come with some risks.”

Ultimately, witnessing the genocide in Palestine has forced many on the left to view the global political economy through another set of lenses. Activists are connecting dots of the military-industrial and prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, patriarchy and toxic masculinity — connections that had often disappeared behind the pressure of the system to isolate struggles and sectors of the oppressed population into silos.

The powers that be strive to push all left history, including that of international solidarity, off the map and replace it with the triumphalist narrative of the “Google world.” Poet June Jordan once said that how we respond to the Palestinian struggle is a “litmus test for morality.” Learning from the past is key to passing that test.

Will Leonard Peltier Die In Prison?

By Sarah Baum

July 30, 2024

Source: The Nation


Image by Kenny, Creative Commons 2.0

Leonard Peltier, one of America’s longest-serving political prisoners, could have been a free man today. He could have gone home to the little plot of land waiting for him in North Dakota that Indigenous groups and elders had prepared for him. He could have hugged his son, Chauncey, who he hasn’t seen outside the walls of a prison since Chauncey was 10. He could have lived out his final days in peace, or at least the approximation of it, after a lifetime of violence at the hands of the United States government, starting with his boyhood at the notoriously abusive, state-sponsored Indian Boarding Schools.

Instead, the US Parole Commission decided on July 2 that the ailing soon-to-be-octogenarian would spend the next 15 years—if he lives that long—in a federal penitentiary.

“They didn’t sentence him to death,” Nick Tilsen, an Indigenous activist who aided in the Peltier release efforts with the South Dakota-based NDN Collective, told The Nation, “but that’s what’s happening to him slowly, every day.”

The announcement came three weeks to the day after Peltier’s June 10 parole hearing, his first in well over a decade. It was a lot like his other legal proceedings, which is to say, highly unusual.

Many of the people who had led the charge to put Peltier behind bars in the first place, such as District Attorney James Reynolds and a top federal officer, were among those advocating for his release. But neither of those men—nor most of the character witnesses requested by Peltier’s legal team—were permitted by the government to take the stand. Only Tilsen, who had been coordinating Peltier’s release plan, and Peltier’s doctor had made the cut.

Most of the eight character witnesses Peltier’s legal team brought to speak on his behalf were deemed “inadmissible.” The Parole Commission didn’t give reasons as to why, but such quirks—to put it lightly—in the judicial process are not new for Leonard Peltier, a man who has spent nearly 50 years incarcerated for a crime he likely did not commit, thanks to a trial rife with prosecutorial misconduct and state-sanctioned violence.

To use that district attorney’s words: “[T]he continued incarceration of Mr. Peltier was and is injust. We [the FBI] were not able to prove that Mr. Peltier personally committed any offense.” To use Amnesty International’s words, Peltier is a “political prisoner”—jailed simply for being part of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.

Thirty sitting members of Congress (and countless former ones) have also called for Peltier’s release, as have the United Nations, Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, Human Rights Watch, and the Democratic National Committee.

But Peltier’s defense committee told The Nation that the roster was stacked against him at his hearing. In contrast to Peltier’s two allotted witnesses, nearly a dozen people were brought in to speak out against him. The current FBI director, Christopher Wray, wrote to the commission calling Peltier a “remorseless killer.” Testimony also included the families of the two FBI agents at the heart of the Peltier case: Jack R. Coler and Ronald A. Williams. The pair were killed in a shootout at the Raging Bull encampment, located inside the Pine Ridge Reservation, on June 26, 1975.

Hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence have since been uncovered to suggest that Peltier’s conviction was the end product of unconstitutional tactics and surreptitious violence perpetrated by the feds. The Raging Bull shootout occurred in an era dubbed the “Reign of Terror” by Indigenous traditionalists who were routinely brutalized by the FBI, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the paramilitary faction of the US-installed tribal government, known as the Guardians of the Oglala Nation, or the Goon Squad. There were reportedly upwards of 60 unsolved murders across the reservation in one three-year period at this time. The FBI was known to turn a blind eye to, if not actively arm, the GOONs.

Peltier’s AIM codefendants were acquitted on homicide charges by an Iowa jury on the grounds that it was rational and necessary self-defense in the face of the government’s ongoing terror campaign. But Peltier, who had fled to Canada, had to be extradited, so his trial came later. This time, the FBI took the case to a federal judge who was“notoriously anti-Indian” and who barred all evidence pertaining to anti-Indigenous violence from the GOONs and the federal government. Key witnesses were blocked from the stand, or threatened and coerced into false testimony.

The jury found Peltier guilty of two counts of first-degree murder; he was given two consecutive life sentences.

Today, Peltier cannot even walk unassisted, let alone be a “danger to his community,” which is one of the considerations the Parole Commission must take into account. His lawyers told The Nation that for an incarcerated person, it can be near-impossible to access quality healthcare.

“The only consistent feature of his medical records is the near-universal lack of follow-up,” Moira Meltzer-Cohen, of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, said. “Even when it’s the prison’s own doctors recommending care, it just doesn’t happen.”

Moreover, in a maximum security prison, inmates are often thrust suddenly into lockdown—making reliable, routine care seemingly impossible, Meltzer-Cohen said.

But Jenipher Jones, a cocounsel on the case, said Peltier’s plight goes beyond the typical pitfalls of prison healthcare. “To withhold care from that political prisoner often means that attention is being diverted from advocacy, from pursuit of release,” Jones told The Nation. “It is forcing them to fight for their lives instead.”

Meanwhile, the FBI has leveraged its political power to keep Peltier locked up. Under the Clinton administration, The White House allegedly all but promised to free Peltier. His defense committee bought him clothes and his grandson prepared a bedroom for his homecoming.

Then, thousands of current and former FBI agents swarmed to Washington to protest Peltier’s clemency. Suddenly, and without warning, Clinton released his list of clemency grantees on January 20, 2001—without Peltier’s name on it.

Chauncey Peltier, Leonard Peltier’s oldest son, was with his father on the reservation on the day of the shootout. He recalls the long, winding road trips in his father’s orange Chevy van, fishing out on the lake, traveling with AIM demonstrators. He also remembers being 10 years old, entering the courthouse for his father’s trial—and being slammed against the wall by FBI agents who told him his “murdering dad would never walk free.”

It was just one more chapter in what the junior Peltier described as a lifetime of FBI harassment and violence on account of his last name, and a lifetime of loss.

“So many people tell me I sound just like him,” Chauncey Peltier told The Nation. “I feel like I’ve been robbed in this situation too, because my father’s been wrongfully incarcerated and he ain’t been there for us kids when we needed him.”

But Peltier’s reach has also spanned far beyond the prison walls—not just his story, but his words, his poetry, his art and his activism. From his cell in a supermax prison, Peltier has helped organize Indigenous-led mutual aid initiatives such as toy drives, collaborated with scholars to craft Indigenous-focused policy, and funded humanitarian initiatives by selling his artwork.

The elder Peltier was not available for interview at this time, impeded by both his declining health and the communications roadblocks of incarceration—phone calls and visits are severely limited. But in his 1999 memoir, he stood up for continued Indigenous resistance, and emphasized the importance of preserving the culture and heritage of his people.

“I am guilty only of being an Indian,” he wrote. “Being who I am, being who you are—that’s Aboriginal Sin.”

Peltier’s lawyers told The Nation they will be filing an appeal. There have also been continued demands for President Joe Biden to grant Peltier clemency—demands that will likely increase now that Biden is set to leave office in January.

ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY

Sandra Hemme freed after 43-year murder conviction overturned

 Sandra Hemme walks out of prison in Chillicothe, Mo., after 43 years. Photo courtesy of the Hemme legal team

July 20 (UPI) -- Sandra Hemme walked away from a Missouri prison and into the welcoming embrace of her family members Friday evening after serving 43 years for a 1980 murder she didn't commit.

Hemme, 64, was released at about 5:50 p.m. CDT from the Chillicothe Correctional Center, which is about 90 miles east of Kansas City, Mo.

Attorney Sean O'Brien escorted Hemme from the prison and to members of her family gathered outside the prison.

Hemme's time is prison was the longest that a wrongfully convicted woman has served in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

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"We are grateful that Ms. Hemme is now, finally, reunited with her family after 43 years," Hemme's legal team, which included the Innocence Project, said. "She has spent more than four decades wrongfully incarcerated for a crime she had nothing to do with. Tonight, she is surrounded by her loved ones, where she should have been all along. We will continue to fight until her name is cleared.

Hemme, a young mentally ill woman, was under the effects of strong prescription drugs when law enforcement investigators questioned her several times about the murder of Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Mo.

Many have since concluded a former police officer who died many years ago likely murdered Jeschke.

"Police exploited her mental illness and coerced her into making false statements while she was sedated and being treated with antipsychotic medication," the Innocence Project told media.

Her conviction was based on the false statements coerced by St. Joseph Police Department investigators who ignored evidence pointing to St. Joseph Police officer Michael Holman, who died in 2015, the Innocence Project said.

No witnesses connected Hemme to the victim, murder or the crime scene, and Hemme had no motive to murder Jeschke, according to the Innocence Project.

The organization said only evidence against her were the false statements that police extracted from Hemme while she "was being treated at the state psychiatric hospital and forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will."

Officials at the Innocence Project said the St. Joseph Police Department "hid evidence implicating one of their own."

Evidence showed officer Holman used Jeschke's credit card a day after her murder, his truck was parked her home during the time she was murdered and investigators found her earrings at Holman's home.

Livingston County Presiding Judge Ryan Horsman overturned the conviction against Hemme, which the Missouri Supreme Court later upheld.


"It would be difficult to imagine that the state could prove Ms. Hemme's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt based on the weight of the evidence now available that ties Holman to this victim and crime and excludes Ms. Hemme," Horsman said in his ruling overturning Hemme's conviction.

The Bigoted Fraud of JD Vance

BY HARVEY WASSERMAN

JULY 19, 2024
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As Joe Biden inches toward retirement, right-wing attacks on his presumptive replacement, Kamala Harris, are already beyond the pale.

The meanness of spirit and naïveté can sometimes be breathtaking.

Take a vicious recent commentary by David Suissa in LA’s Jewish Journal.

Suissa welcomes Trump’s nomination of JD Vance as a “breath of politically incorrect fresh air” and a “middle finger to identity politics.”

Suissa presumes that Trump has big-heartedly chosen Vance for the VP slot out of a selfless bow to “the best man for the job.”

By contrast, Suissa implies that the choice of Harris means just to fill the Democratic ticket with a woman of color. Her prominence, he implies, is strictly the product of her politically correct race and gender.

The level of deception is mind-boggling…but deadly characteristic of the Trump Cult.

Far from a bearer of proven competence, Vance is a 39-year-old misogynist and homophobe with virtually no background in government and zero preparatory experience to serve as either Vice President or President of the United States.

Like Trump, Vance is a hollow media creation. His claim to fame is as the author of a book allegedly about “hillbillies”, a fortune made as a tech speculator, and a blind ring-kissing fealty to Donald Trump despite all the nasty things Vance once said about him. Like Trump, Vance is a wholly-owned, climate-denying subsidiary of the fossil/nuclear fuel industry.

Aside from his brief stint in the US Senate, Vance brings zero administrative or foreign policy preparation to competently handle the highest or second-highest positions in our government.

And very far from what Suissa says about him, Vance’s anointment is pure demographics. To anyone who was listening, the core of Vance’s acceptance sales pitch was as a child of Appalachia serving as Trump’s designated toady in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and other Rust Belt bulwarks whose electoral votes will decide the presidency.

Vance’s nomination only makes sense as the middle finger of a GOP campaign desperate to win midwestern electoral votes. This is, after all, a ten-state election, and Vance’s demographic plays in at least five of them. None of which has anything to do with any presumed capability to actually handle the job(s) for which Trump has him running.

Kamala Harris also, of course, brings her own demographics. She’s a woman of color, which Suissa presumes to label as her sole qualification Vice Presidency or beyond.

The contempt is breathtaking.

Like Vance, Harris of course has her demographic role to play. More than half the electorate is female. The black, Caribbean, South Asian and other ethnicities she embodies represent a third or more of it (her husband is Jewish).

Of course, running as a woman of color comes with costs. We’ve never had a female president. But Hillary Clinton did beat Trump in 2016 by more than three million popular votes. The male, white Christian Nationalist resistance was beyond ferocious…and this year will likely explode on a whole new level.

Harris brings plenty of baggage, left and right, from her highly contentious career.

But as an accomplished 59-year-old attorney and prosecutor, she brings with her decades of brutally intense, highly complex, often contradictory public service. In 2007 she published Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, about her contentious, mostly progressive ideas on legal reform.

Kamala served two terms as San Francisco’s District Attorney, then twice as the Attorney-General of the nation’s largest state. She worked four years as America’s third female US Senator of color, and four more as Vice President of the United States.

Fifteen previous Vice Presidents have become president. Six have been elected on their own, including Nixon and Biden. Few have had greater prior preparation to actually handle the job than Kamala Harris. Few if any have had thinner preparation than JD Vance.

Vance’s “middle finger to identity politics” includes his vehement misogyny, including the demand that women who choose to have abortions be tracked down and prosecuted by armed police. He is vehemently anti-LGBTQ.

Like Trump, who offered essentially to sell his presidency to the oil and gas industry for a billion dollars, Vance loves fossil fuels. He also hates wind and solar, which in Ohio have been devastated by a legislature recently turned toward a $1 billion nuclear power bailout by a $61 million bribe to a former Speaker of the House (who now resides in federal prison).

Suissa also bemoans the tendency of those on the left to equate Trump with Hitler. Vance, of course, has famously done just that.

The Donald still brands his his opponents as “vermin,” a term favored by Hitler to describe Jews like Harris’s husband.

In explicitly violent rhetoric, Trump vows “retribution” against those he dislikes. An actual functionary now has a “Dachau List” of more than three hundred designated “far left” targets. Public death penalty trials for “treason” have been floated for the likes of former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) and current US Rep Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who is also Jewish.

No previous major American presidential candidate has ever made such public threats. Richard Nixon had an “enemies list,” but never talked openly of violent “retribution.”

Trump’s threats recall Adolph Hitler’s fascist rhetoric leading up to his assumption of absolute power in the 1930s. Trump’s Supreme Court has given the President unfettered authority to break any law, a staggering assertion absolutely alien to anything the Founders might have said at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Far from an “originalist” interpretation, this astounding decree paves the way for the absolute power at the core of Trump’s game plan.

From his January 6, 2021 attempted coup to the present and predictable future, Trump’s absolutist rhetoric reeks of a coming dictatorship…backed by heavily armed MAGA brown shirts itching to open fire.

Much of the post-Holocaust agony among the Jewish community wonders how the Jews of Germany could not see what was coming with Hitler despite the absolute clarity of his authoritarian vision. What right-wing Jews seem to miss today is that from the KKK to MAGA, fascist bigots always end at anti-semitism. No matter their professed Revelations-based love for the state of Israel, Christian Nationalists’ hateful vengeance against gays, women and people of color will forever coincide with a visceral hatred for Jews.

Despite JD Vance’s loud warnings about Trump’s core Hitlerism, his “hillbilly” demographic defines his choice as The Donald’s #2. It’s certainly not from any special talent or experience he might have displayed for public service to anyone except the fossil/nuclear industry.

And despite the personal contempt of David Suissa and so many others, Kamala Harris brings deep, tangible credentials to the professional demands of actually doing the job of a President of the United States.

It’s sad to see such a career denigrated on the basis of her race and gender in a publication like The Jewish Journal.

But buckle down….as Joe heads toward the door (hopefully after freeing Leonard Peltier) the right wing waves of misogynist and racial contempt aimed at Kamala Harris are about to hit critical mass.

Harvey Wasserman wrote THE PEOPLE’S SPIRAL OF US HISTORY: FROM JIGONSASEH TO SOLARTOPIA.  Most Mondays @ 2-4pm PT, he co-convenes the Green Grassroots Election Protection Zoom (www.electionprotection2024).  The Mothers for Peace (www.mothersforpeace.org) could use your help in the struggle to shut the Diablo Canyon nukes.