Assange Is Finally Free As America, Britain, Sweden And Australia Are Shamed – OpEd

 June 29, 2024 

By Dave Lindorff

This was quite a week in the annals of freedom of the press.

Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblower organization Wikileaks, after being hounded by the US with the help of its sycophantic allies in the governments of the UK, Sweden, Ecuador and, most shamefully, his native Australia, for 14 years since his Wikileaks organization obtained and released  documents proving systemic war crimes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been freed. He spent the last 14 years fighting efforts by the US to lock him up oar execute 9or even to assassinate him ,spending 12 of those years in the hell of confinement in a British maximum security prison and earlier seven years as an asylum seeker trapped in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London.

His asylum ended and his imprisonment in Belmarsh began when the leftist president who had granted him asylum from British authorities who wanted to hand him over to the US for prosecution as a spy, lost an election and was replaced by a right-wing president who cancelled his asylum and called in the London Metropolitan Police, who dragged him out of the embassy and into solitary confinement in Belmarsh Prison pending extradition to the US.

Over the seven years he was trapped in the little embassy, or left alone in a tiny cell in hellish Belmarsh, his supporters — initially a handful of journalists and his family — a father, a half-brother and father and attorneys in Britain and the US, and one attorney, Sara Gonzalez Devant, who later bore  him two sons who have never met him except in captivity worked to build a movement to defend and free him.

It was a tough struggle. The US and UK media organizations that benefitted from his Wikileaks organization’s documentation of US war crimes, including the gun-sight video of a US helicopter gunship slaughtering, amidst audible mocking laughter,  11 unarmed Iraqis including two local Reuters journalists, and from other scoops Wikileaks  received from whistleblowers, largely turned on him when he was being pursued by US prosecutors.

Typically these same news organizations, when covering his case, would repeat in their articles about him (almost as if pasting in pre-set macro paragraphs”),  the false accusation that he was wanted by Swedish prosecutors for allegedly “raping” two women in Sweden. They also would routinely include in such stories gratuitous quotes from politicians smearing his character and even from fellow journalists questioning his claim to be one of them, along with grudging acknowledgement that the US charge of espionage against him was a threat to press freedom,

But truth gradually prevailed and pressure kept building: in Britain against his being extradited and against the US obsession with pursuing the case against him, and in Australia for the government in Canberra to end its years of submissive and callous acceptance of the abuse of an Aussie citizen by a US government out for revenge. This international movement to free Assange grew larger and more vocal when a new Labour government replaced the prior conservative one in Australia and Labor PM Anthony Albanese openly called on President Biden to end the case against his countryman Assange.

In the end it was this slowly and painstakingly developed international movement to free Assange that compelled the Biden administration to offer Assange a deal. He and his attorneys were reportedly told that the US would agree to his  freedom if he would plead guilty to one felony count of theft of US military secrets (the evidence of war crimes), and a sentence of five years, which would be satisfied by crediting the over five years he had spent being held in Belmarsh Prison without conviction of anything but denied bail while fighting the US’s extradition effort.

Much is being made now, of course, by US officials of that guilty plea, but it is important that what Assange was facing if he were extradited to a court in Washington DC. With an indictment on 17 felony counts under the 1917 Espionage Act an one felony count of  encouraging hackers and of helping NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to escape to Russia, the total prison term if convicted on all those counts would have run to 175 years’ jail time served consecutively.

The urgency of the US plea deal offer, which apparently came as a something of a surprise to Assange and his defense team, had to do with the reality that the US was facing of his possible escape from their trap:  That became at least a possibility when, after many rejections, two UK High Court Judges last year overruled a 2022 British Supreme Court decision denying Assange the right to challenge his extradition. Unconvinced by US promises that he would receive a fair trial in a US court (promises that were hedged by the US DOJ’s acknowledgement that the US Supreme Court would in fact be the final arbiter of whether, for example, Assange could avail himself of the Constitution’s First Amendment right of Free Speech and a Free Press — a Supreme Court packed with originalist justices who support the national security state. The two High Court judges were preparing to review his arguments against extradition later this month.

There’s no telling how they would have ruled of course, but the Washington nightmare of his walking free in Britain was more than Biden, AG Merrick Garland and the US national security agencies pressing for a lengthy jail sentence in the US, could tolerate. They needed at least the fig leaf of a guilty plea.

To understand why Assange, who is about to turn 53, after being effectively incarcerated for nearly a quarter of his life, simply for doing what investigative journalists do, revealing the truth about government crimes, it’s important to know what he was facing if he didn’t accept the Biden deal and then lost his last appeal of the extradition order that had already been approved in a UK court.

Let me explain.

In the self-appointed “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave” United States, those of us who as journalists cover legal issues know that American justice is not blind like the statue in many courts of the woman “Justice” blindfolded and holding up a scale in one hand and a sword in the other.. Neither is it fair. Worse yet, it routinely punishes those who demand  their Constitutional right to a jury trial for doing so applying the stiffest of penalties should they end up being convicted.

The safest bet in an American court under such circumstances is to “cop a plea,”  meaning to take the advice of one’s lawyer or  public defender: typically to plead guilty to a lesser charge and accept a lesser penalty. or if that proves unacceptable to the judge and prosecution, agree to plead guilty as charged in return for a lesser penalty. This harsh reality has led to a large number of people in prison for crimes they did not commit, but that they pleaded guilty to out of necessity and lack of funds to hire a lawyer or to appeal a wrongful conviction.

That’s why for instance, of the 71,954 defendants facing criminal federal charges in the US fiscal year 2022, only 1669 opted to go to trial, according to a Pew Research report.  That is  just 2.3% of all those facing felony or serious misdemeanor charges that year. Of those few who boldly requested a trial before a jury or a district court judge, only a handful — 290 or 0.4% of those charged, were acquitted. The other 1379 who had their cases tried were convicted, and because they insisted on a trial they had a right to, likely were slapped with lengthy or maximum sentences. Of the rest of those who didn’t have their cases adjudicated, 89.5% or 64.434 just pleaded guilty hoping for a lighter sentence. Another 8.2%, or 5900 defendants, had their cases tossed out, usually for lack of sufficient evidence.

Given this sorry record, which is depressingly typical of how the federal courts operate year in and year out in the US, it’s understandable why Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who finally escaped over 12 years of terrible torture at the hands of the US government and a supine British government, agreed to cop a plea.

Assange and his British counsellors also probably knew also about an investigative report published last year in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, summarized later in a British publication called The Pen, which located copies of at least some of the long-missing or destroyed emails between Swedish prosecutors and Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service concerning the effort by a politically connected and CIA-linked prosecutor in Stockholm and the CPS, which at the time in 2013 was headed by none other than Barrister Keir Starmer. He’s the man widely expected to become Britain’s new Prime Minister if, as polls suggest, his Labour Party wins an outright majority and a six-year term as Prime Minister in the July 4 Parliamentary elections.

Starmer’s correspondence suggests it was his office that was pressing reluctant Swedish officials to  keep insisting on trying to extradite Assange to Sweden to face questioning there about allegations of sexual abuse accusations by two Swedish women, and who advised them to reject offers by Assange and his attorneys to respond to their questions if they came to London and met with him. There had long been a question of why, Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny, from  2010 to 2016, unable to question Assange in Sweden, refused a standing  offer from his lawyers to travel to the UK and question him where he was holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy.

As the Italian newspaper Il Facto Quotidiano  explains, “No one understood why Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny did not want to travel to London to question Julian Assange and determine whether to charge him or not. It was our FOIA investigation that allowed unearthing the reason: It was the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service…who advised the Swedish prosecutors not to question Assange in London.”  The magazine learned that all of the email correspondence by CPS officer Paul Close’s, who did most of the communicating with Ny was mysteriously wiped when he left the agency in 2014.

Starmer, who has been strangely silent about Assange’s plea deal with the US and his escape from British detention, was in charge of the CPS from 2008 through 2013 and during those years when the office was handling communications regarding Assange with the Swedish prosecutor and was Close’s boss, appears to have been a key agent in Assange’s unconscionable torment. That would clearly have made Assange and his defense team keen to get him out of Britain and out of the news cycle before Keir “our national security always comes first” Starmer were to enter 10 Downing Street as the UK’s Prime Minister.

The deal offered by the Biden Administration’s “Justice Department” was tough one. It required that in return for agreeing to plead guilty to one of the 17 felony charges of violating the US Espionage Act and being sentenced to five years in prison, a punishment which would be met by counting the over five years he has spent in solitary confinement in Britain’s dank and oppressive Belmarsh Prison fighting a US extradition petition, Assange would be able to fly home to his native Australia a free man.

Behind the scenes, one can see that the Biden administration, like the Trump and Obama administrations before it, has been vigorously doing the bidding of the US National Security State —the CIA,, the FBI, NSA  and the Pentagon — in pursuing a major espionage case against Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, He and his organization had hugely embarrassed those agencies and the US government agencies over the years with the release of documents proving that the US was guilty of  systemic and massive war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was spying on the leaders of allies in NATO, and and Assange had also also helped NSA leaker Edward Snowden, another arch enemy of the national security state, to escape to Russia.

The US media happily ran page-one banner-headlined stories and videos of the US war crimes exposed by Assange and his Wikileaks organization. But then, when he was being indicted and hounded by the US government and was fighting his extradition to the US from a jail cell in Britain, those same media organizations just as happily stabbed him in the back, quoting slimy US politicians like former Trump VP Mike Pence claiming that his releases “put US personnel at risk.”  (In fact the US, in its arguments in British courts seeking an extradition order, never could present a single case of a US soldier or CIA agent being put at risk, injured or killed because of a Wikileaks story or purloined document.   Like the Swedish “rape charges,”  all the smearing of Assange was and remains lies.

Establishment journalists too, in Britain and the US, have been guilty of shamelessly piling on in the tarring of Assange even as others of their colleagues, most of them outside of the mainstream news organizations, have heroically worked to debunk the lies.

The bottom line is that Assange in his struggle for freedom, has been heroically defending the freedom of all journalists and publishers around the world to speak truth to power.  The indictment of Assange, a foreigner working outside the US, was nonetheless pursued by three presidents including Obama (whose Justice Department drew up a sealed indictment, but never acted on it),  Trump, whose Justice picked it up and activated it in 2019, and Biden, who pressed forward with the effort to extradite Assange and have him face the Trump Justice Department’s indictment. All three presidents have sought to expand the reach of the already controversial Espionage Act  to include  journalists of any nationality operating anywhere in the world.

From its first use in the days of WWI, when the Espionage Act was passed to enable the government to arrest immigrants (usually anti-war leftists) on supposed spying charges, the act has morphed fairly recently under those three feckless presidents into a tool to go after not just alleged spies, but whistleblowers and the journalists who rely on them.  Going after Assange just expanded its reach globally.

Some desk-bound pundits to whom the notion of challenging state abuse of power would never occur, are claiming that Assange, by copping a guilty plea, sold out his media colleagues.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  First of all, Constitutional scholars say that a plea bargain creates no new legal precedent in the federal or state courts of the US. Only an appellate court ruling of a Supreme Court ruling has such significance on future cases.  (That’s not to say that just seeing what the US government and its willing puppet states in Europe are willing to do to those who do expose its crimes isn’t going to deter many from following in Assange’s footsteps.)

But in any case, no one who has not spent more than twelve years in enforced confinement has any right to criticize Assange for availing himself of the chance to get out of jail, to avoid the horror of a prosecution in the US legal system, and to join his family, including his two children, whom he has never met except in captivity.

As a fellow journalist, I can only congratulate him for his courage, to wish him well as he gets used to freedom again, and to salute all those who have worked for his freedom.

As my friend, colleague and fellow journalist Ron Ridenour, a US journalist/activist who has long ago abandoned his native US to live in Denmark, and who years ago cashed in his retirement savings and sent it all to Assange’s defense fund (he also reports giving $1000 to a Crowdfunder campaign to fund to repay the cost of the private jet Assange had to charter at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars to safely fly to his court hearing in Saipan in the Northern Marianas and on to the safety of Australia), says, “ I think Assange’s freedom is a huge victory. We the people all came together — not so much in the US, but in Europe and England and around the world. It shows that when a good number of people are willing to get together in the early morning in a cold rain we can make good things happen!” (In less than a week the fund had collected £441,793, close to the target goal of £520,000, a powerful demonstration of the support for Assange.)

Ridenour adds, “It’s a disappointment that the great journalist John Pilger, who tirelessly fought for Julian’s freedom, and Dan Ellsberg, and Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner, didn’t live to see this day.”

I think a headline on the BBC the day Assange walked out of a US district court in Saipan with the judge telling him he was “a free man” was on target,  Referring to the years before PM Albanese called for his release, when Australian leader after Australian leader ignored Assange’s plight at the hands of the US, including even Labour PM Julia Gillard, who pointedly refused to lift a finger to help her persecuted countryman it read

Australia turned its back on Assange, Time made him a martyr.

The only thing wrong with the story topper is it ought to have said:

Australia turned its back on him, Britain tortured him at the request of US prosecutors, and America betrayed its own First and Fifth Amendments. Time made Assange a martyr.


Dave Lindorff  is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective. Lindorff is a contributor to "Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion" (AK Press) and the author the author of “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press). He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com

Why the swing state faith voters who really matter in 2024 aren’t evangelicals

MAGA evangelicals grab all the headlines. But it’s swing state faith voters — Catholics, mainliners and Black Protestants — who will likely decide the election.

This combo image shows President Joe Biden, left, Jan. 5, 2024, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, right, Jan. 19, 2024.

 (AP Photos, File)

June 25, 2024
By Bob Smietana, Jack Jenkins


(RNS) — On Election Day in November 2022, Pastor Charlie Berthoud of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Madison, Wisconsin, sat at a table outside the church’s polling place and handed out treats and encouragement.

“Anyone want a nonpartisan cookie?” he recalls asking neighbors who came by to vote.

“We want to thank people for taking part in the democratic process,” said Berthoud, who believes voting is both a civic duty and an act of faith. That idea, he said, is enshrined in the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which Covenant belongs to.

“Voting is in our job description,” said Berthoud, who hopes to hand out more cookies this November.

This fall, the outcome of the presidential election may be determined by how church members like those at Covenant do that job.
The difference-makers

While evangelicals and Christian nationalists have made the most of the God and country political headlines in recent years, experts say they aren’t as numerous or influential as other faith groups in the swing states — such as Wisconsin — where the presidential election will likely be decided.

For example, about half of voters in Wisconsin identify as mainline Protestants or Catholics, said Craig Gilbert, the former Washington bureau chief of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a fellow at the Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. The “nones” — those who claim no religion — make up another quarter. White evangelicals (16%) and other faiths make up the rest.

Republicans attend a rally for Trump-backed U.S. Senate candidate Trent Staggs and others on June 14, 2024, in Orem, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Gilbert said he and a colleague looked at polling from 2020 and compared it with more recent polls. Their study showed that both candidates are seen less favorably than they were in 2020 — though former President Donald Trump has become more popular with born-again voters while President Joe Biden has become more popular with nones.

Predicting what will happen this fall is tricky, he said.

“You can talk yourself into reasons why neither guy can win,” he said. “They are both more unpopular than they were the last time they met each other.”

Nationwide, some faith groups will be courted by campaigns as part of turnout operations, such as nones and Black Protestants, who tend to back Democrats, and white evangelicals, who overwhelmingly vote for Republicans.

But the gap between the two parties is closer among Catholics and mainliners, making them targets for persuasion — even as both groups have inched closer to Republicans.

“You can sort of think of white, nonevangelical Protestants and white Catholics as the center of the political spectrum,” said Greg Smith, associate director of research at Pew Research Center.

Here’s a look at how the faith vote is playing out in these battleground states.
Pennsylvania

While Biden has Pennsylvania roots and is a regular Mass-attending Catholic, he may not find enthusiastic support in his home state among those who share his faith. Both he and Trump are unpopular with voters, said Christopher Borick, professor of political science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion.

“I think the major takeaway is that indeed there is lots of dissatisfaction,” said Borick, referring to the results of an April 2024 Pennsylvania survey about the presidential election.

In that poll, Trump led among Catholics by 45% to 41% for Biden. Among Protestants overall, Trump got 56% of support, while Biden got 33%. Folks from other major religions and atheists/agnostics favor Biden over Trump.

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden participate in a memorial wreath ceremony at the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge National Historic Park in Valley Forge, Pa., Jan. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

“For a practicing Catholic and someone that loves these Pennsylvania roots to not be winning that group is challenging,” said Borick. “But that’s the nature of the Catholic vote.”

Michael Coulter, professor of political science and humanities at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College, said Pennsylvania — where closely contested matches are increasingly common — will likely come down to motivating swing voters, especially among mainliners and Catholics.

“These might be people who might not be switching from Trump to Biden or from Biden to Trump — but they might be switching from nonvoter to voter,” he said. “And that becomes a very important thing.”
Georgia

Religion has long been a major political player in Georgia, which remains one of the most religious states in the country: More than half the population attends religious service at least a few times a year, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.

Georgia reentered the swing state discussion in 2020, when the Peach State — which hadn’t backed a Democrat for the presidency since 1992 — went for Biden. Voters also elected two Democratic senators, one of whom is the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a prominent Black Baptist pastor. Experts frequently point to two groups when assessing the impact of religion on those elections: white evangelicals and Black Protestants.

Trump, for his part, aggressively courted evangelicals in 2020, enlisting Georgia-based pastors as faith advisers and hosting faith-themed “Praise, Prayer and Patriotism” events in the state.

Hundreds of people wait in line for early voting in Marietta, Ga., on Oct. 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Ron Harris, File)

“There’s a mingling on the evangelical side of religion and politics that certainly benefits Donald Trump and benefits other Republicans up and down the ballot,” said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia.

Conversely, Bullock noted Democratic candidates “regularly attend Black church services” seeking support, and sometimes — much like Republican candidates at white evangelical churches — even speak from pulpits.

In both cases, politicians are engaging in more of a “mobilizing effort than a conversion effort,” he explained. It can make or break a campaign: In 2022, Republican former football star Herschel Walker narrowly lost his U.S. Senate bid to Warnock in a campaign where both candidates leaned heavily on religious rhetoric. But Walker got 81% of the evangelical vote, a drop-off from Trump and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

“Had he hit probably 82% of the white evangelical vote, we would have Senator Herschel Walker right now in D.C.,” said Bullock.

Charles Bullock. (Photo courtesy of UGA)

But religion’s dominance over politics in the South may be waning. According to Bullock, younger Southerners are abandoning rural homesteads for better job prospects in nearby cities, with many breaking off ties to their home churches. Younger, less religious Americans from outside the state have also flocked to cities such as Atlanta.

“Overall, the people moving into these growth states are more Democratic than the existing population is,” he said.

When it comes to persuasion, both parties are fighting over a demographic that is believed to be less religious and has shown a tendency to shift political allegiances: white, college-educated voters. Bullock argued Trump has been a deciding factor for this group in the past, and not in a way that favors the former president.

“You’ve got these white, college-educated voters who are still essentially Republicans, but they just can’t bring themselves to vote for Donald Trump or someone like him,” Bullock said.

RELATED: Catholics could decide the 2024 election

Arizona and Nevada

Religion was once an afterthought in Arizona politics, but locals say it has increasingly become a major factor — or at least a rallying cry.

In 2020, Dream City Church, a megachurch in Phoenix, hosted a Trump campaign event. In the years since, the church — along with several others — has forged a relationship with the activist group Turning Point USA and began openly advocating for forms of Christian nationalism from the pulpit. Politicians, too, have begun engaging more aggressively with evangelicals, such as failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

When Trump once again spoke at Dream City Church during a rally earlier this month, the crowds treated it as a triumphant return.


Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, right, speaks as former President Donald Trump listens during a rally, Oct. 9, 2022, in Mesa, Ariz. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)

“It’s strange as an Arizonan, because we’re just not used to it,” said the Rev. Caleb Campbell, a pastor at Desert Springs Bible Church who has launched an effort to combat what he says is a rise in Christian nationalism.

Yet for all the energy that has gone into religious outreach by conservatives in the state, it has yet to produce major results at the national level.

“The people who’ve been doing it are not winning,” Campbell said, noting Trump’s 2020 loss as well as Lake’s failed bid despite hard-charging religious rhetoric.

According to Thomas Volgy, professor of political science at the University of Arizona, national-level campaigns appear to be struggling with Arizona’s unusual electorate.

“The key is not Republicans or Democrats, but independents,” he said. “They make the largest grouping of people, and they look a lot more on social issues — and in terms of their religious preferences — (like) Democrats rather than Republicans.”

Jon Ralston, a veteran journalist and expert on Nevada politics, said his state has also seen a surge in independent voter registration due to a new law that automatically adds people to voter rolls when they interact with the Department of Motor Vehicles. Like in Arizona, Trump has made campaign stops at churches in the state, but Ralston was skeptical that courting religious votes alone could secure a victory for either candidate.

“It’s a very mercurial electorate, and even more so now, because there’s been a huge upsurge in independent registration,” Ralston said.

Both Nevada and Arizona have also seen an influx of new residents moving in from blue states such as California. In Arizona’s case, Volgy said, the shift has “likely made the state more liberal” while also diminishing the voting power of religious groups such as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a traditionally Republican-leaning group which polls nonetheless show have long been skeptical of Trump.

Meanwhile, 1 in 4 Arizona voters are expected to be Latino this year. It’s a demographic analysts say is up for grabs: In a June 2023 Axios-Ipsos poll that surveyed Latino adults nationwide, a plurality (32%) said “neither” party represents them. And while Arizona’s Hispanic population leans heavily Catholic (along with pockets of evangelicals), their voting priorities often diverge from the views of church hierarchy on issues such as abortion, making Election Day outcomes hard to predict.

Michigan

Michigan, a state that had moderately supported Democratic presidential candidates since 1992, was an unexpected win in Trump’s first candidacy and a real blow to his second when he lost it. The Rev. Ralph Rebandt, founder of Michigan Lighthouse Ministries, said he’s determined to get his fellow Michigan evangelicals out to vote this fall, in hopes of returning the state to the Republican column in the presidential race. A former pastor turned political activist, Rebandt said that many Michigan evangelicals didn’t vote in 2022, when a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights was on the ballot.

The measure, which Rebandt’s group opposed, passed.

“The church did not show up,” he said.

Rebandt — who resigned from the church he’d led for three decades in order to run for governor in 2022 — has traveled the state in recent months, hoping to boost turnout for the 2024 presidential election. He gives presentations about Christian influence in American history as well as telling churchgoers they have a duty to vote.

“It’s funny,” he said. “The church has been told to stay out of politics, but it’s politics that bring the church together.”

He added: “This is good versus evil.”

Corwin Smidt, a senior fellow at Calvin University’s Paul Henry Institute and longtime observer of Michigan politics, said the state’s religious diversity plays a role in its politics. Along with Catholics, mainliners and evangelicals, the state has a sizable Muslim and Black Protestant population.

It’s not clear how those groups will vote. Christians who lean evangelical, in places such as Grand Rapids and other parts of western Michigan, may not be as enthusiastic about Trump as they are in the Bible Belt or other Republican strongholds. The state’s Muslim voters, who have supported past Democratic candidates, may be less likely to vote for Biden because of the war in Gaza.

Turnout among Black voters, particularly in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, may prove key. Black Protestants have been staunch supporters of Democratic presidential candidates in the past, and a nationwide Pew Research poll from earlier this year found that 77% support Biden in the 2024 presidential race. Smidt pointed out that in 2016, Trump won Michigan largely because of a big drop-off in African American votes


U.S. Rep. Hillary J. Scholten. (Courtesy photo)

Engaging with religion can be a balancing act. U.S. Rep. Hillary J. Scholten, who represents Michigan’s Third District, is known for talking about faith and politics everywhere she goes — well, almost everywhere.

“For me, I leave my politics at the door whenever I go to church,” she said.

Scholten, a Gordon College graduate, grew up in a Dutch Reformed version of Christianity that straddles the line between evangelical and mainline versions. She described the people in her district as both independent and deeply spiritual. They don’t want government intrusion in matters that are personal, like in vitro fertilization, she said. Instead, she said, they want to be free to choose what they believe is the right thing to do. They also want faith to play a role in public life.

“I have seen just an overwhelming number of people who have been drawn to our campaign, because I have not been afraid about talking about my faith — and frankly being unapologetic about being a person of deep Christian faith,” she said.
Wisconsin

Back in Wisconsin, Berthoud said that during the election season, he tries to keep the focus on the common good and to help people listen to different of points of view. Berthoud, who described himself as a back-to-basics pastor, said he also tries to focus on Christian virtues such as kindness, honesty and loving your neighbor. While the church encourages voting, Berthoud does not endorse candidates and tries to walk a fine line of defending democracy without demonizing others.

“I’m not going to tell people to paint the house orange or blue,” he said. “But if someone’s threatening to burn down the house, then I feel like I need to say something.”



Pastor Charlie Berthoud. (Courtesy photo)

Kris Androsky, pastor of Community United Methodist Church in Elm Grove, Wisconsin, said the polarization of American culture and the upcoming election make pastoring in an election year difficult.

Her church, located in suburban Waukesha County, a Republican stronghold that Trump won by nearly 60,000 votes in 2020, was politically and theologically diverse when she arrived six years ago. Today the church is less diverse politically as people have begun to self-select in or out along political divides. COVID-19 split folks apart. The 2020 election and the polarization of the last four years have just deepened the divides.

“Pre-COVID and pre-Trump, we could think about our neighbors in a nice, clean, nonpersonal way,” she said. “Of course we love everybody.”

Now, she said, people are much more aware of who their political enemies are — and who their neighbors voted for. That makes the reality of loving your neighbors, and your enemies, much harder.

Androsky believes faith should play a role in how people vote on issues. The problem comes when outside politics divide a congregation and make it hard for people with different views to worship together. As the election approaches, things will become increasingly complicated.

“In election years, everything gets a little bit wonky and wild in general,” she said. “I suspect that that will be true for church leadership as well.”

DISANTISLAND

Florida’s Brazen Assault on Public Sector Workers Puts Unions in Survival Mode

More than 50,000 Florida workers have lost their union membership in the advent of S.B. 256.

MCKENNA SCHUELER

JUNE 5, 2024

IN THESE TIMES

Unionized teachers and firefighters join together at a rally to protest budget cuts proposed by then Florida Gov. Rick Scott

.PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE VIA GETTY IMAGES

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — Early one February morning, Chris Pagel, a retired U.S. Army combat engineer and physical education teacher, begins his three-and-a-half hour drive from Nassau County to the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee. He’s opposing a bill designed to build on S.B. 256 — an anti-union law passed last year that has, so far, already caused more than 50,000 public employees to lose their union representation.

Later, standing in front of lawmakers, he questions why he bothered making the drive at all. ​“I’ve been here before,” he says during public testimony. ​“The Republicans have already made up their mind. Democrats fight it.”

More than a decade in the making, S.B. 256 essentially requires unions to have a lot of dues-paying members while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so. While the law bans public sector unions from deducting dues directly from members’ paychecks, it also requires at least 60% of a bargaining unit to pay dues or risk losing their union status.

Shortly after signing the bill, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis framed it in a statement as an effort to ​“reign in out-of-control unions” that he said take money away from teachers and misuse government funds for political aims. In the same announcement, he specifically mentioned teachers unions, many of which were already required to maintain at least 50% membership under a law approved by then Gov. Rick Scott in 2018.

Pagel is a registered Republican and president of the Nassau Teachers’ Association. When Florida lawmakers and DeSantis approved the legislation in 2023, teachers unions like his — representing a large share of the state’s unionized public sector — declared they were being targeted.


Union supporters and teachers protest austerity in Orlando, Florida, on March 8, 2011, at the beginning of Florida's legislative session.PHOTO BY JOE RAEDLE VIA GETTY IMAGES


Most other public sector unions — which hadn’t previously been subject to any membership threshold—became collateral damage. While some teachers unions lost members due to the payroll deduction ban, not one of the 48 decertified bargaining units represented teachers. Most were decertified due to low membership and represented state and municipal employees (such as utilities and code enforcement workers and non-instructional staff in public schools and universities).

Under the new law, bargaining units reporting low membership can petition for an election to keep their union intact. This must be done within a month of submitting mandatory annual paperwork to the state confirming membership numbers and requires gathering signed cards from at least 30% of employees in support. Then, a simple majority must vote to recertify. If the union doesn’t file a petition at all, they’re decertified. The latter has been the case for all units dissolved so far.

“We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association."


Andrew Spar, president of the statewide teachers union, is adamant that educators won’t see the same fate. ​“We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association,” says Spar.

Unions have entered survival mode, mobilizing to recruit and retain members. Several, including the Florida Education Association (FEA), have sued the state over the law.

Erik Hagen, a 31-year-old elementary school music teacher in Hillsborough County, says transitioning members to a new dues payment system has been a ​“huge undertaking,” especially for older teachers. His union rose to the challenge. Nonetheless, he describes the entire situation as a ​“nightmare.”

“I shouldn’t be spending all of this time walking around, just trying to get people who were members back to being members."


“I shouldn’t be spending all of this time walking around, just trying to get people who were members back to being members,” says Hagen. ​“I should be spending my time supporting my teachers, building personal connections.”

The impact, he argued, extends beyond schools and the union hall. ​“Any attack against teachers and labor movements in Florida damages society as a whole,” he adds.

There’s one unintended consequence of the law that troubled its Republican sponsors and DeSantis: its impact on police and firefighter unions. S.B. 256 aimed to exempt these unions from most of the new regulations, including the membership threshold and payroll dues deduction ban. The bill’s sponsors argued that first responders belong to a special category of workers who deserve to be treated differently than others in the public sector.


The Right Has a New Playbook to Crush Unions and Enshrine Corporate Power
The American Legislative Exchange Council is pushing a spate of anti-worker bills in states across the country—the latest in the group's onslaught on collective bargaining rights.
JULIANA BROAD


But then last summer the state agency in charge of rulemaking determined that some police and firefighter unions must follow the new rules like everyone else because some of their units also contain civilian employees who weren’t clearly carved out of the bill.

Emails I obtained through a public records request for Orlando Weekly show police and firefighter unions consequently lobbied the Republican sponsors of S.B. 256 to exempt all their members. So did lobbyists for out-of-state conservative think tanks, like the Freedom Foundation and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Both have a history of advocating for similar anti-union policies in other states.

In January 2024, a so-called glitch bill delivering such carve-outs — and new, onerous reporting requirements for nonexempt unions — was born. Florida Rep. Dean Black, one of the GOP sponsors, described the glitch bill to me as a follow-up to last year’s legislation. Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, described it during a public hearing as an effort to clarify the bill’s original intent.


Students walk out of school to oppose Florida education policies outside Orlando City Hall on April 21, 2023.PHOTO BY PAUL HENNESSY/ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES


Pagel, the teacher and union president, leans over the speaker podium with purpose while delivering public testimony on the glitch bill.

“As a Republican, I can tell you, I am embarrassed and ashamed that we keep on voting yes when your constituents are telling you no,” Pagel says, staring down the panel of mostly Republican lawmakers. ​“Please get a backbone and vote ​‘No.’”

Despite Democratic opposition, the glitch bill passed the GOP-dominated legislature, with seven Republicans dissenting.

Many units are anxiously awaiting recertification elections, with union leaders hopeful that workers will vote to preserve their unions.


The future of Florida’s unionized public sector remains unclear. But some on the frontlines remain cautiously optimistic. Many units are anxiously awaiting recertification elections, with union leaders hopeful that workers will vote to preserve their unions. Twelve of them, including two teachers unions, already have. But if dues-paying membership falls below 60%, they’ll have to repeat the process next year.

None of this is occurring in a vacuum. At the same time Florida’s unions are fighting to survive the new rules, they’re also fighting for better wages and against book bans and industry-backed rollbacks to the state’s child labor laws.


Johanna ​“Hanna” Folland, a high school history teacher in South Florida, puts it bluntly: ​“We need solidarity and we need help.”

Folland is a member of the United Teachers of Dade (UTD), a union targeted by the Freedom Foundation for decertification. UTD is one of the largest teachers unions in the country, and its president, Karla Hernandez-Matz, ran on a Democratic ticket for lieutenant governor of Florida in 2022. She and her running mate, Charlie Crist, were endorsed by teachers unions and lost to DeSantis. Badly.

“Teachers will stick together” and fight, Folland assures me. We’re sitting at a table inside Chicago’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare hotel on the final day of the 2024 Labor Notes Conference. We’re both exhausted but simultaneously heartened and inspired by the dwindling motley crew of union activists around us. The battle in Florida, she admitted, is one she expects teachers will continue to fight ​“probably every year for the foreseeable future.”

MCKENNA SCHUELER is a staff reporter for Orlando Weekly in Florida, where she covers labor issues, local news and politics. Her work has also appeared in Strikewave, Facing South, Protean Mag and Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

Capital’s Big Bank

BY RON JACOBS

 JUNE 21, 2024
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Image by Markus Krisetya.

I remember once hearing Michael Parenti say about conspiracy theories that if one thinks there are groups of mostly rich white men gathering in a room and deciding how they are going to tighten their control on the world, they would be partially right. Why? Because there are groups of mostly rich white men who gather in boardrooms and fancy restaurants to decide what they are going to do next to profit even further. The complementary element of this is that these individuals don’t control those boardrooms as much as those boardrooms control their action, at least figuratively. If one accepts this, then there might be fewer boardrooms more powerful than that of the World Bank. Even if one doesn’t accept it, that statement rings true.

This is the essence of the recently updated history of the World Bank by Eric Toussaint. Titled The World Bank: A Critical History, the book was originally published in 1986, a few years before activists worldwide began organizing the Fifty Years is Enough campaign that would result in a series of anti-capitalist protests and actions worldwide. Perhaps the most well-known of these protests was the first international mobilization against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999. The WTO was itself a conspiracy between powerful governments and the biggest capitalists in the world; a conspiracy to keep the Global South enslaved to a Global North dominated in virtually every sphere by the United States.

First and foremost, this book is a historical explanation of the World Bank’s role in maintaining and expanding the dominance of the US-centered system of global capitalism since the end of World War Two. It exposes the lies and deceptions behind the Bank’s original conception regarding its intent and delineates the actual implementation of bank policies and practices that were always designed by Washington and its co-conspirators to maintain the domination of the Global South’s economies and governments. Using country studies, bank policy statements, United Nations surveys and other sources, Toussaint breaks down the truths about how the World Bank works, who it serves and what its intentions are. During his discussion, it becomes clear that many of the same leaders and officers employed by the World Bank and its affiliates (the International Monetary Fund, for example) were and are members of US capitalism’s elite corps of managers and warmakers. Foremost among those names are Robert McNamara, a former Ford Motor company executive who was a major architect of the US war on the Vietnamese while serving under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s, and Paul Wolfowitz, a neocon whose involvement in the US war on Iraq under George W. Bush is well-documented and as worthy of war crimes charges as McNamara’s work around Vietnam.

The economic policies described in this history prove over and over again that developing independent and local economies of what were once called third-world nations has never truly been the purpose of this bank. Indeed, in certain cases where local governments rejected the demands of the World Bank to build export-based economies, the governments and the countries they governed were penalized until they buckled to the bank’s demands. In example after example, Toussaint’s text makes it clear that any development sponsored by the World Bank would be the development that benefited Wall Street and punished independent governments and independence itself. This later phenomenon is most stark in those countries that were either granted independence by their former colonizer or won it after a war. Any loans granted to the former colonial regimes were forced on to the new government of independence. In certain scenarios, this meant that the colonial government intentionally over-borrowed from the Bank knowing full well the individuals in that government could abscond with the millions and leave the new national liberation government with the bill. In turn, the new governments most often ended up having to pay off the loans to get new money to address their people’s needs. Debt servitude writ large.

There is a lot to digest in this book. This edition is current up to the COVID-19 pandemic. It ends with a call to end the World Bank, the IMF, and other such institutions that were designed solely to maintain the imbalance of power that US capitalism requires. It’s a call supported by those in and out of power who understand that the pursuit of uncontrolled profit and power by that system is ever more rapidly and certainly leading us to an ugly, unnecessary and tragic denouement. It’s a call that echoed worldwide during the protests mentioned at the beginning of this review. Of course, that was before Washington chose endless war after 9-11 instead of addressing the gross inequalities that partially informed those attacks.

Ron Jacobs is the author of Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. He has a new book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation coming out in Spring 2024.   He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com