AVA DUVERNAY INTERVIEWS ANGELA DAVIS ON THIS MOMENT—AND WHAT CAME BEFORE

The scholar and activist has spent more than 50 years working for social justice. This summer, society started to catch up.


BY AVA DUVERNAYAugust 26, 2020

IN THE MOMENT
Angela Davis, at her residence in Oakland, July 2020. Poncho by Pyer Moss.Photograph by Deana Lawson.

AVA DuVERNAY: I was reading an interview in which you talked about something that’s been on my mind quite a bit lately. It’s about this time we are in that I’ll just call a racial reckoning. Do you feel that we could have encountered this moment in as robust a manner as we’ve felt it this summer without the COVID crisis having been the foundation? Could one have occurred with this much force without the other?

ANGELA DAVIS: This moment is a conjuncture between the COVID-19 crisis and the increasing awareness of the structural nature of racism. Moments like this do arise. They’re totally unpredictable, and we cannot base our organizing on the idea that we can usher in such a moment. What we can do is take advantage of the moment. When George Floyd was lynched, and we were all witnesses to that—we all watched as this white policeman held his knee on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds—I think that many people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, who had not necessarily understood the way in which history is present in our lives today, who had said, “Well, I never owned slaves, so what does slavery have to do with me?” suddenly began to get it. That there was work that should have happened in the immediate aftermath of slavery that could have prevented us from arriving at this moment. But it did not happen. And here we are. And now we have to begin.

The protests offered people an opportunity to join in this collective demand to bring about deep change, radical change. Defund the police, abolish policing as we know it now. These are the same arguments that we’ve been making for such a long time about the prison system and the whole criminal justice system. It was as if all of these decades of work by so many people, who received no credit at all, came to fruition.


You understood the dangers of American policing, the criminalization of Black, native, and brown people, 50 years ago. Your activism and your scholarship has always been inclusive of class and race and gender and sexuality. It seems we’re at a critical mass where a majority of people are finally able to hear and to understand the concepts that you’ve been talking about for decades. Is that satisfying or exhausting after all this time?


I don’t think about it as an experience that I’m having as an individual. I think about it as a collective experience, because I would not have made those arguments or engaged in those kinds of activisms if there were not other people doing it. One of the things that some of us said over and over again is that we’re doing this work. Don’t expect to receive public credit for it. It’s not to be acknowledged that we do this work. We do this work because we want to change the world. If we don’t do the work continuously and passionately, even as it appears as if no one is listening, if we don’t help to create the conditions of possibility for change, then a moment like this will arrive and we can do nothing about it. As Bobby Seale said, we will not be able to “seize the time.” This is a perfect example of our being able to seize this moment and turn it into something that’s radical and transformative.


I love that. I know that there’s a lot of energy around how to keep the attention. But what you’re saying is it needs to be happening in isolation of any outside forces. So that when the right time comes, there’s a preparation that had already been in process. Don’t think so much about sustaining the moment. Just always be prepared for the moment when it comes, because it will.

Exactly. I’m also thinking about your contributions. So many people have seen your work, your films: 13th and the film on the Central Park Five.

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD CHANGES...AS A RESULT OF THE PRESSURE ORDINARY PEOPLE EXERT ON THE EXISTING STATE OF AFFAIRS.

When They See Us! I can’t believe you know about it. I’m excited.


Oh, my God. I’ve not only seen it, but I’ve encouraged other people to look at it. I saw that really moving conversation between the actors and the actual figures. All of that helps to create fertile ground. I don’t think that we would be where we are today without your work and the work of other artists. In my mind, it’s art that can begin to make us feel what we don’t necessarily yet understand.

You’ve just made my life saying that. Thank you is not enough. There is a lot of talk about the symbols of slavery, of colonialism. Statues being taken down, bridges being renamed, buildings being renamed. Does it feel like performance, or do you think that there’s substance to these actions?

I don’t think there’s a simple answer. It is important to point to the material manifestations of the history that we are grappling with now. And those statues are our reminders that the history of the United States of America is a history of racism. So it’s natural that people would try to bring down those symbols.

If it’s true that names are being changed, statues are being removed, it should also be true that the institutions are looking inward and figuring out how to radically transform themselves. That’s the real work. Sometimes we assume the most important work is the dramatic work—the street demonstrations. I like the term that John Berger used: Demonstrations are “rehearsals for revolution.” When we come together with so many people, we become aware of our capacity to bring about change. But it’s rare that the actual demonstration itself brings about the change. We have to work in other ways.

I always love talking to you because you drop nine references in the conversation. You give me a reading list after from your citations. John Berger. Writing that down. One of the things that you’ve talked about that I hold on to is about diversity and inclusion. In many industries, especially the entertainment industry where I work, those are buzzwords. But I see them in the way that you taught me during our conversation for 13th. These are reform tactics, not change tactics. The diversity and inclusion office of the studio, of the university, of whatever organization, is not the quick fix.

Absolutely. Virtually every institution seized upon that term, “diversity.” And I always ask, “Well, where is justice here?” Are you simply going to ask those who have been marginalized or subjugated to come inside of the institution and participate in the same process that led precisely to their marginalization? Diversity and inclusion without substantive change, without radical change, accomplishes nothing.

“Justice” is the key word. How do we begin to transform the institutions themselves? How do we change this society? We don’t want to be participants in the exploitation of capitalism. We don’t want to be participants in the marginalization of immigrants. And so there has to be a way to think about the connection among all of these issues and how we can begin to imagine a very different kind of society. That is what “defund the police” means. That is what “abolish the police” means.

How can we apply that to the educational system?


Capitalism has to be a part of the conversation: global capitalism. And it’s part of the conversation about education, because what we’ve witnessed is increasing privatization, and the emergence of a kind of hybrid: the charter schools. Privatization is why the hospitals were so unprepared [for COVID-19], because they function in accordance with the dictates of capital. They don’t want to have extra beds because then that means that they aren’t generating the profit. And why is it that they’re asking children to go back to school? It’s because of the economy. We’re in a depression now, so they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of so many people in order to keep global capitalism functioning.

I know that’s a macro issue, but I think we cannot truly understand what is happening in the family where the parents are essential workers and are compelled to go to work and have no childcare. Not only should there be free education, but there should be free childcare and there should be free health care as well. All of these issues are coming to a head. This is, as you said, a racial reckoning. A reexamination of the role that racism has played in the creation of the United States of America. But I think we have to talk about capitalism. Capitalism has always been racial capitalism. Wherever we see capitalism, we see the influence and the exploitation of racism.

We haven’t been talking a lot about that period of Occupy. I think that when we look at how social movements develop, Occupy gave us new vocabularies. We began to talk about the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And I think that has something to do with the protests today. We should be very explicit about the fact that global capitalism is in large part responsible for mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, as it is responsible for the migrations that are happening around the world. Immigrants are forced to leave their homelands because the system of global capitalism has made it impossible to live human lives. That is why they come to the U.S., that is why they come to Europe, seeking better lives.

How does it feel for a woman born into segregation to see this moment? What lessons have you gleaned about struggle?

That’s a really big question. Perhaps I can answer it by saying that we have to have a kind of optimism. One way or another I’ve been involved in movements from the time I was very, very young, and I can remember that my mother never failed to emphasize that as bad as things were in our segregated world, change was possible. That the world would change. I learned how to live under those circumstances while also inhabiting an imagined world, recognizing that one day things would be different. I’m really fortunate that my mother was an activist who had experience in movements against racism, the movement to defend, for example, the Scottsboro Nine.

I’ve always recognized my own role as an activist as helping to create conditions of possibility for change. And that means to expand and deepen public consciousness of the nature of racism, of heteropatriarchy, pollution of the planet, and their relationship to global capitalism. This is the work that I’ve always done, and I’ve always known that it would make a difference. Not my work as an individual, but my work with communities who have struggled. I believe that this is how the world changes. It always changes as a result of the pressure that masses of people, ordinary people, exert on the existing state of affairs. I feel very fortunate that I am still alive today to witness this.

And I’m so glad that someone like John Lewis was able to experience this and see this before he passed away, because oftentimes we don’t get to actually witness the fruits of our labor. They may materialize, but it may be 50 years later, it may be 100 years later. But I’ve always emphasized that we have to do the work as if change were possible and as if this change were to happen sooner rather than later. It may not; we may not get to witness it. But if we don’t do the work, no one will ever witness it.




Ava DuVernay is a filmmaker whose work includes the Oscar-nominated Selma and acclaimed Netflix limited series When They See Us.

BLUE BLOODS: AMERICA’S BROTHERHOOD OF POLICE OFFICERS

To understand the citadel of law enforcement, we must reckon with its unions—which resemble fraternities more than labor unions.


BY EVE L. EWING

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAWN MARTINBROUGHAugust 25, 2020

Illustration by Shawn Martinbrough. Colorist Christopher Sotomayor.

The man stands before them, head slightly bowed. He is gangly, awkward, against the backdrop of the officers’ firm march. They are hurried and he is not. Everything about them is fast, crisp, matte.

We watch the push. We watch him fall.

We watch them pass his body. Swirling around him, an eddy of thick black fabric. When the blood comes, it drifts languidly across the concrete.

When night falls, this is the story they tell: “During that skirmish involving protestors, one person was injured when he tripped & fell.” But when the video appears, the world will see the police shove Martin Gugino to the ground, fracturing his skull.

The email from John Evans, president of the Buffalo Police Benevolent Association, came the next day. Evans forcefully defended the police officers implicated in the assault. “After witnessing first hand how these 2 officers were treated,” Evans wrote, “I can tell you, they tried to fuck over these guys like I have never seen in my 54 years.” He signed off the email by writing, “Fraternally, John Evans – PBA.”

There are people who will tell you that people like John Evans lead a union. But this is not a union. This is something else.

This is a brotherhood. It abides no law but its own. It scorns the personhood of all but its own brethren. It derides all creatures outside its own clan. And for that reason, the brotherhood is not only a hurdle impeding reform. It is the architecture of an alternate reality, one that seethes and bubbles just beneath the surface of our own. And it’s a reality in which none of us are human.

In May, the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police elected John Catanzara as president. According to a 2017 report by the United States Department of Justice, the police department in Chicago “engages in a pattern or practice of using force that is in violation of the Constitution,” where “officers’ force practices unnecessarily endanger themselves,” “a pattern...[which] results from systemic deficiencies in training and accountability.”

And yet, even given the city’s abysmal standard of police conduct, in his 25 years on the force Catanzara has managed to distinguish himself from his peers by being especially awful. According to the Citizens Police Data Project (a database of police misconduct records made public after a lawsuit and Freedom of Information Act requests), Catanzara has been the subject of 50 complaints, putting him in the 96th percentile for allegations. At the time he was elected to lead the FOP, Catanzara was assigned to administrative duty; according to the Chicago Sun-Times, he is the first president to take on the role while stripped of his official police powers.

In June, when asked about the killing of George Floyd, Catanzara referred to Officer Derek Chauvin’s actions as an “improper police tactic.” “Explain to me how race had anything to do with it,” he went on. “There’s no proof or evidence that race had anything to do with it.” Catanzara has said that any lodge members showing support for protesters could face disciplinary action from the FOP, and perhaps expulsion.

Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police is a local chapter of the larger national organization of the same name. The national FOP boasts more than 2,100 such lodges, representing more than 330,000 members, which makes it, according to its website, “the world’s largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.”

IT ABIDES NO LAW BUT ITS OWN. IT SCORNS THE PERSONHOOD OF ALL BUT ITS OWN BRETHREN. IT DERIDES ALL CREATURES OUTSIDE ITS OWN CLAN.

When Chicago police officer Robert Rialmo killed Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones—a young man having a mental health episode and his neighbor, who answered the door—Rialmo was fired. The vice president of the Chicago FOP called the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which recommended the firing, “a political witch hunt on police officers. The investigations are unfair and politically motivated.”

When Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the FOP defended him. When four of the officers accused of aiding in the cover-up were fired, a different FOP vice president used the decision as an occasion to impress upon police board members that they should not “fall to the pressure of the media or the radical police haters.”


These men were sworn officers of the law. But they did not look at Van Dyke as a convicted murderer who had broken that law. They did not look at him and see police—a social category, a profession, a uniform one puts on and can take off. They looked at him and saw their brother. They saw a different type of being, bound by an oath that transcends civilian understanding. And by virtue of Van Dyke’s being, in their eyes, he could do no wrong.

The same logic underlies the phrase “blue lives matter,” which semantically equates the color of a uniform with the nonnegotiable, unshakable fact of Blackness. It’s a phenomenon not unlike the transfiguration that took place behind the eyes of Darren Wilson. “It looks like a demon,” he told the grand jury in describing Michael Brown. Michael Brown: not man, but beast. Jason Van Dyke: not man, but kin. A brother in the pantheon. A demigod among demigods, his actions deemed necessary and virtuous because they were wrought by his hand, and his hand was necessary and virtuous.

Of course, as Catanzara’s comment about support for protesters demonstrates, it’s not that it’s impossible to be cast out from the brotherhood. The unforgivable sin within the brotherhood is to cast aspersions against the only people whom the brotherhood recognizes as human—its own kind. Shoot a boy in the back, and you can still be in the brotherhood. Side with the people who are asking questions, or raise a fist with them, or kneel before them, or talk to them, and you are out.

Maya Angelou had a thing she used to say—When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. Perhaps it’s time for America to heed Angelou’s advice. The Fraternal Order of Police has told us candidly what they are—that they are not a union, but a fraternity. A brotherhood. We ought to believe them.

History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ” These officers sought a way to bargain collectively over issues like wages and hours, without affiliating themselves with labor organizations.

And as labor historian Rosemary Feurer told me in an interview, until the 1970s “there was a feeling that police didn’t belong in the union movement. And now I think we have to realize that that is part of our history, from the stark reality that people were confronted with police brutality whenever they tried to assert their rights as union members.” Indeed, the most formative days of the labor movement were marked by police violence against workers. During the 1886 Haymarket Affair, police fired on the crowd during a dispute with striking workers. During the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain—the largest labor uprising in American history—thousands of West Virginians led by the United Mine Workers were in armed struggle against thousands of police and National Guardsmen. The local sheriff, Don Chafin, was paid by mine operators to beat, arrest, or intimidate suspected union organizers, a job which each year earned him more than 10 times his annual salary in bribes and helped him maintain a well-funded department. By 1921, his net worth was about $350,000. In the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre, police fired on a demonstration of steelworkers, killing 10 and seriously wounding many others, including a baby and an 11-year-old boy. A worker on the scene said that as the injured fell under the hail of bullets, it looked “as though they were being mowed down with a scythe.”

And the institution of policing as a means of violently controlling working persons’ right to economic freedom has deeper roots than even the labor movement itself. The need to attack workers in the name of private interests is historically intertwined, like a double helix, with the need to control, limit, and sanction Black autonomy.

“You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest,” South Carolinian William H. Trescott told the governor of South Carolina in 1865. The end of the Civil War meant that millions of Black people were transformed from items of property, from which labor could be forcibly and freely extracted, to independent humans with, at least nominally, the agency to do with their labor what they pleased, for their own benefit. “Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended,” writes historian Eric Foner, “the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.” In the absence of slavery as the means by which Black people could be made to stay in one place and work when and how White people needed them to work, the plantation class looked to the law to ensure that they would. Hence, the Reconstruction-era legislation known as the Black Codes was born. In Mississippi, being Black and not having written proof that you were employed was now illegal. In South Carolina, being Black and having a job other than servant or farmer was illegal unless you paid an annual tax of up to $100. Being in a traveling circus or an acting troupe? Illegal. In Virginia, asking for pay beyond the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” was illegal. In Florida, disrespecting or disobeying your employer was illegal. In some areas, fishing and hunting, or even owning guns, were now banned, as these activities could lessen Black dependence on White people for employment.

And who would enforce these new laws? The police. In some cases, Foner writes, these newly deputized men wore their old Confederate uniforms as they patrolled Black homesteads, seizing weapons and arresting people for labor violations.

Despite this history, those who lead America’s police unions raise a cautionary alarm—that teachers and other public sector workers should be wary of any attempts to curtail police power, lest they find themselves at the center of the next effort to limit union rights. In June, Patrick J. Lynch, who heads the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News drawing a direct connection between efforts to defund the police and a broader labor struggle. “Our brothers and sisters in the labor movement should be very careful. If they support a successful campaign to strip police officers of our union rights, they will see those same tactics repeated against teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other public sector workers across this country.”

But there’s a crucial difference. “How many unions are there where you’re assigned a gun and told you can shoot people?” Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner asked me during a phone interview. “I mean, they have superpowers. They are given superpowers over the lives and freedom of other people. Over the integrity of their bodies.” Krasner told me of two instances in his legal career when he defended women who, after finding their police officer husbands cheating and trying to divorce them, had been arrested by those same husbands. One was arrested twice. The other was arrested alongside her brother, who had tried to defend her. Both women were found not guilty despite police officers testifying against them on the stand. Krasner attempted to sue on their behalf, for monetary damages but also injunctive relief—for the police department to change its policies to require an arrest of a relative or spouse to be overseen by a supervisor.

“The answer that I got from the city is nope. We’re not going to do any of that. Dealing with the police department, contract negotiations…we’re not even going to get into it. So we’ll just pay you more money,” Krasner recalls. “So you know, that kind of told me everything I needed to know. It was an overwhelming imbalance of power. It’s a city I think that in many ways is so politically compromised by its relationship with police unions that they have for a very long time pretty much given them anything they wanted.” Krasner believes that the situation is exacerbated by the fact that in Philadelphia, the FOP allows retired officers to be voting members. “The police union is the voice of the past,” says Krasner, “and in Philly the past is Frank Rizzo,” the 1970s-era Philadelphia mayor who openly told his supporters to “Vote White.” Before becoming mayor, Rizzo was police commissioner. During his campaign, Rizzo promised his supporters that after he was elected, he would “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”

Rachael Rollins, district attorney of Suffolk County (which includes Boston as well as nearby Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop) agrees with Krasner, telling me that police are “the only section of our municipal local, state, or federal government that has the lethal and legal authority to kill you with no oversight.” For this reason, she dismisses Lynch’s comparison between police unions and teachers unions. “If a teacher strangled George Floyd as an 11-year-old,” Rollins said, “no D.A. would even wait a nanosecond to charge that teacher with a homicide. We would be shocked and appalled. But when police do it, we have been so triggered to believe law enforcement, right? To not question them…. When you have the authority to do something as final as death without oversight, you are different than any other union we are talking about.”

Beyond this point—police carry guns and are permitted by the state to kill people—is a deeper distinction: the task of policing itself as intrinsically counter to the ideology of a union. “A union is supposed to protect the rights, and the labor movement is supposed to protect the rights, of all working people,” said Sheri Davis-Faulkner, a program director at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. “The point is to be lifting up all working people. That is the work. Collective bargaining and having bargaining units, that is a part of it. But it’s also pushing an ideology that people should not be exploited.” Police unions do not and cannot promote this ideology, because doing so would require them to confront “the infrastructure that has been built for them to be policing Black bodies and protecting White communities,” Davis-Faulkner told me.

“In its best formulation, the labor movement has been about the concept of solidarity,” says Feurer, who studies political conflict and the labor history of the late 19th and 20th centuries at Northern Illinois University. “And so that is the key conundrum here. Is that if you’re an entity that’s sworn against solidarity, you can put your foot on the neck of a working-class person. It is the cardinal issue that we’re facing right now…what do you do with a group of workers that are in your movement whose purpose is a state purpose? Whose purpose is to deny protest rights, and to deny solidarity?”


In Minneapolis, after the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests, Bob Kroll, president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, wrote a letter to membership in which he said: “I commend you for the excellent police work you are doing in keeping your coworkers and others safe during what everyone except us refuses to call a riot…. What has been very evident throughout this process is you have lacked support from the top. This terrorist movement that is currently occurring was a long time build up which dates back years.”

In August 2019, when Daniel Pantaleo—the NYPD officer who killed Eric Garner—lost his job, Lynch, the PBA president, condemned the decision. “The police commissioner needs to know he’s lost his police department,” he said at a press conference. Lynch declared that if Pantaleo could be labeled “reckless,” the condemnation could be applied to any police officer and warned that the commissioner would “wake up tomorrow to discover that the cop haters are still not satisfied, but it will be too late.”

After Tamir Rice was killed, Jeffrey Follmer, the president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, told MSNBC that “this shooting was justified. It was tragic that it was a 12-year-old. But it was justified.”

Indeed, for American policing to function, physical assault is an important tool, but as important is intimidation—the threat of physical assault and the psychological terror it engenders. And for those tools to work, they require the premise of impunity, elevating the police officer as a different kind of being, one unencumbered by the laws of civic comportment or even the basic laws of reality. It requires not only that Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis after he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, fracturing his skull—it requires a system that defines Lewis as the criminal in that scenario, and the trooper as the guardian of safety and order. It requires not only that a Chicago police officer, guarding a statue of Christopher Columbus this past July, be able to punch 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the mouth, knocking out her front teeth—it requires us to see the video and know that the officer will go unnamed and unpunished. It requires not only that a New York City police officer crack 20-year-old Dounya Zayer’s head against the pavement, causing her to have a seizure—it requires a commanding officer to watch and do nothing. It requires Lynch to refer to the officer who shoved Zayer as someone “whose boss sent him out there to do a job, who was put in a bad situation during a chaotic time,” and to refer to the decision to charge him with assault as “dereliction of duty.” For the police to act as they do, and for the body politic to accept it, requires not only fear or force but a reconfiguration of the very fabric of reality as we know it.

“Part of what fascist politics does,” explains philosopher Jason Stanley, “is get people to disassociate from reality.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that such politics craft an alternate universe—an unreality. “It is not so much the barbed wire,” says Arendt, “as the skillfully manufactured unreality of those whom it fences in that provokes such enormous cruelties and ultimately makes extermination look like a perfectly normal measure.”

When I was in college, I was a resident assistant, which meant that in some instances I was the first responder when someone had been sexually assaulted. I once confronted a young man who was the president of one of the fraternities where a resident of mine had recently…she thought, she wasn’t sure…she had woken up, in the attic, she told me. Alone. She didn’t know where he had gone, or….

I asked: How could you choose to call someone your brother when you know they are capable of something like that? He looked away.

This was the wrong question. The whole point of the brotherhood is that it enables a willful not knowing. The brotherhood swallows all other planes of reality that could pose an existential challenge. I had asked the wrong question, because the answer to how can you call someone your brother when he does something like that is: Because he is my brother. The brotherhood is a self-contained universe, with its own physics, its own gravity. Within a band of brothers, there is no law that supersedes the law of the brotherhood itself. To be part of a brotherhood is not to be a “member” of something—for membership is fleeting, and outside oneself. To be part of a brotherhood is not simply to be a workaday person who belongs to a collective corps, but to be reborn as a new type of thing, nestled in a selfhood intimately woven among other selfhoods, moving as one through a world in which you trust nothing but one another, because your self has become inextricable from all those other selves you call brother.

In the brotherhood, there is no such thing as wrongful police action. A member of the brotherhood cannot err any more than a dropped apple can fall toward the sky. The man who choked Eric Garner to death can never be “reckless.” All police work is “excellent police work.” The death of a 12-year-old boy is “justified.” You watch the video again. He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

In the days after my city rose against the clouds, I woke to a news item that made me laugh out loud. When desperate and angry and tired people were breaking windows across the South Side, a group of police officers had broken into the campaign offices of Representative Bobby Rush. The surveillance footage is almost cartoonish. The officers ate popcorn. They made coffee. As Chicago burned, they napped on the couch.

When the incident became public, Catanzara told the press that Rush or his staff had asked the officers to come. He told local news that Rush was “an absolute liar, a piece of garbage” and that anyway, the coffee and popcorn were bought with taxpayer money, and the officers were taxpayers, were they not?

Of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criticism of the officers, Catanzara said: “Shame on her for ever questioning their valor and the heroism and the officers of CPD to make it sound like they were letting other officers get the crap beat out of them while they sat there and slept. That is a disgusting accusation. She owes the men and women an apology for even implying that was.”

I read the statement. I looked again at the picture of the sleeping officer.

He tripped and fell. He tripped and fell.

A union is a pact, wrought among the human. Among the fallible. And there can be no error in the brotherhood. And the brotherhood can never be reformed, because reform requires fidelity to something external, and the brotherhood has fidelity only for itself. This is the unreality of the brotherhood. And as long as police are endowed with near-absolute state-sanctioned power, it is our unreality. We live behind its gates.

Eve L. Ewing is a poet and sociologist whose 2019 collection, 1919, inspired this issue’s title. See more from V.F.’s THE GREAT FIRE project here.

Annals of a Warming Planet

How Fast Is the Climate Changing?: It’s a New World, Each and Every Day


By Bill McKibben September 3, 2020

The extra energy trapped by the atmosphere is expressing itself every second of every hour, usually quietly; you may not notice it, but eventually a downpour turns into a flood.Photograph by Eric Thayer / Getty

The struggle over climate change is necessarily political and economic and noisy—if we’re going to get anything done, we’ll have to do it in parliaments and stock exchanges, and quickly.

But, every once in a while, it’s worth stepping back and reminding ourselves what’s actually going on, silently, every hour of every day. And what’s going on is that we’re radically remaking our planet, in the course of a human lifetime. Hell, in the course of a human adolescence.

The sun, our star, pours out energy, which falls on this planet, where the atmosphere traps some of it. Because we’ve thickened that atmosphere by burning coal and gas and oil—in particular, because we’ve increased the amount of carbon dioxide and methane it contains—more of that sun’s energy is trapped around the Earth: about three-fourths of a watt of extra energy per square meter, or slightly less than, say, one of those tiny white Christmas-tree lights. But there are a lot of square meters on our planet—roughly five hundred and ten trillion of them, which is a lot of Christmas-tree lights. It’s the heat equivalent, to switch units rather dramatically, of exploding four Hiroshima-sized bombs each second.


We get a sense of what that feels like when we have a week like the one we just came through. Hurricane Laura detonated in intensity in a few hours before it made landfall—that escalation was one of the most rapid that has ever been observed in the Gulf of Mexico, and it’s because of the extra heat that’s available. That sudden burst of fury is becoming more likely, the experts explain, precisely because there’s more energy stored in the ever-warmer ocean, ready to be converted into howling wind and surging tide. As the Washington Post reported, some experts say that “it is almost as if as the maximum ‘speed limit’ for storms increases, the storms themselves, like drivers, are adjusting by speeding up.” Sometimes we get comparatively lucky, as we did with Laura—it poured most of its power into the wildlife refuges and the marshes along the Louisiana-Texas border. Only about three per cent of the planet’s land surface, after all, is urbanized, so the odds are with you most of the time. And physics, of course, is agnostic—a storm goes where it goes.

But physics is also implacable. It just keeps going, hour after hour, day after day. The wildfires in California came earlier this season than usual and were the second largest the state has ever recorded. But they were inevitable in the same way. “With temperatures warming, unless there are increases in precipitation or atmospheric moisture to compensate, our fuels are going to get drier,” the University of Alberta fire scientist Mike Flannigan told E&E News. Fuels, in this case, means grass, brush, and trees, and they dry out at a predictable pace, which becomes much faster in a heat wave. Get the temperature high enough (and in August California saw, if verified, the hottest ever reliably recorded on our planet) and “grasslands can be bone-dry in seven days.” Once they’re dry, all it takes is a spark. “Fuel moisture is critical in that the drier the fuel, the easier it is for the fire to start and spread, and there’s more fuel available to burn.”

Floods and fires are obvious and dramatic. But this extra energy is expressing itself every second of every hour, usually quietly; you may not notice it, but eventually an ice shelf collapses or a heavy downpour turns into a monster flood. It’s relentless, and it means that we live in a new world, newer all the time. For almost all of human history, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide stuck at about two hundred and seventy-five parts per million, meaning that the planet’s energy balance was essentially unchanged. The physical world worked in predictable ways. But there’s around twenty-five parts per million more CO2 in the air now than there was a decade ago: That’s more change in ten years than over all the millennia from the invention of agriculture to the start of the Industrial Revolution. To think about it this way is to understand why this is a bigger predicament than any we’ve ever faced. Our other dramas—wars, revolutions—have played out against the backdrop of an essentially stable planet. But now that planet has become the main actor in our affairs, and more so every second.

Passing the Mic

The environmental journalist Amy Westervelt—she won an Edward R. Murrow Award, in 2016, for a series that aired on Reno Public Radio about the environmental and economic effects of a Tesla plant in Nevada—is now the host of the podcast “Drilled,” which has been exploring the climate-denial history of the fossil-fuel industry. Season 5 launches soon, and it will tell the story of Chevron’s misadventures in Ecuador, where a series of oil spills in the jungle have led to decades of litigation. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Chevron and Ecuador is a huge, sprawling story—can you explain the saga enough to make clear why it’s so interesting?

The first complaint was filed to Texaco back in 1993, there have been so many twists and turns and legal proceedings since then, and it’s still going on. [Chevron bought Texaco in 2001 and therefore assumed responsibility.] But it all sort of boils down to accountability; oil companies dumped wastewater and crude in the Amazon, it contaminated the water and the land, and it ought to be cleaned up. There’s been a lot of legal maneuvering in this case, and Chevron has tried to make it about the lawyers—and about one particular lawyer—but they were found liable for this contamination in 2011, and since then they have sued the lawyers, blamed the Ecuadorian oil company, sued the Ecuadorian government in international arbitration, and . . . the pollution is still there.

Why does it matter so much?

First, Chevron’s strategy seems engineered to intimidate any activists that might try to hold them accountable. Then, it’s a very good example of how oil companies have continued colonialism long past the point when countries stopped (or at least said they would). Related, it’s a good example of how the international arbitration system has become a tool that enables multinational companies to circumvent the sovereign constitutions of (usually developing) countries. And, finally, I think it illustrates that these are companies that do not and will not operate in good faith; the idea that eventually they’re going to come to the table and make good decisions about energy transition or emissions is just implausible, and it’s probably time to stop expecting them to.

You’ve done a lot of work on the public-relations industry and the oil industry—what story are the fossil-fuel companies trying to tell about themselves at this point

There are these two levers they pull, depending on what’s happening at any given time. For a long while it was the science-denial lever, but lately they’ve gone back to their first and favorite story: the idea of oil as central to the American identity and the American economy. They’re on it, they will solve this problem, and if you’re a red-blooded, God-fearing American you are on their side. They are also cynically co-opting the Black Lives Matter movement to push the message that energy transition will be racist (yet another good reason for the environmental movement to sort itself out on that front). There’s an interesting difference between the American companies and the European companies like BP and Shell, which seem to feel more required to commit to climate goals, because they’re operating in countries that have signed on to the Paris Climate Accord. But their commitments should be questioned at every turn.
Climate School

“Carbon capture and storage”—taking CO2 from the exhaust stream of, say, a coal-fired power plant and storing it underground—may get more play from a Biden Administration trying to score climate points but wary of forcing utilities to stop emitting carbon in the first place. Judith Lewis Mernit, at Capital & Main, reminds us why this is almost certainly a poor idea—and an expensive one at that.


The lift Solar Everywhere project, a collaborative effort of four clean-energy organizations, has released a comprehensive report explaining how to quickly increase access to solar power for low- and moderate-income households: no upfront costs and letting people pay for their efficiency improvements on their electric bill turn out to make a huge difference.


A Times investigation shows how Big Oil is pivoting to plastics as part of a plan for survival in an age of climate change and is trying to flood Africa with them. The Times reviewed e-mails from industry representatives last year revealing efforts to stall tough laws designed to curtail plastic waste in Kenya. To understand the desperation that would lead people to embrace that as a business plan, consider this piece by Chris Tomlinson, a business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, who writes, “While the broad S&P 500 index of top corporations is up 6.6 percent for the year, the energy sector is down 40 percent. Energy was the worst performing sector in 2018 and 2019, too.” Companies like Exxon continue to pay dividends because otherwise their stocks would dive, but “the five supermajors paid out $16.9 billion more in dividends than they generated from their core business operations, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a nonpartisan think tank.”
Scoreboard

The endless battle to block a giant new coal mine in Queensland, Australia, heated up last week, as the traditional owners of the Wangan and Jagalingou lands blocked access to the construction site. Meanwhile, court records revealed that the company building the mine, an Indian firm called Adani, had asked Australian courts to grant it an order to search the home of an activist. (The court said no.)

What if a tree burns in the forest and everyone sees it on TV, but no one says why it caught on fire? Noting that “it’s been 15 years since Hurricane Katrina left its mark on New Orleans, and news outlets are still failing to discuss the links between fossil fuel pollution, climate change, and extreme weather,” the N.G.O. Progress America has a petition asking the networks to take note.

Good news from a small study: painting one of three blades of a wind turbine black was enough to minimize “motion smear,” enabling birds to better see the blades, and so reducing the avian mortality rate at the turbines by seventy per cent.

Polling makes it clear that, even amid the pandemic and resulting recession, public interest in the climate is unabated. Sixty-eight per cent of Americans want the government to do more to deal with climate change; a quarter of the country feels that the issue is very important to them personally.

After tireless campaigning by New York climate-justice groups—and the defeat of a pipeline proposed by Williams, an Oklahoma energy company, which would have cut through New York Harbor—ConEd announced last week that it would stop investing in natural-gas pipelines and that expanding the use of fracked fuel was “no longer . . . part of the longer term view” for the utility.

It begs the question of whether buying lots of stuff makes environmental sense, but the odds of it arriving at your home in an electric truck seem to be growing quickly.

Warming Up

Judy Garland had a slightly different, and considerably more lyrical, take on this idea of a new world every day.



Bill McKibben is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org and a contributing writer to The New Yorker. He writes The Climate Crisis, The New Yorker's newsletter on the environment.

Facebook bans Indian politician over hate speech

Hasan Chowdhury,
The Telegraph•September 3, 2020
  

Raja Singh, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi, was blocked from Facebook - SAJJAD HUSSAIN /AFP

Facebook has banned a politician from India’s ruling party over alleged hate speech on the social media service after facing strong condemnation over its inaction and handling of similar posts.

Raja Singh, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by incumbent prime minister Narendra Modi, was blocked from Facebook over posts in which he suggested Rohingya refugees in the country should be shot and incited hate towards Muslims.

The ban marks a significant move by Facebook in India, its largest market with over 300m users and a country where it has faced a growing political storm from critics who have accused it in the past of failing to take down extremist posts to protect its business.

On Wednesday, Ajit Mohan, the head of the Silicon Valley giant’s India division, faced a series of questions from a parliamentary committee over reports in the Wall Street Journal that Facebook refused to apply its policy on hate speech to posts from BJP politicians.


The paper claimed that Facebook deemed posts from the politician violated its rules on hate speech back in March, but left the posts up after a top executive of the firm in India was alleged to have waived the call for them to be taken down.
Profile | Narendra Modi

The Hindu nationalist party has faced growing criticism in recent months both at home and internationally over the spread of propaganda on Facebook and its sister apps such as WhatsApp that promote violence against Muslims and other minorities in the country.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform.”

The company claimed its process for evaluating potential violators is “extensive”. Mr Singh has claimed he was not responsible for the posts that went on his page.

It comes as Facebook has upped its efforts in recent months to make further inroads into the India market, after it announced a $5.7bn (£4.6bn) investment in April into Reliance Jio, the telecoms empire owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst promoted a far-right conspiracy theory that falsely claims coronavirus cases are inflated by healthcare providers

Oma Seddiq,Eliza Relman Business Insider•September 2, 2020

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, speaks with reporters.

Associated Press


Republican Sen. Joni Ernst pushed a conspiracy theory that coronavirus deaths in the US are being drastically overcounted because healthcare providers want to be paid more.

During a campaign stop in Iowa, her home state, Ernst said she was "so skeptical" of the reported national figures and noted that medical professionals are compensated at higher rates for COVID cases.

The unsubstantiated claim has been promoted by the far-right conspiracy group QAnon and President Donald Trump.

Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, pushed a baseless conspiracy theory on Monday claiming that US deaths from the coronavirus have been vastly over-reported by medical professionals.

During a Monday campaign stop in Black Hawk County, an attendee told Ernst he believed coronavirus cases and deaths are being overcounted in the US, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier reported.

Ernst replied that she's similarly "so skeptical" of the official figures, which are currently at 6 million infections and 185,000 deaths in the US, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And the senator baselessly suggested the numbers have been vastly inflated by medical professionals, who receive more money from the federal government for handling COVID-19 patients.

"These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they're doing?" Ernst told the crowd.


"They do get reimbursed higher amounts if it's a COVID-related illness or death," she told the Falls Courier after the event. "I heard the same thing on the news. ... They're thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19. ... I'm just really curious. It would be interesting to know that."

The claim that case counts and deaths are fraudulently tallied has been widely debunked by medical professionals and public health experts.

The official coronavirus numbers are most likely significantly undercounted, according to experts. Researchers at Yale University reported in July that nearly 30,000 likely coronavirus deaths in the US had not been reported.

Ernst, who's facing a competitive race for reelection this year, made these comments a day after the White House announced Iowa is currently suffering from the largest COVID-19 outbreak in the country.

"Rural and urban counties in Iowa continue to have increases in case and test positivity. Common sense preventive measures must be implemented to stop further spread," White House coronavirus task force officials wrote.

President Donald Trump promoted the same conspiracy over the weekend in a tweet that was later removed by Twitter for violating the platform's rules about spreading misinformation.

On Sunday, the president retweeted QAnon follower "Mel Q," who shared a message falsely claiming that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported only 9,000 people — or just 6% of the more than 180,000 reported deaths — were actually killed by the virus.

In reality, the CDC reported that 94% of those who've died of COVID-19 in the US also suffered from another disease that contributed to their death. These so-called "co-morbidities" include obesity, diabetes, and asthma.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci fact-checked the conspiracy this week, explaining that while the vast majority of people who've died from the coronavirus in the US had underlying conditions, it was COVID-19 that killed them.

"That does not mean that someone who has hypertension or diabetes who dies of COVID didn't die of COVID-19. They did," Fauci said. "It's not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19, it's 180-plus thousand deaths."

Young Belarusians are turning away from Russia and looking towards Europe

Félix Krawatzek, Senior Researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies and Associate Member of Nuffield College, University of Oxford,
The Conversation•September 3, 2020

Since Belarus’s disputed presidential elections on August 9, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians have taken to the streets. Their protests have been met with extreme police brutality.

According to the country’s electoral commission, Alexander Lukashenko won 80% of the vote share, and his principal opponent, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, received 10%.

While some older people, particularly women, have taken to the streets, young people have been at the forefront of the protests. In early September, teenagers were even filmed being removed from school by security services amid student protests.

At the Berlin-based Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), we’ve been conducting surveys among young Belarusians since 2019. One survey in late June 2020, just before the election, found that support for Lukashenko was around 10% among young people.


Our survey results also show that young people are turning away from Russia to look towards Europe.
Between Russia and Europe

Separate research from early 2020 found that Belarusians appear content with their country being slightly pro-Russian. But people under 40 were significantly more likely to want closer relations with the west.

The ZOiS’s own online surveys have been asking young people what kind of relationship they want Belarus to have with the EU and Russia. Our surveys include 2,000 young people aged between 16 and 34, though the June 2020 survey included young people of voting age between 18 and 34. The respondents, who live in the country’s six largest towns, were included based on quotas for age, gender and city of residence.

Since the ZOiS survey was first conducted in 2019, young Belarusians have significantly shifted away from wanting closer relations with Russia and instead are seeking closer relations with EU countries. Facing the trade-off between closer EU relations and worsening relations with Russia, 55% of young people now wish for closer relations with the EU.

Graph showing shift towards Europe of young Belarusians.

Asked whether Russia and Belarus should unite as one state, more than 70% of young Belarusians were opposed to the prospect. A union between the two countries was the ultimate aim of the 1999 Union State treaty which intends to create a federation between Belarus and Russia that would harmonise their laws, state symbols, economy and politics.

Graph showing reluctance among young Belarusians for the country to unite with Russia

Our results showed a clear division of views between those living in the east and west of Belarus, with those living in the east, near the Russian border, is significantly more critical of the EU and favourable to Russia. We also found that the better-educated respondents and those who don’t use any state media were particularly in favour of closer relations with the EU. Those with a lower level of education and no political interest were more likely to want closer relations with Russia.
Language and identity

The growth in political interest and discontent predates the August election and can be linked to the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which laid bare the ineffectiveness of the Belarusian state.

Read more: Belarus election: why strongman Alexander Lukashenko faces unprecedented resistance

But the current protests also represent a national awakening. Many of the protesters have draped themselves in red and white, colours reminiscent of the independent Belarusian People’s Republic that existed for less than a year after March 1918. Its white-red-white flag returned briefly after the Soviet Union’s collapse, but after a referendum in 1995 it was replaced by the country’s current green-red flag resembling the Soviet Belarusian flag.

The question of Belarusian identity is, therefore, crucial to the current protests. The Belarusian language has been largely marginalised since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lukashenko himself prefers speaking Russian, and Belarusian has become a statement of opposition. The young Belarusians we’ve surveyed overwhelmingly speak Russian in their daily interactions, although a third consider both to be their native languages.

Still, we found that young people have no strong desire to speak more Belarusian. Instead, more than a quarter of our respondents said they didn’t care, suggesting that the language issue was not a crucial political and social question for young people. People living in towns in the east were even less likely to have a desire to speak more Belarusian. But those respondents over 25-years-old, the better educated ones and women were significantly more likely to express a desire to speak more Belarusian.

Still, protesters are calling for the autonomy to make a political choice. They have expressed this using traditional Belarusian symbols, including elements of medieval history such as a knight, which refer to the time of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th-18th centuries.
Visions of Europe

In June 2020, we also asked our respondents what country Belarus should resemble, both politically and economically. Our initial analysis shows that economically, Switzerland was the most frequently mentioned country and was also the second most desired in political terms. Germany came second economically, and first politically, with Sweden third in economic terms.

Graph showing which other country young Belarusians think their country should resemble.

All this shows how young Belarusians are increasingly oriented towards European countries. Their turn away from Russia, and the Soviet values associated with it, is striking. The continuing mobilisation is, therefore, part of a new political awakening which is seeking to establish Belarus’s independence both politically and symbolically.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Félix Krawatzek is Senior Researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS), an independent research institute funded by the German government. The institute also receives funding from German and international research councils. The survey this article refers to was supported by ZOiS.

How Japan, which has the world's oldest population, has so far managed to keep its nursing homes safe during the pandemic
James Pasley Business Insider•September 1, 2020

A nursing home with care offers the visit through a glass window to prevent infection in Bunkyo Ward, Tokyo on May 12, 2020, amid an outbreak of COVID-19.

The Yomiuri Shimbun/Reuters

Japan, which has the oldest population in the world, has about 1 million people living in nursing homes, while the US has about 1.2 million, Reuters reported.


Despite similar numbers, 14% of Japan's 1,225 COVID-19 deaths by August 30 were elderly people in nursing homes.


In comparison, 40% of the US's 180,000 COVID-19 deaths were people living in nursing homes, according to the Washington Post.


One of the reasons for Japan's success is that there is an expectation that the elderly will be looked after and not neglected, and because of this nursing homes are closely monitored.

Despite a huge elderly population, Japan has had few COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. Experts say it comes down to a culture that respects the elderly, and because people took the pandemic seriously from the beginning.

Japan has the oldest population in the world — more than 28% of its population is older than 65, equating to about 36 million people, the average life expectancy is over 81 years old, and the average age is 47.

About 1 million people in Japan live in nursing homes, compared to 1.2 million people in the US, Reuters reported.

Despite that similarity, 14% of Japan's 1,225 COVID-19 deaths by August 30 were people living in nursing homes, according to the Washington Post.


In comparison, 40% of the US's 180,000 COVID-19 deaths were people living in nursing homes. In the US, it's gotten to the point where nursing homes are described as "death pits."

Not that Japan's nursing home response has been perfect. In April, the system was inundated with a wave of coronavirus infections, and there have been more than 100 clusters in nursing homes.

In August, Business Insider's Rhea Mahbubani reviewed inspections reports for 220 US care facilities that were flagged for violations. Numerous reports said nursing homes had a lack of hygiene and infection control, unmet medical and nutritional needs, and neglect.

One of the reasons the coronavirus has not hit Japan's nursing homes harder is that Japanese society expects the elderly to be looked after, not neglected, and that nursing homes are closely monitored, the Post reported.

National Institute of Population and Social Security Research deputy director-general Reiko Hayashi told the Post that Japan's quick reaction helped early in the year, restricting the movements of visitors and staff at nursing homes when the pandemic was spreading.'

A nursing home in Toho, Fukuoka, Japan, in 2017.
The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

Since early March, the majority of Japan's nursing homes banned family visits, Reuters reported.

National Center for Global Health and Medicine infectious-disease expert Kayoko Hayakawa told the Post that Japan's nursing homes also have high expectations for hygiene, and strict "day-to-day precautions" were already in place to stop infections.

"Japan's elderly care facilities have taken great care in protecting the elderly, not just from this virus but from norovirus, influenza, and other germs," she said.

At one nursing home near Tokyo, called Cross Heart home, staff members took their own temperatures, filled out medical history forms, disinfected themselves, and ensured access to residents was closely monitored.
The only time some family members were allowed in was if a patient was close to dying.

Cross Heart home's head caregiver Chihiro Kasuya told the Post: "The very basic principle of elderly care is washing your hands at each step of your work: Take care of someone, wash your hands, do another job, wash your hands. But now it is even more thorough."

Staff members don't all wear masks, since it's detrimental for communication with patients. The focus is instead to keep the coronavirus out from the beginning.

Duped by Russia, freelancers ensnared in disinformation campaign by promise of easy money
Jack Stubbs, Reuters•September 2, 2020

Duped by Russia, freelancers ensnared in disinformation campaign by promise of easy money
Freelance journalist Walters is pictured near her home after speaking to Reuters in London

By Jack Stubbs

LONDON (Reuters) - When freelance journalist Laura Walters submitted a 1,000 word article about Chinese political influence in New Zealand to her new editors at non-profit media outlet Peace Data, the response was emphatic.

"I'd like to express our deep gratitude for your work," wrote Peace Data communications manager Alice Schultz in a June 15 email seen by Reuters. "It's hard to believe how totalitarian countries like China (or Russia) are finding their ways to meddle even in the strongest democracies around the globe."

But that email, from a person claiming to be Schultz, now appears to have been a small part of one such meddling attempt.


Acting on a tip from the FBI, Facebook and Twitter said on Tuesday they had identified Peace Data as the center of a Russian political influence campaign targeting left-wing voters in the United States, Britain and other countries.

The website succeeded in tricking and hiring freelance journalists to write articles about topics including the U.S. presidential election, the coronavirus pandemic and alleged Western war crimes, Facebook said.

Email correspondence reviewed by Reuters and interviews with six journalists commissioned by the website show how the writers were approached on social media, paid up to $250 per article and some times encouraged to insert political angles into their work.

A person who identified themselves as Bernadett Plaschil, an associate editor at Peace Data, told Reuters via email: "We're really confused by these accusations and deny all of them." The person declined to speak via phone or video call.

The news about Peace Data follows warnings that Russia is attempting to sway the outcome of November's election after what U.S. intelligence officials have said was a concerted effort to boost the campaign of President Donald Trump in 2016.

Russia has repeatedly denied those allegations and the Kremlin did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Peace Data on Wednesday.

"I actually referenced the Russian 2016 interference in the article I wrote," UK-based Walters, who was paid $250 to write the story for Peace Data in June, told Reuters. "I appreciate the irony right now."

OLD SCHOOL TACTICS

Peace Data "staff" approached Walters and other authors online, usually in private messages on Twitter or business networking site LinkedIn. They offered between $100 to $250 for an article and paid promptly via internet money transfers, the writers said.

All of the writers contacted by Reuters, some of whom requested anonymity due to fears of professional repercussions, said they had no knowledge about the website's Russian backing before Tuesday.

Some of the journalists said they viewed the work as an easy way to earn money during the coronavirus outbreak. Others were aspiring reporters looking for a break. "My first published article on an independent news source," one of the writers said when posting their work on social media in May.

While some of the authors said there was no overt political direction from the Peace Data staff, others said the website's editorial line made them uncomfortable.

"There was an over-stated political angle put into my stories," said one journalist who wrote for Peace Data about Turkey and the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"It rapidly stopped being a news article as they kept asking for more focus on political topics with a particular spin," the person added.

Russia's use of fake organizations to ensnare unwitting agents and activists as part of its propaganda efforts dates back to the Soviet Union, said Thomas Rid, a professor at John Hopkins University and author of Active Measures, a book about political warfare.

As efforts to catch online influence operations have increased since 2016, "defaulting back to some of the old school tactics appears to be what they are doing to try to stay hidden," he said.

Walters said her experiences showed the importance of improving public awareness about efforts to deceive people online.

"The level of sophistication, the effort that's gone into it... they obviously think it's worth it and it's going to amount to something," she said.

"So I feel like if I can be fooled by something like this, anyone could be," she added. "But it's probably the most interesting thing that's going to happen to me for a very long time."

US jobless claims drop sharply as government changes counting method

Dominic Rushe,The Guardian•September 3, 2020

Photograph: Robert F Bukaty/AP

The number of people filing claims for unemployment benefits dropped sharply last week as the US labor department switched to a new method of counting weekly jobless claims figures.

For the week ending 29 August, 881,000 claims for benefits were filed, down from just over 1m the previous week. It was only the second time since the pandemic hit the US economy that claims had dipped below 1m.

However, last week the labor department announced it was switching its statistical model to better reflect the extraordinary number of unemployment claims made during the pandemic.

Government bodies routinely use “seasonal adjustments” to smooth out annually occurring events that can cause spikes in numbers, such as the January layoffs of retail workers hired for the holiday season. The unprecedented nature of the coronavirus has meant the old method of seasonal adjustments may have overstated the actual number of weekly unemployment claims.

While the fall in the latest claims numbers suggests firings are slowing, the job market remains deeply troubled. The labor department said the total number of people claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending August 15 was over 29 million, an increase of 2m from the previous week.
On Friday, the August jobs report will be released. The government’s broadest look at the labor market is expected to show another dip in the unemployment level to below 10% as workers are rehired following the lifting of quarantine measures. The level, however, is expected to remain close to the peak witnessed in the Great Recession.

Trump looks alone on the world stage as international leaders line up to condemn the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny

Thomas Colson,Adam Bienkov Business Insider•September 3, 2020




Getty

Donald Trump remained silent on Wednesday as world leaders called on Russian president Vladimir Putin to explain the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny.


Navalny was taken ill on a plane in August after drinking a cup of tea at an airport in Siberia and is now being treated at a hospital in Germany.


German chancellor on Wednesday said that Navalny had been poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent, similar to one which was previously used to poison a former Russian spy in England in 2018.


Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, said Trump's silence on the matter made him complicit.

World Leaders, including Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson offered vocal condemnation of Navalny's poisoning and said that the Russian government should explain its actions in relation to the incident.


But Trump did not yesterday mention the incident, either in Twitter or in a statement, despite tweeting dozens of times throughout the day, and nor did US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Donald Trump looks increasingly alone on the world stage, as he fails to join the growing international outrage over the poisoning of the Russian opposition leader, and leading critic of President Putin, Alexey Navalny.

German chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday said that Navalny, a politician and activist whose vocal criticism of Putin's government has made him a celebrity in Russia, had last week been poisoned in August with a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group.

Navalny was taken ill on a plane in August after drinking a cup of tea at an airport in Siberia and is now being treated at a hospital in Germany.

Speaking at a press conference, Merkel said Navalny had been the "victim of a crime" and said his attackers "wanted to silence him."


She added: "There are very serious questions now which only the Russian government can and must answer. The fate of Alexey Navalny has received a lot of attention worldwide. The world will wait for an answer."

The poison was from the same group of agents used to poison former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in 2018, an attack for which the UK and other governments hold the Russian government responsible.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson joined Merkel in offering vocal condemnation of Navalny's poisoning.

"It's outrageous that a chemical weapon was used against Alexey Navalny," Johnson said on Wednesday.

"The Russian government must now explain what happened to Mr Navalny – we will work with international partners to ensure justice is done."

Johnson's spokesman called on other world leaders come together to act against those responsible.

"The international community must come together and use all the tools at our disposal to hold the perpetrators accountable," he said on Thursday.

Countries, including Canada, Italy and France also joined the condemnation, with French Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian saying that he condemned, "in the strongest possible terms the shocking and irresponsible use of such an agent."

The European Union also issued a statement, with the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell saying in a statement that "The use of chemical weapons under any circumstances is completely unacceptable and a breach of international law."

Yet despite these growing calls, both in the US and abroad, to condemn the poisoning, Trump has yet to personally address it.

Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, on Wednesday said that Trump's silence amounted to "complicity" in the attack.

"Once again, the Kremlin has used a favorite weapon – an agent from the Novichok class of chemicals – in an effort to silence a political opponent," Biden said in a statement. "It is the mark of a Russian regime that is so paranoid that it is unwilling to tolerate any criticism or dissent."

"His silence is complicity," Biden said of Trump. "As president, I will do what Donald Trump refuses to do: work with our allies and partners to hold the Putin regime accountable for its crimes."

The administration did address the incident on Wednesday with a statement on Twitter by John Ullyot, the National Security Council spokesperson.

"The United States is deeply troubled by the results released today. Alexei Navalny's poisoning is completely reprehensible," Ullyot said.

"Russia has used the chemical nerve agent Novichok in the past. We will work with allies and the international community to hold those in Russia accountable, wherever the evidence leads, and restrict funds for their malign activities.

"The Russian people have a right to express their views peacefully without fear of retribution of any kind, and certainly not with chemical agents."

However, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who held a press conference after Merkel's announcement, didn't mention the poisoning, according to CNN.

John Bolton, Trump's former national security adviser, called on Trump to issue an "urgent statement ... demanding a full explanation from the Russians."

However, despite the growing pressure on Trump to speak out against the apparent poisoning of a Russian opposition figure, the president remains conspicuously silent on the issue.