U.S., rights groups urge full probe of Rohingya leader's killing in Bangladesh

Mohibullah had been an international advocate for Rohingya rights, including traveling to the White House for a meeting on religious freedom in 2019.

Bangladesh has been sheltering more than 1.1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar.

Mushfiqul Alam / Reuters

Oct. 1, 2021
By Jennifer Jett and Emanuel Stoakes

The United States and rights groups are calling for a full investigation after a prominent Rohingya Muslim leader was shot and killed at a refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Mohibullah, who was known by one name and was in his late 40s, was killed by unidentified gunmen on Wednesday in the Kutupalong camp in Cox's Bazar.

On Thursday evening, thousands of refugees attended his funeral prayers before Mohibullah was buried in a graveyard inside the camp.

The incident comes amid worsening violence at the sprawling settlement, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees driven from neighboring Myanmar in 2017 by waves of state-sponsored violence.

2020: Bangladesh ships Rohingya refugees to remote island

 DEC. 4, 2020

Mohibullah had been an international advocate for Rohingya rights, including traveling to the White House for a meeting on religious freedom in 2019.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. was saddened by the murder and praised Mohibullah as a brave and fierce advocate for Rohingya rights.

“We urge a full and transparent investigation into his death with the goal of holding the perpetrators of this heinous crime accountable. We will honor his work by continuing to advocate for Rohingya and lift up the voices of members of the community in decisions about their future,” Blinken said in a statement Thursday.

Mohibullah was known as a voice for starting the repatriation of the refugees to Myanmar.

Manir Uz Zaman / AFP via Getty Images file

Mohibullah's death highlights the enduring struggles of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group long persecuted by the Myanmar government, as they contend with not only displacement but threats to their safety within the camps, Human Rights Watch said.

“He always defended the rights of the Rohingya to safe and dignified returns and to have a say in the decisions concerning their lives and future,” Meenakshi Ganguly, the group's South Asia director, said in a statement.

“His killing is a stark demonstration of the risks faced by those in the camps who speak up for freedom and against violence.”

The U.N. refugee agency condemned the attack and said it was in contact with agencies responsible for the security of Rohingya refugees

"We urge the Bangladesh authorities to undertake an immediate investigation, and hold those responsible to account," it said.

As leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, Mohibullah painstakingly documented the testimonials of survivors in the camps. The detailed record he provided has been cited in multiple investigations, including one by the International Criminal Court.

He addressed the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2019, and later that year he was part of a delegation of victims of religious persecution who met with former President Donald Trump at the White House.

Mohibullah, a former teacher, had served as a spokesman representing the Muslim ethnic group in international meetings. 

Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images file

In his remarks to the U.N. rights council, Mohibullah said the Rohingya had faced "systematic genocide" in Myanmar, where the government denies them citizenship.

"Imagine you have no identity, no ethnicity, no country, nobody wants you," he said. "How would you feel? This is how we feel today as Rohingya."

He said the Rohingya wanted to return home if they could be guaranteed citizenship and security.

"We are not stateless. Stop calling us that," he said. "We have a state, it is Myanmar."

But as Mohibullah's international profile increased, so did the number of death threats.

“Everyone in governments around the world who facilitated his travel overseas was well aware of the death threats he received, over the last 12 months in particular,” Eva Buzo, Mohibullah's lawyer, said in a phone interview with NBC News.

Saad Hammadi, South Asia campaigner for Amnesty International, said Mohibullah's killing "sends a chilling effect across the entire community."

The rights group said that since last year, at least 2,000 Rohingya refugees had been forced to flee their shelters by violence between two factions vying for control of the camp's illicit drug trade.

Bangladesh pledges 'justice' for murdered Rohingya activist

The country said that "no-one will be spared" in the hunt to find Mohib Ullah's killers. The police have made a number of arrests tied to the murder

Mohib Ullah was killed by unknown gunmen in Kutupalong refugee camp

Bangladesh on Saturday promised to mete out justice to the killers of a prominent Rohingya rights activist.

Mohib Ullah, the head of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), was killed by unknown gunmen in the Kutupalong refugee camp, in the southeastern Bangladeshi district of Cox's Bazar, on Wednesday night.

The police made three arrests on Friday in connection with the killing but provided no further details.

Over 700,000 Rohingya fled their home country Myanmar to Bangladesh, following a brutal crackdown by the military in 2017.

What has Bangladesh promised?

"The government will take stern action against those who were involved in the killing. No one will be spared," Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen said in his first comment since the killing.

Momen added that "vested" interests were responsible for the killing as Mohib Ullah had wanted to return to Myanmar. "The killers of Mohib Ullah must be brought to justice," he said.
Are there any suspects?

The three people arrested on Friday are believed to have links to an armed insurgent group among Rohingya refugees.

They are currently being interrogated, Naimul Huq, a police official in Cox's Bazar, said.

In an unverified video circulated on social media, Mohib Ullah's brother, Habib Ullah, who said he witnessed the shooting, blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed group active in the camps.

ARSA said in a post on Twitter on Friday that it was "shocked and saddened" by the killing and decried "finger-pointing with baseless and hearsay accusations."

Who was Mohib Ullah?

Mohib Ullah was known as a moderate who advocated for the Rohingya to return to Myanmar with rights they were denied during decades of persecution.

He founded the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights in a bid to document atrocities against Rohingya in their native Myanmar and give them a voice in international talks about their future.

But his high profile made him a target of hardliners and he received death threats.

The killing has ignited grief and anger in the camps that make up the world's largest refugee settlement.

Why aggressively taxing the obscenely rich is key to fighting fascism

John Stoehr
October 01, 2021

Wealthy friends sip champagne on a yacht (Shutterstock)


A reader asked the other day why the Republicans are voting against the full faith and credit of the United States when the GOP comprises so many millionaires and billionaires invested in financial markets. In other words, why would the very obscenely rich support a party that's clearly threatening the very obscene power of the very obscenely rich?

One theory, which I think is the right theory, is they don't want the Republicans to prevail. They think the Democrats will do the right thing for the sake of their country, not their party. The gamble is almost certainly the right one. Bringing the economy to the brink of panic is dangerous, but the actual risk is minimal given the Democrats are the party of governance. They would not call the Republicans' bluff.

Proof of this theory can be seen in the near-total silence of the very obscenely rich in the wake of news that the Senate Republicans had voted against the full faith and credit of the United States. Sure, there's been a few gentle reminders that defaulting on the national debt would be, um, subpar. But that's nothing compared to the hysterical outcry against the Democrats and their big plan to raise taxes on the very obscenely rich to pay for reshaping the government. While they have little to say about the real danger of default, they have a lot to say about higher taxes! That would hurt business! The economy! Jobs!

One takeaway is the very obscenely rich are lousy with bad faith. The government taxed them at much higher rates decades ago (at more than 90 percent during the Eisenhower administration). Yet they still managed to continue being very obscenely rich. During the same period, the economy was gangbusters. Jobs, too. The Democrats haven't yet passed their 10-year infrastructure bills, but so far, they seem unaffected by the lousy bad faith of the very obscenely rich (though the rates they are aiming for are not nearly high enough).

The other takeaway is the very obscenely rich are fully supportive of the Republican Party's efforts to sabotage the country just enough to maintain parasitic control of it. The GOP and the very obscenely rich don't want to kill off democracy. That would be bad for business. They only want to weaken it. As I said earlier this week, the party voting against America's credit is the same party "undermining the national recovery from the covid pandemic, which is the same party tolerating insurgents who nearly brought down the republic, which is the same party eroding the rule of law, which is the same party welcoming interference by Russia, which is … so on and so forth." The very obscenely rich, meanwhile, have resumed campaign donations to Republicans who voted to toss the 2020 election results. Firms like Home Depot and Walmart want the people to buy their stuff. They also want to prevent the people from flexing the sovereignty that would prevent them from continuing to extract wealth from the people.

Those of us worried about the future of democracy have pinned hope on the Democrats passing election reform. I've pointed out one reason that's not enough. We need to crack down on lawlessness, too. But all of the above is another reason reforming elections is insufficient. If we're going to fight authoritarianism creeping through the body politic, we need to do more about the very obscenely rich who are paving the way for that authoritarian creep with their money. The democratic way of doing that is with higher, much higher, taxation.

The problem is worse than it looks. The very obscenely rich are not only financing Republicans prepared to deny the sovereignty of the people. Directly and indirectly, they are enabling the bullies, thugs and terrorists trying to bring the republic down. In April, The Guardian reported a Christian fundraising site connected the Proud Boys and other violent groups to "anonymous high-dollar donors." Robert Mercer, Donald Trump's sugar daddy, backs far-right candidates and a social media network insurgents used to organize the assault on the US Capitol. Charles Koch, the industrialist, is tied to a vast propaganda network that includes VDare, a fascist organization. Virtually all organized anti-government "protests" during the covid pandemic can be traced back to the very obscenely rich. Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, has been called "one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement."

Right now, the Democrats are focused on getting two infrastructure packages through the Congress to reshape government and the US economy. Their focus is on raising taxes on the very obscenely rich just enough to pay for it. Democracy demands taking that another step. To fight fascism, we must fight the people paying for it. That means raising taxes higher, much higher, on the very obscenely rich.

John Stoehr is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative; a contributing writer for the Washington Monthly; a contributing editor for Religion Dispatches; and senior editor at Alternet. Follow him @johnastoehr.

Will the United States officially acknowledge that it had a secret torture site in Poland?

Pro Publica
October 01, 2021

Abu Zubaydah's drawings, which were made while he was in U.S. custody. These are two of eight drawings released by the CIA. Credit: Drawings released by the CIA

One of the longest-held prisoners in the U.S. global war on terror is finally getting a day in court. Sort of. The prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who has never been charged with a crime, has been waiting 14 years for a federal judge to rule on his habeas corpus petition that challenges the legality of his detention. But next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on a separate case: Zubaydah's request that he be permitted to take testimony from the two CIA contractors who oversaw his torture.

The Trump administration intervened to block public disclosure about how Zubaydah was treated while in U.S. custody, or even where he was held, and the Biden administration is continuing the fight. In its Supreme Court briefs, the administration has cited an array of arguments against allowing the two men to be deposed, citing everything from the state secrets privilege, which shields highly sensitive government information from being revealed in civil litigation, to the plot of the Oscar-winning thriller “Argo."

Zubaydah's case has reached the Supreme Court circuitously, beginning with an investigation in Poland five years ago into whether any of its government officials were complicit in Zubaydah's detention and torture. The United States has refused to cooperate with the Polish prosecutors, citing national security concerns.

The Polish investigators asked for help from Zubaydah's lawyer, who in turn sought to take the depositions of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Paid more than $80 million, they were the principal architects of the CIA's “enhanced interrogation techniques" — the agency's euphemism for waterboarding prisoners, slamming them against walls, forcing them into a coffin-sized box, depriving them of sleep for days at a time and other forms of torture. Zubaydah was the first prisoner on whom Mitchell and Jessen tested their techniques, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2014.

After the CIA seized Zubaydah in Pakistan in March 2002 and secretly took him to a black site in Thailand, Bush administration officials asserted that he was al-Qaida's third-highest-ranking leader. The government has since acknowledged that he was not a senior terrorist leader and that he had no known connection to the 9/11 attacks. He had been in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan for nearly a decade and had suffered a serious head injury while fighting against the Soviet-backed government. Intelligence officials concluded he was more of a facilitator, providing false passports, housing and other arrangements for men, some potential terrorists, who moved between the two countries.

“He wasn't hatching plots and giving orders," Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad when Zubaydah was being monitored and eventually seized, wrote in his book “88 Days to Kandahar." “I did not expect that he would know the time or place of the next attack." However, in Washington, CIA officials were convinced that Zubaydah knew about plans to attack the United States, and Mitchell was determined to extract the information, according to declassified documents.

After being waterboarded 83 times in Thailand, Zubaydah had still not revealed any “actionable intelligence," cables from Thailand to Langley reported. Later, interrogators would conclude he knew nothing about al-Qaida's plans.

He did, however, send FBI agents on futile investigations as he tried to end the torture. At one point, interrogators in Thailand asked Zubaydah a hypothetical question: If you were going to carry out an attack in the United States, where would you do it? The Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, Zubaydah answered. This led New York City to impose security measures “not seen since the first months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," The New York Times reported.

In December 2002, when journalists began asking questions about a black site in Thailand, it was shut down, and Zubaydah was secretly transferred to Poland.

For years, the Polish government denied the existence of a CIA detention site. But after the 2014 Senate Intelligence report and after the European Court for Human Rights ruled in 2015 that it was “beyond a reasonable doubt" that Zubaydah had been held in Poland, Polish prosecutors began their investigation. Invoking a mutual legal assistance treaty, which commits each country to support the other's criminal investigations, Warsaw asked Washington for assistance. Their request went unanswered.

Joseph Margulies, one of Zubaydah's American lawyers, realized that the Polish investigation offered an opportunity to make public at least some of what had been done to his client at the black sites and might lead to his release. Invoking a federal law that allows an interested party to gather evidence in support of a foreign investigation, he asked a court to compel the depositions of Mitchell and Jessen. The Trump administration immediately intervened. It asserted the state secrets privilege to block the depositions, contending that the testimony would formally confirm or deny that the CIA operated a clandestine detention center in Poland.

As the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a nonprofit organization in London, put it in a brief recently filed with the Supreme Court in support of Zubaydah, “Study after study, report after report, emerging from the CIA, DOJ and SSCI, along with flight record after flight record, flight invoice after invoice, have confirmed, in graphic and granular detail, what the world already knows: that the CIA had black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay."

Even the former Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski has acknowledged that the CIA had set up a black site in his country. “Of course, everything took place with my knowledge," he told Poland's leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, in 2012. “The President and the Prime Minister agreed to the intelligence co-operation with the Americans, because this was what was required by national interest."

None of this has slowed the U.S. government's efforts to avoid acknowledging what is now accepted fact. In their briefs, government lawyers argue that the Polish site, if it ever existed, remains a state secret because the federal government has never officially admitted to its existence. They contend that all those public reports and statements could be part of a CIA disinformation campaign. The lawyers cite as evidence the book and movie “Argo," which chronicles how the CIA rescued Americans hiding out in Iran by posing as a film crew. (As many commentators pointed out, the movie takes considerable liberties with the facts, adding, among other things, a chase through an airport that never occurred.)

The government's Supreme Court brief relies primarily on United States v. Reynolds, a 1953 case regarding the crash of an Air Force B-29 near Waycross, Georgia. When the families of three civilian engineers killed in the crash sought a copy of the accident report and witness statements, the Air Force refused to turn over the documents, asserting that they contained classified information about a secret mission. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the government's claim and, for the first time, formally recognized the state secrets privilege.

Forty-seven years later, the Air Force declassified the documents. They contained no reference to a secret mission. “Instead, the report told a horror story of incompetence, bungling, and tragic error," Garry Wills wrote in The New York Review of Books.

From slavery to police abuse, new museum documents US history of racism

Agence France-Presse
October 01, 2021

An exhibit at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama (AFP)

Slavery, lynchings, segregation, mass incarceration and police abuse: a museum that opens Friday in the state of Alabama traces a direct link between the racist past of the United States and today's inequalities.

The Legacy Museum in the state capital of Montgomery is housed in a building where African captives were once held before being sold as slaves.

"It's a museum about the history of America, with a focus on the legacy of slavery," Bryan Stevenson, the head of Equal Justice Initiative, a civil rights organization in Alabama, told AFP.

"I can't think of another institution in America that has more profoundly shaped our economy, our politics, our social structures. And our character."

"Our understanding of slavery is very very incomplete," he said.

It is this information void that the Legacy Museum aims to fill, while prompting Americans to campaign against the inequality that persists today, according to Stevenson.

"The only way we can make progress in this country is if we engage both our minds and our hearts in a serious commitment to truth and justice to eliminating racial injustice," he said.

The museum, inspired by memorials to the Holocaust in Berlin or to apartheid in Johannesburg, offers an immersive experience: upon arrival, visitors board a ship crossing the Atlantic, witnessing the suffering of future slaves.

Another space is dedicated to the violence experienced by slaves, including sexual violence.

One wing is dedicated to the thousands of victims of lynchings of Black Americans, which occurred between 1877 and 1950. The National Lynching Memorial, located next to the museum, is devoted to the same topic.

The museum also conveys the "humiliation of segregation" in the South after World War II, Stevenson said.

Stevenson's organization provides legal assistance and advocacy for people wrongly convicted of crimes, a widespread problem for African Americans.

The group has succeeded in acquitting several people who had been condemned to death. In the museum, visitors can listen to them tell their stories.

The museum is part of a national reckoning on race and racism in America, which has grown more intense since the murder of African American George Floyd by a white police officer in May 2020.

Stevenson lamented that the efforts are meeting resistance on the part of conservatives. Still, he was optimistic.

"The good news is that we have the capacity to get past that fear, to get past that preference for silence," Stevenson said. "I believe we will make that choice."

Gen. Honoré plans to confront oil companies over neglecting infrastructure in Louisiana
Wesley Muller, Louisiana Illuminator
October 01, 2021

Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré and former President George W. Bush (Bush Archives)

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré plans to attend a meeting of the Petroleum Club of Lafayette next week to demand that oil corporations — not taxpayers — pay the half-billion dollar bill that could result from having to clean up the thousands of oil spills and other incidents of pollution in Louisiana exposed by Hurricane Ida, according to a Friday press release.

Honoré, an emergency preparedness expert known for leading the recovery of Hurricane Katrina and the U.S. Capitol security review in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, will attend the Petroleum Club meeting at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 5, at 1030 E. Saint Mary Blvd., Lafayette.

According to his press release, the general will demand the industry foot the bill that could cost up to $650 million to properly plug all 4,600 abandoned wells across the state of Louisiana. The news release said the thousands of pollution incidents since Ida's landfall have exposed vulnerable and abandoned industrial infrastructure across the state.

Industrial and petrochemical pollution incidents in Louisiana have drawn heightened scrutiny after Associated Press journalists, combing through weather satellite images, spotted oil slicks near a Gulf of Mexico rig in the days following Hurricane Ida's Aug. 29 landfall. That oil spill, which left an 11-mile long slick, came from an abandoned pipeline that authorities have yet to trace to a company responsible.

Since then, the U.S. Coast Guard has received more than 2,100 reports of spills and other contamination incidents, according to a Washington Post article.

Among those reports, the Phillips 66 Alliance refinery, located along the Mississippi River in Belle Chasse, spilled an unreported amount of oil that killed several deer and cows and covered otters, hogs and at least 100 birds, according to NOLA.com.

Louisiana's industries also affected the air after the storm. Oil refineries, such as Shell Norco, released chemical emissions at a high rate in the days before and after Ida's landfall, forming a long black cloud that stretched from Norco to near the middle of Lake Pontchartrain north of Metairie where it began to dissipate.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jarvis DeBerry for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and Twitter.

‘Clear and present danger’: Majority of Trump voters believe it’s ‘time to split the country’ in two: report

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
September 30, 2021

The highly-respected University of Virginia's nonpartisan Center for Politics has released a new study that finds a majority of Trump voters believe it's time to split the country into two, with "red states" and "blue states" seceding from the Union.

The organization, headed by Larry Sabato of "Sabato's Crystal Ball," reports that four in ten Biden voters agree.

“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous. The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed," said UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato.

“In order to figure out ways to bridge these divides, we need to understand not just the divides themselves, but also understand the ways in which we can, together, move forward to reach common ground. This project helps us do both," said Larry Schack of Project Home Fire, a new initiative partnering with the UVA Center for Politics.

The report top-line revelations include: "Trump and Biden voters are at crisis stage"; there is tremendous "fear and distrust among Biden and Trump voters"; and "Many Trump and Biden voters believe the deck is stacked against them, and their commitment to democracy is wavering."

Crystal Ball's managing editor, Kyle Kondik, tweeted out some charts (below) from the project. Among the disturbing but unsurprising revelations:

Eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say elected officials from the opposition party present a "clear and present danger" to democracy. Almost eight in 10 Biden and Trump voters say Americans who support the opposite party have also become a "clear and present danger" to the American way of life.

The report also finds strong areas of common ground, including on the need for improvements to the electric grid, water supply, roads, rail, and bridges, and raising taxes on the wealthy

Toxic foam dumped into southern Illinois coal mine in unsuccessful attempt to extinguish underground fire

2021/10/1 
© Chicago Tribune

Sugar Camp coal mine near Benton in southern Illinois on Sept. 16, 2021.

 - E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/TNS

Operators of a southern Illinois coal mine dumped toxic foam deep underground in an unsuccessful attempt to extinguish a fire that idled production last month, according to documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

The type of foam used by St. Louis-based Foresight Energy is being phased out in Illinois and 11 other states under laws that for the first time restrict unregulated chemicals known as PFAS — shorthand for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

PFAS are a growing concern worldwide because they remain in the environment forever, linger in the blood of exposed people for years and trigger several health problems, including cancer, liver damage and decreased fertility.

One of Foresight’s lawyers told state officials the foam used at the Sugar Camp complex was biodegradable and would not harm fish or wildlife. But inspectors later determined the company had pumped more than 46,000 gallons of PFAS-laden foam into the mine, raising the possibility that nearby private wells and other sources of drinking water could be contaminated.

Company officials also hired contractors to drill boreholes into the mine without a permit, records show. One of the boreholes is close to a creek where testing this month by the Illinois Environmental Protection detected high levels of PFAS.

“Potential environmental impacts are tremendous, especially if the foam is not contained,” said Melanie Benesh, an attorney for the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization pushing to ban the chemicals. “PFAS can seep into groundwater where it won’t break down. If the contaminated groundwater is a source of drinking water, then residents may be exposed to PFAS.”

Both the fire and Foresight’s responses to it remained secret until a local environmental activist took pictures of foam that had drifted to above-ground ditches and farm fields near the mine entrance in Franklin County, about 270 miles southwest of Chicago.

The activist forwarded the photos to state officials and to the Tribune, which sought more details under the Freedom of Information Act.

Foresight executives did not return requests for comment. Federal and state officials declined to say anything other than the fire remains under investigation.

Portions of the mine are still smoldering, and federal mining regulators have blocked Foresight from resuming production.

Emails show the Illinois EPA didn’t begin looking into potential harm to people and wildlife until Sept. 1, more than three weeks after Foresight evacuated miners at Sugar Camp.

“We should have our PFAS crew go out there to do some sampling,” Sanjay Sofat, chief of the agency’s Bureau of Water, wrote to colleagues.

Samples collected the next day had PFAS concentrations up to 16 times higher than state health guidelines, records show.

Foresight’s use of PFAS-laden foam came a month after federal and state regulators ordered a Louisiana-based contractor to switch to safer alternatives while putting out a fire that destroyed a chemical plant near Rockford.

A lack of uniform federal or state policies reflects how regulators struggle to protect Americans from PFAS more than two decades after it became clear the chemicals pose widespread hazards to public health.

Nearly every American has PFAS in their blood, studies have found. The compounds are known largely for their use in products featuring the Teflon and Scotchgard brands, manufactured by DuPont and 3M, respectively. But dozens of related compounds are still widely used in firefighting foam, food packaging, stain- and water-resistant clothing, carpets and household products, among other things.

Foresight, one of the last coal companies operating in Illinois, declared bankruptcy last year. And yet, led by the Sugar Camp complex, the company produced more than half of the 32 million tons of coal mined in the state during 2020.

Nearly all of Foresight’s coal is shipped to other states and countries. The company cuts costs by relying on longwall mining, a process that uses robotic equipment rather than people to do most of the work.

Since opening in 2008, Sugar Camp has repeatedly shown up on the U.S. EPA’s list of chronic violators of the federal Clean Water Act. Five of the 16 Illinois miners killed on the job since 2008 worked at the mine, where the injury rate exceeded the national average at times during the past decade.

The mine also is a major source of heat-trapping pollution scrambling the earth’s climate. Burning Foresight’s coal in power plants and factories released more carbon dioxide last year than the heat-trapping emissions from all 4.6 million automobiles registered in Illinois.

It turns out Elizabeth Warren was right all along

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
September 30, 2021

Senator Elizabeth Warren (Screenshot)

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.

"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.

"Look closely, and you'll see — on issue after issue, widely popular policies are stymied because giant corporations and billionaires who don't want to pay taxes or follow any rules use their money and influence to stand in the way of big, structural change," she wrote in her plan announcement.

Warren's view is, sadly and perhaps surprisingly, not popular. Republicans clearly don't view corruption as a bad thing these days — that's one more reason why they love Donald Trump. But even on the left, where everyone says they're against corruption and voters in particular always sign off on the idea that ending corruption is a good idea, there's a gulf between saying you're against it and actually working to eradicate it. If more agreed with Warren to make corruption a priority target, we might not be watching President Joe Biden's bold agenda slowly fall apart now.

When it comes to brass tacks, not enough people are willing to put in the effort required to make fighting corruption a real agenda item. Activists are more likely to put their time into causes like health care and climate change. Democratic politicians, when they get power, are also attracted to policy fights that offer tangible rewards, such as increased social spending, rather than the more abstract and far-flung discourse about lobbyists and corruption. And voters definitely reward politicians for these priorities, which is one reason why Warren lost handily in the primary to Sanders and Biden.

But as the current debacle playing out on Capitol Hill demonstrates, Warren was right all along. Democrats and their voters may want to pass progressive legislation that addresses wealth inequality, climate change and lack of health care. But corrupt business interests keep stopping them. It's like trying to make a dress when someone keeps stealing your sewing machine. You can have the pattern and the fabric and the vision, but if you don't have the means to put it all together, you will never get that dress made.

Biden and Sanders are learning this the hard way as their dual vision for the Build Back Better plan — an expansive set of bills meant to address climate change, reduce poverty, ensure child care, expand health care, and build up American infrastructure, among other things — teeters on the edge of collapse. After spending months carefully constructing a two-track plan where moderate Democrats would support the progressive agenda, in exchange for progressives supporting the moderate agenda, a handful of centrist Democrats in the House and Senate are about to blow the whole thing up by reneging on their end of the bargain. And while there are multiple reasons for this backstabbing behavior, it's hard not to notice the undue influence of lobbyists.

The two biggest names in the Senate Betrayal Caucus are, of course, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both are throwing their weight around, clearly trying to derail Biden's agenda while claiming to have no such intention. Instead, they come with an endless array of incoherent, even nonsensical, explanations as to why they can't just suck it up and vote for the two-bill track the Democratic caucus agreed to vote on. There's now an entire cottage industry built around psychoanalyzing these two: What do they want? What will get them to "yes"? Why won't they just tell us what they want, so we can give it to them? Why are they making so little sense?

Everyone has a favorite reason, but the likeliest is the boring one: They're being dodgy because they don't want to be honest about their real motives. Looking at their track records, it's hard not to notice that both deeply enjoy being wined and dined by some of the sleaziest lobbyists and fundraisers on Capitol Hill. Manchin, for instance, blew off fellow Democrats begging him to support voting rights in favor of going to a fundraiser held by oil and gas executives who have a financial interest in keeping working people from voting. Sinema is deep in cahoots with industry lobbyists who want to tank Biden's agenda, holding fundraisers with anti-Biden groups and taking money from the pharmacy industry, right before doing an about-face to block fair pricing drug policies she previously claimed to support.

It's not just those two. The price control policy for pharmaceuticals is one of the most wildly popular items in the Biden agenda — at least with voters. But a small group of Democrats in the House pulled that item out of the bill, and they're barely trying to pretend it's for any reason other than to appease pharmaceutical lobbyists. They likely know that politicians and voters may say they oppose corruption, but that actually doing something to stop it never becomes a priority.

Lobbyists have Sinema's ear, but her own party and voters do not. The Democratic party in Arizona is threatening a vote of no confidence against her, and her response was somewhere between a shrug and throwing them the finger. Activists are crowdfunding for a primary challenger against her. It is possible she is such an egomaniac that she thinks she's going to have a great re-election after teeing off her own voters, of course. But it's also hard not to wonder if she isn't influenced by the knowledge that she's all but guaranteed a well-heeled job in lobbying if she loses re-election. Notably, a lifetime ban on politicians becoming lobbyists is part of Warren's anti-corruption bill. If it was law, then Sinema might be making more pro-voter choices, rather than treating her constituents as an annoying inconveniences.

Corruption isn't a sexy issue, but focusing attention on it can pay huge dividends when it comes to advancing progressive causes. Take gun control, for instance. Decades of rational argumentation and emotional appeals did little to move the needle, policy-wise. Even in the face of children being murdered in schools repeatedly, Republican politicians have successfully blocked all bills, and Democrats didn't even bother making it a priority when they got power. Eventually, however, gun control advocates started to look away from the ideological arguments and toward the influence of the gun industry, through its main lobbying arm, the NRA.

Once they did that, real progress started to happen. Investigations revealed that the NRA was a thoroughly corrupt organization and that its leadership was on the take. Then the lawsuits started to fly. Now the organization is in very real danger of collapse — not because of its views, but because of its corruption. It might be too late, and Republicans may be too dug in on their gun mania to ever start to moderate. But without the NRA in their ear all the time, there could be a real chance to persuade even just a few Republicans to support common sense reforms that are backed by the majority of Americans. But only if the NRA is gone — and coming at them from a corruption angle was the path to this possibility.

It's admittedly a tough sell, even to Democrats. Most Democrats have been happy to back bills that tackle the issue in similar ways to what Warren proposes, and many seem to understand that they would benefit from a more level playing field, where wealthy interests have less influence over policy and politics. Still, as with most legislation that Democrats want to pass, anti-corruption bills have been torn apart on the shores of the filibuster. And the two people who are doing the most to make sure the filibuster remains and anti-corruption bills have no chance of passing? You guessed it: Manchin and Sinema. Corruption on Capitol Hill is a grotesque house of mirrors, and until that changes, real progress will be an impossibly tall hill to climb.

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'Deeply dangerous': MSNBC host reveals the history behind the GOP embrace of a deadly conspiracy theory

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
October 01, 2021

Peter Cvjetanovicm (Twitter)

Fox News' Tucker Carlson generated considerable controversy when, on his April 8 show, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory — a racist conspiracy theory that has become prominent in white supremacist and white nationalist ideology. And almost half a year later, Carlson is still claiming that President Joe Biden and other Democrats are trying to "replace" white voters with immigrants from developing countries. MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan called Carlson out on his show this week, warning that he is promoting a claim that "gets people killed."

The progressive firebrand described the Great Replacement as a "conspiracy theory so vile, so extreme, so dangerous" that it was, in the past, avoided by mainstream conservatives and kept "on the furthest fringes of the far right."

Hasan told viewers, "What is the Great Replacement? It's a story, or a theory if you will, about liberal elites secretly changing our demographics, helping Black and Brown immigrants to invade America and replace white people. It's a white supremacist story about so-called white genocide. Scary, right? Bonkers, too. And yet, this year, Fox's Tucker Carlson came along and thought, 'Hmmm, let's bring this idea into the light to a prime-time cable audience."

The MSNBC host went on to say that the Great Replacement Theory has become a "rallying cry for the neo-Nazi far right," noting that it originated in France with white nationalist author Renaud Camus and his book "Le Grand Remplacement." And Hasan noted that a series of terrorist attacks have been carried out by White supremacists who embrace and promote that theory.

"The Great Replacement Theory gets people killed," Hasan warned. "And yet, you now have Tucker Carlson — the most influential right-wing cable news host in America — defending it, promoting it, mainstreaming it. And elected Republicans are now following in his footsteps…. Members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric."

Hasan showed clips of Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Brian Babin of Texas promoting the Great Replacement Theory, arguing that "members of the GOP are now openly trafficking in neo-Nazi rhetoric" rather than simply using racist "dog whistles" like Republicans of the past. And he noted that Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida has vigorously defended Carlson by explicitly promoting the Great Replacement Theory by name.

"This is how white supremacy is normalized in America today: the marriage between Rupert Murdoch's Fox and Donald Trump's GOP," Hasan warned. "And they make us numb to this stuff…. This is a deeply dangerous moment for America."

New report details the dangerous weaponry brought by Capitol rioters — despite claims they were unarmed

Meaghan Ellis, AlterNet
October 01, 2021

Capitol Insurrectionists (Shutterstock)

Republican lawmakers have spent months gaslighting the American public on what transpired at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Although harrowing footage captured the deadly series of events that transpired, Republicans have adamantly attempted to downplay the incident and cover up multiple aspects of the insurrection.

One fact that hasn't received enough coverage — and has also been falsely denied by many figures on the right — is the serious weaponry brought by some of the insurrectionists.

According to Mother Jones, some of Trump's extremist supporters actually did carry guns into the federal building. "A Mother Jones investigation drawing on public video footage, congressional testimony, and documents from more than a dozen federal criminal cases reveals that various Trump supporters descended on DC that day armed for battle with guns and other potentially lethal weapons," the publication reports.

Multiple individuals are also facing charges of carrying firearms on U.S. Capitol grounds. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and court documents, "at least eight others carried knives or tasers at the Capitol, including two defendants who allegedly committed assaults with tasers." A number of others were also arrested in downtown Washington, D.C. Those individuals reportedly had " rifles, pistols, explosive materials, and large supplies of ammunition."

Despite the existence of evidence, Republican lawmakers have repeatedly pushed back against those claims. "This didn't seem like an armed insurrection to me," said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) just weeks after angry Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. He added, 'When you think of armed, don't you think of firearms?'

During the hearings back in May, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) also claimed law enforcement officers found "zero firearms" on riot suspects. Former President Donald Trump had also echoed the same claim. "There were no guns whatsoever"' Trump said when he appeared on Fox News in July.

However, the defendants in the case appear to have made their intentions quite clear. One defendant, in particular, is Guy Reffitt of Texas. Facing a charge for unlawfully carrying a handgun, Reffitt sent a message to fellow members of the extremist organization known as the Three Percenters. He suggested that incidents like the Capitol insurrection are only the beginning of their efforts to take back the country.

"We took the Capital and put the POS Capital Hill on it's [sic] heels," said Reffitt, according to court documents filed by prosecutors. "This has only just begun and will not end until we The People of The Republic have won our country back. We had thousands of weapons and fired no rounds yet showed numbers. The next time we will not be so cordial."