Human rights activists accuse new Haiti police chief of past repression and abuse

2021/11/1 
© Miami Herald

RICHARD PIERRIN/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

Shortly after being named the head of Haiti’s national police late last month amid a surge in gang violence, rampant kidnappings and a life-threatening fuel shortage, Frantz Elbé promised to tackle the Caribbean nation’s crime problems while motivating cops inside his department’s beleaguered force.

But Elbé, who was appointed by interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry to replace embattled interim Police Director General Léon Charles, who resigned over a week ago after less than a year in the job, could find his past overshadowing those efforts.

Several human rights advocates in Haiti are accusing Elbé, the former inspector general of the Haiti National Police, of being involved in police repression and human rights abuses dating back to the early 2000s. He’s also accused of having links with a once-powerful gang leader and kidnapper in the Croix-des-Bouquets area, Jean Elie “Ti Elie” Muller, and being godfather to his son. Muller died in 2008 in a Port-au-Prince hospital after being shot in the thigh during his arrest by Haitian police for his alleged involvement in several kidnappings., including that of a 20-year-old student who was brutally murdered.

Elbé, contacted by the Miami Herald soon after his naming about the allegations surrounding his policing career, did not respond to several requests for comment.

“We at the National Human Rights Defense Network have our concerns over the appointment of Frantz Elbé,” said human rights advocate Rosy Auguste Ducena, describing the contents of a March 29, 2004, legal complaint accusing Elbé of being involved in the disappearance of three anti-government activists. “He was a police commissioner, and occupied various posts. At another moment he was a departmental director. All of this shows that, even though he was implicated in human rights allegations, he managed to make a career inside the police institution.”

Ducena said given the multitude of problems facing Haiti, the country needs someone in the top cop job who is above reproach, and not one whose nomination implies he’s part of a political deal.

“There cannot be a political nomination at the head of the police because today the problems within the police are many, the issue with insecurity is grave, and it’s not a political nomination that we need,” she said.

As director of the national police, often called PNH, its French acronym, Elbé is tasked with not just tackling the country’s rising tide of violent gangs and kidnappings, but also building up a battered force plagued with bad cops who have ties to gangs, issues of discontent within its ranks over poor pay and working conditions, and low morale. The force is also tasked with providing help in the ongoing investigation into the July 7 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse, which is now in the hands of an investigative judge.

According to the United Nation’s latest report, as of Sept. 3 the Haiti National Police roster stood at 14,881 officers — or 1.25 officers per 1,000 inhabitants, which is significantly below the international standards for the country of 11.5 million citizens.

William O’Neill, an international human-rights lawyer who worked for the United Nations while it worked with the U.S. to build a new civil police force in the mid-’90s, said putting a police officer in the top job while there are questions about his own human rights records and relations is “extremely troubling and unhelpful.”

“Somebody like this is just too enmeshed in the past and too identified with bad things, whether he is criminally culpable under laws. It’s the perception that matters too,” O’Neill said. “You just need somebody who is above any kind of criticism or suspicion because PNH is in dire straits and it’s going to need someone who can reassure the population.”

Haitians, O’Neill said, already lack confidence in the police, which is a huge obstacle in trying to tackle kidnappings and other crimes by armed gangs.

“We worked really hard in ‘95 to start with a new name, new uniforms and new everything; rigid recruiting requirements and vetting,” he said of the building of the new force to replace the disbanded Haitian Army. “For a while people had confidence in the police, and then it all unraveled. This doesn’t help in creating a bond of trust with the population and the police.”

Between 2010 and last year, the U.S. has provided $312 million to strengthen law enforcement and the capacity of the Haitian police, the State Department has said. In recent weeks, the Biden administration has allocated an additional $15 million to partnering with the police on top of existing efforts, including $12 million specifically to strengthen its capacity to respond to gangs.

Multiple sources tell the Herald that no advance notice was given to the U.S. about Elbé before his appointment. They also note that Elbé had previously been vetted by Washington and passed.

That process is now being called into question, given the allegations dogging Elbé, which come at a time when Haitians and foreign diplomats are demanding increased vetting of members of the Haitian police force to root out bad cops.

A State Department spokesperson did not address the allegations specifically, only that “the Department of State’s Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs routinely vets recipients of U.S. security assistance, including Mr. Elbé.”

“Strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms remains a cornerstone of our foreign policy throughout the world,” the spokesperson said in reference to whether the administration is aware of the allegations. “We will continue to raise these issues with Haitian counterparts.”

The Port-au-Prince human rights group Fondasyon Je Klere, or Open Eyes Foundation, recently issued a report accusing Elbé of being a human rights abuser. The foundation’s president, lawyer Samuel Madistin, remembers the March 2004 complaint and was involved as a lawyer.

Elbé “has a past rapport with gangs, armed groups in various places where he served,” Madistin said. “It’s very disturbing that it’s someone like this who they selected to put at the head of the police.”

Among the allegations, the 2004 report mentions an alleged relationship between Elbé and Muller, the gang leader known as Ti Elie.

“The gang leader Ti Elie with whom Superintendent Frantz Elbé appeared in broad daylight in a baptismal ceremony is a man of unparalleled cruelty,” the foundation said.

Muller’s gang was behind the first recorded cases of kidnappings in the Croix-des-Bouquets region, the same area where 17 missionaries, 16 of them Americans, were taken at gunpoint on Oct. 16 by the 400 Mawozo gang. The missionaries remain in the hands of their captors.

At the time of the first registered kidnappings, Elbé had just arrived as head of the police station.

Among the abductions the Ti Elie gang was linked to was that of a 20-year-old student, Farah Natacha Kerby Dessources. In November 2006, she was raped and tortured despite the payment of a ransom, and according to a March 30, 2009, order issued by investigating judge Etzer Aristide, she also had acid poured into her eyes before she was killed and left on a heap of trash, the foundation said in its report.

At the time of his rise, Ti Elie reportedly had 275 soldiers who were armed with automatic rifles as well as grenade and rocket launchers, the report said.

The human rights and police repression allegations against Elbé first surfaced in 2004 during the nationwide protests movement against then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The police force was highly politicized and officers were accused of using armed groups to terrorize the protesting population.

During the period, Haiti was engulfed in protests by both supporters and opponents of Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas political party. The report notes that Elbé, a police commissioner during Aristide’s tenure, took a stance in favor of armed gangs, as he supported Aristide as part of his duties and rigorously fought anti-Lavalas militants.

At the time, Elbé was in charge of the police station in Grand-Goâve, where a group of young people were organizing anti-government demonstrations. To help police the protests, he requested assistance from agents in Port-au-Prince, Miragoane and Petit-Goave.

After police arrived, one person, Stanley Rodney, was dead and another person was injured. Several opposition activists were forced underground. Three of them, Pierre Jabin Bellerice, Jean Bed Bellerice and Luxon Obin, decided to head to Delmas 41 in the capital to escape the repression. They were later arrested on Feb. 21, 2004, the foundation wrote.

Elbé, according to the report and Ducena, left his jurisdiction to come after the young opposition activists. He was joined by the head of the Delmas 33 police station at the time and several armed gang members, including a powerful gang leader named Jean Anthony Rene, who went by the nickname Grenn Sonnen.

Elbé’s vehicles, the report said, were identified at the scene. After being taken to the Delmas 33 police station, the three activists were never seen again. After Aristide fell eight days later amid a bloody coup, the family of the men filed a report with the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, the predecessor of the National Human Rights Defense Network.

A delegation of human rights activists later went to the Delmas 33 police station to investigate and found that the men’s names were never registered in the police station’s day-to-day arrest registry.

“The risk of using the PNH for political ends is high with Frantz Elbé,” the report said.

The report also points to evidence of unexplained wealth, along with a building that Elbé allegedly built in the Croix-des-Bouquets area while a police commissioner, and ownership in a private security company called Sécurité Plus S.A. 47.

“On the company’s website, you can read the advertisement made by Frantz Elbé in these terms: “To secure your companies, your residence, you can trust SECURITE PLUS S.A.,” the report said.

“A Director General of the PNH cannot, without conflict of interest, be a shareholder or owner of a private security company,” the foundation said.

O’Neill, the human rights lawyer, said not every cop in Haiti is tainted. Some have tried to do right despite the pressure and threats. But if there are well-founded allegations or serious reasons to believe that someone has committed a human rights violation, he said, he should not be appointed director.

“We are not talking about sending someone to prison. That would correctly require a much higher burden of proof and solid evidence,” he said. “There is not a right to be a police officer, or the head of the police. It’s a privilege. ... If there are any suspicions, it should be ‘No. We will find other people.’ ”

Brazil's Bolsonaro meets Italy far-right leader

Agence France-Presse
November 02, 2021

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (L) and Italian Lega leader Matteo Salvini during a commemoration for Brazilian soldiers fallen during WWII in Pistoia, Italy 

Handout MATTEO SALVINI PRESS OFFICE/AFP

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro met Italian far-right leader Matteo Salvini Tuesday in a ceremony for Brazilians killed in World War II, on a visit to Italy marred by controversy.

The Brazilian far-right leader chose to skip UN climate talks in Glasgow after the G20 summit in Rome to instead spend two days in northern and central Italy.

He was met by flag-waving supporters but also protesters on Monday when he collected an honorary citizenship from the northern town of Anguillara Veneta. Tuesday's program was no less controversial.

The local bishop boycotted a ceremony attended by Bolsonaro and Salvini in the cemetery of the Tuscan town of Pistoia, where a monument remembers 500 Brazilians who died fighting the Nazis.

The diocese condemned the politicization of the event, while neither the mayor of Pistoia nor the head of the Tuscan region turned out to welcome the Brazilian.

Salvini apologized for the protests, saying: "Honoring the fallen should be outside of political controversy."

Bolsonaro is under intense pressure back home over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and has been widely criticized for his hardline stance on climate change.

Following Bolsonaro's visit Monday to Anguillara Veneta, home of his ancestors, he travelled to the Sant'Antonio basilica in Padua, where police used water cannon against hundreds of demonstrators.

The mayor of Anguillara Veneta, Alessandra Buoso, a member of Salvini's anti-immigrant League party, said the town honored Bolsonaro to "reward the welcome that migrants from Anguillara Veneta have received in Brazil".

About a thousand inhabitants of the Italian town of 4,000 fled poverty to emigrate to Brazil at the end of the 19th century, among them Bolsonaro's ancestors.

"I am moved to be here. It's from here that my grandparents left" for Brazil, Bolsonaro said Monday.

After his visit to Pistoia, Bolsonaro visited Pisa, taking in a brief visit of the famous leaning tower before he was due to fly home to Brazil.

© 2021 AFP

Are Trump and his associates guilty of mass murder? 

YES!

Thom Hartmann, Independent Media Institute
November 02, 2021

All across America this past year-and-a-half 700,000 people have died an agonizing, terrifying, drowning-in-their-own-fluids death, their relatives helpless, saying goodbye using Zoom or FaceTime. Families broken and shattered; husbands, wives, children and grandchildren left bereft; doctors, nurses, and physicians assistants dying along with them or holding their hands as they draw their final, tortured breath. Many of those deaths were absolutely unnecessary.

They happened because of decisions made by a small group of people led by Donald Trump.

If you or I made any decision, grounded in the desire to gain a political or other type of benefit, that caused even one single person to die we'd be on our way to prison. Look at people who simply decide to text while driving…and then kill a pedestrian. Prison.

Trump not only caused over 130,000 Americans to die unnecessarily (according to Dr. Deborah Birx's sworn testimony before Congress last week), but there's a pile of evidence — which I'll lay out below — that he did it because he believed the virus was hitting Blue states and Black people the hardest.


If this is true (and I'm building a case here that it is), it's called second-degree murder, which, to use the definitions of the State of Florida where Trump lives (there is no federal homicide law) constitutes:

"The unlawful killing of a human being, when perpetrated by any act imminently dangerous to another and evincing a depraved mind regardless of human life, although without any premeditated design to effect the death of any particular individual, is murder in the second degree and constitutes a felony of the first degree, punishable by imprisonment for a term of years not exceeding life…"

From the first case in the US on January 20, 2020 until the week of April 7th of last year, for four months Trump and his team were actually trying to do something about the Covid pandemic.

Trump put medical doctors on TV daily, the media was freaking out about refrigerated trucks carrying bodies away from New York hospitals, and doctors and nurses were our new national heroes.

By March 7th, US deaths had risen from 4 to only 22, but that was enough to spur federal action. Trump's official emergency declaration came on March 11th, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome that week.

The Dow collapsed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration. Jared Kushner put together an all-volunteer taskforce of mostly preppie 30-something white men to coordinate getting PPE to hospitals.

They even had a plan for the Post Office to distribute 650 million masks — 5 to every American household — to stop the pandemic.

But then came April 7th, when the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline: Black Americans Face Alarming Rates of Coronavirus Infection in Some States.

Other media ran similar headlines across the American media landscape that day, and it was heavily reported on cable news and the network news that night. Most of the non-elderly people dying from Covid, the report found, were Black or Hispanic, not white people.

White conservatives responded with a collective, "What the hell?!?"

Limbaugh declared that afternoon that "with the coronavirus, I have been waiting for the racial component." And here it was. "The coronavirus now hits African Americans harder — harder than illegal aliens, harder than women. It hits African Americans harder than anybody, disproportionate representation."

It didn't take a medical savant, of course, to figure out why, and it had nothing to do with the biology of race: it was purely systemic racism. African Americans die disproportionately from everything, from heart disease to strokes to cancer to childbirth.

It's a symptom of a racially rigged economy and a healthcare system that only responds to money, which America has conspired to keep from African Americans for over 400 years. Of course they're going to die more frequently from coronavirus.

But the New York Times and the Washington Post simultaneously publishing front-page articles about that disparity with regard to COVID19, all on April 7th, echoed across the rightwing media landscape like a Fourth of July fireworks display.

Tucker Carlson, the only prime-time Fox "News" host who'd previously expressed serious concerns about the dangers of the virus, changed his tune the same day, as documented by Media Matters for America.

Now, Tucker said, "we can begin to consider how to improve the lives of the rest, the countless Americans who have been grievously hurt by this, by our response to this. How do we get 17 million of our most vulnerable citizens back to work? That's our task."

White people were out of work, and Black people were most of the casualties, outside of the extremely elderly. And those white people need their jobs back if we're going to get Trump's economy back on track in time for the upcoming election!

Brit Hume joined Tucker's show and, using his gravitas as a "real news guy," intoned, "The disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought."

Left unsaid was the issue of for whom it was "not quite as dangerous," but Limbaugh listeners and Fox viewers are anything but unsophisticated when it comes to hearing dog-whistles on behalf of white supremacy.

Only 12,677 Americans were dead by that day, but now that Trump and his rightwing media knew most of the non-elderly were Black, things were suddenly very, very different. Now it was time to quit talking about people dying and start talking about getting people back to work!

It took less than a week for Trump to get the memo, presumably through Fox and Stephen Miller.

On April 12th, he retweeted a call to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci and declared, in another tweet, that he had the sole authority to open the US back up, and that he'd be announcing a specific plan to do just that "shortly."

On April 13th, the ultra-rightwing, nearly-entirely-white-managed US Chamber of Commerce published a policy paper titled Implementing A National Return to Work Plan.

The next day, Freedomworks, the billionaire-founded and -funded group that animated the Tea Party against Obamacare a decade earlier, published an op-ed on their website calling for an "economic recovery" program including an end to the capital gains tax and a new law to "shield" businesses from lawsuits.

Three days after that, Freedomworks and the House Freedom Caucus issued a joint statement declaring that "[I]t's time to re-open the economy."

Freedomworks published their "#ReopenAmerica Rally Planning Guide" encouraging conservatives to show up "in person" at their state capitols and governor's mansions, and, for signage, to "Keep it short: 'I'm essential,' 'Let me work,' 'Let Me Feed My Family'" and to "Keep [the signs looking] homemade."

One of the first #OpenTheCountry rallies to get widespread national attention was April 19th in New Hampshire. Over the next several weeks, rallies filled with white people had metastasized across the nation, from Oregon to Arizona, Delaware, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois and elsewhere.

One that drew particularly high levels of media attention, complete with swastikas, confederate flags and assault rifles, was directed against the governor of Michigan, rising Democratic star Gretchen Whitmer.

NBC News, when they'd gotten hold of April emails from within the White House, ran the headline: "Trump Administration Scrapped Plan to Send Every American a Mask in April, Email Shows."

When Rachel Maddow reported on meat packing plants that were epicenters of mass infection, the conservative Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court pointed out that the virus flare wasn't coming from the "regular folks" of the surrounding white community; they were mostly Hispanic and Black.

The conservative meme was now well established.

Then came news that the biggest outbreaks were happening in prisons along with the meat packing plants, places with few white people (and the few whites in them were largely poor and thus disposable).

Trump's response to this was to issue an executive order using the Defense Production Act (which he had refused to use to order production of testing or PPE equipment) to order the largely Hispanic and Black workforce back into the slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

African Americans were dying in our cities, Hispanics were dying in meat packing plants, the elderly were dying in nursing homes.

But the death toll among working age white people, particularly affluent white people (who were less likely to be obese, have hypertension or struggle with diabetes), was relatively low.

And those who came through the infection were presumed to be immune to subsequent bouts, so we could issue them "COVID Passports" and give them hiring priority.

As an "expert" member of Jared Kushner's team of young, unqualified volunteers supervising the administration's PPE response to the virus noted to Vanity Fair's Katherine Eban, "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy."

It was, after all, it was exclusively Blue States that were then hit hard by the virus: Washington, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's grandson Max Kennedy Jr, 26, was one of the volunteers, and blew the whistle to Congress on Kushner and Trump. As Jane Mayer wrote for The New Yorker, "Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as 'a marketing genius,' because, Kennedy said they'd told him, 'he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.'"

At year's end, the United States was ranked 5th worst in the world in our response (behind Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Iran); we have about 20% of the world's Covid deaths, but only 4.5% of the world's population.

Why? Apparently because Trump and his Republican enablers and co-conspirators were just fine with Black people dying, particularly when they could blame it on Democratic Blue-state governors.

And once they put that strategy into place in April, it became politically impossible to back away from it, even as more and more Red State white people became infected.

Everything since then, right down to Trump's December 26th tweet ("The lockdowns in Democrat run states are absolutely ruining the lives of so many people — Far more than the damage that would be caused by the China Virus."), has been a double-down on death and destruction.

How could anybody think this was anything other than negligent homicide at best and intentional murder at worst?

Even Sweden has put together a commission to look into their government's response to the pandemic, and it's already reporting its result.

In Brazil, their Senate has compiled a 1000+ page report, detailing the mistakes and malicious actions President Bolsinaro took — very much like Trump did — that caused hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, and they're recommending he be prosecuted under Brazilian and international law.

It's astonishing that there's no major, national commission or special prosecutor looking into what happened here in the US, particularly when so much of the evidence of the Trump administration committing murder is publicly available.

If a half-million people had died — unnecessarily — under Obama as president, you know how the GOP would react.

After all, they spent millions to hold 4+ years of multiple hearings across several congressional committees over 4 American deaths in Bengazi, taking thousands of hours of testimony, including an 11-hour day from Hillary Clinton.

During the Clinton presidency Republicans gave Ken Starr and his assistant Brett Kavanaugh four years and $70 million to uncover the democracy-ending crime of Bill Clinton getting a BJ from a consenting adult. (Seriously: Newt said it endangered "the survival of the American system of justice.")

In this case, there are actual dead bodies, and a hell of a lot more than four of them.

Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer must appoint select committees in the House and Senate to investigate this crime, and Attorney General Merrick Garland must appoint a special prosecutor with a grand jury.

Americans deserve to know why their friends and relatives died such a terrible death when every other country in the world (except Brazil) took strong and effective action to limit infections and fatalities.

And if it can be proven that Trump and his buddies like Scott Atlas let all these Americans die because they thought it would help them politically, people need to go to prison.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Here's what Republicans really mean when they say they're fighting for 'parents' rights'

John Stoehr
November 03, 2021

"Parents Against Critical Theory" activist Scott Mineo appears on Fox News (screenshot) earlier in 2021

This article was paid for by Raw Story subscribers. Not a subscriber? Try us and go ad-free for $1. Prefer to give a one-time tip? Click here.

The top issue in yesterday's Virginia election was reportedly "parents' rights." I had some thoughts about that but first wanted to see arguments in favor laid out in full. My friend Bill Scher watched the governor's race for Washington Monthly. I asked if he knew of an article capturing the position. He said, "An honest one?" I guess enough said about that.

Juan Williams got ahead of me. He's a news analyst for Fox. He's also a Black conservative, which is not a white conservative who happens to be Black. In his latest for The Hill, Williams said "parents' rights" in Virginia is code for white power. "It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt."

He added:
"Unlike their earlier defense of Confederate monuments, the "Parents' Rights" campaign message at first glance looks to have zero to do with race. That puts Democrats on the defensive. They are in the uncomfortable position of calling the attention of suburban white moms to divisive racial politics being used by Republican Glenn Youngkin's campaign."

Put these together — it's a dishonest argument and it's designed to put Democrats on their heels. But that's where I think I might be able to help. Those "suburban white moms"? They're the respectable white people I spend so much time talking about. They care for their kids. They fear for their kids. No one should blame them. But they need to know there's something scarier: men talking about parents' rights. Williams is right. It's code for anti-Black. But as a conservative, a Black one, he seems rather blind to the other awful truth. It's anti-woman.

First, remember what I said Monday. There's always someone willing to make the goals of the authoritarian collective, which is what the GOP has become, seem respectable. In Virginia, that's gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. He's very good at respectability politics. Right now, he's riding an anti-Black backlash, but he's casting himself as a kind of warrior for "suburban white moms" and their kids.

He's not. What he's doing is rationalizing the thing "suburban white moms" need to fear, which is this: a long effort to restore America to its original, Godly and "constitutional" order by which white Christian men stand atop, ruling over everyone else, including their women. Indeed, the first goal of authoritarians is putting women back in their place in the natural orders of power, which means making them, once again, dependent on a man for their health, safety and good fortune.


What does this have to do with "suburban white moms"? Parents hold a special place in the natural order of things. There's God over Mankind, men over women and — right before you get to white people being over everyone else — there's parents over children. The "over" here is important to bear in mind, because whoever's "over" is the one in charge. Whoever's "under" is expected to obey. Otherwise, it's a perversion of the natural order of things, which must be punished.

In the world of the authoritarian collective, which is what the GOP has become, there's no democracy between and among the natural orders of power, because there is no such thing as political equality. None.

Efforts to reform the natural order of things, which is to say, for instance, efforts to enshrine greater rights and privileges for women on account of being created equally, are met with fierce opposition. Efforts can't be, according to the authoritarians, driven by morality, because morality isn't about doing unto others what you would have done unto you. Morality is about authority. It's about obedience. A woman asking for equality is a woman asking for punishment.

What does this have to do with public education? Public education is the greatest tool invented for flattening the natural order of things, creating space for demands for political equality, where there was no space before when morality was about obedience instead of morality. An educated girl is one who might question the authority of her father before questioning the authority of her husband. (Forget about LGBTQ rights, because in the authoritarian world, LGBTQ people do not exist.) Public education doesn't punish girls for asking for political equality, as it should. Instead, it validates, supports and drives their hunger for it.

So when Youngkin says the first thing he's going to do is use the power of the state to censor information and police thought ("I will ban critical race theory"), what he's saying is he's going to use the power of the state to restore the natural order of things — to bring Virginia back to its original, Godly and "constitutional" order by which white Christian men stood atop the hierarchy, ruling over everyone else, including their women. When he says he's gonna fight for parents' rights, the parent doesn't include moms. Just men, and their women.

This is what "suburban white moms" need to know. Whether they believe it or not is another question. No one appears to be saying what needs saying, which is that "parents' rights" isn't only code for white power. "Parents' rights" is about protecting the "rights" of men.


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.

Noted business expert explains what America is teaching us about the willful ignorance of a failed state


Umair Haque, Dc Report @Rawstory
November 02, 2021

Alabama AG vows to revive law protecting Confederate monuments after it's struck down by judge
Confederate flag supporters rally in Alabama (screenshot/Twitter)

It's a peculiar pattern of history. Like the axis around which a cycle of ruin spins. Societies — even civilizations — don't see their own collapses coming. And not seeing them coming, they can hardly take steps to avert them. They're left like deer in the headlights. And you know what happens next. If anything, curiously, societies tend to lean into their collapses.

So why don't societies see their own collapses coming? Why do they accelerate and intensify them? It's an especially relevant question, because, well, look around. Things aren't exactly going too well for our civilization. We're threatened by everything from global warming to ecological implosion to mass extinction to the pandemics and poverty and fascisms they're already breeding.

If I think about it, four reasons jump out at me. In this little essay, I'll use the examples of everyone's favorite collapsing societies, America and Britain, to illustrate them.

The first reason's simple: entrenched elites want to preserve the status quo. Think about America. The average American's life is in freefall. Every single social indicator imaginable — from longevity to trust to happiness to income — is either flatlining or plummeting. Every single one. As a result, it's not too hard to see why Americans are turning to hatred, superstition, fanaticism and other assorted forms of stupidity. They're literally losing their minds as their lives fall apart.

And yet the really curious thing is that that's been going on for decades now — and the whole while, America's ruling classes have pretended that everything's OK. Which classes are those? Well, there are the political class, the intellectual class and the capitalist class. None of these three classes can even brook the idea that America is in serious, deep trouble, which adds up to a collapsing society.

Hence, American pundits will say, on cue, every quarter, that the "economy's roaring" and that "confidence is rising" and all the other flavors of canned doublespeak they're renowned for. Meanwhile, life keeps on falling apart.

The Soviet Union's laughing in its grave, because it's seen all this before. Why do entrenched elites want to preserve the status quo? You're right to say that it preserves their power. But in a subtler way than I think is often understood. To say that a society is collapsing would be for elites to admit they mismanaged them. They'd have to admit they were badly, badly wrong — ideologically, theoretically, paradigmatically. Who wants to do that? And that, of course, would probably cost them. Fancy sinecures and "consulting" contracts and high office and all the rest of it.

So entrenched elites go on pretending nothing's wrong — even in societies like America, where social collapse has reached breathtaking proportions. Kids shoot each other in schools, people just…die…because they can't afford insulin which is profiteered on…the average American lives and dies in debt, with little to no real freedoms or choices. And elites just whistle, shrug and walk away.

I have to give a special mention to intellectual elites. America's in a funny place. It thinks of itself as having the finest thinkers in the world — and yet practically none of these fine thinkers can see that America's collapsing, much less explain why, much less offer many ideas to stave it off. Intellectual elites, too, are complicit in the game of self-preservation, perhaps most of all so — because a collapsing society means their ideologies and theories were all badly wrong, too. Just ask the Soviets.

That brings me to the next reason that societies don't foresee their own collapses. If elites want to preserve the status quo, then why don't people…do something about those elites? Because elites in collapsing societies are entrenched. That means they're dug tight into impregnable bunkers — and nobody can force them out and regain control of a society's resources and decisions.

Corruption Run Rampant

Why can't elites be forced out? How do they end up entrenched? Well, again, take a hard look at America. It has probably the most openly corrupt set of elites since the Soviet Union. In Europe, if politicians took "donations" the way American politicians do, it'd be a scandal every hour for decades. But in America, it's just business as usual. The pervasive corruption of elites is another grand theme in collapsing societies. Who cares if Rome falls — as long as you've got your villa and your servants? That seems to be the feeling among elites when it comes to American collapse, too. Corruption saps incentives for elites to do anything but aggressively pursue self-preservation in the most antisocial and corrosive ways imaginable.

And yet it's not just corruption that entrenches elites. That's necessary, but not sufficient. A deeper force is at play: the disempowerment of the demos, as in, the democratic unit that is "the people."

Think about that mouthful this way. The average American is completely disenchanted with their elites. Nobody much likes Biden or Pelosi or McConnell or any of the rest of them. But the problem is that Americans don't have the time or energy or spirit or willpower to do anything about their failed elites. The American demos has little to no power over its elites.

Why not? Because they're too busy just trying to survive. Just trying to make it through another day in America is a wearying affair. Life is an endless game of brutal competition, right down to death. Lose that job? Whoops, there goes everything, from health care to a home. So Americans, caught in the trap of capitalism, have to work every single day, to the bone, just to make ends meet. And even then, they can't. Remember, the average American dies in debt — "credit card debt," "medical debt," "mortgage debt" and so on.

Trapped in Debt

To a good economist, societies where the average person dies in debt are also societies incapable of forcing entrenched elites out — at least short of a grand revolution. That's the trap Americans are in. Elites have made sure they're indebted…to elites…so Americans, worn out, broken, defeated, having to fight each other every day, over and over again…to pay off those debts…don't have the energy or power left to dislodge those very entrenched elites.

Why don't Americans protest? At least the way, say, the French famously do? It's not just a cultural thing, though any proper Frenchman or woman is practically born waving a placard and shouting non! It's also, more to the point, a matter of political economy: the French have time and energy left over to protest, like Europe and Canada generally do. From an American point of view, those societies hardly work at all — Americans work twice as long and receive less in return. No wonder Americans are indebted — and don't have the energy left over to remove their entrenched yet failed elites from power.


If you're working 80 hours a week at some crap job — like many Americans are — what time or energy do you really have left over for serious reflection about your society? Protesting? Giving "voice," as political scientists, call it, to your discontents? Who's going to organize and coordinate and fund all that, anyway? Maybe you see the problem. America's ended up a democracy in name only, one without a demos exerting any real power over entrenched, failed elites.

Result? The grim, disheartening choice between Biden and Trump.

And yet there's an even starker, darker path to collapse. Often, there is someone who sees a society's in trouble, serious trouble, even beginning to collapse. The demagogue. The demagogue sees that a society's not doing well, that things are beginning to break and crumble and fall apart. But he or she then scapegoats the most powerless groups in society for those problems — instead of fixing them. The obvious result is that the problems afflicting a society only get worse, while people are incited to hate, and so the vicious cycle of collapse only accelerates, usually hard and fast. Societies like this lean into their collapse — baffling and bewildering those around them, usually, too.

Britain Turns on Europe

It's modern-day Britain that exemplifies this weird, sinister path to social collapse best. Britain was beset by problems after the financial crisis of the 2000s. But those problems came from a bungled bank bailout, which simply shifted costs to the public balance sheet, and led to a decade of austerity. In this vacuum, demagoguery arose — an entire generation of British leaders blamed Europe for Britain's woes. Europe had nothing — nothing whatsoever — to do with British austerity, which led to falling living standards. And yet this class of demagogues — expertly scapegoated Europe, to the point that you'd turn on the BBC, and see someone called an "economist" or "analyst," with no credentials whatsoever, just spouting folly, lies and hate…every day.

The catastrophic result was Brexit. And the consequences of Brexit, today, are as funny and absurd as they are shocking. Brits can't get food — they see cardboard cutouts of food at supermarkets. The country's running out of beer. Raw sewage is floating down waterways because the chemicals to treat it can't be found. All that stuff came from Europe. And now it doesn't come from anywhere.

Meanwhile, nobody in Britain, at least in a position of power, is allowed to say the word "Brexit." It's Voldemort, at idiot Hogwarts. Even the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, won't say the obvious, which is that Brits can't get food or fuel or, shortly, medicine, because it all used to come from Europe, and Britain is still busy picking fights with Europe, instead of trying to figure out how to supply itself with basic goods.

Meanwhile, Europe's baffled — and at this point, infuriated — with Britain. It has little appetite left to be scapegoated. Give Europe some credit — it took Britain's insults for five years, with grace and kindness, just out of friendship. Shortly, though, Europe's going to do things like stop supplying Britain with power and gas, because Britain keeps on provoking it, demonizing it, attacking it. And then the real chaos will begin.

In this form of social collapse — let's call it the Brexit Pattern — nobody sees collapse coming because they're too busy cheering it on. The demagogue's lies appeal to people because their lives really are hurting — and it's always easiest to blame it on a scapegoat. Hence, Britain became literally a "hostile" country to foreigners — as its own government puts it — and especially to Europeans.

But attacking and insulting and provoking Europeans didn't fix Britain's problems. It only created far, far bigger ones — ones that have led Britain squarely to the point of collapse. What else do you call a society where people are given…cardboard cutouts of food…raw sewage is floating down rivers…where the lights are likely going to go off in the winter…while the people who created this mess are riding higher in the polls than ever…because, still, idiotically, astonishingly, it's all someone else's fault? Britain's still so busy blaming Europe that it can't see it's collapsing because it began blaming Europe from the start.

It's hard to unpack and unpick the layers of stupidity and irony therein, so many abound.

Five Decades of Decline

America took about half a century to collapse. Incomes began stagnating in the '70s, social mobility began to stall in the '80s, living standards began to flatline in the '90s, by the end of the '00s, America's famed middle class was a minority and an underclass. That was the point at which debt, drugs and despair began to ravage (even white) America in earnest. That's a pretty standard form of social collapse — it took the Soviet Union about three decades of stagnation and falling living standards to come undone.

Britain, though, is something closer to Weimar Germany. It took Weimar Germany a decade, maybe 15 years, depending on how you count it, to really implode into Nazi Germany. Britain's much closer to that pattern, that form of collapse. Just 20 years ago, it was the envy of the world, with one of the world's highest living standards, finest healthcare system, most renowned public broadcaster. Today? All that's in tatters, precisely because Britain leaned into collapse even harder than America did.

In that respect, Britain and America teach us different lessons about how societies collapse. America teaches us that time, neglect, ignorance and poverty can slowly crumble the foundations of even the mightiest empires until they totter and fall. Britain teaches us an even darker lesson: Give a society a crisis, a demagogue and a scapegoat — and it takes just a decade or two of stupidity and anger to turn into hate and venom to the point of total and utter self-destruction.

America teaches us that small amounts of the social poisons of greed and indifference and inequality can add up to a very big collapse, in the end, given time. But Britain teaches us that societies can implode with lightning quickness, too; that even wise and gentle people like the British are not immune to the Big Lies of hate and nationalism and intolerance and unkindness, that anyone can be seduced by a demagogue offering a nation growing poorer a convenient scapegoat for its ills.

Does that get us a little closer to understanding why societies don't see their own collapses coming? Perhaps it does — you'll have to tell me. In the end, the answer may be as simple as this. Societies don't see their own collapses coming because they grow weak, blind, dull, defeated in the spirit, corroded in the heart, hubristic in the mind. They've been warned, time and again, that it can't happen here — and left too weary to fight it much, anyways. That's America's case. But that's the kind case. Even more revealing, some societies, like Nazi Germany, end up leaning aggressively into their own collapse, cheering it all on in a frenzy, attacking every scapegoat in sight, provoking newly made enemies, instead of fixing their own problems. A weird Orwellian freedom-is-slavery perversion of reality takes place. That's Britain's case right about now.

Which one, I wonder, will hit which nation next?

Umair Haque is a London-based consultant. He is director of Havas Media Lab, founder of Bubblegeneration and frequent tweeter and contributor to the online Harvard Business Review. Haque's initial training was in neuroscience. He studied at McGill University in Canada, went on to do an MBA at London Business School and is the author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business (2011).

Republicans have made it disturbingly clear: They think women are too stupid to have rights

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
November 02, 2021

Samuel Alito (screen capture)

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments over SB8, a new Texas law that set up a bounty hunter system that empowers private citizens to use lawsuits to prevent abortions. Going in, most observers expected the Republican-dominated court to be eager to uphold this law. In a twist, however, multiple conservative judges — including Donald Trump appointees, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett — seemed skeptical.

To be sure, it's not because the conservative justices care about human rights, but because they care about their own power and look askance at a law designed to evade legal review by federal courts. Now the expectation in legal circles is that the court will throw out the Texas law and open the door to banning abortion through a Mississippi case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which is a straightforward challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Most of Monday's arguments were centered around impenetrable legalese about "ex parte young" and "sovereign immunity." But through the thicket of lawyerly jargon about who has what legal power here, a picture did emerge of the actual moral and political argument Republicans are making about abortion rights. It all boils down to one very basic, insulting premise: Women are simply too stupid to be allowed rights.

Throughout arguments, Solicitor General of Texas Judd Stone and Justice Samuel Alito, both Federalist Society-linked far-right Republicans, casually spoke about women as if they were incapable of handling the choice to have an abortion. When asked about who could be suffering "extreme moral or otherwise psychological harm" over someone else's abortion, for instance, Stone invoked the tragic tale of a mansplainer who is horribly abused by a woman who decides to ignore his opinion.

An individual discovers that -- that someone -- that a close friend of theirs who they'd spoken with about -- about pro-life issues and about abortion has chosen instead to have a late-term abortion in violation of S.B. 8, and they were very invested in the -- basically, in that child's upbringing and the child's coming into being.

Oof! Can you imagine the nerve of this hypothetical woman? After someone goes to all that effort to browbeat her about how much he hates abortion, she up and decides that she is going to abort a pregnancy anyway! One can feel Stone's heart breaking for the mansplainer denied his god-given right to boss women around.

And if that diatribe weren't sexist enough, Stone had to slide in that little jab about "late-term" abortion. It's been a common talking point for GOP defenders to claim that the law gives women plenty of time to get abortions. The implication is that only dum-dums can't get it done on time, and therefore they deserve forced childbirth. But this supposed "six weeks" to decide is utter nonsense. While the media keeps calling the Texas law a "six week" ban, it is, at best, a two-week ban, as that's the length of time since the missed period indicating pregnancy.

Alito, on the other hand, decided to insult women's intelligence from another angle, portraying women as mental children who are being manipulated by sinister abortion doctors and therefore need to be protected from having choices. Alito repeatedly invoked the specter of a bird-brained woman who didn't realize until after the fact that the abortion — the one she scheduled, went through and paid for — meant she wasn't going to have a baby. He spoke of a woman who wants to sue "the doctor who performed my abortion because it caused me physical and/or emotional harm," conjured up a woman who "sues an out-of-state doctor" for "for physical or emotional harm suffered as a result of the abortion," and asked of a woman who "sues a doctor who has flown in from another state to perform the abortion."

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor gently pointed out, there are already "common law torts" that cover "emotional infliction of harm, breach of contract, medical malpractice." So if a woman was actually forced or tricked into an abortion she didn't want, she can already sue for damages. Alito, however, wasn't interested in the real world. He wanted to wallow in an elaborate sexist fantasy, where women routinely get abortions without understanding such a procedure means they won't get to have the baby. Wouldn't the mansplaining hero in Stone's tragic tale have told them?

Alito was riffing on a sexist notion that has been rampant in the anti-choice world for decades. Women are naturally too dumb to make choices, the argument goes, and therefore end up awash in regret after foolishly letting the "abortion industry" take their babies away. This myth persists despite ample evidence that the opposite is true, and that a whopping 99% of patients report, five years after the fact, that their abortion was the right choice. In fact, most women who get abortions are already mothers, so they understand intimately what the other choice already looks like.

Alito's line of argument isn't just misogynist. It's also worrisome from a legal perspective.

The last time the Supreme Court chipped away at abortion rights, in the 2007 Gonzales vs. Carhart decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy justified upholding a federal ban on an abortion procedure used to end pregnancies in the late second or early third trimester. Even though most of those abortions are done for medical reasons, as Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate at the time, "His opinion blossoms from the premise that if all women were as sensitive as he is about the fundamental awfulness of this procedure, they'd all refuse to undergo it."

Kennedy's argument wasn't just false and condescending, it also set up a legal precedent for the idea that women are too dumb to understand what abortion is and therefore need to be kept from having one for their own good. No doubt Alito was thinking of that as he kept harping on this fantasy of the woman tricked by a doctor into getting an abortion. It's looking unlikely the court will uphold the Texas law, but there's a good reason to worry that they will use the Mississippi case to end the legal right to abortion, citing the myth that women are too stupid to be trusted with rights.

CHATTEL SLAVERY AFTER 20 YRS OF WAR

CNN airs shocking footage showing old man 'buying' an 9-year-old girl in Afghanistan

Bob Brigham
November 02, 2021

"Old man" and Parwana. (CNN/Screengrabs)

CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward broadcast shocking video of a 9-year-old girl being sold by her family to an old man in Afghanistan.

"It is important to note that parents gave us full access and permission to speak to the children and show their faces because they say they cannot change the practice themselves," Ward reported.

Ward interviewed 9-year-old Parwana, whose family sold her for 200,000 Afghanis which is just over 2,000 U.S. dollars.

"My father sold me because we don't have bread, rice, and flour. He sold me to an old man," Parwana said.

Ward also interviewed a 10-year-old who threatened suicide after her family borrowed money from a 70-year-old neighbor and planned to repay the debt by selling the man their daughter.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for CHILD BRIDES 

 

UNICEF to directly fund Afghan teachers, bypassing Taliban authorities

By Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam

Posted on November 3, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Waheedullah Hashimi, Director of External Programmes and Aid at the Ministry of Education, speaks during an interview in Kabul

KABUL (Reuters) – The United Nations children’s agency said it was planning to set up a system to directly fund Afghan teachers, after the international community placed a freeze on funding to the Taliban-led administration.

“UNICEF is setting up a system that will allow direct payments to teachers without the funds being channelled through the de facto authorities,” Jeannette Vogelaar, UNICEF Afghanistan’s Chief of Education, told Reuters in an email.

In preparation, she said, UNICEF would begin registering all public school teachers.

“The best way to support the education of girls in Afghanistan is to continue supporting their schools and teachers. UNICEF is calling upon donors not to let Afghanistan’s children down,” Vogelaar added.

Afghanistan’s public services, in particular health and education, have been plunged into crisis since the Islamist Taliban movement took over the country on Aug. 15.

Many foreign governments have placed a ban on funding outside of humanitarian aid that is channelled through multilateral agencies.

That has generally been limited to urgent supplies such as wheat and blankets, leaving public service workers including teachers without pay for months. Billions of dollars in Afghan central bank funds held overseas have also been frozen.

The international community has raised alarm that the Taliban might restrict female education, and high schools for girls in many parts of the country have remained closed even while those for boys have been allowed to open.

A Taliban official told Reuters this week there would be “good news” soon on older girls being allowed to go back to school, and that they were working with UNICEF and other international organisations on the issue.

“We are working especially with UNICEF and some other international organisations … to come up with a good solution … we have meetings on a daily basis,” said Waheedullah Hashimi, Director of External Programmes and Aid at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Education.

“We have a problem that economically we are not good … that is why we are requesting the international community, international organisations, especially those who have funds for emergency situations, to help us in this regard,” he added.

(Reporting by Gibran Peshiman; Writing by Charlotte Greenfield; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Teacher's Union boss Prez schools Tom Cotton: 'Is this a new hateful homophobic slur?'

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
November 02, 2021

Tom Cotton (Fox News Screen grab)

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is under fire after attacking Randi Weingarten, the president of the nation's second-largest teachers' union, claiming she is not a mother and therefore should not have anything to do with children.

Throwing support to Republican Glenn Youngkin, the GOP nominee for governor of Virginia, Fox News' Bill Hemmer attacked Randi "Weingartener," mispronouncing the veteran labor leader's name.

Calling Weingarten a "target," Hemmer told Cotton that Democratic Virginia gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe had the American Federation of Teachers' president on stage on Monday.

"What's that tell you?" Hemmer asked.

After slamming McAuliffe, Cotton went on to attack Weingarten.

"Randi Weingarten is a joke," Cotton told the Fox News host.

"Randi Weingarten does not even have children of her own. What the hell does she know about raising and teaching kids?" Cotton asked, falsely claiming she "shut down schools for two years" because of COVID. Cotton also appeared to suggest having children in the home was too difficult.

Weingarten did not hesitate to blast the Arkansas Republican.

"Wait…Did I misread this or did Tom Cotton just say any teacher who is not also a parent shouldn't be able to teach?" she tweeted. "Really? Is he now disqualifying every nun from teaching? Or is this simply a new divisive & hateful homophobic slur against LGBTQ teachers?"

The 63-year old Democrat who is a lawyer, a former teacher, a lesbian, and married wasn't finished.

"I guess Sen Cotton hasn't done his homework and doesn't know I have step-children, grandkids & nieces and nephews. They would certainly be surprised by his comments. As would the many students I taught ( and loved) at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn," she added.

"Millions of people who raise and teach and care for America's children are not parents. Parents everywhere rely on their expertise. Parents everywhere rely on the profound commitment we all must have to other people's children, their health, well-being, and potential," Weingarten, proving her educator bona fides, continued schooling Cotton.

"We owe them- teachers who are parents, and teachers who are not parents- our thanks, not insults," Weingarten added. "Parents and educators are partners, and must work together to help our kids thrive… stop the dog whistles Tom and help us help our kids recover."

Engineer’s insurers argue they shouldn’t be on hook for millions in Surfside condo collapse

2021/11/3
© Miami Herald

Rescue workers continue to look through rubble for survivors at the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South Condo building in Surfside, Florida, on July 3, 2021. - Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald/TNS

MIAMI — Soon after the deadly collapse of a Surfside condo tower, dozens of victims and their relatives started filing lawsuits accusing the building’s condo association and its engineering consultant of causing the tragedy because they failed to keep the oceanfront structure safe.

Now two major insurance companies are using that same argument to deny huge coverage claims by Morabito Consultants, which was hired by the Champlain Towers South condo association to inspect the 12-story building and come up with a structural renovation plan long before it partially fell down in June.

To support their refusal to provide potentially tens of millions of dollars in coverage, the two insurers have sued Morabito and cited allegations in lawsuits filed by the very people hoping to collect on that insurance. The insurers’ suits argue the Champlain tower deaths and property losses were caused by the consulting firm’s “negligence,” including “acts or omissions in connection” with providing “professional engineering services.”

In response, Morabito Consultants have sued National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford and Continental Casualty Company, claiming that they did provide professional services, completed a 2018 structural safety report and produced a restoration plan that was just getting under way before the Champlain tower partially collapsed.

With limited funds to divide among the 98 people who died and the 136 owners who lost their units, the escalating dispute over the consultant’s insurance coverage could make a substantial difference in how much money the victims of Champlain Towers South can collect in damages from the June building collapse.

Both the victims and their lawyers involved in individual and class-action cases are closely following the legal battle between Morabito Consultants and its insurers, National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford and Continental Casualty Company. Both insurers have not only rejected Morabito’s insurance claims but also those of the Champlain Towers South condo association, which was covered under the engineering firm’s policy too.

The two insurers’ refusal to honor their policies with the Champlain condo association under Morabito’s coverage stands in stark contrast to several other insurance companies that have already agreed to pay in full the association’s property damage and personal injury claims, totaling about $50 million.

A spokesman for Morabito Consultants, Brett Marcy, blasted the two insurers for denying the claims. The engineering company “believes all relevant and necessary parties should be included in any litigation related to insurance coverage,” he said. “That includes the condo association and those parties representing the victims.”

The leaders of a team of lawyers in the Champlain class-action case, though adversaries of Morabito and the condo association, agreed with that approach.

“Insurance proceeds are critical to compensate the victims of this tragedy,” said Miami attorneys Harley Tropin and Rachel Furst, who are among the team of lawyers heading the class-action case against the Champlain condo association. “The insurance companies that insured those that played a role in causing the collapse have an obligation to honor their commitment and to provide coverage.”

Miami attorney Stephen Binhak, who represents developers with condo- and construction-related matters but is not involved in the Champlain cases, said that while the collapse of the Surfside high-rise is an extraordinary situation, the legal fight between the tower’s engineering consultant and its insurers is commonplace. Sharp differences arise not only over insurance coverage and “exclusion” provisions, but also over the amount of the payouts based on liability, caps on damages and other factors — including the number of accidents. In the Surfside case, for example, the building partially collapsed on the night of June 24 and the remaining structure was later demolished for safety reasons.

“Litigation over insurance coverage and claims is normal — you see it all the time,” Binhak said. ”Initially, there is the question of whether a policy covers a claim. If so, there is the question of how much insurance is ultimately available. Larger claims increase the chances of a lawsuit — especially when the damage may exceed the policy limits.

“After the World Trade Center collapse in 2001, with billions of dollars of insurance on the line, there was a lawsuit to determine whether the attack on the towers was a single ‘occurrence’ or two separate ‘occurrences’ for the purposes of insurance coverage,” Binhak he said. “Even with that level of insurance in place, the federal government stepped in to make funds available to compensate victims,” referring to the massive litigation that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin north and south World Trade Center towers.

Morabito, a Maryland-based firm, was hired in 2018 by the Champlain Towers South condo association to provide a structural safety inspection and renovation plan for the 40-year “recertification” of the 8777 Collins Ave. property. Morabito found “major structural damage” to a concrete slab in the pool area and “abundant” deterioration of garage columns supporting the condo tower, but the association did not move forward on Morabito’s restoration plan until just before the building partially collapsed.

In the aftermath, Morabito Consultants was sued by its two insurance companies, National Fire Insurance Company of Hartford and Continental Casualty Company. The companies, known together as CNA, have denied Morabito’s insurance claims and also refused to defend the engineering consultant against 19 individual lawsuits brought by Champlain Towers South condo owners. Morabito is also expected to be sued in the ongoing class-action case representing most of the victims in the condo collapse.

In their lawsuit, the two insurance companies claim that the liability coverage provided under Morabito’s policy does not apply to bodily injury or property damage “caused by the rendering or failure to render any professional service.” CNA says the coverage, dealing only with Morabito’s engineering services, is excluded from its “primary” and “umbrella” insurance policies between 2017 and 2021. Also, the insurers denied coverage to the Champlain condo association, which was added to Morabito’s policies in recent years.

CNA’s lawyers, who filed the firm’s suit in Maryland federal court, did not return phone and email messages for comment.

Morabito Consultants fired back, filing a motion to dismiss CNA’s federal suit. The consulting firm’s lawyers argue among other things that the coverage matter belongs in the Miami-Dade Circuit Court where all of the parties affected by the Champlain tower collapse are fighting over liability and damage issues.

In fact, the engineering firm filed a lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court against its two insurance carriers as well as the Champlain condo association and the building’s individual owners who sued them. The reason: They all have an interest in Morabito’s coverage with CNA.

Morabito’s lawyers assert the insurance companies have no legal basis for denying the consulting firm’s claims for property losses and deaths in the condo collapse. They argue the firm’s engineers performed their “professional services” for the Champlain condo association and that its insurance coverage must be interpreted broadly not narrowly.

“CNA has ignored settled law governing the interpretation of insurance policies and the duty to defend and has wrongfully refused to defend Morabito against the [condo owners’] lawsuits,” Morabito’s suit says.

“Moreover, any allegations that could be construed to assert a failure to perform inspection or engineering services are contradicted by allegations that acknowledge Morabito properly performed inspection and engineering services and identified and reported serious structural issues to the [condo] association,” the suit says.

The Champlain condo building, completed in 1981, was facing a formal structural, mechanical and electrical review, as required under Miami-Dade’s building code nearly 40 years later. Morabito Consultants was hired by the condo board in 2018 and produced a nine-page inspection report, which was an initial summary of its structural findings. The estimated initial cost of repairs was heavy — $9 million — a price tag that caused dissension among board members and rose significantly to $15 million as the association delayed the repairs for almost three years. Morabito was also retained to prepare and oversee the restoration plan, which got under way starting with the replacement of the Champlain tower’s roof just before the collapse in June.

Although Morabito’s initial report did not raise an obvious red flag that the building was “unsafe” or at risk of falling down, the firm did urge Champlain’s condo board to replace and repair the deteriorating structural areas in the pool and garage areas in a “timely fashion” because the concrete problems could “expand exponentially.”

Under Miami-Dade County’s building code, “a building, or part thereof, shall be presumed to be unsafe if ... there is a deterioration of the structure or structural parts.” The ordinance further states that “the [local] Building Official, on his own initiative or as a result of reports by others, shall examine or cause to be examined every building or structure appearing or reported to be unsafe.”

But after Surfside’s building official was sent Morabito’s engineering report by a Champlain condo association member, the official met with the board after reviewing the document and assured members that “it appears the building is in very good shape,” according to minutes of a Nov. 15, 2018, board meeting.

Several structural engineers, after evaluating public records, condo plans and video footage of the collapse, told the Herald that they suspect the Surfside tower began to fall after the pool deck caved into the parking garage, which in turn undermined the structural integrity of the tower and triggered the collapse of the middle and oceanfront sections of the building. However, the exact cause of the collapse, under investigation by local and federal authorities, is still not known.

In the months after the tragedy, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman has tried to steer the litigation in the direction of recovering and raising as much money as possible to compensate the hundreds of victims — including condo owners and those who died. So far, with the help of receiver Michael Goldberg, who has taken over the Champlain condo association’s role, the judge has managed to recover $30 million in property coverage and $19 million in personal injury coverage from the association’s various insurance carriers — all of whom immediately agreed to honor their maximum policy coverage, unlike CNA, which refuses to pay out anything.

In addition, the now-vacant, nearly two-acre Surfside property fetched an initial bid from a private developer of $120 million. Higher bids could be offered for the lot, where there are plans for a luxury condo high-rise.

But dividing up those funds has been difficult because of the tragic ordeal. Hanzman assigned a mediator to figure out how to compensate both the Champlain condo owners and those who died in the collapse. But the mediator, lawyer Bruce Greer, said he has been unable to bridge the gap, with some condo owners saying they should receive all the money and the families of deceased residents saying all the funds should go to them.

Whatever money might be recovered from third parties, such as Morabito’s insurance carrier, CNA, would be added to the total pot of compensation.

“There is a heavy divide between the two sides,” said Martin Langesfeld, whose sister, Nicole, and her husband, Luis Sadovnic, died in a Champlain condo unit owned by Langesfeld’s grandparents. “They think we deserve nothing when we think we deserve everything.”

E

xcavators are seen working in the rubble of the Champlain Towers South collapse, one day after a shift from search-and-rescue to recovery in Surfside, Florida, on July 8, 2021. - Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/TNS

Progressives on Virginia loss: Corporate Democrats have only themselves to blame

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams
November 03, 2021

Governor Terry McAuliffe [Facebook]

After Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe—a conservative whose campaign was flush with billionaire cash—fell to Republican private equity mogul Glenn Youngkin in Virginia's closely watched gubernatorial race on Tuesday, establishment Democrats wasted no time pinning the blame on progressives.

The finger-pointing started days before the polls opened in Virginia, a state that has trended blue in recent years and that President Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points in 2020.

"Did progressives literally have a press conference yesterday for the sole purpose of declaring that a deal was not close? No, that was Joe Manchin."

Several conservative Democrats, including Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, suggested leading up to the contest that progressive lawmakers' refusal to allow a bipartisan infrastructure bill to pass the House without simultaneous approval of a broader reconciliation package could be at least partially to blame for a McAuliffe loss.

"I've got to tell you, in Virginia, where we've got a gubernatorial race tomorrow, that would have really helped Terry McAuliffe a lot if we had been able to notch that win," Warner—who, like McAuliffe, previously served as Virginia's governor—said in an appearance on MSNBC, referencing Democrats' inability to secure an infrastructure vote last week amid progressive opposition.

Warner expressed the same sentiment on Fox News hours before the Virginia results were reported. "I think it would have helped Terry McAuliffe in Virginia," the senator said of a vote on the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Tester, for his part, said of his progressive colleagues: "We haven't gotten anything done. That says enough about their strategy."

The blame game resumed almost immediately following McAuliffe's narrow defeat to Youngkin, a millionaire backed by former President Donald Trump and now the first Republican to win statewide office in Virginia since 2009. Politico reporter Heather Caygle tweeted after the race was called that Democratic members of Congress "are already texting me blaming progressives for [the] 'debacle' in Virginia."

Progressives were quick to push back on that narrative, characterizing it as baseless and self-serving on the part of a Democratic establishment that threw its weight behind McAuliffe—the former chair of the Democratic National Committee—in the Virginia gubernatorial primary earlier this year.

Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible, noted that "progressives have been earnestly working to deliver on Biden's full agenda. It's conservative Dems who've ensured that every day for the last several months, the headlines are about how we aren't delivering paid leave, prescription drug reform, elder care, or voting rights."

"Did progressives literally have a press conference yesterday for the sole purpose of declaring that a deal was not close? No, that was Joe Manchin," Greenberg continued. "Progressives were busy trying to pass Biden's agenda. As far as I'm aware, progressives also did not choose McAuliffe over a new generation of rising Black women leaders, nor did they run his campaign and choose his messaging, nor did they write his debate lines."

"I don't want to play the blame game. I'd rather be focusing on what to do next (hint: pass Biden's agenda)," Greenberg added. "But folks have been working overtime to seed this narrative before the election was even over and it's important that we be clear: it's a ridiculous red herring."

Other prominent progressives also weighed in.

Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), tweeted that "maybe, just maybe, the 'debacle' in Virginia could have been avoided if we had a Congress that listened to the overwhelming majority of Americans and passed progressive policies like paid family leave and expanding Medicare instead of bowing down to wealthy campaign contributors."

Charles Idelson of National Nurses United lamented that "any time a Democrat loses, the party establishment, with the help of the corporate media, always blames progressives, no matter how weak or 'centrist' the losing candidate is, and no matter how much the Dem conservatives block reforms that would help the vast majority of people."

Writing for The Daily Beast late Tuesday, Democratic strategist Max Burns observed that Youngkin's campaign "centered around the bogeyman of 'Critical Race Theory,'" not the lack of a timely vote on a bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump and other Republicans have trashed.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, made a similar point earlier this week. "I've watched all the attack ads on Terry McAuliffe and not a single one has talked about [infrastructure] not passing," she said Monday. "They've all been about other things."

In his Daily Beast column, Burns argued that "the worst thing that could possibly happen... is for the party's conservatives to read McAuliffe's loss as a sign that Americans are turned off by the Democratic agenda."

Alluding to fears that the Virginia race is a harbinger for Democratic performance in the 2022 midterm elections, Burns wrote that "there's one simple trick to averting a Democratic bloodbath next year: Do what voters say they want."

"A Vox/Data for Progress poll conducted last month found 71% of voters support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and six-in-ten support Biden's signature spending plan at the full $3.5 trillion. These aren't mere 'suggestion' numbers—they're supermajorities. Democrats ignore those clearly stated wishes at their own electoral peril."

LAPD forced to protect comic book artists after anti-LGBTQ fans freak over bisexual Superman: report

David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
November 02, 2021

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

It's just a comic book but for some it's yet another entry into a changing world they just cannot handle.

On National Coming Out Day last month DC Comics announced Superman is a proud member of the LGBTQ community. In the latest storyline, Superman's son Jonathan, who is taking over for dear old dad, comes out as bisexual, and will share a kiss with his friend/boyfriend Jay Nakamura.

DC Comics recently was forced to ask the Los Angeles Police Dept. to provide protection to some of its artists and the studio itself after it reported threats LAPD deemed "credible." There is no indication of what those threats actually were or who made them.

"LAPD officers were recently dispatched to patrol the homes of some of the illustrators/production staffers who created the latest iteration of Superman. The extra protection comes after major backlash that included some so-called fans making threats," TMZ reports. "We're told the pissed-off comic book readers inundated the studios to voice their displeasure with the character's newly-announced sexuality."

One angry and apparently flustered Arizona Republican state Senator, Wendy Rogers, was so triggered she tweeted, “Superman loves Lois Lane. Period. Hollywood is trying to make Superman gay and he is not."

She further embarrassed herself by using a bigoted and homophobic lisp “joke," saying, “Just rename the whole version Thooperman."

Image by Chris Yarzab via Flickr and a CC license