The Constitution is important. Full stop. It does many things, chief among them being defining and protecting the rights of people in the United States. So, what happens when America elects an executive that doesn’t fairly apply the constitution because he either doesn’t understand it or doesn’t respect it (the jury’s still out on which is worse)? The American Civil Liberties Union starts getting busy.

The inauguration of Donald Trump in 2016 was a watershed moment for civil liberties in the United States. Since the Warren Court, our constitution has been interpreted in a way that has made speech more free and rights more universal. Tinker v. Des Moines paved the way for student speech, Brandenburg v. Ohio protected inflammatory speech that doesn’t incite violence, Roe v. Wade extended a woman’s right to privacy to reproductive healthcare. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have encountered rulings they’ve disagreed with, but for the most part with some notable exceptions (Bush activities after the Patriot Act) they’ve accepted the norms that make our democracy work. Whenever a President did try to skirt the constitution and curb our civil liberties they at least made noises about “national security”. But there has perhaps never been a President so willing to abandon dog-whistle rhetoric and explicitly state his intentions to undermine our constitution.

“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”

“Nobody wants to say this, and nobody wants to shut down religious institutions or anything, but you know, you understand it. A lot of people understand it. We’re going to have no choice.”

“We’re going to open up those libel laws, so when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace … we can sue them and win money”

“I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.”

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came.”

“We’re rounding them up in a very human way, a very nice way.”

“Regardless of recommendation, I was going to fire Comey.”

President Trump’s public statements rival those of Richard Nixon who famously declared “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But the institutions of 2018 seem to lack the intestinal fortitude of the institutions of 1974. Even with the intervention of a few state attorneys general and the 9th circuit court of appeals, we appear to be witnessing a rapid erosion of constitutional norms that has been exacerbated by recently emboldened state governments. That’s why there’s a necessity for non-profits that exist independent from government, enter the ACLU.

We asked the Executive Directive of the ACLU of Missouri, Jeffrey Mittman, how he views the role of his organization and he said, “Our job is to be a check on the government, we are the only organization whose absolute responsibility is to protect every American, every Missourian against government overreach, against violation of constitutional civil rights.” When Mittman says every American, he really does mean every American and it has not been without controversy.

Last year, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the city of Cape Girardeau on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan because the city considered it a crime for that group to leave handbills on windshields. For many people, it’s head scratching that the same group that has been integral in the expansion of minority rights should also defend a hate group that is diametrically opposed to those rights. Mittman told us “We will defend any right as strongly as any other, so we have to defend free speech rights, but we also have to defend the right to racial equality to ends of restrictions on racial … restrictions on voting, to school the prison work, the unfair treatment of African American students…When hate crimes laws came up that said…if you say something bad, or think something bad, or write something bad, we will punish that. The ACLU said, “Wait, nope.” We can’t punish speech, we can’t punish thought. Our friends in the LGBT community, and the African American, and minority racial communities were not happy, but understood. What we said is if you commit a crime, and in the commission of that crime you say you are doing it because of that person’s race, or religion, or sexual orientation, we can as a community say, because of that history of discrimination there will be an extra penalty because of that. But to simply punish thought, or speech, or writings is not permissible.”

The ACLU is perhaps the most consistent advocacy organization in America, and it’s operated under its mission statement “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” essentially without fail for nearly 100 years. It’s put them at odds with a number of Presidential administrations, but maybe none more than the Trump administration whose policy directives continue to challenge the limits of the constitution. Mittman detailed to us the work that’s been done on behalf of DACA students, Muslims that have been targeted due to the travel ban, and transgender soldiers whose ability to serve is in jeopardy to name a few. But listening to Mittman, who has been in Missouri since 2014, it’s clear that maybe the nature of his work hasn’t changed but rather the public has become more aware of problems that have existed longer than we’d like to admit.

Mittman went on at some length about racial disparities in this state, especially as they relate to education and law enforcement. There’s a “school to prison pipeline” which is essentially the disproportionate way minority students eventually become incarcerated adults that is likely related to school disciplinary policies. Mittman talked about a specific case that’s emblematic of similar experiences around the country. “In 2015 that Missouri had the highest differential between rates of discipline of white students and black students in elementary school. We represented a young, seven-year-old boy who was handcuffed. Less than four feet tall, weighed less than 50 pounds, was crying his classroom, was handcuffed, was taken to the principal’s office and left in handcuffs in the principal’s office. So, we’re working on the issue of police and schools.”

The ACLU is in the middle of a multi-year program to address this, and Mittman says the struggle is “How do we say that under third grade you should never have an out of school suspension?” he continued, “It’s just not necessary, these are young people, these are students, these are children. These are not criminals. These are not people who need to be dealt with by police officers.” Currently the ACLU is starting with five school districts in a partnership to help them look at their policies and “help them educate themselves, help them look at implicit bias training for schools, for teachers. Whatever it takes to lower those differentials.”

Now back to the President, who not only dominates media conversation but a significant portion of the National ACLU’s casework. We asked Mittman, who knows quite a bit about constitutional law, if the President can pardon himself. It seems more relevant now as the Mueller probe has progressed and many of his associates have been indicted including his former campaign manager and national security advisor. Mittman had an interesting answer “My own fundamental belief, and I think it’s fairly what ACLU would say, is going back to our earlier question, we are a system of laws not men. So, the fundamental principal will be the Constitution applies to all of us. The president is not above the law. So, if we agree on that starting point, I would hope and trust that any opinion, whether a trial court, whether the Supreme Court, would strongly ascribe to that idea that the president is not above the law.”

The ACLU is doing something that every citizen should be doing, and that’s ensuring the continued existence of liberal democracy. Whatever freedoms we have and rights we acknowledge only exist because they were fought for. The ACLU has done much of the heavy lifting in shaping how we view free speech, and it’s been a net positive for our country. Mittman said of his organization, “What people don’t know is before the 1920s, nobody would’ve said first amendment. There was a first amendment to the constitution, but it hadn’t been enforced. ACLU started around the time of World War I. Wilson was having people jailed for opposing the war. ACLU said wait a second, we have free speech right. We went to court, and now we’ve built a body of law. We’re that follow-through on what the federalists said. We’re the follow-through on the constitution…the challenges in Missouri are going to be different than the challenges of New Hampshire … [but] we know what goes on here, we are part of what goes on here, and we have the expertise in national to make it happen. They listen to us, we listen to them.”

The constitution is not a partisan issue, it’s literally above politics. It’s patriotic to support the constitution, it’s sycophantic to make excuses for its degradation. As Americans, now is the time to come together and make it known that we believe that government has to work for the people and do that work within the bounds of the people’s document.

The post While Rome burns, the ACLU rebuilds appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Prison reform and prison labor are topics we’ve written about before on the Occasional Planet. American prisons are making tons of money hiring out their inmates for minuscule wages. It’s more than just breaking rocks and stamping license plates too. Companies like Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and even Boening use inmates to sew, run phone centers, assemble missiles, and other manufacturing jobs instead of paying full wages to other Americans. But that’s not all. Private prisons make millions of dollars for filling beds and hosting a large number of occupants. When you start doing the math, it makes you wonder if our legal system is more interested in filling quotas than reforming people who break the law.

The post Prison profits appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The criminal justice system is, by the admission of many liberal politicians, in desperate need of change. Prisons are overcrowded as a result of mass incarceration; minimum sentencing policies can put people behind bars for years over a small mistake; and the racialized enforcement of laws has led to contemptible disparities in the way people of different backgrounds are treated.

And while those are critical concerns, there’s one really important issue we’re not talking about: clemency.

Clemency is a public official’s ability to pardon or moderate a prisoner’s punishment; it is wielded either by the governor (for state offenses) or the president (for federal offenses) and can either reduce, end, or forgive a criminal sentence. Legal scholars widely consider clemency to be an important check on the judicial system, as it corrects mistakes made in the conviction process, can assert a prisoner’s innocence, allows for the retroactive application of policies which remedy previous unjust or too harsh laws, and can amend flaws in the sentencing process when prisoners receive punishments disproportionate to the offense.

As a result of the politicization of clemency proceedings and the ever-popular “tough on crime” stance, however, the use of the gubernatorial clemency power– especially in the state of Missouri under Jay Nixon– is becoming less and less frequent. Essentially, governors are now overly worried about the fallout that could result if any one of the inmates for whom they elect to use their clemency power recidivate, and the press uses the opportunity to drag the governor’s name through the mud with accusations that the pardon allowed said person to commit their crime.

As a result, governors hesitate to use their powers of clemency, particularly during times of political difficulty for them or if they’re in the midst of a re-election campaign. That means that more and more appeals for justice– frequently from people who have exhausted their appeals process, may not have adequate legal representation. Or, legal pleas from people who were convicted as a result of policies or stigmas that have changed drastically today such that their trial result would likely differ if retried– go unread and unanswered.

Consider this: Jay Nixon has granted clemency only some 15 times during his two terms (2008-2016) while Pat Quinn of  Illinois granted over 1,752 clemency pardons while in office from 2009-2015. Quinn also denied 2,000 clemency requests, which is important to note because that means he read and responded to over 3,700 clemency requests… versus the MO inmates languishing in limbo because they haven’t received any word on their petitions.

I’ve personally had the opportunity to interact directly with this uncompromising, senseless brick wall through my time interning with The WILLOW Project. WILLOW is a nonprofit organization that provides pro bono legal services to women who are currently wrongfully incarcerated for crimes that arose from family and domestic violence. At this moment, the organization represents three women– Angel Stewart, Amelia Bird, and Amanda Busse— in line with its mission to improve the lives of society’s “forgotten women” who are denied full access to the “justice system as a result of poverty, oppression, exploitation, and other injustices.”

Just take a brief look at these women’s stories to understand the injustices dealt to them:

• Angel Charlene Stewart was 19 when she was kidnapped and physically, sexually, and mentally terrorized by two men in Iowa. Her kidnappers also kidnapped and murdered two elderly women— one in Iowa, one in Missouri— and took her along on their crime spree while also holding her one year old son hostage. When police found them, they regarded her solely as a victim, but later charged her alongside her captors. Threatened with the death penalty, she eventually pled guilty to kidnapping and received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. A survivor of a lifetime of physical and sexual abuse, she is functionally illiterate with severe learning issues and limited reasoning ability: Angel Stewart did not have the mental capacity to voluntarily make such a life-altering choice or to even read/comprehend her plea agreement.

• After a lifetime of physical and sexual abuse, 16 year old Amelia Bird was charged with crimes for which she had little to no responsibility; she had complained to her then ex-boyfriend about the abuse she suffered, and he then broke into her house and shot both of her parents to try to win her affection. The prosecution in this case was overzealous, as she was overcharged for her limited role in complaining about ongoing abuse in her household. Charged alongside the ex-boyfriend, and threatened with the death penalty, Amelia was pressured to take a plea to second-degree murder and first-degree assault, receiving two consecutive life sentences.

• A victim of physical and sexual violence throughout her life at the hands of her father and “husband” to whom her father sold her, Amanda Busse was wrongfully implicated and convicted of a crime she did not commit. Since her arrest in 2003, she has maintained her innocence and continuously denies being at the scene of the crime. Amanda Busse is factually innocent; she did not commit the crime for which she is charged, was not present when it was committed, and was never implicated except in a retaliatory move almost seven year later by her brother who also was not present during the commission of the crime and who has since recanted several times. Furthermore, her defense at trial was a mere three minutes, insufficient time to mount a meaningful defense when a woman’s life hung in the balance.

Anne Geraghty-Rathert, the Executive Director of The WILLOW Project, explains:

People fall through the cracks. And not only in going to prison, but in the larger sense; society fails people. Our clients have fallen through the cracks every step of the way. The education system has failed them, their families have failed them, neighbors have failed them– it’s incredible the things that our clients have suffered. And so, of course, they ended up incarcerated. It almost seems like prison is the inevitability in a system that doesn’t look out for people…

[And] the ways in which violence permeated and destroyed their [our clients’] lives are unfortunately far more broad and universal than we like to think. WILLOW could easily have a thousand clients. We only have three, but you need to know that The WILLOW Project is standing for even more than just Amanda, Amelia, and Angel and their cases. It stands for all the people– and particularly women– who suffer incredible amounts of violence throughout their lives and are disregarded by everyone– ignored, disbelieved, chastened, treated badly, embarrassed, humiliated, victimized. And they deserve justice.”

Why talk about clemency now?

Because with gubernatorial elections coming up, now is a critical time for WILLOW and others seeking clemency. Nixon has significantly fewer political pressures on him now that he’s leaving office, and it gives him the opportunity for more free reign on his decisions without fear of the publicity consequences. And that means that now is a critical time to apply pressure in an appeal to Nixon’s morality and humanity to respond to– and ideally grant– Angel’s, Amelia’s, and Amanda’s clemency petitions, among the thousands of other petitions currently unanswered. So, if these women’s stories moved you to action, please write a letter to Governor Nixon imploring him to review their cases.

The proximity of gubernatorial elections is also critical in that if Nixon does not exercise his clemency power before leaving office, I would hope that those petitions wouldn’t fall on deaf ears with the next governor. In fact, a lot of my voting decisions August 2 were colored by questions about whether, as an elected official, the candidate would contribute to or further hinder clemency petitioners’ quests for justice. And I encourage you, when election time comes, to also consider the importance of clemency power when you cast your ballot in November.

So please, the next time you’re watching a campaign ad or considering your ballot, think about this. Remember that “tough on crime” rhetoric is dangerous because it frequently undercuts presumptions of innocence in court by pushing prosecutors and state officials to try for convictions rather than justice. Remember that when a campaign ad brags that a candidate has “put away X number of criminals” that that candidate is the one who defined them as criminals and if convictions, not justice, was their goal, then the truth may not coincide with such an assessment. Remember that not every person in prison received justice because too many people are innocent, too many people did not have fair trials, and too many people received overly harsh sentences. Remember that people who are incarcerated are still people and every bit as worthy of compassion, empathy, and dignity.

The post A critical time for clemency in Missouri appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In 1865, the 13^th amendment abolished slavery, but there was a loophole. Prisoners were exempt. Since the passage of the amendment, prisons and businesses have been forcing inmates to work for slave wages, or sometimes no wages.

Capital thrives on squeezing as much profit and productivity as possible out of workers. In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy for maximizing profit.

In an article at U.S. Uncut, Kelly Davidson reports that corporations, in partnership with the United States government, are forcing prisoners to work for wages as low as .25 and $1.15 per hour. It’s called “insourcing.” If you are a CEO or a stockholder in one of these companies it’s great! You get your products made by prison slaves for practically nothing, or you get your products made in third world countries for practically nothing—either way, you reap the profits.

Which companies make use of prison labor?

I’ve annotated Davidson’s list:

Lets start with Whole Foods. This high-end grocery chain purchases artisan cheese and fish prepared by prison inmates who work for private companies. The inmates are paid .74 cents a day to raise tilapia that Whole Paycheck sells for $11.99 a pound.

Then we have McDonald’s. It buys tons of prison-manufactured items including plastic cutlery, food containers, and uniforms. As Davidson notes, the inmates who sew the uniforms make even less money per hour than the people who wear them.

And, of course, there’s Wal-Mart. The official company policy is: “no forced or prison labor will be tolerated.” But Wal-Mart gets around this by buying from independent prison labor factories. Same thing Whole Foods is doing. According to Davidson: “Wal-Mart purchases its produce from prison farms where laborers are often subjected to long, arduous hours in the blazing heat without adequate sunscreen, water, or food.”

If you like sexy lingerie, you may enjoy buying from Victoria’s Secret. Know that female inmates in South Carolina, forced to work for slave wages, make a lot of the company’s garments, as well as J.C. Penny’s women’s underwear.

In 1993, AT&T laid off thousands of union telephone operators in a move to smash unions and increase profits. It has a prison labor policy similar to Wal-Mart’s. Yet, since 1993, AT&T has used inmates, managed by third party companies, to work their call centers, paying them $2 a day.

It turns out BP used African-American inmates to clean up the 4.2 million barrels of oil it spilled into the Gulf coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster. The right thing was for BP to hire Coastal residents whose livelihoods it had just destroyed, but the company opted for cheap prison labor. Then its PR department put out ads touting the company’s dedication to the Gulf and the people who live there.

Davidson sums up:

From dentures to shower curtains to pill bottles, almost everything you can imagine is being made in American prisons. Also implicit in the past and present use of prison labor are Microsoft, Nike, Nintendo, Honda, Pfizer, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, Starbucks, and more.

The “more” includes, among others, Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, Motorola, Compaq, IBM, Boeing, Texas Instrument, Revlon, Macy’s, Target Stores, Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Honeywell, Pierre Cardin, 3com, and Lucent Technologies.

The Prison-Industrial-Complex and UNICOR

Davidson fingers the U.S. government as the guilty party in this modern day reincarnation of slavery. UNICOR, a corporation created in 1934 and owned by the federal government, oversees penal labor, and sets the condition and wage standards for working inmates.  UNICOR’s official line is that in exchange for their slave labor, prisoners are given “vocational training.” Yet the workplace conditions are often appalling, and the transfer of skills to the private sector is dubious.

For example, at one UNICOR operation at a California prison, inmates “de-manufactured” computer cathode-type monitors. According to industry safety practices, a mechanical crushing machine is supposed to be used to minimize danger from flying glass, with an isolated air system to avoid releasing lead, and other toxic substances into the workplace atmosphere. At the UNICOR facility, prisoners were required to smash CRTs with hammers without any protection.

The United States of Incarceration

We have a huge per capita prison population—the second highest in the world. Although we have only 5 percent of the world’s population, we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Racism, drug laws, mandatory sentencing, and of course, privatization of prisons all play a part. The partnership of the U.S. government with big business allows prisoners to be used as slave labor, another great incentive for filling prisons. Prison overcrowding is common. Instead of helping and rehabilitating people, we use them for profit—another grotesque feature of a capitalist system fixated on making money over everything else.

I’m afraid the answer is not prison reform, because that simply won’t happen in our current political and economic environment. Also, the use of prisoners for profit has been going on for 150 years. Instead, we have to examine and question the overriding system that created prison slave labor in the first place. We have to break the taboo on talking about capitalism. We have to question capitalism’s ruthless, limited way of thinking, and its distorted, often inhumane values. We have to step back and ask ourselves: Is this how we want to treat people? Is this really how we want to live? Is capitalism a system that works for most Americans, or most inhabitants of the Earth, or just a lucky few? How can we transition to a better, more humane system, a new democratic socialism for the 21^st century?

Michael Liebowitz writes about the nature of capitalism in his book The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development:

. . .no one could say that capitalism is a good society. Capitalism is certainly not oriented toward solidarity, respect, social responsibility, or caring: it is not about creating the conditions for protagonism in the workplace and society—that necessary way by which people can achieve “their complete development, both individual and collective.” On the contrary, capitalism is not about human development at all.

The logic of capital generates a society in which all human values are subordinated to the search for profits. . . .Rather than building a cohesive and caring society, capital tears society apart. It divides workers and pits them against one another as competitors to reduce any challenge to its rule and its bottom line. Precisely because human beings and nature are mere means to capital’s goal, it destroys what Marx called the original sources of wealth—human beings and nature.

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It’s absolutely true that Mitch McConnell and the Republicans obstructed every Democratic initiative. On the other hand, Democrats didn’t give people a reason to go to the polls. Why should Democrats bother to vote when its clear their party chooses the needs of banks and corporations over the needs of its constituents?

Whatever you think of Ralph Nader, he made a lot of sense when he spoke with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about Democratic losses in the midterm elections. He says there are plenty of excuses being made like being outspent by Republicans, and Republican obstructionism, but they don’t hold water.

The Democrats raised huge amounts of money this time around, and in 2012 . . . plenty of money to win. [But] . . . they didn’t get their own voters out, because although they finally came around to the only issue that Politico said is getting traction for the Democrats—raising the minimum wage for 30 million people, who are paid less now than workers in 1968 adjusted for inflation, 30 million people and their families, a lot of voters—they didn’t make it a big enough issue. . .

We got a president who spent almost two weeks in salons, from New York and Maine and San Francisco and Los Angeles, raising money for the Democrats, not barnstorming the country on an issue that has . . .80 percent support. . . .So, . . .they didn’t have a policy. They didn’t have an agenda. They didn’t have the message. They had tons of money to put on insipid television ads that didn’t move the needle. . .

In other words, people back home are not given enough reason to vote for the Democrats. But they’re given plenty of emotional reason to vote for the Republicans because of all the social issues—the school prayer, the reproductive rights, the gun control. The Democrats have dropped the economic issue that won election after election for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. They can no longer defend our country against the most militaristic, corporatist, cruel, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environment, anti-women, even anti-children party—the Republican Party.

A lot of soul searching is needed, and we shouldn’t let Citizens United and voting restriction laws . . . be used as alibis by the Democrats in Congress.

“Soul searching,” of course, means actually adopting a progressive agenda—one that serves the majority of Americans. And that means being willing to give up the corporate gravy train—the big campaign contributions, and the lucrative jobs upon leaving office. Most (although not all) Democrats are hooked into this money/power revolving door, so I don’t expect the money influence in the party to change, on its own, any time soon.

But there is some good news coming out of the midterms. The Republican “sweep” of Congress in no way represents the underlying mood of the country. Democratic losses came from a cocktail of Republican voter suppression and glaring Democratic Party policy failures.

While Republicans were claiming a mandate on the national level, there were plenty of local progressive victories that reveal a growing left-leaning electorate. If you’re bummed about the midterms, this laundry list of progressive victories complied by Bill Moyers.com will cheer you up. The dysfunctional, corporate-owned Democratic Party needs to sit up and take notice.

David beats Goliath in Richmond, California

Richmond, California is a small town of 100,000 and the home of Richmond Chevron refinery. For a hundred years, Chevron owned the Richmond city council. Then, in 2007, locals put forward a progressive movement to run local progressive candidates who pledged not to take a penny from corporations. Running on very little money, they won the mayor’s seat and five other local elections based on a progressive, anti-corporate message. Since then, the progressive controlled city council has accomplished a lot, including passing a $13 minimum wage and gaining an additional $114 million in taxes from Chevron. This year progressive candidates won again against extremely well funded Chevron-backed candidates. Chevron and Wall Street money failed to drive progressives out of office.

Richmond is a microcosm of what could happen on a larger scale in this country if progressives became focused and organized.

Minimum Wage measures pass in four red states

Voters in four “red” states—Arkansas, Alaska, Nebraska and South Dakota—approved measures on Tuesday to raise the minimum wage. They did this against the well-funded opposition big business groups. As a result, over 1.7 million workers will be getting a raise.

These victories didn’t come out of nowhere. Increasing grassroots pressure and demonstrations by low-wage workers around the country—especially employees of fast-food chains and Walmart—helped bring the issue to the attention of the wider public. Polls show that most Americans, Democrats and Republicans, support an increase in the federal minimum wage.

Worker’s rights expanded in two states

In Massachusetts a ballot measure passed giving paid sick days to about million workers. In Montclair and Trenton, New Jersey, voters passed ballot initiatives expanding paid sick leave to food service, childcare, and home health care workers.

Fetal personhood proposals defeated in Colorado and North Dakota

Planned Parenthood and its allies organized to beat back this extreme assault on women’s rights.

California voters say no to the prison-industrial-complex 

More than two-thirds of California voters approved revising some of the lowest-level petty crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. This was a major victory against the prison-industrial complex and the growing number of private corporations that now run state prisons and support legislation to incarcerate as many people as possible. Money for incarceration is money drained away from schools and other social needs.

Gun reform beats the NRA

Washington state voters defeated the National Rifle Association by approving a ballot measure to impose criminal background checks on people who purchase firearms online or at gun shows.

Soda tax passes in Berkeley California

Three quarters of voters in Berkeley, California adopted a tax on soda and sugary drinks to combat diabetes and other illness. The American Beverage Association spent $2.1 million to oppose the soda tax through full-page newspaper ads, television and radio spots, and telephone and door-to-door canvassing.

The “yes” campaign spent only $273,000, primarily on door-to-door canvassing and phone calls.

Public employees win in Arizona

Arizona voters defeated Proposition 487, put on the ballot by business and Republican interest groups to undermine public employee pensions.

Pot legalized in Oregon and Washington, DC

In Oregon, voters legalized recreational use of marijuana, joining Washington state and Colorado, who adopted similar measures in 2012. In Washington, DC, voters passed a measure to let residents grow cannabis indoors and possess as much as two ounces.

The post Midterms: Democratic Party didn’t give people a reason to vote appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In a move that demonstrates a small—and too rare—step toward common sense in lawmaking, Missouri has rescinded [mostly] an 18-year-old law that banned people with felony drug convictions from ever receiving food stamps under the SNAP program. The new law is not a “get-out-of-jail-free,” though. It retains a one-year waiting period following a drug felon’s release from custody, and a third drug felony conviction would still trigger a lifetime ban. But those convicted of one or two drug felonies would be able to get food stamps under the SNAP program after a year, provided that they adhere to court orders regarding drug treatment programs.

The problem with the lifetime ban, argued proponents of the new, more humane approach, is that:

It turned safety net programs into a weapon in the drug war, adding a socioeconomic penalty to the criminal penalties the system imposes for drug crimes.

That approach fails to account for the realities of life in poverty, The Sentencing Project’s Director of Advocacy Nicole Porter said. “There has been a move to modify the ban ever since the 1990s in recognition that it was unfair to people who had already completed their sentence and were living in the community to deny them the ability to participate in the social safety net.” But “poor assumptions about people with prior convictions” have guided lawmakers in the handful of holdout states. The bans are “one way that people who are opposed to the safety net at all have been able to narrow the net and to marginalize people,” she said.

Relaxing the lifetime ban is a nod to the growing evidence that the war on drugs isn’t working. It also demonstrates that punishing poor people doesn’t help, either.

Calling the ban a “lifetime sentence,” The Sentencing Project notes that, when the national law—which gave states the ability to opt in or out—was enacted by Congress in 1996—with very little debate—the ban was intended to show that Congressional representatives were “tough on crime.”

As Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), the sponsor of the amendment, argued, “If we are serious about our drug laws, we ought not to give people welfare benefits who are violating the Nation’s drug laws.”

Conspicuously absent from the brief debate over this provision was any discussion of whether the lifetime ban for individuals with felony drug offenses would advance the general objectives of welfare reform.

During this year’s Missouri hearings on the bill to lift the ban, people with prior drug convictions testified that the food-stamp ban has made it harder for people to climb out of poverty. Some also questioned its fairness, noting that the ban did not apply to convicted murders or sex offenders who are released from prison.

The old law resulted in some ludicrous situations, Think Progress reports:

Johnny Waller, who served five years decades ago for selling marijuana as a teenager, said, “I can go buy a firearm but I can’t get assistance to buy a sandwich

As is so often the case, Missouri is late to this remediating effort. Until Missouri Governor Nixon signed the new bill into law in June 2014, Missouri was one of nine states holding out for the punitive lifetime ban (Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Wyoming). The bans were imposed as part of welfare reform under President Clinton, but over the 18 years since they have been repealed in 16 states and modified in various ways by another 25.

The sponsor of the new law in Missouri, Sen. Kiki Curls, D-Kansas City, said food assistance would reduce the chances that a person with a drug problem would relapse and return to prison. “I think it gives folks an opportunity to succeed.”

Not much encouraging comes out of the Republican-dominated Missouri state legislature these days, so this development is refreshing. I doubt that this law passed for purely humanitarian reasons. I’m guessing that legislators just decided that Missouri shouldn’t be—once again—left behind and viewed as a backward state—that’s not good for business, after all. But whatever the reason, this is a small step in a better direction. And in Missouri, that’s newsworthy.

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I’d almost forgotten about the three friends who, while hiking in Kurdistan in 2009, were lured across the Iraq/Iran border and then held prisoner in an Iranian jail for two years. Then I saw a short interview with them on MSNBC and learned that they had just published a book about their experience. In the interview, they seemed so articulate and appealing that I immediately downloaded their book.

I was hooked from the first page and almost didn’t breathe until I finished it two days later.

In A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran, Sara Shourd, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer take turns telling their story, a detailed, first-person account of a trip down the rabbit hole of the Iranian judicial system. Their memories are vivid and detailed. They recall, with amazing clarity, how they were wrongfully arrested and how their initial imprisonment proceeded, day-by-day into an inexorable descent into long-term captivity. It’s so personal, evocative and honest that you can almost feel yourself there, in Evin Prison, alongside them as they navigate their feelings, learn how to operate in the bizarr-o world of the Iranian system and sustain each other.

As they rotate the role of narrator, Sara, Josh and Sean each give an astonishingly thorough and personally revealing account of what was going through their minds at each stage of their imprisonment.

They tell their stories matter-of-factly, in a situation where the facts of their lives are both terrifying and unpredictable, and where the facts that lead to their imprisonment are not regarded as facts at all by the Iranian judicial system. They are accused of spying for the CIA, for the State Department, for Israel. Their innocent life histories—as students, activists, journalists, teachers and travelers—are twisted by Iranian authorities into evidence to be used against them. They are lied to about the duration of their imprisonment, psychologically manipulated by prison guards and supervisors, allowed extremely limited contact with their families, and never get to talk with their Iranian-government-appointed lawyer.

Through all of it, they maintain their sanity and dignity by mining every resource they brought with them: intelligence, intuitiveness, political savvy and an impressive internal encyclopedia of literature, poetry, music, and history. They recite poems from memory, [Wordsworth!], devise coded messages, teach each other new languages, dance, sing, exercise, defy their guards, wangle privileges, and use hunger strikes to manipulate the system. They keep secret diaries. At one point, to keep their minds from rotting, Josh and Sean create a secret timeline of world history, adding dates that they glean from the random books they manage to get from their captors. Their story is one of resilience, tenacity and incredible optimism in the most trying of circumstances.

Each narrator describes—often painfully—the ups and downs of their feelings and the ever-shifting complexities of their relationships. Sara and Shane entered captivity as a couple, and they go to extraordinary lengths—in extremely limited circumstances—to comfort each other, stay in communication and keep their relationship intact. Josh is their very close friend. How the three of them work to sustain each other—even when the triangle threatens to fracture—is an inspiring story of true friendship and caring under duress. As I read their stories, step by step, I worried alongside them about whether, in the end, they would be able to keep their relationships together.

Solitary confinement is a central issue in their stories. Though Shane and Josh started out in solitary, they were eventually reunited and spent most of their 26 months in a shared cell. Sara was alone the entire time and suffered greatly from the isolation. [She was released after a year.] None of the three was tortured in the traditional meaning of the word, or even in the manner falsely dubbed as “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the Bush administration. In the book, they speculate that they were spared—while others in the same prison were not—because they were regarded as “high-value” prisoners [meaning Americans who could be used as bargaining chips]. Sara, who endured solitary the longest—presumably because of her gender—essentially calls solitary a kind of de facto torture, because of the psychological damage it inflicts.  An extremely insightful and articulate writer, more than once, she reflects on the effect that solitary confinement is having on her—and on how it must affect others similarly.

As Shane writes: “Solitary confinement is not a head banging against the wall in terror or rage. Sometimes it is, but mostly it’s just the slow erasure of who you thought you were. You think you are still you, but you have no real way of knowing. How can you know if you have no one to reflect you back to yourself.”

Fittingly, after her release, Sara became an editor at Solitary Watch and focuses her human-rights advocacy efforts on combating the widespread use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons and jails.

A Sliver of Light, as those who followed the story know, has a relatively happy ending, for a story that never should have happened. Sara, Shane and Josh’s release was achieved primarily as the result of an intense, tireless “Free the Hikers” campaign led by the hostages’ family and friends, and by Sara after her release, and enabled by the savvy, humanitarian diplomacy of the King of Oman and the Swiss government. Sara’s chronicle of official efforts to free the hikers does not put the U.S. State Department in a particularly positive light.

A Sliver of Light is a powerful memoir, so detailed and so honest that I sometimes wanted to turn away, to pretend that this couldn’t happen to such smart, likeable, caring people. But I couldn’t. The book rips off your blindfold. After reading their story—and experiencing the openness of their narration—my admiration for Sara, Josh and Shane, and for their families, is enormous. As you close the book, you’ll be asking yourself if, in a similarly unimaginable and unjust situation, you could come anywhere close to what they did.

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The Bill of Rights may have been passed over 220 years ago, but it seems to still not have been fully enacted. “Missouri executed this man while his appeal was pending,” in The Atlantic, tells the story:

It is 2014, not 1964 or 1914, and yet on Wednesday night [January 2014] a black man in Missouri, a black man convicted by an all-white jury, was executed before his federal appeals had been exhausted. He was executed just moments after reportedly being hauled away by prison guards while he was in the middle of a telephone call discussing his appeals with one of his attorneys. He was executed even though state officials knew that the justices of the United States Supreme Court still were considering his request for relief.[1]

The sixth amendment guarantees all people “the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury” in “all criminal prosecutions,” yet the state of Missouri has denied not just this man, but three others that same right.

Asked repeatedly not to execute Smulls while appeals were pending, state officials failed even to respond to emails from defense attorneys that night while corrections officials went ahead with the execution. Smulls thus was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court denied his final stay request. This was not an accident or some bureaucratic misunderstanding and did not come as a surprise to Smulls’ lawyers. They say it was the third straight execution in Missouri in which corrections officials went ahead with lethal injection before the courts were through with the condemned man’s appeals.[2]

That the Supreme Court sent a refusal for the appeal is irrelevant. The fact of the matter remains that the state lawyers completely undermined the power of the Supreme Court and the entire concept of equal representation in the American justice system by executing a man before his case was fully considered.

 What happened in Missouri this week is unacceptable in a nation that purports to worship its rule of law. It ought to be unacceptable even to the most ardent supporters of capital punishment. And the worst news of all is that there is no reason to think the problem is going to get better anytime soon. Missouri wasn’t punished for its zealotry. And that surely signals officials in other death penalty states, like Louisiana, that they won’t likely be punished, either, if they execute someone while his appeals still are pending. Herbert Smulls may have deserved to die. But surely not before the Supreme Court was through looking at his case.[3]

 

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I think it’s time to talk about an issue that isn’t glamorous or infamous, but it is so subtle and so completely off the radar, for a girl from the St. Louis suburbs, that my comprehension of it is still watery at best. But we cannot keep ignoring mass incarceration or what is often called the school to prison pipeline.

Mass incarceration has become a massive problem in this country in the aftermath of the war on drugs. And this problem disproportionately affects African American males. It has been argued that “mass” incarceration cannot possibly just affect black males, which is true, but because it is centered in a certain demographic area it is does disproportionately affect the urban poor. It is likely for this reason, that mass incarceration and the systematic imprisonment, and thereby the oppression of these individuals, isn’t at the forefront of the public’s mind for long.

Despite public outcry after the Trayvon Martin trial, we are still failing to address the monumental discrimination and criminalization of young blacks. I understand but refuse to accept the complacency, after all. for those of us outside of the neighborhoods in which this taking place and outside the barbed wire race walls, it doesn’t come up in conversation, it doesn’t affect our everyday lives, and many of us see the persecution of a people who are falsely accused of criminal behavior as inevitable. After all, “You can’t be too careful.” We tell ourselves these people had to have just slipped through the cracks, and that the law is simply going above and beyond by taking every necessary precaution. But from the other side of the bars, men and women suffer. They are innocent and will live their entire lives struggling with the burden of a police record.

As progressives, it has to be complacence and ignorance that keep us from action. My own battle was with ignorance, both of African-Americans’ systematic imprisonment itself and a lack of understanding of the urban culture’s intent. I didn’t understand that maybe sagging pants and graffiti were forms of expression, forms of resistance, a self- imposed identity created because the ones given to them are clad in orange jumpsuits. Which leads to that expressive and rebellious identity, to be tainted by the visage of our imposed impression of what ‘criminal’ looks like.

The sad truth is that police brutality in poor neighborhoods isn’t a fantasy nor is it an isolated event. It’s a real problem that happens to real people. Has the war on drugs really accomplished much more than sweeping drug busts that target one-time offenders in the poorest neighborhoods, while college students are getting high in their dorms? If it is socially acceptable for posh stores to sell t-shirts with marijuana leaves on them, then why do young black men have to watch how they act when wearing a hoodie.

A criminal record only continues the already endless and nearly inescapable cycle of poverty and for so many who are  influenced so young, don’t they deserve a second chance? Or is it written that they must be reconciled to a society that excludes them from their right to education, property and liberty? People’s human rights are being violated and trampled on. How can we say that isn’t the definition of being disenfranchised? Of being oppressed?

If you want to become further involved in the social movement against mass imprisonment, awareness is the first place to start. I recommend Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow a book that explains this phenomenon with depth and backs her findings with tremendous research and detail.

The post Mass incarceration–the new Jim Crow appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Just a few hours before convicted serial murderer Joseph Paul Franklin was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Nov. 19, 2013, two federal judges granted a stay. Then that stay was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. And then Franklin was executed.

But, even though the eventual outcome—another state-sponsored execution—was a defeat for those of us who oppose capital punishment—the controversy surrounding the case gives us a glimmer of hope that new concerns about lethal-injection drugs might lead to the eventual end of the death penalty in the U.S.

Missouri’s rush to execution

In the run-up to Franklin’s execution, Missouri—under legal, medical and international pressure—had to scramble to find a way to make it happen.  Franklin was the first Missouri inmate scheduled to be put to death under the state’s newly minted execution protocol. According to Yahoo News:

In October 2013, the state changed its rules to allow for a compounded pentobarbital—a short-acting barbiturate—to be used in a lethal dose for executions.

Missouri was forced to change its prescribed death drug because the German company that manufacturers propofol—the drug Missouri had planned to use—objected to its use in executions.

More specifically, earlier this year, Missouri sent back a shipment of propofol that it had planned to use for executions.

Fresenius Kabi, by far the largest supplier of  Propofol to the US, instructed its distributors last August not to ship the drug to any departments of corrections in the country after several states said they planned to use it for lethal injection. But the Louisiana-based distribution company, Morris & Dickson LLC, sent the shipment to the Missouri Department of Corrections by mistake.

“We learned about such plans of certain states in the US to use Propofol for executions last year. And this was when we implemented tighter distribution controls,” said Matthias Link, a spokesman for Fresenius Kabi. The company’s concern is that Propofol, if used for executions, could be placed on the EU’s list of export restricted substances under the so-called Torture Regulation, which would then severely restrict US access to the popular drug. [Propofol is the most widely used surgical anesthetic in the U.S., with an estimated 50 million dosages per year.]  Capital punishment is illegal throughout the EU.

Were Propofol to be classified under the Torture Regulation, Link explained, it would mean layers of added bureaucracy and three to six month waiting periods for every shipment. “Any executions with Propofol would lead to an extreme shortage,” he concludes.

It seems absurd, of course, that Missouri was in such a hurry to find a way to kill someone—even someone as awful as Franklin, a serial killer. Still, it’s hard to imagine a more ludicrous and horrifying scenario than that of a state desperately scurrying about for an acceptable way to kill people.

But that’s the insane state that the state of Missouri—along with 32 other death-penalty states—is in. Missouri’s frantic quest for a better death-inducing drug brought it to pentobaritol—an anesthetic widely used in euthanizing animals, but previously untried in human death penalty protocols.

And it was precisely Missouri’s hurry that impelled U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey to issue the last-minute stay of execution for Franklin. In her ruling, she noted that:

Missouri issued three different protocols in the three months preceding Franklin’s execution date and as recently as five days before.

Franklin has been afforded no time to research the risk of pain associated with the department’s new protocol, the quality of the pentobarbital provided, and the record of the source of the pentobarbital.

Compounding the problem

Those last two phrases—“the quality of the pentobarbital provided, and the record of the source of the pentobarbital”—deserve a closer look.

The first phrase, drawing attention to the quality of the drug, refers to Missouri’s decision to get its pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy. Pharmaceutical compounding refers to the creation of a particular pharmaceutical product to fit the unique need of a patient. It’s often used to alter the form of a medication—creating a powder or liquid for a patient who can’t swallow a pill, or creating a special dosage of a medication, such as a half dose, not routinely offered by drug manufacturers.

The problem is that compounding can be controversial, because drugs mixed in compounding pharmacies are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Critics contend use of the compounded drugs could result in needless suffering and botched executions, but states including Missouri have pressed ahead.

Then, there’s the issue of—as the judge noted—“the record of the source of the pentobarbital.” Missouri decided to hide the name of the compounding pharmacy mixing its lethal-injection drug. The state accomplished this task by making the compounding pharmacy a member of its official “execution team,” which could allow the pharmacy’s identity to be kept secret.

Desperate measures

Similar issues outside Missouri demonstrate the lengths to which states seem willing to go to find ways to execute people on death row. For example, a federal civil complaint in Texas claims that officials from state’s Department of Criminal Justice may have falsified prescriptions, lied to pharmacies and perhaps even broken the law.

“The states are scrambling to find the drugs,” says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. “They want to carry out these executions that they have scheduled, but they don’t have the drugs and they’re changing and trying new procedures never used before in the history of executions.”

States have been forced to try new drug combinations or go to loosely regulated compounding pharmacies that manufacturer variations of the drugs banned by the larger companies. The suit against Texas alleges the state corrections department falsified a prescription for pentobarbital, including the patient name as “James Jones,” the warden of the Huntsville Unit “where executions take place,” according to court documents. Additionally, the drugs were to be sent to “Huntsville Unit Hospital,” which, the documents say, “has not existed since 1983.”

In October, Ohio was set to execute Ron Phillips using a two-drug cocktail never before used in an execution. Ohio’s Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said it “was unable to obtain a sufficient quantity of pentobarbital.” Pentobarbital was the “preferred” drug [what a concept!], but it became unavailable because of its European manufacturer’s objections to its use as an execution drug. So, Ohio created a new, untested protocol, in which it would inject, intravenously, the sedative midazolam and pain-killer hydromorphone in a lethal dosage. Shortly before it was scheduled, Phillips’ execution was delayed by a lawsuit unrelated to the protocol.

Death to the death penalty

Most American states, plus the U.S. Supreme Court—and all of the European Union—have already decided that previous forms of execution are not acceptable. So, we’re not going back to the gas chamber [although, earlier this year, Missouri’s Attorney General threatened to do so if he couldn’t get the lethal drugs he desperately needed for scheduled executions.] Or the electric chair. Or hanging. Or firing squads. Or the guillotine. Or stoning. Maybe states will look at what they are doing and realize that their desperate, absurd search for an ever-dwindling supply of killer drugs is a form of insanity. We can only hope that state-sponsored executions by lethal injection will eventually join the Death Penalty Hall of Shame, too.  And–if humanity and sanity prevail–so could the death penalty itself.

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