AFTER 54 YEARS U.S. GOVERNMENT FINALLY RESTORES DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH CUBA

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/2/a_new_chapter_after_half_a

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

Thursday, July 3, 2015 

"A New Chapter": After Half a Century, U.S. and Cuba Unveil Reopening of Embassies & Restored Ties

 

After half a century, the United States and Cuba have announced they will reopen embassies in each other’s capitals and formally re-establish diplomatic relations. Secretary of State John Kerry said he will travel to Havana to open the U.S. Embassy there. In a statement, the Cuban government said relations with the United States cannot be considered normalized until trade sanctions are lifted, the naval base at Guantánamo Bay is returned, and U.S.-backed programs aimed at "subversion and internal destabilization" are halted. But in a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Cuban President Raúl Castro acknowledged much progress has already been made, and confirmed the openings of permanent diplomatic missions later this month. We are joined by Peter Kornbluh, author of "Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana."

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with the historic news announced on Wednesday by President Obama that after more than half a century, the United States and Cuba will reopen embassies in each other’s capitals and formally re-establish diplomatic relations.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: More than 54 years ago, at the height of the Cold War, the United States closed its embassy in Havana. Today, I can announce that the United States has agreed to formally re-establish diplomatic relations with the republic of Cuba and reopen embassies in our respective countries. This is a historic step forward in our efforts to normalize relations with the Cuban government and people, and begin a new chapter with our neighbors in the Americas.

AMY GOODMAN: In a statement, the Cuban government said relations with the United States cannot be considered normalized until trade sanctions are lifted, the naval base at Guantánamo Bay is returned, and U.S.-backed programs aimed at, quote, "subversion and internal destabilization" are halted. But in a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Cuba’s President Raúl Castro acknowledged much progress has already been made, and confirmed the openings of permanent diplomatic missions later this month.

PRESIDENT RAÚL CASTRO: [translated] It pleases me to confirm that the republic of Cuba has decided to re-establish diplomatic relations with the United States of America and open permanent diplomatic missions in our respective countries on the 20th of July, 2015. On Cuba’s part, we make this decision based on the reciprocal action to develop respectful and cooperative relations between our peoples and our governments.

AMY GOODMAN: Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday he’ll travel to Havana to open the U.S. Embassy there, while Cuban officials say Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez will lead a delegation of "distinguished representatives of Cuban society" at an official ceremony to reopen the Cuban Embassy in Washington. All of this follows the U.S. decision in May to remove Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terror. It was just in December that Obama first announced loosened travel and economic restrictions between the two nations.

For more, we are joined by Democracy Now! video stream by Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. He’s co-author of the book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. An updated edition comes out in September with a new epilogue that tells the story of how President Obama re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba.

Well, Peter Kornbluh, welcome back to Democracy Now! First, your reaction to President Obama’s announcement?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, thank you, Amy, for having me on the show, the first day of what Obama calls a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations. I don’t think that the true magnitude of Obama’s speech yesterday has quite sunk in, but this is a historic moment in bilateral relations. It’s a historic moment for Latin America as a whole. And it’s certainly an extraordinary kind of change of events in the whole history of U.S. foreign policy, which, as you know better than anybody and as your listeners know better than anybody and your audience knows better than anybody, has been a bitter history of imperial and imperialist intervention in Cuban affairs. And Barack Obama yesterday stepped forward, basically said we’re going to change the past and have a very different future. He actually said, "This is what change looks like." And it was very dramatic.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about what this change looks like. What has been agreed to at this point? Tell us about the Cuban mission in Washington and the U.S. mission in Cuba, in Havana, and how they’ll change.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, you know, Jimmy Carter, back in the 1970s, 1977, initiated the first truly serious efforts of a president to normalize relations with Cuba. And he got as far as kind of reopening kind of mid-level diplomatic kind of representations called "interest sections." The United States would have an interest section in Havana; Cuba would have an interest section in Washington. They would not be headed by ambassadors. They would not have full embassy status. And today, President Obama and President Castro have now agreed that we are going to re-establish official diplomatic relations and kind of upgrade these interest sections to full embassies.

And this has a symbolic meaning. President Obama set out to accomplish this starting in 2013, when he directed his aides to find a way to change our policy towards Cuba and to arrive at this point where we have arrived today. That is what he could do as president without having to deal with the Congress on the issue of lifting the embargo.

And, you know, it’s a symbolic move in many ways, but it creates a kind of a new framework of our interaction and certainly is going to pave the way, I think, to an acceleration of ties—bilateral ties, cultural ties, economic ties, political ties—between the United States and Cuba. And I think it’s going to accelerate leaving the past in the past and creating a very different kind of ambiance and environment of the ties between the two countries, which really have a lot of common interests, which will now rise to the surface of the relationship.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us the history of the U.S. mission in Cuba? I remember when I was in Havana, there were sort of major billboards that the U.S. mission had to face, that the Cubans had put up. But the U.S. had done things with the U.S. mission that Fidel Castro wanted to cover, what, with a series of flags?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, that was during the last Bush administration, where George Bush decided that he would kind of stick it to the Cubans by putting a ticker tape on the top of the building of the U.S. interest section that kind of, you know, broadcast news, like down there in Times Square, that was hostile to the Cuban government. And Fidel Castro’s response was to erect 119 flagpoles and put 119 black flags, kind of with a pirate-type sign on the top, to mask the ticker tape and to kind of make a statement of how evil the United States was.

Now, you can contrast kind of the animosity, the—what Henry Kissinger once called the perpetual hostility of that kind of interaction, with what’s going to happen today. And that visual contrast will be John Kerry, the highest-ranking U.S. official since the Cuban revolution to travel to Cuba, overseeing the hoisting of the American flag of the new U.S. Embassy on the Malecón there in Havana. The visuals will be rather dramatic and, I think, will appeal, quite frankly, to Cubans and to the American public here in the United States in a very dramatic way. And I think it’s going to help visually push the idea of a normal relationship forward in a big way.

AMY GOODMAN: The restoration of relations with Cuba is not sitting well with Republican presidential contender, Cuban-American Marco Rubio. He issued a statement that read, quote, "I intend to oppose the confirmation of an Ambassador to Cuba until these issues are addressed. It is time for our unilateral concessions to this odious regime to end." Peter Kornbluh, talk about Rubio’s attitude toward Cuba and his own history.

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, he distorted his own history for many years. He left the public impression, and even stated it specifically, that his parents had fled after Fidel Castro took power, that they were political refugees, when in fact they had left Cuba three years before the revolution, and they were simple economic refugees, just like anybody else, so many others who have come to the United States from Latin American countries or other Third World countries, seeking better economic situations for themselves and their families. So his parents and his family, he does not have a background of persecution during the Castro regime.

But, of course, he is beholden and a fixture in the dwindling community of hardline anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, and he is catering to them in his presidential bid. There are still a number of older Cuban Americans who have made a lot of money and who are going to be supportive financially of Rubio’s candidacy. But in terms of broad numbers, his position no longer reflects, in any way, shape or form, the majority view of Floridians and Cuban Americans in Florida.

Having said that, let me be clear that Cuba is obviously going to be a political hot potato, and Cuban policy is going to be a political hot potato, in the next presidential election. Hillary Clinton came out very early calling for an end to the embargo. She sees that there is financial support among the more moderate Cuban-American community in Florida. And she also, I think, sees that this is much in the interest, both international and domestic, of the United States of America to normalize fully relations with Cuba. On the other side, you have, you know, Republican candidates like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, who, like Marco Rubio, is vying for the support of the anti-Castro Cuban community in Florida, who are obviously going to attack the president on this policy change.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, in Havana, Cubans welcomed news that U.S. and Cuba will open embassies in each other’s country.

CUBAN MAN: [translated] We’ve been in this situation for 56 years, and I think this will benefit the country in certain respects, and I think it benefits those of us who want to see our families, our children, who are in the U.S.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to read a comment made by Elián González. He was the boy at the center of a bitter international custody battle in 2000 that highlighted the poor relations between the United States and Cuba. In a 2015 interview with Granma, he said, quote—Granma is the Cuban newspaper—"Sometimes we young people think that if we stop being a socialist country, and give way to capitalism, we will become a developed country like the United States, France, Italy ... But it must be understood that if Cuba stops being socialist, it won’t be like the U.S., it would be a colony, it would be Haiti, a poor country, a lot poorer than it is now, and everything that has been achieved would be lost. It is true that we could have accomplished more, but we can never forget the most important historic question: we have been a country besieged by a blockade." And, of course, for people who don’t quite remember who Elián González is, he was made famous with the standoff with his relatives in Florida and his father, who was trying to take him home to Cuba. He had come in a boat, and his mother had died on the boat. And the image of the U.S. military with a gun at his head as the U.S. government took him away from his Miami family to reunite him with his father and brother. Your comment, Peter Kornbluh?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Elián González raises an important point that a number of Cubans feel, which is that they don’t want to lose all the vestiges of the revolution. And Raúl Castro himself has said, "We want to have an economic model that allows us to have sustainable socialism." The problem for Cuba is that they can’t sustain the advances of the Cuban revolution in education and health unless their economy changes and they are able to be a productive society generating the resources to do these social programs in the future. And that is why, in a opening of the economy, the economy is—under Raúl Castro, is evolving away from a strict communist model to a much more kind of—more social democratic model, eventually, and perhaps like Vietnam, perhaps like China. It’s hard to know where it will end up. But it is evolving steadily towards that new model of the economy, and it’s up to the Cuban government, of course, to decide what kind of interaction they’re going to have with American economic interests. We can no more tell them what to do now than we can—than we could before the normalization of diplomatic relations. But they know what’s in their interests, and I’m sure that they are going to act accordingly.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Peter Kornbluh, talk about what has to happen now. And what does Congress have to do, which President Obama alluded to as he spoke yesterday? And how could a change of a presidential administration, or even the current Congress, stop anything—or could they—from moving forward?

PETER KORNBLUH: I think what President Obama has done in normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba is irreversible. And Congress can certainly stand in the way—the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dominated by Republicans like Marco Rubio, can thwart kind of a naming of a new ambassador. They can hold up any ambassador—ambassadorial nomination that President Obama gives them. But I think what he is going to do is simply assign the diplomat that is there, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who’s head of the interest section and who already is an ambassador, in the sense that he was ambassador previous to his posting in Cuba, with the kind of interim status. So, 'til the end of the Obama administration, I believe that he's not going to pick a fight with Congress over this nomination.

You know, Obama has two years left. He’s going to move quickly and with all the power that he has as president to kind of consolidate this change in policy. He has normalized diplomatic relations. To normalize overall relations, of course, we do have to lift the embargo. The United States does have to address Cuba’s interest in the return of the Guantánamo military base. And these regime change programs that USAID has been running for all these years, kind of in a kind of bureaucratic imperative mandated by Congress, do have to be reconfigured to some kind of more educational-oriented or economic sharing, as opposed to an effort to roll back the Cuban revolution. Those things are down the road. I think Obama wants to create an ambiance, a very new ambiance, a very new framework of relations, and then have the countries negotiate accordingly.

A new president could certainly create a much more hostile policy towards Cuba. A new Congress with Democrats could actually vote to lift the embargo and lift the travel ban that prevents people like you and I from freely going on vacation in Varadero Beach, to Cuba, at this point. But I think that Obama’s strategy is simply to create constituencies in the business community, among American citizens, as well as support in Cuba for going forward with this relationship, to the point where it will be very difficult for a Republican president, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, to reverse this process.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of trade, Peter, what exactly is going to happen now? I mean, many Republican and Democratic governors, for example, not to mention CEOs, have been going back and forth to Cuba. What happens next?

PETER KORNBLUH: You’ve had the president of Google going. You’ve had the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce going to Cuba. There are all sorts of businessmen who have been there. And President Obama has kind of looked at the embargo like a dam, and he’s used his executive powers to poke holes in it, with the hope that as the kind of economic waters pour through the holes that he has created in the embargo, the dam weakens and eventually collapses. I think that’s his strategy, and it’s being supported by the business community and by the advocacy community. There’s a new organization out there called Cuba Engage, which is trying to organize business and advocates to lift the travel ban—very important to support that. And I think that that’s his idea.

And Obama, using executive orders, has created all sorts of clauses in the—for the business community. The United States can now import goods from Cuba from private businesses in Cuba. We can sell them more food. Internet companies of the United States of America are now going to Cuba and are going to work with Cubans to build a Internet network there. So there’s a loosening of the restrictions on trade. You still are not going to see, you know, Hilton Hotels building hotels in Cuba. You’re not going to see a McDonald’s or a Wal-Mart or major U.S. mining companies arriving in Cuba and investing in Cuba, unless Congress lifts the trade embargo on Cuba. But you are going to see quite a bit more economic activity in the years to come.

AMY GOODMAN: And the visits—President Obama says he personally will go next year, and the pope, before he comes to the United States, will be going to Cuba first. Is that right, Peter Kornbluh? And the pope’s role in the negotiation that has opened up the relationship between Cuba and the United States?

PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the next edition, the paperback edition, of the book that I did with William LeoGrande, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana, is going to have a whole new 50-page epilogue that tells the story of how the pope got involved with the secret talks to improve relations between the United States and Cuba. And certainly, when the pope goes to Cuba in mid-September, he is going to raise the issue of the embargo. He’s going to come to the United States afterwards, and I’m sure the issue will actually come up.

The pope will be following John Kerry, who is going to be going to Cuba later this month. That is going to receive quite a bit of media attention. And, of course, there’s going to be a parade of celebrities, businessmen, political figures continuing to go to Cuba 'til the end of the year. Obama—certainly the White House has said that Obama would relish his own trip to Cuba in 2016. That would be history making. That would be Obama's Nixon-in-China moment, and he would go down in history as the president who ended the Cold War in the Caribbean once and for all, and actually took steps to set foot on the island of Cuba while the Cuban existence—while a Castro was still in power. I think that will go a long way to normalizing simply the kind of people-to-people relationship between this country, and I hope we all live to see the day that a president of the United States sets foot on the island of Cuba in the near future.

AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, I want to thank you for being with us. He directs the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, which is at George Washington University in D.C., co-author of the book, Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Updated edition with that epilogue that tells the story of President Obama, the pope and President Castro are all in that book. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

On NSA Spying, Civil Liberties, and Our Constitutional Rights

http://www.thenation.com/blog/177608/judge-rules-against-nsa-spying-congress-should-do-same?

Judge Rules Against NSA Spying; Congress Should Do the Same
by John Nichols
December 16, 2013
The Nation
 

(Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Civil liberties advocates on the left and the right have argued for many years—but especially in the aftermath of revelations this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden—that spying by the National Security Agency disregards privacy protections outlined in the Fourth Amendment and is surely unconstitutional. Indeed, as the American Civil Liberties Union has argued, the NSA’s “unconstitutional surveillance” represents “a grave danger to American democracy.”

Now, a federal judge has recognized the constitutional concerns.

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval,” wrote US District Judge Richard Leon.

Judge Leon’s decision, which will surely be appealed, focuses attention on legal challenges to the spying program. But it also serves as a reminder that Congress can and should act to defend privacy rights.

“The ruling underscores what I have argued for years: The bulk collection of Americans’ phone records conflicts with Americans’ privacy rights under the U.S. Constitution and has failed to make us safer,” says Senator Mark Udall, D-Colorado, a supporter of legislation to end the bulk collection program. “We can protect our national security without trampling our constitutional liberties.”

Senator Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, said: “Judge Leon’s ruling hits the nail on the head.  It makes clear that bulk phone records collection is intrusive digital surveillance and not simply inoffensive data collection as some have said. The court noted that this metadata can be used for ‘repetitive, surreptitious surveillance of a citizen’s private goings on,’ that creates a mosaic of personal information and is likely unconstitutional. This ruling dismisses the use of an outdated Supreme Court decision affecting rotary phones as a defense for the technologically advanced collection of millions of Americans’ records. It clearly underscores the need to adopt meaningful surveillance reforms that prohibit the bulk collection of Americans’ records.”

The senators had reason to be enthusiastic about Judge Leon determination that legal challenges to the massive surveillance program are valid. So valid, in fact, that he issued a preliminary injunction against the program. The judge suspended the order, however, in order to allow a Justice Department appeal.

But Judge Leon was blunt regarding the strength of the challenge that was brought after Snowden revealed details of the agency’s spying in The Guardian.

"I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison... would be aghast," the judge wrote with regard to the NSA program for surveillance of cell phone records,

“The court concludes that plaintiffs have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the government’s bulk collection and querying of phone record metadata, that they have demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their Fourth Amendment claim and that they will suffer irreparable harm absent…relief,” Judge Leon wrote in response to a lawsuit brought by Larry Klayman, a former Reagan administration lawyer who now leads the conservative Freedom Watch group.

The case is one of several that have been working their way through the federal courts since Snowden disclosed details of the NSA program.

Legal challenges to NSA spying are not new, and they have failed in the past.

Challenging the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the law that permits the government to wiretap US citizens communicating with people overseas—Amnesty International and other human rights advocates, lawyers and journalists fought a case all the way to the US Supreme Court in 2012. In February 2013, however, the Justices ruled 5-4 that the challengers lacked standing because they could not prove they had been the victims of wiretapping and other privacy violations.

The Justice Department has continued to argue that plaintiffs in lawsuits against the spying program lack standing because they cannot prove their records were examined. But Judge Leon suggested that the old calculus that afforded police agencies great leeway when it came to monitoring communications has clearly changed.

Suggesting that the NSA has relied on “almost-Orwellian technology,” wrote Judge Leon, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia bench. “The relationship between the police and the phone company (as imagined by the courts decades ago)…is nothing compared to the relationship that has apparently evolved over the last seven years between the government and telecom companies.”

The judge concluded, “It’s one thing to say that people expect phone companies to occasionally provide information to law enforcement; it is quite another to suggest that our citizens expect all phone companies to operate what is effectively a joint intelligence-gathering operation with the government.”

This case will continue in the courts, as will others.

But it is also in Congress. A left-right coalition that extends from Congressmen Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning Republican, to Congressman John Conyers, a progressive Democrat, has raised repeated challenges to the NSA spying regimen.

Now, Congress needs to step up to what Congressman Alan Grayson, D-Florida, refers to as “the spying-industrial complex.”

A number of members are ready. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders responded to Judge Leon's ruling by saying: “In my view, the NSA is out of control and operating in an unconstitutional manner. Today’s ruling is an important first step toward reining in this agency but we must go further. I will be working as hard as I can to pass the strongest legislation possible to end the abuses by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.”

The outlines for legislative action have already been presented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups that work on privacy issues.

“Congress should not be indifferent to the government’s accumulation of vast quantities of sensitive information about American’s lives,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal counsel told the House Judiciary Committee in July. “This Committee in particular has a crucial role to play in ensuring that the government’s efforts to protect the country do not compromise the freedoms that make the country worth protecting.”

Jaffer told the committee,

Because the problem Congress confronts today has many roots, there is no single solution to it. But there are a number of things that Congress should do right away:

• It should amend Sections 215 and 702 to expressly prohibit suspicionless or “dragnet” monitoring or tracking of Americans’ communications.

• It should require the executive to release basic information about the government’s use of foreign-intelligence-surveillance authorities, including those relating to pen registers and national security letters. The executive should be required to disclose, for each year: how many times each of these provisions was used, how many individuals’ privacy was implicated by the government’s use of each provision, and, with respect to any dragnet, generalized, or bulk surveillance program, the types of information that were collected.

• Congress should also require the publication of FISA court opinions that evaluate the meaning, scope, or constitutionality of the foreign-intelligence laws. The ACLU recently filed a motion before the FISA court arguing that the publication of these opinions is required by the First Amendment, but Congress need not wait for the FISA court to act. Congress has the authority and the obligation to ensure that Americans are not governed by a system of secret law.

•  Finally, Congress—and this Committee in particular—should hold additional hearings to consider further amendments to FISA, including amendments to make FISC proceedings more transparent.

Members of Congress, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, have moved on a number of these fronts. Now it is time for concerted action.

The Congress does not have to wait for the legal wrangling to be resolved. It can, and should, act in defense of civil liberties.

http://www.thenation.com/article/177649/spying-lying?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=email_nation&utm_campaign=Email+Nation+-+20131219#

How the Government Misled the Supreme Court on Warrantless Wiretapping
 
The Snowden revelations have vindicated The Nation and the ACLU. When will the government correct the record and stop the abuses?

by Jameel Jaffer and Patrick C. Toomey
December 18, 2013

This article appears in the January 6-13, 2014 edition of The Nation.

Surveillance cameras are visible near the U.S.Capitol in Washington Saturday, Oct. 26, 2013. (AP Photo)

Early in 2013, before Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Supreme Court turned aside a challenge by this magazine and other organizations to a 2008 law that permitted the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications. The plaintiffs claimed that the law was unconstitutional, but the government argued that the plaintiffs lacked standing to pursue their challenge because they had failed to show that the law would be used to intercept their communications. In a 5-4 vote, the Court agreed with the government.

Over the past six months, we’ve learned a great deal about the way the NSA has been using and abusing its surveillance powers, including the powers that were at issue in the Supreme Court case, Clapper v. Amnesty. And we’ve learned something else as well: that the government’s representations to the Court were incomplete in some respects and altogether false in others.

The law that the plaintiffs challenged in Clapper, the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), authorizes mass acquisition of Americans’ international communications for foreign-intelligence purposes. It is the same law, we now know, the government relies on when it compels Google, Facebook and other companies to turn over customer e-mails, text and video chats, and photographs as part of the NSA’s PRISM program.

But long before PRISM came to light, the plaintiffs in Clapper argued that the FAA permitted the NSA to read Americans’ e-mails and listen in on their phone calls without a warrant, violating the Constitution. Rather than seriously engage this argument, the government contended that the plaintiffs had no business being in court at all. The dragnet surveillance described by the plaintiffs, it said, was mere “speculation” and “conjecture.”

The government also assured the courts that dismissing the plaintiffs’ challenge would not forever insulate the law from court review. The solicitor general told the Supreme Court that while the plaintiffs could not show that their communications had been intercepted, another group could: criminal defendants who were prosecuted based on evidence acquired under the surveillance law. These defendants, the government said, would be notified that they had been monitored by the NSA—and they would be able to challenge the law’s constitutionality. When the Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs in Clapper, Justice Samuel Alito repeated almost verbatim the government’s assurance that such defendants would receive notice.

Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the government’s arguments were misleading or worse. First, we know that the NSA is engaged in dragnet surveillance under the very law the plaintiffs challenged. The agency uses that law to monitor Americans’ communications with foreign-intelligence targets abroad—targets who may be journalists, academics or lawyers. A leaked copy of NSA procedures shows that the agency also conducts keyword searches of virtually all Americans’ international communications. As The New York Times reported in August, the NSA examines the contents of almost all text-based communications entering or leaving the country.

While the government’s claims about dragnet surveillance were misleading, its claims about the “notice” provided to criminal defendants were simply false. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Clapper, the government has conceded that at the time the case was argued, in October—and for the five years preceding—it did not provide notice to criminal defendants who had been monitored under the surveillance law.

The ACLU, as well as three members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has called on the solicitor general to correct the record in the Supreme Court, but thus far the government has failed to do so.

The government will not be able to insulate the law from constitutional review forever. Recent disclosures have finally forced the government to provide criminal defendants with notice of surveillance under the 2008 law—the notice that the government should have been providing all along. Those defendants will now have a chance to challenge the law in court.

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Their cases will raise issues of significance for all Americans, and it’s crucial that judges scrutinize the government’s claims in them more searchingly than they have in the past. The Snowden revelations have been a watershed, exposing practices that the public—and the courts—should have known about long ago. The outcome in Clapper, which hinged on a single vote, might have been different had the Supreme Court known then what we all know now.

In December, Federal District Court Judge Richard Leon invalidated the NSA’s call-tracking program in a careful ruling that treated the government’s arguments respectfully but skeptically. Other judges should follow Leon’s lead. For too long, the extraordinary deference accorded to national security officials has allowed misleading claims to stand uncorrected, and abusive and unconstitutional practices to flourish.

Read Next: With all the NSA spying revelations, it's hard to believe that President Barack Obama was once a constitutional lawyer. David K. Shipler wonders what happened to that man.

Cornel West Interviewed by the Real News Program About the 50th Anniversary of the March On Washington and the Obama Administration

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10625

Cornel West Says Civil Rights Leaders Have Failed The Movement

In an exclusive interview with The Real News, Cornel West argues civil rights leaders have failed to hold president Obama accountable - August 27, 2013

Bio

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN and C-Span as well as on his dear Brother, Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show. He can be heard weekly with Tavis Smiley on "Smiley & West", the national public radio program distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

Transcript

OSCAR LEÓN, TRNN PRODUCER: On August 23, tens of thousands of people rallied at the National Mall to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which drew a quarter million people to the nation's capital and was a key moment in the civil rights movement. The Real News' Jaisal Noor spoke to Dr. Cornel West after the march.

CORNEL WEST, PHILOSOPHER, ACTIVIST, AND AUTHOR: We had very low quality leadership today on the stage. We saw bona fide apologists for the Obama administration. There was no serious talk about Wall Street. There was no serious talk about the new Jim Crow, no serious talk about drones, no serious talk about the U.S. security state, no serious talk about the massive surveillance state. It was about just voters' rights and maybe some vague reference to jobs. Martin Luther King Jr. turns over in his grave. He turns over in his grave.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Did you take part in the march today? Why or why not?

WEST: Well, no, no, no, no. My spirits are with the people, but I wanted to make sure I heard every word of the speakers, because I've got to be on television later on and I want to make sure I have a sense of all the different voices. But, unfortunately, the rich prophetic and progressive voices of the past and present were pushed completely to the margin and we ended up with voices of those on the Obama plantation.

NOOR: What you mean by that?

WEST: Those who are wedded to Obama won't say a critical word about the Obama administration and won't say a critical word about the shortcomings [incompr.] of the White House and executive branch.

NOOR: Now, I was there for the beginning of the march and I heard a lot of references to drones, mass incarceration, prison-industrial complex, but no words on how to address those problems and what hasn't been done to address those problems.

WEST: I didn't hear a reference to any of those issues from the major speakers. So you heard it early on?

NOOR: Yeah.

WEST: Oh, but that's good news, then. That's very good. I didn't hear one word for what was projected for the American people. You had to be at the march to hear--what was it? Two-minute presentation?

NOOR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so at the--so what did the march 50 years ago mean as far as economic justice, racial justice, civil rights? What did the civil rights movement mean for public education, for housing? And 50 years later, are those same messages still [incompr.]

WEST: Well, 50 years ago we were dealing with an American terrorism call Jim Crow, and you had a social movement that was expanding, you had a social movement that was intensifying, and you had Martin King, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and other voices emerging. Today you have a black leadership that is captive and deferential to the Obama administration that has most visible presence. You've got voices on the side--Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, and others. But for the most part it is so tied to the Obama administration, we cannot get any truth-telling. Not at all.

NOOR: Now, I interviewed about ten people at the march [incompr.] people that had taken part in the march in '63, and they were there, and they themselves were not willing to be critical of the current administration. But [crosstalk]
WEST: That's the whole atmosphere.

NOOR: --show lack of leadership [crosstalk]

WEST: Absolutely. An atmosphere has been created that is so protective that people can't be free to speak their minds, to speak in the name of justice when the Obama administration falls short, as with drones, the captivity to Wall Street, silence on new Jim Crow, and so on.

NOOR: And why is it important that the leadership of this march address those issues that were like you said. He didn't mention Wall Street [crosstalk]

WEST: Those are the major issues of our day. Those are the issues of the American empire. Those are the issues that the world itself is looking for leaders and black leaders to speak to.

NOOR: And the fact that Al Sharpton, the National Action Network, they ran this march, they give out the press credentials--talk about his position on things like housing, on public education. He supported Race to the Top.

WEST: No. I mean, you know, he's my dear brother, but he is a bona fide house negro on the Obama plantation, and that's how house negroes behave. They don't want to hear the truth of the underside of their boss. It's just a fact.
NOOR: So one of the key components of the civil rights movement was fighting for civil rights and public education for everybody. Now--.

WEST: This brother right here would talk about public education.

NOOR: Well, I'll have to talk to you after that.

WEST: Interview this brother. Interview--he got something to say. Absolutely.

NOOR: So Dr. King believed in a universal public education [crosstalk]

WEST: Yes, he did.

NOOR: --everybody. Obama has endorsed Race to the Top competition, charter schools--great schools for some people, but not for everybody. Al Sharpton has endorsed that. So talk about the significance of that and the fact that voices that support public education for everybody, voices that support teachers unions, which were a huge part of the civil rights movement--. Dr. King--someone told me today Dr. King died fighting against the privatization of unions. So talk about [incompr.]

WEST: Well, he died fighting with sanitation workers to try to promote their dignity and that they have access to a living wage. But no, as I said before, I mean, unfortunately, brother Al Sharpton has fallen lockstep with the Obama administration. And when you're on the plantation, you don't oppose the master in the big house. It's just a fact.
So it's not just private education. Stop-and-frisk was the same way. This brother and I had to get arrested a year before they got the green light from the White House to fight stop-and-frisk because the mayor of New York City is such a close friend of the president.

NOOR: Now, you were part of the movement that put stop-and-frisk on the map.

WEST: Well, this brother here called it. We called it together. Yeah.

NOOR: You were part of that movement that got stop-and-frisk addressed by the media, this huge public reaction [incompr.] months after your arrest and others' arrests. It got addressed. And this movement rose and it get talked about. You had--I looked at this on Google News--50 mentions of stop-and-frisk three years before the arrests that you took part in, thousands of mentions afterwards. And public opinion turned against it. Public opinion was for stop-and-frisk before. It's against it now. You have--the judge ruled against stop-and-frisk. New York City has now passed the Community Safety Act, which bans racial profiling. Yet Obama has suggested that Ray Kelly be promoted [crosstalk] security. But talk about the significance of that [crosstalk]

WEST: No, Ray Kelly is the poster child for racial profiling in America. Barack Obama said, he's outstanding; his values are my values. So you can see the hypocrisy of calling, on the one hand, a critique--.

NOOR: What's your reaction to that? Yeah.

WEST: My reaction to it is outrage, 'cause I don't like hypocrisy. He talked about racial profiling in his own case in regard to his brother Trayvon Martin. Then he calls to appoint somebody who is the poster child for racial profiling to head homeland security. So it's ridiculous.

Katrina vanden Heuvel On the Dire Necessity Of Fighting On Behalf of the Unemployed and the Ongoing Struggle for Public Education and Teachers Unions in Chicago

http://www.thenation.com/blog/175162/do-we-have-will-fight-jobless#axzz2YbWzypus

 

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL 

Do we have the will to fight for the jobless 
by Katrina vanden Heuvel 

July 9, 2013 

The Washington Post

Job seekers wait in line at a construction job fair. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Turmoil in Egypt. Edward Snowden’s travel plans. Immigration reform’s fortunes. Obamacare’s troubles. The Weiner-Spitzer return to politics. There’s no shortage of items absorbing political energy and media bandwidth. But simmering below all of this is a crisis that goes without the immediate attention it demands. Last Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yet another month of lackluster jobs numbers. While Washington has long since lost any sense of urgency regarding the jobs crisis, this is an issue that continues to poll at the top of Americans’ concerns.

Our economy is stuck at just over 2 percent growth, and the rate of productivity is worse than anemic. We have hit a point where an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent inspires cheers of “it could’ve been worse!” The result is a painful “new normal” for too many of our fellow Americans.

Few commentators even mention that most of the 195,000 jobs added last month, as well as the ones added in the last few years, are low-paying, temporary, part time and usually without benefits. Much of the job growth we have seen is in restaurant, retail and temporary work — the sort of jobs that rarely offer basic security, let alone a foothold for people to climb into the middle class.

For working families, the struggle is painful, persistent and real: Hourly wages have plummeted to record lows, while executive pay has soared to record highs. There is no longer an income gap; there is now an income gulf. In 1978, the average American chief executive earned 26.5 times more than the average worker. Today, that gap is four times larger, with chief executives taking home 206 times more than average workers.
 
The crisis is disproportionately affecting minorities and younger Americans. Youth unemployment is at a staggering 16.1 percent, while African Americans are at 13.7 percent and Latinos are at 9.1 percent. The picture we are left with is of a severe shortage of jobs, in which millions of Americans drop out of the labor force in frustration and despair.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party, not least its “intellectuals,” such as Paul Ryan, has come to fetishize the values of Ayn Rand — radical individualism, a hatred of government intervention and spending — and the sort of austerity policies that have proved to be a disaster all over the world. They display adoration for the wealthy and apathy toward the working, and non-working, families that they claim to represent.

Recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that after four years of recovery, we’re only one-fifth of the way out of the hole left by the recession. At this rate, we won’t close the jobs gap until 2020. That’s too long for out-of-work Americans who continue to suffer.

Fortunately, some in the media are speaking out. And dedicated lawmakers, including members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and other thoughtful Democrats in both the House and the Senate, continue to introduce strong, smart bills to put people back to work. They are stymied only by the wrongheaded belief that debt, not joblessness, is our central challenge — and by GOP obstructionism that has paralyzed the capital.

Indeed, despite the stagnation, solutions to our problem abound.

With interest rates at a historic low, now is the time to invest in job creation and rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure. We could listen to 72 percent of the country and put unemployed Americans to work on government-funded projects to shore up aging bridges, roadways, and schools. President Obama and others have proposed a passel of infrastructure legislation that could put people back to work and transform our nation’s landscape.

They have also proposed major investments in education, especially in preschool, to prepare tomorrow’s workforce. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has been a fierce advocate of job creation, successfully included a provision in the Senate’s recently passed immigration bill to invest $1.5 billion in expanding job opportunities for young people.

Instead of giving tax breaks to companies that move their assets and jobs to distant shores, we should offer tax incentives to companies that create jobs at home.

We could and should tie executive pay to average employee pay in a company, expand the earned income tax credit and raise the threshold for paying payroll taxes. And as Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) has noted, in the wealthiest nation in the world, “the people with so much of the wealth bought lobbyists and influence to get loopholes for themselves so that they would not have to pay for the civilization that is America.” That’s why he introduced a bill to create a financial transaction tax, which would tax Wall Street to rebuild Main Street.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has stitched together an array of strong proposals in its Back to Work Budget, which ought to be a starting point for a serious jobs push by Congress.

There are plenty of good ideas, plenty of good bills and plenty of good legislators willing to fight on behalf of the millions of Americans who simply want a decent job. As Obama gears up to spend the summer focused on the economy, isn’t it time to summon the energy and the political will to solve the crisis before our eyes?

Read more from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter

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http://www.thenation.com/article/175085/chicago-rising?page=full#axzz2YdOi05k3

Chicago Rising!

by Rick Perlstein

July 2, 2013
The Nation

A resurgent protest culture fights back against Rahm Emanuel’s austerity agenda.

Karen Lewis, center, president of the CTU is joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, and United States Representative Bobby Rush, right, during a demonstration and march over the a plan to close fifty-four Chicago Public Schools through Chicago's downtown Wednesday, March 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
 
On a sunny saturday this past May, far down on the city’s black South Side where corner stores house their cashiers behind bulletproof plexiglass, about 150 activists assembled at Jesse Owens Community Academy. In just a few days, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s appointed Board of Education would vote on the largest simultaneous school closing in recent history. Owens, along with fifty-three other public schools, was on the chopping block. A recent Chicago Tribune/WGN poll found that more than 60 percent of Chicago citizens opposed the closings, and a healthy cross section of them had turned out for the first of three straight days of marches in protest.

Women in red Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) T-shirts registered participants; a vanload of purple-shirted SEIU marchers lingered in excited anticipation; an activist from the city’s Anti-Eviction Campaign, which breaks into and takes over foreclosed houses, donned a parade marshal’s orange vest; two street medics from the Occupy-associated Chicago Action Medical checked on some elderly marchers who arrived in a church bus. The music teacher at Owens, a former minister, asked rhetorically, “Will I have a job on Monday?” She answers her own question: “That’s OK.” A white, middle-class mother with two kids in the system, who traveled almost 100 blocks to be here, told me that she is a Republican but that “people on the right don’t like being pushed around by overbearing government.”

There were signs representing Jobs With Justice and the community-labor umbrella group Grassroots Collaborative. Another sign snarked: if rahm and his unelected school board ever set foot in a CPS school perhaps their math wouldn’t be so bad. The president of Michigan’s American Federation of Teachers spoke. Then a parent mocked public schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s recent invocation of Martin Luther King at a City Club of Chicago speech: “How can you call this a civil rights movement when you resegregate our schools, decimate our teacher corps and destabilize our neighborhoods?”

The march stepped off, passing boarded-up houses and auction signs; a CTU staffer called cadence (“I don’t know but it’s been said/ Billionaires on the Board of Ed”). Supporters shouted out in solidarity from front porches. When we passed the first of five closing schools along our seven-mile route, a clutch of 10-year-olds bearing handmade signs joined in and got turns at the bullhorn. I noticed something striking: again and again, when the CTU yell-leader barked out the first half of a new chant (“We need teachers, we need books”), everybody already knew the second line: “We need the money that Rahhhhhhm took!”

They know the words because they’ve been here before. The CTU beat Rahm in a historic strike this past September and hasn’t stopped fighting austerity and privatization since. They probably know the words across town too, where a simultaneous march along an even longer route on the even poorer black West Side was going on.

But it isn’t just CTU members who know the words. The progressive tribes have been gathering in Chicago with force, efficiency, creativity, trust and solidarity, building a bona fide, citywide protest culture. And it’s working. Days before these marches, Mayor Emanuel, who has been talked up in some circles as possibly the first Jewish president, told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I am not running for higher office—ever.” This purring protest infrastructure is one of the major reasons why.

To many national observers, this rebirth of the city’s militant protest culture seemingly came out of nowhere. But it didn’t. It’s the product of years of organizing from sources both expected and surprising. And while the radicalized CTU under the leadership of Karen Lewis has deservedly received much of the credit, the teachers union is just the current tip of the spear in a long and potentially transformative movement.

* * *
“I think we have a synergy going on here that is unrivaled in any other city,” says the Rev. C.J. Hawking, “but it could be replicated.” Hawking is originally from the far South Side neighborhood of Mount Greenwood, “where all the firefighters and cops live.” Twenty-nine years ago, she became a United Methodist pastor. Twenty years ago, during a historic strike in the downstate town of Decatur, she began devoting her ministry to labor issues. In 2007, she became executive director of Arise Chicago, a group founded in 1991 by local religious leaders who wanted to mass their voices together in favor of workers and immigrant rights. Arise created a thriving workers center in 2002, and in the fall of 2011, the group was at the center of the Week of Action, one of the most extraordinary protests in any US city in recent memory.

It began on a Monday in October. The Mortgage Bankers Association was in town for its annual meeting. From five separate sites across downtown, the marches began; late in the afternoon, they converged on the Art Institute of Chicago. There, on the rooftop pavilion of a sumptuous, brand-new wing designed by Renzo Piano, the wizards responsible for wrecking the US economy sipped champagne and networked. Or at least they tried to above the din of the peasants singing, chanting and yelling up at them from below. On any other day, the pavilion’s vertical struts look like graceful architectural ornaments, but on this day, they looked like jail bars. Martin Luther King said a long time ago, “There is nothing more powerful to dramatize a social evil than the tramp, tramp of marching feet.” He is right—still. I saw fear written on the bankers’ faces. On our faces, I saw joy.

The next day at the Pritzker family’s Hyatt Regency Hotel, sixteen activists from Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation were arrested for occupying the sky bridge between the hotel’s two wings, as hundreds in the streets below cheered them on. A group called Action Now dumped garbage from a vacant foreclosed home outside a Bank of America branch. The rest of the week was filled with similar actions. It was a triumph.

“I never entered a bank before because of my immigration status,” one participant said. “I felt uneasy, but then we became family.” “I was scared,” said another, “but my courage grew.” A third: “I can’t believe I sat in the street! That was my first time. It was great!” A fourth: “I am going to educate my children about what I did and bring them up to do the same.”

Nineteen months later, I asked Hawking how it all came together. The idea sprang from meetings the previous summer of the convening umbrella organization, which eventually became known as Stand Up! Chicago. Twenty groups were at the table: religious groups, a senior citizens group, immigrant groups, community groups and labor unions—a rare convergence in itself. “It was a little awkward at first,” she says. “We always got along. But we were also competing for all those precious grant dollars.”

It turned out to be easier to work together than anyone thought. After testing out a smaller feeder march in June, the groups met in October for an intensive week of planning using an innovative organizing model: they separated into a dozen or so groups of twenty-five. Each group contained members from different organizations; those members planned their own actions, argued together, socialized together and then, when the pivotal moment came, stuck together on the streets.

“People from Arise Chicago, workers who’d had their wages stolen, unionists from Jobs With Justice, people from the Lakeview Action Coalition…I think this [collaboration] is really unique and pivotal to understanding how we’ve been so successful,” says Hawking. “If I get caught and the light turns red, twenty-four other people are going to make sure that I get across the street.”

Stand Up! Chicago dubbed the groups “flying squads” after the Flint, Michigan, General Motors sit-down strikes of 1936–37. “Each flying squad was completely bonded to each other by the end of that week,” says Hawking. At a debriefing after one protest, an experienced activist testified that he rarely felt so free to voice an opinion, to disagree and still feel that he was heard.

I ask Hawking whether she thinks the Week of Action had a direct effect in inspiring the success of the Chicago Teachers Union the following year. “Absolutely. Absolutely,” she answers, before listing a tumult of actions that followed, one feeding into the next: a takeover of the LaSalle Street Bridge over the Chicago River on November 17; 4,000 teachers in their red CTU shirts filling the Auditorium Theatre for a rally that grew into a 10,000-person march in May 2012; the September CTU school strike itself and, three months after that, a meeting of a Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago at the St. James Cathedral, dedicated to fighting for a $15 hourly wage; Black Friday at Walmart; the spread of the fast-food strikes to Chicago; and the latest marches against Rahm’s school closings.

“Organized labor as we know it seems to be struggling,” Hawking says. “And so what did they do in the 1880s and the 1930s? Well, you start building power in the streets.”

* * *

Occupy Chicago has also played a fascinating role in the city’s burgeoning protest movement. Listen to wiry, intense and voluble Jerry Boyle, the movement’s pre-eminent legal defender. Boyle is another product of a “classic South Side Irish family”—this one, though, made up of stalwarts of the Irish Republican Army. “I’m a green diaper baby,” he says, which explains something of his fascination and passion for street politics, a subject on which he has emerged here as something of a theorist.

“It has really encouraged me to see what’s happening here over the last few years. I mean, there has always been a good, strong activist community here, but two things converged that I think made a big difference. One was, Rahm Emanuel became mayor of Chicago, OK?” (Boyle expels one of his thin, reedy laughs.) “And the second one was the particular character that Occupy Wall Street took on as a result…Rahm knew he had NATO and G-8 coming [to Chicago], and he didn’t want that mess on the streets.”

The mayor’s decision to prohibit encampments turned out to be the movement’s ironic source of power. In contrast to other occupations, Chicago Occupiers were forced to move around; they had their own flying squads. They moved, for instance, to places where the mayor was scheduled to appear in order to provoke him. “He has ambitions,” Boyle explains. “Chicago is just a steppingstone for him…and he’s kind of a control freak.” When things don’t turn out the way he wants, Emanuel famously loses his temper. “One of the best weapons the Occupiers have is, you don’t get elected president when you’ve got a temper like that.” The Occupiers would go where Rahm went, “and he left—because he didn’t want to get pissed off.”

The Occupiers also moved one mild October evening to Grant Park, the city’s front yard. Many were arrested for violating the city curfew, some violently—one reason the White House announced, in March, that the G-8 was taking its conference elsewhere. Meanwhile, lawyers working with Occupy contested their arrests before a judge named Thomas Donnelly. Late in September of 2012, Emanuel was served another humiliation—his second in weeks after losing the school strike—when Judge Donnelly dismissed the charges by ruling that the application of the curfew law violated the First Amendment because it was applied differently for different political events, such as President-elect Obama’s legendary victory party in Grant Park in 2008.

By then, Jerry had watched his Occupiers mature into seasoned, effective hell-raisers. “This whole generation of people have a first-rate education from experience,” he says. And unlike elsewhere, where Occupy energies feel dissipated, “they’re all over the place, OK? They’ve spread like a virus!” Even, he relates, in this very cafe where we’re sitting. One day, Jerry watched as the mayor and his entourage walked in. The wait staff here write the customer’s name on the cup, to call out the order when it’s ready. “And they didn’t realize he was being waited on by someone who was busted during OWS. Straight face: ‘And your name?’

“Rahm. Went. Ballistic. ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’

“The whole room is silent. The manager, also busted during OWS, says: ‘Sir, if that behavior is repeated here, we’re going to have to ask you not to come in.’”

And so Occupy Chicago is everywhere. “They go down to the South Side! They’re so clueless, they don’t care!” exclaims Jerry, imitating old-generation Chicago lefty activists who, he says, “wouldn’t be found dead on the South Side…. Just yesterday, there was a vigil and die-in down on the South Side. I see brilliant Occupiers wearin’ shirts spattered with fake blood, in handcuffs. “They’ve changed the whole face of protest in Chicago. It helped lay the foundations for what the teachers did.”

* * *

There’s another group that has changed the face of protest in Chicago, and they’ve done it indoors, sans picket signs or fake blood: the data nerds. Tom Tresser is a former Shakespearean actor who moved to the city in 1980 and soon found himself making his way into arts administration, which sparked an interest in policy. “You start asking questions. You start to look at zoning laws, city planning,” Tresser says.

When Republicans started going after the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989, Tresser began attending the Midwest Academy, a legendary training ground for Chicago organizers. In 2007, he noticed a neighborhood outrage: the Latin School of Chicago, one of the city’s toniest private high schools, was carving out a corner of Lincoln Park as its own private soccer fiefdom; the public would be permitted access only 10 percent of the time, during winter. On a shoestring, he and some neighbors filed a lawsuit. On their day in court, they were shocked to find that among the twelve lawyers lined up on the other side, one was a partner in Chicago’s most high-powered white-shoe law firm and another was the city’s chief corporation counsel.

Tresser quickly realized that “something bigger than a soccer field was at stake” in his Lincoln Park suit. At the time, Chicago had been named a finalist for the 2016 Olympics. “If we got a legal ruling that you can’t privatize a park, the Olympic bid would have been dead before it was unsealed,” he recalls. For privatizing parks on behalf of corporations were what the Games would be all about, and “we would have got nothing for it except bankruptcy.” Tresser and his neighbors weren’t going to stand for it.

“We have a massive global movement of capital,” he told me, “which, because they’ve burned their own fucking houses down through their own greed, don’t have the gilt returns that they’re used to receiving…. So the new guaranteed annual returns that big business and big capital are looking for is our assets.”

In the summer of 2009, he used his credit card to finance a trip by his core activists to Switzerland, where the International Olympics Committee was deliberating. They were armed with a book composed only of articles from the Chicago press about why a corrupt and incompetent city government would botch the Games. When the dust cleared, the Olympics went to Rio, and a consultant with knowledge of the IOC’s deliberations told Tresser that his group’s efficient presentation of information had played a significant role in the decision. Tresser, the son of a public school teacher, began conceptualizing himself as a “public defender.”

“I believe what we call ‘the public’ is under attack in America today: public housing, public education, public health, public transportation. All these things have become precious and scarce, and have actually become dirty words,” he tells seventy-five activists one April evening at a meeting of his next venture, the TIF Illumination Project.

TIF, or tax increment financing, was a potentially noble solution to fix a market failure. Developers don’t want to build in blighted areas where banks won’t lend money, thereby guaranteeing their continued blight. TIF districts are supposed to subsidize development in these underdeveloped areas essentially by borrowing against projected gains in tax revenue generated by the new construction. But in Chicago, the idea has metastasized in a particularly wicked way. TIFs became a scam to funnel public funds to wealthy private interests; the allegedly “blighted” areas came to encompass the Lyric Opera, which got TIF money to spruce up its bronze door handles, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which was pledged $15 million, in part to refurbish its bathrooms. In response to the latter scandal, activists from the anti-TIF movement marched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange bearing a golden toilet, embarrassing the company into publicly rejecting the money.

Tresser’s work is to create more stories like that one. But to get TIF money returned, you have to find it first—a frightfully difficult task. Each TIF district goes through a review panel composed of representatives from various city agencies, all of them appointed by the mayor. There is supposed to be one public representative on each panel, but that person is appointed by the local alderman and usually doesn’t have much of a clue about what’s happening. A TIF developer seeking public favor can promise to hire a certain number of locals, but there is no mechanism for evaluating whether the developer holds to the deal, and no penalty if it doesn’t. TIF projects are discussed at Chicago Development Commission meetings, but by that time they are basically done deals. No one knows the backroom process by which TIF-worthy projects are determined, though there does seem to be one constant: “If the mayor wants a project,” Tresser notes, “the project will happen.” What’s more, TIF amounts are excluded from the tax bill that property owners receive each year, which itemizes how the city is spending their money.

Finding that crucial hidden information is where the data nerds come in. “This stuff is enough to glaze your eyes over,” Tresser warns his audience, picking up his PowerPoint remote. He’s wrong; Tresser describes his first encounter with the TIF page on the city website, and the audience is rapt. His presentation features a city spreadsheet of individual projects with an unmanageable 4,588 rows, sortable by name, type or by amount of money allocated—but not by ward or neighborhood, the only information relevant to citizens who want to find out whether their community is being ripped off.

To get at that, Tresser’s team sat around his kitchen table and worked through the spreadsheet line by line, compiling their own database—a task made harder by the fact that the TIF districts bear no logical relation to the city’s fifty wards or seventy-seven official planning areas. He flips to a slide of the city’s map of 163 TIF districts. “It looks like a lady with varicose veins!” he says. The map is even harder to work with; when you click on each district, you get a PDF document. Chicago city bureaucrats love PDFs—you can’t enter information on them into database programs unless you do it by hand, which is what Tresser’s data team did. Only then were they able to arrive at some basic conclusions about a program that ate up no less than $455 million in 2011, out of total city property tax receipts of over $1.3 billion. Another even more stunning find was that each TIF district includes a fund balance, an unspent surplus that totals $1.7 billion citywide. That’s a lot of business for whichever bank gets to hold those funds—but the identity of the bank is secret, too.

Tresser begins his presentation explaining what led him to the TIF problem in the first place: hearing, over and over again, “We’re broke… sorry about your overcrowded school, sorry about your public park with no basketball hoops, sorry about the fact that you have to wait forty minutes for the bus, but we’re broke!” That is the excuse for the city’s proliferating privatization deals. It is the excuse, indeed, for Rahm’s fifty school closings.

Later, Tresser describes the even more painstaking work of breaking down TIF finances in each of the city’s fifty wards; they have been able to finish only fifteen so far. (The old trouper, who is a cueball, gets a laugh joking, “I used to have hair.”) He points to a chart indicating that the Fourth Ward, which we’re in, has $15 million in its fund balance. (“The provocative question is: What would you do to improve the ward if you had $15 million in your checking account?”) He points to another chart listing the ward’s TIF beneficiaries: twenty-one private real estate developments and one public school (one of the schools, ironically, that the school board is closing), all outside the designated blighted areas.

Tresser announces, “We want to deputize you to go to these projects and ask them what they did with your money.” He notes that while the city claims 54 percent of property taxes went to the Board of Education, if you include the money in the TIF “black box,” it’s actually only 36 percent.

“So are we broke?” Tresser asks. “It starts to get a little hazy to me.”

The local alderman, Will Burns, has sent his policy and communications director as his representative. At the beginning of the meeting, the aide announced that without TIFs, “high-quality development would not happen in the South Side community.” By the end, he is the recipient of some very hard stares. And a new cadre in Chicago’s activist army has been stirred.

Chicago school activists call this kind of work “data liberation,” and it’s been crucial to their campaign. Sorting through the data (when they could get it), they discovered that the “utilization formula” the school board was using to select which schools to keep open was based on whether homerooms were in a certain range: 20 percent above or below an “ideal enrollment” of thirty students. This means a school could average thirty-six students per classroom and still be considered underutilized. Activists had to dig that statistic out of an entirely separate pool of numbers, the district’s “empty seat” calculation. “We know it’s intentional,” explains Eric Téllez, communications and research coordinator for the Grassroots Collaborative, “to keep the public at bay and unaware of what’s going on.”

It’s not working. Such data liberations have turned into major propaganda coups for the CTU and a major driver of outrage against the school closings. So did a finding by radio station WBEZ, based on much of this same work, that of the nine empirical claims the school board was making about school closings, all nine were either inaccurate or false.

Chicago is where the spreadsheets are meeting the streets—and changing the face of politics in the city. Consider the victories of the last few years. Activists helped sink an Olympic bid that would have been a giant boondoggle and land grab (the failure was a key reason Mayor Richard Daley shocked the city by deciding not to run for re-election in 2011 after six terms). The Chicago Mercantile Exchange was embarrassed into returning $15 million in TIF money. The G-8 moved its conference out of fear of an advancing activist army. The CTU led its members in a victorious teachers strike. This kind of thing is not supposed to be possible, because teachers unions are said to be despised, especially by public school parents. But not in Chicago, where in a recent poll the most militant teachers union in the country is supported by 54 percent of parents; only 9 percent side with the mayor. That mayor came into office with national ambitions, but now his disapproval rating is 40 percent, and only 24 percent of Chicagoans believe the city is better off than it was under the also-unpopular Mayor Daley.

Watch Chicago. Watch it this September, when the school year is set to open with fifty fewer schools in operation. “So let me tell you what you’re gonna do,” shouted CTU president Karen Lewis in a rally last March. “On the first day of school, you show up at your real school! Don’t let these people take your schools!” The conditions are ripe for such civil disobedience: the bonds of trust within a variegated activist community; a growing culture of militancy extending all the way down to formerly quiescent middle-class parents; strategic smarts, passion, momentum. Brazil, Bulgaria, Taksim Square… Chicago. The next battle in the global war against austerity, privatization and corruption just might spark off right here.

Past shuttered schools and glass-strewn vacant lots, the Chicago Teachers Union documented the likely toll of Rahm Emanuel’s latest disastrous education plan, in Rick Perlstein’s April 5 blog entry, “A New Chicago Freedom Ride [2].”

Read more: Chicago Rising! http://www.thenation.com/print/article/175085/chicago-rising#ixzz2Ydg2Uj9J 

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WE MUST DEMAND JUSTICE IN THE BRUTAL RACIST MURDER OF TRAYVON MARTIN!

Trayvon Martin, 1995-2012

http://www.thenation.com/article/166887/justice-trayvon-martin?rel=emailNation

All,

So the first goddamn question I have is this: Are WE (meaning especially the over 45 million black people in this country) GONNA DO ANYTHING ABOUT THIS RACIST MURDER? Second question: Are WE going to DEMAND that the federal law enforcement authorities --which is to say the Obama Administration!-- via its Justice Department and the FBI not only "investigate" this blatant vicious coldblooded murder of a 17 year old boy who "happened to be" an African American male but also immediately arrest and take the 28 year old murderer into police custody? Third question: Are WE going to aggressively organize a massive national movement against the ongoing white supremacist stalking, profiling, harassment, and murdering of black men throughout the United States by the police, private citizens, and the criminal justice system? Next question: Are WE going to sit back once again and allow this domestic terrorism against our People to continue sanctioned and supported by the State? Are WE going to DEMAND that the President of these United Hates--yeah you know the one everyone keeps ritually referring to as "our first black president"--immediately call a national press conference to directly address and condemn these terrorist acts, and openly assure the national black community that he is seriously committed with all the power and authority that he and his state apparatus has in its possession to attacking and institutionally resolving once and for all the severe systemic and structural crisis of racial profiling and racist vigilante violence in this country? Because you can bet everything you own and will ever have that if the situation was reversed and black police officers, private citizens, self proclaimed "neighborhood watch commanders", store employees, random individuals on the street etc. were systematically stalking, harassing, and murdering white American males that Obama would have LONG AGO called just such a news conference and not only assured white American citizens of justice against such ongoing racist terrorist acts by "the blacks" but both he and Congress (and reinforced on every conceivable level by the Supreme Court!) would have passed so many stringent and ironclad laws and edicts against such terrorism so fast that your head would spin and never stop. The President would have declared martial law by now if millions of white citizens had demanded it (and you KNOW they would have)...

So do WE have the guts, the determination, and the deep respect for our own humanity and that of our loved ones throughout this country to GO TO WAR against this "New Jim Crowism" and to relentlessly and aggressively and tirelessly DEMAND that the federal and every single state, local, and municipal government do the same?

WELL DO WE?

Kofi

Justice for Trayvon Martin
by Mychal Denzel Smith
March 19, 2012
The Nation


Here’s what we know: Trayvon Martin is dead.
 
On February 26, during halftime of the NBA All-Star game, the 17-year-old high school junior went to a nearby store in the Orlando suburb where he was visiting his father and stepmother in order to buy some candy for his younger brother. He returned to his family a six-foot, three-inch, 140-pound corpse.
 
We know who killed him.

George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old college student who had appointed himself captain of the neighborhood watch for the Retreat at Twin Lakes gated community, admits to shooting Martin with a 9mm handgun. Zimmerman spotted Martin and followed him in his car before placing a 911 call to report a “suspicious" person in the area.

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something,” Zimmerman told the 911 operator. “He’s just staring, looking at all the houses.” What happened in the approximately twenty minutes between the time this call took place and when Zimmerman fired the shot that killed Martin is disputed—although recordings of the 911 call provide chilling hints—but what we do know is that Zimmerman claims he shot the young man in self-defense. This was enough for the police to let him go. Zimmerman was not and has, as of this writing, yet to be arrested.

We also know that Trayvon was black.

There are some who would argue that race is not a factor here. We’ve heard that Zimmerman is Hispanic—but this is not a defense. Neither is the statement released by Zimmerman’s father, which employs the “he has black friends” claim. Mentoring two black children and word from a black neighbor that she would entrust Zimmerman with her life doesn’t preclude him from holding racist views of black men. If it did, how then does he explain what made Martin a suspicious enough figure that it warranted Zimmerman leaving his vehicle and getting into an altercation with the young man?

What was the threat? We know that the only items retrieved from Martin’s person were a bag of Skittles, a can of iced tea, and some money, so unless Zimmerman felt he was in danger of contracting a deadly form of diabetes or a lethal cavity, he has more explaining to do. But whether the item is as innocuous as a bag of candy—or, as in Amadou Diallo’s case, a wallet—the assumption is that the natural state of black men is armed and dangerous.

If Martin was so threatening, why didn’t Zimmerman wait for the police to arrive, particularly after being told not to follow the suspect? (“We don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher told him.) Why have three witnesses come forward to say that in the moments before the shooting they heard crying that stopped as soon as the bullet fired? Was Martin crying in anger? And what if he was? Would he not have a right to be angry that a man was stalking him for no reason? And if Martin was the aggressor, how did he manage to get a man over a hundred pounds heavier than himself to the ground? What injuries did Zimmerman sustain that would lead us to believe there was a struggle that left him in the grip of a life-and-death situation? The 911 tapes that have been released suggest that the two shots that were fired, one from a distance, the other the fatal one from close range. Does self-defense require a warning shot?

That these questions are likely to go unanswered in court of law is thanks to Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which places the threshold for self-defense so low that you need little more than your word to show that your life was in danger. Zimmerman’s description of events was enough for the police, who evidently feel they know all that they need to know to determine that Zimmerman should be free to walk the streets while Martin’s family mourns. The crime of killing a black person still is not greater than the crime of being black. And, as one of the family’s attorneys asked, “Do we really believe that if Trayvon Martin had pulled the trigger, he would not have been arrested?”

We know that being a black man in America is a life-threatening occupation, whether you’re a 22-year-old in Oakland or a 13-year-old in Chicago or a 17 year-old in Orlando. The characters change, but the script remains the same. When everyone has had their say, another young black man has been killed for doing nothing more than being a young black man.

What we don’t yet know is what it will take to get justice for Trayvon.

A good place to start would be signing the Change.org petition started by his parents calling on Florida’s 18th District State’s Attorney to prosecute Zimmerman. Trayvon is dead, and black men everywhere live in constant fear they could be the next Trayvon. The very least we can do is put his killer in handcuffs.


[WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO ABOUT RACIAL TERRORISM IN THIS COUNTRY?]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/opinion/blow-the-curious-case-of-trayvon-martin.html?_r=1

All,

More on the wanton racist murder of 17 year old Trayvon Martin...I'm so filled with pure sputtering rage writing this that I can't even breathe properly at this point. All I know is that we had better do something about this NOW. We have to stop this racist carnage against black males NOW!!!!!

Kofi

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Curious Case of Trayvon Martin
By CHARLES M. BLOW
March 16, 2012
New York Times

Damon Winter/The New York Times
Charles M. Blow

“He said that Tray was gone.”

That’s how Sybrina Fulton, her voice full of ache, told me she found out that her 17-year-old son, Trayvon Martin, had died. In a wrenching telephone call, the boy’s father, who had taken him to visit a friend, told her that Trayvon had been gunned down in a gated townhouse community in Sanford, Fla., outside Orlando.

“He said, ‘Somebody shot Trayvon and killed him.’ And I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ ” Fulton continued in disbelief. “I said ‘How do you know that’s Trayvon?’ And he said because they showed him a picture.”

That was Feb. 27, one day after Trayvon was shot. The father thought that he was missing, according to the family’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, but the boy’s body had actually been taken to the medical examiner’s office and listed as a John Doe.

The father called the Missing Persons Unit. No luck. Then he called 911. The police asked the father to describe the boy, after which they sent officers to the house where the father was staying. There they showed him a picture of the boy with blood coming out of his mouth.

This is a nightmare scenario for any parent, and the events leading to Trayvon’s death offer little comfort — and pose many questions.

Trayvon had left the house he and his father were visiting to walk to the local 7-Eleven. On his way back, he caught the attention of George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old neighborhood watch captain, who was in a sport-utility vehicle. Zimmerman called the police because the boy looked “real suspicious,” according to a 911 call released late Friday. The operator told Zimmerman that officers were being dispatched and not to pursue the boy.

Zimmerman apparently pursued him anyway, at some point getting out of his car and confronting the boy. Trayvon had a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea. Zimmerman had a 9 millimeter handgun.

The two allegedly engaged in a physical altercation. There was yelling, and then a gunshot.

When police arrived, Trayvon was face down in the grass with a fatal bullet wound to the chest. Zimmerman was standing with blood on his face and the back of his head and grass stains on his back, according to The Orlando Sentinel.

Trayvon’s lifeless body was taken away, tagged and held. Zimmerman was taken into custody, questioned and released. Zimmerman said he was the one yelling for help. He said that he acted in self-defense. The police say that they have found no evidence to dispute Zimmerman’s claim.

One other point: Trayvon is black. Zimmerman is not.

Trayvon was buried on March 3. Zimmerman is still free and has not been arrested or charged with a crime.

Yet the questions remain: Why did Zimmerman find Trayvon suspicious? Why did he pursue the boy when the 911 operator instructed him not to? Why did he get out of the car, and why did he take his gun when he did? How is it self-defense when you are the one in pursuit? Who initiated the altercation? Who cried for help? Did Trayvon’s body show evidence of a struggle? What moved Zimmerman to use lethal force?

This case has reignited a furor about vigilante justice, racial-profiling and equitable treatment under the law, and it has stirred the pot of racial strife.

As the father of two black teenage boys, this case hits close to home. This is the fear that seizes me whenever my boys are out in the world: that a man with a gun and an itchy finger will find them “suspicious.” That passions may run hot and blood run cold. That it might all end with a hole in their chest and hole in my heart. That the law might prove insufficient to salve my loss.

That is the burden of black boys in America and the people that love them: running the risk of being descended upon in the dark and caught in the cross-hairs of someone who crosses the line.

The racial sensitivity of this case is heavy. Trayvon’s parents have said their son was murdered. Crump, the family’s lawyer, told me, “You know, if Trayvon would have been the triggerman, it’s nothing Trayvon Martin could have said to keep police from arresting him Day 1, Hour 1.” Even the police chief recognizes this reality, even while disputing claims of racial bias in the investigation: “Our investigation is color blind and based on the facts and circumstances, not color. I know I can say that until I am blue in the face, but, as a white man in a uniform, I know it doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”

Zimmerman has not released a statement, but his father delivered a one-page letter to The Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. According to the newspaper, the statement said that Zimmerman is “Hispanic and grew up in a multiracial family.” The paper quotes the letter as reading, “He would be the last to discriminate for any reason whatsoever” and continues, “The media portrayal of George as a racist could not be further from the truth.” And disclosures made since the shooting complicate people’s perception of fairness in the case.

According to Crump, the father was told that one of the reasons Zimmerman wasn’t arrested was because he had a “squeaky clean” record. It wasn’t. According to the local news station WFTV, Zimmerman was arrested in 2005 for “battery on a law enforcement officer.”

Furthermore, ABC News reported on Tuesday that one of the responding officers “corrected a witness after she told him that she heard the teen cry for help.” And The Miami Herald published an article on Thursday that said three witnesses had heard the “desperate wail of a child, a gunshot, and then silence.”

WFTV also reported this week that the officer in charge of the scene when Trayvon was shot was also in charge of another controversial case. In 2010, a lieutenant’s son was videotaped attacking a black homeless man. The officer’s son also was not initially arrested in that case. He was later arrested when the television station broke the news.

Although we must wait to get the results from all the investigations into Trayvon’s killing, it is clear that it is a tragedy. If no wrongdoing of any sort is ascribed to the incident, it will be an even greater tragedy.

One of the witnesses was a 13-year-old black boy who recorded a video for The Orlando Sentinel recounting what he saw. The boy is wearing a striped polo shirt, holding a microphone, speaking low and deliberately and has the heavy look of worry and sadness in his eyes. He describes hearing screaming, seeing someone on the ground and hearing gunshots. The video ends with the boy saying, “I just think that sometimes people get stereotyped, and I fit into the stereotype as the person who got shot.”

And that is the burden of black boys, and this case can either ease or exacerbate it.



I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at chblow@nytime