Shadowproof: Recent Episodes
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After eight years, we have decided that it is time to shut down Shadowproof, but that does not mean that the independent journalism that we fostered is coming entirely to an end.
In a span of time defined by numerous global crises and an ever-shifting online media landscape, readers like you helped us develop an oasis for incisive reporting on prisons, policing, whistleblowers, and crackdowns on political activists.
So many members and donors made it possible for Shadowproof to hire over 90 freelance journalists to cover stories and perspectives that were often outside the beats of most other publications. We were able to pay journalists fairly and give them a solid platform as many major media organizations were uninterested in their work or treated them poorly in the context of layoffs and politically motivated firings.
There is so much to be proud of in the last eight years, and we can’t recount all of it here. The Marvel Cooke Fellowship, overseen by co-founder Brian Nam-Sonenstein, was a remarkable success thanks to the support of Mariame Kaba and dozens of subscribers, who funded in-depth reporting from incarcerated and marginalized writers on the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex.
Shadowproof further distinguished itself through regular coverage of the extradition case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Co-founder Kevin Gosztola drew from this reporting to write a book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange, that was published in March of this year.
Countless other reporting projects – from our dogged coverage of the prison strikes of the 2010s to our on-the-ground reporting at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, early investigations into privatized prison health care, our development of model Medicare For All legislation, reporting trips to the UK to cover the Assange case – made critical interventions and contested mainstream narratives and, in some cases, mainstream silence on major events of the time.
Yet in the past couple of years, we have moved away from the Shadowproof website. We propped up other media platforms, like newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels, that gave us more outlets for sharing our work. Kevin has produced the bulk of his journalism on Assange, whistleblowers, government secrecy, and press freedom through The Dissenter Newsletter, which began as a project of Shadowproof.
Brian recently joined the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) as a senior editor and researcher, where he has been publishing the bulk of his work on police and prisons. Meanwhile, the media technology space has radically changed and in some ways introduced tools that made it simpler and less cumbersome to publish work without operating a full website and organization. And so, like all good things, we have made the decision to celebrate our accomplishments and fully transition away from Shadowproof.
Kevin will continue his extensive coverage of Assange through The Dissenter Newsletter, and if you are not yet a subscriber, we strongly encourage you to sign up. He is also developing a YouTube channel to accompany his written journalism. He is still on Twitter (@kgosztola), and he has updated a Substack account here to make it easier for readers to follow postings that appear on several platforms.
Brian plans to continue his collaborations with incarcerated writers and his work covering the abolition movement, including through the Beyond Prisons podcast. You can follow him on Twitter (@bsonenstein) for updates on such projects in the coming months.
Beginning today, Shadowproof memberships will transition to supporting The Dissenter newsletter. Members will receive an email with more information, but if need help making changes to your subscription, please contact Brian at brian@shadowproof.com.
This change will present new challenges. Kevin Gosztola will continue his journalism at The Dissenter newsletter but without much of the supportive infrastructure that was built through Shadowproof.
Please chip in a few dollars to help Kevin cover some of the operating expenses that he will have to shoulder.
Go to thedissenter.org/donate to support his work.
Finally, we are immensely grateful to all the journalists and writers who collaborated with us. In particular, Dan Wright, Kit O’Connell, and Roqayah Chamseddine deserve special mention for working as founding Shadowproof staff members. Their talents, perspectives, and contributions were essential to starting and shaping our work over the years. We would like to thank Rania Khalek, Kim Wilson, Maya Schenwar, Jane Hamsher, and many others for their friendship and support over the years, without which none of this would have been possible. We’d also like to thank our families, whose love and encouragement have always been crucial to our ability to experiment and take risks with this work.
We would also like to thank our many freelance contributors over the years, listed below. We encourage you to seek them out, follow their work, and support them. And if you are a publisher, we highly encourage you to work with them.
We are honored to have published the work of the following writers, and want to give special thanks (from most recent to earliest contributor) to:
Raymond Williams
Christopher Blackwell
Emily Nonko
Jessica Phoenix Sylvia
Sierra Dickey
C. Dreams
Jovan Strong
Lawrence Jenkins
Minali Aggarwal
Brendan Maslauskas Dunn
James Jones
Caren Holmes
Luke Ottenhof
Sam Bishop
Nicole Froio
Felix Sitthivong
Vanessa Taylor
Larissa Banitt
Daniel Moritz-Rabson
James Anderson
Kit Klarenberg
Mohamed Elmaazi
Caleb Brennan
Juan Moreno Haines
Eoin Higgins
Rahsaan Thomas
Rebecca Chowdhury
Lucia Geng
Michael Sainato
Tom Secker
Tamar Sarai
Amanda Abrams
Citlali Pizarro
Ken Klippenstein
Emma Rosewood
Brian Zayatz
Will Lennon
Ella Fassler
Billie Anania
Kiran Misra
Clare Busch
Lex McMenamin
Joergen Ostensen
Jared Ware
James Potuck
Jonathan Michels
Steven Yoder
Maddie Rose
Rainier Harris
Adam Mahoney
Reina Sultan
Jessica Buxbaum
Jonathan Ben-Menachem
Tavleen Tarrant
Halley Bondy
Katie Dancey-Downs
Devyn Springer
Ian Alexander
Adryan Corcione
Arvind Dilawar
Mike Kuhlenbeck
Will Parrish
Camille Fassett
Miles Quarles
Natascha Elena Uhlmann
Michael Arria
Jon Walker
Joanne Leon
Aaron Cynic
Will Cox
Will Pierce
Lauren Gill
Siobhan O’Leary
Ashoka Jegroo
Brandon Smith
Nick Musgrave
Larissa Banitt
Rory Fleming
Elizabeth King
Willie Burnley Jr.
Brian Saady
Brandon Jordan
Paul Gottinger
Branko Marcetic
Steve Horn
Gadeir Abbas
Zachary Senn
Ben Foldy
Desiree Kane
Laura Muth
We plan to keep the Shadowproof archive online for the foreseeable future. (If you wish to help fund that work, you can do so through donations and subscriptions to the Dissenter).
Running an independent media platform is difficult and often unglamorous work, but it is essential given the media landscape which all too often feels like a rocky wasteland.
We have learned so much from those we mentioned and many others, and we strongly encourage the next generation of young independent publishers to stick with journalism, even if it is a struggle. Your efforts are desperately needed in these times. We encourage independent publishers to make themselves available to mentor and support emerging publications focused on voices for liberation.
This is intergenerational work, and it cannot be done in isolation or with a highly competitive and cutthroat attitude. It is critical that independent media organizations and media workers work together, are accountable to each other, and take their role in our movements seriously. They must do everything they can to pay people well, empower them in the editorial process, and help them develop their skills.
We cannot afford to lose more journalists to this unforgiving media economy that has already pushed so many people out.
Thank you for believing in our work and supporting us.
The post Shadowproof Is Shutting Down appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
I board the transport in an orange jumpsuit, shackled and cuffed at the waist, one of many prisoners in exodus from the Washington State Reformatory.
The rattling of our chains fills the cabin as we find places to sit. I slide into a seat with a small window high on the wall next to me—the coveted seat with a “view.” Nervous chatter ensues as we wait to be shipped to the next prison.
In 2021, during the pandemic, the Washington Department of Corrections (WDOC), experienced a steep decrease in prison admissions (and therefore a great loss of revenue). In response, the department announced it would close the Washington State Reformatory (WSR), the oldest unit in the Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, Washington. This caused a rift among incarcerated abolitionists: some saw it as a win for the movement, while others felt it was a win for the prison industrial complex.
Two years after WSR closed, the latter group feels vindicated as it appears the state created an illusion of decarceration. The lessons that can be learned from these events will prove invaluable to future generations fighting for change. Otherwise, we may be left celebrating battles while we are all losing the war.
By the time the bus gets moving, the still air and hot breath of prisoners have fogged the windows. I stand and strain against my shackles, searching for a clear corner of glass from which to catch a peek. In my effort, the leg irons bite into my ankles: a price I willingly pay to see the world.
As we roll away from the walls and grounds of that prison, I am filled with a sense of loss. Not for that 6×9 foot cell — a cell so small I am forced to sidesaddle the toilet to take a dump — but loss for what has just been taken from me.
The prison may have closed, but for me, shackled in the back of the transport, removed from my support networks, advocacy community, platform, and education, this did not feel like abolition. As I’ve learned, we sometimes hold different definitions of the word. But I know my chances for freedom diminish with every mile we put between us and the walls of that prison.
TEAR IT ALL DOWNYesterday, a prisoner jokingly asked a guard walking by “What do you think about abolition?”
The guard facetiously answered, “Sure. Tear it all down.” Then walked off shaking his head in laughter.
This trope is unfortunately prevalent in the minds of many. How telling and shocking would it have been if he instead replied, “Sure. Go ahead and build something new.” If that was his answer, even in jest, our movement would be in a better place.
The tragedy is that some members of our movement are so narrowly focused on the idea that abolition is defined by tearing things down that the impulse to dismantle can reign without regard for a longer vision of transformation. Or, as was the case at WSR, the impulse to dismantle can even compromise existing abolitionist infrastructure.
When a plan to shut down a prison or precinct or to release prisoners under reform schemes is presented, it is easy to jump at the opportunity for what appears to be a win. Wins are, after all, very hard to come by. Who can blame good-hearted people who wish to seize apparent opportunities for decarceration? But the reality can be more complicated. This can make us vulnerable to exploitation. Our impulse to jump at apparent victories should be tempered with caution and foresight when the win is offered too willingly by our oppressors.
When, in the summer of 2021, WDOC announced it would close WSR, abolitionists began to choose sides, both for and against the closure.
The voice of prisoners in favor of the closure was led by a prisoner named Felix Sitthivong, who published an article in Inquest titled “Divide and Conquer.” In the article, Sitthivong excoriated abolitionist prisoners who did not view the closure as abolition and argued that the material conditions of confinement at WSR justified the closure. Sitthivong stated he stood on the ideal that “prison closures really mean prison closures.”
The other side of the argument was led, in part, by another prisoner named Tomas Keen, who published an article in the same publication titled “A Warm Closure.” In this article, Keen exposed WDOC for couching the closure of WSR as decarceration while, in reality, this maneuver would instead increase the carceral footprint and harm communities of color. Keen argued that “WSR is, quite literally, the paradigm for restorative, community-focused facilities.”
But the lens of history has helped settle this debate. The social and political landscape that emerged in Washington prisons since WSR’s closure shines a bright light on the harm caused to abolitionist formations and reveals sinister designs by WDOC to eradicate programs, organizations, and communities working towards liberation. In order to understand why some abolitionist prisoners fought to keep a prison open, one would have to know why WSR was important to the movement.
Built in 1910, WSR was one of the oldest prisons in the state. The walls surrounding the prison endured cycles of crumbling and repair, leaving a mosaic of partially whitewashed brick as a testament to the century of its carceral presence. It leaked, had sewage problems, and its concrete floors sagged, but WSR was a power center for prisoner-led abolition groups and liberation efforts in Washington state. No greater collective of prisoners fighting for change and freedom could be found anywhere else in Washington.
Prisoners confined to WSR benefited from their proximity to the Seattle metropolitan area and the long history of community involvement found there. WSR held onto remnants of a culture predating the era of mass incarceration, and organizations there, like The Black Prisoners Caucus (BPC) and Concerned Lifer’s Organization (CLO)—both born in 1972—were older than some of the bricks in the walls.
These prisoner-led organizations had taken to heart a 2014 article by Michelle Alexander, How To Dismantle the New Jim Crow, and were deploying the three actionable steps she listed for change. Prisoners at WSR were actively engaged in (1) Awakening, (2) Building an Underground Railroad, and (3) Working for Abolition.
The CLO and BPC were providing great and loyal service towards Awakening. Every Monday and Friday night, the CLO and BPC hosted members of the community, volunteers, and lawmakers to engage in robust discussions on the harms of the carceral state. Both groups held annual conventions where several hundred members of free society would come and hear prisoners give speeches that educated the public on the need for change. Annually, the CLO and BPC interacted with around a thousand free citizens each year.
Through work done at WSR, relationships were cultivated, and people in free society were able to see prisoners as members of their communities working towards common goals. This opened pathways to clemency for prisoners engaged in the work. By 2020, people in the community tied to WSR as volunteers were working in tandem with prisoners confined there to — as Alexander called for — “make a break for freedom in the era of mass incarceration.” These social structures served as an Underground Railroad, with the prison itself a kind of Harper’s Ferry. Prisoners across the state knew that if they wanted to sail toward clemency, WSR was the place where they could find a boat.
Prisoners at WSR were stringently working for abolition. This work included dismantling the preschool-to-prison and foster-care-to-prison pipelines. CLO and BPC legislative committees worked in tandem to draft bills and lead legislative efforts for change. The BPC and CLO created a college, University Beyond Bars, where all prisoners—regardless of time structure or immigration status—could pursue higher education. In 2018, the BPC and CLO worked with Collective Justice to create HEAL, a class where prisoners worked with crime victims in restorative justice processes focused on healing from trauma.
By January 2020, prisoners at WSR had built enough momentum to organize the Rally To End Mass Incarceration, where hundreds of protestors showed up on a cold winter night demanding change at the steps of the state capitol. We were just getting started.
In Washington State, there was no movement to end mass incarceration that had the reach and diversity of the one led by the prisoners confined at WSR. In circles at WSR, people of every race, religious affiliation, or demographic—even members of rival gangs—found common cause and solidarity in collective efforts for transformation. Here, for a time, the movement was truly beautiful.
And then the COVID pandemic happened. Everything came to a halt. The murder of George Floyd happened, and conversations on abolition increased with the Defund The Police demand. Having lost the illusion of the moral high ground for a brief moment in time, the power of the carceral state seemed in jeopardy. As the pandemic raged into 2021, WDOC faced a financial and staffing crisis, bleeding human capital as prisoners were released under decriminalization laws. The carceral state was weakening and looking for strategic ways to maintain the status quo in the face of sweeping change.
According to a WDOC News Spotlight article, the department had seen a 54 percent decrease in prison admissions during the height of the pandemic from March 2020 to June 2021. The lack of human capital and a proposed budget decrease of $80 million over two years by Governor Jay Inslee made other stressors, such as concerns about overtime pay for guards, primary concerns for WDOC. Here, the state claimed to lose more staff than it could retain and that these vacancies led to increases in overtime pay. The proposed closure would allow the state to immediately reduce high levels of overtime, noting that “nearly a quarter of those hours were incurred at the Monroe Correctional Complex,” which included WSR, WDOC’s prime target for closure.
But, this proposed closure was to be a “warm closure,” meaning the prison would leave the lights on and keep a skeleton crew of guards working nearly empty units. This type of closure would allow the prison to reopen, at a later date, without having to bring the 100-year-old infrastructure up to code before repopulating the cellblocks. Two years later, WSR is now gearing up to do just that.
WARM CLOSURERobert Alderson, one of a handful of prisoners who remained at WSR after the “warm closure,” recently transferred from there to the Washington Corrections Center. He told Shadowproof, “When I left, [WDOC was] taking bids to repaint and resurface the units. They just put new mattresses in all the cells and installed a brand new WiFi system.”
“The closure of WSR was abolition in one respect,” said Darrell Jackson, member of the Black Prisoners Caucus and Co-Chair of BPC TEACH. “It abolished those groups. The things DOC took during the pandemic were the very things you guys had there at WSR. We didn’t have those things at the other prisons where I was at, but because you guys had them there, we were able to fight for them as well. Now they just don’t exist at all, and DOC ain’t giving them back.”
Jackson’s comments echo the fears of some incarcerated organizers as WDOC began maneuvering to “close” WSR. And this possibility was obvious to most of the people involved in liberation efforts across the state.
Vincent “Tank” Sherrill is a champion of abolition efforts in Washington state, a longtime leader in the BPC, and one of the prisoners displaced by the closure of WSR. Tank reminisced about what prisoners had. “We created an activist and organizer university inside the Reformatory,” he said. “We were literally given the tools to dismantle the master’s house right under the master’s nose.”
Nothing exemplifies Tank’s point more than the work now being conducted by those who benefited from the Underground Railroad at WSR. Many of those who were liberated from there are now in society, participating in and building new structures to displace the carceral state.
Devon Adams and Matt Murphy (also formerly incarcerated at WSR) pose with other Seattle-based youth at a trauma retreat in San Francisco. (Credit: Devon Adams & Matt Murphy)Devon Adams was released in 2021 from a 30-year year sentence. Once a leader in both the BPC and CLO, Adams currently works with Collective Justice, providing trauma-informed training to youth most likely to be involved with gun violence.
“We actually have to take these kids out of town in order to get them to relax and feel safe enough to fully engage in this process,” Adams said. A former victim and participant in street violence, he is acutely familiar with the social pressure and fear these youth face in the streets. Adams is taking what he learned from HEAL and applying it to this next generation of youth, disrupting cycles of violence that the carceral state exploits in order to keep the prison industrial complex alive.
When asked about the role prisoner-led organizations at WSR played in his life, one word jumps out from the rest: “community.” Adams told Shadowproof that the community found at WSR was like no other and that it helped him answer questions about who he could be. “When I got out, that community was intact, allowing me to continue the work we were doing inside now that I am free.”
Eugene Youngblood, another beneficiary of the Underground Railroad, is also applying what he learned at WSR in the community since his release. Youngblood says, “Once, I was on one side of the gun, now I’m on the other side of the gun, working with families of gun victims.” Youngblood currently works through the Freedom Project and dream.org, where he does court support, violence interruption, and teaches classes at the King County Juvenile Detention Center.
Youngblood told Shadowproof, “People don’t change, they heal.” He said that relationships with community members, especially the frequency and consistency of those relationships at WSR, were what made the difference. “It is impossible to replicate the involvement of the community without the actual involvement of community.” He believes this is what gave prisoners at WSR chances like those he enjoyed and that these relationships “benefited everyone except for DOC.”
Abolition-minded prisoners who stood against the closure of WSR understood that prisons are not in the business of decarceration. So, when WDOC came out with their plan to shut down the prison, many saw this as a maneuver to kill two birds with one stone: WDOC would reallocate money while eliminating opposition groups that had grown over decades at WSR—groups that existed nowhere else in the state prison system.
Long accustomed to practicing the discipline of hope, some initially approached this with optimism. Tank told Shadowproof that when he first heard about the closure, he imagined “those of us with the training spreading the seeds of abolition, revolution, and transformation like Johnny Appleseed.” But, this vision has been stymied through actions by WDOC to limit and prevent this very thing from happening, lending evidence to the theory that the closure was about furthering oppression.
The social and political landscape inside prisons that emerged from the closure of WSR reveals a design beyond addressing fiscal concerns. Since the closure, WDOC has prevented similar groups from forming at new facilities. Meanwhile, the few bastions of transformation that once existed outside of WSR in Washington prisons — culture groups and BPC TEACH — are now under attack as well.
Tank now laments the landscape prisoners are facing in WDOC. He said the Black Prisoner’s Caucus has recently come under attack and is “fighting for its existence.”
Felix Sitthivong, a proponent for the closure of WSR, is now currently fighting with WDOC for the existence of cultural groups at Stafford Creek Corrections Center.
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CRACKING DOWNAt Washington Corrections Center, prisoners were able to start the Concerned Lifer’s Organization (CLO), only to have prison administrators kill the organization after two months of meetings. When Dr. Katherine Beckett—a lead sponsor for the CLO and esteemed member of the community—inquired about the matter, she was told the group was canceled because another administrator at the prison didn’t follow clerical procedure. The CLO was told that a series of paperwork and approvals would be necessary in order to meet again.
Over the next five months, CLO sponsors worked with prison administrators to restart the group. After supplying the newly required paperwork, sponsors were told the group would not be allowed going forward because sponsors could not prove the value of the organization. Meanwhile, DOC Media Relations Manager Tobby Hatley told reporters that the Washington Department of Corrections had never heard of the Concerned Lifer’s Organization—a program with a 50-year history at WSR.
Then, in August 2023, this author published an op-ed with the Seattle Times excoriating the Washington Department of Corrections for attacking programs in the state’s prisons. The article elicited push-back from the community and engaged Secretary Strange on the issue of the Concerned Lifer’s Organization being canceled. Initially, Strange denied the claims in the article, but after CLO sponsors presented evidence to Strange, Washington Corrections Center suddenly saw the value of the organization. In September of that year, the group was reinstated.
This episode illustrates the propensity of oppressive forces to attack transformative spaces but also shows that, through community action and solidarity, wins can be secured against the carceral state. This leaves organizers like this author considering that the transformative space we had at WSR could have been saved through solidarity.
Another transformative space to come under attack by WDOC is BPC TEACH, an education program that facilitates liberation education, providing access for prisoners to obtain college degrees.
In the winter of 2022, WDOC leveraged Fabian’s Fund, the financier of BPC TEACH, into a Memorandum of Understanding. This contract set restrictions and established a kill mechanism in its charter. At the time, journalists Chris Blackwell and myself reported to the Everett Herald that this bullied them into an arrangement feeling “an awful lot like a knee above their necks, thinly veiled as a promise to let them breathe.” In May 2023, the knee dropped, and WDOC severed the ability of BPC TEACH to fund its students, leaving prisoners without the ability to continue their degrees.
Atif Rafay is an incarcerated journalist, abolitionist, and scholar. When WSR closed, he was transferred within the Monroe Correctional Complex to the Twin Rivers facility. One fence line now separates him from the ghost of WSR. Rafay told Shadowproof, “The hub of activity at WSR that made for expanding networks of opportunity and participation in the world of new ideas and movements has been smashed…” He noted that no one in the new institution he ended up in just across the fence has the opportunity to “work with free people on projects (educational, professional, or otherwise) that would permit them to develop or display the qualities that would have to be observed for them to merit employment or clemency.”
In other words, WDOC will not allow any new Devon Adams or Eugene Youngbloods to develop within these walls and fences. Rafay’s analysis of the closure was that it was “designed to make incarceration more efficient and cheap, as well as to disable the movements that were critical of mass incarceration.” His sentiment is shared by many.
When asked if the voices who supported the closure of WSR aided WDOC in this objective, Rafay took a breath, then said, “They helped misrepresent a cost-cutting plan that smashed the networks most effective in enabling prisoners to engage in meaningful activity… and they perpetuated the confusion between genuinely transformative decarceral changes and plans that distract or deter prisoners from pursuing those changes.”
Sitthivong, as a prominent voice for the closure, wrote, “the programming either goes where we go, no matter where we go, or it should cease to exist.” But others argue social networks and transformative structures are not shrubs. You can’t just pick them up from here and plant them there, expecting they will function. Not when oppressors own the soil. Sitthivong did not see it this way, and some felt the division he fomented drowned out more reasoned voices that were fighting against the interests of WDOC, trying to hold on to the Underground Railroad.
That these programs should “cease to exist” was the endeavor of WDOC, and abolitionists should have stood in solidarity against the interests of these oppressors. It is unclear if solidarity could have changed the outcome. But some are arguing that voices siding with WDOC undermined resistance efforts to hold on to the Underground Railroad built by prisoners at WSR.
Shadowproof caught up with Sitthivong, who was a Marvel Cooke Fellow in 2022, to get his perspective on the closure and its impact on abolitionist work in the state.
“In hindsight, I wish we had stuck together and made sure it stayed closed instead of dividing us and allowing DOC to do soft closure,” Sitthivong said in an interview. “We should have demanded they actually release people instead of fighting for a structure.”
“But for me, the silver lining was we were able to go to these other facilities, highlight the other facilities that were malnourished and did not have support but were also our peers and our colleagues. An effort to keep [WSR open] was almost an effort to horde the resources rather than say, hey, systemically, 90 percent of the prisons were not being served, prisoners were left to fend for themselves. Now we have this organizing space here at a different facility. So it wasn’t a building or prison or bars; it was us. And I think a lot of people forget that.”
Sitthivong said he disagreed with the notion that the closure hurt abolitionist organizing. “The abolitionist community that I am from and represent and organize with that’s been split up are still organizing, are still fighting. I just went through retaliation for organizing. This is nothing new for people who have been in movements and struggle for generations and carry that legacy. We continue to spread the word, and wherever we touch down we provide resources and continue to empower our people and shift power from the state to our people. That’s the mission, that’s the goal.”
“Even though I have very strong stances, I love my community with all my heart,” he said. “I want to be able to humanize people’s fears and humanize people’s concerns. I don’t want to be like, “Oh, I don’t give a shit.” I don’t want to come off like that. I want to honor that and still [have the others] also honor our position. Honor that there were sacrifices made before you.”
“They had a building called the [Prisoner Activity Building or PAB] at WSR that was fought for, prisoners fought for that space to have a place to organize,” Sitthivong reflected. “And I believe personally, in my heart, that prisoners who fought for that space fought for it not to strengthen the prison but to get free. I think that some of the narrative behind keeping the prison open is that, since prisoners fought for the PAB, it would be a shame to close it down. No, I think that actually disrespects the legacy of resistance. We can’t disrespect that legacy, and we can’t drop the baton. I feel like using that space to add more bars and razor wire; it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
PRISON REALISMWe will do well to remember this: the carceral state is a rational actor playing a zero-sum game, and we should analyze its actions through the lens of Realism, the very lens that informs its calculus. The carceral state does not seek actions that work towards its own demise.
What happens when the next cost-cutting move is disguised by the carceral state as decarceration? Will members of our community, in attempts to achieve change, side with the interests of state entities like WDOC in the future?
This author fears the answer is yes, and predicts we will see this play out in Washington State in the 2024 legislative session.
In a 2022 interview on Inside Olympia, WDOC Secretary Cheryl Strange stated that 30,000 individuals are waiting to be sentenced by the courts. Of those, 10,000 are charged with violent felonies. This will invariably mean reopening prisons like WSR, prisons that never really closed anyway. But the math does not work. Adding this many potential new prisoners would put the Washington prison population way over capacity.
The predicted influx is, for various fiscal and logistical concerns, more than the state can manage. There is not currently enough money in the budget nor staff available to run prisons at their former capacity, let alone at a greater one. In fact, none of the staffing concerns that allegedly drove the closure of WSR were addressed, and prisons across the state now regularly shut down recreation, education, and religious programs because of a lack of staff.
In response to this, as a blatant attempt to open up bed space for new prisoners, WDOC tried to slide a reiteration of a 2021 bill to increase good time (time taken off of prisoners’ sentences) by a third. But, they introduced the bill late in the 2023 session. This caused the bill to be delayed and postponed any hearing of the bill until the 2024 legislative session.
In 2024, when this reform is heard, the voices of prisoners who stand to benefit will rise to the top of the discussion. They will create and insist on the narrative that this reform is decarceration. Those prisoners will muster what influence they can through privilege, family, and community in order to help WDOC pass their own legislation.
But the legislation itself will be problematic. Early versions of the bill contain language that cuts people out from the proposed relief by excluding those with mandatory minimum sentences. This exclusion will disparately impact communities of color as disproportionate numbers of BIPOC men and women are sentenced under the mandatory minimum schemes this legislation seeks to exclude.
The result of this proposed “decarceration” plan will be to force local organizers and organizations like Look2Justice to exert massive amounts of energy in the next legislative session to make this legislation less harmful to the community. The energy spent attempting to mitigate the harm of this proposed reform will detract from work towards transformation.
In the end, some prisoners will go home, but no meaningful change will occur. WDOC will conservatively repossess 30 percent of those who were released within three years. No significant human capital will be lost, and the system will continue on, uninterrupted. The prisoners who do go home will do so at the cost of WDOC having a tighter grasp on the rest the carceral state will continue on with the status quo. This is not decarceration.
HELPING THE STATE FAILMariame Kaba tells us, “Community matters. Collectivity matters. To me, that’s the whole thing. And if we can’t get along with each other, and we can’t take responsibility for what we do with each other, then what the hell are we doing?”
The voices that spoke for the closure of WSR caused harm and assisted the carceral state in its objective to both save money and disempower abolition structures that took decades for prisoners to build at WSR. These voices carried water for the man. The voices of those who will speak for the proposed “third off” bill in Washington’s 2024 legislative session will also be carrying water for The Man. This will be done by putting energy into helping WDOC pass a bill that benefits the carceral state in the long term.
As we struggle to create abolition, it is vital for us to learn from each other, to have accountability, and to maintain—and sometimes reestablish—solidarity along the way. We are all going to get it wrong sometimes. But when we do, we have to be able to analyze that, explore how it impacted our efforts, and apply those lessons to the future. We desperately need to get on the same page, or people with power will continue to divide and distract us from achieving the transformation we so desire.
As abolitionists, we should let the carceral state fight for what is its own. Our energy could be better spent helping the state fail than helping it succeed. We should be focused on building systems of social support to replace it rather than keeping it from collapsing under the weight of its own bloated grotesqueness. When the carceral state is in crisis, it will seek remedies to further its own existence. As abolitionists, we should never align with those interests. Even when they look like wins for our movement, they are not.
The post In Washington State, Prison Closure Divides Abolitionist Community appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
Those who are brave enough to practice journalism in prison often encounter the most aggressive intimidation and retaliation from prison administrators and guards.
Closely monitored telephone calls and messages. “Lost” and delayed mail. Random transfers. Contaminated food. Withheld healthcare. Frequent cell searches, with belongings shuffled through and thrown around; papers torn up and left in the toilet. A stint in solitary confinement, that might last a month or never-ending years. Directives and rules that target you, increasing your risk for a repeat of all the punishments above.
Prisoners have endured mental, emotional and physical abuse for centuries by those entrusted to watch over them. Those who push back are often singled out and made an example. It’s less known that these punishments are often wielded to their highest degree against prison journalists in an attempt to silence their voices, halt their writing, and further criminalize them for publishing work and accepting compensation.
Incarcerated writers fight to share the truth of their experiences in environments often shrouded in extreme secrecy. In recent years, the number of inside journalists has increased, as has the number of investigations into topics like exposing harmful covid policies, inhumane conditions during the recent heatwave, and administrative tampering with legal mail.
Even as more outside readers are exposed to this work, few understand the risk incarcerated journalists take to educate society on what happens behind those towering walls and razor wire fences. Writers are routinely targeted and attacked for their work countering ignorance and mythology to surface the real violent structure of the carceral system.
Prison journalism spilled into public conversation in June, when New York Focus exposed a policy passed in May effectively banning incarcerated writers and artists in the state from freely publishing their work without administrative approval. New York rescinded the ban one day after the story sparked a public backlash. Those two intense days revealed that, as public support for prison journalism grows, Departments of Corrections will look for new ways to restrict and punish people who document prison life.
As members of Empowerment Avenue, a collective that supports incarcerated writers and artists in publishing and getting compensated for their work, we have witnessed this firsthand since we began working together in 2020. In that moment, the COVID-19 pandemic was tearing through the U.S. prison system and incarcerated journalists exposed conditions and mistreatment such as transfers of sick people and overcrowding, using solitary confinement as medical quarantine, and inadequate medical care.
We spoke with several incarcerated journalists in state prisons across the country to understand the hurdles, oppression, and retaliation they face as they struggle to be published in mainstream media. It is because of their bravery that society is able to see what happens inside prisons. Yet, they are rarely recognized and almost entirely legally unprotected for the exceptional and risky work in which they are engaged.
Mini fiefdomsPeople often assume that prisons across the country operate more-or-less the same, with similar rules, methods of communication to the outside world, and living conditions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Corrections departments are not uniform and individual prisons operate without accountability or enforced oversight. As a result, prisons more closely resemble mini fiefdoms with distinct staff cultures and varying levels of inhumane conditions.
Attitudes and restrictions around prison journalism vary widely as well. As the Prison Policy Initiative noted in a study published in June, “While explicit bans on prison journalism are rare, a web of complex and vague policies make the practice extremely difficult and sometimes risky.”
Juan Moreno Haines is a longtime staff writer for the San Quentin News, who now freelances and works as a senior contributing writer and editor at Solitary Watch. “At San Quentin, I have an advantage over a lot of writers because the administration, from Sacramento down, are very supportive of San Quentin News and the writing they do,” he said.
Publications like the San Quentin News, a prison newspaper founded in 1940, can create a culture for journalism and somewhat warm a Department of Corrections to the idea of incarcerated people writing about their conditions. These papers and newsletters, produced with state oversight, have varying degrees of press freedom from the prison administration.
But even rare exceptions to draconian censorship, like San Quentin News, face significant limitations at the hands of prison officials. Prison publications can serve as “good PR,” obfuscating rather than exposing oppressive prison conditions. And as Wilbert Rideau, the former editor of the prison newspaper The Angolite, detailed in his memoir, the administration ultimately holds editorial control. Currently, no state-approved newspaper or newsletter encourages its writers to publish hard-hitting, investigative reporting to expose the system they’re living under. Once writers decide to produce that work, they can face a range of punishments that vary depending on the facility, staff, and state, as well as the identity of the writer.
John J. Lennon, an accomplished journalist in New York, argues that retaliation can feel like it comes completely at random. “I don’t think I see writing and publishing as a risk, and I don’t expect to be, nor am I retaliated against by my jailers all the time,” he told Shadowproof. “I don’t think it’s a top-down thing. I think a mid-level security officer will read something he doesn’t like and set something in motion.”
Lennon is most bothered by the retaliation faced by the subjects of his reporting. In a New York Times opinion piece calling President Biden to back prison reforms, he described a scene in which a guard had yelled out, so everyone in the cell block could hear, that a particular incarcerated person had a sex crime. After the piece published, he witnessed a targeted attack:
“[He got] attacked from behind and brutally beat by another prisoner … The guard at the desk leisurely strolled over to the fight. The misbehavior reports that were subsequently written had him as the aggressor. At the hearing, he was punished more than the man who pummeled him. It was all set up, and it made me mad.”
Sara Kielly, a trans journalist and jailhouse lawyer who is also incarcerated in New York, has experienced “a myriad of intimidation and retaliatory actions.” Some could be considered minor — like the mailroom denying her package of typing paper, which she needs to produce work — but others have been horrifying. She has been threatened with physical violence, sexual assault, and rape.
Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated writer in Texas who has been held in solitary confinement for over seven years, faces distinct pressure in a Republican state actively passing censorship laws. Prior to the pandemic, the only media allowed at Harris’ solitary confinement unit was one hour of Fox News television per day.
“They put me in exile,” she said of her long-term stay in solitary. At this specific prison, in a majority-white town where many correctional officers and administration are related, she faces a complex web of risks including intimidation by staff, frequent cell searches, mail and package tampering, and contaminated food.
“The inmate janitors who pass out trays will tell me not to eat certain food because someone doesn’t like me,” she said. She’s even been punished for talking about abortion and sexual health.
In Washington State, Jessica Sylvia (who is now out of prison, and has written for this publication) faced punishment for both her activism and writing related to her health needs as a trans woman. “The major, the worst thing, was that I repeatedly had my healthcare withheld for me,” she explained. “The staff knew how important that healthcare is and that interrupting it would harm me; it would be devastating.”
Certain punishmentWhile no journalist faces the exact same punishment as another, there are common tactics we have seen used across a number of states: staff threats, cell searches, and frequent and random transfers to other facilities.
“I’ve had my cell ‘searched’ and left looking as if a tornado tore through it multiple times a day or several days in a row; I’ve had my papers and family photos ripped up and/or thrown into the toilet; I’ve been transferred to segregated confinement with no access to pen or paper without cause,” Kielly said. “I’ve been given false disciplinary infractions with sanctions ranging from loss of commissary, loss of phone privileges, confinement to my cell with no programming.”
Lennon said that, “A guard will flip my cell. I’ll receive a frivolous misbehavior report. My mail will be scrutinized and delayed. I’ve had eerie messages delivered to me from sort of trustee prisoners who work for guards, and they’ll tell me to watch my back or whatever—that I pissed off the guards.”
Cell searches, used against all incarcerated people, can be devastating for a prison journalist without access to a computer. Books, research materials, drafts, and notes will disappear, and no one is held accountable, leaving prisoners to pick up the pieces. Sometimes that means having new material mailed in; other times, it means completely starting over from scratch.
“Beyond being invasive and disruptive, it’s [the administration] invading your space, showing that they can do whatever they want to you in this personal space,” Sylvia said. “I remember finding something destroyed in a wet sink.”
Harris, in Texas, found that books by Black authors triggered cell searches. Now she covers them with book jackets by white authors. “I don’t keep personal things in my cell,” she adds.
Tablets, which usually have some form of paid e-messaging app installed, provide some relief and a faster way to communicate with outside supporters. These are small tablets that leave prisoners to type out articles with the taps of their thumbs much like texting on a cell phone. There are no keyboards or mice, and they lack the ability to use basic tools like cut and paste. But every message is monitored and can be blocked or delayed for months or weeks. California prisoners recently gained access to the e-messaging system GettingOut, but restrictive word bans (including the word “piece,” often used between fellow journalists) cause messages to get stuck as “pending.”
Transfers as punishment hold extra weight for journalists. Being transferred from prison to prison, never allowed to settle in one place, leaves people unbalanced and strains their support networks. They limit their ability to develop trusted sources, and force them to spend time and energy in survival mode. It is difficult to share one’s experiences when they are struggling the hardest to survive them.
Transfers into solitary confinement are one of the most extreme ways DOC’s attempt to break spirits, stripping people from access to society and nearly any form of human contact. The mental and physical torture of solitary confinement is enough to dissuade many people from practicing journalism and breaking the rules. But some refuse to back down. “I’m in jail, inside of jail,” explains Harris, who has been in solitary for 7½ years. When it comes to retaliation, she feels, “They’ve done everything they can to me.”
Criminalized compensationAccording to the Prison Policy Initiative, “Fourteen states prohibit imprisoned people from operating or engaging in a business, including being self employed, and from receiving compensation for their work.” But forgoing compensation might not protect an incarcerated journalist, as “vague restrictions on ‘business activities’ are enough to threaten their work with media outlets.”
Empowerment Avenue is committed to advocating for fair compensation for the creative work of incarcerated people, a population that makes pennies on the hour through prison labor. In pursuing this goal we’ve faced constant hurdles: DOC rules against payment, publications that are afraid to break any rules and are unequipped to transcend red tape and pay marginalized contributors, and deeply-held beliefs — from prison officials to editors — that incarcerated individuals do not need money or do not deserve to be compensated for their creative and journalistic work.
“I really do believe that some of these guards and prison officials show a level of jealousy. They see an incarcerated person publishing and doing well and they don’t like it,” Sylvia explained. “There exists this respectability politics and this idea that people who are incarcerated don’t deserve anything.”
In spite of the hurdles, Empowerment Avenue has worked directly with at least 50 incarcerated writers to figure out safe methods of payment regardless of their location or circumstance, such as making arrangements with outside loved one or power of attorney.
While we’re declining to quote any currently-incarcerated writers about the impact of being paid, we can say with confidence that earning an income while incarcerated has tremendous, often life-changing, benefits. “People are often surprised to hear that nothing is really given to people in prison but a hard place to sleep and a little bad food,” Sylvia said.
People can take better care of themselves when they have money, buying food and hygiene products. They can support the families they have left behind, contributing to rent, bills and items for their children. They can help pay for the exorbitant communication costs that often burden families with a loved one inside. They can pay for legal resources to get out of prison and save funds for their release. All of this allows them to support the their families and a smoother release back into society.
“For me personally, as a trans woman, it was very difficult to get a job in prison,” Sylvia said. “I have to pay for all of these things and there are people who would love to force me into sex work. I resist stereotypes and want something different for myself.” She was able to save while inside, so “that when I was released I had more than the forty dollars and a bus ticket that the state issued.”
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Credulous editors, prison minimizersThe challenges don’t stop once an incarcerated journalist has had their story green-lit by a publication. Like the police, Departments of Corrections typically enjoy significant narrative control and editorial capture in the mainstream media. Additionally, many news outlets’ distrust and hold significant biases against incarcerated journalists, often demanding higher and often unachievable standards of evidence than what other journalists might face.
Incarcerated journalists understand the importance of fact checking; they go through great lengths to document and report carefully, represent their sources accurately, and collect paperwork and evidence as it’s available. But it’s rarely acknowledged that they’re up against the Department of Corrections “machine,” which has mastered the skill of silencing, discrediting, lying about, and harming those who boldly stand against their draconian ways. Then there’s a mainstream media that is far from objective, propping up police narratives and pushing “tough-on-crime” agendas, rife with misinformation and racism. Editors and publishers within this system often approach incarcerated reporters with a level of suspicion no other journalist would face.
As a result, incarcerated journalists are pressed to prove every claim while Departments of Correction are allowed to make claims freely without ever being asked to show evidence.
“There’s this strong distrust, this feeling that we’re all liars,” Harris said not just of DOC officials, but of outside journalists and editors who contact her. “I can prove these things. I have grievances, I have paperwork, I can send you all that. I’m telling you the truth.”
Kielly added that, “When we do finally find an entity willing to publish our pieces, our stories are published in a manner that discredits or demeans the lives of incarcerated individuals or us as a writer.”
Sylvia spoke of struggling to overcome these credibility issues. “People don’t feel like someone who is incarcerated can actually write a credible, truthful story and it’ll be as good as someone not incarcerated.”
We’ve seen editors — particularly at legacy publications — pressure writers about their conviction, insert dehumanizing language into their work, and challenge journalists about details of their reporting that surprise the outside journalists who support them, and who haven’t faced that level of scrutiny in their own reporting.
In a more just world, the common journalistic practice to seek comments from “both sides” can make sense. But in this world, the media’s reverence for law enforcement permits severe journalistic malpractice. Credulously seeking comments, explanations, and fact checks from the Department of Corrections can easily become harmful and result in publishing lies that bolster the system the reporter attempts to expose.
One jarring example comes from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s communication department, which regularly states “there are 30 females in security detention [solitary confinement] throughout the state, less than 0.02% of the overall population.”
“There are 228 people in my unit,” explains Harris, “And every one of them is experiencing solitary confinement.” TDCJ classifies people in her unit in various ways to manipulate the data and undercount the solitary population. This means that Harris is up against a lie about the very population she is a part of.
These DOC lies play out on the published page. A story by Harris details the lack of educational materials in solitary confinement. The end of her piece includes a long comment from the Texas Department of Justice on how that isn’t true.
This piece reported by Chris (the co-author of this story) detailed a deadly breakdown of government policy during COVID-19. The editor inserted DOC responses — many of them directly refuting his reporting — throughout the published piece. The first editorial comment includes the statement: “The author stands by this account of his experience.” To any outside journalist, an editorial statement like that, preceding their reporting, would be unthinkable.
Sharing the risksMake no mistake: incarcerated journalists are reporting from behind enemy lines. And yet none of the reporters we surveyed felt the risks they’ve taken are fully recognized or appreciated by their peers in journalism or their readers.
“Absolutely not,” were direct quotes from both Harris and Haines when asked about this point.
“Incarcerated journalists are not given recognition for the risks we take in writing and breaking stories,” Kielly echoed. “Where are the Pulitzer Prize nominations for incarcerated journalists who write explosive exposés … [while breaking] stories on issues that no one else has the courage or ability to cover? Where are the awards and equitable royalties?”
“Incarcerated writers, and particularly those of us who are journalists are treated as publishable sideshows and the bastard redheaded stepchildren of the industry,” Kielly said. “We’re token pieces to publish rather than seen as hard-hitting [investigative journalists].”
Recognition, agency, leadership, and meaningful opportunities in the media industry are sorely needed. More urgently, what legal support will writers and jailhouse lawyers get if Departments of Correction ramp up their oppressive and retaliatory tactics? Will incarcerated journalists be offered the same legal protections as journalists in the free world, or will they be expected to fend for themselves?
Unless there is a break with history, many inside journalists feel it will be the latter. We were recently disappointed to see an incarcerated writer start writing for a major publication, one with significant resources at its disposal, only to be discouraged by the editors from writing anything that would need fact checking and could put the publication at legal risk with the DOC.
“I really believe legal support would have made a difference,” Sylvia said about losing her healthcare access in the midst of her writing and organizing efforts inside.
“I have yet to see an incarcerated journalist’s freedom of speech rights defended by a major publisher or newspaper,” Kielly said. “Not until publishers, literary agents, and entertainment/literary lawyers begin defending incarcerated journalists’ First Amendment rights as vehemently as they do free world writers will any change come to fruition.”
Legal challenges can make a difference. Haines pointed to the case of Boston Woodard, whose legal team successfully sued the California department of corrections after they put him in solitary confinement for his journalism. “I really think he set the stage for incarcerated writers in California and to protect them from retaliation,” he says.
Prisons have so many policy tools at their disposal to punish journalism that more legal and public support is desperately needed on all fronts. According to the Prison Policy Initiative:
- 46 states have censored correspondence with news media (meaning incarcerated journalist are not able to protect their sources, whom are often other prisoners, leaving them to risk everything to speak towards the injustices they experience at the hands of their oppressors);
- 14 states have a total ban on business and compensation (meaning incarcerated journalist cannot sign a contract with publishers or receive payment for their work);
- 19 states have a partial ban on business and compensation (meaning incarcerated journalist could be limited — causing a gray area — on the kind of contracts they sign or the compensation they receive);
- and the Federal Bureau of Prisons explicitly forbids any incarcerated individual from acting as a journalist at all — a clear violation of a U.S. citizen’s First Amendment rights.
Our hope is that the public backlash that emerged against New York’s May directive is not a one-time phenomenon but a sign of greater recognition and solidarity taking hold. And more importantly, that publications and legal organizations, who have the ability to offer support, will step up and join the fight in protecting incarcerated voices from being suppressed. These questions have yet to be answered — but we know that the incarcerated journalists, their families, and grassroots organizations who support them cannot hold the line alone forever.
Defending years of sacrificeWe asked the journalists a final question: Is the risk you take worth it?
“Is it worth it? Hell yeah!” said Lennon. “I risked my life when I was a drug dealer on the street. Everyday I could have been robbed or killed or arrested. And for what? To me, this idea of being a journalist is a higher calling. So, I mean, why not risk it all for this?”
“Oh yeah,” said Haines. “I do this because I want the public to understand that prisons aren’t a place to keep them safe — prisons are a result of failed policy, it holds all the failures of our society.”
Incarcerated journalists are in a battle that will determine the future of the practice of journalism in prisons. At stake is whether they can continue to play a role as truth tellers of the conditions they endure every day. If the momentum of the work stalls, it could roll back what has been accomplished and years of sacrifices could have been for nothing. But lost progress will also mean years of rebuilding and continuing to fight.
We are in a moment to finally solidify incarcerated journalists’ right to have access to their First Amendment rights and fair compensation. We are in a time where our refusal to let oppressed voices be shut down or suffer abuse for sharing the truth with society can be sustained.
“I am willing to suffer whatever crap they decide to do to me for writing, if it makes them tell the truth for once in their careers,” Kielly says. “I want people to know that this is happening,” says Harris.
Incarcerated journalists are willing to risk it all. What is society willing to risk to protect them?
The post From Behind Enemy Lines, Prison Journalists Report On Conditions At Their Own Risk appeared first on Shadowproof.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his legal team believe that Assange may be extradited to the United States before the end of summer. It is unfortunately time for us to prepare for court proceedings, and so far, you came through for us marvelously. I am so grateful to our readers
The post What’s Next In The Julian Assange Case appeared first on Shadowproof.
There I was sitting in the movie theatre trying to watch “Sound of Freedom,” when I heard the sound of an air horn.
The post They Tried To Censor The ‘Sound Of Freedom’ With An Air Horn appeared first on Shadowproof.
Rebuilding a life after years in a cage is a daunting task and some of those challenges are quantified and documented. But there are many more complicated, nuanced challenges that are less popularly known and harder to turn into data.
The post Rebuilding A Life After Years In A Cage appeared first on Shadowproof.
The song challenged the celebrated actor for his bigotry and role in helping to prop up an oppressive colonial system. It refers to his movies that often portrayed Wayne as a heroic cowboy fighting against the villainous Native Americans.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘John Wayne Was a Nazi’ By Fucked Up & The Halluci Nation appeared first on Shadowproof.
Massachusetts is refusing to share information about plans for a new women's prison with concerned citizens through a controversial exemption to the state’s public records law.
The post Redacted: Massachusetts Withholding Plans For New Women’s Prison appeared first on Shadowproof.
The attention Dan gave to you was a sign of the love and respect that he had for those who were willing to fight for the same causes that were crucial to him.
The post The Loving Truth-Teller That Was Daniel Ellsberg appeared first on Shadowproof.
Inside Georgia's prisons, Georgia Prisoners Speak fights barriers to the outside and engages in abolitionist political education.
The post In The South, ‘Georgia Prisoners Speak’ Organizes Against Incarceration From The Inside appeared first on Shadowproof.
Jovan Strong speaks to Steven Anthony Jones about adjusting to life after Death Row.
The post Interview: Returning To General Population After San Quentin Closes Death Row appeared first on Shadowproof.
While the United States Justice Department has increasingly wielded the Espionage Act to make an example out of government employees or contractors, federal prosecutors have been reluctant to charge current and former high-ranking officials. That makes the thirty-one Espionage Act charges against former President Donald Trump stunning.
The post The Espionage Act Is Not The Answer To Donald Trump appeared first on Shadowproof.
Divide and Dissolve is an Australian-based instrumental doom metal duo that features saxophonist and
guitarist Takiaya Reed and percussionist Sylvie Nehill. For the female duo, the act of simply inhabiting a
prominently white male genre space is political.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Indignation’ By Divide and Dissolve appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
No-No Boy is a multimedia project formed by Julian Saporiti & Erin Aoyama while pursuing their doctorates at Brown University.
The project employs music as an educational tool to teach historical lessons about the Asian American experience, something they both share in their heritage. Saporiti’s family were refugees during the Vietnam War while Aoyama had family incarcerated at United States internment camps during World War II.
Their name comes from the No-No Boys, who were Japanese Americans who refused to pledge allegiance to the U.S. government and who were detained in concentration camps. They also refused to fight in the war. These experiences were the basis of John Okada’s classic 1957 novel No-No Boy.
No-No Boy released their debut album “1942” in 2018, but it has since evolved primarily into a Saporiti project.
Saporiti followed it up in 2021 with the album “1975,” which featured considerable vocal, musical, and production contributions from Emilia Halvorsen. The album title referred to the year Saigon fell.
Similar to “1942,” Saporiti explored his own family heritage and connected that heritage to the. experiences of those in WWII Japanese internment camps. He linked this history to modern-day immigrant detention centers and refugee camps.
One of the album’s highlights is “The Best Goddamn Band In Wyoming” which relates the story of a 1940s Asian American swing band that perseveres in the face of bigotry.
No-No Boy’s latest single “La Banda Más Chingón en Wyoming” is a mariachi reworking of that tune. It features Mariachi Los Broncos, whose bandleader Jessie Vallejo was drawn to the parallels between the Japanese internment camps and the detention centers set up at the U.S.-Mexico border that are filled with Latin American migrants.
The new arrangement adds an element of exuberance in the face of adversity. The harrowing reality is balanced with the optimism that the human spirit will conquer and still find reasons to sing.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘La Banda Más Chingón en Wyoming’ By No-No Boy Featuring Mariachi Los Broncos appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Armed with his weapon of choice, a guitar with the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” painted on it, Woody Guthrie was a pivotal contributor to the canon of protest tunes. He composed nearly 3,000 songs, many of which remained unpublished. This has allowed a new generation of artists to
set these unused lyrics to music and create anthems that still resonate in modern society.
One group that recently did this is the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys. The first time they made use of unused Guthrie lyrics was “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight” for their 2003 album “Blackout.” They followed that up with their most well-known song, “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” which appeared on their 2005 album “The Warrior’s Code.”
After discussions with Woody’s daughter Nora, the band recorded an entire album of Guthrie lyrics in 2022 called “This Machine Still Kills Fascists.” During the same session, they also recorded a second album of Guthrie-penned lyrics, Okemah Rising, which will be released on May 12, 2023.
“Every night, when the audience is singing along with Woody’s words, his steadfast defense of the working class, and his fight against social injustice and the abuse of political power comes across loud and clear,” said vocalist Ken Casey, the band’s founder. “So as long as Dropkick Murphys are involved, Woody’s message will always be heard.”
The first video and single from the upcoming album is “I Know How It Feels.”
“And I know how it feels to work ’til you drop. And it’s 10,000 bills that you owe,” the song declares. It continues, “[I] know how it feels when you got calloused hands. And blisters on both of your feet. You can’t pay the rent, so the men take your things. And throw you right out on the street.”
With the working class under growing pressure and ongoing labor strikes and protests around the world, the song is a message of solidarity for the downtrodden.
The song weaves its way to a verse of empowerment: “I know how it feels to join a union. Speak up like a man and fight. I know how it feels to march and sing. When you know that your fight is right.”
Watch/listen to Dropkick Murphys’ “I Know How It Feels”:
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘I Know How It Feels’ By Dropkick Murphys appeared first on Shadowproof.
Die Jim Crow Records, the first record company to work exclusively with musicians impacted by the United States prison system, has collaborated with another formerly incarcerated artist named EL BENTLY 448.
Wrongfully convicted, EL BENTLY 448, who is also known as Leon Benson, spent 25 years in an Indiana prison. Ten of those years were spent in solitary confinement. He was released on March 8, 2023, after he was exonerated.
Shadowproof is honored to debut “Innocent,” a hip-hop track from Leon’s forthcoming EP that will be available on June 26. (Another track, “Mugabe,” was shared on April 26.)
Leon told Shadowproof, “I was innocent, but I wasn’t an innocent person.” He recorded the track to explore this idea of being innocent, but born guilty.
“You’re innocent born guilty if you’re born a different gender than somebody, if you’re born to a particular racial group, if you’re born in a particular time, in a particular location, in a particular economic status, or under a particular religion or culture,” Leon described.
Leon added, “If you look at it, nobody had a choice of coming to the world. So when you come into the world, we are already made guilty by the powers that be in our life.”
The lyrics for the track are autobiographical in the first verse. The second verse questions thos who may believe that they are somehow more innocent than anyone who has been incarcerated.
Leon wrote the track in 2012 while he was in solitary confinement. He hoped the track would help him bring awareness to his case so that he could be exonerated.
As Leon recalled, he took that solitary cell that was meant for sensory deprivation, a “torture chamber,” and he transformed it into “a university, a place that I had to heal, learn, [and] grow.”
“That’s where I got over a lot of anger because it was a place that I knew was meant for me to smother in, and even go crazy,” Leon shared.
Fury Young founded Die Jim Crow in 2019. In 2014, Fury connected with Leon after an activist named Zulay Velasquez shared an announcement on the Facebook group for the Innocence Network that indicated Die Jim Crow was looking for artists.
“I’d never heard from someone in prison directly before (via cell phone) so we had a long uninterrupted conversation a couple hours later,” Fury shared. “We instantly hit it off, bonding about certain philosophy shit and world history. Then we continued to build!”
The Indiana Department of Corrections denied Die Jim Crow access to record music with Leon at least twice. So Leon found a way that he could record without them while he was in prison.
For incarcerated musicians like Leon, making music is a form of “healing justice.” It is “music therapy.” Leon contended that allowing prisoners to “voice their particular experience” while locked up is a very powerful way of dealing with trauma. It can be a means of seeking rehabilitation before returning to society.
Leon grew up primarily in the area around Flint, Michigan. He was inspired by local music like the Dayton Family, Top Authority, and MC Breed. “They made the dream look really big. This is what made me try to put my voice on tracks” when he was about 13 years-old.
“I used two radios,” Leon recalled. “One radio to record, one with the beat playing, and that’s how I used to make my first mixtapes.”
The name EL BENTLY 448 is an amalgamation of El, bent, and -ly. Together, to Leon, they mean “becoming God in the nature of determination and talent.” What 448 refers to is numerology. Leon said it means “completion.” The number can represent the trust that one should have in their instincts and abilities to survive.
“I’m a person who grew up in urban America. I used to be in the drug trade so it’s a lot of stuff that comes with LB 448,” Leon also shared
According to Die Jim Crow, Leon’s song reflects the record label’s goal of dismantling stereotypes around race and prison. His lyrics deal with the injustice of wrongful conviction as well as the “emotional trauma that comes along with it.”
“But even more so EL BENTLY 448 himself is an incredibly unique person,” the label added. “He spearheaded the fight for his freedom relentlessly until his dream of being a free man was achieved. It is an honor for us to provide our platform to him.”
Listen to EL BENTLY 448’s “Innocent” from Die Jim Crow Records:
The post Die Jim Crow Records Releases New Music From Hip-Hop Artist Wrongfully Convicted And Imprisoned For 25 Years appeared first on Shadowproof.
The following article was made possible by paid subscribers of Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter. Support independent journalism on whistleblowers and press freedom and become a subscriber with this limited offer for World Press Freedom Week.
On World Press Freedom Day, the United States State Department abandoned its policy of not commenting on the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and essentially backed the prosecution against him.
Matthew Lee of the Associated Press asked State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel “whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day.”
“I’m not asking for the [U.S. Justice Department point of view. I’m asking for what the State Department thinks,” Lee said.
It was not the first time Lee had posed this question. In 2021, on World Press Freedom Day, Lee asked if President Joe Biden’s administration was looking into the Assange case, “his detention, his extradition, the request for extradition here, the charges against him?”
“I realize you can’t speak for DOJ, but from the State Department’s perspective, is the current position still – does that still hold? Do you believe that Mr. Assange is a journalist?” Lee added. “And given the importance you place on accurate and factual information being disseminated, do you believe that the information that was published based on the U.S. government documents that he obtained and put out was either unfactual or inaccurate?”
Jalina Porter, who was a spokesperson for the State Department, avoided the question. “So to your specific on Julian Assange, we’ll have to get back to you on that.”
But now, with Biden going around repeatedly declaring that “journalism is not a crime,” Patel read a prepared response.
“The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history,” Patel declared. “His actions risked serious harm to U.S. national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”
Patel continued, “It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention. So it does not matter how we categorize any person, but we view this as something, he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct.”
The response was lousy and stale. The State Department basically dusted off a few talking points from 2010, when WikiLeaks first published U.S. State Embassy cables that exposed the inner workings of U.S. diplomacy.
To be clear, Assange’s “role” was that of a publisher who received documents from U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. A 2011 review by the Associated Press of sources, which the State Department claimed were most at risk from the publication of cables, found no evidence that any person was harmed. The potential for harm was “strictly theoretical.”
Lee appropriately pushed back on the idea that being charged with “serious criminal conduct” made Assange a person unworthy of support on World Press Freedom Day.
“Yeah, but anyone can be charged with anything. Evan Gershkovich has been charged with a serious criminal offense in Russia, and you say that he is a journalist, and he is obviously,” Lee replied. “And I just want to know whether or not you, the State Department – regardless of any charges that he faces – believe that he is a journalist, or he is something else.”
Patel contended the two cases are “completely different.” He said, “The United States doesn’t go around arbitrarily detaining people, and the judicial oversight and checks and balances that we have in our system versus the Russian system are a little bit different.”
The U.S. government subjected nearly 800 people to rendition, indefinite detention, and torture and brought them to Guantanamo Bay military prison, which was established a legal blackhole for alleged terrorism suspects. It’s still open, continues to hold detainees not charged with any crimes, and in fact, the United Nations recently condemned the US for keeping Abu Zubaydah in arbitrary detention, which “may constitute crimes against humanity.”
Yes—the U.S. does arbitrarily detain people. Just not people the U.S. thinks should be free from arbitrary detention.
Tip Jar
“Okay. So, basically, the bottom line is that you don’t have an answer. You won’t say whether you think he is a journalist or not,” Lee stated.
The State Department cannot say that US officials do not believe Assange is a journalist because they know that puts them at odds with civil society organizations that they frequently partner with on press freedom issues and campaigns to free detained journalists.
Gershkovich’s case is not meaningfully different from the case against Assange. Russian intelligence accused Gershkovich of “collecting state secrets.” Like the U.S. government, the Russian government claims the authority to detain a journalist to make an example out of them and send a message that they will protect their military information from further disclosure.
Few may know, the State Department intervened in the extradition process to help the Crown Prosecution Service win their appeal after a district judge ruled that extraditing Assange would be oppressive for health reasons. Diplomats offered empty “assurances” that Assange would not be mistreated in U.S. custody and leaned on the United Kingdom to approve Assange’s extradition to preserve the close partnership between the U.S. and the U.K.
Now, on the same day, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about Assange. “Advocates on Twitter today have been talking a great deal about how the United States has engaged in hypocrisy by talking about how Evan Gershkovich is held in Russia on espionage charges but the United States has Espionage Act charges pending against Julian Assange.”
The reporter who asked this question also suggested the US had lost the “moral high ground.” Unlike the State Department, the White House did not feel compelled to take this question seriously. “Look, I’m not going to speak to Julian Assange and that case from here,” Jean-Pierre blurted.
CODEPINK co-founder Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK member Tighe Barry, and others in the peace group probably deserve credit for forcing the State Department to respond to a question about Assange with something more than “no comment.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken participated in a World Press Freedom Day event hosted by the Washington Post. As he sat down to talk with Post columnist David Ignatius, Benjamin stepped on to the stage. “Excuse us. We can’t use this day without calling for the freedom of Julian Assange.”
The Post muted the audio for the video broadcast as security swiftly dragged Benjamin offstage. Security was so rough that it made Blinken uncomfortable. He stood up from his seat and told them, “Take it easy. Take it easy. Take it easy, guys.”
Associated Press reporter Matthew Lee tied his Assange question to the protest, noting the case had been “raised perhaps a bit abruptly at the very beginning of [Blinken’s] comments.”
Perhaps, that is why the State Department had a canned response ready. Or maybe the State Department flack had an answer prepared because all the advocates chatting about US hypocrisy bother the department.
There is more political support in the world for ending the case than ever before, with parliamentarians in the U.K., Australia, Mexico, Brazil, and a handful of U.S. representatives urging the Justice Department to drop the charges. U.S. officials are afraid to engage reporters and defend the case in public.
Confrontation works. Letters to the Justice Department that demand an end to the case are welcome, but they do not have the capacity to provoke an immediate response as CODEPINK’s protest apparently did.
The post After Years Of Refusing To Comment, State Department Backs Assange Prosecution appeared first on Shadowproof.
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For the United States government, World Press Freedom Day is an opportunity to further project an image of the U.S. as a supposed champion of journalism and human rights. But that projection is muddied greatly by the prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
An event was hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the UN headquarters in New York. It marked the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day.
Dr. Agnès Callamard, the secretary general for Amnesty International, called attention to the double standard of so-called democratic countries while discussing challenges to protecting press freedom.
“It is not just what is happening in Iran or in Russia that should worry us, although it should worry us a lot. It is also what is happening here [in the U.S.],” Callamard said. “Who is imprisoning Julian Assange? Who is creating more laws to curtail the freedom to protest? All of those indicators and trends are occurring within the so-called democracies of the world.”
Callamard added, “Sadly, the playbook of autocracy, of control over conscience, of control over speech, has been well-learned by our so-called democratic leaders.”
President Joe Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have wielded the playbook of autocracy through deliberate acts of omission—by consistently dodging any attempts by reporters or civil society leaders to hold them accountable for pursuing the Assange case.
At the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 29, Biden highlighted Russia’s detention of Evan Gershkovich and the abduction of Austin Tice in Syria over a decade ago.
Then Biden proclaimed, “Tonight, our message is this: Journalism is not a crime.”
However, that message seems fraudulent as the U.S. government remains committed to prosecuting Assange and keeps him in jail.
Assange has been a target of surveillance and subject to some form of arbitrary detention for more than a decade. The journalism he oversaw as WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, which involved publishing classified documents from the U.S. government, effectively made him a target.
Last year, Blinken uttered the following on World Press Freedom Day:
When individual journalists are threatened, when they’re attacked, when they’re imprisoned, the chilling effects reach far beyond their targets. Some in the media start to self-censor. Others flee. Some stop reporting altogether. And when repressive governments come after journalists, human rights defenders, labor leaders, others in civil society are usually not far behind.
A similar statement about the climate of fear fueled by prosecuting Assange has been made by Rebecca Vincent, the director of operations and international campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
“If the U.S. government is successful in securing Assange’s extradition and prosecuting him for his contributions to public interest reporting, the same precedent could be applied to any journalist anywhere,” Vincent contended. “The possible implications of this case simply cannot be understated; it is the very future of journalism and press freedom that is at stake.”
This year, Blinken will participate in a “moderated conversation on the state of press freedom worldwide” with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
After Assange’s arrest on April 11, 2019, Ignatius argued the U.S. Justice Department had “drawn its indictment carefully enough that the issue [was] theft of secrets, rather than their publication.” The Washington Post Editorial Board has maintained that WikiLeaks “differs from journalism.” So Blinken will likely be permitted to advance a litany of double standards without being called on it.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marked World Press Freedom Day by promoting “Reporters Shield.” Under the new program, certain journalists and media organizations can apply to become “members” that are eligible to receive funds to help combat legal threats aimed at silencing them (Note: USAID has in the past been used by the CIA as a front for operations.)
According to USAID Director Samantha Power, who spoke at the UNESCO meeting, independent journalists around the world increasingly face lawfare from “corrupt leaders,” who are intent to drive them out of business.
“Repressive or corrupt elites have tried to silence opposition by killing journalists. Now they are trying to kill journalism,” Power stated.
Power was thinking of journalists countries like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, but the reality is that Assange and WikiLeaks might benefit from such a program.
The CIA mounted a disruption campaign against WikiLeaks to make it difficult for the media organization to function. Officials reportedly discussed kidnapping or poisoning Assange while he was living under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy, and Mike Pompeo, when he was secretary of state, pressured Ecuador to toss Assange out of the embassy so the US could get their hands on him.
Later in the meeting, Committee to Protect Journalists Jodie Ginsberg pointed out that if we really want to keep journalism safe then all governments must cease lawfare that involves targeting journalists with a “wide variety of spurious charges.”
“One thing that the United States could concretely do is drop the charges against Julian Assange,” Ginsberg declared. She noted if Assange was brought to trial it would “effectively criminalize journalists everywhere.”
Hitting Assange with Espionage Act charges and jailing him for the past four years has forced WikiLeaks to focus on freeing their founder. The organization has little to no funds to support the publication of new leaks, not to mention their reputation has been tarnished by smear campaigns engaged in by current and former U.S. intelligence officials. And it has also become harder to maintain the invaluable archive of documents on the WikiLeaks website.
U.S. officials could abandon this case on World Press Freedom Day, but they will not because officials have entrenched themselves in the spiteful position that Assange is not a journalist. They see no conflict between their calls to free imprisoned journalists and their own autocratic conduct.
The post US Double Standards On World Press Freedom Day appeared first on Shadowproof.
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Even as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg closes in on the end of an incredible and impactful life, the Washington Post and the pundit class still cannot resist using Ellsberg as a prop to misleadingly assert that he is history’s best example of a “Good Leaker.”
Devlin Barrett, a national security correspondent who covers the FBI and the United States Justice Department for the Post, spoke to Ellsberg and invited him to compare what he did to the leak of Pentagon documents, which were allegedly posted to a Discord chat group by Air National Guard reservist Jack Teixeira.
The framing somberly noted how Ellsberg faces terminal pancreatic cancer, and to him, the war in Ukraine is eerily similar to the Vietnam War he helped end. “I’m reliving a part of history I had no desire to live again. And I hoped I wouldn’t. And by the way, that makes it easier to leave,” Ellsberg declared.
But Barrett and the Post brought in Steven Aftergood, who is known in Washington, D.C., for his work with the Federation of American Scientists’ Government Secrecy Project, to comment on Ellsberg. Aftergood held up Ellsberg as the “archetypal” leaker of government secrets and pits him against many of the more recent whistleblowers, who Ellsberg himself has supported.
“He actually read and understood all of the material he released. He knew what he was doing. And he acted with thoughtful discrimination by withholding four volumes of material on diplomatic negotiations that he considered particularly sensitive,” Aftergood argued.
Aftergood added, “Government officials had told the public lies before, but rarely had they been exposed with such merciless clarity as they were in the Pentagon Papers.”
Furthermore, Aftergood described Ellsberg as an “example” because he “took responsibility” and “did not try to evade the consequences of his decisions.” That supposedly “won the respect even of his adversaries and critics.”
It is unclear who these “adversaries and critics” might be.
Henry Kissinger was secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, and he dubbed Ellsberg the “most dangerous man in America.” Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who commissioned the classified Pentagon Papers study, wanted to hurt Ellsberg “very badly.” Later in their lives, they never showed Ellsberg respect for facing the “consequences.” So, Aftergood cannot be referring to them.
Aftergood was obviously referring to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. A popular talking point promoted by President Barack Obama’s administration is that Snowden “fled into the arms of an adversary [Russia]” and that country engaged in a “concerted effort to undermine confidence in [US] democracy.”
Ellsberg has wholeheartedly backed Snowden. “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.”
What Aftergood, Barrett, and the Post did is similar to the tactic that prosecutors employed in the extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when Ellsberg took the stand to defend Assange.
Lead prosecutor James Lewis of the Crown Prosecution Authority emphasized that Ellsberg had withheld four volumes of the Pentagon Papers and made the same point that Aftergood made. But Ellsberg informed Lewis that he was wrong about the reason why Ellsberg did not disclose the volumes.
Ellsberg did not want to give the U.S. government an excuse during the war for breaking off negotiations to end to the conflict. It did not bother him at all if the names of U.S. intelligence sources were exposed.
As Ellsberg described, the 4,000 pages of original government documents that he disclosed contained thousands of names of Americans, Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese. There was even a clandestine CIA officer, who was named.
Nowhere in the Pentagon Papers was there an “adequate justification for the killing that we were doing,” Ellsberg recalled. “I was afraid if I redacted or withheld anything at all it would be inferred I left out” the good reasons why the U.S. was pursuing the Vietnam War.
Ellsberg was concerned about revealing the name of a clandestine CIA officer, though he mentioned the individual was well-known in South Vietnam. But he left it in the documents so no one in the government could get away with lying about redactions in the papers.
Just like U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who released entire databases on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Ellsberg believed the public needed to have access to the complete record. (Needless to say, Manning is not a “good leaker” to Aftergood.)
In the extradition proceedings and in almost every instance where a whistleblower has courageously risked their livelihood, Ellsberg said the pundit class has used him as a “foil” against any “new revelations” of systematic government abuses of power. They have claimed certain leaks were different than his leaks to make it easier to discredit people who took great risks to reveal the truth.
The inconvenient fact is that many of these “Bad Leakers” from the past 50 years are individuals who Ellsberg has championed. But soon the media establishment and wider pundit class will no longer have to worry about a longtime person of conscience getting in the way of their narrative.
Ellsberg will no longer be around to correct them, and they will be able to focus on helping the FBI identify and hunt down leakers after they squeeze out all the scoops that they can from their disclosures.
Back in early March, you may recall that I published a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg, who graciously agreed to help me promote my book Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.
We talked for over an hour and a half, and I edited the conversation to less than an hour so it could air on “The Project Censored Show” on KPFA radio in Berkeley, California.
But it is Daniel Ellsberg Week, a celebration of a peace activist and whistleblower. I shared some of the parts that were left out of my conversation, and I invite you to listen to Daniel share more of his insights on leaks, secrecy, the press, and lawless government.
The post The Myth Of Daniel Ellsberg As The ‘Good Leaker’ appeared first on Shadowproof.
The following was originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music.
Mark Stewart made several contributions to the canon of protest music as part of the pioneering UK post-punk band The Pop Group, his solo work, and various other projects. He died on April 19, 2023, at the age of 62, and no cause of death was immediately shared.
Several musicians including the trip-hop group Massive Attack, Steve Albini, and Nick Cave paid their respects and acknowledged Stewart’s considerable influence. Cave described Stewart as a “fearsome vocalist and unbelievably exciting frontman to whom I am deeply indebted.”
Cave also specifically singled out the Pop Group’s 1979 standout single “We Are All Prostitutes,” which he said “influenced me as much as anything I have ever heard and has, I would say, the greatest opening 20 seconds of any song ever recorded.”
The single appeared on reissues of their influential 1980 sophomore album “For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder,” and it also featured the B-side “Amnesty International Report on British Army Torture of Irish Prisoners.”
“We Are All Prostitutes” declared that “capitalism is the most barbaric of all religions” and that “we are all prostitutes, everyone has their price.”
The lyrics remain relevant decades later given politics, where wealthy lobby groups hold considerable influence over policy and greed fuels the climate crisis and other societal ills.
Listen to “We Are All Prostitutes” by The Pop Group (1979):
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘We Are All Prostitutes’ By The Pop Group appeared first on Shadowproof.
The following article was made possible by paid subscribers. Support independent journalism on whistleblowers and press freedom and subscribe to Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter.
A judge in North Carolina found two journalists with the Asheville Blade guilty of “trespassing” on Christmas in 2021 when they stayed in a public park to cover Asheville police as officers evicted a homeless encampment.
Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss were “sentenced to pay $25 fines and court costs.” Coit received an additional sentence of “one year of unsupervised probation with a 10-day suspended [prison] sentence,” according to the Asheville Citizen-Times.
The Asheville Blade reporters immediately appealed the decision by Judge Calvin Hill, and a jury trial was tentatively scheduled for May 1.
“In today’s bench trial of Blade journalists Veronica Coit and Matilda Bliss, judge Calvin Hill declared them guilty of trespassing, ignored freedom of press, openly sided with [Asheville Police Department’s] claim [that it] can order reporters off public land,” the Asheville Blade stated.
Hill, according to the media organization, apparently contended that no evidence had been presented to show that Coit and Bliss were journalists. The prosecutor did not even take this position.
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The Asheville Blade is a “leftist local news co-op” that focuses on “hard-hitting journalism, in-depth investigation and sharp views” from Asheville. They are reader-supported (primarily through Patreon) and have been around for more than a decade.
Beginning on December 19, 2021, those in the Asheville community gathered at Aston Park for five evenings to urge the City of Asheville to leave people without any shelter alone in the park after it closed at 10 p.m. They took a stand on Christmas, and police responded by sweeping the encampment and arresting six people, including Coit and Bliss.
All six arrestees were “released from custody on the condition that they do not return to Aston Park,” the Asheville Free Press reported.
The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, National Press Club, and Committee to Protect Journalists backed Coit and Bliss and urged the City of Asheville to abandon their prosecution.
Body camera footage was released after the groups requested that the Buncombe Superior Court in Asheville make the video public. The footage showed that police had ordered the arrest of Coit and Bliss because they were “videotaping.”
Seth Stern, the advocacy director for Freedom of the Press Foundation, said the footage also showed that the Asheville Blade reporters had “recorded the sweep from a distance and did not obstruct police.”
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In the released footage, Asheville Police Department Lieutenant Mike McClanahan asks Bliss if they are leaving. “Clearly, I have marked identification as press,” Bliss responds. To which the police lieutenant replies, “Clearly, you are trespassing.”
Coit is singled out by officers similarly. They tell police they are “covering a story” and identify themselves as press.
“These two journalists were serving the public interest by documenting this event, and their presence is protected by the First Amendment,” stated Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the United States Bureau for Reporters Without Borders. “The charges against them for trespassing are a poor attempt by local officials to intimidate the press and public from being able to monitor law enforcement.”
Weimers spoke to Asheville Citizen-Times and highlighted the fact that more and more local governments in the U.S. are passing ordinances to prohibit reporting from homeless encampments.
“I think this is the first guilty verdict in one of these cases, and I hate to think about what kind of precedent we’re setting here.”
The trial was the fourth trial since 2018 against journalists for “offenses allegedly committed while gathering and reporting news,” according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
“Bliss and Coit were never accused of harming or obstructing police or anyone and it’s ridiculous the case even got to this point,” Stern declared after the verdict. “Asheville’s crackdown on free speech doesn’t end with journalists—the same prosecutors are trying mutual aid workers for ‘felony littering.’ Seriously.”
“Every reporter, everyone who’s ever criticized any official or cop should find the push to punish our journalists chilling,” the Asheville Blade concluded. “We remain determined to keep fighting.”
The post North Carolina Judge Convicts Journalists Of ‘Trespassing’ While Covering Eviction Of Homeless Encampment appeared first on Shadowproof.
The following article was made possible by paid subscribers. Support independent journalism on whistleblowers and press freedom and subscribe to Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter.
British police invoked a terrorism law in the United Kingdom to question and later arrest a French publisher over his alleged involvement in protests in France.
Ernest Moret is the foreign rights manager for Editions La Fabrique. He arrived in London on April 17 to attend the London Book Fair. Police detained Moret and demanded that he “give up his phone and pass codes to the officers, with no justification or explanation offered,” according to a joint press statement from Editions La Fabrique and Verso Books.
The following morning on April 18 the police arrested Moret and accused him of obstruction because he had refused to share his pass codes with police who detained him.Around 6:30 p.m. local time, Moret was released by police and not charged.
But his lawyer Maître Marie Dosé told Libération that he was still facing an investigation. The police seized his computer and phone, and Dosé contended if the police are able to access the contents of his devices they will share the information with French authorities.
An update posted by Editions La Fabriqueand Verso Books indicated that Moret was ordered by British counter-terrorism police to return to London in four weeks.
The British counter-terrorism system is unique in Europe as far as emergency legislation is concerned: it is the only one that allows, without any investigative leads, suspicious behaviour, prosecution or even official ‘police custody,’ to arrest, detain and interrogate individuals who automatically expose themselves to legal proceedings if they refuse to cooperate It also provides a very permissive legal framework for police officers to extract all data from any computer device or phone of an interrogated person. Despite his release, our colleague’s fundamental rights have been violated and his life subjected to a totally opaque state arbitrariness.
National Union of Journalists (NUJ) senior books and magazines organizers Pamela Morton condemned the arrest. “It seems extraordinary that the British police have acted this way in using terrorism legislation to arrest the publisher who was on legitimate business here for the London Book Fair,” Morton declared.
PEN International indicated that they were “deeply concerned by the detention of French Publisher La Fabrique’s foreign rights manager,” who had planned to take part in the London Book Fair. They called for his immediate release.
As Editions La Fabrique and Verso Books shared, Moret had plans to meet with over 30 foreign publishers at the book fair. When he arrived at St. Pancras International railway station, officers stopped him for questioning under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000. It evidently means that French and British police are collaborating to track down individuals who have participated in protests against French President Emmanuel Macron’s “pension reform” in France.
“We consider these actions to be outrageous and unjustifiable infringements of basic principles of the freedom of expression and an example of the abuse of anti-terrorism laws,” Editions La Fabrique and Verso Books further stated. “We consider that this assault on the freedom of expression of a publisher is yet another manifestation of the slide towards repressive and authoritarian measures taken by the current French government in the face of widespread popular discontent and protest.”
Both publishers announced that there would be a protest at the French Institute in London in the evening on April 18, where Moret had been scheduled to attend a reception. They also indicated that there would be a “simultaneous protest at the British Embassy in Paris.”
Stella Magliani-Belkacem, who is the editorial director for Editions La Fabrique, told the Guardian, “When we were on the platform, two people, a woman and a guy, told us they were counter-terrorist police. They showed a paper called section 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 and said they had the right to ask him about demonstrations in France.”
“I’m still shaking, we are in shock about what happened,” Magliani-Belkacem added.
While abuses of authority under Schedule 7 of the UK’s terrorism law have primarily targeted Muslims, journalists have also had to worry about authorities using the law to violate their rights to freedom of the press.
The NUJ previously noted that in October 2018 “the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation called for greater clarity over the use of Schedule 7 stops, which allow police to question people and copy data from their mobile phones and computers at ports and airports without reason for suspicion.”
In 2013, David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was stopped under Schedule 7 for nine hours. Police detained Miranda in the hopes of seizing copies of documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that detailed United States and U.K. involvement in mass surveillance programs.
Multiple newspapers in the U.K. asked the Metropolitan Police and the French embassy in London for comment, however, they did not immediately respond to their requests.
The post UK Police Arrest French Publisher For Refusing To Share Pass Codes For Phone appeared first on Shadowproof.
Dawn Ray’d is a UK anarchist black metal band that draws from the folk traditions of rebel music. On their latest album “To Know The Light,” the trio conveys a rousing anti-fascist message that balances the bleakness that black metal is known for with a sense of optimism.
The band released a video for one of the album’s tracks called “Go As Free Companions”. According to vocalist and violinist Simon Barr, the song is an “exploration of anarcho-nihilism, and ‘Go As Free Companions’ is our conclusion.”
“We have chosen not to despair in the face of overwhelming odds, but to live while time allows it. If the future is canceled, if the present is all we have, then each minute must be revolutionary; every moment counts, so live these ideas in every moment.”
“It is easy to know what we are against, but we must not forget what we are for,” Barr added. “Whilst there is joy, love, empathy, kindness, people in need of your help; we cannot give up. You may sometimes feel like it, but you are not alone and you are not powerless, there are huge numbers of us, let’s find each other! Though acrid black clouds race across the horizon we must not forget: today, the sun still shines.”
The song’s potent message is summed up in the lyrics:
If you make food for those without,
And if you pour sugar in to their machines,
If you help those stolen by jail
Or fight for your neighbours basic needs,
You the still unafraid to love
demand for the end of demands!
The sun still shines,
And it would be a waste
To not only lose tomorrow
But also lose today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM9XjdDIV3s
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Go As Free Companions’ By Dawn Ray’d appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Founded in 1911, the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children was a juvenile correctional facility in the Mount Meigs community near Montgomery, Alabama. The juvenile facility was notorious for the abuse inflicted on Black youth.
As late as the 1960s, prisoners were forced to pick cotton from early morning to late evening, with physical and sexual abuse commonplace.
“This was functionally a slave plantation,” concluded journalist Josie Duffy Rice, who researched the school’s history for a podcast series.
Among those who endured those horrors was 73-year-old acclaimed visual artist and avant-garde musician Lonnie Holley, who was arrested when he was 11.
“I was like the Jungle Book child,” Holley shared in 2018. “I was cast away from society.”
Years later those memories continue to haunt Holley to the point of experiencing night terrors. Holley tries to exorcize those past demons on the unsettling “Mount Meigs”, a stand-out track off his recently released fourth album “Oh Me Oh My.”
Hearing Holley say, “They beat the curiosity out of me. They beat it out of me. They whooped it. They knocked it!” is jarring, but it properly confronts the dark past. Holley’s music does not whitewash history.
Listen to Lonnie Holley’s “Mount Meigs”:
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Mount Meigs’ By Lonnie Holley appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Disruption Lab
Saturday, March 25 – 7pm CET (2pm ET)
Featuring Stella Assange (Julian Assange’s wife, Lawyer, UK) and Kevin Gosztola (Journalist, Dissenter Newsletter Editor, US).
Introduced and moderated by Stefania Maurizi (Investigative journalist, IT).
As an introduction to the film Ithaka, this panel describes the pervasive surveillance, monitoring and personal control that has oppressed Julian Assange and WikiLeaks for more than ten years, and discusses the conditions around Assange’s incarceration at the Belmarsh high-security prison in the United Kingdom, where he has been imprisoned for four years, and faces indefinite detention, while the United States seeks his extradition to face a 175-year prison sentence. He is accused of receiving and publishing documents from Chelsea Manning which documented war crimes, extrajudicial killings and civilian casualties during the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The panel starts with a talk by Stella Assange, a human rights lawyer born in South Africa and one of the protagonists of the film Ithaka. In March 2022, she married Julian Assange with whom she has two children, born in 2017 and 2019. She joined Assange’s legal team in 2011. During the latter stages of Assange’s political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, Julian Assange, Stella, their infant child and WikiLeaks lawyers were targeted by illegal surveillance. The embassy has been described as ‘the most surveilled embassy in the world’ and a ‘type of prison’. Since his arrest in April 2019, Julian Assange has been kept under administrative detention in the UK’s harshest, most surveilled prison, Belmarsh prison, also known as Britain’s Guantanamo Bay. All this while not having been convicted of any crime.
In his talk, Kevin Gosztola, journalist and Dissenter Newsletter editor, accounts for the role of U.S. national security agencies in targeting Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He describes what is known about the CIA and the FBI’s roles in the prosecution. Through several examples, he shows the extensive lengths that those in the shadow government have gone to instil paranoia and fear among those in Assange’s inner circle, who represent him publicly and legally, and those who campaign for his freedom.
The panel is opened and moderated by investigative journalist Stefania Maurizi. In light of her work on the WikiLeaks secret files since 2009, she reconstructs how Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists unleashed a revolution not only in journalism, but also in the people’s right to know. Based on her 8-year-long trench warfare to unearth the truth on the Julian Assange and WikiLeaks case through FOIA litigation in UK, US, Australia and Sweden, she provides and dissects forensic evidence of the persecution of Assange and the WikiLeaks journalists.
The post [LIVE PANEL] Targeted by Surveillance: Julian Assange, WikiLeaks & Networked Repression appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Born Evan Pang, Aysanabee is a Canadian Indigenous multi-instrumentalist, producer, and singer-songwriter. He is Oji-Cree and began creating music under his mother’s maiden name in order to reclaim his family name.
Aysanabee’s mother gave him the last name Pang because she felt that a non-Indigenous name would make it easier to find employment.
His 2022 debut album “Watin” was named after his grandfather. His grandfather was renamed from Watin to “Walter” by the McIntosh Residential School in northwestern Ontario that he was forced to attend.
“Watin actually started out as a series of conversations between myself and my grandfather,” said Aysanabee. “We spent the first year of the pandemic talking about things we’ve never spoke about, his life on the trapline on Sandy Lake First Nation, falling in love, his life in residential school and then leaving everything behind..we never spoke of it until now. Even though we were over 1,000 kilometres apart, it was probably the closest we’ve ever been.”
The album includes nine spoken word interludes featuring his grandfather, which add poignancy to the music.
The opening interlude relates to Watin’s harrowing experiences in residential school: “Ya I was eight years when I went to Residential School. Somebody from outside, the government person, said ‘if you don’t send your kids out, you guys, we’re not going to help you.’ And so I went to school. We had no choice. It was 300 kids that went to school, and I used to cry. I was lonesome. I was wondering why I was sent here. And I didn’t know why. What did I do wrong?”
One of the album’s highlights is the anthemic “We Were Here”. It opens with the potent lyrics, “They say that we can reconcile this. Put it in the past. They say that we can reconcile this. What if I can’t?”
The song and album are all about reclamation in the face of “fading memories,” “fleeting stories,” and “disappearing words.” Even though there may be efforts to whitewash history, Aysanabee defiantly declares that “it’s in my blood.”
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘We Were Here’ By Aysanabee appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
About one year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit Washington State prisons, sick prisoners at Stafford Creek Correctional Center found themselves huddled into the gym to isolate from the rest of the population.
The events that took place in that gym, organized by medical and corrections staff, provides a window into how medical care is approached in a carceral environment.
“A couple of weeks ago, I had got diagnosed with COVID,” Robert Hampton recounted from a prison phone in June 2022. “Now when I first got diagnosed, I didn’t believe I had COVID. I was telling everyone like, yo, I don’t got COVID, they’re tripping. But then they put us in the gym.”
“We get to the gym and you got all these people up in there, and they’re coughing, just hacking up and everything. And the next day I found out I did have COVID, and I could barely walk and whatnot.”
Hampton recovered in the gym, but soon more people arrived. He realized prison officials were mixing people from different housing units—raising the risk of transmitting infection between buildings in the midst of an outbreak of a highly contagious airborne virus.
“As I started getting well, they started bringing other people in,” Hampton explained. “They bring in a couple of brothers and I know that they’re from a different unit. We’re all hanging out. We’re making prayers and everything together.”
“And then one night, they come in there about nine o’clock and they turn the field lights off,” he said. This was a surprise because typically the lights were turned off around 11pm.
“I’m just thinking like damn what the hell they doing? Then [staff] go over to one of my bros—actually they went to two of them—but they went to one of my bros. He came and told me before he left.”
“He came up and said, ‘Rob, man, they’re moving me over…. They said I got [tuberculosis].’”
This was the start of a massive and deadly tuberculosis (TB) outbreak at Stafford Creek, which would continue for months and eventually see the WADOC fined $84,400 for “reportedly failing to follow safety rules meant to stop the spread of disease” at the prison.
“He’s been in here with us for three days. We’re not even wearing a mask in there, you know—we all got COVID so we’re not wearing a mask in there—but he’s been there with us for three days. And then he comes and tells me on his way out the door that they’re moving them guys out and that he has TB.”
Hampton told the others in the gym what had just happened, but by then it was too late. Over 300 people who had been quarantining in that space had been exposed to the disease. Many had already returned to their housing units.
“They turned the gym into like a sick hall and a TB testing place,” he said, “but I don’t know… I don’t know what they do… I don’t know what they do for it. But I know this. We didn’t have it in our [housing] unit. (Well, so they said, right?) But then it started showing up in all these different places.”
“This has been going on now with this TB for months,” Hampton said with frustration. “So it’s like, yo, how did we even get to a point where we got TB and we don’t even have that under control here? How are we… how are we getting to this? You know what I mean? So they don’t care. They don’t care.”
The administration’s response to the outbreak was not one of regret and remediation but one of obfuscation.
“When they were on the news and the news media got wind of it, then they blame it all on COVID. ‘Oh, well, you know, it’s hard for us to tell…’ You know what I mean? Like we’re in a cold catch-22 up in here.”
“We have this lady named Cheryl Strange that was on TV denying a lot of stuff the other day,” Hampton said, referring to the State Secretary of Corrections who had recently been appointed to the position by Democratic Governor Jay Inslee. Strange was promoted to the position after running the Department of Social and Health Services.
“That’s supposed to be the head of medical,” Hampton said. “That’s supposed to make these things better. And it’s like, how can you make things better if you can’t even come in here and meet with us? You got authorization to slide up in here and talk to the people, not the staff, come talk to the people, but you’re not doing that you know.”
Hampton eventually recovered in the gym and returned to his housing unit, but he said they “changed the rules up.”
“Now they be testing cats and, if a cat has COVID, they’re not even gonna tell you,” he said. “They’ll just retest you later, and then your results will come, and you’ll be like, ‘Oh the whole time I had COVID.’ So what happens to the guy that didn’t have COVID, you got COVID, and then they don’t tell you?”
“Then they had these guys sign waivers that said that, if they get COVID, they’re gonna shelter in place, whatever whatever. But they’re not even telling you if you got COVID now. See what I’m saying? So I was like, man, this is all, it’s all bad.”
Deliberate IndifferenceHampton’s story demonstrates how prison health care is designed to avoid or withhold care for as long as possible, often to the point of causing serious harm.
Legally, prisoners are the only people in the United States who have a constitutional right to state-sponsored medical care. The Eighth Amendment is supposed to shield prisoners from cruel and unusual punishment, which includes protection against “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs.” But as Hampton’s experience indicates, such rights mean little in a system that is designed to punish instead of care.
Prisoners’ “right” to healthcare was established in a 1976 Supreme Court decision Estelle v. Gamble, which held that “deliberate indifference by prison personnel to a prisoner’s serious illness or injury constitutes cruel and unusual punishment contravening the Eighth Amendment.” At first glance, this ruling may seem to adequately protect a prisoner’s right to medical care. However, it only legislates over its absence.
Prisoners point out a number of issues with this. First, there is an enormous burden of proof placed on incarcerated people to prove “deliberate indifference.” It is easier to prove that something happened—that injury or an act of harm has taken place—than it is to prove neglect.
The second issue concerns the standard necessitated by “deliberate.” The protection presumes a degree of contact between prisoners and those for whom a standard of “deliberate indifference” would even apply. However, the prohibitive bureaucratic processes and perverse incentives inherent to the prison healthcare system ensure that there is as little contact as possible between prisoners and the healthcare system. Prisoners feel they are abandoned to either muddle through costly and complicated bureaucratic processes, or to cope with or address their medical issues collectively or on their own.
The irony of having to meet the standard of “deliberate indifference” is that, to actually experience and understand the reality of prison health care is to know that there is nothing indifferent about it. Incarcerated people and their loved ones see correctional health as intentionally callous and cruel, a system designed to make people suffer through illness, infections, chronic pain, and mental health crises all while pleading for care with little hope of relief.
Seeking Medical Care In an Inside Olympia interview shortly after the TB outbreak, Secretary of Corrections Cheryl Strange said healthcare reform is her administration’s top priority. She described the prison’s current healthcare model as “treatment on demand” and said that her team is working towards a “preventative care” model.
Washington prisoners take issue with Strange’s characterization of the existing system for a number of reasons. They will tell you that, because the system is so quick to deny them care and will often charge them exorbitant costs regardless of treatment, there is nothing “on demand” about it. Even if state prisoners pay the $4 copay for medical visits and are permitted to see a doctor, more often than not they are denied any additional testing or a referral to a specialist. While $4 may not seem like a steep price to those on the outside, for prisoners who are indigent and supporting themselves on wages that range from $0.70 to $1.70 per hour, medical co-pays are often debilitating.
In other words, prisoners without significant outside financial support have to choose between purchasing basic food and hygiene items or seeing the doctor. For this reason, they often decide to cope with medical conditions that raise concern, such as high blood pressure, low blood sugar, nerve pain, bloody stools, and breaking or rotting teeth. If they see a doctor without adequate funds, they incur institutional debt. And whenever money is added to their commissary accounts, it is automatically garnished to pay off that debt.
Prisoners also reject the idea that a prison-run “preventative care” model will fix the major systemic issues with prison healthcare, such as the refusal to solicit second opinions, the authority that non-medical personnel have to make decisions about provision of care, and the debilitating cost of co-pays. As long as the DOC denies that these problems produce severe illness and mass death, no healthcare reform program will improve conditions for prisoners.
Want to get involved in the fight for health care in Washington State prisons?
Contact Lawrence Jenkins via Securus:
LAWRENCE JENKINS
ID#: 306665
Stafford Creek Corrections Center (WA)
When people enter prison, they lose any prior healthcare coverage and are automatically enrolled in the state’s prison healthcare plan. In Washington, for example, prisoners are enrolled in the WA DOC Health Plan. The plan’s language makes evident that the system is designed to withhold rather than provide care while insulating the institution from lawsuits as much as possible. The first page of the plan states that the “WA DOC Health Plan is not a contract or a guarantee of services to incarcerated individuals.” In order to receive medical services, the prison must identify the issue as “medically necessary” for the patient or general health of the prison population.
Each step in the process of obtaining medical care is increasingly prohibitive. Prisoners first file a medical “kite,” on which they detail their medical, dental, or mental health needs. Of course, for many ailments, it is extremely difficult for the patient to pinpoint exactly where the pain is or describe exactly what it feels like in as much detail as a doctor needs to proceed. Nonetheless, when prisoners are later called for “sick-call,” they are only evaluated for exactly what they describe on their kite.
Prisoners can expect to be called up two-to-three days after submitting a kite. For optometry, dental, and mental health-related issues, it can take much longer. These long time horizons leave prisoners at risk not only for severe pain and discomfort, but also an increased likelihood that their conditions worsen and become harder to treat.
When prisoners are finally summoned to sick-call, medical personnel will categorize the issue with a “level” of one, two, or three. As WA prisoner Frank Brunner describes, the level essentially determines how long somebody will have to suffer, not the amount of attention or care they will receive.
“Medical level one is emergent, necessary, life-sustaining care—a broken bone, or you’re bleeding or you’re having a heart attack,” he said. “They have to give you immediate emergent care, regardless of cost. Level two care is like a person with cancer—stage three cancer or diabetes—they know that you’re dying, but it hasn’t reached the level of number one care for it to be considered emergent. Yeah, so it’s slowly killing you is the difference.”
“And then level three care is the stuff you can’t get, like anything cosmetic,” he said. “You should see all the stuff that they just deny, you know acne, and stuff like that—cysts and tumors.”
Many prisoners do not even bother seeking care when they think the doctor will deem the issue level three. They make the assessment that the $4 co-pay isn’t worth being told to take Ibuprofen and drink water before being sent back to one’s cell.
Of course, any “minor” issue can become quite serious without adequate attention and care. One WA prisoner, Darrin Maiden, suffered ankle pain for over three years and racked up a bill of over $900 in an effort to get medical care. Each time he sought treatment for his pain, he paid $4 and was told to rest and take Ibuprofen. The medical staff never documented the progression of his pain, nor did they schedule follow up appointments.
“Eventually three years go by and it’s to the point where I can’t even walk, I have to use a cane and I’m missing meals,” he said. “So I decided to go up there and look at my medical records because I wanted to know what was my medical provider putting in my medical records to explain why they wasn’t doing nothing to help me.”
“That’s when I realized he wasn’t documenting everything that I was telling him. When I told him how much pain I was in or the level of swelling… he didn’t document any of that. That’s how they’re able to get away with not doing anything for you.”
Maiden’s story demonstrates how difficult self-advocacy is, even if you can afford to rack up medical bills and bear the mental burden of seeking care. When he was able to get the X-ray needed to properly diagnose his condition, he found out that the cartilage in his ankle joint had completely deteriorated and his bones were scraping together with every step. At that point, the pain was excruciating.
For conditions deemed “level two,” WA DOC has a Care Review Committee composed of DOC medical staff from across the state. It meets weekly and decides whether care is necessary and cost-effective. If they decide it is not, it becomes nearly impossible for prisoners to get care and for families to advocate for them.
This leads to another issue toward which WA prisoners consistently point: the lack of alternatives if they are denied care or believe they are misdiagnosed.
“There is no access to a second opinion whatsoever. If you have money to pay for it yourself, maybe you can get it, but it has to be approved by the DOC,” said Brunner.
As one would expect, obtaining DOC approval is nearly impossible. However, practically speaking, there is no reason a prisoner should be denied access to a second opinion if outside family members and loved ones can organize and pay for it. Here we start to see thepunitive nature of these denials.
Hampton has suffered from chronic migraines for 20 years in prison. While the medical staff prescribed him a migraine medication, he went to sick-call a number of times in an effort to understand the underlying issue. Each time his requests for a CT scan were deemed unnecessary.
If prisoners want to appeal a decision by the Care Review Committee, their only route is to file a grievance. Prior to President Bill Clinton’s enactment of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) in 1996, prisoners could directly file lawsuits in federal court. Under the PLRA, they are required to exhaust all other administrative remedies before filing a lawsuit. The grievance is the first step.
Grievances go through an intra-administrative process in which prisoners file formal complaints. When a prisoner submits a grievance, the prison’s grievance coordinator—an administrator with no medical training or experience—will deem the issue grievable or non-grievable. Prisoners have the option of appealing the decision, but the cycle of appeal and denial can continue for months until the grievance is reviewed by WA DOC headquarters.
In the unlikely best case scenario, when a prisoner files a grievance for an issue that is deemed grievable, DOC policy permits 120 days for the department to remedy the issue. When it comes to medical issues, a four-month waiting period can become a death sentence.
Even worse is the apathy and negligence around emergent medical issues. For emergencies, prisoners are at the complete mercy of the prison guards, who lack medical training yet are given the responsibility of determining whether a medical issue is emergent or not.
Hampton explained that prisoners are often forced to resort to extreme measures to get the help they need. In one instance, an elder prisoner was continuously denied a hospital visit and forced himself to pass out so he could get the prison staff’s attention. He was only taken to the hospital after passing out a second time.
“When he got back from the hospital he was like, ‘Man, you’re not gonna believe this. I got stage 4 liver cancer.’ We were all just stunned.” Hampton said. “When they finally took him serious, he’s gone. He passed away.”
In the absence of medical care, WA prisoners pointed out that they do whatever they can to care for each other. They check in on each other regularly, inquiring about physical and mental health. They cook together and pool resources to meet the dietary needs of people with chronic illnesses such as diabetes. They also act as physical therapy aides. In the event that someone’s medical issue is becoming life-threatening, they collectively organize campaigns with outside support to pressure the prison administration to attend to their needs. While prisoners risk getting an infraction for caring for one another, they see these measures as necessary to ensure their collective survival.
Each Crisis Amplifies The NextAs the COVID-19 pandemic raged in prisons, blatant disregard for pandemic safety protocols led to many deaths in WA facilities. Stafford Creek Correctional Center was recently fined $60,000 for skirting COVID-prevention measures. On top of this, the pandemic strained the already understaffed prison healthcare system and led to even further denial of care for non-COVID related medical issues. As Brunner explained, prisoners were locked down in their units and could not access medical care if they needed it.
“Because they were short on medical staff, there was no sick call. There were no kites going out. We had no access to medical care,” Brunner said. “If you had an infection or something, by the time they picked up a kite, it’s already been days or weeks even and you still haven’t been seen. Routine care was totally set aside.”
When prisoners and their families thought the medical situation in WA prisons could not get any worse, the tuberculosis outbreak at Stafford Creek in May instigated the largest outbreak of tuberculosis that the state has seen in two decades. From the perspectives of Stafford Creek prisoners, prison officials did nothing to curb the outbreak and acted with intentional disregard for their safety, even after dozens of prisoners were infected.
When you unearth the violence underneath any facet of the prison industrial complex, it’s extremely difficult to believe in any outcome short of abolition. But there are life-saving measures that prisoners need now.
WA prisoners compiled a few important measures they hope advocates will help fight for:
- Elimination of medical co-pays. Medical co-pays force prisoners into institutional debt, making it extremely difficult for all prisoners, but especially indigent ones, to access medical care. Healthcare services should be accessible to all prisoners without financial obligation.
- Establish first aid training classes for prisoners. WADOC should remove rules and regulations that prevent prisoners from helping other prisoners in the case of a medical emergency. Currently, if prisoners assist each other in a medical emergency, they risk catching a write-up because the prison doesn’t want to risk legal liability if something goes wrong.
- Establish health education courses for prisoners. When prisoners are sick, experiencing pain, or coping with chronic illness, they don’t have the ability to Google their symptoms and help themselves through common illnesses. In this information void, prisoners need access to education that teaches them about how to manage common illnesses and diseases commonly experienced by prisoners, such as diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure etc.
- Allow prisoners and their families to access medical information. While the barriers to getting a second opinion on medical diagnoses are significant, one important step would be to remove institutional barriers that prevent prisoners from accessing their medical records. Currently, it can take months to receive records once a request is made. This prevents prisoners from effectively advocating for themselves and families from advocating on behalf of their loved ones.
- Allow alternatives to prison medical coverage. Currently, WADOC does not allow prisoners’ loved ones to pay for procedures or necessary medication or medical equipment, such as an insulin pump. These senseless restrictions have led to preventable death in WADOC.
- Expand healthcare coverage through medicaid and medicare. Currently, prisoners are not covered by Medicare or Medicaid while incarcerated, even if they are eligible. While recent reforms have introduced Medicaid access for prisoners who are set to be released, these programs should be expanded to cover currently incarcerated people and therefore remove healthcare from state DOC budgets altogether. This would hopefully provide strong coverage as well as more stringent oversight provisions for care.
It’s undeniable that prisons are death-making institutions, but the contradiction of the prison healthcare system specifically is that it is a system designed around withholding healthcare – it actually hastens death. Whether or not the law recognizes it, medical neglect in prison is cruel and unusual punishment. The greatest irony is that it is actually the state that inflicts this very punishment.
Want to get involved in the fight for health care in Washington State prisons?
Contact Lawrence Jenkins via Securus:
LAWRENCE JENKINS
ID#: 306665
Stafford Creek Corrections Center (WA)
The post Healthcare As Punishment: Seeking Medical Care In Washington Prisons appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a monthly paid subscriber* to help us publish more independent journalism on whistleblowing.*
To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.
There is no shortage of activists, journalists, academics, and people of conscience who have some story to share about the impact of the “Collateral Murder” video.
The U.S. military footage of an Apache helicopter crew shooting indiscriminately at a dozen Iraqi civilians — including Reuters journalists Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, and two young children — is widely recognized for exposing the true nature of the United States war in Iraq and for making WikiLeaks and Julian Assange household names.
Three years before WikiLeaks made it possible for the public to watch this video, Dean Yates, Reuters bureau chief in Iraq, learned of its existence. Yates testified about the impact of the video at the Belmarsh Tribunal in Sydney, Australia on March 4, 2023.
Later in the Tribunal, another delegate, Australian lawyer Bernard Collaery, called Yates’ testimony “admissible evidence,” which could serve as witness testimony in defense of Assange. (In fact, a statement from Yates was submitted to a British court during Assange’s extradition trial.)
It has now been nearly 13 years since WikiLeaks published the video, and nearly 16 years since the attack took place. No one responsible for the attack or the invasion of Iraq has faced even a modicum of accountability.
In contrast, Assange is languishing in Belmarsh Prison under torturous conditions. He sits in legal limbo while the United States continues to pursue his extradition under Espionage Act charges, in a case which poses an unprecedented threat to press freedom.
While WikiLeaks’ publication of military documents from Iraq and Afghanistan are at the heart of the case, the “Collateral Murder” video is absent from the 18-count indictment that spans 37 pages.
“The U.S. military usually didn’t investigate civilian casualties in Iraq. It did in this case because Namir and Saeed worked for a major international news organization,” Yates said as he started his speech.
“I was shown—without advance warning—less than three minutes of footage from the gun-camera of Crazy Horse 1-8, up to where it opened fire for the first time. I was told the gunship then attacked a minivan because it was believed to be helping wounded insurgents and picking up weapons. U.S. forces had acted in accordance with the rules of engagement for Iraq, I was told.”
Yates spent the next three years trying to convince the Pentagon to provide the full footage through the Freedom of Information Act, yet his effort was met with repeated refusals.
Then, in 2010, WikiLeaks published the video. It immediately was clear that what the Pentagon had claimed was deceptive and dishonest.
Screen shot from the “Collateral Murder” video“It was obvious why the U.S. government didn’t want to share the tape with Reuters,” Yates said. “It showed grainy figures on a Baghdad street. The hellish clack of Crazy Horse 1-8’s chain gun firing rounds the size of a small soft-drink bottle, the length of a man’s hand. Clouds of dust as those cannon shells crashed into men.”
Yates further explained in his testimony that he highlighted sections of the indictment against Assange when the charges were announced. He concluded they were “an attempt to criminalize what journalists do,” and then Yates recalled something U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning explained at her court-martial.
“After saving a copy of the tape, Ms. Manning told her court-martial that she searched for and found the ROEs, a 2007 flow chart outlining the chain of command for the use of force in Iraq and a laminated ‘ROE Card’ soldiers carried with them that summarized the rules,” Yates explained. “Then I got it. The U.S. government didn’t want the video in a courtroom. Too embarrassing.”
“Potential war crimes. Cruel pilot banter. The U.S. military repeatedly lied about the events of July 12, 2007, in which my Iraq staff were killed.”
Yates debunked, point-by-point, the lies in the original statement that the U.S. military put out justifying the attack, as well as the excuses U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made following WikiLeaks’ publication of the footage. Yates emphasized that U.S. troops were well aware of the rules of engagement that they were violating, and despite this clear breach of rules, a U.S. military investigation cleared the pilots.
The Pentagon engaged in a cover-up to try to keep the footage from ever seeing the light of day.
Zoomed in screen shot from the “Collateral Murder” video“All this shows why the U.S. government didn’t put the tape in Assange’s indictment – that snapshot of the war would have exposed the hypocrisy of its case against him,” Yates said. “The breach of the ROEs, the blatant way the military ignored the wrongdoing and the extent senior military and civilian officials lied about it. Collateral Murder is so powerful because it is pure truth-telling. No military officials could deflect, sanitize, or provide ‘context.’”
Yates finished his testimony by comparing the video to the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by photojournalist Eddie Adams at the start of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. The photo powerfully documented the casual execution of Nguyen Van Lem, and is credited for changing public perception of the war in Vietnam.
The “Collateral Murder” video certainly impacted the public perception of the Iraq War. However, 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, many of the war’s architects have succeeded in memory-holing their crimes, lies, and abuses of power.
Thanks to Assange and WikiLeaks, even if the criminals behind the war and occupation in Iraq never face any justice for their actions, this video will always be available to anyone who wants to know the truth about the conflict.
The post US Still Trying To Bury ‘Collateral Murder’ Video That WikiLeaks Released appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter, a project of Shadowproof. Become a monthly paid subscriber* to help us publish more independent journalism on whistleblowing.*
To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.
Shadowproof and Project Censored present a conversation between Kevin Gosztola and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg to mark the release of Kevin’s book, “Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.”
The book is available today, March 7, from Censored Press and Seven Stories Press. It is a crucial and compelling guide to the United States government’s case against the WikiLeaks founder and the implications for press freedom.
“Kevin Gosztola is a rare journalist who understands the abominable threat that the case against Assange poses to press freedom,” says Daniel. “I rely on his indispensable reporting not only to stay informed about Assange, but also to follow developments in the wider war on whistleblowers.”
Daniel has spent many decades sharing not only his experiences as a Nixon-era whistleblower but also showing support for fellow whistleblowers, who have faced similar attacks. He testified at the extradition trial against Assange in the United Kingdom in September 2020. He is also a board member for the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
We thank Daniel for his generosity, and all the kindness he has shown to whistleblowers and independent journalists while standing up for peace and truth-telling.
Below is the conversation between Kevin and Daniel on Guilty of Journalism.
The following is a transcript of the conversation with minor edits for clarity.
GOSZTOLA: We’re fast approaching the fourth anniversary of Julian Assange being thrown out of the Ecuador embassy and put into jail. Though we don’t have to get into all the details, especially given the life announcement you made recently, I just want to ask you about the passage of time as it applies to Julian Assange because it’s something that I think about as I follow this case.
What I wrote about in my book, we’re talking about events that unfolded 13-14 years ago. The passage of time has usually factored into criminal cases. Sometimes it is weighed against hem when you’re considering bringing a case against a person. But Julian Assange has considered figures like Michael Ratner, who is no longer with us who was a really good human rights attorney who represented him, [as a mentor]. He’s lost Gavin MacFadyen, who was a figure in some way that he looked up to. So I’d like to get your view about what you consider most alarming about the fact that this keeps marching onward and doesn’t have a resolution yet.
ELLSBERG: On the one hand, [the U.S. government] would be very happy to bring him to trial in Alexandria in particular, to extradite him and get him on trial, and with the expectation that in the post-9/11 world of law and attitude that he would be convicted. The Supreme Court has never yet ruled on the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to anyone other than a spy, who gives secret information to a foreign power generally with intent to harm the United States especially in wartime. That’s where it’s been used exclusively before my case in 1971.
I was the first one tried as they said for a non-espionage case under the so-called Espionage Act. That’s not it’s official name, as you know. It’s 18 U.S.C. 793, especially paragraphs (d) and (e). As a non-lawyer—I’m not a lawyer I’m a defendant—that’s the one law I can trip off my tongue easily because I was the first non-spy, and they didn’t accuse me of being a spy. People misreported that often. But the [first] person who was not being charged with espionage to be charged under the act, and both paragraphs (d) and (e).
[793(e)] is particularly for people who did not have authorized access to the material for which they were a source. I was an authorized person with the Pentagon Papers to have it, as was Chelsea Manning when she had access to the material that she gave over. That’s true in most of the cases that have been brought.
It’s never been brought before against a journalist, as you know—and despite [former New York Times executive editor] Bill Keller’s despicable, I would say, allegation that he doesn’t recognize Julian Assange as a journalist. That’s partly due to the fact that most journalists do not really regard sources as part of the process.
Journalism begins with the person I give it to, and the source is sort of, I’ve come to realize, is sort of like a policeman’s criminal informant, a snitch who disobeys the rules of his organization. If he’s in the mafia, he’s subject to death. Even if he’s not in the mafia, he’s a criminal. And he’s very, very useful to the policeman. [The police don’t] want to share him with any other police person because it’s useful information. He wants to build his career on that information, but he doesn’t really have much respect or concern.
I will say that journalists do show a great deal of concern for concealing the identity of a source, and I’m sorry if I sound cynical here. I’m talking out of a good deal of experience of talking to whistleblowers other than myself. They don’t feel that journalists in the end have shown as much concern as they expected, often in the beginning.
I actually don’t know a whistleblower who regrets what she or he has done. Even when they’ve almost all—you know them only when the law has entrapped them, not the anonymous ones. But I’ve talked to a lot of them. I’ve made it my effort to meet a lot of them because I identify with them, and I’ve been through the mill and I can give them some advice and reassurance and generally my admiration for what they’ve done. I’ve found that it’s very hard to find one who ends the process without great complaint against the journalist they’ve dealt with.
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To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen that before as a generalization, or even as a selective case. Because they don’t fight them. They’re happy that the material got out, as certainly I am for example. But they all are, they’re happy the material got out in nearly all cases. There’s a few where they didn’t really intend it. And they generally start out with a really friendly relationship with the journalist, and in some cases, certainly mine and others, you feel you’re part of a movement, say against war or nuclear weapons or invention or [for] the Constitution.
You sort of assume that the journalist is on your side as a liberal. That’s who you’re dealing with. Or a progressive, even if their editors are not that liberal or progressive. But you sort of start out with the assumption—and they encourage this assumption—that we’re together on this somehow. We’re getting this out. It seems a very natural presumption. If people are against the war, they welcome the opportunity to put out some truth that might shorten it.
But it turns out, as these people nearly all find out, that the concern either for keeping their identity, or how they present the materials, does not really extend to the source very much. They don’t really regard them as being on the same team as the source may originally mistakenly imagine.
The Times Treated Assange In A Manner That Was FamiliarComing back to Assange, I perceived immediately that he was treated in a way very familiar to me by the Times, even terribly [and] contemptuously. Bill Keller may be in some ways that I don’t know a very fine person and a good journalist. From what I do know of him and his treatment of Chelsea Manning and Assange and others, he’s a horse’s ass, one of the jerks of the world. [chuckles] Elon Musk is revealing himself in those terms.
When Bill Keller says I don’t recognize him as a journalist and then he prints a [New York Magazine] story introducing the world to Julian Assange, which describes him as this unkempt character looking like a bag lady—Look, we’re talking about a computer guy who lives at night on his computer, pretty much. Or around the clock. He was originally a hacker, as some of the others. This is his life. So he didn’t look like a Times reporter, which I guess has some of the standards of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI agents. And he smelled bad.
Now, when was the last time you saw that described of anyone? Have you ever heard anyone described as smelling bad? This is a source. So Julian didn’t expect that kind of treatment. He was rather dismayed by it, and I had to say Julian. I could have told you what would come here.
I haven’t ever publicized it at all. I can tell you why. But I was treated even worse than that by the New York Times Magazine section in a disastrous profile that was done of me, which was misleading in almost every paragraph. And I’ve never talked about that publicly.
Why don’t any of the leakers or sources come out like me and criticize the dealing with the papers, or the papers as they see them? Because we want to get the word out. It’s got to be through a newspaper. No one wants to antagonize media. And like any profession, they don’t like criticism, even of their colleagues. Even if they don’t like those particular colleagues. It’s like lawyers and doctors. They don’t testify against each other, and they don’t like to hear it. You may want to get something else out, as certainly I did.
I never wanted to antagonize the New York Times. As you know, I’m coming to a point here, where I don’t have to worry whether I antagonize the New York Times. So I will say, and I’m not going to go into details, my dealings with the New York Times were not less frustrating than those of Julian Assange and some of the others. I do think of that as a defect because of their craft. Because they could get an awful lot more information if they had more respect for sources, and if they probed for what’s there, which they generally don’t.
Sometimes they do. Good investigative reporters, certainly, [like] Sy Hersh, who doesn’t try to maintain to government officials by dining with them, and playing tennis with them, and being part of their club, the officials club.
“They Don’t Like Civil Disobedience”Let me get away from the relations with the sources to a more general point. It’s the kind of thing you cover, Kevin. I’ve often been asked, how do you weigh the way the press is doing compared to 1971 when they printed the Pentagon Papers? And I got more coverage than I could have dreamed of, that is the papers did. Because of the effort by Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell, disastrous to them, of trying to enjoin the New York Times. And then, when I gave it to the Post, they enjoined the Post. So I gave it to one paper after another.
A friend of mine, Gar Alperovitz, who didn’t want to be known as a source until recently, a wonderful historian and scholar—He was very involved in this process for other reasons. I was inclined to put it all out. We didn’t have the web then, but to get it out before the FBI could make me stop it. He said no. I’ll give him credit for this. He said do it one at a time. He had worked for Congress. He says stretch it out. That will give more attention to it.
The effect was there were four injunctions, and then they stopped because they simply realized they could not stop this. It eventually got to 17 newspapers I recall. The prosecution had to say we can’t stop this with injunctions. I remember the prosecutor saying it’s like trying to herd bees. They’re just out there.
That was a glorious moment for the press, which they take almost no credit for. It was a wave of civil disobedience, which is what they were doing. Not one of them wanted to acknowledge that because they don’t like civil disobedience. They don’t get treated well; in particular, the New York Times.
For instance, Abe Rosenthal, the managing editor of the New York Times, did a wonderful job getting this through and getting the documents in despite the fact that he supported the [Vietnam War]. I don’t give him credit for that, but I give him a lot of credit as a newsman for getting this stuff out despite the fact that it contradicted policies that he had supported.
[chuckles] Okay, I’ll tell you something I’ve never said publicly. A friend of mine on the Times informed me that Abe Rosenthal hated me. What? How could that be? First, I’m an antiwar activist, and he didn’t respect any of them. He was for the war. So as an establishment person, he didn’t like the Berrigans. He didn’t like David Harris, and he didn’t like me.
But more important than that, he was furious at me—I was told very authoritatively—because by revealing my identity to Walter Cronkite and otherwise while the FBI was searching for me, I had taken the attention away from the New York Times. It had become a Daniel Ellsberg story, to a considerable extent, instead of we have a anonymous source; a reason why I think they love their sources to be anonymous. Obviously, it’s for the benefit of the source to a large extent, but it turns out also for the press. They don’t have to share attention for their revelations [with] the source.
I said to the person I was talking to that I had always made it clear to Neil Sheehan on the Times that if I was indicted, which was almost certain but not quite certain. I was not aware of any indictments, but I assumed there had been and that I just didn’t happen to be aware of them. But I assumed if there’s been so few that even I don’t know about them from being in the government for a decade, seeing a lot of leaks. They must have known the source in a number of those cases. Others they didn’t. But often they must have known who the source was, and [the Justice Department] didn’t seem to indict them, as far as I could see.
I didn’t know that that was for constitutional reason. They felt they didn’t have a British-type Official Secrets Act. And they don’t. The British who didn’t have a war of independence, a revolution. And they do have a monarch who cannot impeached. He’s above the law. So we made some advances in terms of freedom and democracy in our war of independence. And because we don’t have, as you point out in your book right at the beginning—We do not have a British-type Official Secrets Act, which criminalizes any and all release of protected information that they don’t want out. Just [basically], did you do it?
Now, that’s the way they’re using the Espionage Act since my case, and above all, by Obama, then Trump, and now Biden.
‘The Guardian As A Whole Doesn’t Look Good’GOSZTOLA: The media is something that I deal with in the book, and we wanted to make sure that we raised that Andrew Cockburn did this fantastic feature story for Harper’s Magazine called “Alternative Facts: How the media failed Julian Assange.” And he also incorporated some details from my book into the feature. He used it as a kind of guide to help him question and account for all the misrepresentations that the media, these news organizations particularly in the US but also at the Guardian, have engaged in collectively.
A good example is David Leigh and even Nick Davies saying Julian Assange said that Afghan informants “deserve to die.” That was something that was quoted in a PBS FRONTLINE documentary. Der Spiegel journalists say he never expressed anything of that nature. It’s been used to defame Julian Assange.
ELLSBERG: Let me say since you’ve just given that anecdote. I want to take advantage of this since this is one of my last late interviews in life. You may have noticed I’m using language that I really have never used before, and I’m criticizing the media in a way I was afraid to do like other sources. I don’t want to antagonize people that I might want to share stories eventually with, but that’s not going to go on.
Okay, David Leigh and Nick Davies and the other people who said that, who with Luke Harding revealed the password that enabled these State Department cables to be released. They had done it in their book. But in their general attacks from the Guardian on this major source, I can identify David Leigh as another jerk, a real, real jerk.
The Guardian as a whole doesn’t look good. Alan Rusbridger, the editor, pretty good at printing this stuff. But the people under him have an almost campaign against Julian. It’s bizarre. I don’t know, have to go into that. Very bad performance. I started to generalize, and I didn’t say it in my monologue here. People would ask me how the press is doing.
I said there’s two ways to answer that. One is terribly but better than any other institution in our government structure. Look at the Supreme Court in recent years, Congress, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party. [chuckles] No use even talking about that now. So the press looks better than any of those. Another way of saying it is they’re better than any other institution but terribly. They’re doing terribly.
What was it? Twenty years after the Pentagon Papers for the Gulf War, and then for the Iraq War. Each case they were as misled by the executive as willingly, as easily as Vietnam. There was no improvement there. Rightly so, the government has even found new ways to suppress truth in the press. But they go along with it pretty easily.
How Do We Know They’ll Print It?GOSZTOLA: One of my favorite movies of all time, which is from the era of film-watching that you were doing. I remember in your Secrets book that you mention seeing “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid“ with Howard Zinn. But another Robert Redford film that is quintessential to a conversation —
ELLSBERG: Day of the Condor!
GOSZTOLA: “Three Days of the Condor,” yes. And I want to say that question at the end, where we see the New York Times and the CIA company man asks, how do you know they’ll print it? I think that’s something that should enter our conversation here.
ELLSBERG: How did he say it?
GOSZTOLA: How do you know they’ll print it? That’s what the CIA man says to Robert Redford at the end. Because Robert Redford’s character Joe Turner says that he’s just blown the whistle on the underground assassination network inside the CIA, and he’s gone inside the New York Times building and he’s given [them] the allegations. And as he’s walking away, the CIA man—this is the Cliff Robertson character—looks at Robert Redford’s character and says—
This is kind of him saying that you didn’t necessarily beat us because how do you know that the news media is going to publish your claims about our underground assassination network. We’ve talked about how the media demeans sources. They don’t want to share ownership. But we have countless examples in the last 20 years of journalists flat out not publishing material that was brought to their attention. And I think that’s something that we have to contemplate too in this case with Julian Assange and the way that the government has been able to go to war with WikiLeaks.
Because what WikiLeaks did was publish material that probably the New York Times and the Washington Post would not have published, and it put them in the position where they had to deal with the fact that material they wouldn’t publish was now being shared by all of us and they didn’t want to have to deal with it in their newspapers.
ELLSBERG: Good question. It brings me back to someone I was discussing a little earlier.
I remember “Three Days of the Condor.” My memory of the ending is that he looks up at the triangular building, the New York Times building, with the crawl that goes underneath. Isn’t that right? But I didn’t remember the question that you just mentioned, which is, how do you know they’re going to publish it?
Well, they had just shown definite courage [it was 1975], as did the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers, who each of them defied the attorney general. He didn’t use the word treason, but he implied it. This is against the national security right at this moment. And the president was saying it. They said we’ve looked at it, not very long in some cases. They went with the New York Times example, which is why the New York Times is such an important place to put this. And they decided the attorney general was wrong. They didn’t agree that it endangered national security.
Of course, I’m the good whistleblower now because 50 years later no one has ever found any way in which it endangered national security. By the way, Irwin Griswold, who represented the government in the civil case to enjoin the New York Times and the others, had said at the time it endangers national security. Years later, at a conference and in an op-ed in the Washington Post said I never saw any reason to believe that this endangered national security. It contradicted what he said before the Supreme Court, but then again he’s a lawyer and not a defense lawyer.
‘Let Me Tell You A Secret That I’ve Never Told’Can you be sure that they’ll print this stuff? Let me tell you a secret that I’ve never told. Why not? I’m not holding anything back now, and you’ll see why I was reluctant before.
A year ago, just about exactly a year ago, I gave the New York Times and Charlie Savage a 350-page study by my old colleague Morton Halperin, who had done a top secret study for the Rand Corporation. Two-thirds of it had been declassified, but a third of it was still classified. And it had to do with the nuclear threats we had made and were ready to carry out to protect Taiwan from Chinese assault and even the offshore islands, a mile and a half from the mainland, which they regarded as part of the defense of Taiwan.
The Economist had just had a piece on the cover showing Taiwan with cross-hairs on it. It said it’s the most dangerous place in the world. So I wanted to reveal to the American public—I think it the study was done in 1964, 1966, more than half a century ago. It’s time for people to know that we thought it then. Taiwan was worth blowing up the world, starting a nuclear event.
Eisenhower expected, he said, in secret communications, the part that he had not declassified—He expected the Russians to respond with nuclear attacks. Which would mean, as I knew having worked on the war plans in 1961, in the Eisenhower period, even a non-nuclear attack on American forces, and we had American forces in Taiwan. Any attack would call for an all-out attack on Russia or the Soviet Union and China.
What he was saying was if this blockade on the offshore islands and we can’t break it just by going through it if they’re shelling our ships, we’re going to do something that begins the process of destroying the northern hemisphere. They didn’t know about nuclear winter then, which would also take out the southern hemisphere. Okay, so I release that to the New York Times, and of course, revealed myself as the source. Charlie Savage did a good story on this.
I said I would welcome, and I was younger then but not a lot younger, a year younger. I was 91. So I said I would be glad to prosecuted on this because I’m not going to bargain plea. The others have pled bargains in almost every case to get only 30 or 40 months in prisons or 55 or something like that. Rather than a life sentence, and I’d been charged with what amounted to a life sentence, 115 years. Julian is facing 175 years, but in both cases, that’s basically a life sentence.
But I said a life sentence to me doesn’t mean what it used to mean 50 years ago. I wasn’t ready to face that then, but a life sentence isn’t going to weigh on me too heavily. I’m 91. No prosecution for this.
Alright, so what I hadn’t told Charlie. I’ll now reveal it. I hope he doesn’t mind too much. I hadn’t told him because I thought it might deter him from this scoop—That I had given this study when it was all top secret to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, a friend of mine, wonderful journalist. I think he’s probably a Pulitzer Prize winner. I think he was head then of the Washington office. I’m not sure. But I gave it to him on my way to give to Japanese political parties.
I put it out in Japan. I had a press conference. Never talked about this publicly. Every party was represented except the main party. The liberals control them. It’s essentially a one-party state but has a lot of other parties under it. So they were all there, and I put this on the table. I said you should know that Japan was very explicitly in this study a hostage, would be treated as a nuclear target if we started a nuclear war—for one thing because all of our warships had nuclear weapons in Japanese harbor, which the public didn’t know and their government denied.
We had American bases there. Planes would be coming off from Japan. So I thought the Japanese public deserved to know that the president was secretly endangering them at this time.
Then, on my way to Japan I thought, better if I make sure that the Americans have this before I give it to foreigners. So, on my way to Japan, I duck in to Washington, and I give this Tom Wicker. None of it ever appeared. So what Charlie Savage revealed last year had been in the hands of the New York Times—this would have been something like ’82. That’s 40 years ago.
I thought if I mentioned that they had it and chose not to run it then that might discourage him. He might look a little deeper into whether he should run it now. I can understand that. So I didn’t mention it to him. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t reveal that particular part of the past.
I also thought it’s going to be hard for them. Frankly, they can prosecute me. But I’ve got a pretty good case here because they know perfectly well that I gave this to these parties in Japan, and the Japanese have an ability—It was in a parliament building, the Diet Building. They use their regular Diet stenographers, or translators. They translate it into Japanese almost overnight. It’s like the congressional record. So it was available in Japan. This top secret study.
An International Herald Tribune reporter was at this press conference, and I’ve forgotten his name. He writes a long story about what I said to the press, which had a lot to do with Taiwan, other things about our relations to Japan. I told them a lot of things. And he didn’t mention that I put an explicitly top secret study on the table in front of these people, who immediately copied it. It’s not in the story, and it’s a long story.
There could only have been a phone call from somebody who said that’s top secret. Don’t run it. Must have checked it with somebody. It’s not mentioned. It was never mentioned in the press in the U.S. that I had done this. So I didn’t get prosecuted that time. This was after the Pentagon Papers.
Criminalizing Journalists For Protecting Their Sources
GOSZTOLA: One last question and then we will end this interview. I want to first bring up the fact that since you mentioned Edward Snowden we should raise the matter of how the third indictment against Julian Assange incorporated the support that WikiLeaks provided to Edward Snowden as a source—
ELLSBERG: Oh, I’m not sure I knew that. Hmm.
GOSZTOLA: Yes, it’s in there. In June 2020, they criminalized WikiLeaks for sending Sarah Harrison to Hong Kong to help Edward Snowden. And of course, we know the story. He gets stuck in the Moscow airport because his passport revoked. I wonder if you could draw a parallel to Pentagon Papers. You disclose them to journalists, and if any journalists had been accused of helping you evade the FBI, would they have been legally liable if we’re going to apply the way the Justice Department is pursuing Assange now?
ELLSBERG: As I discussed with Charlie Savage at the time, just to make sure this is all clear, there is no question that he and the Times editors, who approve this, and the secretaries who dealt with it on the Times, were as indictable as I was under the plain language of the act, which needs to be amended in various ways. Which has been proposed by the way by Rashida Tlaib, a different version from Tulsi Gabbard’s earlier.
Savage is as indictable. That’s the way it is, and the publisher, yes. [DOJ] have until now refrained naturally from taking on the New York Times, and for a lot of reasons. I’ll just mention one. Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece in Rolling Stone. Why in Rolling Stone? He couldn’t get it published anywhere else, and it was a long piece about CIA dealings with journalists in which he said 500 journalists had aided the CIA knowingly. I think 500 had security clearances or non-disclosure agreements, which would seem to compromise them as journalists significantly.
[Note: According to Bernstein’s report, the CIA had dealt with 400 journalists. At least 200 had signed agreements or some form of a contract.]
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Bernstein said their number one asset was the New York Times for getting out information. Conceal this, and we’ll give you that. I could give you many examples, but we’ve been going on for a long time. And that’s true for the Times of course.
The CIA did not want to take on the Times, even though it does expose things infrequently that they don’t want out. But that just enhances the credibility of the Times from the government’s point of view, when the New York Times is doing their job. [chuckles] They’re doing it about one-tenth of the time to the extent that they should be doing it, and from the government’s point of view, we’ll accept and we won’t prosecute these people for embarrassing us occasionally.
As long as they’ll align ourselves with us, as long as they won’t put out the surveillance story for a year with [Thomas] Tamm [on NSA warrantless wiretapping]. We need that. So they don’t prosecute them—yet. And yet it has been true for a half a century. Some day, and the ACLU predicted that it would be trump who would indict a journalist, which Obama who had indicted more sources than anyone else—you go into why.
You tell a little bit more why [in your book]. It’s always puzzled me. How did he get in that position? Well, he hated leaks. Well, all presidents hate leaks. Why was it under him that there were so many prosecutions? I was learning from that at midnight last night from your book, reading it.
Trump didn’t care about that, of course. He didn’t even like the New York Times. Didn’t he call it the failing New York Times? He hated the Washington Post even more. As you mention in the book, there was an earlier effort by Nixon to prosecute the New York Times. That grand jury was dismissed before bringing indictments apparently because those people had been overheard illegally without a warrant, as I had, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, my friends. They didn’t get indicted then because almost surely they asked, have I been overheard?
Now it’s against Assange, and if Assange is convicted, if he is extradited and convicted, every journalist in the world has an x on their back, a laser target for if they print anything that is classified of the one hundred percent that is classified. Of which, five percent should be classified. Five percent is a lot, but 95 percent is even more. Say it’s a few years old.
The Charlie Savage case is 50 years old. I was looking forward to arguing in court. This is before I knew that my life would be shorter than I had expected. But I was looking forward to going to court and saying, do you really think it’s going to endanger national security? To put out information that is 50 years old? Now granted, it is very current. There is a crisis going on about Taiwan. I’m not sure I could have prevailed.
It does affect U.S. policy with respect to Taiwan, right now. That’s why I put it out. Still I would like to see them argue explicitly in court that they must protect a policy of readiness and threat to blow up the world to hold on to Taiwan, which I think would not look a lot better than Putin’s monstrous threats to blow up the world to protect Crimea, his hold in Crimea and the Donbas, which he has defined as Russia.
Now why isn’t he being denounced? That’s an unconscionable threat, immoral and insane, which it is. Well, because NATO has been making that threat for 70 years and is still doing that. Not very actively because we now have a conventional non-nuclear superiority to the Russians.
[cell phone ring interrupts]
The Warsaw Pact has changed sides, and is now in NATO. We have a huge superiority. Though we don’t need nuclear threats, they can’t denounce Putin for making these insane threats to take an insane action to initiate a nuclear war because it’s their policy. Biden needs that threat for Taiwan, where we don’t have conventional superiority in that region.
Now, do you have to threaten nuclear war to keep the Chinese from invading? No, I don’t think so. Even Putin—well, Putin may feel he has to threaten that to hold on to the Donbas against American intervention, if we intervene directly. If we do intervene directly, he will say to hold on to this part of Russia, whose existence is threatened—the Crimea, the Donbas, or Zaporizhzhia—we can do that against Ukrainians. Against American pilots directly, not so clearly. That’s where I fear he would carry out his threats to carry out a small nuclear war, which has of course every risk. You would hope not, but every risk of causing nuclear winter.
‘We Have Only A Small Chance’I’ll say right now. Anyone in the government, in the Russian government—A citizen can’t even object to this without getting imprisoned and in many cases tortured, like Navalny, in Russia. That’s not true here. So people who object to his policy can say you should not be threatening or preparing to blow the world up. That’s a shorthand for it doesn’t kill everybody, but 90-98 percent yes—from the smoke in the stratosphere that shuts out all the sunlight and destroys all the harvests.
No nation in the world should accept without the utmost condemnation and resistance. If anyone, as I have said before in other occasions, any American I’ll speak to, but this is just as true in any other country—some of which the dangers of doing what I’m saying are much greater.
Anybody who knows that the public and the world is being lied to by their officials or that preparations are being made that may well be carried out to cause nuclear winter or to initiate nuclear war. Of course, a Russian who knows that now or someone in the U.S. who knows that about Taiwan should consider at any cost personally to tell the truth that may avert a nuclear war, or any kind of war, actually.
I can’t say they should individually do it, but if they think, they should consider doing it, what I wish I had done earlier in 1964 or ’61, when I had top secret information or access to it that could have averted the Vietnam War. Of course, I should have put that out earlier. So I say don’t do what I did. Don’t wait til the bombs are actually falling. And get it out. Get it to the New York Times, if they’ll print the documents. Get it to El Pais, Der Spiegel, even the Guardian. [chuckles] They behaved so badly with respect to Assange. Don’t expect respect or concern from the Guardian or these others, or the Times. That’s not an issue.
It’s not a question of whether you should be called names, which have kept Democrats from opposing wars for generations here; not only Vietnam but all the others. That’s not a sufficient reason for not telling the truth. So people should have the moral courage that our soldiers routinely exhibit in combat with respect to their lives. But it’s very rare to find an official who will risk her or his career, or clearance or access. Or re-election or any of this. Unless there is more moral courage in the press, in Congress, and in the military than we’ve seen in the past, I don’t think we’ll survive the consequences of climate change or avoiding nuclear war. Everything depends on it.
Even a small chance of affecting the ripping apart of the Constitution, as in Snowden’s case, or of ending a war and avoiding a war’s worth of lives at stake, of course it’s worth any personal cost to consider, and to do it. We have only a small chance, but everything is at stake. It’s worth pursuing it.
You’re in a potentially noble confession, Kevin. And you didn’t mention in this excellent article in Harper’s by Andrew Cockburn, who is terrific on the question of the military industrial-complex and on how the media failed Julian Assange, terrific article—You naturally didn’t mention that you were the single investigative journalist who is singled out by name in your book and in your reporting for having covered this properly, courageously, and meticulously and so, I give you that tribute too just as Andrew does. And I think others will avail themselves of your information in your book.
GOSZTOLA: Let’s end there, Dan. I really appreciate your time, and I thank you again for the endorsement that you gave to the book. I wish you the best. You seem like you’re at peace, and I’m very happy for you.
ELLSBERG: Well, the world is not at peace. But we’re doing what we can.
GOSZTOLA: John Shipton, Julian Assange’s father, calls it the difficulty of destiny. This is what is chronicled in the film that’s touring the country right now in the United States. That Julian Assange’s brother [Gabriel Shipton] produced. I’m just mentioning it and plugging it in addition to my book because there are screenings that people who watch this stream or broadcast will be able to go see in different locations.
But the difficulty of destiny. Not the idea that an individual can be a hero and change the world but the idea that people who are trapped in these predicaments, in these circumstances, have to struggle and try to transform it. These Belmarsh tribunals that we participated in, rallies, the pressuring of Congress people. We’re all trapped in these predicaments, and it’s all up to us to try and transform it.
Thank you very much, Dan.
ELLSBERG: Thank you for the chance.
The post A Conversation With Dan Ellsberg On Assange And The State Of Journalism appeared first on Shadowproof.
In a word, the ongoing union organizing drive that has swept the coffee giant Starbucks can be described as ‘unprecedented.’ Never before has a mass unionization effort of this magnitude gripped a fast food company in the United States. The humble origins of the barista-led Starbucks Workers United can be found in the Rust Belt city of Buffalo. It is there where the nation-wide unionization effort was publicly launched in August 2021.
As Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) expands from shop to shop, workers face an onslaught of union busting tactics from the company. Union fever continues to rapidly spread across the country as Starbucks workers at over 400 locations have filed petitions for union elections, with more planning to do so.
Starbucks’ response to these efforts came as no surprise to veteran union organizers and former baristas involved with a lesser-known and very different unionization effort at the company that took place years ago by the Industrial Workers of the World.
Workers have won union elections at 291 stores and at two of the company’s three roastaries at the time of this writing. Those numbers are only expected to grow. There are 7,335 workers represented by SBWU at union stores.
Starbucks barista Colter Chatriand got involved early in the organizing at his shop in Philadelphia. It kicked off “once Buffalo started to make the news,” he said. “And what that did for us was, when I would be talking to people or trying to start conversations with people, it was extremely easy to just be able to reference Buffalo.”
All eyes were on the three locations in Buffalo when the unthinkable happened: workers at two of the stores won their union elections, with tightly contested results at the third. Chatriand and other baristas were ecstatic.
Arjae Red was a barista and union organizer at SBWU’s flagship store in Buffalo. They were aware of the organizing going on before they were hired, and joined a union organizing committee shortly thereafter. It did not take too long for Red to see the writing on the wall for how the company treats its workers.
“They just basically lie. They’re like military recruiters. They say you’re going to get all these benefits when you come out and then you don’t have anything,” said Red.
Both Chatriand and Red have a similar background that propelled them to organize at Starbucks.
In 2017, Chatriand was living in Butte, Montana, an old mining town with a deep history of labor militancy with the radical, anti-capitalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the Wobblies. Chatriand became enamored with the history of the union, and in particular with Wobbly organizer Frank Little.
“He was lynched by the bosses for his efforts to organize. He’s a local labor martyr in Butte,” Chatirand said. “It was the 100 year anniversary of his death when I moved up there. So that’s that part of what piqued my interest.”
As he researched more about the history of the Wobblies, Chatriand learned that the union was still active in Butte. He joined the IWW and attended a workplace organizer training to learn how to form a union at his workplace.
Chatriand moved to Philadelphia in 2019 and got a job working at Starbucks, but he had not yet fully put the knowledge he gained from the IWW union training to use. “I was kind of just keeping it in my back pocket,” he said.
Arjae Red also joined the IWW around the same time that Chatriand did. They attended the same IWW training in Buffalo and made an attempt to organize at a factory where they worked.
Their work intersected with a range of other left wing organizing around Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ justice, and socialist base-building. As a low-wage worker who saw the bigger picture of organizing, it made perfect sense for Red to get involved with the Starbucks campaign in its earlier, still underground, stages.
Red noted that a number of organizers with SBWU, which is a part of an affiliate of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) known as Workers United, are also Wobblies. However, they were quick to point out that this cross-union activism represented only a small minority of SBWU activists.
“A lot of the people who are organizing at Starbucks right now are doing it for the first time,” said Red. “And a lot of them are not activists, they’re not people who were super political before. Many of them are people who are, for the first time, becoming politicized by the struggle.”
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When Wobblies Organized Starbucks Both union activity and union busting are as old as the company itself.
Although the Starbucks campaign is the most widespread unionization effort at the company in the U.S., it is not the first. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) represented about 120 workers at Starbucks before the union was decertified in 1992, the same year Schultz bought the company.
Major Starbucks unionization efforts—some more successful than others—have unfolded in Canada, Chile, and New Zealand.
It was not until 2004 that the first nation-wide, sustained IWW organizing campaign at Starbucks surfaced at a Starbucks storefront in New York City. Organizers named their newly formed union Starbucks Workers Union (SWU).
When Wobblies filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they received a rude awakening about the limitations of labor law in the U.S. The board determined that the bargaining unit would have to include every Starbucks location on the entire island of Manhattan.
At that time, powerful unions like SEIU and UFCW were not interested in organizing on such a scale in the fast food industry. It would be near impossible for a small, anti-capitalist union with a shoe-string budget to do it alone. Wobblies pulled their union election petition and adopted a strategy called “solidarity unionism,” which marked a return to their union’s roots.
In practice, solidarity unionism took on many different approaches as the SWU spread across New York City and ultimately across the U.S. Rather than waiting to bargain for a union contract, and relying on union officers to represent workers off the shop floor in lengthy grievance procedures, Wobblies and their coworkers took direct action at work to address issues as they arose.
“Solidarity unionism, to me, means staying up all hours of the night writing press releases, and having long meetings where you definitely bring snacks, and tease out strategy—strategy beyond, how do we get somebody to sign a card,” recounted Anja Witek, another former Starbucks Workers Union organizer who worked at a shop in Minneapolis.
In an echo of the sentiments outlined by long time labor and civil rights activist Staughton Lynd in his book, Labor Law for the Rank and Filer, Witek said that Wobblies did use labor law as a defensive tactic, but never as a guiding element of their strategy.
In 2009, Starbucks fired Witek’s coworker Azmera Mebrahtu, falsely accusing her of stealing $1,200 from the company. She said that the company’s firing of Mebrahtu, an Ethiopian immigrant, was racist, and she and other Wobblies picketed the store and organized other actions to pressure the company to rehire her.
“In the IWW, we say ‘direct action gets the goods,’” Witek said. “We filed an Unfair Labor Practice but it was the direct actions that got her job back. She didn’t have to wait for the law.”
The most successful IWW Starbucks campaigns centered around wages. Union activists won three wage increases, or a 25 percent total increase, for baristas across New York City. This bump in pay spread in varied forms to other cities and states.
In a separate three-year-long battle, organizers won company recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and time-and-a-half holiday pay for workers.
“We’re not going to win this,” Locke recalled thinking while organizing around the holiday. “I was just depressed and bogged down. But everybody else on the organizing committee said ‘we still want to’ and we went with what the committee wanted.”
The IWW announced a march and Locke, who worked at Starbucks for nearly a decade and was one of the core organizers for seven years in New York City, was in disbelief when fellow union organizer Anja Witek texted him on MLK Day about the major win.
“I immediately looked up the employee manual, because they did digital updates all the time, and it had Martin Luther King Day listed as one of the holidays,” Locke said. Tears over that bitter victory streamed down his face.
“Since 2013, we have gotten $1.3 million of additional money into the pockets of baristas across the country on Martin Luther King Day for paid holiday pay, as well as a paid day off for managers, which was a side effect,” said Locke. With pay increases and company growth, that initial dollar amount has increased over the years.
“I have never been more proud of anything in my whole life,” Locke said of the union victory. “It’s really profound the way that that specific campaign touched a lot of baristas, the way that it mattered to them when they learned about the labor fights that Dr. King supported and fought for, and the fact that he was in support of unions.”
King was a vocal backer of unions. His final act before his assassination in Memphis was supporting a mass strike of union sanitation workers.
According to Locke, at the union’s peak there were only “300 baristas nationwide organizing.” In New York City, he said there were about 200 SWU members and an additional 900 workers who took collective action but never officially joined the union. Wobblies organized at Starbucks in over a dozen states.
A small-yet-committed group of union members were able to achieve victories.
However, many union leaders were targeted and fired in the course of the campaign. There was constant turnover of workers, and organizers endured an incredible amount of mental and physical pain from the daily grind of working at Starbucks. Union leaders were burnt out.
In the end, the company’s brutal union busting pushed the IWW campaign into oblivion.
The Workers United CampaignThe IWW and Workers United – SEIU could not be more different unions. There is certainly some overlap between the two on the basics of organizing and talking to coworkers, but the differences in overall strategies and structures of both unions are night and day.
The IWW has always marched to the beat of a very different drum since its founding in 1905. While the dominant American Federation of Labor practiced a “pure and simple unionism” that focused exclusively on improvements to wages and working conditions under capitalism, but also actively excluded Black and Asian workers from union ranks, the IWW preached revolutionary socialist and anarchist ideas, militant industrial unionism, and practiced racial equality.
Because of their power to disrupt industry and their criticism of World War I, the IWW was brutally repressed by the U.S. government and nearly destroyed.
Today, the IWW in the U.S. and Canada has only about 9,000 members, but Wobblies contest that what the union lacks in numbers it makes up for in its unique approach to organizing: solidarity unionism that transcends industries and national borders, a refusal to get involved with electoral politics, and a grassroots directly-democratic structure. Wobblies still cling to their radical, anticapitalist ethos and were the first union to endorse Occupy Wall Street when it erupted in the streets of New York City in 2011.
SEIU by contrast is the largest union in the U.S. and Canada, and boasts a membership of 2 million. While many unions in the U.S. have decreased in membership over the years from an anti-union onslaught, SEIU has been steadily growing and taking the lead in organizing nurses, service workers, janitors, and adjunct faculty. They were behind the Fight for 15 campaign to demand “15 dollars and a union” across the fast food industry, which resulted in widespread wage increases for fast food workers.
Their promise of a fast food workers union, at least at Starbucks, is finally coming to fruition. SEIU towers over the IWW in numbers and material gains, but it is a hierarchical, staff-driven organization that has deep ties to the Democratic Party.
There are plenty of reasons why the SBWU campaign under SEIU is taking off in ways that the IWW’s Starbucks Workers Union campaign never did. A significantly more favorable political atmosphere is one of them, which created fertile soil for SBWU to plant firm roots.
Mass movements and protests like Occupy Wall Street, the Wisconsin Uprising, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter, have all made a deep imprint on the landscape of organizing in the U.S.
Rising income inequality, inflation, and the stresses specifically faced by service industry workers from the COVID-19 pandemic have also ripened conditions for organizing.
There are legal forces behind SBWU’s boost, too. “I think the reason why this movement is so widespread is because the judge in Buffalo allowed [bargaining units and elections] to be on a store by store basis,” Chatriand said. “That was the ruling that took us by surprise.”
“We were anticipating that the law was not going to be on our side, and that they would rule against us and in the favor of Starbucks,” he said. The favorable ruling has made the process of filing for union elections much easier.
Unlike other SEIU campaigns, SBWU only has a small handful of staffers who are assisting Starbucks baristas in their organizing. New baristas are constantly reaching out to Workers United expressing an interest in organizing but the organization lacks the staff necessary to provide deep support. By necessity, union leadership and staff have turned to empowering workers to learn the skills to become organizers, run their own campaigns, and bargain their own contracts.
The structure of SBWU, according to Arjae Red, is very democratic and run essentially by Starbucks baristas.
“We don’t have the union staff speak for us, we just do it ourselves. And then we refer to them if we need advice,” said Red of Workers United staff.
Organic worker-to-worker networking has developed across “a web of stores that are connected to each other,” Red shared. This includes baristas in Buffalo, Memphis, Phoenix, and other cities.
Baristas also set up city-wide committees and regional networking structures to share resources and offer support.
Chatriand sees this campaign as “very worker driven.” He believes that the past organizing at Starbucks “was too top heavy with the UFCW, and it was too bottom heavy with the IWW. But I think now with Workers United it’s finding some sort of middle ground where it’s kind of the best of both worlds.”
Tactically, Starbucks Workers United activists are not solely organizing around union elections.
“There’s a lot of random little strikes that are being called, one day strikes, one day boycotts, weekend boycotts,” Red said. “As people get fired from stores, the stores are walking out. And this is not really something that we’re coordinating on a country wide scale, but our union still fully supports these autonomous strike actions.”
Workers are getting more bold with their actions as well.. At the Starbucks roastery in New York City, they walked off the job on October 25, 2022 over the health and safety concerns surrounding a bedbug infestation. The historic strike lasted 46 days, and workers won on several of their demands as a result.
In mid-December, baristas staged a three-day strike against unfair labor practices that involved over 1,000 workers and over 100 stores. Much of the work to pull off these actions came from baristas on the shop floor.
The strikes are building a foundation of confidence for the workers. The roastery workers released a statement when they ended their strike, stating, “We are excited to return to work, but we recognize that our fight as a unionized store has just begun… Our next step is to bargain a contract!”
All eyes are on Buffalo to see what the first union contract will look like.
“We want to get a strong first contract so we put out a bargaining survey around the whole country and got a poll of what everybody wants,” Red explained as a member of the barista-led bargaining committee.
The belief is that the first union contract that comes out of Buffalo will set a precedent, good or bad, for stores across the country.
‘Starbucks Has Been Crushing Unions Since Day One’ Starbucks Workers United has thus far weathered the storm of union busting, but given the severe anti-union history of Starbucks, there is no telling what lies in wait for the union.
“Starbucks has been crushing unions since day one,” said Arjae Red. Shortly after buying the six-store company in 1987, CEO Howard Schultz set his sights on the UFCW union membership at the company.
“He quickly stomped out the union,” Red explained. “Howard Schultz lied and told these unionized workers, if you decertify at your next vote, then you’ll maintain all your benefits, and we don’t need a union once we do the merger. And unfortunately, I guess they fell for it because they decertified.”
Starbucks has fostered a public image as a progressive company that champions racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and a variety of progressive causes. That image stands in stark contrast to the reality experienced by workers.
In 2020, a movement of Starbucks baristas emerged in Solidarity with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Baristas wore BLM buttons and face masks in support of the movement, but managers and the company pushed back against them. In a company-wide memo sent to baristas, management explicitly forbade workers from wearing anything in support of Black Lives Matter. Their justification for this was that this public display of support for the movement might incite “agitators” to violence.
Public pressure in support of the workers mounted and the company conceded. They allowed workers to wear BLM buttons and masks, and created a company sponsored BLM tee shirt—a move that Red and other baristas called “tokenistic.”
“What they’re doing is just using the struggles of marginalized people just to advertise,” Red said. “It’s just a way to make money.”
“They present themselves like their cafes are a safe space for LGBTQ+ people, people of color and all kinds of different people who need a place to go. The workers do a good job of trying to make that a reality, but the company, really, it’s not compatible. Many of their values and principles that they’ve claimed to have are totally contradictory to just the way that they run as a corporation.”
Red, who is queer and non-binary, said they were misgendered by managers “on a constant basis.” They want the company to “hold their managers to a higher standard” and “train them better.”
Liberte Locke faced an even deeper level of homophobia at the coffee chain. “Starbucks used my queerness heavily in the anti-organizing campaign,” said Locke, who identified as a queer woman when in the IWW, but has since transitioned.
“It’s not untrue that Starbucks offers assistance with IVF, supports gay marriage, and has pretty extensive language that’s supportive of trans employees. But I feel like Starbucks knows too much, so they are able to use it against us,” he said.
While Locke was organizing in New York, Starbucks replaced the store manager—a straight Puerto Rican woman—with a new manager, who, like Locke at that time, identified as a lesbian woman.
“Starbucks took the basics of queerness and tried to make sure that I would identify with the person,” he said. “And then she did her job as an anti-union person of doing everything she could to appeal to that in me.”
But the approach failed, and the manager was eventually fired.
Several months later, Locke’s former manager asked to talk to him privately. “We met in the park for my lunch break. And she tells me, she says, ‘listen, everything you think is happening is happening. Everything you’re worried about, they’re actually doing.’”
Locke was a primary target for Starbucks’ effort to bust the IWW, and the company attempted on multiple occasions to write him up over minor issues and fire him.
Daniel Gross was one of the original IWW organizers at Starbucks, and one of the Wobblies who asked Locke to join the union in 2007.
When the IWW initially filed for a union election, Gross “had a meeting with all these Starbucks lawyers and district managers and his lawyer, and they had offered him a certain amount of money in the 10s of 1000s to just quit Starbucks and never come back,” recalled Locke. Gross refused the bribe and kept organizing.
At a union picket in 2004, Gross and another union activist were singled out by the police and arrested. Starbucks fired Gross in 2006 in what he and other union members say was an attempt to destroy the organizing effort.
In the years-long court battles that waged over Gross’s termination, and the thousands of documents that surfaced in discovery, it was revealed that Starbucks went so far as to send managers to follow Gross and other union members back to his home to spy on them.
Meanwhile, Starbucks reserved its harsher actions for Black union organizers, many of whom were fired.
One Black union leader targeted by the company still leaves Locke with a feeling of deep unease. She was on the organizing committee with Locke at the 17th and Broadway Starbucks store.
“She was galvanizing everybody,” he said. “She got people to join the union and to take action.” Locke declined to give her full name out of concern over retaliation from Starbucks.
Locke said that, in early 2009,an irate customer threw a cup of coffee at the union leader, who responded by deflecting it. The customer was not hurt, but filed a complaint with Starbucks which then used the incident as justification to fire her.
According to Liberte Locke, the union leader, who was a single mother of three facing foreclosure, begged management not to fire her.
“And then Starbucks said, ‘we won’t fire you, but only if you give us the names of everyone that’s in the union in the city that you’re aware of,’” Locke said. He claimed she was also asked to steal his notebook. “And she adamantly refused. And they fired her on the spot when she had no previous write-ups.”
The union was primed to take both legal and collective action, but the fired union leader never showed up. “We couldn’t get a hold of her. We couldn’t find her,” he said, and figured she was burnt out and afraid.
Liberte Locke did not hear from the fired union leader for two more years when he happened to run into her at another barista’s apartment. He was incredibly relieved to see her. What she told Locke made him speechless.
“She just told me: ‘I had to sign this stuff where I wasn’t allowed to talk to you, where I wasn’t allowed to talk to the IWW anymore. And I wasn’t allowed to go to the organizing trainings, or talk to the media, or talk to anything or they wouldn’t give me my house.’”
“Starbucks literally gave her a house in Queens,” Locke claimed. He repeated the words so as to let that reality sink in again years later. “They literally gave her a house.”
Ultimately, the company was successful in crushing the IWW Starbucks Workers Union through the use of threats, intimidation, targeted firings, spreading lies, bribing union activists, and spending millions of dollars in the process. The company has utilized some of these same tactics against the current SBWU campaign. Starbucks continues to target Black and other union activists of color, too.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a group of Starbucks baristas in Memphis went public with their union. In a public statement, workers noted that they were doing so “in the city where [King] was killed while fighting for the right of sanitation workers to organize.” The workers urged Starbucks to “embrace Dr. King’s vision” and asked the company to not employ union-busting tactics.
Starbucks responded by firing the entire organizing committee, which was made up almost entirely of Black and Latino workers.
Although it is illegal in the U.S. for employers to fire workers for union activity, employers will find other justifications for doing so. Starbucks, for example, claims Memphis workers were fired for violating various company policies, which the union argues were arbitrarily enforced to target activists. Starbucks Workers United launched a national campaign to demand the “Memphis 7” be rehired. The campaign was ultimately successful. Last August, a federal judge ordered Starbucks to reinstate the fired workers.
“Starbucks obviously doesn’t treat any of the organizers well, whether they’re Black or white, regardless of ethnicity,” said Red. “But they acted particularly viciously against Black organizers compared to the stores that have majority white organizing committees, for example, like in Buffalo.”
The NLRB issued a statement against Starbucks on April 22, stating Starbucks broke the law and fired the seven workers because they “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.”
Another union leader, Leila Dalton, was fired from her store in Phoenix, AZ after a recording of her manager harassing her went viral. “She’s the only Black worker at her store. She’s 19 years old. And the company targeted her heavily, they were just non stop harassing her, trying to threaten and intimidate her. And they fired her,” said Arjae Red.
Starbucks has used a variety of other tactics as well. Red said that, in the lead up to the union election at their Starbucks store in Buffalo, the company closed another local store that had a particularly anti-union reputation, sending much of its workforce over to Red’s store.
“Many of the votes that we had, in the end, were actually people that didn’t even work at our store. It was really obvious that Starbucks was trying to just stack the vote with people they thought would vote no,” said Red. They alleged some pro-union workers never received election ballots. The vote was 15-9 in favor of forming a union, and an additional 7 ballots were challenged.
Starbucks also conducted a series of captive-audience meetings across the country, often shutting down stores for hours without public explanation. During the sessions, managers lied to the workers about the unionization effort and attempted to derail organizing. Union activists and supporters across the country also had their hours and benefits cut.
In April, Howard Schultz told store managers across the U.S. that he would review a plan to expand benefits for employees but exclude employees from stores that have undergone union elections from those same benefits.
The union filed charges against Starbucks with the NLRB, saying that Schultz’s comments were illegal and a violation of the National Labor Relations Act.
Arjae Red was not immune from retaliation. Over 100 barista union activists were fired across the country. Many more found themselves in a situation similar to Red’s. “The company slashed my hours and I was forced to look for options elsewhere,” they said. “I actually liked working at Starbucks and would’ve preferred to stay.”
On March 1 the NLRB finally made a ruling on multiple unfair labor practices filed by the union in Buffalo.
In a scathing condemnation of Starbucks’ union-busting tactics in Buffalo, NLRB Administrative Law Judge Michael A. Rosas ruled in favor of the SBWU in a 218 page decision. The company must rehire and compensate union activists who were retaliated against, according to Rosas, and reopen stores that were closed in an effort to stymie the union drive.
‘It’s Bigger Than Just Your Contract’If this history of organizing and union busting has anything to teach Starbucks Workers United, it is that the union will continue to face a torrent of attacks from the company. Baristas are bracing for this.
The struggle ahead will be an arduous one, particularly so since the union’s goal is to bring every one of the 7,000 Starbucks locations across the United States into the union fold. And while the unionization effort has only spread to a few hundred locations so far, for now there appears to be no end in sight for the eagerness and tenacity of union baristas to keep building their union from coast to coast.
Red said the next big fight for the union is over bargaining for a first union contract. Starbucks is dragging out the bargaining process, according to union activists. Workers are demanding an increase to wages and benefits, including a more robust health insurance plan and guaranteed hours.
While the company does offer benefits to employees, including health insurance, and college tuition to Arizona State University online courses and programs, the company is notorious for cutting employees’ hours to disqualify them from receiving them.
“The problem is that many of us, even people that have been at Starbucks for years and have been getting those benefits, they’re getting their hours slashed down to 5, 10, 15 hours a week,” which puts workers below the 20-hour-a-week minimum for eligibility.
Citing comments that Howard Schultz made during a Starbucks town hall meeting with employees in March 2022, Red noted that the CEO “has a class-wide perspective. He’s not just thinking about it in terms of his own company and his own money. He’s looking at the entire capitalist class under assault by the workers.”
“I think if these corporations have a class-wide perspective, then the workers need to have a class-wide and international perspective, too,” said Arjae Red. “That’s something that I’ve been trying to point out to people, that this is bigger than just getting your store a contract or even just unionizing Starbucks as a company. We have to be linking up with Amazon workers, and other workers. We’ve got to be linking up with other left forces. It’s bigger than just your contract.”
The post On The Long Road To Organizing A Starbucks Union appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Back in 1992, Ice-T’s heavy metal project Body Count released their self-titled debut album, which
included one of the most controversial protest songs of all-time, “Cop Killer”. The lyrics express the
frustration that many in the Black community were feeling.
The original album version references then-Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, and Rodney King, who was brutalized by the LAPD on March 3, 1991.
Ice-T defended the song as it faced a boycott. “I’m singing in the first person as a character who is fed up with police brutality. I ain’t never killed no cop. I felt like it a lot of times. But I never did it. If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.”
Due to the uproar, the album was pulled and reissued without “Cop Killer.” The studio version of the
song still hasn’t been re-released and isn’t available on streaming services, but there is now a cover version by R&B singer Macy Gray that features her backing group California Jet Club. The reworked track appears on her recently released album “The Reset.”
Gray said, “The album was written right in the thick of the pandemic. It was just a really good
time to make an album because everybody was emotive and expressing themselves. Everybody was just like releasing and letting go. Most musicians are musicians because they aren’t great communicators, so it all came out in the album.“
“There is a song called PTSD, which is a song about how my country gave me PTSD, cause after all that I was traumatized,” added Gray.
Part of that PTSD stemmed from the ongoing issues with police brutality, a theme that is heavily dealt
with on the timely album, which was composed in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor in 2020. The modern-day lynching of Tyre Nichols renews the relevance.
Along with her music, Gray was motivated to co-found My Good, an organization created to support
families who have lost loved ones to police violence.
“I don’t think people are aware that three people die via the police on average every day. So the 99.9%
of those you don’t hear about, and most 99.9% of those don’t get any kind of settlement, don’t see a
penny,” Gray declared. “You know, you have moms 10 years later still going to court fighting for justice.”
Even though the lyrics of “Cop Killer” will still make a segment of people uncomfortable, the anger
towards corrupt cops is at an all-time level. More and more people are raising their voices to declare,
“Fuck police brutality!”
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Cop Killer’ By Macy Gray and The California Jet Club appeared first on Shadowproof.
As Georgia prison officials move towards fully digitizing communications with Securus and curtailing access to contraband cellphones, incarcerated people and their loved ones are speaking out. According to advocates, at the heart of the issue is how contraband phones are both a vital transparency tool and are increasingly used by Georgia prison officials as a scapegoat for agency brutality and incompetence.
When Tim Ward was commissioner of the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) last year, he told the state senate that the department believes cellphones are used to commit crimes and plan “hits” on civilians within the prison walls. The crackdown on such devices is allegedly a response to threats to safety and security within the prison system. However, incarcerated people and their advocates say the GDC is is attending to fears of media exposure and enjoys financial incentives to remove the devices.
BT, a Georgia prisoner, is the spokesperson for the incarcerated group called Georgia Prisoners Speak. Shadowproof is withholding BT’s name to protect him from retaliation from prison officials. The self-described “auto-advocacy” group aims to expose the prison system and hold prisoncrats accountable through its YouTube platform, website gallery, and blog posts.
“This isn’t about cellphones,” argues BT. “It’s about money and exposing the prison system. There are serious problems in the GDC, starting with all the deaths: suicide, murder, lack of medical care.”
“People are starving and the lack of vital nutrition has become a serious concern, especially as most of the ‘food’ is inedible. There are no programs for rehabilitation and job skills, despite what they claim in their fiscal reports, and so for many prisoners there is nothing to do.”
“GDC doesn’t want taxpayers or lawmakers to know just how terribly they are failing in their mandate,” BT said.
There have even been reports of prisoners forced to live in shower stalls or outside. Georgia prison conditions are so abysmal that it has prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to announce the launch of a second investigation into GDC’s deadly prison conditions.
In recent years, cellphones have become a major talking point for prisoncrats who are questioned about conditions. In order to legitimize state assertions that contraband phones are mainly used for nefarious ends, the GDC has invested in security technology such as Mobile Access Management systems that allow them to control devices on their property, and sensors to detect drones and the presence of electronic devices. The agency has also made use of full body scanners, electronic detection-trained dogs, and prolific searches.
In a letter dated January 26, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr and 21 other state attorneys general called on Congressional leaders to pass legislation that would allow states to use cellphone-jamming technology in correctional facilities. Currently, federal law prohibits the use of such technology.
Securus—a telecommunications company that provides phone and video services to prison systems across the country—has a contract with the Georgia Department of Corrections, and the company stands to benefit if the use of contraband cellphones is reduced. This is because when prisoners use Securus’ tablets and pay phones, the company charges them and their families high rates.
Zombr3x, 28, is incarcerated within a Middle Georgia men’s prison. Shadowproof is withholding his identity to protect him from retaliation.
“The reason they want to take away phones is because the more we are able to establish lines of communication outside of ‘official’ channels, the less money companies such as Securus and JPay make off of us,” Zombr3x explained. “Less money for the prison industrial complex means less money for kickbacks to wardens and commissioners.”
The GDC entered into a revenue-sharing agreement with Securus and also reportedly receives over $8 million dollars per year in kickbacks from the company for prisoner phone calls. Additionally, there may be unrecorded kickbacks given to select GDC employees.
The crackdown is also about ensuring access to surveillance, narrative control, and, of course, punishment. Contraband phones and jailbroken tablets have been the amongst the most prominent means that prisoners, their loved ones, and prison reform activists have to compel transparency and demand accountability.
Prisoners’ use of cellphonesto document and share evidence of abusive guards, inadequate medical care, and unsanitary living conditions has put pressure on the GDC to improve conditions. It is likely that the crackdown on these devices s is an attempt to prevent prisoners from continuing to expose these issues.
Campaigns for free prison phone calls have become more common, and pretty much everyone except for prison officials and prison profiteers agrees this is a good and fair demand. But those campaigns alone arguably do not obviate the other roles contraband phones play in terms of avoiding surveillance and reporting conditions of confinement.
Several Facebook groups, such as They Have No Voice and The Human and Civil Rights Coalition of Georgia, actively communicate with prisoners via social media in order to get the hard details on what’s happening inside.
“GDC wants the absolute isolation and deprivation of the incarcerated,” said Susan Burns of They Have No Voice. “GDC is trying to prevent exposure as a failed agency providing cover to a remarkably inept and corrupt staff. GDC cannot afford to be transparent with stakeholders when violence, cruelty, callous treatment of the sick, injured, and elderly, starvation rations, and disrespect are not considered abhorrent behavior by its workforce.”
The Southern Center for Human Rights and Ignite Justice, nonprofit organizations both, have also corresponded with prisoners through their phones and tablets in order to collect evidence that has resulted in rare steps towards accountability.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the suspension of in-person visits in most prisons and jails. Since then, most prison systems have reopened “limited visitation,” but a handful still have not returned to their pre-pandemic arrangements, according to the latest available data by the Marshall Project.
Adding communications obstacles to this situation further isolates incarcerated individuals and weakens their connection to their friends and family, and other support systems. This is a recipe for disaster as around 600,000 people leave prisons in the US and a larger number cycle in and out of jails. Approximately 2.7 million children in the US have a parent who is incarcerated. By removing cellphones, the process of rehabilitation and reentry can be hindered, increasing the risk of recidivism. Maintaining these bonds is critical to the health and safety of communities.
Prisoners’ access to phones and other unrestricted internet devices needs to be encouraged and protected, possibly even legislated in favor of, because of the roles they play.
Ultimately, this is about the GDC’s financial interests and the agency’s efforts to conceal the inhumane realities of the prison system. Prisoners, their loved ones, and the communities to which prisoners must return suffer most from these pernicious prison cellphone policies.
The post Georgia Prisoners May Lose Critical Lifelines As Prison Officials Overhaul Communications And Target Contraband Phones appeared first on Shadowproof.
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To further their nationwide efforts to restrict access to transgender health care, Republicans in the state of Missouri have deployed a former case worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, who they claim is a whistleblower.
On February 9, Jamie Reed went public with allegations against the pediatric center in a post that appeared on “The Free Press,” a website founded by commentator Bari Weiss. That same day Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced that Reed had submitted a “sworn affidavit” and his office, along with the Missouri Department of Social Services, had opened an investigation into the pediatric center.
“We have received disturbing allegations that individuals at the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital have been harming hundreds of children each year, including by using experimental drugs on them,” Bailey asserted. “We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children.”
Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley was ready with a letter that he sent to Washington University and the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where he announced that his office would investigate the pediatric center’s “treatment practices in order to present American taxpayers and parents with all the facts relevant to policymaking and medical treatment decisions.”
“If even a fraction of the whistleblower’s new allegations is corroborated, the Center should be immediately shut down,” Hawley declared.
Bailey followed his announcement with a letter to the president of St. Louis Children’s Hospital on February 10 that urged the institution to ban the prescription of “puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to any new patients.” (The hospital also launched their own inquiry.)
Yet as Bailey acknowledged, Reed’s affidavit was submitted two weeks before Reed went public with her allegations at “The Free Press.” That gave Reed and Republicans time to figure out how best to weaponize the allegations against transgender care in general.
Reed is represented by Vernadette Broyles, a notorious anti-trans attorney with the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, and Ernie Trakas, a Republican St. Louis County council member who also serves as a senior litigation counsel for CPRC.
Going After Medicaid Coverage For Transgender CareBailey, Broyles, Hawley, Trakas, and Weiss are involved in a calculated effort to exploit the goodwill that is typically generated from whistleblowing in order to help conservative religious extremists notch another victory in their culture war against transgender people.
Most significantly, the whistleblower complaint incorporates some of the language found in successful lawsuits under the False Claims Act that are aimed at holding health care companies for Medicaid fraud.
Reed asserted that from 2020 to 2022 “medical transition” procedures were “paid for mostly by private insurance,” but it was also her understanding the pediatric center had “billed the cost for these procedures to state and federal publicly funded insurance programs.”
“I have personally witnessed staff say they were uncomfortable with how the Center has told them they have to code bills sent to publicly funded insurance programs,” Reed added. “I have witnessed staff directly ask the providers for clarification on billing questions and have providers dismiss the concerns and work to have the patients have this care covered as the priority.”
An ultimate goal may be to ensure that the state’s Medicaid program, which voters expanded through a vote in 2020, no longer covers gender-affirming care for transgender youth by manufacturing this scandal.
Fighting The ‘Tools Of Indoctrination’Erin Reed, a trans queer journalist (no relation to the whistleblower), went point by point in their newsletter Erin In the Morning to debunk the claims made by Jamie Reed. I recommend that you read that to understand the disinformation and pseudo-science that underpins the worst allegations. Instead of dealing with the specific allegations, I’ll focus on the political players involved.
The Child and Parental Rights Campaign was founded in 2019. Over the past two years, it has received over $370,000 in grants, contributions, and other payments, but CPRC does not disclose the sources of these funds. Only $2,500 from the Matthew 2540 Foundation, which is an organization that says they are committed to Christian values to create “strong families,” has been made public.
Broyles contends that she is fighting a “transgender threat” to kids and American culture that is “sow[ing] the conditions for totalitarianism.” This supposedly involves “tools of indoctrination” intended to “compel kids to normalize a radical new belief system by their actions.” That radical belief system, to Broyles, is made up of medically-backed treatments like puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which Bailey and other Missouri officials may try to permanently ban.
Puberty blockers, as described by the St. Louis Children’s Hospital, help transgender teens block hormones and “delay changes that can affect gender expression.” They are temporary and can give transgender teens time to consider whether they would like hormone therapy.
For transgender older teenagers and young adults, the St. Louis Children’s Hospital says hormone therapy can be important for “mental health, confidence, body image, and overall quality of life.”
Both treatments are supported by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Endocrine Society.
According to the American Medical Association, one study conducted in 2022 followed “more than 100 transgender and nonbinary youth 13–20 years old.” Results indicated that “youth who received gender-affirming medications—including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones—had a 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality over those first 12 months, compared with youth who did not get such medications.”
In a case in Arizona, the Child and Parental Rights Campaign supported a lawsuit to ensure Arizona’s Medicaid program did not pay for a transgender teen’s transition surgery. Broyles erroneously claimed that rigorous clinical studies have not been performed to know whether the procedure is “safe and effective.”
CPRC was behind a lawsuit in Florida that alleged that a school district had “illegally counseled their daughter about her gender confusion issues without their consent.” A federal judge declined to rule on the case in January, and CPRC appealed the decision.
‘Forbid Your Child To Go To The Public School Counselor’Broyles is an open supporter of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law. She cheers the law for its ability to prohibit school counselors from having conversations with students about their gender without informing parents.She is against public school counselors helping teenagers with gender identity issues that may affect their mental health, even if parents know about the discussions.
“If you have a child in school, monitor closely or frankly forbid your child to go to the public school counselor,” Broyles said at the Eagle Forum in 2020. (The Eagle Forum was founded by Phyllis Schafly, who was a conservative activist known for her campaigns against reproductive healthcare and equal rights for women.)
Ernie Trakas of CPRC opposed President Joe Biden’s executive order intended to promote rights for transgender children. He also objected to making certain governmental bathrooms gender-neutral, contending this was “all part of a conspiracy against religious freedom in America.”
During a Senate hearing on rights to reproductive health care, Senator Josh Hawley tried to police how UC Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges discussed the issue. “You’ve referred to ‘people with a capacity for pregnancy,’” Hawley mentioned. “Would that be women?”
Bridges explained to Hawley how trans men could become pregnant and that was why she was not simply saying women, but Hawley refused to take what she said seriously. Hawley also has co-sponsored national legislation to prevent transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Journalism That Fiercely Depends On The Right-Wing Political MachineBari Weiss may contend that the “Free Press” is built around “honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence,” but the fact is Reed’s self-proclaimed whistleblowing did not spread independently from a right-wing political machine that has committed itself to making it harder for transgender youth to exist.
The Concerned Women of America Legislative Committee put out a press release the day that the Free Press published Reed’s op-ed. A part of the New Christian Right, the organization was founded by Beverly LaHaye, whose husband Timothy LaHaye authored the rapture fiction series Left Behind. It previously received millions of dollars from the Koch network, known for advancing the conservative agenda in legislatures throughout the United States.
These same health-destroying practices are happening in children’s hospitals across the country and are the reason so many state legislatures are working to block the use of mutilating drugs and surgeries ‘permanently harming’ vulnerable youth,” proclaimed Penny Nance, the CEO of CWA. “Reed’s first-hand account is every reason to shut down the transactivism infecting our country peddled by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Big Pharma, corporate America, and the Biden Administration.”
Breakpoint, a publication of the Colson Center, which was founded by President Richard Nixon’s hatchet man, Chuck Colson, shared the allegations with their followers. Colson was an evangelical Christian involved in the Watergate scandal. He also pled guilty to obstruction of justice after he attempted to defame Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.
Weiss herself is well-known for her anti-trans views and previously peddled disinformation about transgender medical treatments. For example, Weiss published a similar post from Abigail Shrier in 2021 that purportedly featured two trans doctors who “blew the whistle” on “sloppy” transgender medical care, including the use of puberty blockers.
For those who do not know, Shrier authored a book about the “transgender craze.” Medical researcher Dr. Jack Turban concluded, “The book’s central (and false) premise is that there are massive numbers of transgender youth who are not truly transgender, but rather just confused, and that they are all being rushed into gender-affirming medical interventions and surgeries that they will later regret.”
“As a physician and a researcher who has dedicated my career to taking care of and understanding transgender youth, I recognized the book as bizarre and full of misinformation. I assumed it wouldn’t gain much traction. I was wrong,” Turban added.
More Than Two Dozen States Move To Ban Transgender Medical CareThe Associated Press reported in January that more than two dozen states have considered bans against gender-affirming care. The Republican governor in Utah signed a ban into law. Similar laws were passed in Alabama and Arkansas but have been put on hold by the courts.
In 2021, the NPR documented a “historic wave of anti-trans bills” aimed at transgender youth. “Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s child welfare agency to investigate parents and health care providers who give gender-affirming care to trans youth, characterizing those actions as child abuse,” NPR recalled.
Nebraska, South Dakota, and Oklahoma Republicans have advanced bans against puberty blockers and hormone therapy, despite the fact that such treatments are supported by major medical associations.
The Oklahoma Senate Committee passed a bill on February 8 that would ban transgender medical care for anyone under the age of 18. The bill would make it a felony for a doctor to provide medical care. A doctor would face up to 10 years in prison and a potential $100,000 fine if charged under the law.
“I think Oklahoma is currently positioning itself to be the most dangerous state for trans people in the country,” declared Nicole McAfee, who is the director of the LGBTQ rights organization Freedom Oklahoma.
Missouri Governor Michael Parson, who appointed Bailey to serve as the state’s attorney general, was sorely disappointed last year when the state legislature failed to pass a ban on transgender students participating in sports teams that match their gender identity.
Republicans in the state’s legislature proposed “more than a dozen separate pieces of legislation specifically addressing transgender youth in Missouri ahead of the 2023 session.” The so-called whistleblower allegations from Reed put pressure on opponents of these proposals and may create the political climate needed to pass numerous anti-trans measures.
The post Missouri Republicans Weaponize ‘Whistleblowing’ To Shut Down Pediatric Care For Transgender Youth appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally posted at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up recently released their sixth full-length album “One Day.” As denoted by the album’s title, each band member committed to a self-imposed time frame of 24 hours to write and record their contributions.
Compared to their previous ambitious standards, the album is more straightforward but still carries considerable weight. It also features a few poignant social commentaries.
“Broken Little Boys” explores the generational cycle of toxic masculinity. Another song, “Found,” which is Shadowproof’s protest song of the week, chronicles how Indigenous people have been displaced and
murdered to build highways and “temples of police and landlords.” All for the worship of money.
The track was inspired by guitarist Mike Haliechuk’s experiences living on one of the oldest streets in
North America and his observations of the tragic consequences of colonization and gentrification.
“I used to live on Davenport Road, which is one of the oldest streets in North America and has been a
First Nations trail for thousands of years, running along the north shore of Lake Iroquois, which receded
after the last ice age,” Haliechuk recalled. “Just to the east was Taddle Creek, which was
buried underground during the 19th century to build the streets I walk on. I thought about gentrification
a lot, watching little stores get swallowed up by big buildings until I realized I am one of those big
buildings.”
Haliechuk continued, “The name of the song comes from the Shadi Bartsch translation of The Aeneid,
where she points out that the words ‘found’ and ‘stab’ open and close the book, which are two
meanings for the same Greek verb. That discovery is actually conquest, and that settlement is always
violence. And that any story I try to tell myself about the place I found to live can only be a story to
justify the expansion of one people across the world of another.”
The lyrics, “There I stood on the shore. Of a story we don’t tell anymore. All the names were erased.
Buried under a land that my people stole,” connect to repeated talks of a reconciliation taking place within Canada.
An essential part of the process is an acknowledgment that Canada is “a country found on a genocide”. It is time to discontinue the whitewashing of history.
Listen to Fucked Up’s “Found” off their album “One Day.”
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Found’ By Fucked Up appeared first on Shadowproof.
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Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder and co-author of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, and Ann Wright, a CODEPINK member, retired Army colonel, and former State Department diplomat, join “Unauthorized Disclosure” hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola to discuss the high stakes of a protracted conflict in Ukraine.
Initially, President Joe Biden said the United States would not ship tank to Ukraine. That line was crossed, and now Ukraine would like fighter jets. Both Medea and Ann address the issue of escalating with more and more weapons and military equipment and crossing red lines that are drawn by officials.
Medea draws from her experience in antiwar organizing to share how difficult it has been to advocate for a diplomatic settlement and mobilize Americans to oppose fueling this war.
Later in the conversation, Ann, who lives in Hawaii, responds to the prevalent idea that the conflict in Ukraine against Russia has been a test run for a war over Taiwan against China. Hawaii is a US military launchpad for Asia-Pacific exercises and actions intended to curtail China’s influence in the region.
The Chinese “spy balloon” incident shows just how rapidly a scenario could develop that resulted in a devastating conflict.
The post Unauthorized Disclosure: High Stakes Of Perpetuating War In Ukraine appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
Joseph Wilson, who is incarcerated in a maximum security state prison, believes COVID-19 worsened the existing crisis of incarceration in the United States and amplified the urgency for mutual aid practices in prison.
Such survival work, thoroughly theorized by organizers like Dean Spade, encompasses projects that work to meet people’s basic needs and educate them about why we don’t have the things we need in the first place.
“During the height of the covid pandemic, the residents of prison banded together to care for one another regardless of affiliation,” Wilson said. “Men shared food. Some made masks. Everyone checked in on their neighbors. It was a beautiful glow around a dark cloud.”
“Lots of men lost family members. They were not able to go to funerals. Some men died in prison and we, their friends and neighbors, were not able to say goodbye in a meaningful way. Grief was a bonding agent.”
Joseph lost family to covid, too. “I couldn’t go to her funeral and I was distraught,” he said of his mother’s death in 2020. “Men, some of whom I’d never had more than simple conversations with, signed sympathy cards, made meals, and checked in on my mental and emotional well-being. These are the most relevant examples of mutual aid for me.”
Formal and informal mutual aid work beckons us to consider the inequalities that shape our world, and often reveals that the very systems responsible for addressing our social problems are also responsible for producing crises.
We (James Jones and Caren Holmes) surveyed and interviewed incarcerated comrades across the country and in the United Kingdom in an effort to collectivize our knowledge of the robust mutual aid practices happening inside prisons.
The people we spoke with shared experiences, stories, and strategies, confirming that—despite the best efforts of the criminal punishment system—incarcerated people keep each other alive. Small acts of care, enormous acts of courage, and “mundane forms of collective rebellion” preserve life and humanity inside prison walls.
We focus on four categories of mutual aid work: connections and relationships, advocacy, material resources, and care work. For each, we consider how conditions of falsely-produced scarcity and isolation work to destroy the bonds that facilitate our collective survival, and explore the creative and enduring mutual aid practices that persist in spite of them.
Prisons across the country are different beasts and can vary widely in everything from security classifications to facility-specific policies and customs. While we don’t claim to paint a comprehensive picture of mutual aid in all prisons, we hope to offer a few glimpses that arrived to us from different settings.
Still, there are patterns to the work. Inside prisons, letter writing, networking, storytelling, education, resource distribution, mentorship, collective mourning, nursing, nurturing, listening, and performing other rituals of mutual aid belong to the legacy of incarcerated caregivers.
People on the inside may not always name these practices as “mutual aid,” but its tenets are practiced on a daily basis and are critical to survival strategies. These practices are life-giving forces within death-making facilities. Those on the outside, who have never experienced incarceration, have an enormous amount to learn from those who have had to ensure each other’s survival under conditions of imprisonment.
Paul Cortez, who has spent 16 years in a maximum security facility, explains that, “as a prisoner, sometimes the need to just survive another day can become the sole focus of one’s existence.”
This piece is a love letter to practices of love and solidarity, which survive despite the dehumanizing conditions of the prison system.
Connections and RelationshipsPrisons seek to dismember the types of social connection that humans need to survive, subjecting people to state-sanctioned alienation through constant and multilayered forms of punishment.
Incarcerated people are disappeared from their communities, their communications are highly surveilled and restricted, and they are obstructed from building relationships with other criminalized people. Prison officials have nearly unlimited discretion to further restrict already-limited visitation and phone access.
“Isolated further and further into our own cliques, our own cells, our own selves,” Cortez explains, “we begin to lose one of the most fundamental aspects of our own humanity: connection.”
Conditions of extreme scarcity breed desperation and can lead people to burn each other. People are pushed to destroy trust between them. Compounding traumas around neglect and abandonment loom over relationships.
On Christmas Day, 2021, prisoners in one midwestern medium-security prison clamored for the few working telephones, desperate to be in contact with their families during the holidays. Pitted against each other in a situation of calculated scarcity, fights broke out and the whole facility was locked down.
Broken phones were common in the facility and prison staff could have easily anticipated how a holiday would exacerbate demand. Yet official accounts of the event turned to accusations of gang violence and the age-old myth of inmate-facilitated drug smuggling when it came time to lay blame.
In this way, prison workers not only created this crisis by ignoring weeks of complaints and work orders anticipating holiday demand, but retroactively used the violence that ensued to formalize criminalizing narratives that would justify future punitive actions, like cell sweeps and searches. That is, the facility took actions that reproduced the cycle of communications scarcity and crisis that caused the lockdown in the first place. It is this cycle that mutual aid endeavors to break.
While prisons are designed to prevent social growth and interconnectivity, people inside strategize to resist social death, building and preserving relationships in and outside of prison. According to those we spoke with, sharing phone lines, creating phone trees, passing along messages, connecting people to each other and to local activist groups, creating newsletters, and developing letter-writing networks, are all ways that people coordinate to meet the social needs of those locked inside.
Sustaining social connection is itself survival work. People on the inside who have no outside support become vulnerable because prison guards know that no one will show up for them.
Over the last four years, we organized to meet this need in the facility where James is incarcerated. Together, and in collaboration with other incarcerated organizers, we connected hundreds of people inside his facility to writers on the outside. From the seed of these connections have sprouted friendships, book clubs, commissary fundraisers, clemency petitions, poetry, and curated art shows. Our friendship and collaboration on this piece are testaments to this network and the commitment of people inside to connect with each other.
Advocacy, Organizing, and Political Education Incarcerated people are subjected to daily indignities, institutionalized violence, and systemic neglect. Disappeared into fortified compounds, they are refused medical treatment, held in small cells without air conditioning during heat waves or without heat during cold snaps, cavity searched by guards, arbitrarily refused visitation or phone access, and transferred far away from loved ones without warning. Bare necessities such as use of the phone, visitation, and time outside are recategorized as “privileges” and are always precarious, taken away at the discretion of guards without transparency or due process.
Friends and family on the outside call and email prison officials in an attempt to intervene in the sustained mistreatment of those inside. Often called the “run around,” those advocating from outside are herded through a maze of phone calls in order to reach someone who ultimately tells them, “there’s nothing we can do about it,” leaving those inside feeling defeated and utterly powerless.
Incarcerated people bear witness to the injustices endured by a cellmate or a fellow prisoner. They know that intervening is likely to result in collective punishment. With the threat of retaliation always looming, they move strategically to de-escalate and mitigate harm.
De-escalation skills therefore become life-saving, heading off a progression of violence and punishment from guards. Many people become accustomed to “tucking your tail,” swallowing indignities, even abuse, in order to prevent the escalation of violence or retaliation of guards.
Prisoners try to remind each other that enduring such indignities does not compromise their humanity. Rocko, who’s incarcerated at a medium security facility in rural Illinois says, “a lot of the time we laugh to keep from crying or say things to comfort one another in times of duress. Kind words are the glue that prevents us from falling to pieces. While folks inside may not have the power to change a situation, they listen and extend empathy to one another.”
But tucking tail is not always an option. Rocko recounts one incident, in which prison staff failed to orchestrate an inmate’s virtual visit to attend his grandmother’s funeral. As the scheduled time approached and his door remained locked, it became clear to this comrade that the prison had no intention of honoring his visit.
Knowing only a massive disruption would garner immediate attention, everyone in the unit began yelling and banging on their doors. The uproar seemed to overwhelm the arriving officer, who nervously explained he had no knowledge of this inmate’s visit, and that he couldn’t open his cell without prior confirmation. This incited another barrage of banging and yelling from irate inmates.
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The corrections officer left and returned minutes later to finally escort him out of his cell. He was late, but he made it to witness the funeral.
Miran (Mikey) Thakrar, who is incarcerated at HMP Whitemoor in the United Kingdom, gives another example of using disruption to help an incarcerated friend. He says people have coordinated impromptu noise demonstrations to demand medical attention for a person in his cell block. But disruption comes with a cost. “[Prisoners] raise complaints, verbally or formally, and end up in segregation over it, transferred or moved wings,” Miran explains.
“The prison prefers we stand alone, that way they can do what they want to, to make the prison run with the least amount of resistance!”
Prisons not only prevent collective organizing and solidarity, but intentionally strategize to create disunity, turning prisoners against each other. “Creating a sense of isolation, even within a single wing of the prison, destroys our sense of community and that leads to conflict between ourselves, which I’m sure the guards love,” he said.
Page Dukes, a formerly incarcerated researcher and organizer in Georgia agrees, “solidarity is condemned and criminalized—people inflict harm on one another in an environment of designed scarcity and desperation. Admin encourages distrust and fear, discourages community and hope.”
Despite this, she explains, “We bear witness, tell each other’s stories, share skills and resources, encourage one another to organize and resist, to hope and to create our own opportunities, to liberate ourselves and each other.”
Building on the legacies and demands of the Attica uprisings, incarcerated people have advocated tirelessly for programming and access to educational resources. Several men in a maximum security facility shared with us their experiences of studying, practicing, and facilitating restorative and transformative justice processes.
When the state would not provide, inside organizers and educators designed their own political education curriculum. Paul, who has been incarcerated for more than 16 years, explains, “there is no greater mutual aid than to educate the mind, and to help one break out of the prison of mental slavery.”
Joseph Wilson mobilizes a collective of family members connected to incarcerated people in his facility. He writes and regularly publishes a report on conditions inside the prison for families.
“At times,” he says, “I must quell rumors and suspicions on both sides of the wall. Continuing this work is important because many families are unaware of the law, how to use it, and their collective and individual political power.”
In recent months, as the corrections department worked to limit access to physical mail in his state, he and others inside coordinated outside advocacy on social media to counter threatened policy changes.
Ethel Edwards, a formerly incarcerated organizer with Survived and Punished, explains she consistently filed grievances to demand changes of collective conditions within the prisons where she was held. Having come home recently, she has a long list of women she continues to support and advocate for from the outside.
The things people do to advocate for each other “to thwart the system’s effects, we often don’t really acknowledge, sometimes because it’s illegal, sometimes because we’re embarrassed to admit we needed help, sometimes because we didn’t get any help even when we asked for it,” Rocko observed.
Advocacy inside prison walls is not often recognized as such, but even the small things keep people alive and in relationship with each other. “Eating meals together, listening to music or watching sports/movies, exercising or playing games, looking at magazines or pictures, imagining what kind of car, truck, motorcycle or boat you’d drive or where you’d live if you could decide, reading books and discussing the storylines and characters, or studying religious or educational material: all these activities pass the time in a constructive way and keep our minds occupied and distracted from the oppression of the day-to-day indignities.”
“It’s a miserable existence but being active gives the mind and soul something to look forward to, and dulls the hunger pains and the yearning for human touch and engagement,” he said. “It doesn’t quite satiate the longing, but it quiets it a bit.”
Material ResourcesPrisons meticulously calculate the minimum calories needed to sustain their incarcerated population. Prison meals are rationed, served at unreasonable hours, and often are entirely inedible. Folks inside supplement their portions with food from the commissary, which they are responsible for purchasing themselves. States have different baselines for the amount of money they commit to prisoners each month (in Illinois, for example, the monthly “state pay” is $10). It is with these funds—sometimes the cents-per-hour people are paid to work—that people must buy food, hygiene products, letter-writing materials, and clothes, and cover court fees and medical bills.
While some people have loved ones on the outside who can send them money, others do not. Even those with financial support can be barred from accessing their basic necessities when prison officials place them under punitive commissary restrictions.
Sharing or doing things for another person, labeled “trading” or “trafficking,” is against the rules in most facilities. Simple human kindness or gestures as small as giving someone a snack or a bar of soap can be forbidden.
“We cook each other meals. We make cards for each other’s family members,” Miran said. “We distribute the burdens to make conditions easier to bear.”
He notes that Muslim communities who support each other are harshly targeted. Their collectivity is interpreted by Islamaphobic guards and state officials as evidence of “extremism,” “terrorist plotting” and a generalized security threat. He says prison staff “try to stop large gatherings, or to make it difficult for them to share meals together in certain areas.”
This racialized targeting of a community is similarly experienced by Black and brown people, whose efforts to share or exchange basic material resources are targeted as evidence of “gang affiliations.”
Ethel explains that when COVID-19 hit, people were limited in the ways that they could support and provide for each other. When the prison stopped providing two hot meals a day, people made meals for each other. “I always fed someone who didn’t have anything,” she said.
Everyone we spoke to for this piece could recall times when they, despite endemic scarcity, provided resources for someone who needed it, such as coffee, paper, headphones, or food. Several recalled being moved by moments when they needed and received the generosity of others.
Scholar Orisanmi Burton tells this story of his incarcerated friend, Absolut, in an episode of the Millenials are Killing Capitalism podcast. “Absolut, and another person who was in solitary confinement, took turns abstaining from eating lunch so that the other person [could] have a double portion. So that, on that particular day, that person would feel satiated.”
“Imagine the kinds of sacrifice that it takes, the kinds of selflessness, and acknowledging of another person’s feelings. The sort of small, mundane tasks of care and tenderness are in fact, forms of rebellion.”
Burton explains that these tremendously selfless acts, “make possible other forms of struggle that might be more easily recognizable, as political. And that’s precisely why they’re forms of rebellion.”
The prisons have the power to restrict food intake by not allowing people to order from the commissary or accept commissary items from other inmates. The prison restricts not only that which feeds the body but also that which feeds the mind, controlling what can be read, which in turn controls what can be learned.
All books coming into the facility pass through a review board, who read book covers and synopses to determine if the books are “acceptable.” Most books with revolutionary or subversive messaging are denied and added to a list of restricted material.
Yet, thanks to the stubbornness of supporters on the outside, beacons of hope—books by authors such as George Jackson, Mariame Kaba and Dean Spade, to name a few—make their way inside. Reading about abolition and revolutionary ideas gives people something to discuss and hold onto, something to rally around.
Care WorkIn reflecting upon the forms of mutual aid people described in interviews, the majority of experiences can be, and often are, categorized as care work. This includes organizing birthday celebrations, caring for the sick, helping to mourn and process grief, providing relationship advice, or comforting someone who has been denied parole.
Burton, who spent many years writing to and learning alongside incarcerated people, and in particular Black men, writes about how the violent and gendered segregation that takes place in prison severs cis and heterosexual men from types of gendered social reproductive labor that is most often performed by women, trans, and gender non-conforming people. While women on the outside often continue to provide enormous care and support for incarcerated loved ones, this gendered segregation forces some cishet men to take up these roles themselves.
Care work thus becomes a necessity for collective survival in men’s prisons. Burton notes that, perhaps as a result of their relation to care work, many of the incarcerated men he communicates with have a “profound tenderness that is intact.” Despite the system’s efforts to harden, that tenderness becomes “part of how [incarcerated people] are able to survive.”
In the absence of grieving rituals available to people on the outside, people in prison come together to grieve lost loved ones. “My cellmate lost his brother to gun violence,” Rocko recalls. “Together we honored him on what would have been his 24th birthday, cooking a meal together from commissary items we pay homage to our loved ones, wishing we could be with them and sending all the positive energy we have stored up inside us out to them.”
Ethel Edwards explains that humanity comes to the surface in crisis. In the women’s prison where she was incarcerated, people provided emotional support to survivors of sexual violence. Shared experiences, she explains, create conditions of compassion. When Ethel’s 21-year-old daughter was murdered during her time in prison, she found intimacy and support from other women whose children had also been murdered. She notes that “the women, around me, the mothers around me, checked on me all day long, anything I needed they slid it under my door.”
Shantee, an organizer incarcerated at a maximum security facility, notes that when inmates are summoned to the chaplain’s office, they anticipate that they will be notified of a loved one’s death. He and others inside have learned to anticipate their return with empathy, love, handmade sympathy cards, and cooked meals.
Embracing a man whose mother passed, Shantee recalls, “he knew he was not alone in his darkest moments. I asked him if he was hungry, and another brother blurted out, ‘I’m already cooking something for him!’ If he needed to talk, eat, or a shoulder to cry on, we were there for him.”
Sometimes the care work does not involve crisis, but encompasses more mundane needs. Staten Taylor, a barber locked up in central Illinois, notes, “haircuts are huge for maintaining your mental stability, you feel a piece of normality and feel better when you are looking fresh.”
These forms of care remind those inside of our humanity, our dignity, our integrity.
‘Towards Collective Survival Work’The mutual aid that takes place inside prisons is deeply political and, more often than not, overlooked by outside organizers. When outside organizers look to build with people on the inside, they are often plugging into existing practices and networks of care work and mutual aid, not starting from scratch. These practices provide insight into the revolutionary potential of care work under deeply repressive conditions.
While they may not codify mutual aid as such, or name its counterinsurgent power, prison officials know that the collective survival tactics of prison populations undermine their authority and yet the prison system simultaneously relies on these practices to function. They know that resource sharing, adaptive communication networks, and care work chip away at the deprivation and dependency upon which their unearned and precarious power relies.
Disciplinary tactics reveal an explicit focus on undermining sociality. It is not just commissary or phone time that is revoked for minor infractions, it is time outside of one’s cell, access to news media, and in the cruelest instances, all forms of human contact.
The prison and its guards have the impunity to take away ‘privileges’ that people can’t afford to lose – more explicitly, they have the power to restrict food intake, sensory input (through solitary confinement), and access to community. The scarcity of basic necessities is compounded by levels of control, isolation, and punishment.
Even still, people organize to survive and take care of each other.
“I’m trying to figure out how to change our thought process away from ‘survival of the fittest’ towards collective survival work, or social reproduction, as they call it,” Rocko said. On the inside, “we don’t all have the language or a manual for these practices and sometimes we hurt each other or let each other down.”
But mutual aid work holds a promise of generating new ways to relate to one another. As Dean Spade says, “at its best, mutual aid actually produces new ways of living where people get to create systems of care and generosity that address harm and foster well-being.” The revolutionary nature of the mutual aid that takes place inside prison walls embodies this possibility.
The post Mutual Aid Inside: How Incarcerated Communities Survive Together appeared first on Shadowproof.
A few days after a massive power outage in North Carolina in early December, Margaret Killjoy shared a thread on preparedness in response to the outages. Alongside the usual emergency supplies like extra water, batteries, medicine, heat sources, and food, Killjoy noted something not usually included in preparedness toolkits: “organize against the far right so that they are less capable of shooting up power stations.”
Killjoy, an author and musician who lives in the mountains of West Virginia, hosts the anarchist prepping podcast Live Like The World Is Dying. Since its creation just before the pandemic began, it has grown into a valuable and widely-accessed resource for people wondering how to deal with any number of emergencies in their communities.
The recent sabotages of power stations across the United States, along with increasing rates of climate-related infrastructure devastation, have prompted people to wonder: what do we do if the lights go out in our community? Killjoy says the answer is simple. We need to embrace preparedness culture.
Alleged Right-Wing Attacks On InfrastructureThe reasons behind the North Carolina power outage are still officially unknown, but some locals believe that it was part of a far-right protest against a drag show in nearby Southern Pines. (LGBTQ+ people in the area reported feeling a heightened sense of fear after the blackouts.) The outages are part of an uptick in targeting of energy infrastructure across the United States, responsibility for some of which has been taken by neo-Nazi and far-right groups.
Killjoy says that intentional attacks on utilities infrastructure from fascist groups can be understood as “an accelerationist technique” and part of a far-right strategy of pushing society to a breaking point to encourage social collapse. In the vacuum and chaos, she says, these groups believe they can seize power.
This isn’t the first time the idea has emerged in the United States; it’s practically a national playbook. Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter theory promoted social breakdown leading to a race war. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, author and activist scott crow documented how gangs of white vigilantes were perpetrating racist violence amid the chaos. (Multiracial communities quickly organized to defend against the attacks, and the white supremacists went back underground.) Back in December 2020, a neo-Nazi-led plot to wreck the power grid was foiled in Colorado, and last year, Canadian and American white supremacists planned a mass murder that they hoped would start a race war.
While Killjoy says it’s unlikely these tactics would succeed given how extreme they are and modern America’s tactical preference for systemic disenfranchisement over racist violence, the tenor and visibility of fascism in America via culture war attacks on marginalized communities suggests a need for heightened vigilance.
The Prepper in Pop CultureFor decades, the pop culture archetype of the prepper has been colorfully right-wing and individualist: a paranoid, libertarian recluse stockpiling weapons, ammunition, and canned beans while waiting for some cataclysmic event. Killjoy says we’ve built up a “mythos of the loner who builds and hides in a bunker and eats camp food until their appendix bursts and they die.” In this scenario, virtually all other people are viewed as a threat because of either malicious intent or desperation for access to resources.
This association has prevented people on the political left from engaging with preparedness culture, says Killjoy. “I think people are way too quick to give up cultural terrain to the right-wing,” she says. “People are way too quick to be like, ‘Oh, a right-wing person is interested in the following thing so I cannot be,’ instead of saying, ‘How is our take on this different?’”
Killjoy says the popular portrayal of prepping has also led people to neglect the real and worsening conditions of emergency around us. “We tend as a society to look at preppers as people who are waiting for nuclear winter or zombies, but by and large preparedness is about responding to disaster, and disaster is happening, even just in the United States, always,” says Killjoy. “More people are starting to realize that they are less insulated from disaster than they grew up thinking that they are.”
Individual and Community PreparednessKilljoy says that even more than a bug-out bag packed with survival supplies, the single most important thing someone could consider doing is knowing who their neighbors are. That could mean being friends with them, or just being cordial, but it could also mean marking which ones aren’t safe and who to avoid.
“During times of disaster, each other are the main things that we have,” she says. “Knowing that ahead of time is at least as important as knowing where your secondary source of potable water is.”
Similarly, Killjoy notes that halting the advance of the far-right is a communal task, not an individual one. That’s why community defense is as critical as personal defense. Personal defense, says Killjoy, includes those things that an individual does to keep themself safe. For Killjoy, who has been doxxed and threatened by the far-right, that includes a handgun and concealed carry permit.
Community defense is a larger and more difficult project, but also a potentially more effective one. Fascist movements often move to shut down cultural and social infrastructure, so when far-right mobs crash Pride rallies, Black churches, or abortion clinics, community organization is the only viable protection. Killjoy points to recent community defenses of drag shows, including large crowds of supporters flanked by allies open-carrying long rifles, as an example of community preparedness.
Killjoy says that while the rifles demonstrate to armed far-right crowds that “we can’t be fucked with,” they’re just a small piece of community preparedness. There’s also keeping track of each other and what issues we’re dealing with—for example, threats from bigots or police harassment—alongside monitoring and exposing white supremacist groups organizing in your area.
“Possibly nothing has been more effective at pulling the rug out from underneath far-right organizing in this country than exposing people for not just being a regular right-wing person, but a bonafide Nazi,” says Killjoy. “All of that falls under community defense.”
Most right-wing prepping culture tends to depict the ideal survival situation as rural and isolated from other people, and while Killjoy lives rurally, she says urban and suburban spaces are at least as good for preparedness due to proximity to community and infrastructure.
Prepping For The WorstKilljoy says that while society encourages a division between these things—the right insisting on the importance of the individual, the left on the importance of the community—they strengthen one another when both are tended to in prepping culture. When the pandemic hit, a friend of Killjoy’s had to caretake for an elderly person but couldn’t find any suitable masks. Killjoy had a supply of P100 masks for her earthquake preparedness kit, and shared them.
“Having resources available to you means you’re in a better place to help other people,” she says. “By being able to take care of ourselves, we’re able to require less from the mutual aid networks that we might build. By requiring less from those networks, we’re better able to help them.”
It’s these qualities of prepping culture that Killjoy says move people toward engaging more deeply with their own lives and their communities. Acknowledging the stakes and what could happen will, ideally, push people to fight to avoid worst-case scenarios.
“We can all wish things were like they used to be, but they’re not,” says Killjoy. “I think people are used to avoiding taking responsibility for what happens in the world, and assuming that experts will handle whatever the problem is. We’re all waiting for the government to save us, and I don’t believe that’s a rational way to survive any crisis. Any look at history shows that very clearly.”
Attacks on power infrastructure and anti-LGBTQ+ hate both spiked in 2022, and while it’s possible those facts are coincidental, it might pay off in the long run to treat them as correlated. Killjoy says that after decades of comparable stability, people have grown accustomed to things working as they should. Prepping is a long term investment in making sure that when the lights go out, we’re ready to take care of ourselves and each other.
The post Should The Left Embrace Preparedness Culture? appeared first on Shadowproof.
Incarcerated Georgians and their loved ones have struggled to stay in touch after the Georgia Department of Corrections began switching communications services from JPay to Securus, as the former merges its systems with the latter. This change was accompanied by the emergence of a more stringent and increasingly punitive prison communications policy.
While the Georgia Department of Corrections’ (GDC) policy was written in 2018, it is only now being enforced, according to incarcerated people and their loved ones. Under the policy, people who wish to communicate with someone inside must submit an application and submit to government screening. Additionally, a prisoner may only have 12 people on this approved communications list.
Prisoners and their advocates say this process is meant to gate-keep and surveil prisoners’ communications. It also limits the means through which prisoners and loved ones can expose abhorrent, brutal prison conditions.
The timing of this transition is particularly distressing because of a wave of killings and unrest affecting incarcerated people. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating soaring violence in GDC facilities and yet prison administrators have refused to provide federal investigators with basic data on the number of incarcerated people murdered within their facilities.
Many Georgia prisoners have been without electronic communication with their loved ones for over six months at the time of this reporting. In Georgia, most communication between prisoners and those on the outside occurs via correctional tablet devices and in-dorm kiosks. They could exchange emails, pictures, and short videos over this system. This has been the case for over seven years.
Pointing to a gross understaffing crisis and the prolificacy of drugs, many facilities have stopped physical mail delivery via the U.S. Postal Service. Any mail that does enter the facility is scanned and a copy is provided in print or on the electronic tablet devices. Most facilities lack the staff to adequately receive, process, and disburse mail to prisoners or make electronic copies accessible via the tablets and dorm kiosks. Prisoners have reported missing mail at some institutions for months at a time since COVID collided with the staffing crisis. This includes legal mail, the disruption of which presents its own grave concerns for prisoners’ defense and the ability to secure release.
In mid-October, this reporter’s inbox was flooded with messages from Georgia prisoners and their friends and family complaining about email communications. Prisoners reported being told that it would no longer be permissible to have contact with anyone not on their “approved contact list.”
Emily Shelton of Ignite Justice, a prison reform nonprofit, says she reached out to both Securus and JPay after receiving numerous appeals from Georgia prisoners and their loved ones. “I spoke with Securus and was told that GDC sent Securus/Jpay a message stating that no one is allowed to message an inmate unless they’re on the approved visitation list for them,” says Shelton.
Advocates Shadowproof spoke with say this could be a First Amendment mail/communication violation, arguably curtailing or, at the very least, failing to provide meaningful communication between prisoners and the general public. With the in-dorm kiosks out of service as well, prisoners have been unable to submit institutional grievances and health service request forms – an additional First Amendment and Eighth Amendment violation, respectively.
“This drastic change in policy blocks the way nearly 50,000 incarcerated people communicate with their family, including their children, other loved ones and advocates, hurting them and their communities,” said Gerry Webber, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights. “In effect, countless people who used to be able to communicate with folks on the inside now cannot, with no justification from GDC for this dramatic and inexplicably punitive revocation of vital connection with community supports.”
Shadowproof spoke with people incarcerated in no less than six facilities who say that, as far back as July, all digital or electronic communication with their friends and family via Jpay services was terminated.
“The kiosks were shut off for the entire compound here when Securus reps came in to begin installing the new kiosks and their hardware,” said Zombr3x, a prisoner housed at a Middle Georgia men’s prison. We are withholding his identity to protect him from possible retaliation by prison staff for speaking to the press.
“The kiosks are in now, turned on and running, and have been for the entire compound for weeks,” he said. “Yet we still don’t have login credentials or anything, and we’re being told that anyone who wants to communicate with us must submit to the usual visitation background check procedure.”
A.J., whose real name is also being withheld for his protection, is a prisoner at Smith State Prison. He says that family members and friends who are not entering the facility for physical visitation sessions shouldn’t be subjected to this degree of government scrutiny.
“It’s invasive,” he said. “The process to get someone approved for visits is outrageous. In addition to the criminal records check, our families and friends have to send in their ID, birth certificate, and social card.”
“This is a hassle and GDC treats our families like they are under investigation for being related to an inmate. My family cannot pass drugs or anything else through a screen. Due to this process they are keeping us isolated from our families when these tablets and video visits are meant to keep us together.”
In addition to this information, loved ones are asked to submit background checks and submission of all telephone numbers, emails and addresses. Others will be disqualified from communicating with incarcerated people because of felony convictions, as the GDC doesn’t permit people with felony records to be on a prisoners’ visitation or financial list for a period of time post-conviction.
The lack of email also has a negative impact in terms of access to culture, the press, penpals, external services, advocacy projects, and civil rights organizations.
Susan Burns is the founder and chief administrator of THEY HAVE NO VOICE, a Facebook watchdog group for prisoner rights and conditions. Burns and her group vociferously advocate on behalf of the incarcerated, regularly flooding GDC officials with open letters, chain emails, petitions boasting hundreds of signatures, and phone call campaigns.
Burns told Shadowproof, “I have been blocked at the behest of GDC officials via JPay and Securus. I cannot speak with or e-mail the very people for whom I advocate.”
“They have intentionally maneuvered to stop me from being a voice for those who most need it,” Burns argued. “This is affecting the work of other non-profits also and obstructing our attempts at holding GDC accountable to the public.”
The lack of communications means prisoners aren’t able to maintain and nourish meaningful connections, which negatively impacts their lives post-incarceration. Numerous studies have found that contact and connection with those in the community is powerful in terms of successful reentry. Those prisoners who are pursuing postsecondary education (believed in some cases to to lower recidivism rates by 48 percent), are unable to easily and meaningfully communicate with their educational institutions and professors in a way that facilitates their success.
Amy Ard is the founder of Motherhood Beyond Bars, a nonprofit with the particular mission of working with incarcerated mothers in order to enable and empower them for successful reentry, as well as the responsibilities and joys of motherhood after incarceration. For months now, Ard’s organization hasn’t been able to speak with their clients, assist with reentry planning, or ensure that pregnant mothers are receiving proper care.
Ard says that “cutting off communication with support on the outside does a real disservice not just to the women and the men who are in prison coming home. This negatively affects the communities on the other side of those prison walls that are going to be receiving them because they’re gonna start receiving people who have no preparation, who have no connection to outside organizations or agencies, and who haven’t built relationships with those they have on the outside.”
Despite these byzantine GDC policies, there are little benefits to anyone who is impacted. There isn’t a legitimate justification for this pernicious act of government overreach by the state prison agency. Not only will prisoners and their loved ones suffer from such harmful policies that serve absolutely no sound penological interest, but so too will communities.
The post Delays And Obstacles Disrupt Communications For Georgia Prisoners appeared first on Shadowproof.
“Part of our job is just to rock you, and part of our job is to be like troubadours, carrying the news from one town to another, like town criers,” singer-songwriter David Crosby declared in an interview in 2006.
Crosby took his responsibility as a prominent musician seriously, and when he made this comment, he was on the Freedom of Speech tour with Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young, where they performed songs from Young’s “Living With War” protest album, called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, and spoke out against the Iraq War.
He co-authored a book, Stand and Be Counted: Making Music, Making History, that was released in 2000. It recounted antiwar demonstrations, civil rights marches, and music benefits from the perspective of artists.
“Nobody kids themselves into believing that they can solve the world’s problems,” Crosby wrote. “We’re just trying to make a difference, to change things for the better wherever we can. And if it takes a long push, then we’re in it for the long haul.”
“A lot of times this isn’t about the genius of the moment. It’s about persistence. It’s about being in there and staying in there.”
On January 18, 2023, Crosby died after battling what his family described as a “long illness.” Though he was in poor health, he still was working on another album and thinking about touring again.
In 1971, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) organized the “Winter Soldier” investigation to call attention to war crimes by the United States military in Vietnam, Crosby (and Nash) performed two concerts to help raise funds in support of the event. The investigation emphasized the role of U.S. generals and commanders, who were responsible for the My Lai Massacre.
Up to the final years of his life, Crosby visited the wall at the Vietnam War memorial to remind himself of the “awful price we pay when we let our politicians drag us into wars for profits going to the giant [corporations].”
Profiteering in the Iraq War deeply upset Crosby. He cared about young people who joined the US military and risked their lives, and it disgusted him how Halliburton, Bechtel, and ExxonMobil, etc, were benefiting from the carnage.
He was part of the Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) collective that performed in concerts after the Three Mile Island disaster to demand an end to nuclear energy.
Crosby joined Nash in 2011 to support Occupy Wall Street in New York. They visited the site of the encampment and performed several songs for the people of Liberty Plaza that had gathered to stand up for the 99 percent.
As Crosby described the influence of money over politics, “A senator has to spend more than half his time whoring himself out to get money. And of course, there are all those guys in the $2,000 suits just standing around dying to stuff it in his pockets, you know, from the corporations, because they want to buy a senator, they want to buy a congressman, they want that contract, and that takes our representative democracy out of your hands and my hand. It means it disenfranchises us, and I don’t feel that that’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
Crosby never accepted the official US government narrative around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He shouted at multiple concerts, “The Warren Report was a lie.”
“It was, you know, a hit, and it certainly was no lone gunman. You know, if you watch the Zapruder film, [Kennedy] got hit from two directions. There’s no question about it. Also, I’ve been there and stood in Dealey Plaza behind the fence, and I could’ve hit him with a handgun. It’s not very far,” Crosby contended.
Until his death, Crosby maintained that Kennedy had pissed off those in the power structure, and that was why he was assassinated.
Now here are six protest songs that David Crosby wrote or co-wrote.
“Long Time Gone” (1969)
The liner notes for the 1991 box set version of Crosby, Stills & Nash, the group’s debut album, features Crosby’s explanation for what inspired this song.”
“It was written the night Bobby Kennedy was killed,” Crosby shared. “I believed in him because he said he wanted to make some positive changes in America, and he hadn’t been bought and sold like Johnson and Nixon—cats who made their deals years ago with the special interests in this country in order to gain power.”
Yet in later interviews, Crosby also said that Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination was just the “penultimate trigger.” He was also had the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. in mind while writing the tune.
The song is both about the importance of dissent, even when it feels like it will not make any difference. “Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness,” Crosby sings. “You got to speak your mind, if you dare.”
“But don’t, no, don’t now try to get yourself elected. If you do, you had better cut your hair, Crosby adds.
The lyrics recognize that one could no longer be part of the counterculture and independent of the establishment if they were in political office. They would gradually become more implicated in the madness and forced to give up their identity.
“It appears to be a long time before the dawn” represents the very impatience any person feels in the never-ending struggle for truth, peace, and justice.
The song took on a kind of legendary status, when it was included in the introduction for Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock” documentary. But it was nearly scrapped after Crosby struggled with it for several weeks while the band was recording their debut album.
According to CSNY: The Wild & Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup by David Browne, Stephen Stills stayed up all night perfecting the instrumentation. Writer Ellen Sander, who was present, recalled that Stills gave Crosby a look that appeared to say: “I arranged your song better than you could have in a thousand years. And don’t forget it.”
“Almost Cut My Hair” (1970)
Even David Crosby recognized that the song was rather adolescent, but its defiance represented the rebellious spirit of the late 1960s.
“We were the counterculture so the idea was, ‘Don’t give in, stay with it, don’t cop out from the attitude that we’re different and want it another way,’” Crosby recalled in Browne’s book. “Hair was only a symbol. It was a statement of independence. We’re not going to shave it and put on a button-down shirt and become like you.”
“Almost cut my hair. It happened just the other day,” Crosby sings. He says he often feels like letting his “freak flag fly.” But now the pressure to conform has added to his paranoia, “like looking at my mirror and seeing a police car.”
That fear is the fear of being singled out because you are fighting for the world to be organized differently. It stems from a recognition that hose wearing a badge or acting under the banner of the law may try and stifle you to preserve a certain order.
The song appeared on the first album that included Neil Young, Déjà Vu. It’s considered one of Crosby’s finest songs, and for what it’s worth, Crosby lived his entire life with long hair and let his freak flag fly.
“What Are Their Names” (1971)From Crosby’s debut solo album, the song featured Jerry Garcia on guitar and Graham Nash on guitar and piano. The instrumental opening crescendos to the song’s powerful indictment of the men who really run the US government.
“I wonder who they are,” Crosby sings. “The men who really run this land, and I wonder why they run it with such a thoughtless hand.”
“What are their names and on what streets do they live? I’d like to ride right over this afternoon and give them a piece of my mind about peace for mankind.”
“Peace is not an awful lot to ask,” Crosby concludes.
It was rarely performed live, according to Browne, but the song was part of the setlist for CSNY’s Freedom of Speech tour in 2006.
The version performed in the midst of the Iraq War was a shorter a cappella version similar to Stephen Stills’ “Find The Cost of Freedom,” which was also featured in shows.
When Crosby appeared on “Democracy Now!” with Nash after visiting Occupy Wall Street, they recited the poem.
“Nighttime For the Generals” (1988)
The Iran-Contra scandal was fresh in the minds of the nation, and George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, had become president after Ronald Reagan completed his second term in the White House.
“Nighttime For the Generals” appeared on the CSNY album, American Dream. David Crosby’s song is another one of his songs about the faceless and unknown men who rule the country. This time he explicitly referred to those who plot covert and lawless operations in the shadows.
“And it’s nighttime for the generals, and the boys at the CIA,” Crosby sings. “Power gone mad in the darkness. Thinking they’re God on a good day. They giveth, they taketh, but they like to take it away.”
The boys at the CIA think they know what’s best for the population. At least that’s what they tell themselves. But they “shot blind Lady Liberty in the back of the head,” he adds, a nod to the disregard for how their actions endanger freedom.
Unfortunately, the song has not aged well. An artist like Peter Gabriel may have been able to make it work, but it has too much of a tacky ‘80s sound that is particularly discordant to our ears because it differs from that transcendent folk-rock sound, which defined CSNY and helped make them a supergroup.
“They Want It All” (2004)David Crosby performed this song with Graham Nash at Occupy Wall Street in 2011, and it’s a searing indictment of the one percent and crooked and greedy capitalist executives, who hold too much power and influence over government.
“They want it all, they want it now. They want to get it and they don’t care how,” Crosby sings.
The faceless men, who are the subject of the song, want our life savings, our mother’s ring, and another mansion. Enough is never enough. A piece of the pie will not do. They want the whole pie. And “they always have a president or two” to help them “get away with what they do.”
As the song progresses, Crosby paints a picture of corruption engaged in to avoid any accountability. Executives make wire transfers in Jamaica. They’ll “sacrifice” their lawyer just to be certain that they’re never prosecuted.
“If you want us to believe in justice, justice better be real,” Crosby adds.
The song was actually recorded for Crosby and Nash’s 2004 album, which received lackluster reviews.
Graham Nash said in one interview that the lyrics were inspired by the Enron scandal. “It’s about all corporate malfeasance, but inspired by the outrage that David felt about the way that Enron treated its employees and ruined countless thousands of lives, destroying their life savings and their IRAs and their 401s. But at the same time, making billions for themselves.”
Performed at Zuccotti a decade after that major scandal, Occupy protesters must have thought the song was written specifically for the moment in which they mobilized against the class warfare fueled by corporations on Wall Street.
“Capitol” (2017)
David Crosby’s son James Raymond co-wrote this song with his father, which was released on Sky Trails. It sounds nothing like any classic Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song, but the music production is much better than the songs on American Dream.
By the time Crosby recorded Sky Trails, it was apparent that the acrimony between Crosby and Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and Neil Young would prevent any further reunion tours from happening. So he focused on projects like this one and Lighthouse (2016).
“Capitol” is about the scene of the crime, the building where members of the US House of Representatives and Senate meet regularly, and what it is like to realize as one tours the premise that this is where all the most impactful decisions get made.
Crosby sings, “This is where it happens. They run the whole damned thing from here. Money to burn, filling up their pockets, where no one can see and no one can hear.”
Once again, it’s about a cabal that is shrouded in secrecy. They ignore the constitution. They hide from the public, where no one can hear what they do. All they care about is staying a part of the machine.
And the votes are just pieces of paper
And they sneer at the people who voted
And they laugh as the votes were not counted
And the will of the people was noted
And completely ignored
Over a lush composition, Crosby articulates what it’s like to observe daily that there is a big elite club in Congress, which has the ear of lobbyists from corporate and special interest groups, while the most important people of them all—the bottom 90 percent of citizens—are shut out of decisions.
Remarkably, the song was released after President Donald Trump’s election. It distinguishes itself from the many, many songs recorded during that era by staying focused on the real center of power rather than the personality of Trump.
As Crosby described, “‘Capitol’ is an indictment of our Congress. It’s me saying this is a scam. They’re tricking you with all that white marble and all that pomp and circumstance that they’re showing you. They’re really a grubby bunch of thieves, lowest kind of people.”
The post The Protest Songs Of David Crosby appeared first on Shadowproof.
Chris Hedges, longtime journalist and host of “The Chris Hedges Report,” had Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola on his show to discuss his book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange.
The book can be pre-ordered from Seven Stories Press. It will be released on February 21.
As Chris said in the introduction, “I think your book and Nils Melzer’s book are books I would recommend for people who don’t understand the case.”
Chris and Kevin go issue by issue, like the book, which is not a chronology but a meticulously organized guide to all aspects of the United States government’s charges and allegations.
Prior to the interview, one of the endorsements that Kevin received for his book came from Chris. “Kevin Gosztola has doggedly done what most of the press has not, cover in exacting detail the long persecution of Julian Assange and the judicial farce that passes for Julian’s trial.”
You may have seen—or heard—this interview already. In two days, it has over 20,000 views and has been shared widely on social media and republished to several independent media sites.
Thanks again to Chris Hedges and the crew at The Real News for giving Kevin a platform to share his book with a wide audience.
Listen to the interview or watch the interview on YouTube:
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Shadowproof’s Kevin Gosztola, along with Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Steven Donziger, Stella Assange, Jeffrey Sterling, and several other distinguished panelists, will be speaking as part of the Belmarsh Tribunal. The event on the case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will take place at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, at 2pm ET.
It is sponsored by Progressive International, and the tribunal will be chaired by Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!” and Srećko Horvat.
The tribunal is modeled after the Russell-Sartre tribunals that were convened by activists during the Vietnam War to call attention to war crimes committed by the US government. (See this video for example.)
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This article was funded by paid subscribers of Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber* to help us continue our independent journalism.*
The Central Intelligence Agency and former CIA director Mike Pompeo notified a federal court in New York that they intend to push for the dismissal of a lawsuit that alleges that they were involved in spying against attorneys and journalists who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in Ecuador’s London embassy.
Both the CIA and Pompeo maintain that the “allegations in the complaint do not establish a violation of the Fourth Amendment [right to privacy].”
In August 2022, four Americans who visited Assange in the embassy sued the CIA and Pompeo in his individual capacity: Margaret Ratner Kunstler, a civil rights activist and human rights attorney; Deborah Hrbek, a media lawyer, represented Assange or WikiLeaks; journalist John Goetz, who worked for Der Spiegel when the German media organization first partnered with WikiLeaks; and journalist Charles Glass, who wrote articles on Assange for The Intercept.
The filed complaint alleged that as visitors Glass, Goetz, Hrbek, and Kunstler were required to “surrender” their electronic devices to employees of a private company called UC Global that was contracted to provide security for the embassy. What they did not know was that UC Global “copied the information stored on the devices” and allegedly shared the information with the CIA, and Pompeo allegedly authorized and approved the action.
Security contractors required the attorneys and journalists to leave their devices with them, which contained “confidential and privileged information about their sources or clients.”
On January 13, 2023, a letter [PDF] was filed in the United States Court for the Southern District of New York that laid out the CIA and Pompeo’s basic arguments for seeking dismissal of the lawsuit.
The CIA and Pompeo maintain that the alleged acts detailed in the lawsuit involve “intelligence gathering and implicate national security.” They further insist that the alleged acts also “took place outside the United States.” Both of these factors supposedly prevent anyone from suing them for alleged misconduct.
Since the CIA and Pompeo were sued under what is known as the “Bivens doctrine,” the CIA claims that it cannot be sued because the doctrine is only to be applied to “federal employees in their individual capacities, and any such claims are otherwise barred by sovereign immunity.”
The allegations of privacy violations were not only submitted against the CIA and Pompeo but also UC Global and its director, David Morales. In Spain, Morales faces criminal charges for his role in targeting Assange, however, the United States Justice Department has hindered the investigation by issuing unreasonable demands to the court.
A hearing in the case was already scheduled for February 21, and the government proposes that they discuss the motion to dismiss during those proceedings.
Richard Roth, the lead attorney representing Americans who claims their privacy rights were violated, was frustrated. “[The government] was required to file a motion today and instead filed a letter, which is ineffective and weak.”
Previously, he stated, “The United States Constitution shields American citizens from US government overreach even when the activities take place in a foreign embassy in a foreign country. Visitors who are lawyers, journalists and doctors frequently carry confidential information in their devices.”
“They had a reasonable expectation that the security guards at the Ecuadorian embassy in London would not be US government spies charged with delivering copies of their electronics to the CIA,” Roth added.
In 1971, a Supreme Court case known as Bivens created a process for bringing cases against federal government officials for violating a person’s constitutional rights. However, courts have been extremely reluctant to allow plaintiffs to pursue damages when a case may set a precedent or lead to a court intruding upon national security and foreign policy matters.
Pompeo was summoned by the Spanish court to provide testimony back in June. It is unknown if he has acknowledged or rebuffed the court’s request.Reporting from the Spanish newspaper El País previously corroborated many of the claims in the complaint. Their journalism was based upon primary source materials shared by whistleblowing UC Global employees.
In September 2021, Yahoo! News published a bombshell report on “secret war plans” against Assange that involved proposals for kidnapping and assassinating Assange after Pompeo became obsessed with the WikiLeaks founder following the media organization’s publication of CIA hacking materials, which became known as the “Vault 7” materials.
Pompeo labeled WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence agency,” and in April 2017, he made it the focus of his first speech as CIA director. “The one thing [current] whistleblowers don’t need is a publisher,” since the internet already enables enough sharing of information, he proclaimed.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, a whistleblower and known supporter of Assange, reacted, “What the CIA did to Julian Assange is in opposition to everything that we should stand for as Americans. On the other hand, and this is what’s wrong with our country, the Supreme Court has ruled that foreign nationals who are located abroad do not have Fourth Amendment protections.”
Because the attorneys and journalists who brought this case against the CIA were visiting a foreign national, Kiriakou suggested the CIA might claim—if they even confirmed the agency’s involvement—that Americans’ privacy rights ended when they met with an intelligence target.
The spying lawsuit is unrelated to the criminal charges and extradition case against Assange, which is in limbo as the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom considers whether to grant Assange an appeal hearing.
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Black Belt Eagle Scout is the alias of Katherine Paul, an indigenous multi-instrumentalist and
singer-songwriter. Her third studio album, “The Land, the Water, the Sky,” will be released on
February 10.
In a press statement, she declared “I created The Land, the Water, the Sky to record and reflect upon my journey back to my homelands and the challenges and the happiness it brought.”
Three singles from the album were released. “Don’t Give Up,” according to Paul, is a song about mental
health awareness and the importance that her connection to the land plays within her own mental
health journey. Spending time with the land and on the water strengthened her connection to her ancestors and her culture.
The lyrics ‘I don’t give up” mean staying alive. I wrote this song for me but also for my community and anyone who deals with challenging mental health issues to remind us just how much of a role our connection to the environment plays within our healing process,” she added.
The second single, “My Blood Runs Through This Land,” also connects to Paul’s ancestors.
“When I run my hands through the rocks at Snee Oosh Beach and dip my fingers into our waterways, I am reminded of where I come from,” Paul shared. “Paying attention to all of the sounds and the feelings I get when I am immersed in trails of cedar trees and canoeing out on the water deeply grounds me and strengthens my bond to my lineage of the Swinomish tribe.”
As Paul described, “I wanted the delicateness of these moments to meet the intense reality of the history of my people. I like to imagine my blood—all of my ancestors—running through our homelands freely and powerfully.”
The third single is “Nobody,” a poignant tune about the importance of representation.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t have very many Native role models to look to on TV or the radio,” Paul recalled. “It was within my own community that I found inspiring role models through our elders and our community leaders.”
“With Native representation in music and television slowly growing, I often ask myself where I stand within representation in music and how I want to be seen. This song is about the relationship I have with my own representation in music.”
The video for this single was directed by indigenous filmmaker Evan Benally Atwood. The visuals beautifully depict a day in the life of an Indigenous family, displaying the moments of kinship that they share with the land and each other.
The post Protest Song(s) Of The Week: Black Belt Eagle Scout appeared first on Shadowproof.
*The following is a collection of some of the best albums of protest music released in 2022. They were selected by Kevin Gosztola and C.J. Baker, who publishes writing regularly at Ongoing History Of Protest Songs. They are in alphabetical order by artist.
**Full playlist with each album on Spotify
| Ashenspire – Hostile ArchitectureHailing from Glasgow in Scotland, the lads of Ashenspire make progressive metal for the working class that is grandiose and theatrical. The lyrics are largely delivered as spoken word over instruments that amplify the dark storytelling and agitation of the narrator. The story told, as the band puts it, is about “hostile architecture” under late capitalism, which refers to the “design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes.” Each song draws inspiration from the post-industrial landscape of cities, “hauntological in nature,” that are so often unfit for housing due to cost-cutting. For example, the “Law of Asbestos” refers to the cancer-causing mineral that was incorporated into electrical insulation for many buildings, especially before the 1980s. Asbestos continues to kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. A metal-sounding saxophone accentuates Ashenspire’s rage: “A corner cut, a penny saved, Grenfell burns again and again and again!”—a reference to the Grenfell Tower fire that resulted in 72 deaths. “Tragic Heroin” has a kind of anthemic quality to it. At the end, Ashenspire proclaims: “Fueled with your labour. Built with your bones. There are no great men. Only the great many.” Then there’s the sprawling “Cable Street Again.” A tapestry of darkness percolates, sounding almost jazz-like in sections. Ashenspire warns the dispossessed and disposable human beings faced with hostile architecture that is part of the threat of fascism. “You cannot fix that which is working as intended.” In a final call to action, Ashenspire belts out, “Get down off the fence before the barbed wire goes up.”(Kevin Gosztola) | | Jake Blount – The New FaithSometimes it is necessary to look to the past to learn about the future. That is the case with Jake Blount, a singer, multi-instrumentalist, and scholar whose stunning concept album weaves a compelling Afrofuturist narrative. The album’s premise is similar to Octavia Butler’s influential 1993 science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, an apocalyptic tale of Black American refugees struggling to survive ecological collapse.Blount reworks ten traditional Black spirituals, along with two original spoken word compositions, and imagines what Black religious music would sound like in a future ravaged by climate disruption. Three of the tracks feature rousing verses from rapper Demeanor.“Take Me To the Water,” a traditional hymn and first track on the album, morphs into an ominous prayer for those seeking to “be washed for the sins of humanity.” It is a call “to reject the greed of our forefathers,” who “melted the ice at the ends of the earth, drowned the coast, emptied the seas and forests of life, filled the very ocean with fire.”Not only does Blount prove he is a skillful musician, but in developing these themes throughout his album, he proves that he is also an archivist, historian, and prophet capable of sounding an alarm for humanity.(CJ Baker) | | Bob Vylan – Bob Vylan Presents The Price Of Life UK grime-punk and hip hop duo Bob Vylan storm their way through a crash course on underclass survival in a capitalist world, where one’s life could be snuffed out at any moment without any remorse. “The BBC are talking about the GDP. That means fuck all to me,” Bob Vylan raps. “I gotta eat.” How the underclass lacks access and cannot afford healthy food is the subject of “Health is Wealth.” Bob Vylan states, “The killing of kids with £2 chicken and chips is a tactic of war waged on the poor.” But the damage done by junk food can also be self-inflicted, as the duo acknowledges, and the track develops into sound advice for eating right to survive.Take note of the album cover. It’s a dark and brilliant nod to the way society dupes people into believing they may escape poverty if they could just win the lottery. Several of the songs incorporate thick guitar riffs to make the rhymes more potent. That’s especially true on “Phone Tap (Alexa),” a fierce assessment of the role that lower class people play in enabling a police state.Bob Vylan raps, “If somebody’s getting bodied, watch the ratings hit the roof. I was there, I was there, gather ’round and gather proof.” Then the cops come to the door, and the doorbell rings. “Our babies” are taken.“Alexa, take me to prison,” the duo roars at the end of their gutting indictment.(Kevin Gosztola) | | Fantastic Negrito – White Jesus Black Problems Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, who performs under the pseudonym Fantastic Negrito, recently discovered that his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were a white Scottish servant named Elizabeth Gallimore and a black slave whose name has been erased in the annals of history. This lineage inspires Fantastic Negrito’s compelling concept album, which he released as a multimedia project with a companion film. The album reclaims the story of the courageous forgotten, as emphasized on the “Man with No Name.” It contains a galvanizing message of hope and perseverance, particularly as he sings, “I keep moving on.” “There’s a feeling out there right now that we can’t get anything done because we’re so polarized, so entrenched in our ideologies and unmoved by facts or logic, but I wanted to share this story because I think it smashes that narrative to pieces,” Fantastic Negrito shared. “I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors, both Black and white, who showed me that anything is possible.” From the ugliness of injustice to the beauty of what can be gained in the struggle, Fantastic Negrito grapples with it all in his music. (C.J. Baker) | | Ezra Furman – All Of Us FlamesEzra Furman breathes new life into a stale and largely heteronormative art form by incorporating themes of queerness into her timeless-sounding rock music. The album is the third in a trilogy of albums that includes 2018’s “Transangelic Exodus” and 2019’s “Twelve Nudes.”On “Book Of Our Love,” Furman expresses a desire to forever remember those who historically tend to have their identities erased. On “Lilac and Black,” Furman dreams of “my queer girl gang,” whose enemies will eventually “bow down before our wrath.” “It’s a queer album for the stage of life when you start to understand that you are not a lone wolf, but depend on finding your family, your people, how you work as part of a larger whole,” Furman declared. “I wanted to make songs for use by threatened communities, and particularly the ones I belong to: trans people and Jews.” Furman succeeds in crafting a vision of a world, where everyone may feel that they belong. (C.J. Baker) | | Hurray For The Riff Raff – Life On EarthPuerto Rican singer-songwriter and self-described “nature punk” Alynda Segarra’s album is a worthy follow-up to their exceptional 2017 album, “The Navigator.” It explores themes of immigration, the environment, and other social ills.One of the album’s many highlights is “Precious Cargo,” where Segarra sings, “We made it to the border. I jumped and I was detained. Split me from my family. Now the light begins to fade. They took me to the cold room, where I sat down on the floor. Just a foil for a blanket. For 17 days or more.”“I don’t know why he would lie on me. The man from the I-C-E. And I don’t know why he hate on me. The man from the I-C-E,” Segarra adds, as she grapples with cruelty of immigration agents.The album’s title track gorgeously acknowledges the peril from man-made climate change and other societal ills. Yet despite the despair, throughout each song Segarra approaches the subject matter with an embrace of beauty and hopeful yearning. Segarra shows that she has the gift of being able to express the humanity of the downtrodden. Thankfully, they shared this precious gift with the world.(C.J. Baker) | | Leyla McCalla – Breaking The Thermometer“In 1980, Radio Haiti was shut down and all of its journalists were either executed, jailed or exiled alongside many of Haiti’s most prominent artists, intellectuals and academics,” recalled Haitian American multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla. McCalla’s “Breaking The Thermometer” project combines audio from the Radio Haiti archives to create Afro-Caribbean music that honors those who rebelled against the United States-backed dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, as well as Jean-Claude’s father, François Duvalier. The songs are in English and Kreyòl, a native language in Haiti.Over banjo and soft percussion, “Fort Dimanche” features a Kreyol radio clip that leads into McCalla singing about the prison, where François Duvalier had entire families executed. A Haitian man describes when their family was killed at the prison and how it inspired him to become a journalist. (Note: At one point, the fort was a military facility for US Marines in the 1920s.)The song, “Ekzile,” is a somber melody mixing several string instruments over soft percussion. It features a Haitian woman who recounts fleeing brutal repression and ending up in New York. McCalla movingly grapples with what it is like for someone to have to leave their home because they are no longer safe.“Le Bal est Fini” (“The Party is Over”) stands out among all the tracks. It is an invigorating tribute to the journalists who defied dictatorship. All the percussive elements of the project shine, culminating in a solo that ends with dogs barking. Jean Dominique, Radio Haiti’s owner, was murdered, and McCalla developed a close relationship with Michèle Montas, Dominique’s widow. The project honors their resistance. “A big part of their connection and their love for each other was their love for journalism and their vision for what this could do to transform their country,” McCalla told the Guardian. “It’s a really hard thing to have faith in, but that faith held them together.”(Kevin Gosztola) | | Samora Pinderhughes – GRIEFOur annual list, given Shadowproof’s journalism on prison abolition, would not be complete without this collaborative album from singer, songwriter, pianist, and scholar Samora Pinderhughes.For “GRIEF,” a part of the Healing Project, Pinderhughes interviewed around 100 people of color who shared their experiences with incarceration or “structural violence.” The online archive of interviews features includes insights on abolishing prison, but the album is more introspective than essayistic and draws from the well of emotions that come from prison life and life in a world of prisons. Through the harmony of “Holding Cell,” Pinderhughes sings, “Holding cell, I can’t get well while you hold me.” The slave labor, or slaving for the tiniest of wages, comes through on, “Hope,” as Pinderhughes, Nio Norwood, and Jehbreal Jackson sing, “While we try to build a room for our freedom (for our freedom). We build what they destroy.”“Masculinity” is a profound inward examination from the perspective of a man grappling with their incarceration or carceral past. “If I feel these things, is it gonna hurt me?” Pinderhughes wonders. The lyrics eventually give way to an ethereal alto sax outro from Immanuel Wilkins.Pinderhughes told the New York Times that he intended to explore how the machinery of incarceration operates and ask, what is the system doing to people? What can be done to fight back? And then, from a more personal perspective, “How am I a part of that? How am I implicated, and how am I doing something against it? What does that make me feel like?”You feel every word of the experiences that flow through the music, as well as the spirituality of interrogating a harmful system that has impacted so many lives.(Kevin Gosztola) | | Soul Glo – Diaspora ProblemsSince their formation in 2014, Soul Glo has built a reputation for their ferocious musical attack and radical political lyrics. The hardcore punk band is made up of Black musicians who share their experiences as artists in a genre dominated by white groups. On the album, the band dispels the myth that lasting change can come from continuing to prop up the two-party system. For example, lead singer Pierce Jordan derisively snarls on “John J,” “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip. But still liberals are more dangerous.” Elsewhere, with the incisive “Fucked Up If True,” Soul Glo address the fallacy that voting is enough to enact meaningful change.“So we just gon always vote in false elections and accept each result and it’s effects as though people were powerless. Do you feel supportive care? How do you wake up everyday? What enforced your belief that you can vote their power away?” The album is filled with killer anthems of righteous indignation that continue punk’s tradition of confronting racial and social injustice, and it is the band’s first release on renowned punk label Epitaph.(C.J. Baker) | | Tanya Tagaq – TonguesCanadian Inuk singer Tanya Tagaq aims “to repair the damage” from trauma inflicted by centuries of colonial repression. Over 10 tracks produced by Afrofuturist and poet Saul Williams, the album spits in the face of her oppressors then shifts away from their savagery to what gives Tagaq empowerment, joy, and strength.“Teeth Agape” bares a maternal instinct to protect her child from further trauma from colonizers while “Earth Monster” celebrates the creation of life. “Today is for her, and today is for me. For choosing to make her, to keep her, and to love her.”“They took our tongues,” declares Tagaq on the album’s title track. She vows, “You can’t have my tongue,” and later adds, “I don’t want your shame.” Her vocals grow more guttural as she confronts the loss of language that came as a result of white colonial settlers, who committed cultural genocide.“The Canadian government took Indigenous children away from our families for many generations in the residential school system,” Tagaq told NPR. “All of us know who didn’t come home.”Tagaq’s vocal artistry is a dagger aimed at the hearts of those complicit and responsible for all the pain and terror. But the power in her voice also carries a sense of pride. She does not want anyone’s sympathy or guilt in order to live life on her own terms—free of the legacy and influence of colonizers. (Kevin Gosztola) | | HONORABLE MENTIONS: Jimmy Cliff – “Refugee” | Dropkick Murphys – “This Machine Still Kill Fascists” | Moor Mother – “Jazz Codes” | Mali Obomsawin – “Sweet Tooth” | Special Interest – “Endure” | SAULT – “11”/”Earth”/”Today & Tomorrow”/”Untitled (God)”/”Air” |
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This article was originally published as part of the Dissenter Newsletter. Become a monthly paid subscriber* to help us continue our independent journalism.*
Reality Winner is an NSA whistleblower who was harshly prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but she is also more than that. She is an advocate who has used the visibility gained from her case to promote an end to prisons in the United States.
I covered Reality’s detention and incarceration as a whistleblower extensively. What she endured further solidified her understanding of how prisons function. Yet according to Winner, she questioned the existence of the US prison system before she was arrested in June 2017.
This is the first time that I have spoken to Reality since she was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in 2018. We discuss her incarceration during the COVID pandemic, rampant sexual abuse in Bureau of Prisons facilities, and why prison is one of the worst places for a person struggling with drug addiction or substance abuse problems.
Some of what Reality shares in the interview was reported previously by The Dissenter Newsletter, however, her stories from prison are much more detailed than what was described in earlier reports.
*Below is a transcript of the interview with NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, with minor edits to improve clarity.
GOSZTOLA: I’ve been following your commentary and how you follow issues in the US prison system, and I was really drawn to how your outspoken. You say, America’s incapable of a humane system detention. Just as there’s no humane form of slavery. Abolish it all. You think prison reform is a lot like asking for slavery reform. And you’ve been outspoken about abolishing prisons, and I was hoping to talk with you today about how you came to that view and if you could share some of what you experienced while you were incarcerated that maybe led to this awakening.
WINNER: Ironically enough, this realization actually started a month before my incarceration. I had watched the Netflix documentary “The 13th,” and leading up to the night I found myself in jail, that was actually the only thing that my family had ever heard about from me. I was like, you need to watch this. My sister watched it. We had many conversations about it.
For me, the first time I was indirectly or in the vicinity of a police killing was when I lived on the outskirts of Baltimore in 2014, when Freddie Gray was basically murdered. Or he died in police custody, but the negligence just made it a homicide. I remember I was working my mission in the Air Force the first night of the curfew. And so, it was kind of surreal.
Without going into my career as a linguist too much, I was essentially sitting in a combat position watching our war in Afghanistan, and we had the local news and we had CNN on and they were doing a live countdown to when the curfew would be enforced. And there were still people on the street, and there was a line of police officers in their military gear. That’s kind of the first time for me where I realized the same war, the same conflict that I had wanted to dedicate my life to in Afghanistan, was playing out 15 miles away from me on American streets, and that I in no way sympathized with the people in uniform.
That’s kind of where I had started in 2014, to pay attention to police brutality and the over-militarization of the American police. That’s where I started to understand it’s completely deregulated because it’s compartmentalized into different jurisdictions, and there is no one tracking at the federal level what every police force is doing.
It was incredibly ironic that I found myself in an extremely negligent county jail and [faced] the sexual exploitation in the jail and the constant negligence of basic needs and watching women go through medical emergencies.
I, myself, had a medical issue come up when I was in court. I fell while handcuffed and busted my face open and also had a contusion in my knee. And it resulted in a giant bubble that a month later was drained at a local clinic by a doctor that was really questionable. I mean, I’m glad he drained it because that bubble was huge and weird; but the fact that I waited a month for that, and it was a clearly visible thing that was going on. I was limping.
The transfer process—They told me, oh, it’s diesel therapy. It’s dehumanizing, but the conditions steadily got worse. Never say you’ve hit rock bottom because that floor can always break open and expose new rock underneath it. Every time I said I’ve been through the worst. I’m good.
Then Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, and we got put on lockdown for it. Their excuse was the BOP sent their riot task force to the streets to police civilians. And the BOP is not a police force. In no system should that have ever happened. We did not draw soldiers from Afghanistan to police Dallas, Texas. Why are we sending BOP guards to police civilians?
The only thing that makes sense is that it was punitive to us. We had little to no contact with our family, and it was a direct retaliation on the communities that were hurting the most from the murder. That’s how the system works. You always have to look at, what is the overall message to the American people when 80,000 inmates go quiet? It’s a direct message to those communities to stop rioting. It’s a direct message that police can murder people, and you are all going to be put in the SHU [solitary confinement].
It was demoralizing. It was about as bad a month later when we all had COVID, and we were blamed for it, even though none of the safety precautions that were given to us did any good. My unit had a 90 percent infection rate, and all they did was continue to shuffle us around. They locked us down so we could be quarantined from one unit to another.
But the day we got sick there were inmates that were too sick to move, told to carry their stuff and go to another unit. There was no consideration for the fact that people were actively ill with a virus that in July 2020 nobody actively knew what this body does to the body. That’s how soon it was. That’s how early it was in the pandemic. Long COVID was not a household word at that time.
You have inmates who are catching COVID over and over again, their civil rights and civil liberties being violated over and over again in the name of safety and COVID control, when the moment they do get sick nothing is done for them. There’s no medical care.
The COVID Pandemic And PrisonGOSZTOLA: COVID is still an issue for prisoners. It wasn’t long ago that you put this out where you let people know, “Meanwhile, US federal and state prisons still have ZERO idea how to handle COVID without cruel and unusual lockdowns, which usually mean inmates deprived of fresh food&air, visitation, programs…All while waiting to be infected, the 4th or 5th time,” while being held in these facilities.
Connecting this back to your experiences, when you were released in the middle of 2021—just to give people some perspective—what was it like when you were leaving, despite the fact that we had elected Joe Biden and there was some movement when it came to dealing with the pandemic that was much better than Trump? And despite having vaccines available, how behind was the Bureau of Prisons?
WINNER: There was no change. That was kind of the biggest crush. From January 2021 to the time I left, little to no change. Little to no lifting of the lockdowns. I was still using my job as an excuse and my good standing with certain officers to get outside as much as possible. We had caught COVID in July 2020 and December 2020. So we actually had it twice in a six-month period.
Going into April 2021, one day nurses came into the unit and started setting up stations. They said we’re giving out the first dose. Get in line or pack your shit. People said, well, where are we going? There’s different units. We were in 2 North. People were asking if we were going downstairs to 1 North if we didn’t get vaccinated. And they said you’re not going to like where you’re going. Get the vaccine or pack your shit.
There was no conversation with your doctor about which version of the COVID vaccine is right for you. There was no discussion of the certain ingredients that certain individuals are allergic to. It was very authoritarian.
A counselor had come out at that time to saying if any of y’all are trying to go to halfway houses just know they’re not accepting you If you’re not vaccinated, which was not true. But basically that was when I was like, okay, I’m getting released in a month to a halfway house. I need this vaccine. I need record of this vaccine. So I got in line.
Obviously, it was the Pfizer vaccine because we got vaccinated twice. In 21 days, we got the second dose. That’s how we knew which version of the shot we got. So I got my two doses, and even though I had caught COVID twice and being vaccinated, 23 days before my release I had to go into a hospital room.
Carswell was built in a old military hospital. So when I say hospital room, I mean the main building of the prison is the old hospital. We eat in the old prison cafeteria. So the quarantine rooms—you can actually picture it. The old school hospital room built for two beds, and it had two little bathrooms on each side up by the front door. There were nine of us in that room for 23 days straight. And you [didn’t] leave that room for anything ever.
It was like you’re about to go home, and time stands still. There’s like ten different rooms like that—either people on one side of the hall are coming to the prison or people on our side of the hall are leaving. You have ten rooms of women demanding to use the phone. You have ten rooms of women demanding ice for drinking water. And you have one officer doing that for ten rooms for 12 hours at a time.
I have compassion so I understand it was a lot, but it was also a lot of disrespect. I know that there were times when I demanded a lieutenant. I knew the lieutenant that was working that day, and that’s why I demanded a lieutenant that day.
The smartass officer waited till the next day for the meanest the lieutenant, opens the door, says, “I got your lieutenant,” and in walks the fiercest lieutenant ever. I was like, I’m going home. I’m not going to lose face. I jump down, and go have a conversation with that lieutenant. That officer was just mad that I was even willing to be direct with that lieutenant. They thought I was going to be scared.
We didn’t even get really anything out of that. They had skipped us for three days on the phone. So imagine you’re trying to make plans with your family. Pick me up at this time on this day, and then you go quiet for three days straight. That’s not good. You can’t do that to us.
It was just a horrible situation. The first three days I only got a breakfast tray because even though I had a legal right to a non-flesh or a vegetarian tray the way it is they shipped up the styrofoam trays from the kitchen. If they didn’t put a vegetarian tray on the cart, I didn’t eat that meal.
What you could carry was in that room with you. So it wasn’t like I packed a bunch of commissary because I thought they were going to feed me. Every now and then an officer who knew me would call the kitchen and get a tray sent up. But it was three days at least until they actually regularly sent up meals for me to eat.
That’s what we were doing after we were vaccinated. That’s the kind of authoritarianism, the kind of blatant abuse, the kind of neglect. And once I got to the halfway house, they said you need to be quarantined again because we don’t know if you’re vaccinated.
I said okay, well, can I call the prison tomorrow and have them fax my vaccine [record]? Because once you’re vaccinated in the halfway house, you don’t go outside. You don’t eat with everybody else. You’re quarantined. You don’t get to go use the phone in the hallway because you’re quarantined.
I actually to this day have not seen that original vaccine record. I couldn’t get it from the prison. The halfway house, which is part of the Bureau of Prisons, could not get Federal Medical Center Carswell to send my vaccine record to them.
My attorney could not get it. My family physician could not get it. We’ve even called the regional office on this. Federal Medical Center Carswell is not giving out those records of vaccines given to me. So I don’t know what I got, but I had to be quarantined twice for it.
Once I was released from the halfway house and had my ankle monitor cut off—you know, I didn’t know how Texas was going to be about it. Obviously, Texas we’re super chill, pretending like COVID doesn’t exist. But in most states, you would need a vaccine card to apply for a job.
So I went out and immediately got the Johnson & Johnson one-and-done, however, because that was within six months of my last dose, I was laid out for three days with some of the worst pain ever. But I was willing to do that because Carswell refused to give me a vaccine card for a vaccine they forced me to get in the first place.
I’ve had one of the worst COVID experiences—not so much COVID itself, the virus, but with authority and how they handled keeping people safe from a virus and keeping people vaccinated. Or giving people the option to vaccinate.
GOSZTOLA: While you were in the facility, they’re choosing to lock down people, but you all can see the guards and people who work at the facility coming out during this pandemic. Are you and your fellow prisoners aware that COVID could be coming in and out of the prison? Are you seeing sick people? Are you seeing that, oh, that guard is not here today, and oh, this other person they’re sick now?
WINNER: Right, so when the state of Texas first shut down, officers were talking about certain officers who turned their backyards into bars for their street, for their neighborhood. As federal employees, they never quarantined themselves before coming into work or not. When we had COVID, they actually setup tents outside for the kitchen workers so that the kitchens wouldn’t shut down.
I watched an officer do 12 hours on our unit while we were COVID positive walk straight to that tent after work. We watched our officers get sick, and they had COVID with us. Even though they were supposed to sign, every morning they came into work. They would get their temperature checked. I’m not symptomatic today. They were lying to come in because they thought they were going to get hazard pay. Everybody was going after that hazard pay, the bonus money, the overtime because of the lockdown and having less staff.
The same way we were lying on our temperature checks to make sure we stayed in our unit, where we felt safe, they were lying to come in to make extra money to keep their paycheck. So they all got sick with us.
I was already symptomatic, already coming back down, already feeling better. That was when they told me I’m not negative. So, originally, after they tested all of us on a Wednesday, that Sunday they pulled out—out of a unit of 170 women—they pulled out 15 of us that were supposedly negative for COVID. They said we’re going to put you guys in a COVID negative unit. We’re going to test you again however.
And then, six of us, including me, were called aside again from that group. So we sat in a room of people that were allegedly COVID negative. For fifteen minutes, we hadn’t seen these people in months.
Everyone’s looking at the officers and running over and hugging people. Then they called us aside after we’ve been in this room, and said, I don’t know why y’all are here. Y’all aren’t negative. So no one was giving us a piece of paper with our test results with positive or negative. They just told us six y’all aren’t negative for COVID. Go back to your unit.
We carried all of our stuff back up to the unit. Nobody knows what’s going on, and there was the officer that didn’t like me that day so I was being extra. And everybody is like, Winner, what happened? I’m like, we’re the COVID unit. We got COVID, like just making a joke of it. Because at that point everybody was sick. We knew it. Everybody started clapping. Yeah, Winner’s back.
I went back up into my room because I had to pack up everything again, and this officer comes. We had plastic curtains. It’s an airborne virus, and so we have one central AC unit pumping the same air into the rooms. But they gave us plastic curtains in the middle of summer that made the room hot as hell, and it was a disciplinary shot if we pulled those curtains aside to get air.
That officer came into the curtain after it was revealed that I had COVID, pulled down her mask, and said, oh, Winner, I just want to congratulate you for your positive test results. So you can tell how hard they were trying to not get COVID.
It was never about the virus. It was never about spreading a contagious disease. It was always about discipline. They had different masks than us. We couldn’t talk to our family as much. We couldn’t leave our room. We showered when they told us to shower. They handed us our food. It was all about breaking down and removing what freedoms we did have. And once they started lifting the lockdowns—they actually lifted the lockdowns and the quarantine for the prisons.
We didn’t get our programs back because so much of the staff had left or quit during COVID. So they actually didn’t have the staff or resources to go right back to the same programs they offered pre-COVID. So Federal Medical Center Carswell is still operating at 70 percent of the programs, of the resources for inmates that they were just before 2019—for no reason, other than sheer incompetency.
They got used to having everybody locked down, and I fear that that’s going to be the new BOP standard of operations.
Federal Medical Center Carswell (Photo from the US Bureau of Prisons and in the public domain.)Rampant Sexual Abuse From BOP EmployeesGOSZTOLA: Something that’s in the news because of a US Senate subcommittee report that I imagine was daily life for you and other prisoners at Carswell is the rampant sexual abuse that goes on in Bureau of Prisons facilities. We now have Senate staff spending many months to document the way in which this is basically just a feature of being incarcerated. Nineteen out of 29 facilities they found in the last ten years have had some employee accused or found guilty of crimes when it comes to sexual abuse.
I was hoping you could share what you observed or witness while you were at Carswell, as far as how you and all your fellow prisoners knew this was something you had to contend with as incarcerated individuals.
WINNER: It’s definitely known, and at Carswell, it wasn’t hidden very well. There was a certain lieutenant who was charged. He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but Lt. Luis Curiel actually got a woman pregnant. When I heard the initials of the victim, I said, oh, that wasn’t even his girlfriend because he had another little favorite. And they would just go on walks together, and she had a special prison assignment of cleaning his office when he was at work. Everybody knew it.
[Note: Curiel was sentenced September 21. Remarkably, as Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported, he “pleaded guilty to raping two women” at Carswell and was sentenced to 18 months—“half the amount of time one of his victims is serving for drug possession.”]
So often it’s these lieutenants. They have the right to call inmates to the lieutenant’s office. Make it look like a disciplinary matter. They’re really the only people who have the right to have complete one-on-one privacy with inmates but also not have staff who are in a place to complain about it.
As far as actual staff members committing assaults on the units with witnesses, there was one, and she touched me when I was in my bed for no reason. I reported it. So there’s the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). There’s posters everywhere you go in federal prisons. They’re by the phones. They’re by the phones. They’re by the water fountains. They’re on the walls randomly. They’re by the computers.
You’ve got five different ways of reporting it. You can do it by secure mail or you can do it on a phone call. Or you can do it on the computer system, and it goes straight to the DOJ IG. Okay, I did that, and I don’t know what happened
I did that in March 2020, and by December 2020, that same officer was working our unit. She was extremely abusive, like threatening violence on a regular night. For me, it wasn’t a threat. It was real because she put hands on me. She had been removed from a unit just before that for actually taking off her belt and trying to wrestle an inmate.
She came from Texas state prisons, where they regularly physically abuse prisons, and was trying to bring that culture and make it normal in a federal prison. Telling us that we didn’t deserve this treatment simply because we were charged under the federal system, that we deserved to be degraded the way that Texas state inmates are degraded. And that was what she tried to normalize in every unit that she was working in.
A woman came up to me after it was known that I had made a report against [the officer] and said she watches me when I shower, and then she later calls me to the office to tell me about my body. She was making very predatory remarks to us. It got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore.
Unfortunately, it was that same lieutenant who knocked up a girl, who came to the unit to save us. Because we were actually waving at the cameras to get somebody from control to send somebody. She was going on a rant. We were locked down.
She had us in our cells, and she was in the center of the unit. And it was Stockholm syndrome. She was telling us, when y’all had COVID, who was the only officer that let y’all shower? Who was the only officer that let y’all use the phone to talk to your families? And most of us weren’t even in her unit.
She never came into our unit when we had COVID. You weren’t that officer. Every single officer who worked here gave us our basic rights. Stop acting like that. And she’s like, I’m the only person that cares about y’all getting out. It’s psychological abuse. It’s priming your victims to depend on you. They should not be allowed to talk to us like that, and the lieutenant is just standing there watching this.
People are gesturing to him, like please come talk to me. I need you to come talk to me, and he was just standing there. I lost it. I came up to the railing because I was one the second floor and just screamed across the whole unit, and I said you need to look at the PREA reports against this officer. And she turned, and she was just like I don’t have any PREA reports against me. I said there’s three women on this unit that have reported you for sexual assault. You do not need to be here. And I looked at the lieutenant again, and I said, where are the reports? And she’s like, you’re a liar. She’s just screaming insults.
Finally, I looked at her and said you touched me. I filed a report, and I looked again at the lieutenant. Where are the reports? That’s when the officer said, you keep lying, and I’m coming for your blood. Right after she said that, the lieutenant turned around and walked out of the unit, and we were left on our own with her until midnight.
Basically, in short what she did was she started upstairs and she started tearing up rooms, one at a time, all the way to midnight. Just tearing rooms apart one at a time. Because as an inmate you’re not allowed to sleep. If the officer doesn’t want you to sleep, you don’t have the right to sleep at night. And she starts at the room right next mine. She looks at the clock. It’s 11:55. Steps out, looks at me, and says, this isn’t over. I’m starting over tomorrow night.
The next night was New Year’s Eve, but I had spent all day trying to get SIS, the Special Investigative Service, and then the staff investigative and the captain to come talk to me. Only one person came and talked to me. I said this is what happened, and I would like to report a threat against my physical safety because she said she was coming for my blood. Ironically enough, she actually didn’t work our unit that night. She was actually pulled from our unit. And later on, a staff member had told me of something that had happened within the prison.
The captain allegedly had pulled [the officer] from our unit, said you can’t work our unit after what happened. She wasn’t working another unit. She was actually put on leave while they were investigating. So she had allegedly tried to call the captain on her work phone and leave a voicemail, but she left a voicemail on the wrong line and it was a different prison administrator. So the officers were talking shit about it. They don’t keep secrets either.
One [officer] had told me that she’s probably coming back to your unit because she thought she had left a voicemail on the captain’s phone saying, on a first-name basis, you know nothing happened. Please let me come back to work. I’m just alone at home with the kids. They’re driving me crazy. I don’t want to be home. Please let me come back to work. Saying they’re obviously closer than anyone imagined, and you need to prepare yourself.
Coincidentally enough, she did come back a lot more subdued. But it was only for two nights and the second night happened to be January 6 [in 2021]. She tried to start some kind of riot or fight in our unit. Again, it was sexually explicit.
We were on a COVID quarantine. We had active COVID cases in our unit, and she pulled two different inmates from different units who weren’t on COVID quarantine into our unit until she found the right inmate that went by the nickname that she was looking for. She convinced two other officers to send their inmates to a COVID quarantine unit.
And that inmate gets there and that inmate is not even properly dressed. She’s in pajamas, and the officer said, hey, your girl’s in the shower with another inmate. And just let this inmate walk around our unit to go to the showers. Obviously, if that’s the case, they’re looking for a fight. They’re looking for an altercation.
When that didn’t happen, when she found her girlfriend in the TV room and went back and told the officer, the officer said, naw, she’s lying. Her knees are wet. I mean, the level of foulness that was going on here. When the other inmate found out what was happening, she went at the officer and said I don’t know why you’re doing this to me. The moment she raised her voice this officer hit her body alarm, and there were six officers in our unit trying to figure out what’s going on.
Those of us who were standing in the computer line, right in the vicinity of what happened—we all raised our hands saying witness. You must record us as witnesses as to what just happened. So she was walked off our unit for the final time that night. It took something like that to get her off our unit, not the fact that I had said there’s sexual harassment and allegations against her, actively pending investigations in this unit.
Why was she working this unit? Because the BOP does not investigate their own.
GOSZTOLA: You’re all given these hotlines you can call if you’ve got complaints. Like you’ve just said you can directly complain to the Justice Department’s inspector general. What’s the fear like? How many people are afraid because they’re not going to do anything but also because officers might see they complained and they’ll face some kind of punishment for letting people know that an officer is a problem?
WINNER: First and foremost, when I brought it to the prison’s attention that I had filed the DOJ IG report, I was told, oh, you did that the wrong way. That goes to Washington, DC, and we would never have seen it. Which is ridiculous because that’s what we’re told to do. You can try to do it within the prison, but the safest way to not have retaliation is if you go through the centralized federal government so there’s a documentation. That way you can say I filed this. They put me in the SHU.
The second was when they did finally interview me—So they didn’t directly ask me but they said, do you feel like you’ve been victimized? Are you a victim right now? So that’s when you’re like, I guess not. The word victim means you are going to be separated and put in the SHU.
Drug Addiction, Substance Abuse in Prison
GOSZTOLA: While you were at Carswell I presume you got to see that US prisons are not places for people to be sent it in order to help them deal with their drug addiction or substance abuse problems. What can you share about that? There are a lot of people who might suggest that’s what you can do if someone is having those issues. Those facilities could help them take care of that.
WINNER: Yes, the worst place you can go if you have a drug addiction is a county jail, and then later on, a prison—either state of federal. Because there are drugs in both institutions. Even more than that, you are sitting in all these triggers of what caused the addiction in the first place.
You’re in a powerless environment. You are up front facing your depression, or whatever has triggered or started that addiction. It’s not treated as a medical condition. It’s treated as a moral issue. It’s treated as a character flaw. It’s treated as a, oh, well, if you just sit in this cell long enough and the methamphetamines are sweated out of your system, your addiction is over. Without going to the root cause of why people use to escape.
I went in, and I didn’t even have an alcohol habit. I had cut out all alcohol as a yoga teacher for two years before my arrest. During the George Floyd uprising, while we were on lockdown, people started passing me pills to get high. It went from there to K2, which is a liquid form of spice—it makes you hallucinate—to trying liquid meth on paper. Because the pressure was so much that people were actually giving it to me for free at first because they thought I was going to swing on an officer.
I was that tightly strung. I was that confrontational, and I was that unruly at times. I never had a physical addiction or craving to it, but when we were told we would be put on lockdown for COVID, and we would go into the same lockdown conditions as the George Floyd lockdown, my mental dependency on using to cope with being confined—I basically crept from one room to the other.
There were four officers in the unit, and I still managed to do it. I went to all the dealers and got 32 days worth of drugs, racked up like a 200 dollar bill to get myself through COVID itself and then the lockdown. It became a mental dependency for me because I was already on an SSRI.
At the start of the lockdown, I realized that I have seasonal depression, and if I can’t go outside and feel the changing of the seasons, I get manic depression. So I was already on an SSRI for that, and it wasn’t enough to cope with everything being taken away again for something that was outside of our control.
One of the things I feel the most guilty about is one of the girls that I used with, Zantana, was doing four years for trafficking fentanyl. Even before the lockdowns, this girl would pass out in chow at breakfast. She stayed high like every day of her prison experience, and everybody knew it. And not to say that the guards should have known it to punish her further. But that there was never an honest conversation with her about what rehabilitative services would help her kick this lifelong habit.
She got out shortly before I did in 2021, and before I even had my ankle monitor cut off in October 2021, she died of a fentanyl overdose. So you want to talk about what the prison system can offer addicts as far as rehabilitation goes, that’s a big failure right there.
They let her continue her habit in Carswell. She never had a disciplinary write-up, was never caught for being high, even though everybody knew she was high every day she was in that prison. Nobody said this is a psychological resource to deal with the root causes of your addiction. She slipped through the cracks and now she’s dead. Anybody who says that simply being pulled off the streets and put into confinement is a treatment for drug addiction—I mean, they’re wrong.
GOSZTOLA: When you left Carswell, you tried to stay in touch with some of the people you were incarcerated with. Did you try to communicate with some of the people you left because you cared about what they were going through in the facility?
WINNER: Yes, but one of the most inhumane things about this whole thing is you trust people with your life, and you do some of the hardest days of your life with them. When you get out, it is a crime to stay in contact with them. Maybe there were times when I thought it was worth it—letting people know, hey, I made it home. But beyond that, it’s a one-way track back to prison.
GOSZTOLA: I didn’t know that.
WINNER: When you are on federal release, or federal probation, it’s a violation to be in contact with any felon, whether they’re currently incarcerated, currently on probation, or they’ve already finished their time and just have felon status.
GOSZTOLA: Wait, so hypothetically, if someone was prosecuted under the Espionage Act like you and has this felony on their record, you can’t talk to them about your experience until after your probation ends?
WINNER: Correct. Well, and not even the Espionage Act. Anything.
GOSZTOLA: I know it would go for anything, but I also understand that although it’s a small universe of people if anybody wanted to reach out to you and give you support now that you’re no longer in prison you wouldn’t want to do that because it could send you back to prison.
WINNER: It’s kind of established that Terry Albury and me—We’ll connect in the future.
GOSZTOLA: That’s what I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of Jeffrey Sterling, who has gone through this who has their own experiences. John Kiriakou is actually in your documentary, but you can’t really talk to these people because they have felonies on their record.
WINNER: Mmm-hmm, I can’t talk with anybody whose been incarcerated in a way that’s meaningful. So there’s nobody that I’m legally allowed to talk to who has been through what I’ve been through.
In Part 2, which will be posted later, Reality Winner comments on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, President Donald Trump taking classified documents with him to his Mar-a-Lago estate, and upcoming Hollywood films that will bring her story to the silver screen.
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Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music
Music is often an outlet for songwriters to express their political and personal frustrations. That was the
case with the New Orleans singer-songwriter Earnest Jackson, who in 1975 composed the song
“Inflation” in response to being adversely affected by the high cost of living.
Jackson collaborated with the instrumental funk band Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux, to record the topical tune. But it remained unreleased until recently.
The group’s keyboardist Kinny Landrum sent an email to NPR’s “Planet Money.” He was in possession of a demo cassette of the song, and due to the renewed timeliness of the subject matter, he reached out to inquire if “Planet Money” could feature the tune. “Planet Money” ended up forming a record label for the sole purpose of distributing the song and giving it the long-overdue exposure that it deserves.
Jackson sings, “Inflation is in the nation, and it’s about to put us all away.” Just like in the 1970s, folks are now being crushed by low wages and rising prices. This 47-year-old ditty is the perfect
anthem for our current times.
Several members of the funk band went on to have careers in the music industry, most notably music
executive and former American Idol judge Randy Jackson (no relation to Earnest).
For Earnest, success mostly eluded him. He had a #22 US Billboard Hot 100 hit in 1973 with a cover of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness,” but he missed out on royalties—only receiving a one-time fee of $150.
Feeling exploited and discarded by the music industry, he pursued a different path and worked as a waiter for 30 years. Thankfully, he is now receiving another opportunity to share his music with the world.
Listen to ‘Inflation’ By Earnest Jackson and Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Inflation’ By Earnest Jackson appeared first on Shadowproof.
Supporters of Native American activist Leonard Peltier rallied in Washington, D.C. to demand President Biden grant clemency to the long-held prisoner.
The post Leonard Peltier Supporters Walk Over 1,000 Miles To Demand Freedom For Native American Activist appeared first on Shadowproof.
In August, a lawsuit against the CIA, former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UC Global, and UC Global director David Morales was filed that alleged Americans who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange when he was living in the Ecuador embassy had their privacy rights violated.
The post Attorney: Plenty To Uncover On CIA-Backed Spying That Violated Privacy Of Assange Visitors appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at Ongoing History of Protest Music On October 31, 2022, trailblazing singer-songwriter and activist Patrick Haggerty died at the age of 78. A few weeks earlier he suffered a stroke. He fronted Lavender Country which is widely believed to be the first openly gay country band. In 1973,
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Waltzing Will Trilogy’ By Lavender Country appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our coverage of whistleblowers. A National Security Agency whistleblower unearthed a hot-shot analyst’s unauthorized “project” that targeted the communications of citizens or persons in the United States, according to a top secret inspector general
The post NSA Whistleblower Unearthed ‘Project’ That Targeted US Communications appeared first on Shadowproof.
"Man with No Name," which appears on the album, is a painful reminder that often the identity and experiences of the oppressed are erased.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Man With No Name’ By Fantastic Negrito appeared first on Shadowproof.
"Man with No Name," which appears on the album, is a painful reminder that often the identity and experiences of the oppressed are erased.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Man With No Name’ By Fantastic Negrito appeared first on Shadowproof.
The United States government censored parts of Chelsea Manning’s new book, where she attempted to describe the information she provided to WikiLeaks in 2010.
The post The Parts Of Chelsea Manning’s Book Censored By The US Government appeared first on Shadowproof.
The United States government censored parts of Chelsea Manning’s new book, where she attempted to describe the information she provided to WikiLeaks in 2010.
The post The Parts Of Chelsea Manning’s Book Censored By The US Government appeared first on Shadowproof.
In the United States government’s case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, prosecutors claim that he communicated with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning through an encrypted chat client known as Jabber.
The post Chelsea Manning’s Book Further Complicates US Government’s Case Against Julian Assange appeared first on Shadowproof.
In the United States government’s case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, prosecutors claim that he communicated with US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning through an encrypted chat client known as Jabber.
The post Chelsea Manning’s Book Further Complicates US Government’s Case Against Julian Assange appeared first on Shadowproof.
Success Stories helps incarcerated men discover how to live more fully by rejecting patriarchal values and toxic masculinity.
The post In California, Prisoners Organize Program To Confront Patriarchy And Toxic Masculinity appeared first on Shadowproof.
At Washington's Stafford Creek Corrections Center, a group of incarcerated organizers have built community with local youths to fight for sentencing reforms, grappling with what it means to organize through an abolitionist lens from inside.
The post In Washington State, Incarcerated Organizers Build Community With Youth To Fight For Releases appeared first on Shadowproof.
In one of the largest settlements ever secured by a whistleblower under the False Claims Act, the multinational pharmaceutical corporation Biogen agreed to pay $900 million in order to end a lawsuit related to an illegal kickback program.
The post Biogen Whistleblower Lawsuit Against Massive Kickback Scheme Ends In Huge Settlement appeared first on Shadowproof.
Singer-songwriter Rain Perry recently released "A White Album," a concept piece that addresses white privilege. She is also working on producing a stage version of the album.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘The Money’ By Rain Perry appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism. A whistleblower protection bill containing access to jury trials, which has long been a priority for advocates, passed in the United States House of Representatives on September 15. The legislation, the
The post US House Of Representatives Finally Passes Whistleblower Protection Bill With Access To Jury Trials appeared first on Shadowproof.
Obomsawin uses her music to convey the indigenous
experience and preserve cultural heritage. Her solo debut, "Sweet Tooth," a compositional suite due for release on October 28, uses field recordings of relatives at Odanak First Nation in order to tell the story of the Wabanaki people.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Odana’ By Mali Obomsawin appeared first on Shadowproof.
Joe and Jale Ferland. They recently released their debut album, "Pink Lem."
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Not Without a Fight’ By Danceland appeared first on Shadowproof.
Originally published at The Dissenter, a Shadowproof newsletter In 2019, longtime national security journalist William Arkin appeared on “Democracy Now!” and spoke out against liberals in the United States who believed the FBI (and CIA) could save the country from President Donald Trump. “The FBI, in particular, has a deplorable
The post Interview With National Security Journalist William Arkin: FBI Faces Brewing Political Disaster After Mar-a-Lago Raid appeared first on Shadowproof.
A group of journalists and lawyers, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, sued the CIA and former director Mike Pompeo.
The post CIA, Pompeo Sued For Allegedly Spying On US Attorneys And Journalists Who Met With Assange appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by paid subscribers of The Dissenter Newsletter. Become an annual paid subscriber to help us continue our independent journalism. *Article was updated on August 12 to reflect further developments. Mary McCord, who was the chief of the United States Justice Department’s national security division under President
The post Justice Department Unlikely To Charge Trump With Violating The Espionage Act appeared first on Shadowproof.
After completion of a United States tour with his father, Mádé released his latest single "No More Wars," featuring powerhouse vocals and expert backing from his newly formed band The Movement.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘No More Wars’ By Mádé Kuti appeared first on Shadowproof.
CNN host Michael Smerconish interviewed Roger Waters about his “This Is Not A Drill” concert tour. By comparing the 7-minute edited version that aired to the 28-minute uncut version, which Smerconish posted, it is evident that producers used the interview to try and paint Waters as a “political madman” to
The post CNN’s Attempt To Police Roger Waters And His ‘This Is Not A Drill’ Show appeared first on Shadowproof.
Shadowproof was launched seven years ago. With many crises facing our world, we are proud to still be publishing independent journalism.
The post Shadowproof’s Seventh Birthday: Looking Back On Another Year appeared first on Shadowproof.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States raided the offices and homes of members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement. At 5 am in the morning on July 29, FBI agents in St. Louis, Missouri, targeted the Uhuru Solidarity Center
The post FBI Targets Black Liberation Activists, Claims Russia Used Them As Pawns To Spread Propaganda appeared first on Shadowproof.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget. In May, a gunman killed ten Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and livestreamed the event on Twitch. While that by itself was horrific, many were further
The post Abolitionist Organizers Warn ‘Counter-Extremism’ Won’t Stop White Supremacist Violence appeared first on Shadowproof.
The veteran New York-based singer-songwriter and folk artist Steven Keene has established a
reputation for composing timely social critiques.
The post Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Soon’ By Steven Keene appeared first on Shadowproof.