We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On 2 November 2008, the New York Times Magazine headlined “Questions for James K. Galbraith: The Populist,” which was an “Interview by Deborah Solomon” of the prominent liberal economist and son of John Kenneth Galbraith. She asked him, “There are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis” which had brought on the second Great Depression?

He answered: “Ten or twelve would be closer than two or three.”

She very appropriately followed up immediately with “What does this say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?”

He didn’t answer by straight-out saying that economics isn’t any more of a science than physics was before Galileo, or than biology was before Darwin. He didn’t proceed to explain that the very idea of a Nobel Prize in Economics was based upon a lie which alleged that economics was the first field to become scientific within all of the “social sciences,” when, in fact, there weren’t yet any social sciences, none yet at all. But he came close to admitting these things, when he said: “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.” His term “useless” was a euphemism for false. His term “blot” was a euphemism for “nullification.”

On 9 January 2009, economist Jeff Madrick headlined at The Daily Beast, “How the Entire Economics Profession Failed,” and he opened:

At the annual meeting of American Economists, most everyone refused to admit their failures to prepare or warn about the second worst crisis of the century.

I could find no shame in the halls of the San Francisco Hilton, the location at the annual meeting of American economists. Mainstream economists from major universities dominate the meetings, and some of them are the anointed cream of the crop, including former Clinton, Bush and even Reagan advisers.

There was no session on the schedule about how the vast majority of economists should deal with their failure to anticipate or even seriously warn about the possibility that the second worst economic crisis of the last hundred years was imminent.

I heard no calls to reform educational curricula because of a crisis so threatening and surprising that it undermines, at least if the academicians were honest, the key assumptions of the economic theory currently being taught. …

I found no one fundamentally changing his or her mind about the value of economics, economists, or their work.”

He observed a scandalous profession of quacks who are satisfied to remain quacks. The public possesses faith in them because it possesses faith in the “invisible hand” of God, and everyone is taught to believe in that from the crib. In no way is it science.

In a science, when facts prove that the theory is false, the theory gets replaced, it’s no longer taught. In a scholarly field, however, that’s not so — proven-false theory continues being taught. In economics, the proven-false theory continued being taught, and still continues today to be taught. This demonstrates that economics is still a religion or some other type of philosophy, not yet any sort of science.

Mankind is still coming out of the Dark Ages. The Bible is still being viewed as history, not as myth (which it is), not as some sort of religious or even political propaganda. It makes a difference — a huge difference: the difference between truth and falsehood.

The Dutch economist Dirk J. Bezemer, at Groningen University, posted on 16 June 2009 a soon-classic paper, “‘No One Saw This Coming’: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models,” in which he surveyed the work of 12 economists who did see it (the economic collapse of 2008) coming; and he found there that they had all used accounting or “Flow of Funds” models, instead of the standard microeconomic theory. (In other words: they accounted for, instead of ignored, debts.) From 2005 through 2007, these accounting-based economists had published specific and accurate predictions of what would happen: Dean Baker, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Stephen (“Steve”) Keen, Jakob B. Madsen, Jens K. Sorensen, Kurt Richebaecher, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Robert Shiller.

He should have added several others. Paul Krugman, wrote a NYT column on 12 August 2005 headlined “Safe as Houses” and he said “Houses aren’t safe at all” and that they would likely decline in price. On 25 August 2006, he bannered “Housing Gets Ugly” and concluded “It’s hard to see how we can avoid a serious slowdown.” Bezemer should also have included Merrill Lynch’s Chief North American Economist, David A. Rosenberg, whose The Market Economist article “Rosie’s Housing Call August 2004” on 6 August 2004 already concluded, “The housing sector has entered a ‘bubble’ phase,” and who presented a series of graphs showing it. Bezemer should also have included Satyajit Das, about whom TheStreet had headlined on 21 September 21 2007, “The Credit Crisis Could Be Just Beginning.” He should certainly have included Ann Pettifor, whose 2003 The Real World Economic Outlook, and her masterpiece the 2006 The Coming First World Debt Crisis, predicted exactly what happened and why. Her next book, the 2009 The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers, was almost a masterpiece, but it failed to present any alternative to the existing microeconomic theory — as if microeconomic theory isn’t a necessary part of economic theory. Another great economist he should have mentioned was Charles Hugh Smith, who had been accurately predicting since at least 2005 the sequence of events that culminated in the 2008 collapse. And Bezemer should especially have listed the BIS’s chief economist, William White, regarding whom Germany’s Spiegel headlined on 8 July 2009, “Global Banking Economist Warned of Coming Crisis.” (It is about but doesn’t mention nor link to https://www.bis.org/publ/work147.pdf.) White had been at war against the policies of America’s Fed chief Alan Greenspan ever since 1998, and especially since 2003, but the world’s aristocrats muzzled White’s view and promoted Greenspan’s instead. (The economics profession have always been propagandists for the super-rich.) Bezemer should also have listed Charles R. Morris, who in 2007 told his publisher Peter Osnos that the crash would start in Summer 2008, which was basically correct. Moreover, James K. Galbraith had written for years saying that a demand-led depression would result, such as in his American Prospect “How the Economists Got It Wrong,” 30 November 2002; and “Bankers Versus Base,” 15 April 2004, and culminating finally in his 2008 The Predator State, which blamed the aristocracy in the strongest possible terms for the maelstrom to come. Bezemer should also have listed Barry Ritholtz, who, in his “Recession Predictor,” on 18 August 2005, noted the optimistic view of establishment economists and then said, “I disagree … due to Psychology of consumers.” He noted “consumer debt, not as a percentage of GDP, but relative to net asset wealth,” and also declining “median personal income,” as pointing toward a crash from this mounting debt-overload. Then, on 31 May 2006, he headlined “Recent Housing Data: Charts & Analysis,” and opened: “It has long been our view that Real Estate is the prime driver of this economy, and its eventual cooling will be a major crimp in GDP, durable goods, and consumer spending.” Bezemer should also have listed both Paul Kasriel and Asha Bangalore at Northern Trust. Kasriel headlined on 22 May 2007, “US Economy May Wake Up Without Consumers’ Prodding?” and said it wouldn’t happen – and consumers were too much in debt. Then on 8 August 2007, he bannered: “US Economic Growth in Domestic Final Demand,” and said that “the housing recession is … spreading to other parts of the economy.” On 25 May 2006, Bangalore headlined “Housing Market Is Cooling Down, No Doubts About It.” and that was one of two Asha Bangalore articles which were central to Ritholtz’s 31 May 2006 article showing that all of the main indicators pointed to a plunge in house-prices that had started in March 2005; so, by May 2006, it was already clear from the relevant data, that a huge economic crash was comning soon. Another whom Bezemer should have listed was L. Randall Wray, whose 2005 Levy Economics Institute article, “The Ownership Society: Social Security Is Only the Beginning” asserted that it was being published “at the peak of what appears to be a real estate bubble.” Bezemer should also have listed Paul B. Farrell, columnist at marketwatch.com, who saw practically all the correct signs, in his 26 June 2005 “Global Megabubble? You Decide. Real Estate Is Only Tip of Iceberg; or Is It?”; and his 17 July 2005 “Best Strategies to Beat the Megabubble: Real Estate Bubble Could Trigger Global Economic Meltdown”; and his 9 January 2006 “Meltdown in 2006? Cast Your Vote”; and 15 May 2006 “Party Time (Until Real Estate Collapses)”; and his 21 August 2006 “Tipping Point Pops Bubble, Triggers Bear: Ten Warnings the Economy, Markets Have Pushed into Danger Zone”; and his 30 July 2007 “You Pick: Which of 20 Tipping Points Ignites Long Bear Market?” Farrell’s commentaries also highlighted the same reform-recommendations that most of the others did, such as Baker, Keen, Pettifor, Galbraith, Ritholtz, and Wray; such as break up the mega-banks, and stiffen regulation of financial institutions. However, the vast majority of academically respected economists disagreed with all of this and were wildly wrong in their predictions, and in their analyses. The Nobel Committee should have withdrawn their previous awards in economics to still-practicing economists (except to Krugman who did win a Nobel) and re-assigned them to these 25 economists, who showed that they had really deserved it.

And there was another: economicpredictions.org tracked four economists who predicted correctly the 2008 crash: Dean Baker, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, and Med Jones, the latter of whom had actually the best overall record regarding the predictions that were tracked there.

And still others should also be on the list: for example, Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider headlined on 21 November 2012, “The Genius Who Invented Economics Blogging Reveals How He Got Everything Right And What’s Coming Next” and he interviewed Bill McBride, who had started his calculated riskblog in January 2005. So I looked in the archives there at December 2005, and noticed December 28th, “Looking Forward: 2006 Top Economic Stories.” He started there with four trends that he expected everyone to think of, and then listed another five that weren’t so easy, including “Housing Slowdown. In my opinion, the Housing Bubble was the top economic story of 2005, but I expect the slowdown to be a form of Chinese water torture. Sales for both existing and new homes will probably fall next year from the records set in 2005. And median prices will probably increase slightly, with declines in the more ‘heated markets.’” McBride also had predicted that the economic rebound would start in 2009, and he was now, in 2012, predicting a strong 2013. Probably Joe Weisenthal was right in calling McBride a “Genius.”

And also, Mike Whitney at InformationClearinghouse.info and other sites, headlined on 20 November 2006, “Housing Bubble Smack-Down,” and he nailed the credit-boom and Fed easy-money policy as the cause of the housing bubble and the source of an imminent crash.

Furthermore, Ian Welsh headlined on 28 November 2007, “Looking Forward At the Consequences of This Bubble Bursting,” and listed 10 features of the crash to come, of which 7 actually happened.

In addition, Gail Tverberg, an actuary, headlined on 9 January 2008 “Peak Oil and the Financial Markets: A Forecast for 2008,” and provided the most detailed of all the prescient descriptions of the collapse that would happen that year.

Furthermore, Gary Shilling’s January 2007 Insight newsletter listed “12 investment themes” which described perfectly what subsequently happened, starting with “The housing bubble has burst.”

And the individual investing blogger Jesse Colombo started noticing the housing bubble even as early as 6 September 2004, blogging at his stock-market-crash.net “The Housing Bubble” and documenting that it would happen (“Here is the evidence that we are in a massive housing bubble:”) and what the economic impact was going to be. Then on 7 February 2006 he headlined “The Coming Crash!” and said “Based on today’s overvalued housing prices, a 20 percent crash is certainly in the cards.”

Also: Stephanie Pomboy of MacroMavens issued an analysis and appropriate graphs on 7 December 2007, headlined “When Animals Attack” and predicting imminently a huge economic crash.

In alphabetical order, they are: Dean Baker, Asha Bangalore, Jesse Colombo, Satyajit Das, Paul B. Farrell, James K. Galbraith, Wynne Godley, Fred Harrison, Michael Hudson, Eric Janszen, Med Jones, Paul Kasriel, Steve Keen, Paul Krugman, Jakob B. Madsen, Bill McBride, Charles R. Morris, Ann Pettifor, Stehanie Pomboy, Kurt Richebaeker, Barry Ritholtz, David A. Rosenberg, Nouriel Roubini, Peter Schiff, Robert Shiller, Gary Shilling, Charles Hugh Smith, Jens K. Sorensen, Gail Tverberg, Ian Welsh, William White, Mike Whitney, L. Randall Wray.

Thus, at least 33 economists were contenders as having been worth their salt as economic professionals. One can say that only 33 economists predicted the 2008 collapse, or that only 33 economists predicted accurately or reasonably accurately the collapse. However, some of those 33 were’t actually professional economists. So, some of the world’s 33 best economists aren’t even professional economists, as accepted in that rotten profession.

So, the few honest and open-eyed economists (these 33, at least) tried to warn the world. Did the economics profession honor them for their having foretold the 2008 collapse? Did President Barack Obama hire them, and fire the incompetents he had previously hired for his Council of Economic Advisers? Did the Nobel Committee acknowledge that it had given Nobel Economics Prizes to the wrong people, including people such as the conservative Milton Friedman whose works were instrumental in causing the 2008 crash? Also complicit in causing the 2008 crash was the multiple-award-winning liberal economist Lawrence Summers, who largely agreed with Friedman but was nonetheless called a liberal. Evidently, the world was too corrupt for any of these 33 to reach such heights of power or of authority. Like Galbraith had said at the close of his 2002 “How the Economists Got It Wrong“: “Being right doesn’t count for much in this club.” If anything, being right means being excluded from such posts. In an authentically scientific field, the performance of one’s predictions (their accuracy) is the chief (if not SOLE) determinant of one’s reputation and honor amongst the profession, but that’s actually not the way things yet are in any of the social “sciences,” including economics; they’re all just witch-doctory, not yet real science. The fraudulence of these fields is just ghastly. In fact, as Steve Keen scandalously noted in Chapter 7 of his 2001 Debunking Economics: “As this book shows, economics [theory] is replete with logical inconsistencies.” In any science, illogic is the surest sign of non-science, but it is common and accepted in the social ‘sciences’, including economics. The economics profession itself is garbage, a bad joke, instead of any science at all.

These 33 were actually only candidates for being scientific economists, but I have found the predictions of some of them to have been very wrong on some subsequent matters of economic performance. For example, the best-known of the 33, Paul Krugman, is a “military Keynesian” — a liberal neoconservative (and military Keynesianism is empirically VERY discredited: false worldwide, and false even in the country that champions it, the U.S.) — and he is unfavorable toward the poor, and favorable toward the rich; so, he is acceptable to the Establishment.) Perhaps a few of these 33 economists (perhaps half of whom aren’t even members of the economics profession) ARE scientific (in their underlying economic beliefs — their operating economic theory) if a scientific economics means that it’s based upon a scientific theory of economics — a theory that is derived not from any opinions but only from the relevant empirical data. Although virtually all of the 33 are basically some sort of Keynesian, even that (Keynes’s theory) isn’t a full-fledged theory of economics (it has many vagaries, and it has no microeconomics). The economics profession is still a field of philosophy, instead of a field of science.

The last chapter of my America’s Empire of Evil presents what I believe to be the first-ever scientific theory of economics, a theory that replaces all of microeconomic theory (including a micro that’s integrated with its macro) and is consistent with Keynes in macroeconomic theory; and all of which theory is derived and documented from only the relevant empirical economic data — NOT from anyone’s opinions. The economics profession think that replacing existing economic theory isn’t necessary after the crash of 2008, but I think it clearly IS necessary (because — as that chapter of my book shows — all of the relevant empirical economic data CONTRADICT the existing economic theory, ESPECIALLY the existing microeconomic theory).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta’s separation question. “For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people,” wrote the province’s Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments’ actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It’s no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province’s Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it’s important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

The election victory of Mark Carney’s Liberal Party on April 28, 2025, provoked fresh strain and already rigid posing of Alberta’s separation question. “For the last 10 years, successive Liberal Governments in Ottawa have unleashed a tidal wave of laws, policies and political attacks aimed directly at Alberta’s free economy – and in effect – against the future and livelihoods of our people,” wrote the province’s Premier Danielle Smith. The implementation of the No new pipelines law Bill C-69 as well as the oil tanker ban, increase of taxes on carbon emissions and imposing restrictions on oil and gas industry are just several examples of the liberal governments’ actions that cost Alberta billions of dollars.

It should be emphasized that the province contributes great sums of money to the federal budget of Canada, some hundreds of billions of dollars more, then other parts of the country. Despite this fact, the money is not allocated between provinces in proportion to their contribution. Thus, the Albertans give several times more, than they get.

It’s no surprise that, according to the data reported for May, 2025, the idea of independent Alberta is supported by approximately 36% of the locals. Their desire to leave Canada is quite reasonable as independence will open up new horizons to the current Canadian province and will help to avoid the limits set by Ottawa. Among other advantages Alberta will gain an opportunity to export its natural resources not only to the USA but also to other countries, all money it earns will stay within Alberta that will substantively increase the living standards of the population.

Premier Danielle Smith says she is ready to hold a referendum on provincial separation already in 2026 if citizens gather the required signatures on a petition. Taking into account that Ottawa demonstrates no intention to change its policy towards Alberta as well as to meet the demands voiced by the province’s Premier, there is no doubt the task will be implemented within a short period of time. By the way, it’s important to stress that the Albertans are not the first who started to talk about separation in Canada. The experience of Quebec, that tried to gain independence twice, should help the Albertans to achieve their goal.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Aaron Denley.

I worked in a video store when I was in high school, so I dreamed of going to the land of movies. It was in my small town of 2000 people in Washington State and is now-defunct, but it was called Village Video. I lived in a seaside retirement community when I was growing up in school. But it was a great job because I just worked there on the weekends and evenings, and I dusted all the movie shelves, and part of my job was I could watch any movie and rent any movie. I was the Girl Tarantino.

But without the foot fetish.

[Laughs] Yeah.

And then your first produced script was 10 Things I Hate About You. I’ve spoken to so many writers, and obviously some of their first were amazing, but never made. Did you have that experience too?

My partner, Karen [McCullah], and I wrote another script before that that did not sell and did not get made, so it was our second effort as a writing team. But yeah, it was just crazy that 10 Things I Hate About You got optioned. It didn’t even get bought. It got optioned. There were no other bidders. One buyer wanted it, and that was Disney, Touchstone Pictures. And then it was just crazy that it got made. I mean, shortly after we optioned it, the producers said that the studio had realized that teen comedies were a very bankable business, and so they had optioned two of them. They optioned ours and a script called School Slut.

Oh no.

This is Disney! This is Disney in the ’90s. And the mandate was given to us that whichever rewrite turned out better, because they’d given us notes, they were going to green light that movie. And so we won the great teen movie lottery of 1997.

And thank God. It was so formative. And for it to be both based on Shakespeare and so successful is incredible. Did you feel at the time that it was a bold move? Were you confident?

We definitely got excited about that as a concept. We didn’t know the word “IP,” but we knew that Clueless had turned Jane Austen’s Emma into a modern teen classic, so we wanted to try to do the same thing. We searched for a lot of different fairytales, myths, fable, all kinds of stuff that was in the public domain. I really was broadcasting, like, “Hey, all my English major friends, what do you think, any ideas?” Then a friend of mine was like, “Oh, yo, why don’t you do Taming of the Shrew? But you should make the shrew a dude.” And I was like, “That’s great!” And I told Karen, and she was like, “Love it!”

And then we read the play. We have a bounty of incredible twists and turns, and it just felt like such a perfect thing. We lived in different places at the time, and we went on a trip together to Mexico where we outlined the movie at her timeshare, and we sat on a beach for a week, and we just ran through it. We weren’t necessarily thinking too much about how daunting it was to tackle Shakespeare.

Did that have anything to do with having a writing partner alongside you? Many people think that creative work needs to be so isolated. When did you two start to feel like you understand one another’s brains? How did you find somebody that you could have that rapport with whilst also getting your point across?

Yes, it’s an excellent question, and it was very accidental. I had read a script that she’d written because I was working for a company where my job was to read scripts, and then we talked on the phone. She lived in a different city, and then I said, “Well, if you’re in LA, let’s meet for drinks.” And we met for drinks, and we had margaritas and started talking about actresses we liked. We wanted to write a female action movie, which we did. That was our first script. But we just started taking notes on cocktail napkins the night that we met.

And then we were like, “Ooh, let’s go to another bar.” You have to sort of be having a good time with someone to want to go to a second location. And then we went to a third location. I like to say we sort of got pregnant on our first date. [Laughs] We liked that process enough to where we wanted to keep going, and to then come up with this teen movie, which we wrote and sold, and then we were on our way. We’re wildly different people, but there was some kind of chemistry and we had a lot of shared sensibilities.

Of course, it’s very fun to have a partner when you’re brainstorming the plot of a movie because it takes so long. Outlining and getting ready to write the movie, you really do have to spend several months at getting that right before you start writing it in order to make it a good script.

How has your collaborative process changed from that first action script to today?

I feel like the pandemic changed our process most. Previously, I would go over to her house, we’d work there, and then we would divvy up scenes, assign each other things, and then we would de-camp, and in a few days, a week, we would get back together with new scenes and rewrite.

But that’s changed in the post-pandemic. Now we do more on Zooms, doing our own things. And she’s writing with a few other partners, I’m writing with a few other partners, but tomorrow, we’ll talk about this project that we have had for a long time and try to get that going again.

Do you ever rewatch the movies that you’ve written as inspiration?

I try not to. It’s really funny because I was at a conversation with Sleater-Kinney last night, who are one of my favorite bands ever.

Oh, me too!

I love them! And it was really interesting because so many of these same questions about friendship, partnership, and the weaving in and out came up. They have both worked with other projects, with other people, but then what they have is such a sacred and unique thing. They were also asked about their past work, having been a band for 30 years, and Carrie really said, “We try to stay very in the present and the future and not look back.” I think that was a challenge for me because I’m so proud of those movies. And I feel so connected with the younger generation because of that work, but I also so much am wanting to create new things. That is probably always just a part of aging as a creator, I guess.

Does the fact that your projects had this sense of surprise, of standing out from the scene play into that? The press, the audiences, were so blown away by, say, Legally Blonde or 10 Things that they were focused on how it captured the moment, but now rewatching those movies it’s fascinating to see how well they still hold up.

Legally Blonde was such a surprise hit. It opened against a movie called The Score with Robert De Niro and Ed Norton, who seemed like really big male movie stars at the time. And we were like, “There’s only two billboards of Legally Blonde up in LA. Is anyone going to come?” The creative marketing team behind the movie, guys from MGM that we’ve since became friends with, they were doing really wild, creative stuff to get the movie out there. They were having talk show host Regis Philbin dye his hair blonde. They put Jennifer Coolidge on a float in the Gay Pride Parade in West Oregon, surrounded by shirtless guys throwing out t-shirts. For the premiere, they had mani-pedi stations set up. I had male producers coming up to me in the blonde wigs that were handed out at the door. It felt like a very zesty underdog. It was an underdog movie and it was an underdog hit. It’s a movie about an underdog. It just felt like there was something so special about the surprise of it, like you said.

It was so exciting the night that it opened. We had a party, Karen and I, and we invited all of our friends. We found out the movie had opened number one. It was a really cool night, and here we are however many years later.

I also want to go back to Sleater-Kenney because I feel you’ve been connected to the riot grrrl movement. Have you always been someone that approached creativity and art as having that possibility of a political social change? Have you always felt like there’s space for the commentary there for you?

Yes. I’m probably not as deeply wise and informed about all things political. I never would use the word “activist” in any part of my young life. I think I would use the word “feminist” pretty defiantly, which maybe was another way of saying it. But I find the energy of that music… I mean, I really want to be fired up about stuff. I like people with opinions, I like strength, I like humor. I like really feeling intensity in music, and I think that’s what drew me to that whole movement and era. And being from the Northwest, I got into grunge in general too. I just love that intensity.

It’s so funny. The stupid response to feminism is always like, “Oh, you’re too intense.” Whenever a woman is passionate about something, men just label it as intense. And I think it’s the best compliment.

Yes. We’ve got to reclaim that word.

I’m like, “Yeah, I’m intense. Thanks. I’m not dead. I’m not on the floor under your thumb.” But talking about music, Legally Blonde was adapted for stage musical. I can’t imagine you ever assumed that was a possibility.

No. No, we didn’t. We had no idea. And while we weren’t involved in any way in the production, we were invited to come to the premiere on Broadway. And what an insane roller coaster to see that this thing that we wrote had taken on this whole other life. And I’m so grateful to it. With the sequel and with that, our movie became a franchise. And that felt so unattainable for me as a young woman writing female-driven comedies. Franchises were always male-driven action, or Marvel stuff, but there aren’t a lot of female-driven franchises. Hopefully we’ll have a third movie here in a second.

I guess Twilight is a female-driven franchise. And I guess there’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. So maybe we cleared the way. Young women in the 2010s really started making female franchises possible, which is cool.

Your whole career has been full of putting young women at center stage. It’s so important for young girls looking around for some representation to have something to connect with. With Twilight, she’s flanked by two men, but she’s still the heroine, the center of the story.

And it’s a female author, female screenwriter, female director who started the franchise. It makes me very emotional, actually. I feel a kind of auntie, mom, big sister energy to all these incredible young women. I’m friends with this writer, Dylan Meyer, and she and Kristen [Stewart], and their friend, Maggie [McLean], started a production company together, and they just produced their first movie. And they’re about to go on their second. And then to see Rachel Sennett create her own show. I just feel like, “Yay, there’s so many different kinds of voices and so much possibility!” As an audience member, as the girl who worked in the video store, I’m just so stoked to consume all of these stories with all of these amazing women creators.

I can only imagine how that must feel for you. Do young writers contact you often?

Yes, and I really love it. I love to interact, to collaborate, mentor, or just be in conversations. One of my heroes was this writer named Leslie Dixon, who wrote Outrageous Fortune and The Thomas Crown Affair. She was the queen. She didn’t direct like Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers. They’re famous because they’re directors as well, but Leslie Dixon was the female screenwriter of the day when I came of age, and I never got to meet her. I never knew how to contact her, and it would have been so cool to do that. So I am really excited to interact with people and offer any wisdom, and get inspired myself. I’m not taking my kids to soccer games, but I am definitely having coffee with cool, young, screenwriting actor, director, creative women.

Having that open door, staying inspired and excited, is so important, especially when you’re working on as many different projects as you are. You’ve not only worked in film, you’ve also done poetry, and novels, and graphic novels. How do you know what creative form a story is going to take?

I have to confess that I’m so obsessed with movies. I am so mercenary. It’s not like I dreamed of writing a graphic novel. I met with a really cool editor. She’s like, “If you have any ideas…” And I’m like, “I have this movie idea, but I can’t sell it because no one’s buying a female action adventure, but yes, I would like to write it as a graphic novel.” Trinkets, which is a novel that I wrote that became a TV series, was more like I had a movie idea about girls who meet in Shoplifters Anonymous who plan a heist, and then I realized, “Oh, I’m not very good at planning a heist. That’s really hard.” So then I was like, “Okay, I’ll sell it as a novel, and then maybe it’ll come back around to something.” It came back around as a TV show. But I’m pretty much always thinking of things as a movie.

But I really want to get back to a more interior space, like how you talked at the beginning about how certain things need to be written alone and really deeply felt. I want to get back to my little creative freak weirdo poet emo girl. I’ve got to just unplug and figure out, drive in a car with the windows down.

Screaming.

Screaming with loud music and that kind of stuff.

With Trinkets, were you excited about episodic storytelling? That’s a huge change in storytelling.

Yes. Honestly, I was very intimidated by it. And I worked with this great young female writing team who also came from features, and we had to do the whole pitch of the season arc. And we were like, “Ooh, this is so scary!” TV writers, they’re geniuses. They can do this in their sleep. My brain doesn’t work that way, so I’m like, “Let’s just turn into a three-act structure. We need to just make it into a movie, and then we’ll sell it, and then we’ll figure out more about how the episodes end.” I learned so much about that style of writing, and it wasn’t something that came as naturally to me. I’m just kind of good at one thing.

And you’re so good at it.

Oh, thank you!

As a creative, when you pitch something and then have to deliver, how do you then make sure that you are not going to be writing for the rest of your life? How do you know when you are done with an idea?

Well, I think it’s in that outlining phase. I’m kind of a little intense and rigorous about the outline. Trying to sell the movie to get paid to write the script, you really do have to outline a lot of it and then shrink it down into a presentation, which is a whole other skillset that they don’t even talk to you about in terms of screenwriting. It’s all about a presentation, really. You’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to tell the movie in 18 minutes with character arcs, high points, funny jokes, set pieces, and that’s why it takes many months to get ready for that. Once you do that, then you write, and then you really do know what your beginning, middle, and end are.

If I have too long of a draft, it maybe was not destined to be. But I don’t really think that it ever goes way over 120 pages, even in a first draft. And then there’s a ton of tinkering, and a ton of re-breaking things, and a ton of big revelations that occur. It’s draft after draft, meeting after meeting, probably 15 drafts or so, and then it’s handed in to someone. But once the first one’s done, I could probably tinker a long time. But I think all writers are tinkerers.

For me, the beginning is the hardest because I know that if the beginning is not where I need it to be, then everything else just falls apart. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re writing until you start, which is the pain and the best part of it.

Yeah. You’re right about the beginning. Sometimes it’s like you have to kill off the fantasy of the thing that you thought you were writing and face the ugliness of what it could be. And then you’ve got to turn that into its own thing. That’s kind of how it goes when you’re making the movie too, because the writers have this vision of something in their head, and even if they’re the director, it’s still never going to match exactly because your locations aren’t going to match, you’re not going to get the actor you thought you would. There’s always four movies for every one movie.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Lior Phillips.

Announcing their hiring of Ben Smith, New York Times editors (1/28/20) declared, “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”

In a time of downsizing and consolidation, Ben Smith has had a journalistic career many would envy. He became famous as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a rising media giant that raised $19 million last year. (This “replac[ed] the money it had received from the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried,” the New York Times reported—5/24/23).

These two adventures bookend his two-year stint as the “Media Equation” columnist at the New York Times, from March 2020 through January 2022. During his entire tenure there, Smith held an undisclosed amount of stock options in BuzzFeed, creating a conflict of interest for him and the Times, which both consistently waved away (Slate, 10/15/21). “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company,” Smith explained on several occasions (here 9/26/21).

But from his influential perch, Smith did, of necessity, cover BuzzFeed’s competitors, frequently critically, putting his investment’s rivals and potential rivals in a bad light. Buzzfeed started out as pure internet culture, a website offering entertainment and quizzes. But it expanded into hard news, thus competing with others in that new media mold, like the nodes of the Gawker empire.

Smith’s stake in BuzzFeed exceeded $7 million, according to FAIR’s sources—a strikingly large material interest in a company whose competitors Smith regularly covered, underscoring the ethical concerns about both Smith’s coverage and the Times’ willingness to ignore its own ethical guidelines.

‘Well above my Times salary’

With a considerable financial stake in online media, Ben Smith could have different reasons from the rest of us for freaking out about Substack (New York Times, 4/11/21).

Smith (New York Times, 10/17/21) covered sexual harassment allegations at Axel Springer as the Berlin-based multimedia company was looking to grow its footprint in the US media market—making it a potential competitor to BuzzFeed.

In a critical piece (New York Times, 4/11/21) about the self-publishing platform Substack, which includes heavy investment from venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Smith wrote:

Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform the Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back—media types often overvalue media writers.

Smith appears to be putting his cards on the table here, but readers have no way of knowing that his financial interest in BuzzFeed far eclipsed the salary he was getting from the Times or was offered by Substack, a new media product that competed against the very company, BuzzFeed, he was invested in.

Smith (New York Times, 4/18/21) also pooh-poohed Bustle’s growth with Mic and Nylon, and its eye on restarting Gawker, in part because Bustle bet on advertising revenue, which Smith maintained was destined to flow overwhelmingly to Google and Facebook (later rebranded as Meta).

A month later, Bustle rebranded in preparation for its IPO (Axios, 5/11/21)—an initial public offering to investors. A month after that, Hollywood Reporter (6/30/21) noted that BuzzFeed was one of a number of media companies, including Bustle, that were looking to go public in order to shore up investments. Once again, readers should have had a clear understanding that Smith was writing about an entity that was competing for venture capital with the outlet he had major holdings in.

Downfall of a high-flying startup

A story by Smith in the New York Times (9/26/21) contributed to the downfall of the media startup Ozy—a company that Buzzfeed under Smith’s leadership considered buying.

The most interesting example of Smith’s conflict of interest is the case of Ozy Media. Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC and CNN anchor, attracted lots of attention when he launched Ozy, raising $5.3 million in its early days (Venture Capital Post, 12/28/13), reaching up to an enormous $20 million investment from Axel Springer (USA Today, 10/6/24). Watson and his media child were riding high—for a time.

Smith (New York Times, 9/26/21) was the first journalist to raise questions about the veracity of Ozy’s claims to investors. Less than two years later, Watson was arrested for fraud (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), and the operation was no more (Variety, 3/1/23). He and the company were ultimately found guilty in a New York City federal court earlier this year, “in a case accusing them of lying to investors about the now-defunct startup’s finances and sham deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey” (Reuters, 7/16/24). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (AP, 12/16/24).

Smith’s reporting on Ozy was considered momentous, leading to the downfall of a high-flying media startup. But Smith was not a disinterested journalist when he went after Watson and Ozy. Late last year, Ozy sued Smith, BuzzFeed and Semafor for allegedly stealing Ozy’s trade secrets (Reuters, 12/21/23); in the initial complaint, Ozy’s legal team said that Smith was interested in BuzzFeed acquiring Ozy as early as 2019.

‘Sizable material stake’

It is also through this case that we have a better understanding of Smith’s financial interest in BuzzFeed during his time as a Times media columnist. According to FAIR’s sources, the prosecution obtained financial records from BuzzFeed in discovery that document how much stake Smith has had in the company over time. FAIR has not seen this sealed document; however, David Robinson, a business scholar at Duke University who served as an expert witness for the defense, did see it.

In an April filing in the case, Robinson noted that in Smith’s original report about Ozy, he disclosed that “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.” But, Robinson noted:

Columnist Benjamin Smith had, at the time of that article’s writing, an ownership stake in BuzzFeed in the form of stock options. Those options would become valuable if BuzzFeed went public later in 2021 in an initial public offering (IPO). In an IPO, options holders, such as Smith, are able to convert their options at the then-anticipated IPO price of $10 per share.

Analyzing BuzzFeed’s capital table, I calculated the number of Ben Smith’s outstanding split-adjusted shares. I then computed, for each option grant, the stock price minus the option exercise price multiplied by the number of options for each option grant, to arrive at the proceeds that Ben Smith would net upon selling his options. I estimate that Ben Smith’s options had an expected value of approximately $23,468,268.64.

On January 4, 2022, the New York Times announced that Smith had left the paper to start a new media company, one [that] “would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.”

In a phone interview with FAIR, Robinson clarified that, since he issued this testimony, he revised his calculations based on BuzzFeed’s capitalization table. This reduced his estimate of Smith’s stake to $7.4 million, still a princely sum—and a valuation that he said, to his knowledge, hasn’t been challenged.

“I think he had a clear sizable material stake in BuzzFeed in the time when other corporations’ decisions were immediately impacting the value of BuzzFeed,” Robinson told FAIR. “I’m simply trying to bring to light the bias that seems to be apparent.”

A flexible deadline

The New York Times‘ rules about financial conflicts cite as an example, “a reporter responsible for any segment of media coverage may not own any media stock”—and make clear that that includes options.

That Smith had a conflict of interest does not mean that all or indeed any of the reporting he published about BuzzFeed‘s rivals was untrue or unjustified. (Some of the outlets he criticized, like Substack and German media giant Axel Springer, are ones I’ve also critiqued at FAIR—3/4/21, 11/5/21). The problem with Smith’s conflict of interest is that it gave him a financial incentive to encourage the decline of these particular outlets. Times readers can’t know whether, or how much, this incentive factored into his journalistic decisions—especially as the scale of the conflict was not made clear to those readers.

Moreover, the Times has clear rules about stock ownership. Its ethics guidelines say:

No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.

In several early columns, Smith included disclaimers about the conflict. In a column (5/3/20) on union organizing in newsrooms that mentioned his experience at BuzzFeed, for instance, Smith included this disclosure:

I agreed with the Times when I was hired that I wouldn’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, because I retain stock options in the company, which could bring me into conflict with the Times’ ethics standards. I also agreed to divest those options as quickly as I could, and certainly by the end of the year.

But this deadline was quietly extended—and BuzzFeed went public right before he left the Times (Vox, 12/6/21). It appears that he never wrote directly about BuzzFeed, but Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) noted that as the end-of-year deadline came and went, Smith’s columns stopped mentioning any sort of deadline by which he would divest. When Peters inquired with the Times, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Smith’s deadline was extended until February 2022—two years after he was hired.

BuzzFeed went public in December 2021. Smith left the Times to start Semafor in January 2022.

Rhoades Ha told FAIR that Smith’s deadline was extended “due to the pandemic,” and that he “disclosed the options when relevant in that period.”

Smith and the media desk at Semafor did not respond to requests for comment.

A really big deal

Pointing out that it’s “bad for readers to have a media columnist whose motives they cannot absolutely trust to be disinterested,” Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) wrote that Smith “probably shouldn’t be writing about such a broad swath of digital media.”

Peters (Slate, 10/15/21) reported that neither Smith nor the Times explained why Smith stopped putting a divestment deadline on the investment disclosures in his columns. Further, he said:

Neither Smith nor Rhoades Ha responded to separate questions about why, exactly, the Times extended Smith’s divestment deadline, or whether the shifting deadline had anything to do with BuzzFeed’s plans to go public. But an SEC filing from July pertaining to BuzzFeed’s proposed SPAC merger—and an amended filing dated October 1—describes a 180-day post-merger lockup period during which certain stockholders and options holders are prohibited from transferring their shares.

The Times is not offering a sufficient answer. For one thing, it ignores the scope of Smith’s reported stake. Had he stood to gain a few thousand dollars from his former media employer while working on the media beat, big deal (sarcasm). But millions? Big deal (not sarcasm).

And there seems to be a betrayal of the spirit of the Times’ own codes about conflicts of interest when the deadline was extended for him; if the paper can bend the rules on the media beat, where else could it bend the rules? When FAIR told Robinson that the Times confirmed that the Smith’s deadline to divest had been extended, he countered, “What good is a stop sign if you tell people they’re free to run through it?”

“Given that he was a senior executive, it stands to reason he’d have a significant stake in the company,” Robinson said of Smith and BuzzFeed. “I just think it’s not appropriate for him to be writing about the company’s competitors.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Announcing their hiring of Ben Smith, New York Times editors (1/28/20) declared, “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”

In a time of downsizing and consolidation, Ben Smith has had a journalistic career many would envy. He became famous as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a rising media giant that raised $19 million last year. (This “replac[ed] the money it had received from the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried,” the New York Times reported—5/24/23).

These two adventures bookend his two-year stint as the “Media Equation” columnist at the New York Times, from March 2020 through January 2022. During his entire tenure there, Smith held an undisclosed amount of stock options in BuzzFeed, creating a conflict of interest for him and the Times, which both consistently waved away (Slate, 10/15/21). “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company,” Smith explained on several occasions (here 9/26/21).

But from his influential perch, Smith did, of necessity, cover BuzzFeed’s competitors, frequently critically, putting his investment’s rivals and potential rivals in a bad light. Buzzfeed started out as pure internet culture, a website offering entertainment and quizzes. But it expanded into hard news, thus competing with others in that new media mold, like the nodes of the Gawker empire.

Smith’s stake in BuzzFeed exceeded $7 million, according to FAIR’s sources—a strikingly large material interest in a company whose competitors Smith regularly covered, underscoring the ethical concerns about both Smith’s coverage and the Times’ willingness to ignore its own ethical guidelines.

‘Well above my Times salary’

With a considerable financial stake in online media, Ben Smith could have different reasons from the rest of us for freaking out about Substack (New York Times, 4/11/21).

Smith (New York Times, 10/17/21) covered sexual harassment allegations at Axel Springer as the Berlin-based multimedia company was looking to grow its footprint in the US media market—making it a potential competitor to BuzzFeed.

In a critical piece (New York Times, 4/11/21) about the self-publishing platform Substack, which includes heavy investment from venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Smith wrote:

Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform the Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back—media types often overvalue media writers.

Smith appears to be putting his cards on the table here, but readers have no way of knowing that his financial interest in BuzzFeed far eclipsed the salary he was getting from the Times or was offered by Substack, a new media product that competed against the very company, BuzzFeed, he was invested in.

Smith (New York Times, 4/18/21) also pooh-poohed Bustle’s growth with Mic and Nylon, and its eye on restarting Gawker, in part because Bustle bet on advertising revenue, which Smith maintained was destined to flow overwhelmingly to Google and Facebook (later rebranded as Meta).

A month later, Bustle rebranded in preparation for its IPO (Axios, 5/11/21)—an initial public offering to investors. A month after that, Hollywood Reporter (6/30/21) noted that BuzzFeed was one of a number of media companies, including Bustle, that were looking to go public in order to shore up investments. Once again, readers should have had a clear understanding that Smith was writing about an entity that was competing for venture capital with the outlet he had major holdings in.

Downfall of a high-flying startup

A story by Smith in the New York Times (9/26/21) contributed to the downfall of the media startup Ozy—a company that Buzzfeed under Smith’s leadership considered buying.

The most interesting example of Smith’s conflict of interest is the case of Ozy Media. Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC and CNN anchor, attracted lots of attention when he launched Ozy, raising $5.3 million in its early days (Venture Capital Post, 12/28/13), reaching up to an enormous $20 million investment from Axel Springer (USA Today, 10/6/24). Watson and his media child were riding high—for a time.

Smith (New York Times, 9/26/21) was the first journalist to raise questions about the veracity of Ozy’s claims to investors. Less than two years later, Watson was arrested for fraud (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), and the operation was no more (Variety, 3/1/23). He and the company were ultimately found guilty in a New York City federal court earlier this year, “in a case accusing them of lying to investors about the now-defunct startup’s finances and sham deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey” (Reuters, 7/16/24). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (AP, 12/16/24).

Smith’s reporting on Ozy was considered momentous, leading to the downfall of a high-flying media startup. But Smith was not a disinterested journalist when he went after Watson and Ozy. Late last year, Ozy sued Smith, BuzzFeed and Semafor for allegedly stealing Ozy’s trade secrets (Reuters, 12/21/23); in the initial complaint, Ozy’s legal team said that Smith was interested in BuzzFeed acquiring Ozy as early as 2019.

‘Sizable material stake’

It is also through this case that we have a better understanding of Smith’s financial interest in BuzzFeed during his time as a Times media columnist. According to FAIR’s sources, the prosecution obtained financial records from BuzzFeed in discovery that document how much stake Smith has had in the company over time. FAIR has not seen this sealed document; however, David Robinson, a business scholar at Duke University who served as an expert witness for the defense, did see it.

In an April filing in the case, Robinson noted that in Smith’s original report about Ozy, he disclosed that “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.” But, Robinson noted:

Columnist Benjamin Smith had, at the time of that article’s writing, an ownership stake in BuzzFeed in the form of stock options. Those options would become valuable if BuzzFeed went public later in 2021 in an initial public offering (IPO). In an IPO, options holders, such as Smith, are able to convert their options at the then-anticipated IPO price of $10 per share.

Analyzing BuzzFeed’s capital table, I calculated the number of Ben Smith’s outstanding split-adjusted shares. I then computed, for each option grant, the stock price minus the option exercise price multiplied by the number of options for each option grant, to arrive at the proceeds that Ben Smith would net upon selling his options. I estimate that Ben Smith’s options had an expected value of approximately $23,468,268.64.

On January 4, 2022, the New York Times announced that Smith had left the paper to start a new media company, one [that] “would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.”

In a phone interview with FAIR, Robinson clarified that, since he issued this testimony, he revised his calculations based on BuzzFeed’s capitalization table. This reduced his estimate of Smith’s stake to $7.4 million, still a princely sum—and a valuation that he said, to his knowledge, hasn’t been challenged.

“I think he had a clear sizable material stake in BuzzFeed in the time when other corporations’ decisions were immediately impacting the value of BuzzFeed,” Robinson told FAIR. “I’m simply trying to bring to light the bias that seems to be apparent.”

A flexible deadline

The New York Times‘ rules about financial conflicts cite as an example, “a reporter responsible for any segment of media coverage may not own any media stock”—and make clear that that includes options.

That Smith had a conflict of interest does not mean that all or indeed any of the reporting he published about BuzzFeed‘s rivals was untrue or unjustified. (Some of the outlets he criticized, like Substack and German media giant Axel Springer, are ones I’ve also critiqued at FAIR—3/4/21, 11/5/21). The problem with Smith’s conflict of interest is that it gave him a financial incentive to encourage the decline of these particular outlets. Times readers can’t know whether, or how much, this incentive factored into his journalistic decisions—especially as the scale of the conflict was not made clear to those readers.

Moreover, the Times has clear rules about stock ownership. Its ethics guidelines say:

No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.

In several early columns, Smith included disclaimers about the conflict. In a column (5/3/20) on union organizing in newsrooms that mentioned his experience at BuzzFeed, for instance, Smith included this disclosure:

I agreed with the Times when I was hired that I wouldn’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, because I retain stock options in the company, which could bring me into conflict with the Times’ ethics standards. I also agreed to divest those options as quickly as I could, and certainly by the end of the year.

But this deadline was quietly extended—and BuzzFeed went public right before he left the Times (Vox, 12/6/21). It appears that he never wrote directly about BuzzFeed, but Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) noted that as the end-of-year deadline came and went, Smith’s columns stopped mentioning any sort of deadline by which he would divest. When Peters inquired with the Times, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Smith’s deadline was extended until February 2022—two years after he was hired.

BuzzFeed went public in December 2021. Smith left the Times to start Semafor in January 2022.

Rhoades Ha told FAIR that Smith’s deadline was extended “due to the pandemic,” and that he “disclosed the options when relevant in that period.”

Smith and the media desk at Semafor did not respond to requests for comment.

A really big deal

Pointing out that it’s “bad for readers to have a media columnist whose motives they cannot absolutely trust to be disinterested,” Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) wrote that Smith “probably shouldn’t be writing about such a broad swath of digital media.”

Peters (Slate, 10/15/21) reported that neither Smith nor the Times explained why Smith stopped putting a divestment deadline on the investment disclosures in his columns. Further, he said:

Neither Smith nor Rhoades Ha responded to separate questions about why, exactly, the Times extended Smith’s divestment deadline, or whether the shifting deadline had anything to do with BuzzFeed’s plans to go public. But an SEC filing from July pertaining to BuzzFeed’s proposed SPAC merger—and an amended filing dated October 1—describes a 180-day post-merger lockup period during which certain stockholders and options holders are prohibited from transferring their shares.

The Times is not offering a sufficient answer. For one thing, it ignores the scope of Smith’s reported stake. Had he stood to gain a few thousand dollars from his former media employer while working on the media beat, big deal (sarcasm). But millions? Big deal (not sarcasm).

And there seems to be a betrayal of the spirit of the Times’ own codes about conflicts of interest when the deadline was extended for him; if the paper can bend the rules on the media beat, where else could it bend the rules? When FAIR told Robinson that the Times confirmed that the Smith’s deadline to divest had been extended, he countered, “What good is a stop sign if you tell people they’re free to run through it?”

“Given that he was a senior executive, it stands to reason he’d have a significant stake in the company,” Robinson said of Smith and BuzzFeed. “I just think it’s not appropriate for him to be writing about the company’s competitors.”

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

Man, life has been really insane.

In a good way?

The world is in an interesting transformational period right now. We’re all just trying to figure out how to be with reality on reality’s terms. And yeah, there are so many blessings. There’s so much good stuff happening. Just keeping on the path of being a human is difficult. I think we all feel that.

I’m with you. I’ve been questioning my place in a world that’s changing so fast and wondering how I can help. Speaking of our collective experience, ​​I wanted to talk about your last album, Empathogen. The title itself is inspired by molecules found in indigenous plants known for their unique ability to foster empathy. So, how does empathy shape both Willow, the artist, and Willow, the person?

For Willow, the artist, empathy is the vehicle. The vehicle where all amazing art gets done. That place of looking at the world, feeling deeply, and creating. Empathy is the seed of any really good artistic endeavor. It shapes how we live in the world, how we speak, how we move—that’s rare and powerful medicine. Empathy is everything to me in both worlds.

On the same album, you delve into love—for others and yourself. In a Zane Lowe interview, you called self-love “one of life’s biggest lessons.” Where are you now on that journey?

I’m going to be on that journey forever, I feel. But right now, the universe has set up some challenges for me. I tell myself “Okay, this is your next level of learning how to love yourself and how to live authentically without fear.” I’m navigating these challenges and it feels really good.

Can you expand on your current stage of learning?

I’m becoming the musician that I want to be. Musicians and artists that I look up to are starting to see me in a different way. This is challenging my perceptions of myself, my self-deprecating thoughts and my insecurities. It’s like, “Oh no, it’s time to update my perception of myself. It’s time to open up and really start to see myself for what I am and not try to downplay myself.” Being humble is really important, and we need that, but being too humble means putting yourself in a lower place. True humility is knowing exactly who you are—no more and no less. In the past, I sidelined myself; now, I am walking in my power.

I love that.

Walk in your power.

That’s so important. Like you said, it’s tough to keep reminding yourself—especially when setbacks hit. It affects your self-worth. It’s really hard to remind yourself to be strong and not let the imposter syndrome eat you up, so you can live your authentic self.

Yes!

So going off that, I know one of your songs is called “False Self.” I love that song—it’s all about finding your voice and staying authentic. But playing devil’s advocate here—do you think the False Self is always negative, or could it have a constructive role?

In “False Self,” I’m reflecting on my ego, and I’m starting to see it differently. The ego isn’t evil—it’s just trying to protect you. Sometimes, though, the way it does is unhealthy. But think about an animal backed into a corner—it fights back. That’s just nature. I don’t believe the ego is all bad. It can actually be used constructively. In the past, I thought the ego had to be completely eradicated, but now I realize it’s more about healing it so the ways it protects you aren’t toxic. You know what I mean?

Definitely. And how do you feel this plays a role in creativity?

It’s crazy. Me and myself, me and my ego are having insane conversations and confrontations with one another. That’s where a lot of my inspiration comes from. The struggles that I have in my mind are really a huge inspiration for all of my art.

When you get stuck, how do you deal with those creative blocks?

When you’re creatively stuck, there’s something else that’s stuck. There’s something else that’s stagnant that needs to start moving so that your creativity can flow again. Maybe you’re holding it in an emotion. Maybe you need to have a conversation that you haven’t had and you’re putting it off. Whatever it is, your creative energy gets affected by other things in your life. Your creative energy is your life force.

It’s true. I relate to what you say about creativity as a life force. It’s something you need to protect and cherish. It’s precious.

Yes.

When bad energy affects you, it can leave you feeling vulnerable. Sometimes, you just need to let it out and process it, rather than resisting it.

Exactly. Instead of resisting that discomfort we’re all trying to get away from.

Talking about music because music is your life force. What’s the best music for you? Is it about the sound, the story, and how it moves people? Is it timeless and universal?

Oh, wow. Oh, man. I think people have a different perception of what good music is. For me, the best music is timeless and extremely personal. Something that I love about Joni Mitchell is her storytelling. She paints a picture. It’s almost like you’re not even listening to what she’s saying, you’re in the picture of what she’s saying. You’re seeing the planes in the sky, you’re seeing the desert that she’s talking about. You’re feeling the wind. Her lyrics bring you into the story.

It’s like a movie.

Yes. It’s like a freaking movie.

So would you say good music is cinema?

It needs to… Yeah. it needs to have a strong enough energy to transport you into its world.

Is there a song that has this effect on you?

Oh, yeah. It’s a Joni Mitchell song. It’s actually off Hejira and it’s called “Coyote.”

I love that cinematic effect in music. It’s not just about hearing—it should engage all your senses. You should feel it with your eyes, your touch, and even imagine smelling the melodies. As you said, a full 360 experience.

Yeah, exactly. It’s immersive

So talking about songs you love, music spans generations and cultures carrying the echoes of those who came before us. So there’s this lineage that’s inherently very melodic, very in us. How do you see yourself within this lineage of jazz, funk and pop musicians, who have inspired you?

That used to cause me a lot of pain. I didn’t see myself in that lineage. I used to feel I wasn’t worthy. But now I see that, whether I make music or not, whether I’m a musician or not, I am still a part of this lineage because I’m an African-American woman, first and foremost. And that alone holds so much purpose. Every choice I make and everything I do, whether I like it or not, is part of that lineage. The fact that I’ve reached this point in my musical life and my relationship with my instrument, where I feel deeply connected to my ancestors through my devotion to music, is profound. And that connection isn’t just about jazz or funk—it’s about a human lineage that predates culture as we know it today. It’s about those moments when we sat around the fire, sang, and played the bones of our ancestors.

That’s beautiful.

And so yeah, it goes beyond the music for me at that point. It’s deep medicine, calling on your ancestors and connecting to your ancestors.

Are there any musicians that have inspired you in your creative lineage?

Oh man. I don’t know why Björk is really coming to mind right now.

Björk is great! She’s out of this world.

Björk is so tapped into that human lineage, and you can tell with just the art that she creates, you can tell just how deeply connected to the earth and even she’s connected to the star people. I’m like, “Okay, this is a whole thing.” Björk, Ella Fitzgerald. Man, another one, let me give you another one. Brittany Howard.

Okay, yeah, Björk is incredible. I get what you mean about her transcending music. I saw her perform at Bluesfest many years ago without knowing much about her work. She had this massive cage filled with lightning bolts, and dancers, and it was right at sunset by the river. It felt magical—so grand and beautiful, it moved me. I didn’t know her songs or much about her, but her deep connection to the audience was undeniable.

That’s the real deal. Any good artist’s art transcends the art form. That’s why it’s so next level because you don’t need to know Björk songs to walk up to the show and be like, “Wow. I’m changed forever.”

It’s true. There’s the before and after Björk experience. Talking about this spirituality and magic, when I’m looking at your brand and your social media there’s something magical and very spiritual, do you believe in magic?

Oh my goodness, yes. I believe in magic. I studied physics for four years. It made me believe in magic. It’s wild how some scientists resist the idea that the world is beyond our understanding. The more I study science, the more I’m in awe of its complexity—it’s pure magic. Many great scientists feel the same, just like great artists. It all blends together. That’s why mad scientists often look like artists—just look at pictures of Einstein or others like him.

Accurate. If you think of the theory of relativity, it’s magical.

Bro. Yes.

Gravity is magical.

Yeah. We’re on a planet going thousands of miles per hour around a burning ball of fire. What the heck? Are you kidding me?

And also, I guess the people we meet and the people we move, it’s all magical.

Yes.

Have you had a magical moment or experience recently?

Recently, I’ve been waking up with the sunrise. That’s not usually my thing, but it’s just been happening. I’ll open my eyes, and there’s a window right next to my bed. The sun is peeking out from behind the mountain, and I’m just like, ‘Damn. What a beautiful view.’ You can’t make this stuff up. I’ve also been noticing something else. You know that moment when you feel triggered? Like, something happens or someone says something, and you get that little flinch of, ‘Oh shit, now I’m triggered.’ Well, I’ve been focusing on the opposite of that. It’s called glimmers—those moments where something happens, and you’re like, ‘Oh shit. Magic. I see it.’”

I can see that.

I’ve been trying to remind myself every time it happens to say, “That’s a glimmer. That’s a glimmer. That’s a glimmer.” Because when we’re triggered, we feel it—it hits hard. So why not feel those little glimmers just as deeply? Like, “Oh man, magic does exist.”

I love that—I never thought of it that way. I never considered there could be an opposite of a trigger, like a positive trigger. Triggers are so powerful, and the more you’re triggered, the more susceptible you become. I’d assume glimmers work the same way—the more you experience them, the more you notice them. I’m going to practice the observation of glimmers.

Yes!

In interviews, you often mention noticing the little things around you—your curiosity and eagerness to learn stand out. How do they shape your artistry and influence your music?

Empathy and curiosity are the best fertile soil for some good shit to happen. I feel if you’re not curious, you’re not going to be obsessed with an instrument. Because being obsessed with an instrument or being obsessed with a craft requires you to be curious. It requires you to be like, “Oh, how does this work? How does this sound?” To explore your artistic world as much as possible, you’ve got to be curious. It’s fundamental.

It’s true. And talking about being curious and being obsessed with art and crafts. Ella Fitzgerald, one of your favorite artists once said, “The only thing better than singing is more singing.” How does this resonate with you? And how do you balance that between discipline and just the pure bliss of creating?

You can only reach pure bliss through discipline.That’s something I’ve come to realize. My relationship with music was tumultuous for a long time because I hadn’t fully discovered my way of expressing commitment and devotion. Now that I’ve found it—this is exactly how I express my dedication—I’m no longer confused. The real gifts of music are finally revealing themselves. I didn’t think I could love music more after 15 years, but the deeper my devotion, commitment, and discipline grow, the deeper the joy and bliss become. I think that’s just how it’s designed. The same applies to relationships—the more present and committed we are to loving and honest connections, the deeper the experience becomes.

This is how I feel about my connection to craft. It’s all just a labor of love.

The deeper our love can really become, the deeper the love can grow, and the deeper the gifts are.

That’s true. I find it so hard nowadays. We’re so distracted by social media in a world that’s always on fire. It’s difficult to create a space of intention for creativity. How do you make that space for yourself?

Oh man, you ask some really good questions. This place of intention is so important.

It’s sacred.

It’s sacred. I’m so glad you said that. Have you ever been to a meditation retreat or a ceremonial space where gratitude and devotion are central? Those spaces, so intentional, amplify the energy of gratitude. I’m lucky to know people who’ve dedicated their lives to creating such spaces. Spending time with them, and learning from their ceremonies, words, and way of living, has been invaluable. I’m still learning—it’s a deep skill to create spaces of intention.

It’s magic.

Yes. Just like you were saying before. I’m a baby magician, I’m not a full…

Wizard.

[laughs] I’m not a full wizard yet, but we learn and we practice.

That’s the way to go! I have one last question for you. I mentioned before I’m also on a journey of self-discovery—as a creative, as a woman of color, navigating this tumultuous world. So, at the end of the day, Willow Smith, what do you want your legacy to be?

Oh my God. Man, I just love you. I love talking to you. You’re a cool person.

Haha, same!

I know. I’m like, “Let’s just hang out.” What do I want my legacy to be? I want my legacy to be a legacy of care and devotion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to music even though that’s my specific way of injecting care and devotion into the world. I want to inspire people to love each other intensely and with deep presence.

It’s almost utopian, like a hippie dream.

Yeah. I hate to say it, but I’m a total hippie.

Me too. It’s a safe space on a global scale.

Yeah! A safe space, but on a global scale. Imagine this: a space of intention everywhere—that magic of everyone being tuned in. Not just holding it individually, but truly holding it together.

And pursuing this lineage of love, care and music.

Pursuing the lineage of love and care. Yes. I love that.

Thank you for your authenticity and honesty. You’ve inspired me as a creative person to stay true to myself and create for the sake of art and love.

Yes. Everything is really simple, we make it complicated.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Yang Shi.

So both my parents are writers as in the book and my grandmother, and the family, like Jane Austen is my sixth something aunt. So I really didn’t want to do it, as strange as that might sound. I thought it was lame and stupid, like the way you hate your parents, I guess, until I think I must have read maybe a Marie Calloway piece in Vice or a Clancy Martin piece in Vice, and then I just read around from that because that stuff was electrifying, and all the stuff that Giancarlo [DiTrapano] was putting out. And I was like, “Oh, maybe books can be actually cool.” Like they sounded like they were written by my friend’s older siblings. It just felt like it didn’t belong to my parents. And I didn’t really try writing until I was about 24, but something just broke in my brain and I decided I wanted to have a go.

Was Brat your first go of it?

It was the first story I sent anywhere. New York Tyrant published it as a story. I’d been sending Clancy Martin fan mail for ages, so I sent it to him and I was like, “Clancy, I wrote this story.” And then he emailed back being like, “Yeah, I could spend a lot more time with these characters.” And I was like, “Okay, well if Clancy says it, I’ve got to do it.”

Brat is so very strange and atmospheric. On the physical level, there’s the deteriorating house, the shedding skin, the creeping vines, etc., but then there’s the psychological element too: the hallucinations, the shifting of texts. Do you think about atmosphere when you’re writing, or do you have any tricks to make it so effective?

I had horror movies on, on silent, all the time when I was working on Brat, because I think the images are so great. Music was also important—lots of vaporwave, lots of…I think you guys call it dubstep? When I say dubstep to Americans, that means something different than what it means over here, maybe like Burial, lots of post-garage stuff. Very funky but also just haunted. I try to get the rhythm of that in the words while staying as completely on the object as possible. There’s a rule I used where the protagonist is only allowed to have any kind of self-reflection every 50 pages or so. He doesn’t even have memories. The novel was very rule-based.

I love that and I love that you were able to get away with it because I know people with novels on submission, and they keep hearing, “Oh, I wish there was more interiority.”

People don’t think about themselves, do they? That’s not my experience of reality.

I know. I’m like, “What is interiority? How am I supposed to put more of it? Do you mean memories, desires?”

I don’t sit around pondering stuff.

No.

That’s not how I live. I’m like, “Oh, I think I’ll go do this now.”

Mm-hmm.

I think that actually helped with the atmosphere, because in the first half of the book at least, there’s no one else he interacts with basically. Having to be so object-based I think helped with the physical space.

What, to you, makes a good novel?

I don’t like being talked down to. I want to be surprised all the time. It should feel like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, I guess. I just don’t want to know what’s coming next. That’s all. Whether that’s to do with voice or character or the words or the sounds they’re making, just do something that engages me and surprises me.

I hear the old adage all the time that if you’re not surprised when you’re writing, then the reader isn’t going to be surprised. Do you believe that? Were you surprised when you were writing?

Only structurally. I had to work really hard on the sentence level stuff. I didn’t think I was a very good sentence writer when I started this, which is probably expected given it’s a debut. So I had to do a lot of going back and making the sentences good. Like you know that great … You must know that great Garielle Lutz lecture?

“The Sentence is a Lonely Place.”

Yeah. There was one edit where I just turned that into a list of rules and I went through every sentence and I was like, “Well, does this do any of those things that it should do?” And if it didn’t, then I cut it. And then making it not feel forced to me after I’d sort of added all this clever, clever stuff, that was hard. So I never felt surprised on a sentence level. Structurally, I was surprised by some stuff that happened. I didn’t really know what the skin image meant going in. Lots of the images, I was just like, “I like that image,” and then it kind of turned, the way things do. It just turned into something.

I reread your story “The Complete” the other day, in which you wrote about trying to affect a nonlinear reading experience. You likened it to dozing then waking up in the back of the car. Were you going for that with Brat?

Definitely. All my favorite art has a drug that it is about. I want to say that in the least cool-guy type way I can, but it’s just true. I wanted Brat to be like a benzo novel, and if your readers have been into those heavy, that you slip in and out and it’s very object focused, so it matched the narration style. You don’t really have short-term memory when you do a lot of those. So that was one aspect with the way the structure works.

I also just didn’t want it to be boring with the way it jumps between passages. I didn’t want scenes to exist when nothing was happening. So that also gives it kind of a dreamlike quality. He’s just snapping between moments. I don’t know if I wanted that half-asleep thing in the same way I wanted it in that story. I think the effect is probably the same because I’m the same guy but, past that, I’m not sure.

I love the idea of a benzo horror novel.

It’s fun, right?

Yeah. Whenever a writer gives a narrator their own name, it risks giving the readers the impression that it’s about them. Were you wanting readers to read Brat as a work of autofiction?

Well, I wrote it in 2019 and, as you’ll remember, it felt very difficult to see a way out of autofiction at that time. And authenticity is so highly valued just by audiences of pop culture generally. You’ve been following the Drake/Kendrick thing?

A little bit.

It’s just about who has the best gossip. That parasocial element was at the time and probably still is super important to audiences. So part of that decision was cynical. I wanted to do something fun and genre-y and haunted house-y, and I didn’t think it would really fly with audiences at all if it didn’t have something else going for it.

Also, because it’s a Russian doll novel, because the structures are nested within each other, I wanted the narrative to be concentric circles inwards, but for that also to move out of the book into reality as well. So the character has my name. The mother’s manuscript is literally just one of my mother’s books, is straight plagiarized. There’s a bunch of stuff there that if people want to go digging, they can go digging down the parasocial path. I think that’s fun and interesting and I’m excited with whatever I do next to take that further.

From what I’ve seen on social media, I’ve gathered that your next manuscript is about MKUltra or something?

Currently, I can’t tell whether I’m joking when I say it, but it’s meant to be a history of fascism over the last 500 or 1,000 years. It’s like a big dreamlike systems novel.

Do you use the name Gabriel there too?

Yeah. There is probably a thread that is my life in that, I think. I’m not sure. The way I’m thinking about it is if Brat is a Gabriel character who reads stuff—because I was constantly having to have him go and then sit down and read this thing—how can I write a novel where it’s not like that, where I can just jump into something that’s completely different? Like, “Hey, we’re in 1990s Russia now,” and you don’t have to have the character be like, “Oh, I’m sitting down and reading this thing.” I want that, but for it to still flow for the reader and feel like one thing. That’s what I’m trying to achieve with the next one.

I’m excited.

Don’t be. It’s trash.

Doubtful. What’s something that you wish someone told you when you began to write? Or, since you grew up around writers, what’s something you wish they hadn’t told you?

I kind of wish they’d told me less. No, not really. The problem is doing this publicity stuff is nice and very exciting and it’s great if more people read the work, but it sucks that I already know that you just don’t make any money. I wish no one had told me that so I could be more excited about the whole thing, but that’s probably for the best as well.

Do you have any writing habits or creative tics that you have to fight against? Do you notice yourself doing the same thing over and over?

Yeah, I had a big problem with the word “but” for a long time. It’s such a cheap way to surprise. Starting a sentence with but and you’re like, “Damn, I’m smart.” But it’s a cheap trick.

How do you fight it? You just hit Control+F and replace?

I tried doing that. Just getting stronger on a sentence level has helped, being able to do that, getting my sonics half decent. Just working more and being able to think of more ways to outmaneuver the reader has helped. But also, the last couple of years I’ve stopped fighting stuff like that. I can’t be bothered. You just sound like how you sound and that’s it.

What does your work entail on the day to day? What’s your process look like?

Straight up in the morning, 500 words because it’s what Graham Greene did. And then stop at 500, knowing the sentence you’re going to start with the next day and not writing it down. You start the next day and are supposed to read it back in the evening. I don’t usually, just because I don’t really want to get in the work zone again. I’m not one of these smash-3,000-words-out-in-the-evening type people. I can’t do that. It makes me tired. It drains me too quickly.

But you get quite a lot down just chugging away, and I like the morning because I feel like my brain fills up with words through the day. By the end of the day, by now, it’s really buzzy in there. In the morning, you’ve just woken up, it’s clean. That’s the thing I’m always trying to carry and get on the page. Lots of white space.

If you don’t read it back every night, do you reread in the morning, or do you just keep going and not read until you have a full draft?

I’m obsessive enough that it is in my head and then, after 15 or 30 days, I won’t remember the voice I was using or whatever from 15-plus days ago and I’ll start making inconsistencies. But over the length of a longer project, it feels like you can iron those out afterwards. I’m much happier editing than writing.

Interesting.

I don’t really like writing. When I edit, I love it.

What’s your editing process?

I print every draft out even if it’s like seven things I want to change and then I type it all back into the computer sentence by sentence so that every single one is good and I’ll mumble them to myself as I’m doing that to make sure they sound okay. But I’ve permanently fucked up my hand. When I was editing Brat, it was twice the size of my other hand. I don’t know what it is, like repetitive strain injury, but it’s just permanently fucked now.

Wow.

I know. It’s turned into a baby hand.

Have you tried a laptop stand?

I’ve tried everything, yeah, but I feel too stupid. I want to be the most ergonomic writer, and I simply cannot.

You live in London. I don’t know much about the UK literary scene, but I’m curious if you’ve noticed any differences between the UK and the US with publishing and/or literary scenes?

Well, New York’s the center of the world obviously. Actually, until today, I’d never had anything in a British magazine, so I guess they’re fucking idiots as far as I’m concerned.

Recently there’s been more of a scene here. Like the one Paul Jonathan throws is pretty good. Soho Reading Series is pretty good. But before that, there was nothing here. It was dead. I know far more New York people than I do London people. So that’s a crucial difference.

And even the publishers here… the subtitle here for the novel is A Ghost Story and in the US it’s A Novel. Americans are just more open to literary fiction generally. I guess you’ve got a better tradition of it. You’ve got a better small magazine tradition than we have here. I don’t know if that’s a function of there just being more readers overall or big college towns, which we only have a couple of. I’ve been much more welcomed by Americans than British readers so far, which is fine. I think a lot more interesting writers are coming up there.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

• Special counsel Jack Smith filed a narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in his 2020 election case after Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.
• President Joe Biden’s top Middle East adviser held talks in Doha with senior Qatari leaders today, focusing on efforts to finalize a cease-fire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.
• The UN’s top weather agency issued a stark warning this week about climate change endangering lives and livelihoods in South Pacific island nations.
• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed senior Biden administration officials pressured Facebook to censor certain COVID-19 content during the pandemic.
• California’s ‘Closing the Digital Divide’ task force discussed proposed legislation that could soon ban students from using phones and social media in the state’s schools.

The post Special counsel Jack Smith files narrowed indictment against Donald Trump in 2020 election case – August 27, 2024 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) demonstrates for housing justice in Seattle in 1964. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Barbara Smith is one of the leading intellectuals and activists who developed the traditions of Black feminism. A part of a group of Black lesbian socialists, she co-authored the groundbreaking “Combahee River Collective Statement.” A prolific writer, she has published many books and articles that have emphasized the interlocking nature of systems of oppression under capitalism and the necessity of fighting all of them as part of a struggle for collective liberation. But she is no armchair intellectual; she is also an organizer and activist. Tempest’s Ashley Smith interviews her here about her history as a participant and leader in struggles from the civil rights movement to Palestinian solidarity today.

Ashley Smith: In a meeting we were both in, you said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes. We are in the midst of one of the largest student revolts since the 1960s. You were part of that great uprising. How did you get involved in it? How did it develop and what did you do in it?

Barbara Smith: I became politically active in the heart of the 1960s during the long Civil Rights Movement. As a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio, I joined the struggle that was centrally focused on school desegregation.

Urban school districts were segregated then and are segregated now. What’s ironic is that my twin sister and I lived in a neighborhood where Black people could buy a house. Our family had moved there because it had really good public schools, probably some of the best in the city. And so, my sister and I went to integrated schools from first grade through 12th.

As teenagers, we were following the civil rights movement. My entire family was from the deep South, from a town in rural Georgia called Dublin. I like to say, kind of jokingly, that my sister and I were the only two Northerners in our house.

The adults in Cleveland’s movement made a priority of getting young people involved. We went right to work to challenge the de facto segregation of almost all neighborhoods and schools in our city.

The city officials, in a typically cynical manner, built new schools in segregated areas so that the color line was upheld and reproduced. This was true of all northern school systems. They would never put a school in an integrated neighborhood.

So, our movement started protesting segregated school construction. One of the actions ended in the tragic death of a white minister named Reverend Bruce Klunder. People had blocked the front of a bulldozer while Reverend Klunder blocked its back.

The driver put the bulldozer in reverse and ran over Reverend Klunder, killing him instantly. He was in his 20s, married, and had young children. His death escalated the movement to a much higher level. In April of 1964, the movement launched a boycott of Cleveland public schools on the east side of the city where Black people lived.

My sister and I joined it. Our family had no issues with us participating in the boycott and in fact I think they expected us to. Our family members were pillars of one of the most prominent Black churches. It was very progressive.

My sister and I were mid-year high school graduates, so we had a lot of time on our hands before college. They made a lot of students graduate mid-year then because the schools were so over-crowded. If your birthday was after a certain point in the fall or even in the late summer, you would have had to start school mid-year and then graduate mid-year.

While we got full-time jobs, we used our spare time to volunteer with CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). Fortunately, the executive director of CORE was a wonderful woman, a German teacher, who had left teaching in the school district to work for civil rights.

If there had been someone more typical in that leadership role, they might have been dismissive of people like us who didn’t fit the standard profile. They might have said, “What could you do? You’re two teenage girls. What could you possibly do?”

But this teacher saw our potential. We worked in the office, took notes, typed up letters and documents, and also went out canvassing in neighborhoods where the housing quality was poor, whether it was public housing or not. They didn’t send us out by ourselves, but they would send us out with this wonderful person named Chuck, who was blind.

We were a great team. Since Chuck did not have a guide dog, we were his guides and he was our mentor as we rode the bus and walked door to door talking about integration, housing, and other issues in the struggle against racism and inequality.

Already active in the struggle, I went to Mount Holyoke College in the fall of 1965. There were virtually no Black students on my campus. There was a group called the Civil Action Group, which I joined. Most of the Black students already at the school were active in it.

We didn’t have a Black student group or an Afro-American society yet. The focus of the Civil Action Group was civil rights organizing. Already, the movement was turning toward Black nationalism and Black power and also beginning to take up the struggle against the Vietnam War.

We were in a very small, rural town. It felt like being in a Norman Rockwell painting! So, we didn’t have the forces for large rallies locally. But we organized, nonetheless. We held vigils and organized fasts for peace and to stop the war in Vietnam.

Out of those struggles I went on to become active in the feminist and LGBTQ movements. And thinking about their interaction led me to Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective and our statement about the interlocking systems of oppression and the need to fight against all of them as part of our struggle for collective liberation.

AS: The Black freedom struggle set in motion the whole chain of radicalism in the 1960s. Black Lives Matter along with Occupy and a whole wave of struggles from teacher strikes to Bernie Sanders’ campaigns and Women’s Marches have all seemed to flow into Palestine solidarity as a point of profound convergence. What is similar and different between the process of radicalization in the 1960s and today?

BS: I hesitate in some ways and just to make clear that these are not in any way definitive thoughts. These are observations in the midst of a dynamic movement. What we’ve been through as organizers since October 7 feels pretty unprecedented to me in my lifetime.

That includes the struggle to end the war in Vietnam. Although the body count in Vietnam was much higher than what we have seen in Gaza, and the conditions were quite different.

The war in Vietnam was a war and civilians were being killed and napalmed, but it wasn’t under an occupation. Palestine has been under the [Israeli] occupation since 1948. The West Bank has been occupied since 1967 and Gaza has been under siege since 2007, essentially turning it into an open-air prison.

Then in the wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack, the Israeli government launched a genocidal war on Gaza. I say the Israeli government, because I think it’s really important to make distinctions between the government and the people.

Remember, before October 7 there was quite a vibrant movement against Netanyahu’s regime. People were protesting its attempt to abolish the court system so that he could rule with impunity.

But Netanyahu has used October 7 to galvanize his base and justify genocide in Gaza. He even said that if Biden pauses shipment of the 2,000-pound bombs, we will fight with our fingernails.

He will not relent in his declared aim to get rid of Hamas, under the illusion that that will make people in Israel safe. He cannot achieve that goal and wiping out people in Gaza will certainly not make Israelis safer.

So, the wars are different, the period is different, and the political dynamics of the movement are different. I was in college at the height of the 1960s. My campus transformed during those years.

The student movement at that time was shaped by the contrast between the new Left versus the old Left. I had the opportunity to meet people who had been in the old Left, people who were middle-aged or elders at that time.

Because there was no Internet, there was no way of getting information except through books, articles, and newspapers. The new Left valued studying and reading. It was like a litmus test.

If we met someone–it might even be somebody you were interested in dating– we asked each other what we had been reading. Have you read Frantz Fanon? Have you read Herbert Marcuse? What about Karl Marx? There was an assumed reading list that serious politicos were expected at least to have dipped into.

I don’t think it’s like that now. People in my generation, not to be ageist, talk about how we can get our younger generations more interested in studying and engaging with theory, analysis, and history.

The old Left and its movements still influenced us—the struggle in the 1930s for unionization and workers’ rights. And of course, the Black freedom struggles of that period like the Scottsboro Boys. All of that was part of the emotional, social, and political context that affected how we thought about the world.

But there was a different experience then between Black and white activists. I knew this from first-hand experience. In the 1960s, young Black people were not rebelling against our parents. We did not think that our parents were the root of the problems. We knew that racism was the root of the problem, and our parents were being victimized by that as well.

Young white activists were rebelling against how they were raised. To be honest, if I was raised the way they were, I’d have been rebelling too. Of course, some Black people were rebelling against their parents, particularly those from the Black bourgeoisie.

But my sister and I, like most Black people at the time, were from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds. We didn’t have a lot of money and went to college on a complete scholarship.

Today’s rebelliousness I don’t think has much to do with rebellion against parents. Activists today are focused more on systemic problems across the board. I have joined all the recent waves of the new movement since Occupy through Black Lives Matter (BLM) to Palestine solidarity today.

I participated in Occupy right outside of City Hall in Albany, New York. Those were some of my happiest days as an elected member of the Albany Common Council. I would go to Council meetings, which all too often were like watching paint dry.

After these meetings, I would go outside to Occupy, and it was like a breath of fresh air. I wasn’t on the Common Council primarily to do legislation per se, but to make change and represent my Black working-class community. So, it was the struggle outside of City Hall like Occupy and BLM that were much more compelling for me.

The Occupy encampment was just across the street from City Hall and the New York State Capitol. I would go there and join people of color meetings. It was just great until the city shut it down one day in December.

Occupy had an anti-capitalist stance without articulating it. In some ways, it really was getting at the bottom line of what makes the society unjust, which is the economic disparity—the great gaps in income. But it wasn’t saying that we need to build a socialist society.

I supported Black Lives Matter when it burst onto the scene. It is the Black liberation movement of our era. It’s different from the Civil Rights Movement. Although it has a number of things on its agenda, it is focused on a particular aspect of white supremacy—police brutality and the criminal injustice system.

I have nothing except praise for what people of younger generations are trying to do from Occupy on through BLM to Palestine solidarity today. The solidarity with Palestine is simply amazing, especially the student encampments.

It has transformed politics in this country. Six months into this genocide, my Jewish Voice for Peace chapter was exhausted. We never thought this war on Gaza was going to go on so long.

Then at the end of March all of a sudden an encampment popped up first at Columbia; then they spread all over the United States and around the world. Before that, our movement had been demanding a ceasefire, which is of course essential, but the encampments upped the ante by demanding university divestment and an academic boycott.

I went to some events at the encampments, but not too many, because of my mobility issues. I’m not prepared to stand for a long time these days let alone engage in defense of encampments against police.

But I try to be at as many as I can. It matters to show up. When history speaks, when we are called upon, you either answer or you don’t. I’ve always been a person who answered the call to fight injustice on any and every issue as best I could and can.

I went to the mobilization at the University of Albany as well as a number of demonstrations at the Capitol. I went to a May Day rally to stop the genocide organized by our BLM in Saratoga, New York. I have nothing but joy with the connections that I have made during this period, working on all these connected issues.

AS: You have been intimately involved in the Palestine solidarity movement in Albany, New York. How has it developed? What have been the key events and turning points in the struggle so far?

BS: I have been working pretty much nonstop on the liberation of the Palestinian people since October. Not that anybody outside can make that happen, but we can definitely support their struggle.

I have been an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace since 2019, well before Israel’s current genocidal war. I have been part of organizing for Palestinian rights in Albany ever since I moved here 40 years ago in 1984. I’ve been affiliated with the Palestinian Rights Committee.

I went to their regular protests in front of what used to be an armory in downtown Albany. Those were the years when I was running Kitchen Table Press, a publisher for women of color, so I didn’t have a lot of time to be in a lot of groups.

But I was in a feminist group that we started that was explicitly focused on fighting racism called the Feminist Action Network. We were doing very different kinds of work than most so-called feminist groups do because we had an explicit anti-racist agenda.

All of this flowed together after 9/11 when we formed the Stand for Peace Coalition to stop the war on Iraq. Everyone in Albany’s progressive community came together. For a city of our size of less than 100,000 people, we have a pretty large progressive community.

Maybe our progressive community is so big because it’s the state capital or because it has a major university. But we’re up against a mainstream political culture run by the Democratic Party machine that is conservative.

When our Stand for Peace Coalition came together, we rowdy feminists had questions about why there were so few people of color in this organizing. We raised the question with pretty familiar white male activists and some women as well.

They had no idea what we were talking about or why. They said, “What difference does it make? We just want people to be for peace and opposed to the war in Iraq. What difference does it make whether we have people of color here or not!” What?

So, we started a sub-group of the Coalition made up of white women and women of color called the Stand for Peace Anti-Racism Committee. It actually stayed together longer than the Coalition itself.

One of the things we prioritized in the Stand for Peace Anti-Racism Committee was to connect with the Muslim, Central Asian, and Arab American communities because we knew that they were under attack.

One of the things that we did that I loved was that every so often we would go to restaurants owned by people in the Muslim community whether they were Middle Eastern or South Asian. We’d have these wonderful dinners with like 20 children running around.

We made a priority of connecting with women in the Muslim community. Through that work, we started the Capital District Coalition Against Islamophobia in the 2010s, in the time right before Trump. Luckily, when he came to power, we already had an organization to oppose his Muslim ban. We did some major actions.

This work led me to focus on Palestine and to join Jewish Voice for Peace. It is, of course, an anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian organization. We had an incredible seder in the spring of 2019, which was attended by 200 people, and we were looking forward to having another one, but COVID interrupted those plans.

During the worst of the pandemic, we stopped being very active. Some people made the transition to Zoom meetings, but our JVP did not do very well. Some people had illnesses, some sadly passed away, and others got new jobs and moved away.

So, it dwindled to a small group that would every so often meet with our congressperson. We met with the mayor of Albany who had gone to Israel to try and educate her. But the chapter really wasn’t growing or vital.

After October 7 and the start of Israel’s genocidal war, suddenly dozens and dozens of young people whom we had never met before joined the organization. They have remade our chapter, indeed, remade JVP as a whole organization.

One of our leaders, a founding member of JVP, would go with these new members to protest after protest with a sign-up sheet and register new members. Our chapter has grown in leaps and bounds.

We now have subcommittees of all sorts. We have an events committee, we have communications, and many more. I was the point person for a committee that organized a Black History Month event sponsored by JVP. That was, I think, pretty unique for JVPs around the country.

We mostly plan events like screening the film “Israelism.” Our most recent event was a seder, which was actually an event in solidarity with Palestine. It was outside next to a statue of Moses in Washington Park and drew a couple hundred people.

It had the atmosphere of a seder, which is of course a serious annual holiday. Our chapter wrote our own Haggadah emphasizing our collective struggle for liberation.

Our most significant achievement to this point was the passing of a ceasefire resolution in the Albany Common Council, the first one in all of New York State. We worked with members of the Muslim community based on all the years of previous collaboration to bring the resolution forward.

We had a core group that worked on it night and day from early December until we passed it in January. We had two Council members, one who had introduced the legislation and the other who co-sponsored it.

There were all kinds of shenanigans, and that’s a nice word, on the part of the Common Council. It was just a mess. One of the things that I felt so great about is that, as a former Council member, I knew what their tricks might be and could explain to our team how to use their tactics against them.

We brought hundreds of people to City Hall to the second council meeting in December, the last one of the 2023 calendar year. Unsurprisingly we made little headway on the resolution. So, we were determined to be better prepared for the next one in January 2024. One of our members, who’s a part of the Muslim community, said we need to get five hundred people to turn out to the next one.

I thought, oh yeah, five hundred people, that’s a heavy lift to persuade people to leave their couches and their comfortable heated homes for City Hall. So, our planning meeting was tasked with an enormous project.

I said that we needed to do something that the Council was not expecting like, maybe, a newspaper ad. Everyone thought that was a great idea and collaborated to make it happen. We launched a GoFundMe campaign to pay for it and one week later, we had a full-page ad in The Times Union in print and online that said, “Cease Fire Now!”

Over 20 organizations, including labor unions and Muslim groups, signed on to the ad. That helped us rally people to come to City Hall. When we all got to the Council meeting in January, it was standing room only with the crowd inside with more outside the door in the corridor. We had too many people to fit into the Council chamber.

Amazingly, people brought copies of the print ad and held it up like a placard during the meeting. They lined up to testify and they were all so eloquent. But we faced some serious opposition.

We have a committed Zionist on the Common Council. She’s the only Jewish member and had pushed the Council to pass a pro-Israeli resolution in their first meeting after October 7. There was no vetting. They just declared that they stood with the state of Israel.

Astonishingly, the Council had the gall to then declare when faced with our push for a ceasefire resolution that they didn’t deal with international issues. But in the past, they had passed several resolutions on such issues from one declaring support for Israel to another one on Ireland.

They used a terrible incident of someone brandishing a gun in front of a synagogue and saying something about Palestine as another reason not to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire. The Zionist rabbis backed them up.

But the combination of the horror of the war, our pressure, and the enormous shift in public opinion enabled us to win a ceasefire resolution. Since then, we have continued to organize in several working groups dedicated to all sorts of projects.

We have one called our cross-pollination group. It brings together groups and communities of all sorts for social events and actions. One of my favorites was an Iftar during Ramadan that brought together people from the Muslim community with JVP and BLM.

Such interlaced connections would be hard to imagine before this period. Of course, some of these connections existed. After all, we call our small city of Albany, “Smallbany.” People in our activist community know each other well. But this moment has deepened such solidarity and expanded it in ways we could never have imagined.

AS: What are your thoughts about the student encampments and their significance?

BS: The encampments spotlighted the contradictions in our society, between the students’ demand for an end to this war and the violent, repressive response from the establishment. I watched the confrontation at Columbia on TV. It was shocking to behold.

First students at Columbia and then all over the country just peacefully occupied their college greens. They were then met with police repression sometimes in the most brutal fashion. At Columbia, the police stormed Hamilton Hall with a twenty-first-century siege engine and brutalized and arrested scores of students.

The idealism of these young people is extraordinary and special. Having been one of those people at one time, I remember back to what we used to do, but can’t do now. I would if I could, but I can’t climb into windows or run from the police anymore. But I support and admire what they’re doing.

The youth are the future. Why? Because the youngest have not yet fully absorbed and even better yet have rejected all the oppressions. There’s not a baby in the world ever born as a card-carrying racist, homophobe, elitist, capitalist exploiter or whatever.

Even royal babies are just like all the other babies until they find out where they are living, in Kensington Palace. Only once they’ve absorbed their privileged position with all its prejudices do they become defenders of the established order.

Until then they’re just like all babies—interested, curious, and playful. They don’t have a whole portfolio of carefully adopted and rigid beliefs. That only comes with socialization.

Many young people who are in college today, not the majority by any means, but enough of them have brought a new passion for solidarity and justice to the table. It’s wonderful and it’s expanded globally. As we used to say, La luta continua, the struggle continues.

They have challenged all those who say the situation in Israel Palestine is complicated. It’s not complicated for the students in the encampments and it’s not for me. People are dying, people are being annihilated, people are being starved, people don’t have clean water to drink, and people don’t have sanitation.

And doctors don’t have anesthesia for operations. All I could think is, what’s it like to be a six-year-old and having your limbs cut off with no anesthesia? What trauma will last for that child if they survive? But 15 thousand children have not survived.

Who on earth can defend such horrific crimes against humanity? Anyone who is in favor of the policies of the Israeli regime at this point have lost their moral compass. The “buts” that fill their sentences are just appalling.

I know which side I’m on when it comes to oppression. I’m always with the oppressed. I’m a Black person living in the United States, the belly of the beast, and I understand what side needs to be treated as full human beings. The Palestinians.

I haven’t been to Palestine, but I know people in this group, the National Council of Elders, which is made up of all sorts of leaders from SNCC and other organizations from the civil rights and peace movements. Many of them have visited the occupied territories.

One of them, Zoharah Gwendolyn Simmons, who was in SNCC, converted to Islam, got a PhD in Islamic Studies, lived in Jordan, and went to Palestine several times. She grew up under Jim Crow in Memphis, Tennessee. I know of other people from South Africa who lived under apartheid and have visited Gaza.

All these people who experienced Jim Crow in the United States and South African apartheid say they have never seen anything as bad. They all say that Israeli apartheid is far worse. I absolutely believe my siblings in the movement.

We’re at the start of a new, long struggle to get rid of Israeli apartheid. But we’re seeing a paradigm shift today and the students have led the way into a new era. This struggle in solidarity with Palestine is going to impact all our movements and make them all stronger.

AS: One of the most shocking things we have witnessed is the repressive and sometimes brutal response to the encampments, not only by Republicans and conservative leaders of school administrations, but also by the Democrats and liberal administrators. They have all unleashed police on protestors. What explains the bipartisan nature and brutality of the crackdown?

BS: I watched the crackdown unfold and couldn’t help but think of my own experience in the late 1960s. During that period, I was in New York City studying at the New School for Social Research during my junior year.

It was my junior year abroad. I left bucolic Mount Holyoke for something I was more familiar with—urban America. I got to go to the city I had been dreaming about ever since I saw its skyline on our black-and-white TV in the early 1950s.

At the New School College, we had young radical professors who closed the school in solidarity with Columbia when students went out on strike.

I was part of the movement, but as a Black woman I felt marginalized among the white student Left I was around. So, although I was definitely down with SDS, I was not a part of it because if you were Black there were limits to what you were supposed to be interested in.

After college, I started graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 1969. Some of the Black nationalists on campus harshly criticized me because I was active in advocating for an end to the war in Vietnam, which was peaking toward a major mobilization in November of 1969.

I faced challenges as a Black woman because the colleges and universities were still in the process of desegregating. But even the most ridiculous of these institutions could not help but be impacted by the zeitgeist of the times, by the cascading social and political movements of that era.

Every night when administrators of colleges and universities went home, they were seeing Black people beaten by police and attacked by police dogs. Remember, the 1963 March on Washington had happened, the anti-war movement was reaching a crescendo, a new women’s movement was starting, and Martin Luther King had just been assassinated.

The university bosses were impacted by this climate. They were also shaped by a political consensus around the social welfare state forged out of the New Deal. But that didn’t stop Columbia from building its gymnasium in Harlem and displacing all of those Black families.

So, the conflict remained intense between the radicalizing students and their administrations on a whole number of issues. At Columbia, students shut down the school in 1968. They detained administrators in their offices, they occupied whole parts of the campus, and they held Hamilton Hall for about a week.

The whole scenario in 2024 is different. This year, students at Columbia held Hamilton Hall for less than 24 hours. Today, the people who head up these institutions are products of the backlash that began with Nixon and peaked with Reagan.

Nixon came in with an agenda to roll back every single gain of the twentieth century. While Nixon’s government fell apart in disgrace after Watergate, he set the direction for a counter-offensive that would culminate in Reagan’s all-out attack on workers and oppressed people.

Today’s administrators are products of that era of backlash and corporate greed. They head up institutions that are thoroughly neoliberalized and preoccupied with the financial bottom line and efficiency.

Their chief priority is fundraising and pleasing their capitalist donors, not enhancing knowledge or improving culture. As a result, liberal arts are being cut and even eliminated.

So, like the capitalists who control them, they are absolutely hostile to those below them—professors, students, and staff. That is one reason for the ferocity of their crackdown on the encampments.

Another reason is the nature of the student activists who are participating in the protests. Unlike in the 1960s, when campuses were still mostly segregated, today they are much more multiracial and multi-gendered. So, the administrators responded to them like the city bosses and police did to Black Lives Matter, with brutal repression.

AS: It seems that we are in the midst of a New McCarthyism with far-right GOP leaders like Representative Elise Stefanik holding hearings in the House, grilling college presidents, and pushing for legislation that essentially criminalizes criticism of the state of Israel. Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims as well as their allies have been canceled, fired, denied promotion, and disciplined. What explains the ferocity of this backlash against people calling for an end to genocide and for equality, justice, and democratic rights for Palestinians?

BS: These hearings could have been organized by the House Un-American Activities Committee. They have grilled university president after university president, pressuring them to escalate the crackdown they have already ordered.

They went after Claudine Gay in particular. She has been justifiably criticized for adapting to the right’s charge against the movement being antisemitic and for not being an outspoken proponent of liberation for Palestine.

Now, what would we expect from the president of the most elite university in the entire nation? But I have issues about how they went after her, the first Black woman president of Harvard. Politicians, donors, and alumni did everything possible to bring her down.

This is undoubtedly a new and racist McCarthyism. Everything old is new again. I lived through the McCarthy era as a kid in elementary school. I remember when the Rosenbergs were executed. Our family paid attention to the news, and we talked about it.

My sister and I were around the same age as the Rosenbergs’ two sons, the Meeropol brothers. Both of us asked our family, how can they kill those two boys’ parents? They’re allowed to kill somebody’s parents?

We didn’t know then that we would lose our mother three years after the Meeropol boys lost their parents. Our mother died of a disease. So, I’ve always felt a bond with those kids out of that horrific experience of loss. At least my mother’s death was not the decision of a completely evil state. She died of supposedly natural causes.

Her death led my sister to get a master’s degree in public health from Yale specifically focusing on Black women’s health. She is very aware of the disparate outcomes for Black people suffering from diseases compared to whites.

My mother died as a result of rheumatic fever, something one of my favorite college professors, a white man, had and survived. My mother had been long gone by the time I met him. Given the lack of access to health care in rural Georgia in the 1920s when she contracted rheumatic fever as a child, her death was not simply from “natural causes.”

But no one sentenced her to death as the state did with the Rosenbergs. And she wasn’t wantonly killed by the state like Black people are murdered by police mostly in our cities. Those killed by the state, if they are not children themselves, leave behind orphans and bereft loved ones. So, when I speak of McCarthyism, I speak from experience across generations.

Speaking across generations is vital. Those of us engaged in revolutionary political work have to unite all different kinds of people, including people of different ages. This young generation of activists is so much more diverse than ours was.

I grew up in a Black-white dichotomy. My college years were a Black-white dichotomy. For a long time after that, it was a Black-white dichotomy. But as a result of all our struggles the new generation is much more diverse and much more aware of the intersectional nature of our collective fight for liberation. That is heartwarming for me as a Black, anti-racist, feminist, lesbian.

Our new LBGTQ+ movement has benefitted from all this diversity. It is not so mono-issue. Mono this or mono that politics is now a thing of the past. Today’s radicals are so much more open to the incredible diversity of human beings.

Today’s new right that is driving these new McCarthyite hearings want to roll all that back. They want to restore all the old binaries, all the old hierarchies, all the old divisions. That’s what’s behind their slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Please don’t Make America Great Again. Please don’t. I’ve already been through that. I don’t want to live through that again.

AS: The current struggle is playing a profound role in the shaping of a new Left in this country. Coming out of the 1960s radicalization, you as part of the Combahee River Collective emphasized in your Statement and work the importance of understanding interlocking systems of oppression and the necessity of an intersectional approach to resisting and changing them. How do you think this is useful for today’s Left? Has it become their common sense? Or is there work to be done?

BS: There’s always work to be done. We’re mortals and we’re still trapped in this capitalist society and the oppressions and divisions it breeds. None of us are free from it yet. So, we all need to engage in collective, intersectional struggle till we’re all free.

In this struggle, we need as I and many others have said a collective intelligence. You cannot solve social problems as an individual. It’s not possible. Our problems are the product of our society and especially its capitalist economy.

Our problems are ones of political economy. The only way we overcome these and find solutions is by joining together in struggle, sharing what each of us brings to whatever the issue is, and creating a collective intelligence capable of transforming our world.

Humor plays an important role in this process. It can help us to relate to each other when we’re dealing with dire situations. You generally don’t joke with people you don’t like. This has been part of our dynamics within our local groups organizing for Palestine. Humor can be a way of showing kindness. It’s been a part of every healthy movement I’ve ever been part of.

Part of that collective intelligence is face-to-face organizing in meetings. Don’t just do slogans. Don’t just think that because you get a certain number of likes on whatever social media platform you’re on that you’ve done the organizing.

You have to be organized and meeting with people. I’m a member of DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) here in Albany. It functions pretty well and has taken some different stances than some other DSAs, including national. It’s a good organization.

There is a housing committee in DSA. Some of us are in another group that also works on housing that’s called the Albany Justice Coalition that includes some of the same DSA members. DSA has led the way in doing canvassing around legislation for housing rights.

They go out once a month and door-knock in the neighborhood that I used to live in and that I represented on the Common Council. That’s organizing. They are talking to people and asking them what are the problems you have day to day?

And they tell tenants that if this housing bill gets passed, you will be able to have protections against what your landlord might do. They’re both doing political education and they’re finding out what’s the situation here on the ground.

This movement for a ceasefire, an end to this genocide, and for Palestinian liberation is grassroots organizing. That’s what I want people to understand. It’s not just being cute and having a following on a static medium, which is your computer or your phone.

It’s about knowing people, meeting people where they’re at, and finding out if there is anything that my little mind or my little body can do that could perhaps help your situation to be different than it is. The most wonderful thing is when people get this and mobilize on their own to change their life circumstances, stand up and fight, and speak truth to power.

One of the most important things to do when we face some of the most intractable problems like the assault on reproductive justice is to look for our opponent’s vulnerabilities. What are their weak points we can exploit to change the power dynamics?

Within our own movement, we have to make sure we are empowering oppressed people. In the mid-1970s, I was involved in a campaign against sterilization abuse in Boston. We noticed that there were no guidelines for people facing the problem, so we just wrote guidelines ourselves and publicized them ourselves.

In Albany during the late 1980s, our anti-racist feminist group noticed that a new shelter for women who were experiencing battering, or domestic violence, had hired an all-white staff. That was typical of the white feminist movement.

We had a frustrating meeting with the shelter organizers. We made the point that a lot of people who were going to use the shelter were going to be women of color, and that they needed staff who were like them, but they didn’t hear what we were saying.

So, you know what we did? We wrote our own job description, and we circulated it in the city. As a result, several women of color applied and got staff positions. We took the approach that if they can’t figure it out, we’ll just take action ourselves.

In the current movement, one of my favorite examples of exploiting our opponent’s weakness was the bridge and tunnel shut-down in New York City. It was the right people, at the right place, at the right time. And it made a statement.

A couple of friends of mine have a son in New York who’s right at the center of all this activism. I’ve known him since he was a child. He was one of the people perching on a high balcony at one of the actions when they occupied Grand Central Station.

I asked his mother: Did you tell him not to do that again? But I was just joking. I take great joy in seeing a new generation spread their wings. They are playing a leading role in this great new movement we have created in solidarity with Palestine.

AS: Solidarity with Palestine has brought together many wings of today’s radicalization, including sections of the trade union movement. The higher education workers in California voting to go out on strike against police brutality and in solidarity with the Palestinian movement is a profound example of the intersectional nature of the struggle for liberation. What has been its impact on our social and labor movements?

BS: The best example of its impact has been the UAW. The fact that this major industrial union called for a ceasefire is a breakthrough. Others have followed their lead. The union movement in this country is not where we would like it to be, but it’s definitely different from where it was, say, in the, in the moribund 1980s and 1990s.

The movement in solidarity with Palestine has profoundly impacted working-class communities inside and outside unions, especially people of color in the working class. I’ve experienced this personally at the mosque here in downtown Albany, which is where working-class Muslims in that neighborhood go to worship.

Most of the meetings of our Coalition against Islamophobia were in that mosque. It was an intersectional space. It’s where a lot of people of African heritage and African Americans worship. So, it’s a racially diverse mosque.

All that has flowed into the broader solidarity movement with Palestine. It really does feel like a point of convergence for Palestinians, people of color, Arabs, Muslims, Jews, and white activists as well. It is a sign of hope for our collective future.

AS: One of the positive developments of the new Left that is forming is opposition to US imperialism. We have been collaborating together in the Ukraine Solidarity Network where we have tried to put forward a principled position of solidarity with all struggles for national liberation and self-determination against all imperialisms, whether that of the US or China or Russia. We have put forward the slogan, “From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime.” That seems exceptional on the Left, with many instead practicing selective solidarity, supporting this or that struggle but not all of them. What explains this? Why is it a problem? What do you think should be done about it?

BS: I try to practice solidarity without exception. So, I have these two buttons that I wear at protests, one for Ukraine and another for Palestine. And I just don’t wear those buttons. I speak about the connectedness of the struggles against imperialism of all sorts.

At the May Day event in our area, I talked about the struggle for a free Palestine and a free Ukraine. I explained why we need to oppose Israel’s genocidal war and Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine.

I told the crowd that I was a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Capital District and that we were working in solidarity with the people of Ukraine and people applauded. That gave me confidence that we can and must oppose occupation from Ukraine to Palestine as part of a common struggle for collective liberation.

I really don’t understand why some on the Left cannot see it that way. How can people be in solidarity with Ukraine but not Palestine? And how can people be in solidarity with Palestine but not Ukraine?

That kind of politics, which is very different from mine, leads them to selective solidarity. Several of us here in Albany reject that approach and have joined the movement in support of both Palestine and Ukraine.

I think the key to such politics—solidarity without exception—is listening to the people impacted, in this case, the Palestinians and Ukrainians, and taking a lead from them, their experience, and their analysis. That’s in keeping with what Tempest I think calls socialism from below.

That means always siding with listening to the people who are experiencing oppression and exploitation. Who would be surprised by me saying that? Listen to the Black person, listen to the Palestinians, listen to the Ukrainians, listen to the Muslims, listen to the queer people, listen to workers.

That may sound simplistic, but I think it provides a reliable moral and political compass to find our way forward in this complex world in our struggle for collective liberation.

This piece first appeared at The Tempest.

The post Answering the Call to Fight Injustice: An Interview with Barbara Smith appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ashley Smith.

As the American Prospect (1/19/24) reports, Dollar General has also been fined by New York and sued by Ohio and Missouri for business practices that harm consumers.

Janine Jackson: Some listeners may have seen the story of Dollar General stores in Missouri being caught cheating customers by listing one price on the shelf, then charging a higher price at checkout. It’s a crummy thing to do to folks just trying to meet household needs. And yet it’s just one of many harms dollar stores—some call them deal destinations—are doing to communities across the country. What’s the nature of the problem, and what can we do about it? 

Our guest has been tracking the various impacts of chain dollar stores and their proliferation, as well as what can happen when communities and policymakers fight back. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She joins us now by phone from Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to Counterspin, Kennedy Smith.

Kennedy Smith: Thank you.

JJ: Well, dollar stores are sort of like fancy restaurants. If they aren’t part of your life, you might not even physically notice them. But they’ve been proliferating wildly in recent years. In 2021, as the Institute’s report, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” begins, nearly half of new stores that opened in the US were chain dollar stores, a degree of momentum with no parallel in the history of the retail industry. 

Now, I want to talk through specific problems, but could you maybe start by talking about where these stores are and what’s giving rise to them, which connects directly to what they do?

KS: Basically, they are everywhere. They are in 48 states now. They haven’t quite made the leap yet to Hawaii and Alaska, but they began—the two major chains, Dollar General, which is headquartered in Tennessee, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, which is now in Virginia Beach, Virginia—began by radiating out from their headquarters. And so we see heavy concentrations of them sort of in the east and the southeast. They are now marching across the country and entering all kinds of markets. 

And they have slightly different profiles. Dollar General tends to be a little more rural. They tend to go into smaller rural communities. Dollar Tree tends to be more suburban, and Family Dollar tends to be located primarily in urban neighborhoods. 

And they are being fueled by a variety of factors, including consolidation in the grocery industry and people’s desire to find more affordable food and products in general are driving people to believe that dollar stores are offering them a better value. 

And in fact, that’s one of the tricks that the dollar stores play on people, is that they actually are getting poor value and usually paying more in a per ounce or per pound basis than they might be if they were shopping at a traditional, independently owned grocery store or hardware store or office supply store, whatever it might be.

JJ: It sounds like they’re filling a need, like they’re reaching to an overlooked group of people. And it reminds me a little of check-cashing stores, where folks who are oppressed economically in terms of their wages, so they don’t get to bank in a regular way, and then these fill-in spots show up and it’s perverse, you know. 

But it’s also just not how a lot of folks think things work. They see these things, oh, these are cheap stores. These are for folks who can’t afford as much as, you know, maybe some others. And this is filling their need. That’s exactly what it’s not doing. 

So let’s start on this “17 problems” that you engage in a pullout piece of the Institute’s work on this. What are some of the big things you lift up as the harmful impacts?

ILSR’s report on dollar store impacts

KS: Well, I should mention, to begin, that these are 17 of the problems that we hear mentioned most frequently, but there are plenty of others. And there are slight variations around the country. For example, in areas of the country that are susceptible to flooding and to hurricanes, there’s a lot more concern about the environmental impact of these stores and what it might mean in terms of stormwater runoff, because one of the problems with dollar stores in general is that they tend to have a very thin operating model. They’re thinly staffed. They look for inexpensive land. They build cheap buildings if they’re building new buildings. And so they’re not likely to want to afford to put in stormwater retention basins and things like that. So there’s some regional variations. 

But in general, the things that we find to be the biggest problems are, one, their economic impact on the community, and two, their sort of social impact on a community. In terms of the economy, they are a direct threat to independent grocery stores. And there are a number of studies now that have come out that have looked at what that impact is. 

There’s one that the USDA did last year, which found that basically grocery store sales will decline by 10 percent when a dollar store enters the market. There was one that was done by the University of Toronto and UCLA in 2022 that found after looking at 800-some dollar stores, that when you have three dollar stores within a two mile radius of one another, they’re likely to kill a grocery store that’s there. 

And that has a huge impact on a community because grocery stores are really community anchors in many ways and are responsible for providing their community members with healthy food as opposed to the sort of overly preserved things that you’re likely to get at a dollar store, like a box of macaroni and cheese or a box of sugary cereal or something like that. When a community loses its grocery store, it can be devastating. 

And the same thing can be true for some of the other categories, industry categories on which dollar stores tend to compete, like hardware and like office supplies and school supplies. Those are important anchor businesses for communities that people don’t want to lose. 

On the sort of social side of things, there are a number of problems and probably first and foremost is crime. Because they are so thinly staffed, dollar stores are easy targets for robberies. It’s very easy for someone to come in and just reach into the cash register, grab cash and leave. And communities complain about this all the time. I have literally hundreds of news articles that I’ve clipped about dollar store crime. 

They also have poor labor practices. They pay their workers less than the independently owned grocery stores that they’re threatening. They tend to promote workers to assistant manager relatively quickly, which means that they’re then exempt from overtime, and they make them work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They’ve been sued several times, both of the major chains, successfully by groups of workers or former workers for wage theft for exactly that. 

There are other things, too. One of the things that we have observed and a researcher actually at the University of Georgia in the Geography Department has reported on and written about is that they tend to target black and brown neighborhoods. Dollar General, for example, 79 percent of its stores tend to be located in majority minority neighborhoods. And we think this is a little bit parasitic. And we also think that they’re looking for places where the community is likely not to have as much influence at City Hall as somebody in another neighborhood. And we think that’s just despicable.

JJ: Well, if I could just bring you back to that economic impact for a second, because it’s not that they are able to deliver better things cheaper, just to spell that out. That’s not what they’re doing.

A More Perfect Union investigation found that Dollar General frequently charges more than its competitors for staple goods but “masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.”

KS: Correct. No, they’re selling similar products, but the packaging that they’ll sell them in tends to be smaller. And therefore, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, we find that the products are often actually more expensive for consumers to buy. It’s a practice called “shrinkflation.” There are a couple of other names that it goes by—”cheater sizes.”

JJ: So it’s not, well, they just build a better mousetrap. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not what’s going on.

KS: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you mention capitalism because in communities that are where a dollar store has been proposed to be built and the community kind of comes out and opposes it, the people who tend to support the idea of the dollar store coming in tend to say, well, that’s just capitalism. That’s just free market economics.

It isn’t. Free market economics are based on having a level playing field. And that’s why all of our major antitrust laws were developed a century ago, because we wanted for small businesses to be able to compete on the same playing field as bigger businesses. One of the things that dollar store chains often do is that they will go to their suppliers, their wholesalers, and say, we want you to offer this product to us, but not offer it to our competitors, do not offer it to grocery stores. Or we want you to make a special size for us of a package that no one else can get. And we can price it the way we want. 

Those are blatant violations of federal antitrust laws. And I think that on a federal level, we need to begin paying attention to that. And the same thing at the state level, while communities themselves are doing what they can to fight dollars for proliferation at the local level.

JJ: OK, I don’t shop at dollar stores. I’m just a taxpayer. Why should I care about the issue of dollar store proliferation as a taxpayer?

KS: Well, I think there are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons I would think as a taxpayer is that tax revenue that would normally accrue to the community, and wages that would normally accrue to the community, are now leaving the community, and they’re going to a corporate headquarters where they’re being either reinvested in corporate expansion, or they’re being distributed to shareholders or being used to pay off their investors. 

There’s an example that we cite in one of our reports about Haven, Kansas, which had a local grocery store that was there that was paying $75,000 a year in property taxes. So the city was getting that revenue. A dollar store came in, a Dollar General store came in, and within a couple of years, the grocery store couldn’t hold on anymore. The dollar store had eked away just enough of its sales that it couldn’t hold on. And so it closed. The dollar store was paying $60,000 a year in property tax. So the city right off the bat is losing $15,000 a year in property tax revenue that it had before. 

But not only that, as a concession to attract the dollar store, the city council had agreed to basically rebate half of the municipal utility taxes that the dollar store developer would have paid for two years. That was $36,000. So now all of a sudden the grocery store is gone and the city is losing $51,000 a year in property tax revenue. 

And that’s just an example of tax revenue. We’re not even talking about the wage differential and the fact that dollar stores typically only have one or two staff employed at a time, whereas a grocery store might have 30 or 40 people employed. And the dollar store, Dollar General, is at the rock bottom of the 66 largest corporations in terms of hourly wages. So the community is just losing right and left.

JJ: Right. Well, what happens when communities recognize that, and they resist these dollar stores? I know that the Institute tracks that as well.

KS: Dollar General tends to work with developers who build buildings for them that they then lease for 15 years, usually with three five-year expansion options. And the developer is going to try to minimize costs. And so the developer tends to look for inexpensive land, which tends to be land that is often zoned for agricultural use, or on a scenic byway, or in some kind of rural area, or maybe on the edge of a residential neighborhood. 

And to do that, they have to go to the city generally and request a zoning variance. And that’s where the battles tend to develop, is people come out and say, no, we want this area to remain zoned like it is, because there was a reason for that, that we wanted it zoned that way. And we don’t want to change that. I’ve tracked 140 communities now that have defeated dollar stores. And in 138 of those, all but two, they’ve been defeated based on the city denying a zoning variance request. 

The other two—it’s something pretty exciting that’s happened recently. In Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana—which is where Hammond and Ponchatoula is, if you know Louisiana—last spring, a developer came to the Planning Commission and submitted plans to build a Dollar General store. It was an unzoned parcel of land. There was no zoning, so he wasn’t requesting a zoning variance. He simply had to have his building plans approved. 

The Planning Commission turned him down. And they turned him down based on their police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community, which is a completely novel approach. We had not seen that happen before. The developer appealed that to the parish council. The parish council supported the Planning Commission. 

The developer then sued. And last September, the trial took place. And then in November, the judge—in a, you know, this is a pretty conservative part of the country—the judge ruled in favor of the parish and said that they were completely correct in using their police power to protect the health and safety of the community by denying that developer the right to build a dollar store there.

JJ: Wow.

KS: This is a kind of groundbreaking thing. There’s another community that we found, Newton County, Georgia, used essentially the same approach. So we’re getting to have now sort of a body of case law that provides a precedent for a community saying, wait a minute, forget, I mean, zoning is one thing, but these stores are unhealthy for our community. They’re not good for the economy. They’re not good for jobs. They’re not good for the environment. They’re not good for crime. And we’ve had enough.

JJ: Well, it sounds as though that community involvement relies a lot on information and on advance information. They have to know that this is in the planning process to know about the points that they could intervene, which is wonderful. But it also suggests, as I know the work does, that there could be interventions from a higher level, including from the federal level. What do you see as potentially useful that could happen there?

KS: Well, at the federal level, we would, of course, like to see stronger and more vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws that we already have on the books. The Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act are all laws that are there to prevent exactly what’s happening with dollar store proliferation. And states can also adopt those same laws at the state level to provide some protection there. And that may be, in some instances, easier than getting federal attention. 

States also are being pretty aggressive in looking at things like scanner errors, which you mentioned. In fact, the former attorney general of Ohio—well, first of all, the current attorney general of Ohio has investigated and fined Dollar General a million dollars for scanner violations. Basically, the price someone sees on the shelf is not the price they’re being charged by the scanner when they check out. The former attorney general of Ohio, a guy named Marc Dann, is now putting together a class action lawsuit against the dollar store chains for scanner errors, which he’s estimating Dollar General loan is making hundreds of millions of dollars annually in scanner errors because they’re so huge and they’re almost always in favor of the company and not the consumer. 

The adage is, “the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago.” And often communities don’t think about protecting themselves from this sort of proliferation, this kind of predatory business expansion until it’s too late. But for those who are seeing this happening around them in other communities and thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense to put some protection in place right away. 

And some of the things that communities are doing are things like what we call dispersal ordinances, which basically say you cannot build a new dollar store within X distance, two miles, five miles of an existing store so that we don’t have the market crowded with them. Or they’re putting in place ordinances like just happened in a town in Oregon that I saw that has put in place a formula business ordinance saying we want to have retail diversity in the community. We don’t want to have 10 identical pizza places. We don’t want to have five identical grocery stores. We want to have diversity. So therefore, we are fine with one dollar store, but not with five.

JJ: Well, finally, information seems key to all of this—information of the actual impacts of dollar stores and then about the possible levers of potential resistance. And that brings me back to news media and reporting. The report itself on the dollar store invasion got coverage, absolutely. But of course, the implications go well beyond covering the report itself as an event. What would you like to see finally more of or less of from news media on this set of issues?

Kennedy Smith: “I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while…. I don’t see much looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.”

KS: That’s a great question. I think I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while. I don’t see much on that. I don’t see much sort of looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome. 

I’d also like to see more news media tying this to threats to democracy, because if we have major corporations that are able to basically extract this kind of money, this vast volume of money from communities and make it difficult for independently owned businesses to compete, then we’ve changed what the nature of capitalism is. And we need to get back to the roots of what democracy is about. And that really is about having a level playing field for small businesses, for every American to basically have the opportunity to create a business enterprise and thrive and reinvest in their community. And that’s being taken away from us.

JJ: Well, we’ll end it there for now. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find a lot of work on dollar stores, along with much else on their site, ILSR.org. Kennedy Smith thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KS: Thank you so much, Janine.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

We feature a special broadcast marking the Juneteenth federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

The president's remarks were characterized as perhaps his most direct criticism of the Israeli military's conduct since it began its large-scale war on the Gaza Strip just over four months ago, following a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.

But critics argued that Biden's words will ring hollow as long as his administration continues to arm Israel's military unconditionally, oppose global efforts to enact a lasting cease-fire, and reject evidence that Israel is committing genocide. Since October 7, the U.S. State Department has twice bypassed Congress to send lethal weaponry to Israel and is working to gut lawmakers' oversight of foreign military financing for the country.

"It's maddening to hear him say stuff like this," wrote journalist Mehdi Hasan. "Now he says Israel is going 'over the top.' Before he said they were doing 'indiscriminate' bombing. But throughout it all, he arms them, funds them, defends them, enables them, and refuses to call for a cease-fire."

Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said that if Biden truly feels Israel has gone too far in its assault on the Gaza Strip, he should "do something about it."

"'Over the top' is how you might describe an action movie that was more violent than you were expecting, not an atrocity you've been backing to the hilt," Duss added.

Biden's press conference came as the Israel Defense Forces ramped up its bombardment of Rafah—where more than half of Gaza's population is currently living in overcrowded and increasingly horrific conditions—ahead of an expected ground invasion. Israeli airstrikes on the city, located near Gaza's border with Egypt, hit two houses on Thursday, killing and wounding multiple people.

John Kirby, spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told reporters Thursday that the Biden administration would not support an Israeli ground invasion of Rafah, which was previously deemed a "safe zone" for displaced Gazans.

"I think you all know more than a million Palestinians are sheltering in and around Rafah," Kirby said. "That's where they were told to go. There's a lot of displaced people there. And the Israeli military has a special obligation as they conduct operations there or anywhere else to make sure that they're factoring in protection for innocent civilian life."

"I could tell you that—absent any full consideration of protecting civilians at that scale in Gaza—military operations right now would be a disaster for those people, and it's not something that we would support," Kirby added.

But the White House has not publicly said there would be any consequences if Israel decides once again to ignore the administration's stated concerns and go ahead with the Rafah assault.

In late October, Biden administration officials privately urged Israeli leaders to rethink its plans for a full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip, but Israel launched the deadly invasion anyway—and U.S. support for the country's military did not waver.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate voted to begin debate on White House-backed legislation that would provide Israel with more than $10 billion in additional military aid as famine and disease spread across the Gaza Strip and the death toll grows.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) opposed advancing the legislation, warning in a statement Thursday evening that "so long as this bill contains $10 billion to enable [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's right-wing government to continue its horrific war against the Palestinian people, I will keep voting no."

"The taxpayers of the United States cannot continue to be complicit in this humanitarian disaster," said Sanders. "We should not provide another penny to allow Netanyahu to continue this incredibly destructive war."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Image: Jeffrey St. Clair.

“But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.”

– Albert Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine”

Kenneth Smith was executed by the state of Alabama for a contract killing. He was paid by a pastor to murder his wife. The state of Alabama paid an execution squad to strap Kenneth Smith to a death gurney, clamp a mask over his face, and suffocate him to death with nitrogen gas. Smith thrashed and convulsed for at least four minutes as the nitrogen squeezed the oxygen out of his lungs. What is the message here?

Nitrogen hypoxia was touted as an efficient and humane method of killing humans. Compared to what? The lynchings of 340 people that took place in Alabama between 1877 and 1943? The electric chair? Hanging? Firing squad? Lethal injection, which the state previously used to try to kill Smith and failed? It took Kenneth Smith at least 22 minutes to die, gasping for breath, his stomach heaving, vomiting into his gas mask. Is this the new definition of humane? Is 22 minutes to death a new measure of efficiency?

According to Alabama’s State Attorney General, Steve Marshall, it was a “textbook” case of execution. Who wrote the textbook, Dr. Mengele?  Marshall bragged about the execution as if Alabama had been the first state to land a man on Mars: “As of last night, nitrogen epoxy as a means of execution is no longer an untested method; it is a proven one.” Marshall sounded like a pitchman for an execution franchise.

Even though they managed, barely it seems, to kill Kenneth Smith,  the state still can’t find any doctors willing to supervise its lethal gassings and lend the killings medical legitimacy. They can’t even find a willing veterinarian.  Will Alabama state colleges and universities replace their sociology degrees with a BS in Death Penalty Administration? Will community colleges offer certificates in the proper application of Execution Technologies?

But did the execution of Kenneth Smith really go as smoothly as Marshall claimed? We were told that Smith would slip into unconsciousness almost immediately after the valves were opened and the nitrogen began to flow into his lungs. He didn’t. We were told that the execution would be painless. It wasn’t.  We were told it would all be over in minutes. It wasn’t.

It’s impossible to know the full details of what really happened to Kenneth Smith. How much agony he experienced, how long he struggled for breath, how long it took him to die. Why? Because the state of Alabama closed the curtain on the death chamber before Smith was pronounced dead. The handful of witnesses allowed in the execution viewing room weren’t able to witness his death, only the preamble of his killing. What is the state hiding behind its fatal curtain? An affinity for torture?

How long did it take Kenneth Smith to die? We don’t know for sure. At least 22 minutes. But perhaps as long as 28 minutes. A long time. But perhaps that’s the kind of death Alabama wants. Given the blood-thirsty statements of Governor Kay Ivey and AG Marshall, you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

None of the witnesses were allowed cellphones, cameras, tape recorders, notebooks, pens or pencils in the theater of death. The witnesses had to memorialize the killings in their minds. Here’s what Matt Roney of the Montgomery Advertiser saw: “Smith writhed and convulsed on the gurney. He appeared to be fully conscious when the gas began to flow. He took deep breaths, his body shaking violently with his eyes rolling in the back of his head…Smith clenched his fists, his legs shook under the tightly tucked-in white sheet that covered him from his neck down. He seemed to be gasping for air.”

Smith’s spiritual adviser Jeff Hood stood next to Smith during the execution. Here’s how Hood described the state killing to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: “What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life. We saw minutes of someone heaving back and forth. We saw spit. We saw all sorts of stuff from his mouth develop on the mask. We saw this mask tied to the gurney and him ripping his head forward over and over and over again. And we also saw correction officials in the room who were visibly surprised at how bad this thing went.”

The US Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. But Kenneth Smith’s execution proves these words have lost all meaning. By a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allowed Alabama to kill Smith. But the cowardly court couldn’t even be bothered to put their reasoning in writing as to why an experimental method of execution didn’t qualify as “unusual” and how a second attempt to kill a man wasn’t considered “cruel.” You can see why these usually garrulous jurists remained mute. Their logic would have been as tortured as the execution itself.

Kenneth Smith was put to death for a murder for hire that took place in 1988. What was gained by his execution? Was he a threat to kill again? By all accounts, he’d been a model prisoner for 35 years.

Kenneth Smith was put to death even though the person who subcontracted him to do the killing, Billy Gray Williams, was sentenced to life without parole.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though a jury recommended by an 11-1 vote he receive a life sentence. This recommendation was overruled by the judge in the case, who unilaterally imposed a sentence of death.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the State of Alabama has since banned judicial overrides of jury recommendations in death penalty cases.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the State of Alabama had previously tried to kill him by injecting him with a lethal cocktail of drugs but botched the execution.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the method used to kill him was experimental and had been banned by veterinarians for use on mammals.

Kenneth Smith was put to death, even though the family of his victim pleaded for his life.

Does Kenneth Smith’s execution make anyone feel safer? Thirty-five years after the crime does it make anyone feel like “justice” was done, that a “message” had been sent? If so, what kind of message?

Does killing Kenneth Smith act as a deterrent to potential murderers? Since the moratorium on the death penalty was lifted by the US Supreme Court in 1976, Alabama has executed 76 people, the seventh most of any state in the Union. Yet Alabama’s homicide rate is the fourth highest in the US. Alabama and Oregon have roughly the same population. There were 721 homicides in Alabama last year and only 204 in Oregon. Oregon placed a moratorium on executions in 2011 and has only executed 2 people since 1976. One might argue that the death penalty actually increases homicide rates. Killing begets killing.

So why was Kenneth Smith executed?

The family of Elizabeth Sennett can’t tell you.

Constitutional scholars can’t tell you.

The Catholic Church can’t tell you.

The people who witnessed his death can’t tell you.

His spiritual advisor can’t tell you.

The Supreme Court won’t tell you.

But the State of Alabama will.

Kenneth Smith was executed to advertise that the State of Alabama could kill. It’s as simple and gruesome as that. Not kill efficiently or humanely (as if executions could ever qualify as such). But kill. If its bumbling death squad couldn’t find a vein to poison before, they could locate his lungs this time around. If they couldn’t find a doctor to administer lethal drugs before, they now found people willing to strap a mask around his face, turn on the gas and watch him die, gasping and writhing, for as long as it took without any moral hesitation. The state had found a new way to kill humans and the humans willing to do the job–for a price.

Who benefits? Not the people of Alabama. Not the state’s already strapped budget, which expended millions to put him to death. Only the state’s pitiless politicians, a group so monstrous they are willing to use human sacrifice as a campaign theme. 

The State of Alabama has become the very thing it claimed to be punishing: a contract killer.

The post Execution as Advertisement: Killing Kenneth Smith appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Smith was convicted in 1989 for murdering Elizabeth Sennett, the wife of a preacher’s wife, in a murder-for-hire killing.  His life, taken in turn, succumbed to a tawdry experiment of penological vice.  When state authorities dabble with various methods of death, they can never be anything but cruel.  Sometimes, these methods might even be unusual.

Defenders of capital punishment take refuge behind the words of the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which has often functioned as a form of subversive encouragement to murderous authorities. While the amendment famously states that no cruel or unusual punishments are to be inflicted, the onus is then on officialdom to come up with a form of punishment that is not cruel, nor unusual.  And how often has death by firing squad, lethal injection, or swift decapitation been defended on those very grounds?

Nitrogen hypoxia has received much press, much of it ghoulish.  In December 2023, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) released its final report into the deaths of six poultry plant workers.  All had been victims of nitrogen asphyxiation.  Investigators found that the Foundation Food Group facility in Gainesville, Georgia was staffed by workers inadequately informed, trained or equipped to deal with deadly leaks.  Such concerns were also expressed about staff at the Atmore correctional facility.  To date, the US lacks a national standard on the managing, storing, use and handling of such cryogenic asphyxiants as liquid nitrogen.

The degrading nature of the Smith execution was also highlighted by the fact that many US veterinarians would not even stoop to using nitrogen in euthanising animals.  In 2020, the American Veterinary Medical Association stated in its euthanasia guidelines that using nitrogen was problematic for mammal species.  Such gas would also have to be “supplied in a precisely regulated and purified form without contaminants or adulterants”.

UN experts, including Morris Tidball-Binz, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions and Alice Jill Edwards, Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, also warned that nitrogen asphyxiation was “an untested method of execution which may subject [Smith] to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or even torture.”

None of these concerns has dissuaded lawmakers hunting for other methods of killing convicts.  Oklahoma (2015) was the first state to permit prison staff to use nitrogen gas.  Mississippi (2017) and Alabama (2018), followed.  Much of this is being propelled by crude market considerations.  The drugs used in lethal injections are becoming harder to obtain, be they because of shortages or restrictions placed on their use in executions by pharmaceutical companies.

With Alabama being the first to apply the measure, a dark interest in the minutiae of killing was taken. The state’s protocol on how the gas would be employed came under withering scrutiny.  With nitrogen gas being administered through a mask, intruding oxygen might risk triggering a stroke, creating a permanent vegetative state, or cause excruciating suffocation.  Depriving a person of oxygen could also lead to vomiting, thereby choking the victim.

With such complications in the offing, blissful, or wilful ignorance reigned among correction officials and lawmakers.  For those involved in a state’s killing machinery, be they robed judges, hungry prosecutors, or the executioners themselves, this remains a standard response.  Seedy justifications are offered: just retribution, deterrence, the confusion of novelty with humane policy.  Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour was keen to emphasise the latter point with his absurd remark that his state had “adopted the most painless and humane method of execution known to man.”

Alabama officials had submitted in a court filing that they expected Smith to lose consciousness within a matter of seconds and expire in a matter of minutes.  “What we saw,” stated Smith’s spiritual adviser, Reverend Jeff Hood, “was minutes of someone struggling for their life.”

In witnessing such executions, those present commune and connive in the same scene.  They become vicarious participants, many the unintended apologists for a spectacle featuring murder.  On hand were journalists to feed on the macabre display of Smith’s demise.  “I’ve been to four previous executions,” the insatiable Alabama journalist Lee Hedgepeth told the BBC’s Newsday program, “and I’ve never seen a condemned inmate thrash in the way that Kenneth Smith reacted to the nitrogen gas.”  The session saw Smith gasping “for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes in total.”

The stern face of officialdom was supplied by John Hamm, Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner.  For Hamm, all that was aberrant about the scene could be rationalised, reasoned, and explained.  Smith understandably held his breath as long as he could.  His movements had been involuntary; he showed expected symptoms from inhaling nitrogen gas.  He had lost consciousness quickly.  “He struggled against the restraints a little bit but it’s an involuntary movement and some agonal breathing.  So that was all expected.”

A more candid, vengeful note was struck by the state’s Attorney General, Steve Marshall.  “Tonight, Kenneth Smith was put to death for the heinous act he committed over 35 years ago: the murder-for-hire slaying of Elizabeth Sennett, an innocent woman who was by all accounts a godly wife, a loving mother and grandmother, and a beloved pillar of her community.”  Smith’s calculated death, crudely experimental and economically determined, was no less heinous, a vulgar rationalisation of cold intent, the exemplar of state cruelty.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

So far this year, U.S. spending on Israel, typically the largest annual recipient of U.S. military aid, has been outstripped by military aid to Ukraine, though that balance could begin to change as President Biden plans to ask Congress to approve emergency funding to support Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip following Saturday’s attack by Hamas militants. For more on U.S. policy in Ukraine and Israel, we host a discussion with CodePink’s Medea Benjamin and the Ukraine Solidarity Network’s Barbara Smith. Benjamin urges diplomacy and deescalation, arguing that “we have to get off this treadmill of military madness that only benefits the weapons companies and brings horror, suffering, death, destruction,” while Smith, a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, says that calls for immediate ceasefire are idealistic. “This is an invasion by an imperial power, namely Russia, and I stand with the people of Ukraine,” she states.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

It’s an interesting starting point. Questions or concerns that you bring up—one being absence and the other connection. I’m paraphrasing but I am thinking about emotional connection. There is an emotional experience and an emotional intelligence that can be a way to bring people back to the center. It’s a gross generalization, but in art we talk about an object, which is distant and separate. Then there are all of these movements or genres that are all about emptying out—emotive and [looking at the] facts of what it means to be a human being. I think that’s a difficult concept for me to think about because that is what the world is. How do you talk about the world without actually locating us in something that is felt first? It doesn’t have to be the only thing, and it isn’t the end of the conversation, but I do think it’s the foundation of the conversation that I’m interested in having. I can talk around that.

Sable Elyse Smith, BARRICADE, 2023, powder coated aluminum, 41 7/8 x 53 x 53 inches (106.4 x 134.6 x 134.6 cm)

Another thing you point out, which is actually really important to me, is how I’m focused on observing everyday objects or what some people might classify as inconspicuous. How I’ve come to think about and know art and artists is not in the intellectual or academic way that we’ve become familiar with in the art world, but through all the people around me that were doing something creative. They were putting two objects or ingredients together to create joy, excitement, help someone in their process, bridge a gap or to find closure is through objects and gestures. This has always been the most important art for me, and those [who engage in this type of practice] are the most important artists even today. I’ve grown to like some [contemporary] artists, but there are so many different contexts or anchors for conversation.

How has writing played a role in your thought processes?

I tend to be a very quiet person and am very interior, so early on, writing was usually my main outlet and something very important to me. It requires keen observation and attention to detail. If we think about some of the greatest fiction writers, when they are describing an environment that is usually relational between humans, through the objects they are surrounded by, the colors, the humidity in the air. These are the ways that we can get to something so complex, or heartbreaking, or difficult to articulate and find language around. So my practice has always felt intuitive and a natural to look and research what is happening in spaces. Because that is what I am intuitively drawn to, I start to look at that framework more rigorously.

That is beautiful and something that I’ve immediately felt with your sculptures. You aren’t necessarily changing the source (table, chair, etc.), but rather giving it a new otherworldly, geometric form. How did you arrive at the shapes you make in your sculptures?

It’s nice that you bring up the question of use and value. I try to provide a broader framework for things that I’m interested in. Often those things get reduced to the thing that feels…I don’t know, the most salacious or glaring —prison, power, violence and violences. I’m not actually interested in creating an image, caricature, charge or to recreate a picture of violence. By taking an object, which for all intense purposes is a seat and a table, that has a capacity to exist, that should exist, but this specific seat and table were designed for one specific environment, a prison visiting room. I think of its use-value which is very different for us, the “free” and how we experience the necessity of this furniture object. Its use is a violent act. There is violence implicit in the existence of it in that context and shape around it but that is not something that a general audience or general population would look at as violent or even be able to wrap their heads around.

Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 140, 2023, screen printing ink, oil pastel, and oil stick on paper, framed dimensions: 63 1/4 x 53 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (160.7 x 135.9 x 6.4 cm)

I’ve had many different types of conversations with people and still there can be a gap in comprehension. It’s a difficult reality to process. This is also something I’m interested in and why it felt kind of natural and immediate to think about the prison visiting room space. So many things that happen there—images, symbols, narratives. There are a million possibilities that I could make about that space. The objects that I present are legible but also have an illegibility. There’s a time-scale for them to come into focus. Thinking about that kind of time, the slowness of reading an object, this was inherent in how I thought about how I wanted to manipulate it or why to present it in the first place.

In all the series of works or mediums I’ve used thus far, I think the thing that is most interesting is to find something that already exists and speaks to a structure or system that we are already living in but is difficult to name or has a form of illegibility and find a way to shift that context or embed tension in it so that even if you aren’t able to exactly name why something doesn’t feel right, you know it is off, I think about how to create that through space and object.

You have a way to bring objects into a space devoid of their original intention or people who would normally be around them. The tension could be seen as a dialogue between negative and positive [space] and a question of which is which? There is value to both, the people who are experiencing this space and their loved ones, and then the objects themselves have value as they serve as a ground and resting space for these bodies.

The only function, or reason they exist is to be occupied, and in order to be occupied, there needs to be more people there, so what is that equation?

On a personal note, I’ve visited the women’s prison at Rikers Island on numerous occasions to speak. Those experiences, having gates close behind me the further into the venue I go, has helped me to think about your work in a different way. And it’s powerful to think of that space [the prison, the process of incarceration] to be something that needs to constantly be filled. Maybe now you can talk more about the specifics of what will be in the Regen Projects show.

For my solo exhibition at Regen Projects in LA, as far as the sculptures from this particular series, there are two. They are a form that I’ve used before but in a new color-way. It’s the seat tops and they are configured like jacks, the children’s counting game, or that’s what they sort of resemble and each color is the inverse of each other. Also in the room they will be exhibited in, there is a striped wallpaper that is the same tones of the sculptures which creates a disorientation and dizzying effect. It brings me back to you talking about the positive and negative space whereas the positive and negative are the inverse. That’s one thing that I was playing with in the configuration of Fair Ground as a riff on thinking about art and the use-value of objects and the economic and intellectual value that is placed on art objects. If i’m talking about value there are all these different scales and registers; there is the economic system of furniture for prison, there is an intellectual value now on this object for people entering the art space which is another kind of infrastructure, and there is value in the setting. There is an interplay and that is the pattern in shape of the object and color-way used in the backdrop of these painted walls, do too.

Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 129, 2023, screen printing ink, oil pastel, and oil stick on paper, framed dimensions, each: 63 3/4 x 53 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (161.9 x 135.9 x 6.4 cm)

The first thing that comes to mind for me is camouflage, blending in but also aware of its dimensions.

Yes, that is definitely the intention. And thinking about it as a reference point Op Art too optical illusions that allow things to be concealed and revealed.

There is a specific conceptual quality to the Coloring Book works and an aesthetic difference from your sculpture. As an artist, would you say you are tapping into two parts of yourself to make these?

That’s a good question. I would say that I don’t think I’m in two different places in my brain. I feel like even though I am an introvert, my mind is always doing a hundred things at once. It feels very natural as a way of processing, separate from being an artist, as a person. If something happens I need to look at it from all these different vantage points to gather information and then know how to respond. I’m looking at the world and trying to ask these questions, but I need to process and translate it. In order for me to see something it almost has to be exhaustive, one could say a maximalist approach. Also, working across all of these different materials and series, the system or really any kind of engine of oppression, violence, finance, whatever it is, is persistent and omnipresent. A lot of the works have these numbered naming conventions (editions) and it’s as if to say, Yes this is still happening. This is not a closed conversation or something that we get and then it’s over. It repeats itself every single day.

Concerning physically making the work, it’s the same brain, but I could say embodied in different ways. There are different approaches and different energies that go into the work.

Sable Elyse Smith, Coloring Book 139, 2023, screen printing ink, oil pastel, and oil stick on paper, framed dimensions: 63 1/4 x 53 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches (160.7 x 135.9 x 6.4 cm)

When you come up with the color designs for these paintings, do you work with children?

This series has evolved in so many different directions. For the Regen show there will be a new page that I hadn’t used before. When I first started making these works they were based off of a coloring book that I found, that a child had used. In the beginning I was fixated in thinking about mark-making as a layer that makes you focus on what is the actual content of the material? There is a frenetic freeness of a child’s scrawl. As I’ve made more and more people have seen them, there is space to redact some of the content. The narrative might be present and more established but there are other things that I might focus on and draw out. This could be color and pattern, didactic and binary ideas around power, people, gender or race that’s implied. There is a different type of aesthetic sensibility that is necessary for them. The shadow reference for this show specifically is carnival—the traveling circus, sights of amusement. This show has motifs that point to and reference the absurdity, spectacle, and caricature of those spaces.

When did you find that you truly started to engage your background and experiences in an artistic way?

I feel like, always. Even before I started making art or became an artist I had a writing practice. You can’t escape your life. You can’t escape your history. You can’t escape your context. Even if you are talking about something you weren’t directly effected by, what you have been effected by defines and determines how you respond to life. They can’t be unlinked, and I embrace that.

Sable Elyse Smith, 9855 Days, 2023, digital c-print, suede, artist frame, framed dimensions: 49 x 41 x 2 inches (124.5 x 104.1 x 5.1 cm)

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Katy Diamond Hamer.

“Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said in an article on the Marion Record’s website. “But we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

The police action raised concerns among press freedom groups — including CPJ – and national news organizations about the possible violation of federal law limiting local law enforcement’s ability to search newsrooms.

In a letter sent to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody on Sunday, attorneys for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that, “under any circumstances, the raid and seizure appeared overbroad and unduly intrusive.” The letter was signed by CPJ along with more than 30 media outlets.

The use of search warrants against journalists remains rare in the United States, according to statistics maintained by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a CPJ partner. In 2019, San Francisco law enforcement and federal agents seized unreported source material from the home office of freelance video reporter Brian Carmody, who eventually won a settlement against the FBI.

Police Chief Cody told The Associated Press via email that, while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.” The report said that Cody did not provide further information about what the wrongdoing was.

Marion County police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emails and phone calls requesting comment.

To better understand the local context of the raid, CPJ spoke by phone with Sherman Smith, the editor in chief of the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news website focused on Kansas politics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why do you think that law enforcement used this dragnet, and highly questionable, approach? Isn’t there a state shield law in Kansas?

We really need the court to release the affidavit that supports the search warrant to get more clarity about why they thought this was necessary.

The exception to Kansas’ state shield law is only in matters of national security, and I think we can all agree that this does not rise to that level.

From the police statement on their Facebook page, they believed that this conduct [of the Marion County Record] amounted to identity theft and justified the raid. And I think the media everywhere would simply say they are wrong. If there were other motivations [they] are not exactly clear to me right now.

This is a small town of about 2,000 people, and so there is rampant potential for conflicts of interest with everybody involved. There’s a lot of small-town drama that we haven’t all clearly unpacked yet. Hopefully the affidavit will shine a light on that.

What message does this send to journalists working in Kansas?

I think it has this chilling effect on journalists in Kansas. If law enforcement is able to get away with this– and they appear now to have the support of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation– that means there’s open season on journalists everywhere in Kansas,

Police and prosecutors always want to know, who’s giving us [journalists] information? What do we know? How did we know it? And the ability of police to obtain our unreported information, and to identify our sources would prohibit us from doing our job; it would stop the flow of information; it would be a direct attack on democracy. And that’s why we’re all very interested in what happens here.

How has this event affected your thinking about protecting the Kansas Reflector’s unreported source material?

We’re just starting to have those conversations. One of the things that the raid underscores here is the importance of being able to back up information on the cloud in a way that we can continue to access it, if personal devices are taken.

We have to take great precautions to protect our sources, how we store the information on our personal devices and anywhere else.

We are eager for the legal outcome here, and [are hopeful that] it will send a clear signal to law enforcement that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

The first time we spoke in January 2022, it was about how Kansas lawmakers barred media from the Senate floor, stymieing newsgathering. Do you think that kind of state-level activity creates a permission structure for local law enforcement to infringe upon freedom of the press?

It shows that we can’t take our freedoms for granted. We have to constantly fight to preserve them. Part of this is the need to educate people about what we do, and why we do it, and the value that we, as journalists, bring.

There is a general misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, by the public about who we [journalists] are and what we do. And so we have to do a better job of going out and telling our story and making it clear that we [journalists] are people who are in these communities that are gathering information, vetting that information, trying to hold powerful people accountable, and trying to get information out that somebody doesn’t want to have disclosed. That this kind of work is at the heart of so much of what we do.

When we see an action like what happened in Marion County. You know, it’s very clearly a direct attack on newspapers saying things that [powerful people] don’t want the public to hear. 

What are the key takeaways for people outside of Kansas to understand about what’s happening in Marion County right now?

It’s important to push back on the narrative that police have put out there, which is that no reporter is above the law. The issue is not about a reporter being above the law, everybody understands that nobody’s above the law.

The question is whether police can act outside the law in this way and get away with it. What would the repercussions be?

I think there’s a lot still to understand about, for instance, why a judge would sign this in the first place, and also understanding the qualifications for a magistrate judge in Kansas. In this case, [the judge] is a licensed attorney, but under Kansas law, it doesn’t have to be. And so I think, in Kansas, and perhaps elsewhere, we should be looking at, you know, who is qualified to sign off on a search warrant? And are they really doing more than simply rubber stamping them?

Usually when there are these kinds of attacks on journalists, law enforcement try to pick off somebody who is a freelancer, or maybe a contributor of some kind, but not a full time employee for a news organization. And this case is a bit of an outlier: it’s a raid on [an] entire news organization that’s been in operation since the post-Civil War era. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen.

“Our first priority is to be able to publish next week,” Meyer said in an article on the Marion Record’s website. “But we also want to make sure no other news organization is ever exposed to the Gestapo tactics we witnessed today. We will be seeking the maximum sanctions possible under law.”

The police action raised concerns among press freedom groups — including CPJ – and national news organizations about the possible violation of federal law limiting local law enforcement’s ability to search newsrooms.

In a letter sent to Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody on Sunday, attorneys for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press noted that, “under any circumstances, the raid and seizure appeared overbroad and unduly intrusive.” The letter was signed by CPJ along with more than 30 media outlets.

The use of search warrants against journalists remains rare in the United States, according to statistics maintained by the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a CPJ partner. In 2019, San Francisco law enforcement and federal agents seized unreported source material from the home office of freelance video reporter Brian Carmody, who eventually won a settlement against the FBI.

Police Chief Cody told The Associated Press via email that, while federal law usually requires a subpoena — not just a search warrant — to raid a newsroom, there is an exception “when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.” The report said that Cody did not provide further information about what the wrongdoing was.

Marion County police and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to CPJ’s emails and phone calls requesting comment.

To better understand the local context of the raid, CPJ spoke by phone with Sherman Smith, the editor in chief of the Kansas Reflector, a non-profit news website focused on Kansas politics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why do you think that law enforcement used this dragnet, and highly questionable, approach? Isn’t there a state shield law in Kansas?

We really need the court to release the affidavit that supports the search warrant to get more clarity about why they thought this was necessary.

The exception to Kansas’ state shield law is only in matters of national security, and I think we can all agree that this does not rise to that level.

From the police statement on their Facebook page, they believed that this conduct [of the Marion County Record] amounted to identity theft and justified the raid. And I think the media everywhere would simply say they are wrong. If there were other motivations [they] are not exactly clear to me right now.

This is a small town of about 2,000 people, and so there is rampant potential for conflicts of interest with everybody involved. There’s a lot of small-town drama that we haven’t all clearly unpacked yet. Hopefully the affidavit will shine a light on that.

What message does this send to journalists working in Kansas?

I think it has this chilling effect on journalists in Kansas. If law enforcement is able to get away with this– and they appear now to have the support of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation– that means there’s open season on journalists everywhere in Kansas,

Police and prosecutors always want to know, who’s giving us [journalists] information? What do we know? How did we know it? And the ability of police to obtain our unreported information, and to identify our sources would prohibit us from doing our job; it would stop the flow of information; it would be a direct attack on democracy. And that’s why we’re all very interested in what happens here.

How has this event affected your thinking about protecting the Kansas Reflector’s unreported source material?

We’re just starting to have those conversations. One of the things that the raid underscores here is the importance of being able to back up information on the cloud in a way that we can continue to access it, if personal devices are taken.

We have to take great precautions to protect our sources, how we store the information on our personal devices and anywhere else.

We are eager for the legal outcome here, and [are hopeful that] it will send a clear signal to law enforcement that this kind of behavior cannot be tolerated.

The first time we spoke in January 2022, it was about how Kansas lawmakers barred media from the Senate floor, stymieing newsgathering. Do you think that kind of state-level activity creates a permission structure for local law enforcement to infringe upon freedom of the press?

It shows that we can’t take our freedoms for granted. We have to constantly fight to preserve them. Part of this is the need to educate people about what we do, and why we do it, and the value that we, as journalists, bring.

There is a general misunderstanding, or lack of understanding, by the public about who we [journalists] are and what we do. And so we have to do a better job of going out and telling our story and making it clear that we [journalists] are people who are in these communities that are gathering information, vetting that information, trying to hold powerful people accountable, and trying to get information out that somebody doesn’t want to have disclosed. That this kind of work is at the heart of so much of what we do.

When we see an action like what happened in Marion County. You know, it’s very clearly a direct attack on newspapers saying things that [powerful people] don’t want the public to hear. 

What are the key takeaways for people outside of Kansas to understand about what’s happening in Marion County right now?

It’s important to push back on the narrative that police have put out there, which is that no reporter is above the law. The issue is not about a reporter being above the law, everybody understands that nobody’s above the law.

The question is whether police can act outside the law in this way and get away with it. What would the repercussions be?

I think there’s a lot still to understand about, for instance, why a judge would sign this in the first place, and also understanding the qualifications for a magistrate judge in Kansas. In this case, [the judge] is a licensed attorney, but under Kansas law, it doesn’t have to be. And so I think, in Kansas, and perhaps elsewhere, we should be looking at, you know, who is qualified to sign off on a search warrant? And are they really doing more than simply rubber stamping them?

Usually when there are these kinds of attacks on journalists, law enforcement try to pick off somebody who is a freelancer, or maybe a contributor of some kind, but not a full time employee for a news organization. And this case is a bit of an outlier: it’s a raid on [an] entire news organization that’s been in operation since the post-Civil War era. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen.

We feature a special broadcast on the newly created Juneteenth federal holiday commemorating the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

We feature a special broadcast on the newly created Juneteenth federal holiday commemorating the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We begin with our 2021 interview with historian Clint Smith, originally aired a day after President Biden signed legislation to make Juneteenth the first new federal holiday since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Smith is the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America. “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both/andedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

The Coronation of King Charles III was yet another instance of that complex in action. It was a spectacle, redolent of ancient ceremony, aged ritual, punctuated by the monarch’s statements of “I do”.

While this delighted a goodly number of punters, the whole affair also presented Republic and others of like mind to avail themselves of the chance to protest. Republic is one of the key groups attempting to stir the waters of change, running petitions, arranging protests and selling merchandise for the cause. On this occasion, the group was promising some of the biggest protests against the monarchy, with demonstrators sporting “Not my King” placards.

Unfortunately for the protesters, and for the right to assemble in general, the UK Parliament made sure to pass laws for that precise eventuality. Nothing would be left to chance. Security Minister, Tom Tugendhat, explained away the coincidental nature of the Public Order Act 2023 and it coming into effect just days before the Coronation. “We’re not just thinking of our own security but the security of heads of states, and we’re dealing with protest groups who have nothing to do with the UK but to do with foreign leaders visiting the UK.”

The 2023 statute builds on measures that were already used against anti-monarchy protests following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. As human rights legal academic David Mead noted at the time, the right to protest peacefully is protected in domestic law, while free expression is also protected by the European Convention on Human Rights via the Human Rights Act. But this did not prevent the police from making adventurous use of various countering provisions, though it was not clear what they were. Attention was paid to the possible use of section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, public nuisance, or arrest to prevent a breach of the peace.

Evidently, the Tory government did not feel these measures adequate in their severity. The 2023 Act specifically outlines such offences as “locking on” and “being equipped for locking on”, in addition to expanding stop and search powers. Police making use of such powers may, provided they are of or above the rank of inspector, authorise stop and search without the need for suspicion.

The locking on offence covers instances where a people “attach themselves to another person, to an object or to land”, do the same with other people, and “attach an object to another object or to land”. Such acts must also cause, or be capable of causing, serious disruption to two or more individuals or an organisation in a place other than a dwelling, and be accompanied with the requisite intent.

As for the offence of being equipped for locking on, a person is in breach “if they have an object with them in a place other than a dwelling with an intention that it may be used in the course of or in connection with the commission by any person of an offence under section 1(1) (offence of locking on).”

The government would have also delighted in the High Court’s decision to reverse a District Judge’s ruling to acquit a protester for allegedly breaching a police direction made under the Public Order Act 1986. In 2020, the protester in question sat down in Parliament Street, adjacent to Parliament Square. According to the police, the protest had stay within the confines of Parliament Square.

The decision, handed down the same week the new Public Order Act received Royal assent, held that the judge applied the wrong test in assuming that a defendant’s conviction had to be proportionate relative with their rights to free expression and assembly. It was a remarkable decision, and abysmal in the context of assembly and free expression.

In a statement from Commander Karen Findlay of the London Metropolitan Police, a fat finger of accusation was pointed at the Coronation protestors. There had “been a significant police operation after we received information protestors were determined to disrupt the Coronation procession.” It was “targeted at those we believed were intent on taking this action. It was not our intention to prevent protest”.

All in all, 64 arrests were made on May 6. Of these, 52 “related to concerns people were going to disrupt the event, and arrests included to prevent a breach of the peace and conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” Eight arrests were also “made for other offences, including possession of an offensive weapon, drugs offences, and breaching a sexual harm prevention order.”

In the arrest count were six demonstrators from the Republic campaign group, suspected of having items among their placards that “could be used as lock on devices.” The Met investigation that followed proved otherwise. “Those arrested stated the items would be used to secure their placards, and the investigation has been unable to prove intent to use them to lock on and disrupt the event.” There was “regret that those six people arrested were unable to join the wider group of protesters in Trafalgar Square and elsewhere on the procession route.”

One of the arrestees, Republic head Graham Smith, subsequently revealed that three embarrassed officers, one with the rank of chief inspector, personally apologised to him and handed “the straps [for the placards] back to me.”

Such actions did little to douse the fire. “This,” fumed Smith, “has been a disgraceful episode and we will be speaking to lawyers about taking legal action. I also expect a full inquiry into why they repeatedly lied to us and who authorised the arrests.” The newly crowned King will be hoping that interest in the matter will be quick to die down. But even the attractive glossiness of pageantry won’t last.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Deconstructed.

"Of the $234.6 billion total capital expenditure for the LNG export terminals built in the last decade, loans from international public finance institutions made up at least 24% of the total ($55.2 billion)," the report explains. "On top of this, these institutions provided $22.4 billion in equity investments and loan guarantees to insure against potential losses for other financiers."

The 17 completed projects included in the analysis have locked 928 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) each year, comparable to "the annual emissions of 423 coal-fired power plants, nearly two times the annual emissions of Canada, or over three times the annual emissions of France."

OCI's briefing warns that another dozen projects expected to be completed by 2026 would generate an additional 654 megatonnes of yearly planet-heating pollution, or about the annual emissions of Germany—as climate scientists and energy experts emphasize the need to swiftly end the world's fossil fuel era.

"These shocking figures show that laggard countries need to catch up with leading governments and urgently change course to stop pumping taxpayers' money into gas projects that are wrecking our climate, leave the energy crisis unsolved, and will end up as stranded assets."

"These shocking figures show that laggard countries need to catch up with leading governments and urgently change course to stop pumping taxpayers' money into gas projects that are wrecking our climate, leave the energy crisis unsolved, and will end up as stranded assets," asserted OCI public finance strategist Adam McGibbon.

At $39.7 billion, Japan leads the world in public financing for LNG export capacity 2012-26, followed by China ($25.4 billion) and the United States ($15.5 billion). Rounding out the top 10 "worst offenders" are South Korea, Russia, Italy, Germany, France, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

During the COP26 climate summit in Scotland two years ago, the United States, Italy, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands were among the 39 countries and institutions that signed the Glasgow Statement, agreeing to cut off financing for new international fossil fuel projects by the end of last year and instead invest in clean energy.

Japan initially held out, but under pressure from its fellow Group of Seven countries, ultimately agreed to the pledge last May. However, in July, at the urging of Germany and Italy, the G7 watered down its members' commitments specifically on gas.

With Japan set to host a G7 summit in Hiroshima next month, the nation's "leadership in the expansion of LNG development is the exact opposite of what we need," OCI campaigner Makiko Arima declared Wednesday. "Japan needs to take last year's G7 commitment to end public finance for fossil fuels seriously and stop funding gas projects."

"There is no time for so-called transition fuels, when fossil fuel dependency is exacerbating the climate and energy crises, and fossil fuel projects are harming communities and the environment," Arima added. "G7 countries need to do much more than make climate commitments that they break."

While the United States, Australia, and Russia top the list of counties, by emissions, where publicly financed LNG products were built in the past decade or are now underway, they are followed by nations that aren't the "worse offenders" in terms of funding: Mozambique, Canada, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico.

As Common Dreams has reported, civil society groups across Africa have argued in recent months that "rather than doubling down on the obsolete and dirty energy systems," the African Union must "move away from harmful fossil fuels towards a transformed energy system that is clean, renewable, democratic, and actually serves its peoples."

Anabela Lemos, director of Justica Ambiental!/Friends of the Earth Mozambique, echoed that argument Wednesday.

While Global North nations, "the culprits creating the climate crisis, benefit from this gas," it is the Global South "who will suffer," Lemos stressed, noting that "Mozambique has been hit by four cyclones within three years that have displaced over 1 million people."

"The gas industry in Mozambique is devastating the country's climate, people, environment, and economy," she said. "Even though gas has been produced in Mozambique for decades, still only 30% of people have electricity access, and in Inhambane Province, where Sasol has been extracting gas for 20 years, displaced communities have seen no benefits."

"Northern governments and their companies involved in the Mozambique LNG Project in Cabo Delgado Province are complicit in forcing the already debt-ridden country into a fossil fuel lock-in, and pushing people into further poverty, by taking away their livelihoods and fueling a war that has created 1 million refugees," Lemos added.

Given the impacts of export terminals on both the climate and the communities around such facilities, OCI's report concludes with recommendations that include ending domestic subsidies and permits for fossil fuel development, scaling up finance for clean energy, and providing debt cancellation, climate finance, and loss and damage support for the Global South.

"To meet their climate obligations, governments should stop funding LNG expansion," said McGibbon. "In addition, those countries that have not already done so should join the Glasgow Statement initiative to show they are serious about solving the climate and energy security crises. Anything less is just hot air."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Ms. Rawlins Smith brings more than a decade of experience in fund development, securing significant public and private philanthropic dollars to resource organizations that drive transformative social change. 

As a fundraising specialist, Ms. Rawlins Smith has supported some of New York’s most impactful education and community-based initiatives. Prior to joining the Innocence Project, Ms. Rawlins Smith served as Chief Development Officer at Partnership with Children, an organization devoted to providing New York’s most vulnerable children with the resources they need to thrive in school and beyond. While there, she led the critical growth of private fundraising to support school-based mental health initiatives. In addition, she previously served as Senior Director of Development at All Our Kin, overseeing a broad portfolio of philanthropic, public, and corporate funding in support of high-quality family child care programming. Ms. Rawlins Smith also served as Director of Institutional Giving at the Harlem Children’s Zone, one of New York City’s most dynamic community-based initiatives, supporting a broad range of early education, K-12, post-secondary, and family-based programs.

“We are thrilled that Jessica will serve as Innocence Project’s new Chief Development Officer,” said Innocence Project Executive Director Christina Swarns. “Her proven track record of bolstering mission-driven organizations like ours makes her exactly the kind of dynamic and forward-thinking leader we need to strengthen and grow our community of supporters and donors and advance our mission to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, equitable, and compassionate systems of justice for everyone.” 

The Innocence Project’s development team has significantly grown the organization’s operating budget year over year by cultivating new donors, creating innovative partnerships and events, and educating key external stakeholders about the organization’s work. 

“Throughout my career, I have always been drawn to organizations that seek to build opportunities and more fair and equitable outcomes for everyone,” said Ms. Rawlins Smith. “The Innocence Project is one of the most transformative organizations in criminal legal system reform, and I am eager to bring my skills and experience to its continued growth and success.” 

Ms. Rawlins Smith received her B.A. in religion from Dartmouth College and an M.S. in fundraising management from Columbia University. She serves on the board of directors of Fiver Children’s Foundation and resides in Harlem with her husband and their French bulldog.

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ABOUT THE INNOCENCE PROJECT

The Innocence Project works to free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. Founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, our work is guided by science and grounded in anti-racism.

The post Jessica Rawlins Smith Joins Innocence Project as Chief Development Officer appeared first on Innocence Project.

This content originally appeared on Innocence Project and was authored by Dani Selby.

This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and Sarah Kendzior and was authored by Andrea Chalupa & Sarah Kendzior.

Well, I don’t know about most prolific. I can’t figure out how people write a book a year no matter the size. Nothing feels like a race to me. I’m not rushing. There’s no secret to making art. It’s just, if you want to make some art, make some art, humans have evolved towards art. Avoid things that drain and do things that feel fulfilling, put those fulfilling life experiences into a small piece of art, and perhaps, even the most common type of life (my own) adds up to something grander, because I was paying attention, documenting, trying to learn from it. If I had children, I’d be teaching them these experiences. I don’t. I put it in a poem, a story, a novel. To be more productive, just to do a little bit of your art, when you feel like you can. Don’t beat yourself up. Make your goals tiny. And I really am saying, write three hundred words a day. Fill up ONE index card a day with chicken scratch. That’s all it takes. Retype the things that pile up. All of a sudden you have something. Have no hierarchy of importance when it comes to your work. Make whatever. Be at play, always. Get comfortable doing sloppy work, malformed, phoned in, wonky work—believe you can fix it later. Because you can. And then when it does pile up, actually fix it later, as if harvesting a crop you get to correct once more, twice more, impossibly, luckily, till you’re happy with the harvest. Limit distractions. Just today, I re-approached things fresh, yet again, gave my phone to my wife, Rae, and said, “Why don’t you put in a parental control password for me, write it down. Don’t tell me.” I’ve gotten too depressed with social media. So now I only have Twitter and Instagram on my phone for 15 minutes per day and then it disappears. Poof. I don’t have the internet on my phone at all anymore, zero minutes. I can’t browse … anything.

I remember when you were giving me advice about writing a novel a few years ago, you said to start at the part you’re most excited about. Did you do that with Teenager?

For sure. That’s what I mostly do. Write about things I’m really excited about. In the beginning I don’t have a plan, maybe just one or two scenes but I write them, and bumble towards creating things around them that thrill me in some way. Then for the next draft I make a little punch list/index card of new scenes to create to properly finish ‘the thing.’ The cards become a vague map I can leaf through when I get stuck. Working through that punch list often happens out of linear order, too. Just jumping to which new scene I feel most like working on. Later, I have to fix everything. Tie it all up, make it gel. Connect the dots even further, which is just a way of saying ‘reverse engineering.’ I have a clerical mess to rearrange, but while I’m rearranging all of it logistically, I get a chance to enhance the language so it matches the characters and the place, which I had to discover through writing it all anyway. So I’m never too worried, early on, if I get lots of things wrong along the way, if it seems idiotic. Repairing my errors has always led to the actual interesting places in the work, slowly emerging out of some fog, to surprise me.

How does your writing process differ between your short stories and novels?

My shortest short stories are like little dreams I’m having—I forgive myself for not totally knowing the place, not totally knowing the people, and not even totally knowing their exact problems or the exact problem of the place. Did I convey the feeling I wanted? Great. We out.

But with the novel, I want to know more about the people, the place, the problems. I want the reader to feel like I just didn’t fling a bunch of shit at them. If the novel is a long dream, I have time to understand the dream somewhat while it’s happening, learn its illogical rules. But my short stories are closer to dream logic, closer to this thing happened and we’re not explaining.

Your wife and collaborator, Rae Buleri’s illustrations added so much to my experience of reading Teenager. They created an entire atmosphere. I know that you two worked together in a similar capacity when she illustrated Dust Bunny City. What was it like to collaborate with a visual artist as a writer?

Well, first of all, Rae’s art is amazing. She seems to like my work too, so it’s easy to work together. She’s got no ego, and I try not to have any either. So it’s real easy to give each other little critiques, little challenges. She’ll say, Ah you can do that better, and she’s right, and so I go back and do better. And I can give critique, she says, “Hmm.” And then she redraws, carves the block print out again, whatever. But as those things go, maybe her re-work is not in the direction of the critiques I give, just towards what she chooses to do, deeper.

If somebody gives you a really good critique or a really bad critique, all they’re doing is diagnosing something off in the energy of the art. If the critiquer has taste you agree with, maybe you should try to “fix it.” But only you will know the true answer to finish your art, no matter what they prescribe. Every once in a while they happen to say it is a great diagnosis, and miraculously, the medicine to cure the illness too.

Rae and I got better at offering each other critique, after I began teaching creative writing classes in our apartment and she heard how students gave each other feedback, positive and negative. So when she became the illustrator of Teenager, she asked me to read her 20 pages of the novel each night. And she’d say, “Okay. So here’s what I liked.” And she gave her list and then, “Here are the things that weren’t very good.” And then she started to rip the novel apart.

Rae’s never looking for a shortcut. And I think that’s one of the things that we have to remember with our art. It can feel like it’s taking forever to make it, and there’s no time, and there’s always a rush to publish. But Rae feel like there is always time to redraw the thing, redraw everything (if you’re not sure it’s your best work), and I’m the same way, I want to retype my novel again and just go wilder, truer with it.

You can retype your whole novel in three weeks or whatever it is. Or you can just settle and say, “This thing is as good as I can make it.” Sometimes, hey, you’re out of time, you do have to surrender. Obviously you have to at some point. Anyway, the mistakes, the crudeness, the unfinished, sometimes that is the soul of the work, you’ll know. Just don’t let anyone rush you. And don’t take critiques from someone who wouldn’t work as hard on their art as they are telling you to work on yours, they have no frame of reference, they have no foot in reality. Rae works as hard as I do, who better to take advice from?

That’s wise. Has your experience teaching workshops changed you as a writer or editor?

Yeah, it’s actually made me much more anarchistic with form and style because I’ve just seen that anything works if you fully commit to it. It doesn’t matter what your personal style is, what matters is that you fully commit to that personal style, and just go all the way in. However you present your work, slick, or raw and ragged, ultimately, it has to touch the person reading, or why bother doing it.

Something that I’ve noticed in your work is that you’ll depart a bit from reality as we know it to render people and experiences in more magical ways that often feel more emotionally true. How do you tune into the emotion of what you’re writing, and how do you go about getting that emotion across?

Abstraction swiftly transforms a basic story into a grand tale. A bending of space and time, conveying a feeling that is specific to a character in that moment, that place. We as humans do this every time we tell a joke, how we exaggerate a common thing that happens to us, and reform it into a tall tale, a bullshit story, blown out of proportion, because the logic, the rules of physics, holds us back. I’m telling you a story, I want you to forget your problems, here are mine, maybe they’ll help. Perhaps if I make my problems even bigger, the solution gets even bigger, and somehow it will be more obvious, easier to help you. Transcendence, breaking away–it’s the point of expression–I’m going to take you away. And if I am going to take you away, I want to take you farther away than you’d at first be willing to go, or hopefully, farther than you know we can go.

The narrative situation of Teenager—two kids running from the law—was naturally propulsive, but your short stories carry that same propulsive feeling. How do you manage to keep your reader at the edge of their seats the whole time?

Find a hook and get yourself on it. The reader will get on the same hook too and they’ll be with you. I usually write in small vignettes. I know in a couple hours I’m going to sit down and I’m going to try to write this one little tiny scene. I know it’s like 300 words, and I know I’m just going to try to sketch it out on an index card. With *Teenager, *I was purposefully trying to write a thriller, a page turner. But sometimes when I read a typical thriller, I feel like the author is not really taking care of me with language. They’re not taking care of me with all kinds of other stuff. It’s just a bunch of plot design, plot elements. So with *Teenager *I spent a lot of time making sure I was doing better than the books that piss me off. Most badly written books have short scenes, short chapters. Great ones can do the same thing, it’s all about style, and substance. And no fluff.

I think of you as proof that writers don’t need to go to MFA programs.What other avenues have you found useful in helping hone your craft?

Volunteer to read for online lit mags/zines. See what people are submitting, because that is the leading edge of underground art as far as literature is concerned. They are your contemporaries and their work is more important than anyone’s. The dead are dead, and the people making art today have learned, whether they know it or not, from dead legends, an osmosis of cultural influence. Get involved in selecting and curating that underground work for publication anywhere that will let you. Learn to edit others for publication. That will be the most vital thing you can do for your own writing. You can’t edit yourself effectively until you can edit others masterfully.

Starting my own small press was a big thing. Anything DIY that you can do. People all the time start a band, put out their own record, put out another record, go out and they play shows for it. And eventually, somebody decides that there’s something there, and then there’s a little bit more money, a little bit more whatever behind the artist. But they had to gain that experience, become road tested, put in the hours. It can be the same with writers. Put in the hours.

But some of the communities won’t have you. So what do you do? Make your own place off to the side. However small. It’s what I did. If you feel like you don’t have a place in an established scene, then you’re right, you don’t have a place, but you can always make your own spot—apart—you should. And eventually you’ll have put in your hours and you’ll have become a road tested creator. What I mean at its most basic level, if you are studying and working at something because it adds value to your life just by doing, then you’re doing it the best way. The most valuable way. Study what you love. Always expect you can do better. Because you can. That’s what experience offers you the chance to do, simply, better. Only you will know what “better” means, the community, whatever the community is, they won’t know it till you show it to them.

Another thing I tell people is to jst to read lit journals and websites of whoever is doing underground writing these days. Read bestsellers, and classics, but it’s vital to read books from small presses. When I read something I legitimately like, from an author, especially an underground writer, I reach out to them and let them know. It isn’t just like, “Here’s a chance to network so I can gain their favor.” It’s a way to find the most interesting living artists working today and be in communication with them the way I wish I could talk to Tolstoy, because, listen, some underground artists are operating at that level of genius, but the dead are dead and we need to seek out our living geniuses, and at the very least say hello.

And every once in a while somebody would write back, “Oh, wow. So good to hear from you! After I read your note, I read your story in blah, blah, blah. And I really like your stuff too.” And eventually I would find people who would want to exchange work, and maybe they were just bullshitting me, but you can quickly find out if they actually respect your work when they start to give you edits, and you edit them (and this is how you become a “better” editor of others and then yourself) (By doing.)

Get rid of imposter syndrome as soon as possible. Thoughts like, “I don’t have the degree” or whatever. I learned the most about literature by teaching literature to others. That came about by deciding one day that I would explain what I knew about it to people who wanted to come to my apartment and study it with me. Does that make me a teacher? Everybody is a teacher, I’m saying, if you pay attention.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Shy Watson.

The move was a safety precaution: After the leak of a draft of a majority Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn the constitutional right to abortion, reporters at Rewire grew concerned about a possible uptick in online harassment.

“The newsroom has for years kept a repository of harassing messages to track patterns, just in case,” said editor-in-chief Galina Espinoza. The threats range from blowing up Rewire’s Virginia headquarters to suggesting the editors should be shot. 

“I feel very fortunate to say that nothing has ever come of these kinds of threats,” Espinoza said. “But it’s obviously not only scary, it’s mentally taxing and it takes a toll on mental and emotional health.” 

The changing abortion landscape in America has put some reporters who cover the topic on edge. In addition to concerns about online harassment, reporters told CPJ they are wary of real-world violence and of the ways that shifting laws could leave them and their sources vulnerable to legal threats in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

In Kansas, where an anti-abortion activist killed abortion provider George Tiller in 2009, reporters are highly aware of the potential for violence around the issue. 

“I would say that I’m always cautious of that danger, particularly being in a state where we’ve seen a doctor murdered in his church,” Sherman Smith, editor-in-chief of the nonprofit news organization Kansas Reflector, told CPJ. He said he’s not worried about an immediate threat, “but it’s something I think that we have to be cautious about, that when we’re going out to public events we have to think about it, and certainly when we’re talking to sources, we have to be cautious about putting them in harm’s way.” 

Smith said that though the news organization has no stance on abortion, it was accused of taking sides after it published in July leaked audio of a meeting during which an activist group made clear its intent to ban abortion with a proposed amendment to nullify the state Supreme Court’s abortion protections. The group, Value Them Both, had publicly claimed that it didn’t seek to ban the procedure. 

When the amendment failed, Value Them Both sent out an email blast claiming that “the mainstream media propelled the left’s false narrative, contributing to the confusion that misled Kansans about the amendment.” Smith said the newsroom also received vitriolic emails from readers, including one that accused the reporters of having “bloodshed” on their hands by failing to portray abortion as murder. 

“From our perspective, we’re just trying to give people the information they need to make up their mind about this [issue], but if we’re not carrying water for them, [advocates] see us as the enemy and they can direct their rage toward us,” Smith told CPJ. The only other issue around which Smith remembers witnessing so much vitriol toward the media was another dealing with bodily autonomy: COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Becca Andrews, a reporter at Mother Jones magazine who covers abortion and is based in Nashville, has also noticed a more heated environment, she told CPJ in a phone interview.

When a source who works in abortion rights called to say that anti-abortion activists had damaged her house and car, Andrews, who has a book about abortion rights coming out this fall, began reassessing her own risk profile. 

“Things just feel a little more charged than they have previously,” said Andrews, adding that her identity as a white staff reporter adds a layer of privilege that others do not necessarily enjoy. “I’d like to say it all [the threats to advocates and sources] doesn’t have a chilling effect… but it’s messy.” 

Shifting legal landscape

The Supreme Court decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion has also ushered in a new era of legal uncertainty for pro-abortion activists, medical providers, and patients, as well as the journalists who cover them. 

Journalist Rosemary Westwood, one of the few reporters in the Deep South on the reproductive health beat, chronicled the closing of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic at the center of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case in a podcast called Banned. 

She told CPJ in a phone interview that she began to fear that her reporting could be used against her sources after Roe v. Wade fell. 

“I was reporting on things that were completely legal – they were just controversial. And now I’m reporting on stuff that’s going to be illegal, which is a completely different landscape,” Westwood said. 

According to Gabe Rottman, director of the Technology and Press Freedom Project at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a non-profit that provides free legal resources for journalists, Westwood is right to be concerned. 

“People need to know what the fallout of the Dobbs decision looks like on the ground, which creates a professional obligation for journalists to tell the story,” he told CPJ in a phone interview. He fears that legislation in states where abortion is newly restricted could compel reporters to compromise their sources. 

He pointed to Branzburg v. Hayes, a 1970s case in which prosecutors forced a reporter to hand over source information, arguing that the source, a drug dealer, was committing a crime. A court could, in theory, attempt to use this same argument to compel reporters to turn over identifying source material from their abortion coverage. 

“There are, of course, First Amendment arguments you could make if that kind of situation arose [around abortion],” Rottman said. “But the fact that this is even in the realm of possibilities is itself cause for concern… [T]he temptation to push the envelope can itself impact newsgathering and reporters’ ability to report on abortion after Dobbs.”

For some news organizations, the possibility of legislation that increasingly could limit speech around abortion has also stoked concerns. 

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC), an anti-abortion activist group, drafted proposed state-level legislation that would make it illegal to host or maintain a website “that encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion,” though the phrasing leaves it unclear if journalists covering the procedure and where it is offered could be implicated. 

In South Carolina, lawmakers introduced legislation that echoes that proposed by the NRLC, and which would make it illegal to host a website or “[provide] an internet service” with information that could direct people to an abortion. The bill drew national attention when it was introduced in June, but South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, said in August that the restriction on speech about abortion was unconstitutional and is “not going to see the light of day.” 

Though the First Amendment should, in theory, protect reporters, “[j]ust because something like this seems like it shouldn’t hold up in court doesn’t mean that it won’t,” said Ashton Lattimore, the editor-in-chief of the independent non-profit news outlet Prism, which focuses on justice reporting and has supported abortion access. 

“There are plenty of times in the past when a newsroom has been sued into non-existence by a bad faith actor who got ahold of some law or piece of reporting,” Lattimore said. “Lawsuits are a handy way to distract us from doing work and tie up the financial resources that we would need to stay afloat. That’s one of our biggest concerns.”

As legal debates around abortion access continue, journalists covering protests both in favor of and against restrictions have also faced threats. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, which CPJ co-founded, has documented at least 14 incidents since the Dobbs decision was leaked in which journalists were detained or assaulted covering abortion-related protests. 

Based on staff feedback, Rewire decided to shrink the size of its press badges, a trend that CPJ has documented in other U.S. newsrooms due to the increased targeting of journalists by law enforcement and demonstrators at protests. 

U.S. journalists are not alone in the need for precautions when covering abortion and the issue’s attendant protests. In Poland, journalists were harassed, and some arrested, covering women’s marches held in protest of the country’s abortion ban in 2020. And in Brazil in 2019, a feminist outlet, AzMina faced retaliation after publishing information about abortion access. 

While it remains to be seen just how severely the new abortion landscape will impact the right to report in the U.S., journalists and newsrooms are paying attention more keenly than ever. 

“My experience in the South is that the bulk of the anti-abortion movement, the religious and political groups, have so much power that threatening my physical safety has been nowhere on their list of ways to get what they want. They have so many other tools and avenues to advance their cause,” said Westwood. “I think it’s still too early to know where all of that energy and focus and anger that’s been directed at abortion is going to go.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Katherine Jacobsen.

Rep. Cori Bush and Sen. Tina Smith introduced bicameral legislation Monday aimed at bolstering access to medication abortion as Republican-led states across the U.S. attempt to restrict distribution of the pills in their drive to ban abortion entirely.

If passed, the Protecting Access to Medication Abortion Act would codify into federal law the Food and Drug Administration's Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, one of two medications commonly used in tandem to end a pregnancy. In December, the FDA permanently lifted its requirement that mifepristone be administered in person, allowing patients to receive the medication through the mail.

"Extremist Republicans are attacking and undermining access to a safe and effective medication."

The new bill would also "ensure those seeking abortion care can always access medication abortion through telehealth and certified pharmacies, including mail-order pharmacies," according to a summary released by Bush's office.

While the U.S. Postal Service has said it won't actively help GOP-led states block access to medication abortion and the Biden administration has warned pharmacists against denying people access to the pills, news reports indicate that some patients have been turned away when seeking mifepristone and misoprostol in states that have banned abortion following the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

"Abortion care is healthcare and, therefore, a human right—period," Bush (D-Mo.) said in a statement. "While extremist anti-abortion lawmakers in states like Missouri use the recent decision made by the stolen Supreme Court to attack a person's right to bodily autonomy, I remain committed to ensuring everyone in this country can have access to an abortion—no matter where they live."

The high court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization prompted a surge of interest in abortion care via telemedicine, but sweeping state-level abortion bans enacted in recent weeks have raised questions about the legality of medication abortion and whether pregnant people will still be able to access the pills.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, 19 U.S. states "require the clinician providing a medication abortion to be physically present when the medication is administered, thereby prohibiting the use of telemedicine to prescribe medication for abortion."

As ABC News reported earlier this month, "Some legal scholars believe that state restrictions on medication abortion are subject to preemption challenges—meaning that federal oversight of the drug trumps state laws."

"Because the FDA has approved and regulates mifepristone," the outlet explained, "it may not be lawful for states to ban it."

Some of the laws currently in place in Republican-led states are highly draconian. The Tampa Bay Times notes that "a physician who mails the medication to a Louisiana resident could face up to 10 years in prison and a $75,000 fine."

"A new law in Tennessee makes distributing abortion pills through the mail a felony punishable by up to $50,000 in fines," the Florida paper observes. "And South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently called for a special legislative session to craft new laws barring the practice. A 2015 law prohibits Florida physicians from prescribing the medications without an in-person visit at least 24 hours in advance—effectively outlawing telehealth abortions."

Smith (D-Minn.), the only U.S. senator to have worked at Planned Parenthood, said Monday that "right now, extremist Republicans are attacking and undermining access to a safe and effective medication because they believe that the government—not women, not their healthcare providers—should control the healthcare that doctors provide women."

"We need to fight back against Republicans' ongoing efforts to chip away at women's reproductive freedoms," said Smith. "Our bill, which would safeguard access to medication abortion, is a critical step that would help protect what remaining access exists to reproductive healthcare."

In a one-pager outlining the new legislation—which faces an uphill battle in the U.S. Senate due to likely opposition from the GOP and at least one right-wing Democrat—Bush's office states that "extremist anti-abortion lawmakers are attacking access to medication abortion, and even going so far as to criminalize it."

"States have imposed restrictions that contradict scientific evidence," the document continues, "by requiring healthcare providers to be physically present when administering the drug to a patient, prohibiting medication abortion before 10 weeks gestation, or only allowing physicians—and not other healthcare professionals—to administer medication abortion."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jake Johnson.

In a Juneteenth special, we mark the federal holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. We speak to the writer and poet Clint Smith about Juneteenth and his new book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both-handedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“As far as I’m concerned, those people don’t exist.”

— Arizona Republican Governor Jack Williams, telling farm workers they’d be arrested if they were to strike and boycott during harvest seasons (May 1972).

May Day harkens back to celebrations of spring, a renewal and fertility. In Rome, I witnessed one such event: the festival of Floralia, where people wear colorful clothes and were pelted with beans and flowers (fertility symbols).

I was in Edinburgh and celebrated their May Day around a bonfire: The Celts welcomed spring during Beltane by lighting bonfires or the ‘fire of Belt.’ My partner and I even danced around a Maypole and watched the crowning of a May Queen.

However, my most meaningful celebrations for May Day tie into my family’s union roots. This day is about workers’ rights, which should be embedded in everyone’s blood in this country, post-COVID and with the growing gap between those who have and those who do not.

I’ve worked with Portland warehouse workers as their case manager, and many of them I met were either in mini-vans or broken down RVs. These are workers toiling 10 or 12-hour shifts. Some had two jobs just to make ends meet, sleeping in vehicles.

Going back 170 years, the eight-hour work day movement fanned across the world, aiming to reduce the working day from 10 to eight hours. In 1886, the first congress of the American Federation of Labor called for a general strike on May 1 to demand an eight-hour day, which culminated in what is known today as the Haymarket Riot.

On May 3, 1886, one person was killed and several others injured as police intervened to protect strikebreakers and intimidate strikers during a union action at the Chicago McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. It was part of a national campaign to secure an eight-hour workday. Then, a day later, anarchist labor leaders called a mass meeting in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality.

It was a peaceful gathering, even by Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison’s observation. But after Harrison and most of the demonstrators departed, a large group of police arrived and demanded that the crowd disperse. A bomb was thrown by an individual — never positively identified — and police responded with random gunfire. Seven police officers were killed and 60 others wounded before the violence ended; civilian casualties have been estimated at four to eight dead and 30 to 40 injured.

Employers regained control of workers, and 10 or more hour workdays became the norm again.

My May Day March participation includes Tucson, El Paso, Mexico City, Spokane, Seattle, Portland. I’ve marched with day laborers in Oregon demanding higher hourly pay, and I’ve marched with nuns, priests and other clergy in El Paso demanding worker rights for immigrant farm workers.

May Day for me is about that American sacred right to protest, right to free speech, and the right to gather and call out the powerful, the elite, the bosses.

Of course, I was always aware of heavy police presence, always aware of the negative mainstream media coverage.

Today, as Starbucks and Amazon workers are voting for unionization, many Americans are oblivious to the degradation of the workplace and the lack of real opportunities for young people to find gainful, sustainable and worthy employment.

Young and old — many with college degrees, and many with huge student loan debts — are finding a collective voice in setting up unions in order to demand fair wages, safe work environments and an end to the boss lording over their lives.

When I was an organizer for the Service Employees International Union, Local 925-Seattle, my work was around adjunct faculty. I had been a freeway flyer. I worked in Washington, Texas and Oregon as a part-time faculty. Low wages, countless hours of unpaid work (I was an English faculty so essays and tons of other writing assignments I took home for weekend reading/commenting/grading blitzes), no benefits and no guarantee of work semester to semester resonated with me.

I always saw myself as a worker, not as some professor or multiple college degreed highfalutin elite. Part of my work was with students of migrant farm worker parents, as well as organizing service workers — CNAs and others laboring as caregivers.

Many of my union brothers and sisters were from Somalia, Eritrea and Mexico. Working for pay on 24-hour shifts, these amazing immigrants were both first and last line of defense for aging and dying-in-place clients.

I talked to one terminal white woman, Gloria, who was in a foster care facility at the tune of $4,600 a month. She told me that her main caregiver, Mehret from Eritrea, not only bathed, fed and took her to doctor’s appointments, but Mehret celebrated Gloria’s birthday with her own Eritrean family, and even had Gloria come to her extended family’s gatherings.

“I will die with Mehret by my side. My own children haven’t seen me in a year. They pay for this care, but have no interest in an old cranky dying mother. Mehret is my only friend, my only family.”

Mehret got $12 an hour, and she had to pass dozens of classes to keep up her credentials. Many of Mehret’s family members were harassed by Seattle police and other law enforcement agencies for “driving while black.”

We need more labor history, more media coverage of workers, and more Americans pushing for the 8-8-8 day: eight hours of work, eight hours with family/community, eight hours of sleep.

If you haven’t already read the book, then check out Dr. Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

It’s all about how Americans are working themselves to death. Literally. Unions can stop that. Happy May 1!

++Note: Appeared first in Newport News Times, April 29, 2022!++

And a side note — try and catch Johnny Depp (yes, that fool) in the movie, Minimata, about Chisso factory and the mercury poisoning of Japanese, young and old and fetuses.

At the end of the flick, you get a short run down of the industrial “accidents” that killed thousand immediately and then many others through time.

Fifty years after American photographer W. Eugene Smith first arrived in the Japanese port town of Minamata, the fight for recognition and compensation still continues, for scores of people poisoned by mercury dumped into the bay by a local factory.

Aileen Mioko Smith, Eugene’s Japanese-American wife and collaborator, hopes that the September screening of the film Minamata will once again shine a light on the case, which was one of the worst industrial pollution disasters in Japanese history.

Nearly half a century later, victims of the mercury poisoning are still trying to obtain full restitution from the national government, although 2,265 people, 1,784 of whom died, have been formally recognized as victims of the disease. In 2004, Chisso also paid compensation totalling $86 million (€70.7 million).

“There are 10 ongoing lawsuits against the prefectural government in Kumamoto and the national government,” said Smith. “These are people who were toddlers 50 years ago when they were exposed to this pollution. They have gone through the lower courts and some of these cases are now before the Supreme Court, but I do not think we will have a final decision before the end of this year.”

“The government has always refused to carry out a full epidemiological study of the impact of the poisoning, and that can only be because they do not want to know,” Smith added. “So these are people who have lived with this their whole lives, and they are still fighting.” (Source)

Here we go, more disasters of capitalism. Who pays the price? Workers, and those living around or near those facilities, or sometimes, those living and working thousands of miles away:

Bhopal

Chernobyl

BP Oil Spill, Gulf of Mexico

1952 London Great Fog

Dust Bowl 1920s-’30s, USA

For more on the “films” depicting corporate wrong-doing, go to the book, Corporate Wrongdoing on Film: The ‘Public Be Damned’ by Kenneth Dowler, Daniel Antonowicz

Fukushima, anyone?

And the workers helping release those millions of gallons of radioactive water? How will they be treated? Consequences? And us, the global citizen? Did we vote on this?

In April, the Japanese government announced its formal decision that the treated water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi site will be discharged into the sea. Japan intends to start releasing the treated water around the Spring of 2023, and the entire operation could last for decades.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

All the comedians who don’t make jokes and only make tirades against cancel culture now want me to cancel Will Smith because Will Smith is the embodiment of cancel culture because he slapped a comedian named Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife.

Why should I cancel Will Smith? Because in these people’s minds he is toxic masculinity. But don’t all these comedians spend their time complaining about feminists and Lia Thomas destroying feminism? Imagine if instead of Will Smith we had Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accept the invitation the Oscars gave him. These same people would have been begging for him to make a joke about killing Russians.

Not only does every Hollywood movie pass a Pentagon censor test it also celebrates personal acts of violence like Will Smith’s slap heard around the world. Every time a plot escalates in Hollywood the hero throws a punch on the other man who has gone too far. We clap. But that’s the tame version. Most of the time these films are explicit propaganda for the military-industrial complex.

I’m not trying to cancel Hollywood either. I find propaganda informative and amusing. It’s often more rewarding than the comedians themselves. This was why we shouldn’t have canceled RT. Of course, to go to RT for Russian news would be for the laughs. But to go to RT for news about the suppression (cancellation?) of American leftists on the ground there were few more well-funded sources for real reporting.

My main point here is that the entire country has war fever. This is toxic masculinity. A man defending his wife in this day and age is seen as naive in our postmodern dystopia. Oh you actually love your wife? No, no, no. Focus on self-care, advancing your career, hiding your emotions, learn about the world not your neighbors, etc., etc.

But dig deeper still and we find that the beef between Chris Rock and the Smiths goes back to Rock engaging in identity politics and hosting the Oscars rather than boycotting (canceling?) the racist awards back in 2016. The Smiths were leaders in the walkout by people of color and Rock wanted his own career to move forward, seeing this as an opportunity for his identity group as a whole.

But this wasn’t only about the pornographic racism of “Black on Black” crime that get the liberals rock hard. It was also because Will Smith is seen as a pussy by these people accusing him of toxic masculinity because he allows his wife have sex with other men and still loves her. If a man has affairs he is a real man. If a woman has affairs her man is not a real man. Women cannot have sexual agency even (especially?) in the age of corporate imperialist feminism.

Being a cuckold is a sign of maturity. This country is filled with men who hate women who won’t have sex with them and a society that bullies and demeans men who don’t have sex. As a result we look abroad for our masculine valor to be fulfilled. Putin, as the man we want to have, Zelenskyy, as the man we have to want. Women die one way. Men die another. Gender is reaffirmed. Order in disorder for a decaying society.

Fools quote William Shakespeare in regards to Will Smith the cuckold. However, Shakespeare would be proud of Will Smith, before the slap, for Shakespeare saw male jealousy as the disease plaguing society, not promiscuous wives. If anything Shakespeare demonstrated that wives weren’t promiscuous enough and society was becoming more rigid in its structure, with the social unraveling we see today beginning as industry organized and consolidated its monopoly on violence.

I remember hiding behind what I thought was manhood when a cuckold and his dominatrix girlfriend approached me for a three-way. Whenever I am offered such an opportunity (once) I like to call such a request a Nicki Minaj. I was right to say no, because I wasn’t ready for the radical love these two possessed.

At the time I also thought I was right to say no. Yet I thought so for the wrong reasons. I thought I was more of a man than the man who let his woman whip and cuckold him. However, he was happier than I was and likely still is. He was secure in his masculinity and his personhood and he’s better for it. Such relationships can exist with the reverse gender dynamic too, or completely different gender dynamics.

In war and in love we judge only what we cannot understand. Our judgment proves only our own ignorance and it is a slap in the face to the multiculturalism the elites claim to represent. Their global attitudes are only to many forms of extraction and exploitation and to one kind of person: the slave. Such systematic violence in real life clouds us from seeing clearly the love of ordinary human beings. All love is framed as violence and all violence is framed as an act of love.

I’m not saying that Will Smith is without jealousy. Slapping others is not a sign of a healthy mind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him. If we choose to cancel every man who doesn’t seek to control his wife we will be left with the cowardly society we have where the whole country cheers for a war it refuses to fight.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nick Pemberton.

The post Will Smith Slapping Chris Rock wasn’t the Worst thing that Happened on Oscar Night appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Ware.

Image by Alberto Bigoni.

There's an ancient church in Pohja, Finland named after Mary, the mother of Jesus. Built in the fifteenth century. In 2019 it hosted and, in its obvious aural perfection, became an essential part of a recording by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith released in 2021. Titled completely and simply Trumpet, the music on these discs is as sublime as a church choir imagines the heavenly choirs of angels. Smith's horn is as clarion as Gabriel's was said to be and as melodic as the birds singing outside your morning window. The tones and timbre in these solo pieces are as clear as the source of a mountain spring and as bewitching as a Nordic winter in the forests of the Völva; the witches of the Norsemen and women.

Wadada Leo Smith is a jazz legend; an elder in the halls of this music that defines improvisation, defies form while creating new ones, and demands the listener respond to its calls for contemplation and response. Born in the small Mississippi town of Leland in December 1941, he formed the Creative Construction Company with Anthony Braxton and Leroy Jenkins in 1967. Prior to that first foray into the new milieu known as free jazz, Smith had worked in R&B and the blues. When considering his birthplace, it's interesting to note that not only does US Highway 61 go through the town, but the bluesmen James “Son” Thomas and Johnny Winter both spent parts of their lives there. Indeed, Thomas is buried there after spending much of his later life living near the railroad tracks in town.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.