Or, as he puts it to one voter, everybody else now sounds like him.

“They want to deal with gentrification and all that,” he says of his opponents, “but they haven’t done it until the epiphany of the last six months.”

Fort, who served as the Democratic whip in Georgia’s state Senate until he resigned to run for mayor, has been a fixture of populist politics in the state for two decades. While politics in Georgia have swung from left to right, Fort served as the rare example of a politician who stuck by his guns, in good times and bad.

Ben Speight, the organizing director of Teamsters Local 728, says endorsing Fort’s bid was a no-brainer for the union. “This is about a guy literally walking the walk, viewing his role as a state senator as a way of amplifying movements,” he observes.

For years, that form of movement politics made Fort a lone voice in the wilderness. But, with radical municipal politics rising in neighboring Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Alabama, there’s a chance that his moment has finally arrived.

Among cities in the South, Atlanta has a reputation as a rising metropolis. In 2016, Metro Atlanta “gained the fourth-most residents in the nation,” as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes.

It houses the headquarters of Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and UPS. Its airport, Hartsfield-Jackson International, is the busiest in the world — topping its rivals in Beijing and Dubai. Following the introduction of a state tax credit, it has become a hub for Hollywood filming (“Spider-Man: Homecoming” and “Baby Driver” were both filmed there).

Atlanta’s incumbent mayor, term-limited Kasim Reed, is known as a steady hand who has had a friendly relationship with Georgia’s right-wing Republican Gov. Nathan Deal and the business community.

While populist mayors across the country have pushed policy designed to lift wages, expand affordable housing, open up government to participatory budgeting, and protect the environment, Reed shied away from national progressive priorities.

At an event earlier this year, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president Tom Donohue shared the stage with both Deal and Reed, praising Georgia’s business-friendly politics. “I’m very excited about what you’ve done in the state,” he said. “You guys are all about growth. I’m very impressed with what I’ve learned, beyond what I knew.”

Reed and his allies have long clashed with Fort. The incumbent mayor, channeling much of the political establishment, told reporters in April that Fort would be a “disaster as mayor,” implying that his politics are quixotic. “What has he accomplished?” he asked. “Don’t sit out here throwing stones at Atlanta running around talking about as if you’re holier-than-thou when you’re just a politician, guy. You’re not any holier-than-thou person.”

Reed has reason to be sensitive to criticism. In the shadow of Atlanta’s rapid growth is some of the worst inequality in the country. A 2015 Brookings Institute report found that Atlanta was the most unequal major city in the U.S., with the top income households in the city (those at the 95th income percentile) earning almost 20 times as much as those in the lowest income bracket (those in the 20th income percentile).

Like many other cities, rising housing prices are a concern for low-income residents.

Georgia Advancing Communities Together, a nonprofit that works on housing issues, is pressing the mayoral candidates to work on affordability.

In literature handed out before the housing forum it hosted at St. Luke’s, the organization notes that Fulton County, which houses Atlanta, has a sky-high eviction rate: 22 percent of all rental households in the county received an eviction notice in 2015, three times the rate of Chicago.

Fort is an academic by training, having taught at many of Atlanta’s universities. He has studied black politics, history, and inequality.

But some of his best education about the power of elites came from the time he angered every major bank on Wall Street.

In 2002, years before the subprime mortgage meltdown, Fort teamed up with Georgia’s last Democratic Gov. Roy Barnes to pass one of the toughest anti-predatory lending laws in the country. As the local press noted, he was one of the “prime movers” of the bill, which prohibited pre-payment penalties and loan flipping, and required lenders to provide counseling to people who take out certain high-cost loans.

Bill Brennan, now retired and living in North Carolina, was a lawyer with Atlanta Legal Aid who worked closely with Fort and Barnes on the legislation. He recalls running into Fort in a hallway and explaining the crisis of predatory lending in Georgia to him.

As Gary Rivlin notes in his book, “Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.—How the Working Poor Became Big Business,” Atlanta was one of the cities targeted earliest by the subprime swindle. “The foreclosure rate between 1996 and 1999 fell by 7 percent for those who held a conventional home loan but soared by 232 percent among those holding subprime loans,” he writes.

Fort attended a hearing held in Atlanta about the issue by then-Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, and was moved to action. “He was great, he spoke up, and that became his cause, dealing with predatory lending,” Brennan says. “Senator Fort was the energy, and he was the force behind getting it signed.”

But 2002 was also the year the Democrats finally lost the governor’s mansion, leading to the first GOP statewide government since Reconstruction. Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue made repealing the law’s toughest provisions a priority when he took office the following year.

The lending industry, which had angrily protested the law, saw its shot. One trade publication warned that it “will result in the drying up of credit in the subprime market. … The law could result in fewer Georgia loans making their way into securitized pools in the months ahead.” A number of top subprime lenders announced that they would stop lending to the state; George W. Bush’s U.S. comptroller of the currency announced that some national banks would be exempted from the law.

Then the industry’s lobbyists targeted the new Republican Senate majority and governor.

“The entire mortgage industry and banks descended on Georgia to get that law weakened,” Brennan says.

By March 2003, the lobbyists and Perdue succeeded in repealing Fort’s protections, which the Associated Press noted was the “first major bill” the  

A clip from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 9, 2003.

More than a decade later, Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines looked back at the Fort legislation, noting that its protections “might have forestalled the foreclosure crisis” had they been adopted and enforced across the country.

Brennan agrees with their assessment. “Had it gone into effect and been replicated in other states, there’s a good chance that [we could have stopped] the financial collapse,” he concludes.

Years later, when the financial meltdown began, one of the lobbyists who led the effort to gut Fort’s law, Wright Andrews Jr. of the National Home Equity Mortgage Association, offered a sort of mea culpa to the Wall Street Journal. “I certainly was not aware of the degree to which many in the industry clearly failed to follow proper underwriting standards — the standards which they represented they were following to us lobbying,” he told the paper in 2007.

Without a law to shield Georgians from the depredations of subprime lending, Fort took to the streets. He called up CEOs, including Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, threatening them with protests over individual clients who Brennan represented.

Doing so won settlements for a number of homeowners. In one such case in 2009, Fort assembled a crowd outside Wachovia Bank (later bought by Wells Fargo) to call attention to the case of Avonia Carson, one of Brennan’s clients.

Carson was a 68-year-old African-American woman, who was spending 99 percent of her fixed income (a $1,233 Social Security check) to pay for two bank loans.

The bank settled Carson’s case.

“He did this a lot, he would write letters, he’d make phone calls to the CEOs of these companies,” Brennan recalls. “And it helped. It helped a lot.”

“They figure it’s better to work things out than face a picket line,” Fort told Rivlin of his many interventions against bank CEOs.

Fort’s platform represents a sort of culmination of his life’s work on various issues: reducing inequality and defending civil rights.

He is calling on the city to decriminalize marijuana, a shot across the bow at Atlanta’s Fulton County, which, in 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union found to be one of the most racially biased counties in the entire country when it comes to marijuana arrests.

“It’s more than ironic that in a city dominated by African-American elected officials at the city level and the county level that you have that disparity,” Fort says.

The stance on marijuana, combined with his activist background, earned Fort the backing of Michael Render, the Atlanta-area rapper who goes by Killer Mike.

To promote the economic mobility that Atlanta lacks, Fort is proposing two years of tuition-free college for all high school graduates. He also wants to expand the city’s meager public transit system, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority.

Georgia is one of the states that made it illegal for cities to establish their own wage laws, but Fort has been promoting $15 an hour in the legislature.

He also has vowed to make Atlanta a “sanctuary city,” a step that Reed has declined, saying instead that Atlanta is a “welcoming city.”

Communication Workers of America Local 3204 political director Rita Scott, like many others interviewed by The Intercept, pointed to Fort’s consistent support for populist causes as the reason for its endorsement.

“He’s always fought those issues with us,” she says. “For CWA, it was a no-brainer.”

She contrasted Fort’s record with that of another mayoral candidate, Atlanta City Council President Ceasar Mitchell, who recently came out in support for $15 for Atlanta’s city workers. “[He] did not support raising the minimum wage and the Fight for 15 until he started running for mayor,” she notes. (Fort has attended rallies for the movement for years.)

She also points to the effort by Georgia’s progressive community that defeated a ballot measure last year that would have allowed the state to take over local school districts, noting Mitchell refused to come out publicly against it, despite prodding by the union.

That’s among both the benefits of and challenges for Fort’s campaign: All the other candidates are starting to sound like him.

Five members of the Atlanta City Council are running for mayor, and many are harping on themes of inequality and housing affordability that Fort has talked about for decades.

But that means they are running against a status quo they helped shape.

It’s probably no coincidence that it wasn’t until June 2017, months into Fort’s campaign, that Atlanta City Hall voted to raise city workers’ wages to $15 an hour.

“I think I set the tone of the debate … but that’s not what I want. I want to win,” Fort says. “This is not just about making a statement. Although, when you change the debate, you change people.”

If Fort reminds you of someone — say, a 76-year-old senator from Vermont who polls as America’s most popular sitting politician and also has the backing of Killer Mike — don’t worry, he sees the similarities, too.

Bernie Sanders has endorsed Fort’s run for mayor. In an email sent to his campaign list, Sanders praised Fort as “unapologetically standing up for middle-class and working-class families, for blacks, whites, and Latinos, for women and the gay community.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted that of the $250,000 that Fort raised in the first six weeks since announcing his mayoral bid, $100,000 came in the weeks after Sanders authored a fundraising email for him. Fort also enlisted Revolution Messaging, the firm that powered Sanders’s email fundraising campaign.

In one sense, Sanders is returning a favor. Fort was the highest-ranking African-American lawmaker in the South who endorsed his run for president, drawing ire from the state’s Democratic establishment.

Reed lashed out at the endorsement, calling it “nothing but a publicity stunt to help him run for mayor. He will lose that race also.”

(Reed coordinated closely with Team Clinton during the primary. An open records request filed by The Intercept revealed that his CNN op-ed attacking Bernie Sanders was actually authored by a pro-Clinton super PAC.)

Tim Franzen has worked for the Quaker-founded American Friends Service Committee — a social action group that has worked for peace and social justice since its founding in 1917 — for the last decade. He spent much of the past few years working on issues, such as stopping foreclosures. At one point, he worked with a group of organizers to save the home of a retired police detective, making national headlines.

He typically avoids electoral campaigns, but like many young people who donned clipboards to canvas for Sanders, he was inspired by Fort to get involved. He has taken what he calls an “unprecedented leave of absence” from AFSC to spending his days at Fort’s field office, dialing for dollars and recruiting volunteers.

“I was in the meeting when Fort decided, ‘I have to do this because my conscience won’t let me do anything else,'” Franzen says of Fort’s decision to switch his endorsement from Hillary Clinton to Sanders.

Asked about endorsing Sanders, Fort cites an incident that occurred early in the primary, where a group of Black Lives Matter protesters in Atlanta interrupted Clinton during a speech at Clark Atlanta University in October 2015. They were quickly ejected.

“I was very disappointed when Hillary came to Clark Atlanta University and they manhandled some Black Lives Matter students,” he says. “That created a lot of unease with me. Matter of fact I … followed the students out, made sure they weren’t mistreated. That created a lot of unease in my spirit.”

He started to look at Sanders’s record and positions on issues, and in the Vermont senator’s targeting of Wall Street, he found a kindred spirit. He decided to change his endorsement.

The Sanders endorsement is an example of one of many times Fort has shown he is willing to break with his party’s establishment when he thinks it’s wrong.

For instance, in 2011 when House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams cut a deal with Gov. Deal to cut back Georgia’s tuition-free HOPE Scholarship, Fort opposed the agreement.

When a group of students was ejected from a committee meeting for protesting the cuts, Fort walked outside and counseled them on how to be more effective advocates. “They don’t fear you,” he told them. “They fear what you represent. Because you represent what? Justice. You represent something more than they fear anything else, regular folks standing up, speaking for themselves. That’s what they fear.”

“That is probably Exhibit A,” Fort says of the deal Abrams cut with Republicans to gut HOPE, “in what I talk about as far as Democrats not adhering to an economic populist agenda.”

With a smile, he alludes to the gubernatorial race, where Abrams is facing off with another Democrat who opposed the HOPE cuts. “It’s just ironic that some people are positioning themselves as these progressive candidates for statewide office at the same time that they undercut the most important Democratic [achievement],” he says. “But we’re not talking about people running for statewide office.”

To Fort’s activist backers, the difference between his approach and that of many other Democrats is that he genuinely believes the same things they do.

“It was like endorsing one of our own,” Speight says, noting that sometimes Fort comes to organizing meetings just to observe — unlike most politicians, he sometimes doesn’t even speak. “We don’t feel like we’re going to have to call and ask Senator Fort for things, we feel like Senator Fort is already with us.”

Fort’s defiance goes all the way up to the national Democratic Party.

During the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, The Intercept asked a long slew of Democratic elites — representatives of the DNC, the Clinton campaign, several members of Congress — about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s primetime speaking role at the event.

Bloomberg administered mass surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers during his time as mayor — something that President Donald Trump cited as a model. We asked Democrats if Bloomberg should use his speaking time to apologize for spying on innocent Muslims. Not a single one agreed that he should — except for Fort.

“He should apologize for that, just like he should apologize for stop and frisk,” he said. “He should apologize for singling out Muslims, Muslim Americans for surveillance. Very important. The same mindset that spies on Muslim Americans is the same mindset that says … we gotta stop and frisk people. I’m not a fan of Michael Bloomberg.”

But he does have one establishment backer in his corner. Barnes hosted a fundraiser for Fort’s mayoral run in January; he personally ponied up $4,000 — a sort of welcome-home present to the senator who helped him pass landmark predatory lending legislation 15 years ago before a GOP wave defanged it.

For Fort, getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience at protests is a routine occupational hazard — talk to any prominent Atlanta-area activist, and they are likely to know the senator well.

In October 2011, Fort was hauled away by Atlanta police after Reed lost patience with Occupy Atlanta and ordered its overnight encampment in Woodruff Park to be dismantled, citing safety concerns.

“This is the most peaceful place in Georgia,” Fort declared at the time of Reed’s move. “At the urging of the business community, he’s moving people out. Shame on him.”

Franzen was among those swept up in arrests with Fort.

“I remember Fort showed up in the park and he said something like, ‘I’ve been waiting here for years for ya’ll,” he recalls. “He wasn’t showing up with ‘Here’s two cases of water, good luck, ya’ll’; he was digging in, like an organizer. My relationship with Fort is like a relationship with a fellow community organizer who cares about issues.”

Franzen was also one of several activists arrested alongside Fort in 2014, when protesters staged a sit-in at the governor’s office to demand that Deal expand Medicaid. The governor’s blockade has kept health care out of the hands of 600,000 Georgians.

Then-Deal spokesperson Brian Robinson mocked Fort’s arrest, equating the act of civil disobedience with a lack of work ethic:

Tomorrow I'm going to sit in Vincent Fort's office and demand to be arrested. Oh wait, I have to go to work.
#gapol pic.twitter.com/XpbF0Kz045

— Brian C. Robinson (@LordTinsdale) January 27, 2014

In contrast to Reed’s chummy attitude with Deal, Fort was livid about the governor’s Medicaid blockade.

“People are dying,” Fort replied at the time, “and that’s the level of discourse we’re getting from the governor’s office on this issue.”

Atlanta’s mayoral race is technically a nonpartisan contest. But the list of 12 candidates is topped by Councilperson Mary Norwood, who has consistently been leading polls with a plurality because she is the most conservative candidate in the race. If you’re a Republican in Atlanta, you already have your candidate.

Because the rules dictate that no candidate can win Atlanta’s mayoral race without a majority, that means that the November general election will likely lead to a December runoff. Thus the other 11 candidates are more or less vying to be her challenger, and most are bunched in the high single-digits or low double-digits. Norwood has shown that she is viable — she narrowly lost to Reed in 2009 by only about 700 votes.

Bryan Long, who leads the Progress Now chapter in the state called Better Georgia, worries more about the threat of Norwood than the differences between the other 11 candidates.

“I’m very concerned that she slips into a runoff and becomes mayor of Atlanta, and I think that would be as big of a shock for this city as Trump was for the nation,” Long says. “If Mary Norwood ends up in the mayor’s office, we have no barrier at all between us and the Trump administration.”

That puts Fort’s campaign on the spot — he has to convince Atlantans that they should turn the page on Kasim Reed’s neoliberalism and that he can prevent a genuine conservative from running Atlanta’s traditional Democratic stronghold.

To tackle this task, Fort has a grassroots army — stacked with volunteers, labor unions, and national organizations — behind him.

In late June, the campaign announced a slew of Atlanta-area union endorsements, including locals from the aforementioned CWA and Teamsters, as well as the United Auto Workers and Georgia Federation of Teachers. In all, 28 union locals are backing the candidate.

He also has the backing of the Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists of America — an organization Fort worked with years before the Sanders campaign made it to the mainstream left. Among national organizations, Our Revolution and the Working Families Party have endorsed and are planning to step up their operations in support of his campaign.
“Fort is an inspiring leader who is running to transform Atlanta into a city that truly works for all its working families, not just a handful of wealthy and well-connected insiders,” Joe Dinkin, WFP national communications director tells The Intercept. “Those are the values he’s been fighting for his entire career. He was on the forefront of a movement to defend consumers from the unfair practices of big banks before the Wall Street collapse by leading the fight against subprime lending as a state senator. Change always comes from the grassroots up, and we’re excited to help elect Atlanta’s next mayor.”

Top photo: Vincent Fort poses for a portrait in his field office in Atlanta on Sept. 9, 2017. Fort is one of 12 candidates in a nonpartisan race for Atlanta mayor.

Correction: September 18, 2017, 12:52 p.m.
An earlier version of the article misnamed the nonprofit Georgia Advancing Communities Together.

The post Vincent Fort Angered Democratic Elites When He Endorsed Bernie Sanders. Can He Be Atlanta’s Next Mayor? appeared first on The Intercept.

Salman al-Odah, Awad al-Qarni, and Ali al-Omary were arrested with little explanation over the weekend, but activists suspect that their failure to follow MBS’s hawkish line on Qatar played a role in their imprisonment.

Human rights activists told the Wall Street Journal that Odah’s arrest came after he declined to come out in support of the Saudi government’s actions against Qatar.

On September 8, Odah tweeted a fairly banal message hoping for reconciliation between the kingdom and Qatar. “May God harmonize between their hearts for the good of their people,” he wrote:

???? ?? ????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??? ????..????? ??? ??? ?????? ?????? ??? ??????

— ????? ?????? (?????) (@salman_alodah) September 8, 2017

Odah, who has 14 million followers, has not tweeted since September 9, the day he was swept up with the others.

“The Qatar crisis, a tribal dispute with potential global implications, is a key reason. This ‘kerfuffle’ is now very serious. MBS is showing that he can clean house in terms of those who may express sympathy to any opening of dialogue thru the new Saudi State Security Presidium,” Ted Karasik, a senior adviser at Gulf State Analytics who has spent years in the region, told The Intercept in an email. “Importantly, the cleavage between Qatar and the ATQ is now directly impacting Saudi society — the arrests were across a broad swath of clerics, poets and television personalities,” Karasik added, referring to the Anti-Terror Quartet, a name used to refer to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, the four countries that initiated the months-long blockade of Qatar. “Thus, some may say these arrests are a purge.”

“For the clerics, MBS needed to make a sharp demonstration that social reforms are coming quickly and that the clerical establishment needs to support Saudi Vision 2030 no matter the cost to their belief system,” he continued. “[Odah] and Qarni in particular were on the government’s payroll up until their arrests to keep quiet on key issues. That line has now been crossed.”

Saudi officials have not commented on the arrests, but the state-run Saudi Press Agency reported Tuesday that the state intelligence agency had broken up a spy ring of “Saudis and foreigners” who “wanted to stir up sedition and prejudice national unity.” Also on Tuesday, a Twitter account run by the Saudi Interior Ministry encouraged Saudi citizens to report each other’s social media activity to the government.

“When you notice any account on social networks publishing terrorist or extremist ideas, please report it immediately via the application #We‘re_all_security,” it said.

??? ??????? ??? ???? ??? ??????? ?????????? ???? ??????? ??????? ?? ?????? ???? ??????? ???? ??? ????? #????_??? pic.twitter.com/SlfOpolOw1

— ??????? ????? (@kamnapp) September 12, 2017

Top photo: In this photo released by the state-run Saudi Press Agency, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman speaks at a meeting of the Islamic Military Counterterrorism Alliance in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Nov. 26, 2017.

The post Saudi Arabia Cracks Down on Dissenting Clerics Amid Rumors of Crown Prince’s Rise to Throne appeared first on The Intercept.

The hotel is a natural venue for such an event. The host of the conference, the National Mining Association, an industry lobby group, has won a string of policy victories and carve-outs from the Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress.

The NMA board of directors meeting, which takes place October 3-4, is yet the latest example of a special interest group spending thousands of dollars on a property owned directly by the Trump family. The Trump International charges over $800 a night for the days the mining event is scheduled.

“President Trump has refused to divest from the Trump Organization, so money spent at the president’s D.C. hotel will make it into the president’s pocket,” says Brendan Fischer, an election law expert with the Campaign Legal Center.

“The National Mining Association or any other lobbying group has likely concluded that spending money at the Trump International Hotel in D.C. is a solid way of currying favor with the administration — and that spending money anywhere else runs the risk of offending our very sensitive president,” Fischer added.

The NMA did not respond to a request for comment. While NMA does not make its board of directors public, tax disclosures from previous years reveal that the board has included chief executives from mining firms such as Peabody Energy, Drummond Company, and Cloud Peak Energy, among other major mining interests.

The event will include a discussion of policy strategy, along with speeches and meetings with members of the administration and other key decision-makers.

“The evening reception on the rooftop will be the first reception since the 2016 elections and will provide an excellent opportunity to meet the new members of Congress, build on our relationships, and share our perspectives with our guests from Congress and federal agencies,” the invitation notes.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, a close ally of the coal and mining industry, is scheduled to address the group of coal executives at the hotel.

Zinke has been widely praised by industry and assailed by environmentalists and conservationists. Earlier this year, he not only repealed the Obama administration’s moratorium on new coal leases on public lands but reduced the amount of royalties that coal mining firms pay to the federal government.

Coal firms have seized upon the new rules and production levels throughout the country, particularly in Western states where much of the coal is extracted through massive strip mines on federal land, are increasing.

The Trump administration has also handed victory after victory to the coal industry in the form of regulatory rollbacks on environmental rules. In June, Trump announced that he will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, which called for reductions in greenhouse gases. The administration has also worked with Republicans in Congress to take an ax on other rules hated by industry, such as the repeal of an Obama administration regulation to limit mining waste in waterways and streams.

Since Trump’s campaign victory, lobbyists for domestic and foreign interests have flocked to properties owned by Trump and his family, especially the hotel in Washington, D.C. Lobbyists for the candy industry, oil industry, funeral industry, as well as representatives of the governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have booked events at the Trump International Hotel since November.

Top photo: Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Tiffany Trump, and Ivanka Trump take part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony during the grand opening of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 26, 2016.

The post After Massive Giveaways to Industry, Mining Executives Will Spend Big at Trump’s D.C. Hotel appeared first on The Intercept.

Despite the laudatory title and mission of the diversity committee, Johnson is a consultant who perfectly embodies the corporations-first agenda of President Donald Trump’s FCC.

Johnson has long worked on behalf of industry groups seeking to undermine consumer regulations and promote the interests of large corporate clients.

Shortly after Trump named Pai to lead the FCC, the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council — a nonprofit chaired by Johnson and funded by Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and other large telecom firms — released statements praising Pai’s appointment and endorsing his strategy for unwinding the net neutrality protections secured during former President Barack Obama’s administration.

MMTC’s pro-Trump administration statements, cast as being made on behalf of communities of color, are typical of Johnson’s approach. Over the years, Johnson has used racial minorities as a cudgel to disingenuously lobby on behalf of industry.

For instance, as The Intercept previously reported, a news website created by Johnson’s consulting firm, Politic365, worked aggressively to slam the idea of “net metering,” which allows homeowners to claim credit for the solar electricity they generate and send back to the utility grid. Politic365 published multiple pieces sharply criticizing the rule, claiming that the metering would somehow harm African-American consumers and would simply benefit “privileged” elites. Those claims directly contradict findings by independent analysts, especially those working in communities of color on renewable and green job initiatives. What’s more, while Politic365 led the anti-net metering effort, it did not disclose that Johnson was paid by the utility firms opposed to net metering, including FirstEnergy and NorthWestern Energy.

Johnson’s history of “astroturfing,” a term for lobbying using fake grassroots groups, goes back more than a decade. During congressional testimony in 2006, Johnson was unmasked for lobbying against minorities on behalf of the telecom industry. Then-Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., asked Johnson why her organization, a group she formed called the Video Access Alliance, appeared to oppose a requirement of a bill that would force telephone companies to “build out” services to poor and minority neighborhoods.

The question led to a fairly unusual exchange, with Johnson finally admitting that she was consulting for the same telephone industry interests that had also resisted the build-out mandate:

Markey: Is your organization financially supported by the Bell [telephone] companies in any way?

Johnson: No, we’re not.

Markey: At all.

Johnson: Yes, and let me elaborate upon that too. We’re a relatively new organization.

Markey: No, that’s OK. I can go along with that answer. That’s fine. Thank you. And are you compensated in any way by the Bell companies?

Johnson: I have a consulting firm that works for a variety of companies, generally in the regulatory space.

Markey: But are the Bell companies amongst those companies that pay you?

Johnson: Yes.

Watch here:

Johnson’s appointment to the FCC’s diversity board has been celebrated by none other than Politic365. In a news item that does not mention Johnson’s connection to Politics365, the website notes that many of Johnson’s colleagues from her group, MMTC, have also joined Pai’s diversity effort, and that their first meeting will take place on September 25.

Top photo: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaks during the 2017 NAB Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center on April 25, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The post FCC’s New Diversity Chair Lobbied Against Net Neutrality and Services for Minority Communities appeared first on The Intercept.

The authorization, which was passed in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, is the legal justification for many U.S. military engagements abroad, as part of what has been called the “global war on terror.” The expansively interpreted law authorized military attacks against those responsible for 9/11 and “associated forces.”

The failed vote came after Paul took to the floor on Monday, vowing to block other Senate actions until his amendment was allowed.

An attempt was made to run the clock on the bill overnight. I objected and am now sitting on the floor of the Senate to stop that

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 11, 2017

Tonight I sit silently to protest the thousands of American soldiers who have died over the past decade in these wars.

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) September 11, 2017

Paul’s effort won him four hours of debate time to argue for his amendment, which he used to denounce “unlimited war, anywhere, anytime, any place upon the globe.”

In addition to arguing on the floor, he appeared on MSNBC on Wednesday morning to argue that the original AUMF should not continue to apply. “I don’t think one generation should bind another generation to war,” he said.

Top photo: Sen. Rand Paul, R.-Ky., walking through the Senate subway on July 27, 2017.

The post Rand Paul’s Amendment to Force a Vote on Endless War Gets Kicked Down the Road appeared first on The Intercept.

The question is: What do proponents think will make this push for single payer any more successful than others in the past? After all, activists who backed such an approach during 2009’s health care debate were literally arrested at hearings, and their legislation was sidelined and never even brought to a vote.

But this time, as he launches his campaign, Sanders has the support of 24 grassroots organizations with a combined membership base of tens of millions of people. Here they are:

1.      Our Revolution: The grassroots group formed from Sanders’s presidential campaign list; it is led by former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner.
2.      Social Security Works: President Nancy Altman and Executive Director Alex Lawson helm Social Security Works, which has for years worked to protect the Social Security system from cuts and expand its benefits. It has well over 1 million members.
3.      National Nurses United: The nation’s largest nurses union and has made single-payer health care one of its top legislative priority for years.
4.      Progressive Campaign Change Committee: A million-member progressive grassroots organization led by Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor. 
5.      Democracy for America: DFA was formed from the network that coalesced around Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.
6.      Labor Campaign for Single Payer: The single-payer advocacy wing of many major American unions.
7.      LULAC: The League of United Latin American Citizens is the nation’s largest and oldest Hispanic advocacy organization.
8.      Working Families Party: A progressive political group founded in New York that has since spread across the nation. It works to recruit, train, and elect progressive candidates, often in Democratic primaries, and occasionally on its own ballot line.
9.      MoveOn: A national progressive grassroots group with millions of members.
10.      AllOfUs: A youth-driven social activism group founded by activists who supported Sanders’s campaign.
11.      Demand Progress: A major social activism group that works on issues ranging from civil liberties to net neutrality.
12.      Health Care Now: A coalition of activist groups founded in 2004 to establish single-payer health care.
13.      Progressive Democrats of America: A political action committee dedicated to empowering progressive Democrats.
14.      CREDO: A fusion progressive organization and phone company that uses its revenues to fund activism. It has more than 5 million members.
15.      Public Citizen: This Ralph Nader-founded civic activism organization has been the driving force behind landmark consumer legislation for decades.
16.      Latinos for Healthcare Equality: A New York-based nonprofit that works to increase health care access.
17.      Americans for Democratic Action: ADA has spent 70 years supporting progressive causes. It was a major force during the push for the Great Society, but has languished since.
18.      AIDS Healthcare Foundation: This Los Angeles-based nonprofit, which provides treatment for HIV-positive patients, was one of the driving forces behind the 2016 drug-pricing initiative in California.
19.      DailyKos: A hub for liberal bloggers founded in 2002 opposed to the Bush administration, which has an active email list of millions of people.
20.      Food & Water Watch: This nonprofit works on government and corporate accountability related to our ecosystem.
21.      Friends of the Earth: A grassroots environmental group; its parent group has 2 million activists in 75 countries.
22.      350.org: This group, founded by environmentalist Bill McKibben, fights to keep fossil fuels in the ground and for a clean energy future.
23.      International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers: This union represents nearly 600,000 workers.
24.      American Sustainable Business Council: The only business group on the list, the ASBC represents a number of American companies who believe that progressive policies, like single-payer health care, are good for the country and good for business.

In an email to his campaign list sent earlier this month, Sanders described the grassroots organizing that will go into passing universal Medicare as similar to a presidential campaign.

“There will be rallies, buttons, bumper stickers, shirts and most importantly people organizing in their communities across the country,” he said. “This is not going to be a quick or easy fight. We’ll be taking on the insurance companies, the drug companies, Wall Street and all those who make billions in profit from the current dysfunctional system.”

Top photo: A single-payer protest sponsored by the National Nurses United in South Gate, Calif., on June 27, 2017.

The post Bernie’s Army: 24 Organizations With Millions of Members Vow To Help Pass His Universal Medicare Plan appeared first on The Intercept.

He shared his candid thoughts last weekend at the Wells Fargo Healthcare Conference in Boston, a gathering for investors and major pharmaceutical and biotech firms.

Americans have lost trust in drug companies, Saunders said, noting the industry consistently ranks lower than oil and tobacco companies in public trust surveys.

“I think we’ve got to do things to bring that trust back,” the executive added, “because ultimately, someone’s going to be in the White House. Somebody’s going to be in Congress. Someone’s going to be somewhere and going to have to say, ‘Enough’s enough. Let’s just change the whole system. Let’s go to one payer. Let’s do something.'”

While single payer has been discarded as a fringe, far-left idea over recent generations, the policy proposal has gained new traction in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Many in the Democratic Party are drifting to the ideas of Sanders and other progressives who have long advocated for expanding coverage by providing Medicare to all Americans.

Saunders observed that “the party that seems to be out of power tends to move dramatically to the left or to the right,” adding that the Republican Party during the Obama era had lurched more right-wing.

“We’re seeing almost the equal but opposite reaction here now that they’ve been swept out, the left of their party is really taken, gotten a louder voice and taken control,” Saunders continued, speaking about changes in the Democratic Party.

“And so Bernie Sanders and others in that movement had really tried to vet candidates,” Saunders noted, adding, “They wanted to go to one — that part of the party wants to go to a one-payer system.”

Listen here:

During his speech, Saunders touted a statement of principles he released in 2016 calling for a “social contract” with patients, promising not to use predatory pricing and other behaviors that have come to define his industry.

But if Saunders is concerned that the public may get fed up with the current system, it may have something to do with how Allergan itself has acted in recent weeks. The CEO has been under fire for taking the unprecedented step of transferring the patent of one of Allergan’s blockbuster drugs, the eye medication Restasis, to a sovereign Native American tribe as part of a bid to maintain monopoly control of the drug and its revenue.

The highly unusual legal strategy is designed to keep generic drug firms from challenging the Restasis patent, thus lowering the cost to consumers, while keeping Allergan in effective control of the revenue through its deal with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. The Restasis patent was approved 15 years ago and was set to expire in 2014, but the Allergan deal is part of an attempt to renew the patent and extend the company’s control of the drug through 2024.

While serious questions linger about the political viability of single payer, especially for the immediate future under President Donald Trump and a Republican Congress, the center of gravity within the Democratic Party has shifted dramatically in favor of the universal Medicare plan that health care executives fear.

Top photo: People rally calling for a single-payer health plan on June 28, 2017, in Sacramento, Calif.

The post Pharma CEO Worries Americans Will Say “Enough Is Enough” and Embrace Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Plan appeared first on The Intercept.

Amendment No. 126 was sponsored by a bipartisan group of nine members, led by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. He was joined by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna of California; Washington state’s Pramila Jayapal, a rising progressive star; and Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard.

Civil asset forfeiture is a practice in which law enforcement can take assets from a person who is suspected of a crime, even without a charge or conviction. Sessions revived the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allowed state and local police agencies to take assets and then give them to the federal government — which would in turn give a chunk back to local police. This served as a way for these local agencies to skirt past state laws designed to limit asset forfeiture.

The amendment would roll back Sessions’s elimination of the Obama-era reforms.

Amash, the prime mover of the amendment, spoke forcefully in favor of the Obama-era rules on the House floor and the need to bring them back.

“Unfortunately these restrictions were revoked in June of this year. My amendment would restore them by prohibiting the use of funds to do adoptive forfeitures that were banned under the 2015 rules,” he explained.

Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer reached across the aisle to voice support for Amash’s effort. “Civil asset forfeiture without limits presents one of the strongest threats to our civil, property, and constitutional rights,” he said on the floor. “It creates a perverse incentive to seek profits over justice.”

The amendment passed with a voice vote, meaning it had overwhelming support.

Republican Reps. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Raúl Labrador of Idaho, and Dana Rohrabacher of California joined in the effort, along with Democrat Earl Blumenauer of Oregon.

Top photo: Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., arrives to the Capitol on May 4, 2017.

Correction: Sept. 12, 2017
Due to an editing error, this story originally misnamed the state Jayapal represents.

The post In Surprise Vote, House Passes Amendment to Restrict Asset Forfeiture appeared first on The Intercept.

In two states on different sides of the Mason-Dixon line, two upstart candidates are vying in elections aiming to upset the local political order.

In Mississippi, voters head to the polls in what could be a shocker of a special election. A state House seat for District 102 that has long been in GOP hands is up for grabs, and if Republicans lose it, they lose their supermajority in the legislature. The election was triggered when Toby Barker, the former House member — who had cast a critical vote against expanding Medicaid — was elected mayor of Hattiesburg and stepped down.

The Democrat in the race is Kathryn Rehner, a 27-year-old community organizer, who, as director of the Mississippi Health Access Collaborative, has led the local charge to enroll uninsured residents in Obamacare. She’s running as an outspoken populist-progressive, trying to upend the notion that to win as a Democrat in a majority-white district in Mississippi, you have to pretend to be Republican.

The one-time Republican front-runner, Cory Ferraez, is openly gay and libertarian-leaning, but apparently, even in 2017, that was a bit much for Mississippi, so Republican elites swung their support to Missy McGee, scion of a local family who dominates the paving business. Conventional wisdom in a crowded race assumes that nobody will get 50 percent and there’ll be a runoff in October, but if previous national patterns hold, it’s quite possible Rehner — using the clever hashtag #MakeItRehn — could crack 50 and win it outright.

And in New York City, the Rev. Khader El-Yateem is running in the Democratic primary for New York City Council District 43, which encompasses a part of southwest Brooklyn that includes Bay Ridge. While the city trended for Hillary Clinton during the presidential primary, El-Yateem’s district handed its votes to her challenger Bernie Sanders.

El-Yateem is one of two city council candidates this year backed by Democratic Socialists of America, the other being the Green Party’s Jabari Brisport, who is also running in Brooklyn and will be on the ballot in November.

El-Yateem is both openly socialist and a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign aimed at Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians; if elected, he would also be the first Palestinian-American to serve on city council, having been born in Bethlehem.

Needless to say, his campaign is a rebellious one in a city known for both its capitalism and pro-Israel politics.

The challenge for El-Yateem is to get the turnout needed to win. For its part, DSA has knocked on roughly 15,000 doors getting out the vote for the candidate. His campaign estimates that 5,000 voters in the district are of Middle Eastern descent, but roughly 250 of them voted in the Democratic presidential primary last year.

Regardless of whether he wins or loses, El-Yateem’s campaign serves as an example for other Arab Americans who have been hesitant to run for office. Zein Rimawi, who is a member of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, explained that dynamic to the Village Voice.

“You can be a councilman, you can be a state senator, a congressman,” he said. “And it doesn’t make any difference if you are an Arab or a Muslim. You have a chance to be there.”

Update: September 13, 2017

A Democrat stunned in a special election in Oklahoma Tuesday night. In November, Trump won the district by 11 points, and Jacob Rosecrants, the Democratic candidate, lost his race by 20 points. Tuesday night, Rosecrants ran again in the special, and won by 20. That’s the third special election Democrats have flipped in Oklahoma since November and in a fourth, in May, they lost a race by two points in a district that Trump had won by 50. 

And in New Hampshire, in a 29-point swing, Democrats flipped another district Tuesday night. 

In Mississippi, there were reports of people — many students — showing up to the polls and being told they were no longer registered. If you were among them, reach out to us at tips@theintercept.com. The Democrat, Rehner, finished second to McGee, forcing a runoff election in October.

El-Yateem lost by seven points.

Top photo: The campaign for the Rev. Khader El-Yateem, who is running in the Democratic primary for New York City Council District 43, which encompasses a part of southwest Brooklyn that includes Bay Ridge.

The post In New York and Mississippi, Upstart Candidates Surge in Today’s Elections (Updated) appeared first on The Intercept.

“I am expecting a riot,” said Bradley Devlin, the secretary of the Berkeley College Republicans. “We can look at a political pattern. Whenever the right steps up in the Bay Area, the antifa is there to perpetrate violent acts and shut them down.”

Devlin, who has helped organize previous controversial speaking events, said he opposes violence in any form, but coyly added that violence perpetrated by his opposition might not be so bad, as it will provide increased publicity for Shapiro, who he called an “icon” and a worthy spokesperson for the conservative movement.

“Ben on a larger pedestal for the conservative movement is nothing but a good thing,” continued Devlin, speaking on a YouTube channel called the Lone Conservative. Devlin joked that he hasn’t decided whether he should stream video of Shapiro’s speech or just broadcast footage of the protesters outside.

Shapiro is a firebrand right-wing pundit, who denounces the “alt-right,” a far-right movement grounded in white supremacy, as anti-Semitic. Yet Shapiro provokes the ire of campus liberals by mocking what he calls excesses of political correctness; he’s known for his bigoted tirades against Muslims and transgender people.

Conservative student groups have long used provocative demonstrations and incendiary speakers to gain attention for their cause. The Young America’s Foundation, a conservative group closely affiliated with the Republican Party, provided the $9,162 security fee for the Shapiro event this week. YAF spends over $8 million a year on campus activism, including efforts to bring conservative speakers to college campuses — while filming and publicizing left-wing demonstrators to cast them as extremist.

The Leadership Institute, another GOP-aligned foundation that provides grants and funding to campus conservatives, makes the strategy explicit in its instructional materials. One Leadership Institute video explains how radical labor organizer Saul Alinsky’s strategies can be adopted for conservatives, including an effort to seize upon left-wing violence. The video shows how a 2009 anti-immigration speech by former Rep. Tom Tancredo at the University of North Carolina was interrupted by a brick thrown through the window. The violent act was filmed by a conservative student, which went viral on social media and gained mainstream media attention condemning the act.

“The protest by the liberal students failed because the focus of the story went from ‘students exposing an extreme speaker’s view’ to left-wing extremists deny free speech,” explained the LI instructor. “Anyone who watched the video was forced to sympathize with the congressman and the conservative students.” The strategy, the instructor declared, demonstrated how to turn “left-wing extremism into a conservative victory.”

LI, which sponsors over 1,300 student groups and publications on over 650 campuses, has produced dozens of Republican politicians and right-wing leaders trained with similarly provocative campus activism tactics. The group spends about $13 million a year on such efforts. James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, the pair whose undercover videos brought down the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), received financial support from the foundation world when they were students — O’Keefe via the LI and Giles via an internship with the YAF‘s journalism wing.

But the strategy has taken new heights in recent months. Newly energized leftist groups, which have increasingly embraced violence as a tactic and conservatives on college campuses as their primary target, are providing ample bait for conservatives hoping to shape media coverage and public opinion.

Berkeley, in particular, has become a hotspot for this particular dynamic. In February, a left-wing riot shut down the Berkeley event scheduled for Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative pundit known for his intentionally offensive rhetoric and abusive insults hurled at minorities. The riot included violent attacks on students perceived as conservative, including at least one student who was reportedly beaten because he looked “like a Nazi” and $100,000 in damages to seemingly random businesses and campus buildings.

The incident transformed Yiannopoulos, primarily a star in online far-right subcultures, into a mainstream personality, with sympathetic coverage in major newspapers, including the New York Times, hours of coverage on cable news, and hundreds of thousands of new subscribers on his Facebook page.

Conservatives in Berkeley appear to be hoping for a similar reaction.

Over the course of the year, some left-wing activists, known largely as antifa, or anti-fascists, have similarly attacked random bystanders, journalists, and ordinary conservatives under the mantra of combatting fascism.

In Boston last month, a bald, white man with tattoos who traveled to Boston Commons to protest racism was beaten by antifa activists after being mistaken for a white supremacist. In Berkeley, antifa chased and violently attacked the leader of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, a Japanese-American who says he disavows white supremacy. Journalists, in particular, have been threatened and attacked by antifa during recent demonstrations, including a local CBS News photojournalist in Richmond, Virginia, who was sent to the hospital with stitches and a KTVU reporter who was struck in Berkeley for filming a public demonstration.

Experts who study right-wing extremism have cautioned against antifa’s violent approach. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for instance, recommends that demonstrators avoid violence and instead “organize a joyful protest” to distract from far-right speakers. Life After Hate, a nonprofit that works to de-radicalize racist extremists, has discouraged violent confrontations, noting that such tactics do nothing to stop hate, and are more likely to embolden neo-Nazi organizations.

Researchers have also found that violent protests and riots correlate strongly with public support for law-and-order politics, a dynamic that far-right politicians and law enforcement have long tapped into.

But for the Berkeley far left, some of whom even attacked a worker-owned cooperative during a demonstration supposedly centered on raising awareness about police abuse, there might be little that can be done to stop a violent confrontation with upcoming conservative speakers.

Devlin helped organize the February event for Yiannopoulos that ended in mayhem. The upcoming Shapiro event is scheduled for September 14, which will be followed by Yiannopoulos’s return to campus for “Berkeley Free Speech Week” on September 24-27, an event sponsored by a campus magazine called the Berkeley Patriot.

Top photo: Antifa members and counterprotesters gather during a right-wing No to Marxism rally on Aug. 27, 2017 at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in Berkeley, Calif.

The post Berkeley Republicans Hope More Left-Wing Riots Will Create “Pedestal” For Conservative Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

Ramirez-Rosa joined Democratic state senator Daniel Biss’s gubernatorial ticket in late August — setting up Biss’s campaign as the unapologetic left edge of a Democratic primary in a field that includes a billionaire and a member of the Kennedy family.

Ramirez-Rosa came under fire this week from a prominent member of his state party, but not for his support of democratic socialism.

Illinois Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider penned a Facebook post on September 3 citing the alderman’s views on Israel and particularly his “affiliation with a group that is an outspoken supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel” — namely, DSA — as a cause for concern. He wrote that he had spoken to both Biss and Ramirez-Rosa and decided to withdraw his endorsement of the campaign.

Ramirez-Rosa’s statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been critical of the status quo but hardly extreme. “You know, for too long the U.S. government has subsidized the oppression of the Palestinian people, and it’s time that that’s stopped,” he told the Real News Network during an interview in June 2016.  “And we have seen a shift internationally in favor of justice for the Palestinian people. You know, people stand with Israel, but they also want to make sure that Palestinian people have [justice].”

On Wednesday evening, Ramirez-Rosa posted news of his departure from the ticket on Facebook:

While I was honored to be chosen as Senator Daniel Biss’ gubernatorial running mate, it became clear over the past few days that while we share a total commitment to peace, security, and statehood for the Israeli and Palestinian people, and both oppose pursuing BDS at the state level, the difference of opinion we have on the role the BDS movement plays at the federal level would make it impossible to continue moving forward as a ticket.

I was asked to join the ticket to even more strongly advocate for the critical issues facing this state, such as Medicare for all, a $15 living wage today, affordable childcare, and free college tuition. While I am no longer part of the ticket, I have every confidence that Senator Biss and I, in our different roles, will continue to be strong advocates for these progressive issues.

I especially want to thank the members and organizational leaders of Reclaim Chicago, Our Revolution IL, and Democratic Socialists of America, and the thousands of activists who have shown their commitment to addressing these critical concerns for their confidence in me, and their continued work on these progressive issues. There is so much work to be done, and I am proud to stand by your side while we continue to build our progressive movement.

Biss also put out a lengthy statement explaining his decision, suggesting that Ramirez-Rosa had not been upfront about his support of BDS when Biss interviewed him for the job of running mate. According to Biss:

Carlos Ramirez-Rosa and I have reached a difficult decision about our ticket. As of today, I’ll be moving forward with a new running mate.

Growing up with an Israeli mother, grandparents who survived the Holocaust, and great-grandparents who did not survive, issues related to the safety and security of the Jewish people are deeply personal to me.

I strongly support a two-state solution. I support Israel’s right to exist, and I support Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. I also care deeply about justice for Palestinians, and believe that a vision for the Middle East must include political and economic freedom for Palestinians.

That’s why I oppose the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, as I believe it moves us further away from a peaceful solution.  

When I asked him in the interview process prior to his selection, Carlos said he too supported a two-state solution and opposed BDS.

Since we’ve announced his selection, we have been asked about his position on BDS. After much discussion, it’s become clear that Carlos’ position has changed. While I respect his right to come to his own conclusions on the issue, it simply wasn’t the understanding we shared when I asked him to join the ticket.

In light of this, we have agreed that I will be moving forward with a new running mate. It was not an easy decision, but it was the right decision.  

Schneider, meanwhile, has long been affiliated with the right-wing, pro-Israel lobby, which tolerates little dissent on the issue.

“If you look at [Schneider’s] record, he was just an Israel guy, that was his thing,” MoveOn strategist Daniel Mintz told The Huffington Post in 2012, after the then-businessman won the Democratic primary.

Steve Sheffey, the former president of CityPAC, a Chicago-based, pro-Israel political action committee, used a 2016 op-ed  in The Hill to sing Schneider’s praises. “Schneider is a lifetime member of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), He has long been active in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities,” he wrote. “Schneider visited Israel over a dozen times before running for Congress and worked for several months on a kibbutz.”

When asked about Israel issues in a 2012 Chicago Magazine interview, Schneider replied, “I’ve been to Israel more times than I could actually count.” Although he eventually came to terms with it, he was one of the most outspoken Democrats initially opposing the nuclear deal with Iran. In an op-ed published on the Times of Israel website, he denounced the agreement. “My personal stake in this debate is further influenced by the terrifying youthful memory of Yom Kippur in 1973, when Israel faced a surprise attack from Egypt, and the Jewish state’s very existence was threatened,” he wrote.

During the 2014 war between Gaza and Israel, Schneider attended a rally offering little nuance on the issue. “We are here as one people to say in a strong clear voice, the United States has no better ally in the region, in fact no better ally in the world than the democratic, Jewish state of Israel,” he told a crowd in Chicago. “In a strong, clear voice Israel has the right, Israel has a responsibility to defend herself against the terrorist rockets, the terrorist tunnels, and the evil that is Hamas.” He then repeated the same line he gave to Chicago Magazine, telling the cheering crowd that he has been to Israel more times than he can count.

He is also a co-sponsor of a House bill that would criminalize support for BDS.

In Schneider’s 2016 race, pro-Israel money formed a major funding stream. OpenSecrets ranks pro-Israel donors as his third-largest pile of money — bringing in $318,749 — behind lawyers and law firms, and Democratic Party and liberal interest groups.

Schneider’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Update: Sept. 6, 2017

This story was updated to include a statement from Biss.

Top photo: Illinois state senator and candidate for governor Daniel Biss, right, and former running mate Carlos Ramirez-Rosa speak with a participant of the Fight for 15 Labor Day march.

The post Socialist Forced Off Democratic Campaign for Criticism of Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

But Biss is countering his capitalist opponent by picking as his running mate someone who is Pritzker’s direct opposite: a democratic socialist.

At a rally Thursday night, Biss announced that Chicago Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, would be his running mate.

In his speech, Rosa takes multiple digs at Pritzker (though without naming him) warning against replacing 1 billionaire gov w another pic.twitter.com/U7xJMLJGhH

— Tony Arnold (@tonyjarnold) September 1, 2017

“There’s something much more powerful than money and political machines, and that’s organized people,” Ramirez-Rosa said at the event, a clear reference to the hill the pair have to climb in running against Pritzker and other elements of the establishment.

“We’re at a defining moment for our party and our state,” Biss said in a statement explaining the pick. “As I thought about who to choose as a running mate, I thought about how Illinois needs a lieutenant governor who deeply believes in grassroots politics. We need someone who is a progressive in their core, who is unafraid to take on entrenched power, and unashamed to always stand with the working families of Illinois.”

In a state where the Democratic Party runs a notoriously tight machine that demands obedience to leadership, Ramirez-Rosa has been a consistent thorn in the side of the party’s establishment. At 26 years old, he won office in 2015 as the youngest member of Chicago’s city council, defeating an incumbent backed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s super PAC.

Earlier this year, Ramirez-Rosa spoke at the Democratic Socialists of America biannual convention. He made no bones about his determination to take aim at both the Republicans and the establishment of his own party. “As democratic socialists, we know that just as rigorously as we resist the right wing and their mouthpiece president, so too must we resist the neoliberal Democrats,” he said.

Biss and Ramirez-Rosa will be campaigning on a platform of establishing a public financing system for Illinois elections, enacting a single-payer health care system, and moving the state toward ranked-choice voting. The primary is in March 2018.

Top photo: Illinois state senator and candidate for governor Daniel Biss (R) announced Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, alderman for Chicago’s 35th Ward, as his running mate for the upcoming election.

The post Illinois Democrat Picks Democratic Socialist as Running Mate for Gubernatorial Run appeared first on The Intercept.

Jones’s advocacy, however, has spawned a vitriolic reaction from some of her opponents. On Monday, GOP state representative Jason C. Spencer posted a photograph with a Jefferson Davis memorial on Facebook, saying that it represents the state’s history.

Jones took issue with Spencer’s stance, saying that she doesn’t want to pay for statues to the Confederacy. He shot back: “Continue your quixotic journey into South Georgia and it will not be pleasant. The truth. Not a warning.”

The two continued to argue, until at one point Spencer chimed in that people advocating for the removal of Confederate symbols will “go missing in the Okefenokee” — a reference to a large swamp and wildlife refuge near the border with Florida.

Jones was taken aback by Spencer’s words, saying they sounded “like a threat of physical violence.” But she countered that the next generation of people in South Georgia will “come work for me and my children who were taught no one is better than anyone else.”

Jones told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she is cordial with Spencer, who she has known for years.

“If it were anybody other than Jason Spencer, then I would be alarmed. But we had a unique relationship in the Georgia Legislature,” she said. “If that had come from anybody else, I’d take it as a serious threat.”

But she also told the paper she was “concerned” by his reaction, “because if that’s representative of what people in south Georgia think, then yikes.”

In her fight against Confederate memorials, Jones has been met with resistance from both parties.

In the 2015-2016 legislative session, she was one of three cosponsors of HB 760, which would convert Stone Mountain from a Confederate memorial to a Civil War memorial.

In a blog post earlier this month, Jones said she internally pushed for House Democrats to rally around removing Confederate symbolism from Stone Mountain following the 2015 Charleston shooting.

But she writes that she was rebuffed by then-House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams — who is today one of two Democrats running for governor — when she met with her in August 2015 to try to get her support for the bill.

“As leader of the caucus, support includes being a sponsor on the bill,” she explained to The Intercept. “Getting other allies to support it was my first ask.” Abrams “was not interested in that,” Jones said.

Jones then tried to get Abrams and other lawmakers to take a caucus-wide position on the bill. Many Georgia House members, Jones said, are hesitant to take caucus positions because if  “one of your caucus members does not stand in line, it kind of weakens the value of taking a caucus position.” So an informal poll was taken. “Her answer again to that was no,” Jones said.

Jones then fell back on trying to get Democratic state House officials to take a public stand together.”Even if we don’t do legislation, we can do a press conference, we can do a statement, we can do something as a Democratic caucus,” she said. “Her response to that was, ‘No, that sounds like something you should do with the Legislative Black Caucus.'”

In mid-August, following the tragedy in Charlottesville, Abrams came out for removing the Stone Mountain carving. Abrams’s evolution on the issue fuels the type of criticism that has been leveled at her previously: that while she may be campaigning to the left during a primary contest, her record is far more moderate, notably when she backed GOP cuts to the state scholarship in 2011. (Abrams says that by working with Republicans on the cuts, she staved off what would have been more draconian reductions had she not engaged.)

On background, a member of Abrams’s campaign team offered a response to Jones’s blog post. “Abrams has led protests against the Confederate flag, and as minority leader, worked with Chairman Emeritus Calvin Smyre to secure the statue of Dr. King on the grounds of the Capitol. As a member of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus and as minority leader, she deferred to the leadership of the GLBC — who were spearheading the effort — regarding the 2015 debate. Rep. Jones did not submit legislation in 2016 for inclusion in the Georgia House Democratic Caucus agenda.”

Jones says she introduced the bill to Abrams in 2015, so the two narratives do not technically conflict with each other.

Top photo: Confederate flag supporters climb Stone Mountain to protest of what they believe is an attack on their Southern heritage during a rally at Stone Mountain Park in Stone Mountain, Ga., on Saturday, Aug. 1, 2015.

The post Georgia GOP Rep. Tells Former Colleague She May ‘Go Missing’ Over Criticism of Confederate Monuments appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump has faced growing criticism for leaving vacancies in many government positions, as well as apparently handing out appointments to connected Republican insiders and lobbyists over experts and well-qualified public servants. But as the administration faces Harvey, a reshuffle that’s brought Kirstjen Nielsen to the White House may raise eyebrows even further.

Until recently, Nielsen served as the top aide to retired Gen. John Kelly as he headed the Department of Homeland Security. But when Kelly became Trump’s chief of staff, Nielsen changed positions too, becoming Trump’s deputy chief of staff.

Nielsen is known in the Beltway for her close relationship with Kelly; a Washington Post story recently stated that administration officials “usually work through Nielsen, and she funnels information to Kelly, who decides what to show the president.” Less known, however, is her history as a key figure singled out by two 2006 congressional reports highlighting members of former President George W. Bush’s administration who were warned about Hurricane Katrina and failed to act.

Over a decade ago, Nielsen held the title of senior director for preparedness and response at the White House Security Council.

The Senate report, “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” names Nielsen as among the key administration figures who failed to act on early warnings about the storm. A related bipartisan report from the House of Representatives on the government’s botched response to Katrina, “A Failure of Initiative,” similarly criticized Nielsen.

While serving in the Bush White House, the Senate report notes, Nielsen received an email from emergency planning officials six months before the storm in February 2005, warning that flooding in New Orleans “could cause similar devastation” as the tsunami that had devastated Southeast Asia the previous year.

Throughout August 27 and August 28, before the storm made landfall, Nielsen and other senior Bush aides received a flow of reports from DHS about the growing strength of Katrina, including a warning that floodwaters could overtop New Orleans’s levees. “Any storm rated Category 4 or greater,” one email from the Homeland Security Operations Center sent on August 28 warned, “will likely lead to severe flooding and/or levee breaching. This could leave the New Orleans area being submerged for weeks or months. … The magnitude of this storm is expected to cause massive flooding.”

Nielsen, the House report points out, headed Bush’s Homeland Security Council for Prevention, Preparedness, and Response directorate, a team designed to relay information from disaster response agencies to the president.

Bush and his senior aides did not act on the warnings. On Saturday, August 27, Bush spent the day vacationing at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. The following Monday, August 29, the president attended events in Arizona and California as the storm reached U.S. shores, including Arizona Senator John McCain’s birthday celebration.

“Despite the clear warnings before landfall that Katrina would be catastrophic, the President and the White House staff were not sufficiently engaged and failed to initiate a sufficiently strong and proactive response,” the Senate report concluded.

The lack of preparation for the deadly storm led to absolute chaos on the ground as Katrina flooded New Orleans and destroyed communities along the coast. Local authorities, lacking guidance from the federal government, failed both to evacuate residents and to provide medical assistance to those stranded by the storm. Katrina is estimated to have cost nearly 2,000 lives.

In April 2007, Bush appointed Thomas Bossert to replace Nielsen as senior director for preparedness and response, one of many turnovers in personnel in the Homeland Security Council during a congressionally mandated “shakeup” of the department in the years after Hurricane Katrina. Bossert, notably, has also returned to the White House as a senior aide for Trump.

Nielsen, like many Bush homeland security officials, ended up in the for-profit security industry — in Nielsen’s case, at a company called Civitas Group LLC. Civitas, which describes itself as a “strategic advisory and investment firm serving the homeland and national security markets,” was founded by Republican lobbyist Charles Black and Samuel Berger, a former national security adviser to former President Bill Clinton.

Beginning in 2012, Nielsen served as the president of Sunesis Consulting, a consulting firm that “advises senior government officials and senior private sector officials on the development, assessment, and execution of preparedness strategies, policies, plans, tools, and tabletop exercises to prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from all hazard events with a focus on cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and emergency preparedness and response.” The firm, according to GovExec, won a contract last year to review the Homeland Security Department’s efforts to collect data about threats to U.S. infrastructure. She also served as a fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber & Homeland Security.

Top photo: Bryan Vernon and Dorothy Bell are rescued on Aug. 29, 2005 from their rooftop after Hurricane Katrina hit, causing flooding in their New Orleans neighborhood.

The post As Hurricane Harvey Approaches, Trump Appoints Deputy Chief of Staff Who Failed to Prepare for Katrina appeared first on The Intercept.

Lilla attacked “identity politics” as atomizing the American public and losing elections, contrasting it with a holistic variation of liberalism that powered the New Deal Coalition — Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which focused not so much on who individual Americans were, but what rights they all needed. The column went viral, sparking countless hot takes, and he quickly padded out the argument into enough words to call it a book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” Let the hot takes resume.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

The reactions to Lilla’s original piece from left and liberal writers were harsh. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilla’s Columbia University colleague Katherine Franke compared his ideology to that of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s, arguing that “Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the more nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable.”

But while Lilla may be a white, male professor in New York City, his concerns are hardly uncommon among those in left-liberal politics. For instance, former Democratic state representative LaDawn Jones — an African-American woman who chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in Georgia — lamented earlier this year that her party’s Atlanta convention seemed to offer caucuses and councils for every racial and affinity group except white people. In the state of Georgia, less than 25 percent of white voters choose Democrats at the ballot box, meaning that white Democrats are indeed a minority group. Would the logic of identity liberalism then dictate that the party design messaging aimed directly at them? Traditionally, identity liberalism justifies itself by organizing around groups that have been historically oppressed, but when traditional majority in-groups become out-groups in certain organizations and societies, is there a need for special categorization and organizing for their inclusion as well?

These are the sort of questions Lilla tries to wrestle with in the short book released this month. “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics” is a breezy 165 pages that he uses as a short overview of contemporary American political history and what he believes are the shortcomings of modern American liberalism.

The book is at its best when it is reviewing the strengths of modern conservative thought and liberal shortcomings — when Lilla reviews the towering political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who reset American politics, to his laments of over-reaching identity sectarianism on American campuses — but comes up much weaker when suggesting an alternative way forward.

Reagan’s Patriotic Individualism

Before Lilla diagnoses the weaknesses of what he calls identity liberalism, he takes a step back and uses the first section of the book to analyze the strengths of modern conservatives.

He traces their rise to Republican President Ronald Reagan, whom he credits with promoting themes of American patriotism and optimism that easily steamrolled his Democratic rivals. He quotes from Reagan’s 1980 election eve speech where the former president took a shot at Jimmy Carter’s lectures on the need for sacrifice: “I find no national malaise, I find nothing wrong with the American people.”

To Lilla, Reagan’s defeat of Carter and Walter Mondale after him created what he terms the “Reagan Dispensation” — a new political ethos where individualism and, particularly, business is equated with patriotism. He writes that this dispensation preaches that the “good life is that of self-reliant individuals — individuals embedded perhaps in families, churches, and small communities, but not citizens of a republic with common goals and duties to each other.”

Lilla, however, misses a couple things about Reagan. One is that Reagan himself appealed to a form of white identity politics — his invocations of “welfare queens,” for example, and the way he implemented his war on drugs. And while Reagan preached individualism, he was not afraid to use the government on behalf of groups he needed to achieve electoral success. For instance, he imposed heavy tariffs and import quotas to protect certain industries, and his administration bailed out Continental Illinois, the original “too big to fail” bank.

Identity Liberalism Offers its Own Individualism

The book traces the origin of identity liberalism to the 1960s and ’70s. Lilla praises the work of the civil rights movement, antiwar movement, feminists, and others for creating a more civilized American society, but believes that the New Left’s retreat largely to college academia during the Reagan years created a new form of inward-looking politics that mirrored the Republican president’s individualism.

“You might have thought that, faced with the dogma of radical economic individualism that Reaganism normalized, liberals would have used their positions in our educational institutions to teach young people that they share a destiny with all their fellow citizens and have duties toward them,” Lilla writes. “Instead, they trained students to be spelunkers of their personal identities and left them incurious about the world outside their heads.”

He trains his fire largely on colleges and universities, who serve as gatekeepers for society’s elite in modern American society. They have created what he calls a “Facebook model of identity: the self as a homepage I construct like a personal brand, linked to others through associations I can ‘like’ and ‘unlike’ at will.”

He says this leads young liberals to be less likely to adopt universal political ideas and instead say they are engaged in politics “as an X, concerned about other Xs and those issues touching on X-ness.” To Lilla, this academic culture is offering an “intellectual patina to the radical individualism that virtually everything else in our society encourages.”

Under this new framework, liberalism is more about declaring the self-righteousness of your identity than persuading people from other backgrounds of a unifying cause. And focusing intensely on the needs of whatever subgroup you’ve defined your political identity around threatens to make politics about selfish self-interest more than solidarity.

A Problem in Search of a Solution

Where Lilla’s book is weakest is proposing an alternative to identity liberalism. His book relies heavily on theoretical situations and history, but touches little on actual contemporary political controversies or electoral campaigns. He is committing the same sin he criticizes college academics for making: he is arguing about problems in a theoretical sense without looking at practical solutions.

He suggests transferring left-liberal organizing away from a phalanx of identity groups toward citizenship instead. “Citizenship is a crucial weapon in the battle against Reaganite dogma because it brings home the fact that we are part of a legitimate common enterprise that We, the people have freely willed into being,” he writes.

But Lilla does not provide the details. Beyond the abstract notion of citizenship, what would citizen liberalism look like? How would university education, social movements, advocacy media, and electoral campaigns based on the citizen idea operate like in practice?

There is also the inherent problem with making citizenship the organizing principle of a political ideology: not everyone has it.

Debates about immigration reform necessarily include the 13 million undocumented immigrants; discussion of trade agreements or foreign conflicts involve millions more; climate change will impact all 7.5 billion human beings in one way or another.

Today, politics is globalized. The pre-Reagan New Deal coalition politics of the U.S. did not have to urgently deal with these issues in the same ways that modern Americans have to.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t tangible examples of how to form a solidarity politics — one that recognizes differences between human beings but works to address the whole’s interests — that can replace an individualistic and sectarian one.

For instance, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom mobilized a broad group of supporters not by appealing to segmented groups of society, but by pointing out the fabric that ties them together. Contrast Hillary Clinton’s “I’m With Her” — a branding formed around the candidate’s  gender identity — to the Labour campaign advertisement below, which was designed to create solidarity between older British voters of all stripes and their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters:

In #GE2017: Vote for your daughters, your granddaughters, your nieces and all the young people who will be the future of this country. pic.twitter.com/lXBFjvHBaq

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) June 6, 2017

Issues like equal pay are not relegated to just one sect — such as “women’s issues” —  but seen as fundamental to human rights that are being denied to one segment of society. Voters are activated to care about these issues out of human empathy, not guilt or shame about being male. Noticeably, Corbyn did not ask anyone to check their privilege so much as ask that they pay attention to other people’s lack of it.

But we don’t have to go overseas to find a movement leader who understands solidarity. On the third Monday of every January of every year, Americans celebrate one.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was skeptical of sectarian forms of organizing. Although he was a powerful advocate for the rights of African Americans denied basic human rights, he insisted on demanding dignity for many other groups of people as well; his opposition to the war in Vietnam ruined his relationship with the Democratic Party and much of the Civil Rights community, who believed that speaking out on behalf of Indochina was contrary to the immediate self-interest of African-Americans. And he cautioned against any form of racial organizing that walled off one race from another, responding to the growing “Black Power” movement by writing in 1966 that “black supremacy or aggressive black violence is as invested with evil as white supremacy or white violence.”

On Christmas Eve in 1967, he gave a sermon that could very well define solidarity for our age. He described a world where every person directly depended on the dignity of others:

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.

The UK’s Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once rolled over her opponents by declaring that “there is no such thing as society.”

Today, many liberals would no doubt agree: there is gay society, black society, Muslim society, trans society, and so on. We can’t be one society because we are too different and our interests do not align.

But that isn’t what people bled and died for not far from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King gave the sermon quoted above. They fought to live together, work together, study together, and be together in one just society where all are treated equally.

Top photo: Text from Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech at the newly dedicated Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York, Oct. 17, 2012.

The post Mark Lilla’s Book Criticizes Identity Politics, but Falls Short on Proposing an Alternative appeared first on The Intercept.

Today, Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta announced that the department’s first honoree under the Trump administration would be a former president: Ronald Reagan.

This marks perhaps the first time the Department of Labor has honored someone who openly and actively diminished the power of American labor unions.

The department press release notes that Reagan, a Republican, was a member of a union himself, the Screen Actors Guild, which he led. It also notes that he was vocally supportive of the Solidarity union in Poland, which did battle with the Soviet Union.

But it curiously leaves out Reagan’s most high-profile interaction with organized labor: his intervention into the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike in 1981 set the tone for a presidency that was more hostile to organized labor than any other since before World War II.

When almost 13,000 controllers walked out on talks with the Federal Aviation Administration that year — an illegal strike — Reagan ordered them to return to work. When they did not, he fired 11,000 of them.

Writing about the PATCO strike three decades later, historian Joseph A. McCartin noted that it created a sea change in attitude by presidential administrations toward labor. “Although there were 39 illegal work stoppages against the federal government between 1962 and 1981,” he wrote, “no significant federal job actions followed Reagan’s firing of the Patco strikers.”

Reagan also appointed staunchly anti-union Donald Dotson to the head of the National Labor Relations Board. Dotson once equated collective bargaining with “labor monopoly, the destruction of individual freedom, and the destruction of the marketplace as the mechanism for determining the value of labor.”

At the start of Reagan’s term, 21 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to a union; in 1988, his last year in office, 16.2 percent did.

Top photo: Striking air traffic controllers and sympathizers demonstrate outside U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York, Aug. 12, 1981.

The post Trump Labor Department Announces It will Honor Ronald Reagan, the Man who Broke American Labor appeared first on The Intercept.

The bill, SB 754, has been introduced by Rep. Scott Martin of Lancaster County; his district has been the site of anti-pipeline protests aimed at the Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline.

Under the terms of the bill, “a person is responsible for public safety response costs incurred by a State agency or political subdivision as a result of the State agency’s or political subdivision’s response to a demonstration if, in connection with the demonstration, the person is convicted of a felony or misdemeanor offense.”

In other words, they could be on the hook for costs, such as police overtime, medical or emergency response, or other basic public services associated with protests. Whatever felony or misdemeanor offense the protester was convicted of would come with its own independent penalty.

Elizabeth Randol, the legislative director at the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, raised two separate concerns about the bill. First, she warned, it could end up punishing protesters for acts they didn’t commit. “People can be fined and charged, liable for costs associated with a particular crime they committed. That’s normal,” she noted. “What’s different is that it expands it … to allow the government entity, like say, a state or it could be the National Guard, it could be the police department, to determine, to leave it up to them as to whether or not they want to attempt to recover additional costs that are associated with the protest but that are not necessarily related to the specific crime that the individual was convicted of.”

She also warned that the legislation singles out protesters. After all, police and emergency personnel respond to all sorts of situations. “Public protests are very strictly protected in constitutional law,” Randol noted. “We’re all sensitive to costs and to what that does to a tax bill or the kind of stress and strain it puts on our first responders. But you can’t have those costs be borne on the back of people who are protesting and engaging in their First Amendment protected rights to speech and assembly.”

The text of the legislation is not subtle about being inspired by anti-pipeline protests. It includes a lengthy section laying out the costs associated with the demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota — citing specific figures, such as the “331,721 hours of response support” by local police and National Guard and a $38.2 million price tag for local and state taxpayers.

DeSmog Blog notes that Martin has close ties to pipeline lobbyists. Prior to joining the Pennsylvania Senate, Martin worked for a firm called Community Networking Strategies. CNS is a subsidiary of the lobbying firm, McNees, Wallace & Nurick — which lobbies for Gulf Oil Ltd, Industrial Energy Consumers of Pennsylvania, and Sunoco Logistics.

Sunoco Logistics is a company working on the Mariner East 2 pipeline, another Pennsylvania-based project that demonstrators have besieged. The company involved with the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline, Transco, hired the Pennsylvania Advocacy Group last year for consulting work; the Pennsylvania Advocacy Group was created in part by two lobbyists who worked at CNS.

Martin didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Top photo: A sign at the entrance to a small chapel built in the path of the proposed Atlantic Sunrise natural gas pipeline by the Adorers of the Blood of Christ, a group of Catholic nuns that support environmental justice, in Columbia, Pennsylvania, July 30, 2017.

The post New Bill Would Force Arrested Protesters to Pay Police Overtime, Other Fees appeared first on The Intercept.

Statewide, the region is dominated by right-wing Republicans. The Democratic Party is cordoned off in urban centers, but mayors typically avoid populist policy and tend to have a cozy relationship with the ruling GOP governors (just ask Atlanta’s Kasim Reed).

But over the past year, a new generation of populists has taken aim at these city centers, seeking to oust a Democratic establishment that has grown moribund, in favor of a radical politics that favors greater redistribution of power from elites to the common person.

In Jackson, Mississippi, this took the form of the election of Chokwe Antar Lumumba Jr. as mayor. His father was elected mayor in 2014 but tragically passed away. His son has vowed to carry on his legacy and make Jackson “the most radical city on the planet” — implementing forms of community control over government that are unheard of not only in the South, but in most municipalities anywhere in the country.

Tuesday night, the second domino came close to falling in Birmingham’s mayoral race. It was supposed to be an easy reelection for Birmingham mayor William Bell, a fixture of the state’s Democratic Party establishment who had been in office since 2010. In an Aug. 1 poll taken by a local news station, Bell held a wide lead, winning support from 54 percent of respondents with 57 percent saying Bell was doing an “excellent” or “good” job.

But Randall Woodfin, a 36-year-old former board of education president who ran an insurgent campaign promising, among other things, free community college for graduates of the city’s high schools, stunned observers by actually getting more votes than Bell on Election Day. Woodfin took 41 percent of the vote to Bell’s 37. That Aug. 1 poll had Woodfin at just 14 percent. Woodfin and Bell will both advance to a runoff on Oct. 3.

Woodfin’s team knocked on 40,000 doors between February and the election, making contact with 15,000 voters (15,656 was the number who voted for him last night). He also had support from Our Revolution, the organizing group formed around the campaign list of Bernie Sanders’s presidential run. Our Revolution president Nina Turner flew in for a rally on Saturday.

To be sure, his platform is less radical than that of Lumumba’s. For instance, he made expanding the city’s police force a priority issue. The city has the seventh highest homicide rate of cities of over 100,000 people, and crime is a personal issue to the candidate. His nephew was shot and killed during the course of the campaign; the boy’s father, Woodfin’s older brother, was killed in a shooting five years before that.

Because Alabama has a preemption law preventing cities from raising their own minimum wage, Woodfin’s wage plan is limited to lobbying for that law to be overturned so the city can have a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2024.

But there is no doubt that he represents a newer generation of leaders who are running campaigns to take power away from the old guard.

Should he succeed on Oct. 3, that would mean the largest cities in both Alabama and Mississippi would be run by this new generation, which has fought uphill battles against the political establishment to take office.

The next domino to fall could be one state east. In Atlanta, state senator and Democratic Whip Vincent Fort, the highest-ranking African American official in the region who backed Sanders, is running in a crowded contest to be the city’s mayor.

His platform includes decriminalizing marijuana and two years of tuition-free college for all students in Atlanta.

Top photo: Randall Woodfin greets attendees during a fundraising reception at Smith Commons this summer.

The post Populist Challenger Stuns In Birmingham Mayoral Election, Will Go To Runoff appeared first on The Intercept.

The Obama administration, he told leadership back home, remained reluctantly supportive, but the ongoing Saudi-led campaign was harming the U.S.’s reputation and thus putting his own country, an active and eager participant in the war, in a delicate position.

The September 2015 memo documenting Otaiba’s concerns was sent to a wide set of UAE decision makers. It was originally emailed to Assistant Secretary-General of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Al Shamsi, Crown Prince Court Undersecretary Mohamed Mubarak Al Mazrouei, and Syed Basar Shueb, a Pal Technology executive.

Otaiba then forwarded the email to Khaldoon Al Mubarak, a top UAE official close to Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, informing him that he sent the same memo to “TBZ, ABZ, and Dr. Anwar” — referring to Emirates Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan; Tahnoon bin Zayed, a senior banker in the UAE; and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Mohammed Gargash.

In the memo, Otaiba laid out stark concerns about the war and the political situation it was creating.

“In a series of long conversations with WH officials, it has become evident that the human toll and collateral damage occurring in yemen is putting the administration in a political corner,” he wrote.

He then frankly conceded, “The increased targeting of civilian sites combined with the lack of humanitarian support is translating into a liability for washington.”

Publicly, Otaiba has not conceded the level of human suffering the Saudi/UAE war is causing the people of Yemen. During an event at the Center for American Progress — a top Democratic Party-aligned think tank that takes UAE funds —  in the fall of 2016, Otaiba struck a very different tone, acting as if the country does not care about political fallout in the West over the conflict.

He complained of the Houthi rebel takeover of the country, and justified the war. “We were not going to allow for this to happen on the border of a country that produces 10 million barrels a day, and that is home to Mecca and Medina. And if that decision upsets some of our friends in the West, then so be it.”

Otaiba in 2016 pledged $700,000 to the Center for American Progress, according to a Dec. 17, 2015 email exchange he had with Brian Katulis, who is a senior CAP analyst for the region.

Otaiba used his memo to clarify that he’s not “proposing a modification of strategy,” but that the UAE and Saudi engage in a diplomatic offensive to repair their image, including by meeting with media, academics, and NGOs. His very last suggestion was for the UAE to “at least temporarily, urge caution when selecting military targets (this applies to saudi air force, where apparently most of the errant strikes are occurring).”

The exchange was discovered in a cache of correspondence pilfered by hackers from Otaiba’s Hotmail account, which he used regularly for official business, and provided to The Intercept.

Top photo: Yemenis search for survivors under the rubble of houses in the UNESCO-listed heritage site following an overnight Saudi-led airstrike in the old city of Yemeni capital Sana’a, on June 12, 2015.

The post Email Shows UAE’s Ambassador Worried About ‘Targeting of Civilian Sites’ in Yemen War appeared first on The Intercept.

In June, the Department of Homeland Security revoked a grant to the nonprofit, telling The Huffington Post that it wants to focus on funding groups that work with law enforcement.

This comes at a time when government agencies have warned about rising membership in far-right organizations, and the nation reels from the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Intercept interviewed Life After Hate executive director Sammy Rangel about his organization’s work and the approach they take that has successfully convinced dozens of white nationalists to leave the movement.

He was disappointed that the Trump administration revoked the $455,000 grant that was promised by the Obama administration, and told us the organization has received no explanation. “We didn’t hear anything for many months, and finally toward the end of June, we were notified that the award would be rescinded,” he said. “All the inquiries that we’ve put in or that we put in on behalf of the Freedom of Information Act have not been answered at all.”

Following the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, his organization has been deluged by interest from the media. Many Americans are wondering: What draws people to white nationalism, and what do we do about it?

Life After Hate’s approach focuses on compassion, counseling, and redemption. The idea of redeeming a white nationalist or neo-Nazi is understandably shocking to many Americans — and for many, it recalls the “Southern redeemers” who led a terrorist campaign after the Civil War to reinstate white supremacy. Life After Hate has a different type of redemption in mind.

Imagery of young men clad in armor, carrying weapons, and chanting anti-Semitic slogans is naturally terrifying, and the idea that these people could one day leave extremism and embrace tolerance can seem far-fetched.

But history is full of examples of people who’ve shed their hatred and repented later in life. Rangel is a believer. He himself comes from a life of redemption. A former member of the Maniac Latin Disciples gang, he spent time in a maximum security prison; later in his life he co-founded Life After Hate to help people of all backgrounds step away from extremism and violence. He rejects the idea that people drawn to extremism can’t be redeemed based on his own experience.

“How do we know people are redeemable? Life After Hate is completely made up of Formers,” he said, invoking a phrase the organization uses to describe people who have successfully departed hate groups. “The rest of the team were all members of white supremacist groups and were in leadership roles. They were the core of those groups.”

“I myself was an extremist,” he said, pointing to his former gang leadership. “I had a lot of mental health diagnoses that said I was incorrigible, I was anti-social … basically that I couldn’t change, and yet here I am.”

Rangel said there was one thing that he and the other former extremist leaders who work at Life After Hate share. “What we all have in common, for the most part, is that compassion and empathy are common themes in what helped turn us around,” he said. “What finally got through.”

That puts Rangel’s organization on the opposite side of activists and organizations that are using punitive tactics, such as online shaming and physical fights, against white nationalist groups.

He cited one of the organization’s co-founders, former skinhead Frankie Meeink, as an example. “No matter how many beer bottles flew past his head in these fights, he never walked away once re-thinking his life,” he explained. “The negative things that we think to do to challenge the other side only help us dig in. It’s only through kindness, it’s only through understanding, it’s only through compassion and peace that people were able to get past all of our armor. It was never aggression, it was never shaming.”

Rangel said that white nationalist organizations promote a sense of belonging to individuals who join, something that is hyper-charged by the internet — where extremist groups can confirm and exacerbate people’s fears and vulnerabilities.

“We get online and then we follow a rabbit hole of algorithms that takes us down a deep but narrower path … that helps validate our concerns, helps validate what we’re afraid about, and then we realize we’re not alone,” he said. “Where it turns into extremism is when they promote this sense of social obligation as a sense of activism, and that the only way to be activist is to be violent. That’s where it goes into extremism.”

Life After Hate has worked with hundreds of white nationalists and the social networks close to them: their families, counselors, and case workers. Its program ExitUSA uses a number of different tactics, ranging from individualized education to support groups to job training to guide people away from extremist groups and help them get their lives back on track. Currently, it has nearly 100 active members in its support groups.

We asked Rangel what he would say to a white nationalist activist who demonstrated in Charlottesville last weekend. “Let’s say there was somebody there who was at least interested in hearing what I have to say,” he said. “I would say is what we would offer would come from a place of being nonjudgmental. Whatever we would talk about would definitely stay between us. And that we would like to share our own experience as Formers and share what has been helpful to us in turning around the way we participate in life … whenever they’re ready our door would be open to them.”

Critics may accuse Life After Hate of naïveté, and argue that the only way to deal with such elements of our society is with shame, not compassion. If the goal, though, is not immediate moral satisfaction but actually reducing the strength of white supremacist movements, the more effective path may lie in empathy. For Rangel, the dozens of white nationalists the organization has convinced to give up their past ways are proof enough to him of his approach. “I would say show me the evidence,” he replied. “Tell me not what you can think or feel but what you can prove. If you can show me someone you have shamed into changing, beaten into changing, by all means I want to see that. But I don’t think that’s the way for anyone.”

Top photo: A demonstrator holds a sign reading “Love Trumps Hate” during a march protesting the election of Donald Trump in Washington.

The post This Group Has Successfully Converted White Supremacists Using Compassion. Trump Defunded It. appeared first on The Intercept.