Category: systemic racism

𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑪𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒓 𝒊𝒔 Your 𝑷𝒓𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒈𝒆? Now Available!

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

A collection of 72 political statements in poetic form, What Color is Your Privilege? examines the wide spectrum of ways our society marginalizes people. Although many people on society’s fringes still have some privilege, society maligns, excludes, and abuses them because of their skin color, religion, disabilities, neurodivergence, sex, sexual orientation, gender, immigration status, age, financial position, housing arrangements, etc.

What Color is Your Privilege? opens a window on the suffering many are privileged to ignore.

“Serving a truth serum for hate and hypocrisy, F.I. Goldhaber is writing with a hammer and speaking with a tongue of fire. In What Color is Your Privilege?, they sing a book-length blues song decrying racial, gender, religious, and sexual intolerance in America. With courage and a rejection of conventionality rarely found in contemporary verse, this book shines a bright, beaming light on the ‘hostile world’ we live in and the revolution being fought for the soul of America.” — John Warner Smith, Louisiana State Poet Laureate 2019-2021.

Now available from Left Fork books and your local bookstore as well as from Bookshop.org. You can also order from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Left Fork is a small “unashamedly progressive press” based in Southwest Oregon, overlooking the West (left) Fork of Oregon’s Illinois River.

Cozcacuauhtli: Protester Facing Prison for Dancing

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
January 19, 2022

An Aztec Jaguar Warrior running a traditional dance; photo by Jonata Oregón (CC BY-SA 4.0). The photo shows the head and shoulders of an Indigenous person wearing an Aztec headdress with many black feathers emerging from a jaguar head and a dozen longer black and white feathers coming from the center.

Born in California, Cozcacuauhtli moved to very rural Oregon with her family when she was five and grew up among the Native communities of Warm Springs, Yakama, and Siletz.

Both of Cozcacuauhtli’s grandfathers served in World War II and her father in Vietnam. She joined the U.S. Navy in 1990, serving two years active duty, including during Operation Desert Storm, and six years in the naval reserves. Her service left her disabled with a partially paralyzed right leg and a fractured L-4. Since leaving the Navy, Cozcacuauhtli obtained a bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University and a master’s degree in social work from Eastern Washington University.

A Mestiza (a woman of mixed European and Native American ancestry), her paternal grandparents were born in California of Mexican heritage. Through them, she has ties to Nahuatl peoples which included the Aztecs. In the mid ’90s while at OSU, Cozcacuauhtli learned Danza Azteca and was a member of an OSU MEChA, the first Aztec Dance group in Oregon.

The group, “Mexica Tiahui” danced on Mexican holidays and at protests. In addition, they brought supplies to farm workers, advocated for them, and backed them on marches for justice.

Mexica Tiahui shared their knowledge of Danza Azteca and taught hundreds of dancers all over Oregon. For more than 10 years, Cozcacuauhtli volunteered in schools in the Yakima Valley teaching Danza Azteca to students. She also continued attending farm worker rallies and marches.

In addition, Cozcacuauhtli stood up to Canadian Mounties in defense of water protectors; supported successful protests against the Jordan Cove pipeline that threatened waterways and wildlife habitat in the Oregon Coast Range and on the Southern Oregon Coast; and supported the Atsa Koodakuh wyh Nuwu defending Thacker Pass/Peehee mu’huh in Nevada from lithium mining that will destroy sacred sites and burial grounds of Paiute and Shoshone tribes and threatens water, air, and endangered wildlife in that area.

In Portland for the last two years, Cozcacuauhtli has filmed and supported those protesting ICE atrocities against Indigenous peoples including those who died in Oregon and Washington jails and prisons, the more than 1,000 Indigenous children dragged from their parents’ arms at the border who still haven’t been returned to their families, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIW).

For this, she has been beaten, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, tackled, punched, and repeatedly arrested. She has sustained multiple traumatic brain injuries, additional nerve damage to her injured leg, contusions, abrasions, and other serious injuries. City, county, and federal law enforcement caged her in a filthy Multnomah County jail (walls and floors covered in feces) and ICE holding cells where she was deprived of medical care, food, water, clothing, and sanitary facilities. She witnessed sexual assaults on minors.

On May 31, 2021, Cozcacuauhtli and other Native American protesters hung piñatas and said prayers for Indigenous people murdered and disappeared by ICE. When the federal officers destroyed the sacred prayer altar, Cozcacuauhtli spontaneously began Danza Azteca. In protest. In prayer.

In retribution, after pepper spraying the protesters, ICE officials “tackled me very hard.” One “injured my knee and slammed my head into the road. I was still gagging and coughing from the pepper spray. It made the fed angry so he elbowed the back of my head and then he punched me in the temple and my head hit the asphalt again. He was angry because when I coughed it made it difficult to lock the cuffs.”

Cozcacuauhtli was carried past the gate onto ICE property. Although ICE called an ambulance, her injuries made it difficult for her to communicate with the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). An ICE supervisor dismissed the EMTs, claiming Cozcacuauhtli had been drinking and smoking, neither of which was true. “After spending two days in jail with no medical treatment or evaluation I went to the hospital from jail. A CT scan showed a hematoma under my cheekbone. I had a black eye and injuries all over. My knee hurt so bad I thought it was broken but an X-ray showed the screw in the knee from a previous surgery was aggravated by the federal officer’s tackle.”

A federal officer claimed that Cozcacuauhtli “grabbed my baton and took me to the ground.”

She laughs. “I’m 5’4”, 145-pound, 50-year-old, disabled grandma who doesn’t work out. There is no way I took a strong, young, tall dude down! It’s all on video camera, but I’m sure the judge will excuse this Fed’s lie as a mistake and not fraud.”

On February 8, 2022, Cozcacuauhtli is scheduled to appear in federal court on charges of having eyebrows similar to someone, wearing a mask, who was captured on video spray-painting a security camera. All other charges stemming from the May 31, 2021, protest have been dropped because the video evidence didn’t support them.

U.S. Attorney for Oregon, Scott Erik Asphaug, dropped charges of assaulting a federal officer against Cozcacuauhtli “after he saw the fed attacking me for nothing.” Those charges were the sole reason for her arrest and the two days she spent in federal custody. “He dropped the charges, but in order to keep their hooks in me they needed something to replace it with. They went back six months to find video of someone who looks similar to me masked up except eyes and eyebrows spray painting a security camera. It is not me. I have evidence and witnesses it’s not me. I was elsewhere.”

CozcacuauhtliEven though Cozcacuauhtli is a fourth-generation U.S. Citizen, she has been accused by numerous white supremacists and fascists of being an illegal immigrant. “You can’t be any shade of Brown while protesting ICE without your citizenship status publicly questioned,” she stated.

Every time Cozcacuauhtli is charged with a crime, the false accusations are repeatedly broadcast by right-wing media and Mayor Edward Tevis “Ted” Wheeler who objects to the fact that she has never been convicted in the city of Portland. So far, almost all of the charges have been dropped. Many were based on false statements by police officers who are known liars including Ken Le, one of three Portland Police Bureau officers accused of spreading lies about City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty in retaliation for her attempts to hold the PPB accountable for racial injustice and out-of-control use of force. Le has been accused by numerous protesters, and other victims of his lies, of falsifying police reports. In Cozcacuauhtli’s case, she had multiple cameras angles proving Le was lying in order to arrest her. Despite that, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt persecuted her for more than a year over Le’s false charges.

One week after the president [at the time] retweeted Cozcacuauhtli’s full legal name with her video covering the protests stating “lock these animals up” she was arrested by federal law enforcement for the first time. They have arrested her five times since. She doubts this is a coincidence.

“Hundreds of J6-ers are facing no charges while I sit here going on trial next month for piñatas, candles, balloons, and (MMIW) red dresses. No charges for Shane Kohfield, who stood outside Wheeler’s house with an AR-15 threatening to slaughter us all. And Louis Garrick Fernbaugh was filmed leaving the pipe bomb scene by the protesters he threw bombs at.

“How many right wingers did an armed takeover of [Malheur National Wildlife Refuge] federal property for weeks and they never got charged or successfully prosecuted?” Cozcacuauhtli asks. “The FBI knows who every Indigenous water protector and their cousin is, but they are still searching for hundreds of white males on film assaulting capitol police.”

National Day of Mourning

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 24, 2021

This week in the U.S., those who can afford it are traveling, shopping, and cooking in preparation for a manufactured holiday that (in reality) celebrates the damage done to the lives and society of the Wampanoag Tribes after the English arrived in Plymouth. Incorporating recipes developed during the U.S. occupation of Mexico City, it was proclaimed into existence by a president who only “freed” the slaves to “save the union” not, as many believe, because he was an abolitionist.

Those who don’t have the resources will, if they have homes and kitchens, line up for boxes of food they can cook. If they’re houseless they might queue up at whatever charities are handing out paper plates filled with slices of turkey, or a vegetarian equivalent, stuffing/dressing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie for which they’ll be expected to pray to a god they may not believe in or show their gratitude in some other demeaning way.

Painting of Trail of Tears for the Creek People showing Indigenous people on foot, horseback, and in wagons being forced to travel thousands of miles from their homeBut, for many Indigenous peoples and their allies in the U.S., Thursday is the National Day of Mourning, a reminder of genocide, theft of Native lands, and erasure of Native cultures–a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience.

The United States was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and the blood of Indigenous peoples. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights all were written to impose and maintain white supremacy. Congress was designed to favor states allowing slavery. The Electoral College exists to give slave-owning southern and rural red states a greater voice in electing the president. And the police forces throughout the country were developed from slave patrols to protect the property of white men.

Every acre of land occupied by settlers was stolen from those who lived here for millennia before Europeans arrived. Colonialists perpetrated the World’s Longest Holocaust, the slaughter of more than 100 million Native people. Intentional and unintentional methods of murder included blankets deliberately tainted with small pox; bounties paid on scalps sliced from the heads of Native men, women, and children; wars and massacres; thousands-miles-long forced relocations during which thousands died from disease, starvation, and hypothermia; and exposure to yellow fever, measles, typhoid, and influenza. Many of those who survived were enslaved, raped, imprisoned on often desolate reservations, and/or had their children stolen.

This genocide, theft, and erasure continue to this day.

  • Thousands of Native women and girls are reported missing or murdered each year.
  • Four out of every five Indigenous people experience violence in their lifetimes.
  • The Navajo Nation suffered more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any U.S. state.
  • Chemawa Indian School just east of Keizer, Oregon, one of the last four off-reservation boarding schools run by the federal government, is still killing Indigenous students.
  • Artificial “national borders” separated families and cut off trade routes in existence since long before Europeans invaded. “Prehispanic inhabitants of North America lived in a world that stretched from Canada to Panama,” anthropologist Mikael Fauvelle notes. “Goods traded included food (fish, pine nuts, meat), tobacco, beads, shell products, furs, basketry, minerals (obsidian), and textiles, as well as feathers and birds.” Lee Edward Littler, Public Educator at Elden Pueblo Public Educational Project, writes: “Exotic items clearly imported from Central America have been repeatedly uncovered in the archaeological records within the traditional territory of the northerners collectively known aptly as the ‘Pueblo’, or town peoples.” Yet Indigenous peoples attempting to cross the U.S. southern border–fleeing violence, natural disaster, economic destitution, and/or a pandemic–are routinely assaulted, arrested, raped, sterilized without consent, imprisoned in inhumane conditions, and have their children torn from their arms, caged and, because no one is keeping accurate records, handed over to white people for fostering and adoption while they’re “deported” south.
  • The U.S. government continues to violate Native treaty rights by allowing multi-national companies to build pipelines and mines through and on Native lands and burial grounds, destroying sacred sites and endangering access to clean water while police, military, and private security forces arrest, assault, injure, and kill those trying to protect their land and water.

While the Indigenous Americans lost their lives and their territory to the rapacious plundering of Europeans, Africans were ripped from their homes and those who survived the horrendous conditions during the months-long Atlantic crossing were tortured, raped, and forced to labor under wretched circumstances to mine coal, plant and harvest crops, and build plantations, railroads, wealth for white people, and even the White House.

Many white people in the U.S. would like to believe, and teach their children, that slavery ended in 1865 with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. But that amendment is carefully worded to allow the continuation of slavery.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]

That same year saw the enactment of Black Codes which replaced the Slave Codes and became the basis for the criminal legal system in the U.S. These “laws” trapped Black people in slavery-in-all-but-name conditions. Their former “owners” conspired to keep wages artificially and punitively low while the Codes made not having a job a crime. Punishment for such “crimes,” many of which only applied to Black people, was a fine. The inability to pay those fines meant the county court hired out the “criminals” until they worked off their balances. So both the vast disparity in how Black and white “offenders” are treated by the U.S. criminal legal system and the criminalization of poverty began during Reconstruction.

In the week preceding the 2021 National Day of Mourning, we witnessed even more very specific examples to pile on top of myriad others of the inequity on which this country was built and that the “Thanksgiving” celebration perpetuates.

Rittenhouse caricature by DonkeyHoteyThe most blatant example is the acquittal on all charges of the white supremacist teenager who was driven across state lines by his mother to play vigilante and who murdered two BLM supporters–36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber–while allegedly protecting a car dealership. The same right-wing talking heads who called Adam Toledo a 13-year-old man referred to then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an AK-47 a little boy. His acquittal came after:

  • All but one person of color was eliminated from his jury.
  • Judge Bruce Schroeder, whose cell phone interrupted proceedings playing the theme song from Trump rallies, ruled against almost every prosecutorial motion and in favor of every motion the defense made, including that the murdered men could not be described by prosecutors as victims but that they could be called rioters, looters or arsonists by the defense; called for a round of applause on both Veterans’ Day and the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps for a defense witness, the only self-identified veteran in the courtroom; refused to let the jury see videos of Rittenhouse hitting a girl who was arguing with his sister in June 2020 and stating he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot people he believed were looters from August 2020 as well as still photos of him posing with members of the Proud Boys in a bar, and flashing a white supremacist hand signal, after he was released on bail; and believed the defense claim that increasing the size of a video image manipulated the footage using artificial intelligence.
  • Rittenhouse made a show of sobbing, dry eyed on the witness stand, side eyeing the jury (at 30 seconds) to make sure they appreciated his performance.

Of course the jury’s decision wasn’t surprising to anyone familiar with the white supremacist realities of the U.S. criminal legal system. A 2013 study of U.S. homicides by the Urban Institute found that killings involving “a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim.” And, although Rittenhouse’s victims were not Black, they were protesting in support of Black lives. “While this trial was not about white men shooting targeting Black people, it was about a radicalized white youth taking arms against those willing to stand in support & defense of Black lives,” said Mac Smiff, owner and editor of We Out Here and chair of Black Liberation & Racial Justice Committee of the NAACP Portland branch among other projects. “The case reminds that defending Black people’s rights is punishable by white violence.”

“The victims were white.” Kendra Pierre-Louis posted on Twitter. “The message is if you align with Black people, however nominally, your whiteness will not protect you. The consequence of that verdict seems designed to erode solidarity.”

As Michael Harriot, journalist, historian, and author of Black AF History: the Un-Whitewashed Story of America, notes: in “the entire criminal justice system…Only white people’s perceptions are made into a reality that everyone else must abide by.”

After the verdict was announced, President Joe Biden, architect of civil asset forfeiture and sponsor/co-author of the 1994 crime bill that resulted in the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans, told reporters “I stand by what the jury has to say. The jury system works.”

Rittenhouse’s acquittal has further empowered far-right domestic terrorists. They are celebrating and making plans, under the hashtag #WhiteBoyWinter, to hunt Black, Latiné, and Indigenous people as well as Jews and Muslims. They do so with the expectation that, like Rittenhouse, they will be hailed as heroes for such slaughter.

The day after the verdict, Harriot posted one of his famous threads contextualizing history: “A brief history of white vigilantes at Black protests” because of “speculation about what could happen if people like Kyle Rittenhouse are allowed to get away with murder. But, as usual, it’s never ‘if’ but ‘when,'” he wrote.

On the day that Rittenhouse was acquitted, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt tweeted in response to the verdict: “The work to reform our criminal justice system is evident, it is urgent and I am here for it” for which he was thoroughly ratioed by people pointing out he is “part of the problem“. He did so while his staff was demanding Multnomah County Judge Melvin Oden-Orr send Alexander Dial to prison for preventing a Nazi from injuring participants at a 2019 Portland anti-fascist counter-protest with a hammer. Dial was charged with assault, riot, unlawful use of a weapon, and criminal mischief, despite video proving he prevented an American Guard white nationalist from hitting protesters with the hammer and the fact that “the prosecution was unable to identify anyone as a victim.”

Dial, who acted to defend members of his own community from out-of-state white supremacist invaders, spent more than three months in jail, was required to wear an ankle monitor for more than two years, and incurred tens of thousands of dollars in debt to pay bail and pretrial fees. In addition, he was prohibited from attending protests, drinking alcohol, and leaving his house after dark.

As often happens across the U.S., Dial was coerced into pleading “no contest” to a misdemeanor riot charge and two felony assault charges by Schmidt’s predecessor who threatened Dial with Measure 11 crimes and the mandatory minimum sentencing that could have put him in prison for almost six years. Schmidt, who ran on the promise to “make the system fair” including getting rid of cash bail, ignored numerous and repeated pleas from the community and did nothing to mitigate Dial’s ordeal.

Despite acting in self-defense and the absence of any victim, Dial was sentenced to 80 hours of community service, in lieu of a $1,000 fine, and almost three years of probation. Although the terms of the probation only prevent Dial from attending “unlawful assemblies,” in reality he still is essentially prohibited from exercising his First Amendment rights. Portland Police regularly and capriciously declare peaceful protests “unlawful assemblies” and are likely to do so if that would give them an opportunity to arrest Dial for probation violation in support of their white supremacist friends and neighbors from outside Portland who are angered by Dial’s release.

This is just one instance of the vast and outrageous disparity in the U.S. criminal legal system.

  • Two days before the Rittenhouse verdict, an Indigenous woman was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for killing her rapist when he came after her the next day. She is just the most recent example. As Brie Loskota tweeted upon learning of the verdict: “Women rotting in prison who killed their abusers in self-defense would like a word”. The “only correct battered woman when talking about self-defense is a dead one,” according to Sue Osthoff, co-founder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. “By engaging in violence in order to live, a woman cannot be a victim. Her survival itself becomes reason to condemn her.” Women’s prisons are filled with those who killed in self defense, “at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.”
  • Throughout 2020, thousands of protesters (AP put the tally at 10,000 at the beginning of June and protests/arrests continued through the Fall) were arrested for marching in the streets. They carried no weapons. They murdered no one. Thousands were beaten, shot with impact munitions, drenched in chemical weapons, and arrested on unsubstantiated charges such as interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Of those arrested, the vast majority were released but only after they were exposed to COVID-19 by law enforcement officers who refused to wear masks and often ripped the ones worn by the protestors off their faces. But, many of the protesters were forced to pay out money for cash bail and/or spend time in fetid, filthy jail cells where some, including at least one minor, were sexually assaulted.
  • On August 29, 2020, 48-year-old Michael Forest Reinoehl believed he and a friend, a “person of color”, were about to be stabbed by Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of the right-wing Patriot Prayer group and a participant in a violent rally in downtown Portland. In self defense, Reinoehl shot and killed Danielson. Reinoehl never had the opportunity to explain how he feared for his life to a jury. He was executed by law enforcement from several jurisdictions less than a week later. And although those cops couldn’t get their stories straight, they still were absolved of all responsibility for Reinoehl’s death.

“White violence is not just slavery, it’s also abolishing slavery without administering justice and then creating a police force to ensure we don’t come looking for it.” Smiff tweeted last week. “White violence is not just genociding the indiginous, it’s celebrating it with an Autumn harvest holiday.”

If I Were Police Commissioner

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
May 12, 2021

Last week, Civil Rights advocate Zakir Khan asked “If you were the Police Commissioner of the Portland Police Bureau what would be your first move?”

My answer wouldn’t fit in a tweet because I’ve thought quite a bit about the ramifications of municipalities negotiating contracts with so-called police unions that, in reality, should be classified as hate groups. Other than contract negotiations, these associations actually have nothing in common with the labor unions that police actively engage in attacking. And these associations consistently put Black, Indigenous, and other non-white people in danger by protecting racist officers, advocating reinstatement of criminal cops removed for cause, and fighting even miniscule reforms through lobbying and lawsuits.

Photo of the chest and arms of a person wearing a long-sleeved blue dress shirt writing on a multi-page document with black and gold pen.If I were police commissioner (of any municipality), my “first move” would be immediate cancellation of contract negotiations with whatever association represents officers, such as the Portland Police Association (PPA), the oldest association of law enforcement officers in the United States. Instead, I would have a contract written and offered to all members of that organization on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Anyone who didn’t sign it by the current contract’s expiration date (June 30, 2021, in Portland) would no longer be employed as a police officer.

This would have one of two results:

  1. The possibility of meaningful reform and a police force that actually served and protected all citizens of any municipality that applied this option, or
  2. All members of that police force quitting.

Either option is a win for the city budget, the citizenry, and especially for those who are routinely harassed, injured, and murdered by police.

What would this fantasy contract include?

  • Total elimination of qualified immunity by requiring that all police officers to agree to take personal responsibility for all actions performed while on duty including, but not limited to, payment of any settlements or judgments for wrongful death, denial of civil liberties, inappropriate use of force, false arrest, etc.
  • All police employees must reside within the municipality for which they work. For example, all Portland Police officers, more than 80 percent of whom currently live out of town and out of state, must reside within the city of Portland. Any employees living outside the city who wish to retain their employment would have one year to relocate.
  • All police officers, including those currently employed, must receive training from social service and mental health professionals in de-escalation techniques and other ways to stop a crime in progress without resorting to force. Any officer who does not demonstrate proficiency in these techniques would be put on probation until that is rectified. Any use of force when de-escalation was an option would be grounds for termination and revocation of police certification.
  • Attendance at any workshop that teaches ambivalence regarding use of force, “killology”, or an equivalent philosophy justifying/mitigating police injuring and murdering civilians, will result in immediate dismissal and revocation of certification.
  • All police officers, including those currently employed, must receive a thorough and complete education in systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy taught only by individuals who have suffered under those paradigms and who are paid adequately to develop and teach appropriate curricula. To continue employment, officers must prove they understand the consequences of systemic racism, colonialism, and white supremacy in the United States and their state/city of residence for those who are not white, straight, cis, native born, Christians speaking English as their first language. Any evidence of prejudice and bigotry on the part of an officer will be grounds for immediate termination and revocation of certification.
  • All police officers, including those currently employed, must receive a thorough and complete education in the difference between consensual sex work and human trafficking taught only by current or former sex workers who are paid adequately to develop and teach appropriate curricula. To continue employment, officers must prove they understand the difference between consensual sex work and human trafficking including trafficking for domestic and agricultural labor.
  • All police officers, including those currently employed, must receive a thorough and complete education in types of neurodivergence taught only by qualified psychologists and individuals on the spectrum who are paid adequately to develop and teach appropriate curricula. To continue employment, officers must prove they understand the difference between the behavior of someone on the spectrum, someone who has other mental health diagnoses, and someone who is using drugs.
  • All weapons must be registered, including those personally owned by officers. Any officer found in possession of any unregistered weapon will immediately be terminated and their certification revoked.
  • All munitions, including those classified as “less than lethal” must be strictly accounted for and their use documented and justified with verifiable facts.
  • No current police officers will be eligible to continue employment if they meet any of the grounds for termination listed below at any time, past, present, or future.
  • Membership or participation in any group that espouses white supremacy, nationalism, racism, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, and/or misogynistic sentiments and/or disparagement of any religion (including but not limited to Indigenous religions, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Paganism) will be grounds for immediate dismissal. This includes posting any information supporting any of those attitudes to social media. No one with any involvement in any group designated as a hate group will be eligible for employment in any capacity by the police force.
  • Any police officer who injures or kills an individual will immediately be placed on unpaid leave; required to surrender their weapons, uniform, badge, and police certification; and restricted from interaction with the public until the case is investigated and resolved. The officer will be required to answer questions about the event within 24 hours and may only be accompanied to that interrogation by their attorney. No other police officer or representative of any organization may participate on behalf of the officer in any questioning. Investigations will always be conducted by an outside body such as the citizen review board.
  • If an officer is found to have caused harm to an individual without being able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they did so to protect their life or the life of another, that officer will be terminated, their police certification permanently revoked, and they will be required to stand trial for any and all crimes committed. While it is possible that such an officer may not be found guilty of any criminal offense, they will never again be allowed to work as a police officer or carry a weapon and they will be liable for any civil penalties resulting from their actions
  • Any police officer found to be in violation of any department standards or policies on or off duty will immediately be terminated and their certification revoked.
  • Any police officer convicted for any criminal offense on or off duty, including DUI, will immediately be terminated and their certification revoked.
  • Police officers convicted of more than two moving traffic violations per year, or more than five in total, will be terminated and their certification revoked.
  • Any traffic enforcement officer who neglects to ticket a police officer will be terminated and their certification revoked.
  • Any police officer who witnesses any crime committed by any other officer, does nothing to prevent an officer from causing harm, and/or does not immediately report the criminal/harmful activity to their superior will be considered an accessory. They can be criminally charged as an accessory, terminated for aiding and abetting a criminal, and liable for any civil penalties assessed by a court of law.
  • Armed police officers will only respond to calls involving actual threats to human life and safety. No armed officers would engage in:
    • traffic enforcement
    • enforcement of drug possession or prostitution laws
    • answering calls about an individual experiencing a mental health crisis (unless there is a credible and confirmed evidence the individual is threatening to use a lethal weapon)
    • property damage and theft
    • protest response
    • directing traffic
    • harassing/arresting houseless individuals who have not committed any offense unrelated to not having a home (e.g., sleeping on the street, camping in the park, food preparation in public)
  • Any citizen complaints about inappropriate behavior, harmful actions, and/or abuse by a police officer including, but not limited to, domestic violence, threats, coercion, animal abuse, and racial harassment, will be investigated by a citizen review board with the power to determine appropriate discipline including unpaid leave, additional education, and termination of a police officer for violation of department standards, policies, city code, and/or state and federal laws. Any police officer terminated by the citizen review board will also have their certification revoked.
  • This citizen review board also will be the only entity to which a police officer can appeal if they believe they have been wrongfully disciplined and/or terminated. The citizen review board’s decision will be final.
  • No former or current police officers or employees of the police bureau will be allowed to serve on the citizen review board. No prosecuting/district attorney may serve on the citizen review board until a minimum five years after they have retired or worked in a different aspect of law. No more than 25 percent of the citizen review board can be currently or previously elected officials.
  • Any officer terminated for any of the above reasons automatically loses all access to any pension funds accrued on their behalf. Any pension contributions deducted from their paychecks will be held toward payment of damages until the statute of limitations expires and/or all court cases are resolved. No interest accrued on the withheld amount will be owed to the officer.
  • Any officer who resigns rather than face discipline as outlined above will have their certification revoked and will forfeit their pension. They will still be liable for any civil penalties assessed by a court of law.
  • Police officer pensions will be based only on the amount of annual pay earned by the officer at the time of retirement and will not be influenced by selecting specific periods of time. Overtime pay will never be used to calculate pension amounts. Police must contribute a portion of their salary to their pension fund.
  • Membership in police associations will be allowed unless/until that specific association has been designated as a hate group. However, police associations will have no standing in contract negotiations and will not be permitted to advocate on behalf of officers under any circumstances. Any police association involved in lobbying any elected official must register as a lobbying organization and follow all legal requirements for lobbying organizations and individuals.
  • Police officers will be required to hire and pay for their own legal counsel in all criminal and civil proceedings.
  • A portion of the money saved by anticipated reductions in the police budget due to attrition will be used to create and/or fund separate departments. Employees of those separate departments will be educated in methods of and certified responsible for:
    • traffic enforcement
    • directing traffic during events (including protests) and at the scene of crimes, fires, and traffic collisions
    • responding to mental health calls
    • property damage/theft investigations
    • investigating major crime such as rape, murder, shootings, assault, etc.
    • answering calls to emergency and non-emergency numbers, differentiating between actual threats to human life/safety and all other situations including callers who exaggerate circumstances in order to weaponize police responses, and making appropriate referrals based on callers’ demonstrated needs

Employees of these divisions will not be permitted to carry lethal weapons. They will only be able to issue citations and will not have the power to arrest anyone. In the event a perpetrator of a major crime is identified by investigators, that information will be turned over to police officers for the purpose of arresting the suspect. Police officers will be responsible for safely taking a suspect into custody and remanding them over to the courts. No information about any suspect will be made public until/unless they are tried and found guilty in a court of law. Sharing information about people who have received citations and/or been arrested will result in the termination of the person who leaked that private information.

Any additional funds saved from the police budget resulting from the above changes will be returned to the municipal budget specifically earmarked for housing, social services, education, and restitution.

Congress Has Blood of Babies on Their Hands

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

Joseph Goebbels would have been proud of U.S. Representative Suzanne Bonamici‘s “both sides” answer to a Valerie’s question about the bloodshed in Palestine during a town hall phone call on Saturday, May 15. As her constituent, I was just embarrassed by her ignorance and/or complicity. Because, there is no “both sides” to apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.

People crowding the streets of London carry signs demanding freedom for Palestine and waving the Palestinian flag to protest Israeli apartheid and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.
11 May 2021 – Emergency Rally For Jerusalem, Save Sheikh Jarrah protest in London. (Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash)

Israel forces began terrorizing eastern Jerusalem five days before a single rocket was launched by Hamas. Slaughtering women, children, and civilians, destroying their homes, is not a “conflict” you “deescalate”.

Mobs of armed Zionists (aided by Israeli police) who dragged Palestinian women and children out of their homes and attacked them in the street proved that apparently the only problem Israelis have with the Shoah is that they weren’t the ones murdering children and openly declaring genocidal war.

Did Bonamici miss Kristallnacht 2.0? This time it was Jews breaking all the glass and celebrating the destruction/deaths.

Bonamici and the U.S. Congress have the blood of Palestinian babies on their hands. By signing the Deutch-McCaul letter (along with Q-conspiracy believers Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, along with other Congressional racists), by continuing to fund the Israeli military so U.S. arms-selling corporations can profit, she and her colleagues gave Israel carte blanche for apartheid and genocidal violence.

That letter, not anything Hamas did, triggered this current violence . Because the primary purpose of the atrocious Israeli violence against Palestinian civilians is to keep Netanyahu in power so he can avoid criminal charges. Sound familiar?

For the record, I was born to a family of Jewish immigrants and my grandparents escaped pogroms in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and what was then Palestine. I lost family I will never know in the Holocaust. However, I will not stand by and not speak out against a government doing the exact same things Hitler’s did.

Never again is now. Step up or step down, Bonamici.

You. Can. Not. Reform. This.

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
April 19, 2021

On Friday, Portland, Oregon, police murdered an unarmed man who had no home, had expressed a long-time (unfortunately validated) fear of cops, and who may have been experiencing a mental health crisis. They were responding to a call about a different man possibly experiencing a mental health crisis in Lents Park. The cops fired impact munitions at Robert Douglas Delgado’s body and prevented anyone from offering medical attention until seven and a half minutes after police shot him (four minutes after arriving at the scene) almost five full minutes after he finally stopped moving, attacked with chemical weapons those who gathered to mourn the victim and protest his murder, and ate pizza over the corpse which they left lying in the grass for hours while they tried to “find” the gun they claimed was in his hand when they shot him. (Some reports before the fact that they had shot the “wrong” man was released, included the existence of a replica handgun, but cops are known to carry those to drop at a scene when they’ve murdered yet another unarmed person. Three days after the shooting, police produced a photograph of a toy handgun with an orange tip identifying it as fake that they allegedly found at the scene. Audio released at the same time “does not indicate that Delgado had a gun — or replica gun — in his hand at the time he was shot. … none of the officers on the ground say they see a gun in Delgado’s hand before” shooting him.)

This all took place:

  • after police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, murdered 20-year-old Daunte Wright in front of his girlfriend during a traffic stop and then brutally attacked those who rallied to protest his death and the reporters who covered those protests;
  • before a “trigger happy” cop placed on administrative leave for sexually abusing a child murdered three people in Austin, Texas;
  • during the same week that Chicago police finally released the video showing how many times and how many ways they lied about their murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo;
  • while Derek Chauvin’s defense attorneys did their best to put his victim, George Floyd, on trial for Floyd’s own murder including smearing him with false overdose theories and other lies.

Image of a black sign with "Defund Brutality" written in white block print over three red fists and the outlines in white of two raised hands.For reference, Brooklyn Center police — who shot at protesters from tanks and continued using tear gas and other “crowd control munitions” after the Brooklyn Center’s city council passed a resolution “banning dangerous crowd-control tactics including the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, and protester kettling” – gained national recognition as a “police reform model” last summer.

In Portland, a federal judge found in February of 2020 that the police department was in “substantial compliance” with a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice reached after DOJ found officers often used excessive force on people who were experiencing a mental health crisis. Portland recently launched a pilot program in Lents — the Portland Street Response team — which is supposed to answer calls for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis rather than police. The Portland Street Response was not sent to the scene because the caller (possibly a member of a group notorious in Lents for attacking the houseless and which organized a “back the blue” rally the day after the murder) claimed that a man “acting erratically” had a gun. It also should be noted that the murderer, Zachary Delong, has expressed support for Michael Brown’s killer Darren Wilson and that Delong’s boss, East Precinct Commander Erica Hurley, is under investigation by the Secretary of State for violating Oregon law last month. In addition, Portland Police are currently under investigation by the DOJ for brutal attacks on protesters, failing to file use of force reports, and using flawed, possibly unconstitutional logic to clear themselves of alleged misconduct.

All of the above represents just a few of the incidents that occurred in less than a week of egregious police malfeasance and murder in the United States of America.

Over and over again, politicians at federal, state, and municipal levels play the “reform” game. They pass laws, enact codes, and implement policies which police then ignore, fight in court, and/or claim are in violation of their contracts. Most of the time, even if the police obeyed them, the laws/code/policies changes touted by reform politicians won’t even prevent the most egregious violence and brutality that police inflict. The U.S. House of Representatives’ so-called “Floyd Act”, passed March 3rd, “could not have even saved George Floyd’s life” or all those police have murdered since Floyd died, begging for his life, on May 25th, 2020.

Portland is preparing to revive, yet again, the racially biased, ever name changing Gang Enforcement Team (GET) Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) Focused Intervention Team without ever discussing with those who experience and understand the causes of gun violence whether or not this program offers any solutions. “Adding more police is like putting sugar on shit. It makes it taste a little better, but it’s not really changing anything. You may prevent murders, but you won’t stop the problem. You’re just going to have a lot more guys in jail… a lot more families without fathers. Then what?” asks Mike “Bretto” Jackson, former gang member who’s now a hip hop artist and youth mentor.

Meanwhile, using gun violence as an excuse, the agencies that claimed deputizing local law enforcement as federal officers last year was only temporary have announced a “gun violence collaboration” that includes Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who ran for office as a progressive reformer. Collaborating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Portland and Gresham police and the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office “entered into a voluntary agreement … to “deputize a small contingent of local law enforcement officers”.

Because Portland public officials don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge, that correlation does not equal causation. In reality, gun violence spiked across the country during the pandemic, resulting in overall gun homicides at the highest rate in more than 20 years. “The COVID-19 pandemic worsened many of the underlying conditions that contribute to community gun violence risk — poverty, unemployment, food and housing insecurity, ” according to Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, who researches violence prevention at the University of California.

One of the centerpieces of reform is the call to require police to wear body cameras. But there has been no reduction in police violence as more and more departments spend millions of dollars incorporating this requirement and citizens with smart phones fill the Internet with videos of egregious police conduct. And we have a multitude of video evidence of police brutally attacking and maiming the thousands of people who gather to protest police behavior, no matter how peaceful.

“Rather than thinking that they ought to be chastened by being caught on tape beating, tear-gassing, and pepper-spraying protesters, perhaps doing all this in full view of the public is the point. They’re not afraid of being filmed, because being filmed simply reinforces the central theme: If you come to protest, an action that explicitly challenges the order and my place in it, this is the consequence,” Patrick Wyman wrote last June. It’s “about sending a message: Try to hold us accountable, and we’ll find you. Whether the violence is real or merely threatened, the goal is public acknowledgement of this order, rooted in racial inequality and the protection of property.”

Mass arrests of protesters across the country are “all about intimidation” of people who vocally oppose police brutality, said Detroit Will Breathe organizer Tristan Taylor. “It says something about the nature of policing when that’s a uniform tactic.” The vast majority of citations and charges against protesters were ultimately dropped, dismissed, or otherwise not filed, but “police response created this whole additional public health crisis that wasn’t something people talked about much, but, in the moment, that was one of the biggest issues we were concerned about,” said Tyler Crawford, the National Lawyers Guild director of mass defense.

Reform is not possible when, as Colin Kaepernick stated in his introduction to a 30-part series demanding abolition, “The central intent of policing is to surveil, terrorize, capture, and kill marginalized populations, specifically Black folks.” He echoes the words of Huey P. Newton, Black Panther Party co-founder, “The police are in our community not to promote our welfare or for our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us, and murder us.”

Organizations with roots in capturing and punishing Africans who attempted to escape carceral slavery, whose members ignore the law themselves while using it to capture, incarcerate, and kill those who are not white, cis, straight, able-bodied, males — or otherwise do not fit in what their limited worldview defines as citizen — cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

Abolish The Police

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

For political reasons, I temporarily changed my social media avatar from “Abolish The Police” to “Black Lives Matter”. Since the reason no longer applies, I changed my avatar back. Almost immediately, someone on Facebook Abolish the Police asked the standard liberal question “And do what about crime?” (She deleted her comment after I a) documented the fallacy of her question and b) informed her how lazy and inconsiderate it was.)

Given that others still don’t understand why we will never end white supremacy and systemic racism without eliminating slave patrol/union busting cops, here’s some places to start. (And, these are only starting points. Many of my articles point to other articles/authors and there are long and detailed reading lists available at many libraries and online.)

1) Much of what you call “crime” (except that involving bodily harm) was created by laws written to continue slavery based on the wording of the 13th amendment (and have precedence in imprisoning uppity peasantry).

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-black-codes-4125744

2) #Police ≠ #PublicSafety
In fact, cops are hazardous to public health.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/08/20/bioweaponizing-a-pandemic/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-man-wrongfully-detained-maskless-police-officer-tests/story?id=74967778

3) Police do not prevent or solve crimes. They show up after a “crime” has been committed, ask for the public’s help and/or tap into your business/personal surveillance video to figure out who did it, and then lie to get confessions/convictions.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/06/06/defund-the-police-to-end-police-violence/

4) Police are criminals and liars.

https://thebigsmoke.com/2020/08/29/blue-crime-matters/

https://twitter.com/fodderyfodder/status/1297405642848837633

https://thebigsmoke.com/2020/09/09/peaceful-protests/

(Also, see thousands of hours of OTG video contradicting fabricated police reports “documenting” protest events in which police instigate and are the primary perpetrators of violence and murders of unarmed Black people.)

5) There are no good cops.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/11/17/no-good-cops-still-on-force/

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/07/18/rotten-apples/

If you want to stop crime, use the money wasted on police to make sure everyone has enough to eat, a safe place to live, an education, and health (including mental health) care.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/06/06/defund-the-police-to-end-police-violence/

Also, eliminate the oligarchy that rewards corporations and billionaires who constantly steal from the rest of us and never face any penalties.

If you want to know more, you should do your own research. If you do not know where to start, I regularly post on Facebook and on Twitter on this topic.

I also write about it here and on The Big Smoke America as well as in much of my poetry.

Protesters, Press, Police

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
December 16, 2020

In 1983 — when USA Today began changing the way, and what, newspapers covered as “news”, when Reagan’s deregulation started enabling the consolidation that would become mega media mergers, eventually leaving the U.S. with almost no locally-owned newspapers and television stations — I walked away from newspaper reporting as a career after only six years.

In that short time, I exposed discrepancies in federal loan subsidy application handling, local political manipulation of the federal bidding process, the impact of the Reagan administration’s first major union busting move, a medical clinic’s prescription misuse and inappropriate use of federal funds, a local coal baron’s questionable financial dealings and tax avoidance, and a local agency’s conflict of interest — all while reporting for very small newspapers. My stories resulted in state and federal investigations, tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes paid, contracts terminated, and Flight Service Station siting changes.

But, after a year of watching major metropolitan newspapers, including my own employer, remake themselves in McPaper‘s image, I walked away when my boss demanded I go out and cover a non-event (except on the police scanner), that required invading someone’s privacy. If didn’t, he said he would fire me. I quit.

The story I refused to report is one you have read dozens of times since. One that, instead of condemning the system that created the problems, merely makes you feel sympathy for the victim, or treats them as a hero, or vilifies them for crumbling under the weight of a society that deliberately breaks people.

Over the years, my decision was repeatedly validated as television and newspapers became worse about disrespecting everyone’s privacy, more and more mistakes appeared in print and on the air, and entertainment and celebrity coverage drowned out actual news. Bigger and bigger media conglomerates gobbled up local newspapers and television stations, and most media now is owned by a handful of mega corporations. [see two examples at the end of this article]

Now, we have so-called journalists who believe they’re empowered to invade other people’s lives and private property for their clickbait and sixty seconds of infotainment spotlight. They work for companies with right-wing, racist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant agendas and do not care whose lives they destroy to get their “stories.”

When activists politely ask them not to take a photograph or collect video of an event, they scream about freedom of the press and their First Amendment rights. Except most of them have never, apparently, actually read the First Amendment. Because it doesn’t give them any rights at all to invade other people’s lives and steal their stories. It states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” [emphasis mine]

Nothing requiring anyone talk to the press; no mention of allowing the press to invade private property in order to report on an event. Case law, specifically libel and sunshine laws, allow the press to write about public figures and celebrities without worrying about being sued and require government officials, both elected and appointed, to produce information to the press as representatives of their constituents.

But, if a broadcast “journalist” sticks a microphone in your face or points a camera at you, they are invading your privacy without your consent and if you don’t want to enrich them by sharing your information and/or photograph for their broadcast, you have the right to insist they stop and/or walk away. I have done both. As an author and a business owner, I also have been interviewed more than once by a reporter who took the facts I gave them and inadvertently misinterpreted or deliberately twisted them to meet their own narrative, rather than reporting mine.

Too often, people who have watched television footage of victims sobbing, witnesses sharing details, and families wailing their grief, believe they’re obligated to answer questions in front of a camera. But, footage like that is lazy reporting and rarely includes factual information.

Moreover, police view that footage and use it to target activists who protest police brutality and demand their elected officials stop funding military police forces in urban areas; who fight gentrification and sweeping houseless camps during a pandemic; who stand up against armed Nazis marching in our streets.

White Supremacist terrorist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer use video and photographs posted by media to doxx and menace anti-fascist activists and their families with violence, including rape and death threats.

Right-wing “journalists” edit video to remove any mitigating circumstances, such as self defense. Edited video, claiming a “random lone protester fights with multiple proud boys” led to the arrest of a local Black man who defended himself with a knife in Washington D.C., when dozens of out-of-town white Proud Boys surrounded, trapped, and attacked him. It should be noted, that the Proud Boys, who were openly carrying hand and long guns in violation of D.C. laws, had already vandalized black churches, and roaming mobs of them attacked multiple counter-protesters, reporters, and random passersby with fists, chemical spray, weighted gloves, flag poles, and other weapons. But police arrested the Black man and they will use the edited video against him in court.

Those at home, scrutinizing photographs and video on television, websites, and social media, forget that U.S. law requires a presumption of innocence. With broadcast and print media frantically regurgitating inaccurate, deceptive, and outright deceitful police reports, viewers judge someone guilty before they’re tried, sometimes before they’re even charged with a crime, based on seeing often-doctored video.

Invasively filming and photographing people involved, sometimes only peripherally, in news events puts lives in danger. “Any journalist who has embedded with military forces knows there are times you DO NOT take photos,” investigative journalist Robert Evans tweeted recently. “A picture is not worth life.”

When I was a reporter, I was the first to report a national story from a small town newspaper because I worked to develop relationships with sources and to protect them. But, even back then, one of my sources lost his job because his superiors were able to determine, based on our locations and history, that he had to be the person I had spoken with. Today, with all the surveillance tech available to authorities, those who protest police brutality, evictions during winter and a global pandemic, stolen land, and other forms of capitalistic-enforced inequality are in even more danger from an authoritarian government.

At a recent active eviction defense in Portland, The Oregonian complained about being denied access making “it difficult to provide the public with a full account of the ongoing occupation“. This was after the newspaper printed false information, including calling the event an “occupation”. The only other “journalist” quotes routinely endangers protesters by deliberately filming their faces.

In addition to endorsing Portland’s much-hated Mayor Edward Tevis “Ted” Wheeler, The Oregonian, owned by Advance 1, is run by John Maher who also chairs the Portland Business Alliance which heavily funded Wheeler’s election campaign. Urban Housing Development, which purchased the Red House at a foreclosure sale, belongs to the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland (HBA) which is affiliated with the Portland Business Alliance (PBA). HBA and PBA, along with Realtors and developers, also were among the entities behind United for Portland, created in the final months of the mayoral campaign to spend money targeting male voters to discredit Wheeler’s female opponent.

The Oregonian continuously uses language such as “become known as the ‘red house'”. Well, it’s a house. And, it’s red. So people call it the red house — hardly worthy of repeatedly wasting words. The Oregonian also deliberately contrasted the $260,000 the current owner paid at auction in 2018 with the more than $308,000 raised to buy it back via GoFundMe without acknowledging the $20,000 in property taxes also required as part of the proposed agreement, possible legal fees, and the costs of major repairs to the house required after law enforcement deliberately trashed it, including destroying the plumbing fixtures. It faulted the family for failing to pay the mortgage for nearly a year and half without mentioning that they paid the mortgage until it was sold and two different companies demanded payments. Although the family has made it clear how they want to be contacted, The Oregonian called one of the individuals on the phone and then made a big deal about reporting that he hung up, despite the fact that they had specifically asked not to receive phone calls.

Meanwhile, a reporter with KATU, owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, 2 refused to leave the property when asked and kept filming people despite their repeated requests that she not do so. Her camera was knocked from her hand and stomped on to prevent her from further filming. She was injured slightly (although she tried to make it appear worse than it was, including erroneously claiming her hand was broken) when she tried to pull it out from under someone’s foot.

“By treating this like a regular news story you are, inadvertently or not, antagonizing the participants”, an activist who uses the handle @imlaceyimfine, posted in response. “You, and especially your camera, are a threat, whether you believe that to be true or not. The fear your camera inspires in people who have been brutalized and arrested all summer, is very real and in my opinion incredibly valid. Not only are the protesters rightly afraid of retribution, they are also traumatized. Many of them may be triggered by your presence. If you want the story, right or wrong, you need to make allowances for that fact.”

The “reporter” cried (literally) “crocodile tears” on Twitter and demanded the right to invade people’s privacy on private property with signage clearly stating filming was not allowed.

“If you have been following KATU’s limited coverage at the protests or the press conferences, you know they are not capable of telling the entire story,” TeamRaccoonPDX, volunteers who cleans up trash at protest events, noted.

Many of KATU’s reports about the Red House Eviction Defense were inaccurate and/or just a series of quotes from Portland Police Bureau, Multnomah County Sherriff’s Office, and Wheeler. The station played down Wheeler’s and Police Chief Charles Lovell‘s threats against and lies about the family and activists that resulted in racist death threats and attacks by fascists. KATU was among the media breathlessly reporting that the four generations of family fighting to retain ownership of the “infamous ‘Red House'” also own another home.

When an agreement was reached with the city and the barricades protecting the house from police raids were removed Monday, December 14, KATU claimed “those who live in North Portland” — an area that encompasses more than fort-five square miles, 25,883 households, and the University of Portland — were “still concerned” about the few blocks surrounding the house. Sources for this included an “anonymous person” who allegedly lives in “the area” (already defined as North Portland, so, not necessarily anywhere near the Red House) and the Coalition to Save Portland (another entity formed to push Wheeler’s reelection) were still upset about the “occupation”.

During its “coverage”, the station also interviewed another person who doesn’t even live in “the area”, who was upset because some activists legally carried firearms. (This person also complained in that article he was unable to get “the city’s help to get his concealed handgun license”.  Licenses to carry concealed handguns are issued by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office not the city of Portland.)

These few “complaints” ignored numerous neighbors, including businesses, who supported efforts to fight the gentrification that has driven almost all Black homeowners out of a traditionally (redlined) Black neighborhood as well as efforts by activists protecting the eviction defense area to provide food, clothing, and medical supplies to those in need and to help remove graffiti from local businesses.

Other reporters — who respect their sources and do not film them without consent and/or who edit their video to remove information that can be used to identify, arrest, and doxx someone — had no difficulty providing accurate coverage of the events.

“This Oregonian article is nonsense. I’ve been at Red House nearly everyday since Tuesday. I’ve taken pictures & interviewed people without issue,” tweeted Garrison Davis a young, dedicated, and effective journalist who has covered protests in Portland since they started in May. “You don’t need to film 24/7 to “accurately” report. Write, take notes, it’s in the name, ‘Journal(ism)’.” Unlike reporters who pretend to be objective while working for right-wing media owned by oligarchs, Davis makes no effort to hide which side he sympathizes with.

“It’s not a matter of being objective, it’s really about being transparent,” Andrew DeVigal, chair in journalism innovation and civic engagement at the University of Oregon, told Portland Monthly.

“Not choosing a side, when one side is oppressed, means choosing, through inaction, the side of the oppressor”, freelance journalist Lady Rosie G. Riddle points out. “if you’re not an anti-fascist FIRST and press SECOND, then chances are, you’re helping fascists.” As she and numerous other BIPOC journalists and pundits state repeatedly, “objective journalism upholds white supremacy.”

If you do not believe that statement, compare any mainstream coverage of Portland BIPOC protesters in trying to prevent a local family from losing its home in winter, in the middle of a pandemic, while providing food, clothing, and PPE supplies to any in need, to the coverage a few years ago when heavily armed, out-of-state, anti-government white men took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, threatened local residents and law enforcement, and did major damage, including removing fences and plowing roads in defense of two men who had pleaded guilty to arson further.

1The Oregonian/OregonLive is owned by S.I. Newhouse-founded Advance which also owns Condé Nast (Architectural Digest, Allure,  Ars Technica,  Bon Appétit,  Epicurious, Glamour,  GQ, House & Garden, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, and more), American City Business Journals (BizEquity, The Business Journals, Bizwomen, etc.), among others and is also among the largest shareholders in Charter Communications, Discovery (HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet, Cooking Channel, American Heroes Channel, Now This, Thrillist, to name a few) and Reddit.

2KATU is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group which owns 190 television stations in 88 markets that are affiliated with all major broadcast networks plus 23 regional sports network brands. In May, 2020, it paid the largest civil penalty by a broadcaster, $48 million, to the Federal Communications Commission for violating the FCC’s sponsorship identification rules as part of its attempt to acquire Tribune Media. In addition to slanting its reporting to the right, Sinclair requires talent at its subsidiary stations to spout pro-Trump propaganda and right-wing opinions such as “comparing removal of Confederate statues to destruction of archaeological treasures“.  The Guardian calls it ” the most dangerous US company you’ve never heard of”.

Meet the New Boss … Same As the Old Boss

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 10, 2020

Despite

  • more than a quarter million mostly preventable deaths from COVID-19
  • thousands of children imprisoned in concentration camps
  • at least 660 children who may never again see their parents
  • hundreds of asylum seekers who were sexually assaulted, physically abused, and then deported to hide the evidence
  • hundreds of women whose uteruses were involuntarily/unnecessarily removed and who are now being deported to hide the evidence
  • a $2 trillion increase in U.S. debt
  • 12.6 million unemployed
  • 40 million on the brink of eviction
  • and 12 million who lost access to health care

while

  • a handful of billionaires increased their wealth by $1 trillion
  • the president, his family, and cronies stole millions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury
  • the president violated the U.S. Constitution daily since January 20, 2016
  • he and his staff lied constantly (thousands of times)
  • and the president, his children, son-in-law, and staff committed treason

more than 71 million U.S. citizens voted to keep the current administration in office. And many of them lied about it. Because the only reason 99 percent of them had to vote for him is to support white supremacy.

And yet, despite four years of numerous analysts explaining in myriad articles, Twitter threads, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, etc. that racism is their primary reason for supporting him, there are still people insisting we need to “understand” why people vote for white supremacy and that we must not blame them for doing so.

Mike Stanfill, who creates Raging Pencils, went so far as to claim voter fraud in favor of the president because “in no rational universe could that walking bolus of bile and malice garner 71 million votes, 8 million more than in 2016, without significant covert aid.”

The only reason for anyone to not understand why and to not blame the people who subjected BIPOC, LGBA, transgender and two-spirit folx, immigrants, non-christians, people with disabilities, and others to four years of abject terror is to assuage their own, covert racism and/or white supremacy.

Black voters, Indigenous Americans, and many other people of color fought attempts to disenfranchise them; risked their lives; lost wages they couldn’t spare; traveled for hundreds of miles; stood for hours in the rain, the heat, the snow; registered thousands of new people to vote, and drove those who had no other way of getting there to the polls. All so they could hold their noses, after eschewing more progressive and representative choices in the primary, and vote for the slightly less evil, racist white man who has only marginally better impulse control. Because, they knew they couldn’t count on white voters to make the right decision last week.

“White pundits and talking heads still cannot say White folks voted for racism,” Marley K. said on Sunday. “When you can’t get White people to acknowledge there was no reason on earth to vote for Trump except racism, there’s no way in hell you can address the problem.”

Anyone who is still shaking their head, “reaching out” to racists, trying to understand why people vote for a narcissistic con man, is complicit in white supremacy, whether or not they’re an active participant.

More than 71 million U.S. citizens voted for a treasonous criminal because he allows them to brazenly display their hatred for people who are not straight, cis, white, xtianist, third generation; to be proud of their homomisia, transmisia, Islammisia, xenomisia, misogyny, and racism; to deny anyone they see as other civil rights, access to medical care, housing, food, bodily autonomy if they’re not cis males; and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

That complicity includes the entire Democratic party that

  • actively worked to prevent any progressive candidate from topping the ticket
  • sabotaged progressive candidates for vulnerable Congressional seats only to have the moderates they supported for those seats lose to the Republican incumbents
  • within moments of network news declaring a winner began haranguing against any attempts to move the party toward the left.

If “we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) proclaimed despite

  • at least half a dozen Democratic centrists losing their seats in the House
  • every single swing seat member who co-sponsored Medicare for All winning re-election
  • only one of the 93 House co-sponsors of the Green New Deal who ran for re-election losing

Because white people in the U.S. will forfeit healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, breathable air, drinkable water, etc. rather than allow BIPOC the same benefits. The people who were comfortable with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal because Black people were deliberately excluded, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren consistently vote to impoverish themselves rather than improve the living standards of a single BIPOC.

“White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way,” Umair Hague explains.  “White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem.”

So, while liberals wring their hands and shake their heads, while they try to understand, while they believe the “long nightmare” (four years isn’t long when your people have been oppressed for four centuries or four millennia) is over because the oligarch was elected instead of the autocrat, the reality is that for anyone who isn’t white, straight, cis, neurotypical, and abled; for all the people who stood in line for hours and hours; for those already at work in Georgia on the runoff elections, the nightmare continues, as it has for centuries.

If* the president-elect takes office, he plans to “work with all my heart with the confidence of the whole people, to win the confidence of all of you,” making it clear that he learned nothing from the previous administration in which he served as vice president about what happens when you put bi-partisanship over getting things done.

He refuses to back programs that eliminate insurance companies as arbitrators over who gets access to health care; has given only lukewarm support to the Green New Deal, which although it might have been meaningful a few years ago, now is in itself inadequate; will do nothing to stop police from murdering BIPOC; and has made it clear he has no intention of mitigating a Supreme Court poised to reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. The latter is despite

  • the fact that the vast majority of the people who live in this country approve of both women’s bodily autonomy and marriage equality
  • there’s no restriction in the U.S. Constitution on the number of SCOTUS judges
  • five of the nine justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a senate representing fewer than half the people in the U.S.

The protests will continue despite whoever is in the White House, because the occupant doesn’t really matter to those who are poor, houseless, hungry, BIPOC, LGBTQ2S, immigrant, non-christian, different abled, neurodivergent, etc. (and it’s no coincidence that many of those categories overlap).

The problems in this country that feed white supremacy — racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, misogyny, homomisia, transmisia, Islammisia, xenomisia — are systemic. They are literally built into the foundation (and founding documents) of the U.S. and all attempts to remove them, from the very beginning, have failed.

I am not alone in the belief that 400 years of white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, never-ending wars, planetary destruction, unfettered exploitative capitalism, patriarchy, and enslavement/murder of BIPOC is enough.

The coup* started June 1 when the president ordered the U.S. military to attack civilians exercising their First Amendment rights. Defense Secretary Mark Esper had no problem with that, although he apparently drew a line in the shifting sands wide enough to get himself fired Monday, paving the way for someone with even fewer scruples. Also on Monday, Richard Pilger, the director of the Department of Justice’s elections crime branch, stepped aside after Attorney General William Barr — who has actively been trying to suppress dissent for the past six months by arresting protesters on trumped up (pun intended) federal charges — released a memo making it clear he intends to have the DOJ interfere in the election results. The second U.S. Civil War is already in progress.

Older Black voters who consistently pull the U.S. back from the brink of self-destruction are tired and dying. And the younger ones, who are in the streets now, see no reason to continue the colonialist wars of aggression, extraordinary resource theft, and oppressive racist systems that the rest of the world learns from (e.g. German Nazis).

The reality is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a United States. It’s a bunch of very different states with very different values, and with many value differences within individual states. The GOP, unsatisfied just controlling a bunch of states where not many people live, has been working for decades to force the rest of us to fall into line with its colonialist, patriarchal vision of America circa 1784.

None of this started with the current White House occupant and it won’t end if/when he’s removed from power. The slaughter/incarceration of BIPOC didn’t pause under the previous administration. Children were still separated from their parents at the border. The concentration camps that this administration stuffed full were built before this president took office. The Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the Voting Rights Act is named after the previous administration’s attorney general for a reason … it was handed down in 2013.

The Affordable Care Act didn’t get health care to BIPOC because it was written to appease insurance companies and then eviscerated by various states. So BIPOC are dying in far greater numbers from COVID because they don’t have access to medical care and because even if they have insurance they’re turned away from hospitals and their symptoms ignored. (Did no one else notice the not-so-subtle shift in the administration’s attitude toward the virus when the numbers came out that more BIPOC were dying than white folks?)

People in the U.S. are houseless. They are starving. The police are beating and murdering them. They are dying for lack of medical care. In much of the world people are drowning because of climate change the U.S. and its fossil fuels companies caused. And the president-elect will not do one damn thing to change any of that.

The biggest difference if he is able to boot the current occupant from the White House? Liberals will blithely brush off their hands as if they had accomplished something when all they did was put some crazy glue on the massive crack opening in the dam.

Standing Still While Moving Left

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
October 29, 2020

I grew up in the U.S. “south” and experienced explicit racism firsthand, both as an observer of how Black and other people of color were treated, and as a victim for not being white enough and not practicing christianity. I have spent most of my adult life in the U.S. “north” where the racism was always implicit, but no less systemic.

I always speak out against bigotry and intolerance in all its many forms: racism, misogyny, homomisia, transmisia, xenomisia, etc.; step up when and where I can to defend victims; use my words in an effort to explain harm and persuade change.

But, during my lifetime I have watched the animus and bitterness of the reaction to small gains in civil rights for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; freedoms for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, and other Queers; acceptance for people who are transgender; and independence for women grow rapidly in the United States, far out of proportion to the relatively minor advances that were made. The acrimony comes couched in pious but authoritarian terms: “law and order,” “America first,” “religious freedom,” “pro-life,” “border protection,” “individual liberty,” etc.

Hands of a white-passing person in focus in the foreground holding a Black Lives Matter sign with a Black person, out of focus, on a bullhorn speaking to a crowdWhen the Civil Rights movement made open racism more unpopular and awareness curtailed racist speech, the evangelical crusade — started before the U.S. Civil War to fight the growing movement to abolish slavery — shifted gears. Inspired by women’s access to hormonal birth control and the U.S. Supreme Court Roe v Wade decision, which combined gave women in the U.S. unprecedented control over their own bodies, evangelicals transferred their focus from keeping “coloreds” out of their schools, jobs, unions, and neighborhoods to “saving” the lives of “unborn children”. This campaign flourished despite biblical declarations that life begins at first breath, specification that a fetus has a lower value than a person, inclusion of an abortifacient formula (for unfaithful wives), and the fact that no statement against pregnancy termination was even once attributed to Jesus in the text.

Meanwhile, U.S. legislation and practices that prevented non-whites from owning homes, obtaining a quality education, earning equivalent income and benefits, and securing access to political influence, continued. The 1994 crime bill (sponsored by then U.S. Senator Joe Biden and signed by then U.S. President Bill Clinton), combined with the zero tolerance policies enabled in the Gun-Free Schools Act signed the same year, exacerbated the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline sending people of color, especially young Black men, into the for-profit carceral system built and codified after the Civil War to replace slave labor.

Still, white, especially male, resentment simmered, albeit below the surface in “polite” circles. It emerged as the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-LGBQ, anti-Trans, anti-reproductive health care biases spread by right-wing organizations across the globe. Attempts to address harm done to BIPOC, LGBTQ, women, and non-christian populations through affirmative action met with fierce backlash and ludicrous accusations of reverse discrimination.

Straight, white, cis, male entitlements — the pillars of systemic racism and patriarchy — allow mediocre heteronormative people with lighter skin tones to continue reaping the rewards of advantages bestowed those who fit within privileged classes. And that, more than anything else, is what the melanin challenged refuse to give up, whether they are willing to admit it or not.

While they may claim to abhor racism; express regret and anger about the deaths of BIPOC routinely slaughtered by police, especially but not exclusively in the U.S.; berate and ridicule those who call the cops to report folks who are just trying to work, deliver packages, drive, park, picnic, swim, play, bird watch, or even just exist while Black; there is a limit to how much they are willing to personally sacrifice for the necessary changes to end systemic racism and patriarchy.

Once upon a time, I labeled myself a Democrat. But, as the Democrats moved to the center-right to fill up the void left by Republicans’ radical shift to the authoritarian right, I renamed myself a liberal, even though my views did not seem to have changed all that much. But then, more and more, I encountered only neo-liberals and hypocrites branding themselves with the “liberal” label. So, I switched my identification to progressive.

But now, five months into world-wide protests against police brutality that have been met with even more egregious police savagery, while media constantly equate protester vandalism with police violence, so-called officers of the law continue to kill Black and other people of color, district attorneys continue refusing to charge police with any of the crimes they commit, and elected officials across the United States and in other countries continue ignoring the public outcries demanding they strip funding from police departments.

And yet, I still hear “liberals” and even “progressives” enthusiastically embrace a tough-on-crime ticket for U.S. president and vice president, rallying behind the man who helped create the school-to-prison pipeline that has swallowed so many Black lives and communities, voicing their ardent support for the pro-cop/pro-prison woman who locked up and terrorized BIPOC and trans Californians because she has dark skin. That back-the-blue endorsement spits in the face of the millions in the U.S. who took to the streets, at the risk of arrest, injury, and even death, to demand abolition of the carceral system.

As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his August 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, where he was imprisoned after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of Black protesters without a permit, in response to a statement, published in The Birmingham News, written by eight moderate white clergymen criticizing the march and other demonstrations:

“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.'”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “white moderate” is today’s liberal and progressive. And, personally, I just cannot identify with those who find it acceptable to support two people who have done so much harm to communities of color and LBGTQ people. Bigotry and white supremacy behind a polite, civil, congenial facade is still bigotry and white supremacy.

So, now, I apparently am a radical abolitionist. I already had come to accept the utter impossibility of reforming a police force of racist white supremacist bullies who do not believe the law applies to them, whose organizations began as slave patrols and whose progenitors were protectors of property that belonged to well-to-do white men and union busting thugs. But even though I have always been well left of center, “radical” seemed too far, especially as a senior citizen.

Is believing that all people — whatever their skin color, sexuality, gender, faith, ethnicity, nationality, financial status, age, mental acuity, ability, etc. — are entitled to the same protections under the law, the same civil rights, the same access to basic needs such housing, food, and medical care, really that radical?

In an epiphany-inspiring article she wrote about how whiteness dilutes voices of color at public radio stations for The American Prospect, Laura Garbes, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote:”Public radio and the broader academic world are liberal or progressive in their thinking, but are not radical. They are not about to jeopardize their own comfortable situations by fostering fundamental change” (boldface emphasis is mine).

And therein lies the crux of the difference between liberals/progressives and radicals. It is fine to talk about equality and police reform, but liberals and progressives are not willing to do the necessary heavy lifting of completely rebuilding a system that was designed to create “equality” only for straight, white, cis, property-owning men, a Republic that built slave patrols into its Bill of “Rights” (what that “well-regulated Militia” in the Second Amendment refers to).

Many liberals and progressives are not even willing to confront their fanatically white supremacist, homomisiat, transmisiat, and/or xenomisiat friends and relatives because that might mean giving up the pleasures of a weekend brunch or the comfort of a holiday dinner. They are certainly not inclined to support zoning changes that would provide more houseless people places to live if that would also allow apartment complexes in the neighborhoods of their single-family homes; services for the mentally ill in the same building as their fancy, high-rise apartments; or tent camping in their church parking lot. They won’t support defunding the police because then who would they call if someone stole a lawn ornament or took shelter in their doorway or painted anti-fascist graffiti across the street?

Fundamental change requires extensive sacrifices. And most people who identify as progressives and liberals are only willing to make small efforts toward the illusion they are working to offset the injustices that fuel their privilege: making commensurately small donations to crowd-funding campaigns, food banks and/or social justice organizations; recycling paper and cans; giving up plastic straws; signing meaningless petitions; adding a Black Lives Matter border to their social media profile picture; and maybe even writing a letter to the editor or showing up for a night of protest or two. However, they are not ready to sacrifice any of their own comforts, even to save someone’s life (unless it is someone they know personally, but sometimes not even then). They are not willing to recognize that the planet cannot sustain a capitalist lifestyle, that the privilege that allows them to own a home or condominium and one or more personal vehicles (even electric ones) is killing BIPOC around the world.

The liberals and progressives reveal themselves when they fervently urge you to vote blue, as if that would result in any substantial changes, and explain how they firmly believe that peaceful protests are perfectly acceptable and should be permitted, but they draw the line at looting, graffiti, setting fires, pulling down statues of colonizers, and other acts of vandalism. That translates to the colonialist concept that “white people’s property has more value than Black lives”. The excruciatingly brutal police response: bloody beatings with night sticks and arrests for “disorderly conduct” and “interfering with a peace officer” echo across centuries of violent oppression.

Although liberals and the progressives, especially in the U.S., know, and quickly recite or post, every MLK quote about non-violence, they conveniently forget that he was assassinated because agencies of the United States government considered him a dangerous radical. And they never quote from his April 14, 1967 speech, “The Other America”, given at Stanford University one of the many times he referred to rioting:

“I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. … But at the same time, it is as necessary for me to be as vigorous in condemning the conditions which cause persons to feel that they must engage in riotous activities, as it is for me to condemn riots. I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. So in a real sense, our nation’s summer’s riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”