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We Actually Know a Lot About How Trump Would Handle Policing and Race

by Kristopher43W Posted on August 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has been routinely criticized for sharing scant details about the policies he hopes to implement as president. But although he’s drawn little attention for it, there is one area where Trump has gotten pretty specific: policing.

In an interview with the Guardian US last October, Trump said he supported federal funding for body camera programs at local police departments. And in a Facebook post following the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas and the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police, he made appeals to both sides of the debate. He called for the restoration of “law and order” while acknowledging that “the senseless and tragic deaths of two people in Louisiana and Minnesota reminds us how much more needs to be done.” At a rally in Indiana, he pondered whether police officers had shot Sterling and Castile because of poor training.

Still, Trump has called the Black Lives Matter movement “divisive.” And of course there’s the time he threatened to fight members of the movement if they tried to disrupt his rallies. After a Black Lives Matter protester who did just that was assaulted by several Trump supporters last November, the Republican candidate condoned the attack. “Maybe he should have been roughed up,” Trump said. (He has been endorsed by the New England Police Benevolent Association and by conservatives with a range of views on criminal justice reform.)

So what does Trump actually think about the state of policing in America? In fact, he answered in his own words in response to a 33-question survey sent to him by the Fraternal Order of Police earlier this year. The self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate also met with the FOP earlier this month to seek its endorsement. (The FOP also sent the survey to Hillary Clinton, who did not respond.)

Here’s what Trump’s answers to the survey revealed:

Police militarization: Trump said he would repeal President Barack Obama’s executive order banning local police departments from receiving certain kinds of equipment through a federal program that transfers surplus military equipment to local and state police forces. Obama signed the order in May 2015 after public outcry over law enforcement’s aggressive response to protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in late 2014. (Obama recently said he will review each item on the “controlled equipment list” after law enforcement officials said they needed some of it in the wake of targeted attacks on police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.) Trump also said he believes police should receive federal grants with no strings attached. Currently, departments can lose funding if they don’t meet incident reporting requirements or other mandates.

Racial profiling: “Current law and judicial precedent provide a great deal of civil rights protection,” Trump wrote. But he also noted that he would sign anti-racial-profiling legislation like the proposed End Racial Profiling Act “if there is a clear need for edification for certain civil rights that are being violated.” Trump responded to the FOP questionnaire months before the Department of Justice’s damning new report on racist policing in Baltimore. But there were already similarly outrageous DOJ reports on police departments in Cleveland, Ferguson, and Newark, New Jersey, the products of more than a dozen reviews and investigations into local police departments launched by the DOJ under the Obama administration.

Demographic data collection: Trump said he believes police departments “should be aware of the circumstances” of encounters between their officers and the public. If keeping information on the races of people interacting with police “is determined to improve policing,” Trump said, “then that should be part of the protocols officers use.” A major issue raised by police reform advocates in recent years has been the lack of reliable federal data on police shootings and the races of people killed by law enforcement. But the determination of whether to collect such data should be left to department administrators and local elected officials, Trump said.

“Blue lives matter”: Trump said he would push for harsher penalties for crimes against federal law enforcement officers and that he would consider signing bipartisan legislation to make any crime against a police officer a hate crime. (I reported on why that’s a bad idea earlier this year.) But he said he would not sign legislation to label murders or attempted murders a federal offense if the victim is a law enforcement official employed by an agency that receives federal funding. Doing so, Trump said, would effectively make state and local law enforcement agencies—which receive funding from the feds—an extension of the federal government, “which was not intended at the founding” of the nation.

Asked whether he would support legislation to limit the damages a plaintiff could win in compensation for injuries sustained as the result of an arrest after the commission of a felony or violent crime, Trump responded in a fashion more typical of his general lack of specificity. He stated that he would “sign any legislation that is in the best interest of America and Americans.”

The FOP announced that it will vote on which candidate to endorse later this fall.

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We Actually Know a Lot About How Trump Would Handle Policing and Race

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A Damning Federal Report Just Confirmed Our Worst Fears About Private Prisons

by LorriS36kvrfq Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Federal prisons run by private prison companies aren’t just less safe and less secure than than their publicly run counterparts. They’re also inadequately supervised by the federal Bureau of Prisons, which has outsourced the incarceration of 12 percent of its inmates to three giant for-profit prison companies, while allowing gaps in oversight that endangered inmates and put their rights at risk.

That’s the takeaway from a damning new report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. The report, released Thursday, examined how the BOP monitored its contracts with three of the nation’s largest private prison companies: Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group, and Management and Training Corporation. For $639 million, these corporations run the country’s 14 private federal prisons, incarcerating around 22,660 people as of December—mainly low-security immigrants serving short sentences.

The inspector general’s findings corroborate years of reports documenting violence in private prisons, including Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s immersive investigation of a CCA prison in Louisiana.

Compared to federal prisons of similar sizes, locations, and security levels, the private facilities had a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults, and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults per capita between 2011 and 2014. Prison officials also found nearly twice as many weapons and eight times as many cellphones in private prisons as compared to BOP prisons, per capita. The inspector general also found that private prisons went on “lockdown” much more frequently, confining inmates to their quarters “often in response to a disturbance or incident that threatens the secure and orderly running of the prison.” The number of private prison lockdowns: 101; in BOP-run prisons: 11.

The inspector general found that least two private prisons dealt with overcrowding by automatically assigning new inmates to “special housing units”—isolation units, including solitary confinement, usually used to discipline inmates. There, they were subject to special restrictions, including “controlled movements; limited access to programs such as education or vocational programs, as well as work details; and limited telephone calls.” (According to wardens at the facilities, they had no choice. Vacant beds in solitary created the appearance of extra space at their facilities, so the BOP assigned them more inmates—and the prisons were not allowed to refuse them.)

BOP monitors, who are charged with ensuring that the private prisons are following federal policy and fulfilling the terms of their contracts, did not verify whether inmates were receiving basic medical care, according to the report. One facility went without a full-time doctor for eight months, in violation of its contract—even though the monitor reported it as being in compliance. Monitors also are not instructed to verify that private companies are conducting regular searches of housing units and visiting areas, nor are they required to confirm that the prisons are employing enough staff.

Private facilities did have fewer positive drug tests and sexual-misconduct incidents than BOP prisons, though the inspector general noted that limited or faulty data existed in both of those categories. In its response to a preliminary copy of the report, GEO Group’s executive vice president wrote that the higher incident numbers in private prisons could be explained by more diligent incident reporting than in public prisons.

The companies also claimed that elevated violence in private prisons could be attributed to their “homogenous foreign national population”—largely Mexican—resulting in a “high number of gang affiliations,” according to GEO and CCA. “Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons,” wrote Scott Marquardt, president of MTC. “The conclusion is wrong.”

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A Damning Federal Report Just Confirmed Our Worst Fears About Private Prisons

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

by HiltonFryman68 Posted on August 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

I met Damien Coestly on my first day on the job as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a private Louisiana prison then run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). I’d been sent to monitor the suicide watch cells in the segregation unit. I pulled my chair across from Coestly’s cell as he sat on the toilet, his body hidden under his tear-proof suicide smock. He told me to “get the fuck out of here” and threatened that if I didn’t he would “get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto my motherfucking neck.”

Read more: Reporter Shane Bauer’s four months as a private prison guard

When I was at Winn, inmates on suicide watch were kept in solitary confinement. They weren’t allowed to keep much more than a small amount of toilet paper, their suicide smocks, and suicide blankets. They had to sleep on a steel bunk, often without a mattress. They also received worse food than the rest of the prison population: A typical meal consisted of one “mystery meat” sandwich, one peanut butter sandwich, six carrot sticks, six celery sticks, and six apple slices. There were no mental health professionals stationed in the unit, just me and another guard watching over four inmates in their cells.

“This dumb-ass motherfucking CCA. This tops the charts in non-rehabilitation,” Coestly told me, leaning against the bars of his cell. “This Winnfield, man. Till you shut this mothafucker down, it ain’t go’ change.” He tried to hand me a Styrofoam cup through the food slot, asking if I would sneak in some coffee for him. At dinnertime, he demanded a vegetarian bag from the Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the SWAT-like tactical squad that was patrolling the unit. He didn’t get one, so he picked the meat out of his sandwich and ate the bread and carrot sticks. Afterwards, I watched him sleep, wrapped in his suicide smock like a cocoon.

After I quit my job at Winn in March 2015, a lawyer in Louisiana told me that a woman named Wendy Porter had read about me working at the prison and wanted to talk to me. Her son was Damien Coestly. Porter told me Damien had committed suicide six months after I’d seen him. He had just turned 33.

Johnny Coestly remembers the last time he saw his younger brother Damien. They were in a hotel room in a New Orleans suburb, laughing and joking as a hurricane raged outside. Damien, then 20 years old, was on the run. A few months earlier, three men had confronted him in a club. One was angry because Damien had been “messing” with his girlfriend. The man spit in his face. Damien shot all three, killing one.

Not long afterwards, Damien was arrested and sentenced to 30 years. He ended up in Winn. As an ex-felon, Johnny says he was never allowed to visit. He and Damien frequently talked on the phone, but the calls ended when Johnny got locked up for selling drugs. Then, on June 12, 2015, one year into his sentence, Johnny was suddenly told to pack his stuff and was put on a bus to Winn. He thought he was going to see his little brother for the first time in 13 years.

Johnny hadn’t yet finished the intake process at Winn when a guard took him into a room where the warden and the prison’s mental health director were waiting. They had bad news: Damien had attempted to kill himself in the segregation unit that afternoon, and had been sent to the hospital, unconscious. “It’s like my world had stop,” Johnny wrote me using the prison’s email system. Before the information could sink in, Johnny was put back on a bus and shipped to another prison across the state.

At first, Johnny refused to believe that Damien would try to take his own life. His brother had never said anything to him about depression or suicide. At Winn, however, Coestly’s fragile mental state was no secret. Prison records obtained from the Louisiana Department of Corrections by Anna Lellelid, the lawyer who currently represents his family, show that he went on suicide watch at least 17 times in the three and a half years before he died. One inmate wrote to me that Damien had told him “he was not going to do all his time. When the time came and he was at peace with God he was going to kill himself.” This inmate also said Coestly had expressed regret for killing the man who’d spit on him. “He said that he rather be in the same place that that guy was than do his time in prison.”

In records obtained by Lellelid, Winn’s part-time psychologist noted, “Inmate stated that he was feeling depressed and worried that he was going to kill himself, because he was hearing the voice of the person that he killed and that he was telling him to kill himself and join him.” On another occasion, a prison counselor wrote, “He says he’s done with CCA and his life.” CCA responded to one question about Coestly’s death for this article; it has yet to respond to more than 20 additional questions sent more than a month ago.

Earlier this year, I visited Wendy Porter at her home outside New Orleans. She was wearing a t-shirt that read “God is Good!” and a floppy purple cap to cover the scars from her recent brain surgery. When I’d initially contacted her, one of her most pressing concerns was how to pay the bill the hospital had sent her for Damien’s medical records. It was clear that she’d had a hard life. Her two remaining sons were in prison. Their fathers and Damien’s were either behind bars or dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” says Wendy Porter. James West

She was navigating her loss while reckoning with the fact that she’d missed a lot of her boys’ childhood because she’d been smoking crack. “When I would put the crack in a pipe, I would be looking in a mirror asking God to please help me,” she said as we talked in her living room. When Damien got locked up, she was serving a short prison term. Yet she was eager for me to know that she never stopped loving her kids. She quit using drugs and got back into their lives. Even when they were in prison, she would always send them what little she could scrape together.

After Damien died, the prison turned his belongings over to Porter. Everything he owned fit into a single box. When she eventually opened it, she found sugar packets and years of letters she had written him. There was a photo of him sitting in a prison yard in front of a row of books—biographies of Malcolm X and Che Guevara and titles on astronomy, astrology, and health. There was a grievance form in which Coestly claimed he’d mailed the gold caps from his teeth to his mom, but they went missing. (CCA turned down his complaint.) There was another in which he complained that the rehabilitative efforts at Winn were inadequate and that he’d been on a wait list for 12-step and mental health programs for two years. (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed this complaint.) “Just because I have 20 years left in prison doesn’t mean that I’m nonexistent and that I don’t matter,” he wrote.

Mixed in with Coestly’s paperwork was a printout from CCA’s website on which he highlighted the phrase, “We constantly monitor the offender population for signs of declining mental health and suicide risk, working actively to assist a troubled offender in his or her time of need.” Yet mental health staffing at Winn was thin while I was there. It consisted of one part-time psychiatrist, one part-time psychologist, and one full-time social worker for more than 1,500 inmates. (CCA confirmed this, adding that “The staffing pattern for mental health professionals at Winn was approved by the Louisiana Department of Corrections.” However, DOC documents show that it had asked CCA to hire more mental health employees at Winn.) The prison’s single social worker told me most Louisiana prisons had at least three full time social workers. Her caseload, she said, included 450 inmates with mental health issues.

Coestly was about 21 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

In a 2014 grievance, Coestly claimed that while on suicide watch in Winn’s Cypress unit he was jolted awake by two guards who dragged him out of his bunk, cuffed him, made him stand naked in the hallway, and slammed him against the wall repeatedly. In another complaint, he wrote that he and other inmates were left on suicide watch with no guards to monitor them. He claimed that two inmates then came into the tier and threw milk cartons full of feces on the inmates in the suicide watch cells while the guards stood by, doing nothing to stop them. “Check the cameras ASAP because this incident is going to ruin Winnfield’s reputation with this criminal act,” he wrote. “I fear for my life back here in Cypress because there’s nothing but chaos back here.” (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed these complaints.)

Coestly’s family believes his suicide could have been prevented. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

Among the records turned over to Porter was a sheaf of legal documents. Coestly had been studying law in prison. After bringing a case against Winn in state court over two pairs of shoes taken by guards, the Department of Corrections asked CCA to reimburse him $47.32. Was he preparing a more substantial case against the prison? According to Lellelid, Coestly had collected documents from lawsuits brought on behalf of inmates who had committed suicide in custody. He had filed at least one grievance claiming that guards were putting him on suicide watch, naked, without consulting the mental health staff. (DOC policy stated that mental health professionals should make suicide watch assignments whenever possible; in their absence, they were to be notified immediately to assess the inmate as soon as they could.) He had appealed to the Louisiana Department of Corrections to review his claim, a necessary step before an inmate can file a federal civil rights claim. The DOC denied his appeal.

Coestly didn’t just protest on paper. He frequently went on hunger strike. At times it was because the prison would not give him a vegetarian meal as he’d often requested. The prison didn’t offer vegetarian options, so he ate the regular meals without the meat. Other times, he stopped eating because he felt he was not receiving adequate mental health services. Once, the prison psychologist reported in Coestly’s medical records that Damien was on suicide watch and “upset because he felt that he was not getting the appropriate care from mental health.” He wrote that Coestly complained that claiming to be suicidal was the only way to get a meeting with the psychiatrist. “Inmate has a long history of playing games and trying to manipulate the system,” the psychologist wrote.

Winn’s assistant chief of security, whom I’ll call Miss Lawson since she asked not to be named, was one of the CCA employees assigned to investigate Coestly’s death. She told me that he had been on suicide watch for “a couple weeks at least” when a SORT officer decided to take him off watch and put him in a regular segregation cell without, she noted, the approval of mental health staff. (State policy says that “suicide watch may be discontinued or down-graded only by a mental health professional or physician.”) “Me and the social worker got on ’em bad about moving him,” Miss Lawson recalled.

Coestly was put in a cell with an elderly man who was severely mentally ill, Miss Lawson told me. Unlike inmates on suicide watch, prisoners in segregation were not supposed to be under constant watch. Guards were supposed to check on them every 30 minutes. An inmate who had been a few doors down from Coestly in seg later told me that he saw Damien taken out of his cell to make a phone call. Afterwards, the prisoner heard Coestly tell a SORT officer he was feeling suicidal. The officer said he would return to get Coestly, but never did. Coestly repeated several times that he was going to kill himself, the inmate recalled. Miss Lawson said that according to prison policy, that should have gotten him automatically placed on suicide watch.

Related: Watch former guards and a prisoner recall life in a private prison James West

On the afternoon of June 12, 2015, the man in the cell next to Coestly—I’ll call him Tony—pounded on the metal above his door. “Dude is hanging himself!” he shouted. SORT officers stormed down the tier with pepper spray in hand, shouting, “Who the fuck is beating?” (Tony likely had been in Cypress because of me. I’d caught him with synthetic marijuana and he wound up in seg.) Tony told me some details of that day through JPay, the prison’s monitored email system. He wrote that “CCA could of saved Damien’s life if only they would of listened to him when he told them he had some problems.” He asked me to pay him for the full story. When I declined, he refused to tell me more.

Miss Lawson told me Coestly had tied a sheet to the top of his cell’s bars, looped it around his neck, and jumped off the top bunk. When the SORT officers arrived, his cellmate, sedated by sleeping medication, was struggling to hold up Coestly so he could breathe. Coestly was still alive and taken to a hospital, where his mom saw him. “It was bad,” Porter recalled. “He had skin rolling off his ankles.” Coestly remained shackled even as he lay unresponsive, she said. “Why you got shackles on him? What you think—he going to break out and run?”

Coestly remained on life support for 19 days. Porter said that her son had once been a “thick something” who liked to work out. But when he died, “He was so little.” An autopsy found that he weighed 71 pounds, nearly 50 pounds less than he had weighed six months earlier.

An excerpt from Coestly’s death certificate

In their reports about the incident, Miss Lawson said, CCA’s SORT officers “covered up a lot of stuff they shouldn’t have.” She said that video from the prison’s cameras showed that it had been an hour and a half since they had done a security check on Coestly’s tier. “If they had been going up and down the tiers like they were supposed to, then it wouldn’t have happened,” she believes. No Winn employees were ever disciplined as a result of the investigation, she said.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter into a private prison

I asked CCA spokesman Steven Owen about Coestly’s death. “You have your facts wrong in this case,” he wrote back. “The warden at Winn requested compassionate release for Mr. Coestly from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which was granted. The inmate was hospitalized when he passed away.” Beyond noting that Damien did not actually die at Winn, he provided no further details. Lellelid confirmed that the DOC had granted Damien a compassionate release, but only as he lay in the hospital and “because he was brain dead.”

Coestly’s mom and brother hope to pursue a lawsuit against CCA for negligence in Damien’s death. Yet it is unlikely that the question of who is responsible for Coestly’s death will ever be decided in court. Louisiana law only allows a year for family members to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. And despite her recent involvement in her sons’ lives, Porter gave up custody of Damien when he was about five. Legally, her aunt, who became Coestly’s guardian, could have brought a case against CCA over his death. But she has advanced Alzheimer’s and does not understand that Damien is dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” Porter told me. “He suffered. He weighed 71 pounds. That was like somebody starving.” Her voice cracked. “I keep food in my house. I give people food!” she shouted, weeping. She paused and took a deep breath. “It’s all about a dollar. That’s what you is, a dollar sign to them. You know what my son said? He said it over the phone. He said, ‘When I get through with them, they’re going to shut this place down. It ain’t fit for an animal.'”

Additional research by Madison Pauly

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

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Baton Rouge Cop Killer Was a "Sovereign Citizen." What the Heck Is That?

by JerroldDaecher1 Posted on July 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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On July 17, in the second (at least) targeted attack on police in just over a week, 29-year-old Gavin Long shot six cops, three fatally, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The former Marine had posted YouTube selfie videos in which he commented on the need to respond to “oppression” with “bloodshed,” and praised the recent shooting of 11 officers in Dallas as “justice.” Long also appears to have been part of the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. Last May, he filed official documents in Jackson County, Missouri, declaring a name change and identifying himself as a member of the Empire Washita de Dugdahmoundyah—a black group that espouses some of the movement’s ideas. According to the Daily Beast, Long was also carrying an ID card from the Empire at the time of the shooting. Here’s what you need to know about sovereign citizenship, and the branch Long subscribed to.

Sovereign citizen ideology is modeled on Posse Comitatus. A government-hating, right-wing Christian group, Posse Comitatus was founded around 1970 in Oregon. Its members claimed that white Americans, not Jews—whom members accused of manipulating government and financial institutions—were the true descendants of the Biblical tribe of Israel. Posse members rejected the authority of government officials, judges, and police officers. They claimed that because blacks were granted citizenship under the 14th Amendment (an act of government) they were bound by the government’s laws and were slaves to the state. But white citizenship predates the Constitution, the Posse claimed, so whites were bound only by “common” law, which made them “sovereign” and free—and not, for example, compelled to pay taxes.

Ryan Lenz of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks anti-government groups, says Posse members traveled around during the 1970s and 1980s teaching financially stressed whites—chiefly farmers who were losing their land during the agricultural crisis of those decades, or people facing foreclosure and debt—that the group’s ideology could help them out of their money binds. The Posse’s solution? Declare sovereignty and separate one’s legal “shell”—the named entity tied to social security numbers, birth certificates, and other forms of government identification—from one’s actual personhood. A person who did this, the Posse said, would no longer need to abide by rules of the state. Sovereign citizens played a major role in the formation, during the 1990s, of so-called “patriot” militia groups. (There was a resurgence of such groups after President Barack Obama was elected.)

Sovereign citizens are notorious for “paper terrorism”: Members of the movement often travel without drivers licenses, passports, or other state-issued ID. They are known to drive with fake license plates and often present police officers with travel cards and bogus insurance paperwork when they get pulled over. Faced with a traffic ticket, or when involved in other dealings with government agencies, sovereign citizens are notorious for flooding the agencies with hundreds of pages of documents—written in somewhat nonsensical “common law” language—arguing for the rights to which they claim entitlement. In one 2010 case, a sovereign submitted 10 such filings in a bid to get out of a $20 dog licensing fee. It worked. A state prosecutor dropped the case after two months of back and forth. Sovereign citizens have also been known to squat on vacant property and lay claim to it using phony deeds, and file bogus property liens against adversaries. Some have convened citizen tribunals, declaring government officials guilty of corruption, and acquitting themselves of any charges against them by the state.

The movement is growing, and spreading to new demographics. Based on IRS data on tax protesters, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that the sovereign movement has about 300,000 members. The SPLC has seen an uptick in participation since 2010, Lenz says, largely due to the housing crisis. Naturally, the ideology spreads quickly online, in chat rooms and YouTube comment sections. Newer recruits may be unaware of the movement’s racist roots; ideas espoused by Black sovereign citizen groups, Lenz says, “seem to affirm black personhood in the presence of a dominant white narrative.” And the anti-government sentiment often takes the form of leftist pan-Africanism and black separatism.

One strain of the ideology popular among black Americans is rooted in the Moorish Science Temple of America: It holds that blacks predated Native Americans in North America, and thus have indigenous rights. (Wesley Snipes, convicted of tax evasion in 2008, had ties to one of the first known black sovereign groups, the Nuwabians.) According to J. J. MacNab, an expert on sovereign citizens at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, sovereign ideology is most common among blacks in East Coast cities such as Philadelphia and DC, and in the South—particularly Florida, Tennessee, and the New Orleans area. After the 2014 Ferguson protests, the St. Louis area also became a hotbed for black sovereign citizenship. “You’re going to find chiropractors and dentists and doctors and all kinds of wealthy professionals in this movement as well—not just poor,” MacNab says.

Gavin Long hailed from Kansas City, Missouri. In Long’s county filings, MacNab told me, he declared that he was shedding the name associated with his legal shell—he’s “Cosmo Setepenra” in the YouTube videos—and that he was only subject to indigenous common law. Sovereign citizenry may have begun as a right-wing movement, she says, but “by the time you’re in the fringe, left-wing, right-wing doesn’t really matter anymore.”

Members of Long’s “Moorish” offshoot, the Empire Wishitaw de Dugdahmoundyah, insist that much of the land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana purchase belongs to their ancestors. (Fredrix Washington, an Empire leader, told me he does not consider it a sovereign citizen group, that the Empire no longer producers false identification documents, and that he denounced Long’s killing of police officers. The group sells bogus license plates on its website, however, and some of its members were investigated by the federal government in the late 1990s for money laundering, offshore banking fraud, and selling illegal license plates, which they said were justified under common law.)

Members of other black groups, such as the African American Homeland Association and the New Black Panther Party (not to be confused with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense) also express sovereign ideas, MacNab says, but so-called Moorish sovereigns probably represent just 5 to 10 percent of the overall movement. Many black Americans subscribe to “patriot” sovereign ideology, which has been around longer and is largely championed by whites. There are “hundreds of strains of thought as to what sovereign citizenry is,” Lenz notes.

Police see sovereign citizens as their biggest threat: While the movement’s chief tactic is legal warfare, sovereign groups have been prone to physical violence against police, judges, and government officials. In a 2015 survey of nearly 400 law enforcement agencies by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement research group, 74 percent said they considered sovereign citizens to be the top threat facing law enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security also considers sovereigns a domestic terror threat.

From 2010 through 2014, there were at least 24 violent incidents involving sovereign citizens, according to CNN. In 2010, a father-son sovereign duo in West Memphis, Arkansas killed two police officers with an AK-47 during a traffic stop. In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson protests, two men were accused of plotting to kill the Ferguson’s police chief and top prosecutor, and blow up a police station. The men, who ultimately pleaded guilty to weapons charges, had ties to the New Black Panther Party. One, like Gavin Long, identified himself as a Moorish national, according to the Star Tribune. Only “a tiny little group of people” within the larger movement have been linked to violence, MacNab notes. But younger sovereigns may be more amenable to it: “The older generation will do a decade of paperwork before they give up” and lash out.

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Baton Rouge Cop Killer Was a "Sovereign Citizen." What the Heck Is That?

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10 More States Sue Federal Government Over Transgender Bathroom Rules

by Adan36Vsqcmfib Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ten more states sued the federal government Friday over rules allowing transgender kids to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity—rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates—in public schools. They join a group of 13 other states already suing the Obama administration over the same mandate.

A May 13 directive from the Department of Education and the Department of Justice, which does not carry the force of law, said schools that forced transgender kids to use bathrooms matching their birth sex would be violating Title IX and could lose federal funding.

The lawsuit filed Friday is being brought by the states of Nebraska, Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. They argue the Obama administration’s directive was an overreach and a misinterpretation of Title IX.

“The recent action by these two federal agencies to require showers, locker rooms, and bathrooms to be open to both sexes based solely on the student’s choice, circumvents this established law,” Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson wrote in a statement. “It also supersedes local school districts’ authority to address student issues on an individualized, professional and private basis. When a federal agency takes such unilateral action in an attempt to change the meaning of established law, it leaves state and local authorities with no other option than to pursue legal clarity in federal court in order to enforce the rule of law.”

On May 25, another lawsuit was filed against the federal government over the same directive by the states of Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, and Georgia; the governor of Maine; the Arizona Department of Education; and school districts in Texas and Arizona. Kentucky and Mississippi later signed on to that lawsuit.

The Obama administration argues that transgender kids are already a vulnerable minority and that blocking them from bathrooms of their choice is discriminatory.

“We’re talking about kids, and anybody who’s been in school, been in high school, who’s been a parent, I think should realize that kids who are sometimes in the minority—kids who have a different sexual orientation or are transgender—are subject to a lot of bullying, potentially they are vulnerable,” President Barack Obama said in an interview with BuzzFeed defending the directive.

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10 More States Sue Federal Government Over Transgender Bathroom Rules

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Here’s the Next Big Story on Climate Change

by LaraKiek280 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last December, the climate summit in Paris offered journalists an unprecedented opportunity to reframe the global warming story. Climate reporting used to rest on the tacit understanding that the problem is overwhelming and intractable. That no longer rings true. While we have a better understanding than ever of the potential calamity in store, we finally have a clear vision of a path forward—and momentum for actually getting there.

To that end, Paris was a turning point for me personally, too: It was the end of the beginning of my career as an environmental journalist. This week I’m leaving Mother Jones after five years covering climate and other green stories. Paris underscored that it’s past time for me to look beyond the borders of the United States. That’s why, this fall, I’m going to undertake a Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. For at least nine months, I’ll move between Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria to document how climate change is affecting food security.

I see agriculture in Africa as one of the most important yet underreported stories about climate change today. It’s a fascinating intersection of science, politics, technology, culture, and all the other things that make climate such a rich vein of reporting. At that intersection, the scale of the challenge posed by global warming is matched only by the scale of opportunity to innovate and adapt. There are countless stories waiting to be told, featuring a brilliant and diverse cast of scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians, farmers, families, and more.

East Africa is already the hungriest place on Earth: One in every three people live without sufficient access to nutritious food, according to the United Nations. Crop yields in the region are the lowest on the planet. African farms have one-tenth the productivity of Western farms on average, and sub-Saharan Africa is the only place on the planet where per capita food production is actually falling.

Now, climate change threatens to compound those problems by raising temperatures and disrupting the seasonal rains on which many farmers depend. An index produced by the University of Notre Dame ranks 180 of the world’s countries based on their vulnerability to climate change impacts (No. 1, New Zealand, is the least vulnerable; the United State is ranked No. 11). The best-ranked mainland African country is South Africa, down at No. 84; Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda rank at No. 147, No. 154, and No. 160, respectively. In other words, these are among the places that will be hit hardest by climate change. More often than not, the agricultural sector will experience some of the worst impacts. Emerging research indicates that climate change could drive down yields of staples such as rice, wheat, and maize 20 percent by 2050. Worsening and widespread drought could shorten the growing season in some places by up to 40 percent.

This isn’t just a matter of putting food on the table. Agricultural productivity also lies at the root of broader economic development, since farming is Africa’s No. 1 form of employment. So, even when hunger isn’t an issue, per se, lost agricultural productivity can stymie rural communities’ efforts to get the money they need for roads, schools, clinics, and other necessities. “We only produce enough to eat,” lamented Amelia Tonito, a farmer I met recently in Mozambique. “We’d like to produce enough to eat and to sell.” More food means more money in more pockets; the process of alleviating poverty starts on farms.

The story goes beyond money. Hunger, increased water scarcity, and mass migrations sparked by natural-resource depletion can amplify the risk of conflict. Al-Shabaab in Kenya and Boko Haram in Nigeria have both drawn strength from drought-related hunger.

This is also a story about new applications for technology at the dawn of Africa’s digital age. It’s a story about gender—most African farmers are women—and the struggle to empower marginalized sectors of society. It’s about globalization and the growth of corporate power, as large-scale land investors from Wall Street to Dubai to Shanghai see a potential windfall in turning East and West Africa into a global breadbasket. Such interventions could boost rural economies—or disenfranchise small-scale farmers and further degrade the landscape.

Of course, all the data points I’ve just mentioned are only that: cold, lifeless data. They work as an entry point for those of us who are thousands of miles away from Africa. But they don’t tell a story, and they won’t lead to action. They won’t help Amelia Tonito improve her income. My hope is my coverage of this story will help provide the depth of understanding that is a prerequisite for holding public and corporate officials accountable, so that the aspirations of the Paris Agreement can start to come to fruition.

I’ve loved my time at Mother Jones and I’m truly at a loss to express my gratitude to my editors for the experiences they have afforded me. I’ve seen the devastating impacts of global warming, from the vanishing Louisiana coastline to the smoldering wreckage of Breezy Point, Queens, after Hurricane Sandy. And I’ve seen the cost of our fossil fuel addiction, from the dystopian fracking fields of North Dakota to Germany’s yawning open-pit coal mines. But I’ve also seen the fortitude of the young Arizonans who spent weeks sweating in the woods to protect their community from wildfires. And I’ve seen the compassion of a caretaker who, in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, stayed with her elderly patient on the top floor of a Lower East Side high-rise with no electricity or running water.

Encounters like these are what draw me to climate change as a beat. The story is just getting started.

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Here’s the Next Big Story on Climate Change

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Watch: What It’s Like to Earn $9 an Hour as a Prison Guard

by JoyTNYEomnagic Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Read Bauer’s gripping firsthand account here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of a six-part video series produced by Mother Jones senior digital editor James West. In the second episode, Bauer learns about an escape finds out that a guard’s $9 an hour wage doesn’t stretch very far.

Also: Watch episode one.

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Watch: What It’s Like to Earn $9 an Hour as a Prison Guard

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If You Think Ted Cruz Is Extreme, Wait Till You Meet the Conservative Activists Who Endorse Him

by MayraLamilami Posted on May 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tuesday’s Indiana primary is arguably the final frontier for Ted Cruz to keep alive any prospect of winning the Republican presidential nomination. The poll numbers aren’t looking good for him in the Hoosier State, but he’s holding out hope that Indiana will join several other Midwestern states in rewarding him for his socially conservative record. But in his quest to become the favorite of social conservatives, Cruz has aligned himself with a number of far-right extremists who could cause him trouble in the increasingly unlikely event that he finds himself in a general election battle in November. From the star of Duck Dynasty to activists who advocate executing abortion doctors and gay people, here’s a partial list:

The Benham family: In February, Ted Cruz appointed David and Jason Benham, twin brothers and real estate entrepreneurs based in North Carolina, to his campaign’s Religious Liberty Advisory Council. As Mother Jones reported in April, the brothers have been at the forefront of every battle to oppose gay rights in North Carolina in recent years. They’ve opposed gay pride parades and organized anti-abortion protests, and at one point David Benham equated the battle against marriage equality with fighting Nazis. The brothers were most recently instrumental in stoking opposition to a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance that eventually led to HB 2, the state’s transgender “bathroom bill” that has sparked a national uproar.

Their father, Flip Benham, is a well-known anti-gay and anti-abortion street preacher in Charlotte. In November, Cruz touted Benham’s endorsement in a press release. In 1994, Benham became the director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, and he later renamed it Operation Save America. He still leads the group. Benham is best known for having helped convert Norma McCorvey—the “Jane Roe” of the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion—to fundamentalist Christianity and to renouncing her past support of abortion rights. In 1995, Benham opened the national headquarters of Operation Rescue next door to the Dallas abortion clinic where McCorvey was working at the time as a marketing director. The two struck up a friendship, and when McCorvey eventually converted, Benham performed her baptism.

Troy Newman: After Flip Benham moved and renamed the national Operation Rescue operation, Newman took over its western branch, now based in Wichita, Kansas. In January, Cruz announced his campaign would form a Pro-Lifers for Cruz coalition co-chaired by 10 anti-abortion activists. Newman is one of them. The campaign’s press release announcing the coalition describes Newman as the author of Their Blood Cries Out, a 2000 book in which he wrote that “the United States government has abrogated its responsibility to properly deal with the blood-guilty. This responsibility rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes.”

Last week, after Cruz appeared to be making a play for more women voters by announcing former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as his running mate, executives from several pro-choice groups wrote an open letter to the Cruz campaign encouraging it to fire Newman from Pro-Lifers for Cruz due to his history. “Troy Newman’s history of violent rhetoric and harassment toward women’s health providers is truly beyond the pale,” they wrote.

Kevin Swanson: Cruz was a featured speaker at the National Religious Liberties Conference in Iowa last November. He was introduced by conference organizer Kevin Swanson, a pastor who is known for his belief that gay people should be killed. Right before bringing Cruz to join him onstage, Swanson gave an impassioned speech in which he clarified that gay people should be executed by the government only after they’ve had sufficient time to repent.

“Yes, Leviticus 20:13 calls for the death penalty for homosexuals,” Swanson said, pacing the stage, his voice rising. “Yes, in Romans chapter 1, verse 32, the Apostle Paul does say that homosexuals are worthy of death. His words, not mine! And I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!” Here’s Swanson’s speech in full:

Cruz’s appearance at the event, along with those of former GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Gov. Bobby Jindal, caused an uproar, but the Cruz campaign made no moves to distance itself from Swanson’s ideology. Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler told the Rachel Maddow Show that Swanson’s call for the execution of gay people was “not explicit.” In December, the campaign changed its tune and told USA Today that it was a mistake for Cruz to attend Swanson’s event.

Tony Perkins: Perkins is the head of the Family Research Council, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as an anti-LGBT hate group, and the chair of Pro-Lifers for Cruz. Early in his career, while working as a reserve police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1992, Perkins was suspended from duty after failing to report to his supervisors that an anti-abortion group was planning a violent protest at a local abortion clinic. Perkins had learned this information because he worked part-time for a local conservative TV station, and his camera crew was often outside the clinic, filming confrontations between pro-choice and anti-abortion protesters.

While managing a US Senate campaign in 1996, Perkins paid more than $80,000 to purchase the mailing list of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. He later gave a speech to the Louisiana chapter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, another white supremacist group, in front of a Confederate flag. Under his leadership, the Family Research Council has touted a number of false claims about LGBT people, most famously the idea that gay men are more prone to sexually abuse children. (Many medical groups, including the American Psychological Association, have debunked this claim.)

James Dobson: In February, Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, the largest organization of the religious right in the United States, endorsed Cruz for president in a TV ad and in robocalls to voters.

Focus on the Family has several million subscribers to its monthly magazines and more than 220 million listeners of its various radio broadcasts, which usually feature Dobson. The group has become known for its deep-pocketed opposition to marriage equality measures and candidates across the country who back gay marriage. It also supports the practice of reparative therapy, which aims to “cure” homosexuality, and has continued to do so even after Exodus International, a reparative therapy group it once partnered with, disbanded and disavowed the practice.

Dobson has also made some extreme statements over the years. He blamed the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage, warned of an impending civil war over gay marriage, and said he opposes the Harry Potter books because they promote a “New Age ideology” to kids.

Phil Robertson: In January, the Cruz campaign put out a video of the candidate duck hunting with Phil Robertson, the star of the A&E show Duck Dynasty, who has come under fire for his anti-gay comments. Robertson has compared homosexuality to bestiality and said AIDS is God’s “penalty” for immorality and gay sex.

In this video from the Cruz campaign, Robertson endorses Cruz, saying, “Ted is my man.” Robertson and Cruz are wearing face paint and hunting gear, shooting rifles into the air.

“I am thrilled to have Phil’s support for our campaign,” Cruz said at the time. In February, Cruz suggested that Robertson would make a good ambassador to the United Nations.

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If You Think Ted Cruz Is Extreme, Wait Till You Meet the Conservative Activists Who Endorse Him

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Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York?

by Myrna Posted on April 18, 2016

The Democratic presidential candidates have divergent views on the controversial natural gas drilling technique. New Yorkers protest against fracking in 2014 a katz/shutterstock In this week’s tight New York Democratic primary, the fight over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is one issue of contention between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And it could be a deciding factor for some voters. Sanders says he would ban all fracking everywhere. Clinton says the practice should be regulated and restricted, but natural gas is helping the U.S. move away from coal-fired power. Sanders’ campaign has capitalized on that difference, noting in an ad released on Monday that he “is the only candidate for president who opposes fracking everywhere.” Fracking uses a high-pressure stream of water, sand and chemicals to tap into shale formations to release natural gas. The practice has been highly contentious in New York, which contains a lot of natural gas in the Marcellus formation. A number of communities in upstate New York banned the practice, worried about potential impacts on groundwater, along with other health and safety concerns. In December 2014, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would ban the practice entirely. (Sanders’ home state of Vermont banned fracking in 2012.) Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Link:   Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York? ; ; ;

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Can Bernie Sanders Ride Fracking to Victory in New York?

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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

by NeilMcgehee Posted on April 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.

“It is unacceptable that the wage gap has persisted, punishing the country’s women and families for decades,” wrote Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership, in a press release. “At a time when women’s wages are so critical to the economic well-being of families, the country is counting on lawmakers to work together to advance strong, fair and family friendly workplace policies that would promote equal pay.”

The National Partnership used Census Bureau data to analyze the wages of workers in every state and Washington, DC, and broke down the numbers by state and congressional district, as well as by demographic information. Louisiana has the biggest pay gap (women there are paid 65 cents for every dollar), and DC, with just a 10 cent difference, has the smallest.

The gender pay gap is even larger for women of color. African American women are paid 60 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latin American women make even less, at 55 cents for every dollar. All in all, the pay gap amounts to more than $10,800 in lost wages for the average woman each year.

That’s costly for families, many of which rely on mothers as the sole or primary breadwinner. According to the National Partnership, mothers are the heads of households in nearly 40 percent of families. Yet the wage gap for mothers is even larger than for women overall: Women with children are paid 71 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, and single mothers make only 58 cents for every dollar to fathers.

Wage inequality got national attention in March when five high-profile players on the women’s national soccer team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the US Soccer Federation of gender-based wage discrimination. The players—who last year brought in their third World Cup gold medal and are projected to rake in $18 million in revenue next year—say they are paid four times less than their male counterparts.

“Simply put, we’re sick of being treated like second-class citizens,” wrote Carli Lloyd, who scored a record-breaking hat trick in the final World Cup game against Japan last year, in a New York Times op-ed on her decision to file the complaint. “It wears on you after a while. And we are done with it.”

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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year

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