“Criminalizing vague and undefined forms of ‘fake news’ without proper judicial oversight risks silencing critical journalism and creates a chilling effect among journalists,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “The Karnataka government must ensure that any legal measures to address misinformation fully safeguard press freedom and uphold journalists’ right to report without fear of reprisal.”

According to several media reports, the draft bill, parts of which were reportedly leaked, proposes penalties of up to seven years in prison and fines of 1 million rupees  (US$12,000) for those found guilty of spreading “fake news” online. It also outlines broad categories of prohibited content, including material deemed “anti-feminist” or “disrespectful of Sanatan (Hindu) symbols.” The bill proposes a state-appointed authority, led by politicians and government officials, to determine what qualifies as misinformation. It stipulates the creation of special courts and limits anticipatory bail for those accused.

State Information Technology Minister Priyank Kharge said the bill’s current version is an early internal draft, and that broader consultation will occur before any formal introduction. Kharge claimed that the law aims to counter harmful misinformation, especially during elections, and invited input from journalism groups.

Despite these assurances, the proposed law has drawn strong criticism from civil society groups. 

“The bill provides no clear methodology or standards for how the authority or special courts will fact-check and discern false content,” Apar Gupta, founder and director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, an Indian digital rights nonprofit, wrote in an op-ed for the Karnataka-based Deccan Herald newspaper. 

The state government’s proposed law has drawn comparisons to the Indian federal government’s controversial Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules of 2021, particularly provisions that allow government authorities to unilaterally label online content as “fake” and compel its removal. These rules were partly struck down by the Bombay High Court in January 2024, and later stayed by the Supreme Court that March. 

Kharge did not respond to CPJ’s email and text message requesting comment.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Cal Poly Pomona’s Farrah Hassen about criminalizing homelessness for the June 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani

Janine Jackson: In 1999, then–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani declared that “streets do not exist in civilized societies for the purpose of people sleeping there. Bedrooms are for sleeping.” He added that the right to sleep on the streets “doesn’t exist anywhere. The Founding Fathers never put that in the Constitution.”

That absurd out-of-touchness, the failure, not merely of empathy, but of knowledge? Our guest reports that still seems to undergird much of what we are told are policies and laws meant to address homelessness, including at the highest levels.

Farrah Hassen has been tracking the issue for years. She’s a writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. She joins us now by phone from Sacramento. Welcome to CounterSpin, Farrah Hassen.

Farrah Hassen: Hi, Janine. Thanks for having me.

Other Words (6/4/25)

JJ: I want to ask you about Grants Pass v. Johnson, last year’s Supreme Court case that you wrote about recently for OtherWords, but I’d like to start, as you do, with the acknowledgement that ought to anchor every story we see: that a person who works full time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the United States. That’s the reality, that’s the understanding that any of our responses ought to take on board, or to be judged by, yes?

FH: That’s correct. I mean, we have to consider that backdrop if we are going to talk about the growing problem of homelessness, and the related housing crisis. And, unsurprisingly, homelessness has increased as our government has diminished social safety nets. And we have to consider that when we think about how people fall into homelessness.

JJ: So rather than respond with a commitment to housing and social services, and job and wage growth, what we’ve seen is criminalizing. I couldn’t find it, but I remember Rudy Giuliani saying that he hoped that his crackdown on unhoused people would lead to them just going away, just sort of disappearing. And that seems to be some of the thinking behind, if not the Grants Pass ruling, some of the support for it. So tell listeners a little about what Grants Pass, that decision, did, and then, what didn’t it do?

FH: A year ago, on June 28, in the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there is no available shelter. The Supreme Court overturned the 2018 Martin v. Boise precedent that had been decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had said that the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause prohibits cities from penalizing unhoused people for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property unless they have access to adequate temporary shelter.

And so, for some context, in Grants Pass, like other cities across the United States, the number of people living unhoused easily exceeds the number of available shelter on any given night. Debra Blake was among those Grants Pass residents who were forced to live outside—in her case, for eight years—after losing her job and housing. Moreover, her disability disqualified her from staying in the town’s only shelter. And the city had these anti-camping ordinances that prohibited people like Debra Blake from sleeping or camping in the public, and they interpreted “camping” to even include the use of bedding, like a blanket, to stay warm in the cold.

Anyone who violated these ordinances in the city could be ticketed, could face fines, even subject to criminal prosecution. And the Grants Pass City Council themselves revealed that the underlying goal of these ordinances was to “make it uncomfortable enough for unhoused people in our city so they will want to move down the road.”

Cal Matters (2/27/25)

And so in Debra Blake’s case, after being banished from every park, accruing thousands in fines, she sued the city of Grants Pass as part of this class action suit, for violating unhoused residents’ constitutional rights. And the Oregon District Court agreed in 2020 that the city’s actions constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

But, sadly, Blake never got to see the results. And the city of Grants Pass ended up appealing this decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the city’s favor.

And which brings us back to today. And I should also note, going back to the Supreme Court’s decision, that, importantly, it did not say, “Therefore, state and local governments must now criminalize homelessness.” But because the high court found Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances constitutional, many jurisdictions, unfortunately, including in California where I live, have used the court’s decision as a green light to crack down on people living unhoused, including by passing these “anti-camping ordinances,” similar to Grants Pass, which broadly criminalized the act of sleeping or pitching tents or other structures on publicly owned property.

JJ: It’s clear that the issues of homelessness involve many societal factors other than housing. And, at the same time, there’s an Occam’s razor at work here. There’s a reason that “housing first” lands as a call, isn’t there? For people who think, “Well, it’s very complicated. It’s about mental health, it’s about family structure” or whatever, housing first makes a lot of sense, if folks would just think of it that way, yeah?

Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative (6/23)

FH: That’s absolutely correct. There is a misconception that homelessness is primarily caused by addiction and mental illness—which is not to say, to be clear, that there are not people suffering from mental illness and addiction among our nation’s unhoused population.

But there was this landmark study in June 2023 by the University of California San Francisco that focused on California, and it found that poverty and high housing costs are, in fact, the driving forces of homelessness. And that’s just more confirmation that housing unaffordability is the primary cause of homelessness, as other research and experts have long noted.

And that’s why, therefore, using the findings of this evidence, punitive fines, arrests, sweeps of encampments do not address the root of the problem, which is, again, the absence of permanent, affordable and, I might add, adequate housing. And so there are more things our country can do instead of criminalizing homelessness, which only traps people into these cycles, these endless cycles of poverty and homelessness, not to mention criminal penalties being inhumane to begin with.

And so housing first, as you mentioned, is one proven, evidence-backed solution here. It prioritizes providing permanent housing as soon as possible to individuals and families experiencing homelessness, without preconditions. It’s in contrast to what some people want, which is treatment first, or treatment only. Housing first also is coupled with voluntary supportive services to help improve housing stability and well-being, especially for those people who may need additional support, additional treatment.

And housing first has had strong bipartisan support for decades. It’s been supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and other agencies. And there’s so much evidence that shows that housing first actually works, including in places like Houston, Texas, which notably reduced homelessness by nearly two thirds over a decade. So that’s just yet another example of why, instead of kicking people while they’re down, housing support, combined with other voluntary services, really helped to lift people back up.

JJ: I’ll just only ask you, finally, Farrah Hassen, if you see a particular role for news media here, either for good or for ill, in terms of consideration of this question, which I want to ground folks in the statement that you have in the piece, “Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime.” It’s not bending laws of nature, it’s just informed effort. And I wonder what role you think news media might play there.

Farrah Hassen: “We have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight.”

FH: Oh, thank you. I really do appreciate that question, because underlying that question is, I believe, a larger narrative of how we talk about housing in this country. And you would never know that it’s actually a well-defined and internationally protected fundamental human right that all people—not people who have to be means-tested, or meet certain qualifications—all people are entitled to. Why? Because we all know innately, looking at our own lives, that housing is essential to life, to health, to well-being, but in the United States, it has primarily treated housing as a commodity, and it’s failing to protect this right for large numbers of people.

Homelessness itself, the sheer fact that over 770,000 people last year experienced homelessness, a record high, directly violates this right to adequate housing. So we have to look at this as a government failure, instead of constantly pointing back at people living unhoused, and blaming them for their plight, as if there are not larger structural factors at play that contribute to housing remaining perpetually unaffordable for more and more people living in this country.

And so obviously the US doesn’t recognize housing as a human right, but I believe we should talk about it more, like we do about the need for Medicare for All, which is rooted in healthcare for all. We need these economic, social and cultural rights, along with civil and political rights, to really be able to live our lives to the fullest. And, fundamentally, that means transforming our nation’s approach to housing policies, and to remember that people shouldn’t be punished as well, as we look back on homelessness, for living in public spaces. People should not be punished for existing.

JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with writer, policy analyst and adjunct professor at Cal Poly Pomona Farrah Hassen. Thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

FH: Thanks so much, Janine.

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

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.

We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.

Other Words (6/4/25)

Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Pregnancy Justice’s Karen Thompson about criminalizing pregnancy for the April 25, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

People (4/11/25)

Janine Jackson: “Why Was a Georgia Woman Jailed After Suffering a Miscarriage?” That’s the headline over an account of Selena Chandler-Scott, a 24-year-old woman who was treated by paramedics after a miscarriage on March 20 and arrested the 21st, charged with “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body.” Charges weren’t dropped until April 4.

And the question of the headline remains, to which I’ll add another: Why was this story in People Magazine and not, say, the New York Times?

Joining us now to talk about where this terrible story fits in the current landscape is Karen Thompson, legal director at the group Pregnancy Justice. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Karen Thompson.

Karen Thompson: Hi, thanks for having me.

JJ: There’s a single sentence in this People story that gave me chills: “Police investigated Chandler-Scott because she was 19 weeks into her pregnancy when she suffered her miscarriage.” That “because,” you know. But the DA says law enforcement “acted in good faith” by arresting her. Why is that? Why did she go to jail?

KT: She went to jail because of an idea that fetuses have legal rights. She had a miscarriage at home. She did what most doctors tell folks who are experiencing a miscarriage to do, which is to stay at home. But because she did that, and because someone saw her disposing of those remains, the EMTs and the prosecutors decided that she was engaging in a crime. And why? Because that fetal anomaly, the fact that she had that miscarriage, was enough for them to justify arresting her. And that’s the basis of pregnancy criminalization, and what we’re seeing, not only in Georgia, but all around the country.

JJ: So to be clear, this is not an aberration. It’s one of a number of cases. Listeners may have heard some of them, but I think for some people, they’re getting caught up in this “fetal remains” and the “disposal process.” But this is part of miscarrying. In other words, what are the laws that are relevant here?

New Scientist

KT: I think that’s a really important place to start, right? First of all, let’s just think and talk about miscarriages. They are pretty common. I believe the number is three out of five pregnancies might end in a miscarriage, and that goes to show that this isn’t something that’s abnormal. It’s not something that is unknown to individuals who are pregnant. It’s a tragedy, but it’s a tragedy that occurs quite frequently.

And so I think the saddest thing about this is that in this moment of loss, when she should have been given healthcare, and when she should have had a moment to grieve, she was instead facing a law enforcement response, a carceral response, to what is really a medical question and a health issue.

JJ: What are the laws? There are laws governing, and I guess they differ state to state, but what are important laws around—what on earth is a person to do when they miscarry at home with fetal remains?

KT: Well, it’s unfortunate, because Georgia did pass a fetal personhood law in 2019, and it has that law in its criminal code. And so what that means is that we’re still trying to figure out what prosecutions are going to be brought under that law. And even though Georgia has a specific infanticide law, that is any kind of homicide involving children, even though they have a law that exempts the conduct of a pregnant woman with respect to her unborn child, Georgia’s murder statute doesn’t have that same exception.

And so although courts before the passage of that fetal personhood law declined to recognize fetuses as people for the purposes of murder, we don’t know where we are right now. And the fact that this poor woman was charged in this way is showing us that the laws that are on the books are now being expanded, and used in this method to criminalize pregnant women.

JJ: I think they’re making use of the sort of secrecy and shame with which miscarriage can be surrounded. The very fact that people might not understand what happens when you miscarry at home has to do with silences around it.

And I want to point out the fact that Pregnancy Justice has a resource called Unpacking Fetal Personhood that really talks you through these laws—where they come from, what they do and what they mean. And I would direct folks to that resource.

As we record on April 24, I did do another search this morning. I still saw nothing from broadcast news, major dailies. And now it’s been a month in the past, so is it even “news’ anymore? I don’t know if these major outlets think that they have met their quota of reporting on efforts to control pregnant people, but what do you make of media attention in general to these laws, to their predicted and predictable impacts? How do you think journalists are doing on this?

KT: I don’t think they’re doing great, to be honest, for the reasons that you said. I think that there are a lot of ways in which the attention is pulled to what is being framed as a crime. But what is not happening is the understanding that even this terrific news, which did get reported on, that the charges were dropped against Ms. Chandler-Scott, the bigger problem is that it doesn’t undo the very real harm and devastation that the charges bring in the first place.

And what the media are doing by not reporting on the charges being brought, instead of the fact that they were dropped after pressure was brought to bear by the community, by the outrage of huge swaths of the United States population, that is the stuff that gets things going. But, unfortunately, it is the stuff that is always ignored by the media.

And that’s not just within the reproductive justice space. We’ve seen it when it comes to racial equity, economic equity. There are places that fall out of the conversation because the issues that they foreground, the issues that they shine light on, are really hard for people to accept.

And so my hope is that even in this really calamitous situation, Ms. Chandler-Scott is getting rest and privacy, but what it’s showing us is that we have to continue to talk about these cases. We have to continue to talk about what’s happening, and we have to hold space for women who are going through something that a lot of other women have experienced. We need to make sure that they are not feeling shame, that they know that they did not do anything wrong, and they deserve to get the medical help and the support that they need.

JJ: I was struck by a number of stories, of what stories there were, they would end with, “We reached out to Ms. Chandler-Scott, and we haven’t heard back.” And I thought, “You think? You think maybe she doesn’t want to chat right now?” And what I wonder is, why not reach out to the police? Why not reach out to the DA and ask them why they did what they did, and demand answers from them, rather than trying to add human interest or color to the story by talking to someone who doesn’t have any reason to necessarily talk to you?

KT: Right.

JJ: Well, that’s my rant.

And I’m just going to ask you, finally: Pregnancy Justice. It’s not just abortion rights; that’s part of it. Pregnancy justice is a more expansive term and concept, that’s not about separating out cases from one another. I’d just like to give you an opportunity, finally, to talk about what that broader understanding means. And then, are there particular policies and laws that you point to, that could meaningfully intervene right now? Just final thoughts.

Karen Thompson: “The thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still.”

KT: Pregnancy Justice, our entire mission is to advocate for those who are being criminalized because of their pregnancies, their pregnancy outcomes, like a miscarriage in this case, or stillbirth or abortion. But, as you noted, abortion cases are actually a tiny fraction of what we see, and, sadly, the vast majority of them involve people who are criminalized for behavior during their pregnancy that people don’t approve of, whether that’s substance use, or maybe not even getting prenatal care in a way that others would like folks to do.

And so the thing that is important to know about pregnancy criminalization is that it doesn’t stay still. The laws that are being used to criminalize folks, as they were used here in the Chandler-Scott case, they’re not made, actually, to protect a child, but they’re being used against pregnant people in a way that is just harmful to pregnant people, and not actually helping or serving their pregnancies, or the fetus that the state is saying that they have interest to protect.

So our work is to make sure that the truth about science, and the reality of giving rights and not stripping them from pregnant people, upholding bodily autonomy for folks who are experiencing pregnancy—all of those things are our focus, so that we can make sure that the law is doing what it’s supposed to do, and not spreading to just criminalize pregnant people, and socially control how they act and the decisions they make with their bodies.

And, unfortunately, we’re up against a lot of laws, a lot of legislative pushes to make abortion a homicide, to say that any exposure in utero that might involve drugs, whether prescribed or not, is sufficient to charge somebody with murder if they have an adverse pregnancy outcome. All of these laws are percolating in at least 17 different states in the country.

So my hope is that people will stay aware, that they will look at the resources, including the one that you just mentioned, on our website, and that we can start thinking about the ways in which what is happening now reflects a broader picture of trying to keep women out of public space, from having power over their own bodies to make their own decisions, and to understand where that fits into a bigger picture around criminal justice and incarceration in this country.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice. They’re online at PregnancyJusticeUS.org. Thank you so much, Karen Thompson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KT: Thanks so much for having me, and having this discussion.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed the American Immigration Council’s Dara Lind about the criminalization of immigrants for the April 11, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

ABC (4/6/25)

Janine Jackson: US legal resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was swept up by ICE and sent to an infamously harsh prison in El Salvador. A judge declared that unlawful, and, we are to understand, the White House said, “Yes, actually, that was an administrative error, but we won’t return him to his family in Maryland because, well, he’s there now, and besides, they paid for him.” And in the latest, as we record on April 9, the Supreme Court says, “You know what? Let’s sit on that for a minute.”

What in the name of humanity is happening? Is it legal? Illegal? Does that matter? What can thinking, feeling human beings do now to protect fellow humans who are immigrants in this country?

Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, and has been reporting on issues around immigrants’ rights for years now. She joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Dara Lind.

Dara Lind: Thank you for having me on. Let’s try to figure this out.

Immigration Impact (3/20/25)

JJ: Yeah. Well, let’s start, if we could, with what some are calling “renditions,” because “deportation” doesn’t really seem to fit. The White House has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as justification for sending, in this case, Venezuelan people it has deemed to be members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.

They are no contact. We don’t know what’s happening to them, exactly. They haven’t been convicted of any crime. They’ve had no chance to challenge charges against them.

You’ve written recently about this rubric that’s being wafted over this, and that folks will have heard about: the Alien Enemies Act. Talk us through, if you would, what that is, and what we should make of this employment of it.

DL: Sure. So the Alien Enemies Act was enacted in 1798. It was part of a suite of laws, where every of the other laws that were passed around those issues—as America was very worried about war between Britain and France—all of the other acts passed around that were eventually rescinded, because everybody kind of looked at that moment and went: “Ooh, that was a little bit tyrannical. We may have gone too far there.” But the Alien Enemies Act stayed on the books, and has been used very infrequently since then, most recently in World War II, to remove Japanese and German nationals.

What the Trump administration has done is say, “One, we’re using it again. Two, we’re using it not against a government, but against a criminal group, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua,” which they argue is so enmeshed with the government of Venezuela that it constitutes a hybrid criminal state. And three, saying that any Venezuelan man over the age of 14 who they deem to be a member of Tren de Aragua can be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, without any of the process that is set out in actual immigration law.

New Republic (4/11/25)

Under immigration law, you have the ability to make your case before a judge, to demonstrate that you qualify for some form of relief, such as asylum if that applies to you, and the government has to prove that you can be removed. They say, “No, no, no, no, no, because this law existed before any of that, we don’t have to go through any of that process.” That is their interpretation of the law, under which they put people on planes and sent them to El Salvador.

What has been litigated, and with a Supreme Court order on Monday night, where we are right now, is that the courts have said, “No, it is illegal to use the Alien Enemies Act to remove people with no process whatsoever.” But the Supreme Court says, if people want to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, they need to do it through what are called habeas claims, which is not the way that the initial court case was brought.

So in theory right now, we’re in a world where someone hypothetically could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, but how that’s going to work in practice is a little bit unclear, because it would have to be a different process than the one the Trump administration used in mid-March. And what we’re actually seeing is, even in the hours before you and I are speaking, that judges have started to receive lawsuits filed under these habeas claims, and have started saying, “Yeah, you can’t remove people under this act through this either.” So it’s really changing very quickly on the ground, and part of that’s the result of this 200+-year-old law being used in a manner in which it’s never been used before, and with very little transparency as to what the administration wants to do with it.

JJ: It seems important to say, as you do in the piece that you wrote, that the Alien Enemies Act sidesteps immigration law, because it’s being presented as kind of part of immigration law, but one of the key things about it is that it takes us outside of laws that have been instituted to deal with immigration, yeah?

CounterSpin (1/6/23)

DL: I compare this to when the Trump administration, after the beginning of the Covid pandemic, used Title 42, which is a public health law, to essentially seal the US/Mexico border from asylum seekers. In that case, they were taking a law from outside of immigration, that had been enacted before the modern immigration system, and saying, because this law doesn’t explicitly say immigration law is in effect, we can create this separate pathway that we can use, that we can treat immigrants under this law without having to give them any of the rights guaranteed under immigration law.

They’re doing the same thing with this, saying, because this law that is on the books doesn’t refer to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed a century and a half later, we don’t need to adhere to anything that was since put in to, say, comply with the Refugee Convention, to comply with the International Convention Against Torture, all of these structures that have come into place as people have started to care about human rights, and not sending people to torture or persecution—they’re now saying they don’t have to bother with, because they weren’t thinking about them in 1798.

JJ: Right. And it brings us to, folks for many years on many issues have been saying, Well, it’s not legal, so it’s all going to be fixed, because the law’s going to step in and fix it, because it’s not legal. And I think you’re referring to the fluidity and the importance of the invocation of law. It’s not like it just exists, and you bring it down to bear. It’s fought terrain.

DL: Right. Yes, exactly. It’s contested, and when we say “contested,” it really is being fought out in the courts as we speak. Because the administration is using its authority, the fact that it is the federal government, and litigators are saying, “Please point to us in the law where you can do that, or demonstrate to us that you are adhering at all to what we think of as fairly basic constitutional protections, like due process, like the right to know what you’re being detained for.”

What is legal is ultimately what the courts decide, but how they rule on this is very unclear, and, to be fully honest, the government’s insistence on giving very little information, and in conceding very little—even in cases like Mr. Abrego Garcia’s, where, as you say, they’ve said there was a mistake made—makes it a little bit harder to understand what it would even look like to say a government that’s been so truculent and so resistant is in fact operating under the law.

JJ: Let me just pivot a little bit. The talking point of, If they just come here the right way, like my grandparents did—that’s ahistorical garbage, we understand, but it’s still potent. And we have seen for years an effort to cleave “bad immigrants” from “good immigrants,” and to suggest, even now, that the good ones have nothing to fear.

Your work places this “bad hombre” rhetoric within a broader context of immigration policy and enforcement, because you don’t have to throw people in the back of a van to stir up enough fear and uncertainty to upend lives. You can do it with a quietly announced rule change.

And so I just want to ask you to talk about some of the maybe less visible fronts—you know, the ending of the CHNV program, the demand for registration. Talk about some other things that are going on that are still, in their own way, violent and disruptive.

Dara Lind: “They’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those.”

DL: I love this question so much, because something that I personally have been thinking about a lot over the last several weeks is that the administration has gotten a lot of attention for the unprecedented ways in which it’s treated people with legal permission to be here, especially student visas.

But we’re hearing about those in terms of individual cases of visas being stripped. And meanwhile, they’re taking far more sweeping, categorical actions toward people with fewer protections under current law, and it’s harder to talk about those, because they don’t look like individual cases. They look like policy changes.

So, for example, thousands of people have gotten letters over the last couple of weeks, saying that their permission to live in the United States and work, which was extended under a presidential authority known as humanitarian parole, has been revoked, or will be revoked as of later this month, and that they’re supposed to return to their home countries as soon as possible.

Now, some of those people received those letters in error. Some of them were Ukrainians who were let in under the United for Ukraine program, and the government said later, the day that it sent them, “Oops, you guys, we didn’t mean to send that to you guys, so hopefully you didn’t see that and pack up and leave already.”

Immigration Impact (4/8/25)

But many of them are being told they need to leave immediately, or within seven days, and it’s absolutely upending their lives, because they were told they had two years, or that they didn’t have to think about this until the next time their parole was up for renewal.

What you’re alluding to with registration is this bind that they’re trying to place immigrants in. People may very well not know that while we talk about “unauthorized” or “illegal” immigrants in the US, millions of those, at this point, are known to the government in some form or another: They have pending immigration court hearings, or they have some form of temporary permission to be in the United States.

While the Trump administration is, on the one hand, talking about this “invasion” of people who we don’t know who they are, on the other hand, they’re trying to use yet another obscure pre-1960s law to force anyone who isn’t already on the books with the federal government to register.

Now, are they going to be protected by registering? Are they being given legal status? Are they being given the right to work? No, not at all. And, in fact, the government has said nothing—the implication is that they’re using that information to go find people and deport them. But if you don’t register, then you risk being prosecuted as a federal criminal.

So they’re doing their best to, instead of actually going after the criminals who they promised were lurking around every corner on the campaign trail, to turn people who have not committed any crime into criminals, simply by engaging in what previously was a civil violation of immigration law.

JJ: To put the pin on it, this would make the United States a place where you can be stopped and told to show your papers.

DL: Yeah, this law that was passed in 1940 says that if you do not produce evidence that you’ve registered if asked by an immigration official, then that also constitutes a federal crime. It’s absolutely one of those where, we say all the time, we’re not a country that asks people to show their papers, and actually, according to this obscure law, that is a thing we can do.

But as with so many things in immigration law, there are powers the federal government in theory has but doesn’t use. And the Trump administration is trying to use them for the first time, and reminding a lot of people just how much power we’ve given the government and trusted them to use correctly.

JJ: Absolutely. Well, we understand, if we’re paying attention, that the Trump administration is not just interested in so-called criminals when we read that they are tracking anyone—immigrant, citizen, no matter—who expresses criticism of the deportation agenda on social media. So it seems clear that this is ideologically based on its face, or at least pieces of it is. Is that not a legal front to fight on?

Just Security (3/12/25)

DL: A lot of things that would be entirely illegal, if the government went after a US citizen for them, are in fact historically considered OK for the government to do in the context of immigration law. For example, the grounds that are being used for many of these student visa revocations are this obscure regulation that the State Department can revoke the visa of anyone it deems to be a foreign policy problem for the United States, which does open itself up to deporting people for speech, for protected political activity, for, again, the sort of thing that would be a core constitutional right for US citizens, but that, in the context in which US immigration law has developed, which was a lot of people being very concerned about Communist infiltration, immigrants have been carved out.

I think in general, it’s really important for people to understand that while the Trump administration loves to imply that it’s going to use all of its powers maximally, that no one is safe and that everyone should be afraid, in fact citizens do have more protections than Green Card holders, Green Card holders do have more protections than others.

For example, the one Green Card holder who they’ve tried to use this State Department thing on, the judge in that case, as of when we’re talking, has told the government, give me some evidence in 24 hours or I’m ordering this guy released. Because it does take more to deport somebody on a Green Card.

So how scared people should be, this isn’t just a function of what the government is saying—although what it’s doing is more relevant—but it should also be a function of how many layers of protection the government would have to cut through in order to subject you to its will.

Washington Post (4/10/25)

JJ: And that gives us points of intervention, and I appreciate the idea that while we absolutely have to be concerned about what’s being said, it’s helpful to keep a clear eye on what is actually happening, so that we see where the fronts of the fight are. But I then have to ask you, when you hear analysts say, well, this person had a disputed status, this person had a Green Card, and make those distinctions, but then you hear Trump say,  well, heck yeah, I’d love to send US citizens to prison in El Salvador.

He’s making clear he doesn’t think it’s about immigration status. He says, if I decide you’re a criminal, and you bop people on the head, or whatever the hell he said, you’re a dangerous person. “Well, I would love the law to let me send US citizens to El Salvador also.” So you can understand why folks feel the slipperiness of it, even as we know that laws have different layers of protection.

DL: I do. The thing that strikes me about these US citizens–to–El Salvador comments is that I was reporting on Trump back when the first time he was a presidential candidate, so I’ve been following what he says for a minute. It’s really, really rare for Donald Trump to say “if it’s legal,” “we’re not sure it’s legal.”

But he said that about this, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt has also said that about this, and that caveat is just so rare that it does make me think that this is different from some of the other things where Trump says it and then the government tries to make it happen, that they are a little bit aware that there’s a bright line, and even they are a little bit wary of stepping over it.

And I’m kind of insistent about that, mostly because I worry a lot about people being afraid to stand up for more vulnerable people in their communities, because they’re focused on the ways in which they’re vulnerable. And so what I don’t want to see is a world where noncitizens can be arrested and detained with no due process, and citizens are afraid to speak out because they heard something about citizens being sent to El Salvador, and they worry they will be next.

New York Times (11/21/24)

JJ: I hear that. And following from that, I want to just quote from the piece that you wrote for the New York Times last November, about focusing on what is actually really happening, and you said:

The details matter not only because every deportation represents a life disrupted (and usually more than one, since no immigrant is an island). They matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on January 20. Millions of people will wake up on January 21 not knowing exactly what comes next for them—and the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts, the better able immigrants and their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears.

What I hear in that is that there is a real history-making moment for a press corps that’s worth its salt.

DL: Absolutely, and to be honest, in the weeks since the flights were sent to El Salvador, we’ve seen some tremendous reporting from national and local reporters about the human lives that were on those planes. We know so much more about these people than we would have. But what that means is that these people who, arguably, the administration would love to see disappear, Nayib Bukele would love to see disappear, they’re very, very visible to us.

And that’s so important in making it clear that things like due process aren’t just a hypothetical “nice to have.” Due process is the protection that prevents, in general, gay makeup artists from getting sent to a country that they’ve never been to because of their tattoos, that it’s an essential way to make sure that we’re not visiting harm on people who have done nothing to deserve it.

JJ: Finally, I do understand that we have to fight wherever there’s a fight, but I do have a fear of small amendments or reforms as a big-picture response. We can amend this here or we can return that person. It feels a little bit like a restraining wall against a flood.

And I just feel that it helps to show that we are for something. We’re not just against hatefulness and bigotry and the law being used to arbitrarily throw people out. We have a vision of a shared future that doesn’t involve deputizing people to snitch on their neighbors who they think look different. We have a vision about immigration that is a positive vision that we’ve had in this country, and I guess I wish I’d see more of that right now, in media and elsewhere.

DL: What makes it particularly hard, from my perspective, is that most Americans know very little about immigration law. It’s extremely complicated, and most people have never had firsthand experience with it. So in order to get people to even understand what is going on now, you need to do more work than you do for areas where people are more intuitively familiar with what the government does, and that takes up space that otherwise could go to imagining different futures.

The other problem here is that, frankly, it’s not that new and radical ideas on immigration are needed. It’s a matter of political will, to a certain extent, right?

FAIR.org (5/24/21)

The reason that the Trump administration’s use of this registration provision is such a sick irony to some of us is that there was a way, that Congress proposed, to allow people to register with the US government. It was called comprehensive immigration reform. There have been proposals to regularize people, to put people on the books, to bring people out of the shadows.

And the absence of that, and the absence of a federal government that was in any way equipped to actually process people, rather than figuring out the most draconian crackdown and hoping that everybody got the message, is where we’ve gotten to a point where everyone agrees that the system is broken, and the only solutions appear to be these radical crackdowns on basic rights.

JJ: Yeah. We’ve established that the ground is shifting under our feet, but anything you’d like reporters to do more of or less of, or things to keep in mind?

DL: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the amount of attention, and duration of attention, on the Salvadoran removals. It’s been something where I could easily have seen things falling out of the headlines, just because there weren’t any new facts being developed.

I do worry a little bit that now that the court cases—with a couple of exceptions, we’re unlikely to see really big developments in the next several days—that that’s going to maybe quiet the drumbeat. And I’m hoping that people are continuing to push, continuing to try to find new information, to hold the government accountable to the things that it’s already said, especially if they’re going to start removals back up again.

Because it’s often the case that in the absence of new facts, important things don’t get treated as news stories anymore, and it would be really a shame if that were to happen for this, when our only recourse, unless the courts are going to end up ruling that the Trump administration has to send the plane back and put everybody on them and bring them back to the US, is going to be some measure of public pressure on the administration—on the government of El Salvador, even—to do the right thing.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Dara Lind. She’s senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. Thank you so much, Dara Lind, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DL: Thank you.

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

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Intercept (4/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”

It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with.

Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. She joins us this week on the show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the Hands Off! protests.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by CounterSpin.

A jury in North Dakota has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages for defaming Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Texas-based pipeline company accused Greenpeace of orchestrating criminal behavior by training and providing funds to the Indigenous-led protests at Standing Rock. Greenpeace and its supporters, including other nonprofits and advocacy groups, argued that the lawsuit is part of a conspicuous attempt by corporations to destroy the right to free speech. Longtime human rights and environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who was part of the independent trial monitoring team observing the trial, says it was purposely held in a region of the country with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Donziger said most of the jurors in the case were connected to the industry and were “predisposed” to rule in favor of Energy Transfer despite the “false narratives” presented at the trial. Greenpeace plans to appeal the ruling.

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

The amendments to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) were previously approved by the National Assembly and now await the president’s signature to become law. 

“The Pakistan Senate’s passage of amendments to the country’s cybercrime laws is deeply concerning. While on its face, the law seeks to tamp down the spread of false news, if signed into law, it will disproportionately curtail freedom of speech in Pakistan,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “President Asif Ali Zardari must veto the bill, which threatens the fundamental rights of Pakistani citizens and journalists while granting the government and security agencies sweeping powers to impose complete control over internet freedom in the country.”

The proposed amendments to PECA include the establishment of four new government bodies to help regulate online content and broadening the definitions of online harms. CPJ’s texts to Pakistan’s Federal Information Minister Attaullah Tarar did not receive a response.

The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced nationwide protests against the amendments, calling them unconstitutional and an infringement on citizens’ rights.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

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Fascists march in Charlottesville, 2017 (cc photo: Tony Crider)

This week on CounterSpin: We revisit the conversation we had in August 2017 in the wake of the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writer and podcaster Adam Johnson had thoughts about the way so-called “mainstream” news media responded to a straight-up celebration of white supremacy.

(cc photo: Sasha Patkin)

Also on the show: If we’re to believe the chest-thumping, high on Trump’s agenda will be the enforced criminalization of immigration. We talked about that in July 2018 with Jacinta Gonzalez, senior campaign organizer at Mijente.

The past is never dead, it’s not even past: This week on CounterSpin.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press about Chris Matthews’ “morning after,” the New York Times‘ promoting white resentment, and Israel’s assassination of journalists.

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

By weaponizing the legal system against journalists, China has ruthlessly reneged on guarantees given to Hong Kong, which should enjoy a high degree of autonomy after the former British colony was handed back to Beijing in 1997, the groups said in a joint statement.

Former Stand News editors Patrick Lam and Chung Pui-kuen are due to be sentenced on September 26 and could be jailed for two years.

“We now await with trepidation the outcome of trials targeting senior staff from the defunct Apple Daily newspaper, especially its founder Jimmy Lai who faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars,” they added.

Read the full statement here.

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

Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

FAIR.org (11/22/16)

Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.

Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.

Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.

Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.

JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?

HuffPost (8/26/21)

ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.

So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.

So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.

So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.

Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”

And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.

The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”

And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.

And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.

JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.

So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”

And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.

ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.

JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.

Extra! (4/13)

ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.

And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.

And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.

JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks again for having me.

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

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional.  We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.

Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!

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

Janine Jackson interviewed Food Not Bombs’ Keith McHenry about criminalizing homelessness for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Axios (3/20/24)

Janine Jackson: With wages, including the minimum wage, largely static, prices rising out of the reach of many who call themselves middle class, and rents outpacing wages in 44 of the country’s 50 biggest cities, you could be unsurprised that homelessness is at record rates. The latest federal count found 650,000 unhoused people on a single night, nearly half of them sleeping outside. The response of several localities is to criminalize the act of sleeping outside or, in some places, of having a shopping cart.

States are using their budgetary power to punish communities that don’t push people off the street, including places that have more unhoused people than shelter beds, and to arrest people who don’t have a safe space to go to.  As of October, in Florida, any city that doesn’t enforce their ban on camping can be sued, including by individual residents or businesses. “We’re going to have clean sidewalks,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, signing the law in March.

Other places have introduced fines, so that a person who asks for a quarter can get a fine of hundreds of dollars. This is being called a “crackdown on homelessness,” as though that were an isolated abstraction, and not a broad societal failure.

Keith McHenry is an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He joins us now from Santa Cruz, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Keith McHenry.

Keith McHenry: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.

Slate (6/29/24)

JJ: Let’s start with California, and Governor Newsom’s directive to dismantle encampments throughout the state, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling that gave governments more authority to do that. Newsom says he’s directing state agencies to “move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them.” Is that a thing that can happen?

KM: Even before Newsom’s executive order, he was giving out money to cities to clear homeless encampments. It’s called the Homeless Encampment Resolution Grants. And in Santa Cruz, $4 million was given to clear the camps around the homeless shelter. And, in fact, the management of the homeless shelter was all excited that they got the money, and that they could get rid of the homeless that were camped around them and in the neighborhood where the shelter is.

And this campaign, I think, is getting more and more aggressive, not only because of the removal of the protections from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case that went to the Supreme Court, but because it’s being driven, in part, by this organization called the Cicero Institute, which was started by Joe Lonsdale in 2016, and he is connected directly to the Central Intelligence Agency. He received funding, along with Peter Thiel, who is most famous right now for being the backer of JD Vance as the running mate with Trump, and by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.

So Palantir is one of the largest surveillance organizations in the United States, the private company that was created after protest of Total Information Awareness, which was a government plan after the 9/11 bombing. And they are involved in a matrix of things surrounding homelessness, including creating AI to find homeless camps.

So there’s already, since Newsom’s executive order, you can see police and people just throwing away homeless people’s belongings in these sweeps, mentioning both the Supreme Court ruling and Newsom’s executive order, basically stating that they’re going to get rid of the homeless from California.

The Nation (3/15/24)

But Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute has been providing model legislation to states across the country. The one that you just referred to, with DeSantis, was one of their victories. They also got a law passed in Kentucky where you can actually use the Stand Your Ground law to shoot homeless people that are not cooperating with your eviction of them from private or public land.

So this trend is frightening, and we’re already seeing it in Santa Cruz, and this is in San Francisco, it’s across the country, and the problem is, there’s no place for anyone to go. And in Newsom’s executive order, he claims that you’re supposed to store things for 60 days; this virtually never happens with the sweeping of the camp. The camps that were swept here in Santa Cruz in the last couple of weeks, people just didn’t get their belongings back, and we had to give them pup tents and sleeping bags and blankets, just to replace the equipment that was taken by the police and public works during these really vicious sweeps.

JJ: I hear that. And Miami Beach, I understand, is one of a number of places that allow arrests if the individual declines shelter placement. And I think that kind of line makes sense for a lot of people, for whom this is just a story in the paper—the idea that, well, they were offered shelter, and maybe even offered some kind of mental health care, or some substance abuse care. And aren’t those the personal problems that are driving them to the street? What’s wrong with that solution of, “Well, we’re offering them stuff”?

KM: The reality is there is no there that they’re offering. They’re just telling the public that there is some kind of shelter space. First of all, the shelters are already full, everywhere in the country, so you have to kick a homeless person out of a shelter, and that’s what they do here in Santa Cruz, to make place for a new homeless person. So when they cleared Coral Street in front of the homeless shelter, they evicted 10, 15 people out of another shelter, and then put the 10 or 15 people into that shelter, and then it’s a net gain of zero sheltered people.

But the other thing is, a lot of people do not want to go to shelters because, for instance, the shelter here is referred to as the “concentration camp,” and that’s because you can’t have your husband or wife with you, you can’t have your pets with you….

There’s one shelter that’s being proposed in San Diego where there’s 715 people in one room on bunk beds, and you get a little plastic box to put all your belongings in. And then you have to live in—just like the shelters here—very controlled, like a minimum security jail.

In our town, you’re not allowed to walk out of the shelter into the city. You have to get a van, because they don’t want homeless people walking by housed people’s houses. And therefore you’re limited by the staff as to when you can come and go.

PBS (12/15/23)

I am very concerned with the increase in homelessness. Right now, there’s 81% of America is living paycheck to paycheck, and homelessness has already been increasing dramatically. According to HUD, it increased 12% last year. We have so many unhoused people, because of the rocky economy, that they will then be moving people into large camps outside of cities, like they did with the Japanese during World War II. I’m worried about it, because we are heading into what could potentially be a world war, and then a lot of the polite comments that can happen before war, and ideas, will just be out the window, and it’ll be okay to round up the homeless and place them in these camps, which will be presented as navigation centers, where they’ll somehow get a job somewhere in the future, or some kind of mental health help.

And here in California, they passed Proposition 1, and essentially they’re building mental hospitals, and then homeless people are becoming wards, basically, of the local county, who then controls all their Social Security benefits and everything. So it’s very tragic, and I think American people really actually do know, because so many of us have family members that are homeless, and probably struggled with their addictions, or with their having to sleep on our couch, and we’re getting tired of it. We’re all impacted directly in this, and there’s definitely solutions to ending homelessness, which is building things like single room occupancy hotels, and all the things that kept people off the streets before this catastrophe.

JJ: I just wanted to pick up on that, because I think a child would say, “Oh, people are unhoused. What about housing?” And yet, somehow, that seems like, ”Oh, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Well, we’ll put out signs, we’ll pay money to put out signs telling people, don’t give money to homeless people, but we won’t put that money into housing.”

Keith McHenry: “Millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.” (photo: KSQD)

KM: Governor Newsom here in California has spent $24 billion on homelessness. And, in the city of Santa Cruz, they gave us $14 million to help the homeless about a year and a half ago. And so far they’ve used $1 million to clean out a camp of about 400 people who had no place to go. Those people were just cleared out of the woods this weekend. So now they’re back downtown. And so millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.

And then there’s a very “Not In My Back Yard” campaign that happens. So every time there’s even a slight proposal to house some homeless people, build a building for them or open a hotel for homeless people, you end up with riots and protests, as you can see has happened in places like New York City. And then there’s the pitting of immigrants and homeless against one another, which is another divide-and-conquer tactic that is occurring, that’s also making housing homeless people very difficult.

So there’s just no policy, no national policy, no state policies, really, to resolve this, other than through criminalization.

Now, the criminalization is really dire. So, for example, in Santa Cruz, you get a $25 ticket each time you’re found camping. Of course, then they take most of your stuff when they give you that ticket. And then what ends up happening is if you fail to pay that, then you get a $350 fine for not paying your $25 ticket. And then two tickets in 30 days is a misdemeanor, and you can end up, ultimately, over time, spending months and months in jail for just the crime of being homeless.

And then each one of these tickets and late fees goes into collection. You get a job, finally, and then your wages are taken by the collection agency for your fines for having slept outside. So this is going to make ending homelessness in America much, much more dire, because more and more people will fall into that trap, because the system’s set up to be difficult.

CounterSpin (1/13/17)

JJ: And then don’t think about helping unhoused people with food, because that’s going to be a crime too. We talked with Megan Hustings back in 2017, when people from Food Not Bombs were being arrested in Florida for serving free food to homeless people in a public park. So even the places where other people might be trying to intervene, and trying to provide some support, offer some help, they’re being told no, no, that’s also a crime.

KM: Yeah, there was just a person arrested in Dayton, Ohio, for feeding the homeless there. In San Francisco, we were arrested a thousand times. I did 500 days in jail, and ultimately faced 25 to life in prison, when the city was so frustrated they eventually framed me on things that I never did. I also did 18 days personally in Orlando, Florida, for feeding the homeless at Lake Eola Park.

Fortunately, Food Not Bombs has pushed back across the country in that regard, and we won an appeals case in Florida, which ruled that sharing free food is a First Amendment–protected right. And the Dayton, Ohio, people are using that case to defend themselves.

And then we also have found in Houston, where we were ticketed nearly a hundred times, at $2,000- a-time fines, that they could not find a jury that thought it was reasonable to convict someone and force them to pay money for feeding the homeless. So they’ve kind of generally dropped that case. So we’re having some good fortune pushing back.

But the idea that a country that’s letting their people go hungry, and I answer the Hunger Hotline, 1-884-1136, and I get calls all day long, roughly 20 a day, from seniors who have no food, who get referred to me by UnitedHealthcare or Red Cross or something, for home delivery. And the system is breaking down. And the stories I hear of these 20, 30 people, sometimes—on a good day, it’s like 10 people—it’s just heartbreaking. And those are people on the verge of becoming homeless, that have a home but have no food, and live in America. Often they’re vets that have worked their entire lives, and now they’re in this precarious position, and it is just heartbreaking.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Keith McHenry from Food Not Bombs. They’re online at FoodNotBombs.net. Keith McHenry, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KM: Thank you so much.

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

This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

(photo: Elvert Barnes)

Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.

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

At a critical hearing this week in London, lawyers for imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked the British High Court of Justice to grant him a new appeal in what is likely his last chance to avoid extradition to the United States, where he faces a 175-year prison sentence for publishing classified documents that exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, says the judges were receptive to their arguments that Assange could face the death penalty in the U.S. and that an extradition would set a dangerous precedent for press freedom. “If Julian is extradited and goes on trial under the Espionage Act, this is a case which is going to set precedent which criminalizes journalistic activity and will be used against the rest of the media.” A ruling in the case is not expected until next month at the earliest.

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

American political activist Omali Yeshitela on 18 March, 2023. Photograph Source: The Burning Spear – CC BY 2.0

In their 1999 song “Police State,” the rap duo Dead Prez took a disturbing look at the prison system, poverty, economic exploitation, and domestic surveillance of the Black community. In keeping with Dead Prez’s revolutionary Black socialism, the song opens with a spirited speech describing the state as “a repressive organization” and observing the connection between one’s economic class and his subjection to America’s abusive criminal justice system. The voice delivering the speech belongs to Omali Yeshitela, who helped found the African People’s Socialist Party in 1972, and who remains its Chairman today.

Yeshitela and several others associated with the African People’s Socialist Party were indicted by the Biden administration last year, hit with charges of spying for and working with the Russians. The indictments followed years of harassment, as well as violent FBI attacks on the Party’s offices in Florida and Missouri. The defendants’ Motion to Dismiss the case was argued this week, though the case has received remarkably little attention from the legacy media. Historically, this charge of spying is among the U.S. government’s go-to accusations when it doesn’t care for a radical group’s political speech and activities. The U.S. government knows it cannot compete in the marketplace of ideas we hear so much about.

Cases like this one must be understood within the appropriate historical context. It is vital to underscore the fact that these indictments—and the use of law enforcement and legal systems to punish dissidents—are not an aberration. They are consistent with a broader historical program of violent attacks on activists in our country. The federal government has a long and sordid history of targeting civil rights organizers, anti-war activists, socialists, labor unions, anarchists, and other political radicals.

Through its COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) initiatives, the FBI behaved as the United States’ secret police, illegally and unconstitutionally interfering with legitimate political activities and denying citizens due process. COINTELPRO was the then-Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover’s brainchild, launched at the height of the Red Scare and dedicated to undermining activist movements under a broad program of secret activities. The program began in 1956, about a decade before the passage of the Freedom of Information Act. Among the FBI’s key tactics during this period were attempts to infiltrate activist groups and sow discord and disinformation, even fabricating assassination threats. Among the most actively targeted groups were the civil rights movement, the American Indian Movement, anti-Vietnam War activists, and the Black Panther Party. In its many harassment and disinformation campaigns, the FBI leveraged personal information, frequently obtained in violation of the Constitution, as blackmail, engaging in threats and psychological warfare. (Perhaps the most well-known example of this was the FBI’s attempt to push Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to end his own life.)

As the group grew in prominence, the Black Panthers were infamously put in the crosshairs of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, which sought “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of the Black nationalists.” They were spied upon, infiltrated, and harassed for years at the hands of the FBI. Indeed, in 1969, Hoover said that “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” The Black Panthers represented a challenge to the status quo because they wouldn’t play by rules imposed by the power elite: participate in narrowly prescribed, two-party-but-single-ideology electoral politics that neither countenance radical change nor challenge the fundamental psychological predicates of racism, authoritarianism, or capitalism.

Huey Newton and the Black Panthers presented a clear and direct challenge to the violence at the heart of white supremacy and the second-class citizenship for Black Americans that endures today. Newton was a realist and understood the unmentioned mechanisms of violence upon which hierarchical power structures like racism depend. “The power structure,” Newton argued in 1967, “depends upon the use of force without retaliation. This is why they want the people unarmed . . . . An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment.” Under this view, mainstream liberal promotion of “gun control” was a case of white privilege and white supremacy, reflecting the country’s historical two-tier social system: whites could expect to be protected by the police, whereas, again in Newton’s words, “Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors.” The United States government saw this level of awareness and self-respect as a threat to its power. The Panthers believed that they could help their communities from within, without the help or influence of white supremacist elites in government and corporations. They empowered their friends and neighbors to support each other directly as a community. They fed people and taught them solidarity, helping their neighbors to organize and see themselves as agents of change capable of generating a wave of equality and justice.

This was unacceptable to a United States government obsessed with eradicating grassroots leftist movements. Then, as now, radical or socialist leanings provide the pretext for questioning one’s loyalty to her country and for working around and outside of formal legal and constitutional protections. We must understand COINTELPRO’s attacks on Black activists within this historical context, as an episode in a larger story of the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and bogus charges of imagined or fabricated secret plots. Some of the infiltrators working for the FBI later went public and admitted their involvement in tactical missions to destroy the Black Panthers; Louis Tackwood, for example, recounted the story of the FBI’s (together with local law enforcement) concerted efforts to destroy the Los Angeles office of the Black Panther Party and, in particular, Geronimo Pratt, using surveillance, harassment, groundless arrests, and false accusations. As Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall pointed out in Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, the federal government designated Pratt a “Priority I” national security threat on the recommendation of the FBI, despite “virtually no evidence” being offered other than a bogus “biography” authored by the Bureau itself. Pratt’s story is just one of dozens of examples of COINTELPRO operations aimed at minorities with the wrong politics.

It has become popular practice today to describe these oppressive tactics as “extra-legal,” but within the appropriate historical context, such tactics are the law’s fundamental reason for being; the law has consistently been a weapon against the powerless to shield agents of the state from accountability. The FBI’s treatment of activist groups was not “extra-legal” in any rational sense. It was conducted under the aegis of the state and the law. Had it not been for the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, an activist group that broke into a Pennsylvania FBI office in 1971, the public may never have known about COINTELPRO’s activities. We usually find out years or decades later that the government has been violating our constitutional rights, and there is almost never a real remedy. To say that the COINTELPRO era’s atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and conformity bears a striking similarity to the present moment would be an understatement. Our New Cold War is in direct continuity with the old in ideological character and affiliations, methods, and aims. Zooming out, it becomes evident that the country never left this Cold War mentality. When the Soviet Union ceased to be and the War on Terror ushered in a new era of mass surveillance, torture, murder and detention without trial, and harassment of journalists and activists, COINTELPRO had provided the model. American citizens—that is, your neighbors—are to be treated as dangerous enemies to be spied on and violated with impunity. Be on the lookout for “extremism” and “misinformation” and “if you see something, say something.” McCarthyism, like the imperialist ideology that rules the world today, depends on creating a climate of fear and a nation of unthinking, obedient tattletales. Even very recently, leaked documents have revealed FBI programs aimed at the made-up category “Black Identity Extremist,” which as always roughly aligns with activists and radicals who present compelling, real-world alternatives and challenges to the status quo. Due to the heroic efforts of Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights, we have learned that the FBI tracked and surveilled activists associated with the Black Lives Matter protests in Missouri in 2014.

We have created frightening political and legal conditions in which the Constitution instantly vanishes as soon as someone is branded, however arbitrarily, a terrorist, or a traitor, or an agent of a foreign government. This has happened during every war, and there always seems to be a new one. The standards for such accusations are of course not neutral or objective, but heavily encumbered with normative positions on politics, economics, and social organization generally. But even more than that, the standards are shaped and determined by the fact that the United States cannot allow people to tell the truth about its role in the world. It focuses extraordinary amounts of time and resources to targeting dissents and suppressing alternative and independent journalism. The threat level is conveniently calibrated as needed by the leaders of the national security apparatus. Russia is an example of this phenomenon: sometimes the enemy is weakened, to be overcome imminently; sometimes the enemy is everywhere, overwhelming in power and diabolical beyond imagining. This fear lever is deployed to adjust the state-corporate complex’s control over the public.

That the words of activists fighting for peace, freedom, and equality should elicit such responses from the world’s most powerful government is telling. Even the mightiest empire has to fear these ideas, and occasionally this fear results in reluctant respect. But only if we continue to fight. That means fighting for the rights of others—in Yeshitela’s case, fellow American citizens—even if we don’t agree with them on particular issues. It is unfortunately necessary to point out that all people have a right to associate freely with others as they wish, and to think, say, and write according to their own beliefs—even if these associations and beliefs run contrary to the interests of the U.S. government. It is not a crime to be a radical. It is not a crime to oppose war or to call the United States empire what it is. It is not a crime to be both Black and a leftist, our country’s history notwithstanding. It is not a crime even to openly sympathize with the government’s enemy in a time of war. The people who want to make these things crimes are now running the federal government and using their positions of power to punish dissidents and violate the Constitution’s protection of political speech, just as they have in some of the darkest and most shameful episodes of the country’s past. If the Constitution is to be more than a mere symbol, citizens must call attention to the ongoing political persecution of dissenting voices, and to the authoritarian might-makes-right ideology of our government.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David S. D’Amato.

Members of the Disrupt Burrup Hub have had Woodside in their sights for some time.  Their primary object of concern: the Burrup Hub project, consisting of the Scarborough and Browse Basin gas fields, the Pluto Project processing plant, and various linked liquified gas and fertiliser plans found on the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region.

On this occasion, the group’s practical efforts proved stillborn.  One of the protestors, Matilda Lane-Rose, found herself facing over a dozen counter-terrorist police lying in wait on O’Neill’s property.  Lane-Rose, along with three other members of Disrupt Burrup Hub, were charged with conspiracy to commit and indictable offence.

The howl of indignation has been eardrum splitting.  Mark Abbotsford, Woodside’s executive vice president, stated that there was a line, and it had been crossed.  Former Greens MP, Alison Xamon, questioned the wisdom of the protest, suggesting that there “is a sense that people’s homes should almost be off limits.”  The media imperium owned by the mogul Kerry Stokes expressed fury at the antics of “eco fanatics”.

Seven West Media also took the national broadcaster to task for having covered the actual protest as part of an intended program for Four Corners. Their journalists, for one, suggested that the ABC had overstepped, despite those from their own stable having done precisely the same thing on two previous occasions.  In 2021, for instance, Channel Seven found itself covering a protest that blockaded Woodside’s facilities on Burrup. They even got live crosses into the market ready for breakfast television.

The Western Australian Premier, whose electability in that state is determined by fossil-fuellers, was also critical of the ABC.  In a letter to its chair, Ita Buttrose, Roger Cook wished to “express [his] serious concerns about the ABC crew’s actions and urge you organisation to reflect on the role it played in this matter.”

The prosecuting police, holding their side of the bargain protecting a citizen of such sweet purity as O’Neill, painted a picture of sinister domestic insurgency at her doorstep.  In the Perth Magistrates Court, WA Police prosecutor Kim Briggs had stern words for two of the protestors seeking bail, Jesse Noakes and Gerard Mazza.  “They prepared their actions in detail including surveillance and reconnaissance.”  They also “parked near the residence and Ms O’Neill’s departure time was worked out to maximise disruption.”

The intention of such conduct, Briggs alleged, “was to damage the property using spray paint and lock themselves [to a gate] with a D-lock to hinder the ability of Ms O’Neill to leave the property.”

Whatever the immediate merits of the publicity seeking exercise by the Disrupt Burrup Hubbers, Woodside had a devilish card to play.  After all, anything that might divert, or at least stifle interest in an expansionist agenda that promises to produce billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2070, would prove inevitable.

Despite already having protective bail conditions in place that would prevent the protesters from approaching O’Neill in any capacity, let alone any Woodside property, the company wanted more.  A legal remedy to effectively extinguish speech and coverage on the executive, the company and the protest, would be sought.  The target, in other words, was publicity itself.  In a novel, even shocking way, Woodside sought Violence Restraining Orders against the protestors.  A VRO is intended to restrain a person from any one of the following: committing an act of abuse, breaching the peace, causing fear, damaging property or intimidating another person.

Through August, VROs were served on Lane-Rose, Emil Davey and Gerard Mazza.  The relevant clauses note that the campaigners are not to “make any reference to [the Woodside CEO] by any electronic means, including by using the internet and any social media application” or “cause or allow any other person to engage in conduct of the type referred to in any of the preceding paragraphs of this order on your behalf”.

This could only be taken for what it was: a violent effort to stomp on speech, especially of the critical sort.  Barrister Zarah Burgess, representing Disrupt Burrup Hub, described it as “a transparent and extraordinary attempt to gag climate campaigners from speaking about Woodside’s fossil fuel expansion.”  Never before had she seen the VRO system used in such a manner.  “The intended purpose for granting VROs is to protect people, predominantly women and children, usually in the context of family violence.”

A dismayed Alice Drury of the Human Rights Law Centre was blunt: “Woodside and the multibillion dollar fossil fuel industry are trying to send a chilling message to anyone who dares to speak out: you will be intimidated and silenced.”

This brutal reaction from O’Neill and company says everything about Woodside and its place in Australian society.  It advertises itself as “a global energy company, founded in Australia with a spirit of innovation and determination.”  And, just in case you forget, the company provides “energy the world needs to heat and cool homes, keep lights on and enable industry.”  To that, can be added another jotting: it will seek to prevent, and even criminalise free speech and protest on the environment if permitted. The legal authorities in Western Australia, at least pending appeal, agree.

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

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There has, for many years, been a tendency in the US to treat poverty as if it were something like leprosy, a contagious disease that is, something that must be avoided by good and healthy people. In the last few year’s we have seen the rise of anew kind of “war on poverty”.

This war on poverty, unlike LBJ’s war on poverty, which he initiated during his State of the union address in 1964, which was an attempt to follow in the footsteps of such Democratic leaders as FDR and JFK, is not by any means an attempt to lift up the lives of those who are suffering from poverty in the US, but instead is a war that moves in the other direction, which is to say that rather than lifting-up, this war is an attempt to press down on those whose lives are already compromised by the difficulties and hardships that come with one of lifes most stressful and degrading of circumstances, poverty.

Laws recently passed by both conservative and liberal local governments that criminalize panhandling on roadways and in public spaces are an example of their cruel and twisted attempt at addressing this phenomenon that is now affecting some 37.9 million Americans which includes at least 11 million children. According to the latest figures from the Childrens Defense Organization.

These numbers, which they admit are likely lower than the actual number of people living in poverty are likely rising in the aftermath of the covid pandemic with its destabilization of small business all across the country.

Adding to the economic up-set of lock-downs and changing business models that include the loss of jobs due to such things as computerized/mechanized self-check out stands, a continued decline in manufacturing, environmental considerations that have affected industries in the energy sector among others and a middle class that finds itself with less disposable income which in turn threatens artists, food vendors, providers of entertainment, and every other occupation that relies on those who can afford a little extra something from a stop at the ice-cream store to hiring some outside help for around the house or yard.

As if the decline in disposable income due to a lack of job opportunities was not enough to throw the system that once supported one of the most vibrant middle classes in the world, we have run-away inflation that has affected the price of nearly every commodity or service available to the public. The price of housing, health care, all kinds of food, all forms of energy and any service that is provided by our neighbors as they raise their prices in an attempt to stay in business and pay their bills, has gone up and up while wages remain static as the buying power of those wages is reduced to levels that have reduced the buying power of a doller by about 85% making what was in 1971 worth a dollar now worth about 0.15 cents.

With this poverty, homelessness continues to increase year by year while the health of Americans also is declining due to the unaffordability of quality food, health care and stress reducing activities such as vacations and the pursuit of hobbies and activities that give a sense of fulfillment to those that can enjoy them.

Chasing the homeless out of their pitiful camps and laws that prohibit a person from pan-handling in public seem to be some of Americas latest answers to the problem of poverty, as cruel and inhumane of an action that our government could possibly come up with. Smashing camps and destroying the few possessions that the homeless may have somehow gathered is an incredible tactic, one that would better describe a terrible bully or thug than a government bent towards the welfare of its citizens. Likewise, prohibiting a person on the edge of life, from asking for help in this cruel world is on the same level as stealing a poor man’s begging cup.

In one, used to be, fair city that I recently lived in (Asheville N.C.), according to The Asheville Blade, “the city councils’ environment and safety committee chaired by Maggie Ullman saw the members go farther than even city staff and seek to change their noxious “panhandling” ban to criminalize giving money to houseless people from cars, extend the areas covered by the ban and require those in poverty to stay at least 10 feet, rather than the current 6, away from those with money.”

“Asheville’s existing panhandling bans are part of a raft of ways city government uses to send the poor to the deadliest jail in the state for daring to exist in public.”

“Ullman went further, proposing in the Asheville Politics group that anyone giving desperately needed goods or cash to the poor (should) face criminal charges for doing so. Along with an “education program” to tell people that directly helping their neighbors is bad, actually. Better to give the money to non-profit hacks who will talk about the problem while spending it all on their salaries and bonuses.”
ashevilleblade.com

This push to criminalize direct charity to those in need is becoming a common ruse to funnel money into established institutions that purport to help the poor while criminalizing a person’s natural inclination to spontaneously give and to help those in need on the spot, at the point of empathetic action.

This directive inhibits a person’s charitable instincts, slows down the transfer of charitable contributions, creates conditions for those receiving the charity and of course siphons off hundreds of thousands of dollars that might have gone to support the most vulnerable among us.

Asheville has also recently been in our national news for destroying homeless camps, in particular an action that happened on Christmas eve where several of the homeless were charged with FELONY littering while also arresting two journalists from the Asheville Blade as they attempted to cover the camp eviction. (ashevilleblade.com)

This war on the poor is exactly the kind of response one might expect from a government that has lost all sight of its mandate to provide for the security and general welfare of the people. The poor in this country are treated as collateral damage in a nation that wars against its own citizens.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the US, which is a mere pittance compared to what is spent in our government’s efforts to destroy people’s lives, both here and abroad.

Ending poverty could be accomplished in many ways including raising the living wage, creating jobs programs in the manner of FDRs New Deal with its Works Progress Administration which would have the added benefit of rebuilding Americas crumbling infrastructure, or LBJs Economic Opportunity Act which expanded the government’s role in providing education, health care and direct welfare to those in need.

We can despise the Clinton administration for doing what it could to throw the poor under the bus by cutting welfare, approving NAFTA, while increasing the US prison population to that of the highest in the world among other abuses. Clinton destroyed the Democrats role in giving assistance to the poor and a number of his right-wing policies are still hindering, in fact are the cause of many of America’s attacks on the working people of America, reducing the middle class to a portion of its former numbers while in that same move creating an atmosphere of antagonism and hate towards those who, because of government mismanagement, couldn’t keep up with changing times. Today’s Democratic party continues along in the image of Clintons cruelty while pretending virtue in identity politics. Even Hillary Clintons and Barack Obamas much discussed health care reforms never came to full fruition while the Biden administration refuses to do anything even slightly helpful. The Republicans and general welfare should not even be uttered in the same sentence except to shame them, if they are at all capable of shame.

There’s an election coming up in 2024 but the general public due to corporate propaganda and fears instilled by the same, might change the course of this governments war against its own people, but considering the outcome of other recent elections, even given the chance of breaking away from this insult of a government with a couple fresh candidates that have a truly Democratic vision for our country, they very well might go right ahead and once again vote away their rights to a better life, voting, whether Republican or Democratic, against their own better interests and instincts.

And we say, “God Bless America”.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Owen.

The post Criminalizing Journalism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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

Turkey’s parliament, known as the Grand National Assembly, started discussing the draft bill on Tuesday evening and is set to finish voting this week, according to multiple news reports and tweets from an official account. The bill includes amendments to press and internet laws and the penal code and, if approved, will criminalize the act of “spreading false information,” according to those reports.

“Turkish parliamentarians are about to vote on a dangerous bill that, if approved, will hinder freedom of the press and speech, not only for members of the media but of Turkish society who may have opinions that authorities disagree with. Criminalizing the spreading of so-called false information under such vague terms is plain censorship no matter what you call it,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “While this law is expected to pass, there is still a chance for Turkish parliamentarians to reverse course and prevent this historical step backward for the country’s democracy and protect press and speech freedoms.”

Lawmakers already voted on and passed the first two articles of the 40-article bill, reports said. The first 28 articles of the bill introduce a new category for online journalists who are not currently recognized as members of the media by Turkey’s Press Law; Article 29 updates the penal code. The bill was introduced by the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), in May, and was approved by a parliamentary commission by June before being considered by the Grand National Assembly this week.  

The AKP and MHP, which control the necessary majority in the legislature, plan to approve all articles by Friday, the reports said. If passed, the bill will go into effect if President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan signs it within 15 days.

If the penal code change is approved, those found guilty of publicly spreading false information to cause concern, fear, or panic would face sentences of one to three years in prison, and the penalty would increase for offenders who hide their identity or act on behalf of a criminal group, but what constituted misleading information or who would make that determination was not clear, according to CPJ’s review of the bill.

The bill’s authors wrote in the introduction that the change to the penal code is designed to protect Turkish citizens’ rights online while combating “disinformation” and “illegal content” produced by “false names and accounts”; they argued that this action falls in line with regulations in the United States and European countries, such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

The bill also expands restrictions on social media first passed in 2020; that law requires social media platforms with over one million users to open local offices and assign local representatives. Under the bill, a representative of a social media platform will be required to reside in Turkey, which would allow the Turkish authorities to prosecute them if they choose. The proposed amendments also provide more detail of existing obligations of social media companies and make it easier for Turkish authorities to remove content from the internet.

In recent months, local press freedom groups have protested the proposed law, describing it as “the heaviest censorship in the history of the press” that would “suffocate” journalism in Turkey.

CPJ emailed the Turkish president’s office and Grand National Assembly for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, as we long feared, we’ve been forced to navigate a new legal landscape. The terrain for people seeking abortions is changing almost daily, and abortion care is increasingly threatened for more communities. In this new era, increased attention has been paid to when the “wave” of criminalization will begin for those providing or seeking abortion care. Prosecutors have declared they won’t enforce laws and journalists have reported on possible police surveillance of period tracker apps. Yet, these responses are disconnected from what reproductive rights and justice advocates know about criminalization, and they are out of line with what I found in my research.

Over the last decade, I’ve been steeped in research and advocacy challenging the criminalization of people for pregnancy outcomes and self-managed abortions – abortions managed outside of the medical system. While abortion medication made self-managed abortions more accessible and safer, criminalization has always been an issue. 

In fact, over the last two years, I’ve documented 61 cases from the years 2000 to 2020 in which people have been criminally investigated or arrested for self-managing their own abortion or helping someone else do so; the majority of these cases exclusively involved abortion medication. Our team analyzed publicly-reported case details to better understand exactly how the criminalization of self-managed abortion happens.

We’ve understood for years what it looks like when people are stigmatized for their healthcare decisions and what it means when the criminal system intervenes in this process. The future of abortion criminalization is an extension of our current criminal system, one built on injustice that dehumanizes people at every turn.

The criminalization of self-managed abortion reinforces that the criminal system targets those already experiencing unjust and racist societal structures. People who are already targets of state violence because of their race, income status, or being further along in their pregnancy have been the main targets of the 61 investigations we’ve documented. These communities are and have been most at risk for being restricted from accessing clinical care because of law or policy.

Though there has been a lot of focus on period tracker apps in recent months, we didn’t find a single instance of an app like that being used in a case. This doesn’t imply that state surveillance of data isn’t a cause for concern, but what we’ve seen is that even less sophisticated forms of data and technology – text messages and Google histories – were wielded as evidence in some of these cases.

Instead, the biggest privacy threat is other people. Law enforcement were most often contacted by healthcare professionals – people that individuals reached out to when they were in need of care during or after their abortions. This breakdown of trust and ethics in these patient-doctor relationships is alarming. When healthcare workers police their patients, it can instill fear and push them away from care.

Investigations occurred in 26 states despite the fact that only seven states historically criminalized self-managed abortion; today that number is just three (Nevada, South Carolina, and Oklahoma). This means that overzealous police and prosecutors have circumvented the law’s parameters in many states, subtly using criminal laws not meant to apply to allegations of self-managed abortion. Strikingly, regardless of whether these became the final charges, law enforcement considered applying murder or homicide charges in 43% of all 61 cases. These considerations happened twice as frequently in cases involving people of color compared to non-Hispanic white individuals. Racism and stigma infiltrated these investigations and further entrenched them in a crushing criminal process. 

Ultimately, the majority of cases proceeded and most often concluded in a guilty plea – unsurprising given how most cases are resolved in the criminal system. But almost a quarter of the cases were dropped or dismissed by either the prosecutor or court. This should motivate advocates and trained criminal defenders to force a review of the charges so clients aren’t wrongly convicted.

For anyone entangled in the criminal process, the harm lasts. Conviction or not, several people lost custody of their children temporarily or permanently. In one case, while local authorities declined to prosecute the woman after acknowledging the self-managed abortion was not unlawful, they still turned her over to immigration authorities for deportation.

Criminalization of self-managed abortion has already altered the lives of so many families. Because of abortion stigma, state actors have used their power to funnel people into systems of surveillance and control. The cases from the last twenty years show us what happens when racist and unjust systems take hold of abortion legality. Today, in the absence of Roe, as we are likely to see more and more cases of abortion criminalization, the law still matters and advocates must demand its full protection.

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

A federal judge on Monday barred enforcement of a so-called "personhood" law in Arizona that advocacy groups warned would be used to criminalize abortion across the state.

The Center for Reproductive Rights—part of the coalition that demanded and obtained the injunction—noted in a press release that the 2021 law crafted by Republican legislators "classifies fetuses, embryos, and fertilized eggs as 'people' starting at the point of conception."

"Over 80% of Arizona voters want abortion to remain legal—and we'll continue to fight for that freedom."

"The vague provision placed both providers and pregnant people at risk of arbitrary prosecution," the group said. "Amid the uncertainty surrounding the interpretation and application of the personhood law, Arizona abortion clinics in the state have suspended abortion services. Arizona's personhood law is one of several conflicting laws on the books, including a pre-Roe ban, adding to the confusion on whether abortion providers can resume services."

Judge Douglas Rayes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona expressed agreement Monday with the reproductive rights coalition's argument that the 2021 statute is overly and unlawfully vague. Arizona officials have conceded in legal filings that it's "anyone's guess" what the law's impacts would be across the state.

"When the punitive and regulatory weight of the entire Arizona code is involved, plaintiffs should not have to guess at whether their conduct is on the right or the wrong side of the law," Rayes wrote in his decision Monday.

Victoria López, director of program and strategy with the ACLU of Arizona, said that in response to the ruling that "while we're glad that the court has blocked it and that prosecutors can't use this to go after pregnant people or providers, the fight for abortion access continues."

"Arizona's personhood provision was crafted recklessly by extremist lawmakers in their harmful quest to eradicate abortion access in the state," said López. "Over 80% of Arizona voters want abortion to remain legal—and we'll continue to fight for that freedom."

The judge's decision came as pregnant people and healthcare providers in Arizona are also bracing for the looming activation of a 15-week abortion ban that Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed into law in March.

Additionally, Arizona's GOP attorney general has argued that thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a total abortion ban that's been on the books since 1901—before Arizona was a state—is now enforceable.

"The Supreme Court's catastrophic decision overturning Roe v. Wade has unleashed chaos on the ground, leaving Arizona residents scrambling to figure out if they can get the abortion care they need," said Jessica Sklarsky, senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. "People should not have to live in a state of fear when accessing or providing essential healthcare. We will continue our fight to preserve abortion access in Arizona and across the country."

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

A Return to Forced Birth in Shackles

Women prisoners at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Wilsonville, Oregon. Photo: Oregon Department of Corrections.

In the aftermath of Roe, women prisoners seeking to terminate pregnancies often had to go to court and seek injunctions forcing jail and prison officials to provide them with access to abortion services. There is a dearth of information about how many pregnant prisoners are in custody at a given time and how many have sought to terminate their pregnancies.

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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Wright.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had an immediate impact on pregnant people in Republican-controlled states with "trigger bans," more than 80 elected attorneys from around the country vowed not to prosecute individuals who seek, assist in, or provide abortion care.

"Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion care makes a mockery of justice," says a joint statement signed by 84 district attorneys and attorneys general. "Prosecutors should not be part of that."

More than half of all U.S. states are expected to end or drastically restrict legal access to abortions in the coming weeks, a process that began just minutes after the high court's right-wing justices struck down Roe in a 6-3 ruling.

"As elected prosecutors, ministers of justice, and leaders in our communities, we cannot stand by and allow members of our community to live in fear of the ramifications of this deeply troubling decision," says the statement, organized by Fair and Just Prosecution.

"Not all of us agree on a personal or moral level on the issue of abortion," says the statement, signed by prosecutors representing more than 87 million people in communities across the nation, including over 27 million in states where abortion rights have been, or will soon be, eradicated.

"But we stand together in our firm belief that prosecutors have a responsibility to refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions," the statement continues. "As such, we decline to use our offices' resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide, or support abortions."

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, said that "by cruelly and callously stripping away a 50-year-old fundamental right," the Supreme Court's reactionary majority "has undermined the legitimacy of the criminal legal system and trust in the rule of law."

"With many states now seeking to criminalize those who seek, perform, and receive abortion care, elected prosecutors are the last line of defense in protecting patients and providers from criminal charges," said Krinsky. "At this frightening and dark moment, we desperately need the bold leadership demonstrated by these signatories—and hope to see far more prosecutors across the country join this chorus."

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

While the crackdown is reflective of long-standing British foreign policy towards the Israeli regime, it is also part of a wave of legislation aiming to criminalize a wide range of social justice and political movements, with a focus on demonstrations and political actions. The British government has targeted movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) that challenge state violence, and in turn these groups have led the effort to push back against this crackdown. This repression has also spurred new solidarity and cross-movement work among targeted groups, which is increasingly apparent at demonstrations and political actions across the UK. In these spaces, Palestine solidarity activists, BLM activists, migrant and refugee activists, and climate activists, among others, are all converging in shared struggle.

While this crackdown is far reaching, this policy brief will focus on the increasingly repressive environment facing those working and organizing within Palestine solidarity spaces in the UK. It explains how this latest iteration is part of a renewed attempt to suppress protest and political expression, and spotlights successful efforts to resist this crackdown on dissent. It concludes with strategies for confronting this repression and strengthening the connections between these movements.

Consistent UK Foreign Policy Towards Zionism

Britain’s support for the Zionist project has been unwavering since its colonial inception, and British foreign policy has continually reflected this. Indeed, Britain’s political elite was comprised of ardent Christian Zionists, including Prime Minister Lloyd George, who led the coalition government at the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. This commitment to Zionism, which necessitated the denial of Palestinian national aspirations, was central to British rule throughout its thirty-year occupation of Palestine, from 1917 to 1948. British colonial authorities facilitated the immigration of tens of thousands of European Jews to Palestine and supported the establishment of Zionist institutions while repeatedly suppressing Palestinian resistance to both British rule and Zionist colonization. 

After the Israeli state was established in 1948 on more than 80% of historic Palestine, Britain continued to support the Zionist project. In the 1950s and 1960s, it secretly aided the Israeli regime in developing nuclear weapons. The UK has maintained its sale of arms to the Israeli regime throughout the decades — reaching a new peak in 2018 — despite its continuous war crimes and violations of Palestinian rights. Many of the weapons and technologies sold are then used in the Israeli regime’s deadly assaults on Gaza, which has been under military siege for over 15 years. 

While the British Labour government condemned the Israeli regime’s occupation of the rest of historic Palestine in 1967, including East Jerusalem, it maintained a strong relationship with the Israeli Labour Party, which was in government at the time. Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was an “incomprehensible” advocate of Zionism, and considered the Israeli regime a “wonderful experiment in Socialist politics.”  

The British government has long taken measures to quell Palestine solidarity activism. Recent maneuvers, however, mark a new era in British state repression
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Ironically, it was the Israeli Labour Party that would spearhead the illegal settlement enterprise in the West Bank, Gaza, and the occupied Syrian Golan. The British government has since maintained the official line that “settlements are illegal under international law” and the Israeli regime should “cease immediately” their construction. Yet it not only refuses to hold Israel accountable for these war crimes, but rewards the Israeli regime with deepening trade and diplomatic relations. Today, there are over 620,000 Israeli settlers spread across over 200 settlements in the West Bank. These settlements and their supporting infrastructure take up the majority of land in the West Bank, impinging on every aspect of Palestinian life.

Britain’s persistent endorsement of the Zionist project also figures in its current foreign policy considerations. This was articulated by former British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson, who stated in 2018 that the UK-Israel relationship is the “cornerstone of so much of what we do in the Middle East.” In other words, the Israeli regime protects the UK’s interests in the region and, in return, the UK protects the Israeli regime. Thus, while Britain’s historic ideological alignment with Zionism helps to explain the current wave of repressive measures against Palestine activism in the UK, it is likewise important to stress that it falls within the UK’s own strategic interests to do so. 

Repressive UK Government Maneuvers

The British government has long taken measures to quell Palestine solidarity activism. Recent maneuvers, however, mark a new era in British state repression and have serious repercussions for Palestine solidarity activism and allied movements.  

One of the government’s preferred tactics is to associate the Palestinian struggle for liberation with terrorism, a deliberate attempt to delegitimize the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. This accelerated following 9/11 and the US “war on terror,” which the British government supported and adopted. In 2003, as part of this approach, the British government introduced Prevent, a strategy to deal with “extremism” and to stop those who might become “terrorists” or who might support “terrorism.” In 2015, the government passed legislation that institutionalized a “Prevent Duty” in education and health sector entities, requiring professionals to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” 

According to various experts and human rights organizations, this strategy has created a serious risk of human rights violations, particularly in its targeting of “pre-criminality.” In other words, it encourages professionals within those sectors to identify potential extremists who have yet to commit a crime. The guidelines and training identify a set of signs that might suggest vulnerability to extremism, including “grievance triggered by aspects of government policy.” Unsurprisingly, Muslims have been disproportionately targeted and, in many cases, are simply reported for showing signs of adherence to Islam. Of course, most of the referrals made by professionals in these sectors are unfounded. Nonetheless, they often have very damaging consequences for those referred, including privacy violations, police interrogations, and social stigma. 

Prevent also identifies sympathies for, or interests in, Palestine as another possible sign of extremism. “Vocal support for Palestine” and “opposition to Israeli settlements” are included in a list of potential grievances for professionals to watch out for. Ironically, this runs contrary to the British government’s official policy, which claims to oppose Israeli settlements. Using the same logic, the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office would itself be reported for potential extremism. 

(Britain’s) legal maneuvers constitute a clear effort to create a chilling effect in order to deter Palestine solidarity activists and allied movements from organizing
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The detrimental effects of Prevent’s demonization of Palestine solidarity activism are abundantly clear. In 2014, a school boy was referred to counterterrorism police by his teachers for wearing a “Free Palestine” badge and handing out leaflets against the Israeli regime’s bombing of Gaza. The police interrogated the boy at his home and he was reportedly told not to speak about Palestine at school again. There are also many incidents of students on university campuses being surveilled and harassed for vocally supporting Palestine. 

In addition to the defamatory association with terrorism and extremism, Palestine solidarity activism is frequently conflated with antisemitism. Previously spearheaded by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs — a ministry established in large part to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and Palestine solidarity movements, whose work has since been merged with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — this strategic conflation has become a global phenomenon. 

In 2018, the British government adopted the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which purposely conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It states that, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour,” is a form of antisemitism. The IHRA’s definition has thus been disproportionality invoked to target Palestine solidarity groups that naturally critique the Israeli regime, while white nationalist and far-right European groups have received little attention. 

Since 2020, universities in the UK have come under pressure to adopt the IHRA definition. In October 2020, former British Education Secretary Gavin Williamson even threatened that universities could lose funding streams if they failed to do so. In many cases, universities have succumbed to the pressure, with troubling consequences. At Sheffield Hallam University, for example, Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama was suspended from her post pending an investigation into complaints from external bodies that she had broken the university’s rules on the IHRA. The investigation was soon dropped following a widespread campaign in support of Abusalama and after the university failed to substantiate the complaints. 

The IHRA definition has also been the backbone of many attacks directed at the BDS movement, and the British government has proposed legislation that directly targets it. In 2016, the government introduced “guidelines'' that denounced procurement boycotts by public bodies as “inappropriate.” Later in its 2019 general election manifesto, the Conservative Party promised to cement this into policy, pledging to “ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries.” 

While the manifesto did not explicitly mention the BDS movement, various Conservative Party politicians have made it clear where their motivations lie. For example, MP Robert Jenrick claimed in an online conference that, “Within a year or two we should… have an absolute ban on BDS here, which would be a great step forwards.” Meanwhile, Conservative MP and government-appointed Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, Eric Pickles, insisted at a conference in Jerusalem in 2019 that the BDS movement is antisemitic and that proposed legislation would not allow public bodies to divest from or boycott the Israeli regime.

It is now clear that anti-BDS legislation will be introduced in Parliament. In her May 2022 speech at the opening of Parliament, the Queen affirmed that the UK government will put forward “legislation [that] will prevent public bodies engaging in boycotts that undermine community cohesion.” Beyond curtailing the work of Palestine solidarity activists, this will also affect those wanting to pursue boycotts as a form of protest against other powers involved in human rights abuses. A statement from a group of British NGOs noted that this will “stifle a wide range of campaigns concerned with the arms trade, climate justice, human rights, international law, and international solidarity with oppressed peoples struggling for justice.”

In addition to this crackdown on boycotts, Palestine solidarity activism faces repression from legal maneuvers targeting social justice movements and vulnerable communities, including migrants and refugees. Critics are calling it a plunge towards a “police state” reality. These include the Nationality and Borders Bill, which attempts to halt immigration from certain parts of the world by criminalizing asylum seekers and introducing “offshore” processing centers, and efforts to reform and restrict the Human Rights Act — essentially allowing the government to pick and choose who has access to human rights. 

Perhaps most worrisome for political campaigns and movements is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC), which expands and extends the powers of the police and other institutional authorities. Human rights groups and activists explain that this is a massive overreach of political power and an attempt to suppress protest. Furthermore, it is “an attack on some of the most fundamental rights of citizens, in particular those from marginalised communities.” The PCSC bill gives the Home Office and police officials broad discretion to deem protests illegal and to arrest and charge attendees and organizers. A protest can be deemed illegal if it simply makes too much noise, and anyone may be arrested and charged for organizing or sharing information about protests. The bill also further criminalizes “trespassing,” which not only attempts to limit the spaces of political activity, but also directly targets nomadic Gypsy, Romany, and Traveler communities. 

In addition to arrests, punishments under the PCSC bill include lengthy prison sentences and hefty fines. Undoubtedly, this will deter many people from participating in protests and political rallies. The UK-based human rights group, Liberty, stated that the provisions in this bill will affect everyone and will dismantle “hard-won and deeply cherished rights to freely assemble and express dissent.” 

Successful Pushback and Strategies of Defense

These legal maneuvers constitute a clear effort to create a chilling effect in order to deter Palestine solidarity activists and allied movements from organizing. Yet activists have continued to push back against British state repression — and in many cases, successfully so. The following are some examples and possibilities for building further action.

The National Union of Students (NUS), with the support of allied academic staff, has historically fought back with its own strategy of “Preventing Prevent,” encouraging campuses to launch campaigns under the title “Students not Suspects.” The NUS officially opposes Prevent as a government policy and supports those who have been targeted by it. More broadly, academics and other professionals have publicly denounced Prevent, with one public letter criticizing the strategy as lacking an “evidence base in science.”

Collectives are not only able to exert greater pressure on the government, but they are rooted in the conviction of the connectedness of struggles, as well as a shared belief in resistance to oppression
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Academic institutions have likewise been the site of fierce opposition to the IHRA definition of antisemitism. In early 2021, academics at University College London published a report stating that the “specific working definition is not fit for purpose within a university setting and has no legal basis for enforcement.” Following this report, an internal academic board urged the university to reject the use of the IHRA definition and forced the university into a review of the decision to adopt it. 

Around the same time, the British Society for Middle East Studies (BRISMES) published a statement affirming that the definition has been used to delegitimize those who support Palestinian rights, and that it does not substantively contribute to the fight against racism. Other statements and actions followed, including a letter from a group of 135 Israeli academics rejecting the definition, and a letter from Palestinian and Arab academics and intellectuals published in the Guardian. This pushback against IHRA has led many universities to stand steadfast in the face of government pressures to adopt the definition.

The forging of student and academic staff alliances is key to fighting oppressive university policies, as both hold significant collective power. Crucially, academic staff can and must refuse en masse to participate in government-mandated spying on students. Educational institutions have long been sites of refusal and resistance to repressive policy, including to the silencing of Palestine solidarity activism, and must continue to be so.

Legal pushback against the delegitimization of the BDS movement has also been particularly effective. Since 2017, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), along with a coalition of allies, has fought the British government’s attempts to silence BDS in the courts. In April 2020, the PSC defeated the UK government in a landmark case at the Supreme Court. The court ruled against the aforementioned government guidelines, which restricted the ability of local government pension schemes to remove investments from companies complicit in the Israeli regime’s violation of Palestinian fundamental rights. 

The PSC’s success coincides with other successful legal interventions across Europe in pursuit of upholding the right to boycott. In 2020, a German Regional Constitutional Court ruled against an anti-BDS motion, stating that it impinged on fundamental rights. And in May 2021, a French criminal court in Lyon recognized the legitimacy of the character of the BDS call. 

Beyond BDS, the European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), an independent organization established to defend and empower Palestinian rights advocates across Europe, works to bolster the Palestine solidarity movement by combining “monitoring, defensive strategies, impact litigation, trainings and advocacy.” It also works to develop “legal tools and engage in strategic litigation to support civil society advocacy and campaigns.”

These interventions collectively create a body of legal precedence which can be used by activists and movements across the world. Indeed, PSC alluded to this significance following its court win: 

For some years Israel and its allies have been engaged in a battle to delegitimise activism for Palestinian rights and, in particular, to attempt to criminalise action in support of the Palestinian call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). The UK Government’s attempts to introduce these regulations must be understood within that context. The Government announced in the Queen’s Speech its intention to bring in further anti BDS legislation. Our victory in the Supreme Court today should act as a shot across their bows.

Beyond the rights of Palestine solidarity activists, the PSC argues that their case is also about broader threats to freedom of expression and government overreach in local democracy. Indeed, the Palestine solidarity movement is not the only target of British state repression, as demonstrated by the PCSC bill. As the bill targets a broad range of activists and movements, mobilization against it has been led by a massive coalition of allies, with British Black Lives Matter groups taking a leading role. 

Since the beginning of 2021, thousands have taken to the streets across big cities in the UK in “Kill the Bill” protests. The mass mobilization helped push the House of Lords to reject the bill twice due to grave concerns about its repressive nature. However, in a worrying development for political campaigners and social justice movements, the PCSC bill passed through Parliament on April 28, 2022.

Both the “Kill the Bill” campaign and the legal interventions in defense of the BDS movement confirm the need to fight these latest maneuvers in broad intersectional collectives. These collectives are not only able to exert greater pressure on the government, but they are rooted in the conviction of the connectedness of struggles, as well as a shared belief in resistance to oppression. 

Deputy director of the PSC, Ryvka Barnard, writes that it is this collective power “that scares our complicit government and the corporations that enjoy its carte blanche to profit from death and destruction.” Indeed, as the British government adopts police-state policies, this collective strategy is what will most effectively defend against ongoing government repression and lay the foundation for future struggle. 

The post Criminalizing Palestine Solidarity Activism in the UK appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Yara Hawari.

The British government’s support for Zionism has remained unwavering for over a century. Beyond its 1917 promise to the Zionists to establish a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, Britain consistently assisted the Israeli regime militarily, from developing nuclear weapons to ongoing arms sales. Although the British government has maintained an official opposition to Israeli settlements since 1967, it refuses to hold Israel accountable and even rewards the Israeli regime with deepening trade and diplomatic relations. This is a clear outcome of not only Britain’s historic ideological alignment with Zionism, but also its own foreign policy priorities in the Middle East.

In line with these policies, the British government has long taken measures to quell Palestine solidarity activism. However, recent maneuvers mark a new era in British state repression and have serious repercussions for Palestine solidarity activism and allied movements. One of the goverment’s preferred tactics is to associate the Palestinian struggle for liberation with terrorism. In 2003, as part of this approach, the British government introduced Prevent, a strategy to deal with “extremism.” Prevent targets “pre-criminality” and requires professionals in health and education sectors to identify potential extremists who have yet to commit a crime.

Despite the fact that most referrals made by professionals are unfounded, they have damaging consequences for those referred, and Muslims have been disproportionately targeted. Prevent also identifies sympathies or interests in Palestine as another possible sign of extremism, and the effects of this are already clear: schoolchildren have been interrogated by the police, and university students have been surveilled and harassed. 

In addition to the defamatory association with terrorism and extremism, Palestine solidarity activism is frequently conflated with antisemitism. In 2018, the British government adopted the 2016 International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which purposely conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Since 2020, universities in the UK have come under pressure to adopt the IHRA definition, with the government threatening to revoke funding streams if they failed to do so. Many universites have succumbed to pressure, and as a result, Palestinian academics face a heightened risk of losing their positions. 

Beyond the IHRA, the British government has taken legislative steps to limit the right to boycott, a direct threat to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In 2016, the government introduced “guidelines'' that denounced procurement boycotts by public bodies as “inappropriate.” These attacks have only escalated in more recent years, and anti-boycott legislation is set to be introduced in Parliament — a step that would jeopardize the work of a wide range of social justice campaigns.

Palestine solidarity activism also faces repression from legal maneuvers targeting social justice movements and vulnerable communities. Perhaps most worrisome is the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC), which gives the Home Office and police forces broad discretion to deem protests illegal and to arrest and charge attendees and organizers.

Facing this new wave of state-led repression, activists have continued to push back — and in many cases, successfully so. This work offers a blueprint to defend against ongoing government repression and lay the foundation for future struggle.

• On university campuses, the forging of student and academic staff alliances is key to fighting oppressive policies. Academic staff can and must refuse en masse to participate in government-mandated spying on students, and likewise can push universities to reject the use of the IHRA definition.
• Legal pushback against the delegitimization of the BDS movement has been particularly effective. In the UK, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and a coalition of allies have fought the British government’s attempts to silence BDS in the courts, and legal interventions across Europe have been similarly successful. Activists and social justice movements can and should draw upon this new body of legal precedence.

• Palestine activists should continue to mobilize against the PCSC and other government maneuvers in broad intersectional collectives. These collectives are not only able to exert greater pressure on the government, but they are rooted in the conviction of the connectedness of struggles, as well as a shared belief in resistance to oppression. 

The post Criminalizing Palestine Solidarity Activism in the UK appeared first on Al-Shabaka.

This content originally appeared on Al-Shabaka and was authored by Yara Hawari.

The post Taking Aim at Criminalizing Russia: Stephen Cohen Challenges A Rampant Mania appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Welton.

On February 23, the Commission of Justice and Human Rights unanimously approved a bill that would amend several articles of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the penal code regarding “effective collaborators,” according to media reports and a statement by the Lima-based regional group Institute of Press and Society (IPYS). An “effective collaborator” is someone who agrees to provide evidence for the prosecution in return for judicial lenience, although they are not always subject to the criminal investigation or proceeding, according to the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office.

Under the proposed changes in the bill, anyone who reveals, even partly, the identity of an “effective collaborator” or the content of their testimony faces a prison sentence of between four and six years.

“The Peruvian Congress must reject this bill about ‘effective collaborators,’ as it risks criminalizing reporting based on leaked information from informants cooperating in criminal investigations,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in New York. “A blanket prohibition on the publication of information stemming from the testimonies of informants, which can be of clear public interest, is incompatible with freedom of the press.” 

In the past, informants’ testimonies have been leaked to journalists who then undertake their own investigations, according to Adriana León, director of Information Freedoms at IPYS, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app. León added that these testimonies were essential for the investigative reporting done by the Peruvian press in uncovering corruption in the country, especially in the well-known Lava Jato/Odebrecht and Montesinos cases.

The proposal is now ready for debate and vote before the plenary session of Congress, which could happen at any time now, according to León.

CPJ contacted the Peruvian Congress for comment by email, but the request went unanswered.

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