Jonathan P. Baird

I saw that after 37 years behind bars Jaan Laaman was released from federal prison. The name Jaan Laaman would likely not be known by younger people but there are some older people who might remember.

Laaman was a 1960’s radical. He grew up in a blue collar family in Roxbury, Massachusetts and later in Buffalo, New York. Early on, he developed a sense of solidarity with black people. As a teenager he got locked up for a non-political crime. He did some time in prison and he said he became more aware of what life was like for victims of the capitalist system.

Upon his release, he later went to Cornell and UNH and he joined Students for a Democratic Society, the radical student organization of that era. He became a full-time activist and he supported the Black Liberation and anti-war movements.

In 1971, he spoke at an anti-war rally. The authorities charged him with a parole violation for his talk and they sent him to Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Laaman served a period of time at Attica before the September 1971 prison riot. There he met Sam Melville, another radical.

Melville had been party to multiple bombings of government and corporate offices. He was linked to the Weather Underground. Melville was one of the leaders of the Attica uprising. He was seen alive after the uprising was put down by the state police but two days later his name showed up on a list of prisoners killed during the riot. Thirty three prisoners and ten hostages died.

It is hard to know how much Melville’s example affected Laaman. He was close to Melville. Possibly he was already connected to underground clandestine work.

After Laaman got out, he again got into trouble. In 1972, the police arrested him for bombing a Richard Nixon for President Headquarters building and a police station in New Hampshire. No one was injured in these bombings except Laaman who hurt his hand. The state convicted Laaman for the bombings and he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He won early release in 1978 after winning on appeal. He served over five years in New Hampshire State Prison.

During his time in the New Hampshire State Prison, Laaman shook the place. He brought seven legal actions against the prison. The Court described Laaman as an “able, prolific and often successful jailhouse lawyer”. Laaman operated a legal clinic for prisoners. In a published opinion, the Court went on about Laaman:

“He has served as an elected inmate representative since 1973 when he helped establish a formal grievance procedure, and has continuously acted informally as a spokesperson and mediator for other prisoners. He has been an officer in the New England Prisoners’ Association and has attempted to establish a prisonwide newspaper at NHSP…Laaman is popular among the inmates and evidences a genuine concern for them…He writes personal letters for the semi-literate, speaks on behalf of men who can’t talk, and demands the things he feels are right and needed.”

Laaman’s case turned into a class action, Laaman v Helgemoe, to improve the living conditions, treatment and programs available at the New Hampshire State Prison. In 1975, Federal Judge Hugh Bownes appointed New Hampshire Legal Assistance as counsel for the prisoners. A number of pro see individual cases were consolidated into the case.

Legal Assistance challenged the totality of prison conditions including visitation and mail privileges, work, education and rehabilitation opportunities, medical care, harassment of the named plaintiffs and overall conditions and practices. It was an everything but the kitchen sink lawsuit.

Judge Bownes ruled that the conditions and treatment accorded prisoners at NHSP violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The Court entered a comprehensive order to address the many unconstitutional conditions at NHSP. In a section of the court order entitled “Debilitating Conditions”, Judge Bownes wrote:

“..Deep anger and hatred of the society that relegates prisoners in the name of reform to cages with nothing to do, frustration and hostility engendered by false promises, and the loss of pride and self-esteem inherent in such a degrading experience spawn antiauthoritarian and often violent criminal behavior. Time at NHSP costs a man more than part of his life; it robs him of his skills, his ability to cope with society in a civilized manner, and, most importantly, his essential human dignity. Degeneration is hastened at NHSP by the impediments placed in the way of inmates who try to gain something positive during their imprisonment.”

A 38 page consent decree approved by the judge ordered creation and implementation of a classification system, protection for inmates from violence and aggression, adequate sanitation, medical care and mental health care, and meaningful vocational and educational opportunities. The Court recognized that idleness was negative and found a requirement that inmates obtain rehabilitation opportunities.

For over three decades, New Hampshire Legal Assistance continued to vigorously enforce the terms of the consent decree. Consent decrees are not self-executing. Without vigorous enforcement, things backslide.

I do not think it is appreciated now how significant the Laaman case has been. Before Laaman and cases in other states like it, federal courts had a hands-off approach and prisoners’ rights were very narrowly circumscribed. A very punitive mentality reigned both in the courts and prisons.

This was captured by George Jackson, the prison writer and revolutionary, who wrote in his book Soledad Brother:

“Most [prison] policy is formulated in a bureau that operates under the heading Department of Corrections. But what can we say about these asylums since none of the inmates are ever cured. Since in every instance they are sent out of the prisons more damaged physically and mentally than when they entered. Because that is the reality.”

Judicial attitudes did change in response to prisoners’ efforts to improve conditions through litigation. While the Laaman case did not create a constitutional right to rehabilitation, it did recognize that inmates had a right to be incarcerated in conditions which did not threaten their sanity and were not counterproductive to their efforts to rehabilitate themselves.

After Laaman got out of NHSP, he moved to Boston and he worked as a community organizer. He opposed South African apartheid and U.S. imperialism in Central America. He helped organize the Amandla music festival held at Harvard Stadium in July 1979 where Bob Marley and the Wailers headlined.

Laaman later went underground again. The police charged him with seditious conspiracy although that charge did not go forward. He ended up convicted of five bombings, one attempted bombing and criminal conspiracy. Sentenced to 53 years in prison, he served 37 years.

In his last prison stint, Laaman taught meditation classes and yoga. As a yoga practitioner, he initiated a yoga class for people with disabilities, those with limited mobility and those wheelchair-bound.

Progressives now seem more about prison abolition and ending mass incarceration than they do about improving conditions of people still confined.

I think that is a mistake because so many remain incarcerated. The Laaman consent decree helped to break the cycle of incarceration and offered vocational opportunities that helped re-entry to society. Back in 1977 there were 261 prisoners in NHSP. In 2020 there were 2283. The provisions of the Laaman consent decree have helped countless inmates. That is an undeniable legacy.

I just wanted to share this song “We are still here” composed by Joe DeFilippo and performed by the R.J. Phillips Band, a group of Baltimore musicians.

https://soundcloud.com/hillipsand/we-are-still-here

Even before Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election, Trump whined that the election was rigged. He spouted wild unsupported conspiracy theories that the election would be corrupted by mail-in ballots. Before the 2016 election Trump did essentially the same thing except then he ended up winning.

When he did lose in 2020, Trump’s response was to manufacture a monstrous lie. Out of no evidence, he created the Big Lie the election was stolen. Trump has repeated the Big Lie religiously so that he could transform reality to resemble his lies. He and his allies have worked to purge Republicans who do not buy into his fiction.

Unlike almost all presidents in U.S. history who accepted the will of the voters, Trump embarked on a non-stop campaign to overturn a democratic election. Never accepting the peaceful transfer of power, Trump worked single-mindedly between November 2020 and January 2021 to find a way to install himself as a dictator. He never conceded.

After he lost, he demonstrated a loss of interest in the job of being president. His energies fixated on how he could maintain power because losing was inconceivable for him. Trump’s cumulative actions added up to a multi-pronged offensive against democracy. When his non-violent schemes failed, he opted for violence.

The stages can now be clearly delineated. When Trump’s court strategy failed, he turned to state legislatures. When that failed, he attempted to manipulate the Department of Justice and the military. When every strategy he tried could not get the job done, he resorted to a violent insurrection on January 6 to prevent certification of the Electoral College vote.

Trump’s coup attempt, which has been joked about as inept, came uncomfortably close to success. If Mike Pence, Jeffrey Rosen or General Mark Milley had acted differently, the election might have been thrown into the House of Representatives, with uncertain results. For those who doubt there was a legitimate coup danger, closer scrutiny of the events between November 2020-January 2021 are in order.

After the election, the Trump legal team filed 60 federal lawsuits focused on swing states. These frivolous lawsuits were laughed out of court, even by Trump-appointed judges. Trump made zero headway. His colorful cast of lawyers, including some genuine nutcases, violated professional ethics by repeatedly making false statements of fact to multiple tribunals.

Trump then tried to bully and threaten state election officials, governors and state legislators to do his bidding. A litany of death threats and threats of physical harm directed against election officials has continued since last November. We have had the Arizona audit and Trump pleading with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find 11,780 votes”. The solicitation of election fraud is almost certainly a crime.

Trying to get friendly state legislatures to appoint electors may turn out to be one of the most dangerous legacies of Trump’s efforts. As a minority party, Republicans are looking at ways to maintain their power beyond voting. Unlike earlier authoritarians, Republicans suppress votes rather than entirely eliminating the right to vote.

In the future, Republican lawyers will be arguing the “independent state legislature doctrine” to justify the power of state legislatures to run elections as they see fit. It is a possible vehicle for overturning close elections. Instead of votes deciding elections, state legislatures conceivably will.

Trump treated the Department of Justice as if it was his private play thing, not a non-partisan law firm. Although Attorney General William Barr was a sycophant who always went along with his boss, when he disputed Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud, that was the end for him. Trump replaced Barr with Jeffrey Rosen whom Trump badgered daily. Trump sought investigation of election conspiracy theories including satellite interference from Italy and Dominion Voting System improprieties.

In a December 27 call, Trump urged Rosen to make a false declaration. According to Rosen’s deputy Richard Donaghue, Trump said, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R. Congressmen”. Trump wanted to create the appearance of wrong-doing. He intended to use Rosen to nullify the election.

Behind Rosen’s back, Trump also conspired with Rosen’s underling, Jeffrey Clark. Trump wanted to replace Rosen with Clark as Attorney General because Clark was willing to play ball with Trump’s criminal games.

On December 27, Clark produced a letter he wanted Rosen and Donaghue to sign. Following Trump’s lead, Clark wanted to bypass Georgia’s governor and call the Georgia state legislature into session to reject Biden electors and appoint Trump electors. Rosen and Donaghue would not go along.

White House lawyer Pat Cipillone persuaded Trump not to fire Rosen. If Trump had fired Rosen and replaced him with Clark, the entire senior leadership of the Justice Department was poised to resign en masse.

We also now know that the former U.S. Attorney in Georgia, Byung Pak, a Trump appointee, was told he would be fired if he refused to say there was election fraud in Georgia. He abruptly resigned on January 4.

Trump clashed with General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who worried Trump might call on the armed forces to decide the outcome of the 2020 election. Trump was replacing senior officials at the Pentagon with his loyalists. General Milley compared November 2020 with 1933 when Hitler used an attack on the German Parliament to establish a Nazi dictatorship. Milley said, “This is a Reichstag moment”.

After the December 12 pro-Trump demonstration in Washington D.C. protesting the Supreme Court not coming to his rescue, Trump tweeted on December 19: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”.

Probably the most cogent statement made about January 6 comes from Capitol Police Sgt. Harry Dunn. When he testified before the House select committee investigating January 6, he said:

“If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, the hitman goes to jail. But not only the hitman goes to jail, the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6. And a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

Take your pick on the crimes Trump has committed: solicitation of election fraud, conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding (Electoral College certification), violation of the Hatch Act and inciting insurrection jump out. Failure to prosecute likely guarantees a repeat performance in the future by Trump or a Trump clone. You don’t have to be a cynic to wonder if our legal system is up to the task.

With Trump we have a cult leader who incited a violent and deadly insurrection. He presents himself as some kind of national savior to his followers. He has promoted a culture of hatred and dehumanization against immigrants and an utter disregard for the rule of law. Believing himself above the law, he has no hesitation in trying to steamroll any obstacles in his path to power. This behavior is far more consistent with the fascist strongman tradition than any kind of conservatism.

Nobody should be reassured that we barely escaped this time.

Back in April, I wrote an article about Attorney Steven Donziger’s fight with the oil giant, Chevron. The story is a model for how a powerful corporation can corrupt our legal process and try and buy results. As Donziger has said, “I’m like a corporate political prisoner”.

In 2011, Donziger, a human rights attorney, had won an epic two-decades long lawsuit against Chevron. Back between 1964-1992, Chevron, previously Texaco, had dumped 16 billion gallons of benzene-laden oil waste into the forest, rivers and streams of Ecuador. On behalf of 30,000 indigenous people of Ecuador, Donziger and a team of attorneys won an unprecedented $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. The judgment has been upheld by both the Supreme Court of Ecuador and Canada.

Since April there have been some significant developments in the Donziger-Chevron saga. In July, the federal court in New York found Donziger guilty of six charges of criminal contempt. Donziger has already served more than 700 days of home confinement with an ankle bracelet and he is looking at an additional six month jail term with sentencing on October 1.

Donziger is the only lawyer in U.S. history to be deprived of his liberty pre-trial on a misdemeanor charge. He is also the only person ever charged in the U.S. with criminal contempt for appealing a court order related to discovery in a civil case.

Chevron has pursued a scorched earth strategy against Donziger. To divert attention from their environmental crimes, they have demonized and attempted to destroy him. That may sound like hyperbole but it is not.

Chevron hired private investigators to track Donziger. They created a publication to smear his reputation. With their virtually unlimited resources they put together a legal team of hundreds of lawyers from 60 law firms to try and ruin Donziger and they have done real damage.

Donziger cannot work, travel, earn money or leave his home. He has been disbarred, had his passport seized, and his bank accounts have been frozen. He now has a lien on his apartment where he lives in New York. Donziger owes enormous court fines and costs and he remains under house arrest.

Chevron had filed a Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations or RICO lawsuit against Donziger. The case is before Federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former tobacco company lawyer. Kaplan once described Chevron as:

“..a company of considerable importance to our economy that employs thousands all over the world, that supplies a group of commodities, gasoline, heating oil, other fuels and lubricants on which everyone of us depends every single day.”

Chevron had originally sought $60 billion in damages against Donziger. Two weeks before trial Chevron dropped the monetary claim entirely to deny Donziger a jury trial. They wanted the case before Kaplan. With the money claim gone, Kaplan had the option to deny Donziger’s request for a jury trial and he did that.

The Court charged Donziger with contempt for refusing to hand over his computer, cellphone and other electronic devices. Donziger did not comply, citing client confidentiality, as identification of his clients could place them in great danger. When Judge Kaplan asked the U.S. Attorney to prosecute the contempt, the U.S. Attorney refused the prosecution.

While corporate power had already turned the tables on Donziger, here is the point where things went sideways. Instead of random assignment of judges as required by local court rules, Judge Kaplan handpicked another judge, Loretta Preska, to preside over the contempt case. Under an unusual procedure, Kaplan also appointed a private law firm, Seward and Kissel, as prosecutors since the U.S. Attorney had declined to prosecute the alleged contempt.

The appointed private law firm, Seward and Kissel, had and has a disqualifying conflict of interest as they had a direct tie to Chevron. Chevron had been their client as recently as 2018 but that was not disclosed until months into trial. Still, Seward and Kissel remain as prosecutors.

As for the judge handpicked by Kaplan, Loretta Preska, she is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that has received funding from Chevron. As Kaplan had done, Preska also denied Donziger’s request for a jury trial. At the trial she denied virtually all the objections of Donziger’s defense team while sustaining all prosecution objections. Martin Garbus, one of Donziger’s lawyers, said this about Kaplan picking Preska:

“He knows in choosing her, he is choosing the one judge in the Southern District, perhaps, who is going to go after Steven in the worst possible way. And Kaplan was exactly right”.

Prosecution witnesses in Donziger’s contempt trial included attorneys from Gibson Dunn, a law firm which had represented Chevron in litigation against Donziger.

What we have is the hijacking of a legal proceeding by a hugely powerful corporation that uses its massive resources to crush an environmental activist lawyer. Changing the subject away from its environmental crimes has been an effective strategy. The company will do anything to avoid paying the $9.5 billion court judgment.

The punishment Donziger is suffering is crazily out of whack to any standard of fairness. It is off the charts and it is Chevron sending a message to all its adversaries, current and potential: cross us and you will pay. Lengthy home arrest and jail time for a lawyer under these circumstances is beyond unusual.

Donziger’s lawyer, Martin Garbus, is famous for his trial skills, for being a civil libertarian and for having vast experience as an international lawyer. He said:

“I have seen many, many oppressive judges, and I have seen many, many rigged court systems. The way this is rigged is peculiar and amazing in New York. Nothing like this has ever happened before in the American legal system.”

Donziger is, of course, appealing the contempt charges and he remains hopeful about his chances on appeal. He is also fighting his disbarment. Many have raised public questions about these proceedings including Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, former Federal Judge Nancy Gertner and former Federal Judge Mark Bennett.

The Donziger prosecution reflects a deep tension and a corrosive passivity within our legal system. The other side of the coin from the legal system’s failure to enforce judgments against a climate-ruining corporation is the hyper-persecution of activist lawyers like Donziger.

Edward Abbey once said, “There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed”. With its role in climate destruction, that speaks directly to Chevron. As a society, we are failing to respond to the real dangers.

Maybe readers have seen those stories about the mass graves of Indian children found at boarding schools in Canada and the United States. The remains of thousands of children have been found around the school sites and more unmarked mass graves keep appearing.

Beyond superficial apologies, the explanations given do not do justice to the scale of the crimes committed.

Native American history, as conventionally told, has big gaps. One gap is the story of how between 1869-1978 the federal government removed hundreds of thousands of Native American children, some as young as five, from their parents. By 1926, 83% of Indian school age children were attending boarding school.

Since Trump’s election in 2016, family separation became a big issue but the problem has very deep, under-appreciated roots in American history. That history has been erased.

After the violent removal of Native Americans from their land by white settlers and the creation of reservations, Native children became subject to a policy that was called “assimilation”. It was actually cultural genocide.

First started by Christian missionaries, boarding schools required Native American children to be educated according to Anglo-American standards. Federal law mandated the education. Nationally, 350 boarding schools came into existence. The schools attempted to divest the children of their Native identities.

As the founder of Carlisle Indian School, the first government-run, off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans, Richard Henry Pratt expressed it, the goal was “kill the Indian, save the man”. He desired to take children at a young age, remove them from family and eradicate Indian culture.

Before starting Carlisle, Pratt, a U.S. Army lieutenant, ran a prison school for Indians in Florida that focused on destroying culture, language and family connection as a means to assimilate Native children into mainstream American life.

The schools gave the children new names. They stripped the children of their clothing and forced them to wear military style uniforms. The schools made the children cut their long hair, forbid them from speaking their Native American languages and prevented them from practicing their religion. The children were physically punished for being caught speaking Native languages.

The schools told the children that what their parents practiced would send them to hell. They were forced to adapt Christianity. The indoctrination was intended to make the children ashamed to be Native Americans.

Pratt also saw family separation as a strategy to control the adults in tribes. In a letter he wrote in 1879 to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Pratt said that he took the children of tribal leaders to the boarding school because their parents “will be restrained by that fact and invited to seek for themselves a better state of civilization”.

The colonialist mentality saw stripping away Native identity as part of the process of bringing Native people from savagery to civilization. A similar process went on in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There was significant resistance by Native people. Families that refused to cooperate were jailed. The boarding schools discouraged close family proximity and they were typically located far from reservations. Many children tried to escape. If captured they were beaten and whipped. They also were subject to other harsh punishment like solitary confinement.

Why so many children died at the schools remains something of a mystery although it is easy to speculate. Illness and suicide were two reasons. Some who tried to escape died trying. It is impossible to know the numbers.

In June, Interior Secretary Debra Haaland, the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, ordered a federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to recover the histories of the institutions. Secretary Haaland wants the investigation to identify the children who attended and their tribal affiliations. She also wants to find records of cemeteries or burial sites that may contain unidentified human remains.

Haaland herself has a connection to Carlisle Indian School. Her great-grandfather was removed from his family and sent to Carlisle. Haaland said, “I am a product of these horrific assimilationist policies”. In requesting the Initiative, she wrote:

“Survivors of the traumas of boarding school policies carried their memories into adulthood as they became the aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents to subsequent generations…The loss of those who did not return left an enduring need in their families for answers that, in many cases, were never provided.”

There was a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the schools. It is hard to get a handle on the extent of the abuse because the issue of abuse was not recognized in that era. Stories come from survivor interviews.

Along with the federal government, Christian churches and especially the Catholic Church played an integral role in the boarding schools. Under the Civilization Fund Act, Christian missionaries and other “persons of good moral character” were charged with introducing Native children to “the habits and arts of civilization”.

The Native boarding schools were poorly funded and overcrowded. They were infamous for inadequate food, poor health care and neglect. Infections often would sweep through dirty dorms.

The schools had an Outing program where students were lent to non-Native patrons who exploited them as low-cost labor. Patrons paid the school for the student’s services but they did not pay the students who typically performed domestic or farm work.

Many schools failed to keep accurate records of student deaths. If they were notified at all, parents of those students who died were often notified after the child’s burial. When students died, classmates were sometimes forced to bury the bodies in mass graves.

This history has been hidden. Christine McCleave, the chief executive officer of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, estimates that fewer than 10% of the U.S. public knows anything about the history of Indian boarding schools in this country.

I would mention that family separation did not end with the decline of Indian boarding schools. Between 1941-1967, a shockingly high number of American Indian children, as many as one-third, were forcibly removed from their families and were permanently placed in homes with white parents.

Unlike Canada, the United States has failed to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to consider these matters. Nor has it ever acknowledged or addressed its role in the cultural genocide of Native American children. Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill that would create a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy but it died in Congress when it was first introduced. Sen. Warren plans to re-introduce the legislation.

In considering the widely-recognized problems in Native American communities like substance abuse and suicide, the context of cultural genocide and its legacy is typically missed. Traumatic childhood experiences disrupt brain development and can lead to negative health outcomes for adults. We as a society need to stop blaming and start listening. Truth-telling about cultural genocide has barely begun.

One puzzling aspect of the conservative attack on critical race theory is why it is happening now. Why in 2021 are states passing laws to inhibit and prevent free and open exploration of racism and slavery? All of a sudden in the last year conservatives and FOX got hot and bothered about it.

I think it is part of a national effort to control the narrative about our racial history. Since the George Floyd protests, conservatives are afraid and they want to reassert a sanitized version of history told from a white supremacist point of view. Fearing replacement by multi-racial democracy, they double down on voter suppression and 21st century Jim Crow.

Just as they did with the 1619 Project, conservatives needed to create a bogeyman and critical race theory serves that purpose.

A national opinion poll taken by Reuters/Ipsos found 57% of adults were unfamiliar with the term critical race theory. Many of those who claimed familiarity embraced misconceptions spread by conservative media outlets. It is a certainty that many who are using the term “critical race theory” have no clue what it is.

The campaign against critical race theory can only have a chilling effect on classroom speech. It will inhibit teachers and students who may wonder if their ideas have strayed over some Maginot line. It is highly likely many teachers will censor themselves to avoid being reported and getting into trouble.

The new laws limiting the teaching of critical race theory are almost certainly an unconstitutional infringement on free speech.

In considering why critical race theory is now under attack, a historical parallel comes to mind. Nineteenth century white supremacists, who also wanted to control the historical narrative, castigated abolitionist educators in a fashion similar to modern-day conservatives opposing critical race theory.

Before the abolition of slavery, the story of nineteenth century American life was contested terrain. Slavers and abolitionists embodied opposites sides of the coin. One side saw a noble order sanctioned by god; the other side saw a monstrous and unacknowledged evil.

Slavery was not just a political and economic order – it had ideological underpinnings and justification. Much of the ideological battle around slavery has been forgotten.

The South lived in fear of slave rebellion and insurrection. The Haitian revolution especially stirred slave resistance. The southern states believed it was critical to prevent black men and women from becoming literate. Knowledge could encourage independence and free thought.

In the 1830’s, new laws prohibited slaves from learning to read and write. Black illiteracy was considered essential to the internal security of the slave South. All slave states except Maryland, Kentucky and Tennessee passed laws against teaching slaves to read and write.

The historian Patrick Breen wrote, “Anti-literacy laws were written in response to the rise of abolitionism in the north”. Alabama passed a law in 1833 that read:

“..any person or persons who shall attempt to teach any free person of color, or slave, to spell, read or write shall upon conviction thereof indictment be fined in a sum not less than two hundred and fifty dollars nor more than five hundred dollars.” (The fine would be equivalent to $7600 in today’s dollars)

Those slaves who learned reading and writing had to be extremely careful. Slaveowners were known to cut off thumbs or fingers for that offense.

The South was frightened by abolitionists like David Walker who distributed the Appeal, a pamphlet calling for uprisings to end slavery and by William Lloyd Garrison who published the Liberator, a newspaper committed to freedom for the enslaved. Garrison called for the immediate uncompensated abolition of slavery. Southerners greatly feared the possibility of an interracial abolitionist movement.

In 1835, the Anti-Slavery Society flooded the South with abolitionist literature through a postal campaign. The postal campaign provoked a very hostile response with a massive public burning of abolitionist literature in Charleston, South Carolina.

The story the South told was about the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon institutions. Slavery was touted as normal and natural. Black people were disparaged as irresponsible, child-like, incapable of self-control and ignorant. Black people were allegedly grateful and content with their position as slaves.

North Carolina passed laws aimed at suppressing slave rebellions by repressing the spread of abolitionist literature. An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications made it a felony to import and distribute “any written or printed pamphlet or paper…the evident tendency whereof would be to excite insurrections, conspiracy or resistance”.

In 1829, Georgia also passed a law which made circulating insurrectionary texts punishable by death.

While we have moved beyond opposing black literacy, the conservative response to critical race theory is very much like the opposition to abolitionism. Then it was fear of slave resistance, now it is fear of Black Lives Matter.

The abolitionists had circulated books and leaflets providing true accounts of life under slavery. Critical race theorists write books about systemic racism and how racism is deeply interwoven into housing, education, health care, policing and all walks of life. Invested in a whitewashed version of our past, conservatives have no time for any anti-racist narrative. They act like critical race theory is some kind of extremism which is exactly the way 19th century southerners saw abolitionism.

The common thread is a fear that abolitionism and critical race theory provoked and provoke unrest among the oppressed.That was and is a threat to white supremacy.

Although Black Lives Matter has been an overwhelmingly peaceful movement, conservatives have responded with anti-protest legislation. Back in their day, the slave states did similarly.

Just as happened almost 200 years ago, conservatives say anti-racists are motivated by hate. Slaveowners and white supremacists said the same about abolitionists and portrayed them as fanatics.

The mistake made is the idea that critical race theory has anything to do with hating white people. It does not. Critical race theory only tries to understand structures of racism and how they operate in society.

America still has a deep white supremacy problem. Consistent anti-racists can see that the fight today is a continuation of the same fight the abolitionists fought, just a different permutation.

There is deep cynicism about the ultra wealthy evading taxes. People expect it. Still, it was disconcerting to read ProPublica’s story about how the ultra wealthy are still gaming the system to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

I am reminded of an old quote from Eugene V. Debs:

“There is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through.”

The whales, in earlier days known as robber barons, play by their own rules. ProPublica shows that many of our richest citizens have figured ways to pay no or minimal taxes. To name a few, Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011; Elon Musk paid no taxes in 2018; and Carl Icahn paid no taxes in 2016 and 2017.

ProPublica obtained tax data on tax returns of thousands of the wealthiest Americans for over fifteen years. The pattern shows that the wealthiest pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the many millions their fortunes grew.

To the extent there is a debate over taxes it is mostly about incremental changes at the top of the tax rate. For individuals the debate is whether the high end rate should jump from 37% to 39.6%. For corporations, the rate may jump from 21% to 28%. The corporate rate was 35% before 2018.

While the income generated by these possible tax increases on the very wealthy would be much needed tax revenue, these discussions miss a bigger picture.

The IRS taxes income rather than assets like stock holdings or property. The value of stocks and property are not defined as taxable income until they are sold. As a result, much wealth escapes any IRS scrutiny. Determining the value of stocks and property would no doubt be extremely contentious but it is doable by some kind of fair and objective criteria.

The phenomena of extreme income inequality is a defining feature of our era. Over the last 16 months since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the combined wealth of 713 U.S. billionaires increased by $1.8 trillion, a gain of almost 60 percent. This increase happened at the same time the net worth of working Americans lagged.

The tax system in America is failing to come to grips with the reality of the economic inequality and the ways the ultra wealthy have maneuvered assets. Because wealth is accumulated outside the narrow realm of income, the IRS ignores it. It is like the IRS misses the boat because it is set up to address a time that no longer exists. It is not allowed to look in the right places.

ProPublica compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid between 2014-2018 compared to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in the same time period. The IRS records show the ultra wealthy paid only a tiny fraction of their wealth increase.

With their fleet of lawyers, the ultra wealthy have devised an array of techniques to get around the tax system. Minimizing salaries and income, holding onto stock in their companies, not paying dividends, deductions, wealth stored in off shore accounts and using loans are all legal ways the ultra wealthy have devised to minimize their tax burden.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse have demanded an investigation by the Senate Finance Committee into the ultra wealthy tax avoidance. In a letter to the Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, they write:

“…tax avoidance by the nation’s wealthiest individuals is profoundly unfair. It leaves the nation unable to pay for critical investments in infrastructure, education and health care. It favors investment income over wages, distorting our nation’s economy and adding to inequality. And it leaves low-income and middle class families paying an unfair tax burden.”

Warren and Whitehouse are also sponsoring an “ultra millionaire tax” to tax the wealthiest 100,000 households. The tax would include a 2% tax on households and trusts between $50 million and $1 billion. It would also feature an additional 1% annual surtax on the net worth of households and trusts over $1 billion.

A wealth tax at least considers a truer picture of the ultra wealthy and their schemes. It creates a mechanism for addressing wealth that has been stowed away in off-limits locations.

Since the ProPublica story broke, much media has focused on the fact that the unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information is illegal. ProPublica has not disclosed how it obtained the tax info. Republicans especially have expressed outrage about illegal violation of billionaires’ privacy. But Democrats barely had a better response. Neither party was outraged that billionaires have cheated the public by paying no or absurdly low taxes.

I am at a loss what harm occurs from the release of tax returns of the ultra wealthy. ProPublica noted that the Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland all regularly make public the tax returns of all citizens.

The IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig testified earlier this year that the government may be failing to collect more than $1 trillion of the taxes it is owed annually. The IRS has been starved of funding for years, crippling their ability to enforce tax law. Audits of the rich have plummeted. Poor people are now more likely to be audited than the ultra wealthy which is a travesty. The weakness of the IRS is not an accident – it has been de-clawed by the lobbyist tools of the super-rich.

When Jeff Bezos and other billionaires shoot themselves into space, maybe it is partly about obscuring the fact they do not pay fair taxes on the earth. For those old enough to remember, it is reminiscent of Gil Scott-Heron singing “Whitey on the moon”.

Normalizing tax evasion by the ultra wealthy is pathological. Maybe we are worn down by outrage fatigue but it is only fundamental fairness that those who can afford to pay the most at least pay their fair share.

When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is ultimately written, it will be seen as a failure of public health. There is broad agreement among scientists that hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily. The Lancet estimated 40% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths were avoidable.

Explaining why the deaths did happen is a story that has been inadequately told. It goes far beyond inept and negligent leadership by the Trump Administration. The story is fundamentally about how Trump subordinated public health to his presidential campaign for re-election. Protecting the country from the virus was less important than winning re-election.

Optics meant everything to Trump and his administration’s response to COVID-19 was a model for what not to do in the face of a public health emergency. In their book Nightmare Scenario, Washington Post reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta chronicle the Trump COVID-19 response through the last year of his administration.

Early on in January 2020, Trump minimized the virus and said “we have it totally under control”. Abutaleb and Paletta say Trump thought he could will the virus away:

“The key to willing it away was to ensure that his public remarks conveyed no concern, no apprehension. His life, in public and private, was built on a stack of fakes and lies, an amoral brazenness that gave him a decided advantage over his adversaries…He would use the same tactic on this virus, this microbe, this tiny thing no one could see.”

Trump refused to believe the virus would come to America. For months, he repeatedly said the virus was just going to magically disappear.

When it did not disappear, he focused on creating the impression that virus numbers were minimal. Abutaleb and Paletta say Trump saw the U.S. case count like a golf score he wanted to keep low. He did not want infected passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess to disembark in America because it would double his COVID-19 numbers.

Trump actually suggested sending the ill passengers, most of whom were elderly, to Guantanamo Bay. His aides killed the idea because they realized sending elderly sick people to Gitmo was a birdbrain idea.

Trump saw the virus as a messaging problem and he wanted to control the message. In the early months of 2020 the message was: this is going away. He blamed testing for making him look bad. From his perspective, the more testing, the more cases would show up. He told Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, “Testing is killing me.” He wanted to slow testing down.

There is no question though that Trump privately knew COVID-19 was deadly. He told Bob Woodward:

“This is deadly stuff. You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

That, however, was never the public message. He always played the virus down. Trump’s re-election strategy was to keep people working and shopping no matter how many died. He remained afraid of the stock market crashing and a poor economy costing him re-election. In March 2020 he tweeted that we could not let the cure be worse than the problem. This became the mantra for Republicans and right wing media.

Things went especially haywire when Trump started touting miracle cures like hydoxychloroquine, bleach and shooting powerful lights into the body. Selling quack cures like some elixir degraded his station and made him look like a snake oil salesman. He became too easy fodder for late night comedians.

No president was ever more anti-science than Donald Trump. When public health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx tried to inject reality, Trump accused them of negativity. He had contempt for his own COVID-19 Taskforce calling it “that fucking council that Mike (Pence) has”. Trump was fed up with doctors who would not tell him what he wanted to hear. He could never embrace the importance of masks and social distancing.

In the second half of 2020, Trump gave up on any pretense of fighting the virus. Trusting his gut instincts, Trump backbenched Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx in favor of Dr. Scott Atlas, a telegenic figure who appeared on FOX, who promoted discredited theories of herd immunity. Doctors in the infectious disease community were horrified. Trump returned to rallies with tightly packed crowds of people who were largely maskless.

Abutaleb and Paletta say that when Trump came down with COVID-19 he was far more sick than was ever reported to the public. His fever spiked and his blood oxygen fell below 94 percent, once dipping into the 80’s. His doctors worried he would die. Because of his access to experimental medications others could not get, he recovered but he appeared to learn nothing from the experience.

Beating the virus, he doubled down and played macho man. His message was that people should not be afraid of the virus and they should live normal lives.In effect, they should ignore the virus.

Trump’s post-illness performance, when he removed his mask after walking up the White House stairs reflected his anti-science attitude. He hated masks as a sign of weakness and he asked aides who wore masks in his presence to take them off. Appearances were always more important than science to Trump.

As the pandemic evolved, Trump was oblivious to the massive pain, hardship and suffering. He remained unable to show empathy or compassion to COVID-19 victims or their families.

In October 2020, a Trump Administration official said: “What happens when you mix politics and public health? You get politics.” Winning was everything to Trump but his incompetent handling of the pandemic was probably the biggest single reason he lost re-election.

Instead of leading a coordinated federal effort, Trump took no responsibility and downshifted blame to the states. Initially he and Jared Kushner wanted to blame blue state governors but the spike of infections in red and swing states nixed that.

Trump believed the COVID vaccine could save his electoral prospects and he was obsessed with getting the vaccine out before the November election. When that did not happen, he did not step up to counter vaccine hesitancy. You would have thought he would have championed the vaccine and then taken credit. Instead he did nothing to counter the anti-vaxxers which is tragic because COVID deaths are now almost entirely coming from red states with higher unvaccinated populations.

In a little known moment, Trump and the former First Lady got vaccinated in the White House back in January 2021. He did very little to encourage people to get vaccinated and it could have made a difference. More recently, he has railed against school age children getting the COVID-19 vaccine saying falsely that they are not affected by coronavirus.

I am not expecting any accountability for the Trump Administration’s epic failure. There is no law against doing nothing while hundreds of thousands die.Hopefully though, when the next pandemic hits, we will have learned something from this debacle.

I pretend to no special expertise about the cult conspiracy theory QAnon. I tried to watch the HBO special about it and I could not get through it. I have marveled at the number of followers swept up by the cult.

The Public Religion Research Institute did a new national survey that found 15% of Americans buying into QAnon. The survey found white evangelicals and Hispanic Protestants were the most susceptible to the QAnon theory. The survey found a strong correlation between consuming right wing media sources and accepting QAnon conspiracy theory.

QAnon’s prominence in Trumpworld is undeniable. Looking at the New York Times video about January 6, QAnon supporters figured prominently. Many carried signs and wore clothing emblazoned with references to Q. Names come to mind like Jacob Chansley(the QAnon shaman), Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert: all have some connection to the Q universe.

Two QAnon supporters died on January 6 at the Capitol. In the melee, Rosanne Boyland, a Georgia woman, died from accidental acute amphetamine intoxication. It had earlier been reported she was trampled by the crowd. Ashli Babbitt, a California woman, was shot and killed by a U.S. Capitol police officer.

Why so many would join QAnon remains a mystery. A friend recently told me that Meryl Streep, Robert DeNiro and Tom Hanks were all pedophiles who drink the blood of children. He said it with absolute certainty and he referred me to youtube videos for confirmation. He said that Trump is fighting against a global network of Hollywood celebrities and deep staters populating the federal government.

QAnon rests on the theory that Trump is fighting a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global sex-trafficking operation. QAnon supporters believe there is a storm coming that will sweep away elites in power and will restore rightful leaders. They also think American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.

It should go without saying that the idea there is a conspiracy of blood-drinking pedophiles out there utterly defies any notion of credibility. Meryl Streep, a blood-drinking pedophile? Please. You have to ask: how can people believe it and where do such whacked-out, far-fetched ideas come from?

History provides an answer. QAnon is not the first to assert there is a cabal of blood drinkers. Over the last 1,000 years, it is a frequently recurring trope. It has been deployed by Christians against Jews, by Christians against witches, and by Catholics against heretics. Talia Lavin has written:

”…it is a malleable set of accusations that posit that a social out-group is engaged in perverse, ritualistic behaviors that target innocents – and that the out-group and all its enablers must be crushed.”

Most commonly, the accusation of ritual murder took the form of a blood libel against the Jews. The blood libel accusation was that Jews stole the blood of Christian children. The accusation was often made around Passover as Jews were supposed to require Christian blood to make matzo.

In his book, The Accusation, Edward Berenson described some other forms of the blood libel:

“Jews supposedly cleansed themselves of sin by bathing in Christian blood, used it for their weekly Sabbath ceremonies and considered it a cure for various diseases and disabilities, including impotence.”

The blood libel has been anything but harmless. During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jews in Europe were accused of ritual murder every few years and thousands of Jews were tortured and murdered.

In the late nineteenth century, rhetorical violence against Jews became extreme. In Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia, newspapers spread anti-semitic lies that ritual murder of Christian children played an essential role in the Jewish religion. The myth was that Jews were murdering Christian children pursuant to Talmudic law. Allegedly, Jews needed the blood of young Christians to mix with Passover wine as ingredients for matzo.

Pogroms against Jewish communities spread through Russia, Austria-Hungary, and eastern Germany. Anti-semites looted Jewish shops and taverns, ransacked Jewish homes and acted out violently, battering and killing Jews.

QAnon connected up with and follows in this tradition of junk thought. While the QAnon movement is diverse and evolving, you do not see any denunciations of anti-semitism or white supremacy coming out of that movement. Since Twitter banned QAnon after the Capitol attack, one Q influencer named GhostEzra has emerged on Telegram spewing anti-semitic memes.

From my exposure, I would say that Q people see themselves as soldiers fighting a good fight pursuing a quest to punish bad guys. The problem is the underlying irrationality of the QAnon movement. It does not appear to matter how implausible their belief system is. Nor does it matter if there is evidence in support of the theory. This is a movement absolutely contrary to evidence-based science.

QAnon, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, gun confiscation paranoids and believers in Trump’s Big Lie of a stolen election have all junked rationality. They all inhabit an anti-intellectual universe where subjective belief is all that matters. Nutty opinions are the norm and clear thinking is a casualty.

On July 3 at a campaign stop in Florida, Trump himself provided a good explanation for how he gets his followers (including QAnon believers) to believe nonsense. He said:

“There’s a word: disinformation. If you say it enough and keep saying it – just keep saying it – and they’ll start to believe you.”

This is no different than what Joseph Goebbels used to say: ”Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it.”

It is hard to know where the QAnon movement is headed or how it will survive predictions that never happen and turn out to be false. QAnon has made inroads into New Age spirituality groups. Some wellness and yoga adherents have embraced QAnon’s conspiratorial world view.

QAnon has shredded families who have to cope in the wake of a family member’s indoctrination. It can be extremely painful as non-believers can be seen as an enemy.

The cult expert Steven Hassan believes QAnon is structured like a psychological warfare operation that is akin to brainwashing and sophisticated manipulation. He stresses that it is average people who are involved who started out seeking information and answers during an uncertain time. The pandemic and its social isolation created more favorable conditions for the growth of QAnon.

Hopefully, QAnon will crash and burn. As an inheritor of the blood libel theory, its danger must not be underestimated.