Friday cat blogging

Janeway and Mio are doing a good job overseeing Alln in our absence. Who knows what he'd get into without them to remind him to feed and love them?

Organized fire

The news that Jane McAlevey has entered hospice care hits hard. If you didn't have the chance to meet her, know that Jane was a stalwart of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and hundreds of labor struggles over the last four decades. She communicated how people, collectively, can find their power and fight for themselves.

I've always liked this snap of Jane caught at a board meeting of the Applied Research Center in 2000.

Her organized fire, harnessing anger and pride for people power, has made a difference to so many.

• • •

The news about Jane puts me in mind of this from the wise Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

The past few years has been a relentless stream of days in which someone I care about dies and I grieve the loss. Worse, I’m at an age where I know I will have to face many more of those days. Death. Grieve. Repeat. I am no longer surprised when it happens, the inevitability has numbed me from shock. But not from the sadness. Not from the grief.

At the same time, I realize that each death is like a customer number being called at a bakery—each number brings us closer to our own digits being announced. Then—if you’ve lived your life right—others will grieve for you. Circle of life, blah blah blah.

I’m all for inspirational quotes that embrace the challenges of life with a positive can-do attitude. I do them almost every week. But to ignore the darker aspects of living is to trivialize them and leaves us ill-equipped to deal with them. In a way, the grieving process is a way of honoring your relationships and celebrating a life that is filled with people worth grieving over.

Each day I wake prepared to grieve again. I am not afraid of it anymore. Grief and I are friendly companions skipping stones across the infinite that spreads out before me like a calm lake with grandchildren frolicking on the shore.

It's a time of life. But some people go on too soon.

Good riddance

It's great to learn that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to close the Federal Corrections Institution at Dublin, California. This minimum security women's prison has been a sexual abuse hellhole for a couple of decades. The last few male wardens have ended up charged and convicted for assaulting and raping inmates. 

... “It is a remarkable admission,” said attorney Michael Bien, whose law firm represents inmates in a class-action lawsuit over conditions at the prison. Prison authorities are “saying they can’t operate this prison safely.” He said closure doesn’t address the underlying issue. “How does this solve the problems? The same policy and procedures are in place at other prisons. It is not the building that did anything wrong.” ... “It is an unprecedented move to opt for closure,” said Amaris Montes, director of West Coast litigation and advocacy for Right Behind Bars. “It has been a long time coming for Dublin.”  

... Maria Ledesma, a former inmate released from Dublin after two years in 2022, said she was surprised the closure took so long. “I wish it would have happened sooner,” the 52-year-old Salt Lake City woman said . During her time there, she saw frequent sexual abuse. “Girls were getting raped on the daily there,” she said.

Ledesma recalled walking back from her prison job when she heard some shuffling and spotted two people between the buildings. “There was the warden, zipping up his pants,” she said. “He looked at me, I looked at him, and I knew in that moment I needed to put my head down and keep walking.”

It may or may not be relevant that the current head of the Bureau of Prisons is a woman.

• • •

The article from the LA Times I've quoted here describes the culture of abuse at the Dublin facility as going back to the 1990s. I have reason to believe it is even older.

In 1978-9, I regularly visited a very young Native American woman who was doing a couple of years in there as part of a plea agreement. She claimed she had been waiting in a car while some guys she was with charged into a bank and apparently attempted an armed heist. Hence, there was a federal crime, as bank robbery was then usually prosecuted by the feds. She copped to a guilty plea for a short sentence just to be done with this; somehow the guys got off altogether, but she didn't much understand any of it except that she ended up locked up in a federal prison in another state. I met her through friends who had befriended her in the Seattle King County jail when she was awaiting trial; my friends were in jail for pouring blood on signature petitions for a county anti-gay rights initiative. (Those were the days.)

FCI Dublin was a dreary place. The visiting area was an open space with plastic chairs and tables that looked like a school lunchroom. Each group jostled for its own space amid the hubbub. Many visitors came with children; as I understood it, the younger kids had to be left in a prison day care pen, but older ones did join the visiting. I'm sure that, despite all the searches of inmates and scanning of their visitors, a lot of contraband came in through that room, though I never knew how it worked.

My friend did assure me that some women could get anything they wanted through "relationships" with male guards. She never clarified to me how she fit in the economy of the place and I was too ignorant to know how to ask.

The curiosity of the era was that Patty Heart, the newspaper heiress turned terrorist, was locked up there. She was always in the visiting room with a couple tables of visitors, very much a queen bee for the moment. In February 1979, President Jimmy Carter commuted her bank robbery sentence.

One evening the prison put on a dance to which the inmates were allowed to invite a guest. This was a challenge to me; not only didn't I dance, but I looked like a proper '70s lesbian, a schlub. I took as much care as I could with what I wore, wanting not to embarrass my young friend. I am sure I didn't enhance her status any. 

There was a rumor (later true for awhile) that FCI Dublin was about to be made coed. My friend belonged to a set that hated the idea: they were sure that whatever privileges were available would go to the guys. They were proved right when the experiment happened.

Eventually my friend got out and returned to the Northwest. I lost touch with her. She'd be 65-ish today. I wonder if she has made it alive ...

Whining with a side of extortion

Donald Trump, on trial for one of his many crimes, is sinking in the polls and attempting to imitate the mob bosses he always admired. 

His small donors are not forking over cash at the volume they once did. Maybe they smell a rat? Anyway, he whines for them.

For donors who can give contribute "bigly", the message is extortion. As political scientist Bruce Cain explained to Thomas Edsall: 

... some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”

There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”

Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion was limited by stricter campaign contribution laws before we loosened the system up post the Citizens United decision. The irony of inviting large donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that the court strengthened the implicit hostile dependency relationship between donors and Trump.

Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”

While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.

 Not a pretty picture.

I don't expect our plutocrats to know much history, but if they did, they'd be aware that the experience of men who thought they could buy protection from the autocrats they enabled has not been happy.

Info-graphic palooza

I collect these quasi-meaningful info-graphics. Sometimes they go with some topic on which I'm writing. Sometimes they just intrigue me. Busy today, so I'll just share a few:

Click to enlarge. The green areas are growing; the pink areas are losing population.

In general, population growth signals a healthy economy. With freedom of movement across borders in the European Union, including to work, many people are clearly moving west. Nevertheless, when we walked the Camino half a decade ago, we saw plenty to indicate that the westerly Spanish countryside was emptying out.

Click to enlarge. Gerrymandering has its effects.

I was surprised that Illinois (12.3 million) and New Jersey (9.2 million) were the most gerrymandered largish Democratic states. The monster ones, California and New York, have drawn congressional districts that give Republicans a chance; though Dems win most of their seats. Interesting too, that Louisiana and Alabama have been forced by the feds to give their Black population something like a chance to elect a few Congressmembers so they do not appear as rigged for Republicans as the rest of the South.

Click to enlarge

In this moment, people in Pennsylvania who always vote have been trending more and more Democratic. As recently as 2018, the GOP leaners were more numerous in this subset of the electorate. Over the last three cycles, a broad coalition for Dems has formed and increased with each election. It's always important to bring new voters to a coalition, but bringing the existing base out has become central to getting a Democratic win.

Enjoy unpacking these.

A measure of comeuppance

On the eve of Trump's first criminal trial, let's listen in on what Jessica Bennett imagines is rumbling about in his disordered brain: 

Letitia James. Fani Willis. E. Jean Carroll, and her lawyer Roberta Kaplan. And, of course, Stormy Daniels. The five women who are living rent-free in Mr. Trump’s mind these days.

... Women. I suspect he never thought they would be the ones to corner him, making the case about his craven and possibly criminal behavior. Mr. Trump has long treated women as objects, targets, supplicants ... He seems to mostly associate women with sex — they are “driving me crazy,” he said of all the “beautiful women” at a recent event at Mar-a-Lago — or with spite (see how he treated Nikki Haley, Megyn Kelly, Hillary Clinton and others). He will woo them, he will grab them, he will scorn them, he will mix them up, he will call them names. But he never took them as much of a threat, until now.

.... But it’s the women whose behavior — call it bravery and moxie, as I do, or impertinence and temerity, as Mr. Trump might — gets him spinning like a top, as when the judgment in Ms. James’s case against him threatened Mr. Trump’s real estate assets — or in his words, “my ‘babies.’”

Imagine being called to account by people — by a gender, I’d argue — that you consider beneath you. ... After years of demonizing women who refuse to do his bidding, he is getting a measure of comeuppance at their hands. ...

For whatever reason, Bennett left Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presides over his federal January 6 insurrection trial, out of this terrifying regiment of women. Chutkin can do him as much or more harm as these women. It's a lovely thought, that he should pay at least a little for his crimes against our country.

Donald Trump did this

Jessica Valenti thinks Arizona will be seen as a tipping point.

... It’s like they’re rubbing our noses in it.

Gone is the pretense that Republicans want to pass abortion bans to protect women’s health, or that they’re enacting laws in service of some grand morality. With this ruling, the GOP made clear what their end goal is: forcing women back to a time when we weren’t full citizens, and when we could be married off as children to any 50-year-old lech who decided he wanted us.

To endure that insult, after two years of watching stories about little girls forced into childbirth and women mandated to deliver dead babies, is too much for anyone to take. Especially women. 

And that’s the thing that Democrats would do well to remember as we close in on November: The danger abortion bans pose to women’s health and lives makes us afraid, but what makes us furious is the affront to our humanity.

It’s that anger that politicians campaigning on abortion rights need to tap into. The foremost feeling driving American women on abortion rights isn’t fear—it’s humiliation. It is demeaning, incredibly so, to watch as statehouses full of men decide that women were better off in a time when we had no choices, about anything.

If Democrats want to motivate women, they should talk less about how dangerous abortion bans are, and more about what that danger means: that to Republicans, our lives don’t matter. Instead of talking about how women are losing their rights, remind voters why that is: because Republicans don’t want women to have any.

If we learn anything from the Arizona tipping point, let it be that.

Let's make Valenti correct in November.

Friday cat blogging

No cats here in the house on the Vineyard. Our monsters are not the sort to travel well. But that doesn't mean we're entirely cat-deprived. This house is full cat art and cat artifacts. Here are a few:

 

A young relative created this 30 years ago -- it hangs in a prominent spot.

 

This beauty looms over the desk where I write.

In the living room, this Japanese beauty knows how to entertain a feline.

 

On the driveway, there's a memory of hazards to cats past.

 

Griveny was once the undisputed lord of this manor ...

 

while Morty of blessed memory is nestled among the couch cushions.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It's not entirely clear who first said it, but the French aphorism seems all too true of the horrors we see, again, being acted out on the bodies and souls on Gazan Palestinians and traumatized Jewish Israelis.

Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, has as much access to broad scale American media as any Palestinian; he uses this to try to explain the tribulations of the land of his ancestors.  In 2020, he published his seventh history, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. It's more than slightly appalling to realize how little has changed in the interaction of Palestinians and Zionist Jews since a Jewish nationalism to be based in Palestine was first articulated the 19th century.

Khalidi's great-great great uncle Yusef Diya, was mayor of Jerusalem under the Ottoman empire. He corresponded with Theodor Herzl, the Austrian founder of European Zionism, and tried to warn Herzl that Palestine "is inhabited by others ..." The point was not taken then and remains obscured to this day, says the professor:

Either the Zionist leader meant deceive him by concealing the true aims of the Zionist movement, or Herzl simply did not see Yusuf Diya and the Arabs of Palestine as being worthy of being taken seriously."

When it came to pass in 1948, the founding of the Jewish Israeli state depended on the nakba, the cleansing, dispossession, and expulsion of as much of the Palestinian population as Zionists could manage. Once the Zionists had seized homes and power, they needed to deny the legitimacy of the history, culture, and society that had been displaced.

If they did not exist, then even well-founded Palestinian objections to the Zionist movement's plans could be simply ignored.

The Hundred Years War reports on a series of periods of Zionist upending of Palestinian life, beginning with the British imperial control of 1917-39, through the wars of 1947-1948, 1967, and 1982. Khalidi's account of the time of the first intifada (the locally led, predominantly non-violent protests 1987-1995) becomes more directly personal. He served as part of a Palestinian negotiating team involved in what came to be called "the Oslo process" which brought the old Palestinian leadership back inside the country without autonomy and with responsibility for tamping down local Palestinian unrest on behalf of the Israeli state.

His conclusions, written half a decade before current agonies, still seems on point:

 ... the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them over their heads, or pretending they do not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds.... for all its might, its nuclear weapons, and its alliance with the United States, today the Jewish state is at least as contested globally as it was at any time in the past.

... While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israel encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other. Their mutual acceptance can only be based on complete equality of rights, including national rights, notwithstanding the crucial historical differences between the two. There is no other possible sustainable solution, barring the unthinkable notion of one people's extermination or expulsion by the other.

 • • •

Today (April 11, 2024) Khalidi writes in the Guardian that too little has changed since Hamas' raid of 10/7 and Israel's vengeful punitive war on Gaza.

... While much has changed since 7 October, the events of the past six months are not unique, and do not stand outside history. We can only properly understand them within the context of the century-long war waged on Palestine, notwithstanding efforts by Israel to deny the relevance of context, and to explain them in terms of the “barbarity” characteristic of its enemies. While the actions of Hamas and Israel since 7 October might appear to represent a change or a departure, they are consistent with decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation and theft of Palestinian land, with years of the siege and deprivation of the Gaza Strip, and with an often violent Palestinian response to these actions. ... an upheaval that might have been a catalyst of change may in fact produce continuity of colonisation and occupation, of the Israeli establishment’s exclusive reliance on force, and of armed Palestinian resistance.

... One constant in the 100 years of this war is that Palestinians have not been allowed to choose who represents them. ... In the absence of Palestinian agreement on a unified and credible political voice representing a national consensus, this would mean that crucial decisions about the future of their people will be made by outside powers, as has happened so many times in the past.

... Looking back over the past six months – at the cruel slaughter of civilians on an unprecedented scale, the millions of people made homeless, the mass famine and disease induced by Israel – it is clear that this marks a new abyss into which the struggle over Palestine has sunk. While this phase reflects the underlying lineaments of previous ones in this 100 years’ war, its intensity is unique, and it has created deep new traumas. Not only does no end to this carnage appear in sight: we seem to be further than ever from a lasting and sustainable resolution, one based on dismantling structures of oppression and supremacy, and on justice, completely equal rights and mutual recognition.

Something has to give and it is not clear how. Neither national people is going away.

Where are the working women?

Erudite Partner pointed out a wrinkle about the reception of her latest article syndicated by Tom Dispatch, headlined "Republicans have plans for working people."

Among the many sites which have picked this up, almost all that added images have accompanied the text with pictures of male workers, mostly white. Here's a selection of how lefty publications think to illustrate an article about the future of work:

 

Their selections remind me of a 1970s introduction to "scientific socialism" which we once studied. It began: "take you typical worker -- a steelworker."

No, dammit! Though men's labor force participation rate is counted as higher than for women (statisticians don't count child raising as work?), most women are working for wages in this country.

And as is true in academia, once they let us in there, we rise to the top. Liz Shuler is president of the national union federation, the AFL-CIO. Some of the most dynamic leaders of activist unions are women: think Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Gwen Mills if the hospitality union UNITE/HERE.

The lefty publications are behind the curve here -- their picture of a typical worker needs updating.

Misusing their brains for profit and fun

So you don't have to, Erudite Partner read up on what Trump's "policy" wonks plan to do to working people.

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for—the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor—are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a “presidential transition” plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.

Some guy from the Federalist Society named Jonathan Berry wants to get rid of the data collection that makes it possible to see whether employers are discriminating.

... the elimination of “racial classifications” would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear. “The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment, and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.” Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Californians with long memories might recall that way back in 2003, right wingers put this one on the ballot as Prop. 54. We voted it down when Californians noticed it would prevent health authorities from collecting information on health outcomes of different groups.

The Trump guys have lots of ideas, most of them also retreads; allowing child labor and reducing the number of employees subject to labor laws are among them.

Read all about it. We always assumed these guys were bad news; now they've spelled out their vile intentions.

The time to unite and fight is now, so the Donald never crawls back into power.

Donald Trump hopes he's found a way to slice the baby in half

Trump's recent video claiming he's found a way to escape the trap he set for Republicans and himself by appointing anti-abortion Supreme Court justices is pretty much a dud that will satisfy no one.

He can't both boast that he set the stage for overturning Roe v. Wade and also claim he wants to preserve the freedom of the states to regulate abortion as they choose. It's gooble-de-gook. I hope media keep pushing him on whether he'd enforce existing prohibitions on mailing abortion drugs (the Comstock Acts - if GOPers get control, you are going to have to learn about this legal remnant.) Meanwhile anti-arbortion absolutists like Mike Pence fear he is betraying them (as of course he would if it helped keep him out of jail.)

But to me the most interesting comment on Trump's declaration came from Heather Cox Richardson. She suspects that his political handlers had him announce his "position" in a carefully produced video because they don't trust him not to wander from his talking points if they let him loose.

The video did, though, make an enormously interesting and unintended point: Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies, his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like this apparently heavily edited video.

At some point, he's going to have to talk about this -- or so obviously dodge that it becomes clear to all that he's a damaged, fearful old guy who is loosing it.

Simon Rosenberg reminds us that Trump is best understood as a desperate, faltering old criminal.

It’s my view that once it becomes understood Trump is no longer ahead we will start to get a more honest assessment of the strength and weaknesses of the two candidates; that this perception Trump is ahead and strong have masked his historic awfulness, and the clear problems with his campaign and his party. For in my view Trump is weak, not strong. He’s struggling to raise money. He’s facing an unprecedented revolt inside his party, causing a potentially fatal splintering of his coalition. MAGA lost in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023, and lost the big early 2024 bellwether, NY-3, by 8 points!!!!!!!!! The RNC is in disarray and months behind Biden organizationally without enough time to make it up. Many prominent Republicans in Congress are retiring, quitting and abandoning ship. ...

Trump may be in the process of ousting another Speaker. His agenda is much further away from the electorate than before. His performance on the stump is significantly degraded, far more impulsive, erratic and disturbing. He wears more make up than a drag queen. He keeps losing and getting humiliated in court. He’s an adjudicated rapist. He committed one of the largest financial frauds in American history. His new company is already failing. He stole America’s secrets, lied to the FBI it all, and shared those secrets with others. He tried to end American democracy for all time in 2021 and has promised to finish the job if he gets back into the White House. He and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in US history.

He is singularly responsible for ending Roe, stripping the rights and freedoms away from the women of America, and yesterday endorsed the most severe abortion restrictions in the states, which are without doubt, the most extreme policy enacted in America in many generations. He’s the ugliest political thing we’ve all ever seen, and all of this ugliness and structural weakness is being largely dismissed because the perception that he leads in polling makes him “strong.” ...

He's not strong. He's a crook who is running for President to escape the law ...