Monthly Archives: September 2023

While the idea of a public figure putting their money where their mouth is isnt a new concept, seeing someone stand by their hard held beliefs is not something we should ignore. Whether its activism surrounding the environment or human rights, its very important for public figures to be vocal about whats going on because thats how these causes become more mainstream and get more support behind them.

So, it was a nice surprise to learn that one of the comic book industrys most prolific writers, Allan Moore, used his money to support a worthy cause like Black Lives Matter.

During a recent interview with The Telegraph, Moore explained why he wants the royalties owed to him from film studios adapting his work to be donated to another cause. He says that he used to have the money go to the creatives behind the projects instead, but that he doesnt really feel, with the recent films, that they have stood by what I assumed were their original principles. So I asked for DC Comics to send all of the money from any future TV series or films to Black Lives Matter.

Moore technically has no control over whether his comics are adapted for film or television, but has a longstanding tradition of not having his name attached to any adaptation. Its ironic that Moore has such liberal values and always depicts some of that in his work, as Nazis have woefully missed the point and become big fans. According to The Telegraph, thefascist hymn Moore wrote for V for Vendetta is now widely used by the neo-Nazi internet forum Stormfront.

Moore explained how this came to b,e stating, The person who posted it said: after reading his beautiful words, I cant help but think he must secretly be one of us inside. So yes, apparently Im very big with the Nazis.

Though the worst people see what they want in Moores work, its nice to know that some of the big-name creatives are still on the right side.

(featured image: Warner Bros. Pictures)

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'Watchmen' Creator Alan Moore Donates Movie and TV Royalties to Black Lives Matter - The Mary Sue

At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Customs and Border Protection encouraged officers to consider more lethal force when making arrests to protect themselves against the highly contagious virus, according to newly uncovered agency documents.

Frequently, the necessity to use force, especially less-lethal force, requires an officer or agent to be in direct proximity and in personal contact with individual(s), reads an April 2020 CBP memo. If an officer or agent reasonably believes a subject may be infected with COVID-19, the threat of transmitting the virus to resist or evade arrest should be considered when establishing the immanency of a threat and the resulting determination of objectively reasonable force.

The memo listed electronic control weapons (stun guns like Tasers) and compressed air and munition launchers (guns with rubber bullets) as tools that CBP officers could use from a safe distance.

In the coming months, CBP officers would join the sprawling law enforcement response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 even policing George Floyds funeral. The agency made headlines that summer for deploying a surveillance drone in Minneapolis and when unidentifiable Border Patrol officers whisked away a protester in Portland, Oregon. But new documents, obtained by legal advocates through Freedom of Information Act litigation, reveal the extent of CBPs involvement, conducting arrests and barraging protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets sometimes without the knowledge of other agencies, city or state leaders, or even CBP officials themselves.

The records obtained by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the American Immigration Council, and the University of California Irvine School of Laws Immigrant Rights Council reveal that CBP deployed officers to at least 18 cities and towns across the country. That list includes Chicago; Minneapolis; Buffalo, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; and Whitefish, Montana. Dozens more law enforcement agencies requested assistance or equipment from CBP, the heavily redacted records show, though the agency did not appear to fulfill every request.

The agencys redactions of the document set, which consists of thousands of pages, conceal the number of officers deployed throughout the summer and other details about the operation.

CBP did not respond to The Intercepts questions.

Emily Creighton, the legal director for transparency at the American Immigration Council, said that CBPs involvement in policing protests even when it was not asked to raises concerns about mission creep.

The agency redacted the documents under an exception to protect law enforcement techniques, a justification Creighton said does not make sense given that the CBP operation concluded years ago. If anything, the agencys painstaking efforts to redact information contained in the records demonstrates a careful effort to conceal the extent of the agencys involvement, said Creighton, whether the CBP was doing so to avoid embarrassment or in a blind adherence to redaction versus disclosure a longstanding pattern with CBP and antithetical to the purpose of FOIA a law intended to reveal to the public what its government is up to.

CBP started policing protests within a week of Floyds death on May 25, the documents show. On June 1, the Department of Justice requested CBP agencies including Border Patrol, the Office of Field Operations, and Air and Marine Operations to assist Federal partners with general law enforcement activities.

The agency is generally authorized to operate within 100 miles of land and coastal borders, though that remit can be extended. On June 26, 2020, then-President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing numerous agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, CBPs parent agency to provide assistance for the protection of Federal monuments, memorials, statues, or property amid the mass protests.

The documents reveal that CBP officers provided situational awareness for police departments, conducted general law enforcement activities and crowd control, monitored encrypted online chat rooms, and even arrested protesters.

The documents also include a breakdown of the agencys aerial surveillance operations from Uvalde, Texas, and Miami to Dayton and New York City.

Jeramie Scott, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centers Project on Surveillance Oversight, said that such surveillance has a chilling effect on protesters First Amendment rights. Agencies like CBP have no business conducting domestic surveillance and law enforcement operations that have nothing to do with the agencys mission, he said. Surveillance tech will not solve structural racism in this country but has and will continue to exacerbate it without meaningful change.

In some cases, it was local police departments that called on CBP for assistance. On June 4, 2020, the police chief in Pearland, Texas, solicited the help of the Border Patrol in preparation for Floyds funeral. The chief listed CBP capabilities including tactical support with armored vehicles, less lethal force options (rubber bullets), and drone surveillance as reasons for why they were reaching out for help. The CBP obliged and deployed officers to the community for nearly a week.

Tsion Gurmu, legal director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, viewed the CBP deployment to Floyds funeral as emblematic of a colossal operation with little answerability.It is disturbing to know that enormous resources were spent to send federal law enforcement to team up with local law enforcement across the country to quash Black organizing, not to mention the militaristic language used to describe their role (e.g., developing a battle rhythm) and surveillance reaching as far as George Floyds funeral, Gurmu said. Its clear that we still dont have a full picture or understanding of the role of federal law enforcement and immigration agencies, and what role they might play in future policing efforts. We expect CBP to be primarily at our borders, but it seems that their authority far surpasses that.

Armed members of the U.S. Border Patrol gather as peaceful protests continue citywide against police brutality and the death of George Floyd, on June 3, 2020 in Washington, D.C.

The documents indicate that, at times, senior CBP officials were caught off guard by news reports of their own agencys involvement in the protests.

After Vice reported that the CBP flew a Predator drone over Minneapolis during the outset of the protests in May, for instance, Acting CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan sent an email to colleagues seeking more information. Is this correct? Who asked [for] the support? What support are we providing? Morgan wrote. What authority are we using to provide the support?

In mid-July, a video depicting a Portland protester being whisked away into an unmarked vehicle by unidentified officers went viral. The Nation soon reported that the officers were from CBP, but the documents show that in the immediate aftermath, even higher-level CBP officials were not quite sure.

I see CBP is on the chain and may have additional info, because it is my understanding that it is very likely that the officers in the Twitter video were from CBP and using a rental minivan to conduct the apprehension on the video, one official wrote, in an email chain discussing a press response to the video. CBP was looking into this last night to obtain more facts.

The Portland incident took place just after Morgan had recommended that CBP officers take a more enhanced proactive posture in response to the citys protesters. In a July 15 email, Morgan also wrote of his desire to ask for enhanced FBI engagement from an investigative standpoint to identify the organizers and modes of communication to proactively disrupt the actions of these criminals, adding that we must move more aggressively beyond reactive enforcement.

I know weve had a call and there is a set of actions in place, but Im recommending ramping-up our presence there and being even more proactive in making arrests, Morgan wrote. If the local police will not take meaningful actions nor will the Governor call in the National Guard, then its up to us.

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As federal agencies, including CBP, prepared to deploy agents to Chicago to quell protests, a Department of Homeland Security director acknowledged that their presence was not invited. There has been no request from the State or City for federal assistance, the official wrote. Other cities are being discussed for possible additional surge ops. Two cities mentioned were Kansas City and Albuquerque.

The records show that CBP lacked real understanding about its own role at the protests, said Creighton, of American Immigration Council. The agencys own numerous reports describing protester activity reveal that most protests were peaceful, that the show of force from CBP was not necessary, and when CBPs presence was revealed, it was shocking and unwelcome to protesters and the general public.

Some CBP officers may not have been equipped to do the kind of work they were doing at all, and the records show officers in some jurisdictions received rushed additional training just days before their deployments. All efforts must be taken to ensure the safety of CBP personnel and they should not be placed in roles that put them in direct contact with the public since they do not possess the appropriate crowd control training and equipment, one CBP field liaison director wrote ahead of a deployment in Los Angeles.

The emails also show that CBP officials felt they were not getting due credit for their policing of protests. As you can see, OFO deployed significant resources and provided a substantive response to the civil unrest around the nation, an official from the CBPs Office of Field Operations wrote in a June 2020 email. The official expressed concern that the majority of the agencys activity was not represented in a report forthe DHS Office of Operations Coordination, or OPS. Can you ensure that our activity is included in the final report and not substantially chopped as it has been in the last couple days. OPS does perform an initial chop.

See the rest here:

Uninvited and Unaccountable: How CBP Policed George Floyd ... - The Intercept

To make the books political stakes even plainer, Merchant renders the early 19th century in current-day language. Factory owners are entrepreneurs, the one percent, even tech titans who are disrupting the textile industry moving fast and breaking things, to borrow Facebooks old slogan. Factory technologies spread virally and represent a form of automation (a term, as Merchant notes, that was not coined until the 1940s). The Luddites themselves are likened to decentralized movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. In the books final section, Merchant shifts back into a journalistic register, interviewing labor lawyers, analysts and workers struggling against the worst abuses of the gig economy. Chris Smalls, the magnetic warehouse employee who led the first successful unionization drive at Amazon last year, emerges as our eras nearest analogue to Mellor.

Luddite histories are not just political, but almost always corrective. Today the term Luddite is divorced from the context of labor struggle, and instead signifies an irrational technophobia or a stubborn adherence to older ways. You might be a Luddite if you prefer to pay in cash, or if you think smartphones have ushered in the downfall of society. As Merchant argues, this is a holdover from how the elites of the day depicted the weavers struggles, as tantrums against technology. In fact, machine breaking was not a raison dtre for the Luddites, but a last resort when appeals to law, custom and morality fell on the deaf ears of authorities. If smashing a stocking frame became the signature Luddite action, it was because it got the goods, so to speak: Many millowners submitted to Luddite demands on pay and working conditions rather than risk their machines or their lives.

Merchant is keen to reframe the Luddites as proto-unionist reformers rather than violent revolutionaries. Mellors story ends with a letter from his prison cell, where he awaits his execution, requesting that his name be added to a petition calling for restrictions on machines. In Merchants account, gig economy workers and their advocates focus on regulation and fair treatment, never sabotage. It is not an unfair conclusion to draw: No American worker movements approach the militancy of the Luddites during their raids, and President Bidens ear bends more readily than that of the Prince Regent. But if we truly want to break from the future that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have planned for us, with our blood in their machines, it could take more than legislation to do so. It might require a few hammers.

Gavin Mueller is an assistant professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam, and the author of Breaking Things at Work.

BLOOD IN THE MACHINE: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech | By Brian Merchant | Illustrated | 465 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $30

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Book Review: Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant - The New York Times

When Margot Wallstrom, then Swedens foreign minister, announced back in 2014 that her country would pursue a feminist foreign policy, the idea was greeted with skepticism. Ms. Wallstrom was criticized by the foreign policy establishment globally for both her openly activist approach and the perception that she was nave to the realities of realpolitik. As a 2015 New Yorker article put it, Within the diplomatic community, where words are carefully chosen so as not to offend, feminism is usually avoided.

Ms. Wallstroms vision turned out to be at the forefront of something bigger than Sweden. Less than a decade later, 16 governments have formally adopted feminist foreign policies. The idea started as a niche, Nordic approach to put womens rights and representation on the world stage, and it has become an increasingly global tool for governments to articulate their commitment to prioritizing people and the planet over battles for economic and military dominance, to focus on collaboration over competition and on power together rather than power over.

It took five years for the first four governments Sweden, Luxembourg, France and Canada to adopt feminist foreign policies. Since 2020, as progressive governments have come into power, a dozen have followed, across a more diverse geographic area, including in Latin America, Africa and Asia. As the movement has grown, its focus has expanded from challenging entrenched gender dynamics to disrupting the colonial dynamics that continue to define international relations.

What feminist foreign policy looks like in practice varies from country to country. Germany, the largest country in the group in terms of foreign aid, has pledged to almost double its donations geared toward gender equality. Canada and Slovenia have met or exceeded gender parity in their diplomatic or ambassador corps, while France, Spain and Colombia have set up boards of feminist activists to advise their governments. Argentina has put trans feminism at the center of both its foreign and its domestic policies, creating the position of special representative for sexual orientation and gender identity. And the Netherlands, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, has commissioned a review on racism in the foreign ministry.

This isnt just talk. Prioritizing women has a measurable impact to help nations to achieve their foreign policy goals. A global study of United Nations Security Council resolutions found that womens participation in the peace-building process increased the likelihood that a peace agreement would last at least two years by 20 percent, and increased the probability it would last 15 years by 35 percent. Gender equality is also correlated with broader peace and stability: Countries with higher gender equality are more likely to comply with international laws and treaties and less likely to use violence as a first response in a conflict setting. Economically speaking, a 2015 report from McKinsey found that true gender equality everywhere would raise global gross domestic product by up to $28 trillion.

To be sure, there are headwinds, from the so-called pro-family forces in Russia, Poland and Hungary that are working to roll back womens rights, to the crackdowns on womens liberty in Iran and Afghanistan and reproductive and trans rights in the United States. While feminist foreign policy has seen exponential growth in the last few years, further progress is not assured. If a series of progressive election victories is what brought us this movement, a wave of conservative victories can take it away just as quickly.

Take Sweden, where it all began. In 2022, after a change of government, Sweden announced that while it remained committed to gender equality, it was no longer pursuing an explicitly feminist foreign policy and would decrease its peace-building budget and tighten immigration restrictions.

Over the next 12 months, at least three more feminist foreign policy nations face critical elections: Argentina in October, the Netherlands in November and Mexico in June. In these and other countries, right-wing forces are threatening the feminist agenda, with Donald Trump-styled candidates and increasingly racist, misogynist and populist rhetoric promising to rescind womens rights, opportunities for asylum seekers or commitments to climate justice.

On Wednesday, during U.N. General Assembly week, the foreign ministers of a dozen nations representing the United Nations Feminist Foreign Policy Plus group met and announced the first global declaration on feminist foreign policy. They committed to work together to defend women and girls in all their diversity, to shape feminist foreign policies and to exchange best practices and lessons learned regarding the different feminist approaches.

It will take more than 16 governments to change the world. And my own country the United States is conspicuously absent from a club that some might suggest it started, when it appointed the worlds first ambassador at large for global womens issues more than a decade ago.

From Washington to Buenos Aires, the risk looms large that these hard-fought, forward-looking policies can easily be abandoned and with them, hopes for better protection of people, peace and planet. But this week at least, a new coalition has emerged that is doing what it can, where it can, while it can. And thats good news indeed.

Lyric Thompson is the founder and chief executive of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, an adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, and an appointee of the secretary of states International Security Advisory Board.

Read more from the original source:

Opinion | Why More Countries Are Adopting Feminist Foreign Policies - The New York Times