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Photo: Bend Bulletin
A dozen "Patriots" are holed up in a federal wildlife refuge outside of Burns, OR this morning. I hope no one is genuinely surprised by this — at least, not anyone who remembers what happened at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada last year. Because make no mistake: it was federal inattention in the aftermath of that one that led, very directly, to the scenes coming out of Oregon today.
Let me be clear. The Feds did a smart thing in standing down at Bundy Ranch. With 150 armed men pointing guns at their officers, tensions rising, rhetoric becoming ever more belligerent, and the media making a national spectacle out of it all, the whole thing was a hot, fast-rising updraft spiraling toward a violent Waco-style storm of violence and terror. The site commanders, having learned some hard lessons from past standoffs, recognized the path they were on and wisely took the right steps to get off of it. In a situation pushing everyone toward hardline behavior, they retained some capacity for nuance, kept their eyes on the long-term goals, and saved a lot of people from getting unnecessarily hurt. All in all: well done.
The failure was in the follow-up, as it became clear that what looked at first like a temporary tactical retreat was, in actuality, a complete and utter surrender. As anyone who's gotten on the wrong side of the IRS knows, our government has an endless array of innovative ways to put pressure on people that don't involve agents with guns. De-escalating the situation was a way, I thought, of increasing the range of options, and giving them room and time for more subtle maneuvers. For months after, I expected to hear any day that they'd finally arrested Bundy and his co-conspirators, coercing him to surrender out of the public eye through some kind of creative deployment of the law.
But that arrest never happened. Instead, the feds seem to have lost interest about as quickly as the cameras disappeared. Most of the gun-toting seditionists were allowed to go home and resume their lives (though ). But it's the lessons their movement as a whole took away with them that led us directly to this moment, and we need to understand where that mistake happened.
With the rise of the militias and other hate groups in the early 90s, a certain canon developed among law enforcement and community groups about how you deal with right-wing insurrection. Devin Burghart at the Center for Community Change developed a set of principles, ultimately used by scores if not hundreds of communities, that rested on some central understandings of how right-wing hate groups begin, grow, and metastasize.
Among these understandings was that you cannot let even small things slide. Within a community, right-wing violence often starts small, typically with someone tagging a mosque or synagogue, or perhaps putting racist graffiti in a very public place. Also typically, the police will tend to ignore these first events: it's just kids, or it will make the town look bad if we make a big deal out of it, or we have more important things to do.
What they don't factor into this is that the perpetrators are watching for just this reaction. Almost always, they're motivated by the idea that they're simply acting on widely-shared community values. "Other people have been silenced by the political correctness police; I and I alone have the courage to say out loud what everyone else is really thinking. And in daring to do this, I'll be hailed as a hero — as the one who finally stands up for the truth." Wherever you see right-wing violence in action, it's a pretty safe assumption that some version of this dramatic, heroic vision is playing in the actor's head. You can bet this is what they're telling each other right now in that little building in Malheur.
Letting them get away with their first actions provides strong confirmation for this story. In their minds, they got away with it because the cops and city leaders must agree with them, and are on their side. They really are speaking for the community! So they keep at it, escalating both the magnitude of their crimes and their ability to evade capture as they gain skill and experience. More people join them. They get brazen, and may start acquiring arms. What was once mere tagging is now arson, robbery, beatings, or bombings. And before too long, the cops who once looked the other way find that they're facing down a skilled, tough gang of self-styled Aryan warriors or Patriots or militiamen who are now fully convinced that their crusade has been blessed by the community as a righteous one. After all: nobody's done anything yet to stop us.
The Center for Community Change's recommended strategy for nipping emergent racial and right-wing violence in the bud had several prongs, but there are two that matter here. First, the community needs to respond to the very first broken window or tagged wall by expressing the community's actual values in one unanimous, full-throated voice. The perpetrators need to know, beyond a doubt, that they are not speaking for everyone. (This often comes as a genuine shock to the perps, who have completely convinced themselves otherwise.) Government, service groups, congregations, and the local media all have roles to play. Events and vigils, window signs, school assemblies, op-eds in the media — the message needs to be ubiquitous and inescapable. Hate will not be tolerated. Violence will be prosecuted. You don't speak for us.
Second, law enforcement also needs to know it can't blow off the little stuff without risking much bigger problems down the road. Their choice is to quietly bust a few people now, or risk a much bigger stand-off with a far larger and more sophisticated crew somewhere in the future. In the end, their failure to make early arrests — and make them stick — is the one factor that will ensure the worst possible future outcomes.
That's the mistake the Feds made in Nevada. They let the crowd at the Bundy Ranch go home thinking that they'd scored one on Obama. They already had a raw, bone-deep contempt for the federal government, which for years has been too weak to keep them from using and abusing public lands however they saw fit. Authoritarians despise weakness, and have no compunction about taking full advantage of it. So to them, it was pretty laughable when the Feds finally decided to come after Bundy. (Now you think you're gonna do something about it? Let's just see about that.)
When that motley militia of Minutemen, Oathkeepers, and self-styled Patriots succeeded in driving federal agents off the land, it absolutely confirmed and amplified everything they and their fellow Middle American Radicals thought they knew. The Federal government is weak, and deserves their even more scathing contempt than they might have imagined. The public — represented by all that national media — is indeed with them. They are heroes, at least to a large number of FOX-watchers. And, most importantly of all: they totally got away with it. All of it. They made Obama blink.
After a victory like that, there was zero chance that they wouldn't come back again — bigger, badder, with more overheated "I'm gonna die a patriot" rhetoric, higher ambitions, greater contempt for American norms, and general bad attitude. High on their own supply, they've been eagerly scouting the rural West for other places to stage their traveling seditionist circus. And given the parlous state of rural white America today (something I'll write about another time), they won't find any shortage of those.
Malheur is the next episode — but if the federal response this time is anywhere as feckless as it was last time, it almost certainly won't be the last. The FBI needs to learn what countless city law enforcement and local policy folks already know: while it's wise not to let these things turn into high-noon confrontations that end in bombs and bullets, ending the siege is only half the work. The job's not done until you've also made sure that law and order have been restored to their full authority, and that would-be seditionists achieve full understanding of the steep price to be paid for rebellion, and that their disgrace is every bit as fully public as their crimes were.
To fail here is to open the door to full-on armed insurrection. They cannot be allowed to succeed again.
The GOP in Florida has lost a major battle they should never have had a chance at winning in the first place. A judge for the Leon Circuithas ruled in favor of district maps drawn up by voters' groups, and not the GOP-controlled legislature. These maps give Democrats a new chance at capturing the state's Senate in upcoming elections by making districts competitive again.
The House is another story, because Republicans dominate Florida's House by a huge margin. Right now, they hold the Senate by a 26-14 margin, despite the fact that registered Democratic voters outnumber registered Republican voters in the state. Judge George Reynolds rejected the state Senate's maps as partisan, saying:
"While the Senate maintains that the selection of Senate Map 1 was without partisan intent and that all safeguards were taken to insulate staff from outside political influence, it is difficult to infer anything other than impermissible partisan intent in the selection of Senate Map 1 based on its political performance."
Gerrymandering has been losing a lot of ground around the nation, particularly in the wake of a little-known Supreme Court decisionearlier this summer that upheld Arizona's citizen redistricting commission. Arizona's legislature sued in federal court after the commission drew Arizona's new districts, claiming the Constitution doesn't give them that authority. It was a 5-4 decision, but the Court sided with the independent commission, which paved the way for other states to create their own independent commissions to combat the scourge of gerrymandering.
"Safe districts" are a major problem for voters and the population because they give one party a distinct advantage over the other for years at a time. States end up with disproportionate representation in their legislatures and in the federal government. Florida is a prime example of this, with more Democratic voters than Republican voters, but far more Republicans controlling the state.
Safe districts can cause two massive problems that seem contradictory: The first is to make legislators lazy, because they don't have to fear serious challenges from the opposition. However, it can also make them more extreme politically, because they fear primary challenges from their lunatic fringes. This is part of how the GOP's lunatic fringe, a.k.a. the Tea Party, took over. Republicans screwed themselves with their gerrymandering efforts, because they created hyperpartisan districts for themselves, some of which were way too far right. When you create entire districts for your lunatic fringe, your lunatic fringe takes over.
Florida's new maps—one for the House and one for the Senate—will be drawn by the League of Women Voters of Florida and Common Cause Florida. These two groups spearheaded the four-year long war against the Republicans' own redistricting plans. The court rejected those plans as illegal under a voter-approved ban on gerrymandering.
State Sen. Joe Negron, of Stuart, seems to think that the Senate should cut its losses with this, although others are reviewing the judge's decision and seeing if there might be a way to appeal to the state Supreme Court. Negron thinks that the people of Florida will continue to elect "principled" Republicans in spite of the new maps.
Florida's Supreme Court has struck blows to nearly every one of the legislature's redistricting challenges, so if they do appeal, they can probably expect to be shot down yet again. Negron might actually be a voice of reason for the GOP on this. It's time for them to give it up and find real, honest ways to reach voters.
That requires real work on the party, though, which is too difficult for them.
Earlier in December, Florida's Supreme Court approved the independently-drawn Congressional district map, which was also far less gerrymandered than previous maps. It will hurt some Republicans and also some Democrats, but helps to end the "safe district" problem at the federal level, too.
Other states with independent redistricting commissions include California, Arizona, Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Washington. These commissions do not include lawmakers as a general rule, which is necessary to create the fairest map possible.
Ohio voters approved a ballot measure earlier this year to reform the redistricting process in their state. With that, the Supreme Court ruling on Arizona's commission, and this latest ruling in Florida, we're seeing a slow, agonizing death to the gerrymandering process, which will help voters get their voices back and prevent politicians from languishing in their seats, and catering to their fringe elements, because they come from safe, hyperpartisan districts.
Image by Second Judicial Circuit Guardian ad Litem Program. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr
Friday 19 December 201409.36 ESTLast modified on Friday 19 December 201419.08 EST
When the American theologian Thomas JJ Altizer first published his work on Christian atheism back in the 1960s, he received an avalanche of hostility, including death threats. But most people were just plain puzzled. Christians believe in some big God up in the sky. Atheists don't. There is no middle path. Surely it's that simple. So Altizer's big idea that the project of the Christian God was progressively to work himself out of existence, found few friends on either side of the God argument.
The fancy footwork of Hegelian dialectics – refusing to accept the simple binary of God existing/not existing – just did not cut it in an age where God's existence had become such a raw issue politically. Nonetheless, Altizer's account of the Christian God being in a gradual process of divesting himself of His God-ness is a pretty good way of recapturing some of the puzzlement and shock value of the original Christmas story. "He emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant," is how St Paul described the incarnation in a letter to new Christians at Philippi. This word "emptied" – kenosis in Greek – has been argued about by scholars ever since. To some it implied that, in becoming human, God was almost giving up divinity, or at least giving up something of the power that we often associate with it. From here on in, God would cry, bleed, and (horror of horrors) defecate. No longer omnipotent nor omniscient, He would be vulnerable to the constituent conditions of humanity. And all this seemed a bit too much like the beginnings of atheism. Like a prince becoming a pauper, or Prospero throwing away his magic.
Yet the astonishing assertion of the Christmas story is that the God who comes as a pathetic child is all the more God-like for the total evacuation of power. It's a birth story at one with what would become the central message of His teaching: the first will be last and the last first. It sounds like a phrase from the French revolution, with the mighty being pulled off their thrones and the weak being held up high. But it's the buried message of Christianity, extravagantly heralded in the festival we know as Christmas. At Christmas, God becomes a child. Power is divested. Might and right no longer nestle comfortably together. But how many people would follow this new God if He were no longer able to smite enemies or call down a plague of frogs? For what the Gospel drama goes on to demonstrate is that if might (in this case, the Romans) and right (in this case, Jesus) point in different directions, many haven't the guts to follow what is right.
Of course, none of this is in the slightest bit acceptable to an institutional church that has looked to the state for comfort, protection and kudos. No Christian coronation service is going to proclaim the first being last, or the mighty being pulled off their thrones. No state is going to hold up banners to a powerless poverty-stricken God screaming in a dirty shed. Indeed the whole reason Christianity came to have official status with European political leaders is because the Emperor Constantine superstitiously believed it helped him win battles. Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick. The Christianity of Christmas is not the religion of a warrior like David – despite the irony that He was born in David's city. A religion of the baby, one that has forsworn hard power, can no longer be a warrior religion. This is not a religion that can support Trident. Nor can it have any need of seats in the House of Lords.
I know, this is a Christmas column and you might have been expecting carols and community. But this sentimental stuff is such a massive distraction from the earth-shatteringly radical nature of the Christmas story which tells us to forget about the God of power. That's not what God looks like. No, when thinking of God, imagine a tiny child, unable even to look after itself. Still, 2,000 years later, the full theological and political consequences of this astonishing about-turn continue to be lost, forgotten, betrayed, ignored and denied – and I'm talking about by us religious people.
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Jury finds former coal executive Don Blankenship guilty of a conspiracy to commit safety violations that resulted in an April 2010 explosion that killed 29
Don Blankenship, the "outlaw" former coal executive and enemy of environmentalists, has been found guilty of a conspiracy over events that led to a deadly mine explosion in West Virginia.
Nine days of jury deliberation, which was put on hold over the Thanksgiving, have resulted in Blankenship being found guilty of a conspiracy to commit safety violations at the mine. But he has been acquitted of charges that he made false statements and committed securities fraud.
An explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in April 2010 killed 29 miners. A jury deliberated over the fate of Blankenship for six weeks, hearing testimony from 27 witnesses and sifting through more than 500 pieces of evidence.
Blankenship, 65, is the former chief executive of Massey Energy, a coal company that was acquired by Alpha Natural Resources in 2011.
A protester holds a sign behind Don L Blankenship during a Senate hearing on mine safety in 2010. Photograph: Scott J Ferrell/CQ-Roll Call,IncHe was charged with three criminal counts over his role in dodging federal mine safety laws at the Upper Big Branch mine in Raleigh County. He was also accused of committing fraud through a statement sent to shareholders following the mine explosion. He denied all of the charges from the outset.
Federal regulators said a series of unsafe practices led to the explosion, with US attorney Booth Goodwin telling court that "Don Blankenship ran a massive criminal conspiracy". Goodwin said an internal memo shows that Blankenship was aware of measures to make the mines safe but chose to not do so. Blankenship, according to Goodwin, was an "outlaw" who pushed miners to continue extracting coal in hazardous conditions.
Bill Taylor, Blankenship's defence attorney, said the federal government had provided "no witnesses, no proof" to back up its charges. Taylor had moved for a mistrial, arguing that the long distance travel required of jurors and the looming Thanksgiving holiday increased the likelihood of a rushed decision. Judge Irene Berger rejected the request.
Democratic senator for West Virginia Joe Manchin said he was pleased with the verdict.
"With this verdict, the state of West Virginia has set precedents and signaled that we will not allow the prioritization of production and profits over the safety of our workers," he said.
"While nothing can ever bring back the 29 beloved souls who we lost on that tragic day, I hope that today brings some closure and peace to the families of the miners."
The makers of Blood on the Mountain, a new documentary about environmental and economic injustice in West Virginia, also welcomed the outcome.
"This verdict has finally held a coal company executive criminally responsible for his crimes against his own workers for his own greed," said Mari-Lynn Evans, the film's director and producer.
"This guilty verdict affirms our faith in justice, and it will have a tremendous a tremendous and lasting impact on how the coal industry does business. For West Virginians, this verdict affirms that the lives of our coal miners is more important than the cost of a mule."
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