Extradition and Militarism

Dec 8, 2020 | The Indy Brief
December 7, 2020

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The Headlines

U.S. Politics 

In Historic First, House Votes to Decriminalize Marijuana (Truthout)

Black Voters Matter: Group Sues Georgia for Purging 200,000 Voters Ahead of 2020 Election (Democracy Now!)

U.S. Foreign Policy 

‘Money For War’: US Arms Sales Soar and Bipartisan Militarism Thrives Amid Covid-19 Pandemic (Common Dreams)

Trump Has Pushed Ahead With Drone Strikes, Putting US Citizens in the Crosshairs (Truthout)

What’s At Stake in Julian Assange’s Extradition Trial (The Nation)

Prisons and Policing

NYPD Cops Cash In on Sex Trade Arrests With Little Evidence, While Black and Brown New Yorkers Pay the Price (ProPublica)

COVID-19 

New CDC Data Confirms the Pandemic’s Outsize Impact on People of Color (Mother Jones)

Climate Crisis

Recognition of Native Treaty Rights Could Reshape the Environmental Landscape (In These Times)
 
 
U.S. Politics
 

In Historic First, House Votes to Decriminalize Marijuana

On Friday, The House voted 228-164 to pass the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, which would decriminalize marijuana on the federal level.

Truthout reports the act “would remove cannabis from the federal list of illegal drugs, create a process for expunging ‘non-violent’ federal marijuana convictions, and funnel tax revenue from legal cannabis sales to communities that are disproportionately targeted by police in the war on drugs.”

The legislation, backed by 68% of Americans’ support for legalization, takes steps to repair massive racial disparities from the war on drugs.

The MORE Act is unlikely to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate before the end of the year. Its success may rely on how Vice President-elect Kamala Harris garners support, and if Democrats win the runoffs for Georgia’s two Senate seats.
 

Group Sues Georgia for Purging 200,000 Voters Ahead of 2020 Election

The voting rights organization Black Voters Matter has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that Georgia’s current secretary of state improperly removed nearly 200,000 voters from the rolls.

Black Voters Matter co-founder and executive director Cliff Albright says the state is “ground zero” for Republican voter suppression efforts. Democracy Now! speaks further with Albright on the upcoming voter registration deadline for Georgians voting in the state’s two Senate runoff elections.

Emory University professor Carol Anderson says Donald Trump’s attacks on the election’s legitimacy reflects the Republican party’s overall attitude toward voting: “He is the culmination of decades of the Republicans hollering voting fraud […] to justify massive voter suppression.”
 
U.S. Foreign Policy 
 

US Arms Sales Soar and Bipartisan Militarism Thrives

Pentagon and State Department officials announced Friday that in the fiscal year that ended September 30, the U.S. sold more than $175 billion in military equipment to foreign governments. This is a 2.8% increase compared to 2019, when weapons exports totaled just over $170 billion.

Common Dreams writes Donald Trump has said Democrats represent a danger to the U.S. because they will “[destroy] our military through a lack of funding.” In reality, the annual budget approval for the U.S. military is “overwhelmingly bipartisan,” as journalist Sarah Lazare describes.

The U.S. “has by far the biggest mil­i­tary bud­get on the plan­et, spend­ing more than the next 10 coun­tries com­bined,” and it’s likely lawmakers will continue the past six years’ pattern of increasing or maintaining the budget.
 

Trump Has Pushed Ahead With Drone Strikes, Putting US Citizens in the Crosshairs

Donald Trump plans to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, but the move doesn’t reverse his legacy of militarism. Trump’s record on drone strikes, assassination and militarism has “continued the perpetual war machine, especially the targeted killing program created by George W. Bush and greatly expanded by Barack Obama.”

Truthout describes how this policy extends to U.S. citizens: freelance journalist Bilal Abdul Kareem, who survived five drone strikes while working in Syria, was reportedly placed on the U.S. government’s kill list.

The Trump administration launched far more drone and lethal strikes than Obama. Trump also made it easier for the U.S. military and CIA to conduct global air and drone strikes and raids as part of the “war on terror.”

So far, Joe Biden has done little to indicate his administration will end the “sophisticated program of global targeted killing under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism.’”
 

What’s At Stake in Julian Assange’s Extradition Trial

Julian Assange’s extradition trial in London this fall showed how far the U.S. government would go to bring the WikiLeaks founder to America. It also demonstrated a disturbing abuse of process in the English courts.

The Nation reports Assange was indicted in federal district court in Virginia in 2019 on 17 counts of violating the 1917 Espionage Act for “unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defense,” and for conspiring to hack into a Pentagon computer network.

If the British court approves the extradition and he’s found guilty, Assange could be sentenced to as much as 175 years in a maximum security prison.

The Espionage Act raises troubling constitutional questions by infringing on the First Amendment rights to receive and publish information; “If this extradition attempt is successful, no one should feel safe in calling authority to account or in scrutinizing the actions of those who hide behind the veil of power.”
 
Prisons and Policing
 
NYPD Cops Cash In on Sex Trade Arrests With Little Evidence

In one of the New York Police Department’s biggest sting operations since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, NYPD officers aimed to convince people to agree to exchange sex for money.

It was a strategy touted to combat human trafficking, but it led to cops descending on minority neighborhoods, incentivized to round up as many “bodies” as they could with sparse evidence.

ProPublica reports an overwhelming majority of the people arrested for these crimes over the past four years are nonwhite: “89% of the 1,800 charged with prostitution; 93% of the 3,000 accused of trying to buy sex.”

ProPublica’s investigation details numerous instances of corruption and exploitation from officers on the streets.
 
COVID-19
 
CDC Data Confirms the Pandemic’s Outsize Impact on People of Color

As coronavirus cases and deaths reach record heights in the U.S., new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms the pandemic’s disproportionate toll on people of color.

Mother Jones reports data from March to November shows “Black, Native, and Latinx people are between three and four times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus than white people.”

There are myriad reasons for the pandemic’s uneven impact, including Black Americans’ high-risk essential jobs and disproportionate suffering from underlying health conditions.
 
Climate Crisis
 
Recognition of Native Treaty Rights Could Reshape the Environmental Landscape

Last month, Michi­gan offi­cials announced plans to shut down a con­tro­ver­sial oil pipeline that runs below the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mack­inac.

In the shutdown order, Gov. Gretchen Whit­mer referenced an 1836 treaty in which tribal nations ceded more than a third of the territory that would become Michigan in exchange for the right to hunt and fish on the land in perpetuity. Whit­mer said an oil spill would destroy the state’s abil­i­ty to hon­or that right.

The U.S. has largely ignored its nearly 400 treaties with tribal nations. As In These Times writes, the U.S. could begin to repair its damage to Native people and the natural landscape by finally honoring its treaties.
 

In Other News

1. Pfizer and Moderna reportedly turn down White House invitation to a ‘vaccine summit’ (The Independent)

2. Headlines Don’t Capture the Horror We Saw (The Atlantic)

3. Tuesday Is ‘V-Day’ In Britain; First Citizens Will Get COVID-19 Vaccine (HuffPost)

4. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh: ‘Machine-gun with AI’ used to kill Iran scientist (BBC)

5. Mystery illness puts 450 in hospital in Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (The Guardian) 
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The Indy Brief is edited by Jeremy Lovelett.