http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2021/09/theres-no-such-thing-as-low-skill-worker.html

Op-Ed, LA Times: Andrew Cuomo’s act of clemency in New York reaches all the way to California

BY MIRIAM PAWEL

Andrew Cuomo, now embarked on his own defiant quest for some sort of redemption, used his final hours as New York governor to grant clemency to a man who had seemed destined to die behind bars.

Like all acts of clemency, it was both an affirmation of the power of redemption and an act with personal and political consequences, in this case stretching across the country to California.

It might seem a relatively safe gesture to enable a 76-year-old who has spent 40 years in prison with a spotless record to apply for parole. But the prisoner is David Gilbert, a former leader of the radical Weather Underground who was an unarmed getaway driver in a botched 1981 Brinks armored truck robbery that left two police officers and one security guard dead. Cuomo’s last-minute commutation of Gilbert’s 75-years-to-life sentence met with predictable outrage from the law enforcement community, who will oppose his release when he appears before the parole board.

Gilbert has attracted many prominent supporters over the years, none more fervent than his son, Chesa Boudin, who was 14 months old when his father and his mother were arrested after the Oct. 20, 1981, shootout in suburban New York. When Boudin could barely sign his name, he protested a decision to abolish the overnight trailer visits that gave him his only chance to get to know his father. “It doesn’t seem fair to take away these trailer visits after years of having them work so well,” the 10-year-old Chesa scrawled in a note to the prison warden.

That preoccupation with fairness became a trademark that eventually propelled Boudin to law school, to a job as public defender, to a crusade against cash bail. And then, the son of a man who represented himself at trial and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court made a move in some sense as revolutionary as his parents’ acts. He ran for district attorney in San Francisco, part of a wave of progressive prosecutors committed to ending mass incarceration and rectifying racial inequities that fill the jails with Black and brown men.

At his January 2020 inauguration, Dist. Atty. Boudin thanked his father, who “can’t be here today because he sits in a cage,” and his mother, Kathy Boudin, paroled in 2003 after serving 22 years for her part in the Brinks robbery; she, too, had been unarmed, sitting next to Gilbert in the getaway car. “You taught me that we are all more than our worst mistakes,” Chesa said, addressing Kathy, who sat in the front row. “Thank you for teaching me about forgiveness and redemption.”

Over the decades, Gilbert has become a mentor for generations of activists behind bars and beyond, respected for his intelligence and passionate commitment to progressive causes. He maintains an extensive correspondence with dozens of younger organizers. He agitated for AIDS education when the frightening, deadly disease first raged, co-founding a peer counseling program in two prisons. He wrote a book of essays, and then, at the urging of his son, a memoir titled “Love and Struggle,” about his years as a leader of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, and his ill-fated turn away from peaceful resistance.

The most difficult conversation Boudin had when he decided to run for district attorney was in his father’s prison visiting room. “I was wary, even unhappy about it,” Gilbert wrote to me. “I’m skeptical about what one can accomplish in the money-loaded arena of electoral politics and at the same time I was concerned on a more personal level for him about the demands and stresses entailed. … I reconciled myself when I saw how he used that arena to get out much more widely a clear critique of the criminal justice system.”

That critique, deeply rooted in his own experience, has made Boudin a lightning rod in the national debate over criminal justice policy. He seems certain to face a recall election early next year, just halfway through his term. His father’s clemency is already being weaponized in that battle. (“This is what pure power looks like folks. You can kill without accountability,” the recall campaign tweeted in response to the clemency news.)

From childhood on, Boudin has lived with a foot in two vastly different worlds, raised in the intellectual salon of his adoptive parents, former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. “Every day I combine two lives,” he wrote in his college application essay, “one, immersed in the stability of privilege and the other, meeting the challenges of degradation. Oddly enough, wrestling with these worlds has extended my vision and generated a plethora of possibilities.”

That those possibilities would include a job in which he sent people to prison would not have seemed plausible. But in a 2004 letter to Gilbert on his 60th birthday, Boudin foreshadowed the throughline between his parents’ activism and his own. He had grown up infused with a deep tradition of “optimistic, open-minded engagement in local, national, and global politics,” he wrote. “It is this legacy that has done the most to place me in a position to continue your struggle for a better world while avoiding the kinds of mistakes that led to the murder of those three men and to your life behind bars.”

When Chesa Boudin was married in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in November 2019, David Gilbert was in attendance as a larger-than-life cardboard cutout, greeted by Chesa and his two mothers as they walked him down the aisle. Boudin’s first child was born Friday. Perhaps a flesh-and-blood Gilbert will soon be able to embrace his son and grandson, freed by an unexpected act of clemency from that life behind bars.

Miriam Pawel is the author, most recently, of “The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.”

PLEASE HELP:URGENT: You have only 24 hours to up-load a letter on behalf of granting parole for David Gilbert, who is 76 years old and has spent 40 years in NY State Prisons. His first parole hearing is fast approaching thanks to a sentence commutation by the governor. Please visit this website, learn about his case, and draft a letter to the parole board urging them to grant parole and allow him to come home.

http://www.friendsofdavidgilbert.org

This is a time of tears for those of us who knew and loved Malik Alim.

He’s gone, and a gaping, irreparable hole has been ripped in our hearts.

We’re stabbed, assaulted.

And we cannot stop the tears.

I knew and admired Malik for years as an organizer and an activist, a thinker and a doer, a reliable presence in the Movement—we said hello and chatted at demonstrations; we greeted one another with a hug at Movement gatherings. But something changed qualitatively a year ago when we began collaborating to create our little back-room podcast about freedom (Gratitude to Damon and Daniel for thinking that Malik and I could become a team). We may have looked—on several dimensions—like an odd couple, but we clicked, and somehow we found a unique synergy across our vast differences of age and race and background, and within our common dreams of a world that could be and should be, but is not yet. I learned from him every day—where to hold the mic and how to create studio conditions in a closet, for example, but also when to shut up and listen, and how to make our messages more educational and compelling. We mentored one another, and I learned from him and grew with him inch by inch.

We didn’t need a reminder—certainly not this unwelcome prompt—to tell us that life is fragile—precious—hanging by a thread. But, even so, there it is: a boisterous declaration that our moment in the sun is brief. Malik knew it too: his was a short life, true, too short, but a rich life nonetheless because he lived it fully and fiercely—with purpose and at full attention. He got up each morning, took care of his kids, connected with friends, did his good work, and loved his family and his community passionately. Day by day. Every day.

Malik’s passing is entirely upside down, out of order: no parent should be required to grieve their son; no young child should have their Papi torn away in a flash. 

So the tears keep coming, but not tears alone—no—it’s also been a time of intense remembering, of intimate laughter and fervent embraces. Death took his life, but death did not end our relationships—with him or with one another. No matter how far back you go in memory, it’s in the work of his hands, in his curious and impatient mind, in his family and in each of us that we find Malik again. Those things are still unfolding, still in the making, still drawing from the deep well of his life. The past is done; and life is still unfolding.

The pain we share now is a measure of Malik’s impact and value in our lives, but we’re not broken—as long as we have not lost his place among us. We will always miss him, of course, but we can all choose to live deeper and more intentional and more committed lives—in honor of him.

I’m sending laser beams of Light and Love to Malik’s parents and siblings, to Kristiana, and to the mighty Ori and Yari—for their sake, we rise again.

David Gilbert was granted clemency by Governor Cuomo in one of his last acts, and the right, then, to go before the parole board!Chesa released this statement:I am overcome with emotion. On the eve of my first child’s birth, my father, David Gilbert, has been granted clemency. He served 40 years in prison—nearly my entire life. I am so grateful for this moment and am reminded of the many other families praying for their loved ones’ return.My heart is bursting, and it also aches for the families of the three victims. Although he never used a gun or intended for anyone to get hurt, my father’s crime caused unspeakable harm and devastated the lives of many separate families. I will continue to keep those families in my heart; I know they can never get their loved ones back.

Malik Alim, my friend and comrade, and for the last year my co-conspirator on the Under the Tree podcast, died Friday morning in a boating accident at Fox Lake, Illinois. We join his family and his comrades at the #LetUsBreathe collective, Chicago Votes, the Chicago Community Bond Fund, and the larger BLM and progressive movement in mourning this tragic loss to our community and the world. 

Some details are sketchy, but this is what I think I know at this moment: The accident occurred August 20 around 10 am. His two small children were with him on a tube being towed by a power boat when the tube flipped over. The kids had life jackets on and popped up—and they weren’t physically hurt. Malik never surfaced. Kristiana Colon, his partner,  was in the boat and went into the water for the kids. Malik’s body was recovered Sunday morning.

Malik, 28-years-old, was an inspirational organizer and activist, a spark of energy and hope. 

I wanted you to know.

I am completely heart-broken.

Rest in power, dear Malik Alim.

Light and Love, and hold one another closer tonight, Bill

~~Under the Tree is, of course, suspended for now. We will plant a tree in Chicago in his memory as a gathering place to reflect on the work he did, and the work ahead. You can hear Malik Alim on most Episodes, but Episode # 38 (“Haiti on my Mind”) is the one we co-authored, and the inspiration for a lot of planning, including future Episodes and a trip to Haiti with Walter Riley. Listen to that one. Also listen to Episode # 15 (“Revolution is a Curatorial Act”) featuring Kristiana Rae Colon.

ADDENDUM:

George Bush is “heart-broken” witnessing the “tragic events.”

Liberal commentators urge us to “learn the lessons.”

OK, what are the lessons? “An illiterate population—no matter how well-trained—cannot mount a technologically advanced fighting force;” “Our mission [sic] to bring democracy [sic] to a backward [sic] country was overly optimistic [sic].”

Addendum II:

It’s difficult to listen to the self-assured reporters and the self-righteous pundits “analyzing” the situation in Afghanistan—often wrong (for decades now), but never in doubt. And not a moment of either self-criticism or serious reflection.

“The Taliban says the press will be free to criticize the government, but there’s reason to doubt those assurances…”—pair that with the fate of people who got on the wrong side of the US government for telling the straight and simple truth, like Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, and Julian Assange.

“The children are suffering under the Taliban…”—wonder for a moment about the fact that in the richest country in the world 15% of people under 18 live in poverty, including 35% of Black children and 40% of Latinx children, and that millions go hungry and have no access to excellent health care.

“The Taliban are unlikely to allow free and fair elections…”—consider the hundreds of recently proposed laws restricting access to the ballot in the US, and add at least a nod to the distortions wrought by the pillars of minority rule: the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court.

“The progress made by women and girls is sure to be set back…”—think about the backward motion of women’s liberation, and read the legal and scholarly writings concerning women’s roles and rights by Barrett, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and  Gorsuch.

The reporters and pundits keep on talking, assuming (without deep reflection, serious inquiry, or critical thought) that the US is the exceptional nation, the greatest country on earth, the oldest and best democracy ever conceived—there are problems, of course, but they are the exception and not the rule.

Rather Than Focus on How the US Got out of Afghanistan, Focus on How It Got In

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post

17 August 21

hile politicians and pundits debate “who lost Afghanistan,” that question will likely seem very distant from many Americans’ lives. Indeed, more than two-thirds supported the decision to withdraw. If anything, most Americans might wonder how the United States came to be in the position to “lose” Afghanistan in the first place?

There should be a serious accounting for the Afghanistan debacle. The United States waged its longest war in a distant, impoverished country of only minimal strategic importance. After two decades, more than 775,000 troops deployed, far more than $1 trillion spent, more than 2,300 U.S. deaths and 20,500 wounded in action, tens of thousands of Afghani civilian deaths, the United States managed to create little more than a kleptocracy, whose swift collapse culminated in the death and panic seen at the Kabul airport on Monday.

Rather than focusing on how we got out, it would be far wiser to focus on how we got in. The accounting can draw from the official record exposed by The Post’s Afghanistan Papers project. The papers come from an internal investigation by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, based on interviews with hundreds of officials who guided the mission. Their words are a savage and telling indictment.

Under President George W. Bush, the early mission — to defeat al-Qaeda and get Osama bin Laden in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — quickly turned to nation-building. The United States would seek to build a democratic state in an impoverished country with entrenched divisions and cultural, language and religious traditions of which U.S. national security managers and military officials remained utterly ignorant.

That mission was an abject failure from the beginning. Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent more money developing Afghan institutions than it had spent to help all of Western Europe after World War II. Yet as Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan concluded, the “single biggest project” stemming from the flood of dollars “may have been the development of mass corruption.” Decades and millions of dollars devoted to building up the Afghanistan military produced forces that U.S. military trainers described as incompetent and unmotivated, with commanders making off with millions from the salaries of tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

The effort to build a “flourishing market economy” led to, as Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House’s Afghan war czar under Bush and President Barack Obama, reported, “a flourishing drug trade — the only part of the market that’s working.” Nearly $10 billion was spent to eradicate poppy production but as of 2018, Afghan farmers produced more than 80 percent of the global opium supply. The reality, Lute admitted, was that “we didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

To sustain the fiasco, presidents, generals, civilians and uniformed military up and down the line reported “progress” in a war that they knew was not being won. While avoiding enemy body counts after Vietnam, they puffed up figures — schools built, troops trained, women educated, roads laid — that were both exaggerated and irrelevant. Each commander claimed that his objectives were met on his watch. Each president offered a new strategy that would make a difference.

Even now, at the end, hawks such as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) tout a new strategy, claiming aggressive U.S. air power plus a small number of U.S. troops could fend off the Taliban for years or decades at little cost and little controversy. To what end? So the corruption could continue, the casualties mount up, the fraud be sustained? To his credit, President Biden knew better, saying Monday in perhaps the most powerful and clear-eyed speech he’s ever given that “American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.”

Now, partisan politicians, reporters, pundits and armchair strategists have begun to issue dark warnings about a blow to U.S. credibility, another echo of Vietnam. But surely U.S. credibility suffered more from sustaining the debacle for years than it will from ending it. Ruinous and wrongheaded interventions — destabilizing the Middle East in Iraq, discrediting humanitarian intervention in Libya — erode our credibility far more.

Progressive activists often call for “speaking truth to power.” The Afghanistan Papers show however that those in power often know the truth, but hide it from the American people. Accountability and truth-telling could begin with the media. Why are those who have consistently lied to the American people populating news talk shows as supposed experts? Why are those who got it right, such as Andrew Bacevich, Matthew Hoh, Phyllis Bennis or Danny Sjursen, largely shunned? Why are networks — not just Fox News, but CNN, MSNBC and others — part of the culture of misleading Americans?

We also need accountability and truth-telling in Congress. As Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has proposed, it’s time for public hearings to probe the bureaucracy about its pattern of lying, while strengthening the War Powers Act and congressional oversight. A special committee should investigate the abject failure of Congress to do its job. Having had the courage to end the war, Biden could launch an internal investigation of the national security bureaucracies to figure out how to root out the culture of lying and end the promotion of buck-passing officers pretending to achieve fanciful goals. At the very least, Biden might ensure that those who promoted, defended and lied about the Afghanistan folly have the opportunity in private life to reflect on their failures.