October 2020

Pull investments from companies not committed to environment, pope says.

Pull investments from companies not committed to environment, pope says – VATICAN CITY (Reuters).

Pope Francis urged people to pull investments from companies that are not committed to protecting the environment, adding his voice to calls for the economic model that emerges from the coronavirus pandemic to be a sustainable one.

Francis spoke in a video message for an online event called “Countdown Global Launch, A Call to Action on Climate Change”.

“Science tells us, every day with more precision, that we need to act urgently … if we are to have any hope of avoiding radical and catastrophic climate change,” he said.

The pope listed three action points: better education about the environment, sustainable agriculture and access to clean water, and a transition away from fossil fuels.

“One way to encourage this change is to lead companies towards the urgent need to commit to the integral care of our common home, excluding from investments companies that do not meet (these) parameters … and rewarding those that (do),” he said.

He said the pandemic had made the need to address the climate crisis and related social problems even more pressing.

“The current economic system is unsustainable. We are faced with a moral imperative … to rethink many things,” he said, listing means of production, consumerism, waste, indifference to the poor, and harmful energy sources.

In June, a Vatican document urged Catholics to disinvest from the armaments and fossil fuel industries and to monitor companies in sectors such as mining for possible damage to the environment.

Other speakers and activists at the online event included actress Jane Fonda, Britain’s Prince William, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

By Abe Mazliach, ago

Sir David Attenborough to 60 Minutes on climate change: “A crime has been committed”

For nearly 70 years Sir David Attenborough has been exploring the planet, taking hundreds of millions of television viewers on eye-opening journeys through the natural world. Jungles and island archipelagos, deserts and deep under the sea, no place has been too remote, no animal too elusive, for Sir David and his talented team of filmmakers to document.
Now 94, Attenborough has witnessed the evolution of the natural world more closely than most. Attenborough’s latest project includes a book and film both titled, “A Life on Our Planet.” The documentary premiers on Netflix on October 4.
He calls this latest project his “witness statement,” and on 60 Minutes told correspondent Anderson Cooper “a crime has been committed” against the planet. Attenborough says “our planet is headed for disaster and climate change is the greatest threat facing the plant for thousands of years. There could be whole areas of the earth that people could no longer safely live”. The World Wildlife Fund says 2/3 of the world’s wildlife has disappeared in the last 50 years.
He would tell world leaders that the time has come to put aside national ambitions and look for international ambitions of survival. “We don’t have an alternative but to be optimistic, if you love your children, if you love the rest of humanity”. It’s the young Sir David has hope for. “There is a huge movement around the world of young people who can see what’s happening to the world and demanding that their government take action. That’s the best hope I have. My generation failed”. We allowed it to happen despite being the smartest creatures that ever lived. We need more than just intelligence, we need wisdom. After all, this planet is all we have. There is no where else to go.
“We’re both in broadcasting, if you’re going be telling something as though it’s true, you better be sure it’s true,” Attenborough said to Cooper. “So I didn’t say anything much about the world being in ecological peril until I was absolutely sure that what I was talking about was correct.”
Attenborough no longer minces words nor leaves his viewers wondering where he stands on the issue of climate change. In the new film, he laments Earth’s decline and states emphatically, “Our planet is headed for disaster.” Despite his stark warning about the planet’s peril, Attenborough told Cooper it is not too late to salvage it, if countries work together and societies alter their behavior. The nonagenarian remains hopeful for the future.
By Abe Mazliach, ago

We Need Leaders NOW!

James Baldwin said “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”. The Democratic Party and it’s leadership need to play hard ball for this election. Trump is taking the world stage everyday and continues to say whatever he wants and gets away with it. He bullies everyone around him and he has turned the White House into a house of lies and not the house of the people. We all know Trump only cares about himself and will do anything in his power to win or disrupt this election. Anything!
 
We need leaders who have the courage to confront Trump everyday, calling out his lies and the damage he is doing to the American people and our Democracy. Vice- President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris are calling Trump out but we need a chorus of voices to do this. We need leaders who will demand that Republican Senators speak up when Trump breaks the law, becomes unhinged or puts people’s lives in danger. We need leaders who will demand that voter suppression stops.
 
We need leaders NOW to express their anger and outrage loud and clear!
By Abe Mazliach, ago

All In: The Fight for Democracy’ Film Review: Stacey Abrams Documentary Is Timely and Terrifying

Lisa Cortés and Liz Garbus’ doc focuses on Abrams’ campaign for governor of Georgia but expands far past that to encompass nearly 200 years of voter suppression.

We haven’t had too many election years with quite this much attention paid to the process of voting, from allegations of voter suppression and voter fraud to President Trump’s recent suggestion that North Carolina voters cast ballots twice. But even before the act of voting became a hot-button issue in this particular election cycle, documentary filmmakers have turned their sights on the right to vote and the manipulations thereof.

Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance’s “Slay the Dragon,” which premiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival and was released in April, went deep on the practice of gerrymandering. Dawn Porter’s “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” which was released by Magnolia and CNN in July, is a portrait of the late congressman that detours to explore the issues of voting rights for which he spent his lifetime crusading. And now, Lisa Cortés and Liz Garbus’ “All In: The Fight for Democracy,” which focuses on Stacey Abrams’ fight to become governor of Georgia but expands far past that to encompass nearly 200 years of every type of voter suppression.

It is the most comprehensive and far-reaching of the recent voting-rights docs, and with the election approaching it’s an uncommonly timely and urgent document of the many ways in which the foundations of democracy can be thwarted. So exhaustive that at times it’s exhausting, it’ll terrify anybody who’s worried that the true danger in this year’s election is voter suppression, not voter fraud.

Stacey Abrams is one of the producers of the film, which is organized around her run for governor against Brian Kemp – who, as Georgia’s sitting secretary of state, also oversaw the election in which he narrowly defeated her amid numerous examples of the closing of polling places and the purging of voter rolls. And she’s one of its key talking heads, all of whom are positioned at long tables with deep rooms behind them; the settings make it look like they’re lecturing or testifying before congress, and lend an air of gravitas to what’s being said and to the people who are saying it.

Of course, the issue deserves all the gravitas it can get, and the film takes it all the way back to the election of George Washington, when only six percent of Americans — white, male property owners – were eligible to vote. From there, it delves into the 15th Amendment in 1870, which gave Black men the right to vote (women were still excluded) and led to African-American congressmen elected at state and national levels.

In the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, the film points out, more than two-thirds of eligible Black people registered to vote in some southern states. But after congress agreed to withdraw troops from the South to effectively end Reconstruction, the states (initially in the South, but later elsewhere) began to find ways to exclude them from the voting rolls: poll taxes, literacy tests that were designed to be almost impossible to pass, then felony disenfranchisement coupled with statues that made arrests and convictions easy.

By the end of World War II, “All In” says, registration in the South had fallen to three percent of eligible African-Americans. And organizations like the Ku Klux Klan intimidated those who were registered. For instance, Maceo Snipes, a WWII veteran, was the only Black person to vote in Taylor County, Georgia in 1946, and was shot and killed by a group of men on his front porch soon after casting his ballot.

“All In” suggests that Martin Luther King’s march over the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965 was a turning point, when graphic footage of Alabama police savagely beating peaceful protestors woke up Americans and spurred President Lyndon Johnson to push for and get passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

At this point, the film’s clear storytelling gets a little diffuse; the movie alternates between sequences featuring Abrams’ race for governor with sections from the past, but then there are time jumps within the time jumps, and a sense that “All In” really is trying to fit it all in.

And there’s a lot to fit in, notably in recent years when opponents of the Voting Rights Act seized on Barack Obama’s election as a way to undermine the act by claiming it was no longer necessary. At the same time, says author Carol Anderson, the coalition of 15 million new voters brought to the polls to vote for Obama became “the hit list for voter suppression.”

The Voting Rights Act had been extended many times over the years, and always proudly signed by Republican presidents. But behind the scenes, a strategy to constantly challenge elements of the law in court finally hit pay dirt in 2013, when the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts – whose mentor was former Chief Justice William Renquist, once one of the leaders in voter suppression in Arizona according to the film – invalidated many provisions of the bill.

In the aftermath, “the floodgates” opened to voter ID laws that made it particularly hard for minorities to be registered, as well as purges of the voting rolls, poll closures and aggressive gerrymandering.

“Intimidation from the government is real, it is powerful, it’s because of changing demographics and the fear of what this larger vote can mean,” says Anderson.

All of this is a huge amount to cover, and the film strains to do it. But even if it feels a little disorganized at times, and occasionally overwhelmed by the mass of material it’s trying to cover, “All In” leaves the unmistakable impression that there is an organized effort to prevent some citizens from voting, and that President Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud – which his own commission could not document – is part of that effort.

By Abe Mazliach, ago

Meet the Jewish Woman Suing Neo-Nazis For a Living

Meet the Jewish Woman Suing Neo-Nazis For a Living By Lior Zaltzman

What do you do when you get a call from an iconic human rights lawyer, asking you to help her sue some Nazis? Well, if you’re Amy Spitalnick, you say yes, of course.

Spitalnick, 34, is the executive director of Integrity First for America, the nonprofit group that’s taking on the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.  On behalf of community members of that Virginia city, her organization is suing two dozen individuals and groups connected to the rally — the one where protestors were shouting, “Jews will not replace us” — back in August 2017.  The main defendant of the case, Jason Kessler, was a member of the Proud Boys, the white nationalist hate group president Trump told to “stand back and stand by” at the first presidential debate this week. Another, Andrew Anglin who runs the Daily Stormer, construed Trump’s debate comment as a call for a race war.

This case, which The New York Times called “the most sweeping lawsuit against the promoters of the Charlottesville white power rally,” is slated to stand trial in April of 2021.

Back in 2017, Spitalnick was the communications director and senior policy adviser to the New York Attorney General. She was at her sister’s wedding shower when she learned that a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville, injuring 28 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. It was a terrifying and memorable moment for Spitalnick.

“I’m the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and we had surrounded the shower with photos of our family, including all the photos of my grandparents,” Spitalnick tells me in a telephone interview. “And I remember sitting on one of the folding chairs, as people were leaving, on the phone with the Attorney General, writing the statement that we put out, and thinking how horrifying and baffling it was, that in America in 2017, neo-Nazis were so emboldened that they could murder someone on the streets of an American city.”

In the course of her work for the Attorney General, Spitalnick had met Roberta Kaplan — one of the lead attorneys of the Edie Windsor case, which paved the way for marriage equality in 2013. It was Kaplan who first called Spitalnick, asking if she wanted to help her sue Nazis. Kaplan had put together a case on behalf of community members in Charlottesville to hold accountable some of the individuals and groups that brought terror to that town. Thinking of how Nazis murdered almost all of her grandparents’ families, Spitalnick joined IFA as its executive director.

“Even before we go to trial, we’ve seen very real financial and legal and operational consequences for these groups and leaders,” Spitalnick says. “Richard Spencer, who’s one of our defendants, said the case is ‘financially crippling’. Groups like League of the South have said they can’t open a new building because of our case. Two defendants have had bench warrants issued for their arrest. Others have faced tens of thousands of dollars in sanctions and so they’re already facing very real financial, legal, and operational consequences even before trial.”

“And when we go to trial and win very large civil judgments against them, this case really has the potential to totally undercut, bankrupt, and dismantle these groups, which is not only about their own ability to operate, but the deterrent effect it will have on the broader movement,” Spitalnick explains.

Of course, the main goal of the case is to get justice for the injured residents of Charlottesville. But there’s also another, more lofty goal: “This is something that our lead counsel Robbie Kaplan often talks about… Every decade or so there’s a trial in this country that is about more than the trial itself, and serves as the sort of public reckoning [and] public education on a critical issue,” Spitalnick says.

She continues, “We believe that this case can be that case; that moment to really help sharpen and focus the public’s understanding of the crisis of violent white supremacy.”

This crisis, Spitalnick says, is not political. She sees it as “a fundamental question of security and democracy. And what we’re talking about here is one of the most dire threats to our communities… And they’re only becoming more and more emboldened.”

Spitalnick says there’s a “clear line” that connects the Charlottesville rally to the other white supremacist, racist, and anti-Semitic violence that’s occurred in recent years, including the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the shooter in Christchurch, New Zealand who targeted Muslims and mosques.

Social media, she says, plays a crucial role: “The Charlottesville violence was planned extensively online, and the basis for our lawsuit are these online chats, in which they discuss every detail down to hitting protesters with cars,” she says. “Even again, last night, the Proud Boys were immediately online, gleefully celebrating the President’s comments, and turning it into their new slogan.”

“It’s important to point out this isn’t happening in a vacuum,” Spitalnick adds. “There have been active disinvestments from the federal government in the types of policies and work that is meant to combat extremists.”

This has nothing to do with free speech, she cautions. “If these individuals and groups had simply gone to Charlottesville, and stood on the street corner with their vile, racist, anti-Semitic signs and their swastikas and chanted the awful things that they did, they would have had every right to do so,” she says. “But that’s not what they did. They, after planning for months in advance on social media and elsewhere, went to Charlottesville with the intent to bring racist violence to that community, and target people based on their race, their religion, and their willingness to defend the rights of others. That is not something that’s protected by free speech.”

As dark as it all sounds, fortunately, there’s something we can all do about it. “Broadly, it’s so important that the issue of violent white supremacy and violent extremism not fall off people’s radars…” Spitalnick says. “And it’s so important that we hold our officials accountable on the federal, state, and local level.”

“There’s also a lot we can do as consumers,” she adds. “We should be holding social media accountable. There is no obligation by any social media company to give a platform to violent extremism. The First Amendment does not require private companies to give a platform to extremism — no matter what they might say… And as consumers, we should use our voices and the power that we have to hold the private sector accountable.”

Of course, there’s a real danger to the work Spitalnick does. She and her colleagues get a lot of violent and hateful threats, many connected to the Jewish identity of many of their team members. “Security is our biggest priority, the biggest line item in IFA’s budget,” she says. “It’s fairly rare for a civil case to require this level of security, or, frankly, any real security. But most of the cases don’t involve neo-Nazi defendants.”

“It’s so easy and understandable to feel hopeless and helpless, and scared and angry in this moment — and I certainly do at times,” Spitalnick tells me when I ask how she keeps herself motivated. “But I think a lot about my grandparents’ generation and the fact that, unlike their generation, we live in a country that is supposed to be governed by the rule of law, that has a justice system that has laws, like the ones we’re using to fight back and hold accountable those who threaten justice who seek to undermine justice and civil rights.”

“We have been, knock on wood, or, you know, not to give it kinehora as my grandmother would say, successful at doing that so far in this case, if you look at the impact it’s had,” Spitalnick says. “And so we are going to keep fighting to use that rule of law and use that justice system and to protect that rule of law and to protect our justice system, which is even more urgent over the last few weeks.”

By Abe Mazliach, ago