v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Conspiracy to Commit Sedition

 

From the NYT, a letter from a reader to an OpED by  Jamelle Bouie writes:

Trump campaigned relentlessly on a promise to root out the "Deep State", which to him is some kind of unelected, politically connected, liberal-leaning DC apparatus that works to subvert the Republican agenda.

So what, then, would Ginni Thomas and John Eastman be? The exact same description would apply, except substitute out the word "liberal" for the word "autocratic", and the words "the Republican agenda" for "democracy and our Constitution".

Neither was elected to any position, nor held any position in the government at all. Yet both were able to interact freely and often with the highest level of White House officials, including President Trump himself, in connection with the events of January 6. Both clearly encouraged and plotted with a sitting U.S. president to ignore a legally conducted election, use illegal means to overturn the result, and also enlist others (Mike Pence, the sitting Vice President, for example) to do so.

As for Judge Thomas, he is connective tissue between these two, with one being his wife and the other his former law clerk. Surely he is too smart to have put things in writing about any support he may have had for what they did, but is it even remotely plausible he had no idea what his wife was doing?

If what Ms. Thomas and Eastman did is not sedition, or at least conspiracy to commit sedition, I'm not sure what is.

Who Provided the Funding for January 6th?

From  Wall Street on Parade:

The House Select Committee did an excellent job last evening of providing the big picture on the plot to shred U.S. democracy in service to Donald Trump’s megalomaniac desires. But the question that any good investigator of an unsolved crime scene must ask is this: who benefits from this crime? And to understand who, besides Donald Trump, would be the chief beneficiaries of a coup that installed Trump for an illegitimate second term as President, one has to follow the money trail. That money trail leads to Charles Koch, the billionaire Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, one of the largest private corporations in the world.

Along with the heirs of his late brother, David, Charles Koch is a majority owner of Koch Industries, a global conglomerate which has interests in fossil fuels, refineries, chemicals, paper products and extensive trading operations.

For more than four decades, Charles Koch has also been involved in a shadowy network of front groups that seek to gut the federal government of its regulatory powers over corporations – particularly those involving fossil fuels. To further Koch’s anti-regulatory goals, Charles Koch and Koch Industries were heavily vested in making sure that Trump had another four years as President.

One of the Koch front groups that played a major role in the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House in the first place was Freedom Partners. (It quietly shut down in 2019 after the press started reporting on its role.) When the group was still active in 2018, we had taken a hard look at its Board of Directors. We found that all but one of its Board Members was a current or former Koch company employee. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, Freedom Partners ended up with 12 of its former employees working in the Trump Administration.

Freedom Partners Action Fund, a related organization that ran attack ads against Democrats, had received at least $14 million from Charles Koch and his trust before it shuttered its operations.

Freedom Partners outlined their marching orders for the Trump administration in a formal memo. Their well-placed toadies in the Trump administration delivered: the Trump administration quickly withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. It passed a massive tax cut for corporations. It gutted federal regulations and put industry lobbyists and straw men in charge of the very federal agencies that oversaw those industries.

To handle any legal pushback, Koch Industries’ law firm, Jones Day, sent 12 of its law partners to staff up key positions in the Trump administration on the very day Trump was inaugurated. Jones Day has since removed the press release it issued at the time but you can read the reporting on it at the American Bar Association Journal.

Environmental Injustice

From NYRB, a review of Josiah Rector's account of environmental justice in Detroit:

In Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, Josiah Rector, who teaches at the University of Houston, instead looks northward to Detroit and its environs. As a graduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit a decade ago, he first came across records that charted the city’s rich and often overlooked history of environmental justice organizing. It was also in Detroit that Rector, a white newcomer in a city that is nearly 80 percent Black, witnessed one of the most naked displays of environmental injustice in recent memory.

Beginning in 2014, the City of Detroit shut off the water of more than a quarter-million people. Starting at the same time, authorities in nearby Flint made a series of cost-cutting decisions that resulted in lead-laced water being pumped into thousands of homes. Astonishingly, Detroit’s water has been so foul for so long that its rate of childhood lead poisoning is twice as high as Flint’s—despite the fact that the city is surrounded by the largest freshwater system in the world. During Rector’s time there, moreover, Detroit recorded the highest rate of childhood asthma among the nation’s largest cities. A 2017 study estimates that air pollution causes 7 percent of all deaths in Detroit—more than twice the city’s rate of homicide.

After interviewing activists and immersing himself in the region’s archives, Rector concluded that the “existing literature on environmental justice did not give me the conceptual vocabulary I needed to make sense of what I was seeing in Detroit,” both past and present. A decade later, he has written a book that advances two major interventions. First, it pushes back the environmental justice movement’s genesis to midcentury union organizing. Second, and just as significantly, it firmly connects the effects of debt and austerity—that is to say, capitalism—to environmental racism.

“While most environmental justice studies examine communities on the ‘fence line’ of billowing smokestacks and toxic waste dumps,” Rector writes, “finance and real estate have been no less historically implicated in racialized environmental injustice than heavy industry.” Toxic Debt concretely documents this history by recovering the voices, names, and actions of individuals whose fights have been forgotten or buried.