Fwd.us: Another Failed Silicon Valley Experiment in Technocratic Social Change

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Fwd.us: Another Failed Silicon Valley Experiment in Technocratic Social Change

May 14, 2013 By Leighton Woodhouse In Immigration, Politics, Social Justice

Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s widely reviled, rapidly dissolving Washington DC lobby group, heralds itself as the bringer of “different and innovative tactics” to the usual Beltway brand of back room politicking. As has become abundantly clear over the past few weeks, the reality of Fwd.us is anything but that. Zuckerberg’s DC outfit has not only failed to bring anything new to its approach to the pay-to-play, back-scratching culture of Congress, but has in fact made the most cynical kind of Machiavellian horse trading into its signature style. As Branch.com CEO Josh Miller has noted, it’s a style identical to that of the pharmaceutical and gun lobbies.

How did so many smart and powerful people so quickly and thoroughly screw up such a simple and straightforward task? As Fwd.us never tires of pointing out, its founders and contributors are the A-list set of Silicon Valley luminaries: people like Bill Gates, Marissa Mayer, Sean Parker, and, before he withdrew in protest, Elon Musk. The immediate legislative objective of the organization, by the standards of the political kingdom whose castle it aimed to storm, isn’t exactly world historical. Fwd.us is committed to spending lots of tech cash to help pass bipartisan immigration reform, an issue that’s already at the very front of the President’s legislative agenda and one for which both parties are under extraordinary popular pressure to strike a compromise. What’s more, Fwd.us’ core constituency in Silicon Valley is already united in consensus behind the group’s position. After jumping into the fray at the eleventh hour, all Fwd.us had to do was to keep up the appearance of being a formidable player in negotiations for long enough for a bill to be passed, and then bow for the unearned applause. As one unimpressed tech lobbyist told The New Republic:

“They’re taking an issue where a win was already in sight, and basically they were going to try to get credit. There seemed to be almost a hubris. ‘All the people who’d been lobbying on this for years, they’re incompetent, it’s only when we, Zuckerberg’s group, gets involved in it, that we can turn the tide.’”

Now, barely a month after its first birthday, a Google News search for “fwd.us” serves up page after page of stories about the backlash the group brought upon itself from environmentalists, progressive organizations and its own erstwhile tech industry boosters for its strategy of running ads applauding regressive social and environmental positions by senators whose votes Fwd.us is trying to buy. Not a sentence in any of them speaks to any meaningful contribution the group has made to the overall reform effort. For all the press it has garnered, Fwd.us’ own “In the News” web page includes only one article dated after the group’s launch — and that article doesn’t even mention Fwd.us.

Fwd.us’ spectacular failure has much to do with the hubris of its founders, but it also has something to do with the myopically technocratic culture of the business world, and, in particular, Silicon Valley. The pervasive assumption among politically engaged business leaders that intractable social problems are merely technical puzzles to be solved by disinterested and enlightened experts is problematic enough on its own, especially when it’s a hallmark of the President’s own worldview. When those same simplistic notions are married to one’s understanding of the political process itself, the outcome is even more disastrous.

Fwd.us’ leaders seemed to believe they could run a high-profile political campaign in the same way as a product development initiative: by throwing a lot of money in the pot, hiring very smart people, giving them the space to do what they do best, and keeping a lid on what information gets out to the public. It’s a managerial approach to politics that’s practically designed to fail. As anyone who’s not paid to believe otherwise could have told them, the most successful issue advocacy efforts are not the ones run by cliques of secretive, well-compensated consultants; they’re the ones that have movements behind them.

The Obama administration learned the difference between the two during its first term, when the President was forced to match up his insular, expert-approved inside game on the stimulus bill and on healthcare reform with the spreading wildfire of the Tea Party movement. Obama got his bills in the end, but only after exhausting his limited bank of political capital in an interminable campaign of asymmetrical warfare with an opponent that got stronger the longer the struggle dragged out. Obama won his narrow legislative victories, but he lost his Congressional majorities in the process.

Later, the Tea Party movement itself learned a similar lesson. Caught in a power struggle between local grassroots activists and the seasoned Astroturf professionals at Freedomworks and Americans For Prosperity, local Tea Party leaders who chose to side with the latter found themselves branded as traitors to the founding principles of the movement. As it turned out, the fresh-faced activists who fueled the fire of the Tea Party movement cared about more than mere short term political victories for the GOP political operatives who hoisted their banner. They wanted to shape the world in their own image, and after a short-lived honeymoon with the Republican Party establishment, they found that it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi, but the professional DC co-opters who stood in their way.

Tech industry rhetoric about “crowdsourcing” and “disruptive innovation” aside, the kinds of messy, bottom-up, confrontational movements that fundamentally transform politics are alien species in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Successful business leaders excel at developing practical solutions to identifiable problems in a relatively constrained arena of entrepreneurs, investors and consumers. That is the world of the marketplace. It is not the world of political engagement.

Behind the immigration reform effort is what is arguably the most widespread, powerful and enduring movement since the Civil Rights era. It’s a movement that will prove to dwarf the Tea Party in its scope and longevity. It is this movement, and the demographic shifts that are adding to its ranks every day, that moves the needle inexorably toward passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill. Whatever Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues add to this historical tide are but drops in the bucket, which is exactly what makes their tactics of expediency — of sacrificing critical environmental issues that truly are in precarious shape to serve their narrow organizational goals — so odious and unnecessary.

Zuckerberg’s defenders — the few that are left — will undoubtedly point to naïvety to the sausage-making ways of Washington on the part of Fwd.us’ detractors. Some already have. And in a fight on another issue, perhaps they’d be right. Sometimes, the kinds of unseemly trade-offs that are at the center of Fwd.us’ lobbying strategy are just the regrettable price to pay for representative democracy. But on this issue, Fwd.us’ tactic isn’t just cynical, it’s gratuitous. The movement behind immigration reform doesn’t need Mark Zuckerberg; at this point, he’s a peripheral and ridiculous distraction at best.

What is truly naïve is the remarkable notion that a handful of tech industry titans can step in front of a social movement, cut a few checks and change history. That’s the fantasy behind Zuckerberg’s vision of Fwd.us, just as it was the fantasy behind his faux heroism in forking $100 million over to Newark public schools while the cameras were rolling on Oprah, with questionable accountability and transparency. Washington (like Newark) may be a hopelessly corrupt place, but meaningful social change is still a harder task than that, even for the digital technocrats of the ruling class.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Flailing New Lobby Group Represents Everything That’s Wrong With DC

Mark Zuckerberg's new DC lobbying group is already a failure

May 10, 2013 By Leighton Woodhouse In Environment, Immigration, Politics, Social Justice

Within about a month of the debut of Fwd.us, Mark Zuckerberg’s new DC lobby outfit aimed at promoting immigration reform, the group is already falling apart. If this week is any indication, the meltdown will be as spectacular and ignoble as every other ill-conceived, overfunded start-up in the Valley.

Fwd.us’ political problems began the way they usually do: with a cynical, too-cute-by-half strategy adopted by his Beltway proxies. Fwd.us’ approach amounted to this: buy the votes of key lawmakers by dumping money into ads in their home states on issues that are useful to them but that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t care about. What that has meant in practice is running commercials supporting South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham for his bold opposition to Obamacare and his support of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and applauding Alaska Senator Mark Begich for his support for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Since Fwd.us doesn’t want its own brand associated with such unsavory positions, it’s done what “special interests” always do: it has set up ad hoc shell groups to front its ad buys, in this case, “Americans for a Conservative Direction” and the “Council for American Job Growth”.

The problem with this approach, Zuckerberg is learning, is that when you pull together a coalition to fund your lobbying campaign, it’s not enough just to grease your way into political influence in the Capitol. You also have to answer to the people who cut your checks. That’s especially difficult when some of them have actual integrity.

Today, PayPal billionaire/Tesla founder Elon Musk pulled out of Fwd.us, objecting to the group’s crass exploitation of “other important causes” in its myopic pursuit of its immigration policy agenda. He was joined by another PayPal alum, David Sacks.

It’s incredible to conceive of Zuckerberg not seeing this coming. After the ANWR and Keystone Pipeline ads ran, the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn.org and a number of other groups put out a joint statement condemning the tactic and announcing their suspension of ad buys on Facebook. Musk’s entire business persona rests on his reputation as a visionary of sustainability and green entrepreneurialism. Even if he’d wanted to, it would have been all but impossible for Musk to continue participating in Fwd.us after it had been exposed for shoveling his money into ads supporting fossil fuels and Big Oil.

Another, more subtle design flaw in Fwd.us’ cynical approach is noted by an anonymous “tech lobbyist” in an article in Forbes:

One tech lobbyist says the approach, by avoiding any mention of the immigration debate itself, sends the message that FWD.us is “afraid of its own issue. They’re saying, ‘We want you to vote for this, but we don’t want to get you in trouble.’”

Of course, it may well be that Fwd.us is afraid of its own issue. Zuckerberg, after all, isn’t interested in immigration reform as a human right; he’s interested in facilitating Facebook’s acquisition of work visas for foreign-born software engineers. Narrow as it is, that’s not necessarily an objectionable policy goal in its own right. But nor is it a font of moral conviction burning in the heart of a champion for the nation’s oppressed. This is Mark Zuckerberg we’re talking about.

Fwd.us’ lobbying approach reflects the worst of DC-style politics: it’s cynical, it’s transactional, and it’s predicated on using critically important social and ecological issues as pawns in a chess game. Worse for Zuckerberg, it’s ineffective. Filled with Silicon Valley hubris, Fwd.us boasts about its “innovative” and “disruptive” approach to politics. But so far, the crude tactics it has adopted are as old as politics itself, and clumsily handled at that. To pull off a strategy as calculated and risk-fraught as this one, at the very least you’d need an extremely dexterous hand. Instead, Fwd.us’ sneaky back room dealmaking has been exposed to the world by every major news outlet from The New York Times to TechCrunch. Zuckerberg’s hired political hands have fingers made of butter.

If Zuckerberg really wants to wield influence in the immigration debate, he needs to stop pretending he’s a guest star on House of Cards and start getting serious about the issue. Though at this point, he’s probably better off recognizing Fwd.us as the failed start-up it is, folding up shop and selling the office furniture on Craigslist.

The World Begins Anew: Zapatistas Demonstrate Against the Resurrected PRI

December 22, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Politics, Social Justice

Yesterday, the world’s tinfoil fringe thanked its various deities for the fact that their gross misunderstanding of the Mayan belief system did not in fact bring the world to an end. In Mexico itself, meanwhile, tens of thousands of people acknowledged a much more worldly significance to the date: the eve of the anniversary of the Acteal massacre 15 years ago.

On December 22, 1997, close to four years after the armed insurrection by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) against the government of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), militants allied with the PRI crept into a poor Indian village in Chiapas State whose residents were known to be sympathetic to the Zapatista movement. There, they gunned down 45 defenseless civilians while they prayed for peace in a chapel, among them 21 women — five of them pregnant — and 15 children.

Last year, relatives of victims of the massacre, under anonymity, filed suit in U.S. court against then-president Ernesto Zedillo for crimes against humanity (Zedillo currently lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale, serving as director of the Center for the Study of Globalization). The suit contends that Zedillo’s administration walked away from peace accords signed in 1996 and resorted to a military crackdown after a report from Chase Manhattan Bank counseled the Mexican government “to eliminate the Zapatistas.” Zedillo, the complaint alleges, had knowledge of and promoted the formation of the paramilitary group that carried out the slaughter, then covered up his involvement after the massacre. (Some allege that the case is part of a political vendetta against Zedillo, speculating the involvement of his predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari.)

The U.S. State Department has recommended immunity for Zedillo in the case.

After 12 years out of power, this month marked the return of the PRI to the National Palace in Mexico City, in the person of newly elected President Enrique Peña Nieto. His inauguration two and a half weeks ago was received with massive street protests by thousands of people all over the city, including violent confrontations between hundreds of protesters and police immediately outside the barricades erected around the Legislative Palace to protect the new regime from an anticipated civil uprising and to prevent disruption of the ceremonies.

Yesterday, thousands of Zapatistas donned the movement’s trademark black ski masks and converged on the centers of cities, towns and villages all over Chiapas to memorialize the massacre and demonstrate opposition to the PRI’s return to power.

Lorenzo Tlacaelel Lambertino, a blogger originally from Oaxaca, writes:

EZLN groups in this action have gathered by foot and by bus into the municipal centers of Ocosingo, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Las Margaritas, and Palenque among others. Preliminary estimates project a total possible mobilization of 30 to 50 thousand people from the Los Altos and Jungle regions of Chiapas. The action was nonviolent and extremely orderly. Men, women, and children wore black hoods covering their face, with a red bandana around their necks and green, white, and red ribbons, well known as the three colors of Mexico’s flag. ‘Subcommandante’ Marcos, the famous and outspoken public relations officer for the EZLN, did not make a presence.

Yesterday marked the end of the Mayan calendar and the beginning of a new cycle. It may also have marked the beginning of a new cycle of resistance in Chiapas to the resurrected hegemony of the PRI.

Photo: Trailofdead1, Creative Commons

Follow Leighton on Twitter and at Dog Park Media.

Gun Control and Mental Illness

December 17, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Gun control, Politics, Social Justice

Following last week’s horrific massacre in Newtown, two enormous social problems have moved to the center of the public debate: lack of access to adequate mental health treatment, and the prevalence of guns in this country.

The focus on each is appropriate, given the toxic combination of the two that gave rise to the atrocity, the same deadly mixture that was at work in Aurora, at Virginia Tech, in Oak Creek, Tucson, Columbine and far too many other places in recent years.

Both are not equal, however, when it comes to the causes of gun violence in America. The lack of treatment for mental illness in this country is a serious problem and it belongs at the center of the discussion around this plague of mass shootings that seems nowhere near its end. But to the extent that some are presenting it as a more fundamental issue than the prevalence of firearms in the larger context of American gun violence, they’re losing sight of the forest for the trees. To be sure, serial mass shootings by severely deranged individuals are almost certainly a symptom of untreated mental illness in America. But the much vaster epidemic of day-to-day gun-related homicides is not. Most people who deliberately kill other people with guns are not mentally disturbed; they’re driven by murderous but nevertheless rational or at least sane motivations. There’s more than guns at play in these crimes, of course: there’s poverty, lack of opportunity, a culture of violence, our perverted sense of masculinity. But easy access to guns ranks far higher on the list of factors in most gun murders than the dearth of mental health treatment.

That’s not to say that mental health isn’t a fundamentally important problem, and addressing it may in fact do more to prevent these horrific mass shootings than gun control. But it is to say that gun control would have a far greater impact on stemming the everyday epidemic of gun violence that occurs in cities all over America, which, after all, accounts for the overwhelming majority of gun-related murders. The focus on mental health is critical, but we should not let it crowd out the imperative of more restrictive regulations on guns.

As things currently stand, our legislative record is pathetic on both counts. At the root of the failure in both cases is the ascendancy of libertarianism in our political culture: the obsession with a narrowly conceived notion of “individual freedom” that has engendered the widespread fetishization of the Second Amendment, and the recklessly tenacious conservative commitment to de-funding the social safety net even for those who are psychologically and emotionally incapable of functioning in society without it.

It’s encouraging to see the tide finally turning on gun regulation, with pro-gun rights lawmakers beginning to change their tune and pro-gun control legislators finding the courage to introduce new legislation. It was only a month ago that Republicans tried to attach an amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill that would have prevented the Department of Veterans Affairs from sharing names of veterans who have been deemed mentally incompetent with the FBI for the purpose of factoring them into background checks on firearms acquisitions. In other words, the Republicans wanted to make it easier for mentally unstable people to purchase guns — at least when those people are military veterans. The bill that the amendment was based on, it’s worth noting, is also co-sponsored by two Democrats: the swaggering Senators Jim Webb of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana.

Hopefully, in the wake of Sandy Hook, such regressive measures are dead forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. On Sunday, 31 pro-gun Senators turned down invitations to appear on Meet The Press to recite their talking points on the Second Amendment. If now is not the time to pass legislation tightening regulations on guns, there will likely be no such time.

As our bloody recent history has shown, though, America has a short attention span. Before the new Congress takes its seats, the NRA could have its Facebook page back up again, and we could be back to arguing over protecting the freedom of Americans to own guns instead of the freedom to drop our kids off at school without fearing they’ll find themselves in the middle of a shooting rampage or in the crossfire of a gun fight. If that happens, we will have to put another intractable social problem at the very top of the list of causes of epidemic gun violence in America: the total, utter failure of our political leadership to look beyond ideology and special interest lobbying even for a purpose as basic as protecting the lives of children.

Let’s hope that day does not arrive.

Photo: Creative Commons, Gideon Tsang

ELF Activist Daniel McGowan Released After 7 Years in “Little Guantanamo”

December 12, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Animal Rights, Environment, Politics

Daniel McGowan is not a household name. Even among people who have devoted years of their lives fighting to protect the natural world from the predations of capitalism, his role in the history of the environmental movement is marginal and obscure.

It shouldn’t be. McGowan’s story tells us too much about the desperate situation we’re in — politically as well as ecologically — to be dismissed as a sideshow in the struggle to curb the excesses of human consumption before they destroy us.

Outside of radical circles, McGowan’s story is best known from its telling in last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary “If A Tree Falls.” McGowan was one of a dozen underground environmental and animal rights activists with the Earth Liberation Front and its sister movement, the Animal Liberation Front, who were swept up in a two year, multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional investigation called ‘Operation Backfire,’ which culminated in a series of high-profile arrests and prosecutions at the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006. (Two weeks ago, Rebecca Rubin, one of the three remaining fugitives in the investigation, turned herself in at the U.S.-Canada border.) The activists were charged with committing a series of arsons and other property crimes against numerous targets that they deemed to be agents of environmental destruction and animal exploitation, including U.S. Forest Service ranger stations, a horse slaughterhouse, a dairy farm, lumber company facilities, SUV dealerships, wild horse corrals, a university horticultural research center, a meat company, and, most famously, the Vail Ski Resort.

Though none of the crimes targeted people nor resulted in human death or injury, the Justice Department wasted little time in publicly declaring the arrestees “terrorists.” At a 2006 press conference announcing the defendants’ indictments, FBI Director Robert Mueller referred to perpetrators of environmental and animal rights-related crimes as one of the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities.” Congress passed legislation later that year specifically singling out animal rights activists for enhanced criminal penalties, classifying property crimes against industries that exploit animals and even, in some contexts, First Amendment activities directed at agents of those industries, as “terrorism.” No such special legislation has ever been passed to selectively brand white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists, anti-immigrant vigilantes and right-wing militias — all of which have targeted, injured and killed humans — as terrorists.

In an interview with the Eugene Weekly in 2007, David Iglesias, the former federal prosecutor for New Mexico who was terminated by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the 2006 U.S. Attorney firing scandal, called the terrorism charges “political” and “overreaching.” “It seems to me what happened here should not fit my traditional definition of what terrorism is,” Iglesias explained.

McGowan was detained in two different prisons, both of them belonging to a category of new experimental facilities called “Communications Management Units,” or CMUs (he also spent a brief period of his incarceration in general population). CMUs were built to contain low-level terrorists rounded up in the War on Terror; most of their inmates are alleged to be connected to Islamic networks. They are designed to severely restrict and control the amount and nature of prisoners’ communications with the outside world, earning them the nickname among inmates and prison staff of “Little Guantanamo,” according to journalist Will Potter. For several years, their existence was kept secret. There are only two CMUs in the United States, in Illinois and Indiana; McGowan served time in both.

This week, after seven years in federal prison, McGowan was released. For the next six months, he will be living in a halfway house in New York City, and then be under supervised release for three years before he is finally free from the terms of his sentence.

It’s easy to ignore McGowan’s story, to write it off as a criminal psychodrama a world away from the mainstream currents of today’s environmental movement. At the time when McGowan’s ELF cell was still operational, many advocacy groups were subjected to enormous pressure to make that chasm as wide as possible, or risk being marginalized themselves. To help discredit the political content of their crimes, prosecutors, politicians, law enforcement officers and the media have demonized ELF and ALF activists as terrorists, sociopaths, ordinary criminals hiding behind an ideology or, at best, naïve kids with overly romantic notions of what it means to fight for a cause.

A more disinterested, less agenda-driven observer, however, might recognize the near inevitability of the ELF movement’s dialectical emergence out of a prevailing political culture that has stubbornly refused to even begin to address some of the most dire and vexing problems facing every living thing on the planet. When mainstream political institutions fail to rise to the scale and urgency of epochal crises like global warming, deforestation or massive species extinction — in some cases, even failing to acknowledge their reality — among those who understand what’s at stake, there will be some who are driven to desperate acts.

The ELF and ALF could never be the solution to the problems they point to, but neither are they merely incidental to them: radical movements tend to be harbingers of the struggles to come when ossified political systems bury their heads in the sand instead of measuring up to the profound challenges they face and to their own internal contradictions. Rather than vilify McGowan as a terrorist or mythologize him as a martyr for the earth, we should consider his story for what it tells us about a civilization so blind to its circumstances that it provokes individuals to engage in extreme political acts and risk serving years in Little Guantanamos in order to do something to stem an unfolding catastrophe.

Photos: NYC Anarchist Black Cross (with permission)

Undercover videos are fine, except when they’re about animal abuse. Then they’re terrorism.

December 4, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Animal Rights, Politics

Think Progress reports that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that police can secretly videotape the inside of your home without a warrant.

The case involves an undercover officer who entered a suspect’s home under false pretenses (claiming to be an interested buyer of contraband bald eagle feathers and pelts), carrying a concealed video camera. The footage from that camera was used as evidence in the suspect’s prosecution.

The suspect claimed that the method for gathering the footage constituted a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights and that the evidence should have been suppressed. The court ruled that because what was revealed to the undercover officer during his visit was in plain sight, the fact that he was secretly recording it is irrelevant.

Earlier this year, Iowa and Utah became the latest states to approve “Ag Gag laws” that criminalize undercover investigations of animal abuse on factory farms. When activists enter a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation under false pretenses (usually by getting hired) for the purpose of secretly videotaping the daily gratuitous atrocities committed against pigs, cows, chickens and other livestock, their conduct in states with Ag Gag laws is criminal. The FBI has recommended they be prosecuted as terrorists.

So:

Cops lying about their identities and shooting undercover videos in your house = no problem.

Animal rights activists lying about their identities and shooting undercover videos of animal abuse on factory farms = terrorism.

That is all.

Holiday Hope for Incarcerated Survivors of Sexual Abuse

December 4, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Social Justice

Ca’Linda was locked up in a Kentucky county jail on a drug charge when a captain on the corrections staff first demanded to see her naked. That was the first abuse. It got worse, quickly.

The captain knew Ca’Linda had an infant daughter, so he didn’t have to use physical force. He just had to threaten to transfer her to a facility where she would never be able to see her daughter again. That was the leverage he used to force Ca’Linda to submit to his routine visits to her cell, where he would fondle her and, eventually, rape her.

Ca’Linda did what most inmates do not: she lodged a complaint. But after an investigation affirmed her charges, Ca’Linda’s rapist wasn’t fired. He was given the option to resign.

Ca’Linda was transfered to another facility. There, the sexual abuse began again. As before, the perpetrator was an officer on the correctional staff, this time a lieutenant. And as before, demands to see her naked quickly escalated into physical assault. When Ca’Linda reported her second abuser, the pattern repeated itself: rather than being terminated, he was suspended, then re-assigned to another part of the facility. Eventually he was fired for a sexual offense involving someone else.

Today, Ca’Linda, who was also abused as a child, is emotionally and psychologically crippled. Her abusers walk free. There is little that is remarkable in this story. It’s simply the day-to-day reality of the American prison system.

More than 200,000 inmates are sexually abused every year in American jails and prisons, usually by corrections staff, often routinely. Typically they are targeted for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, or in some other way vulnerable and alone. Their lives are shattered by the long-term consequences of rape: PTSD, depression, drug addiction and suicidal ideation.

Boa Smith was imprisoned when she was 20 years old. She’s spent the majority of her life so far behind bars. “The officers did what they wanted,” Smith says. “They sexually harassed us all the time – exposing themselves, trying to coerce us into sex with them, pulling blankets off us at night to see if they could catch us without clothes. They just laughed about it. It was part of life.”

One day, Smith was raped by an officer in the walk-in freezer. She sat down on a palette of ice cream and cried, which at the time was all she could really do. “Back then you didn’t get help,” she says. “You just shut up and dealt with it.”

“It’s hard to describe what it’s like to live with that kind of fear,” she continues. “It was with me all the time. I could feel it in my gut. I was on my guard 24 hours a day, ready to defend my life. I had to be. Those officers could do anything they wanted to me, and I knew it.”

Just Detention International is a human rights organization devoted to ending the epidemic of sexual assault behind bars. JDI seeks remedies in long-term policy changes; in the short term, it facilitates outreach to prisoners to help them cope with their anguish.

A large part of the emotional trauma of sexual assault is the fact or the perception of being socially isolated. The sense that one is alone in one’s suffering is common among survivors of rape in the outside world; behind bars, that sense is compounded by the reality of both physical and social seclusion. It’s nearly impossible to heal when you’re completely alone in your pain.

Every holiday season, JDI organizes a holiday greeting card campaign, inviting members of the public to write a sentence to an inmate who has suffered from sexual abuse, letting them know that they are not beyond the reach of human empathy. These cards save lives — literally. JDI has heard from scores of inmates who were brought back from the brink of suicide simply by receiving a holiday card from a compassionate stranger, or were encouraged to stand up for themselves.

“When I decided that I was going to do something about what had happened to me, I knew it was going to be a hard fight,” explains Joe, an incarcerated rape survivor. “Hearing that strangers cared about me was what gave me the backbone to keep going and keep fighting.”

This year, JDI aims to collect 10,000 cards. It takes no more work to fill one out than it takes to write a tweet; as on Twitter, the limit to each message is 140 characters, and you can fill it out online, at JDI’s website. Volunteers transcribe every electronically submitted note into a hand-written holiday card, which is then delivered to a rape survivor behind bars.

These cards will not end the ongoing and systemic crisis of rape in the criminal justice system. But for their recipients, they will help resolve the immediate emotional crises they face as individual survivors of sexual assault, alone in prison during the holidays — crises that will otherwise lead to withdrawal, depression, and possibly suicide. It’s the smallest effort one could possibly make that could actually result in saving a life.

“This holiday season, for the first time in almost 30 years, I’ll be celebrating with friends and family on the outside,” says Smith. “I was granted parole back in June, and I was released last week. I know that there are thousands of men and women, just like me, who are struggling to heal from sexual abuse and who need to know that they haven’t been forgotten, and that their voice matters.”

Visit JDI to spend 60 seconds helping to save a life.

Black Bean Soup yum

December 3, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Meatless Mondays

Meatless Monday! Here’s today’s rainy Fall season recipe.

Black Bean Soup

Ingredients:

2 15 oz. cans black beans

4 cups veggie stock (Better Than Bouillon No Chicken Base, eg.)

1 yellow onion

3 cloves garlic

1 piece of ginger root (about the size of a C battery)

3 carrots

3 stalks celery

1 leek

2 red bell peppers

1/2 bunch parsley

Canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce

1 cup red cooking wine (2 Buck Chuck will do)

2 tablespoons cumin

1 cinnamon stick

Salt

Pepper

Instructions:

Roast the peppers over an open stove top flame, turning occassionally until they’re charred and black all over.

Meanwhile, dice the onion. Heat olive oil in a stock pot over medium high heat. Sautée the onions, stirring frequently. Chop garlic; peel the carrots and cut them finely; chop celery; skin and dice garlic; chop leeks into fine slices. When onions are translucent, add the other vegetables. Keep stirring frequently.

When peppers are done, remove them from the flame and set them aside to cool.

After about five minutes of sautéing vegetables and herbs in the stock pot, add the wine and vegetable stock, and turn flame down to simmer. Add cumin and cinnamon stick. Dice a couple chipotle peppers, and toss them into the pot with about two tablespoons of adobo sauce. Add two cans of beans, with juice. Salt and pepper to taste.

Let the soup cook for another ten minutes or so, then serve. Garnish with chopped parsley.

Protests erupt into street battles during inauguration of Mexico’s President Peña Nieto (Video)

December 3, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Politics

Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, took office last Saturday in a day of inaugural festivities punctuated by violent clashes between police and protesters in the streets beyond the steel wall erected to shield the Legislative Palace from anticipated unrest.

Hundreds of protesters smashed windows of stores and banks in Mexico City and threw Molotov cocktails over the barricades, denouncing the election, which was tainted by allegations of massive fraud, as illegitimate. Police attacked protesters with tear gas, water cannons and rubber-coated bullets. At least 76 people were injured in the mêlée, 29 of them hospitalized, according to the Associated Press, including one student protester who was in critical condition.

Inside the legislative chambers, the new president was greeted with jeers from some members of Congress. Before an audience that included U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Peña Nieto ushered in a restoration of political rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, a party with a seven decade-long history of corruption, fraud and authoritarian control of Mexico before its hegemonic rule over the country was first broken twelve years ago.

Here are two videos of the protests from Emergencia Mx:

Photos: Eneas, CC 2.0

Activists Protest Juicy Couture Founders for Use of Fur in New ‘Skaist Taylor’ line

December 1, 2012 By Leighton Woodhouse In Animal Rights, L.A.

Juicy Couture, the brand that built a fashion empire out of rhinestone-studded velour track suits with “Juicy” emblazoned across the ass, became a darling of animal lovers in 2008 when it pledged to go fur-free.

But on Saturday, Juicy Couture co-founder Pamela Skaist-Levy found the street outside her Beverly Hills home the site of a demonstration by dozens of animal rights protesters shaming her and her business partner Gela Nash-Taylor for trading in the pelts of foxes, raccoons and other animals that were raised in confinement and brutally killed for fashion industry profits.

Juicy Couture is still listed on the Humane Society’s website as a fur-free designer. But now Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor, who left the company two years ago, have a new fashion line out called Skaist Taylor which embraces fur with the same ostentatious aplomb with which Juicy showcases costume jewelry and the color pink.

The fur trade has been the object of protests and boycotts for decades for its horrific treatment of animals.

“Animals including fox, rabbits, mink, cheetah, and even dogs and cats are gassed, beaten, have their necks broken, are caught in steel-jaw leg hold traps and vaginally and anally electrocuted for their fur,” said animal rights attorney Shannon Keith, who produced a documentary on the fur industry called “Skin Trade” and was one of the campaigners behind West Hollywood’s ban on fur retail a year ago. “If someone were caught anally electrocuting a dog, they would be arrested and sent to prison for felony animal cruelty; however, because the fur industry is completely unregulated, those who control it get away with it.”

The demonstration Saturday was organized by two longtime anti-fur activists, Ellen Lavinthal and Jessica Schlueter. Lavinthal was one of the primary organizers behind the West Hollywood fur ban, and Schlueter helped launch a boycott of a major fur retailer.

At one time, Lavinthal, who lives in the neighborhood, was friends with Skaist-Levy. That relationship had already grown distant, but ultimately soured over Skaist-Levy’s decision to use fur as a centerpiece in her new Skaist Taylor line.

“I approached Pamela when she appeared on the front page of the L.A. Times wearing fur to promote her new line,” said Lavinthal. “The next day, my daughter and I reached out to her and dropped off a letter from my daughter asking her to stop using fur, as well as a copy of ‘Skin Trade‘ and some literature about the fur industry. I told her that I and the rest of the animal rights community would be glad to help promote her new line if she changed her mind about fur. A few weeks later, we gave her a petition with 33,000 names on it. When she didn’t do anything about it, we were left with no choice but to protest.”

Skaist Taylor’s press agent did not respond to repeated attempts to contact the company for comment.

Schlueter also had a falling out — not with the designer herself, but with the Juicy Couture brand. Like countless other young women around the world, in high school and college, Schlueter spent “hundreds, if not thousands of dollars” on Juicy clothes. The company’s image appealed to her: the story of two women with practically no resources starting a global brand out of their small L.A. apartment was irresistible. Juicy Couture’s pledge to go fur-free sealed her brand loyalty.

Now, Schlueter feels disappointed and betrayed, dismayed that all the money she spent on Juicy Couture clothes over the years had only helped further the careers of two fashion industry giants who then went on to become part of the multibillion dollar fur industry.

“I don’t think they are horrible people, I think they have spent years in a community that glamorizes fur and that mocks people who stand up against its inherent cruelty,” Schlueter explained.

Skaist Taylor has no physical stores, so the activists chose Skaist-Levy’s home residence as the site for their demonstration. Especially given its residential setting, the protest was conceived from the start as a calm, peaceful, educational action — no screaming in people’s faces or mixing it up with the cops.

But demonstrations in front of private homes are an inherently risky tactic for animal rights activists. Federal prosecutors have shown a willingness to classify “home demos” as acts of terrorism under the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that the fur trade and other animal-based industries lobbied for and which was written explicitly to criminalize certain protest tactics in animal rights campaigns that are Constitutionally protected in every other context. In 2009, the government indicted four Santa Cruz animal rights activists on terrorism charges for engaging in First Amendment activities, including protests in front of the homes of UC Santa Cruz vivisectors, claiming a connection between those actions and two 2008 firebombings of the car and the home of two UCSC scientists, crimes which remain unsolved. A federal judge threw out the indictments the following year for lack of specificity.

With about one bike cop for every three protesters, however, no tension was visible between law enforcement and activists at the demonstration on Saturday. Protesters restrained their passion with civility, aiming to reach the public instead of alienating it. A few Star Tours vans passing by slowed down for tourists to take pictures.

The organizers were pleased. “I’m beyond thrilled that this was one of the largest home demos ever in the United States,” said Leventhal. “The fact that so many people would give up their Saturdays and choose to be there really made a statement of how strongly they feel about the use of fur in fashion.”