Wertheimer

During the past year, I found it hard to explain, to family and friends, a strange truth. I was reporting on places where starvation and dehydration deaths had unfolded across a span of weeks or months—but these were not overseas famine zones or traditional theatres of war. Instead, they were sites of domestic lawlessness: American county jails. After meeting Carlin and Karina, I identified and scrutinized more than fifty cases of individuals who, in recent years, had starved to death, died of dehydration, or lost their lives to related medical crises in county jails. In some cases, hundreds of hours of abusive neglect were captured on video, relevant portions of which I reviewed. One lawyer, before sharing a confidential jail-death video, warned me, “It will stain your brain.” It did.

The victims were astoundingly diverse. Some, like Mary, were older. Some were teen-agers. Some were military veterans. Many were parents. In nearly all the cases I reviewed, the individuals were locked up pretrial, often on questionable charges. Many were being held in jail because they could not afford bail, or because their mental state made it hard for them to call family to express their need for it. (These jail deaths would not have occurred, several lawyers pointed out to me, in the absence of the cash-bail system.) Others were awaiting psychiatric evaluation or a court-mandated hospital bed. Often, the starvation victims were held in solitary confinement or other forms of isolation, which is well proved to deepen psychosis. Some were given no toilet and no functioning faucet, or were expected to sleep on mats on concrete floors, in rooms where the lights never turned off.

Despite the terror, the early weeks of the pandemic contained perhaps more hope than I've felt in the subsequent five years. It became more apparent than ever where the weak links in capital's chain were located. Millions of people realized that their jobs were bullshit. The massive decrease in commuter vehicles proved that there were actually ways we could alter society to combat climate change. Powerful people started talking about universal basic income and universal healthcare.

Then it seems like the 1% got together on Zoom or whatever and put an end to all of that. There was a drumbeat of "it's patriotic to let grandma die." (Was Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick the first to say it out loud?) Teachers' unions became villains for wanting to prevent children and workers from spreading the plague. The people whose jobs couldn't go remote were given the title "essential workers" but never got sick days. In the months and years that followed, the Democrats nominated their most anti-healthcare candidate, who went on to crush a strike that threatened to give supply chain workers sick days. The CDC took its isolation recommendations from Delta Airlines, and masks became rarer and rarer. And worse, and worse, and worse, and millions of people are dead or disabled and we're further into fascism and farther from universal healthcare than we were five years ago.

I'm looking for books or longform essays about this switch, because the change happened very quickly - before the George Floyd uprising, even. Today too much of this is lost in the memory hole, but I wonder if studying the days in which the discourse changed can give us clues about where we should direct our organizing efforts.

fair.org is a great resource and a necessary corrective to the mainstream media. They've been particularly good at documenting the lies and propaganda in the New York Times and Washington Post during the last few years:

Despite History of Fabrication, Press Uncritically Covers IDF-Provided Documents on Hamas

For NYT’s ‘Free Speech’ Maven, Racism Needs Protection, Gaza Protests Don’t

NYT Engages in Front-Page IDF ‘Womenwashing’

And so on. They're pretty essential. And they're not that different from what we might try to do in this comm.

From their freelance guidelines page (linked above):

A typical FAIR story focuses on US media coverage of a story currently in the news or an issue that receives perennial coverage, e.g., Afghanistan. We also occasionally cover news about the media—for example, layoffs of journalists, labor disputes or media mergers—and stories of activism that challenges media bias, censorship or policy.

...

Freelancers receive $300 per article, paid within two weeks of publication. To help our message find the widest possible audience, we request that writers grant FAIR the right to approve republication of their articles; any proceeds from such reprints would belong to the writers. We also ask that you grant us the right to publish your piece in the Nexis media database. FAIR publishes under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Creative Commons license, which allows for published work to be copied, distributed, displayed and performed for noncommercial purposes if full attribution is given and no alterations are made to the work.

Submissions from BIPOC, women and LGBTQ writers are particularly encouraged.

Because of FAIR's history (they've been publishing since 1986) and reputation for accuracy, their articles are often the first thing I send to libs who realize that something is wrong with the coverage they're reading from other outlets. At the beginning of the Ukraine war I must have sent this one to everyone I know. Some people memory-holed it immediately, naturally, but this stuff often works on people who will read it in good faith.

Maybe this comm can be a space for practicing or collaborating on writing takedowns and correctives like this?

In the 20 months since Mr. Nichols’s death, the state’s Republican leaders have repeatedly maligned Steve Mulroy, the newly elected district attorney for Shelby County, and other Memphis-area officials for failing to address the scope of the city’s crime issues and overstepping their legal boundaries.

At least one police reform ordinance supported by Mr. Nichols’s family, which would have prevented police from stopping cars over more minor traffic infractions, was repealed by Republicans in the legislature.

Mr. Mulroy now faces a threat to oust him from his position when the legislature convenes in January, led by State Senator Brent Taylor. And last month, the top two Republicans in the legislature threatened to withhold sales tax revenue from the city, the second-largest in the state, over plans to put three gun safety initiatives on the November ballot.

Dies of phytohemagglutinin poisoning in every movie

The sister of Willie McCoy, who Vallejo police fatally shot in 2019, was killed in a crash last week and police are investigating the death as a homicide, according to police and the family’s attorney.

Sharmell Mitchell, 48, was taken off life support on Friday after being ejected from a vehicle and suffering head injuries, according to Vallejo police and attorney Melissa Nold.

. . .

One of the detectives assigned to the investigation into Mitchell’s death is Jarrett Tonn, the Vallejo police officer who fatally shot 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, a San Francisco resident, in 2020 during a night of protests against the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd.

After a third-party investigation found he violated department policies led to his termination, he was reinstated to the department in August 2023. Like the shooting of McCoy, Monterrosa’s killing prompted protests against Vallejo police and calls for justice.

Two days later, crime analyst Kimberly Dunn of the Records and Identification Bureau emailed a team of crime analysts working within the Sheriff’s Information Bureau with instructions to “keep an eye” on me.

“Freelance journalist Cerise Castle is currently working on a series of articles that started being released yesterday. The project is called “A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department,” she wrote. “Just something to keep an eye on – to monitor what else she posts as part of this project, and for potential doxing purposes, as well.”