Linky Friday: Moth To A Flame Edition

As always, all the opinions presented in Linky Friday are solely those of the authors, and are presented for discussion purposes only, not endoresments.

[LF1] Chauvin’s Conviction Will Almost Certainly Stand by Andrew Fleischman in Arc Digital

“I’m an appellate attorney—the case for overturning Chauvin’s conviction is far weaker than many are claiming”

The odds of winning a criminal appeal—as in actually reversing the conviction and getting an acquittal or a new trial—generally hover somewhere between 1 and 5 percent.

The odds in Chauvin’s case are particularly poor, because the issue that critics of the decision have decided to focus on is an absolute dog’s breakfast—a mash of half-remembered legal concepts vitamixed and funneled into a thin blue line. There are a few reasons for this.

First, you generally can’t ask jurors about their deliberations or what happened in the jury room. So, for instance, if a juror wanted to testify that he always meant to convict Chauvin, no matter what the evidence was, because he was hell-bent on avenging George Floyd or because he was terrified a “mob” would “burn down his city” if he acquitted? Inadmissible.

Minnesota courts have repeatedly held that the only way to even get a hearing to see if a juror inappropriately considered external information is by providing evidence that they acted inappropriately. The evidence must “standing alone and unchallenged … warrant the conclusion of jury misconduct.”

So, unless one of the jurors wants to come forward and say they were bribed or threatened, the defense is not likely to meet that threshold.

In fact, the Supreme Court of Minnesota previously said that a juror’s statement, after a trial, that she did not believe in the presumption of innocence, was not enough to get a misconduct hearing.

Even if a juror did come forward to say that Waters’s and Biden’s statements influenced her decision-making in this case, it’s still probably inadmissible. Minnesota courts will let you ask about what kind of outside information a jury considered—for instance, a police report that was never admitted. But the court doesn’t let you ask the jury how it affected them.

Despite this pretty clear rule, lots of politically motivated critics of the conviction have predicted a slam-dunk appeal for Chauvin. The Bulwark racked up a pretty long list of commentators calling this “mob justice” or suggesting that those who saw this as the “right result” would not have accepted any other.

But that gets to another problem with any potential appeal: the problem of “overwhelming evidence.”

It is much easier to win an appeal when the evidence against you is weak than when it is strong, because you have a much easier time showing that the evidence actually affected your verdict. But in this case, the jury was shown George Floyd’s death, and heard from multiple eyewitnesses describing their contemporaneous (and recorded!) belief that Floyd was being murdered. A Minnesota court might decide, as it has 729 times before, that any outside influence the jury might have experienced was irrelevant in light of the state’s strong case.

None of this is to state definitively that Chauvin’s appeal is hopeless. His attorney did preserve some jury instruction issues whose merits I have not assessed, and jury instruction issues tend to be among the strongest on appeal. And, honestly, Minnesota’s 60-year-old Schwartz rule on what questions you can ask a jury does seem unduly restrictive compared to the rest of the country—which means there’s an off chance Chauvin’s case could try to overturn that precedent.

But these are not slam dunks or lay ups or jump shots. They are, as in most criminal appeals, an attempt to sink a shot while perched precariously from the opposite basket.

[LF2] Rich People Paying Other Rich People Is Not a Climate “Solution” by Nick Martin at The New Rebuplic

“Why big polluters and a bipartisan group of senators want to create a national carbon market”

Carbon markets have been integral to the climate plans offered thus far by the White House and Congress. In January—hours before the insurrection at the Capitol—Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan told reporters that the creation of carbon markets would be a “top priority” for the Senate Agriculture Committee. (With Democrats reclaiming a Senate majority, Stabenow has since assumed the role of committee chair.) And on Thursday morning, Stabenow held true to her words. As the committee waited for Senator Ben Ray Luján to arrive to officially reach a quorum, Stabenow reminded her fellow senators that “creating new revenue streams through voluntary markets is only one tool in the toolbox,” and echoed Senator Chuck Grassley’s concerns about middlemen and the potential for vertical integration between “the farmers and the polluters”—an attempt by the Iowa Republican to separate family-owned-and-operated farms from the corporate behemoths that dominate the field.

The bill, backed by 17 Democratic and Republican senators apiece, passed the committee via voice vote unanimously. It will now wait in line for a full-chamber vote. On the whole, it was an entirely agreeable, diplomatic affair—a true instance of climate-focused bipartisanship. The only problem: Carbon markets, much like bipartisan-backed biofuels, are not so much a solution as they are a way for industry stakeholders to signal their interest in Doing Something while clinging to the very practices that have helped lead to the current climate crisis.

Carbon offsets can already be purchased, with varying degrees of reliability, by companies simply looking to green their profile for public relations reasons. This bill would help establish an official offset system. That is, companies could pay landowners to leave trees standing instead of harvesting them or farm crops that store carbon in the soil, to offset their own emissions. At some point, the federal government could theoretically establish an emissions cap, creating a flourishing carbon market of companies buying their way to the target.

The fundamental effect of offsets will be money—subsidized by the federal government—moving from one wealthy person’s pockets to another’s.
If this all sounds a little bit like allowing cash-rich companies and corporations to pay off landowners so that they can continue polluting, that’s because that is precisely what offsets and carbon markets are designed to accomplish. The goal is not to snuff out the original source of emissions and pollution causing the problem but instead to try to mitigate those cumulative effects via cold, hard cash. Ag tech companies like Indigo have framed the introduction of a carbon market as a chance to cash in, with a company executive telling Bloomberg, “It’s a little bit of a gold rush out there.” Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the logging industry’s enthusiasm for the offset model. Its interest in being paid not to log isn’t exactly beyond suspicion, as the Journal noted. There’s worry landowners will be “paid to preserve trees” they weren’t going to cut anyway, “because they grow in forbidding terrain, are far from mills or already subject to conservation agreements.”

The people being paid for these offsets, in most cases, will be large-scale landowners, just as the people paying them will mostly be large-scale corporations. (The Journal’s report found that among those setting their tree stock aside for the offset check was Molpus Woodlands Group, described as “one of the country’s largest timberland investment-management organizations.”) The fundamental effect of offsets will be money—subsidized by the federal government—moving from one wealthy person’s pockets to another’s.

[LF3] Want to get political at the Oscars? Tell the truth about what China is doing in Xinjiang by Sonny Bunch in The Washington Post

If anyone out West needs some tips, here’s what one such speech might look like:

Thank you to the Academy, to my parents, to my agents, to my producers. It was an honor to work on this picture, and I can’t wait to do more great work with everyone in this room.

I’d also like to thank Richard Gere. Richard, you don’t know me, and you’re not here tonight because you’ve been largely banned from the show. Not for vulgarity or coarseness, but because you dared call out China for its shocking abuses of Tibet.

But you were right to criticize the Chinese government then. And I’d be remiss if I did not highlight another atrocity happening right now, as we fete ourselves and launch yet another blockbuster season in China: the oppression of the minority Muslim Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese Communist Party has engaged in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing.

You can see it in the region’s birthrate, which has fallen by almost half among Uyghurs. In some prefectures, the decline has been even more precipitous because of forced sterilization campaigns that include implanting IUDs in women against their will.

You can see it in the campaigns to alter the very foundation of these Muslim strongholds, where mosques and shrines have been destroyed, where minarets have been removed, where cemeteries have been razed.

You can see it in the horrifying practice of family separation, an act we rightfully condemned when it happened within our own borders, yet stand silently about as it happens in Hollywood’s largest foreign market. That Uyghur children are torn from the arms of their parents and reeducated to hate their heritage is abominable.

And, finally, you can see it in the campaign of lies propagated by the Chinese government about what it’s doing in Xinjiang, its war on the truth-tellers and their families. This campaign can only succeed with our silence.

I, for one, will be silent no longer. Thank you again for this award.

That speech took about 90 seconds for me to read, roughly twice the length of the traditionally afforded 45. But one of the changes that Steven Soderbergh has promised this year is to “give [winners] space. We’ve encouraged them to tell a story, and to say something personal.”

Few stories are more important right now than that of the Uyghur population’s suffering at the hands of the Chinese government. It’s a crime against humanity taking place while the whole world watches — or, rather, turns its head in shame and lets occur, worried about losing access to the valuable Chinese market as retailers H&M and Nike have for criticizing the use of forced labor to pick cotton in Xinjiang.

Hollywood is as susceptible to these pressures as anyone else, possibly more so given the beleaguered state of domestic theatrical exhibition and China’s increasingly important global market share. But the movie business is unsure of how to dance around China’s crimes against humanity, often winding up in hot water even as it tries to placate the Chinese Communist Party. Consider the fate of “Mulan,” which was crafted with the Chinese market in mind yet cratered at that country’s box office after Disney offered thanks to governmental agencies linked to concentration camps in Xinjiang, sparking outrage in the United States and causing embarrassment in Beijing.

[LF4] Two spies, an explosion and the new Czech rift with Russia by William Nattrass at Spectator

“The explosion is now being described as the biggest violation of Czech sovereignty since Soviet tanks entered the country in 1968”

‘Putin is a murderer,’ read the signs carried by protesters outside the Russian Embassy in Prague on Sunday. On Saturday night, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš stunned the Czech Republic by saying that evidence now links Russian GRU secret agents to a massive explosion which killed two people at an arms depot near the Moravian village of Vrbětice in 2014.

Czech minister of the interior and acting foreign minister Jan Hamáček gave 18 diplomats known to be linked to Russian foreign intelligence 48 hours to leave the country. He compared the situation to the Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals in 2018. The Salisbury parallel was underlined by the announcement of a manhunt for Alexandr Miškin and Anatolij Čepigov — the two Russian intelligence agents thought responsible for the explosion in 2014 and the GRU Unit 29155 agents also blamed for the Salisbury poisoning.

The agents used false identities to arrive in Prague days before the blast in 2014, staying in the city of Ostrava before leaving the country on the day of the explosion. An email to the company which operated the Vrbětice depot, purporting to be from the National Guard of Tajikistan, asked for the two men to be granted access to the site for an inspection. Speculation is rife that the depot became a target for Russian agents due to concerns that its armaments and ammunition would be shipped to Ukraine and to rebel forces in Syria.

The explosion, which killed two workers at the site, was long presumed an accident, but is now being described as the biggest violation of Czech sovereignty since Soviet tanks entered the country to quash the Prague Spring liberalization in 1968.

The shocking developments have brought about a rapid reversal in Czech-Russian relations. Babiš’s government seemed on the verge of acquiring the Sputnik V vaccine, following the appointment of Petr Arenberger, a figure sympathetic to the use of Sputnik, as the country’s new health minister. Acting Foreign Minister Hamáček was due to fly to Moscow on Monday to discuss the Czech Republic receiving the Russian jab — Hamáček has now admitted that the visit was, in fact, publicized as cover for the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the country. The Kremlin announced a tit-for-tat retaliation with the expulsion of 20 Czech diplomats from Moscow on Sunday night.

The revelation is forcing the Czech Republic to reconsider not just the Sputnik V vaccine, but Russia’s long-term economic involvement in the country. Minister of industry and trade Karel Havlíček has all but confirmed that the Russian company Rosatom, previously the favorite to win a major nuclear power plant contract, will now be excluded from the selection process. A crackdown on Russian organized crime and businessmen representing Russian state interests in the Czech Republic could also follow.

For the majority of people in the Czech public — who remember the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia from 1968 until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 — evidence of Moscow’s violation of Czech sovereign territory has confirmed their worst suspicions about Russia. Some protesters at the Russian Embassy on Sunday carried placards calling Czech president Miloš Zeman a ‘traitor’ for his pro-Russian tendencies and passionate lobbying for the use of Sputnik V.

[LF5] Why the Biden DOJ Should Be Hesitant to Use ‘Consent Decrees’ by Daniel McGraw at The Bulwark

“Federal intrusions into local police matters can be warranted, but they are often resented by the swing states targeted by the DOJ.”

This sort of consent decree started during the Bill Clinton administration. Police in Pittsburgh had been accused of targeting black people for arrest and abuse in 1995, and it came to a head when a black businessman died of asphyxiation during a struggle with white police officers. The DOJ gave Pittsburgh the chance to avoid a federal lawsuit if it agreed to certain reforms. Hence, the newly ordained consent decree was applied.

Since then, policing consent decrees have been more common under Democrat presidents than Republicans: they were deployed three times under Bush, 15 times under Obama.

Though policing consent decrees have been used in some form or fashion all over the country, their concentration in Midwest municipalities is obvious: major cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, as well as smaller locales like Erie, Pennsylvania, Warren, Ohio, and Lorain, Ohio have all been investigated by the DOJ for problems in their department. Politically powerful police unions and their allies in city government cannot stand these interventions, while local residents see them as intrusions.

Local officials hate these decrees in large part because there’s no guarantee the feds will let you out of them in a reasonable time period. Cleveland has been under the consent decree monitoring process since 2015, in response to 13 officers firing an astonishing 137 shots into a car with two unarmed African-Americans inside, killing them both.

“Having acquired this valuable power, the feds or other plaintiffs can be leisurely about relinquishing it,” the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson wrote in 2019. “Definitions of what constitutes compliance can be vague, complex, and doubtfully practical, and even if the defendants manage to show that they have crossed every ‘t’ and dotted every ‘i,’ they may still need to prove that they are not likely to backslide when taken off the hook. So, the process drags on—sometimes for decades, sometimes indefinitely.”

Sad cases like George Floyd and Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo will continue to happen in many cities, but federal interventions might be too aggravating for voters to tolerate. They’ll point to how they fired the officer involved (or put them on trial), worked with community groups to ameliorate the situation, and opened up to being investigated for civil rights violations by the state government.

“Why do the feds need to jump on us as well?” is a conservative outcry that has resonance. And Democrats run afoul of it at their peril.

[LF6] From Plague to Renaissance: Notes on COVID-19 in the Workplace by Luis Feliz Leon in Liberal Currents

More than 100,000 Americans who died from COVID-19, about 20 percent of the total deaths, were of working age, between 18 and 64 years old, and people of color. (That number doesn’t include Americans who work past retirement age to scrounge up a living.) The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) has a database of publicly reported COVID-19 fatalities that lists over 1,000 workers. It is almost certainly a gross undercount.

“No public agency is systematically tracking all workers infected with COVID after exposure at work, or the number who have died from these infections,” says National COSH spokesperson Roger Kerson.

But the sector specific data we have can be quite shocking. A joint investigation by USA Today and the Midwest Center discovered in January that poultry plants reported less than half of 240 known deaths to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the pandemic. Another estimate from the Food & Environment Reporting Network puts the number of deaths of meatpacking workers at 383, with 89,680 testing positive for the virus. The law normally mandates that employers report a worker death to OSHA within eight hours, but during the pandemic, the agency weakened these requirements, USA Today said. Meatpacking plants became vectors for community spread, with rates of transmission exploding to 110 to 160 percent in communities with meatpacking industries.

“The meat and poultry industry, aided and abetted by the Trump Administration, failed to implement basic preventive measures, so outbreaks ripped through their plants and into the community,” says Deborah Berkowitz, worker safety and health program director at the National Employment Law Project (NELP).

“The Trump administration used the Defense Production Act not to make needed PPE, but to keep slaughterhouses open and force meatpackers to stay on a speeded-up line that forced workers to crowd together more, increasing infection risk,” says evolutionary biologist Robert Wallace whose book Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science analyzes the links between infectious disease outbreaks and agriculture dominated by multinational corporations.

Since 1970, as the journalist Timothy Noah highlighted last year, it has been illegal for any U.S. employer to expose their workers to “recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

“The meatpackers took the [brunt] of the first rural waves,” Wallace adds. “They served as the doorway to the rest of their home counties. Some of the largest meatpacking plants are still serving as COVID incubators across state, meat type, and company: JBS, Hormel, Tyson, among others.”

During the pandemic, it has become even clearer than before how the economic interests of employers have superseded the laws on the books intended to protect workers from harm on the job.

Berkowitz cited a study published by the National Academy of Science last year, saying it found that “the outbreaks in meat and poultry plants alone during the first five months of the pandemic are associated with 236,000 to 310,000 COVID-19 cases (6 to 8% of total) and 4,300 to 5,200 deaths (3 to 4% of total) as of July 21 of last year.”

In March, Berkowitz testified before Congress and shared the gruesome numbers, hoping to spur federal action. Last year, the AFL-CIO advocated that the Labor Department should issue a legally enforceable emergency standard without consulting Congress, as permitted by the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act. Then-President Donald Trump refused to act.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden promised swift action. But workers are still waiting. As The New Republic’s Timothy Noah explains, “the Labor Department is ready to go with two emergency standards—one for health care workers and another for everybody else—but the White House, fearful of setting off angry protests, is dithering.”

Roughly 158 grocery workers have died after contracting the virus, while at least 35,100 workers were infected, according to data from the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. This month, the UFCW filed an OSHA complaint against Seaboard, a meatpacking plant in Oklahoma, for failing to report 99 percent of its COVID-19 outbreaks, not allowing workers to quarantine after exposure to the virus, and other safety violations.

[LF7] Fredrick Brennan Is the Founder of 8chan. Now He Wants to Take It Offline. by Fredrick Brennan in Jacobin

Anew documentary from HBO, Q: Into the Storm, introduces us to many of the odious characters who helped create and popularize the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. Set against the cultural backdrop to the Trump era, it offers useful insight into the strange mixture of reactionary politics, grift, and nihilism that helped push the United States to the right. But it’s at its strongest in depicting the rise of today’s internet culture — and chronicling how memes and obscure image boards made the journey from irony-poisoned trolling to non-ironic reaction.

In his early twenties, software designer Fredrick Brennan found himself in the middle of this wave. He created the image board website 8chan, which later became home to Gamergate proponents and QAnon acolytes, in 2013. Since then, he’s become an outspoken critic of the conspiracy theory and has fought to have 8chan (which he no longer owns) taken offline.

Brennan sat down and spoke with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar Sunkara about his life trajectory, what the internet should be, and the question of free speech.

This Week At Ordinary Times:

Green New Deal (Slight Return): Read It For Yourself
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Mini-Thoughput: Ingenuity Flying on Mars Edition
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OT Contributor’s Network: Spheres Of Influence Podcast with Dennis Sanders
In his latest Spheres of Influence Podcast, OT contributor Dennis Sanders reflects on the guilty verdict Derek Chauvin.

The “Young Conservative Problem” is Current Conservatives’ Fault
The most influential force on young people deciding on whether or not to be conservative is the behavior of current conservatives.

Wednesday Writs: Frothingham v. Mellon Sets Legal Precedent For Karens
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MAGA Civil War Breaks Out In Georgia
Civil war is about to break out among Georgia Republicans. An entire slate of MAGA candidates is forming to challenge our incumbent officials

Anti-Capitalism Never Made Much Sense
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Sunday Morning! Persona by Ingmar Bergman
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Sunday Spins Part 2: Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass Vol 2
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Saturday Morning Gaming: Still Looking for a PS5
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Game of Thrones: The Subversiveness of Liking Sansa Stark
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Saturday Spins Part 1: Sturgill Simpson’s Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1
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