
Tired of ads? Want to support our progressive journalism? Click to learn more.
JOIN FOR $1
Enjoy good journalism?
… then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has slashed advertising rates, and we need your help. Like you, we here at Raw Story believe in the power of progressive journalism. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and legal efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. And unlike other news outlets, we’ve decided to make our original content free. But we need your support to do what we do.
Raw Story is independent. Unhinged from corporate overlords, we fight to ensure no one is forgotten.
We need your support in this difficult time. Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Invest with us. Make a one-time contribution to Raw Story Investigates, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you. Click to donate by check.
Value Raw Story?
… then let us make a small request. The COVID crisis has slashed advertising rates, and we need your help. Like you, we believe in the power of progressive journalism — and we’re investing in investigative reporting as other publications give it the ax. Raw Story readers power David Cay Johnston’s DCReport, which we've expanded to keep watch in Washington. We’ve exposed billionaire tax evasion and uncovered White House efforts to poison our water. We’ve revealed financial scams that prey on veterans, and efforts to harm workers exploited by abusive bosses. We need your support to do what we do.
Raw Story is independent. You won’t find mainstream media bias here. Every reader contribution, whatever the amount, makes a tremendous difference. Invest with us in the future. Make a one-time contribution to Raw Story Investigates, or click here to become a subscriber. Thank you.
Report typos and corrections to: corrections@rawstory.com.
'New platform, same racists': How white supremacists used technology to upend Black History Month
March 04, 2021
White supremacist keyboard warriors appear to have declared a cyber war against Black History Month. Virtual events across the land have been Zoombombed by these perpetrators. I know about these attacks from firsthand experience; an event that I led was one of those victimized.
Black History Month events sponsored by universities are among the most frequent targets. Those attacked include Penn State, Rutgers, Rider University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the University of South Florida, Seattle University, Wyoming, Salt Lake Community College, Del Mar College, my own University of Detroit Mercy, and many more. Some institutions report strikes on multiple events. My students have heard of similar assaults at other institutions that have not yet been reported by the media. There are commonalities to the attacks, including racial slurs appearing on screen, racist and homophobic images (some drawn by hand on the screen), and racist remarks in chatrooms. At Rutgers, the culprits inserted pictures of black bodies, some hanging, and others covered in blood. Meanwhile a Ku Klux Klan song played on a continuous loop, stating "kill all blacks/we will find you."
<p>These institutions are conducting investigations of the attacks, either with local law enforcement or with the FBI. Although the wrongdoers have yet to be identified, they seem to have come from outside the universities and community colleges being targeted and they seem to be coordinated. The heaviest day of Zoombombings took place on February 15, including the one that occurred at the University of Wyoming. According to the <em>Laramie Boomerang</em>: "evidence suggests the individual(s) responsible for Monday's attack may also be connected to similar attacks that have occurred during other university-hosted virtual Black History Month programs across the nation." One investigation hints that these coordinated strikes may have originated in the eastern United States.</p><p>Other entities have suffered similar attacks. Zoombombers interrupted the virtual reading of a Black History Month proclamation by the Lawrence (Kansas) City Commission with images of sexual abuse and a racist message.</p><p>My own experience with this phenomenon came on February 15 during a Black History Month event at my university titled "Love Stories from the Underground Railroad." This annual event brings together the celebrations of Black History Month and Valentine's Day to share the stories of enslaved couples who ran away together to find freedom in the northern states or Canada. This February, I told the story of freedom seekers William and Louisa Swan, who fled to northern Michigan and settled under the protective gaze of the Odawa and Ojibwe peoples there. About forty minutes into my presentation, twelve new participants abruptly joined the Zoom session. Within seconds, the N-word appeared superimposed in red over one of my PowerPoint slides. When the session host removed the racist language, a pornographic video emerged. After those disturbing images were eliminated, the twelve perpetrators hijacked the Chat function to serially post racist and anti-Semitic remarks, each of which popped up momentarily on the computer screen. We were forced to abbreviate the event rather than further compromise and offend our other participants, which included our students, faculty, and staff, a class from another college, a few historians at other institutions, and community guests. A video of a dramatic reading of one of Louisa Swan's letters by two African American actresses in our Theatre Company – the product of much hard work – became part of the content jettisoned.</p><p>What happened to American universities during this Black History Month is already being recognized by academics as a distinct form of racial violence. This is the argument made by University of Michigan scholars Lisa Nakamura, Hanah Stiverson, and Kyle Lindsay in their forthcoming book <em>Racist Zoombombing</em> from Routledge. Although some may see these assaults as just a new form of online trolling in the wake of our dramatically increased virtual presence since the outbreak of COVID-19, these authors demonstrate that it is "a specifically racialized and gendered phenomenon that targets Black people and communities with racialized and gendered harassment." A survey of news stories over the past year offers growing evidence of these virtual strikes on events by and about African Americans. Purveyors of white supremacy have always been willing to adopt new media with which to carry out their racist attacks. From the Ku Klux Klan's use of the film <em>Birth of a Nation</em> in the early twentieth century to the neo-Nazi embrace of the Internet in our own, white supremacists have shown a willingness to be at the cutting edge of technological change. Even so, they exhibit the same dark intent, the same patterns, the same cowardly spirit they have always shown. As one of my colleagues notes, Zoombombing demonstrates the "sadly evergreen resiliency of white supremacy." That is why Nakamura, Stiverson, and Lindsay title one of their chapters: "New Platform, Same Racists."</p><p><em>Roy E. Finkenbine is Professor of History and Director of the Black Abolitionist Archive, University of Detroit Mercy.</em></p>
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Nothing is being done in Georgia to prevent violent threats against election workers from happening again
March 04, 2021
On Nov. 30, 2020, as Georgia slogged through the second recount of its presidential election results, a man in Ohio perusing Twitter came across what he later described as a “call for action" to protect polling locations across the country. His response was to drive more than 500 miles to Gwinnett County in the Atlanta suburbs. He began surveilling the Gwinnett County elections office — and livestreaming his vigil on Twitter.
At around 11 a.m. on Dec. 1, the Ohio man zeroed in on two workers — both Gwinnett County IT employees — who he decided, absent any evidence, were illegally removing “Chinese servers" used for voting tabulation. He “felt he needed to be a patriot and take action," according to a Gwinnett County police report of the incident. From his black pickup truck, he recorded video of the two men putting equipment in their car. When they drove off, he followed them.
<p>The Ohio man quickly gained thousands of viewers and retweets for his livestream, partially by repeatedly tagging the Twitter account @CodeMonkeyZ, a now-suspended major disseminator of QAnon conspiracy theories. A viewer in Oklahoma called the police department in Gwinnett's county seat, Lawrenceville, complaining that the two county employees were mishandling voting equipment and that police should stop them. (The Lawrenceville Police Department also got complaints from Kansas and Utah about alleged ballot cheating that callers claimed to have seen on livestreams.)</p><p>The suspicious cargo the workers loaded into their car actually had nothing to do with elections: They'd stopped by the voter registration office to pick up new desk phones to distribute across the county. Gwinnett County elections supervisor Kristi Royston had warned her employees to be mindful of their surroundings, particularly as groups of people concerned about election fraud had been gathering at the county elections office that day, and encouraged staffers to “buddy up" before they went out.</p><p>The black pickup followed the Gwinnett County employees' car for nearly 10 miles: first, to a gas station, where no one got out of their vehicles — the two employees later told police they were trying to lose their tail — then to a gated county water treatment facility. One of the employees called 911, waiting in the car to keep the situation from escalating.</p><p>After police arrived, one of the IT workers said he had no interest in pressing charges and “just wanted [the Ohio man] to leave him alone," according to the police report. Police let the Ohio man off with a warning. He did not respond to requests for comment; ProPublica is not naming him because he hasn't been charged with a crime.</p><p>The Georgia Bureau of Investigation received an increase in “threat information and tips" — including death threats against elected officials and election workers — in the wake of November's presidential election and throughout the Senate runoff campaigns that followed, according to bureau public information officer Nelly Miles. Despite this, there have been next to no arrests and little follow-through by lawmakers.</p><p>ProPublica could identify only one case of a Georgia elections-related threat since November that led to an arrest: an <a href="https://wfxl.com/news/local/man-arrested-for-threatening-campaign-worker">Albany, Georgia, man</a> who according to police yelled a racial slur at and threatened a campaign worker who had left a flyer at his house. No arrests were made in any of a dozen or more high-profile cases of politically fueled threats against Georgia's governor and secretary of state, all of its state legislators, Fulton County's district attorney, and election officials and workers in several counties.</p><p>For nearly a year, election administrators across the country weathered the pandemic while facing an <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/for-election-administrators-death-threats-have-become-part-of-the-job">unprecedented number of attacks and threats</a> — leading many officials to resign or retire. Since November, the situation has been especially tense in Georgia, after a combustible chain of events: a Democratic presidential win in the state for the first time since 1992, the Trump campaign's many challenges to the state's election results and recounts, newly elected U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's support of baseless conspiracy theories and comments promoting violence against Democratic officials, two runoff races that would determine which party took control of the U.S. Senate, and a leaked phone call in which Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find" enough votes to reverse his loss, to name a few.</p><p>“Georgia certainly was one of the top places that we were looking at for threats to election officials," said Nealin Parker, co-director of the Bridging Divides Initiative, a project based at Princeton University. The initiative has teamed with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, to create the U.S. Crisis Monitor, which analyzes political violence and demonstrations in the U.S.</p><p>According to the U.S. Crisis Monitor, Georgia saw paramilitary activity — by such militant far-right groups as the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, or the Proud Boys — at more than twice the rate seen at demonstrations taking place nationwide between the November election and President Joe Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration. At least eight Georgians have been arrested for their alleged roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.</p><p>But arrests for politically motivated incidents at the state or local level in Georgia remain rare.</p><p>Gwinnett County Solicitor-General Brian Whiteside has <a href="https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/gwinnett-solicitor-commits-to-prosecuting-election-worker-intimidation/RXU5BWFKI5GDXFGU3Q3PMCH3J4"></a>vowed to prosecute anyone who threatens or assaults an election worker, which is a <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/law-georgia-voter-intimidation-poll-watchers-and-challengers">felony</a> under state law. Even though police didn't file charges in the IT incident involving the Ohio man, Whiteside is investigating it; he said that, if a law has been broken, “our job is to be a preventive agency and enforce the law." Otherwise, he said, “what type of message do you send to people when they do this? That it's going to be lawless?"</p><p>Whiteside also said there needs to be a special division of state government tasked with investigating election-related crimes. “I have a deep fear that somebody is going to get hurt out here," he said. “Because they're not making enough preventive arrests when these incidents happen."</p><p>Around the same time as the Ohio man followed the Gwinnett County IT employees, social media users circulated videos of a voting-systems tech who was doing some work at a Gwinnett elections office. The videos show the tech walking away from one election workstation with a USB drive, then inserting the drive into a nearby laptop. Social media users accused him of stealing or changing voting data. (The part of the video with the USB drive was a “smoking gun," wrote one.) The tech actually was transferring data to the laptop in order to use Microsoft Excel, which wasn't installed on the first computer, according to a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-gwinnett-dominion/fact-check-video-does-not-show-dominion-employee-manipulating-votes-in-gwinnett-county-georgia-idUSKBN28C1OL">Reuters fact check</a>.</p><p>The tech's home address was shared across social media; one Twitter user posted a warning that he was “committing treason" and included a picture of a noose. This prompted Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling to ask of then-President Trump in a widely covered press conference: “Stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence. Someone's going to get hurt, someone's going to get shot, someone's going to get killed."</p><p>In November, a video that drew 5 million views on Twitter falsely accused a temporary elections worker in Georgia's Fulton County of rigging votes. The worker told <a href="https://www.wabe.org/why-an-election-worker-in-georgia-went-into-hiding"></a>WABE that he changed his appearance and went into hiding for three days.</p><p>In the time between the November election and the January runoffs, Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters about death threats on social media against him and his family; Raffensperger reported a text message that said, “You better not botch this recount. Your life depends on it," sexualized threats against his wife, and people trespassing on their home property; an aggressor followed a Georgia election worker home and called him a racial slur; and Georgia Elections Director Chris Harvey received an email with his address, a photo of his home, and the message: “Your days are numbered. The FBI can't save you. ... Every time you leave your house in the morning, make sure to say goodbye to your family, as you may not see them again."</p><p>A couple of days before the January runoff election, employees in 10 Georgia counties — all of which lean Republican — received threatening emails about explosives at polling places. Sheriff's deputies and other police in those counties increased their presence at polling places during the election, and Spalding County Sheriff Darrell Dix said the GBI later traced the email to an overseas server. As with the other incidents, no arrests were made.</p><p>Unlike in Georgia, recent high-profile, politically motivated threats in other states have resulted in charges and arrests. In November, authorities in Norfolk, Virginia, arrested a man for threatening to bomb a polling place. The same month, a New York man was arrested and charged with making threatening interstate communications after allegedly using social media to issue an apparent threat against U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and to write that he wanted to “blow up" an FBI building. After Republicans on the elections board of Wayne County, Michigan, initially refused to certify November election results in favor of Biden, the U.S. Attorney's office charged a New Hampshire woman with sending threatening messages — allegedly including photos of a bloodied, naked body — to a Republican member of that board.</p><p>The Michigan Attorney General's office also filed charges this year against multiple people for making threats to public officials — including a Georgia man who in September allegedly left a threatening voicemail for a Michigan judge who had ruled in favor of Biden in a case related to mail-in ballots.</p><p>“It is unacceptable and illegal to intimidate or threaten public officials," Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel said in <a href="https://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,4534,7-359--552711--,00.html">a statement</a>. “To those who think they can do so by hiding behind a keyboard or phone, we will find you and we will prosecute you, to the fullest extent of the law. No elected official should have to choose between doing their job and staying safe."</p><p>Georgia state Rep. Scott Holcomb, a Democrat who represents parts of Atlanta's northeast suburbs, said he and all state legislators received multiple emailed threats after the November election. Holcomb said he'd be interested in exploring tougher penalties for crimes committed against election workers. But first, he said, lawmakers need to get a sense of the pervasiveness of the problem.</p><p>“What we need to really think through is whether or not 2020 and '21 were aberrations, with the dramatic increase of threats of violence against election workers," he said. “Or is that the new norm? And if it's the new norm, then we really need to be prepared to address it."</p><p>And yet, even as misinformation gave rise to a mounting number of threats against election workers and polling places, there's no centralized way to track every threat in Georgia.</p><p>The GBI oversees a multi-agency “fusion center" called the Georgia Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which logs threats and tips and shares information with the FBI and other agencies. The GBI's Miles described GISAC as one part of the state's threat-monitoring system. But the GBI does not keep a statewide tally of politically motivated threats, which could fall under a variety of statutes, including intimidation of election workers, trespassing or terroristic threats.</p><p>The absence of a centralized system can make it difficult to detect patterns or spikes. That's not uncommon: Law enforcement officials in Arizona, Vermont and Michigan told ProPublica that election-related threats in their jurisdictions are not comprehensively tracked at the state level.</p><p>“It's hard to think of anything more urgent when we're talking about election security than protecting election officials and election workers," said Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Project at the Brennan Center for Justice. “If we can't accomplish that, then our elections are in real danger. And right now, as far as I can tell, it's being mostly ignored."</p><p>As for the types of changes that state or federal lawmakers can make to safeguard elections workers and officials, Norden pointed to a <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/8591/actions">bill</a> introduced last year by U.S. Senators Bob Menendez and Cory Booker that proposed stronger protections for federal judges following the murder of a New Jersey federal judge's son. Norden said election workers would benefit from similar protections, including the ability to shield personal information from public view, training on how to maintain online privacy, and new threat-management capabilities for the U.S. Marshals Service.</p><p>Gwinnett County elections supervisor Royston, who's worked in Georgia elections offices for more than two decades, said last year's presidential election was unprecedented for her staff. Royston is thinking ahead to 2022, when Georgia is likely to see a heated gubernatorial race (potentially a rematch between Kemp and Stacey Abrams) and another U.S. Senate race (the newly elected Raphael Warnock, who's filling the remaining two years of Sen. Johnny Isakson's term, is almost certain to face a Republican challenger).</p><p>Last year, the combination of the pandemic, new and contested elections equipment, looming threats, and scrutiny from all over the country forced Georgia election officials to be “reactive," Royston said. “I think now that we've experienced that, we can say, 'Okay, what do we need to plan for in case we have that again?'"</p></div><script async="" src="http://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
CONTINUE READING
Show less
The first findings are in from a groundbreaking program in Stockton CA in which 500 financially struggling residents were given $500 per month for a year by the city with no string attached.
Advocates of universal basic income, a concept used around the world but not in the U.S., have to be happy about the results. The program, known as the Stockton Economic Empowerment Seed, got rave reviews from an independent study.
<p> Here's how the Atlantic <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/stocktons-basic-income-experiment-pays-off/618174/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reported</a> it:</p><p> "An exclusive new analysis of data from the demonstration project shows that a lack of resources is its own miserable trap. The best way to get people out of poverty is just to get them out of poverty; the best way to offer families more resources is just to offer them more resources.</p><p> "The researchers Stacia Martin-West of the University of Tennessee and Amy Castro Baker of the University of Pennsylvania collected and analyzed data from individuals who received $500 a month and from individuals who did not. Some of their findings are obvious. The cash transfer reduced income volatility, for one: Households getting the cash saw their month-to-month earnings fluctuate 46 percent, versus the control group's 68 percent. The families receiving the $500 a month tended to spend the money on essentials, including food, home goods, utilities, and gas. (Less than 1 percent went to cigarettes and alcohol.) The cash also doubled the households' capacity to pay unexpected bills and allowed recipient families to pay down their debts. Individuals getting the cash were also better able to help their families and friends, providing financial stability to the broader community. </p><p> "It let me pay off some credit cards that I had been living off of, because my household income wasn't large enough," one recipient named Laura Kidd-Plummer told me. "It helped me to be able to take care of my groceries without having to run to the food bank three times a month. That was very helpful." During the study, Laura also experienced a spell of homelessness when the apartment building, she was living in had a fire. The Stockton cash helped her secure a new apartment, ensuring that she could afford movers and a security deposit.</p><p> The researchers also found that the guaranteed income did not dissuade participants from working—adding to a large body of evidence showing that cash benefits do not dramatically <a href="https://home.uchicago.edu/~j1s/Jones_Alaska.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">shrink the labor force</a> and in some cases <em>help</em> people work by giving them the stability they need to find and take a new job. In the Stockton study, the share of participants with a full-time job rose 12 percentage points, versus five percentage points in the control group."</p><p> Mashable also <a href="https://mashable.com/article/universal-basic-income-stockton-program-results/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">weighed in</a> on the initial success of the Stockton program:</p><p> "After a year of operating the program, cash transfer recipients were more likely to obtain full-time jobs than a group of people who were not receiving money but providing data to researchers as a comparison. Recipients also primarily spent the money on basic needs, paid off debt, and saw improvements in their emotional health, program officials announced Wednesday. </p><p> "While not a full-fledged <a href="https://mashable.com/article/what-is-universal-basic-income/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">universal basic income</a>, the program's findings will likely crop up time and time again in UBI arguments as support for the concept continues to pick up steam. Since former presidential candidate and UBI evangelist Andrew Yang announced his candidacy for New York mayor, the most populous city in the U.S., others in the race have been promising <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/nyregion/andrew-yang-ubi-mayor.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">some form of basic income</a>, too."</p><p> While it was Yang who gave the biggest spotlight to UBI, Michael Tubbs, Stockton's former mayor, was the young progressive force behind Stockton's effort. Business Insider <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stockton-basic-income-experiment-success-employment-wellbeing-2021-3" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">put a spotlight</a> on Tubbs' initiative.</p><p> "Tubbs didn't see much risk in giving money to his city's poorest residents, no strings attached. The former mayor of Stockton, a city in California's Central Valley, is a strong proponent of universal basic income, a policy that essentially pays people for being alive as a way to alleviate poverty. "My belief in it came from being raised by three amazing women, including my single mom," Tubbs told Insider. "The issue wasn't that they couldn't manage money. The issue was they never had enough money to manage."</p><p> "As mayor, Tubbs spearheaded the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, a pilot program that gave 125 residents debit cards loaded with $500 each month. The program launched in February 2019 and ended in January.</p><p> "Its critics argued that cash stipends would reduce the incentive for people to find jobs. But the SEED program <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/stockton-basic-income-test-success-mayor-tubbs-2019-12" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">met its goal</a> of improving the quality of life of 125 residents struggling to make ends meet. To qualify for the pilot, residents had to live in a neighborhood where the median household income was the same as or lower than the city's overall, about $46,000.</p><p> "A new report from a team of independent researchers found that Stockton's program reduced unemployment among participants during its first year and helped many of them pay off debt. The report studied the effects of the payments from February 2019 through February 2020. SEED participants also reported improvements in their emotional well-being and decreases in anxiety or depression.</p><p> "It's really made a huge impact on my quality of life and being able to go do just normal things that a lot of people take for granted," one participant said in the report, "whether it's go out to eat once every two weeks and sit down for a nice dinner, or whether it's, you know, my mom's birthday and I just want to get her a birthday present."</p><p> "Tubbs said it was likely that the $500 monthly payments helped in other ways during the pandemic, such as tiding people over until their stimulus checks arrived or allowing them to take days off work if they got COVID-19."</p><p> Here's a <a href="https://www.stocktondemonstration.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">link</a> the Stockton Economic Empowerment Seed demonstration project.</p>
CONTINUE READING
Show less
Trending
Latest
Videos
Copyright © 2021 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 | Masthead | Privacy Policy | For corrections or concerns, please email corrections@rawstory.com.
Thanks for your support!
Did you enjoy Raw Story this year? Join us! We're offering RawStory ad-free for 15% off - just $2 per week. From now until March 15th.