Reviving the Gallows, Electric Chair, Gas Chamber, and Firing Squad Recalls a Hideous History ~~Austin Sarat

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/05/trumps-plan-revive-gallows-electric-chair-gas-chamber-and-firing-squad-recalls

The way the federal government can kill death row prisoners will soon be expanded to ghoulish methods that include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber and the firing squad.

Set to take effect on Christmas Eve, the new regulations authorizing an alternative to lethal injections – the method currently used in federal executions – were announced by the Justice Department on Nov. 27.

What is clear is that these new regulations send a message about the lengths the administration will go to kill as many death row inmates as possible before Joe Biden takes office and, as expected, halts the federal death penalty.

If the president and Department of Justice succeed in their plan, the period from July 14, 2020, the date of the first of Trump's federal executions, through January 20, 2021 will be the deadliest in the history of federal capital punishment in nearly a century.

As someone who has studied execution methods in the U.S., I see in the new regulations echoes of a troubled history of less-than-perfect execution methods.

To grasp their full significance, it is necessary to look at the record of hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber and firing squads. Each of them has been touted as humane only to be sidelined because its use was found to be gruesome and offensive. Given that history, there are questions over whether the administration's plans serve any purpose other than continuing a death penalty system deemed to be a cruel outlier among modern societies.

The noose and the chair

Let's start with hanging.

Hanging was the execution method of choice throughout most of American history, and it was used in America's last public execution in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro, Kentucky. When done correctly, the noose killed by severing the spinal column, causing near instantaneous death.

But, all too often, hanging resulted in a slow death by strangulation and sometimes even a beheading. Given this gruesome record and hanging's association with the lynching of mainly Black men, by the end of the 19th century the search for other execution methods began in earnest.

The first of those alternatives was the electric chair. At the time it was adopted, it was regarded as a truly modern instrument of death, a technological marvel in the business of state killing. Hailed by penal reformers as a humane alternative to hanging, the electric chair was first authorized in 1888 by New York state following the report of a commission that concluded, “The most potent agent known for the destruction of human life is electricity…The velocity of the electric current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”

Yet, right from the start, electrocution's potency was a problem. Its first use in the 1890 execution of convicted murderer William Kemmler was horribly botched. Reports of the execution say that “After 2 minutes the execution chamber filled with the smell of burning flesh.” Newspapers called the execution a “historic bungle” and “disgusting, sickening and inhuman.”

In spite of the Kemmler debacle, the electric chair quickly became popular, being seen as more efficient and less brutal than hanging. From the start of the 20th century until the 1980s, the number of death sentences carried out by this method far outstripped those of any other method.

But electrocutions continued to go wrong, and eventually several dramatic botched executions in Florida helped turn the tide. Included were two executions, one in 1990, the other in 1997, in which the condemned inmates caught fire.

The gas chamber

By the start of the 21st century, states all over the country were abandoning the electric chair. As Justice Carol W. Hunstein of the Supreme Court of Georgia explained, “Death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies,” was no longer compatible with contemporary standards of decency.

One alternative to electrocution was the gas chamber, but it too has its own history of problems. First adopted in Nevada in 1922, executions using lethal gas were to take place while the condemned slept. Death row inmates were supposed to be housed in airtight, leak-proof prison cells, separate from other prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves would be opened that would fill the chamber with gas, killing the prisoner painlessly.

This plan was soon abandoned because officials decided it would be impractical to implement it, and states constructed special gas chambers fitted with pipes, exhaust fans and glass windows on the front and back walls for witness viewing. But deaths by lethal gas were never pretty or easy to watch.

Inmates regularly fought against breathing the gas as it entered the chamber. They convulsed, jerked, coughed, twisted and turned blue for several minutes before they died.

Far from solving the problems associated with hangings or electrocutions, lethal gas introduced its own set of horrors to the institution of capital punishment. In fact, by the end of the 20th century, 5% of executions by lethal gas had been botched.

As a result, states used gas as the sole method of execution only from 1924 to 1977, and it was last used in 1999. By then, the gas chamber had become a relic of the past because of its inability to deliver on its promise to be “swift and painless” and its association with the Nazi use of gas to kill millions during the Holocaust.

The firing squad

Finally, the firing squad. Of all of America's methods of execution, it has been least often used. From 1900 to 2010, only 35 of America's 8,776 executions were carried out using this method, and since 1976 just three people have faced a firing squad, with the last one carried out in Utah in 2010.

Critics point out that because death by guns evokes images of raw, frontier justice in a society awash in gun violence, this method mimicked something that the law wished to discourage. Nonetheless, Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 due to challenges to the state's lethal injection protocol.

While it has some contemporary proponents who claim it is the least cruel of all execution methods, the history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.

A cruel history, revived

While Trump's Department of Justice is now holding out the prospect of using these previously discredited methods of execution, it cannot erase the cruelty that marks their history. That history stands as a reminder of America's failed quest to find a method of execution that is safe, reliable and humane.

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Another article on the cruelty of lethal injections:

https://portside.org/2019-06-03/one-night-two-executions-and-more-questions-about-torture

Isn't socialism about conformity? ~~ Paul D'Amato

https://socialistworker.org/2006-1/590/590_09_MakeSame.php

From the Meaning of Marxism Series

SOCIALISM WILL make us all like the same. This claim is, to quote the British journalist Paul Foot, "delicately stoked by the press and television of a capitalist society which is increasingly stamping sameness and conformity on its working people."

The claim was buttressed by images and stories of people in the so-called communist regimes wearing identical clothing; schoolchildren mouthing slogans by rote to the great leader' highly regimented work and leisure time; row upon row of drearily identical buildings; and the absence of any public debate.

But the system of totalitarian conformity that Mao and Stalin imposed in the Soviet Union and China respectively had nothing to do with socialism. Rather, it was part of a policy designed to regiment and dragoon the population, as the military does its soldiers, into making the maximum exertion for the purposes of building up these countries' industrial and military strength.

This swift, blitzkrieg-style industrialization required strict labor discipline. Along with that went an ideology emphasizing national unity and strict conformity to the dictates of the party bureaucracy, centered around a deified leader--the infamous cult of personality.

"Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood," Russian students were required to say in class. One Chinese official sang this "hymn of praise" to Chairman Mao at the 1955 National People's Congress: "The sun shines only in the day, the moon shines only at night. Only Chairman Mao is the sun that never sets."

The West had its own brand of stifling conformity during the Cold War--the climate of fear surrounding the McCarthyite anticommunist witch-hunts and the sterile clichés offered up by film, television and advertising of prosperous, happy (and white) suburban family life that never conformed to reality, for instance.

A 1957 novel expresses some of the frustration felt at the sameness of mass produced suburban tract housing: "In any one of these new neighborhoods, be it in Hartford or Philadelphia, you can be certain all other houses will be precisely like yours, inhabited by people whose age, income, number of children, problems, habits, conversation, dress, possessions and perhaps even blood type are also precisely like yours."

Mass-market capitalism imposes conformity on the majority. This is true at work and outside work.

At work, we are expected to follow strict rules about our time and behavior; we are expected to follow a dress code. We churn out the same product, day in and day out, with no let up, and we have very little control over the process.

Outside of work, we are treated as "mass consumers"--coaxed, exhorted and seduced into showing up in our millions to buy exactly the same product.

Only the wealthy have the money and leisure to have palaces built by craftsmen, send their kids to the best schools, and take exotic vacations in private jets. Socialization is not about conformity or sameness, but about creating the basis for the flowering of creative expression and individual achievement.

In a socialist society, the productive power of society is harnessed to serve everyone's needs. We have the technology today, if we replaced the market with democratic planning, to end unemployment and shorten the workday to six or even fewer hours--creating the leisure time that would allow the majority to pursue all sorts of dreams that today are out of reach to all but a minority.

Trotsky wrote, "Spiritual creativeness demands freedom. The very purpose of communism is to subject nature to technique and technique to plan, and compel the raw material to give unstintingly everything to man that he needs. Far more than that, its highest goal is to free finally and once for all the creative forces of mankind from all pressure, limitation and humiliating dependence.

"Personal relations, science and art will not know any externally imposed 'plan,' nor even any shadow of compulsion. To what degree spiritual creativeness shall be individual or collective will depend entirely upon its creators."

 

LEE CAMP: We Can’t Vote ‘Em Out

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/11/30/lee-camp-we-cant-vote-em-out/

The criminal absurdity of American politics - 

It doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. I know that because here in America we can’t vote out the assholes. We can trouble them, scare them, annoy them, and sometimes even pressure them into doing some small thing that’s mildly progressive. 

But we can’t vote out the assholes.

Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful. (They are “parashits,” if you will. Copyright pending.)

I’m not arguing Trump’s goons aren’t awful. I’m just saying that if you even take a momentary peak at the people Biden is already putting in power for his transition and his future cabinet, they’re still more assholes. 

War Hawks in Charge of Peace

He’s putting war hawks in charge of creating peace, fossil-fuel puppets in charge of fixing the environment, propaganda enthusiasts in charge of the media and cops in charge of fixing a brutal white supremacist police system. I’m pretty sure he’s getting ready to put Rudy Giuliani in charge of election integrity, and a dead skunk who formerly worked for Dow Chemical as the head of the EPA. 

We can’t vote out the assholes. 

We already know that Biden’s first national security briefing included two board members of the massive defense contractor Raytheon. Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes said in a CNBC interview a couple months ago that it would be “ridiculous” to think military spending will be cut under Biden. But it doesn’t stop there.

We now know Biden’s pick for defense secretary is Michele Flournoy and his selection for secretary of state is Tony Blinken. As The Grayzone has reported, these two have played central roles in all the wars waged by Democratic presidents all the way back to Bill Clinton. 

But to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, it makes sense that one would want a defense secretary with a standard American war criminal past because otherwise they wouldn’t know their way around the Pentagon.

You don’t want to get a new guy (or gal) in there as head of our murder machine, and he’s bumbling around muttering, “What lever do I pull to blow up a village in Somalia? I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention during the introductory tour. I thought I launched a drone bomb in Libya this morning, and it turned out to be just the button for the coffee machine. But the cappuccino was great. I will say that.” 

We can’t vote out the assholes.

The Environment

Let’s move on to the environment. How are Biden/Harris doing on that front? Well, in an interview, the most famous environmental activist ever played by Julia Roberts, Erin Brockovich, already railed against Biden’s EPA transition team selection, Michael McCabe, a former DuPont consultant.

As his climate change envoy Biden chose that great climate activist — that warrior for the trees and birds — John Kerry. …Ummm, we literally have a few years until the point of no return and Biden thinks the guy who helped negotiate the completely meaningless Paris Climate Agreement is going to do a goddamn thing? I have a sneaking suspicion Biden only picked Kerry because he looks like a horse and therefore might be better equipped to explain to the animals why we’re killing them all.

The head of Biden’s transition for the U.S. Agency for Global Media is Richard Stengel who called himself the “chief propagandist” at the State Department and said the American government doesn’t use propaganda against our own people enough. That’s like putting Pikachu as the starting center of your NBA team — it’s not a recipe for success.

Then there’s Janet Yellen to run the Treasury — someone we know is a team player when it comes to capitalism’s destruction of the globe.

Is everyone starting to get the point? We can’t vote out the assholes.

Other Countries, Not Us

Other countries can. Other countries have the option to vote ‘em out. They just did it in Bolivia, despite the security forces arrayed against them. They voted out the U.S.-backed fascist coup. They did it for the most part in Mexico by electing Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is largely progressive. They do it fairly often in other countries. But not in America. Can’t happen. Both sides of our fake two-party system are owned by the “business community” (AKA assholes).

Our system is owned by the frauds and the scam artists, the trolls and gremlins, the con-men and hacks, the swindlers and hucksters, cheaters, scammers, fraudsters, and big fat flimflammers! Oh man, how I hate a flimflammer. They know that no matter which of the corporate parties wins each election — they still win. And we’re seeing it yet again.

It happens year after year after year after year — like that Bill Murray movie where he’s repeating Groundhog Day over and over, and he even kills the groundhog to see if that will stop Groundhog Day from happening, but it doesn’t. Groundhog Day still doesn’t stop. I think the movie was called “The Day That Happened A Lot.”

We can’t vote the assholes out. 

Still in Power

That’s why I say it doesn’t matter when you read this, the assholes will still be in power. Maybe you read this two weeks from now — in which case you’re viewing it on a phone while sprinting away from the zombies that have been transformed by Covid-19 and are now exacting revenge for the way they were treated during the election with their insatiable man-eating tactics. (Don’t forget to douse them with kerosene and light them after you hit ‘em with the shovel because otherwise they’ll come back. They’ll come back, and they’ll remember you.)

I have to admit, I’m cheering for the postal employees. But don’t take that personally. It’s just because I’m pissed about the 2006 bill that the Democrats and Republicans joined together on to destroy the U.S. Postal Service, and I want to see a kindly 70 year-old mustachioed man in blue shorts exact his revenge. (It’s tough to say whether you can still call a grandpa “kindly” when he’s chomping into your carotid artery, but still.)

Point being, if we truly want to change this system, then we can’t spend four years bickering about what will happen one day when it will always be the same result. We need to spend those four years building the systems that make the assholes obsolete, that make the system seem old and meaningless.

We need to build the alternatives that make the ruling elite, the oligarchs at the top, look like fucking VHS tapes. Really, we need to make it so that people look at Joe Biden’s garbage pro-war and pro-Wall Street cabinet and go, “What the hell were you ever used for? I don’t know how you fit into the system these days. We need an adapter or something.” 

Side note — Why is it that everyone over roughly 30 or 35 still has a small stack of VHS tapes or DVDs somewhere in our house or apartment? What the hell are we preparing for? Do we all think that after 20 years of never watching one VHS or DVD that the night will come when we say, “Let’s spend the next six hours watching scratchy versions of ‘Ghost,’ ‘Mrs. Doubtfire,’ and ‘The Firm’?”

Even if that did happen — even if hackers in the United Arab Emirates developed a new internet virus that shut down all television and streaming services and we blew the dust off the old collection — after about 30 minutes of deciding what to watch, we would then realize we don’t have a way to play goddamn DVDs anymore!

We’re all going to be holding up the disk grumbling, “What do you do with this again? Do we plug it into an iPod and hook that to the microwave? I can’t seem to recall.” No, we’re never going to watch those again.

And yet, we’ll keep that little stack of VHS & DVDs there until we die. Just in case. You never know. Maybe the dollar will collapse and VHS tapes will be the new form of currency, and you’ll be able to buy a helicopter ride out of the country with a single copy of “The Breakfast Club.” Who knows. It could happen.

Point being — We can’t vote out the assholes.

Because we can’t vote them out, the U.S. is less democratic than many other countries in the world. So let’s stop talking about nothing but the presidential election and start building a better future that makes this one look like that old pile of VHS tapes.

If you find this column important, please share it. Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show Redacted Tonight. His book Bullet Points and Punch Lines is available at LeeCampBook.com and his stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at LeeCampAmerican.com.

The Philosophy of Antifa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgwS_FMZ3nQ&feature=youtu.be

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

00.00 - Introduction

00:53 - Meet The Antifascists

08:18 - Fascism

20:47 - Violence

39:58 - Free Speech

53:30 - There Is No Peaceful White Nationalism

COVID Tipped the Scale: How King County Employees Made Childcare a Union Benefit ~~Michael Laslett

https://labornotes.org/2020/11/covid-tipped-scale-how-king-county-employees-made-childcare-union-benefit

Ten thousand union members who work for King County, where Seattle is located, have won a $9 million fund to cover emergency childcare expenses this school year. Now the union coalition is pushing to make the benefit permanent.

Childcare affordability was already a crisis for working parents—even before the pandemic. A typical single parent in Washington state spends more than half her income on childcare. The cost of childcare is often greater than college tuition.

And being a parent disproportionately affects working women, who often miss work, pass up promotion opportunities, switch jobs, or quit to take care of their children.

The new benefit can be used for various kinds of childcare, including pre-K, support for school-agers, and tutors.

“For me as a full-time working mom with a special needs child, this is huge,” said Service Employees Local 925 member Stephanie Brown, who works in the Department of Public Defense.

“Even with one parent at home and myself telecommuting, it is extremely difficult to meet the academic needs for both of our kids. Having childcare for just one of our children would help tremendously.”

INTERNAL DISCUSSION

SEIU 925 first raised the idea of union-negotiated childcare benefits in 2018, when the Coalition of King County Unions was bargaining a successor master agreement. The coalition includes PROTEC17 (a union of professional and technical workers), Teamsters, AFSCME, Office and Professional Employees, Building Trades, and others.

We were inspired by the example of the 1199SEIU Child Care Fund in New York, founded 20 years ago and funded by employer contributions of 0.5 percent of payroll. It now has hundreds of signatory employers and provides childcare benefits to tens of thousands of workers.

It took some internal discussion within our coalition before a childcare proposal was put on the table. The bargaining team debated cost, trade-offs, eligibility, who would benefit, and what ages of children would receive care.

At first some members were opposed, but others spoke from their personal experience as working parents—or as public health workers serving working families—to insist that childcare was an important union issue. At the end of 2018 bargaining, a labor-management task force was formed to explore childcare options.

Next the task force commissioned a poll to see how workers in King County would feel about a childcare benefit; the results showed overwhelming support.

As the unions prepared for this year’s bargaining, SEIU 925 put the childcare proposal before the coalition again. This time it passed easily.

COVID TIPPED THE SCALE

When COVID-19 hit, it threw everyone’s family lives into chaos. If there was any doubt left about whether childcare was an important union issue, this settled it.

King County workers, like other parents, were overwhelmed by school closures and childcare providers closing down. Many lost their childcare and had to find more expensive alternatives.

Even workers who didn’t have young kids themselves could see the crisis for their friends, co-workers, and grandkids. Almost everyone knew someone who was juggling work and children.

This year, when union negotiators proposed to tap $9 million for emergency childcare benefits, nearly the entire bargaining team supported it, and management agreed. The money came from a health care fund that had ample reserves, so this allocation does not reduce worker health care benefits. (Health care is bargained separately from the rest of the master agreement, and wrapped up earlier.)

The $9 million is a one-time fund to support union members during the pandemic, and a pilot to show how a childcare program could work. But in the current bargaining for a contract to take effect in January, the union coalition is proposing ongoing childcare funding—this time funded by an employer contribution of 0.5 percent of payroll into a jointly managed fund, just like the one in New York.

Ultimately SEIU 925 and our coalition partners dream of forming a multiemployer, multi-union childcare benefits trust in Washington state, covering public and private sector employers. The need is clear, and the victory at King County is a good first step.

Michael Laslett is the Strategic Campaigns Director of Service Employees 925.