Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

US citizens face charges ‘punishable by death’ in alleged coup attempt in Congo
Three US nationals on trial in Democratic Republic of Congo over events in May described as an attempted coup

More than 50 people, including three US citizens and a Belgian, have gone on trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo over what the army has described as an attempted coup.

The actions of the three Americans were “punishable by death”, Judge Freddy Ehume told the military court in the DRC capital, Kinshasa.

Marcel Malanga and Taylor Christian Thomson, both 21, and 36-year-old Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun were the first of the defendants to stand before the judge to hear the charges read out against them.

“These acts are punishable by death,” the presiding judge of the Kinshasa-Gombe military court told the three.

Another 50 or so defendants then took the stand one by one under a large tent in the grounds of the Ndolo military prison to hear the charges.

All appeared in blue-and-yellow prison uniforms at their trial, which started at about 11.40am local time and was followed closely by western diplomats, journalists and lawyers.

The alleged coup attempt occurred on 19 May, when armed men attacked the home of the economy minister, Vital Kamerhe, in the early hours before moving on to the nearby Palais de la Nation that houses President Felix Tshisekedi’s offices.

They were seemingly filmed brandishing the flag of Zaire – the name of the central African country during the rule of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko – and chanting that Tshisekedi’s government was over.

The army later announced on national television that security forces had stopped “an attempted coup d’état”.

The alleged plot was led by Christian Malanga, a Congolese man who was a “naturalised American” and who was killed by security forces, the army spokesperson Gen Sylvain Ekenge said.

Malanga’s son, who is a US citizen, was one of the three Americans to face trial on Friday.

Ekenge said about 40 of the assailants, of “various nationalities”, had been arrested and a further four killed, including Christian Malanga.

The motive behind the alleged incident remains unclear but the government condemned it as an attempt to “destabilise” the vast country’s “institutions”.

Four women are among the accused, as well as at least one Belgian national, Jean-Jacques Wondo.

Wondo, a military expert of Congolese origin, was arrested two days after the events, on 21 May.

He is accused of being an “accomplice of Christian Malanga” by “providing transport” for the alleged putschists, his lawyer, Masingo Shela, said.

Wondo denied the charge against him and would defend himself, Shela added.

According to a court document, a total of 53 defendants are being tried, including Christian Malanga, even though he is dead.

The charges include “attack, terrorism, illegal possession of weapons and munitions of war, attempted assassination, criminal association, murder [and] financing of terrorism”, according to the document.

Two big stories today that together reveal a broader landscape.

The first is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics today released another blockbuster jobs report. The country added 272,000 jobs in May, far higher than the 180,000 jobs economists predicted. A widespread range of sectors added new jobs, including health care, government, leisure and hospitality, and professional, scientific, and technical services. Wages are also up. Over the past year, average hourly earnings have grown 4.1%, higher than the rate of inflation, which was 3.4% over the same period.

The unemployment rate ticked up from 3.9% to 4%. This is not a significant change, but it does break the 27-month streak of unemployment below that number.

The second big story is that Justice Clarence Thomas amended a financial filing from 2019, acknowledging that he should have reported two free vacations he accepted from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. While in the past he said he did not need to disclose such gifts, in today’s filing he claimed he had “inadvertently omitted” the trips on earlier reports. ProPublica broke the story of these and other gifts from Crow, including several more trips than Thomas has so far acknowledged.

Fix The Court, a nonprofit advocacy group that seeks to reform the federal courts, estimates that Thomas has accepted more than $4 million in gifts over the last 20 years. As economic analyst Steven Rattner pointed out, that’s 5.6 times more than the other 16 justices on the court in those years combined.

These two news items illustrate a larger story about the United States in this moment.

The Biden administration has quite deliberately overturned the supply-side economics that came into ascendancy in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan took office and that remained dominant until 2021, when Biden entered the White House. Adherents of that ideology rejected the idea that the government should invest in the “demand side” of the economy—workers and other ordinary Americans—to develop the economy, as it had done since 1933.

Instead, they maintained that the best way to nurture the economy was to support the “supply side”: those at the top. Cutting business regulations and slashing taxes would create prosperity, they said, by concentrating wealth in the hands of individuals who would invest in the economy more efficiently than they could if the government interfered in their choices. That smart investment would dramatically expand the economy, supporters argued, and everyone would do better.

But supply-side economics never produced the results its supporters promised. What it did do was move money out of the hands of ordinary Americans into the hands of the very wealthy. Economists estimate that between 1981 and 2021, more than $50 trillion dollars moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

In order to keep that system in place, Republicans worked to make it extraordinarily difficult for Congress to pass laws making the government do anything, even when the vast majority of Americans wanted it to. With the rise of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to the position of Senate majority leader in 2007, they weaponized the filibuster so any measure that went against their policies would need 60 votes in order to get through the Senate, and in 2010 they worked to take over state legislatures so that they could gerrymander state congressional districts so severely that Republicans would hold far more seats than they had earned from voters.

With Congress increasingly neutered, the power to make law shifted to the courts, which Republicans since the Reagan administration had been packing with appointees who adhered to their small-government principles.

Clarence Thomas was a key vote on the Supreme Court. But as ProPublica reported in December 2023, Thomas complained in 2000 to a Republican member of Congress about the low salaries of Supreme Court justices (equivalent to about $300,000 today) and suggested he might resign. The congressman and his friends were desperate to keep Thomas, with his staunchly Republican vote, on the court. In the years after 2000, friends and acquaintances provided Thomas with a steady stream of gifts that supplemented his income, and he stayed in his seat.

But what amounts to bribes has compromised the court. After the news broke that Thomas has now disclosed some of the trips Crow gave him, conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “It’s long past time for there to be a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes. What he has taken, and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time.” A bit less formally, over a chart of the monetary value of the gifts Thomas has accepted, Conway added: “I mean. This. Is. Just. Nuts.”

As the Republican system comes under increasing scrutiny, Biden’s renewal of traditional economic policies is showing those policies to be more successful than the Republicans’ system ever was. If Americans turn against the Republican formula of slashing taxes and deregulating business, those at the top of the economy stand to lose both wealth and control of the nation’s economic system.

Trump has promised more tax cuts and deregulation if he is reelected, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently projected that his plan to extend the 2017 tax cuts that are set to expire in 2025 will add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. In April, at a meeting with 20 oil executives, Trump promised to cut regulations on the fossil fuel industry in exchange for $1 billion in donations, assuring them that the tax breaks he would give them once he was in office would pay for the donation many times over (indeed, an analysis quoted in The Guardian showed his proposed tax cuts would save them $110 billion). On May 23, he joined fossil fuel executives for a fundraiser in Houston.

In the same weeks, Biden’s policies have emphasized using the government to help ordinary people rather than to move wealth upward.

On May 31 the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it will make its experimental free electronic filing system permanent. It asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia to sign on to the program and to help taxpayers use it. The program’s pilot this year was wildly successful, with more than 140,000 people filing that way. Private tax preparers, whose industry makes billions of dollars a year, oppose the new system.

The Inflation Reduction Act provided funding for this program and for beefing up the ability of the IRS to audit the wealthiest taxpayers. As Fatima Hussein wrote for the Associated Press, Republicans cut $1.4 billion from these funds last summer and will shift an additional $20 billion from the IRS to other programs over the next two years.

Today the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued five new reports showing that thanks in part to the administration's outreach efforts about the Affordable Care Act, the rate of Black Americans without health insurance dropped from 20.9% in 2010 to 10.8% in 2022. The same rate among Latinos dropped from 32.7% to 18%. For Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, the rate of uninsured dropped from 16.6% to 6.2%. And for American Indians and Alaska Natives, the rate dropped from 32.4% to 19.9%. More than 45 million people in total are enrolled in coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

President Biden noted the strength of today’s jobs report in a statement, adding: “I will keep fighting to lower costs for families like the ones I grew up with in Scranton.” Republicans “have a different vision,” he said, “one that puts billionaires and special interests first.” He promised: “I will never stop fighting for Scranton—not Park Avenue.”

Coltan is short for Columbite-tantalite – a black tar-like mineral found in major quantities in the Congo. The Congo possesses 64 percent of the world’s coltan. When coltan is refined it becomes a heat resistant powder that can hold a high electric charge. The properties of refined coltan is a vital element in creating devices that store energy or capacitors, which are used in a vast array of small electronic devices, especially in mobile phones, laptop computers, pagers, and other electronic devic

Foreign Corporate exploitation
Although the countries mentioned above directly exploit coltan, foreign multi-national corporations have been deeply involved in the exploitation of coltan in the Congo. The coltan mined by rebels and foreign forces is sold to foreign corporations. Although, the United Nations in its reports on the Congo do not directly blame the multi-national corporations for the conflict in the Congo, the United Nations does say that these companies serve as “the engine of the conflict in the DRC.”

3. War-torn Central Africa supplies about a fourth of the world market as production declines in Australia, the previous world leader. Most Central African coltan is considered conflict mineral because mining areas are controlled by armed factions and organized crime. It’s the same in the South American jungles where Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil meet and where officials say they’ve found vast coltan reserves.

About 20,000 people work at the mine, in shifts of 5,000 at a time. Mining operations have been ongoing for years here in flagrant violation of the DRC’s laws and in defiance of the site’s owner, a subsidiary of mining and commodities giant Glencore.

As the diggers gouge at blue-tinged soil, hundreds of dust-covered porters trudge up a ramp leading out of the pit, their backs bent under the weight of sacks of ore.

Marcel Kabamba, age 31, taking a break amid the sounds of clanging and the shouts of his fellow diggers, said he could make the equivalent of $200 on a good week – a small fortune in a country where most live on under $2 a day.

“The forced evictions taking place as companies seek to expand industrial-scale copper and cobalt mining projects are wrecking lives and must stop now,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
“Amnesty International recognizes the vital function of rechargeable batteries in the energy transition from fossil fuels. But climate justice demands a just transition. Decarbonizing the global economy must not lead to further human rights violations.

“The people of the DRC experienced significant exploitation and abuse during the colonial and post-colonial era, and their rights are still being sacrificed as the wealth around them is stripped away.”

The dollar is expected to crash sooner rather than later.

Yesterday the Washington Post published an article by Beth Reinhard examining the philosophy and the power of Russell Vought, the hard-right Christian nationalist who is drafting plans for a second Trump term. Vought was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from July 2020 to January 2021 during the Trump administration. In January 2021 he founded the Center for Renewing America, a pro-Trump think tank, and he was a key player in the construction of Project 2025, the plan to gut the nonpartisan federal government and replace it with a dominant president and a team of loyalists who will impose religious rule on the United States.

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2023, Vought advised the far right, calling for draconian cuts to government agencies, student loans, and housing, health care, and food assistance. He called for $2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over ten years, more than $600 billion in cuts to the Affordable Care Act, more than $400 billion in cuts to food assistance, and so on.

Last month the Republican National Committee (RNC), now dominated by Trump loyalists, named Vought policy director of the RNC platform committee, the group that will draft a political platform for the Republicans this year. In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying that it “enthusiastically” supported Trump and his agenda. With Vought at the head of policy, it is reasonable to think that the party’s 2024 platform will skew toward the policies Vought has advanced elsewhere.

Vought argues that the United States is in a “post constitutional moment” that “pays only lip service to the old Constitution.” He attributes that crisis to “the Left,” which he says “quietly adopted a strategy of institutional change,” by which he appears to mean the growth of the federal government to protect individual Americans. He attributes that change to the presidency of President Woodrow Wilson beginning in 1913. Vought calls for what he calls “Radical Constitutionalism” to destroy the power of the modern administrative state and instead elevate the president to supreme authority.

There are historical problems with this assessment, not least that it attributes to “the Left” a practical and popular change in the U.S. government to adjust it to the modern industrial world, as if somehow that change was a fringe stealth campaign.

While it has been popular among the radical right to bash Democratic president Woodrow Wilson for the 1913 Revenue Act that established the modern income tax, suggesting that it was this moment that began the creation of the modern state, the recasting of government in fact took place under Republican Theodore Roosevelt a decade before Wilson took office, and it was popular without regard to partisanship.

The liberalism on which the United States was founded in the late 1700s came from the notion—radical at the time—that individuals have rights and that the government generally must not intrude on those rights. This idea was central to the thinking of the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who put into the form of a mathematical constant—“we hold these truths to be self-evident”—the idea that “all men are created equal” and that they have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” as well as the right to live under a government of their own choosing.

To keep the government from crushing those individual rights, the Constitution’s Framers wrote the Bill of Rights. Those first ten amendments to the Constitution hold back the federal government by, among other things, prohibiting Congress from making laws that would establish a national religion or prohibit the free exercise of religion, limit freedom of speech or of the press, or hamper people’s right to assemble peacefully or to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The belief that liberalism depended on a small government dominated the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the rise of industry in the late nineteenth century shifted the relationship between individuals and the government. Was everyone really equal when industrialists were worth millions and commanded state legislatures and Congress, while workers, consumers, and children had little leverage to protect themselves?

The majority of Americans said no, and Theodore Roosevelt agreed. The danger for individuals in their era was not that the government would crush them, but that industrialists would. In order for the government truly to protect the people, Roosevelt argued, it must regulate businesses and support the ability of ordinary Americans to prosper. A true liberal government, one that protected the rights of individuals, must be big enough and strong enough to act as a referee between workers, consumers, and businessmen.

Roosevelt actually loathed Wilson, in part because Wilson ran for office in 1912 with the argument that as soon as the government broke up big corporations, the country could revert back to a small government. To Roosevelt, this made no sense. Unless the conditions of the modern economy were changed—and he believed they could not be, because the trend was always toward bigger and bigger enterprises—industry would always concentrate. Only a big government could stop those corporations from taking over the country.

Tearing apart the modern state, as those like Vought advocate, would take us back to the world Roosevelt recognized as being antithetical to the rights of individuals promised by the Declaration of Independence.

A key argument for a strong administrative state was that it could break the power of a few men to control the nation. It is no accident that those arguing for a return to a system without a strong administrative state are eager to impose their religion on the American majority, who have rejected their principles and policies. Americans support abortion rights, women’s rights, LBGTQ+ rights, minority rights: the equal rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

And therein lies the second historical problem with Vought’s “Radical Constitutionalism.” James Madison, the key thinker behind the Constitution, explained why a democracy cannot be based on religion. As a young man, Madison had watched officials in his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for attacking the established church in the state. He was no foe of religion, but by 1773 he had begun to question whether established religion, which was common in the colonies, was good for society. By 1776, many of his broad-thinking neighbors had come to believe that society should “tolerate” different religious practices, but he had moved past tolerance to the belief that men had a right of conscience.

In that year, he was instrumental in putting Section 16 into the Virginia Declaration of Rights on which our own Bill of Rights would be based. It reads: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”

In 1785, in a “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” Madison explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.

Journalist Reinhard points out that Trump strategist Steve Bannon recently praised Vought and his colleagues as “madmen” who are going to destroy the U.S. government. “We’re going to rip and shred the federal government apart, and if you don’t like it, you can lump it,” Bannon said.

In July 2022 a jury found Bannon guilty of contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and that October, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, sentenced him to four months in prison. Bannon fought the conviction, but in May 2024 a federal appeals court upheld it.

On June 6, Judge Nichols ordered him to report to prison by July 1.

Harry Dunn’s mother ‘unspeakably hurt’ that son’s killer will not attend inquest
Family angered by Anne Sacoolas’s refusal to give evidence in person over motorcyclist’s death in 2019

Harry Dunn’s mother has said she is “unspeakably hurt” that her son’s killer, Anne Sacoolas, has refused to attend the inquest into his death, saying it was “bitterly disappointing and, as a mother, utterly incomprehensible”.

An inquest into Dunn’s death opened on Monday, almost five years after the 19-year-old was killed when his motorcycle collided head-on with a vehicle driven by Sacoolas that was on the wrong side of the road outside a US military based in Northamptonshire in August 2019.

Last year, Northamptonshire coroner Anne Pember invited Sacoolas to attend the inquest remotely, an offer which “had not been taken up”, the inquest heard. Her evidence will now be read out in court instead.

Speaking through tears, Charlotte Charles, Dunn’s mother, told the hearing that “learning that Anne Sacoolas will not be attending Harry’s inquest this week was bitterly disappointing and, as a mother, is utterly incomprehensible to me”.

“She could have chosen to give me and our family this opportunity to finally understand what led to Harry’s death that night. But no,” she said. “I am unspeakably hurt that she has chosen to hide instead and it cannot help but feel disrespectful to Harry, the life he had and the future he lost.”

Inquest proceedings were delayed due to a years-long fight by Dunn’s family to bring criminal charges against Sacoolas, who had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf by the US and left the UK 19 days after Dunn’s death.

The family’s campaign for justice included meeting Donald Trump at the White House to ask the then president to review a decision to block an extradition request for Sacoolas.

In December 2022, Sacoolas attended court remotely and was given an eight-month suspended sentence and disqualified from driving for 12 months after admitting to causing death by careless driving.

Harry’s father, Tim Dunn, read an emotional statement to Northampton coroner’s court on Monday in which he described comforting his son on the roadside after the crash.

“I could hear Harry moaning with pain, and I told him I was there and to let the doctors do their thing to help him,” he said. “I told him ‘I will see you at the hospital. Do what the doctors say, and I love you.’ Little did I know these would be my last words to him and the last time I would see him alive.

“To this day, this part haunts me. I wish I did more, said more or just held him. As he was being loaded into the ambulance, even though I could see his bones sticking out of his arms, I did not think he would die.”

Dunn’s twin brother, Niall Dunn, said: “I don’t think there’s anything I can say that would describe him better than someone who would do anything for his brother.”

The four-day inquest is expected to examine what training was given to Sacoolas about driving in the UK, the history of road traffic collisions in that area, as well as whether delays by emergency services caused or contributed to Dunn’s death.

You really have no clues past RW sources for what's happening here.