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Charles Pierce | Nancy Pelosi's Impeachment Letter Suggests Sh*t Is Getting Real, Constitution-Wise
 Charles Pierce, Esquire Pierce writes: "The Speaker will make this examination of the president* seem as integral to the constitutional design as it was meant to be."
EXCERPT:
One of the lesser-known—but nonetheless pivotal—moments in the pursuit of Richard Nixon came in October of 1973, when Peter Rodino and his staff at the House Judiciary Committee put together a book explaining the impeachment process and how it had worked down through the centuries, its basic principles, and how the Constitutional Convention had adapted it for use within the infrastructure of government. Because he knew the importance of how things work, Jimmy Breslin, in his terrific Watergate book, made a point of using the publication of Rodino's study as one of the first moments in which Nixon's blood was drawn, even though the cut was barely visible to the general public.
And on the cover it said, "Impeachment." It was 718 pages long. Jee-zus! Goddamn big book! Seven hundred-and-eighteen pages long. Keerist! This is gettin' to be important business now. Nobody read a line of the book, but everybody held it and looked at the last page and saw that it was 718 pages long.
After the publication of those 718 pages came a series of votes that nobody noticed—including one that allowed Rodino and his committee the power to subpoena anyone in government and any documents that the committee might deem relevant. It was a party-line vote but, as Breslin shrewdly noted, it was a vote. And it was on impeachment, which, at that point in history, had been a dead letter since 1868. It was a part of the business of the Congress for the first time since Thaddeus Stevens was whipping votes against Andy Johnson. Part of the business of government. Business, as usual.
 Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a military officer at the National Security Council, arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Missing Words and a Screaming Match: Inside a Wild Day of Impeachment Testimony
Zachary B. Wolf, CNN Wolf writes: "Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council official in charge of Ukraine policy, told impeachment investigators he tried to make changes to the transcript of a call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky."
EXCERPT:
However, the Times reports that one of the changes to the transcript sought by Vindman was regarding replacing an ellipses: "The rough transcript also contains ellipses at three points where Mr. Trump is speaking. Colonel Vindman told investigators that at the point of the transcript where the third set of ellipses appears, Mr. Trump said there were tapes of Mr. Biden."
A source also tells CNN's Manu Raju that that reference was to recordings of Biden.
Below are more details of Vindman's deposition and other events Tuesday and coming up.
A screaming match behind closed doors
The impeachment inquiry is turning more acrimonious. Less than a week after Republicans stormed into the secure room where an impeachment witness was set to be deposed, Tuesday's deposition of Vindman devolved into a shouting match between Republicans and Democrats.
What set it off? Democrats accused Republicans of trying to goad Vindman into revealing the identity of the whistleblower with their questions.
Trump's rhetoric is also escalating. There is a knee-jerk attempt by President Donald Trump to discredit witnesses as Never Trumpers or nobodies. That effort backfired with Vindman, a decorated war veteran.
Immigrant patriot -- Vindman's testimony was preceded by a profile in The New York Times of his journey from Ukrainian refugee to the White House, where he works on the National Security Council along with his twin brother.
He arrived on Capitol Hill in uniform, with a chest full of medals, including a Purple Heart.
In his opening statement, he told of fleeing the Soviet Union as a child and how that made him an American. He proved it by serving in Iraq. Vindman never complains about it but still carries shrapnel in his body from Iraq IED attack, a source close to him told Jake Tapper.
"I am a patriot, and it is my sacred duty and honor to advance and defend OUR country, irrespective of party or politics," he said.
Note: He said he's never had contact with the President. He also said he is NOT the whistleblower.
Former White House counsel Don McGahn has refused to testify, and, finally, a judge will hear the Justice Department's and the House's arguments over his assertion of immunity beginning at 2 p.m. Former acting national security adviser Charles Kupperman has asked the court to decide if he, too, is immune from testifying, but on Tuesday the Justice Department and the House asked a federal judge to postpone that court hearing, which had been scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday, so they can attend the McGahn hearing. The judge, Richard Leon of the US District Court in Washington, has not yet responded.
If the court schedule doesn't change, Obama-appointed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and Bush-appointed Judge Richard Leon will weigh, within an hour of each other, very similar legal questions with major implications for the House's impeachment inquiry.
 Private prison. (photo: AP)
ICE Has Been Ramping Up Its Work With a Private Prison Company Connected to Horrific Allegations
Gaby Del Valle, Vice Del Valle writes: "A migrant at one of the facilities committed suicide earlier this month after being put in solitary confinement."
EXCERPT:
Despite years of documented and alleged abuse at its facilities, Ruston, Louisiana-based LaSalle Corrections has experienced a boom thanks to the Trump administration's immigration policies. Over the past year, the Department of Homeland Security has contracted eight new immigrant detention facilities in Louisiana, six of which are former prisons or jails owned and operated by LaSalle.
Earlier this month, a migrant held at LaSalle’s Richwood Correctional Center in Monroe died by suicide after being put in solitary confinement as punishment for participating in a hunger strike. Another migrant detained at the same facility, a Venezuelan asylum-seeker with diabetes and hypertension, has seen his health deteriorate because of the food served in the facility, his lawyer told VICE News.
“We have requested, because of his medical condition, for him to be released on his own recognizance or through a bond,” his lawyer, Nathalia Dickson, said. “He’s been to the clinic they have in Richwood and has been going there to talk to the doctor. However, I see through his medical records that he’s not being properly treated.”
Richwood isn’t the only LaSalle-owned facility where detainees say they aren’t treated well. Yuselys, a Cuban asylum-seeker whose partner is detained at LaSalle’s Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, said the people held there are in physical and psychological distress.
Yuselys said she often has to send money to her partner so he can buy food from the commissary, since the food in Winn’s cafeteria is occasionally moldy. She said other detainees suffer from stomach aches because of the food. Now that winter is coming, she has to send him money for a jacket, too; she said the facility hasn’t provided any.
In 2017, when Richwood was still being used as a county jail, the families of two inmates filed wrongful death suits against LaSalle after one inmate stomped another to death before being killed by a guard. Both inmates’ families said LaSalle’s lack of adequate training for guards led to the deaths.
Earlier this year, four former Richwood guards were found guilty of pepper spraying kneeling, handcuffed inmates at the facility — or of standing by while others did. Those guards no longer work at Richwood, which now holds civil immigrant detainees instead of people being held on criminal grounds.
 Demonstrators rally against the state’s new abortion law at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, on May 19. (photo: Reuters/Michael Spooneybarger)
Alabama's Near-Total Abortion Ban Blocked by Federal Judge
Kate Smith, CBS News Smith writes: "Alabama's near-total ban on abortion has just been blocked from implementation. The ban, dubbed the 'Human Life Protection Act,' was set to take effect on November 15." READ MORE  Protesters march in the street as lightning flashes in the distance in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 20, 2014. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP)
The FBI Spends a Lot of Time Spying on Black Americans
Alice Speri, The Intercept Speri writes: "Although the FBI has frequently changed its labels and terminology, the surveillance of black Americans has continued." READ MORE  Firemen work to contain a building fire after massive protests against Sebastian Piñera's policies at Palacio de La Moneda on October 28, 2019 in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Claudio Santana/Getty Images)
The Meaning of Chile's Upheaval
Camila Vergara, Jacobin Vergara writes: "The ongoing popular upheaval in Chile is the product of thirty years of neoliberal oligarchy and half-hearted democratization. To uproot the existing power structure, the country needs a new constitution."
EXCERPT:
Chile is neoliberalism’s ground zero, a testing ground for neoliberal economic policies as well as neoliberal forms of legality. The Constitution of 1980, which has been amended almost forty times and is still in place, was mostly designed by Jaime Guzmán, an ultraconservative jurist and member of the fundamentalist Catholic Opus Dei, with the intention of stabilizing and protecting the newly implemented neoliberal economic model — together with a patriarchal social framework — against popular pushback. Article 8 —repealed in 1989 just few months before the return to democracy — outlawed any doctrines based on “class struggle” or aimed at “attacking the family.” The brutal costs of the “neoliberal adjustment” came shortly after, and the population was forced to endure economic hardship and domination at gunpoint.
During the seventeen years of dictatorship under Pinochet, poverty increased from 20 percent to 44 percent while GDP was distributed more unequally: the share of wages in national income fell from more than half to one-third, while the share of corporate profits rose from 31.4 percent to 42.4 percent. The neoliberal model of accumulation by dispossession created massive wealth on the backs of the working classes and through the savage plundering of public property as well as the Earth. The legal scaffolding of the neoliberal state allowed the oligarchy to disproportionately appropriate this socially created wealth while shielding political elites from popular pressures through procedural arrangements aimed at insulating public officials from electoral accountability. Chile’s particular institutional arrangement has made for a rapid oligarchization of the economy in which oligopolies have given rise to collusion scandals, from the toilet paper industry to pharmacies, and a political system in which elected representatives receive the highest compensation packages in Latin America while consistently endorsing laws and policies favoring the wealthy and further entrenching monopolies, or neglecting to adopt measures to counteract oligarchic outcomes, passively letting the wealthy keep enriching themselves.
The merciless extraction of wealth from humans and nature, at high speed and insulated from popular pressure, has nurtured a new crop of the superrich who own most of the national industries, media outlets, banks, supermarkets, pension investment funds, health insurances, electricity, land, precious metals, and water. Chile boasts ten billionaires in the Forbes list, with a combined wealth of about $40 billion, equal to roughly 16 percent of GDP, while middle- and low-income households spend 45 percent of their salaries to pay off debts just to make it to the next paycheck. It is in this context that the slight increase in transportation tariffs in Santiago sparked what has become a national popular uprising.
 Farmers and farm guests partake in field walks and discussions at Willow Lake Farm Agroecology Summit in Windom Minnesota. (photo: Anna Claussen/Grist)
Think Rural America Doesn't Care About the Climate? Think Again.
Scott Shigeoka, Grist Shigeoka writes: "In 2018, Anna Claussen started Voices for Rural Resilience, an organization that brings rural people into the conversation by identifying local climate-related problems and creating their own solutions."
EXCERPT:
Although less than 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural communities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, they live and work across 97 percent of our country’s land mass. Almost all of the nation’s energy and food is produced in rural landscapes, which are rich with natural resources essential for our survival and critical in addressing the climate crisis.
We miss out on a significant opportunity when we assume rural people are “the enemy,” Claussen said. She argues that rural work often strengthens people’s connection with nature and stokes their desire for more environmental protection.
You don’t need to take her word for it. Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in climate change. That includes folks who live in rural areas in states as diverse as Louisiana and California. A group of researchers at Yale found that more than 6 out of 10 Trump voters believe in taxing or regulating pollution.
Blaine Hill, Morris city manager, says he was interested in the dialogue because it was an opportunity to bring local voices into a conversation that was happening in the government and at universities. Rural communities got left behind in the electrification of America, Hill said, and then again during the high-speed internet revolution. He doesn’t want that to happen again.
“The future is not going to be coal,” Hill said. “It’s going to be the production of sustainable and renewable energy, and we have the capability here where we live to do it.”
The community’s ongoing conversation about climate change has led to an initiative called the Morris Model, designed to reduce the town’s emissions and support climate adaptation and resilience projects. They’ve even established a three-year partnership with a small town in Germany, called Saerbeck, to share insights and solutions with each other.
This year, Morris replaced its 450-watt streetlights with energy-saving LED bulbs and installed electric vehicle charging stations, including one behind Morris City Hall. Around town, solar farms are popping up. Rebecca Michael, a representative from the area’s Otter Tail Power Company, said there are plans to install about 250 kilowatts of solar energy near Morris over the next few years.
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