Julia Quecaño Casimiro, Veronica Baleni and the struggle for farm workers’ and small-scale farmers’ dignity

Julia Quecaño Casimiro

It turns out it’s not the meek who shall inherit the earth, but rather those who have been mistakenly deemed as meek by the seemingly powerful. This is especially true of those who work the earth, day in and day out. Consider the tales of Julia Quecaño Casimiro and Veronica Baleni. Julia Quecaño Casimiro is a seasonal or migrant farm worker in England; Veronica Baleni is a small-scale farmer in South Africa. Consider their stories and imagine the conversation their tales weave together.

Julia Quecaño Casimiro is Bolivian. She hopes to study biochemistry. To pay for her studies, she went to England to work as a cherry picker, where, the recruiters told her, she would earn about £500 a week and that she would have to repay no more than $1,000 , or £800, for the flight.  After a month, when Casimiro left the farm, she was broke and homeless. Last week, she sued her employers, Haygrove, claiming unlawful deduction of wages, unfair dismissal, discrimination and harassment. Haygrove is one of the UK’s biggest fruit producers. At first, she was given no shifts, then barely given a shift the following week. Then Haygrove told the workers they had to pay £1,500 in six weekly £250 instalments for their flights to the UK. For many, that demand was the final straw. When government inspectors visited Haygrove, they found and reported numerous violations. The State did nothing. So, last week, Julia Quecaño Casimiro filed a complaint, becoming the first person on a seasonal worker visa to take a farm to an employment tribunal.

Julia Quecaño Casimiro had worked before on farms, in Bolivia and Chile, but she had never experienced the kind of intimidation and exploitation that she saw and was subjected to at Haygrove. Julia Quecaño Casimiro’s parents are small-scale farmers in Bolivia. She grew up on farms and has worked on numerous farms. Julia Quecaño Casimiro knows a thing or two about how farms should be run. She also knows what slavery is: “As soon as I started, I saw that it was exploitation. It was modern slavery.”

Veronica Baleni is a small-scale farmer in Riverlands, near Malmesbury, about 45 minutes by car from Cape Town. Veronica Baleni is one of over 100 small-scale farmers who work on a large piece of land in Riverlands. Many have been working this land for generations, in some cases for over a century. Veronica Baleni grows vegetables and has over 200 fruit trees.

The land is owned by the government’s Housing Development Agency, HDA. In May 2022, HDA initiated eviction proceedings, at first allegedly against three farmers but ultimately against the whole population. The farmers resisted, secured legal representation and went to court. On Monday, the Judge in the Western Cape High Court ordered HDA to withdraw their application for eviction and strongly urged the agency to enter into “meaningful engagement” with the community. According to Veronica Baleni, the real impediment for the farmers, both as farmers and as citizens of the Republic of South Africa, is ownership of the land.

In both instances, the ones threatened are assumed, by their aggressors, to be powerless, uninformed, helpless and hopeless. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Workers know the score and they know abuse, exploitation and slavery when they see it. Small-scale farmers know that those who work the land have a right to fully inhabit the earth on which they walk, in which the toil. The fruit of one’s labor must include and support the dignity of those who labor, from the fruit farms of the United Kingdom to the fruit farms of South Africa and beyond.

Farmers celebrate their victory in court

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit 1: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / Nacho Rivera)

(Photo Credit 2: Groundup / Liezl Human)

Australia’s investment in the cruelty of spit hoods: “I can’t breathe”

On July 25, 2016,  Australians watched in horror as the investigative journalism series Four Corners showed the torture and abuse of children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in the Northern Territory. The scenes were from 2015. Children, sometimes as young as 10 years old, were thrown into solitary, or shackled, strapped into a chair, head covered with a so-called spit hood, and left alone, for hours. For hours, children moaned, cried, whispered, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe”. Australians were shocked and horrified, or so they said. In November 2021, Selesa Tafaifa, a 44-year-old Samoan woman, died in custody, in the Townsville Women’s Correctional Centre. Selelesa Tafaifa died writhing on the floor, with a spit hood over her head, wheezing, moaning, crying, whispering, “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” According to the Commission for Children and Young People Annual Report 2022 -2023, tabled today in the Parliament of Victoria, “In February 2023, a child under the age of 18 in adult custody contacted the Commission and reported that prison officers had applied a spit hood on him earlier that day. The Commission established an individual inquiry.” Yet again, Australians will express shock and horror. Liana Buchanan, Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People in the state of Victoria, said she was “shocked”: “I almost couldn’t believe it. We like to think in Victoria that we avoid the very worst abuses of children in custody, that sometimes unfortunately we see in other parts of the country. This case unfortunately showed me that is not true.” We like to think. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. We like to think.

Each of these stories should have been enough, and yet, obviously, they weren’t, and of course these are the stories we know, the stories that have been `uncovered’ by the press, as in the Don Dale case seven years ago, or by state commissions, that express shock and concern and then offer remedies of sorts, and family members, such as those of Selesa Tafaifa at the inquest now taking place, who sit in tears, watching the video of their loved one’s death. Selesa Tafaifa’s family’s attorney noted, “The family hopes to expose the truths behind her death … to ensure that what Selesa was forced to endure never happens again to anyone’s mother, grandmother, sister, daughter, grandfather. They want to do what they can to ensure that what happened to their beloved Selesa never happens to any other human being.”

Almost immediately after the expression of shock and horror come the procedural questions. Did the staff overreact? Did the child, did Selesa Tafaifa, did the children in Don Dale actually spit at anyone? These questions defer attention from the real issue. In reporting on Selesa Tafaifa’s death, it was noted that “spit hoods were used 82 times across Queensland prisons last year.” It was further noted that “The use of spit hoods and restraint chairs was described as `inhumane’ by a 2017 royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory, which recommended they no longer be used. Spit hoods are not used in Victoria or New South Wales.” And yet today, a Commission reports that a child in adult custody in Victoria was subjected to spit hoods, among other atrocities. This kind of fog is what happens when torture becomes an administrative rather than a moral and ethical issue of justice.

Selesa Tafaifa’s family knows the way forward. Ban spit hoods. The Commission for Children and Young People is, in its way, equally clear: “children should not be held in adult prisons.” The Commission further calls for the prohibition of use of spit hoods on prisoners under the age of 18. While we would wish for a total ban, at the very least this is a preliminary step. Seven years from now, will we again read, in shock and horror, about a child being subjected to a spit hood, about someone dying, writhing on the floor, choking inside a spit hood? Will we continue to be haunted by “I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I         can’t    breathe”?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Karla Dickens, To see or not to see / Art Gallery of New South Wales)

Prayer of Mothers for Life and Peace

Prayer of Mothers for Life and Peace

God of Life
Who heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds
May it be your will to hear the prayer of mothers
For you did not create us to kill each other
Nor to live in fear, anger or hatred in your world
But rather you have created us so we can grant permission to one another to sanctify
Your name of Life, your name of Peace in this world.

For these things I weep, my eye, my eye runs down with water
For our children crying at nights,
For parents holding their children with despair and darkness in their hearts
For a gate that is closing, and who will open it before the day has ended?

And with my tears and prayers which I pray
And with the tears of all women who deeply feel the pain of these difficult days
I raise my hands to you please God have mercy on us

Hear our voice that we shall not despair
That we shall see life in each other,
That we shall have mercy for each other,
That we shall have pity on each other,
That we shall hope for each other

And we shall write our lives in the book of Life
For your sake God of Life
Let us choose Life.

For you are Peace, your world is Peace and all that is yours is Peace,
And so shall be your will and let us say
Amen.

(By Sheikha Ibtisam Mahameed and Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, translated by Amichai Lau-Lavie)
(First published in the Open Siddur Project)

(Image Credit: Come For One, Face Us All by Molly Crabapple / MollyCrabapple)

Write My Name

Write My Name

“Some parents in Gaza have resorted to writing their children’s names on their legs to help identify them should either they or the children be killed.”
—CNN, 10/22/2023

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn’t bleed
if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt
if it’s exposed to heat

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
so I can take comfort in seeing
my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep

Write my name on my leg, Mama
and on the legs of my sisters and brothers
This way we will belong together
This way we will be known
as your children

Write my name on my leg, Mama
and please write your name
and Baba’s name on your legs, too
so we will be remembered
as a family

Write my name on my leg, Mama
Don’t add any numbers
like when I was born or the address of our home
I don’t want the world to list me as a number
I have a name and I am not a number

Write my name on my leg, Mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skulls and bones
our legs will tell our story, how
there was nowhere for us to run

(By Zeina Azzam)

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet and the author of Some Things Never Leave You (TIger Bark Press, 2023) and Bayna Bayna, In-Between (The Poetry Box, 2021). She is the poet laureate of Alexandria, Virginia.

This poem first appeared in Vox Populi. Thanks to Zeina Azzam for permission to share it here.

(Image Credit: Banksy, Bomb damage, Gaza City // Banksy Explained)

It’s the little things

 

It’s the little things

We two decide
to brave the subway
to the other side
(where the grass is
not any less the smellier)

It’s the little things
the overalled fellow
poignantly observes
post- the Heritage Day
we have just had

It’s the little things
retail workers work
(is there a union
in agreement there)
and the wheels turn

It’s the little things
sardine-filled taxis
rush on by
as I make my way
to a Remembrance Walk

It’s the little things
Preserving Celebrating
and Memorializing
that which was

It’s the little things

I make my way to Livingstone High School, the venue for the Newlands / Claremont Heritage, Environmental Justice and Restitution Society gathering.

(By David Kapp)

(Image Credit: Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Studio Wall XII / Southern Guild)

For women in England and Wales, “safety in custody” continues to mean self-harm

January 2015: “On Thursday, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice issued its Safety in custody quarterly update to September 2014. The report is grim.” September 2018: “In July, the Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales released their annual report, and it was predictably grim, especially for women prisoners.” February 2021: On Thursday, January 28, the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice issued its Safety in Custody Statistics, England and Wales: Deaths in Prison Custody to December 2020 Assaults and Self-harm to September 2020. The report is generally grim, and especially so for women.” February 2022: “Once upon a time, the word custody meant protection, safekeeping, responsibility for protecting or taking care of. No longer. If one is to take the sorry and sordid output and history of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice, custody today means the power to cage and code for cruelty. It’s that time of the year again when the Ministry releases its in no way long awaited “safety in custody” reports, and, yet again, one can only look at the numbers and wonder. If this is safety in custody, what would danger look like?” Well, here we are, September 2023, and the United Kingdom Ministry of Justice has release yet another `grim’ Safety in Custody Statistics, England and Wales: Deaths in Prison Custody to June 2023 Assaults and Self-harm to March 2023, and this one is actually worse than its predecessors, and, like its predecessors, will go largely unread, undiscussed, and without response, in word or deed. So … here it is, and here we are.

“There were 59,722 self-harm incidents in the 12 months to March 2023, up 11% from the previous 12 months, comprising of a 1% decrease in male establishments and a 52% increase in female establishments. Over the same period, the rate of self-harm incidents per 1,000 prisoners, which takes account of the increase in the prison population between this and the previous year, decreased 5% in male establishments but increased 51% in female establishments.”

Here are the Statistician’s comment: “In female establishments, both self-harm and assault incidents increased, by 52% and 16% respectively, with self-harm incidents reaching their highest level in the time series …. The rate in female establishments has increased considerably by 51% to a new peak (5,826 per 1,000 prisoners), whereas it has decreased 5% in male establishments (523 per 1,000 prisoners), meaning the rate is now more than eleven times higher in female establishments. This was driven by a substantial increase in the average number of incidents among those who self-harmed in female establishments, from 11.1 to 17.0, a much larger increase than previously despite this continuing an increasing trend seen for the last six years.”

The comments continue, more or less in the same vein, but you get the picture. The trend of self-harm among incarcerated women has been bad and getting worse for the past six years, but this year, the increase was much larger. Again, no one other than the usual suspects will pay any attention to this report. How do we know? Because the report was released end of July, and it’s already mid-September, and the response has been a resounding silence. Actually, more like a blurry noise, always there but not worth noticing or discussing.

The violence against women perpetrated by the State is increasing. The report notes that the assaults by women are less violent than those of men. What does that tell you? That the women are sending a message by carving into their own flesh, again and again and again, and all they get, in response, is another government report from a ministry that dares to use the name “Justice”. In circumstances like this, language only exists to demonstrate its own vacuity, our own capacity to empty words of any real significance: grim, custody, justice, harm, responsibility, care, prison, women. We study, we write, we organize … and the violence does more than continue, it escalates: “The number of incidents and rate of self-harm in the female estate are now at the highest level in the time series.” Who cares?

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Infographic: UK Ministry of Justice)

Hope in a time of choler: Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalizes abortion at the federal level


In the same week that Mexico’s two major political parties nominated women to run for President, nearly assuring that Mexico’s next President will be a woman, Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled that abortion as a federal crime violates Mexico’s Constitution: “The legal system that penalises abortion in the Federal Criminal Code is unconstitutional since it violates the human rights of women and people with the ability to carry a fetus”. This decision builds on a 2021 decision that decriminalized abortion in the state of Coahuila, a state that ironically or tragically or both shares a border with the United States, specifically with Texas. As the Washington Post succinctly put it, “Mexican court expands access to abortion, even as U.S. restricts it.”

The Supreme Court case came as a result of a suit last year, filed by el Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida, GIRE, the Information Group for Reproductive Choice, challenging a 1931 Federal regulation. Since the 2021 decision, 12 Mexican states decriminalized abortion. This week’s ruling means that all Federal hospitals and clinics, irrespective of local laws and restrictions, must provide abortions. Women and people with the ability to carry a fetus can seek abortions without fearing prosecution. Health providers can respond to women and people with the ability to carry a fetus without fearing prosecution. The decriminalization of abortion means the end of a police state of ever impending terror and incarceration.

As both GIRE and the Supreme Court Justices freely admit, while this was a judicial decision, it emerged from years of organizing, from the Green Wave that has swept across Mexico and across the Americas, surging in Argentina, Colombia, and beyond. As Arturo Zaldivar, the former president of the Supreme Court, wrote: “The Green Wave continues to advance. All rights for all women and pregnant people!” A Green Wave continues to surge across Latin America, inspiring, invigorating, and instructing.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: GIRE)

Johannesburg: “Just because they are already living on the margins of society does not make them invisible social outcasts or nuisances”

On August 29, the Pretoria High Court declared that “the recent series of evictions undertaken by the City of Johannesburg (COJ) and the MMC for Human Settlements in Gauteng, on Farm Allandale, have been declared unlawful and unconstitutional.” Lawyers for Human Rights, the attorneys representing Farm Allendale residents, described this as “a pivotal court decision …. This ruling is not just a win for the residents of Farm Allandale but a clarion call to all entities, reminding them of the human touch essential in the dispensation of justice. This victory serves as a testament to the resilience of communities and the critical role that organizations like LHR play in ensuring that justice is meted out fairly.” A community of 836 people, identified as Rabie Ridge Community, have lived for years on land known as Farm Allendale. The City of Johannesburg has evicted them, destroying their homes as well as their belongings, numerous times. The residents sued the City … and won. Acting Judge Elmien Du Plessis said, “These people have human rights as contained in the Bill of Rights and protected in the Constitution. Just because they are already living on the margins of society does not make them invisible social outcasts or nuisances, however much their presence may frustrate the respondents – the City and the MMC.” The Judge declared the actions of the City unlawful and ruled the City had to either rebuild the shacks within 72 hours or pay each family R1500 to buy materials to rebuild their own homes. This was a landmark victory, a beacon in the very dark and too long night. Had I written in response on Wednesday, this would be a celebration. But then the fires broke out the next day, in the central business district of Johannesburg, the fires this time, the fires next time, and the whole world suddenly invoked the “tragedy waiting to happen”. And so today, the question is not “What is there to celebrate”, although that is a good question, but rather “What is there to say? What is the point of saying anything, when everything has already been said, and so many times before?”

In June 2017, we wrote, “Last Thursday, the Constitutional Court of South Africa ruled that judges cannot authorize an eviction order that will leave people homeless. Over the past 25 years, South Africa’s highest courts have ruled consistently that the rights of residents, including occupiers, matter. Even with those protections in place, this decision is viewed as groundbreaking and welcome. The case involves 184 people – 47 women, 114 men, 23 children – who have occupied an apartment building in the Berea neighborhood of Johannesburg’s inner city. Hlengiwe Mhlambo is one of the 184. She is forty years old, a mother of two, and an informal trader. For the past 14 years, Hlengiwe Mhlambo has lived in her apartment, eking out a meager living, raising her children, hoping to find, or better create, the once promised green pasture.” This was a “momentous decision for millions of poor people across South Africa who live with insecure tenure and inadequate housing”. Remember? That was “only” six years ago.

In October 2022, just last year, the Johannesburg High Court rejected the `natural’ inevitability of eviction. As we wrote then, “In the case of Rycloff-Beleggings (Pty) Ltd v Ntombekhaya Bonkolo and Others, the Johannesburg High Court ruled that a group of working people’s access to work and right to dignity had to be considered when adjudicating an eviction notice. The case involves waste reclaimers who have been living on an `undeveloped’ stretch of farmland that lies between a residential complex and a business park in the Midrand section of Johannesburg. In 2018, the owners of the land, Rycloff-Beleggings, decided they wanted to `develop’ the land, and so issued eviction notices. The city offered a site with no possibility of developing waste reclamation economies, and so, in May 2019, the residents sued, demanding to either stay put or be placed somewhere where they could continue to work. On October 4, Judge Greg Wright agreed and gave the city until March 2023 to find appropriate site for the community. Anything else `would leave them at risk of not being able to maintain their dignity and care for their children.  It would be unfair and therefore unconstitutional to uphold the other parties’ rights while the reclaimers go hungry. Furthermore, the rights of children are paramount in cases involving children such as the present one.’ If people are on the land, it is not `undeveloped’. If people live in a neighborhood, it too is not undeveloped.” Remember? It was less than a year ago … and yet here we are.

The people living on Farm Allendale first moved in in 2017, but most moved in last year and this, having lost their jobs during the Covid pandemic. Many families had previously rented but could no longer pay the bills. Others had squatted elsewhere but could no longer afford to stay in those areas. And so they moved, adults and many children, to Farm Allendale. The City declared that too many people were moving in and so they started evicting everyone, although the City claimed they only destroyed `abandoned’ shacks. The residents had photos and videos showing that not to be the case. While the incidents that sparked the court case occurred mid July of this year, the City has performed mass evictions every three weeks for the past three years. For three years, the City of Johannesburg engaged in illegal evictions, and you want to know how the fires this week started and spread, how so many people could end up living in a five-story building? Everybody knew already.

If people are on land, the land is not `undeveloped’. If people live in a neighborhood, it is not `undeveloped’. And if people live in a building, whether it is called derelict or hijacked or blighted or whatever, it is not vacant nor is it `undeveloped’. It’s home. Living on the margins of society does not make people invisible social outcasts or nuisances, however much their presence may frustrate others or `development’ programs. At the same time, writing insightfully always already after the event, after the tragedy waiting to happen, is not insight. It’s alibi. No next time. Now. Mutual respect is already encoded in law as well as ethical behavior. Now make it so.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Philiswa Lila – Entsizwa II / Art Times)

Eviction must mean more than the sum total of legal processes

“The mainstream has never run clean, perhaps never can. Part of mainstream education involves learning to ignore this absolutely, with a sanctioned ignorance.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

 Across the United States and around the world, evictions are rising and residential rentals and home sales prices are skyrocketing. Predictably, this is accompanied by rising rates of eviction. While parts of the United Kingdom are experiencing rates of eviction they haven’t faced in almost twenty years, the United States is facing mortgage rates it also  hasn’t faced in over twenty years. But what exactly is an eviction, other than an existential crisis, a crisis that in the United States targets Black and Brown women? In the official discourse on housing, eviction has meant “the action or an instance of expelling a person by legal process from land, property, etc., occupied by him or her.” The key here, and the element of sanctioned ignorance, is “by legal process”. If eviction is only an action based on a legal process, what then do we call all those actions in which people are forced to move, but without any legal process involved?

Consider these stories from the last couple days.

In Sausalito, California, the owners of an apartment complex occupied mostly by elderly residents recently issued eviction notices to all the residents. The all-too-familiar story is a new owner came in a year or so ago, began letting maintenance go, never answered calls for repairs and then, again this week, decided the buildings needs “remodeling”. And so … people on fixed incomes in a hot rental market are out on the streets.

In Bakersfield, California, rents are going up as much as 40%, often in violation of the law. When Bakersfield Tenants Union Founder Wendell “J.R.” Wesley Jr. was issued a $100 rent increase, he knew that was illegal, and so went to the Leadership Counsel, a local advocacy group, got some help, and stopped the rent increase as well as the threat of eviction.

In Tucson, Oklahoma, a recent survey of unhoused people showed that the population of homeless elders is rising precipitously, and that the two leading causes of homelessness are eviction and skyrocketing rents.

These are just three stories from the last couple days, taken from a much longer list. They are stories of eviction, and familiar ones at that, but they hide as much as they show. What about all the elders living in apartments where the writing is on the wall, sometimes in the form of unattended mildew and mold? What about the elders who are harassed, directly or through `passive’ nonresponse and inaction, into `informal eviction’ or, even more ineptly, `self eviction’? Likewise, J.R. Wesley is an organizer who knows more than a thing or two about local and state housing laws. What about all those people who received a $100 increase in their rent, didn’t know it was illegal, didn’t know there are organizations and resources to help them, and moved before they lost everything and incurred today’s version of a Scarlet Letter, ie an eviction filing? Finally, it’s not only evictions leading to homelessness. It’s also rents rising so fast and so much they become unaffordable. People who have lived for years in an area that was affordable, if barely, are now forced to move through no action or fault of their own. What about them?

In Wisconsin, the Supreme Court will hear an argument to reduce the time eviction records are kept from 20 years to one year. In Wisconsin, the 20 years on file is for eviction filings, not evictions, and so the landlord has an extraordinarily menacing tool: “The vast majority of renters in eviction court are not evicted. According to the petition, there were 17,727 eviction filings in Wisconsin in just 2021. Just under ten percent of those eviction filings actually resulted in an eviction”. What about all those people who understand that an eviction filing is as damning as an actual eviction and decide to move?

That more attention is being given to eviction is good, but we need more and better attention. At this stage, there is still no national eviction data base. Last month, Virginia began collecting data on the number and locations of evictions that occur in any given year. That’s a good step. Across the country, many groups follow the model of Princeton’s Eviction Lab and collect data on eviction filings, also an important step in the right direction. But, again, those who are formally filed against, and even more those who go through the tragedy and existential crisis of eviction, are a minority of those who have been forcibly displaced. And we know, from history as well as from contemporary experience, that forcible displacement, while it may be experienced in deeply individual ways, is never a solitary event. Forced displacement is always already mass displacement. We cannot, in our research, advocacy, and organizing, create yet another mainstream moment, in which millions of people and communities are relegating to the status of ghosts, present and yet somehow not sufficiently enough to matter.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo: Iziko Slave Lodge)

The Day After Pee Wee Herman Died

 

The Day After Pee Wee Herman Died 

Trump was indicted in Washington D.C.
The day after Pee Wee Herman died

Two shots of Tequila
One for Pee wee
The other for this political moment

Can I dance on my toes like I meant to do that?

Just mesmerized by the coverage.

I’m having Nixon flashbacks

The  inner child in me
That only understood Watergate as an emotional pastiche
Is being introduced to the grown man following the  coverage of this event
On multiple computer screens
Like a super villain

The paradox that returning citizens can’t vote
After paying their debt to society
But, Trump can run for President with pending charges
In multiple jurisdictions
And pay for his lawyers
With $40,000,000 from his political action committee

The argument that there are two tiers of Justice in America
One for him and one against him

And the promise that he will kill American democracy
Like the cancer that consumed Paul Reubens.

Can we ever be vindicated of he who claims to be
Retribution Vengeance and Vindication itself?

The man who Tweeted from D.C. Playhouse
With a host of loonies as his supporting cast
Who tried to steal Democracy in broad daylight
Broadcast from the mountains
To the Prairies
To the oceans white with foam

Until Democracy became a McGuffin
In Mango Mussolini’s quest for personal
And dynastic power
Featuring Jarad “I want to be a real boy” Kushner
And Ivanka “Why does daddy stare at me” Trump

While his enablers just stared like Pee Wee Herman
In the middle row of an adult movie theater
As American Democracy was transformed
Into MAGA Pornography

Jack Smith come as Justice vindicator of democracy
Ready to engage all conspirators and co-conspirators
All of these miscreants are under One Law
Strike
Stay your hand no longer

You are only striking corpses.

(By Heidi Lindemann and Michael Perry)
(Image Credit: José Clement Orozco, “The Demagogue” / Artvee