June 23, 2023 “Two-Tiered Justice?” by Paul Street (Jess Reznicek post)

JUNE 23, 2023

Two-Tiered Justice?

BY PAUL STREET

Two-Tiered Justice?

Trying to Save Livable Ecology as “Terrorism”

Speaking of climate change and two-tiered justice, compare Trump’s likely lifelong freedom from richly deserved detention with the experience of the Des Moines Catholic Worker Jessica Reznicek. Ms. Reznicek is currently serving an eight-year “terrorism” sentence in a federal prison for carrying out an openly admitted series of attacks on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the 1200 mile “long black snake” that can carry as much as 750,000 barrels of carbon-rich, planet-cooking shale oil each day from the Bakken oil fields in in northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa.

Think about that. The eco-cidal putschist, pandemicist, and neoliberal fascist Trump – “the most dangerous criminal in human history” – evades confinement for hideous crimes, including possible high treason (eligible for the federal death penalty that Trump restored and enforced!) and the attempted overthrow of what’s left of rule of law and democracy in the US. His biggest crimes go essentially unacknowledged – the ones the that exacerbated the top two grave existential menaces facing humanity today: the capitalogenic climate catastrophe and thermonuclear war, the escalated threats of which have combined to compel The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to put their 76 year Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to Midnight, “the closest to global catastrophe it’s ever been.”

Jessica Reznicek, by contrast, has dedicated her life to peace and environmental healing, trying in her own deeply religious, messianic, and small group, monkey-wrenching way to rescue prospects for a decent human future from the grips of Masters of War and Ecocide. She was/is a member of the Plowshares movement, a Christian pacifist movement dedicated to the dismantlement of nuclear and other weapons and means of military mass destruction. She acted courageously on her accurate understanding that the capitalist-driven extraction, transport, and burning of fossil fuels poses a lethal threat to livable ecology. For this she is imprisoned as a “terrorist” by the US Attorney General serving at the pleasure of the leading eco-cidal fossil state-capitalist Joe Biden [1], running dog lackey of the Arctic-melting firm Conoco-Phillips.

While Jessica Reznicek is confined to a federal women’s prison in Waseca, Minnesota, the demented and destructive, mass-murderous maniac Trump stalks the nation, enjoying Secret Service protection while telling his fascist, disproportionately armed and political violence-prone cultists that he is their “Retribution” against the supposedly “radical left,” “Marxist,” and even “communist” Democrats!