HR 9495, the nonprofit-killer bill, per Michael Novick
- This is a discussion of a Zoom interview recorded 2024-12-20 with Michael Novick, former interim general manager for KPFK, the second station in the Pacifica Radio Network, about HR 9495, which has been called the "nonprofit-killer bill, by its opponents. A 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the companion video will be posted here after it is released to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show[1] syndicated for the Pacifica Radio[2] Network of over 200 community radio stations.[3]
- It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources[4] and treating others with respect.[5]
Michael Novick discussed HR 9495, the “Stop Terror Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act”, which passed the House November 21. Its opponents have called it the “nonprofit-killer” bill, because it would give the Secretary of Treasury the authority to designate any nonprofit as a suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organization" and remove their tax-exempt status unless they convince the Secretary of Treasury that they do not support terrorists.[6] Mother Jones reported, 'In the bill’s original iteration, it was popular among both Republicans and Democrats, who saw it as an appealing way to police Palestinian rights organizations after protests last year. An earlier version, in April, passed the House easily, with only 11 votes against the bill. It didn’t make it through the Senate ... One of those early no votes was Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who said on the House floor [November 21], “... This is a dangerous and an unconstitutional bill that would allow unchecked power to target nonprofit organizations as political enemies and shut them down without due process.”'[7]
Beth Gazley, Professor of Nonprofit Management and Policy at Indiana University,[8] said, "I believe that this is part of a strategy to preempt opposition to Republican policies and encourage self-censorship. It’s a way for the GOP to try to restrict what activists and nonprofit organizations can say or do. And, essentially, it’s a threat to political opponents of President-elect Donald Trump." On November 21, only 15 Democrats supported it and one Republican opposed it. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the bill “a werewolf in sheep’s clothing." ... An earlier version of this legislation was introduced in December 2023 and passed in the House in April 2024. Based on the timing, it was widely interpreted as an attempt to quell widespread protests by students and other people who were expressing their solidarity with Palestinians and their objections to Israel’s military operations in Gaza. But this legislation could easily do far more than that, because it does not distinguish between foreign and domestic terrorism – whether it’s real or imagined.[9] Raskin further noted that “rendering support to terrorists is already a felony”,[10] and this bill could end all rights to due process.[9]
Michael Novick
[edit | edit source]Novick has described himself as antiracist, antisexist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian. Between 2022 and November 2024, he was the interim general manager of KPFK,[11] the second station in the Pacifica Radio Network.[12]
Novick can be reached at antiracistaction_la@yahoo.com or changelinks2@gmail.com. The latter is for the Change Links community calendar.[13] "antiracist.org" is the website for Turning the Tide,[14] which Novick has been doing since 1988.
HR 9495
[edit | edit source]HR 9495 says that "the term ‘terrorist supporting organization’ means any organization which is designated by the Secretary [of Treasury] as having provided, during the 3-year period ending on the date of such designation, material support or resources" to a designated terrorist organization. Before an organization can be so designated, the Secretary is required to mail a written notice of such impending designation and giving them 90 days to "demonstrated to the satisfaction of the Secretary that such organization did not provide the material support or resources".[6]
Selected comments
[edit | edit source]Novik noted that 9495 is not likely to pass the Senate this year,
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but they are going to bring it back immediately when the new Congress is seated, which is even prior to the inauguration of the new president. ... It's also related to a separate initiative of Project 2025 that Trump, of course, said he never read ... but he's been appointing all sorts of people involved in that Project 2025 to his administration. And he has already said he'll be appointing the person who wrote the section of 2025 on media, who is a current member of the FCC, ... Brendan Carr. And in that document, they talk about actually not just defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and public media efforts like NPR. ... But they actually want to remove the non-commercial educational licensing entirely. And they mentioned Pacifica by name in that report 2025. So we're expecting a lot of attacks of this nature to come down the pike. Because ... nonprofits and non-commercial media have been an important avenue for exposing some of the ills of the society and whistleblowing ... . They want to really contain and control the philanthropic sector and the public media sector to carry out some of their other goals ... that have been spelled out pretty clearly in the campaign of mass deportations, ... privatization ... . They want to try to force everything into the commercial enterprises, ... the billionaire owned media." |
” |
Regarding Trump suing ABC and The Des Moines Register,[15] Novick said, "I think it's part and parcel of this whole attack on on freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the whole thing about fake news. ... [T]his effort internationally and nationally to really control the free flow of information because they understand that an informed public is less likely to sit still for its own rights being violated. And certainly the other end of the freedom of speech is freedom of discourse and freedom of listening. If you can't hear any contrary views to those being expressed by the great leader, that's a violation of your rights, not just the rights of the speakers. And so I think ... that it is an attack on human rights and on people's ability to understand what's going on in the world and do something about it."
Graves asked Novick about Trump saying that Liz Cheney, a Republican who represented Wyoming in the US House, should be prosecuted and jailed for her role in a Trump impeachment proceeding during Trump's first term.[16] Novick replied,
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I think it's a much deeper problem. It it started before him. ... The Biden administration ... prosecuted Julian Assange and actually won a conviction. They got him to plead guilty to a violation of the Espionage act for releasing data that was not espionage at all. It was whistleblowing about a war crime by the United States killing of reporters in Iraq. And similarly the Biden Administration is the one that pursued the case of the Uhuru 3 ... from the African People's Socialist party ... accusing them of being foreign agents for opposing the war in Iraq and ... the genocide in Palestine. So I think that this is a bipartisan issue. In fact, there were votes on both sides of the aisle for 9495. One of the first things that Richard Nixon did [as president of the US] was introduce the Tax Reform Act of 1969, as they were trying to dismantle the great society and some of those programs that were about empowering communities, particularly poor people, people of color. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 specifically ... said that any ... organization that wanted nonprofit status could not support voter registration drives or ... activities that ... affected legislation. ... This is a very similar effort, I think," though 9495 has a much more authoritarian stamp. ... 9495 is targeted directly at organizations that are engaged with international solidarity, particularly with the Palestinian cause. But ... the terrorism term has been used extensively as the so-called Communist threat faded ... . I think the head[17] of the Holy Land Foundation was just recently released from prison. ... This was a humanitarian project, ... based in, obviously, the Muslim community ... . [I]t was humanitarian aid, but it was criminalized. And I think that's what they're trying to do here is to really prevent people from any kind of person to person diplomacy outside the bounds of what the State Department is carrying out which is really militarized. The State Department, I think, follows the same dictates as the Department of Defense, so-called, and the CIA. They're basically involved in, you know, trying to identify forces within different societies that will follow the dictates of US Policy. And anybody that does not want to do that is identified as a potential targeted terrorist or someone supporting terrorism. ... I've been associated for many years with the Los Angeles Chapter of the Anti-Racist Action Network ... . The idea was, be part of the solution. But ... terror is, you know, very widespread in this world, and has mainly been used actually by the right and by State actors including the United States. You know when Bush went into Iraq, ... the second bush and the second Iraq War, they talked about "shock and awe". Well, it's just a polite name for terror. Right? You're bombing people into submission. You're trying to intimidate them through violence. ... it can be classified as terror as well as genocide. They're terrorizing the entire population. Historically, the Ku Klux Klan, and a lot of other organizations have been terrorist organizations. But that's not what they're talking about. They're talking about resistance to white supremacy, resistance to colonialism. ... If there's some action against the German occupation, or in this case the Israeli occupation, they're going to punish people ... in the area where it happened without regard to who is responsible. ... The term is used is to justify that kind of actual terrorism by labelling any resistances as terrorism. ... The case of the Humanitarian Law Project ... went all the way to the Supreme Court ... [which] ruled that even providing nonviolence training was a form of material support. Lydia Brazon[18] ... was with the Humanitarian Law Project for a long time. ... She was at one point the executive director of Pacifica. ... Pacifica's mission is to identify the causes of conflict and try to resolve them without violence. ... It was created by a group of pacifists who actually resisted even World War 2. Lew Hill and a group of others ... formed the Pacifica Foundation and launched this project of listener sponsored non-commercial radio. But that's seen as a threat, trying to to solve things, because the State wants to reserve that power of the use of violence. And if you oppose violence by the state, then you're somehow a subversive. When 9495 passed, Mike Johnson, who is the Speaker of the House, sent a tweet to a number of organizations, saying, "We're thinking about you." That included, for example, a Jewish Voice for Peace; ... because they believe in supporting Palestinian rights, they're targeted. We have a program on our station KPFK, which is Middle Eastern focus for many years, and the current co-host is the head of the LA chapter of a Jewish Voice for Peace, trying to bring about peace in the Middle East. But that's seen as a threat. I also work on a newspaper called Change-Links.[13] It's a community calendar for Los Angeles. We publish every month with a list of activities that people might be interested in, cultural, political, and otherwise. ... It's not a nonprofit itself. But we have a fiscal sponsor which is the Alliance for Global Justice based in Tucson, Arizona.[19] They serve this purpose for a number of smaller projects around the country. Media and other community service organizations that are not full nonprofits themselves have a fiscal sponsor. The Alliance for Global Justice is also in Mike Johnson's Tweet. He tweeted out to 5 or 6 or maybe 8 organizations. This is something that's very clearly directed at not just the activities but the information. They want everything to be like the right wing echo chamber of right wing talk media. Anything that's outside those bounds becomes a fair target. |
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Graves noted that in August he had interviewed Heidi Beirich,[20] co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Global Project Against Hate & Extremism (GPAHE).[21] She noted that recent National Defense Authorization Acts have included provisions that explicitly prohibited the Secretary of Defense from attempting to root violent extremists out of the Us. Military.[22]
Novick replied,
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It's not surprising. There is a big struggle in the military. Trump has come in saying he wants to get rid of "Woke" generals.[23] And there is a group that focuses on the question of religious freedom in the military, to be free, free from religion if you want. And there's a number of quite fundamentalist Christian people in high positions of authority in the military that are trying to enforce Christian nationalism. You see a lot of these right wing groups specifically targeting members of the military. We saw that both law enforcement and the military were overrepresented in the people involved in January 6 storming of the Capitol. It's a longstanding phenomenon. ... I was just reading a book called Morningside about the 1979 massacre of anti-clan activists in Greensboro, North Carolina. The people involved in that were included people in the so-called White Patriot Party, which was based at a marine base in North Carolina, and law enforcement, ..., the Nazis and the Klan and the United Racist front.[24] |
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Novick continued,
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The militia movement got its start from a couple of sources. One of them was a guy named John Singlaub, who was a general, removed, similar to what happened with MacArthur in Korea. ... He formed something called the World Anti-Communist League and then proceeded to use right wing Christian forces in the Philippines and Guatemala as a model for organizing similar forces in the United States. They collected money in the United States for these right wing militias in Guatemala and in the Philippines that were involved in terroristic activities of a supposedly anti-communist nature. And once they got that going, they started using it to build up militia groups in the United States on the same model. And you saw some of the repercussions of that with, you know, the Federal building in Oklahoma City, and other actions that came out of that. So I think that people need to take the threat of terrorism seriously, but that we need to understand where it's coming from. It's not coming from nonprofit humanitarian aid for poor people around the world or poor people in this country. It is coming from very well established and well rooted right wing forces in this country. |
” |
The threat
[edit | edit source]Internet company executives have knowingly increased political polarization and violence including the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, because doing otherwise might have reduced their profits. Documentation of this is summarized in other interviews regarding "Media & Democracy", available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.
Discussion
[edit | edit source]- [Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources[4] and treating others with respect.[5]]
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Media & Democracy, Director: Spencer Graves, Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q127839818
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link) - ↑ Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q2045587
- ↑ List of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates, Wikidata Q6593294
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 The rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources may not be enforced on other parts of Wikiversity. However, they can facilitate dialog between people with dramatically different beliefs
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Wikiversity asks contributors to assume good faith, similar to Wikipedia. The rule in Wikinews is different: Contributors there are asked to "Don't assume things; be skeptical about everything." That's wise. However, we should still treat others with respect while being skeptical.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 US House (2024).
- ↑ Hurwitz (2024).
- ↑ Beth Gazley, Wikidata Q131542978
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Gazley (2024).
- ↑ Raskin was quoted in Gazley (2024). In fact, "Providing material support for terrorism" is a felony under the USA Patriot Act of 2001 punishable by fines and imprisonment of up to 15 years or 20 years if human(s) convicted know(s) they were aiding an organization so classified by the US State Department and life in prison if the "death of a person" has resulted, and 'the term “person” means any individual or entity capable of holding a legal or beneficial interest in property'. In Holder v. the Humanitarian Law Project (2010), the US Supreme Court ruled that teaching nonviolence to someone designated as a "terrorist" was "providing material support for terrorism". David D. Cole, attorney for the Humanitarian Law Project, said that under that ruling, even asking the State Department to explain why some individual or group was designated as a "terrorist" was similarly "providing material support", a major felony with penalties as just described.
- ↑ Novick (2022) noted that he began as interim general manager of KKFK in 2022. In this interview, he said he was no longer in that position.
- ↑ The Pacifica Radio Network includes stations owned by the Pacifica Foundation plus over 200 that are "affiliates".
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Change-Links, Los Angeles, Wikidata Q131544553
- ↑ Turning the Tide, Los Angeles, Wikidata Q131544806
- ↑ Gold (2024).
- ↑ Mascaro (2024).
- ↑ Mufid Abdulqader was released 2024-12-12 after 16 years in federal prison. He was described as a "top fundraiser" and "leader" of the Holy Land Foundation
- ↑ Pacifica in Exile (2015).
- ↑ Alliance for Global Justice, Wikidata Q129502246
- ↑ Heidi Beirich, Wikidata Q128844587
- ↑ Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, Wikidata Q125952435
- ↑ Donnelly (2022).
- ↑ Axe (2024).
- ↑ Shetterly (2024).
Bibliography
[edit | edit source]- David Axe (5 December 2024). "Trump is planning to rip the guts out of the US armed forces". The Daily Telegraph. Wikidata Q131545681. ISSN 0307-1235. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/12/05/trump-military-purge-woke-generals-us-armed-forces/.
- John M. Donnelly (14 December 2022). "Final NDAA removes most House provisions on hate groups". Roll Call. Wikidata Q130545466. ISSN 0035-788X. https://rollcall.com/2022/12/14/final-ndaa-removes-most-house-provisions-on-hate-groups/.
- Beth Gazley (22 November 2024). "US House passes measure that could punish nonprofits Treasury Department decides are ‘terrorist’". The Conversation. Wikidata Q131543053. https://theconversation.com/us-house-passes-measure-that-could-punish-nonprofits-treasury-department-decides-are-terrorist-244391.
- Hadas Gold (16 December 2024). "Emboldened by ABC settlement, Trump threatens more lawsuits against the press". CNN. Wikidata Q131545105. https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/16/media/trump-threaten-news-media-lawsuits-abc-settlement/index.html.
- Sophie Hurwitz (21 November 2024). "The House Passes Bill Allowing Trump Admin to Declare Nonprofits Terrorist Supporters". Mother Jones. Wikidata Q131540369. ISSN 0362-8841. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/hr9495-nonprofit-killer-bill-passes-house-trump-palestine-protest/.
- Lisa Mascaro (17 December 2024). "After investigating Jan. 6, House GOP sides with Trump and goes after Liz Cheney". Associated Press. Wikidata Q131545154. https://apnews.com/article/trump-cheney-capitol-attack-prosecution-0aaba7a8d011115410c544374dd0d57f.
- Michael Novick (15 November 2022). "General Manager Report". KPFK. Wikidata Q131543205. https://www.kpfk.org/blogs/from-the-gm/post/general-manager-report/.
- Pacifica in Exile (14 September 2015), Lydia Brazon, Executive Director, Wikidata Q131545325
- Aran Shetterly (15 October 2024). Morningside: The 1979 Greensboro Massacre and the Struggle for an American City's Soul (in en). HarperCollins. Wikidata Q131545762. ISBN 978-0062858214.
- US House of Representatives (9 September 2024). "H.R.9495 - Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act". congress.gov. Wikidata Q131540249. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/9495/text.