The “moderate” Democrats in Congress are on the march again, this time in alleged high dudgeon over the urgently needed $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill. After a hopeful start, a clutch of “moderates” hauled out their pick-axes and slowed the whole process to a crawl. It is looking increasingly likely that whatever emerges as Manchin-worthy will be about as potent as a handful of sand. Their newest target: The historic effort to upgrade Medicare, and change the utterly foolish way drug prices are negotiated with the pharmaceutical industry.
“Moderate” and “centrist” — the favorite words of corporate media types, all of whom apparently got the same memo some years ago: “Don’t call them conservative.” When was the last time you read the phrase “conservative Democrat” in a mainstream publication? Do a Google search for the phrase and you get a white paper by Texas Christian University professor Adam J. Schiffer titled, “I’m Not That Liberal: Explaining Conservative Democratic Identification.” It was published in 2000.
Some 21 years later, and the term “conservative Democrat” has been all but scourged from the political lexicon. That needs to change. “These people are conservatives — period, end of file — who hide behind the ‘moderate’ label even as they undermine policies Democrats have hewed to for half a century,” I wrote back in March of 2019. “If they vote with conservatives, they are conservatives.”
Case in point: A trio of House Democrats have announced their opposition to a key element of Biden’s budget. Representatives Scott Peters, Kathleen Rice and Kurt Schrader do not like the idea of empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with drug companies, even though most Democrats and just about everyone else thinks it’s a bully idea. The pharmaceutical industry at large dislikes the $600+ billion in savings these policies will create over ten years, because that money will be carved out of its outrageous profits.
“While Democrats’ drug-pricing plan can still advance to a floor vote in the House, the three members’ opposition puts the broader reconciliation package at risk and may force leaders to compromise on its provisions,” reportsThe Washington Post. “Democrats cannot lose another vote for the drug-price plan if it is to be included in their massive social spending package, known as the Build Back Better Act, and other centrist members of the party have signaled they have their own sets of concerns.”
That savings is at the core of the Biden budget plan, a huge slice of “how we pay for it.” Losing it, or even a substantial portion of it, would be a terrible blow to legislation that also seeks to address the menace of climate change and other profoundly pressing matters. The world knows Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition stems from the fact that he bleeds coal slurry whenever he cuts himself shaving, but why these three? What would motivate them to derail such an important bill?
Representative Schrader’s top industry donors were “Pharmaceuticals/Health Care Industry” and “Health Professionals,” according to the most recent report by OpenSecrets. Insurance giant Blue Cross/Blue Shield was his largest single donor. Taken in total, the combined donations from those two health care industries amounted to $308,145.
Representative Peters’s top industry donor was “Pharmaceuticals/Health Care Industry,” according to the most recent report by OpenSecrets. His top individual donors were Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer Inc., Amgen Inc., Merck & Co. Inc. and Gilead Sciences. The combined donations from these health care corporations amounted to $96,050.
Representative Rice is a bit of a mystery on this score. According to OpenSecrets, lobbyists, insurance companies and real estate interests dominate her top donors; nary a dollar of “health care” or Big Pharma money is found. Furthermore, a full 90 percent of her constituents support the exact sort of health care reform the Biden bill seeks to enact. Rice is a former prosecutor who ran a tough-on-crime campaign, and has been in the House since 2014. Perhaps this is her announcement that she’s open for dealings with one of the wealthiest and most powerful industries in the world, although in these strange times, her motives are anyone’s guess.
Speaking of powerful, Pfizer Inc. — one of Representative Peters’s top donors — dropped a veiled threat at the beginning of the month that was impossible to misinterpret:
In meetings with lawmakers, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have issued warnings about the reconciliation package now moving through both chambers of Congress that is set to include language allowing Medicare to negotiate the price of some drugs, which could generate billions of dollars in savings.
In those conversations, K Street insiders say, lobbyists have explicitly mentioned that the fight against the coronavirus will almost certainly extend beyond the current surge of the Delta variant. And they’re arguing that now isn’t the time to hit the industry with new regulations or taxes, particularly in light of its successful efforts to swiftly develop vaccines for the virus.
The companies claim that fundamental changes to their bottom line — in addition to the Medicare provision, the reconciliation bill will likely raise corporate tax rate significantly, as high as 28 percent (a jump of 7 percentage points) — will threaten its current investments in research and development at a historically critical juncture.
Translation: “Hit us with new regulations or taxes, and we might ‘accidentally’ lose the formula for those precious vaccines. Booster shots? Oh, jeez, see, because our profits were lowered 0.002 percent by your new rules, it’s gonna be a year at least until those suckers are ready.”
Simpler translation: “Nice vaccines you got there. Be a shame if something happened to them.”
Stop calling the lawmakers who allow themselves to be ruled by these corporations “moderates” or “centrists.” Only conservatives — The Party of “Life,” remember — play hardball with such ruthless abandon.
A bunch of these conservative Democrats in the House are new, swept into office in 2018 and 2020 thanks in no small part to the reverse coattails of Donald Trump. They are why Nancy Pelosi has a big hammer on her desk, and why she has defended these right-leaners so assiduously. The two Trump impeachments were theater, not actual legal actions, because Pelosi wanted to protect her coterie of conservatives who make the difference between Democrats being the majority and the minority.
I get the argument, I really do… but the House Democratic Caucus has become like a firehouse where a segment of the firefighters are running around lighting fires instead of helping to put them out. It’s an apt analogy, because the country and swaths of the world are actually fa-chrissakes burning, and these “moderates” are flicking lit matches at the tinder, right alongside their conservative Republican pals.
The only way around this is to render these people moot by expanding the House Democratic majority. A pile of conservative-governed states are working hammer and tong to prevent this with brutal new voting restrictions, but they are not the only states in the union, and they sure all aren’t where most of the people are.
The great big mega-populated state of New York is rolling out some interesting plans along these lines. As the state prepares for the redistricting process, state-level Democrats are looking to use their super-majorities to capture the process and erase as many as five Republican seats from the map.
“Under the most aggressive scenarios,” reportsThe New York Times, “Democrats could emerge from 2022’s midterm elections with control of as many as 23 of New York’s 26 House seats in an all-out effort to prop up their chances of retaining control of Congress. For the first redistricting cycle in decades, Democrats control the Legislature and governor’s office, giving them the freedom to reshape districts without having to compromise with Republicans, who long held a lock on the State Senate.”
It would be something indeed if other Democratically controlled states followed suit. In the meantime, remember: They are conservative Democrats.
Economic observers commonly remark that the chair of the Federal Reserve System is the second most powerful person in Washington. Though probably an overstatement, this trope nonetheless reflects the fact that our central bank has an enormous impact on financial conditions not only in the United States but also, because of the key role of the U.S. dollar in global markets. That means the Fed can, for good or ill, impact economic growth, employment, wages, inflation and investment from Alabama to Azerbaijan. And, as the primary leader of such a powerful institution, the chair of the Fed holds the key to most of these policies.
The four-year term of the current chairperson, Jerome Powell, ends February 2022, and President Joe Biden must soon decide whether to reappoint him. Even under normal circumstances, this decision would be highly consequential. But now, the implications could be monumental.
The Biden administration and the United States face a number of profound challenges which the Federal Reserve must help confront: facilitating the continued economic recovery from the pandemic’s destruction; promoting maximum employment and decent living standards, including accelerating opportunities for oppressed racial and ethnic groups and others facing unfair structural barriers; helping to make the economy more resilient to global warming and, more importantly, assisting the U.S. and the world make the massive but critical transformation to a fossil fuel-free economy; and accelerating efforts to protect the economy from reckless, destructive and unstable financial decisions by politically and economically powerful megabanks and other financial institutions.
Importantly, the Biden administration is taking on most of these challenges. President Biden wants to end the pandemic, combat the climate crisis, address structural racism and inequality, “build back better,” and promote full employment — while keeping the financial system from melting down for the third time in less than 15 years. Whom he picks to be the next Federal Reserve chairperson could not be more important. The next chair of the Federal Reserve will lead the Fed in playing an appropriate, active and effective role to help address these issues at this critical time, or he or she will drag the Fed’s feet and even oppose the actions that must be taken. The success of the Biden administration’s agenda, to say nothing of the health and welfare of the American people, could hang in the balance.
Some progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and progressive groups have raised serious questions about a Powell reappointment. But there are many, across the political spectrum, who think the choice is obvious: that Biden should simply reappoint Powell, since he seems to be doing a good job. But this is far from obvious. In fact, a Powell renomination raises serious concerns simply based on his record. And then when the challenges facing the U.S. and the Biden administration are considered, these serious concerns mount further.
Republicans in Congress believe that the Fed should “just” focus on the outcomes that the Federal Reserve is narrowly tasked with addressing, namely maximum employment and stable prices. And since the great financial crisis of 2007-2009, financial stability has also been added as an explicit important goal. But even if the focus is “only” on these three goals, Powell’s record is problematic. And if we take into account the ramifications of the failure to address systemic racism in the labor market and the climate emergency, then reaching these three basic goals (maximum employment, stable prices and financial stability) becomes a much more difficult task. So we cannot neatly separate out these broader goals from the narrower list.
In terms of the substantive policy arguments, many of those in the center and on the left who are supporting Powell’s reappointment appear to be basing their views on Powell’s record on the first two of the standard mandates: maximum employment and price stability. With the onset of the pandemic, Powell committed the Fed to placing a monetary floor under the severely threatened economy by injecting the economy with massive amounts of liquidity, supporting broader swaths of the economy — albeit sometimes grudgingly, like in the case of the municipal lending facility — by administering special lending facilities created by Congress to support small businesses, municipalities, and others during the dark days of Spring and Summer 2020, and by resisting pressure to pull back many of these supports even as the economy was recovering and inflation fears began to mount. Powell’s support of maximum employment pre-dated the pandemic and dovetails with a mission of attacking structural racial and ethnic employment inequality by supporting the adoption of new monetary policy guidance that would allow for the temporary overshooting of the inflation target in order to sustain economic recovery that would generate demand for workers deeper and deeper into the pool of the unemployed and underemployed.
In these areas — employment and prices — with positive spillover effects on aspects of racial and ethnic inequality — Powell deserves good marks.
But supporters who focus only on these areas are ignoring another crucial component of the Fed’s job — financial regulation and financial stability — where Powell has a much more problematic record. By supporting questionable policies in the area of financial regulation, Powell has likely jeopardized some of the progress made on employment issues. These policies have most likely also greatly exacerbated wealth inequality, minimizing the otherwise positive results that would follow the change in monetary policy toward the Fed’s inflation target.
As experts on financial regulation at the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) and Better Markets have documented, in recent years, during the Trump Presidency, Powell supported numerous Federal Reserve initiatives to roll back financial regulations that had been put in place as a response to the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. In addition, as AFR notes,
The Powell Fed did more than water down Dodd-Frank reforms…. It also weakened core supervisory tools that federal bank regulators have always used to monitor bank risk-taking and compliance with laws. Led by Chair Powell, the Fed has effectively turned off some of the early warning systems regulators used to detect emerging risks to the financial system.
These de-regulatory moves came just prior to the global financial market meltdown in March 2020 when the pandemic hit, a meltdown made potentially much worse by the buildup of speculative excesses and high debts that U.S. financial regulators, led by Powell’s Fed, had allowed to accumulate. As Better Markets puts it, “Many of the Fed’s actions in response to the pandemic were necessary given the unprecedented uncertainty it caused…. But it is important to remember that the scale and scope of those actions were needed not just because of the pandemic, but because of preexisting fragility and instability in the financial system.” As a result of the turmoil exacerbated by previous failures to regulate, especially the nonbank financial system, the Federal Reserve had to commit trillions of dollars to sustain the financial system.
The Fed did run some congressionally mandated programs to help small businesses and municipal, state and local governments. But the latter program was so narrowly drawn and involved such high interest rates that it provided very little direct help. The upshot is that, despite having more than 10 years to implement a thorough-going financial regulatory regime, in March 2020, the Fed still found itself in the position of having to bail out the financial markets when the pandemic hit, while simultaneously giving relatively short shrift to specialized facilities to help out communities, small businesses and local governments. In the absence of a strong commitment to financial regulation and the will to enforce it, this destructive cycle of speculative excesses, financial crises and bailouts is simply going to continue.
Central Bank Independence: The Perennial Red Herring
Right-wing, mainstream and even some progressive observers have argued that Biden should reappoint Powell in order to protect the so-called independence of the Federal Reserve. One version of this argument is that it is “traditional” for the incoming President to reappoint the current Fed Chair to a second term in order to acknowledge the Fed’s independence. According to this view, it would be good to restore this “tradition” since Donald Trump violated it by refusing to reappoint Janet Yellen as chair of the Fed. However, there are several problems with this argument. First, there is no such tradition at the Fed. More importantly, the idea of Federal Reserve “independence” is mostly a cover to protect the outsized power that the financial industry holds over Fed policy, and to undermine the democratic control of the Fed that is written into its by-laws and is consistent with a functioning democracy.
If one looks at the Fed chairs since 1936 when the current governance structure was adopted, some incoming presidents did reappoint the current chairs and some did not. And some were pushed out and some simply resigned.
Marriner Eccles was chair from 1936-1948 and when Harry Truman was elected president, he appointed a different chairperson, Thomas McCabe. Arthur Burns, who had been Richard Nixon’s appointee was not reappointed by Jimmy Carter when he became president. Paul Volcker, chair from 1979-1987, would not have been reappointed a second time by Ronald Reagan. And, as mentioned earlier, Trump did not reappoint Yellen. So, far from a tradition, the reappointment of a Fed chair occurs sometimes, at other times, not.
As far as central bank independence is concerned, it is certainly true that the presidential abuse of central banking powers for narrow political goals, such as being reelected, or supporting personal real estate investing goals, is a potential recipe for disaster. The solution to this problem is to not elect such people to be president.
But no central bank can or should be “independent” from political influence in a democracy. The Federal Reserve’s governing laws, as amended during the 1930s, make it a creature of Congress with its structure also being influenced by the U.S. president’s appointment powers. These laws were created to make sure that the Federal Reserve is responsive to the needs of the overall economy, as interpreted by our elected officials, and not disproportionately influenced by the Fed’s natural constituency: Wall Street. And the pressures to cater to Wall Street — because of the close ties between the Fed and the financial markets, the natural revolving-door tendencies of regulatory agencies and, most importantly, the desire by Federal Reserve officials to cultivate a powerful political constituency to help it maintain its autonomy from governmental authority — are extremely strong.
As a result, central banks that are independent from their political authorities tend to be highly dependent on private banks and other financial institutions. In this way, it is too easy to get Federal Reserve policy that is lax toward the financial institutions they are supposed to be regulating while they engage in highly risky, speculative and dangerous activities, and then turn around and bail them out when they get in trouble.
So for progressives and others to trot out this shibboleth of “central bank independence” in defense of reappointing Jerome Powell is troubling, given the implications for more Wall Street control of the Fed.
To be sure, the possible presidential abuse of the Federal Reserve System would be problematic. But for the president to exercise his or her legally authorized influence on the choice of the Federal Reserve’s priorities, at a time of great economic transition and need, is simply an act of exercising one of the key channels of democratic, public input into these important policies. The Federal Reserve’s amended laws authorized more presidential control as part of an attempt to try to reduce the destructive powers of Wall Street on the Fed. (Congress, of course, is the other key democratic channel of influence).
Given the serious destructive power that financial deregulation has had on both the economic and political power of the megabanks and their capacity to destabilize our economy, Jerome Powell’s poor record of upholding strict financial regulatory rules is a serious concern, even if his expansionary monetary policies and apparent commitment to full employment is important.
No Need to Choose Between Commitment to Full Employment and Financial Stability
The important point is that we do not have to choose between desirable goals of monetary policy; there is no necessary trade-off. There are other strong candidates for Fed chair: for example, Federal Reserve Governor Lael Brainard, who has a strong commitment both to full employment monetary policy and to strong financial regulation.
The problems with reappointing a Fed chair who is not committed to strong financial regulation are not the end of the story. What about the other big challenges we face that President Biden has high up on his agenda? Improving the access of communities of color to good jobs and to fight systemic racism are a strong priority of President Biden and the Democrats. Jerome Powell and the Fed’s new strategy for prioritizing full employment and allowing temporary over-shooting of their inflation target in order to generate more employment opportunities for those typically at the back of the employment line is a good step in the right direction. But a financial crisis caused by lax regulations and enforcement could easily derail this policy by crunching the economy and labor market.
In addition, there are serious concerns about Powell’s commitment to using the Fed’s tools to combat the climate crisis. Powell’s Fed has been reluctant to limit banks’ lending to fossil fuel companies, even though this increases risks to banks, given the likely constraints to be placed by governments on fossil fuel production in the near future. Nor has Powell made a commitment to using the power of Fed asset buying and lending to help finance green energy, as envisaged, for example, in the Green New Deal policies.
These policies would, to be sure, be highly controversial. Some Republican lawmakers, such as Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, are already pushing back hard on the idea that the Fed should promote climate friendly policies. But that is all the more reason why it is necessary to have a Fed chair and other Federal Reserve board members who will be aggressive and fearless in pushing these policies.
Thankfully, Biden has the chance to change significantly the orientation of the Fed board. Not only is the position of the Federal Reserve chair open, Biden will also have the opportunity to appoint a Federal Reserve vice chair and the Fed governor who is the point person on financial regulation. Experienced progressives, such as former Fed Reserve board governor Sarah Bloom Raskin, a firm advocate of strong financial regulation; William Spriggs, professor of economics at Howard University and chief economist at the AFL-CIO who is an expert on labor markets, including labor issues related to workers of color; or my colleague Robert N. Pollin of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an authority on finance and the job creation impacts of Green investments would be ideal candidates for these positions.
Still, Biden is being urged by some moderates and even progressives to offer a “balanced ticket,” to satisfy all elements of his constituency, a ticket that would include retaining Jerome Powell as chair.
This would be a mistake. The Fed will either be a significant, powerful and leading institution that helps to implement Biden’s transformational agenda, or it will be lagging behind and even dragging the agenda back. It is time for Biden to be bold and to create a Federal Reserve to match his crucial economic agenda. He should seize the opportunity while available.
The 20th anniversary of September 11 is behind us now, but the George W. Bush Reputation Rehabilitation Tour continues unchecked, and the cognitive dissonance surrounding it remains thicker than the frosting on my daughter’s last birthday cake. “He seems decent compared to the other guy,” I overheard someone say. It was almost too much to bear.
I suppose it would have been impossible to pass the day without Bush making an appearance, but it would have been nice if he had kept it simple: “That was awful, I’m sorry for “fixing the facts around the policy” and lying the country into two failed calamity wars that started a bunch of other wars and torturing people and spying on everyone and looting the Treasury and dropping a giant turd on your future, so I’m going to go paint in Kennebunkport for the remainder of my years and never be seen again until they put me in the ground. Bye, y’all.”
Would that it were so. Instead, the foulest failson of fearsome privilege went and made himself a bit of news on Saturday by alluding that Donald Trump’s domestic terrorism brigades are not such a good thing for the country. He named no names, but even that infamously obtuse man can pop a cap in a fish when it’s in a very small barrel.
Speaking from the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, memorial for the passengers of Flight 93, Bush alluded to “growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.” That got everyone’s attention in a hurry.
“There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home,” Bush continued. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”
Quick note: When the U.S. withdrew from Bush’s war in Afghanistan, some of Donald Trump’s favorite Proud Boys were vocally thrilled, considering the Taliban’s actions a worthy roadmap for their own plans. “Little cultural overlap, George?” More than you and your Republican pals may want to think.
To be fair, this wasn’t the first time Bush gave Trump and his minions a soft serving of the back of his hand. After the 1/6 insurrection, Bush said, “This is how election results are disputed in a banana republic — not our democratic republic,” adding that he was “appalled by the reckless behavior of some political leaders since the election.” Again, no names, but the inference was unmistakable … though I winced hard at the time to hear Bush, of all people, use the (notably racist) term “banana republic” after gaining the presidency by way of the bag job they call the 2000 election.
Had Bush stopped there, this column probably would not exist … but, of course, he didn’t stop there. “A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures,” he said in Shanksville. “So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.”
Full stop, what?
You know what year was worse than 2001? 2002. That was the year the swelling started to go down after 9/11 and Bush’s people, along with their allies in Congress and the news media (most of the news media, not just Fox), went full-tilt into fearmongering and brazen racism. Bush said many nice things about Muslims and peace and getting along, while his administration arrested Muslims by the score and slapped together anti-Muslim no-fly lists that included 4-year-old children.
2002 was the year of “Watch what you say” from the press secretary, well-timed terror “alerts” that seemed to come along a few minutes after any negative story about the administration hit the wires, and WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA whenever anyone dared question the lethal course we were taking. 2002 was the first full year of the war in Afghanistan, and unbeknownst to most of us, was also the year when the groundwork for the Iraq War WMD lies was being prepared. The torture of Muslims around the world began in full not long after.
“At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith,” said Bush in Shanksville. “That is the nation I know. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.”
According to the FBI, hate crimes against Muslims had increased 1,617 percent by the end of 2001. Mosques were vandalized and burned, and those seeking to worship at them were brutalized. George W. Bush was not personally directing violence against these communities, but in his quest to maximize his power after 9/11, he wound the country up so tight with a cocktail of fear and patriotic balderdash that racist violence was an obvious outcome, and it was. There is little chance Trump’s rampant anti-Muslim bigotry would have bloomed as well as it did without the Bush era preparing the ground first.
That is the nation I know, Mr. Bush, and you had a heavy hand in creating it … which brings me back around to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. The country, and in particular the news media, spent the weekend gazing deeply into its navel wondering, “What does it all mean? How did we come to this dismal place after 20 years?”
A primary answer, of course, should have been “the Bush administration,” which presided over 9/11 and got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. That triple play served to put us down in this deep hole, but few people in positions of responsibility seem willing to say it. The TV news people want no part of it, though their role is almost equally bleak.
Many are rightly worried about the ongoing effects of Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election being stolen. What about Bush’s “Big Lie” regarding WMD in Iraq? Cognitive dissonance is what. That deliberate decision to mislead the country into a two-decade war has cost us countless lives and trillions of dollars. It touches every aspect of our existence now, and not for the good, but the corporate media and politicians largely refused to acknowledge it even on September 11, 2020, a day when a reckoning with what we’ve done and what we’ve become seemed just and proper.
That didn’t happen, and George W. Bush was allowed out in public again without even the most minor public displays of accountability. Instead, we spent the weekend lamenting our sorry national estate while one of the principal authors of that collapse was treated like a returning hero.
That is cognitive dissonance to the bone. It is our lasting collective inheritance from a former president who knew exactly what he was doing and who he was doing it for all those years ago. All you really need to remember is the smirk. The rest is aftermath, and the ashes in our hair.
Last week, it seemed as if many Democrats were gearing up for a robust fight to pass every part of their $3.5 trillion climate-directed budget. “That $3.5 trillion is already the result of a major, major compromise,” said Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders. “$3.5T is the floor,” Rashida Tlaib tweeted. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the face of threats from perennial legislation troll Joe Manchin.
Days later, and while solid progressives like Sanders and Tlaib are holding firm, others are wavering. Democrats are fighting with Democrats over how much of the bill to cut, again. The issue is not the portions addressing climate change, on the surface at least. It’s actually much filthier: Conservative Democrats are kicking and screaming over how much the bill intends to tax rich people and corporations in order to pay for itself, and party leadership appears ready to give in to those “concerns.”
There I was, foolish enough to hope.
A draft plan, which emerged on Sunday from the House Ways and Means Committee, is a departure from the original proposal in a variety of ways. If the math adds up, the combined proposals would raise $2.9 trillion in new revenues. The top capital gains rate would jump from 20 percent to 25 percent, and alterations to what is defined as “investment income” would bump that number to 28.3 percent. This is, of course, less than what was first proffered by billions.
Also included in the Ways and Means proposal, according to an Axiosreview of a Washington Postreport: “Accelerating the end of the $24 million estate tax exemption would bring in another $50 billion; Imposing an additional 3% tax on Americans who make more than $5 million would raise $127 billion; Expanded restrictions on carried interest impacting how private equity firms compensate employees could bring another $14 billion; The pharmaceutical industry could be forced to foot $700 billion of new spending by negotiating rates directly with Medicare. Add these provisions and others up and you get to $2.9 trillion.”
Getting from $2.9 trillion to $3.5 trillion involves the kind of fingers-crossed argle-bargle that has kept trickle-down economics alive for so long: In marking up the bill, Democrats intend to employ something called “dynamic scoring,” a mathematics game that assumes all the other stuff will stimulate the economy enough to produce that missing $600 billion. The “dynamic” part? Laying a more-than-half-a-trillion-dollar bet on, “Trust us.”
All this, I suspect, amounts to little more than chum for the swarming corporate and energy lobbyists, who are already gnawing away at the draft proposal like hungry sharks. “The far-reaching social policy bill under construction in Congress has much that corporate America has long sought from Washington,” reportsThe New York Times. “But the bill also contains plenty for corporate America to dislike — particularly the tax increases that would pay for it — and in the cold calculus of corporate lobbying, industries are working hard to bring the whole enterprise down.”
Everything from the capital gains bump to the corporate tax increase is under assault because these combined proposals chisel away at the trillion-dollar Trump tax cut of 2017, and a grim number of corporate-beholden Democrats are giving ear to those complaints.
One (of course) unnamed lobbyist toldThe Hill back in September, “The business community has made progress with certain Democrats on legitimate policy concerns with some of these proposals and their implications on the economy and international competitiveness. A lot of those arguments are landing.”
“The economy” and “international competitiveness.” Right. They must send these people to Capitol Hill reporters with buzzword flash cards.
Beyond them are the Joe Manchins of the world, whose entire political existence is stapled to fossil fuel money. If they can deeply damage a climate bill in the name of fiscal responsibility, they will be grateful for the political cover, and the complicit corporate “news” media will be more than happy to skip the nuance in their coverage.
Congressional progressives and their activist allies are making it clear that watering this bill down amounts to an utterly unacceptable capitulation to Big Money. “There is a sense of urgency which I think the American people understand,” said Bernie Sanders on Sunday. “And what they want, is finally — maybe, just maybe — the Congress of the United States will act for them, and not just for the wealthy campaign contributors.”
Erica Payne, founder and president of the progressive advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires, took it further:
America’s billionaires are popping champagne tonight as the House Ways and Means Committee — led by Chair Richie Neal — fails the president, fails the country, and fails history….
If this proposal becomes law, working people in America will continue to pay almost twice the tax rate of millionaire investors, heirs to billionaires will continue to inherit enormous amounts of money and property tax-free, and the concentration of wealth and power will continue until this country becomes what it is already fast approaching, a feudal aristocracy,” the Patriotic Millionaires said of the House plan.
And because the House Ways and Means Committee refuses to stand up to the 55 profitable multinational companies that paid no federal income tax last year, corporations will continue to play international shell games with their profits while moving American jobs overseas.
Beyond the bottomless greed of the one-percenters and their business allies lurks the belief, held dear by too many members of Congress, that being perceived as doing something is vastly preferable to actually doing something. “These people,” I wrote on August 10 after a drastically denuded infrastructure bill passed in the Senate, “are happy to have something in hand to prove they actually work for a living. After all, it’s Washington D.C.; the details of the bill matter far less than the fact of the bill’s passage.”
After some hopeful noise last week, the retreat appears to be on. At moments like this, I close my eyes and play out a scenario where Democratic leadership — with broadly popular legislation in hand — finally decides to stop haggling with other Democrats over how much to strip out and shave down.
“Most Americans love this bill,” my imaginary Pelosi and Schumer tell the right-leaning elements of their caucus, “and you’re going to vote for it. It will improve people’s lives noticeably, including the lives of your constituents. We will all run on that next year, and we will win. Vote against it at your peril.”
Even if that strategy fails and the legislation is defeated, there is merit to the approach. Shake most any citizen awake in the middle of the night and ask them what pisses them off most about Democrats, and a large swath will reply, “They’re weak. They always retreat. They never seem to stand for anything. At least Republicans stand for something.” That the “something” is comprehensively horrifying did not stop 74 million people from pulling the lever for Donald Trump ten short months ago. It is, alas, what it is, for the time being anyway.
There you have it. Democrats: perfecting the art of losing debates with Democrats since 1981. Let the undoing commence, again.
As I sit wearing an oversized orange jumpsuit and silver bracelets around my wrists, I listen to the intensive management unit (IMU) supervisor at Monroe Corrections Complex say something I never expected to hear: “The Washington State Reformatory doesn’t want to take you. They say the transgenders are taking over.”
“What!?” I blurt out. “What the hell do you mean the transgenders are taking over? Are they rioting? Do the skinheads not have anywhere to sit now? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Look, I’m just telling you what administration is saying,” the supervisor says.
It is April 11, 2018, and prison staff are trying to figure out where to send me. I have recently been kicked out of two different prisons, and I have a reputation for resistance. The prospect of being in a prison yard with trans solidarity is intriguing. These people are running out of places to send me, and I feel like they don’t have a choice.
On August 8 of that year, I walk out of IMU and hit the big yard at Washington State Reformatory (WSR) with the IMU supervisor’s words still in my head. I find about a dozen outcasts standing in a circle who identify as LGBTQ. The scene feels anticlimactic as I ask myself, “Is this it?” It seems so… ordinary. I ask when the LGBTQ group meets and how to sign up, and they tell me that they don’t have one, but they are trying to start it.
As I stand bewildered, trying to figure out how “the transgenders” are taking over, I assess the situation. This small group of gay and trans prisoners seems like most other groups gathering in the yard but without the macho insecurity.
I meet a transgender woman who shows me the “rainbow bench” where queer and trans prisoners hang out, and the small triangular patch of grass dubbed “tranny triangle.” The group is marginalized into occupying the less desirable spaces in the yard. Those spaces are then turned into stigmatized places that are joked about. “Rainbow bench” and “tranny triangle” are places where “the fellas” wouldn’t be caught dead.
Then it occurs to me: Queer and trans prisoners are occupying space like any other group at the prison. That is the prison staff’s whole problem! The prescriptive norms of institutionalized gender violence are being challenged by the mere existence of visible queer identities. This group lacks predatory masculine signifiers of power dominance and “manliness,” yet they are surviving just like the other groups.
I told the group that I was expecting more, since the staff complained that they didn’t want me because the “transgenders were taking over.” That was when I first heard the story of the rainbow bench. I would hear this story over and over, sometimes accompanied by intense laughter.
The space was named the rainbow bench because known gay and trans prisoners would spend hours hanging out at that bench. Some would walk back and forth in an area behind the bench, which created a worn path in an arc-like shape that appeared to be a rainbow. One day there was a fist fight between two people — nothing out of the ordinary for a prison yard. But what happened after that certainly was.
The prison’s gang investigation unit cordoned off the rainbow bench area with yellow crime scene tape. They brought a video camera and documented the area, paying close attention to what appeared to be a rainbow. The area stayed taped-off for several days as an investigation was conducted for suspected security threat group activity.
It was a scandal, the talk of the prison. The “fellas” would joke about the fact that a group of gay people hanging out was seen as such a threat, and what appeared to be a rainbow was investigated as a gang symbol, like a swastika or other violent gang identifier. Over six months later, people were still telling the story, at times jokingly, like it happened yesterday.
That comical overreaction was the excuse the heterosexist prison regime used to attempt to erase queer visibility in the name of “safety.” Queer possibilities defy prescriptive norms and sometimes move across areas of race and gender, challenging hegemonic masculinities and institutionalized violence. Gathering in solidarity in visibly queer spaces is a powerful way to trouble hegemonic cis-hetero masculine dominance.
By doing so, queer prisoners didn’t wait for permission to have an approved LGBTQ group to sign up for. They found the self-determination to exist, accompanied by a rainbow. I am still dreaming of a transgender takeover.
President Joe Biden’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan has fueled a significant slide in hisapproval ratings in polls, with barely 4 in 10 respondents viewing the president favorably. The Afghan debacle has been defined in the public eye both by the chaotic scenes at the Kabul airport and by cascading intelligence failures. Over 20 years, the country spent untold billions of dollars on intelligence gathering in Afghanistan, and yet at the most crucial of moments, the powers-that-be still couldn’t quite get their heads aroundhow corrupt and hollowed-out the Afghan government under Ashraf Ghani was. They didn’t realize how it was failing to pay or feed its soldiers, and how its leaders were, apparently, just waiting for an opportunity to head off into gilded exile with the fruits of their corruption sustaining them. Yet, amid all the horrors of the past month, the airlift of more than 100,000 Afghans stands out as at least a partial corrective.
And yet, the Trumpist echo chamber has been pushing more virulent anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric in recent days, and consequently,GOP support for refugee resettlement has eroded. The odious Fox News demagogueTucker Carlson decided to use the human tragedy of mass displacement to his political advantage, railing against refugees he accused of invading the U.S., and warning they would dilute and pollute American culture.“The idea that you can move people from one completely different country — with a completely different culture and language and religion and history on the other side of the globe — into our country in large numbers, and everything will be just fine, is insane,” Carlson told his audience in mid-August. Laura Ingraham told her viewers that the refugees were “unvetted” and thus posed a mortal threat to the U.S.
Donald Trump himself has waffled on the issue — at one moment this past month seeming to endorse a resettlement program for Afghans who had helped the U.S. over the two decade-long war, at other moments riffing about unvetted refugees and telling his audience that he would always put “America First.” Meanwhile, his fanatical henchman,Stephen Miller, who was the chief architect behind the web of anti-immigrant regulations and actions that defined the Trump presidency, was quick to accuse those supporting significant levels of refugee resettlement in the U.S. of having a “political” agenda. He has also urged countries bordering Afghanistan to accept all Afghan refugees, while suggesting that the U.S. should massively restrict entry. Presumably, Miller fears that a “political agenda” by pro-refugee advocates is part of some nefarious plot to flood the electorate in coming years with newly minted refugees who will become citizens, then turn around and tilt the political scales against nativist Republicans.
Of course, the use of a “political agenda” around immigration was actually perfected during the Trump years, when the full and mighty force of the U.S. government was turned against one vulnerable immigrant group after another.
It took decades to build the U.S.’s refugee resettlement infrastructure, but it took barely four years for Trump and his acolytes to shred it.
Today, the resettlement infrastructure faces a huge challenge: how to provide services and resources to incoming Afghan refugees during a period in which many resettlement experts have lost their jobs and had to shut down their offices.
Biden’s request for billions of dollars in targeted assistance to help refugees will go a long way, but the bigger challenge remains: how can resettlement offices that have been shuttered reopen and rehire all their experts at speed? Furthermore, how can this infrastructure be reinvigorated not just to deal with the current crisis, but as part of a long-term strategy to reopen the country to refugees once again? Even in more immigrant-welcoming times than these, U.S. refugee resettlement policies were still profoundly shaped by both geopolitics and racist sentiment. Today, Biden’s challenge is not just to resurrect the pre-Trumpian refugee settlement system, but also to reimagine it and enlarge it to meet the growing needs of a 21st century riven by war and environmental displacement.
Five years ago,I reported a story for Sacramento Magazine on local efforts that went into resettling Afghans in Sacramento and its environs. Many of the people being resettled had Special Immigrant Visas — visas reserved for those who had helped Americans during the conflict in some way, such as translation skills or military assistance. Others were refugees from Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere. I followed one family from the time they exited the airplane to their placement in a new apartment. Along the way, they needed assistance navigating everything from enrollment in health care programs to finding nearby supermarkets. Many of the refugees needed classes in English as a second language (ESL), children needed to be enrolled in schools and adults needed help lining up paid employment. This required a strong collaborative effort from local volunteers and also from the professional staff at the resettlement agencies.
What will the experience of this current wave of Afghan refugees be like? Given the damage done to refugee resettlement agencies since Trump’s election in 2016, who will help them navigate complex bureaucracies today? Who will be there if they need help filling in paperwork or finding an affordable apartment to rent? Who will be there to provide translation services, or to find suitable jobs for the new arrivals?
It’s not enough to just admit refugees during an acute crisis when the eyes of the world are upon the U.S. If proper services are to be provided for admitted refugees, it is vital to pour adequate resources into funding the country’s once-robust network of refugee resettlement agencies. And since funding for these agencies is tied to the number of refugees admitted each year under the annual presidential finding on the issue, the best way to get more funds flowing is for the president to raise the refugee admissions cap and then actually ensure that the full number of permitted refugees make it into the U.S.
In April,Biden attracted political heat for backtracking on a campaign promise to raise the refugee cap from 15,000 up to 62,500. A month later, facing a torrent of criticism from progressives, the president back-pedaled again and announced that the cap would, indeed, increase to 62,500. Yet the reality on the ground doesn’t meet this promise: So far this year, the refugee cap has been raised to 62,500. Yet, excluding the recent Afghan arrivals,only a small fraction of those 62,500 have actually been admitted into the country. Until those numbers improve significantly, the U.S. won’t be able to fully restore the resettlement programs so wantonly vandalized during Trump’s reign of horrors — let alone improve upon them.
The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns, and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.
Those policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.
In a new report I co-authored with my colleagues at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.
Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.
After strong growth from 1970 to 2000, household incomes have stagnated for 20 years as Americans struggled through two recessions in the years leading up to the pandemic. As pandemic eviction moratoriums end, millions are at risk of homelessness.
Our public health systems have also been chronically underfunded, leaving the U.S. helpless to enact the testing, tracing, and quarantining that helped other countries limit the pandemic’s damage. Over 650,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 — the equivalent of a 9/11 every day for over seven months. The opioid epidemic claims another 50,000 lives a year.
Meanwhile extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and floods have grown in frequency over the past 20 years. The U.S. hasn’t invested nearly enough in either renewable energy or climate resiliency to deal with the increasing effects climate change has on our communities.
In the face of all this suffering, it’s clear that $21 trillion in spending hasn’t made us any safer.
Instead, the human costs have been staggering. Around the world, the forever wars have cost 900,000 lives and left 38 million homeless — and as the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan has shown us, they were a massive failure.
Our militarized spending has helped deport 5 million people over the past 20 years, often taking parents from their children. The majority of those deported hadn’t committed any crime except for being here.
Fortunately, there’s a silver lining: We’ve found that for just a fraction of what we’ve spent on militarization these last 20 years, we could start to make life much better.
For $4.5 trillion, we could build a renewable, upgraded energy grid for the whole country. For $2.3 trillion, we could create 5 million $15-an-hour jobs with benefits — for 10 years. For just $25 billion, we could vaccinate low-income countries against COVID-19, saving lives and stopping the march of new and more threatening virus variants.
We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.
The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through the imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.
Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center, U.S. Mission to the U.N. officials called us and asked that we visit with them.
I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.
The U.S. government and military exploited the grief and shock following the 9/11 attacks to raise fears, promote Islamophobia and launch forever wars which continue to this day. Under the guise of “counter-terrorism,” the United States now pledges to combine drone attacks, surveillance, airstrikes and covert operations to continue waging war in Afghanistan. Terror among Afghans persists.
I last visited Kabul, Afghanistan in September 2019. While there, a young friend I’ve known for five years greeted me and then spoke in a hushed voice. “Kathy,” he asked, “do you know about Qazi Qadir, Bahadir, Jehanzeb and Saboor?” I nodded. I had read a news account shortly before I arrived about Afghan Special Operations commandos, trained by the CIA, having waged a night raid in the city of Jalalabad at the home of four brothers. They awakened the young men, then shot and killed them. Neighbors said the young men had gathered to welcome their father back from the Hajj in Mecca; numerous colleagues insisted the young men were innocent.
My young friend has been deeply troubled by many other incidents in which the United States directly attacked innocent people or trained Afghan units to do so. Two decades of U.S. combat in Afghanistan have made civilians vulnerable to drone attacks, night raids, airstrikes and arrests. Over 4 million people have become internally displaced as they fled from battles or could no longer survive on scarred, drought stricken lands.
In an earlier visit to Kabul, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, another young friend earnestly asked me to tell parents in the United States not to send their sons and daughters to Afghanistan. “Here it is very dangerous for them,” he said. “And they do not really help us.”
For many years, the United States claimed its mission in Afghanistan improved the lives of Afghan women and children. But essentially, the U.S. war improved the livelihoods of those who designed, manufactured, sold and used weaponry to kill Afghans.
When the United States was winding down its troop surge in 2014 — but not its occupation — military officials undertook what they called “the largest retrograde mission in U.S. military history,” incurring enormous expenses. One estimate suggested the war in Afghanistan, that year, was costing $2 million per U.S. soldier. That same year, UNICEF officials calculated that the cost of adding iodized salt into the diet of an Afghan infant — helping to prevent chronic brain damage in children suffering from acute malnourishment — would be 5 cents per child per year.
Which endeavor would the majority of U.S. people have opted to support, in their personal budgets, had they ever been given a choice? Profligate U.S. military spending in Afghanistan or vital assistance for a starving Afghan child?
One of my young Afghan friends says he is now an anarchist. He doesn’t place much trust in governments and militaries. He feels strong allegiance toward the grassroots network he has helped build, a group I would normally name and celebrate, but must now refer to as “our young friends in Afghanistan,” in hopes of protecting them from hostile groups.
The brave and passionate dedication they showed as they worked tirelessly to share resources, care for the environment, and practice nonviolence has made them quite vulnerable to potential accusers who may believe they were too connected with westerners.
In recent weeks, I’ve been part of an ad hoc team assisting 60 young people and their family members who feel alarmed about remaining in Kabul and are sorting out their options to flee the country.
It’s difficult to forecast how Taliban rule will affect them.
Already, some extraordinarily brave people have held protests in the provinces of Herat, Nimroz, Balkh and Farah, and in the city of Kabul, where dozens of women took to the streets to demand representation in the new government and to insist that their rights must be protected.
In many provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban may find themselves ruling over increasingly resentful people. Half the population already lives in poverty and economic catastrophe looms. In damage caused by war, people have lost harvests, homes and livestock. A third wave of COVID afflicts the country and 3 million Afghans face consequences of severe drought. Will the Taliban government have the resources and skills to cope with these overwhelming problems?
On the other hand, in some provinces, Taliban rule has seemed preferable to the previous government’s incompetence and corruption, particularly in regard to property or land disputes.
We should be honest. The Taliban are in power today because of a colossal mess the United States helped create.
Now, we U.S. citizens must insist on paying reparations for destruction caused by 20 years of war. To be meaningful, reparations must also include dismantling the warfare systems that caused so much havoc and misery. Our wars of choice were waged against people who meant us no harm. We must choose, now, to lay aside the cruel futility of our forever wars.
My young friend who whispered to me about human rights abuses in 2019 recently fled Afghanistan. He said he doesn’t want to be driven by fear, but he deeply wants to use his life to do good, to build a better world.
Ultimately, Afghanistan will need people like him and his friends if the country is ever to experience a future where basic human rights to food, shelter, health care and education are met. It will need people who have already made dedicated sacrifices for peace, believing in an Afghan adage that says “blood doesn’t wash away blood.”
Essentially, people in Afghanistan will need people in the United States to embrace this same teaching. We must express true sorrow, seek forgiveness, and show valor similar to that of the brave people insisting on human rights in Afghanistan today. Collectively, recognizing the terrible legacy of 9/11, we must agree: To counter terror, abolish war.
When 19 al-Qaeda hijackers flew four commercial airliners — one crashed following an attempt by heroic passengers to regain control, one plowed into the Pentagon and two rammed New York’s Twin Towers — it seemed the world sat glued to a million different TV screens. After the first report, I ran home as crowds stared at the news in bars, restaurants and bodegas. Reflected off those screens, it looked to me like New York City was filled with hundreds of burning towers.
The surreal moment had a truth. September 11 was instantly split by political ideology into many 9/11s. But the one that ended up defining the past 20 years was the right wing’s version. “Never forget” may be the slogan, but the right “never forgot” 9/11 because it never remembered it correctly. The national trauma of Ground Zero became a call to fight. Since they do not see people of color as citizens or even human, the “war on terror” transformed into a war on democracy.
The Two 9/11s
Here in New York, smoke rose from Ground Zero, carrying the ash of over two thousand people into the sky, and grieving families lit candles near photos of loved ones, buried under a mountain of debris. On the left, 9/11 was partly understood as the inevitable blowback of U.S. imperialism. On the right — and in many cases, in the center — it was portrayed as an attack on “Western civilization.”
Coming back from volunteering at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center where I helped organize relief supplies, I saw a man talking to a large crowd. “You can’t bomb the whole world,” he pointed above their heads, “and not expect it to come back at you.” Three months later, Seven Stories Press published 9-11 by Noam Chomsky, explaining the al-Qaeda attack as blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky said, “In much of the world the U.S. is regarded as the leading terrorist state.” In the pages, he cited U.S. state terrorism against Nicaragua, its support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that left 18,000 dead and the arms shipment to Turkey to slaughter Kurds. Chomsky explained 9/11 was caused by U.S. arming Islamic fundamentalists in the 1980s in order to create an “Afghan Trap” for the Soviet Union. When Osama bin Laden saw U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia, he sought to overthrow the client state to create a pure Islamic caliphate. In 2004, bin Laden released a video saying inspiration came from the U.S. backing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He said, “While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America.”
After the Twin Towers fell, the far right’s version of 9/11 crystallized; the enemy was not fundamentalists but people of color and non-Christians whose existence undermined the U.S. from within. The motif of the “internal enemy” deepened the further right one went. Some on the right blamed 9/11 on its victims, implying that many marginalized New Yorkers deserved to die.
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way — all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘you helped this happen,’” Rev. Jerry Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s show “The 700 Club” on September 13, 2001. Falwell saw terrified New Yorkers, covered in dust, through an ideological lens of Christian nationalism that made them into the “sinful” who caused this suffering.
His vision differed only in degree from neo-Nazi reactions to 9/11, monitored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracked respect for al-Qaeda. In one post, Rocky Suhayda of the American Nazi Party said, “It’s a DISGRACE that in a population of at least 150 MILLION ‘White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same” — essentially calling for neo-Nazis to commit similar acts of terrorism.
For the settler-colonial complex, difference is danger, and enemies are everywhere. This type of thinking pervaded the right and center-right response to 9/11. It also led to Trump’s presidency. It led to the January 6 attempted coup at the Capitol. And it fuels the ongoing right-wing attempts to destroy democracy to save white supremacy.
Circle the Wagons
“Islam is peace,” President George W. Bush said. “These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent war and terror.” The speech took place at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., two weeks after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people. The goal, according to the Bush administration, was to prevent vigilante violence against Muslim Americans and show what “compassionate conservativism” meant. On the ground, the FBI reported that in 2001, there were 481 hate crimes against Muslims, a wild spike compared to years before. Three people were killed. Many, many more were targeted, discriminated against in the workplace and in schools, and singled out for extra airport security. Racist violence not only targeted Muslims, but also racial and religious groups perceived to be Muslim.
This violence made the red in the American flag look like blood. 9/11 did not cause new racism but released what existed under the surface. The United States is a settler-colonial nation in which European colonizers attempted to replace Indigenous people through genocide, and enslaved millions of Africans to create massive wealth. Murder cleared space to erect a permanent state and a racial vocabulary to justify the violence. Each generation inherited the mythology through popular culture. The common theme was that Anglo-Saxon America had to be safeguarded against threats.
It’s in our language, like the phrase “circle the wagons” which comes from the seizing of Native land in the West by settlers who rode wagons and circled them when they faced resistance. It’s in Thomas Dixon’s 1902 book, The Leopard’s Spots, in which Black men are portrayed as animalistic brutes, and in the 2018 film, The Quiet Place, where dark snarling creatures hunt a white family. It’s in early American captivity narratives and Western film showing whelping, “bloodthirsty” Natives, a motif analyzed in Reel Injun. It’s in popular culture’s portrayal of Arabs as “savage” and Muslims as “terrorists” — from Aladdin to Iron Man. What one repeatedly sees in this mythology is the white American being portrayed as a victim of violence inflicted by people of color.
The right-wing settler-colonial complex made 9/11 more than a tragedy — it was a trigger of paranoia. It hit a core and sensitive cultural trauma, defined by Ron Eyerman in his 2019 bookMemory, Trauma, and Identity as “… a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a people who achieved some degree of cohesion.” Later, he explained that that trauma has to be “explained” through “public reflection” for later generations. The “tear in the social fabric” for the right was white bodies supposedly torn apart by Native people fighting the theft of their land, when outnumbered duringthe U.S.’s foundation. Added to that was the terror of enslaved Africans rising up in Nat Turner’s rebellion and in scores of smaller slave revolts. The settler colonial myth of people of color being violent to whites made 9/11 an existential crisis for conservatives, who continue to ignore how many working-class people of color died in the Twin Towers, like those memorialized in Puerto Rican poet Martin Espada’s poem “In Praise of Local 100.”
In the years that followed, history seemed to conspire to heighten that anxiety. President Obama was elected. During the campaign, fringe far right conspiracy theorists said he was not born in Hawaii but Kenya, and was a secret Muslim. Republican voters told then-candidate Sen. John McCain that Obama palled with domestic terrorists and one woman said he was “Arab.” Media personality and next president Donald Trump took “Birtherism” to new heights, demanding Obama present a birth certificate, stoking racial animus until finally relenting.
In the eyes of a colonial-settler mindset, Obama was the terrifying sign that whites would be “vulnerable” again and people of color would elect socialists to seize their property. Election night 2008 saw gun sales go off the charts. Over Obama’s two terms, pollster Cornell Belcher’s book, Black Man in the White House, tracked the rise of “racial aversion.” He said, “It was a predictable backlash to the first time the vast majority of whites — their political will did not have an outcome that they wanted.”
Fear and loathing bubbled under the surface, until again, Trump came in the 2015 presidential campaign and blasted it through the megaphone of his mouth. He warned of “rapist” Mexicans and Muslims as a “Trojan Horse,” and called for a travel ban on Muslims. He recycled 9/11 to stoke red state rage, saying, “There were people that were cheering, in the other side of New Jersey where you have large Arab populations, they were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” It was a lie. It was believed anyway, though, because the right wing truly sees itself as a hapless victim of history.
The right’s use of 9/11 reached beyond Trump to the semi-intellectual sphere with Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” (referencing the plane where passengers fought the hijackers) in Claremont Review of Books. He warned that if Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, Big Government would cannibalize civil society, open borders and flood the U.S. with hordes of “Third World foreigners” to lock in a permanent majority. (Unfortunately, Clinton’s agenda was in reality much more centrist.) Anton’s essay was a stylized take on the “white replacement” conspiracy found in the far right.
Again, the colonial-settler complex. Again, the fear of being overtaken. Again, the panic that the Natives and foreigners are winning. It led to panic at the 2018 midterms, when the initial members of The Squad (Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) were told by a weakened Trump to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Trump came hard at Representative Omar, a Somali American and Muslim, with a video splicing footage of the burning Twin Towers with a speech she had given.
And then Trump lost. Encouraged by the bitter ex-president and led to believe an election lost meant they lost America, known on the right as “white replacement” in which people of color outnumber whites and seize control. It is a nightmare fantasy that drove a ragtag coup was attempted on January 6, 2021. Officers were wounded. Wild-eyed right-wingers fought with police. For those who ransacked the Capitol and the many who supported them, it was the climactic battle of 9/11.
Woke Empire
Twenty years after September 11, President Joe Biden removed the last of the U.S. military from Afghanistan and the far right had an interesting reaction. The American far right praised the Taliban. On Telegram, an encrypted app used by neo-Nazis, cheers poured in for the Islamic fundamentalists as one post said, “If white men in the West had the same courage as the Taliban, we would not be ruled by Jews currently.” It is a similar sentiment to the one expressed by the far right when al-Qaeda first rammed planes in the towers and Rocky Suhayda said in response, “’White/Aryan’ Americans … we provide so FEW that are willing to do the same.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the European far right warned of an invasion of refugees from the collapse of the U.S. puppet government in Kabul.
The far right praised terrorists while paramedics, firefighters, construction workers and military tunneled through a mountain of rubble to rescue desperate people on 9/11. They pulled survivors out. They breathed in toxic dust that destroyed lungs. Some died of cancer.
They did that dangerous work in spirit of humanism. It is the same spirit that moved pilots and humanitarian workers to get fleeing Afghans onto planes as the Taliban closed in. It is the same spirit that drove the tireless work of activists over the past two decades. It is a vision that rejects the white-supremacy-structured foundation on which this country was built. The social movements that changed the face of the country ultimately make an appeal to our greater humanity, even if they begin with defending a specific racial group or gender or class. Racism still exists. The legacy of it is still seen today. But social movements are chipping away at that foundation, more and more each day.
The far right hates what the U.S. is becoming. It is possessed by a settler-colonial vision to protect a purity that never existed. The rest of us, the vast majority, have to take the true lesson of 9/11, during the crises that will come — climate change, more attempted coups by Republicans, economic meltdowns — to do what the first responders did and keep risking ourselves to make sure everyone gets out alive.
Snapshot of the moment: On the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, days after the president announced vaccination mandates intended to stop the 9/11-every-two-days death toll caused by the COVID pandemic, a Washington, D.C., rally planned for next Saturday celebrating people who invaded the Capitol Building and tried to overturn a free and fair election may become the flashpoint for further political violence because an astounding number of Republicans have been brought to believe Democrats are running a cannibal pedophile ring with Hollywood “elites” as part of a larger plot to take over the world.
Twenty years ago this morning, as I stood before a bank of televisions and watched the Twin Towers swaying in their death throes, I had a vision of what was to come. It was ridiculously incomplete, to be sure — Nostradamus himself couldn’t have pulled “President Trump” out of his hat — but those events in combination with the people in power at that moment assured me we were headed for some very dark places.
Twenty years later, and all I can say is, “I had no idea it would be like this.” By “this,” I mean members of the very same Republican Party that pounced on 9/11 to wrap itself in the flag while attacking the Taliban and then Iraq has transmogrified into a pack of neo-Confederate would-be warriors, some of whom see the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan as a model for future endeavors. The GOP was bad enough back then — remember John Ashcroft shrouding the stone breasts of a statue so as not to be tempted, or something? — but this new breed is thoroughly around the bend.
You can’t blame it all on an economy that left them behind. A whole lot of these Republicans drive cars that cost more than your average three-bedroom house — see: the gun-toting McMansion couple who got famous on the right-wing circuit for menacing peaceful protesters with an AR-15. What most of these people share in common is a frenzied terror that being white in America might be becoming less of a power ticket than it used to be, and hating Muslims 20 years ago has metastasized into hating everyone and everything that might threaten their centuries-old supremacy. Even you. Especially you.
If that includes disrupting and destroying elections, so be it. David Frum, the George W. Bush speechwriter who helped that Republican president sell fear to a traumatized nation, made an observation once. “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically,” he predicted, “they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
It turns out Frum was only half right. They are rejecting democracy wholesale (see: Trump’s “Big Lie”), but in their tumbledown rush to please a failed real estate mogul, they are also abandoning the flaccid “strictures” of basic conservatism. Look no further than Texas and Florida, where right-wing governors are dropping the hammer on local governments and small business over COVID mask mandates.
I’m so old, I remember when local government and small business were the reasons conservatives claimed they existed in the first place. Now, they exist to please Trump, and have gone so far out into the ether that people like John McCain, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, John Boehner and God-help-us even George W. Bush are considered to be too squishy-lefty to be tolerated in proper Republican circles.
All that, and they have foot-soldiers now, shock troops dressed in their finest tac gear and armed to the last tooth. These brigands are insinuating themselves into the ranks of anti-mask and anti-vax fanaticism, to the point that any school board meeting on these topics is likely to descend into a parking lot brawl, with fathers screaming at school board members, “We will find you.”
* * * * *
Flipping through the TV channels on Thursday night, I came across the first game of the NFL season. Someone was performing the national anthem, and I caught “…gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” The thought came of itself, immediate and unbidden — “Not in Afghanistan, not anymore” — and I fell down the stairwell of 20 years, again.
That’s been happening quite a bit lately, as this grim anniversary has lurked on the far side of news reports — try to contain your shock — about how our disastrous, useless, calamity war in that country came to a disastrous end. I mashed the buttons on the remote until some show about growing carrots came on, and I watched for a while in search of elusive calm; the very last thing I wanted to see was the God damned war machine flyover that has become a stinking staple of sporting events ever since the whole country went sideways into war, fear and failure.
Please clap, right? Twenty years, 20 miles of bad road, millions dead, damaged or displaced, trillions of dollars deftly handed to the fortunate few who sell the bullets and the bombs, criminal profiteers and their political enablers walking unencumbered in the daylight, hauling down small fortunes in speakers fees, and more again in fees for commentator gigs with the murderously complicit corporate “news” media….
All of it aftermath, the consequences of getting everything wrong since that day, and it has all only just begun, because a segment of the population spent 20 years bathing in far-right Republican Kool-aid — the best stuff for fundraising, don’tcha know — and came out of the tub orange with rage, oblivious to the absurdities and the brazen picking of their pockets. Every time I see a vehicle with a Trump sticker next to an American flag sticker next to a Confederate flag sticker, a tiny part of my prefrontal lobe turns into pus and leaks out of my ear.
When did it start? Trump? The Tea Party? Newt Gingrich? Ronald Reagan? Richard Nixon? Barry Goldwater? Ayn Rand? Henry Ford? Appomattox? Wounded Knee? Jamestown? Cristóbal Colón? From what bleak corner came the original sin that set us pinwheeling into this vortex of racism, greed, ignorance and violence?
Answer: “Yes.”
Upon this anniversary, I offer a dollop of purest truth to that cohort: Osama bin Laden and his friends got more than everything they came for 20 years ago, and you are the proof.
To the rest, I humbly proffer a bit of wisdom from Helen Keller: “Rights are things which we get when we are strong enough to make our claim to them good.”
To properly consecrate this day, endeavor to be stronger than those who seek to shred your rights out of a misguided fear that they are losing theirs. Quite an enormous amount depends on it.
A state defies a landmark decision by the Supreme Court and enacts legislation that effectively bans a hotly contested civil right. The state designed the legislation to evade the federal courts’ jurisdiction. The Supreme Court hears the case and, in a unanimous opinion, blocks the state’s actions. Each justice signs their name to the beginning of the opinion and they condemn the state’s attempt to “nullify” the Court’s landmark decision through “evasive schemes.”
That’s what should have happened to Texas and SB 8, which defied Roe v. Wade by effectively banning all abortions after about six weeks into a pregnancy. Instead, the Supreme Court let SB 8 “evade federal judicial scrutiny,” as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissent. The Court went in the opposite direction of the opening narrative, which is from the civil rights era, when it struck down state laws undermining desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education. Those rulings established the federal courts as the legitimate enforcers of constitutional and civil rights for the last 60 years.
But the Supreme Court has now decided to let a state openly defy the federal court system. And if the “supreme” body of an institution gives up on asserting its authority, then we have to ask whether we should continue trusting that institution. The common sense of going to federal court when your rights are violated or donating to a legal organization to fight the bad guys may not make sense anymore.
Maybe the fight to reform and relegitimize the federal courts really is worth it, but we can’t solely rely on legal strategies to defend our rights. We have to question these strategies if the conservative justices — a few people in black robes — can discard a crucial civil rights system with such indifference. Our best strategies don’t rely on top-down institutions, but on social movements and grassroots and working-class institutions, such as unions. Either way, we can’t stick around just because that’s where legal advocates have spent the last two generations or because of a misguided belief that “the law” will eventually be just. The law, like any other institution in our society, is malleable and rarely a level playing field.
The federal courts rose with the civil rights movement and may now fall with the end of Roe. Rather than stand lopsided, we have to start fighting on our own terms.
Supreme Court Ruling Has Opened the Floodgates
Texas designed SB 8 to get around the way federal courts normally stop unconstitutional state laws, including other six-week bans on abortion: They order state officials to not enforce the law. However, SB 8 gives enforcement powers not to state officials, but to private citizens (and many anti-abortion “vigilantes” will take up that mantle). The law allows them to sue and win, at minimum, $10,000 in “damages” from anyone who “aids or abets” a banned abortion. And since the federal courts have no state official to order around, the logic goes, they can’t block the law as unconstitutional until someone actually tests it out by suing.
But the damage will already be done. Abortion providers in Texas are closing and reducing services. Up until now, federal courts had blocked these flagrantly unconstitutional laws before they went into effect. That approach softened the blow on abortion providers by reducing their legal risk. It was how this process was “supposed” to work. A state restricts a civil right, civil society groups ask legal organizations for help, the lawyers go to federal court and the court stops the law. It wasn’t perfect, and states were still bringing death by a thousand cuts to abortion providers.
The Supreme Court has now opened the floodgates. Even the conservative justices couldn’t deny there were “serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law.” But their opinion took SB 8’s scheme at face value, saying its “complex and novel” procedures — lawsuits by private citizens — had to play out first. The Court is inviting states to challenge the legitimacy of civil rights enforcement in federal courts. States will pass all kinds of unconstitutional laws designed to evade judicial review. Federal courts may eventually patch up the specific jurisdictional hole that Texas used, but there will be others.
The Civil Rights Era of the Federal Courts
This is how states resisted desegregation after Brown — the federal courts won, and won big. After the “Little Rock Nine” and a federal troop occupation began integrating schools in Arkansas’s capital city in 1957, the state legislature and governor passed laws that did not explicitly challenge Brown but still, as the Supreme Court justices at the time put it, “reflect[ed] their own determination to resist this Court’s decision.” One such law, eerily similar to SB 8, gave money to school districts to attack integration in court. And the school district officials, not those actually behind these legislative schemes, were the only ones whom civil rights activists could sue.
The Supreme Court struck down the laws despite this procedural trickery — and in some ways, because of it. Arkansas essentially challenged the legitimacy of the federal courts, and the justices had to beat that back. That’s why they, for the only time in history, all signed their names to the beginning of the opinion. The state’s “evasive scheme” of using school district officials as a legal decoy could not hide the fact that “vindication” of a constitutional right “was rendered difficult or impossible by the actions of other state officials.” The unconstitutional laws had to go, and the justices unanimously signaled the federal courts’ power over the states.
The Supreme Court’s assertion of its own authority boosted the institutional legitimacy of the federal courts, and it spawned the world of federal civil rights litigation that we know today. It’s an industry where hundreds of legal organizations spend billions of dollars every year to advance civil rights. And it became the commonsense place to go to fight tyranny. When Trump won the 2016 election, the ACLU threatened him with its “full firepower” and “staff of litigators and activists in every state … ready to fight against any encroachment on our cherished freedom and rights.” Donations soared.
The Limits of the Federal Courts and the Law
But is this the system we really want to rely on? A system whose legitimacy depends on pretenses like nine people in black robes signing their names on a piece of paper? A system where our rights rise or fall based on procedural technicalities only understood by the lawyers who create them? For people who believe in “the law,” maybe that checks out. But for the rest of us, who see politicians and the rich flout every rule while the courts throw poor and oppressed people in prison, it’s time to take this latest hint from the Supreme Court and move on.
That doesn’t mean lawyers (like yours truly) and our many great legal organizations have no role to play. And even the conservative justices in control of the Supreme Court have not totally abdicated the idea of civil rights. It was, after all, Justice Neil Gorsuch who wrote the Bostock v. Clayton County opinion, which extended Title VII protections to gay and trans people. We can and should use the federal courts, state courts, and whatever other legal avenues are out there to help people and push back against tyranny. And we should reform those institutions to make them more just.
But the law is a means, not an end. It’s useful for some things, and not for others. In particular, the past two generations of federal civil rights litigation have not panned out as a way to build power at the grassroots. To the contrary, institutions designed to build grassroots power have suffered from overreliance on lawyers and judicial intervention.
In unions, for example, lawyers started negotiating the contracts and trying to enforce them in court, rather than workers sitting at the table and using the strike tool as leverage. Unions told workers to take their disputes not to their co-workers and fellow union members, but to a legalistic grievance process where they were basically a spectator. Today, unions have resurged not because of smart lawyers, but through rank-and-file organizing and strike activity that have energized the communities around them.
Even where we see victories in top-down institutions — such as Mexico’s Supreme Court’s decriminalization of abortion — the underlying role of social movements is clear. Argentina’s “green wave,” a women-led movement of hundreds of thousands, won the right to abortion through legislation less than a year ago. That wave swept into Mexico and will be necessary to support this fledgling right against challenges on new institutional battlefields in both countries. There are fights to come over funding, accessibility, training and cultural competence, and religious exemptions.
Meanwhile, we are sliding backwards in the United States. Why are we facing the impending fall of Roe when we should be gaining ground by repealing the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion, and passing Medicare for All? The unavoidable answer is that our strategies are not working. Frustrating as it may be to watch the Supreme Court delegitimize itself, the next generation of change needs a broader, more grassroots horizon.
If you were to take every bad move by the Democratic Party and its politicians over the last four decades — every failed attempt at leadership, every waffle, every retreat, every horrid bill created to make Republicans like them (hint: they never will) — and poured that noisome soup into a Captain America vita-rays chamber set to “reverse,” Joe Biden is what would emerge.
Biden has been in the game for every fiasco Democrats have stumbled through since Ronald Reagan frightened their collective wits into ashes. Biden himself is a perfect avatar for the phenomenon: His crime bill, his banking bill, his Iraq War vote, his AUMF votes, his PATRIOT Act vote, his misogyny-laden treatment of Anita Hill — name a decade since 1981, and there were Biden and his fellow Democrats, almost never failing to fail.
I do not say this to throw dirt on the president. These things I note are known, as is the general temperament of your average long-serving Democrat. They spent so many years trying to be like the very Republicans they found so terrifying that appeasement became their most prominent trait. This soul-numbing characteristic remains in place today, but if I’m hearing the rumblings correctly, the Democrats appear to be squaring up for one hell of a fight, at last.
The debt ceiling crisis is upon us once again. Refresher: This is the vote that ensures the U.S. will make good on its debts. It does not involve any new spending, but puts “the full faith and credit” of the U.S. behind what we have already spent.
This was a no-brainer passing vote since time out of mind until 2011, when Mitch McConnell took it hostage during the fight over the Affordable Care Act. Even the threat was enough for ratings agency S&P to downgrade our fiscal reliability in 2011, and the economy shuddered ominously in response. Now, if the U.S. defaults on the debt ceiling in this perilous pandemic moment, the economic consequences could be dire to say the least.
Despite the peril, Republicans have shown no hesitation in returning to this particular well, and this year is no exception. Facing a fusillade of progressive Democratic legislation, McConnell announced that there would be no Republican votes to avoid defaulting on the debt ceiling this year. “If our colleagues want to ram through yet another reckless tax and spending spree without our input,” said McConnell last week, “if they want all this spending and debt to be their signature legacy, they should leap at the chance to own every bit of it.”
When they ran this number on President Obama multiple times, the president was able to call their bluff because the consequences of following through on the threat were terrifying. It’s a little bit like Mr. Burns stealing the sun from Springfield in The Simpsons; the reckless evil of it beggars cogent explanation.
This new, Trump-radicalized pack of Republicans, however, may be exactly irresponsible enough to try and execute the hostage. Most years, even the possibility would have Democrats rushing to be conciliatory, but maybe, just maybe, not this time. House Speaker Pelosi has made it abundantly clear that any debt ceiling vote will not come as a stand-alone, but will be stapled to some other crucial piece of legislation.
This dovetails neatly with the other game of chicken being played out in Washington, D.C., over avoiding (yet another) looming federal government shutdown. Forecasters have stated the government will run out of operating funds some time in October. In its proposal to keep the government operating, the Biden administration is requesting funds for disaster relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.
If the pieces fall together just so, and the debt ceiling is added to a bill that keeps the government running and assists those in distress from the storm, Republicans will find themselves in a tremendous bind. “The combination would present a triple threat,” reportsPolitico, “daring GOP lawmakers to go on record in opposition to aid for disaster-hit communities, staving off a debt default that could throw financial markets into chaos and preventing a government shutdown.”
Some will no doubt shrink at the idea of playing political hardball with money meant to help storm victims, but it is precisely that brand of ruthless certitude that has allowed Republicans to run (or stall) the country as a minority party for the third Democratic presidential administration in a row. There’s no doubt that disaster relief will pass one way or another, and in the meantime, doing this puts the Republicans on record for voting to basically burn the country down to the stumps. That seems to be what a lot of elected GOP officials want, but it isn’t likely to play well come ballot-casting time.
This sudden vigor for victory also seems to have invaded the fight over Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget-climate bill. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, playing the role of plaque in the arteries of progress, has flapped his kill-shot vote at Democratic leadership, laying out a list of demands that would leave the historic bill with no beating heart at all. House Majority Whip James Clyburn then hopped on the Manchin bandwagon, suggesting Biden’s $3.5 trillion bill could accomplish its goals at $2 trillion, at which point simple mathematics loaded itself into a giant rubber band and shot itself into space.
Manchin and Clyburn got a nifty bundle of here’s-your-hat from a variety of fellow Democrats in response, most significantly from the majority leader. “We’re moving full speed ahead,” said Chuck Schumer. “We want to keep going forward. We think getting this done is so important for the American people.” Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders said, “That $3.5 trillion is already the result of a major, major compromise.” Rashida Tlaib tweeted simply, “$3.5T is the floor.”
The debt ceiling, funding the federal government, storm relief, and a budget bill that may salvage the future from its apparent flood-and-fire-raddled fate… all hanging on the stomach Democrats have for the fight. We’ve all been here before, or have we? Stay tuned; the second half of September is shaping up to be either a donnybrook for the ages, or a capitulation that seals the downward-spiraling deal.
Amid record hurricanes, wildfires and droughts, battles are being waged over the fate of the Earth. Many of those battles are being fought by Indigenous people, and by others whose relationship to life, land and one another compels them to push back against an extractive, death-making economy that renders people and ecosystems disposable. On the front lines of the struggle to halt construction of Enbridge’s new Line 3 pipeline — which would bring nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin — Water Protectors have locked themselves to excavators and drills, and overturned cars and barrels of cement, while also deploying aerial blockades, including elaborate tripods and tree-sits. In scattered encampments that run along a 300-mile stretch of pipeline construction, a culture defined by mutual aid, and a spiritual and physical struggle to defend the Earth, has held strong in the face of brutality and an increasingly entrenched alliance between police and the corporate forces fueling climate catastrophe.
I recently spoke with Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, over a shaky internet connection, as she held space at the collective’s Namewag Camp in Minnesota. The camp, which is led by Indigenous women and two-spirit people, was founded by the Giniw Collective in 2018, as Minnesota’s final permit decision on Line 3 drew near. Houska says she invited Native matriarchs, including LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Winona LaDuke, among others, to initiate the effort. “We laid out our prayers and our songs to begin this phase,” Houska told me.
Since then, the Namewag Camp, says Houska, has been “a home for many people.” Some people have spent years at the encampment, while others have held space for months, weeks or even a few days. “It really depends on the person or persons that are coming through,” says Houska. The culture of the camp emphasizes direct action, mutual aid and Native traditions. “We’ve trained well over 1000 folks in non-violent direct action, decolonization, traditional knowledge and life in balance,” says Houska. People who call the camp home are committed to stopping the pipeline, but Houska says making a home at Namewag also requires a commitment to mutual aid as a way of life. “I think we’re trying to create a balance, a place that is more reflective of balance, and deep values that are very much needed in the climate movement, and also just generally in the world,” Houska told me, adding that, “the first structure that was built in this camp was actually our sweat lodge.” The encampment also includes a “very large, beautiful garden.”
Houska was not always an activist on the front lines. “I started out as a D.C. lawyer back in 2013, after law school, and worked on a lot of different issues for tribal nations, and saw the treatment of our people on the hill, and through the law,” says Houska. She engaged with legal efforts to thwart the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and efforts to stop the project that would eventually be known as Line 3, but Houska ultimately felt called to fight for the Earth “in a different way.” Houska travelled to Standing Rock in 2016 and “spent six months out there learning and resisting.”
While some Water Protectors involved in the Line 3 protests carry lessons from Standing Rock, the two struggles have manifested differently. The movement in Standing Rock drew an unprecedented assemblage of Natives from over 300 federally recognized tribes, and other Indigenous and non-Indigenous co-strugglers. Thousands of people converged on a cluster of camps, the largest of which was known as Oceti Sakowin. Houska says a variety of nations and groups are also represented in the Line 3 struggle, but rather than being relatively centralized, Line 3 encampments are staggered across 334 miles of pipeline construction. “We also have been fighting this pipeline during a pandemic,” Houska noted, “which means a lot of caution and precaution around COVID-19 and making sure everyone is healthy and safe, and that we’re not putting anyone at risk.”
Line 3 opponents say the pipeline, once fully operational, would be the carbon pollution equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants. As an editorial that will be published in 200 health journals worldwide this fall, ahead of the UN General Assembly and the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, states, “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature.”
The pipeline would also tunnel under 20 rivers, including the Mississippi, threatening the drinking water supply of millions of people. In 2010, 1.2 million gallons of oil spilled from Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline into the Kalamazoo River, in one of 800 oil spills the company experienced between 1999 and 2010.
While regulatory battles and legal maneuvers are crucial in any fight to stop a pipeline, Houska says that land defense, and the “building of a resistance community on the front lines” is an “under-respected, undervalued, but critical component to a healthy movement.” Houska says the work of building that communal effort, and sustaining it, has been “beautiful, hard, sad, [and] sometimes painful.” Houska explained: “Police have been getting pretty brutal in recent weeks. They’ve been shooting ‘less lethals’ at us, and using pain compliance tactics. So torturing people, really engaging in behaviors that are quite shocking, I think. Which means a lot of care, and community is really important for us on the front lines.”
Houska says sustaining the struggle also means making time to acknowledge “the hurt that we’re experiencing in real time” while also naming and uplifting “the reasons we’re engaging in struggle, [which is for] the littles, and those to come, and the four-legged and the winged, and the rivers, and the wild rice.”
Houska also notes that the violence of fossil fuel extraction embodies the longstanding violence of colonialism, with large influxes of transient workers at so-called “man camps” (temporary housing camps of mostly male pipeline construction workers) destroying the life-giving ecosystems that sustain Native communities, while also inflicting violence on Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. For years, Native leaders have sought to raise awareness about the measurable increase in sexual assaults, murders and disappearances of Native women in areas where “man camps” are established. To highlight this threat, Water Protectors hosted by the Giniw Collective’s camp recently staged a blockade action in front of the Line 3 “man camp,” in which an “all-BIPOC group of mostly Indigenous femmes [and] two-spirits” locked themselves to an overturned vehicle, and other equipment.
“Man camps” are the modern embodiment of colonial raiding parties that have historically seized upon Native land, looted Indigenous resources and inflicted sexual violence on Native women. Today, pipeline workers and police inflict the violence of colonialism on Indigenous people, enacting the true character of capitalism for the world to see, while relying on the public’s lack of concern for Native people and the environment as they commit atrocities in plain sight.
A war is being waged against land and water defenders in the U.S., just as a war is being waged globally against environmental activists, by corporations and world governments, in order to maintain the repetitions of capitalism: extraction, exploitation, destruction, disposal, and the consolidation of wealth and resources. Globally, violence against environmental activists has hit record highs in recent years, with Indigenous people facing disproportionately high rates of murder and brutality for their organizing. Indigenous people make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but steward over 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. In some parts of the world, such as Colombia and the Philippines, the assassination of Indigenous activists has become increasingly common. Here in the United States, Indigenous activists have faced escalating violence and criminalization while acting in opposition to pipeline construction and other extraction efforts.
While many people recoil from any discussion of the reality of climate change, catastrophes like Hurricane Ida, and the Dixie and Caldor fires in California, are making the subject harder to avoid. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021 climate report, environmental catastrophes will continue to accelerate over the coming decades, but human beings still have something to say about the severity of the damage. Coming to terms with the existential threat of climate collapse can easily lead to distress and despair, but with so much at stake, it is imperative that we not only absorb statistics and haunting images of destruction, but also zero in on the front lines of struggles like the fight against Line 3, where Water Protectors are modeling a relationship with the Earth that could help guide us into a new era.
The Theft of Water
The Giniw Collective has been vocal about Enbridge’s overuse of local water supplies during an ongoing drought. Enbridge was initially authorized to pump about 510 million gallons of water out of the trenches it’s digging, but in June, the company claimed it had encountered more groundwater than it had anticipated, and obtained permission to pump up nearly 5 billion gallons of water, in order to complete the project. According to Line 3 opponents, Enbridge paid a fee of $150 to adjust its permit.
Giniw Collective members say it’s unconscionable that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources would allow Enbridge to displace so much water, particularly during a drought. “We’ve been in an extreme drought all summer long,” says Houska. “The rivers have been dry, the waterfalls are empty, and the wildfires have spread into Ontario and up on the north shore of Lake Superior.”
Activists organizing against Line 3 and members of the White Earth Nation argue that Enbridge’s voracious consumption of local groundwater threatens local wetlands, including cherished wild rice beds. “With higher than average temperatures and lower than average precipitation, displacing this amount of water will have a direct detrimental impact on the 2021 wild rice crop,” wrote Michael Fairbanks and Alan Roy, tribal chairman and secretary-treasurer of the White Earth Nation.
According to the UN, “By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.” Scientific projections suggest that many regions of the U.S. may see their water supplies reduced by a third, even as they face increased demand for water due to a growing population. As world temperatures rise, and water scarcity continues to escalate, Enbridge is displacing 500 billion gallons of groundwater to build a pipeline that will transport 915,000 barrels of tar sands crude oil per day, threatening more than 200 water ecosystems — including 389 acres of wild rice, which are a source of sacred sustenance for the Anishinaabe.
The White Earth Nation has brought a “rights of nature” lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, in an effort to defend wild rice, or manoomin, which means “good berry” in the Ojibwe language, against the destruction being waged by Enbridge. According to Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Ojibwe tribe, for the Ojibwe people, manoomin “is like a member of the family, a relative,” which means “legally designating manoomin as a person … aligns with the Ojibwe world view.” As Pember writes, “According to [the United Nations’ 6th Assessment on Climate Change], recognition of Indigenous rights, governance systems and laws are central to creating effective adaptation and sustainable development strategies that can save humanity from the impacts of climate change.”
The suit is only the second rights of nature case to be filed in the United States and the first to be filed in tribal court. But as Pember notes, “Several tribes, however, have incorporated rights of nature into their laws.”
According to the nonprofit organization Honor the Earth, “The proposed new oil pipelines in northern MN violate the treaty rights of the Anishinaabeg by endangering critical natural resources in the 1854, 1855, and 1867 treaty areas.” In a statement outlining the alleged treaty violations, Honor the Earth explains, “The pipelines threaten the culture, way of life, and physical survival of the Ojibwe people. Where there is wild rice, there are Anishinaabeg, and where there are Anishinaabeg, there is wild rice. It is our sacred food. Without it we will die. It’s that simple.”
Buying the Police
During the movement in Standing Rock, we saw that resistance to pipeline construction can generate significant costs for local governments. In 2018, Morton County Commissioner Cody Schulz claimed that protests that aimed to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) cost the county almost $40 million. But rather than serving as a deterrent to other municipalities considering pipeline permits, the cost of the NoDAPL protests have been leveraged by authorities to more blatantly merge the interests of police and oil companies.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission included a provision in Enbridge’s permit for the project that requires the company to establish an escrow trust that would reimburse local law enforcement for any mileage, wages, protective gear and training related to the construction of Line 3. In order to access the finds, law enforcement agencies submit requests for reimbursement to a state appointed account manager — a former deputy police chief — who approves or denies the requests. In April of 2020, The Minnesota Reformerreported that Enbridge had paid over $500,000 to local law enforcement in support of pipeline construction. That number has since ballooned to $2 million.
“The level of brutality that is experienced by Indigenous people and allies in struggle with us is extreme,” Houska told me. “About a month ago now, I was a part of a group that experienced rubber bullets and mace being fired at us at very, very close range,” said Houska. “I was hit several times, but I also witnessed young people with their heads split open, bleeding down their faces … and sheriffs have been using pain compliance on people, which is essentially torture. They dislocated someone’s jaw a couple weeks ago.”
As Ella Fassler recently reported in Truthout, “More than 800 Water Protectors have been arrested or cited in the state since November 2020, when the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) approved the Line 3 permit.” The total number of arrests along Line 3, since November of 2020, has surpassed the total number of arrests during the Standing Rock protests, in which nearly 500 people were arrested. The charges Water Protectors and land defenders face are likewise escalating. According to the Pipeline Legal Action Network, 80 Water Protectors were charged with felonies during July and August of 2021, and as Mollie Wetherall, a legal support organizer with the legal action network told Fassler, “It’s clear that they really are in a moment where they want to intimidate people as the construction of this pipeline winds down.”
Direct actions similar to those that garnered misdemeanor charges two years ago have more recently led to felony charges. According to the Giniw Collective, which has bailed out hundreds of Water Protectors, individual bonds have often run between $10,000 and $25,000, making bail fundraising a crucial point of solidarity work.
Disturbingly, in late July, two Water Protectors were charged with felony assisted suicide for allegedly crawling into the pipeline as part of a lockdown action. Officials claim the pipeline was an estimated 130 degrees and lacked oxygen. The criminal complaint lodged against the two activists claims that they “did intentionally advise, encourage, or assist another who attempted but failed to take the other’s own life.” The charge of felony assisted suicide carries a 7-year prison sentence, $14,000 fine or both. If convicted, the Water Protectors could face up to 13 years behind bars.
For refusing to embrace the death march of capitalism, and resisting the destruction of most life on Earth, two Line 3 opponents are being charged with attempted assisted suicide. “These are 20, 21, 22-year-old people, who are literally chaining themselves to the machines, crawling inside of pipes, doing everything and anything they can to have a future,” says Houska. “And the charges being waged, like felony theft and felony assisted suicide for people who are trying to protect all life, [are] absolutely appalling, and a horrific reality of Water Protectors being imprisoned while the world burns around us.”
Members of Congress, including “the Squad,” signed a letter to President Biden on August 30, 2021, calling on the president to “uphold the rights guaranteed to Indigenous people under federal treaties and fulfill tribal requests for a government-to-government meeting concerning Line 3.” Among other concerns, the letter cited the troubling financial ties between Enbridge and local law enforcement, stating:
Law enforcement entities in the region have received around $2 million from Enbridge to pay for police activity against water protectors, which has included staggering levels of violence, tear gas, and rubber bullets. While Enbridge was required to pay these costs under project permits, leaders have noted they create a conflict of interest as law enforcement are incentivized to increase patrols and arrests surrounding pipeline construction.
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also hosted a press conference on September 3 to draw further attention to the struggle to stop Line 3, which included remarks from U.S. Representatives Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Mary Kunesh-Podein. During the press conference, Omar declared, “The climate crisis is happening and the last thing we need to do is allow the very criminals who created this crisis to build more fossil fuel infrastructure.” Bush, Presseley, Tlaib and Kunesh-Podein also visited the Giniw Collective’s Namewag Camp to hear from Water Protectors firsthand about the struggle. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that she had planned to join the group as well, but her plans were derailed by the climate impacts of Hurricane Ida in her district.
Finding a Home on the Front Lines
Despite the brutality protectors have faced, people have continued to answer the call to head to the front lines. After years of engaging in solidarity actions at banks and financial institutions that are funding the construction of Line 3, one activist — who asked to be identified by the name Marla, so as not to facilitate state surveillance of her actions — left her job as a nanny in Chicago and headed to the front lines in May of 2021. “I had never seen a pipeline before,” Marla told me. “I had only done solidarity organizing up until this point. Land defense was something new entirely to me, but I knew that bank actions alone were not going to stop this pipeline.” Marla saw heading to the front lines as “a tangible way to show up as an accomplice for Indigenous sovereignty.”
While living at Namewag has meant bearing witness to police violence, deforestation and constant state surveillance, Marla says it has also meant experiencing “a microcosm of the world we all want to build.” Marla says the Giniw Collective’s camp “an incredible place to live in community and resistance.”
“Living at Namewag shows us what a post-capitalist world could begin to look like,” says Marla, “where labor is valued because it keeps our community safe, skilled up and fed from the land.” Marla says the camp is a place “to see accountability in action, to learn and unlearn, and do better.” While police and the surveillance state can be intimidating, Marla says, “We keep each other safe working overnight security shifts by night and supporting folks taking action by day.” Marla also describes the camp as a joyful place, even amid pain and struggle. “Cooking meals from the garden, living outside among the trees, washing the camp’s dishes, [providing] elder and childcare, and making space for joy — all of these things sustain us.”
“People have consistently been showing up for the struggle,” Houska told me. “And that is a beautiful thing to witness and be part of.” Houska says that almost 90 percent of Line 3 construction is now complete. “We are still resisting, in the face of that reality,” says Houska. “So, if you’re planning to show up, please show up with your heart, and your good intentions and do your best to find your way to the place that calls to you.” Houska also encourages supporters to “use whatever platform or voice and agency you have to call on the Biden administration, and also to call on other people around you” to take action to stop the pipeline.
“This fight is not just about looking upwards,” says Houska. “It’s also looking at each other. This is our world, and no one else is going to protect it, but all of us.”
To learn more about other powerful movement work like the struggle against Line 3 and mutual aid efforts across the country, check out our podcast “Movement Memos,” which will release its next episode on Wednesday, September 15.
In the early morning hours of September 8, 2018, Marcus Deon Smith, a 38-year-old Black man who was suffering from a mental health crisis and was pleading to be taken to the hospital, was instead fatally hog-tied by eight white Greensboro, North Carolina, police officers, two of whom were supervisors who refused to intervene to stop the brutal process.
The Greensboro Police Department (GPD) and the City of Greensboro then embarked on a cover-up that continues to this day. Similar to the initial press release issued by the Minneapolis Police Department in the George Floyd case, the GPD chief of police, after reviewing the police body camera videos, issued twosuccessive press releases in which he and his department omitted the crucial operative fact — that Smith was hog-tied — while falsely asserting that he “collapsed” while in police custody. They maintained this fiction until Smith’s father and the family’s lawyer viewed the police body camera videos and the North Carolina Medical Examiner publicly announced that Smith’s death was a homicide with the leading cause being prone restraint (that is, hog-tied with a RIPP Hobble belt wrapped around the ankles and attached to the handcuffed wrists behind the back while face down on the ground).
These events compelled the city to publicly release the videos, but its obvious attempt at damage control only intensified public outrage, and the protests were taken to the floor of the city council, to Black churches and to the streets in weekly “Mondays for Marcus” demonstrations. Smith’s mother Mary became a powerful spokesperson for the movement, a role that she has continued to assume despite her continuing grief and anger.
Undeterred, the GPD conducted a sham internal “investigation,” publicly exonerated the officers before its “investigation” was complete, and followed with a report that failed to probe either the obvious failures in training and supervision, or whether there was a GPD practice of similar brutal hog-tyings, while formally absolving all of the officers.
After numerous local Black ministers and the North Carolina NAACP called for an independent investigation, the Greensboro City Council, in April 2019, agreed to consider doing so, only to indefinitely table the proposal two weeks later after the Smith family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force and municipal liability.
The Smith Family’s Lawsuit
The lawsuit and the battles to interrogate the city and police officials responsible for Smith’s death and the resultant cover-up began to take center-stage in the fall of 2020 after Federal District Court Judge Loretta Biggs denied the city’s attempt to dismiss the case on the basis of qualified immunity, and its subsequent plea to stay the discovery process. This occurred in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the worldwide protests that followed, and demonstrators at a “Blackout North Carolina” rally raised up Smith as “Greensboro’s George Floyd.” Feeling the pressure, Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan publicly embraced the obvious similarities between the police-perpetrated murders, saying, “To all who are outraged by the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Marcus Deon Smith, and so many others, I hear you. I hear your anger, your pain, your frustration of justice denied for far too long. I hear you crying out for a new way, for changes in policies, in systems and structures.”
The city hired the local defense firm of Mullins Duncan Harrell & Russell at taxpayers’ expense, to defend the city and the police in the case, while utilizing the city attorney, Chuck Watts, as the primary front man for the continuing attack on the Smith family, its legal team and the community activists who were focusing the demand that “Black Lives Matter” on the Marcus Smith case. Shortly after Vaughan’s statement, Watts announced that the “unfortunate death of Mr. Marcus Smith was totally different than what happened to Mr. Floyd,” and accused respected community activist Lewis Pitts, who was working closely with the Smith legal team, of having “pimped” the Black clergy of Greensboro. Watts would later tell community activists in a widely publicized statement that Marcus Smith’s life was not worth six figures.
The Battle for Transparency
In the lawsuit, the city cloaked all of the thousands of pages of police documents which they produced with a “highly confidential” designation, including those that revealed 275 incidents of hog-tying that occurred over the four years prior to Smith’s death. The parade of city and police officials — the mayor, city manager, the current and former chiefs, command and supervisory officers, and the eight police hog-tyers — all closed ranks behind a shared code of silence in their lengthy deposition testimony, with Mayor Vaughan walking back her statement connecting Smith to George Floyd, and another prior public statement where she accused the chief of lying in his September 2018 press releases.
The movement on the streets continued to demand a fair settlement, a public apology, a public memorial and transparency in the Marcus Smith case. The city responded in court by moving to hold the Smith lawyers, including the author of this article, in contempt for allegedly disseminating to community activists and the media non-confidential testimony and documents and for making public statements about the case, while claiming that the Smith lawyers had acted unethically. They also attempted to file non-confidential documents that outlined the cover-up secretly under court seal. Their blunderbuss attack also roped in Pitts and another stalwart community activist, Hester Petty, together with an independent journalist , Ian McDowell, who had received the North Carolina Press Award for his work exposing the Smith cover-up, and a prior Truthout article on the case was also cited as an alleged transgression.
The Smith lawyers fought back by defending their right as public interest lawyers in an important civil rights case to inform the public and to combat the false and slanderous statements made by Watts, Vaughan and other City and police officials. On August 2, 2021, Magistrate Judge Joe Webster denied the City’s motion. Vindicating the Smith family’s position and the broader First Amendment and transparency rights that were at risk, the judge wrote:
In a case involving a government and its agents, the public’s access to judicial materials is essential to fulfill the public’s role as a guardian of both its judicial system and its elected officials. This Court did not enter the P[rotective] O[rder] to stifle that role, and it will not punish Plaintiff for responding to the narrative originally put forth by Defendants from the date of Mr. Smith’s death.
Evidence of a Pattern and Practice of Hog-Tying Is Revealed
The pretrial battles for video evidence demonstrating a routine practice of GPD hog-tying have now also come to a head. In June 2020, the Smith family lawyers first sought this evidence, but the city resisted. This resistance continued throughout the discovery process, with the city’s lawyers — who, according to Freedom of Information figures provided by the city, have now collected $1.1 million in publicly funded fees — finally producing police body camera videos after being ordered to do so first by the magistrate judge in April 2021, and subsequently, on June 25, by District Judge Biggs, to whom they had appealed. After receiving the “highly confidential” videos on July 20 — after the discovery period had closed — the Smith lawyers watched all of the highly disturbing videos, and in early August, asked the judge to reopen the discovery process so that we could question the hog-tie officers and responsible city officials about the videos. Additionally, we moved the court to make the videos, redacted to protect the privacy of the victims, publicly available. In our motion, the lawyers summarized what we saw on the videos.
Of the 50 incidents produced, 38 of the victims (76 percent) were Black, and 39 (78 percent) were of color;
84 percent of the hog-tiers were white, 24 of the victims (48 percent) were women, and all of these women were hog-tied either by all male officers (58 percent) or by a crew of majority white officers (42 percent).
Analysis of the police reports from 2014 to September 2018 where “maximum restraint” was mentioned, showed 275 incidents, with 68 percent of the victims being Black, and 17 percent suffering from a mental health crisis;
Several of the eight officers who participated in the hog-tying of Marcus Smith, and the supervising sergeant and corporal, were repeat hog-tiers, with one having 16 prior hog-tie complaints.
The motion also summarized individual incidents of racially and sexually discriminatory use of painful, deeply humiliating and potentially life-endangering hog-tying:
A Black woman hog-tied by a Defendant with her legs at less than 90 degrees from her body, left prone on the ground for more than five minutes, with her breasts exposed, yelling and screaming in pain, outrage and humiliation;
Other persons expressing pain, with eight also saying that they could not breathe;
Indifference and verbal abuse by the Defendant hog-tiers to the pain and suffering of the victims;
Numerous examples of people with their legs bent at an angle of less than 90 degrees from their back, including during an incident only hours before Marcus Smith was hog-tied;
An officer tightening the RIPP Hobble restraint device beyond the 90-degree angle despite being told by a fellow officer not to do so;
An officer complaining that they don’t make the RIPP Hobbles like they used to, and that the new ones hurt more;
An officer responding to an older Black woman peacefully asking for her lawyer by hog-tying her while she screamed out in pain;
An officer, while hog-tying a Black victim without apparent cause, saying that he ends up RIPP Hobbling people all the time for “some reason”;
A veteran officer saying that “just about every time” he’s had to use a RIPP Hobble, he’s had to go back and get a new one “because it’s covered in blood”;
On one occasion, an officer has his knee on the neck of a pregnant Black female victim, similar to how George Floyd was fatally restrained, for more than 2 minutes while she is being hog-tied; she is prone, hog-tied and crying out that she can’t breathe;
An elderly woman suffering from dementia was RIPP Hobbled while she repeatedly complained that the officers were hurting her arms. She was crying while on the ground, facedown, with her dress up throughout the RIPP Hobbling;
Officers put pressure on the head, back, and/or buttocks of the victims on numerous occasions while hog-tying, and pushed a victim’s face into the ground;
Victims were left in a prone position after hog-tying on numerous occasions;
Several hog-tied victims were placed face down in a squad car.
In the wake of the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, City Councilmember Michelle Kennedy, a sometimes-outspoken critic of the GPD, once again called for transparency, as well as for an independent investigation, this time not only into the handling of the Marcus Smith case, but also into the systemic problems within the police department. Once again, the council initially decided to take up her request, but in early June of this year, in a secret closed-door meeting, and in apparent violation of the open meetings act, rejected the proposal. To add insult to injury, Kennedy was forced to publicly read the council’s statement rejecting her request to investigate that was drafted by Chuck Watts. On August 18, 2021, Mayor Vaughan announced that Kennedy, who had again broken ranks in her June 29, 2021, deposition testimony in the Smith case by calling out the cover-up, had resigned, effective immediately, ostensibly to take another city job.
The Movement for Black Lives in Greensboro continues to fight on behalf of Marcus Smith’s loved ones. Frustrated by the city’s continued secrecy, denials, resistance to a decent settlement and refusal to admit any wrongdoing, the community, on the eve of the third anniversary of Smith’s homicide, in a letter signed by numerous community and religious organizations and activists, including Rev. William Barber III, has formally called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the GPD’s racially and sexually discriminatory patterns and practices of policing, as most recently demonstrated by the hog-tie videos, by a previous pattern of racially discriminatory stops and arrests, and by repeated incidents of police violence and misconduct.
Hopefully, the Justice Department will hear the powerful cry of the movement and the compelling evidence that supports it, and not be deterred by Greensboro’s “liberal veneer,” which long-time Greensboro activist Rev. Nelson Johnson has correctly identified as a mask for its “reactionary underbelly.”
Without doubt, the Marcus Smith case, and the issue of hog-tying as a method of brutal restraint most often used against people of color, is not only an issue of local importance, but also commands national attention and official condemnation as a dehumanizing and life-threatening police tactic that has been repeatedly used at Guantánamo, at Camp Delta in Iraq and in U.S. prisons as a component of torture.
President Biden will address the nation tomorrow on the ongoing COVID pandemic. Early reports suggest it will be a somber affair, bereft of the optimism that suffused the country at the outset of the summer. The president will lay out a “six-pronged strategy” for dealing with COVID through the fall, a strategy that will not include a national vaccine mandate, according to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
What happened? The Delta variant, in combination with an intractable segment of the population that rejects science because they think it voted against Donald Trump, happened. There were more than 152,000 new infections yesterday, and the economy — which was widely expected to be in high gear by Labor Day — is once again throwing smoke from the vents.
Worse, kids are taking this latest surge straight in the teeth. Pediatric cases of COVID have erupted since children started returning to school. Weekly cases of COVID among children topped 250,000 for the first time since the pandemic began, and a full quarter of all COVID cases for the week of September 2 were among kids. This will likely continue to be a crisis until children under 12 are able to get vaccinated, and the crisis is landing right in the middle of classrooms.
Biden has quite a daunting task before him, made all the more perilous by the fact that Delta is not the only dangerous COVID variant in play, although it is overwhelmingly the most prevalent in the United States, still accounting for 99 percent of cases here. Variant Mu, B.1.621, is one example of the new breed. Mu was first identified in Ecuador and Colombia in January. The World Health Organization (WHO) has officially designated Mu as a “variant of interest,” a rating one step below “variant of concern,” the highest rating for danger to the populace. (Delta is a variant of concern.)
According to the WHO, “A SARS-CoV-2 variant with genetic changes that are predicted or known to affect virus characteristics such as transmissibility, disease severity, immune escape, diagnostic or therapeutic escape; AND identified to cause significant community transmission or multiple COVID-19 clusters, in multiple countries with increasing relative prevalence alongside increasing number of cases over time, or other apparent epidemiological impacts to suggest an emerging risk to global public health.”
Put simply, there is some fear within viral research circles that the mutations found in Mu may allow the variant to interfere with our vaccine-enhanced immunity. This has been the nightmare scenario since variants first began appearing, and they began appearing because the virus was allowed to run rampant without serious checks for so long.
At this juncture, the Mu variant has spread to more than four dozen countries. It has been found in 49 of the 50 U.S. states, including Alaska and Hawaii, but excepting Nebraska (Hawaii disputes the existence of Mu in that state). One health care facility, Houston Methodist Hospital, currently reports some 50 patients who have been infected with the Mu variant.
Thank goodness there are serious conservatives taking this seriously … ha, I almost made it to the end of that sentence, because seriously, we’re pretty screwed. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio climbed up onto his Twitter perch on Monday to proclaim, “Vaccine mandates are un-American.” Some good folks on that social network took pains to remind Jordan that no lesser light than George Washington, “the commander in chief of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, made the bold decision in 1777 to require that his troops be immunized after a smallpox outbreak devastated the nation,” according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, demand for ivermectin, the livestock dewormer that does not cure COVID no matter what you’ve heard on the radio, is exploding in the portions of the country where vaccine refusal has become some bent badge of honor. And even in Chicago, QAnon supporters are bombarding AMITA Resurrection Medical Center, demanding that doctors administer ivermectin to a fellow-Q patient there. As of this writing, the doctors have refused to accept medical advice from that group.
Not to sound the dire note, but we could look back at the end of this summer as perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in history. Remember the spring? It really felt like we had a handle on this thing, with vaccination rates soaring and infection rates plummeting. I was actually looking forward to sending my daughter back to school in school. Now, I pick her up wondering if this is the day she gets sick, or gets me sick, or gets her Nana sick. I wear my mask anyplace I expect there will be people, and I don’t get strange looks, because most everyone else is masked as well.
There is cause to believe the Mu variant may actually find itself getting suppressed by the Delta variant, as if all this wasn’t strange enough. Survival of the fittest is also apparently the rule with viruses, and Delta is showing signs of “outperforming” Mu. John P. Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, told Newsweek, “The key thing is, it’s just not spreading much.”
This would be happier news, but for the fact that we are currently getting run over by Delta, with no clear resolution in sight. Optimistic voices are at pains to tell us this pandemic will end someday, because all pandemics do. I look forward to the day with great relish. Between now and then, however, I think the president is going to have to revisit his refusal to levy a national vaccine mandate, and businesses, schools and other institutions will have to do the same. Another lethal variant wave like the one we currently endure may leave no choice in the end. It’s getting positively existential around here.
One hundred and sixty years ago, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress. The event entirely lacked the fluffery of the modern State of the Union Address; Lincoln wrote a letter and had it delivered to the Capitol, where it was read aloud to however many members felt like lending an ear.
At the midpoint of his message, Lincoln made a statement that would be nothing short of economic heresy today. “Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” he said. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
As this is a nation founded on the notion of plunder, whose first major industry was the exploitation of enslaved people’s labor by capital, labor has always taken a back seat to the priorities of concentrated wealth. For its part, capital has never shied away from playing deadly dirty to defend its interests. When the power of unions peaked in the manufacturing sector midway through the last century, for one example, capital shipped those jobs overseas en masse, shredding the power of unions for generations.
This is hardly the only instance of capital breaking its opposition across its knee. A century ago last week, coal miners in Blair, West Virginia, rose up in revolt against the deadly and deplorable conditions they were made to work in. The New York Timesreports:
In late August 1921, thousands of rifle-bearing coal miners marched to this thickly wooded ridge in southern West Virginia, a campaign that was ignited by the daylight assassinations of union sympathizers but had been building for years in the oppressive despair of the coal fields. The miners’ army was met at Blair Mountain by thousands of men who volunteered to fight with the Logan County sheriff, who was in the pay of the coal companies. Over 12 miles and five days, the sheriff’s men fought the miners, strafing the hillsides with machine-gun fire and dropping homemade bombs from planes. There were at least 16 confirmed deaths in the battle, though no one knows exactly how many were killed before the US Army marched in to put a stop to the fighting.
The Battle of Blair Mountain, as it came to be called, was the largest insurrection in the U.S. since the Civil War. This was not a group of states seeking to set up shop in their own country. This was labor taking a stand against capital. It was not the only such incident; the Battle of Evarts in Kentucky and the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado featured ownership using horrific levels of violence to quell labor uprisings. The Blair Mountain fight stands apart from Ludlow in one vital respect: Ludlow is remembered and commemorated in Colorado, while the Battle of Blair Mountain is mostly forgotten.
“In the final room of the Mine Wars Museum, Kimberly McCoy, the museum’s resident guide, and a great-niece of Sid Hatfield, opened up five different West Virginia history textbooks from the 1930s to the 1980s to the section where ‘the Battle of Blair Mountain should have been,’ Kim said, ‘but they’re all empty,’” writes Samuel Fleischman for The Nation. “In 1920, Governor Ephraim Morgan set up an American Constitutional Association to select the textbooks used in West Virginia schools, which excluded any mention of the state’s mine wars. Generations grew up cut off from their ancestors’ struggles because business leaders were afraid history would repeat itself.”
A century later, the U.S. is fighting a pitched “culture war” battle over what right-wingers are describing as the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. As Elias Rodriques and Clinton Williamson point out in their recent Truthout article, “In actuality critical race theory is a subgenre of legal studies that emerged in the 1970s and that plumbs the ways in which race and gender structure U.S. laws and policies, excluding some and granting rights to others.” But the right wing is now using the term as a catch-all for any discussion of racism, sexism or other forms of oppression, seeking to ban discussions of truths that they see as threatening to their white supremacist priorities. Furthermore, they see it as bad for business, an affront to the advertising that has millions believing this is the “greatest nation on Earth,” even when all available metrics vividly say otherwise.
While the current efforts to stifle discussions of racism and sexism in schools are different in meaningful ways from the forces that suppressed public education about the Mine Wars of West Virginia, they share certain commonalities. Simply put: Facts destabilize fictions, and fictions are the adhesive that allows capital to hold and maintain power. If you’ve never heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain, you would not know that U.S. business leaders machine-gunned and bombed workers who only sought a modicum of dignity and safety in their labors. If you know, you may be motivated to act, and that right there is what capital seeks to quash.
It is no small irony that a century later, the coal powers of West Virginia once again stand in the path of progress. A much-needed $3.5 trillion budget bill will soon come to a vote in Congress. Its fate hinges on the actions of one man: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Coal in his home state. Manchin has made noises about the bill costing too much, but in truth, he stands against it because several climate-related elements of the legislation will be bad for Big Coal’s bottom line, and he has gotten his marching orders from the interests that line his campaign pockets.
For its part, capital likewise detests this bill, because it pays for itself with taxes levied against the wealthy and corporations, and seeks to protect the environment in ways that might shrink profits in the name of rescuing the species. Capital has set up a seamless little feudal economy in the U.S., where the top 1 percent has sheared $50 trillion from the bottom 90 percent over the last few decades. It has no interest in surrendering this particular catbird seat.
It is all unsustainable on its face, but powered into continued existence by the fact that most people have not heard the stories about those who fought back. If we tell the stories, new legends will grow, and we may come to realize that we are not as powerless as capital would have us believe.
My family escaped Afghanistan and resettled in the U.S. in the early 1990s, when I was a child. Even as I grew accustomed to life in the United States, I mourned the separation from my beautiful home country. Hardly a decade had passed before my new home country waged war on Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11.
From the very beginning of the war on Afghanistan Afghan women have been selectively and opportunistically used as pawns to justify military intervention and nation building. For example, less than two months after the launch of the war, First Lady Laura Bush gave a speech saying, “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Fast-forward 20 years, and former president George W. Bush, who launched the war on Afghanistan, expressed concern for Afghan women in response to the news that Biden was withdrawing troops, saying “I’m afraid Afghan women and girls are going to suffer unspeakable harm.” However, U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan was never actually about protecting Afghans. That the Bush administration used an illegal war to feign concern for Afghan women was yet another level of violence that that the U.S. government inflicted on Afghanistan and its people.
In my visits to Afghanistan in 2011, 2012 and 2013, I witnessed the violence of the U.S. military occupation firsthand. The capital city of Kabul felt like an open-air prison with U.S. military and NATO forces surrounding and blockading the city. U.S. soldiers and vehicles had priority over everyone and everything; Afghans had to stand back and give them right of way. I never felt safe during these visits, and it wasn’t the norm for any Afghan, regardless of gender identity, to speak of feeling safe. There were a handful of suicide attacks while I was there. One day I was shopping in a well-known and heavily populated market; 24 hours later, that exact market was attacked by a suicide bomber and suffered high casualties. The fact that I was in that exact location just 24 hours ago really impacted me for the remainder of my trip, and it still haunts me to this day. That was life in Afghanistan under the U.S. occupation.
I spent most of my time in Kabul, supposedly the safest city in all of Afghanistan. But when I traveled outside Kabul, it was another world, free of occupation and violence; the mountains, rivers, and rural landscape were so breathtakingly beautiful and calming. That’s the Afghanistan I like to remember. The military occupation did nothing for my country or my people, especially women. Now the country has completely fallen to the mercy of the misogynistic and brutal Taliban, and as an Afghan in the diaspora, I honestly wonder if I will ever be able to set foot on Afghan soil again.
While I never believed the U.S. to be the savior of Afghan women, the U.S. failure to prevent the Taliban from once again assuming power shows that the stated mission articulated by the U.S. in the early days of the war has not been “accomplished” in the last two decades, especially in relation to women. Instead, women have been harmed by the Taliban and the U.S. alike. The fear, anxiety and despair that has gripped Afghans both in Afghanistan and in the diaspora is impossible to express in words. The Afghan people are urgently in need of the protection and support of the international community. The rapid advancement of the Taliban has proven how precarious the current situation is. The most extreme members of the Taliban are ruthless fanatics vowing once again to subjugate Afghan women to extreme human rights abuses. Their dominance threatens to yield systematic persecution against individuals based on gender, ethnic background and religious beliefs. This past week, the U.S. abandoned Afghan women abruptly and without sufficient aid or support for evacuation, proving that they never cared about women’s rights and security in Afghanistan. In the last few weeks, numerous Afghan women have gone into hiding in Kabul. Women’s rights activists, journalists, young students and women NGO workers are all fearing backlash from the Taliban. My heart has always bled for my Afghan sisters, and even more so now. And as an Afghan American woman, I feel it is my responsibility to be a voice for women in Afghanistan and hold the international community accountable for their safety and security.
The perpetual narrative that the U.S. has always put forth is that it is saving Afghans from themselves. But we don’t need to be saved by the U.S. — we are the ones who will determine our future. As young Afghan American influencers are making noise and spreading awareness on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, this new generation, born and raised in the U.S., express their American roots but have not forgotten their ancestral roots either. Their voices matter and I beg my fellow Americans to listen to them first and foremost. The U.S. has demonstrated a lack of care for the Afghan people time and time again, both by waging war on Afghanistan in the first place and in the way paternalistic government and media narratives have drowned out the voices of actual Afghan and Afghan American women.
In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld, who was an architect of the war in Afghanistan, stated, “We did not start the war… So let there be not doubt, responsibility for every single casualty in this war, be they innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of Taliban and Al Qaeda.” From the beginning therefore, the U.S. has always deflected responsibility and accountability for the war in Afghanistan. This has resulted in callous disregard for the destruction the United States has caused in Afghanistan and the harm and pain it has caused Afghan women.
The U.S. is responsible for the state violence it has inflicted on Afghanistan, and it is imperative for accountability to be included in the discourse surrounding the war. One aspect of accountability is clear: The U.S. must implement an “open borders” policy pertaining to incoming Afghan refugees. This means that the U.S. in addition to the international community must open their borders to Afghan women and other vulnerable groups in Afghanistan that are fleeing the country. This is critical as many are fleeing from the violence in Afghanistan that the U.S. caused over the course of 20 years of perpetual warfare and destruction that only legitimized and paved the way for the return of the Taliban. Providing assistance to Afghan refugees, especially Afghan women, is not an act of benevolence by the U.S.; rather, it is what is owed.
On September 1, the Costs of War Project out of Brown University released its findings on the number of deaths in the post-9/11 wars. Their findings indicate that, in the almost 20 years of the War on Afghanistan, over 46,000 Afghan civilians were killed. This is almost certainly a conservative estimate and the real cost of lives lost is likely much, much higher, particularly when one includes deaths driven by displacement, starvation and other consequences of war. Despite this human cost, the United States has made no effort to acknowledge these deaths in any serious way. This violence must be reckoned with, and that reckoning must include compensation to the families of deceased loved ones and a serious mechanism of accountability for those who caused the war in the first place — namely Bush and his administration officials.
We need accountability from the U.S., for the violence that it has both perpetrated and facilitated and for the everlasting facade of caring about and protecting Afghan women. If U.S. leaders really care about Afghan women, it’s time to implement an open borders policy for refugees. This is the only way forward.
One of the many preposterous claims coming from supporters of the vicious new Texas law against abortion is that bounty hunters — who stand to gain a $10,000 reward from the state — will somehow be “whistleblowers.” The largest anti-abortion group in Texas is trying to attach the virtuous “whistleblower” label to predators who’ll file lawsuits against abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” a woman getting an abortion.
As a journalist and activist, I’ve worked with a range of genuine whistleblowers during the last several decades. Coming from diverse backgrounds, they ended up tangling with institutions ranging from the Pentagon and CIA to the National Security Agency and the Veterans Administration. Their personalities and outlooks varied greatly, but none of them were bullies. None of them wanted to threaten or harm powerless people in distress. On the contrary, the point of the whistleblowing was to hold powerful institutions accountable for violations of human rights.
What the Texas vigilantes will be seeking to do is quite the opposite. The targets will be women who want abortions as well as their allies — people under duress — with pursuers seeing a bullseye on their backs.
The whistleblowers I’ve known have all taken huge risks. Most lost their jobs. Many endured all-out prosecutions on bogus charges, like violating the Espionage Act for the “crime” of informing the public with vital information. Some went to prison. Almost all suffered large — often massive — losses that wrecked their personal finances.
In sharp contrast, the Texans trying to cash in on the new law will risk nothing. While collaborating with the state to spy on the lives of others, they will be striving to enrich themselves.
“The state law created a so-called ‘private right of action’ to enforce the restriction,” in the words of a CNNreport. “Essentially, the legislature deputized private citizens to bring civil litigation — with the threat of $10,000 or more in damages — against providers or even anyone who helped a woman access an abortion after six weeks.”
Calling those who exploit this law “whistleblowers” is a way to turn the true meaning of whistleblowing on its head. We might as well have history books referring to enforcers of the Fugitive Slave Act as “good Samaritans,” or monitors of Jim Crow compliance as “civic activists.”
It’s fitting — and revealing — that the professed “whistleblowing” website thrown up by the big Texas Right to Life organization was welcomed by an internet provider that specializes in hosting services for extreme far-right groups. Thanks to a provider called Epik, the Daily Beastreported, the site “found a new home alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists.” The digital relocation came after the site was booted by GoDaddy on Friday. But before the end of the weekend, even Epik backed away.
One of the enormous dangers of the Texas abortion law is that a Stasi-like culture of betrayal and fear will evolve in the Lone Star State and copycat states, with long-lasting destructive effects. If a friend, neighbor or co-worker can turn someone in and gain a reward for doing so, the ripple effects are going to be corrosive, intensifying over time.
Aided by the U.S. Supreme Court, the state of Texas has now codified misogyny. The results will surely include ongoing deaths, making the coat hanger the state’s unofficial symbol. Real whistleblowing will expose those who profit from victimizing women under cover of this horrible new law.
On May 19, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into legislation the notorious SB 8 anti-abortion bill, aka the “heartbeat law,” which bans abortions after 6 weeks and enables anyone, regardless of where they reside, to sue abortion providers and those who provide financial assistance or transport to anyone trying to obtain an abortion after the six week cut off. On September 1 the legislation went into effect after the Supreme Court ignored an emergency appeal to block enforcement of the law.
The ban on abortions in Texas is devastating, but the provision for lawsuits will make it near impossible for any Texas resident to safely or easily obtain an abortion, even outside of the state. Plaintiffs in these lawsuits would be entitled to damages of at least $10,000, along with legal expenses. This legislation thus incentivizes and provides legal recourse for anti-choicers to mobilize against the right to abortion access. It allows them to sue not only abortion providers, but anyone who helps someone get an abortion, including by something as small as providing a ride to an abortion clinic. Just about anyone can be sued. It provides them material rewards to bring forward these lawsuits and threatens to bog abortion providers down in countless costly lawsuits.
According to The New York Times, this law bars care for at least 85 percent of Texas abortion patients. In addition to making abortion inaccessible for those people, it also means that many abortion clinics may close. Organizations like the Center for Reproductive Rights have sued to block the law before it went into effect, but the Supreme Court has so far remained silent allowing S.B. 8 to become law. This is yet another blow against the fight for a basic health care service that should be indisputably free and readily available on demand.
As someone who grew up in the border city of El Paso, Texas, this is especially devastating to witness. I remember being saturated by conservative and anti-choice messages in El Paso. I thought it was ironic that people could care so much about an embryo or fetus, but were silent on the misogynistic femicides happening right across the border in towns meant to provide workers, products, and profits for U.S. imperialism. I felt haunted by the murders of women in Juarez, Mexico, and it was the first time I started to become aware of how women and other femmes are devalued due to racist patriarchal structures enforced by capitalism.
This “pro-life” hypocrisy remains true for those who give birth in Texas, as the maternal mortality rate is one of the highest in the nation, particularly among Black mothers. The lack of attention to that matter is racist and perfectly exemplifies the lie of the “pro-life” title anti-choicers proudly assert for themselves.
This fiction is again all too apparent in the actions of one such “pro-lifer,” Governor Gregg Abbot himself, who cut extra COVID unemployment benefits in June in an attempt to starve people back into unsafe work in the midst of a pandemic. Rather than a politics of life and healthcare, he’s playing COVID wars by banning mask and vaccine mandates, even as COVID-19 has killed more than 600,000 individuals in the United States alone. The truth is that conservatives are more interested in controlling pregnant people’s bodies than protecting life.
As a nurse practitioner who provides Medical (or drug induced) abortions to pregnant people in New York, I believe that abortion is an important health care service. Not only should it be legal, it should be free and accessible for anyone who needs it. It is an essential part of the fight for Medicare for All and ultimately nationalized healthcare under worker control. It’s folks like me and my co-workers, and the patients we serve, many of them essential workers themselves, who should be making decisions about healthcare, not politicians.
No one should have to justify why they are terminating a pregnancy, but as someone who has been involved in abortion work for over 8 years I’ve seen countless reasons as to why people have abortions, including reasons that have everything to do with the financial burdens created by capitalism.
I myself have experienced unintended pregnancies, one of which I chose to carry to term. I placed my child up for adoption when I was just twenty. It was a traumatic experience to give birth and then relinquish my parental rights. For years, I dealt with the shame and lack of support I felt as a birth mother, an identity that is not often discussed publicly. At the age of 27 I had an abortion at 6 weeks pregnant, shortly before I started nursing school at Yale University. Both experiences stand in contrast to one another: my abortion experience did not leave me traumatized like the adoption and loss of my child from my immediate life did.
One of the tragedies of the S.B. 8 legislation is that it will force many pregnant people to either carry their pregnancies to term or to navigate the impossible obstacles that stand between them and an abortion. S.B. 8 directly targets the working class, people of color, and immigrants because abortions will always be available to the wealthy who can afford to travel to places like New York. UCSF’s Turnaway Study found that those who were denied a wanted abortion and instead gave birth had four times greaters odds of living below the Federal Poverty Level. Additionally the minimum wage in Texas is $7.25, which means that for those who embark on the journey to get an abortion, they’d have to use a majority of their earnings towards travel expenses in addition to childcare, time off work, lodging, and the actual cost of the abortion service itself.
All of this is frustrating to watch as a health care worker who provides abortions every day. I think of my pregnant patient who I administered the abortion pills to after she was sexually assaulted by her husband. She told me about how she worried for her toddler daughter suffering from PTSD after her toddler witnessed the violent dynamic. “I can’t bring a new child into this situation,” my patient sobbed. If this patient lived in Texas, she would be forced to find the means to obtain an abortion or endure the possibility of exposing her newborn child to an abusive father. I’m certain there are numerous pregnant people in Texas facing similar struggles.
The strategy of much of the reproductive rights movement has been to bring lawsuits and hope the Supreme Court upholds reproductive rights. This has been a failing strategy. S.B. 8 is going into effect in Texas today. It’s just another piece of evidence that the court does not stand with people like my patients or the working class. It’s made evident in countless court cases, from the end of the eviction moratorium, to reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy.
South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Idaho have also passed heartbeat bans, and Arkansas and Oklahoma approved near-total abortion bans. To defeat these bills working people must come together to fight for reproductive justice. We need to build a massive movement to defend reproductive rights that are under attack around the country. To do this we will need all feminist, immigrants rights, leftist organizations, and all healthcare unions to unite in this effort.
The collective wealth of the seven wealthiest Americans has now reached nearly $1 trillion. And these seven pay virtually nothing in income tax.
According toForbes, the collective wealth of these seven men — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Larry Ellison — stood at $996 billion at the end of the day on August 25.
That’s a group small enough to fit an SUV.
Think about that. Just seven guys now control about $1 trillion in wealth — that’s about one-third the $3.5-trillion package now before Congress for desperately needed programs that range from dental and vision care for seniors to child tax credits for rescuing millions of families from poverty and measures that can save our burning planet from climate change.
Some vilify that social spending as “unaffordable.” But it turns out that one third of the tab could be covered by the wealth of just 0.0000022 percent of the U.S. population — seven guys in one SUV.
The still deeper connection between the wealth of our “trillion-dollar seven” and that $3.5-trillion in social spending: Whether that spending becomes reality likely will hinge on the votes of so-called political moderates who insist the programs must be “paid for.”
Those same moderates will hold the deciding votes on the “pay fors” advocates for the social spending are proposing: increased taxes on the country’s enormously rich, including the trillion-dollar seven.
And that gets us back to how we got into this mess in the first place.
ProPublica recently exposed what many of us already suspected: Our trillion-dollar seven — and their fellow billionaires — barely pay any tax as a percentage of their true income. Between 2014 and 2018, America’s 25 top billionaires paid federal income tax during that five-year period equal to just 3.4 percent of the increase in their collective wealth over that same period.
Can we change this dynamic?
Yes, but to do so, those political moderates will need to agree to end the tax-avoidance strategy — “Buy-Borrow-Die” — that allows billionaires and the merely super-rich to escape tax on the enormous gains they realize on their investments.
This scam works really quite simply. The wealthy buy an investment or — in the case of the trillion-dollar seven — found a company. Then, as their asset soars in value, they never sell. Instead, they borrow against the increased value of their asset whenever they need cash.
Finally, they die, and each death wipes off the tax liability on all the gain that’s gone untaxed, sometimes for an entire adult lifetime.
What makes the Buy-Borrow-Die strategy possible? The gaping loophole in our tax law known as “stepped-up basis.” Under this loophole, those who sell inherited assets get treated as if they had purchased the assets at their fair market value on the date of the deceased owner’s death.
The end result: If Jeff Bezos’ children inherit his Amazon stock, about $200 billion in gains will face no tax at all.
Our political leaders have been aware of the stepped-up basis loophole for decades, yet have done nothing while the super-rich have been using Buy-Borrow-Die to accumulate obscene piles of untaxed wealth.
But the Biden administration is now calling on Congress to end stepped-up basis to fund the programs we need to move our country forward. Will our lawmakers now summon the courage to tax the trillion-dollar seven?
The pandemic has confronted unions with a historic challenge. COVID-19 and the response to it have simultaneously illuminated and intensified the ways “women’s work,” labor traditionally done by women in and for social reproduction, is both essential and devalued. The pandemic has exposed our dependence on people who are paid to provide physical and emotional care, along with our society’s inability and unwillingness to support and protect these workers as they risk their lives for us. From nurses, therapists and teachers to workers in jobs viewed as less skilled with lower status and pay, like aides in hospitals and nursing homes, restaurant workers and hotel workers, it’s clear the less respect (and money) workers receive, the more disproportionately the job is done by Black, Latinx and Indigenous people, often women. The poor pay and working conditions of much caregiving work reflect not only who is doing the care but for whom it is being done. Low-income people of color get the short end of both sides of the stick.
Social movements for racial and gender equality have exposed disparities at the workplace, giving unions an opening to support workers who most need the protection collective representation brings. We see employers, from nonprofits to transnational corporations, giving verbal homage to correcting inequalities while failing to disrupt underlying inequalities in how work is organized, classified and paid. Outrage at the hyper-exploitation of food delivery services forced some of the most exploitative businesses to modify practices, stating clearly that delivery fees weren’t going to workers and providing ways for customers to tip. We should be fighting for the “gig economy” workers in food services to earn a living wage and have stable hours. Even the modest improvement masks a gender divide. The apps and websites allow customers to tip the workers who do deliveries (mostly young males of color) while the workers who prepare, pick and package food (traditionally women’s work) remain invisible and subject to whims of employers about wages.
Labor Day invites us to commemorate significant contributions unions have made for working people, recognizing courageous sacrifices of workers who lost their jobs and sometimes their lives fighting for the right for us to have collective voice at the workplace, and to force both political parties to pass legislation limiting employers’ exploitation. At the same time, we confront sobering realities of how many advances have been undercut, as labor’s economic and political power and its numbers waned, due in part to widespread acceptance of “business unionism,” which makes workers clients served by a union apparatus, rather than “owners” of their unions. The pandemic has created a global opportunity for disaster capitalism to mask policies that increase exploitation — and profits — in rhetoric about addressing longstanding social inequality. One ominous change is the chilling intensification, development and application of information technology to control workplace conditions; provide social, health and educational services; increase surveillance and data mining; and replace workers with AI.
Employers applaud themselves for boosting the prominence and authority of individuals from historically marginalized groups, substituting this shared power at the top in dominating workers instead of supporting workers’ voice and power. In contrast, when workers organize collectively, independent of the employer, they challenge the employer’s unilateral control over life at work, from pay and hours to the air they breathe, which in the pandemic is literally a matter of life and death. Collective organization brings voice, but whether and how that voice translates into power depends on the extent to which workers control what unions do in their name. Unions are only as strong as workers’ understanding that they, not union staff or officials, “own” their organizations. It’s important we not romanticize workers and diminish the enormousness of what we ask. Given the harsh conditions for work, expecting working people to do the jobs for which they are paid and also help organize their workplaces is a huge ask.
To address this, we need to see the inseparability of struggles for social justice and workplace democracy. We are not diluting our power to improve economic conditions at work when we fight for demands to make our society and workplace more equitable, just and humane. On the contrary, we benefit from the synergy of increased resources and networks, often missed even when unions organize and defend workers who do “women’s work.” They often ignore the power of highlighting the gendered nature of work. UNITE HERE’s campaign opposing Hilton Hotel’s elimination of the daily requirement for cleaning rooms, putting housekeepers’ jobs in jeopardy, rightly highlights how this harms communities of color and low-wage women workers. But what it misses is how housekeeping can be eliminated because “women’s work,” cleaning the home, is taken for granted. Women who do this work, and the work itself, should be valued and respected. Seeing gender (and its intersectionality with race) in labor requires dispelling the inaccurate nostalgia for a white, male cisgender working class. Many Black women have historically worked for pay outside the home (in addition to caring for their own families) when they could. Teachers and nurses have often displayed a resilience and militancy defending their own working conditions and protecting those who are most vulnerable in our society. In this way they are a model for the rest of the labor movement.
When Liz Shuler, the newly elected president of the AFL-CIO, who proudly claims the mantle as first woman to hold this position, tweets “I am humbled, honored and ready to guide this federation forward. I believe in my bones the labor movement is the single greatest organized force for progress,” we must be careful not to accept as reality what is actually a hope, a vision to embrace.
To support labor and realize that vision, we need to say labor officialdom’s actions often undercut our chances of success. For example, the AFL-CIO has gone all in for the PRO Act, and while the legislation is important, the assumption that its passage will solve labor’s problems is a huge mistake. We cannot rely on Biden and the Democrats’ promises of legislation to substitute for workers fighting for what they want and need, for themselves and the society.
When a hospital starts to hire “replacements” for striking nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, who have been on the line for months, demanding conditions that protect patients, the state and national AFL-CIO need to speak up for a state-wide one-day walkout — and provide resources to organize it.
When teachers and staff demand school districts change policies to help keep schools safe, reflecting new dangers brought on by the Delta variant, they deserve to have the state and national teachers’ unions show up with resources for organizing one-day statewide walkouts and protests. As one activist pointed out to me, teacher unions have the most influence over the White House than we’ve had in a generation, and yet both national unions, AFT and NEA are “working as mouthpieces for the administration instead of pushing the envelope.”
Movements fighting for social justice need a massively reinvigorated labor movement, just as much as labor unions need social movements. We need new understandings and enactments of solidarity that recognize how social oppression affects us all. Unions are stronger when they recognize this fact and provide democratic spaces for workers to hammer out political differences and specifics for fighting back. When we use our power on the job to force those who exploit us to hear us, value us, and respect our humanity, we are demanding a new world. The challenge workers and their organizations face is not so different from what women must accomplish when they go into labor — arduous work that requires courage, confidence and hope — the work essential for birthing a new society, which we need and deserve.
In addition to the drastic restrictions it places on a woman’s reproductive and medical care rights, the new Texas abortion law, SB8, will have devastating effects on online speech.
The law creates a cadre of bounty hunters who can use the courts to punish and silence anyone whose online advocacy, education, and other speech about abortion draws their ire. It will undoubtedly lead to a torrent of private lawsuits against online speakers who publish information about abortion rights and access in Texas, with little regard for the merits of those lawsuits or the First Amendment protections accorded to the speech. Individuals and organizations providing basic educational resources, sharing information, identifying locations of clinics, arranging rides and escorts, fundraising to support reproductive rights, or simply encouraging people to consider all their options — now have to consider the risk that they might be sued for merely speaking. The result will be a chilling effect on speech and a litigation cudgel that will be used to silence those who seek to give people truthful information about their reproductive options.
SB8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, encourages private persons to file lawsuits against anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” It doesn’t matter whether that person “knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of the law,” that is, the law’s new and broadly expansive definition of illegal abortion. And you can be liable even if you simply intend to help, regardless, apparently, of whether an illegal abortion actually resulted from your assistance.
And although you may defend a lawsuit if you believed the doctor performing the abortion complied with the law, it is really hard to do so. You must prove that you conducted a “reasonable investigation,” and as a result “reasonably believed” that the doctor was following the law. That’s a lot to do before you simply post something to the internet, and of course you will probably have to hire a lawyer to help you do it.
SB8 is a “bounty law”: it doesn’t just allow these lawsuits, it provides a significant financial incentive to file them. It guarantees that a person who files and wins such a lawsuit will receive at least $10,000 for each abortion that the speech “aided or abetted,” plus their costs and attorney’s fees. At the same time, SB8 may often shield these bounty hunters from having to pay the defendant’s legal costs should they lose. This removes a key financial disincentive they might have had against bringing meritless lawsuits.
Moreover, lawsuits may be filed up to six years after the purported “aiding and abetting” occurred. And the law allows for retroactive liability: you can be liable even if your “aiding and abetting” conduct was legal when you did it, if a later court decision changes the rules. Together this creates a ticking time bomb for anyone who dares to say anything that educates the public about, or even discusses, abortion online.
Given this legal structure, and the law’s vast application, there is no doubt that we will quickly see the emergence of anti-choice trolls: lawyers and plaintiffs dedicated to using the courts to extort money from a wide variety of speakers supporting reproductive rights.
And unfortunately, it’s not clear when speech encouraging someone to or instructing them how to commit a crime rises to the level of “aiding and abetting” unprotected by the First Amendment. Under the leading case on the issue, it is a fact-intensive analysis, which means that defending the case on First amendment grounds may be arduous and expensive.
The result of all of this is the classic chilling effect: many would-be speakers will choose not to speak at all for fear of having to defend even the meritless lawsuits that SB8 encourages. And many speakers will choose to take down their speech if merely threatened with a lawsuit, rather than risk the law’s penalties if they lose or take on the burdens of a fact-intensive case even if they were likely to win it.
The law does include an empty clause providing that it may not be “construed to impose liability on any speech or conduct protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as made applicable to the states through the United States Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.” While that sounds nice, it offers no real protection—you can already raise the First Amendment in any case, and you don’t need the Texas legislature to give you permission. Rather, that clause is included to try to insulate the law from a facial First Amendment challenge — a challenge to the mere existence of the law rather than its use against a specific person. In other words, the drafters are hoping to ensure that, even if the law is unconstitutional — which it is — each individual plaintiff will have to raise the First Amendment issues on their own, and bear the exorbitant costs — both financial and otherwise — of having to defend the lawsuit in the first place.
One existing free speech bulwark — 47 U.S.C. § 230 (“Section 230”) — will provide some protection here, at least for the online intermediaries upon which many speakers depend. Section 230 immunizes online intermediaries from state law liability arising from the speech of their users, so it provides a way for online platforms and other services to get early dismissals of lawsuits against them based on their hosting of user speech. So although a user will still have to fully defend a lawsuit arising, for example, from posting clinic hours online, the platform they used to share that information will not. That is important, because without that protection, many platforms would preemptively take down abortion-related speech for fear of having to defend these lawsuits themselves. As a result, even a strong-willed abortion advocate willing to risk the burdens of litigation in order to defend their right to speak will find their speech limited if weak-kneed platforms refuse to publish it. This is exactly the way Section 230 is designed to work: to reduce the likelihood that platforms will censor in order to protect themselves from legal liability, and to enable speakers to make their own decisions about what to say and what risks to bear with their speech.
But a powerful and dangerous chilling effect remains for users. Texas’s anti-abortion law is an attack on many fundamental rights, including the First Amendment rights to advocate for abortion rights, to provide basic educational information, and to counsel those considering reproductive decisions.
EFF will keep a close eye on the lawsuits the law spurs and the chilling effects that accompany them. If you experience such censorship, please contact info@eff.org.
In 1997, the new Spanish branch of the Guggenheim Museum opened in the autonomous Basque Country, replacing the remains of a once-thriving harbor. Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry designed the building to resemble a large, abstracted fish in a not-so-subtle nod to the maritime-industrial capital. Before the Guggenheim Bilbao even opened, the wind and salt from the Bay of Biscay had already corroded the metallic airplane parts that comprised its facade, leading late art critic Allan Sekula to compare it to “the wreck of an old bomber, stained with the greasy residue of burnt kerosene fuel.” Corporate media has been much kinder to the museum in celebrating the “Bilbao effect,” wherein a flashy building “restores” a waterfront city predominantly through tourism and global brand recognition.
Just a few years later, however, the construction of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi would poke holes in this narrative. Located on Saadiyat Island (or, “island of happiness”) in the United Arab Emirates, the museum and its collaborators drew ire worldwide after a Human Rights Watchreport detailed how South Asian construction workers were underpaid, forcibly indebted, and otherwise pressured into labor. All this was in service to wealthy New York capitalists helping the UAE government turn an island into a tourist destination. It was a landmark moment in the art world, pointing to how closely tied high-profile institutions and luxury real estate had become.
In 2002, historian Andrew Friedman coined the term “Guggenomics” to refer to the museum’s widespread real estate endeavors. Today, Guggenomics continues in the United States as part of the popular narrative that art restores urban communities. Today’s target destinations for new museum projects are often cities heavily impacted by neoliberal austerity, many of which are inhabited by working-class families and local business owners in reasonably priced housing. Communities of color routinely get pushed out of these urban centers — where they historically migrated during the era of suburban white flight — to make way for new waves of gentrification. Commercial art is entangled in this process, primarily through local elites and celebrated institutions.
This was the case with the Bronx in 2015, when real estate developers and art moguls worked together to brand the borough, which is flanked by both Hudson and East rivers. In Queens, the Museum of Modern Art planted its PS1 satellite location in an abandoned public school near the Long Island City waterfront. Today, MoMA PS1 stands surrounded by an excess of new luxury condos. Perhaps most glaringly, the construction of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards — a 28-acre real estate development that opened in 2019 — turned much of western Midtown into a zone of corporate desolation, exacerbated by COVID-19. Labor controversies at multidisciplinary cultural center The Shed and a series of suicides at the climbable Vessel sculpture have escalated this decline and made the future of the riverside complex somewhat unclear.
Now, a new museum planned for Jersey City, New Jersey, begs the question of whether the same moneyed interests can effectively install a big-name arts outpost without harming working-class people living in the surrounding neighborhoods. In June, Mayor Steven Fulop announced that the Centre Pompidou, a Paris-based modern art museum, would open its first-ever satellite location in the industrial Pathside Building. The administration claims that the Pompidou, along with the Loew’s Jersey Theatre (which hosts concerts and performances), would expand Jersey City’s arts resurgence, encouraging Manhattanites and other tourists to make the trip.
Located near a main transportation hub connecting New Jersey and Manhattan, the Pathside Building was originally acquired by the city in 2018. Its plans were unclear for years, although Fulop had long promised a new museum and community center committed to local arts and culture. (The city currently lacks one since the Jersey City Museum closed in 2010.) With easy access to public transit, the Pompidou is Fulop’s bet that a more commercial entertainment nexus will bridge the divide between the newly developed downtown area and historic Journal Square.
Amid these plans, Jersey City is experiencing an affordable housing crisis that Fulop has only marginally addressed since taking office in 2013, escalated by his own development plans. For more than a decade, the city has been undergoing a “redevelopment” that has shifted economic demographics and installed luxury properties from the Kushners and Eliot Spitzer. Fulop’s original mayoral campaign in 2013 promised to address the “Tale of Two Cities” dilemma — a reference to the growing inequalities between the gentrified downtown and more neglected southside municipalities. But little has been done to close that gap, leading residents and activist groups to express concern about the few remaining working-class neighborhoods in Jersey City.
The original Centre Pompidou, designed by European architects Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, is itself a work of postmodern art: a high-tech rectangular building that displays its infrastructure and mechanics on the outside. It sits in the Beaubourg district of Paris’s fourth administrative district, surrounded by 19th-century architecture designed by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. The museum’s 1977 opening, documented for Roberto Rossellini’s final film, was a pivotal event for all modern art museums due to its design and innovative use of exhibition spaces. Now, Fulop is seeking guidance from high-profile artists like Rashid Johnson and Jersey City native KAWS on how to handle art industry politics.
Some costs for the Pompidou may fall on Jersey City taxpayers, along with $24 million from New Jersey’s state budget and private philanthropy. Just before the announcement, the Jersey City Council introduced an $82 million bond, with around $15 million promised to the Pathside Building. The Pompidou is slated to open in 2024, and the city will pay an additional $6 million per year until 2029 for collections and exhibitions plus the rights to use Pompidou branding. While the overall price tag is not finalized, building renovations may also cost up to $30 million before opening.
Plans for the Pathside Building were established in 2018, but the Pompidou partnership seems to have been finalized just weeks before the announcement. In a memo obtained by Truthout, the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency (JCRA) identified that as late as April 15, 2021, the city had not yet found a cultural partner. For a project of this magnitude, cities often pair up with a prominent arts institution or nonprofit to collaborate on the development. Two independent consultants tasked with finding such a partner — OMA*AMO Architecture, P.C. and AEA Consulting, LLC — issued requests for interest in September 2019, with responses due that December. According to the memo, they only received one response that “was not in line with the goals for the development of the Pathside Building.” Only after a virtual press conference with museum representatives did it become clear that New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy facilitated the Pompidou deal through her personal art world connections.
Following this conference, the City Council held an 8-to-1 vote approving the project. The sole dissenting vote was cast by Councilman-at-Large Rolando Lavarro, a four-decade resident of the Greenville district who expressed concerns around public school funding and housing. While Lavarro originally voted Yes to the 2018 Pathside Building acquisition, he claims the Pompidou plans neglect the needs of local communities and feel rushed overall.
“Since the 2018 vote, much has changed,” he told Truthout. “Our state aid for Jersey City public schools has been cut. This is becoming a crisis, as just this past year, schools were cut by $71 million in the $814 million city budget. The city ended up raising taxes by nearly $1,000 per average household, during a pandemic.”
Lavarro has watched many southside neighbors get priced out of housing as new development raises rent prices. In 2017, Jersey City was ranked the fifth-most expensive in the nation for renting a one-bedroom apartment. Its population is around 70 percent renters, with 11,000 newly registered voters in the last two years. The Fulop administration’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, according to Fair Share Housing Center, was the weakest in the state despite Jersey City having the strongest real estate market. Nonetheless, a huge subsidy emerged seemingly overnight for the museum.
“Whenever we talk about where to find funding for social programs, housing assistance, or more affordable housing, there is always some excuse for not having the money,” Lavarro said. “I’ve always said [the museum] cannot be a money pit for the city — the equivalent of charging a credit card and hoping someone else will pay it off down the line.”
Media responses to the Pompidou range from enthusiasm to skepticism and bad-faith criticism. NorthJersey.comquotes an executive director of the Loew’s Theatre, emphasizing the potential for tourism and profits. Hudson Reporter, meanwhile, details the finances and notes that current expenses exceed the planned allotment for Journal Square. An article in Curbed provides thorough analysis yet still ends up jabbing Jersey City as “a place whose principal draw is the PATH train that allows you to escape from it.” In the Jersey City Times, an op-ed questions the project but, oddly, criticizes grassroots activists for not making public statements.
Yet activists have certainly been speaking out about gentrification and development in Jersey City. One activist group, Jersey City Together (JCT), has been at the forefront of advocating for affordable housing as luxury development spreads across town. Bringing together more than 40 houses of worship, JCT pushed for affordable housing units in the Bay Front Area — about 100 acres of formerly contaminated land the city acquired from Honeywell, which the federal government ordered to clean up and remediate. Other groups like Solidarity Jersey City and Hudson County Progressive Alliance recently rallied to shut down the inclusionary zoning ordinance that gave carte blanche to developers. These organizations also pressured Fulop to do property revaluations for the first time in nearly three decades, revealing that homeowners in Greenville were paying the same property taxes as those in the gentrified downtown area. Lavarro claims that around 75 percent of Greenville renters are cost-burdened, with little money for additional expenses.
“If you look at our numbers and changing demographics, we have Asian, Indian and Dominican populations growing off the charts, but the fastest-growing population isn’t in race or ethnicity, it is actually in income,” he said. “Considering all the new luxury properties, it is not too surprising that the income bracket experiencing the most growth is $200,000+ a year. Some argue that developers are not displacing anyone because they are building on vacant lots, but costs of living and housing are still rising for the surrounding areas as market demand increases.”
Meanwhile, cultural organizations in Jersey City are also fighting for greater funding as commercial rents rise. This creative class of artists and performers opened theaters, studios and galleries in the city over the last few decades and formed the Jersey City Arts Council, which led a campaign to reorient portions of tax abatement revenues to local arts programming. In December 2020, state legislators passed the Arts and Culture Trust Fund — a separate tax on property owners established at one percent of property values. Many artists view the Pompidou as an opportunity for further investment in the community, as Jersey City currently has no public art institution, and the for-profit Mana Contemporary only offers residency programs in a limited capacity.
“It has taken so long to develop the city, and I’m curious to see what happens myself,” said Meredith Burns, a lifelong Jersey City resident and executive director of Art House Productions. “We don’t really know what will happen when an anchor institution takes up residence inside a mainly working-class environment with no history or infrastructure of supporting arts and culture, and I do have my doubts. This is all just a plan until it happens, and it will probably take much longer than we think, but I’m hopeful.”
The Pompidou could become an asset for Jersey City, but art alone cannot remedy the inequalities affecting everyday people. Without robust social services, this corporate expansion may further price out those who were already displaced from the downtown area to Journal Square, all thanks to backdoor deals between politicians, private real estate and powerful art institutions. City officials hoping to make good on public art might consider how to bridge these disparities and retain long-time residents, as flooding neighborhoods with luxury will inevitably result in a bubble. Time will tell whether art truly saves Jersey City, or if this shiny new object expedites its overdevelopment.
Phi “Tommy” Pham is currently facing deportation to Vietnam, a country he has no ties to. Pham is a refugee and incarcerated firefighter. His story is ours, too.
In 2020, after serving as firefighters in the worst fire season in California history, we were handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While we were recently pardoned, the state prison system continues to detain and deport people like Pham — and like us.
As the second largest fire in state history rages on, we know that this year’s fire season will be even more destructive than the last. Pham should be home preparing to protect our communities. Instead, he’s now detained in Aurora, Colorado, and facing permanent family separation.
Like Pham, our families fled the wars in Southeast Asia before arriving in the United States. We survived refugee camps and resettled in impoverished neighborhoods in California. We struggled to make ends meet. Our families didn’t speak English, and we were frequently bullied in school for being Asian and poor. We understand why Pham turned to harmful activity. After experiencing years of trauma, we only understood survival.
Like many others in prison, our entire lives were changed by a mistake we made as youth. Pham was just 20 when a verbal argument turned into a physical altercation. Feeling scared and outnumbered, Pham drew his gun and shot in the direction of a group, hitting one person. Everyone thankfully survived, but Pham pled to assault and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
In prison, Pham confronted the harm he did to his community and decided to make amends. He took anger management classes, joined support groups and completed his college degree. In 2018, Pham saw news of the devastating wildfires in Paradise, California, and decided to volunteer as a firefighter to protect the people of his home state. After months of rigorous training, he became a star firefighter at Folsom State Prison Fire Department, responding to countless life-threatening emergencies in and out of prison.
On June 16, 2021, Pham became eligible for parole. After his years of hard work, transformation and healing, he should have been able to return home to his family. But instead, upon his release, California’s state prison system directly transferred him into ICE custody.
In 2020, we were in exactly Pham’s position. We had both turned our lives around in prison and served on the front lines of wildfire season, risking our lives for California communities. Because of our refugee status and California’s collaboration with ICE, we were also immediately detained after paroling. Our own transformation and contributions to defending California were overlooked.
Being detained was as terrifying as entering prison for the first time. We had already earned our freedom but were doubly punished for no reason other than that we were born outside of this country. We and our families were terrified. Locked up, we had spent years waiting for the day we could finally embrace our siblings and care for our aging parents — only to be severed from them and potentially deported to countries we never called home.
We were incredibly grateful that this past May, Gov. Gavin Newsom pardoned us both so that we could reunite with our loved ones. But Pham is still in ICE detention, over 1,200 miles from his mother and siblings in Hayward, California.
No family deserves to be ripped apart by deportation. That’s why we’re asking our state senators and Governor Newsom to pass A.B. 937, the VISION Act, which would protect people like us, who have served their sentences, from being transferred from jails and prisons directly into ICE custody.
We also urge Governor Newsom to immediately pardon Pham. In detention, Pham is suffering from lung damage and vision problems, while ICE refuses to let him seek treatment. We ask that the governor recognize Pham’s contributions to society and make sure that he comes home to the care of his family.
In the next few months, California will be devastated by unprecedented wildfires, exacerbated by extreme drought and the climate crisis. The governor must take decisive action by protecting the immigrants and incarcerated firefighters who serve our communities. If our elected officials pardon Phi Pham and sign the VISION Act, they’ll help build a safer, more compassionate society where all families, including families like ours, can thrive.
Donald Trump’s installation of three radical right-wing “justices” on the Supreme Court is paying off for the forces trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. On September 1, in a 5-4 vote, the high court allowed the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country to go into effect, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson. SB 8, known as the “Texas Heartbeat Act,” bans all abortions after physicians detect, or should have detected, a fetal heartbeat. That generally occurs at six weeks of pregnancy, when most women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
The split vote on the Court signals the likelihood that the “justices” — who were so quick to allow Texas’s Machiavellian law to take effect — will seize the opportunity next term to overturn Roe v. Wade when it considers the constitutionality of a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks. That would open the floodgates to similar legislation in other states preventing women from having abortions.
About 85 percent to 90 percent of Texas women who have abortions are at least six weeks into their pregnancy, which means the law will prohibit nearly all abortions in the state. There is no exception for rape or incest. Women in Texas will now have to travel to another state to secure an abortion or resort to life-threatening back alley coat-hanger abortions.
The drafters of SB 8 established a novel scheme to prevent lawsuits against state officials by privatizing enforcement and deputizing private persons to sue people who provide abortions. The bill gives any non-governmental person the right to sue abortion providers and those who “aid and abet” them, financially or otherwise. The defendants could include anyone — doctors, nurses, friends, spouses, parents, domestic violence counselors, clergy members or Uber drivers. Defendants must pay plaintiffs who win their lawsuits a $10,000 bounty plus attorneys’ fees. In other words, Texas is bribing its residents to sue people who help women get abortions.
President Joe Biden said the Court’s action in Woman’s Whole Health “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts.” He added, “Complete strangers will now be empowered to inject themselves in the most private and personal health decisions faced by women.” Biden is launching a “whole-of-government” response, directing the White House Counsel, Gender Policy Council, Health and Human Services and Justice Department to determine what “legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”
Abortion providers in Texas challenged SB 8 in federal court. A U.S. district court judge scheduled a hearing about whether to block the Texas law. But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals canceled the hearing. The plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to stop SB 8 from taking effect, or in the alternative, to permit the district court proceedings to continue.
In an unsigned one-paragraph order, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett left the Texas law in place with no analysis of the constitutional issues at stake. They wrote, “[I]t is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.” The majority said they were not drawing “any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law,” and their order “in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts.” Meanwhile, the law will prevent most women from seeking abortions in Texas.
John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer dissented and filed four separate opinions. Roberts wrote, “We are at this point asked to resolve these novel questions — at least preliminarily — in the first instance, in the course of two days, without the benefit of consideration by the District Court or Court of Appeals.” The Court was asked to do this, he added, “without ordinary merits briefing and without oral argument.” So, why rush to allow implementation of a law that could be unconstitutional? Roberts emphasized that “the Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”
Breyer stated, “[A] woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage,” citing Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. And, he wrote, “a State cannot delegate … a veto power [over the right to obtain an abortion] which the state itself is absolutely and totally prohibited from exercising during the first trimester of pregnancy.”
Sotomayor declared, “The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.” She wrote, “In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
Kagan objected to a lack of full briefing and argument before “this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions.”
The Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021 (WHPA), which would codify Roe v. Wade, is pending in the Senate and the House. On June 8, the WHPA was introduced with 176 original co-sponsors in the House and 48 supporters in the Senate, a record-high amount of support for a bill at introduction. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has pledged to bring the bill to the House floor when Congress returns from summer recess.
The WHPA protects the right to access abortion without medically unnecessary restrictions and bans on abortion. It creates a statutory right for health care providers to provide abortion care, and a corollary right for patients to receive care, without medically unnecessary restrictions that single out abortion and impede access to it.
A Hart Research poll found 61 percent of voters nationally supported the WHPA when it was introduced. “This poll sends a clear message to Congress: the majority of voters want abortion protected under federal law,” Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said. “We cannot wait any longer. If Roe falls, many states will immediately take action to make abortion a crime.”
South African anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela once said, “Fools multiply when wise men remain silent.” As the pandemic continues to ravage our country — in particular those within the prison system — the time to remain silent is no more.
As we have seen time and time again, across both the state and federal level, most institutions have contingency plans in place for emergencies. But the prison system is woefully negligent on this front, and we have seen countless people pay for it with their lives over the course of the last year and a half. The First Step Act, touted by both Republicans and Democrats as a bold solution to mass incarceration, has done little to protect them.
After the First Step Act was passed in 2018, the law has retroactively released over 3,000 of the more than 600,000 individuals incarcerated by the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) as of May 2020. Then, the law codified a directive from standard operating procedures mandating that pregnant people not be shackled during childbirth — but still left discretion up to officers. The law also removed the stacking clause that once added a 25-year penalty to cases involving violent and drug trafficking crimes that included the possession of a firearm. This mandate had already been enacted through former Attorney General Eric Holder’s “Smart on Crime” initiative during the Obama administration. Former President Donald Trump disbanded Holder’s program — only to circle back and falsely claim victory for the removal of the stacking provision under the First Step Act a few years later.
Moving forward, the Biden administration won’t be able to build on the First Step Act until it addresses the racist, oppressive clauses that worsened the lives of Black communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. You don’t build a house on an unstable foundation.
Black and Brown people were stuck in prison and left to die based on the racist risk assessment tool mandated by the First Step Act, known as the Prisoner Assessment Tool Targeting Estimated Risk and Needs. Advocates for the Act kept quiet, even as these risk assessment tools and initiatives have been found to be biased and create disparities because of static factors that disproportionately impact marginalized, primarily Black, communities. These factors include an individual’s number of arrests and violations, age of first police interaction or arrest, and highest education degree or grade level completed.
Because Black and Brown communities and schools are over-policed in this country, Black adults and children are more likely to have early and multiple interactions with the police over the course of their lifetime. Schools in marginalized and oppressed neighborhoods are more likely to be staffed with officers than social workers, leading to increased punishment of children by law enforcement for minor offenses and misbehavior, compared to children in communities with higher economic status.
These immense racial and socioeconomic disparities mean that many Black incarcerated individuals scored higher on the First Step Act’s risk assessment tools, while political cronies convicted of white-collar crimes, many of them friends of Trump’s, were released to home confinement or sent home without any conditions.
Through the CARES Act, the Trump administration released 4,400, mostly Black incarcerated individuals from BOP custody. The people who were released now have to comply with strict conditions such as home confinement and GPS monitoring, and could be sent back to prison once the federal government officially declares the pandemic “over.”
President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris are faced with granting those individuals clemency or overturning former Attorney General William Barr’s memo, which began the discretionary release of at-risk individuals to home confinement, in order to allow those living under this conditional release over the past year to remain home with their families. It’s time for Biden and Harris to live up to their campaign promises and begin to address past harm, including Biden’s co-sponsorship of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that enabled the harmful expansion of mass incarceration and policing in the U.S., and Harris’s record as a prosecutor.
The First Step Act was not enough and, with the threat of a resurgence in the COVID-19 pandemic, will continue to fall far short of what we truly need. Incarcerated people continue to suffer under the stress of strict home confinement that could send them back to prison any day, or remain stuck behind bars under constant threat of illness, all because a biased risk assessment tool decided their fate.
Let this be a reality check: If officials don’t grant these clemencies, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party are done for in the 2024 election. Trump and his advocates have already begun campaigning on a faux-progressive platform around the criminal legal system and continue to take credit for the First Step Act’s pre-existing reforms.
My organization, JustLeadershipUSA, is currently working to call out these injustices, regardless of party, and to demand that marginalized people — especially incarcerated people — are given a say in what comes next. That is why we have worked with Senators Tammy Duckworth and Cory Booker on the reintroduction of the Correctional Facility Disaster Preparedness Act, which aims to ensure prison emergency response and recovery plans protect the health, safety, and civil rights of incarcerated individuals during public health emergencies and natural disasters.
We must protect those who are often forgotten and amplify their voices. This administration must begin to uphold its commitment to all people in this country and work tirelessly to reconcile the past in order to not entrench further harm.
If you flipped on the news this morning, like as not you were greeted with scenes of catastrophic flooding, water up to the windows of houses, cars floating down streets, nine dead and counting. This was the work of Hurricane Ida, but the images of destruction were not from New Orleans or Mississippi. This was New York City. This was Newark, which looks for all the world like the Louisiana coastal communities that were all but washed away only days ago.
“The 3.15 inches that fell in Central Park in one hour broke a record set only days earlier by Tropical Storm Henri,” reportsThe New York Times. “Across the region, up to nine inches of rain fell in just a few hours. The National Weather Service, struggling to depict the level of danger, declared a flash flood emergency in New York City for the first time.”
For the Big Apple and the surrounding region, the future is now. Climate disruption arrived again in America’s largest city last night by way of a climate-charged storm that muscled up in the unnaturally warm, gruesomely polluted waters of the Gulf of Mexico, stomped into the South, and wasn’t finished until it had laid a beating on the Northeast all the way to New Hampshire.
This is the new normal, but after 16 years since Katrina of biannual or triannual once-a-generation monster storms, it isn’t really even that new anymore. Nature has been brushing us back with inside pitches for years, and all of a sudden there are no more warnings — it’s throwing high heat at our heads: Unprecedented fires in the West, “heat domes” that ruthlessly bake entire regions, years of relentless drought serving as the engine for a climate feedback loop with no end in sight, and Brobdingnagian hurricane seasons like the very end of the world, every year.
The storm did particularly lethal damage in New York’s District 14, comprised of parts of Queens and the Bronx, which is represented by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). “I will be canvassing the district today assessing the impact from last night’s catastrophic flooding,” she tweeted this morning. “Tragically, we lost several community members last night. Please check in on your neighbors – especially those in low-level apartments.”
AOC, along with progressive allies like Bernie Sanders, has been out on the bleeding edge of the fight against climate calamity since the first breath she drew in elected office. The Green New Deal she has championed for years now is all over the $3.5 trillion budget currently being cobbled together in Congress. That bill, not to put too fine a point on it, could go a long way toward helping us as a species rescue us from, well, us. The “anthropogenic” in “anthropogenic climate disruption” translates to “human-caused.” Pogo was right.
The only reason that sentence makes any sense is because we are talking about the United States Congress, worldwide distributor of illiberal illogic and hyperactive hypocrisy.
It goes like this: Both the infrastructure bill and the budget-climate bill have passed the necessary procedural votes, and will come to a final vote in both chambers once the legislation is finalized. The infrastructure bill has broad bipartisan support and is set to sail to passage. The budget-climate bill, however, is despised not only by the Republicans, but by the Manchin-Sinema quisling cohort in the Senate.
Because the budget-climate bill can expect zero Republican votes in the Senate, Majority Leader Schumer intends to pass it by way of reconciliation, a process that staples it to the previously passed budget bill and requires only 51 votes, i.e. no filibuster. This means every Democrat and Vice President Harris have to vote “Yes,” and at present, thanks to the Manchin-Sinema crew, those 51 votes do not yet exist.
Why?
“At this point, powerful industry groups have stripped down the infrastructure legislation so that it includes all the corporate goodies they want and almost none of the initiatives needed to avert an ecological disaster,” reports David Sirota for The Daily Poster. “These business interests purchase politicians through campaign cash, and they have now ordered them to pass this legislation and kill the separate budget bill that may end up including the stuff corporate interests hate — stuff like polluter taxes and fairer corporate taxes, an end to oil subsidies and provisions that would let Medicare negotiate lower prescription drug prices.”
Joe Manchin, leader of the “No” Democrats in the Senate, is so deep in the pocket of the oil industry that he may as well be lint. Still, Democrats believe the best chance of passing these bills is to lash them together for a single mega-vote. At present, that is the plan, but Republicans, the Manchin Democrats and a slew of energy interests are leaning hard on Pelosi to “decouple” the bills.
They desire this because doing so would spell the end of the budget-climate bill that the energy and pharmaceutical industries so despise. The watered-down infrastructure bill, if decoupled, would go first, and everyone would get their “bipartisan victory.” The budget-climate bill, now disconnected from the far more popular infrastructure bill, would die a lonely death in the Senate.
This is why the Progressive Caucus members need to vote against the infrastructure bill if Pelosi allows it to be decoupled from the budget-climate bill. They have promised as much already — “no climate, no deal” has been the position of the Progressive Caucus ever since the infrastructure bill was stripped of most of its climate-related elements. Those elements are now in the budget-climate bill, but if the two are decoupled, they’re gone all over again.
The only way to ensure these two bills are not voted on separately is if the Progressive Caucus keeps its word and votes down the infrastructure bill in the House. The Caucus is nearly 100 members strong today, as influential as it has ever been to my personal recall, and this would be a moment to flex that influence. A defeated infrastructure bill would halt the process and force Pelosi to reconsider separating the two bills. Even the threat itself could accomplish this, if nobody blinks.
If the bills are not decoupled, there is still Manchin et al. to worry about, but he won’t matter nearly as much if the bills are voted on separately, because the budget-climate bill would die by more than his hand. The Progressive Caucus must hold the line on this, and these bills must be voted on together. “Only under that scenario,” continues Sirota, “will Manchin, Sinema and the Gottheimer Ghouls be compelled to vote for both bills in order to get the infrastructure legislation they crave.”
If anything threatens the viability of the budget-climate bill, if a decoupling is in the offing, it is to be hoped that other Congress members join Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive allies in voting “no” on the infrastructure bill if it comes up alone. Don’t blink.
On Tuesday, an American president said the words: “The war in Afghanistan is now over.” One president started it, three presidents shared it and sustained it, and now a fourth president has dropped the curtain at enormous political cost.
Twenty years of sacrifice beyond comprehension, tens of thousands of civilian and military lives lost, including the scores laid low by the Kabul airport bombing. “$300 million a day for two decades,” President Biden explained on Tuesday, a fortune squandered that could have funded health care, child care, housing, education, clean energy exploration. A fortune squandered that could have provided reasons for our youngest generations to look forward to the future instead of down in despair.
After days of merciless pummeling from wildly hypocritical Republicans, a number of purple-district Democrats and a “news” media that was instrumental in foisting this fiasco on us in the first place, Biden rose forcefully to his own defense. “By the time I came to office, the Taliban was in its strongest military position since 2001,” he explained, “controlling or contesting nearly half of the country. The previous administration’s agreement said that if we stuck to the May 1 deadline that they had signed on to leave by, the Taliban wouldn’t attack any American forces. But if we stayed, all bets were off.”
“So we were left with a simple decision,” Biden continued. “Either follow through on the commitment made by the last administration and leave Afghanistan, or say we weren’t leaving and commit another tens of thousands more troops. Going back to war. That was the choice, the real choice. Between leaving or escalating. I was not going to extend this forever war. And I was not extending a forever exit.”
Addressing the chaotic final days of the war, the president stated flatly, “I take responsibility for the decision.” Following this declaration was Biden’s apologia — not apology — for the mayhem of the withdrawal. He painted a picture of a security situation that would have fallen into chaos no matter what plans were executed. While there is a good degree of truth to this, the fact remains that the Biden administration pulled the string on withdrawal while this country’s immigration/refugee assistance programs were in a deplorable state of disrepair. Thanks in large part to the vandalism of prior administration officials including national security adviser and vivid fascist Stephen Miller, our government was ill-prepared for an influx of help/rescue requests from fleeing Afghan civilians. Our allies were similarly unprepared.
Not every voice has been raised against Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. “Unlike his three immediate predecessors in the Oval Office, all of whom also came to see the futility of the Afghan operation, Biden alone had the political courage to fully end America’s involvement,” writes David Rothkopf for The Atlantic. “Although Donald Trump made a plan to end the war, he set a departure date that fell after the end of his first term and created conditions that made the situation Biden inherited more precarious. And despite significant pressure and obstacles, Biden has overseen a military and government that have managed, since the announcement of America’s withdrawal, one of the most extraordinary logistical feats in their recent history.”
The American public appears to agree. Recent surveys show that a solid majority supports the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a supermajority believes this country failed to achieve its goals in that country. Politically, Biden is laying a huge and thoroughly tactical wager on those numbers. While the administration expects another round of brutal news cycles as the Afghanistan situation is folded into the 20th anniversary of September 11, “they assume that attention will shift back again to the coronavirus pandemic, the president’s proposals for large public works projects and social welfare programs, and a dozen other issues that will absorb the public more than far-off Afghanistan,” according to The New York Times.
It would not have been a speech by an American president without providing a side-serving of menace. “And to ISIS-K,” he growled in an eerie echo of George W. Bush. “We are not done with you yet.” What does that mean? Biden spoke of “the war on terror” and of “over-the-horizon capabilities,” hedged his bets on “boots on the ground,” and made it abundantly clear that the war paradigm which has burdened these last two decades will not be altered by his administration any time soon.
Russia and China were not spared the treatment, as Biden rattled the chains for the possible onset of the next Cold War. “The world is changing,” he said. “We’re engaged in a serious competition with China. We’re dealing with the challenges on multiple fronts with Russia.” Nothing about this was demonstrably aggressive, but American leaders seem to do their best politically when the people have a clear and identifiable enemy to seethe at (and be distracted by). In this, the president was old-school normative establishment right down the line.
Notably, the speech also failed to even wink at one likely reason the war lasted so long: the trillions of dollars in mineral, gas and oil deposits lying fallow in Afghanistan. This is a rarely spoken answer to why we remained there for so long after the Taliban was defeated, after al-Qaeda was shattered, and after Osama bin Laden was killed: If the country could be brought under some semblance of control, there were riches to be plundered beyond the dreams of avarice. This, then, was another goal our efforts failed to achieve.
Here — the threats, the vague vocabulary of eternal war, the proffered example of existential menace, all wrapped in a dark fog surrounding our true goals that a thoroughly compromised corporate “news” media appears entirely unwilling or unable to penetrate — are the seeds that, if allowed to germinate again, will make the future look very much like the ash-coated battlegrounds of the present and past.
Biden’s speech on Tuesday was remarkable for one thing: Despite the occasional bouts of bog-standard bombast, it did not bristle with exuberant confidence, or ooze self-congratulation as if such feelings were an unquestioned birthright. It entirely lacked the glossy veneer of “American exceptionalism” that has scarred so many political speeches over the last 20 years and beyond. The president did not say, “We lost the war,” but that solemn message underscored almost every word he spoke.
When he was finished on Tuesday, Biden turned away from the podium, giving his back to a hail of questions from the assembled press. He paused, turned and retrieved a black face mask from the podium. Plodding slowly down the red-carpeted hall, he donned the mask before receding from view. Thus do we all plod into an uncertain future, again, but one with one less war to fight. We hope.
Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its latest report, identifying a rapidly closing window to avoid the direst impacts of the climate emergency. The report set off renewed calls to stop the fossil fuel industry, the dominant cause of carbon emissions, from keeping us on a path to climate disaster.
What’s been largely missing from the conversation is how financial institutions — banks, insurance companies and asset managers — are covertly backing the fossil fuel industry. These players must pull their money and business from the planet’s biggest polluters if we are to stay within a 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) limit to planetary warming. Without them, fossil fuel operations are simply not financially viable.
Every fossil fuel company needs financing and insurance coverage to build, expand and maintain its dirty operations. Banks, insurers and asset managers provide this service, functioning as the backbone of this climate-wrecking industry. Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, the world’s 60 largest banks have financed fossil fuels to the tune of $3.8 trillion.
These institutions are driving the climate crisis by investing in fossil fuel projects and companies. Taking the IPCC’s conclusions seriously means understanding that financing and insuring emissions actually fuels the climate crisis. The report is clear that even fractions of a degree matter. When a bank funds new emissions or an insurer’s coverage helps keep existing sources operational, they increase the likelihood and magnitude of future climate impacts.
United Nations Secretary General António Guterres sums up the implications of the IPCC report for financiers and insurers: “This report must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet…. There is no time for delay and no room for excuses.” Guterres also specifically calls on financial institutions to “align their portfolios with the Paris Agreement.”
The insurance industry has fallen woefully short in cutting support for fossil fuels despite being particularly vulnerable to the costs of disasters driven by climate disruption. Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers (a company that provides insurance for other insurers), estimated insured losses from natural disasters for the first half of 2021 at $40 billion, the second-highest on record.
Insure Our Future is a global coalition of environmental, consumer protection and grassroots organizations that collectively pressures the insurance industry to end its support for fossil fuels. Since the Insure Our Future campaign launched in 2017, at least 30 insurers have restricted their coal underwriting, and some have committed to phase out coverage for the sector entirely.
Still, these policies all urgently need improvement in light of the new IPCC report. The insurance industry as a whole has failed to reduce its support for oil and gas, with only two major insurers adopting an oil and gas underwriting phaseout plan (Suncorp and Generali). Meanwhile, some insurers have made zero commitments to end or limit underwriting and investments in coal or any other fossil fuel, with U.S. insurers lagging behind the rest of the world.
Among them is AIG. The field of insurers for coal is narrowing, and the coal sector is feeling the squeeze in the form of rising premium costs and difficulty obtaining insurance for some controversial projects. This leaves AIG increasingly isolated as one of the few major insurers left to insure massive new coal projects. Yet, coal makes up less than 1 percent of AIG’s underwriting portfolio — so what is it holding on for? In the company’s first ever “Environmental, Social, and Governance Report,” the insurance giant still fails to adopt a single policy to curb its support for fossils.
Instead, AIG reaffirms its continued underwriting for and investments in fossil fuels in its “environmental” report. The company’s reasoning? AIG says that it is not in the “best interest of our stakeholders and the general public … to abruptly reduce or stop insurance access to clients that are heavy users or producers of fossil fuels.” However, increasingly urgent predictions of worsening climate impacts show that rapidly phasing out fossil fuels is absolutely in the public’s best interest.
As evidence of “climate action,” the insurer touts its commitment to “net zero operations by 2050.” On paper, AIG could achieve “net zero operations” within a year by purchasing carbon offsets. Even AIG admits that it does not “consume large amounts of natural resources for the operation of our business relative to many of the businesses we insure.” The carbon impact of AIG’s buildings is trivial relative to its impact as a top 3 insurer of oil and gas that has invested $26.8 billion in fossil fuels.
Meanwhile, AIG has said it’s not very concerned about paying for worsening climate damage because, as the harms increase, it can just raise prices or drop coverage. AIG is putting us all at risk by supporting the fossil fuel industry and planning to jump ship when the damage gets too intense.
The campaign calling on AIG to drop fossil fuels has been ramping up in the past few months. In February of this year, Indigenous youth peacefully occupied AIG’s Vancouver office over its involvement with the Trans Mountain pipeline. Climate groups have held actions at its New York headquarters, and activists have emailed and called company executives thousands of times. One of the insurer’s major shareholders, Legal and General Investment Management, recently dropped AIG for continuing to underwrite coal and failing to disclose its financed emissions. Yet all AIG has done is pat itself on the back for its laughable “climate action.”
The IPCC report provides a stark picture of our future if financial institutions stick to the status quo and continue backing fossil fuels. They must change the way they operate and stop mindlessly prioritizing profits over communities. Financial institutions might try to ignore the increasingly urgent calls for change, but as UN Secretary General Guterres said, there is no time for delay and no room for excuses.
The future before us if we continue on the same course is dire. Financial institutions must embrace the paradigm shift and take rapid, aggressive action to decarbonize our economy. There is no livable alternative.
As we enter a new school year with students actually in the building, as autumn looms a few scant weeks away, and as the Delta variant of COVID-19 leaves us guessing as to what comes next in this long, lethal slog, “uncertainty” is the watchword of the day. A number of positive indicators are running into the teeth of a seemingly ceaseless tide of bad news, and as ever, the acolytes of Trump continue to kill their supporters through disinformation.
When discussing the climate crisis, we speak often of the dangers of “feedback loops” — factors feeding into factors that accelerate the process. The spread of COVID has been no different: A segment of the population either refuses to take the threat seriously or has limited access to the vaccine, the virus ravages that segment, and out of that sickened segment emerge variants like Delta. As a segment of the population continues to dismiss the threat or fails to have vaccine access, the variant hits harder than before, and the increased number of infected people become incubators for an even more dangerous variant. This fits the definition of a feedback loop.
Underscoring this is the emergence from South Africa of a new COVID variant, this one designated as C.1.2. As yet officially unnamed, this new variant has been found in China, New Zealand, Switzerland, Portugal, Mauritius, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DAR) and England. As we have learned, COVID gives not a damn about borders, and the fact of its existence overseas means it could very easily be here in the U.S. already. Delta came from India, remember.
The South African scientists studying C.1.2 noted that it has “concerning constellations of mutations.” They went on to warn, “While these mutations are not characteristic of current VOCs/VOIs, they have been associated with escape from certain class 3 neutralizing antibodies. The combination of these mutations presents a potentially novel antigenic landscape for C.1.2 variant specific antibodies.”
The science-to-English translation of this is stark: C.1.2 may be capable of evading to one degree or another the protections provided by our vaccines. Delta has caused more “breakthrough” infections of vaccinated people because its viral load is approximately 1,200 times that of the original virus, and because the vaccines do not provide 100 percent protection from infection.
How exactly are variants created? “According to the scientists,” reports Joseph Choi of The Hill, “these mutations likely occurred in a single individual who had a prolonged case of COVID-19, resulting in an accelerated evolution.”
This is vital: The vaccines may not be bulletproof, but they are almost completely effective at preventing people from becoming severely ill from COVID. If a person avoids becoming severely ill from COVID for a protracted amount of time, they deprive the virus of what is necessary for them to evolve into a new variant.
Of all the reasons to get vaccinated, even if a booster is required later, this is one of the best I’ve heard. Though we remain in a terrifying fog regarding what is to come, and even as tens of thousands of new infections are happening daily due to vaccine resistance, there can be no denying that we have made huge strides since last winter. This is almost entirely due to an increasingly vaccinated public.
All of this can be undone by a variant with the ability to evade vaccination. And the way to stop this is by way of vaccination; people who worry about being a petri dish for Big Pharma should worry more about becoming an unvaccinated petri dish for COVID. The longer you are sick, the more likely a new variant emergence becomes. I don’t imagine even the most stalwart pro-Trump MAGA shouter aspires to wake up as Typhoid Mary one day. Skip the shots, and that’s what you’re gambling with.
It appears the issue is trending in a positive direction. The latest surveys reveal a steep decline in the number of people refusing to get the vaccine. A number of factors appear to be causing this: The FDA approval of the Pfizer vaccine, workplace vaccination mandates and the beginning of the school year. (Children under 12 now make up the largest group of unvaccinated people in the country, and unfortunately, the solution to that remains months away.)
My favorite part of this survey, according to Axios: “The share of Americans who say they feel hopeful right now has plummeted to 34 percent, from 48 percent in March — but those saying they feel motivated, energized, inspired or resilient has risen by at least as much. That suggests that, rather than giving up, these Americans are reassessing their expectations about how quick a fix the first generation of vaccines alone can be — and resolving to do what it takes over the long haul.”
In other words: Stout hearts. May it be so. Get the shots if you can, please, and break the feedback loop.
