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.
United Nations experts taskedwith monitoring human rights abuses across the globe are condemning Texas’ near-total abortion ban as a clear violation of international law, characterizing the state’s newly imposed restrictions as “profoundly discriminatory” and dangerous.
Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer and the chair of the U.N.’s working group on discrimination against women and girls,toldThe Guardianon Tuesday that the Texas ban “violates a number of rights guaranteed under international law” and represents “structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst.”
“This new law will make abortion unsafe and deadly, and create a whole new set of risks for women and girls,” said Upreti, who argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block the Texas ban “has taken the entire country backward” on reproductive rights, potentially imperiling abortion access throughoutmuch of the nation.
Known as S.B. 8, Texas’ new law prohibits abortion after aroundsix weeks of pregnancyand deputizes private citizens to enforce the ban, offering a $10,000 reward — plus legal fees — for those who prevail in litigation against abortion providers or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure. Many Texas abortion clinics will likely be forced toshut downentirely due to the law, which was authored by Republicans.
According tothe Center for Reproductive Rights, roughly 85 to 90% of people who obtain abortions in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy.
The Supreme Court last weekdeclinedto grant an emergency request to stop Texas’ ban from taking effect, a decision that legal analysts saideffectively overturnedRoe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established abortion as a constitutional right. AsCommon Dreamsreported, several GOP-led states are already signaling plans to replicate Texas’ law, which wasdesignedto evade legal challenges.
Reem Alsalem, the U.N.’s independent monitor on violence against women, echoed Upreti’s assessment of the Texas ban and the Supreme Court’s inaction, tellingThe Guardianthat the nation’s conservative justices have “chosen to trample on the protection of women’s reproductive rights, thereby exposing them and abortion providers to more violence.”
The U.N. Human Rights Committee has previouslysaid(pdf) that while countries “may adopt measures designed to regulate voluntary terminations of pregnancy, such measures must not result in violation of the right to life of a pregnant woman or girl, or her other rights under the [International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights].”
“Thus, restrictions on the ability of women or girls to seek abortion must not… jeopardize their lives, subject them to physical or mental pain or suffering… discriminate against them, or arbitrarily interfere with their privacy,” the panel said in 2018. “In addition, States parties may not regulate pregnancy or abortion in all other cases in a manner that runs contrary to their duty to ensure that women and girls do not have to undertake unsafe abortions, and they should revise their abortion laws accordingly.”
#USA: Texas law (SB8) endangers women with unprecedented obstacles to safe abortion in nearly all cases. New forms of pressuring those who uphold sexual and reproductive health & rights, including service providers, are a serious concern.
The U.N. experts’ comments on the Texas abortion ban came after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in astatementMonday that the Department of Justice is exploring “all options to challenge Texas S.B. 8 in order to protect the constitutional rights of women and other persons, including access to an abortion.”
In the meantime, Garland said, the Justice Department “will continue to protect those seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services pursuant to our criminal and civil enforcement of the [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances] Act.”
“The FACE Act prohibits the use or threat of force and physical obstruction that injures, intimidates, or interferes with a person seeking to obtain or provide reproductive health services,” said Garland. “The department will provide support from federal law enforcement when an abortion clinic or reproductive health center is under attack. We have reached out to U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and FBI field offices in Texas and across the country to discuss our enforcement authorities.”
As theTexas TribunereportedMonday, the Texas law’s impacts have already “rippled” across the United States.
After conservative justices in the Supreme Court upheld Texas Republicans’ draconian abortion ban this week, GOP lawmakers in other states are already considering similar infringements on reproductive rights, despite the ban’s unpopularity.
Republican officials in Arkansas, South Dakota and Florida are looking into how Texas’s “bounty hunter” method of enforcing the ban could be used to bar people from accessing the vital health care procedure in their states.
The Florida Senate president, Republican Wilton Simpson, told local media outlet WFLA that the state GOP is working on a bill already that would ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy — essentially a near-total ban like that of Texas.
One Republican lawmaker in Arkansas has already filed a 6-week abortion ban similar to Texas’s; and, in South Dakota, GOP Gov. Kristi Noem said Thursday that she’s directing people in her administration to ensure that her state also has “the strongest” anti-choice laws possible.
As Axios writes, there are about a dozen other states that have tried to implement similar abortion laws recently but have had their efforts shot down by the courts. North Dakota, Iowa, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia recently tried passing restrictive laws that were shot down by courts. Other states like Ohio had laws that were temporarily blocked by courts.
Conservative justices in the Supreme Court could soon overturnRoe v. Wade across the country, which, if it occurs, would surely spark a wave of anti-abortion policies across states that haven’t already tried to pass such bills. It’s unclear whether the Supreme Court will issue a sweeping overturn of the decades-old abortion rights precedent, but the Texas decision blatantly guts it.
Critics say that the abortion ban — which effectively within Texas denies the reproductive freedoms that Roe v. Wade sought to protect, without expressly seeking to overturn the ruling — is cruel not only because it rescinds people’s rights, but also because of its “private right of action” enforcement mechanism. The law allows any private citizen to sue someone who aids a pregnant person in getting an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy — or well before the vast majority of people even know that they’re pregnant.
If the defendant is found to have aided the abortion in any way, they will be ordered to pay court fees and $10,000 or more to the plaintiff. This will have a vast chilling effect on abortions in the state, as health care providers, abortion clinics and any family members or even Uber drivers who assist the pregnant person in obtaining an abortion could get sued, creating an atmosphere of terror around the procedure in the state.
Banning abortion is incredibly dangerous, and in countries that have adopted such bans, many people die from trying to obtain an abortion illegally. Texas’s law is incredibly strict, with no exceptions for rape and incest and very few exceptions for medical emergencies. If other states adopt similar policies, they could also severely endanger the life of pregnant people both during and after the pregnancy.
But Republicans may run into roadblocks when trying to implement such policies. The “bounty hunter” method of enforcing abortion and the abortion ban in general will likely end up being challenged in courts by pro-choice groups. On top of that, the GOP hasn’t even been publicizing what is an ostensible win for its anti-choice agenda — perhaps because abortion bans are unpopular, and near-total abortion bans even more so.
Democrats in the House have said they’re working on passing a bill to guarantee abortion access for all across the country. But the bill faces essentially zero odds of passing the Senate, so long as the filibuster and its defenders stay in place.
Democratic lawmakers in Congress have proposed a few responses to a recent Supreme Court ruling that allows an anti-abortion law in Texas to remain in place, but they will likely require centrists in the party and President Joe Biden to take on the dreaded Senate filibuster.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced on Thursday that the House would vote, within two weeks upon lawmakers’ return from legislative recess, on the Women’s Health Protection Act.
“Upon our return, the House will bring up Congresswoman Judy Chu’s Women’s Health Protection Act to enshrine into law reproductive health care for all women across America,” Pelosi said in a statement.
The bill would protect abortion access across the entire country, and would disallow several state-imposed restrictions on reproductive care, including 20-week bans, mandatory ultrasounds, or counseling that discourages individuals through shaming against getting an abortion.
“We must expand and reform the Supreme Court. Millions of lives are at stake,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York), noting that, beyond abortion, the Court will also likely rule soon on voting, workers’, and other civil rights protections.
Whether by legislation or by expanding the size of the Court, both measures will face fierce opposition from Republicans, particularly in the Senate where GOP lawmakers can use the filibuster to block either route.
Biden has said he’s reluctant to call for reforming the filibuster, much less for its abolition. And centrist Democrats in the chamber have also indicated that that’s a non-starter.
Biden, for his own part, announced Thursday that he’s directing departments and agencies within his administration to look into how the state can protect abortion access for individuals in Texas and elsewhere following the ruling.
Biden plans to “launch a whole-of-government effort to respond to this decision.” That includes directing the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice to find ways “to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions as protected by Roe, and what legal tools we have to insulate women and providers from the impact of Texas’ bizarre scheme of outsourced enforcement to private parties.”
Recent polling shows that the vast majority of Americans, nearly nine-in-ten voters, oppose abortion legislation similar to the Texas law that was enacted this week. An NBC News Survey conducted in mid-August found that 54 percent of Americans believe that abortion should be legal always or most of the time. Just 34 percent said it should be illegal in most cases but allowed in some circumstances, including rape or incest, which the Texas law does not allow for. A mere 8 percent said it should be illegal in all circumstances.
While the big news from Texas this week was about the Supreme Court upholding the state’s ban on essentially all abortions in the state, a number of other restrictive laws that advance a far right Republican agenda also went into effect the same day.
A total of 666 new laws were rolled out on Wednesday. Many of them, if they had been implemented individually, would have raised the alarm for Democrats and progressives. One law, for instance, criminalizes homelessness by disallowing people without homes from camping in a public location, making the act a misdemeanor with a $500 fine. Another law will make it illegal for people to hire workers for sex, which critics say will only exacerbate dangerous conditions for sex workers.
Many of the laws that went into effect on September 1 were a direct backlash against the Movement for Black Lives that gained momentum across the country over the past year, along with the general movement for racial justice. One bill will create financial penalties for medium to large municipalities that decline their police departments’ budgets yearly.
Another bill that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed in June bans the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 schools. The scholarly theory, deliberately misinterpreted and politicized by the GOP, is not taught in grade schools. However, the intent of the law is to discourage educators from teaching American history without a white supremacist lens or talking about race in school. It bars teachers from giving “deference” to either side of a conflict while teaching about historical events.
One bill, which again appears to be a backlash against last year’s mass uprisings for racial justice, makes it a felony for protestors to block a road while protesting. This will lead to harsher penalties for left-wing protesters who already face disproportionate punishment and violence from police when they demonstrate.
A law that bans establishments from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine before entry also went into effect on Wednesday after having been signed by Abbott earlier this year. The punishment for requiring vaccinations is especially harsh on businesses: a business could be denied state contracts or even lose their license if they are found requiring customers to be vaccinated.
And then, of course, Texas also implemented a law that essentially overturns Roe v. Wade in the state, outlawing abortions at a point so early in the pregnancy that most people don’t even realize that they are pregnant. It will do untold damage to the millions of people in the state that it affects — especially low-income people who don’t have the wherewithal to go out of state to seek abortion care
Texas Republicans are working on yet more restrictive laws to come, many of them advancing a radical authoritarian agenda.
Abbott called the current special legislative session just so Republicans could pass a number of radical bills that the legislature wasn’t able to pass during the regular session. One is a bill aimed at making it harder for non-white people and people with disabilities to vote. The legislature passed the bill Tuesday, and Abbott has pledged to sign it.
Unsatisfied with just one bill scaring teachers from talking about race in schools, Republican legislators in the special session are advancing yet another supposed critical race theory bill that would remove required civil rights teachings from the curriculum, including writings from Martin Luther King, Jr. and lessons about slavery, white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan being “morally wrong.”
Republicans are also hoping to pass a slate of hateful anti-trans bills that would limit health care access for transgender youth, bar them from participating in sports, and more. The Texas GOP is following a wave of anti-trans laws being passed by Republicans across the country.
A draconian Texas law banning abortions beyond around six weeks of pregnancy took effect at midnight after the conservative U.S. Supreme Court did not act to block it on Tuesday, a decision that could have major implications for reproductive rights across the country.
Despite weeks of protest by Democrats in the state, Texas Republicans succeeded this week in passing their sweeping voter suppression law, which will make it harder for voters with disabilities and non-white voters in the state to cast a balllot. It now goes to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has vowed to sign it.
The bill, S.B.1, outlaws drive-through voting, for instance — a method of voting widely used by non-white voters to cast a ballot last year. Drive-through voting, which some counties had rolled out for the 2020 election, was a popular method, with about 1 in 10 early voters in Harris County casting their ballot that way.
Harris County, the state’s most populous county, had also implemented a 24-hour early voting program that officials offered for one day. Republicans also outlawed 24-hour voting in their bill, taking special issue with Harris county’s methods to increase turnout — perhaps partly because the county voted for President Joe Biden by a margin of nearly 30 points in 2020.
The Texas GOP is also creating hurdles for disabled people to vote. Some people with disabilities need another person to assist them in filling out a ballot. But the new bill will create an application process for people assisting others in voting and anyone assisting a disabled voter could potentially face criminal penalties if they perform a misstep.
S.B.1 contains a wide swath of other restrictions as well. For example, it makes it a felony for election officials to send out unsolicited mail-in ballot applications — another direct response to a Harris County initiative — and calls for stricter voter ID requirements for voting by mail. Further, the bill empowers partisan poll watchers who could intimidate voters when they go to cast a ballot and creates a monthly review system to check voter rolls for noncitizens. Though there are few to no documented cases of noncitizens voting in Texas, it did not stop Donald Trump from propagating the lie that it was a widespread problem.
Democratic lawmakers in Texas had fled the state for over a month to deny the legislature quorum and block the bill. But enough lawmakers returned after Republicans voted to threaten them with arrest warrants for the GOP’s marquee bill to pass.
Advocates, journalists and Democrats decried the passage of S.B.1. “The Texas legislature just passed its egregious voter suppression bill,” tweeted University of California, Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Meanwhile, voting rights legislation languishes in the Senate because [Senators Joe] Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema refuse to work around the filibuster. This is how democracy dies.”
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo vowed to fight the legislation. “The voter suppression bill has passed the legislature in Texas. We won’t give up now. We will fight this in court,” she wrote on Twitter. “And we will work relentlessly so voters in Harris County, from both parties, can cast a ballot despite these shameless suppression efforts.”
Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement shortly after the bill was passed that he is planning to sign S.B.1 into law, citing spurious concerns about so-called election integrity. Republicans have offered a variety of excuses to implement such widespread voting restrictions in what was already one of the hardest states in which to cast a vote.
But the Texas GOP’s intentions, much like the intentions of Republicans across the country trying to implement similar restrictions, are transparent: They want to make it harder to vote, especially for populations that they perceive to be Democrats, so that they never lose an election again.
After failing to manipulate and then overturn the 2020 election — including attempting to cover up a violent attempted coup — Republicans have all but outright said that their goal is to ensure Republican wins in presidential and down ballot elections.
This statement by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) last year is just one example of countless others made by Republicans across the U.S.: “If we don’t do something about voting by mail, we’re going to lose the ability to elect a Republican in this country.”
It’s not just voter restrictions that Republicans are pushing, however. Texas Republicans are prepared to pull off yet another gerrymandering session that will turn the tides even further in their favor, after having pulled off an extremely bold partisan gerrymandering map 10 years ago.
A Texas law that bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy went into effect on Wednesday after the United States Supreme Court chose not to enjoin it from being enforced.
Many had expected the Court to intervene, by placing at minimum an injunction on the law to allow for further review at a later time. But as the midnight deadline on Wednesday morning passed, no action from the Court came about.
The Supreme Court could still act on the matter, and enjoin the law from being enforced.
While highly restrictive, the law is unique in that it doesn’t place the onus for its enforcement on the state. Rather, Texas will allow individuals (including people from out of state) to sue abortion providers and others if they help a person procure an abortion. A person who helps someone else receive abortion services can be sued for up to $10,000 under the terms of the statute.
A federal judge in Texas disagreed with that assessment late last month and blocked enforcement of the law pending a hearing on it on August 30. But the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, widely regarded as the most conservative in the nation, blocked judge Robert Pittman’s enjoinment of the law, and canceled the hearing.
The law is already affecting those seeking abortion services in the state. In mid-August, all 11 of the Planned Parenthood locations in Texas that offered abortion services stopped scheduling appointments for newly prohibited procedures after September 1. If more providers follow suit, the average Texan seeking abortion services would have to drive 248 miles one way on average (as opposed to 12 miles) — a 20-fold increase, noted the Rewire News Group.
The law is set to negatively impact marginalized communities hardest of all.
“The Texans who will be most harmed by this ban are low-income people of color — the majority of whom are parents caring for their children,” wrote the Lilith Fund, an organization that provides financial assistance to those seeking abortions in Texas, on its Twitter feed.
Texas lawmakers’ attempts to circumvent Roe v. Wade may also be replicated elsewhere, warned Tina Vasquez, senior staff writer for The Counter.
“Over and over and over again — whether it’s immigration or abortion access — we see that draconian policies are piloted in Texas before being parroted elsewhere,” Vasquez said. It’s a mistake to dismiss what happens there as ‘the backwards south.’ It’s a roadmap.”
In the absence of Supreme Court intervention, many were urging the Biden administration to take immediate action to address the situation in Texas.
“Last year, candidate Biden promised that he would pass legislation to make Roe ‘the law of the land.’ Now’s his chance,” said Niko Bowie, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School.
Texas’s Speaker of the House warned representatives in the Texas State House on Thursday night not to use the word “racism” when debating the Republicans’ voter suppression bill..
Speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, started debate on the bill by saying “the chair would appreciate members not using the word ‘racism’ this afternoon,” according to the Houston Chronicle. He insisted that it was a matter of respect.
Republican legislators in Texas have been objecting to claims that their voter suppression bill, or S.B. 1, is racist. The bill has been slammed by voting rights advocates and Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) as the “Jim Crow 2.0” for its prohibitive voting requirements and overtly racist voting restrictions.
In April, the Houston Chronicle reported that GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said, “you’re in essence calling us racist, and that will not stand,” in response to these Democratic criticisms of the bill’s racist effects.
The chamber advanced the bill 79 to 37, with only one Republican voting no. It is expected to pass in a floor vote on Friday, after which it goes back to the Texas State Senate, where senators can pass the new bill or reconcile differences between a similar bill previously passed by the chamber.
If passed, the bill would ban 24-hour and drive-through voting, voting options that have been championed as expanding access in nonwhite communities. It would make it harder for people with disabilities to vote by restricting the ability of those who help them turn in their ballots. And, among a slate of other restrictions, it would also bar local election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, with the aim of restricting mail-in voting.
Texas Democrats had fled the legislature in July to block a special session in which Texas Republicans planned to pass the voter suppression bill, anti-trans laws, and more. In an effort to force a vote on the voter suppression law, Texas House Republicans earlier this month voted to arrest their Democratic counterparts if they didn’t return to the state.
Democratic lawmakers pointed out the bill’s implicit and explicit racist effects in debate on Thursday night.
“The courts have pointed out over and over and over again: intentional discrimination against African Americans, intentional discrimination against Latinos, intentional discrimination against people of color. These are not my words. These are three federal courts across this country making 10 findings of that intentional discrimination,” said Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat.
Hinojosa was referencing past court rulings against Texas election law, including a 2012 ruling finding that Texas lawmakers didn’t comply with the Voting Rights Act when drawing district maps that cycle. “Intentional discrimination against people of a different race…” Hinojosa said. “Is that racism?”
Phelan interjected, saying, “we can talk about racial impacts with this legislation without accusing members of this body of being racist.” Hinojosa pointed out that she hadn’t accused any one lawmaker as being racist.
Democrats expressed frustration and anger over Phelan’s attempted ban on discussing racism in the chamber. “Wow. The Speaker just asked us to not use the word ‘racism’ during debate today,” wrote Democratic Rep. Erin Zwiener on Twitter. “SB 1 will harm the freedom to vote for all Texans, but it will disproportionately impact people of color. That’s racist, no matter how you dress it up. Period.”
“One Republican has already filed an amendment to put the ‘Souls to the Polls’ provision that would limit black churches voting on Sunday morning back in the bill. It’s racist,” Zwiener continued. “Coddling R legislators who are uncomfortable about how this bill hurts people of color is not our job.”
This summer, methane got a nickname that stuck. Climate scientists and policy analysts have been calling the greenhouse gas a “low-hanging fruit” for years, but the term seems to have caught on more broadly among world leaders, journalists and organizers, due in part to a major United Nations report on methane and the most dire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment issued yet.
Methane is the second greatest contributor to the climate emergency after carbon dioxide, but unlike CO2, it only sticks around the atmosphere for about a decade. So cutting methane emissions drastically and immediately can have a sizable impact on keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and thereby averting the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, such as global food shortage.
In total, the oil and gas industry is responsible for over one-third of methane emissions, some of which occur through flaring and venting: the practice of burning off, or releasing unwanted methane gas in the process of drilling, pumping, transporting and refining fossil fuels.
An August 19 report by Earthworks reveals that among the lowest of low-hanging fruits may be found in the Permian Basin, in West Texas, where up to 84 percent of producers are flaring without permits. Since fracking was commercialized a decade ago, the Permian Basin has exploded as the top oil-producing region in the U.S.
The report outlines how state regulators charged with keeping tabs on flaring, including the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), which issues flaring permits, and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), which oversees air quality, are doing nothing to stop producers observed to be dumping gas into the atmosphere. In other words, the Permian Basin is even more of a climate bomb — and a potential site of climate intervention — than environmentalists may have originally thought.
Texas is the top flarer of all U.S. states, according to federal data from 2019. But the practice is a problem far beyond the Lone Star State. A July study in Environmental Research Letters found that across the U.S., over half a million people live within three miles of a flare. Living near a flare is associated with 50 percent higher odds of premature birth. In addition to being a climate pollutant, methane, which seeps out of leaky flares, is also the primary precursor to the asthma-causing pollutant ground-level ozone.
Methane emissions have slid under the rug for years — in part because the gas is invisible to the human eye, but also because systems for monitoring emissions are less comprehensive and therefore more uncertain than for CO2. Sometimes, incomplete flaring leads to black smoke that is visible, also known as black carbon. But in recordings at oil and gas production sites without a special camera, you can also see a lot of sky.
The increased use of optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras in recent years has made it possible to watch dark plumes of otherwise unseen pollutants escape from inactive-looking infrastructure, like steel storage tanks and thin metal chimneys.
Sharon Wilson, a senior field advocate for Earthworks and co-author of the report on unpermitted flaring, is a certified optical gas imaging thermographer and has been busy capturing footage of oil and gas production sites around the U.S. since 2014.
It’s only when putting an OGI camera up to one’s face, Wilson told Truthout, that dark plumes of pollutants become visible, turning landscapes into what look like war zones. “If people could see with their naked eye what I see with my lens, there would never have been a fracking boom.”
According to the report, many flares are left unlit, which means they are seeping methane straight into the atmosphere, rather than burning it, which makes the release visible and at least converts the gas into less-potent carbon dioxide.
To assess flaring operations in the Permian, Wilson and co-author Jack McDonald pulled from two data sets. One was generated from Environmental Defense Fund helicopter flyovers using OGI cameras from the sky to capture flares in January, March and June of 2020. After ensuring the data was focused specifically on the area of the Permian Basin in Texas, rather than in New Mexico, the authors cross-referenced that data with permits logged in the RRC’s database.
If there was any overlap between a flare observed during flyovers and one for which a permit could be identified in the database, over any period, the authors gave the producer and regulators the benefit of the doubt, and counted that site as permitted. But ultimately, of the total 227 flares they ended up counting, a mere 35 sites had permits to flare every time they were observed to be doing so. Many companies were found to be flaring without ever obtaining a permit, including Diamondback Energy, Conoco and Shell.
In Texas, flaring permits are governed by a state administrative law known as Rule 32. Under the rule, flaring is only legal for the first 10 days of a new oil and gas operation. After that, the practice is illegal without a permit, except for during 24-hour emergency periods. But the law does not clearly define what conditions oil and gas companies need to justify a permit or emergency exemption.
As such, the operations that have received permits have essentially been rubber-stamped, the report suggests. Operators have applied for and received permits to flare for a host of nebulous reasons such as “inconsistent curtailments” or “economic conditions.” Still, the vast majority are unpermitted, the report suggests.
Earthworks visited one site known as the “Seattle Slew” 14 times with an optical gas camera, as is described in the report, and detected pollution every time — nine of which involved flaring specifically. The owner of the site, MDC, has never been issued a permit from the RRC, according to the analysis. Earthworks reported as much to the TCEQ.
According to correspondence Earthworks obtained via a public records request, the state agency did reach out to the company about the findings. “There is no way to estimate how much gas was vented, as we don’t measure our tank gas … since it isn’t sold to gas sales but instead sent to the combustor for incineration,” MDC replied. “Also, we don’t know for how long this gas was vented to the atmosphere.”
In spite of this response, the state agency did not issue any violations, Earthworks found. A TCEQ representative told Truthout that “compliance determinations were made based on a review of the completed questionnaires and other relevant data such as reported emission events and applicable permits or authorizations,” noting that the facility did have a permit covering other emissions, including volatile organic compounds, nitrous oxide and carbon.
Wilson says she’s documented numerous similar instances in which she’s reported emissions violations on the ground, such as at Diamondback’s Waler State Battery site, which regulators have all but shrugged off.
In response to the report, RRC Spokesperson Andrew Keese told Reuters, “A short-term observation of a flare from a flyover and absence of an explicit exception does not necessarily mean the observed flaring is illegal.”
In July, the RRC published data suggesting that the practice of flaring was declining across the state, dropping from 2.29 percent of all natural gas produced in June 2019, to 0.65 percent in May 2021. “Texas is seeing significantly reduced flaring rates as a result of improved technologies, infrastructure and regulatory processes,” RRC Chair Christi Craddick said in a statement.
McDonald, however, said that dealings with the two state agencies do not offer much assurance. “From what we can tell, this seems to be an issue broadly across Texas, with just this kind of systemic lack of will to go and get these permits.”
Without closely monitoring releases, or following up on violations, the agency’s data is a moot point. “Even if they are right that exempt flaring is exclusively the cause of the flaring, the RRC does not know how much flaring is happening,” McDonald said. “That means they are dramatically underestimating the amount of flaring that’s actually happening in the state because they aren’t able to account for all those exempt flares.”
As Clean Energy Wire has reported, oil and gas production in places like the Permian has expanded faster than infrastructure to transport it. Oil is still profitable, but gas prices are so low that it’s cheaper to burn it on the spot, or release it directly, than to pay to send it to markets.
The report concludes with a handful of actions state lawmakers and regulators could take to bring protocols in line with the regulatory agencies’ purported missions, including making all permitting data and enforcement actions publicly available online; updating Rule 32 such that it clearly identifies what justifications warrant a flaring permit or an emergency exemption; and creating an impartial panel free of oil and gas interests within the RRC to review all flaring permits.
But Wilson says real reform will also require action beyond state lines. “After over a decade, it’s pretty clear that Texas has no intention of enforcing any rules,” Wilson said, noting lawmakers’ and regulators’ conflicts of interest. The RRC’s Craddick, for instance, owns land with her father — a state congressman — that generated over $100,000 from natural gas production in 2019, according to TheTexas Tribune.
The Biden administration is likely to unveil a new methane rule in September. In anticipation, the RRC and TCEQ penned a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in July requesting minimal changes. “The TCEQ has a robust air permitting program. Air permits typically include fugitive monitoring programs and control of volatile organic compound emissions, which could include methane emissions since methane is not separated from [volatile organic compounds] prior to atmospheric release,” agency directors wrote. “Additional requirements to control and monitor methane specifically are burdensome to the regulated community, duplicative and are therefore unnecessary.”
Given that the EPA delegates how states must implement Clean Air Act regulations, Wilson says the moment warrants the strongest possible rule, such as one that would lead to slashing oil and gas methane emissions 65 percent by 2025. “If Biden is serious about taking action on the climate, the federal government will need to step in,” she said. “What they give, they can take away.”
The agency tasked with regulating schools in Texas issued new guidance on Thursday stating it will stop enforcing a ban on masking rules.
The guidance is temporary, pending the resolution of litigation involving school districts that have attempted to require masking in defiance of Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Texas), who issued an executive order banning such requirements. But the move by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) indicates that, for now, children’s safety will be prioritized.
A number of school districts have challenged Abbott’s ban, as the governor tries to keep it intact through the courts. Some districts have pursued creative ways to circumvent the ban on masking rules, including the Paris Independent School District, which temporarily made masks part of the employee and student dress codes.
The state Supreme Court also issued a temporary ruling, refusing to say that districts have to undo their masking rules until the lawsuits are resolved.
TEA’s new recommendations include allowing public school districts, in consultation with their respective local health officials, to come up with plans for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in their hallways. Masking requirements are now allowed as a means to that end, the agency said.
The recent surge of coronavirus cases in Texas is also impacting more children. Last week, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins released a statement detailing the increases in hospitalizations, noting that numbers were rising higher for younger populations in the state.
“In Dallas, we have zero ICU beds left for children. That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one,” Jenkins said. “Your child will wait for another child to die.”
In spite of the governor’s ban, Texans overwhelmingly support the use of mask mandates for schools to keep children better protected against COVID-19.
In a Spectrum News/Ipsos poll conducted in the state from August 6 to 13, 72 percent of respondents said they backed mask requirements in K-12 schools, while less than three-in-ten Texans (28 percent) said they opposed the idea. Among parents, 66 percent in the poll said they are worried about their child contracting coronavirus while at school.
As news reports have detailed how Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has contracted coronavirus — and after at least four school districts in the state have had to temporarily close due to the spread of the virus being so prevalent — one Texas district has found a workaround for Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, by implementing the requirement to wear facial coverings into its student dress code.
The school board for Paris Independent School District in northeast Texas issued a statement on Tuesday announcing that it believed the ban on masking rules at schools to reduce the spread of COVID-19 (and its Delta variant) doesn’t preclude them from changing the dress code among students and employees of the district alike.
“The Board believes the dress code can be used to mitigate communicable health issues, and therefore has amended the PISD dress code to protect our students and employees,” the school district, which has around 4,000 students, said.
The board members voted 5-1 to change its dress code to read, “For health reasons, masks are required for all employees and students to mitigate flu, cold, pandemic, and any other communicable diseases.” The dress code will be revisited monthly, and if the situation changes in the future, the code can be amended to remove the mask provision upon a majority vote of the board.
The announcement by the Paris Independent School District to require masks as part of its dress code in order to bypass the executive order issued by Abbott against mask mandates came on the same day that his office announced he had contracted COVID-19. Abbott, who is vaccinated, is reportedly asymptomatic and isolating himself from others.
NBC News analyst Vin Gupta, who is also an ICU doctor, noted that Abbott’s actions after getting a positive diagnosis were curious, to say the least. The governor has utilized a treatment plan that uses monoclonal antibodies, which is generally reserved for people who are far more seriously ill from COVID than Abbott currently is.
“Quickly getting access to monoclonal antibody therapy when you’re the fully vaccinated, asymptomatic Governor of Texas shows just how anxious and scared @GregAbbott_TX actually is of a virus that he constantly downplays,” Gupta wrote. “Hope Texans take note.”
Quickly getting access to monoclonal antibody therapy when you’re the fully vaccinated, asymptomatic Governor of Texas shows just how anxious and scared @GregAbbott_TX actually is of a virus that he constantly downplays.
Abbott is refusing to budge on his ban on masking mandates for schools though, even going so far as to sue school districts in the state Supreme Court in order to try and force them to comply. But as Abbott goes about turning his state’s public health into a game of strategy, pediatric ICU beds in Texas hospitals are filling up at a rate not seen before.
Last week, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins, reflecting on a school district’s desire to keep masking rules in place, noted that there were no ICU beds available for children in that county, because of a rise in the number of kids contracting coronavirus.
“In Dallas, we have zero ICU beds left for children,” Jenkins said on Friday. “That means if your child’s in a car wreck, if your child has a congenital heart defect or something and needs an ICU bed, or more likely if they have COVID and need an ICU bed, we don’t have one. Your child will wait for another child to die.”
When the definitive history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, August 17, 2021, may be remembered as one of the great forks in this terrible road. One path leads to ever-deepening calamity, and the other returns basic common sense to the fight against the virus. We cannot know the outcome today, but I strongly suspect the wrong road will be taken, and another lethal winter will once again put us, and our children, at the mercy of that which did not have to happen.
It was announced yesterday, August 17, that Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas and a vocal opponent of mask mandates, has contracted COVID. He is the 11th governor to do so to date. The announcement brought back vivid memories of the October 2020 day when we found out that Donald Trump had become infected.
As was common during the Trump administration, the general reaction was the paradox of being shocked and thoroughly unsurprised simultaneously. Trump had spent the year essentially daring the virus to catch him, flouting and mocking even the most basic protective measures. In this, he planted the seeds of our current crisis, as millions of his still-devout voters continue to follow his self-destructive lead.
Abbott is cut from the same bolt of hidebound cloth. The Texas governor has gone to war against several municipalities in his state because they want children to wear masks when they return to school. Given the growing body of terrifying evidence that the Delta variant of COVID is going after kids far more than we have seen before, this seems like a reasonable precaution for all to take. Not so, according to Abbott, whose disdain for local government flies in the face of, well, everything conservatives often pretend to stand for.
The arm-flapping hypocrisy does not end there. Abbott is by all reports asymptomatic, which should come as little surprise: He has been vaccinated three times. The vaccines have been highly effective at minimizing the damage of infection so far, but those numbers have recently grown distressingly blurry.
As part of his treatment, Abbott is also getting the Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment, which is usually only used for patients in dire condition. He is not, but he’s getting it anyway.
With three shots, Abbot is among a favored few; only half the country has been fully vaccinated, and those who have their shots look now to the necessity of booster shots. The COVID Delta variant has caused an explosion of infections, even among inoculated people like Abbott. There were almost 140,000 new infections yesterday alone, a solid portion coming from Abbott’s state.
To recap: The governor of Texas has caught COVID after striving to thwart minimal safety measures for children. His state’s medical infrastructure is trembling on the verge of collapse. Yet he himself has been vaccinated three times, making him rare in the populace and assumedly safer than most. From this bubble, which still did not completely protect him, Abbott has made it his business to keep others in far more peril of infection from minimal precautions like masks.
The icing on the cake is this astonishing video, taken the night before Abbott’s infection announcement. There he was, in a packed room filled with elderly donors, and nary a mask in sight. Was he spraying virus around the room like a one-man superspreader? These were his people, but one wonders if they have all gotten three inoculations like their mask-flouting governor. It’s possible, which in many ways makes the visual all the worse.
How bad is it getting in Abbott’s state? “Texas health officials have requested five mortuary trailers from the federal government in anticipation of a possible spike in deaths brought about by surging coronavirus numbers in the state,” reports The Washington Post. “Mobile and refrigerated mortuary trucks were seen as a grim symbol during earlier waves of the pandemic. Trailers were delivered to cities to keep pace with mounting deaths, and in some places they reportedly remained in place as makeshift morgues months into the pandemic.”
School has begun in a number of places, and many more will open soon. In Texas, they will throw their doors wide to a maskless tide of unvaccinated children who are at greater peril of infection than at any time in the pandemic. The actions of Abbott, and of ideological, conniving pals like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, may come to be seen as nothing short of criminally negligent homicide on a mass scale if the worst does come.
This is COVID. If we have learned anything, it is that the worst often does come, sooner or later, through whatever gaps we negligently provide it. Governors like Abbott and DeSantis are deliberately providing those gaps because they want to inherit Trump’s tarnished (yet lucrative) throne, and need to play to their base in order to do so. It is as ruthlessly cynical as anything that has ever been seen in this land — Let them eat virus! — and threatens to get a lot more people killed.
This is that fork in the road — is a mask-hating governor catching COVID after three shots enough to turn heads and slow down this thundering herd of deadly foolishness? Don’t expect Abbott to get religion after his infection; Trump didn’t, and in fact doubled down hard on his ongoing war on science. That got us this. What will Abbott and his friends get us, but more of the same or worse?
At some point very soon, a greater power than Abbott and DeSantis is going to have to take these matters in hand. Until President Biden takes decisive action, the rest of us will witness the numbers climb every day, as the infection spreads to more and more of our children.
Following an order from the Texas Supreme Court that invalidated a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed local governments to issue masking rules, Dallas Independent School District (DISD) Superintendent Michael Hinojosa announced that his schools would still be requiring students and staff to wear face coverings to prevent the spread of coronavirus.
The Texas Supreme Court’s order on Sunday placed a stay on a restraining order from a lower district court, which had said an executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott (R) preventing mask mandates from being implemented could not be enforced. But after speaking with attorneys for DISD, Hinojosa said the ruling from the state’s highest court did not address school districts, only county governments that wanted to enforce mask requirements.
“The order that was issued by the Supreme Court was issued to Dallas County and it’s listed as [Dallas County District Judge] Clay Jenkins and the county. It did not say one word about DISD in that order,” Hinojosa said in a statement.
While some may view the superintendent’s reaction to the state Supreme Court’s ruling on Sunday as playing with semantics, one legal expert said Hinojosa was absolutely right in his assessment.
“DISD is not in fact bound by the Texas Supreme Court decision, so it could go ahead and have a mask mandate for now, unless there will be litigation involving DISD,” Southern Methodist University law professor Dale Carpenter said to Fox 4 News in Dallas.
Abbott’s executive order, issued in late July, forbade any local government, including school districts, from issuing mask requirements. Abbott’s decree stated that “no person may be required by any jurisdiction to wear or to mandate the wearing of a face covering.” Jurisdictions in violation of the order can be subjected to fines of $1,000.
After Hinojosa announced he would not remove the mask rule for DISD, he received a phone call from President Joe Biden, who praised him for standing up to the governor’s order.
“The president said he was proud of us for making this opportunity available to our students,” Hinojosa said. “He thanked me for having the courage to stand up for our students and our community.”
Texas has experienced a fast resurgence of coronavirus in the past month. From July 16 to August 15, the state’s 7-day average of cases being reported jumped by more than 471 percent. The rate of hospitalizations currently seen in the state is matching levels not seen since February.
Even as their budgets have climbed upward, police departments have deprived sexual assault units of proportional funding for decades. Today, advocates in Texas are trying to transform the state’s approach to sexual violence.
August 3, 2021, marked the second anniversary of the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that took place on a Saturday morning in 2019 and resulted in the deaths of 23 people and injury of 26 others, ranging in age from 2 to 82.
Twenty-one of the 23 killed were of Mexican origin, and eight were Mexican citizens; another eight Mexican citizens were wounded. The killer was a lone, white gunman, aged 21, named Patrick Crusius, who published an online manifesto immediately prior to the attack where he proclaimed his intent to target those he considered responsible for what he described as the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
The El Paso killer’s text referred to immigrants of “Hispanic” origin as the purported “instigators” of his murderous violence, from the perspective of his self-described role as a “defender” of “his” country “from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by” Latino immigrant “invaders.” It should be noted here that it is much more accurate to describe the historical origins of Texas in terms of an invasion by white settler slaveholders into what was at that time internationally recognized as Mexican territory, and that the largest Latino immigrant community in Texas today is of Mexican origin. All of this is deeply embedded in the cross-currents of the battles over what can and should be taught — and what must be suppressed — about the history of Texas in the state’s public schools.
Nonetheless, the August 2019 killing spree must be placed within the broader historical context of anti-Mexican violence in Texas, throughout the U.S.-Mexico border region and nationally. This necessarily includes the relationship within this framework between violence perpetrated directly by federal, state and local authorities, and “vigilante”-style violence by non-state actors in potential complicity with governmental agents, as suggested by Article 25 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute regarding the scope of international criminal responsibility. This includes white nationalist militias that set up camp at the outskirts of El Paso in the spring of 2019 with the express intent of terrorizing migrants at local border crossings.
In El Paso — and in the U.S.-Mexico border region and Texas more generally — to target “Hispanics” generally, in practice, means targeting primarily people who are specifically of Mexican origin. There are large numbers of Central Americans among the migrants who tend to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, but most of them do not settle in Texas because they have relatives already present elsewhere within the U.S.
The El Paso gunman also touted his “support” for the March 2019 mass shootings directed at Muslim immigrant worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 51 and injured 40, and were accompanied by a manifesto entitled “The Great Replacement.” This title echoed that of a well-known book published in 2011 by French white nationalist author and activist Renaud Camus, which has been cited as an influence by ethno-nationalist, anti-immigrant sectors throughout the world, including the killer responsible for Norway’s Utoya Massacre in July 2011. Utoya in turn was a crucial inspiration for the Christchurch mass killings.
According to the El Paso shooter, his rampage was “just the beginning of the fight for America and Europe,” which made him feel “honored to head the fight to reclaim my country from destruction.” Chris Grant, a surviving eye witness to the shooting described how “the shooter targeted people who appeared to be Hispanic, but let white and black shoppers out of the building.”
The gunman’s self-confessed intent to kill “as many Mexicans as possible” has led to his still unfolding prosecution on federal hate crimes charges in addition to multiple crimes under Texas state law. The site of the shooting was reportedly visited and chosen by the killer shortly before the incident because of its proximity to the border and popularity with shoppers from Mexico. The store was packed with hundreds of back-to-school shoppers at the time of the shooting, including many children.
The U.S.-Mexico border region in general, and the sector centered around the binational communities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, had long been highlighted as the epicenter of a persistent U.S. immigration policy-driven humanitarian crisis when the mass shooting erupted in August 2019. The incident must thus be understood as a culminating moment in a much longer, continuing story about how this region — and El Paso specifically — have been at the core of longstanding efforts to militarize the border, “securitize” immigration policy, and criminalize migrants and their families, which the Trump administration vastly intensified.
El Paso, meanwhile, continues to be central to the most backward, abusive elements of U.S. immigration and border policy still being perpetuated under the Biden administration, as the site where thousands of migrant children have been held under inhumane conditions in an improvised detention facility at Fort Bliss, one of the country’s largest military bases.
Longstanding historical continuities are striking in this context. It was at Fort Bliss that about 5,000 Mexican refugees (including many families and children) fleeing the violence of the Mexican Revolution were held behind barbed wire in improvised settings in 1916, and fumigated regularly through gasoline baths and by insecticides such as Zyklon B (later employed in Nazi death camps for purposes of extermination) at the Santa Fe bridge border crossing.
Both Trump and Biden-era immigration policies and practices — such as family separation, the generalized denial of the right to seek asylum on both sides of the border, and the indefinite detention of migrant children and families in inhumane conditions — must be understood and redressed as serious violations of human rights that rise to the level of “crimes against humanity,” such as torture. Similar policies are being implemented aggressively at other border sites and against migrant families and communities throughout the world.
What does the El Paso massacre tell us about the implications and consequences of such policies in practice? What is the relationship between racist and xenophobic violence and policies of this kind? To what extent does the story of El Paso, migrants, and the border converge with that of other border regions and migrant communities within the framework of the global struggle for human rights?
El Paso’s central role in this overall narrative notably includes the Trump administration’s family separation policy, which mandated forcible separation upon arrival at the border of thousands of migrant families and their transfer to detention sites that in many cases were hundreds of miles apart, without any way to locate or communicate with each other. Such practices and their consequences (for example traumatization of children that may be irreversible) coincide with the definition of “torture” and of “forced disappearances” pursuant to international criminal law and international human rights law, which fall within the definition of “crimes against humanity,” the most serious kind of offense, according to the Rome Statute. This policy, later expanded to the rest of the border as part of the “Zero-Tolerance” initiative, was first tested in El Paso.
El Paso received unprecedented national and international media attention at the height of the family separation crisis in June of 2018, and became a convergent site for a wide range of national and international mobilizations of concern and solidarity, including many faith-based initiatives and a national campaign to end child detention focused on closing the Tornillo “tent city” facility, located in the desert east of the city. This intensity continued between December 2018 and July 2019, as numbers of Central American families fleeing structural injustices and drug violence surged at the border as part of entrenched processes of forced migration that are ultimately attributable to the regional effects of U.S. policies.
The El Paso’s killer’s rhetoric regarding the “Hispanic invasion” of Texas was echoed on multiple occasions by former President Donald Trump and other high-level administration officials. This discourse provided a framework within which Trump’s targeting of Mexicans in particular, and of immigrants more generally, including his laughing off a supporter’s demand that migrant caravan participants be shot at the border during a May 2019 rally, could be anchored.
The El Paso massacre must be understood as much more than simply another seemingly random “mass shooting.” It is tempting to obfuscate or elide the specifically racist and xenophobic dimensions of the El Paso attack by approaching it primarily from the perspective of the broader category of undifferentiated mass shootings, and to focus on its implications for important issues like gun control, rather than to explore it as a case study of white nationalist violence directed both at people of Mexican origin and immigrants.
The August 2019 shooting must instead be framed as a racist and xenophobic mass human rights crime — a “massacre” that had a potentially genocidal character. “Massacre” in this context is a term of art grounded in the expert terminology of international criminal law and human rights, and specifically of genocide studies, pursuant to the internationally recognized definition of genocide in the United Nations Genocide Convention and in the Rome Statute, as an act of deliberate killing that was “intended to destroy, in whole or in part” a social group with identifiable national, racial, ethnic or religious characteristics. The El Paso massacre falls within this definition because it was specifically intended to generate a large number of victims of Mexican and/or immigrant origin, who were targeted because of their identity.
This also means understanding that the El Paso massacre is at least in part the product of presidential incitement dating back to the “anti-Mexican” dimensions of the announcement of Trump’s candidacy in June 2015, and to the cumulative impact of the cascade of official policies targeting the U.S.-Mexico border region and El Paso specifically for intensified enforcement throughout the last three years.
From this perspective the August 2019 mass killing in El Paso was the ultimately predictable, and thus preventable, result of the policies that preceded it, and that made it possible.
Shelter staff have called 911 on migrant kids for minor offenses. In some cases, police have arrested, jailed and even tased those kids.
When unaccompanied children arrive alone at the U.S. border and seek asylum, they get sent to cells, then to government-funded shelters, where they wait to be released to family members or sponsors. Kids can spend months, sometimes years, at these shelters, and they can be secretive places. It’s hard for reporters and even government officials to get access to the shelters. But Reveal reporters Aura Bogado and Laura C. Morel found that one group sometimes entering shelters is police.
Reveal had to sue the federal government to get the records on migrant children in shelters run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The documents show that since 2014, at least 84 children held in shelters have been turned over to law enforcement.
First, Bogado and Morel share the story of a 16-year-old asylum seeker from Honduras who was tased by a Texas sheriff’s deputy. The incident was caught on the deputy’s body camera, which also captured the deputy’s partner as he insulted the teenager, calling him “El Stupido.” Then, we hear another disturbing story of a 17-year-old boy who briefly grabbed another teenager – and wound up being arrested for assault, held in jail and deported.
These are cases of overpolicing in a place where there are no bystanders to record, a place that is supposed to be taking care of vulnerable children. With a new administration, will anything change?
Hospitals are filling up and children are near death across a swath of Red states from Texas to Florida. The governors of those two states are leading a movement.
Republican Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have gone all-in on a high-stakes bet, and the example of Donald Trump suggests they may just win it. Win or lose, though, they’re both tenaciously hanging onto their bans on mandated masks in schools.
Their bet is that they’ll get away with letting tens of thousands of their citizens — and thousands of their citizens’ children — die or get “long Covid” and the people of their states will simply forget and move on.
They’re encouraged in that belief by the scientific reality that contagious diseases usually follow a predictable curve of increasing infections until hitting a point where so many people are dead or immune that the disease can no longer expand its range. From there, the disease incidence declines steadily and eventually flattens out to a low level. Add in rapidly expanding vaccination and the curve collapses even faster.
It happened centuries ago with the Bubonic Plague (aka the Black Death) and Smallpox, among other diseases. Before vaccines it happened every year with chickenpox, mumps and measles. It happens now every year with the flu as it did in a big way in 1918. We’ve all seen that curve both in history and in our own lives.
The question is how many adults and children in Florida and Texas will have to die or get “long Covid” before those states hit the “herd immunity” threshold… and whether the good citizens of those states (particularly the Republican voters) will tolerate that level of disability and death just to satisfy the tough-guy egos of their respective governors.
After all, Trump presided over what was arguably the worst period of unnecessary mass deaths and disability in the history of America… and DeSantis and Abbott voters still love him.
Multiple scientific analyses of Trump’s response to the pandemic, the most credible highlighted by Dr. Deborah Birx after she left the White House, show that at least 400,000 Americans would not have died if Trump had simply put into place a nationwide mask and social-distancing mandate like most other countries did.
But Trump, afraid that any concessions to public health would soften the economy and therefore his re-election chances, chose instead to encourage people to ignore masks and other protective measures and just go shopping and get back to work.
That part of Trump’s bet didn’t quite work out as planned: he lost the election. But his longer-term bet, that most Americans would soon forget and not blame him for all those unnecessary deaths, has paid off.
Instead of being saddled with the Stalin-like title of a mass murderer of his own people (Stalin used famine instead of disease), Trump is back to holding rallies and basking in the warm glow of his cult’s adoration… while continuing to spread disease among his followers!
DeSantis and Abbott think they can pull off the same trick, and they may well be right. Killing large numbers of Americans rarely sticks to Republicans.
George W. Bush made a similar bet back in 2001 after 9/11, as Spencer Ackerman documents in detail in his new book Reign of Terror. Bush could have simply taken the Taliban up on their offer to arrest Bin Laden and turn him over for prosecution, but instead he began bombing the second-poorest country in the world, where the average income was around $700 a year.
The following year he doubled down on his bet, repeating LBJ’s trick of lying us into an unnecessary war, this one with Iraq, leading to over a million dead and displaced Iraqis and thousands of dead Americans.
LBJ isn’t remembered so well, in large part because the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC brings into shocking relief the level of death and sacrifice his lies caused. It’s safe to bet that Republicans will never allow a memorial of that type for veterans of the Afghanistan or Iraq wars… or to the memory of the half-million-plus Americans who died of Covid on Trump’s watch.
Plus, Democratic President Joe Biden has taken on the task of cleaning up the messes from Bush’s illegal wars and Trump’s democide, and he doesn’t seem particularly inclined to rub either in Republicans’ faces.
So, how will this play out for DeSantis and Abbott? Both are betting that deaths and “long Covid” disease will plateau soon and then begin to drop and they can then do a victory lap. But they may be waiting quite a while, given the low vaccination rates in their states and the particularly ugly virality and potency of this new variant.
And Delta, unlike the original Covid that was often called the “Boomer Remover,” is landing children in hospitals by the hundreds in both states. Last month, in an early foretaste of the brute force of this variant, the nation was shocked when 5-year-old Wyatt Gibson — an otherwise normal, healthy child with no preexisting conditions — died in his mother’s arms at a children’s hospital in Georgia.
And children are also getting long Covid, which may disable them for life. As theAgence France-Presse news service reports about a normal, American healthy 10-year-old in Philadelphia who got long Covid, “His symptoms were debilitating: pain in his legs so bad he couldn’t walk anywhere and gastrointestinal distress and nausea so severe he had to lie in bed. Unable to navigate stairs, he crawled instead.”
And the damage wasn’t limited to this child’s body:
“At school, basic math equations and completing homework assignments became enormously challenging for the usually grade-A student. Kasturirangan describes it as a ‘kind of confusion, because he couldn’t grasp basic things that he’d normally find so easy to deal with.’”
“Almost half of children who contract Covid-19 may have lasting symptoms, which should factor into decisions on reopening schools… Evidence from the first study of long covid in children suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 percent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities.”
The authors add that such symptoms include long-lasting “fatigue, muscle and joint pain, headache, insomnia, respiratory problems and heart problems” and that “there may be up to 100 other symptoms, including gastrointestinal problems, nausea, dizziness, seizures, hallucinations and testicular pain.”
“What can protect those children, however, is universal in-school masking for students and staff. It’s been studied by Duke University researchers who tracked COVID-19 transmission in North Carolina K-12 schools across 100 school districts, 14 charter schools, 160,549 school staffers, and more than 864,515 students attending in-school instruction.
“‘We have learned a few things for certain,’ wrote the researchers, Dr. Kanecia Zimmerman, associate professor of pediatrics at the Duke University School of Medicine, and Dr. Danny Benjamin, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Duke Health. ‘Although vaccination is the best way to prevent COVID-19, universal masking is a close second, and with masking in place, in-school learning is safe and more effective than remote instruction, regardless of community rates of infection.’”
With school mask mandates banned by DeSantis and Abbott, however, children’s hospitals in Florida and Texas are now staggered by Covid; the headlines tell the story.
“COVID-19 Cases Among Kids Overwhelming Florida Hospitals” blares The NY Post; “Florida Sets COVID Hospitalization Records Again, Including Highest in Nation for Children” says The Daytona Beach News-Journal.
In Texas, the Dallas NBC TV affiliateKXAS (Channel 5) headlined their story this week: “‘Full-on Surge’: Tarrant County Leaders Worry About Children’s Health, Hospital Capacity.” CNN delivers the grim news with this headline: “Baby Girl with Covid-19 Airlifted 150 Miles Because of Houston Hospital Bed Shortage.”
Will DeSantis and Abbott be able to withstand this kind of news as their infection rates, particularly among children as school resumes, continue to climb?
How many deaths and how much illness will Florida and Texas Republicans accept in the name of “owning the libs” by refusing to allow schools to mandate masks?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions right now, but betting that a Republican can’t get away with something awful close to murder is always a bad bet.
Texas lawmakers in the state’s House of Representatives voted on Tuesday to order state law enforcement to forcibly return Democrats to the legislative chamber, including potentially arresting them, in order to force a vote on implementing restrictive voting provisions in future elections in the state.
The 80-12 vote total did not include dozens of Democrats who remain absent from the legislative chamber. All votes in favor of the warrants were from Republicans, while 11 Democrats who were present, joined by one GOP lawmaker, voted against issuing the warrants.
After the vote was held, Republican Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives Dade Phelan signed 52 civil arrest warrants for those Democrats who remain absent.
The vote was made possible on Tuesday after the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked a lower court order, which would have prevented such warrants from being issued. The state’s highest court issued a stay of that lower court’s ruling, granting Democrats time to respond to the stay later on this week, but permitting Republicans to hold the vote on the warrants later in the day.
More than 60 of the Texas House’s Democratic legislators left the state in May and traveled to Washington, D.C. to prevent a quorum, blocking the passage of a bill that would have restricted access to voting for Texas residents. Since then, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has called two consecutive special sessions in order to keep the matter alive in the legislature, resulting in the Democrats having to stay away longer.
At least 20 of those Democrats remain in the nation’s capital. The whereabouts of the others are unknown, and it’s possible some have returned to Texas. The warrants that were issued would only allow for those lawmakers to be compelled to appear in the state House if they were detained in Texas.
The Texas Democratic Party expressed strong criticism of the actions of Republicans in the state House on Tuesday.
“Texas Republicans continue to show they’ll stop at nothing to cling onto their power, but Texas Democrats made a promise to defend the #FreedomToVote at all costs,” the state party’s official Twitter account posted.
The Democratic lawmakers made their exodus to Washington, D.C. in order to push for passage of voting and election reform bills, the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would prevent state legislatures from enacting restrictive measures such as the ones that Texas Republicans have proposed. The state representatives held rallies in the nation’s capital and spoke directly to federal lawmakers on the need to pass those bills — including the need to end or amend the Senate filibuster rule in order to do so.
“We came to Washington, D.C. to demand action and draw the nation’s eyes to the fight for the freedom to vote,” Texas state Rep. Trey Martinez Fisher, one of the Democrats who left Texas, said earlier this month.
Centrist Democrats, and even President Joe Biden, have been sympathetic and agreeable on the passage of those bills, but they have not been willing to call for the filibuster’s end in order to pass them into law. Without at least 10 Republicans in the U.S. Senate voting with Democrats, the voting rights bills seem destined to fail.
As the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread, many hospitals are reporting record numbers of children being hospitalized, especially in areas with low vaccination rates, including Arkansas, Florida, Missouri and Texas. Dr. Christina Propst, a pediatrician in Houston, says children under 12 who are still ineligible forCOVID-19 vaccines are at risk. “They are currently our most vulnerable population, just as this highly transmissible variant is surging across the country,” Propst says. She says Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order banning mask mandates in schools is a purely political decision that ignores science. “What he is doing is a direct threat to the health and well-being of the children of Texas,” says Propst.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN:Many schools are reopening this week. We begin today’s show looking at the rise ofCOVID-19 infections in children as the highly contagious Delta variant continues to spread. Many hospitals across the country are reporting record numbers of children hospitalized especially in areas with low vaccination rates.The New York Timesreports, in a single day last week, Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock had 19 hospitalized children; Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, had 15; and Children’s Mercy Kansas City in Missouri had 12. Some of the children were in the intensive care unit. This is Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief at Children’s Hospital New Orleans.
DR.MARKKLINE:I have to tell you that I am as worried about our children today as I have ever been. This virus, the Delta variant ofCOVID, is every infectious disease specialist’s and epidemiologist’s worst nightmare. … As the governor mentioned, there was a myth that circulated during the first year of the epidemic that children somehow were immune. I think there was — there were people who said children don’t get the disease, they can’t transmit the disease. We know that those were fallacies all along, but particularly now that the Delta variant has emerged, it has become very clear that children are being heavily impacted by this organism and by this pandemic at this point, perhaps more than ever before.
AMYGOODMAN:In Florida, where many schools reopen today, the sharpest spike inCOVIDcases has recently been in children under the age of 12. As of Sunday, Florida had 172 children being treated in hospitals forCOVID— the highest number in the country. This comes as Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is threatening to defund the salaries of school officials who mandate mask wearing in schools. Several counties have announced mask mandates in schools in defiance of DeSantis.
A similar battle is brewing in Texas, where school authorities in Dallas and Austin are requiring masks in defiance of Republican Governor’s Greg Abbott’s order. This comes as pediatric wards in Houston are nearing or at capacity. One 11-month-old baby in Houston was recently airlifted to a hospital 170 miles away because there was not enough space to get treated in a Houston hospital.
So that’s where we’re going, to Houston, where we’re joined by Dr. Christina Propst. She is a physician, a pediatrician at a private practice and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters. She is also a member of the Texas Pediatric Society Committee on Infectious Diseases and Immunizations.
Dr. Propst, thanks so much for being with us. Can you start off by explaining what the Delta variant has to do with this increased number of children being hospitalized? Why are they so particularly vulnerable right now?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:Right now we are in an unfortunate situation where the Delta virus is prevalent. The Delta variant ofCOVID-19 is the prevalent circulating variant in this country. It is more easily transmissible, and, notably, more easily transmissible to those who are unvaccinated. And as I’m sure you and your listeners know, children under age 12 are currently still ineligible to be vaccinated againstCOVID-19. They are currently our most vulnerable population, just as this highly transmissible variant is surging across the country, notably in Texas, in Florida, in Louisiana, in Arkansas, Missouri and many other states.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And, Doctor, could you talk about also the issue of longCOVIDin children? There have been reports that many children are suffering from lingering physical, mental and neurological symptoms as result of sometimes an infection that is very mild or asymptomatic.
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:Absolutely. That is one of the greatest concerns, I would say, for pediatricians, and, frankly, should be one of the greatest concerns for parents across the country right now. There is a condition, as many people have heard, called longCOVID. It was originally identified in adults, mostly because adults were getting tested. From day one, children have been undertested in this country. So, longCOVID, now also known as post-acute sequelae ofCOVID-19, is a condition that can arise weeks to months later and generally involves a constellation of symptoms, including the brain fog many people have heard of, aches, low-grade fevers, a malaise that just won’t go away, a lack of energy.
And unfortunately, we are seeing more and more longCOVID, which can be truly debilitating, in young children. We are seeing that as the incidence among the pediatric population increases, we are starting to see those longCOVIDcases, so the malaise and fatigue that just does not go away, six, eight, 10 weeks after an acuteCOVIDinfection, which might even have been a mild infection. The vast majority of children do not require hospitalization forCOVID-19. However, that does not mean they are safe or somehow immune from longCOVIDor from multisystem inflammatory conditions that can occur post-COVIDinfection.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And could you respond to Texas Governor Abbott’s having issued a ban on school masking mandates?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:It’s so frustrating, as a pediatrician and as a parent. I feel for parents who are making these difficult decisions right now, whether to homeschool. Many school districts do not offer a virtual option this year. Many have done away with the plexiglass and some of the otherCOVID-mitigating modes and modalities in their classrooms. Our governor, unfortunately, has taken our children’s lives and is using it in a political game of chicken. That’s really the best way to describe it right now.
I’m thrilled to see Houston Independent School District, our new superintendent, Millard House, last week announced intention to issue a mask mandate in our huge public school system here in Houston. Dallas has followed. Austin has followed. Other districts are now starting to try to come up with a virtual option. Masks are the last best hope of defense for children who are vulnerable, and that includes every single child under age 12 right now.
Unfortunately, it also includes a huge proportion of our population of school-age children who are eligible, who are between ages 12 and 17. Currently only 30% of tweens and adolescents in that age group are fully vaccinated. And so, pediatricians across the country and the American Academy of Pediatrics are begging parents to get their children vaccinated before the start of school.
AMYGOODMAN:Would you say, Dr. Christina Propst, that the governor is threatening the health of the children of Texas?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:I would say what he is doing is a direct threat to the health and well-being of the children of Texas. Unfortunately, also we need to keep in mind that for some Texans who can afford to send their children to private school, this might not be a problem. Private schools have issued mask mandates. Private schools are doing pooled testing and screening for symptoms. This will disproportionately affect, in every way, health, mental well-being, education, the most vulnerable students among the most vulnerable of our population. And so, that includes our unvaccinated children under age 12 who are in perhaps the poorest performing, oldest schools, with the most overcrowding, with the oldest school buildings, with the poorest ventilation. Those children have a disproportionately high incidence of some comorbidities that even put them at higher risk — asthma, a highBMIor obesity. So, those children absolutely will be disproportionately affected by this purely political and unfortunate decision by our governor.
AMYGOODMAN:Dr. Christina Propst, we’re going to break, then come back to this critical discussion about children andCOVID, why it’s not only surging — COVID is not only surging in the United States among children, and also among the unvaccinated population overall, but around the world, as well. Dr. Christina Propst is a pediatrician at a private practice in Houston, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters, member of the Texas Pediatric Society Committee on Infectious Diseases and Immunizations. We’ll be back with her in a moment.
[break]
AMYGOODMAN:“Sea of Tranquility” by Kool & the Gang. Co-founder Dennis “D.T.” Thomas died this week at the age of 70.
This isDemocracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. As we talk about children andCOVID, we turn to top White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was speaking on NBC’sMeet the Pressabout the rise ofCOVIDinfection in kids and what can be done to protect them from the virus.
DR.ANTHONYFAUCI:There is a problem with children. You’ve got to separate and make sure you get the facts. The likelihood of a child getting serious disease compared to an elderly person or someone with an underlying condition is absolutely less. But less doesn’t mean zero. And there are a lot of children now — all you need to do is do a survey of the pediatric hospitals throughout the country, and you’re seeing a considerable number of young people who are not only infected, but who are seriously ill. Again, the numbers compared to the elderly are less, but that’s a false comparison. These kids are getting sick. We’ve really got to make sure we protect them. …
There are two things you do with children who are not vaccinated, and that’s the recommendation. You surround them with those who can be vaccinated, whoever they are — teachers, personnel in the school, anyone. Get them vaccinated. So, protect the kids with a shield of vaccinated people. For the kids who can’t get vaccinated, that’s the reason why we’re having a strong recommendation that, in the schools, everybody should wear a mask, whether or not you’re vaccinated.
AMYGOODMAN:So, that’s Dr. Anthony Fauci. We’re talking to Dr. Christina Propst. She is a Houston pediatrician, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters, member of the Texas Pediatric Society Committee on Infectious Diseases and Immunizations. You have, in Houston, hospitals filling, in Austin, in Dallas. An 11-month-old is taken on a plane 150 miles away because there wasn’t room for them in the Houston hospital. Can you talk about what parents have to look for? If you can’t — what are the symptoms? Are they different in infants, in young children? And also, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, huge unvaccinated populations, but in places like New York, the vaccination rate is very high. How concerned should parents be here?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:So, to address your first question, the presenting signs forCOVIDin children can really vary. I have treated children as young as 5 weeks old, and I have treated teenagers, 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds. Obviously there is a huge range of how those individuals can respond, even can articulate how they are feeling. So, for some children, it can be abdominal pain. And I have seen children, school-age children, for whom significant or even severe abdominal pain was really the presenting sign. Then they developed fever. Some have not developed fever at all. Many develop upper respiratory symptoms. So, I would say the majority of patients that I have seen have had cold-like symptoms — congestion, cough, sore throat, low-grade fever, sometimes then elevating fever a few days in. Some pediatric patients, of course, do lose their sense of smell and their sense of taste, as well. So, it’s really a variety of symptoms.
And parents and pediatricians, of course, need to have a very low threshold right now for testing and for getting a quality test. There are still tests out, that are widely circulating, that have a very high false negative rate. That’s not helpful to anyone. So, getting tested frequently, certainly as soon as symptoms are setting in — if we know there’s been an exposure, getting tested several days out, if you are asymptomatic — and getting a quality test truly is important.
There certainly are parts of the country where the vaccination rate is significantly higher. Now, we need to remember, cohorting among a group of adults, let’s say, in New York City, where the adults have a very high vaccination rate, and possibly even the teens and tweens, although it is significantly lower than the adult population, is not enough to protect our young children under age 12 from the Delta variant ofCOVID-19. It’s simply not going to do it. There is enough travel. There is clear data showing vaccinated individuals can transmit the virus to the unvaccinated. So, if you have an adult in a household who is vaccinated in New York City who’s hopped on a plane where someone with the Delta variant took their mask off to eat or drink, that person could be harboring the virus, could be asymptomatic or have a very mild infection, where they think it’s allergies, and pass it on to their child. And even a mild infection in children — we need to remember this — even a, quote, “mild” or moderate infection withCOVID-19 still puts that child at risk for long-haulCOVIDand for multisystem inflammatory conditions. So, that is a key takeaway right now, that even areas with a high vaccination rate among adults, children there are still incredibly vulnerable.
JUANGONZÁLEZ:And, Dr. Propst, I’d like to ask you about a surge in another virus calledRSV. Could you tell us what you’ve seen of that virus? Is there a connection between it andCOVID? And why has there been a sudden surge inRSV?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:So,RSVis a virus that many parents are not familiar with, and it is — it stands for respiratory syncytial virus. In the pediatric community, it is notorious. It tends to run in tandem with flu season. It tends to be a wintertime virus that predominantly affects young children, babies, particularly premature babies. They can have respiratory distress and even respiratory failure. Here in the state of Texas, typically, the state stops monitoring, stops even counting, cases ofRSVin late May or June. This year, they didn’t stop. In fact, our surge occurred afterwards. Our surge really has been June, July and August, which is unprecedented for this viral infection, at least in the 20 years that I’ve been in practice here in Houston. So, it is highly unusual.
There doesn’t appear to be a direct relation betweenCOVID-19 andRSVper se. The respiratory syncytial virus by far predatesSARS-CoV-2, which is a novel or new coronavirus. So, it is unclear whyRSVis surging right now. It’s also notable that in an area such as Houston and in Texas, whereRSVright now is surging and rampant, flu really is not — and I knock on wood as I say that. Certainly people are vaccinated against influenza; however, the vaccine efficacy from last season would have waned significantly by now. And so, with those viruses generally running in tandem, one would have expected flu also to be at least increased, if not surging.
So we are really in a perfect storm down here. And other states are facing this, as well, certainly.RSVhospitalizations are at a level I’ve never seen at this time of year. I have personally had to hospitalize more babies withRSVrespiratory distress, and some who developed respiratory failure and had to be intubated and in the intensive care unit for over a week due toRSV, more in the past two months than I have in the previous three to four years.
AMYGOODMAN:Finally, would you send — do you have school-age kids or younger?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:I have college-age kids.
AMYGOODMAN:If you had younger kids, whether you’re in Texas or New York, would you send them to school?
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:If my children were under age 12 and in a schooling situation such as public schools right now in Texas, where our governor has banned mask mandates in a school setting against the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Centers for Disease Control, I would be seriously looking at other options, whether that is homeschooling, virtual option — for those who can’t afford it, let’s say, a private option. Unfortunately, that is not reality for the vast majority of students.
AMYGOODMAN:We want to thank you for being with us, Dr. Christina Propst, pediatrician —
DR.CHRISTINAPROPST:Thank you.
AMYGOODMAN:— private practice in Houston, member of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Children and Disasters, as we continue on the issue of schools, but now we’re going to talk about teachers.
Over the past two weeks, Rodney Reed’s legal team presented its case that Mr. Reed deserves a new trial in light of newly discovered evidence that supports his innocence claim. At the hearing before District Judge J.D. Langley, his legal team also presented evidence that prosecutors had withheld evidence and experts had given misleading testimony at Mr. Reed’s original trial in 1998.
On July 29, the team rested its case. Now, it is preparing written and oral arguments, which include its findings and conclusions, that it will present to Judge Langley later this month. Judge Langley will then make his recommendations to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on whether Mr. Reed should be granted a new trial.
Mr. Reed has been on death row in Texas for more than 20 years and came within five days of being executed in November 2019. He was granted an indefinite stay of execution on Nov. 15, 2019, so that his innocence claims could be considered.
Mr. Reed was convicted for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites — a crime he’s always said he didn’t commit. In fact, Mr. Reed said he and Ms. Stites had had a consensual relationship before she died, which explains the presence of his DNA. However, the two kept their relationship a secret because Ms. Stites was engaged and because they feared racist retaliation — Mr. Reed is Black, Ms. Stites was white.
At Mr. Reed’s original trial, the prosecution said no evidence of their relationship existed and claimed to have conducted an exhaustive, but fruitless, search for proof of their connection. However, witness interviews in the prosecution’s files at the time of Mr. Reed’s original trial show the prosecution was aware that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other — yet this information was not turned over to Mr. Reed’s lawyers at the time, as the U.S. Constitution requires.
During Mr. Reed’s recent hearing, several witnesses testified that they knew Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites had had a relationship or had seen them together, further supporting what Mr. Reed has been saying for more than 20 years. Mr. Reed’s legal team also presented evidence that Jimmy Fennell, Ms. Stites’ fiancé at the time of her death who was originally suspected of killing her, had confessed to killing his fiancée after learning she had been having an affair with a Black man. Forensic experts also testified about Ms. Stites’ time of death and crime scene evidence that does not support the prosecution’s argument that Mr. Reed killed Ms. Stites.
The State then presented its own witnesses for cross-examination by Mr. Reed’s legal team during the second half of the hearing.
Throughout the hearing, Mr. Reed had the support of his family, including his brother who was able to attend the hearing in person, and millions of others who have rallied to support his fight for justice over the last few years.
— Kim Kardashian West (@KimKardashian) July 16, 2021
During #RodneyReed’s evidentiary hearing today, prosecutors informed the court that time stamps on video footage of the crime scene are incorrect. This only raises further doubt about the accuracy of trial testimony related to time of death and other timeline issues.
— Sister Helen Prejean (@helenprejean) July 27, 2021
At time of writing, Judge Langley is expected to make his recommendations by Aug. 31. Until then, Mr. Reed and his legal team will continue to push for justice.
Conservative lawmakers nationwide are taking unprecedented steps to restrict people’s access to abortion, with 90 new abortion restrictions imposed across states in 2021 alone, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health policy advocacy group.
Numerous new restrictions have been enacted in states across the South, where abortion rights were already limited. For example, a new Arkansas law bans abortion at any point in a pregnancy, except when the patient’s life is endangered, while lawmakers in Tennessee adopted bans on abortion at six weeks of pregnancy with limited exceptions.
Texas law already banned abortion after 20 weeks, but on May 19 Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law the even more restrictive Senate Bill 8. The so-called “heartbeat bill” not only bans abortions starting at six weeks — before most people even know they are pregnant — but also allows for individuals to sue any person or group who “aids and abets” someone seeking an abortion, encouraging citizens to enforce the law.
SB8 has organizations that help Texans access abortion fearful of being shut down. To combat this possibility, reproductive justice groups and abortion providers are challenging the law, which is set to take effect on Sept. 1. On July 13, abortion rights advocate groups filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas that claims the measure “flagrantly violates the constitutional rights of Texans seeking abortion and upends the rule of law in service of an anti-abortion agenda.”
Among the more than 20 plaintiffs denouncing the bill is the Afiya Center, a reproductive justice center in North Texas founded by, directed by, and serving Black women and girls. Although the organization itself does not provide abortions, it is part of the Trust, Respect, Access coalition that advocates for abortion accessibility and helps raise funds for low-income people seeking abortions — actions that under the new law could be construed as illegally aiding and abetting abortion.
Afiya Center Policy Associate Michelle Anderson said the new law’s provision allowing individuals to sue is “an intentional tactic to pretty much drain organizations of resources by tying them up with extensive legal proceedings.” But fighting back against SB8 is not only important for the Afiya Center’s survival but to protect the lives of Black women who Anderson says are “still fighting to have full bodily autonomy.”
Additionally, SB8 makes it impossible for groups sued under the law to recoup attorney fees and costs even if the group wins the case, said Cristina Parker, communications director of the Lilith Fund. Founded in 2001, it’s the oldest abortion fund in Texas and one of 10 in the state, which shows how great the need for help accessing safe and legal abortion is, she said.
“[SB8] is really just meant to harass or intimidate and stop us,” Parker said. “So the risk here is that they’ll drown us in lawsuits that have no basis, that are just about harassing us… It’s really outrageous.”
Federal policy bars the use of federal funds including Medicaid for abortion, while Texas law bars private insurers from covering abortion costs, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. Because abortions in Texas are not covered by insurance, people who seek abortions have to pay for them out of pocket.
The cost of an abortion depends on how far along the pregnancy is and what method is used, with the price typically ranging from $300 to $1,500, according to the ACLU of Texas. This makes the work of abortion funds that raise money for people seeking abortions especially important in the state.
Forcing Texans to pay for an abortion completely out of pocket puts a tremendous financial burden on low-income individuals and families, “and that’s why we’re here to help people access the care they need,” Parker said.
Paying for these costs can be next to impossible for people who are already at an economic disadvantage, such as those who live in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where about half of the residents live below the poverty line, according to a Valley Central analysis of Texas Association of Counties income data.
Located in this region is the Frontera Fund, which helps residents pay for and access safe abortions. In the last year alone, the fund assisted 400 people facing unwanted pregnancies, Executive Director Zaena Zamora said. If SB8 resulted in the fund drowning with lawsuits, hundreds of people each year would either go without needed care or obtain abortions in dangerous situations. Zamora said she is especially concerned about what this means for the undocumented immigrants her group serves, whose ability to travel is limited by Border Patrol checkpoints in the area.
“If you have no documentation barriers, you can conceivably leave the state to get your care,” Zamora said. “If you’re undocumented, that option is not available to you.”
Also worried about the implications of SB8 are members of organizations that help minors access abortion in Texas such as Jane’s Due Process (JDP).
Under state law, a doctor must notify a parent or legal guardian of a pregnant teen age 17 or under seeking an abortion and get their consent, unless the minor is married, emancipated or the abortion must be performed immediately because of a medical emergency. If the minor doesn’t want the doctor to notify the parent, the minor must seek an order from a judge, called a judicial bypass, removing the requirement.
JDP Director Rosann Mariappuram said the Texas abortion restrictions already harm someone seeking an abortion, “but for youth, they kind of add another complicated layer because already as a minor, you don’t have a ton of autonomy over where you are, how you get somewhere, and if you have money or resources to do what you need.”
Most of the young people that seek help from JDP do not have extra cash lying around to even pay for transportation to a clinic, which is one of the many barriers minors face, Mariappuram said. Additionally, almost all of the clients who seek help from JDP get their abortion after six weeks, which is past the time frame written into SB8.
“Particularly for youth, Senate Bill 8 will probably make abortion impossible to access,” said Mariappuram, who’s also bracing for lawsuits come September.
To get ready for these potential legal attacks, JDP is working to find ways to continue helping minors even if the bill goes into effect. JDP staff is also preparing for eventual lawsuits by raising money for their defense.
“Abortion is legal, we can still help people,” Mariappuram said. “And although all the stuff with Senate Bill 8 is really scary, I do think we’ll figure out ways to help people no matter what.”
Republican politicians and commentators spent the last week of June promoting their claim that this year’s increase in apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border constitutes — in the words of Fox News host Sean Hannity — “a crisis of a monumental scale.”
The campaign’s high point came on June 30 when former president Donald Trump visited a stretch of the border wall near Pharr, Texas, and delivered a number of “questionable statements” about his administration’s supposed enforcement successes. With him was Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who plans to have his state build a border wall of its own. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem was not to be outdone: Her office had announced the day before that the state was sending 50 of its National Guard members to the southwestern border.
A group of far right lawmakers, including Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, were also at the border. They toured the area near La Joya, Texas, on June 29 — accompanied by unindicted January 6 rioter Anthony Agüero — and joined up with Trump’s tour the next day.
This series of photo ops looks like an effort to keep the public focused on border apprehensions at a time when media outlets have largely moved on from their earlier exaggerated coverage of the topic. MSNBC cable TV host Joy Reid has even gone so far as to describe the situation at the border as “a nonexistent crisis.”
Analyzing the Numbers
There are real crises at the border, of course. The Biden administration is still failing to provide adequate treatment to minors who have crossed from Mexico, and it’s continuing a 2020 Trump policy of expelling migrants under Title 42 of the U.S. health code, although there may be a change at the end of July to exempt family units. This policy has resulted in thousands of asylum seekers suffering violent attacks after being forced back into dangerous areas in northern Mexico. And while GOP politicians talk about “Biden’s open borders policies,” migrants continue to die in their efforts to elude capture at a frontier which is actually quite well guarded. In May, the Border Patrol reported finding the bodies of 203 migrants so far in fiscal year 2021.
But the present increase in border apprehensions hardly justifies the term “crisis.”
It’s true that as of June, this fiscal year’s apprehensions had topped 1 million for the first time since 2006. Still, this only seems high because of a sharp contrast with the previous 14 years. Apprehensions were unusually low during that period, as Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey, an expert on immigration patterns, showed in a 2020 study. Apprehensions exceeded a million a year for most of the period from 1983 to 2006, but they declined significantly during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. This year’s increase is at most a return to normal.
But it may well be a temporary uptick. “My guess is that [the 2021 increase] shows the effects of the COVID epidemic,” Massey told Truthout in an email. Economic hardships created by COVID may have pushed more Mexican workers to cross the border, he noted, and these conditions might also explain the increase in asylum seekers from Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
In addition, stepped-up border enforcement itself accounts for part of the increase. The number of apprehensions is inflated because of the Title 42 policy, according to a fact sheet from the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. By simply pushing migrants back across the border without formally removing them, the policy makes it easier for migrants to attempt repeated crossings — and to be apprehended more than once. From 2014 to 2019, before Title 42 went into effect, only 15 percent of the migrants apprehended by the Border Patrol had been apprehended previously in the same year. In May 2021, recidivists accounted for 38 percent of apprehensions.
In any case, an increase in apprehensions at the border doesn’t necessarily translate into more migrants getting into the United States without being caught.
When commentators compare apprehension figures now with those from previous years, they ignore the fact that the number of Border Patrol agents has nearly doubled since 2003. According to a June tweet from the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the number of people who cross the border without being apprehended might be five times lower now than it was 15 years ago.
Challenging the Narrative
The GOP’s hyped-up “border crisis” is simply the latest stage in a long-term process of exaggerating the impact of unauthorized immigration. Undocumented U.S. residents only make up 3 percent of the country’s population, and the number has been declining since 2007. Nevertheless, U.S. adults rank immigration as the second most important problem facing the U.S., according to a July 1 Ipsos poll.
Undocumented immigrants aren’t actually a problem, but the Republican Party has framed them “as criminals and lawbreakers and a grave threat to the nation in order to motivate and mobilize the Republican base, to great effect,” Massey told Truthout. Up until now, the Democrats have failed to push back, he added. They “have sought to placate conservatives by agreeing to boost border enforcement and internal deportations in hopes that the Republicans will move toward legalization for those already here.” Massey called this “a completely unrealistic expectation.”
What can be done to challenge the conservative narrative? Massey noted that “it is difficult to counteract the effect of so much misinformation and disinformation that is put into the public sphere by well-funded political and ideological actors.” Still, there are signs of movement.
Joy Reid’s dismissal of the “border crisis” is a step in the right direction — as is shown by the reaction from the right-wing media. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) has also pushed back, pointing out that the topic can be used to start a serious conversation on migration’s root causes. It’s possible to have what Massey calls “a reasoned appraisal of what’s happening at the border,” but more people need to step up and call this “crisis” what it is: another big lie from the right.
State senators in Texas passed a bill on Friday that removes requirements that schools include topics like Native American history and historical documents relating to the suffrage and civil rights movements, building upon previously passed legislation in the state.
The bill, SB 3, removes requirements to teach about civil rights work by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. Works by women’s suffragists are also no longer required to be taught.
The Republicans’ bill also removes requirements to teach “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong.”
On top of removing requirements to teach about the civil rights and suffragist movements, the bill bars schools from compelling teachers to teach on current events or controversial issues. If they do teach such subjects, the teachers must not give deference to any one point of view.
Though the bill passed the Senate 18 to 4 along party lines, it’s unlikely to pass the House as the Democrats have fled the state to deny quorum in that chamber in hopes of blocking the Republicans’ voter suppression legislation.
SB 3 is a continuation of the state GOP’s efforts to stifle teachers from teaching history accurately, especially as it pertains to the country’s history with racism and white supremacy. The bill removes requirements set by a previous House bill on similar subjects that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law earlier this year. The requirements were Democratic proposals that were included in the bill after criticism from Democrats and educators in the state.
Democrats have criticized the law, saying that it muzzles teachers from teaching their students the truth about history.
“How could a teacher possibly discuss slavery, the Holocaust or the mass shootings at the Walmart in El Paso or at the Sutherland Springs Church in my district without giving deference to any one perspective?” one Democratic lawmaker asked, per Dallas News.
“The amendments the House added were essential to ensure that we were teaching students all of American history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” state Democratic Rep. James Talarico told the Texas Tribune. “They were put in place to ensure that teachers wouldn’t be punished for telling their students the truth…. It’s a frightening dystopian future that starts to come into focus.”
Texas Republicans, like many other conservatives across the country, claim that they are opposing the teaching of critical race theory. But in reality, they’re likely setting out to erase Black history from the nation’s collective knowledge and make teachers afraid to create lesson plans addressing race.
The wave of anti-education Republican legislation has already had a chilling effect on teachers, leading them to censor themselves from talking about racism. Some teachers are quitting because of attacks from conservatives accusing them of teaching critical race theory, which is only taught in certain higher education contexts.
Republicans have made critical race theory their new boogeyman despite either not understanding what it is or wilfully misrepresenting it, as also where it is taught. Indeed, Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who introduced SB 3, has admitted that schools don’t actually teach critical race theory, but wanted to press forward with his bill anyway.
As Republicans are sweeping the country with stifling bills under the guise of limiting critical race theory, Democrats and progressives in Congress have criticized the effort.
“The Texas Senate has voted to remove civil rights and women’s suffrage from public school curriculum,” wrote Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) on Twitter. “It was never about Critical Race Theory. It was always about teaching white supremacy.”
Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia applauded Texas Democrats on Wednesday for leaving their state in an effort to thwart a GOP attack on the franchise and said federal lawmakers must make the exodus worthwhile by passing robust voting rights legislation — even if it means overhauling Senate rules to do so.
“Voting rights is not just a political issue, this is a moral issue. Because the vote, in essence, is really about your voice — and your voice is about your humanity,” Warnock told reporters after meeting with Texas state Democrats who traveled to D.C. to demand action from members of Congress.
“I want to thank these Texas legislators for coming up, because in a real sense they are fighting for our humanity,” continued the Democrat from Georgia, where Republicans recently passed a sweeping voter suppression bill. “They’re trying to make sure that the voices of the people are not squeezed out of their own democracy… So I submit that failure is not an option. We have to pass voting rights no matter what. We have to pass voting rights this Congress. No Senate rule supersedes people’s constitutional rights.”
Last month, Senate Republicans deployed the chamber’s archaic filibuster rule to block debate on the For the People Act, a sweeping and popular bill that would expand ballot access and stymie the hundreds of Republican-authored voter suppression bills advancing in state legislatures across the country. In its current form, the filibuster effectively requires 60 votes for most bills to pass the Senate.
In an interview with Axios on Wednesday, Warnock said that “voting rights is bigger than the filibuster.”
“And shame on us if we’re more committed to a Senate rule than we are to the principles of democracy,” he added.
On Monday, Democrats in the Texas state House left town in a coordinated attempt to stop their Republican counterparts from passing legislation that would further restrict ballot access by imposing new voter ID requirements and banning drive-through voting sites, among a slew of other changes.
The Democratic lawmakers hope to remain out of Texas until the state’s special legislative session expires in less than a month, which would further delay passage of the GOP’s voter suppression bill.
In an effort to call attention to the importance of national election reforms to counter GOP attacks on voting rights at the state level, many of the Texas Democrats traveled to the nation’s capital to hold public events and meet with key senators to discuss the issue.
“Our commitment in the House Democratic Caucus is that we’re going to stay out [of Texas] until the session is over to kill this bill,” Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Chris Turner (D-101) said during a press conference Wednesday. “And we’re going to use the intervening time to shine a harsh national spotlight on the Republicans’ voter suppression efforts, and use that pressure to encourage and urge and implore Congress, and specifically the U.S. Senate, to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.”
But as the Washington Postreported, a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) earlier this week left some of the Texas Democrats “pessimistic about whether their foray to Washington will make a difference.”
Texas state Rep. Senfronia Thompson (D-141) told the Post that neither Schumer nor other members of Congress made any new promises to overcome Republican obstruction and advance a federal voting rights bill.
“Not a one,” Thompson said. “I wish they had.”
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden delivered a speech pillorying state-level Republicans for their assault on the right to vote — “Have you no shame?” he asked — and promising to fight “vigorously” to protect ballot access nationwide.
But Biden did not mention the legislative filibuster, which can be weakened or repealed with a simple-majority vote. Several Democratic senators, most prominently Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), have said they would not vote to change the filibuster rule, and Biden has not publicly pressured them to reverse their position for the sake of approving voting rights legislation.
With state-level redistricting set to get underway throughout the country, progressive advocacy groups are warning that the window for federal action on voting rights is rapidly closing. As The Interceptreported earlier this year, Republicans are looking to “gerrymander their way back to the majority,” a ploy that could succeed without Senate passage of the For the People Act, which would curtail partisan gerrymandering. The U.S. House passed the bill in March without a single Republican vote.
“The time to act is now — before gerrymandered congressional districts are drawn, effectively disenfranchising millions of Americans,” Progressive Democrats of America said in a statement on Tuesday. “With bold decisive action, we can defeat the right-wing assault on democracy.”
Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, threatened to arrest Democratic legislators who have left the state to prevent quorum on a bill that would restrict voting rights.
The bill includes provisions that would ban drive-through voting, ban 24-hour voting, prevent election officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot applications to voters, empower partisan poll workers, and add additional and unnecessary restrictions to voting by mail.
Democratic lawmakers left Texas earlier in the day on Monday. In a statement from legislative party leaders, they explained that they did so in order to “refuse to let the Republican-led legislature force through dangerous legislation that would trample on Texans’ freedom to vote.” It is the second time this year that Democratic lawmakers in Texas have left the state in order to block restrictive voting rules changes.
Abbott admitted he couldn’t actually force Democrats to vote on the bill by arresting them until they returned to Texas. “Once they step back into the state,” he said, “they will be arrested and brought back to the Capitol and we will be conducting business.”
Abbott also said that he would keep calling 30-day special sessions until the Democratic lawmakers return to vote on the restrictive bill.
“We have special sessions that last 30 days,” Abbott explained on the Fox News program. “And the governor calls them, and I will continue calling special session after special session because over time it is going to continue until they step up to vote.”
Texas state Rep. Jasmine Crockett, one of the Democrats who left the state to block quorum on the bill, said she’s not concerned about Abbott’s threats because he can’t actually arrest her or other lawmakers.
The governor’s threat to continue issuing special sessions is also an empty one, Crockett added, since he vetoed funding to keep the legislature open through the summer.
“The governor got so frustrated that he vetoed the legislative branch,” Crockett said. “… that means that we can’t function anyway. There is no money after September 1 [to run the legislature]. So he can call as many special sessions as he wants to, but there’s no funding” to hold a vote after that date.
Texas Democrats are now in Washington, D.C. where they plan to encourage lawmakers there to pass the For the People Act, legislation that would address and supersede many of the restrictive provisions being sought in the Texas Republicans’ bill. But the federal voting rights bill faces its own challenges as Republicans in the Senate have already filibustered it once, preventing a vote on the bill.
Several Democratic lawmakers have called for changes to the filibuster rules, or for ending the filibuster altogether, in order to protect voting rights for all Americans, particularly those in states where Republicans are putting up additional barriers to voting in the wake of their 2020 election losses.
“Call me radical, but I do not believe a minority of Senators should be able to block voting rights for millions of people,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said following the filibuster last month. “But I guess I’m just from that far-left school of thought that legislation should pass when a majority of legislators vote for it.”
President Joe Biden plans to deliver a speech in Philadelphia later on Tuesday to discuss the “moral case” for protecting voting rights across the U.S. Biden “will redouble his commitment to using every tool at his disposal to continue to fight to protect the fundamental right of Americans to vote against the onslaught of voter suppression laws,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday.
But Biden has not yet called for changes to the filibuster, nor is he likely to do so in his speech on Tuesday, rendering the prospects of the For the People Act being passed as slim as they stood prior to this week.
Just days after the Texas state legislature convened for a special session, GOP legislators in the state are trying once again to ram through a new voter suppression bill into law. The lawmakers had failed to pass a previous version of the bill after Democrats walked off the floor at the end of the legislative session in May to deny quorum and block the legislation.
It appears that Democrats are prepared to try that strategy again. At least 58 Democratic members of the Texas House are evidently planning to flee the state on Monday, this time for weeks, to block the GOP’s new voter suppression bill as well as a slate of other Republican priorities that are planned for the session.
In fleeing the state, the legislators are risking legal consequences, according to NBC. The Texas legislature requires lawmakers to be in the chamber to reach quorum.
But the legislation that the Democrats are planning to block could result in dire consequences for voting access in the state. The slate of proposals in the most recent version of the Republican bill makes the package one of the worst, most restrictive voter-suppression bills in the country, voting advocates say. Texas is already one of the hardest states to vote in.
The new bill retains many of the proposals from the first version, such as banning drive-through and 24-hour voting, barring election officials from sending out unsolicited absentee ballot applications, empowering partisan poll watchers and adding restrictions to voting by mail, among other things.
Republican legislators rammed the bill through committee in the House after about 24 straight hours of testimony and debate, passing it along party lines early Sunday morning. The Senate advanced the bill through committee on Sunday afternoon, meaning the bill could come to a floor vote this week.
Hearings on the bill attracted hundreds of members of the public, including former member of Congress Beto O’Rourke, to testify at the hearing on the restrictive legislation. Many of the Texans who signed up to testify were against the legislation, but they had to wait nearly 18 hours to do so as legislators debated the package.
Democrats may also be hoping to block other alarming proposals that Republicans are planning to raise during this legislative session.
Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called the special legislative session not only to pass the voter suppression legislation but also to advance a slate of other Republican wish-list items that are currently sweeping the country, such as a ban on teaching Black American history in schools, placing further restrictions on abortions and taking steps to end what Republicans view as “censorship” on social media platforms.
The new version of the voter suppression bill, however, doesn’t contain a couple of key items from the last draft: allowing judges to overturn election results and wide restrictions on Sunday early voting, when many Black voters turn out to vote after attending church.
Getting rid of those two troubling items doesn’t necessarily signal good intentions on the part of the Republicans. The proposal to allow the overturning of election results was a last-minute and extremely controversial addition to the earlier version of the bill in the spring. The proposal to end Sunday early voting was a subject of controversy not only for its likely racist intention of suppressing Black voters, but also because the Texas GOP claimed, somewhat dubiously, that the sweeping restriction that would affect millions of voters was a mere typo.
The Republicans’ voter-suppression effort in Texas is one of hundreds of similar efforts by conservative lawmakers across the country to restrict voting. As of May, 489 restrictive bills had been filed in 48 states, many of which have advanced in the legislature and some of which have passed into law.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appears to be trying to help his fellow Republicans in their efforts to throw completely unfounded questions into the election process. Just before the GOP unveiled the latest voter-suppression bill in the state, Paxton tweeted about the arrest of Hervis Rogers — which he had ordered — on two counts of illegal voting.
Rogers, who went semi-viral in a CNN clip last year for waiting over six hours in line to vote in the 2020 presidential primaries, was on parole when he voted once in 2018 and once in March of 2020. Under Texas law, it is illegal for someone in prison or on parole to cast a ballot.
However, in order to be found guilty of illegal voting, the person in question must have “knowingly” voted illegally. Rogers’s lawyers argue that he wouldn’t have talked to national TV news reporters if he had known it was illegal. “He’s really devastated,” one of Rogers’s lawyers told The Washington Post. “He does not want to go back to jail.”
Still, Paxton boasted about the arrest, saying that he is standing up against voter fraud. But considering there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, it’s more than likely that he is simply trying to build the case for more voter suppression.
As President Joe Biden met with civil rights groups this week to discuss how to fight voter suppression efforts, Texas lawmakers followed other battleground states controlled by Republicans with a new push to overhaul the state’s election laws. New restrictions would include a ban on drive-thru voting and 24-hour or late-night voting options, and election officials could be penalized for sending out unsolicited absentee applications. The measures would also impose stringent signature-matching requirements and increase the power of partisan poll observers, which can result in intimidation. “This would make it the worst voter suppression bill in the country,” says Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, who urges Democrats across the United States to take part in walkouts and other maneuvers to impede voter suppression bills. “What we need right now, along with civil disobedience on the streets, is legislative disobedience,” Albright says.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMYGOODMAN: President Biden met with civil rights groups Thursday to discuss ways to combat voter suppression efforts, as the White House announced a new effort to counter the Republican push to pass voting restrictions in key battleground states. Vice President Kamala Harris also announced that the Democratic National Committee would be spending an additional $25 million on organizing and registration efforts. She spoke at Howard University.
VICEPRESIDENTKAMALAHARRIS: We are going to assemble the largest voter protection team we have ever had, to ensure — to ensure that all Americans can vote and have your vote counted in a fair and transparent process.
AMYGOODMAN: Meanwhile, in Texas, lawmakers followed other battleground states controlled by Republicans with a new push Thursday to overhaul the state’s election laws. In a special session called by the governor, they introduced bills based on their earlier attempt to pass a sweeping voting bill that failed in the last session after Democrats walked out.
For more, we’re joined by Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, which recently finished a nine-state, 10-day Freedom Ride to mark the 60th anniversary of the first Freedom Rides for voting rights.
Cliff, we welcome you back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about — we’ll start with Texas and then go national. What is happening in Texas right now with this special session?
CLIFFALBRIGHT: Right. So, there’s a special session. We’re calling it the “suppression session,” because in addition to pulling out this voter suppression bill, which in a state that’s already one of the — has one of the lowest turnout rates in the country, where it’s already the hardest to vote, they would make it even more difficult by passing a bunch of draconian pieces of provisions that would include criminalizing not just voters or people that try to provide assistance to voters, even criminalizing election officials that send out absentee ballot applications to voters.
But one of the worst provisions in this bill is the one — and we talked a lot about this a couple months ago when they were first trying to pass it — they still have the provision that would allow election observers, partisan election observers, basically unfettered access to the polling places, including the possibility of video recording voters. We already know that Republicans had been using this as a recruitment tactic. They said that they wanted to recruit an army of thousands that would flood the polling places to observe voters, the kind of army of observers that Trump talked about during his campaign. And so, this is just, you know, again, one of the worst bills — this would make it the worst voter suppression bill in the country.
And I will add this: It’s a suppression session not just because of this bill that they’re considering, the voter suppression bill, but also because this special session, or suppression session, includes 11 other bills that are basically a smörgåsbord of white supremacy, patriarchy, transphobia — just everything that you could imagine that is the worst on the Republican agenda, they’ve included in this suppression session, which is a reminder that when they suppress our votes, Black and Brown votes, in particular, but all votes — when they suppress our votes, when they distort this democracy, or what’s left of it, it has implications that affect a range of policies, dealing with our health, our economics. They’ve even got critical race theory in this suppression session.
AMYGOODMAN: And talk about how this is being repeated around the country. In what other states? And will the Texas Democrats walk out?
CLIFFALBRIGHT: Right. So, first I’ll deal with the second half of that, in terms of the Texas Democrats walking out. I mean, they’ve said in interviews, and they said yesterday at the press conference, at the rally that we helped to organize, that everything is on the table. But I think that they really gave us a blueprint that Democrats in other states really need to look at. You know, I’ve been saying — you know, we talk a lot about civil disobedience. What we need right now, along with civil disobedience on the streets, is legislative disobedience. If Republicans are going to change rules in all of these states where they’re trying to push this suppression through — and there are still bills pending in, I think, at least a dozen other states, including Michigan and Pennsylvania — but if they’re going to play around with the rules and suspend rules and change the rules of the game in order to push the suppression through, Democrats all across this country need to be willing to follow the pattern that the Texas Democrats demonstrated. After weeks and months of grassroots organizing by an incredible coalition, Texas Right to Vote Coalition in Texas, the legislators were then able to finally do the walkout. That needs to be a blueprint all across — all across this country.
I will add this: It was disappointing that with this massive press conference that took place yesterday, that included grassroots organizations, as well as Texas Democrats from the state House, that there was no federal presence. Like, Kamala Harris could have been there, since she’s the czar on this. Joe Biden could have been there. Somebody from the Justice Department could have been there. Somebody from the national — the Democratic National Committee could have been there. Any number of federal folks, to show, to demonstrate that Texas is not alone and that no state is alone in this battle, that would have been a good thing to show. But again, the Texas legislators and the grassroots organizations were there taking a stand on their own. We’ll continue to do that in state after state, but this is a federal battle that’s going to require federal legislation.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, you came out quite strongly in a series of tweets yesterday, Cliff. Among them, “don’t come relying on activists to out-organize voter suppression to compensate for your legislative failures. This ain’t The Green Mile or Bagger Vance and we are NOT your magical negroes—covering up your mediocrity, lukewarm support & broken promises.” And then you name “@POTUS,” “@SenSchumer” and “@VP.” Talk about what you feel they’re not only not doing in Texas, but why you feel this must be done at a national level. When the For the People Act was being considered in Congress that week, President Biden did not speak on it. He gave a major address on crime instead.
CLIFFALBRIGHT: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, and, you know, to speak to the tweet, there’s a feeling — and it’s come out both in the actions coming from the White House, as well as in some, you know, leaked, unnamed staffers, that basically they feel like organizers will be able to outorganize the voter suppression, that we’ll be able to outorganize Jim Crow, or even to outlitigate this Jim Crow, which, again, cannot happen without federal legislation. Sherrilyn Ifill from the Legal Defense Fund tweeted as much out yesterday, as well, that we cannot outlitigate this if we don’t have the federal protections necessary, in the form of the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. If we don’t have those protections necessary, you can’t outlitigate it, you can’t outorganize it. And it’s unfair, and actually insulting, for the White House to assume or for the party to put that burden on the backs of voters, again, primarily Black voters and Brown voters and marginalized voters, to put that burden on our backs because they fail to get passed this necessary piece of legislation.
What could the administration do more of? Just a couple months ago, Joe Biden said in an interview that he was at least open to modifying the filibuster, but we haven’t heard anything else about that. Where is your — just like he presented a plan, he didn’t just leave it up to Congress to say what he wanted on infrastructure, right? They had a White House plan for infrastructure. They had a White House plan on American families and American jobs. Where is your plan on voting rights? Where is your plan? If you’re open, don’t just be open to modifying the filibuster; show Joe Manchin what your plan is, and tell him, “Joe, we’ve known each other for decades. I need you to get this rules change on the filibuster.” Chuck Schumer, have a specific plan to get the filibuster at least modified. I’d really like to see it ended, but at least to get it modified. He has not shown the same level of aggression that he has shown, and urgency that he’s shown on other issues, on this voting rights issue. We need them to — we need him to use the bully pulpit. We need him to use every carrot, every stick, and show Joe Manchin a specific plan and twist those arms, the same way Lyndon B. Johnson did, because he was forced to by organizers. But he needs to have that kind of a moment, instead of a Rutherford B. Hayes moment, who was the president who ended Reconstruction, took the federal troops out of the South and basically allowed white Southerners to have their way with Black folks all across the country. We don’t need Joe Biden to have that moment and to follow that example. We need him to follow a more aggressive example that supports and aggressively fights for voting rights.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, let’s hear what they did say at the White House yesterday, President Biden and Vice President Harris meeting with civil rights leaders. This is Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, speaking to the Black News Channel after the meeting.
SHERRILYNIFILL: I used the opportunity to talk about the history of civil rights legislation in this country, of the Supreme Court’s role in often eroding civil rights statutes, dating back to the 19th century, dating back to the 1875 Civil Rights Act and the civil rights cases, dating back to Plessy v. Ferguson, dating back to Mobile v. Bolden, the voting rights case in 1980 that Congress had to overturn in 1982 with the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, and then, of course, Shelby County v. Holder and last week’s decision in the Brnovich case. We are at, again, such a moment. We are litigating at the Legal Defense Fund in Georgia, challenging their voter suppression law. We’re challenging Florida’s voter suppression law. But I told the president we will not be able to litigate our way out of this threat to Black citizenship, voting and political participation.
AMYGOODMAN: So, that’s Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. And Vice President Harris announced a $25 million DNC investment to aid voting access ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Cliff Albright, you are talking to us from Atlanta, and 2022 is very important. Both Senate seats were taken by Democrats, which has clearly been a great motivation not only in Georgia for the Republicans, but around the country, to get rid of voters on voting rolls, certainly in Georgia. If you can talk about what has happened there? Reverend Raphael Warnock is up again in 2022. But what that DNC influx of money means? Is it what you’re calling the fierce urgency of now, that has been lacking from the federal government?
CLIFFALBRIGHT: Unfortunately, no, that’s not the fierce urgency of now. Twenty-five million dollars, it sounds like a lot. Like, certainly in my personal life, that would be a lot. But, you know, in terms of democracy, that’s a drop in the bucket.
Let me say this, since we were just — you played the clip from Sherrilyn Ifill, and we’re talking about what can the White House do. It would be a good time to seriously discuss expanding the court, and I would love to see somebody like Sherrilyn Ifill as being somebody nominated to an expanded Supreme Court. That’s going to be necessary, because even if they pass the legislation, it’s still going to have to pass the constitutionality test from a Supreme Court that has already shown what its predilections are or what its taste is. And so, we need to expand the court.
But again, you asked about Georgia. Yes, Senator Warnock is going to be up again next year. And as we’ve said, we are not going to be able to just outorganize this level of voter suppression. And even if we do, the scary thing about the Georgia bill, which is part of a trend that we’re seeing in other states, is that it’s got that piece in there that would make it easier for the state to overturn elections. They’ve already gone about the process of removing people, of removing officials from some of the election boards in some of the counties. That was made possible by this new law. And with that provision, even if we outorganize the suppression and win the votes, they can always come back and do exactly what Donald Trump was trying to get the secretary of state to do on that phone call, which is to go out and find 11,000 votes, or go out and decide that Fulton County, predominantly Black county in Georgia, that that county’s votes shouldn’t be counted. This bill would give them the ability to do that.
So, we can’t outorganize the level of Jim Crow suppression that we’re seeing. We have got to have federal protections. We’ll do everything that we can, but we need help from the federal government. The $25 million, there are organizations — we came close to spending that much in just our limited footprint across the country to mobilize voters. Twenty-five million dollars is not nearly enough to combat the kind of voter suppression that we’re seeing.
And beyond the amount — last thing I’ll say — beyond the amount is just the timing or the sequencing. Now is not the time to be talking about how we’re going to try to mitigate the impact of voter suppression. If the DNC is going to spend $25 million, I’d rather they spend it supporting groups that are organizing to fight the suppression. Let’s finish this fight before we start talking about how we’re going to mitigate the suppression that we’re basically conceding we’re going to fail on defeating.
AMYGOODMAN: And finally, Cliff Albright, talk about the 60th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, and the Freedom Rides that you engaged in. You’re, again, speaking to us from Atlanta. John Lewis, the late great John Lewis, participated in those first Freedom Rides 60 years ago.
CLIFFALBRIGHT: Yeah, it was just an incredible experience for us. The Freedom Ride for Voting Rights, marking the 60th anniversary, we wanted to do a reverse Freedom Ride, where we went — instead of going from D.C. to the South, like in 1961, we took it from the South all the way up to D.C. We passed through nine states, or 10 states, if you include the state of D.C., because part of our objectives of the Freedom Ride was to talk about three pieces of legislation — the H.R. 1, S. 1, of course, the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and H.R. 51, which is an issue a lot of people in the country don’t know enough about, which is D.C. statehood. The denial of the vote to D.C. is one of the oldest forms of voter suppression. And so, our rally that took place on the 26th was largely about D.C. statehood, as well as the other two pieces of voting rights legislation.
But we stopped in nine states along the way, even more cities, because we did some pit stops throughout. And at each location, we were doing rallies, educating voters about the legislation, motivating voters to get involved in how to fight for this legislation, and to talk about the history of the 1961 Freedom Rides, because that’s history that a lot of people don’t know a lot about. We think that, you know, there was slavery, and then all of a sudden Dr. King gave a speech in 1963, and then Barack Obama was president. And in spite of what you hear about critical race theory, there’s a lot of our history that’s not taught. Those Freedom Rides were an important part of that civil rights movement. And part of why we wanted to focus on it is because we believe that by raising that history and amplifying it, and by featuring actual Freedom Riders — at some of the stops, some of the rallies, we had actual Freedom Riders from 1961 who told their stories. By amplifying that history, you can’t help but hear that history and not get involved in today’s movement. To hear how those Freedom Riders saw a bus get bombed, and then they decided not to run away from the movement, but to actually run to the bombing and to finish the Freedom Rides — you can’t hear that history and not ask yourself, “Will I answer the call today?”
So, it was an incredible experience. We had dozens of national organizations that joined us, including many of those organizations that met with President Biden yesterday.
AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, Cliff Albright, for joining us, co-founder and executive director of Black Voters Matter, speaking to us from Atlanta, Georgia.
Coming up, we’ll speak to a women’s rights activist in the southern African nation of Eswatini, where the king is cracking down on dissent. This is the country formerly known as Swaziland. Stay with us.
Janine Jackson: The U.S. socioeconomic status quo that enriches so few and neglects so many can only be sustained by — not to put too fine a point on it — myth: You have to tell the same story so repeatedly and forcefully that people will question what’s before their eyes.
There are many myths, of course, but an important one is that if we give corporations tax breaks, they’ll just turn that gift right around and support the community with, first and foremost, jobs. And if you don’t give them that break, well, they’ll just take all those benefits to someplace that will.
That narrative is unraveling right now in Texas, where a massive and particularly perverse subsidy program known as Chapter 313 is set to expire, thanks to the work of a range of groups and reporters, particularly at the Houston Chronicle. Here to explain what’s happening and what’s at stake is Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First. He joins us by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to “CounterSpin,” Greg LeRoy.
Greg LeRoy:Thanks, Janine. Great to be with you.
Subsidies, tax breaks, sweetheart deals: They’re in the DNA, almost, of many state and local, as well as the federal government. But Chapter 313 still stands out. It was passed in 2001, and renewed three times since, by wide margins. But that seems to have been in good part because not a lot of people knew what it was actually doing. How did — or how does, we don’t quite know yet — but how does 313 work in Texas?
Sure. So it’s really a sweetheart mainly for the oil and gas industry. And the way it works is that companies apply: They say they’re going to build a new facility, or they’re going to expand an existing facility, or even, under the old rules, they’re just going to refurbish or do a bunch of maintenance work on an existing facility. And they want to get a 10-year, 100% property tax cut, an exemption, for that new value. And that’s real money, especially for capital-intensive facilities like refineries and petrochemical plants, because they’re very capital intensive.
The school district would be the biggest loser, of course, in that transaction, because school districts are the most expensive local public service. But the state would then reimburse the school districts, and paper over the losses. So it was really the state, at the end of the day, that was losing a lot of money, although school districts were losing money too. And at the end of the day, that bill was coming up to about a billion dollars a year from the state treasury. The annual cost of this program has been climbing, climbing, climbing over the years, even though nobody really understood it, because it is kind of a shell game, right, between local and state government.
Well, you’ve kind of answered it. I was going to say, who have been the big winners? Who’s losing out, who’s on the other end of the deal?
I would say both state taxpayers and local taxpayers. We issued astudyback in March, in which we documented that 52 school districts in the state of Texas lose more than $1,000 per student per year to corporate welfare. And the biggest, but not the only, culprit behind those numbers is Chapter 313. It’s just a big net loss for public services generally. And schools will always be the biggest losers in that equation, because education is the most expensive local public service.
And, frankly, small businesses and homeowners, and everybody else who had to pay higher taxes in many cases to make up that difference, lose. And also, school districts that are in nonindustrial areas; school districts in rural areas that don’t have refineries or chemical plants, they’re contributing to the pot of money at the state that then goes and pays the school districts in the industrial areas of the state. So it’s really kind of a shell game, even among school districts around the state.
Well, that explains the title of the Houston Chronicle series, “Unfair Burden”…
Yes.
…led, I believe, by Mike Morris and John Tedesco. And it seems they just checked the receipts on the promises these companies made in exchange for these subsidies. What was key from that series, and/or other investigations into the extent to which corporations were keeping the promises that premise these deals?
Yeah, the big series by the Houston Chroniclecan’t be under-applauded, frankly. They really, as you said, checked the receipts. They said, “First of all, let’s look at how we’re doing on job creation here.”
And, in many cases, we’re barely getting any jobs out of many of these deals. Because when you subsidize making a plant more capital intensive, well, by definition, that can often mean fewer jobs over time. They also looked at the financial impact on public services. And they looked at the long-term impact that’s creeping up on the state costs. It was a soup-to-nuts investigation, and they basically said, by every measure, what we think we’re supposed to get out of these things — which is, top of the list obviously, these jobs and additional tax revenue — we’re actually not getting much of either, and we’re losing a lot of revenue.
Yeah, one of the things I noted was that hardly any applications were being denied, like 2.5% of them. It was kind of, “If you say you want it, you get it.” They found companies announcing they were going to move to Texas before they even applied for the waiver. So it wasn’t an incentive at all.
And Dick Lavine — who I saw on your site cited from the group Every Texan — he talks about research that says that 85% of projects that got abatements would have gone to Texas anyway because, after all, it has to do with, if you’re talking oil and gas, it’s what’s in the ground. That’s where they want to be; it’s not a matter of taxes.
Yeah. And just to flesh out that cast of characters that came together here, it really was kind of a perfect storm. So the progressive state tax and budget group is called Every Texan, and Dick Lavine there has been all over this thing since the first time it was enacted 20 years ago. On the right came theTexas Public Policy Foundation, a libertarian think tank, which decided to weigh in against this, because we were picking winners and losers, and government is trying to shape industrial policy and so on, and hurting public services.
Then the faith-based network, theIndustrial Areas Foundation, they have 13 community groups around the state, they weighed in against this, because of the harm to public education, and the fact that they are very big about a pro-family agenda. Even the Texas AFL-CIO issued astatementagainst it, which was unusual, because there are a modest number of union jobs in some of the facilities on the coast. But they basically were very blunt, saying, “Even our members aren’t really benefiting very much, because the job creation is so modest, and the harm to public services is real and big.”
Right. And according to the Chronicle, only one company ever had to repay a tax break for failing to meet the job creation target…
Yeah, zero accountability.
…even though lots of them have fallen short.
Can we just pivot for a second to the origin story, which, I mean, proponents were brandishing this industry magazine and said, “Texas is losing out! We’re 37th in the country on bringing in manufacturers.” But what was the reality there?
In 2001, the most influential of several magazines that talk about state economic development trends — it’s calledSite Selection — published the annual ranking, which erroneously said that the state had capturedthreeprojects, because there was atypo; it should have been 73. And instead of saying “73,” by having only three deals captured, the state ranked very low among the states.
Literally a typo.
The fact that nobody checked that, that nobody looked at that number and said, that’s impossible. We’re a huge state, we’re the second biggest state in the country; there’s no way we’re not going to have a lot of deals, right? These rankings are not based on proportionate rates; they’re just absolute number rankings. That’s a crazy number.
Instead, the chamber and other business interests used it to say, “Oh, we got to have a new tax break. We’ve only got three deals. The sky is falling.”
Wow, wow. Well, it does matter that it’s energy companies at the center here in Texas, and in Louisiana, because, of course, bigger picture, if those companies in particular had to really pay the real costs of doing business, that would really change incentives and priorities in the direction that we need to survive, and stuff like that. It matters that it’s energy here.
It does. And the same issues play out in Louisiana, where groups that we’ve been working with have been fighting this for a long time too. They don’t call the lower stretch of the Mississippi “Cancer Alley” for nothing — the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans — because it has a very high rate of cancer, mostly in communities of color, neighboring facilities along the Lower Mississippi. And certainly the same issues apply to many, many parts of Texas as well; not to mention the climatechange issues, andHurricane Harveyis Exhibit Z of the problem. So, yes, if fossil fuels paid their full freight for their extraction and their burning, we’d have a very different incentive system for getting to renewables.
Finally, there’s a great quote in Alleen Brown’s Interceptpiece, from Broderick Bagert of Together Louisiana: “In a lot of cases, it’s not that these battles have been lost — they just haven’t been fought. What you’re seeing for the first time is the battles being fought.”
Now we know that industry is going to keep fighting for these subsidies, but it seems like, and you’re citing the wide range of folks who came together in coalition — some folks have seen some daylight on an issue that they might not have expected. They’re not giving up either, are they?
I think Bagert’s point is exactly right: In many cases, the tax break industrial complex has not been challenged. And it’s been in place so long, people just take it for granted because it’s been on autopilot all these years. It might actually be a lot more vulnerable than people think.
We’ve been speaking with Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First. They’re online at GoodJobsFirst.org. Greg LeRoy, thank you so much for joining us this week on “CounterSpin.”
Janine Jackson interviewed Good Jobs First’s Greg LeRoy about Texas corporate subsidies for the June 25, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The US socioeconomic status quo that enriches so few and neglects so many can only be sustained by—not to put too fine a point on it—myth: You have to tell the same story so repeatedly and forcefully that people will question what’s before their eyes.
There are many myths, of course, but an important one is that if we give corporations tax breaks, they’ll just turn that gift right around and support the community with, first and foremost, jobs. And if you don’t give them that break, well, they’ll just take all those benefits to someplace that will.
That narrative is unraveling right now in Texas, where a massive and particularly perverse subsidy program known as Chapter 313 is set to expire, thanks to the work of a range of groups and reporters, particularly at the Houston Chronicle. Here to explain what’s happening and what’s at stake is Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First. He joins us by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Greg LeRoy.
JJ: Subsidies, tax breaks, sweetheart deals: They’re in the DNA, almost, of many state and local, as well as the federal government. But Chapter 313 still stands out. It was passed in 2001, and renewed three times since, by wide margins. But that seems to have been in good part because not a lot of people knew what it was actually doing. How did—or how does, we don’t quite know yet—but how does 313 work in Texas?
GL: Sure. So it’s really a sweetheart mainly for the oil and gas industry. And the way it works is that companies apply: They say they’re going to build a new facility, or they’re going to expand an existing facility, or even, under the old rules, they’re just going to refurbish or do a bunch of maintenance work on an existing facility. And they want to get a 10-year, 100% property tax cut, an exemption, for that new value. And that’s real money, especially for capital-intensive facilities like refineries and petrochemical plants, because they’re very capital intensive.
The school district would be the biggest loser, of course, in that transaction, because school districts are the most expensive local public service. But the state would then reimburse the school districts, and paper over the losses. So it was really the state, at the end of the day, that was losing a lot of money, although school districts were losing money too. And at the end of the day, that bill was coming up to about a billion dollars a year from the state treasury. The annual cost of this program has been climbing, climbing, climbing over the years, even though nobody really understood it, because it is kind of a shell game, right, between local and state government.
JJ: Well, you’ve kind of answered it. I was going to say, who have been the big winners? Who’s losing out, who’s on the other end of the deal?
GL: I would say both state taxpayers and local taxpayers. We issued a study back in March, in which we documented that 52 school districts in the state of Texas lose more than $1,000 per student per year to corporate welfare. And the biggest, but not the only, culprit behind those numbers is Chapter 313. It’s just a big net loss for public services generally. And schools will always be the biggest losers in that equation, because education is the most expensive local public service.
And, frankly, small businesses and homeowners, and everybody else who had to pay higher taxes in many cases to make up that difference, lose. And also, school districts that are in nonindustrial areas; school districts in rural areas that don’t have refineries or chemical plants, they’re contributing to the pot of money at the state that then goes and pays the school districts in the industrial areas of the state. So it’s really kind of a shell game, even among school districts around the state.
JJ: Well, that explains the title of the Houston Chronicle series, “Unfair Burden”…
GL: Yes.
JJ: …led, I believe, by Mike Morris and John Tedesco. And it seems they just checked the receipts on the promises these companies made in exchange for these subsidies. What was key from that series, and/or other investigations into the extent to which corporations were keeping the promises that premise these deals?
GL: Yeah, the big series by the Houston Chronicle can’t be under-applauded, frankly. They really, as you said, checked the receipts. They said, “First of all, let’s look at how we’re doing on job creation here.”
And, in many cases, we’re barely getting any jobs out of many of these deals. Because when you subsidize making a plant more capital intensive, well, by definition, that can often mean fewer jobs over time. They also looked at the financial impact on public services. And they looked at the long-term impact that’s creeping up on the state costs. It was a soup-to-nuts investigation, and they basically said, by every measure, what we think we’re supposed to get out of these things—which is, top of the list obviously, these jobs and additional tax revenue—we’re actually not getting much of either, and we’re losing a lot of revenue.
JJ: Yeah, one of the things I noted was that hardly any applications were being denied, like 2.5% of them. It was kind of, “If you say you want it, you get it.” They found companies announcing they were going to move to Texas before they even applied for the waiver. So it wasn’t an incentive at all.
And Dick Lavine—who I saw on your site cited from the group Every Texan—he talks about research that says that 85% of projects that got abatements would have gone to Texas anyway because, after all, it has to do with, if you’re talking oil and gas, it’s what’s in the ground. That’s where they want to be; it’s not a matter of taxes.
GL: Yeah. And just to flesh out that cast of characters that came together here, it really was kind of a perfect storm. So the progressive state tax and budget group is called Every Texan, and Dick Lavine there has been all over this thing since the first time it was enacted 20 years ago. On the right came the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a libertarian think tank, which decided to weigh in against this, because we were picking winners and losers, and government is trying to shape industrial policy and so on, and hurting public services.
Then the faith-based network, the Industrial Areas Foundation, they have 13 community groups around the state, they weighed in against this, because of the harm to public education, and the fact that they are very big about a pro-family agenda. Even the Texas AFL-CIO issued a statement against it, which was unusual, because there are a modest number of union jobs in some of the facilities on the coast. But they basically were very blunt, saying, “Even our members aren’t really benefiting very much, because the job creation is so modest, and the harm to public services is real and big.”
JJ: Right. And according to the Chronicle, only one company ever had to repay a tax break for failing to meet the job creation target…
GL: Yeah, zero accountability.
JJ: …even though lots of them have fallen short.
Can we just pivot for a second to the origin story, which, I mean, proponents were brandishing this industry magazine and said, “Texas is losing out! We’re 37th in the country on bringing in manufacturers.” But what was the reality there?
GL: In 2001, the most influential of several magazines that talk about state economic development trends—it’s called Site Selection—published the annual ranking, which erroneously said that the state had captured three projects, because there was a typo; it should have been 73. And instead of saying “73,” by having only three deals captured, the state ranked very low among the states.
JJ: Literally a typo.
GL: The fact that nobody checked that, that nobody looked at that number and said, that’s impossible. We’re a huge state, we’re the second biggest state in the country; there’s no way we’re not going to have a lot of deals, right? These rankings are not based on proportionate rates; they’re just absolute number rankings. That’s a crazy number.
Instead, the chamber and other business interests used it to say, “Oh, we got to have a new tax break. We’ve only got three deals. The sky is falling.”
JJ: Wow, wow. Well, it does matter that it’s energy companies at the center here in Texas, and in Louisiana, because, of course, bigger picture, if those companies in particular had to really pay the real costs of doing business, that would really change incentives and priorities in the direction that we need to survive, and stuff like that. It matters that it’s energy here.
Greg LeRoy: “If fossil fuels paid their full freight for their extraction and their burning, we’d have a very different incentive system for getting to renewables.”
GL: It does. And the same issues play out in Louisiana, where groups that we’ve been working with have been fighting this for a long time too. They don’t call the lower stretch of the Mississippi “Cancer Alley” for nothing—the stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—because it has a very high rate of cancer, mostly in communities of color, neighboring facilities along the Lower Mississippi. And certainly the same issues apply to many, many parts of Texas as well; not to mention the climate change issues, and Hurricane Harvey is Exhibit Z of the problem. So, yes, if fossil fuels paid their full freight for their extraction and their burning, we’d have a very different incentive system for getting to renewables.
JJ: Finally, there’s a great quote in Alleen Brown’s Interceptpiece, from Broderick Bagert of Together Louisiana: “In a lot of cases, it’s not that these battles have been lost—they just haven’t been fought. What you’re seeing for the first time is the battles being fought.”
Now we know that industry is going to keep fighting for these subsidies, but it seems like, and you’re citing the wide range of folks who came together in coalition—some folks have seen some daylight on an issue that they might not have expected. They’re not giving up either, are they?
GL: I think Bagert’s point is exactly right: In many cases, the tax break industrial complex has not been challenged. And it’s been in place so long, people just take it for granted because it’s been on autopilot all these years. It might actually be a lot more vulnerable than people think.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First. They’re online at GoodJobsFirst.org. Greg LeRoy, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
