10 July 20
Bill McKibben | It's Been an Awful Week for the Fossil-Fuel Industry
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "It's been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it's been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth: a trio of sweeping and unlikely victories have demonstrated the depth of great organizing and the increasing weakness of the industry's hold on our political system."
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Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "It's been a truly awful few days for the fossil-fuel industry, which is another way of saying that it's been an unexpectedly good few days for planet Earth: a trio of sweeping and unlikely victories have demonstrated the depth of great organizing and the increasing weakness of the industry's hold on our political system."
First, on Sunday, Duke Energy and Dominion Energy—enormous Southeast utilities—announced that they were scrapping plans for the Atlantic Coast natural-gas pipeline, despite having invested $3.4 billion in the project. They’d actually won a big Supreme Court ruling just weeks earlier, giving them the right to lay the pipeline beneath the Appalachian Trail—but that, executives from the two companies said in a joint statement, wasn’t going to be enough. “This announcement reflects the increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States. Until these issues are resolved, the ability to satisfy the country’s energy needs will be significantly challenged.” Translation: they were evidently rattled by a court order earlier this spring in the granddaddy of all pipeline battles; a Montana federal court ruled in April that the Trump Administration couldn’t simply waive environmental laws to help the backers of the Keystone XL pipeline. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline may have had Supreme Court permission to traverse the Appalachian Trail, but the companies must have realized that they were going to face litigation at every stream crossing along the route.
On Monday came the news that a federal court had ruled in favor of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, who have been fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. In this case, the pipeline has already been built, and is carrying oil. Stunningly, the court said that Energy Transfer, the company that developed the pipeline, has to shut it down and drain the crude within the next thirty days—an unprecedented blow. The ruling will be appealed, and, if the company is lucky enough to draw some Trump appointees in its panel at the D.C. Circuit Court, it could be overturned. But what a moment. D.A.P.L. had been the most iconic fight of recent years, with hundreds of tribes from across the continent descending on Standing Rock, at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, to take a stand. No one who was there in 2016 will ever forget the scene: the smoke rising from a hundred campfires, the nonstop ceremonies of prayer and drumming, and the incredible courage of activists facing militarized police forces that did not hesitate to deploy the tools in their anti-protest arsenal. The images of dogs biting peaceful protesters were straight out of Birmingham, circa 1963, and a reason that the Obama Administration, in its waning days, put the kibosh on the project. Donald Trump revived it immediately upon taking office, but the judge ruled this week that the haste with which the Administration pushed through the pipeline violated environmental rules, in particular because there was no study into the environmental impact of possible leaks on reservation water supplies.
Then, on Monday night, the Supreme Court let that Montana ruling on Keystone XL stand, meaning that the project can’t be built until much of the litigation is settled. That process will take us well past the November election; because Joe Biden has pledged to oppose Keystone, Trump’s defeat would mean a battle that has been fought for more than a decade would be over.
If it seems as if all the action around these cases is in court, it’s not. The only reason that there were substantial legal challenges in the first place is because of the epic organizing that preceded the lawsuits. In the case of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, thousands of local and national groups have fought it at every turn—as Adam Siegel wrote for the Blue Virginia blog, “Bit by bit, as opposition delayed fossil foolish infrastructure and political momentum swung (especially in Virginia) against them, the [utilities’] analysis made clear that going with lower-carbon options would provide a higher and lower risk return (profit) for shareholders.” (Or, as an activist tweeted, “In case you thought that small actions don’t matter . . . this is a result of every tree sitter, each person who chained herself to a piece of equipment, sat at an air board mtg, blocked a site.”) That’s equally true in the Dakotas, where it has been made clear to anyone paying attention that indigenous communities are at the forefront of the fight for a livable planet. And Keystone was where Native Americans, climate scientists, farmers and ranchers, big environmental groups, and activists all found one another for the first time.
These three announcements, in the span of twenty-four hours, are the payoff of a decade of endless hearings and petitions and trips to jail—a triumph against what seemed overwhelming odds. They also show that, going forward, only the truly reckless will henceforth invest their money in giant fossil-fuel-infrastructure projects. The victory here is measured not just in pipelines defeated but in pipelines and other projects that will never even be proposed, simply because it has been demonstrated that opponents have the resources—in bodies, in determination, in legal talent, and in moral standing—to slow them down to the point where profitability becomes impossible. Should Trump be reëlected, he may be able to help some of these giant projects hang on. If he’s defeated, their lifeline will be gone, and with it a century’s worth of fossil-fuel expansion.
Passing the Mic
Pramila Jayapal is the first Indian-American woman elected to Congress—her district includes most of Seattle, including the area that was briefly an “autonomous zone” in the city’s center. She’s the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and I wanted to get her insights because, last month, a House Select Committee put forward the most comprehensive climate proposal yet introduced in Congress. This interview has been condensed for clarity.
Let’s assume a Biden Presidency and a Democratic-controlled Senate and House. Is there going to be sufficient gumption to move dramatic climate legislation through, or will the government be stuck in incrementalist mode?
Right now we’re seeing a crucial awakening to many of our country’s foundational demons. Trump’s Presidency, the COVID-19 crisis, and mass uprisings against white supremacy have laid bare systemic anti-Blackness, deadly public-health inequities, and economic greed. Incrementalism cannot be the solution. The structural inequities in our system are what allowed Trump to be elected in the first place; our task in the new Administration must be to fix those holes urgently and transformatively. Our movement will have to work harder than ever across silos to make the connections between climate, migration, health, and justice, so that we can push on all fronts simultaneously, powerfully, and leaving no one behind.
There’s been a lot of talk this summer about the overlap between climate justice and racial justice—the idea that vulnerable people can’t breathe for too many reasons. Do you sense that bridges between those issues and caucuses are being built in Congress, too?
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which I co-chair, has long been the leader in advocating for intersectionality across multiple issues. Ahead of the release of the report from the House Select Committee on Climate, the C.P.C.’s climate committee developed a set of recommendations for how to urgently tackle the climate crisis with a focus on jobs, decarbonization, and justice. It is a testament to our inside and outside organizing work that many of our recommendations were included in the Select Committee’s report. So we have started to build the bridges we need, but there is much more to do to take on money in politics and the status quo, which prioritizes corporate profits over the health and safety of our communities.
What’s it like in Seattle right now—what does it feel like on the street?
The energy on the streets is real, as people push for transformative justice in policing and community safety, economic relief, and universal health care. COVID-19 cases have tripled in just two months; forty per cent of the cases in our state are among Latinx people, who make up only thirteen per cent of the population. Additionally, among COVID-19 deaths, the death rate is more than fifty per cent higher among Black people compared to white people. And yet, finally, we are taking on police brutality and moving progressive taxation legislation that pushes corporations to share the wealth and lessen devastation. We are reminded of the transformational W.T.O. protests two decades ago, and the strength of mass movements. Through all the pain and volatility, people are seeing their power, and using it to take care of each other and for the common good. Neighbors look out for each other, hospital workers march against police brutality, and mass uprisings take on existing power structures. It is messy, but with a palpable sense that our fates are forever interconnected.
Climate School
Policymakers may be starting to get a little more serious about some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the energy orchard. The Democrats’ Select Committee report mentions plans for massive building retrofits. Rick Barnett, writing at the Energy Central blog, offers an in-depth discussion of building a “continuous thermal seal” around homes and offices. He writes, “Most interior space is surrounded by thermal defects such as lumber, pipes, electrical boxes, ducts, doors and windows. This is like wearing a flannel shirt when you need a parka.” Happily, the parka is available off the shelf, and plenty of local contractors know how to wrap it around you—with immediate savings that should more than finance the cost.
You might want to check out a topographical map of your neighborhood—new data indicate that six million more American homes than previously thought are in the hundred-year-flood zone. That’s a seventy-per-cent increase from current government figures.
Those Marxist eco-radicals at Goldman Sachs ran the numbers and have predicted that global private investment in renewable energy will amount to sixteen trillion dollars in the next decade, overtaking oil and gas for the first time next year.
Observers have been understandably fixated on Siberia these past weeks, watching the fearful heat wave there and the resulting fires. But, regarding the other end of the planet, researchers said last week that the South Pole is now warming three times faster than the global average. The temperature there is unlikely to rise above freezing, but warmer seas mean that, along the Antarctic coast, the ice shelves are subject to an ever-greater danger of collapse.
Scoreboard
Two more big European insurers—one of which is Munich Re, the world’s largest—may be getting ready to drop their coverage of the Trans Mountain tar-sands pipeline, in Canada, after hard campaigning from First Nations groups who don’t want it crossing their land. On the other hand, the Boston-based company Liberty Mutual, which had pledged not to support the vast new Adani coal mine in Australia, seems to be sponsoring another such project not far away, forcing activists into a tiring game of whack-a-coal.
George Washington University has joined Georgetown University and American University in plans to divest from fossil fuel, meaning that the centers of intellectual power surrounding the nation’s capital are in agreement about the shape of the energy future.
Volkswagen’s massive factory in Zwickau, Germany’s “city of cars,” produced its final internal-combustion car last month, “a Golf R Estate with 2.0-litre petrol engine in Oryx White Pearl Effect.” The factory has been in operation since 1904; after its workers go through a few weeks of retraining, it will start churning out electric vehicles.
With an eye to future negotiations, the House Select Committee on Climate laid down one really important marker, even if it’s buried on page 287 of its new report: “Congress should not offer liability relief or nullify Clean Air Act authorities or other existing statutory duties to cut pollution in exchange for a carbon price.” Because this is likely to be the first bargaining position of the oil companies if President Biden takes over, it’s good to be on the record in advance that it’s not acceptable. The Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, among others, apparently deserves credit.
Warming Up
Want to see a great ad for a great product, the e-bike? You can’t on French TV, because it’s been banned for hurting the feelings of the auto industry. But that’s why we have YouTube. Better yet, the inspiration for the commercial apparently came from a classic Supremes hit.
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A line of police officers surrounding City Hall on June 3, 2020, in Seattle, look to
Majority of Seattle City Council Pledges to Defund Police by 50% and Reallocate Money to Meet Community Needs
Daniel Beekman, The Seattle Times
Beekman writes: "A majority of Seattle City Council members now say they agree with a high-level proposal by advocates to defund the Police Department by 50% and reallocate the dollars to other community needs."
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Daniel Beekman, The Seattle Times
Beekman writes: "A majority of Seattle City Council members now say they agree with a high-level proposal by advocates to defund the Police Department by 50% and reallocate the dollars to other community needs."
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Senator Bernie Sanders and former vice president Joseph R. Bid
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders Unite for Student Loan Forgiveness, Free College
Zack Friedman, Forbes
Friedman writes: "Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have united to tackle your student loans. Here's what you need to know."
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Zack Friedman, Forbes
Friedman writes: "Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have united to tackle your student loans. Here's what you need to know."
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A number of hate groups received loans from the government's small business coronavirus relief fund. (photo: Getty)
Millions in Aid From Small Business Relief Fund Went to "Hate Groups"
Stephen Gandel, CBS News
Gandel writes: "At least 10 groups with a history of making anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ or anti-immigrant statements received loans from the government's small business coronavirus relief fund."
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Stephen Gandel, CBS News
Gandel writes: "At least 10 groups with a history of making anti-Black, anti-LGBTQ or anti-immigrant statements received loans from the government's small business coronavirus relief fund."
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Derek Harris, left, in an undated photo. (photo: Antoine Harris)
This Louisiana Gulf War Veteran Is Serving Life for Selling Worth of Marijuana
Aaron Morrison, The Appeal
Excerpt: "Derek Harris awaits arguments in the state Supreme Court about the sentencing, which one judge called 'unconscionable.'"
n Oct. 2, 2008, a teenage boy in Abbeville, Louisiana, led an undercover police officer to his mother’s small shack on the poor side of town to make a small purchase of marijuana from his mother’s partner. There, the officer purchased .69 grams of marijuana for $30 from Derek Harris, an unemployed Army veteran.
Aaron Morrison, The Appeal
Excerpt: "Derek Harris awaits arguments in the state Supreme Court about the sentencing, which one judge called 'unconscionable.'"
n Oct. 2, 2008, a teenage boy in Abbeville, Louisiana, led an undercover police officer to his mother’s small shack on the poor side of town to make a small purchase of marijuana from his mother’s partner. There, the officer purchased .69 grams of marijuana for $30 from Derek Harris, an unemployed Army veteran.
Four months later, a warrant was issued for Harris’s arrest. Then, in July 2009, the District Attorney’s Office for Louisiana’s 15th Judicial District, which serves Vermilion, Acadia, and Lafayette parishes, charged Harris with distributing marijuana. Harris posted his bond and then spent nearly three years waiting for his trial to begin. He elected to have a trial by judge instead of facing a jury, and on June 26, 2012, a judge found Harris guilty and later imposed a 15-year prison sentence.
Then, prosecutors with the district attorney’s office filed a habitual offender bill of information based on Harris’s prior convictions. On Nov. 15, 2012, Judge Durwood Conque resentenced Harris to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Louisiana’s habitual offender statute allows prosecutors to file to have a punishment enhanced based on a person’s criminal history. The statute has long played a role in the state’s notoriously long sentences and high incarceration rate. In 2016, Louisiana had one of the nation’s highest rates of people sentenced to life without parole, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2017, The state legislature enacted habitual offender reform which reduced maximum sentences triggered by a fourth offense.
While incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, Harris challenged the excessiveness of his sentence and argued that he did not receive effective legal representation as required by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Harris now hopes to find relief in a petition he filed with the state Supreme Court on May 23, 2018.
“Nothing that he did deserved life without the possibility of parole,” Harris’s older brother Antoine Harris said in a phone interview. “I’ll be the first to say he made bad decisions. You reap what you sow, most of the time. But if you’re going to reap something, it should match what you’ve sown.”
Prosecutors wielded the habitual offender statute because of a string of prior convictions including distribution of cocaine, simple robbery, and theft of property worth less than $500. His family members insist, however, that the untreated substance use disorder Harris developed after serving in the Army during the Gulf War in the early 1990s contributed to these petty offenses.
But prosecutors have the discretion to not file a habitual offender bill of information, and Harris’s family and post-conviction attorney say that ineffective assistance of counsel by his public defender also played a part in his harsh sentence. “Had my family or, perhaps, someone close to my brother had the financial means to not have him with a court-appointed attorney, maybe the outcome would’ve been different,” Antoine said. “If everything worked out accordingly, he’d be a free man working now and doing whatever he could to better his life.”
More than a year before Harris’s 2012 trial, prosecutors extended a plea offer of seven years in prison. But Jan Rowe, Harris’s trial counsel, never communicated that offer to him, Harris later alleged in a post-conviction legal challenge. When prosecutors came back with a 10-year offer, Harris says he informed Rowe that he was willing to accept the deal.
Harris’s stance on the deal from prosecutors apparently never got back to the DA’s office. Before trial in 2012, a new prosecutor who took over Harris’s case rescinded the 10-year offer and set out the terms of another deal: 30 years in prison, even though the statute allowed for a five-to 30-year sentence. Harris declined that offer and then faced a trial that may have permanently cost him his freedom.
On Dec. 11, 2013, Louisiana’s Third Circuit Court of Appeal ruled against Harris’s claim of excessiveness in sentencing. But in a dissenting opinion, Judge Sylvia Cooks said the sentence was “bereft of fundamental fairness.”
“I believe it is unconscionable to impose a life-sentence-without-benefit upon this Defendant who served his country on the field of battle and returned home to find his country offered him no help for his drug addiction problem.” Cooks wrote. “It is an incomprehensible, needless, tragic waste of a human life for the sake of slavish adherence to the technicalities of law.”
Harris had legal representation “in name only” and Rowe did not provide effective counsel to his client at pivotal stages in the case, said Cormac Boyle, an attorney now representing Harris in his writ of certiorari filed with the state Supreme Court.
“The sheer harshness of the Mr. Harris’ life without parole as an enhancement for selling .69 grams ($30 worth) of marijuana truly shocks the conscience,” Boyle wrote in briefing filed with the court on Sept. 9 of this year. “Now, the state wants to deprive him of any remedy for these wrongs.”
In a phone interview with The Appeal from his home in North Carolina, Rowe said he negotiated with prosecutors over a plea offer for Harris “probably three or four times.” But Rowe acknowledged that he had trouble keeping track of Harris, which he blamed on his client’s substance use disorder. He said he lost track of Harris for about two years until right just before the DA’s office offered its deal of 30 years, which Harris declined.
“Personally, I think that he had a future, if he would’ve given up the drugs,” Rowe said. “I knew several lawyers that went to school with him and they all said he was a great guy, great athlete, all that stuff. I really consider this the worst case I’ve ever had. I was shattered that he didn’t help himself, for the longest time. It didn’t have to happen like that.”
The DA’s office also disputes the claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. In filings with the state Supreme Court, they argued that the seven-year deal was communicated to Rowe, who dutifully noted the deal and other developments in his client’s case file. Prosecutors further argued that the seven-year offer did not come with a commitment that they would “forgo a habitual offender prosecution” and is not excessive because it is in accordance with state law.
“Arguing over the length of the jail term offered is pointless,” Calvin Woodruff, an assistant DA for the 15th Judicial District, wrote in an Aug. 19 brief with the court.
As of publication time, arguments in Harris case before the Supreme Court have yet to be scheduled.
On the day in June 2012 that Judge Conque sentenced Harris to life in prison without parole, his mother stood before the court and offered a plea for mercy.
“My son is not a drug dealer,” she said, according to Harris’s brother Antoine. “What he sold the cop that literally went into the neighborhood posing as a drug addict was the equivalent of a joint or two.”
“And the judge stepped in and told my mother point blank,” Antoine recalled. “He said, ‘Ms. Harris, one joint or two joints, he sold it. He’s a drug dealer.’”
“To me, a piece of her life was gone then,” Antoine said. “She had a broken heart, you know, because one of her kids is locked up in a cage for the rest of his life for nothing more than petty drug crimes.”
But Antoine says that Derek still clings to hope that he will be freed from Angola. Although their mother died in 2015, at least Derek may one day visit her grave, he said.
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Bolivian opposition leader and senator Jeanine Anez Chavez speaks during a news conference following Bolivia's former president Evo Morales' exit out of the country, in La Paz, Bolivia, Nov. 12, 2019. (photo: Marco Bello/Reuters)
Bolivia: Interim President Anez Tests Positive for COVID-19
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's de facto president Jeanine Áñez Thursday announced via her Twitter account that she had tested positive to COVID-19 while other members of her team are infected as well."
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Bolivia's de facto president Jeanine Áñez Thursday announced via her Twitter account that she had tested positive to COVID-19 while other members of her team are infected as well."
"I feel well, I feel strong, I am going to keep working remotely from my isolation, and I want to thank all the Bolivians who are working to help us in this health crisis," Áñez said as COVID-19 cases have spiked in the country in recent weeks.
However, the situation in Bolivia is far worse with deaths in the streets, social protests, and hundreds of people waiting with coffins in their homes, unable to bury their loved ones.
"I have tested positive for Covid19, I'm fine, I will work from my isolation. Together, let's get ahead."
Áñez's coup-born government, which at the beginning of the pandemic refused the help of Cuban doctors and medicines, admitted on May 25 that it had made mistakes at handling the crisis and asked the World Health Organization for help after the eastern department of Beni declared a health disaster following the collapse of its health system.
At the beginning of June, Añez allowed municipalities to relax the quarantine, yet La Paz had to reverse the decision following an increment of infections.
On June 23, it was reported that at least two hospitals had closed in La Paz as staff members were exposed to COVID-19 positive cases without proper protective gear and safety protocols.
The country reports 42,984 confirmed cases and 1,577 deaths so far.
A farmworker at an egg farm in San Diego, California, on November 6, 2014. California voters passed an animal welfare law in 2008 to require that the state's egg-laying hens be given room to move around, but did not provide the funds for farmers to convert. (photo: Melanie Steton Freeman/Getty)
Farmers and Animal Rights Activists Are Coming Together to Fight Big Factory Farms
Ezra Klein, Vox
Excerpt: "Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have a new bill, and a new coalition, with far-reaching consequences."
Ezra Klein, Vox
Excerpt: "Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have a new bill, and a new coalition, with far-reaching consequences."
bout a year before Sen. Cory Booker officially ran for president, he took a trip through the Midwest, meeting voters in the states he knew he’d need to win. One visit, in particular, sticks in his mind. It was in the home of a Republican farmer, a man who told Booker’s team he wasn’t sure he wanted to host the senator because “this is a Christian household.” Booker is Christian, but he knew what that meant: He’s vegan, liberal, an African American Democrat from Newark, New Jersey. Booker wasn’t the kind of politician this farmer saw as his own.
Booker tried to loosen the guy up with dad jokes. “I told him his cows were udderly amazing,” Booker recalls. Nothing.
The breakthrough came when the farmer began telling Booker about “the hell” he and his neighbors found themselves in. They used to sell their cows to five different companies, which meant if a buyer didn’t give them a good price or demanded practices that compromised their cows or land, they could go to another. But the industry had consolidated. Now there was one buyer, and that buyer controlled everything. The farmers had been reduced from entrepreneurs to serfs. Here, finally, was common ground. The farmer hated what his business had become, and so did Booker.
This was a story Booker heard again and again. And it carried the seed of an idea. Booker is vegan, and so he knows, better than most, how unpopular veganism is — in one survey, only people with drug addiction were viewed more negatively. Asked during a September CNN town hall whether he thought others should become vegan, Booker said “no,” before pivoting to discuss the problems of factory farming. In an MSNBC interview, he laughed off the idea of a “radical vegan agenda,” reassuring voters he doesn’t think “government should be telling Americans what to eat.”
But Booker realized there was a place that vegans and farmers could come together: Both of them hate the ways agribusiness had consolidated and mechanized the meat market, forcing farmers into using massive, cruel, and environmentally devastating confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
The agricultural industry has an unusual structure: Virtually every node in the industry is highly concentrated around a few megaproducers. That’s true for seeds, for pesticides, for machines, for production. And concentration has been increasing, and fast. In 1980, 34 percent of pigs were slaughtered by the four largest meatpacking companies. By 2015, that had nearly doubled, to 66 percent.
But the food is still grown, and the animals still raised, on family farms. These farms are, in theory, independent, but in practice, they bear the risks of independence without the expected freedoms. The megaproducers they buy from and sell to have all the leverage; farmers are left with little choice save to accept the onerous, binding contracts they’re offered. As the Center for American Progress puts it, “growing corporate power has left relatively small farms and ranches vulnerable to exploitation at the hands of the oligopolies with which they do business.”
The results, for farmers, have been disastrous. In 2018, median farm income was negative $1,840 — meaning most farms lost money. Farmers saw a 50 percent drop in income since 2013. Adjusted for inflation, farm incomes have been stagnant for the past 30 years. As a result, farmers are buried in debt: The sector’s debt-to-income ratio is the highest it’s been since the farm crisis of the mid-’80s. (The National Pork Producers Council declined to comment for this story, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association did not reply to a request for comment.)
As farmers have lost control of their livelihoods, they’ve also lost control of their animals, their crops, and their land. They have no choice but to contract with companies that dictate the way they raise their animals, setting farmers in competition with one another for production speeds and efficiency. The way you win that competition is to pack more animals into your sheds, pump them fuller of antibiotics so they don’t die from infections that flourish amid overcrowding, raise breeds that live lives of pain but grow with astonishing speed, create massive manure lagoons that poison streams and turn air acrid. The result is a brutal incentive to mechanize the process of livestock production in ways cruel to the animals, the farmers, and their communities.
“Independent family farmers and ranchers are being driven off their land, driven into bankruptcy, being forced into a system of industrialized agriculture that our values don’t support,” says Joe Maxwell, a Missouri farmer, former lieutenant governor, and co-founder of the Family Farm Action Alliance. “It’s either join up with these transnational monopolies or we’re going to bankrupt you. That’s the reality of family agriculture today.”
Booker realized that, as unlikely as it sounds, there was a space in the Venn diagram between the people who believe raising and killing animals for food is wrong and the people whose chose, as their livelihoods, to raise and kill animals for food. Both could agree that the way we are doing it now is cruel, both to animals and to people.
“This is not how we raised livestock 70 years ago,” Booker says. “We’ve gone from raising animals in a far more humane, pasture-based model to one where we’re producing food in hyper-confined, concentrated, enclosed buildings that produce these massive lagoons of waste that are poisoning our streams and our rivers.”
In December of 2019, while campaigning in Iowa, Booker unveiled the Farm System Reform Act. It’s sweeping legislation, but at its core it does four things:
- Imposes an immediate moratorium on the construction of new CAFOs and phases out the largest existing CAFOs by 2040
- Imposes the liabilities and costs of pollutions, accidents, and disasters on the agricultural conglomerates that control the market rather than on the independent farmers who contract with them
- Creates a $100 billion fund to help farmers who are currently running CAFOs transition to other agricultural operations
- Strengthens the existing Packers and Stockyards Act to prohibit a range of contract terms and structures that let huge meat buyers put farmers in a race for the bottom while denying them political and legal recourse
Booker dropped out of the presidential race in January. But his legislation kept picking up cosponsors. In May of 2020, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) signed on to the bill. That same month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, sponsored a companion bill in the House with six co-sponsors, including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), co-chair of the House Progressive Caucus.
“For years and years, giant multinational corporations have been crushing competition in the agricultural sector and seizing key markets while regulators have looked the other way,” Warren says. “The Covid-19 crisis is making it even easier for Big Ag to get even bigger and gobble up small farms — leaving farmers out in the cold and consumers facing higher costs and fewer choices.”
“My interest in it came because I was spending time with Bernie Sanders in Iowa,” Khanna says. “I saw these factory farms, and I saw miles and miles of land where you couldn’t see farmers. All you could see was machinery and runoff. And when I spoke to actual farmers, they talked about how the people who owned these farms weren’t in Iowa. They had no control over the environmental impact. They felt they didn’t have control over their own economic destiny.”
There is a coalition emerging here, one that could lead to overdue reforms in our food system, but one that also has profound things to say about our politics.
The politics of animal — and human — suffering
David Coman-Hidy is the president of the Humane League, an animal welfare organization. In May, I had a conversation with him I’ve had trouble getting out of my head. My question was innocuous. I wanted to know what he was working on. “Switching from live shackling to the atmospheric killing of chickens,” he replied.
Oh.
I wasn’t familiar with these terms, and maybe you aren’t, either. And I’m sorry for what I’m going to force you to imagine as I explain them. “The process of how we slaughter broiler chickens is the cruelest thing imaginable,” says Coman-Hidy. These are, functionally, malnourished, young birds. Workers flip them upside down to shackle them by their legs. In many cases, the process dislocates their hips.
Chickens aren’t meant to be upside-down. They have no diaphragm. Shackled and inverted, their organs crush into their lungs, making it hard for the birds to breathe. The point of the shackling is to put them on a conveyor that drags them through electrified water, stunning them before the kill. But the birds panic, thrashing in wild terror. Some of them miss the water, or the stun setting is too low. Those birds have their throats cut while they’re still conscious, and then they’re pulled through boiling water to defeather them. If the blade misses the bird, the bird boils alive.
Coman-Hidy and his organization are working to convince agricultural producers to slaughter chickens by simply gassing them, en masse. It’s easier on the chickens, and less traumatizing for the workers. And the campaign is seeing some success. McDonald’s has pledged to move to atmospheric killing, for one.
Coman-Hidy is vegan; he’s devoted his life to reducing animal suffering. Didn’t it feel strange, I asked him, to become part of this machine whose very existence he loathes? Even if atmospheric killing was more humane, wouldn’t it unnerve him to become one of the people shaping the architecture of animal slaughter?
“The thought experiment that helped me is if I could die, or have a member of my family die, by being euthanized by gas, or have what I just described happen to them, what would I give to get the gas?” He replied. “And the answer is everything.”
There are few movements as alienated from the consensus position as the animal suffering movement. They look at the world and see tens of billions of animals being tortured and slaughtered in ways that poison the earth, warm the planet, and — as we are seeing with particular clarity now, as scores die daily from a pandemic virus that likely began in a meat market — harm human health. The practices of industrial animal agriculture are so cruel that you can’t describe them in polite company, so traumatizing that suicide and abuse are too-common worker hazards, so disturbing that agriculture companies pass laws criminalizing efforts to show the world where their meals are made. It is a structure of suffering with no bottom, no end, and what is most astonishing about it is that almost everyone simply treats it as normal.
And so the animal suffering movement has to practice, in the truest and most challenging sense of the word, politics. They have to find common purpose with those they disagree with profoundly. To have any chance of changing a system they loathe, they must become part of it, even complicit in it. They don’t get to realistically hope for success anytime soon, for a world they could be comfortable in, for an end to the horror they see all around them. They get to hope chickens will die from gas rather than shackled upside down with their throats cut. And they are finding that the best way to get to that world is to focus on human suffering, too.
The coronavirus has created coalitions that didn’t exist before it by laying bare the close connection between animal and human suffering. Meatpacking plants have been epicenters of outbreaks, with the suffering concentrated among immigrant laborers who then transmit the virus to their communities. The League of United Latin American Citizens called for “meatless May Mondays” to protest conditions in the slaughterhouses.
“Until the meat industry, federal and state governments protect the lives of essential workers at all meat processing facilities in a federally mandated and verifiable manner, LULAC will call for boycotts of meat products,” the organization’s president, Domingo Garcia, said in a statement.
It’s in the intersection of human and animal suffering that the animal rights community sees opportunity. Farmers and vegan activists may not agree on the world they want to see, but they can agree that the way both farmer and animals were treated in the past is preferable to the way they are treated today. LULAC and the Humane League aren’t pursuing the same long-term goals, but better conditions for workers would also mean better conditions for animals.
How much change would the Farm System Reform Act bring?
In reporting for this piece, I’ve asked everyone the same question: If the Farm System Reform Act passed, how much would really change?
“It doesn’t ban animal agriculture,” says Leah Garcés, the president of Mercy for Animals. “If you look for the part of the bill banning cages and crates, it’s not in there. But it would end animal agriculture as we know it. It wouldn’t let the system go forward as it does.”
To Garcés, the key element of the bill is the reversal of liability. She’s spent years working with chicken farmers who’ve been driven by contract terms and debt loads to accept practices that repulse them, and who find themselves paying the bill when disease cuts through their flock, or pollution gushes into the waterways that feed the community.
“Currently, integrators” — that’s your Tysons and Smithfields — “have created a system where all the bad parts of animal farming are on the back of the farmer or taxpayer,” Garcés says. “The bill flips that: ‘Integrator, you need to pay for all the pollution.’ I think that would bankrupt the current system if they had to pay for it.”
In her work with farmers, Garcés has found many of them want to escape the industrial animal agriculture business, because they appalled by how they have to treat their animals, their land, or both. But the integrators load them up with so much debt that they have no way out but through. So the debt forgiveness and transition assistance thrills her. “The biggest hurdle to getting farmers to transition is the debt,” she says. “I think hundreds of farmers would sign up for this. They just need a bridge.”
Maxwell, of the Family Farm Action Alliance, agrees. “Most of these farmers are just cogs in a big machine,” he says. “Once they borrow money from one of these big companies, they get stuck on a treadmill of poverty and debt that they can’t get off of. That’s why 70 percent of us live at or below the federal poverty level. So many farmers are looking for ways off that treadmill, and that’s what this bill offers.”
There are two wild cards here. One is the rapid rise of plant- and lab-based meats. By 2040, when the Farm System Reform Act is fully implemented, how rapidly have those technologies advanced? How cheap is an Impossible Burger? How tasty is lab-grown pork, or 3D-printed steak? Animal meat is so cheap in part because the true costs are hidden — they are absorbed by the suffering of the animals, the unpriced pollution flowing into communities, the quiet traumas and injuries carried by workers. If a bill like this made animal-based meat more expensive, it might accelerate the transition to other forms of meat. That’s certainly a quiet hope in the animal rights crowd.
The danger, though, is that the bill could drive production overseas or to Latin America, where standards are lower and even crueler, more dangerous practices prevail. The bill establishes country-of-origin labeling, but there’s little reason to believe that would be much of a hurdle — Americans already buy strawberries from Mexico and steak from Brazil.
The question is what Americans really want, and how easy it will be for them to get it. There is a deep ambivalence in our relationship to the food that ends up on our plates: We want food from small farms, where workers and animals are treated well, where the land is respected, and we want it all to be incredibly cheap and absurdly plentiful.
The average American consumed 222 pounds of red meat and poultry in 2018, according to the USDA. Right now, big agribusiness producers try to ease consumer consciences through misdirection: Their packaging and advertising emphasize small farms, their ag-gag laws and contract provisions choke off the flow of actual information, the massive scale and mechanization of their processes hold down prices, and their political contributions repel real oversight.
“The tilt in America in the last 30 years of policy has been toward consumerism,” Khanna says. “We will do everything possible to lower prices. We won’t care about jobs, real wages, or the environment. My argument is that we ought to care enough about farmers [having] a decent livelihood, about environmental consequences, about consequences to communities, so even if this means there’s a slight increase in the price of meat, that’s worth it.”
The Farm System Reform Act won’t end all the abuses of factory farming, all the environmental degradation it causes, all the economic exploitation faced by farmers. But it’s a start. And if the odd-bedfellows coalition Booker is trying to build materializes, and finds real political footing, profound change is possible.
“We can’t vilify each other,” Booker says. “If we can’t have compassion for people in these broken systems, then we’re not going to have the compassion or coalitions to end these systems themselves.”
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