17 September 20
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Robert Reich | Racism Is Profitable
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable."
ince the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color.It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable.The profitability of racism sparks a vicious cycle called the Oppression Economy:Elite institutions are motivated to keep suppressing the economic vitality of people of color. That economic oppression in turn hinders their political power, and that political oppression kneecaps their ability to change the system.
This cycle plays out in every aspect of our economy and is particularly apparent in mass incarceration.The criminalization of people of color is a multibillion-dollar industry: In 2017 alone, mass incarceration cost $182 billion; trapping mostly low-income Black and Latinx people in a cycle of economic and political disenfranchisement.
If we follow the money, we find that some of America’s largest banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, have all extended millions of dollars in credit lines to for-profit prison operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic.
The unregulated operations of prisons has increasingly mandated cheap service for maximum profit. For example, bail bonds companies, telecommunications, food, and commissary companies gouge both those incarcerated and their families.The exploitation doesn’t stop upon release from prison.
The suppression of economic vitality of people of color is just beginning. Because of discrimination, formerly incarcerated people face an unemployment rate of 27 percent — higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including during this pandemic and the Great Depression.
Fines and fees associated with the criminal “justice” system have placed $50 billion in debt on the shoulders of approximately 10 million people who have been through the system. To make matters worse, many states bar people convicted of felonies from receiving any government assistance.That’s just incarceration.
Over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the U.S. has skyrocketed, almost tripling from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017. Of the 100 largest cities in America, the nine police forces that kill people at the highest rate per population all take up over 30 percent of their cities’ budgets — leaving paltry resources to invest in housing, education, or health care.
This deliberate economic oppression suppresses political power of people of color, weakening their constitutional right to change the rules of a system that regulates whether or not profit can be derived from racism.
In our current system, the wealthy elite use their purchased political power to manipulate the system for their own gain at the expense of people of color.
Let’s turn back to people who are incarcerated. In 48 states, those who are currently or formerly incarcerated face restrictions on their right to vote. Yet, inmates count as residents of where they are incarcerated, rather than their hometowns. That means people in prison have no representation, and are used as pawns to skew representational power towards the largely white, rural areas that house prisons.
This leaves incarcerated people’s hometowns under-represented. The restrictions on voting power don’t end upon release. 6.1 million people are prevented from casting a ballot due to a prior felony conviction, and 1 in 13 Black people have lost their right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement, compared to 1 in 56 non-Black people.
It’s a never-ending cycle that has been churning for centuries: the profitability of racism motivates elite institutions to continue economic oppression of people of color that in turn hinders their political power, and that political oppression kneecaps their ability to change the system in which racism is so profitable.
So how do we break the cycle?
Let’s start with supporting candidates and pressuring elected officials at every level of government who will support bold policies that dismantle the Oppression Economy and build a Liberation Economy — and remove those that don’t.
To end the Oppression Economy, our government must end the criminalization of people of color, end their political suppression, and curb runaway corporate power.
And, to build a Liberation Economy our government must guarantee that all people of color have access to basic economic rights like guaranteed income and employment, universal health care, guaranteed housing, a free college education and generational wealth.
This Liberation Economy is within our power to create. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “we are the government.” It does not belong to the corporations and the plutocrats that currently control them. It belongs to us, and it is within our power to take it back.
We can break this cycle, if we act together.
Let’s get to work.
Military police hold a line near the White House as demonstrators gather to protest police brutality on June 1, 2020 in Washington, DC. (photo: Olivier Doulery/Getty)
Federal Officials Stockpiled Munitions, Sought 'Heat Ray' Device Before Clearing Park Near White House, Whistleblower Says
Marissa J. Lang, The Washington Post
Lang writes: "Hours before law enforcement forcibly cleared protesters from Lafayette Square in early June amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd, federal officials began to stockpile ammunition and seek devices that could emit deafening sounds and make anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire, according to an Army National Guard major who was there."
READ MORE
LaShenda Williams had been living in her car parked in the Kroger parking lot before she was hired by the store. (photo: The Kroger Co.)
Nashville Kroger Hires Homeless Woman Who Slept in the Grocery Store's Parking Lot
TODAY Show
Excerpt: "After many months of living out of her car that was parked in a Kroger grocery store's lot, LaShenda Williams was feeling increasingly hopeless. Today, thanks to one attentive hiring manager, that supermarket has now welcomed her with a job and a fresh start."
Williams, who has faced drug addiction and abuse, was homeless for about a year. During the day she would drive around to different locations, but most nights she would park outside of the same Kroger.
“I would lean my seat all the way back so no one would see me because, you know, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Williams told NBC Nightly News.
Williams' fate changed when she met Kroger employee Jackie Vandal, who oversees hiring at the store location where Williams would often park. Late last year, Vandal told her about an upcoming job fair.
“It was just a sense, a gut feeling,” Vandal said. “You can just tell when people are really genuine and when people, you know, are trying."
On the day of the job fair, Williams was one of the first applicants, Vandal recalled. Vandal spent several hours helping Williams fill out the job application online. After reviewing Williams credentials, she then hired her on the spot.
Williams started to work at Kroger in December, just a few days after the job fair. She currently monitors and assists customers in the self-checkout lanes. After eight months on the job, Williams had earned enough money to move into her own one-bedroom apartment, which her new co-workers helped her set up and furnish.
Melissa Eads, a corporate affairs manager for Kroger's Nashville division, told TODAY that local community members and fellow employees donated furniture, household items, clothes and shoes to "help her get back on her feet."
Williams is grateful to have been given the opportunity to change the course of her life and is committed to keep working hard.
“For the very first time in my life, now I know what love is," she said tearfully. "Now I know what friendship is."
Eads said Williams has been a great employee.
“We are so lucky to have Lashenda as part of our Kroger family,” said Eads. “Her uplifting spirit is contagious. She has made such a positive impact on her fellow team members, and so many customers as well."
Comedian, writer and veterans advocate Jon Stewart speaks at a press conference on ‘The Presumptive Benefits for War Fighters Exposed to Burn Pits and Other Toxins Act of 2020’ at the House Triangle in Washington, D.C. (photo: Paul Morigi/Getty)
Jon Stewart Uses His Celebrity to Bring Attention to Vets Exposed to Burn Pits
Quil Lawrence, NPR
Lawrence writes: "Since retiring from television in 2015, comedian Jon Stewart's most prominent work has been on behalf of Sept. 11 first responders - people who got sick after working in the toxic wreckage of the World Trade Center in New York. Many credit his celebrity testimony in 2019 with pushing Congress to preserve the Sept. 11 Victims Compensation fund."
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A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew leaders of countries around the world were using their site to manipulate voters - and failed to act. (photo: iStock)
"Have Blood on My Hands": A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation
Craig Silverman, Ryan Mac and Pranav Dixit, BuzzFeed News
Excerpt: "Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News."
A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew leaders of countries around the world were using their site to manipulate voters — and failed to act.
The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.
“In the three years I’ve spent at Facebook, I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions,” wrote Zhang, who declined to talk to BuzzFeed News. Her LinkedIn profile said she “worked as the data scientist for the Facebook Site Integrity fake engagement team” and dealt with “bots influencing elections and the like.”
“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote.
The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.
“I know that I have blood on my hands by now,” Zhang wrote.
These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:
- It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.
- In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets... to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.
- Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”
- In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that "he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch." Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.
- In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.
- Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.
- After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.
- In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence" the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.
“We’ve built specialized teams, working with leading experts, to stop bad actors from abusing our systems, resulting in the removal of more than 100 networks for coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. "It’s highly involved work that these teams do as their full-time remit. Working against coordinated inauthentic behavior is our priority, but we’re also addressing the problems of spam and fake engagement. We investigate each issue carefully, including those that Ms. Zhang raises, before we take action or go out and make claims publicly as a company."
BuzzFeed News is not publishing Zhang’s full memo because it contains personal information. This story includes full excerpts when possible to provide appropriate context.
In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.
“I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot – caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole,” she said. “The last thing I want to do is distract from our efforts for the upcoming U.S. elections, yet I know this post will likely do so internally.”
Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. Doing so allowed her to speak out internally, and she used that freedom to reckon with the power that she had to police political speech.
“There was so much violating behavior worldwide that it was left to my personal assessment of which cases to further investigate, to file tasks, and escalate for prioritization afterwards,” she wrote.
That power contrasted with what she said seemed to be a lack of desire from senior leadership to protect democratic processes in smaller countries. Facebook, Zhang said, prioritized regions including the US and Western Europe, and often only acted when she repeatedly pressed the issue publicly in comments on Workplace, the company’s internal, employee-only message board.
“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator – he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”
A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform.
“She's the only person in this entire field at Facebook that I ever trusted to be earnest about this work," said the engineer, who had seen a copy of Zhang’s post and asked not to be named because they no longer work at the company.
“A lot of what I learned from that post was shocking even to me as someone who's often been disappointed at how the company treats its best people," they said.
Zhang’s memo said the lack of institutional support and heavy stakes left her unable to sleep. She often felt responsible when civil unrest took hold in places she didn’t prioritize for investigation and action.
“I have made countless decisions in this vein – from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador,” she wrote. “Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place.”
Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.
“Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside world that can lend itself to such theories, but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents,” she wrote.
“We simply didn’t care enough to stop them”
Zhang wrote that she was just six months into the job when she found coordinated inauthentic behavior — Facebook’s internal term for the use of multiple fake accounts to boost engagement or spread content — benefiting Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández.
The connection to the Honduran leader was made, Zhang said, because an administrator for the president’s Facebook page had been “happily running hundreds of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in a show of extreme chutzpah.” The data scientist said she reported the operation, which involved thousands of fake accounts, to Facebook’s threat intelligence and policy review teams, both of which took months to act.
“Local policy teams confirmed that President JOH’s marketing team had openly admitted to organizing the activity on his behalf,” she wrote. “Yet despite the blatantly violating nature of this activity, it took me almost a year to take down his operation.”
That takedown was announced by Facebook in July 2019, but proved futile. Soon, the operation was soon back up and running, a fact Facebook has never disclosed.
“They had returned within two weeks of our takedown and were back in a similar volume of users,” Zhang wrote, adding that she did a final sweep for the fake accounts on her last day at Facebook. “A year after our takedown, the activity is still live and well.”
In Azerbaijan, she found a large network of inauthentic accounts used to attack opponents of President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan and his ruling New Azerbaijan Party, which uses the acronym YAP. Facebook still has not disclosed the influence campaign, according to Zhang.
The operation detailed in the memo is reminiscent of those of Russia’s Internet Research Agency, a private troll farm that tried to influence the 2016 US elections, because it involved “dedicated employees who worked 9-6 Monday-Friday work weeks to create millions of comments” targeting members of the opposition and media reports seen as negative to Aliyev.
“Multiple official accounts for district-level divisions of the ruling YAP political party directly controlled numerous of these fake assets without any obfuscation whatsoever in another display of arrogance,” she wrote. “Perhaps they thought they were clever; the truth was, we simply didn’t care enough to stop them.”
Katy Pearce, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technology in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used to undermine the opposition and independent media in the country for years.
“One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they're not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative,” she told BuzzFeed News. “There's a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I'm going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I'm going to be targeted?”
Pearce said Zhang’s comment in the memo that Facebook “didn’t care enough to stop” the fake accounts and trolling aligns with her experience. “They have bigger fish to fry,” she said.
A person who managed social media accounts for news organizations in Azerbaijan told BuzzFeed News that their pages were inundated with inauthentic Facebook comments.
“We used to delete and ban them because we didn’t want people who came to our page to be discouraged and not react or comment,” said the person, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak for their employer. “But since [the trolls] are employees, it’s easy for them to open new accounts.”
They said Facebook has at times made things worse by removing the accounts or pages of human rights activists and other people after trolls report them. “We tried to tell Facebook that this is a real person who does important work,” but it took weeks for the page to be restored.
Zhang wrote that a Facebook investigation into fake accounts and trolling in Azerbaijan is now underway, more than a year after she first reported the issue. On the day of her departure, she called it her “greatest unfinished business” to stop the fake behavior in the country.
“Many others would think nothing of myself devoting this attention to the United States, but are shocked to see myself fighting for these small countries,” she wrote. “To put it simply, my methodologies were systematic globally, and I fought for Honduras and Azerbaijan because that was where I saw the most ongoing harm.”
“I have blood on my hands”
In other examples, Zhang revealed new information about a large-scale fake account network used to amplify and manipulate information about COVID-19, as well as a political influence operation that used fake accounts to influence 2018 elections in the US and Brazil. Some of these details were not previously disclosed by Facebook, suggesting the company’s regular takedown announcements remain selective and incomplete.
Zhang said Facebook removed 672,000 “low-quality fake accounts” after press reports in April that some of the accounts had been engaging with COVID-19 content on the Spanish Health Ministry’s page. She said accounts in that network also engaged with content on US pages. Facebook did not disclose how many accounts it removed, or that those accounts engaged with content in other countries, including the US.
Zhang also shared new details about the scale of inauthentic activity during the 2018 midterm elections in the US, and from Brazilian politicians that same year. “We ended up removing 10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the U.S. in the 2018 elections – major politicians of all persuasions in Brazil, and a number of lower-level politicians in the United States,” she wrote.
A September 2018 briefing about Facebook’s election work in the US and Brazil disclosed that it had acted against a network in Brazil that used “fake accounts to sow division and share disinformation,” as well as a set of groups, pages, and accounts that were “falsely amplifying engagement for financial gain.” It did not fully mention Zhang's findings.
The scale of this activity — 672,000 fake accounts in one network, 10.5 million fake engagement and fans in others — indicates active fake accounts are a global problem, and are used to manipulate elections and public debate around the world.
As one of the few people looking for and identifying fake accounts impacting civic activity outside of “priority” regions, Zhang struggled with the power she had been handed.
“We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” Zhang wrote, adding that “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”
In Bolivia, Zhang said she found “inauthentic activity supporting the opposition presidential candidate in 2019” and chose not to prioritize it. Months later, Bolivian politics fell into turmoil, leading to the resignation of President Evo Morales and “mass protests leading to dozens of deaths.”
The same happened in Ecuador, according to Zhang, who “found inauthentic activity supporting the ruling government… and made the decision not to prioritize it.” The former Facebook employee then wondered how her decision led to downstream effects on how Ecuador’s government handled the COVID-19 pandemic — which has devastated the country — and if that would have been different if she'd acted.
“I have made countless decisions in this vein – from Iraq to Indonesia, from Italy to El Salvador. Individually, the impact was likely small in each case, but the world is a vast place. Although I made the best decision I could based on the knowledge available at the time, ultimately I was the one who made the decision not to push more or prioritize further in each case, and I know that I have blood on my hands by now.”
Zhang also uncovered issues in India, Facebook’s largest market, in the lead up to the local Delhi elections in February 2020. “I worked through sickness to take down a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence the election,” she wrote.
Last month, Facebook’s Indian operation came under scrutiny after reports in the Wall Street Journal revealed a top policy executive in the country had stopped local staffers from applying the company’s hate speech policies to ruling party politicians who posted anti-Muslim hate speech.
“Haphazard Accidents”
In her “spare time” in 2019, Zhang took on tasks usually reserved for product managers and investigators, searching out countries including Ukraine, Turkey, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, “and many many more.”
Zhang said she found and took down “inauthentic scripted activity” in Ukraine that supported Yulia Tymoshenko, a complicated political figure who has been involved in controversial gas deals with Russia but taken a more pro-Western tack in her later career, as well as for former prime minister Volodymyr Groysman, an ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” she wrote.
In another part of her memo, Zhang said she wanted to push back on the idea that Facebook was run by malicious people hoping to achieve a particular outcome. That was not the case, she wrote, attributing actions to “slapdash and haphazard accidents.”
“Last year when we blocked users from naming the Ukraine whistleblower, we forgot to cover hashtags until I stepped in,” she wrote.
But she also remarked on Facebook’s habit of prioritizing public relations over real-world problems. “It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” she wrote, noting that she was told directly at a 2020 summit that anything published in the New York Times or Washington Post would obtain elevated priority.
“It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.”
Zhang mentioned one example in February 2019, when a NATO strategic communications researcher reached out to Facebook, alerting the company that he'd "obtained" Russian inauthentic activity “on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch.” That researcher said they were planning on briefing Congress the next day.
“I quickly investigated the case, determined what was going on, and removed the activity, dousing the immediate fire,” Zhang wrote. “Perhaps motivated by the experience, the same researcher tried the same experiment within a month or two, waiting half a year afterwards before sending the report to the press and finally causing the PR fire.”
“Human Resources Are Limited”
Beyond specific examples from around the world, Zhang provided insight into the inner workings at Facebook. She criticized her team’s focus on issues related to “99% of activity that’s essentially spam.”
“Overall, the focus of my organization – and most of Facebook – was on large-scale problems, an approach which fixated us on spam,” she said. “The civic aspect was discounted because of its small volume, its disproportionate impact ignored.”
Zhang outlined the political processes within Facebook itself. She said the best way for her to gain attention for her work was not to go through the proper reporting channels, but to post about the issues on Facebook’s internal employee message board to build pressure.
“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said.
When she asked the company to do more in terms of finding and stopping malicious activity related to elections and political activity, she said she was told that “human resources are limited.” And when she was ordered to stop focusing on civic work, “I was told that Facebook would no longer have further need for my services if I refused.”
Zhang was fired this month and posted her memo on her last day, even after offering to stay on through the election as an unpaid volunteer. In her goodbye, she encouraged her colleagues to remain at Facebook and to fix the company from within.
“But you don’t – and shouldn’t – need to do it alone,” she wrote. “Find others who share your convictions and values to work on it together. Facebook is too big of a project for any one person to fix.”
Each year, some 700 Palestinian children are tried in Israeli military courts that boast a 99.7 percent conviction rate, according to rights groups. (photo: AFP)
Occupying Palestine Is Rotting Israel From Inside. No Trump Deal Can Hide That
Raja Shehadeh, Guardian UK
Shehadeh writes: "More than a quarter of a century after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, Israel has managed to turn its occupation of Palestinian territory from a burden into an asset."
Israel has twisted its laws and contorted its politics to protect the occupation. The UAE and Bahrain deals won’t create peace
ore than a quarter of a century after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, Israel has managed to turn its occupation of Palestinian territory from a burden into an asset. What was for so long a liability – the flagrant violation of international law – has now become a valued commodity. Understanding this development is key to explaining why the Israelis are making peace with two distant Gulf states but not their closest neighbours, the Palestinians – without whom there can be no real peace.
Israel has learned in recent years how to manage the occupation in perpetuity with minimal cost. But from the very beginning of the occupation in June 1967, Israel has been unwilling to recognise the Palestinian nation or cede control of the Palestinian territory occupied in order to make peace.
The evidence to support this claim is easily found in Israel’s own archives. Two days after the occupation began, Israel passed military order number three, which referred to the fourth Geneva convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war – mandating that military courts apply the provisions of the convention to their proceedings. Four months later, this portion of the order was deleted.
In September 1967, the legal counsel to the Israeli foreign ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked by the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, whether building new settlements in the occupied territories would violate the Geneva convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into the territory seized in war. He answered in the affirmative. But his advice was rejected and the government proceeded from that moment to establish illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Over the following months, Israel began a process that would continue for many years: amending laws governing Palestinian land – from the periods of Ottoman, British mandate and Jordanian control of the territory – to construct a false “legal” basis for the acquisition of land and other natural resources for the establishment of Jewish settlements.
I spent much of my working life, from 1979 until 1993, investigating and resisting Israel’s abuses of law in the occupied territories, and warning about the implications of building illegal settlements, all to no avail.
Yet it was not the legal transformations alone that enabled settlements to be built and to flourish. The militant Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky had written, in the 1920s, that “settlement[s] can … develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”. And so it was.
There was an added component to the transformation of the laws to enable the settlement project and that was sheer violence by settlers: vigilante actions that seemed to go against the law Israel had put down and bound itself to. In the early 80s Al-Haq, a West Bank-based human rights organisation that I was then directing, worked hard to document incidents of settler violence.
At the time we naively believed that if only Israelis knew what was taking place and the failure of law enforcement to stop it, they would take action to prevent it. We were unaware that it was all part of the Israeli struggle for the land. The agents of the orderly state can stay within the boundaries of their rewritten laws while the unruly settlers do the work of intimidation and violence to achieve the desired goal. It is all part of the same scheme.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, settler violence in the West Bank has become an almost daily occurrence. It is all out in the open and the government and the courts are on the same page in supporting the settlers and working to achieve the goal of greater Israel. The Knesset has passed the regularisation bill, which “legalises” settlements built on privately owned Palestinian land via de facto expropriation.
While Jewish settler violence against the Palestinians rages – preventing Palestinians from working their land or using it as their own, with no real attempt by the Israeli military or police to prevent this – Israel declares any and all Palestinian resistance to occupation to be terrorism.
When Palestinians began to organise non-violent resistance to the occupation, Israel redefined attacks by the army on these unarmed protesters to bring them under the category of “combat operations”. Recently, the villagers of Kafr Qaddum were staging weekly demonstrations against the blocking of a road, which prevented access to their village, because it was claimed that the road passes through a new part of the settlement of Kedumim. The army planted explosives on roads used by the villagers – but the soldiers who took this decision would be immune from prosecution for any injuries caused to the villagers.
With all these “victories” on Israel’s part, the country has now decided that it can manage the occupation rather than end it. The occupation even began to be seen as an asset. Israel has turned the occupied territories into a laboratory for testing weapons and systems of surveillance. Israelis now market their crowd control weapons and systems of homeland security to the US, based on testing in the occupied territories. Yet all this financial investment in the occupation – and all the twisting of domestic laws to protect the illegal settlement project, all the political contortions to cultivate authoritarian allies, from Trump to Orbán to Bolsonaro – is rotting Israel from the inside, turning it into an apartheid state that rules over millions of Palestinians without rights.
In Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, one of her characters, Musa, says that if Kashmiris have failed to gain independence from India, at least in struggling for it they have exposed the corruption of India’s system. Musa tells the book’s narrator, an Indian: “You’re not destroying us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.” Palestinians today might say the same of our struggle with Israel.
Fields of carrots are watered March 29, 2015, in Kern County, Calif. (photo: Frederic J. Brown/Getty)
California Farmers Are Using Oil Wastewater to Irrigate Their Fields. Activists Worry About the Risk to Human Health.
Abby Weiss, Inside Climate News
Weiss writes: "For decades, farmers in California's Kern County have turned to wastewater from oil production to help irrigate their crops during extended dry spells."
A recent study found chemical concentrations in the wastewater met safety standards in one California county. But activists say more testing is needed.
ven if chemicals in the oilfield water did not pose a health risk, the researchers noted, salt and boron might accumulate in the soil to levels higher than traditional groundwater, imperiling crops in the long-term.
As a result, farmers would have to replace or grow more boron-tolerant crops, such as grapes, peanuts and carrots, and keep mixing the produced water with fresh water to prevent this build-up.
A Dry State and Even Drier County
Water shortages are all too familiar in California. For the farmers in the state, making sure there is water for their crops is one of the highest costs of producing a majority of the nation's food supply. In Kern County, water scarcity is a defining characteristic of the region.
Climate change is making things worse, lengthening dry periods. California only last year came out of an eight-year drought, then returned to drought conditions in February.
Faced with water shortages and a 2014 law that puts limits on groundwater use, farmers have increasingly turned to oilfield wastewater. The water irrigates 95,000 acres of cropland in California's southern San Joaquin Valley, according to the California Regional Water Quality Control Board.
David Ansolabehere, general manager of the Cawelo Water District, which has used diluted oilfield water for more than 25 years, said the water has helped farmers maintain crop yield during dry years. The recycled water makes up 25 to 30 percent of the district's yearly irrigation water and irrigates 34,000 acres of the surrounding farms, according to Ansolabehere.
"Without this water, thousands of acres of high value crops could be fallowed," Ansolabehere said.
Oilfield wastewater is also abundant in Kern County, which produces 70 percent of the state's oil.
Every barrel of oil generates around 15 barrels of produced water, according to the Cawelo Water District. As of 2015, Chevron, one of Kern County's main oil suppliers, recycled 21 million gallons of water each day and sold it to farmers who used it on 10 percent of Kern County's farmland, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Groundwater, a Dwindling Resource
One reason farmers have turned to oilfield produced water is that without it, water shortages could force them to significantly reduce their acreage.
Tom Frantz, an almond farmer in Shafter, does not use oilfield-produced water for his 40-acre almond farm. But bigger farms have a higher crop yield and require more water, an amount that's unavailable most years.
"We've over-planted too many acres for the amount of water we have, that's why we start using more questionable water supplies," Frantz said.
Historically, farmers have relied on groundwater during droughts, but too much pumping has led to water scarcity in the long-term. In some agricultural regions of the state, the groundwater overdraft—the extent to which more water is pumped than is replenished—is between one to two million acre-feet annually.
Laura Feinstein, a senior researcher at the Pacific Institute and one of the study's authors, said that rising temperatures contribute to groundwater overdraft because they reduce the amount of surface water available, which leads to more groundwater pumping. In 2014, the state created the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to manage groundwater resources and halt groundwater overdraft by the 2040s. SGMA, which allows for more federal control over groundwater use, requires that local groundwater agencies develop sustainability plans that set limits on how much water can be pumped.
Dr. Graham Fogg, a professor emeritus of hydrology at University of California Davis, said excessive groundwater pumping has caused a compaction in clay layers and subsidence of land surface, damaging roads, pipelines and canals. He said in at least one case, land subsidence damage reduced the carrying capacity of a major canal by about 40 percent.
But for some farmers in Kern County, the amount they are allowed to pump under the Act is not enough to water their farms, making the land unprofitable. A study by University of California, Berkeley researchers estimates that current groundwater regulations will cause California to lose one-fifth of the cultivated farmland in the San-Joaquin Valley, 85,000 jobs and $7 billion per year in farm revenue.
That makes oil water all the more valuable because it's constantly available.
"Water should never be wasted—recycling of municipal and industrial water is a central tenet of California statewide water policy," Ansolabehere said.
Rodgers said recycled produced water could potentially be a longer-term solution to dry periods, as long as there is oilfield production. "We do everything we need to do to confirm that there aren't any issues with recycling of this water and recycling is something the state of California supports," he said. "We are interested in making sure that what we're doing with water is appropriate."
An Argument Over Health Risks
Although some farmers in the Cawelo district have been using oilfield produced water for more than three decades, not everyone is happy about it. Environmental activists have argued that although the regional water control board has approved the use of the water, it's still uncertain whether the water poses health risks.
Bill Allayaud, the California Director for Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group, said in an email that experts need to test other organic and industrial chemicals that may be present in oil production, and not just boron, salt and arsenic.
"We waited years for this report and the main conclusion was "'we need more study,'" he said.
Until state officials are certain the oilfield water is safe, activists argue that it shouldn't be used for irrigation. Water agencies did not have access to information on hazardous chemicals used in oil production until the state legislature passed a bill in 2017, Rodgers said.
The bill provides additional authority to the State Water Board and regional water boards to obtain information from oil suppliers or other entities on chemicals in the wastewater. The bill also requires that the water board disclose this information to the public on their website.
"Oil industry waste fluid contains a wide array of chemicals, both known and unknown, and we do not understand the full extent of harm it will inflict on our crops and on our health," said Hollin Kreztmann, senior attorney for the Center of Biological Diversity.
He said residents have long been concerned about whether the oil wastewater posed risks to their crops.
Andrew Grinberg, special projects manager with Clean Water Action, said that the testing methods and toxicity information for some chemicals that could be present in produced water are not available.
"So we're unclear on what the impacts are on human health and the environment," he said.
Regulators and Industry Dispute Health Risks
For their part, California water and oil officials like Ansolabehere say the wastewater is already properly regulated.
Salt accumulation, Ansolabehere said, does not pose a risk because regulations from the regional water control board prevent salinity from exceeding normal levels. Produced water is blended with surface or groundwater to lower the salt content to a level crops can tolerate. "Salt build-up has been and will continue to be a concern for all farmers, whether using recycled produced water or any traditional water source," he said.
He said the study confirmed years of research by the regional board that indicated the practice of using wastewater was safe in that area of Kern County, he said.
Since then, the Cawelo Water District and the Regional Water Control Board, with the assistance of a Food Expert Safety Panel, have tested more than over 160 compounds that could be in the water, he said.
Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer for the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Valley, said that so far, the regional control board has not found any evidence that indicates the recycled produced water is unsafe to use for irrigation.
"But that doesn't mean the board isn't still looking and everything is resolved," Rodgers said. "If we get any evidence that the water is unsafe, we'll take steps to stop it."
A spokeswoman from Chevron, one of the county's main oil producers, said that the Duke University study conclusions are consistent with findings from studies initiated by the regional board.
"Protecting people and the environment is one of Chevron's core values," she said. "We remain committed to cooperating with regulators and partnering with organizations like the Cawelo Water District on innovative solutions to California's water challenges," she said in an email.
Frantz, however, said farmers shouldn't be dependent upon oil suppliers because excess salts in their water will eventually adulterate the soil. He said while farmers can profit from it now, it will create problems for future generations.
"It's short-term thinking for profit instead of looking many generations down the road to see what's best for society as a whole," he said.
With the threat climate change poses to the southern San Joaquin Valley region, Frantz said, farmers are likely to face a lot of uncertainty and struggle in the years ahead.
"It's very hard to quantify an ever-present looming disaster," he said.
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