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05 October 20
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The Virus Is Not Justice for Trump
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
Jones writes: "He is the same person he was yesterday, which is the same person he will be tomorrow. Trump is still lying about his health. This falsehood is a vantage point from which all things look permissible to him."
onald Trump has COVID-19, and I am running out of things to say. Sure, there’s news to report, and possible outcomes to analyze, and the days to come will only provide more noise to interpret. Over the weekend, the cases multiplied: Several Republican senators fell ill. Chris Christie is in the hospital. More cases are likely to come, and the people involved won’t all be famous. The consequences of the Trump administration’s disregard for life will be felt far beyond the White House.
But in other respects, the president’s diagnosis changes nothing at all. He is the same person he was yesterday, which is the same person he will be tomorrow. Trump is still lying about his health. This falsehood is a vantage point from which all things look permissible to him. So keen is he to avoid the slightest appearance of weakness that he took a joyride outside Walter Reed on Sunday. He tooled around for his hooting followers, heedless of the risk to his security detail or even to his own health. He is still careless, and he is still callous. He prefers conspiracy over fact. If he survives, he will almost certainly tell us that it’s no big deal or that a mask would have been useless anyway. Trump routinely ordered staffers to remove their masks, sources told the New York Times. His party follows his lead. At the behest of Governor Ron DeSantis, bars in Florida are open, even as the state surpasses 700,000 cases of COVID-19.
Aping Trump, Republicans pretend to be brave. Give me open bars, or give me death. Now they might get both. But unfortunately the intransigence displayed by Trump and his party creates a problem for everyone else. We are back to where we started before the virus, with a president whose narcissism and selfishness are central to the way he governs. It’s not a surprise that Trump put others, even his own supporters, at risk. His actions this week are what we’ve known of him for years.
The Trump presidency has been so maximally destructive that it provokes a sense of dissociation. By the time the coronavirus first appeared in the U.S., Trump had already exhausted us. He’d overseen a continued transfer of wealth to the very top. He’d caged migrants, including children, at the border in such filthy conditions that some died. Women in ICE custody in Georgia say they’ve been sterilized against their will. White nationalists have rioted and killed, but Trump wouldn’t and still won’t condemn them: He doesn’t like to “say something bad about people who support him,” Rick Santorum explained last week. The president’s moral failures appear nearly endless. There have been two-dozen accusations of sexual assault. The incompetence, the cruelty, and the corruption all generate constant headlines that come and go. And yet Trump endures. Nothing topples him. His tenacity is so audacious that next to it, his sins almost look intangible.
So when my fiancé shook me awake at 1 a.m. Friday to tell me that Trump had the virus, I felt at first like I was dreaming. I’d seen footage of Trump, maskless, at the White House and at his rallies — he’d killed Herman Cain! I watched his press conference for Amy Coney Barrett last Saturday. Hardly anyone wore a mask. Nobody kept six feet apart from each other. Barrett even dragged her entire maskless family to the event. At the time, a potential irony presented itself: Trump might have spread a deadly disease while announcing his pro-life Supreme Court nominee. It was too obvious, I thought; too extreme. Reality isn’t quite that florid.
But here we are: The president himself has the virus. Trump tends to bring the most outrageous possibilities to life. This is principally a problem for everyone Trump exposed to the virus. My own problem is of secondary importance. I am a writer, and I can’t concoct any novel insights into the character of the president. I can’t do much with him at all. He’s the dullest sort of person imaginable, a bully whose insecurities and prejudices are neither subtle or rare. It is year four of this presidency, month eight of this pandemic, month six of this recession, and I have nothing to offer but weariness and rage. Of course the president’s behavior got him sick. Of course his illness didn’t transform the GOP into the party of science. The virus, again, changes nothing. We’re stuck in a loop with him, and sometimes nothing feels real.
Except for America’s COVID death toll, which is as heavy as concrete. It has the power to make the news corporeal again. Whatever happens next, more than 209,000 Americans will still be dead from COVID and more will die every day. Break it down further, and the virus has killed one out of every 1,000 Black Americans and one out of every 1,220 Indigenous Americans. Tens of thousands of elderly people are gone. One of them is my grandfather, who died last month from a pandemic that Trump called a hoax.
So there is only one thing I have left to say about Trump. At some point, there will have to be justice. It won’t come from the virus, which is not a moral agent. It will have to come from us. The necessity of voting him out is so obvious it barely needs mentioning, but it isn’t really justice, either. To rectify crimes as comprehensive as Trump’s, you need more than ballots. Reality feels unbelievable because it is sick and it is broken, and that is a political problem. Trump’s obsession with reopening the economy at all costs, and his hostility to public health, all stem from the same ideological location: The heartless free-market absolutism he embodies ought to end with his presidency. Nothing can bring Trump’s dead back to life, but we must make sure their memories matter.
President Donald Trump at a daily coronavirus press briefing at the White House on Tuesday. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Tom Engelhardt | Murder, He Said: America's Maestro of Death and Destruction
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible.'"
Then he won -- and this November 3rd (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a murderer, but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: as president, he's proven to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day, on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.
Nothing so minimalist for The Donald! Nor is it as if, say, he had ploughed “the Beast” (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proven to be America’s twenty-first-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his Inaugural Address, “American carnage.” In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.
Back in 2016, he was way off when it came to the scale of what he could accomplish. As it happens, the killing hasn’t just taken place on Fifth Avenue, or even in his (now hated) former hometown, but on avenues, streets, lanes, and country roads across America. He was, however, right about one thing: he could kill at will and no one who mattered (to him at least) would hold him responsible, including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen of mayhem.
His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: he’s daily been on “Fifth Avenue” killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.
Death by Disease
We know from Bob Woodward’s new book that, in his own strange way, in February Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of Covid-19 and made a conscious decision to “play it down.” There have been all sorts of calculations since then, but by one modest early estimate, beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives (the equivalent of twelve 9/11s); two weeks earlier and it would have been a striking 54,000 in a country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year’s end. If the president had moved quickly and reasonably, instead of worrying about his reelection or how he looked with a mask on; if he had followed the advice of actual experts; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he’s championed the Confederate flag, military bases named after Confederate generals, and the Proud Boys, we would have been living in a different and less wounded country -- and that’s only the beginning of his Fifth Avenue behavior.
After all, no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors, it was clear that the president just couldn’t bear a world without fans, without crowds cheering his every convoluted word. That would have been like going on the diet from hell. As a result, he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa.
Admittedly, that particular crowd would be nowhere near as big as he and his advisers had expected. Still, perhaps 6,000 fans, largely unmasked and many in close proximity, cheered on their commander-in-chief there. It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event, but the commander-in-chief, mask-less himself, couldn’t have cared less. About three weeks later, when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases (likely linked to that rally) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of Covid-19, it didn't faze him in the slightest.
He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented, wildly cheered rambles in the brambles. As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina, the president’s “remarks” that day (which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words) were “practically a novella, albeit a novella that makes Finnegan’s Wake look like See Spot Run!”
Nothing, certainly not a pandemic, was going to stop Donald J. Trump from sucking up the adoration of his base. Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden, he claimed that he’s only been holding his rallies outdoors, in September in Nevada, a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people, he held a typically boisterous, adoring indoor rally of 5,000 largely unmasked, jammed-together Trumpsters. When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering, he classically responded, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned” -- i.e. not at all concerned about (or for) them.
If that isn’t the Covid-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue, what is? And it summed up perfectly Trump’s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves (and seems so desperately to need) or keeping Americans healthy. During these unending pandemic months, he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them, while at one point even tweeting to his followers to “LIBERATE” (possibly in an armed fashion) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders. He needed what he’s long called the “greatest economy in the history of America” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go.
Mimicking his boss’s style, Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery. As he put it, “A national lockdown. Stay-at-home orders. It’s like house arrest. Other than slavery, which is a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
Clearly at the president’s behest, “top White House officials” would, according to the New York Times, pressure “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.” (As the president would tweet in a similar spirit: “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is important for the children and families. May cut off funding if not open!”)
In other words, it didn't matter who might be endangered -- his best fans or the nation’s school children -- when his reelection, his future wellbeing, was at stake. Murder on Fifth Avenue? A nothing by comparison.
Supreme Assassins?
And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell. In the end, it could even prove to be the most modest part of it.
For the rest of that death toll, you might start with health care. It’s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years (and that figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, includes 726,000 children, some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions). That, in turn, could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration’s ongoing assault on Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) finally succeeds. And after November 3rd, it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act). A supposedly “pro-life” Trump version of the Supreme Court -- unless the pandemic were to sweep through it -- would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion. Think of them as potential Supreme Assassins.
Barrett, in particular, is known to hold negative views of the ACA and the Court will hear the Trump administration’s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day, so you do the math. Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could, in the end, leave tens of millions of Americans with “pre-existing medical conditions” in an uninsured hell on earth.
Death? I guarantee it, on and off Fifth Avenue -- and it will have been the Donald’s doing.
A Murderous Future
All of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter. All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change.
It’s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “hoax.” And as he withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord and, like the child of the fossil-fuelized 1950s that he is, proclaimed a new policy of “American Energy Dominance” (“the golden era of American energy is now underway”), he’s never stopped rejecting it. He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season, where he predicted that it would soon get “cooler.” The only exception: when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases. As he said in a September 22nd speech to the U.N. General Assembly, “China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the U.S. has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.”
He and those he’s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment. So far, they have rolled back (or are trying to roll back) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, including most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children. Air pollution alone was, according to one study, responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016. Above all, at the service of a still expanding American fossil-fuel industry, he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil, gas, and coal development in just about any imaginable form.
In a season in which the West coast has burned in a previously inconceivable fashion, leaving a historic cloud of smoke in its wake, while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast, he’s continued, for instance, to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling. In short, he and his administration have, in a rather literal fashon, proven to be pyromaniacs of the first order. They've been remarkably intent on ensuring that, in the future, the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity, creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction. Despite the fact that Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist” as the West coast burned, somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season.
If the legend was true, the Roman emperor Nero fiddled -- actually, he was probably playing the cithara -- while the capital of his empire, Rome, burned for six days. He didn’t personally set the fire, however. Trump and his crew are, it seems, intent on setting fire not just to Rome, or New York, or Washington, D.C., but to the Alaskan wilderness, the Brazilian rain forest, and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn’t figure out how to purchase, Greenland. He’s helping to ensure that even the oceans will, in their own fashion, be on fire; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive; that the temperature will rise ever higher; and that the planet will become ever less habitable.
Meanwhile, intently maskless and socially undistanced, even he (and his wife Melania) have now contracted the coronavirus, officially becoming part of his own American carnage. The White House, Air Force One, and the president and his aides became the equivalent of Covid-19 superspreaders, as senators and reporters, among others, also began to come down with the disease. It's now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order.
Donald Trump has, of course, hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet, but it’s certainly eerie that, at this moment, such an arsonist would stand any chance at all, if he recovers successfully, of being reelected president of the United States. His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat, but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future.
Murder, he said, and murder it was, and Fifth Avenue was the least of it.
Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs TomDispatch and is a fellow of the Type Media Center. His sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Kim Davis in 2015. A judge ordered her to issue the licenses. After refusing, she spent five days in jail. (photo: Chris Tilley/Reuters)
Supreme Court Rejects Appeal From Clerk Who Refused to Register Gay Marriage
Associated Press
Excerpt: "The US supreme court said on Monday it would leave in place a decision that allowed a lawsuit to move forward against a Kentucky clerk who was jailed in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples."
Justice Clarence Thomas, however, wrote for himself and Justice Samuel Alito that while he agreed with the decision not to hear the case, it was a “stark reminder of the consequences“ of the court’s 2015 decision which made same-sex marriage legal.
Because of that decision, he wrote, “those with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage will find it increasingly difficult to participate in society without running afoul” of the case “and its effect on other anti-discrimination laws”.
Thomas and Alito are two of five conservatives on the nine-member court. Following the death in September of the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Trump administration and Republicans who hold the US Senate are attempting to confirm a sixth conservative, the Indiana appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett, before the presidential election on 3 November.
Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote on Twitter that Thomas and Alito’s statement was “a reminder that stare decisis – the principle of applying precedent – will not protect even recently decided cases. The brazenness of the rightward direction of the court is a threat to even the most basic expectation of legal protection.”
Nonetheless, the court said it would not take the case involving Kim Davis, the former clerk of Rowan county, and two same-sex couples who sued her.
Soon after the court ruled in 2015 on Obergefell v Hodges, giving same-sex couples the right to marry across the US, Davis, a Christian who has a religious objection to same-sex marriage, stopped issuing all marriage licenses.
That led to lawsuits and a judge ordered her to issue the licenses. After refusing, she spent five days in jail.
Davis argued that a legal doctrine called qualified immunity protected her from being sued by two couples, David Ermold and David Moore and James Yates and Will Smith.
The case will now move forward.
Davis, a Republican, lost her bid for re-election in 2018. Democrat Elwood Caudill Jr is now the Rowan county clerk.
Strangio added: “I think we can expect states to pass laws that will be direct challenges to Obergefell in 2021 sessions. Which is another reason to pay attention to down-ballot races. State lawmakers have a huge impact on our lives.”
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany speaks during a press briefing at the White House. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
About Those 'Ballots' That Trump Said Were Found 'in a River'...
Steve Benen, MSNBC
Benen writes: "It was embarrassing enough when the president's chief spokesperson effectively and grudgingly conceded that Trump's 'river' references weren't accurate. It's quite a bit worse now that the underlying claim about ballots appears to be wrong, too."
Trump said there were "a lot" of ballots; they were found "in a river"; and "they" threw them out because they were votes cast for him. About that...
he first sign of trouble came eight days ago. Donald Trump, desperate to find evidence of voting irregularities, told reporters, "It was reported in one of the newspapers that they found a lot of ballots in a river. They throw them out if they have the name 'Trump' on it, I guess."
A day later, at a campaign rally, the president pushed the same line, telling supporters that "they" found "many, many ballots thrown into a river someplace." The day after that, Trump started treating his claim as if it were common knowledge, saying, "They found many ballots, as you know, in a riverbed."
At this week's debate, the Republican added that ballots are "being dumped in rivers."
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Trump was actually referring to absentee ballots in Wisconsin that were found with mail that ended up "in a ditch." (Last night, Trump nevertheless referred to ballots he believes were "thrown into a creek or a river.")
It was embarrassing enough when the president's chief spokesperson effectively and grudgingly conceded that Trump's "river" references weren't accurate. It's quite a bit worse now that the underlying claim about ballots appears to be wrong, too. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported late yesterday:
No Wisconsin absentee ballots were found in mail discovered in a ditch in the Fox Valley last week, the state's top election official said Thursday.
Meagan Wolfe, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told reporters during a virtual news conference, "There was mail found outside of Appleton and that mail did not include any Wisconsin ballots."
So, when the president first started pushing this, he said there were "a lot" of ballots; they were found "in a river"; and he guessed that "they" threw out the ballots because they were votes cast for him.
Literally every element of this now appears to have been wrong. It comes on the heels of Team Trump also flubbing the details about alleged voter fraud in Luzerne County, Pa., which came on the heels of Attorney General Bill Barr flubbing the details about alleged voter fraud in Texas.
The New York Times noted this week, "It is remarkable, but not at all accidental, that a narrative built from minor incidents, gross exaggeration and outright fabrication is now at the center of the effort to re-elect the president."
With Trump's "river" claims also unraveling, it's a tough assessment to disagree with.
Guy Reiter, executive director of grassroots Native group Menikanaehkem, uses digital tools and information to assist voters on the reservation of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. (photo: Earth Justice)
Native Voters Could Swing the 2020 Election - if They're Able to Vote
Stephanie Woodard, In These Times
Woodard writes: "The power of Native voters to decide the 2020 presidential election cannot be overstated, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids (DKan.), a Ho-Chunk Nation citizen, told the Democratic Party in August. States with sizable Indigenous populations - Arizona, Minnesota and others - are in play, Davids said."
Menominee tribal citizens are working to make Native votes count in Wisconsin
he power of Native voters to decide the 2020 presidential election cannot be overstated, U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids (D‑Kan.), a Ho-Chunk Nation citizen, told the Democratic Party in August. States with sizable Indigenous populations — Arizona, Minnesota and others — are in play, Davids said. Even Wisconsin’s small Native voting-age population could impact the race for the White House, according to Davids. President Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by just 0.77%, while Indigenous voters make up about 1.5% of the state’s electorate, according to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI).
To get people to the polls, a grassroots advocacy group called Menikanaehkem, based on the 235,000-acre reservation of the federally recognized Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin, is working with the Native-organizing arm of Wisconsin Conservation Voters on digital ways to communicate with fellow tribal members about this year’s issues and voting procedures. The group, whose name is pronounced men-ee-KAHN-ah-kem (translated as “community rebuilders”), supports the well-being of Menominees living among the green hills, rushing rivers and sparkling waterfalls of northeastern Wisconsin.
During Wisconsin’s April primary election, in-person voters faced long lines and the risk of Covid-19 infection to cast their ballots. To prevent this from recurring, Menikanaehkem is encouraging use of the absentee, or mail-in, option — as is Menominee County, whose borders correspond with the reservation’s and which handles national elections there.
While the Menominee reservation, according to Menikanaehkem Executive Director Guy Reiter, enjoys relatively good mail service, postal service in many Native American communities, like access to physical polling places, has long been unreliable and inequitable. Postal slow-downs during mail-in voting would likely hit these communities particularly hard.
A drop in Native voter turnout could have consequences across the country. Native Americans are more involved and influential in U.S. elections than is commonly understood—fielding scores of candidates for state and national office, running presidential candidate forums and managing energetic get-out-the-vote campaigns. With around 3.7 million Native people of voting age concentrated in Western states — and this voting-age population accounting for up to 11% of the electorate in New Mexico, 12% in Oklahoma and 17% in Alaska, as tabulated by NCAI — Native voters can dramatically shape election results. Tribal backing has helped many candidates, among them Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan (D‑Minn.), Sen. Jon Tester (D‑Mont.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D‑Wash.), former Sen. Mark Begich (D‑Alaska), former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D‑N.D.), former Sen. Tim Johnson (D‑S.D.) and former Sen. Tom Daschle (D‑S.D.).
To make sure every Menominee vote counts this year, Wisconsin Conservation Voters is helping Menikanaehkem and representatives of other tribal nations reach out to their communities through text messages, social media, email, and virtual town halls. These digital techniques have become essential to campaigns in the pandemic era, as formerly routine meetings and canvassing efforts become potentially hazardous. Reiter explains: It’s hard to be a community organizer if you can’t be in the community.
Hurdles to Native voting
Since being granted U.S. citizenship and suffrage in 1924, Native people have brought scores of lawsuits to exercise their voting rights. Some Native voters still face harassment, distant and hard-to-access precinct offices, reduced or unpredictable voting times, and the refusal of poll workers to accept the kinds of personal identification they ordinarily carry.
The pandemic adds new barriers: This year, because of Covid-19, many voters will rely on mail-in ballots to cast their votes. But as In These Times has reported, many tribal citizens do not have home mail delivery but rely on P.O. boxes or general delivery in distant post offices. On some reservations, these are small contract facilities with inconsistent service and limited hours.
A recent study conducted around the Navajo Nation offers a warning. Native voting rights group Four Directions sent test mailings from towns in and around the reservation and found that while mail from some majority-white communities typically took a day to get to the county polling place, Navajo mail took as many as 10 days.
Four Directions is assisting Navajo plaintiffs with a federal voting-rights lawsuit that features the mail study. The lawsuit asks Arizona to allow additional time for Navajo mail-in ballots to be counted.
Bret Healy, a consultant for the group, puts it this way: “[Mail service on the reservation] was bad before the pandemic, and any slowdown or confusion makes it worse.” Healy predicts a “catastrophic drop” in voter turnout across Indian country if such problems aren’t fixed.
Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Lakota People’s Law Project recently joined Sen. Tom Udall (D‑N.M.) and U.S. House Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Luján (D‑N.M.) to work on passage of the Native American Voting Rights Act. The bill would mandate accessible polling places, increased voter registration, better access to federal election monitors and other improvements for Native communities.
Saving the “good place”
According to Reiter, many Native voters are more driven by issues than candidates and parties. They are always interested in health and education issues, he says, and have grave concerns about challenges to tribal sovereignty and harm to land, water and sacred places. As in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), Native people are often the spearpoint in environmental clashes with outcomes that affect millions of people.
In addition to pushing for pipelines, such as DAPL and Keystone XL, to be built through or near Native homelands, the Trump administration has diminished federal protection for vast areas of natural beauty and tribal cultural meaning, including Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. A major worry in northeastern Wisconsin is the Back Forty Mine, an open-pit metals mine proposed for just over the border in Michigan. Wisconsin’s name comes from a Menominee expression meaning “a good place to live,” and Menominees say the mine will degrade that good place. They predict damage to centuries-old garden sites, ceremonial places and burial mounds.
According to Earthjustice, the law firm representing the tribe in litigation against the mine, its harms would go much farther. Toxic acid drainage from the mine will contaminate the Menominee River, the firm says. The river flows into Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, which together contain one-fifth of the planet’s surface freshwater. Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities and towns downstream from the proposed mine pull their drinking water from this gigantic continental reservoir.
Also worrisome for the Menominees is exploratory drilling underway for a metals mine in the headwaters of the Wolf River. This Wisconsin National Scenic River arises north of the Menominee Reservation and flows through it.
Though the challenges are huge, Reiter says, his people and other tribal citizens will persist in fighting to protect the earth. “As long as this earth is here, as long as we’re here, we’ll never give up,” he says. To vote in a way that supports that effort, “You have to do your homework.” Though Democrats have historically been cooperative about environmental issues, so have some Republicans, Reiter says — so he is producing paper and digital election scorecards to chart and clarify candidates’ positions on issues important to Indigenous people.
Leading from tradition
Menominee political activism exists in the context of numerous heritage-based projects and businesses. “Our work is spirit-led and comes from our land-based lifeways,” says tribal member Rachel Fernandez. For a century and a half, the tribe has used traditional principles to harvest wood sustainably and profitably. The 145-year-old conservation group American Forests calls the Menominee woodland “one of the most historically significant working forests in the world.”
Menikanaehkem brings the same time-honored principals to bear in its other projects. Among them are food sovereignty and women’s leadership and empowerment, including midwifery and traditional birthing practices. The group’s solar-powered “tiny homes” shelter those who need time and space during life transitions.
Fernandez believes that getting the next generation of Menominee leaders interested in elections is also important and functions as part of preparing youngsters to carry their traditions into the future. “In these trying times,” she says, “we need to reflect on who we are, who our ancestors were and what they endured to ensure that we are here. In this way, we can …prepare for our descendants’ lives. We must be that good ancestor for them. When you stand in your truth, it sustains you.”
Despite the turmoil this year, Menominees are undeterred, Reiter says. His people have survived other crises, even other pandemics, even genocide. “That is a helluva strength,” he says. “We got this.
The train departs from Rigasa station, the main rail terminus on the 186km line from Kaduna to Abuja. (photo: TJ Benson/Al Jazeera)
Nigeria's Railway People: Life Alongside a High-Speed Rail Link
Sada Malumfashi, Al Jazeera
Malumfashi writes: "Poor transport infrastructure has long been a big hindrance to economic development in Nigeria. This railway line, opened by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016, is the first of the country's standard gauge railway modernization projects, accommodating high-speed rail lines."
A Chinese-backed railway was supposed to reinvigorate communities along its route, but residents have mixed feelings.
rom Rigasa, the next station is Kakau, then Dutse, then Rijana,” announces Ade, a train conductor with the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC). He is dressed in the company’s green and yellow and wears a reflective safety vest as the train departs from Rigasa station in Kaduna, northwestern Nigeria. Its final destination is the country’s capital, Abuja.
Rigasa, a densely populated urban slum, is the site of the main rail terminus along the 186km (115.6 miles) Kaduna-Abuja railway line.
The Chinese-built train has a sparkling white and cerulean interior and features 10 neat, air-conditioned carriages with comfortable seats made of plastic draped in green cotton coverlets. The train, quiet and serene, carries only half its capacity of about 1,000 passengers amid precautionary social distancing measures to curtail the spread of COVID-19. It is a contrast to the overbooked trains, with passengers squeezed into the aisles, that existed before the pandemic.
“Three stops, then you alight at Rijana,” Ade repeats a little later on in the journey as he moves across the aisle checking passengers’ tickets, punching two holes in each. “The train only stops briefly at every station. It does not wait for long,” he warns us.
An economic invigoration?
Poor transport infrastructure has long been a big hindrance to economic development in Nigeria. This railway line, opened by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016, is the first of the country’s standard gauge railway modernisation projects, accommodating high-speed rail lines. It is part of an attempt to reinvigorate Africa’s largest economy as railways make a comeback after decades of neglect.
The British colonial government completed Nigeria’s first rail infrastructure more than 100 years ago to aid the movement of agricultural goods from the northern region to the ports in the south. The service began to decline in the 1970s due to a fall in agricultural exports, mismanagement and government neglect. By 2009, the number of annual passenger rail trips in Nigeria had fallen from its 1963 heyday of 11 million to just one million.
The new standard gauge line – the most widely-used railway track around the world for high-speed trains – connects Abuja with the former colonial capital of northern Nigeria, Kaduna, as part of the $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) unveiled by China in 2013. Nigeria’s 200 million-strong population serves as a ready market for Chinese exports and technology. It is also a lucrative access point into West Africa and the rest of the continent for Chinese exporters.
Matthew T Page, associate fellow of the Africa Programme at Chatham House, the international affairs think-tank based in London, explains that China’s strategic interest in Nigeria is important for the African country’s status as an emerging global power, with huge unmet demand for infrastructure projects.
“It’s a very natural connection,” he says. “Rail projects financed by low-interest Chinese loans allow the Chinese entrepreneurial class in the diaspora to establish themselves in Nigeria, Africa’s largest consumer market where there is a huge demand for Chinese exports. For the Nigerian government, the cost of building and refurbishing the rail would be an extremely large expense.”
The Kaduna railway line began operating in July 2016 with the aim of enabling faster movement of goods and people, easing road traffic congestion and promoting the economic development of towns along the route.
At the opening ceremony of the railway with its nine new stations, President Buhari announced that the service would provide a much-needed alternative transport link between the two cities. The main terminus at Idu Station in Abuja is a large grey building. The substations along the line are similar, albeit smaller, cream-coloured buildings.
But while the railway recorded about one million passengers in its first two years of operation, it has not produced the economic invigoration that the communities hosting the substations hoped for. Residents say the cost of train tickets is prohibitive and the substations are difficult to access.
Confusion
After a 40-minute ride from Rigasa through landscapes of lush green savannah, the train arrives at Rijana station, an agrarian and grazing village along the expressway road.
As the doors of the train open, the photographer and I jump out and find ourselves not on a platform, but right in the middle of two tracks, sandwiched between two locomotives, one racing towards Kaduna and another – the one from which we have just alighted – towards Abuja. The sound of the trains – which reach speeds of more than 100km/h (62mph) – is deafening.
At the entrance to Rijana station, a scowling station manager flanked by four other members of staff, three men and a woman, enquires about why we have stopped at the station. He looks to be in his 50s and is dressed in a flowing blue kaftan and traditional blue cap. He is dismissive of our pleasantries.
“Did you buy a ticket for Rijana?” he asks. “If you bought a ticket for Abuja then why are you dropping here?” We explain that we need to stop at the substations between Kaduna and Abuja and ask to buy a ticket from Rijana to the next station at Jere, a journey of about 40 minutes.
There are just four return train trips a day from Kaduna to Abuja. Passengers can only buy one-way, single-use tickets up to two hours before departure from Kaduna, with the date and details of the departure and arrival stations imprinted on them. Passengers making multiple stops along the line have not been anticipated.
The station manager informs us that passengers can only buy tickets physically at departing stations and that the substations no longer sell them. He cannot explain the rationale for this, but says it is a directive from the Nigerian Railway Corporation. He suggests we hail a commercial taxi driving from Kaduna to Abuja on the expressway and get out at Jere, which is just less than an hour away by road.
Our attempts to telephone the NRC via the contact numbers displayed on its website – for help with buying a new ticket – prove futile as both go unanswered.
The station at Rijana consists of a single trackside platform and a modern station building; its red roof standing out against the backdrop of surrounding farmland. Inside, there is a barricaded ticket sales area, a sparse waiting room and some office spaces. From the station, it is a 15-minute walk along a footpath through bushes and farmland to the main expressway that leads into Rijana town.
Bandits and kidnappers
Rijana has become infamous as a hub for banditry and ransom kidnappings, both of which have become rampant on the Kaduna-Abuja highway and across other parts of northern Nigeria. At its peak in November 2019, almost 10 kidnappings a day were taking place on this stretch of highway alone, according to the commander of the Nigerian police Intelligence Response Squad (IRT), Abba Kyari.
Thick rows of trees serve as a cover for the armed gangs that pounce, brandishing firearms, on unsuspecting road travellers, pulling them from their vehicles.
They abduct both rich and poor, demanding ransoms of between $1,000 and $150,000, depending on the wealth of the victims and their families. About $11m was extorted in this way between January 2016 and March 2020. Commuters between Kaduna and Abuja have resorted to using the train to avoid the risk of kidnapping, however not everyone can afford the train fare and with so few trains running, many travellers have no option but to risk the road.
Just a few days before our journey, the Nigerian Air Force claimed an air attack had killed several armed bandits in the forests surrounding Rijana.
At a minimarket on the Abuja-Kaduna expressway, a 20-minute walk from Rijana station, we meet 45-year-old shopkeeper Ali Abubakar, who is dressed in a blue kaftan with a matching cap. He is selling soft drinks, foodstuff and household items in his store, which can hold only three people at a time.
I buy a can of malt drink and sit with him on a wooden bench outside the shop. He tells me that he believes the seven identical substations located in towns and villages between Kaduna and Abuja are too far from the towns and that the train fare is too high to serve as a proper alternative to road transport for village dwellers and traders like him.
“If it is meant for the towns and villages with the substations then it should not be this expensive,” he says. Abubakar travels to Kaduna by road at least once a week for business, a distance of less than 60km (37 miles), at a cost of about 300 naira ($0.78) for a commercial bus ride.
Locals priced out
When the Abuja-Kaduna rail service commenced operations, economy class tickets cost 600 naira (about $1.50), while the VIP coaches cost 900 naira ($2.35). The first-class coaches have a bar within, extra legroom and a table for each rider for eating or reading.
In April 2020, the federal government suspended commercial services because of the pandemic. But operations resumed four months later in July, with an increase in fares approved by President Buhari. Now an economy class ticket between Kaduna and Abuja costs 3,000 naira ($8), while the VIP ticket costs 6,000 naira ($16). By contrast, travelling by road using commercial taxis or buses costs about 1,500 naira ($4). Almost half the population of Nigeria live in poverty, earning less than $1 per day.
“With the current kidnappings happening every day on this road, it is only the rich that can afford the safety of the train,” says Abubakar.
“But for someone like me, I cannot afford the train so I have to follow the road and hope my luck doesn’t run out. When you are unlucky and they [the kidnappers] get you, your family has to source money for your ransom, and if they do not meet the deadline, nobody hears from you again,” he adds.
“Some of my own friends and neighbours have disappeared due to this situation. The ransoms could not be paid and they never came back.”
Fifty-seven-year-old market trader Kabiru Salisu wears a flowing multi-patterned kaftan. For more than 40 years, he has been selling sugarcane that he grows on a small farm in Rijana. He has never been to the train station that is less than 15 minutes from his farm since it opened in 2016.
“I do not earn anything there. I do not benefit at all from there. What will take me there?” he asks, offering us sticks of sugarcane. “In my whole life I have never set foot in Abuja, so what do I need the train for?”
The commuters
But, for those who can afford it, the train offers a safer way to travel between the two cities.
Most of the travellers are civil servants who work in Abuja, but due to the high cost of rent in the capital, commute in from Kaduna where housing is cheaper. These weekly commuters between Kaduna and Abuja are the main targets of the bandits and kidnappers.
Before the onset of the pandemic and the introduction of social distancing measures, passengers bought standing tickets after seats filled up for the two-hour train journey, for the same price as a seat. They leant on chairs or squeezed into aisle spaces, making the trains overcrowded and frequently increasing train capacity from its 1,000 seats to nearly 4,000 passengers each time.
When we started our journey in Kaduna, we met Maryam Ahmad. The 22-year-old works for a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Kaduna and uses the train service to visit her sister in Abuja on weekends. As she relaxes into her seat, she whips out her phone to take selfies and record videos with the cream-coloured interior of the train carriage in the background. She will post them on Instagram, where she has thousands of followers. It is a popular pursuit with many young travellers who document their train travel experience on their social media accounts.
“The train is the safest option right now, but the commotion of getting a ticket can be stressful,” she says as the train starts to move and she changes position to take another selfie. There is no e-ticketing facility, so you have to physically buy tickets. Furthermore, some passengers have accused train officials of hoarding tickets and selling them just before the train departs at inflated prices.
“Also getting to the train station in Rigasa is difficult. It is quite far from the centre of Kaduna town,” she says. “If the road was safer, I would have travelled by taxi to Abuja, it is much easier and stress-free. It is fun travelling by train but the car parks are more accessible than the train station, both in Kaduna and Abuja.”
For another passenger, Nafisa Abubakar, a 27-year-old entrepreneur and resident of Abuja, the cost of the tickets is also a concern. “I always board the VIP section for my round trip when travelling on the train, but I can’t afford to do that any more, it is too expensive,” she says. “So I have had to sacrifice the comfort of the VIP section for the economy class because following the road is not an option for me. It is better to pay 3,000 naira on the train than follow the road and be kidnapped.”
A ticket home
On the other side of the Kaduna-Abuja expressway at Rijana, we hail a Volkswagen van heading towards Abuja. There are seven other passengers cramped inside the vehicle. It costs 400 naira ($1) for a drop off at Jere, a distance of about 50km (31 miles) and the next town with a train station after Rijana.
At Jere, a group of commercial motorcycle riders waits by the side of the expressway for passengers getting off the bus. One takes us through the hills and farmland to the railway station, a journey of 10 minutes.
It is the peak of the rainy season and the road to the train station at Jere is waterlogged and inaccessible for vehicles larger than our motorbike. There is no sign of passengers waiting at the station; the only people here are the maize farmers tilling their nearby farmlands.
Unlike the station manager at Rijana, the official at Jere tells us that the Kaduna-bound train from Abuja can pick us up from Jere station for 1,100 naira ($2.9). There is no explanation as to why the situation is different here and the tickets he gives us are official NRC tickets with “departure from: Jere” and “destination: Rigasa” imprinted on them. It will be the last train of the day, after which the station will close, so we decide to return to Kaduna.
Few economic benefits
When the Kaduna-Abuja rail link was completed in 2016, there was a buzz of anticipation amid hopes it would have a positive knock-on effect on the economies of satellite towns like Rijana and Jere.
Tolu Ogunlesi, the special assistant to Nigeria’s president on digital and new media, blogged earlier this year about how the rail projects would “open up” towns and cities.
Abdulaziz Halliru, a father of two in his 30s, lives in a new apartment 10 minutes from the Jere substation. He works as an estate agent and rears goats and sheep on the side.
Halliru, who wears a pink Juventus shirt and grey tracksuit, says he has never used the train due to its limited schedule. But he still hopes it could bring positive economic developments to his town, especially in real estate.
“The station here can serve as a train junction for travellers from the southern part of Kaduna and Niger State, and, if properly utilised, can turn Jere into an economic hub,” he says. “I am really happy the rail line passes through this town.”
When we board the train at Jere to head back to Kaduna, we cannot find seats as all of the coaches have been filled to half capacity and the other seats must remain empty due to social distancing protocols. Alternate seats are marked off with red masking tape, and the train conductors ensure passengers do not sit in them.
We squeeze into space at the end of the train between the luggage racks and the toilets and remain there for the hour-long journey to Rigasa station, the final stop in Kaduna.
Two ticket officers on the train have taken pictures of the tickets we bought at Jere – surprised that we were able to buy them. They repeat what the staff at Rijana told us – that the substations do not sell tickets.
Later on, when I am able to talk to someone from the NRC, I am told that tickets are no longer supposed to be sold at the substations – due to a lack of demand – but that the Jere station manager may not have received this message yet due to a “problem with communication”.
‘I would rather walk’
Arriving back at Rigasa train station, we are welcomed by the sight of fast-food joints, hawkers selling face masks, groundnuts, soft drinks and phone chargers, among other things. It is a stark contrast to the empty substations we visited on our journey.
To avoid the infamous kidnapping gangs on the Kaduna-Abuja road, thousands of travellers arrive at Rigasa every day to board the train to Abuja. As a result, businesses in Rigasa are booming, with a new shopping mall opposite the station and real estate investors developing new properties.
The state government has also built a new dual-carriageway road to connect the train station with Kaduna city centre in an effort to make it easier to reach the station.
Sixteen-year-old Haruna Salisu works as a payments collector in one of the numerous private car parks near the station. Passengers travelling to Abuja can leave their cars here to be watched over for 500 naira ($1.3) a day. There are more than 50 cars parked there when we arrive and Salisu explains how he now makes enough money not to have to ask his parents for any.
Despite this, the train ride from Kaduna to Abuja is nothing more than a dream for a local like him. “I would rather walk to Abuja than pay 6,000 naira [$16] for a ticket,” he says as he directs a driver out of the open-air car park.
As the sun begins to recede into the Rigasa skyline, the fourth and final train of the day to Abuja gets ready to depart. On a bridge above the tracks, children run to get a glimpse of it.
Fourteen-year-old Aisha Badamasi, who sells corn by the side of the road, dashes across the bridge to wave the train goodbye.
“I don’t know where Abuja is, but I know that is where the train goes,” she says. “Maybe one day I can take the train too and see the city where President Buhari is living. Maybe,” she giggles shyly, as the train disappears from view.
Tasmanian devil. (photo: Getty Images)
Australia: Tasmanian Devils Released on Mainland for First Time in 3,000 Years
Deutsche Welle
Excerpt: "Tasmanian devils were released into the wild on Australia's mainland for the first time in 3,000 years after they went extinct there, in what conservationists hailed as a 'historic step' to 'rewild' Australia."
The release marked the first time since their local extinction that the furry marsupials set foot in the wild on the mainland. Conservationists hailed the event as a "historic step to rewild" Australia.
asmanian devils were released into the wild on Australia's mainland for the first time in 3,000 years after they went extinct there, in what conservationists hailed as a "historic step" to "rewild" Australia.
Aussie Ark, an animal conservation organization, along with a coalition of other similar groups, revealed on Monday that they had released 26 of the carnivorous marsupials into a 400-hectare (roughly 1,000-acre) sanctuary at Barrington Tops, about 3.5 hours' drive north of Sydney.
Tim Faulkner, the president of the organization, said the "historic" releases in July and September were the first of three planned introductions in a project similar to the move to return wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in the 1990s.
Over the next two years, Aussie Ark is planning two additional releases of 20 devils each.
"If all goes as planned, the animals will breed and produce joeys, eventually resulting in a self-sustaining wild population," the press release said.
Conservationists will monitor the creatures through surveys, radio collars fitted with transmitters, and camera traps to track where they are, what they're eating and whether they're reproducing.
Ravaged by dingoes
Studies suggest that Tasmanian devils were pushed to extinction in mainland Australia 3,000 years ago, partially due to the introduction of dingoes.
"The devils survived only on the island of Tasmania, where the dingoes never reached," Aussie Ark said.
They are now classified as endangered, after a "transmissible, painful and fatal" facial tumor disease devastated the population on Tasmania. It is estimated that fewer than 25,000 Tasmanian devils still live in the wild, down from around 150,000 before the disease "decimated up to 90% of the wild population."
Tasmanian devils, which weigh up to 12 kilograms (26 pounds), making them the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world, typically prey on other animals or scavenge carcasses.
The furry carnivores are not considered to be dangerous to humans or livestock, but will defend themselves if attacked and can cause serious injury. The animals, also known for their loud growl, typically have a coat of brown or black fur and a white stripe or patch on their chest.
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