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18 July 20
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
Reich writes: "Donald Trump said that June's jobs report, which showed an uptick, proves the economy is 'roaring back.'"
Rubbish. The Labor Department gathered the data during the week of June 12, when America was reporting 25,000 new cases of Covid-19 per day. By the time the report was issued, that figure was 55,000.
The economy isn’t roaring back. Just over half of working-age Americans have jobs now, the lowest ratio in over 70 years. What’s roaring back is Covid-19.
Until it’s tamed, the economy doesn’t stand a chance.
The surge in cases isn’t because America is doing more tests for the virus, as Trump contends. Cases are rising even where testing is declining. Deaths have resumed their gruesome ascent.
The surge is occurring because America reopened before Covid-19 was contained.
Trump was so intent on having a good economy by Election Day that he resisted doing what was necessary to contain the virus. He left everything to governors and local officials, then warned that the “cure” of closing the economy was “worse than the disease.” Trump even called on citizens to “liberate” their states from public health restrictions.
Yet he still has no national plan for testing, contact tracing and isolating people with infections.
It would be one thing if every other rich nation in the world botched it as badly as has America. But even Italy – not always known for the effectiveness of its leaders or the pliability of its citizens – has contained the virus and is reopening without a resurgence.
There was never a conflict between containing Covid-19 and getting the economy back on track. The first was always a prerequisite to the second. By doing nothing to contain the virus, Trump has not only caused tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths but put the economy into a stall.
The uptick in jobs in June was due almost entirely to the hasty reopening, which is now being reversed. Across America, a vast re-closing is underway, as haphazard as was the reopening.
In the biggest public health emergency in US history, in which nearly 136,000 have already lost their lives, still no one is in charge.
Brace yourself. Not only will the virus take many more lives in the months ahead, but millions of Americans are in danger of becoming destitute. Extra unemployment benefits enacted by Congress in March are set to end July 31. About one in five people in renter households are at risk of eviction by September 30. Delinquency rates on mortgages have more than doubled since March.
An estimated 25 million Americans have lost or will lose employer-provided health insurance. America’s fragile childcare system is in danger of collapse, with the result that hundreds of thousands of working parents will not be able to return to work even if jobs are available.
What is Trump and the GOP’s response to this looming catastrophe? Nothing. Senate Republicans are trying to ram through a $740 billion defense bill while ignoring legislation to provide housing and food relief.
They are refusing to extend extra unemployment benefits beyond July, saying the benefits are keeping Americans from returning to work. In reality, it’s the lack of jobs.
Trump has done one thing, though. He’s asked the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act. If the court agrees, it will end health insurance for 23 million more Americans and give the richest 0.1% a tax cut of about $198,000 a year.
This is sheer lunacy. The priority must be to get control over this pandemic and help Americans survive it, physically and financially. Anything less is morally indefensible.
Rep. John Lewis waves during the swearing-in ceremony of Congressional Black Caucus members in January. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
Daniel Strauss and Naaman Zhou, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "John Lewis, the civil rights hero and Democratic congressman, has died at the age of 80."
Lewis helped Martin Luther King organise the March on Washington in 1963 and once suffered a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers
On Friday night, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, confirmed Lewis’s death. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Barack Obama, the first African American president, said Lewis “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise”.
Lewis campaigned for civil rights to the very end of his life. Obama also said it was “fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death”.
Born to sharecroppers in Troy, Alabama, in February 1940, Lewis became a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He joined the Freedom Rides that began in 1961, traveling to the south by bus to fight segregation on interstate buses.
A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he became its chair in 1963 and helped organise the March on Washington, when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
Lewis was the youngest and last survivor of the “Big Six” civil rights activists, a group led by King. When he attended Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, he was the last surviving speaker from the March on Washington. Obama presented Lewis with a commemorative photograph signed “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.” In 2011 he awarded Lewis the presidential medal of freedom.
In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, as activists tried to cross the Edmund Pettus bridge, Lewis was walking at the head of the march with his hands tucked in the pockets of his overcoat when he was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. His skull was fractured. Nationally televised images of the brutality forced attention on racial oppression in the south. That incident, along with other beatings during peaceful protests, left Lewis with scars for the rest of his life.
Within days, King led more marches in Alabama. President Lyndon B Johnson soon was pressing Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which became law later that year, removing barriers that had barred black people from voting.
“I have been in some kind of fight – for freedom, equality, basic human rights – for nearly my entire life,” he said. “I have never faced a fight quite like the one I have now.”
On Friday, Obama said: “I first met John when I was in law school, and I told him then that he was one of my heroes. Years later, when I was elected a US senator, I told him that I stood on his shoulders. When I was elected president of the United States, I hugged him on the inauguration stand before I was sworn in and told him I was only there because of the sacrifices he made.
“And through all those years, he never stopped providing wisdom and encouragement to me and Michelle and our family. We will miss him dearly.
“It’s fitting that the last time John and I shared a public forum was at a virtual town hall with a gathering of young activists who were helping to lead this summer’s demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
“Afterwards, I spoke to him privately, and he could not have been prouder of their efforts … I told him that all those young people – of every race, from every background and gender and sexual orientation – they were his children. They had learned from his example, even if they didn’t know it.”
Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King, said Lewis fought “the good fight”. Former president Bill Clinton said Lewis “gave all he had to redeem America’s unmet promise of equality and justice for all” and “became the conscience of the nation”.
Pelosi said: “Every day of John Lewis’s life was dedicated to bringing freedom and justice to all. As he declared 57 years ago during the March on Washington, standing in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial: ‘Our minds, souls, and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all the people.’
“How fitting it is that even in the last weeks of his battle with cancer, John summoned the strength to visit the peaceful protests where the newest generation of Americans had poured into the streets to take up the unfinished work of racial justice.”
In 2001, Lewis boycotted the inauguration of George W Bush because he did not believe the Republican had fairly been awarded victory over the Democratic nominee, Al Gore. Donald Trump, the current Republican president, did not immediately comment on Friday night or Saturday morning. The most senior Republican in Congress, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, said Lewis was a “pioneering civil rights leader who put his life on the line to fight racism”.
“Congressman Lewis’ place among the giants of American history was secure before his career in Congress had even begun,” McConnell said. “You did not need to agree with John on many policy details to be awed by his life.”
Late last year, a spokesperson for Lewis said the congressman had been arrested 40 times during the civil rights era and he had been arrested several times since, including in 2013 at a rally for immigration reform.
Even while ill earlier this year and unable to work on Capitol Hill, Lewis continued to speak out and expressed hope that Black Lives Matter protests would lead to real change. In early June, he said that while he had “been down this road before” in seeing large-scale protests against systemic racism, this time gave him hope.
“As a nation, and as a people, we’re going to get there. We’re going to make it,” he told NBC.
Clearly ailing, he appeared to be signaling to a new generation of leaders.
“We’re going to survive and there will be no turning back,” he said.
Federal agents patrol in Portland after dispersing a crowd protesting police brutality on Independence Day. (photo: Nathan Howard/ZUMA)
Tal Axelrod, The Hill
Axelrod writes: "The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Friday filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Marshals Service after they deployed agents to quell demonstrations in Portland, Ore."
The ACLU’s lawsuit seeks to block federal law enforcement from dispersing, arresting, threatening to arrest, or using physical force against journalists or legal observers. The group says the move is one of many suits it will be filing for “unconstitutional attacks” on protesters in the city.
“This is a fight to save our democracy,” Kelly Simon, interim legal director with the ACLU of Oregon, said in a statement. “Under the direction of the Trump administration, federal agents are terrorizing the community, risking lives, and brutally attacking protesters demonstrating against police brutality.
“These federal agents must be stopped and removed from our city," Simon added. "We will continue to bring the full fire power of the ACLU to bear until this lawless policing ends.”
The plaintiffs in the case include The Portland Mercury and individual journalists and legal observers who say they were attacked by law enforcement. The lawsuit adds federal agencies to an existing complaint filed last month against local law enforcement.
“Cowardly attacks on those who report police misconduct to the world have no place in a free society,” said Matthew Borden, partner at Braun Hagey & Borden LLP.
The suit comes after reports surfaced Friday morning of federal officers in unmarked military fatigues detaining demonstrators and driving around in unmarked vehicles.
Demonstrations have continued in Portland over the killing of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis at the end of May. Some protests have led to the damage of federal buildings, prompting the administration to send in federal officers. Some demonstrators have also tried to make their own autonomous zone similar to one that lasted for weeks in Seattle.
Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf in a statement Thursday said protesters were part of a "violent mob," though demonstrations Thursday night were reported to be mainly peaceful.
The federal response has sparked pushback from Democrats, with four Oregon lawmakers calling on the inspectors general for the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security to investigate federal law enforcement’s presence and practices in Portland amid rising protests in the city.
“DHS and DOJ are engaged in acts that are horrific and outrageous in our constitutional democratic republic,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) said in a statement. “First, they are deploying paramilitary forces with no identification indicating who they are or who they work for. Second, these agents are snatching people off the street with no underlying justification. Both of these acts are profound offenses against Americans.”
“We demand not only that these acts end, but also that they remove their forces immediately from our state,” he added. “Given the egregious nature of the violations against Oregonians, we are demanding full investigations by the Inspectors General of these departments.”
DACA recipients and their supporters rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on June 18, 2020, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Joel Rose, NPR
Rose writes: "A federal court has ordered the Trump administration to begin accepting new applications to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children from deportation."
As NPR reported earlier this week, the Trump administration has not been accepting new applicants even after the Supreme Court ruled last month that the administration didn't go about ending the program correctly. The administration has only been processing DACA renewals.
"This means that the administration not only must continue protections for current recipients, but that that it must also accept new applications," said Ali Noorani, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum. "Ignoring this decision puts the administration directly at odds with the rule of law, and leaves DREAMers steeped in even more uncertainty about their futures."
The U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled on Friday that the DACA policy must be restored to what it was before the Trump administration rescinded it in September 2017.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who led the multistate coalition suing to restore DACA, said: "From the Supreme Court down, the courts have made it clear: DACA stands, and now its doors are open to new DREAMers to apply. That's a fact and that's what matters. I urge all DREAMers to enter DACA."
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has been renewing DACA status for about 650,000 people who already have it but rejecting new applicants. An estimated 300,000 young immigrants are eligible for the program and still waiting for a chance to apply.
A notice on the agency's website for months has said: "USCIS is not accepting requests from individuals who have never before been granted deferred action under DACA." And immigration lawyers said clients who applied for DACA for the first time after the recent Supreme Court ruling were denied.
After the high court decision, Trump said he would move quickly to terminate the program again — this time in a way that would pass muster with the Supreme Court. But in recent days, Trump has softened his stance.
On July 10, the president promised a "road to citizenship" for DACA recipients during an interview with Telemundo before the White House walked that back. Then, earlier this week, Trump said he would be "taking care" of DACA recipients.
Fox News Staffers Erupt Over Network's Racism: Bosses 'Created a White Supremacist Cell'
Lachlan Cartwright, Lloyd Grove, Andrew Kirell, Noah Shachtman and Justin Baragona, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "Four days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphic connecting the killings of Black men - including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr. - to stock market gains, many of the network's Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox's increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality."
A heated early-June phone call between Fox execs and Black staffers was just the beginning of an internal revolt against racism at the network, insiders told The Daily Beast.
our days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphic connecting the killings of Black men—including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr.—to stock market gains, many of the network’s Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox’s increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality.
It did not go well.
The call on June 9 lasted more than 90 minutes and included Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott, President Jay Wallace, and HR chief Kevin Lord, people familiar with the matter told The Daily Beast. It was led by Scott, who is white, and Marsheila J. Hayes, the vice president of diversity and inclusion at Fox Corporation, who is Black.
It was almost immediately rife with tension. One staffer directly asked why Bret Baier—the anchor of the network’s key weekday news broadcast, Special Report, which aired the offensive graphic—was not on the call, nor any other white on-air talent. (Baier had previously apologized for the “major screw-up,” noting that, because the show bears his name, “the buck stops with me.” Fox News also apologized for the “insensitivity” of the infographic, adding that it “should have never aired on television without full context.”)
Other participants on the call expressed anger and distress about rampant racism at Fox, both on- and off-air.
Fox Business Network host Charles Payne, who is Black, was particularly incensed, according to multiple people who attended the call. In fact, he had previously called Scott directly and, per a person familiar, was “ripshit” about the Baier graphic debacle and about racist remarks that Laura Ingraham had recently made on the air.
At one point on the June 9 call, sources told The Daily Beast, an irate Payne suggested he’d been the victim of racial discrimination, repeatedly passed over for opportunities given instead to white colleagues. Elsewhere, the staffers recalled, Payne, who has been at Fox since 2007, lamented the network’s tone when covering Black cultural stories, including the killing of California rapper and anti-gang activist Nipsey Hussle. How can he talk to his children about Fox News, the host wondered, when it portrays people like Hussle in a racist, stereotypical manner as a gangster?
Ultimately, the conversation was full of “a lot of talking and a lot of emotions,” one staffer said, making sure to note how Fox executives were “deliberate to allow everyone to have a chance to talk.”
A spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily Beast, “FOX News Media is committed to providing an ongoing dialogue targeting issues of diversity and workplace inclusion, which is why we recently took the unprecedented action of providing an open forum among an intimate group of diverse employees to candidly discuss this critical issue.
“We have long been a leader in cable news for featuring a broad range of voices, and will continue those efforts to ensure all views are respected and celebrated both on and off air.”
But even if the call may have been therapeutic, staffers say the network has since then made barely any progress on confronting its own racism.
In the month since, on-air talent has continued to rant against the Black Lives Matter “mob” and proclaim that America is “under attack,” while a top writer for Tucker Carlson’s show was ousted just last week for his pseudonymous racist and sexist posts on an online troll forum.
Two people familiar with the situation told The Daily Beast that Fox Corporation CEO Lachlan Murdoch personally approved what Carlson would say in his defensive Monday remarks addressing the exit of his top writer. Despite demands from Fox News executives that he pre-tape the segment and strike a conciliatory tone, Carlson barely sounded apologetic, knowing he had the full backing of the Murdoch heir.
A rep for Murdoch did not respond to a request for comment. But The Daily Beast spoke to more than a dozen Fox News insiders, who all suggested that behind the scenes there is a growing despair among employees about the network’s role in demonizing and spreading fear about Black Americans in particular.
One employee was especially angry, saying, “They created a cell—they created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president… This is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”
Fox News has an apparent racism problem, and it’s not just the network’s critics who notice it. Anger over the cable giant’s shoddy coverage of racial issues is also increasingly coming from inside the building.
Over the past month, the network’s Black employees, including on-air talent, have begun to openly confront management over Fox’s anti-Black rhetoric—especially that of the network’s biggest stars, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.
Fox News personnel have expressed outrage to network brass over their unwillingness to rein in hosts like Ingraham, whose primetime show—helmed by Tommy Firth, the same executive producer behind Megyn Kelly’s former Fox show—has long made white grievance politics a core feature. On June 29, she did an anti-Black Lives Matter monologue which included a line that many viewed as a racist dog whistle and threat: “We will remember those who desert their colors.”
A complaint to corporate executives prompted an HR investigation into how Ingraham's segment was conceived and made it to air, which ultimately cleared Ingraham and her team of racist intent in deploying the loaded phrase. Marsheila J. Hayes, the Black HR official who also led the June 9 call, was detailed to explain that the phrase was not racist at all. It was simply a historical military reference, said Hayes. (The phrase appears to have been more often used during the nineteenth century, frequently in reference to Civil War turncoats.)
A Fox News insider, meanwhile, suggested to The Daily Beast that the network frequently deploys right-leaning Black contributors and guests to give cover to racially insensitive content. “That’s something they routinely do—they turn out these people, like Candace Owens, to support these things, and use Black apologists to denigrate other Black men and women and victimize them.”
In one such monologue, Carlson warned viewers that a Black Lives Matter “mob” will “come for you.” Fox News PR scrambled to claim his tirade was actually just about Democrats and “inner city politicians,” but some of the primetime star’s co-workers weren’t buying it.
“Bull. Shit. They have the script written that gives them an out,” one Fox staffer told The Daily Beast. “But what the viewers hear is the white supremacist crap. And that crap goes straight to the White House.”
The company’s inclination to look the other way as Carlson seemingly stokes a race war is also a concern that several staffers mentioned to The Daily Beast—especially because Murdoch sent a company-wide memo in early June urging all employees to “closely listen to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black lives matter.”
Furthermore, and in stark contrast to the fact that he is known to personally approve of what his top primetime host says nightly on TV, the Murdoch heir added: “We support our Black colleagues and the Black community, as we all unite to seek equality and understanding.”
Fox’s willingness to give its top-rated star a pass for openly flirting with racist ideology has never been more apparent than in the aftermath of last week’s CNN report that Carlson’s top writer, Blake Neff, had for years pseudonymously posted bigoted comments to AutoAdmit, a notoriously unmoderated message board.
The 29-year-old Neff, who’d worked on Carlson’s show for nearly four years and once bragged that “anything [Carlson is] reading off the teleprompter, the first draft was written by me,” resigned after his extensive history of hateful comments was revealed.
“Make no mistake, actions such as his cannot and will not be tolerated at any time in any part of our work force,” Fox said at the time in an internal memo. Network execs also condemned Neff’s “horrific racist, misogynistic and homophobic behavior” while assuring that Carlson would sufficiently address the ordeal during his next broadcast.
But when Monday rolled around, Carlson’s brief on-air remarks were anything but conciliatory. While never actually mentioning what Neff had done, Carlson said the writer was “ashamed” and that his words—which the Fox host did not “endorse”—“have no connection to the show.”
Before announcing a “long-planned” vacation to go trout fishing, Carlson spent the majority of the monologue attacking and threatening the media for having the audacity to expose his top staffer.
“We should also point out to the ghouls now beating their chests in triumph of the destruction of a young man, that self-righteousness also has its costs. We are all human. When we pretend we are holy, we are lying,” he said. “When we pose as blameless in order to hurt other people, we are committing the gravest sin of all, and we will be punished for it. There’s no question.”
Network executives had hoped that Carlson’s brief address would temper the internal unease over his on-air conduct. But Fox News staffers told The Daily Beast that his snarling, defensive commentary has only further served to anger the primetime star’s co-workers.
“How hard would it have been to say sorry?” one Fox insider told The Daily Beast. “That being said, I’m not surprised.” Another staffer noted that because Carlson never specified the nature of what Neff had written, his viewers—many of whom are unlikely to be reading CNN articles during the day—were left with no clue of what happened in the first place.
“What has happened since that [June 9] phone call is we’ve taken two steps forward and now three steps back,” another Fox insider told The Daily Beast. “What [Fox executives] don’t understand is you had a white supremacist in a very senior position on [Carlson’s] show. That kind of thing doesn’t live in a garden that isn’t fertile.”
Indeed, Neff is just the latest person employed by Carlson to have a history of secret racist posts or connections to white supremacist groups. At least 11 people who wrote or edited for The Daily Caller—the conservative website Carlson co-founded in 2010 and only recently divested from—were found by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other outlets to have been laundering aggressively racist beliefs, either publicly or anonymously online.
Another source of internal strife at Fox News is that the network has never come close to promulgating any consistent standard as to what constitutes unacceptable, racist rhetoric and what is allowed on its air.
In 2012, for example, Fox News contributor Jehmu Greene—a Black woman who is prominent in Democratic Party politics—was removed from the air for two weeks after she jokingly referred to Carlson as a “bow-tying white boy” during an on-air debate with him on Megyn Kelly’s primetime show. Carlson angrily objected and Kelly ended the show by telling viewers that Greene’s quip was unacceptable and did not meet Fox’s standards.
Eight years later, in the wake of the recent on-air incidents involving Ingraham and Carlson, for which these white Fox News anchors have suffered no consequences, Greene offered to help the network come up with standards of on-air rhetoric, especially for remarks that can be interpreted as race-baiting, said a person familiar with her offer which has yet to receive a response. (Greene declined to comment for this story.)
And the network’s deeply problematic record regarding race was already well-established by the time weekend anchor Kelly Wright, in April 2017, was the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Fox News that included nine other current and former Fox News employees of color who claimed systemic racial discrimination.
“We literally have a handful of Black and Latino reporters, and only one Black male anchor—which in 2017 shouldn’t be the case,” Wright, then one of very few Black anchors at the network, said during a packed press conference. He added that the situation, along with the alleged denigration of minority employees toiling behind the scenes, was “inexcusable and indefensible” and the result of “systemic and institutional racial bias.” (Wright, who left Fox News shortly after that and currently anchors the 6 p.m. news program on the just-launched Black News Channel, declined to comment.)
That same year, 2017, the network formed a diversity and inclusion council—an in-house group including staffers of color whose membership was determined by Fox’s senior management. During her time on the committee, long-time weekend booking director Patricia Peart registered concerns about racism with the network executives.
Peart, who has been at Fox News since 2005, was treated unfairly, Fox News insiders said, and occasionally tasked over the years with training younger, less qualified white men and women who were ultimately promoted to jobs above her. Fox News insiders told The Daily Beast that several of Peart’s colleagues had advised her over the years to hire an attorney and sue the network, but she hesitated to jeopardize her job by engaging in a public fight with her employer.
“A lot of us watched her go through it,” said one Black Fox News insider. “A lot of us told her years ago to file a lawsuit…A lot of people are still being hurt.”
Peart recently received a salary bump and a better title: vice president of weekend booking. She initially declined to comment to The Daily Beast, but ultimately offered one on the record in a phone call on Thursday evening.
“There have been a couple of issues that have happened with one person and it got to the point where a complaint was made but that was not made by me,” she told The Daily Beast of an incident that happened during the Roger Ailes era. “I was asked to meet Suzanne Scott. We had a conversation about it. I was given an option of what I wanted to do—did I want the person fired. I said no. I received an apology and the issue never came up again. The n-word was not used but there were other comments that were inappropriate and insensitive and it was not a one-time thing but it was not something that was ongoing.”
Meanwhile, blatant instances of on-air racism—including dozens of incidents catalogued over the past decade—are often excused or laughed off, especially if the offender is a key star for the network.
During a 2015 holiday cooking segment on Fox & Friends, in which Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner, who is Black, prepared her mother’s peach cobbler recipe, host Brian Kilmeade, who is white, asked Faulkner if she also serves Kool-Aid at her family gatherings—a stunningly blunt reference to a negative racial stereotype.
Faulkner initially let the incident slide but, as she later revealed to the Los Angeles Times, she eventually confronted Kilmeade in his office. “We sat. He said, ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I want you to know I have no idea what it really means, blah, blah, blah.’ By the end of the conversation, I apologized. He said, ‘Why are you apologizing?’ I said, ‘Because I need to hear the words ‘I’m sorry’ right now.’ So we moved on.”
“Fox has a reputation for being bigoted and racist, all for very good reason,” former Fox News Specialists host Eboni K. Williams, who left the network in 2018, told The Breakfast Club last year. She now works for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt TV.
Fox News’ coddling of racist behavior, Williams said, has been a deeply ingrained feature since its founding, not least because the late Roger Ailes saw the opportunity to profit off “the fear of intrinsic devaluation of white people in this country.” When radio host Charlamagne tha God asked if, at Fox, “the fear of a Black and Brown planet drives the message,” Williams agreed: “It feels like a viable threat.”
And Carlson has launched to Fox News superstardom primarily by appealing to that exact fear—whether it comes from the threat of immigrants, whom he accused of making America “poorer and dirtier” in Dec. 2018, or the Black Lives Matter “mob,” or “hoax” fears about white supremacy, or Muslims like Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar, whom the Fox host called “a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately or else.”
Such bigoted commentary has driven away many of the network’s sponsors, and yet, according to The New York Times, Lachlan Murdoch personally texted his support to Carlson amid one such advertiser boycott.
All told, advertising during Carlson’s show, the most-viewed on the entire network, has been reduced to an anemic roster of Fox promos, PSAs, low-budget diret marketers, and MyPillow—an aggressively pro-Trump pillow company that now accounts for more than 30 percent of the show’s ads.
But Carlson, along with like-minded Fox News stars like Ingraham, appears to be safe from ever facing any repercussions for his conduct, leaving concerned employees feeling frustrated and resigned.
“It’s unbelievable,” one staffer said. “I know you’re supposed to stay silent, but this is intolerable.”
Polish president Andrzej Duda, backed by the right-wing Law and Justice party, celebrates with supporters following initial election results during Poland's runoff on July 12, 2020, in Pultusk, Poland. (photo: AP)
Pigs at a factory farm. (photo: Mongabay)
World Bank-Funded Factory Farms Dogged by Alleged Environmental Abuses
John C. Cannon, Mongabay
Cannon writes: "A pork and chicken producer has expanded its operations in northern Ecuador with the help of funding from the World Bank's commercial lending arm, despite sustained complaints from local communities about air and water quality, public health and labor issues."
Mongabay’s investigation into the funding of livestock operations and factory farms by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation continues, revealing the environmental and social problems these investments can cause.
pork and chicken producer has expanded its operations in northern Ecuador with the help of funding from the World Bank’s commercial lending arm, despite sustained complaints from local communities about air and water quality, public health and labor issues.
The financing, through the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), is intended, in part, to kick-start the economies of developing nations. But the funds, given to Quito-based Pronaca between 2004 and 2013 totaling $120 million, haven’t benefited the country’s poorest citizens, critics say.
“In Ecuador, the benefits are only for the big companies, not for the people,” Xavier León of the NGO Acción Ecológica told Mongabay.
Globally, the IFC has provided financing of more than $1.8 billion to livestock producers since 2010, according to IFC data aggregated during an investigation by Mongabay and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
Pronaca — short for Procesadora Nacional de Alimentos — is Ecuador’s largest industrial livestock company. The province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, west of the capital Quito, sits at the base of the Andes Mountains, and it’s been promoted as an ideal location to build out Ecuador’s food production industry, both to feed a growing nation and boost private sector profits.
Pronaca has built more than 30 pork and poultry farms in the province since the 1990s. Each one houses thousands of pigs or millions of birds. Local community members say, however, that the burgeoning industry with Pronaca leading the way has come at the cost of their health, livelihoods and quality of life.
They also allege that the IFC and its office of the Compliance Adviser/Ombudsman (CAO) haven’t addressed their complaints, even as funds have continued to flow from the agency to Pronaca to fuel its expansion.
Pronaca in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas
In 2004 and 2008, the IFC provided a total of $50 million to Pronaca in two installments. The tranches comprised a mix of loans the company would eventually have to pay back, typically with terms of seven to 12 years, as well as equity investments that would give the IFC a stake in the company.
But as Pronaca built more farms, local residents began to complain of the effects that the concentrations of industrially farmed animals had, particularly in the local rivers. Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas has long been populated by smallholder farmers. It’s also home to the Tsáchilas Indigenous group, numbering 3,000 to 4,000 people, who live in seven communes in the province. Both the farmers and the Tsáchilas depend on the rivers to provide fish, to water their crops and animals, and for bathing and cooking.
Today, community members estimate that Pronaca’s farms in the province are home to about 1 million pigs, around double the province’s human population. They say that waste from all of those animals eventually ends up in the river, tainting it with fecal coliform bacteria.
“Several studies of the water quality of the rivers show contamination that in some cases exceeds hundreds of times the maximum permitted limits,” León said.
There is some doubt about the source of the pollution, whether it comes from the farms or it results from poor sewage infrastructure in the communities that line the rivers of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. But critics of the company say that such questions are just a smokescreen, behind which they’re pumping millions of kilograms of pig feces into the region’s waterways.
IFC’s ombudsman gets involved
In December 2010, two community members alerted the IFC’s CAO to the impacts of the expansion of Pronaca’s farms. The complaints alleged that the company was contaminating local rivers, making the water unusable for both farms and households. Community members who came into contact with the water reported skin and gastrointestinal problems, according to the filings, and respiratory issues had arisen as the farms expanded.
They also said that the farms and processing plants polluted the soil and air and emitted foul smells. Additionally, the complainants said that the farms didn’t have environmental licenses from the Ecuadoran government to operate, nor had the farms’ operators carried out environmental impact assessments.
Pronaca did not respond to multiple requests for comment by Mongabay.
These filings triggered an assessment by the CAO in February and March 2011. But local activist Beatriz Andrade said that the process was cursory, with the CAO team present on the ground for only a few days — inadequate, as Andrade sees it, to gain a full understanding of the situation.
CAO’s report states that the team met with “stakeholders” in Quito and Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas over three days in February and one day in March 2011. The report addresses the concerns about the odors, acknowledging that they were a “nuisance” in the area around the farms. The CAO team also noted the water pollution issue but was not able to determine the source.
“Although everyone seems to agree that there is a serious problem due to the lack of wastewater treatment in the cities and towns of the province, the complainants and several of the interviewees have the understanding that solid and liquid wastes from the PRONACA pig farms are being dumped into the rivers without prior treatment, making them an additional source of significant pollution in the area,” the report says. “PRONACA, on the other hand, says that the facilities that generate industrial effluents have treatment systems and that their liquid wastes meet domestic standards.”
CAO’s interviews also revealed other concerns in the community, such as the proximity of farms to population centers. Ecuadoran regulations require farms to be at least 15 kilometers (9 miles) away from each other and 3 km (1.9 mi) from population centers.
At the end of the process, the CAO team reported that the complainants weren’t willing to participate in a “mediation process” with the company. Rather, they wanted the IFC to stop the flow of money to Pronaca, a demand the CAO doesn’t have the ability to meet.
“Normally, companies reported for polluting should not take advantage of international funds,” said Ilario Signori, who operates a tourist lodge in the town of Valle Hermoso, home to one of Pronaca’s slaughterhouses. “The company has never fulfilled the social obligations towards the community that needed investment.”
On its website, the CAO wrote regarding the Pronaca case, “CAO’s Ombudsman assessment does not entail a judgment on the merits of the complaint. Rather, the aim is to listen to people’s concerns, understand the different perspectives, and gauge whether it is possible to address the concerns in a collaborative process.” (Similar language about the limitations of CAO’s mandate appears in many of its reports from different cases.)
After the complainants declined mediation with the company, the CAO shifted the process to its “compliance function,” leading to an appraisal, also by the CAO.
Dated Nov. 3, 2011, the appraisal report again lays out the details of the complaints. Mongabay confirmed with a spokesperson that the CAO stopped short of a full investigation. This decision was taken despite apparently finding some merit to the accusations. CAO noted that the annual monitoring reports Pronaca submitted evidenced “a variety of noncompliances with IFC/World Bank Group guidelines.”
The appraisal findings indicated that, following the IFC’s second investment in 2008, the annual monitoring report data demonstrated “that the operations of PRONACA were showing continued improvement in emissions to air and water and were in compliance with IFC guidelines for most parameters and most locations.”
But at the end of the appraisal report, the authors also note, “The CAO finds that the reporting of data to IFC (for example, in the [annual monitoring reports]) is insufficient to give IFC full assurance that the operations are in compliance with applicable IFC guidelines.”
The appraisal also acknowledges that environmental licenses weren’t yet in place for all of the farms and processing plants. The authors of the appraisal report attributed that to holdups in Ecuador’s Ministry of the Environment — circumstances that were “outside the control” of the company.
Furthermore, the appraisal notes that full environmental impact assessments, though previously requested by the IFC, weren’t required because the Pronaca project was classified as a “Category B” project. According to the IFC’s environmental and social categorization, category B projects have “potential limited adverse environmental or social risks and/or impacts that are few in number, generally site-specific, largely reversible, and readily addressed through mitigation measures.”
The IFC did not respond to repeated requests for comment about why industrial farming operations involving millions of animals did not require assessments to determine how expansion would affect the local environment and people.
The appraisal ends with the finding that, although “it would have been desirable for IFC to have identified gaps earlier and for PRONACA to have responded more quickly to these gaps such that the pace of implementing identified actions was quicker,” they determined that the interaction didn’t rise to the level of one requiring an audit. At that point, they closed the case.
The appraisal did mention that Pronaca had undertaken several mitigation measures, such as the implementation of deep bedding for the pigs. In this animal-rearing technique, frequent replacement of the rice straw on which the pigs live is supposed to lock away more of the smells from pig waste, among other touted benefits. The document also suggests that biodigesters would help address the odor problem.
A resident of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retribution from officials and company representatives said that few farms installed the biodigesters, which in any case “only serve to capture and burn off methane gas.”
Acción Ecologica’s Xavier Leon added that Pronaca didn’t implement these measures in a way that was proportional to the massive expansion of the region’s farms.
“My personal opinion was that this was only for the social responsibility publicity for Pronaca,” León added.
Beatriz Andrade went a step further. “The deep bedding — it’s a fraud. It’s more contaminating,” she said. “It’s not a solution.”
Thus, as financing continued to flow, Andrade and others in the community sent further complaints to the IFC. But she said they never received meaningful responses in the form of further investigations about Pronaca’s operations and whether they were in line with IFC and Ecuadoran regulations.
A continuing relationship
In 2013, the IFC issued another loan of up to $70 million to Pronaca, again slated for further expansion of the company’s livestock operations in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas.
More than a year later, on Dec. 24, 2014 — Christmas Eve — Ecuador’s Ministry of the Environment approved the licenses of 14 of Pronaca’s farms.
León said that locals, dubious of the raft of licenses approved all at once just before the Christmas holiday, fought the hurried legalization.
Regardless, he said, the continued investment before all of the farms were properly licensed was perplexing.
“I don’t understand why the International Finance Corporation financed these farms if the farms were not legalized in these years,” León said.
A 2017 IFC document on improving the organization’s management of environmental and social risks indicates that further investments to a client, such as the $70 million provided to Pronaca in 2013, would trigger a new set of assessments on this front. “[I]t would be considered as a new project with separate E&S due diligence, categorization, and public disclosure period prior to Board approval,” according to the document.
Still, today, many of the problems that instigated the communities’ protests a decade ago remain, according to people who live in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas. The reek of thousands of pigs living in close quarters still pervades the areas around the farms. People say the rivers are too polluted to use. The town of Santo Domingo is trying to improve the water quality of the Pove River, but sources say that that’s the only such effort in the province.
León and others say that more frequent and routine testing of the river would help provide a better sense of the problem. Currently, authorities typically test the rivers only once a year.
At the moment, Pronaca isn’t adding facilities in Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas, Andrade said, perhaps as a result of the communities’ pressure.
For others, though, the damage has already been done.
Illario Signori, the lodge operator, said that the rural tourism industry has been devastated by Pronaca’s presence due to “the terrible smells coming from [the] farms, the contamination of rivers and the threats from the company so that the people don’t protest.”
He pointed out that Valle Hermoso sits just 200 km (124 mi) from the outer edge of Quito, and was once a nearby rural retreat for some of the capital city’s 1.6 million residents. He blames the installation of a 10,000-hog farm in the town in 2000 for the decline in annual visitors to the town.
The lesson remains clear to Xavier León: “I think these investments continued because the financing is more powerful than the interests of the people.”
