25 January 21
Need to Pull a Rabbit From the Hat Today
We are down but not out. As bad as it looks right now, we absolutely positively can do this if we get on a roll.
The key is “you,” not someone else.
Donate folks, we are running out of time.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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24 January 21
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How to Win Medicare for All Under President Biden
Michael Lighty, In These Times
Lighty writes: "With a Democratic White House and Congress, we have an opportunity to organize like never before to finally achieve a universal, single-payer healthcare system. Let's seize it."
he Democratic Party platform now states clearly that “we fundamentally believe health care is a right for all, not a privilege for the few.” And following the Senate races in Georgia, Democrats will now take control of both houses of Congress along with the presidency. So the question is, now that they will hold power, how will the party reform healthcare? In 2009, Barack Obama assumed the presidency as Democrats held a supermajority in the Senate, with a majority in the House, yet the party failed to pass the full-fledged reform they sought, instead landing on a compromise bill, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which expanded healthcare access but did not make coverage universal.
Now, the Covid-19 pandemic has fully revealed the structural flaws of the healthcare industry model: profit-driven, just-in-time staffing and supply chains have produced unsafe work environments, a lack of regular testing, and too little personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. The defunding of public health systems and long-standing health inequities can no longer be ignored. Instead, this crisis requires a fundamental systemic response, and a single-payer system is the only comprehensive, cost-saving option that eliminates barriers to care while addressing the multi-faceted Covid-19 public health crisis.
That solution is rooted in the savings, universality, comprehensive benefits, public health, and cost control generated by single-payer healthcare financing.
Advocates for Medicare for All have won the policy debate — a recent study from the Congressional Budget Office shows again that single-payer saves money, controls costs, and covers everybody, including for long-term care. There is tremendous popular support for Medicare for All. But we lack the backing among enough elected officials to win politically, including from the newly inaugurated President Joe Biden.
Our task is not to simply convince Biden to change his views on Medicare for All, but to change the political waters in which that view holds sway. Our task is to create the political will to topple the for-profit healthcare industry, which means building a popular movement that can vilify its business model, expose its corruption of policymaking and shine a light on its financial influence over elected officials, who should similarly be exposed and challenged electorally for protecting an inhumane system.
Fixing the ACA is on the table, if it can be done in the Senate through a majority vote in the “budget reconciliation” process, or if the Democrats eliminate the 60-vote filibuster rule. As consumer advocate Wendell Potter writes, “Biden has proposed lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 60 and establishing a public health insurance option to compete with private insurers. He also campaigned on improving the Affordable Care Act to make federal subsidies available to more people.”
With an evenly divided Senate, there will likely be a push from mainstream Democrats to add a “public option” to the health plan. But even a genuinely public program with no out of pocket costs that provides comprehensive benefits, like the “public option” proposed by the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, doesn’t contain costs system-wide, leaves 10 million people uninsured, burdens taxpayers with a bailout of insurers to keep their product “affordable,” and adds further complexity to a costly insurance plan-based payer system.
When a federal ACA fix bill moves through committee, there will be a strategic opportunity to demand a “mark-up” of the single-payer bill and the inclusion of key policy priorities — such as lowering prescription drug prices and eliminating out of pocket expenses — in whatever bill emerges. This process could bring media and political attention to the policy advantages of Medicare for All.
But the task is larger than working to improve the ACA. We must organize to solve the healthcare crisis, not just to “fix” the bill.
There’s a set of administrative actions the Biden administration could take to immediately expand healthcare coverage, including enrolling everybody in Medicare for the duration of the pandemic, as incoming Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders has proposed. Passing additional pandemic-related healthcare legislation will be essential, so pressing for that package to include coverage of all out-of-pocket costs for everybody while covering the uninsured is both good politics and good policy.
Many advocates believe the political road to a national healthcare program is through a successful state model. Biden’s Health and Human Services Department, under the leadership of Medicare for All supporter and California Attorney General Xavier Beccera, can administratively grant state innovation waivers to establish single payer in states such as California, where support is strong. Gov. Gavin Newsom campaigned in favor of single payer. Initiating a waiver would change the argument from whether to implement a single-payer system to how. And it’s arguably the fastest way to move the issue politically while demonstrating the policy advantages of such a model. Other states could also follow course.
Still, there is no shortcut to winning guaranteed healthcare for all residents of the United States. Doing so will require a mass movement allied with, and incorporating the demands of, broader social movements for justice. We must continue to loudly protest and challenge the inequities highlighted by the pandemic, the public health crisis of racial injustice, anti-immigrant attacks, and state-sanctioned violence — which includes the denial of healthcare itself — propelled by economic inequality. At the heart of overcoming these injustices, Medicare for All stands as a policy solution that would intimately affect and improve our lives.
Fighting for a universal, guaranteed healthcare system embodies solidarity — the acts of kindness and caregiving that show we are all in this together, taking care of each other. It’s a task worth taking up in 2021.
Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania. (photo: Reuters)
Republican Congressman Played a Role in Trump's Campaign to Fight Election Loss
Reuters
Excerpt: "A Republican U.S. congressman played a role in ex-President Donald Trump's efforts to oust the top Justice Department official and replace him with a loyalist willing to support efforts to overturn his election defeat, the New York Times reported on Sunday."
Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania arranged for Trump to meet Jeffrey Bossert Clark, a Justice Department official who Trump considered naming to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen earlier this month, the newspaper reported.
Clark, the Times reported, was sympathetic to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, and he met with Perry to discuss a plan to have the Justice Department send Georgia a letter disclosing the department would be investigating the election results.
Reuters has not independently verified the details of the New York Times report, which cited several anonymous former officials. Neither Perry nor Clark, who served as head of the Environment and Natural Resources Division before becoming the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Division in September, could immediately be reached for comment.
In a statement to the New York Times, Clark declined comment on his relationship with Perry, and denied trying to oust Rosen, saying he had participated in “a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president.”
On Saturday, the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson saying it was launching a congressional probe into Trump and Clark’s actions, and asked for the department to turn over documents and communications to help assist their inquiry.
Voters head into their Iowa Democratic caucus site last year. (photo: Steve Pope/Getty Images)
Democrats Weigh Whether Iowa Should Stay 1st in Line for 2024 Election
Clay Masters, NPR
Masters writes: "While it's only 2021, a major question facing Democrats this year and next will be what to do about the presidential nominating calendar and whether Iowa, in particular, should retain its prized place at the front of the calendar in 2024."
Iowa's decades-long lock on the nominating process has been under threat since last year's disastrous caucus, when results were delayed for days due in part to a faulty smartphone app that was supposed to make things easier for precinct captains when they reported results. Ultimately, The Associated Press never declared a winner in the contest because of problems with the vote count, which was administered by the Iowa Democratic Party.
Iowa's voters are also older, more rural and more white than many other states so it's seen as increasingly out of step with the Democratic mainstream, which increasingly relies on voters of color and young people for its support.
President Biden's newly installed pick to lead the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison of South Carolina, will get a chance to shake up the calendar by appointing members to the party's rules and bylaws committee. Unlike past presidents, Biden didn't win in Iowa (he came in fourth, after former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and owes no political debt to the complex caucus process.
"I think on its merits that the Iowa caucus falls short of the values that we espouse as Democrats," Julian Castro said. Castro served as housing and urban development secretary under President Barack Obama and ran for president himself in 2020.
Castro, who dropped out of the race before the Iowa caucuses, made the argument during the campaign that 2020 should be the last year Iowa goes first and that a primary election run by the state makes much more sense than a caucus run by the party.
"You have 'one person, one vote' instead of an archaic formula to figure out who wins the whole thing," Castro said.
While Castro says that Obama's 2008 win in Iowa that helped propel him to the White House was wonderful, it was an exception when it comes to promoting the candidacies of diverse candidates.
"The diversity of Iowa and New Hampshire simply don't reflect the diversity of either our country or the Democratic Party," said Castro. (New Hampshire's primary is generally the second nominating contest.)
Expect a lengthy debate about the nominating calendar, says DNC member Clay Middleton from South Carolina.
"President Biden is going to have a say in this, too," said Middleton, who is close friends with Harrison. "Who better than Joe Biden to provide his assessment having run for president a few times and not winning Iowa?"
Harrison, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate last year, comes from another one of the early states — the one that provided the crucial victory that kept Biden's candidacy alive. Many South Carolina Democrats are also Black, as is Harrison, a vital constituency inside the party.
One idea would be to have all the early states go closer together, says Wendy Davis, a DNC member from Georgia.
"If you look at those the first four states: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada," said Davis. "Put together they actually are a good picture of America, right? And the diversity that is in America."
Even in the aftermath of the app meltdown, state party leaders have remained committed to the notion that Iowa should go first.
"We study the candidates very well," said then-party chair Mark Smith last February. "We give the candidates the opportunity to travel across the state and to meet with people and to hone their message as well."
An audit into what went wrong on caucus night released last month pinned the blame on the DNC, which made last-minute demands of the app's developer.
Meanwhile, the chair of the Iowa Republican Party says he's working on cementing an alliance with the other early states to preserve the current nominating calendar for his party.
Democrats hope to have the calendar issues resolved before the summer of 2022, when possible 2024 candidates will begin planning their campaigns.
Activists blocking the street outside the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. (photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Biden's LGBTQ Rights Executive Order and the Transphobic Backlash, Explained
Katelyn Burns, Vox
Burns writes: "Shortly after being sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden signed a thick stack of executive orders, undoing a host of Trump administration policies - including protecting LGBTQ rights under existing federal law."
The executive order’s legal reasoning is simple: Take last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which ruled that LGBTQ people are protected from sex discrimination in employment decisions under Title XII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and apply it wherever sex is a protected class in federal law. That means that LGBTQ people can no longer be discriminated against in housing, education, and health care as well as employment.
“Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love,” reads the order. “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes. People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination.”
LGBTQ rights advocates hailed the order Wednesday, praising Biden for taking immediate action to roll back some of Trump’s most personally intrusive policies. “Biden’s executive order is the most substantive, wide-ranging executive order concerning sexual orientation and gender identity ever issued by a United States president,” Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the National Women’s Law Center, called it “a critical recognition of what was the historic decision from the Supreme Court last June.” However, she told Vox, “it is important to know that this is not a radical step. The Biden administration is merely enforcing the Supreme Court’s ruling as it was written.”
While Biden’s executive order rolls back most of Trump’s anti-LGBTQ policies, Biden hasn’t yet officially revoked the former president’s trans military ban. Instead, White House officials have instructed military leaders to expect it soon after more of Biden’s appointments to the Pentagon are confirmed.
Despite widespread applause for Biden’s order, it didn’t take long for fringe conservatives and anti-trans “radical” feminists to respond with the usual transphobic attacks that trans women aren’t women and thus Biden’s order will put their definition of women in harm’s way. The hashtag #BidenEraseWomen trended on Twitter for most of the day Thursday — partially because LGBTQ advocates pushed back against the transphobic message.
Most Americans are in favor of LGBTQ rights — nearly 7 in 10 Americans support LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections, according to a 2019 poll by the non-partisan organization Public Religion Research Institute. And Biden, by sticking to his promise to protect queer and trans Americans and signing this executive order on his first day in office, showed his commitment to standing up for the LGBTQ community.
Biden’s LGBTQ executive order rolls back most of Trump’s anti-queer policies
Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too, deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. Then last summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex.
Queer people have also been under attack. Though marriage equality is the law of the land, the White House has taken steps to limit or undo gay rights in several key policy areas, such as lobbying to give religious adoption agencies the right to refuse same-sex couples. Most critical, perhaps, was the administration’s attack on the Affordable Care Act’s LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections in a rule released last June that would allow doctors and insurance companies to refuse care to LGBTQ people.
Biden’s executive order now rolls back most of these specific Trump-era policies except for the military ban, which is expected to come soon. The move wasn’t much of a surprise, given that Biden has long been a supporter of LGBTQ rights and was an early political voice in favor of trans rights.
In 2012, Biden said trans rights would be the “civil rights battle of our time,” a line he often repeated when asked on the campaign trail. Early on in the 2020 Democratic primary, a conservative activist with Turning Point USA in Iowa asked Biden how many genders there were. Without missing a beat, Biden dryly responded, “at least three,” before telling the woman, “Don’t play games with me, kid.”
The executive order itself ordered all federal agencies to review and update their rules and enforcement procedures to protect LGBTQ people from sex discrimination. What this means practically is the Biden administration will now consider discrimination against transgender students to be a violation of Title IX, and discrimination against gay or lesbian people in housing decisions to be against the law. It also protects LGBTQ people from employment discrimination by federal contractors and LGBTQ homeless people from discrimination at federally funded shelters.
However, sex is not considered a protected class under federal public accommodations law, so it’s still possible for private entities to deny a trans person access to a bathroom matching their gender identity or for a bus driver to deny a ride to a gay couple.
The executive order is essentially a reset to the legal theory that sexual orientation and gender identity are a form of sex discrimination first advanced under former president Barack Obama, though it now rests on more solid legal ground thanks to the Bostock decision last June.
The early commitment, especially to trans rights, puts the new administration in a clear position to oppose the ongoing international backlash against trans rights. Dozens of conservative states have proposed banning puberty blockers and other trans-related care to trans minors or banning trans women and girls from school sports, both of which would run counter to the new executive order.
It remains to be seen how committed Biden’s Department of Justice will be in opposing state-level discriminatory laws, but trans advocates mostly see Wednesday’s order as a good first step.
LGBTQ advocates are also keeping their eyes on the introduction of the Equality Act in Congress. If passed, the legislation would codify much of Biden’s executive order in federal law along with expanding LGBTQ and sex discrimination protections into public accommodations.
The predictable trans moral panic backlash comes for Biden
Whenever a government rule or law that even hints at improving the lives of trans people is proposed or enacted, anti-trans far-right conservatives always react negatively, and Wednesday’s order signing was no exception.
Despite ordering a modest adjustment to existing civil rights law, which still puts the US behind other Western nations like the United Kingdom, anti-trans voices reacted with anger to trans people receiving legal protections against discrimination. For example, Ryan T. Anderson, a senior fellow at the anti-LGBTQ Heritage Foundation, attempted to shame Biden for breaking his promise to seek unity by protecting trans and queer people in comments to the Washington Post.
The religious conservative was also joined by several “gender critical” feminists in calling out Biden, accusing the new president of “erasing women” by including trans people under the definition of sex discrimination.
But Biden’s executive order “is not an abandonment of his call for unity by any stretch of the imagination,” said Branstetter. “It’s frankly a little boilerplate because it’s merely enforcing the Supreme Court [decision] as is the executive branch’s constitutional duty.”
She also added that anti-trans activists have long “been preparing for a broader media campaign aimed at convincing people that transgender people pose a risk to cisgender women, all while powerful men laugh in the corner.”
In other words, it shouldn’t be a surprise that anti-trans activists are accusing the man who chose Kamala Harris, the first-ever female vice president in US history, of erasing women. But their attacks shouldn’t take away from trans people receiving the critical protections they’ve long deserved.
Senator Bernie Sanders on Capitol Hill before Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president on 20 January. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Sanders Hopes Nation Smitten by His Mittens Will Back Food Charity Push
Martin Pengelly, Guardian UK
Pengelly writes: "Bernie Sanders is turning a meme based on the mittens he wore to Joe Biden's inauguration into a money-making opportunity - to benefit programmes like Meals on Wheels in a time of spiraling food insecurity."
At the US Capitol on Wednesday, the independent senator from Vermont was pictured wearing chunky knitted mittens, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, socially distanced from other guests, hunched against the cold.
The image was soon spliced into a billion social media pictures and videos, the be-mittened democratic socialist appearing from Yalta to the ranks of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the famous potters’ wheel scene in Ghost. In Wisconsin, one man even adapted a snow sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial, a pillar of American democracy, to depict Sanders and his mittens instead.
The Vermont second-grade teacher who made the mittens out of an old sweater and recycled plastic bottles and offered them on Etsy soon announced she had sold out.
“There’s no possible way I could make 6,000 pairs of mittens,” Jen Ellis told Jewish Insider, “and every time I go into my email, another several hundred people have emailed me. I hate to disappoint people, but the mittens, they’re one of a kind and they’re unique and, sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.”
On Sunday, a chuckling Sanders welcomed his mittens’ notoriety and described how he wanted to put it to work.
“Not only are we having fun,” the 79-year-old told CNN’s State of the Union, “what we’re doing here in Vermont, is we’re going to be selling around the country sweatshirts and T-shirts and all of the money that’s going to be raised, which I expect will be a couple of million dollars, will be going to programs like Meals on Wheels that feed low-income senior citizens.”
Food insecurity under the coronavirus pandemic has become a serious problem, among Biden’s targets in his first days as president.
“So,” Sanders added, “it turns out actually it’s a good thing, not only fun.”
On the senator’s website on Sunday morning, a $45 “Chairman Sanders” crewneck sweatshirt featuring the inauguration image was itself sold out.
André Ventura, far-right presidential candidate from Chega, hosts French far-right politician Marine Le Pen on the campaign trail in Lisbon, Portugal, in January 2021. (photo: unknown)
As Portugal Votes, the Far Right Is at Its Strongest Since the Return to Democracy
Joana Ramiro, Jacobin
Ramiro writes: "After the Carnation Revolution overthrew the dictatorship in 1974, Portugal boasted over four decades with no fascist presence in parliament. But with a far-right anti-migrant candidate likely to be runner-up in today's presidential election, a hard-won anti-fascist consensus is beginning to crumble."
verybody knows who will win today’s Portuguese presidential elections. The winner has been known since January 24, 2016, when professor Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, a tenured academic, politician, and beloved TV pundit, was first declared president. The foretelling of his repeat victory isn’t just linked to his success back in 2016, but to the fact that he has been such a perennial figure in political folklore — indeed, any other result would be unthinkable.
While his political affiliation lies with the center-right PSD, Rebelo de Sousa is a liberal populist best known for his many stunts — from driving a taxi around Lisbon during his mayoral campaign in 1989, to swimming to the rescue of two women whose kayak had capsized last summer. He’s been called the “King of Selfies” for the sheer number of photos he takes with fans; if not for the pandemic, he’d doubtless have been kissing every woman over sixty-five years old on the campaign trail.
It’s clear that by Monday, Rebelo de Sousa will be president for another five-year term: polls rate him close to 60 percent support. But that isn’t what these presidential elections are about. Rather, this is a poll on the rise of the far right — and a serious test for Portugal’s historic anti-fascist legacy.
The Rise of the Far Right
The last time Portugal went to the polls was in October 2019, when parliamentary elections shook the status quo. Established forces performed poorly. The center-left Socialist Party, in office since 2015, was only able to form a minority government with just over 36 percent of the votes. The Left’s overall vote share shrunk: the anti-capitalist Bloco de Esquerda (BE) just about held on to its nineteen seats in parliament, while the Communist/Green CDU coalition fell from seventeen to twelve. As for the center-right, both the PSD and the Christian-Democratic CDS were thrown into crises that both are yet to fully recover from.
All these parties have been around for twenty years more (the oldest, the Communist Party, was founded back in 1921). But new players fared well. The animal rights party PAN, which has only been running in elections since 2011, rose from one seat to four. And three new political forces were able to nab a seat each. One newcomer in the Assembleia da República is André Ventura, the first representative of a far-right party to be elected to parliament since the Revolution of 1974 overthrew Portugal’s decades-old dictatorship.
Ventura is the leader of the openly chauvinist Chega (meaning: Enough). Originally a local council member for PSD, Ventura realized around 2017 that his comments against Muslims and the Roma community garnered him more media attention than his party ever did. Bolstered by his growing popularity as a football commentator on Portugal’s most-watched cable channel, CMTV, Ventura launched Chega in spring 2019. By October, he’d been elected a member of parliament, securing a mainstream platform for his virulent far-right politics.
Not even four months into his role as an MP, Ventura announced he would be running for president. He found 10,250 signatories to his candidacy (Portuguese law demands a minimum of 7,500 backers) and spent the rest of 2020 showing as much face as he could. Throughout the pandemic, he barely stopped hosting political gatherings, rallies, and fundraising dinners. He was critical of all imposed lockdowns and restrictions, but he argued for a closing off of the border and strict curfews for “gipsies.”
When the Black Lives Matter movement brought tens of thousands of people to the streets across the country, Ventura hosted a “Portugal Is Not A Racist Country” counterdemonstration. Despite the slogan, he was photographed seemingly doing a Nazi salute. Month after month, thanks to political exposés, candid interviews, and a lot of fact-checking reportage, Ventura and his party got hours of screen time. And that was exactly what he wanted.
Chega is a party riddled with internal conflict. Held together by the cult of Ventura’s hackneyed personality, its supporters span from petty-bourgeois boomers squeezed by big capital as Portugal’s main cities are gentrified, to professed fascists with a criminal record. The presidential election campaign and its press coverage have given Ventura even more opportunities to speak to his acolytes, proposition other demographics, and prove to his funders that his project is here to stay. Chega is yet to truly galvanize a split in the ruling class and become a real fascist threat. But it’s much closer than any other party has been since 1974.
In less than two years, Chega has built strong links with evangelical lobbies, paired up with the international far right (hosting Marine Le Pen as a guest of honor on the campaign trail not two weeks ago), and built alliances with immensely wealthy elements of the Portuguese diaspora. It has also pushed the Christian-Democratic CDS further to the right, to a discourse far closer to the Catholic ultraconservatism that once ruled Portugal. For now, Portugal’s capitalist class sees little to no gain in Chega’s corporatist, isolationist rhetoric. But as neoliberalism totters, we can’t rule this out in future.
Presidency as Performance
The Portuguese president isn’t the equivalent of presidents in countries like the United States and Brazil — the role is, above all, ceremonial. They will preside over national events, host other heads of state, and officially appoint the prime minister.
But the last few years have also proven that the position has significant powers, within limits. When the 2015 general elections produced no straight winner, then-president Aníbal Cavaco Silva offered a PSD-CDS coalition to form a minority government — to the Left’s great annoyance, as it had to wait a few months to take power after the Right failed at the first hurdle. Then, in 2020, the role took special significance once more, as only the president can declare a state of emergency and approve lockdowns and curfews.
But the power of the presidency is, above all, rendered by the ebullience of its performance. No wonder, then, that a showman like Ventura, who lives by the motto of “bread and circus,” would bid for it. What is more, the gravitas of such an exhibition of authority suits Ventura’s fascistic inclinations to a T. That is why he copies — often verbatim — the rhetoric and style of the likes of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro.
Playing against the King of Selfies, Ventura has no chance of overall victory. But he stands a rather better chance of beating the other contenders: the former Socialist diplomat Ana Gomes; the Communist Party’s youngest figurehead, João Ferreira; Bloco’s second-time candidate, Marisa Matias; the liberal drone Tiago Mayan Gonçalves, and a onetime Big Brother contestant named Tino de Rans.
The problem is not so much Gomes’s dry performance in debates or Ferreira’s mediocre social media presence, but rather that their offering stops at socioeconomic measures without appealing to a wider message of prosperity and hope. Their campaigns have lacked creativity and strength and have failed to make sonorous anti-fascist statements against Ventura or signal toward Portugal’s shameful past under a fascistic dictatorship. The only moment when you could sense a genuine grab of the collective imagination followed one of Ventura’s sorry initiatives.
Attempting to come across as the Portuguese Trump, Ventura has taken to pejoratively nicknaming political adversaries when rallying his supporters. Footage of him berating Bloco candidate Matias’s use of red lipstick went viral, as thousands of Portuguese people took to social media to protest Ventura’s vulgar misogyny. #VermelhoEmBelem, or “Red in Belém” (the name of the presidential palace), trended for days, with men and women alike painting their lips red on camera.
When Gomes shared a video of herself donning red lipstick, it signaled not only a sense of solidarity but also of anti-fascist euphoria. And, for that brief moment, it felt like the presidential elections had gained some dynamism and some real transformative power. People of both progressive and conservative persuasion were joining the hashtag, rejecting a reality where Ventura is part of the norm.
But this moment proved short-lived — and once the initial excitement on social media waned, things went back to the same old debates, with Ventura making preposterous propositions and the Left hammering him with logic. But logic alone won’t do.
The Left, already weakened by the variety of offerings, seems to have opted for a scrupulous but somewhat formulaic approach. The shortcomings of this strategy show in the polls. While front-runner Rebelo de Sousa is polling around 60 percent, center-left Gomes has remained bogged down in the low teens, challenged for second place by far-right Ventura. All other candidates fared lower than 5 percent.
While Portugal is a peaceful country, with an economy that benefited greatly from a timely mixture of state investment coupled with a tourism boom, there’s much to be changed and improved. Indeed, the pandemic has underscored how far Portugal still is from being a country with a strong public infrastructure, not to mention a fair redistribution of wealth. These are, in great part, things that are possible for parliament to change, and that the president neither has, nor should have, the power to directly influence. But Ventura has known all along that his pledges across the campaign serve less as concrete offerings than as placeholders for the politics he aims to normalize.
Anti-Fascist Defense
Given the long-presaged result, these elections felt like a missed opportunity for the Left to put forward an unequivocally anti-capitalist, anti-establishment program — a program that came out against problems still looming large in Portuguese society and that Ventura exploits so often for his own gain. Chega’s focus on corruption and social inequality, much like its appropriation of racist bigotry and misogyny, have not been conjured out of thin air. These issues have thrived in Portuguese society long before he came along.
The importance of these presidential elections goes far beyond the democratic duty of voting. They need to bring to life a historic legacy of anti-fascism. Those who left us that legacy, those who fought the dictatorship that Ventura so often praises and who hailed the advent of democracy in 1974, put forward an idea of Portugal as a socialist country. So much so that the Constitution still states in its very opening that the purpose of the Portuguese state is to “make way for a socialist society, respecting the wishes of the Portuguese people, taking into account the building of a freer, fairer, and more fraternal country.”
The vision our revolutionary forebearers laid out of socialism and prosperity, freedom and solidarity, needs to swiftly be reinjected into the messaging of the Portuguese left. It may be too late for the presidential candidates to reap the benefits of this shift, but it’s never too late if we are to truly end fascism.
Brad Cornell, a policy associate for Audubon of the Western Everglades and Audubon Florida, left, and Christian Spilker, right, discuss the conservation easements that would be associated with the development in Collier County on Jan. 20, 2020. (photo: Alex Driehaus/Naples Daily News/USA Today)
Money and Politics Could Doom the Florida Panther - and the Endangered Species Act
Jimmy Tobias, The Intercept
Tobias writes: "Florida's state animal has been listed under the Endangered Species Act since the law's inception in 1973."
lorida’s Collier County is a place of conflict and contradiction. Its southeastern flank features sprawling public landscapes like Big Cypress National Preserve, that wild redoubt of rare orchids and alligator wallows. Its western edge is home to some of the state’s most valuable real estate, including Naples, a city of wealthy snowbirds who descend in droves down Interstate Highway 75 each winter. Elsewhere in the county, a booming population and frenzied development clash constantly with beleaguered remnants of the region’s flora and fauna — and especially with the endangered Florida panther, an iconic predator beset by existential threats. Collier County is the panther’s last best refuge. But it’s a panther killing ground, too, and it’s getting more deadly by the day.
Florida’s state animal has been listed under the Endangered Species Act since the law’s inception in 1973. The panther was once so scarce that some thought it gone altogether. When scientists discovered survivors in the 1970s and 80s, the cats were withered and gaunt. They were so inbred that they had crooked tails and faulty hearts. Some adult males even had undescended testicles. Their population had dwindled to a couple dozen hidden away in hot Florida forests.
At the time, the Florida panther was “just hanging on by a thread,” said Deborah Jansen, a National Park Service wildlife biologist who has spent decades wandering the backwoods of Big Cypress.
Jansen, who has blue eyes and a bright, tanned face, played a storied role in bringing the panther back from extinction’s edge — she tracked them, studied them, and helped save them. She even once gave CPR to a dying panther. Last winter, Jansen and I met up at Big Cypress headquarters, hopped in her truck, and headed north toward a trail that would take us into the heart of the national preserve. During the drive, Jansen reflected on the panther’s recent history: Roughly 40 years ago, scientists began studying the panthers in earnest to determine the cause of their decline. In 1995, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the country’s famed conservation agency, introduced eight pumas from Texas into the Florida panther population to fortify its failing genes. In the 2000s, the panthers’ numbers climbed and stabilized. Jansen was there through it all.
All that effort, however, has failed to fully safeguard the panther’s future. Now incessant development is devouring the big cats’ habitat. And bustling Florida traffic often leaves them dead and bleeding by the side of the road. “It is horrendous,” Jansen said. “In fact,” she added, remarking on the roadkill, “it just came up today that they picked up two more dead panthers.”
Jansen is now watching with alarm as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, or FWS, appears ready to permit a plan that would allow some of Collier County’s largest private landowners to pursue a string of new developments in panther habitat. Among the developers is the county’s namesake, the Collier family, members of which gave millions of dollars to President Donald Trump’s reelection bid, the Republican Party, and associated PACs.
For many years now, the Collier family companies and other local landowners have sought to bring new residential communities, roads, commercial real estate, and more to northeastern Collier County, just north of Big Cypress. Jansen and other conservationists fear such development could seriously damage panther habitat, close off suitable range in the north, and bring a flood of new cars to the area. Some even say it could shove the animal toward extinction. But FWS, which is responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act and protecting the panther, doesn’t appear poised to stop the projects.
A yearlong investigation by The Intercept and Type Investigations examined the forces at play in the development and FWS’s role in reviewing and permitting them. Hundreds of public records and dozens of interviews show that as they work to get federal approval for a plan that would pave the way for their developments, the Collier County landowners have hired a phalanx of Washington lawyers and enjoyed access to top appointees at FWS as well as its parent agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior. The records and interviews paint a picture of a politicized FWS that is struggling to uphold the Endangered Species Act amid a growing global extinction crisis.
For years now, FWS has declined to fully employ the law’s most powerful provisions. In the case of the Collier County developers, FWS even accepted money for staffing costs from a private entity — one called Eastern Collier Property Owners, or ECPO, and comprised of companies owned by the Collier family and other local landowners — whose permit application the agency is currently evaluating. This type of financial arrangement is troubling and could potentially create the appearance of conflicts of interest, according to government watchdog groups and Endangered Species Act experts. It is also a symptom of long-term deterioration within FWS, which has been beaten down by years of political attacks and starved budgets. All the while, animals like the panther remain in peril.
FWS released its most recent recovery plan for the Florida panther in 2008, which was intended to guide agency management of the endangered species. The plan stated that in order for the panther to be removed from the endangered species list, three separate populations of 240 individuals each must be established. Yet the panther population hasn’t come close to those numbers. There is currently only one population, and Jansen estimates that there are just 150 individuals in it. Despite the recovery plan’s unmet objectives, FWS continues to sanction development in panther habitat.
“I don’t think there is any way we are going to stop the development,” Jansen said, lamenting the threat to the panther.
Last winter, Jansen and I went to the woods together to try to see the big cats. With a sizzling sky overhead, we arrived at the edge of the Big Cypress backcountry, where she unloaded her swamp buggy, a hulking green contraption with huge black tires hitched to a trailer behind her truck. She clambered aboard the machine and invited me on. Together we bounced into the forest to find a Florida panther.
Head east out of Naples, past subdivisions and strip malls, and you’ll eventually edge into farm country, where workers from nearby Immokalee pick tomatoes in hot humid fields. Many of the fields belong to rich and powerful landowners, among them Collier Enterprises and Barron Collier Companies, both affiliated with the Collier family. The family’s forebear, Barron Collier, bought up more than a million acres in southwest Florida in the early 20th century after amassing a fortune in streetcar advertising.
This region has a violent history, according to Michael Grunwald’s book “The Swamp.” The U.S. Army waged war on Indigenous populations in the area, a Seminole stronghold, for decades. It was also a scene of shocking corruption when the state government engineered a massive bribe-fueled “land-grabbing frenzy,” as Grunwald calls it, after the Civil War, handing out swamp and forest to speculators and land companies.
The county’s northeastern lands, much of which is important Florida panther habitat, are where ECPO hopes to get federal approval for a plan that would allow them to turn as many as 45,000 acres of farm and forest into residential communities, new roads, and some mining sites.
In pursuit of that goal, the Collier County property owners submitted to FWS a so-called habitat conservation plan, also known as an HCP — part of an application that, if approved, would permit them to develop in panther habitat under the Endangered Species Act so long as they also implement conservation measures on their land. In general, such habitat conservation plans are meant to allow for development while encouraging large-scale land planning and limiting damage to imperiled wildlife. If a private entity’s application meets federal standards, it can receive a government permit that grants it limited immunity under the Endangered Species Act should it unintentionally harm or kill endangered species in the course of its commercial activities.
The plan ECPO developed, though controversial, also has potential environmental benefits. In addition to designating large tracts for intensive development, the property owners’ plan would put up to 107,000 acres of ranch, farm, and forest into conservation easements and protect them in perpetuity. The plan also promises to fund ecological restoration and species protection programs, including the creation of road crossings for panthers and other wildlife.
Christian Spilker, vice president of Collier Enterprises, one of the leading companies involved in ECPO, said the landowners’ plan is a good deal given local development pressures. “We think this is an awfully big public benefit to set aside 107,000 acres of private land for all those benefits, offset by 45,000 acres of development,” he said.
The day after I met Jansen, Spilker took me on a tour of lands that fall within the habitat conservation plan and showed me a farm field that he said would be the site of one of Collier Enterprises’s proposed residential villages. By and large, he said, “this is not preferred habitat” for panthers. While Spilker is technically correct that the field itself does not constitute a panther breeding habitat, said Bob Frakes, a former FWS ecologist, panthers “still use it. They will cross through it.” Frakes added, “Their home ranges are many square miles.”
The ECPO proposal is actually good for the panther, Spilker asserted, because development in the area is inevitable, and at least the landowners’ plan will provide “real time preservation and advanced protections that would not occur otherwise.”
“We are the path for those protections,” he said. “There is no other viable path.”
Conservation groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Conservancy of Southwest Florida ardently dispute Spilker’s claim that the Collier plan would be good for panthers, arguing that science shows it would actually put the animal in serious peril.
Two peer-reviewed studies, one from 2006 and another from 2015, found that maintaining existing core habitat in South Florida is critical to sustain a viable panther population. Nevertheless, FWS has let developers wipe out tens of thousands of acres of panther habitat in recent decades, as the journalist Craig Pittman details in his book “Cat Tale.” And now, according to the 2015 paper, published by Frakes and his colleagues, the Florida panther is restricted to 5 percent of its historic range with just one breeding population. The paper also found that in order for the panther to survive, “all remaining breeding habitat in south Florida should be maintained.”
A recent analysis found that the plan, if it comes to full fruition, would cause the direct loss of at least 16,880 acres of adult panther breeding habitat.
But the proposed ECPO development footprint overlaps with as many as 45,000 acres of primary and secondary panther habitat, according to maps included in the habitat conservation plan. And a recent analysis conducted by Frakes on behalf of Florida conservationists found that the plan, if it comes to full fruition, would cause the direct loss of at least 16,880 acres of adult panther breeding habitat, nearly equivalent to the land area of Manhattan. Opponents of the ECPO plan say that the loss of this large quantity of breeding habitat could fatally undermine the subspecies’ chances for survival and recovery.
The ECPO plan poses other potential threats to the cats as well, including an influx of new residents and their automobiles. According to the plan’s conservationist opponents, the amount of development allowed under the plan could see nearly 300,000 new residents move into the area as well as 225,000 new vehicles. They contend that ensuing roadkill mortality could claim as many as 1,276 panthers over a 50-year period. These numbers were drawn in part from an analysis conducted for conservationists by Reed Noss, the former editor of the journal Conservation Biology and an expert on habitat conservation plans. Noss wrote that the ECPO plan suffers from “dangerous inadequacies,” including the absence of a scientifically valid analysis of the project’s roadkill impact. Already, roadway mortality is a leading cause of death for panthers — at least 17 died in roadside collisions in 2020.
ECPO, for its part, disputed the conservation groups’ traffic and roadkill analysis. The company claimed, in response to emailed questions, that “potential impacts to panthers and their prey base due to habitat fragmentation are largely avoided by the configuration of the HCP.”
The ECPO plan, it’s worth noting, does not stand alone. It comes alongside other development in the area, including a proposed state toll road that panther advocates oppose. Indeed, Collier County is a development hotspot and has been for some time. Barron Collier Companies has already built a small town called Ave Maria in the area.
All this has put endangered species and their conservationist defenders in a tight bind. Making matters worse is FWS’s weak enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.
The world is facing a biodiversity crisis that threatens to drain the planet’s gene pool. As many as 1 million species face extinction, some within coming decades, and hundreds of species domestic to the United States are at risk. But the U.S. benefits from one of the world’s strongest conservation laws: the Endangered Species Act, a powerful statute that has rarely been allowed to fulfill its true potential.
Though ECPO’s plan for Collier County applies to private property, it falls under the purview of the Endangered Species Act because of its likely impact on endangered species. Ultimately, the plan requires approval from FWS, and that approval hinges on a key provision of the act called Section 7.
Among other things, Section 7 enables FWS to block any federal action — including permitting decisions, infrastructure projects, and more — that is likely to jeopardize the survival and recovery of endangered species. In theory, it is a potent provision that allows FWS to stop a wide range of public and private development that harms wildlife. When the agency reviews a project and makes a “jeopardy determination,” in agency parlance, that project is supposed to stop in its tracks until it seriously reduces its impact on imperiled species.
The provision serves an important function amid the Earth’s current mass extinction event.
According to Dan Rohlf, an Endangered Species Act expert at Lewis & Clark Law School, “the prohibitions in Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act … are really the heart of the statute’s protections for threatened and endangered species.” Yet they are increasingly a dead letter.
Despite ample authority, FWS almost never calls jeopardy on anything.
Despite ample authority, FWS almost never calls jeopardy on anything, according to a 2015 analysis published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The analysis looked at more than 6,800 formal Section 7 reviews conducted by FWS between 2008 and mid-2015 and found that the agency only called jeopardy twice in that time. And even when it did, the study found that “no project was stopped or extensively altered as a result of FWS finding jeopardy.” That trend continued in the Trump years.
According to several experts on the Endangered Species Act and former Interior Department officials, FWS’s infrequent use of the jeopardy mechanism is in part a culmination of Reagan-era efforts to weaken the mechanism as well as inadequate political support for the federal agency among elected officials.
“FWS believes calling jeopardy is a failure and should be avoided at all costs,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, a conservation group that regularly sues FWS for failing to uphold the Endangered Species Act. “By never calling jeopardy,” he added, “the service undermines its own negotiating power and therefore undermines the conservation of the very species of wildlife and plants it is mandated to protect.” (In response to emailed questions, FWS wrote, “The Service works diligently with federal agencies and applicants to help ensure their proposed actions are not likely to jeopardize listed species or destroy or adversely modify critical habitat.”)
Now FWS is conducting a Section 7 review to determine whether the ECPO plan — with its proposed large-scale development, conservation measures, and associated federal permits — will jeopardize the survival of the Florida panther, among other endangered animals. A decision from the agency has been expected for months and could come at any time.
As FWS reviews the landowners’ plan, ECPO has made its presence felt in in Washington, D.C., where decisions from local and regional field offices are often sent for final approval.
In February 2020, according to Interior Department emails obtained through open records requests, lawyers for the Collier companies and other ECPO landowners approached top Interior appointees, including then-FWS Director Aurelia Skipwith. The business representatives asked for a meeting to discuss a key obstacle facing their habitat conservation plan: the surge of new automobile traffic that will likely accompany new development within the plan area, which could devastate panthers. According to the email exchanges, ECPO and their lawyers encouraged FWS to take a very specific approach to its analysis of the conservation plan’s impact on panther roadkill.
“The issue concerns whether future, offsite collisions between Florida panthers and vehicles operated by third parties on state, county and local roadways should be attributed to” the approval of the habitat conservation plan and associated permits, wrote an attorney with the lobbying firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, which represents the landowners, in an email to Skipwith and other appointees. “The answer, in our view, is no.” The next morning, the lawyer received a reply from Skipwith, who offered to “look into the matter.” Skipwith also put the lawyer in touch with her aide William Dove. “He will reach out so that we can reach a resolution,” Skipwith wrote the Hunton attorney. (A Collier Enterprises spokesperson said that ECPO representatives did not end up meeting with officials at the Department of the Interior headquarters, but that they did discuss the issue with the FWS regional office instead.)
A few months later, in July, the Interior Department chose to include the Collier habitat conservation plan in a list of projects that were to be fast-tracked with “expedited” environmental review in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of a federal effort to spur economic development.
According to campaign finance records, the Collier family itself has engaged in major political giving in recent years. In February 2020 alone, two members of the family, whose donation records identify them as owners of Collier Enterprises, gave more than $1.4 million combined to the Republican National Committee, Trump’s campaign coffers, and a Trump-aligned PAC. (In response to emailed questions, an ECPO spokesperson wrote that “there is no connection whatsoever between personal contributions made by members of the Collier Family during an election year and events associated with ECPO’s decade-long pursuit of the HCP permits.”)
Winter 2020 was not the first time ECPO representatives had the ear of top federal officials, according records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Earlier in the Trump administration, ECPO’s lawyers circulated a legal memo to key FWS officials, arguing that the agency, in conducting its Section 7 review, should not treat “vehicle strikes of panthers” as “‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ effects” of its decision to permit their plan. There is “general sentiment that the decision how to address vehicle strikes could have national implications,” wrote a Hunton attorney in an April 2017 email to FWS’s Assistant Director for Endangered Species Gary Frazer.
The roadkill issue is key because, in the past, FWS officials in Florida have considered roadway collisions with panthers an indirect effect of development, as they did in 2018 when they published a Section 7 review of a proposed 625-unit residential development in Lee County. Should FWS find that the ECPO plan and the development it enables are associated with too much panther roadkill, it could trigger a jeopardy determination. ECPO lawyers appear to want the agency to abandon the view that roadkill impacts will be a direct or even an indirect effect of their plan in the hopes that such a change will make approval more likely.
In January 2018, meanwhile, Spilker, two Hunton lawyers, and a Barron Collier Companies executive met with then-Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt and top aides, according to agency records. (An ECPO spokesperson said that the meeting “was not related to the HCP nor was the HCP discussed.”)
ECPO’s contacts with FWS have not been limited to Washington. For years, their representatives have had regular meetings and calls with officials in FWS’s South Florida field office as well as its regional office in Atlanta. Hundreds of pages of emails, memos, and meeting agendas indicate a close relationship between the parties. For example, in a draft memo to FWS headquarters dated June 2020, Leo Miranda, the director of the agency’s southeastern region, described the close working relationship with ECPO, writing that since April 2018, FWS officials have “met continuously with ECPO every other week to review progress, settle issues, and exchange information to advance our review.”
In a 2019 memo, meanwhile, FWS officials in Atlanta hinted at forthcoming approval of the habitat conservation plan. “We anticipate litigation to follow the final decision,” the officials wrote. “We need to make sure all documents and the administrative record are as defensible as possible to minimize risk to the applicant (most importantly) and the Service.” While contact between an applicant and FWS during the development of a habitat conservation plan is not necessarily unusual, these and other communications from public records requests show, at times, notable deference on the part of the agency.
In response to emailed questions about these communications, FWS said that during the conservation plan application process, “we work with the applicant one on one. This is true for all applicants whether they be individuals, corporations or private landowners.”
ECPO’s interactions with the FWS have also included large direct payments. The arrangement amounts to a situation where the landowners paid for staff positions at the agency that will decide the fate of their plan for eastern Collier County — an arrangement that reflects, among other things, FWS’s perennial lack of funding, according to experts.
A memorandum of agreement signed by the agency and ECPO in June 2016 stipulates that the landowners would pay FWS more than $200,000 to fund the agency’s normal operations while it dedicated “staff away from those duties to facilitate the development and review” of the conservation plan and associated permits. FWS ultimately invoiced Collier Enterprises for at least $292,000 for that purpose, according to documents obtained through FOIA requests. Two FWS staff members assigned to work with ECPO to craft their habitat conservation plan would later go on to help lead the Section 7 evaluation of the plan’s impact on panthers.
In late September 2018, FWS sent Spilker two invoices for staffing that totaled more than $115,000, according to billing records. A month later, an FWS official wrote an email to Spilker and a Barron Collier Companies executive with the subject line “Got $,” according to the public records. The official wrote: “Gents, THANKS for your help getting the checks to the RO” — the regional office. In response, the Barron Collier Companies executive wrote back, “Keep Chuck going…” — an apparent reference to one of the FWS staffers who was assigned to help the companies with their conservation plan and later ended up working on the Section 7 evaluation. (In the public records obtained by Type Investigations and The Intercept, the 2018 invoices and email were the latest documents referencing the financial relationship between the developers and FWS.)
FWS declined to comment on the arrangement. An ECPO spokesperson wrote that its “financial assistance … is helping to offset the government’s staffing costs for the required processes, reviews, and reports — period. Any intimation to the contrary is baseless and explicitly incorrect.”
Kevin Bell, staff counsel at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, called the arrangement “corrosive” to public service. “It is pretty rare to see a property developer cheer on regulatory staff by name, but then it’s also pretty rare that the federal government puts employees performing environmental reviews up for auction,” Bell said. “It isn’t hard to guess how that review will come out when the McMansion lobby is literally paying their salary.”
“The last thing in the world the agency should be doing is giving the public the perception that it has been bought.”
“It stinks,” said Pat Parenteau, an environmental law professor at Vermont Law School. “The last thing in the world the agency should be doing is giving the public the perception that it has been bought.” He said the Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General should investigate the matter.
Spilker readily admits that the landowner coalition has advocated for itself in Washington. “It is part of the process,” he said. For all of ECPO’s de facto lobbying, however, he believes the landowners’ conservation and development plan deserves approval on its merits alone.
“If you think that things aren’t going to move in the direction of development in Florida, you are fooling yourself,” he told me as he drove past sprawling Collier County ranchlands. “And if you can help guide and direct the development into appropriate locations and have big public benefits as offsets, that is a much better way to do it than the piecemeal approach.” Spilker hopes FWS takes this approach in its evaluation, he said after taking me past a hidden panther den. “We will see what they decide.”
Paula Halupa, who worked as a biologist at the South Florida FWS office for nearly 20 years until her recent retirement, believes the agency should call jeopardy.
It is not a habitat conservation plan, she said in an interview. It is “a habitat loss plan.”
Her husband, Bob Frakes, the former FWS scientist who conducted key research on the panther in 2015, is also against the habitat conservation plan. They say they both oppose the ECPO plan because they believe the best available science — that panthers can’t afford any more core habitat loss. They are also worried about all those new automobiles on South Florida roads.
“It is like the worst possible place you could put a project like that,” Halupa said. “It is in the primary zone of the panther, and it is all these people, all these cars, everything.”
Some conservationists have different views of the habitat conservation plan, among them Defenders of Wildlife, which supports the process. According to Elizabeth Fleming, the group’s Florida representative, “There are parts of the HCP that we would like to see improved, but there is a lot of good to it also.” She cited especially the 107,000 acres that would be preserved. Two local Audubon Society chapters, which cumulatively received $45,000 from a Collier family foundation in 2017 and 2018, also support the plan. (Audubon Florida Executive Director Julie Wraithmell said that the Collier foundation is one of the group’s many donors and its donations did not affect Audubon’s decision to back the ECPO project.)
Other conservation organizations, meanwhile, are desperate to stop the ECPO habitat conservation plan, chief among them the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, based in Naples. It has campaigned to block the plan, pressing FWS to call jeopardy. The Conservancy hired scientists, including Frakes and Noss, the editor and expert on habitat conservation plans, to put together reports analyzing what they say are flaws in the landowners’ plan. The group is concerned that the 107,000 acres the plan sets aside for preservation will actually be left open to oil and gas drilling, as well as other commercial activities, which the conservation plan indicates is a possibility.
There is also some tribal opposition to the plan: Public records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida submitted a letter to FWS in 2019 urging the agency to deny ECPO’s plan. According to the agency’s summary of the letter, the Miccosukee said that the plan, among other concerns, “violates tribal rights under federal law” and “the panther and other wildlife would lose habitat, connections to other wildlife populations, and become subject to greater human conflict.”
Few observers think the agency will ultimately call jeopardy. “They could announce that they are going to build a nuclear weapons test site in the middle of panther habitat, and the Fish and Wildlife Service would find some way to approve it,” said Frakes.
Numerous FWS retirees and outside observers interviewed for this story believe political interests influence the agency’s scientific decisions. And FWS has been underfunded for decades, according to experts.
“It is a very demoralized agency,” said U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, whose late husband John was an author of the Endangered Species Act. “Professionals [work for FWS] because they love the outdoors, and they want to protect our natural resources,” she observed. “Not only are they not appreciated, their budgets are being cut, they are being undermined when they make recommendations based on science.”
The last four years were particularly hard on the agency. The Trump administration weakened the Endangered Species Act with regulatory rollbacks. It removed protections from imperiled wildlife. As for Section 7, the administration sought to stymie proposed jeopardy decisions that stand in the way of big commercial interests, as it did in California in 2019.
The enforcement “teeth” of the Endangered Species Act have been ground down to “just a bunch of nubs.”
All this adds up to a sorry situation, according to Don Barry, a former Interior Department official who helped shape its endangered species program while serving in four different administrations in the late 20th century. The enforcement “teeth” of the Endangered Species Act, he said, have been ground down to “just a bunch of nubs.” (FWS did not respond to requests for comment on critics’ claims that the agency has weakened its overall enforcement of the Endangered Species Act.)
The Florida panther is a lens on these trends. Flattened by motorists, beset by genetic problems, threatened by a disturbing new neurological affliction, and hemmed in by development, the panthers need a strong FWS and a strong Endangered Species Act. But that’s not the reality right now.
Halupa, the former FWS official in Florida, gets emotional recounting the many times she saw front-line FWS biologists try to call jeopardy on harmful projects in panther habitat, only to be overruled by supervisors. She described an agency culture that puts political considerations over conservation imperatives — and silences dissenters.
“The ESA is such a powerful act,” she said, between tears. “But the Fish and Wildlife Service makes it weak, purposefully makes it weak.”
Jansen and I drove for hours around the Big Cypress backcountry, our eyes peeled for predators. We passed through a landscape of slash pine and cypress; we saw palmetto, dark marshes and dry uplands, wading ibis and lounging alligators, but no luck. The Florida panther is endangered, after all — a vanishing subspecies. We did discover plenty of panther tracks, however, and Jansen decided to make me a memento.
She pulled a bag of plaster and a jug of water out of the swamp buggy, mixed the ingredients in a bowl, and poured its contents into a depression in the dirt. She wanted to send me home with a plaster cast of a panther print.
Jansen’s favorite memories from her lifetime among panthers, she said, involve watching newborn kittens grown into mature adults, then die natural deaths — all without ever leaving Big Cypress.
“I am glad I’ve lived when I’ve lived,” she told me, “because I think we are in for some rough times.”
Between habitat loss, traffic mortality, declining deer herds, and other maladies, Jansen says she is “extremely concerned that we are going to have a really hard time keeping [the panther] as part of the ecosystem in Florida.”
The plaster dried quickly. Jansen pulled it from the ground and handed it over — a white slab etched with a panther print and dirt stuck between the toes. Someday down the road, that plaster print could be the sad relic of another wild animal future generations won’t get to see.
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