27 February 21
2 Days Left in February, We’re in Serious Trouble
The February funding-drive is nowhere close to where it should be and we are running out of time. We need a boost here any way we can get it, as soon as we can get it.
With significant urgency.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
26 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Bill McKibben | On Climate, Wall Street Out-Orwells Orwell
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes:
t was likely too much to hope that the Biden Administration, as it tries to get a handle on climate change, might find some help from Wall Street. Instead, last week, we saw financial heavyweights turn in a performance so rigid and so short-sighted that it makes one wonder whether capitalism in anything resembling its current form can, or should, survive.
The scene was a virtual forum organized by the Institute of International Finance, and the participants were the people running the world’s biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance companies. The backdrop was the heightened effort by activists in the past eighteen months to get them to stop loaning money to, buying the stocks of, and underwriting the expansion plans for the fossil-fuel industry. (Another backdrop was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth, a year that also saw the biggest wildfires and the most Atlantic hurricanes.) The Biden Administration has begun to make noises about supporting those activist efforts with new regulations at the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now the money men were saying, essentially, go to Hell. Not in the obvious, gloating way of the Texas gas exec who boasted last week of “hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.” Nothing quite so crude, yet far more ominous.
Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, warned against a “full divestiture” from fossil-fuel stocks, because it would be “greenwashing.” Not only is that statement contrary to his company’s own policies—BlackRock has made a conditional promise to divest from some coal-mining companies—it’s also a remarkably Orwellian use of an Orwellian idea. Greenwashing, in truth, is what Fink and his peers engage in when they announce their calls for Paris compliance or for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or the other dodges that, for the time being, allow them to keep lending vast sums of money to the fossil-fuel industry while insisting that they’re very worried.
Here, for instance, is Brian Moynihan, the C.E.O. of Bank of America, which is the world’s fourth-largest financier of fossil fuels, having handed the sector more than a hundred and fifty-six billion dollars last year: “We have to have a balanced, fair transition across the globe and realize it’s going to take time and investment and innovation. And that’s what capitalism brings.” Actually, what capitalism has helped bring during the past decades (besides incredible economic inequality) is a rise in the global average temperature of nearly two degrees Celsius, record lows for summer sea ice in the Arctic, and a jet stream so destabilized that, in mid February, Houston can be colder than Anchorage.
And now capitalism—or so the scientists tell us—does not have time. It has nine years to deliver a world in which emissions are cut in half; if it doesn’t, then the talk of “Paris” will be utterly meaningless, because the targets we set there just six years ago will be unachievable. These institutions, to play their part, would have to set aside only a small part of their business. (A hundred and fifty-six billion dollars is, stunningly, a small part of Bank of America’s business—but a rant about the concentration of economic power will have to wait for another day). But they are, simply put, too greedy to do that. I suppose a politer way of saying it would be that they are too invested in their current business model. Forget about reading the room (though one hopes that they’re underestimating Biden’s moxie); they’re not reading the planet.
Two things will happen. One, peaceful protesters—eventually set free by vaccines—will turn their full attention to these institutions. (Full disclosure: one of my last trips before the coronavirus lockdown was to jail, last January, for sitting down in the lobby of a Chase Bank branch to protest the bank’s position as the fossil-fuel industry’s largest lender). Two, political pressure will mount on the Biden Administration to prod these institutions before they do more damage—they’d like to move slowly, but Washington must force them to go fast. Because nine years is not long. It is, more or less, two Presidential terms.
We have to move fast because the fossil-fuel industry mounted a huge campaign of deception and denial, which long paralyzed our political system. (Politicians beholden to those companies are still engaged in that campaign, as the blizzard of misinformation about wind power coming out of Texas last week made clear.) Last week, Michael Ryan, who has headed up the COVID-19 effort for the World Health Organization, got an award from Trócaire, a charitable agency of the Irish Catholic Church that, among other things, led a successful effort to divest that nation’s public accounts from fossil fuels. Ryan talked about both the coronavirus and the climate, and he did so bluntly. “We are pushing nature to its limit. . . . We’re pushing communities to their limits. We’re stressing the environment,” he said. “And we’re doing it in the name of globalization and some sense of chasing that wonderful thing that people call economic growth. In my view, that’s becoming a malignancy.” The “we,” though, is not as broad as Ryan’s brogue. Much of the “we” doing the damage works on Wall Street.
“We’re writing checks that we cannot cash,” Ryan said. That’s a metaphor, and also a fact.
Passing the Mic
Robin Chase is an entrepreneur who co-founded Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing operation. However, she spends much of her time on policy. Her book, “Peers Inc,” showed how we might build a sharing economy that benefits communities. In the wake of General Motors’ big announcement last month that it will go all electric by 2035, she is an important voice to hear from. (Our e-mail conversation has been edited for length.)
G.M.’s going to build nothing but electric cars and trucks. That seems like a big deal, but is it less of a triumph than one might assume?
I’d call it politically motivated, rather than triumphant. Before Joe Biden’s election, G.M. was at the forefront of industry calls for reducing the previously negotiated fuel-economy (CAFE) standards and used climate deniers to help them make the case. It also was one of a group of car companies to join the Trump Administration’s lawsuit to deny California its historical legal right to set its own (tighter) emissions requirements. But, just days after Biden’s victory became clear, G.M. dropped out of the lawsuit.
And can we ever forgive G.M. for turning the military Humvee into a consumer product—with its outsized footprint, weight, emissions, and inexcusable impact on the killing and maiming of people in crashes?
All that said, I was absolutely delighted to read about G.M.’s recent—and leading—announcement that it has targeted 2035 as the year by which it will have completed its transition to making and selling only electric vehicles. G.M. is the largest legacy car company to make such an early and complete commitment.
Are there ways to rethink what we actually need out of transportation, so that fewer people have their own cars? You’ve been touting something you’re calling the freedom network—explain.
The problem with a car-only solution is that it still has us manufacturing and moving a hundred-and-fifty-pound person in three thousand pounds of metal. Most commuter car trips in the U.S. are with the driver alone, according to a 2017 study, and nearly half of all car trips are three miles or shorter. It is crazily inefficient and expensive.
I’ve also been struck by the reality that, over the last hundred years, we’ve made it safer to cross the ocean than to cross the street. The vast majority of Americans do not have access to a bike lane or bike path.
No matter where we live or who we are, without a safe, low- (or no-) cost ability to get around, there is a very real sense of feeling trapped and dependent. I think it’s this visceral understanding of our loss of autonomy that is one of the reasons people get so angry and adamant about proposed changes to the gas tax, parking, bike and bus lanes, or transit improvements.
We’ve got to build more resilience and choice back into our transportation network. I’m down with vehicle electrification, more transit, and, some day, autonomous vehicles, but we’ve totally lost sight of the necessity of enabling basic freedom of movement. For this, we need a freedom network, a no-/low-cost network of walking and biking—sidewalks, trails, lanes—that connects us to essential services, and to have as a goal development patterns where people can live in places where daily needs are all within walking and biking distance.
Car dependency, electric or not, delivers congestion, exclusion, and an enormous drain on household budgets.
Where do you travel around the world that seems to be getting it right? Describe what mobility is like in that place.
There are the big European cities, such as London, Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona, that have been steadily creating more parity in the ways you get around. It is safe to walk and bike; there is high-quality and ubiquitous transit; and travel by car is possible, though expensive.
I’d also like to give a shout-out to Bogotá—which is well known in some circles for its biking and transit infrastructure—as well as Vancouver.
My personal favorite is the whole of the Netherlands, where they’ve spent the last fifty years building out this freedom network. Yes, it is flat, but the wind can make you feel like you are on a steep hill. Two images that really stuck with me on my last trip: being passed in the city by an elderly woman on her electric bike, and watching the joy of a pack of kids racing on a paved trail through the woods after school had been let out, backpacks and soccer balls in their bike baskets.
Climate School
Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, is under fire from many quarters right now—including from state legislators who have figured out that two paragraphs buried in his four-thousand-page budget would bail out developers, by helping to gut New York City’s landmark new law that requires retrofits to increase energy efficiency in large buildings. Pete Sikora, of New York Communities for Change, which lobbied for the original law, said, “Now that experts have analyzed it in detail, it’s very clear that our worst fears are being realized, and that this proposed language would destroy the country’s best climate and jobs law.”
For a full understanding of the ongoing Texas mess, I highly recommend Naomi Klein’s account in the Times. “Of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas.”
Department of Foreseen Consequences: It would obviously be a bad idea to extract and burn oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, because we already have too much carbon in the atmosphere. A new analysis makes it clear that the plan to allow that, which Donald Trump set into motion in his final days in office, with the sale of gas and oil leases, would be doubly bad: by disrupting caribou migration through the area, drilling operations would remove the grazing pressure that scientists believe helps to sustain the permafrost. Without the munching herds of ungulates, shrubs would start to dominate the landscape. As Oswald J. Schmitz explains in Yale Environment 360, “Taller shrubs rise above the snowpack and can cause earlier snowmelt as well as summer permafrost thawing by changing the surface albedo in ways that make the tundra more conducive to absorbing rather than reflecting heat from the sun. A thawing permafrost in turn re-animates microbial decomposition of organic matter.”
The law professor Clemens Kaupa, writing in a European journal, calls for a total ban on all fossil-fuel advertising. “The enforcement of the prohibition against deception is very unsatisfactory,” he argues. “While science and politics agree that fossil fuels should be phased out as soon as possible, the fossil fuel companies are free to promote their destructive products and do so by misleading claims about climate and environment.”
Scoreboard
A new report from the Center for Western Priorities shows that, although Joe Biden, on his first day in office, moved to pause new leasing for drilling and mining on public lands, the oil industry is already sitting on millions of acres of idle land that it pays almost nothing for. “It is clear,” the report’s authors write, “that the leasing pause will not devastate the oil and gas industry, as the industry has stockpiled enough leases and approved drilling permits to continue drilling for years.”
Last week, the Reverend William Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign, and former Vice-President Al Gore, joined the fight against the proposed Byhalia Connection crude-oil pipeline, which would run through Memphis. “Building more fossil fuel pipelines is reckless and many proposed routes are racist,” Gore—a Tennessee native—tweeted. “I stand with those opposing the Keystone, DAPL, MVP, Line 3, and Byhalia pipelines.”
Despite the gas industry’s full-on campaign against measures that would ban natural gas in new construction, a recent poll finds that “the public is split on whether they would back” such measures in their own communities—forty-four per cent of the respondents supported the idea and thirty-seven per cent opposed it.
The fossil-fuel divestment beat rolls on at colleges around the world. Last week, Pembroke College, Cambridge—home, in different eras, to William Pitt the Younger and Eric Idle—committed to making “all reasonable efforts” to divest fully from fossil fuels in two years. And the University of Southern California—home, in different eras, to Neil Armstrong and Rob Kardashian—will no longer invest in fossil fuels and, in the coming years, will liquidate its existing fossil-fuel holdings.
Attempts to account for the effect of the coronavirus shutdown on the atmosphere continue: a new study shows that air pollution from factories temporarily dropped across some of the planet’s industrial belts, and this exerted a short-term warming effect, since smog usually blocks some of the sun’s rays. This warming will continue, as anti-pollution efforts in places such as China continue, but, in temperature terms, those efforts are nonetheless a good idea. “I guess I would call this nature’s modest ‘tax’ on our efforts to reduce carbon pollution,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, explained. “Just as the paying of income tax doesn’t offset the economic advantage of having a job, the warming effect of reduced aerosols doesn’t offset the cooling effect of reducing the burning of coal and other fossil fuels.”
Warming Up
Last week’s discussion of proposed tests of geoengineering technology in the skies above Sweden—tests opposed by, among others, native Sámi activists—got me thinking about the great Sámi singer Sofia Jannok, who was born and raised in the region called Sápmi. This video showcases not only her remarkable voice but also some beautiful winter scenery.
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Graeme Jennings/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Bernie Sanders Won't Give Up on $15 Minimum Wage,
'We Are Going to Deal With This'
Bernie Sanders Says Democrats Will Devise a Backdoor to Implement a $15 Minimum Wage After Setback
Kelsey Vlamis and Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider
en. Bernie Sanders said Democrats would try to devise a backdoor to implement a $15 minimum wage after a pay hike was struck from the $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Thursday evening — a major setback for progressives.
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled that a $15 minimum wage violated the strict guidelines of the reconciliation process. It's the legislative method Democrats are using to approve the package in a party-line vote without Republican support.
In a statement, Sanders criticized McDonough's decision. "It is hard for me to understand how drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was compliant with the Byrd rule, but raising the minimum wage is not," the Vermont Democrat said, referring to a part of the 2017 GOP tax law allowed through reconciliation.
Then he said he will work with other Senate Democrats on "an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that don't pay workers at least $15 an hour and to provide small businesses with the incentives they need to raise wages."
There were early signs of Democratic support for the move on Thursday evening. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted "COUNT ME IN" on the Sanders proposal.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, also said in a statement: "I'm looking at a tax penalty for mega-corporations that refuse to pay a living wage."
Democrats are rushing to approve the emergency spending package ahead of March 14, the deadline when enhanced unemployment insurance starts to expire. The House is set to vote on the relief package, which contains a gradual wage increase to $15 an hour among other provisions like stimulus checks, unemployment aid, and vaccine funds.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the pay bump would remain in the legislation.
"House Democrats believe that the minimum-wage hike is necessary," Pelosi said in a statement. "Therefore this provision will remain in the American Rescue Plan on the floor tomorrow."
Yet designing and gathering support for a new plan to raise wages could complicate the swift timeline Democrats are pursuing. Some centrist Democrats may be reluctant to increase taxes on businesses during the economic downturn.
It's unclear whether the proposal would be supported by Sen. Joe Manchin, a key West Virginia Democrat. The Sanders provision would also have to clear a set of rules governed by the parliamentarian.
Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage since 2009, and it stands at $7.25 an hour. Experts say hourly workers have borne a disproportionate burden of the pandemic, suffering large job losses in the service and leisure sectors of the economy in particular.
"Workers of color, women, and younger workers are overrepresented in minimum wage jobs," Elizabeth Pancotti, policy director of Employ America, said in a recent interview. "Politically, we've forgotten about these workers in the past ten years and in the covid crisis. We didn't implement hazard pay, mandatory paid sick leave, or a lot of policies for workers who are still at work."
Workers demonstrate for $15 minimum wage. (photo: Getty)
McDonald's Secretive Intel Team Spies on 'Fight for $15' Workers, Internal Documents Show
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
McDonald’s collects ‘strategic intelligence’ on workers advocating for a $15 minimum wage, including ‘how and where will FF$15 attack the brand.’
or years, McDonald's has internally labeled activists and employees working with the Fight for $15 campaign a security threat and has spied on them, Motherboard has learned. McDonald's says that this work is designed to identify protests that "could put crew and customer safety at risk."
The fast food giant's secretive intelligence unit has monitored its own workers’ activities with the movement, which seeks to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour, including by using social media monitoring tools, according to two sources who worked at McDonald's who had direct knowledge of the surveillance and leaked documents that explain the surveillance strategy and tactics. A team of intelligence analysts in the Chicago and London offices keep an eye on the activities of Fight for $15 labor organizers across the world, figure out which McDonald's workers are active in the movement, and who they are working with to organize strikes, protests, or attempt to form unions.
No McDonald's workers are currently unionized, but many of them are politically involved with Fight for $15, which has organized fast food worker strikes and protests since 2012 and is affiliated with one of the country's largest unions. To date, McDonald's has refused to bargain with workers who the company says aren't its employees because they work for franchises.
The surveillance is particularly notable given the current political battle being fought over a $15 minimum wage, which has been proposed in Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package. An increase in the minimum wage is broadly popular nationally with both Republican and Democratic voters (and two-thirds of Americans support raising it to $15), but the proposal has become a sticking point in the stimulus legislation: West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin—a critical vote in the Senate—has said he does not favor a $15 minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for more than 10 years.
Specifically, McDonald's was worried about tracking workers who may be involved in activist groups advocating for higher wages, better working conditions, and the right to join unions, such as Fight for $15 campaign and its financer the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second largest labor union in the United States.
According to documents obtained by Motherboard, McDonald’s has a goal of collecting "strategic intelligence" on "counter-parties" as well as "political intelligence on difficult political landscapes in complex markets that could cause significant business disruption and impact returns on investment."
One of the stated goals of the intelligence team is to figure out "how and where will FF$15 attack the brand," according to an internal McDonald's document obtained by Motherboard. Other questions the team was investigating include: "What risk scenarios will manifest in 2021 and put pain on McDonald’s?" and "How is the FF$15 executing its 2020 objectives? … what new tactics and strategies are not part of the FF$15’s 2020 objectives?"
One of the documents seen by Motherboard, a report on "Ongoing FF$15 Activity Against McDonald's During the COVID-19 Crisis" contains a series of bullet points where the company's intelligence analyst recap labor activists' activities, down to the number of in-person and "virtual" protests.
"Protesters have gathered in parking lots, placed signs on their cars while passing through parking lots and drive-thrus, blocked traffic, and parked billboard trucks with FF$15 messaging outside [McDonald's HQ] and restaurant locations," the document reads.
"There has been little to no notice ahead of protest events, with strike letters often being sent on the day of the event or even while the event is taking place," the report concludes. It also notes in its list of activity "against McDonald's" that the "ACLU launched an advocacy campaign pressuring McDonald's to provide paid sick leave for all of its employees."
Fight for $15 has successfully lobbied for $15 minimum wage laws in several states, including in Florida in November's election, where it passed with more than 60 percent support from voters. Cofounded by and largely made up of McDonald's workers, the campaign has become one of the most recognizable among labor organizing groups in the world. Its activism has helped lead directly to today, where there is a very real chance that Congress passes a $15 federal minimum wage.
Two former McDonald's corporate employees, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation from the company, described details of the intelligence program against labor organizers.
"The entire thing was messed up," one of the former employees said. "A company should be working with employees and the people that drive the business, not building an intelligence program directed at reporting on those same people."
As part of this program, since at least last year, McDonald's has used its internal analysts and two different pieces of data collection software, according to internal strategy documents obtained by Motherboard. McDonald's intelligence analysts have used a social media monitoring tool to collect and scrape data openly available online and to help it monitor social media accounts. The sources told Motherboard that the company's intelligence analysts have attempted to use the tool to reconstruct the friends lists and networks of workers involved in the labor movement using fake Facebook personas, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the efforts.
"The idea was to figure out their strategy, counter it, and find out where the key players are, and who they know," a former McDonald's corporate employee told Motherboard.
McDonald's denies this specific aspect of the program. McDonald's "has never used fake social media accounts to actively gather information, including labor activity," McDonald's spokesperson Jesse Lewin said.
"This story is laden with false information, pulling together disparate pieces of information to build a sensationalist narrative that is inaccurate and misleading," Lewin said. "Moreover, McDonald’s does not tolerate retaliation of any kind. To be clear, none of the business intelligence work is related to labor relations. To suggest otherwise is entirely false."
However, Lewin said that McDonald's does have a team "focused on identifying any potential safety threats that could pose harm to our crew, franchisees, and customers in the nearly 40,000 communities globally in which we operate."
"For example, we have a responsibility to monitor for labor protest activity that may have the intended purpose to disrupt restaurant operations that could put crew and customer safety at risk," Lewin said. "This is not unusual for a large multinational corporation like ours."
Surveillance of labor movements and organizing is often couched in the language of "safety." Last year, secret internal documents from Amazon obtained by Motherboard showed that it was surveilling labor movements and environmental groups "to help keep our employees, buildings, and inventory safe."
The intelligence team's surveillance efforts also included keeping an eye on the public social media accounts—including using Google Alerts—of prominent labor movement leaders such as David Rolf, a long-time labor movement activist, Mary Kay Henry, the president of the SEIU, and Rev. William Barber II, the founder of Moral Mondays and the Poor People's Campaign, grass-roots movements for racial and economic justice, and a pastor at the Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The alerts also included keywords such as "wage theft," "low pay is not ok," and "fissured workplace," according to a document seen by Motherboard.
Lewin, the McDonald's spokesperson, said that "it’s hardly notable that McDonald’s reads publicly available news and information relevant to our industry and business."
The workers who have been protesting were surprised to find out how the company has been tracking Fight for $15.
"It's a shame that instead of listening to workers' demands about what we need to stay safe on the job and support our families, McDonald's is spending its time and resources trying to undermine our voices," Gloria Muchaca, a McDonald's worker and a leader of the Fight for $15 movement in Houston, Texas, told Motherboard. "We're not afraid and this won't stop us. These desperate efforts by McDonald's only show the power of the movement that we've built over the past eight years."
Matthew Finkin, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law and a longtime labor law expert, said in an interview that surveilling workers is a tradition in the United States that goes back to the early 20th century with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Still, he said, spying on workers with the purpose of learning about their labor organizing, and even just creating the impression that there may be surveillance, is illegal and a violation of federal labor law, regardless of the result—retaliation or punishment, for example—of that surveillance.
"Surveillance for the purpose of determining union activity is a violation of federal labor law," Finkin said.
"It’s as outrageous now as it was a hundred years ago," Finkin added, referring to congressional investigations in the previous century and a long history of surveillance against labor organizers. "What’s new here is the deployment of technology."
Currently, no McDonald's employees are unionized, and McDonald's said that "All these teams use publicly available information, in full compliance with the law and with our own ethical standards."
The Fight for $15 campaign was born in 2012, when McDonald's workers in New York City walked off the job demanding a $15 hourly wage and the right to form a union without retaliation. The movement quickly spread across the United States, galvanizing thousands of fast food workers in more than 150 American cities to protest and strike. In 2014, thousands of protestors partially shut down McDonald's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, the largest protest against McDonald's in the company's history, and more than 100 people were arrested.
By many measures, the Fight for $15 has become the most successful labor movement in decades, getting higher minimum wage legislation passed in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland, and most recently in the 2020 general election, in Florida. Last year, during the COVID-19 pandemic, McDonald's workers from Chicago to Los Angeles to St. Louis went on strike, demanding protective gear and hazard pay. This year, the Biden administration is pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 as part of its COVID-19 stimulus package, and thousands of McDonald's workers in dozens of U.S. cities have already gone on strike to pressure the new administration.
Since its inception, McDonald's has publicly opposed the campaign's attempts to unionize workers and pay a $15 minimum wage. McDonalds has dedicated vast resources to paying lobbyists, top union avoidance lawyers, and its own staff to fight minimum wage increases proposed by the campaign.
The company has also not responded to requests that it sit down at the bargaining table with union organizers and workers. For years, one of the country's top anti-union law firms, Littler Mendelson, had a legal hotline that McDonald's franchise restaurant owners could call for advice on how to respond to protest actions at their stores. In 2014, according to a lawsuit, the Memphis police department said they received "authorization from the president of McDonald's" to arrest protesting McDonald's workers affiliated with Fight for $15. Fight For $15 and the city of Memphis settled the lawsuit a few months after it was filed in 2017. The Memphis Police Department denied any wrongdoing in 2014, but at the same time promised in the settlement to not spy on Fight for $15 activists without probable cause.
In 2016, a former McDonald's CEO blamed the Fight for $15 campaign for the implementation of automated pay kiosks at restaurants.
"When the Fight for $15 was still in its growth stage," then-CEO Ed Rensi wrote, "I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives."
McDonald's franchise model has made it uniquely difficult for its fast food workers to unionize because workers are forced to contend with both the owner of their specific restaurant, and McDonald's.
Several people within the intelligence team did not think that monitoring the labor movement was ethical, and some even doubted whether it was legal, according to the former employees.
"Times are changing," one of the former McDonald's corporate employees told Motherboard. "So why is a company like McDonald's not facing the reality of what the changing workforce is like, and how labor is not an outdated discussion and something that it shouldn't actively oppose?"
"I think what's frustrating is that McDonald’s—to put it very simply—is not putting their money where their mouth is," the former employee added. "They might say 'we support Black lives' or change a logo. But what is it doing structurally to help Black lives, and to show that they matter, not through PR, but through supporting workers?"
Demonstrators call for justice for Jamal Khashoggi. (photo: Ozan Kose/Getty)
Long Withheld Intelligence Report Finds Saudi Crown Prince Approved 2018 Killing of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi
Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post
DeYoung writes: "Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation that led to the brutal 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to a long-withheld U.S. intelligence report made public Friday."
The unclassified report, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), confirmed classified conclusions reached by the CIA just weeks after the killing of the dissident writer, a Virginia resident and contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
The two-page report said the intelligence community based its conclusions on the absolute control the crown prince, known as MBS, had over decision-making in the kingdom, his “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” and the participation in the operation of his senior aides and security officials.
It was not immediately clear what steps the administration will take to meet President Biden’s pledge of accountability for the crime. Lawmakers in both parties have variously suggested sanctions ranging from economic restrictions, to prohibitions against U.S. dealings with the 35-year-old crown prince, to criminal prosecution.
“I think there are a range of actions that are on the table,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday.
As part of his promise to “recalibrate” relations with Saudi Arabia, Biden has cited several issues, including Saudi human rights violations and political repression, the prosecution of the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the Khashoggi killing. He has already stopped the U.S. sale of offensive weapons used in the war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels and paused for review all other weapons purchases by the kingdom, the world’s largest customer for U.S. defense goods.
At the same time, Biden has called the Saudis important regional partners, saying the United States will continue counterterrorism cooperation and its assistance against regional threats, including Iran.
Future dealings with the crown prince — the heir to the crown now held by his 85-year-old father and already the country’s de facto leader — will be challenging. The White House delayed Biden’s initial call with King Salman until more than a month after the inauguration and made clear it did not want his son on the line.
Neither side mentioned whether the Khashoggi issue was discussed on the call, which took place Thursday.
Release of the report marks the end of a long process that began when Khashoggi, lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to pick up documents, was drugged and dismembered by Saudi agents. His remains have never been found.
The CIA, based in part on intercepts of text messages and telephone calls, along with an audio recording of the actual killing, quickly contradicted the Saudi government’s claims that the crown prince was not involved. After a classified briefing just weeks after Khashoggi’s death, lawmakers said the evidence was irrefutable.
“If the crown prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes,” then-Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters.
But President Donald Trump, who had also been briefed, continued to insist there were no firm conclusions, asking, “Well, will anybody really know?”
Although his administration imposed sanctions on 17 Saudi officials with alleged direct involvement in the killing itself, Trump insisted that the U.S. security alliance and massive Saudi purchases of U.S. weaponry were more important than holding the top Saudi leadership accountable.
“We do have an ally, and I want to stick with an ally that in many ways has been very good,” he told Fox News after hearing the intelligence evidence.
In early 2019, Congress demanded that the ODNI produce an unclassified report of U.S. intelligence conclusions, including names of involved Saudi officials at all levels, and passed legislation giving the administration 30 days to release it.
For the next two years, Trump ignored the law, while he and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the White House official in charge of the Saudi account, continued to develop a close relationships with Mohammed.
Saudi Arabia, while convicting 11 intelligence agents of the murder in a closed-door trial — with five death sentences later commuted to 20 years — avoided directly addressing the CIA findings and instead raised Trump’s skeptical public comments.
The crown prince, during a 2019 interview with “60 Minutes,” pointed out that the United States had never released “an official statement” implicating him. “There isn’t clear information or evidence that someone close to me did something,” he said.
Asked about the CIA finding, he said, “If there is any such information that charges me, I hope it is brought forward publicly.”
While bipartisan majorities voted to stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, they were unable to muster the votes necessary to override Trump’s veto. When further sales were up for approval by lawmakers, the administration bypassed Congress altogether and declared a national security emergency required delivery.
Last year, on the second anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder, Biden said that, as president, he would “reassess our relationship with the Kingdom, end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”
“Jamal’s death will not be in vain,” Biden said.
Asked during her confirmation hearing whether she would release the ODNI report, Avril Haines, now Biden’s national intelligence director, said yes and confirmed she would “follow the law.”
Officers stand guard as antifa protesters rally against threats from the far-right on January 20, in Columbus, Ohio. (photo: Jason Whitman/Getty)
The Right Is Using the Capitol Riot as a Trojan Horse to Target the Left
Branko Marcetic, In These Times
Marcetic writes: "Since January 6, Republicans across the country have introduced a slew of anti-protest bills."
n the wake of the January 6 pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, momentum has grown across the country to institute a new, domestic “war on terror.” In response, scores of civil rights organizations such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a group of progressive lawmakers including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D‑Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑N.Y.) have objected, cautioning that such an aggressive response could end up targeting activist groups and vulnerable communities.
The events since January 6 suggest that these warnings are all-too accurate.
Even as the FBI was leaking information to media outlets after the Capitol riot suggesting the possibility of imminent, armed pro-Trump actions across all 50 states, the agency was training its sights on the Left. On January 15, the Bureau, alongside state law enforcement, arrested 33-year-old military veteran and Tallahassee activist Daniel Baker, charging him with “using social media to recruit and train like-minded individuals in furtherance of his Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism Ideology.” The Bureau’s arrest of Baker was so aggressive that his blind, elderly landlord called the police out of fright.
As the FBI’s criminal complaint ultimately revealed, however, no such plot actually existed. Instead, the FBI had targeted Baker over a series of social media posts showing that, alarmed by the Capitol riot and the Bureau’s own leaks, he had urged fellow residents to take up arms and resist what he thought was a coming, armed far-right uprising. To make the case that Baker was a threat to peace and order, the FBI packed its court filing with references to various constitutionally protected activities: Baker’s involvement in last year’s protests against racism and police brutality, his use of various left-wing slogans and hyperbolic language criticizing cops.
Lawrence Keefe, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney who announced the arrest, made clear that the targeting of Baker was intended to send a message.
“Extremists intent on violence from either end of the political and social spectrums must be stopped, and they will be stopped,” Keefe said. Keefe — a political ally of Matt Gaetz, the right-wing Florida congressperson who has baselessly blamed Antifa for the Capitol riot — had vowed to go after the “shameless criminals” who stormed the Capitol. Now, he appears determined to lump left-wing activists into this group.
The case may well turn out to be the start of something much bigger.
Targeting protesters
The push to outlaw peaceful protests are gaining legislative steam around the country in the wake of the Capitol riot. According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, since January 6, 48 anti-protest bills have been introduced in 23 states, only four of which have been defeated so far. The vast majority of these bills have been authored and sponsored by Trump allies, including by many of the same people who pushed the very misinformation over the 2020 election results that led Trump supporters to storm the Capitol.
An Ohio bill, for instance, would force protesters who have committed vandalism or “aggravated riot” to pay law enforcement back for its response to a protest. In Georgia, legislation has been introduced which would ban protests on public property without a permit, while simultaneously making it much harder to get one. Meanwhile, an Arizona bill stipulates that being involved in a group of six or more people who threaten personal or property damage, obstruct government services, or disturb anyone’s enjoyment of a right, would be illegal as a “violent or disorderly assembly.” Along with outlining a number of new felonies, such as for using fireworks or defacing a monument while assembled, the bill also blocks anyone found guilty of such newly designated crimes from future government employment and benefits, including welfare.
The same day Daniel Baker was arrested, the FBI and New Jersey state police paid a visit to the Newark home of activist Zulu Sharod, an interaction he filmed and posted to social media. Sharod, also known as Shaka Zulu, is the founder of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, a group that has organized protests against a planned youth prison in Newark and the March, 2020 police killing of Daniel Prude in Rochester, New York.
Referencing a statement Sharod had made on Facebook disavowing a group of seven protesters who had been arrested for property damage at the protest over Prude’s death, the FBI agent told Sharod he “completely believe[d]” that “they don’t represent what you all represent.” Instead, he was asking for his help.
“What happened down at the Capitol was a lot of people who were probably along that same line of thinking that infiltrated some of the groups down there who were causing problems,” the agent tells Sharod in the video he uploaded, prompting Sharod to deny any involvement in the Capitol riot. “That’s all I wanna hear,” the agent replies.
“This was pure, unmitigated harassment,” Sharod now tells In These Times.
The FBI agent who questioned Sharod identified himself as special agent Michael Hooper, the same name and title as the author of a June 2020 court filing in the district of New Jersey that concerned the case of a Trenton man who set fire to a police car in the middle of a protest sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Sharod says this wasn’t the first time he’d been targeted by law enforcement. He recounts traveling to California in October 2019 to speak at three colleges, and being pulled out of line at airport security and searched for weapons and bomb material. He was on a watchlist, he says he was told, and that he could expect similar treatment every time he flew.
“And sure enough, on my way back from California, I had to go through the exact same treatment,” he says.
The FBI’s January 15 visit to Sharod isn’t an outlier, says Moira Meltzer-Cohen, a civil rights attorney with the National Lawyers Guild.
“Law enforcement is using the Capitol riot as hook to go after people they perceive as being on the Left,” Meltzer-Cohen says. “There has been a flurry of visits of people perceived by the government as leftists, leftist dissidents.”
One of Meltzer-Cohen’s clients, who didn’t want to reveal their name out of fear of reprisal, is part of a mutual aid organization that has distributed personal protective equipment and taught about firearm safety and laws. This client was visited twice by the FBI: once in December, and again in January after President Biden’s inauguration. The client describes the door-knock as a “good cop” and “bad cop” dynamic, with the first visit featuring the Bureau professing concern over a local fascist group’s threat to the client’s safety, and the second inquiring about their firearm-related work. According to the client, the FBI asked them not to tell anyone they had visited and, after an attorney was invoked, attempted to contact several of their family members and professional colleagues.
Dissent in the crosshairs
It’s not hard to imagine how any future domestic terror legislation would be used by law enforcement to suppress the Left, given the FBI’s long history of targeting so-called “black identity extremists” for protesting police brutality, while also harassing all kinds of civil rights groups and leaders, if not worse. Just look at the last year alone. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University, which tracks this data, 2020 saw the highest number of federal prosecutions classified as “domestic terrorism” in the 25 years since the U.S. government began keeping track, with 183 such cases—more than double that of 2019, and up 195 percent from just five years ago.
TRAC identifies the nationwide George Floyd protests over the summer of 2020 as the main driver of this surge, with the largest share (78) taking place in Oregon, whose largest city, Portland, eventually became the focal point of authoritarian attempts, backed by former President Donald Trump and his allies, to quash the protest movement.
“On many nights, after peaceful demonstrations end, violent agitators have physically attacked police officers and firefighters, damaged buildings, and repeatedly attempted to set public buildings on fire,” U.S. attorney for Oregon Billy J. Williams complained last year, pointing to protesters’ use of slingshots, shields and, as with the Capitol rioters, use of bear spray against officers.
According to TRAC, the most common charge for 2020’s domestic terrorism offenses was “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” officers, followed by “interstate communications,” the same charge currently being used to put Daniel Baker in prison over his social media activity. Ranked fifth is “civil disorders.”
A domestic “war on terror” of the kind being currently pushed in statehouses across the country could potentially lead to a lot more cases like that of Loren Reed, an indigenous Arizona man who has been charged under a federal arson law and is facing up to 10 years in prison over online comments made during the racial justice protests last year, in which he allegedly suggested he would burn down a local courthouse. Given the broad nature of terms like “civil disorder,” this new push to stamp out “domestic terrorism” could lead to overzealous officials targeting a wide swath of activities and people. Just look at the city of Olympia, Washington, whose mayor recently labelled an occupation of a hotel by a homelessness advocacy group “an act of domestic terrorism.”
While the rash of post-January 6 anti-protest legislation around the country would criminalize demonstrations across the political spectrum, it seems clear that, by and large, they are chiefly driven by concerns about protests from the Left. This is not just because of the similarity in language to the crop of anti-protest bills that emerged last year during the George Floyd protests, but because of the bills’ specific targeting of vandalism of government property, defacing of statues and monuments, use of fireworks, or “camping” in front of state capitols — clear references to activities carried out by left-wing groups in the recent past. Five of the proposed bills specifically target protests around oil and gas pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure.
A showdown in Florida
Florida is currently the epicenter of efforts to use the events of January 6 to stamp out dissent. Trump-backed Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to last year’s demonstrations against police brutality by pushing the “Combatting Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act” — what he called “anti-rioting, anti-looting legislation” — which the ACLU deemed “fundamentally hostile to American values.” The bill was so aggressive that even some of the state’s top law enforcement officials thought it was overkill. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, for example, said, “I can also see just some blanket categorical that would legitimately give people pause and give people concern where you wouldn’t just accept it as it’s proposed.” Despite DeSantis’ best efforts, by November 2020, the bill had stalled, and the Republican-controlled legislature declined the governor’s request for a special session to pass it. It later died in committee.
But the fallout from the Capitol riot appears to have changed things. DeSantis seized on the event, declaring that “it was totally unacceptable and those folks need to be held accountable, and it doesn’t matter what banner you’re flying under, the violence is wrong, the rioting and the disorder is wrong.” He quickly reintroduced the “anti-mob” legislation.
“I hope maybe now we’ll get even more support for my legislation because it’s something that needs to be done,” DeSantis said a day after the riot. DeSantis had previously appeared to side with the cause of the January 6 rioters, having called the ballot-counting process in Wisconsin “troubling” and later urging Republican legislators to send “faithless electors” to the Electoral College.
Among the Florida bill’s provisions are a new criminal offense of “mob intimidation,” defined as a situation where three or more people try to “compel or induce, another person by force, or by threat of force, to do any act or to assume or abandon a particular viewpoint,” in effect criminalizing even non-violent gatherings aimed at pressuring lawmakers to support or oppose particular policies. The bill also includes harsher punishments for damaging public monuments, the outlawing of blocking traffic while protesting, granting power to the governor and cabinet to reverse local efforts to defund police departments, and even protections for Floridians who may “unintentionally” kill or injure protesters when they obstruct traffic.
The bill has caught flack from quarters as diverse as civil liberties advocates, racial justice activists, environmental groups, Democratic officials and prosecutors. Yet in the present climate, it now looks likely to sail through the Florida state legislature, with the House version having passed the Criminal Justice & Public Safety Subcommittee at the end of January.
“The newly proposed laws go too far in criminalizing conduct and penalizing people for participating in lawful activity,” says Mitchell A. Stone, president of the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “The proposals suffer from definitional problems and create punishment that seems to violate the Constitution and our principles of justice.”
Considering the long-running hostility to the Left among the U.S. security state, the recent efforts in Florida and across the country are a stark reminder that a domestic “war on terror,” far from stamping out right-wing violence, could target the very activist groups combatting the ongoing fascist threats to U.S. democracy. Law enforcement and politicians have wasted no time in making it clear where new terror-fighting powers and resources will be directed. Progressives would be wise to take notice.
Sr. Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun who founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition. (photo: TASSC)
Dianna Ortiz, Survivor and Witness of the Guatemalan Genocide (1958-2021)
Sergio Palencia Frener, NACLA
The American nun became an important voice against torture around the world and U.S. involvement in the Guatemalan conflict.
n February 19, 2021, American nun Dianna Ortiz passed away. Her testimony of torture and rape in 1989 showed to the world the brutality of the Guatemalan regime, and the support of experts in torture from the American government. Ortiz case situates the Guatemalan torture centers between 1980 and 1989 at the same level of ignominy as Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1944, or of the U.S. prison of Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, between 2002 and 2003.
Dianna Ortiz lived in Guatemala during a moment of escalating state violence between 1987 and 1989. Despite anonymous threats, she decided to continue her educational work among Maya-Akateko communities in the northwestern highlands. She was kidnapped by the Guatemalan police and military, who tortured and raped her on November 2, 1989. Ortiz managed to escape and denounced the hellish conditions in which thousands of Guatemalans died, with the complicity of the United States.
Life in the Guatemalan Highlands During the War
Dianna Ortíz was part of the Order of Saint Ursula. In 1987, at the age of 29, she was entrusted to travel to San Miguel Acatán, an Indigenous Mayan-Akateko municipality located in northwestern Guatemala. Just six years before, Acatán had been one of the first municipalities to suffer attacks by the Guatemalan army at the beginning of the genocidal campaigns. Since 1981, the villages of Chimbán and Coyá were bombed and invaded by infantry. The military believed both villages functioned as training centers for the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP).
In Acatán, soldiers dismembered Antil Torol, a Maya spiritual leader of the Akateko communities. When I visited in 2011, people still remembered this Mamin or elder. According to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH, 1999), led by the United Nations, people from San Miguel Acatan suffered multiple kidnappings, tortures, and displacement.
Sister Ortíz arrived five years after these events. She worked on educational projects with survivors of the war. The Guatemalan army did not like the presence of foreign priests and nuns, capable of denouncing in their countries the rampant terror in the countryside. In his book Through a Glass Darkly, Thomas Melville reconstructs the life of a Maryknoll priest who witnessed the 1982 scorched-earth campaigns in Huehuetenango. The military believed Dianna Ortiz could help the rebels or denounce the government’s crimes. In 1988, the bishop of the province of Huehuetenango received letters threatening the work of the Ursulines and Dianna Ortiz.
Since then, Guatemalan State intelligence agents followed her, took photos, and sent multiple rape threats. In those years, the military regime considered enemies not only the armed insurgents, but also human rights organizations, religious networks, and families of the disappeared, such as the Group for Mutual Aid (GAM, Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo).
American Intervention, Intimidation, and Kidnappings
During the 1980s, the United States supported the military regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. It had established military bases in Honduras and supported the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The main goal of Ronald Reagan’s administration was to defeat, both politically and militarily, the revolutionary movements in the Central American isthmus. Sister Dianna Ortiz arrived when the Guatemalan army wanted to destroy guerrilla-controlled territories. Two of these rebel territories were the Ixcán jungle and the Ixil Cuchumatanes, located east of San Miguel Acatán, where Ortiz worked on local education projects.
Despite the Guatemalan military offensives between September 1987 and April 1988, the Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR) managed to survive and consolidate their territories for the next 10 years in the department of Quiche. Meanwhile, state intelligence networks planned the kidnappings and executions of organized students, religious, and peasants who, they thought, could support the revolutionary movement. In her case for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1997), Ortiz spoke of anonymous threats beginning in 1988.
By then, the Guatemalan government focused on dismantling student organizations at the University of San Carlos. Between August and September 1989, the Guatemalan State kidnapped 10 students: Silvia Azurdia, Víctor Rodríguez, Iván González, Carlos Contreras, Aarón Ochoa, Hugo Gramajo, Mario de León, Carlos Cabrera, Carlos Chutá, Eduardo López, as Ruth del Valle documents. Many of them later appeared in the streets with cruel signs of torture. In this context, after multiple threatening letters, members of the police and the army kidnapped Dianna Ortiz on November 2, 1989 at a retreat center in Antigua Guatemala.
What Ortiz suffered marked a watershed in her life. In a conference held in 2007, Sister Ortiz remembers the day of her torture as the day of her death and resurrection. After escaping from her captors, a Maya Indigenous woman helped her in the streets of Guatemala City. In her 2007 speech, Ortiz portrays this Maya woman appearing to her as the Lady of Guadalupe.
Since 1989, Sister Dianna Ortiz denounced the role of her own government in the sinister counterinsurgency in Guatemala. She brought a case against General Héctor Gramajo, Minister of Defense in Guatemala between 1987 and 1990. By then, General Gramajo was pursuing a master’s degree at Harvard University. Ortiz won the case and Gramajo never again could re-enter U.S. territory. General Gramajo had been one of the strategists of the scorched-earth campaigns under the governments of Generals Romeo Lucas García and Efrain Ríos Montt, between 1981 and 1983.
For sectors close to the U.S. Embassy and the Guatemalan government, Sister Ortiz's denunciation sought to prevent further military aid to this Central American country. The Guatemalan military spread the slander that Ortiz was enmeshed in a crime of passion, the same version they used to diminish the political implications of Bishop Gerardi’s assassination in 1998 after publishing the Truth Commission (REMHI). Thomas F. Stroock, back then the U.S. ambassador in Guatemala, denied the participation of U.S. personnel in the torture chambers and blamed far-right paramilitaries for Ortiz's kidnapping.
Voice Against Torture
Despite the smears, Dianna Ortiz played an important role in the declassification of part of the U.S. intelligence communications. Ortiz was the founder of the International Coalition for the Abolition of Torture and the Support of Survivors (TASSC). In 2002, together with Patricia Davis, she published the book The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In 2005, following the publication of photographs at the Abu Ghraib torture center in Iraq, Dianna Ortiz played an important role opposing torture during the George Bush administration.
Ortiz's testimony contributes the following points to the historiography of the Guatemalan war. First, the collaboration between the United States and the Guatemalan State, not only in matters of finance, military instruction, and weapons, but of a whole school of torture. This international network of counterinsurgency has also been studied by Lesley Gill and Patrice McSherry in Central and South America. Second, Ortiz's testimony included descriptions of death pits at the Old Polytechnic School. Similar practices were used at northern Quiche military bases, as described by witnesses to Jesuit anthropologist Ricardo Falla. More recently, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation found more than 500 bodies in another military base in Cobán, Alta Verapaz.
Bishop Gerardi, who was murdered by the military, used to say that only through knowing what actually happened during the war can peace be achieved. Dianna Ortiz knew and suffered the underworld of torture in the Guatemalan genocide. She went down to Xibalbá, the reign of death and evil according to the Popol Wuj. She emerged from a terrible experience to open herself to life and, with that, to the memory of Indigenous and mestizo Guatemalans who died during the dictatorships. Through Ortiz’s words, we can embrace the memory of Silvia Azurdia and Victor Hugo Rodríguez, Guatemalan students who were tortured and died around the same time. Dianna Ortiz bet everything on life and threw herself into the ocean of faith, from which she articulated the mystery of life beyond the face of death.
For this reason, amid the swamp of everyday, to assume history–in Guatemala, Kurdistan or Minneapolis– is to face the real meaning of knowledge in the world, which ceases to be that of an undifferentiated account of the passage of time to become the testimony and the decision to be willing to know. The task of historical knowledge, as it progresses, ceases to be that of the accumulator of bricks or books and becomes that of a warrior. Dianna launched herself into the void of meaning and, in its core, found something that turned her into a witness to an era. Along with survivors of El Mozote (1981) and San Francisco Nentón (1982) massacres, such as Rufina Amaya and Mateo Ramos Paiz, Dianna Ortiz became one with the poor Central Americans, making their wounds and hopes her own.
Rev. Ben Chavis, right, raises his fist as fellow protesters are taken to jail at the Warren County PCB landfill while protesting the dumping of contaminated soil in their community near Afton, North Carolina, on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1982. (photo: Greg Gibson/AP)
The Origins of Environmental Justice - and Why It's Finally Getting the Attention It Deserves
Alejandra Borunda, National Geographic
Borunda writes:
Decades of research show that Black and brown communities are on the front lines of environmental harms. Can those longstanding injustices be remedied?
ociologist Robert Bullard has spent four decades making the case that environmental harms have disproportionately affected communities of color across the United States. So when one of President Joe Biden’s first moves after inauguration was to sign an executive order that pledged to “advance environmental justice” in his efforts to address the climate crisis, Bullard was ecstatic.
“Now, environmental and racial justice is the centerpiece, not a footnote,” says the professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.
Over 40 years of research has outlined patterns of environmental injustice, where Black and brown communities bear the brunt of environmental degradation or pollution. Now, climate change is adding another dimension: Those communities also often experience the worst effects of climate-change fueled risks like hurricanes and wildfires.
Decades of environmental injustice, recorded
Research on environmental injustice began in the late 1970s, after residents of a Black middle-class neighborhood in Houston, Texas, found out that the state was going to permit the siting of a solid-waste facility in their community. One question loomed large in the residents’ minds: Why was it being placed here and not in the white neighborhoods nearby?
Bullard, a sociologist by training, got pulled in to collect and parse the data. He found that 14 of the city’s 17 industrial waste sites—accounting for over 80 percent of the city’s waste tonnage—were situated in Black neighborhoods, though only 25 percent of Houston’s population were Black.
The findings were the first to systematically show that environmentally harmful infrastructure was more likely to end up in places where minority populations lived. But from the start, Bullard and other researchers were certain that Houston was not the only place where this was happening.
Just a few years after Bullard’s Houston analysis, a group of residents and activists in Warren County, North Carolina, gained national attention when they resisted a proposed waste facility that planned to store 60,000 tons of PCB-contaminated soil. At the time, the county had the highest percentage of Black residents in the state. When the contaminated soil began to arrive at the site, more than 500 protestors showed up to oppose it, lying on the road to block the dump trucks.
They ultimately failed to stop the soil from being buried at the site. But news of their fight galvanized Black leaders, community members, and researchers across the country, prompting them to ask whether there was evidence that toxic waste disposal sites were more often placed in minority communities.
The following year, in 1983, a federal report confirmed what Bullard had shown in Houston: Black communities in the South were home to a disproportionately high percentage of waste sites. And in 1987, a study commissioned by Benjamin Chavis, a minister at the United Church of Christ who had been deeply involved in the Warren County protests, took that conclusion nationwide: In almost every place researchers looked, the best predictor of whether someone would live near a toxic waste site was race.
That was true even after controlling for geography and income. Income levels contribute to the disparities but are usually a compounding factor. The inequality in dangerous environmental exposure is worst for communities that are both poor and minority.
Birth of a movement
A movement started to emerge, says Dorceta Taylor, an environmental justice expert at Yale. In 1990, she was one of about 20 researchers and activists who gathered in Detroit to confer about the recent studies and the enraging implications.
“It was a bone-tingling moment,” says Taylor. So energized by the passion in the room, they stayed up till the wee hours of the morning, crying and laughing and talking about the work they could do to make their world more environmentally just.
“We knew we were doing something that was going to change things,” she says. “We knew it was going to grow.”
The next year, over a thousand people attended a conference in Washington, D.C. At that meeting, they finished drafting out their “Principles of Environmental Justice,” 17 precepts that that could guide the growing research, activist, and policy movements that are still used today by many environmental justice groups.
Environmental racism occurs for many reasons: intentional and unintentional discrimination in siting of things like waste dumps, but also unequal enforcement of environmental laws and the exclusion of Black and other minority groups from decision-making processes. To achieve true environmental justice, the principles said, all of those issues must be addressed.
Policymakers began to take notice. In 1992, the EPA officially defined “environmental justice” and established an office devoted to it. In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order calling on all government agencies to consider environmental justice in their decisions.
Rhetoric vs reality
The rhetoric, though, has not consistently translated into reality.
“As far as I know, there have been no policies that have produced measurable changes on the ground, and until we get to that point, environmental justice policy is nothing more than a window dressing,” says Paul Mohai, an environmental justice expert at the University of Michigan.
The more places researchers looked, the more examples of longstanding environmental inequity they found—everywhere across the country, and above and beyond the inequalities caused by income disparities.
For example, in Texas, primarily Hispanic communities are more likely to be exposed to natural gas “flaring” events at fracking sites than primarily white communities. Historic “redlining”— racist housing policies that led to and upheld neighborhood segregation and disinvestment—have been linked to many environmental hazards that still impact minority communities today: Premature births are more common, and babies are often born smaller, in redlined neighborhoods.
Black and minority communities are more often exposed to devastating toxins in water than white communities, a reality that is still playing out in Flint, Michigan and in other cities across the country. Black households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 experience overall pollution burdens equal to those felt by white households earning $10,000 or less.
Overall, Black residents absorb about 1.5 times the air pollution burden of the population at large. White communities get a “boost” and are exposed to 17 percent less pollution than they are responsible for producing through their consumption of goods and services.
Recently, environmental injustice has aggravated the pandemic, because people exposed to long-term air pollution are more vulnerable to lung-damaging diseases like COVID-19. The excess exposure in minority communities has contributed to their higher proportion of deaths, research has found.
Unequal climate impacts
As climate change’s effects became more visible in the U.S., it has also become clear that those effects are disproportionally hitting minority communities, a form of what author Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” inflicted on communities of color.
Jacqui Patterson, the director of the NAACP’s environment and climate justice program, saw the disparity firsthand when she spent weeks volunteering after Hurricane Katrina, a storm that was likely made more damaging by climate change.
Most of the people in the temporary shelter where she worked as a sign language interpreter were Black, as she is. In New Orleans, 75 percent of residents in badly flooded areas were Black.
“I spent six weeks in that disaster recovery center hearing stories and seeing the patterns,” she says. “It was impossible not to see the disproportionate number of African American people who were there who were suffering.”
After the storm, the disparities widened. Research found that recovery aid flowed more readily to white, wealthy communities than to poor or minority ones, a divide that other researchers have found grows with the magnitude of the disasters. FEMA has recently acknowledged it.
Other climate risks also hit minorities harder—extreme heat, for example. Temperatures in formerly red-lined areas can be over 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than other neighborhoods in the same city, Tree cover and greenspaces are less common. And minority communities tend to have less access to air conditioning.
What’s the cause—and does it matter?
For a long time, the legal and political conversation around environmental injustice centered on intent. Did a company siting a waste facility or other pollution source, or a city or state permitting it, mean to put it in a poor minority neighborhood—an explicit racially motivated goal—or was the location simply the outcome of market forces, which put the bad stuff where land was cheapest?
Intent is difficult to prove. In some rare cases, there was evidence that communities with little political power were implicitly targeted as places to site heavy industry or pollution sources. For example, in 1984, the California Waste Management Board was deciding where to put toxic waste incinerators. A report commissioned to find communities that might put up the least resistance suggested looking for low-income, rural, Catholic communities—which almost guaranteed the sites would be placed in Latino neighborhoods.
Sure enough, an incinerator site was proposed in a predominantly Latino town in California’s Central Valley. But the community turned out to be less passive than the report authors had expected; residents fought back and defeated the proposal.
Whatever the motivation for such siting decisions, the outcomes clearly tend to affect some racial and ethnic groups disproportionately.
“It’s not really necessary to have racial animus,” says Mohai. “Once discriminatory zoning happens, everything after looks like non-discriminatory, even though it is. It’s already been institutionalized into the system, even if people are not intentionally making the decisions.”
“Where I see the racism is not caring about making reckless decisions, or not caring, after damages have been made, to repair the problem.”
New hope
The Biden Administration has embraced environmental justice, at least in theory, promising to consider it in all decision-making and to direct 40 percent of environment- and climate-related federal investments to communities that have borne the brunt of past environmental harms.
Exactly which communities those are and how they’ll be prioritized is still being hammered out, says Julian Brave Noisecat, a climate policy expert at the nonprofit analytical group Data for Progress—and those details matter a lot. The patterns are sometimes less obvious at the census block level than if researchers look at the precise distance people live from a hazard like a power plant, for example. “We have a baseline problem there, which is that we don’t have a great federal dataset for lawmakers to tap into,” he says.
But Bullard is fizzy with hope for the new administration.
“The environmental justice framing is integral here, and we’ve never had that before,” he says. “What we have now is an opportunity for the reformulation and overhauling of the whole thing.”
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.