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20 February 21
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Jane Mayer | Meet SG3: The Élite Legal Squad That Vowed to Safeguard the Election
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Mayer writes: "Last March, after President Trump declaimed that the only way he could lose the election was if there was fraud, Seth Waxman couldn't sleep."
Calling themselves the Three Amigos, a self-appointed legal SWAT team of former Solicitors General ran through all the Doomsday scenarios they could think of—except armed insurrection at the Capitol.
A member of the tiny, élite club of litigators who have served as Solicitors General of the United States, Waxman is not a mellow guy. An obsessive runner with the wound-up energy of a twisted rubber band, he often wakes up at three in the morning agitated by something or other. Typically, he makes a cup of tea, works for an hour, and goes back to bed. But the insomnia last March, he said, “was, like, five nights in a row!”
The proximate cause was what he calls “the Doomsday scenarios,” which he feared could unfold if Trump tried to subvert the 2020 election. Could the President order the election postponed because of the pandemic? he wondered. Could he call a reunion of the ICE agents he sent into Portland to intimidate minority voters in urban centers?
Night after night, Waxman tabulated every possible thing that could go wrong. Having advised several Democratic Presidential campaigns, he was familiar with the pitfalls. But none of the nightmares conjured by Trump “corresponded with anything I’d worried about in earlier campaigns,” he said. He ended up with a three-and-a-half-page single-spaced list of potential catastrophes.
Eleven months before the Senate impeachment trial exposed an unprecedented level of political savagery, Waxman quietly prepared for the worst. He reached out to two other former Solicitors General, Walter Dellinger and Donald Verrilli, who served as the Clinton and the Obama Administrations’ advocates, respectively, before the Supreme Court. By April, they had formed a small swat team to coördinate with the Biden campaign. They called themselves the Three Amigos, but the campaign referred to them as SG3. Their goal: safeguarding the election.
“They were phenomenal,” Bob Bauer, a legal adviser to the Biden campaign, said. “Our preoccupation was to do everything we could to address the potential that the electoral system would just collapse.” To describe the trio’s special area of legal assistance, the Biden campaign avoided using Waxman’s term, “Doomsday scenarios,” in favor of the less apocalyptic term “unconventional challenges.”
“It was an unreal exercise,” Waxman said of his under-the-radar strike force. “I kept shaking my head and asking, Why, in a mature democracy, am I even worrying about the President federalizing the National Guard to intimidate voters?” He knew that safeguarding the system would be an enormous legal undertaking, requiring hundreds of lawyers in as many as eighteen states, far more volunteers than his firm, WilmerHale, could provide. Coördinating with the Biden campaign’s lawyers, each of the Three Amigos headed up a separate task force. Verrilli rounded up volunteer legal teams to address the ways in which Trump might try to use his executive powers to disrupt voting. Dellinger focussed on what could go wrong after the electors cast their ballots, in December. Waxman handled everything else, including potentially rebellious state legislatures, which they considered the most likely threat. By May, he had twenty legal teams on it.
Bauer said that the squads of lawyers “produced thousands of pages of legal analysis, and what I call ‘template pleadings,’ ” in preparation for every conceivable kind of breakdown in the democratic system. “Some of these scenarios were beyond unlikely, such as federal marshals seizing ballot boxes, and federal troops at polling places. But we had to game out what someone of Trump’s ruthlessness and lack of concern for the law would do.”
Even before the Capitol riot, the group had prepared Supreme Court pleadings in case Trump strong-armed Vice-President Mike Pence into rejecting the certification of the Electoral College votes. “We were fully prepared to go to the Supreme Court by nightfall,” Dellinger said by phone from North Carolina, where he teaches at Duke Law School. “We had paper filed and ready.” By then, the Biden campaign had sent the trio hoodies emblazoned with a special “Team SG3” logo. “Even though we planned for every possible loony scenario we could think of,” he went on, none of them foresaw the Capitol riot.
“We watched in horror as it unfolded,” Waxman said. For months, people had been teasing him about being paranoid. Verrilli recalled, “Seth said in December that we needed to make sure people could get to the building on January 6 to meet.” But an armed insurrection, in which five people died, was beyond the imagination of even the legal profession’s best and brightest.
“The lesson we learned,” Waxman said, “is that the state of our democracy is perilous—even more so than we thought. I am very, very worried.”
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Biden Approves Major Disaster Declaration Over Texas Deep Freeze
Lauren Aratani, Guardian UK
Aratani writes:
oe Biden has approved a major disaster declaration for Texas, which has suffered widespread power blackouts and water shortages during a deep freeze, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) said on Saturday.
The declaration makes federal funding available to individuals across the state, including assistance for temporary housing and home repairs and low-cost loans for uninsured property losses.
Though many in Texas have had power restored and temperatures are no longer below-freezing, the state is still reeling from the winter storm that pummeled its power grid and left millions without heat, food or safe drinking water. On Saturday morning, about 80,000 customers were still without power.
At least 30 people have died in Texas since Sunday, according to the Washington Post. Authorities have not released an official death toll and say it could be weeks until it is known. Some counts put the toll at at least 69.
Many say the power crisis has turned into a water disaster, also affecting other states including Mississippi and Tennessee. On Friday, more than 14 million people were affected by a disrupted public water system.
Half of the state was under a boil-water advisory after water treatment centers experienced blackouts. Even those with access to safe water had been told to turn off their water, for fear thawing pipes will burst, causing flooding. Residents short on water were being advised to take measures including using melted snow to fill toilet tanks and contacting neighbors with running water for assistance.
Food scarcity was also an issue, with panicked shoppers clearing shelves, school meal programs suspended and food banks struggling to keep up with demand.
“People are out of options,” Terri Willis, executive director of a community resource center in Texas, told the Guardian. “They’ve gone into survival mode to get what they can. We are all in disaster mode.”
Biden said on Friday he hoped to visit Texas next week but also said he did not want to cause a burden to local authorities.
“When the president lands in any city in America, it has a long tail,” he said, “and they’re working like devils to take care of their folks.”
Anger has spread over attempts to spread blame for the crisis by elected Republican officials at state and federal levels.
Rick Perry, a former governor, US energy secretary and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was widely ridiculed after he said, “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business” when expressing pride in the state’s power grid system.
Though early reports indicate malfunctions in the state’s natural gas supply played the biggest role in the outages, Republicans have insisted that renewable energy sources like wind turbines were to blame for the blackouts. Natural gas remains the state’s top energy source for electricity.
“Our wind and solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10% of our grid,” Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States.”
The Green New Deal is an ambitious package of proposed legislation championed by progressive Democrats. It is not law.
Officials at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot), which runs the Texas power grid, have said that while all types of energy sources had some problems, renewable energy malfunctions accounted for just 13% of energy loss.
While the Texas state government has oversight over Ercot, over the last two decades Republican governors have largely left it up to the power company to decide on costly weatherization upgrades.
Calls to better regulate the state’s power grid have become louder this week. Abbott called for an investigation into Ercot and urged state lawmakers to make a law requiring the weatherization of power plants and utilities.
Bernie Sanders. (photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
Bernie Sanders Lays Out Ambitious Budget Committee Agenda
Mike DeBonis, The Washington Post
DeBonis writes: "After three decades in Congress wielding influence as a left-wing outsider with a grass-roots following, Sen. Bernie Sanders has finally grasped institutional power on Capitol Hill - and he is moving quickly to use it."
As the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders has already played a key role in advancing President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, and he is now scheduling high-profile hearings on some of the nation’s most pressing challenges.
For the first, set for Thursday, Sanders has summoned the chief executives of some of America’s best-known companies to testify about the wages they pay their employees — speaking alongside some of their own front-line workers.
The hearing’s title — “Why Should Taxpayers Subsidize Poverty Wages at Large Profitable Corporations?” — reflects how Sanders intends to use his new gavel to promote an unabashedly liberal economic agenda, one that breaks with the Budget Committee’s traditional focus on the nation’s long-term fiscal outlook.
Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, said he sees his panel’s scope as touching on “every aspect of public policy — in fact, on every aspect of American life,” and he plans to focus on the plight of the working class amid growing inequality.
“They are living through an economic desperation the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression,” Sanders said in an interview. “So we are going to be a very active and aggressive Budget Committee, which is going to explore what’s going on with the working class and the middle class of this country and how we can successfully address the crises that they face.”
Other hearings are tentatively on the books: On March 17, Sanders is planning a hearing on income and wealth inequality, followed by a March 24 hearing on “making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes” and an April 14 hearing on the costs of climate change.
As chairman of a Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee, he also plans to hold a hearing later this year on prescription drug prices.
It remains unclear whether the McDonald’s and Walmart executives Sanders has invited to next week’s hearing will appear. McDonald’s declined to comment, and representatives for Walmart did not respond to inquiries Thursday.
One top executive who has agreed to testify, according to Sanders’s office, is W. Craig Jelinek of Costco, which is known for paying its workers higher-than-average wages and benefits. Costco also did not respond to a request for comment.
Sanders said no matter who shows up, he is determined to highlight the ever-growing gap between the pay of top executives and their essential employees — and the effect those wages have on federal expenditures.
“Do they really think that the taxpayers of this country have to subsidize their workers in terms of food stamps, in terms of Medicaid or public housing, because they’re paying starvation wages? We are going to raise those issues,” Sanders said. “So I would suggest that they come and they take the opportunity to . . . defend what they’re doing.”
The Budget Committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building has rarely been a place of great televised drama. The panel’s gavel for decades has been swapped between chairs who saw their main task as casting a watchful eye on widening deficits and a growing national debt. Republicans have tended to focus on curbing government spending, while Democrats have urged the need to maintain revenue.
While Sanders has declared some concern about a national debt that has soared past $20 trillion, his greater worry is about an American underclass that the federal government is failing to help.
His GOP sparring partner on the panel is Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who has been more prominent in recent years for his up-and-down relationship with President Donald Trump than for economic policy matters. But Graham has shown a long interest in tackling the nation’s long-term fiscal trajectory, and he recently indicated he relishes the chance to engage in broader debates over thorny issues with Sanders.
“It gives us a chance, I think, to talk about big things, and there’s going to be differences,” Graham said at a hearing last week. “One of my goals is to make sure that all these big things that we’re talking about other people paying for, that we have a sense of, you know, how do you pay for all this stuff?”
Sanders from 2013 to 2015 chaired the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, a panel with limited jurisdiction. Now Sanders’s grasp of true agenda-setting power is being celebrated by fellow lawmakers on the hard left, who are encouraged to have an ally — not a deficit hawk — in a key position.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Thursday that she has been speaking to Sanders multiple times a week about pending legislation — including a minimum wage hike that Sanders is working to shoehorn into the pandemic relief bill.
“It’s just been great to have somebody chairing that committee who’s got power and who’s willing to call it like it is and say exactly why it’s so important that we deliver for people on these bold, populist, popular policies,” she said.
One task that remains in doubt is whether the Budget Committee under Sanders will write a traditional budget — one that sets out long-term revenue and spending targets for the federal government. “I just don’t know the answer to that at this point,” Sanders said.
That core task is up in the air in part because Biden and Democratic congressional leaders are relying on special rules under the Senate Budget Committee’s purview to skirt a GOP filibuster and pass major legislation over the next two years — starting with the pandemic bill, known as the American Rescue Act.
The Senate earlier this month passed a stripped-down budget resolution that paved the way for that process, known as reconciliation, to move forward. Now, Sanders’s staff and aides from other congressional committees are working to convince the Senate parliamentarian that the wide-ranging proposals Democrats are eyeing comport with strict budget rules.
The process is expected to repeat later this year when Democrats embark on an even larger package that is expected to include trillions in new infrastructure spending.
Sanders declined to discuss how big of an infrastructure bill he is eyeing or how quickly it might move. Both of those parameters are subject to negotiation with more moderate Democrats. But he said he expected the legislation to address “structural problems” facing the country, including addressing student debt, remaking the federal tax regime and “transforming our energy system.”
To lay the groundwork for that effort, Sanders said, he plans to continue holding hearings on big issues and perhaps — pandemic willing — taking his panel on the road.
“I think it would be really interesting to go to communities around the country and hear from working people about what is going on in their lives and how the national priorities that we have now impact them,” he said.
A prisoner. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Thirsty, Cold, and Scooping Feces With Their Hands: Crisis in Reality Winner's Texas Prison
Taylor Barnes, The Intercept
Barnes writes:
“These women — they’re trapped. They can’t escape this. They can’t do something to better their situation at all.”
s millions of people across Texas suffered from power and water outages during extreme cold from a winter storm this week, women at the federal prison in Fort Worth where National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner is imprisoned faced alarming conditions. The detained women were forced to literally take matters into their own hands — in a disgusting way.
Winner told family and a friend that incarcerated women at her prison “took one for the team” and used their hands to scoop feces from overflowing toilets that hadn’t been flushed due to the prolonged water outage.
“Reality told me that the toilets stopped working because there wasn’t any water and things got disgusting really fast,” said Brittany Winner, who spoke with her sister Reality by video chat. “Some inmates put on rubber gloves to scoop out the shit and throw it away to get rid of it because of the smell.”
Many of the women, like Winner, are at Federal Medical Center Carswell because they have chronic medical needs that the prison, a medical detention center, is tasked with treating. But the toilet incident was one of several unsanitary and unhealthy hardships that the women endured, according to advocates and a detailed press report, during a week of extreme weather that has left dozens dead nationwide. While the frigid prison was dealing with internal temperatures so cold that one incarcerated woman told a local reporter that her hands were blue and shaking, it was also still contending with an ongoing Covid-19 outbreak that has already taken the lives of six women incarcerated there.
In a statement, the Bureau of Prisons said interruptions to service were minor. “Similar to many of those in the surrounding community and across the state of Texas dealing with heat and water issues during the recent winter storm, the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell experienced minor power, heat, and hot water issues that affected the main supply channels,” Emery Nelson, a bureau public affairs official, said in an email. “However, back-up systems were in place and FMC Carswell maintained power, heat, and hot water until the main supply issues were resolved.” Nelson also said incarcerated people at Carswell “had access to potable water with no disruptions or shortages, to include hot water for showers, and the ability to flush toilets.”
A report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this week said that the “medical portion of the prison” — the hospital facilities — appeared to maintain heat, but the newspaper also collected accounts from the housing units that matched those given by Winner’s advocates: shortages of hot water, loss of heat, and issues with waste management.
Suffering was widespread across Texas, where local authorities have raised alarm over people so desperate for warmth that they used cars and charcoal grills to heat their homes and suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. To Winner’s advocates, the crisis inside the prison felt like the latest unjust blow for an incarcerated person who, like many across the United States’s sprawling prison system, could have been released to home confinement long ago when the government made a halfhearted effort to reduce the federal prison population in the early days of the pandemic. Prosecutors involved in Winner’s case opposed the policy and successfully argued to keep the whistleblower behind bars, where she eventually was infected with Covid-19.
“These women — they’re trapped,” Reality’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said of the sub-freezing temperatures in Fort Worth this week. “They can’t escape this. They can’t do something to better their situation at all.”
No Water, No Heat
Winner’s family and friends first heard from the whistleblower about winter storm conditions in her prison on Monday, when she told them that water had been intermittently off since Saturday afternoon. This meant the women detained inside not only couldn’t flush toilets, but that they also couldn’t wash their hands or drink from water fountains, Winner told them.
“She was so dehydrated and so thirsty,” Winner’s friend and advocate Wendy Meer Collins said. Collins added that Winner was so desperate to shower that she had given herself what she called a “birdbath” using ice cubes from a machine.
In addition to the water shortages, the furnace appeared to be off or insufficiently functioning for much of the week, even though the prison appeared to mostly maintain power, according to Winner’s advocates and the report in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which said women put socks on their hands and guards wore winter coats and hats indoors to stay warm. The Bureau of Prisons said there was a “maintenance period” in the prison and that internal temperatures were “monitored” but did not specify what needed to be maintained nor when it was fixed.
During the days of sub-freezing temperatures, women at FMC Carswell needed to walk in ice and snow outdoors to go to the cafeteria to get meals, according to Winner-Davis and Collins. The women don’t even have the option to huddle together to stay warm, Collins said, as Winner has been punished in the past for hugging a fellow incarcerated person in violation of the prison’s unauthorized contact policy. (Despite saying that the prison had “maintained” heat, the Bureau of Prisons also told The Intercept that it distributed extra blankets to incarcerated women.)
By the time Winner spoke to her mother on Thursday morning, she told her that heat had been recently restored in their building.
The miserable week inside the cold prison spurred a new round of calls for relief from supporters who back the year-old clemency campaign for Winner, their eyes now on the new administration.
Winner, who blew the whistle on threats to election security, is currently serving the longest prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists’ sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for “mishandling classified information.”
The government itself acknowledges that Winner’s intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence on local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund, another First Look Media company, supported Winner’s legal defense.)
Her clemency campaign has drawn a diverse array of political supporters, including the President George W. Bush-era “secrecy czar” responsible for overseeing classification procedures, who wrote an op-ed calling for Winner to be Biden’s first pardon, as well as a prominent congressional Libertarian who said using the Espionage Act to prosecute her was unjust and abusive.
Winner was the first national security whistleblower prosecuted by the last administration, and Collins believes that a Democratic White House, whose voters are motivated by issues of election integrity and security, should signal a clear break with the 45th presidency and allow Winner to go home.
“This is Trump’s political prisoner, and it’s time to let her out,” Collins said. “She’s served more time than she ever should have anyway.”
The pandemic isn't over. (photo: ABC News)
School Districts Around the United States Lack Any Real Regard for Educators' Lives
Barbara Madeloni, Jacobin
Madeloni writes: "Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it's fully safe. And while many teachers' unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing."
his is not the agreement you deserve.”
So said Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Jesse Sharkey, announcing that members had voted to accept a plan to return to school buildings.
Chicago teachers began returning to schools on February 11, after contentious negotiations over whether they would be forced to teach in person. While their district’s animosity was exceptional, many similar struggles for safety are being fought across the country.
The CTU agreement increases vaccine access for educators who are required to enter buildings, delays the return to buildings for some, and establishes union-dominated building safety committees. It also guarantees Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodations for educators who are the primary caregivers to individuals especially vulnerable to COVID, and establishes metrics for what would prompt the district to close school buildings and go fully remote again.
Nonetheless, by not maintaining fully remote teaching, it puts educators and the community at risk for catching the virus.
Sharkey speaks for educators across the country when he says that the struggle to protect the health and safety of educators and their communities should never have been this difficult, should never have been a subject to be negotiated. And the agreement does not go far enough.
Although COVID numbers in Chicago and across the country are on a downward trend, the daily case rate in January was as high as the highest rates last spring. New more transmissible variants are expected to dominate in the United States by mid-March, just when more students and educators will be back in school.
So why did Chicago teachers accept the deal? After months of sustained battle, they’re exhausted. “It is difficult to understand the trauma of this struggle,” said Kirsten Roberts, an elementary educator. Others felt that they had built as much power as possible, and still didn’t have enough power to win what could have been a prolonged strike.
Exhausted
The battle in Chicago has been particularly intense, but since January, the heat is being turned up across the country as districts, politicians, and a cascade of media stories demand that educators return to school buildings.
In Philadelphia, the district announced on January 27 that the first wave of educators would return February 8. In San Francisco the city is suing the school district to force educators back into buildings.
In Montclair, New Jersey, the district filed a suit against the union for supporting thirty educators who have, with union support and solidarity, refused to enter their buildings since October.
In North Carolina, cities like Durham, where the school board voted months ago to continue remote learning throughout the school year, are facing state legislation that would overrule these local decisions and require school buildings to reopen.
Likewise, in Los Angeles, where the union won fully remote schools quickly back in the summer, pressure is mounting from the city council and the governor for buildings to reopen, even as the virus rages in the county.
“A lot of people across the country are at a point of exhaustion” from the unrelenting pressure, said Carlos Perez, a high school teacher in Durham.
Refused to Enter
In Chicago, special educator Ana Bolotin said, “the leadership fought as hard as they could at the table against a cruel and incompetent mayor and a cruel and incompetent unelected board of education.” But, she said, “the energy from the leadership shifted away from being able to build power.”
They won what they could in bargaining, but Bolotin felt there was more to win in the streets. And she believes members had shown they were ready — when some refused to enter buildings, teaching outside in the cold instead, and when the whole membership took an initial vote to strike if those educators were locked out.
Kirsten Roberts, a teacher in Chicago who voted against the agreement, felt that educators should have followed through on a tactic they had voted up: refusing en masse to enter the buildings, and continuing to work remotely. In her assessment, doing this would have forced the mayor either to lock them all out of remote learning — as it had already done to punish a handful of activists — or to concede to continue remote learning district-wide.
“There were strong leaders and good people on both sides [of the vote],” said Roberts. “It was a balance of forces issue.” By locking educators out, she believes, the mayor would have lost any community support. Teachers were ready to teach remotely; the mayor would have been the one denying students the opportunity to learn.
Tricky Solidarity
Teacher unions in Chicago and elsewhere have struggled to build and assess power in the midst of the pandemic.
Besides the challenges of trying to organize behind masks and over Zoom, the pandemic has affected everyone differently. Dennis Kosuth, a nurse in Chicago public schools, said it took a lot of conversations among members to figure out how to take action together — some people were more afraid of getting the virus, while others were more afraid of getting fired.
In places where educators were able to talk through these risks, they used direct action to pressure districts to slow things down and, in the case of Chicago, to finally come to the table.
Many districts are announcing phased school reopening plans that further divide members. Usually, a small group of educators of special needs students is required to return first. Then, over time, come the educators of young elementary, older elementary, middle school, and high school students.
This has complicated negotiations and the building of solidarity.
First-Time Activists
In Montclair, thirty educators of special needs students were told to go back into the buildings in October. With no preparation, no access to protective gear, and no clear plan, they refused to enter.
“We talked about it, we organized, and they made the unanimous decision not to reenter the building. They’ve been in that sort of action since October 15,” said Montclair Education Association president Petal Robertson.
In late January, when the superintendent suggested it was safe to return to the buildings, the union said it was not safe and insisted on mediation. Shortly after mediation started, the city announced that it was suing the union to force educators back in.
The court refused the city’s request for an injunction; a hearing on the suit is set for March 9. All educators continued to work remotely, except for a skeleton crew of custodians who go in to maintain the buildings.
“That group of thirty,” said Robertson, “it’s important to know, they’re not building reps. They’re not on my union committee. They are a quiet subset of the association who have never had to do anything like this before. It changed my whole association.”
Members Moving Members
Schools in Philadelphia have been remote since last spring. But on January 27, the city announced that it would begin to reopen buildings — starting with Pre-K–second-grade educators on February 8, and their students two weeks later. Liza Dolmetsch, an art teacher in the only K–2 school in the city, said her building committee met immediately to talk through what this timeline meant and how to respond.
“It was clear that we did not feel it was safe,” she said, “and that we at least had to talk about not going in.”
Across the city, supported in large part by the Caucus of Working Educators, building meetings brought members together to talk through what steps to take in the face of the district’s announcement.
Kaitlin McCann, a seventh-grade teacher in a K–8 school, talked about the meeting in her building. “It was very emotional,” she said. “People are afraid. They’ve been spending months being super safe, not seeing family, not seeing grandchildren, and now they were supposed to risk everything. It really made a difference for people to hear each other’s stories.”
Still, she said, “it was a heated debate.” It wasn’t easy getting teachers in third through eighth grades to support a refusal to return. “But one thing that helped was saying, ‘This is a moment in showing our power’” — no matter where you stood on reopening.
The building-based organizing was buoyed when Philadelphia Federation of Teachers president Jerry Jordan announced that educators should not enter buildings on February 8. Instead, educators showed up with signs, donuts, and hand warmers. They chanted, made speeches, and cheered supporters who honked as they drove by.
In Dolmetsch’s school, all fifty-three educators refused to enter the building. “It was transformative,” she said. As the only building where everyone was in the first wave required to enter, they felt that “we should be the loudest voices.”
The district backed off the plan, for now, and has brought in a mediator.
Fights Inside
Direct actions like these have slowed the process of reopening, but we still do not know how much power the unions will need to keep members safe for the duration of the pandemic and if they can access that power.
In DC, where the union put a strike vote to members around reopening, the members voted it down.
Back in Chicago, some educators started back in the buildings on February 11. Safety committees will be the front line of the fight to enforce the agreement, and that will require action at the building level. Following up on guarantees for ADA accommodations and access to vaccines will take vigilance.
One of the complications of organizing during the pandemic is just how weedy and detailed an agreement can become. All those details are ideal places for management to obfuscate — and, Roberts suggests, the technical issues pulled the fight away from other issues the union could have taken on: education quality and childcare for all.
“Ventilation, social distancing, six feet, three feet, all of this stuff,” she said. “We tried but didn’t have the space to build solid coalitions around childcare, funding, and reimagining schools.”
A Sudden Rush
The pressure to reopen school buildings now, rather than wait until all educators have been vaccinated, exemplifies the reckless disregard for educators’ lives that district administrators and politicians have shown throughout the pandemic.
But Durham teacher Perez has seen “a dramatic shift” since Biden took office. “Now there is bipartisan support for going back into buildings,” he said. “Even [American Federation of Teachers president] Randi Weingarten is putting out statements saying we need to do this.” Weingarten is a close ally of the Biden administration.
“I am trying to get my head around how the argument changed once Biden was elected,” said Roberts in Chicago. “There was suddenly an avalanche of the need to get back to work.”
With the Chicago agreement being held up as a model for the country, other unions may feel pressure to accept the same terms.
The pandemic isn’t over. For Perez, the lesson of the struggles thus far is that “we need to create more opportunities for members to have debates and conversations with each other.”
“We need to stop training members to look up” to politicians, he said, “and instead learn to look over their shoulder, toward each other.”
'Displaced families live in crowded settlements that lack safe water, health care, and other basic services.' (photo: UNICEF DRC)
DRC: Violence Threatens Three Million Displaced Children
teleSUR
Excerpt: "The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Friday denounced that over three million displaced children are at high risk due to the operation of armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)."
In the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a succession of brutal attacks has forced entire communities to flee.
“Displaced children know nothing but fear, poverty, and violence. Generation after generation can think only of survival,” UNICEF Representative for the DRC Edouard Beigbeder lamented.
“Yet the world seems increasingly indifferent to their fate. We need the resources to continue helping these children have a better future.”
In the east of the country, a succession of brutal attacks, performed by irregular fighters who are armed with machetes and heavy weapons, has forced entire communities to flee.
So far, at least 5.2 million people have been forcibly displaced in the DRC, which makes it the country with the second-highest number of internally displaced persons after Syria.
Some of the families displaced by the violence live in overcrowded informal settlements where there is no clean water, medical care, or other essential services. Others displaced have been taken in by local communities which themselves live in a situation of poverty.
Ituri, North Kivu, South Kivu, and Tanganyika, which are the provinces most affected by armed conflict, are home to over eight million people who survive amid acute food insecurity.
The UNICEF report also presents testimonies of children who were recruited by local militias and suffered sexual abuse. In the first half of 2020, reports of violations of their human rights increased by 16 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.
The northeast of the DRC has been mired for years in a long-running conflict fueled by dozens of national and foreign armed groups. This happens despite the presence of over 15,000 troops from the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO).
Environmental activists protest in front of the construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
Urging Biden to Stop Line 3 Pipeline, Indigenous-Led Resistance Camps Ramp Up Efforts to Slow Construction
Kristoffer Tigue, Inside Climate News
Tigue writes: "The Biden administration may have finally put the Keystone XL pipeline to rest, but Tara Houska has hardly had time to celebrate."
Biden has pledged to make environmental justice, including Native rights, a cornerstone of his climate policy, but his response to Line 3 remains uncertain.
Just a week after President Biden revoked Keystone’s border-crossing permit, Houska was on a video call in late January with a dozen other Indigenous activists and over a thousand spectators. She was calling on them to join her fight in northern Minnesota to stop another trans-U.S.-Canada oil pipeline: Line 3.
After obtaining the final necessary permits in November, and with a Minnesota appeals court on Feb. 2 denying a request to stay construction, Enbridge Energy is speeding forward with its Line 3 replacement project, hoping to finish building the 1,031-mile-long pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the Midwest before the end of the year.
That has Houska, and other Indigenous and environmental activists who have long fought Line 3 and similar fossil fuel infrastructure, scrambling to delay construction as they await rulings on several legal challenges to the project and call on President Biden to intervene.
Over the last couple months, opponents to Line 3 have been ramping up their efforts to stop it, marching down streets, blocking roads and chaining themselves to construction equipment. In one encounter, an individual spent more than a week in a tree, suspended dozens of feet above the frozen ground, to delay work in the area.
Resistance camps and protests, where activists call themselves “water protectors” and “land defenders,” have cropped up near half a dozen cities and small towns along the pipeline’s proposed route in northern Minnesota.
“Just under 100 people have been arrested out defending our beautiful territory here, defending our wild rice, trying to protect the sacred with our bodies and with our freedom,” Houska said during the Jan. 26 call.
The new Line 3 would replace the original one built in the 1960s and would cross 337 miles of some of Minnesota’s most pristine streams and wetlands, where Houska and other activists say any spills would cause “irreparable” harm to bodies of water where local tribes fish, harvest wild rice and hold treaty rights.
Enbridge says replacing the old Line 3 is the best way to prevent future spills while continuing to meet the country’s energy needs. But opponents say the project tramples on Indigenous rights and would lock Minnesota into years, if not decades, of further dependency on fossil fuels at a time that the world economy is transitioning to renewables.
Until Line 3 is officially dead, Houska—a member of Couchiching First Nation and founder of the Indigenous advocacy group Giniw Collective—said she’ll keep fighting the pipeline any way she can. And activists say they expect the encampments, which sit just outside Line 3’s construction zone and act as bases of operations for protesters, to only grow larger as the weather gets warmer.
“Please find your bravery,” she told the online crowd. “There are nine folks who just got arrested yesterday. It’s not that bad. Defending the land is a beautiful thing, it’s a beautiful risk to take.”
Biden’s Response to Line 3, Dakota Access Remains Uncertain
How the Biden administration will respond to growing calls to intervene with Line 3 in Minnesota and the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota remains uncertain.
Prominent progressive leaders, including Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar and Massachusetts’s Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have called on Biden to shut down the Dakota Access and block Line 3. But some energy experts say the situation is complicated, and that Biden must walk a fine line between pursuing his climate agenda, while also maintaining good relations with Republicans and the Canadian government.
By intervening with the Keystone XL, Biden has made other trans-Canadian pipelines into the U.S. more valuable and potentially more politically damaging if he chooses to take similar action on them, said Ben Cahill, the climate and energy analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In some ways, Biden had to act on Keystone, Cahill said, because the project had become a “totemic” issue for political parties that had long drawn their battle lines on the subject. And when Biden won the election, it was expected for him to act on the pipeline, he said.
“The Keystone XL pipeline was a special case,” Cahill said. “To some extent, I think the same thing is true for Dakota Access because it became so politicized. I’m not sure that the Line 3 replacement project has that kind of high profile.”
Biden has promised to make environmental justice, including elevating the rights and voices of Native Americans, a cornerstone of his administration and signed a series of executive orders that moved to strengthen those pledges.
When asked how Biden planned to respond to calls to intervene on the Dakota Access and Line 3, the White House responded with a statement that said the administration “will evaluate infrastructure proposals based on our energy needs, their ability to achieve economy wide net zero emissions by 2050, and their ability to create good paying union jobs,” while ensuring that “such proposals comply with all legal obligations.”
While climate and Indigenous activists want him to cancel both pipelines, such tandem rollbacks would make it difficult for Alberta’s vast deposits of tar sands oil to get into the United States for refining and would likely create a problem in relations between Canada and the U.S.
Opponents to Line 3 have said that while they hope Biden will take action, they won’t wait around for it. Last week, Indigenous activists launched a new campaign that aims to convince 18 major banks that are funding the project to drop their investments.
“As we learned at Standing Rock, Indigenous land defense poses a deep reputational risk to the financial institutions profiting from oil pipelines,” Houska wrote in an email blast. “Our commitment and self-sacrifice in taking this direct action sends a clear message to Wall Street executives that funding toxic projects like Line 3 comes with what bank executives call ‘social risk.’”
Standing Rock Protests ‘Set the Tone’ for Today’s Environmental Movement
The environmental movement has come a long way since the 2016 Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, where Houska and thousands of other people rallied behind the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to fight against the development of the Dakota Access pipeline.
Not only did those protests bring together Native Americans across the country under one banner, but it also elevated environmental justice and Indigenous rights issues in a way not previously seen in the mainstream media or the environmental movement, Houska said in an interview.
Violent clashes between demonstrators and a heavily militarized police force, captured by photojournalists and on cellphone videos, spread rapidly over social media, showing Indigenous and environmental activists being sprayed with fire hoses, attacked by police dogs and shot with rubber bullets in below-freezing temperatures.
That galvanized the environmental movement, and many in the public, to confront how racial justice and environmental issues intersect, said Houska, who was arrested with hundreds of other demonstrators at the Standing Rock camps for trespassing and other charges.
“I think that the resistance to the Dakota Access pipeline set the tone for the rest of the environmental movement,” she said.
Today, Houska, who was born in International Falls and obtained her law degree from the University of Minnesota, spends much of her time at the resistance camps along the route of Line 3, where she trains other “land defenders” how to participate in civil disobedience, engage with government officials and spread awareness of their cause.
Helen Clanaugh, a freshman at St. Olaf College—a liberal arts university south of the Twin Cities—is one of those recruits. Since the beginning of January, Clanaugh has left her life at the dorms to help organize at several of the camps in northern Minnesota and coordinate efforts to shuttle people in from bigger cities like Minneapolis and Duluth.
When she’s not camping in tents, Clanaugh said, she’s living with other protesters in shared housing arrangements in nearby towns. “I grew up in Duluth … and have seen firsthand how the land and water gives back to us,” she said. “It’s also important that we stand in solidarity with Indigenous relatives because they were on this land first.”
The camps have also garnered attention from prominent political leaders like Rep. Omar. On Jan. 30, the liberal firebrand visited with Native leaders, including Houska, at one of the resistance camps and called on President Biden to stop the pipeline from moving forward.
“Climate change does not stop at the border of a reservation or a state or a country,” Omar wrote in a letter to the president. “The decision that U.S. entities make on Line 3 is a decision made for the entire world, and for all coming generations of humanity.”
Minnesota Already Suffering Billions in Losses Because of Climate Change
Like the Keystone XL, Line 3 would act as a main thoroughfare for carbon-intensive Canadian crude into the United States. The thick, heavy slurry is a mixture of oil, sand and clay, requiring specialized equipment and more electricity than other crude to process it into usable products like gasoline.
That alone has environmental advocates calling the project detrimental to Minnesota’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change. Running at full capacity, the new Line 3 would generate 193 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to Enbridge’s environmental impact statement. That’s the annual equivalence of the emissions from a dozen of the nation’s largest power plants, Minnesota Public Radio reported.
Those emissions could be a problem, since the state is off track to meet its goal to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2025, according to a biennial report from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency released last month. That report shows that statewide emissions fell just 8 percent since 2005.
Minnesota has also become noticeably hotter over the last few decades, driving more frequent extreme weather, affecting ice cover and soil moisture and altering wildlife behavior and plant growth, says a major 2015 report from the Minnesota Department of Health.
Since 1960, the state has warmed at an average rate of about half a degree Fahrenheit per decade, the agency says, with seven of Minnesota’s top 10 hottest years on record having occurred between 1998 and 2012. That makes Minnesota one of the fastest warming states in the country, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
In many ways, that warming has equated to increased costs, too. Record floods in 2019 caused Minnesota an estimated $33.1 million in damages. And between 2000 and 2011, extreme heat was responsible for over 1,000 hospitalizations, 8,000 emergency department visits and nearly 40 deaths in the state.
“Minnesota has already experienced billions of dollars of economic harm due to climate change,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a lawsuit his office filed against the fossil fuel industry in June 2020. “And without serious mitigation,” Ellison added, the state “will continue to suffer billions of dollars of damage through midcentury.”
The suit—one of more than a dozen similar legal challenges across the country—accuses ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute and three Koch Industries entities of willfully deceiving Minnesota consumers so they could continue to sell their petroleum products, which for decades they had known would cause devastating climate change.
Koch Industries, which owns a major oil refinery in Minnesota through its subsidiary Flint Hills Resources, has a big stake in the completion of Line 3. For decades, Enbridge-owned pipelines, including Line 3, have fed energy-intensive but cheap Canadian crude to the Pine Bend oil refinery in southern Minnesota.
That refinery has been a cash cow for Koch Industries, accounting for more than a third of the company’s entire profits in 1982, according to Christopher Leonard’s book, “Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.” Today, Pine Bend handles a quarter of all Canadian tar sands oil entering the country, including from Line 3, Ellison’s lawsuit said.
Line 3 is vital to Pine Bend’s operations and its replacement must be completed, Flint Hills wrote in a letter to Minnesota regulators in 2018. “The importance of the Enbridge pipeline system to Minnesota, including the proposed replacement of Line 3,” the company said, “cannot be overstated.”
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