24 February 21
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24 February 21
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Jesse Jackson | The Right to Vote Is Under Siege
Jesse Jackson, The Chicago Sun-Times
Jackson writes: "In state after state, Republicans want to suppress voting because they know they are a minority party."
he fundamental right in a democracy — the right to vote — is once more under siege. In state after state, Republican legislators have introduced literally hundreds of bills designed to suppress voting.
Their passion is fueled by Donald Trump’s big lie that the presidential election was “stolen” from him. Their targets are minorities — African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, and the young. They call themselves Republicans, but their lineage comes not from Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, but from Jefferson Davis, the southern Democrat who led the Confederacy in its battle to keep Blacks enslaved.
The current debates have a haunting history. After the South was defeated in the Civil War, Congress passed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. Often termed the “second founding,” these amendments ended slavery (13th), guaranteed equal protection under the laws (14th) and prohibited discrimination in the right to vote (15th).
The defeated south then began what was called Reconstruction. To be readmitted to the Union, they had to create new constitutions that rendered equal rights to all. In some states, newly freed Blacks constituted the majority. In many states, a new fusion politics began, often bringing the newly freed Black citizens together with small farmers and merchants against the old plantation aristocracy. In states like North Carolina, the new majorities passed remarkable progressive reforms in public education, public works, progressive taxation, land redistribution and more.
The white plantation aristocracy could not abide the new order. They organized a systematic effort to suppress the new coalitions. America’s first domestic terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, unleashed a wave of violence against newly freed Blacks and the whites who joined them. An estimated 5,000 Blacks were lynched. The violence that included setting fire to Black stores and neighborhoods was designed to drive Blacks and their allies out of polling booths and the South.
The plantation aristocracy successfully took back power, then imposed Jim Crow laws that made it virtually impossible for Blacks to vote. The federal government failed to check the violence, and in 1876, in a corrupt deal, Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction and remove the remaining federal troops. In 1896, to its lasting shame, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson ratified the surrender, declaring separate but equal laws constitutional. It took more than 50 years before the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act restored the right to vote to African Americans.
Today’s Republican Party is founded on the reaction to the civil rights movement. From the 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign on, Republicans traded hats with southern Democrats to become the party of state’s rights, white sanctuary and opposition to racial equality.
Today’s Jefferson Davis Republicans know that they are increasingly a minority party. In Georgia, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina and other states, Republicans fear they will lose control. Once more, intimidation, mass incarceration and violence are used to intimidate.
After the last election, Trump rallied his supporters with the big lie that the election was stolen, inciting them to sack the Capitol and to march on state legislatures. Worse, even after the riot, 147 Republicans in the House and Senate voted to overturn the election.
The violence, just as in Reconstruction, is combined with a systemic campaign to suppress the right to vote. In 33 states, legislators have introduced 165 bills to restrict voting, the Brennan Center on Justice reports. In nine states, Republicans have introduced legislation to limit mail-in voting (nearly half of votes in the 2020 election were cast by mail due to the pandemic). In 10 states, Republicans are pushing more stringent voter ID requirements, knowing that these discriminate against minorities (25% of African Americans but only 8% of whites have no government-issued photo IDs). Other states are pushing to prohibit the use of student IDs to make it harder for the young to vote, roll back automatic voter registration laws, end Election Day registration or reduce the number of days for early voting.
In Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, Republicans control all branches of government, giving them power to gerrymander districts in the redistricting after the 2020 census.
Once more the Supreme Court has aided and abetted these anti-democratic actions. The right-wing majority gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. For the first time, there will be no prior review by the Justice Department to limit racially discriminatory gerrymandering. Then in Rucho v. Common Cause, the “gang of five” ruled that the courts would no longer review challenges to partisan gerrymandering. No federal court will stand in the way of discriminatory outrages.
It took decades to overcome the Jim Crow laws imposed at the end of Reconstruction. It required mass demonstrations, immense courage on the part of ordinary heroes, and finally the leadership of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, to begin to correct the injustice.
We can’t wait decades this time. Jefferson Davis Republicans are once more intent on imposing minority rule, and using the law and a partisan majority on the Supreme Court to enforce it. They’re using both terrorist threat and legal measures to intimidate and impede voters. Once more it will take popular opposition — demonstrations, voter registration and mobilization drives, popular education and engagement — to protect the right to vote. The House of Representatives has passed a law, HR 1, to expand and protect the right to vote. The bill is likely to face universal opposition from Republican senators, unless popular mobilization forces some to stand up.
It is time for ordinary heroes once more.
Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland listens during his confirmation hearing in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 22, 2021. (photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)
Corporate Lawyers Line Up for Justice Department Top Slots
Alexander Sammon, The Intercept
Sammon writes: "Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland defended hiring lawyers with Big Tech experience at yesterday's confirmation hearing."
he first day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s appointee for attorney general, was surprisingly uneventful. Garland faced little meaningful pushback from Republicans while assuring them repeatedly that he would not bring anything even resembling political motivation into the Department of Justice. “I would not have taken this job if I thought that politics would have any influence over prosecutions and investigations,” he said. With support from at least Sens. John Cornyn and Chuck Grassley on the Republican side, Garland is likely to sail through to confirmation.
But while Garland was asked about investigating Hunter Biden, the president’s son, he was barely asked about the burgeoning ranks of corporate lawyers who are joining or expected to be joining the Justice Department. In both the transition team and early hires, the Biden Department of Justice, with Garland as its presumptive lead, looks to be drawing extensively on the ranks of Big Law representatives to staff its most powerful and important posts.
Several of the lawyers up for major positions at the Justice Department have personal connections to Garland going back decades, including when he worked in the agency during the Clinton administration. In the intervening years when Garland became a federal judge, these colleagues went to work for Big Tech and other corporate clients. Now Garland seems content to bring them back into the fold regardless of their records. Though the Biden administration has attempted to break from the usual list of Big Law expats for judicial nominations, Garland’s fealty to old colleagues is making the Justice Department look quite familiar.
Garland’s most concerning connection is Jamie Gorelick, who, despite being unlikely to get a formal role within the department, is positioning herself as a fixer with Washington’s most direct line to Garland’s office and unique power to influence the Biden Department of Justice. Currently a partner at the powerful firm WilmerHale, Gorelick was the former No. 2 ranking member in the Clinton Justice Department, where Garland served as her top deputy. Gorelick helped Garland secure his judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and since Biden’s announcement of Garland’s nomination, she has been advertising her proximity to Garland and their lengthy friendship. Gorelick and Garland went to college together, and in a recent interview, she referred to Garland as her “wingman.”
That’s particularly concerning given Gorelick’s recent history. Gorelick is a notorious wheeler and dealer inside Washington, known for using her connections to ward off penalties for corporate offenders. Gorelick was hired to help Google beat a burgeoning antitrust case during the Obama years, successfully pressuring the White House and Justice Department to put the brakes on a criminal investigation into the firm. In a separate case against Google, Gorelick also helped shut down a U.S. attorney, to the point that the Justice Department even apologized to the company. Gorelick was rumored to have arranged the apology.
Gorelick’s record does not stop with Big Tech. She has also represented the cities of Chicago and Baltimore against probes into the police murders of Laquan McDonald and Freddie Gray, respectively. She defended BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, getting the company off the hook for the economic distress brought to the region and dodging demands that the company help pay to restore the Gulf of Mexico, an agreement so favorable to the company that it surprised onlookers. She contributed significant legal work on behalf of the predatory for-profit college University of Phoenix and lobbied against Obama administration efforts to curb subsidies to private student loan firms. She represented Jared Kushner as he navigated federal ethics and anti-nepotism laws while taking a job in the Trump White House, and she even did work for former President Richard Nixon. She’s a former board member of Fannie Mae and a current board member of Amazon.
Since the announcement of Garland’s appointment, Gorelick has been advertising her access to him. WilmerHale, the firm at which she’s a partner, ran an article about their proximity, boasting of her appearance on three legal podcasts where she details her unique personal connection to Garland and forecasts what his confirmation means for the future of the Department of Justice, before subsequently deleting the page. Gorelick did not respond to a request for comment.
Already established at the Justice Department is Brian Boynton, who the Biden administration hired to serve as the current chief deputy and acting head of the Civil Division. Boynton, another Washington, D.C., lawyer who was also a partner at WilmerHale until recently, helped see through the merger between Sprint and T-Mobile and worked on behalf of predatory for-profit colleges to keep the Obama administration from enacting protections for student borrowers. One of Boynton’s first moves in the Biden Justice Department was to block lawyers representing students alleging to have been defrauded by for-profit colleges from deposing former secretary of education and notorious champion of for-profit education Betsy DeVos.
Elsewhere, Emily Loeb has been announced as associate deputy attorney general, leaving her post as partner of the law firm Jenner & Block. Loeb most recently represented Apple in the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s investigation into Big Tech and was described by those involved with the investigation to have been an obstructionist force.
Meanwhile, Susan Davies, a former partner at notorious Republican Big Law firm Kirkland & Ellis, one-time employer of Kenneth Starr and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, is expected to join the Biden Department of Justice in some form as well. Her page has been removed from the Kirkland & Ellis website and her email bounces back. At Kirkland & Ellis, which was once home to Trump appointees Alex Azar, John Bolton, Alex Acosta, and even former Attorney General William Barr, Davies defended Facebook against antitrust charges.
Davies and Garland have history as well, having worked together in the Clinton Justice Department; she also helped with Garland’s failed Supreme Court nomination. The Intercept and the American Prospect have previously reported that Garland was pushing Davies to head the antitrust division at the Justice Department. In his hearing Monday, Garland said that Davies would not be leading the antitrust division, though he did not confirm that she would not work at the agency in some capacity.
Meanwhile, two sources with knowledge of the hearings who requested anonymity because of their work on personnel matters told The Intercept and the Prospect that Garland was prepped for this week’s proceedings by Karen Dunn, an attorney who represented then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos during the recent House Antitrust Subcommittee hearings on Big Tech and defended Apple in a suit alleging antitrust violations by the firm. The Prospect reported that Dunn was an early Big Tech favorite for assistant attorney general for antitrust, but her candidacy was shot down by the Biden transition team. Her involvement in the hearing could mean that she may be under consideration for a different role within the Justice Department.
In a statement, Justice Department spokesperson Dena Iverson said: “All department employees, career and appointed, are governed by comprehensive federal ethics rules, including rules concerning recusals related to conflicts of interest. The department hires talented lawyers with a wide range of professional experiences, including from all levels of government, academia, non-profit organizations, and law firms.” A handful of staffers have come from those backgrounds, like nominee for the civil rights division Kristen Clarke (a civil rights advocate) and her principal deputy Pam Karlan (of Stanford Law). But the fact that not everyone in the Justice Department will come out of Big Law is a cold comfort.
Of course, Garland hasn’t yet been installed as attorney general, which means that none of the recent and projected hires are technically his. But it stands to reason that the putative head of the Department of Justice would have influence on and awareness of who is filling the top roles in his department. Given the clear connections to Garland through his time at the Justice Department and Washington, D.C., law firms like WilmerHale and others, there is every indication that these hires are consistent with his preferences.
Garland did take time during his hearing to defend the inevitability of corporate lawyers in his Justice Department, including tech lawyers in his antitrust division. “Fortunately or unfortunately, the best antitrust lawyers in the country have some involvement, one way or another” in tech, Garland insisted. “We can’t exclude every single good lawyer from being able to be in the division.”
All of that points to a concerning trend for a department that will be especially important in the Biden years. Confidence in the Justice Department as an institution is particularly low; for all of President Donald Trump’s transgressions, the department served as no meaningful check on his criminality.
Not only will the Biden Justice Department be tasked with spearheading antitrust investigations into a number of Big Tech firms, it will also have to take on police department abuse and malfeasance, investigations into the January 6 insurrection, and the vast and far-reaching corruption of the Trump administration.
Is a Clinton-era Department of Justice, teeming with corporate lawyers who have worked on behalf of for-profit colleges and the very same Big Tech firms that the government is supposed to be investigating, up to the enormous task at hand?
Maria Pineda cleans the kitchen of a home, where she temporarily stays, Feb. 18, 2021, in Conroe, Texas. Pineda's son, Cristian Pavon Pineda, 11, died of suspected hypothermia as temperatures plummeted into the teens. (photo: Gustavo Huerta/Houston Chronicle/AP)
ALSO SEE: 'I Had to Pay $500 a Day': Freeze Shows Texans
True Cost of Unregulated Power
Family of 11-Year-Old Boy Who Died in Texas Deep Freeze Files Million Suit Against Power Companies
Bill Hutchinson, ABC News
Excerpt: "Cristian Pineda's mother found him dead in their freezing mobile home."
READ MORE
California state Senator Scott Wiener. (photo: Getty Images)
Federal Judge Rules California Can Enforce Net Neutrality Law
CBS News
Excerpt: "A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that California can for the first time enforce its tough net neutrality law, clearing the way for the state to ban internet providers from slowing down or blocking access to websites and applications that don't pay for premium service."
Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (photo: AP)
ALSO SEE: Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Laments Changing San Francisco
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet and Founder of City Lights Bookshop, Dies Aged 101
Janie Har and Hillel Italie, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Poet, publisher and bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who helped launch and perpetuate the Beat movement, has died. He was 101."
READ MORE
Latha Bollapally, with her son Rajesh Goud, holds a picture of her husband, Madhu Bollapally, 43, a migrant worker who died in Qatar. (photo: Kailash Nirmal)
6,500 Migrant Workers Have Died in Qatar as It Gears Up for World Cup
Pete Pattisson, Niamh McIntyre, Nikhil Eapen, Imran Mukhtar, Md Owasim Uddin Bhuyan, Udwab Bhattarai and Aanya Piyari, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago."
Guardian analysis indicates shocking figure likely to be an underestimate, as preparations for 2022 tournament continue
The findings, compiled from government sources, mean an average of 12 migrant workers from these five south Asian nations have died each week since the night in December 2010 when the streets of Doha were filled with ecstatic crowds celebrating Qatar’s victory.
Data from India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka revealed there were 5,927 deaths of migrant workers in the period 2011–2020. Separately, data from Pakistan’s embassy in Qatar reported a further 824 deaths of Pakistani workers, between 2010 and 2020.
The total death toll is significantly higher, as these figures do not include deaths from a number of countries which send large numbers of workers to Qatar, including the Philippines and Kenya. Deaths that occurred in the final months of 2020 are also not included.
In the past 10 years, Qatar has embarked on an unprecedented building programme, largely in preparation for the football tournament in 2022. In addition to seven new stadiums, dozens of major projects have been completed or are under way, including a new airport, roads, public transport systems, hotels and a new city, which will host the World Cup final.
While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects, says Nick McGeehan, a director at FairSquare Projects, an advocacy group specialising in labour rights in the Gulf. “A very significant proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup,” he said.
There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s organising committee. Experts have questioned the use of the term because in some cases it has been used to describe deaths which have occurred on the job, including a number of workers who have collapsed and died on stadium construction sites.
The findings expose Qatar’s failure to protect its 2 million-strong migrant workforce, or even investigate the causes of the apparently high rate of death among the largely young workers.
Behind the statistics lie countless stories of devastated families who have been left without their main breadwinner, struggling to gain compensation and confused about the circumstances of their loved one’s death.
Ghal Singh Rai from Nepal paid nearly £1,000 in recruitment fees for his job as a cleaner in a camp for workers building the Education City World Cup stadium. Within a week of arriving, he killed himself.
Another worker, Mohammad Shahid Miah, from Bangladesh, was electrocuted in his worker accommodation after water came into contact with exposed electricity cables.
In India, the family of Madhu Bollapally have never understood how the healthy 43-year old died of “natural causes” while working in Qatar. His body was found lying on his dorm room floor.
Qatar’s grim death toll is revealed in long spreadsheets of official data listing the causes of death: multiple blunt injuries due to a fall from height; asphyxia due to hanging; undetermined cause of death due to decomposition.
But among the causes, the most common by far is so-called “natural deaths”, often attributed to acute heart or respiratory failure.
Based on the data obtained by the Guardian, 69% of deaths among Indian, Nepali and Bangladeshi workers are categorised as natural. Among Indians alone, the figure is 80%.
The Guardian has previously reported that such classifications, which are usually made without an autopsy, often fail to provide a legitimate medical explanation for the underlying cause of these deaths.
In 2019 it found that Qatar’s intense summer heat is likely to be a significant factor in many worker deaths. The Guardian’s findings were supported by research commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization which revealed that for at least four months of the year workers faced significant heat stress when working outside.
A report from Qatar government’s own lawyers in 2014 recommended that it commission a study into the deaths of migrant workers from cardiac arrest, and amend the law to “allow for autopsies … in all cases of unexpected or sudden death”. The government has done neither.
Qatar continues to “drag its feet on this critical and urgent issue in apparent disregard for workers’ lives”, said Hiba Zayadin, Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch. “We have called on Qatar to amend its law on autopsies to require forensic investigations into all sudden or unexplained deaths, and pass legislation to require that all death certificates include reference to a medically meaningful cause of death,” she said.
The Qatar government says that the number of deaths – which it does not dispute – is proportionate to the size of the migrant workforce and that the figures include white-collar workers who have died naturally after living in Qatar for many years.
“The mortality rate among these communities is within the expected range for the size and demographics of the population. However, every lost life is a tragedy, and no effort is spared in trying to prevent every death in our country,” the Qatari government said in a statement by a spokesperson.
The official added that all citizens and foreign nationals have access to free first-class healthcare, and that there has been a steady decline in the mortality rate among “guest workers” over the past decade due to health and safety reforms to the labour system.
Other significant causes of deaths among Indians, Nepalis and Bangladeshis are road accidents (12%), workplace accidents (7%) and suicide (7%).
Covid-related deaths, which have remained extremely low in Qatar, have not significantly affected the figures, with just over 250 fatalities among all nationalities.
The Guardian’s research has also highlighted the lack of transparency, rigour and detail in recording deaths in Qatar. Embassies in Doha and governments in labour-sending countries are reluctant to share the data, possibly for political reasons. Where statistics have been provided, there are inconsistencies between the figures held by different government agencies, and there is no standard format for recording the causes of death. One south-Asian embassy said they could not share data on the causes of death because they were only recorded by hand in a notebook.
“There is a real lack of clarity and transparency surrounding these deaths,” said May Romanos, Gulf researcher for Amnesty International. “There is a need for Qatar to strengthen its occupational health and safety standards.”
The committee organising the World Cup in Qatar, when asked about the deaths on stadium projects, said: “We deeply regret all of these tragedies and investigated each incident to ensure lessons were learned. We have always maintained transparency around this issue and dispute inaccurate claims around the number of workers who have died on our projects.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Fifa, football’s world governing body, said it is fully committed to protecting the rights of workers on Fifa projects. “With the very stringent health and safety measures on site … the frequency of accidents on Fifa World Cup construction sites has been low when compared to other major construction projects around the world,” they said, without providing evidence.
Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke (center) stands with other water protectors against construction of the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota on Jan. 9. (photo: Kerem Yuceck/AFP/Getty Images)
Indigenous Water Protectors Face Off Against the "Pandemic Pipeline"
Clara Liang, In These Times
Liang writes: "Biden halted Keystone XL, but Enbridge's Line 3 would pipe the same tar sands oil into the U.S. and across Anishinaabe treaty lands."
embers of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa gather periodically at Grandma’s Table, a sacred site on the tribe’s northern Minnesota reservation, to perform moon ceremonies, teach their children how to build fires, sing and dance. Grandma’s Table is where Taysha Martineau first learned to proudly speak their name in the Ojibwe language. In December, Martineau could only watch as Canadian oil giant Enbridge (authorized by the Fond du Lac tribal chairman) began digging up the site to make way for its Line 3 oil pipeline.
“That was, for me, the final straw,” says Martineau, co-founder of the Indigenous community support group Gitchigumi Scouts. “It was as if someone had stormed into church and left the broken body of your grandmother on the altar.”
In early January, Martineau and other water protectors — the activists opposing the pipeline— set up a resistance camp on nine acres of land they bought with $30,000 from a GoFundMe campaign. In defiance of their chairman’s decision, six water protectors live permanently at Camp Migizi (“bald eagle” in Ojibwe), and dozens gather there daily to join direct actions against the pipeline. Six demonstrators had been arrested at press time.
Though President Joe Biden revoked the federal permit for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, construction continues on Line 3. Like Keystone, Line 3 would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada. If completed, the $4 billion expansion project will replace an older, smaller Enbridge pipeline and deliver 760,000 barrels of oil per day to a transportation terminal in Superior, Wis.
Camp Migizi’s campaign is the latest obstacle for the embattled pipeline, which has been planned since 2013 but slowed by legal challenges, petitions and Indigenous-led resistance.
The White Earth and Red Lake nations, the Sierra Club, and Indigenous environmental group Honor the Earth are pursuing legal action against Line 3 in federal court, claiming the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers failed to adequately evaluate the environmental and cultural impact of the pipeline. Water protectors at Camp Migizi hope to delay construction at least until that case can be heard.
According to Winona LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth, Line 3 violates treaty rights of the Anishinaabe peoples, which includes the Ojibwe/ Chippewa. More than 50,000 Anishinaabeg live in Minnesota, where tribal territory spans 3 million acres. Treaties guarantee them the right to harvest sacred wild rice, which is central to the Anishinaabe economy and ecosystem. The pipeline would run through the center of wild rice territory.
Juli Kellner, a spokesperson for Enbridge, says the company has demonstrated “ongoing respect for tribal sovereignty.” Kellner also says the project provides local economic benefits and will increase the operational safety of Line 3.
Landowners and Indigenous people in northern Minnesota, however, are skeptical. Enbridge caused one of the biggest inland oil spills in U.S. history when a pipeline spilled more than a million gallons into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in 2010. From extraction to combustion, the pipeline would also emit 193 million tons of greenhouse gases a year — more than Minnesota’s total 2018 emissions.
As the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, water protectors say the project poses another threat: It will pour out-of-state workers into rural Minnesota. Thousands have already moved into the area, and one report finds around 3.5% of them tested positive for the coronavirus.
Enbridge maintains it has instituted strict Covid testing and screening protocols for Line 3, but LaDuke is not convinced. “It’s genocidal,” she says. “It’s just so wrong.”
Health officials, tribal leaders, and environmental advocacy groups have also stepped up to voice their concerns about plowing forward on this “pandemic pipeline.” In December, the Chairman of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe sent a letter against Line 3 to Governor Tim Walz, citing rising Covid death counts in the region, shortages of nearby ICU beds, and the strain already facing the Reservation’s ambulance system. A petition to the governor signed by hundreds of healthcare workers echoed this sentiment, warning that “A major outbreak in a rural area with limited healthcare capacity … will have ripple effects across our entire state healthcare infrastructure.”
Disease and colonialism have long been intertwined in American history. European diseases were a major factor in the destruction of Indigenous cultures during colonization. Centuries of forced dispossession and relocation have continued to make Indigenous communities vulnerable to disease. Lack of funding, hospital beds and supplies at the Indian Health Service — the federal division that oversees healthcare for 2.6 million tribal members— exacerbates this vulnerability. Indigenous people have the highest Covid-19 mortality rate in both Minnesota and the U.S. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they have died at almost twice the rate of white Americans. New data on “excess mortality” rates in the state suggest that Indigenous Covid deaths have been severely undercounted and that Indigenous communities are especially at risk of indirect Covid deaths stemming from loss of income or averted medical care.
Before Covid, Martineau was focused on a different Line 3 threat: the “man camps” that oil companies often set up in rural areas to house temporary workers. These camps, consisting primarily of young men with disposable incomes and no ties to local communities, are documented breeding grounds for violence and have been linked to increases in sexual assault and sex trafficking, particularly against Indigenous women and children.
Like disease, sexual violence is deeply rooted in historical processes of colonization and genocide. In the words of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a member of Lubicon Cree, one of Canada’s First Nations, “Violence against the Earth begets violence against women.”
Martineau says that local law enforcement, recognizing the severity of this problem, has put in extra efforts this year to prevent sex trafficking associated with out-of-state workers. Nonetheless, Martineau remains “vigilant” in watching for predatory behavior, especially since Camp Migizi is full of women, children, and elders. Minnesota ranks ninth in U.S. states with the most cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
LaDuke, an economist by training, calls fossil-fuel capitalism “predator economics,” or “Wiindigo economics.” (In Anishinaabe lore, Wiindigo is an insatiably greedy monster.) Transient workers and the corporations that send them are a feature of this extractive system. “Transience,” LaDuke writes in her book To Be a Water Protector, “means we do not come to know and love a place; we move on, and as such are not accountable to that place.”
Enbridge is not just building a new pipeline; it’s also abandoning an old, crumbling part of Line 3. The abandonment of the old pipeline is as much of an issue to water protectors as the construction of the new one. “Instead of fixing or removing it, they want simply to walk away,” LaDuke says.
The water protectors at Camp Migizi are resisting these Wiindigo economics by centering a commitment to the land that runs deep into the past and the future.
As Martineau says, “Many of us have made promises to our elders and the next generation that we will do everything we can to stop Line 3.”
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