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18 February 21
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Jonathan Chait | Rush Limbaugh Taught Republicans to Love an Angry, Racist Bully
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes:
onald Trump’s connection to the conservative movement to this day remains a subject of acrimonious dispute among the right-wing intelligentsia — some have embraced the 45th president as the movement’s authentic leader, while others regard him warily as an interloper, a New York Democrat who captured the party from the outside.
Nobody on the right ever disowned Rush Limbaugh. Throughout his career, they agreed he was a pure representative of conservative thought. George Bush courted him with an overnight visit to the Lincoln Bedroom and the presidential box at the 1992 Republican National Convention. National Review declared him “Leader of the Opposition” in a 1993 cover story. “Limbaugh is not fringe,” gushed Washington Free Beacon editor Matthew Continetti. “His views fit in the conservative mainstream. He idolizes Buckley.”
The Republican Party considered Limbaugh’s influence on their 1994 midterm sweep so profound they made him an honorary member of the incoming congressional class. “I am in Congress today because of Rush Limbaugh,” testified Mike Pence, in 2001. Upon news of his death, George W. Bush called him “an indomitable spirit with a big heart.”
Bush himself may have a big heart. Limbaugh oozed bile. He did not merely characterize his targets as misguided, or stupid, or even selfish. He rendered them for his audience as dehumanized targets of rage. He had special rage for feminist women, who were castrating harpies, and Black people, who were lazy, intellectually unqualified, and inherently criminal. The message he pounded home day after day was that minorities and women were seizing status and resources from white people and men, and that politics was a zero-sum struggle — and the victory would go to whichever side fought more viciously.
Limbaugh’s racism was obsessive, not incidental. Any measures to uplift Black America, in his mind, could only come at white expense and were inherently illegitimate. Any economic reform — even a goal like universal health care, which Democrats had sought for decades and which prevailed throughout the industrialized world — was “reparations.” No episode was too marginal to be conscripted into this message. When in 2011, some schoolkids got into a fight — as they have since schooling existed — he warned, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering.”
His allies have praised his talents as a radio host, and he certainly possessed undeniable talent as a vocal entertainer. Yet his show was curiously devoid of any skill at argument. I am a big believer in listening to opposing arguments and attempting to understand them. I regularly read organs like National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and many others to understand how counterparts on the right see the world (and I do the same for those to my left).
Limbaugh’s program was useless in this regard. He could blather for hours without going from a premise to a conclusion. His only tools for processing opposing points of view were assertion, mockery, and resentment. Limbaugh liked to call himself smart, but he was a lifelong stranger to reason. He hid this weakness with a remarkable ability to gab smoothly and seamlessly.
One of the more telling episodes in his career came nearly 20 years ago when ESPN gave him a stint as an NFL commentator, on the calculation that he could put aside his reactionary goals and use his skills as a communicator on a different subject entirely. The experiment quickly blew up when he proclaimed, absurdly, that star quarterback Donovan McNabb was somehow overrated due to his race. “The media has been very desirous that a Black quarterback do well,” he claimed. “There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn’t deserve.” If his willingness to blow up what he had called a “dream job” demonstrated anything, it was that Limbaugh’s racism was not merely a strategy to capture market share but a product of conviction.
Like many conservatives, Limbaugh maintained, and perhaps believed, that the bedrock of his worldview was a set of timeless constitutional principles based on the holy writ of Ronald Reagan, from which no deviation could ever be permitted. Appearing at CPAC in 2009, he delivered a withering rebuke to Republican intellectuals who had proposed revising the party’s Reaganite dogma to suit evolving conditions. Limbaugh thundered:
Sometimes I get livid and angry … We’ve got factions now within our own movement seeking power to dominate it, and, worst of all, to redefine it. Well, the Constitution doesn’t need to be redefined. Conservative intellectuals, the Declaration of Independence does not need to be redefined, and neither does conservatism. Conservatism is what it is, and it is forever. It’s not something you can bend and shape and flake and form …
I cringed—it might have been 2007, late 2007 or sometime during 2008, but a couple of prominent conservative, Beltway, establishment media types began to write on the concept that the era of Reagan is over. And that we needed to adapt our appeal, because, after all, what’s important in politics is winning elections. And so we have to understand that the American people, they want big government. We just have to find a way to tell them we’re no longer opposed to that. We will come up with our own version of it that is wiser and smarter, but we’ve got to go get the Wal-Mart voter, and we’ve got to get the Hispanic voter, and we’ve got to get the recalcitrant independent women. And I’m listening to this and I am just apoplectic: the era of Reagan is over? … We have got to stamp this out.
Yet, by the time Trump appeared on the scene, Limbaugh had realized this was not quite right. Almost every candidate had run to Trump’s right, and all of them had failed. Limbaugh himself no longer cared. In 2016, he explained away the candidate’s many ideological deviations, after having expelled previous Republicans for far smaller transgressions. Buckley-ite dogma could not be the essence of conservative and Republican belief: “If it were, if conservatism — this is the big shock — if conservatism were the glue, the belief and understanding of deep but commonly understood conservative principles, if that’s what defined people as conservative and was the glue that made the conservative movement a big movement, then Trump would have no chance.”
What, then, was the glue? It was simple: “The thing that’s in front of everybody’s face and it’s apparently so hard to believe, it’s this united, virulent opposition to the left and the Democrat Party and Barack Obama.”
Limbaugh, like Trump, understood the party’s id years before its putative leaders grasped it. They had the same feel for the conservative audience and nearly the same message to capture it. They were almost the same person. Perhaps the only only salient difference between the two men’s careers is that Limbaugh found his place sooner than Trump, at a time when a bellicose misogynist could find a valued position in the party but not as its presidential candidate. That had become a possibility by the time Trump found his way to conservatism as a viable exclusive brand.
Why, then, did Trump’s emergence generate open resistance from the party elite (which was then submerged, only to reopen after the January 6 insurrection), while Limbaugh remained a cherished comrade until the end? The answer is that Limbaugh spoke to their voters through channels only they heard: His rants were confined almost exclusively to his audience, with the exception of occasional, short-lived media dustups when he said something especially bigoted. Trump’s rants were front and center, put on bright display every day in the mainstream media. Limbaugh could be hidden away from the mainstream. Trump could not.
It is peculiar that Limbaugh is honored and mourned in a single voice by a party elite that remains split over its descent into violent insurrection. The line from Limbaugh to Trump is about an inch long.
Medical personnel at a COVID testing center in Phoenix, Arizona. (photo: Matt York/AP)
Health Officials Say the Coronavirus Will Likely Become Endemic in the Next Several Years. What Does That Mean?
Adrianna Rodriguez, USA Today
Rodriguez writes:
ven as cases continue to decline and more Americans receive their vaccines, the coronavirus isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, health officials say.
The nation’s top infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed the idea that COVID-19 would be eradicated in the next several years at a webinar hosted by think tank Chatham House in November.
“We need to plan that this is something we may need to maintain control over chronically. It may be something that becomes endemic, that we have to just be careful about,” he said.
So, what is an endemic disease and how would COVID-19 become one? Experts say there are multiple endemic diseases in the United States that could foreshadow what the disease caused by the coronavirus may look like in the upcoming years.
What does endemic mean?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines endemic as the “constant presence and/or usual prevalence” of a disease within a population in a certain geographic area.
An endemic disease spreads at a baseline level every year without causing major disruption to people's lives, said Dr. Donald Burke, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
“Things that are endemic are present for long periods of time without interruption, continuously circulating in the population," like the common cold, he said.
A disease can be endemic in one country but can be considered an outbreak or an epidemic in another country, explained Dr. Pritish Tosh, an infectious diseases physician and researcher at the Mayo Clinic.
For example, malaria is considered endemic in some parts of the world where mosquitos carry the parasite. However, a high number of malaria cases in the United States would be considered an epidemic if it were not contained.
What’s the difference between an epidemic and an endemic?
An epidemic is a sudden increase of a disease above what is normally expected among the population in a certain area, according to the CDC.
Epidemics aren't just caused by diseases that result from viruses or bacteria, the agency says. For example, diabetes and obesity exist in large enough proportions in the U.S. to be considered epidemics. Similarly, a sudden increase in addiction to opioids over the past several years is accurately called an“opioid epidemic.”
The part of the word “epi” means "to be upon," Burke said, and “demic” comes from “demos,” which means "people."
“Epidemic means something that comes out and is among the people,” he said. “Things that are epidemic are things that are unusual that are not there and then appear.”
Endemic means "something that's within the people," he added. Many epidemics have turned into endemics.
But an endemic disease does not necessarily mean that it will exist forever. Some endemic diseases have been eliminated in the U.S. after achieving herd immunity through vaccines and natural infection.
What are some endemic diseases?
The four common cold coronaviruses, which are considered cousins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are considered endemic in most parts of the world, including the U.S., Burke said.
“We don’t notice them,” he said. “They’re transmitted, they’re constant.”
Many childhood diseases also are endemic, he said. The measles, for example, used to be endemic in the U.S.
“In the old days … they were commonplace. Everybody got them,” Burke said. But childhood vaccines helped impede transmission, almost eliminating the measles from the U.S.
However, the measles is still considered endemic in some parts of the world, Tosh said. If the highly infectious virus was brought in from another country, it could cause an outbreak and possibly lead to an epidemic in the U.S.
For example, a series of outbreaks in 2019 led to more than 1,200 measles cases in the U.S. – the highest number of cases recorded in the country since 1992, according to the CDC. The agency attributed the outbreaks to travelers who got measles abroad and pockets of unvaccinated people.
Could COVID-19 become endemic?
It’s likely SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay, health experts say.
“It appears as though this virus is likely to remain endemic in populations at least for several years, possibly indefinitely,” Tosh said.
A January study found that the virus “could join the ranks of mild, cold-causing … human coronaviruses in the long run,” according to Emory University and Penn State University scientists.
The model, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, compares SARS-CoV-2 to four common cold coronaviruses plus the SARS and MERS viruses, which surfaced in 2003 and 2012, respectively.
Researchers determined from the model that if the novel coronavirus continues to circulate in the general population and most people are exposed to it from childhood, it could be added to the list of common colds.
However, the future of the novel coronavirus hinges on many unknowns, experts say. New variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa, which studies have shown may be more transmissible, were discovered in the U.S. Health officials are more concerned about the South Africa variant, as emerging data shows existing COVID-19 vaccines seem to be less effective against it.
Tosh expects more variants to arise as growing immunity and vaccines forces the coronavirus to mutate.
“It will be difficult to project what this will look like five years from now," he said. "But I think we can anticipate some kind of COVID endemicity over the next several years."
Chiquita Brooks-LaSure is President Joe Biden's pick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, sources say. (photo: AP)
Biden to Pick Chiquita Brooks-LaSure to Run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Sources Say
Arlette Saenz and Tami Luhby, CNN
resident Joe Biden is expected to nominate Chiquita Brooks-LaSure to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, two sources familiar with the decision told CNN.
Brooks-LaSure, whose nomination to be CMS administrator would need Senate confirmation, was a top official at the agency during the Obama administration and worked to implement the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Prior to joining the Obama administration, she was part of the Democratic staff for the House Ways and Means Committee, where she also worked on the landmark health reform law.
Currently a managing director at Manatt Health, a professional services firm, Brooks-LaSure also served as a co-lead of the Department of Health and Human Services agency review team during the Biden-Harris transition period.
Brooks-LaSure would be a key player in executing Biden's promises to rebuild the Affordable Care Act and strengthen Medicaid -- as well as institute a government-run public option and lower Medicare's eligibility age to 60, from 65. The $1 trillion agency, the largest within HHS, oversees much of Obamacare and the federal exchange, Healthcare.gov. In total, more than 145 million Americans receive their health coverage through programs the agency administers, including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the Affordable Care Act.
In recent years, Brooks-LaSure has co-authored reports on expanding coverage through state Medicaid buy-in proposals and on advancing health equity. Last month, she and her colleagues at Manatt published a report on two potential public option models in Nevada.
The Washington Post was first to report her expected nomination.
Brooks-LaSure would be tasked with reversing many of the policies put in place by her predecessor, Seema Verma, who served as the agency's administrator for nearly four years. Under Verma's tenure, CMS slashed funding for Obamacare marketing and outreach, cut the open enrollment period in half and promoted the use of private insurance brokers over non-profit navigators to help people find coverage.
Also, Verma took some historic and controversial steps in Medicaid, in particular permitting states to require low-income participants to work in order to receive benefits. The Biden administration has already started walking back the approvals. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments about the issue next month.
The Supreme Court is also considering the fate of the Affordable Care Act itself.
Brooks-LaSure's nomination comes more than two months after Biden selected California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his Health and Human Services secretary, though he has yet to be confirmed. Two Senate committees will hold hearings on his nomination next week.
Becerra sat on the House Ways & Means Committee while Brooks-LaSure was a staffer.
The delays in confirming an HHS secretary and naming a CMS administrator have already had an impact on Biden's early efforts to bolster the Affordable Care Act. CMS launched a special enrollment period on Monday to allow the uninsured to sign up for 2021 coverage. But the agency has not provided more funding for enrollment assistance, which some policy experts say stems from the lack of top officials.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Democrats Unveil Legislation That Would Grant a Pathway to Citizenship to Eleven Million People
Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill
Beitsch writes: "The Biden administration formally rolled out its major immigration bill Thursday, introducing legislation that would give 11 million people a path to U.S. citizenship."
The bill, which will be shepherded by Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) represents President Biden’s chance to deliver major changes to a system where both parties see a need for reform but are sharply divided on how to deliver it.
White House officials called the bill a chance to “reset and restart conversations on immigration reform,” labeling the bill as Biden’s “vision of what it takes to fix the system.”
But even with a Democrat-led Congress, passing an immigration bill will be a heavy lift given that Senate Democrats would need to secure 10 GOP votes to pass the bill through the regular legislative process.
The bill would deliver on several of Biden’s campaign promises, including providing a path to citizenship for the young people brought to the U.S by their parents as children, known as Dreamers.
In addition to Dreamers, it would also allow immigrant farmworkers and those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), who came to the U.S. as far back as the 1990s amid natural disasters and other unrest in their countries of origin, to quickly gain green cards. Undocumented individuals living in the U.S. would also be able to seek greencards after five years.
Each of the groups could seek citizenship three years after gaining their green card, creating a maximum eight year path to citizenship.
But beyond creating a pathway for those already in the U.S. the bill makes efforts to ease immigration timelines abroad, increasing numerous types of visa caps while seeking to reduce wait times for those who may currently wait as long as 20 years to join family in the U.S.
It also changes the term alien in law to noncitizen to “better reflect the President's values on immigration.”
Immigration has already led to roadblocks for Biden after some Republicans stalled his nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security in protest of the president’s plan to pause construction of the border wall.
And Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee have slammed a number of Biden’s immigration executive orders, with Ranking Member John Katko (R-N.Y.) calling it a “catch and release program” that will lead to an unimaginable surge on the border.
If the bill passes, it would be the first major immigration bill approved by Congress since 1996, when lawmakers voted to create the enforcement and deportation system largely still in use today.
Rather than trade amnesty for some immigrants for an increase in enforcement as was often done in prior legislative attempts, Biden’s U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 largely focuses on expanding immigration and looking to address root cases of migration..
“The law is already there. There is no need for added enforcement mechanisms,” a senior White House official said on a call with reporters.
Perhaps most significantly, it would increase visa options on the family-based side of the immigration system, increasing the country caps that limit how many people can come to the U.S. from each country while also reopening roughly 200,000 unused visa slots from years past.
The bill also lifts the so-called three- and ten-year bars that restrict people from reentering the U.S. if they’ve overstayed their visa.
It also ups the number from diversity visas from 55,000 to 80,000, a substantial increase that will boost the number of immigrants from nations that otherwise have low levels of immigration to America.
The bill also triples the number of visas available to those who have been the victim of certain crimes including domestic violence, upping the number from 10,000 to 30,000. Employment-based visas also jump under the legislation from 140,000 to 170,000.
The bill comes after Biden rolled out a number of other major immigration measures, striking down former President Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, ending the emergency authorization for construction of the border wall, and implementing a new asylum process to replace Trump’s remain in Mexico policy. He’s also sought to increase the refugee cap to 125,000 after Trump cut it to a historic low of 15,000.
The bill includes funding to back up some of Biden’s executive orders, setting aside $4 billion in aid for Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to address the root causes of migration while also setting aside funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to help clear the backlog of asylum cases.
But the legislation could face substantial pushback from Republicans, who have already been highly critical of Biden’s early moves on immigration.
White House officials refused to say whether Biden would consider attempting to pass the bill through the reconciliation process, which allows fiscal legislation to pass with a simple majority.
“We're open to a conversation with anyone about this but we think this is a much more comprehensive way to deal with this issue than just simply, you know, a wall,” one White House official said.
Service trucks lined up after a snowstorm on Tuesday in Fort Worth, Texas. (photo: Ron Jenkins/Getty)
Millions of Texans Are Freezing Right Now - Our Deregulated Electrical Grid Is to Blame
Fred Stafford, Jacobin
Stafford writes: "What Texans are suffering through is a failure of deregulation and markets - a neoliberal ideology promoted not just by the fossil-fuel-loving right, but even many environmentally conscious liberals."
he Alamo is under two inches of snow. The daytime temperature for Austin is 20 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s 19 in Houston, 12 in Dallas, and 0 degrees in the panhandle. Texas, home to twenty-nine million Americans, is experiencing one of its coldest winters ever. Nearly unprecedented snow and ice have also created dangerous conditions on roads and have caused at least twenty-three deaths so far.
And to make matters much worse, Texas’s electricity grid is utterly failing. Most of the state’s vast wind power was knocked out of commission days ago due to the freezing temperatures, and about half of its gas-powered plants went off-line due to full gas pipelines. Blackouts across the state left over 2 million homes without power on Monday, 4 million on Tuesday, and still 2.7 million on Wednesday, during some of the coldest days the state has ever recorded. Moreover, rolling blackouts meant to last fifteen to forty-five minutes at a time have actually lasted over twenty-four hours for many Texans, a testament to the colossal failure of the electrical infrastructure.
Unfortunately, in Texas, no electricity also means no heat. Like the rest of the South, about three-fifths of the state’s households rely on electricity rather than gas for home heating. And their homes are built to release heat in hot weather, not retain heat in cold weather. In short: while the power’s out, there’s serious risk of freezing to death, particularly among the elderly and the poor.
What Texans are suffering through right now is not merely the failure of some nebulous technical artifact called the electrical grid. Nor is it simply the failure of variable renewable energy like wind power.
Instead, it’s a failure of deregulation and markets — an ideology promoted not just by the fossil-fuel-loving right, but even many environmentally conscious liberals.
Power Resources in the State
Despite reports that the blackouts were caused by wind turbines icing over and failing to deliver, the outage spans the whole range of generators across the state. Most of the missing power capacity, according to a director of the Texas grid operator, actually comes from traditional thermal generation. Gas plants, as the dominant generation resource in Texas, are particularly struggling with outages.
Texas, like most of the country, has seen a shift in its electrical generation resources, away from coal plants (and nuclear plants, outside Texas) and toward wind farms and gas plants. That shift stems from a market factor: the low wholesale electricity prices that wind and gas both fetch. For gas, that low price is due to the fracked gas revolution that has enabled cheaper production; for renewables, it’s due to rapidly falling prices of overseas wind and solar manufacturing to state-driven demand in the form of “renewable portfolio standards” and to state subsidies like renewable energy credits and federal production tax credits.
But behind those low prices is a troubling commonality between electricity generated from renewables and gas, made clear in the recent book Shorting the Grid by utility analyst Meredith Angwin: they’re both dependent on unreliable “just-in-time” production.
Wind power is only available when weather permits, and natural gas plants rely on a continuous delivery of fuel along a regional network of pipelines — pipelines that are stretched to the limit in extreme cold weather and that, by law, must deliver their gas for heating, as a human need, before power plant usage. In Texas’s last severe winter outage of 2011, the gas pipelines sometimes couldn’t even transmit any gas either way, because compressors didn’t have the electricity needed to pump it through. (Reports suggest the same thing happening now.) Relying on interdependent, just-in-time production for essential resources has downsides.
Worse still, because of the variability of renewables like wind, it requires additional resources to keep the lights on when it’s not available. Unfortunately, that means in practice securing more natural gas plants for backup power, as has been the case in the electrical systems of renewables leaders Germany and California. Germany has even built new coal plants since it started its Energiewende transition to renewables and is currently trying to convince the United States to approve its construction of a massive pipeline carrying natural gas from Russia to meet its just-in-time needs.
It will be days if not weeks before we have a full diagnosis of what exactly went wrong on the Texas grid, as well as the human toll these blackouts have caused. But one thing is certain: virtually all sources of electricity are failing to generate — and transmit — electricity right now due to the extreme weather.
However, there’s still a sign of hope in the state, and for all of us concerned with climate change: nuclear energy, the dominant source of clean energy in the United States and elsewhere in the world. Unlike natural gas and renewables, nuclear plants stockpile fuel on-site; it’s production when we need it, not “just-in-time.”
As of Tuesday morning, only one of the state’s four nuclear generation units has been knocked off-line, as a purely precautionary measure, due to freezing conditions. At one-quarter of nuclear generation off-line, that’s less than either the half or so of fossil fuel generation or three-quarters of the average wind generation that’s missing.
During the 2014 polar vortex, again only one of the state’s four nuclear generators went off-line, while gas plants alone amounted to almost three-quarters of lost capacity. And in 2011, during a freezing outage that almost rivaled the present case, none of the nuclear units in the state went off-line; according to the Texas grid operator’s study, nuclear was the only type of generation in Texas that survived the weather intact.
In fact, based on daily reports from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that one nuclear generator in Texas was the only one to go off-line in the past few days, among all ninety-one generators across the country that were running last week. That’s in spite of record-setting frigid temperatures all across the country, causing power outages also in the neighboring Southwestern Power Pool and Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) electricity grids.
Unlike any fossil fuel plants that manage to stay running in this time of need, nuclear plants emit virtually no carbon into the atmosphere. That’s a technical quality that should unite those interested in electrical reliability — like the entire state of Texas right now — and those interested in decarbonization.
Electric Culture War
Instead of grappling with the ever-increasing dependence on just-in-time natural gas and renewables, as a matter of planning production to meet society’s needs, people find a culture war to wage instead. Renewables vs. fossil fuels. “The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died,” declared Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. Instead of productive technologies that both meet social needs in particular ways with particular trade-offs to plan around, it’s one good, one bad.
Right now, both kinds of resources have failed the state. Indeed, fossil fuel generation comprises the majority of the lost generation in the Texas grid, but is it really so comforting to renewables advocates that wind power is performing poorly in this time of need but more expectedly so than fossil fuels? And still worse than what the grid was relying on it for?
This culture war obscures the actual challenges of production. The fossil fuels proponents don’t get (or don’t mind) that the coal and gas they hold so dear is emitting so much carbon that it causes illness and death, or that it radically alters the climate, leading to more and more extreme weather events like the present one. The renewables proponents don’t get (or don’t mind) that reshaping our electrical system to be even more dependent on that increasingly unpredictable weather is going to be a difficult pill for most people to swallow. Tell the probably millions of Texans who just survived frigid nights without power, heat, or cooking that we’re going to “electrify everything” — and with more of that renewable energy to boot. Perhaps convincing millions of Texans just isn’t even a goal for them; enlisting in the culture war is far easier.
At the end of the day, the fossil fuel culture warriors are by far the more despicable of the two. On Tuesday night, Texas governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News commentator Sean Hannity’s program to pin his state’s failure to produce an essential good — and ensuing humanitarian crisis — on wind and solar power. But it’s not like California liberals and Green New Deal socialists are behind the $46.5 billion invested in wind turbines across the state. It was instead a massive capitalist endeavor whose profitability rested on generous tax credits for wind power, which is the only reason for billionaire Warren Buffett’s investment for example, and which even President Trump himself extended (twice).
And, crucially, it’s the result of the mostly deregulated electricity sector in America — and the invisible hand.
The Two Kinds of Grids in America
Electricity is generated at power plants, transmitted across power lines, and distributed to homes and businesses as consumers. That’s the technical, engineering layer of our electricity grid, “the largest machine in the world.” The fundamental objective is reliable power generation — any customer who wants to turn on a kitchen light, or power a hospital, can do so at any time he or she wishes. But if there’s not enough supply to meet demand at any point in time — a particularly hot summer day with millions of air conditioners humming away — the grid operator has to cut power to whole swathes of the Texan population in the form of blackouts, which is what’s happening in Texas right now. It’s breadlines — but for electricity.
That’s the technical side of an electrical grid, but who directs all this activity and investment? And who profits? In America, there are two fundamental organizations of all that, depending on where you live.
In traditional grids, vertically integrated monopoly utilities mostly own generation, transmission, and distribution assets and sell that electricity to households and businesses in accordance with state public services commissions. Those commissions set the consumer prices the utilities are allowed to charge, and they approve the utility’s investments into particular kinds of resources, say, X amount of power capacity overall with Y amount of it being low-carbon. That’s the setup in much of the Southeast, Central, and Western states, as well as the federally owned Tennessee Valley Authority, harkening back to the New Deal.
But in the other kind of grid, known as “restructured” or deregulated grids, electrical assets are independently owned and generators compete with each other, on regional markets, to generate and sell electricity to middle-man utilities who then distribute that electricity to homes and businesses. Today, most states get their electricity in such deregulated markets, operated by regional transmission organizations (RTOs) like the California ISO, the PJM Interconnection, ISO New England, and the grid operator for Texas, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
Instead of state agencies regulating the business of monopoly utilities in a centralized manner, deregulated grids create a series of perpetual auctions running across the country. Electricity arrives in your home as the result of nonstop bidding and profit-maximization. Put very simply, does Alice’s natural gas plant generate the next unit of electricity that feeds into the grid, or does it come from Bob’s wind farm? Place your bets, Alice and Bob, and let’s see who wins!
Now imagine that happening every five minutes every single day, twenty-four hours a day. There’s also a separate auction for day-ahead dispatch (who plans to generate it twenty-four hours from now?) and, in most RTOs except for Texas, an auction for reserving some amount of power capacity over a year in advance (who plans to have power available in a year?), a market-based perversion of centralized planning.
“Energy Auctions” Create Mass Blackouts
If the fundamental objective of a grid is to produce enough electricity to meet demand at all times — in other words, reliability — then how does the deregulated market accomplish it? Not through direct coordination of productive assets but through an endlessly complicated system of auctions, requests, incentives, and price signals. Regardless, the blackouts in Texas prove that it doesn’t always accomplish reliability, just like it didn’t in 2011, the last time extreme weather led to major blackouts in Texas, or last summer in California, to pick only a few examples.
What’s worse, there’s nobody to blame because, hey, the grid operator is just the auctioneer who set up the technocratic process to incentivize private development of those productive assets. With wholesale electricity prices hovering at the $9000/MWh maximum price, about three hundred times the normal price, scarcity of life’s necessities means scarcity price signals to encourage future investment. But with average prices far lower due to increasing gas and wind, it’s not economical for private plant owners to weatherize their plants better. Truly, it’s the invisible hand that keeps your lights on — too bad that hand is just as ephemeral as the electricity that powers them.
The intensity of that dogmatic belief is unique to the Texas grid, which, for political reasons, stands in almost total isolation from the two West and East grid systems in the United States. Grid operators in other deregulated markets have other technocratic measures to ensure “resource adequacy” — the availability of enough generators to meet potential demand — albeit still as the result of auctions or market incentives, not direct investment by centralized entities.
As usual with deregulation, the real objective of profits quietly usurps the stated one. Just a month ago the president of ERCOT justified the thin reserve margins for power supply on the Texas grid: theirs is “a market structure that can have very bracing outcomes (chuckles) — but also very profitable outcomes, for those [generators] who are there and providing services for those times that we have scarcity pricing and prices go quite high. That can be a really good day.” And late Monday night, the Public Utility Commission of Texas issued an executive order for ERCOT to ensure those scarcity prices in the wholesale market were properly (extraordinarily) high — so that owners of any generators that stay afloat can have that “really good day.”
Vertically integrated utilities, on the other hand, rely on “integrated resource planning,” in concert with state regulators, to determine what resources they themselves will invest in. At least in these grids, the hand is visible and identifiable, and in the case of the TVA grid it’s federally owned and, to some degree, accountable to democratic politics.
Environmentalists for Neoliberal Deregulation
Deregulated electricity markets aren’t a historical burden; they’re a relatively recent political invention. Begun under the Clinton administration and finalized under the Bush administration, restructuring electricity in America was a bipartisan project of neoliberalism, a continuation of markets über alles. It began here just several years after the Thatcher government deregulated the UK electrical system.
Instead of recognizing it as the enemy of the political left, environmentally conscious greens have generally sided with the neoliberalization of energy. Despite the best efforts of labor leaders like Tony Mazzocchi, environmentalism since the 1970s drifted away from workers and production and toward individuals and consumption. Their “small is beautiful” outlook favored deregulation — the decentralization of capital and control into more, and smaller, capitalists’ hands, so long as those capitalists promised green development like solar panels rather than big harmful factories and nuclear power plants in need of a workforce.
To see the green deregulation at work today, one can look to the TVA, a massive federally owned utility that’s still kicking after its New Deal origin story. Obama tried to privatize it entirely, until labor pushed back. Similarly today, greens like the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) don’t see the TVA as a necessary strategic terrain that should never be yielded to market forces; they see it as an obsolete relic that doesn’t care about installing more wind and solar power to go with its copious hydropower, nuclear power, and, to be sure, fossil power.
That’s why SACE has formed a “Tennesseans for Solar Choice” coalition along with a small business association, a solar industry association, and a Tea Party conservatives group that wants to break up the TVA, “an outdated, federally-sanctioned monopoly, that appears to be working against consumer choice and energy freedom.” If they have their way, TVA would lose its largest customer — the public utility of Memphis, Tennessee — breaking an eighty-year arrangement to purchase power and losing about 10 percent of its revenue. Instead, Memphis would build its own solar power and enter the deregulated MISO market — which will require it to build around four new gas plants for reliability.
A similar greens vs. federally owned power conflict happened several years ago at the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), another holdover from the New Deal attitudes toward electricity. BPA is a bit like a mini-TVA that also purchases some of its power from others. In 2011 it was ordered by federal electricity overseers FERC to prioritize private wind farms over its own federallyowned hydropower dams. Greens like the Renewable Northwest Project celebrated the order, which ensured that private owners like Warren Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy could collect lucrative production tax credits and renewable energy credits on the electricity their wind power generates.
Perhaps the epicenter of greens for deregulation is California, where a fervor for solar power has been driven by powerful green NGOs like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, and, of course, the solar industry. In its state-mandated expansion of solar farms, coupled with rooftop solar for the virtuous and the affluent, California is reshaping its grid in the name of “flexibility,” perhaps not unlike the way it’s now reshaping its labor relations in the name of “flexibility” with Prop 22. More market competition, more decentralization — everyone is a homo economicus that is simultaneously (gig) worker and their own boss, energy consumer and producer.
Last year, after a heatwave caused statewide rolling blackouts, California decided that maybe it had an electricity supply problem after all, due to its increasing dependence on solar power and natural gas. In 2016 green NGOs convinced the state that its last remaining nuclear power plant could be shut down and all its power would be replaced with renewables instead. Now they’re angry that the state’s Public Utilities Commission wants to resurrect gas plants to meet the state’s reliability needs post-blackouts.
We Need a Big Alternative
One way to surpass the renewables vs. fossil fuels culture war might be found in nuclear energy. That echoes what a union president in the TVA told Jacobin last year. The TVA, by the way, has not only withstood the similarly frigid temperatures without any outages; it has been producing 45 percent carbon-free electricity the whole time, most of that from its nuclear power plants.
But if nuclear energy is so great, then why isn’t there more of it? Why are perfectly operational plants closing? It’s not for the sake of the climate. When a nuclear plant closes, it inevitably results in more burning of fossil fuels, as can be seen in Vermont, in New York, in Germany, and in Japan.
Instead, nuclear energy is under threat in the United States for the same reason there’s so much natural gas and renewable generation in America today: in the presence of these ever-cheaper resources, nuclear energy is just no longer profitable enough on our deregulated electricity markets.
We should be fighting like hell to protect America’s fleet of 56 nuclear power plants, not just for the sake of reliable, clean electricity, but also to protect their many high-paying union jobs, particularly in rural communities. That means demanding state subsidies for nuclear plants, like we provide to much more scarcely staffed solar and wind farms, even for those with private and not public owners — so long as they maintain close cooperation with federal regulators and with their unions. The labor movement’s recently formed Climate Jobs Illinois coalition is doing exactly that.
Rather than meeting Tucker Carlson on the culture battlefield over renewables, the Left must approach the subject of energy with concerns about production. That means breaking with the environmentally conscious liberals and NGOs in their quest to restructure the economy into more competitive markets and profit-seeking, just with more wind and solar.
We’ve made a lot of progress abandoning the “small is beautiful,” consumer-side environmentalism birthed in the 1970s. Now let’s get serious about the producer side.
Activists offer drinks and vegetarian sandwiches to workers finishing their shift outside the Farmer John Slaughterhouse in LA. (photo: Frederic J. Brown/Getty)
After Pork Giant Was Exposed for Cruel Killings, the FBI Pursued Its Critics
Lee Fang, The Intercept
Fang writes: "He was tired of what he saw as frequent rule-breaking and disregard for the well-being of the tens of thousands of hogs raised by Iowa Select. The company, in his view, seemed hellbent on expansion and profits, leading to rampant overcrowding and water pollution."
The agency, seeking information on an animal rights group, attempted to recruit a former truck driver as an informant, the truck driver says.
ast June, Noel Williams, the chief operations officer of Iowa Select Farms, a powerful pork company and the largest in Iowa, pulled into the parking lot of an empty housing complex typically used for the firm’s immigrant workforce.
He was there to transport Lucas Walker, a former truck driver for Iowa Select, to a meeting with Nick Potratz, an FBI agent from the Des Moines office of the bureau. That’s according to Walker, who had recently tried to report Iowa Select, his former employer, for mistreating animals. After The Intercept published leaked video of pigs being killed off en masse, Walker came under scrutiny.
Now, the FBI had a favor to ask: Would Walker become an informant? More specifically, they wanted him to help in an effort to investigate and undermine an activist group that had become a thorn in Iowa Select’s side. They even asked if he’d be willing to sell drugs.
The saga that brought him into contact with the FBI began when the 26-year-old grew frustrated with his former employer, Iowa Select, which is headquartered in his hometown of Iowa Falls. Walker thought the company was blatantly disregarding state “double stocking” rules, which limit the size and number of pigs that are held in an intensive animal feeding facility, letting overweight pigs crowd into pens far too small to hold them.
He was tired of what he saw as frequent rule-breaking and disregard for the well-being of the tens of thousands of hogs raised by Iowa Select. The company, in his view, seemed hellbent on expansion and profits, leading to rampant overcrowding and water pollution. That rapid expansion led to the annual production of 1.5 billion pounds of pork a year, a global leader before the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, however, closed regional slaughterhouses, creating a glut of pigs.
He decided to speak out and called state regulators.
Walker doesn’t fit the profile of an animal rights activist. The central Iowa-raised truck driver, who jokingly refers to himself as corn-fed with beer running through his veins, is a fervent Trump and NRA supporter who has spent years working in the state’s maze of hog production facilities. He describes himself as independent-minded with libertarian instincts, with a bit of a contrarian side suspicious of organized power.
“I’m not necessarily animal rights by any means,” said Walker in an interview with The Intercept. “I have a cattle herd — small calf herd — and my wife and myself have some free-range pigs ourselves.”
“It was a moral issue at the heart of it. … I’m the kind of person who knows right from wrong. It was a principled thing.”
Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources, the local farm regulator, Walker felt, did not seem to care about his concerns over the phone or show any interest in enforcement on a company like Iowa Select. Iowa, followed by North Carolina and Minnesota, is the largest pork-producing state in the country and infamously deferential to industry. Iowa officials have faced criticism for failing to regulate concentrated pork facilities for water pollution and poor animal welfare standards.
Jeff Hansen, the founder of Iowa Select, built the pork powerhouse first as a salesman, helping distribute modern farrowing crates, automatic feeders, and other livestock equipment to other pig farmers in the state. He built two companies at once: a turnkey construction firm known as Modern Hog Concepts, which helped farmers upgrade their barns into modern factory farms, and Iowa Select, which raised pigs for slaughter.
Along the way, as he grew his business empire, Hansen built close connections with Iowa’s political elite. In 1994, during a cycle in which Hansen was one of the largest campaign contributors to then-Gov. Terry Branstad, he had set aside employee money for campaign contributions to local Republicans. The resulting scandal forced lawmakers to return campaign funds to Iowa Select, but the company continued to grow.
The owners of Iowa Select, Jeff and his wife Debra Hansen, are still among the largest campaign contributors in the state, and close to Gov. Kim Reynolds. A recent donation of $50,000 brought the total the couple has donated to the governor to nearly $300,000.
The governor has maintained cozy ties to Iowa Select. Shortly after her election in 2018, Reynolds volunteered to auction off her time as a gift to the Hansen family foundation. In the early days of the pandemic, her administration arranged a Covid-19 testing site at a corporate office used by white-collar Iowa Select employees and foundation employees, raising concerns with one Polk County supervisor of special treatment for the campaign donor.
And Kayla Lyon, who Reynolds appointed to run the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which inspects hog farms for compliance with animal welfare and environmental rules, is a former dairy industry official and agribusiness lobbyist. Lyon, in her previous capacity as an influence peddler in Des Moines, had worked to pass the 2012 “ag gag” law that criminalized recording at farm facilities, according to lobbyist disclosures. Lyon lobbied at a time when Iowa Select’s lobbyists in Des Moines pushed for the bill, records show.
The impetus for that bill, which was designed to criminally prosecute whistleblowers at factory farming operations, also started in part with Iowa Select. The year before the bill was signed into law, an animal rights activist group, Mercy for Animals, released an undercover video that showed Iowa Select workers ripping the testicles from conscious piglets, removing tails with dull clippers, and scores of sows in small confinement cages, appearing to suffer from untreated sores and other wounds.
The law, though later overturned by a federal court, was the first of its kind and rapidly inspired copycat legislation across the country.
Walker’s failed attempts to reach regulators, to report overcrowding in Iowa Select facilities, didn’t surprise him. “The DNR wasn’t very interested in talking about it,” said Walker. “They’re too big to be regulated.”
“There have been no recent enforcement actions against Iowa Select Farms. Nor are we aware of any complaints or allegations made to the DNR,” Alex Murphy, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said in an email to The Intercept.
Walker, aware that he had few outlets for help, turned to the internet to research whistleblowing resources for factory farms. That’s how he found Direct Action Everywhere, the Berkeley, California-based group that has worked to expose the shocking treatment of animals in factory farms.
Soon after he came into contact with DxE, the novel coronavirus reached global pandemic status, shutting down slaughterhouses across the region. The glut of hogs, which suddenly became unprofitable, quickly ran up costs for the company. Iowa Select decided to mass slaughter thousands of pigs in a particularly brutal process called “ventilation shutdown,” or VSD. Workers sealed off airways while pumping steam into the barns, intensifying the heat — over the course of many hours — to the point at which the pigs died from suffocation and/or hyperthermia.
The process further horrified Walker, cementing his belief that Iowa Select had no concern for the animals they raised. The company, he argued, had the resources to mitigate the killing of healthy pigs. Iowa Select could have offered “some pigs to our neighbors to care for and raise.” But instead, the firm opted to gas thousands — a clear indication that they viewed animal life as disposable.
Walker decided to expose the VSD process to DxE and the media, leading to an investigation by The Intercept, which published a video of the process showing young pigs squealing as they slowly roasted to death.
The widely covered video set off a fury of controversy, bringing international attention to the gruesome mass slaughter. Following the news, DxE activists also picketed the home of Iowa Select’s founder and protested outside of company facilities. Several were arrested and charged after chaining themselves to the fence surrounding the Iowa Select facility in Grundy County that had used the VSD method to kill off its hogs.
Following the controversy, a group of members of Congress filed a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture criticizing the animal agriculture industry for using VSD methods during the pandemic. “The process is inhumane, distressing, and painful for the animals who can take many hours to die,” the letter noted. “Under no circumstances should producers be utilizing ventilation shutdown.”
It sparked an ethical debate within the animal agriculture and veterinary community. “The corporation spent over a month planning this tragedy, retrofitting the barn to close off the ventilation, and preparing workers for this gruesome task — who may suffer mental health consequences for having to partake in this practice,” charged an open letter by prominent veterinarians denouncing the actions of Iowa Select.
The publicity came as a shock to Iowa Select. Emails obtained through a public records request show that Iowa Select collaborated with trade groups to manage the fallout. Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry group that provides crisis communications support to factory farming interests under scrutiny, flagged The Intercept story about the VSD mass killing of pigs. In response, alerts and social media posts about the story were sent to the National Pork Producers Council, a lobby group currently led by Jen Sorenson, the spokesperson for Iowa Select.
“As we know they have targeted Iowa Select,” noted Dallas Hockman, the vice president of industry relations at the National Pork Producers Council, referring to DxE. “I know they have been doing mass mailing, I have received number [sic] of calls from channel partners inquiring about it as well as questions on ventilation shutdown.” Hannah Thompson-Weeman, vice president of strategic engagement at Animal Agriculture Alliance, responded to note that her group was in the process of “contacting our FBI and DHS contacts to raise our concerns.”
They also zeroed in on the role of Walker.
In June, Walker, who had been terminated following a trucking accident earlier that summer, was asked to return to the company to help fill out paperwork. When he arrived at the meeting, he says, he was asked to take his phone out and place it on the table. A private investigator hired by Iowa Select said that local police had obtained the phones of arrested DxE members, searched through their messages, and found Walker’s number. The investigator called his number, and his phone rang. He had been caught.
The discussion then went back and forth, Walker recounts, with Walker answering questions about his involvement with DxE. Satisfied with his answers, Walker was left with a few Subway sandwiches and asked if he could attend a meeting in a few days with an FBI agent.
The following week, Noel Williams, one of the Iowa Select executives who had been in the previous meeting, picked Walker up from his home and drove him to the meeting with the FBI agent, according to Walker.
The FBI agent, Nick Potratz, then started asking a series of questions about DxE: How are they funded? Do they run drugs or sell guns to finance their animal welfare activism?
Potratz then turned the conversation again to Walker. “Would you go to a protest and report back on if these are good people or bad people?” Walker remembers the agent asking. “Would you be willing to buy drugs, buy dope for the FBI?”
During the conversation, Walker says, the men in the room quizzed Walker over what types of services he could provide to undermine the animal rights group. The FBI agent asked Walker if he would be comfortable engaging in recorded conversations with DxE’s spokesperson, Matt Johnson, who had been arrested and charged with a felony earlier that summer for allegedly trespassing at one of Iowa Select’s pork production facilities — though the trespass charges were abruptly dropped last month. They asked Walker how well he could keep secrets, told him what rights he might have as an official FBI informant, and read him the agency’s guidelines for human sources — what the agent described as the “Ten Commandments” for becoming an informant.
Toward the end of the meeting, Williams said he had to leave, ironically to deal with an electrical malfunction that killed 1,500 sows. Without a ride, Walker took a lift home from the FBI agent at the meeting, who continued talking to him about how he could help the agency. He asked if Walker knew about any illegal bribes by farming interests to safety inspectors or other issues like that. The FBI agent also asked if Walker could attend a follow-up meeting with another agent who was in training. Walker agreed.
Mike German, a former FBI special agent who now serves as a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, noted that the FBI may have been hoping to use a drug prosecution to build a network of more informants.
“That may be more in line with the assessment type of activity where they’re not trying to solve a drug distribution problem, but rather trying to find something they can use to coerce the next person to become an informant,” said German. “A buy-bust for some small amount of drugs to justify a local prosecution that can be used to leverage their participation in a bigger operation.”
“The FBI Omaha field office declines to comment,” wrote Amy Adams, an FBI spokesperson, in an email to The Intercept. Iowa Select spokesperson Jen Sorenson responded to multiple requests for comment with a statement that the company “will not be engaging in this story.”
Williams, the Iowa Select executive who brought Walker to the meeting with the FBI, declined over the phone to comment. Potratz, the FBI agent, referred questions to the FBI’s media office.
“The federal government knows that criminalizing peaceful speech activity is a sham, and that the general public is on our side,” said Matt Johnson, DxE’s spokesperson. “But they’re also beholden to the undue influence of companies like Iowa Select Farms. It’s telling to see the roundabout lengths they’ll resort to in trying to undermine our work — and keep the public from knowing the truth.”
The follow-up meeting, in an unmarked van at the local Hy-Vee grocery store, was another opportunity for the FBI to make a pitch. Walker described being brought to an FBI van in the Hy-Vee parking lot for another discussion over whether he would help surveil and engage DxE. Potraz was now joined by a colleague, and the two FBI agents went over the same set of questions, asking Walker if he was comfortable keeping his involvement secret and spying on DxE. Would he be willing to testify if an investigation came to that? He was again read the Department of Justice’s guidelines for informants.
Walker was not offered money, and the FBI did not explicitly coerce him, but the tenor of the meetings left him rattled.
During one phone call with an FBI agent from the meeting, Walker recalled asking whether he was under investigation or some other law enforcement inquiry. “He said he couldn’t confirm or deny,” Walker later said. It may have been a perfunctory response, but that uncertainty loomed over him like a dark shadow.
The FBI has long considered animal rights and environmental groups among the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities,” a focus that has been shaped by industry pressure. In the past, FBI informants have been involved in campaigns to goad environmental activists into acts of terror and violence.
It’s part of a longer history of the FBI targeting nonviolent activist groups, including protesters affiliated with the anti-war movement and left-wing individuals who were planning to demonstrate the 2004 presidential conventions. In more recent years, the FBI, including agents from the Des Moines field office, worked closely with TigerSwan, a private security firm retained by Energy Transfer Partners, which sought to undermine support for demonstrators opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline.
DxE was already on the FBI’s radar. In 2017, agents from the FBI took extraordinary steps to pursue DxE over an action in which dying pigs were taken from a Smithfield Foods-owned facility and brought to an animal shelter. A six-car fleet of FBI agents in bulletproof vests obtained a warrant to raid animal sanctuaries in Utah and Colorado in search of piglets allegedly liberated by DxE’s volunteer activists.
The bureau has faced criticism over the years for lax oversight of its network of more than 15,000 informants, a figure that outnumbers agents in the field. Although FBI agents require probable cause before directly infiltrating organizations, those rules do not apply to informants. This loophole effectively incentivizes the FBI to use informants to infiltrate political or activist groups.
Ramzi Kassem, a professor at CUNY School of Law, where he directs CLEAR, a clinic that focuses on issues arising from the U.S. security state, also raised concerns about attempted recruitment.
“It’s one thing for the FBI to seed informants within suspected criminal organizations like the Mafia to act as the FBI’s eyes and ear,” said Kassem. “It’s an altogether different matter for the FBI to treat activist groups as though they were crime syndicates and to send in informants to not only be the FBI’s eyes and ears, but also its hands and wallet, too, instigating crimes that probably would not have taken place without FBI involvement. That is a highly questionable use of public funds.”
For the most part, the FBI has targeted left-leaning activism, including the infamous COINTELPRO initiative that involved the harassment of anti-Vietnam War leaders, civil rights organizers, and other supposedly subversive political organizations. But the agency has also, at times, targeted conservative-leaning groups, including efforts to use informants to infiltrate libertarian activist circles. The FBI also took the unusual step of planting an informant with then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 to investigate accusations of collusion with the Russian government.
Despite bipartisan criticism of the agency’s conduct, Congress has done little to impose new rules limiting the FBI’s power or its use of informants.
“Once they’ve recruited somebody, they can, with minimal oversight, deploy people in pretty dangerous situations,” said Diala Shamas, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The recruitment process is a big black hole with little information and so much coercion.”
Many informants, said Shamas, face the threat of prosecution or are immigrants living in fear of deportation. The FBI uses legal vulnerabilities as leverage to coerce participation in the informant program.
But they had no such luck with Walker.
Walker eventually declined their offer. He found it odd that his former employer drove him to the meeting with the FBI, and that the FBI had sought to use its vast resources to go after a band of nonviolent activists.
The FBI agent, Walker said, seemed to have a chummy relationship with Iowa Select’s private investigator, who identified himself as a former law enforcement official. The entire arrangement appeared to be a show of deference to Iowa Select, a company that already had far too much power in Walker’s eyes.
Walker had gone to state regulators about other animal safety violations he believed Iowa Select had committed. He knew the company’s founders were among the biggest campaign contributors in the state. Now it seemed to Walker that even federal law enforcement officials were effectively in their pocket.
Months passed and Walker, after discussions with his wife, decided that he wanted to talk to the press a second time, this time using his name. The fact that Iowa Select could wield this power not only over its animals but also the political process and law enforcement agencies was too much.
Shortly after The Intercept reached out to the FBI for comment, Walker says, he suddenly received a call from one of the agents he had met. The call came from an unlisted number. The bureau no longer needed him as an informant, the agent said. Then the person hung up.
Wisconsin has approved 200 wolves to be killed in a February hunt. (photo: Michael Cummings/Getty)
Wisconsin Approves Wolf Hunt, Following Endangered Species Act Delisting by Trump Administration
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "As the former and current administration's endangered species policies battle for prominence, Wisconsin's wolves are caught in the crosshairs, literally."
When the Trump administration delisted gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act, it triggered a Wisconsin law requiring the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to hold a wolf hunt from mid-October through February, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. The DNR originally said it would wait until November 2021 to prepare a hunt, but hunting advocates sued to speed up the process, and last week a judge ordered the board to prepare a February hunt. This prompted the DNR to set a quota on Monday of 200 gray wolves that can be killed before the end of the month.
Wildlife advocates oppose the move, pointing out that the rushed hunt will take place during the wolves' breeding season.
"You remove one, you're essentially destabilizing and killing the entire pack," Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf and Wildlife Executive Director Melissa Smith told Public News Service. "So, we expect this to be pretty detrimental to our wolf population."
The federal delisting of wolves officially went into effect in January. In December, the DNR said it would wait until November to set a hunting quota, arguing that it needed more time to make a scientifically sound plan and consult with tribes and the public, according to Wisconsin Public Radio. In late January, the state's Natural Resources Board rejected a push from Republican lawmakers to speed up the quota, Wisconsin Public Radio reported at the time.
However, Kansas-based group Hunter Nation sued the state to start the hunt this winter. It argued that delaying the hunt violated hunters' constitutional rights, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. Circuit Judge Bennett Brantmeier ruled in the group's favor. While Wisconsin is appealing this decision, the Natural Resources Board still voted Monday to authorize a February hunt.
The hunt will allow the killing of 200 wolves that aren't on tribal reservations, according to the DNR website. The hunt will last from Feb. 22 to Feb. 28, and hunters can apply for a permit between Feb. 16 and Feb. 20. The state will issue 4,000 permits, the Wisconsin State Journal reported, which is twice the number that staff recommended.
The department said it based the quota on the best available science, without intending to increase or decrease the state's wolf population. However, DNR members said they would have made a more accurate decision given more time. They also did not have a chance to fully consult with tribes or gather public input.
"Was there more we would like to do? Yes," Keith Warnke, administrator of fish, wildlife and parks for the DNR, told Wisconsin Public Radio. "Are we confident and comfortable with the quota recommendation we made? I think... we would have been more confident and more comfortable had we taken more time."
There are currently 1,195 wolves in Wisconsin, according to DNR. The last time the state managed the population, it set a quota of 350 wolves in 1999 and last updated it in 2007, wildlife advocates point out. Indigenous groups also argue that wolves are sacred to their communities, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. On the other side, those who support hunting argue that wolves are a threat to livestock and rural residents. But wildlife advocates counter that hunting is not the solution to human and wolf conflicts.
"Indiscriminate killing of wolves actually increases conflicts and spreads deer disease like CWD, so the special interests like the farm bureau and sportsmen's groups are not only doing a disservice to themselves pushing an early wolf hunt but may cause the wolf to be relisted again," Northern Wisconsin resident Britt Ricci said in a Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf and Wildlife statement.
Fear of new federal protections are partly behind the push for a hunt this winter, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. The Biden administration has called for a review of the Trump administration's agency rules, including the delisting of wolves.
"And so, they want to rush and try to kill as many as they can in a short time as possible during a sensitive breeding season," Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf's Smith told Public News Service.
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