13 March 21
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Bill McKibben | Is There Anything Funny About the Climate Crisis?
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes:
orfolk, Virginia, is one of seven cities in the region known as Hampton Roads, which is among the metropolitan areas most vulnerable to coastal flooding in the world. Like New Orleans, Norfolk sits extraordinarily low to the sea—just seven feet above it in some places—and Hampton Roads, where three big rivers converge and the Chesapeake Bay flows into the Atlantic, floods regularly. When a big storm hits, watch out. Also, Norfolk suffers from much the same patterns of racial inequity that made Hurricane Katrina such a disaster for the Crescent City. So you might be excused for predicting that a standup-comedy show about the impact of global warming on Norfolk’s African-American neighborhoods would bomb.
But no. As the theologian James Cone once insisted, “Anger and humor are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to oppression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury.” A new standup-comedy special, “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave,” which premières next week at the (virtual) D.C. Environmental Film Festival, is an attempt to prove Cone’s point. Born of a collaboration between the Hip Hop Caucus (see my interview below with the executive producer, Antonique Smith) and American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact (C.M.S.I.), it features four standup comics from across the country: Clark Jones, Aminah Imani, Mamoudou N’Diaye, and Kristen Sivills. They studied the environmental-justice situation in Norfolk with local experts, wrote some jokes, then staged a show for the community and its elected leaders at the historic Attucks Theatre. (The theatre is named for Crispus Attucks, a man of African-American and Native American descent who was one of the first patriots to die in the Boston Massacre, two hundred and fifty-one years ago last week.) A report, produced jointly with C.M.S.I., documents the whole process. Charles (Batman) Brown, the Caucus’s Virginia leadership-committee coördinator, explained the logic: “The social-justice and community activists are really good at organizing in their sphere,” while entertainers can spread information easily via social media. “And, in the political world, you have to be invited into that world. It’s always best, I think, when those three worlds can come together and partner up. I think the problem is that doesn’t happen as much as it should.” Happily, the Norfolk experiment seems widely replicable—there are lots of comedians, and lots that need poking fun at.
Including, it must be said, the C.E.O.s of various oil companies and banks, who, with the advent of the Biden Administration, are lining up to make ever more earnest-sounding climate commitments. Within the past few days, Goldman Sachs joined the recent convert Citi in following Bank of America and Morgan Stanley in a promise to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050 with its financing, and Wells Fargo did the same, on Monday. (Chase, the biggest fossil-fuel lender of all, has promised to follow Paris guidelines.) It’s good to see the banks acknowledging the new Zeitgeist—that climate change is something we need to show we care deeply about—and good to see them ruling out some of the most egregious potential clients, but it’s hard to escape the idea that, in too many cases, the pledges are mostly a kind of performance. For one thing, no one is specifying how the emissions caused by the loans will be measured. It’s tricky math, at best—even the arguably most important leader in reforming climate finance, the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, had to walk back his recent claim that the six-hundred-billion-dollar portfolio of the asset manager Brookfield, where he is a vice-chair, was carbon-neutral because it was investing enough in renewable energy to offset its holdings in the fossil-fuel industry.
Writing in the Guardian, the environmental campaigners Tzeporah Berman and Nathan Taft dismissed moves by various banks, because many banks and oil companies are using vague pledges as cover to increase their emissions in the next few years. Enbridge Corporation has announced plans to be a net-zero emitter, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing construction on the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline in Minnesota—and, indeed, last week a consortium of banks announced that they would give the company an eight-hundred-million-dollar “sustainability loan,” angering Indigenous leaders, who called it classic greenwashing. Royal Dutch Shell said that it would go to net zero, too, but also announced plans to ramp up production of natural gas, while employing “nature-based offsets”—which translates to planting trees. Even ExxonMobil said last week that it was “supportive” of zero-emissions goals. American University is tracking the pledges from dozens of companies intent on following this route. But, as Bloomberg’s Kate Mackenzie points out, “the total volume of offsets they rely on will quickly exceed the ability of the planet to provide them”—there is only so much ground for planting trees.
These pledges seem to be a way of saying, to quote St. Augustine, “Lord, make me chaste—but not yet.” Augustine feared Hell; if we’ve moved past that, we should at least worry about a future with a similar temperature. I don’t think that these banks and oil companies can keep this act up for five years, much less thirty, because the fires and floods that roll across the planet will make them not the butt of jokes but the focus of rage. (New data this week show that going beyond a 1.5-degree-Celsius global temperature increase may make much of the tropics uninhabitable.) The way to avoid that is to do, right now, what needs to be done: if you’re a bank, stop messing with complicated dodges about carbon offsets and cease lending to oil companies. No kidding.
Passing the Mic
Antonique Smith is, among other things, the singing voice of the climate movement. Since she covered Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” for the Hip Hop Caucus’s “Home” album, in 2014, she has performed at hundreds of rallies and events, and is an original host of the weekly climate podcast “Think 100%: The Coolest Show.” She has also earned Grammy nominations and plays Aretha Franklin’s young mother in the new “Genius” miniseries from National Geographic. (Our conversation has been edited for length.)
Can you describe Norfolk—what its divisions are like and how they set the background for this film? Did people there care about the climate crisis, and did that change as the filming progressed?
While the entire region, including the world’s largest Navy base, is threatened by rising sea levels, the threat is not the same for every community. Black people and communities throughout the region are at greater risk for flooding, disaster, and toxic pollution. The city of Norfolk is about half Black, half white, but the St. Paul’s district, home to a predominantly Black public-housing community, is representative of the economic disparity that has fallen squarely on racial lines; racist urban policies and climate gentrification posed as redevelopment are hitting the Black community the hardest.
Getting to create “Ain’t Your Mama’s Heat Wave” has been such a powerful experience. Community leaders, organizations, and activists are working day in and day out on a bunch of issues. Flooding, from sea-level rise brought on by climate change, is one of them. What we’ve been able to do is to bring together local leaders and talk about the climate crisis in terms of racial justice, housing, transportation, and food security. It’s all about communicating and working on the climate crisis in ways relevant to people’s lives.
People might instinctively say, “There’s nothing funny about global warming.” But we make comedy about many of the most painful things in our lives. What can comedians bring to this fight?
Certainly, there’s nothing funny about suffering, dying, and possible extinction, but I’m so grateful for comedians and for comedy in itself. What would life be like without joy and laughter? Science gives us the facts, but most people aren’t inspired, moved, or touched on an emotional level by science. Infuse that same information with comedy, and you have a magic combination of enjoyment and fun, while learning and being inspired to action. Another magical component of comedy is that it feels very personal and relevant. The best comedians tell stories in a way that makes you feel like they’re telling your story. You identify with it even if it hasn’t actually happened to you. Unfortunately, most people of color can identify with the issues surrounding climate and environmental injustices.
Though you’re very much of the moment, you’ve spent a lot of time in an earlier era, too: singing Marvin Gaye, helping portray the story of Aretha Franklin and the civil-rights movement. What lessons should we take from those days, and what new lessons have we learned since?
If you listen to the lyrics of Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” the things he’s saying are not only still happening—they’re worse. “Poison is the wind that blows,” “oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury,” et cetera. He wrote that more than forty years ago! I believe the lessons we can learn from the past is that the fight isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. People sacrificed their lives and suffered greatly for the progress that was made so that we can have the rightful freedom and liberties that we sometimes take for granted today. The sad lesson we have learned since that era is that we still have so far to go. Until the communities of people of color are no longer considered the sacrifice zones and a dumping ground for billion-dollar polluters; until we all have clean air, clean water, and access to fresh, healthy food; until the systems that allow for Black people to be murdered by police and the systems designed to keep people of color from gaining wealth are dismantled; until white supremacy is destroyed and all Black lives truly matter, then we have to keep on fighting.
Climate School
The former Times reporter Chris Hedges delivers a useful rant about the way that “ruling elites” continually “mollify” public opinion with vague promises.
The city of Miami released a major report detailing its plans for dealing with sea-level rise, replete with beautiful pictures of buildings on stilts, which “allow storm surge to pass beneath the building without damaging it. This approach permits occasional flooding on roads and yards while also lowering the total cost to adapt to sea level rise as it relies on more passive natural infrastructure.” Experts are somewhat skeptical that the plans can work; the scariest possibilities were raised by new reports of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream that could—thanks to the complicated circulation patterns of seawater—speed Atlantic sea-level rise along the East Coast. Were there a Pulitzer for graphics, the Times climate team would deserve one for its depiction of that flagging current.
County officials in North Dakota have passed rules that block a power company from using a transmission line from a coal-fired plant—which was slated to close for economic reasons—for wind energy. According to a report on “All Things Considered,” farmers who could be leasing their acreage for wind turbines are not pleased. “I cussed that frickin’ wind for fifty years,” a retired farmer, Gary Scheid, told the Mercer County commissioners at a meeting last July. “This is an opportunity to maybe cash in a little bit on that wind.”
Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, has a must-read essay cogently laying out the overlapping stages of technological progress required to meet climate goals. He sees four waves: for the first two, over the next ten or fifteen years, we need “quick wins” on problems such as methane leaks and the rapid buildout of renewable energy. The third involves “growing natural sinks” to absorb emissions, perhaps through regenerative farming practices. The fourth, which requires research dollars now, is new technologies for making such things as carbon-free cement, steel, plastic, and jet fuel—and for removing carbon from the atmosphere.
Following up on last week’s column about renewable-energy NIMBYism, Kumar Barve, the chair of the Maryland House of Delegates’ Environment and Transportation Committee, blasts the Montgomery County Council for declaring a climate emergency and then making it all but impossible to use rural land for solar farms.
Scoreboard
The Canadian government corporation Trans Mountain is asking a regulator for permission to hide the names of the companies insuring the expansion of its tar-sands pipeline project, for fear that activists will pressure those firms to stop collaborating, on human-rights and environmental grounds.
Meanwhile, ExxonMobil announced that it is writing off nearly its entire investment in those tar sands, and more than thirty per cent of its reserves. As DeSmogBlog reported, “along with wiping out the value of its tar sands holdings, Exxon also noted that it wrote off ‘approximately 1.5 billion oil-equivalent barrels, mainly related to unconventional drilling in the United States.’ Unconventional drilling refers to the fracking business, which has been a financial disaster for many of those involved.”
Annals of voter suppression: thanks to great reporting from HuffPost’s Alexander Kaufman, we know that, as one city after another joined the push for stronger energy-efficiency standards from the International Code Council (which, despite its name, mostly sets policy for the U.S. and parts of the Caribbean and Latin America), the home builders’ lobby pushed back, trying to prevent local governments from voting on the rules. Now, pressured by groups such as the American Gas Association, the council may end voting on building codes altogether.
There’s a big win for the climate in the Netherlands, where the government has ended huge subsidies for biomass, including imports from the U.S. Essentially, it stopped underwriting the cost of cutting down forests (many of them in the southeastern U.S.) and burning them for electricity. Danna Smith, of the Dogwood Alliance, which played a key role in that fight, explains on CNN why leaving trees standing makes climate-math sense.
Activists in South Texas are doing their best to keep alive what may be the region’s oldest tree. Monty, a bald cypress that has stood for nine hundred years, is dealing with both drought and the incursion of Trump’s border wall.
Rutgers commits to divesting from fossil fuels.
Trump supporters stand on the U.S. Capitol Police armored vehicle as others take over the steps of the Capitol. (photo: Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/ZUMA)
ALSO SEE: Trump Official Charged in Capitol Riots
Had a Rap Sheet and Still Got Top-Secret Clearance
DOJ Says at Least 100 More People Could Be Charged Over Capitol Attack
Ryan Lucas, NPR
Lucas writes:
he Justice Department says it expects to charge at least 100 more people in connection with the storming of the Capitol, describing the investigation into the deadly attack as one of the biggest in U.S. history.
Federal prosecutors disclosed the estimate in court papers Friday as they seek more time to gather and sift through evidence in the sprawling probe before having to move cases to trial. More than 300 people have already been charged in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob seeking to disrupt the certification of Electoral College votes.
"The investigation and prosecution of the Capitol Attack will likely be one of the largest in American history, both in terms of the number of defendants prosecuted and the nature and volume of the evidence," federal prosecutors said in a filing Friday in a case against nine alleged members or associates of the Oath Keepers paramilitary group.
Similar language appears in new filings made in other Capitol attack cases, including in cases against individual defendants. In the filings, prosecutors are requesting a 60-day deadline extension because of the scope and scale of the investigation and the mountains of evidence they have to sift through.
Prosecutors say investigators have gathered more than 15,000 hours of surveillance and body camera footage; some 1,600 electronic devices; more than 210,000 tips, many of which include digital photos or video; more than 80,000 reports and 93,000 attachments related to law enforcement interviews of suspects and witnesses.
"As the Capitol Attack investigation is still on-going, the number of defendants charged and the volume of potentially discoverable materials will only continue to grow," prosecutors said in the Oath Keepers filing. "In short, even in cases involving a single defendant, the volume of discoverable materials is likely to be significant."
That Oath Keepers case is among the most closely watched because the defendants are charged with conspiring to storm the Capitol.
At a court hearing Friday, one of the defendants, Thomas Caldwell, was ordered released pending trial. Judge Amit Mehta ordered Caldwell to be restricted to home confinement with GPS monitoring and no access to computers, smartphones or any electronic communication device, among other conditions.
"If there is any hint a violation of these conditions, you'll be right back where you are right now," Mehta warned him.
Earlier this week, prosecutors disclosed in court that they could add up to six or more defendants to the case.
Their filings suggest that investigators are scrutinizing the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes.
Prosecutors have alleged in court papers that Rhodes was in direct contact before Jan. 6 and then during the Capitol attack with some of the individuals who have been charged with conspiracy.
According to the government, Rhodes was in a group chat called "DC OP: Jan 6 21" on the encrypted messaging platform Signal. Rhodes allegedly sent the group messages the day before the riot about what to bring.
"DO NOT bring in anything that can get you arrested. Leave that outside DC," Rhodes told the group, according to the government filing. He also recommended bringing a flashlight and a collapsible baton, which he called "a grey area in the law."
"I bring one. But I'm willing to take the risk because I love em," Rhodes texted the group, according to prosecutors. "Good hard gloves, eye pro, helmet. In a pinch you can grab Mechanix gloves and a batters helmet form Walmart. Bring something to put on your noggin. Anitifa likes brikes."
Prosecutors have also brought conspiracy charges against members of another extremist group, the Proud Boys, for their alleged role in the violence on Jan. 6.
A man stands in front of a memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Minneapolis Will Pay George Floyd's Family $27 Million to Settle a Wrongful Death Lawsuit
Tasneem Nashrulla, BuzzFeed
Nashrulla writes:
he city of Minneapolis agreed to pay $27 million to George Floyd's family to settle a wrongful death lawsuit filed last July.
In the civil lawsuit, Floyd's family alleged that former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin and the three other officers involved in Floyd's death violated his constitutional rights by using "unjustified, excessive, and illegal, and deadly use of force."
The lawsuit also accused the Minneapolis Police Department and the city of acting with "deliberate indifference" in condoning unconstitutional police practices, which were the "moving force behind George’s death."
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted to approve the settlement during a meeting Friday, five days into jury selection in the ongoing criminal trial for Chauvin, who is charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and third-degree murder for Floyd's killing last May.
As part of the settlement agreement, $500,000 is to be used "for the benefit of the community" around 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, the site of Floyd's death that has now become widely known as George Floyd Square.
"No amount of money can ever address the intense pain or trauma caused by his death to George Floyd's family or to the people of our city," City Council President Lisa Bender said after the vote. "Minneapolis has been fundamentally changed by this time of racial reckoning."
Attorneys for Floyd's family said Friday that this was "the largest pre-trial settlement in a civil rights wrongful death case in U.S. history."
"George Floyd’s horrific death, witnessed by millions of people around the world, unleashed a deep longing and undeniable demand for justice and change,” Benjamin Crump, one of the attorneys, said in a statement. “That the largest pre-trial settlement in a wrongful death case ever would be for the life of a Black man sends a powerful message that Black lives do matter and police brutality against people of color must end," he said.
Floyd's brother, Rodney Floyd, said the agreement was a "necessary step" for the family to get some closure.
"George’s legacy for those who loved him will always be his spirit of optimism that things can get better, and we hope this agreement does just that — that it makes things a little better in Minneapolis and holds up a light for communities around the country,” Rodney Floyd said in a statement.
His sister, Bridgett Floyd, the founder of George Floyd Memorial Foundation, said, "While our hearts are broken, we are comforted in knowing that even in death, George Floyd showed the world how to live."
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the settlement with Floyd's family "reflects a shared commitment to advancing racial justice."
Attorneys for Floyd's family said they were also waiting "for justice in the criminal courts."
As of Friday afternoon, seven jurors had been selected in Chauvin's criminal trial, which began Monday amid heightened security in the city.
Any public information about the case, including the settlement agreement, could be damaging to the defense, Ted Sampsell-Jones, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor, told BuzzFeed News before Friday's announcement.
However, he believed that the civil settlement would not impact the criminal trial. It would not be admissible evidence, so the jury would not hear about it all, Sampsell-Jones said.
"Of course, with this trial, there is a ton of inadmissible evidence that has been published in the media," he said. "We just have to hope that the jury will follow the law, ignore what it reads in the press, and decide the case based on the evidence presented at trial."
During Friday's press conference, attorneys for Floyd's family said that the civil settlement would not hinder the criminal trial and that they had faith in Attorney General Keith Ellison's to "zealously prosecute" the criminal case.
In 2019, Minneapolis agreed to a $20 million settlement with the family of Justine Ruszczyk Damond who was fatally shot by former Minneapolis officer Mohamed Noor, a Somali American convicted of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Floyd's civil lawsuit said that while the city's settlement with Damond's family was "billed as transformational, it had no meaningful impact on how the MPD conducts its business."
People wait in line to receive food at a food bank in Brooklyn, New York. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The 'American Dream' of Upward Mobility Is Broken. Look at the Numbers
Mark R. Rank and Lawrence M. Eppard, Guardian UK
The US has far less mobility and equality of opportunity today than almost the entire European Union
he US has long prided itself as being an exceptionally fluid society with respect to social class and economic mobility. The American Dream holds that anyone who works hard can achieve economic success – perhaps even rise from rags to riches.
Underlying this belief is the assumption of abundant opportunity and meritocracy. Arriving immigrants often believe they have come to a land of opportunity, with a level playing field allowing for advancement and success. Those who fail to do so tend to blame themselves.
Yet according to recent research, the United States has far less mobility and equality of opportunity today than the European Union or other OECD countries.
First, the amount of economic advantage passed down from one generation to the next is much higher in the US. Approximately 50% of a father’s income position is inherited by his son. In contrast, the amount in Norway or Canada is less than 20%.
What about rising from rags to riches? In the US, 8% of children raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are able to climb to the top 20% as adults, while the figure in Denmark is nearly double at 15%.
Equality of opportunity is also much less viable in the US than in other OECD countries. American life expectancy varies by up to 20 years depending on the zip code of residence. Quality of education also differs widely depending on the wealth of the neighborhood that families reside in. And the chances of being victimized by a crime, exposed to environmental toxins or having unmet healthcare needs is far greater for America’s poor than those impoverished in all other OECD countries.
One of the reasons for lower US mobility is that the ladder of opportunity has become much harder to climb – because the rungs of the ladder have grown further apart. This is evidenced by the rising levels of income and wealth inequality. Currently, those in the top 20% of the income distribution earn nearly nine times more than those in the bottom 20%. This difference is far greater than in the European Union or the United Kingdom. Wealth inequality is even more skewed. In the United States, the top 5% of the population own three-quarters of the entire financial wealth of the country, while the bottom 60% possess less than 1%.
We discuss one explanation for these trends in our book, Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty. The United States has traditionally viewed economic success and failure as the result of individual effort. Rugged individualism and self-reliance have been defining qualities of the American character. On the other hand, our European neighbors are much more likely to attribute poverty to structural factors such as social class or the lack of jobs. As a result, other OECD countries are much more willing to invest in a robust social welfare state designed to help ameliorate some of these structural inequities.
In addition, the United States has frequently viewed poverty and inequities through the lens of race and ethnicity. Poverty is often seen as a “black problem” rather than as an “American problem”. Race has been used to divide poor blacks and whites from seeing their common economic interests. As President Lyndon Johnson once explained to an aide in 1960, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Research has shown that more racially heterogeneous societies tend to be less generous in their economic redistribution policies to address structural inequities. The reason for this may be that we tend to be less concerned about the needs of others when they look different from us. On the other hand, countries that are racially homogeneous tend to have much more robust social safety nets.
With a new president in the White House, let us hope that more progressive policies will begin to restore the viability of the American Dream and reverse the trends towards less mobility and opportunity. The American Dream should reflect a reality where every child has the opportunity to pursue their passion in order to reach their full potential. Such a dream is well worth investing in.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
The Clock Is Ticking for the Amazon Union Vote in Bessemer, Alabama
Alex N. Press, Jacobin
Press writes:
Ballots are due by March 29 in the first warehouse-wide union drive at a US Amazon facility. The Alabama workers are up against an avalanche of anti-union propaganda, but if they win a union, it would mark a historic incursion by labor into the heart of a formidable anti-union employer.
orkers in Bessemer, Alabama are currently voting on whether to form the first union of Amazon workers in the United States. Due to the pandemic, the election is taking place via a mail-in vote, rather than in-person — the company fought to force an in-person election, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rightly rejected the request on health and safety grounds (and then rejected Amazon’s appeal on this matter).
Ballots were mailed out to the roughly fifty-eight hundred workers on February 8, and are due back by March 29. It’s unclear if the unusual voting method will help or hurt the union effort. The lengthy voting period means more time for the company to push its anti-union propaganda (it is legally barred from holding captive-audience meetings with workers during the voting period, but there is no barrier to other, more subtle forms of fearmongering).
But voting by mail may help the union. All it needs is majority support from those who vote, not from the entire bargaining unit; mail-in voting might allow the union to undertake efforts to ensure that its supporters vote, while hoping those who are ambivalent simply do not send back ballots.
The cause for the organizing drive won’t be surprising to readers of this publication: overwork, with frequent firings. Amazon is infamous for its innovations in controlling workers, using algorithms to track productivity down to the second, with too much “time off task” grounds for a talking to and, frequently, termination. Such is the basis for the well-known stories of workers peeing in bottles to avoid trekking across the enormous warehouses to go to the bathroom — the Bessemer location is 855,000 square feet, and multiple floors.
As Jennifer Bates, a worker at the Bessemer facility, put it in a recent interview, this technology-heavy approach to labor discipline means that Amazon’s insistence that a union will get in the way of workers’ relationship to the company rings hollow — the workers have a relationship to an app, to an algorithm, not to the company.
No one knows how this election will shake out, or what the consequences will be. Amazon is virulently anti-union, and it is spending a lot of money to defeat the organizing drive — one anti-union consultant, hired on January 25, was paid $3,200 a day for his services. It’s running the standard anti-union playbook, with captive-audience meetings, incessant anti-union texts, and flyers in the bathroom stalls. It’s even getting the most precarious workers, temps who are ineligible for the union, to wear “Vote No” flair on the shop floor.
All this is taking place in a right-to-work state in the Deep South. And the pandemic makes the logistics harder than usual for the union: home visits to talk to workers are a no-go, and with workers socially distancing on and off the job, there are fewer opportunities for the sort of informal shop talk and camaraderie that is so crucial for collective efforts.
Even if the union drive succeeds, challenges will remain: Amazon does not shy away from closing facilities where labor unrest is on the rise, and workers can also expect the company will do its damnedest to prevent them from ever winning a first contract. One study from 2009 found that one year after voting to unionize, 52 percent of workers had not yet won a contract, an important marker due to the fact that if workers lack such a contract one year in, the NLRB allows them to vote on decertifying the union.
On the flip side, had you asked labor-movement people — union organizers, labor journalists, rank-and-file activists — a year ago whether Amazon warehouse workers would be voting on unionizing an Alabama facility in early 2021, most of them would have laughed at your naivete.
These are workers who reached out to the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) within months of the Bessemer warehouse becoming operational in March of 2020. They have support from people around the world. The help isn’t only coming from other workers, though there is that too: the union also recently received a Congressional delegation, and a video from Joe Biden. Their efforts have already inspired other Amazon workers. Just in the past few weeks, a nascent Teamsters effort in Iowa has become public.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the town in question has a rich history of radical, anti-racist, militant union organizing: Bessemer, the scene of landmark 1930s coal strikes and the radical Mine Mill union. This history suffuses the union drive — the workers there say so themselves — and the campaign is being led by other workers, RWDSU members employed in nearby meat processing plants. There are unions of Amazon workers in other countries, but no one has gotten this far in organizing the company’s US facilities. Only a fool would presume to know what these workers are capable of, and what their victory might inspire among a working class that has been pushed to the brink.
Jeanine Añez. (photo: David Mercado/Reuters)
Bolivia: Ex-President Jeanine Añez Arrested Over 2019 Coup
DW News
Jeanine Anez, who succeeded Evo Morales as interim president for a year in 2019, has denounced the move as "political persecution."
olivian police have arrested former interim President Jeanine Anez on charges of terrorism, sedition and conspiracy, a government minister said Saturday.
Anez replaced ex-President Evo Morales in November 2019 when he fled the country amid widespread protests against his reelection to an unconstitutional fourth term.
Morales' Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party, which is now back in power, has claimed that Anez and her allies promoted his ouster after almost 14 years in power.
"I inform the Bolivian people that Mrs. Jeanine Anez has already been apprehended and is currently in the hands of the police," said Interior Minister Carlos Eduardo del Castillo in Twitter and Facebook statements.
The opposition has slammed the actions of the government, with one deputy, Edwin Bazan, saying the MAS party had "mounted a judicial operation to implant the lie that there was a coup d'etat when what there was an [electoral] fraud."
Anez herself wrote in a Twitter posting before the arrest that the "political persecution has begun."
Media reports said two former ministers who backed Anez' one-year caretaker government were also in police detention.
Widespread protests
At the time she took over the presidential post, Anez was the most senior Senate official available, with several of Morales' allies in senior posts having fled amid the violent protests, which left 36 people dead.
The leftist Morales himself at the time called her "a coup-mongering right-wing senator" who had declared herself interim president "without a legislative quorum."
The interim authorities tried to take legal action against Morales and some members of his government, accusing them of rigging an election and suppressing dissent.
But Bolivia is now again ruled by the MAS after it won an easy victory in a general election in October 2020. Luis Arce, Morales' chosen successor, is now president, and Morales himself has returned home and taken over leadership of the ruling party, which he founded.
Red wolves. (photo: Mark Newman/Getty Images)
Can Red Wolves Come Back From the Brink of Extinction Again?
Lucy Sherriff, Guardian UK
Sherriff writes:
Once a US conservation success story, numbers in the wild have plummeted. Now a court has given hope for their survival
here are perhaps no more than 10 red wolves left in the wild, and they are all in just one place: North Carolina.
It is an astonishing statistic for a species once hailed as undergoing the most successful reintroduction programme in the US, providing the blueprint for Yellowstone national park’s much-lauded grey wolf rewilding project.
“The [red wolf] programme has almost entirely crumbled since I’ve been working here,” says Heather Clarkson, who works with the environmental charity Defenders of Wildlife. “It took about 20 years to get the programme to a strong place, that’s the really sad part. Because now it’s crashed. Disappointed barely scratches the surface.”
In January, following legal action by conservation groups including Defenders of Wildlife, the district court for the eastern district of North Carolina ruled that the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), which had cancelled the red wolf reintroduction programme, must resume the release of wolves into the wild. This month the USFWS presented a new plan to the judge and he has given the groups that launched the lawsuit two weeks to lodge any objections.
Start of the rewilding scheme
The plan to boost the number of red wolves in the wild began in 1973, when the USFWS set out to capture as many of the remaining wolves as possible to establish a captive-breeding programme.
In 1980, the red wolf was declared extinct in the wild. Seven years later the first reintroduction was made at the 60,000-hectare (152,000-acre) Alligator River national wildlife refuge in North Carolina. A breeding pair was released, and captive-bred pups were later fostered by the pack.
At its peak, in 2011, there were as many as 130 red wolves back roaming the marshes, swamps and coastal prairies. Their recovery was the first time in the US that a large carnivore had been declared extinct in the wild and then successfully reintroduced.
But by the time Clarkson started work on the project in 2016, they were already looking at “some pretty terrible numbers”. There were fewer than 60 left in the wild.
“I remember being a small child in elementary school and learning about the red wolf, and learning that we are the only place in the whole world that has these wolves,” says Clarkson, who was born in North Carolina. “Fast forward 20-odd years and I’m applying for a job that’s a last-ditch effort to save the species. It’s surreal. And heartbreaking.”
Although there has been debate about whether they are a separate species, a sub-species or a hybrid, most scientists now regard the red wolf as a distinct species. They are smaller than their grey counterparts, closer in size to coyotes and primarily prey on smaller mammals such as racoons, rodents and rabbits. They are the world’s most endangered wolf species, although until the early 1900s they were common throughout the eastern and south central US, ranging from New York state to Louisiana and as far west as parts of Texas.
They have suffered from the degradation of their habitat due to increasing urban development – which fragmented their breeding and hunting grounds – and hybridisation with coyotes. But the biggest threat today is conflict with landowners, which has led to them being hunted and shot.
Conflict with landowners
Despite the species being safeguarded under the Endangered Species Act, it is not illegal to kill a wolf if the animal is attacking you, your livestock or your pets. Under the act, red wolves can be killed when a “take” is authorised by the USFWS, and after efforts by the agency to capture the animal have been abandoned. Over the years, the USFWS has issued a number of lethal take permits to landowners.
“There have been a lot of tensions between landowners and the federal government,” Clarkson says. “Wolves became a very easy scapegoat. They represented federal government intrusion. It really became a bigger issue.”
Tim Gestwicki is chief executive of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation, a conservation charity that promotes coexistence between landowners and wildlife. The NCWF introduced Prey for the Pack, a programme to support red wolves on private land, and has signed several contracts with landowners who wish to help the species recover.
“The whole issue goes back to the ability of private landowners to manage their property,” Gestwicki says. “And that means one thing only: coyote management. The ability to shoot coyotes is what landowners want, but they’ve been banned from doing so because they’re difficult to tell apart from wolves.”
Coyotes are “everywhere”, says Gestwicki, who believes there is a future for the red wolf “as long as private landowner concerns are met”.
Although the permission to kill a “problem wolf” was a factor in their decline, more critical was that in 2015 the USFWS declared it would no longer release wolves into the wild or continue its sterilisation of coyotes to protect the red wolf genome. Following the decision, the population plummeted. In 2019 and 2020, for the first time in 31 years, no red wolf pups were born in the wild.
“To go six years without releasing more wolves,” says Clarkson, “means losing even two wolves in a year is devastating. The USFWS has stopped the most basic forms of management.”
Conservation groups eventually took the USFWS to court. “The agency’s bar on captive releases would effectively doom the red wolf to extinction in the wild,” says Sierra Weaver, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). The SELC, along with Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Welfare Institute, sued the federal agency last November, alleging its new policies of stopping coyote sterilisation and ending the release of captive wolf pups into the wild – which appeared to run counter to red wolf conservation – were illegal.
In its ruling on 22 January, the district court said the USFWS must resume the release of wolves into the wild as well as the coyote sterilisation programme and submit a plan to reinstate the programme.
The court found it was “likely” that the USFWS had violated the Endangered Species Act, and banned the agency from issuing any more permits to kill wolves. The court added that the failure to release additional wolves “will all but certainly result in the extinction of the red wolf”.
The USFWS has since released its plan, saying that it is resuming the release of red wolves into the wild. Conservation groups will now consider the details of the plan before making their response.
The decision is welcome news to North Carolina zoo. The number of red wolves in captivity is increasing, with more pups born every spring. Until 2015, the USFWS had released captive-born wolf pups, pairing them up with wild foster families, and the technique had proved a success.
“I was disappointed when the USFWS stopped the pup fostering programme but understand the reasoning behind the decision. At the time there was a review of the entire recovery programme,” says Chris Lasher, animal management supervisor at the zoo.
North Carolina zoo got its first red wolf in 1995. It was the first facility to foster pups born under human care in a wild den, and has bred 40 pups, two of which were sent to the now-closed recovery location at Great Smoky Mountains national park. Of the 247 red wolves in captivity in the US, North Carolina zoo has 25, making it the second-largest breeding facility for red wolves in the world.
“By adding pups of around two weeks old to a wild litter, we are able to increase the genetic health of the wild population in a manner that has the least amount of mortality possible,” says Lasher. “We have had 100% acceptance of the fostered pups by the wild mother wolf.”
Clarkson remains hopeful that the red wolf can be saved and even thrive. “The Endangered Species Act is a legal obligation,” she says. “This is what USFWS is here for. There are dedicated people in USFWS, so I’m hopeful.”
USFWS declined to comment.
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