28 March 21
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Founder, Reader Supported News
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27 March 21
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Bragman, Perez and Sirota | Fast Food Giant Claims Credit for Killing $15 Minimum Wage
Walker Bragman, Andrew Perez, and David Sirota, The Daily Poster
Excerpt: "The parent company of some of America's largest fast food chains is claiming credit for convincing Congress to exclude a $15 minimum wage from the recent COVID relief bill, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Daily Poster."
In internal company documents, a private-equity owned conglomerate is bragging to its employees about successfully blocking a boost in pay for low-wage workers.
he parent company of some of America’s largest fast food chains is claiming credit for convincing Congress to exclude a $15 minimum wage from the recent COVID relief bill, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Daily Poster. The company, which is owned by a private equity firm named after an Ayn Rand character, also says it is now working to thwart new union rights legislation.
The company’s boasts come just a few months after a government report found that some of its chains had among the highest percentage of workers relying on food stamps.
Inspire Brands — which owns Jimmy Johns, Arby’s, Sonic, and Buffalo Wild Wings, plus recently acquired Dunkin’ Donuts for $11.3 billion in November — on Thursday sent employees and franchisees a review of its government lobbying activity that highlighted its success in keeping the $15 minimum wage out of Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, the COVID-19 relief bill President Joe Biden signed earlier this month.
“We were successful in our advocacy efforts to remove the Raise the Wage Act, which would have increased the federal minimum wage to $15 and eliminated the tip credit,” reads the report.
Further down, the report notes the company’s ongoing lobbying campaign in the Senate against the PRO Act, which recently passed the House and contains a laundry list of organized labor’s goals, such as eliminating right-to-work laws and banning mandatory company-sponsored meetings that are designed to discourage union activity.
“Under this proposed rule, franchisors could be considered the direct employer of the franchise owners in their system, as well as the restaurant workers those owners employ, taking away the independence of small business owners,” the document said.
“You get the impression that they’re actively spitting in our eye, saying ‘Yes, we worked to suppress wages of our employees and we’re just going to brazenly tell you,’” one Inspire Brands worker told The Daily Poster. “I really do think that a line was crossed. You’re just going to brazenly tell your employees, ‘not only did we work to kill wages, but going forward we’re also going to make sure that the PRO Act doesn’t pass either.’”
Inspire Brands did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Government Report On Low Wages Spotlighted Inspire Brands’ Companies
During the 2020 campaign, Democrats pledged to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which would boost the wages of 32 million workers nationwide, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
However, efforts to include a $15 minimum wage in Biden’s pandemic aid bill failed after the Senate parliamentarian advised Democrats such a hike should not be passed by budget reconciliation and Vice President Kamala Harris declined to use her authority to override the decision.
Inspire Brands’ success in eliminating the minimum wage hike from the bill follows Dunkin’ Brands’ then-CEO Nigel Travis saying in 2015 that a $15 wage would be “absolutely outrageous.” At the time, unions noted that Travis was being paid more than $4,000 every hour.
The minimum wage defeat also follows an October 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office finding that low-wage workers at Dunkin’ Donuts, Arby’s, and Sonic were among those relying most heavily on food stamps in states where those franchises operate. In 2019, some Sonic workers walked off the job in Ohio in protest of low pay.
While paying many of its workers below $15, Inspire Brands’ franchises are generating $26 billion in annual revenue and enriching top executives. The founder of Jimmy John’s — which has been accused of busting worker union drives — recently boasted on his website that he was named one of the planet’s wealthiest men.
In the year before Inspire acquired his company, Dunkin’ Brands’ CEO was paid millions and then made millions more when the deal closed.
In government filings that year, Dunkin’ Brands warned investors about the prospect of low-wage workers being paid better.
“A significant number of our franchisees’ food-service employees are paid at rates related to the U.S. federal minimum wage and applicable minimum wages in foreign jurisdictions and past increases in the U.S. federal minimum wage and foreign jurisdiction minimum wage have increased labor costs, as would future such increases,” the company wrote. “Any increases in labor costs might result in franchisees inadequately staffing restaurants. Understaffed restaurants could reduce sales at such restaurants, decrease royalty payments, and adversely affect our brands.”
The company also bragged that “none of our employees are represented by a labor union, and we believe our relationships with our employees are healthy.”
“Our Name Signifies Our Admiration For The Qualities Embodied By Howard Roark”
Inspire Brands is majority owned by Roark Capital — a $23 billion private equity giant named after the self-centered protagonist of Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead, which is considered a foundational conservative text for the defense of billionaires and economic inequality.
“Our name signifies our admiration for the qualities embodied by Howard Roark,” the firm says on its website. “We are committed to being a good partner in good times, and an even better partner in bad times.”
Donors from Roark-linked companies delivered more than $800,000 of campaign contributions in the 2020 election cycle, mostly to Republicans, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.
Several state and local retirement systems have invested public employees’ retirement savings in the Roark funds involved in Inspire Brands’ takeover of Dunkin’ Brands last year, including the Oregon State Treasury, the Maryland State Retirement and Pension System, and the Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System.
In its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Roark advised investors that “portfolio companies of the type targeted” by the firm can be “adversely affected by changes in governmental policies” including the minimum wage.
State Rep. Park Cannon is placed into the back of a patrol car after being arrested by Georgia state troopers at the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on March 25, 2021. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
ALSO SEE: 'Jim Crow in the 21st Century': Biden
Denounces Georgia Republicans Over New Voting Law
Jim Crow Tactics on Full Display in Georgia as Black Legislator Arrested for Knocking on a Capitol Door
George Chidi, The Intercept
Chidi writes: "State Rep. Park Cannon probably didn't expect to be arrested for knocking on a door in the Georgia Capitol. Never mind how innocuous the act: There's a state law about such things."
Behind that door, Gov. Brian Kemp, alongside six white lawmakers, signed what critics say is a new era of voting restrictions.
tate Rep. Park Cannon probably didn’t expect to be arrested for knocking on a door in the Georgia Capitol. Never mind how innocuous the act: There’s a state law about such things. Georgia’s constitution specifically bars the arrest of a legislator “during sessions of the General Assembly, or committee meetings thereof, and in going thereto or returning therefrom, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.”
Apparently knocking on a door constitutes a felony. Two, actually: obstruction of a police officer and disrupting a session of the General Assembly. Video from the arrest is going viral.
At least, the Capitol police found a way to charge her with these felonies as five of them hauled her away from the door, behind which Gov. Brian Kemp was busy signing legislation that opponents have likened to the worst abuses of Jim Crow.
“The only thing that’s missing out of this voting bill is a poll tax and the question of how many bubbles in a bar of soap and how many jelly beans in a jar,” said Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta NAACP, waiting in the rain under a tornado watch at the Fulton County Jail for Cannon’s release. Behind us, two dozen activists were chanting “No Park, no peace” at mildly irritated deputies.
“I’ve been here before and done this before,” said Cannon’s attorney Gerald Griggs, an anti-racist activist who tends to be the person extracting other activists out of jail in Atlanta. The charges have no merit, he said. “I fully expect that Park Cannon’s name will be cleared.”
Senate Bill 202, now law, requires the use of a state ID to verify identity for an absentee ballot, which might be the least problematic provision. Absentee ballots will only be able to be dropped off during regular business hours at early voting locations. Coupled with strict legal limits on who can drop off a ballot, it effectively makes the use of the drop boxes impossible for people who work nontraditional hours.
While weekend early voting expanded under the law, the overall period of early voting was contracted. The law also allows the State Election Board to remove local election board officials for violations, replacing them with a state-appointed superintendent. Because larger jurisdictions like Atlanta have more voters, otherwise-competent administrators are more likely to err in violation simply as a matter of volume. The provision is a legal fig leaf for a state takeover of city elections.
In an effervescent finishing splash of absurd cruelty, the law makes giving food and water to people standing in line to vote a felony.
“This is clear voter suppression, clear racism, a clear manifestation of white supremacy,” Rose said. “Georgia is going backwards instead of forwards. To them, the Civil War is still going on and this is how they’re fighting it.”
U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock got on a plane from Washington, D.C., to help fish her out of jail. Last night around 11 p.m., the two emerged, flanked by progressive activists and other state legislators, to walk her to a car.
“I’ve known Rep. Cannon for years,” Warnock said. “She’s my parishioner. She is understandably a bit shaken by what happened to her. She didn’t deserve this.”
Cannon, 28, is a firebrand progressive representing the trendier parts of Atlanta, an LGBTQ+ icon within the city and widely considered an eventual candidate for higher office. Her star began to rise almost immediately after her election in 2016, when she won a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.
I count Cannon as a friend. I’ve been barbecuing with her mother at another state rep’s house. I find her concern about homelessness in the city sincere and her understanding of the root causes deep. Like Warnock, Cannon comes from the city’s progressive protest traditions, where one expects to defy authority in the face of perceived injustice simply to make a point or extract a political cost for intransigence.
Rather than sign the bill in the ceremonial governor’s office, Kemp had taken a nondescript conference room. “There were cops all around this conference room,” said Tamara Stevens, co-founder of No Safe Seats and an Atlanta activist working with Cannon. Stevens recorded Cannon’s arrest.
“Reps. Cannon and Erica Thomas came down, and Park knocked on the door,” Stevens said. “She didn’t bang on the door.” Stevens began taping the moment an officer demanded that Cannon stop knocking, Stevens said.
I’d like to contrast all of this with an infamous photograph of state Rep. Denmark Groover of Macon leaning over the balcony of the Georgia Capitol in an attempt to stop the clock before it struck midnight, which signaled the end the legislative session of 1964. Groover was a Democrat in the vein of Lester Maddox and the architect of Georgia’s runoff system, designed to prevent Black voters from being political kingmakers. He faced no legal consequences for the clock stunt — even though it crashed to the floor — as he tried to prevent a reapportionment that gave Black voters more political power.
Arresting a sitting legislator in the Capitol for anything short of firing a gun in the chamber had been thought beyond the pale, at least until police bundled then-state Sen. Nikema Williams off in handcuffs in 2018. Protesters had been demonstrating in the Capitol over irregularities in the election of Kemp over Stacey Abrams. Williams, tending to protesters, was arrested along with them, her badge plainly visible to police. At the time, she said she believed that she had been targeted by police for her activism. Then, a month ago today, a state trooper grabbed Cannon during a sit-in protest in the halls of the Capitol.
Cannon had been at a protest of Delta Air Lines at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport when word came down that Kemp planned to sign the bill at 6:30 p.m. Cannon and others sprinted back to the Capitol, about a 25-minute drive north in rush-hour traffic.
Warnock described House Bill 531 — a similar bill making its way through the Georgia legislature — as “desperate” and “democracy in reverse” and said that “the people aren’t asking for this.” Activists have been increasing the pressure on Georgia’s business elite to push back on the legislation, with public protests at the World of Coca-Cola and elsewhere. Threats of boycotts loom, though it’s not clear what form that might take.
Warnock issued a challenge.
“We need Georgia businesses to stand up,” he said. “They too are citizens of this state. I can tell you as someone who is the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Dr. King served, that come Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, the corporate entities will all be falling over themselves to honor Dr. King. If you want to honor Dr. King, stand up to voter suppression right now.”
A rally in support of Jacob Blake. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
Jacob Blake Files Excessive Force Lawsuit Against Kenosha Police Officer Who Shot Him
Rachel Treisman, NPR
Treisman writes:
acob Blake, the Black man left paralyzed after being shot in the back by a white police officer last August in Kenosha, Wis., has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the use of excessive force.
Kenosha Police Officer Rusten Sheskey is the sole defendant named in the lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. It says Blake suffered "catastrophic, permanent injuries'' as a direct result of Sheskey's actions, and seeks unspecified compensation for his injuries as well as punitive damages, attorney's fees and other relief.
Blake's legal team spans three law firms and includes high-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has worked with many families of Black victims of police violence and most recently helped the family of George Floyd reach a $27 million civil settlement with the city of Minneapolis.
"Nothing can undo this tragedy or take away the suffering endured by Jacob, his children, and the rest of the Blake family," Crump said. "But hopefully today is a significant step in achieving justice for them and holding Officer Sheskey answerable for his nearly deadly actions — actions that have deprived Jacob of his ability to walk."
In January, a Wisconsin prosecutor declined to bring criminal charges against Sheskey, and said no charges would be filed against Blake. Crump said at the time that "our work is not done and hope is not lost."
The Kenosha Police Department confirmed to NPR on Friday that Sheskey is still employed but on administrative leave, and declined to comment further.
The 19-page complaint — which does not list an attorney for Sheskey — recounts the events that unfolded on Aug. 23, culminating in Sheskey firing seven shots at point blank range as Blake walked away from him and towards the driver's side of a parked vehicle where two of his young children were sitting.
Six of those rounds entered Blake's body, with at least one severing his spinal cord and "instantly rendering his fully seated body limp upon impact," according to the complaint.
Blake, a father of three who worked as an armed security guard, had been leaving a gathering for his son's eighth birthday following a verbal dispute between two women when Sheskey and other officers were dispatched to the area for what was initially deemed "family trouble." They approached Blake as he was putting one of his sons in the backseat of a Dodge SUV.
Wisconsin Public Radio reports that the officers were trying to arrest Blake for an outstanding sexual assault warrant, and that the state dropped those charges against him in November.
The complaint details how, without announcing any intention of arresting him, Sheskey grabbed Blake by the wrist and began applying physical force to his arm, causing him to tense up. A number of officers then placed him in a headlock, punched and choked him and shocked him three times with a taser. Blake had dropped a folding utility knife on the ground during the scuffle, and picked it up and started walking towards his vehicle as officers followed him with their guns drawn.
As Blake opened the driver's side door, threw the knife onto the floor and started to sit down, the complaint states, Sheskey pulled him backwards by his t-shirt with one hand and fired his semi-automatic pistol with the other.
Blake's lawyers said repeatedly that he made no physical or verbal threats towards any officer and attempted to disengage by walking away from them. They also noted that at the time Sheskey began firing, several women and a toddler were standing in the vicinity, and Blake's two children were sitting just feet away in the backseat.
"Miraculously, no bystanders were hit by gunfire," B'Ivory LaMarr, one of Blake's attorneys, said in a statement. "Although Jacob's children escaped physical injury and avoided being hit by the stray bullet that fired into the SUV, they were forced to witness their father being gunned down only feet away from where they sat."
The complaint also includes several stills from eyewitness video, showing the positions of Blake and Sheskey at the moment each shot was fired. Blake's lawyers said the images prove that "the hail of gunfire fired into the back of Mr. Blake in the presence of his children was excessive and unnecessary for which there must be accountability in a court of law."
Another of Blake's attorneys, Patrick Salvi II, called his injuries "permanent and life-changing," adding that he now suffers from an "intractable pain syndrome."
"After various surgical procedures and an agonizing course of physical rehabilitation, Jacob remains unable to return to his job as a security guard and relies on others to assist him with the basic needs of daily living," Salvi said.
Blake has made few public appearances since the shooting. In September, he recorded a video from his hospital bed describing the pain of his recovery and his hopes for the future.
"To all the young cats out there and even the older ones, older than me, there's a lot more life to live out here, man. Your life, and not only just your life, your legs — something that you need to move around and move forward in life — can be taken from you like this," Blake said, snapping his fingers.
Video of the shooting circulated widely and prompted days of protests in Kenosha. It was during this period of unrest that Illinois teenager Kyle Rittenhouse was captured on video shooting three protesters, two of them fatally. Rittenhouse, who has garnered support from conservative Second Amendment advocates, said he acted in self-defense and has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him. A judge earlier this month delayed his trial until November.
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)
Amazon's PR Flacks Are Starting to Sweat
Alex N. Press, Jacobin
Press writes: "Amazon's PR operation is getting defensive after increasingly negative press over working conditions."
With Bernie Sanders on his way to Bessemer, Alabama to support warehouse workers voting on a union, and the company facing increasingly negative press over working conditions that include drivers being forced to urinate in bottles, Amazon’s PR operation is getting defensive.
mazon, a company whose warehouse workers have in the past year told me about seizures, injuries, and heat-induced fainting spells in their facilities and which pushed many of its hundreds of thousands of US employees to the breaking point during the pandemic by refusing to communicate with them about coronavirus outbreaks, much less shut down infected facilities for cleanings, can’t stop insisting that it’s a great place to work. It’s not the only company that kills its workers through negligence, but it is one of them, and it has decided to openly mock the idea that its workers suffer.
Now, anyone who writes about Amazon knows, for starters, that the company regularly lies to journalists and the public alike. Given its money and power, that is often an effective strategy, and the company’s PR team, led by none other than Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, has reason to be confident in its ability to manipulate the public. Witness, for example, how journalists almost uniformly compare Amazon’s $15 starting wage — which was only adopted after Senator Bernie Sanders turned up his criticism of the company — to the wages at fast-food chains, rather than the pay at other warehouses. Amazon pays below the prevailing wage in its industry and has been shown to lower wages at nearby warehouses, yet writers too often swallow the company’s words hook, line, and sinker, propagating the idea that wages at Amazon’s warehouses are higher, not lower, than they need to be.
But as workers at the company’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse continue voting on unionization, Amazon’s PR operation is getting uncharacteristically defensive. Responding to news that Sanders will be visiting Bessemer today to support the union drive, Dave Clark, Amazon CEO of Worldwide Consumer, tweeted that he “often” calls Amazon “the Bernie Sanders of employers,” one which “delivers a progressive workplace” with “health care from day one” and “a safe and inclusive work environment.”
While it is undeniably funny to imagine Clark “often” taking up minutes in executive meetings with such a nonsensical comparison — after all, Bernie Sanders is the “Bernie Sanders of employers,” and when his presidential campaign staff unionized, he voluntarily recognized them without forcing them to sit through captive-audience meetings — Clark’s desire to speak about this subject is ludicrous. His nickname is “the Sniper,” a moniker he earned because of his “habit of lurking in the shadows of Amazon warehouses and scoping out slackers he could fire.” He was Amazon’s global logistics chief, a key architect of the company’s delivery operation. He is more responsible than almost anyone else for the remarkably dangerous working conditions endured by Amazon’s employees.
Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), cochair of the newly formed House Labor Caucus, responded to Clark’s statements by noting that Amazon union-busts and makes workers pee in water bottles and thus is decidedly not a “progressive workplace.” The company replied to Pocan via its official news account, writing, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.”
Putting aside the absurd idea that “nobody” puts up with horrifically exploitative jobs, that Amazon workers resort to peeing in bottles was famously documented by UK journalist James Bloodworth. Bloodworth went undercover as an Amazon worker and found that given the size of Amazon’s warehouses and the company’s down-to-the-second tracking of workers’ “time off task,” workers sometimes forgo trips to the bathroom in favor of using bottles.
It’s not as if the facilities Bloodworth investigated are an anomaly. Workers in Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse have mentioned their fear of wasting time on bathroom trips too. While none of them have said they pee in bottles, it doesn’t take much digging to find other members of Amazon’s workforce talking about doing exactly that.
As Vice’s Lauren Kaori Gurley writes in response to Amazon’s denial of the issue, Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles and coffee cups “is one of the most universal concerns voiced by the many Amazon delivery drivers around the country.” The internet is rife with workers describing their inability to access a bathroom while driving for the company, with Reddit threads describing where they pee instead: bottles, garbage bags, hand-sanitizer bottles, hedges. As the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein quickly confirmed, drivers are not only peeing, but also defecating, in work vehicles. As one area manager wrote to his employees in an email, they were to tell drivers that “they CANNOT poop, or leave bottles of urine inside bags.”
As for the health care touted by both Clark and Amazon’s news account, it’s worth revisiting revelations about AmCare, the company’s network of on-site medical clinics. As Reveal found in an investigation of how the company covered up the alarming injury rates in its warehouses, AmCare distorted the numbers by delaying sending workers to a doctor for up to twenty-one days, leading injuries to get worse.
If a work-related injury requires care beyond first aid, it is logged for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Amazon was so set on keeping injuries off those logs that it contracted with “OSHA sensitive” clinics that instructed their medical providers “to avoid giving any treatment to Amazon workers that would make their injuries recordable.” As one nurse practitioner who worked at such a clinic told Reveal, “she dreaded seeing Amazon patients because she didn’t think she would be able to treat them appropriately.”
Amazon got to where it is by its ruthless pursuit of profit. The company will say anything that it thinks will help clear obstacles to that goal from its path. This latest PR blitz is just the latest example, but there is now one key difference: Amazon’s workers have started getting organized, and that means they and their duly chosen representatives can counter the company’s lies.
Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby during a news conference in Maryland. (photo: Julio Cortez/AP)
Baltimore Will No Longer Prosecute Drug Possession, Prostitution, Low-Level Crimes
Jon Schuppe, NBC News
Schuppe writes: "A year ago, as the coronavirus began to spread across Maryland, Baltimore State's Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, a move aimed at curbing Covid-19's spread behind bars."
A pandemic experiment in criminal justice reform takes hold in one of America's most violent cities.
That shift — repeated by prosecutors in many other cities — didn’t just reduce jail populations. In Baltimore, nearly all categories of crime have since declined, confirming to Mosby what she and criminal justice experts have argued for years: Crackdowns on quality-of-life crimes are not necessary for stopping more serious crime.
On Friday, Mosby announced that she was making her pandemic experiment permanent, saying Baltimore — for decades notorious for runaway violence and rough policing — had become a case study in criminal justice reform.
In the 12 months since she ordered scaled-back enforcement, violent crime is down 20 percent and property crime has declined 36 percent, she said. Homicides inched down, though Baltimore still has one of the highest homicide rates among cities nationwide. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found sharp reductions in calls to police complaining about drugs and prostitution, she said.
“Clearly, the data suggest there is no public safety value in prosecuting low-level offenses,” Mosby said at a news conference.
But whether Baltimore is indeed an experiment that can be replicated elsewhere remains to be seen. Enforcement of low-level crimes has dropped in many parts of the country over the past year, as police limited operations to avoid contracting and spreading the virus and as prosecutors and judges sought to contain the virus’s spread in jails. But Baltimore is one of the few big cities where violence did not increase. In dozens of cities, homicides and shootings rose in 2020.
While many prosecutors have maintained their pandemic suspensions on low-level offense prosecutions, few have said those shifts will remain in place in perpetuity. Some newly elected prosecutors, though, have vowed to abandon low-level cases permanently.
At Friday's news conference, Mosby also faced questions about a federal investigation into her campaign finances, as well as the finances of her husband, a city councilman. Her attorney has called the investigation "politically motivated." Mosby dismissed a reporter's questions about the probe, saying she wanted to focus on her new policy.
She said the Baltimore Police Department will be a partner in this shift away from low-level prosecutions, in which officers and prosecutors will focus on violent crime and drug trafficking as courts begin holding criminal trials again.
“Our understanding is that the police are going to follow what they’ve been doing for the past year, which is not arresting people based on the offenses I mentioned,” Mosby said.
At the same time, law enforcement will work with a local nonprofit, Baltimore Crisis Response Inc., to provide services to people suffering from mental illness, homelessness and drug addiction.
The Baltimore Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Police Commissioner Michael Harrison told The Washington Post that the policy had been difficult for officers to accept when it was implemented last year, and that he expected crime to rise. He told the Post that he now believed the pullback may have worked.
A spokeswoman for the local police officers union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kobi Little, head of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, said at the news conference that Mosby’s move was a recognition that decades of heavy-handed enforcement in Baltimore had done more harm than good.
“We want to see more elected officials stand up on these issues,” he said.
Kim Foxx, the state's attorney in Cook County, Illinois, said Mosby’s announcement was the culmination of years of discussion among reformers seeking ways to reduce focus on low-level offenses. “Covid provided a real opportunity to test it, to move from theory to practice,” she said.
“What Marilyn has been able to do is demonstrate that those changes didn’t lead to an increase in violent crime, didn’t lead to mayhem in the streets. The theory in practice yielded good results.”
Foxx, like Mosby, halted prosecution of minor crimes in the early days of the pandemic. But she is still exploring whether to make those changes permanent. Cook County — which includes Chicago — has seen an increase in homicides and shootings. That means Foxx will have to do a deeper analysis of what caused the spike before deciding what to do.
Michael Kahn, director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said he believed Mosby was the first prosecutor to permanently shift away from minor offenses. More will likely follow if they see that their policies did not cause crime spikes, he said.
“I would expect now that the dam has broken that in the next few months we will start to see folks follow once they have their arms around the data,” Kahn said.
A man part group of asylum seekers, mostly from African countries, checks his phone in Tijuana on July 9, 2019, northwestern Mexico. (photo: Guillermo Arias/Getty Images)
Black Immigrants Are Facing Rampant Racism in Mexico While Waiting for US Asylum
Nisha Venkat, BuzzFeed
Venkat writes: "When Laure fled Cameroon in 2019, she never expected to be sleeping on the streets of Tijuana, eating from trash cans and, more than a year later, still fighting near-constant racism while trying to gain asylum in the US."
During those initial weeks, she said she came to understand her cold new reality when she was unable to find employment despite having a nursing certification.
“She asked for my papers, my diploma. I gave it to her. Maybe 30 minutes later, she called me and said, ‘We have no work for a stranger,’” Laure said. “If somebody lives in your country and has documents, how are they a stranger? I told her, ‘You want to say that I am Black, that I have a Black color.’”
President Joe Biden has signed a series of executive orders to start rolling back the Trump administration’s legacy of racist policies designed to stop immigration altogether. But so far, much of his focus has been on easing access for Mexican and Central American immigrants, leaving people like Laure stranded in Mexico. There, people like her typically face police violence, racism from locals, and a language barrier while they wait for their asylum cases to be processed.
Espacio Migrante is an immigration rights nonprofit that splits its time working between Mexico and California. The group estimates there are 3,000 to 5,000 Black immigrants in Tijuana, where in addition to racism and discrimination from locals, they face higher rates of police mistreatment, said Paulina Olvera Cáñez, the director of Espacio Migrante.
“Black migrants get noticed immediately, so they get stopped by the police a lot more,” Cáñez told BuzzFeed News. “And when the police stop them, they may ask for money in exchange for not turning them over to immigration, or they might just mistreat them. They face greater discrimination not just because of the language, but also because of racism in Mexico.”
Laure, who asked BuzzFeed News to only use her middle name out of fear of the circumstances that caused her to flee Cameroon, also said she had to deal with rampant bigotry specifically directed at Black women on account of their race and gender. She says she was repeatedly told by employers and local residents that the only way a Black woman could make money in Mexico was sex work.
“Many times I would pass in the road, and every time the Mexican guys say, ‘Cuánto, cuánto, cuánto.’ I didn’t know what this ‘cuánto’ meant. I think maybe it was a greeting, because I didn’t know Spanish. So I say, ‘Hola, hola!’” Laure said.
It took another African friend to tell her what she thought was an innocent greeting was actually them asking her how much she would sell her body for.
“I was very sad. I thought they liked me, that they were greeting me,” Laure said.
H, a Ghanaian immigrant also waiting in Tijuana, said he fled home in 2018 after he filed a police report about a rape he witnessed and gang members labeled him an informant, putting his life in jeopardy. He asked to be identified by his first initial out of fear for his safety in Tijuana, where he said there’s not much recourse to the everyday racism he faces, even from supposedly neutral parties.
“We have no choice. We have to go through it. It is something we experience every day, and we are used to it,” he said. “Wherever we go, even the UN works with the local government and what the local government does is what the UN will do.”
Meanwhile, border closures and Trump-era immigration restrictions have forced more immigrants to seek other forms of entry that have been problematic for years.
Metering, for example, is an informal system both H and Laure encountered as African immigrants in which names are written down in tattered notebooks held together with duct tape. People are then admitted into the US from other ports of entry in the order their names were listed.
Although metering gained popularity during the Trump administration, it was first used in February 2016 in response to a backlog caused by a surge of Haitian immigrants. But it has long been criticized as discriminatory, racist, and unstructured.
“I never wanted to cross illegally. I wanted to do it the legal way,” H said. “My name was written down, number 3,000 or something, and I waited and waited and waited until the pandemic came. And after that, they kept saying three months, five months, and now it’s been almost a year since the pandemic started.”
The Biden administration faces one of its toughest challenges yet in unraveling the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including a recent influx of unaccompanied immigrant children at the southern border that has brought bipartisan criticism for not more forcefully dissuading people from attempting the journey.
And yet, change cannot seem to come fast enough for immigrants like H. After a year of waiting at the border, he’s ended up in a situation that he describes as not much better than where he started. When gunshots ring out in his neighborhood most nights, he shelters in place with his six housemates to avoid becoming collateral damage.
“I know nobody is after me here. There [in Ghana], somebody's after me. Here, I know if I avoid getting involved with bad people and stay indoors all the time, I can be safe,” H said. “But for asylum, I have lost all hope. There is no money to go anywhere. There’s no job. But this is the only way. This is what we call home, for now.”
Laure said her journey from Cameroon to Mexico spanned months and involved just one cross-continental plane ride, with the rest of the distance covered by bus or on foot. In between stops, she did odd jobs to save enough money to continue traveling.
“I never thought I’d ever feel that unsafe. I would never advise this trip to anybody. I left everything. I had no money. I am a poor woman. I am divorced,” said Laure, who left three children behind to escape Cameroon.
Laure’s journey involved traversing the Darien Gap, a perilous strip of wilderness between Panama and Colombia. Thousands of miles later, she reached the Mexican border city of Tapachula, where she said immigration officers discriminated against her on the basis of her race.
“When you arrive at immigration, they treat you like a pig. They prefer to have Central Americans. Nobody gives you any attention,” Laure said. “In immigration, the Central Americans have a line, the Africans have another line.”
She remained in the Tapachula facility — which she described as “prison” — for eight months before making it to Tijuana, where she is today.
Now, Laure and H are stuck in a life-threatening limbo while much of the media coverage and policy around immigration during Biden’s administration has focused on people who aren’t Black. The end of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) and the Asylum Cooperative Agreements (ACAs) announced in January, for example, explicitly affect Mexican and Central American immigrants, leaving thousands of people like Laure and H in the shadows.
“It is a step in the right direction. But it’s not a policy that is a solution for all the migrants that have been waiting in a corner for so long,” said Cáñez of Espacio Migrante. “So we don’t just want an end to MPP, but to the practice of making asylum seekers wait in Mexico in general, because that is not safe.”
Adult desert locusts. (photo: David Chancellor/National Geographic)
A Locust Plague Hit East Africa. The Pesticide Solution May Have Dire Consequences.
Tristan McConnell, National Geographic
McConnell writes: "A swarm of locusts is awe inspiring and terrible. It begins as a dark smudge on the horizon, then a gathering darkness. A rustle becomes a clatter that crescendos as tens of millions of voracious, finger-sized, bright yellow insects descend on the land."
Heavy use of a broad-spectrum pesticide seems to have slowed the desert locust invasion. What the repercussions of that approach are isn’t yet clear.
swarm of locusts is awe inspiring and terrible. It begins as a dark smudge on the horizon, then a gathering darkness. A rustle becomes a clatter that crescendos as tens of millions of voracious, finger-sized, bright yellow insects descend on the land. Since late 2019, vast clouds of locusts have shrouded the Horn of Africa, devouring crops and pastureland—and triggering an operation of staggering proportions to track and kill them.
So far, a ground and air spraying campaign over eight East African countries, coordinated by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), has staved off the worst—the very real prospect that the locusts would destroy the food supply for millions of people. Last year, the operation protected enough pastureland and food stocks, by the FAO’s calculations, to feed 28 million people in the Greater Horn of Africa and Yemen for an entire year.
But progress comes with yet-unknown consequences to the landscape, and responders have sought to find the elusive balance between eradicating the invading pests without destroying foliage and harming insects, wildlife, and humans. Northern Kenya is renowned worldwide for its bee diversity, and farmers and conservationists worry that bees are becoming casualties.
So far, 506,000 gallons (2.3 million liters) of chemical pesticides have been sprayed over 4.7 million acres (1.9 million hectares) at a cost the FAO says is $195 million. The spraying is expected to continue this year.
Assessments of possible environmental damage are incomplete at best, though the effects of pesticides have been well documented for decades in other settings. Broad spectrum pesticides are not only very effective at killing locusts, they also kill bees and other insects. They leach into water systems and can damage human health.
“Of course, there is collateral damage,” says Dino Martins, an entomologist and executive director of the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. “All these chemicals are designed to kill insects and they do so in very large numbers.”
Caught off guard
Kenya had not suffered a major locust invasion in 70 years. When the first swarms arrived in 2019, the country was woefully unprepared for what had been, quite reasonably, regarded as a remote threat.
“They had no equipment, no expertise, no pesticides, no aircraft, no knowledge,” says Keith Cressman, the FAO’s senior locust forecaster.
The swarms began forming in 2018 after cyclones dumped heavy rain on the inhospitable deserts of Arabia, allowing locusts to breed unseen in the wet sands. Strong winds in 2019 blew the growing swarms into Yemen’s inaccessible conflict zones, then across the Red Sea into Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
In the early stages of the locust control effort Kenya threw everything it had at the problem. “It was a panic reaction,” says James Everts, a Dutch ecotoxicologist specializing in the environmental effects of pesticide use.
The spraying continued even as the COVID-19 pandemic spread and shuttered much of the world. Donning face masks against the coronavirus, hundreds of local volunteers, as well as members of Kenya’s National Youth Service, shouldered knapsack sprayers and, with minimal training, unloaded on the locusts with whatever pesticides happened to be in stock. They sprayed tens of thousands of liters of deltamethrin, as well as hundreds of liters of fipronil, chlorpyrifos, and other insecticides, many of which are banned in Europe and parts of the United States.
In one documented case in the northern region of Samburu, a ground control team sprayed 34 times the recommended dose of pesticide on a patch of ground, killing bees and beetles while spilling pesticide on themselves and crops.
“In the beginning it was an emergency,” says Thecla Mutia, who leads an FAO team monitoring the environmental effects of locust-control efforts in Kenya. “The whole idea was to manage this as fast as possible to ensure food security.”
Pesticides banned in Europe and the U.S.
Designed to kill, pesticides are toxic by definition, but they are also blunt weapons. Three of the four chemicals recommended by the FAO and authorized by regional governments—chlorpyrifos, fenitrothion, and malathion—are broad-spectrum organophosphates, widely used pesticides sometimes referred to as “junior-strength nerve agents” because of their kinship to Sarin gas. The other, deltamethrin, is a synthetic pyrethroid, which is especially toxic to bees and fish, though much less so to mammals.
The FAO’s Pesticides Referee Group, which vets pesticides for use in locust control, lists all four chemicals as high risk to bees, low or medium risk to birds, and medium or high risk to locusts’ natural enemies and soil insects, such as ants and termites.
The European Union banned chlorpyrifos early last year, and in the U.S. state bans have been enforced in New York, California, and Hawaii. Fenitrothion, too, is banned in Europe, but permitted in the U.S. and in Australia, where the government deploys it as a central weapon in the fight against locusts.
“We are not hiding what conventional pesticides are,” says Cyril Ferrand, FAO resilience team leader in Nairobi, who points out that doing nothing was not an option in the face of the rapidly expanding swarms. “We want to lower the population of desert locusts in a way that is responsible.”
Non-toxic alternatives
Non-toxic biological alternatives that kill locusts, but do no other harm, have been available for decades. Yet chemical pesticides remain the weapon of choice, accounting for 90 percent of the spraying in the current East Africa campaign.
Biopesticide development began in the late 1980s after the end of a years-long locust plague that stretched from North Africa to India.
“When we saw the figures of the millions of liters of pesticide being sprayed, even the donor community was horrified,” recalls Christiaan Kooyman, a Dutch scientist who developed the biopesticide using a fungus, Metarhizium acridum, that attacks locusts. “And they asked the scientists, ‘Is there nothing else we can do?’”
Metarhizium, which has been on the market since 1998, is recommended by the FAO as the “most appropriate control option” for locusts, yet is rarely used. It is slow acting with a low “knockdown” rate—meaning it kills over days rather than hours. It is expensive and tricky to apply. And it is most effective against immature “hoppers,” rather than the adult swarms that are the greater threat.
Its best feature—that it kills only locusts—also makes it a less profitable product. Companies have little incentive to manufacture metarhizium and go through the costly bureaucratic process of registering it in a country until it is needed—and by then it is too late.
“Locusts aren’t around very much, and manufacturers are not keen on producing something that doesn’t get used,” says Graham Matthews, a British scientist and the founding chair of the Pesticides Referee Group. When the swarms arrive, “you don’t want to wait for production, you want it off-the-shelf,” he adds.
Instead, governments reach for the broad-spectrum toxic chemicals mass-produced by large agrochemical companies.
Extent of harm is unknown
What makes widespread spraying of chemical pesticides especially worrisome to farmers, herders, scientists, and conservationists in Kenya is that so little is known about what, if any, harm the pesticides have done. A U.S. government environmental assessment of the regional locust operation warned of the “potential for significant adverse impacts on environment and human health,” and a review by the World Bank found the environmental risk to be “substantial.”
Yet more than a year into the control campaign, the FAO’s assessment of the environmental impact of the spraying has not been made public.
“The excessive use of pesticides is of course detrimental to biodiversity, but it has not really been quantified as to what the level of impact is,” says Sunday Ekesi, an entomologist and director of research and partnerships at the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi, part of a government task force set up to tackle the desert locust invasion.
“Our key concern is the impact it has on the pollinators,” says Anne Maina, of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya. The farmers she works with attribute reduced honey and mango harvests to the disappearance of bees. Martins shares these concerns, but says the lack of monitoring information means it is impossible to know what’s really going on.
“Northern Kenya and the greater Horn of Africa is one of the world’s hotspots of bee diversity, with thousands of species, most of which we know absolutely nothing about,” he says. “We need to develop tools that allow us to both control locusts and protect the fragile biodiversity of the region’s drylands.”
The FAO’s 2003 guidelines on safety and environmental precautions acknowledge that aerial spraying may have less impact on human health than ground spraying, but often creates “more environmental concerns” because it risks contaminating ecologically sensitive areas. Aerial spraying increases the potential for “uncontrolled drift,” whereby chemicals—much like the locusts themselves—are blown off course by the wind.
Mutia, the FAO’s team leader for environmental monitoring, insists that ground-spraying teams have become better trained and local communities are better informed about the spraying and the risks to themselves and their livestock. Kenya’s overall locust operation today has improved since the early weeks of the invasion.
“Done right, the environmental impact is very low,” says Cressman.
A key report still under wraps
Still, Mutia’s environment and health monitoring report, finished last September, has yet to be made public. And there is confusion over why. The FAO says the report is for Kenya’s agriculture ministry to release, but a ministry spokeswoman says the FAO has yet to deliver it.
In an interview, Mutia says she found “no cause for alarm,” in her review of the spraying.
However, a copy of the report obtained by National Geographic paints a more detailed and problematic picture, with evidence of heavy overdosing at the Samburu site and widespread lack of communication with residents in sprayed areas.
In four of the 13 sites inspected, there was no sign of locust deaths at all, suggesting either that the spraying had been ineffective or that the monitoring teams weren’t in the right locations. The report says they were repeatedly given inadequate location information and lacked the helicopters and other vehicles required to quickly reach more remote sites.
“Our main concern has been the focus on control of the locusts without a parallel monitoring system of the undesired effects,” says Raphael Wahome, an animal scientist at the University of Nairobi. He says the FAO’s information should be made available to researchers and others: “Your guess is as good as mine as to what is happening wherever [the pesticides] have been used.”
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