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30 March 21
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30 March 21
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Jane Mayer | Inside the Koch-Backed Effort to Block the Largest Election-Reform Bill in Half a Century
Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "On a leaked conference call, leaders of dark-money groups and an aide to Mitch McConnell expressed frustration with the popularity of the legislation - even among Republican voters."
n public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.
A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress.
Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.”
As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.”
McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”
Gretchen Reiter, the senior vice-president of communications for Stand Together, declined to respond to questions about the conference call or the Koch group’s research showing the robust popularity of the proposed election reforms. In an e-mailed statement, she said, “Defending civil liberties requires more than a sound bite,” and added that the group opposes the bill because “a third of it restricts First Amendment rights.” She included a link to an op-ed written by a member of Americans for Prosperity, another Koch-affiliated advocacy group, which argues that the legislation violates donors’ freedom of expression by requiring the disclosure of the names of those who contribute ten thousand dollars or more to nonprofit groups involved in election spending. Such transparency, the op-ed suggests, could subject donors who prefer to remain anonymous to retaliation or harassment.
The State Policy Network, a confederation of right-wing think tanks with affiliates in every state, convened the conference call days after the Democrats’ twin victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, which meant that the Party had won the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, making it likely that the For the People Act would move forward. Participants included Heather Lauer, the executive director of People United for Privacy, a conservative group fighting to keep nonprofit donors’ identities secret, and Grover Norquist, the founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, who expressed alarm at the damage that the disclosure provisions could do. “The left is not stupid, they’re evil,” he warned. “They know what they’re doing. They have correctly decided that this is the way to disable the freedom movement.”
Coördinating directly with the right-wing policy groups, which define themselves as nonpartisan for tax purposes, were two top Republican congressional staffers: Caleb Hays, the general counsel to the Republicans on the House Administration Committee, and Steve Donaldson, a policy adviser to McConnell. “When it comes to donor privacy, I can’t stress enough how quickly things could get out of hand,” Donaldson said, indicating McConnell’s concern about the effects that disclosure requirements would have on fund-raising. Donaldson added, “We have to hold our people together,” and predicted that the fight is “going to be a long one. It’s going to be a messy one.” But he insisted that McConnell was “not going to back down.” Neither Donaldson nor Hays responded to requests for comment. David Popp, a spokesperson for McConnell, said, “We don’t comment on private meetings.”
Nick Surgey, the executive director of Documented, a progressive watchdog group that investigates corporate money in politics, told me it made sense that McConnell’s staffer was on the call, because the proposed legislation “poses a very real threat to McConnell’s source of power within the Republican Party, which has always been fund-raising.” Nonetheless, he said that the close coördination on messaging and tactics between the Republican leadership and technically nonpartisan outside-advocacy groups was “surprising to see.”
The proposed legislation, which the House of Representatives passed on March 3rd, largely along party lines, has been described by the Times as “the most substantial expansion of voting rights in a half-century.” It would transform the way that Americans vote by mandating automatic national voter registration, expanding voting by mail, and transferring the decennial project of redrawing—and often gerrymandering—congressional districts from the control of political parties to nonpartisan experts. Given the extraordinary attempts by Donald Trump and his supporters to undermine the 2020 election, and Republicans’ ongoing efforts to deter Democratic constituencies from voting, it is the bill’s sweeping voting-rights provisions that have drawn the most media attention. During his first press conference, last week, President Joe Biden backed the bill, calling Republican efforts to undermine voting rights “sick” and “un-American.” He declared, “We’ve got to prove democracy works.”
But as the State Policy Network’s conference call demonstrated, some of the less noticed provisions in the eight-hundred-plus-page bill are particularly worrisome to conservative operatives. Both parties have relied on wealthy anonymous donors, but the vast majority of dark money from undisclosed sources over the past decade has supported conservative causes and candidates. Democrats, however, are catching up. In 2020, for the first time in any Presidential election, liberal dark-money groups far outspent their conservative counterparts, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign spending. Nonetheless, Democrats, unlike Republicans, have pushed for reforms that would shut off the dark-money spigot.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, from 2010, opened up scores of loopholes that have enabled wealthy donors and businesses to covertly buy political influence. Money is often donated through nonprofit corporations, described as “social welfare” organizations, which don’t publicly disclose their donors. These dark-money groups can spend a limited percentage of their funds directly on electoral politics. They also can contribute funds to political-action committees, creating a daisy chain of groups giving to one another. This makes it virtually impossible to identify the original source of funding. The result has been a cascade of anonymous cash flooding into American elections.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in the 2020 federal election cycle more than a billion dollars was spent by dark-money groups that masked the identity of their donors. Of that total, more than six hundred and fifty-four million dollars came from just fifteen groups. The top spender was One Nation, a dark-money social-welfare group tied to McConnell. The For the People Act requires greater disclosure of the identities of donors who pay for election ads—including those released on digital platforms, which currently fall outside of such legal scrutiny. It also requires that donors who give ten thousand dollars or more to social-welfare groups be identified, if that donation is spent to sway elections. Donors who fund non-election-oriented activities by such groups can remain anonymous. And, notably, the legislation calls for the disclosure, for the first time, of large donors trying to exert control over the selection of judicial nominees. This provision appears to target groups such as the Judicial Crisis Network, on the right, and Demand Justice, on the left, which have mounted multimillion-dollar public-advocacy campaigns to influence the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees.
Brendan Fischer, a campaign-finance-reform advocate in favor of the legislation, said that the conference call showed that “wealthy special interests are working hard to protect a broken status quo, where billionaires and corporations are free to secretly buy influence.” After listening to the recording, Fischer, who directs the Campaign Legal Center’s Federal Reform Program, added that it exposed “the reality that cracking down on political corruption and ending dark money is popular with voters across the political spectrum.”
On the call, McKenzie, the Koch operative, cited one “ray of hope” in the fight against the reforms, noting that his research found that the most effective message was arguing that a politically “diverse coalition of groups opposed” the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “In our message example that we used, we used the example of A.C.L.U., Planned Parenthood, and conservative organizations backed by Charles Koch as an example of groups that oppose H.R. 1,” he said. “I think, you know, when you put that in front of people . . . they’re, like, ‘Oh, conservatives and some liberal groups all oppose this, like, I should maybe think about this more. You know, there must be bigger implications to this if these groups are all coming together on it.’ ”
However, that test message was inaccurate. Planned Parenthood does not oppose the For the People Act. It is, in fact, on a list of organizations giving the legislation their full backing. And the A.C.L.U. supports almost all of the expansions of voting rights contained in the bill, although it has sided with the Koch groups and other conservative organizations in arguing that donors to nonprofit groups could be harassed if their names are disclosed. Advocates for greater transparency in political spending argue that there is no serious evidence of any such harassment. Asked if she could cite any examples, Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the A.C.L.U., said that the only one she knew about was atypical—the online backlash experienced by the actor Mila Kunis, after she had made a donation to a pro-abortion group in the name of Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion rights.
With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”
Pressure tactics from dark-money groups may work on individual lawmakers. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the Senate. But, as the January 8th conference call shows, opponents of the legislation have resorted to “under-the-dome-type strategies” because the broad public is against them when it comes to billionaires buying elections.
A memorial for George Floyd. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
'Believe Your Eyes, It's a Homicide': Key Quotes From Day One of the Chauvin Trial
Joanna Walters and Joan E. Greve, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "It's a small badge that carries with it a large responsibility and large accountability to the public. You will learn that on May 25 of 2020, Mr. Derek Chauvin betrayed this badge."
Prosecutor says ex-officer betrayed police principles in killing of George Floyd while defense argues Chauvin followed his training
pening arguments got under way on Monday morning in the trial of the white former police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis last May, after Chauvin kneeled on his neck during an arrest.
The Minnesota prosecutor Jerry Blackwell began, saying Chauvin betrayed his police principles. He also played the entire bystander video that showed Floyd begging for his life and then passing out as he is pinned to the street by officers, including Chauvin who presses on his neck for more than nine minutes.
Then Chauvin’s lead defense lawyer, Eric Nelson, set out his case, focusing on Floyd’s use of illicit drugs and his underlying health conditions. He argued that Chauvin followed his police training and should be found not guilty.
Key quotes from the first morning:
Blackwell, holding up a Minneapolis police badge: “It’s a small badge that carries with it a large responsibility and large accountability to the public. You will learn that on May 25 of 2020, Mr Derek Chauvin betrayed this badge.”
Blackwell: The prosecution will show that Chauvin pinned down Floyd and “put his knees upon his neck and his back. Grinding and crushing him until the very breath – no, ladies and gentlemen – until the very life was squeezed out of him”.
Blackwell: “What was this all about in the first place? It was all about a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store … They [police] could have written him a ticket. Even if he did it on purpose it’s a minor offense.”
Voice of the late George Floyd in bystander video: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, man, please. The knee in my neck … I can’t move … Mama.”
Unnamed bystander off camera, of and to Chauvin: “He’s enjoying this. You’re enjoying this … he’s not even resisting arrest, you are stopping his breathing, you think that’s cool?”
Blackwell: “You can believe your eyes, that it’s a homicide, that it’s murder.”
The defense lawyer Nelson on the prosecution’s focus on the period Chauvin knelt on Floyd: “This case is clearly about more than nine minutes and 29 seconds.”
Nelson describes attempts to restrain Floyd: “This was not an easy struggle … The use of force is not attractive, but it is a necessary component of policing.”
Nelson: “You will learn that Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career.”
The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, on Joe Biden keeping an eye on the trial: “He certainly will be watching closely … at the time of George Floyd’s death he talked about this as being an event that really opened up a wound in the American public … racial injustice and inequality that many communities are experiencing every single day.”
Joe Biden. (photo: Frank Franklin II/AP)
Congress Looks to Rein In Biden's War Powers
Jordain Carney, The Hill
Carney writes: "Congress is wading into a messy fight over President Biden's war powers after years of ceding authority to the White House."
The legislative effort is blurring political lines by testing the balance of power between two branches of government and creating strange bedfellows, with hawkish Republicans who disagree with Biden’s policies wary of attempts to limit presidential authority on the issue.
Proponents of change are hoping Biden’s ascendancy, after serving for decades in Congress, and shifts in public opinion in the decades since earlier military authorizations by lawmakers will provide a boost of momentum after years of stalemate.
“I think we’re overdue. ...We are so far past the scope of what any member serving in '01 or '02 imagined,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who serves in Biden’s old Senate seat. “I think it’s important that we take this up, debate it and pass something.”
Congress is looking at three previous authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs): the 1991 measure for the Gulf War, the 2001 bill passed days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and 2002 legislation passed for the Iraq War.
The biggest challenge, lawmakers acknowledge, will be how to handle the 2001 authorization. It was approved by Congress just days after Sept. 11, 2001, to go after groups behind the attack. But it’s since been stretched to cover military operations in 19 countries, including against groups that didn’t even exist on 9/11.
“What the replacement looks like, what are the contours of it, that’s going to be the tricky part of that and the more difficult part,” said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the chairman of Foreign Relations Committee.
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the panel, agreed that the 2001 AUMF should be “rewritten,” but that it would be hard to do.
“The administration seems open to revisiting some of these things, but admittedly the '01 AUMF is going to be much more challenging than ditching the ‘02 and the ‘91,” he said.
The Biden administration has signaled it’s open to revamping the military authorizations, sparking optimism among those on Capitol Hill who want Congress to reassert itself on foreign policy after increasingly yielding to the executive branch in recent decades.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement that the administration was “committed to working with Congress to ensure that the authorizations for the use of military force currently on the books are replaced with a narrow and specific framework.”
Menendez and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) say they are in early discussions with administration officials about rewriting the 2001 authorization. Kaine, who noted that he had already talked with national security adviser Jake Sullivan, predicted that they would sit down after the current two-week recess to talk about what the administration’s red lines might be.
“The first thing I’m trying to do is talk to the White House about any 'thou shalts' or 'thou shalt nots,'” he said. “We’re going to have to find, definitely, an accord. Because there’s different points of view.”
But trying to repeal the 2001 authorization could spark pushback from both sides — with the executive branch and Republicans wary of taking potential military options off the table and Democrats wanting new restrictions.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) said the 2001 authorization has been “misused” and was no longer “functional.”
“You’re going to have to get ... the president to take on White House counsel to do what’s right because White House counsel will tell a president, ‘Why do you want to limit your options?’” he said.
Progressives view a sunset on the 2001 rewrite, where it would automatically expire unless Congress acted, as a must-have. They also want stricter guardrails on where the authorization can be used, and what terrorist groups it should cover.
But reining in the 2001 bill could be anathema to some Republicans.
Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, questioned the need for a debate, saying, “We don’t need to do that.” And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told The Washington Post that he thought the debate about previous authorizations could “incentivize the rise of terrorism.”
Democrats acknowledge they are likely to get pushback from Republicans but are hoping that they’ll be able to pick up at least 10 GOP votes in the Senate on a 2001 rewrite.
Cardin said there would be “significant Republican opposition,” but that he thought there could be support for a “reasonable” authorization.
“I think we’re now so many years into this war that the American public, I think, is reflecting a view that’s having an impact on the traditional views of some of the members of the Senate,” he said about the war on terror.
In a sign of shifting sentiments, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he was “coming around” to the idea of putting a hard expiration date on any new authorization.
“I think there’s got to be some way where Congress renews these things,” he told WBUR's “On Point.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) added that he thought it was “appropriate to review” the previous authorizations, even though he wasn’t sure if he would support the end result.
“I think time has a lot to do with it. ...We’re getting past the point where the original request, and the reason for the original request, needs to be revisited. ...I’m not sure after we revisit, I would agree” to changes, he said.
To help work their way up to a fight over the 2001 authorization, lawmakers are setting their sights on an easier, but still significant target: repealing a 1991 authorization for the Gulf War and a 2002 authorization for the Iraq War.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted late last week to repeal the 2002 authorization, with two Republicans joining with Democrats on the panel.
In the Senate, a bipartisan group spearheaded by Kaine has introduced legislation to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations. Menendez indicated that he intends to take them up “sooner rather than later,” but declined to give a specific timeline.
“We’re going to look at two of the previous AUMFs that I think there might be more common agreement that can be repealed,” he said.
The House passed a repeal of the 2002 in the past two years but the bills went nowhere in the GOP-controlled Senate. Democrats already have the support of four GOP senators, meaning they only need six more to overcome a filibuster.
“My strong suspicion is that we’ll find at least 10. ...My hope would be significantly more in number than that,” Young said about GOP support for repealing the 1991 and 2002 authorizations.
Murphy added the efforts to repeal the 2002 authorization was Congress getting its “feet wet when it comes to dealing with AUMFs.”
Biden’s ascendancy to the presidency sparked new hope that Congress and the White House could finally tackle the perennial debate about what to do about the decades old authorizations, given Biden’s long tenure in the Senate, where he served as chairman of Foreign Relations Committee for years.
Coons, a close ally, predicted Biden would be a president “most likely to welcome congressional action in this area.”
But there are complications.
Biden’s pledge to have all 2,500 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan is already facing skepticism. The U.S. withdrawal is supposed to be contingent on the Taliban meeting certain benchmarks including breaking with Al Qaeda, but top military officials say Taliban leaders are not adhering to the agreement.
And there have been broader tensions between the Democratic-controlled Congress on military authorization after Biden launched a strike in Syria against Iran-aligned militias last month without. The administration rankled lawmakers who felt they weren’t properly notified. And Democrats signaled after a briefing last week that they still disagree about the administration’s argument that the strike fell under Biden’s Article Two powers.
“I am still in search of more answers,” Menendez said, calling it an “ongoing debate” between Congress and the White House.
Murphy added that the administration has “broader definition of their legal authority,” signaling that it was a discussion lawmakers needed to tackle along with the military authorizations.
“We have to redo the AUMFs. ...The new problem is that administrations aren’t looking to the AUMFs but just continuing to expand their Article Two authority. I think the disagreement here is whether they have the Article Two authority,” Murphy said.
“I think we should solve the AUMF problem,” he added, “but that doesn’t address the broadening jurisdiction.”
Indiana University students protested against anti-Asian hate on March 24, 2021. (photo: Jeremy Hogan/Getty Images)
Anti-Asian Racism Has Been Overlooked for a Long Time. It's Now Reached a Boiling Point.
Li Zhou, Vox
Zhou writes: "Anti-Asian racism may have surged during the pandemic, but it's been happening for years, fueled by the idea of Asian Americans as 'perpetual foreigners,' or people who aren't perceived as fully American."
The events of the last year have been a breaking point for many Asian Americans.
or a long time, anti-Asian racism has been overlooked — but this past year, a wave of hate incidents and a devastating series of shootings in Georgia have made it much tougher to ignore.
“There’s a tendency to not believe that violence against Asian-Americans is real,” Angela Hsu, a lawyer based in Atlanta, recently told the New York Times. “It’s almost like you need something really, really jarring to make people believe that there is discrimination against Asian-Americans.”
That idea — that such severe pain needs to happen before anyone cares — is awful in itself, and it has been underscored by the way Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have often been treated in American society and popular media.
Anti-Asian racism may have surged during the pandemic, but it’s been happening for years, fueled by the idea of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners,” or people who aren’t perceived as fully American.
Such discrimination has taken the form of microaggressions, like asking people “where they’re really from,” and includes the conflation of US conflicts with Asian countries with Asian American people. It’s also included racist jokes about Asian people’s accents, eye shape, or foods that have become so normalized that Jay Leno only just apologized after engaging in such humor for years. It’s present, as well, in the longstanding dearth of Asian American representation in pop culture, and the barriers many people face to workplace advancement. And it’s a major factor in violence toward Asian Americans, including the murder of 27-year-old Chinese American engineer Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death in 1982 by two white autoworkers who viewed him as an embodiment of the competition posed by the Japanese auto industry.
Anti-Asian discrimination goes unacknowledged, in part, because of the privilege that some Asian people have compared to other minority groups, including Black and Latino Americans, and the difference in the degree of racism they face. The “model minority” myth, too, has played a significant role in rendering such discrimination invisible — Asians don’t have it so bad, they are doctors and scientists, so the stereotype goes. That misleading framing not only attempts to pit minority groups against one another, it obscures the racism people experience and the immense diversity within Asian American communities.
The events of this last year, though — including the recent attacks on elderly people and the shooting that killed eight people in Atlanta — have been a breaking point for many Asian Americans.
“For so long, our community has felt invisible and unseen,” says Cynthia Choi, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that’s tracking hate incidents. “That’s a reason we started Stop AAPI Hate. We did not want this to be minimized, we wanted to have the numbers. We didn’t want there to be denialism.”
Since last March, 3,795 anti-Asian incidents have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate, including everything from verbal abuse and shunning to physical assault and property damage.
Attacks documented by the organization and by media outlets have varied: Last year, an Asian American man and his two children were stabbed at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, by a suspect who believed they were carrying coronavirus. In February, a Los Angeles man was punched in the face as his attackers yelled racial slurs. And two weeks ago, a ramen shop in San Antonio, Texas, was graffitied with racist terms.
To provide some context for the range of discrimination that’s been experienced — and show what Asian Americans have been facing as they walk down the street or make a quick stop at the grocery store in towns and cities across America — here are some accounts that have been reported to Stop AAPI Hate, in people’s own words. (Please note that these accounts include language that may be disturbing.)
MARIETTA, Georgia — “I was in line at the pharmacy when a woman approached me and sprayed Lysol all over me. She was yelling, ‘You’re the infection. Go home. We don’t want you here!’ I was in shock and cried as I left the building. No one came to my help.”
LAS VEGAS — “A [ride-hailing service] driver said to me after I got into his car, ‘Damn, another Asian riding with me today, I hope you don’t have any Covid.’ He was leaning as much as he could against the driver’s door with his head tilted toward the window, implying he doesn’t want to be close to me while I am sitting diagonally behind him as a rider. After I told him, ‘Have a good day,’ he replied back, ‘You shouldn’t be requesting any more rides from anybody.’”
SAN FRANCISCO — “I was standing in an aisle at [a hardware store] when suddenly I was struck from behind. Video surveillance verified the incident in which a white male using his bent elbow struck my upper back. Subsequent verbal attacks occurred with him saying, ‘Shut up, you Monkey!’ ‘F--k you, Chinaman,’ ‘Go back to China,’ and ‘...bringing that Chinese virus over here.’”
CUPERTINO, California — “I was shouted [at] and harassed by the cashier, workers, as well as customers to get out of the store. They said, ‘You Chinese bring the virus here and you dare ask people to keep social distance guidelines.’”
LOS ANGELES — “I was at our local park with my mom, taking our daily walk. We both, of course, had our masks on. When we started walking up and down the flight of stairs we always do reps on, this lady that was on the opposite side of us with her husband, she kept making racist remarks to both me and my mom. For example, ‘Get off these steps, do you know about the Chinese disease,’ and she even referred to me as ‘Asian boy.’”
AUSTIN, Texas — “My son (9 years old) was on a summer camp field trip to [a pizza restaurant]. While there, a girl from his camp group told him that all Chinese people have the coronavirus. She said that Asians brought the virus. Then she proceeded to get the other kids to play a game called ‘corona touch’ and said that he had the ‘corona touch.’ The constant insults ended up making him cry. The camp counselors stepped in at that point to stop her.”
CLIFFSIDE, New Jersey — “My elderly grandparents (Korean) were taking our 1-year-old daughter for a walk in her stroller. A group of young men followed them, yelling that they had coronavirus. They were scared to engage (especially since they had a baby with them) and just kept walking until eventually the men lost interest and went away.”
SPRECKELS, California — “Some young men came by in a white pickup, slowed down, and one of them yelled, ‘Hey Ch**k! Take your virus and go back where you came from!’”
SANTA CLARA, California — “A man kicked my dog and told me to shut my dog up and then spat at me, saying, ‘Take your disease that’s ruining our country and go home.’”
FORT WORTH, Texas — “Our next door neighbor yelled, ‘North Korean coronavirus f**ker!’ repeatedly before attempting to run me over with his Jeep. He was arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. His wife came on to my property after his arrest and threatened me with firearms.”
TRENTON, New Jersey — “As soon as we walked in, there were stares from the other families. Some of them hugged their children closer to shield them away from us. I walked past a family that called us ‘Ling Ling,’ and my brother overheard a woman say, ‘Stay away from those Chinese people, they have corona.’”
QUEENS, New York — “The racist remarks ‘this is now the Wuhan lane,’ and ‘welcome to the Wuhan lane’ was made by an individual over and over again while looking at my family and me. My family and I were the only Chinese on the sidewalk, and it was clearly directed at us.”
ANNADALE, Virginia — “My boyfriend and I were riding the metro into DC. When on the escalator in the transfer station, a man repeatedly punched my back and pushed past us. At the top, he circled back toward us, followed us, repeatedly shouted ‘Chinese b**ch’ at me, fake coughed at and physically threatened us. A few days later, we saw a news story about how the owner of Valley Brook Tea in DC was harassed and pepper sprayed by the same man, calling him ‘Covid-19’ repeatedly.”
DALLAS — “I am a Pacific Islander. I was at the mall with a friend. I was wearing a plumeria clip and was speaking Chamorro when a woman coughed and said, ‘You and your people are the reason why we have corona.’ She then said, ‘Go sail a boat back to your island.’”
AUSTIN, Texas — “While waiting in line to enter a [a warehouse retail] ... I heard a random person behind me shout at me, ‘Get out of line and go back to your own country! We don’t want your ch**k germs!’ Rather than defend me, others in line either turned away or chuckled.”
Environmental activists protest in front of the construction site for the Line 3 oil pipeline. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
A Fight Is Brewing Over an Oil Pipeline and It's Pitting Native Groups Against Big Oil
Kailani Koenig and Cal Perry, NBC News
Excerpt: "On the edge of the Mississippi River in Northern Minnesota, Tania Aubid stares at the slushy waters that thaw a little more with every passing spring day."
“Sixty-eight-million people rely upon this water that comes from up here in Northern Minnesota, and it goes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” one activist said.
Once the river is no longer frozen, she’s dreading the day that the Canadian energy company Enbridge will be able to drill and lay down a new section of their Line 3 pipeline, a construction project about halfway finished that has sparked increasing environmental demonstrations and unrest from Native Americans and other climate activists in recent months.
“Sixty-eight million people rely upon this water that comes from up here in Northern Minnesota, and it goes all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico,” she said. “And along the way there are cities — people that drink straight from the river here.”
These wilds of Northern Minnesota, a place so beautiful the Northern lights dance across the sky, have become the new front line in tensions between climate protesters and some Native populations and Big Energy. The changing seasons will likely bring more attention to this fight, as more people are expected to populate the growing number of protest camps that have sprouted up along the path of the pipeline and work is allowed to progress beneath the river.
Enbridge’s Line 3 is a 60-year old pipeline that will be partially taking a new route with new construction in Minnesota. They are replacing a 34-inch pipeline with a 36-inch pipeline, and it now cuts along a different path than the original — 13 miles in North Dakota, 337 miles in Minnesota and 14 miles in Wisconsin. The Minnesota phase of construction has been going on for four months.
When President Joe Biden moved to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, it gave new hope to activists who are desperate for him to renew a focus on Line 3.
“The No. 1 issue to young voters is the climate, and they know that,” said Tara Houska, a tribal attorney and member of the Couchiching First Nation, Anishinaabe, who was born in Northern Minnesota and founded the Giniw Collective, an environmental advocacy group led by Indigenous women. “I thought that in terms of this project, and in terms of Dakota Access, that it opened a window into hearing a different answer.”
That window means that unlike the last administration, Biden’s team is at least talking to them.
“We’ve met multiple times with the White House with the Army Corps,” Houska said. “There’s a planned follow-up next week. I’m supposed to meet with Interior. There’s a conversation and a door that has been opened.”
In addition to climate concerns, activists have pointed out that the pipeline travels directly through Native land given in the treaty of 1855 and through lands where Native tribes have been harvesting wild rice for decades.
"If it [the pipeline] breaks, it will destroy the wild rice,” said Elizabeth Skinaway, a Sandy Lake Band member. “If Indigenous peoples are telling you that, then you need to listen."
Enbridge says the construction will bring 5,000 new jobs, and bring a $2 billion boost to the local economy. This replacement pipe, they say, is critically necessary to avoid a potential ecological catastrophe.
Just such a disaster occurred two decades ago when the pipeline ruptured in Minnesota and 1.7 million gallons of crude oil leaked in the largest inland oil spill in the nation’s history, according to Minnesota Public Radio.
“If you're really concerned about safety, we need this pipeline,” said Mike Fernandez, a senior vice president at Enbridge. “This is really like Biden says, ‘Build Back Better.’ So this is a modernization project to make sure that the pipeline is safe and to make sure there is no environmental harm.”
While there are still multiple lawsuits over the pipeline underway, Enbridge maintains that it already went through all the proper avenues.
“This is a six-year long review,” Fernandez said. “There were scientific elements talking about pipeline safety itself, there were concerns raised all along the way. We had more than 70 public hearings, three state authorities that reviewed this process, permitted this process, and two federal government agencies reviewed this pipeline.”
On the ground, the expectation among protesters is that more people will come — as was the case with the oil pipeline protest at Standing Rock in 2017. Those present then said they're now using lessons learned in that confrontation.
At a makeshift kitchen in the main camp, an activist who declined to give his name talked about the strategy of building multiple small camps rather than one large one. a lesson learned at Standing Rock.
“We are getting better,” he said. “They learn so that we learn. Having multiple camps set up is a part of that strategy.”
Also part of the strategy among some of the most fervent activists have been demonstrations with the expectation of arrest. Houska and several others were arrested Thursday during a protest at one of the Enbridge construction sites.
“We've had over 200 people arrested fighting Line 3 over the winter,” she said before she was taken into custody this week. “Through the cold 30-below zero, you got people crawling into pipes, risking their actual safety, fighting for the future.”
For now, the Biden administration finds itself jammed between two of the interest groups it has worked the hardest to court in the last few years. Biden positions himself not only as a president who puts a focus on climate, but also someone who will ensure job creation and protect unions.
The White House hasn’t given any indication that it is considering any kind of action related to this pipeline. “President Biden has proposed transformative investments in infrastructure that will not only create millions of good union jobs but also help tackle the climate crisis,” an official said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris Administration will evaluate infrastructure proposals based on our energy needs, their ability to achieve economy wide net-zero emissions by 2050, and their ability to create good paying union jobs.”
For now, unless the administration acts or a judge intervenes, activists expect to see their presence and their actions here only escalate.
“I think I'm at a point where I've heard people refer to me as a radical person,” Houska said. “I don't think that it's radical to protect the Earth. I don't think it's radical to care so much for someone who isn't born yet. I think it's deeply powerful and it's reconnecting to our own humanity, and who we are as people. We can't live without the Earth. It's that simple.”
Posters of women victims of domestic violence are pictured at the Saint Michel fountain in Paris. (photo: Francois Mori/AP)
'Shadow Pandemic': Domestic Abuse Reports Soar During Europe's Coronavirus Crisis
Guy Davies, Ibtissem Guenfoud and Dragana Jovanovic, ABC News
Excerpt: "Advocates in several countries have reported dramatic increases in requests for domestic abuse services. In the U.S., the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice reported an 8.1% increase in incidents after lockdown orders."
Charities in France and Britain have recorded marked rises in case referrals.
arlier this month, the World Health Organization reported that an estimated 641 million women had faced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner over the course of their lifetime. Another 95 million were subjected to sexual violence from a non-partner, meaning that 1 in 3 women face such treatment at least once in their lives.
While the data, collected between 2000 and 2018, is shocking, the scale of the problem amid the coronavirus pandemic may be even larger, women's organizations in Europe and the UN told ABC News.
That’s because over the past year, women around the world have had to stay at home with their potential abusers, unable to seek help in some cases, in what the U.N. has described as a “shadow pandemic” of domestic violence.
Data is still incomplete, but advocates in several countries have reported dramatic increases in requests for domestic abuse services. In the U.S., the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice reported an 8.1% increase in incidents after lockdown orders.
And advocates and others have developed creative ways to empower women to report abusers and seek help amid the trying circumstances of the pandemic.
‘Shadow pandemic’
At one point in April last year, an Agence France-Presse database suggested that over 3.9 billion people, around half of the global population, had been asked to stay at home to combat the spread of COVID-19 either through mandatory lockdowns or voluntary restrictions.
While global infection rates reduced towards the end of summer, the coronavirus “second wave” saw a number of countries, particularly in Europe, re-enter lockdowns to halt the spread.
According to Anita Bhatia, the deputy executive director of UN Women, those circumstances have played a role in increasing the rates of domestic abuse globally.
“What the pandemic simply did was to create conditions for abuse that are ideal for abusers because it forced people into lockdown,” she told ABC News in a recent interview. “It provided institutional cover for people not being able to leave the house. And so it just was, if you will, the perfect set of circumstances for a perpetrator of abuse.”
With reports emerging last April of increasing rates of violence against women around the world, the UN called the situation a “shadow pandemic.” Yet by September, only 1 in 8 countries had measures in place to protect women from the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, they said, including to tackle violence against women and girls.
Experts on domestic abuse say that the stay-at-home orders ushered in by the pandemic have exacerbated the problem. By having movement so heavily restricted, abusers have had more opportunities to exert control, and the economic crisis has placed an even greater strain on abusive relationships, they say.
A preliminary overview from the EU on the issue of intimate partner violence during the pandemic published this month said that the full scale of the problem is not yet calculable, but “no government can deny the gravity and urgency of the situation in the light of the wave of violence we saw in 2020.”
The British Charity Refuge, the U.K.’s largest provider of specialist domestic abuse services, received an average of 63% more calls and contacts this year, while the French women’s organizations received 70% more calls.
Two women in England and Wales are killed each week by a current or former partner, according to Refuge, the police receive a call about domestic abuse related call every 30 seconds. Those stats, Lisa King, Refuge’s Director of Communications, told ABC News, are “horrific.” She described the national lockdowns seen at various points across the U.K. as a “bit of a perpetrator’s playground.”
“Women are controlled financially, sexually, psychologically and increasingly technologically as well,” she told ABC News. “A huge, huge issue that has definitely been compounded by the pandemic. We would not say that COVID had caused domestic abuse, but it's certainly exacerbated pre-existing behaviors. And those who certainly experienced domestic abuse will most likely have experienced it more frequently and more severely.”
In France, the National Federation of Women’s Solidarity, which manages a major domestic abuse hotline, saw their shelters completely fill up during the first lockdown. They were forced to open more shelters for women seeking to escape abuse as callouts escalated. After the first lockdown, there were many cases of women and their children experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, Françoise Brié, the organization’s director, told ABC News.
“When you are just like in jail with your perpetrator, it’s more difficult for you to find help,” Brié said. “It’s more easy for the perpetrator to control your activity.”
During the second national lockdown in France, which was less severe, women were “able to go to work, their children are going to school, so it was less difficult for them to reach the calling centers, or the shelters,” she said.
Economic loss and unemployment have exacerbated the issue, Joanna Gzyra, director of communications at the Center for Women’s Rights in Warsaw (CWR) told ABC News.
"Most abusers are good manipulators, so they are often pleading for forgiveness and promising to do better in the future,” she told ABC News, noting that a problem like job loss is an issue even in the best of times. "It causes tension even in most stable relations. In an abusive relationship, such a problem is a pretext, for an illegitimate behavior. The victim often justifies the abuser, because he is really stressed but would never do it otherwise."
Creativity in crisis
The novelty of the extent of the domestic abuse crisis has led people to develop creative ways to report suspected abuse.
In Poland, Krystyna Paszko, a high school student, won a prize this year from the European Union for setting up a fake cosmetic website which allows women to report domestic abuse in a discreet way. When the user places a skin care item into their online basket, a series of coded questions are prompted from psychologists specializing in crisis intervention. They ask, for instance, how long the problem has been going on for, whether it is impacted by alcohol, if the problem also affects your children. Lawyers are also involved, and based on the responses, the authorities will be called to check in.
“I thought I would help one person, maybe two,” she told ABC News. “I am also shocked there was a need for me to create [the website] and that it wasn’t a government initiative, and that so many people need it… it was because of the increase in domestic violence cases due to the COVID-19 pandemic, because of that I decided to face this problem and try to help these people.”
To date, her Facebook page -- named “Chamomiles and Pansies” -- has helped around 350 women report cases of abuse, Paszko told ABC News.
Paszko was inspired after reading reports in France of inventive ways of reporting domestic violence. This month, the French feminist campaign #NousToutes (equivalent of #MeToo in France) will distribute 615,000 bread bags to bakeries around the country. The bags are plastered with information on hotlines to call, as well as educational messages to help identify what domestic abuse actually is. Their reasoning is that the country's bakeries are some of the most accessible places for vulnerable women, even for the isolated amongst them, in France go out to get bread – and they hope the initiative will raise awareness.
And in the U.K. the government has supported the “Ask for Ani” campaign, a domestic abuse codeword that will signal to pharmacies that you are a victim.
“There's a lot of creativity unleashed in times of crisis,” Bhatia said. “And we need to see as many creative initiatives as possible because the standard ways of reporting just don't cut it.”
Similarly, more governments have addressed the issue in coronavirus daily briefings, something unheard of in the past.
“I think that's been a real turning point, in the kind of that that the public and women's understanding of what domestic abuse is,” King said. “You can only do something about a problem if you know what it is and you're experiencing it. So that's helped. And then government, too, has not been able to turn a blind eye to the problem.”
Forced to stay at home, more women have come to recognize the relationships they are in as abusive, according to Brié.
“We also noticed that some women said that they understood at the beginning of the pandemic that they were victims of violence, because they were confronted to the perpetrator every day,” she said. “They didn’t speak about it before.”
Despite this awareness and creative new ways to report violence under trying conditions, there seem to be troubling signs that the reported increase in violence may outlast lockdowns.
“I wish I could say that those countries which have opened up actually have seen declines in violence,” Bhatia said. “We are tracking the data… We see that the levels of violence against women remain fairly consistent. They go up in lockdown, but conversely, they do not necessarily go down when countries open up.”
The tortoises were found in a suitcase that was on its way to the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, during an inspection at the Galápagos Ecological Airport, the authorities said. (photo: Aeropuerto Ecológico Galápagos/Facebook)
Nearly 200 Baby Tortoises Are Seized at Galápagos Airport
Johnny Diaz, The New York Times
Diaz writes: "Officials at an airport in the Galápagos Islands seized 185 baby tortoises on Sunday that were wrapped in plastic and packed in a suitcase that was bound for mainland Ecuador, the authorities said."
The tortoises were found on Sunday wrapped in plastic inside a red suitcase that was bound for mainland Ecuador. A police officer has been taken into custody, the authorities said.
The tortoises were discovered in a red suitcase that was on its way to the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, during an inspection at the Galápagos Ecological Airport on the island of Baltra, the airport said in a statement.
An inspector noticed “irregularities’’ during an X-ray scan of the suitcase, which had been declared as carrying souvenirs, the airport said.
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