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Jimmy Carter | Statement on Efforts to Restrict Voting Access in Georgia
Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center
Statement on Efforts to Restrict Voting Access in Georgia
n 1962, I ran to represent the 14th Senate District in the Georgia legislature. I won my Senate seat, but only after the courts ruled that a ballot box had been illegally “stuffed” with votes for my opponent. My experience with our election system was one of the reasons Rosalynn and I created The Carter Center. Since 1989, we have observed 113 elections in 39 countries and helped build consensus on standards for democratic elections, perhaps the most fundamental of which are the rights to vote and be elected.One thing we have learned from our international work is that while states must safeguard the integrity of the election process to prevent fraud, this should not be at the expense of voters’ access to the polls. They should proactively expand voter access through safe, secure administrative practices.
Since that 1962 Senate race, Georgia has established itself as a leader in providing voter access and taking steps to enhance election integrity. Georgia now uses technologies that provide a paper trail allowing voters to review their ballot before it is cast. In addition, Georgia requires post-election risk-limiting audits that make it possible to check the accuracy of voting machines. Indeed, November saw a successful set of elections with record turnout and few or no fraudulent ballots counted—which should make us all proud.
Now, as our state legislators seek to turn back the clock through legislation that will restrict access to voting for many Georgians, I am disheartened, saddened, and angry. Many of the proposed changes are reactions to allegations of fraud for which no evidence was produced—allegations that were, in fact, refuted through various audits, recounts, and other measures. The proposed changes appear to be rooted in partisan interests, not in the interests of all Georgia voters.
I also am disappointed that advocates for these restrictive changes have repeatedly and selectively referenced a report prepared by a 2005 commission that I co-chaired with former Secretary of State James Baker. While our report noted a few good and bad examples of vote-by-mail practices, its main recommendation was that further study of voting by mail was needed. In the 16 years since the report’s release, vote-by-mail practices have progressed significantly as new technologies have been developed. In light of these advances, I believe that voting by mail can be conducted in a manner that ensures election integrity. This is just one of several ways to expand access to the voting process for voters across the state, regardless of political affiliation.
American democracy means every eligible person has the right to vote in an election that is fair, open, and secure. It should be flexible enough to meet the electorate’s changing needs. As Georgians, we must protect these values. We must not lose the progress we have made. We must not promote confidence among one segment of the electorate by restricting the participation of others. Our goal always should be to increase, not decrease, voter participation.
Former President Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump's Long Con Is Finally Catching Up With Him
Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
Trump's Long Con Is Finally Catching Up With Him
The Republican Party has paid a steep price for signing on to his hustle. Now he may be about to pay one, too.
oward the end of the 2016 campaign, Michael Wolff reported in Fire and Fury, Donald Trump was talking with Roger Ailes about how perfectly the campaign had gone. He’d never dreamed in July of 2015 that the Republican Party was stupid and soulless enough to give him its nomination. But it had! And he got all these months and months of free publicity, all three cable news nets constantly cutting off regular programming to show him, Trump, carrying on about whatever rile-up-the-rubes outrage popped into his head that evening.
And now here it was, close to Election Day, and soon it would all be over. He’d lose, so he wouldn’t actually have to be the president, but what a hustle!
Wolff: “He’d come out of the campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities. ‘This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,’ he told Ailes in a conversation a week before the election. ‘I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.’”
And there you have it. The campaign was a scam. Use the Republican Party to increase his brand value. Four and a half years later, here we are as Trump, like some blood-sucking roundworm, is still trying to suck as much life as he can out of the host body while he still can, with a $421 million loan bill coming due and the Manhattan district attorney breathing down his neck. He’s about to come face-to-face with a fact that I suspect, deep down, he’s known all along—which is why he was bragging to Ailes that he was delighted to lose: that winning the presidency would destroy him.
It was just reported this week that Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance’s probe into Trump’s finances was being extended to include a Chicago development deal where the lender (which is not under investigation) forgave a big part of Trump’s loan, more than $100 million. The question is whether the Trump Organization properly recorded the forgiven debt as income, which would require the company to pay tax on it.
Meantime, Trump has $421 million in debt (most of it presumed to be owed to Deutsche Bank) coming due soon. During the 2020 campaign, he scoffed at the debt, because of course to hear him tell it $400 million is a “peanut.” No one knows the truth right now, except maybe some investigators in the Manhattan DA’s office, but it would hardly be shocking to learn that Trump just doesn’t have the money.
Hence, the current, post-presidency phase of the hustle: to bleed every penny he can out of the Republican National Committee. First, he said they couldn’t use his name in fund-raising material, an obviously unenforceable demand in a country where political speech is explicitly protected in the Constitution.
But then, because the Republican Party is such a bunch of ninnies, the RNC announced that it was moving part of its spring donor retreat next month to guess where? Hint: It rhymes with Bar-a-Pago. So even after Trump picked a petty fight with the RNC, and even while he's urging people to donate to his personal PAC instead, the RNC will be paying event and catering fees to Trump. Probably not $421 million worth, but every little bit helps.
Even as Trump has cost his party control of the Senate and the White House, Republicans just can’t quit the guy. That doesn’t prevent some of them from seeing the hopelessness of the situation and deciding to chuck it in, the latest being Missouri Senator Roy Blunt, a member of the party’s Senate leadership and, at 71, a veritable teenager by Senate standards. They could stay and fight for their party, and spend their lives getting death threats and losing battle after battle, or they could go make $300,000 a year working part-time and spend two days a week trying to learn to read the slope of the greens at Burning Tree. You tell me.
It would be worth staying and fighting if there were some principle at stake. But there is none. The party is totally brain-dead and without conscience. OK, maybe not totally. There’s Mitt Romney, who shows signs of actually wanting to legislate. There’s Adam Kinzinger, who seems a decent fellow. And, gulp, I can't believe I'm saying this, but there’s Liz Cheney.
But by and large, it is a party so unmoored from thought, so bereft of ideas and a sense of standing for anything that Republicans couldn’t even bring themselves to put up a decent fight on the COVID bill. Were you as struck by this as I was? Trump was near-silent. The party’s legislators never mounted a strong counter-argument. And Tucker moved on to Dr. Seuss. It was astonishing to watch, but then again it wasn’t, because their only principle for several years now has been power. And now that they don’t have it—thanks, of course, to Trump—they have no idea what to fight for.
Trump, at least, knows what to fight for, the only thing he’s ever fought for: himself. But he is surely beginning to see now what a tragic mistake he made when he descended that famous escalator.
If he’d never become president, he could have carried on lying and swindling people just as before, and no one would be the wiser.
But when you’re president, certain checks and balances kick in. You’re being watched more closely. Lying about your tax returns being “under audit” will keep the dogs at bay for a while, but they’ll bash down the door eventually. Private citizen Trump paying off Stormy Daniels? Feh, who cares. Candidate/President Trump doing it? Against the law. And so on and so on and so on.''
And most of all, at least my hunch? Private Citizen Trump keeps Allen Weisselberg on the pad his whole life and makes sure that his children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren never have to fly coach. But in the Candidate/President Trump reality, just maybe Weisselberg starts singing.
The whole point of the campaign, as Trump told Ailes, was branding. Well, he’s going to be branded, all right. Just not the way he thought.
Immigrants seeking asylum hold hands as they leave a cafeteria at the ICE South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, on Aug. 23, 2019. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
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Despite Court Filings and Public Rhetoric, Official Says Biden Administration Is 'Not Ending Family Detention'
Julia Ainsley, NBC News
Ainsley writes: "'We are not ending family detention,' a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told NBC News. 'We are not closing the family detention centers.'"
READ MORE
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Education and Labor Committee Chair Bobby Scott attend a press conference on the Protecting the Right To Organize (PRO) Act in the Capitol on February 5, 2020. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
The House Just Passed a Sweeping and Bipartisan Bill to Boost Unions
Ella Nilsen, Vox
Nilsen writes:
Its chances aren’t looking good in the Senate, with the big hurdle of the filibuster.
he US House of Representatives has officially passed a sweeping, bipartisan labor bill, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Cheered by unions and disliked by businesses, the bill likely cannot pass the Senate without filibuster reform.
The bill passed the House Tuesday night on a vote of 225-206. The bill gained the support of five House Republicans, and was co-sponsored by three Republicans: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey.
If enacted into law, the PRO Act would be one of the most dramatic changes to US labor law in decades. One of the bill’s most significant provisions is a policy that would override state right-to-work laws that weaken unions by letting unionized workers not pay dues. It would also create tougher penalties for employers who interfere in employees’ efforts to unionize.
Should these penalties work as designed, they would remove a major barrier to unionization, Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, told Vox in a recent interview.
“It’s the workers facing an uneven playing field when they try to assert their right to form a union,” Appelbaum said. “The employer has all sorts of opportunities to intimidate workers and to interfere with their desire to have a fair choice.”
Finally, the bill would give independent contractors and gig workers the right to collectively bargain alongside employees. There has been some pushback to this provision from businesses — and independent contractors themselves, who are afraid it could restrict their ability to continue to freelance. But House Democrats argue the bill would not restrict an independent contractors’ flexibility.
“It is a serious problem when employers misclassify employees as independent contractors in order to prevent their workers from organizing,” House Education and Labor Committee Chair Bobby Scott (D-VA) told Vox in a statement. “The PRO Act closes that loophole by giving eligible freelancers and gig workers, who are classified as employees, the right to decide for themselves whether to form a union. Or not.”
Scott added, “Anyone making wild claims that this bill would mean the end of freelancing or restrict workers’ flexibility is either mistaken or deliberately misrepresenting the facts.”
The bill’s passage comes as a time when membership in private sector unions is very low. Just 6.3 percent of private sector workers belong to a union, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while workers’ membership in public sector unions is over five times that number, around 34.8 percent.
Beyond this bill, union organizers are seeing glimmers of hope, however. For one thing, a study by the progressive Economic Policy Institute found workers in unions were less likely to get laid off than their non-unionized counterparts during the Covid-19 recession, making a case for more union representation. For another, the administration of President Joe Biden is positioning itself as far friendlier to organized labor than even past Democratic administrations.
What’s in the PRO Act, explained
The PRO Act has many parts, but its main aims are to make it easier for workers to join a union and to make it easier for unions to exist.
The biggest reform would be allowing workers to override right-to-work laws that 27 states (plus Guam) currently have on the books. The PRO Act would allow employers and unions to enter into a contract that lets unions collect fair-share fees to cover costs of collective bargaining and administering the agreement.
With the support of pro-business groups, right-to-work laws have been proliferating from the South to Midwestern states with a more robust union history since Republicans flipped state legislatures en masse in 2010. The laws undermine unions in a creative but debilitating way: They don’t prohibit employees from joining a union, but they give employees the option to not pay union dues or agency fees that collectively help pay for the costs of bargaining or negotiating a contract. With fewer workers paying dues, it’s been tougher for unions to sustain themselves.
As Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote for Vox in 2019:
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank, attributes right-to-work laws to a 3.1 percent decline in wages for union and nonunion workers after accounting for differences in cost of living, demographics, and labor market characteristics.
In addition to overriding state right-to-work laws, the bill takes a number of other measures to strengthen unions, including:
- It would authorize “meaningful” penalties for companies and executives for violating workers’ rights, and allow the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to assess monetary penalties for each violation.
- If a company is retaliating against an employee, the bill would requires the NLRB to immediately seek an injunction to reinstate the employee while their case is pending. The bill gives the NLRB power to enforce its own rulings, rather than waiting for a decision from the Court of Appeals.
- The bill would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend so-called “captive audience meetings,” where the employer attempts to dissuade employees from voting to unionize.
- The bill facilitates first contracts between companies and newly certified unions by requiring mediation and arbitration to settle disputes.
- The bill would implement an “ABC test” to determine whether independent contractors or freelance workers can be considered full-time employees. While that has caused some fear that this legislation could hurt freelance journalists or gig workers, Democratic aides say the bill won’t limit someone’s ability to freelance or contract with a company but will simply give them the option to collectively bargain along with regular employees.
Even though the legislation passed the House with three Republican co-sponsors, it’s unlikely to gain much — if any — Republican support in the Senate.
“The PRO Act is not and shouldn’t be political or controversial,” Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, one of the House Republican co-sponsoring it, told reporters on Tuesday.
Though five Republicans ultimately voted for the act, the vast majority of House Republicans opposed it. Most Republicans voted in line with business and industry groups that stand in staunch opposition to unions.
“The bill would make radical changes to well-established law, diminish employees’ rights to privacy, and threaten entire industries that have fueled innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation,” said Kristen Swearingen, the chair of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace — a group representing 600 major industry organizations including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation.
The PRO Act, as with many other bills the House is poised to pass in the coming weeks, will likely meet its end in the 50-50 US Senate. The bill doesn’t have support among Senate Republicans, and can’t meet the 60-vote threshold to override the filibuster. There have been some preliminary discussions about ways to incorporate pieces of the bill into the next Senate budget reconciliation package, but the entire bill cannot pass through reconciliation.
Absent any filibuster reform in the Senate, the PRO Act probably won’t be hitting Biden’s desk in the next two years. That’s why some of the country’s largest unions like the AFL-CIO are currently deciding whether to publicly support eliminating the filibuster.
Biden is seen as union-friendly, but there’s only so much he can do
Recently, the White House released a video statement of Biden unequivocally endorsing workers’ right to collectively bargain, and referencing an ongoing vote in Alabama to decide whether Amazon workers at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse will unionize.
“Everybody knew what he was referring to,” said Appelbaum, the president of the union that would represent Amazon workers if they unionize. “The only organizing he was referring to was the organizing in Alabama, and the workers understood clearly what the president was saying.”
The Bessemer fight has garnered national attention and could prove to be a pivotal battle for modern labor movements. Appelbaum said the PRO Act would give workers tools to push back against intimidation by Amazon, which is strongly urging its workers to vote against forming a union.
But beyond advocating for labor laws to boost unions, there’s plenty Biden can do from the White House to encourage union growth. One of his early acts as president was to fire Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board general counsel Peter Robb; he named longtime NLRB attorney Peter Sung Ohr as Robb’s replacement.
This move was seen as an effort to ensure the Biden administration and its agencies can enforce prevailing wage laws and that its NLRB will be more union friendly. Labor historians have noted Biden’s union statement is striking — in both its strong pushback against employers interfering in employees attempts to unionize and its timing in the middle of a crucial union vote.
“It’s basically unprecedented in American history,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island who studies labor rights, recently told Vox. “Even FDR did not really intervene at the moment of a union election with a direct statement for a particular set of workers.”
But ultimately, Biden still needs Congress to expand the existing labor laws in the US. The House has taken the first step, but the Senate would likely need to get rid of the filibuster for this bill to have any chance of passing.
Protesters hold signs criticizing police surveillance. (photo: Irfan Khan/Getty)
Police Surveillance Can't Be Reformed. It Must Be Abolished.
Hamid Khan and Pete White, VICE
Groups like the ACLU are pushing a program to rein in surveillance tech. But all it does is expand and strengthen the police's surveillance powers.
he expanding use of surveillance technology is a fundamental component of police violence against Black communities. Across the country, police use technology ranging from drones and facial recognition to predictive analytics to keep marginalized communities under constant watch and control.
But even after months of street protests condemning police violence, some advocates seek dangerous compromises that allow this violent institution to expand its power—promoting toothless regulations instead of dismantling and defunding policing as a whole.
The Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) campaign—promoted by the ACLU, the nation’s largest civil liberties organization with a budget of over $300 million a year—is just this type of compromised initiative that undermines organizing efforts against police surveillance. Various forms of CCOPS laws have now been enacted in 15 cities, and the ACLU and others are promoting this reform across the country. Some are even encouraging the Biden administration to make adoption of these laws a requirement for local funding grants.
CCOPS requires police to publicly disclose certain information and data about surveillance programs they intend to use. Of course, this means police can use these rules to selectively frame their surveillance in the terms most favorable to them. These disclosures then form the basis for public hearings to approve or disapprove the programs.
These hearings wrongly assume that politicians and their appointees will effectively represent those most harmed by the surveillance programs. In reality, hearings like this will be stacked in favor of approval and will marginalize voices of opposition. In January, over 98 percent of respondents rejected the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)'s proposed facial recognition system during a request for public comment—but the department adopted the program anyway.
The CCOPS approach to surveillance creates structures that we will later regret. For example, last summer politicians in New York City responded to the George Floyd rebellion by passing a law that requires the New York City Police Department to publish self-audits and set self-governance policies. Last month, the NYPD published those reports, which of course announce that all their surveillance is harmless and valuable.
Now, the very same reform groups that celebrated this law as “vital legislation” are calling it “weak” and expressing surprise that NYPD has “systematically attempted to evade the law.” Abolitionist organizers from across the country had warned this would happen.
The bottom line is that these surveillance technologies are so dangerous that they should be abolished, even if police could convince politicians and the public to support them. A large majority of white Americans approved of Jim Crow segregation, and the Patriot Act had widespread support when it was enacted after 9/11. That didn’t make those forms of oppression just. Even if the majority of a community approves of brutal surveillance and police tactics against some residents, those practices are still unacceptable.
CCOPS takes the opposite approach, treating potentially abusive surveillance programs as acceptable—and approved for unleashing on our communities—so long as a particular bureaucratic process is followed. The CCOPS scheme aligns in this way with other policing reforms, like community “advisory” boards and “community policing” that police use to work with people and organizations who they know will compromise in their favor. These bodies represent a narrow segment of the community that benefits from or supports oppressive policing, while ignoring those most vulnerable to police abuse and surveillance.
CCOPS ignores the broadly oppressive history of police surveillance, treating it as an acceptable project that sometimes tips into excess. Police surveillance has always been an instrument of racial control. This means police “reform” is inherently anti-Black, seeking to improve an institution that is white supremacist at its core by regulating only its worst abuses.
Reform is also crucial to how racial domination has evolved and become more durable over time. In fact, many aspects of policing that we are organizing against today were once liberal reforms. Even the use of predictive policing algorithms was long promoted by police reformers as a way to make policing more “efficient” and “fair.” But we know from the reality in Los Angeles that these tools unleashed extreme police abuse and harassment on our communities.
There is a better way to stop the growing surveillance state: building grassroots power to systematically dismantle oppressive institutions. Unlike the pro-police heritage of reforms like CCOPS, this strategy puts power in the hands of the people. Our organizations, the Los Angeles Community Action Network and Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, have long taken this approach. Over the years, we forced LAPD to dismantle its two first-generation predictive policing programs, and we have built a culture of resistance to academic, nonprofit, and industrial complicity in police surveillance.
Unfortunately, reform organizations like the ACLU are often on the wrong side of this struggle. For example, in 2015 the ACLU office in Los Angeles worked in conjunction with LAPD to draft a prototype of the CCOPS ordinances that the organization is now trying to push nationally. ACLU lawyers did this without consulting communities and people harmed by surveillance or organizations in those communities working to build power.
Proponents of CCOPS say that completely opposing surveillance structures is not politically expedient, at least compared to passing oversight and transparency laws. But it is always easy to win political success supporting initiatives that do not challenge police power. This kind of “success” harms the community by diverting attention from fighting for meaningful change and helping entrench the structures we seek to dismantle.
More and more people are recognizing the grave violence that policing inflicts on Black, Brown, and poor communities, as well as understanding that policing and surveillance will not bring us safety. Simply reforming policing has never worked and will never work. We should reject reforms like CCOPS and focus on the hard work of dismantling the police and surveillance state.
Feminist groups protest against Felix Salgado Macedonio during a march in Mexico City last week. (photo: Sashenka Gutierrez/EPA)
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Are Subjected to Violence
'AMLO Made Us Public Enemy No 1': Why Feminists Are Mexico's Voice of Opposition
Elisabeth Malkin, Guardian UK
Malkin writes:
A president who claims to represent the dispossessed faces widespread backlash over his tacit support for a politician accused of rape
exico’s president had a confession to make. Women on social media were holding up signs reading, “President, break the pact” and Andrés Manuel López Obrador was confused.
He turned to his wife to set him straight. The women were describing the pact of the patriarchy, she told him.
But he waved off the plea.
The expression, he declared at a news conference last month, was imported. “What do we have to do with this if we are respectful of women, of all human beings?” he said.
For weeks now, the president – commonly known as Amlo – has faced mounting anger over a candidate for governor from his party who faces five accusations of sexual abuse, including rape. The disgust has spread to prominent women in the party, who last month called on its leadership to remove the candidate.
Behind the furor over the candidacy, though, is a women’s movement that poses an unyielding challenge to Amlo’s claim to be the champion of Mexico’s dispossessed.
This feminist activism has become the country’s most powerful opposition voice against the popular president, a leftist who swept into office in 2018 promising to rid the country of its entrenched corruption and lead a social transformation.
While Amlo has appointed women to powerful posts, including much of his cabinet, his policies have failed to address the pervasive violence that kills more than 10 women a day and forces many more to live in fear.
Instead of acknowledging their concerns, he has suggested that women’s groups are being manipulated by his conservative enemies. He even cast doubt on the rising rates of domestic violence registered during the pandemic lockdown, suggesting that most emergency calls were fake.
“He has placed the feminist movement as public enemy No 1,” said Arussi Unda, the spokeswoman for Las Brujas del Mar, a feminist collective based in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz that organized a women’s strike a year ago after International Women’s Day.
“We are not asking for crazy things,” she said. “We’re asking that women get to work, that women aren’t killed and girls aren’t raped. It’s not insane, not eccentric, it’s human rights.”
The new wave of feminism emerges from a younger generation of women, many of them from outside Mexico City, who have a more direct experience of violence than women’s rights advocates of the 1970s and 1980s.
Many of that older generation have joined Amlo’s government or represent his party, Morena, in Congress, seeing it as the way to advance a progressive agenda.
But younger activists believe that women’s voices have been muzzled inside the party.
“There is nothing feminist about Morena,” said Yolitzin Jaimes, an activist from the state of Guerrero, one of the country’s poorest and most violent regions. “The conservative one is the president.”
A year ago on International Women’s Day, Mexican women filled the streets in a vast, mostly peaceful, protest against violence. Before this year’s march, authorities have erected steel barriers around the national palace – creating what seems like a symbol of the division between the president and the women’s movement. On Saturday night, activists covered the wall with names of femicide victims.
“It is the best articulated movement in society,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst who has written on social upheaval. He sees the current women’s movement as a turning point comparable to Mexico’s 1968 students’ movement and the 1994 Indigenous Zapatista uprising.
Given the movement’s focus on violence against women, the choice of Félix Salgado Macedonio to run for governor of Guerrero seemed almost a deliberate provocation.
In a letter to party leaders last month, 500 Morena supporters, including prominent female senators, wrote: “It is clear to us that in Morena there is no place for abusers” and called for Salgado Macedonio to be removed.
Amlo has repeatedly said that it is up to the people of Guerrero, where the candidate is popular, to decide.
Loyalty to the president runs so deep in the party that nobody has dared to criticize the president’s tacit support for the candidate outright. “You know that we are not going to be able to fight against the president,” said one female member of Morena.
Salgado Macedonio has a long legislative career, and as mayor of Acapulco from 2005 to 2008, he cultivated an image of rough machismo, riding a motorcycle and surrounding himself with pretty young women.
Late last year, Basilia Castañeda went to Morena with the accusation that he raped her in 1998 when she was 17. In response, she has faced attacks from the party and said in a video last week that she fears for her safety.
The attitude of the president and his supporters has come as a shock, said one of her lawyers, Patricia Olamendi.
“Personally, I am tremendously surprised by his speech. There doesn’t seem to be anybody who clarified the situation to him,” Olamendi said. “You would expect that when somebody governs, they govern for everybody.”
Salgado Macedonio faces a second accusation of rape from a woman who said he abused her in 2016 when she was working as a journalist for a newspaper where he was the editor. That investigation stalled.
Through his lawyer, Salgado Macedonio has denied the accusations.
A Morena party commission ruled that the allegations were unfounded but said it would repeat the selection process to pick the Guerrero candidate.
Before that happened, Salgado Macedonio went ahead and registered his candidacy with electoral authorities on Thursday.
If he continues in the race, it sends the message that “impunity is being institutionalized, not only in Guerrero but in Mexico”, said Marina Reyna Aguilar, a lawyer in Chilpancingo, the state capital.
Nestora Salgado, a Morena senator from Guerrero who still hopes to run for the party’s nomination, called on women to speak up. (She is not related to him.)
“As fighters, I think it is the moment to call on women – and for us to be taken into account,” she said. But she refused to condemn Amlo’s tacit support for the former Acapulco mayor.
That reluctance seemed to find an echo among other women in Morena who had asked for Salgado Macedonio to be removed.
“The president has been very congruent in his speech,” said Aleida Alavez, a congresswoman, even as she condemned the party’s leadership for limiting women’s participation.
Lorena Villavicencio was one of the few legislators willing to speak out about the president’s response. “It has been a very complicated moment for many women in Morena,” she said.
“There is a long conversation pending with the president of the republic,” she said. “Feminism is the most transformative movement in the world and I don’t think that has been adequately understood.”
Female climate activists. (photo: Ollie Millington/Getty)
Oil Companies Want You to Think They're Feminist. It's BS.
Alexandria Herr, Grist
Herr writes:
onday was International Women’s Day, and oil companies want you to know — they’re feminists, too! Shell, Chevron, and even the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s biggest lobbying group, posted messages about the importance of women in the oil and gas industry. “Here’s to the women making a difference at Chevron,” tweeted the Chevron account.
Symbolic gestures of corporate solidarity are nothing new for the oil and gas industry. Last year, in a particularly cringe-worthy commemoration of International Women’s Day, one Shell gas station run by two women temporarily added an apostrophe to its logo, becoming She’ll. The stunt quickly became the object of Twitter mockery (“more women gas pumps!” said one user). Last summer, Shell, BP, and Chevron similarly released statements against racism, declaring themselves allies of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Many of the oil companies’ recent posts allude to their inclusion of women in the workforce; the Canadian oil magnate Enbridge, for example, pointed to its goal of having 40 percent women in the workplace and on the board of directors by 2025, while Shell tweeted an article highlighting women in positions of power at the company. But oil companies’ claims to anti-racism or feminism ring hollow — even with women at the helm — when the effects of oil and gas extraction and climate change fall disproportionately on women, particularly women of color.
For instance, women make up 80 percent of people displaced by climate change, according to the United Nations. Women are more likely to die in extreme weather events, including heat waves, according to studies on France, China, and India, and in tropical cyclones, according to studies on Bangladesh and the Philippines. Climate change is also tied to pregnancy risks — people exposed to higher temperatures or air pollution from fracking are more likely to have underweight, stillborn, or preterm babies, with Black and Hispanic pregnant people experiencing the worst impacts.
Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005, is a case study in how natural disasters hit women hardest. A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that recovery policies following the storm ignored the needs of Black women, resulting in displacement. Extreme weather has been linked to violence against women, and that was similarly the case after Katrina, when women experienced higher rates of rape and violence.
Oil and gas infrastructure is also tied to gender-based and sexual violence. Company-owned housing for fossil fuel workers known as “man camps” are well-documented sites of sexual assault and trafficking, and is one of the factors linked to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women. In a letter to President Biden urging the cancellation of the Keystone XL and Line 3 pipelines, Indigenous women leaders wrote, “We still have daughters, aunties, mothers, cousins, and two-spirit relatives who have never been found and whose perpetrators have never been brought to justice.”
The irony is particularly stark when you consider that International Women’s Day originated out of a radical, anti-capitalist political movement meant to highlight the insecurities faced by women workers. While oil companies celebrate milestones of installing women in leadership positions with cutesy tweets, women around the world continue to suffer assault, displacement, and death due to the effects of oil extraction. All the hashtags in the world can’t erase that.
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