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08 March 21
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Jonathan Chait | Joe Manchin Says He Might Reform the Filibuster and Save American Democracy
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes:
t is only a slight exaggeration to say that the fate of American democracy rests on Joe Manchin’s willingness to permit democratic election reforms. Manchin’s statement on NBC’s Meet the Press that he would consider reforms to the filibuster, and therefore potentially allow a majority vote on election law, is therefore potentially momentous.
Manchin’s argument for the filibuster has been, depending on how generously you look at it, either incoherent or cagey. Asked by Chuck Todd if he would allow a majority vote on election reforms under any circumstances, Manchin waxed idealistic about the need for deliberation, regular order, and the need to allow Republicans to negotiate and deliver speeches.
“I will change my mind if we need to go to a reconciliation” — meaning a 50-vote process currently permitted only for budget bills — if “we have to get something done,” Manchin said, but only after “my Republican friends have the ability to have their say also.” He did not rule out using the process for election reforms, merely insisting, “there’s no need to go into reconciliation until the other process has failed.”
Senate reformers have long viewed the filibuster as an archaic, accidental feature that emerged despite the Founders explicit aversion to a supermajority requirement. But the reformers have also argued for measures that would curtail it without fully eliminating it as a mechanism for debate. (The filibuster emerged in the 19th century and was reformed several times, and the modern routine supermajority requirement has only existed since about the 1990s.) Michael Ettlinger, Norman Ornstein, and others have suggested ways to permit determined majorities to pass vital reforms without going directly to flat-out majority rule.
Manchin seemed to be indicating openness for those sorts of reforms on Sunday. He cited one popular reform, making a filibuster “a little bit more painful,” by placing the onus of obstruction on the minority, rather than forcing 60 supporters to be continuously present to resume debate.
Ironically, it is the misleading nature of pro-filibuster propaganda that has enabled Manchin to co-opt its themes. Filibuster advocates present the device as a requirement to allow “debate,” likening it to a kind of free-speech right for senators. “If I should have the opportunity to send into the countries behind the Iron Curtain one freedom and only one, I know what my choice would be,” claimed then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, in 1949, when he was still an ardent segregationist, “I would send to those nations the right of unlimited debate in their legislative chambers.”
In fact, the modern filibuster inhibits rather than enables debate. So Manchin can propound on the need to allow consideration of bills, and permit Republicans to speak on them extensively, because those are not the actual goals of filibuster supporters. The real purpose of the mechanism is to impose a 60-vote requirement (one that has already been eliminated for executive-branch appointments, fiscal policy, and judges).
What makes the cause so pressing is that, in the wake of Donald Trump’s failed autogolpe, Republicans are undertaking a national wave of voter suppression. Their professed goal is to “restore confidence” in elections. But since the only reason for voters to lack confidence in the accuracy of election results is lies circulated by Trump and his allies, the only conditions under which confidence can be restored is Republican victories. Fair elections with high levels of participation is what Republicans don’t have confidence in.
Vote-suppression measures currently racing through legislatures in states like Georgia include bans on Sunday voting, a staple of the Black community’s mobilization, and even bans on giving water and snacks to voters standing in lines. The latter may seem like a trivial change, but the Republican vote-suppression agenda is designed to create long voting lines in Black areas, in part be preventing early and mail voting that reduce the pressure on Election Day turnout. Attending to the hunger and thirst of voters in lines that can last for hours is the most minimal palliative, and even that is too much for Republicans to concede.
All this is to say that the status quo is not one of the possible options. Either Republicans will crack down on voting and re-gerrymander legislative maps to lock in their majorities for a decade starting with the midterm elections, or else Democrats will pass reforms to give voters a chance. Manchin seemed to have closed the door on allowing such reforms. Now he has cracked it open.
President Biden departs after attending Mass on Saturday at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Biden Sends a Signal With an Executive Order on Voting Rights
Scott Detrow, NPR
Detrow writes:
s Republicans in statehouses across the country introduce hundreds of bills raising barriers to vote, President Biden is issuing a new executive order signaling his administration's commitment to expanding, not shrinking, voting access and rights.
Among other things, the order directs federal agencies to put together plans to "promote voter registration and participation." It also directs the General Services Administration to put together a plan improving the accessibility and user experience of vote.gov. Federal agencies will also be ordered to examine how they can increase federal employees' voting access, or ability to take time off work to serve as poll workers.
The order appears to be more about signaling Biden's policy priorities than enacting major changes in federal voting rights policies.
Expansive new federal protections for voting rights would only come via a new voting rights bill. The House passed a broad voting measure last week. It would mandate automatic voter registration, bar state voter ID laws, and restore voting rights for felons, among other changes.
But the legislation, HR 1, appears blocked, for now, by Senate rules requiring support from 60 senators for bills to advance. Republicans in Congress are united in opposing the measure authored by Democrats. Former President Donald Trump's false claims of widespread voter fraud, while rejected by federal judge after federal judge, have further galvanized the Republican Party into pushing for more barriers in the voting process, including restrictions on early voting days, and more identification requirements for mail-in ballots, among other proposals in dozens of statehouses.
"Every eligible voter should be able to vote and have it counted," Biden will say in a prerecorded message that will be played on Sunday at a virtual gathering honoring the anniversary of the racist police attack on the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march led by John Lewis. "If you have the best ideas, you have nothing to hide," Biden will say. "Let more people vote."
Biden's message comes just days after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that would uphold restrictive voting laws in Arizona.
Virus variants. (image: Timo Lenzen/New Yorker)
Dhruv Khullar | What the Coronavirus Variants Mean for the End of the Pandemic
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes:
ast March, during the first wave of the pandemic, Adriana Heguy set out to sequence coronavirus genomes. At the time, New York City’s hospitals were filling up, and American testing capacity was abysmal; the focus was on increasing testing, to figure out who had the virus and who didn’t. But Heguy, the director of the Genome Technology Center at N.Y.U. Langone Health, recognized that diagnostic tests weren’t enough. Tracking mutations in the virus’s genetic code would be crucial for understanding it. “No one was paying attention to the need for sequencing,” Heguy told me recently. “I thought, I can’t just sit here and not do anything.” Within weeks, her team had sequenced hundreds of samples of the virus collected in New York City and published a paper with three key findings: the virus had been circulating in the city for weeks before the lockdown; most cases had come from Europe, not China; and the variant infecting New Yorkers carried a mutation, D614G, that scientists soon confirmed made it far more contagious than the original virus isolated in Wuhan.
Heguy’s efforts were prescient. The world is now confronting a growing number of coronavirus variants that threaten to slow or undo our vaccine progress. In recent months, it’s become clear that the virus is mutating in ways that make it more transmissible and resistant to vaccines, and possibly more deadly. It’s also clear that, at least in the United States, there is no organized system for tracking the spread or emergence of variants. As Heguy sees it, the U.S. has more than enough genome-sequencing expertise and capacity; the problem is focus. “Efforts in the U.S. have been totally scattered,” she said. “There’s no mandate to do it in a timely fashion. The government is kind of like, Let us know if you find something.” Funding has also been a major constraint. “It boils down to money,” Heguy said. “With money, I could hire a technician, another scientist, get the reagents and supplies I need.” Because of their better-organized efforts, other countries have been more successful in identifying new versions of the virus: “The reason the U.K. variant was identified in the U.K. is that the U.K. has a good system for identifying variants.” The U.K. has, for months, sequenced at least ten per cent of its positive tests. “If you’re doing ten per cent, you’re not going to miss things that matter,” Heguy said. “If a variant becomes prevalent, you’ll catch it.”
Heguy’s lab sequences ninety-six samples a week—as many as will fit onto a single sample plate, which has eight rows and twelve columns. The process—receiving, preparing, sequencing, and analyzing samples, then reporting the results—takes time and resources, and diverts attention from other research. “Mostly we do this out of a sense of moral obligation,” Heguy told me. “This feeling that the country shouldn’t be left in the dark.” As we enter what seems to be the endgame of the pandemic, tracking and analyzing variants—which could fill hospitals and reduce the effectiveness of therapies and vaccines—is more important than ever.
To understand coronavirus variants, you need to understand a little about viral biology and, more specifically, about how the fragments of RNA and protein from which viruses are made go about replicating. SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, has about thirty thousand letters of RNA in its genome. These letters, or “bases,” are like the architectural plans for the virus’s twenty-nine proteins, including the “spike” protein that it uses to enter cells. Once inside a cell, the virus hijacks the cellular machinery, using it to make copies of itself. Because the machinery is good but not perfect, there are occasional errors. SARS-CoV-2 has a mechanism that checks the new code against the old code; still, it’s possible for the substitution, deletion, or addition of an amino acid to evade this proofreading. If the errors don’t arrest the replication process completely, they sneak into the next generation. Most mutations don’t meaningfully change a protein’s structure or function. Sometimes, however, one of these accidental experiments “works.” A variant has been created—a virus with a slightly different design.
In the time that SARS-CoV-2 has troubled humans, it’s accumulated innumerable mutations. Those that matter have one of two key features: they either help the virus latch onto and enter cells more easily, or they allow it to better evade tagging and destruction by the immune system. Today, scientists are following three variants of particular concern: B.1.1.7, originally detected in the U.K.; B.1.351, from South Africa; and P.1, from Brazil. Predictably, variants seem to have emerged more quickly in countries with rampant viral spread—places where the virus has had more chances to replicate, mutate, and hit upon changes that confer an evolutionary advantage. The U.K.’s B.1.1.7 variant has spread to more than eighty countries and has been doubling every ten days in the U.S., where it is expected to soon become the dominant variant. Its key mutation is called N501Y: the name describes the fact that the amino acid asparagine (“N”) is replaced with tyrosine (“Y”) at the five-hundred-and-first position of the spike protein. The mutation affects a part of the spike that allows the virus to bind to cells, making the variant some fifty per cent more transmissible than the original; new evidence also suggests that people infected with it have higher viral loads and remain infectious longer, which could have implications for quarantine guidelines.
Both the B.1.351 and P.1 variants carry the N501Y mutation. They also have another, more dangerous mutation, known as E484K: a substitution of glutamate (“E”) for lysine (“K”) at the spike protein’s four-hundred-and-eighty-fourth position. This mutation diminishes the ability of antibodies—both naturally acquired and vaccine-generated—to bind to and neutralize the virus. Last month, South Africa halted use of the vaccine produced by AstraZeneca, citing evidence that it offers minimal protection against the B.1.351 variant that is now dominant in that country; a monoclonal antibody drug from Eli Lilly is also inactive against it. In the U.S., a number of homegrown variants are beginning to circulate, including some with the antibody-evading E484K mutation; in the U.K., B.1.1.7 has, in some cases, also acquired the mutation, becoming more like the South African and Brazilian variants.
There’s growing concern that B.1.351 and P.1 can infect people who’ve already had COVID-19. The city of Manaus, in Brazil, has faced a viral surge this winter, even though some three-quarters of its population is thought to have been infected by the original virus in the fall—a level at which herd immunity is believed to settle in. This suggests that the antibodies produced by the original virus have struggled to neutralize its successor. Lab tests examining blood from immunized people have shown that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines—which are effective against the U.K. variant—tend to produce fewer antibodies that fight the South African and Brazilian variants. It’s not yet clear how this will affect real-world protection: the vaccines still elicit huge numbers of antibodies—probably more than enough to neutralize the virus—and they stimulate other parts of the immune system, such as T cells, that weren’t assessed in the blood tests. At least for now, a degree of uncertainty is inevitable.
How worried should we be about the variants? They pose a challenge, but, compared to the original vaccine-development effort, it’s small. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna have said that they can develop booster shots within six weeks that work against these variants; Moderna has already started working on one that targets the South African version. From a scientific perspective, developing variant-specific vaccines is a straightforward proposition—one simply swaps the new genomic material for the old. Testing, manufacturing, and distribution could still take months. But the F.D.A. has released guidance designed to streamline the approval process for coronavirus boosters, indicating that it will review them using roughly the same approach it employs for annual flu shots. This means that the new vaccines will likely be tested in small trials of several hundred people, as opposed to the larger randomized trials that were needed for initial approval of the vaccines. Instead of following trial subjects for months to see if they develop COVID-19, researchers will be able to use a blood test to determine if they are mounting an adequate immune response to the variant. The U.S. regulatory apparatus is evolving with the virus.
On January 6, 2020, Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, was in Park City, Utah, waiting in a ski shop for his new boots to be heat-molded. His phone rang; it was Barney Graham, the deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. McLellan had previously collaborated with Graham on projects to study the molecular structure of viruses such as RSV and MERS-CoV. After the conversation, McLellan sent his team a text: “Barney is going to try and get the coronavirus sequence out of Wuhan, China. He wants to rush a structure and vaccine. You game?”
In the coming weeks, McLellan and his team determined the structures of key proteins in the new coronavirus. They learned that SARS-CoV-2 had an “unstable” spike protein, capable of changing shape when it attaches to cells, and sometimes before. The immune system makes more effective antibodies against the initial, “prefusion” version of the protein. The trick, therefore, was to lock the protein in that state. Drawing on their work with MERS-CoV, McLellan and Graham introduced two mutations to stabilize the spike protein. Every successful COVID-19 vaccine developed in the United States works by presenting the immune system with the “locked” proteins that McLellan and Graham devised; the paper describing their work, published online last February in the journal Science, has been cited nearly four thousand times.
McLellan has been tracking coronavirus mutations and how they change the structure of the spike protein. For much of 2020, he told me, the protein seemed to accumulate a few mutations a month. Then, in December, variants began to emerge with as many as twelve mutations simultaneously. “We were like, Wow, how did this one variant get so many mutations all of a sudden?” he said. McLellan hypothesizes that, in addition to the usual factors—the passage of time, uncontrolled viral spread—certain individuals vastly accelerate the rate of mutation. “Some people aren’t able to eliminate the virus for a long time—sixty days, a hundred days,” McLellan said. “They mount enough of an immune response to not die, but not enough to get rid of the virus. That creates selective pressure. There’s an evolutionary experiment going on inside these people. The virus emerges with a bunch of changes, some of which improve its fitness.” Such individuals become not superspreaders but supermutators.
A growing body of evidence suggests that persistent infection within a person can greatly accelerate the speed with which the virus mutates. Last year, in Boston, a forty-five-year-old man with an autoimmune condition contracted the coronavirus. The man suffered labored breathing, fatigue, abdominal pain, a fungal infection, and extensive bleeding throughout both lungs and was admitted to the hospital six times; he was given the usual COVID-19 therapies—remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, steroids—as well as other powerful immunosuppressants to treat complications of his autoimmune condition. All the while, his compromised immune system struggled to clear the infection. In total, he experienced a five-month illness. He died a hundred and fifty-four days after he was diagnosed, with the virus still circulating in his body.
Genetic analyses conducted at different points during the man’s illness revealed that the virus in his system had accrued a startling number of mutations. Dozens of genomic letters had changed or been deleted. The genes encoding the spike protein account for thirteen per cent of the virus’s genome, but had accumulated nearly sixty per cent of the observed changes, with most of these occurring in a region that allows the protein to bind to its receptor. Many scientists now suspect that the B.1.1.7 variant, which surfaced with nearly two dozen concurrent mutations in the U.K., emerged from immunosuppressed COVID-19 patients who were treated with therapies that exerted further selective pressure on the virus. (The South African variant, by contrast, appears to have evolved more gradually, suggesting that population spread was its dominant mutational force.)
Like all viruses, SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve. But McLellan believes that it has a limited number of moves available. “There’s just not a lot of space for the spike to continue to change in ways that allow it to evade antibodies but still bind to its receptor,” he said. “Substitutions that allow the virus to resist antibodies will probably also decrease its affinity for ACE-2”—the receptor that the virus uses to enter cells. Recently, researchers have mapped the universe of useful mutations available to the spike’s receptor-binding area. They’ve found that most of the changes that would weaken the binding ability of our antibodies occur at just a few sites; the E484K substitution seems to be the most important. “The fact that different variants have independently hit on the same mutations suggests we’re already seeing the limits of where the virus can go,” McLellan told me. “It has a finite number of options.”
Over time, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to become less lethal, not more. When people are exposed to a virus, they often develop “cross-reactive” immunity that protects them against future infection, not just for that virus, but also for related strains; with time, the virus also exhausts the mutational possibilities that might allow it to infect cells while eluding the immune system’s memory. “This is what we think happened to viruses that cause the common cold,” McLellan said. “It probably caused a major illness in the past. Then it evolved to a place where it’s less deadly. But, of course, it’s still with us.” It’s possible that a coronavirus that now causes the common cold, OC43, was responsible for the “Russian flu” of 1889, which killed a million people. But OC43, like other coronaviruses, became less dangerous with time. Today, most of us are exposed to OC43 and other endemic coronaviruses as children, and we experience only mild symptoms. For SARS-CoV-2, such a future could be years or decades away.
For now, tracking and analyzing variants remains vital. In July, a report on the state of genomic sequencing in the U.S., published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, concluded that “genome sequence data are patchy, typically passive, and reactive in the United States.” Last year, the federal government organized two efforts to increase genetic surveillance; neither was particularly effective, and, in January, the U.S. sequenced less than one per cent of all positive coronavirus tests—placing it thirty-eighth in the world, behind Gambia, Vietnam, and Thailand, by proportion of tests analyzed. President Joe Biden has announced a two-hundred-million-dollar investment to bolster the country’s sequencing infrastructure; the C.D.C. has indicated that it hopes to sequence twenty-five thousand samples a week in the near future; and Biden’s COVID-19 relief plan, which passed the Senate on Saturday and will likely be signed into law later this coming week, will provide nearly two billion dollars to strengthen the country’s genomic-sequencing efforts.
Still, these improvements are yet to come. In January, New York City, where I practice, sequenced, on average, just fifty-five samples a day. In hopes of expanding its capacity, the city has convened a consortium of research institutions and is seeking to identify more partners. Much of the resulting effort will likely run through the N.Y.C. Pandemic Response Lab, created by Opentrons, a Brooklyn-based robotics company, whose technology is used to automate research functions and efficiently process samples in labs around the world. Since September, PRL has focussed on diagnostic testing; now it is turning its attention to sequencing, as well. In recent weeks, it has tracked the spread of the U.K. variant and identified New York’s first case of the South African variant. The lab has more than doubled its sequencing capacity every week for the past month and plans to expand its testing and sequencing efforts to cities around the country.
Effective vaccines, emerging variants, expanding testing—what does it all add up to? In September, I wrote about two models of infectious-disease control that can help us think about the fight against COVID-19. On the one hand, there’s the silver-bullet model, typified by the eradication of polio: vaccines for that disease were so effective that, within a few years, we had extinguished it entirely in the U.S. On the other hand, there’s the incremental, multipronged approach, which was used to tamp down tuberculosis. There is no silver-bullet vaccine for TB; instead, the disease has been beaten back slowly, over a long period, using a series of interventions, including better sanitation, contact tracing, masking, and therapies. In the days after we learned of the spectacular efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the polio model felt within reach. To an extent, it still is: universal vaccination would drastically reduce the damage of COVID-19, even if it doesn’t stamp out the coronavirus completely. But, given how easily SARS-CoV-2 spreads, how entrenched the virus has become, and how many people are skeptical of vaccines, the TB model remains relevant. We live in a liminal state, requiring progress on both fronts. Now, variants have further complicated the story.
Confronting the variants, we should be cautious but hopeful. They are a worrying development but not a devastating blow. Every coronavirus vaccine available in the U.S. appears likely to prevent the more concerning consequences of infection—severe illness, hospitalization, death—even for the new variants. (In South Africa, where B.1.351 dominates, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine prevented a hundred per cent of COVID-19 deaths a month after inoculation.) Vaccinated people, therefore, should feel confident in the protection they’ve gained, and in the knowledge that booster shots, should they become necessary, can quickly be developed and approved. Even for those who have been inoculated, the risk of illness has not been, and may never be, eliminated—but it remains vastly lower than it was before vaccination, despite the new variants in our midst.
For millions of unvaccinated Americans, however, the variants pose a heightened danger. More transmissible variants mean that activities such as travel, shopping, socializing, and dining carry a higher risk of infection; if individuals infected by variants do become ill, they may be less likely to benefit from existing therapies. This spring, people who haven’t been vaccinated—the vast majority of Americans—have reason to be concerned. The variants may well provoke another viral surge, especially as governors rush to reopen states and discontinue mask mandates. With the addition of a third coronavirus vaccine, the U.S. should have enough supply to immunize every American adult by the end of May. The emergence of variants is a reason to strengthen, not weaken, public-health measures—surveillance, masks, distance, isolation—until widespread vaccination has been achieved.
In a way, the beginning of the pandemic was simple: the virus was spreading, and we had to stop it. Its ending will be more complicated. While the arrival of the virus changed life swiftly and decisively, our return to normalcy won’t mirror our departure from it. There probably won’t be a day, week, or month when the U.S. rises out of the pandemic, with a “Mission Accomplished” banner unfurled overhead. Instead, as more of the population gains immunity, either through infection or inoculation, daily life will become less risky. We’ll feel more comfortable running errands and seeing friends. More of us will trek to the office, board planes, eat in restaurants. With time, concerts, weddings, and spin classes will return, too. The variants may postpone or complicate this reality, but they won’t foreclose it. A likely future is one in which most Americans are protected by the end of the summer. From there, we will line up for coronavirus booster shots the way we do for flu vaccines. The virus will linger and it will evolve. New variants, constrained by the virus’s molecular limitations, will arise, in a game of evolutionary cat and mouse. But, step by step, our old rhythms will return. We’ll end up finding a new equilibrium, one more favorable to humanity than to the virus—a slight variation on the way we used to live.
Radio personality Rush Limbaugh was awarded the Medal of Freedom by First Lady Melania Trump during the State of the Union address on February 4, 2020. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
Robert Lipsyte | Rush, Roger, Rupert, and the Donald May Ride Forever, as Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death.
Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch
Lipsyte writes: "The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse - Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump - have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives."
Only recently Donald Trump had his Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) moment. He promptly announced that, despite rumors he had reportedly spread, he did not intend to form a third party (“fake news, fake news”) — not when the second one was his for the asking and he could potentially defeat a future Democratic presidential candidate as a Republican. “Who knows?,” he told that audience, “I may even decide to beat them for a third time.” Admittedly, he spent much of his CPAC speech time at the border mourning his “great” (if largely nonexistent) wall there and decrying Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House as “the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history.” As he put it, “In just one short month, we have gone from ‘America First’ to ‘America Last.’”
And yes, if you bothered to listen to that jut-jawed canary tweeting up a storm and were a CPAC devotee, you, too, might have been chanting, “We love you, We love you!” (although ominously enough only 68% of his fans in that conference hall actually want him to run again in 2024). If you weren’t part of his base, however, you would have found yourself listening to a genuinely dangerous, all-too-mad man who — if, say, the economy crashes — might indeed still win in 2024, sending this country over the edge of time, space, and god knows what else.
On TV, as Robert Lipsyte, TomDispatch jock culture correspondent, suggests today, it was indeed like watching one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in action. The Donald even took the time to “defend” women’s sports (as he’s never defended women) from the coming of supposedly record-breaking transgendered athletes. (“Joe Biden and the Democrats are pushing policies that would even destroy women’s sports.”) Of course, if you’re thinking of apocalyptic horsemen and sports — and you have a long memory — you might recall the 1924 Notre Dame football team of which, after a victory against Army, sportswriter Grantland Rice so famously wrote:
“Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon…”Meanwhile, saddle up and join former New York Times sports columnist Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, in a wild, very personal gallop into our very own world where, for years, four distinctive horsemen of what indeed could prove to be the apocalypse rode us into the ground. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Rush, Roger, Rupert, and The Donald May Ride Forever
As Do Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death
he Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse — Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump — have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda masquerading as journalism, and plain old fake news will be our inheritance.
The original Four Horsemen were biblical characters seen as punishments from God. By the time they became common literary and then film currency, they generally went by the names of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Matching each with Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and Trump should prove a grisly but all-too-relevant parlor game. The originals were supposed to signal end times and sometimes, when I think about their modern American descendants, I wonder if we’re heading in just that direction.
Reflecting on the lives of those modern embodiments of (self-) punishment makes me wonder how we ever let them happen. Isn’t there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it. Hey, I even worked for one of the horsemen. It was my favorite job… until it wasn’t.
But first, let me start with Rush Limbaugh. The nation’s leading right-wing bullhorn died last month at 70. His vicious wit (“feminazis”) and ability to squeeze complex subjects into catchy sound bites (“In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering”) stirred and nourished a devoted mass who would become a crucial part of Trump’s base. Limbaugh, earning by the end more than $80 million a year, left his heirs a reported $600 million.
Those numbers, I believe, defined him far more than any political stance he took and, at the same time, made him indefensible. He was Pestilence, spreading poison without either genuine ideology or principle of any sort. He was doing shtick, whatever worked for him (and work it certainly did). He was, by nature, a great entertainer. One more thing: don’t kid yourself, he was smart.
I realized this in 1995 when Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., was approaching Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive baseball games. The Yankee star set that record in 1939 when, after 17 big league seasons, he finally took himself out of the lineup because he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Tongue-in-cheek, in my then-weekly New York Times sports column, I called on Cal to take a day off to avoid breaking the record. I wrote that, if he did, he would “be remembered forever as an athlete who stepped proudly over the statistical rubble of his sport to lead us all into a higher level of consciousness. He will end up a bigger Calvin than Klein.”
The response from pundits, sportswriters, and fans was overwhelmingly negative. I was called clueless and stupid or, at least, a running dog of a new, much-mocked and demeaned “participation culture,” unaware of the competitive nature of sports. Worse yet, I was trying to deny a hero his due.
It seemed that, of all people, only Limbaugh picked up on the mindless paradox of the situation — after all, Ripken would merely have to show up at work that day to claim his trophy — or even how obviously I had been offering my advice tongue in cheek. And he said so on a national radio network carrying his shows.
As the saying goes, it takes one to know one. That he saw what I was actually doing convinced me that he, too, often had his tongue tucked firmly in that cheek of his and away from anything that might pass for his rational brain. And this would, in the end, make it all that much worse. My guess: he wasn’t ever truly a believer in the right-wing trash he talked. From the beginning, he was a mercenary, a commercial provocateur who found fame and fortune by spreading ever more toxic takes.
Down Under with Murdoch
Of the Four Horsemen, I came upon Rupert Murdoch first — in early 1977, soon after he bought that once-liberal newspaper, the New York Post. Among his earliest hires as columnists (strange indeed, given what we now know of him) were progressive icon Murray Kempton and me.
I already knew something about Murdoch’s Australian and British reputation as a venal press lord, but the lure of a no-holds-barred cityside column and the possibility of sharing an office with Kempton proved irresistible. Murdoch and I first met in the crowded, raffish Post newsroom in lower Manhattan. He was brisk but pleasant that day, asking me at one point how I would improve the paper. I answered breezily: “For starters, I’d hire more women, Blacks, Latinos, gays, so the city can be properly covered.”
He regarded me coolly. “Hmm, yes,” he said, “but instead I’m hiring a liberal like you.”
At that moment, I sensed that he was a monster and that this would end badly. I lasted all of seven months, mostly thanks to another monster, the serial killer Son of Sam, who terrorized the city that year. Like so many other tabloid writers of that moment, I spent the summer writing about the hunt for him, which mostly kept me out of trouble, since Murdoch loved sex, violence, and crime. But then there were those off-his-message columns I wrote about Israel, the South Bronx, and his favored candidate for mayor, Ed Koch.
And there were my shoes. They were soft Italian suede. Beige. I felt cool in them. One day, a new Australian editor took me aside and said, “Lose the poufter boots, mate. The boss hates them.”
Of course, now I had to wear them every day despite that boss’s homophobia. It was about then that whole paragraphs simply began to disappear from my column (without anyone consulting me), while the column itself was often shoved ever deeper into the paper, especially if I wrote about, say, marching in a women’s movement or gay pride parade with one of my kids. Sometimes the column would be cut entirely.
I resigned from the Post live on Dave Marash’s 11 p.m. local CBS TV news show. The next morning, in answer to a question during a press conference in Los Angeles, Murdoch claimed that he had fired me. When that didn’t fly, he said that I had never been much good anyway. By then, thanks to TV, more people had heard about me than had ever read anything I wrote at the Times or the Post — a lesson about the new world we were all being plunged into.
As it happened, there would be no escape from Rupert Murdoch. After quitting the Post, I went back to writing books for HarperCollins, the publishing house that he had bought. Thank goodness he never seemed to make the connection. Not so far anyway.
Soulmates Without a Soul in Sight
Among the Four Horsemen, Murdoch is surely Famine. Given the sports and gossip-driven sensibility of his newspapers and the role of Fox News as a tool of right-wing and Trumpian political propaganda, he’s helped starve people on at least three continents of the kinds of information they would need to truly grasp our world and make educated decisions about it.
His most reliable collaborator in those years was Roger Ailes, who became the chairman and CEO of Fox News. He would prove so skilled when it came to purveying misinformation that he deserves a horse of his own. And no question about it, Ailes represented War, both against the truth and (within journalism) for circulation, eyeballs, and the clicks that always favor profit over facts.
Of all four horsemen, I had the least personal interaction with him. One evening in 1990 (I think), I went to see him at his poorly lit midtown office. It was evening and I had the feeling he might have been drinking, though he didn’t offer me anything. I was then the host of a nightly local public television show and we wanted to put him on a political panel we were forming. By then, after all, he had successfully advised presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush (though he wouldn’t join Murdoch for another six years). He had blown off all the producers who tried to book him on their shows but had agreed to let me come in for a pitch.
I didn’t know it, but around then he first met his future co-horseman Rush Limbaugh who, at the time, was still trying to invent himself as a radio star. Limbaugh had walked into New York’s posh 21 Club looking for famous people to buttonhole. He soon spotted Ailes but was too intimidated to introduce himself.
As Rush would later tell it, Roger was the one who first swaggered up to him and boomed, “My wife loves you!” Soon after, they began talking and, so Rush reported, he felt that he had met his “soulmate.” Ailes would soon be producing a short-lived Limbaugh TV show. Alas, it would prove long-lived indeed by becoming a model for the bogus news/talk format of Fox News a few years later when Murdoch hired Ailes as the devil’s consigliere. Later, Ailes would use that very position to advise George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Still, when I met Ailes that was the unknowable future. It comes back to me now as if in a dream, brief and weird. He listened to my description of my show, “The Eleventh Hour,” and why we wanted him as a guest. I may not have been as fawning as I remember myself being. (I hope not anyway.) He nodded along as I made my pitch, offered me the most perfunctory thanks for coming, and dismissed me with body language suggesting that he had checked me out and found nothing he wanted. He simply turned away and began murmuring to a woman I could barely see in the darkened office.
In 2016, after years of commercial and political success together, Murdoch dumped Ailes in the midst of an ever-spreading sex scandal. He had not only personally harassed Fox employees but had created a company-wide climate of abuse and intimidation. He left with a reported $65 million. A year later, he died in Palm Beach (as would Limbaugh four years after that). He was 77.
A “Great Show” for a Great Showman
Of all the horsemen in those years, I spent the most time with Donald Trump. (By now, haven’t we all?) He’s our greatest shame because while we in the media may have thought that we were using him — listening sneeringly to his lies and braggadocio since it pushed our media products so effectively — he was using us bigly. Making the “fake news media” his very own accomplices may have been his greatest skill.
I was no exception to the media patsies who flocked to him for easy stories. Maybe I didn’t take him seriously enough then because we both came from Queens, a scorned outer borough of New York City, or because he was already a well-known publicity hound and boldfaced tabloid name.
Honestly, who could have taken an obvious buffoon like him seriously? And back then, we didn’t have to, as long as we took him. And here’s what I do remember from those days: he would always respond to a question, no matter how negative, as long as he was its subject. That’s all he truly cared about. Him, him, him, and him again.
The first time we met, in the early 1980s — he was then an ambitious real-estate mogul and B-list celebrity — he insisted that he didn’t much like attention, but felt obligated to do the interview because I represented “a great show” (“CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt”). He would then go on to lie about his scheme to pressure the National Football League into admitting to its ranks the New Jersey Generals, the United States Football League team he then owned.
In a later meeting, I remember him offering me his supposed credo as a public figure, one that in retrospect seems grimly ironic, if not satiric: “I tend to think that you should be decent, you should be fair, you should be straight, and you should do the best you can. And beyond that, you can’t do very much really. So yeah, you do have a responsibility.” Then, as if adding a note in the margins of his bland comment, he added, tellingly enough, “I’m not sure to what extent that responsibility holds.”
Once, for reasons I can’t recall, I returned to that supposed sense of “responsibility” of his, asking him if he’d like to “run the country as you have run your organization.” That was in 1984 (no symbolism intended) and he responded, “I would much prefer that somebody else do it. I just don’t know if the somebody else is there.” So, 32 years before his election, he was, it seems, already imagining the unimaginable that would become our very own surreal world in 2016. “This country,” he added ominously, “needs major surgery.”
“Are you the surgeon?” I asked, innocently enough.
“I think I’d do a fantastic job, but I really would prefer not doing it.”
I would have preferred that, too, but it’s much too late now and, sadly enough, there’s no reason to think that the ride of the modern Four Horsemen is over. Limbaugh and Aisles have left their vast poisonous pools behind and they won’t dry up soon. Murdoch, turning 90 just days from now, is still running his empire. And Donald Trump, of course, continues to gallop toward the future astride his pale horse, as the rider called Death.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Kyal Sin, known as Angel wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Everything will be OK'. (photo: Reuters)
A Teenage Girl Wearing 'Everything Will Be OK' T-Shirt Was Shot in the Head on Myanmar's Bloodiest Day of Protests Yet
Erin Snodgrass, Yahoo! News
Snodgrass writes:
ineteen-year-old Kyal Sin, known as Angel, made careful preparations before hitting the streets of Mandalay Wednesday.
She left a contact number and details about her blood type on a social media account with one additional request - if she died, she wanted her organs donated.
Angel had been attending Myanmar's anti-coup protests for nearly a month and knew the dangers posed by the increasingly violent junta.
But none of her precautions, nor prior awareness has abated the tragedy of her brutal death: She was shot in the head by Myanmar security forces Wednesday during the bloodiest day of protests in the country yet.
Since her death, the teenage activist has become a martyr for fellow protesters in Myanmar, spurring continued defiance with the message printed on the T-shirt she was wearing when she was killed: "Everything will be OK."
After more than a month of protests stemming from a February 1 military coup, the pro-democracy demonstrations have turned increasingly deadly in recent days as military officials have escalated the violence, using stun grenades, tear gas, and live ammunition against protesters.
Demonstrators first hit the streets at the start of February, after Myanmar's military announced it would be taking control of the country for at least a year, citing unfounded claims of voter fraud as justification for the coup.
Wednesday, Angel joined the growing number of people killed in Myanmar's streets when she was shot in the head while fighting for the country's tenuous democracy - the one for which Angel had proudly cast her first-ever vote last year, according to Reuters.
"My very first vote, from the bottom of my heart," she reportedly posted. "I did my duty for my country."
One of Angel's fellow protesters, Myat Thu, told the outlet that the young activist looked out for and protected other demonstrators during the protests, kicking open a water pipe to help wash the tear gas from people's eyes and throwing a gas canister back toward security forces.
Thu told the outlet the police first hit them with tear gas, then switched to bullets. It wasn't until later in the day that Thu said he heard a girl had been killed.
Angel wasn't the only one to be murdered by a shot to the head. According to Reuters, more than a dozen protesters have been killed in the same way, raising suspicions that certain protesters are being targeted. Last weekend, a bystander in Mandalay was also reportedly shot in the head.
More than 54 protesters have been killed by security forces in the last month, according to the BBC, though other reports estimate the number is much higher. Wednesday was the single bloodiest day since the coup was initiated with at least 38 deaths across the country. According to the New York Times, at least three children have been "gunned down" in the country in the last month.
"Myanmar's military must stop murdering and jailing protestors," United Nations High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet said in a Thursday press release. "It is utterly abhorrent that security forces are firing live ammunition against peaceful protesters across the country.
Photos of Angel at the protests leading her fellow demonstrators while wearing her defiant T-shirt have galvanized social media as her friends, family, and supporters from around the world mourn the taekwondo champion who loved to dance.
Large crowds gathered Thursday to line the procession at Angel's funeral, according to the BBC.
The outlet reported that Angel's aunt spoke at her funeral.
"I feel sad but they must fall soon. Our fight must win."
People protest against Switzerland's ban on wearing a full face veil in public plans, which has been approved in a national referendum. (photo: Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA)
Switzerland to Ban Wearing of Burqa and Niqab in Public Places
Philip Oltermann, Guardian UK
Oltermann writes:
Muslim groups criticise move, which they say will further stigmatise and marginalise their community
witzerland will follow France, Belgium and Austria after narrowly voting in a referendum to ban women from wearing the burqa or niqab in public spaces.
Just over 51% of Swiss voters cast their ballots in favour of the initiative to ban people from covering their face completely on the street, in shops and restaurants.
Full facial veils will still be allowed to be worn inside places of prayer and for “native customs”, such as carnival.
Face coverings worn for health and safety reasons are also exempt from the ban, meaning face masks worn because of the Covid-19 pandemic will not be affected by the new law.
Switzerland’s parliament and the seven-member executive council that constitutes the country’s federal government opposed the referendum proposal. They argued that full facial veils represented a “fringe phenomenon”, and instead proposed an initiative that would force people to lift their facial coverings when asked to confirm their identity to officials.
Muslim groups have criticised the ban. “This is clearly an attack against the Muslim community in Switzerland. What is aimed here is to stigmatise and marginalise Muslims even more,” said Ines Al Shikh, a member of Les Foulards Violets, a Muslim feminist collective.
“This symbolic policy is directed against female and male Muslims,” said the Swiss Federation of Islamic Umbrella Organisations in a statement. “But it also damages the whole of Switzerland, which has undermined its own values by accepting the initiative.”
An alliance of hoteliers and tourism professionals from the Berne and Geneva regions also opposed the ban on the basis that it would reduce the number of visitors from Arab countries.
“A burqa ban would damage our reputation as an open and tolerant tourism destination,” said Nicole Brändle Schlegel of the HotellerieSuisse umbrella organisation.
Supporters of the ban argue that it also intended to stop violent street protesters and football hooligans wearing masks, and that the referendum text does not explicitly mention Islam or the words “niqab” or “burqa”.
Their campaign, however, framed the referendum as a verdict on the role of Islam in public life.
The initiative behind the referendum was launched in 2016 by the Egerkingen Committee, an association that also successfully pushed for a vote to ban the building of new minarets in 2009, and which has links to the populist rightwing Swiss People’s party.
Campaign ads it paid for showed a woman wearing a niqab and sunglasses alongside the slogan: “Stop extremism! Yes to the veil ban.”
A video on the Swiss government’s website explaining the arguments in favour of a ban proposed that “religious veils like the burqa or the niqab are a symbol of the oppression of women and aren’t suitable to our society”.
The Ticino and St Gallen cantons already have local bans on face coverings. Three other cantons rejected such proposals. Face coverings at protests and sport events are already banned in 15 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons.
A recent study by the University of Lucerne put the number of women in Switzerland who wear a niqab at 21 to 37, and found no evidence at all of women wearing the burqa, which women were forced to wear in Afghanistan under the Taliban.
In Ticino, where a ban on full facial veils was introduced in 2016, it has since led to around 30 police interventions.
Muslims make up around 5% of the Swiss population of 8.6 million, or about 390,000 people, most of whom have their roots in Turkey, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The referendum outcome means Switzerland will follow France, which banned wearing a full face veil in public in 2011. Full or partial bans on wearing face coverings in public are also in place in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Southern Oregon. (photo: Gillian Flaccus/AP)
Will Race and Income Inequalities Trip Up Cascadia's Fight Against Climate Change?
Iris M. Crawford, Grist and InvestigateWest
Crawford writes:
he heavy wind woke Niria Garcia about 5 a.m. It whipped against her home, leaving her restless as she fitfully tried to get a little more sleep.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” Garcia thought to herself.
On that day last September, a devastating fire ripped through Southern Oregon, whipped by those very winds that woke Garcia, a Xicana climate activist based in Talent, a town of about 6,500 people. Three people would die and more than 2,800 homes and other buildings would be destroyed by the fire.
Later that morning Garcia heard that nearby Ashland was being evacuated. Around 11 a.m. Garcia looked out her window and saw that the wind still was not letting up. Then she saw the smoke.
“I’m not going to sit here and wait,” said Garcia.
She evacuated immediately.
It was only in Ashland, a wealthier area 5 miles down Interstate 5, that residents were told to evacuate, activists said after the fire. Jackson County’s emergency alert system left out many communities, they said, including Talent, a community with mobile home parks and other low-income housing and a median household income of $40,400. Ashland’s median household income is $56,315.
“People were clueless and our Spanish-speaking community was left out,” said Garcia in a recent interview. Damage would ultimately prove more extensive in Talent than in Ashland.
The racial and social disparities exposed by the September fire are emblematic of a broader picture: Communities of color, low-income people, and other marginalized groups are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, according to community activists across Cascadia. From country towns like Talent to the diverse urban landscape of South Seattle, activists say the government is not yet fully hearing from the long-marginalized communities that are feeling the biggest effects of climate change.
“I really see this as a little microcosm of everything that’s going on,” said Elib Crist-Dwyer, of Rogue Climate, a grassroots organization in the Talent area working to help ensure that people in marginalized communities have the resources to deal with the effects of climate change and that they have access to clean energy. Of the issues posed, he said: “There’s racial justice in here, climate justice, and economic justice.”
Rogue Climate’s office — a converted greenhouse — was burned out during the fire. “The last time I drove by, it was just an empty lot,” said Crist-Dwyer.
Nowadays Crist-Dwyer and others from Rogue Climate work at a rented office space in a strip mall. In the same little strip mall, another storefront was turned into a resource center for displaced residents where “you can get anything from water to a quick hot meal to a new set of dishes,” said Crist-Dwyer. He helps clients seeking donations as well as people who need help resettling.
Many of the homes that burned in the September fire were trailer homes occupied by Latino residents, low-income people, farm workers, seniors, and immigrant community members.
Even before the fire, Southern Oregon already was dealing with housing shortages and severe rent burdens.
“The livability down here is really challenging,” Crist-Dwyer said. In cities like Medford and Eugene, close to 30 percent of renter households spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent.
“That’s even me with a good-paying job,” Crist-Dwyer said.
He is noticing two trends. The first is that the continued marginalization of communities in this area is contributing to this crisis. The second is seeing the community become activated around justice and equity. Ashland, to the south of Talent, and Medford to the north, are more affluent communities that have largely ignored the marginalization of communities of color and low-income communities in Talent and Phoenix, Crist-Dwyer said. “So there’s these communities that have already been really marginalized, without a safety net of any kind,” Crist-Dwyer said. Despite the housing shortage and even before the fire, the population of Rogue Valley and surrounding Jackson County experienced steady population growth. “The majority of people who lost their homes in the fire want to come back,” said Allie Rosenbluth, campaign director of Rogue Climate.
But can they? As climate change engenders more fires, floods, and other disasters that disproportionately affect communities of color, Cascadia is wrestling with how to protect these communities after a history of largely failing to do so. Increasingly, people of color are seeking a seat at the decision-making tables. Activists say politicians and others are paying more attention to these issues of equity. But there’s still a long way to go.
Crossed signals in South Seattle
Industrial South Seattle is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Cascadia. And one of the most polluted. It’s also an example of how communities of color are struggling to be heard as governments make plans to transition to a zero-carbon economy.
With air pollution wafting into many residents’ homes from diesel trucks making their way from the nearby Port of Seattle, and the Duwamish River declared one of the nation’s largest toxic-pollution Superfund sites, the area anchors a swath of high-pollution, high-health-risk areas. Those risks are identified in a map showing statewide environmental public health data from the Washington State Department of Health. The Washington Environmental Disparities Map reveals that both the Duwamish River Valley and Puget Sound rank high in environmental health disparities such as larger proportions of residents exposed to toxic soot.
All of that has consequences. Life expectancy in the Duwamish River Valley is 13 years lower than in wealthier neighborhoods in North Seattle. The longstanding racial and ethnic inequities exemplified in South Seattle were central to the most significant example to date of the movement to decarbonize Cascadia running headlong into aspirations for people of color to be part of the so-called “just transition” to a carbon-free future.
Here’s how that happened: Progressives in Washington splintered their organizing efforts in two ballot initiatives in 2016 and 2018 designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by taxing them. At the heart of the disagreement was whether tax revenues raised from levies on, for example, carbon dioxide emissions from an asphalt plant should be returned to taxpayers, as happens with British Columbia’s carbon tax; or whether those revenues should instead be used to invest in clean energy jobs and other benefits to communities of color, labor groups, and others who can provide broad support at the ballot box.
Both measures failed by substantial margins. (For a detailed look at the standoff, see David Roberts’ piece for Vox.) And now, grassroots community groups working on climate change and racial-justice issues are vowing to fight Governor Jay Inslee’s latest effort to pass cap-and-trade legislation in the Washington Legislature, saying it would go too easy on carbon polluters without doing enough to help marginalized communities. Inslee says he would “put environmental justice and equity at the center of climate policy” and provide green jobs.
“The transition to renewable energy offers an opportunity to generate community prosperity,” says Puget Sound Sage, a grassroots organizing group in South Seattle. “Our community needs the benefits of the transition to be reinvested back into our wallets, our neighborhoods, and our infrastructure.”
Where does that leave decarbonization efforts today? Grassroots groups continue to spotlight the possibilities for this transition to benefit previously marginalized groups.
“We’re really interested in getting to a regenerative economy,” said Adrienne Hampton, Climate Policy and Engagement Manager of Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition, one organization that has been fighting for “climate resilience,” meaning that the community can prepare for, recover from, and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The Duwamish coalition works to lay the groundwork for community decision-making, create economic equity, and eliminate the community’s disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards.
The Duwamish Coalition is one of many groups across Cascadia fighting to move the economy away from fossil fuels to renewables without burdening already-marginalized communities, or leaving those communities out of benefits. For example, they want to protect low-income people from rising transportation and energy bills that could result from climate policies. And they want all communities to have affordable access to cleaner options such as public transit and home retrofits, as well as new jobs in the renewable energy sector.
Puget Sound Sage surveyed the community to try to understand what residents thought an equitable transition to renewable energy would look like. The resulting report sought to speak the mind of the community. In her outreach, Yolanda Matthews, climate justice organizer with Puget Sound Sage, noted that community members were primarily interested in “having lower energy bills, having energy-efficient appliances, and keeping a roof over their heads.”
However, the city had its own ideas about what the South Seattle community needed. “We constantly needed data to back up everything we said,” said Matthews. The needs of the community and plans of the city did not align, she said. Puget Sound Sage was hearing that the community wanted an expansion of public transit, better access to weatherization programs for homes, and more energy-efficient affordable housing. However, the city thought that the South Seattle community wanted solar panels and incentives on electric vehicles, Matthews said. “The city tends to think that what works for one community will work for the other,” said Matthews. “That’s why we needed the report, to really prove what our community was thinking and needing,” said Matthews.
But will the city listen? Only time will tell. And the scene echoes 300 miles to the south.
Hitting the gas in Eugene
Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong — some of the biggest Black luminaries of the mid-20th century music scene — number among the Black travelers who stayed at the Historic Mims House at 330 High Street in Eugene. Why? In the 1940s, they were not allowed to rent rooms at whites-only motels. Fast forward to this century and the Mims House is the regional branch office of the NAACP, which is working to convert the building into a solar installation project. “There aren’t a whole lot of examples of that in Eugene right now,” said Aimee Okotie-Oyekan, the NAACP Eugene/Springfield branch’s environmental and climate justice coordinator. The branch is doing this through a grant program with Eugene Water and Electric Board (EWEB) that allows customers to designate a small portion of their utility payment to support the solar installation. Aligning with the national NAACP’s Solar Equity Initiative, the branch aims to conduct a demonstration so that the community can learn about clean energy.
The NAACP is also a part of a new campaign, Fossil Free Eugene, a coalition of environmental organizations including Beyond Toxics, Sunrise Eugene, 350 Eugene, and Cascadia Wildlands. Two main demands of the Fossil Free Eugene campaign are to ban the construction of all new fossil fuel infrastructure in Eugene and levy a fee on polluters such as NW Natural, the region’s natural-gas utility, to create a fund to help historically marginalized and low-income communities make the switch to renewable energy. This funding mechanism takes inspiration from the Portland Clean Energy Fund, a grant program established by a 2018 ballot initiative. The Portland fund is designed to distribute up to $61 million a year in clean energy funding for job training, energy efficiency, renewable energy infrastructure, and innovation. It prioritizes low-income residents and communities of color.
In early February, the Fossil Free Eugene Campaign scored a victory when the Eugene City Council rejected NW Natural’s proposal to renew a franchise agreement allowing the utility to run its pipes under city rights of way. Backed by the campaign, “the city was trying to incorporate our climate action and carbon reduction goals into their franchise agreement with Northwest Natural,” said Dylan Plummer, grassroots organizer of Cascadia Wildlands. This renewal would have locked the city into another 20-year contract. “What was at stake was the legitimacy of our city’s climate recovery goals,” Plummer said. “Our coalition was directly responsible for providing our city councilors with the support needed to take Northwest Natural to task,” said Plummer. Despite this victory, activists like Okotie-Oyekan and Plummer say much work remains.
A ray of hope in state solar initiative?
It’s going to take a lot of lobbying and government action to enable a so-called “just transition” that focuses on equity, activists say, but some glimmers of progress are evident. Take the example of rooftop solar installations. An interactive tool created at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that combines federal data on solar deployment and census data shows that for Washington and Oregon, the upper half of households by income account over 80 percent of those states’ residential solar systems.
Similar census-enhanced research by Oregon’s Department of Energy recently added another layer to the solar gap: racial bias. Agency director Janine Benner explained during a presentation of the department’s 2020 biennial energy report recently that, using census data, agency researchers determined that state tax credits to incentivize solar installations have historically flowed disproportionately to areas with more white residents.
“The benefits for clean energy were not evenly distributed among Oregonians,” said Benner.
Oregon’s long-standing tax credits did achieve their primary goal helping transform solar panels into a cost-effective energy source. Providing equity was not an explicit program goal, and it is not surprising that the credits came up short on that measurement. As Benner put it: “People with low incomes don’t have a lot of tax equity, and so credits don’t really work for them.”
That is no longer acceptable in 2021, the state says. Oregon’s Department of Energy head said they are now designing programs with equity in mind from the start, as directed by Governor Kate Brown last year and guided by an Environmental Justice Task Force. Solar and home energy storage incentives offered last year, a one-year $1.5-million program, provided rebates that help everyone and reserved a quarter of the funds for low- and moderate-income households and installers. Benner called it “a modest step toward equitable distribution.”
Advocates for a “just transition” to a carbon-free economy that does not unduly burden already-marginalized people say that after years of struggle, they are seeing hopeful signs.
Said Hampton, of the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition:
“One day I woke up and everyone was finally listening to what I had to say.”
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