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23 March 21
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Republicans Want to Upend the Electoral College Too
Russell Berman, The Atlantic
Berman writes:
State GOP lawmakers want to maximize their party’s advantage in the next presidential race, but their approach is far from consistent.
few months after losing the White House, Republicans across the country have had a revelation: The Electoral College could use some improvements. The problem is that they have contradictory proposals for how to fix it—and contradictory arguments for why those proposals would help Americans pick their president. In Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, GOP lawmakers want to award Electoral College votes by congressional district, just like Nebraska and Maine currently do. But in Nebraska, Republicans want to do the opposite, and return to the same winner-takes-all method used by, well, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Hampshire, and almost every other state.
These Republicans do agree on one thing, however: They insist that their proposals have nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
“I think people would just feel better knowing that their vote went to the candidate that they chose in their area,” Gary Tauchen, a GOP state legislator in Wisconsin, told me recently. Tauchen is 67 and retiring next year, and the measure he’s introduced, which would split Wisconsin’s electoral votes by congressional district, could be a capstone to a 16-year career in the legislature. Under his bill, even if deep-blue Milwaukee and Madison pushed the state into the Democratic column—as they have in eight of the past nine presidential elections—shutting out Republicans entirely would be virtually impossible. Tauchen said he would have introduced his bill even if Trump had won Wisconsin last year. Why, then, didn’t he push it after 2016, when Trump narrowly carried the state? “The timing wasn’t right, I don’t think,” he said. “This just seemed more appropriate for right now.”
In New Hampshire, Bill Gannon, a Republican state senator, has proposed similar legislation. He told me he got the idea from his son, a college student who had read about how Maine divvies up its electoral votes. Republicans control New Hampshire’s governorship and legislature, and if they pass Gannon’s bill, the GOP could wind up with an extra electoral vote in 2024 even if Democrats carry the state again. Around the time Gannon offered up his proposal, a prominent Michigan Republican suggested that his state do the same.
Meanwhile, in Nebraska, a 24-year-old Yale graduate named Julie Slama wants her state to go in the other direction. A state senator first appointed by Governor Pete Ricketts in 2018, Slama has introduced a bill that would award all of Nebraska’s electors to the winner of the statewide vote. The last Democrat to carry the reliably red state was Lyndon B. Johnson. Trump won the statewide vote last year by nearly 20 points. But Joe Biden, like Barack Obama before him, walked away with one of Nebraska’s five electors by winning a district that comprises Omaha and its suburbs. Had Biden won about 44,000 fewer total votes across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, that single electoral vote in Nebraska would have decided the election.
Yet when I raised this with Slama, she never mentioned the advantage her party would gain. Instead, she drew her argument from the Constitution. “The Founders and the Framers made it very clear that states, not segments of states, were intended to determine the president,” Slama told me, “and we really shouldn’t have presidential elections determined by lines drawn by politicians.”
Read: The secret to beating the Electoral College
Taken together, the changes these legislators are seeking would likely ensure that the next Republican presidential nominee wins at least a few more electoral votes in the race to 270. But the proposals could also backfire. All of the states trying to imitate Nebraska are battlegrounds; Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan in 2016, and he came within 3,000 votes of carrying New Hampshire that year. All of them could be competitive in 2024. “At the end of the day, I think that they might live to regret those things,” warns Ryan Hamilton, the executive director of the Nebraska Republican Party.
The desired result of the proposals, however, is clear: These bills are aimed at making it harder for Democrats to win. At this point, they are all long shots; none of the proposals currently has the votes to pass. But Democrats are taking them seriously, seeing the attempts to tweak the Electoral College system as linked to the GOP’s much more widely publicized efforts to suppress voter turnout.
If Republicans are trying to tinker with the Electoral College to boost their chances, many Democrats want to go much further to strengthen theirs. Some have long wanted to abolish the institution altogether. Others are pushing legislation that would effectively neutralize the Electoral College by creating a multistate compact to elect as president the winner of the national popular vote, an idea that arose in response to the disputed 2000 election of George W. Bush. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia—all controlled by Democrats—have endorsed the measure over the years, but few supporters believe that it will win over enough states to succeed anytime soon.
Unlike in Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire, the push to change Nebraska’s system isn’t new—Republicans have been trying to abolish the state’s Electoral College split almost from the moment it was enacted. Nebraska has the nation’s only unicameral, nonpartisan legislature, which requires legislation to muster a supermajority to pass. A Democratic state senator succeeded in winning bipartisan support to implement the Electoral College change in 1991, and Nebraska’s Democratic governor at the time signed it into law. Hamilton, the state GOP executive director, concedes that his party’s desire to return to the winner-takes-all system plays to its advantage, but he has a tough time accounting for the fact that Republicans in other states are moving in the opposite direction. When I asked him about this contradiction, he paused for a few seconds. “I’m trying to answer judiciously,” he told me. “I respect what they’re trying to do.”
Nebraska Republicans likely would have succeeded already if it were not for Ernie Chambers. A Democratic 46-year veteran of the legislature from Omaha, Chambers mounted a days-long filibuster in 2016 to preserve the current system. Republicans at one point had the votes they needed to adopt the winner-takes-all method, but a couple of members peeled off after Chambers commandeered the floor and jeopardized the passage of other bills before the legislative session expired. Chambers, who is Black and has long described himself as a “defender of the downtrodden,” argues that the change would silence the voices of nonwhite citizens in Omaha, Nebraska’s biggest city. “There is very little impact that the people who are not white and Republican in Nebraska can have,” he told me. “But that doesn’t mean people will not do with the little they have to work with.”
Chambers, 83, is now out of office, having been forced to leave last year for the second time in his career because of term limits. When I spoke with him recently, he said he didn’t know if the defenders of Nebraska’s unusual approach would prevail again. But he was unsentimental. “Politics is a dirty, backstabbing, double-crossing racket,” Chambers said. “If you’ve got the numbers, you want winner-take-all. If you don’t have the numbers, you want to at least have a little bit of an opportunity for your voice to be heard.”
“There’s nothing mystical about it, nothing philosophical about it,” Chambers said about the fight over the Electoral College, both in Nebraska and elsewhere. “It’s politics, pure and simple.”
Robin Rue Simmons, who represents Evanston's historic Fifth Ward, has been a leading advocate of the city's reparations initiative. (photo: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images)
Evanston, Illinois, Leads the Country With First Reparations Program for Black Residents
Mark Guarino, The Washington Post
Guarino writes:
he nation's first government reparations program for African Americans was approved Monday night in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, action that advocates say represents a critical step in rectifying wrongs caused by slavery, segregation and housing discrimination and in pushing forward on similar compensation efforts across the country.
“Right now the whole world is looking at Evanston, Illinois. This is a moment like none other that we’ve ever seen, and it’s a good moment,” said Ron Daniels, president of the National African American Reparations Commission, which wants redress at local and federal levels.
The Evanston City Council approved the first phase of reparations to acknowledge the harm caused by discriminatory housing policies, practices and inaction going back more than a century. The 8-to-1 vote will initially make $400,000 available in $25,000 homeownership and improvement grants, as well as in mortgage assistance for Black residents, primarily those can show they are direct descendants of individuals who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 and suffered from such discrimination.
The housing money is part of a larger $10 million package approved for continued reparations initiatives, which will be funded by income from annual cannabis taxes over the next decade. Black residents make up about 16 percent of Evanston’s population of 75,000.
More than 60 people spoke before the vote, many endorsing the resolution and calling for the city to take the historic step, others criticizing it and pleading for more time to reshape the plan. Housing assistance, detractors said, isn’t a credible form of reparations.
“It’s a first tangible step,” said Alderwoman Robin Rue Simmons, who represents the largely African American Fifth Ward and has been a key force on the program. “It is alone not enough. It is not full repair alone in this one initiative. But we all know that the road to repair injustice in the Black community will be a generation of work. . . . I’m excited to know more voices will come to the process.”
The issue of reparations has been raised nationally for decades, with supporters focusing not just on financial restitution for the descendants of enslaved Americans but also on governments’ formal apologies for their role in that legacy.
In the wake of anti-racism demonstrations that swept the country last summer — after the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville — California established a task force to propose a model for reparations. Chicago and several other cities are discussing reparations programs of their own.
Historian Jennifer Oast, an expert on institutional slavery at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, expects that the Evanston program in particular will have a “snowball effect” on proposed federal legislation.
That measure, H.R. 40, would create a national commission to study potential reparations. It was introduced in 2019 but largely languished until last year’s presidential race when two key candidates, Kamala D. Harris and Joe Biden, voiced support.
A House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing on the bill last month. The bill has 173 sponsors in the House, but Daniels projects that number “going toward 190,” which makes it likely to pass. It faces a much bigger challenge in the Senate.
While White House press secretary Jen Psaki has not said whether President Biden would sign the legislation into law, she noted in late February that “he continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address systemic racism that persists today, and obviously having that study is part of that.”
Federal reparations are advocates’ ultimate goal because of the greater monetary resources that would become available. Yet local reparations are important because cities such as Evanston can “serve as a blueprint,” according to Daniels.
Other reparation programs have been created for specific injustices: In 2016, for example, Chicago passed a law to allocate $5.5 million for 57 torture victims of a police unit led by a disgraced former commander. And just last week, the Jesuit order of Catholic priests announced that it would raise $100 million for 5,000 living descendants of enslaved people it owned two centuries ago.
Figuring out how to build reparation programs that address redlining and segregation from the past century is much different than those designed to bring redress for the slave trade, Oast said — primarily because individuals from the Jim Crow and civil rights era are still alive and can directly benefit.
And Evanston should be considered the prototype because of how the city approached its initiative, said Kamm Howard of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. “Most other commissions file resolutions and then allocate funds for them, but Evanston set aside the resources up front,” he said.
City leaders decided to first address housing following a report last year that showed how, starting with the arrival of the first Black resident in 1855, Evanston restricted where Blacks could live.
“Over the decades, policies, practices, and patterns of discrimination and segregation took place,” the report said. Together, they “not only impacted the daily lives and well-being of thousands of Evanston residents, but they also had a material effect on occupations, education, wealth, and property.”
Their impact over generations, the report concluded, “was cumulative and permanent. They were the means by which legacies were limited and denied.”
The housing discrimination extended to Evanston’s most famous community: Northwestern University. According to the report, the City Council supported the university’s refusal following World War II to provide housing for Black students, including returning Black veterans.
Despite the city passing a fair housing law in 1968, evidence showed that as late as 1985, real estate agents continued to steer Black renters and home buyers to a section of town where they were the majority. The vestiges of racial segregation remain evident.
Not everyone thinks the council’s approach is the right way to proceed. In the view of Alderwoman Cicely Fleming, choosing housing grants over cash payments is a form of discrimination itself. She voted no on Monday despite her support for reparations, saying the focus on housing confirms negative stereotypes that the poorest “can’t handle their money” and discriminates against people who may be due reparations but either don’t own a home or don’t plan to purchase one.
“I don’t think it’s true reparations. If we start out with something that is not clearly modeled after what historic reparations are about, we open up a lack of trust,” said Fleming, a longtime resident who is Black. “There’s no way I could go to African Americans in Mississippi who have experienced true racial terror and tell their city councils to do the same as what we’re doing with housing. I would be mortified.”
Tina Paden, who lives in the same house in downtown Evanston that her Black ancestors built in the late 1800s, thinks the disbursements for housing repair and mortgage assistance primarily benefit banks and other financial institutions. And those, she added, are the entities directly responsible for redlining and other discriminatory practices that the program is seeking to address.
“Reparations are supposed to repair harm to the injured parties. So if you’re telling someone what to do with the money, this appears to be a discriminatory practice as well. Now you have discrimination on discrimination,” she said.
She also supports reparations but would make cash payments to the city’s senior population the priority. “Why are you saying this 20-year-old can buy a new home in Evanston and the 80-year-old is still waiting?” she asked.
Daniel Biss, a former Illinois state senator who will be sworn in as Evanston‘s mayor in May, considers all options on the table for reparations, including cash payments. “There’s an incredible amount at stake here, and we have to do it thoroughly, inclusively and to get it right,” he said.
Nationally, polls continue to show a dearth of support for reparations. A Reuters/Ipsos survey last summer found that only 20 percent of respondents agreed with using “taxpayer money to pay damages to descendants of enslaved people in the United States.” Support varied widely by race and political affiliation.
Biss, who is White, hopes the victory in his city will help to move the country forward.
“There’s a ton of progress to be made to get people to develop the fluency and the vocabulary to come to terms why arguments [against reparations] don’t hold water. That progress has to come from the grass roots up — from the neighborhoods, the municipalities and the states, and eventually the federal process in building that kind of pressure on the federal government,” he said.
Evanston “will be a small part of that,” he said. “We get to go first, but hopefully that will spur others to go soon.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, testifies before a House financial services committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Facebook Sued for 'Deceptive Practices' Over Disinformation on Platform
Kari Paul, Guardian UK
Paul writes:
New lawsuit filed by Reporters without Borders says platform allows ‘disinformation and hate speech to flourish on its network’
acebook has failed to live up to its promises of creating a “safe” and “error-free” online environment, according to a new lawsuit filed by the press freedom not-for-profit Reporters without Borders.
The organization alleged in a court filing on Tuesday that Facebook is guilty of “deceptive commercial practices” for promising users in its terms of service that it would provide “safe, secure and error-free environment”, one that cannot be used to “share anything (…) that is unlawful, misleading, discriminatory or fraudulent”.
“The reality is quite different,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. “[Facebook] allows disinformation and hate speech to flourish on its network – hatred in general and hatred against journalists – contrary to the claims made in its terms of service and through its ads.”
The suit has been filed in France, and names the French and Irish divisions of Facebook. Under European Union law, a business can be sued if it violates Consumer Code, which protects consumers from “deceptive business practices”.
Facebook is unlikely to be forced to make substantial long-term change under the new suit, but such practices under EU law are punishable by two years’ imprisonment and a fine of €300,000 ($356,000). However, for larger companies the fine can be as high as 10% of average annual turnover. Facebook made $86bn in 2020, meaning it could be fined up to $860m or around €720m.
The lawsuit cites a variety of research that underscores how Facebook’s failure to put a stop to misinformation has negatively affected EU users and constitutes a deceptive practice.
For example, Facebook was recently identified as “the hub of vaccine conspiracy theories” in French-speaking communities by the non-profit anti-disinformation organization First Draft. The lawsuit, according to a draft of the complaint, also cites a report that details billions of interactions with deceptive sites on Facebook.
The lawsuit marks the latest stumbling block for Facebook as its international battles with legislators continue, with legislation in Australia forcing the platform to pay publishers, a privacy lawsuit in Belgium threatening to enforce fines against Facebook for privacy violations, and a growing pile of lawsuits against Facebook in the US.
Facebook is also facing pressure from US lawmakers over alleged anti-competitive behavior. One lawsuit, filed against Facebook by a coalition of US attorneys general in December, accuses Facebook of using its power and acquisitions of its rivals to stifle user growth for competing services. A similar suit has been launched by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could force Facebook to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. On Thursday, the company will join other executives in the US to testify about antitrust concerns.
Sidney Powell at a press conference with Rudy Giuliani and other lawyers for then-president Donald Trump after the election. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Sidney Powell Now Argues "No Reasonable Person" Would Believe Her Voter Fraud Lies Were "Fact"
Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed
Tillman writes:
Powell is facing billion-dollar lawsuits after accusing voting technology companies of rigging the election.
idney Powell argued Monday that she couldn’t be sued for defamation for repeatedly promoting false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being rigged because “no reasonable person would” believe that her comments “were truly statements of fact.”
In the months after the election, the Texas-based attorney became one of the most public faces of a campaign to discredit President Joe Biden’s win. Vowing to “release the Kraken,” she pushed the lie that the election was stolen from former president Donald Trump. In numerous TV and public appearances, as well as in court, Powell spread conspiracy theories that two voting equipment companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, were part of a Democrat-backed scheme to “steal” the election by rigging voting systems to flip votes for Trump to Biden, count ballots more than once, and fabricate votes for Biden.
Now facing billion-dollar lawsuits from both companies and having lost all of her court cases challenging the election, Powell is on the defensive. On Monday, her legal team filed a motion to dismiss Dominion’s $1.3 billion lawsuit, or at least to move it from the federal district court in Washington, DC, to Texas. They argued that the election fraud narrative that Powell had spent months touting as grounds to undo the presidential election was “hyperbole” and political speech entitled to protection under the First Amendment.
Even if Powell’s statements were presentations of fact that could be proven as true or false, her lawyers wrote, “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”
Powell deflected blame to the Trump supporters who adopted the conspiracy theories and lies that she and other Trump allies pushed and that ultimately fueled the insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Her lawyers wrote that she was just presenting her “opinions and legal theories on a matter of utmost public concern,” and that members of the public who were interested were “free” to look at the evidence and make up their own minds or wait to see how the evidence held up in court.
Even as Powell tried to distance herself from responsibility for the conspiracy theories she promoted after the election, she also disputed that the statements at issue were, in fact, false. She argued that Dominion was a “public figure” because of its prominent role in the election process, a status that set the bar higher for proving defamation and meant Dominion had to show that she acted with “actual malice.” Powell’s lawyers argued that Dominion couldn’t meet that standard because “she believed the allegations then and she believes them now.”
Powell’s lawyers argued that her statements were political speech in support of Trump. Quoting from a court decision in an earlier First Amendment case, they wrote that it was a “well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.” They said the fact that Dominion had described her comments as “wild” and “outlandish” only supported the notion that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process.”
Court filings in many of the criminal cases brought against alleged Jan. 6 rioters feature quotes from defendants who posted on social media about how they “stormed” the Capitol because they believed the election was stolen from Trump. One defendant, Jeffrey Sabol, who is charged with assaulting police at the Capitol, told law enforcement afterward that he “knew that Dominion voting machines were tampered with,” echoing a Powell claim, according to the government’s filings.
Powell’s lawyers also argued that even if the underlying “evidence” she’d relied on was unreliable or false, she was still entitled to First Amendment protection for citing it in the same vein as journalists who reported information that they learned from sources.
“Plaintiffs’ attempts to impugn the various declarations as unreliable, attack the veracity or reliability of various declarants or point to later statements that are arguably inconsistent are beside the point,” Powell’s lawyers wrote. “Lawyers involved in fast-moving litigation concerning matters of transcendent public importance, who rely on sworn declarations, are entitled to no less protection.”
Attorney ethics rules generally bar lawyers from knowingly presenting false information to a court or to an outside party as part of their work on behalf of a client. State officials in Michigan filed an ethics complaint in February against Powell with attorney disciplinary officers in Texas, where Powell is licensed to practice; attorney ethics investigations are typically conducted in secret, and there’s been no public announcement to date about the status of Michigan’s complaint.
Powell’s response to Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit in state court in Manhattan is due April 8. Smartmatic’s lawsuit also names Fox News, longtime Trump lawyer and ally Rudy Giuliani, and conservative commentators Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo, and Jeanine Pirro as defendants. Dominion has separate lawsuits against Giuliani and Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO.
Proud Boys. (photo: Kevin Mohatt/Reuters)
Proud Boys Are Rallying Again, but With a Sneaky Twist
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes:
Left reeling after the Capitol riot, revelations their chairman was an informant, and leaders’ arrests, some Proud Boys chapters have resumed public rallies—but not as headliners.
n Saturday, on opposite sides of the country, men in black and yellow uniforms took to the streets for various far-right causes. In Sandy, Oregon, they joined a church for an anti-gay event. In Raleigh, North Carolina, they joined supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory for a protest against COVID-19 prevention measures.
They were members of the Proud Boys, a far-right paramilitary group, many leaders of which have been charged with planning and taking part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (The group may face additional legal challenges, with a top prosecutor suggesting sedition charges for unnamed rioters.) Following the Capitol riot, and subsequent revelations that the Proud Boys’ chairman was a federal informant, some Proud Boys chapters splintered while others appeared less publicly active than in months past.
But in recent days, some Proud Boys chapters have resumed their public rallies, often attaching themselves to other right-wing groups, while their own leadership battles serious criminal charges.
“I think we saw a little bit of a lull right after Jan. 6 from the Proud Boys and many other anti-democratic groups across the country,” said Stephen Piggott, a program analyst at Western States Center, a nonprofit that monitors the far right. “But certainly there’s been an increase recently and in gatherings in the Pacific Northwest.”
The rally in Sandy, Oregon, on Saturday was among the group’s first post-Jan. 6 events in the state, where Proud Boys are infamously active, Willamette Week reported. During that rally, members of the Proud Boys joined an anti-LGBT event hosted by Rivers of Living Water United Pentecostal Church, which did not immediately return a request for comment. Its pastor, Russell Collier, told Willamette Week that it had not invited the Proud Boys but that he appreciated the group’s presence because someone had previously hung pro-LGBT banners on his church.
When counter-protesters hosted a “have a gay day” event across the street, Proud Boys reportedly shouted insults at them, accusing them of being communists. (Oregon Proud Boys have previously endorsed violence against communists, wearing T-shirts endorsing the murder of communists under the administration of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.)
Piggott said many of the Proud Boys’ recent appearances have been at events organized by other groups on the far right. That was the case in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday.
Online, the Raleigh rally was advertised as part of a worldwide March 20 uprising against COVID-19 “lockdowns.” In reality, North Carolina is far from locked down, with indoor dining and sporting events allowed. About 100 people showed up for the event.
Among them was a motley assortment of Proud Boys and MAGA types, with at least one person flying a flag for a Three Percenter militia and another flying a large flag for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely accuses former President Donald Trump’s foes of being involved in Satanic cannibalism and pedophilia.
The rally came during a bad week for North Carolina Proud Boys, and a bad year for the organization at large. Charles Donohoe, the leader of a North Carolina Proud Boys chapter, was arrested on Wednesday on conspiracy charges for allegedly planning to overpower police and enter the Capitol. Proud Boys leaders in three other states are listed as co-defendants in his case, with other Proud Boys across the country facing their own criminal charges stemming from the Capitol riot. And just last month, multiple Proud Boys chapters announced their separation from the national organization, after it was revealed that Proud Boys chair Enrique Tarrio has worked as a federal informant.
It’s enough for some Proud Boys to eye a rebrand when they attempt public events. The Patriot Party, a loosely affiliated pro-Trump movement, has hosted events attended by uniformed Proud Boys, CNN previously reported. One Patriot Party organizer, who is currently advertising upcoming events in Pennsylvania, has previously described himself on video as a Proud Boy. Nevertheless, he told CNN at a Patriot Party event that he had never heard of the group.
Even online, the Proud Boys appear to have taken measures to blend in with a broader pro-Trump crowd after the Capitol riot. One longtime Proud Boys channel on the messaging platform Telegram now describes itself as a safe haven for users of the conservative social media site Parler, which briefly went offline after the Capitol riot.
“This is a PUBLIC chat for Parler refugees and not affiliated with any group,” a pinned post in the channel reads. The channel currently has more than 12,700 members, many of them not Proud Boys.
Despite the channel’s insistence that it isn’t affiliated with any group, Tarrio appears to moderate the group and promotes his own content to the channel’s thousands of subscribers.
Piggott said Oregon was bracing for a far-right car rally this weekend. Like the Raleigh and Sandy events last weekend, the Proud Boys are not organizing the event, but are expected to attend.
Twenty-one people face jail for helping to save the lives of refugees on the Mediterranean Sea. (photo: Flickr)
Stop Jailing People for Saving Refugees' Lives in the Mediterranean
Nathan Akehurst, Jacobin
Akehurst writes:
A prosecutor in Sicily has charged twenty-one people, including the crew of the Iuventa migrant rescue ship, with aiding illegal immigration. The potential long jail terms show how European countries have criminalized aid for refugees — and how little they care about the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean.
n spring 2019 Italian prosecutors opened an investigation into Miguel Roldán, a Spanish firefighter. A potential two-decade sentence was attached to his crime — namely, aiding drowning people. One of a number of such investigations into aid crews, it was part of a long war pursued by Europe’s reactionaries against refugee rescue operations.
Italy took a leading role in this, not least under the pugnacious Il Capitano — the far-right Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister until the end of summer 2019. Rescue captains Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp were also arrested that spring, joining two hundred fifty people arrested for similar offenses including the mayor of a small Italian town.
That autumn, Ursula von der Leyen entered the European Commission presidency. Her opening speech appeared to be a continent away from Salvini’s rhetoric. She belonged to a German government who had rendered more than its fair share of humanitarian assistance. The refugee crisis was a shame upon the continent, she said. And she had skin in the game, having personally adopted and cared for a young Syrian refugee. She was cited as an example of how the right-wing populist tide could be halted across the world.
But the speech turned sharply a few paragraphs later. Von der Leyen announced that Frontex, the EU’s border agency, would take on thousands of new guards. One defense of this move held that their role would involve rescue — and yet, increased enforcement has already made the Mediterranean more lethal. Worse, patrol boats are giving way to drones which cannot carry out rescues and can only impassively observe disasters. This colossal humanitarian crisis is occurring not on the other side of the planet, but just off Europe’s beach resorts.
And Von der Leyen’s launch had one final sting in the tail; the gathering of migration policy under a commissioner for “Protecting Our European Way of Life,” a Trumpian title that sparked outrage even in Brussels circles. Such “protection” is premised, however much it publicly baulks at the consequences, on perpetuating a saltwater graveyard where six people a day die preventable deaths, including thousands of people who died while the predominant European policy focus was on Brexit, and tens of thousands since the 1990s.
It is an organism with limbs and antennae in run-down detention centers outside London and Glasgow, in the sun-drenched skies over the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, in mountain border posts in the Balkans, and in air-conditioned committee rooms in the EU’s Berlaymont HQ in Brussels.
A Feature Not a Bug
Three years and a pandemic later, the case against the Iuventa, the search-and-rescue vessel on which Roldán once worked, is back. On March 3, 2021, the prosecutor in Trapani, Sicily officially charged twenty-one people and three organizations of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, including Roldán and the Iuventa crew.
The charges relate to rescues carried out between 2016 and 2017, with evidence gained by undercover agents in direct contact with Salvini, ostensibly providing “security” on rescue boats under the auspices of a security firm whose boss is linked to far-right group Generation Identity. One of these spies later expressed regret and admitted he had no evidence of a relationship between NGOs and people smugglers. If convicted, the crews could face decades in jail.
This is the decision of a local prosecutor. But rather like Von der Leyen’s speech, it exposes the brutal system in which a dizzying range of people and organizations are complicit. It may be tempting to view this case as a simple moral failure. But it is so much more than an unpleasant bug in the system. Across ideological divides from Von der Leyen to Salvini, and across moral frameworks and cultural backgrounds, Europe is complicit.
The Mediterranean murder machine is the system, that reproduces itself through all of its constituent parts, along every point of the refugee journey. The far right, the mainstream right, and liberals in local and global politics; police forces, armies, and military security contractors; think tanks and academics; criminals and traffickers; all share in producing and reproducing human suffering.
The most brutal, and brutally honest, component in that system is the renewed hard-right as represented by Viktor Orbán and Matteo Salvini, or inspired by Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump further afield. In its account, those who seek a better life across the sea essentially deserve their death. This external enemy has given a narrative unity to the far right across Europe, allowing it to shift a general malaise into racism, both on the street and at the ballot box.
There is, of course, real discontent in coastal communities that have been negatively affected by the sudden influx of people — but here, there have also been considerable expressions of solidarity which are neglected or even outlawed. The far-right current is in the personal politics of many border police, and often their institutional leaderships. On the fringes, it also inspires vigilante “migrant hunters” in helicopter gunships.
There are also those whose investment in this economy of suffering is less ideological and more financial. There are the people traffickers who profit off misery and sometimes treat life so cheaply that they fling people into the sea in order to avoid being caught smuggling.
There are the gangsters who reportedly run both smuggling operations and reception centers. There is every contractor who runs squalid accommodation in Britain, rips off state-run refugee camps over mattresses and tent pegs in Greece, or whose shareholders’ dividends are dictated by each new mile of razor wire and weaponry sold.
Elsewhere, a section of the body politic acts to cloud and complicate what should be a very instinctive, unpolitical response to suffering. Mainstream conservatives (generally) acknowledge that the intentions of Miguel Roldán and his ilk were good but ultimately misguided. The chance of encountering a rescue boat “encourages” people to make a lethal journey, they say, in a vacuum of evidence.
Treating these (non-)people with decency will only encourage them. The unarguable evils of the traffickers become used as arguments not to open safe routes, but to bomb their boats and infrastructure, inevitably risking more refugee lives in the process.
This doctrine of tolerating mass death out of simple practicality extends into liberalism; into many people who would place themselves on the Left and be appalled by Trump’s border walls. Even Von der Leyen’s opposition candidate from the center-left European Socialists spent several years acting as the Commission’s go-between in a set of tawdry deals involving paying Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey to detain refugees, claiming most were simply economic opportunists. The doublethink in Von der Leyen’s inaugural speech is replicated across mainstream politics.
Prisons of History
The self-styled enlightened nations often claim their commitment to values and human rights distance it from the less civilized world. In one sense it’s true: Europe does not abuse, torture, or enslave refugees, but merely makes deals to return them to places that do. Frontex does not drown people — it shifts the patterns of its patrols in a way that makes having to rescue people less likely. Europe sniffs at the outrages of member states like Hungary, while confining the issue to its periphery, for instance by threatening to close the border with Greece if it could not prevent people journeying northward.
Those who make the crossing are condemned to extended stays in neglected camps. The coronavirus pandemic, as well as legitimizing even harsher entry control measures, has created a time bomb in refugee camps. In Greece, suspected cases have been forcibly isolated together in shipping containers with three-level bug-ridden bunk beds.
The lack of effective government response has indicated (unsurprisingly) little regard for camp-dwellers, but also a shocking lack of recognition that underfunded, ham-fisted approaches to potential virus clusters put the general population at risk.
Meanwhile, those who do not drown or face random deportation, and who arrive in a place that makes some effort to aid their integration have still not escaped the system. Their interests as workers will be pitted against those of domestic workers, in a grim race to the bottom. Among the refugees’ ranks will be liberals, socialists, conservatives, and everything else and yet their contributions will rarely be articulated in public discourse; they are subjects upon who “we” will decide the correct policy.
This system endures. The European polity (including Brexit Britain) prefers to think of 1945 as Year Zero — but there was no clear endpoint between European colonization of the globe, the carving up of postcolonial borders, and the birth of neocolonial relationships of extraction. The European polity continues the internal discipline of its own periphery from the Greek financial crisis to Balkan structural adjustments, and the maintenance of an iron wall around its supposed utopia of free exchange and free movement. It promotes its cultures and historic relationships across the world but will not honor requests for sanctuary within the embrace of those relationships.
This current history informs present and future strategy, and not just because many of those seeking sanctuary are refugees from Western military misadventures or colonial hangovers. Europe’s Mediterranean border is not enough for its architects; a concerted military-diplomatic approach is underway to push that border further south into Africa and collaborate with whatever questionable regimes are necessary to that end. It is not hard to speculate about the endpoint of this grand strategy. The global North (wrongly) believes it can use vast peripheries to insulate itself by force from the migrations, upheavals, and challenges to the nation-state posed by climate chaos.
Challenging the Murder Machine
We are used to systems that normalize the senseless and monstrous. We live with starvation amid wealth, homelessness amid luxury skyscrapers, and more recently health workers responding to a pandemic in bin bags. Yet the normalization of this vast system of multinational institutions and street gangs, liberals and conservatives, law enforcers and criminals, all complicit in a vast economy of suffering at the foot of our beach resorts, is an extreme case, nonetheless.
So too is the idea that in a coalition of advanced liberal democracies, a firefighter who takes part in an operation to save thousands of lives is worthy of a potential life in jail while those who perpetuate the processes behind such loss of life are worthy of lives in public office.
The case of the arrested rescuers is interesting for another reason. Sometimes it seems impossible to fight. The political environment seems as immutable as the sea itself and restructuring it a task as arrogant and foolish as stemming the tides. Yet the twenty-one arrestees and all their peers did fight, both practically saving lives in huge numbers, and symbolically demonstrating that this system can be penetrated.
As well as the cross-political complicity in the crisis, there are also voices throughout politics — liberals and even some conservatives — whose humanity has risen above so-called realpolitik. Building a coalition which can expose and overcome this monstrosity is still within our grasp.
The inhumanity of the Mediterranean machine does not occur just because of some people with moral deficiencies, it occurs because of the historic and present imbalance of wealth and power. The logic of upholding this imbalance is why figures across the moral and ideological spectrum perpetuate the scale of suffering it. The experience of people like Miguel Roldán, and British firefighter Brendan Woodhouse who was detained in a similar incident, points to how trade unionists and socialists can make a difference.
From the UK Fire Brigades Union demonstration in favor of Roldán on Europe Day to the efforts of unions to organize refugees who arrive in sanctuary and join the ranks of migrants facing exploitation and division at work, the labor movement has been at the heart of the movement for refugee justice. It has done so by making the case for the dignity of labor, and broadening it into a powerful case for universal dignity and humanity.
In the waters of the Mediterranean, the behavior of advanced economies is reflected back at them. From surveillance machinery to administrative brutality to militarism, pandemic response failure, and a narrow nationalist response to climate crisis, we are seeing the technologies of power which may yet come to define this century for all of us, not just those currently subjected to them. But none of this is inevitable. Currently, twenty-one people face jail for jamming the system. Their fight is a shared fight for a more just and decent world.
A harp seal pup sits on a snow-covered beach near the town of Blanc-Sablon, Québec, in early March. Normally harp seals give birth and raise their pups on sea ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but this year's ice coverage is at an all-time low, throwing pups' survival into jeopardy. (photo: Mario Cyr/National Geographic)
Harp Seal Pups Dying on Beach as Winter Sea Ice Fails
Saroja Coelho, National Geographic
Coelho writes:
Their unprecedented appearance on land is a sign of the drastic impact of climate change on northern sea ice and wildlife.
n Mario Cyr’s 40 years as a marine photographer and expedition leader in Canada’s north, he has never seen harp seal pups clustered on shore. Every December, a population of harp seals arrive in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, traveling south from the Canadian Arctic and Greenland to give birth on the sea ice around the Îles de la Madeleine in late February and early March. These harp seal nurseries attract hundreds of people each year, eager to see the fuzzy white pups bellying around the ice and getting fat on their mothers’ milk.
But in recent days, hundreds of pups instead have appeared on the beach just outside the small community of Blanc-Sablon, Québec, some 350 miles northeast of the islands.
The sea ice cover in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is at its lowest since 1969, when yearly measurements first began. As ice pans dissolve into slush or crack into small pieces, seal pups forced to the seashore risk being crushed by broken-up chunks of ice, drowned, or eaten by land-based predators such as coyotes. It is expected that 2021 will be a devastating year for harp seal pup mortalities.
The Gulf of St. Lawrence is missing its sea ice
Global warming is making it difficult for sea ice to form in this cold body of water. The month of March usually features over 90,000 square miles of ice covering the gulf, but in 2021 most of the water appears to be ice-free. “This year, there is absolutely no ice,” Cyr says. “These seals are out of options.” Cyr spent days photographing the pups for National Geographic as they struggled in the slush at the waterline or lay on the snow banks calling for their mothers.
Unpredictable sea ice
Harp seals, which can grow up to six feet long and weigh up to 400 pounds, typically spend little time on land, preferring to cruise the chilly waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans feeding on crustaceans and fish. They remember where they were born, and each winter, they tend to return to those sites where they congregate en masse to breed and give birth.
Sea ice is the only place harp seals will give birth, but coverage in the Gulf of St. Lawrence is less predictable every year. “There’s hardly anything left in the gulf,” says Peter Galbraith, a sea ice expert with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Most years see about 15 cubic miles of ice across the gulf, he says. This year, the ice peaked at less than three cubic miles in February, and it’s already dwindled to less than one.
“The quality of the ice is also important for harp seals,” Galbraith says “They want thick floes that resist storms and give the wind nothing to grab onto.” A decade-long warming trend in the Gulf of St. Lawrence continued this winter, with deep waters reaching record highs. What little ice has appeared in the gulf lacks density and breaks easily.
“Waves creep into ice floes and break them up,” Galbraith says. “If you’ve got seals on small ice floes, with thin ice, and lots of open water, any storm can come and blow pups into the cracks or right into the water before they can swim.”
Seal mothers search for a place to give birth
The seal mothers with cubs on shore in Blanc-Sablon likely traveled south into the gulf, as they do each year, to feed during the winter months, says Garry Stenson, an expert on harp seals with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. But when it came time to birth their pups, they would have found themselves without the ice they usually would use for a nursery, forcing them to travel north again.
But farther north, along the northeastern parts of Newfoundland, the ice conditions also have been poor, according to marine mammal expert Mark Hammill.
The expectant seal mothers needed to find ice fast and likely settled for broken pieces near the shore. They may have discovered pockets of ice not far from Blanc Sablon, or further out near Belle Isle, only to have that ice drift towards the shore, breaking up as it was ripped at by the wind and waves.
“The ice is quite compact in a good ice year and stays together,” Stenson says. “But in bad ice years, there’s lots of space, the ice is much more mobile, and moves with the wind and current.”
When that happens, harp seal mortality is high. The pups don't have any blubber at birth, but quickly gain weight nursing on high-fat mother’s milk. They need weeks on stable ice to mature physiologically so they have the stamina required for swimming in frigid waters. A fall into the ocean without mom nearby almost certainly will be fatal.
It’s unclear whether the pups washed ashore on broken ice or were born on the beach, but either way, it’s unlikely any of the pups at Blanc-Sablon will survive, Hammill says. They may be crushed, drowned, or left defenseless against predators if their mothers can’t find them after they’ve drifted to shore.
Seal expeditions to disappear with the ice
Harp seals may eventually stop returning to these waters as warmer temperatures caused by climate change delay or prevent the development of ice, Galbraith says. The cold seasons are getting shorter, and what began as occasional anomalies of ice failure in 1958 and 1969 have escalated to ice shortages in 2010, 2011, 2017, and 2021.
If the sea ice continues to fail in the gulf, the seals will eventually have no memory of their nurseries in these waters and will stop migrating to the Gulf of St. Lawrence altogether.
That would mean a crushing new reality for the communities here, particularly on the Îles de la Madeleine where seal watching expeditions draw thousands visitors and provide jobs during the winter months. “It’s so strange with the ice. We can feel it, something is missing. At this time of year, walking on beach, [there’s] no ice, just water, water, water,” says island resident Ariane Berubé. “It’s like there’s a break in our life cycle. We jump from fall to spring, and a season is missing.” (Nat Geo selected the Îles de la Madeleine as one of its best trips of 2020.)
Berubé is the communications director at Hotel Accents, which has been offering tours of the pupping nurseries on the ice for more than 40 years. There was a time when they could fly a helicopter out onto the ice and find a harp seal nursery with thousands of pups. She says they were shocked when the ice failed in 2010 and had to cancel all their tours, but they found opportunity in the loss that year.
Accents revised its program to include climate education and lectures on conservation, and Berubé says their visitors are now keen to find out how the sea ice can be preserved, so future generations can experience the joys of seeing the seal nurseries on the ice floes.
“We are making the harp seal pups the face of the climate crisis,” she says, adding that the disappearance of these baby seals has helped underscore other climate change-driven issues faced in the region, including widespread coastal erosion caused by a lack of protective sea ice and disruptions in lobster populations, which are slowly heading north to colder waters.
Meanwhile, on the shores of Blanc-Sablon, the spectacle of harp seal pups on the beach continues to draw people from the nearby village, including classrooms of children and visitors on snowmobiles. One visitor posted a video celebrating the sighting but may have actually captured the last moments of an exhausted infant in distress. It is likely to be only one of many harp seal pups beneath the waves this year.
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