05 April 21
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Andy Borowitz | Rand Paul Claims Biden's Infrastructure Plan Infringes on Bridges' Right to Crumble
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Senator Rand Paul said that he is opposing President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan because it 'infringes on bridges' constitutional right to crumble.'"
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
enator Rand Paul said that he is opposing President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan because it “infringes on bridges’ constitutional right to crumble.”
“Decay, deterioration, and collapse are all a part of the natural process of entropy,” Paul said. “It is not the job of government to play God and interfere with that.”
Warning of the “slippery slope of government overreach,” Paul said that the Biden plan is “threatening our infrastructure’s precious freedom to disintegrate.”
“First they came for our bridges, then they came for our potholes, and then they came for our lead water pipes,” he said.
The Kentucky senator’s comments drew support from an unlikely ally, Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Look, I was just glad to see Rand talking about something besides the pandemic,” Fauci said.
Donald Trump. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Getty Images)
Justices Dismiss Suit Over Trump's Blocking of Critics on Twitter
John Kruzel, The Hill
Kruzel writes: "The Supreme Court on Monday vacated a ruling that found that former President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter, with the justices dismissing the case as moot."
he Supreme Court on Monday vacated a ruling that found that former President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking his critics on Twitter, with the justices dismissing the case as moot.
The court’s move came in an unsigned order. But Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s most conservative member, wrote separately to voice concern that Trump's removal from Twitter reflected a degree of power in the hands of tech platforms that the court would soon need to address.
The lawsuit arose in 2017 after Trump’s social media account blocked seven people who had tweeted criticism of the president in comment threads linked to his @realDonaldTrump Twitter handle, which has since been banned on the platform.
Lower federal courts found that Trump’s Twitter account, where he often weighed in on official matters, constituted a public forum and that blocking his detractors violated their constitutional free speech protections.
In a 12-page opinion written in concurrence with the court's dismissal of the case, Thomas on Monday expressed alarm over what he referred to as digital platforms’ “concentrated control” of speech. The staunch conservative also said it was inevitable that the court would soon have to take on the issue directly.
“The disparity between Twitter’s control and Mr. Trump’s control is stark, to say the least. Mr. Trump blocked several people from interacting with his messages,” Thomas wrote, noting that Trump had 89 million followers at the time. “Twitter barred Mr. Trump not only from interacting with a few users, but removed him from the entire platform, thus barring all Twitter users from interacting with his messages.”
He later added: "We will soon have no choice but to address how our legal doctrines apply to highly concentrated, privately owned information infrastructure such as digital platforms."
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to take up its appeal in the case last August. But following Trump’s electoral loss in November, his administration dropped its request on the eve of President Biden’s inauguration, arguing that the change in administrations would make the case moot.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the seven blocked Twitter users, said it would have preferred the Supreme Court to have left the lower court ruling intact, but added that the litigation had left an important mark.
“We’re pleased with what we were able to accomplish in this litigation — not just forcing President Trump to unblock our clients and dozens of others from his Twitter account, but also establishing a precedent that other courts have invoked to preclude other public officials from silencing their social media critics,” Katie Fallow, an attorney at the Institute, said in a statement.
Dr. David Fowler, Maryland's former chief medical examiner, on Oct. 1, 2008. (photo: Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Chauvin Defense Witness Faces Lawsuit of His Own Over Death of Black Teenager in Police Custody
Samantha Hendrickson and J.D. Duggan, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Nearly two years before George Floyd was pinned under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Anton Black was pinned to the ground by police outside his home in Greensboro, Maryland."
David Fowler, Maryland’s former chief medical examiner, is being sued for civil rights violations by the family of Anton Black.
early two years before George Floyd was pinned under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Anton Black was pinned to the ground by police outside his home in Greensboro, Maryland.
On September 15, 2018, body camera footage captured the 19-year-old struggling under the weight of multiple officers, laboring to breathe and crying out for his mother.
Black’s mother watched her son die in front of her. He used his last breaths to shout “I love you.”
Dr. David Fowler, who was the chief medical examiner of Maryland for nearly two decades, classified Black’s death as an accident. Now, he is an expert witness for Chauvin’s defense and is expected to offer testimony as to how Floyd died last year.
The forensic pathologist, who resigned from Maryland’s medical examiner office in 2019, is one of several parties being sued by the Black family for wrongful death and civil rights violations. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in December, alleges that Fowler “covered up and obscured police responsibility for Anton Black’s death.”
The determination in Black’s case was part of a broader pattern of the medical examiner’s office relying on police narratives in cases involving deaths in custody, the complaint on behalf of the Black family argues. Between 2013 and 2019, 30 percent of deaths involving a law enforcement officer reviewed by Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner were classified as “accidents,” “undetermined,” or due to “natural causes,” according to data released by the state.
The office’s findings in at least two of those cases were later disputed by independent forensic investigators who concluded that the deaths were homicides. Experts interviewed by The Intercept said Black’s death also fit the definition of a homicide per the National Association of Medical Examiners — an organization Fowler was once president of.
“In my opinion, the NAME guidelines for manner-of-death determination would indicate that Black’s death should have been called a homicide because of the physical involvement of others in the struggle,” Dr. Judy Melinek, a board-certified forensic pathologist and author unaffiliated with either case, wrote in an email.
Fowler declined to comment for this story, citing his role as an expert witness in the ongoing case against Chauvin.
Sonia Kumar, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who represents Black’s family, called Fowler’s involvement in the Chauvin case “troubling” and “disturbing.”
“The flawed practices that have been used in Maryland to prevent police accountability and accurate assessment of deaths in police custody are now being exported to the murder of George Floyd and a broader national stage,” she said.
Chillingly Similar
Long before the Chauvin trial began, the parallels between the deaths of Floyd and Black were clear to those close to the Anton Black case. The lawsuit on behalf of Black’s family describes the cases as “chillingly similar.”
Both men were unarmed. Both were pinned to the ground by multiple officers and said they were afraid of dying at the hands of police. Both cried out for their mothers. And both were ignored until it was too late.
“To me, the same thing that happened to George Floyd already happened to Anton Black. They held him down, they suffocated him, and they didn’t let him up,” said Antone Black Sr., Anton’s father. “I felt like they took his life and they covered it up.”
Prior to his death, Black ran from police while experiencing a mental health episode. Officers said they thought he was trying to kidnap a young boy he was with, who turned out to be Black’s younger cousin. Black was found hiding in a car outside his family home. Greensboro police officer Thomas Webster IV smashed the car window and tased him, as seen in footage from Webster’s body camera. Multiple police officers then struggled with Black before pinning him to the ground.
The autopsies of both Floyd and Black revealed multiple blunt force trauma injuries and cited a loss of heart function as a cause of death. The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, in opening statements Monday, noted that Floyd was put into a “prone position.” He was pinned flat on his chest and unable to expand his lungs to take in oxygen. Body camera footage showed Black in the same position as officers held him down with their body weight.
In opening statements at Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution told jurors that Floyd lived with a heart condition and a drug addiction, but it was the encounter with Chauvin that ended his life.
While Minnesota’s Hennepin County medical examiner ruled Floyd’s death a homicide, Fowler’s office classified Black’s death as an “accident.”
Police involved in Black’s arrest mentioned his immense strength and speculated that he was on drugs, a claim repeated by the Maryland medical examiner’s office. “Reportedly, he may have recently smoked spice,” the autopsy reads, referring to synthetic marijuana. The toxicology report later showed that no drugs were found in Black’s system, but it was not made public for four months.
The Black family and community members still question why it took so long for them to learn how Anton died. Fowler’s office only released the autopsy when Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan stepped in, according to reporting by Maryland Matters.
“The report seemed to look at Anton’s body to try to blame him in his own death,” Kumar, the ACLU attorney, said. She suggested that Fowler’s testimony in defense of Chauvin could similarly seek to shift responsibility away from law enforcement. “The medical examiner is refusing to acknowledge the role of police restraint and now taking that same sort of logic and trying to apply it to the death of Mr. Floyd.”
Defining Homicide
As is the case with other forensic practitioners, medical examiners work closely with law enforcement, which can leave them vulnerable to bias. “The entire discipline is built on a cooperative relationship between agencies,” Melinek said. “In most cases, police reports are necessary. … But in cases of in-custody deaths or officer-involved shootings, there is an inherent conflict of interest if we rely exclusively on the police reports to tell us what happened.”
“That is why it is so important that medical examiners and coroners have an independent capacity to perform death investigations and have access to evidence such as body camera videos and eyewitness statements that might contradict the police narrative,” Melinek said.
Justin Feldman, an epidemiologist researching social inequality and state violence at Harvard University, said the medical definition of homicide is about intentional force, not intentional killing. “If the force was intentional, whether or not you wanted it to cause death, it should be ruled a homicide,” he said.
“Intentional force” includes blunt force trauma, chokeholds, and the prone position, as well as the use of stun guns like Tasers. Often, Feldman said, the debate within forensics about when to classify a death as a homicide can be subject to outside pressure.
“Much of those debates are influenced by people who have received funding by Axon, who makes Tasers, or have received funding by city governments facing lawsuits,” Feldman said. “They will claim positional asphyxia does not really exist.”
Between 2009 and early 2016, 11 people in Maryland died following encounters in which police used Tasers, according to reporting from the Baltimore Sun. Fowler’s office classified all but one of these deaths as undetermined, accidental, or due to natural causes.
In 2014, police tased 19-year-old George Vonn King five times before he fell into a coma and died. His death was reported as being due to natural causes.
In 2015, DeOntre Dorsey had a grand mal seizure and drove his car off the road. Paramedics arrived and got him out of the car. While Dorsey was seizing on the ground, a police officer told him to put his hands behind his back. As he regained some “semblance of control,” according to a lawsuit filed by his estate, the officer tased him and delivered at least five electric shocks to his body while commanding him to stop flailing. Dorsey went into cardiac arrest and never regained consciousness, dying nine months later. Fowler’s office said the cause of death was undetermined.
Black was also tased over the course of 10 minutes before he fell unconscious and died.
The conclusions of Fowler’s office have been contested by independent investigations in other cases.
In 2016, Tawon Boyd, a 21-year-old Black man, called 911 for help. When officers showed up and Boyd was acting erratically, they punched him in the face and restrained him in a prone position, according to the police report. Medics then administered an antipsychotic medication. He quickly became unresponsive and died three days later. No officers had body cameras.
Fowler’s office cited drug use and “excited delirium,” a diagnosis that is not accepted by multiple top medical boards, as factors leading to Boyd’s cardiac arrest. His death was classified as an accident.
Dr. Francisco Diaz, an independent pathologist who served as an expert in a civil rights suit filed by Boyd’s family, later concluded that Boyd “died as result of asphyxia after restraint.”
Tyrone West’s death in 2013 was classified by Fowler’s office as “undetermined.” During an extended “scuffle” in 90-plus degree weather, police beat 44-year-old West with batons and kicked him in the head, according to witness statements. They eventually pinned him down in a prone restraint position similar to that of Black and Floyd. West’s breathing became labored and he later died. At least one witness said police tased West, though reports are conflicting.
As with Black, Fowler’s office blamed West’s death on a heart abnormality, writing that it was “complicated by dehydration during police restraint.”
Two independent forensic investigations later concluded that West died of asphyxiation. “The main cause of death is the fact that he was restrained in such a way that he was unable to breathe,” wrote Dr. William Manion, a forensic pathologist who conducted the first independent investigation.
West’s sister, Tawanda Jones, said she did not receive the autopsy from Fowler’s office for nearly five months and felt like information was being deliberately withheld. The office said the delay was because of an ongoing criminal investigation.
After George Floyd’s death, Jones reached out to Floyd’s brother in Minnesota. “It was like … the medical examiner’s office there was trying to downplay stuff,” Jones said, referring to the autopsy that mentioned Floyd’s heart condition and drug use as contributing factors in his death. “I said, ‘No, don’t let them downplay. They did the same thing to my brother.’”
A Future Cut Short
When the video of Floyd under Chauvin’s knee surfaced on social media, the world came to a reckoning. Protests erupted in Minneapolis and spread worldwide.
There was no such reckoning for Anton Black.
Freelance reporter Glynis Kazanjian first saw Black’s name in a Washington Post op-ed in January 2019, more than four months after he died.
The existing local coverage of him, she said, faded in the months between his death and January, when the autopsy was released. Her anger at the lack of attention launched reporting that sparked an internal police investigation into Black’s death. No charges were pursued for the officers involved.
“I had a 19-year-old son at that time,” Kazanjian said. “What if it had been him?”
As Black’s story gained traction statewide, a bill made its way through Maryland’s legislature — Anton’s Law — to open up police disciplinary and complaint records to the public. The bill recently passed the state Senate, but Anton’s father said that justice has yet to be served for his son, and he mourns the story of Black’s life that was cut short.
“They took my son’s voice, so I try to speak on his behalf,” Antone Black Sr. said.
Anton was a star athlete and “one of the fastest boys in Maryland,” Antone Black Sr. said. He was a high school track champion and played football and basketball.
Fowler’s office said that a heart condition, myocardial tunneling, and bipolar disorder led to sudden cardiac arrest. The autopsy states that the stress of the struggle with officers, but not their restraint, killed him.
“In what universe does a psychiatric condition cause death?” Kumar said.
Black studied modeling and acting. After he walked New York Fashion Week, event organizers were searching for him the week of his death to invite him to walk in Milan, Italy.
He also studied criminology at Wesley College in Delaware, which was inspired by the mentorship of a former local police chief, according to his father. Black was two months away from being a father himself. His child would never know him.
According to court documents, Black was likely experiencing a manic episode at the time of his arrest. The diagnosis of bipolar disorder was recent, and Black had been admitted involuntarily to a hospital for treatment.
He was released 10 days prior to his death, according to court documents, and was “still learning how to manage his severe bipolar disorder.” Despite prior knowledge of Black’s mental illness, the lawsuit on behalf of his family notes, police officers did not follow de-escalation protocol. Black’s mental health crisis would later be blamed by Fowler’s office for his death.
The timing of Fowler’s witness testimony at Chauvin’s trial remains unclear.
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Amazon Illegally Fired Workers Who Spoke Out, Labor Board Finds
Rebecca Klar, The Hill
Klar writes: "Amazon illegally retaliated against two of its workers when it fired them after they publicly criticized the company's climate policies and supported workers protesting warehouse conditions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found."
mazon illegally retaliated against two of its workers when it fired them after they publicly criticized the company’s climate policies and supported workers protesting warehouse conditions, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found.
The NLRB found the allegations in the case had merit, and a regional director will issue a complaint if the case does not settle, according to the board.
The board’s determination about the firing of Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa was first reported by The New York Times.
“It’s a moral victory and really shows that we are on the right side of history and the right side of the law,” Cunningham told the Times.
Cunningham and Costa were outspoken critics of Amazon and publicly supported workers pushing for better warehouse conditions, especially better safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic. They were also part of a group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, which is pushing the company to do more to address its impact on the climate.
Cunningham and Costa accused the company of firing them for speaking out.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by The Hill, but Jaci Anderson, an Amazon spokesperson, told the Times the employees were not fired for speaking out.
“We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against our internal policies, all of which are lawful,” Anderson told the newspaper. “We terminated these employees not for talking publicly about working conditions, safety or sustainability but, rather, for repeatedly violating internal policies.”
The case is one of many allegations of unfair labor practices Amazon is facing. The NLRB has filed more than three dozen charges against Amazon across 20 cities since February 2020, NBC News reported last week, citing NLRB filings.
A spokesperson for the board told NBC it is considering creating a consolidated effort between the regions based on the number of similar charges against the company.
The NLRB is also in the process of counting up ballots in the unionization vote at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala. If successful, the effort would create the first Amazon union in the U.S.
“Today is a reminder that Amazon will break the law to silence its own workers who speak out about the dangerous work conditions frontline workers are facing during this pandemic,” United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International President Marc Perrone said in a statement.
UFCW is leading the campaign to unionize Amazon workers in Alabama through its Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union affiliate.
“Amazon’s illegal retaliation against these whistleblowers makes the Amazon union election in Alabama even more urgent as Bessemer employees exercise their right to make their voices heard,” Perrone added.
'Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land - who owns it, who works it, and who cares for it - reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy.' (photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
Bill Gates Is the Biggest Private Owner of Farmland in the United States. Why?
Nick Estes, Guardian UK
Estes writes: "Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him 'Farmer Bill' this year?"
Gates has been buying land like it’s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation
ill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him “Farmer Bill” this year? The third richest man on the planet doesn’t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get for far less praise for it. That kind of hard work isn’t what made him rich. Gates’ achievement, according to the report, is that he’s largest private owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime eastern Washington farmland – which is traditional Yakima territory – for $171m helped him get that title.
In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly the size of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where I’m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation!
The United States is defined by the excesses of its ruling class. But why do a handful of people own so much land?
Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land – who owns it, who works it and who cares for it – reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, and also the world. Wealth accumulation always goes hand-in-hand with exploitation and dispossession. In this country, enslaved Black labor first built US wealth atop stolen Native land. The 1862 Homestead Act opened up 270m acres of Indigenous territory – which amounts to 10% of US land – for white settlement. Black, Mexican, Asian, and Native people, of course, were categorically excluded from the benefits of a federal program that subsidized and protected generations of white wealth.
The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner epitomizes such disparities. He owns 2m acres and has the world’s largest privately owned buffalo herd. Those animals, which are sacred to my people and were nearly hunted to extinction by settlers, are preserved today on nearly 200,000 acres of Turner’s ranchland within the boundaries of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty territory in the western half of what is now the state of South Dakota, land that was once guaranteed by the US government to be a “permanent home” for Lakota people.
The gun and the whip may not accompany land acquisitions this time around. But billionaire class assertions that they are philosopher kings and climate-conscious investors who know better than the original caretakers are little more than ruses for what amounts to a 21st century land grab – with big payouts in a for-profit economy seeking “green” solutions.
Our era is dominated by the ultra-rich, the climate crisis and a burgeoning green capitalism. And Bill Gates’ new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster positions himself as a thought leader in how to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how to fund what he has called elsewhere a “global green revolution” to help poor farmers mitigate climate change. What expertise in climate science or agriculture Gates possesses beyond being filthy rich is anyone’s guess.
When pressed during a book discussion on Reddit about why he’s gobbling up so much farmland, Gates claimed, “It is not connected to climate [change].” The decision, he said, came from his “investment group.” Cascade Investment, the firm making these acquisitions, is controlled by Gates. And the firm said it’s “very supportive of sustainable farming”. It also is a shareholder in the plant-based protein companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as well as the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere. His firm’s largest farmland acquisition happened in 2017, when it acquired 61 farming properties from a Canadian investment firm to the tune of $500m.
Arable land is not just profitable. There’s a more cynical calculation. Investment firms are making the argument farmlands will meet “carbon-neutral” targets for sustainable investment portfolios while anticipating an increase of agricultural productivity and revenue. And while Bill Gates frets about eating cheeseburgers in his book – for the amount of greenhouse gases the meat industry produces largely for the consumption of rich countries – his massive carbon footprint has little to do with his personal diet and is not forgivable by simply buying more land to sequester more carbon.
The world’s richest 1% emit double the carbon of the poorest 50%, an 2020 Oxfam study found. According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth swell by $1.9tn in 2020, while more than 22 million US workers (mostly women) lost their jobs.
Like wealth, land ownership is becoming concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, resulting in a greater push for monocultures and more intensive industrial farming techniques to generate greater returns. One per cent of the world’s farms control 70% of the world’s farmlands, one report found. The biggest shift in recent years from small to big farms was in the US.
The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns.
Small farmers and Indigenous people are more cautious with the use of land. For Indigenous caretakers, land use isn’t premised on a return of investments; it’s about maintaining the land for the next generation, meeting the needs of the present, and a respect for the diversity of life. That’s why lands still managed by Indigenous peoples worldwide protect and sustain 80% of the world’s biodiversity, practices anathema to industrial agriculture.
The average person has nothing in common with mega-landowners like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. The land we all live on should not be the sole property of a few. The extensive tax avoidance by these titans of industry will always far exceed their supposed charitable donations to the public. The “billionaire knows best” mentality detracts from the deep-seated realities of colonialism and white supremacy, and it ignores those who actually know best how to use and live with the land. These billionaires have nothing to offer us in terms of saving the planet – unless it’s our land back.
After building a new life in Canada, Anar Sabit returned to a region gripped by an obsession with 'prevention and control.'
Raffi Khatchadourian | Surviving the Xinjiang Crackdown
Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker
Khatchadourian writes: "As Sabit was deciding to move to Canada, in 2014, a dark future was being mapped out for Xinjiang in secret meetings in Beijing. Xi Jinping had become President the year before, and he was consolidating power."
As mass detentions and surveillance dominate the lives of China’s Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a woman struggles to free herself.
hen Anar Sabit was in her twenties and living in Vancouver, she liked to tell her friends that people could control their own destinies. Her experience, she was sure, was proof enough.
She had come to Canada in 2014, a bright, confident immigrant from Kuytun, a small city west of the Gobi Desert, in a part of China that is tucked between Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mongolia. “Kuytun” means “cold” in Mongolian; legend has it that Genghis Khan’s men, stationed there one frigid winter, shouted the word as they shivered. During Sabit’s childhood, the city was an underdeveloped colonial outpost in a contested region that locals called East Turkestan. The territory had been annexed by imperial China in the eighteenth century, but on two occasions it broke away, before Mao retook it, in the nineteen-forties. In Beijing, it was called New Frontier, or Xinjiang: an untamed borderland.
Growing up in this remote part of Asia, a child like Sabit, an ethnic Kazakh, could find the legacy of conquest all around her. Xinjiang is the size of Alaska, its borders spanning eight countries. Its population was originally dominated by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other indigenous Turkic peoples. But, by the time Sabit was born, Kuytun, like other parts of Xinjiang’s north, had dramatically changed. For decades, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps—a state-run paramilitary development organization, known as the bingtuan—had helped usher in millions of Han Chinese migrants, many of them former revolutionary soldiers, to work on enormous farms. In southern Xinjiang, indigenous peoples were still prevalent, but in Kuytun they had become a vestigial presence.
As a child, Sabit imbibed Communist Party teachings and considered herself a committed Chinese citizen, even as the bingtuan maintained a colonialist attitude toward people like her. Han residents of Kuytun often called Kazakhs and Uyghurs “ethnic persons,” as if their specific culture made no difference. Sabit accepted this as normal. Her parents, a doctor and a chemistry professor, never spoke of their experiences of discrimination; they enrolled her in schools where classes were held in Mandarin, and they taught her to embrace what she learned there. When Sabit was in elementary school, she and her classmates picked tomatoes for the bingtuan. In middle school, she picked cotton, which she hated: you had to spend hours bent over, or else with your knees ground into the dirt. Her mother told her that the work built character.
Sabit excelled as a student, and after graduating from high school, in 2004, she moved to Shanghai, to study Russian, hoping that it would open up career opportunities in other parts of the world. She loved Shanghai, which thrummed with the promise of glamorous, fast-paced living. But she was still an “ethnic person.” If she told a new acquaintance where she was from, it usually derailed the conversation. Some people, believing that “barbarians” lived in Xinjiang, expressed surprise that she spoke Mandarin fluently. Just before she completed her degree, the tech company Huawei hosted a job fair, and Sabit and her friends applied. She was the only one not offered an interview—because of her origins, she was sure.
Sabit brushed off this kind of prejudice, and became adept at eliding her background; when circumstances allowed, she fibbed and said that she was from some other region. She found a well-paying job with an investment company. The work was exciting—involving travel to places like Russia, Laos, and Hong Kong—and she liked her boss and her colleagues.
While Sabit was in Shanghai, her parents immigrated to Kazakhstan. They urged her to move there, too, but she resisted their pleas, believing that China was a more powerful country, more forward-leaning. She had spent most of her life striving to be a model citizen, and was convinced that her future lay with China—even as the politics of her homeland grew more fraught.
In 2009, a fight broke out in a toy factory in the southern province of Guangdong. Amid the melee, two Uyghur employees were killed by a Han mob. The next month, hundreds of Uyghurs took to the streets of Xinjiang’s capital city, Ürümqi, waving Chinese flags and chanting “Uyghur”—a call to be seen by the country’s leadership. The police cracked down, and riots erupted. Hundreds of people were injured or killed, and hundreds were arrested. More than forty Uyghurs were presumed disappeared. Dozens were later sentenced to death.
A year after the riots, Sabit was travelling to Kyrgyzstan with a group of co-workers. While trying to catch a connecting flight in Ürümqi, she was pulled aside by the authorities and told that, because she was from Xinjiang, she needed special permission to proceed. As her colleagues went ahead, she had to spend a day at a bureau for ethnic and religious affairs, getting the papers that she needed.
Having absorbed the Party’s propaganda, she believed that such measures were necessary. Still, she began to feel a deep alienation. No matter where she went in China, she remained an outsider. One day, back in Shanghai, she looked up at the city’s towering apartment buildings and asked herself, “What do they have to do with me?”
Not long afterward, she talked with a friend who had moved to Vancouver. Sabit flew over for a visit and was drawn to the openness and opportunity that she found; whenever she told a Canadian that she was from Xinjiang, the response was warm curiosity. She enrolled in a business-diploma program, and that summer she returned and found an apartment and a roommate. She landed a job as a junior accountant in a Vancouver company. She fell in with a circle of friends. She had met a man whom she loved. Her life was on a course that she had set, and it was good.
In the spring of 2017, Sabit’s father died suddenly, of a heart attack. Her mother called, but, to spare Sabit a shock, said only that he was in the hospital and that she should come see him. Sabit, on vacation at the time, dumped her plans and flew to Kazakhstan. Just before the plane took off, she logged on to a family group chat on her phone. Someone had written, “May his spirit rest in Heaven,” in Kazakh. But the message was in Arabic script, and Sabit could make out only “Heaven.” She spent the flight in painful uncertainty. After she arrived, another relative, unaware of her mother’s deception, offered condolences for her loss. Realizing that her father was dead, she burst into tears.
Sabit found her mother devastated with grief, so she decided to stay to support her. She asked her boss for several months off, but he couldn’t hold her position vacant for that long, so she resigned. She called friends in Vancouver and told them to put her things in storage.
That summer, Sabit and her mother returned to Kuytun, to settle her father’s affairs. Friends had warned her not to go: rumors had been circulating of an escalating crackdown on the indigenous peoples of Xinjiang—of Kazakh traders being disappeared at the border. But Sabit had made an uneventful trip there less than a month earlier, and she wanted to be by her mother’s side. For two weeks, they met with family and visited ancestors’ graves. The trip, she later recalled, “was full of tears and sadness.”
On July 15th, Sabit and her mother drove to Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, for a flight back to Kazakhstan. They arrived in the middle of the night, and the building was nearly empty. At customs, an officer inspected her mother’s passport and cleared her to go. But when Sabit handed over her documents he stopped, looked at her, and then took her passport into a back office.
“Don’t worry,” Sabit assured her mother, explaining that the delay was most likely another bureaucratic annoyance. Minutes later, the officer returned with an Uyghur official, who told Sabit to sit on a bench. “You cannot leave,” he said. “You can discuss between yourselves whether your mother will go or stay.”
In an emotional torrent, Sabit’s mother pleaded for an explanation. The officer replied, “We need to ask her a few questions.”
“You hurry and go,” Sabit told her mother. “If I don’t make the flight, I’ll come tomorrow.”
The two women had packed their clothes in the same bags. As they separated their things, her mother began to cry, and Sabit comforted her. Then she watched her mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, walk toward the gate. Once she was gone, the official turned to Sabit and coldly explained that she had been assigned a “border control”—a red flag, marking her for suspicion. “Your mother was here, so I didn’t mention it,” he said. “You should know what Xinjiang is like now. You’d best coöperate.”
II. “LIKE RATS”
As Sabit was deciding to move to Canada, in 2014, a dark future was being mapped out for Xinjiang in secret meetings in Beijing. Xi Jinping had become President the year before, and he was consolidating power. As he cleared away the obstacles to lifelong rule, he eventually subjected more than a million government officials to punishments that ranged from censure to execution. With China’s ethnic minorities, he was no less fixated on control.
Xinjiang’s turbulent history made it a particular object of concern. The region had never seemed fully within the Party’s grasp: it was a target for external meddling—the Russian tsar had once seized part of it—and a locus of nationalist sentiment, held over from its short-lived independence. Communist theoreticians long debated the role that nationalities should play in the march toward utopia—especially in peripheral societies that were not fully industrialized. The early Soviets took an accommodating approach and worked to build autonomous republics for ethnic groups. The Chinese pursued a more assimilationist policy.
In the fifties, Mao, recognizing that the Party’s hold on Xinjiang was weak, mobilized the bingtuan to set up its farms in the region’s north—a buffer against potential Soviet incursions. Revolutionaries flooded in, and within decades the population was forty per cent Han. Party officials, hoping to assimilate the indigenous residents, sought to strip away their traditions—their Muslim faith, their schools, even their native languages. The authorities came to regard Uyghur identity as “mistaken”: Uyghurs were Chinese.
In the late seventies, Deng Xiaoping took power, and rolled back the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. In Xinjiang, mosques were reopened and local languages were permitted, giving way to a cultural flourishing. But amid the new openness people began to express discontent with what remained a colonial relationship. Adhering to regional traditions, or even maintaining “Xinjiang time”—two hours behind Beijing—became a subtle act of dissent. Some locals staged protests, bearing placards that read “Chinese Out of Xinjiang.” A few radicals discussed an insurgency.
In April, 1990, near the city of Kashgar, a conflagration broke out between locals and the authorities—apparently started by an amateurish group of militants and then joined by demonstrators who did not fully grasp what was happening. Police and members of the bingtuan quickly quashed the violence. It had been only a year since the Tiananmen Square protests, and the country’s ruling élite had little tolerance for disunity. A year later, when the Soviet Union fell, the Chinese Communist Party—convinced that ethnic nationalism had helped tear the former superpower to pieces—became even more alarmed.
With near-paranoid intensity, the government pursued any perceived sign of “splitism.” The Party secretary of Kashgar, Zhu Hailun, was among the most aggressive. Abduweli Ayup, who worked for Zhu as a translator and an aide, recalled that, in March, 1998, cotton farmers protested a ruling that barred them from planting vegetable patches. Zhu railed at them for being separatists, adding, “You’re using your mosques as forts!” On another occasion, he derided the Quran, telling an Uyghur audience, “Your God is shit.” Zhu ordered Ayup to lead a door-to-door hunt for families harboring nationalist or religious books—telling him that he was not to go home until he succeeded. Ayup worked until dawn, rousing people. But, he said, “I couldn’t find any books at all.”
Xinjiang’s insurgents had proved unable to gather many adherents; locals favored the Sufi tradition of Islam, which emphasizes mysticism, not politics. At the time of the September 11th attacks, there was no terrorist violence to speak of in the region. But Osama bin Laden’s operation, planned across the border in Afghanistan, put a new and urgent frame around the old anxieties. Chinese authorities drew up a long list of incidents that they claimed were examples of jihad, and made their case to the U.S. State Department. Many of the incidents were impossible to verify, or to distinguish from nonpolitical violence. In China, mass attacks—with knives, axes, or even improvised explosives—are startlingly common, and often have nothing to do with ethnic unrest. Not long ago, a man walked into a school in Yunnan Province and sprayed fifty-four people with sodium hydroxide, to enact “revenge on society,” officials said. Similarly, a paraplegic assailant from eastern China detonated a bomb at one of Beijing’s international airports—apparently an act of retaliation for a police beating. The bombing was treated as a one-off incident. An Uyghur, frustrated that this would never be the case in Xinjiang, asked on Twitter, “Why is everything we do terrorism?”
As the 2008 Olympics approached, Chinese authorities became obsessed with the concept of weiwen, or “stability maintenance”—intensifying repression with a ferocity that the Chinese sociologist Sun Liping compared to North Korea’s. Sun, who had served on a committee that reviewed Xi Jinping’s doctoral dissertation, noted that the Party was a captive of its own delusions: by overestimating the chance of an imminent societal rupture, it had become blind to the root causes of discontent. Reflexive crackdowns designed to eliminate a “phantom of instability,” Sun warned, would lead to a downward spiral of repression and unrest, which could bring about the very collapse that had been feared all along.
Nowhere did this seem more apt than in Xinjiang, where China’s leaders continually appeared to mistake popular discontent for a growing insurgency. The 2009 protests in Ürümqi—following similar ones in Tibet—caused Party theorists to call for engineering a monocultural society, a single “state-race,” to help pave the way for “a new type of superpower.” One influential domestic-security official noted, “Stability is about liberating man, standardizing man, developing man.”
A new Party secretary in Ürümqi began to pursue such a policy: women were told not to wear veils, Uyghur books and Web sites were banned, historic buildings were demolished. Within a few years, the downward spiral that Sun Liping had warned of began to occur. In the autumn of 2013, an Uyghur man, accompanied by two family members, plowed an S.U.V. into a crowd of tourists in Tiananmen Square—possibly because his local mosque had been damaged during a raid. The S.U.V., filled with homemade incendiary devices, caught fire. The man and his family died, but not before killing two pedestrians and injuring thirty-eight others.
Several months later, in Yunnan Province, a small group of assailants dressed in black stormed a train station and, wielding knives, brutally killed twenty-nine bystanders and injured more than a hundred and forty others. Although no organization claimed responsibility for the incident, an insurgent group based overseas celebrated the attack. The authorities declared that the assailants were Uyghur separatists, and in Beijing the incident was called “China’s 9/11.” Xi was enraged. “We should unite the people to build a copper and iron wall against terrorism,” he told the Politburo. “Make terrorists like rats scurrying across the street, with everybody shouting, ‘Beat them!’ ”
In April, 2014, Xi travelled to Xinjiang. At a police station in Kashgar, he examined weapons on a wall. “The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” he said during the trip. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, axe heads, and cold steel weapons.” He added, “We must be as harsh as them, and show absolutely no mercy.”
On the final day of his visit, two suicide bombers attacked a railway station in Ürümqi, injuring dozens of people and killing one. At a high-level meeting in Beijing, Xi railed against religious extremism. “It’s like taking a drug,” he said. “You lose your sense, go crazy, and will do anything.”
Soon afterward, the Party leadership in Xinjiang announced a “People’s War.” The focus was on separatism, terrorism, and extremism—the “Three Evil Forces.” The region’s top official took up the campaign, but Xi grew dissatisfied with him, and two years later appointed a replacement: Chen Quanguo, then the Party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region—a tough-minded apparatchik whose loyalty was beyond question.
Ambitious and regimented, Chen had served in the military and then risen quickly through the political ranks. When he arrived in Tibet, in 2011, monks were immolating themselves—an urgent response to a long-running crackdown, which the Dalai Lama called a “cultural genocide.” The crisis was generating international headlines.
In a place where oppression had become the norm, Chen did not stand out for his use of physical violence. Instead, he distinguished himself as a systematizer of authoritarian tactics, ready to target entire groups of people with methods that pervaded daily life.
The vast majority of self-immolations were occurring to the east of the autonomous region, so Chen tightened the borders of his jurisdiction, restricting entry for Tibetans from outside it. In Lhasa, he made it impossible to buy gas without an I.D. He built hundreds of urban police depots, called “convenience stations,” which were arranged in close formation—an overwhelming display of force. He dispatched more than twenty thousand Communist Party cadres into villages and rural monasteries, to propagandize and to surveil. Some locals reported that members of volunteer groups called the Red Armband Patrols upended homes to confiscate photos of the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese authorities blamed for the unrest. Detentions appeared to rise. In 2012, when a large number of Tibetans travelled to India to receive a blessing from the Dalai Lama, Chen had them consigned to makeshift reëducation facilities.
The self-immolations continued in neighboring territories, but Chen’s jurisdiction recorded only one in the next four years. “We have followed the law in striking out, and relentlessly pounding at illegal organizations and key figures,” he declared. He had a flair for cultivating his superiors. In March, 2016, just before his appointment to Xinjiang, delegates from his region arrived at the National People’s Congress, in Beijing, wearing pins with Xi’s image on them—“a spontaneous act to show gratitude,” state media noted. The Party deemed Chen’s tactics a success.
In Xinjiang, Chen wore his thin, jet-black hair in a precise coiffure, and travelled with a security detail brought with him from Tibet. Rather than move into the Party secretary’s residence, he set himself up in a hotel that was controlled by the government and secured by the People’s Liberation Army. The building was in close proximity to facilities that housed police organizations, and Chen had a high-speed data line run from his residence into the region’s digital-security infrastructure.
Xi had once compared reform to a meal, noting that after the meat is eaten what’s left is hard to chew. Chen made it clear that he came to “gnaw bones.” He titled one of his speeches “To Unswervingly Implement the Xinjiang Strategy of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping at the Core.”
His predecessor had borrowed from his Tibet strategy, deploying two hundred thousand Party cadres in Xinjiang. Chen increased their numbers to a million, and urged them to go from house to house, and grow “close to the masses, emotionally.” Under a program called Becoming a Family, local Party officials introduced them to indigenous households, declaring, “These are your new relatives.” Cadres imposed themselves, stopping by for meals; sometimes they were required to stay overnight. Terrified residents forced smiles, politely served them, engaged their questions, and even offered them their beds.
Assisted by Zhu Hailun, who by then had become the deputy Party leader of Xinjiang, Chen recruited tens of thousands of “assistant police officers,” for a force that could implement mass arrests and also quell any unrest that they provoked. He began constructing thousands of “convenience stations,” seeking to impose an “iron grid” on urban life. He set out to divide the population into three categories—trusted, average, untrustworthy—and to detain anyone who could not be proved sufficiently loyal.
In early 2017, half a year after Chen arrived, he prepared his leadership for a long, complex, and “very fierce” campaign. “Take this crackdown as the top project,” he instructed them, noting that it was necessary “to preëmpt the enemy, to strike at the outset.” The mission, he said, was to rip out the separatist problem by its roots. He expressed zero tolerance for any “two-faced” officials who were unwilling to zealously carry out his plan.
Pump jacks. (photo: Martina Birnbaum/Getty Images)
One Researcher's Quest to Quantify the Environmental Cost of Abandoned Oil Wells
Naveena Sadasivam and Christopher Collins, Grist and The Texas Observer
Excerpt: "No two geological formations are the same, so without more detailed data from major oil- and gas-producing states, it's impossible to say precisely the damage that abandoned wells may be doing to the planet."
Unplugged wells could be quietly leaking millions of pounds of methane in West Texas.
my Townsend-Small has been chasing methane her entire professional life. The quest has taken her from Southern California freeways to sewage plants to animal feedlots. Sniffing out the potent greenhouse gas, which traps 86 times as much heat as carbon dioxide after it’s emitted into the atmosphere, has required her to breathalyze cows and take chemical measurements at large manure lagoons. When fracking took off around 2010, Townsend-Small shifted her focus to a new and growing problem: methane leaks from oil and gas activity.
Natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane, was pitched as a fuel that could transition the U.S. to renewable energy, since it burns more cleanly than coal and is naturally abundant — and, thanks to fracking, newly inexpensive to extract. But the thinking at the time missed an important detail: The thousands of wells drilled, the millions of miles of pipeline that transported natural gas, and the refineries that processed it all leaked methane. Natural gas plants emit about half as much carbon dioxide as coal plants, but without knowing how much methane leaks when extracting and moving natural gas, the true climate effects cannot be assessed. As regulators and policymakers caught on to this fact, Townsend-Small’s work began to take on new significance.
“That sort of catalyzed a giant push for more research on methane emissions across the whole supply chain,” Townsend-Small said.
Townsend-Small began trying to quantify just how much methane was leaking from wells and pipelines. She investigated whether methane from fracking sites may have tainted groundwater in rural Ohio and collected data on pipeline and compressor station leaks in Colorado. The work of Townsend-Small and other environmental scientists tracking greenhouse gases culminated in a 2018 study finding that 2.3 percent of the natural gas extracted in the country either leaked or was directly released into the air — the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emitted by all coal plants operating at the time.
Distressingly, a small but unknown volume of those emissions come from wells that no longer produce fossil fuels at all, because the companies responsible for them have walked away from their legal obligation to seal them with cement after use. As a result, hundreds of thousands of holes in the ground are direct conduits between the atmosphere and vast reserves of fossil fuels underground, allowing them to quietly belch methane for years with no one being the wiser.
In 2016, Townsend-Small found that 40 percent of unplugged wells she tested in Colorado, Wyoming, Ohio, and Utah were emitting methane. On average, each unplugged well was leaking about 10 grams of methane each hour, contributing the annual carbon equivalent of burning more than 2,400 pounds of coal each year. The EPA used her research to estimate that the nation’s approximately 3.1 million abandoned wells were spewing greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to burning more than 16 million barrels of oil.
Such attempts to quantify methane emissions nationally come with fairly large margins of error, primarily because research on this front is scarce and what does exist is based on surveys in the Appalachian Basin. No two geological formations are the same, so without more detailed data from major oil- and gas-producing states, it’s impossible to say precisely the damage that abandoned wells may be doing to the planet. That’s why Townsend-Small recently set out to fill a Texas-sized hole in the research: The Lone Star State is the largest producer of oil and gas in the country and has thousands of abandoned wells, but its methane emissions have never been systematically measured.
Last year, after Grist and the Texas Observer introduced Townsend-Small and a research assistant to West Texas landowners with inactive wells on their properties, the researchers used a U.S. Interior Department grant to conduct what they believe is the first-ever academic study of methane emissions from abandoned wells in Texas. Their findings, which were recently published in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, suggest Texas’ inactive wells could be emitting enough methane to power more than 15,000 homes for a year. Their findings provide more granular data for the EPA and state regulators to rely on when assessing the oil and gas industry’s contribution to climate change.
To conduct her research, Townsend-Small drove down to Pecos County, Texas, from Ohio, where she is now an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, and spent three days surveying 40 wells, nearly half of which were actively leaking methane. Most of the sites, which are connected by thin dirt pathways just wide enough for a truck to pass through, are rough-cut openings in dense mesquite. There, Townsend-Small and her assistant knelt in the sand to set up their equipment: a computerized instrument housed inside a briefcase that’s attached to a vacuum hose. The hose is secured to a section of the oil well that’s open to the atmosphere, and the computer tells the researchers how much methane the sampled air contains. They collected specimens by using a syringe and plunging it into a glass vial. Sometimes they had to use strips of plastic and elastic bands to trap enough wellhead gas to measure.
Of the 17 wells where methane leaks were detected, the emission rates ranged from 0.2 to 132 grams an hour. Just three wells at the high end of that range were responsible for 94 percent of all emissions. The phenomenon — in which a handful of especially leaky wells that Townsend-Small and other researchers call “super emitters” are responsible for the vast majority of emissions — is a pattern that’s also been observed in the Appalachian Basin and other oil fields in the country.
“If you want to make a big impact, you only have to fix the big leakers,” Townsend-Small told Grist and the Texas Observer.
If Texas’ roughly 102,000 inactive and abandoned wells leak at a rate similar to the wells Townsend-Small sampled, they could be emitting more than 5.5 million kilograms of methane into the atmosphere each year. That’s the equivalent of burning more than 150 million pounds of coal.
A subset of the wells examined by Townsend-Small’s research are so-called shut-in wells, which are not technically abandoned because their operators claim they may someday revive them, but nevertheless often lie idle for several years when oil prices are low. Of the 26 shut-in wells surveyed, 12 were emitting methane. All three “super emitter” wells were shut-in. Last year, as a global decline in demand sent oil prices plummeting, a large number of legacy wells were idled.
“There’s a record number of shut-in wells in the United States right now, especially these older conventional wells, which were already producing a very small amount,” said Townsend-Small.
Townsend-Small said that more research is required to understand the volume of particularly toxic chemicals, like benzene and toluene, that may be leaking from abandoned and idled wells alongside methane. Research has demonstrated that living near active oil and gas sites leads to poorer health outcomes, including a higher risk of cancer, increased odds of underweight newborns, and a higher likelihood of preterm birth. But whether those trends hold true for those living near abandoned wells is an open question. A 2020 study by a group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that women who lived close to inactive wells were more likely to give birth to underweight and preterm babies. Their findings are inconclusive, but they hypothesized that a slew of toxic chemicals that are often released in tandem with methane may be driving the health effects. (Editor’s note: One of the paper’s co-authors is Rachel Morello-Frosch, who is a member of Grist’s board.)
At some of the well sites Townsend-Small visited, the stench of hydrogen sulfide, a gas that is deadly to humans in large quantities, hung heavy in the air. She described being overwhelmed by the smell during at least six well site visits. Those wells were leaking methane as well as releasing chemical-laden water. After those visits, Townsend-Small and her assistant felt nauseous for several hours, waking up multiple times in the night. The wells are just a few miles away from Buena Vista High School as well as the Pecos River, a source of irrigation water in the area.
“That needs to be investigated further,” she said.
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