02 April 21
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Garrison Keillor | Still Thinking of George Floyd, Wishing I'd Known Him
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "I am still thinking about George Floyd almost a year after he died with the cop's knee on his neck because it was in south Minneapolis, a few blocks from the Brethren Meeting Hall I attended as a kid, near where my aunts Margaret and Ruby lived."
I wish I had met him but I didn’t patronize the Conga Latin Bistro where he worked security and I didn’t eat at the Trinidadian café he liked. He’d come here from his hometown of Houston where he grew up in the projects in Beyoncé’s old neighborhood. He was a high school basketball star, went to college but it didn’t take, did some hip-hop and rap, did drugs, did prison time, and got religion. He attended a charismatic church that met on a basketball court and he was the guy who hauled a horse-watering trough out on the floor for the pastor to baptize people in. He came north to get in a drug rehab program and change his life.
He’d been unusually tall since middle school and knew that this made him appear threatening and to avoid trouble, he adopted a friendly demeanor all his life. He grew to 6’7” and 225 lbs. He made himself meek and blessed are the meek. He was easygoing, even sort of shy. Shaking hands, he used two hands. He was a hugger. He could lift up a troublemaker and carry him out of the Club. He tried to dance but was too tall, and people laughed at him, and he didn’t mind. He kept a Bible by his bed and in his struggles with addiction, he and his girlfriend Courteney made a practice of standing together, hand in hand, and reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. A tall Black man far from his family, dealing with demons, stood close to his girlfriend and they both said, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me” and declared their faith in goodness and mercy.
He was accused of passing a counterfeit $20 bill and he died with the officer’s knee on his neck and thanks to the onlookers who recorded his death with their cellphones, it became the most famous death in a viral year of anonymous deaths, and he was made into a social cause. This gentle giant had never expressed himself as a victim; he grew up well-loved and all his life he never felt excluded but loved the ones he was with, just as Christ told him to do. Everyone was his neighbor.
South Minneapolis in my youth was highly segregated, no different from any Southern city, and if Margaret or Ruby had met George, they might have been alarmed. When I was 17, my friends and I played basketball against a team of big Black guys in Minneapolis and we were scared speechless and could hardly dribble the ball. George was aware of the effect of his size and color but his gentleness won the day, and if he had spoken the psalm to my aunts and held out his hand, I believe they would’ve taken it in theirs. They would be moved that he knew the words by heart, the green pastures and still waters, the paths of righteousness. George knew the meaning of “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies” — it means that even in the midst of hate, there is beauty and generosity and goodness.
There is also silliness. Our secular liberal society does not know how to honor a godly man and in honor of George Floyd, white institutions issued reams of mission statements about inclusivity and diversity and banning words such as “master” that might be triggers. The “Massa” in Massachusetts could be a trigger and maybe it should change its name to Minnechusetts. To me, this isn’t justice, it’s masturbation, but in the world we live in, gesture trumps reality.
George Floyd was a religious man and the corner where he died is now a shrine. The mob that burned and looted after his death mistook him for something else. Minneapolis is honored by his life, the fact that he sought redemption here. He has already forgiven the cop. I know this. We can honor him by reaching out to others in trouble, as we are, and taking their hand and saying, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” and the pasture and waters and if I forget the rod and the staff, or if I skip the anointing of the head with oil and go to the cup running over, you correct me, and in so doing, you and I will light a candle on the table that’s been prepared for us. God rest your soul, George, and in perpetual light may you at last be able to dance.
Pro-Trump mob storm the Capitol on 6 January 2021. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Oath Keepers Founder Swapped Calls With Members During Capitol Attack
Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK
Bekiempis writes:
Stewart Rhodes made numerous calls with three members of the far-right group, prosecutors say in new indictment
he founder of far-right group the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, his lieutenant, and three members of the militia who guarded Donald Trump ally Roger Stone swapped numerous phone calls in a three-hour period on 6 January when the Capitol was attacked by a mob, prosecutors said Thursday.
These exchanges coincided with the initial assault on police barricades outside Congress, and continued into when the three guards breached the US Capitol building, according to the Washington Post.
Prosecutors made this claim in a new indictment, which added two of these guards – Joshua James and Roberto Minuta – to an ongoing Oath Keepers conspiracy case. James and Minuta were both previously charged.
The case has 12 defendants, who are facing charges such as conspiracy, and obstruction of an official proceeding. Four of these co-defendants, including James and Minuta, have yet to enter pleas. The others have pleaded not guilty.
“In response to a call for individuals to head to the Capitol after the building was breached, James and Minuta drove to the Capitol in a golf cart, at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles with Minuta stating, ‘Patriots are storming the Capitol … so we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now … it’s going down guys’,” federal prosecutors said.
Rhodes has previously denied there was a plan to breach Congress and insisted that authorities were trying to establish a bogus conspiracy. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” he remarked to Texas Republicans during a recent rally in Laredo.
Rhodes also implored ex-president Trump’s supporters to “not cower in fear”, maintaining that federal authorities were “trying to get rid of us so they can get to you”. Rhodes also reportedly said: “If we actually intended to take over the Capitol, we’d have taken it, and we’d have brought guns.”
Neither Rhodes nor Stone have yet been accused of wrongdoing, The Post noted.
Chicago police shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo. (photo: Toledo Family)
ALSO SEE: Police Officers Are Prosecuted for Murder in
Less Than 2 Percent of Fatal Shootings
Family of 13-Year-Old Boy Killed by Chicago Police Call Incident a 'Reprehensible Crime,' Call for Justice
Jessica D'Onofrio, ABC 7 Chicago
D'Onofrio writes: "The family of a 13-year-old boy killed by Chicago police earlier this week in an 'armed confrontation' has hired an attorney and wants to seek justice for his death."
Adam Toledo, 13-year-old shot in Little Village, wanted to become a police officer, family said
Adam Toledo was shot and killed by police Monday after an early morning Shot Spotter alert in the 2300-block of South Sawyer.
The teen was identified Thursday as Toledo of Little Village by the Cook County medical examiner's office.
Officers say the 13-year-old was armed and fled from police with another suspect.
Toledo's life ended in an alley after what Chicago police say was an "armed confrontation." The officer fired one shot, according to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability.
Police shared a photo of a gun allegedly recovered at the scene. A second suspect, 21-year-old Ruben Roman, is charged in the incident with a misdemeanor for resisting an officer.
A source told ABC 7 Chicago Roman is a known gang member.
The boy's family released a statement overnight Thursday, calling his death the result of "unreasonable conduct of a Chicago Police Officer."
The statement also said that although Toledo was killed Monday, his family was not notified for two days.
"Adam was a seventh grade student at Garvey School, enjoyed sports and was a good kid. He did not deserve to die the way he did," the statement said. "The Toledo Family will seek justice for this reprehensible crime."
Weiss Ortiz PC is now representing the family.
Alderman George Cardenas of the 12th Ward said Friday that questions remain as to why Roman was with Toledo in the middle of the night.
"We need to get ahold of ourselves and right the rudder in a big way, and that's the outreach to youth organizations to see what's going on on the ground, and it's gonna take some resources, but we have to do it," Cardenas said.
Ramiro Rodriguez is pastor of Amor de Dios United Methodist Church, which is right next to the shooting scene. He said he's worried about the youth in the area.
"This year we're gonna have 15 years serving our community, making sure our people, our young kids, have food on their tables. And look what happened: We are losing a child every year," he said.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is calling for the release of bodycam video from the incident.
The incident was caught on body camera video, but is unable to be released without a court order given Toledo's young age, according to COPA.
A spokesperson for COPA said in an updated statement late Thursday: "COPA is currently making every effort and researching all legal avenues that will allow for the public release of all video materials which capture the tragic fatal shooting of 13 year old Adam Toledo."
"He was so full of life," said Elizabeth Toledo, his mother, on Thursday. "They just took it away from him."
Toledo was overwhelmed with loss and surrounded by family as she planned her 13-year-old son's funeral.
"I just want justice. I just want answers ... what happened?" Toledo said. "I just want justice for my son. That's all."
Toledo's mom said he used to sneak out at night while she was asleep, and she had filed a missing person's report for her son last Thursday after she noticed he was missing.
She told ABC7 that Toledo eventually came back on Saturday, but had snuck out again Sunday night.
"Why did he shot at him if there's other ways?" Toledo said. "He was a little boy. Obviously he was gonna get scared."
Toledo's mom said he had aspirations of becoming a police officer one day.
The officer involved in the shooting was placed on desk duty for 30 days while the Civilian Office of Police Accountability investigates the shooting, police said.
FULL STATEMENT FROM TOLEDO FAMILY
"Adam Toledo was killed early Monday morning, due to the unreasonable conduct of a Chicago Police Officer. We are confident that the Chicago Police Department and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability will conduct a thorough investigation, that there will be transparency, and that Toledo Family wilt find out the truth of what happened to Adam. Adam was killed on March 29th, 2021, but the Toledo Family was only notified of his death two days later. Adam was a seventh grade student at Garvey School, enjoyed sports and was a good kid. He did not deserve to die the way he did. The Toledo Family will seek justice for this reprehensible crime and requests privacy during this time of mourning. The Toledo Family is represented by Weiss Ortiz PC."
State Rep. Park Cannon, D-Atlanta, is placed into the back of a Georgia State Capitol patrol car after being arrested by Georgia State Troopers at the Georgia State Capitol Building in Atlanta, Thursday, March 25, 2021. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Atlanta Journal Constitution)
Georgia Lawmaker Arrested for Knocking on Gov. Kemp's Door Calls Possible 8-Year Prison Term 'Unfounded'
Marquise Francis, Yahoo! News
Francis writes:
eorgia state Rep. Park Cannon, who was arrested last week after attempting to gain access to the office where Gov. Brian Kemp was signing a controversial voting restriction bill into law, said Thursday that her actions were justified.
“I felt as if time was moving in slow motion,” Cannon said, fighting back tears as she described the details of the incident. “My experience was painful, both physically and emotionally, but today I stand before you to say as horrible as that experience was ... I believe the governor signing into law the most comprehensive voter suppression bill in the country is a far more serious crime.”
It was the first time Cannon has spoken publicly about the incident since her arrest. Video of her knocking on the door to Kemp’s office before being forcibly removed by police went viral on social media, drawing further attention to the new restrictions on voting.
Flanked by a handful of supporters and fellow Democratic lawmakers at the base of a mural of civil rights icon John Lewis in Atlanta, Cannon described the law as a “voter suppression bill” and said that with “one stroke of a pen” Kemp “erased decades of sacrifices, incalculable hours of work, marches, prayers, tears and ... minimized the deaths of thousands who have paid the ultimate price to vote.”
The Election Integrity Act of 2021, or Senate Bill 202, imposes new voter ID requirements for absentee ballots, limits the number of drop boxes across the state and gives state-level officials the power to take over county election boards, possibly allowing GOP officials to decide the ballot count in Democratic strongholds.
The bill, which Kemp signed into law just over an hour after it was passed in the General Assembly, also criminalizes passing out food or drinks to voters waiting in line.
Republicans say the law’s stricter requirements will ensure that future Georgia elections will be more secure, but Democrats contend it was designed to suppress the elderly and Black vote, and was written in direct response to GOP losses in the 2020 presidential election in the state as well as two runoff contests that handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate. A record 5 million Georgians voted in the last election cycle.
Fortune 500 companies based in Georgia and others headquartered nationally, including Delta, Home Depot and Coca-Cola, have condemned the new election law.
In a Wednesday memo to Delta employees, CEO Ed Bastian said it was “evident that the bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong.”
Cannon is now facing two felony charges from last week’s arrest — obstruction and preventing or disrupting a General Assembly session, according to the Fulton County Department of Public Safety website.
She told reporters Thursday that she is facing eight years in prison for those charges, which she called “unfounded.” Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr did not respond to a request from Yahoo News for comment for this story.
Park’s attorneys say the Democratic legislator is now raising money for her legal defense on a GoFundMe page titled “I Stand With Park.”
The fund’s initial goal is set at $1 million, and the page says that “any remaining funds will be used to protect Voting Rights.”
Security footage from an immigration detention facility in Arizona shows staff firing pepper spray at detainees who were peacefully protesting on April 13, 2020. (photo: DHS)
DHS Watchdog Finds Widespread Mistreatment of Immigrants at ICE Facility
Camilo Montoya-Galvez, CBS News
Montoya-Galvez writes: "Immigrants held at an immigration detention center in Arizona were subject to widespread mistreatment last year, ranging from inadequate medical care to excessive punishment for peacefully protesting lax coronavirus mitigation efforts, an internal government watchdog found."
During a remote inspection of the La Palma Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General (OIG) found violations that jeopardized "the health, safety, and rights" of detainees, according to a report published Thursday. Citing nearly 1,300 grievances from immigrants held at the detention facility, the internal watchdog said detainees depicted "an environment of mistreatment and verbal abuse."
Immigrants held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Eloy, which is run by a for-profit prison company, told inspectors they held peaceful protests in April 2020 because they were concerned that staff was not providing them the necessary protective equipment to curb the spread of the coronavirus. The detention center's staff deployed pepper spray to quell one of the protests on April 13, according to Thursday's report and surveillance footage.
A screenshot of the surveillance footage from April 13 shows several dozen detainees sitting or standing outside their holding cells and inside the common eating area as part of a peaceful protest. Another screenshot from later that day shows at least a dozen facility employees, many equipped with riot shields, aiming handheld pepper spray devices at a smaller group of detainees laying on the floor. The image captures one staffer spraying an immigrant who appears to be trying to stand up.
One immigrant detainee said he was injured by the pepper spray balls, but did not file a grievance report fearing reprisals by facility staff. Those who did file grievances had their complaints rejected by detention center employees, the OIG report said.
Detainees told inspectors that immigrants who participated in the protests were also punished "with lengthy stays in segregation." According to the inspectors, those held in segregation reported being denied access to clean bedding and clothing, legal materials, the commissary, haircuts and recreation — required services for all detainees.
In addition to the alleged physical abuse, the report found that facility staff demeaned and verbally abused detainees, citing one grievance by an immigrant who reported being called a racial slur by a staffer who allegedly hanged up a family call and threatened to pepper spray him.
Thursday's report corroborated detainees' concerns about the spread of the coronavirus inside the Arizona detention facility. Inspectors said they found that facility staff failed to ensure all detainees had and used face masks and practiced social distancing, noting the lax protocols "may have contributed to the widespread COVID-19 outbreak at the facility."
In August, more than 200 of 1,200 immigrants held at the Eloy facility tested positive for the coronavirus.
Inspectors also detailed subpar medical services, a common finding in external and internal reports on ICE's sprawling detention system, which is primarily comprised of county jails and detention facilities operated by for-prison companies, like CoreCivic. The reports said the Eloy's facility medical unit was "critically understaffed," citing 21 vacancies that inspectors determined may have slowed responses to detainee sick calls and efforts to provide immigrants prescribed medication.
"One detainee, who is a cancer patient, ran out of leukemia medication after the medical staff did not order a refill on time," the report said. "Since the detainee did not hold the medication, he was not aware of when the medication was running out or how long it would take medical staff to obtain a refill."
DHS inspectors found that employees at the Arizona detention facility had properly complied with ICE rules on separating immigrants with only civil immigration violations from those with criminal records. All immigrants held by ICE, including those with criminal charges or convictions, are, legally, in civil detention.
In its response to the report, ICE disagreed with most of the findings. It said the use-of-force examples cited in the report complied with the agency's detention rules set in 2011 and that staff who mistreated detainees "received remedial action." The agency also maintained that it was offering immigrants in segregation the required services.
ICE said the Eloy facility was complying with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) protocols to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. The agency said it has provided immigrants in the facility soap and face coverings, as well as training on social distancing.
A spokeswoman for CoreCivic told CBS News that the company agrees with ICE's response, saying the report "has it wrong about [La Palma Correctional Center] in more ways than it has it right."
"We operate every day in a challenging environment that was made all the more difficult by a pandemic with which the entire world has and continues to struggle with," spokeswoman Amanda Gilchrist said in a statement. "We always appreciate the feedback and accountability that our partners provide, and we strive every day to do better in our service to them and the people in our care."
DHS inspectors noted that during a follow-up inspection in 2021, the Eloy detention center was complying with rules related to medical services for immigrants in segregation. The report also said the facility instituted a new policy requiring staff to monitor and automatically refill the medication for detainees with chronic medical conditions.
UNICEF nutritionist Stefany Martinez diagnoses 11-month-old Dilcia Cajbon with acute malnutrition on March 26. (photo: Kevin Sieff/The Washington Post)
The Reason Many Guatemalans Are Coming to the Border? A Profound Hunger Crisis.
Kevin Sieff, The Washington Post
Sieff writes: "So far this year, more unaccompanied minors processed by immigration agents are from Guatemala than any other country. Analysts and U.S. officials refer obliquely to 'poverty' as an underlying cause of that influx. But often the reason is far more specific: hunger."
he team of nutritionists looked at 11-month-old Dilcia Cajbon, her ribs visible through her skin, and they knew immediately.
“Severe acute malnutrition,” said Stefany Martinez, the leader of the UNICEF team, as the child was lifted onto a scale.
Like many in this rural stretch of Guatemala, Dilcia’s family was down to one meal a day. Storms had flooded the nearby palm plantation, the biggest source of local employment. To eke out what little the family had to eat, Dilcia’s mother had held off on giving her youngest child solid food.
As more and more Central American families arrive at the United States’ southern border, the municipality of Panzós offers a stark illustration of the deepening food crisis that is contributing to the new wave of migration.
So far this year, more unaccompanied minors processed by immigration agents are from Guatemala than any other country. Analysts and U.S. officials refer obliquely to “poverty” as an underlying cause of that influx. But often the reason is far more specific: hunger.
“What we hear is, ‘If I can’t get food on my table, what am I doing here?’ ” said Ana María Méndez, Oxfam’s Guatemala country director.
Guatemala now has the sixth-highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world. The number of acute cases in children, according to one new Guatemalan government study, doubled between 2019 and 2020.
The crisis was caused in part by failed harvests linked to climate change, a string of natural disasters and a nearly nonexistent official response. Supply-chain disruptions then led to a spike in prices. The cost of beans in Guatemala went up 19.6 percent last year, according to the World Food Program.
In interviews with migrants preparing to leave Guatemala and others who have recently arrived in the United States, the majority mentioned food insecurity as a significant factor in their decisions to leave. In Indigenous communities in the country’s western highlands, where a disproportionate number of people are leaving, the chronic child malnutrition rate hovers around 70 percent, higher than any country in the world.
“When we stopped working, we stopped eating,” said Guillermo Chub, from the village of Tinajitas in Panzós, who plans to emigrate in the coming months.
Chub said he lost his job on the palm plantation late last year when the Polochic River flooded, destroying the farmland on either side of it. The federal government sent food that lasted only one day. As his family reduced their daily meals from three to two to one, he decided it was time to head to the United States.
Panzós was one of the municipalities prioritized by the Obama administration and the Guatemalan government in 2015, when the United States tried to deter a previous wave of migration. President Barack Obama created a $1 billion aid package that was meant to tackle the root causes of migration, including food insecurity.
But the malnutrition rate here — and across Guatemala — has increased since that aid effort was implemented. The collective impact of hurricanes, droughts, an economic contraction and a government seemingly unconcerned with inequality has far outstripped any piecemeal development efforts.
“At this pace, it will require 100 years for Guatemala to eradicate chronic malnutrition,” said Carlos Carrera, the country director for UNICEF.
In a new report, the World Food Program predicts 428,000 Guatemalans will have reached a “Phase 4” level of food-insecurity emergency this year — the highest before famine.
Aid groups are trying to prevent that. When the UNICEF team identified malnourished children such as Dilcia in Panzós last week, they gave the families packages of special supplementary food. But it would be up to the Guatemalan health department to follow up on those cases, which, in remote parts of the country, was unlikely.
Now, as the Biden administration prepares to launch its own $4 billion aid package aimed at reducing migration from Central America, U.S. officials are discovering anew how deeply rooted the causes are. Even as Guatemala’s gross domestic product has grown, its malnutrition rate has continued to rise. Last year, the pandemic thrust an additional 1 million Guatemalans into poverty, according to the World Bank.
In the department of Quiché, farmers said their harvests last year were devastated by a historic drought. The cost of fertilizer had risen. Movement restrictions during the pandemic meant that farmers couldn’t find day labor jobs to make up for those losses.
“We went days without eating,” said Juan Hernandez, 45, who is planning to leave his village of Xix in the coming days. “Sometimes we just shared tortillas.”
A smuggler is charging $15,000 to take Hernandez and his 19-year-old daughter to Florida, he said. He didn’t have a “single dollar,” but he would borrow the money at interest from friends already living and working in the United States.
With increasingly easy access to human smugglers and the loans to pay them, many here now weigh the risks of migration against a worsening standard of living. Even the country’s poorest people can secure the means of migration — albeit through predatory lenders and often exploitative smuggling networks. Many have friends or relatives who have made the trip successfully, sending WhatsApp messages touting their new jobs.
In the country’s highlands, large homes paid for by those already in the United States — what some scholars call “remittance architecture” — are daily reminders of the upside of migration. But they’ve also created a new dynamic in rural Guatemala, where a growing divide has emerged between those mired in poverty and malnutrition and those, sometimes living just yards away, who have entered a kind of middle-class life through American wages.
“They say you get a job within two days to a week,” Hernandez said. “Some work in the fields, others in construction.”
In the northwestern town of Cuilco last year, an unprecedented snowstorm wiped out acres of cornfields, devastating both the area’s labor market and its source of food in a single blow. Celso, 16, had a conversation with his father as the family of five struggled to piece together three meals a day. As the oldest son, he was seen as bearing responsibility for the family.
“We both decided that I should go to help,” he said.
Celso arrived in South Florida in January. He owed his smuggler $8,000, so he began cutting plywood at a construction site for $10.50 per hour, rather than attending high school. He’s studying English at night.
Other children had responded to that same calculus.
“I came because we didn’t have anything to eat,” 12-year-old Oscar told an Agence France-Presse videographer through tears last week after crossing the Rio Grande.
He walked along a dirt road with a group of other children and families, all seeking to turn themselves in to Border Patrol agents.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. (photo: Caroline Brehman/Getty)
'Green New Deal' Leaders See Biden Climate Plans as Partial Victory
Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR
Kurtzleben writes:
ep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a blunt initial response to the prospect of a new, climate-focused infrastructure package weighing in at around $2 trillion.
"The size of it is disappointing. It's not enough," she said.
However, in President Biden's new plan — not to mention the conversation within the Democratic Party around climate change — Ocasio-Cortez also sees success for the Green New Deal that she, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and grassroots climate activists championed.
The White House plan did end up including priorities that Ocasio-Cortez said she was excited to see: strengthening unions, for example, as well as a focus on communities hit hardest by climate change.
"One thing that I am very excited about is that I do believe that we have been able to influence a lot of thinking on climate and infrastructure," she said. "As much as I think some parts of the party try to avoid saying 'Green New Deal' and really dance around and try to not use that term, ultimately, the framework I think has been adopted."
The New York Democratic representative spoke to NPR this week hours before final details on Biden's much-awaited infrastructure package were released. That plan would spend $2 trillion over eight years, much of it on mitigating the climate crisis. It is the first of a two-part push on an expansive array of infrastructure initiatives, green energy projects, as well as social programs that the administration refers to as "human infrastructure," that is estimated to be around $3 to $4 trillion.
Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives want more than double that rate of spending.
Her comments mirror the tension in how progressives view the Biden administration's climate change agenda, as a clear sign that with measures like the Green New Deal, they have reframed the policy conversation... albeit not nearly to the scale of their liking.
Varshini Prakash is executive director of the Sunrise Movement, one of the main activist groups pushing for the Green New Deal. She applauded multiple aspects of Biden's climate policy — for example, the commitment to spend 40% of the infrastructure plan's money on "disadvantaged communities," as well as a New Deal-inspired plan to create green jobs.
"I think the Civilian Climate Corps was something that we didn't anticipate being a priority for the administration right away," she said.
Biden called for the creation of that corps in his January executive orders on climate change — orders that climate groups widely supported.
However, the $10 billion his new infrastructure plan calls for spending on it is far too little, says Prakash.
"We're just orders of magnitude lower than where we need to be," she said. "And I think that that fight over the scale and scope of what needs to happen in terms of employment and the creation of jobs, in terms of the scale of investment and the urgency is going to be a terrain of struggle as this plan gets debated and discussed in Congress."
With Democrats holding a modest majority in the House and the thinnest possible majority in the Senate, getting this infrastructure plan passed will require a balancing act of keeping both progressives and moderates happy. In the House, Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., called Biden's plan "a welcome first step," but added that "more must be done to improve on this initial framework."
Meanwhile, moderate Democrats in the Senate may hesitate at spending several more trillion, on top of the latest COVID-19 relief package.
From carbon taxes to the Green New Deal
The Green New Deal was never a hard-and-fast policy proposal; it was a nonbinding resolution that broadly called for an overhaul of the economy intended to benefit workers and the environment. That overhaul included a long list of progressive ideas, like guaranteed jobs with paid leave.
Candidate Joe Biden did not fully embrace the Green New Deal on the campaign trail — certainly not to the degree that, for example, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders did.
But Biden did speak approvingly of it, calling it on his campaign website "a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face." And once he gained the nomination, Prakash and Ocasio-Cortez were both on the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on climate, part of an effort to create policy consensus within the party last year. Both Prakash and Ocasio-Cortez credited the Biden team for its openness to their ideas.
Altogether, Ocasio-Cortez says, she thinks that the Green New Deal shifted both policy and how politicians talk about that policy.
"Pre-Green [New Deal] rollout, a lot of the conversation around climate policy was very scientific and also very capitalist, very — carbon taxes. It was very, 'Let's nudge the market tax incentives,' things like that, which is not to say all of those things are bad, but the idea that the market is going to fix a problem that is created by the market is just, in my view, it's not correct," she said.
"What the Green New Deal did was that we said and we spoke about how we need to use a New Deal framework for public policy and to address climate change, which means a full economic mobilization and using an infrastructure and jobs creation plan," she said.
It's also true that the Democratic Party has started framing climate policies as being more explicitly about improving people's lives.
One crude but telling measure: the Biden campaign's climate change proposal mentioned the word "jobs" 29 times. The Hillary Clinton 2016 proposal: twice.
Likewise, Biden put "environmental justice" in the headline of its plan — a sign of how central that concept has grown in climate conversations in just a few years.
However, forces well beyond climate activists and the Green New Deal may have also precipitated this shift, says Paul Bledsoe, who was a climate adviser to former President Bill Clinton and is now a strategic advisor at the centrist Democratic think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.
"I think that Americans during the pandemic have come to appreciate the role of government in emergencies and are increasingly viewing climate change as our next biggest emergency and therefore [are] more comfortable with a government-led response that focuses on incentives for clean technology," he said.
Whatever the cause, however, the upshot is the same: a newly expansive climate policy.
"It seems clear that Biden is determined to use large government incentives and investments in clean energy to jumpstart the economy and job creation, and that's a new, more Keynesian approach than has been used in decades," he said.
As a clear show of what more they would like to see, progressives introduced the THRIVE Act this week — a nonbinding resolution cosponsored by more than 60 Democratic members of Congress, including Ocasio-Cortez. The act mirrors the Green New Deal in calling for sweeping change (strengthening unions, providing a range of supports to communities of color), as well as heavy spending (proponents are calling for $10 trillion in spending over a decade).
And that means climate activists will continue the balancing act of both celebrating the White House's plans while also trying to pull them further to the left.
"I think this is a moment where our movement demands and the way we have communicated about this crisis, the connection to jobs, the connection to justice, is making its way into mainstream politics," Prakash said. "And it's a huge victory for all of us."
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