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21 April 21
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The Girl in the Kent State Photo
Patricia McCormick, The Washington Post
McCormick writes: "Last May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd's dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space - to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier."
In 1970, an image of a dead protester immediately became iconic. But what happened to the 14-year-old kneeling next to him?
ast May, when Mary Ann Vecchio watched the video of George Floyd’s dying moments, she felt herself plummet through time and space — to a day almost exactly 50 years earlier. On that afternoon in 1970, the world was just as riveted by an image that showed the life draining out of a young man on the ground, this one a black-and-white still photo. Mary Ann was at the center of that photo, her arms raised in anguish, begging for help.
That photo, of her kneeling over the body of Kent State University student Jeffrey Miller, is one of the most important images of the 20th century. Taken by student photographer John Filo, it captures Mary Ann’s raw grief and disbelief at the realization that the nation’s soldiers had just fired at its own children. The Kent State Pietà, as it’s sometimes called, is one of those rare photos that fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Like the image of the solitary protester standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Or the photo of Kim Phuc, the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the napalm that has just incinerated her home. Or the image of Aylan Kurdi’s tiny, 3-year-old body facedown in the sand, he and his mother and brother having drowned while fleeing Syria.
These images shocked our collective conscience — and insisted that we look. But eventually we look away, unaware, or perhaps unwilling, to think about the suffering that went on long after the shutter has snapped — or of the cost to the human beings trapped inside those photos. “That picture hijacked my life,” says Mary Ann, now 65. “And 50 years later, I still haven’t really moved on.”
Mary Ann Vecchio has granted few interviews in 25 years, and as a child of the ’60s — with her own entanglement with the FBI — she’s still a bit wary. Partway through the first of what would go on to be a dozen interviews over the phone, she stops abruptly. “Are you doing this on your own?” she asks. I’m freelancing, I tell her. Is that what she means? No, she wants to know if I’m working with a political party. Or law enforcement. “When you’ve lived the life I have,” she says, “you still worry that maybe people are after you.” She also tells me she’s researched me before agreeing to speak. “I’m a little FBI-ish myself, in a renegade way,” she says. “And I’m also still that hippie kid who always sees a rainbow.”
Before Kent State, she says, she was a free spirit. “I was the kid rolling down the river on a raft,” she recalls. “I was magic. In my childhood, I believed anything was possible.” But her home in Opa-locka, Fla., not far from Miami International Airport, where her father was a carpenter, could be volatile. When her parents fought, she and her brothers and sisters would scatter, with Mary Ann hiding out in spots as far away as Miami Beach, some 15 miles from home. Soon she got in trouble — smoking pot, skipping school. So in February 1970, when the police told Mary Ann, then 14, that they’d throw her in jail if they caught her playing hooky one more time, she took off — in her bare feet. She says she wasn’t rebelling against her parents’ authority or seeking to join the antiwar movement: “I just wanted to be anywhere that wasn’t Opa-locka.”
Hitchhiking her way across the country, Mary Ann slept in fields, at hamburger shacks, at crash pads, working here and there for money for food, which she shared with other kids who were also bumming around. Seeing the country, meeting new people, sharing music and the occasional joint — the adventure had that feeling of magic from her childhood. Until, that is, she got to Kent State in northern Ohio, where, on May 4, student protests erupted over President Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia. Mary Ann, in her jeans, white scarf and a pair of hippie sandals someone had given her, headed toward a field where students were gathered. On her way to join the protest, she struck up a conversation with a guy in bell-bottoms. The two of them watched as another student waved a black flag, taunting the National Guard troops who had been sent in after protesters had burned down the ROTC building two nights before. The soldiers seemed to retreat to a nearby hill; then, in the next 13 seconds, they fired more than 60 shots.
Mary Ann dropped to the pavement and waited until the smoke had cleared to look up. Jeffrey Miller, the student she’d been talking to, was facedown on the ground; he’d been shot through the mouth. She knelt over his body as blood seeped onto the pavement. Other students walked by, too stunned or confused to look. “Doesn’t anyone see what just happened here?” she remembers crying. “Why is no one helping him?” As the soldiers approached, their guns at the ready, she recalls asking them a question that countless others across the country would soon ask as well: “Why did you do this?”
Nearby were more bodies. Allison Krause was shot in the chest; William Schroeder in the back. Sandy Scheuer, who was just passing through the area on her way to class, was struck by a bullet that hit her jugular vein. Four dead in Ohio.
“I would have stayed anonymous forever,” Mary Ann says. “But that guy from the Indianapolis Star, he knocked out my future.”
John Filo was a senior at Kent State in May 1970, a student photographer who almost missed out on covering the protests because he’d been in the woods taking pictures of teaberry leaves for his senior thesis that weekend. All the other photographers on the student paper had assignments from out-of-town papers, so John, 21, was working in the newspaper office to help process their pictures. On his lunch break, he grabbed a camera and stepped outside. He went straight toward the action, where a student in the no man’s land between soldiers and students waved a black flag. John snapped a photo thinking, “Okay, I’ve got my picture.” A moment later, the soldiers formed a rifle line. “I put my camera to my eye and trained it on one of the soldiers,” he says. “He aimed toward me, and then his gun goes off. The next thing I know, a bullet hits a tree next to me and a chunk of bark flew off.”
John dropped to the ground and waited out the 13 seconds of gunfire. When the smoke cleared, he stood and patted his arms and legs, checking to see if he’d been hit. “It was like slow motion. I just kept wondering, ‘How come I’m not shot?’ ” Then, not 10 feet away, he saw a body on the ground. John was running out of film as he saw a girl kneel beside the body. “I knew the boy was dead, but I could tell she didn’t know,” he told me. “I could see something building in her, and all of a sudden she lets out this scream and I shoot. I shoot one more picture, and I’m out of film.” By the time he had reloaded his camera, the girl was gone.
John remembers the soldiers ordering students who were lingering at the scene to disperse — “or they’d shoot again.” A few moments later, soldiers using bullhorns announced that the university was closed. “They ordered everyone to go home.”
Mary Ann just remembers running. She didn’t know anyone at Kent State; she’d known Miller for only 25 minutes. But she saw National Guard troops herding students onto buses, so she followed in a daze. Some two hours later, when the bus arrived in Columbus, the soldiers told everyone to get off. Many of the students ran to waiting parents. Mary Ann stumbled around the streets of the city; she’d never even heard of Columbus.
Back on campus, students were yelling at John, calling him a pig, a vulture. John yelled back. “No one’s going to believe this happened,” he told them. “This,” he said, pointing to his camera, “is proof.” When he saw Guard troops cutting down electric lines, John ran to his car. After hiding the film inside a hubcap, he drove two hours to the office of his hometown newspaper in western Pennsylvania to process his film. As he watched the film develop, he knew he had something the world needed to see.
When he called the Associated Press from the newsroom of the Valley Daily News of Tarentum, he was told the news service had plenty of Kent State photos coming in from its bureau in Akron, Ohio, and that its entire wire capacity was being used to transmit those photos. But when there was an unexpected break in the transmissions from Akron, John jumped on the wire and sent his photo. His image of the grieving girl ran on the front pages of newspapers all over the world the next day. The caption identified her simply as a “coed.”
I remember seeing the picture in my hometown paper. At 12, I wondered if the nation’s adults were intent on killing their own children, in Vietnam and now at home. But Mary Ann cannot remember the first time she saw the photo; she has no memory of the moment when she became the most famous unknown person in the world.
The days after the shooting went by in a haze for her. She hitchhiked out of Columbus, drifting west and sleeping wherever she could. She had heard she was wanted by the FBI, so she didn’t tell anyone who she was. She wound up at a crash pad in Indianapolis, thinking that if she could just get to California, she could start her life over again, but a kid at the house where she was staying recognized her and tipped off a reporter from the Indianapolis Star. Mary Ann, barely disguised in a granny gown and fake glasses, talked to the reporter, hoping he’d give her bus fare to California in exchange for her story. The reporter got his scoop, then called the authorities, who put her in juvenile detention as a runaway.
“I would have stayed anonymous forever,” she says. “But that guy from the Indianapolis Star, he knocked out my future.” Within days, she was back home in Opa-locka.
Many people refused to believe the nearly 6-foot-tall girl with the long, flowing hair and the mournful face was only 14. Her family received calls and letters calling her a drug addict, a tramp, a communist. The governor of Florida said she was “part of a nationally organized conspiracy of professional agitators” that was “responsible for the students’ death.” While some people saw her as a symbol of the national conscience, some Kent State students expressed resentment about her fame, saying she wasn’t even a protester.
Back in Kent, Ohio, local business owners ran an ad thanking the National Guard. Mail poured in to the mayor’s office, blaming “dirty hippies,” “longhairs” and “outside agitators” for the violence. Some Kent residents raised four fingers when they passed each other in the street, a silent signal that meant, “At least we got four of them.” Nixon issued a statement saying that the students’ actions had invited the tragedy. Privately, he called them “bums.” And a Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths; only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.
The FBI also questioned John. They demanded his film, he says, and when he refused, he remembers them tailing him for nearly a week. He says his phone rang nonstop with crank callers insisting that the photo was fake. He got hate mail, including a letter that, as he recalls, read, “I had a friend die in Vietnam. You’re next.”
John was still reeling from his close call with the Guard when the Indianapolis Star ran the story identifying the subject of his photo not as a college student but as a teenage runaway. That, he says, “was a heavy weight to carry.”
On “60 Minutes,” Morley Safer said Mary Ann “wasn’t a symbol of the tragedy of the Vietnam War. She wasn’t a symbol of anything.”
Back in Opa-locka, Mary Ann couldn’t go to Royal Castle for a burger without reporters and hecklers following her. Death threats filled the Vecchio family mailbox. “It’s too bad it wasn’t you that was shot.” “What you need is a good beating until you bleed red.” “I hope you enjoyed sleeping with all those Negroes and dope fiends.” “The deaths of the Kent State four lies on the conscience of yourself.” At 14, she was a human flashpoint, her face on magazine covers, posters and handbills. The humor magazine National Lampoon ran a fake ad for a Kent State playset, complete with toy soldiers, protesters and “1 kneeling student.” And not that long ago, the Onion ran a satiric news story calling a loss by the Kent State basketball team a “massacre.” Mary Ann’s face is photoshopped onto the body of a cheerleader, kneeling over a fallen basketball player.
Her father sold T-shirts with Mary Ann’s grieving image on the front. She signed the shirts — and the occasional autograph — still in a state of shock. “People thought we were getting rich, but we never had any money,” she says. “It sounds bad, but my dad did what he did for me. He was taking care of me in the only way he knew how.”
What the traumatized teenager didn’t get was counseling. It didn’t even occur to her. “I was too afraid,” she says. “He,” she notes, referring to Jeffrey Miller, the boy in the photo, “was a college student. I was just a runaway. I felt less than. And I felt like I did something dirty because that’s the way I was treated.”
She ran away from home again and got caught, ending up in juvenile detention. “They tried to give me Thorazine,” she says. She ran away from there, too, was caught again and returned. But when she was sent back home, she recalls, the police followed her incessantly, arresting her for loitering, for smoking pot. “I was a mess, like I was trying to punch my way out of a paper bag,” she says.
Later, in 1977, Mary Ann was profiled by “60 Minutes” as a “maladjusted kid.” For the segment, she read aloud from the hateful letters she’d received, which were spread out on her parents’ dining table. Morley Safer said she “wasn’t a symbol of the tragedy of the Vietnam War. She wasn’t a symbol of anything.” Just a “14-year-old nobody hitchhiking from nowhere to nowhere.” He seemed, at least to me as I watched the segment recently, to take smug satisfaction in the trouble she had after Kent State, turning her into a national cautionary tale.
“Everyone had a piece of me,” Mary Ann says. “And when everyone in the world thinks they know who you are, you don’t want to be who you are.”
John Filo’s picture would win a Pulitzer Prize. His photo, Time magazine said, captured the sense that the Vietnam War had come home and “distilled that feeling into a single image.” But he, too, was haunted. “I felt very guilty,” he says. “An arm’s length to my right, a guy was shot. An arm’s length or two to my left, that’s where Jeffrey Miller was killed. I’m alive and I’m relatively famous, and they’re dead.” And when he read that the police had been harassing Mary Ann, he felt responsible.
Eventually, at age 22, Mary Ann took off from Florida, moved to Las Vegas, married and got a job in a casino coffee shop. She was rarely mentioned in news stories commemorating the events of May 4, 1970. In May 1990, she told the Orlando Sentinel that the photograph had “really destroyed my life.” Still, she said, she was proud of a job where she wore a nicely pressed blouse and skirt and where she’d built a new life far removed from the shooting. “Kent State has nothing to do with my life,” she said.
By that time, she’d also learned it was risky to tell people that she was the girl in the iconic photo. “The less I said, the safer I felt,” she recalls. And while she took pride in her job and the stability she’d achieved, underneath she carried a sadness about the way her life had turned out. “My life was already upside-down by the time of Kent State, but with some different guidance, maybe I could have made something of myself,” she says. “Maybe I could’ve done something good with my life. That’s the damage, when you don’t get to be who you were going to be.”
Meanwhile, John went on to have a successful career as a photographer. (Today he’s the head of photography for CBS.) He says that not a day went by that he didn’t think about the Kent State students — or Mary Ann. Sometimes he had nightmares about her. When he became a father and looked in his daughter’s eyes, he saw Mary Ann’s eyes. He tortured himself by wondering how he’d feel if someone had taken his daughter’s photo in such a vulnerable moment. “I thought about reaching out to her many times,” he says. “But I figured she hated me.”
It was Gregory Payne, a professor at Emerson College and author of “Mayday, Kent State,” who had an idea that he thought might help them both. In 1995 he organized a 25-year retrospective on Kent State and Mississippi’s Jackson State, where students had been shot and killed by police around the same time. He invited both Mary Ann and John to attend. “Mary Ann was open to the idea, but John wasn’t initially,” Payne says. “He always felt terrible about trapping her in that picture, and he’d read that she said it ruined her life.” The day before they were to meet, Payne recalls, he asked Mary Ann what she was going to say to John. “She said she had no idea.”
“I was kind of mad at [John] for a long time,” Mary Ann says. “He’s lucky. He’s done very well. He’s got a nice house. He’s got everything. He got the pony.” She laughs at that. “I got the crap.”
John says he “dreaded ever meeting Mary Ann,” but he accepted Payne’s invitation to the retrospective, unsure, until the last minute, if he would go through with it. When Payne brought the two of them together for a private meeting before the opening ceremony, no one knew what to expect. “John looked so scared,” Payne says. But Mary Ann surprised everyone. “I saw the anguish in his eyes,” she says of John, “and, you know, I felt sorry for him.” She smiled, took his hand and hugged him. They both cried.
Even though they’d never before met, Mary Ann says that she and John had the instant bond of a pair of old army buddies. “It was kind of a war,” she says. And neither of them had ever really been recognized as among the casualties. Kent State had haunted them both, from opposite ends of the lens.
Later that day, as Mary Ann spoke to the assembled group about the trauma of the Kent State shootings, John had an epiphany about the power of his photo. “It was because she was 14, because of her youth, that she ran to help, that she ran to do something. There were other people, 18, 19, 20 years old, who didn’t get close to the body. She did because she was a kid. She was a kid reacting to the horror in front of her. Had she not been 14, the picture wouldn’t have had the impact it did.”
After the retrospective, John gave her a signed copy of the photo. The inscription: “For the courageous Mary Ann Vecchio, I cannot fathom how this photograph affected your life. I’m proud to call you a friend.”
The public glare defined her as someone she never was. Now she’s who she wants to be.
Mary Ann lived in Las Vegas for nearly 20 years, moving up from her job in the coffee shop to the casino floor, where she had the keys to pay out the slot machine jackpots. She says she dreamed of being a lawyer. But something told her, “Don’t get too successful, don’t get too visible. Don’t be too happy.” Hiding was much safer, she says.
In 2001, however, she took the story of her life back into her own hands. She had earned a high school diploma at the age of 39; now in her mid-40s, she was ready to study for a career in health. She also ended an unhappy marriage and started over again by returning to Florida. She bought a 24-foot camper, worked full time at the Trump Spa at Doral, enrolled at nearby Miami Dade Community College and studied to be a respiratory therapist. Between shifts and classes she spent time nursing her dying mother.
“Everybody at the Doral loved Mary Ann,” says longtime friend Charlotte Brewer, 85. “She has this very caring personality.” Still, Mary Ann didn’t tell her about the photo until it popped up on Charlotte’s phone one day. “That’s me,” Mary Ann said. At first Charlotte couldn’t believe it, but she soon understood: The girl who ran to help an injured student at Kent State was the same person who saw her massage work as healing treatments for her clients and who was training to help patients with respiratory problems. Charlotte and her fellow massage therapists were so happy to see Mary Ann on a new professional path, they took her out to lunch after she passed each course. “Maybe that’s why I got such good grades,” Mary Ann says.
After school, the woman who perhaps had been the most visible symbol of protest against the Vietnam War worked at the Miami VA hospital, where she cared for men who’d served in that war. But she never told them she was the girl from the Kent State photo. Sometimes, she says, she wanted to tell the veterans who she was so she could explain that the protesters weren’t anti-soldier, just antiwar, and that they did what they did to bring soldiers home. Instead, she operated on a “no-need-to-know policy.” She wanted “to be in the vets’ shoes,” she says. “I had to make a connection on a spiritual level.”
By working with veterans, she learned about resilience and came to understand what being in the line of fire had done to her. “I tried to hide my shell-shockedness from them,” she says, but she saw ways in which they were traumatized that echoed some of her own behaviors. “I’m very positional,” she says. “Wherever I go, I sit with my back to the wall so I can see what’s coming in the front door.”
Mary Ann is retired now — she didn’t remarry or have children — and leads a quiet life, growing avocados and oranges on a small plot at the edge of the Florida Everglades. Payne, who keeps in regular touch with her and has invited her to speak to his classes at Emerson, credits her “incredibly strong spirit” for her survival. “She also still has that unaffected purity,” he says. “That’s what you saw in the photo on May 4th. And that’s still who she is.”
Charlotte says Mary Ann is more like a neighborhood sprite. She pops in to see their older neighbors, bathing them and delivering home-cooked meals. She gets offers to work for pay, but she prefers to “be that surprise person that shows up with banana bread.”
Last May, however, when she watched the video of George Floyd’s death, she was so shaken, it was as if the electronic scrim of her TV had dissolved. She jumped off her couch and yelled at the crowd in the video, “Why is no one helping him?” She sobs as she describes that moment to me. “Doesn’t anyone see what’s going on?”
“Mary Ann,” I say. “It seems to me that you’re still that girl in the photo, you’re still that girl saying, ‘Doesn’t anyone see what’s happening here?’”
She stops crying abruptly. “But it’s been 50 years,” she says. “Why can’t I move on?”
What would it take to move on? I ask.
“Maybe if I do some good for the planet,” she says. She tells me that she does small, secret acts of charity every weekend, when she goes “undercover” to the Walmart parking lot near her home and leaves canned foods, staples and her homegrown avocados in an empty shopping cart for someone to discover. “I feel like I need to do something good,” she says, crying again.
You’ve already done something profoundly good, I tell her. “In that moment when you knelt over Jeffrey Miller’s body,” I say, “you expressed the grief and horror that so many people were feeling. You helped end the Vietnam War.”
“You can say that,” she says, “but I can’t feel it.”
Nowadays, the girl who wanted to be anywhere but Opa-locka lives not far from there. No one knows her as the girl from the photo. No one follows her or sends her hate mail, though once in a while she finds an autograph request with a faraway address in her mailbox. Sometimes students find her online and send her letters saying they read about her in their history books. This cracks her up. “I’m a living person,” she says with a laugh. “And I’m in a history book! Not many people can say that.”
For me, it’s hard now not to look at that photo and see a 14-year-old girl, unaware of how that single moment will shape her entire life. She’ll become a public figure — as a minor — with no consent and no control over her image or her reputation. Well before there’s such a concept as victim-blaming, before social media or Us Weekly, she’ll become an object of national fascination — a target for some, a footnote in history to others. She’ll be the subject of a photo known the world over, but never really known as a person.
And yet, she eventually defied the narrative that was written for her. She built a new life on her own terms. Far from the public glare that defined her as someone she never was, she’s now who she wants to be: someone whose life is both private and purposeful. And on weekends, as she roams the Walmart parking lot near her home, leaving gifts for strangers, it’s possible to see that 14-year-old girl before the shutter is snapped, that kid who thinks she’s magic.
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
Joe Manchin Mocked Bernie's $15 Minimum Wage Bill at Lobbyist Event
Joel Warner and Andrew Perez, The Daily Poster
Excerpt: "When Joe Manchin told attendees at the National Restaurant Association (NRA)'s national conference on Tuesday that the minimum wage shouldn't be more than $11 and there should still be a subminimum wage for tipped workers, the group's chief lobbyist couldn't contain his excitement."
Conservative Dems Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema win plaudits at a closed-door event with restaurant lobbyists after voting to block a $15 minimum wage.
hen Joe Manchin told attendees at the National Restaurant Association (NRA)’s national conference on Tuesday that the minimum wage shouldn’t be more than $11 and there should still be a subminimum wage for tipped workers, the group’s chief lobbyist couldn't contain his excitement.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” exclaimed Sean Kennedy, the NRA's executive vice president of public affairs, who spoke with the Democratic senator from West Virginia as part of a virtual panel entitled, “Seeking Unity: Conversations on Finding Bipartisan Solutions.”
The NRA is a powerful, sprawling lobbying operation, with $289 million in revenue in 2018 and state affiliates around the country. The organization has been leading the charge to block a federal $15 minimum wage and is also fighting a separate Democratic effort to make it easier for workers to form unions.
Manchin, along with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, were added to the NRA conference line-up after they joined six other Democrats in blocking an attempt by Sen. Bernie Sanders to add a $15 minimum wage provision to the Democrats’ COVID-19 relief legislation in March.
Both lawmakers have also spoken out against efforts to reform the filibuster — a stand that will keep a lid on many key Democratic legislative priorities — and they have recently enjoyed cash infusions from business interests that would be affected by the party’s proposals.
Manchin and Sinema’s statements at the conference, reportedly attended by several hundred restaurant operators from around the country, pull back the curtain on what they say to corporate interests when they’re out of the public eye. The NRA event, billed as “off the record” and “closed to press,” was the association’s annual “public affairs conference,” which means it was designed for lobbyists and focused on shaping legislation.
“It Might Be The Way To Go, Bernie, But It Ain’t Gonna Go”
During Sinema’s talk, Kennedy praised senator as a “true moderate.” She responded: “My approach has always remained the same. I promised Arizonans that I would do things differently than some in Washington, and that I would be an independent voice for our state, not for any political party.”
Sinema said she believes that “achieving lasting results on the issues that matter to everyday Americans really requires bipartisan solutions,” and she called on her “colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join me in my approach.”
In truth, however, Sinema’s political approach and viewpoint on the minimum wage have shifted considerably since she first got into politics. She was at one time considered a progressive.
During his talk, Manchin specifically took aim at Sanders for continuing to push for a $15 minimum wage.
“We’ve been having meetings on minimum wage, and I can’t for the life of me understand why they don’t take a win on $11,” he said. “Bernie Sanders is totally committed in his heart and soul that $15 is the way to go. Well, it might be the way to go, Bernie, but it ain’t gonna go. You don’t have the votes for it. It’s not going to happen. So they’re going to walk away with their pride, saying we fought for $15, got nothing.”
Manchin said there are other Democrats who agree with him that “the path they’re going down is wrong.”
He added that he doesn’t think the minimum wage should be increased to more than $11, and he said there should still be a lower subminimum wage for workers who rely on tips.
“If it comes down to one person, I don’t believe it should be above $11, I don’t think the tipped wage should ever go above half of that,” Manchin said. The federal minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, and the subminimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13. West Virginia has an $8.75 minimum wage, with a $2.62 tipped wage.
In response, Kennedy gushed to Manchin: “You and your staff have been absolutely amazing in working with small businesses, including the National Restaurant Association, in finding a common-sense path, so we can wrap up that aspect by just saying thank you.”
Kennedy, who previously served in the Obama White House as a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, has become the public face of corporate opposition to a $15 minimum wage.
“The Raise the Wage Act imposes an impossible challenge for the restaurant industry,” Kennedy noted in a statement earlier this year. “A nationwide increase in the minimum wage will create insurmountable costs for many operators in states.”
Kennedy’s talking points contrast with statements made by executives from several of the NRA’s biggest member restaurants, including Denny’s, Domino’s, and the Cheesecake Factory, who have indicated to investors that increasing the minimum wage wouldn’t be an overwhelming burden.
In January, for example, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski told investors: “Our view is the minimum wage is most likely going to be increasing whether that's federally or at the state level as I referenced, and so long as it's done... in a staged way and in a way that is equitable for everybody, McDonald’s will do just fine through that.”
“We Will Not Be The Country We Are”
During his talk on Tuesday, Manchin reiterated his opposition to eliminating the legislative filibuster, which currently allows Republicans to block most legislation, outside of spending bills, unless Democrats can find 60 votes. The Senate is currently split 50-50, and Democrats only have a 51-vote majority with Vice President Kamala Harris able to break ties.
“You get rid of the filibuster and we will not be the country we are for this reason: You’ll have the violent swings, extreme swings, every time there’s an election, whichever party is in power,” he said. “It’ll be no different than a lot of European countries are, no different than a lot of developing countries. It’s whoever’s in power, and basically it swings. Everything’s thrown out and started over. We have been a country and we have grown as a country with a consistency that people could depend on.”
Labor activists were thrilled when Manchin on Monday said he would cosponsor Democrats’ landmark labor reform legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act — meaning there are now only three Democrats who have not signed onto the bill. Sinema is one of the holdouts.
But Manchin’s position on the filibuster makes it unlikely the PRO Act will advance at all, as there is basically no chance that ten Republicans will support the legislation.
While Sinema didn’t speak about the filibuster specifically, she said, “What I’m telling my colleagues is that we cannot accept a new standard by which important legislation only passes on party line votes. If we were to accept that, it would set the stage for permanent partisan dysfunction, it would deepen the divisions that exist within our country, and it would further erode Americans’ confidence in their government, which we know is a challenge we face already.”
When Kennedy asked Sinema what restaurant operators should know about communicating with lawmakers, she replied that “Senators need to hear from their constituents… They may have a public position on an issue, but it’s also that person’s job to represent his or her constituents.”
A March poll of Sinema’s constituents found that 52 percent of independents in Arizona and 72 percent of Democrats support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Arizona’s minimum wage is currently $12.15, with a tipped wage of $9.15.
The same poll found that only 50 percent of Democrats viewed her favorably, down from 65 percent in January. The change came after Sinema attracted national attention for the overly performative way she flashed a thumbs down on the Senate floor to spike the $15 minimum wage provision that would have boosted the paychecks of 839,000 workers in her state.
During the NRA conference, Sinema, who recently posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing a ring that read, “Fuck Off,” said it’s important to treat people with respect.
As she advised lobbyists in attendance, “You always want to be polite.”
A mural honors George Floyd at Scott Food Store in Houston. (photo: Montinique/The Washington Post)
ALSO SEE: Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed Floyd's Murder,
Praised for Making Verdict Possible
Black Americans Are Buoyed by Chauvin Conviction, but They Worry It Will Blunt Pace of Reform
Arelis R. Hernandez and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Danyal Green had just come home and switched on the television when she started to jump up and down and scream: 'Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!'"
anyal Green had just come home and switched on the television when she started to jump up and down and scream: “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”
Her 24-year-old daughter, Paris Green, came out of the bathroom, startled by her mother’s cries.
Then the two women put on shirts bearing George Floyd’s face and drove to Cuney Homes, the public housing project where he grew up. In front of a mural of Floyd, whom they had known from shared holidays at a relative’s home, they held each other and wept.
The murder conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in Floyd’s death brought relief, but it also spurred reflection on the justice deferred for many other Black men and women, Danyal Green said.
“My dad never got a chance to see this,” she said through sobs. “My grandmother never got a chance to see this. But in my lifetime and in my children’s lifetime, they got a chance to see it.”
They were not the only ones with mixed emotions. Across the country, Black Americans welcomed the conviction of Chauvin on three charges with free-flowing tears, raised fists and unbridled elation.
But the positive feelings were tempered by outrage over other injustices and worries that one officer’s conviction would be held up as proof that the systemic problems highlighted by Floyd’s killing were solved. If that sentiment takes hold, activists warned, it would blunt the urgency of a year-long movement.
“People are going to try to use this incident to say we’re healed from racism without actually doing the real work to get at the root of the problem,” said Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, a Philadelphia activist who helped organize bail funds for people arrested during last summer’s protests.
“The moment will pass, and people will say [Floyd’s] name on the anniversary of the day, just like they say Trayvon’s name, just like they say Breonna Taylor’s name. But does that mean that we’re not going to be seeing names in the future? I don’t think that’s true. Does that mean that White people have corrected themselves, or the system has corrected itself in addressing this thing that we all have been socialized in, which is white supremacy?”
Floyd’s Memorial Day killing, and the ensuing protests that spilled onto American streets, forced the nation to confront systemic racism that permeates many aspects of American life. But some of the larger reforms that protesters pushed for have stalled, activists say, and there have been few major policy victories.
U.S. lawmakers wore kente cloth and knelt while introducing the Justice in Policing Act, but have not enacted meaningful legislation, including laws that would ban chokeholds like the one that killed Floyd. Floyd’s family led a moment of silence at the Democratic National Convention and President Biden called the Floyds after Chauvin’s guilty verdict was read, but he has been guarded about whether the U.S. Senate should end or amend the filibuster to pass a police reform bill that bears George Floyd’s name.
On April 11, just 10 miles from where Chauvin was tried, a 20-year-old Black man was shot and killed during a traffic stop. The Brooklyn Center, Minn., police officer accused of shooting Daunte Wright said she thought she was holding her Taser when she fired her service weapon. Days later, Chicago authorities released graphic video of 13-year-old Adam Toledo being chased through an alley where he was shot and killed March 29, by a police officer who thought the teen was holding a gun. Shortly before the Chauvin verdict was read, police shot and killed a 16-year-old Black girl in Columbus, Ohio.
“I’m glad that Derek Chauvin is going to jail,” said Shanee Garner, a lifelong West Philadelphia resident who is a legislative director for a city council member. In her community, neighbors hugged, motorists honked cars horns and people whooped as the Chauvin verdict was read. “But I hope that this moment is not taken as an indicator that our system is just and police brutality is solved.”
In Kenosha, Wis., where another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot by police, Michael White paused to reflect on the Chauvin verdict.
Blake was partially paralyzed last summer after being shot seven times in the back by a White police officer.
“I’m glad they found the police guilty, that’s good,” said White, who is Black and works at a steel mill. “I just wish they’d find more police guilty for some of the stuff they’re doing around here.”
White spoke at 20th Avenue and 60th Street, a short distance from the church where President Biden spoke after the Blake shooting.
He noted that, unlike in the Floyd case, the officer who shot Blake wasn’t charged or disciplined. “He got his job back,” White said, his voice rising with anger.
Stephanie Keene, a Philadelphia organizer who wants to abolish the police and prison system, said she had already worried that the narrative was shifting to highlight the problems of a bad police officer, not problems inherent in policing.
“People will say we’ve rooted out that one bad actor and that’s all it was — one bad actor,” Keene said. “It’s not a systemic issue. It’s not policing working as it’s designed, it’s Derek Chauvin being a bad example of America’s finest. But my bigger worry is that the general public will be like, ‘We let the system handle it and the system handled it, and now we can go to brunch.’ ”
Minneapolis Police officer. (photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty)
DOJ to Investigate Minneapolis Police for Possible Patterns of Excessive Force
Carrie Johnson, NPR
Johnson writes: "One day after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on murder charges, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into possible patterns of discrimination and excessive force among the police department there."
ne day after a jury convicted former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on murder charges, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into possible patterns of discrimination and excessive force among the police department there.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the new civil inquiry on Wednesday, the first such "pattern or practice" investigation in the Biden administration, which has pledged to build trust between police and communities.
"Today, I am announcing that the Justice Department has opened a civil investigation to determine whether the Minneapolis Police Department engages in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing," he said in remarks at the Justice Department.
He said the investigation is separate from the previously announced federal criminal inquiry into George Floyd's death.
"Yesterday's verdict in the state criminal trial does not address potentially systemic policing issues in Minneapolis," Garland said.
He said the investigation will look at the use of excessive force, including during protests, and examine the MPD's accountability systems.
"If the Justice Department concludes that there's reasonable cause to believe there is a pattern or practice of unconstitutional or unlawful policing, we will issue a public report of our conclusions," he said.
The investigation marks a return to increased federal oversight of errant police departments, with a tool the Trump administration used just once in the past four years to examine a small force in Massachusetts. By contrast, during the Obama years, the Justice Department conducted more than two dozen pattern or practice investigations.
Last week, Garland revoked a Trump-era memo that made it more difficult for the Justice Department's civil rights lawyers to reach consent decrees with state and local governments over policing practices and to seek court approval for independent monitors to check whether police departments were honoring the terms of settlements.
Protest against Republican voter suppression efforts. (photo: Erik McGregor)
'Shameless': Texas Republicans Lead the Charge on Voting Clampdown
Alexandra Villarreal, Guardian UK
Villarreal writes: "Texas Republicans are at the vanguard of a national push to curtail voting rights, with lawmakers targeting the voters and policies that helped Democrats make inroads in the 2020 election."
Republican measures target low-income residents, people with disabilities and people of color, and impose severe penalties
exas Republicans are at the vanguard of a national push to curtail voting rights, with lawmakers targeting the voters and policies that helped Democrats make inroads in the 2020 election.
Texas legislators have introduced 49 bills restricting voting access, far more than any other state, even as major Texas-based corporations such as American Airlines express fervent opposition.
The sweeping provisions could deal an outsized blow to low-income residents, people with disabilities, city dwellers and Texans of color, many of whom belong to diverse, youthful cohorts whose political views spell trouble for the GOP.
And, in a twist that differentiates Texas from other states such as Georgia and Arizona that have instituted or are planning voting restrictions, some of the proposals impose extreme penalties on people who make even innocuous missteps.
“When you make making a mistake on a voter registration application a second-degree felony, that’s the equivalent of arson and aggravated kidnapping,” said Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.
Conservative politicians have tried to justify the rollback by hiding behind Donald Trump’s claim that last year’s presidential contest was stolen – despite a complete lack of evidence, and even though their party won handily in Texas.
Allegations of widespread voter fraud have almost become a “litmus test” among Texas Republicans, said Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.
Conservatives’ political futures could hinge on whether their base believes they are cracking down on the non-issue. And, as a new generation of voters comes of age, the specious talking point provides cover for politicians who can see that their party’s prospects may be dimming.
Although Republicans maintained their ironclad grip on Texas last year, Trump’s margin of victory in the presidential race winnowed to less than six points, from a nine-point lead four years earlier. Democrats also gained significant ground during the 2018 midterm elections, when former representative Beto O’Rourke lost his Senate bid to incumbent Ted Cruz by fewer than 215,000 votes.
The state’s current officeholders know they will not be able to get re-elected on the issues alone, so they are moving the goalpost, said Claudia Yoli Ferla, executive director of civic engagement non-profit Move Texas.
“These legislators are seeing the writing on the wall, and they’re scared of the power of young people. They’re scared to have the true voices of our communities reflected,” Yoli Ferla said.
Already Texas subjects its residents to a byzantine electoral system, giving it a reputation as the hardest place to vote in the US. Voters do not have access to same-day registration, and they can only register online if they are simultaneously updating their driver’s license.
Then, at the ballot box, hardline documentation requirements honor handgun licenses as a form of accepted identification, but not student IDs. Mail-in voting is so limited that last fall, voters were forced to gather in long lines, in-person, regardless of the coronavirus pandemic.
But despite Texas’s legacy of voter suppression, large, Democratic counties – most notably Houston’s Harris county – came up with innovative approaches to expand access to the polls last year. For instance, Harris county implemented 24-hour and drive-thru polling sites, while the local election administrator tried to send mail-in ballot applications to every registered voter.
Instead of lauding those solutions, Republicans fought them hard. Now, the state’s leaders are working to ensure they are not an option for future elections.
“Whether it’s the unauthorized expansion of mail-in ballots, or the unauthorized expansion of drive-thru voting, we must pass laws to prevent election officials from jeopardizing the election process,” said the Texas governor, Greg Abbott.
In February, while Trump’s national defeat was still fresh, Abbott designated so-called “election integrity” as one of five emergency items for the legislature. As of late last month, Texas was leading the charge among 47 total states that had introduced 361 bills restricting the vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
One Texas bill would do away with drive-through polling places, allow partisan poll watchers to electronically record voters, and set limits on early voting hours.
Another could consolidate voter registration responsibilities under the secretary of state, sidelining local governments.
Yet another would dangle felony charges over basic activities, such as public servants proactively distributing applications to vote by mail.
Texas is already known for criminalizing the ballot box, especially among communities of color. Under the state’s current attorney general, Ken Paxton, at least 72% of prosecutions by the so-called election integrity unit have targeted Black and Latino residents, according to the ACLU of Texas.
Those severe penalties cause confusion and can have chilling effects on would-be voters. In the border community of Brownsville, people fear they can’t legally vote for reasons that should not be disqualifying, such as their family’s immigration status, said Ofelia Alonso, a regional field manager for youth organizers at Texas Rising Action.
“It’s already such a hostile environment for folks that want to participate in the process, but these restrictions would make it even harder,” Alonso said.
In an ironic turn, the proposed reforms may inadvertently affect senior citizens, who are among the few demographics eligible to vote by mail, and whose bloc trends right.
As the Texas legislative session ramps up, voting rights advocates and experts are especially concerned by two omnibus bills filled with restrictions, SB7 and HB6. Both are already advancing through the legislature.
“It’s kind of difficult to be able to have a strategy on, like, how to target this,” said Alonso, “when we know that the majority of the Republicans in the Texas legislature are very shameless.”
Unlike in Georgia, where backlash from corporations such as Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines came retroactively, the Texas bills have already become a lightning rod.
“Free, fair, equitable access to voting is the foundation of American democracy,” Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies, tweeted in early April. “Those rights – especially for women, communities of color – have been hard-earned.
“Governments should ensure citizens have their voices heard. HB6 does the opposite, and we are opposed to it.”
American Airlines similarly came out against SB7, saying the company is “strongly opposed to this bill and others like it”.
But, emboldened by victory in 2020, the state’s conservatives don’t seem to care. When corporate giants decried the bills for being anti-democratic, Abbott simply warned them to “stay out of politics”.
“Their priority’s to stay in power, with whatever means necessary,” Alonso said. “And election fraud is a good fearmongering way to rile up their base and not have to come out and say what they’re doing are Jim Crow tactics.
“They won’t say it, but we know what it is.”
The months-long conflict has forced more than 1.7 million people from their homes. (photo: Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)
A Tigrayan Womb Should Never Give Birth': In Ethiopia's Tigray Conflict, Harrowing Accounts of Rape
Lucy Kassa, Al Jazeera
Kassa writes: "Akberet* knew she was no longer safe. The Amhara fighters in charge of her hometown of Humera and other disputed areas of western Tigray had just ordered all Tigrayans in her neighbourhood to leave their homes within 24 hours."
Displaced people from Ethiopia’s western Tigray region report cases of rape, looting and extrajudicial killings allegedly perpetrated by Amhara forces.
kberet* knew she was no longer safe.
The Amhara fighters in charge of her hometown of Humera and other disputed areas of western Tigray had just ordered all Tigrayans in her neighbourhood to leave their homes within 24 hours.
“The militiamen who have been terrorising us for months,” said the 34-year-old mother of three, “told us we are not allowed to live there anymore, because we are Tigrayans. They ordered us to leave empty-handed. They said all the properties we owned belong to Amharas, not to us.”
The Amhara forces entered western Tigray from neighbouring Amhara region in support of Ethiopian federal forces in November last year, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered an offensive against Tigray’s then-ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Since then, the Amhara, who are Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group, have taken control of several areas in the region – land, they claim, that historically has been theirs.
Akberet wasted no time after the ultimatum.
The following morning, on March 8, she fled her home on foot, her six-month-old baby strapped to her back, and her two other sons – aged four and seven – and 14-year-old brother in tow.
Some seven hours later, as they reached a bridge on Tekeze River used by the Amhara forces as an informal border between what they say is now Amhara and Tigray, four Amhara militiamen stopped them. The Amhara men separated Akberet from her children and brother and took her into an abandoned farmer’s house, just a few metres away.
The four men took turns raping her. After they were done, the militiamen inserted into her genitals a hot metal rod that burned her uterus.
“I begged them to stop,” Akberet told Al Jazeera. “I asked them, crying, why they were doing that to me. What wrong have I done to you?
“You did nothing bad to us,” she said they told her. “Our problem is with your womb. Your womb gives birth to Woyane [derogative term used to refer to the TPLF]. A Tigrayan womb should never give birth.”
After the militiamen left, Akberet was left there unconscious. Her brother went to get her, and with the help of other displaced people took her to a town to the east. “The sexual assault made her infertile,” a doctor who treated her there confirmed to Al Jazeera. Her bleeding has now stopped but Akberet, currently recuperating at a relative’s house, cannot walk and has to keep her legs spread. Sleeping at night is hard.
Hundreds of women have reported horrific accounts of rape and gang rape since the start of the conflict in Tigray nearly six months ago. Medics have reported removing nails, rocks and pieces of plastic from inside the bodies of rape victims, while the United Nations said last week women and girls in the mountainous region’s remote areas are being subjected to sexual violence “with a level of cruelty beyond comprehension”.
Healthcare workers in Tigray’s few operational clinics document new cases on a daily basis, despite fearing reprisals and attacks, according to Pramila Patten, the top UN official on sexual violence in conflict. The cases reported have involved Ethiopian soldiers and allied Eritrean troops, as well as Amhara fighters and other members of irregular armed groups or aligned militia.
In the regional capital, Mekelle, doctors at the Ayder Referral Hospital said the number of rape cases on April 1 stood at 272. Within one week, it had jumped to 330.
“Overall, 829 women have reported sexual assault to major hospitals of Tigray. The figure was 518 on April 1,” said Hayelom Kebede, chief executive director of Ayder Referral Hospital.
Doctors fear, however, the true number is much higher, suspecting there are many unreported cases as fighting continues and large parts of Tigray remain inaccessible.
Since December, three other women from the contested areas of western Tigray have reported suffering the same fate as Akberet, doctors said. In northern Tigray, troops from neighbouring Eritrea have also been accused of committing similar acts of gang rape and torture.
“On February 22, our hospital received an emergency call that a 21-year-old girl was gang-raped and found dumped in Edaga Hamus,” said Hayelom, who is currently out of Ethiopia but is in regular contact with his staff. “The report was that Eritrean soldiers had burned her external and internal genital parts using a match and hot metal rod. We could not send an ambulance immediately because of security issues. Later, the communication was lost. Perhaps the girl has died,” he added.
Abiy ordered federal forces into Tigray on November 4 after accusing leaders of the TPLF of launching an attack to take over the Northern Command of Ethiopia’s military. A senior official of the TPLF, which used to dominate Ethiopia’s politics until Abiy came to power in 2018, accused the federal government and its longtime foe Eritrea of launching a “coordinated attack” against it.
As fighting began, Tigray, a region of some six million people, was put under a nearly total communications blackout. Journalists were also barred from visiting the region, making it difficult to verify information. But that has now started to change, with investigations by human rights groups and numerous credible reports documenting alleged atrocities in Tigray.
After months of denials, Abiy acknowledged last month that Eritrean troops had entered the embattled region. In a lengthy parliamentary address, he also admitted for the first time that atrocities including rape had been committed, and promised perpetrators would be held accountable. He said, however, there had been a campaign of “propaganda” and “exaggeration”, before adding: “Women [in Tigray] were raped by men, but our soldiers [in the Northern Command] were violated with bayonets. No one raises this issue.”
The Ethiopian government has set up a task force to investigate the reports of sexual violence in Tigray, insisting it takes the allegations seriously. Separately, Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights commission and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights announced in late March they had agreed to carry out a joint investigation “into human rights violations and abuses allegedly committed by all parties” in Tigray.
Thousands of people are believed to have been killed in the conflict, while some 4.5 million are in need of humanitarian assistance.
According to Tigray’s federal government-appointed interim administration, there are 1.7 million internally displaced people in the region, an estimated 60 percent of whom are from the disputed areas of western Tigray.
But Etenesh Nigusse, spokeswoman of the interim government, told Al Jazeera that displacement is ongoing. “On a daily basis, we are receiving new cases of forceful displacements from the contested areas of western Tigray,” she said.
In late March, the head of the interim government told Reuters news agency that western Tigray “is occupied by the Amhara militias and special forces, and they are forcing the people to leave their homes”. Mulu Nega also accused Amhara of taking advantage of the precarious situation in Tigray to annex the contested territories, saying “those who are committing this crime should be held accountable.”
Sixty-five-year-old Medhin*, a restaurant owner in Humera, was among those forced to flee. She said five Amhara militiamen broke into her house at night on February 27 and threatened to kill her if she did not leave the area.
But the men did not stop there, according to Medhin. They raped her two daughters, aged 24 and 28, in front of her.
“They beat my daughters after the gang rape. They beat them in their genitals,” she told Al Jazeera. “They ordered me to leave the place. They took everything I owned. They threatened me to write for them a money check.”
The account of rape could not be independently verified but other displaced people sheltering at the same place confirmed to Al Jazeera that Medhin’s daughters had difficulties walking.
Last month, United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted that “ethnic cleansing” has taken place in western Tigray, and called for the withdrawal of Eritrean and Amhara forces from the region. According to a UN Commission of Experts, ethnic cleansing refers to a purposeful policy designed to forcefully remove a civilian population from certain geographic areas by violent and terror-inspiring means, including murder, torture, arrests, rape and sexual assaults.
Al Jazeera spoke to 11 people from western Tigray who described different methods used by Amhara militias and Fano – an Amhara armed youth group – in the western Tigray areas they control.
At times, they have involved the Amhara militiamen giving Tigrayans a 24-hour notice to leave. In other instances, Tigrayans were ordered to accept a new identity card marking them as Amhara instead of Tigrayans, or leave. Some also reported being arrested and arbitrarily detained.
“On February 16, they came [to our house] and told us we should leave the place; that Humera is under the Amhara region and that they don’t need Tigrayans,” said Negisti*, a 40-year-old displaced woman who used to live with her mother in Humera.
“They arrested my mother. She is a 67-year-old who already suffers from kidney disease. Before they began arresting, they were issuing Amhara IDs to some Tigrayans. But later they said they stopped issuing IDs,” said Negisti, who left Humera after her mother was released from her week-long detention.
Tsgay*, an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian priest, was arrested twice before he decided to flee Humera on March 24 after learning about the extrajudicial killing of four people he knew, including a neighbour whose slaughtered body he said he had seen.
“They looted everything these dead men owned,” the father of three told Al Jazeera. “I started to fear for my life. At night, they always come and fire guns. They don’t have a ruler. They kill, rape, loot and do whatever they like. I preferred to flee than live in terror.”
Al Jazeera reached out to Amhara regional state President Agegnehu Teshager and his predecessor Temesgen Tiruneh, now director-general of Ethiopia’s National Intelligence Security Service, for comment about the allegations against the Amhara militia in western Tigray. Neither responded.
Eritrea has denied the allegations of rape and other crimes levelled against its soldiers as “outrageous” and “a vicious attack on the culture and history of our people”.
*Names changed and current whereabouts not disclosed to protect their identity
President Joe Biden's $2 trillion 'American Jobs Plan,' released last month, is full of measures to boost clean energy. (photo: unknown)
Can the Federal Government Run on Round-the-Clock Clean Energy? Biden Wants to Try.
Shannon Osaka, Grist
Osaka writes: "Over the past decade, hundreds of cities, companies, and states have started buying renewable energy to power their Wi-Fi routers, run their refrigerators, and otherwise keep the lights on."
How “24/7 clean electricity” could drive a whole new era of energy use.
ver the past decade, hundreds of cities, companies, and states have started buying renewable energy to power their Wi-Fi routers, run their refrigerators, and otherwise keep the lights on. The Empire State Building, for instance, is powered entirely by wind energy; the small city of Burlington, Vermont is run entirely on biomass, wind, solar, and hydropower; and the tech giant Google has been powering its data centers and office buildings with renewables since 2017.
Or have they? Plenty of cities and companies are aiming to run on 100 percent clean energy, but it’s not exactly what it sounds like. The truth is that for the past several years, they’ve been trying to cut carbon emissions on what could be termed “Easy” mode. Yes, they buy enough renewable energy to run on clean power all the time, but that energy isn’t necessarily what’s providing the power for their air conditioners and microwaves at any given point in time.
Now, however, some are pushing governments and companies to switch from “Easy” to “Hard.” They want to deploy something called “24/7 clean energy” — a goal that could drive a whole new phase of clean energy use. And they’ve just convinced the Biden administration to bring it to every single federal building in the United States.
President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion “American Jobs Plan,” released last month, is chock-full of measures to boost clean energy and help the country fight climate change. But tucked into page 10 of the 25-page plan, between a measure to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells and a pledge to retrofit 1 million homes, was something a reader could easily miss: a promise to purchase “24/7 clean power for federal buildings.”
It was a measure pushed by an eclectic group of interests, including the tech companies Google and Adobe and environmental groups. If implemented, it would result in 24/7 clean power going to more than 300,000 federal buildings scattered across the United States — from post offices Alaska, to courthouses in Washington, D.C.
Now, “24/7 clean power” might sound a bit repetitive. If you’re using clean electricity, shouldn’t it be 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? But the situation — like most things to do with electricity grids and utilities — is a bit more complicated than that. There’s no such thing as a “renewable” electron or a “fossil fuel” electron: Once a power plant plugs into the grid, you can’t separate the power that came from fossil fuels from the energy that came from wind, solar, or hydropower.
So companies and cities looking for clean power do something a little bit tricky: They buy credits for renewable energy that cover how much power they use in a given year. Those credits help boost the demand for renewable energy and help to cut emissions — but they come with some pretty big limitations. A company headquartered in Washington, D.C. could be buying renewable power from a wind farm in Iowa. And by purchasing credits that encompass an entire year, buyers get to ignore a pesky thing called “variability” (that is, the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine) and still claim to run on renewables all the time.
The new challenge, proposed in the Biden plan, is this: Buy enough clean energy — whether from wind and solar, biomass, geothermal, or some other source — to run operations every single hour of every single day.
“It’s much, much harder,” said Michael Terrell, the director of energy at Google, which signed the letter encouraging the Biden administration to take on the challenge. “But it is doable and achievable.”
Google was the first company to set its own 24/7 clean energy goal, which it announced last year, and its analysis demonstrates the difficulty of procuring clean power all the time. The tech giant has been buying enough renewable credits to cover its energy use since 2017, but on an hour-by-hour basis the tech giants data centers aren’t always pulling from green sources. In Oklahoma, for example, 96 percent of Google’s round-the-clock power comes from clean energy — in South Carolina, however, it’s only 19 percent.
Terrell says the benefit of 24/7 goals is that they guarantee clean power be available on the grid where the company or building operates (as opposed to thousands of miles away in Iowa) and they can boost demand for clean energy that isn’t wind or solar. In the long run, because solar and wind aren’t available all the time, electricity grids are going to need to be outfitted with “firm” power sources that can kick in at any time. That will push developers to build big batteries, nuclear reactors, geothermal plants pulling heat from under the Earth’s surface, or even natural gas plants with carbon capture capabilities.
“When you’re thinking about sourcing energy in every location on a 24/7 basis, it really motivates you to think even more about how to get the electricity grids to carbon-free faster,” Terrell said.
That’s the benefit of having the approach piloted by the government, which buys 53.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity every year, making it the largest consumer of electricity in the United States. All that buying power can help move markets, especially since federal buildings are everywhere, peppered across the country and in every regional grid. “You take a policy like this at the umbrella level and then it filters down in every part of the country and helps achieve these deep decarbonization goals,” said Lindsey Baxter Griffith, federal policy director at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group focused on cutting air pollution.
That doesn’t mean it will be easy. At the moment, utilities only sell clean energy on a monthly or annual scale — not hour-by-hour — and so the federal government will have to enter into new types of purchasing agreements to ensure that it’s buying clean power 24/7.
And it’s not certain that every federally owned building will count as a “federal building.” According to estimates, the federal General Services Administration, or GSA, has around 300,000 properties — but that excludes those owned by the Department of Defense and some other agencies. In response to requests for comment, a spokesperson from the GSA said the agency “is currently assessing the federally owned buildings under its jurisdiction, custody and control where clean power from renewable sources will be required to meet the Biden-Harris Administration’s plan to produce ‘24/7 power for federal buildings.’” Griffith expects that the policy will be implemented first for buildings with big electricity footprints (national labs, for example) before trickling down to more and more buildings across the country.
The last time a president tried to green the federal government’s electricity it didn’t go so well. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring that federal agency buildings run on 20 percent renewable energy by 2020; the order was later revoked by President Donald Trump, and the goal was never met. (Today, federal agencies get around 8.6 percent of their electricity from renewables.)
But the hope behind setting these 24/7 targets is that they will start a snowball effect, pushing other cities, companies, and even states to adopt these more advanced electricity targets. Google has already been joined by the city of Des Moines, Iowa, which has pledged to reach a similar target by 2035. If they succeed, other cities and companies may follow, helping to clean up the electricity grid and boost 24/7 clean goals around the country.
“On the decarbonization journey, this is really the last — and most important — step,” Terrell said.
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