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30 May 21
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Andrew Perez and Walker Bragman | Corporations Are Still Funding the GOP Campaign to Roll Back Voting Rights
Andrew Perez and Walker Bragman, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Many corporations made a big show of rejecting the GOP's most reactionary leaders after the January 6 capitol riot. But records show that, post-riot, big business kept funneling millions to GOP groups to roll back voting rights."
ajor corporations won praise in the weeks after the January 6 Capital riot by expressing support for voting rights and promising to suspend their political action committee donations to Republican lawmakers who had tried to overturn the election. Corporate America would be a vanguard in the defense of democracy, some headlines suggested.
Left largely unmentioned: brand-name corporations and corporate lobbying groups still funneled $15 million last year to two major GOP groups — the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican State Leadership Committee — after the organizations and their officials pushed to curtail voting rights and overturn the 2020 election, according to IRS records we reviewed.
Meanwhile, many major companies continue to support the US Chamber of Commerce — even as the powerful lobby group has been leading the fight against federal legislation protecting voting rights.
RAGA Rakes in Cash
In November 2020, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) backed a Supreme Court amicus brief requesting that the high court prevent Pennsylvania election officials from counting mail-in ballots postmarked on election day.
The brief alleged that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had opened the door for “unscrupulous actors” to “attempt to influence a close Presidential election in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” by granting a three-day extension for ballot counting because of problems with the COVID-19 pandemic and US Postal Service delays.
A month later, Texas Republican attorney general Ken Paxton brought suit to withhold the certified vote count from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin ahead of the Electoral College vote on December 14, on the grounds that the states had violated the Constitution when they changed their election rules to make accommodations for COVID.
Supporting Paxton’s lawsuit were the Republican attorneys general from seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. The group filed an amicus brief in the case. All but one of RAGA’s executive committee members at the time — Georgia attorney general Chris Carr — were represented among the signatories.
Amid those brazen attempts to overturn the national election, forty-seven companies and trade associations donated nearly $1.5 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association in December 2020. Several of the donor companies have subsequently claimed to support voting rights.
For instance, Philadelphia-based international law firm Cozen O’Connor signed the well-publicized “We Stand for Democracy” letter against voter suppression laws in April. Yet the firm funneled $50,000 to RAGA weeks after the group tried to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the election in Cozen’s home state of Pennsylvania.
Other signatories to the letter that also gave to RAGA in December were PayPal ($50,000) and Lyft ($25,000).
A number of companies gave to RAGA in the days immediately after it filed the brief. Those include Johnson & Johnson ($50,000), PepsiCo ($25,000), U.S. Sugar Corporation ($15,000), and Microsoft ($25,000).
Walmart, which would later decline to sign on to a letter pledging support for democracy and voting access, gave $125,000 to RAGA in late December. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, meanwhile, gave $15,000 to RAGA in December, only to pledge three weeks later not to give PAC donations to the lawmakers who voted against accepting the Electoral College results.
Soon after the money flowed to RAGA, the group helped direct people to the January 6 protest preceding the Capitol insurrection through its dark money arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF). RLDF appeared on the “March to Save America” website and even made robocalls promoting the protest that eventually resulted in the storming of the US Capitol building.
“The March to Save America is tomorrow in Washington, DC, at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m.,” the calls stated. “At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com.”
Since then, Republican attorneys general backed by RAGA have continued to try to make voting more difficult. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, for example, urged states with Republican legislatures to tighten their election laws in March.
“There are certain states where we still control legislatures and we still have governors,” Paxton said in an interview with Breitbart. “I would encourage them to work with the legislature in those states and make sure that their laws are tightened up.”
Meanwhile, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich has been fighting to uphold restrictive voting laws, claiming to do so in the name of “election integrity.”
“There is a whole menu of options of how people can exercise their right to vote. Nobody is disenfranchising anybody in Arizona,” he said in February. “This litigation is all about, ‘Can we protect the integrity of our ballots?’”
The laws — the first invalidating ballots cast in the wrong precinct; the second banning third-party ballot collection, or “ballot harvesting” — were challenged by the Democratic National Committee, which argued that they had a discriminatory impact on racial minorities that connects to a history of discrimination in the state.
In January 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the laws down on the grounds that they violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership to minority groups.
As the case headed to the Supreme Court, Brnovich dismissed Democratic complaints that the laws would disproportionately impact minority voters, claiming that “they always play the race card.” The case is ongoing.
RSLC Scores Millions After Trying to Restrict Voting Rights
In the months before the election, another GOP group, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), filed a Supreme Court amicus brief pressing justices to uphold Arizona’s restrictive voter laws. If the court sides with the GOP, the decision could gut the main remaining enforcement mechanism in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“RSLC submits this brief in support of Petitioners because the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, if allowed to stand, will significantly undermine the ability of states to safeguard election integrity and maintain voter confidence, and will cause paralyzing uncertainty as to the continued validity of innumerable facially-neutral time, place, and manner election regulations,” the June 1, 2020, brief reads.
More than two hundred corporations and trade associations gave RSLC nearly $13.7 million after the organization filed its brief, according to data compiled by CQ Roll Call’s Political MoneyLine. Some of the biggest donors included BNSF Railway ($280,000) and Dominion Energy ($170,000).
Health insurance giant Centene Corporation contributed $250,000, while Anthem chipped in $50,000. Pharmaceutical companies continued donating, too, including Novo Nordisk ($125,000), Novartis ($60,000), AbbVie ($50,000), and Gilead Sciences ($50,000).
Fossil fuel companies ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both gave $100,000 to RSLC. Tech money poured in as well, including donations from Google ($25,000), Uber Technologies ($25,000), PayPal ($25,000), and Amazon ($10,000). Other corporate names, like Bank of America and Best Buy, each donated $25,000 to RSLC. General Motors chipped in $10,000.
Some of those same corporate donors signed the “We Stand for Democracy” letter last month, including Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Bank of America, Best Buy, General Motors, and PayPal.
The RSLC is now encouraging state legislatures to purge voter rolls, change voter registration deadlines, and enact new voter ID requirements, as Documented recently reported.
The Texas state house is currently considering a bill that would close polling locations primarily in Democratic and minority areas. In Harris County, for example, thirteen of the twenty-four House districts — all represented by Democrats — would lose polling stations. Texas isn’t the only state aiming to restrict voting rights. According to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.”
“Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law,” the report continues. “In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).”
Julian Brookes, a spokesperson for the Brennan Center, said that the “vast majority” of those bills were introduced by Republicans.
Both RAGA and RSLC are due to next report their election filings in July.
Breaking Up With the Chamber
In the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and in the face of ongoing Republican efforts to restrict voting rights, political watchdog Accountable.US has started a new campaign asking companies, including Microsoft, Target, and Salesforce, to disaffiliate from the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s preeminent business lobbying group, on the grounds that the Chamber has been bankrolling the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda.
The Chamber’s long history of complicity and enablement of Republican assaults on voting rights is documented in a recent report from Accountable.US. The report notes that in 2010, the Chamber, joined by Republican strategists, “hatched” and funded REDMAP, the notorious GOP redistricting project focused on flipping state legislatures ahead of the 2010 census.
REDMAP was so successful that Republicans picked up nearly seven hundred state legislative seats in 2010, flipping twenty chambers. After that, the project focused its efforts on redrawing congressional and state legislative districts to favor Republican majorities. Through REDMAP, the GOP was able to gerrymander a standing majority in the House that held until 2018, despite losing by 1 million votes in 2012. Even in 2018, in at least three states, the GOP held its congressional majority despite a majority of voters selecting Democrats to represent them.
Beyond REDMAP, the Chamber and its affiliated entities have been major funders of RAGA and RSLC, giving the groups a combined $13.6 million since the 2016 election cycle, based on data from Political MoneyLine. It has also contributed to Republicans who support cracking down on voting rights.
The Chamber is currently waging a campaign against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which is the Democratic Party’s response to Republican voter suppression laws.
Capitol police patrol Capitol Hill. (photo: Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Democrats Plot Next Move After GOP Sinks Jan 6 Probe
Mike Lillis and Scott Wong, The Hill
Excerpt: "Republicans on Friday blocked the launch of an external investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But the issue is a long way from disappearing."
House Democrats, behind Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), are vowing to charge ahead with internal congressional probes of their own, a process now more likely to include the creation of a select committee focused solely on the violence that day — and any role former President Trump played in instigating it.
Democrats had dangled the select committee as a kind of last resort — an unsubtle warning that investigations would proceed even if Republicans prevented the formation of an independent panel, modeled on the bipartisan 9/11 commission, to examine the violent events of Jan. 6.
With Senate Republicans voting Friday to sink the outside investigation with a filibuster, Democrats say they have little choice but to move on to a Plan B.
“Using the filibuster to cover up the truth about Jan. 6 is a scandalous abuse of power that should bring the filibuster to an immediate and long overdue end. Until that happens, we will now have to move forward without the Senate to figure out how to create the nonpartisan, objective investigation into the events and causes of Jan. 6 that America deserves,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served as Democrats’ top prosecutor in Trump’s second impeachment trial, told The Hill.
“It’s shocking that the GOP has now extended the territory of the Big Lie to cover Jan. 6 too,” he said. “They obviously can’t handle the truth.”
Precisely how Democrats plan to proceed remains unclear.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has left open the possibility that the Senate will take another stab at passing legislation to launch an external investigation. But Pelosi has also hinted strongly that she’ll create a special committee dedicated to exploring the Capitol attack, just as she’s done with other prominent issues, such as climate change and the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Honoring our responsibility to the Congress in which we serve and the Country which we love, Democrats will proceed to find the truth,” Pelosi said after Senate Republicans blocked the commission.
Any congressional investigation into Jan. 6 risks appearances that the process will be partisan and the findings will be dismissed by conservative voters as a result. Yet GOP leaders are labeling even the independent commission “slanted,” despite the bipartisan agreement to create it and the equal party divide among its members. That’s led Democrats to charge that Republicans will oppose any Jan. 6 investigation, regardless of the details, for fear it will inevitably make their party look bad.
“When people are moving heaven and earth to block an investigation, you've got to ask, what is it they're afraid will be revealed?” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said Thursday in an interview with CNN.
The GOP blockade of the outside commission has raised concerns among its Republican supporters, who are warning that the party will face a tougher investigative regime with Pelosi in the driver's seat of any coming probes.
Indeed, a select-committee investigation would likely provide Democrats with subpoena power, just as Republicans were able to summon witnesses during their years-long investigation into the 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Among those witnesses was the central target of the probe, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was subpoenaed by Republicans in July 2015 and appeared before the special panel three months later. Her testimony lasted 11 hours.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the only lawmaker to speak directly to Trump as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded, has said he would testify about that conversation before an independent commission. And many Democrats would also like to have him appear before a select committee.
A select committee investigation would provide another advantage for Democrats, who would be empowered to extend the probe well into 2022, creating midterm headaches for Republicans as they try to win control of both the House and Senate. By contrast, the outside commission would be required to issue its findings by Dec. 31, before election season kicks into high gear.
“There’s gonna be select committees. But remember, the committees have a lot of power to call witnesses and do their own thing,” former Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) said on ABC News Live. “So I think it would behoove Republicans to vote for the 1/6 commission because I think this is actually going to go a lot longer if they don’t.”
Like the incident itself, the debate over how to investigate the Jan. 6 attack is fraught with partisan politics. Unlike 9/11, which was perpetrated by foreign adversaries, the January rampage was carried out by a pro-Trump mob that, goaded by the then-president, sought to block the certification of his election defeat to President Biden.
Trump has denied any responsibility for the attack, and that message is reverberating with his supporters. A Yahoo News/YouGov survey published Thursday found that 73 percent of Republican voters blame “left-wing protesters” for the deadly riot.
Such polls have revealed the pressure facing GOP leaders to downplay any role that Trump — along with other Republicans in Congress — played in the lead-up to the attack.
In opposing the external investigation this month, Republican leaders in both chambers argued it would be duplicative, given other ongoing investigations by Congress, the FBI and other federal agencies. They’ve also warned their GOP members that a new investigative panel would hurt the party’s chances of flipping the House and Senate in next year’s midterms.
"I think this commission would be partisan and really has no value," said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has called the failed insurrection “largely peaceful” even though video footage and federal charges show rioters attacking police with bear and pepper spray, flag poles, baseball bats and stun guns.
Pelosi, who was targeted during the attack, hasn’t signaled who she might pick to lead a special panel. But there are already plenty of names being floated.
Raskin is indelibly tied to Jan. 6. Earlier this year, Pelosi tapped him as her party’s lead impeachment manager, putting him in charge of prosecuting Trump for inciting the riot at the Capitol. Democrats fell 10 votes shy of conviction, but Raskin’s performance — inspired by the untimely death of his 25-year-old son a week before the attack — earned the constitutional law professor high marks from both sides of the aisle.
Multiple Democratic sources said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) — who have a record of working across the aisle — would be strong picks. As the mob tried to break down the doors of the House chamber on Jan. 6, Crow was famously captured by photographers clutching the hand of his panicked colleague, Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.). The decorated Army Ranger later recalled how he planned to use a pen to fight his way out of the descending mob.
“Jason Crow would be terrific. He’s a veteran, an attorney and an honorable man,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) told The Hill. “I was in the House gallery with him on Jan. 6.”
Pelosi also could turn to a widely respected, senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, as she’s done in the past for similar special committees. She appointed Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) to serve as the top Democrat on the GOP’s special Benghazi committee; Cummings died in 2019. And last year, Pelosi named Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) the chairman of the special committee to oversee Congress’s COVID-19 relief efforts.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), a United Methodist pastor and former mayor of Kansas City, could fill that role. Another obvious choice would be Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who co-authored the legislation creating the Jan. 6 independent panel with his GOP counterpart, Rep. John Katko of New York.
Other possibilities include Administration Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a close Pelosi ally who has been involved in four presidential impeachments; and Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.), a former Orlando police chief who is preparing to challenge Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in 2022.
However the investigation evolves, Democrats say the apparent death of the independent commission means there’s only more urgency for Congress to jump in with a special probe of its own.
“There are answers that we have to get to,” Crow told CNN last week, adding that Congress can’t rely solely on inspector general investigations and the Government Accountability Office.
“We will get a lot of information that way,” he said. “But Congress has a responsibility here, too."
Voting rights activists protest proposed new voting restrictions in Austin on May 8. (photo: Mikala Compton/Reuters)
Texas Senate Approves Stringent Voting Restrictions After All-Night Debate
Amy Gardner, The Washington Post
Gardner writes: "After a dramatic all-night debate, the Texas Senate approved one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country early Sunday on a party-line vote, despite emotional pleas from Democrats who likened the measure to the Jim Crow laws of the 20th century that effectively barred Black Americans from voting in Southern states."
The Republican-majority House is scheduled to take up the measure later Sunday; if it passes, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is widely expected to sign it quickly.
Republicans barreled forward with the bill and hashed out a final version behind closed doors late last week, over the objections of civil rights leaders and business executives, who said the measure targets voters of color. President Biden on Saturday called it “wrong and un-American,” and Democrats vowed to immediately challenge it in court.
The bill is the latest example of how Republican legislators around the country have pushed for new voting restrictions as former president Donald Trump has kept up a barrage of false attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election.
GOP lawmakers in Texas argued the bill is necessary to shore up voter trust, even though they have struggled to justify the need for stricter rules in the state, where officials said the 2020 election was secure.
Senate Bill 7 imposes a raft of hurdles on casting ballots by mail and enhances civil and criminal penalties for election administrators, voters and those seeking to assist them.
The measure would make it illegal for election officials to send out unsolicited mail ballot applications, empower partisan poll watchers and ban practices such as drop boxes and drive-through voting that were popularized in heavily Democratic Harris County last year. It would bar early-voting hours on Sunday mornings, potentially hampering Democratic get-out-the-vote programs aimed at Black churchgoers
In a last-minute addition, language was also inserted in the bill making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race but rather only that enough ballots were illegally cast that could have made a difference. The law also changes the legal standard for overturning an election from “reasonable doubt” to “preponderance of the evidence” — a much lower evidentiary bar.
The Senate debate lasted more than seven hours into early Sunday, as Democrats argued that the measure would create barriers for many voters of color.
One Black senator from Houston, Borris Miles (D), took issue with a provision requiring anyone who transports more than two voters to the polls to fill out a form, saying that many of the voters he represents lack transportation and get rides from other residents.
“You really have no idea how things work in my neighborhood,” he said around 3:20 a.m. Central time, according to Houston Chronicle reporter Jeremy Wallace, who chronicled the debate on Twitter through the night.
Miles gestured to portraits of Confederate leaders hanging on the walls of the Senate chamber and asked, “Why are we allowing people to roll back the hands of time?”
Another lawmaker accused Republican proponents of Senate Bill 7 of intentionally erecting barriers for voters in Harris County, home of Houston and an increasingly Democratic stronghold with a large minority population.
“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” said Sen. Carol Alvarado (D-Houston). “This is about Harris County.”
The proposed new voting hurdles come after the state logged record turnout in the 2020 election, including huge surges in early voting in cities including Austin and Houston.
The bill would broadly prohibit local election officials from altering election procedures without express legislative permission — a direct hit against Harris County, where election officials implemented various expansions last year to help voters cast ballots during the pandemic. It also specifically targets some of those expansions, explicitly banning drive-through voting locations, temporary polling places in tents and 24-hour or late-night voting marathons.
Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston defended the restrictions that would prevent Harris County from expanding voting access as it did in 2020, claiming without evidence that “drive-through voting didn’t work” and resulted in a 1.5 percent error rate.
Chris Hollins, who served as elections clerk in Harris County last year, disputed that claim.
“Drive-thru voting is safe, convenient, and secure for Texas voters. It worked so well in 2020 that nearly 1 in 10 in-person voters in Harris County cast their votes at drive-thrus,” he said in a text message.
“It’s a great service for Democratic and Republican voters, and everyone in between. Senator Bettencourt is not a fan because in 2020, too many of those voters were women and minorities.”
Republican sponsors of the bill dismissed the criticism.
“Senate Bill 7 is one of the most comprehensive and sensible election reform bills in Texas history,” Republicans Rep. Briscoe Cain and Sen. Bryan Hughes said in a statement issued Friday evening. “There is nothing more foundational to this democracy and our state than the integrity of our elections.”
Cliff Albright, co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, said such rhetoric mirrors the language used during the Jim Crow era to bar Black Americans from voting without explicitly stating that as the goal. He noted that an earlier version of Senate Bill 7 described protecting the “purity of the ballot box” — language used decades ago by white supremacists to limit Black voting.
“This bill is exactly in the Jim Crow tradition,” Albright said. “While not mentioning race, it is inarguably the case that these provisions are squarely aimed at Black and Brown voters.”
Critics also took aim at the process as much as the substance of Senate Bill 7. They noted that the conference committee appointed to work out a compromise between House and Senate versions of the bill never actually met in person, leaving much of the legislature in the dark about its details. And they slammed Republican leaders for failing to appoint a single Black lawmaker to the negotiating team on a bill with major civil rights implications in a state with a long history of voting discrimination.
Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic election lawyer, promised to challenge the law in court quickly if Abbott signs it. He also noted that the measure’s restriction of early voting before 1 p.m. on Sundays is a direct assault on Souls to the Polls, the longtime Democratic get-out-the-vote effort that encourages Black voters to cast their ballots after church services.
Elias also accused business leaders of doing too little to block the bill.
“Can anyone send links to the statements about the new Texas bill from the 700 companies that said they were standing up against voter suppression?” Elias tweeted on Saturday. “Specifically, what steps they will take in Texas now?” The tweet also included images of crickets, denoting the business community’s silence in recent days about the Texas bill.
The legislation is the latest example of how state officials have rushed to align themselves with Trump’s false claims that lax voting rules undermined the integrity of the 2020 presidential election.
GOP lawmakers in dozens of states are pushing new voting measures in the name of election security, under intense pressure from supporters who echo Trump’s false claims of rampant fraud. States including Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Montana have passed measures that curtail voting access, imposing new restrictions on mail voting, the use of drop boxes and the ability to offer voters food or water while they wait in long lines.
During debate in the House earlier this month, Cain maintained that he was not backing a voter “suppression” bill but rather a voting “enhancement” bill, insisting that the measure was designed to protect “all voters.”
According to the final draft, the Texas bill would:
- Impose state felony penalties on public officials who offer an application to vote by mail to someone who didn’t request it.
- Allow signatures on mail ballot applications to be compared to any signature on record, eliminating protections that the signature on file must be recent and that the application signature must be compared to at least two others on file to prevent the arbitrary rejection of ballots.
- Impose new identification requirements on those applying for mail ballots, in most cases requiring a driver’s license or Social Security number.
- Impose a civil fine of $1,000 a day for local election officials who do not maintain their voter rolls as required by law, and impose criminal penalties on election workers who obstruct poll watchers.
- Grant partisan poll watchers new access to watch all steps of the voting and counting process “near enough to see and hear the activity.”
- And require individuals to fill out a form if they plan to transport more than two non-relatives to the polls, and expand the requirement that those assisting voters who need help must sign an oath attesting under penalty of perjury that the people they’re helping are eligible for assistance because of a disability and that they will not suggest for whom to vote.
Stormy Daniels. (photo: Getty Images)
Did Stormy Daniels' $130,000 Break Campaign Finance Laws? The FEC Is Too Dysfunctional to Decide
Ann Ravel and Stephen Spaulding, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "Our country's campaign finance referee, the Federal Election Commission, has an exceptionally important mission. It's supposed to protect the fairness and integrity of our elections. But it needs repair."
Among the key indicators: Dark money is still on the rise, rules to ensure transparency have stalled for a decade, and major campaign finance violations are routinely swept under the rug.
Congress must act. The For the People Act, sponsored by Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), will protect the freedom to vote, crack down on corruption, end gerrymandering and reduce the undue influence of money in politics. And it will fix the dysfunction at the FEC. The House passed the bill in March.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the self-professed “proud guardian of gridlock,” tried his best to weaken the bill during a Senate committee proceeding this month. Pushing an amendment to gut the bill’s FEC reforms, he decreed that the commission “is not dysfunctional at all.”
McConnell is wrong.
Consider the FEC’s recent deadlock on whether to investigate Common Cause’s complaint about a $130,000 payment made to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels days before the 2016 election. Donald Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen, says he funneled the money to Daniels through a sham shell corporation to keep her from revealing an affair with Trump at a pivotal moment in the campaign.
Cohen pleaded guilty to two campaign finance felonies and went to prison for his role in the payments. But Cohen said he did not act alone. He testified under oath that he made the payment “in coordination with, and at the direction of” Trump “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.”
In a detailed report, the FEC’s nonpartisan career attorneys in its Office of General Counsel recommended that the commission find reason to believe that Trump, his campaign and the Trump Organization knowingly and willfully violated multiple campaign finance laws by orchestrating the Daniels payment, including by obscuring the source of the money, violating contribution limits and violating the corporate contribution ban.
Yet the FEC commissioners deadlocked on whether to approve the attorneys’ recommendations to begin enforcement proceedings and consequently closed the case.
There are six commissioners. The Republican vice chairman recused himself, and the independent commissioner didn’t vote. That left it to the two Democrats who voted to go forward with the case and two Republican members who rejected the nonpartisan general counsel’s strong recommendation that the FEC should take up the matter.
Deadlocks such as this occur with increasing frequency, as the commission itself acknowledged in statistics it provided to Congress in 2019.
Once the FEC deadlocks and dismisses a case, complainants are entitled to sue the commission to challenge the dismissal as unlawful. But that raises the question: When the FEC deadlocks — in other words, ties — which side of the tie speaks for the commission in court?
Because of a series of court decisions, the commissioners who vote “no” on enforcement recommendations are considered the “controlling group,” and courts generally adopt the controlling group’s reasoning as the FEC’s rationale for inaction. And if these commissioners cite “prosecutorial discretion” to explain their decision, courts have held that the action is unreviewable.
This is exactly what happened in the Trump-Daniels case. The “no” voters, the controlling group, referenced “an extensive enforcement docket backlog” and argued that the issue had already been dealt with because Cohen had pleaded guilty and been imprisoned. They “voted to dismiss these matters as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion.”
The two commissioners who voted to move forward wrote that the controlling group’s justifications for dismissal were “notably devoid of any explanation” related to the substance of the matters.
The court rulings that give “no” voters deadlock deference can in turn give tremendous power to a bloc of commissioners who oppose campaign finance regulation on ideological grounds. In the Trump-Daniels case, just two commissioners had the power to dismiss a significant case without any reasonable rationale. Big-money violators are left off the hook. Transparency and accountability wanes. This is contrary to the FEC’s purpose.
The For the People Act would break the gridlock by reducing the number of commissioners from an even six to five, with checks and balances in place to ensure that no more than two commissioners are from the same political party. These safeguards against ties would align the commission with almost all other agencies charged with administering the law.
Additionally, when the FEC dismisses an enforcement case and the complainant challenges that decision, the bill would require courts to review the dismissal de novo — that is, anew, without deferring entirely to commissioners who voted “no.”
These reforms have bipartisan support. Former Republican and Democratic FEC chairs have endorsed the For the People Act’s FEC provisions. And they were introduced as a standalone bill in February by bipartisan co-authors Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).
Swift passage will bring meaningful oversight and give the referee a whistle for fair play.
Vietnam. (photo: Thomas Watkins/AFP/Getty Images)
How Two Incredible Women Declared War on the Makers of Agent Orange Sprayed All Over Vietnam and the US
Nadette De Visser, The Daily Beast
De Visser writes:
Years after Agent Orange was banned from the battlefields of Vietnam it was still being used in the U.S. Campaigners say it is time the companies who made it are held to account.
he name Agent Orange became synonymous with the horrors of modern chemical warfare. Between 1961 and 1971 the U.S. military used an estimated 13 million gallons of the toxic cocktail to destroy the dense foliage of the Vietnamese rainforest, with devastating results for the people who lived there. But its use did not end there. Surplus from the Agent Orange stockpile was used back home in the U.S. even after Congress banned its use in Vietnam.
In the spring of 1975, a county truck drove past Carol van Strum’s property in coastal Oregon. On the back were two men holding hoses. They sprayed huge quantities of a liquid all over the area. “They were like competing with one another, who could spray the furthest,” van Strum told The Daily Beast. From their truck the liquid drenched the land, the waves rolling toward the nearby river. “The river runs through our property but it’s right on the edge, really. The kids were down there, fishing and playing in it. I’m assuming they didn’t see the kids, but they sprayed them directly. By the evening they were all really sick.”
Van Strum went down to the river the next day to see if there had been any impact on life down there. “The river was full of dead ducklings and dead crawdads and fish floating around, bobbing along the edges. In the bushes nearby we found a hermit thrush sitting on a nest but she was dead. It was very obvious that something really, really poisonous had been sprayed,” she said.
Alarmed, van Strum called the county to ask what had been in the truck. Had there been a mistake? “Oh, no,” they answered, “It’s just 2,4 D and 2,4,5,T. It’s absolutely as safe as table salt, it couldn’t have hurt them.” That was the point when van Strum and her husband decided to drive over to the university library, some 50 miles away. What they discovered was that the truck had been filled with Agent Orange. Its use by the U.S. military had already been banned in Vietnam.
A few weeks later, the poultry on the van Strum family’s farm started hatching with strange deformities. “Within the next few weeks, we had chickens and ducks and geese with no wings or deformed wings, with their feet on backward and crossed beaks,” van Strum told The Daily Beast from her home in Oregon. According to van Strum, the U.S. government must have been aware of the destructive power of Agent Orange, and so must the chemical companies.
“In 1965, the government itself had done studies to the effects of the ingredients of Agent Orange 2,4-D and 2,4,5,-T and found that both chemicals seriously caused birth defects in test animals,” she said. “You can’t say the government didn’t know, I don’t think they understood the scale of what was going on, and they certainly didn’t know about the dioxin content of that time.”
According to The Institute of Medicine, 2,4,5,-T had by the early1970s “become one of the most widely used herbicides in the United States.”
The decades-long battle to hold the companies who produced Agent Orange to account reached the French high court this month. French-Vietnamese victim Tran To Nga brought a civil case against 14 major producers of the chemicals in an effort to hold them accountable for her illness, and that of her children and grandchildren. Although the U.S. Veterans Affairs department acknowledges birth defects in children of Vietnam vets, no chemical company has been held accountable for the Vietnamese casualties of Agent Orange.
Nga has been engaged in a long battle to change that but the high court ruled her claims inadmissible this month, taking the position that it was not within the competence of a French court to make judgements on the defense policy of a foreign state at war. Nga and her team of lawyers immediately announced that they would appeal the decision. This legal battle of epic proportions began in 2015 when she filed suit against 14 big chemical and pharmaceutical Agent Orange producers, including Monsanto, Dow and Hercules. It is not over yet.
Nga, a survivor of the Vietnam war who was exposed to the extremely toxic defoliant, is suing the companies for damages to her health, that of her children and grandchildren, as well as “millions of others.” She also sued over the impact on the environment.
Talking to Nga on a video link to her living room in Paris, the 79-year-old seemed almost ageless with her dainty features. It is difficult to imagine that various different cancers are raging through her body and dioxin is still running through her system. “They took a piece of my skin for the trial and tested it for dioxin, it is a funny thing to say, but I was happy that they could find it,” she said.
Nga’s life story is a tale of turbulence and activism. At the age of 12, she joined the resistance against French colonial rule in Vietnam. Nga would transport small, rolled-up messages. “Nobody suspects a little girl in a pretty dress,” she said. After French rule ended and the Vietnam War started, she began reporting for the Vietcong. “We spent most of our time in the tunnels.” she said, describing the events leading up to this moment. It was during that time as a young journalist for the Vietcong news agency in South Vietnam that she was first exposed to Agent Orange, back in 1966.
“We were in Cuchi, near Saigon, where the U.S. military had started defoliating around a military base. One day, as we heard airplanes flying over, I decided to take a peek outside. High up in the air I could just see the plane moving out of sight. It left big white clouds of powder trailing behind it,” she said. “The powder mixed with the humidity of the jungle and changed into a sort of sticky liquid. It drenched me from top to toe. It made me cough, I was choking.”
It was unpleasant but Nga thought nothing more of it afterward. Unaware of the scale of the danger, she didn’t think twice about walking through fields wet from the recent spraying. And she had no reason to think back to that chemical exposure years later when tragedy struck the family.
“I didn’t even consider those moments when my first child died shortly after it was born. For years after I just felt so guilty, I was her mother and she was born ill,” Nga said. “When my second daughter was born with blood and skin conditions I still thought it was all me.”
Even when her third daughter was born with birth defects, she did not make the connection.
Only 40 years after her encounter with Agent Orange, did she realize the cause of this horrific chain of events could have been something that happened so long ago.
Agent Orange has caused overwhelming damage to the Vietnamese environment and appears to have done the same to the people who lived there. The war ended almost five decades ago, but for many Vietnamese, this silent killer lingers, and keeps wreaking havoc. According to the Vietnamese Red Cross, at least one million Vietnamese suffer from the long-term effects of exposure to Agent Orange. They suffer from ailments varying from different kinds of cancers and diabetes, to miscarriages and generational birth defects. Even the current generation of Vietnamese children is coping with Agent Orange associated afflictions. Different medical studies have linked all these problems to the long-term effects of exposure to Agent Orange.
In a documentary called The People vs Agent Orange that is scheduled to air on June 28 on PBS, directors Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna investigated the devastation brought about by Agent Orange in Vietnam and beyond. The film quotes from U.S. government documents that demonstrate the internal debate over the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.
In the papers, Agent Orange is reportedly described not only as an agent to increase visibility, but also a poison intended to deprive the Vietnamese resistance and population, then called the “enemy,” of its food. Agent Orange did exactly that, and more. It contaminated the food and water supply, causing serious birth defects that are handed down from one generation to the next.
It all started with the U.S. government starting an action under the defense supply act, a few years into the Vietnam war. It required every company that had the productive means, to produce Agent Orange for the war effort. “Every gallon they produced would be purchased by the government at a profitable rate to the companies.” Adelson explains. “The more they produced, the more money they would make. As a result of that, they decided to produce the herbicide at a very high temperature—that would produce much more, much more quickly. But the consequence was, that it produced dioxin in the process.”
It makes it all the more unimaginable that a governmental organization like the U.S. Forest Service would decide to go on using Agent Orange on its own people, its own soil.
This ramp-up in production meant there was plenty going spare when Agent Orange was banished from the battlefield in Vietnam.
Van Strum, back in Oregon, says the companies were not about to let it go to waste.
“The spraying essentially started when our government banned the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. All the production of chemical companies like Monsanto, Dow, Hercules, and the others, was going into making Agent Orange. They had expanded their facilities for it, had all this infrastructure to make huge quantities of it, and had to find a use for it and that’s what they did here.”
That the dioxins in the defoliant cause different forms of cancer is not disputed by most scientists, including the World Health Organization. On its website it states: “Short-term exposure of humans to high levels of dioxins may result in skin lesions, such as chloracne and patchy darkening of the skin, and altered liver function. Long-term exposure is linked to impairment of the immune system, the developing nervous system, the endocrine system and reproductive functions.”
Chronic exposure of animals to dioxins has resulted in several types of cancer. The dioxin TCDD, which was present in Agent Orange, was evaluated by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 1997 and 2012. Based on animal data and on human epidemiology data, it was classified as a “known human carcinogen.”
But to this day, the companies that produce it, and the people and institutes that support them, deny the link between Agent Orange and its effect on humans.
They say there is no way of telling how a person got cancer and whether Agent Orange was responsible for it. In the court case in Paris, the companies contested their responsibility for Nga’s illness arguing that the defoliant was used by the U.S. Army, not by them.
In 2009, Nga was approached by William Bourdon, a French lawyer, who wanted to represent her in a case against the chemical companies. “Of course I said ‘No way!’ What, a lawsuit, at my age?” Nga told The Daily Beast. It took some convincing to get Nga to take on the case. “He told me that this case would not just be for my own benefit. This case would be for all the people who suffered from Agent Orange poisoning.”
When asked why she was continuing to fight, Nga said: “My ultimate goal is that this trial sets a precedent, not only for Vietnamese people, but anyone around the world. So, anyone who suffered from the consequences of exposure to Agent Orange can start proceedings against the chemical producers. What I want is justice and recognition for the plight of all those who had to experience the aftereffects of exposure to Agent Orange.”
In Oregon, the forest service finally stopped using 2,4,5 T dioxin in 1978, although timber companies and other entities were still using it until it was banned in 1984. It continues to use the 2,4-D component to this day. The Environmental Protection Agency published their findings about the spraying in a paper in 1979, stating that: “There is a statistically significant cross-correlation between the study area Spontaneous abortion (miscarriages) index and spray patterns in terms of pounds applied by months in the Alsea basin, 1972-1977, after a lag time of two or three months.”
In other words, two or three months after spraying dioxin, the miscarriage rate went up significantly. Unfortunately, Oregon was not the only area Agent Orange was used in the U.S. “We found out the herbicide was also sprayed in the forest of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho, in Washington and in Northern California. “I think there should be compensation for all Oregon and U.S. victims too,” said van Strum. “Or at least acknowledgement.”
Jair Bolsonaro. (photo: AFP)
Over 200 Brazilian Cities Rise Up Against "Genocidal" Bolsonaro
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Brazilians on Saturday have taken the streets to protest against the chaos created by President Jair Bolsonaro's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic."
Massive rallies call for impeachment of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro
Demonstrators were calming actions against the responsible for over 459.000 Brazilian lives taken by COVID-19 and the recklessness of their President.
Currently, Bolsonaro is under investigation by a Senatorial Commission, which has to evaluate his COVID-19 policies and actions like touted unproven drugs and pressured local officials to prevent health restrictions.
This investigation may lead to an impeachment, which is highly unlikely to happen since Congress is one of the most right-orientated in years, therefore, it would not pass any motion against the right-wing President.
People on the streets were asking for more vaccines, better public health, free public educations, and so on, but the common denominator throughout the country was the phrase "Bolsonaro out".
Despite international calls from neighboring countries, the World Health Organization (WHO), and his own people, Bolsonaro keeps fighting against any health restrictions to stop COVID-19 spread.
“With no scientific proof, governors and mayors have imposed confinement or curfews (...) We are ready to take all the measures necessary to guarantee your freedom,” said Bolsonaro on May 23 during a motorcycle rally in Rio de Janeiro.
As of Saturday morning, Brazil had reported almost 16.4 million COVID-19 cases and 459.171 related deaths.
Indoor tomato farming in Kentucky. Technological advances are fuelling growth, along with increasing customer demand for sustainable food. (photo: Brian Campbell/AP)
We Should All Be Worried About the United Nations Food Systems Summit
Thea Walmsley, A Growing Culture and Deep Green Resistance News Service
Walmsley writes: "Later this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system."
A battle for the future of food is already underway. There’s still time to change the outcome.
ater this year, the United Nations is set to hold a historic Food Systems Summit, recognizing the need for urgent action to disrupt business-as-usual practices in the food system. But far from serving as a meaningful avenue for much-needed change, the summit is shaping up to facilitate increased corporate capture of the food system. So much so, that peasant and indigenous-led organizations and civil society groups are organizing an independent counter-summit in order to have their voices heard.
At the heart of the opposition is the fact that the conference has been co-opted by corporate interests who are pushing towards a highly industrialized style of agriculture promoted by supporters of the Green Revolution, an approach that is meant to eradicate hunger by increasing production through hybrid seeds and other agrochemical inputs. It has been widely discredited for failing to achieve its goals and damaging the environment. The Summit’s concept paper perpetuates the same Green Revolution narrative — it is dominated by topics like AI-controlled farming systems, gene editing, and other high-tech solutions geared towards large-scale agriculture, as well as finance and market mechanisms to address food insecurity, with methods like agroecology notably absent or minimally discussed.
A Crisis of Participation
But the problem is not only the subject matter that the conference has put on the agenda. It’s also the remarkably undemocratic way of choosing who gets to participate, and in what ways. The agenda was set behind closed doors at Davos, the World Economic Forum’s exclusive conference. As Sofia Monsalve, Secretary General of FIAN International puts it, “They have cherry picked representatives of civil society. We don’t know why, or which procedure they used.”
The multi-stakeholder model of governance is problematic because it sounds very inclusive,” Monsalve continues. “But in fact we are worried about the concealing of power asymmetries, without having a clear rule in terms of accountability. What is the rule here — who decides? And if you don’t decide according to a rule, where can we go to claim you are doing wrong?”
The conference organizers have claimed that they have given peasant-led and civil society groups ample opportunity to participate in the conference, but this is a facade. The UN’s definition of ‘participation’ differs significantly from that of the hundreds of civil society groups that have spoken out against the Summit. The Summit claims that allowing groups to attend virtual sessions and give suggestions amounts to participation. But true participation means being consulted about crucial agenda items that have a massive impact on the communities they represent. This was not done.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to shape the agenda, Monsalve explains. “The agenda was set. Full stop. And therefore we are asking ‘why is it that we are not discussing how to dismantle corporate power? This is a very urgent issue on the ground for the people. How is it that we are not discussing about COVID and the food crisis related to COVID?’”
Organizations like the People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), which represents 148 grassroots groups from 28 countries, feel similarly. “It’s just like having a table set,” explains Sylvia Mallari, Global Co-Chairperson of PCFS. “So you have a dinner table set, then the questions would be who set the table, who is invited to the table, who sits beside whom during dinner? And what is the menu? For whom and for what is the food summit? And right now, the way it has been, the agenda they’ve set leaves out crucial peoples and even their own UN nation agencies being left behind.”
Elizabeth Mpofu of La Vía Campesina, the largest peasant-led organization representing over 2 million people worldwide, explains how “The United Nation food systems summit, from the beginning, was really not inclusive of the peasants’ voices. And if they’re going to talk about the food systems, on behalf of whom? Because the people who are on the ground, who are really working on producing the food should be involved in the planning. Before they even organized this summit, they should have made some consultations and this was not done.”
The concerns are not only coming from outside the UN. Two former UN Special Rapporteurs to the Right to Food — Olivier De Schutter and Hilal Elver — as well as Michael Fakhri, who currently holds the position, wrote a statement to the summit organizers early on in the process. “Having all served as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food,” they write, “we have witnessed first-hand the importance of improving accountability and democracy in food systems, and the value of people’s local and traditional knowledge.
It is deeply concerning that we had to spend a year persuading the convenors that human rights matter for this UN Secretary General’s Food Systems Summit. It is also highly problematic that issues of power, participation, and accountability (i.e. how and by whom will the outcomes be delivered) remain unresolved.”
Michael Fakhri has also expressed concern about the sidelining of the Committee on Food Security (CFS), a unique civil society organization that allows “people to directly dialogue and debate with governments, holding them to account.” As Fakhri explains, if the CFS is sidelined in this summit (as they have been thus far), there is a real danger that “there will no longer be a place for human rights in food policy, diminishing anyone’s ability to hold powerful actors accountable.”
Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment (SWAGEN) and PCFS member, stated during a Hunger for Justice Broadcast on April 30th that the problem comes down to one of fundamentally conflicting values: “Multinational corporations and small-holder farmers have different values,” said Kenyangi. “While the former value profit, the latter value the integrity of ecosystems. Meaningful input of small-holder farmers, respect for Indigenous knowledge, consideration for biodiversity… will not be taken into account [at the Summit]. They will not tell the truth: that hunger is political; that food insecurity in Africa is not only as a result of law and agriculture production, but it’s a question of justice, democracy and political will. That’s our concern.”
The Presence of AGRA
The problems with the Summit were compounded further by UN Secretary General António Guterres choosing to appoint Agnes Kalibata, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (AGRA), as Special Envoy to the conference. AGRA is an organization, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations (as well as our governments), that promotes a high-tech, high-cost approach to agriculture, heavily reliant on agrochemical inputs and fertilizers. They have been at the forefront of predatory seed laws and policies that marginalize and disenfranchise peasant farmers on a massive scale.
AGRA has devastated small-scale farmers under the mission of “doubling productivity and incomes by 2020 for 30 million small-scale farming households while reducing food insecurity by half in 20 countries.” Their approach has been proven to be markedly unsuccessful. Timothy Wise, a senior adviser at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, began to research AGRA’s efficacy in the last fourteen years of work. Unlike many nonprofits who are held to strict transparency standards, AGRA refuses to share any information about their performance metrics with researchers. It took a U.S. Freedom of Information Act request to find out what AGRA has to show for their US$1 billion budget. Researchers found that AGRA ‘apparently’ had not been collecting this data until 2017 (eleven years after their founding in 2006).
Food security has not decreased in their target countries. In fact, for the countries in which AGRA operates as a whole, food insecurity has increased by 30% during their years of operation; crop production has fared no better. Yet this narrative continues to be pervasive around the world. It is the backbone of the UN Food Systems Summit and most development agendas. And AGRA’s president is leading the conference.
Attempts to build bridges with civil society organizations have failed. In sessions with civil society groups, Ms. Kalibata has demonstrated a lack of awareness of the growing peasant-led movements that reclaim traditional agricultural methods as promising avenues to a more sustainable food system. Wise explains, “During the session she held with peasant groups, she basically indicated that she didn’t know about the peasant rights declaration that the UN had passed just two years ago. And she told them, why do you keep calling yourselves peasants? She said that she calls them business people because she thinks they’re needing to learn how to farm as a business.”
“It’s also a pretty significant conflict of interest, which people don’t quite realise,” Wise continues. “AGRA is a nonprofit organisation that’s funded by the Gates foundation and a couple other foundations — and our governments. They are about to enter a period where they desperately need to replenish their financing. And so they are going to be undertaking a major fund drive exactly when this conference is happening. And the summit is being positioned to help with that fund drive.”
Since Ms. Kalibata was named special envoy, there has been a public outcry over this clear conflict of interest. 176 civil society organizations from 83 countries sent a letter to the UN Secretary General António Guterres voicing their concerns over Ms. Kalibata’s corporate ties. They never received a response. 500 civil society organizations, academics, and other actors sent the UN an additional statement laying out the growing list of concerns about the Summit. Again, they received no reply.
While 676 total civil society organizations and individuals expressed clear concern over Ms. Kalibata’s appointment, only twelve people signed a letter supporting the nomination. The Community Alliance for Global Justice’s AGRA Watch team found that all but one of these individuals have received funds from the Gates Foundation.
Competing Pathways for Food Systems Change
This summit isn’t just a case of poor planning and a lack of genuine participation for peasant-led organizations. It represents a deeper and more insidious trend in food systems governance: the erosion of democratic decision-making and the rise of powerful, unaccountable, private-sector actors who continue to consolidate power over the food system.
The absence of practices like agroecology from the agenda shows how deeply the private sector has consolidated power — these methods are highly promising, low-input and low-cost solutions for farmers to increase their yields while farming more sustainably. But they are mentioned only in passing. “If you ever look at a situation and see something that looks like the most obvious, sensible solution and it’s not happening, ask who’s making money from it not happening,” explains Timothy Wise. The answer here is clear: high-input agriculture makes many people extraordinarily wealthy. This power allows them to set the agenda for food systems change, at the expense of farmers, and at the expense of the environment.
That’s why this conference is so important: it will set the stage for the approach to food systems change in the coming decades. We the people need to decide who should set the agenda for a food future that affects us all — one that preserves biodiversity and prioritizes human rights and well-being. Are we willing to let the corporations who pursue profits at all cost continue to claim that they know what’s in our best interest? Do we want a future governed by the likes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the largest agrochemical and seed companies in the world? Or are we ready to demand that those who actually grow our food — peasants, farmers, and Indigenous peoples around the world — be the ones to determine our direction?
This is what’s at stake. Right now, the most powerful players in the food system are poised to set an agenda that will allow them to continue amassing profits at staggering rates, at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the environment.
But there is still time to fight back. Where the conference holds most of its power is in its legitimacy. As groups mobilize, organize, and demand genuine participation, this false legitimacy driven by actors like the Gates Foundation begins to crumble. We must stand in solidarity with the grassroots communities who are telling the truth about this conference and what it represents. We must get to work.
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