28 May 21
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27 May 21
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Charles Pierce | Senator Professor Warren Took Jamie Dimon to the Woodshed
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "In the Senate on Wednesday, the heads of the Too Big to Fail banks stopped by the Senate Banking Committee to pat themselves on the back for how they responded to the pandemic by not being the completely greedy bastards they are in the normal course of business."
"No matter how you try to spin it, this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families."
n the Senate on Wednesday, the heads of the Too Big to Fail banks stopped by the Senate Banking Committee to pat themselves on the back for how they responded to the pandemic by not being the completely greedy bastards they are in the normal course of business. (The fact that Wells Fargo, for example, hasn’t been shamed into a Van Alen belt for the swindles it pulled in the past is proof that there is no god.) One of the participants was Jamie Dimon, the boss of J.P. Morgan Chase. One of the senators was Senator Professor Warren. She Had A Plan for Dimon’s spleen, and it involved firing it out the window.
It seems that, while being granted overdraft protections from the Federal Reserve due to the pandemic, the big banks declined to waive their overdraft fees for ordinary customers during the national fiscal emergency. This was an obvious customer service, since millions of personal economies went up for grabs all at once. Senator Professor Warren had some questions about that.
The regulators recommended that the bank automatically waive the fee, the same thing the bank could do at the Fed, if it overdrew its account. Let me ask the CEO's of the four banks. Citibank, Bank of America, Chase, and Wells Fargo. The four banks that collectively manage tens of millions of checking accounts for customers. While you automatically and at no cost got complete protection from overdraft fees at the Federal Reserve, could you please raise your hand if you gave the same automatic protection to your customers and automatically waived all of their overdraft fees? I'm not seeing anyone raise their hand. That is because none of you gave the same help to your customers that the bank regulators extended to you…Mr. Dimon, you are the star of the overdraft show. Your bank, J.P. Morgan, collects seven times as much in overdraft fees per account and your competitors. How much did J.P. Morgan collect in overdraft fees from their consumers in 2020?
Undaunted, and armored by privilege, Dimon decided he would stick up for the fiscal legacy of Scrooge and Marley.
We waive the fees for customers upon request if they are under stress because of COVID.
Very bad move.
I appreciate that you want to duck this question. Do you know how much your profits would have been if you had waived as the regulators recommended? The answer is your profits would have been $27.6 billion. I did the math for you.
Here's the thing. You and your colleagues come in today to talk about how you stepped up and took care of customers during the pandemic and it's a bunch of baloney. It is about $4 billion worth of baloney. You can fix that right now. Will you commit right now to refund the money you took from consumers during the pandemic?
That got a flat “no” from Jamie Dimon.
That's right. Over the past year, you could have passed on the breaks that you got from the fed to your customers, but you didn't do it. Everybody else here, the other three bankers, will you agree to refund the overdraft fees that you collected? I didn't think so.
No matter how you try to spin it, this past year has shown that corporate profits are more important to your bank than offering just a little help to struggling families, even when we are in the world—in the middle of a worldwide crisis.
They’ll never change. They almost blew up the world economy and got rich selling off the wreckage. It is, however, still startling to see them state this all so plainly.
Two brothers perform last rites for their mother who died of Covid-19, at the Nigambodh Ghat Crematorium in New Delhi on Monday. (photo: Ishant Chauhan/AP)
Salman Rushdie | What's Irretrievable After a Pandemic Year
Salman Rushdie, The Washington Post
Rushdie writes: "In her celebrated book 'Illness as Metaphor,' Susan Sontag - herself a cancer survivor, who years later succumbed to a different cancer - warned us against seeing ill health as a figure of some other social ill."
Salman Rushdie is a novelist, essayist and the author of “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” from which this essay is excerpted.
n her celebrated book “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag — herself a cancer survivor, who years later succumbed to a different cancer — warned us against seeing ill health as a figure of some other social ill. “My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness,” she wrote, “is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”
As the global pandemic raged, many people failed to take her advice. Voices including an Islamic State spokesman, Hulk Hogan and a conservative pastor from Florida named Rick Wiles declared that the virus was a punishment from God. Other, greener voices suggested it was nature’s revenge on the human race — though, to be fair, there were louder voices warning against anthropomorphizing “Mother Nature.” The old science-fiction idea that the human race is the virus from which the Earth is trying to recover got some airtime too. Politicians characterized the pandemic as a war. Arundhati Roy called it “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” And sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel “The Plague” went through the roof.
I didn’t buy any of it, the stuff about divine or earthly retribution, or the dreams of a better future. Many people wanted to feel that some good would come out of the horror, that we would as a species somehow learn virtuous lessons and emerge from the cocoon of the lockdown as splendid New Age butterflies and create kinder, gentler, less greedy, more ecologically wise, less racist, less capitalist, more inclusive societies. This seemed to me, still seems to me, like Utopian thinking. The coronavirus did not strike me as the harbinger of socialism. The world’s power structures and their beneficiaries would not easily surrender to a new idealism. I couldn’t help finding strange our need to imagine the good emerging out of the bad. Europe in the time of the Black Death, and later London during the Great Plague, weren’t full of people trying to see the positive side. People were too busy trying not to die.
We are not the dominant species on the planet by accident. We have great survival skills. And we will survive. But I doubt that a social revolution will follow because of the lessons of the pandemic. But yes, sure, one can hope for betterment, and fight for it, and maybe our children will see — will make — that better world.
It is a part of our tragedy that in this time of crisis we have been cursed, in many countries, including all three of those I have most cared about in my life, with leaders of astonishing cynicism and bad faith. In India, Narendra Modi’s government used the pandemic to put the blame on Muslims. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson (despite having had and recovered from the virus himself) handled the crisis with stunning incompetence, at first downplaying the dangers, reacting too little and too late and continuing to play the Brexiteers’ anti-immigrant card, in spite of the fact that both the primary caregivers who looked after him in the hospital were immigrants and the British National Health Service as a whole depends on their skills and courage.
And in Donald Trump’s America, where nothing was unthinkable, no matter how low he and his followers sank, there was always a lower level to sink to — in Trumpistan, the virus (like everything else) was politicized, minimized, called a Democrat trick; the science was derided, the administration’s lamentable response to the pandemic was obscured by a blizzard of lies, wearers of masks were abused by wearers of red hats, and the mountain of the dead went on growing, unmourned by the self-obsessed charlatan who claimed, in the face of all the evidence, that he was making America great again.
To repair the damage done by these people in these times will not be easy. I may not see the wounds mended in my lifetime. It may take a generation or more. The social damage of the pandemic itself, the fear of our old social lives, in bars and restaurants and dance halls and sports stadiums, will take time to heal (although a percentage of people seem to know no fear already). We will hug and kiss again. But will there still be movie theaters? Will there be bookstores? Will we feel okay in crowded subway cars?
The social, cultural, political damage of these years, the deepening of the already deep rifts in society in many parts of the world, including the United States, Britain and India, will take longer. It would not be exaggerating to say that as we stare across those chasms, we have begun to hate the people on the other side. That hatred has been fostered by cynics and it bubbles over in different ways almost every day.
It isn’t easy to see how that chasm can be bridged — how love can find a way.
President Biden. (photo: Melina Mara/EPA)
213 Mass Shootings Later, What Has Biden Done on Guns?
Scott Bixby, The Daily Beast
Bixby writes: "Joe Biden once had a term for politicians who were too cautious to push for meaningful gun reform legislation: cowards."
Gov. Newsom expressed his anger at both sides in Washington for enabling a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence, asking, “What the hell is going on in this country?”
oe Biden once had a term for politicians who were too cautious to push for meaningful gun reform legislation: cowards.
“Why in God’s name can we say that we can’t do anything about 150,000 people being shot dead in the United States of America? Why are guns different?” Biden said during a campaign stop in Las Vegas in February 2020. “Because of cowardness. Because of cowards. Cowards who are afraid to take on these special interests because they are so damn powerful.”
In that address, delivered a few miles from the site of the deadliest mass shooting in American history, Biden promised to send a bill to Congress that would close background check loopholes and end liability protections for firearms manufacturers—on his first day in office.
“I promise you I will not rest until we beat these guys, because it is immoral what’s happening,” Biden said at the time. “I promise you, if I’m your next president they’re going to be held accountable, because I am coming after them.”
But 127 days—and at least 213 mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive—into Biden’s presidency, his administration’s approach to firearm restrictions has not been nearly as expansive as he once promised. The long-promised legislation on background checks and liability reform still hasn’t been introduced, the national gun buyback program he once floated has been put on ice, and his first executive orders addressing guns weren’t issued until April, only coming after a series of high-profile mass shootings in South Carolina, Colorado, and Georgia.
On Wednesday, hours after a shooter at a rail yard in San Jose, California, killed eight people before taking his own life, White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the president was “calling on Congress to take action” on gun violence, reiterating similar remarks that press secretary Jen Psaki had delivered in the wake of previous mass shootings.
“What’s clear, as the president has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,” Jean-Pierre said, noting the smattering of executive actions issued by the president last month. Later on Wednesday, Biden issued a statement lamenting that, “yet again,” he was ordering the nation’s flag to be lowered to half-staff to mark a mass shooting.
And, “once again,” that he was calling on Congress to address the crisis.
“I urge Congress to take immediate action and heed the call of the American people, including the vast majority of gun owners, to help end this epidemic of gun violence in America,” Biden said. “Every life that is taken by a bullet pierces the soul of our nation. We can, and we must, do more.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, however, didn’t hold back his anger at both sides in Washington for perpetuating a cycle of grief and indifference over gun violence.
“There’s a sameness to this and I think a numbness that we’re all feeling," Newsom said at a press briefing with local officials. “It begs the question—what the hell is going on in this country?”
Biden’s piecemeal approach to the issue reflects the limits of his power to address a problem that he has grappled with since his days in the U.S. Senate, gun control advocates say.
“Voters and Americans, by overwhelming margins, support many of these proposals,” said Adam Skaggs, chief counsel and policy director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s only divided in Congress.”
With a razor-thin Democratic majority and generally pro-gun Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) standing athwart any attempts at eliminating the filibuster, Biden’s ambitious agenda on gun control has, for now, been whittled down to the scale of his ability to enact it.
The most recent example is the Department of Justice’s proposed rule change that would update the definition of a firearm to include “unfinished” components sold in gun-making kits. Weapons built from those kits, which don’t have serial numbers and are increasingly popular among weapons traffickers, are known as “ghost guns” for the difficulty of tracing their ownership.
There are a smattering of gun-related bills that would accomplish much of Biden’s agenda on firearms. The Bipartisan Background Checks Act has passed the House of Representatives, and the Untraceable Firearms Act, introduced earlier this month by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in the Senate and Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) in the House, would make proposed rule changes by the Department of Justice Department on “ghost guns” permanent.
But with Republicans largely hoping to block the nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of gun-control advocate David Chipman—who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee only hours before the San Jose shooting—those legislative efforts are currently taking a backseat to Biden’s economic and pandemic-relief agenda. The result? Biden has been left with little more than executive orders and proposed regulatory changes at his immediate disposal.
That’s not to say that gun reform advocates are dissatisfied with what Biden has done so far.
“President Biden pledged last month to treat gun violence like an American epidemic,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, saying that the rule change was proof that Biden was keeping his word. “The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to regulate them like the deadly weapons they are will save countless lives.”
Gun-reform advocates are generally confident in Biden’s personal commitment to the cause, pointing to his successful passage of a federal ban on assault weapons in the 1990s and his close connections with the families of those killed by gun violence.
“We certainly don’t underestimate the challenges of moving legislation through the Senate, but we are pleased that the administration has been fairly clear in what it wants Congress to do,” Skaggs said, adding that the administration hasn’t “sat on their hands” while waiting for Congress to act. “They’ve sent a strong signal that they are going to do what they can, in terms of executive action.”
But whether Biden can navigate a divided Senate to pursue meaningful legislation on guns is another matter.
“We’ve not had anyone in the Oval Office who has spoken about gun violence as the public health epidemic it is, who has acknowledged the role of the executive in funding and in legislation, who has used the bully pulpit, and has had the emotional connection to survivors that he clearly has,” Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, told The Daily Beast. “But obviously, any executive action has a limited potential timeframe—another administration can come in and decide that they’re going to reverse the approach taken. It’s very important that whatever is done is then backed up with legislation.”
Biden knows better than most the risks of mishandling a high-visibility push for gun reform. In 2013, weeks after the murder of 20 young children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, then-Vice President Biden was tasked by President Barack Obama to draft an expansive package of gun control measures. But Biden’s deliberative pace and focus on consensus-driven legislation was seen as a drag to the process, and the long legislative result of the efforts—a bill that would have extended background checks to gun shows and Internet sales of firearms—was defeated by the filibuster.
“The United States Senate let down an awful lot of people today, including those Newtown families,” Biden said bitterly after presiding over the bill’s defeat. “I don’t know how anybody who looked them in the eye could have voted the way they did.”
The lesson learned from that failure, advocates said, is a simple one: Don’t weaken your own legislation before you’ve even begun the fight.
“You don’t bargain against yourself… You don’t wait for consensus to emerge on an issue where history teaches it’s difficult, or just about impossible, to reach consensus,” Skaggs said. “The president, I think, learned from the past that these are challenging and difficult issues, but they are also issues that are too important not to fight for.”
But while gun reform advocates are understanding to a point, there are only so many times that background check legislation backed by a large majority of the American people can fall victim to the filibuster before they call for even more fundamental reform.
“We will not accept a vote on a bill that does not get us to a substantially better place with the system than we are now,” said Brown, whose organization shares a name with the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks for many firearm purchases, that Biden championed while in the Senate. If that comes to pass, she continued, “we believe the filibuster has to end.”
“As goes our issue, so goes [the For the People Act], so goes the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, so goes his entire agenda, effectively,” Brown said.
If that comes to pass, Biden will be forced to confront his own words on the urgency of gun reform, made in response to a shooting at a grocery store in Colorado in March.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take commonsense steps that’ll save lives in the future,” Biden said. “And to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act.”
Police in riot gear force people off a street as they protest the killing of Andrew Brown Jr. on April 27 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Families of Californians Killed by Police Push Bill
to Strip Badges From Bad Officers
Police Are Still Killing People at the Same Rate as Before George Floyd Killing
Nolan D. McCaskill, POLITICO
McCaskill writes: "George Floyd's murder, the ensuing mass protests, the renewed calls for police reform and the trial of the former police officer convicted of his murder overshadow a staggering reality: The pace of fatal encounters with police, who have killed about three people per day this year, is on par with last year's daily average."
Through the first four months of 2021, there are less than a week’s worth of days in which police did not kill anyone, data shows.
eorge Floyd’s murder, the ensuing mass protests, the renewed calls for police reform and the trial of the former police officer convicted of his murder overshadow a staggering reality: The pace of fatal encounters with police, who have killed about three people per day this year, is on par with last year’s daily average.
Through the first four months of the year, there have been just six days in which police across the United States did not kill anyone.
It’s a bracing reminder of how little has changed despite a pandemic and intense scrutiny of policing practices in the 12 months since the world witnessed the Floyd killing in Minneapolis.
“There’s an effort, at least by some political actors, to give folks false hope that we’re turning the corner around police violence,” said Scott Roberts, senior director of criminal justice and democracy campaigns at the racial justice group Color of Change. “These numbers show that, as far as we can tell, it’ll continue.”
Black people like teenager Ma’Khia Bryant, 20-year-old Daunte Wright and 42-year-old Andrew Brown Jr. have all suffered the same fate as Floyd — and so many others before them — in recent weeks: death by police. They are among 89 Black people who have been killed by police this year through May 21, according to Mapping Police Violence. Another teen, Adam Toledo, who was Latino, was shot and killed by police in Chicago in March.
Caron Nazario’s life was spared, but the Afro Latino second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps was pulled over by police in Virginia late last year while in uniform. Guns were drawn on him; he was pepper sprayed, forced to the ground and handcuffed following a traffic stop.
Footage of the encounter went public in April, around the same time Wright, who was biracial, was killed at a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minn., miles from where ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd’s murder.
In a nation in which Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people — and 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed when killed by police — the statistics are damning.
“That strikes me as very hard to think of an innocent explanation or a satisfying explanation for that or a non-invidious explanation,” said Clark Neily, senior vice president for criminal justice at the Cato Institute. “I can’t come up with an explanation that is anything other than concerning for that. It suggests, presumably, a higher level of suspicion and fear on the part of police and a greater willingness to resort to lethal force without hesitation, and that’s quite concerning.”
In interviews, activists were able to highlight some signs of progress in their long battle to severely limit fatal encounters with police. They mentioned Colorado and New Mexico, for example, as the only two states to end qualified immunity, which shields police from lawsuits by victims or their families for alleged civil rights violations, and the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program in Eugene, Ore., where unarmed mental health professionals respond to mental health, homelessness and addiction crises.
But activists are also clear-eyed that much more work needs to be done. They call attention to the fact that nonprofits and the media are doing the legwork on tracking fatal police encounters because the federal government fails to collect and publish such data.
“It’s a huge issue,” said Nancy La Vigne, executive director of the Council on Criminal Justice’s Task Force on Policing.
The nonprofit think tank launched the independent task force in November, and it released five priorities for police reform last week: national training standards, a federal decertification registry, duty-to-intervene and mandatory reporting policies, trauma-informed policing and increased data collection and transparency.
“Data equals accountability,” La Vigne said. “Every agency should make public their use of force incidents. Every single agency.”
The CCJ task force’s priorities call for national training standards, a federal decertification registry, duty-to-intervene and mandatory reporting policies, trauma-informed policing and increased data collection and transparency.
Maurice Mitchell, a strategist with the Movement for Black Lives and national director of the Working Families Party, described the cyclical nature of police killings of unarmed people of color like this: public outrage, a mass movement then government response. The problem he laid out is that government officials tend to focus on symptoms and process, instead of root causes and outcomes.
A national registry of police misconduct, ending qualified immunity, establishing commissions and even Justice Department consent decrees are all reactive policy measures that occur after harm has already been done, he said.
“All these things are not bad, but what we hit the streets for were very clear outcomes, and what we spoke about were the root causes,” Mitchell said. “We need to interrupt this cycle where Black folks and advocates and others are demanding very, very clear outcomes, which is a very simple outcome: We live in a society where our government doesn’t kill us. We believe it’s the actual number and density of interactions that people have with police officers that lead to these instances.”
Law enforcement officials largely agree that the Chauvin verdict — conviction on all charges — was the correct one. But making Floyd’s murder about race is “completely wrong and irresponsible,” said Joe Imperatrice, founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC.
“That has to stop because it’s causing more problems,” he said.
Imperatrice was adamant that “anybody” with “half a brain” could watch the video of Chauvin pinning his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 10 minutes and see “that was wrong” and “inhumane.”
“Unfortunately,” he added, “policing isn’t always pretty.”
Activists insist the culture and scope of policing are in desperate need of change. Most of last year’s police killings began as traffic stops, mental health or wellness checks, a domestic disturbance or some other nonviolent offense.
Responses to alleged violent crime led to approximately 30 percent of last year’s 1,126 police killings. Victims were allegedly armed in nearly 80 percent of all fatal incidents, according to MPV data.
“While George Floyd’s name became sort of the rallying cry, it’s important to recognize that there are a hundred or more names of people who lost their lives because we have not fully addressed this problem,” said Sakira Cook, senior program director for the justice reform program at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Criminal justice experts lament that policing culture is predicated on violence, with militarized police forces, overcriminalization of low-level offenses and an us-versus-them mentality inside police forces.
“Research tells me they’re not recruiting the right people for the job and they’re not training them for the job,” La Vigne said. “They’re training them to take a warrior approach rather than a guardian approach. They’re trained in a militaristic style. They’re trained on use of force, with a use-of-force continuum that gets in their head that you start with this amount of force and then you increase it to that amount and then a higher threshold and a higher threshold versus being trained in de-escalation, which is really pre-escalation.”
La Vigne described pre-escalation as how police interact with people: talk them down, use physical distance and recognize who’s in crisis. “That’s what’s needed in peace officers,” she said.
Americans need to rethink the way they view public safety and crime, Cook said, and look at policing along every point of the continuum that disproportionately affects communities of color.
“Policing is not in isolation,” she said. “It’s connected to pre-trial system. It’s connected to prosecutorial system. It’s connected to sentencing, what happens in prisons and what happens when people return home. All of these things are interrelated and interconnected.”
Prosecutors have also been a focus of activist groups like Color of Change in recent years. The Cato Institute’s Neily suggested conflicts of interest between prosecutors and police officers could factor into why so few officers are criminally charged and convicted for killing people.
Both men also questioned how many violent encounters that don’t end in death and aren’t captured by cellphone video or body camera footage go unreported. The Minneapolis Police Department initially claimed Floyd died following a “medical incident.”
“Obviously, that’s just an anecdote. That’s just one incident,” Neily said. “But it was so wrong that one can’t help but wonder how often are police departments successful in sweeping under the rug blatant misconduct by one of their own officers?”
Mike Kahikina, a Native Hawaiian who helped oversee a homesteading program designed to return ancestral lands. (photo: Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
The US Broke Its Promise to Return Land to Hawaiians. My Family Knows Something About Land Loss.
Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Perez writes: "Long after the interview was over, I had trouble shaking the quote. 'It's like we're an invisible people,' Mike Kahikina had told me. I kept thinking about what he said, even weeks later."
For the last year, reporter Rob Perez has been investigating Native land dispossession in Hawaii. His story starts long before in Guam, where his family had its own brush with land takings.
ong after the interview was over, I had trouble shaking the quote. “It’s like we’re an invisible people,” Mike Kahikina had told me. I kept thinking about what he said, even weeks later.
Invisible people.
Kahikina, a Native Hawaiian, had been a member of the Hawaiian Homes Commission for eight years, from 2011 to 2019. The nine-person panel was charged with overseeing a federally created land trust that was designed to return Hawaiians to their ancestral lands. If you are at least half Hawaiian, it is your birthright to be able to get a 99-year homesteading lease for $1 annually.
Kahikina’s job wasn’t easy. The homesteading program has been plagued by problems — inadequate lands, inadequate funding, inadequate management — almost from its inception a century ago. Hawaiians have waited years and even decades to get a homestead and a chance to claim a piece of their native lands. There are 23,000 people on a statewide residential waitlist; thousands have died without getting a lease.
I have been reporting on the Hawaiian Homes program for more than a year now. The problems I have uncovered, along with my ProPublica partner Agnel Philip, have been disturbing. My latest story was no exception.
In 1995, the federal government promised to give the Hawaiian Homes trust priority when surplus federal lands in Hawaii became available. The government long ago had taken control of more than 1,400 acres of trust land without compensating Hawaiians. This practice mirrored what happened to a much larger extent in 1898, when the island chain was annexed by the United States and roughly 1.8 million acres of former Hawaiian kingdom land was taken with no compensation to its indigenous people.
By 1995, it was payback time: Congress passed what was called the Hawaiian Home Lands Recovery Act to make amends for the more recent taking. Three years after its passage, the federal government and the trust reached a landmark settlement, and nearly 1,000 acres were to be returned to Hawaiians.
But within a few years, one transfer fell through, and today, more than a quarter-century later, the U.S. government still owes millions of dollars of land to the trust.
And unbeknownst to Kahikina and many others, Congress was undermining its pledge of redress by passing at least half a dozen pieces of special legislation allowing land deals to go around the recovery act. Over the past decade, the federal government has authorized roughly 40 such sales to private parties without offering the land to the trust, a practice one Hawaiian who has been on the homesteading waitlist for nearly a decade called “a slap in the face.”
As I shared details of my investigation with Kahikina, he became more upset. “You opened my eyes when you told me about that,” Kahikina said. We were sitting outside the West Oahu homesteading residence that has been in his family for three generations. He kept repeating the same thing, underscoring what he considers government indifference to the plight of Hawaiians: “It’s like we’re an invisible people.”
I know something about that. I know something about land takings.
I am CHamoru, a member of the indigenous people of Guam, a tiny Pacific island nearly 4,000 miles west of Hawaii. My family has had its own brush with land takings.
Japanese military forces seized control of Guam from the U.S. during World War II and occupied the island for more than two years. It was a brutal occupation. Growing up on Guam, I remember elder relatives sharing stories of the harsh times during the war — and the elation they felt when U.S. forces retook the island in a fierce battle in 1944.
But the elation for some was short-lived. After the war, the U.S. military acted to transform our 212-square-mile island into a strategic Western Pacific outpost, and thousands of acres were seized without adequate compensation to CHamoru families. My father’s village was destroyed during the war, and the residents were not allowed to return later to rebuild. Today, the place where his family and others lived for generations is a Navy base. The federal government now owns roughly a third of the island.
My parents’ families lost property after the war and for years sought just compensation. At times, the odds were steep. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the U.S government took firm control of the island, restricting access from the outside, appointing judges and creating other conditions that undermined a free-market economy. That depressed property values, and getting adequate compensation for government land condemnations was challenging at best.
But families persisted. Years ago, my mother’s family received a replacement parcel for one lot and is still seeking compensation for another. Who knows how long that will take.
Hawaiians, like Kahikina, are thinking the same thing. As the homesteading waitlist continues to grow, as more Hawaiians die without getting a lease and as more become homeless, they keep asking the same question: How long will it take to get what is rightfully ours?
An illegal gold mine in the Uraricoera river region of the Yanomami reserve. (photo: Christian Braga/Greenpeace)
Brazil Aerial Photos Show Miners' Devastation of Indigenous People's Land
Tom Phillips and Flávia Milhorance, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Rare and disturbing aerial photographs have laid bare the devastation being inflicted on Brazil's largest reserve for indigenous people by thousands of wildcat gold miners whose illegal activities have accelerated under the country's far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro."
Impact of thousands of wildcat goldminers shown as president Jair Bolsonaro is accused of trying to promote their illegal work
are and disturbing aerial photographs have laid bare the devastation being inflicted on Brazil’s largest reserve for indigenous people by thousands of wildcat goldminers whose illegal activities have accelerated under the country’s far-right leader, Jair Bolsonaro.
Activists believe as many as 20,000 garimpeiro prospectors are operating within the Yanomami reserve in northern Brazil using speedboats and light aircraft to penetrate the vast expanse of jungle near the border with Venezuela.
Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly bemoaned the size of the Yanomami territory and been accused of emboldening environmental criminals with his pro-development rhetoric, was due to make a provocative trip to a village in the reserve’s south-western tip on Thursday – his first to an indigenous community since becoming president in January 2019. Yanomami leaders denounced the visit as an unwanted attempt to promote illegal mining in their ancestral land.
The images, captured during flyovers early last month, leave no doubt about the intruders’ impact on the 9.6m-hectare (24m-acre) Amazon enclave – nor the impunity with which they are allowed to act in a supposedly protected reserve.
Several photographs show areas where the miners, whose trade Bolsonaro has vowed to legalise, have obliterated the dense, pine-green forest and replaced it with immense bronze-coloured gashes littered with felled trees and pools of stagnant water. Others depict bustling riverside encampments where the garimpeiros live and work, featuring bars, restaurants, shops, houses and even a snooker table. In some pictures it is possible to make out single-engine planes and helicopters – used to smuggle workers, supplies and equipment into the reserve – positioned beside clandestine airstrips near the Venezuelan border.
Along the Uraricoera river, a region the Guardian visited last year, the monitoring team spotted enormous manmade craters reminiscent of the Serra Pelada goldmine made notorious in the 1980s by the images of Brazil’s most celebrated photographer, Sebastião Salgado.
“What shocked me was the enormity of it,” said Christian Braga, the Amazon-based photographer who took the recent images from a Greenpeace turboprop plane.
“We knew these mines existed. The whole of Brazil knows there are goldmines on Yanomami land. But we didn’t understand the true scale of it and how economically valuable these mines are. These mines are prosperous. These mines are worth millions … It is truly frightening. They are just huge.”
Braga said the miners he saw at work in the Yanomami reserve, which is the same size as Portugal, bore no relation to those who once used steel pans to hunt for gold in remote Amazon rivers.
“That’s history; nowadays the mines are insane. These guys are organised. They’ve got planes. They got antennas. They’ve got satellite TV, motorbikes, quad bikes, planes, helicopters, air conditioning, generators. These guys have built a town,” the photographer said.
“When I looked down [at their camps] I just thought: we’ve lost control of goldmining … just look at the point this has reached. More than 20,000 garimpeiros. What are we going to do now?”
Braga’s photos were released as part of a report from the Yanomami association Hutukara exposing the dramatic expansion of mining in their territory. The report, which also used satellite imagery, claimed last year there was a 30% increase in deforestation within the reserve compared with 2019, with about 500 hectares of forest razed – the equivalent of about 500 football pitches. Another 200 hectares were destroyed in the first three months of this year.
Estêvão Senra, one of the report’s authors, said an “environmental and human tragedy” was under way in the reserve where an estimated 27,000 Yanomami live, largely isolated from the rest of Brazil.
“The destruction caused by illegal mining this year could break last year’s record, which was already very dramatic,” said Senra, a geographer who is tracking the miners’ advance through Yanomami territory. “Business is booming and this is extremely worrying.”
Indigenous activists describe the crisis as the territory’s most troubling moment since the late 1980s and 1990s when tens of thousands of wildcat miners poured into the reserve bringing with them violence and diseases to which many Yanomami lacked immunity. In the most infamous episode, in 1993, goldminers murdered 16 Yanomami in what became known as the Haximu massacre. “It was terrible,” Carlo Zacquini, an Italian missionary who has worked with the Yanomami since the 1960s, told the New York Times in the aftermath of those killings. “One of the miners stabbed a child, then cut his head off.”
Dário Kopenawa Yanomami, an indigenous leader who was born during that catastrophic gold rush, said he feared history was repeating itself. “I grew up amid the invasion of 40,000 wildcat miners, who killed almost 20% of my people … we suffered so much. Our relatives were massacred. The garimpeiros killed a lot,” the 37-year-old said, adding: “It feels like we’re facing the same crisis today.”
The sense of emergency has intensified in recent weeks after deadly clashes between miners and Yanomami and a gun battle between federal police agents and heavily armed gunmen apparently linked to the mines. “There are signs the situation may become even more complicated [than in the 1980s],” Senra said.
In a recent interview the anthropologist Ana Maria Machado, who works with the Yanomami, called the region “a pressure cooker about to explode” and claimed Brazil’s president shouldered part of the blame because he had encouraged the invading miners. “Bolsonaro gives a green light to all types of illegality in the reserves,” Machado said.
Scientists expect increasing marine heat waves to cause coral bleaching, which can result in reefs dying off. (photo: Kevin Lino/NOAA)
Fearing Their Kids Will Inherit Dead Coral Reefs, Scientists Are Urging Bold Action
Lauren Sommer, NPR
Sommer writes: "Coral reef biologists are often asked the same question again and again: 'When my kids grow up, will there still be coral reefs?'"
"That's a question I ask myself," says Christopher Cornwall, a research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. "The greatest fear is that all the coral will be gone at a certain point in time."
New research shows that, in a hotter climate, urgent action will be needed to prevent the vast majority of coral species from collapsing by the end of the century. Humans will have to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases, but that alone likely won't be enough. Reefs may also need a helping hand through efforts like restoration or coral breeding, which cultivates heat-resistant varieties.
Without that, the picture looks increasingly grim. Coral reefs are biodiversity hot spots, supporting around a quarter of all fish species. Millions of people around the world also rely on them for food, jobs and flood protection, since reefs help prevent storm surges from inundating coastlines.
The dramatic impacts come from a climate triple whammy: marine heat waves, ocean acidification and overall warming. The oceans have borne the brunt of climate change thus far, absorbing the vast majority of heat caused by human impacts.
Marine heat waves are expected to become more intense, and high temperatures cause corals to turn ghostly white in what's known as "coral bleaching."
Corals live in a domestic partnership, of sorts, with microscopic algae. The algae provide food for corals, not to mention their vibrant colors. But under periods of intense heat stress, the corals expel the algae, leaving only white skeletons. Some reefs can recover over time, but many die as a result.
These mass bleaching events have been devastating in places like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which has experienced three in the last five years.
"It's quite traumatic to see these events in person," Cornwall says. "What happens is only a small fraction of that coral will be able to recover from those events, and a large proportion of those, depending on the heat stress, will die."
Once absorbed by the oceans, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels reacts with the water to make it more acidic. The increased acidification can erode reefs and makes it harder for corals to build their skeletons. Overall warmer water temperatures also reduce the reefs' growth rates, even without a marine heat wave.
Corals have to continually grow to counteract erosion from both waves and storms and consumption by other animals such as sponges, sea urchins and parrotfish. But according to a new study, climate change may halt coral growth altogether.
Cornwall and his colleagues looked at three climate futures where human-caused emissions are low, medium or high. Under the medium and high scenarios, the majority of coral reefs are no longer growing by the end of the century. Instead, they'll be eroding away.
Even under the lowest-emissions future, coral growth rates would still be reduced by 76%. Reefs that have experienced less pollution or overfishing will likely do better.
"If we miss this low-emissions-scenario target, the coral reefs are essentially doomed," Cornwall says.
Those dire scenarios have scientists looking for ways to give reefs a helping hand.
"This is just the first major ecosystem that we feel could collapse," says Joanie Kleypas, a scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, a federally funded research institute. "So we have to do something. The eyes are on us."
Like many other scientists, Kleypas is studying coral species that seem able to handle higher heat or higher acidity. At her field site in Costa Rica, she has seen some hopeful results after major bleaching events.
"The corals survived," she says. "They were completely bleached for months and there was some mortality, but by and large, they survived. So they have some kind of secret."
Scientists are looking at breeding these resilient corals, which could be used to restore reefs. Other protections, such as preventing pollution and overfishing, are also key, Kleypas says.
Still, all these efforts to help corals adapt to hotter temperatures won't be enough if greenhouse gas emissions remain high. In a study published this month, Kleypas and others found that adaptation strategies could buy corals more time if emissions are lowered. But under high emissions, corals still largely disappear.
"If we act fast enough to execute that plan and we bring carbon dioxide emissions way down, then we do — we believe we have a chance that this is the way forward for saving the ecosystem," she says.
Time is short, she says. For coral reefs to survive, emissions would have to fall to zero before 2100, and restoration and adaptation tools would have to be rolled out in a widespread way in the next 20 to 30 years.
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