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Charles Pierce | There's Money to Be Made in the Democracy Destruction Business
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "Arizona's 'Cyber Ninjas' are the first of many."
rizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is not playing. From the Arizona Republic:
The county broke the chain of custody, or the procedures for properly securing and tracking the machines, when it was required to give the machines to the state Senate under subpoenas, Hobbs wrote in a May 20 letter to the county's Board of Supervisors, Recorder and Elections Department director.
Hobbs said she consulted with officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who said the machines shouldn't be used again because there is no way to fully determine whether the machines were tampered with while out of the county's custody.
Hobbs wrote that if the county tries to use the machines again, even if it performs a full analysis in an attempt to determine whether the machines were still safe to use, her office would "consider decertification proceedings." In Arizona, voting systems must be certified to be used in elections.
For a secretary of state, this is the equivalent of cranking up the ol’ B-52. This is the hardest hardball that can be played. Hobbs is putting the entire onus of the ongoing farce in Arizona, including the eventual cost to the state’s taxpayers of buying new voting machines, squarely on the bamboo-sniffers conducting the burlesque “audit,” and the Arizona Senate that authorized it. She’s using the Department of Homeland Security to help her do it.
County officials turned over the voting machines, as well as nearly 2.1 million ballots and voter information from the Nov. 3 election, after a judge ruled the subpoenas issued by Senate Republican leaders for the items were valid. The state Senate then provided the items to private contractors, headed by Florida-based cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas, to complete a recount and other analysis.
“Other analysis” is doing a huge amount of work there. (So, for that matter, is the phrase, “cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas.”) And Hobbs is looking askance at the work being done.
Hobbs said her office consulted with election technology and security experts, including at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who agreed "no comprehensive methods exist to fully rehabilitate the compromised equipment or provide adequate assurance that they remain safe to use.”
And the most significant element of this brawl is that the Maricopa County supervisors, who have less use for the state senate than most of us have for prickly heat, are onboard with the bare-knuckle campaign waged by Hobbs.
County supervisors warned months ago, when they were fighting the Senate's subpoenas in court, that handing over its voting machines might cause Hobbs' office to decertify the machines. The lawsuit filed by the supervisors on Dec. 18 argued that "a forensic audit conducted by a technician that is not certified by the EAC could void the certification and could cause the secretary of state to de-certify the equipment.”
"Were the secretary of state to de-certify Maricopa County’s election equipment, the ability of Maricopa County to conduct a free and fair, safe and secure, election would be substantially undermined if not compromised altogether and, thus the County will suffer irreparable harm," the court filing says.
And now, that prediction has been validated by Hobbs’s action. The senate—and the Cyber Ninjas—are on an atoll that’s being swallowed by the sea, but nowhere near fast enough. From the Washington Post:
The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race…Behind the scenes, a loose network of lawyers, self-styled election experts and political groups is bolstering community efforts by demanding audits, filing lawsuits and pushing unsubstantiated claims that residents are echoing in public meetings. Much of it is playing out in largely Republican communities, where Trump supporters hope to find officials willing to support their inquiries.
Once you’ve committed yourself to making bank off the destruction of democracy, it’s tough to go back to work at the bait shop.
DeAnna Sianez Sullivan and Sam Sullivan, the mother and sister of David Sullivan, a 19-year-old who was killed by Buena Park police in Orange county. (photo: Stephanie Mei Ling/Guardian UK)
Can Black Lives Matter LA Dismantle the Powerful Police Unions?
Sam Levin, Guardian UK
Levin writes: "Union members who lost relatives to officer killings are fighting to eject 'harmful and violent' police groups from labor associations."
n 22 April 2020, a Los Angeles police officer showed up to the scene of a car accident and fatally shot one of the drivers.
The officer rapidly fired six shots from a distance at Daniel Hernandez, 38, who was holding a box cutter and appeared disoriented and in distress.
The Hernandez family believed there might be consequences for such an unwarranted killing until they learned the officer’s identity: Toni McBride, a 23-year-old whose father is a director of the powerful LA police union, which defends officers accused of misconduct.
“My brother was in a collision and he needed help,” said Marina Vergara, Hernandez’s sister. “Instead, he was executed by an officer who knew she would have the protection of her father and his associates.”
One year after the George Floyd uprisings, Vergara is part of a coalition of activists in LA that has begun targeting the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL), the union that represents officers after they’ve killed civilians. Organizing with Black Lives Matter LA, the advocates are fighting to eject law enforcement associations from public sector labor groups – in hopes of eventually dismantling police unions altogether.
Tensions over police union membership have been simmering for years within the US labor movement, but boiled over last May after Floyd’s murder, which prompted the Minneapolis police union leader to launch an attack on Floyd’s character and call BLM protesters “terrorists”.
LA is now home to one of the most organized campaigns against police unions, led by local union members who have lost loved ones to police killings and who are now directly standing up to a sister union within the same labor federation.
“LAPPL is not a union. They don’t belong with unions. They take the lives of other union members,” said Vergara, who is part of the LA teachers’ union. “I am a union member and I advocate for my community. They don’t. They advocate for their rights and how they can avoid being held accountable. They advocate for more weapons, more funds, and more jobs for them to control the community.”
How unions have escalated violence
Police unions grew in the US in the 1960s as the civil rights movement was increasing scrutiny of officer misconduct. In the decades since, law enforcement associations have dramatically expanded their powers through their contracts.
“It’s hard for me to think of police as traditional workers,” said Veena Dubal, a University of California, Hastings law professor and labor expert, and former Berkeley police review commissioner. “They are the only people in our country who have the right to take away life and to do so with immunity. They are unequivocally forces that seek to insulate police from any kind of accountability, and that’s very different than what a union does.”
The unions have negotiated a wide range of exceptional rights for officers, including requiring departments to erase misconduct records from officers’ files, giving them a clean slate. Union contracts have also mandated that abuse investigations remain secret; allowed officers found to be intoxicated at work to go home without discipline; created huge obstacles to firing police; and ensured that when police officers kill civilians, they can wait several days before they have to give a statement.
The impact of those contracts, experts say, is deadly.
Research has repeatedly shown that after police departments have won special bargaining rights, those agencies experienced sharp increases in killings by officers and violent misconduct. One study found that the stronger the contracts and protections, the more police abuse people.
The unions in LA also wield significant power through political donations and lobbying, giving them tremendous influence in elections and policymaking.
“Everything that police associations push for the hardest are the things that allow the police to be harmful,” said Nana Gyamfi, an LA civil rights lawyer and the president of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, which recently co-produced a report on US police killings in which human rights experts from 11 countries documented potential US police violations of international law. The inquiry found that unions were integral to “obstruction and manipulation” in misconduct cases.
Police chiefs and mayors have also spoken out against unions, lamenting how difficult it is to fire bad officers and how their contracts block reform efforts. A former Minneapolis police chief called the union leader a “disgrace to the badge” last year, saying the union controlled the police culture, blocked transparency efforts and “fought me at every turn”.
While labor groups have long resisted efforts to publicly oppose police unions, the dynamics shifted during last summer’s uprisings.
The LA union members fighting back
When LA sheriffs killed 18-year-old Andres Guardado, shooting him five times in the back on 18 June last year, one of the first groups that began organizing to support his family was Unite Here, the hotel and food service workers union. That’s because Andres’s father is a cook and 14-year member of the union, which called on the sheriff to resign.
Other LA labor activists began speaking out, energized by the national protests.
“Our unions are for blue-collar workers and the working class, helping families and lifting up the community,” said DeAnna Sianez Sullivan, an LA member of the electrical workers union. “The police unions are there to defend officers at all costs.”
Her son, David Sullivan, was 19 years old when police in Buena Park, south of LA, killed him during a traffic stop in 2019; he was unarmed and had been pulled over for expired tags, and eventually tried to flee during the stop.
Bruce Praet, the lawyer representing the police department in the Sullivan family’s civil lawsuit, is a former LA police union attorney and co-founder of Lexipol, a private corporation that helps craft law enforcement policies for cities. The company works to protect departments from litigation and has been accused of thwarting accountability.
“He founded a for-profit company that writes policies for the police … and then a police officer kills somebody, and he gets another job defending the police,” said Sam Sullivan, David’s sister.
The family said Praet’s involvement in their case was a reminder of how police unions and their associates have influenced higher-level policies while also fighting against accountability in individual cases.
“If you say, ‘I feared for my life,’ that justifies everything,” said Sam, 23, noting how unions rely on policies that give officers wide latitude to kill when they claim that a civilian posed a deadly threat. “Why are you afraid of a boy who was running away and had no weapon?”
Praet did not respond to an inquiry.
When LAPD officer McBride killed Hernandez last year, his family was distraught to learn that not only was she the daughter of an LAPPL union leader (who called BLM a “hate group”), she was also a popular Instagram influencer, who posted videos of herself firing assault rifles at targets and hanging out with celebrities.
The conflict of interest posed by McBride’s father was so problematic that the local prosecutor, who has accepted significant donations from LAPPL, had to recuse herself from reviewing the killing.
Vergara, Hernandez’s sister, said it was enraging to watch McBride’s Instagram videos: “It made me realize what kind of person she was.”
In a rare rebuke of an officer shooting, the LA police commission ruled in December that McBride violated policy when she fired the final two shots at Hernandez while he was on the ground.
But because of the secrecy around the process, Hernandez’s family does not know what discipline McBride faced as a result – if any.
“We miss Danny every day, and we’ll never really get justice,” said Vergara. “But we want accountability. We want to know what happens to a police officer when they kill out of policy.”
Lawyers for McBride did not respond to multiple inquiries, and the LAPD did not answer questions about her status.
‘We will win’
BLMLA is now hosting weekly protests outside the LAPPL union building and is advocating for the LA County Federation of Labor (LA Fed), an umbrella union group, to eject LAPPL and other police unions.
“If we stop thinking of police associations as labor unions, and we have them removed, it would really lift the veil on who they are – a special interest group,” said Dr Melina Abdullah, a BLMLA co-founder, who is also a Cal State LA professor and member of the California Faculty Association union.
The police unions have significant influence within LA Fed, and ejecting them would likely have far-reaching consequences. Last year, LA Fed declined to endorse a criminal justice reform ballot measure that police groups had opposed, and refused to support a progressive district attorney candidate who was supported by other non-police members.
Chiquita Twyman, whose brother was killed by LA sheriffs in 2019, is a board member with SEIU Local 2015 (which represents long-term care workers), and she showed up to an LA Fed meeting in 2019 to urge members not to endorse incumbent district attorney Jackie Lacey, who almost never prosecuted officers for killings. But the police union members showed up “in full force” to support Lacey, and Twyman’s pleas were ultimately ignored: “It was upsetting. The Labor Federation has to stand with us union members.”
DeAnna Sianez Sullivan said it was frustrating that more union leaders weren’t speaking out: “While they support their union members, they don’t want to denounce the police associations out of fear of possible repercussions.”
While the LA Fed has so far resisted calls to eject police, some labor groups across the country have started to take a stand, said Andrea J Ritchie, a researcher with Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Seattle officers were expelled from the region’s largest labor council last year; the teachers’ union successfully campaigned to remove Minneapolis police from schools; and the Writers Guild of America formally urged AFL-CIO (America’s largest union association) to kick out police.
“It’s in labor’s interest to organize as broadly and deeply as possible,” said Ritchie, noting that police membership has become untenable in many unions. “If the majority of the folks that you want to organize don’t want to be in a room with the people you’re allied with, then you’re going to have to make a choice.”
LA Fed and LAPPL spokespeople did not respond to inquiries. LAPPL leaders have dismissed the movement to oust the union as “laughable” and “undemocratic”.
But organizers with BLMLA, which did similar weekly protests outside DA Lacey’s office until she was voted out in November, said they were confident the campaign would be successful.
“We intend to be there every week, because it reminds people that we have the power,” said Abdullah. “We’re committed to it. It might be a long struggle, but we will keep going until we win.”
Mark McCloskey. (photo: Daily Beast)
The GOP Welcomes the McCloskeys' Sick, Sad American Dream
Wajahat Ali, The Daily Beast
Ali writes: "Mark McCloskey, who became a Republican hero by pointing a gun at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters, is running for the Senate. He'd fit right in to the GOP caucus there."
merica is an amazing, generous and inspiring country where even if you have nothing but white skin, rage, fake victimhood, and criminal charges, you too can have a chance to rise up and try to become a Republican senator! That’s Mark McCloskey’s American dream. He’s betting that his illegal use of a firearm to menace peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters can capture the hearts of Republican voters and win him a Senate seat in Missouri.
You’ll remember Mark and his wife Patricia as the personal injury attorneys who brandished guns from the safety of their mansion’s manicured front lawn in a privileged, gated St. Louis suburb. Viral photos of McCloskey—wearing a pink polo shirt tucked into his khakis, barefoot and pointing his assault rifle at unarmed Black people—spread around the world.
Sane people were horrified. Republicans were inspired by a new hero who posed as an alpha male, a tough guy like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, or John McClane, fictional models of the sort of violent, pretend masculinity that has allegedly have been canceled by “the wokes.” In MAGA world’s upside-down account, the McCloskeys were the real victims, protecting themselves from terrifying BLM rioters who’d had the audacity to walk in front of their house. That’s the story the McCloskeys told at the 2020 Republican National Convention, where they were given primetime real estate to warn the base of “Marxist liberal activities” and “criminals” who want to “abolish the suburbs.” They fueled white anxiety by staring directly at the camera and warning voters that “no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.” Well, Trump lost, Biden was elected, and now those very same families have vaccines and stimulus checks during a devastating pandemic—but, I digress.
As I wrote last year, their speech would have fit perfectly in Birth of a Nation, the 1915 blockbuster based on white supremacist novels that revitalized the KKK and portrayed Black people’s emancipation as a zero-sum outcome that would inevitably oppress white men and terrorize white women. Judging from McCloskey’s rhetoric and history, he’ll be an effective cultural warrior for the modern GOP and help them achieve their goal of re-birthing this nation as a country ruled by a white Christian conservative minority.
Of course, McCloskey announced his campaign in an appearance with Tucker Carlson. “God came knocking on my door disguised as an angry mob. It really did wake me up,” McCloskey told his fellow elitist and gated community enthusiast. If you take his absurd metaphor to its logical conclusion, then he admitted on live television that he threatened God with a loaded weapon until God left his property. That’s neither neighborly nor Christian, but at least McCloskey stood his ground and flexed his Second Amendment rights—against the Almighty, no less! McCloskey continued to check boxes on Republican bingo by promising he’d fight all their supervillains and strawmen: critical race theory, cancel culture, Big Tech, Marxists, and so forth.
Like Donald Trump, the GOP’s chosen one and golden calf, McCloskey has a long, litigious and "hostilely"—his term—history of protecting his private property. In 2020, the St. Louis Dispatch catalogued the McCloskeys’ rich history of “fighting back.” McCloskey once admitted to pointing a gun at a neighbor just to “defend" a patch of his green lawn from being mowed. He once ran off trustees who were trying to make repairs to the wall surrounding their property. He once left a note admitting to destroying bee hives planted by the neighboring Jewish Central Reform Congregation just outside his mansion’s northern wall and threatened that he’d seek a restraining order and attorney fees if they didn’t clean up the mess. The community had planned to use the honey for Rosh Hashanah events.
Like conservative Supreme Court justices, McCloskey is also apparently an originalist. His neighbors accused him and his wife of trying to enforce the old written rules in the neighborhood trust agreement as a way to block gay people from living on their block. In 1992, the trustees voted to impeach his wife, Patricia McCloskey, accusing her of being anti-gay. (They have emphatically denied those accusations.)
The more you think about it, Mark McCloskey is the perfect model for the modern Republican elected official. He has absolutely zero experience in politics, like Sen. Tommy Tuberville from Alabama, a former football coach who didn’t know the three branches of the U.S. government. He seems more interested in fighting delusional cultural wars than actually legislating, which means he can take lessons from Rep. Madison Cawthorn, who didn’t so much confess as brag that “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation" and unsurprisingly leads congressional freshmen for missing the most votes. He has "economic anxiety" which means he’ll always have a seat at the overcrowded table, flanked by Paul Gosar, a white supremacist, and every other Republican who promotes conspiracy theories about the Deep State and “replacement theory.”
Perhaps McCloskey’s most appealing trait for Republican voters is his commitment to aggression and using guns and lawsuits to get what he wants and protect what’s his. That’s catnip to a GOP base that loves the “old ultra-violence.” Only 35 Republican members of the House voted with Democrats to pursue a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection that left five people dead. A majority of Republican voters believe the “Big Lie” that rallied the mob and that will undoubtedly inspire future violence and attempts to cancel free and fair elections. Republicans have elevated and adulated murderer Kyle Rittenhouse, who also illegally carried guns and used them against BLM protesters during last summer’s protests.
I bet Mark McCloskey stays awake at night in his spacious estate in St Louis, tossing and turning while plagued with painful regret: Had I fired my semi-automatic weapon at the peaceful crowd of BLM protesters, I’d be a sure thing in this race, if not running for president. Trump joked about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue but I waved a gun at Black people in a video seen around the world.
But McCloskey didn’t fire, and that means he has to compete against two Republican rivals, state Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor who blackmailed and coerced a woman into having sex with him.
As you can tell, Republican voters in Missouri have a very difficult choice ahead of them when deciding which of these men best represents their values and interests. They can find comfort in knowing that at least two out of three candidates will stay on brand if they want to continue being the party of violent criminals.
Citizen. (photo: Brandon Wenerd/Twitter)
Leaked Emails Show Crime App Citizen Is Testing On-Demand Security Force
Joseph Cox, VICE
Cox writes: "Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen has ambitions to deploy private security workers to the scene of disturbances at the request of app users, according to leaked internal Citizen documents and Citizen sources."
Citizen would deploy private security forces at the request of app users, according to documents and sources.
The plans mark a dramatic expansion of Citizen's purview. It is currently an app where users report "incidents" in their neighborhoods and, based on those reports and police scanner transcriptions, the app sends "real-time safety alerts" to users about crime and other incidents happening near where a user is located. It is essentially a mapping app that allows users to both report and learn about crime (or what users of the app perceive to be crime) in their neighborhood. The introduction of in-person, private security forces drastically alters the service, and potential impact, that Citizen may offer in the future, and provides more context as to why a Citizen-branded vehicle has been spotted driving around Los Angeles. The news comes after Citizen offered a $30,000 bounty against a person it falsely accused of starting a wildfire.
"The broad master plan was to create a privatized secondary emergency response network," one former Citizen employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.
"It's been something discussed for a while but I personally never expected it to make it this far," another Citizen source told Motherboard.
Do you work at Citizen? Do you have access to internal Citizen documents? We’d love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
In short, the product, described as "security response" in internal emails, would have Citizen send a car with private security forces to an app user, according to the former employee. A private security company working with Citizen would provide the response staff, the former employee added. A second Citizen source confirmed this description of the service.
Citizen has been actively testing the program, with what the company describes as quick response times and instant communication between Citizen and security partners, according to the emails.
One of those companies, according to the emails, is well-known private security contractor Securitas. The email about the tests says that Securitas average response times have improved to around 20 minutes. In one case, a guard showed up in 10 minutes to escort a Citizen employee to get coffee in Los Angeles. One of the former employees also said Securitas was involved.
The email added that the user and agent experience needed to be improved, and that Citizen was reviewing the results with Securitas to make those improvements.
The email also names LAPS, or Los Angeles Professional Security. On Friday, Motherboard reported that Los Angeles Professional Security is linked to a Citizen-branded vehicle driving around Los Angeles. A Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard that the vehicle is part of a pilot program but declined to say exactly what that program consisted of. On its website, Los Angeles Professional Security describes itself as a "subscription law enforcement service." The internal Citizen email says the company is "an additional response partner."
A Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard that "LAPS offers a personal rapid response service that we are testing internally with employees as a small test. For example, if someone would like an escort to walk them home late at night, they can request this service. We have spoken with various partners in designing this pilot project." The spokesperson did not address other questions from Motherboard about the content of the leaked emails.
One of the emails says that Citizen has pitched the security response service to the Los Angeles Police Department at a high level. The email claims the LAPD said the solution could be a game changer. The email adds that the LAPD has been overrun with property crime, and the agency has effectively thrown its hands up because they don't have enough officers on the street to respond to these sorts of calls. The LAPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Currently, Citizen offers a subscription product called "Protect," which costs $19.99 per month. Protect sends a user's location to a Citizen employee when it's turned on, can stream video to a "Protect agent" when activated using a safeword, and is pitched to users as a "digital bodyguard." Protect also advertises "Instant emergency response to your exact location," and says "Live monitoring means you never have to walk alone." It is not clear if the private security response would be tied to Protect or another service.
Securitas did not respond to a request for comment. Los Angeles Professional Security acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.
Experts have criticized Citizen, saying the app may lead people to report things that aren't crime and may foster racism.
"Honestly Citizen as an app simply doesn't need to exist and it's more and more apparent as the months go on that leadership is just a bunch of scum," the former employee said.
Merrick Garland. (photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)
Advocates See Biden Order as New Tool in Eviction, Immigration Fights
Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill
Beitsch writes:
n order signed by President Biden this past week seeking to make legal representation more attainable has advocates hopeful it could improve access to civil courts — including for those facing eviction or immigration penalties.
The order, signed by Biden on Tuesday, directs the Department of Justice (DOJ) to devise a plan for expanding access not just to public defenders but also to the civil court system, where legal representation is not guaranteed by the government.
It’s an issue advocates say is timely since the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a surge in tenants and homeowners fighting evictions and foreclosures as well as those pushing for medical assistance.
They also see it as an opening for the Biden administration to require access to an attorney in immigration courts — a civil court setting where migrants can face life-altering outcomes such as deportation.
Biden’s order gives Attorney General Merrick Garland 120 days to craft a plan, along with a budget and staffing, to expand access to legal representation for both criminal and civil cases.
“It’s somewhat amorphous to say, ‘Go study access to justice,’ but we’re coming off of four years where no one would even think to utter those words,” said Jonathan Rapping, founder of Gideon’s Promise, a nonprofit public defender organization.
The order also reestablishes the DOJ Office for Access to Justice, which was eliminated by the Trump administration, and revives the White House’s Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable after four years of dormancy.
The Biden administration has touted the order as a way to “reinvigorate the federal government’s role in advancing access to justice.”
“Timely and affordable access to the legal system can make all the difference in a person’s life—including by keeping an individual out of poverty, keeping an individual in his or her home, helping an unaccompanied child seek asylum, helping someone fight a consumer scam, or ensuring that an individual charged with a crime can mount a strong defense and receive a fair trial,” the White House said in a statement.
The effort seeks a turnaround in systems long under strain. Some 80 percent of those facing felony charges cannot afford an attorney and are left to rely on a system of overworked public defenders. Meanwhile, the Legal Services Corporation, which funds civil legal aid across the country, found that in more than half of cases, people receive “only limited or no legal help” due to a lack of resources.
Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, said the order could be particularly important in the housing arena given that the eviction moratorium from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to expire at the end of June.
A massive uptick in those evicted following the pandemic will lead to more problems, Roller said, as those with an eviction on their record will be far more likely to be turned down by prospective landlords.
“Many people with no record in the past will now have an eviction record, so the scope of problems around that are going to be really amplified in the years to come,” Roller said.
Those who are represented are more likely to stay in their homes or owe less to landlords even when they are evicted, Roller said, but there’s often a major imbalance in the number of tenants and landlords able to hire lawyers.
A recent survey from the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel of some cities and states found that just 3 percent of tenants are represented by a lawyer, compared with more than 80 percent of landlords.
And evictions aren’t the only concern.
“There’s so much focus on eviction, but foreclosures are the next wave of issues, and there’s really no sense of how at risk we are overall in the country,” Roller said.
Don Saunders, with the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, said the DOJ could use the effort to serve anyone from veterans to farmworkers.
“We could expand medical legal partnerships where lawyers will be involved in the health system. The easiest example is if a child is suffering from asthma because of health conditions in the home, say mold, a lawyer might be able to treat the cause more than the symptoms,” he said.
“These are the kinds of communities we need some creativity and investment in at the federal level,” he added.
Immigration courts could be another high-impact area for the Biden administration, particularly as it focuses on expanding legal pathways to citizenship.
“There is no right to appointed counsel in the immigration system — something I don't think is widely known — so people in court appear opposite a federally funded [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] lawyer and judge often in their second, third or fourth language by themselves unless they’re lucky enough to get a pro bono attorney,” said Heidi Altman, director of policy at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
The government does have small pilot programs offering counsel to children and people with mental disabilities and disorders who are facing deportation.
“Those are highly compelling populations that need legal representation, but it should not be limited to those populations,” said Greg Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
It’s an idea that’s been introduced in Congress multiple times but hasn’t gained traction.
Chen said the government could expand slowly, starting out with asylum-seekers, people already in immigration detention and rare-language speakers — something he estimates would need an initial investment of $200 million.
Even without new programs, Altman said the government could do more to ensure those in detention who have managed to secure legal assistance are able to freely communicate with their attorneys, limiting the expense of jailhouse phone systems and allowing access to confidential meeting spaces.
Akhi Johnson, deputy director at the Vera Institute for Justice, said some immigration issues could also be addressed by working to ease the burden on public defenders.
“Right now, public defenders tend to be overburdened with cases they have and don't always have training on deportation consequences,” he said.
“You might plead someone out to something that has really drastic immigration consequences, and that person finds themselves deported for something a less overburdened lawyer might help them avoid,” he added.
Rapping, of Gideon’s Promise, is hopeful the Justice Department might turn to legislation sponsored by Vice President Harris from when she was in the Senate. Her bill would have boosted funding for public defenders and required parity in pay with prosecutors.
He also said the government should be tying its existing grant funding to programs that “address issues of racial and economic disparities.”
“These dollars come with a stick and a carrot. These states depend on this money, and we can say, ‘If you want this money, you have to do several things,’” Rapping said.
“We can say, ‘If you’re not committed and don't have a plan to really improve schools, health care and housing for people on the margins, we are not giving you the money.’ That's the power of the federal government,” he added.
Women walk by a billboard showing the words 'All people participate in building a line of defense against the epidemic, please get the vaccine in time' on display outside a shopping mall in Beijing on Monday. (photo: Andy Wong/AP)
Chinese Health Experts Promote Third Doses of Vaccines, Saying Protection Wanes After Six Months
Eva Dou, Erin Cunningham and Paul Schemm, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Amid lingering questions over the efficacy of Chinese-developed coronavirus vaccines, health experts in China are calling for all high-risk groups to take a third dose of the vaccines, saying the shots' protection recedes after six months."
The head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention made waves last month when he conceded the efficacy rate of China’s coronavirus vaccines was “not high,” in remarks that were quickly censored. He said the government was considering mixing different brands of vaccines or adding shots to increase the efficacy rate.
Since then, Beijing appears to have come to a consensus to begin rolling out third shots, as reflected in the reports in major state-media outlets. Third coronavirus shots will further strain China’s vaccine manufacturers, which are already oversubscribed.
Here are some significant developments:
- Amid a brutal second wave, India recorded 4,454 deaths on Monday, making it the third country, after the United States and Brazil, to surpass more than 300,000 coronavirus deaths.
- Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough to require hospitalization a month before the coronavirus outbreak in China, reports the Wall Street Journal, citing an undisclosed U.S. intelligence report. China has called the report a lie.
- For the first time in 11 months, the daily average of new coronavirus infections in the United States has fallen below 30,000 amid signs that most communities are emerging from the worst of the pandemic.
- Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is being widely lambasted for comparing the continuing coronavirus restrictions in the U.S. Capitol to what Jewish people suffered during the Holocaust, when millions were killed by Nazis.
- Fatal opioid overdoses increased in Washington, Maryland and Virginia over the past year because of the disruptions and isolation of the pandemic, say experts.
Seed the North will collect seeds, combine them in biodiverse seedpods and drop them using drone technology over thousands of acres that have been disturbed by natural events and industry. (photo: Amanda Follett Hosgood/The Tyee)
Seed the North: Fighting Climate Change, One Sprout at a Time
Amanda Follett Hosgood, Grist
Excerpt: "Seed the North represents a fresh approach to forest regeneration."
Can an innovative approach to reforestation take root in British Columbia?
or Natasha Kuperman, the seed was planted at a young age.
“Everyone has an issue that they think is the most important thing,” she says. “My entire life, it was clear to me without a doubt that climate change is the issue that trumps all other issues.”
On a plot in northern British Columbia, that seed is taking root. Located 650 miles north of Vancouver, on the traditional territory of the Gitxsan Nation, the site serves as the platform for launching Seed the North, a project that aims to regenerate large swaths of land in an effort to sequester carbon and fight the climate crisis.
It’s a long way from Kuperman’s urban Ontario upbringing. Born and raised in Toronto, she studied architecture at Cornell University, after which she earned a master’s degree in real estate development at York University. After time working in Canada’s north, she settled there a year ago.
Her experience in large-scale infrastructure development may seem far removed from forest ecology, but there’s a connection, she says: “You could say this is the single largest infrastructure there is, which is our forests.”
Kuperman’s long-term vision is massive in scale.
Seed the North will collect seeds, combine them in biodiverse seedpods, and drop them using drone technology over thousands of acres. The project will target areas disturbed by both natural events, like wildfires, floods, and landslides, as well as those impacted by industry. The project’s mission stands on three pillars: traditional Indigenous knowledge, the scientific community, and what Kuperman describes as the “brawn” of technological ingenuity. She is the facilitator — the thread that ties them all together.
It’s a big endeavor. But don’t call it a solution, Kuperman warns.
“There are no foolproof solutions,” she says. “This is harm reduction. This is mitigation. And that is the best thing that we can do with our lives.”
The effects of climate change can be seen in northern British Columbia, where forests in recent decades have suffered drought, wildfires, and pest outbreaks, such as the mountain pine beetle infestation.
The region is sparsely populated. Its largest city, Prince George, has a population of less than 75,000. The entire northern two-thirds of the province is home to only 6 percent of British Columbia’s total population. To paraphrase renowned ethnobotanist Wade Davis, it’s a place where you could hide England and the English would never find it.
It’s also a place where trees could store a lot of carbon.
But rather than seeing this vast region as a carbon bank, governments have long viewed it as a source for withdrawals. The north is relied upon heavily for its resources — traditionally forestry and mining, and increasingly oil and gas extraction and transportation.
In addition to increasing carbon emissions, damaging impacts to the landscape reduce its ability to act as mass holding tanks that pull carbon from the atmosphere and slow the warming climate.
That’s where Seed the North comes in. It represents a fresh approach to forest regeneration. The concept is huge, but it all boils down to one small thing.
“At a certain point, let’s just focus on each seed and how we can get it to germinate,” Kuperman says.
Germination
In early spring, the days are warming. Freeze-thaw cycles have encased the Kispiox Valley in a crust of ice and snow. Kuperman sits on a log that will form the foundation for a cabin to house workers from remote Indigenous communities employed by the project.
Squinting against the sun’s glare, she reaches into a white sack and produces a fistful of seeds, placing them gently in piles on the log: birch, alder, and Rocky Mountain maple — species that aren’t considered valuable to the forest industry but are an important part of the local ecosystem.
Thousands of seedlings are planted every year by British Columbia’s forest industry, but Kuperman’s project deliberately targets remote and hard-to-reach areas that wouldn’t otherwise be replanted. In the beginning, she says, Seed the North needs to establish itself as independent of industry, rooting itself in an entirely different set of values.
“I put ecological diversity first,” Kuperman says. “Industry objectives are not ecology first. They’re economy first.”
Her commitment has begun with enlisting remote Indigenous communities both for their knowledge of the land and for their workforce. This summer, her project will focus on training and seed collection at two sites: one here in Gitxsan territory and the other in the traditional territory of the Kitselas First Nation.
Over the long term, she plans to outsource the collecting, drying, and processing of seeds to remote areas like Tahltan territory, in British Columbia’s northwest, and West Moberly First Nation, in the northeast, where Twin Sisters Native Plants Nursery already is working to repair damaged landscapes through Indigenous-led regeneration programs.
Kuperman also works with the B.C. government and, specifically, the B.C. Tree Seed Centre, which provides seeds to the province’s forest industry.
But it all starts on this property north of Hazelton, which Kuperman bought last year as a base. The land has been stewarded for millennia by the Wilp Luudkudziiwus, a house group of the Gitxsan, and she consults closely with its members. Within 160 acres, it has everything from interior cedar-hemlock forests and wetlands to subalpine and alpine ecosystems.
“That’s why I moved here,” Kuperman says. “This is the spot where you have the most bio-geoclimatic zones in a small radius.”
The property was heavily logged by the previous owner. That, too, provides case-study material — a test site of human-impacted land ripe for regeneration.
In British Columbia, records don’t go back far enough to know exactly how much of the province’s land base has been harvested since the timber industry began, but the government estimates about 500,000 acres are logged each year, almost 1 percent of harvestable forests in the province.
Of that, 80 percent has been replanted, according to the government.
But that replanting emphasizes economic values over ecological ones. In an effort to speed up the harvest cycle, fast-growing, high-yield varieties — pine, spruce, and cedar — have been favored, prioritizing short-term profits over long-term payoffs like carbon reduction, biodiversity, and wildfire prevention.
Species that compete with the high-yield trees — for instance, aspen or alder — are beat back with herbicides and machinery.
What is left is a monoculture, a narrow slice of what’s needed for a healthy ecosystem. Lost are the firebreaks provided by deciduous forest, with its silvery leaves that reflect the sun’s heat back into the atmosphere, and the nutrients derived from decomposing leaves.
Seed the North aims to bring back a more natural and diverse forest, on a shorter timeline.
While forests will regenerate naturally, seeding provides a head start, says Jim Pojar, a 25-year veteran of British Columbia’s ministry of forests and co-author of Alpine Plants of the Northwest, an ecological field guide to the region. So does adding a variety of species into the mix — nitrogen-fixing plants like lupine, and shrubs like alder and soopolallie.
Pojar recalls the first time he heard about Kuperman’s project. The two of them went for hikes. Kuperman talked. Pojar researched.
“I concluded it was a great idea,” says Pojar, now an adviser on the project. “Nobody else is doing what she has in mind, as far as I know.”
The project also aspires to use as much local and salvaged material as possible. Waste wood left on the property is being salvaged, and the workers’ cabin will be constructed from a single cottonwood tree felled nearby.
Not far from where the workers’ cabin is under construction, three 40-foot-long shipping containers sit in a U shape on concrete pads. “We’re going to turn something that was integral to globalization into a very local solution,” Kuperman says about the containers.
They now are being used to store thousands of seed trays. But once a roof is built over the containers, it will create a 3,000-square-foot workspace with an enclosed lab. The rooftop will provide a mesocosm, an outdoor space for testing seed germination, Kuperman explains.
Also stored within the compound are several large bags of biochar. Kuperman reaches into one and produces hands smeared black with charcoal. She proclaims the forest industry by-product “black, shiny gold,” because it holds a key to expediting reforestation.
Made from piles of waste wood left behind by logging, biochar seed casings will assist new seeds in their transition from drone drop to germination. The casings offer all the required nutrients and also protect the bundles from scavenging animals and drought.
While the seedpods contain a suggestion of what should grow, they are not prescriptive, Kuperman says. What takes root will depend on local conditions.
“Where a meadow will form, a meadow will form. Where conifers thrive, conifers will grow,” Kuperman says. “We don’t predetermine exactly, especially over vast areas.”
Taking root
This approach is the opposite of what Herb Hammond describes as “the dogma of forestry,” which has forced conifer stands onto large areas of the province valued for their timber supply.
The professional forester and forest ecologist, who is based in southeastern British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, points to networks — the interdependency of forest ecosystems and the fine balance that exists naturally beneath the earth — as a solution for broadening biodiversity while also potentially assisting the forest industry.
But, as with so many things, the success of innovative ideas comes down to political will.
Although Canada has the land resources to promote biodiversity, it’s also hobbled by a powerful forest lobby, an influence Hammond says has gotten stronger over the years, not weaker.
“Today, we have very, very poor laws or – one could say, no laws – to hold timber companies accountable,” he says about Canada. British Columbia’s tenure systems have meant that public lands were handed over to private timber companies with “token payment,” he says. It has left governments with far less control over the industry, he says.
As a result, attempts to legislate biodiversity — like Nova Scotia’s recent Biodiversity Act — are reduced to toothless gestures.
This is different from the United States, Hammond says, where the government has retained control over much of its land base, particularly in the Northwest, where most of the land is publicly owned. That means better transparency and more accountability from the U.S. Forest Service.
Last year, Oregon’s governor signed an executive order directing state agencies, including the Department of Forestry, to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A proposal from the agencies, which is due in June, is expected to include recommendations for improving carbon sequestration on state lands.
Funding a transition to low-carbon economies has proven tricky.
In the United States, President Biden has announced a plan to tackle climate change, including establishing the Civilian Climate Corps initiative to create employment from conservation and land restoration. In Canada, British Columbia’s failed Pacific Carbon Trust is just one example of the challenges that impede monetizing the carbon market.
The trust was established by the province in 2008 to buy carbon offsets, often from private industry, to gain carbon-neutral status — something British Columbia has claimed every year since 2010. But the program wrapped up amidst political controversy over auditing five years later.
The offsets weren’t credible, the B.C. auditor general said in a 2013 review of the program. Today, the program continues under the province’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy. In 2019, more than three-quarters of $7 million spent by British Columbia went to forest protection in the Great Bear Rainforest, a stretch of B.C. coastline where 7.6 million acres are protected from logging by a multi-stakeholder agreement signed in 2016.
The remaining 20 percent of that money went to the fossil fuel and forest industries for emission reductions, such as switching from fossil fuels or electric or biomass energy sources. A small portion went to carbon-reducing initiatives in waste management, agriculture, and public transportation.
Although carbon offsets are imperfect, Kuperman says, they offer initial steps toward reducing carbon emissions and fighting climate change.
“In the first couple iterations, it didn’t go as planned. But anything new doesn’t go quite right at first,” she says. “The carbon offsets programs of today are much more nuanced and really account for things more accurately.”
Once her project’s seeds have become young forests sequestering carbon, Seed the North will qualify for offsets, Kuperman says. For now, funding is pulled together piecemeal. The project has received one grant from the federal government’s Investment Readiness Program.
“Though government grants are helpful, the reality is that the best long-term success is being supported by people who want to invest in a better future than we’re currently heading,” she says. That means working with private industries wanting to reclaim disturbed landscape with a view to incorporating Indigenous perspectives, increasing biodiversity, and contributing to long-term carbon sequestration.
“Ecological restoration is wonderful at a small scale, and it teaches great lessons to us. But unless we scale it up, it’s fundamentally not going to make a statistical difference,” Kuperman says.
And Seed the North is all about scaling up.
Eventually, Kuperman would like to be seeding tens of thousands of acres on several sites in northern British Columbia, she says. Beyond the three regions in northern British Columbia that have been mapped in detail by a local contractor, Kuperman also has looked at specific areas across Canada that she says would be ideal for reseeding by drone.
“We need to take a fundamentally different approach if we are to make a statistically significant difference for the sequestration of carbon,” she says. “We need to change everything. We need to change the fundamentals of our society because, without that, we are just kowtowing, slapping each other on the back, saying that things are OK, that we can go on with things as they are.”
From large-scale paradigm shift, she returns to the here and now.
Collecting seeds. Listening to people who know the land. Finding value in healthy, functioning ecosystems. “With all of those components,” she says, “we’re going to get somewhere.”
It starts with each seed.
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