09 May 21
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09 May 21
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Garrison Keillor | Sad Story: Lonely Sleepless Man Thinks Dark Thoughts
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Blog
Keillor writes:
or years I have put myself to sleep at night by standing at the rail of the Queen Mary 2 as she slips across New York Harbor past Miss Liberty and inches under the Verrazano Bridge and out to sea toward England. We sailed on the Queen Mary 2 to celebrate my 70th birthday years ago and my wife was wary of the extravagance but it has more than paid for itself by giving me thousands of nights of sleep. My sweetie lies in bed worrying about COVID variants and about all of her loved ones in turn and I stand at the rail with a glass of champagne but there you have it: life is unfair.
We have led a penurious life during the pandemic. “There is no point in wasting money,” she keeps telling me. So our refrigerator is full of tiny plastic bowls holding small portions of leftovers such as would sustain a Chihuahua and she has accused me of wasting laundry soap and I have to hide the books I buy: she only reads e-books she borrows from the library. She sleeps with two windows open so it’s cold when I wake up and I crank up the thermostat and she turns it back down. I ask if the stock market crashed during the night. No, she says, but you can put on a sweater if you’re cold. She says I use too much coffee. We are liberals so the coffee is a locally ground free-trade organic coffee, not made by child slave labor, so I don’t feel bad about generous portions, but I follow her instructions.
Last week she flew to Connecticut to visit family and I went to the store and bought half-and-half for my coffee and a New York strip steak for breakfast. I turned up the heat and closed the windows. I made the coffee strong. A man needs what he needs.
I was awakened at 2 a.m. by the roar of big dragster engines revving on I-94 nearby, drivers who love the bottleneck tunnel for the sheer reverberation. It sounds like a B-52 landing on the lawn. Pure adolescence of the Nobody-can-tell-me-what-to-do approach to life. There’s a lot of it around these days. Four hundred adolescents are likely to pay a price for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, encouraged by members of Congress who then fled from the mob. It was all about noisemaking.
I tried to imagine myself aboard the Queen Mary 2 but it was gone to sea and I was wide awake. The apartment was still. I turned on the bedside lamp. My sweetie, who handles all the anxiety for the both of us, leaving me free to write a comic novel, an adolescent enterprise if the truth be told, was gone. I thought about Connecticut, I thought about Lyme disease.
I tried reading Henry James who’s put me to sleep many times over the years. No luck. I turned on the radio, a call-in festival of people in agreement that the U.S. government had covered up the landing of aliens in New Mexico in 1947 — alien beings who have spread a virus that causes people to think collectively instead of individually, and the COVID vaccine is actually boosting that virus.
I went to the kitchen and put the coffee on. I looked out the window and saw other lighted windows nearby. The insomniac brigade, sentries of the sleeping world, thinking our 4 a.m. thoughts. I opened up the Times and read that Verizon is selling AOL to an equity firm and I remembered the love letters I wrote to my sweetie on AOL. We were both traveling back then, she with an orchestra in Asia, I with a radio show in the Midwest, and our love was urgent since I was fifty at the time. She wrote me about a steep hike to a Buddhist temple in Burma, the strange tourists, the wild monkeys in the trees, her exhilaration at being alone in a foreign land, and I wrote: “When your happiness makes me happy, even at a distance, independent of me, that means I’m the right man for you.” A profound thought and I turned off the coffee, opened two windows, crawled into bed in the chill, and the Queen was on course on the open Atlantic, not far from where the Titanic had gone down but there wasn’t an iceberg in sight and I am still here to tell the story.
The Washington Post's headquarters in downtown Washington are seen in 2019. (photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Feds Seized Washington Post Reporters' Phone Records in Leak Probe
Josh Gerstein, Politico
Gerstein writes: "The Justice Department obtained call records for the phones of three Washington Post reporters last year in an apparent bid to discover the sources for a 2017 story detailing a sensitive aspect of the federal investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the newspaper said Friday."
The Justice Department informed three journalists that it probed their contacts during the height of the Trump-Russia saga.
he Justice Department obtained call records for the phones of three Washington Post reporters last year in an apparent bid to discover the sources for a 2017 story detailing a sensitive aspect of the federal investigation into alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the newspaper said Friday.
Federal investigators used court orders to obtain so-called toll records on phones used by a trio of Post reporters who worked on a July 2017 story about intelligence intercepts indicating that Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak told superiors he discussed issues related to Russia with then-Trump campaign adviser Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, according to the Post.
Such intercepts are considered signals intelligence and are typically treated as highly classified. At his confirmation hearing for attorney general, Sessions denied ever meeting the ambassador during the campaign, but later acknowledged the encounters while denying Kislyak's reported accounts of the meetings.
The toll records typically indicate what numbers a reporter called or received calls from and for how long the call was connected, but do not include information on the content of the conversations.
The Post said the journalists — Ellen Nakashima, Greg Miller and former Post reporter Adam Entous — received letters on May 3 notifying them that the government obtained their calling records from April 15, 2017 through July 31, 2017.
A top Post editor, Cameron Barr, said in a statement that the newspaper is disturbed by the tactics.
“We are deeply troubled by this use of government power to seek access to the communications of journalists,” Barr said. “The Department of Justice should immediately make clear its reasons for this intrusion into the activities of reporters doing their jobs, an activity protected under the First Amendment.”
The Post story was one of a series of leaks that infuriated President Donald Trump during his first months in office. Just two weeks after the report about Kislyak and Sessions, Sessions announced a major crackdown on what he called a "culture of leaks." The attorney general also announced he was creating an FBI unit devoted solely to unlawful disclosures of classified information in the media and he said the department was reviewing its policy on subpoenas seeking information from or about journalists. No changes to the policy were subsequently announced.
Justice Department spokesperson Marc Raimondi declined to discuss specifics about the steps taken toward the Post or to say precisely who was under investigation, but he emphasized that the goal was not to prosecute the journalists.
“While rare, the Department follows the established procedures within its media guidelines policy when seeking legal process to obtain telephone toll records and non-content email records from media members as part of a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” Raimondi said. “The targets of these investigations are not the news media recipients but rather those with access to the national defense information who provided it to the media and thus failed to protect it as lawfully required.”
The Post said the notices it received indicated that investigators obtained permission to access information on what accounts the reporters were emailing to or receiving emails from but that no such data was received by the government. A Post spokesperson declined to comment on why or to say if the newspaper knew of the government’s investigation before this week.
However, an official confirmed that the orders were not obtained until last year. That raises the likelihood that the years old emails may have been automatically or manually deleted by the time investigators got permission to seek the data.
It seems unlikely the Post would have agreed to turn over the email data without a legal fight. It is unclear whether one of the paper’s service providers would have had access to the information.
Under guidelines revamped by Attorney General Eric Holder in 2013 following controversies over the department's use of legal tools to snoop on reporters, the department is required to notify journalists about such searches within 45 days after obtaining the records.
The attorney general can extend that period to 90 days under exigent circumstances but additional delays are not permitted.
The issuance of the notices earlier this week suggests the department did not receive the data until February of this year or later, after the Biden administration came into office.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) holds up a pardon he signed during an event held by the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project at the old Baltimore County Jail in Towson, Md., on Saturday. (Will Newton/For The Washington Post)
Maryland Governor Grants Posthumous Pardons for 34 Black Lynching Victims
Michael Brice-Saddler, The Washington Post
Brice-Saddler writes: "Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Saturday granted posthumous pardons for 34 Black victims of lynchings in the state, a sweeping action he said would be a step toward rectifying the killings of youths and men who were denied due process."
Hogan announced the pardons on a rainy morning in Towson, standing feet away from a building that was once a jail. There, nearly 136 years ago,
75 men, their faces concealed with masks, pulled 15-year-old Howard Cooper from his cell and hanged him from a nearby sycamore tree.
Historians say Cooper, who had been accused of rape and was scheduled to be executed, was lynched before his attorneys could appeal his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. At a ceremony to memorialize Cooper on Saturday, Hogan decried how the teenager’s life was “taken so violently and so senselessly by an angry mob unwilling to give him the due process he was entitled to.” Hogan declared he would posthumously pardon Cooper as well as 33 other victims of lynching in the state between 1854 and 1933.
He read each of the victims’ names aloud before signing the pardons, ending his list with a 13-year-old boy named Fredrick, whose full name, the governor said, “was lost to history.” The boy was hanged from a tree in or near Cecilton, a small city about 35 miles southwest of Wilmington, Del., around September 1861.
“Studying [Cooper’s] case led me to dig deeper and to seek out details” in all the documented cases, Hogan said. “My hope is that this action will at least in some way help to right these horrific wrongs — and perhaps bring a measure of peace to the memories of these individuals and their descendants.”
Several states have offered posthumous pardons to individuals who were falsely accused of a crime and then lynched, dating back at least as far as Georgia’s decision in 1986 to pardon Leo Frank, a Jewish man wrongly convicted of killing a child and then lynched in 1915 in a famous case of Southern anti-Semitism.
But Hogan, a Republican who is barred by state law from seeking a third term in 2022 and is exploring future political options, is the first to make a systematic pardon of all known lynching victims in any state. The Equal Justice Initiative’s “Lynching in America” project has documented more than 4,000 lynchings across the South from 1877 to 1950, as well as dozens of them in other states, including Maryland.
Flanked by state leaders and racial justice advocates, Hogan said his actions were partially inspired by a petition from middle school students at nearby Loch Raven Technical Academy in Towson, calling on him to consider the posthumous pardon for Cooper. The petition was sent to Hogan earlier this year by the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project, which has sought to document the history of extrajudicial hangings throughout the state and has identified at least 40 lynchings in Maryland.
Michael Ricci, a spokesperson for Hogan’s office, said the pardons were granted to victims who were charged with some type of offense and eligible for posthumous clemency.
Among them were George Peck, who was lynched in 1880 while he was being transported to trial; King Johnson, who was seized, beaten and fatally shot in 1911 by eight men after he was left unguarded in jail; and Jacob Henson, who was removed from jail by a mob near Ellicott City while planning his own appeal for a murder conviction in 1895.
Maryland House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County), the first Black person and first woman to hold her leadership position in the state, said it was noteworthy that three White men — Hogan, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. (D) and Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) — “stand here with us to say this was wrong . . . and we should collectively acknowledge it to move forward into the next chapter.”
In recent years, Maryland, a slaveholding border state that remained in the Union during the Civil War, has focused on confronting lynchings in the state, an indelible and deeply painful part of American history.
The Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a government-backed panel, is in the midst of a three-year study examining the acts in 19th- and 20th-century Maryland and the impact it had on the state. The commission was assigned counsel from the state attorney general’s office and issued an interim report on its findings last year to Hogan and the leaders of the General Assembly.
“Cooper was one of the youngest victims we were tasked with investigating — we don’t know a lot about these individuals,” said Charles L. Chavis Jr., the commission’s vice chairman and an assistant professor of conflict resolution and history at George Mason University. “We don’t know what he liked to do as a child, we don’t know what his pastimes were. The humanity for these individuals were stripped in the acts of violence.”
Two months before Cooper was killed in 1885, an all-White jury deliberated for less than a minute and declared him guilty of assaulting and raping a White woman — even though the victim did not testify she had been raped, according to Will Schwarz, president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project.
That charge triggered the death penalty, but Cooper’s attorneys fought to overturn the conviction, arguing that his 14th Amendment rights had been violated because Black people were barred from serving on juries in Maryland.
His attorneys unsuccessfully appealed the conviction in Maryland, and the mob broke into the old Baltimore County Jail and lynched Cooper before his case could go to the Supreme Court. No one was held accountable for his killing.
On Saturday, leaders with the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project and the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a blue marker erected steps away from the jail, detailing Cooper's story.
Louis Diggs, who has written 13 books about Black history in Baltimore County, pulled the tarp off the memorial plaque. He said he hoped other communities would make a similar effort because “we need to know our history.”
The plaque notes that pieces of the rope used to kill Cooper were “given away as souvenirs,” and that Cooper’s mother, Henrietta, collected her son’s remains and buried them in an unmarked grave.
“A child was lynched right here. Why would we ever want to forget that?” Schwarz asked. “Well, we’re here today to make sure no one does.”
Cori Bush. (photo: Andrae Ricketts/Unsplash)
Congress Faces the Gut-Wrenching Facts of the Black Maternal Mortality Crisis
Julia Crave, Slate
Excerpt: "Rep. Cori Bush and others testify about the dangers of childbearing in America."
didn’t think that there could even be a possibility that there could be a complication,” Missouri Rep. Cori Bush told the House Oversight Committee Thursday. Bush was testifying to her colleagues about the premature birth of her own son, Zion, as part of a hearing focusing on America’s ongoing Black maternal mortality crisis, as Congress considers the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2020.
Bush and other speakers offered gut-wrenching testimonies about the realities of Black experience with pregnancy and childbirth. Black people who give birth in the U.S. are three times as likely to experience maternal death during or after delivery as their white peers, who themselves die at a higher rate than in any other comparably wealthy nation. There’s no definitive reason for this atrocious outcome, but systemic racism, poor healthcare access, apathetic clinicians, and weathering all play a role in why the phenomenon transcends class and educational lines.
In a 2019 study on how birthing people are treated by clinicians, 22.5 percent of Black patients reported experiencing some type of mistreatment. Black babies are also at risk since they are more likely to be born premature and more likely to die when treated by white doctors. And when Black women have access to Black doulas, they are more likely to survive birth and the period afterward.
The Momnibus Act is a broad collection of nine separate bills aimed at improving Black maternal health outcomes. One bill is centered on addressing the social determinants of Black maternal health—like housing, nutrition, and transportation—by creating a task force to come up with solutions. A second bill focuses on funding community organizations, while a third seeks to recruit perinatal workers who reflect a variety of backgrounds. This includes support for Black doulas and lactation consultants.
Such data was given a specific, personal dimension in Thursday’s testimony. Below are some of the stories, edited for length and clarity, from Bush, actor Tatyana Ali, and Charles Johnson, the husband of Kira Johnson and founder of 4Kira4Moms.
Rep. Cori Bush
I sit here before you as a mother, a single mother of two. Zion, my eldest child was born at 23 weeks gestation versus what is considered a normal pregnancy of 40 weeks. When I was early in my pregnancy with him, I didn’t think that there could even be a possibility that there could be a complication.
I became sick during my pregnancy. I had hyperemesis gravidarum, which was severe nausea and vomiting. I was constantly throwing up for the first four months of my pregnancy. Around five months, I went to see my doctor for a routine prenatal visit. As I was sitting in the doctor’s office, I noticed a picture on the wall that said, “If you feel like something is wrong, something is wrong. Tell your doctor.” I felt like something was wrong. So that’s what I did, I told my doctor that I was having severe pains. And she said, “Oh no, you’re fine. You’re fine. Go home. And I’ll see you next time.”
I went home and, one week later, I went into preterm labor. At 23 weeks, my son was born at one pound, three ounces. His ears were still in his head. His eyes were still fused shut. His fingers were smaller than rice and his skin was translucent. A Black baby with translucent skin. You could see his lungs. He could fit within the palm of my hand.
We were told he had a zero percent chance of life. The chief of neonatal surgery happened to be in the hospital that morning and saw my case on the surgical board. And she decided to try to resuscitate him. It worked. For the first month of his life, Zion was on a ventilator fighting to live. For four months, he was in the neonatal care unit. The doctor who delivered my son apologized. She said, “You were right. And I didn’t listen to you. Give me another chance.”
Two months later, I was pregnant again. So I went back to her. At 16 weeks, I went for an ultrasound at the clinic and saw a different doctor who was working that day. I found out again, I was in preterm labor. The doctor told me that the baby was going to abort. I said, “No, you have to do something.” But he was adamant.
“Just go home. Let it abort. You can get pregnant again because that’s what you people do.”
My sister Kelly was with me. We didn’t know what to do after the doctor left. We saw chairs sitting in the hallway. My sister picked up the chair and she threw it down the hallway. Nurses came running from everywhere to see what was wrong. A nurse called my doctor and she put me on the stretcher. The next morning, my doctor came in and placed a cerclage on my uterus. And I was able to carry my baby, my daughter, my angel, who is now 20 years old.
My son who was saved is now 21 years old.
This is what desperation looks like—that chair flying down a hallway. This is what being your own advocate looks like. Every day, Black women are subjected to harsh and racist treatment during pregnancy and childbirth. Every day, Black women die because the system denies our humanity. It denied us patient care.
Tatyana Ali
I had a very healthy pregnancy and, when it came time, I was laboring and dilating normally. When my husband and I got to the hospital, it was like we were on a clock. I kept very close track of the hours. I remember [the clinicians] trying to get me to take an epidural though it wasn’t in my birth plan, interrupting me again and again, in the midst of my labor pains and making it seem imperative until finally we relented. I wanted to get onto my hands and knees to push because I could still feel my legs. But every time I tried five of the 10 people in the room, all screaming at me, at the top of their lungs, would push me back down. They’d pin me down by my feet.
I could feel my baby’s wet hair here because he’d been crowned for hours. One doctor climbed up onto the side of the bed, pushed his forearm into my belly, squeezed downward. I could still feel the pain days later. And when my husband and I yelled no to the forceps, they used suction—a plunger. I screamed stop because they were aggressively popping it off of his head again and again. Without warning, one doctor pushed my baby all the way back inside me. I screamed in pain. My body started shaking uncontrollably, then I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I heard my baby cry.
“That’s our baby,” I told my husband, “Don’t let them hurt him. Go, go and get him.” Then I went unconscious again.
I remember the warmth that washed over me when I finally got to hold him. I remember two nurses, in particular, in the maternity ward who were kind and gentle with me. He spent four days in the NICU. The head pediatric urologist explained to us that it would take time for our baby to urinate on his own because of the traumatic nature of his birth. Our prayers were answered when he did and we could leave.
When we found out we were pregnant again we had to find another way. The first time we met our midwife, I felt like I had met her before. She’s a brilliant Black woman with a beautiful smile. Her laugh reminds me of my very own cousin, Valerie. I remember her spending hours with us visiting our home, helping my eldest as he was just learning to walk up the stairs on his own. I remember her asking for permission every time she touched my belly and never using a speculum or getting an intra-vaginal check, like my OBGYN did at every appointment. We decided to have a home birth and she gave us choices. She was a reservoir of information, never too busy to take a call or answer a text.
Last minute, my youngest changed his position and went lateral. I had to have another C-section, but we had planned so thoroughly that we knew exactly which hospital would respect our team. When I broke down weeping after the anesthesiologist said I would feel nothing from the chest down again, my midwife prayed and held my feet. She knew my story and prepared me for the time when the trauma of my birth might return. She also knows that I believe in prayer. She knew me that well. She suggested that I walk into the OR instead of being put on a gurney in order to feel a sense of agency and autonomy that had been taken from me previously.
I got to hold my youngest right after she entered the world. She latched right away. During postpartum visits with our midwife, she provided lactation support. She checked in on my baby’s growth, my physical wellness, my nutrition, my mental and emotional wellbeing, and how we were adjusting as a family. Both my babies were born via be a C-section, but the experiences could not have been more diametrically opposed. My eldest and I were not safe. My youngest and I, cared for by a Black midwife, were.
The birth of my oldest was my first experience of a kind of institutionalized racism and paternalism that can kill. Throughout my advocacy efforts, I’ve heard firsthand stories of people in pain being dismissed, threatened, and called drug seeking. I’ve heard stories of the sheriff’s department coming to homes in the middle of the night because families refuse to take elective tests. I’ve heard stories of child services being called moments after babies are born because the parents seem unfit. The similarities amongst Black families and the treatment and similar outcomes for indigenous families and queer families and disabled families and incarcerated working people are stunning and they all have similar root causes.
All pregnant and birthing people deserve to be treated with loving, patient-centered care.
Charles Johnson
I was fortunate enough to meet a woman who absolutely changed my life. And so when we talk about my wife Kira, we’re talking about sunshine personified. We’re talking about a woman who raised cars, who ran marathons, who spoke five languages fluently, and really challenged me to be a better man in every single aspect of my life. I’ve always wanted to be a father. And so I was ecstatic when we found that we were welcoming our son Charles V in September 2014. Kira and I always talked about how cool it would be to have back-to-back boys who would grow up being rambunctious best friends.
We were absolutely over the moon when we found out we were welcoming our second son, Langston, in April 2016.
The painful irony is that, as a father and as a husband, you want the best for your family. You want the best for your wife. So we made the decision to give birth at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles because it was our understanding that this hospital had what was supposed to be a sterling reputation, particularly in the area of obstetrics and delivery.
On April 12th, 2016, we walked into [the hospital] on what we expected to be the happiest day of our lives and walked straight into a nightmare. It’s important to understand that throughout Kira’s entire pregnancy, she was not only in good health, she was in exceptional health. All signs pointed to both her and Langston being extremely healthy. So at our doctor’s recommendation, we went in for a routine scheduled C-section. Langston was born perfectly healthy—10 fingers, 10 toes, and we were overwhelmed with joy welcoming this tremendous gift into our lives.
Shortly after birth, we were taken back to recovery, which is standard in a cesarean delivery. Kira was resting. I was watching her rest and Langston was in the incubator. And I was just soaking in the pride of being a father for the second time. Our family was finally complete.
Then things began to take a turn for the worst. As I’m sitting there watching Kira rest, the catheter coming from her bedside began to turn pink with blood. This is around four o’clock in the afternoon. I brought it to the attention of the doctors and staff and they examined Kira physically. They took her vitals. They drew blood and they did an ultrasound. And very early on, they could see that her abdomen is beginning to fill with fluid. They ordered a CT scan. It was supposed to be performed … immediately.
Five o’clock came. No CT scan. Six o’clock came, seven o’clock came. No scan. By seven o’clock, my wife is shivering uncontrollably because she’s losing so much blood. Eight o’clock comes. No scans. I’m begging and pleading, “Please do something! Help her!” At around nine o’clock, I pulled a nurse aside and I asked her to, “Please help me. My wife isn’t doing well. She’s weak. She’s in pain. She’s losing color. Please help me.”
And she responded to me, “Sir, your wife just isn’t a priority right now.”
Your wife isn’t a priority.
Ten o’clock came. 11 o’clock came. And it wasn’t until after 12:30 AM that they finally made the decision to take Kira back for surgery. When they opened her up, there were three and a half liters of blood in my wife’s abdomen from where she’d been allowed to bleed and suffer needlessly for 10 hours.
Convention center in Dallas. (photo: The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Kids Go Hungry in 'Insane' Dallas Migrant Shelter, Volunteers Say
Steven Monacelli, The Daily Beast
Monacelli writes: "From reports of kids fainting to transfers in the middle of the night, the place is more like a jail than a shelter, insiders say."
ears that kids are going hungry, and even fainting for that reason. A lack of mental-health and educational resources. Accounts of transfers in the dead of night without warning.
These are among the allegations leveled by a handful of volunteers fed up with what they see as jail-like conditions at a migrant youth facility operated out of the Dallas Convention Center. It’s just one of several federal shelters set up in recent months to house a significant jump in the number of unaccompanied young people apprehended at the southern border of the United States.
In other words, it’s not a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention center. But volunteers say it still seems an awful lot like these kids are behind bars.
In mid-March, over 2,200 unaccompanied migrant youths were brought to the Dallas facility. Though it was at least originally slated to close in less than a month, over 1,400 remain. When the shelter first opened, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—the agency responsible for the migrant youths after they leave CBP custody—worked with the Red Cross to manage the facility with support of local nonprofits.
Then, near the end of March, a military contractor called Culmen International was granted a $2 million contract by HHS to take over day-to-day management. On April 19, the contract ballooned to $29.5 million.
That’s when volunteers say things took a turn.
Kirsten Chilstrom, a Dallas-based special education teacher, started volunteering at the convention center shortly after the young people arrived as a part of a program managed by the Catholic Charities of Dallas. She describes Culmen’s treatment of the youths in carceral terms.
“It’s disturbing... They are being treated like prisoners, and it’s insane,” Chilstrom told The Daily Beast.
Sam Hodges, a Dallas-based MBA student who volunteers with the Catholic Charities, echoed Chilstrom’s assessment of Culmen International’s management of the facility. “They treat it like it’s a jail,” Hodges said.
For weeks, Chilstrom and Hodges said, they and other volunteers advocated for improvements without running afoul of what they described as a policy meant to protect the privacy of the youths at the facility: don’t talk to the press. Having seen little progress, both Chilstrom and Hodges decided to speak on the record for this story. Two other volunteers and one concerned Culmen employee also shared information about their experiences with The Daily Beast under the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The Daily Beast also reviewed emails sent by a fifth volunteer expressing concerns to HHS.
“At this point, I think it’s for the wellbeing of the kids,” Chilstrom said.
As The New York Times and others have reported, the number of children in the custody of CBP has declined as they have been transferred from facilities designed for adults to HHS-managed shelters thought of as more suitable for children. But volunteers say the situation in Dallas suggests being transferred from one agency to another is no salve for the crisis facing young people detained at the border.
Culmen International does not typically oversee the welfare of children. Their website describes their mission as “enhancing national and international security, supporting military readiness, and providing technology solutions.” But job listings for “Humanitarian Support Staff” indicate Culmen has a role in managing at least two other migrant facilities, in San Antonio and San Diego.
Culmen declined to comment for this story and directed requests to HHS staff.
In a written statement, HHS said the site is intended as a temporary measure, where the children are provided clean sleeping quarters, meals, laundry, recreational activities, and access to medical services. They did not respond directly to the claims made by volunteers, but stated that they require care providers to report and document all significant incidents in accordance with mandatory reporting laws, state licensing requirements, federal laws, and regulations.
According to advocates like Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, it is an unfortunate truth that many of these large facilities are run by private, for-profit contractors with little to no child welfare experience. “Private security contractors should not be in the business of child welfare, and it’s outrageous to think companies are profiteering off vulnerable children as they cut corners,” Vignarajah said.
Perhaps the most disturbing complaint: volunteers say Culmen does not provide adequate quality and amounts of food, leaving some of the kids hungry. “Numerous children have told me they are hungry and have begged me for additional food even after they have had a meal,” Chilstrom told The Daily Beast. “The food quality is subpar at best... Culmen pays for separate meal service for their employees and they throw out anything that they don’t use."
Hodges bolstered that contention, noting that many children have mentioned they go hungry. “The rationing is not proper,” he said. The Culmen employee echoed their concerns.
Emails reviewed by The Daily Beast sent by a different volunteer to representatives at HHS suggested the food situation amounted to “negligence” and “child abuse,” and specifically pointed to how Culmen ordered separate meals for their staff. The HHS representative responded by saying the concerns would be shared with Culmen, which is responsible for managing and distributing the budget for food. They also instructed volunteers to file incident reports for any maltreatment they witness.
Likewise, Hodges and Chilstrom both relayed stories they said they heard from migrants about how they would wake up to find that others had been transferred in the dead of night, with no explanation of whether they were sent to a sponsor or to another facility. “I would ask them what happened to so-and-so, and they would say, ‘I don’t know, they just came in the middle of the night and took them somewhere else,’” Hodges said. The Culmen employee corroborated these stories.
Volunteers also described how a paucity of mental-health services and education has taken a serious toll on the kids. For over a month, they have been confined inside the convention center, where their movements are highly regimented. They have to ask permission to use the restroom and are only allowed to leave the main room where they sleep to eat and shower, according to three volunteers and the Culmen employee.
In late April, Michelle Saenz-Rodriguez, an immigration attorney based in Dallas who’s volunteered at the convention center, expressed concerns about the situation in an interview with CNN. “[G]oing on a month in one room has to take its toll on the mental health of those boys,” she said.
On April 23, Chilstrom told The Daily Beast, two children fainted. “I arrived after the first one, and was present for the second. It was in the middle of the center,” she claimed.
The Daily Beast reviewed contemporaneous text messages Chilstrom sent about the alleged incident to another volunteer, as well as an email sent by a different volunteer to HHS referring to kids “possibly fainting due to a lack of nutrients.”
Volunteers and the Culmen employee repeatedly emphasized the traumatic nature of the experiences some of the youth described facing in their home countries and while traveling to the United States. And advocates emphasize that the conditions in Dallas are likely to further traumatize children who have already been traumatized.
“Child welfare means so much more than just a roof over their head,” Vignarajah said. “There, there is a lack of transparency around the standards of care these facilities and their operators are held to… It’s so important to have robust, state-licensed operations, ideally rooted in community-based, trauma-informed models of care.” Though effectively operating in a manner similar to temporary childcare facilities, ProPublica reporting suggests some of these operations may fall short of state license requirements.
Hodges, Chilstrom, and other volunteers have participated in efforts to help connect migrant youths with their families, and described case management progress as slow and inadequate. With over 1,400 youths still at the center, and less than a month left until the center is slated to close, much work is left to be done to reunify children with their families or sponsors. According to Vignarajah and other sources familiar with the matter, approximately 80 percent of the youths have a family member in the United States. According to a statement from HHS, after the youths have been released to a sponsor or sent to a more appropriate long-term HHS shelter, they will be eligible to go through immigration proceedings and petition for asylum.
“It’s critically important that we provide the case management necessary to as quickly and safely as possible to get these kids out of these facilities and into the arms of their families,” Vignarajah said.
In Dallas, the management of the effort has been contracted to the Providencia Group, a for-profit federal contractor that only came into existence in June 2020. On March 17, they were awarded $14.6 million to provide end-to-end case management services, including sponsor assessments and timely reunification. The Providencia Group currently has open job listings for roles in Dallas and San Antonio, suggesting they are responsible for case management at more than one shelter.
As of this writing, volunteers say, there are no full-time case managers working on site, and all case management interaction with the migrant youths thus far has been done via forms and video conferences.
“Case management can be time intensive and requires experienced social workers, ideally who are bilingual,” Vignarajah said.
The Providencia Group did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
While Culmen International’s contract was anticipated to end on May 31, coinciding with the anticipated closing date of the facility at the Dallas Convention Center, the contract awarded to the Providencia Group was slated to end July 16. That suggests the center could remain open past May or that the remaining youth will be transferred to another facility.
“It’s disheartening, but not entirely surprising, to hear allegations of inadequate care in this type of facility,” Vignarajah told The Daily Beast. “These facilities must be governed by the fundamental principle that these children are not just in their custody, but their care.”
Prince Michael was described by his friend, the Marquess of Reading, as 'Her Majesty's unofficial ambassador to Russia.' (photo: Donat Sorokin/Tass)
Prince Michael of Kent's Army Role Questioned After Claims He Sold Access to Kremlin
Josh Halliday and Ben Quinn, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Claims that the Queen's cousin was willing to use his royal status to sell privileged access to Vladimir Putin's regime have raised questions over whether he should keep his honorary position in the British army, according to Labour."
Honorary position challenged by Labour after Queen’s cousin allegedly told reporters he could be hired for £10,000 a day to contact Putin’s team
Prince Michael of Kent allegedly told undercover reporters posing as investors from South Korea that he could be hired for £10,000 a day to make “confidential” representations to the Russian president’s team.
A recording allegedly suggests Prince Michael offered his royal endorsement in exchange for a $200,000 fee during a virtual meeting and was happy to use his home in Kensington Palace as a backdrop for a speech promoting a fake South Korean gold company.
His friend, the Marquess of Reading, later described the prince as “Her Majesty’s unofficial ambassador to Russia”.
Prince Michael has denied the claims, which were made by Channel 4 Dispatches in collaboration with the Sunday Times. Reporters set up a firm called House of Haedong and approached five members of the royal family with an offer of a role.
Michael’s office insisted he had no “special relationship” with Putin and that he had had no contact with the Russian premier or his team since June 2003, when they last met.
But John Healey, the Labour MP and shadow defence secretary, said that the investigation “raises serious questions” about whether the prince should retain his position as senior colonel of the King’s Royal Hussars.
The 78-year-old, who is a first cousin of the Queen, does not receive money from the civil list and earns a living acting as chair of his own private company, which offers consultancy advice.
He was also approached about a role helping the fictitious gold firm in Russia, it was alleged.
The programme said Prince Michael’s business partner, Simon Isaacs, formally known as the Marquess of Reading, had used an event at Kensington Palace in 2013, where Prince Michael was a guest, to sell access to Putin.
The event, to promote the Russian wrestling sport of Sambo, also offered opportunities to personally meet the Russian leader at a later date, Dispatches found.
In a recorded meeting with the undercover reporters, Isaacs said: “If he [Prince Michael] is representing the House of Haedong, he could mention that to Putin and Putin would find the right person who is interested in South Korea or interested in gold. It just opens the door, you know, which is so helpful.”
He added: “I think, if I can say this, this is kind of slightly discreet, we’re talking relatively discreetly here. Because we wouldn’t want the world to know that he is seeing Putin purely for business reasons, if you follow me.”
He went on to describe Prince Michael as “Her Majesty’s unofficial ambassador to Russia” and said tension between the UK and the Russian regime has not affected Michael’s relationship with Putin. He said: “He is just generally regarded as Her Majesty’s unofficial ambassador to Russia. I mean, I say that, you know, between you and me slightly, but I mean it’s generally known that’s the case.”
Prince Michael’s office said: “Prince Michael receives no public funding and earns his own living through a consultancy company that he has run for over 40 years.
“Prince Michael has no special relationship with President Putin. They last met in June 2003 and Prince Michael has had no contact with him or his office since then.
“Lord Reading is a good friend who in trying to help made suggestions which Prince Michael would not have wanted, or been able, to fulfil.”
Isaacs said: “I thought the approach from the House of Haedong was genuine and I was only trying to facilitate an introduction to my friend Prince Michael. I made a mistake and over-promised and for that I am truly regretful. I wasn’t at my peak as I was recovering from a kidney transplant.
“For the record, the Sambo event which was eight years ago was my event and Prince Michael was simply my guest along with many other people.”
Greenidge Generation sits on the shores of Seneca Lake in Dresden, NY. (photo: Jessica McKenzie/Grist)
This Power Plant Stopped Burning Fossil Fuels. Then Bitcoin Came Along.
Jessica McKenzie, Grist
McKenzie writes: "One decade and $1 trillion after the debut of Bitcoin, the environmental footprint of 'mining' the cryptocurrency is still hotly contested."
On the sleepy shores of New York’s Seneca Lake, a cryptocurrency company is showing how Bitcoin can keep fossil fuel use alive.
ne decade and $1 trillion after the debut of Bitcoin, the environmental footprint of “mining” the cryptocurrency is still hotly contested. What’s certain, however, is that the amount of electricity the process requires is growing at a breakneck speed. Each time transactions are added to Bitcoin’s digital ledger, they have to be verified by its network, which requires “miners” to devote huge quantities of computational power to solving cryptographic problems. As more miners join the network — lured by the skyrocketing value of the bitcoin they receive in exchange for their work — the puzzles get harder, requiring ever greater amounts of processing power, and thus electricity, to solve.
Bitcoin mining is now estimated to gobble up more electricity than many entire countries. Since 2019, when the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance placed the cryptocurrency’s power needs ahead of Switzerland’s, its consumption has more than doubled, surpassing that of Sweden. The energy used by the Bitcoin network in a single year could power all the tea kettles in the United Kingdom for over three decades.
Adding so much demand to the world’s electricity grids is risky, especially at a time when the window to meaningfully cut greenhouse gas emissions is rapidly closing. Proponents of Bitcoin would have you believe that many or even most mining operations are in far-flung locations using renewable energy that otherwise would have gone to waste. Bitcoin miners have an incentive to keep electricity costs low, they reason, so they’re likely to seek the cheapest electricity possible. Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, whose respective companies Square and Tesla have invested heavily in Bitcoin, claim the cryptocurrency will actually hurry the green energy transition by steering investment into renewables. A paper prepared by Square predicts that electricity producers and Bitcoin miners will soon become one and the same.
On the sleepy shores of Seneca Lake in Dresden, New York, that prediction is already being realized. Greenidge Generation, a former coal power plant that converted to natural gas and began a Bitcoin mining operation, is positioning itself as part of the clean energy future. The company’s promotional materials describe a “clean” and “environmentally-sound” plant with a “unique commitment to environmental stewardship.”
There’s just one problem: If it weren’t for Bitcoin, there would almost certainly be no reason to run the power plant in Dresden at all. Without the revenue from mining, Greenidge would have no reason to spew hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s stacks, discharge hundreds of billions of gallons of hot water into a nearby trout stream, or pipe in and burn billions of cubic feet of fracked natural gas.
In fact, the plant was shut down in 2011 because there wasn’t enough regional energy demand to justify the operating costs. Its owners filed for bankruptcy and told the state that the plant’s closure was permanent. After belching noxious fumes and dumping toxic coal ash into a nearby landfill for seven decades, the plant was poised to be remediated and reused.
And that’s sort of what happened, in 2014, when Atlas Holdings, a private investment firm based in tony Greenwich, Connecticut, purchased Greenidge. After several years of lobbying New York state officials — and some well-timed donations to Governor Andrew Cuomo — the company won a $2 million regional economic development grant to convert the plant to run on natural gas.
When Greenidge applied for permits to restart operations, it claimed it would be generating power to meet existing electricity demand. In 2016, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, concurred and cited the fact that the “plant itself will not create a new demand for energy” as part of the agency’s justification for letting the plant skip the normal requirement to produce an environmental impact statement.
But when Greenidge reopened in 2017, there wasn’t any more demand than there had been when it shut down. By 2019, the plant was no longer producing power for the public at all. In an attempt to claw back the tens of millions that Atlas invested to convert the plant to natural gas, Greenidge turned to mining Bitcoin. By March 2020, the plant was reportedly using over 14 megawatts of power, enough for roughly 9,000 homes, to mine around $50,000 worth of Bitcoin per day. As of this writing, that same amount of Bitcoin is worth about $300,000. The plant is now one of the largest cryptocurrency mines in the country, and it’s angling to get even bigger.
As Greenidge increased its mining capacity last year, there was a corresponding jump in its contributions to global warming. The plant’s greenhouse gas emissions increased nearly tenfold from 2019 to 2020, according to DEC records obtained by the Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes, one of several local environmental groups that have risen up in opposition to the plant. The equivalent of over 220,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide were emitted over the course of last year, a volume comparable to putting nearly 50,000 new cars on the road. That’s just a fraction of the 580,000 metric tons the plant is currently permitted to emit annually, and the nearly 1 million metric tons it could release every year if operating at full capacity. And since the plant’s growing appetite is driven entirely by cryptocurrency, these emissions can’t be written off as the price of providing heat and power to homes or businesses.
Greenidge isn’t even close to done expanding. In late March, the company revealed plans to merge with Support.com, a publicly traded tech company. In its announcement, Greenidge said it wants to more than double its mining capacity on Seneca Lake by July — and to double it again by the end of 2022, at which point it will total 85 megawatts. The company is not a power plant with a side hustle, but rather a “bitcoin mining company with a wholly-owned power plant.”
Greenidge also said that the company plans to replicate its vertically integrated model — cryptocurrency mining at the source of energy production — at other power plants, with a goal of at least 500 megawatts of combined mining capacity by 2025. To accomplish that, the company would have to acquire and open at least four other power plants of similar capacity. They probably won’t have trouble finding them: National environmental nonprofits Earthjustice and the Sierra Club have already warned that nearly 30 power plants in upstate New York could be used for similar purposes. Atlas Holdings itself partially owns five power plants in New Hampshire that have more than 1,000 megawatts of combined capacity. Like Greenidge before its pivot to Bitcoin, they’re only used at times of peak demand.
Others are already following in Greenidge’s footsteps. In April, a cryptocurrency mining company called Digihost moved to acquire a 55-megawatt natural gas-fired plant in Niagara County, New York. It could theoretically happen at any aging fossil fuel plant around the country: A source of dirty energy that has outlived its profitability could find a second life as a Bitcoin mining operation. Contra Dorsey and Musk, there’s no incentive for Bitcoin miners to purchase or invest in renewable energy if it’s less expensive to produce their own by burning fossil fuels at dirt cheap plants that nobody else wants.
“It’s a gold rush,” observed Vinny Aliperti, the owner of a winery 10 miles up the road from Greenidge. “We’re just the first, but they’re going to be coming after all these old power plants.”
Although emissions from Bitcoin mining have global consequences, many of the locals opposing Greenidge are equally concerned about its effects on water quality and wildlife. They’ve enumerated their issues with Greenidge in a recent lawsuit against the Town of Torrey (within which the village of Dresden is located), the Torrey Planning Board, and Greenidge itself. This lawsuit is only the latest legal action organizations like the Committee to Preserve the Finger Lakes have taken to try to halt the plant’s operation and proposed expansion.
In late March, Phil and Linda Bracht, two of the 30 petitioners on the lawsuit against Torrey, the county planning board, and Greenidge, took me and another petitioner, Carolyn McAllister, out in their boat to get a look at the plant from the water. All three live on Seneca Lake, just a mile from Greenidge.
The first part of the facility to catch the eye is its giant intake pipe, which is 7 feet in diameter and extends further than the length of two football fields from the shore over the water, like an elevated train to nowhere, before dropping below the lake surface. This is where Greenidge can draw up to 139 million gallons of fresh water per day to cool the plant. Like all thermoelectric power plants, Greenidge uses steam to spin the turbines that produce electricity, but the steam has to be condensed back to water by exchanging heat with the fresh water before it can be reused. Once-through cooling systems like this — where water is used once and then expelled at a higher temperature — require vast amounts of water, with consequences for both wildlife and water quality.
Intake pipes like this one will suck in water, plants, and animals indiscriminately, resulting in fish, larvae, and other wildlife becoming either “impinged” — caught or mangled by the screens at the pipe’s entrance — or sucked into the cooling system entirely in a process called “entrainment.” A 2011 Sierra Club report put the matter less technically, describing once-through cooling systems as “giant fish blenders.”
Greenidge’s former owners once commissioned an engineering study that estimated that the plant impinged or entrained nearly 10,000 fish and crayfish annually in 2006-2007, while an additional 592,000 eggs, larvae, and juvenile fish were entrained every year. The federal Clean Water Act requires facilities that withdraw more than 2 million gallons a day for cooling purposes to, at minimum, cover intake pipes with protective screens to reduce these harms, but New York’s DEC gave Greenidge five years to comply, meaning its pipe won’t have screens until late 2022.
After the water is circulated through the plant, it’s expelled through a 7-by-10-foot concrete tunnel into a canal that flows into Keuka Lake Outlet, a trout stream that empties into Seneca Lake and has been designated by the DEC as a fishery requiring special protection. According to a statement to the court from Lori Fischline, another petitioner against Greenidge who often kayaks up the Outlet, the area has been overtaken by “sludge, algae, insects, dead fish, and foul smells.” Greenidge is permitted to discharge up to 134 million gallons of water daily at temperatures that range from 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer to 86 degrees F in the winter. Given that the lake’s normal surface temperatures range from just 32 to 70 degrees F, depending on the season, the potential for ecological havoc is high.
Seneca Lake is known as the lake trout capital of the world — it’s the site of the annual National Lake Trout Derby — but water temperatures greater than 68 degrees F can impede the fishes’ development and increase mortality. In recent years, fishers have reported fewer and smaller catches on the lake. John Halfman, a professor of geoscience and environmental studies at Hobart and William Smith College on the northern end of Seneca Lake, says the size of the biggest fish caught in the derby has been steadily decreasing, while the time it takes to make a catch is increasing. Michael Black, a petitioner and fisherman going on his 50th summer living on the lake, said he used to catch between 60 and 100 lake trout each year from his dock south of Greenidge. In the last three years combined he’s caught just four. While there are multiple reasons fish might be suffering, Black worries that hot water discharges are exacerbating the threats they face.
Tiffany Garcia, a freshwater ecologist at Oregon State University, wrote a letter to the Town of Torrey raising similar concerns about the effects of hot water discharges on the larger lake ecosystem. “You don’t want to increase temperatures artificially in water bodies that are already going to be suffering from or experiencing increased water temperatures from climate shifts,” she told Grist by phone. She compared the lake’s resiliency to a rubber band and said there’s no telling when additional natural and unnatural stressors will cause that resiliency to snap.
Residents fear that warmer waters will also increase the likelihood and severity of harmful algal blooms, or HABs, near Greenidge. While the presence of blue-green algae or cyanobacteria is normal in lakes, a small number of these organisms produce potent toxins that can be dangerous or even fatal for people and other animals. Under the right conditions — which include lots of sun, still water, and, crucially, heat — these algae can explode in vast, dangerous blooms that are becoming increasingly common in the U.S.
Gregory Boyer, the director of the Great Lakes Research Consortium at the State University of New York, studied the effect of artificially increasing water temperature by just 2 degrees on Lake Champlain. That small change resulted in a surge of bacteria growth, with toxic species of bacteria increasing to a greater degree than nontoxic species.
In earlier lawsuits challenging permits the DEC issued to Greenidge, Boyer submitted affidavits on behalf of local environmental groups saying that the large discharges of heated water from Greenidge could increase HABs in the area and should be studied further. Gary McIntee, who lives just south of Greenidge, told me that the water flowing down the Outlet is often flush with nutrient-rich runoff from farms as well as discharge from a wastewater treatment plant upstream, creating an ideal mix for HABs.
Many people who live near Seneca Lake, including petitioners like Black and McIntee, use water drawn directly from the lake in their homes: to shower, to wash clothes and dishes, to water their gardens or — in the case of the region’s dozens of wineries — even their vineyards. HABs would render their only source of running water unusable. As the DEC points out, not even boiling, chemical disinfectants, or water filters will protect people from HABs and their associated toxins.
HABs can also overwhelm industrial water filtration systems, temporarily rendering public water undrinkable. And as winemaker Vinny Aliperti pointed out, algal blooms keep the tourists away. More than anything, many locals object to being subject to these ecological risks for a power plant that’s not actually providing them needed electricity in return.
Greenidge Generation vigorously denies that its plant is having an adverse impact on the environment. It also claims it’s once again producing power for the grid. “Greenidge is a unique success story,” Mike McKeon, a lobbyist and crisis communicator retained by Greenidge, told Grist in a statement. “Today, Greenidge is a clean, reliable source of power for thousands of homes and businesses in upstate New York and is home to a new data processing center mining bitcoin that is already paying enormous dividends to our community at large.”
In response to concerns about impingement and entrainment in the cooling system, Greenidge has said that the risk is mitigated by variable speed drives recently installed on the facility’s water pumps, which lower the speed of water intake — making it easier for fish to swim away and escape. Those drives, however, can be turned off whenever the plant needs maximum water flow. Greenidge also affirmed that it is on schedule to install protective screens by 2022. As for the effect of hot water discharges on fisheries, the company counters that the designated Keuka Lake Outlet trout area is upstream from Greenidge and won’t be affected. However, although there are specific fishing regulations upstream from the Greenidge discharge canal, the lower part of the Outlet is also a designated trout stream; this explanation also does not account for the trout that live in Seneca Lake itself.
The company’s response to residents’ concerns about HABs is to say there were no HABs within 4 miles of the plant last year, so it couldn’t possibly cause them. However, as Boyer told me, the number of HABs was down across the region in 2020, likely because of high winds over the summer. He explained HABs only explode when all necessary conditions are met, so this one data point doesn’t prove Greenidge won’t help cause them in the future.
Finally, Greenidge reiterated that its activities are all within the limits set by its permits from the DEC and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, which determine how much water the plant can withdraw and discharge and at what temperatures, as well as the plant’s air emissions limits. The DEC verified that Greenidge is in compliance with its permits and insisted that it “strictly oversees” the plant’s activities. Greenidge often boasts that these permits are “uniquely strong.”
How Greenidge received those “uniquely strong” permits is a point of longstanding interest to Peter Mantius, a journalist who resides in Watkins Glen, a town at the southern tip of Seneca Lake. Mantius has been covering Atlas Holdings and Greenidge since at least 2017, carefully documenting their sustained lobbying of state officials, as well as contributions to Andrew Cuomo’s reelection campaigns totaling at least $120,000.
Atlas’ lobbying began in 2013, before the firm even bought the plant. Through the law firm Hiscock Barclay, Atlas enlisted a lawyer who had previously been the general counsel at the DEC. That lawyer wrote his former employer on his new client’s behalf, requesting that Greenidge not be treated as a “new” facility under the Clean Air Act, which would avoid the stricter environmental review to which new or significantly altered air pollution sources are otherwise subject.
That same year, the firm and its principals began donating to Governor Cuomo’s reelection campaign, beginning with a $25,000 donation from the company in March. In December, Timothy Fazio and Andrew Bursky, Atlas’ managing partners, each contributed an additional $25,000 on the very same day. Fazio donated another $20,000 in January 2014, shortly before his firm bought the plant. (When asked for comment on these donations, Cuomo’s senior advisor Rich Azzopardi told Grist that “no contribution of any size has any impact or plays a role in any official action, period.”)
In March 2014, the plant hired McKeon, a lobbyist at Mercury Public Affairs and the founder and former executive director of Republicans for Cuomo, which organized bipartisan support for the now-governor during his first run for the office. The plant initially paid a monthly retainer of $20,000 to secure his services. As Mantius has reported, McKeon’s primary activities were lobbying the executive chamber and, for a time, the New York State Legislature. Over the next few years, Greenidge paid Mercury at least $500,000.
In March 2015, Atlas representatives met with top state officials, including Joe Martens and Basil Seggos, the former and current commissioner of the DEC, as well as Thomas O’Mara, a member of the State Senate who also happened to be a partner at the law firm retained by Greenidge Generation. Although details of their conversation are not public, McKeon and O’Mara both told Mantius that they discussed the “new source review” process under the Clean Air Act. (O’Mara also claimed that he was unaware of his conflict of interest going into the meeting.)
Despite these efforts, Greenidge was ultimately subject to stricter treatment as a “new source” under the Clean Air Act, but only after the EPA took the DEC to task for trying to reissue the plant’s air permits after nearly five years of inactivity. “In issuing the proposed permit, NYSDEC did not adequately explain why Greenidge’s reactivation would not constitute a major modification,” the EPA wrote. “NYSDEC relied on Greenidge’s conclusion that the reactivation is not a major modification.”
However, Greenidge’s lobbying paid off in other ways. To start, they secured a $2 million grant to help convert the plant to natural gas through an “upstate revitalization” program meant to stimulate the region’s economy and create jobs. More significantly, when the DEC renewed the plant’s water withdrawal and discharge permits in 2016, the agency waived the normal requirement that the company complete a comprehensive environmental impact statement. The agency essentially reasoned that, since the plant was already built and was resuming operations using a cleaner fuel than coal, it could “not have an adverse environmental impact.”
Environmentalists have repeatedly challenged this decision in court. They argue that, since the plant was shut down, presumably for good, the question shouldn’t be: Is the current Greenidge plant less harmful than the dirty coal plant that was there before? Instead, the question should be: Is the plant more harmful than no plant at all? After all, the most likely counterfactual is not that Greenidge would have continued burning coal — it’s that it would have stopped burning fossil fuels altogether.
Furthermore, Greenidge’s opponents believe the plant should have been required to upgrade the facilities to the environmental standards required of new construction, which are higher than those for old plants. For example, since 2011 the DEC has recommended new and repowered plants use so-called closed-cycle cooling, in which cooling water is recirculated through the plant instead of discarded, significantly reducing wildlife mortality from impingement and entrainment, as well as the volume of hot water discharges. Greenidge, on the other hand, was allowed to continue using its antiquated once-through cooling system, in part because it was deemed too costly to upgrade given the facility’s historic annual revenue.
Of course, that was before the plant started mining hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin every day.
Some locals told me they wouldn’t have a problem — or as big a problem — with the plant’s environmental impact if it were supplying much-needed energy to the grid. But it isn’t. The region didn’t suffer for lack of power while Greenidge was closed, and there still isn’t enough demand to make the plant profitable without Bitcoin.
“The only good thing about mining Bitcoin is somebody makes money,” John Halfman told me on a video call. “You’re not feeding electricity to homes; you’re not feeding electricity to industry. You’re not doing anything else good with electrons other than min[ing] money. So somebody is greedy. They’re using power plants out in the middle of nowhere, where no one’s going to fight it, to line their pockets.”
Halfman also said that Greenidge’s operations pose a serious threat to the state’s goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 85 percent by 2050. Opposition to the plant is coalescing around exactly that fact, and it’s picked up momentum since the company declared its intention to expand. In early April, Earthjustice and the Sierra Club wrote to the DEC to sound the alarm regarding Greenidge’s emissions. There are subtle signs that the DEC is feeling the heat; after the agency received the environmental organizations’ letter, it described its oversight of Greenidge as “aggressive” and said it would carefully review the “precedential” nature of the facility.
Meanwhile, Greenidge’s expansion is barreling ahead. At the end of April, the Town of Torrey gave the company a green light to build four new buildings to house additional Bitcoin-mining hardware. Once those go up, local activists fear it will be that much harder to reverse the plant’s activities.
Before leaving town, I spent some time on the Keuka Outlet Trail. It follows the stream that connects Keuka Lake to Seneca Lake, running over an old railway, and ends near the Greenidge property line, which is posted liberally with no-trespassing signs.
The stream used to power an industrial thoroughfare. In 1820 there were seven gristmills, 14 sawmills, an oil mill, four carding machines for processing wool and other fibers, as well as multiple distilleries. A nonprofit has since transformed the area into a nature retreat with a wide gravel path for walking, running, and biking, well-situated benches for moments of quiet repose, and water access for fishing or boating. The waterfalls once harnessed for their power generation now flow uninterrupted, and the ruins of the area’s industrial past are being reclaimed by new growth.
This could have been the fate of an old coal-fired power plant on Seneca Lake, which in its later years produced energy people rarely needed and was too costly to run at a profit. Nearby residents might have breathed easier, and there would have been one less threat to Seneca Lake and the animals and people who depend on it.
Then a private equity firm found a way to give the plant a second life.
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