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Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim | DOJ Threatened MIT Researchers With Subpoena in Collaboration With Bolivian Coup Regime
Ken Klippenstein and Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Excerpt: "A Justice Department trial attorney repeatedly contacted Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers asking, eventually under threat of subpoena, about research they had conducted on the 2019 Bolivian presidential election, according to emails obtained by The Intercept."
Emails to the analysts show the Trump administration’s complicity with a Bolivian criminal investigation.
Justice Department trial attorney repeatedly contacted Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers asking, eventually under threat of subpoena, about research they had conducted on the 2019 Bolivian presidential election, according to emails obtained by The Intercept. Sent between October 2020 and January 2021, the emails point to the existence of the Justice Department inquiry and add new evidence to support Bolivian allegations that the United States was implicated in its 2019 coup.
The emails reveal the Justice Department’s involvement in the Bolivian coup regime’s criminal investigation into alleged voter fraud, which has not previously been reported. The inquiry targeted a pair of respected MIT researchers about their work for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in which they broadly refuted suspicions that Bolivia’s socialist party had rigged the election.
The short-lived coup regime reached power following a clear script: In the weeks leading up to the Bolivian presidential election in October 2019, the opposition pumped endless propaganda through social media and television networks, warning that incumbent President Evo Morales would exploit widespread fraud to win reelection. Morales had become the first Indigenous president elected in Bolivia in 2005, at the head of his party Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, and by 2019, he was running for his fourth term. He faced intense opposition, often framed in explicitly racist terms, from a Frankenstein coalition of right-wing Bolivians of European descent and supporters of former President Carlos Mesa, once a member of Bolivia’s left revolutionary party who had become hostile to Morales’s social democratic government.
As the votes were counted on election night, Morales was ahead as expected. The question was whether he would win by enough to avoid a runoff, which in Bolivia is triggered when a candidate wins by a margin of fewer than 10 points. In an unofficial tally, Morales led Mesa by 7.9 points, giving the opposition hope for a second round. But when the official count was released, Morales had won by 10.6 points. There would be no runoff.
Without evidence, the opposition immediately leveled fraud charges. It was backed up the next day by the Organization of American States, the powerful hemispheric cooperation organization based in Washington, D.C.
“The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls,” read the OAS’s incendiary statement. Protesters took to the streets; the military called for Morales to step down; and the opposition installed a new leader, Jeanine Áñez, after three weeks of unrest. Far to Mesa’s right, Áñez assumed office and swiftly attempted to eliminate the sense of enfranchisement for Indigenous people that the Morales government had brought. While 14 out of 16 members of Morales’ first Cabinet were Indigenous, Áñez did not appoint a single Indigenous person to her first Cabinet. In the two months before assuming office, she had tweeted that Morales was a “poor Indian” and implied that Indigenous people cannot wear shoes. When she reached the presidency, she declared that “the Bible has returned to the palace.”
The coup, roughly the same play President Donald Trump would attempt a year later, was complete.
But the U.S. press refused to call it that, instead accepting the allegations of fraud at face value.
“The line between coups and revolts can be blurry, even nonexistent,” wrote Max Fisher for the New York Times. He cited what political scientist Jay Ulfelder calls “Schrödinger’s coup”— those cases which “exist in a perpetual state of ambiguity, simultaneously coup and not-coup”— and dismissed the distinction as “old binaries” now considered “outdated” by scholars.
The Times did not undergo such hand-wringing over allegations that Morales’s party had rigged the election. Its October 2019 coverage reproduced the opposition’s promises for a “damning” unreleased OAS report, raising “the prospect that a victory by Mr. Morales would be regarded by the international community as illegitimate.” The Trump administration’s top diplomat for Latin America, Michael Kozak, condemned the Morales government and vowed that the U.S. “will work with the international community to hold accountable anyone who undermines Bolivia’s democratic institutions.”
But even a surface-level look at the vote-counting process suggested that the surge for Morales was utterly predictable. The bulk of the votes that were left to be counted on election night in 2019 had been cast deep in the country’s rural areas, where Indigenous miners, coca growers, and other working-class people overwhelmingly favored Morales. (The former president hails from the Chapare and was previously the head of the coca growers’ union.) It should have seemed obvious that their votes had put him over the top.
Just over a year later, in November 2020, late-counted Democratic votes put Joe Biden over Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election, and Trump called foul. “We were winning everything, and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said on election night. “We’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list.” The U.S. media had no difficulty explaining why the surge for Biden was legitimate. But when reporting on Bolivia, all of the American election expertise evaporated.
The OAS followed its October statement with a more in-depth analysis in November 2019, this time finding perhaps as many as a few hundred cases of apparent vote-tampering. But the data in the report did not sufficiently support the organization’s allegations of widespread fraud. In a letter to the OAS later that month, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., asked if the organization was “aware that this steady increase in Evo Morales’ margin was the result of precincts that were, on average, more pro-Morales reporting their results later than precincts that were, on average, less pro-Morales? Why is this apparently obvious conclusion — from the publicly available data — never mentioned in the EOM [Election Observation Mission] press statements or reports?”
The New York Times did not exercise the same scrutiny. “After the Organization of American States declared on Sunday that there was ‘clear manipulation’ of the voting in October,” the paper editorialized, “Mr. Morales was left with no choice but to resign, bitterly tweeting from an unknown location that ‘The world and patriotic Bolivians will repudiate this coup.”
In fact, it would be statisticians who repudiated the coup. Researchers at MIT, commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, took a closer look at the data and evidence behind the allegations and concluded what many other independent observers had already found: The fraud claims were bogus, according to a statistical analysis conducted by Jack R. Williams and John Curiel of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab.
The fallout from the MIT researchers’ analysis, which was published by the Washington Post in February 2020, was considerable. In a stunning reversal, the New York Times published an article on the findings, saying that it “cast doubt on Bolivian election fraud.”
The prestigious release was a major blow to the coup regime, leading to references in many of the same major media outlets that had peddled the coup government’s election fraud narrative. The new insight sapped the coup government’s international credibility, which was further degraded as it repeatedly delayed a new election. With La Paz shut down by protesters — this time the crowds were on the side of MAS — the regime was finally forced to hold an election on October 18, 2020.
Three days before the vote, the researchers received the first of the Justice Department’s requests. Trial attorney Angela George identified herself as an attorney at the Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs, or OIA, and said she had “received a formal request from Paraguay” for assistance in an ongoing criminal investigation. Curiel told her she had the wrong researcher, as he had not worked on any Paraguayan election study, and she told him that Bolivia was the one she had meant.
George never provided details about the nature of the criminal investigation, the existence of which has not been previously reported. Attempts to reach the coup government’s minister of justice, Álvaro Coimbra, were unsuccessful, as he is in prison facing charges of sedition related to the coup.
“We have a few questions about the data report, and we would appreciate if you could let us know when you are available to speak with us via telephone before or by November 6, 2020,” George wrote to the researchers. When Williams explained that his research was based on publicly available information, she replied threatening “a subpoena being served on you and the lab” but also dialed down her demand, saying that an interview might not be necessary. “I am simply trying to find out if the report, Analysis of the 2019 Bolivia Election, that is embedded in the Washington Post article referenced below includes your research and is an authentic copy of the report that was produced … and includes the comprehensive research you and Mr. Curiel conducted,” the prosecutor wrote.
The threat of subpoena was an extraordinary move, as the Justice Department has strict protocols to protect the freedom of the press and prevent government intimidation. According to a source familiar with the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly, the Justice Department inquiry frightened election researchers in the academic community and may have had a chilling effect on subsequent research.
A former Department of Justice trial attorney who also worked at the OIA told The Intercept that the correspondence was unusual for several reasons. Requesting anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, they said that professional investigators trained in interview techniques usually contact subjects, and there are stiff rules governing any interactions with the media.
“Generally, OIA would enlist the FBI or other investigative agency to execute an incoming MLA request such as a voluntary witness interview or inquiry like this one. It’s unusual for an OIA attorney to handle it,” the former trial attorney explained.
They also said that interactions with the media require authorization from senior Justice Department leadership.
“There is a whole set of onerous protocols in place for trial attorneys seeking information from a media organization, and the decision to move forward would be made at high levels at the DOJ. This particular request is not your run-of-the-mill criminal investigation, so you can be fairly sure that it received very high-level exposure,” the source said.
Justice Department spokesperson Joshua Stueve declined to comment.
Earlier in 2020, the U.S. government-funded media organization Voz de América, the Spanish-language complement to Voice of America, singled out the same two researchers by name in an article. The story implied that they could be taken to court over their study.
“Bolivia roundly rejected the supposed study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, by its English initials), which assured that there had been no electoral fraud in Bolivia,” begins the story dated March 5, 2020, by Yuvinka Gozalvez Avilés.
Avilés writes that Karen Longaric, then Bolivia’s minister of foreign affairs, “dismissed the idea of pressing charges against the two people who published the article,” and warned that there are harsher sanctions than a judicial investigation, namely to be professionally discredited.
“Both experts belong to MIT; however the institution denied any participation or authority in said document, clarifying that both people ‘saw the project through as independent contractors of the Center for Economic Policy and Research,’” Avilés continues. The Center for Economic Policy and Research told The Intercept that they had not received any communication from Voz de América for the article, nor did they hear from the Justice Department about the investigation. MIT’s press team did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.
The article also echoes a baseless allegation from Longaric that the MIT researchers’ report “is linked to people connected to the disputed president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, an ally of former president Evo Morales.” Avilés does not provide any evidence for this claim but quotes Longaric saying of the researchers: “We can assert that once again those enemies of democracy tried under false pretenses to disrupt the rule of law in Bolivia and obstruct the elections.” (Trump allies also claimed that Venezuela had a hand in stealing his own election.)
Leading up to the second Election Day, the right-wing media ecosystem was once again rife with claims that the vote would be rigged, but the effort failed the second time, as MAS won in a landslide. Morales, then still in exile, did not run, but his protégé Luis Arce won 55 percent of the vote. Once again, there would be no runoff.
Áñez had dropped out of contention a month before the new election, leaving Mesa again as the leading opposition candidate. Morales has since returned to Bolivia from exile, and Áñez has been arrested, charged by the new government with terrorism, sedition, and conspiracy.
This combination of photos provided by the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office in Minnesota on Wednesday, June 3, 2020, shows from left, Minneapolis Police Officers Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane and Tou Thao. (photo: AP)
Derek Chauvin, Three Other Ex-Minneapolis Police Officers Indicted by Federal Grand Jury
Pete Williams and David K. Li, NBC News
Excerpt: "A federal grand jury has indicted Derek Chauvin and three other former Minneapolis police officers on charges of violating George Floyd's civil rights during the arrest that led to his death last year, according to the indictment unsealed Friday."
READ MORE
U.S. Border Patrol agents process migrant families in Roma, Texas. (photo: John Moore/Getty)
ICE Subverting Biden's Priorities for Detention and Deportation
John Washington, The Intercept
Washington writes: "On the first day of Joe Biden's presidency, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo to change immigration enforcement priorities and limit the number of people U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would target and detain."
A new report sheds light on how, despite orders from the Biden administration to narrow its immigration enforcement, ICE is still casting a wide net.
n the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo to change immigration enforcement priorities and limit the number of people U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would target and detain. The same day, Biden issued an executive order declaring a partial moratorium on deportations. Both the new immigration enforcement priorities, which have been sporadically upheld by ICE, and the deportation moratorium, which was swiftly blocked after Texas sued the federal government, have become examples of the new administration’s promises falling short.
Over the administration’s first 100 days, lofty campaign rhetoric and policies in line with a more progressive immigration agenda have met the deflating reality of agencies — both ICE and Customs and Border Protection — that are geared toward the indiscriminate targeting and deportation of noncitizens. Operating in the shadows of U.S. cities, the far reaches of the desert, and often overlooked border stations, ICE and CBP have acted in a manner out of accord with directives handed down by the executive branch.
“Since its inception, ICE has operated with impunity and without proper oversight,” said Christina Fialho, co-founder and executive director of Freedom for Immigrants, which recently released a new report about the administration’s priorities and ICE’s enforcement. “It is deeply concerning but not surprising that, under the Biden administration, ICE continues to flout the administration’s orders and the president has done little to rein in his agency.”
The Freedom for Immigrants report details how ICE has not been following its own policies, leaving people locked in detention centers where they are subject to abuse, miserable conditions, solitary confinement, and paltry protections from an epidemic that has disproportionately ravaged immigrant communities and detention centers.
Biden’s Orders
Though the Biden administration bears ultimate responsibility for its immigration record, and advocates have raised issues with its policies, the continued detention by ICE of people outside the designated priorities is not for lack of directives from executive appointees.
On February 18, Acting ICE Director Tae Johnson issued a memo elaborating a January 20 executive order tasking federal immigration agencies with further review of enforcement priorities. The February order reiterated that ICE focus on arresting and detaining people who pose national security, border security, and public safety threats. It also authorized the release from custody of noncitizens who have deep family and community ties, medical needs, and available immigration relief as well as those who have shown evidence of rehabilitation.
When considering past crimes, according to the memo, “the seriousness and recency of such convictions” should be mitigating factors. At the same time, the February memo granted ICE agents broader leeway in arresting and detaining people who fall outside the priorities.
Taken together, the memos by executive appointees prioritize arresting people who had entered the country after November 20, 2020 — an attempt to discourage an ongoing increase in immigration that has been a public relations calamity for the new administration. Yet about 70 percent of the people surveyed in the Freedom for Immigrants report were detained before last November. Those individuals, the report notes, had been detained under the Trump administration, which “had expansive and all-encompassing priorities that placed a target on the backs of all immigrants.”
Immigration attorney Andrew Free said, “If ICE really cannot act responsively to the political will of the American voters, what is the state of the ‘Homeland’ whose security it supposedly protects?”
Unheeded Priorities
Advocates for immigrants and critics of the U.S. immigration system have long pointed to disparities between executive branch mandates and enforcement agencies’ actions. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, author of “Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants,” explained that while the enforcement priorities announced in January and February are far from perfect, he was more worried about those directives ever making their way to the field offices. “ICE agents have been slow and reluctant to implement what they see as excessively lax enforcement priorities,” he said.
Karim Golding, whose case The Intercept previously reported on and who meets all of the standards for relief, according to the new priorities, has been in detention for nearly five years. Golding, a now 36-year-old native of Jamaica who has been in the U.S. since childhood, was initially incarcerated after committing a nonviolent crime in his early 20s. After serving his time, he was taken into ICE custody in 2016 and has been locked up ever since. Last May, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals granted him a stay of removal. Golding has been diagnosed with hypertension, asthma, depression, liver disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder and has tested positive for Covid-19 twice while in detention — all conditions that make him eligible for release.
Golding and his attorneys have made at least four different requests for release under the Biden administration, as well as two appeals of those denied requests. ICE has recognized that he is medically vulnerable but insists on keeping him in detention. Golding told The Intercept, “I have won my case, rehabilitated, and despite my health conditions in a facility that has no mask mandate, ICE continues to place my life at risk.”
Cristina Velez, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Project who represents Golding, told The Intercept, “I would say that ICE’s failure to consider Karim’s considerable evidence of rehabilitation and medical impairments goes against the spirit and the language of the Biden administration’s enforcement priorities.” García Hernández noted that ICE being slow or reluctant to release people, even sometimes after they’ve won their cases, has been “standard operating procedure for decades.”
Golding’s situation is far from unique. Lauren Major, managing attorney at the American Friends Service Committee in New Jersey, told The Intercept that at least four of the group’s clients have had requests to be released denied despite the fact that their criminal charges have been dismissed. Major also counts five other clients whose requests have been denied based on unproven pending criminal charges against them and two other clients whose requests were denied based on criminal convictions that are not “aggravated felonies” — a term that does not correlate to felony criminal convictions, or have any meaning in criminal punishment, and was invented for immigration purposes.
“Aggravated Felonies”
The guidelines issued to ICE, despite what seems to be a softened approach, uphold long-standing principles that over-criminalize and over-police minor infractions, relying on the concept of “aggravated felony” to continue sweeping up migrants who have been convicted of even minor, nonviolent crimes.
The catchall term “aggravated felony” was invented by Congress in 1988 as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act for prioritizing deportations. Two other laws, passed in 1996 under President Bill Clinton, significantly expanded the definition, subjecting even more people to deportation. The current definition of an “aggravated felony,” a term that clearly seems to imply violence or serious criminality, covers more than 30 types of offenses, including minor theft, filing false tax returns, or failing to appear in court.
As the Freedom for Immigrants report notes, “Since their inception, these laws were deeply steeped in racism which vilified Black people and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration of communities of color.” While Black immigrants today make up only 7.2 percent of the noncitizen population, they make up 20.3 percent of people in immigration detention on criminal grounds.
Amanda Díaz, who manages the National Detention Hotline at Freedom for Immigrants, told The Intercept, “The Biden-Harris administration has made a clear commitment to racial equity, but the immigration enforcement priorities have done the reverse. Instead of truly ensuring ‘public safety’ for all, these punitive categories have undermined the safety of Black and brown immigrants who have suffered at the hands of a racist criminal justice system.”
Despite ICE’s dubious focus on targeting “criminals,” less than half of the people who were surveyed in the report had been convicted of “aggravated felonies.”
Meanwhile, as border agents continue to immediately deport tens of thousands every month, the number of people in ICE detention, which has been decreasing for the past year, is beginning to creep back up, with nearly 17,000 people currently being held by ICE. At the same time, deportations have been going down, which manifests in prolonged detentions.
Granting authority to individual officers in an agency with a long-standing record of racist abuse may be courting failure. Jeremy Jong, a staff attorney with the advocacy group Al Otro Lado who also represents Golding, told The Intercept, “A just immigration system is one that allows redemption.”
Former president Jimmy Carter with his wife Rosalynn in 2018. Was Carter actually so ineffectual? (photo: Getty)
'Decades Ahead of His Time': History Catches Up With Visionary Jimmy Carter
Megan Mayhew Bergman, Guardian UK
Bergman writes: "When I reach Jimmy Carter's grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt."
A new film rejects the popular narrative and recasts the former president, 96, as hugely prescient thinker, particularly on climate change
hen I reach Jimmy Carter’s grandson by Zoom, he answers wearing a Raphael Warnock campaign T-shirt. Jason Carter is a lawyer and politician himself, mid-40s, animated and well-read, with blue eyes reminiscent of his grandfather’s. He’s just got off the phone with his 93-year-old grandmother, Rosalynn. It’s a special day; Joe Biden is on his way to the Carter house in Plains, Georgia.
“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.
“He didn’t pity her,” Carter says. “He saw her power. My grandfather believes in the power of a single human and a small community. Protect people’s freedoms, he says, and they can do great things. It all comes back to an enormous respect for human beings.”
Carter is openly moved speaking about his grandfather, though it’s also clear he does so often. A spate of recent biographies and documentaries shows not just a renewed interest in the former president, but a willingness to update the public narrative surrounding his time in office. Recent biographer Jonathan Alter calls Carter “perhaps the most misunderstood president in American history”.
Carter, who lost his bid for re-election in a so-called landslide to Reagan in 1980, is often painted as a “failed president” – a hapless peanut farmer who did not understand how to get things done in Washington, and whose administration was marked by inflation, an energy crisis and the Iran hostage disaster.
Subsequent presidents, especially fellow southern Democrat Bill Clinton, kept a distance – assumably not wanting to be seen as part of a political narrative that emphasized piety over getting things done. Even Obama was apparently wary of being associated with the sort of soft-hearted ineffectuality ascribed to Carter.
But was Carter actually so ineffectual?
In his 2020 biography of Carter, Alter speaks to a more nuanced interpretation of Carter, calling him “a surprisingly consequential president – a political and stylistic failure, but a substantive and far-sighted success”. It is, perhaps, the far-sighted nature of Carter’s ambitions, particularly around energy, that allows us to appreciate him more four decades after his term concluded.
Born in 1924, Carter is now 96. Americans must process his mortality and the onset of climate change, which Carter explicitly warned the nation about 40 years ago.
Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.
“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”
Will’s brother, Jim, agrees. “A question folks should be asking themselves is: what catastrophes would have befallen this country had anyone other than Jimmy Carter been at the helm during that critical time in the late 1970s?”
Those late 1970s were defined by inflation, the cold war, long lines at gas pumps, and a shift in cultural mores. Carter himself showed a willingness to grow. Although Carter served in the navy himself, he pardoned Vietnam draft-dodgers. Though from a segregated and racist background in Georgia, Carter pushed for affirmative action and prioritized diversity among judicial nominees, including the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amalya Lyle Kearse. He employed Mary Prince, a Black woman wrongly accused of murder, as his daughter Amy’s nanny, a move criticized by some contemporary thinkers as perpetuating domestic servitude.
What was radical in the 1970s can appear backwards decades later; the public narrative works in both directions. Carter is, in some respects, difficult to narrativize because he could be both startlingly conservative – financially, or in his appeal to the deep south’s evangelicals – and progressive, particularly on human rights and climate. He seemed to act from his personal compass, rather than a political one.
He startled the globe by personally brokering the critical Middle East peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David. He ceded access to the Panama canal, angering conservatives who thought he was giving away an American asset. Through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, he doubled the national park system and conserved over 100m acres of land – the most sweeping expansion of conserved land in American history.
He was not afraid to make unpopular moves, or ask for personal sacrifice. He was old-fashioned and a futurist, and nowhere did his futurism matter more, or seem more prescient, than on climate and conservation. He risked speaking directly to the American public, and asking them to do a difficult thing – focus on renewable energy and reduce reliance on oil.
He paid the price for this frank ask, and so did we.
In advance of his trip to Plains, Georgia, Biden participated in a video tribute to Carter, joining an all-star cast of Georgia politicians, the familiar faces of Senator Jon Ossoff, Senator Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams serving as an affirming nod to Georgia’s return to political importance.
The messages address the substance of the film, but also serve as a heartfelt thank you to a former president who has only recently begun to look prescient on climate, and singular in his moral bearing.
“He has always lived his values,” Abrams says in the video.
“Our world cries out for moral and ethical leadership,” Warnock offers. “Few have embodied it as clearly and consistently as Carter.”
“He showed us what it means to be a public servant, with an emphasis on servant,” Biden says.
Many Americans can’t help but spot a link between Carter and Biden – who became the first elected official outside of Georgia to support Carter’s bid for the presidency in 1976. Biden’s colleagues decried him as an “exuberant” idealist at the time.
There’s also an increasingly stark comparison between the Carter and the Trump administration.
James Gustave Speth served as the chairman of Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality. As Carter’s chief adviser on environmental matters, Speth helped brief Carter on climate change and direct policy. He finds the contrast between Carter and Trump “striking”.
“People see now that Carter was at a pole,” Speth tells me. “Carter was the opposite of Trump – and everything that people despised about him. Carter had integrity, honesty, candor and a commitment to the public good of all else. Carter was a different man, totally.”
Carter’s vice-president, Walter Mondale, died a month ago at 93, perhaps putting an exclamation mark on the need to expedite overdue praise and understanding. Speth agrees that it would be best to speed up our recognition of Carter. “So many fine things are said over the bodies of the dead,” Speth said. “I’d love to have the recognition occur now.”
Speth is also working on his own book on the Carter administration, that covers the Carter and subsequent administrations on climate and energy and highlights the failure to build on the foundation that Carter laid. His project, soon to be published with MIT, carries a damning title: They Knew.
One of the most profound– even painful – parts of watching documentaries like Carterland is bearing witness to the fact that Carter was right on asking us to drive less, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, to focus on conservation and renewable energy. Not only was Carter’s vision a path not taken, it was a path mocked. Reagan removed the solar panels from the White House, politicized the environmental movement and painted it as a fringe endeavor.
“Carter was our only president who had a visceral environmental and ecological attachment. That was part of his being,” Speth says. “We had an opportunity in 1980 – but we’ve lost 40 years in the pursuit of a climate-safe path. We can no longer avoid serious and destructive changes, period. That didn’t have to happen.”
I ask Speth why getting Carter’s legacy right matters. First, Speth says, it’s important to recognize the example Carter set for looking ahead, in a culture that prizes soundbites and short-term gains. “Carter was a trained engineer who believed in science,” Speth points out. “He understood things on a global scale, and believed in forecasting. Preparing for the long run is rare in politics.”
Carter’s biographer Alter agrees. “If there is a gene for duty, responsibility and the will to tackle messy problems with little or no potential for political gain,” he writes, “Jimmy Carter was born with it.”
While none of these recent documentaries or biographies seeks to portray Carter as a saint or even politically savvy, they do insist that his presidency was more successful than history has acknowledged, particularly on the energy, conservation and human rights fronts. Still, there are aspects of his single term that will probably remain embedded in his narrative, such as his tenuous relationship with Congress, early catering to segregationists to win votes, and Iran’s hostage crisis.
What can we learn from the shifting narrative around Carter’s presidency?
“You can talk about how Carter was an underrated president,” film-maker Jim Pattiz says. “But can you ask yourself: what qualities do you actually want in a leader? Do you want someone who will challenge you to be better, or speak in catchphrases and not ask much of you?
“This film is a cautionary tale,” Pattiz says. “We can elect another Carter. Let’s reward leaders willing to do the right thing.”
Jason Carter has lived with the nuances and inconsistencies in the narrative surrounding his grandfather’s presidency his entire life. “Stories are always summaries,” he says. “They leave out so much so that we can understand them in simple terms. Public narrative, these days, is so often about politics. It should really be about the great, public problems we’re solving. There’s a difference.
“I don’t want history to be kind to my grandfather,” Jason Carter tells me. “I just want history to be honest.”
Demonstrator outside the Federal Communications Commission on May 15, 2014. (photo: Karen Bleier/Getty)
A New Report Details a "Secret Campaign" That Spawned Millions of Fake Comments About Net Neutrality
Jeremy Singer-Vine, BuzzFeed
Singer-Vine writes: "To sway the outcome of a major public policy decision, the US broadband industry funded companies that engaged in fraud on a huge scale, according to a scathing new report by the New York attorney general."
The New York attorney general’s findings about fake public comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission echo those from a 2019 BuzzFeed News investigation.
o sway the outcome of a major public policy decision, the US broadband industry funded companies that engaged in fraud on a huge scale, according to a scathing new report by the New York attorney general.
The report’s findings echo those from a 2019 BuzzFeed News investigation, which dug into millions of fake public comments submitted — supposedly on behalf of individual citizens — to the Federal Communications Commission in 2017 to oppose the policy of “net neutrality.”
The attorney general found that the industry campaign “resulted in over 8.5 million fake comments,” accounting for nearly 40% of the total the FCC received on the record-breaking docket. Despite concerns about the process, the federal agency repealed the net neutrality rules that the Obama administration had pushed for.
The new report describes efforts funded by the industry group Broadband for America to generate fake grassroots support, a practice known as “astroturfing,” that “relied on for-profit ‘lead generation’ firms — businesses that collect names, contact information, and other personal information from consumers and sell that information to third parties.” It continues, “In each case, the lead-generation companies responsible for getting individuals to sign on to these comments simply resorted to fraud in order to meet their goals.”
The debate over how the federal government should regulate internet providers attracted a surprising amount of attention, with both sides claiming it would shape the web for decades to come. But it also showed how easily deep-pocketed corporate interests could corrupt a democratic process. The comments that the broadband industry paid to generate, in hopes of influencing the FCC’s decision, ended up being one of the most prolific cases of impersonation in US political history. Today's statement from the attorney general is the most explicit yet to detail how that process unfolded and to raise a warning about how easily it could happen again.
In one case, Broadband for America hired a political consultancy, which hired another company, which hired “a small California-based digital advertising company” that “claimed it could place advertisements for the comment campaign on websites across the internet and then collect individuals’ names, contact information, and consent to submit a comment to the FCC on their behalf.” The report does not name the advertising firm, but in previous reporting BuzzFeed News has identified it as LCX Digital.
The advertising firm claimed that its ads convinced more than 1.5 million people to have comments submitted to the FCC in their names, according to the report.
“In fact, none of these people had done so,” investigators determined, in findings that mirror those published by BuzzFeed News. “The advertising company had simply copied the names and contact information of approximately 1.4 million people from records that had been stolen in a data breach and dumped online in 2016. For most of the remaining comments — approximately 100,000 — the advertising company brazenly copied information it had provided” to one of the intermediary companies “just a year earlier for comments in a different FCC regulatory proceeding.”
The report says that “red flags were ignored” by the industry’s campaign organizers, but that the state “has not found evidence” to indicate “that the broadband companies that funded and organized these lead generators had direct knowledge of fraud.”
Neither LCX nor Broadband for America responded to requests for comment.
New York’s investigators determined that the advertising company worked on at least three other advocacy campaigns in which it “fabricated all or nearly all of the records of consent.”
The attorney general said it has entered into settlement agreements with three other companies that between them were responsible for some 5.4 million comments, “all or nearly all of which were fraudulent.” The settlements “require the companies to adopt comprehensive reforms in future advocacy campaigns and pay more than $4.4 million in penalties and disgorgement.”
The attorney general said its investigations are ongoing, but did not name specific targets.
Mike Kahikina served on the Hawaiian Homes Commission from 2011-2019. He was stunned to learn that the federal government was selling excess property that could have gone to the land trust that he and other commissioners oversaw. (photo: Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
The US Owes Hawaiians Millions of Dollars Worth of Land. Congress Helped Make Sure the Debt Wasn't Paid.
Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Perez writes: "In the 1990s, Hawaii's two elder statesmen - U.S. Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka - were at the forefront of efforts to ensure that the U.S. compensated Native Hawaiians for ancestral lands taken from them over the years."
READ MORE
Chinese climate activist Howey Ou on hunger strike in Lausanne, Switzerland, 19 April 2021. (photo: Laurent Gillieron/EPA)
The Young People Taking Their Countries to Court Over Climate Inaction
Matthew Taylor, Emily Holden, Dan Collyns, Michael Standaert and Ashifa Kassam, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "After we announced that we were six youths from Portugal who were suing 33 countries for not doing enough to reduce emissions and fight climate change, the response was bigger than anything I had imagined. Media called from around the world. And it made me so happy and hopeful."
Children and young adults around the world are demanding action from governments on global heating and the ecological crisis
ofia Oliveira, aged 16
Sofia Oliveira is one of six young Portuguese people who have filed a lawsuit against 33 countries with the European court of human rights, demanding that governments do more to reduce emissions and safeguard their future physical and mental wellbeing. Last October the Strasbourg-based court granted the case priority status.
After we announced that we were six youths from Portugal who were suing 33 countries for not doing enough to reduce emissions and fight climate change, the response was bigger than anything I had imagined. Media called from around the world. And it made me so happy and hopeful.
I’ve been worried about climate change for a long time. When I was 11 years old, my younger brother André, who is also one of the young people in this case, had a terrible asthma crisis. The weather was hot and dry, and he was suffocating.
Here in Portugal the effects of climate change are increasingly visible: heatwaves that cause water shortages and affect food production, and violent wildfires that give us anxiety. Sometimes I think, if climate change is already so extreme, what will it be like in the near future if we do nothing about it? So one of the most important reasons I’m involved in this case is to help my little brother have a good future, along with my parents, myself and the next generation.
Right now, the courts have told the governments that they need to reply by the end of May. The 33 countries tried to have the case dismissed, but the court said no. And we were so happy. Imagine, 33 of the biggest economies in the world saying, “We don’t want this” and six youths saying, “We are going to do this.”
I think we might win the case. I hope the case will make things right, that it will make countries lower their emissions and stop using so many fossil fuels. This case is revolutionary – it has shown that together our voice is strong and can reach the whole world.
As told to Ashifa Kassam.
Saúl Amaru Álvarez Cantoral, 15
Saúl, who goes by his second name, Amaru, is one of seven Peruvian children who have filed a complaint against the Peruvian state for its alleged failure to adequately halt deforestation in the Amazon. They argue that their futures are severely compromised due to the climate crisis, particularly their right to enjoy a healthy environment, along with their rights to life, water, and health. The case was filed in December 2019, but has not progressed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
We filed this lawsuit because the state does not really develop national policies to protect the environment. By raising our voice as children and teens, we can make the state listen to us and develop more concrete measures to combat climate change.
We were inspired by Greta Thunberg and the idea that children and teenagers can make a difference. We believe that the young should raise our voices when the adults don’t, especially when our politicians are not the best.
In our Amazon, the main problem is deforestation. There are no measures to resolve this problem. The amount they cut down goes up every year, so if we don’t halt this problem now, it will get worse and worse and be more difficult to stop.
Since I was little, I was taught about the problem of pollution and climate change, but I never thought about taking action because I assumed that politicians would take care of it, or I should grow up and become a professional to make changes. Then I realised I could do something as a teenager without letting any more time pass – I could take action.
You can witness climate change. Adults always tell you what the weather was like before; the seasons, for example, are more uncontrolled. How can it be that one day it is hot and the next day it is cold?
We are waiting for a response to the lawsuit because it is a long process. Plus, we have a lot of problems in the country. We are constantly in crisis, so I think it’s not a priority at the moment.
I think we can win. I almost take it for granted that we will because our cause is a just cause. It’s the first lawsuit of its kind in Peru and I hope, for that reason, that it might be the beginning of something and the first of many more.
As told to Dan Collyns.
Anjali Raman-Middleton, 17
Raman-Middleton, who lives in south London, is one of the co-founders of the air pollution campaign Choked Up.
I went to primary school with Ella Kissi-Debrah [who died as a result of air pollution] and, like her, grew up just off the South Circular road in London, so I have lived with the reality of air pollution all my life.
I met the three other founders of Choked Up – who are all young women of colour from south London – on the Advocacy Academy programme last year. It was great to meet people who, like me, felt so passionately about clean air and the environment and who also recognised how people of colour were being disproportionately affected by the environmental crisis – whether in the UK with air pollution, or in the global south with the impacts of climate change.
Too often our experiences are overlooked by an environment movement that is predominantly white and middle class. As young people of colour, we found that frustrating. But I am hopeful this can change because young people are becoming more aware of the intersectionality of climate justice.
There is a growing understanding that it is not just as simple as “solving or fixing” climate change – there is a whole system, a whole multitude of other issues around racial and social justice that are intertwined with the climate crisis. Choked Up aims to make those connections and foreground the experiences of young people of colour. We chose air pollution as our campaign because all four of us live in heavily polluted areas and see every day the often devastating impact it has on our communities.
As told to Matthew Taylor.
Jamie Margolin, 19
Jamie Margolin organised a youth climate march at 15 and co-founded the youth climate action movement This Is Zero Hour at 16. She is a plaintiff in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the government in her home state of Washington, US.
When I first started, I was kind of under the illusion that Democrat equals climate action. I didn’t understand that just because I lived in a blue state, it didn’t mean my leaders would automatically listen to me.
Well, I stepped out of that reality really quickly. I joined a lawsuit suing the state of Washington for denying my generation our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by continuing to worsen the climate crisis. But lawsuits take years. I couldn’t just wait around for the courts to do their thing.
It was a perfect storm – of absolute hell. There were the wildfires that blew over the city of Seattle, covering it in a thick layer of smog. It was really scary because the Pacific north-west is known for amazing air quality – it’s clean and crisp. Suddenly that was gone. I couldn’t breathe, to the extent that it hurt. And then there was Hurricane Maria, Hurricane Harvey, all of these climate disasters. And the last president pulled us out of the Paris climate accords. It was all of these things that came together.
This was before Fridays for Future, before Greta Thunberg started striking. Youth climate mobilisations were not in vogue. The Standing Rock movement, which was big at the time, was started by indigenous young people, so it’s not like young people weren’t mobilised. It just wasn’t something people paid attention to.
When I was 15 years old, I found other youth activists on social media, and we organised 25 youth climate marches, with the main one in Washington, DC. We also had a youth climate lobby day around the country. The movement has changed the culture. Things that were niche are now common knowledge. Greta and I are now legal adults. We have to understand there’s wisdom in each generation.
I identify as a lesbian. When you’re part of a marginalised community, you have to actively fight for justice for your community, while also fighting for climate justice. I’m in film school right now, and I’m not studying to make climate documentaries. The thing I’m super passionate about is LGBT representation in the media, and storytelling. People are often very surprised when I tell them my dream job is to write gay Disney princess movies.
I have dreams beyond just trying to stop the end of the world. No one wants to think about climate change. Everyone has other dreams. When I was a little child, I wasn’t like, “Some day I hope to narrowly escape planetary destruction.” That wasn’t my dream. But I’m doing this because I have to, for survival.
As told to Emily Holden.
Howey Ou, 18
One of China’s only youth climate activists to take part in Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion activities in recent years, before beginning to inspire a handful of others to take similar action.
Ou Hongyi, also known as Howey Ou, demonstrates for climate action, even though demonstrations are forbidden in China without explicit approval of the authorities. In October, Howey sat alone in front of a hotel for more than 10 hours to protest about the lack of ambition in the hotel industry in China to reduce carbon emissions.
But while some youths in China have become energised by Ou’s activism, many attempts to take part in protests have been scuttled, including plans for protests on 19 March.
“Police interfered before the action happened,” Ou said. “Two activists I know of went to Chengdu, but their families were called and they warned them, or tried to scare them, to not take part. They were told to go to the Chengdu NGO management office to ‘provide information’ separately in the days before the action, then on Friday morning [19 March] they were taken to the police station for formal interrogation, required to sign documents, had their DNA samples taken, and were released that night. So they did not go out on the streets.
“The next week, when they returned home, the police met them at the train station like old friends, and they were visited again by police later in the week.”
“Other than these, I spoke with other students who organised at their schools but they now have no more intention to organise any Fridays for Future actions. They’ve been warned by their schools or had conflicts with their parents and stopped.”
She is currently in Europe, and recently went on hunger strike in protest at industrial policies there. She remains defiantly positive about the role that protest can play.
“This is not about how much suppression we received, but the bright part is that although we expect difficulty, we still dare to exist. We dare to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency, we dare to challenge the capitalist and consumeristic world. We refuse to be prisoners of injustice.”
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