27 June 21
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26 June 21
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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
fter the state of New York banned Rudy Giuliani from practicing law, Americans expressed utter shock and disbelief that he had a law license.
“I did not know that he was an actual lawyer,” Carol Foyler, who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, said. “I just thought he was some skeezy guy Trump met at a wedding or something.”
“The fact that Rudy Giuliani had a law license shows that the system for granting law licenses is broken,” Harland Dorrinson, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, said. “There need to be background checks to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.”
Tracy Klugian, a spokesman for the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division, said that their offices have been deluged with requests for law licenses ever since the Giuliani news broke. “People now think we’ll give a law license to anyone,” he said.
A rally for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. (photo: Guardian UK)
By taking control of elections and voter suppression, Republicans are destroying American democracy
he G7 meeting focused attention on many challenges facing the world, but it did not address the most dangerous threat of them all, which is the transformation of the Republican Party in the US into a fascist movement.
When Donald Trump was in the White House there was much debate about whether or not he could be called a fascist in the full sense of the word, and not merely as a political insult. His presidency showed many of the characteristics of a fascist dictatorship, except the crucial one of automatic re-election.
But Trump or Trump-like leaders may not have to face this democratic impediment in future. It was only this year that the final building blocks have been put in place by Republicans as they replicate the structure of fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Two strategies, though never entirely absent from Republican behaviour in the past, have become far more central to their approach. One is a greater willingness to use or tolerate violence against their opponents, something that became notorious during the invasion of the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters on 6 January.
The other change among Republicans is much less commented on, but is more sinister and significant. This is the systematic Republican takeover of the electoral machinery that oversees elections and makes sure that they are fair. Minor officials in charge of them have suddenly become vital to the future of American democracy. Remember that it was only the refusal of these functionaries to cave in to Trump’s threats and blandishments that stopped him stealing the presidential election last November.
Many of them will be unable to perform the same duty in future elections. The Republican Party across the country is replacing or intimidating them so they are giving up their jobs or are being forced from their posts. In Pennsylvania, a state which played a crucial role in Trump’s defeat, a third of county election officials have changed as have numerous others in swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin. Their places are frequently being taken by conspiracy theory zealots who will have the power to nullify election results that are not to their liking. A survey by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that one in three local election officials say that they are being subjected to harassment and other pressures.
Speeding up this exodus are Republican state legislatures that have passed laws mandating heavy fines – $10,000 in Iowa, $25,000 in Florida – for election supervisors who make minor technical mistakes. Republican officials who refused to say that Trump won the election are being removed by their party. The Republicans should be able to do in 2022 and 2024 what they failed to do in 2020, which is to nullify election results at will so the true outcome of a poll can be ignored. Put simply, the will of the people will no longer count for anything.
Authoritarian regimes across the world have found that it is much easier and more certain to announce the election result they would like than to go to all the trouble of suppressing votes and gerrymandering constituencies. Once control of the electoral machinery is obtained then democracy poses no threat to those in power. Fascist leaders may use democratic processes to obtain office, but once there, their instinct is to pull up the ladder and let nobody else climb up it.
Nullification of elections is only the latest step in the Republican Party’s strange voyage towards becoming a genuine fascist party. Other steps have a much longer history, notably the moment half a century ago when President Nixon adopted his “Southern Strategy” whereby the Republicans capitalised on the Civil Rights acts to make a political takeover of the American South. The old slave states became the strongholds of the Republican Party which had once freed the slaves and defeated the Confederacy.
It is worth listing the chief characteristics of fascist movements in order to assess how far they are now shared by the Republicans. Exploitation of ethnic, religious and cultural hatreds is probably the most universal feature of fascism. Others include a demagogic leader with a cult of personality who makes messianic but vague promises to deliver a golden future; appeals to law-and-order but a practical contempt for legality; the use, manipulation and ultimate marginalisation of democratic procedures; a willingness to use physical force; demonising the educated elite – and the media in particular; shady relations with plutocrats seeking profit from regime change.
One by one these boxes have been ticked by the Republicans until the list is complete. The Tea Party movement was an important staging post on the road to Trumpism. Trump himself possesses all the classic features of a fascist leader, though he was somewhat hemmed in by the institutional and political divisions of power. Yet these impediments will be less in future as local legislatures, courts, electoral machinery and Congress itself are colonised by Trumpian Republicans. This erosion of democracy has a precedent, given that Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 were denied the presidency though each won a majority of the popular vote, but it is becoming all pervasive
American fascism differs from its European, Middle Eastern and Latin American variants because of the history of America, with its legacy of slavery, and the Civil War still remaining as a great divider. Slavery was abolished, the Confederacy lost the war, but in many respects the civil war never ended.
The civil rights legislation of the 1960s provoked a white counteroffensive that still goes on. Opposition to racial equality has never ceased. The key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which declared that changes in state election laws must have federal approval, was invalidated by Republican appointed judges on the Supreme Court in 2013. “Our country has changed,” said chief Justice John G Roberts in a majority opinion, which declared that racial minorities no longer faced barriers to voting in states with a history of discrimination. The absurdity of this was immediately demonstrated as Texas introduced a previously blocked voter ID law.
Voter suppression has ballooned ever since, but never more than this year. Some 14 Republican controlled states have passed 24 laws criminalising, politicising and interfering in elections to their own advantage.
What explains the descent of the Republican Party into fascism? Racial division explains much. The division of American culture along the same geographical lines as the civil war explains more. Add to this the frightening dislocation imposed on white working- and middle-class Americans by technological change and globalisation. Powerful forces are let loose similar to those that once propelled the rise of European fascism and is now doing the same in America.
New York Police Department officers are seen outside Washington Square Park in New York City, April 12, 2021. (photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)
Stalling by the city of New York’s lawyers could doom the court case to hold the NYPD accountable for abuses during the George Floyd protests.
n Thursday, a federal judge threatened the administration of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio with sanctions if it doesn’t begin producing documents related to police conduct during last summer’s George Floyd protests.
After the New York Police Department kettled, beat, pepper-sprayed, punched, shoved, rammed, and arrested people protesting against police violence, many of the victims decided to sue, along with the attorney general of New York. Those lawsuits against de Blasio, the city, and the NYPD, including the leadership and individual police officers, have all been consolidated together and put on an accelerated schedule by Judge Colleen McMahon, who intends to have the case ready for trial early next year.
Although deadlines in the case are looming, lawyers for the city and the police have responded to only a tiny fraction of the documents requested by protesters in their discovery requests, hampering their ability to learn exactly what the NYPD did and to hold them to account.
“Courts are an important way to hold the police accountable, and lawsuits like this are an important way for the public to see what police misconduct has happened on a widespread basis,” said Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, managing director of the Impact Litigation Unit for the Bronx Defenders, who is frequently involved in lawsuits against the NYPD but is not representing anyone in the protest-related cases. “If plaintiffs are not able to get information through the litigation process, then their ability to hold police accountable, and to get justice itself, is undermined.”
Lawsuits around the behavior of police during mass protests can often stretch across years, even a decade, but in her first hearing for the consolidated cases in February, McMahon made it clear that she was taking a different approach. She was putting the cases on a “rocket docket,” she said. “I don’t like cases to hang around for a long time.”
Discovery — the production of relevant evidence — itself often takes years in cases like this, but McMahon set a December 31 deadline for all discovery production. The parties would also need to have exchanged enough evidence to name their expert witnesses by July 1, produce those experts’ reports by September 1, and file their arguments over whether the protesters can sue as a class action by September 10.
With the tight deadline and the city dragging its feet, plaintiffs’ lawyers are worried they won’t have time to properly review materials ahead of each stage of the case — potentially severely damaging their efforts.
Months of Inaction
The city and police department’s failure to produce discovery materials has been ongoing for months. At the end of March, the plaintiffs asked the city for all the evidence they wanted turned over: police records; the names of the officers and commanders assigned to all the relevant protests; communications with the mayor’s office; training materials; body camera footage. The request was a massive list stretching nearly 50 pages. A month later, city lawyers responded, objecting to many of the requests. The plaintiffs wrote back that most of those objections wouldn’t hold up and asked for a meeting, but city attorneys said they couldn’t meet for more than a week.
When the lawyers did finally meet toward the end of May, nearly two months after the first discovery requests, the city lawyers still hadn’t turned any documents over. They promised to begin doing so on a weekly basis. Then nothing happened. No weekly document deliveries, no discovery of any kind, except for some police body camera videos that the protesters’ lawyers insisted on receiving as a condition of letting their clients be deposed.
By June 9, the plaintiffs’ lawyers were getting angry. They had three weeks left to designate their expert witnesses, but they had nothing to help them decide what kind of experts they would need — and nothing to show those prospective experts. Exasperated, they wrote the magistrate judge overseeing discovery in the case, asking him to make city lawyers start turning things over. The lawyer overseeing the case for the city, Dara Weiss, responded with her own letter, arguing that the protesters’ attorneys were violating professional standards of civility by continuing to raise their discovery concerns even after hackers had forced the New York City Law Department to restrict most access to its electronic systems on June 6, limiting the department’s ability to respond.
At a June 15 meeting before Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein, Weiss promised that discovery production really was about to get underway. Gorenstein ordered her to write a letter explaining precisely what steps she was taking to provide all the records the protesters needed to mount their case. Later that week, Weiss wrote a letter that shed little light on that process and provided a mere 26 of the requested discovery documents. The plaintiffs asked for another meeting with Gorenstein.
At that meeting, on Thursday, Gorenstein began with a warning: He had spoken with McMahon, the trial judge, for whom he was running discovery in the case. “She wants me to advise her whether any party is being recalcitrant about discovery,” Gorenstein said. “She’s fully prepared to enter sanctions or orders of preclusion against any party who’s being recalcitrant about discovery.”
Time and again throughout the hearing, Weiss was unable to answer the judge’s basic questions about the city’s plans to cooperate with discovery in the case. How many documents was the city prepared to turn over in its first major discovery delivery next week? “I don’t have that number in front of me.” How many city attorneys will be working on getting the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of documents ready for discovery? “That’s part of what we’re trying to determine now.” Has the NYPD even given the city lawyers documents related to a previous investigation of police conduct by the city’s Department of Investigation? “I can’t right now, as we sit here at this moment, 100 percent guarantee that.”
Gorenstein was taken aback by Weiss’s answers. “It’s your responsibility to know,” he told her. “The city is putting itself at risk in terms of how the delay is going to be treated. I want to remind you again: The city is at risk of preclusion and other sanctions.”
Pressed, Weiss did ultimately estimate that the city had roughly 50,000 documents in hand and was reviewing them. She promised that next week the city would turn over a “substantial” number of records — thousands of documents, she guessed. Gorenstein was not satisfied. He ordered Weiss to begin weekly discovery dumps and to file weekly letters explaining her progress, how many staffers she has working on turning over documents, and what specific efforts she’s making to retrieve documents she hasn’t yet provided. (The city’s Law Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Weiss promised the court the city would be able to meet its discovery deadline, but some of the lawyers for the plaintiffs were skeptical. “As a matter of linear time and math, it is physically impossible for them to produce the documents they need to in the time remaining,” said Remy Green, an attorney working on one of the consolidated cases, after the hearing. “Given what the judge said in the conference, I don’t see how sanctions are avoidable. But I’d be thrilled to be pleasantly surprised.”
Still, the plaintiffs’ lawyers say they were generally encouraged by the hearing. “Today was important because the judge made it clear that vague promises aren’t enough,” said Rob Rickner, one of the plaintiff’s lawyers. “Having a judge mention sanctions right at the beginning of a case is remarkable.”
The day after the hearing, with the city lawyers’ consent, McMahon agreed to move back some of the pressing deadlines. On the plaintiffs’ memo requesting the deadlines be pushed back, the trial judge scribbled a handwritten note: “Judge Gorenstein strongly recommended that I grant this extension, so I will.”
Undiscovered History
This isn’t the first time that Weiss has been in trouble with the court for failing to turn over documents. In 2012, she was sanctioned and fined for withholding documents in a lawsuit against the city brought by a man beaten in Rikers Island, the notorious New York City jail complex. In that case, Weiss and her staff repeatedly dragged their feet in producing critical evidence, making promises they did not deliver on, pleading ignorance about important details, arguing that partial disclosures were adequate, and ultimately defying court orders. As part of the penalty, Weiss and another city lawyer were each fined $300.
People familiar with how New York City defends against lawsuits based on NYPD abuses said delays and failure to turn over documents are hardly unique to Weiss — and they’re not accidents or indications of incompetence. Instead, the foot-dragging, when the feet move at all, is a constant element of the New York City Law Department’s strategy any time they’re asked for documents related to the NYPD.
“People injured by the NYPD and seeking redress through the courts face an uphill battle in getting the Law Department to turn over information needed to litigate a case all the time,” said Borchetta, the Bronx Defenders lawyer. “This is not a new thing. This stretches across multiple administrations.”
Often, Borchetta said, the justifications the Law Department puts forward to explain its refusal to turn over documents are laughable and certain not to hold up if challenged. In a case she’s working on now, the Law Department attempted to claim that it didn’t have to turn over the training documents officers receive on a law that proscribes releasing people’s sealed arrest records, arguing that training was effectively legal advice and protected by attorney-client privilege. Borchetta challenged that claim and won. The victory, she said, was but a drop in the bucket.
“Litigating that issue took a month,” Borchetta said. “So it’s a strategy of grinding up time. They assert these ridiculous arguments on enough of these matters, we only have enough time to challenge some of them. And on the rest, those are documents they were able to keep secret.”
Darius Charney, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, faced off against the Law Department when he litigated the yearslong stop-and-frisk trial Floyd v. City of New York. “We probably filed at least half a dozen or more discovery motions over the course of that case, either because [the] city was objecting to producing things, or saying they couldn’t, or fighting over whether things should be produced under confidentiality orders,” Charney said. “Discovery ended up taking three years, and a lot of the reason it took so long was because of all those fights. We had to spend months litigating to get them to produce stop-and-frisk data they’d already produced in a previous lawsuit.”
In another case, the mother of Barrington Williams brought a suit against the NYPD when her son died in 2013 after police wrestled him to the ground in a Bronx subway station because they suspected him of selling MetroCard swipes. When Williams’s mother was pushing for discovery, the city’s lawyers told her that critical police records had been accidentally destroyed, even though the NYPD was legally required to preserve them for the pending litigation. When the judge on the case ordered the city to produce a sworn affidavit explaining how the records came to be destroyed, the missing evidence suddenly appeared.
The judge became curious. What had gone wrong in this discovery process? Ultimately, it was revealed that the NYPD had only conducted a very literal-minded search for the records in the precise and inappropriately narrow place the Law Department had asked them to look, rather than conducting a thorough search as the law requires.
The result was a perfect black hole of information. The Law Department could truthfully say it had asked its client, the NYPD, to search for the records. The NYPD could truthfully say it had conducted that search and hadn’t found anything, even though the records were sitting in an easily accessible and searchable database the whole time. When the judge began pressing officials to make sworn affidavits explaining themselves, the city lawyers took the blame, and the NYPD suffered no penalty.
“The City attempts to foist the blame on the Law Department for having never requested these files,” lawyers for Williams’s mother wrote the court afterwards. “But that only obscures the root cause of the City’s discovery failures: that the City’s discovery practices are deliberately indifferent to the obligation to preserve and produce relevant evidence in the City’s possession.”
The federal judge in the case, Kevin Castel, was enraged at the NYPD and its in-house lawyers in the Legal Affairs Bureau. “It is only when someone from the Legal Affairs Bureau or some person within the NYPD is going to have to put their name on a declaration and under penalty of perjury, and if they are lying, they can go to jail and lose their job, that we get accurate information,” he said. He wondered “whether there aren’t a ton more cases” in which critical evidence was somehow lost to plaintiffs in the murky back-and-forth between the police and city lawyers.
Perhaps significantly for the current protest cases, the magistrate judge working under Castel as the city’s withholding of crucial evidence unraveled was Gorenstein. Gorenstein wrote of the case that he viewed the Law Department’s delay and inaction as “indicative of negligence, not willfulness.”
From the perspective of preserving the NYPD’s veil of secrets, this is frequently a winning strategy, civil rights lawyers say, enough so that the Law Department sticks with it.
“There’s a tremendous amount of resources needed to litigate a case like this if you’re a plaintiff,” Charney said. The strategy of discovery obstructionism “creates fatigue for them and their clients, drains their resources. You can tire out the plaintiffs. You may not get them to give up, but you put a tremendous burden on them. It can become a war of attrition.”
The strategy does carry costs. All the time-consuming obstruction can lead to massive legal bills, which the city — and ultimately taxpayers — has to pay if it loses or settles a case. It also throws sand in the gears of the most active federal court district in the nation, forcing already busy judges to spend time refereeing frivolous discovery squabbles rather than trying substantial cases. The biggest cost of the strategy, civil rights lawyers say, is to the systems of accountability and transparency that guarantee New Yorkers’ rights and upon which the legitimacy of the government and the police depends.
Even when judges lose their patience — imposing sanctions on city lawyers or ruling that because NYPD evidence is missing, the court will assume the worst about what it would have shown — the doings of New York’s most secretive public servants remain undisclosed and unscrutinized. That’s a problem, said Green, the plaintiffs’ lawyer. “We’re really just trying to get to the truth,” Green said. “It’s nice to get adverse inferences, but we’d rather have the documents.”
With the federal moratorium on evictions set to expire, the United States is on the verge of a massive housing crisis. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
he Thursday afternoon session of the Warren Township Small Claims Court on the east side of Indianapolis begins with a clerk reading out loud the terms of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium on evictions. This applies to renters at risk of becoming homeless because they lost substantial income due to reduced work hours or medical issues who have been trying to obtain rental assistance while paying what they can to their landlords, the clerk announces. Tenants who qualify can submit a declaration to their landlord that should keep them in their homes for the time being.
Judge Garland Graves takes the bench, and the hearings begin. One of the tenants who is facing eviction this afternoon, a young mother, tells Judge Graves that she had not understood the moratorium before the clerk read it aloud. It turns out she had COVID, lost her job, and is awaiting a decision on her application for help with her rent. The judge instructs her on how to file a declaration that may postpone her eviction.
But her reprieve may not be for long. The CDC moratorium is set to expire on July 31, and Indiana, like most states, has no current local or state moratoriums that would protect tenants. This young mother in Indianapolis, like many across the nation, sits on the verge of an eviction crisis.
Most likely, her case will get added to the three-hundred-plus stack of evictions in this court, all set for hearings soon after the moratorium expires. Graves estimates more than a thousand eviction cases are pending in other courts in the Indianapolis area.
“I think both landlords and tenants see the end of the road for the CDC moratorium coming,” he says. “The rent some of these tenants owe is more than they can catch up on, and some landlords are refusing to accept government rental assistance. So we have a huge number of evictions set to happen once the moratorium ends.”
Neighborhoods and housing courts across the country face the same looming surge of families being thrown out of their homes. Up to now, the wave of evictions has been largely held at bay by the federal response to COVID-triggered economic struggles. Between the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan, many laid-off workers have received extra unemployment payments, which were expanded to cover gig workers and others who historically did not qualify. More than $40 billion has been earmarked to rental assistance — even though much of that money has been very slow to reach renters — while various eviction stays have been issued, including the national CDC moratorium.
But for many renters, the temporary government payments and moratoriums delayed the pain without remedying it. According to The State of the Nation’s Housing report, released June 16 by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than half of all renter households lost employment income between March 2020 and March of this year. One in five renter households is behind on rent. Among black renter households, that number rises to nearly one in three.
For tenants unable to keep up with the rent, the harm will likely go far beyond losing their current homes. A landlord’s mere filing of a court request for eviction, even if the case ends up being dismissed or settled, is sometimes referred to as the “Scarlet E,” since it will severely restrict the tenant’s housing options for many years. Many landlords check court records and automatically reject applicants with a previous eviction filing.
As a result, many Americans with a past eviction filing become homeless or are forced to rely on expensive, tenuous extended-stay motels that accept “bad credit” tenants — in return for far higher housing costs and no lease protections.
Beyond the damage caused to the tenant’s prospects in the private housing market, an eviction filing can disqualify a tenant from eligibility for a scarce and valuable spot in federally funded housing programs. For example, one elderly Chicago tenant had her landlord dismiss an eviction filing after it was discovered that a rent collector had been stealing the money the tenant had been paying faithfully. Yet that eviction filing’s presence on her record caused the tenant to be denied a spot in senior subsidized housing.
Nationwide, the impact is expected to be devastating. “We are preparing for an increase in eviction filings after the moratorium ends, and possibly a big increase in families losing housing and becoming homeless,” says Alieza Durana, a spokesperson for the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. “The pandemic has really laid bare the housing crisis in this country, including how we treat black families, especially the women with children who are all evicted at disproportionate rates. But this is not new. The fear is we may go back to the pre-pandemic level of evictions of 3.7 million per year, which is seven people being evicted every minute.”
The people most at risk of being thrown out of their homes are well aware of what is coming. The US Census Bureau’s biweekly Household Pulse Survey issued on June 15 showed that nearly 4.2 million people nationwide report that it is “likely” or “somewhat likely” that they will be evicted or foreclosed upon in the next two months.
The Problem With Indiana
For Indiana renters, the situation is even grimmer than in much of the rest of the country. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the director of the Eviction Lab’s tracking system singled out Indiana as one of the states with the highest risk for a post-moratorium surge in evictions, as a result of both limited rental assistance and no significant state-level eviction protections.
That conclusion is not surprising, given Indiana’s consistently high ranking among states with the highest eviction rates. The most recent available data show the Indiana cities of Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, and South Bend all rank in the top twenty cities in the United States for eviction rates. In Indianapolis in 2016, an average of nearly thirty-two households were evicted every day — the highest rate for US cities with a population over five hundred thousand.
During the past year, the CDC moratorium slowed that rate. But in Indiana and beyond, this may only be delaying the inevitable, since the moratorium does not prevent landlords from eventually demanding all rent that has accrued. In Indiana, nearly 20 percent of renters were unable to make any payments as of December 2020. Calls to Indiana’s 211 helpline in late 2020 were showing housing and utility costs as the top unmet need. As Judge Graves notes, federal pandemic tenant assistance funds have been made available in Indiana, but many landlords are choosing not to participate in the programs.
Many of the most stubborn landlords are those who rent to parents with children, particularly black parents. Children spending more time at home during the pandemic has increased landlord-tenant tensions, consistent with the longtime evidence that the presence of children increases the likelihood of an eviction. Multiple national studies show that black women with children are particularly at risk of being evicted, so it is not surprising that recent Indiana data show that black and Latino households are at the greatest risk of post-moratorium evictions.
Most often, tenants’ struggles come down to a simple, brutal fact: they do not have enough income to afford high rent costs. More than half of Indiana’s eight hundred thousand renters lost employment income during the pandemic, and fewer than one in four eligible low-income renters is able to access federally supported housing programs. That leaves most low-income Hoosiers at the mercy of the for-profit housing market, where affordable options are scarce.
As reported by Prosperity Indiana and the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, even modest rental units in Indiana come with a rent that takes up an unsustainable percentage of many Hoosier workers’ wages. For example, a fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Indiana is $848. If a worker is going to devote the recommended 30 percent of their income to housing, they need to earn over $16 per hour in full-time employment, or even higher in Indianapolis and other metropolitan areas.
The $16-per-hour full-time wage needed to afford housing is significantly higher than the average Indiana renter wage of closer to $14 per hour. And it is far above the wages of workers in fields like home care, retail, and food service, industries disproportionally impacted by the pandemic — not to mention the very limited incomes of people living with disabilities. The gap between the income needed and the rent demanded causes financial strain, and a breaking point often occurs when an unexpected medical, family, or transportation cost arises. Nationally, far and away the top reason for eviction is nonpayment of rent.
Eviction in the Spotlight
On paper, it seems like procedural safeguards, including the moratorium, should protect struggling tenants. But national and local advocates say that the respect shown for the CDC moratorium in Judge Graves’s court is more the exception than the norm. Brandon Beeler, director of the Housing Law Center at Indiana Legal Services, says that landlords and courts across the state routinely fail to inform tenants of the moratorium’s protections. Many Indiana tenants have already been evicted even though they qualified for extra time to stay in their homes, he says.
Beeler’s observations reflect an overall approach across state government and the legal system that weighs the scales of justice heavily in favor of landlords over tenants. In one Indiana county, the court was discovered to be using a court reporter to issue pre-signed eviction orders, refusing to allow tenants to even speak to the judge before stamping a court order forcing them out. A client of Beeler’s saw her rental home’s roof cave in during a snowstorm. When the landlord refused to fix it, the tenant rigged up a tarp to keep snow out of the home and held back some of her rent payment. The court found that the gaping hole in her roof was no excuse for not paying in full and ordered her evicted.
“It is difficult to avoid being evicted if the tenant did not pay rent — even if the tenant has complained about deplorable housing conditions,” Beeler says. “Most tenants do not have an attorney. When unrepresented tenants go to court, they don’t know how or when they could raise legal defenses, so the issue comes down to nonpayment of rent, and, by and large, they lose the case.”
Indiana’s failure to provide due process for renters is so acute that even the state’s chief justice of its Supreme Court highlighted it in her 2020 State of the Judiciary address:
I recently spent a morning in a small claims court. The morning docket included 275 eviction cases. None of the defendants/tenants had legal representation. Not one. They all faced the judge and opposing lawyer alone. That is not the model of a legal system where the poor, disadvantaged, and vulnerable are protected.
The audience for Chief Justice Loretta Rush’s observation was the Indiana General Assembly. But when the city of Indianapolis tried to adopt local protections for tenants whose landlords retaliated against them for reporting poor conditions, those same state legislators passed a law making such local ordinances illegal.
As bad as the environment in Indiana is for renters, several other states seem intent on matching it. The Eviction Lab’s Alieza Durana points out that many judges in states like Texas have been ignoring the CDC moratorium for months, and tenants in those states enjoy few due-process protections. In Florida, for example, landlords can obtain an immediate default judgment against any tenant who does not deposit all unpaid rent within five days of receiving the court notice — no court hearing required. Over 40 percent of eviction cases in the state end in this automatic default ruling against the tenant.
Beeler fears that the summer’s eviction surge will further weaken Indiana’s already limited protections for renters. “The emergency rental assistance funds are still coming in, so there should be time allowed for renters to catch up,” he says. “But my concern for our clients is that this coming high volume of cases overflowing dockets will make these courts act even more transactional on landlord-tenant cases than they already do.”
To Durana of the Eviction Lab, the struggles in Indiana and other states illustrate a systemic problem that predates COVID. “Property rights are formalized in the US Constitution, but we do not have an equivalent set of rights set out nationally for tenants,” she says. “Eviction is not just a condition of poverty; it is a major cause of it. It has been unregulated for a very long time, and the pandemic is just putting that into the spotlight.”
David Keene, former president of the NRA, addresses over 3,000 empty chairs representing the estimated number of high school students killed by gun violence before their 2021 graduation. (photo: CNN)
MY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we end today’s show looking at how the parents of a student killed in the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida tricked a former president of the National Rifle Association into giving a high school graduation speech defending gun rights in front of 3,044 empty white chairs — one chair for each student who could not graduate this year because they were killed by gun violence. David Keene, who still serves on the NRA board, thought he was giving a rehearsal speech for graduating students at the James Madison Academy at Las Vegas — but no such school exists.
The stunt was organized by the group Change the Ref, which was founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin, or “Guac,” was shot dead in the Parkland, Florida, massacre in 2018 in his high school.
This week, the group released this video of David Keene’s remarks in front of thousands of empty chairs in Las Vegas. A warning to our audience: His words are interspersed with the sounds of 911 calls of students trapped at schools with active shooters.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES: David Keene was the two-time president of the National Rifle Association. He continues to be a staunch defender of your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Therefore, it is my privilege to introduce to you David Keene.
DAVID KEENE: Let me begin by telling you what an honor it is to be here to help celebrate your graduation. Picture for a minute the young James Madison, for whom this school is named. This year you focused on one of the most important of Madison’s amendments, the Second Amendment. There are some who will continue to fight to gut the Second Amendment. But I’d be willing to bet that many of you will be among those who stand up and prevent them from succeeding.
911 DISPATCHER: 911, what’s your emergency?
STUDENT 1: Help. Please help! Please!
DAVID KEENE: Defending it is a challenge and a duty that Americans like you —
STUDENT 2: Stoneman Douglas High School is being shot up.
STUDENT 3: He was shooting into my classroom.
DAVID KEENE: — who understand what has made the country the envy of the world, must accept as their own.
911 DISPATCHER: OK. Is anybody injured?
STUDENT 1: Yes! Yes! A lot of blood. Please help! Please!
DAVID KEENE: An overwhelming majority of you will go on to college, while others may decide their dream dictates a different route to success.
STUDENT 4: A school. It’s a school. It’s a school.
911 DISPATCHER: OK. Do you know how many people are injured?
DAVID KEENE: So my advice to you is simple enough: follow your dream and make it a reality.
MOTHER 1: My son is in Stoneman Douglas High School.
MOTHER 2: My daughter just texted me from school. She’s at Stoneman Douglas.
DAVID KEENE: And never for a minute doubt that you can achieve that dream. Thank you.
STUDENT 5: Oh my — oh no. Oh no. Oh — [gunshots]
STUDENT 6: Oh my god! Oh my god!
STUDENT 5: Oh no.
AMY GOODMAN: That video, produced by the gun reform group Change the Ref, which tricked the former president of the NRA into giving this graduation speech in front of 3,044 empty white chairs — one chair for each student who would have been a high school senior this year, who will not graduate because they were killed by gun violence. The group also tricked John Lott Jr., the author of More Guns, Less Crime, to give a similar speech.
We’re joined now by Manuel Oliver, co-founder of Change the Ref. His son “Guac,” Joaquin, was one of 17 people killed in their own high school in 2018 at the mass shooting there at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Manny, thanks so much for being with us. What you have portrayed in this — I don’t even want to call it a stunt, this incredible action, this demonstration of what gun violence means in this country, unique in the world, talk about what you did.
MANUEL OLIVER: Well, thank you, Amy, for having us here today.
Well, this is our latest campaign. You know what we’ve been doing for the last three years. And we did something different this time. We actually confronted these leaders, members of the NRA and representing the gun industry for decades.
So, we are very pleased with the results. You have no idea how many emails and text messages of support come to my computer per minute. Like, it’s incredible. I think that we need to do this more often, because it shows that the NRA, the gun industry and the gun lobby are not as powerful as they say. And on the other hand, it also represents the amount of power that parents of victims can show and have.
More [inaudible] I’m pretty sure, that enjoyed that moment, when we were able to show the truth, without any editing. There was no need for that. These guys are repeating their own words. This is what they believe. And this is what they have been repeating for decades, and I don’t know in how many acts like this one, with actual kids sitting down.
AMY GOODMAN: So, as part of this action that you engaged in — and it’s truly amazing. For those listening on radio, the shot from above of the thousands of empty chairs is really astounding. You also invited John Lott Jr., who accepted the invitation, to speak at the fake graduation ceremony. I want to play that clip.
MASTER OF CEREMONIES: John Lott is an economist, educator and scholar. He has authored several books, including More Guns, Less Crime, often referred to as the bible of the National Rifle Association. It is my privilege to introduce to you Dr. John Lott.
JOHN LOTT JR.: Congratulations. You all have made a new stage in life. You know, your school is named after James Madison. And he proposed what became a Second Amendment to the Constitution, that there’s an individual right to people be able to keep guns for protection. Can you name me one place in the world, any place in the world, that’s banned either all guns or all handguns and seen murder rates go down? I can’t find a single place like that.
911 DISPATCHER: 911. What is your emergency?
STUDENT 1: Oh no!
JOHN LOTT JR.: I was just working in the Department of Justice. Gun control advocates and Democrats will fight you tooth and nail.
STUDENT 2: Stoneman Douglas High School is being shot up.
JOHN LOTT JR.: They want to go and say, “We’ve stopped three-and-a-half million dangerous people.
911 DISPATCHER: OK. Is anybody injured?
STUDENT 1: Yes! Yes! A lot of blood. Please help! Please!
JOHN LOTT JR.: I look at it as we’ve stopped three-and-a-half million law-abiding citizens who wanted to get a gun.
911 DISPATCHER: Are you in the school? Where are you in the school?
STUDENT 3: We’re on the first floor. He was shooting into my classroom.
JOHN LOTT JR.: Anyway, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You know, I’m sure all of you will have a very bright future ahead. Thank you very much. [gunshots]
STUDENT 4: Oh my god! Oh my god!
AMY GOODMAN: That was John Lott Jr., who wrote what is considered the bible of the gun rights movement, speaking at the fake graduation ceremony in Las Vegas, of course, where there was another massacre that took place a few years ago that killed scores of people. By the way, BuzzFeed contacted Mr. Lott. He said, “You’re telling me the whole thing was a setup?” He said, “No, I didn’t know that.” So, Manuel, where were you and Patricia, your wife, Joaquin’s parents, when all this was happening?
MANUEL OLIVER: We were right there. And you have to also understand that this guy, his best accomplishment is that he wrote a book that is called More Guns, Less Crime. So, that’s the kind of person that is trying to — after all this happened, trying to protect himself behind the fact that we played with his words or whatever.
We were right there. We were not allowed to be seen, because of probably someone could recognize our faces. So we were inside a trailer home next to the stage, watching everything and making sure that everything was — with a huge team that helped us here, making sure that every single detail was coming out the way that we planned it.
AMY GOODMAN: One of the spokespeople for Change the Ref, your group, said, “Ironically, had the men conducted a proper background check on the school, they would have seen that the school is fake.” Talk about calling it James Madison High School.
MANUEL OLIVER: Well, we needed to bring the reality behind the gun big picture — let’s put everything together — to make it very legit. And the fact that these guys were invited to become speakers in James Madison School, who is the guy that wrote the Second Amendment, that will be a reason to be there. And it worked. And again, more than how we did this and bragging about the way that we were able to bring these two influencers from the gun lobby —
AMY GOODMAN: You made a website.
MANUEL OLIVER: Yeah, we made a website.
AMY GOODMAN: Of the fake school.
MANUEL OLIVER: Correct. Correct. We made a website, and they went in to the website. If you go deep into the website, you will see that that school was only working since April, so that’s a red flag. But the egos of these people are beyond that. You know, they just wanted — “Let’s go to Vegas, spend the weekend.” And everything ties together just like we planned it.
AMY GOODMAN: Manny, we just have one minute. And, of course, it’s graduation season all over the country. You’ve shown the more than 3,000 chairs of kids who won’t graduate from high school because of gun violence. President Biden just gave a major speech on gun violence. Do you think the Biden administration is doing enough?
We’re having a little trouble hearing you. Your sound is dropping out. We’re talking to Manuel Oliver, who is co-founder of the gun reform group Change the Ref. His son Joaquin was one of 17 people killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. If you want to see the full images of this event that he organized in Las Vegas to demonstrate the loss, the pain, the horror of gun violence, can go to democracynow.org. Manny, we have 15 seconds for your final comment on is enough being done.
MANUEL OLIVER: We need to — it’s the addition of different things. It’s not only what President Biden is trying to do. It’s not only what some leaders are trying to do. It’s what we are trying to do, what the youth is trying to do. All those things together are bringing these conversations. We are having a conversation with no need of a mass shooting for you to call me. And that’s advancing in the fight against gun violence.
AMY GOODMAN: We thank you so much. And our best to you and Patricia. Manuel Oliver, thank you. This is Democracy Now!
MANUEL OLIVER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, stay safe. Special thanks to our whole team here at Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
Indigenous activists protesting against Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. (photo: Mia Alberti/Al Jazeera)
Indigenous leaders and human rights groups say the Brazilian president's policies threaten tribal communities and constitutes what should be a new crime: ecocide.
n a Tuesday afternoon in late March 2020, Zezico Rodrigues Guajajara was killed by gunmen as he was driving a motorbike near his home village in Maranhao, Brazil.
A member of the Guajajara tribe, he had worked for years to protect land in the Amazon belonging to his ancestors and other uncontacted, or isolated, tribes. For Zezico, fending off illegal incursions had become increasingly dangerous as emboldened logging and mining groups targeted him and other Indigenous environmental activists. He was the fifth Guajajara to be killed in a five-month period and one of over two dozen forest protectors killed in Brazil since 2019.
Indigenous chiefs and human rights organizations have accused Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro of enabling such killings through state policies that they say encourage the destruction of the Amazon for profit while failing to protect Indigenous people’s rights. They have asked the International Criminal Court to investigate whether the far-right leader's actions — including weakening dozens of environmental protections and encouraging private development of the Amazon, leading to the displacement of Indigenous people and contributing to climate change — constitute crimes against humanity.
“Bolsonaro has been campaigning against Indigenous people and their rights since the first day he took office,” said Marcio Astrini, head of the environmental protection organization Climate Observatory. “In acts and speeches, he's incentivizing land grabbers, illegal loggers and illegal miners to invade Indigenous areas, causing violence and deforestation. He is putting Indigenous communities and lives at risk."
Astrini supports the investigation request and said the international court’s action is needed to stop Brazil’s government from facilitating illegal activity in the Amazon.
Brazil’s Embassy in Washington and its Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment. In response to questions from Inside Climate News and NBC News for a previous article, the Brazilian Embassy said Bolsonaro had “consistently championed” Indigenous people’s well-being and the preservation of the Amazon.
In public comments, Bolsonaro has staunchly defended Brazil’s right to develop the rainforest, citing the country’s sovereignty, and he has accused foreign leaders of wanting to impede Brazil’s lucrative agricultural and commodity export industries. His supporters also point out that Brazil has historically contributed very little to climate change compared to developed countries like the United States.
The International Criminal Court’s Office of the Prosecutor, which is weighing the investigation request, did not respond to a request for comment. The request for the court to launch an investigation into Bolsonaro is the latest turn in a growing debate over whether mass environmental damage should be prosecuted as an international crime.
Bolsonaro’s rampant deforestation of the Amazon, and the threat posed by climate change, have prompted world leaders like Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron to support a campaign for a new international crime called “ecocide,” which would outlaw widespread environmental destruction. Supporters cite Bolsonaro’s actions in the Amazon as a prime example of ecocide happening in real time.
The campaign for an ecocide crime is still in the early stages, though, and for now, the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction is limited to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. When it comes to environmental crimes, the court can only prosecute those that occur during wartime. That means the Brazilian activists’ request for the court to investigate Bolsonaro could be a long shot, legal experts say, especially because national governments have long had control over natural resources within their borders.
But there are also signs that give the activists hope. Some legal analysts think Karim Asad Ahmad Khan, who took over as the court’s new prosecutor on June 16, may consider authorizing the court’s first investigation related to environmental destruction. That’s because Bolsonaro’s alleged crimes are so closely related to the Amazon’s deforestation. Activists and environmentalists hope a decision will come during Khan’s first weeks in office, which coincides with the start of the Amazon’s dry season, when the rainforest is susceptible to fires.
Whatever Khan decides, the Bolsonaro case presents the international court with a novel way to advance legal thinking about environmental destruction and how deforestation can be linked to crimes against humanity, defined legally as widespread or systematic attacks against civilians.
Almir Narayamoga Suruí and Raoni Metuktire, the two Brazilian Indigenous chiefs who requested the international investigation, were not available for interviews, but they said in their request that the stakes for the Amazon are high. The rainforest captures carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, making it a core part of humanity’s fight against climate change. Since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, over 7,700 square miles of the Amazon have been destroyed, an area nearly as large as New Jersey.
Scientists have warned that Bolsonaro’s policies could push the rainforest to an irreversible tipping point, where the rainforest can no longer regenerate itself, which could cause cascading environmental disasters.
“The Amazon rainforest plays an essential role in global climate regulation,” Suruí and Metuktire said in their request. “A point of no return must be avoided at all costs.”
Suruí and Metuktire filed their request, known as an Article 15 Communication, with the International Criminal Court in January. The request detailed Bolsonaro’s environmental and Indigenous policies and those policies’ ecological harms, and alleged that the policies have led to murders, forced displacement and the persecution of Brazil’s Indigenous population. They argued in the 68-page document that further destruction of the Amazon, 60 percent of which is in Brazil, poses a threat to humankind.
The chiefs’ request followed an earlier Article 15 Communication, submitted in November 2019 by Brazil’s Human Rights Advocacy Collective and the Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns Commission for Human Rights, accusing Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity and genocide for the destruction of the Amazon and harm to Indigenous people. The court has not responded to that request.
Both of the requests for investigations argue that the livelihoods, culture and survival of Indigenous groups are directly linked to the natural environment. Policies that encourage mass ecological harm are effectively an attack on tribes, the activists and tribal leaders say. They then extend that argument to the rest of humanity, in light of the climate crisis and the Amazon’s key role in storing carbon.
While neither request alleges that Bolsonaro had knowledge of, or was personally involved in, any of the alleged murders or other crimes, they say he and other officials bear ultimate responsibility because their policies and rhetoric encouraged the attacks on Indigenous groups.
Bolsonaro’s environmental record
From his inauguration through last September, Bolsonaro oversaw at least 57 legislative acts that weaken environmental protections, according to a study published in the science journal Biological Conservation, and a slew of budget cuts and restructurings of key agencies that protect and monitor the environment.
The requests to the International Criminal Court note that Bolsonaro has staffed key environmental agencies with former federal police and military officers. “The goal, according to Bolsonaro, is to ‘put an end to the ideological framework of the sector, led by NGOs and entities concerned with the environment,’” Suruí and Metuktire said.
Under Bolsonaro’s administration, enforcement of laws protecting the environment has plummeted, Suruí and Metuktire said. Environmental fines in Brazil decreased 72 percent even as deforestation rates rose to a 12-year high.
His environmental minister, Ricardo Salles, was the main architect of the remaking of Brazil’s regulatory framework, according to the requests. In May 2020, Salles was captured on video advising Bolsonaro to take advantage of the media’s fixation on the Covid-19 pandemic to “push through” environmental rollbacks. Salles resigned on Wednesday, weeks after Brazil’s federal police opened an investigation into his alleged involvement in illegal timber exports. Salles has denied the allegations. His office did not respond to requests for comment.
The impact on Indigenous people
Suruí and Metuktire’s plea comes nearly 50 years after the release of a damning government report that detailed thousands of atrocities — including torture, murder and land theft — carried out with impunity by Brazilian officials against Indigenous peoples during the country’s 1964 to 1982 military dictatorship.
The mentality of that regime, namely that Indigenous people should assimilate and have no land rights, has become ascendant under Bolsonaro, Indigenous groups and lawyers say.
“It’s a completely wrong mentality, but that’s Bolsonaro. He comes from this school that believes Indigenous peoples aren’t peoples,” said Ana Valéria Araújo, a Brazilian attorney who has represented Indigenous groups for over 30 years and is now the executive director of the nonprofit Fundo Brazil. “He sees them as obstacles to development and when there’s an obstacle, you have to remove it.”
Bolsonaro has a history of making anti-Indigenous statements. He has compared isolated Indigenous peoples to animals in a zoo, and in 2020 said that “Indians are undoubtedly changing. …They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.” In 1998, he lamented that Brazil wasn’t as efficient as the United States, which “exterminated the Indians.” And as president, his administration opened investigations into Indigenous leaders, including Suruí, who have spoken out against his policies, accusing them of defaming him.
Human rights advocates see a direct line between Bolsonaro’s statements and his policies. After he took office, he fulfilled a campaign promise to halt a process of demarcating and protecting Indigenous territories and installed a former federal police officer known to have close ties to the agriculture industry as head of the National Indian Foundation. The government also stopped enforcing environmental and criminal laws that protect Indigenous groups from illegal incursions and exploitation of their land, tribal leaders and human rights activists allege.
These policy changes, coupled with environmental rollbacks, effectively opened up parts of the Amazon long inhabited by Indigenous groups, including uncontacted and isolated tribes, to mining, logging and agriculture. That flood of development activity has led to violence and the destruction of protected Indigenous lands, according to the Article 15 requests.
In 2019, when Bolsonaro took office, there were at least 256 cases of property damage, illegal occupation and exploitation of Indigenous land, up from 109 incidents in 2018, according to the Missionary Council for Indigenous Peoples.
In 2019, the murder rate of Indigenous people reached an 11-year high. In one case, detailed in the January request, Emyra Wajãpi, the leader of the Wajãpi people, was stabbed to death by miners who illegally invaded her village. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said the murder was a "worrying symptom of the growing problem of encroachment on Indigenous lands — especially forests — by miners, loggers and farmers in Brazil.”
In public comments shortly after the murder, Bolsonaro reiterated his desire to legalize mining in Indigenous areas.
To his supporters, Bolsonaro’s decisive 2018 electoral victory gave him a mandate to carry out his campaign agenda: to enact market-friendly policies, limit the rights of Indigenous groups, repeal environmental regulations and, in his words, “authorize industrial, hydraulic and mining in protected areas.” They also question why Brazil, a developing country, should sacrifice monetizing its natural resources when other nations got rich doing the same thing.
In response to the criticism that he is mismanaging the Amazon, Bolsonaro has said Brazil’s “sovereignty is nonnegotiable,” calling the criticisms evidence of a “misplaced colonialist mindset.” And Boslonaro isn’t the first to open up the Amazon. Administrations across political parties have taken steps to develop the rainforest and curtail environmental protections.
But lawyers and human rights activists say sovereign authority doesn’t make it right or lawful to undermine the rights of Indigenous peoples.
“No one disputes the sovereignty of the president to carry out a policy, but this policy must respect the rights of Indigenous peoples,” William Bourdon, a French lawyer who filed the January request, said in an email. “The right to sovereignty cannot be equated with the right to freely dispose of the lands of Indigenous peoples, much less to have the right of life and death over them.”
In asking the “court of last resort” to investigate their president, Suruí and Metuktire said in their request that Brazil’s justice system is unwilling to carry out a meaningful investigation into the alleged crimes.
Legal experts agree. Ana Carolina Alfinito, a legal adviser with the nonprofit group Amazon Watch, said it’s unlikely that Bolsonaro would face an internal investigation in Brazil; the country’s chief prosecutor is one of his allies. So she and other environmental activists see an international probe as their last and best hope.
“We’ll never have true justice for his crimes if the International Criminal Court doesn’t act,” she said.
Should the international court step into the environmental arena, either through the adoption of an ecocide crime or by taking up a case like Bolsonaro’s, environmentalists and lawyers say that just the prospect of court action could have a deterrent effect on polluting businesses, financial institutions and politicians like Bolsonaro.
“When you destroy an environment, you ultimately destroy your home, culture and people,” said Valérie Cabanes, a French lawyer who helped prepare Suruí and Metuktire’s request. “We are part of nature and we can’t guarantee our fundamental human rights if we don’t protect the rights of nature to exist, regenerate and thrive.”
Yellowstone is home to grizzly bear populations and some of the longest intact wildlife migrations, including the seasonal movements of elk, pronghorn, mule deer and bison. (photo: Seth K. Hughes/Getty Images/Image Source)
Researchers say temperatures, already the highest in the past 20,000 years, could increase by up to 10F by 2100
ellowstone, established in 1872, is famous around the globe for good reason: it’s the oldest national park in the United States and one of the most popular.
But a new report issued this week shows how Yellowstone’s near pristine environment, with attractions like the Old Faithful geyser and herds of bison, is under threat from global heating.
The report, conducted by researchers at Montana State University, the US Geological Survey and the University of Wyoming, analyzes the effects of a changing climate not only in the park, but also in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem – an area 10 times the size.
In addition to geysers and hot springs, the area is home to grizzly bear populations and some of the longest intact wildlife migrations, including the seasonal movements of elk, pronghorn, mule deer and bison.
“Greater Yellowstone is valued for its forests, rivers, fish and wildlife,” said Steve Hostetler, a USGS scientist and co-lead author of the report said in a statement. “The trend towards a warmer, drier climate described in this study will likely affect ecosystems in the region and the communities that depend on them.”
The analysis shows that temperatures in the park are now as high or higher as during any period in the last 20,000 years and are very likely the warmest in the past 800,000 years. Since 1950, Yellowstone has experienced an average temperature increase of 2.3F, with the most pronounced warming taking place at elevations above 5,000ft.
Those changes could be even more extreme in the future: by the end of the century, the researchers say the temperature could increase by 5-10F under current emissions scenarios. That would mean the park’s surrounding areas could swelter under 40-to-60 more days per year with temperatures above 90F.
Because of the increased heat, the spring thaw now begins several weeks earlier, and annual stream runoff happens eight days earlier than it did in 1950.In addition, higher temperatures mean that much of the precipitation that once fell as snow will now be rain – annual snowfall has declined by nearly 2ft since 1950 and is expected to decline further.
That snowpack is a bank of water for later in the year, and is used by cities as far west as Los Angeles and earlier snowmelt and loss of snowpack will increase the area’s susceptibility to future wildfires, the authors write.
“The decrease in snow is due to the increase in temperature over time, which caused more precipitation to fall as rain instead of snow,” wrote report co-author Bryan Shuman of the University of Wyoming.
Old Faithful geyser was named for its frequent and somewhat predictable eruptions, which number more than a million since Yellowstone became the world’s first national park in 1872.
But the study also raises questions about the future reliability of the famous geyser: known for blasting water into the air at reliable intervals of about 90 to 94 minutes. Scientists recently found evidence that Old Faithful had ceased to erupt 800 years ago for several decades due to a drought. Dipping into an extended drought could once again cause the geyser to cease its blasts.
Yellowstone’s forests, too, could be changing. Covering roughly 80% of the park, some of the forests may convert to grasslands after a wildfire instead of bouncing back.
Yellowstone isn’t the only national park facing huge changes due to the climate crisis.
In California’s Joshua Tree, extreme temperatures are threatening the endangered flora that names the park. Drought and wildfire could drive the park to lose 80% of its renowned Joshua trees by 2070. And in Glacier national park in Montana, the number of glaciers has fallen from 150 to 26, with scientists predicting that those that remain will melt by the end of this century.
Cathy Whitlock, co-lead author of the report, said changes and preparation need to be made now if the ecosystem will be preserved.
“The assessment is intended to provide the best available science on past, present and future conditions in the Greater Yellowstone Area so that stakeholders have needed information to plan ahead,” Whitlock said.
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