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10 June 21
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Bill McKibben | A Biden Climate Test on the Banks of the Mississippi
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "I suppose that, if I'd thought about it, I could have figured out that there had to be a place where you could jump across the Mississippi."
Indigenous groups are demanding that the Line 3 pipeline go the way of the Keystone XL.
suppose that, if I’d thought about it, I could have figured out that there had to be a place where you could jump across the Mississippi. But I’d seen its majestic flow at so many points along its course (ripping through Minneapolis, regal in St. Louis, oceanic by Baton Rouge) that I’d never imagined it as a mere trickle. Now I have—I’ve waded through that trickle, in fact—and on an epic day in recent American Indigenous and environmental activism.
The backstory is that a big Canadian company, Enbridge, has been trying to expand and replace a pipeline, called Line 3, that runs across northern Minnesota. It would be about the same size as the now vanquished Keystone XL pipeline, and carry seven hundred and sixty thousand barrels of regular crude and tar-sands oil from Canada each day. (Enbridge characterizes the project as a “replacement” of the existing pipeline, but it will double the current capacity.) Most of the activists are Indigenous, led by groups such as Honor the Earth and the Giniw Collective, and many of those are led by remarkable women—Winona LaDuke, Tara Houska, and Dawn Goodwin, among many others. They have waged a stout campaign through a bitter Midwestern winter, but it has been hampered by the pandemic. Now vaccines have freed others to join them, and Monday was the first big mobilization.
Two mobilizations, actually, which was easy because so many people came from across the country. At one, activists locked themselves to construction equipment at a pumping station, and a video shows a border-patrol helicopter hovering low overhead, in what seemed like an attempt to stir up clouds of dust to drive the protesters away. (Law-enforcement officials have denied this, claiming that the purpose of the helicopter flight was to broadcast a dispersal order to protesters.) By the end of the day, state police and sheriff’s officers, who, under the terms of the state permit, receive financial backing from Enbridge, had arrested more than a hundred people.
I was at the other protest, about twenty miles away, where a county road crosses the Mississippi at a place so narrow that the river could be mistaken for a ditch. Tribal elders held water and pipe ceremonies, chanting as the hot sun rose against a clear blue sky and dragonflies by the hundreds circled overhead. Then, after listening to speeches by Jane Fonda and Rosanna Arquette (I spoke, too), the crowd moved toward the bridge. It was easy to see, perhaps a hundred yards away, across a marsh, a boardwalk that Enbridge had built over the wetland, in order to support the equipment that will be used to bore a tunnel for the pipeline under the river. I set off with a large group across squelching hummocks to reach that timbered road. In ten minutes, a few hundred people—many with lawyers’ phone numbers inked on their forearms, in case of arrest—had reached the boardwalk, and began setting up tents. I’m no master of terrain, but it struck me as a favorable redoubt—high ground in a swamp, with a freshwater route for resupply by canoe. As of Monday night, the descendants of the territory’s original inhabitants are occupying both banks of the nation’s great river.
They’re occupying the moral high ground, too. So far, much of the opposition to the pipeline has been based on treaty rights, and on the danger that oil spills pose at the dozens of places where the pipeline route crosses rivers, wild-rice waters, and wetlands. I sat on the boardwalk next to Tom Goldtooth, a veteran leader of the Indigenous Environmental Network, as he explained the treaties that had been violated, and the sovereignty now being asserted. But these arguments alone—even, in 2021, as we theoretically reckon with America’s past—apparently weren’t enough to dissuade the state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz. He was under pressure from the unions supplying most of the labor—Enbridge says more than five thousand jobs, five hundred of them held by Native Americans—to build the pipeline, a project that could be finished by year’s end, and almost all the jobs with it.
Now another argument, about climate change, is receiving renewed emphasis, because the Biden Administration has made it such a central part of its mandate. In 2015, the Obama Administration, with Joe Biden as Vice-President, pulled the permits for Keystone XL, because it failed the White House’s climate test. “America’s now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” President Obama said. “And, frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face—not acting.”
So why would the Biden Administration let a pipeline of almost the same size, carrying tar-sands oil, proceed? Since 2015, the United States has joined (and rejoined) the Paris climate accord, promising to hold temperature increases to as close to 1.5 degrees Celsius as possible, and the world’s climate scientists have explained that this means cutting emissions forty-five per cent by 2030. And we’ve seen the hottest year, the worst wildfire season in the American West, the biggest Atlantic storm season, and the highest temperature ever reliably recorded in America. Meanwhile, the price of solar power has dropped by half in the past decade. So, if the KXL failed the climate test six years ago, how could Line 3 pass it today? Enbridge told the Times that it has “passed six years of regulatory and permitting review.” But this most basic climate question has never been answered: How does increasing the flow of tar-sands oil not make progress in cutting emissions more difficult?
President Biden has taken climate change more seriously than any of his predecessors, with a raft of executive orders designed to work real change across the government. On the supply side, climate experts give him credit for suspending drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and for giving the final quietus to Keystone. But those were not hard decisions: in both cases, many years of activism had made them clear Democratic priorities. Yet, late last month, Biden allowed an Alaska oil-and-gas project approved by the Trump Administration—which would produce more than a hundred thousand barrels a day for thirty years—to proceed. (According to the Times, members of the state’s congressional delegation raised the topic with Biden while at the White House for the signing of a bill allowing cruise ships to visit that state again.) That did not play well with the environmental groups that were a key part of his electoral coalition.
So Line 3 is a real test. If Biden is truly serious that the climate is the most important priority of his Presidency, it makes no sense to give a permit to a pipeline that, decades from now, will still be disgorging huge quantities of particularly dirty crude. He doesn’t even need Senator Joe Manchin’s vote on this one—he can direct the Army Corps of Engineers to revoke the water-crossing permits, which would stop the project. With the work more than half done, more than half the paychecks have been cashed—and, in any event, the unions should be willing to cut some slack for a President who is working hard to pass an enormous infrastructure-spending package. And the rest of the world is watching to see whether this President really intends to resume America’s leadership role on climate change.
On Monday, news came that CO2 levels measured at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, in Hawaii, had set a new monthly-average record of four hundred and nineteen parts per million, the highest levels in more than four million years. But, that same day, watching tribal elders conduct their ceremonies at the clear headwaters of the Mississippi, it was possible to imagine a different world in the making, one that pays heed to different people and different needs. For the moment, anyway, an older, deeper logic seemed to prevail.
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
The Democratic Senators Hiding Behind Joe Manchin
Sam Brodey, The Daily Beast
Brodey writes: "Manchin has long been a 'heat shield' for fellow moderates on the thorniest topics, including the filibuster. He still is, but cracks are beginning to show."
t was March 5, right before the Senate’s doomed vote to raise the minimum wage to $15, and, as usual, Sen. Joe Manchin was the center of attention.
But there was no need for reporters to swarm the West Virginia moderate. On that day, he was far from the only Democrat who’d give the thumbs-down to a progressive priority. Seven other Democratic senators would vote the same way—and draw far less recognition or criticism.
That tally surprised observers outside the U.S. Capitol building, but few within it.
Manchin may find himself nationally relevant, and widely loathed on the left, for his willingness to buck mainstream positions within the Democratic Party. But over the years, Senate insiders have developed a view that on the toughest and thorniest issues, Manchin isn’t only speaking for himself; there’s usually a handful of senators who agree with him, quietly, and are happy to let him take the heat.
Which senators are counted within this category changes based on the issue or vote at hand. The minimum wage vote provided a rare, clear look at how Manchin can be a tip of a Senate Democratic iceberg on a key issue.
But exactly who’s aligned with him, even discreetly, on another consequential question—whether to end the legislative filibuster—is less clear. Only one other Democrat, Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ), has been as strident about keeping the Senate’s 60-vote threshold as Manchin. A handful of others, such as Sens. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH), have sounded concerned notes or have avoided answering the question entirely.
Some Democrats look at that and argue that Manchin, who has defiantly insisted he will not gut the filibuster under any circumstances, is publicly voicing concerns that this group agrees with privately.
"There are other Democratic members who share his reservations about eliminating the filibuster,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who strongly differs with Manchin on the issue. “Perhaps they're less outspoken, and perhaps less vehement."
Even staunch progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), desperate to see the filibuster go, understand that Manchin isn’t alone in his support for a 60-vote threshold.
“It’s something of a symbiotic relationship,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “There are certainly more senators with reservations about the filibuster that are giving Manchin steam to stay firm. But I have also heard from colleagues that none of those other senators want to play Manchin’s role.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued that, if Manchin or Sinema folded, she believed those other senators would come around to eliminating the filibuster as well. “That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be pressed for their position and offer clarity to their constituents, though,” she said of the senators letting Manchin do the talking. “People deserve to know with clarity where their elected representation stands on the filibuster.”
Among those whose job it is to influence lawmakers, it’s widely understood that Manchin is almost never on an island. When Manchin speaks, said one lobbyist for a major D.C. firm, “everyone’s ears perk up.”
“He represents not just a significant swing vote,” this lobbyist said. “He represents a handful of the party.”
There is also a belief among both Democrats and Republicans that Manchin’s current status as a black hole of left-wing outrage and media attention spares these other senators from the same treatment. A Democratic aide told The Daily Beast in a May story on Manchin that a lot of members are “happy Joe Manchin is the tip of the spear, getting shot at every day. Seven or eight of them stand behind him.”
A former colleague of Manchin’s, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), put it another way recently. “He is the heat shield for other members of the Senate that also are reluctant to blow up the protections the minority has from stopping bad stuff the other party wants,” she said on MSNBC on Tuesday.
That heat shield is especially valuable for senators facing tough elections in 2022. Take, for instance, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH). She voted with Manchin on the minimum wage and has been publicly cool toward ending the filibuster. And yet, the Beltway hardly hinges on her every word. Far from the dozen reporters that encircle Manchin in the Capitol hallways, Hassan glides through the Senate basement without any reporters trailing her—and she’s hardly ever a target of the left’s Twitter scorn.
But the GOP’s embrace of 2020 election conspiracies and measures to curtail voting access is forcing a change in this dynamic. Sen. Angus King (I-ME), an independent who caucuses with Democrats, had been seen as quietly aligned with Manchin on the filibuster. However, when The Daily Beast asked King on Tuesday if Manchin reflected the views of a broader group of senators, he responded by reiterating his reluctance to break the 60-vote threshold.
“But I’m very worried about voting rights,” King added. “And if it's a question of voting rights versus a Senate rule, democracy wins, for me.”
That qualification, which Manchin has not made, may leave him increasingly alone within the caucus, no longer the bellwether of colleagues who might have nodded approvingly with every quote or interview in which he punctures the dreams of the party base. But the strength of his objections to ending the filibuster or supporting S.1, Democrats’ marquee election reform bill, have some in the party convinced more than ever he’s not freelancing.
“I’m fully bought into the idea that he’s just a proxy for, like, five or six other senators who feel the same way,” said a Democratic source, expressing the frustration of many in the party.
Like many tricky bits of Hill conventional wisdom, it’s hard to get senators talking on the record about the theory of a Manchin shadow caucus. Several Democrats declined to talk about it when approached by The Daily Beast. Asked if Manchin reflected the views of others in the caucus, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the party’s second-in-command, offered a short answer: “I don’t know.”
King only slightly expanded on that answer when asked the same question. “I don't know, because I don’t know what other people feel,” he said, noting that Sinema was also quite vocal with her concerns about the filibuster. “I think there are others as well.”
Indeed, Sinema is a major exception. She’s hardly quiet about her views, and is beginning to approach Manchin levels of notoriety in the Democratic base for her willingness to disappoint them. The Arizona Democrat is far more press-averse than her colleague from West Virginia, but when she does speak, she tends to have the same effect.
A comment Sinema gave in April, for example, continues to fuel outraged tweets from liberal commentators as the GOP filibusters the party’s agenda. “When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”
Sinema is also considered closest to Manchin in another way: Many Democrats feel they are equally committed to the filibuster in a way that others are not. "Other senators might be behind Manchin and Sinema, but if they budge on the filibuster, they’re all going with them,” said a former aide to a moderate Democratic senator. “None of them are going to be the last ones standing."
A handful of roll call votes this year shows how the scrutiny on Manchin or Sinema can obscure broader shared sentiments in the caucus. In March, the six Democrats who joined Manchin and Sinema in voting against a $15 minimum wage were Sens. King, Hassan, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Chris Coons (D-DE), Tom Carper (D-DE), and Jon Tester (D-MT).
As Democrats worked to pass their $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, Republicans forced dozens of symbolic votes designed to put vulnerable Democrats in tough political positions. Manchin had company on a few. A slightly different group of seven joined Manchin in voting for a GOP resolution to block stimulus checks from going to undocumented immigrants: Sens. Sinema, Hassan, Tester, Kelly, Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), and Gary Peters (D-MI). All did ultimately vote to strip that resolution from the final bill.
But it’s the issues where no votes have yet been cast—election reform and the filibuster—where there’s growing interest in who may be drafting in Manchin’s wake.
A handful of Democratic senators have simply skirted the question of whether to change the 60-vote threshold in order to enact the party’s agenda. Most are up for re-election in 2022 and are navigating tricky balancing acts in their home states, where a Manchin-style stiff-arming of the left could spell trouble in a primary, but where moderation has been a winning general election strategy.
Kelly, who was elected in 2020 and faces Arizona voters again next year, has not said definitively what his stance on the filibuster is, telling reporters this week that he would “evaluate any change to our rules, regardless of what they are, based on what's in the best interest of Arizona, and the best interest of our country."
Hassan, a top target for Republicans looking to flip a Democratic seat, has said she has “concerns” about getting rid of the 60-vote threshold. Shaheen, who won re-election in 2020, has previously said the filibuster should be reformed, but has quietly avoided taking a hard line since Democrats took the Senate and White House in January.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), also a GOP target in 2022, has embraced a middle ground that Manchin himself has opened the door to: supporting the “talking filibuster,” a proposal to make filibustering more painful by requiring senators to fill up debate time with actual debate.
Meanwhile, S.1—the bill that many Democrats believe is worth breaking or changing the filibuster rule to pass—does not have Manchin’s support. He announced on Sunday that he will vote no on the legislation, sparking yet another round of Manchin-inspired groans on the left. But privately, some of his colleagues are said to be uneasy with the bill, Politico reported on Tuesday. And by zooming in on the bill’s parts, it’s clear Manchin is not isolated in his misgivings.
Take statehood for the District of Columbia, which is touched on in S.1. Manchin was the first Democrat to come out against a separate statehood bill, S.51, which now has 46 Democratic co-sponsors. The holdouts are Manchin, Kelly, Sinema, and King.
Among those pushing for passage of S.1 or an end to the filibuster, there’s a sense that the tide is shifting away from Manchin. King is not the only moderate to say recently that he’d jettison the filibuster if it meant protecting voting rights. Tester, a friend and ally of Manchin’s, has done the same.
On Wednesday, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) gave an interview to the Washington Post in which she expressed reluctance toward ending the filibuster—though afterward, her office clarified that she’d support taking that step if it meant passing S.1.
Many of these questions are set to come to a head this summer, when the Senate will vote on the sweeping voting package.
"There’s a few members who have been quiet on this,” said Eli Zupnick, a former Senate aide who’s now spokesperson for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate. “The assumption and hope is they’d be on board where the caucus lands when push comes to shove.”
Roll call votes will put those senators who are less eager than Manchin for the attention, and the scrutiny, closer to the spotlight. As will continued discussion of the West Virginia senator’s “heat shield” status.
For now, though, a dozen or more reporters routinely swarm Manchin on his way to the Senate floor each day, while simpatico low-key lawmakers slip by. Republican onlookers—who might like to see a little more scrutiny on them—have no choice but to shrug.
“I suspect, both on the rules issue, and a lot of the legislative issues, that it's more than just Sen. Manchin and Sen. Sinema,” said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO). “But they've been willing to stand up and take a position.”
Minerva Solla, far left, an organizer with the New York State Nurses Association, works a crowd of healthcare demonstrators in Albany, New York. (photo: Jessica Glenza/Guardian UK)
A Backroom Deal to Kill New York State's Single Payer Bill
Julia Rock, The Daily Poster
Rock writes: "A bill to create a single-payer health care system in New York state has been co-sponsored by a majority of lawmakers in both houses of the state legislature for the first time ever - but it will likely be killed by that same legislature this week."
Under pressure from labor leaders and insurance execs, NY Dem leaders are blocking a vote on health care legislation even though it has majority support in the legislature.
bill to create a single-payer health care system in New York state has been co-sponsored by a majority of lawmakers in both houses of the state legislature for the first time ever — but it will likely be killed by that same legislature this week.
Advocates say that, under pressure from both insurance corporations and labor unions, New York legislative leaders are not planning to hold an up-or-down vote on the measure before the legislative session ends on Thursday.
The bill, known as the New York Health Act, has passed the state Assembly five times before. This year, the legislative session is coming to a close with the New York Health Act stuck in committee, not even having received a vote in the Assembly.
In addition to lobbying by health insurance companies and business groups in the state, public sector unions including the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) have been lobbying against the bill. Realities of Single Payer — a coalition of businesses, insurance lobbying groups, and unions opposing the legislation — has been running television and radio ads.
In effect, labor leaders are reprising their role opposing Medicare for All during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.
“We see our primary opposition as private insurance companies and their front groups and associations. They are doing things like running TV ads and online ads against the New York Health Act, with a lot of misinformation and fearmongering, particularly directed towards seniors,” Ursula Rozum, co-director of the Campaign for New York Health, a group organizing to pass the bill, told The Daily Poster.
“But with New York being a progressive state where unions have a lot of power in terms of helping democrats maintain their majority, I think it does make sense that without the support of public employee unions, there are Democrats that are reluctant to get enthusiastically behind the Health Act,” she added. “I think it is accurate to say that the lack of support from public employee unions is part of what is holding up the vote on the bill.”
The legislation would provide universal health care coverage for New Yorkers, with no copays, deductibles, or premiums. It would be funded by a progressive income tax.
If New York lawmakers do not allow a vote on single-payer, it would mark the second time in recent years a large state with big Democratic legislative majorities prevented an up-or-down vote on such a proposal. In 2017, the California assembly speaker refused to hold a vote on a single-payer bill, even though Democrats had supermajorities in both the assembly and the senate, as well as the governorship.
Labor Opposition
On May 5, the New York City Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) sent a letter to Speaker Carl Heastie to “register our strenuous objection to the New York Health Act 2021.” The MLC represents 102 municipal unions, including the UFT.
“To avoid any misunderstanding, the MLC supports universal health care coverage,” the letter said. “But, as we have repeatedly stated in connection with prior attempts to pursue a single-payer system in New York, next to wages, the health care program for NYC workers is of primary importance.”
The MLC’s argument against the bill is that unions have sacrificed wage increases in the past in order to bargain for better health care coverage and lower costs, and forcing them to switch to a single-payer system would make that past work a waste. “Indeed, because of this economic trade off, we previously suggested that MLC-member workforces be carved out of the statewide bill,” noted the MLC letter.
The UFT is registered to lobby the Assembly speaker’s office and the Senate majority leader’s office on the New York Health Act, and is also actively lobbying against it. The UFT signed an open letter coordinated by Realities of Single Payer sent to the state legislature on June 4 urging lawmakers to oppose the bill.
When asked why the bill has not been brought for a floor vote given that a majority of lawmakers in both branches are signed on as cosponsors, neither the Speaker’s office nor the senate majority leader’s office responded.
Other major unions in the state, including 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a health care workers union, and the New York State Nurses Association, are supporting the bill.
Public sector unions including the UFT have supported single-payer bills in New York in past years when the bills passed the assembly. But in 2019, the New York State United Teachers, representing unionized teachers and health care workers in the state, came out against the bill. The group said that it supported a single-payer health care system, but believed it should be addressed at the federal rather than state level. In 2019, after Democrats had won back a majority in the state senate for the first time in a decade, the bill didn’t get a vote in either body.
Rozum, the co-director of the Campaign for New York Health, emphasized that unions should be an important ally in the fight for single-payer. “We don’t see the public employees unions as our primary opposition, but rather as a really powerful group that we want to win over in this work.”
A Barrier To Health Care Reform
Historically, the opposition from labor unions to single-payer legislation has been a barrier to reform. While coordinated and well-funded campaigns from the insurance industry and hospitals have been the biggest problem for advocates, unions have not been reliable allies.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, the largest labor union in Nevada, the Culinary Workers Local 226, criticized Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ support for Medicare for All weeks before the state’s caucuses. Sanders ultimately won the Nevada caucuses, anyway, thanks in part to the votes of rank-and-file members of the culinary union, who said they were backing Sanders because of his support for single-payer.
More recently, opposition from the SEIU of Colorado to public option legislation there contributed to efforts to water down the bill. This week, the Colorado state legislature passed a bill that would create a public option in two years if private insurers don’t reduce premiums by 15 percent in that time period. Health care providers will not be required to accept the insurance.
An Air Force Global Strike Command unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test on Oct. 29, 2020, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. (photo: U.S. Air Force)
US Led 2020 Nuclear Weapons Spending; Now Biden Going "Full Steam Ahead" on Trump's Nuclear Plans
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Biden is also continuing a number of Trump's initiatives to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In his new budget, President Biden is seeking $43 billion for nuclear weapons, including money to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which, as a candidate, he described as a 'bad idea.'"
s President Biden prepares for the G7 and NATO summits and a meeting with Vladimir Putin, we look at how the United States, Russia and other nuclear-armed nations continue to spend billions on nuclear weapons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite President Biden’s criticisms of the Trump administration’s nuclear policies during his candidacy, his administration is continuing initiatives to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal and is seeking $43 billion for nuclear weapons in his new budget. This comes as a new report from the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons reveals global spending on nuclear weapons increased during the pandemic, and found the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons in 2020, with the United States alone spending $37 billion. “We’ve been seeing, from year to year, the spending on nuclear weapons has been increasing,” says Alicia Sanders-Zakre, ICAN’s policy and research coordinator. “Despite Biden’s campaign promises of wanting to work for arms control, wanting to work for disarmament, we’re seeing that in reality he’s going full steam ahead with Trump’s legacy nuclear weapons programs and continuing to spend more money on these weapons of mass destruction.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: President Biden has begun his first European trip as president. After meeting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson today, Biden will take part in the G7 leaders’ meeting in Cornwall, then head to the NATO summit in Brussels. He’ll end his trip in Geneva, where he’ll meet Russian President Vladimir Putin June 16th. On Wednesday, President Biden addressed U.S. Air Force personnel stationed in Britain.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: We’re not seeking conflict with Russia. We want a stable, predictable relationship. Our two nations share incredible responsibilities, and among them ensuring strategic stability and upholding arms control agreements. I take that responsibility seriously. But I’ve been clear: The United States will respond in a robust and meaningful way when the Russian government engages in harmful activities.
AMY GOODMAN: The Biden-Putin summit comes just weeks after the Biden administration announced it would not rejoin the Open Skies Treaty, a major international arms control deal signed by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992. Vladimir Putin then announced Russia would withdraw, as well. As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden criticized Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the treaty. In May 2020, Biden said, “Trump has doubled down on his short-sighted policy of going it alone and abandoning American leadership.”
Biden is also continuing a number of Trump’s initiatives to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In his new budget, President Biden is seeking $43 billion for nuclear weapons, including money to develop a new submarine-launched nuclear cruise missile, which, as a candidate, he described as a “bad idea.”
Meanwhile, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, has just published a report revealing global spending on nuclear weapons increased by $1.4 billion last year despite the pandemic. The report found the world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $72.6 billion on nuclear weapons in 2020 — that amounts to nearly $138,000 every minute. The United States spent by far the most — $37 billion — three times more than the next country, China, which spent $10 billion. Russia was next at $8 billion, followed by the United Kingdom, France, India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea. ICAN released this short video to accompany its new report.
ICAN VIDEO: $72.6 billion. That’s how much the nine nuclear-armed states spent on nuclear weapons in 2020, taxpayer money during the worst global pandemic in a century financing weapons of mass destruction. Although most countries support a global ban on nuclear weapons, these countries and companies spend billions to keep nuclear weapons in business — $72.6 billion for government agencies and private companies that build nuclear weapons. These companies fund major think tanks that write about nuclear weapons and hire lobbyists to make sure policymakers approve enormous nuclear weapon budgets the next year. This is the nuclear weapon funding cycle, a shadowy interplay between governments, private companies, think tanks and lobbyists, all complicit in today’s massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. It’s time to stop the cycle. It’s time for the ban.
AMY GOODMAN: That little report produced by ICAN.
We’re joined now by Alicia Sanders-Zakre, policy and research coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 for its work on the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Alicia is the co-author of the new report, “Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending.”
So you have a world where the wealthiest countries cannot find the means to inoculate the world, to get the vaccines necessary for the world to be protected from COVID-19, but are spending billions on nuclear weapons. Talk about how the whole system works. Talk about your report, Alicia.
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me on and for sharing the report.
You know, last year we did a report just on how much countries spent on nuclear weapons. We did the methodology to provide that estimate, which hasn’t been done very much in the past. And this year we wanted to show more of the big picture. Why is it that nine countries are spending more than $70 billion on their nuclear weapons in the middle of a global pandemic?
And so we looked at all of the pieces of the puzzle and the flow of money, the cycle of spending on weapons of mass destruction in just one year. And it’s pretty shocking. We saw, after those countries decided to spend $72.6 billion on their nuclear weapons, they gave out billions of dollars, over $27 billion in contracts, to the defense companies that build and maintain these weapons. And then those companies kept spending money to make sure that they kept getting money in years to come. So they spend over $117 million lobbying policymakers to increase spending on defense, and they also spent up to $10 million funding almost all of the major think tanks that research and write about nuclear weapons. So these are all of the actors, all of the players, in this dirty nuclear weapons business that we wanted to highlight and start to hold accountable.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, you mentioned the companies. Could you name them and tell us how much money they made off these contracts?
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. So, in the report, we feature all of the more than 20 companies that are currently involved in producing nuclear weapons. So, a lot of these companies have existing contract that they’re still fulfilling on nuclear weapons. But in 2020, 11 of those companies received new or modified contracts to work on existing or new nuclear weapon systems, amounting to a total of more than $27 billion. And there are a number of companies involved — just to name a few, of course, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing. Honeywell International is one not a lot of people might know about. The full list of all those companies and the amounts are in the report, so if you want more details, I’d recommend checking that out.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, despite the fact that, as you document, the U.S. spent over $37 billion on nuclear arms in the last year, that figure is expected to exponentially increase, according to the Congressional Budget Office, in the coming year because of technological upgrades to the nuclear arsenal in the U.S. Could you talk about what we know about forthcoming increases in nuclear spending here?
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. So, we’ve been seeing, I mean, from year to year, the spending on nuclear weapons has been increasing. As was mentioned, there was an increase in $1.4 billion on these weapons even in the middle of a global pandemic. And we know that that number is just going to continue to increase because of a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office looking at 10-year nuclear weapons costs, which found that there would be an increase of $140 billion over those 10 years compared to a previous 2019 report. So, you know, despite Biden’s campaign promises of wanting to work for arms control, wanting to work for disarmament, we’re seeing that in reality he’s going full steam ahead with Trump’s legacy nuclear weapons programs and continuing to spend more money on these weapons of mass destruction.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Alicia Sanders-Zakre, about the significance — I mean, he’s going to meet with the G7 countries — and what do nuclear weapons have to do with those countries? — and then the NATO summit. And the report you put out ahead of this summit, ICAN is arguing that members of the transatlantic alliance should embrace the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January. So, talk about how these two summits are critical to nuclear weapons and somehow turning the escalation of them around.
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, speaking of the NATO summit, in particular, we saw President Biden wrote, in an opinion piece to The Washington Post recently, that a real focus of this trip was to promote democratic values and to bring the power of democracy to these meetings. And I think that’s very relevant when it comes to nuclear weapons issues in NATO countries and in Europe, because, as this other report shows, that we just released today, in most countries across the NATO there is overwhelming support for the country to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, when you ask the people what they think. But despite popular opinion, democratic support for this treaty, for banning nuclear weapons, these governments continue to say that they don’t support the treaty, to refuse to join it. And this is a NATO position that’s really not in line with the democratic — their democratic values and democratic ideals. So, I think this is an opportunity for NATO to really reevaluate their stance as a democracy that listens to what the people want on key issues like nuclear weapons.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Alicia, could you talk about the extent to which, if at all, the Biden administration has departed from the Trump administration on nuclear weapons policy?
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: I think, so far, we really haven’t seen a departure. And this is clear in the recent 2022 budget request, which, as you mentioned in the introduction, keeps and continues to fund Trump’s additional nuclear weapons programs, as well as kind of the programs of record. So we really need to see more action from President Biden.
I think this upcoming meeting with President Putin is an opportunity for both countries to recognize the increasing risk of nuclear weapons, the devastating humanitarian consequences of these weapons, and take real steps and tangible progress towards nuclear disarmament and towards joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
AMY GOODMAN: Not only the issue of what would happen if a nuclear weapon was used — and, of course, that would be just devastating — but the fact that the money does not go, for example, to dealing with this global pandemic. I wanted to ask you about the report also naming think tanks which receive funding from nuclear weapons manufacturers. The list includes the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Can you talk more about the role of think tanks and these nuclear corporations?
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: Absolutely. I mean, this is really new, I think shocking, research in that it shows that upwards of 10 — in just one year, the companies that produce and work on nuclear weapons spent upwards of $10 million funding really almost all major think tanks that are writing and researching about nuclear weapons. And, you know, it’s not always possible to know exactly the extent of the influence of this funding, but what’s really concerning is, I think, the depth and how widespread this funding is. It’s not just one think tank; as I said, it’s really most of the think tanks that are doing substantial work on nuclear weapons. And I think it’s a systemic problem in the field that, you know, think tanks should be asking themselves, “How can we actually come together and address the perhaps undue influence of nuclear weapon-producing companies in this field, in this sector?”
AMY GOODMAN: As the Biden administration pours billions into developing new nuclear weapons, nuclear resisters are still going to prison for opposing U.S. nuclear policy. On Wednesday, Mark Colville, a member of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, reported to prison. He was sentenced in April to 21 months in prison, breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base April 4th, 2018, on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King. Colville and six other activists entered the base armed with hammers, crime scene tape, baby bottles containing their own blood, and an indictment charging the U.S. government with crimes against peace. Two other members of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, Martha Hennessy and Carmen Trotta, were recently released from prison. Martha Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker Movement. Your final comments on the role of activism when it comes to nuclear weapons?
ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE: I think it’s absolutely essential. You know, at the end of the day, these are weapons of mass destruction, and they have now been made illegal under the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons due to the collaborative work of activists and diplomats and scientists and researchers and people all around the world. And so, it’s really — we really need activism to change the status quo and to finally get rid of these weapons of mass destruction.
AMY GOODMAN: Alicia Sanders-Zakre, we want to thank you so much for being with us, policy and research coordinator for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. And we’ll link to the report, “Complicit: 2020 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending,” as we continue to cover in the coming days the G7, the NATO summit, the summit with President Biden and President Putin.
Next up, as President Biden pledges to buy half a billion vaccine doses to give to almost 100 countries in the world, we’ll look at why many Americans are refusing to get vaccinated. We’ll speak with Dr. Syra Madad of NYC Health and Hospitals, the nation’s largest public healthcare system, and why healthcare workers, a number of them, are saying no. Stay with us.
A woman walks past a wrecked van near the northwestern Syrian village of Barisha. A U.S. raid there in 2019 killed civilians according to local residents and medical staff. (photo: Ibramhim Yasouf/Getty)
Democratic Lawmakers Slam Pentagon for Undercounting Civilian Casualties
Sara Cammarata, Stars and Stripes
Cammarata writes: "The Pentagon's annual report to Congress on civilian casualties drew fierce backlash from two lawmakers who slammed the military's decision not to award condolence payments last year to families of civilians harmed by U.S. military operations throughout the world."
Despite congressional funding for “ex gratia” payments to those who have experienced “property damage, personal injury, or death” as a result of U.S. military activities, the Defense Department wrote in its report released last week that no such payments have been made.
The Defense Department recorded 23 civilian deaths and 10 injuries as a result of U.S. military action in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia in 2020. However, human rights organizations, nongovernmental organizations and monitoring groups contend the number is likely much higher.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the number of deaths from the military could be nearly five times higher, an estimate based on information from Airwars, a not-for-profit organization based in London that tracks civilian harm from international military action.
“To make matters worse, the department has failed to get grieving families the condolence payments that Congress has authorized. This is unacceptable and not how we uphold our nation's values and advance our interests overseas,” said Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Defense Department gives combatant commanders the authority to decide who is provided a condolence payment, so efforts to compensate civilians for damage in the post-9/11 wars have not be standardized.
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, called the lack of condolence payments “unconscionable.”
“Ending the forever wars starts with recognizing the humanity of the people who these wars have harmed. The Pentagon is always coming hat in hand begging for billions, yet last year they didn’t spend a penny of this fund Congress established to help fulfill our moral responsibility and build goodwill around the world,” the congressman said.
In the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress authorized $3 million for condolence payments to individuals affected by civilian loss or injury overseas, but “DoD did not offer or make any such ex gratia payments during 2020,” according to the report.
“Numerous factors can affect a commander’s decision to offer an ex gratia payments,” Defense Department spokesman Michael Howard said.
Howard said the $3 million in funding will be returned to the Treasury Department because they are one-year Overseas Contingency Operations funds.
The Pentagon has made payments in previous years, meant to help “express condolence, sympathy, or goodwill,” though the payments are not an acknowledgment of fault, according to the Defense Department report.
The fiscal year 2012 National Defense Authorization Act authorized funds for ex gratia payments in Afghanistan, and those funds were later expanded to include civilians harmed in Iraq in 2016, Syria in 2017 and Somalia, Libya, and Yemen by 2018.
A department memo in June 2020 to clarify the purpose and nature of the payments said the goal is to help forces build relations with locals on the ground and gain support of the communities where the U.S. conducts operations.
The Defense Department’s 2019 report to Congress on ex gratia payments said the Pentagon awarded more than $1.5 million in condolence fees. A Washington Post analysis from last year also revealed the military made about $2 million in condolence payments to civilians in Afghanistan from 2015 to 2020.
Khanna said he wants answers from the Pentagon on “why they are thwarting the will of Congress on ex gratia payments, and why DoD’s civilian casualty counts are far below those from on-the-ground human rights organizations, and lower than the United Nations civilian casualty count in Afghanistan.”
The Pentagon reported 20 deaths and 5 injuries from U.S. military action in Afghanistan last year, while the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan – a U.N. mission created to assist the country’s government -- attributed 89 deaths and 31 injuries to “international military forces” in its annual 2020 report. Those forces are largely made up of U.S. military personnel, Airwars wrote in an article responding to the Pentagon’s report.
Warren mandated the Pentagon report on civilian casualties in the 2018 NDAA. Priyanka Motaparthy, an international lawyer who works at the Human Rights Institute of Columbia University’s law school, said the report marks progress for transparency.
Directing the Pentagon to compile the report “was an important step forward in terms of transparency, but as you can see from the report, there's still big differences in terms of how different operations and commands do the reporting,” Motaparthy said.
For example, U.S. Central Command’s section on Yemen is brief, whereas U.S. Africa Command’s section is very detailed and the command even issues quarterly reports of civilian casualties.
Last year, Khanna and Warren introduced the “Protection of Civilians in Military Operations Act” in the House and Senate that would improve how the Pentagon reports and investigates civilian casualties and strengthen resources for the Defense Department to prevent, mitigate and respond to civilian deaths or injuries. However, the bill did not reach a full vote in either chamber.
Motaparthy said inconsistencies in how commands conduct investigations into civilian harm must be addressed to ensure thorough investigations. The military rarely talks to on-the-ground witnesses and relies heavily on internal military sources to confirm other organization’s tallies, she said.
Each year, “we see that the number of civilian casualties described in the report is significantly lower than what credible NGOs, human rights investigators describe in their own work,” she said. Yet, “the single thing that was the most shocking to me was that they had not made a single ex gratia payment.”
The Navajo Nation now has the highest per capita infection rate in the country. (photo: Getty)
A Broken System: The Number of Indigenous People Who Died From Coronavirus May Never Be Known
Jourdan Bennett-Begaye, Sunnie Clahchischiligi and Christine Trudeau, High Country News
Excerpt: "In May of 2020, the Navajo Nation reported one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in the United States."
From medical health privacy laws to a maze of siloed information systems, the true impact of COVID-19 on American Indian and Alaska Natives is impossible to calculate.
n May of 2020, the Navajo Nation reported one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in the United States. Since that milestone, official data reveal that the Navajo Nation has been one of the hardest-hit populations since the pandemic began. The Navajo Nation boasts the largest population of any Indigenous nation in the United States, and thousands of Navajos live outside the nation, in towns along the border, cities across the country, and in other parts of the world, making it difficult to tally the virus’ impacts on Navajo citizens.
It’s made worse by a labyrinthian system of local, state, federal and tribal data-reporting systems that often do not communicate with each other or share information. In an effort to come up with a more reliable fatality count, reporters with the Indigenous Investigative Collective (IIC) made multiple public-records requests for death records held by state medical examiners of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Those requests focused on the counties on or adjacent to the Navajo Nation where many Navajo families live. The states rejected those requests, citing privacy concerns, preventing independent analysis of those records to determine death rates. Experts also cite pervasive misidentification of race and ethnicity of victims at critical data collection points, making the true toll of the pandemic on the Navajo Nation impossible to ever know.
The Indigenous Investigative Collective has found that those data problems extend nationwide. As of June 2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 6,585 American Indian and Alaska Natives have died from COVID-19 — the highest rate of any ethnic group in the United States. That estimate likely falls far short of the actual death toll.
“Even though right now we’re showing as having some of the highest death rates, it’s a gross undercount,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, Pawnee, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) based in Seattle, Washington, one of 12 nationally recognized tribal epidemiology centers in the country.
That undercount leaves researchers and epidemiologists completely in the dark when creating practices and policies to deal with future pandemics.
WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS HIT the Navajo Nation, Utah Navajo Health System (UNHS) was at the forefront of providing testing. The private, not-for-profit corporation is tribally run and provides services to the Navajo Nation as well as rural Native and non-Native Utah communities. From the start of the pandemic, the UNHS data team reported its information to the state of Utah, local Indian Health Service (IHS) units and the Navajo Nation’s epidemiology center.
“We pretty much tracked anything that we were doing,” Verlyn Hawks, director of health information systems for Utah Navajo, said. “The scope of what we could handle is basically what we did.” At first it was just test results, then deaths and now vaccines. Hawks said he and his team reached out to neighboring health-care facilities like Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, New Mexico, to ask for COVID-19 data from their service area and would provide them with data. From there, he said, data were reported to the state of Utah and then passed to the CDC.
“But we really don’t have a good way to know where our numbers are going and what’s happening from there,” Hawks said, adding that the process for the Indian Health Service was equally opaque. “There’s no sharing between states.”
On the Navajo Nation, efforts to track cases, vaccinations and deaths are also complicated by the fact that community members move freely between health-care facilities, registering at different hospitals and clinics.
“Patients on the Navajo reservation tend to be kind of transient, meaning they go to different places for care,” Utah Navajo’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Jensen said.
Take for example a patient at Utah Navajo who tests positive for COVID-19, becomes ill, and seeks treatment at that Utah Navajo health center. But if that patient becomes critically ill, Utah Navajo would transfer the patient to a nearby hospital, and if that patient were to die from COVID-19 complications, the hospital they were transferred to may or may not report the death back to Utah Navajo, where the patient originally registered. The same is true for vaccines and COVID-19 results.
“Our systems can gather all kinds of data and run reports every way but sideways,” Jensen said. “But the transient part of that makes it more challenging, and obviously if somebody passes in an inpatient facility, we’re not notified unless we follow up with the family or the doctor calls.”
Accurately tracking Indigenous COVID-19 patients would involve the entire health system, which is made up of IHS health facilities, tribally owned facilities, tribal hospitals, urban Indian health programs, private clinics and other non-IHS health facilities, like city, county or private hospitals. No agency is consistently or reliably doing that.
IHS, which collects data from Indigenous nations that volunteer to share, relies on the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System, which receives its information from states. “We’re not [tracking COVID-19 deaths] because we want to avoid any underreporting,” said IHS Acting Director Elizabeth Fowler, a Comanche citizen and a descendant of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
The CDC, however, is also likely undercounting. A reliable database for the Urban Indian Health Institute’s Echo-Hawk is the APM Research Lab, which reported at least 5,477 Indigenous deaths as of March 2, based on figures from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Around the same time, the CDC was reporting 5,462 deaths.
All deaths, regardless of where they occur, are reported to the state, but the states have refused to release those details. The Indigenous Investigative Collective requested dates, cause and location of death, race, ethnicity, age, gender and a specific request for COVID-related information, including whether or not the infection may have occurred at a work site. Those requests were rejected by records custodians in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado, citing privacy and protected health information, obscuring information for COVID-19 deaths in dozens of tribal communities in those four states combined.
New Mexico, in particular, further explained the denial of public records, stating “the information contained in the responsive records consists of protected health information and information reasonably believed to allow identification of patients.” New Mexico Department of Health Records Custodian Deniece Griego-Martinez said even with names and case numbers redacted, patients could still be identified. “Since this information is identifying on its own and in combination with other publicly available information, it is not possible to redact the responsive records.”
GAPS IN STATES’ COVID-19 DATA often begin right after a person has died. The process for determining and recording the cause of death varies from state to state. In Minnesota, for example, cause of death is registered by medical certifiers such as physicians, medical examiners or coroners. If a person dies from COVID-19, the cause of death on the certificate may say respiratory or heart failure — the reasons for those failures are not included.
Minnesota funeral director Robert Gill, who is Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, said when he sits down to fill out vital statistics forms with a deceased’s family members, most of the work is straightforward: legal name, address at the time of death, social security number, next of kin, parents, children, siblings and details of funeral arrangements. Where it can get tricky is when he needs to include the person’s race and ethnicity.
“They could say, ‘I'm Swedish, African, German, Native American, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican all mixed in one,’ so then I’d ask the family, ‘Well what would you like? What are you, what would you legally consider yourself?’” Gill said. There’s no limit on how many races or tribes can be written down, and often everything is included. He also doesn’t differentiate between individuals who are enrolled in a federally recognized tribe or are descendants or simply community members.
“I write down what they would consider their race. Whether it gets recorded as that, I don’t know,” he said. “I send that into the state and I don’t know what they do with it.”
In Gill’s facility, identifying American Indian or Alaska Native people is part of the job. But in other parts of the country where medical examiners or funeral homes have no knowledge of Indian Country, those individuals can be identified as Hispanic, Asian or any other incorrect ethnicity because medical workers, funeral home directors or coroners simply look at the body and make a decision. While no data exists for death-certificate undercounts of Indigenous people, a 2016 report from the National Center for Health Statistics concluded that of everyone who self-identified as American Indian or Alaska Native on the U.S. Census, 48.6 percent were classified as another race on their death certificate.
“There are so many different ways that these death certificates are improperly categorized for race and ethnicity,” Echo-Hawk said. “But the number one issue ends up being nobody asks the family.”
The CDC website states that “cause-of-death information is not perfect, but it is very useful.” While the agency estimates that 20 to 30 percent of death certificates have issues with completeness, the agency adds: “This does not mean they are inaccurate.” The agency did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
The IHS has tried to correct the problem and continues to do so, with little success so far. In a 2020 COVID-19 response hearing, the chief medical officer for the IHS, Rear Admiral Michael Toedt, testified that the agency was working with the CDC to address the issue of racial misclassification through training. However, Toedt stressed that the main problem with collecting good, timely data for American Indian and Alaska Native deaths rested almost entirely on how the death certificate was filled out.
In short, death counts of Indigenous people, no matter how they died, are woefully inaccurate — and correcting that is likely impossible without a unified system for tracking health issues in Native communities, and regulations requiring death certificates to accurately reflect a person’s Indigenous citizenship, race and ethnicity. Experts who spoke with the Indigenous Investigative Collective could not give an exact number for the undercount.
A 2021 Urban Indian Health Institute report card that grades the quality of collecting and reporting COVID-19 data for Indigenous people gives most states a C grade or lower. The states were graded on the inclusion of Native people and statistics on state health dashboards as well as accurate CDC data for Indigenous people. That information, Echo-Hawk said, helps leaders make decisions and scientists think through vaccine allocations, and helps measure success or failure in the health system.
The omission of data on Native communities, Echo-Hawk said, is “data genocide,” contributing to the elimination of Native people in the public eye, and aiding the federal government in abandoning treaty laws and trust responsibilities. In other words, no data on Native people means no need for obligations or resources.
“We definitely are in a situation where we are not capturing all of the impacts, and we are not capturing all of the deaths for American Indians and Alaska Natives. So we know that the picture, the true picture, is actually worse than what the data tells us,” said Carolyn Angus-Hornbuckle, who is Mohawk and the chief operating officer and policy center director of the National Indian Health Board. “That information is needed because like every other government that’s facing this crisis, our tribal nations need to have real-time, accurate data so that they can protect their citizens.”
Meanwhile, infection rates and deaths in the Navajo Nation are improving, but Utah Navajo Health System CEO Michael Jensen said their work continues. “We’ve done our own contact tracing to find out where it started and who those people are interacting with; we’ve tried to share that publicly — for deceased rates, I think communities should know what’s going on,” he said.
“I hope everybody would want to provide the most accurate and true numbers possible.”
Indigenous leaders and activists participate in a prayer at the Mississippi headwaters on the third day of a protest of the Line 3 pipeline. (photo: Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters)
Line 3: Protests Over Pipeline Through Tribal Lands Spark Clashes and Mass Arrests
Katharine Gammon, Guardian UK
Gammon writes: "Environmental protesters and Native American tribes have joined together to try to block construction efforts that would expand and repair a controversial pipeline called Line 3, which would carry hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil through tribal lands and fragile watersheds in northern Minnesota."
Police arrested more than 100 people this week as activists try to block the expansion of the pipeline
The protesters said they were there as water and land protectors, fighting Enbridge, a Canadian-owned company, and the $9bn upgrade of the pipeline. The action sparked a confrontation with law enforcement officers and raised the prospects of a high-profile fight set to highlight the use of fossil fuels at a time of growing climate crisis.
Earlier this week, police made mass arrests of people who had chained themselves to construction equipment and barricaded a road to a construction site off Highway 71 north of Park Rapids with an old fishing boat and other obstacles. Police also used a sonic device known as a long-range acoustic device, or LRAD, on the protesters.
Representatives of the legal aid non-profit National Lawyers Guild, who were present at the protest, said more than 100 people had been arrested. US Customs and Border Protection sent a helicopter that hovered 20 to 25ft over a group of protesters occupying a pump station, kicking up clouds of dust and debris.
“We continue on our path to resistance until the proper intervention by the Biden administration is done, which is suspending the water crossing permits and ordering a full environmental review,” said Tara Houska, a tribal attorney and the founder of the advocacy organization Giniw Collective. “That’s what I am here to protect.”
The project, which received its final approvals under Donald Trump, is a 340-mile rerouting of a wider pipeline network. Once completed, it would carry 760,000 barrels of tar-sands oil a day from Alberta, Canada, across northern Minnesota and into Wisconsin to the tip of Lake Superior. The trip takes oil across 200 bodies of water, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and the area is also home to traditional wild rice harvesting.
Participants called on Joe Biden to stop Line 3, which opponents say threatens northern Minnesota’s waters, the global climate, and Anishinaabe treaty rights.
“Our ancestors made agreements to take care of this water and land for ever together, and now is our time to do that.” said Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth in a statement.
Several Ojibwe tribes and environmental groups have opposed the pipeline, arguing in court that the line poses significant environmental risks to sensitive waterways and areas where tribal members hunt, fish and gather food.
In a statement issued on Monday, Enbridge said it had to evacuate 44 workers from the site, including 10 employees of a Native-owned contractor from the White Earth Reservation. “The project is already providing significant economic benefits for counties, small businesses, Native American communities, and union members – including creating 5,200 family-sustaining construction jobs, and millions of dollars in local spending and tax revenues,” the company wrote.
Biden’s administration has put environmental justice forward as a priority – but it remains to be seen how they react to thorny issues such as fossil fuel infrastructure, said Dana Powell, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University who studies indigenous resistance movements.
She added that the Enbridge project was particularly interesting because it was not proposed future infrastructure like the Dakota Access pipeline, which garnered huge protests in 2016. Instead, Line 3 is an existing pipeline that is old, corroded and falling down.
“So we have a choice in front of us: are we investing billions of dollars into the restoration and upgrade of old infrastructure or maybe investing in different kinds of systems,” she says.
Indigenous-led resistance is just part of a broader movement that has gone back centuries, said Ben Railton, an American studies professor at Fitchburg State University. He said that, especially in the US, people tend to think about Native Americans throughout history either as vanishing or victims. “They are either tragically lost or gone from a present tense, or seen as victims like Trail of Tears, unjust laws and genocides,” Railton said.
But history is actually awash with examples of Indigenous groups engaging in active resistance to change the laws or infringement on land. Railton points to the protests at Standing Rock, when thousands of protesters tried to stop the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017 – it was the largest gathering of native peoples in more than 100 years.
This is a 21st-century moment of solidarity and collective action, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, says Railton.
He added: “But this moment is also building on a great legacy and taking it another step.”
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