31 May 21
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Bill McKibben | Big Oil's Bad, Bad Day
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "In what may be the most cataclysmic day so far for the traditional fossil-fuel industry, a remarkable set of shareholder votes and court rulings have scrambled the future of three of the world's largest oil companies."
Crushing blows to three of the world’s largest oil companies have made it clear that the arguments many have been making for decades have sunk in at the highest levels.
n what may be the most cataclysmic day so far for the traditional fossil-fuel industry, a remarkable set of shareholder votes and court rulings have scrambled the future of three of the world’s largest oil companies. On Wednesday, a court in the Netherlands ordered Royal Dutch Shell to dramatically cut its emissions over the next decade—a mandate it can likely only meet by dramatically changing its business model. A few hours later, sixty-one per cent of shareholders at Chevron voted, over management objections, to demand that the company cut so-called Scope 3 emissions, which include emissions caused by its customers burning its products. Oil companies are willing to address the emissions that come from their operations, but, as Reuters pointed out, the support for the cuts “shows growing investor frustration with companies, which they believe are not doing enough to tackle climate change.” The most powerful proof of such frustration came shortly afterward, as ExxonMobil officials announced that shareholders had (over the company’s strenuous opposition) elected two dissident candidates to the company’s board, both of whom pledge to push for climate action.
The action at ExxonMobil’s shareholder meeting was fascinating: the company, which regularly used to make the list of most-admired companies, had been pulling out all stops to defeat the slate of dissident candidates, which was put forward by Engine No. 1, a tiny activist fund based in San Francisco that owns just 0.02 per cent of the company’s stock, but has insisted that Exxon needs a better answer to the question of how to meet the climate challenge. Exxon has simply insisted on doubling down: its current plan actually calls for increasing oil and gas production in Guyana and the Permian Basin this decade, even though the International Energy Agency last week called for an end to new development of fossil fuels. Observers at the meeting described a long adjournment midmeeting, and meandering answers to questions from the floor, perhaps as an effort to buy time to persuade more shareholders to go the company’s way. But the effort failed. Notably, efforts by activists to push big investors appear to have paid off: according to sources, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, backed three of the dissident candidates for the Exxon board.
The decision by the Dutch court, which Shell has already said it expects to appeal, is at least as remarkable. Drawing, in part, on European human-rights laws, it finds that, though Shell has begun to make changes in its business plans, they are not moving fast enough to fall in line with the demands of science, and that it must more than double the pace of its planned emissions cuts. “The court understands that the consequences could be big for Shell,” Jeannette Honée, a spokeswoman for the court, said in a video about the ruling. “But the court believes that the consequences of severe climate change are more important than Shell’s interests." Honée continued, “Severe climate change has consequences for human rights, including the right to life. And the court thinks that companies, among them Shell, have to respect those human rights.”
No one knows quite how the ruling, if it stands, will play out. Shell is based in the Netherlands, but it has operations around the world. The ruling, though, is the firmest official pronouncement yet about what a commitment to climate science requires. The forty-five-per-cent reduction in emissions by 2030 from 2019 levels that the court ordered is very close to what, in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) said would be required to keep us on a pathway that might limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The court gently dismissed Shell’s attempts to evade the science: the company, the judges wrote, believes that “too little attention is paid to adaptation strategies, such as air conditioning, which may contribute to reducing risks associated with hot spells, and to water and coastal management to counter the sea level rise caused by global warming. These adaptation strategies reveal that measures can be taken to combat the consequences of climate change, which may in result reduce the risks. However, these strategies do not alter the fact that climate change due to CO2 emissions has serious and irreversible consequences.”
Instead, it’s clear that the arguments that many have been making for a decade have sunk in at the highest levels: there is no actual way to evade the inexorable mathematics of climate change. If you want to keep the temperature low enough that civilization will survive, you have to keep coal and oil and gas in the ground. That sounded radical a decade ago. Now it sounds like the law.
Passing the Mic
The mayors of Miami-Dade County, Florida; Athens, Greece; and Freetown, Sierra Leone, with funding from the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation, have each committed to appointing chief heat officers in their cities and establishing Heat Health Task Forces to dedicate resources to manage mounting heat risks that climate change is producing. Jane Gilbert, who has lived in Miami for a quarter century and served as the director of the city’s resilience programs, has taken on a new role there as the city’s chief heat officer. (Our interview has been edited.)
A reason that Americans like coming to Miami is that it’s hot, but is there too much of a good thing? Does it feel different than it did when you first moved here, twenty-six years ago?
People love visiting Miami for our beaches, art, culture, and night life, and for our Miami Heat (pun intended). However, extreme heat can be quite dangerous, especially for outdoor workers, pedestrians, seniors, and people who can’t afford the increasing costs of A.C. The combination of temperature and humidity during Miami summers results in many days where our heat index reaches dangerous levels. I’ve definitely felt the difference since I moved here, and there’s data to back this up. Research shows that Miami experiences twenty-seven more days that reach at least ninety degrees Fahrenheit in a year than it did in 1995. We’re also expected to have a dramatic increase in the number of days with a heat index of a hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit or higher, over the next thirty years. Miami’s residents and visitors expect it to be warm, but, as temperatures rise, they need to know about the heat-health dangers, and the city needs to be able to protect them. We don’t have all of the resources or technical expertise to do it ourselves. So, when we were approached by the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the group that leads the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, about championing heat action, Miami-Dade County’s mayor, Daniella Levine Cava, jumped at the idea to bring in other global mayors to help brand #HeatSeason (like hurricane season). Together, we will share and replicate the best ways to protect people and their jobs from heat.
How does excess heat interact with other climate problems the city faces—rising sea levels, vulnerability to hurricanes, and so on?
The biggest risk to human lives is having a hurricane followed by a heat wave. Miami has always been vulnerable to hurricanes, but climate change seems to be increasing the intensity of those storms. Hurricanes most often occur in our late summer months, and often result in major and extended power outages. After Hurricane Irma, in 2017, twelve people died of heat-related causes in a nursing home in Broward County, just north of us. Since then, all nursing homes are required to have backup power with the capacity to keep a space cool for at least ninety-six hours in the event of a power outage. Now we need to make sure other vulnerable populations have access to a place to cool off after a storm. Moreover, climate-change impacts, and especially heat risks, are deeply intertwined with social and economic inequalities. Identifying and adopting heat-risk reduction policies and solutions must be informed by the community as well as the science.
Are there some easy first steps to cool a city down a little? What can you do with pavement? How do you make shade?
Plant trees! Tree-shaded surfaces can be as much as thirty-five or forty degrees cooler than surfaces in open sun. Trees can also reduce utility costs, absorb stormwater, and remove pollution and carbon from the atmosphere. We’ve set an ambitious goal of reaching a thirty-per-cent tree canopy countywide by 2030, and prioritizing those neighborhoods with the least shade. Traditional pavements absorb lots of sunlight and can significantly heat up our urban areas. The City of Miami has required cool roofs and pavements in its zoning code for ten years. Miami Beach is now testing some new cool pavements. The evidence that such interventions work exists, but there is much education to be done to make sure the money we spend on rebuilding infrastructure, especially after COVID-19, is heat-risk-informed.
Climate School
Here’s a part of the energy story that’s going to keep developing: Michael Klare, the emeritus professor of peace and security studies based at Hampshire College, argues at the Web site TomDispatch that, if we’re not careful, the scramble for the cobalt, lithium, and rare-earth minerals necessary for storage batteries and wind turbines could turn into geopolitical combat not unlike the long battles over oil. He points out that China is a major producer and processor: “In truth, there’s little choice but for Washington and Beijing to collaborate with each other and so many other countries in accelerating the green energy transition,” he writes. Meanwhile, the Financial Times has been tracking claims that China has been using forced labor to produce solar panels: their latest reporting follows a Potemkinish tour of a Chinese plant. And last week, John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, said that the Biden Administration is considering sanctions on Chinese solar panels. As I pointed out in April, the balancing act between quickly weaning the world off fossil fuels—whose emissions, even without climate change, accounted for a fifth of the world’s deaths in 2018—and safeguarding human rights is exquisitely hard.
The Tulsa massacre is believed to be the first aerial assault on US soil. (photo: The Department Of Special Collections & University Archives McFarlin Library The University of Tulsa)
Tulsa Race Massacre at 100: An Act of Terrorism America Tried to Forget
Bayeté Ross Smith and Jimmie Briggs, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "It was among the worst acts of violence in US history, and no one was held accountable - how much has changed in the last 100 years?"
acial terror has long been the go-to response for aggrieved whites in America. The insurrectionists waving Confederate flags who attacked the Capitol on 6 January to overthrow the results of the 2020 national elections weren’t an anomaly. The intimidation, disempowerment and humiliation of the “other” to maintain entitled rights has been a recurring narrative since the arrival of European colonizers in America and the growth of the slave trade.
“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement,” Carol Anderson writes in her seminal 2016 book, White Rage. “It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.”
This is a lens through which to understand the significance of the centenary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, among the worst acts of violence in US history, and a past that lives today in the ongoing political, economic and extrajudicial attacks on Black people. As the United States and the world commemorate the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, the long-hoped-for racial reckoning still awaits a country seemingly unwilling to acknowledge in its historical memory the most terrible, deliberately obscured sins in its past and their impact today.
Between 31 May-1 June, white residents, peace officers, and soldiers attacked the historical Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the “Black Wall Street”, killing an estimated 300 residents, displacing upwards of 1,000 more, and inflicting irrevocable economic damage to a thriving business district created by and for Black Americans. It’s believed to have been the first time that bombs were dropped on an American community, and the actions undertaken by the white marauders, who received significant resistance from both everyday Black civilians and soldiers recently returned from the first world war, wasn’t taught in Oklahoma school books and barely mentioned in national textbooks for generations afterwards.
As Blacks were recklessly and wantonly raped, murdered, and driven from hard-earned homes and businesses, the cover-up by local and state government representatives was chillingly efficient. Survivors and their descendants held out hope across generations that the full truth of what happened to Black Tulsans would be acknowledged, and recompense would come. A century later, thanks to the last three survivors of the Tulsa Massacre and the descendants of those who were killed or survived the violence, the full horror may finally be understood.
For much of 1919, from March through November, more than 100 Black people were lynched, thousands were seriously wounded or died from mob actions, and over 30 cities across the United States were attacked by spasmodic, white-led violence including Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Syracuse, New York. Faced with post-pandemic fear and uncertainty following the devastatingly fatal spread of the Spanish flu a year before; the return of nearly 400,000 Black soldiers from combat in the first world war; a squeeze for housing and jobs traditionally held by white men; and the emergence of a thriving, robust Black middle and working class, white Americans in the south and the north saw Black strivers as an existential threat. They seized upon any reason, no matter how flimsy the excuse, to lay waste to their neighbourhoods and communities through physical attacks, as well as rhetoric and policies reminiscent of the past five years of American political life.
Over the past two years, artist and photographer Bayeté Ross Smith has re-visited the sites of Red Summer and the violence following the war, capturing present-day images through 360 VR (virtual reality) footage and pairing those with interviews of descendants, historians and activists to bring greater consciousness to a little understood and discussed historical period of the United States that is still relevant today. In addition to Tulsa, Smith visited Washington DC, where white men in military uniform laid siege to Black neighbourhoods forcing President Woodrow Wilson to call in the National Guard; Omaha where 10,000 whites attacked a county courthouse where they captured and burned alive a Black man accused of rape; and Chicago, where an estimated 50 people were killed, over 500 injured and more than 1,000 Black families left homeless in the greatest violence in the Red Summer. And he also visited East St Louis, Illinois, where whites fearful of losing political power attacked Black voters and their white allies two years before the Red Summer.
Before and after the Red Summer, Black Americans fought white rage with whatever weapons they could; following the first world war Black veterans became a core factor in that resistance. As NAACP co-founder and scholar WEB DuBois wrote in The Crisis in May 1919, “we return (from World War I) fighting”. DuBois had previously called for Blacks to “close ranks” with their white counterparts at the outset of the war and volunteer to serve. Returning home to the unchanged realities of systemic racism and violence drew many to political action. The NAACP had less than 10,000 members in the early 1900s, but grew to 100,000 by the early 1920’s.
Out of the ashes of Red Summer, the East St Louis riots, the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the later civil rights efforts of the United Negro Improvement Association, founded by revolutionary activist Marcus Garvey, the seeds of the modern civil rights movement and ultimately Black Lives Matter were sown.
Jamaican writer Claude McKay’s July 1919 poem, If We Must Die, was the Black anthem for the Red Summer and endures today as a call to never accede to terror, violence or injustice. In it he urges “If we must die, let it not be like hogs….Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Yet, without full understanding and acknowledgement of the lessons and still resilient legacy of that span of American history, we are inevitably sentenced to relive a contemporary version of it.
In the century since the Red Summer and Tulsa Massacre, historical memory regarding race has perhaps been among the greatest casualties in the war for a commonly shared national narrative. Within the next 20-25 years, the United States will be a country of so-called “minorities”, people of color, further interrogating the ever-relevant question of “who is us?” Can someone be “American” without embodying a fossilized, milquetoast archetype still upheld by many in the United States? In his 1925 poem, I, too am America, Langston Hughes proclaimed his right to full citizenship and recognition, but in the 21st century “Americanness”, and what parts of history deserve to be explored, are still being debated. The denial of truth risks not only the social gains for intersectional racial justice, but also the possibility of a true reckoning with this country’s terrorism of people of color, including Native Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders and Latinos.
Racial terror undermined the promise of Reconstruction in the wake of the civil war. Between 1865-1877, Freedmen saw unparalleled economic and political gains throughout the defeated south and in urban areas in the north where burgeoning opportunities in industry and commerce prompted the first Great Migration. White backlash – and fear of Black excellence – was swift, without true accountability, or justice. More than 1,000 lynchings occurred in the south by 1920; 90% of those killed were Black and more than half happened in Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and Louisiana – also locations of Red Summer murders. Louisiana saw two of the most horrifying instances of racial massacres. In April 1873, approximately 150 Black men were killed by armed whites for peacefully and freely assembling in front of a courthouse. More are thought to have perished but the precise number remains unknown as many bodies were thrown into the Red River. A year later in Coushatta, Louisiana, six white Republicans and 20 Black witnesses were killed by members of a paramilitary outfit called the “White League”.
Scores of Blacks migrated north, where the racial codes around housing, jobs and education had a less threatening veneer but were no more equitable than what was faced in the south. By the end of 1919, over a million Black Americans had relocated to northern communities such as Chicago and Philadelphia, whose Black populations grew by 148% and 500%, respectively.
In the years immediately preceding the Red Summer, the United States was a country very much on edge, having formally entered the war in 1917, then facing a global Spanish flu pandemic a year later. In many urban hubs restless white residents blamed the spread of the disease on Black soldiers returning from the war as well as international migrants. To white men, Black men in uniform were especially a tremble-inducing sight, returning to America having proven themselves on the battlefield and received widespread recognition and awards from the French, alongside whom they often fought. Yet after the war’s end, more than 13 Black veterans were lynched across the United States – most while wearing their uniforms – according to the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative.
Wilson, the first southerner in the White House since the civil war and the second Democrat, largely ignored the racial violence that occurred between 1917-1923. As president, he enacted segregation within the federal government. He also infamously screened DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, praising the film, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan, saying it was “like writing history with lightning”. His tolerance and general blind eye to the year-long racist attacks, even when they occurred within view of the White House, gave tacit approval to the violence.
By mid-summer 1919, the pace of violent incidents had escalated. Justification often hinged on the enduring racist perception of Black men victimizing white women, but usually they were instigated intentionally to undermine or destroy some emblem of Black progress. As Quixotic as it ultimately was, resistance inspired communities of color across the country to advocate and mobilize with newfound vigor and hope. The individual toll of the Red Summer on communities across the country was often too heavy to overcome in many places – as the economic and psychological trauma proved to be too great for recovery. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre remains the most visceral example.
On 31 May that year, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland entered the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa to use one of the only public bathrooms accessible to Black residents. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, he either accidentally stepped on her foot or startled a 19-year-old elevator operator named Sarah Page. Either way, she screamed, drawing bystanders to beat and detain Rowland for arrest by the local police. Black residents – including veterans from the first world war marched to the police station in protest and were met by a white mob looking to take Rowland. In the ensuing confrontation white civilians with the active participation of police, military soldiers and state agents attacked the Greenwood neighbourhood, known as “Black Wall Street”.
When it was over on 1 June, more than 300 Black residents were dead, thousands were injured and maimed, 1,200 homes were destroyed, and over a million dollars (in 1921 value) in damage was inflicted, according to NAACP executive secretary Walter White. In the aftermath, the official death toll was 36, though many Black bodies were burned, put in mass graves, driven away in trucks, or thrown in rivers.
“One story was told to me by an eyewitness of five colored men trapped in a burning house,” White recounted in a later report. “Four were burned to death. A fifth attempted to flee, was shot to death as he emerged from the burning structure, and his body was thrown back into the flames.”
BC Franklin, father of renowned historian and scholar John Hope Franklin, was a Greenwood district lawyer who survived and recounted that the “sidewalk was literally covered with burning turpentine balls”, from bombs dropped on the Black community by airplanes. “For fully forty-eight hours, the fires raged and burned everything in its path and it left nothing but ashes and burned safes and trunks and the like that were stored in beautiful houses and businesses.”
Wilson’s successor in the White House, Ohio Republican Warren G Harding is still among the most forward-looking presidents on racial equity and justice. Less than a week after the carnage in Tulsa, he gave the commencement address at Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, the first degree-granting historically Black college and university. “God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness, and the justice of this country, we never see another spectacle like it,” he commented in reference to Tulsa. In his State of the Union address a month before, Harding asked Congress to pass anti-lynching legislation, a request still unfulfilled today.
In the weeks after the massacre, the Tulsa City Commission squarely laid blame for the deaths and destruction at the feet of Black residents, absolving the white mob of any wrongdoing. “Let the blame for this Negro uprising lie right where it belongs – on those armed Negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it and any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong,” stated the body officially. No insurance claims made by Black survivors were honored and the only recompense of any kind went to a white gun store owner whose businesses was raided by white residents en route to terrorize the Greenwood community.
In 1997, the state of Oklahoma convened a study commission to fully examine what occurred in Tulsa, and the role of state and local government, law enforcement, the military and civilians – both Black and white. The report produced in 2000 affirmed the accounts of Black survivors and witnesses to the extent of the violence, targeted dismantling of Black wealth, and cover-up by authorities. Oklahoma’s governor at the time, Frank Keating, accepted the report but rejected its calls for reparations. A lawsuit filed by esteemed Harvard professor Charles Ogletree, along with civil rights attorney Johnny Cochran, among others, was eventually rejected by the US supreme court.
Three years ago, Tulsa mayor GT Bynum announced a citywide search for mass graves from the 1921 massacre, with one site having been found last fall in the midst of nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. Excavation of remains will resume in June. The remaining three survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre – 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, her brother 100-year-old Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, and 106-year-old Lessie “Mama Randle” Benningfield Randle testified two weeks ago before Congress. The survivors are lead plaintiffs in a recent lawsuit for reparations.
“This story shouldn’t go away,” observes Dreisen Heath, a researcher and human rights advocate with Human Rights Watch who spearheaded the organization’s recent reporting on economic and policing inequities for Black Tulsa residents, as well as an historically grounded case for reparations to survivors and descendants of victims. “The [state] culpability is there [as well as] the continued preservation of whiteness and power in Tulsa. There is massive media coverage of [the Tulsa Massacre Centennial] and I appreciate it, but I also hope that news coverage encapsulates the continuing harm since the massacres. The book didn’t close in the late afternoon of June 1, 1921 when martial law was declared.”
Disgraced former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel on May 9, 2018 in New York City. (photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
Delmarie Cobb | Skin Privilege
Delmarie Cobb, The Publicity Works
Cobb writes: "Black people witness 'skin privilege' everyday. It's so matter of fact that it hardly gets a second notice unless Black people sound the alarm."
lack people witness “skin privilege” everyday. It’s so matter of fact that it hardly gets a second notice unless Black people sound the alarm. We watch people harm us and land on their feet as if nothing ever happened. Yet, we seldom get the benefit of the doubt. In fact, we’re punished—even fatally--for the smallest infractions: allegedly passing a fake $20 bill, stopping to look at a construction site, shooting a warning shot at a home intruder in the middle of the night, failure to signal a lane change, walking out of a garage with a cellphone or playing in the park with a toy gun.
Very seldom do we get a chance to walk away or reinvent ourselves. Whatever our crime is against society it is a permanent scarlet letter that we’ll wear forever. It becomes the parenthetical that describes us until we die.
For a second time, it was announced that former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is being tapped to join President Joe Biden’s administration--this time to serve as Japan’s next U.S. ambassador. The double standard is incredulous. Nearly everyone I talked to thought it was a done deal. As one report put it, “In selecting Emanuel to serve as his chief envoy to Japan, Biden will reward an informal adviser to his campaign and a significant force in Democratic Party politics for much of the last three decades with one of the highest-profile ambassadorial roles."
The fact that Emanuel’s administration tried to cover up the murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald at the hands of a Chicago police officer is insignificant. He paid the price. He left with his dignity after deciding not to seek a third term for mayor. Avoiding a defeat, Emanuel was rewarded with becoming a political analyst for ABC News. He was rewarded with a job at an investment banking firm. Now, he’s being rewarded with a high profile ambassadorship.
Understand, this is the consolation prize after being bypassed for Transportation Secretary. Even opinion writers who aren’t fans thought he was the perfect pick. After all, he spent $109 million to improve the Riverwalk. Emanuel spent $64 million to build the Navy Pier Flyover. Separation of the Lakefront Trail got a $12 million jump-start from Republican businessman Ken Griffin, who in 2020 spent $54 million to defeat Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s Fair Tax. Emanuel implemented the Loop Link at a cost of $41 million to save seven minutes off the commute of suburbanites heading to Union Station. He designated 100 miles of bicycle lanes at a cost of $67,000 per mile.
In addition to giving his corporation counsel the green light to pay Laquan McDonald’s mother $5 million to keep the details of her son’s death quiet only five days after the runoff election, the former mayor closed 50 public schools in predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods. He closed six of 12 mental health clinics in these communities. Now, who needs access to mental health care more than Chicago’s Black and brown residents who are underserved, underemployed and under constant threat of violence?
He used millions of TIF dollars to subsidize private developers in predominantly white communities instead of incentivizing them to develop in blighted neighborhoods as originally intended by Mayor Harold Washington. Emanuel’s departing commemoration to his tenure as mayor was the $2.4 billion in taxpayer funding for two transformative projects in the South Loop and Lincoln Park. The mega developments will create two new neighborhoods over the next 20 years. He also got a chance to take credit for a new grocery store in the 5th Ward before leaving office, even though he put a brick on it for six years. The petty gentleman didn’t lift a finger to address the food desert created by Dominick’s closing its stores in Chicago. It wasn’t until the alderman brought a grocer to the table that City Hall got involved. He could care less that seniors had to travel miles out of their way to shop at a full service grocery store.
Emanuel had no vision when it came to Black communities. He supported the vision of aldermen who voted with him nearly 100%, but he repeatedly failed to see what Hillary Clinton calls the challenge of politicians, “…to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.”
COVID -19 didn’t create the disparities that were revealed during the pandemic. The city’s Black and brown communities have been victims of benign neglect for decades. Emanuel continued the disinvestment started by Mayor Richard M. Daley. The only difference was Emanuel’s arrogance. His modes operandi was to rip the bandage off the wound—scab and all—with the belief it would heal and people eventually will forget the pain.
It was the belief of many of Emanuel’s Black voters that he would help our communities. His ties to the first Black United States President from Chicago, his work for Bill Clinton, his knowledge of federal government, his legislative skills as a congressman and White House aide and his connections to the investment world were suppose to translate into someone who finally would deliver for us.
In the 2019 municipal election, I discovered there was no internet access on 55th and Halsted streets, while setting up my candidate’s office. The 20th Ward candidate wanted to open her campaign office in the heart of the ward, but the trade-off meant using hotspots to access the internet. For years, no internet access meant students could do only basic homework, residents couldn’t conduct the day-to-day business transactions that most people take for granted or only attract businesses that aren’t reliant on the internet to operate--cash and carry type businesses. We found out that half the households in Englewood, Auburn Gresham and South Shore didn’t have internet access. It quickly became a campaign issue for Nicole Johnson.
Fast forward a year later to the COVID-19 pandemic and residents in Black and brown communities are left behind even further. The students can’t attend school remotely, workers can’t work from home and residents hardest hit by COVID-19 can’t schedule a vaccination appointment. A recent Chicago Tribune article reported, “more than 1 million first doses given in Chicago found nearly 60% of shots went to suburbanites and residents of neighborhoods deemed to have the lowest risk of COVID-19.” The lack of internet access was a major factor. Yet, Mayor Emanuel could find money to attract tourists, provide quality of life amenities for the elite and create whole communities out of thin air.
I’m not saying Emanuel didn’t do anything for Black and brown residents, but the bad outweighs the good. Regardless of his record, there are people in Biden’s ear advocating for him to add to Emanuel’s resume. As usual, the same people who helped elect Biden are being kicked to the curb. By elevating Emanuel, Chicago’s Black voters are reminded just how insignificant our pain is in the big scheme of things.
Imagine if the elite and powerful advocated just as vociferously for us. Imagine if they would forgive our transgressions so easily. Imagine if they made sure to help us always land on our feet. That my friend are the benefits of “skin privilege,” something we can only witness, but seldom know.
President Biden made clear during his presidential campaign that he intended to undo much of his predecessor's immigration legacy. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/NYT)
Biden Aims to Rebuild and Expand Legal Immigration
Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times
Excerpt: "If President Biden gets his way, it will soon be far easier to immigrate to the United States."
Documents obtained by The New York Times show far-reaching efforts by President Biden to remake the immigration system and undo much of his predecessor’s legacy.
f President Biden gets his way, it will soon be far easier to immigrate to the United States. There will be shorter, simpler forms and applicants will have to jump through fewer security hoops. Foreigners will have better opportunities to join their families and more chances to secure work visas.
A 46-page draft blueprint obtained by The New York Times maps out the Biden administration’s plans to significantly expand the legal immigration system, including methodically reversing the efforts to dismantle it by former President Donald J. Trump, who reduced the flow of foreign workers, families and refugees, erecting procedural barriers tougher to cross than his “big, beautiful wall.”
Because of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, the average time it takes to approve employer-sponsored green cards has doubled. The backlog for citizenship applications is up 80 percent since 2014, to more than 900,000 cases. Approval for the U-visa program, which grants legal status for immigrants willing to help the police, has gone from five months to roughly five years.
Keisha Banks. (photo: Ting Shen/BuzzFeed News)
The World Has Changed, but the Hospitality Industry Hasn't. That's Bad for Workers.
Clarissa-Jan Lim, BuzzFeed
Lim writes: "Tenuous employment. Dangerous working conditions. The pandemic has exposed fundamental flaws with how the hospitality industry operates."
or two decades, Keisha Banks had worked on and off in the hospitality industry — until last year, when she was unceremoniously let go from her job as an event server at the Chateau Marmont via a mass email sent in March 2020 to employees of the iconic Hollywood hotel.
Banks, 41, had an inkling that things were going downhill in the industry as soon as hotel guests started “dropping off like flies” in early March, canceling their reservations for events and rooms. She told BuzzFeed News she was taken aback because the notice was “vague and impersonal.”
“When you work at Chateau, one of the things they say is, ‘We're all like family here,’” Banks said. “And then to get this really blunt, ‘You’re cut off’ email was bad.”
It was the first in a streak of unfortunate events that has upended her life and the lives of many others like her.
As tourism collapsed and businesses closed down in the early weeks of the pandemic, millions of people became unemployed, facing down a world of uncertainty. No industry dodged the effects of the pandemic, but almost none was clobbered as hard as leisure and hospitality, which saw its unemployment rate peak in April 2020 at a staggering 39%.
Now, as the US emerges from the pandemic, with 50% of adults fully vaccinated as of the end of May, workers are returning to industries decimated by COVID-19. Many businesses are reopening and travel numbers are rebounding, and there were notable hospitality job gains in April 2021, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But employment in the industry is still down by 2.8 million, or 16.8%, since February last year. Some businesses, especially those in hospitality, have reportedly struggled to find workers as they reopen. As a result, some business owners have concluded that unemployment benefits are too robust, rather than that their businesses are not paying people enough. In recent weeks, some two dozen Republican governors have ended the extra $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits in their states so as to force people back to work.
But for many workers, the pandemic has exposed fundamental flaws with how the hospitality industry operates. In many cases, they are being asked to go back to jobs with weak employment and safety protections, and for pay that still does not reflect the value of their work or the economic destruction that the pandemic wrought on their lives. After 15 months of tumult, not everyone is ready or willing to return to a job that underpays, offers no paid sick leave, and treats them as expendable.
For Banks, who has long looked to hospitality work to bolster her income, she’s hesitant to return to an industry that has not done right by her. And she no longer feels like she can rely on this line of work the way she used to.
“It would mean going back to a broken system,” she said. “Why should rich people get to choose their careers and the rest of us be forced to get just the less fulfilling jobs that are left over?”
Banks was one of the hundreds of employees whom the Chateau Marmont fired in March last year as hotels’ occupancy rates plummeted. Kurt Petersen, copresident of Unite Here Local 11, a labor union that represents hospitality workers in Southern California, said the Chateau neither offered its employees severance nor extended their health benefits beyond a few weeks.
In the months after Banks was laid off, Los Angeles slowly but surely grew into a COVID hot spot. Some of the city’s highest case rates were recorded in neighborhoods where residents are more likely to live in cramped spaces and hold low-paying “essential” jobs with little to no workplace protections.
Meanwhile, as thousands of essential workers got sick and those in hospitality were forced to choose between unemployment and risking their health, the lifestyles of the rich and fabulous sauntered on. Despite stay-at-home orders and a statewide mask mandate, celebrities and influencers threw ragers, brazenly flouted safety guidelines, and challenged public criticism by lamenting, as Kris Jenner did, that “all we can do is live our lives the best way we know how.” California lawmakers, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, attended birthday dinners and traveled with lobbyists to Hawaii, disregarding the very restrictions they had ordered.
As Banks watched politicians and celebrities gallivant around town, it struck her that the only people who were out were the ones who could afford to get sick. “They can’t possibly put themselves into the shoes of other people,” Banks said.
Banks took safety precautions as seriously as she could, limiting trips to the grocery store, passing up invites to socialize, and staying home. She was furloughed twice from her second job as a recruiter and then laid off in July. She waited for cases to go down and for her job at the Chateau to materialize again, all while watching the rich and powerful in her city, her state, and her country behave as if COVID-19 weren’t killing 4,000 people in the US a day at its peak.
But the longer she waited, the worse it got. Restaurants were closing, many unlikely to return. Hotels were not operating at full capacity. No one was hiring. Her credit card debt piled up.
“You're just kind of waiting around for nothing,” she said. “I was sinking money into rent. At some point, I thought, If I don't make a decision now, then I'll have no money to live off of.”
Banks stayed in LA for a few more months until she could no longer justify pouring what little savings she had into rent and bills. In December, she moved back into her parents’ home in Stafford, Virginia, with $2,500 to her name. By the end of that month, after being served with a lawsuit from Wells Fargo for falling behind on her payments, she filed for bankruptcy.
Banks, who lived paycheck to paycheck before the pandemic, has not worked since August. After moving back in with her parents, she decided it was not worth contracting the virus and potentially exposing them for a job that paid $10 an hour. Even though she will be fully inoculated against COVID-19 by mid-June, she isn’t eager to jump back into the workforce.
“It hasn't even been a full year that I've taken off work, but I personally feel like a failure, I guess,” Banks said. “Society makes you feel like you have to be working all the time, you have to be producing all the time, you have to be doing all these things. But in my mind, I'm thinking, Well, this is my year off to relax. Then for the rest of my life, I'm going to be working.”
The pandemic placed hospitality workers in a losing position. Those who were able to keep working were forced into a situation that endangered their health and safety, or that of their family.
May Chang, 52, had to weigh this risk last summer, when her former employer, Ala Moana Hotel in Honolulu, asked if she would be ready to go back to work soon. It was six months after she was laid off from her job as a housekeeper at the luxury resort. Although she desperately needed work, Chang, who lived with her husband, two daughters, and a baby grandson, had to consider her family’s safety.
She and her husband sat down and discussed if they could afford to scrape by for a few more months without her income. There were bills to pay. Her brother in the Philippines relied on money she sent to get medical treatment for his epilepsy. Chang’s unemployment claims had not yet been approved. Her husband, a bank teller, was still going to work, but with reduced hours and pay. At 65, he had planned to retire soon but instead clung to his job because both he and Chang needed health insurance.
Her unemployment benefits finally started coming in after months of delay, but it was far less than what she had earned from her job. Going back to work would alleviate some of the pressure, but COVID cases were hitting record highs in Oahu that month when her employer contacted her. Chang was also anxious about protecting her husband, whose health issues would put him at a higher risk if he contracted the virus, and her grandson, who was only a few months old.
“I was so afraid to expose myself out there, especially [in a] hotel, you have all kinds of people there from other countries,” she said. So she told her employer that she wanted to go back to work and hoped that they would keep her in mind, but was not yet comfortable doing so.
The tourism industry represents nearly a quarter of Hawaii’s economy, researcher and economics professor Sumner LaCroix told Hawaii Public Radio; data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that more than 50% of the state’s hospitality workforce was cut in the early months of the pandemic.
The state has inched toward reopening since the vaccines arrived. State travel data show that Hawaii saw nearly twice the number of visitors in each of the last three months than it did in January or February. The state initially mandated that all visitors during the pandemic commit to a self-quarantine period. In mid-October last year, however, travelers could forgo the quarantine period if they could prove they tested negative for COVID prior to boarding. Though the pretravel testing program was touted as a step toward reopening tourism in the state, the policy received pushback from locals who were angered by tourists flouting COVID guidelines. In May, Hawaii rolled out a vaccination passport program, which allowed residents to travel freely within the state without testing or quarantining, but it doesn’t apply to out-of-state travelers yet.
Chang had been hoping for months that hotels’ occupancy rates would increase so she could go back to work. She and her coworkers were in discussions with hotel management and their local union on how to prioritize their safety when they return. After being fully vaccinated in April, Chang waited daily for Ala Moana to ask her to return to work; every morning, she got ready and prepared her uniform, just in case.
On May 25, she finally got the call and went back to work for the first time in more than a year. “I've been waiting for so long,” she said. “I'm so excited.”
Like Chang, Ana Cortez sent money to El Salvador to help her 87-year-old mom get by. But it became even harder to do so after Cortez lost her job in April 2020 as a housekeeper at the Beverly Hilton, a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills known for hosting the Golden Globe Awards and other star-studded events.
After losing her job, Cortez, 63, got by on unemployment benefits; it was the first time in her four decades in the US that she had to apply for unemployment, she said. She has scrimped and saved where she could and relied on food banks for sustenance so that she had money for her mom, who has epilepsy.
“I'm going to do whatever I need to help take care of my mom,” Cortez told BuzzFeed News in Spanish.
When the Beverly Hilton called her back for a six-day stretch of employment in October, she went into work under a cloud of grief. Her brother, who went back to El Salvador to care for their mom, had contracted COVID and died. He was one of four of Cortez’s family members who had died of COVID following the deaths of her grandmother and two uncles in El Salvador.
In Los Angeles County, COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted the Latino population. The virus has killed Latino residents at three times the rate of white residents, according to county data, and a recent University of Southern California study found that Latino immigrants between the ages of 20 and 54 are more than 11 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic US-born residents.
Amid one of the worst outbreaks of the pandemic, LA County saw a 1,000% increase in the COVID death rate among Latinos from November 2020 to February 2021.
For all the financial difficulties and the personal grief of this past year, Cortez, who is currently back in El Salvador, said she’s thankful that she and her children, whom she lives with, did not contract COVID.
“Thank god, no,” she said. “Me and my sons”
Carlos Barrera didn’t have much of a retirement plan beyond working until 70 and returning to Guatemala, his home country. He had been focused on paying bills and the rent, and making sure his and his wife’s medical needs were covered. Saving for retirement had to come after everything else.
Barrera, 62, also worked at the Chateau Marmont as a parking valet. He enjoyed the job, greeting guests, making small talk, and parking their extravagant luxury cars. He intended to do it the rest of his working life. But in March 2020, Barrera received a text message from his manager informing him that he was being laid off from the Chateau because of the pandemic.
He was stunned. After 40 years of being a reliable employee, he could not believe the hotel would treat him with such disrespect.
“I felt very bad,” Barrera said in Spanish. “I felt disappointed, sad that they never valued me there.”
Even with his job at the Chateau Marmont, Barrera was priced out of Los Angeles seven years ago. He and his wife had moved to Santa Clarita to live with their adult sons. He lived day to day, he said, and tried his best to provide for his family. Although his employer offered a 401(k) plan, Barrera never contributed to it; he was already struggling to get by on his weekly income.
When the hotel fired him, Barrera had little time to process what had happened before panic set in. March 30, 2020, was the last day that he had employer-provided healthcare; though he had applied for Medi-Cal, it would not kick in for months. He and his wife, who has diabetes, needed medication for their health issues.
Barrera was in a state of constant anxiety during that time, terrified of contracting COVID and passing it to his family. He was stressed about the cost of clinic appointments, medications, bills, car payments, and his share of rent.
Before the pandemic, Barrera said he had about $6,000 in savings, part of which he had hoped would go toward retirement. But his savings have been completely depleted in the past year, he said.
In December, after months of searching for work, Barrera landed a job as a pizza delivery driver, working 25 hours a week. He said his financial situation has remained “terrible.” His last paycheck, after taxes, netted him $500 for two weeks of work. Every dollar he earns goes toward his portion of the rent, which costs him $1,000 a month.
The last time Barrera checked in with a manager at the Chateau Marmont in May, he was told no positions were available. He hopes every day that the hotel will hire him again, especially once California reopens on June 15. He and his former coworkers have been publicly fighting to return to work under safe and dignified conditions.
Since the mass layoffs in March 2020, former Chateau workers have filed lawsuits alleging employment and racial discrimination, as well as sexual harassment. Banks, the event server, told BuzzFeed News that the work culture at the Chateau “favors white men specifically” and that men were more likely than women to be asked to do specific work that enabled them to earn overtime pay.
With help from Local 11, former workers including Barrera have asked the hotel’s clientele to avoid staying at the Chateau until it has “demonstrated a commitment to respecting its workers’ years of service by rehiring them in accordance with their legal rights and to ensuring that all workers — regardless of their race, sex, or background — feel treated with dignity and respect.” A number of high-profile Hollywood figures have supported the boycott, according to the union, including Jane Fonda and Alfonso Cuarón.
The Chateau Marmont did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the accusations in the lawsuit, Banks’s allegations about its work culture, and the campaign organized by former employees.
Banks has wondered if she would take another hospitality job when she returns to Los Angeles, and what she would do if the Chateau offered her her job back. She has worked in hospitality since she was 18, either in between other jobs or for extra money when a salaried position didn’t pay enough.
But Banks has had a front-row seat to the ever-widening chasm between the wealthy and the low-income residents over the past year. She has seen rich people vacation, buy houses, and behave badly — often at the expense of service employees — while workers like her have lost everything. She recalled the sounds of people socializing in their multimillion-dollar mansions in the Hollywood Hills last year in the middle of the pandemic.
“We would go out for a walk at night sometimes and hear the clanking of dishes and people talking,” she said, “and you're like, Are they having a dinner party at their house?”
Most of the people who spoke with BuzzFeed News said they hoped that the hospitality industry will bounce back soon and that they will have their jobs again. But Banks said that after seeing how people have behaved over the past year, she’s not optimistic. Just because the country is headed out of the pandemic and into a new normal doesn’t mean Banks or the millions of others like her will be able to find a job that pays a living wage again — or any job at all.
Banks watched with disgust in February as Congress shot down a $15 federal minimum wage, calling it “super discouraging.”
“If after all of this ... they couldn't see fit to pay the people that are feeding them a decent wage,” Banks said. “They're just trying to make people desperate and force them back into work.”
In addition to Merkel, above, the NSA spied on the German foreign minister and former opposition leader at the time, DR said. (photo: John Thys/Reuters)
Report: US Spied on Merkel, EU Officials Through Danish Cables
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The United States used a partnership with Denmark's foreign intelligence unit to spy on European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to Danish public broadcaster Danmarks Radio."
Danish broadcaster says US used a partnership with Danish intelligence to spy on top European officials.
he United States used a partnership with Denmark’s foreign intelligence unit to spy on European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to Danish public broadcaster Danmarks Radio (DR).
The findings are the result of an internal investigation conducted by the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (FE) in 2014 and 2015, DR said in a report on Sunday, citing nine unnamed sources who had access to the classified information.
According to the investigation, the US National Security Agency (NSA) used a collaboration with FE to eavesdrop on Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany from 2012 to 2014.
In addition to Merkel, the NSA also spied on then-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbruck, DR said.
The investigation found the NSA had access to extensive data streams that run through internet cables to and from Denmark and intercepted everything from text messages and telephone calls to internet traffic including searches, chats and messaging services.
Denmark, a close US ally, hosts several key landing stations for subsea internet cables to and from Sweden, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
One DR source described FE’s access to the cables as having “strategic significance” for relations between the US and Denmark.
The FE launched the internal investigation – code-named “Operation Dunhammer” – following concerns about Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013 revealing how the NSA works.
But upon receiving the Dunhammer findings, FE’s top management at the time did not scrap the collaboration with the NSA, according to DR.
Danish Minister of Defence Trine Bramsen, who took over the defence portfolio in June 2019, was informed of the spying in August last year. That same month, she suspended the head of the Defence Intelligence Service and three other officials.
DR said Bramsen declined to comment on its report but told the broadcaster that the “systematic eavesdropping of close allies is unacceptable”.
Biden ‘deeply involved’
In Washington, the NSA did not immediately reply to a request for comment from the Reuters news agency, while the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) also declined to comment.
Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned whistleblower, accused US President Joe Biden of being “deeply involved” in the case. The US leader was vice-president when Snowden blew the lid on the NSA’s mass spying programme.
“Biden is well-prepared to answer for this when he soon visits Europe since, of course, he was deeply involved in this scandal the first time around. There should be an explicit requirement for full public disclosure not only from Denmark, but their senior partner as well,” he tweeted.
A spokesperson for the German chancellery told Reuters it only became aware of the allegations when asked about them by journalists. The spokesperson declined to comment further.
Steinbruck, the former German opposition leader, condemned the alleged US spying.
“It is grotesque that friendly intelligence services are indeed intercepting and spying on top representatives of other countries,” he told German broadcaster ARD. “Politically, I consider it a scandal.”
Sweden’s Minister of Defence Peter Hultqvist told Swedish SVT broadcaster that he “demanded full information on these things”.
And Norway’s Minister of Defence Frank Bakke-Jensen told broadcaster NRK that he “took the allegations seriously”.
The French government on Monday said the allegations are “extremely serious” if proven.
“It is extremely serious, we need to see if our partners in the EU, the Danes, have committed errors or faults in their cooperation with American services,” Europe Minister Clement Beaune told France Info radio.
“Between allies, there must be trust, a minimal cooperation, so these potential facts are serious,” said the minister.
In this Friday, June 26, 2015 file photo, mourners attend a funeral for unclaimed people who died of extreme weather, in Karachi, Pakistan, after a devastating heat wave that struck southern Pakistan the previous weekend, with over 800 confirmed deaths according to a senior health official. (photo: Shakil Adil/AP)
Study Shows Climate Change Is Responsible for 37% of Global Heat Deaths
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
Borenstein writes: "More than one-third of the world's heat deaths each year are due directly to global warming, according to the latest study to calculate the human cost of climate change."
ore than one-third of the world’s heat deaths each year are due directly to global warming, according to the latest study to calculate the human cost of climate change.But scientists say that’s only a sliver of climate’s overall toll — even more people die from other extreme weather amplified by global warming such as storms, flooding and drought — and the heat death numbers will grow exponentially with rising temperatures.
Dozens of researchers who looked at heat deaths in 732 cities around the globe from 1991 to 2018 calculated that 37% were caused by higher temperatures from human-caused warming, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
That amounts to about 9,700 people a year from just those cities, but it is much more worldwide, the study’s lead author said.
“These are deaths related to heat that actually can be prevented. It is something we directly cause,” said Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine at the University of Bern in Switzerland.
The highest percentages of heat deaths caused by climate change were in cities in South America. Vicedo-Cabrera pointed to southern Europe and southern Asia as other hot spots for climate change-related heat deaths.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, has the most climate-related heat deaths, averaging 239 a year, researchers found.
About 35% of heat deaths in the United States can be blamed on climate change, the study found. That’s a total of more than 1,100 deaths a year in about 200 U.S. cities, topped by 141 in New York. Honolulu had the highest portion of heat deaths attributable to climate change, 82%.
Scientists used decades of mortality data in the 732 cities to plot curves detailing how each city’s death rate changes with temperature and how the heat-death curves vary from city to city. Some cities adapt to heat better than others because of air conditioning, cultural factors and environmental conditions, Vicedo-Cabrera said.
Then researchers took observed temperatures and compared them with 10 computer models simulating a world without climate change. The difference is warming humans caused. By applying that scientifically accepted technique to the individualized heat-death curves for the 732 cities, the scientists calculated extra heat deaths from climate change.
“People continue to ask for proof that climate change is already affecting our health. This attribution study directly answers that question using state-of-the-science epidemiological methods, and the amount of data the authors have amassed for analysis is impressive,” said Dr. Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin.
Patz, who wasn’t part of the study, said it was one of the first to detail climate change-related heat deaths now, rather than in the future.
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