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20 June 21
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Bill McKibben | Everyone Wants to Sell the Last Barrel of Oil
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "The Keystone XL win-and the Line 3 battle-make clear that cutting off the supply of oil is a key part of the climate fight."
final victory last week over the Keystone XL pipeline is a reminder that fighting particular fossil-fuel projects is a necessary strategy if the climate is to be saved. The defeat of Keystone XL doesn’t mean that Canada’s vast tar-sands project, which is generally regarded as the largest industrial project in the world, is over, but the fight has been a gut punch to the fossil-fuel industry. In 2011, when protests began outside the White House, Canada’s National Energy Board was confidently predicting that tar-sands-oil production would triple by 2035—which led the climate scientist James Hansen to explain that pumping Alberta dry would be “game over” for the climate. A decade later, as Karin Kirk reported in Yale Climate Connections, fifty-seven major financial institutions have “pledged to stop funding or insuring oil sands ventures. Exxon Mobil has declared a loss on the original value of its oil sands assets, and Chevron has pulled out of Canadian oil and gas entirely. Other oil majors, like Shell and BP, are selling off their oil sands assets, leaving it largely to Canadian oil companies and the Canadian government to forge ahead.” Kirk’s piece appeared in March; the number of such institutions is now seventy-seven.
The situation will get even harder for tar-sands investors if protests led by indigenous groups in Minnesota succeed in halting an expansion of the Line 3 pipeline—which is being built by the Canadian company Enbridge Energy, and will carry tar-sands oil and regular crude—or if protesters north of the border are able to block a huge expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, from Alberta to Canada’s Pacific Coast. Still, as a truly useful Twitter thread from the Cambridge, England, chapter of the Extinction Rebellion movement pointed out last week, there are plenty of other places around the world that are still trying to increase their oil output by developing new projects or enlarging existing fields. Examples ranged from projects in Norway and Russia to those in Uganda and Nigeria, from Mexico and Brazil to Japan and Guyana, from Vietnam and South Africa to Pakistan and Papua New Guinea—and the United States. The governments and companies involved surely know that electric vehicles will soon replace conventional cars, and that solar and wind power are growing cheaper every day. But rather than joining in the effort to speed that transition—and speed is the only thing that gives us a hope of solving the climate equation—they have decided to pump and sell what they can while there is still some market left for it.
In the process, they are undercutting other efforts of theirs, designed theoretically to deal with the climate peril. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, for instance, announced over the weekend that Canada would double its commitment regarding “climate finance” for developing nations around the world, giving more than five billion dollars to the United Nations to support mitigation and adaptation efforts. But that amount is nearly equal to what the country is spending to buy and build the newly nationalized Trans Mountain pipeline, after its former, corporate owner decided to stop throwing good money after bad. Politicians would far rather make promises about the future than shut down existing projects; that means shutting down jobs, some of them good ones. But the math is dauntingly clear.
So the effort to stop these projects will continue, even in the face of adverse court rulings, such as one, on Monday, that upheld Minnesota’s right to proceed with Line 3. And protesters are steadily growing more sophisticated: one coalition has compiled a list of the banks that fund Enbridge, so the campaign can carry on in the canyons of Wall Street as well as in the marshes of Minnesota. There are a great many fronts in the battle for the climate, and this is a crucially important flank.
Passing the Mic
Last Monday, a group of protesters led by RISE (Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging) occupied a wooden road over a marsh in northern Minnesota where Enbridge is planning to build part of the Line-3 extension. Nancy Beaulieu, a founding member of the group, delivered a talk while standing in a narrow, knee-deep stretch of the Mississippi headwaters. This Monday, I relayed a series of questions to her through the Minnesota activist Kevin Whelan, which she answered as the group was preparing to end the occupation. An enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of the Ojibwe, Beaulieu emphasized that, for Native protesters, treaty rights are a key part of the pipeline fight. (Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
What was going through your mind when you talked to people about occupying the boardwalk?
That, if we remain in peace and stay in prayer, we can have this moment to stand together as treaty partners. And that non-Native people can be out there to uplift our voices and amplify our story, because too often—all the time, really—our words fall on deaf ears. So we called on our non-Native treaty allies to come hold the space and show the world that this is how we do peace talks with our local law enforcement. And this is how we can show the local and the state and the federal government that treaties do matter. Eight days later, I think our story is out there. We are going to continue to show up and assert our rights—this is Chapter 1 of a new beginning.
How has it gone?
We are feeling really positive. We had a lot of small wins coming out of this. Our exit will be done with the sheriff’s department here in Clearwater County. The sheriff did a good job of protecting our ceremonies, and we feel that we’ve built a relationship with him, in a good way. This is not a surrender—this is just opening up the door to a legal process. Too often, the police come in with riot gear, and our story is: this is what it can look like—it can be done in peace, in a powerful, prayerful kind of way. We feel good about being here all week—lots of teachings and lots of ceremony were shared. We want to tell the world this is what honoring treaties look like.
Do you have a message for the world?
We have a shared history under those treaties. They’re as alive today as the day they were signed. And they weren’t just signed to protect our way of life but to live in peace, and to leave the earth in a better way than we found it. That we have a reserved, inherent right to protect our sacred water, our sacred elements, and to hold space in our ceded title. We may have surrendered territory, but we never surrendered our right to hunt, fish, gather, and travel.
Climate School
A little Vermont pride: my state came through the pandemic better than any other, largely because of high levels of social trust. A little of that was formed around the Intervale, a unique incubator for young farmers that, each week, draws many residents of the state’s largest city, Burlington, to a parcel of farmland on the edge of downtown, to pick up their fruits and vegetables. The man behind that project, Will Raap—who also founded a gardening-supply company called, straightforwardly enough, Gardener’s Supply—is now developing a big new project about a dozen miles to the south. Nordic Farm will be converted from a big dairy farm into a grain-growing demonstration school and agricultural-innovation station, with a particular focus on farming practices that help sequester more carbon in the soil. As Raap wrote in an e-mail, “The time of combining emissions reduction with terrestrial sequestration as an integrated strategy is finally here!”
An important caution from John Mulliken, the founder of the financial consultancy Carbonware, writing in the Boston Globe: it won’t help much if the Shells and BPs of the world simply sell their oil-and-gas reserves to private companies that are less vulnerable to activist pressure. (Reuters reported over the weekend that Shell may be planning to sell its tracts in the Permian Basin of Texas.) Mulliken argues for coupling that pressure with a sizable carbon tax. (He expands his point with a fascinating essay on how most investors are effectively shorting carbon at the moment, because they’re not figuring in the possibility of a tax on CO2 in their asset calculations.) An interesting straw in the wind: twenty-five current and former Republican state legislators in Utah joined in calling for a carbon-fee-and-dividend plan.
As the level of Lake Mead, in Nevada, falls to historic lows, the drought in the West is getting deeper and scarier—and the authorities charged with getting water to the cities and farms of the Colorado River basin are cautioning that, in an overheating world, we should think of drought as a permanent feature of the region. To adapt, cities must acknowledge that it “is not a temporary condition we can expect to go away, but rather something we have to deal with,” John Berggren, the water-policy adviser for Western Resource Advocates, based in Boulder, told NBC News.
The Onion did a particularly good job of dealing with the final demise of the Keystone XL pipeline. As one of their “interviewees” mused, “Wow, imagine wasting all those years fighting against something that never ended up getting made.”
An invaluable tool kit for climate activists comes from the people at the Years Project, a nonprofit, which now has a Web site called Inside the Movement. Every week, it has new photos, profiles, and action items.
Tracey Lewis, a senior climate-policy analyst for 350.org, argues in The American Prospect that it’s time for a new Federal Reserve chair. “Waiting for Chair Powell to morph into a climate champion is like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot—it’s probably not going to happen. It’s clear President Biden needs to appoint a new Fed chair who will be committed to addressing the ways that climate change creates systemic risk, and be committed to the Fed’s mandate to mitigate that risk.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is investigating the actions of a helicopter at a Line 3 protest in Minnesota last week. An initial statement said that the helicopter had been sent just to tell the protesters to leave, but video taken by an MPR News reporter appears to show the helicopter “rotor washing” demonstrators, performing the low-flying maneuver multiple times and kicking up dust and debris. Meanwhile, Grace Nosek has an article in the Pace Environmental Law Review on the tactics used by fossil-fuel companies to target protesters.
Yessenia Funes, a climate journalist whose parents grew up in El Salvador, has a gripping piece on what the advent of hurricane season looks like in Central America. A quote from an indigenous leader in Nicaragua captures the point: “Every time a hurricane comes, we become poorer.”
In a column on Euractiv, a news site focussed on policy in the European Union, a group of N.G.O.s points out that the E.U. could (and should) replace a directive that somehow counts burning trees for electricity as “carbon neutral.” “Policymakers are considering possible reforms to the EU’s biomass policy,” the group writes, “but so far the options are pretty much business as usual.”
Writing in the business magazine Fast Company, Jamie Beck Alexander, a leader of Project Drawdown’s effort to reduce emissions, makes what should be an obvious point but is routinely missed: we’ll know that corporations are serious about climate change not when they make a bunch of splashy promises about 2050 but when they deploy their lobbying muscle to get serious legislation through Washington now.
Scoreboard
The National Geographic Society, which I suppose has as much claim as anyone to make such a call, has officially declared the “Southern Ocean,” surrounding the Antarctic, to be the fifth of the planet’s great bodies of water, joining the Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. Enric Sala, National Geographic’s explorer-in-residence, described the Southern Ocean to the Washington Post as a distinct water body, characterized by the powerful Antarctic Circumpolar Current that flows eastward through it, “perpetually chasing itself around Antarctica.”
Justin Rowlatt, the chief environment correspondent for the BBC, has a long and useful explanation of why electric vehicles will take over the car market much sooner than most people think. The E.V. market, he says, is about where the Internet was in the early two-thousands: “Its growth was explosive and disruptive, crushing existing businesses and changing the way we do almost everything. And it followed a familiar pattern, known to technologists as an S-curve.” Last year, global sales rose by forty-three per cent, he reports—which means that “we’re already entering the steep part of the S.” Nathaniel Bullard makes much the same argument in Bloomberg Green, writing that “peak internal combustion” may already be in the rearview mirror, and not just because of cars: last year, electrics were forty-four per cent of two- and three-wheeler sales, and thirty-nine per cent of bus sales.
Warming Up
The Line 3 fight is generating some top-notch art and music. Check out this video, directed by Keri Pickett, with music composed by the veteran Minnesota activist Larry Long, whom Studs Terkel once called “a true American troubadour.”
Parade participants walk away as police investigate the scene where a pickup truck drove into a crowd of people at a Pride parade on June 19, 2021 in Wilton Manors, Florida. (photo: Jason Koerner/Getty Images)
One Dead After Pickup Truck Drives Into Crowd at Florida Pride Parade
Daniel Politi, Slate
Politi writes:
driver slammed into spectators at the beginning of a Pride parade in South Florida on Saturday, killing one man and seriously injuring another. The two men struck by the pickup truck “were taken to Broward Health Medical Center, where one was pronounced deceased,” said Fort Lauderdale Police Department detective Ali Adamson at a Saturday night press conference.
At first witnesses said the crash at the Stonewall Pride Parade and Festival in Wilton Manors and Fort Lauderdale looked intentional and Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis publicly said that “this was a terrorist attack on the LGBTQ community.” When asked whether he thought it could be an accident, he was categorical: “Hardly an accident. It was deliberate. It was premeditated,” he added. But then the president of Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus, Justin Knight, sent a statement to media outlets contradicting that characterization. “Our fellow Chorus members were those injured and the driver was also a part of the Chorus family,” Knight said. “To my knowledge, this was not an attack on the LGBTQ community.” Police detained a man wearing a Gay Men’s Chorus T-shirt. Some witnesses said the driver told police that it was an accident.
Important context from the Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus:
“Our fellow Chorus members were those injured and the driver was also a part of the Chorus family. To my knowledge, this was not an attack on the LGBTQ community.” https://t.co/SJBi9caCn8 pic.twitter.com/s1y5arGCcw
— Liane Morejon WPLG (@LianeWPLG) June 20, 2021
Police said the FBI is helping the investigation and insisted they are still analyzing the situation. “We are evaluating all possibilities,” Adamson said. “Nothing is out of the question.” The people who were hit were standing near the car in which Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was riding. “I am so heartbroken by what took place at this celebration,” she tweeted. “May the memory of the life lost be for a blessing.”
We’re praying for the victims and their loved ones as law enforcement investigates, and I am providing them with whatever assistance I can. I am so heartbroken by what took place at this celebration. May the memory of the life lost be for a blessing.
— Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (@RepDWStweets) June 20, 2021
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, speaks to the media on March 25. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Getty)
The Push for LGBTQ Civil Rights Stalls in the Senate as Advocates Search for Republican Support
Mike DeBonis, The Washington Post
DeBonis writes: "The long march toward equal rights for gay, lesbian and transgender Americans - whose advocates have eyed major advances with complete Democratic control in Washington - has run into a wall of opposition in the U.S. Senate."
Floundering alongside other liberal priorities such as voting rights, gun control and police reform, legislation that would write protections for LGBTQ Americans into the nation’s foundational civil rights law have stalled due to sharpening Republican rhetoric, one key Democrat’s insistence on bipartisanship, and the Senate’s 60-vote supermajority rule.
While Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) hinted at a potential action this month — the annual LGBTQ Pride Month — Senate aides and advocates say there are no immediate plans to vote on the Equality Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected classes of the 1964 Civil Rights Act alongside race, color, religion and national origin.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), one of two openly gay senators, said that she has quietly been lobbying Republican colleagues on the issue and that there has been only “incremental progress,” though efforts are continuing.
“So long as negotiations are productive and we’re making progress, I think we should hold off” on a vote, she said. “There may be a time where there’s an impasse. I’m still trying to find 10 Republicans.”
The House passed the legislation in February, 224 to 206, with only three Republicans joining all 221 Democrats in support. The Senate companion bill is sponsored by 49 Democrats and no Republicans. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is the Democratic holdout, and the lone Republican who had sponsored a previous version of the bill, Susan Collins (Maine), is not yet doing so in this Congress.
The partisanship around the issue on Capitol Hill stands in contrast to the wide-ranging support for LGBTQ rights among the public at large, in corporate America, and even in the federal judiciary, which has delivered a string of rulings expanding those rights — including a landmark Supreme Court opinion last year written by conservative Justice Neil M. Gorsuch that effectively banned employment discrimination on the basis of sexual identity.
But lawmakers, aides and advocates say that significant obstacles to progress on the Equality Act remain, including polarized views on how to protect the rights of religious institutions that condemn homosexuality and Republicans’ increasing reliance on transgender rights as a wedge issue.
Schumer last month said the bill was “one of the things we’re considering” for a vote during Pride Month but added, “it’s a very busy June.” And while individual conversations are taking place, according to Baldwin and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the lead Senate author, there appears to be no organized negotiation underway as there has been on other hot-button issues.
“We’re talking about immigration, infrastructure, policing,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a key GOP figure on civil rights matters, said this month. “But not much on the Equality Act.”
The backdrop is a new Republican push to target LGBTQ rights. Advocates count at least 17 new state laws passed this year targeting the community, most of them specifically aimed at transgender Americans. When the House debated the Equality Act earlier this year, numerous Republicans came to the floor to warn of dire consequences if the bill were enacted.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (R-Ga.) said passing the bill would be “opening the door for predatory men to prey on [women] in the most vulnerable of places — in shelters, changing rooms, and showers.” Many others raised fears it would put cisgender women athletes at a competitive disadvantage against transgender women, and some said it would open the door to government-funded abortions.
The sharp-edged rhetoric has continued, even as the spotlight has turned elsewhere on Capitol Hill. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference Friday in Florida, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) launched an extended attack on the bill, claiming it would “mean that boys who self-identify as female are competing against your daughters and granddaughters in sports” and that “domestic abuse shelters would have to take in men who self-identify as females.”
“They say, ‘Let’s treat everybody equal.’ We have equality. We have provisions in our Constitution,” she said.
The corps of advocates who see the Equality Act as the capstone of a 50-year struggle for LGBTQ civil rights say they remain optimistic that progress can be made on a lawmaker-by-lawmaker basis. They believe that at least 10 Republicans will ultimately be open to passing the law, vaulting a potential filibuster, and that Manchin will support the bill once a critical mass of Republicans get on board.
Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ rights organization, said the main thrust of the advocacy has been combating “misinformation” about the bill — including the notion that it would impinge on religious freedom.
“We’ve had the First Amendment on the books for decades. We’ve had a clear separation between church and state for decades. The Equality Act does not change the fundamental principles that support religious freedom,” he said. “We heard some of the same arguments, if you will, in the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was amended — that this would really radically affect how religious institutions function. That didn’t happen.”
The push has been complicated by the federal courts, which have taken up major cases dealing with LGBTQ rights in recent years. Some Republicans have cited last year’s surprise decision banning employment discrimination in declaring that they no longer see a need for broader civil rights legislation. And on Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court rejected a Philadelphia agency’s decision to sideline organizations that refused to place foster children with same-sex couples on religious grounds — a narrow decision that did not establish a broad new religious freedom doctrine.
But the advocates argue that the courts have left major gaps in LGBTQ rights — such as excluding discrimination in housing, public accommodations and jury service — while also pointing out that existing statutes and court decisions do plenty to preserve religious freedom.
“I like the Equality Act how it’s written — I think it is appropriate and fair,” said Mara Keisling, founder and executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality. But, she said, “no bill is perfect, and if there’s some particular thing that anybody wants to talk about, I say we talk about it.”
Some GOP congressional aides, however, said that the Equality Act’s supporters have not been open enough to policy concessions. Tyler Deaton, a political consultant who has helped build GOP support for LGBTQ rights, said the legislation will have to change to win a sufficient number of Republican votes, noting that numerous states who have passed similar civil rights laws have written in those protections.
“Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling, it’s critical that Democrats work with Republicans in the Senate who agree that LGBTQ Americans need federal protections, and people of faith deserve a Civil Rights Act that respects them as well,” Deaton said.
In explaining his opposition to the bill in 2019, Manchin expressed general support for LGBTQ rights but cited the discomfort of school officials in his home state with the bill’s gender implications, saying he was “not convinced that the Equality Act as written provides sufficient guidance to the local officials who will be responsible for implementing it.” He vowed to “build broad bipartisan support and find a viable path forward for these critical protections.”
The bill’s proponents have been reticent to discuss any changes that would address the GOP objections about transgender sports and other issues they have used as political cudgels. Instead, they have focused on convincing lawmakers that their fears are simply misplaced.
Women’s sports and other anti-trans issues are “not a primary conversation that anybody in the Senate seems to really want to have,” Keisling said. “Everybody who has looked at that issue understands it is entirely a red herring, red meat, disgraceful diversion.”
Democrats and advocates have been especially perplexed by Collins’s decision not to co-sponsor the reintroduced bill this year after serving as its lone GOP co-sponsor in the previous Congress and joining Democrats on numerous other LGBTQ rights issues, such as opposing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and repealing the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Some have privately speculated that the HRC’s decision to endorse Collins’s opponent, Democrat Sara Gideon, in her 2020 reelection campaign may have soured Collins on the legislation.
Annie Clark, a spokeswoman for Collins, said the endorsement decision has nothing to do with her position and that she “supports protecting the civil rights of all Americans, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
“The Equality Act was a starting point for negotiations, and in its current form, it cannot pass,” Clark said. “That’s why there are ongoing discussions among senators and stakeholders about a path forward.”
Collins is seeking amendments that would protect the right of domestic violence shelters to serve men and women separately based on their birth gender as well as protections for faith-based service providers, such as Catholic Charities.
“I would hope that [the endorsement] is not a factor,” David said. “Look, I think if an elected official supports LGBTQ rights, what one organization may or may not do should not affect that senator’s fundamental principles.”
Melisande Short-Colomb, who stars in the one-person 'Here I Am,' She is a descendant of some of the 314 enslaved people whom the Jesuits of Georgetown University sold in 1838. (photo: Jonathan Newton/WP)
"Here I Am": Meet a Descendent of One of 272 Enslaved People Sold on June 19, 1838, by Georgetown University
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "We look at another significant June 19 in the history of slavery in the United States: June 19, 1838, when Jesuit priests who ran what is now Georgetown University sold 272 enslaved people to pay off the school's debts. In 2016, Georgetown University announced it would give preferential admissions treatment to descendants of the Africans it enslaved and sold. "
In 2017, The New York Times published the only known photograph of Frank Campbell, one of the enslaved people sold by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838.
In March, the Jesuits pledged $100 million to atone for their participation in slavery, in a deal with a small representative group of descendants, the Catholic Church and corporate partners. A wider group of descendants opposed the deal, saying it was done in private and doesn’t go far enough to repair the harms done.
In a minute, we’ll be joined by Mélisande Short-Colomb, one of the first two Georgetown University students to benefit from legacy admission for direct descendants. First, though, this is a trailer of her one-woman play, Here I Am.
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: I feel like my whole life and all of the lives that have come before me are balled up inside of me. The New York Times broke a story in April 2016 revealing that the Jesuits had sold 272 enslaved persons in 1838 to raise funds to keep Georgetown University going. A few months later, I discovered that I descended from two families in the sale: the Queens and the Mahoneys. By September 2017, I had entered Georgetown College as an undergraduate student at the age of 63.
Here I am, paying homage to 11 generations of the women who have come into me and who are part of me. I am here to tell their story, handed down over more than 300 years. Our ancestors have waited patiently, through centuries, for us to come to the table of acknowledgment. I am Mélisande Short-Colomb. Here I am. Here we are.
AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for the one-woman play, Here I Am, by Mélisande Short-Colomb, who joins us now, one of the first two students to benefit from legacy admission for direct descendants of the enslaved by the Jesuits at Georgetown University, where she’s also a community engagement associate and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Georgetown Memory Project.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Mélisande. It’s such an honor to have you with us. Your thoughts today on this first federal holiday of Juneteenth? And if you can talk about that other June 19th, 1838, and what happened?
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: Good morning, Amy. Thank you for having me here.
Juneteenth 2021, here we are, acknowledging injustices of the past in the present, for the future. Yes, it did take enslaved people two-and-a-half years in Texas to learn that they had been freed. But it’s taken us 156 years as Americans to acknowledge that event. So, we are the turners of the wheels of progress and change.
June 19th, 1838, 183 years ago, my family, two sides of my family — my young great-great-great-grandparents met on a boat on their way to Louisiana and started a family that results in me and many of my cousins in Louisiana. We were part of the human trafficking trade in the United States of America — not the theoretical Middle Passage, which was very true and brought people — more people to the Caribbean and South America than to the United States of America. Yes, I am a Black woman in 2021, who the institution of slavery was built in the wombs of my grandmothers, because every child that they brought into this world, in this life, in this place, from 1677 until 1865, were slaves at birth. What kind of people do that?
Which brings us to the Jesuits, to the founders of the United States of America, to 1868, to 1865, to 1921, to 2021. So, ours, as Americans, is an uninterrupted line of inheritance that many of us refuse to believe that we are descendants of. Black people are not just the descendants of enslavement here in America. We are all the descendants of enslaved here in America. And that is if you got here in 1570, 1619, 1677 or somebody threw you over the fence yesterday. We are here in this place that is 245 years old, plus the colonial period. This belongs to all of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Mélisande, if you can talk about how Georgetown was saved, prevented from going into bankruptcy, by the sale of nearly 300 enslaved people? Of course, I hate to use the word “saved” — in fact, that was a damning of the university.
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: Well, the university, the Jesuits owned property in human beings and in land. In all of their dealings and sales and building of economic wealth here in America, they always had a choice: We can sell people, we can rent out people, or we can sell land. And they always chose to sell the people and not the land. The Jesuits still own all the land that they have always owned in Maryland and in the District of Columbia. The Catholic Church — it’s not just the Jesuits. The Archdiocese of Baltimore got money from this sale. The Catholic Church, up until 1865, in the United States of America were slave-owning Confederates.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go for a moment to Reverend Tim Kesicki, the president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, speaking at Georgetown University’s “Liturgy of Remembrance, Contrition, and Hope.”
REV. TIM KESICKI: Today, the Society of Jesus, who helped to establish Georgetown University and whose leaders enslaved and mercilessly sold your ancestors, stands before you to say that we have greatly sinned. … We pray with you today because we have greatly sinned and because we are profoundly sorry.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Mélisande Short-Colomb, if you can talk about what this $100 million deal is? Where does this money go? And how did you determine that you were one of the descendants? And then, the larger group of people who are understanding where they come from?
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: I cannot actually speak to the details of this agreement between the Jesuits and this group of descendants. I am not part of that group, nor was I privy to those conversations, decisions and agreements that were met. I’m outside of that. I appreciate the effort, the five-year effort that went into creating this concept, because what they’ve done is make it a GoFundMe. So, we have to raise money — the Jesuits have to raise money to correct the economic disparities of the past. This is within the framework of the Catholic Church and not the wider descendant community. Is it a good thing? Yes, it is. I just don’t know and cannot opine, other than to say, “Good. Do your work.”
AMY GOODMAN: And then, there was, in 2019, the students of Georgetown voting to create a reparations fund for the descendants of enslaved people sold by the Jesuits, adding a fee of $27.20 to tuition. What happened after this?
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: Nothing. It was taken over by the administration. And this was the first time in the United States of America that a voting body voted to go into their own pockets, $27.20. The opposition to that was, it should be charitable, which is the position that the administration has taken over and made it a GoFundMe. So, what the students said was, “We’re going to go into our pockets as undergraduate students, in perpetuity, to create an endowment, a student endowment, to engage as Georgetown undergraduate students with the larger descendant community.”
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, your play, Here I Am, your one-woman play, what is your message?
MÉLISANDE SHORT-COLOMB: I think, “Here we all are.” And my hope with Here I Am was that we have something, we have created something, that can instigate and initiate conversations in the larger context of who we are.
AMY GOODMAN: And those conversations will definitely continue here. I want to thank you so much, Mélisande Short-Colomb, one of the first two Georgetown University students to benefit from legacy admissions for direct descendants enslaved by the Jesuits. I’m Amy Goodman. Stay safe.
Ammon Bundy in 2016 at Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the federal outpost that his group took over. (photo: Rick Bowmer/AP)
Anti-Government Activist Ammon Bundy Announces Run for Governor
The Associated Press
Excerpt: "Bundy garnered international attention when in 2016 he led a group of armed activists in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest the federal control of public lands. He was eventually arrested and later acquitted of all federal charges in that case."
Anti-government activist Ammon Bundy has come out with his first videos announcing his campaign to become governor of Idaho
nti-government activist Ammon Bundy on Saturday came out with his first videos announcing his campaign to become governor of Idaho.
“I’m running for governor because I’m sick and tired of all of this political garbage just like you are,” Bundy said in a nearly three-minute video on his campaign website. “I’m tired of our freedoms being taken from us, and I’m tired of the corruption that is rampant in our state government.”
Bundy said he wants to defend Idaho from President “Joe Biden and those in the Deep State that control him” because they “are going to try to take away our gun rights, freedom of religion, parental rights, and more — and further violate the Constitution in unimaginable ways — even more than they’ve already done.”
Last month, Bundy filed documents with the Idaho Secretary of State's office to run as a Republican in the 2022 gubernatorial primary. Current Idaho Gov. Brad Little, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin and four other Republicans — Jeff Cotton, Edward Humphreys, Lisa Marie and Cody Usabel — have also filed campaign documentation needed to run for governor.
In the video, Bundy touts his family's years-long battle with the federal government over the use of government land.
“We cannot afford to have state leadership that lets the federal government bully us, or walk all over us. And its an unfair fight, when the federal government unlawfully attacks the people — believe me, I know as my family and I experienced this first hand, when we were unlawfully attacked by federal officials at our family ranch in Nevada in 2014,” Bundy said. “But we did not back down, and thankfully, likeminded patriots across the country stood with us, as we fought back against federal tyranny to protect our land and our rights.”
Bundy's campaign website also has videos addressing what he says are misconceptions about him, reasons to vote for him and how he would have handled the COVID-19 crisis if he were governor.
Bundy garnered international attention when in 2016 he led a group of armed activists in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest the federal control of public lands. He was eventually arrested and later acquitted of all federal charges in that case.
Bundy currently has two misdemeanor criminal trespassing cases pending against him in Idaho, and he is representing himself for both. The cases stem from events during a protest of coronavirus restrictions at the Idaho Statehouse last August. He has pleaded not guilty in one case and has not yet entered a plea in the second.
Supporters of Ebrahim Raisi.
Iran Election: Hardliner Ebrahim Raisi Will Become President
BBC
Excerpt: "He thanked Iranians for their support, after securing 62% of the votes."
Hardliner Ebrahim Raisi has won Iran's presidential election in a race that was widely seen as being designed to favour him.
Mr Raisi is Iran's top judge and holds ultra-conservative views. He is under US sanctions and has been linked to past executions of political prisoners.
Iran's president is the second-highest ranking official in the country, after the supreme leader.
Mr Raisi will be inaugurated in early August, and will have significant influence over domestic policy and foreign affairs. But in Iran's political system it is the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the top religious cleric, who has the final say on all state matters.
Iran is run according to conservative Shia Islamic values, and there have been curbs on political freedoms since its Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Many Iranians saw this latest election as having been engineered for Mr Raisi to win, and shunned the poll. Official figures showed voter turnout was the lowest ever for a presidential election, at 48.8%, compared to more than 70% for the previous vote in 2017.
Who is Ebrahim Raisi?
The 60-year-old cleric has served as a prosecutor for most of his career. From an early age, Mr Raisi held powerful and high-ranking positions - when he was just 20 years old, he was already serving as the chief prosecutor of the city of Karaj.
He was appointed head of the judiciary in 2019, two years after he lost by a landslide to Hassan Rouhani in the last presidential election.
Mr Raisi has presented himself as the best person to fight corruption and inequality, and solve Iran's economic problems. "Our people's grievances over shortcomings are real," he said as he cast his vote in Tehran.
The man who wears a black turban identifying him in Shia tradition as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad is fiercely loyal to Iran's ruling clerics, and has even been seen as a possible successor to Ayatollah Khamenei.
But many Iranians and rights groups have pointed to Mr Raisi's alleged role in the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, when he was 27 years old.
He is said to have been part of a so-called "death committee" - one of four judges who oversaw secret death sentences for about 5,000 prisoners in jails near Tehran, according to Amnesty International. It says the location of the mass graves where the men and women were buried is being "systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities".
"That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran," said Amnesty chief Agnès Callamard.
Mr Raisi has repeatedly denied his role in the death sentences. But he has also said they were justified because of a fatwa, or religious ruling, by former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
Amnesty also says that as head of the judiciary Mr Raisi oversaw impunity for officials and security forces accused of killing protesters during unrest in 2019.
What does his win mean for Iran and the world?
Mr Raisi has promised to ease unemployment and work to remove US sanctions that have contributed to economic hardship for ordinary Iranians and caused widespread discontent.
BBC Persian correspondent Kasra Naji adds that under Mr Raisi, Iran's hardliners will seek to reinforce a puritanical system of Islamic government, possibly meaning more controls on social activities, fewer freedoms and jobs for women, and tighter control of social media and the press.
The hardliners are suspicious of the West, but both Mr Raisi and Supreme Leader Khamenei favour a return to an international deal on Iran's nuclear activity.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in 2015, gave Iran relief from Western sanctions in return for limiting its nuclear activities.
The US pulled out of the deal in 2018, and President Trump's administration re-imposed crippling limits on Iran's ability to trade. Mr Raisi was among the officials put under sanctions.
Iran has responded by re-starting nuclear operations that were banned under the deal.
Talks aimed at resurrecting the deal are ongoing in Vienna, with President Joe Biden also keen to revive it. But both sides say the other must make the first move.
Iran will be a more closed society
Analysis by Kasra Naji, BBC Persian
The election was engineered to pave the way for Mr Raisi to win. This has alienated a good number of Iranians already deeply discontented with their living conditions in an economy that is crippled by US sanctions but also mismanagement.
The result of the election will not help with their concerns and may even lead to more instability at home. In the past few years Iran has witnessed at least two rounds of serious nationwide protests - with hundreds, some say thousands, killed.
With Mr Raisi taking the presidency the hardliners will have taken all the centres of power: the executive branch as well as the legislative and the judiciary. Iran will be a more closed society. Freedoms will likely be curtailed even more than before.
The regime will look to China to help the economy out of deep crisis. There will be more tension with the West. Indirect talks between Iran and the US in Vienna over reviving the nuclear deal may face more uncertainty. There are already reports that the talks will now break up for a few weeks, allowing all sides to take stock of the new reality in Iran.
Was the election free?
Almost 600 hopefuls, including 40 women, registered to be candidates in the election.
But in the end only seven men were approved last month by the 12 jurists and theologians on the Guardian Council, an unelected body that has the ultimate decision with regard to candidates' qualifications. Three of those candidates subsequently pulled out before polling day.
Before he withdrew, reformist candidate Mohsen Mehralizadeh hinted that the vote would be a foregone conclusion, saying during a candidates' TV debate that the ruling clerics had aligned "sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president," according to The Economist.
Meanwhile former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of those barred from running, said in a video message that he would not vote, declaring: "I do not want to have a part in this sin."
A brown pelican flies at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach, California. (photo: Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/REX/Shutterstock)
California Authorities Hunt Suspect Behind 'Atrocious' Attacks on Pelicans
Edward Helmore, Guardian UK
Helmore writes: "Authorities in California are looking for a suspected human culprit behind attacks on more than two dozen brown pelicans who have been found seriously injured in the south of the state."
Thirty-two of the slow-flying water birds were found in Orange county, with all but 10 showing fractures to their wings
uthorities in California are looking for a suspected human culprit behind attacks on more than two dozen brown pelicans who have been found seriously injured in the south of the state.
In an alert issued last week, the Wetlands & Wildlife Care Center in Orange county said 32 of the slow-flying water birds have been found between San Clemente and Huntington Beach, with all but 10 showing compound fractures to their wings.
“Someone is intentionally breaking Brown Pelican’s wings,” the center said in a statement on Facebook. “We need your help to find whomever is performing this atrocious act. Be OUR eyes and ears.”
At a press conference Wednesday, veterinarian Elizabeth Wood said the injuries are “very serious injuries that require emergency surgeries and long-term care.” One bird, CNN reported, had been taken to emergency surgery. “Bone was protruding through the skin, and the wing was actually twisted all the way around,” Wood said.
Reports of deliberately injured pelicans began trickling in to California Department of Fish and Wildlife late last year, triggering an investigation and a $5,000 reward for information.
But since October, the Wetlands & Wildlife center has received 22 pelicans with severe wing fractures. All have been euthanized. Around 10 birds with less severe injuries are being treated. The center has appealed for donations.
A spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife’s law enforcement division told the Los Angeles Times that it had expanded its investigation to include 100 miles of shoreline from Orange to Ventura counties.
“At this point we don’t have any suspects, we don’t have witnesses, we don’t have evidence other than the injured birds,” the department’s Captain Patrick Foy told the paper.
“If there is a person catching these pelicans and intentionally releasing them injured, how are they even catching them?... And from there, what would be the motivation of a person that has injured the birds?”
There are estimated to be 150,000 to 200,000 California brown pelicans, which are protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Officials also say that the state has a periodic history of attacks on pelicans.
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