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Garrison Keillor | Why I Am Avoiding Retirement and You Should Too
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes:
feel like teaching a course on aging for people in their fifties who are headed that way but on the wrong path, looking forward to unemployment as if it were not the tragedy it is. My nephew has now achieved unemployment at age 55 and is becoming an outdoorsman and birdwatcher, the most useless occupation available to man, second only to competitive expectoration.
What can I say? The birds know who they are and are attracted to the proper mates and wary of enemies and there is little we can do to be helpful other than put out seed. Instead of showing off his familiarity with the finch family, the nephew could walk through the park, eyes peeled for slimeballs selling bad stuff to teenagers. Birdwatching can be left to the birds themselves.
All of my peers are unemployed except those of us who are writers or engaged in what we call “the arts,” where, as a rule, you keep going until you drop dead. Beethoven and Brahms didn’t retire at 65 because it’s so hard to get that good, you’d naturally keep knocking out the concerti so long as you could see and the Duke of Earl was willing to shell out the guilders. Same with painters. So long as the naked female form still held interest for them, Gauguin and Goya and their painter pals kept at the easels. The artistic life was treacherous, what with syphilis, liver damage, lead poisoning, and the knowledge that your death would wildly inflate the market value of your work, creating wealth for schlumps and nothing for you. Posthumous prosperity: what a rotten deal.
My photographer friends are a happy gang. It’s a collegial world, unlike the factionalism of fiction, the pitiless competition of poetry, the assassins of the essay. Poor focus and off-kilter framing are considered creative choices. But in my course, “The Art of Aging,” I shall guide my students toward a late literary career. You begin by writing comedy, the hardest field of all, and you write a devastating satire of whatever you did for a living, medicine, academia, the ministry, public radio, sanitation, and rip it to shreds, infuriating your colleagues who vote to take away your plaques. Then you turn out a heroic memoir, then write scandalous fiction.
The point is to stay busy. You rise in the morning with stuff to do. Work is a necessity of life. Serious work, not standing in a group of slim silent people with binoculars staring at a whippoorwill, which contributes nothing to society. Crimes occur daily that if birders had devoted themselves to watching the street rather than the sky, suffering would’ve been averted. Electric scooters go racing along the streets, ignoring red lights that if the Audubon-bons served as crossing guards instead, they could save lives rather than impressing each other with their knowledge of wrens.
I am a journalist and our role is to stir up trouble. Television is a deadly sedative: hundreds of channels are streaming thousands of shows and a person glued to it loses cranial sensation. TV is a big blur, like a day spent driving across North Dakota. Rachel Maddow helps, Tucker Carlson, Morning Joe, they try to raise the blood pressure and so does the newspaper. You glance at the front page and find three famous people to despise and your day is thereby given purpose and meaning.
Meanwhile, the disciples of Roger Tory Peterson disperse into the parks and ravines, looking up at the flyways, competing to be the first to distinguish the Canada goose from the Quebec condor and the Vermont vulture, and they feel ignored, having no natural enemies. That is my role. And so I come into their bird blind and scatter seed soaked in hallucinogens that condors and vultures snarf up and minutes later Mildred and Gladys and Marvin and Gordon are under attack by sharp-beaked fowl, waving their parasols in defense, shrieking shrieks the attackers recognize as mating cries and they spread their wings and attempt inappropriate things.
You do not fully appreciate a creature until you are attacked by it. This is what I do for the ornithology gang. I go for the throat, I make them feel like part of the natural order. Birds are real, they’re not a cartoon, and when a drug-crazed bluebird flies up in your face and pecks at your eyes, it’s something you never forget.
A tax-policy protest near a mansion owned by Jeff Bezos in Washington. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Fire the IRS Chief Who Doesn't Care if the Rich Don't Pay
Sion Bell and Jeff Hauser, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig isn't looking into how broken the tax system is in favor of the wealthy, but rather he's investigating who leaked the documents proving it."
Commissioner Charles Rettig’s only response to a blockbuster report about how little the richest pay was to say he’d try to prosecute the leaker.
ithin hours of ProPublica’s blockbuster report showing just how little America’s 25 wealthiest people pay in taxes, IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig announced an investigation, which, of course, is what great journalism into a scandal is supposed to generate: a renewed commitment by senior government officials to fix an obvious scandal.
But Rettig wasn’t looking into how broken the tax system is in favor of the wealthy, but rather about who leaked the documents proving that to the press, stating that he intended to prosecute the whistleblower if the investigation found the records were distributed illegally. While the data leak does present security concerns for the IRS—an agency which has been much more successful at protecting the sensitive financial information of millions than banks or Silicon Valley—the bigger issue here is the significant failures of the IRS and our tax administration at large in ensuring the fair application of the tax code.
A commissioner who prioritizes the justness of the system would see the report as a prompt for self-reflection rather than immediately trying to redirect blame on a whistleblower who released information relevant to the public interest. That’s the latest reason we believe that Joe Biden should replace Rettig—who was appointed by Donald Trump to shield his personal tax returns—and install someone committed passionately to making tax collection functional again.
This isn’t the first time Commissioner Rettig has shown his allegiance to protecting the interests of the wealthy over the public interest. Prior to becoming commissioner, Rettig worked at a boutique Beverly Hills law firm for three decades, where he specialized in shielding wealthy taxpayers from IRS audits. In 2010, when the IRS announced the creation of a task force focused on auditing the very wealthy, Rettig publicly denounced the task force’s work as “audits from hell,” a particularly troubling pronouncement from someone now in charge of said audits.
With the newly released ProPublica data, however, Rettig’s comment takes on a particularly absurd tone. We now know that in 2011, the year after the creation of the task force, Jeff Bezos reported so little in taxes that he was able to claim a $4,000 child tax credit. And Bezos wasn’t a unique case; Elon Musk, Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros all paid zero income tax in at least one year covered by the ProPublica report. Suddenly, Trump’s $750 tax bill in 2016 and 2017 no longer looks so paltry.
ProPublica characterized the billionaires’ low income tax payments as a result of tax avoidance, the legal usage of financial planning and loopholes to reduce tax liability. But there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the deductions these billionaires took that allowed them to claim zero income and therefore pay zero income tax—a prospect which would more properly point to illegal tax evasion. The wealthy regularly use secretive and complicated business arrangements to shield income from IRS scrutiny while using other, harder-to-parse activities, like donations of property, to reduce their taxable income even further. According to a recent study on the tax gap, the top 1 percent of income earners on average do not report 20 percent of their incomes, particularly pass-through business income and wealth stored in offshore accounts.
But IRS energies in recent years have focused primarily on the lowest income earners, particularly claimants of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a tax program designed to assist poor workers, particularly those children. The program has long been besmirched as riddled with fraudulent claims, and the IRS has obligingly allocated its resources towards auditing EITC claimants, sometimes targeting honest, vulnerable taxpayers in the process. EITC overpayments make up only about 4 percent of the tax gap even when using the most aggressive estimates. On the other hand, unreported business income accounts for a full 27 percent, and this is likely an underestimate given IRS shortcomings with detecting pass-through income. Despite this, with significantly declining resources, the IRS has more quickly scaled down its audits on the wealthy and large corporations than its audits on poor EITC claimants, even though audits on the rich yield more revenue per audit hour than, unsurprisingly, inquisitions into the working poor.
ProPublica’s reporting confirms what many have suspected for a while: that our tax system and our tax administration are thoroughly and inequitably broken. ProPublica’s source remains unknown, and the outlet expressed some concerns that it could be a foreign government adversary, but with no signs of a hack, the most likely explanation currently points to an IRS employee concerned by the agency’s inability or unwillingness to properly oversee the fair application of the tax code.
With even aggregate tax data slow to be released, the tax filing data revealed is of crucial importance, shedding light on the precise ways the wealthiest shelter their wealth. And, though some of the billionaires whose tax information was disclosed decried the release as a criminal invasion of privacy, it’s unclear what harms come from the release. Indeed, as ProPublica noted in its defense of its reporting, numerous Nordic nations like Sweden, Norway, and Finland regularly make public the tax returns of all citizens with no significant deterioration of privacy.
Commissioner Rettig could have viewed this reporting as a wake-up call and a moment for introspection on how the agency he leads can do better, will do better. Instead, he immediately cast his gaze outward, expressing concern over the violation of billionaires’ right to privacy (which, in this case, means their right to evade scrutiny on their manipulation of the tax system) and declaring his intentions to prosecute. Rettig still has not commented on the substance of the ProPublica reports and what he intends to do to remedy such blatant tax injustice.
Rettig’s interests clearly lie with the wealthy and protecting their privacy over all else. The action that likely tipped the scales in Rettig’s favor when Trump needed to replace former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen was Rettig’s defense of Trump for not releasing his tax returns during the 2016 election. With Democrats intending to use their congressional authority to compel the release of said tax returns, Rettig was the perfect shield, one with both a professed support for Trump’s refusal and experience in fending off tax scrutiny.
President Biden should see Rettig for who he is: a Trump appointee installed to protect the interests of the wealthy, including but not limited to Trump himself, above all else. By immediately forefronting the tenuous and suspect privacy concerns of billionaires, Rettig’s response to the ProPublica reporting is just the latest display of his fundamental allegiance. If Biden is truly committed to reforming our tax system by finally making the wealthy pay their fair share, he will exercise his clear legal authority and replace Rettig at the helm of the IRS.
Ilhan Omar. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)
Arwa Mahdawi | Ilhan Omar Is Once Again Being Attacked by Her Own Party for Speaking Out
Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian UK
Mahdawi writes: "Here are the rules, OK? The United States is the greatest, most moral country to ever exist. It brings democracy to all the poor savages in the rest of the world, who are incapable of knowing what's good for them."
Democratic leadership chimed in to rebuke the progressive congresswoman for what was clearly a mischaracterization of her comments
he Bad Faith Brigade come for Ilhan Omar yet again
Here are the rules, OK? The United States is the greatest, most moral country to ever exist. It brings democracy to all the poor savages in the rest of the world, who are incapable of knowing what’s good for them. It doesn’t commit war crimes, there’s just some occasional collateral damage amid all that democracy-building. Its allies are morally righteous, its enemies are entirely evil. Do not question any of that, do not query American exceptionalism, and you will have a very fruitful career in US politics or cable news.
Ilhan Omar, alas, seems to have a hard time remembering these rules. The progressive Democratic congresswoman is once again being censured by her own party for what appears to be the crime of being an outspoken black Muslim woman. Nobody getting publicly outraged by Omar appears to have any interest in annoying things like context, but here’s the context for the latest manufactured controversy.
On Monday, during a hearing by the House foreign affairs committee, Omar asked the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, a question about America’s stance toward the international criminal court (ICC) at the Hague. Omar noted that the US had opposed ICC investigations into potential crimes committed in Palestine and Afghanistan and asked how victims of war crimes are supposed go for justice if domestic courts won’t pursue justice. Blinken replied with an evasive answer, saying the US and Israel “both have the mechanisms to make sure that there is accountability in any situations where there are concerns about the use of force and human rights”. Understandably unsatisfied with this, Omar later tweeted a video of the exchange, saying: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice.”
Promoting accountability and justice shouldn’t be controversial. But anytime Omar opens her mouth, rightwingers – most of whom probably think the ICC is a cable channel – rush to deliberately misinterpret her words. Omar was immediately accused of antisemitism and promoting false equivalencies by the right. And, as per usual she was accused of being an ungrateful immigrant. The delightful Tom Cotton chimed in to not-so-subtly suggest that the Omar should go back to where she came from. “@Ilhan was a refugee from Somalia and America welcomed her,” Cotton tweeted. “If she really believes America is a hateful country on par with the Taliban and Hamas, she’s welcome to leave.”
You expect bad faith attacks from the right. That’s what they do. Omar could say “I like roses” and the right would find a way to accuse her of promoting communism and hating America. But Democrats should know – and do – better. They should be in the business of protecting their colleagues from bad faith attacks. Instead the highest levels of Democratic leadership chimed in to rebuke Omar for what was clearly a mischaracterization of her comments.
The “Squad” are constantly described as divisive and accused of sparking in-fighting among the Democrats. But what’s more divisive than helping to incite hatred towards a colleague? If Democrats had a problem with Omar’s wording they could have talked to her in private. But, as she noted on Twitter, they didn’t. They chose to add fuel to bad faith Republican attacks and incite violence towards a congresswoman who is already a prominent target for abuse. “Pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of @IlhanMN coming from our caucus,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “They have no concept for the danger they put her in by skipping private conversations & leaping to fueling targeted news cycles around her.”
I’m sick and tired of it too. This latest episode is about more than Omar’s thoughts on the ICC – it’s about Diversity™ more generally. Democrats seem to love “diversity” when it’s just diverse faces around a table. They’re not so keen on diverse voices, however. There’s this implication that if you’re a minority you should just shut up and be grateful for being given a seat at the table. You shouldn’t ask difficult policy questions. You shouldn’t suggest America isn’t the most benevolent place on earth. You should toe the line and be grateful.
What I admire about the Squad is that they are very vocal about their refusal to be used as tokens. In a 2019 speech at the Netroots Nation conference, Ayanna Pressley – who has defended Omar from this latest attack – said she wasn’t interested in bringing “a chair to an old table”. It’s time to shake that table, she said: “We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” What she was saying, her spokeswoman later stressed, was that “diversity at the table doesn’t matter if there’s not real diversity in policy”. By suggesting that the US actually be held accountable for its actions, Omar is pushing for real diversity in policy. It’s depressing her colleagues would rather wage bad faith personal attacks than engage with that.
Sexual harassment has become ‘normalised’ in schools
A depressing review of schools and colleges in England has found almost 80% of girls say sexual assault happens a lot or sometimes between people their age. Sexual harassment and online sexual abuse have become routine that some schoolchildren don’t even bother challenging or reporting it anymore.
Australian swimmer withdraws from Olympic trials over ‘perverts’
Maddie Groves, who won two silver medals at the Rio Games, said her decision to withdraw should be a lesson to “all misogynistic perverts in sport and their bootlickers”. The nature of Groves’s allegations aren’t entirely clear, but last November she alleged someone she worked with had made her feel “uncomfortable” and said she was body-shamed.
Record number of women in England and Wales had abortions in 2020
The increase is attributed to “early abortion at home becoming lawful” and economic uncertainty exacerbated by the pandemic.
Apple repair techs uploaded a woman’s nudes to Facebook
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. As Vice notes, it highlights the “need for Apple to relinquish its repair monopoly and let us repair our own stuff”.
Jeffrey Toobin, notorious Zoom masturbator, back on CNN
Exposing yourself to your colleagues is fine, apparently. Engaging in activism while at university, however, gets you kicked out of a job.
The week in rodentarchy
Please enjoy this video of a Turkish jeweller who has a fierce rescue squirrel called Memocan. Little Memocan will go back to the wild after he recovers from a paw injury, but in the meantime he is guarding the jewellery shop’s cash register. Defund the police and put the spare cash towards security squirrels, I reckon.
Police officers face off with protesters. (photo: Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
The GOP Has Declared a War on Protests
Amara Enyia and Jamecia Gray, In These Times
Excerpt: "A black SUV, part of a Cubans for Trump caravan, rams into Jonathan Gartrelle, a Black Lives Matter activist at a small protest in downtown Miami on July 18, 2020. Video shows Gartrelle landing hard on the hood of the vehicle, then sliding off. The SUV speeds away."
Republican state legislators across 34 states have introduced more than 80 bills this year that criminalize protesting or protect those who harm protesters.
black SUV, part of a Cubans for Trump caravan, rams into Jonathan Gartrelle, a Black Lives Matter activist at a small protest in downtown Miami on July 18, 2020. Video shows Gartrelle landing hard on the hood of the vehicle, then sliding off. The SUV speeds away.
The man who drove into Gartrelle, an unidentified Trump supporter, is the one who’s pressing charges — against Gartrelle.
The driver claims Gartrelle stole a flag from his SUV. Police arrested Gartrelle a couple of days later, charging him with two felonies — one for escape and one for strong arm robbery — as well as misdemeanor counts of resisting an officer and obstructing a public street.
These charges are “hilariously overbroad,” says Alex Saiz, Gartrelle’s attorney and director of legal services for the Florida Justice Center. “As you read the arrest form, you think, ‘This is nonsense.’ ”
Gartrelle is one of more than 14,000 demonstrators who were arrested at anti-racism protests during summer 2020.
Eventually, all of the charges against Gartrelle were dropped (except the misdemeanor for petty theft, still unresolved because of court delays related to Covid-19). But a new Florida law, part of a surge of draconian anti-protest state bills, puts future protesters at risk of far worse outcomes.
Signed into law in April, Florida’s HB 1, the Combating Public Disorder bill, sets harsher penalties (and escalates some misdemeanor charges to felonies) for protesters who block roadways or deface public monuments. It also creates a new misdemeanor called “mob intimidation” and protects police budgets from cuts.
Dream Defenders, a youth-led, Miami-based abolitionist group (and member of the Movement for Black Lives), spearheaded an all-out campaign against HB 1 earlier this year. The organization sent tens of thousands of emails, canvassed, phone banked and hosted events to raise awareness about the “censorship bill,” says Nailah Summers, interim co-director of Dream Defenders.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calls HB 1 the “strongest anti-rioting, pro-law enforcement measure in the country.” But according to Max Gaston, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida, “HB 1 is not an anti-riot law. It is an anti-protest law that suppresses First Amendment rights by criminalizing peaceful protest and silencing government dissent.”
Under HB 1, Gaston says, “virtually every major demonstration in the last several years, from the Women’s March to the March for Our Lives, would have involved a heightened level of danger from police and counter-protesters.”
Law enforcement advocacy groups (particularly police unions) have lobbied hard for the new legislation — which generally increases discretion for police, prosecutors and judges— in at least 14 states, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the campaigns of the bills’ sponsors.
“[HB 1] will almost inevitably result in more arrests, felony convictions and debilitating legal financial obligations,” Gaston says. For example, the law “effectively authorizes police officers to decide in every instance what constitutes a riot, what conduct is criminal under the new law, and who can be arrested for merely assembling to highlight and discuss issues of public importance.”
The law also makes it easier to charge entire groups of protesters for the actions of a single individual. If someone smashes a window during a protest, for example, any nearby demonstrator could face felony charges, Saiz says. This element of the law arguably creates an incentive for law enforcement to use unethical tactics to disrupt peaceful assemblies, such as planting provocateurs in crowds — a tactic wielded against civil rights groups in the past. From the FBI’s COINTELPRO to the murder of Fred Hampton and countless other freedom fighters, law enforcement has long worked to protect white supremacy and destroy Black movements.
As for the driver who hit Gartrelle, new immunity protections from civil lawsuits for drivers who injure or kill protesters appear in bills passed in Florida, Oklahoma and Iowa, and have been introduced in Missouri and Nevada. Oklahoma’s version even includes criminal immunity in some cases, which “emboldens those seeking to harm protesters,” according to Gaston.
The new protection against civil liability comes in the wake of a number of instances of vehicle weaponization by people who align with the Right. Most infamously, in 2017, racial justice activist Heather Heyer was killed by a neo-Nazi driver in Charlottesville, Va., who also injured 19 other protesters.
According to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, Republican state legislators across 34 states have introduced more than 80 bills in the 2021 legislative season that criminalize protesting or grant civil immunity to people who harm protesters. Many of the proposed bills use language that copies elements of the Florida legislation. Some draw from a 2017 model bill drafted by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council at the behest of fossil fuel companies, the so-called Critical Infrastructure Protection Act. A response to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, it set a precedent for severe criminal penalties against peaceful protesters.
Some of the new anti-protest bills extend beyond criminal punishment and cut basic benefits to people convicted of protest-related charges. A bill proposed in Minnesota, home of George Floyd and Daunte Wright, would make people convicted of a crime during a protest ineligible for student loans, food stamps, rental assistance and unemployment relief. SB 34, a Republican bill proposed in Indiana, would prohibit people convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment or elected office.
“The idea that the George Floyd protests were somehow so awful that we need to fundamentally change the way we see riots and protest is just complete fearmongering,” Saiz says, adding that the intention is to create a chilling effect on free speech.
These anti-protest bills also come in the wake of an election cycle that saw record voter turnout and extremely close races— most significantly in Georgia, where President Joe Biden won by a slim margin and two previously Republican-held Senate seats flipped in a run-off.
By creating new felony charges for protest, these bills threaten the constitutional right to vote. The vast majority of states disenfranchise people who have felony convictions — who are disproportionately Black — for some time. HB 1 creates “a substantial risk of disenfranchising more Black and Brown Florida voters,” says Gaston, as citizens convicted of a felony are only eligible to vote after completing their sentence and paying often debilitating fines and fees. In 11 states, mostly in the South, an individual convicted of a felony can lose their voting rights indefinitely. In 18 states, people on parole or probation are barred from voting.
“Those wishing to exercise their First Amendment rights to assemble and protest” have no choice but to be “mindful of the risks HB 1 creates,” Gaston says.
Organizers and activists around the country are girding themselves for the fight ahead.
In Missouri, a coalition of civil and human rights organizations, including the Organization for Black Struggle, came together in March to protest the state’s anti-protest bill. In Oklahoma, dozens of demonstrators occupied the Capitol in April as the governor signed an anti-protest bill.
In some ways, Saiz says, the passage of HB 1 has galvanized demonstrators in Florida. “They feel like the government is actively trying to silence them,” he says. “They feel like they have even more to protest. We’ve got clients who are planning protests of the anti-protest law.”
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the ACLU of Florida and the Community Justice Project have also filed a federal lawsuit challenging Florida’s law on behalf of a number of Black-led organizations, including Dream Defenders. The lawsuit argues that HB 1 violates the First and 14th Amendments by chilling protected speech, criminalizing protest and specifically targeting Black organizers.
Promises Nailah Summers, “We’re putting our heart and soul into stopping this racist law.”
A gas chamber for executions. (photo: Telegraph UK)
Arizona Refurbishes Gas Chamber in Push to Resume Executions
Jacques Billeaud, Associated Press
Billeaud writes: "As it aims to resume executions after a seven-year hiatus, Arizona has refurbished its gas chamber, where the nation's last lethal-gas execution was carried out more than two decades ago before the United States rejected the brutal nature of the deaths."
The state has purchased materials to make hydrogen cyanide gas, which was used in some past U.S. executions and which the Nazis used to kill 865,000 Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp alone.
The secret refurbishment late last year at the prison in Florence, southeast of Phoenix, is drawing criticism as a cruel approach to punishment that is out of touch with modern sensibilities.
“Whether or not one supports the death penalty as a general matter, there is general agreement in American society that a gas devised as a pesticide, and used to eliminate Jews, has no place in the administration of criminal justice,” the American Jewish Committee wrote in a statement this week.
Corrections officials declined to say why they are restarting the gas chamber. However, the move comes as states find it increasingly difficult to secure lethal injection drugs as manufacturers refuse to supply them.
Nationally, executions have neared record lows amid the shortage, though some states are finding ways around it. South Carolina last month passed a law forcing death row inmates to choose between the electric chair or a newly formed firing squad.
Arizona also has struggled to find drug suppliers but revealed this spring it had obtained a shipment of pentobarbital.
Corrections officials pointed to statutory and constitutional requirements that let death row prisoners opt for the gas chamber if they were convicted of crimes that occurred before Arizona adopted lethal injection in 1992. The state is one of four with decades-old gas-chamber laws still on the books.
It’s unclear whether any of Arizona’s death-row prisoners have expressed a preference for the method.
The state corrections department said in a statement that it’s “prepared to fulfill its constitutional obligations, carry out court orders and deliver justice to the victims’ families.”
Lawyers who practice death penalty law in Arizona say its execution protocol contained no provisions for carrying out gas chamber executions from 2007 until the policies were amended this year.
Dale Baich, chief of the unit in the Federal Public Defender’s Office that represents Arizona prisoners in death penalty appeals, said he thinks the state wants to have the gas chamber working in case any of the 17 eligible death-row prisoners select it.
“My guess is that because there are 17 people, the department wants to be ready,” Baich said.
The state’s effort to make its gas chamber operable again was revealed in records obtained by the Guardian newspaper. State officials later released the documents to other news organizations, including The Associated Press.
The records show authorities in December bought a brick of potassium cyanide, sodium hydroxide pellets and sulfuric acid for producing cyanide gas.
Rubber seals on the chamber’s hatch door and windows were replaced. An exhaust fan in the chemical mixing room was repaired. Rust was cleaned off surfaces. Levers on the chamber needed to be lubricated.
A candle was lit near the door and windows to test the chamber’s air-tightness, and a smoke grenade was set off inside to ensure a fan and vent were working, according to the records.
Executions were put on hold in Arizona after the 2014 death of Joseph Wood, who gasped for air and snorted as he was injected with 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours. Wood was executed for the 1989 shooting deaths of his estranged girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, Eugene Dietz, in Tucson.
Two months ago, prosecutors signaled they would seek to execute two prisoners, Frank Atwood and Clarence Dixon.
Dixon was sentenced to death for the 1978 killing of 21-year-old Deana Bowdoin in Maricopa County. Atwood received the death penalty in the 1984 slaying of 8-year-old Vicki Lynn Hoskinson, whose body was found in the desert outside Tucson.
The horrific nature of gas-chamber deaths and the advent of lethal-injection executions turned the United States against lethal gas, said Deborah Denno, a Fordham Law School professor who has studied executions for more than 25 years.
Historical accounts of gas-chamber executions portray prisoners gasping for breath, thrashing their restrained bodies and appearing to be in excruciating pain. A condemned man in Mississippi repeatedly banged his head against a steel pole during his 1983 execution.
The last prisoner to be executed in a U.S. gas chamber was Walter LaGrand, the second of two German brothers sentenced to death for killing a bank manager in 1982 in southern Arizona. It took LaGrand 18 minutes to die in 1999.
Both brothers chose the gas chamber in hopes that courts would find the method unconstitutional. While Karl LaGrand accepted the state’s last-minute offer of lethal injection, Walter LaGrand rejected it, saying he would prefer a more painful execution to protest the death penalty.
The case drew widespread criticism in Germany, which has no death penalty, and prompted repeated diplomatic protests.
Arizona’s gas chamber refurbishment is again being condemned internationally, including coverage in Israel and Germany drawing parallels to Holocaust atrocities.
Asked to comment on the criticism, C.J. Karamargin, a spokesman for Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, said, “Gov. Ducey is following the law as it’s spelled out in Arizona’s constitution. Victims have been waiting a long time for justice in many of these cases.”
In “The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber,” writer Scott Christianson said 594 people died in lethal-gas executions in the United States from 1924 to 1999.
Although the Nazis are believed by some to have invented the gas chamber, the first one made for executions was built in Nevada and first used in 1924, Christianson wrote.
The chamber was a byproduct of chemical warfare research done by the U.S. Army and the chemical industry during World War I. The Third Reich later expanded its use on an industrial level to slaughter millions, he wrote.
“Even after Auschwitz, it still took more than 50 years for gas-chamber executions to cease in the United States,” Christianson wrote in his 2010 book.
Lethal-gas execution laws remain on the books in Arizona, California, Missouri and Wyoming.
In recent years, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama have passed laws allowing executions with nitrogen gas, at least in some circumstances, though experts say it’s never been done and no state has established a protocol that would allow it.
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which has criticized how executions are carried out in the United States, said Arizona officials should have recognized the implications that gas chambers carry, given the Nazis’ use of Zyklon B, a pesticide that had as its lethal component hydrogen cyanide gas.
“You have to wonder what they were thinking to seriously believe that executing a prisoner with cyanide gas is morally acceptable in 2021,” Dunham said.
Thousands of people march through the streets of London, Ontario, on Friday, against the killing of four members of a Muslim family. (photo: AP)
Thousands March in Support of Muslim Family Killed in Canada
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Thousands of people have marched in support of a Canadian Muslim family run over and killed by a man driving a pick-up truck last Sunday in an attack the police described as a hate crime."
People in Ontario marched about 7km (4.4 miles) from the spot where the family was struck down to a nearby mosque.
housands of people have marched in support of a Canadian Muslim family run over and killed by a man driving a pick-up truck last Sunday in an attack the police described as a hate crime.
The four victims, spanning three generations, were killed when Nathaniel Veltman, 20, ran into them while they were out for an evening walk near their home. A fifth family member, a nine-year-old boy, survived.
People in London, Ontario marched about seven kilometres (4.4 miles) on Friday from the spot where the family was struck down to a nearby mosque, the site close to where Veltman was arrested by police.
Some carried placards with messages reading “Hate has no home here”, “Love over hate”.
“The best part was not just the numbers … but the diversity of the people coming from every single community in London, coming together for this cause,” said 19-year old college student Abdullah al-Jarad at the march.
After a moment of silence marking the time of the tragedy, representatives from several religions gave speeches denouncing hatred and saluting the outpouring of support for London’s 30,000-strong Muslim community.
Other rallies or vigils in Canada took place in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec, where a shooting in a mosque left six dead in 2017.
The attack sparked outrage across Canada, with politicians from all sides condemning the crime, spurring growing calls to take action to curb hate crime and Islamophobia.
Veltman made a brief court appearance on Thursday and will return to court on Monday. He faces four charges of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has called the killings a “terrorist attack” and vowed to clamp down on far-right groups and online hate.
Detective Superintendent Paul Waight, who is leading the investigation, has said there was evidence “that this was a planned, premeditated act, motivated by hate”.
Climate activists and Indigenous community members gather on top of a bridge in Solvay, Minnesota, on June 7, 2021, to protest construction of Line 3. (photo: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images)
The Line 3 Pipeline Protests Are About Much More Than Climate Change
Alexandria Herr, Grist
Herr writes: "Frank Bibeau remembers canoeing on the waters of northern Minnesota with his father on a late summer day in 1996."
Indigenous treaty rights may be key to protecting Minnesota’s wild rice waters from oil spills.
rank Bibeau remembers canoeing on the waters of northern Minnesota with his father on a late summer day in 1996. The sky and placid lake stretched to the horizon all around their red canoe, interrupted only by stalks of delicate grasses protruding through the lake’s surface. Bibeau navigated with a long pole while his father, perched in front, rhythmically knocked grains from the stalks into the boat, harvesting wild rice.
Every year, from the time the maple trees first mottle gold and red in late summer until the first frost, Anishinaabe all across the Great Lakes region embark on the wild rice harvest. Bibeau learned to harvest the grain from his father, who learned from his father before him, and so on — “since time immemorial,” he told me.
For Bibeau and the Anishinaabe people, the wild rice harvest is at once tradition, sustenance, and cultural lifeway. According to their oral tradition, the Anishinaabe came to settle in the Great Lakes basin thousands of years ago when they followed a sacred shell in the sky to a place where food grew on water. When they arrived, they found wild rice — one of the only grains native to North America. Wild rice in the Anishinaabe language is manoomin: the good berry.
“Wild rice is our life. Where there’s Anishinaabe there’s rice. Where there’s rice there’s Anishinaabe. It’s our most sacred food,” said Anishinaabe activist Winona LaDuke. “It’s who we are.”
The future of wild rice in this region, however, is at risk. Wild rice has already been threatened by climate change, mining, water pollution, and genetic modification. LaDuke runs the White Earth Land Recovery project, a nonprofit that seeks to preserve the wild rice harvest, as well as the environmental justice nonprofit Honor the Earth. She’s spent much of her career defending the grain. “We have very little left, and it’s central to our identity,” she told me.
Now, LaDuke and Bibeau are facing a new battle for the future of wild rice: the so-called Line 3 pipeline, which is slated to carry 760,000 barrels of crude oil a day across more than 200 bodies of water, including lakes, streams, wetlands, the headwaters of the Mississippi River — and over 3,400 acres of wild rice waters.
On Monday, thousands of protesters from across the country gathered along the pipeline’s new route in the forests of northern Minnesota. They marched to the headwaters of the Mississippi River — which the pipeline will cross underground in two locations — for a ceremony and later moved to a construction site, where some blocked the road with an old fishing boat and others chained themselves to equipment. More than 100 people were arrested; police used a long-range acoustic device as a sonic weapon against the crowd. U.S. Customs and Border Protection dispatched a helicopter that hovered 20 to 25 feet over a group of protesters occupying a pump station, kicking up massive clouds of dust and debris.
This is not Line 3’s first incarnation. Originally built in the 1960s by the Canadian company Enbridge, the pipeline carries oil over 1,000 miles from Alberta’s tar sands through Minnesota to Superior, Wisconsin. In 2014, Enbridge applied for federal and state permitting to replace the existing pipeline, citing concerns over aging infrastructure, including the possibility of an impending spill. The project was classified as a replacement for the purposes of permitting, even though much of the pipeline’s Minnesota portion is being constructed along an entirely new route.
The possibility of oil spills on the new pipeline route looms over the wild rice waters it crosses. Enbridge is no stranger to spills: From 2002 to 2018, the pipeline network owned by Enbridge caused 291 crude oil spills in the U.S, a total of over 2.7 million gallons. The old Line 3 itself has a history of spills in the region; in 1991, a section of Line 3 ruptured near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, causing over 1.7 million gallons of oil to spill into a tributary of the Mississippi River. It was the largest inland oil spill ever recorded in the U.S., but luckily it occurred in winter, when the river was frozen over with 18 inches of ice, allowing for a relatively straightforward cleanup. That was not the case in Marshall, Michigan, when another Enbridge pipeline ruptured in 2010, spilling 840,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River, resulting in $1.2 billion in cleanup costs and contamination of the riverbed and its ecosystems with bitumen, which may never fully be remediated.
The spill on the Kalamazoo was particularly damaging because that pipeline, like Line 3, carried oil from the Alberta tar sands. In addition to being an especially powerful accelerator of climate change — the oil produces emissions 14 percent higher than the average oil used in the U.S. — tar sands oil is composed of a heavy crude known as diluted bitumen, or dilbit. When spilled, the diluent evaporates, causing health risks when inhaled, and leaves behind bitumen, a dense tar. Bitumen doesn’t float on the surface of the water like lighter crudes. Instead it sinks, mixing and adhering to sediments and plants, making it particularly costly and difficult to clean. The spill hit the surrounding community hard; in its aftermath, 150 families moved away from the area permanently. Enbridge estimates that a worst-case scenario spill from the new Line 3 would cost even more than the Kalamazoo spill, reaching $1.4 billion in cleanup costs.
“Line 3 is a safety-driven project, replacing an aging pipeline with state-of-the-art energy infrastructure to serve the region’s energy needs,” an Enbridge representative wrote to Grist in an email. “Impacts on threatened and endangered species are taken into consideration and are mitigated in permit conditions imposed on the project by government agencies along with our own construction plans.”
Wild rice is what’s known as an indicator species — meaning it tends to reflect the overall health of an ecosystem — and it requires abundant, clean water in order to grow. The crop is therefore especially vulnerable to oil spills. The new Line 3 is set to pass through the heart of Minnesota’s wild rice lakes — some of the best remainingwild rice waters in the world.
Since its proposal, the pipeline has faced an embattled decade, including several rounds of legal challenges from Indigenous communities, environmental groups, and the Minnesota Department of Commerce. But Enbridge and its lawyers have consistently beaten back those challenges. In November, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the pipeline’s federal permit to build over the bodies of water along its new route, and shortly afterwards the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency granted the final permit that the pipeline needed to move forward. Construction on the project in Minnesota began in December.
The water crossing permit issued by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, or MPCA, states that Enbridge cannot build the pipeline within 25 miles upstream of wild rice waters, but scientists who commented at the permit hearing argued that their warnings about the potential environmental impacts of oil spills and climate change were ignored, and that they only had the opportunity to give input at the end of the permit approval process. After the permit was approved, 12 of the 17 members of the pollution control agency’s environmental justice advisory board resigned, stating that they could not “continue to legitimize and provide cover for the MPCA’s war on Black and brown people.” They argued that the agency’s approval of the permit despite the advisory board’s opposition to the project was proof that the board’s recommendations were not being heeded.
Now that construction has started, protest camps have developed in response to the pipeline, and attention has turned to the Biden administration, which canceled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline during its first days in office. Indigneous leaders like LaDuke and Minnesota politicians like U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar have written letters calling on President Biden to take similar action on Line 3. “You can’t cancel Keystone and then build an almost identical tar sands pipeline,” tribal attorney Tara Houska told Biden administration advisers last month. (Editor’s note: Houska was selected as Grist 50 Fixer in 2017.) The president hasn’t yet commented on his administration’s position on the future of the pipeline.
LaDuke has been fighting the pipeline in court and at regulatory hearings since the beginning. “Seven years of my life I’ve spent on this,” she told Grist, “I’ve testified at so many hearings. Then they kept asking us to testify again. How many times do you ask your people to come out and cry for a judge?”
I met Bibeau on a cool September day at a facility on the Leech Lake Reservation where he processes wild rice each fall. He was dressed in camo and greeted me with an easy, toothy smile. The earthy smell of wild rice husks and steady thrum of an old engine filled the air of the shed where he runs the processing equipment. A few non-Native men had traveled to the reservation at Bibeau’s invitation to either assist or learn about wild rice processing.
“It’s something to be proud of,” he told me, watching the men load grains from one machine to the other. “How deep into the culture can you be, helping people to prepare food?”
The men dried the freshly harvested wild rice over a wood-burning fire until the husks came off easily when ground. Then, they loaded the grains into a thrasher, which spun the rice around, breaking up the hull. Finally, they poured the grain into a third machine that spat out the chaff. Bibeau oversaw the process from the side, leaning on two canes (his hips were causing him trouble) and giving instructions. “The best part is the smell,” Bibeau told me, grinning at the scent of toasted grain and campfire. All of this processing was once done by hand; now, Bibeau and many other wild rice processors use machines to speed up the job. “All these machines replace Indians,” joked Bibeau, “and we’re OK with that.”
Bibeau, who is a lawyer for Honor the Earth, has been fighting Line 3 in the courts for years, and he sees a unique opportunity in the legal battle. Bibeau understands Line 3 as another chapter in the state of Minnesota’s long history of ignoring Indigenous treaty rights and argues that the case may be an opportunity to force the state to recognize those rights.
The land that is now called Minnesota was signed over to the U.S. government in a series of treaties spanning three decades in the mid-1800s. Before that, the Anishinaabe — and more specifically the Ojibwe — arrived in the land of wild rice at the end of a long westward migration. When the fur trade arrived in the 1600s, the Anishinaabe operated as trappers, trading with the British and French. In this position, the Anishinaabe grew their political power and territory for two centuries, expanding into the lands of present-day North Dakota, Montana, Ontario, and Saskatchewan.
In present-day Minnesota, the Anishinaabe people’s first large land concession was an 1837 treaty that coincided with the decline of the fur trade. U.S. fur interests used their political connections to engineer treaties in which the federal government purchased titles to Indigenous land with cash that tribes could use to pay debts claimed by fur interests. “Title to the land was an alien concept to the Ojibwe,” the Anishinaabe scholar Anton Treuer has written. “Cash payment for title seemed a great deal as long as the Anishinaabe didn’t lose the right to use the land.”
The Anishinaabe negotiators of the treaty, therefore, made certain that the Anishinaabe retained use rights to the land ceded by the treaty for hunting, fishing, and gathering of wild rice. “You know we can not live, deprived of our lakes and rivers,” the Anishinaabe Chief Eshkibagikoonzh said during the treaty negotiations. “We wish to remain upon them, to get a living.” These use rights were thus written specifically into article 5 of the 1837 treaty, and they were reaffirmed in a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision that also applied those rights to lands ceded in subsequent treaties — including those through which Line 3 is set to run.
Bibeau sees the appearance of the words “wild rice” in the 1837 treaty as a crucial part of the fight against Line 3. Because the risk of oil spills threatens water quality, Bibeau argues that the pipeline construction interferes with the use rights guaranteed by these treaties. “When you look at wild rice, maple syrup, and fish, they all require abundant, high quality water,” said Bibeau. “I see that our rights are linked to abundant, high quality water that can’t be risked anymore for new pipeline corridors.”
“Enbridge has demonstrated ongoing respect for tribal sovereignty,” a company representative countered in an email to Grist, pointing to officials from the Leech Lake and Fond Du Lac reservations who have expressed support for the project’s permits. “The project is now being built under the supervision of tribal monitors with authority to stop construction, who ensure that important cultural resources are protected.”
Honor the Earth and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe have filed multiple rounds of legal challenges to Line 3 based on these treaty rights, including challenges to the assessment of the project’s environmental impacts and the permit approving the pipeline’s new route, which were approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, as well as to the water crossing permit granted by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency in November.
Most recently, in December of 2020, the nonprofit environmental law organization Earthjustice filed a federal lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers on behalf of the Red Lake and White Earth nations and Honor the Earth, arguing that the permit is unlawful because the Army Corps didn’t conduct its own environmental impacts statement as required under the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act. The plaintiffs argue that the original analysis violated treaty rights by not adequately considering the environmental impacts of the pipeline on treaty waters.
Bibeau compared the legal argument against Line 3 to a seminal treaty rights precedent set by a 2018 Supreme Court case. The court ordered the state of Washington to remove culverts (tunnels that provide drainage under roadways) because they had a negative effect on the salmon population, a food protected by treaty language. The court ruled that the state could not uphold its treaty obligations while the culverts degraded salmon habitats. And just as the culverts degraded salmon habitats, says Bibeau, so would Line 3 degrade wild rice waters.
Bibeau anticipates that further legal action could be filed against the state of Minnesota over Line 3 in the federal courts — and that the treaty rights arguments will hold more weight in these courts than the Minnesota courts. “There’s other cases we’ve worked through in the last decade that have shown us just how powerful our treaty rights are. The problem is, I can show you the same amount of cases over the last five years where the state of Minnesota says, ‘We don’t give a crap about what you think your treaty rights are,’” said Bibeau. “Every time Line 3 gets closer to happening, it pushes our treaty rights closer to the front, and now we’ve gotten to that place with the litigation starting with the Corps of Engineers.”
Bibeau believes that the water rights held by the tribes are strong enough that the state of Minnesota doesn’t have the right to build Line 3 across sensitive waters without the consent of the tribes. For Bibeau, the pipeline fight is a broader opportunity for gaining recognition of the need for prior informed consent — the importance of asking tribes if they support the construction of a major infrastructure project like Line 3 — when it comes to water rights. “I’d like to think we can ride Enbridge like a pig with lipstick towards our treaty rights goal,” said Bibeau.
“If we have water rights, which I believe we do, then you need our consent to even cross the waters or use the waters for another purpose that we think is harmful. When we get to that consent place, it’s going to change the dynamics across the nation.”
Bibeau sent me off with a piece of smoked fish and a trunk full of processed wild rice, with instructions to deliver it 100 miles west, to LaDuke’s home on the White Earth Reservation. It was there that I met Tim, an activist and enrolled member of the Standing Rock nation. (Tim requested his last name be withheld from publication because he fears law enforcement surveillance of his activism.) LaDuke prepared a cauliflower-crust pizza, leaving Tim and me to sit on her back deck, overlooking her small vegetable garden.
Tim came to the Line 3 fight by way of the battle over the Dakota Access pipeline, or DAPL. He had camped at the DAPL protest site for nine months, and his experiences there made him determined to get ahead of the next fight. “I wanted to come out here and have a head start,” he told me, “not like at Standing Rock, where by the time that anybody really paid attention it was half constructed.” Tim’s grandmother was a member of the White Earth band of Ojibwe, and when he left Standing Rock, he started camping on his family’s ancestral land on White Earth Reservation after hearing about the new pipeline that was coming to the region. He’s been there now for three years. He scouts the entire pipeline route from Wisconsin to the North Dakota border regularly, and he watched from public land as Enbridge built storage yards and access roads. A few others came with him initially from DAPL, but as the years went on the numbers dwindled.
But now, as construction moves forward, protest actions have resurged, with activists locking themselves to equipment and protesting along the pipeline route. Protesters are being met with a policing force that has been preparing for this exact scenario for years as the permitting process simmered in the background. Reporting from The Intercept has found that local police departments and private security contractors have been monitoring Indigenous activists, including LaDuke, online and off under the umbrella of a multi-agency initiative called the “Northern Lights Task Force.” In late 2017, members of the Cass County Sheriff’s office, which played a role in coordinating the police response to DAPL at Standing Rock, gave presentations to police officers in Minnesota on lessons and tactics from their crackdown on DAPL protesters. In the fall of 2020, officers participated in a training exercise dubbed “Operation River Crossing,” simulating a confrontation with protesters along the pipeline route.
The surveillance of activists does not appear to have been limited to local police departments: U.S. Customs and Border Protection drones were also flown over the properties of anti-pipeline activists. (In response to a request for comment from Earther, which broke the story, Customs and Border Protection said that it “does not patrol pipeline routes,” even though the flight path in question was 90 miles from the border.)
Law enforcement hasn’t been the only group with their eyes on Line 3 protesters. Republican legislators in Minnesota have spent the past five years attempting to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protest. State senator Paul Utke, the sponsor of a bill that would have made hiring or training anyone who in the future trespasses on pipeline property a felony punishable by a decade in prison and a $20,000 fine, even cited Line 3 as a reason for his sponsorship of the bill. “We saw what happened in North Dakota, and we have a big pipeline project coming up [in Minnesota],” Utke said of the bill in 2018.
Enbridge is also involved in the police response itself. In 2018, the Public Utilities Commission, or PUC, agreed to approve the pipeline under the condition that Enbridge would put together security plans for the pipeline route and create a Public Safety Escrow Trust Account with an initial fund of $250,000 to reimburse pipeline-related policing in counties along the route. The Beltrami County sheriff’s office has invoiced $190,000 in expenses to this account, including $72,000 worth of riot gear and over $10,000 worth of tear gas grenades, pepper spray, batons, and flash-bang devices. As of April 24, the escrow account has distributed $750,000 to law enforcement overall.
“To receive payment from the Public Safety Escrow Account, Local Government Units (LGUs) submit written, itemized requests to the Public Safety Escrow Account Manager, who was appointed by the Minnesota PUC,” an Enbridge representative wrote to Grist, emphasizing that the creation of the account was a requirement for the project to be permitted. “The Manager makes the determination on eligible expenses.”
LaDuke said in January 29 testimony before the Minnesota legislature that she’s seen a rise in security forces, including unmarked vehicles, since construction began. “There’s a lot of civil rights problems that are associated with a Canadian multinational paying the expenses of your police force in the state of Minnesota,” she said. Tim’s also seen the local police forces start to militarize. “They’re preparing way more in advance” for Line 3 than for Standing Rock, he said. “They’ve learned.”
As construction moves forward, pressure is increasing on the Biden administration to revoke the permit to cross water and wetlands that was issued by the Army Corps of Engineers. However, the administration’s recent decision not to take similar action regarding the Dakota Access pipeline doesn’t bode well for activists hoping that Biden will help stop Line 3. Meanwhile, Bibeau, Tim, LaDuke, and others are keeping up the fight in the courts and on the ground.
“I’m here fighting for Indigenous rights. Indigenous rights is my thing,” Tim explained as we sat eating cauliflower pizza on LaDuke’s back deck. “The land is sacred. The people are sacred. You can’t have the people without the land, and you can’t have the land without the people.”
He paused and looked out over the horizon, beyond the placid lake. “I know that if it was up to us, or up to any caretaker of the land, there wouldn’t be any of these pipelines.”
Bibeau, for his part, thinks about the red canoe that he gathered rice in with his father so many years ago. One day, he hopes to pass it down to a family member who will carry on the tradition. In the meantime, he bought a new canoe, on which he painted in big, blocky letters: “Love water not oil, stop Line 3.”
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