09 June 21
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09 June 21
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Joseph E. Stiglitz | The Inflation Red Herring
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate
Stiglitz writes: "Slight increases in the rate of inflation in the United States and Europe have triggered financial-market anxieties."
Far from signaling the return of significant inflation, temporary price increases are exactly what one would expect in a recovery following an economic shutdown. Whether those peddling inflation fears are pursuing their own agenda or simply jumping the gun, they should not be heeded.
light increases in the rate of inflation in the United States and Europe have triggered financial-market anxieties. Has US President Joe Biden’s administration risked overheating the economy with its $1.9 trillion rescue package and plans for additional spending to invest in infrastructure, job creation, and bolstering American families?
Such concerns are premature, considering the deep uncertainty we still face. We have never before experienced a pandemic-induced downturn featuring a disproportionately steep service-sector recession, unprecedented increases in inequality, and soaring savings rates. No one even knows if or when COVID-19 will be contained in the advanced economies, let alone globally. While weighing the risks, we also must plan for all contingencies. In my view, the Biden administration has correctly determined that the risks of doing too little far outweigh the risks of doing too much.
Moreover, much of the current inflationary pressure stems from short-term supply-side bottlenecks, which are inevitable when restarting an economy that has been temporarily shut down. We don’t lack the global capacity to build cars or semiconductors; but when all new cars use semiconductors, and demand for cars is mired in uncertainty (as it was during the pandemic), production of semiconductors will be curtailed. More broadly, coordinating all production inputs across a complex integrated global economy is an enormously difficult task that we usually take for granted because things work so well, and because most adjustments are “on the margin.”
Now that the normal process has been interrupted, there will be hiccups, and these will translate into price increases for one product or the other. But there is no reason to believe that these movements will fuel inflation expectations and thus generate inflationary momentum, especially given the overall excess capacity around the world. It is worth remembering just how recently some of those who are now warning about inflation from excessive demand were talking about “secular stagnation” born of insufficient aggregate demand (even at a zero interest rate).
In a country with deep, longstanding inequalities that have been exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, a tight labor market is just what the doctor ordered. When the demand for labor is strong, wages at the bottom rise and marginalized groups are brought into the labor market. Of course, the exact tightness of the current US labor market is a matter of some debate, given reports of labor shortages despite employment remaining markedly below its pre-crisis level.
Conservatives blame the situation on excessively generous unemployment insurance benefits. But econometric studies comparing labor supply across US states suggest that these kinds of labor-disincentive effects are limited. And in any case, the expanded unemployment benefits are set to end in the fall, even though the global economic effects of the virus will linger.
Back to Health: Making Up for Lost Time
The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare systemic inequities that will have to be addressed if we are ever going to build more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive societies. Join us on June 23, 2021, for our latest live virtual event, Back to Health: Making Up for Lost Time, where leading experts will examine the immediate legacy of the pandemic and explore solutions for bringing all communities and societies back to health.
Rather than panicking about inflation, we should be worrying about what will happen to aggregate demand when the funds provided by fiscal relief packages dry up. Many of those at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution have accumulated large debts – including, in some cases, more than a year’s worth of rent arrears, owing to temporary protections against eviction.
Reduced spending by indebted households is unlikely to be offset by those at the top, most of whom have accumulated savings during the pandemic. Given that spending on consumer durables remained robust during the past 16 months, it seems likely that the well-off will treat their additional savings as they would any other windfall: as something to be invested or spent slowly over the course of many years. Unless there is new public spending, the economy could once again suffer from insufficient aggregate demand.
Moreover, even if inflationary pressures were to become truly worrisome, we have tools to dampen demand (and using them would actually strengthen the economy’s long-term prospects). For starters, there is the US Federal Reserve’s interest-rate policy. The past decade-plus of near-zero interest rates has not been economically healthy. The scarcity value of capital is not zero. Low interest rates distort capital markets by triggering a search for yield that leads to excessively low risk premia. Returning to more normal interest rates would be a good thing (though the rich, who have been the primary beneficiaries of this era of super-low interest rates, may beg to differ).
To be sure, some commentators look at the Fed’s balance-of-risk assessment and worry that it will not act when it needs to. But I think the Fed’s pronouncements have been spot on, and I trust that its position will change if and when the evidence does. The instinct to fight inflation is embedded in central bankers’ DNA. If they don’t see inflation as the key problem currently facing the economy, neither should you.
The second tool is tax hikes. Ensuring the economy’s long-run health requires much more public investment, which will have to be paid for. The US tax-to-GDP ratio is far too low, especially given America’s huge inequalities. There is an urgent need for more progressive taxation, not to mention more environmental taxes to deal with the climate crisis. That said, it is perfectly understandable that there would be hesitancy to enact new taxes while the economy remains in a precarious state.
We should recognize the current “inflation debate” for what it is: a red herring that is being raised by those who would stymie the Biden administration’s efforts to confront some of America’s most fundamental problems. Success will require more public spending. The US is fortunate finally to have economic leadership that won’t succumb to fearmongering.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. (photo: AFP)
'Bernie Sanders Has Real Influence': Vermont's Longtime Outsider Has Become a Trusted Voice in the Biden White House
Ashley Semler, CNN
Semler writes: "The 79-year-old Vermont senator has become a key voice in the Biden administration: called upon, consulted and indispensable in keeping the liberal Democratic flock in line."
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Wood engraving of Dred Scott, circa 1857. (photo: US Library of Congress)
The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott
Jeannie Suk Gersen, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "By limiting discussion of the infamous Supreme Court decision, law-school professors risk minimizing the role of racism in American history."
n January, 2011, the House of Representatives undertook a recitation of the United States Constitution on the House floor. Lawmakers started with “We the People” and took turns reading the text aloud for the next hour and a half. Orchestrated by a new Republican majority to perform devotion to the Constitution, the exercise excluded some provisions, including ones that supported slavery: the three-fifths clause, which says that an enslaved person counts as “three-fifths” of a person for the purpose of apportioning congressional representatives and taxes, and the fugitive-slave clause, which commands that an enslaved person “escaping into another” state, regardless of its laws, “shall be delivered” back to the slave owner. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery after the Civil War, was read aloud by Representative John Lewis. But Representative James Clyburn, the top-ranking Black congressman, refused to participate in the reading, calling the choice to omit provisions “revisionist history.” Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., similarly objected that the “redacted constitutional reading gives little deference to the long history of improving the Constitution” through “the blood, sweat and tears of millions of Americans.”
A decade later, during the nationwide grappling with racial injustice that followed the murder of George Floyd, I saw a striking Twitter discussion among professors of constitutional law, a course that I also teach. They were debating whether much of the Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford should be excised from constitutional-law courses. In the case, which Scott brought in federal court to assert his freedom from enslavement, the Supreme Court held, in 1857, that Scott did not have the privilege to bring the suit because, as a Black person, he could not be a “citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution. Matthew Steilen, a law professor at the University at Buffalo, launched the Twitter thread and advocated for editing the case down to a minimalistic page or so, to omit text that is “so gratuitously insulting and demeaning.” He wondered whether assigning that material is asking students “to relive the humiliation of Taney’s language as evidence of his doctrine of white supremacy.”
The Dred Scott case addressed the moral and political struggle that in those years was threatening to tear the United States apart: whether slavery would be allowed in newly acquired territories. The man who enslaved Scott had taken him from Missouri, a slave state, to live in Illinois, a free state, and in a federal territory (present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and parts of the Dakotas) where Congress had made slavery unlawful. Scott claimed that his stay in Illinois and the territory had emancipated him; a common-law doctrine said slaveholders who intentionally transported enslaved people into free jurisdictions freed them, regardless of intent.
The problem, though, was that, under the Constitution, in order to bring the lawsuit in the first place, one had to be a “citizen.” To arrive at the conclusion that Scott was not one, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney zeroed in on the statement in the Declaration of Independence that it was “self-evident” “that all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” If the Founding Fathers intended to include Black people in that declaration while personally enslaving them, Taney reasoned, that would mean that the Founding Fathers were hypocrites who “would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.” But Taney found it impossible that these “great men” acted in a manner so “utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted.” So he concluded, instead, that their intent was to exclude Black people from the American political community. Of the two possibilities, grotesque hypocrisy or white supremacy, Taney found the latter far more plausible.
Indeed, Taney, a former Maryland slaveholder, said the language of equality and rights “would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery.” The “unhappy black race,” he wrote, was “never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.” Most notoriously, Taney wrote that Blacks were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He also noted that the Constitution itself took slavery as a given in the fugitive-slave clause, and the slave-trade clause, prohibiting Congress to abolish the “Migration or Importation of such Persons” before 1808 and allowing an import tax of up to “ten dollars for each Person.” Taney took this as evidence that the country’s founding document did not confer on Black people “the blessings of liberty, or any of the personal rights so carefully provided for the citizen.”
Scott’s case was fully resolved by the holding that he could not bring his suit, but Chief Justice Taney went even further, in a famously ill-fated attempt to protect the interests of the South and preserve the Union. Scott’s claim to have been emancipated by his stay in a free state and territory turned on the fact that Congress had prohibited slavery there, through the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Taney declared that the compromise itself was unconstitutional. According to Taney, Congress’s slavery ban violated the fundamental right of slaveholders to their property. Taney pushed a strongly anti-colonial line, insisting that slave-owning citizens who migrate to a federal territory “cannot be ruled as mere colonists” by an imperialist power. The purported imperialist here was the U.S. government imposing colonial domination by banning slavery, and the subaltern colonial subjects were slaveholders from slave states. The liberty at stake in Taney’s anti-colonial rebuke was not the freedom of enslaved people but, rather, the freedom of white men to enslave them.
Taney apparently thought that a Supreme Court ruling that Congress must permit slavery in the territories because of slaveholders’ constitutional rights would prevent a war over the question. If anything, Northern outrage at the Court’s expansion of slavery helped to pave the road to the Civil War by making more likely the election of President Abraham Lincoln, who famously denounced the Court. As we know, the war led to the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which invalidated the Dred Scott decision.
Dred Scott v. Sandford is undoubtedly among the most reviled Supreme Court decisions, often invoked as a clear example of what judges should not do. Jamal Greene, a constitutional scholar at Columbia Law School, has described it as part of the “anticanon” of constitutional law, which includes Plessy v. Ferguson, of “separate but equal” fame, and Korematsu v. United States, which permitted the Japanese internment. But Greene has argued that the cases, including Dred Scott, are not necessarily poorly reasoned according to the forms of constitutional analysis that we still use today, involving the interpretation of text, structure, and history. Casting Taney as “a villain who ignored the Constitution,” Greene writes, may be “a distraction from the reasonable possibility that the Constitution itself enabled Scott to lose.”
When I spoke recently with Nikolas Bowie, my colleague and fellow constitutional-law teacher at Harvard Law School, he put it more strongly: “The Constitution sanctioned slavery.” He said that “it would be profoundly irresponsible to tell a history of the Constitution that intentionally ignores the injustice that the Constitution has perpetuated.” In his view, Dred Scott is not “a case in which the Supreme Court made a logical error or an analytic mistake,” nor can it be dismissed as “The Supreme Court was racist back then.” Rather, Bowie uses the case to “emphasize that what makes something constitutional is not its substantive justice but the ability of someone to justify it using constitutional vocabulary.” He said, “The reason the opinion deserves to be condemned is because it thought it needed to be bound by the constitutional drafters’ dehumanization of Black people. What sort of injustice has that obedience engendered or tolerated?”
In my own constitutional-law course, I assign Dred Scott as the first case for the first day, which is not uncommon. Doing so immediately foregrounds the centrality of slavery and white supremacy to the country’s origin, as a frame for understanding constitutional law. It shows that the standard techniques of constitutional interpretation that students are learning to deploy have enabled morally disastrous conclusions. It also helps to disabuse students of the impulse to approach the Constitution and the Supreme Court with uncritical worship. Julian Davis Mortenson, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who also begins his course with Dred Scott, told me that teaching the case at the start “completely inverts the hero narrative of the Supreme Court, shows how rights can be deeply oppressive, and questions the legitimacy of the enterprise.” Mortenson believes that the decision unwittingly “conveys the essence of Critical Race Theory to a person encountering these ideas for the first time: this is the Supreme Court explaining how the United States has been superracist forever and endorsing the racism. It’s a powerful way for students to confront the racism that has been central to the United States.”
Steilen, who wrote the initial tweet about teaching the Dred Scott case, doesn’t disagree with these principles and has worked to add more content on slavery and the Civil War in his course. But, he told me, “George Floyd has changed everything. . . . I wasn’t sure I could muster the moral authority to stand up there and teach this case.” He explained that omitting it entirely would be “a bridge too far,” but he thought it best to assign just “two paragraphs and move on.” He said, “Taney is making the case that Black people who were enslaved were never part of the people of the United States and could never be citizens. . . . It’s just painful. I’m white and I’m going to stand up there and talk with the students, including Black students, about this stuff? I would be dragging them through stuff that was hurtful to them. . . . It just felt indefensible.” Steilen feels that Taney’s language “gratuitously traumatizes” readers: “I wasn’t comfortable giving his words to my students because I was afraid it would hurt them and destroy the kind of community I want to foster in class.” This year, Steilen also skipped teaching Plessy v. Ferguson, which held that segregation did not imply Black people’s inferiority, and instead only mentioned its ideas in discussing Brown v. Board of Education, which overruled it.
Carolyn Shapiro is a professor and co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago-Kent College of Law. When teaching the case, she lectures to her students rather than requiring them to participate in a class discussion as she would throughout most of the course. She wrote on Twitter that she didn’t “think any student should be forced to recite or describe what Taney says about black people.” Shapiro told me, “It is so deeply offensive that I don’t think it’s appropriate.” In her teaching on race discrimination, she includes historical materials intended to show that “how we’ve grappled with the history of slavery is relevant to today.” As part of that, she used to include a clip of “The Road to Brown,” a documentary about Brown v. Board of Education that features historical photographs and footage, to help set the stage on Jim Crow. But, recently, she came to think that the photographs of lynchings that were shown in the video made it traumatic in the classroom, given today’s levels of violence against Black people. Instead, she prefers describing those historical events to her students. (Both Steilen and Shapiro came to these conclusions without pressure from students; they said they had not heard concerns or complaints.)
This pedagogical soul-searching has gone on during a year in which direct public access to the video of George Floyd’s killing, by Derek Chauvin, galvanized worldwide protests on racial injustice and provided the basis for a murder conviction. Among the changes the movement has spurred are stronger efforts to teach the history and theory of racial injustice, in schools at every level. At the same time, it has brought on resistance, in the form of both the predictable conservative backlash against “indoctrinating” students in “critical race theory,” and the more ambivalent liberal concern not to injure students with an unobstructed view of brutal racism. Sometimes the two converge in advocating the editing out of racist content that is deemed too upsetting to be worth the pedagogical benefits.
For primary- and secondary-school education, there are currently a number of state bills to ban the teaching of critical race theory, which the bills’ proponents understand to mean a focus on systemic and institutional racism as opposed to racism as an individual’s prejudice. A recent Oklahoma law makes it unlawful for higher-education institutions to require that students “engage in any form of mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling,” and for K-12 schools to “require or make part of a course” the concept that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” In response, Oklahoma City Community College paused a longstanding course about racial inequality. When it comes to law school, the truth is that to learn constitutional law is to become well versed in techniques of legal interpretation that have enabled deeply unjust results. Bowie reminds his students that “decisions that they see as neutral will be seen later as profound injustices.” If they had gone to law school in the eighteen-fifties, they might have viewed the Dred Scott decision as controversial but sound. In the nineteen-forties, they might have written a legal brief condoning the internment of Japanese-Americans. And in recent years, law graduates justified the so-called Muslim ban and the separation of families at the border.
Next year, Bowie will publish a new constitutional-law casebook; his edited text of Dred Scott v. Sandford does not omit the Court’s starkly demeaning rhetoric about Black people. Having the text’s racist language appear fully demands more preparation work from the teacher, who must engage with students not only on what the case says and means but on why we read and teach it. The fact that it is so disturbing when it is so visible is why purveyors of constitutional law might have the impulse to obscure it.
Rep. Louie Gohmert. (photo: Patrick Semansky/Getty)
Rep Gohmert Asks if National Forest Service or BLM Can Do Anything to Change the Moon's Orbit
Jennifer Adams, The Daily Beast
Adams writes:
ep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) showed everyone just how knowledgeable he is about science during a House Committee on Natural Resources hearing on Tuesday. “I was informed by the ... director of NASA that they have found that the moon’s orbit is changing slightly and so is the earth’s orbit around the sun, and we know there’s been significant solar flare activity,” he said as he asked a question of the Forest Service’s Jennifer Eberlien. “And so is there anything the National Forest Service or BLM [Bureau of Land Management] can do to change the course of the moon’s orbit or the earth’s orbit around the sun? Obviously they would have profound effects on our climate.” The National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management do not have any control over the moon’s orbit.
Gohmert recently bragged to the House floor that his SAT score would “shock everyone that thinks he’s the dumbest guy in Congress.”
Prisoner at Guantanamo Bay military prison. (photo: Getty)
Biden Quietly Moves to Start Closing Guantánamo Ahead of 20th Anniversary of 9/11
Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube, NBC News
Excerpt: "President Joe Biden has quietly begun efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, using an under-the-radar approach to minimize political blowback and to try to make at least some progress in resolving a long-standing legal and human rights morass before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
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The downstream side of the headgates of a canal fed by Upper Klamath Lake. (photo: Dave Killen/AP)
Amid Mega-Drought, Rightwing Militia Stokes Water Rebellion in US West
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "Protesters affiliated with rightwing anti-government activist Ammon Bundy's People's Rights Network are threatening to break a deadlock over water management in the area by unilaterally opening the headgates of a reservoir."
Demonstrations have sparked fears of a confrontation between law enforcement and rightwing anti-government activists
ears of a confrontation between law enforcement and rightwing militia supporters over the control of water in the drought-stricken American west have been sparked by protests at Klamath Falls in Oregon.
Protesters affiliated with rightwing anti-government activist Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights Network are threatening to break a deadlock over water management in the area by unilaterally opening the headgates of a reservoir.
The protest has reawakened memories not only of recent standoffs with federal agencies – including the one led by Bundy in eastern Oregon in 2016 – but a longer history of anti-government agitation in southern Oregon and northern California, stretching back to 2000 and beyond.
The area is a hotbed of militia and anti-government activity and also hit by the mega-drought that has struck the American west and caused turmoil in the agricultural community as conflicts over water become more intense. Among the current protesters at Klamath Falls are individuals who have themselves been involved in similar actions over two decades, including an illegal release of water at the same reservoir in 2001.
In May, the federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that there would be no further release of water from the reserves in the Klamath Basin for irrigators downstream, who rely on the Klamath Project water infrastructure along the Oregon-California border.
Later in the month, two Oregon irrigators, Grant Knoll and Dan Neilsen, began occupying a piece of land adjacent to the headgates of the main canal which pipes water to downstream farmers and Native American tribal groups, like the Yurok, who depend on the water “flushing” the river for the benefit of salmon hatchlings.
Knoll and Nielsen, along with members of the People’s Rights Network, which has engaged in militant anti-mask protests in neighboring Idaho, began staffing a tent on the property which they dubbed a “water crisis info center”.
They also told a number of media outlets that they were prepared to restore the flow of water, even at the price of a confrontation with the federal government, with Knoll telling Jefferson Public Radio last Monday: “We’re going to turn on the water and have a standoff.”
Also on the property is a large metal bucket, daubed with anti-government slogans, which is a memento of a 2001 confrontation at the same spot. That July, 100 farmers, including Knoll and Nielsen, used an 8in-wide irrigation line to bypass the headgate, sending water down the canal. That year, the action by the farmers was followed by other protest actions, such as an American flag-bedecked horse charge, similar to the one that took place on the Bundy ranch during that family’s standoff with federal authorities in 2014.
The confrontation was only defused after appeals were made to the farmers in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11.
Then as now, the reduced flows were partly with environmental issues in mind.
This year, amid the severe drought, the measure is being taken in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, to ensure the survival of two species of suckerfish whose last remaining habitats are in the reservoirs.
In order to keep enough water in the system to ensure their survival, water must be denied to those who rely on it downstream, including both farmers and tribes who depend on fishing.
Endangered Coho Salmon will likely suffer from the lack of water, along with migrating birds later in the season whose refuges have dried up. But previous court decisions have determined that the interests of those upstream should take precedence, including the Klamath Tribes, for whom the suckerfish have a spiritual significance.
While the protesters claim to represent the interests of farmers, they have been disavowed by agricultural leaders, including Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, who told the Sacramento Bee that the protesters were “idiots who have no business being here”, who were using the crisis as “a soapbox to push their agenda”.
Whether or not DuVal speaks for the majority of farmers, there is no sign that the so far small protest is catching on like 2001’s anti-government surge, which saw protest crowds in the thousands in the lead up to the breaching of the headgates.
And while the protesters’ placards promise “Ammon Bundy coming soon”, their leader has so far not made the trip to the Klamath camp from neighboring Idaho, where he recently filed to run for governor.
Demonstrators are detained at an Enbridge Inc. Line 3 pump station during a 'Treaty People Gathering' protest in Hubbard County, Minnesota, on Monday, June 7, 2021. (photo: Nicole Neri/Getty)
Thousands Came to Minnesota to Protest New Construction on the Line 3 Pipeline. Hundreds Left in Handcuffs but More Vowed to Fight on.
Sam Palca, Kristoffer Tigue and Phil McKenna, Inside Climate News
Excerpt: "Protesters say the pipeline bringing tar sands oil from Canada into the U.S. threatens hundreds of miles of pristine wetlands, violates tribal sovereignty and warms the global climate."
he trickle of activists began on Thursday but it quickly grew into a stream that filled northern Minnesota campgrounds surrounding the Mississippi River headwaters over the weekend.
By Monday night, some 200 protesters had been arrested as they attempted to stop the construction of Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement project. Many had chained themselves to pipeline construction equipment hoping to delay a project that they say would lock Minnesota—and the nation—into decades of continued burning of some of the world’s dirtiest oil and threatens the pristine waterways that many Indigenous people depend on for their livelihoods.
“This is just the beginning,” said Winona LaDuke, an Anishinaabe woman and longtime Indigenous activist who has been fighting the project since it was first proposed in 2014, according to the Star Tribune.
The Treaty People Gathering was organized by a coalition of Native rights groups and environmental organizations that intended “to put our bodies on the line, to stop construction and tell the world that the days of tar sands pipelines are over.”
In a written statement Monday, the company said that it was “disheartened” by the protest’s disruption and “destruction” at its worksite. But as the four-day event wound down on Tuesday and skirmishes between police and activists quieted, Indigenous leaders vowed to continue their protests.
Enbridge is now moving to revive construction after being delayed by a muddy spring. And as protesters redouble their efforts to stop Line 3, they are being met with equally intensifying resistance from police who are carrying out the will of state policymakers who have long resisted calls to transition the U.S. economy to clean energy.
Over the last four years, 15 states have adopted new laws that increase the penalty for trespassing on critical infrastructure like oil pipelines. Five other states, including Minnesota, are considering similar measures, which have become growing points of political tension between progressives and conservatives in the country’s cultural wars.
Those tensions played out Monday as encounters between police and protesters became increasingly hostile. Federal officials are reportedly investigating the use of a low flying helicopter that activists said was meant to intimidate them, according to media reports. The New York Times reported that authorities also appeared to use a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, to drive protesters away with noise.
The hostilities were reminiscent of the 2016 Standing Rock protests, where police were filmed using attack dogs, spraying water cannons and firing rubber bullets on Indigenous and environmental activists who attempted to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.
But for some of the protesters in northern Minnesota this week, the aggressive police tactics only compounded the sting of failing to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“People forget that we lost that fight,” Tara Houska, a member of Couchiching First Nation and founder of the Indigenous advocacy group Giniw Collective, said last November.
Many worry without intervention from the Biden administration, Line 3 may see a similar fate.
They see Line 3 as part of a tightrope that Biden is cautiously walking regarding fossil fuel projects as he attempts to gain bipartisan support for his $2 trillion climate infrastructure plan.
President Biden stopped the Keystone XL pipeline from moving forward when he took office in January, but he has yet to weigh in on the Minnesota pipeline and his administration has taken a hands off approach when it comes to Dakota Access. In May, the administration opted against halting that pipeline’s operations after a court ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to redo the project’s environmental review.
An Old Battle Over a New Pipeline
The new pipeline, which the company hopes to have completed by year’s end, would replace the original Line 3 pipeline built in the 1960s and would cross 337 miles of some of Minnesota’s most pristine streams and wetlands. Enbridge says “replacing” the old Line 3 is the best way to prevent future spills while continuing to meet U.S. energy needs, insisting the new pipe is necessary to “restore the historical operating capabilities of Line 3.” The ageing pipeline is operating at roughly half of its original capacity after a series of serious accidents, including a huge oil spill and an explosion that killed two people.
Opponents say that, despite the old pipeline’s safety record, the new Line 3’s additional capacity would be an even greater threat to the area along its route and also to the global climate. Once up and running, the new pipeline would generate 193 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to Enbridge’s environmental impact statement.
Pipeline opponents are determined to continue their actions against the pipeline to get President Biden to direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to withdraw the project’s water permits and begin a federal environmental impact assessment, which the corps has not yet conducted. Many are also imploring him to honor a series of treaties signed between the U.S. government and the Ojibwe people in the 19th century that protected the tribes’ rights to hunt, fish and gather on land and water they believe is now threatened by the pipeline.
For some, this week’s protests weren’t their first Line 3 action. Joe Hill, a Turtle Clan Seneca who lives on the Cattaraugus Reservation near Buffalo, New York, arrived in Minnesota on Dec. 15, just as Enbridge was receiving its final permits to begin construction. He spent much of the winter, including many sub-zero nights, in a yurt about 100 yards from Line 3, as an act of solidarity with the Anishinaabe. “This pipeline isn’t just about this place or the Anishinaabe or the wild rice,” Hill said. “It’s about the world and what will happen if we don’t shut the tar sands down.”
Another campsite, the Northern Pines Camp, played host to a delegation of about 300 members of different faith communities. LaDuke, executive director of Honor the Earth and an enrolled member of the Mississippi Band Anishinaabe, addressed the campers Saturday evening before leading them down to Fishhook Lake, where the campers held faith ceremonies, including the recitation of Hindu poems and the Havdalah, which ends the Jewish Sabbath and marks the transition to a new week. Changes were also a theme of LaDuke’s speech. “We don’t need that pipeline…What we need is a just transition,” she said. “Are we gonna walk through and carry all that junk or we gonna walk through clean?”
Sunday was a day set aside for training in which activists were taught how to engage with law enforcement and informed about different levels of risk they would confront, the highest of which would have them facing arrest. Leaders of the gathering said they understood that many did not want to risk jail during Monday’s demonstrations. LaDuke also hopes that the law would fall on the side of pipeline opponents in the current legal challenges to Line 3.
“We’d like the courts to work,” she said, shaking her head, “but until then Enbridge has unfurled holy hell up here.”
Other protesters, however, weren’t interested in obeying the law or waiting for the courts to rule. They blocked access to the pipeline construction site with a fishing boat and bamboo poles, climbed on top of equipment and chained themselves to machinery. By Tuesday morning, more than 200 people had been arrested.
At the Two Inlets pump station just off of Highway 71 north of Park Rapids, law enforcement detained dozens of protesters over the course of several hours late Monday. The Northern Lights Task Force, the law enforcement collaborative overseeing the police response, flew a helicopter over the occupiers at the pump station, kicking up a cloud of choking dust, prompting the reported investigation by U.S. Customs and Border Protection of the low flying helicopter.
Police encircled protesters remaining outside the pump station and issued a final dispersal order just before 10 p.m. on Monday night. Soon after, all remaining protesters save those who had secured themselves to either construction machinery or the boat being used to block the access road, were detained. Others were issued a citation and released.
Meanwhile, the Native group Resilient Indigenous Sisters Engaging (RISE) will continue a four-day prayer ceremony that began on Monday near the Mississippi headwaters in the path of the proposed pipeline.
“Where the spirits, the Manidog, guide us, [will determine] how much longer we will go from there,” said Dawn Goodwin, an Anishinaabe leader and co-founder of RISE.
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