2 February 21
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WE NEED TO MAKE UP GROUND ASAP — We are WAY behind on donations this month. Who out there hasn’t donated in the past few months and can chip in? Let’s turn a little attention to RSN’s budget. Please. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News Sure, I'll make a donation!
Sanders Working on a Plan B for the $15 Minimum Wage
ALSO SEE: Ilhan Omar Leads Calls to Fire Senate
Official Who Scuppered $15 Wage Rise Kelsey Vlamis and Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider
 en. Bernie Sanders said Democrats would try to devise a backdoor to implement a $15 minimum wage after a pay hike was struck from the $1.9 trillion stimulus package on Thursday evening — a major setback for progressives.
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled that a $15 minimum wage violated the strict guidelines of the reconciliation process. It's the legislative method Democrats are using to approve the package in a party-line vote without Republican support. In a statement, Sanders criticized McDonough's decision. "It is hard for me to understand how drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was compliant with the Byrd rule, but raising the minimum wage is not," the Vermont Democrat said, referring to a part of the 2017 GOP tax law allowed through reconciliation. Then he said he will work with other Senate Democrats on "an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that don't pay workers at least $15 an hour and to provide small businesses with the incentives they need to raise wages." There were early signs of Democratic support for the move on Thursday evening. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii tweeted "COUNT ME IN" on the Sanders proposal. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, chair of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, also said in a statement: "I'm looking at a tax penalty for mega-corporations that refuse to pay a living wage." Democrats are rushing to approve the emergency spending package ahead of March 14, the deadline when enhanced unemployment insurance starts to expire. The House is set to vote on the relief package, which contains a gradual wage increase to $15 an hour among other provisions like stimulus checks, unemployment aid, and vaccine funds. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the pay bump would remain in the legislation. "House Democrats believe that the minimum-wage hike is necessary," Pelosi said in a statement. "Therefore this provision will remain in the American Rescue Plan on the floor tomorrow." Yet designing and gathering support for a new plan to raise wages could complicate the swift timeline Democrats are pursuing. Some centrist Democrats may be reluctant to increase taxes on businesses during the economic downturn. It's unclear whether the proposal would be supported by Sen. Joe Manchin, a key West Virginia Democrat. The Sanders provision would also have to clear a set of rules governed by the parliamentarian. Congress hasn't raised the minimum wage since 2009, and it stands at $7.25 an hour. Experts say hourly workers have borne a disproportionate burden of the pandemic, suffering large job losses in the service and leisure sectors of the economy in particular. "Workers of color, women, and younger workers are overrepresented in minimum wage jobs," Elizabeth Pancotti, policy director of Employ America, said in a recent interview. "Politically, we've forgotten about these workers in the past ten years and in the covid crisis. We didn't implement hazard pay, mandatory paid sick leave, or a lot of policies for workers who are still at work."
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Friday that a minimum wage hike remained 'a priority and we will get it done,' but stressed that President Biden's relief package was still a 'great bill' without it. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
House Passes Biden's Stimulus Package, With $15 Minimum Wage Provision
Emily Cochrane and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times
Even as the House passed President Biden’s pandemic aid plan with a minimum wage increase included, Democrats were searching for a Plan B for the wage hike, which was ruled out in the Senate.
 he House passed President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan early Saturday in a nearly party-line vote, advancing a sweeping pandemic aid package that would provide billions of dollars for unemployed Americans, struggling families and businesses, schools and the distribution of coronavirus vaccines.
The vote was 219 to 212, with Democrats pushing the measure over unanimous Republican opposition. After hours of debate that stretched past midnight, two Democrats — Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon — broke with their party and voted against the bill. The plan would provide $1,400 direct payments to individuals earning up to $75,000 a year and to couples earning up to $150,000. It would also expand a weekly federal unemployment benefit that is set to lapse in mid-March, increasing the payments to $400 a week from $300 and extending them through the end of August. It would increase the child tax credit; provide more than $50 billion for vaccine distribution, testing and tracing; and allocate nearly $200 billion to primary and secondary schools and $350 billion to state, local and tribal governments. The vote was 219 to 212, with Democrats pushing the measure over unanimous Republican opposition. After hours of debate that stretched past midnight, two Democrats — Representatives Jared Golden of Maine and Kurt Schrader of Oregon — broke with their party and voted against the bill. (This is a MUST READ ARTICLE IN ITS ENTIRETY! DEMOCRATS are taking care of Americans and not profitable corporations as REPUBICANS have done. Americans NEED HELP NOW!) “This isn’t a relief bill,” said Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. “It takes care of Democrats’ political allies, while it fails to deliver for American families.” READ MORE
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents search for an undocumented immigrant at his mother's house. (photo: Irfan Khan/LA Times/TNS)
ICE Investigators Used a Private Utility Database Covering Millions to Pursue Immigration Violations
Drew Harwell, The Washington Post
Harwell writes: Government agencies increasingly are accessing private information they are not authorized to compile on their own
 .S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have tapped a private database containing hundreds of millions of phone, water, electricity and other utility records while pursuing immigration violations, according to public documents uncovered by Georgetown Law researchers and shared with The Washington Post.
ICE’s use of the private database is another example of how government agencies have exploited commercial sources to access information they are not authorized to compile on their own. It also highlights how real-world surveillance efforts are being fueled by information people may never have expected would land in the hands of law enforcement. The database, CLEAR, includes more than 400 million names, addresses and service records from more than 80 utility companies covering all the staples of modern life, including water, gas and electricity, and phone, Internet and cable TV. CLEAR documents say the database includes billions of records related to people’s employment, housing, credit reports, criminal histories and vehicle registrations from utility companies in all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It is updated daily, meaning even a recent move or new utility sign-up could be reflected in an individual search. CLEAR is run by the media and data conglomerate Thomson Reuters, which sells “legal investigation software solution” subscriptions to a broad range of companies and public agencies. The company has said in documents that its utility data comes from the credit-reporting giant Equifax. Thomson Reuters, based in Toronto, also owns the international news service Reuters as well as other prominent subscription databases, including Westlaw. Thomson Reuters has not provided a full client list for CLEAR, but the company has said in marketing documents that the system has been used by police in Detroit, a credit union in California and a fraud investigator in the Midwest. Federal purchasing records show that the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense are among the federal agencies with ongoing contracts for CLEAR data use. On Friday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform sent letters to the chief executives of Thomson Reuters and Equifax seeking documents and other information on how ICE has used the utility data in recent years. “We are concerned that Thomson Reuters’ commercialization of personal and use data of utility customers and sale of broad access to ICE is an abuse of privacy, and that ICE’s use of this database is an abuse of power,” said the letters, which were signed by Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), the committee’s vice chair, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the chairman of a subcommittee on economic and consumer policy. Thomson Reuters directed requests for comment to ICE, which declined to comment on its “investigative techniques, tactics or tools,” citing “law-enforcement sensitivities.” Equifax did not respond to requests for comment. ICE has not shared how often it has used utility records to track people, saying such details should be confidential because they outline protected investigative techniques. But an immigration-case investigator appeared to note the access last June in an email to officials at the Georgia Department of Driver Services. The email was revealed as part of a Freedom of Information Act request by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology and reviewed by The Post. In the heavily redacted email, the officer said immigration authorities are pursuing a “straight-up Pleasure Visitor” accused of overstaying a visa and that a search of unspecified utility records had showed that the target had “recently departed” from an address. In a separate letter to a Texas sheriff’s office in 2019, also obtained by Georgetown researchers and shared with The Post, a Thomson Reuters specialist said CLEAR’s utility data offered investigators a powerful way to find “people who are not easily traceable via traditional sources.” Nina Wang, a policy associate at the Georgetown center, said the database offered ICE officers a way to pursue undocumented immigrants who may have tried to stay off the grid by avoiding activities as getting driver’s licenses but could not live without paying to keep the lights on at home. “There needs to be a line drawn in defense of people’s basic dignity. And when the fear of deportation could endanger their ability to access these basic services, that line is being crossed,” she said. “It’s a massive betrayal of people’s trust. … When you sign up for electricity, you don’t expect them to send immigration agents to your front door.” ICE has a $21 million contract with a Thomson Reuters subsidiary for the data, though the subscription is scheduled to expire on Sunday. ICE published a new solicitation for a “Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription” in November, but it is unclear whether the Biden administration will renew the deal or award a new contract. Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign organizer at the Latino civil rights group Mijente, said her group has been alarmed and “horrified” by how quickly ICE has expanded its surveillance network through the use of private databases, which members suspect have been used by ICE officers to plan raids on people’s homes. “People would say to us, ‘How did ICE get my address? I’ve never had interactions with the police, I’ve never used this address publicly,’” she said. “It puts people in a tremendously difficult situation. They have to decide whether to have electricity or subject themselves to having ICE get access to this information.” Equifax has said it gathers utility-bill records from the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange, a consumer-credit reporting bureau that gathers data on people’s account and payment history with companies including Verizon and AT&T. The data-exchange bureau has defended its data collection as “empowering” for the “underserved and underbanked community,” because the records help big companies assess the creditworthiness of people by using “alternative data sources” beyond traditional credit reports. It’s unclear whether the utility data from Equifax comes from NCTUE or some other source, though the two firms have a long-standing data-sharing agreement. Speaking of the partnership in a letter to the Justice Department in 2001, a NCTUE representative wrote that Equifax had a “commitment to find and exploit appropriate opportunities for third-party access to exchange data.” Federal laws such as the Privacy Act of 1974 regulate how federal agencies can gather or use Americans’ personal information, but they do not cover CLEAR or other private databases, and federal law enforcement has increasingly turned to them for information it otherwise is not allowed to collect without a court order. Immigration agents have accessed information from a private database of license-plate readers holding billions of records related to vehicle locations from scanners on tow trucks, toll roads and speed-limit cameras. Agents have run facial recognition searches on people’s photos to see if they match any of the millions of faces in state driver’s license databases. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials also have used cellphone location data without warrants to track people inside the country. The data is gathered through a mix of weather, gaming and other apps, then bundled and resold by companies to marketers and federal agencies. An inspector general for the Treasury Department said in a letter last week to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that similar uses of commercial location data by the Internal Revenue Service could conflict with a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that found such searches should require a warrant. Lawyers for the IRS and other agencies have argued that they had not needed a warrant because phone users had “voluntarily granted access” to the data-sharing apps.
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Inmate firefighters - notable by their bright orange fire gear compared to the yellow worn by professional firefighters - prepare to take on the River Fire in Salinas, California. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Amendment Would Ban 'Servitude' by California Prison Inmates
Don Thompson, Associated Press
Thompson writes:
alifornia relies on thousands of inmates to fight massive wildfires, churn out vehicle license plates, mop prison floors and myriad other tasks — all for wages that rarely top a few dollars a day.
Opponents want to end what they call a visage of slavery. They propose to amend the state Constitution's ban on indentured servitude to remove an exemption for people who are being punished for crimes.
Prison labor predominantly affects Black and Latino people who make up the majority of inmates, San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney said Thursday. He is asking the Board of Supervisors to become the first to formally back the overhaul proposed by Democratic Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager of Los Angeles.
“Even through the COVID-19 pandemic, California inmates have been forced to work for as low as 8 cents per hour," he said. "Many have been on the front lines fighting our increasingly dangerous wildfires, earning just $2 to $6 a day.”
California has long depended on inmate firefighters to help battle increasingly monstrous wildfires. But their numbers have dwindled in recent years as the state has eased sentencing laws and shifted more offenders to county custody instead of state prisons.
Along with daily wages of $2.90 to $5.12, depending on skill level, inmate firefighters get an additional $1 an hour when assigned to emergencies, corrections officials said.
The state also depends on inmates to work as cooks, custodians, gardeners and many other roles that keep the prison system running from day to day.
Inmates also work for the Prison Industry Authority, which has produced most of the prison system's protective equipment during the pandemic along with more traditional products such as vehicle license plates, furniture, road signs, clothing and numerous food products.
Ending such programs “would be devastating to California, especially on the fire crews,” said Nina Salarno, president of Crime Victims United of California. “This law would hurt rehabilitation efforts ... because you are then taking away incentives for inmates to learn skills and trades so they can come back into society and be self-sufficient.”
State officials did not comment on the proposal to end the practice, but the authority promotes the programs as training inmates to be “job ready" upon release. Those inmates “are getting jobs and paying taxes. For every inmate that does not return, taxpayers save money!” it says on its website.
Inmates who apply to work for the authority receive credits toward earlier release, along with the potential for industry certifications in fields such as computer coding, welding or metal working. Nearly 4,700 inmates are currently in the program, which has space for more than 6,700 inmates.
They are generally paid 40 cents to $1 an hour, though the limited number who work for private companies while serving their sentences receive industry-comparable wages.
Legal Services for Prisoners with Children executive director Dorsey Nunn, who co-founded the reform group All of Us or None, was sentenced to life in prison when he was 19 then paroled in 1981.
He disputed the benefits of the prison work while arguing that an amendment would do more to promote racial equity and healing than recent efforts to rename schools and tear down statues of controversial figures.
“People actually thought that my rehabilitation was occurring because they were forcing me to work. Actually, involuntary servitude gives work a bad name,” Nunn said. “You can’t volunteer when you’re being forced to do this stuff. Nobody in their right mind in the state of California would take a job if they was paying you 15 cents an hour or seven cents an hour or $2 a day.”
He and other proponents hope a change in the California Constitution would eventually lead to a similar ban in the U.S. Constitution. The state's current wording dates from 1974 and reads, “Slavery is prohibited. Involuntary servitude is prohibited except to punish crime.”
The proposed amendment would change the wording to, “Slavery and involuntary servitude are prohibited.”
George Galvis, co-founder of All of Us or None and executive director of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, said there still could be room under the change for prison work and rehabilitation programs leading to jobs.
“The key word is ‘involuntary,’" Galvis said. “It doesn't necessarily mean that there won't be employment or vocational programs and opportunities," but he said inmates should be paid competitively.
The good job-training programs now benefit relatively few of California's 95,000 inmates, argued Nunn, while "half the people that work in the prison are sweeping, picking up paper and doing other stuff. It’s no great skill being taught and they’re being paid pennies on the day.”
Putting the amendment before voters would take a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Legislature, where Democrats hold such an edge. Proponents noted that similar changes have already been adopted in the more conservative states of Colorado, Nebraska and Utah.
The Abolish Slavery National Network says similar efforts are underway in New Jersey and South Carolina. Changing the U.S. Constitution would take approval from two-thirds of states.
Riverside County Supervisor Manny Perez intends to bring up a resolution supporting the California effort when his board meets March 9. He called inmate labor part of “the lingering legacy of slavery.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that civil-rights laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on gender also apply to gender identity and sexual orientation. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
House Passes the Equality Act in a Victory for LGBTQ Americans
Gabby Birenbaum, Vox
Birenbaum writes:
The landmark bill, which would prohibit discrimination against LGBTQ Americans, faces unlikely odds in the Senate.
n a victory for LGBTQ rights, the House passed the Equality Act, a bill that would ban discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, on February 24.
All House Democrats and three House Republicans — Reps. John Katko (NY), Tom Reed (NY), and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) — joined together to pass the bill, 224-206. Now, the legislation moves to the Senate, where it faces tougher opposition because it will need all 50 Democrats plus 10 Republican senators to pass it. The bill, which has been introduced four times in its current form but has existed since 1974, passed the House in 2019 but was blocked by the then-Republican-controlled Senate.
The Equality Act would amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to explicitly enumerate LGBTQ+ Americans as a class protected from discrimination. While the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton last year that discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity was unconstitutional under the “sex” provision in the Civil Rights Act — thereby extending protections in housing, education, and employment to LGBTQ people — the Equality Act would go further, banning discrimination for all federally funded programs and “public accommodations,” like stores, stadiums, rental establishments, and hotels.
That last feature has been a sticking point for religious groups because it would prohibit businesses from claiming religious freedom to deny service to LGBTQ+ Americans, in turn explicitly superseding 1993’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. To use a famous example, a bakery would no longer be able to deny its wedding cake services to a same-sex couple based on the owners’ religion if the Equality Act were passed.
LGBTQ groups lauded the bill’s passage in the House, noting the Equality Act was the culmination of decades of work from LGBTQ activists.
“At the Trevor Project, our crisis counselors constantly hear from LGBTQ young people who are negatively impacted by discrimination and stigma in their everyday life and want nothing more than to be treated with the same dignity and respect as everyone else,” Amit Paley, executive director of the Trevor Project, which provides crisis services to LGBTQ people under 25, told Vox. “We hope the Senate will act swiftly and send a strong message to LGBTQ young people that they deserve to be able to live their lives openly, proudly, and without fear.”
LGBTQ House Democrats also said the bill was a long-overdue step toward guaranteeing equal protection under the law.
“Today we send a powerful message to LGBTQ people around the country, and indeed around the world, that they are seen, that they are valued, that their lives are worthy of being protected,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), one of the first openly LGBTQ Black members of Congress.
In a press conference, Democrats made direct appeals to their Republican colleagues in the Senate, saying the bill just extends the same protections to LGBTQ Americans as other protected classes.
“We want no more, nor should we accept any less,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), one of two openly LGBTQ senators, said.
They emphasized religious exemptions would apply the same way they do to race and sex. But a number of religious groups are lobbying against the bill, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents over 1500 Orthodox Jewish rabbis, and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.
Religious opposition has been the crux of the GOP’s opposition, but Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has put Republicans in an awkward spot with her transphobic comments and actions over the vote this week, while Sen. Rand Paul spread transphobic misinformation at Dr. Rachel Levine’s confirmation hearing. Now, Republicans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) say the GOP needs to be more intentional in its anti-Equality Act messaging — making clear they are tangentially opposed to LGBTQ+ equality because of purported religious freedom arguments rather than explicitly homophobic and transphobic.
GLAAD, the world’s largest LGBTQ media advocacy group, countered that narrative, saying in a press release that majorities of all faith groups — which have significant LGBTQ+ populations — support anti-discrimination laws, including Catholics, Jews, and non-white Protestants.
In the Senate, there are a few Republicans who may vote in support of the bill. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) cosponsored the bill in 2019, though she said she will not do so this time because certain provisions “need revision.” Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) have been supportive of LGBTQ+ rights before, though Portman said he could object on religious grounds. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) has already said he will oppose the bill.
When asked how the Senate plans to get 60 votes, Sen. Jeff Berkeley (D-OR) said he hopes the process will be like the 2013 Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a narrower bill that Democrats lobbied their Republican colleagues for to eventually get the requisite votes.
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Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. (photo: Getty Images)
Named, Shamed but Unscathed: Saudi Crown Prince MBS Spared by US Realpolitik
Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Borger writes:
Analysis: The US has sanctioned 76 people linked to Khashoggi’s murder, but not Mohammed bin Salman, future king of a strategic Middle East ally
riday was the day that Joe Biden’s vaunted drive to put human rights back at the centre of US foreign policy slammed, as such drives usually do, into the brick wall of great power realpolitik.
As it had promised, the new administration obeyed the law laid down by Congress and ignored by its predecessor. It published an unclassified summary of the intelligence assessment that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, “approved” the murder and dismemberment of the Saudi reformer and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
For all the claims by the Trump administration that it could not publish for fear of revealing CIA “sources and methods”, the brief assessment was a logical inference from publicly available material. The 15-member murder squad included seven drawn from the prince’s own bodyguard, in an absolutist monarchy demanding absolute obedience. It was not a great work of sleuthing.
However, the crown prince was not on the list of 76 Saudis sanctioned under the new Khashoggi ban unveiled by the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, imposing visa restrictions at foreigners “conducting serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities, including those that suppress, harass, surveil, threaten, or harm journalists, activists, or other persons perceived to be dissidents for their work”.
Used to the full, the Khashoggi ban could lead to wholesale expulsions of diplomats and other operatives, not just from Saudi Arabia but also from dictatorships like China, which have been heavily involved in intimidation of Chinese nationals and Chinese Americans living in the US.
The ban, though, is a general response to a very specific crime, in which the mastermind has gone without punishment, apart from naming and shaming.
The treasury froze the assets of the former deputy head of Saudi intelligence and blocked all dealings with the Rapid Intervention Force, known as the Tiger Squad, but its royal patron and commander, the crown prince, was left unscathed.
Furthermore, as Kristin Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Gulf States Institute observed, with the ban the Biden administration “is making a distinction between domestic suppression and its pursuit abroad”, explicitly punishing only the latter.
The intelligence assessment and the punitive measures were a one-two punch, in which the second punch was pulled, a compromise born of the cold reality that any dream that King Salman would somehow demote Mohammed in the line of succession for the good of the kingdom was fanciful. The crown prince is too well entrenched for that, and being in his mid-30s, has good prospects for being Saudi leader for a generation or more.
US officials point out that every administration does business in the national interest with leaders with blood on their hands, starting with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. What makes Prince Mohammed different is that he is supposed to be a key strategic ally in the Middle East.
The US runs five bases in Saudi Arabia. While seeking to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (known as the JCPOA), the Biden administration is seeking to show it is not a pushover in the region. Thursday night’s airstrike on Tehran-backed militiamen in Syria is demonstration of that. And like Barack Obama before him, he will need to seek Saudi acquiescence at least or risk the monarchy joining forces in the region and in Congress to sabotage any future deal.
“If we’re going to get the Saudis out of Yemen, we’re going to need their cooperation, and we need to work with them on the JCPOA,” Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations said. “It’s a big important country that’s just super hard to avoid.”
Obama bought off the Gulf monarchies with record arms sales, a tactic many US officials at the time, now in the current administration, came to regret as complicity in the mass killings of Yemeni civilians.
The Biden team has sought to put that right by announcing an end to US military involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but here again there is a grey area. The US will sell defensive weapons but not offensive ones, but in reality the distinction is open to interpretation.
In the same week the Khashoggi ban was unveiled, the Saudi monarchy launched this year’s Future Investment Initiative, known as “Davos in the Desert” and by all accounts, the investment bankers and private equity moguls who stayed away in the years following Khashoggi’s slaughter, are back in force. This week may be looked back on as the one in which the effort to make Prince Mohammed a pariah finally failed.
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Indigenous women of the Cordilleras. (photo: Karlston Lapniten)
'The River Will Bleed Red': Indigenous Filipinos Face Down Dam Projects
Karlston Lapniten, Mongabay
Lapniten writes:
n Nov. 12, 2020, Typhoon Vamco cut across the northern Philippines, flooding more than 60 cities and towns in the Cagayan Valley. Millions of dollars’ worth of property and crops were damaged.
Considered the worst flooding to hit the region in almost half a century, Vamco’s impact on communities was largely attributed to waters released from the Magat dam, one of the largest in the Philippines. The dam sits on the Magat River, a tributary of the Cagayan River, about 350 kilometers (220 miles) northeast of Manila.
In just 11 hours, the dam discharged more than 265 million cubic meters (70 billion gallons) of water — almost a third of the reservoir’s capacity, and enough to fill nearly 110,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The disaster has rekindled criticism of dam-building in the region, including by longtime opponents of two proposed hydropower projects on another tributary of the Cagayan, the Chico River.
“The Cagayan flooding verified one of the many reasons why we maintain our opposition to damming any part of Chico River,” says Danny Bangibang, a leader of the Indigenous communities of Kalinga province, where the rivers are located. “We will not wait for the same disaster to happen in our own soil.” In his leadership role, Bangibang is entrusted with mediating talks among Indigenous communities and facilitating interaction with government agencies.
The two planned hydropower plants, the Upper Tabuk dam and the Karayan dam, are both set to be built on ancestral domain lands. Their developers have touted them as being pivotal to providing cheaper electricity and a consistent supply of water for irrigating upland farms. Some Indigenous groups and activists, however, have opposed the projects since 2008, questioning the exclusion of downstream Indigenous communities from the consultations, and alleging bribery and sweetheart deals surrounding the consent process.
River of life
The Chico River runs 175 km (280 mi) through Mountain Province and Kalinga provinces before merging into the Cagayan River. The Chico and its 12 main tributaries are the lifeblood of Indigenous communities in the Cordillera region of the northern Philippines, providing a bounty of fresh water for drinking and for irrigation. Its watershed is also home to a wealth of wild flora and fauna;28 species of wildlife found here are endemic.
“Similar to other civilizations around the world, communities and culture developed adjacent to the river,” Dominique Sugguiyao, Kalinga’s Environment and Natural Resources Officer (ENRO), tells Mongabay. “People refer to Chico as the ‘river of life’ because it is rightly so. Our ancestors drew living from it and we continue to do so.”
“Indigenous people have always been the stewards of land, including rivers from which they draw a valuable symbiotic relationship,” says Michael Sugguiyao, Dominique’s brother and the Indigenous Peoples Mandatory Representative (IPMR) to the provincial legislature of Kalinga.
Indigenous peoples have maintained their traditional knowledge systems, passed down from one generation to another, that prescribe the preservation and maintenance of the forests, he says. In those practices, forests are protected because they sustain the rivers with waters, which in turn, sustain the communities with food and livelihood — an unbroken cycle even in the 21st century, Michael Sugguiyao adds.
Any venture that disturbs or hampers the natural flow of the river will have an immense and profound negative effect on this ecology and the people who depend on it, Dominique Sugguiyao says.
Analyses of the environmental impacts of the Karayan dam submitted to the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) show that earthmoving activities during construction could increase water turbidity, which could decrease algae diversity. This would reduce the abundance of zooplankton, which feed primarily on algae, sending a ripple effect through the aquatic food chain. The natural migration and movement of freshwater species will also be impeded, and installing fish ladders is not a solution that will work for all aquatic species, Dominique Sugguiyao says.
Overall, the interconnectedness of biological communities will be disrupted and the productivity of the river system will be reduced, the analysis concluded.
The river is also a source of aggregate (sand and gravel) that today fuels a multi-million-peso industry in Tabuk, the Kalinga provincial capital, supplying construction projects across the province and in adjacent towns. Dams would also halt the flow of aggregate, destroying the livelihoods that depend on it. “The same [analysis] is applicable if the Upper Tabuk Dam will be constructed,” says Bangibang, the Indigenous leader. “Imagine the extent of the damage if both dams will [be] push[ed] though?”
The analysis of the effects of the Karayan dam applies to the Upper Tabuk dam, and could spell greater damage if both are constructed, he said.
Upper Tabuk dam: Dividing communities
The proposed Upper Tabuk dam would feed a 17-20-megawatt hydroelectric generator from a reservoir of about 5 million m3 (1.3 billion gallons) on the Tanudan River, one of the main tributaries of the Chico. It’s also expected to provide year-round irrigation for the rice terraces and fields in Kalinga, potentially doubling rice production in the “rice granary” of this mountainous part of the northern Philippines.
The dam would be built in the village of Dupag village, which lies within the officially recognized ancestral territory of the Naneng people. In 2009, members of the Minanga, then a sub-tribe of the Naneng, formed an Indigenous-owned corporation, Kalinga Hydropower Inc. (KHI), to back the construction of the Upper Tabuk dam at an estimated cost of 2 billion pesos (about $40 million at the exchange rate at that time).
KHI partnered with DPJ Engineers and Consultancy (DPJ), owned by Daniel Peckley Jr., a civil engineer who specializes in hydro projects and whose firm operates the 1 MW Bulanao hydropower plant, also in Kalinga.
Despite scattered protests, the project obtained the necessary permits from government agencies. By 2011, it was only lacking major investors to begin construction.
In April 2012, the opposition unified, with more than a hundred tribal leaders from 18 affected villages petitioning the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to cancel the permits.
They accused KHI and DPJ of downplaying the scale of the proposed dam by painting it as “a small hydropower development,” and said that the size of its water reservoir puts it in the category of a large dam under the standards set by the International Commission on Large Dams and the World Commission on Dams.
Mongabay made multiple attempts to contact Peckley by email and by sending a representative to his office but did not receive a response by the time this article was published.
Two months after the petition, the NCIP cancelled the certificates it had issued for the project. Five years later, in 2017, DPJ revived its proposal and reapplied for free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), a legally mandated process for projects with the potential to affect Indigenous peoples and their territories.
The following year, the NCIP identified five tribes, including the Minanga and the Naneng, as the only Indigenous groups who would be impacted by the project and thus who should be consulted for the FPIC.
In response, more than a thousand people from different tribes along the Chico River submitted their own petition against the Upper Tabuk dam, denouncing the potential impact on downstream Indigenous communities. These downstream groups say all tribes whose ancestral domains are connected to the flow of the Chico and the Tanudan should be included in the consultations.
“What is done upstream will affect the river flow in the downstream communities,” Bangibang says. “It is common sense that they too … should be consulted.” He also called into question the validity of the company’s original 2008 feasibility study, saying it skipped an FPIC process that should have been carried out before the study was conducted.
The hardships of agricultural life, however, have persuaded many in these farming communities to support the dam project and its promised benefits, undermining opposition to the dam, says Andres Wailan, an elder and bodong (peace treaty and alliance) holder of the Malbong tribe.
In 2019, three Indigenous communities, including the Minanga and Naneng, consented to the dam project, leaving two other communities opposed to it: the Talloctoc and Malbong. Leaders of the consenting tribes said in a November 2019 community hearing that they were won over by the promise of jobs, infrastructure and a share of tax revenue.
“We cannot blame the people [who consented] but we cannot also just let them make bad decisions,” Wailan tells Mongabay.
Within affected communities, the split has caused tensions, including among members of the same families, straining the strong kinship ties of the Indigenous peoples, says Naneng leader Jerry Bula-at, a member of the Timpuyog ti Mannalon ti Kalinga (Federation of Farmers in Kalinga), or TMK, a progressive group advocating for farmers’ and Indigenous people’s rights.
Within his own family, some members are in favor of the Upper Tabuk dam because of the promised access to better irrigation and farming development, he says. Similar rifts have appeared in downstream communities.
“If a project causes division among Indigenous communities, it should be enough grounds for the NCIP to stop the project,” Bula-at says.
The NCIP did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment. But in a memo to its Kalinga office, dated Jan. 11, 2021, a copy of which Mongabay has seen, the NCIP regional office said the issues and concerns regarding the Upper Tabuk dam need to be settled first and “a common and united stance” among affected Indigenous communities must be achieved before the developer’s FPIC application can proceed.
Bula-at says Peckley should back out of the project knowing it has brought, and continues to bring, tension and division to Indigenous groups. “He claims that he is one of us but he does not act like one,” Bula-at says. “Indigenous peoples know that values and preservation of healthy kinship stand above monetary gains.”
Karayan dam: Wine and dine and bribes
A few kilometers from the proposed site of the Upper Tabuk dam, a larger project, estimated to cost 5.18 billion pesos ($104 million), has stalled due to violent opposition. The 52-MW run-of-the-river hydropower project is a venture by the Karayan Hydropower Corporation (KHC), which is, in turn, a joint operation of San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders and Developers Group, Inc., and the Union Energy Corporation.
Known as the Karayan dam, it would be built on the Chico River itself, in the village of Lucog, according to DENR documents obtained by Mongabay. Its 14-million-m3 (3.7-billion-gallon) reservoir would displace five communities. DENR identifies the project as “environmental critical,” meaning it has “high potential significant negative impact.”
Like the Upper Tabuk dam, the Karayan dam faced immediate opposition from Indigenous groups for its perceived impact on ancestral domain lands and the environment. It has also caused rifts within the community by “distorting information,” Bula-at says.
“They used the same deceptive tactics they used in gaining support for the Upper Tabuk dam,” he says. “They wined and dined people to manipulate them and sow disunity as a means to divide and conquer.”
Instead of directly talking to affected households, Bula-at says, developer KHC talked to residents whose properties fall outside the proposed project site, promising financial benefits and creating disputes with family members whose own properties lie within the area that would be submerged. Residents speaking to Mongabay on condition of anonymity say KHC gave out cash and gadgets, promising even bigger rewards if they agreed to the dam’s construction.
KHC did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.
Ultimately, most of the tribe’s voting members gave their consent to the project. In response, Bula-at and 88 other elders and members of affected communities filed another formal objection with the NCIP.
Since then, tensions have risen in the communities, while engineering surveys and community engagement efforts by non-tribe members have been met with resistance and hostility. (During a visit, this reporter was apparently mistaken for a company representative; residents threw stones and even chased him with a machete.)
Large signs reading “No to Karayan dam” and “Our lands are not for sale” have been painted on the roadside retaining walls and large boulders in the affected areas. In 2017, more than 300 people attended a protest in Tabuk, led by community members, local clergy, and Indigenous organizations like the TMK.
Throughout that year, the Indigenous groups maintained their staunch opposition and disdain for KHC and its employees. Residents showed up at consultation meetings but refused to sign the attendance sheets and disrupted KHC’s efforts to present its materials on the Karayan project.
The tensions dragged on until July 2018, when the NCIP suspended the FPIC process. It justified its decision on findings of technical violations committed by KHC and allegations that the developer had paid some of the community members.
Elders and officials from three villages said they met with a group of ostensibly new developers in January 2019 in an attempt to revive the consent process. But their efforts were rebuffed by residents.
On February 2020, a retaining wall along Naneng village was graffitied: “Don’t force me squeeze the trigger of my gun to speak the language of death. No to dam.” Another read, “No trespassing. No to survey. Chapter 45, Verse M16, M14, R4 to M79” — an allusion to the use of firearms. Residents won’t say who was responsible for the graffiti. A few days later, it was covered over in paint and mud.
‘The question is life’
Today’s opposition to the two proposed dams in Kalinga mirrors a similar resistance in the 1970s, when Indigenous communities joined forces to wage a decade-long struggle against the Chico River Basin Development Project (CRBDP).
A pet project of strongman Ferdinand Marcos while the country was under martial law, the CRDBP called for the construction of four massive hydroelectric dams that would have been the largest dam system in Asia at the time. Two of the dams would have been in Mountain Province, and two in Kalinga. The project’s sheer scale would have submerged Indigenous communities in eight towns, impacting around 300,000 people.
When their efforts to secure an audience with officials in Manila failed, the Indigenous groups resorted to civil disobedience, rolling boulders onto the roads to block construction workers and hurling their equipment into the Chico River.
Indigenous women played a particularly significant role in the campaign. In 1974, Bontoc women drove away survey teams in Mountain Province, while in Kalinga the women tore down the workers’ dormitory in Tabuk four times. They used nothing but their bare hands, says Kalinga elder Andres Ngao-i, who was in his teens back then. “It is taboo to hurt women, much more unarmed, in the Kalinga culture,” Ngao-I says. “It was a strategy. If it were men who dismantled the camps, there would have been bloodshed.”
Upriver in the town of Tinglayan, Indigenous women from other communities tore down construction camps twice. They also stripped down to the waist and displayed their tattooed torsos and arms in front of government personnel and armed guards, in an act known as lusay, which is believed to cast bad luck.
Other members of the affected communities took up arms as part of a community militia, while many joined the armed wing of the banned Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People’s Army (NPA).
The Marcos government responded to the opposition by sending in the military and declaring the area a “free-fire zone,” where security forces had carte blanche to shoot perceived “trespassers.” From 1977, cases of human rights abuses and killings racked up.
The assassination in April 1980 of Macli-ing Dulag, an outspoken pangat (village elder) of the Butbut people of Kalinga, by the Philippine Army’s 4th Infantry Division while inside his home tipped the scales in favor of Indigenous groups.
“The question of the dam is more than political,” Dulag said in a prescient interview shortly before his death for a book authored by journalist Ma. Ceres Doyo. “The question is life — our Kalinga life. Apo Kabunian, the Lord of us all, gave us this land. It is sacred, nourished by our sweat. It shall become even more sacred when it is nourished by our blood.”
Just as he foresaw, Dulag’s death magnified the resistance and mobilized various sectors across the wider region. The violent struggle ended in 1986 with the CRDBP being abandoned. The whole experience forced the World Bank, which had financed the project, to revamp its operational guidelines for infrastructure projects that involve Indigenous peoples. It was also key to institutionalizing the FPIC process, which gave Indigenous groups legal control over their ancestral lands.
The World Bank released its revised global policy on Indigenous-affected projects in 1991 to include a wider definition of Indigenous peoples, encompassing those who have close attachments to their ancestral lands, and who are often susceptible to being disadvantaged in the development process.
But the war for control of the Chico River hadn’t ended. The specter of Marcos’s mega-dams resurfaced in 1987, when then-President Corazon Aquino issued an executive order opening up the electricity generation sector to private companies. The latter quickly moved in; today, there are three large hydropower dams operating inside the Cordillera region that includes Kalinga and Mountain Province, and at least five proposed dams.
For Andres Wailan, the Malbong elder and veteran of the campaign against the Marcos-era dams, the current efforts to build support for the new dams rely on tactics that are all too familiar.
He says the process reeks of manipulation and deception, and suggests that the NCIP, which is meant to protect the interests of Indigenous groups, is complicit in it. “There are prescribed processes and guidelines that these proponents need to conform to, but they do not,” he says. “And the government office who are supposed to check these seem to turn a blind eye.”
Danny Bangibang, the Taloctoc tribal elder, says social media is a new battlefront, used by proponents of the dams to sow disinformation and vilify critics. “Proponents pick science and expert opinions that favor them and present them as absolute truths,” he says. “When this fails, they simply resort to made-up information.”
“We [Indigenous peoples] live here before the concept of dams,” Wailan says. “We will decide what we want with our lands and this must be respected. We will keep on fighting to maintain the natural flow of the Chico, unimpeded by any means, just as our forebears had done. We are not afraid; if the river will bleed red like before, then so be it.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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