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20 March 21
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Bess Levin | Donald Trump Is Drowning in Criminal Investigations and Legally Screwed
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "For much of his adult life, Donald Trump was known for going after his enemies with frivolous lawsuits, so much so that by the time he ran for president in 2016, he and his businesses had been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions."
He’s also facing 29 lawsuits though it’s the investigations that could land him in prison he’s probably most worried about.
or much of his adult life, Donald Trump was known for going after his enemies with frivolous lawsuits, so much so that by the time he ran for president in 2016, he and his businesses had been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions. According to a 2016 report, Trump had no qualms about responding to “even small disputes with overwhelming legal force” and didn’t “hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources,” sometimes refusing “to pay real estate brokers, lawyers, and other vendors.” In other words, he was a consummate bully who used his money and power to screw over little people, and never worried about the tables being turned, as he would simply countersue, like his family business did in the 1970s when the Justice Department accused it of discriminatory housing practices. But as the old saying goes, “karma is a bitch and she relishes the idea of a litigious a-hole living out his last days in prison."
On top of the well-publicized investigations into Trump out of New York—one from Attorney General Letitia James and the other from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.—the ex-president is facing no fewer than three probes concerning his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Two of those investigations are based out of Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in February she is looking into Trump’s infamous call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which the then president pressured Raffensperger to “find” him the necessary votes to win. Willis’s investigation is criminal in nature and will reportedly focus on whether or not Trump broke state laws against “solicitation of election fraud,” racketeering, conspiracy, or making threats related to the election administration. Separately, Raffensperger’s office is also probing Trump’s actions. Additionally, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine has opened a criminal investigation into Trump’s actions on the day an angry mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and tried to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win; according to a spokesperson for Racine, the A.G. is probing if Trump violated D.C. law by “inciting or provoking violence.” While Racine would not be able to charge the 45th president with a felony due to the limits of D.C. law, per The Washington Post, if charged, he could be arrested in the District of Columbia, effectively ensuring he’ll never step foot in the nation’s capital again. On top of that the Department of Justice has launched a broad investigation into the Capitol attack, which could mean it is looking into the ex-president’s role.
And then there are the lawsuits! Per The Washington Post:
Trump must defend himself against a growing raft of lawsuits: 29 are pending at last count, including some seeking damages from Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, when he encouraged a march to the Capitol that ended in a mob storming the building…. Among the 29 lawsuits Trump is facing, about 18 result from disputes with his properties: slip-and-fall suits, an allegation about bedbugs at Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, a suit alleging that his Chicago hotel sucked out river water without a permit. These are the kinds of suits Trump might have faced whether or not he was president. But his single term may still hamper his ability to fight them: The law firm Seyfarth Shaw, which represented Trump in some of these disputes, quit in reaction to the events of Jan. 6. His lawyers in the Chicago River suit have also quit, though they declined to say why.
The rest of the suits seem to have been brought on by his presidency: They focus on Trump’s actions or on long-hidden business practices that were revealed while he was under the presidential spotlight.
In Washington, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, filed a suit accusing Trump of conspiring to intimidate and block Congress’s certification of the 2020 election. Thompson’s case relies on the Ku Klux Klan Act, enacted after the Civil War in 1871 to bar violent interference in Congress’s constitutional duties. It seeks unspecified monetary damages from Trump, Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and two far-right militant groups whose affiliates have been charged in the Capitol assault, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Trump is also dealing with defamation lawsuits brought by Summer Zervos and E. Jean Carroll, both of whom allege Trump sexually assaulted them, which he of course denies, just like he has denied the dozens of other sexual misconduct allegations against him. In the case of Carroll, Trump tried to use the weight of the Justice Department to get the suit thrown out, a protection obviously no longer afforded to him as an ex-president. In another case, a group of current and former tenants in Trump buildings allege Donald and his late father, Fred Trump, used phony invoices to illegally raise their rents, a scheme revealed by The New York Times.
As the Post notes, though Trump is clearly no stranger to legal drama, the unique position he finds himself in postpresidency (and post-insurrection) means he may very well be f--ed:
Trump has fallen to a point of historic vulnerability before the law. He has lost the formal immunities of the presidency and the legal firepower of the Justice Department, but he is also without some of the informal shields that protected him even before he was president: his reputation for endless wealth and his clout as a political donor in New York.
Now, prosecutors roam free in his financial records. New lawsuits keep arriving. Some of his key lawyers have quit. A man who once used the law to swamp his enemies, overwhelming them with claims and legal bills, is finding himself on the other side of the wave, unable to control what comes next.
Until recently, “at his level, there was no such thing as being in ‘legal trouble,’ in the way that ordinary people think about it,” said Michael D’Antonio, who wrote a 2015 biography of Trump. He said Trump usually had something he could hold over the head of his opponents: withholding donations, bad press or a messy countersuit. Today, D’Antonio said, in the urban and liberal jurisdictions where Trump is facing the most peril, “nobody needs him now.”
“What does he have to offer anybody? And in fact there’s every incentive to crush him,” D’Antonio told the Post.
Though there are many to choose from, presumably the most worrisome legal issue facing Trump is Vance’s criminal investigation, which is looking into possible insurance, bank, and tax fraud. Last month, the Manhattan D.A.’s office hired Mark Pomerantz, who helped put John Gotti and others involved in organized crime behind bars, to work on the Trump case. Among other things, Pomerantz has reportedly been working on getting Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime CFO who knows where all the bodies are buried, to flip. Equally terrifying, for someone trying to stay out of prison, is the fact that Vance has something no other investigator looking into Trump’s affairs has had before: the ex-president’s tax returns, which the former real estate developer curiously refused to release while running for office and fought tooth and nail to keep secret. After the Supreme Court rejected his last-ditch attempt to keep the information out of Vance‘s hands, Trump flew off the handle, calling himself the victim of “the greatest political Witch Hunt in the history of our Country.” And while that’s not actually true, you can probably understand why he was upset! As former fixer Michael Cohen told the Post, “the level of review” being undertaken by Vance’s office, “is unprecedented in Trump’s corporate history,” on par with “a proctological exam of the highest order.”
P.S. Trump is also financially screwed
Yes, he’s still worth some $2.5 billion, but that’s down $700 million since he became president and it appears the number may continue to plummet, per the Post:
Several of his hotels and resorts reported sharp downturns in 2020. At Trump Tower in Manhattan, one major commercial tenant—Tiffany & Co.—is planning to vacate its space. Another, Marc Fisher Footwear, stopped paying rent in November, according to a lawsuit the Trump Organization filed against the footwear company this month. The company owes more than $1.4 million in back payments, according to the suit.
Meanwhile, thanks to the events of January 6, 2021, Trump can no longer rely on previous sources of income like hosting LPGA events, which may make it difficult to repay the $1 billion he owes creditors. On the other hand, who knows how much money he’ll make scamming his supporters through his super PAC!
Oh: The officer who sympathetically noted the accused Atlanta shooter had had a “bad day” has a side gig promoting racist T-shirts
Jay Baker, who told reporters on Wednesday that Robert Aaron Long had had a “really bad day” and “this is what he did” while discussing the fact that Long allegedly murdered eight people, is reportedly no longer the spokesman for the case, which makes sense. Per the Daily Beast:
In a Facebook page associated with Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s Office, several photos show the law enforcer was promoting T-shirts with the slogan “COVID-19 imported virus from CHY-NA.”
“Place your order while they last,” Baker wrote with a smiley face on a March 30 photo that included the racist T-shirts. “Love my shirt,” Baker wrote in another post in April 2020. “Get yours while they last.’”
Asked about Baker’s remarks re: Long having had a bad day, Sheriff Frank Reynolds said in a statement on Thursday that Baker’s comments “were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect.”
Texas representative tells a little story about the state’s grand tradition of lynching people
We’d say this was a weird moment to do it but, oh wait, every moment one gleefully talks about hanging people is a weird one:
Kansas senator tries, fails to make a point
Proud Boys and other protesters in Washington, D.C. (photo: Getty Images)
Four Proud Boys Leaders Charged With Conspiracy Over January 6 Capitol Riot
Associated Press
our men described as leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group have been charged in the US Capitol riot, as an indictment ordered unsealed on Friday presents fresh evidence of how federal officials believe members planned and carried out a coordinated attack to stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
At least 19 leaders, members or associates of the neo-fascist Proud Boys have been charged in federal court with offenses related to the 6 January riot, which resulted in five deaths.
The latest indictment suggests the Proud Boys deployed a much larger contingent in Washington, with more than 60 users “participating in” an encrypted messaging channel for group members created a day before.
The Proud Boys abandoned an earlier channel and created the new Boots on the Ground channel after police arrested the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, in Washington. Tarrio was arrested on 4 January and charged with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December. He was ordered to stay out of the District of Columbia.
Tarrio has not been charged in connection with the riots but the latest indictment refers to him by his title as Proud Boys’ chairman.
Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs, two of the four defendants charged in the latest indictment, were arrested several weeks ago on separate but related charges. The new indictment also charges Zachary Rehl and Charles Donohoe.
All four defendants are charged with conspiring to impede certification of the electoral college vote. Other charges in the indictment include obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder and disorderly conduct.
Nordean, 30, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter president and member of the group’s national Elders Council. Biggs, 37, of Ormond Beach, Florida, is a self-described Proud Boys organizer. Rehl, 35, of Philadelphia, and Donohoe, 33, of North Carolina, are presidents of local Proud Boys chapters, according to the indictment.
A lawyer for Biggs declined to comment. Attorneys for the other three men didn’t immediately respond to messages.
Proud Boys members, who describe themselves as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”, have engaged in street fights with antifascist activists at rallies and protests. Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys in 2016, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling it as a hate group.
The Proud Boys met at the Washington Monument around 10am on 6 January and marched to the Capitol before then president Donald Trump finished addressing thousands of supporters near the White House.
Around two hours later, just before Congress convened a joint session to certify the election results, a group of Proud Boys followed a crowd who breached barriers at a pedestrian entrance to the Capitol grounds, the indictment says. Several Proud Boys entered the Capitol building after the mob smashed windows and forced open doors.
At 3.38pm, Donohoe announced on the “Boots on the Ground” channel that he and others were “regrouping with a second force” as some rioters began to leave the Capitol, according to the indictment.
“This was not simply a march. This was an incredible attack on our institutions of government,” assistant US attorney Jason McCullough said in a recent hearing for Nordean’s case.
Prosecutors have said the Proud Boys arranged for members to communicate using Baofeng radios. The Chinese-made devices can be programmed for use on hundreds of frequencies, making them difficult for outsiders to eavesdrop.
After Tarrio’s arrest, Donohoe expressed concern that encrypted communications could be “compromised” when police searched the group chairman’s phone, according to the new indictment. In a 4 January post on a newly created channel, Donohoe warned members that they could be “looking at Gang charges” and wrote, “Stop everything immediately,” the indictment says.
“This comes from the top,” he added.
A day before the riots, Biggs posted on the Boots on the Ground channel that the group had a “plan” for the night before and the day of the riots, according to the indictment.
In Nordean’s case, a federal judge accused prosecutors of backtracking on their claims that he instructed Proud Boys members to split up into smaller groups and directed a “strategic plan” to breach the Capitol.
“That’s a far cry from what I heard at the hearing today,” US district judge Beryl Howell said on 3 March.
Howell concluded that Nordean was extensively involved in “pre-planning” for the events of 6 January and that he and other Proud Boys “were clearly prepared for a violent confrontation”. However, she said evidence that Nordean directed other Proud Boys members to break into the building is “weak to say the least” and ordered him freed from jail before trial.
On Friday, Howell ordered Proud Boys member Christopher Worrell detained in federal custody pending trial on riot-related charges. Prosecutors say Worrell traveled to Washington and coordinated with Proud Boys leading up to the siege.
“Wearing tactical gear and armed with a canister of pepper spray gel marketed as 67 times more powerful than hot sauce, Worrell advanced, shielded himself behind a wooden platform and other protestors and discharged the gel at the line of officers,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Defense attorney John Pierce argued his client wasn’t aiming at officers and was only there in the crowd to exercise his free speech rights.
“He’s a veteran. He loves his country,” Pierce said.
A vigil to mourn and confront the rising violence against Asian Americans. (photo: Joe Lamberti/USA TODAY)
ALSO SEE: Stop Asian Hate: Connie Wun on Atlanta Spa Killings,
Gender Violence and Spike in Anti-Asian Attacks
How Asian American Leaders Say the Biden Administration Can Address Hate
Juana Summers, NPR
Summers writes:
ven before the deadly shootings at spas in the Atlanta area killed six women of Asian descent, President Biden had taken steps to address the recent surge of violence against Asians and Asian Americans by making forceful statements against hate and harassment, banning the federal government from employing the sort of "inflammatory and xenophobic" language used by his predecessor and tasking senior administration leaders to hold "listening sessions" with community leaders and advocates.
Now, with a sharp focus on the disturbing trend, Asian American and Pacific Islander community leaders are calling for concrete, measurable responses from Biden and his Justice Department.
"Right now, people are afraid to leave their homes," said Cynthia Choi, a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate. "I think that basic denial of your sense of safety, it is a violation of our human rights. And I think that this does need to be taken seriously and urgently."
This week, Biden and Vice President Harris, the first Asian American elected to that position, refocused a trip planned to tout the benefits of the coronavirus relief package to instead meet with Asian American lawmakers and other community leaders in Georgia.
"Too many Asian Americans have been walking up and down the streets and worrying, waking up each morning the past year feeling their safety and the safety of their loved ones are stake," Biden said after the meeting. "They've been attacked, blamed, scapegoated and harassed."
"One thing that we know he does well is serve as a healer and a person that understands grief," said John Yang, of Asian Americans Advancing Justice. "A person that understands we must first center ourselves on the victims and their families and make sure that they are taken care of. That's certainly what our community is hoping for. And then, from there we talk about solutions."
There are a wide variety of proposed solutions aimed at curbing violence, many of which are focused on the role that the Justice Department could play. Attorney General Merrick Garland and other Justice Department officials have been meeting with leaders of Asian and Pacific Islander groups, including several meetings this week, according to multiple sources familiar with the meetings.
Gregg Orton, the national director of the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, said that when Biden releases his budget, it should significantly increase funding for programs at the Department of Justice that are designed to engage communities.
"We can have as many listening sessions as we'd like, and I think it's great that a department makes themselves available to that kind of engagement," Orton said. "But truly, until we reach the people on the ground and support not just the community organizers, but the communities themselves, it's difficult to see a lot of progress being made."
One of the areas that leaders say could benefit from increased funding is the Justice Department's Community Relations Service, which was established as a part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
It provides communities dealing with racial or other tensions with professional mediators and other services to help resolve conflicts. In the past, the Community Relations Service has responded in moments like the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown or the 1992 LA riots, which occurred after white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Black motorist Rodney King.
"Their job is to interact with the community, and not in a law enforcement way, not a prosecutorial or criminal way," said Yang. "Rather, their job is to go to meet with community members and also serve as a bridge to bring different community members together."
A spokesperson for the Justice Department said that the Community Relations Service has been supporting AAPI communities since the start of the pandemic, including sharing best practices for responding to and preventing hate crimes, connecting people to government resources and helping to implement solutions identified by local community groups.
"Good data informs good policymaking"
On Capitol Hill, House lawmakers this week held a hearing on anti-Asian discrimination and violence, the first in several decades.
Democratic lawmakers are reintroducing legislation meant to bolster law enforcement's response to hate crimes against Asian Americans. Among other things, the bill would designate a Justice Department official to speed up the reviews of hate crimes reported to federal, state or local law enforcement. The bill's House sponsor, Democratic Rep. Grace Meng of New York, told NPR's All Things Considered that the goal "is really more education and accessible resources for our community."
Before departing for Georgia, Biden released a statement urging Congress to pass the legislation, noting that "every person in our nation deserves to live their lives with safety, dignity, and respect."
Meng and other Asian American leaders have also raised questions about the availability of good data tracking incidences of racially motivated violence. The group Stop AAPI Hate began collecting data on hate and harassment incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. last March. In a report released the day of the deadly shootings, the group said there had been nearly 3,800 such incidents between mid-March 2020 and the end of February this year.
"I think it's extremely important to understand that those who answered our survey said the primary reason why they came onto our site was to register a 'Me, too,' to say, 'This happened to me, this happened to my elderly parents while they were walking with my toddler,' " said Choi, the co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate. "They wanted to be a part of a collective voice."
Still, those figures are self-reported and anecdotal, and some AAPI leaders say that ultimately the infrastructure for reporting hate crimes in the country should be overhauled.
"Good data informs good policymaking," said Orton. "We simply can't expect the government to make decisions about program design and implementation of programs if they don't truly understand the communities that they're trying to protect."
Biden's January memorandum on combating racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans directs the attorney general to "expand collection of data and public reporting regarding hate incidents."
Democratic lawmakers are planning to reintroduce the No Hate Act, which would improve hate crime reporting, expand resources for victims and strengthen federal laws that combat hate speech and attacks.
"Give us a point person"
Jo-Ann Yoo, the executive director of the Asian American Federation, said it's also important that victims or witnesses of crimes receive culturally competent assistance in navigating the legal system.
"Some Asian elders, for instance, may not understand how a question is framed or the way law enforcement might ask a question. How we reach out needs to be done very differently," Yoo said. "It's not what we see on Law and Order. It needs to be very very nuanced, so we need to have people working in DOJ who look like us, who speak our language, who understand the culture to be able to engage with all of those tools."
The Department of Justice has translated its hate crimes resources website and reporting portal into more languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Arabic.
For Shekar Narasimhan, the urgency around responding to anti-Asian harassment and violence underscores why he believes it's critical that Biden's administration reflect the diversity of the nation. Narasimhan, the chairman of the AAPI Victory Fund, has been bringing up the need for more Asian representation in Biden's cabinet and wants the Justice Department to name an official focused specifically on these issues.
"Give us a point person, so every month we can have a briefing. That person can talk to us about what they've learned, what's going on and some questions," said Narasimhan. "And we'll bring together people from other communities that tend not to get listened to."
The Department of Justice has not named a point person on these issues. But a department spokesperson says it has more meetings planned with AAPI lawmakers and leaders.
Narasimhan said recent events underscore the need for the Senate to confirm the civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta, Biden's pick to serve in the Justice Department's third-highest job.
"You need a person at a very senior level who has access to resources," he said. "She comes with the body of knowledge and work and sensitivity to start addressing this tomorrow morning."
In addition to concerns about COVID safety, workers at Amazon have expressed frustration about impossibly high productivity expectations and are therefore starting to unionize. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
The Unionizing Workers Who Became Amazon's Biggest Threat
Lauren Kaori Gurley, VICE
Gurley writes: "The traffic light at Premiere Parkway and Power Plant Road in Bessemer, Alabama, is currently one of the most important intersections in the United States."
How a strong union tradition in Bessemer, Alabama led workers to challenge one of the world’s most powerful companies.
On one side, there's an Amazon warehouse. On the other, tractor yards and dry yellow fields, and behind them dense pine forests extending into the hills. Baby blue tractor trailers emblazoned with Amazon's signature smile barrel down the road. In recent months, tireless organizers have had hundreds of short conversations with warehouse workers as they're stopped at the red light, waiting to leave Amazon's parking lot. Largely through these conversations, they've built one of the most promising labor movements in the country.
They're there all day, everyday. They start at 3:45 a.m., in the dark of night. For a time, the lead organizer slept in his pickup truck to make the first shift change. Twenty organizers have lived out of a nearby Fairfield Inn for months, trading off shifts.
It was at this light where many employees signed union cards, formally pledging their support. And then, one day, red lights at the signal started getting much shorter.
Amazon convinced officials in Jefferson County, where Bessemer is located, to change the timer on the red traffic light outside the warehouse, leaving fewer seconds for organizers to chat with workers. Amazon spokespeople say they changed the signal so traffic wouldn't clog the parking lot, but organizers say their whole campaign was predicated on accessing workers during that red light.
"I only have 10 seconds to explain everything I can," Tray Ragland, a 28-year-old organizer, told me when I visited Bessemer earlier this month. "By the time I get to the good part, the red light has already changed."
The geography of the area makes organizing a union difficult. The fulfillment center, which abuts Alabama Adventure, a theme park (Rampage, a wooden roller coaster that reaches heights of 120 feet and speeds of 56 MPH, is its main attraction), is inaccessible to the public. Workers commute by car from Birmingham and its surrounding suburbs. On a patch of grass beside a Circle K gas station, near the off-ramp to the fulfillment center (Amazon's largest type of warehouse), organizers set up a red tent, which served as campaign headquarters, where they took breaks to hydrate and gobble tacos, often late at night under a canopy of hanging lanterns.
In February, I visited Bessemer for four days. One particularly sunny morning, I met Joshua Brewer, the 33-year-old lead organizer on the drive to unionize the 5,800 worker Amazon facility in Bessemer at the Retail Warehouse and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Mid-South Regional Council union hall in downtown Birmingham. Brewer is a former youth pastor from northern Alabama with three young children, and he's the one who’d been sleeping in his GMC Sierra outside the warehouse. On the day I visited, reporters, photographers, organizers, and Amazon warehouse workers flowed in and out of the union hall, eating free danishes, many waiting to talk to Brewer. His desk was strewn with papers and Diet Mountain Dew cans, and his cell phone seemed to ring once a minute with requests from Amazon workers and RWDSU colleagues in New York City.
"It's been chaos. I mean non-stop," Brewer told me, explaining how for months, he and a team of organizers in red RWDSU T-shirts rarely strayed from the small patch of public sidewalk.
"We were getting so many cards signed so fast. I couldn't keep up," Brewer said, gesturing to a crevice at the top of his desk where he stored union authorization cards signed by Amazon workers. To qualify for an election, unions typically need to provide signed authorization cards from one-third of eligible voters to the national labor board to show "sufficient" support. "I was throwing stacks of cards in here because I was terrified that Amazon or someone was going to find them. And if we lost those cards, that was the whole election," said Brewer.
Amazon's massive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, an increased focus on its working conditions, and its expansive efforts to crush this nascent union have focused the nation's eyes on tiny Bessemer. Supporters say the union will give them dignity, and the simple grace of being treated more like humans and less like robots by a company with notoriously brutal working conditions. Amazon, owned by the richest man in the world, could simply let the union happen. Amazon workers are unionized in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France, and Poland, and still the world's Everything Store marches on. But Amazon does not want this union, which would be the company's first in the United States, and has gone to great lengths to make sure it fails.
Asked why Amazon opposes unionization in Bessemer, Heather Knox, a spokesperson for Amazon, said, “The fact is that Amazon already offers what unions are requesting for employees: industry-leading pay, comprehensive benefits from the first day on the job, and opportunities for career growth, all while working in a safe, modern work environment."
"At Amazon, these benefits and opportunities come with the job, as does the ability to communicate directly with the leadership of the company," she continued. “We firmly believe this direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce.”
In late March 2020, as the first wave of COVID-19 cases swept the country, Amazon opened BHM1, its Bessemer warehouse, named after the nearby Birmingham airport. State and local officials, both Republican and Democrat, celebrated Amazon's arrival. At the groundbreaking event, Ken Gulley, Bessemer's third-term mayor, whose accomplishments include bringing in Dollar General, Fedex, and Lowe's distribution centers to the city, noted that the Amazon facility marked the single largest private investment in Bessemer's 131-year history. "It's just an awesome day for the city of Bessemer," Gulley said.
But the deal also came at a high cost. Amazon collected $3.3 million in tax incentives and road improvements from Bessemer, and $41.7 million in tax breaks from Alabama. In return, Amazon pledged to bring 1,500 jobs that paid $15 an hour—more than double the state's $7.25 minimum wage—and to donate $10,000 for STEM education at Bessemer City High School. Despite months of attention on the union drive from local and national media, Gulley has not commented substantially on the unionization effort. He declined to comment for this article.
In recent years, communities in California's Inland Empire, upstate New York, and rural Massachusetts, have protested the arrival of Amazon facilities, charging that the company brings air pollution, traffic jams, and non-union warehouse jobs that push wages downward, while bullying cities and states into offering generous tax breaks. In recent years, Amazon threatened to stop hiring and opening warehouses in Texas and North Carolina until both states offered tax breaks. Most American cities, though, particularly in low-income areas, welcome the company with generous rewards.
"Bezos has made getting government handouts and tax incentives a major pillar of how he grew this business," said Stacey Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. "Lots of places are struggling economically. It makes it hard to say 'no' to the appearance of anything that looks like jobs ...It’s impossible to overstate how much those public subsidies and tax advantages helped Amazon grow."
Motherboard could not find any public examples of local pushback in greater Birmingham when Amazon secured the deal for the Bessemer warehouse in 2018. Local businesses welcomed the announcement. A Chevrolet dealership near the new facility raised a flag in its parking lot that read, "Chevrolet Welcomes Amazon."
Many residents of the Birmingham area also welcomed Amazon's arrival. Some were lured by the company's promise of $15 an hour. Others assumed working at one of the world's most prosperous tech companies meant dignified treatment and perks. In the lead-up to the warehouse's grand opening last March, Amazon hosted informational sessions for prospective employees at Bessemer's public housing projects and the Boys & Girls Club.
Workers I spoke to said that getting hired was easy. During the pandemic, Amazon on-boarded nearly half a million new employees worldwide, and opened at least 175 warehouses in the US and Canada. Sitting on the carpet in her bedroom beside a pull-up bar and a collection of stuffed animals, Catherine Highsmith, a 24-year-old Amazon worker, described her interview process.
"It was the easiest job application I've ever done," she said. At a local community college, she did a mouth swab drug test and a "90-second" criminal background check, and she was hired. She signed up for the 12-hour graveyard shift because it paid $17.50 an hour. "All they want to know is 'can you stand up?' 'can you pass a drug test?' They don't care where you've worked," she said.
Many of Amazon's hires at its Bessemer warehouse are recent high school graduates; other workers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s came to Amazon from shuttered factories.
Darryl Richardson, a 51-year-old Amazon warehouse worker who commutes 40 miles to the warehouse from Tuscaloosa, felt let down by the reality of working at Amazon. "I thought that working for the richest man in the world meant that he was going to treat us right," he told me. "I thought we were going to get good pay and raises."
In 2019, when a Mercedes-Benz and Nissan seat manufacturer in nearby Cottondale shut down, Richardson took a 36 percent pay cut from his $23.50 hourly wage to work for $15 an hour as a picker at Amazon. Now, Richardson plucks hundreds of items a day and places them into plastic yellow boxes.
On his new income, Richardson says he can't afford weekend outings to Outback Steakhouse or trips to the outlet mall with his girlfriend. "It hurts," he said. At the seat manufacturer, Richardson had been part of the United Auto Workers Local 2083. "Why me? Why am I going through what I'm going through?"
Richardson says he’s seen managers writing up or firing his coworkers for failing to keep up with Amazon's last minute scheduling changes, or even going to the bathroom.
A few months after the Bessemer facility opened, Amazon warehouse workers, including Richardson, called up organizers at RWDSU. They planned a secret meeting. In September, roughly a dozen workers and organizers met at a Fairfield Inn, about a mile from the Amazon warehouse, to discuss working conditions at Amazon and the potential for a union.
"We're just a number to our managers," said Richardson. "As long as we can get the quota out, 'Who cares?' in their eyes. I try not to go to the bathroom. I try not to get no water, because I don't want to put myself in a position where they can fire me."
Amazon is famously an analytics-driven workplace. High productivity quotas don't leave time for bathroom breaks, and workers' productivity is surveilled, and gamified and rewarded with digital prizes. If a worker leaves their scanner idle for too long, Amazon starts tracking their "time off task." Racking up too much time off task, by taking too many or too leisurely bathroom breaks or pausing to take a break, can result in a write-up or termination.
Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University and a lead organizer of the 2018 mass walkout against sexual harassment at Google, said Amazon's tactics are similar to the "scientific management" strategy developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s. Taylor took measurements of the most efficient workers with a stopwatch, breaking down tasks into their most basic form, and streamlined those expectations across a factory.
"Under Taylor, expectations were calibrated against someone with extraordinary capabilities and that became the benchmark," Whittaker said. "You see something similar in the way Amazon automates these logics. The rate always goes up, not down. These systems are calibrated to determine how far we can push people."
Multiple Amazon employees at Bessemer say their very personhood feels questioned at work.
"They really treat you like an animal, like something that's built for a task," Catherine Highsmith, the 24-year-old stower and supporter of the union, told me. She stands for hours, scanning incoming goods—bags of dog food, bottles of sunscreen, Advil, hot sauce—and placing them into yellow bins on large shelving units attached to the robots that zip around the warehouse, a role that used to be filled by human beings.
"You're standing there and you have to go take a piss," she said, "but you don't want to rack up time off task, so you just say man, 'I'll just wait another hour until break.'
Highsmith signed up to work at the warehouse soon after she'd been discharged from the National Guard in April as the pandemic was spreading across the country. "I had heard bad things, but I was desperate," Highsmith told me.
Highsmith grew up in a lakeside trailer park in eastern Alabama. In high school, she worked as a cashier at a McDonald's. When she asked about applying for a college scholarship, her school's college counselor "laughed in my face," she said. Like many poor millennial southerners, her job prospects without a college degree were limited. So, on her 18th birthday in 2014, Highsmith signed a six-year contract with the Alabama National Guard. She served out a yearlong mission at Guantanamo Bay, and later lived out of a hotel for a year, on a mission for the U.S. Border Patrol in Texas. "I joined the Army because I was poor and I slacked off a lot in school," she said.
Highsmith was "used to monotonous heavy labor" from her time in the military, but at Amazon, her work days blurred together. She spends her nights scanning and lifting thousands of items in a windowless warehouse. In the mornings, she pops a melatonin tablet and slips on an eye mask to keep out the sun while she sleeps. On days off, Highsmith re-adjusts to a normal sleeping schedule, also using melatonin pills, a process she and her coworkers call "flipping."
"Anybody who has a job knows it's hard to find time for yourself. But when you work at Amazon, your time is so precious," Highsmith said, hugging her well-fed cat.
Highsmith's sentiment is not unique. Workers often spend their 30-minute lunch breaks walking across the cavernous warehouse to get outside to their cars. Golden Stewart Jr., a 22-year-old Amazon packer and aspiring hip hop artist, told me Amazon's refusal to offer ample break time makes the job "miserable." "You don't have time to do anything on your break," Stewart said. "You just exist."
"I have been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety and Amazon doesn't help," he said. "It feels like you're alone all the time. You're really just a cog in an engine." The anxiety is compounded by seeing his coworkers lose their jobs. "I constantly feel like I'm going to get let go anytime."
After the meeting at the Fairfield Inn, RWDSU organizers weighed the risks and benefits of launching a union drive at Amazon; they decided it was worth it. Following a little vetting and training of organizers, the union drive launched in full force. Many of these organizers were workers from unionized poultry plants in northern Alabama who travelled to Bessemer, using a "lost time clause" in their contracts that allowed them to work on RWDSU organizing campaigns.
RWDSU had already played a key role in pushing Amazon to abandon its plans to open a second headquarters in Long Island City, Queens in 2018. It had also been organizing in Black communities in Birmingham and Alabama since the 1960s and 1970s, when union members marched with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery. Workers at the Bessemer warehouse, which is 85 percent Black and 65 percent women, trusted RWDSU organizers.
During several highly-publicized United Auto Workers (UAW) campaigns over the past decade, at Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen plants, union detractors argued the UAW was an untrustworthy northern outsider. During the campaign to unionize the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama in 2013, an anti-union group famously paid for a billboard along the same Interstate that the Amazon warehouse now sits off. It read: "Don't let the UAW turn Alabama into the next Detroit." Each of these efforts failed. It was hard to make the same outsider argument of RWDSU, which has long occupied a two-story office building in downtown Birmingham.
Amazon workers, many of them Black employees who had worked in unionized factories before, began to support the union because they saw what a union could do to make conditions better. Jennifer Bates, a 47-year-old mother of three grown children, quit her unionized job last May at US Pipe in Bessemer, where she had assembled water and waste pipelines for $19.07 an hour, taking a pay cut to work at the new Amazon facility for $15 an hour, where two of her sisters and 28-year-old daughter had already been hired.
"I saw an article that said Amazon was coming and I had a talk with God, and I got this feeling on the inside that let me know that I needed a change," said Bates about her decision to work at Amazon.
But Bates said she could barely walk after finishing her shift, which she described as "a nine-hour-straight workout."
She would eventually become the first worker to speak out publicly about the union drive, on a local CBS channel, and became a face of the unionization effort. "It was important for me to let other workers know publicly, 'I am one of the workers pushing for a change,'" Bates told me. "I spoke out because I learn very quickly and I know it'd be easy for me to find a job somewhere else."
Bates and Richardson are emblematic of a common dynamic that has happened all over the U.S. Amazon touts its $15 per hour starting pay, the equivalent of $30,000 annual income for a full-time worker, as a selling point. This rate is higher than the minimum wage in most places, and considered good pay when compared to retailers like Walmart and Dollar General. But warehouse work usually pays much better than $15 an hour. The average "order and stock filler," which includes warehouse workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, made $12.92 an hour in the Birmingham area in 2019. But warehouse workers in unionized positions earn upwards of $30 an hour.
On Wednesday, Bates testified before a Senate Budget Committee hearing on income inequality led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos declined his invitation. "I've had good experiences at many jobs," Bates said. "I won't call one better than the other but Amazon is hell."
In January, the New York Times noted that an Amazon union drive was taking hold "in an unlikely place." But that's not really the case.
Local activists, union organizers, and historians familiar with the Bessemer area say the success of the union drive was foreseeable. "This is happening here because Amazon is the winner of the pandemic and for these workers, the speed-up and short breaks is a human rights issue and a civil rights issue," said Michael Innis-Jimenez, a professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Though Bessemer has seen a decline in unionized factory jobs since the 1980s, some union jobs remain. And today, Alabama has the highest percentage of its workforce in a union of any state in the South, at eight percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The region's union history, the global pandemic, and Amazon's windfall profits had created the promising conditions for an Amazon union drive. "If it wasn't for the pandemic and speed-up, this wouldn't be happening," Innis Jimenez said.
During the pandemic, Amazon workers have protested the company's slapdash approach to coronavirus safety en masse. Last spring, at warehouses in New York City, Chicago, and Minnesota, workers defied warehouse leadership, marching out of their facilities during work hours, writing petitions, and calling out sick. Organized worker backlash to Amazon in the United States has never been stronger.
Chelsea Connor, the communications director of RWDSU, told Motherboard that the last time RWDSU attempted to unionize Amazon warehouse workers, at a warehouse in Staten Island in late 2018, the effort petered out. Amazon withdrew plans to bring its second headquarters to New York City and fired Rashad Long, a worker leader of the unionization effort. "The union drive got conflated with the headquarters fight and blew up before it could get off the ground," Connor said, noting that organizers are still in contact with Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island. "This fight in Bessemer is very different. It hasn't slowed down."
Once a prosperous industrial city in the 1930s, and home to a militant union movement run by local Communist Party members, Bessemer fell into hard times in the 1980s as the U.S. moved to import coal from other parts of the world. Today, one in four residents of the majority Black city lives below the poverty line. Less than 15 percent have a bachelor's degree.
Across the Interstate 59/20, Bessemer's main commercial thoroughfare is lined with pawn shops, dollar stores, and title loan companies. At the city's central park, named after its coal magnate founder, Henry F. DeBardeleben, elderly people pass the afternoons in camping chairs spread out in a circle formation, barbecuing and playing religious songs on portable speakers. Past the park, single-story tract homes line sleepy residential streets planted with oaks, magnolias, and pampas grass. Amazon, a 12-minute drive from here, feels a world away.
Highsmith and Stewart, both in their early 20s, are an anomaly. The epic fight to win this election rides on the union’s ability to reach Amazon's 18-to-24-year-old employees, many of whom pro-union workers and organizers say have been the most difficult to reach, either because they’ve been influenced by Amazon's anti-union rhetoric or because they don't see the value in a union.
I met with Tray Ragland, a 28-year old poultry plant worker from Albertville at an Applebee's, down the road from the Amazon warehouse. In December, the union had called on Ragland, a shop steward at his plant, to travel to Bessemer to organize Amazon warehouse workers. The son of a unionized poultry worker himself, he is the youngest of the organizers living out of the Fairfield Inn in Bessemer and working on the campaign.
Sipping from a tall glass of lemonade, Ragland told me he felt optimistic about the election, but that he had struggled to persuade younger Amazon warehouse workers to vote at all. (RWDSU and Amazon could not provide data on the age demographics of the warehouse.) "With the young population they're just like we want to work to get our money," Ragland said. "For them, this is just a short term job. I try to tell them, 'hey it's okay to support the union.'"
It was much easier to convince workers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, he noted. "They've known about unions. They've read about unions. They understand."
Other organizers and pro-union Amazon workers mirrored the sentiment, saying many of the youngest workers were ambivalent about the union at best, or amenable to the anti-union rhetoric that managers and anti-union consultants were circulating around the warehouse. Often it took someone's parents or grandparents to convince younger workers to vote yes, organizers said.
"We have this demographic of like, 18 to 22. They're so young they ultimately don't care. They're just trying to get to Friday night," said Brewer. "This job is a short top."
"I always knew I was pro union," said Highsmith, the 24-year-old. "But younger people are more easily manipulated by Amazon telling them 'hey you're only 20 years old and you're making this much money.' Others don't care either way and I don't blame them."
Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers University, said workers' ambivalent perspective on unions often comes from low expectations of an employer and high turnover at a facility. "You’re talking about workers who never felt like they had a right to a voice on the job," she said. "They don’t even imagine these could be long term jobs. They’re thinking they’ll last a few months, their bodies will be hurting, and they’ll be moving on."
Turnover is notoriously high at Amazon warehouses by design, according to experts. Between 2011 and 2017, when the first Amazon fulfillment center opened in southern California, the turnover rate in five counties with Amazon warehouses leaped from 38 percent to 100 percent, according to a 2020 report by the National Employment Law Project. "It’s in Amazon's interest to have workers who don’t stick around; that's how they keep unions out," said Givan.
When I met Ragland, Amazon's union-busting campaign was in full swing. In late December, the company had launched a pastel-colored anti-union website with dancing dog graphics and images of warehouse workers in Amazon facemasks holding two thumbs up. "If you're paying dues," one section reads, "it will be RESTRICTIVE meaning it won't be as easy to be helpful and social with each other." Amazon also sent out care packages stuffed with anti-union literature and glossy "VOTE NO" instructions, passed out pins and t-shirts, posted anti-union flyers in bathroom stalls, and sent workers text messages on an almost daily basis.
The company also forced workers to attend anti-union presentations during work hours. "They told us: 'You could lose your pay. When you vote for a union, everything is up for negotiation,'" Highsmith said. It wasn't lost on workers that Amazon wanted to spend hours filling workers' ears with anti-union rhetoric, but resisted calls to give workers more time to eat lunch, socialize, and use the bathroom.
"It is important that all employees understand the facts of joining a union and the election process," Heather Knox, the Amazon spokesperson said. "We hosted regular information sessions for all employees, which included an opportunity for employees to ask questions, and provided other education materials. If the union vote passes, it will impact everyone at the site and it’s important all associates understand what that means for them and their day-to-day life working at Amazon."
To some degree, these efforts appear to have swayed workers. Motherboard spoke to pro-union workers who say others on their shifts talk about Amazon cutting their wages and benefits if the union wins, and even shutting down the facility. "To be honest with you, I don't think the union will win," said Stewart, the 22-year old Amazon packer. "They're getting told by Amazon what they could lose and they're afraid."
"The narrative is that Amazon will get up and leave," said Deririck Medlock, a 40-year old part-time Amazon stower from the Florida Panhandle, who earns twice as much at his other job, a unionized electric utility company. He says he signed up to work at Amazon during the pandemic to have something to do on the weekend.
Many Bessemer Amazon workers live paycheck to paycheck, but Medlock says using his Alabama Power income, he put a down payment on a $420,000 house with four bedrooms and a two car garage in Hoover, a nearby suburb.
Organizers remain cautiously optimistic that the union will win when votes are counted at the NLRB office in Atlanta on March 30. An outpouring of support from celebrities such as Tina Fey and Danny Glover, congress members, professional athletes' unions, and even President Biden, has excited progressives around the country. Workers say the impact of these endorsements is palpable, but not a game-changer. "It definitely turns heads," said Highsmith.
On a recent Monday afternoon, Glover flew from San Francisco to lend his support for the union. As the sun slipped behind the pine trees, Glover spoke before a swarm of reporters on a patch of grass near the Amazon warehouse. "Martin Luther King, Jr. said the best solution to poverty is the union," he said "That's why I am here today." Amazon workers in their cars drove by blasting their stereos and cheering, and tractor trailers emblazoned with Amazon's logo honked their horns.
A couple workers rolled down their windows to yell "boo" and "vote no" at union organizers. Later that evening, a local CBS TV channel aired a segment featuring one of the few workers jeering during Glover's speech. Brewer shared the clip with me in his office the next morning. "There were so many workers cheering," he said, shaking his head. "Why would they make the story about the workers who booed?"
In recent days, warehouse workers removed and vandalized RWDSU's tent outside the Circle K gas station, and "Vote Yes!" union signs that line the sides of Power Plant Road. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America Birmingham chapter have been canvassing neighborhoods, asking strangers to put signs on their lawns indicating that they support a union at Amazon.
"We think we're gonna win," said Brewer. "But we think we have a really, really big fight on our hands. This is definitely a very real race. There's absolutely a 'no' base. There's absolutely a 'yes' base."
An MQ-9 Reaper drone performs aerial maneuvers. (photo: Cory D. Payne/U.S. Air Force)
Remote CIA Base in the Sahara Steadily Grows
Eric Schmitt and Christoph Koettl, The New York Times
The agency has been conducting surveillance flights from the base, which has grown since 2018. Any drone strikes would be limited while the Biden administration carries out a review.
eep in the Sahara, the C.I.A. is continuing to conduct secret drone flights from a small but steadily expanding air base, even as the Biden administration has temporarily limited drone strikes against suspected terrorists outside conventional war zones, such as Afghanistan, while it weighs whether to tighten Trump-era rules for such operations.
Soon after it set up the base in northern Niger three years ago, the C.I.A. was poised to launch drone strikes from the site.
But there is no public evidence that the agency has carried out anything but surveillance missions so far. The base was added to a small commercial airport largely to pay closer attention to southwestern Libya, a notorious haven for Al Qaeda, the Islamic State and other extremist groups that operate in the Sahel region of Niger, Chad and Mali.
Protesters carrying an injured man in Mandalay, Myanmar. (photo: AP)
Myanmar: Security Forces Shoot Dead Nine People, Violence Grows
teleSUR
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, there have been at least 234 deaths since the coup began as protests have not ceased. On Friday, the police fired live ammunition in the central town of Aungban.
yanmar's Military Junta elements killed at least nine demonstrators on Friday, as international pressure grows over human rights violations and police brutality almost two months before the February 1 coup.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, there have been at least 234 deaths since the coup as protests have not ceased. On Friday, the police fired live ammunition in the central town of Aungban.
Several regional leaders have joined the international condemnation of the coup and rejected the escalation of violence.
Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said it was appalling to see lethal force against unarmed civilians; Indonesian President Joko Widodo called for an end of the bloodshed, and the Philippine's foreign minister Teodoro Locsin said that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) had to act.
A kangaroo on Kangaroo Island, which is showing signs of recovery a year after the bushfire. (photo: South Australia Tourism Commission)
Post-Wildfire Australia Will Provide Travelers With More Opportunities for 'Restorative Tourism'
Elizabeth Heath, The Washington Post
Heath writes:
hile most parts of the world suffered a terrible 2020, Australia’s trifecta of tragedies seemed especially cruel. Stoked by a years-long drought, fires ravaged huge swaths of the continent and killed or displaced billions of animals. A massive coral bleaching event fueled by the warming ocean further threatened the already fragile Great Barrier Reef. Then came the coronavirus, which shut down international and most domestic travel in a nation struggling to recover — financially and emotionally — from the bush fires.
But in an almost on-brand manner, Australia is bouncing back. With some human assistance, animal populations and habitat are rebounding — even the Great Barrier Reef is getting IVF treatments. Hotels left in piles of ash are being rebuilt. Smoke-tainted grapes are being used to flavor gin. Australians themselves are discovering more of the wonders of their own ample backyard. And, in a case of tragedy spawning trend, a new genre of travel has emerged from the annus horriblis that was 2020 — restorative tourism.
In this form of more engaged travel, international visitors can participate in activities — such as replanting eucalyptus trees, counting cockatoos or surveying coral growth — that will help the country’s many affected areas come back to life. “People around the globe have such an affinity with Australia’s unique wildlife,” says John Daw, executive officer of Australian Wildlife Journeys. “We believe that giving visitors a sense of custodianship over our wildlife and habitats will make them care about it even more.”
As the pandemic nears a possible end, “people are craving deeper, more meaningful connections with the places they visit,” says Phillipa Harrison, managing director of Tourism Australia. “When borders are open once again, Australia is ready and waiting with exactly those sorts of experiences.”
Nature finds a way
Although Australia is used to dealing with nature’s ferocity, the 2019-2020 season caused unprecedented despair. Despite the bush fire devastation, and in many cases because of it, the scorched earth soon sprang to life. “It was immediate,” recalls Craig Wickham, wildlife expert and managing director of Kangaroo Island Wilderness Tours and Exceptional Kangaroo Island Tours. Within seven days of the fires destroying about half the island’s wilderness areas, buds once buried under the thick bark of eucalyptus trees “burst into life,” he says. Fungi bloomed on the charred bush floor and provided food for hungry animals. “The birds and fleet-footed animals, or those which had burrows in which to shelter, were out foraging in the ash-beds,” Wickham says.
Endemic plants flowered within days of the fires, providing an immediate source of nectar for birds, insects, bats and tiny pygmy possums. During an October census of endangered glossy black cockatoos, more than 450 birds were counted — the highest number ever recorded. Wickham says this is “fabulous news for this large, quiet and beautiful cockatoo,” which just 20 years before had numbered only 110 individuals.
Southern Ocean Lodge, one of the signature hotels on the island, burned to the ground on Jan. 3, 2020. Its owners, James and Hayley Baillie, are rebuilding and expect to reopen in 2022. For them, one of the first flashes of hope was the welcomed reappearance of a beloved resident echidna, or spiny anteater, named Enchilada. “She must have burrowed into the earth as the fire passed over her,” says Hayley Baillie. The other was the discovery that Sol the Kangaroo, the lodge’s unofficial mascot who had been nurtured by staff as an orphaned joey, had also survived. “He’s now often seen hopping through the staff village and around the newly growing native plants,” she says.
Even on the Great Barrier Reef, nature finds a way. Andy Ridley, CEO of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, says that at the end of 2020 — the beginning of the Australian summer — teams carried out the world’s first Great Reef Census. “The mission was to capture ‘reconnaissance data’ in the form of images from across the length of the Great Barrier Reef,” he explains. “The project brought together a makeshift research flotilla made up of tourism vessels, dive boats, fishing charters and superyachts, crewed by divers, scientists and everyday people, who headed to the far corners of the reef to help out.” Despite the biggest coral bleaching event to date, the researchers found healthy sections of the reef had never been surveyed before. Diving to inspect and photograph them, Ridley says that “many were so beautiful that you weren't sure if you should laugh or cry when you surfaced. Nature is extraordinary and resilient when given a chance.”
Recent worldwide interest in the plight of the reef is cause for hope, Ridley says. “There has been a groundswell of incredible conservation efforts happening in the water,” with collaboration between the reef tourism industry, researchers and conservation groups. “It’s evolving to be an extremely scalable approach not just on the Great Barrier Reef, but on reefs around the world,” he says.
Travel for the greater good
Travelers keen to visit Australia will still have to wait, because borders are unlikely to fully open until at least late 2021. But once international visitors can enter, they’ll find ample opportunities to assist in bush fire and reef recovery. (Some restorative tourism opportunities can be found at australia.com.) Many of the hoteliers and tour operators in fire-affected regions, as well as near the reef, already offered programs where visitors could lend a hand, and 2020 events have brought those efforts into sharper focus. On Tasmania, for example, 2019 bush fires scorched the remote Overland Track, home to ancient stands of montane conifers. The upside? The fires spurred the production of conifer cones, which had not happened since 2015. On guided walking tours organized by Tasmanian Walking Company in partnership with the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, visitors map tree locations, collect seeds and learn about Tasmania’s alpine flora.
On Kangaroo Island, restorative tourism opportunities include bird banding and re-wilding, ride-alongs to check remote cameras and monitor wildlife populations, and, depending on the season, helping with tree-planting programs for long-term habitat restoration.
On the mainland, high-end Emirates One&Only Wolgan Valley runs a dedicated “Conservation Experience,” giving guests the chance to participate in seed collection, habitat reconstruction, animal counts and tree planting. Echidna Walkabout tours offer one- to three-day Koala Recovery Experience trips to habitats west of Melbourne, where participants plant eucalyptus trees and learn about the importance of koalas to the ecosystem. In Far North Queensland, FNQ Nature Tours takes visitors on day-long treks in search of the spotted-tail quoll — a marsupial that is endangered and, like its cousin the Tasmanian devil, also carnivorous.
Over on the Great Barrier Reef, experienced divers can join Passions of Paradise’s weekly eco-tour and collect data about reef health and coral gardening efforts. Snorkelers can take a guided snorkel safari with Reef Magic Cruises and survey a coral stabilization project installed over a cyclone-damaged coral rubble field. When the Great Reef Census resumes in October, Ridley says, tourists will be able to take part via a range of reef tour and dive companies by taking photos of the reef and submitting them online.
And for those who aren’t interested in counting coral, petting koalas or planting eucalyptus trees, there are more passive ways to give back. Across wide swaths of Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales wine country, smoke taint — the infiltration of smoke in grapes on the vine — ruined much of the 2020 vintage. But Reed & Co. Distilleries, based in Bright, Victoria, teamed with local vintner Billy Button Wines to make lemons out of lemonade.
“We were determined to not be defeated by the fires,” says Hamish Nugent, who runs the distillery and bar with his wife, Rachel Reed. “So instead of the smoke-tainted grapes going to waste, we found new ways to showcase them in the 2020 vintage of our two grape-based spirits.” Spirit Lab Mistelle and Spirit Lab Gin & Juice were top sellers last year, enough so that new releases are planned in 2021.
From disasters, determination
Well-intentioned tourists aren’t going to slow global warming or bring the Great Barrier Reef back from the brink. Yet for Ridley and others, the collective response to Australia’s 2020 disasters was ultimately encouraging. “For all the horrors of the pandemic,” Ridley says, “it has proven the capacity for people and governments in many places around the world to step beyond politics, get organized and dramatically adapt to the massive challenges facing their people.”
He even sees a more significant benefit: “It really proves that if we brought our best game to the climate crisis, we would resolve the key issues within a decade and set the trajectory to restoration and recovery in the second half of the century.”
Nugent notes that nature wasn’t the only victim of the fires: Businesses suffered too, yet many, like Reed & Co., found ways to adapt. In Sydney, Archie Rose Distilling Co. switched from brewing hard liquor to making hand sanitizer, and it also created a brandy made from smoke-tainted grapes from New South Wales’s Hunter Valley wine region. In Queensland, Binna Burra Lodge lost its heritage lodge building in the fires, but it sprang back with campsites, safari tents and apartments that suffered only smoke damage. In Victoria, Peasant Girl Produce created a soap bar made with activated charcoal from burned eucalyptus trees.
That ability to take it all in stride and adjust course as circumstances require may not be a uniquely Australian trait, but it is one that sparks national pride. When visitors can finally return to Australia, Nugent says, they will find a country rife with “creativity, strength and determination” and that offers visitors plenty of ways to take part in the compelling recovery of a natural world that is altered but unbowed.
