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Manchin is the only Democratic senator who has not signed on as a cosponsor of the legislation this year, arguing that the federal government should not infringe on election law, which has generally beendictatedby individual states.
The moderate senator has emphatically stated that a major elections reform bill must be crafted and passed with bipartisan consensus, which would including voting rights.
"Pushing through legislation of this magnitude on a partisan basis may garner short-term benefits, but will inevitably only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the US government,"he said in a statementin late March.
Clyburn alleged that Manchin was elevating bipartisanship with Republicans over the voting rights of minority groups in the US.
"I'm insulted when he tells me that it's more important to maintain a relationship with the minority in the US Senate than it is for you to maintain a relationship with the minority of voters in America," Clyburn told The Huffington Post. "That's insulting to me."
Clyburn said Manchin was jeopardizing Democratic congressional majorities by not backing legislation that would reverse many of the most stringent voting restrictionsbeing implementedby GOP-controlled states, including Georgia, where Sen. Raphael Warnock is up for reelection in 2022.
"Since when do their rights take precedence over your fellow Democrat Warnock, who saw his state just pass laws to keep him from getting reelected?" he asked. "And you're going to say it's more important for you to protect 50 Republicans in the Senate than for you to protect your fellow Democrat's seat in Georgia. That's a bunch of crap."
The HousepassedH.R. 1 by a 220-210 vote in early March with almost unanimous backing among Democrats and no Republican support.
GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hasharshly criticizedthe bill, calling it a "power grab." His conservative-dominated Republican caucusis overwhelmingly in agreement, making bipartisan support incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
With the likelihood of a GOP filibuster facing S. 1, Clyburn said that Senate Democrats need to alter filibuster rules to move the bill through the chamber.
"The issue of civil rights and voting rights, these constitutional issues, should never be sacrificed on the altar of the filibuster," he said. "I've been saying that for a long time."
He added: "I don't understand why we can't see that my constitutional rights should not be subjected to anybody's filibuster."
Clyburn said that if the party allowed the For the People Act to falter in the Senate, then it would "pay the biggest price it has ever paid at the polls" in 2022.
"That is an actual fact," he said. "I think I know Black people. I've been Black 80 years."
Clyburn, one of the most prominent Democratic politicians in the Deep South and the figuremost creditedwith reviving President Joe Biden's campaign in the 2020 Democratic primaries, said that he feels as though the president will push for the bill to get through the Senate.
After Biden won the presidential election last November, he gave a nod to Black voters inhis acceptance speech, saying that the highly influential group and pillar of his electoral support "always had my back, and I'll have yours."
Recalling Biden's statement from last year, Clyburn reiterated the president's commitment to voting rights.
"The best way to have the backs of Black folks is to ensure the constitutional rights to cast an unfettered vote - there ain't no better way than to do that," Clyburn said. "Joe Biden is not going to allow the voting rights of Black people to be sacrificed on the altar of the filibuster."
SCOOPLET — House Democrats vow to include paid family and medical leave for every worker in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal made the pledge today in a letter to Democratic members of the committee, acquired by Nightly’s Myah Ward. Neal also said child care “needs to be a guarantee.”
‘THIS IS ON US NOW’ — Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat elected in 2018, hosted nearly one-fifth of the House of Representatives — welcoming lawmakers pretty much every other weekend — for visits to the border between her city and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
But that was 2019. Last year put an end to the trips. They started again in late March. Today, Escobar greets her second congressional delegation of 2021. The group, led by Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), also includes Reps. Norma Torres (D-Calif.), Lou Correa (D-Calif.) and Jason Crow (D-Colo.). They are scheduled to visit shelters for minors who cross the border without their parents and then to meet with U.S. Border Patrol officials on Tuesday.
Undocumented immigrants walk along the U.S.-Mexico border wall after they ran across the shallow Rio Grande into El Paso in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. | Getty Images
As a member of Congress representing the biggest U.S. city on the border, Escobar is a key figure in Biden’s effort to end the decades-long impasse on immigration. Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam sat down with Escobar this morning over coffee and Gussie’s conchas at her El Paso home to talk about what’s happening at the border now and whether immigration reform is possible. This conversation has been edited.
What is the reaction from your colleagues when they come down to El Paso to visit the border?
The border has been this mysterious place that has been mythologized by a lot of politicians over time, Democrats and Republicans alike. When colleagues come and tour the facilities they obviously are coming during times of great challenge. Many of my colleagues are shocked by the conditions or shocked by the number of individuals arriving.
Here’s what we’re seeing now. We’re seeing a significant number of children. A lot of older teenagers. I’ve spoken with groups of them at the influx facility, and I’ve spoken with some of them in the processing centers. A majority of the kids coming, arriving at our front door, are coming to be with close family members. As of a couple weeks ago 85 percent of them were meeting a close family member, and about 45 percent of them were coming to be with a parent.
Did you read The New York Times story about a Honduran girl who was apprehended in Juárez, just a few miles from here, and had to call her mom in Maryland to tell her she didn’t make it?
No. I’ve actually been trying to take a little bit of a break. Because it’s a lot to carry. It’s year after year. Although I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining at all, it’s emotionally taxing. You want to do everything you can to help and you feel so frustrated that it’s so hard to build consensus.
The Biden administration is essentially doing the best they can. What they’ve inherited is lots of pent up demand from people who were pushed out into Mexico and waited for up to two years. They’re dealing with Mexico saying, “We’ve about had it.”
What do you want your colleagues to understand about the border when they tour facilities and meet with border officials?
Number one, migration doesn’t stop. Number two, deterrence doesn’t work. And number three, the status quo hasn’t addressed anything. I’m going to start pushing an idea of reenvisioning how we address our big challenges at the border. There’s two prongs: addressing root causes, which is something that I wrote about in a New York Times op-ed and something that a lot of members have been talking about for a long time.
The other facet of this is addressing how we deal with folks at the border. We treat every human being arriving at our front door, who doesn’t have, quote unquote, papers as though they are a national security threat. How do we take a look at what immigrants do for our economy, even Central American immigrants with very limited education, with nothing but the clothes on their back?
Those are the kinds of conversations that I’m hoping to have with members of Congress who I believe are serious about their work. There are colleagues of mine on the Republican side, who are truly in it just for the political theater. I’m not gonna engage with people like that. Part of my strategy is trying to reach across the aisle. Victoria Spartz from Indiana came to El Paso. I tried to share with her and with colleagues who will listen, the facts to break through the political rhetoric.
Those facts are this: We’ve been dealing with this for a long time. And it’s now happening on our watch. We’re new to Congress. But this is on us now.
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. I’m off the rest of this week, but feel free to still reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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The White House has laid out electric vehicle goals in its latest infrastructure plan, aiming to convert all federally owned vehicles to electric, deploy hundreds of thousands of charging stations and provide generous customer rebates to get new models rolling out of dealerships.
Meeting those goals will require an increase in advanced batteries, and that’s where one problem lies. Even without new government programs, automakers plan to offer more than 200 electric or hybrid car models in the U.S. market by 2024. That’s on top of demand from electric utilities, which increasingly use similar lithium-ion batteries to stabilize the power grid.
One of the factories slated to help meet that demand is a $2.6 billion plant in Commerce, Ga., being built by South Korean battery maker SK Innovation. If the plant is completed, the firm says, it will employ 2,600 workers and provide batteries for a suite of Volkswagen vehicles, as well as the electric version of the Ford F-150, the single most popular vehicle in the country.
But construction of the landmark facility is being threatened by an international trade dispute. The U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in February that SK Innovation stole trade secrets from rival South Korean company LG Chem, and ordered that the U.S. block SK from importing components to build batteries. Although the independent agency gave a two-year grace period for Volkswagen and a four-year cushion for Ford, SK says the ruling will likely force it to abandon the factory.
That’s where the White House comes in. Federal law allows the president and the U.S. trade representative to overrule an ITC decision within 60 days — April 11 in the battery case.
“If the president does not disapprove of the ITC decision, I think it’s very hard to envision SK staying in the U.S.,” said Carol Browner, who served as EPA administrator during the Clinton administration and White House climate chief under former President Barack Obama and is now working with SK to pressure Biden.
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WHAT'D I MISS?
— Senate Dems release international tax framework as lawmakers start to tweak Biden’s plan: The framework released by Finance Chair Ron Wyden (Ore.) and fellow tax writers Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Mark Warner (Va.) generally agrees with what the administration proposed last week when it called for a host of tax hikes on corporations.
— Arkansas governor vetoes ban on youth transgender care: Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson said he worried the legislation would set a new standard for government interference with medical care, and he said he was particularly bothered that the bill did not make exceptions for patients already receiving treatment who would be forced to stop.
— Yellen makes case for a global minimum tax on multinational corporations: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged a global minimum tax rate on corporations in a push to assert U.S. leadership in ongoing international tax negotiations. The goal is to prevent companies from relocating wherever they find lower taxes.
— Texas governor rejects first-pitch invite over MLB’s All-Star decision: In a letter to Neil Leibman, president of business operations and chief operating officer for the Texas Rangers, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott wrote that he had been “looking forward” to the experience this afternoon — “until Major League Baseball adopted what has turned out to be a false narrative about the election law reforms in Georgia, and, based on that false narrative, moved the MLB All-Star game from Atlanta.”
— Justice Thomas grumbles over Trump’s social media ban: As the Supreme Court issued an order today declaring moot a lawsuit over Trump’s blocking of some Twitter users from commenting on his feed, Justice Clarence Thomas weighed in with a 12-page lament about the power of social media companies like Twitter.
AROUND THE NATION
“You could foresee how an independent entity might say, ‘Well, we can’t be dealing with you unless we know you’re vaccinated.’ But it’s not going to be mandated from the federal government.”
PUTTING THE FRENCH IN FRENCH LAUNDRY — French prosecutors launched an investigation into claims that luxury dining clubs are flouting Covid-19 restrictions. It follows the airing Friday evening of an undercover report by network M6, which showed unmasked guests enjoying champagne meals in what appears to be an upmarket restaurant in Paris.
One person, introduced as an organizer of the parties and identified in various media as celebrity Pierre-Jean Chalençon, says in the footage “I’ve dined this week in two or three restaurants that are so-called clandestine restaurants, with a certain number of ministers.” Chalençon’s statement was just “humor” and it’s to be taken with a “sense of the absurd,” his lawyer later told Agence France-Presse.
However, the Paris prosecutor’s office launched a criminal investigation Sunday, looking to identify breaches of health regulations and track potential organizers and attendees. France this weekend imposed fresh nationwide coronavirus restrictions. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin tweeted: “I asked Paris police to verify the accuracy of the reported facts in order to — if they are verified — charge the organizers and the participants of these clandestine dinners.”
STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: It actually is infrastructure week ... and it will be for a while. What is the administration’s plan to get its top legislative priority through Congress? Add Transition Playbook to your daily reads for details you won't find anywhere else about the state of play of the administration's top priorities and biggest challenges. Track the people, policies and power centers of the Biden administration. Subscribe today.
NIGHTLY NUMBER
6
The number of justices on the Supreme Court who ruled today in favor of Google in a long-running copyright dispute against Oracle that has huge implications for Silicon Valley. The court found that Google did not violate the law when it used more than 11,000 lines of Oracle’s software code in developing its Android mobile operating system.
PARTING WORDS
INTENTIONAL PASS — If Major League Baseball were truly worried about protecting the ability to vote in Georgia — and making sure Georgia’s disenfranchised voters weren’t silenced — there was a much, much better way to act: Bring the full force of baseball’s celebrity power to bear on Georgia itself.
At the purely symbolic level, it’s understandable why MLB made its decision, and why liberals around the country were high-fiving each other about it, Jeff Greenfield writes. But politics isn’t just about parading your virtue. It’s about real outcomes — getting real people to really vote — and by that standard, what the league did was to ignore a heaven-sent opportunity to actually do something concrete.
Consider this alternative: The All-Star Game stays in Atlanta. But the event — a three-day affair — is built around a multi-front campaign to address the restrictions imposed by the new law. None of it would need to be framed as partisan. It would be purely pro-voting, pro-democracy — an equal-opportunity push to be sure the good old-fashioned American election process worked.
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FOCUS: Jonathan Chait | Trump's Campaign Bilked His Fans Because of Course It Did Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine Chait writes: "Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people."
Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.
Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.
At first the auto-checked box simply said, “Make this a recurring monthly donation.” Then it added, “Make this a recurring weekly donation until 11/3,” with a second box below it, with even more text, authorizing an additional one-time $100 donation on September 29.
Ultimately, the messages included two text-heavy boxes, filled with boldfaced, all-caps slogans, with a much less conspicuous line at the bottom informing whoever had made it through this mini op-ed that they were authorizing the campaign to drain their bank account.
Goldmacher found victims who faced serious financial hardship as a result of this scam. Even some professional political operatives sometimes failed to recognize the inconspicuous little box.
The story cannot tabulate how much the campaign raised from unwitting victims. Many of them simply paid without realizing it. The only measure of the size of the grift comes via people who recognized their bank accounts were losing funds every week and demanded a refund. There were a lot of them: The Trump campaign refunded $121 million, or $101 million more than the Biden campaign did.
Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.
Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.
It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling the Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”
Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him.
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erek Chauvin’s demeanor since the moment of his arrest for the killing of George Floyd has been a combination of disbelief, rage, and victimhood. Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, was quick to engender those perceptions in the jurors, saying, “You will learn that Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career.” Guess what? Nelson is to a large extent right.
Why wouldn’t Derek Chauvin be shocked? American policing has contained within its DNA a culture of violence and rogue conduct from its origins. Violence and subversion of rights have been a longstanding tradition in police departments, complete with support for the most virulently racist organizations in US history, most notably the KKK.
In historical context, what Derek Chauvin did was not remarkable for an American law enforcement officer. Nor is the contention by his defense that he did nothing wrong. It was wrong, but it certainly was not an outlier. Yes, the conduct we see in the George Floyd video is derivative of many aspects of police training.
“You are men and women of violence. Violence is your tool.”
In the aftermath of the 2014-2015 Michael Brown killing protests in Ferguson, Missouri, director Craig Atkinson produced the groundbreaking documentary Do Not Resist. Atkinson’s film confronted, among other things, the culture of violence in American police training.
A key segment focused on former US Army Ranger Colonel turned police training specialist Dave Grossman. Grossman’s advocacy of police violence is legendary, and while an extreme example of the violent ideologies that shape American police practices, his philosophies are nonetheless common to police training programs nationwide.
The following segment from Do Not Resist focuses on Grossman’s training techniques. Listening to Grossman nonchalantly encourage police killing, the image of Derek Chauvin’s air of ambivalence as he slowly snuffs out the life of George Flood with his hand in his pocket suddenly makes sense.
As the film points out, ”Dave Grossman’s books are required reading at the FBI Academy and at police academies throughout the country.”
The striking similarities between the video images of the Eric Garner and George Floyd killings were undeniable. Multiple police officers restraining one man, neck compression, pleas for air, for mercy, all going unheeded, ending in silence and death. But there is another similarity that weighed heavily in the Garner case and may too in the Floyd trial.
The medical examiner’s report in the Garner case described the cause of death as “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest, and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Here’s a look at what really killed Eric Garner …
Image from Ramsey Orta original cellphone video of Eric Garner killing.
In the Floyd case, the construct of finding by the medical examiner was nearly identical and reached functionally the same conclusion: “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression [and] is not a legal determination of culpability or intent.” The main takeaway from both reports is take away whatever you like, it’s wide open to interpretation.
Both reports are conveniently vague enough to undermine overwhelming video evidence that, absent the report, would unavoidably lead to a conclusion that the chokeholds applied were the cause of death.
The medical examiners are part of the police-justice system support network. They know exactly what kind of report police defense attorneys need to sow reasonable doubt with jurors and they know exactly how to write them. It’s another cog in the wheel.
Derek Chauvin was an actor in a process, a system of violent American policing. Now he’s on trial and the system doesn’t know anything about what made him do it. Convict Derek Chauvin and force the system to change.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Martin Luther King Jr. in he documentary 'MLK/FBI', which explores FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with the civil rights leader. (photo: IFC Films)
Liz Theoharis | The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World,' Living in a Country Haunted by Death Liz Theoharis, Tom Dispatch Theoharis writes: "On that early spring day, exactly one year before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King warned that 'a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,' a statement that should ring some bells in April 2021."
First, he said that it would a “tough” deadline to keep; then, that it would be “hard to meet.” He’s evidently considering moving it to at least November, even if he can’t quite “picture” relocating it to 2022. We’re talking, of course, about President Joe Biden and the May 1st date the Trump administration negotiated with the Taliban for the withdrawal of all remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan. (Note, by the way, that only the troops are ever discussed, not American air power, some of which may not even be stationed in Afghanistan.) More strikingly, as the New York Timesreported recently, “some military commanders and administration officials” are using a Trump-era intelligence assessment to fight against any such withdrawal at all. They are suggesting that, should the U.S. do so, the Taliban could triumph “within two or three years” (and, of course, al-Qaeda and ISIS might then return to that country and the next thing you knew, it would be 9/11/2023).
So, this country’s longest war of this century — scheduled to start its 20th year in September — just can’t be put to bed. Everyone who’s anyone knows that the most powerful military on the planet simply can’t lose such a war, even if it’s been clear for years that it’s already lost it. No matter that the Pentagon and the military high command are focusing much of their attention these days on future cold-war options with those “near-peer threats” China and Russia. They still can’t admit defeat and simply go home. After all, what about the nearly billion dollars in contracts the Pentagon’s already issued to companies for work in Afghanistan well beyond that May 1st withdrawal date, in some cases even into 2022? (Keep in mind that, if those troops withdrew, those companies could sue!) And by the way, what’s the withdrawal date for the more than 6,000 contractors still in that country who are U.S. citizens?
All of the above is, of course, just part of the ongoing landscape of this country’s twenty-first century “forever wars.” Today, TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign Liz Theoharis surveys an even larger American landscape of war and terror, while considering what Martin Luther King, Jr., might make of our eternally fevered country so many years after he gave a sermon on the American war of his moment, the one that never seemed to end in Vietnam. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
“The Greatest Purveyor of Violence in the World” Living in a Country Haunted by Death
ifty-four years ago, standing at the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his now-famous “Beyond Vietnam” sermon. For the first time in public, he expressed in vehement terms his opposition to the American war in Vietnam. He saw clearly that a foreign policy defined by aggression hurt the poor and dispossessed across the planet. But it did more than that. It also drained this country of its moral vitality and the financial resources needed to fight poverty at home. On that early spring day, exactly one year before his assassination in 1968, Dr. King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,” a statement that should ring some bells in April 2021.
In his sermon, Dr. King openly wrestled with a thorny problem: how to advance nonviolent struggle among a generation of Black youth whose government had delivered little but pain and empty promises. He told the parishioners of Riverside Church that his years of work, both in the South and the North, had opened his eyes to why, as a practitioner of nonviolence, he had to speak out against violence everywhere — not just in the U.S. — if he expected people to take him at his word. As he explained that day:
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems… But they asked, and rightly so, ‘what about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”
A Global Pandemic Cries Out for Global Cooperation
In 2020, the planet was swept up in a devastating pandemic. Millions died, tens of millions suffered. It was a moment, in Reverend King’s spirit, that would have been ideal for imagining new global approaches to America’s ongoing wars of the past century. It would similarly have been the perfect moment to begin imagining global cooperative approaches to public health, growing debt and desperation, and intellectual property rights. This especially given that the Covid-19 vaccines had been patented for mega-profits and were available only to some on this suffering planet of ours, a world vulnerable to a common enemy in which the fault lines in any country threaten the safety of many others.
Internationally, at the worst moment imaginable, U.S.-backed institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund continued to demand billions of dollars in debt payments from impoverished countries in the Global South, only forgiving them when their governments fell into step behind the U.S. and Europe, as Sudan has recently done. Moreover, Washington had a golden opportunity when the search for a Covid-19 vaccine threatened to change patent laws and force pharmaceutical companies to work with low-income nations. Instead, the U.S. government backed exclusive deals with Big Pharma, ensuring that vaccine apartheid would become rampant in this country, as well as across the rest of the world. By late March, 90% of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered had gone to people in wealthy or middle-income countries, with vaccine equity within those countries being a concern as well.
Another menacing development is the thematically anti-Chinese legislation being developed in Congress right now. Three weeks ago, just as the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was nearly across the finish line, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was quietly laying the groundwork for another major legislative package focused on further inflaming a rising cold war with China. For Republicans, legislative action on China is in theory an absolute bullseye, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already made it clear that his support for Schumer’s bill will only come if it includes a large increase — once again — in “defense” spending.
The timing and tenor of this debate, steeped as it is in Sinophobia, economic brinkmanship, and military hawkishness, is more than troublesome. Just a few weeks ago, eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were gunned down in Atlanta by a man plagued by his own toxic mix of religious extremism, white supremacy, and sexism. This followed a year in which there were close to 4,000 documented anti-Asian hate incidents in this country, fueled by a president who blamed the Chinese for Covid-19 and regularly used racist nicknames for the pandemic like the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu.”
In addition, an aggressive and potentially militarized anti-China bill is irresponsible when tens of thousands continue to contract the virus daily here at home and we are only beginning to understand the long-term economic consequences of the pandemic. At a time when there are 140 million poor or low-income people in this country, a fully revived and funded war not against China but against poverty should be seen as both a moral responsibility and a material necessity. At least now, poverty seems to be getting some attention in the pandemic era, but how sad that it took the disastrous toll of Covid-19 on American jobs, housing, and nutrition to put poverty on the national agenda. Now that it’s there, though, we can’t allow it to be sidelined by short-sighted preparations for a new cold war that could get hot.
Cruel Manipulation of the Poor
An inhumane approach to foreign policy and especially wars in distant lands was only half of the spiritual death that Dr. King warned about back in 1967: the other half was how the militarization of this society and a distortion of its moral priorities had brought war and immiseration home. That was what he meant in his sermon when spoke about the “cruel manipulation of the poor.”
In 1967, King saw how American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam “on the side of the wealthy and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.” That hell was being created both in the Agent Orange-saturated lands of Vietnam and Laos and, in a different fashion, in so many poor and abandoned communities in the United States.
Dr. King mourned the “brutal solidarity” of disproportionately poor Black, Brown, and white Americans fighting together against the poor in Vietnam, only to return to a nation parts of which were still committed to inequality, discrimination, and racism (despite the struggle and advances of the Civil Rights movement) and remarkably blind to their suffering. In those last years of the 1960s, he watched as the promise of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was betrayed by massive investments in what President Dwight D. Eisenhower had first dubbed a “military-industrial complex,” and in a reactionary narrative, which would only become more emboldened in the years to come, that blamed the poor for their poverty.
Sadly, the decades to follow would, in so many ways, affirm his fears. And yet — to note a spark of hope amid the pandemic gloom — the last year has finally awakened an earnest concern on the part of some in the government to revive the spiritual health of the nation by committing in significant ways to the material health of the poor.
Indeed, ARPA’s investments in poor and low-income communities should be celebrated, but the question remains: Why is the Biden administration’s Covid-19 legislation so historic and rare? Why is it so unprecedented for the U.S. to invest $1.9 trillion in our own people in a country that, in these last years, has squandered 53% of every federal discretionary dollar on the Pentagon? How is it that we’ve become so steeped in a militarized economy that we don’t bat an eye when politicians propose more funding for the military, even as they say spending on human welfare is irresponsible and unaffordable?
In the lead-up to the passage of ARPA, stalwart old guard Republicans attacked the legislation. In an op-ed for the National Review, Senator Marco Rubio denounced increased welfare spending as “not pro-family” and repeated the tired myth that welfare, by supposedly creating dependency, actually breaks up the nuclear family. So immersed was Rubio in his disdain for the poor that he punctuated his piece with this nonsensical claim: “If pulling families out of poverty were as simple as handing moms and dads a check, we would have solved poverty a long time ago.” Is it really necessary to affirm in 2021 that more money in people’s pockets actually does mean less poverty?
Meanwhile, longtime senior Democratic economic adviser and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers argued that the Covid-19 bill was the “least responsible” policy in four decades. He had, of course, long been a champion of the austerity policies that helped lead to enormous increases in inequality and poverty in this country. (Many other economists dispute his claim.) It’s telling as well that members of the Biden Administration have distanced themselves from him.
Pro-austerity and anti-poor economic policies promoted by influential figures like Rubio and Summers are, in part, what’s kept America in a spiritual death spiral since the days of Dr. King. A country now constantly haunted by death has long been consumed by violence and crisis. Sometimes, it’s the literal physical violence of another mass shooting, driven by rage, hate, and desperation, or the further militarization of the border, or the use of militarized police violence to clear the most vulnerable from homeless encampments. Other times it’s policy violence, whether involving punitive work requirements for food stamps or the refusal to expand Medicaid and make healthcare available and affordable to all. And always, in the background, as Dr. King would certainly have noted, if he were giving his sermon today, is the violence of America’s never-ending wars that have eaten so many trillion dollars and killed and displaced so many people in distant lands.
Of particular concern today is the potential death of democracy that the insurrection of January 6th at the Capitol seemed so ominously to signal. I will never forget listening to a long-time organizer in Flint, Michigan, explain that “before they took away our water, they had to take away our democracy.”
This was true in the fight for racial justice, welfare, and decent wages during the days of Dr. King and it’s no less true in our many human rights struggles today. After all, since 2020, at least 45 states have introduced voter suppression bills, with the recent one in Georgia being only the most egregious and publicized. Such legislation is being proposed and passed by extremist politicians who understand that limiting access to the ballot through racism and a demonization of the poor is the surest way to prevent real and lasting change.
A Moral Revolution of Values
Immediately after cautioning about the spiritual death of the nation in that classic sermon of his, Dr. King made an abrupt and hopeful turn, reminding his audience that a moral revolution of values was urgently needed and that “America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
As both a preacher and theologian, he was acutely aware of the story of Jesus. After all, Dr. King, like the Jesus of the Bible, knew that a transformation of society in the image of peace would involve a full-scale reordering of priorities, dependent on a willingness to reject a politics of death and embrace one of life.
For that to happen, however, society would need to be flipped right side up and that, in Jesus’s time, in Dr. King’s, or in our own, represents a herculean task, one never likely to happen based on the goodwill of those in power. It requires the collective efforts of a movement of people committed to saving the heart and soul of their society.
In this moment following Easter Sunday 2021, 53 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., may we listen to his concerns and honor his enduring hopes by committing ourselves to building exactly such a movement here and now.
Mosby made the announcement on Friday following her office's one-year experiment in not prosecuting minor offenses to decrease the spread of Covid-19 behind bars.
"Today, America's war on drug users is over in the city of Baltimore. We leave behind the era of tough-on-crime prosecution and zero tolerance policing and no longer default to the status quo to criminalize mostly people of color for addiction, said Mosby in an official press release.
The experiment, known as The Covid Criminal Justice Policies, is an approach to crime developed with public health authorities. Instead of prosecuting people arrested for minor crimes like prostitution and public urination, the program dealt with those crimes as public health issues and work with community partners to help find solutions.
The program has led to decreases in the overall incarcerated Baltimore population by 18%, while violent and property crimes are down 20% and 36% respectively, according to the press release.
Mosby said her office will no longer prosecute the following offenses: drug and drug paraphernalia possession, prostitution, trespassing, minor traffic offense, open container violations, and urinating and defecating in public.
"When the courts open next month, I want my prosecutors working with the police and focused on violent offenses, like armed robbery, carjacking cases and drug distribution organizations that are the underbelly of the violence in Baltimore, not using valuable jury trial time on those that suffer from addiction," Mosby said.
Her decision was supported by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and Baltimore City Police Commissioner Michael Harrison. But Republican state Sen. Robert Cassilly told CNN affiliate WBFF that while he supports prosecutorial judgment, Mosby's decision is closer to making the law rather than enforcing it.
"Prosecutors take an oath to uphold the constitution in the state of Maryland and the constitution says the general assembly sets the policy, not the prosecutors," Cassilly told the station. "I respect the whole prosecutorial discretion. That's not prosecutorial discretion, that's an exercise in legislating. That's what the legislature is supposed to do."
Mosby said the state's attorney's office is also working with the Baltimore Police Department and Baltimore Crisis Response Inc. (BCRI), a crisis center dealing with mental health and substance abuse issue, to offer services instead of arresting individuals committing these lesser offenses.
"Rather than arrest and prosecution, BCRI will connect individuals with services in areas such as mental health, housing, and substance use," according to the press release.
Members of the media film water protectors at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Dec. 4, 2016. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post/Getty Images)
Pipeline Company Issues Broad Subpoena to News Site That Covered Protests Against It Alleen Brown and Sam Richards, The Intercept Excerpt: "Last week, members of the nonprofit news organization Unicorn Riot received a subpoena from the pipeline giant Energy Transfer seeking a wide range of documents, including news gathering materials that would identify sources."
“This subpoena is outrageous and strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. It should be thrown out immediately.”
ast week, members of the nonprofit news organization Unicorn Riot received a subpoena from the pipeline giant Energy Transfer seeking a wide range of documents, including newsgathering materials that would identify sources. The subpoena is part of an aggressive, yearslong legal effort launched by Energy Transfer in the wake of the Standing Rock movement, when thousands of opponents of the corporation’s Dakota Access pipeline came to camps at the border of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in an attempt to stop pipeline construction and protect the tribe’s drinking water from contamination.
Through a series of expensive conspiracy lawsuits against a disparate range of actors, the pipeline company has sought to paint the Standing Rock movement as the product of a vast misinformation-driven conspiracy to damage Energy Transfer.
Now, as part of that effort, Energy Transfer is demanding Unicorn Riot turn over virtually any documents, video footage, audio, article drafts, and communications related to the firm and its pipeline. The subpoena also sought information about the nonprofit’s organizational structure, social media accounts, and names of employees, volunteers, and supporters. Niko Georgiades, who was among the Unicorn Riot reporters covering Standing Rock, was separately subpoenaed.
“This subpoena is outrageous and strikes at the heart of the First Amendment,” said Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “The breadth of the subpoena is striking: not only encompassing things like story drafts and internal communications, but also the personal information of Unicorn Riot’s donors. The judge should see this for what it is: a menacing attempt to intimidate a news outlet whose only ‘crime’ is being critical of the company. It should be thrown out immediately.”
Unicorn Riot signaled it would contest the subpoena. “We intend to vigorously defend our sources and our First Amendment protected activity,” Unicorn Riot told The Intercept in a statement. (Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Over the course of months of protests at Standing Rock, Unicorn Riot developed a reputation for its immersive livestreams, video news reports, and public information requests, which provided powerful evidence of the aggressive tactics used by law enforcement agencies and Energy Transfer. The organization’s work leans to the left politically and tends to be critical of law enforcement agencies, with journalists often reporting from within movement spaces. At Standing Rock, law enforcement officials at times viewed the group’s journalists as members of the movement, subjecting them to repeated arrests as well as “less than lethal” weapons.
Unicorn Riot has fewer than a dozen members and is entirely supported by private donations from individuals who seek out their coverage of social movements and protests. (Disclosure: Sam Richards, one of the authors of this story, has written for Unicorn Riot as a freelance journalist on matters unrelated to pipeline protests.) Energy Transfer, meanwhile, reported nearly $5 billion in revenue in 2019 and has somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000 employees.
Fighting back will be an immense financial burden for a tiny organization like Unicorn Riot. The group has launched a fundraiser to pay for a First Amendment lawyer.
Attempt to “Chill” Speech
Critics say the toll exacted by fighting legal attacks is exactly the point of what Energy Transfer is doing.
The Unicorn Riot notice was just one of a slew of subpoenas related to Energy Transfer’s case over the last month to a wide range of individuals and groups who were involved in the Standing Rock movement. Among them were legal collectives, groups that provide nonviolent direct-action trainings, and Standing Rock tribal officials.
The Water Protector Legal Collective, which also received an Energy Transfer subpoena, described the subpoenas as part of a set of tactics “designed to bury organizations in litigation and force organizations to spend precious resources, time, and energy defending against corporations.”
Energy Transfer “is on a fishing expedition for information that could lend credence to their ill-founded notion that nonprofit organizations and Water Protectors seeking to protect human rights and the earth for future generations were allegedly engaged in illicit activity,” said staff attorney Natali Segovia in a statement. “In reality, it is ETP and large corporations that break the law with impunity.”
The subpoenas are part of a follow-up effort to a sprawling federal racketeering lawsuit Energy Transfer filed in 2017 against a range of defendants, including the environmental group Greenpeace; BankTrack, which is a nonprofit that pressures banks to stop financing harmful activity; and several individual pipeline opponents.
The federal complaint alleged that thousands of people came to camps at the border of the Standing Rock reservation because of a Greenpeace misinformation campaign. Widespread evidence, including a robust public record, show that water protectors instead were galvanized by calls for help made by tribal members and the publication of shocking footage showing Dakota Access pipeline security contractors siccing dogs on pipeline opponents.
Energy Transfer claimed it sustained $300 million in damages, a total that could translate into triple the penalties — nearly $1 billion — under the federal law called the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.
The legal effort has been labeled a SLAPP suit by Greenpeace, short for “strategic lawsuits against public participation.” The SLAPP designation refers to efforts designed to silence a powerful plaintiff’s critics by using the legal system to drain them of resources. The goal is not solely to win the lawsuit but to force a corporation’s political adversaries to hemorrhage money, time, and morale through relentless legal filings. In response to repeated SLAPP suits targeting Greenpeace and others, a task force called Protect the Protest launched in 2018.
In February 2019, a judge summarily dismissed Energy Transfer’s initial federal RICO case. “Donating to people whose cause you support does not create a RICO enterprise,” he said. “Posting articles written by people with similar beliefs does not create a RICO enterprise.”
Exactly a week after the dismissal, Energy Transfer filed a new complaint against Greenpeace in a local North Dakota district court. The new case basically repackages the old complaint without the federal RICO claims, adding instead allegations of trespassing and other property-based claims. Named alongside Greenpeace is the Red Warrior Society, which occupied an encampment of pipeline opponents that supported obstructive direct-action protests, Greenpeace organizer Charles Brown, and water protectors Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls.
“The suit was brought to chill Greenpeace’s speech, drain our resources, and intimidate anyone who speaks out against pipeline projects,” said Greenpeace deputy general counsel Deepa Padmanabha. “We’ve been fighting this SLAPP suit for many years, and we’ll continue to fight this battle because it’s important for all individuals and groups engaged in advocacy work.”
Widening Net
In the latest iteration of Energy Transfer’s legal attack, the corporation issued several subpoenas in recent weeks to individuals who are not defendants in the case. Among those subpoenaed are groups that provided legal services to people facing criminal charges during Standing Rock, including the Water Protector Legal Collective and the Freshet Collective. The Ruckus Society and Indigenous Peoples Power Project, which both promote nonviolent direct action, were also subpoenaed. And so were officials involved in inspecting the pipeline route on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, including Dr. Kelly Morgan, an archeologist for the tribe, and Tim Mentz, the tribe’s former tribal historic preservation officer, who submitted key testimony in a case arguing that the pipeline would harm culturally significant sites.
In an objection to its subpoena, the Water Protector Legal Collective noted that it has provided legal support in more than 800 criminal cases and argued that the subpoena is “seeking the records of a legal organization akin to a law office, including communications by, between and among WPLC-associated attorneys, WPLC staff and its clients.” The group said the subpoena was “an assault by Energy Transfer and Dakota Access upon the attorney client-privilege itself” and “a fishing expedition.”
The Water Protector Legal Collective subpoena even requested communications with members of the press. “This is a clear attempt to inhibit communications by an advocacy organization with the press in violation of WPLC’s first amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution,” the collective said in its objection.
Mentz and Morgan, for their part, have objected to the subpoena on the grounds that the documents Energy Transfer is demanding are the property of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, which is protected from such third-party subpoenas by sovereign immunity.
Unicorn Riot has been forced to dedicate a sizable portion of its limited resources to deciding how to handle the sweeping subpoena, even as the group maintains round-the-clock coverage of the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd last summer and sparked a nationwide protest movement. “We are committed to bringing you hard hitting journalism and will not bow to attempts to intimidate or interfere with our reporting,” the organization stated on its new legal defense fund page.
Crystal Mason was sentenced to five years in prison for casting an illegal provisional ballot during the 2016 presidential election. The ballot was never counted. (photo: AP)
Her Ballot Didn't Count. She Faces 5 Years in Prison for Casting It. Christina Morales, The New York Times Morales writes: "On Election Day 2016, Crystal Mason went to vote after her mother insisted that she make her voice heard in the presidential election. When her name didn't appear on official voting rolls at her polling place in Tarrant County, Texas, she filled out a provisional ballot, not thinking anything of it."
Mason’s ballot was never officially counted or tallied because she was ineligible to vote: She was on supervised release after serving five years for tax fraud. Nonetheless, that ballot has wrangled her into a lengthy appeals process after a state district court sentenced her to five years in prison for illegal voting, as she was a felon on probation when she cast her ballot.
Mason maintains that she didn’t know she was ineligible to vote.
The award-winning documentary Writing with Fire follows Meera Devi (right), chief reporter for the Khabar Lahariya - a news publication run by Dalit, members of India's lowest caste. (photo: Black Ticket Films)
"They [people in positions of political power or of a higher caste] can do anything. They can even kill us," the victim tells Meera, who's recording the interview on her smartphone. The woman's husband sits on the floor on the side, listening to the interview with a pained expression. He later says, "We don't trust anyone except Lahariya."
This is a scene from a new documentary called Writing With Fire which profiles Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News), India's only major news outlet run by women from marginalized communities. It focuses on rural reporting through a feminist lens and is led by chief reporter Meera Devi.
The film won the audience award in the World Cinema Documentary category at this year's Sundance Festival. It's directed by Indian filmmakers Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh.
Khabar Lahariya began as a small Hindi language newspaper in 2002 in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Many of its reporters are Dalits, formally called "untouchables" — people at the very bottom of India's ancient 4-level caste system, that are considered by higher castes to be so impure, they should not be touched.
The Indian constitution bans discrimination on the basis of caste but it still persists. Two-thirds of rural women and about half of rural men practice untouchability themselves or had a family member who did, according to a 2016 survey of non-Dalit Hindu adults in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Indian nonprofit Research Institute for Compassionate Economics. That could mean they refuse to eat with lower caste people or don't let them enter their kitchen, which is considered a sacred place in Hindu households. Untouchability is more common in rural India, where Meera and her colleagues live and report.
Lower caste Indians are routinely beaten up and even killed by members of dominant castes for marrying outside their caste. And 10 Dalit women or girls are raped every day across India, according to a 2020 report by the international rights group Equality Now and Dalit rights organization Swabhiman Society.
Attacks against Muslims and other minorities, including Dalits, have been rising since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party came to power in 2014, Human Rights Watch said in a 2019 report. In March, the research group Freedom House downgraded India's global freedom status to "partly free" citing increased attacks on minorities and a "crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters."
This is the environment in which Khabar Lahariya's journalists report on the brutal murder of a woman, profile a young Hindu nationalist leader and interview fellow Dalits about discrimination.
The documentary charts the print to digital transformation of the semi-literate newsroom — most of the reporters have had some, but not a great deal of education — and documents their struggles with the basics of the English language (which they need to know to operate the smartphones they use when reporting). It follows Meera and two other colleagues as they find workarounds to challenges like power outages while reporting, interviewing unyielding, patronizing elected officials. And all the while, many of the reporters' families are pressuring them to marry because that is what is expected for many women in India.
So what keeps them going? The answer might lie in the ending scene of the documentary in which Meera says, "When future generations ask us, 'What were you doing when the country was changing and the media was being silenced?' Khabar Lahariya will be able to say proudly that we were holding the powerful to account."
NPR's Sushmita Pathak interviewed Meera Devi over email in Hindi and translated her responses to English. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the biggest challenge for you as a female Dalit reporter in India?
The biggest challenge is being a female journalist in a place where journalism is not considered a woman's job. It's hard to be a Dalit woman and a less educated woman in a rural area. It's also challenging to have to question those who consider themselves upper caste, who are audacious and have powerful political connections and who may live in the same neighborhood as I.
You report about caste-based and gender-based violence and at the same time also face discrimination yourself. How do you tackle interviewees that try to patronize you or try to make you feel inferior?
I face discrimination every day, and not just because of my work. Sometimes it presents itself in formal situations and other times informally but overall, I have won this fight. A lot of times I feel like people try to humiliate me. For instance, when I go to interview government officials they don't answer my questions or don't answer what's being asked. They say,"go write what you want, we're not going to give you any answers."
I also face discrimination from male journalists especially while covering a news event like a politician's rally. All the media is huddled in one place and male journalists who consider themselves and their channels very important plant themselves at the front with their huge equipment and try to boss me around. Many times I have had to fight my way and jostle to get a good view. Sometimes I have to do my reporting from somewhere else, in the middle of the crowd for instance, to get a good scene. But being a woman is very helpful while reporting on women's issues.
[While reporting on caste-based atrocities] I am reminded of my own caste but I don't express it while reporting. Most interviewees don't know my caste. Sometimes they ask about it or try to guess if I'm Hindu or Muslim based on my dress.
What kind of harassment/backlash do you face because of your work? Have you ever felt fearful for your life or for your family?
There have been a lot of instances of intimidation. One time I interviewed a woman who'd filed a legal complaint against her brother-in-law. She says he stole her house. After talking to her, I had to get the other side, so I went to visit the brother-in-law. He wasn't home but an elderly woman who was there called him. In less than 10 minutes, two men riding a bike arrived. Soon there were several people on bikes, and they blocked the road. They started verbally abusing me and threatening to call the police. They accused me of trying to steal something and said, "if you are interested in photography, why don't you take photos of my bedroom?" They snatched my camera and deleted all the images. They stomped on my press card and copies of the newspaper. With great difficulty, I managed to leave the scene. I went to the local police station but they advised me not to file any complaint. Even today, I see the man in my neighborhood from time to time.
I have got threats against my life. There have been threats against shutting down our newspaper. They raise doubts about my reporting and investigate if I'm really a journalist. They intimidate and threaten because they are powerful. A lot of my colleagues have had mobs turn up at their homes and intimidate their families. They've caused our vehicles to be involved in crashes [by tampering or other means].
Now that we are totally dependent on technology, [because we publish online] this intimidation is out in the open for everyone to see, in the form of trolling. If we post a story critical of someone, the trolls start piling up. Technology has provided them with a platform. I am always fearful for my life and for my family.
The film charts Khabar Lahariya's transition from print to digital. What were the reasons for that shift? How do you feel about it? What are the technical challenges?
The transition from print to digital was essential for us. Not just because everyone else was moving toward digital, there were other reasons too. Printing a newspaper is a costly affair and selling the newspaper was challenging.
When we went digital, there were women in our team who were seeing a smartphone, touching a smartphone for the first time. It was surprising and amazing. They had to learn to operate the phones because their work [such as recording the interview and other videos] was done on the phone. There were a lot of challenges but we made it a success together. There were different challenges every day and with each one we learned to come up with new solutions. No electricity? We had a solution for that too.
There are many challenges that your all-female newsroom faces. But what is your biggest strength?
The challenges are our biggest strength. The values and objectives of our organization are our strengths. As women, we are each other's strength. We are an amazing group of friends who share all our joys and sorrows with each other, and not just work-related ones. Our rural reporting through a feminist lens and our unity as a team is our strength.
This film won an award at the Sundance Film Festival in the USA. Do you think viewers in the USA understand what caste is? How would you describe it to them?
I cannot say if viewers in the US understand what caste is but I know that there are Indian-Americans there. It is important to talk about caste-based discrimination, about the abuses of the rights that the Indian constitution has granted to us. It doesn't matter if it's American viewers or viewers from any part of the world. As a citizen of India, how can my life be separate from this?
Mario Atencio above the wash near his grandmother's home, where 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry spilled. (photo: Jerry Redfern/Guardian UK)
'No One Explained': Fracking Brings Pollution, Not Wealth, to Navajo Land Jerry Redfern, Guardian UK Redfern writes: "The two accidents account for just 1% of oil- and gas-related incidents in north-western New Mexico in 2019, according to statistics kept by the New Mexico oil conservation division (OCD). Since those two, there have been another 317 accidents in the region as of 29 March, including oil spills, fires, blowouts and gas releases."
Navajo Nation members received ‘a pittance’ for access to their land. Then came the spills and fires
t’s not clear why the water line broke on a Sunday in February 2019, but by the time someone noticed and stopped the leak, more than 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry mixed with crude oil had drained off the wellsite owned by Enduring Resources and into a snow-filled wash. From there, that slurry – nearly 59,000 gallons – flowed more than a mile downstream toward Chaco Culture national historical park before leaching into the stream bed over the next few days and disappearing from view.
The rolling, high-desert landscape where this happened is Navajo Nation off-reservation trust land, in rural Sandoval county, New Mexico. Neighbors are few and far between, and they didn’t notice the spill. The extra truck traffic of the cleanup work blended in with the oil and gas drilling operations along the dirt roads in that part of the county.
Then three days after the spill, something ignited and exploded 2,100 feet away on another wellsite owned by Enduring Resources, starting a fire that took local firefighters more than an hour to put out.
The two accidents account for just 1% of oil- and gas-related incidents in north-western New Mexico in 2019, according to statistics kept by the New Mexico oil conservation division (OCD). Since those two, there have been another 317 accidents in the region as of 29 March, including oil spills, fires, blowouts and gas releases.
There were 3,600 oil and gas spills over the previous decade, both smaller and larger.
In both cases in February 2019, the people living closest to the accident sites were among the last to know what happened.
Daniel Tso, chairman of the health, education and human services Committee of the Navajo Nation Council, chalks up the lack of communication to a prevailing attitude he sees among outsiders working on Native American lands: “Oh, it’s on Indian land. Don’t worry about it.”
Because, historically, few outsiders have.
The Eastern Agency of the Navajo Nation sits above 7,000ft in the north-west corner of New Mexico. As the name implies, it is the easternmost district of the reservation, and in the spring, the weather rides the whipping winds over the scrublands and among the pine trees, changing from warm sunshine to rain to blizzard conditions by the hour. You have to firmly plant your feet to keep from being blown over.
There, the tiny town of Counselor takes up a wide spot along State Highway 550, which cuts from east to west along the northern edge of the Eastern Agency. There are a few houses, a convenience store and a clutch of abandoned buildings, which are the remains of an old mission: a church, a boarding school, a gymnasium and some apartments.
The town is the center of Counselor chapter, a traditional, local form of Navajo government. North of the highway is land called Dinétah, the center of the Navajo people’s creation story. The Navajo call themselves Diné, which means “the People”.
On the south side of the highway, a hand-painted sign reads “Entering Energy Sacrifice Zone” next to the turnoff to the spider web of muddy, snowy, rutted dirt roads that string together the homes and drilling rigs and wells in the area. It takes a vehicle with four-wheel drive to confidently navigate here. That’s what the oilfield workers drive, if they aren’t driving semis.
“It’s really hard to come here,” says Mario Atencio, a legislative district assistant with the Navajo Nation Council.
He’s talking of the emotional difficulty.
This land is infused with his people’s history, but with all of the wells, “it looks like a very industrial landscape”. His grandmother’s home is about a half-mile away from – and is the closest to – the two accident sites.
On maps, the area is defined by the rectangular grid of private lands, federal lands and Navajo Nation off-reservation trust lands, which are managed by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on behalf of the Navajo. This checkerboard is a land of often-differing jurisdictions, rules and interests. And, for decades now, oil and gas wells.
Local residents have complained for years that officials with the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and BIA haven’t listened to their concerns about drilling in the area.
The most recent wave of drilling started around 2009 when land agents called families to the Chapter house to sign leases for the oil beneath their homes. Tso says they were treated like football players and told, “Sign here, you’ll get a signing bonus.”
“They don’t tell us, you know, ‘There’s a big oil boom right here and you’re sitting on some riches so you better be sure you have your own lawyers at the negotiating table,’” says Atencio.
Many didn’t understand what they were signing and what the future would bring. “When you have more than 70% unemployment and you have more than 70% of the population living in abject poverty, you can’t fault them for signing,” Tso says.
He lays some of the blame for the misunderstanding at the feet of the Bureau of Land Management, which manages leasing rights. But the majority of blame lies with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he says, which manages land rights on behalf of those living on Navajo trust lands.
“Nobody from the BIA advised those folks,” Tso says. At the meetings, “The BIA stood in the corner, stood in the shadows. Never said anything.”
Public affairs specialists from the BLM and BIA did not respond by deadline for this story.
Tso tells the story of an elderly woman who signed, thinking that the drilling for oil would be like a John Wayne movie: a man digs a hole in the ground, strikes oil and then dances in the fountain of black crude that shoots up – and everyone rakes in the money.
Tso says she told him: “But right now, I can’t even get a good night’s sleep because of the truck traffic.”
And because of an allotment system that divides ownership of tribal lands among all of the families and all of the people attached to a parcel, the money most people received was less than expected. Atencio explains that an allotment with 10 people on it might pay out $1,000 a month. But there are also allotments with hundreds of people. “It’s significant to some people,” he says, but “that’s a mere pittance for destroying the water, the air. And dumping hazardous waste. Tons of it.”
“Nobody explained this process to the folks who signed,” Tso says.
The People in Counselor say they weren’t counseled.
At first, nobody explained the February 2019 spill and fire to local people, either. Someone in Montana heard of the explosion and contacted Tso through the grapevine. Atencio received an email from someone with the Navajo Nation nearly two months after the spill. That was the first the two heard of the accidents and their severity.
Enduring Resources of Denver owns both wells and more than 920 others in New Mexico, all of them in the north-west corner of the state. The company did not respond to repeated calls for comment on this story, but incident reports filed by the company with OCD offer an outline of events. OCD regulates nearly all aspects of oil and gas production in the state: from permitting wells to tracking spills to tallying production to certifying closed wells.
According to the reports, a contractor initially spotted the 17 February spill. The well was new and had just been hydraulically fractured – the process in which a slurry of water, sand and chemicals is repeatedly slammed into a wellbore to fracture the rock at the bottom, to allow trapped oil and gas to flow freely up to the surface.
At the end of that process and before producing a clean stream of oil or gas, a well produces “flowback”, a combination of fracking slurry mixed with oil, gas and the brine that often forms near petroleum deposits.
A valve failed on the well, causing an “integrity failure” on the flowback line, leading to 1,400 barrels of that contaminated slurry pouring off the well pad, across a dirt road and into the snow-filled wash. Workers built a small dam to contain the slurry so it could be recovered, but snowmelt washed almost all of it downstream. Workers built more check dams, but most of the slurry eventually soaked into the creek bed.
Three days later at the neighboring well – also newly fracked – a tank holding flowback caught fire after someone didn’t properly ground a vacuum truck on an adjacent tank. That created a static buildup that sparked and ignited fumes from the flowback.
“I didn’t know another one exploded. Jesus,” says Atencio. He’d heard of an explosion from his uncle, but thought it was connected to the spill at the neighboring well. It was during an interview with Capital & Main that he learned it was a separate accident.
“There’s all these highly dangerous facilities all around my grandma’s house,” he says.
“There was a big old explosion. It shook the ground,” says Wilbert Atencio, Mario’s uncle. He was in his mother’s garage when it happened, at around 7.45 in the evening. “I thought it was like an earthquake or something.”
On that February evening two years ago, Wilbert hopped in his truck and drove a quarter-mile down the road toward the sound only to find the road blocked by contractor trucks with their lights flashing. “We have livestock and everything, and we wanted to know what was going on,” he says. But he couldn’t see the fire or the wellsite itself, as it sits on the other side of a rise down a side road. The contractors said he couldn’t pass and told him to go home. He later saw state police, emergency medical technicians and fire engines arrive.
Three of those vehicles came from the volunteer fire department in Cuba, nearly an hour’s drive away. According to the fire chief, Rick Romero, they got the call a little before 8pm, arrived at the burning well around 9.45 and didn’t leave the scene until 12.40 in the morning. Engines from neighboring San Juan county also responded, and both departments sprayed the well with water and fire-suppressing foam for more than an hour before it was extinguished.
“We graze on this land, we live on this land,” says Wilbert. But he doesn’t see the oil drilling industry changing in his neighborhood anytime soon. It’s been going on for decades, and he thinks it will keep drilling into the future.
“You know, they’re drilling everywhere.” Wilbert says this in a call from a jobsite in Palmdale, California. There are oil and gas wells there, too.
Norm Gaume is a retired water engineer and the former director of the New Mexico interstate stream commission. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in civil engineering, with a focus on water and wastewater engineering, from New Mexico State University. Early in his career he spent a dozen years as an operations and maintenance manager of Albuquerque’s water, wastewater and stormwater pumping systems.
Recently, he and Peter Coha, a retired mathematician who did large dataset analysis in an automation group at Intel, pulled reams of files from OCD’s online system that tracks spills and other accidents in the oil and gas industry across New Mexico.
They found thousands upon thousands of accidents that are chalked up to everything from lightning strikes to vandalism to valve failures.
But the two biggest causes of accidents – by far – are equipment failure, followed by corrosion.
To Gaume, those simply aren’t good enough reasons for oil and gas wells to spill their toxic contents. Equipment failure means you’re not maintaining your equipment, he says, and corrosion failure means you’re using the wrong components. Add to that accidents caused by human error, and three-fourths of all accidents in their accounting were preventable, if stronger regulation were in place to nudge producers in line.
“Spill prevention is voluntary,” says Gaume. There are no laws punishing producers for spills. “And some operators choose to spend money to prevent spills, and some apparently don’t.”
Gaume and Coha find this idea reflected again in another view of the records, which shows vast differences between well operators when it comes to numbers of accidents compared with how much oil or gas they’re producing.
“Some operators do a pretty good job” of producing with few spills, Gaume says. “Some have rates of spill that are 20 times as high [as other producers].”
Taken together, he says, their data analysis shows that most spills are preventable.
In the chart of producers compiled by Gaume and Coha, Enduring Resources produces quite a bit of oil and gas with comparatively few accidents. But according to OCD’s reports, human error and equipment failure caused the accidents in 2019.
To Gaume, despite the company’s generally good record, those reasons are not acceptable.
In August 2020, a pipeline operated by a different company, Harvest Four Corners, of Houston, leaked natural gas into an ephemeral wash about 50 miles away from the Enduring Resources accidents.
Even though crews began cleanup immediately, Harvest got hit with a $92,000 fine from OCD because it neglected to report the spill for 44 days. State regulations require phoning in major incidents within 24 hours and filing a written report within 15 days. Minor incidents – those involving less than 25 barrels of fluids or 500 McF of gas – require only a written report within 15 days of finding the release.
Enduring Resources faced no fines and paid no penalties for either the fracking spill or the well fire. There is no violation in spilling fracking waste or wells catching fire in New Mexico. The only violation is in not reporting accidents. Since Enduring Resources promptly reported both, OCD played a supervisory role that consisted of approving the remediation plan and site cleanup.
Of all of the agencies that were eventually notified and kept abreast of the spill – OCD, BIA, BLM, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US army corps of engineers – none levied a fine or sanction.
According to paperwork filed with OCD, three months after Enduring Resources’ well spilled 1,400 barrels of fracking waste near Atencio’s grandmother’s house in 2019, it had another accident, spilling 20 barrels of crude oil straight into the ground. Half of it was recovered. It was deemed a minor spill by OCD rules and the case was closed after it was reported by Enduring Resources.
Standing in the biting wind on the dirt road next to the spill site in mid-March, Mario Atencio wonders aloud what was in the fracking mixture that spilled on his family’s land and ran down the wash in front of him.
Measurements included in the final report that Enduring Resources filed with OCD show that the water table is only 50ft below the surface. His family has run sheep and sometimes cattle on the land, and the animals would drink from the wash where the toxic mixture sank in. Farther down the creek is a hand pump where people fill a water tank for livestock.
Atencio believes the water table is probably unusable now. “This used to support 40, 50 head of sheep,” he says. “And now the whole water is contaminated.”
Recently, some state legislators tried to pass new rules that would have imposed fines for spilling fracking waste, or so-called produced water. But the bill died in committee in the just-completed New Mexico legislative session.
Gaume and Atencio both testified in favor of the legislation. But the majority of committee members agreed with industry lobbyists opposed to the proposed rules, who said that further regulations could drive the oil and gas industry out of New Mexico.
Meanwhile, oil and gas production remains robust. In a year buffeted by massive downturns in demand and prices brought on by the Covid-19 crisis, New Mexico pumped more hydrocarbons out of the ground than ever before.
As Atencio stands near the two wells on that windy day in March, semi trucks hauling sand and fracking equipment whip up and down the washboard road. “Oil companies are supposed to be our business partners. Look at this road,” he says, pointing at the dirt. It’s a sore point with him that the oil companies didn’t even build good dirt roads connecting the wellsites. “Yeah,” he says, “we’re business partners.”
It’s part of what Tso calls the “fracking tsunami”.
Industry rolled through Native American lands, disrupting everything from sleep patterns to finances, and left little behind. In the end there is no community center, no nearby fire station that can handle chemical fires, no money for higher education and no good roads.
And those abandoned mission buildings in Counselor – the school, the church, the apartments? The Navajo Nation bought the town and those buildings for $1m in 2007 with plans to refurbish them. But Tso says they found out later they were built with asbestos, and it will cost another $2.6m to tear them down and replace them.
“It happened on Indian land,” says Tso. “So it’s trivialized. It’s of no big concern.”
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t’s not clear why the water line broke on a Sunday in February 2019, but by the time someone noticed and stopped the leak, more than 1,400 barrels of fracking slurry mixed with crude oil had drained off the wellsite owned by Enduring Resources and into a snow-filled wash. From there, that slurry – nearly 59,000 gallons – flowed more than a mile downstream toward Chaco Culture national historical park before leaching into the stream bed over the next few days and disappearing from view.
