RSN: FOCUS: John Nichols | Bernie Sanders Is Fed Up With Republican Obstruction - and Democratic Caution

 

 

07 June 21

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FOCUS: John Nichols | Bernie Sanders Is Fed Up With Republican Obstruction - and Democratic Caution

John Nichols, The Nation
Nichols writes: "In recent days, the independent senator from Vermont has become the highest-profile and most enthusiastic congressional champion of the argument that Senate Democrats must use their narrow majority to enact a transformational agenda."

“If Republicans don’t want to cooperate,” he says, “then, yes, we have to move forward without them.”

ernie Sanders ran for president promising a political revolution. When he did not secure the Democratic nomination, the unapologetic progressive immediately threw in as a supporter of a more moderate Democrat, Joe Biden, and became an ardent advocate for his former rival.

But that does not mean that Sanders has lost his revolutionary zeal.

In recent days, the independent senator from Vermont has become the highest-profile and most enthusiastic congressional champion of the argument that Senate Democrats must use their narrow majority to enact a transformational agenda. Sanders has made it clear that he is pleased by the ambitions of the White House when it comes to strategies like those outlined in the president’s initial proposal for an American Jobs Plan. But he has been equally clear in recent days about his frustration with the deference many Democrats continue to show to Republicans who are delaying and disrupting the governing process.

The Biden administration has been engaged in a delicate dance of negotiations with a small group of Republican senators, maintaining the faint hopes of reaching an agreement to approve the president’s infrastructure proposal. Republicans, some Democrats, and many pundits who are unable to get over the delusion of “bipartisanship,” have suggested that compromise is necessary to enact a more modest proposal.

But Sanders isn’t having it.

“If Republicans don’t want to cooperate and help us seriously address the many crises we’re facing today,” he says, “then, yes, we have to move forward without them to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and create millions of good-paying, union jobs.”

This is about much more than the usual wrangling between Democrats and Republicans. Sanders has a longer and more ambitious history of working with Republicans who really want to get things done—on issues ranging from fair trade to protecting civil liberties and auditing the Pentagon—than the vast majority of congressional Democrats. But the senator is unwilling to play the fool. If Republicans fail to bargain in good faith, he is prepared to abandon negotiations and start governing.

That’s an emerging view on the part of progressives, who argue that the handful of Senate Republicans who are talking with Biden—and who have proposed weak-willed alternatives to the president’s agenda—are not taking the discussion about the American Jobs Plan seriously. Activists with the Sunrise Movement gathered outside the White House Friday to call for approval of “the boldest version of the American Jobs Plan.” “No Compromise, No Excuses,” declares the group. “Democrats must take their power seriously and stop negotiating with a GOP who is not serious about climate action or delivering for the American people.”

Sanders is delivering a similar message with interviews, statements, and social media messages that suggest the time to act has arrived.

When CNN’s Wolf Blitzer floated a case for continued negotiations and compromises on the part of Democrats, the senator shot it down.

“The Republicans say they’re on board with a lot of President Biden’s plan when it comes to ‘traditional’ infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, stuff like that,” argued Blitzer. “Are you and other progressives denying President Biden potentially a bipartisan ‘win’ by including all of the other issues that you’re labeling infrastructure that Republicans say is not really traditional infrastructure?”

The Senate Budget Committee chair answered with facts, rather than wishful thinking.

“According to the experts in our country, the American Society of Civil Engineers, what the Republicans are proposing for ‘traditional’ infrastructure is only a fraction of what we need,” said Sanders. “I think every American understands that our roads, and our bridges, our water systems, all of that, is really crumbing before our eyes. I’m a former mayor, and what I know is that, unless you invest in infrastructure, it’s only going to get worse—and it’s only going to be more expensive. We now have the opportunity to create millions of good-paying, often union jobs rebuilding our infrastructure. What the Republicans are talking about is totally inadequate.”

Totally inadequate. And totally antidemocratic.

As Sanders and his fellow progressives note, Democrats won the presidency, control of the House of Representatives, and control of the Senate in the 2020 election cycle. Now, under any reasonable measure of how the system is supposed to work, the Democrats ought to be governing. And if filibuster reform is required to jump-start the process, so be it.

Echoing the urgency of more than 100 groups that on Thursday declared, “We cannot allow the filibuster to stand in the way of progress or imperil the health of our democracy,” Sanders says, “The U.S. Senate is the only institution in the world where a vote of 59-41 can be considered a defeat instead of a huge victory. Enough is enough. Let us change the outdated rules of the Senate, end the filibuster and pass a bold agenda for working families with a majority vote.”

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There's Less Than Two Years to Save American Democracy

Luke Savage, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The ongoing drive by Republicans to pass voter suppression laws presents the biggest challenge to democratic government since the establishment of Jim Crow."

The ongoing drive by Republicans to pass voter suppression laws presents the biggest challenge to democratic government since the establishment of Jim Crow. If Democrats in Congress fail to act by the 2022 midterms, it could be too late to stop it.

hough it has yet to fully register as the national story it deserves to be, America is currently in the throes of what may well be the most concerted effort at voter suppression in living memory. Since the beginning of the year, Republican state legislators have introduced a deluge of new laws intended to restrict voting, suppress traditionally non-Republican constituencies, and overturn the results of elections.

Mother Jones senior reporter Ari Berman has been covering issues related to voting rights, gerrymandering, and democratic disenfranchisement for years and is author of the 2015 book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. Berman spoke to Jacobin’s Luke Savage about the concerted right-wing offensive currently underway at the state level, its deep parallels with similar efforts in the nineteenth century, and why failure to pass federal voting rights legislation will have dire consequences for American democracy.

LS: America is currently in the midst of the most pronounced effort at voter suppression it’s seen for quite some time. According to the Brennan Center, fourteen states enacted twenty-two new laws between January 1 and the middle of last month that restrict access to the vote. From what I can tell, this is just the tip of the iceberg — there being hundreds of voting laws tabled at the state level that have a restrictive character. How would you characterize what’s going on right now?

AB: I would characterize it as the greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction. If you look at the number of bills introduced, the number of bills passed, and the intensity of the effort behind it, I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Many of these kinds of efforts were blocked under the Voting Rights Act — and since the Supreme Court gutted it in 2013, voter suppression has gotten worse. But this is by far the worst it’s been in the past decade. It’s not like this is the first time there have been efforts to suppress the vote, but we are seeing a greater number of efforts at suppression, more restrictive bills than before, and more of an intensity within the Republican party to pass them.

LS: What are some illustrative examples of the bills at play here? I know there’s one in Arizona (which hasn’t passed) that would essentially make it possible for the legislature to nullify the secretary of state’s certification of election results by a simple majority vote. Are there other particularly egregious examples of restrictive or draconian laws that come to mind?

AB: Well, there are laws that have actually passed, or that are close to passing, that I find very disturbing. In Georgia, they stripped the secretary of state as a voting member on the board of elections and basically gave the gerrymandered legislature much more control over the state election board — giving that board the power to take over up to four county boards of elections. That kind of stuff is very disturbing when you think about the fact that Donald Trump tried to overturn the election and that the exact mechanisms he tried to use involved going through county canvassing boards, going through state election boards, and pressuring the secretary of state. So they’re pursuing all the methods that Trump tried to use. There’s a Texas bill making it easier for courts to try to throw out votes, to try to overturn an election which, again, is exactly the kind of thing that Trump wanted to do.

So I’m concerned about all of the bills that will make it harder to vote: whether it’s making it harder to get a mail ballot, making it harder to return a mail ballot, making it harder for your ballot to be counted, the kind of intimidation work that poll watchers could do, adding new ID requirements that weren’t there before, or cutting back on early voting and the amount of time that people have to vote. I’m concerned about all of those policies, which are in some ways a continuation of what we’ve been seeing for the past decade. What I’m really, really concerned about, though, is that we’re actually making it easier to overturn an election. Because that’s the fail-safe if voter suppression doesn’t work: you say, “Okay, well, we didn’t achieve all of our ends to suppress the vote. So we’ll just throw out votes altogether or decertify the election,” then just start breaking one democratic norm after another. That’s what didn’t happen in 2020 that I’m very concerned could happen in 2024.

LS: How concerted would you say the effort is? To what extent are these state-level Republican parties acting in concert? And to what extent is this a national strategy that we’re seeing play out?

AB: It’s an incredibly concerted effort to try and make it harder to vote. First off, it starts with the leader of the Republican Party. He’s setting the tone in terms of the policies and outcome that he wants to see. But we also recently broke a story about this big dark money group, Heritage Action for America (the sister organization of the Heritage Foundation) bragging to donors that they’re writing what they call “model legislation” restricting voting rights. They said very clearly that they either draft the bills for them [state-level Republicans] or they have what they called their “sentinel” give them to legislators. So it has what they called a “grassroots from the bottom up” vibe, or they’re advising them on the kinds of policies they want to see.

They’re doing this in all of these key battleground states, and they’re putting real money behind it. They’re spending $24 million over two years on this campaign, while dark money groups overall are spending $42 million on their voter suppression campaigns. The Republican National Committee and state-level Republicans all have so-called “election integrity” committees, so this is way more coordinated than it was in the past. In short, the voter suppression efforts that we’re seeing right now are much more coordinated than they were a decade ago, with a lot more money and the top leadership of the Republican Party behind it.

“I would characterize it as the greatest assault on voting rights since the end of Reconstruction.”

Just this week, the Pennsylvania Republicans went to Arizona to observe their audit. This is why there was such a big battle over voting rights in Georgia, because the Georgia bill was basically going to be the template for what other states would do. And there have been a lot of similar provisions passed in different places. Any time you have so many bills passed in such a short period of time that are all quite similar, someone’s gotta be coordinating it. And, to me, the Heritage video that we uncovered shows that they are, if not the main group, one of the key groups coordinating it.

LS: This week, you published a long essay on the deep history of voter suppression in places like Georgia — which goes all the way back to the years immediately after the Union victory in the Civil War. I think many people are at least somewhat aware of the parallels between what Southern Democrats did in the late nineteenth century and what Republicans are doing today, but they may not realize how concrete and literal those parallels actually are. Can you talk about the very direct linkages between earlier efforts at disenfranchising black voters and what’s happening right now?

AB: There’s both a pattern that’s familiar and specific parallels. First the pattern: the familiar pattern is that you had the enfranchisement of new voters during Reconstruction. It was black voters who turned out in record numbers and were elected. Then you had efforts at violence, fraud, and intimidation to try to suppress black votes. That worked for a time, but when black voters were disenfranchised it was really through legal means like literacy tests, poll taxes, and things like that, which happened when states changed their constitutions a while after the end of Reconstruction. Reconstruction is often thought to have ended in 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes pulled federal troops out of the South, but blacks still voted in a bunch of states in the South through that period. It wasn’t until Mississippi adopted its constitution to disenfranchise black voters in 1890 that Southern states tried to figure out a way to completely disenfranchise them through what were thought of as “legal” means.

That same kind of process is playing out today: you had the enfranchisement of new groups, manifested in higher turnout in 2020, and you had an attempt to try to overturn the election through extralegal means, including an insurrection. Then, in 2021, you have the so-called legal means to try to disenfranchise people through changes to election law. Those are the big-picture similarities.

The more specific similarities are, number one, the language: Jim Crow never actually said “we want to disenfranchise black voters.” It was technically race neutral, it’s just that everyone knew who the target was. The same thing is happening today. Georgia Republicans aren’t saying “we want to disenfranchise black voters,” but everyone knows that’s their target, because that’s the strongest constituency of the Democratic Party. Number two, even back then you had Southern white Democrats in Mississippi — because remember that Democrats were the segregationist party back then and Republicans were the party of civil rights, and that’s flipped — who were arguing that they were expanding voting rights. They either argued they were expanding voting rights or they argued they were protecting the sanctity or purity of the ballot. That same language is being used by Republicans today.

The last thing is that in the nineteenth century they also made it easier to overturn elections by taking away power from bipartisan election officials, and either gave it to partisan election officials or took power from voters to appoint their election officials. That kind of pattern is playing out in states like Georgia and Texas today. So there are big picture parallels, but also a lot of specific similarities in terms of the nature of the laws themselves.

LS: Legislation intended to curtail the current Republican offensive against voting rights is currently sitting before Congress in the form of H.R. 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Both face obstruction from the filibuster and from Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

I don’t want to ask you to speculate on what the exact outcome will be here, but let’s assume for a second that the filibuster remains in place: What’s the worst-case scenario if these two bills, and particularly H.R. 1, aren’t passed? What do subsequent elections from the 2022 midterms on look like if the current state-level offensive against voting rights succeeds in its main ambitions?

AB: If the federal legislation fails, it’s going to embolden Republicans to pass more sweeping voter suppression laws without fear of any kind of consequence. That could lead to reduced Democratic turnout and higher levels of voter suppression, which could enable Republicans to take back power in Congress and retain power at the state level in 2022 and 2024. That could allow them to not certify elections in 2022 and 2024 so that even if Democrats are able to overcome the suppression measures, Republicans will still control the outcome of the elections and essentially nullify the will of the voters. That’s the worst-case scenario here. Basically, we’ll be in a situation where an election is only viewed as legitimate if Republicans win, and there’s no way that you could describe that as a democracy — where only one side is acknowledged as being able to fairly win an election.

That just goes against all the tenets of what it means to be a democracy. That’s the worst-case outcome, and I see it as a very likely outcome — especially if Democrats fail to do anything. That’s another parallel that I see with Reconstruction: back then, Southern Democrats were passing all of these voter suppression laws and the only thing they were concerned about was what Congress might do, and when Congress didn’t pass federal legislation to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment and protect voting rights, Southern states just felt completely emboldened to do whatever they wanted.

To some extent, that’s the same way Republicans feel right now. I don’t think they fear the voters because they feel like they’re manipulating them — they are not worried about a voter backlash. They also don’t fear the courts, because those are now so dominated by Trump appointees. The only thing they fear is what Democrats can do in Congress, and if the Democrats don’t do anything, it’s very unlikely they’re going to retain both houses of Congress in 2022.

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Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

Joe Manchin Opposes For the People Act in Blow to Democrats' Voting Rights Push
Amanda Holpuch, Guardian UK
Holpuch writes: "In a huge blow to Democrats' hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party's flagship bill - because of Republican opposition to it."

The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.

Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.

It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.

In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”

Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.

Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.

Manchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.

Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.

Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.

“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”

In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”

Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.

On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.

“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.

“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”

Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.

Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”

“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”

With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.

On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.

Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.

Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”

Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.

“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.”

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Police stand guard after protesters set fire to dumpsters after a vigil for Winston Boogie Smith Jr. early on Saturday. (photo: Christian Monterrosa/AP)

Investigators Say There's No Video Evidence of What Led to Shooting of Black Man in Minneapolis
Zack Linly, The Root
Linly writes: "Until every law enforcement agency in America learns that transparency is key in regards to police-involved deaths of Black people, they can expect to see civil unrest. Law enforcement in America has earned that distrust."

f George Floyd’s murder wasn’t recorded by a bystander and shown to the world, there is little doubt that Derek Chauvin would be free today and that he and the other three officers charged in Floyd’s death would still be policing the streets of Minneapolis. It’s also a fact that sometimes cops lie in their reports with the expectation that they will be taken at face value by virtue of them being cops.

So it’s no surprise that members of the Minneapolis community and the family of 32-year-old Winston Boogie Smith Jr.—a Black man who was fatally shot in the city Thursday by members of a U.S. Marshals Service task force—aren’t buying the authorities’ narrative that it was a clean shoot citing the fact that the marshals weren’t wearing body cameras and investigators said there is no video evidence available to determine what led up to the shooting. Not only were the task force members not wearing body-cams, but they aren’t allowed to wear them.

The Washington Post reports that U.S. Marshals and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which is investigating the shooting, said that Smith had a warrant for a felony firearms violation. The task force aptly known as the North Star Fugitive Task Force (*face-palm* Jesus, Mary and slave patrols) said that Smith didn’t comply with their orders and that he “produced a handgun resulting in task force members firing upon the subject.”

The BCA said in a statement that there was evidence that indicated that Smith fired a gun from inside his car, so it’s entirely plausible that this was a justified shoot. The problem is, we may never know definitively how things unfolded because of another tidbit in the BCA’s report.

“The U.S. Marshal Service currently does not allow the use of body cameras for officers serving on its North Star Fugitive Task Force,” the bureau said. “There is no squad camera footage of the incident.”

Listen: I’ve never had a job in law enforcement, so I’m clearly not an authority on the matter, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering why the hell any law enforcement department would disallow officers to wear a body-cam unless they know damn well how much easier it is to cover one’s ass when a lack of video evidence makes taking artistic liberty in an official report more convenient.

I’m not even saying the U.S. Marshalls are lying—I’m saying there are multiple sides to every story, that one person is no longer alive to give his side and that video footage would have been able to provide more reliable truth than anyone involved could provide without said footage.

Suffice it to say, the community and family members of Smith aren’t going along with it.

From the Post:

His family criticized law enforcers’ depiction of Smith and said that while he was trying to “turn over a new leaf,” police were “using his past to tarnish his character.”

“They’re using his past to diminish that what he was trying to do in the present,” Smith’s sister Tiesha Floyd said during a Friday news conference.

Family members and friends said Smith was a father of three who enjoyed music and writing comedy sketches. Shelly Hopkins, who was in a longtime relationship with Smith, described him to the Associated Press as a spiritual man who cared most of all about making people happy and being there for his children. Hopkins told the news outlet that Smith had legal troubles but that police “tried to make a case against him that didn’t exist.”

Toshira Garraway, a Minneapolis community activist and founder of Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, said during the Friday news conference that she does not believe the BCA’s explanation.

“We no longer have faith in just believing the narratives that the police give us. They have forfeited their right to just tell us a story,” Garraway said. “We need facts, and the fact is any video footage. And we refuse to believe that no one has any video footage after all those departments showed up yesterday.”

According to the Star Tribune, protests and vigils on behalf of Smith continued through Friday and leading into Saturday morning. In some instances, things grew contentious between protesters and police.

From the Tribune:

Activists blocked traffic at busy Lake Street and Hennepin Avenue during the Friday evening rush hour. Minneapolis police officers on bikes moved in to try to take control of the busy intersection, but protesters later blocked Lake Street again with a makeshift barricade of motorcycles, bike racks and dumpsters. There were some standoffs between protesters and officers throughout the night.

Until every law enforcement agency in America learns that transparency is key in regards to police-involved deaths of Black people, they can expect to see civil unrest. Law enforcement in America has earned that distrust.

If the people aren’t satisfied that justice is being done then “no justice, no peace” often becomes the default, just as law enforcement tends to consider the reports of officers to be the defacto “truth.”

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A customer looks at a custom made AR-15 style rifle. (photo: Getty Images)

Judge Who Nixed California Assault Weapons Ban Is a Second Amendment Champion
Blake Montgomery, The Daily Beast
Montgomery writes: "Roger Benitez likened an AR-15 to a Swiss Army Knife, and he has ruled in favor of an expansive Second Amendment time and time again."
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A mother holds her child as they surrender to U.S. Border Patrol agents. (photo: David J. Phillip/AP)

Put Migrant Protections at Heart of US Policy, Rights Groups Urge
Sandra Cuffe, Al Jazeera
Cuffe writes: "The Biden administration's focus so far has been on addressing the 'root causes' of migration from Central America, but migration advocates say prioritizing the use of security forces and expulsions to block asylum seekers means that years of failed US policies are continuing."

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The coronavirus's second wave in India has been accompanied by packed hospital wards and oxygen shortages. (photo: Parveen Kumar/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)

Narendra Modi Turned COVID-19 Into a Catastrophe for India
Somdeep Sen, Jacobin
Sen writes: "India's experience of COVID-19 has gone from crisis to catastrophe in recent months. Responsibility for the disaster lies squarely with Narendra Modi's right-wing government, which has consistently prioritized its own political interests over public health."
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A gray wolf. (photo: National Geographic)

Trump Canceled Endangered Species Protections. Biden Wants to Bring Them Back
Peter Wade, Rolling Stone

The last administration revoked or downgraded protections for gray wolves, the American burying beetle, the northern spotted owl and other protected species

he Biden administration announced Friday it is reviewing or ending policies put in place by the Trump administration that weakened protections for endangered or threatened species.

The move comes from an executive order Biden issued instructing all federal agencies to examine Trump administration actions that may conflict with Biden-Harris administration objectives, including climate change policies.

Fish and Wildlife Service Principal Deputy Director Martha Williams said in a statement that the administration intends to work with “diverse federal, Tribal, state and industry partners to not only protect and recover America’s imperiled wildlife but to ensure cornerstone laws like the Endangered Species Act are helping us meet 21st-century challenges.”

As part of these actions, the administration will reinstate a “blanket rule” that automatically extends endangered species protections to species designated as threatened. The agencies will also reinstate an Obama rule that said decisions to protect species and designate areas as a critical habitat should not factor in “possible economic or other impacts.” Trump had reversed that rule, allowing wildlife officials to consider potential economic costs of conservation when selecting which species should be designated as endangered.

Trump also revoked or downgraded protections for gray wolves, the American burying beetle, the northern spotted owl and other protected species, often in service of industries that threaten their habitats. At the end of his term, the Trump administration shrunk the northern spotted owl’s habitat by 3.5 million acres, but Biden’s Interior Department prevented that from going into effect and is reconsidering the plan. Biden has also already made moves to rescind a Trump-era rule that weakened the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which penalizes businesses and people who kill migratory birds, including accidentally.

Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization that sued the Trump administration when it weakened the Endangered Species Act, praised the administration’s decision but urged the president to move quickly. But many of these actions may take a while to implement, just as it took Trump years to undo some Obama-era protections.

“We are currently in the midst of an unprecedented global extinction crisis, and endangered species have no time to waste,” Earthjustice said in a statement. “We are grateful the Biden administration is moving to protect the most imperiled species by reversing the Trump-era rules, but time is of the essence. Each day that goes by is another day that puts our imperiled species and their habitats in danger.”

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WE ARE ASKING FOR A 'FAIR SHAKE' ON DONATIONS. We never believed that all the readers would donate all the time, nor do we expect it. We absolutely understand that extenuating circumstances happen. But less than 1% of the subscribers donating? That's not right or fair. We have no choice but to stand up and protest that. RSN was in fact built entirely with public funding. It's worth preserving. Give us a hand once in a while. / Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News

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RSN: Marc Ash | Welcome to Progressivism Joe, Get Ready to Fight

Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
Ash writes: "The cautionary mantra by progressives as your campaign for the presidency unfolded was, 'He's no Progressive.' A justifiable conclusion based on the totality of your body of work in public service. Clearly, now you've changed."

elcome to Progressivism Joe, Get Ready to Fight

The cautionary mantra by progressives as your campaign for the presidency unfolded was, “He’s no Progressive.” A justifiable conclusion based on the totality of your body of work in public service.

Clearly, now you’ve changed. Life forces us to pay a price for being alive and for you the price has been high. You have converted your pain into compassion for others, which was the best you could have done. You can’t be defined as a progressive yet, but you are really trying, and that counts for a lot.

The first thing you need to know about progressive activism is that it’s a thankless job. You don’t get rich, you rarely get a pat on the back, and the road goes up the wrong side of the mountain. But there’s never any doubt that you’re going in the right direction, and you always know it’s worth it to try.

Some Advice

Be uncompromising. Men and women who accomplish great things normally are. Sticking to your guns inspires dedicated support, and you’ll need plenty of that.

Things don’t change for the better because they should. Good changes come about as a result of determination and perseverance with a little luck thrown in. Stick with it and stay on it, always.

Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” You know Mitch McConnell well. When he says, “100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” you can be certain that he means it. All retroactive posturing aside. The bipartisan thing is a bluff. At some point, you’re going to have to call it. Don’t wait too long.

Of Broken Eggs and Omelets

The agenda you have articulated has won you a surprising degree of public support across a wide political spectrum. That’s the most valuable political currency you can have. Let ‘er rip. Don’t hold back waiting for a cordial invitation from your detractors. It’s not coming.

2022 is coming. The conventional political wisdom is that “getting stuff done” leads to good outcomes in national elections. Perhaps. But giving the voters an agenda and a vision they can embrace with their hearts and minds matters a great deal too. Stay true to your vision. Eggs may get broken, but omelets will get made.

Stay the course. Kick ass. You’ll win.

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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.

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Voters at a polling precinct. (photo: Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

The Republicans' Wild Assault on Voting Rights in Texas and Arizona
Sue Halpern, The New Yorker
Halpern writes: "What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from the polls has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself."

 few hours after Michael Flynn, the retired three-star general and former national-security adviser and convicted felon, told a group of QAnon conspiracists who met in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend that the Biden Administration should be overthrown by force, Democratic legislators in the Texas statehouse, two hundred miles away in Austin, did something remarkable: they stopped their Republican colleagues from passing one of the most restrictive voting bills in the country. Flynn’s pronouncement and the Republicans’ efforts rely on repeating the same untruth: that the Presidency was stolen from Donald Trump by a cabal of Democrats, election officials, and poll workers who perpetrated election fraud. No matter that this claim has been litigated, relitigated, and debunked. Based on data collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the incidence of voter fraud in the two decades before last year’s election was about 0.00006 per cent of total ballots cast. It was negligible in 2020, too, as Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, acknowledged at the time.

Senate Bill 7 was stymied at the last minute, when Democrats in the Texas House walked out, depriving Republicans of a quorum. The legislation is full of what are becoming standard suppression tactics—most of which burden people of color, who in 2020 overwhelmingly voted Democratic—and includes measures that would, for example, allow a judge to overturn an election result simply if a challenger claimed, without any proof, that fraudulent votes changed the outcome. Sarah Labowitz, of the A.C.L.U. of Texas, called the bill “ruthless.” Texas was already the most difficult state in which to cast a ballot, according to a recent study by Northern Illinois University. In 2020, voter turnout there was among the lowest in the nation. Even so, with nonwhites making up more than sixty per cent of the population under twenty, Texas is on its way to becoming a swing state. S.B. 7 is intended to insure that it doesn’t. Governor Greg Abbott has promised to call a special session of the legislature to reintroduce it.

Since January, Republican lawmakers in forty-eight states have introduced nearly four hundred restrictive voting bills. What distinguishes these efforts is that they target not only voters but also poll workers and election officials. The Texas bill makes it a criminal offense for an election official to obstruct the view of poll watchers, who are typically partisan volunteers, and grants those observers the right to record videos of voters at polling places. In Iowa, officials could be fined ten thousand dollars for “technical infractions,” such as failing to sufficiently purge voters from the rolls. In Florida, workers who leave drop boxes unattended, however briefly, can be fined twenty-five thousand dollars. In Georgia, poll watchers can challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of voters.

Even before the pandemic, sixty-five per cent of jurisdictions in the country were having trouble attracting poll workers. The threat of sizable fines and criminal prosecution will only make that task harder, and that’s clearly the point. Polls can’t operate without poll workers. Voters can’t vote if there are no polling places, or if they can’t stand in hours-long lines at the sites that are open—not to mention if other means of casting a ballot, such as by mail, have been outlawed.

What began as thinly veiled attempts to keep Democrats from voting has become a movement to undermine confidence in our democracy itself. How else to understand the “recount” under way in Maricopa County, Arizona (which gave Joe Biden the state), six months after the election was certified? Despite an audit in February that showed no malfeasance, Republicans in the Arizona Senate took possession of the county’s more than two million ballots and turned them over to a private Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, which has no election-audit experience. The firm’s C.E.O. had reportedly tweeted that he was “tired of hearing people say there was no fraud.” It’s unclear who is paying for the recount, which was supposed to have concluded last month. According to the Arizona Republic, recruiters for the project were “reaching out to traditionally conservative groups.” At least one of the recounters was at the January 6th Stop the Steal rally outside the U.S. Capitol. Some have been examining ballots for bamboo fibres, which would purportedly prove that counterfeit ballots for Biden were sent from South Korea. The official chain of custody has been broken for the voting machines, too, which could enable actual fraud, and may force the county to replace them.

It’s easy to joke about conspiracy hunters searching for bits of bamboo. But the fact is that more than half of Republicans still believe that Trump won, and a quarter of all Americans think that the election was rigged. Republicans in at least four other states—New Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—are now considering recounts. Soon, Trump will begin to hold rallies again and will use them to amplify his Big Lie lie; he has reportedly suggested that he could be back in the White House in August, after the recounts are completed. The real, and imminent, danger is that all the noise will make it easier for a cohort of Americans to welcome the dissolution of the political system, which appears to be the ultimate goal of the current Republican efforts.

Last Tuesday, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, Biden vowed to “fight like heck” to preserve voting rights, and he deputized Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the charge. Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he would bring the For the People Act to a vote this month. Among other provisions, the act mandates automatic voter registration, prohibits voter intimidation, and reduces the influence of dark money in elections. If it became law, and survived the inevitable legal challenges, it could stop much of the Republican pillage, and perhaps prove the most pivotal piece of legislation in a generation.

Nearly seventy per cent of Americans favor measures in the bill, but it’s unlikely to gain the support of Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat, let alone of enough Republicans to clear the sixty-vote hurdle imposed by the filibuster. So far, to Biden’s evident annoyance, Manchin and another Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, oppose eliminating the filibuster. It’s up to Democratic leaders to impress upon their colleagues that their legacies, and that of their party, are now entwined with the survival of American democracy.

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A meeting of finance ministers from across the G7 nations ahead of the G7 leaders' summit, at Lancaster House in London, Britain June 4, 2021. (photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire/Pool/Reuters)

G7 Reaches "Historic Agreement" on Global Tax Reform
Oriana Gonzalez, Axios
Gonzalez writes: 

he Group of Seven nations on Saturday reached a historic deal to reform the global tax system, agreeing that corporations around the world should pay at least a 15% tax on earnings.

The state of play: The global tax minimum was proposed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month, per CNN. The new reforms will affect the world's largest firms with profit margins of at least 10%, U.K. Finance Minister Rishi Sunak explained.

Get market news worthy of your time with Axios Markets. Subscribe for free.

• The deal also ends national digital service taxes, which had the support of several European countries, but which U.S. officials said would unfairly target American technology giants, per Reuters.
  


• Yellen said that both Amazon and Facebook will be covered under the arrangement: "It will include large profitable firms and those firms, I believe, will qualify by almost any definition."
  


• G7 finance ministers also agreed to tackle environmental crime "with a new task force on nature-related financial disclosures to mirror the work of the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures," Bloomberg writes.
  

What they're saying: "G7 finance ministers today, after years of discussions, have reached a historic agreement to reform the global tax system, to make it fit for the global digital age — and crucially to make sure that it’s fair so that the right companies pay the right tax in the right places," Sunak said.

• "That global minimum tax would end the race-to-the-bottom in corporate taxation, and ensure fairness for the middle class and working people in the U.S. and around the world," Yellen said.

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People wait in line to receive food at a food bank in Brooklyn, New York. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A Lifeline for the Unemployed Is About to End in Half of US. Here's What's at Stake
Scott Horsley, NPR
Horsley writes: "The United States is about to embark on a big national experiment with 4 million unemployed workers serving as guinea pigs. And it all centers on $300 a week."

The payment was intended as a lifeline for millions of Americans who lost their jobs during the pandemic: an extra $300 a week on top of regular unemployment benefits.

But now 25 Republican governors say the payments must end, with four states acting as early as this week. With vaccines rolling out and the economy reopening fast, they believe the payments are discouraging people from looking for work, leaving businesses begging and job openings unfilled.

Half the states — all led by Republicans — are cutting off enhanced unemployment benefits in the coming weeks in hopes of pushing people back to work. The other 25 states will keep paying out the enhanced benefits through early September as Congress intended.

The actions are raising the ire of many Democratic lawmakers. They believe there's no concrete evidence to suggest the enhanced benefits are preventing people from returning to work.

We'll soon find out more.

Unemployed workers in Mississippi will be among the first to lose benefits — later this week. That's bad news for people like Nicole Jones.

The Jackson, Miss., resident lost her job at a Head Start center when the pandemic struck last year. Since then, the extra $300 payments have helped keep her family afloat.

"I have a mortgage. I have a car note. I have light bill, gas bill, water bill, internet bill," Jones says. "I think it's really unfair that they are taking that away from households that are not able to get back to work right now."

Jones is wary of going back to Head Start and possibly catching the coronavirus and passing it on to her children. Mississippi has the nation's lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate.

"They're not looking at the fact that a lot of people are not able to go back to work because of health issues," Jones says.

She has so far declined to be vaccinated herself but said she might get the shot by the end of this year.

At 6.2% in April, Mississippi's unemployment rate is higher than the national average. But as far as Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is concerned, the pandemic is over, and it's time to put people back to work.

"If you go around anywhere in our state and you talk to small-business owners, you talk to large-business owners, you talk to employees, you talk to consumers — what you hear repeatedly is that it's very difficult to find people to work," Reeves told reporters last month.

Alaska, Iowa and Missouri will also end the benefits this week with other states to follow through mid-July.

Many employers from restaurants to factories say that enhanced unemployment benefits have made it harder for them to find workers, although restaurants added another 186,000 workers in May and factories added 23,000.

Aleetha Dixon, who lost her job working at trade shows last year and is caring for a disabled son, said the problem is not that the benefits are too high, but that competing wages are too low.

"I've never been one that's run away from work," said Dixon, who lives in Dallas. "They need to start discussing raising the minimum wage."

Unemployment benefits have offered a lifeline, Dixon said, only to have Texas officials snatch it away.

"We're talking about people who don't have to worry about their lights getting cut off," she said of those who decided to end the benefits. "They don't have to worry about being put out of their home because they can't pay rent. They don't have to worry about is their child going to be able to eat a full meal the next day."

Economists are divided over how the premature end to benefits might affect hiring in the months to come. The job search website Indeed did see an increase in traffic from states that announced an early cut to benefits, but it was modest — about 5% — and faded quickly.

It's also unclear what kind of impact on consumer spending the end of the $300 a week payment will have. Those who lose the enhanced benefit will have less to spend in their communities, though that could be made up if they rejoin the workforce.

In Arizona, the state government is preserving some enhanced benefits for unemployed residents through early September but plans to stop offering the extra $300 a week. That will leave Amy Cabrera with just $214 a week to live on.

"I couldn't even tell you what else I could possibly cut out," said Cabrera, who lives outside Phoenix. "I mean, I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. I actually took on a roommate, and I'm 46 years old. That's not an easy task to bring on some stranger into your house when you're used to living the way you live."

Cabrera, who used to work as an auditor for a meeting and travel company, says while fast food and convenience store jobs are abundant, she's hoping to find something in an office.

So far, she's had only one interview. At 6.7% in April, Arizona's unemployment rate is well above the national average.

"I think the only thing that really aggravates me is people who think we're living high on the hog collecting government funding and I'm out getting my nails done and traveling the world or something," Cabrera said. "Trust me, I would rather have my job back and living back the way I was supposed to be or the way I was."

Cabrera will now be among the more than 4 million workers expected to have their benefits cut prematurely this summer. And like them, she will soon face a decision on what to do.

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Vic Stemberger, whose father's imprisonment in Spain has has shined a discomfiting light on a little-known operation run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, holds a photo of his parents at his family's home in Centreville, Va., May 25, 2021. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/NYT)

A Little-Known ICE Program Was Devised to Capture Drug Lords. Did It Snare Duped Seniors Instead?
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times
Kanno-Youngs writes: "Operation Cocoon aimed to disrupt international drug trafficking rings, but critics say it has left unwitting elderly 'mules' in foreign prisons."

fter two decades in the military, after earning two master’s degrees and navigating a successful career as a corporate coach, Victor Stemberger seemed ready for a peaceful retirement. But he had a new venture in the works.

Mr. Stemberger, of Virginia, had a $10 million inheritance waiting for him, according to men claiming to be affiliated with the Nigerian Ministry of Finance. Through a dizzying web of more than 160 emails over the course of a year, Mr. Stemberger, then 76, somehow grew convinced.

The final step to collect his millions was a good-will gesture: He needed to embark on a whirlwind tour to several countries, stopping first in São Paulo, Brazil, to pick up a small package of gifts for government officials.

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Police detain a demonstrator during a protest in Bogota, Colombia. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)

Colombia: President Duque Disguises State Terrorism With Police Reform
teleSUR
Excerpt: "After one month of ignoring police brutality reports, Colombia's President Ivan Duque on Sunday announced that his country will undergo a police reform."

Colombia's president vowed to strengthen the education and training of ESMAD agents in the use of force, human rights, and police procedures.

fter one month of ignoring police brutality reports, Colombia's President Ivan Duque on Sunday announced that his country will undergo a police reform to put an end to human rights violations.

"We will modernize the Defense Ministry and transform the Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD) and the National Police," Duque said during a police officer promotion ceremony in Bogota.

The Duque administration hopes to achieve police excellence by drafting a new "Disciplinary Statute", restructuring the institution's General Inspectorate, and creating a new system for receiving complaints.

He also promised to strengthen the education and training of ESMAD agents in the use of force, human rights, citizen attention, and police procedures.

"We will apply protocols for the legitimate use of force and we will draft a bill for the use and trade of non-lethal weapons in Colombia," Duque announced to contain the protests that broke out against his mandate on April 28.

Finally, police officers' uniforms will no longer be green but blue, and the Defense Ministry will be renamed the National Defense and Citizen Security Ministry.

Duque made this announcement amid escalating police brutality in the country, where at least 47 people died at the hands of an officer from April 28 to May 31.

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'Forests serve many purposes.' (image: Malte Mueller/Getty Images)

The Ever-Clearer Link Between Deforestation and Public Health
Sarah Sax, YES! Magazine
Sax writes: "Efforts to decolonize forest protection have been stalling for years. COVID-19 might give the movement the urgency it needs."

n November 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was heading toward a deadly third wave in the U.S., the environmental organization Mighty Earth launched a new campaign against major soy- and cattle-traders in the Amazon, calling for them to halt deforestation and protect tropical forests. But this campaign didn’t use the usual picture the world has come to associate with deforestation: a pristine tropical forest canopy on one side and patch of denuded land or smoldering trees on the other. Instead, the campaign contrasted the image of a burning forest with another the world has since become intimately familiar with: a man wearing a protective gown and blue surgical mask. Their message? Protect forests to prevent pandemics.

COVID-19 has brought the potential risks associated with rampant deforestation quite literally to our doorsteps. Although scientists are still figuring out exactly how COVID-19 emerged, an abundance of evidence shows that land-use change, especially deforestation in tropical regions, is the key driver increasing the transmission of deadly pathogens from animals to humans. More and more environmental organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are framing the need to halt deforestation through the lens of public health. It’s a shift that risk psychologists say could make the risks associated with rampant deforestation much more personal, and in the long run, could potentially help pass policies to limit deforestation globally.

“People need to feel like this affects their own lives to care about it,” says Colin Carlson, a global change biologist who studies emerging diseases at the Center for Global Health Science & Security at Georgetown University. Humans have experienced a host of zoonotic outbreaks connected to deforestation and habitat loss, including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and Zika virus, but, Carlson says, “nothing has brought the connections between environmental and human health to the front of mind like COVID-19 has.”

Forests for Health

Forests serve many purposes: They store carbon, regulate weather, hold more biodiversity than any other land-based ecosystem, and provide shelter and food to hundreds of millions of people. But they are being chopped down at an alarming rate—a soccer field worth of primary rainforest every 6 seconds. Demand for forest products, especially from places like China, the EU, and North America, is turning forests into everything from toilet paper to energy, including wood pellets to meet “renewable energy” requirements in Europe and charcoal for cooking in sub-Saharan Africa. But the biggest threat to forests comes from food production, either directly, by cutting down trees to make room for cattle, or indirectly, by clearing land to grow soy to feed livestock.

For decades, environmentalists have been trying to conserve forests in a few ways: by touting their importance as “the lungs of the world;” by trying to quantify the carbon in them to monetize their preservation; and by showing us pictures of orangutans losing their homes because of our desire for Nutella. And while the past decade has seen slightly less forest loss, deforestation is still rapidly expanding around the world, and very few of the commitments corporations and governments have made to halt deforestation are on target.

One reason so many of these campaigns may not have succeeded is that they don’t fulfill any characteristics that make people generally feel like an activity is risky, according to Wändi Bruine de Bruin, provost professor of public policy, psychology, and behavioral science at the University of Southern California, who studies how people perceive risk.

People’s sense of risk is heightened when something is happening to them individually, “here, now, and without uncertainty,” she says. This has historically been one reason it has been hard to convey the risk of other threats like climate change to the public. “In the past, climate change was often perceived by non-experts as something that would happen in the future, with uncertainty, and to other people,” Bruine de Bruin says. “Those three things are associated with just not being very worried about it. But it’s changing because a majority of people in most countries are now seeing that climate change is affecting them now, and where they live.”

Decolonizing Forest Management

Once associated with melting ice sheets and polar bears, today’s iconic images of climate change are more likely to be photos of people rowing boats in Houston after Hurricane Harvey and people’s homes in California burned to the ground by wildfires. That shift in public perception has also been mirrored by another shift; whereas decades ago climate policy was relegated to the sidelines, it has now become a central policy point.

But “deforestation is a couple of decades behind, in terms of actually being perceived as a risk to my well-being here,” says Rachael Garrett, an environmental systems scientist who studies tropical deforestation and conservation policy at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Instead, the risks of deforestation are talked about in even more abstract ways, such as the loss of carbon or biodiversity.

Ignoring the connection between humans and forests is part of the legacy of colonialism that depicted forests as wild expanses of terra incognita, devoid of people and imagined as empty landscapes. For example, when 16^th century European cartographers sent maps of the Amazon back to Europe, they failed to mark any human settlements on the maps, despite noting in their own travel diaries the abundance of communities and peoples they encountered there.

The continued erasure of Indigenous and traditional peoples from such landscapes has led to some “very alarming narratives around tree planting, which is very popular right now,” Garrett says. “I mean, talk about colonial. It’s like, ‘Here’s some money in the Global North. Let’s plant some trees in the Global South. Who cares how people are using the land right now?’ ”

Garrett is one of a growing number of scientists calling for greater inclusion and attention to the Indigenous and local communities who live in and manage forests, in no small part because they do it much better job of it than anybody else, as study after study shows.

Now COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the potential risks associated with unchecked deforestation. About three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as one of the world’s biggest reservoirs of biodiversity, tropical forests are major potential hotspots for such pathogens. One in every three outbreaks of new and emerging diseases, such as the Nipah virus, Zika, and Ebola, are linked to deforestation.

For policy aimed at halting deforestation, the COVID-19 pandemic could give policy-in-the-making the urgency it needs.

“It could be very relevant for the ongoing discussions on what import countries do,” Garrett says, referring to the current EU and UK attempts to pass policies regulating “imported” deforestation, which is defined as products linked to deforestation and destruction of natural habitats in other countries. In 2021, a British supermarket chain announced it will stock the first mass market soy-free chicken as part of the supermarket’s plans to eliminate deforestation from its supply chains. (Soy is one of the biggest drivers of tropical deforestation). In the U.S., both New York and California have introduced legislation that would close loopholes on imported deforestation.

Governance Failures

The movement could get an even bigger boost if governments start to connect pandemics, deforestation, and national security.

“It was pretty pivotal when the U.S. military acknowledged the national security risks of climate change,” Garrett says. “I think COVID-19 gives that sort of opportunity as well—deforestation in a distant region can still be a national security risk independently, not just through climate change, but directly through disease transmission and pandemics. I think that is a very potentially powerful message.”

But some scientists are also wary of overemphasizing the role of deforestation in creating pandemics without also recognizing the colossal failures of the global and national health systems that allowed for a disease spillover to become a global pandemic in the first place. “Deforestation definitely means more pandemics,” Carlson says. “Also, governance failures mean more pandemics. And in this case, they caused COVID-19 much more tangibly than deforestation or climate change or anything else did.”

Instead, Carlson hopes that COVID-19 might shift our view of deforestation not just by making us aware of the connection between deforestation and emerging diseases, but also by shoring up the connection among forest health, human health, and equity. The idea is being taken up by emerging paradigms such as planetary health. “If we don’t get better at stopping outbreaks, if we don’t build better governance systems and better health care systems, yes, there will be more pandemics as we continue to destroy natural lands and destroy forests,” he says. “But all of that assumes that we continue to live in a world that is vulnerable to that, and we could easily not.”

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