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Unless Joe Biden’s new tax plan is enacted — the odds of which is moving from unlikely to likely. I’ll explain in a moment.
Dynastic wealth runs counter to the ideal of America as a meritocracy. It makes a mockery of the notions that people earn what they’re worth in the market, and that economic gains should go to those who deserve them. It puts economic power into the hands of a small number of people who have never worked but whose investment decisions have a significant effect on the nation’s future. And it is antithetical to democracy.
We are well on the way. Already six out of the ten wealthiest Americans alive are heirs to prominent fortunes. The Walmart heirs alone have more wealth than the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. The richest 1 tenth of 1 percent of Americans already owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.
The last time America faced anything comparable occurred at the turn of the last century, in the first Gilded Age. Then, President Teddy Roosevelt warned that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” could destroy American democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was enacted in 1916 and the capital gains tax in 1922.
Since then, both of Roosevelt’s taxes have been eroded by the moneyed interests. As the rich have accumulated more wealth, they have amassed more political power — which they’ve used to reduce their taxes. By now, the estate tax affects only a handful of super-wealthy families that are busily setting up “dynastic trusts” to circumvent what’s left of it. And the capital gains tax has been defanged by what’s known as the “stepped-up-basis-at-death” loophole. More on this in a moment.
Last week Joe Biden unveiled two tax proposals that would revive Teddy Roosevelt’s original vision, and could possibly slow or even reverse America’s march toward oligarchy: (1) a minimum income tax that Biden calls a billionaire tax but would in reality apply to households with a net worth of $100 million or more, and (2) a separate tax at death on gains from appreciated assets, even if the assets are not sold.
The odds are growing that at least one of these proposals will get through the Senate in April or May via “reconciliation” requiring only a bare majority (i.e., all fifty Democratic senators plus the vice president). I’m told Joe Manchin is mostly on board (which means the other Democratic holdout, Kyrsten Sinema, will sign on as well).
Let me go into a bit of detail on each:
(1) The minimum tax is a 20 percent levy on households with a net worth of more than $100 million, affecting the top 0.01 percent of earners. It would apply both to taxable earnings and to unrealized capital gains (the increased value of your assets), and would function as a kind of prepayment (analogous to withholding) of taxes that eventually would be owed upon the sale of appreciated assets or death.
For example, suppose someone named Mark Zuckerberg owns $100 billion of Facebook stock, for which he paid nothing when he founded the company, and has no other taxable income. For the first year under the Biden plan, he’d owe $20 billion in taxes even if he didn’t sell any Facebook shares. The next year, if his stock increased in value, he’d owe another prepayment equal to 20 percent of any increase in value beyond $100 billion. (There are other provisions to prevent the very wealthy from being taxed twice on the same income.)
The Treasury anticipates Biden’s new minimum tax would raise $360 billion in the first 10 years from America’s 20,000 richest households.
(2) Biden’s second proposal would close the “stepped-up-basis-at death” loophole. Under today’s tax code, you pay capital gains taxes on the increased value of assets when you sell them. But if you pass your assets on to your heirs, they can sell them and not pay a penny of capital gains. In other words, you escape capital gains taxes by dying. They escape it by inheriting your wealth. (I remember years ago arguing that this loophole should be closed with then Treasury Secretary Lloyd Benson, who at one point pounded his fist on the table and exclaimed “death is an involuntary conversion!”)
That’s not all. Under current law, if heirs never sell these assets and they continue to gain value (as they almost certainly will), heirs can borrow against them to pay living expenses and then pass them on to their heirs, who won’t pay capital gains taxes either. Put this together with the unprecedented transfer of generational wealth about to occur, from rich boomer to their millennial children, and America’s oligarchy will become thoroughly entrenched in a small group of people who exercise all the power that comes with great wealth but have never worked a day in their lives.
Biden proposes simply to repeal the “stepped-up-basis-at-death” loophole. The value of assets would not be “stepped up” to their market value at the time of death. Their increased value would be subject to capital gains taxes as if they’d been sold before death.
Either of these tax reforms would be significant, and they fit nicely together. But if I were betting, I’d bet on the latter because Second President Manchin has sounded less enthusiastic about the first.
One thing we’ve all learned over the past fourteen months is not to rely on Manchin or on anything he says or commits to, so I’m not holding my breath. But if Manchin gives the green light, and Biden and the Democrats pull this off, it will be an historic rebirth of Teddy Roosevelt’s movement against dynastic wealth — perhaps Biden’s biggest single accomplishment. Taxing big wealth is necessary if we’re ever to get our democracy back and make our economy work for everyone rather than a privileged few.
People shelter underground following explosions in Lviv, western Ukraine, Saturday, March 26, 2022. (photo: Nariman El-Mofty/AP)
The woman told investigators from Human Rights Watch that Russian soldiers entered the village on February 25, and women and children took to a local school for shelter. On March 14, a Russian soldier entered the school, where she and others were hiding in the basement.
The soldier, she said, ordered the woman to follow him to a classroom, where he held a gun to her head and demanded oral sex, before shooting the ceiling twice and raping her.
Later, when she was dressing, the soldier said he was 20-years-old and she reminded him of a girl he went to school with — and told her to go to the basement where her daughter was sheltering to get her things and return to him.
She refused.
"I knew my daughter would cry if she saw me," the woman told Human Rights Watch.
The soldier then cut her neck with a knife and raped her again.
This woman's story is one of several reports of sexual violence in Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine that are starting to pile up as atrocities carried out on the ground come to light.
Dara Cohen, a Harvard professor who researched wartime rape, told Insider that there are numerous factors of this conflict that make it especially ripe for sexual violence.
"We know that the Russian military has been reported in the recent past to use this violence, which I think is one of the strongest indications that they may use it again," Cohen told Insider. "A number of us — even at the very beginning before any reports started to come out — were quite concerned that this was going to be a case that we may see lots of reporting, and I really unfortunately have every expectation that we're gonna be receiving more and more reports."
Cohen, who is the author of "Rape During Civil War," has done extensive fieldwork researching sexual violence during conflicts around the world. She is also one of several researchers who work on an annual dataset that measures reports of conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors.
The data is collected from annual reports from Human Rights Watch, the State Department, and Amnesty International, so reports from the current conflict in Ukraine have not yet been added.
Even if it had, though, the researchers don't count individual victims, perpetrators, or incidents of rape during conflict, as it would be too difficult to quantify acts of gang rape or sexual servitude — and, overall, rape is the most under-reported crime, even in peacetime.
The researchers have, however, been able to use the past data to identify conditions of war where sexual violence is more common and severe — and several of those conditions are present in Ukraine, Cohen said.
Sexual violence as a bonding mechanism
One of the factors that make researchers especially concerned about what's happening in Ukraine is sexual violence being used as a bonding mechanism for soldiers in conflicts where is a lack of cohesion among the fighters — like those where people have been kidnapped or forced to fight in the war, experts told Insider.
In Russia, about 25% of the military is believed to be made up of conscripts — or people drafted to serve.
Conscripts and foreign fighters are on the ground in Ukraine.
Rape — gang rape, in particular — is more likely to occur in these conditions.
"We know that when foreign fighters come to fight in other people's wars, there's an uptick in atrocities in general," Cohen said, noting that recent research shows the same goes for sexual violence in particular.
Austin Doctor is the Director of Counterterrorism Research Initiatives at National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE).
Through his work studying sexual violence among rebel forces he's learned that when foreign fighters are present, acts of sexual violence are more likely to take place.
"Thinking about gang rape, it can act as this sort of perverse means of socialization within combat units," Doctor told Insider. "With the Russian forces is creating these combat units out of individuals that are Russian, that are Chechen, that are Syrian, there's, there's a lack of cohesion or interpersonal connection between those comrades and arms and sexual violence can play a role in building relationships and trust."
Doctor said that when thinking about Chechen and Syrian fighters, it's particularly concerning, because they likely don't have a history of urban combat and having to navigate an unfamiliar environment could enhance the low morale already taking place among pro-Russian troops.
"It's not just the weakened cohesion that can come from forces made up of persons from far flung communities, but it's the low morale that we're seeing in the Russian ranks that can create a perceived need for a sexual violence being perpetrated by these units," Doctor said.
The biggest red flag for Cohen, though, is that Russian-led forces have committed acts of sexual violence in recent invasions, so it only makes sense that they'd do it again.
Since 2016, there have been reports of sexual violence by Russian forces, Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk, as well as Ukrainian forces, Georgetown University researcher Robert Nagel told Insider, of what the data shows.
The highest reported prevalence of sexual violence in Ukraine was by Russian forces in 2017, when it reached "systematic or massive levels," he said.
Chechen and Syrian fighters also have a history of sexual violence in wartime, Doctor said.
"Just simply looking at recent history by these very same armed forces ... we can show that Russian-led forces have used sexual violence in Ukraine in the recent past. And we know that the Russian military was reported to have committed rape in Chechnya for every single year, for seven years in a row at the turn of the century," Cohen told Insider. "So we know that the Russian military in general has been reported to use this violence, which I think is one of the strongest indications that they may be likely to use it again."
Sexual violence is a weapon of war — and it doesn't discriminate
When people think of wartime sexual violence, they may imagine men as the perpetrators and women as the victims, but that's not always the case, Cohen told Insider.
Cohen's research has showed that in cases where there are large number of female fighters, there are reports of women carrying out sexual violence.
While that may not be the case in Ukraine, Cohen said that there are likely to be male victims.
"Our dataset shows, for example, in recent years that in Ukraine, Russian led forces were reported to have committed sexual violence against people who are detained, and many individuals who are detained are men," Cohen told Insider.
Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes. Ukraine's prosecutor general and the international Criminal Court have said they will open investigations into reports of sexual violence.
People fleeing the besieged city of Mariupol in Ukraine on Monday. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Witnesses say Russian officers are subjecting Ukrainian civilians to interrogation and confiscation of personal items before moving them to Russia.
“People need to know the truth, that Ukrainians are being moved to Russia, the country that is occupying us,” a woman hiding in a Mariupol suburb with her family since the beginning of March told The Guardian.
The reports are consistent with claims by the Mariupol City Council that Russians have kidnapped 20,000 Mariupol residents, according to an English translation of a March 29 post on the council’s Telegram channel.
Russian soldiers have transported Ukrainians, including patients and staff from at least two Mariupol maternity hospitals, through Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine, NPR reported.
The woman told The Guardian she was among a group of roughly 200 to 300 people who were taken to Novoazovsk, Ukraine, via bus.
That’s when they recognized they had arrived at a “filtration camp,” a series of military tents run by the Russian military where those arriving faced interrogation and confiscation of personal items before they were eventually moved to Russia.
The woman said she had her photo and fingerprints taken, and was questioned about potential ties to the Ukrainian military and her opinion on the war before being sent to the Russian town of Rostov. Others have reported they had to hand in their phones and passwords, which officers then used to access their phone contacts and register them into a database, according to The Washington Post.
The woman left the group after telling the soldiers she had family in the area and has since made her way to the E.U.
“Such reports are lies,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.
Unlawful deportations constitute war crimes, according to the United Nations.
President Joe Biden said Putin is a “war criminal” and should face trial, pledging additional sanctions following atrocities documented in Bucha.
Moscow said in March it rescued 420,000 people “from dangerous regions of Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics” and evacuated them to Russia.
U.S. intelligence warned before the invasion that Russia may resort to its past practices of unlawful detentions.
“These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, unjust detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions,” Bathsheba Crocker, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in a letter to the U.N.
The term “filtration camps” originated in the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. Soviet citizens that had been living outside the country who then sought to return — even those forcibly taken to Germany as war criminals — were deemed “suspect.” They had to be screened in camps and holding stations before they were readmitted into the Soviet Union or deported, according to U.K. history professor Nick Baron.
In February 2000, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing excessive violence and rape committed by Russian forces inside a filtration camp in Chechnya, following a 1999 offensive against Chechen rebels during Putin’s first month in power. The aggression offset an earlier Russian setback that forced Russia to remove its forces from the region and sign a treaty that gave Chechnya, a majority Muslim republic, large autonomy in 1996, according to NPR.
Russia emerged triumphant this time, with Putin celebrating his victory in March 2000.
The ongoing Ukraine war has worried those who have followed Chechnya.
“There are some pretty disturbing parallels,” Thomas de Waal, a journalist who covered the area in the 1990s, told NPR. “The use of heavy artillery, the indiscriminate attacking of an urban center. They bring back some pretty terrible memories for those of us who covered the Chechnya war of the 1990s.”
The southern port city of Mariupol, where those taken to filtration camps originated, has borne the brunt of Russian cruelty and faces continued bombardments.
Over 4 million Ukrainians have had to flee their country since the war began.
William Poupart and his father, Duane Poupart, who are Lac du Flambeau tribal citizens, head out on Carrol Lake in Vilas County to spearfish. (photo: Yahoo! News)
“Tribal members have the right to hunt, fish and gather in the Ceded Territories,” said Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul in a statement. “Any attempt to interfere with those rights is illegal and should be reported to local law enforcement and Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.”
Preston D. Cole, secretary for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, also released a statement.
“The department has zero tolerance for harassment of tribal members who are exercising their treaty rights,” he said in a statement. “We fully support Ojibwe sovereignty and treaty rights.”
Officials with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission are urging tribal citizens to remember and practice the four C’s should they encounter any harassment. Those are to create distance, confirm their location, call 911 and check in with GLIFWC.
Tribal officials said incidents of harassment of spearfishers occur every season, yet many go unreported.
Last year, a Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe family reported they were harassed while spearfishing on Mille Lacs Lake in the Ceded Territory in Minnesota.
Melvin Buckholtz told police he and his family, which included his 13-year-old son, were confronted by a group of people on shore who were yelling profanities, throwing rocks at them and threatening gun violence.
Last month, charges were brought against Colin James Louvar, 23, in connection with the incident. The charges include felony harassment with aggravated violations for screaming racially-charged profanities at Buckholtz’s family.
In 2020, Greg (Biskakone) Johnson, a Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe citizen, reported gunfire in his direction after a confrontation with a man on shore while he and a group of others were spearfishing in northern Wisconsin.
James Kelsey, 62, pleaded no contest to using a gun while intoxicated and served no jail time, but was instead ordered by a Vilas County judge to pay a $343.50 fine earlier this year, to the ire and frustration of tribal citizens and their supporters.
Vilas County District Attorney Martha Milanowski said hate crime and use of a dangerous weapon charge modifiers were dropped because Kelsey pleaded no contest to possessing a firearm while intoxicated and interfering with tribal fishing rights, which is a DNR ordinance violation.
The rights for Ojibwe people to hunt and fish off-reservation in what is known as the Ceded Territory, which includes much of the Wisconsin Northwoods, are guaranteed by U.S. and tribal law through early to mid-19th century treaties in exchange for the government taking Ojibwe land.
Those opposed to spearfishing argue it harms the fish populations, but state officials say that’s not true.
The DNR sets safe harvest amounts for each lake so there is less than a 1-in-40 chance that more than 35% of the adult walleye population will be harvested by tribal and recreational fishermen combined.
“Some people say an extra harvest is given to tribal members, which is not true,” said Todd Ambs, former assistant deputy secretary of the DNR, adding that there about 500 tribal spearers compared with about 2 million licensed anglers in the state. “Other (non-tribal) anglers have harvested substantially more.”
Since 1989, the total tribal harvest of walleye in the Ceded Territory averaged about 28,000 per year, according to a joint tribal, state and federal report.
Tribal fisheries on reservations more than replenish those numbers every year.
These hatcheries produced more than 15 million walleye eggs in 2018, of which more than 121,000 reached to extended growth fingerlings and were released into Northwoods lakes.
Tribal officials reported that these hatcheries help replenish declining fish populations that may be caused by warming waters, shoreline development and invasive species.
Anyone violating tribal rights could be charged under several Wisconsin laws, fined up to $10,000 and sentenced up to nine months in prison, according to the Department of Justice.
Additionally, any tribal member whose rights are violated may bring civil action for damages and seek a restraining order.
“The spring treaty fishing season is among the most highly regulated, highly enforced harvest activities in the region,” McGeshick said in a statement. “Overall, GLIFWC’s Conservation Law Enforcement Division maintains excellent working relationships with law enforcement agencies throughout the Ceded Territories. Together, we hope to help create an atmosphere where tribal members can fish, hunt, and gather without worry or apprehension.”
Unaccompanied minors wait to be processed by U.S. border patrol agents near the border on April 10, 2021. (photo: John Moor/Getty Images)
Whistleblowers warn that children who arrive alone at the US-Mexico border are being housed in grim conditions at a Texas military base.
Hess, a 34-year-old who normally helps clean up hazardous waste sites, was deployed to Fort Bliss, a military base in the desert outside of El Paso where the kids were packed into massive white tents, hastily erected at a cost of more than $600 million by a disaster relief contractor. Hess was assigned to help get the kids processed into the immigration system and united with family members or sponsors in the U.S., but almost immediately she sensed trouble.
“This feels like a prison,” Hess told VICE News she recalled thinking. “That was after a week of being there, I was just like, ‘This is absolutely not right.’”
She saw kids crying and depressed, stuck in the tent city for weeks on end, lost in the system that was supposed to find them safe homes. Hess says children got separated from their relatives amid the confusion, including twin brothers who were split up, with one placed on a bus headed off the military base and the other left behind. The twins were eventually reunited, Hess said, but she and her fellow volunteers were taken aback by the grim conditions at Fort Bliss.
“Everyone around me, all of us, we were all just kind of like, ‘What is this place?’” Hess said. “This is not a place for children. This is not a place for adults. It was way worse than I could have imagined.”
A year later, Hess and five other federal whistleblowers are concerned little has changed at Fort Bliss and other “Emergency Intake Sites” created by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to care for migrant children in early 2021. The Government Accountability Project, a group that represents the whistleblowers, sent a letter warning members of Congress on Tuesday that the Biden administration has failed to address dangerous and chaotic conditions in the facilities, raising alarms ahead of an expected migration surge in the coming weeks.
The letter—first obtained and reported by VICE News—was sent to several House and Senate committees and the HHS Office of Inspector General, describing “gross mismanagement, chaos, and substandard conditions” at the shelters. The letter builds on previous disclosures, and includes Hess identifying herself publicly as a whistleblower for the first time. It’s a risk she described as necessary because the Fort Bliss tent city is still operating under “emergency” status and warehousing hundreds of children, with more expected to start arriving soon and no indication that conditions have improved.
“There's absolutely been no transparency or nothing even done for that matter to try and change this process and make this better,” Hess said. “It's just a failure on many, many levels.”
The letter follows the White House’s decision to end Title 42, a policy first implemented during the Trump era to turn away virtually all asylum seekers at the border on public health grounds during the pandemic. The rollback of Title 42 has federal officials bracing for more people to arrive and test the new rules. Spring also brings seasonal migration that the letter warned could “overwhelm HHS—potentially causing chaos and harming still more children.”
An internal email obtained by VICE News shows that the Department of Health and Human Services is once again preparing for federal staffers to accept temporary deployments to the border to help care for a wave of unaccompanied children. The email, dated March 17, outlines the creation of an “Employee Detailee Program Management” to coordinate deployments ranging from 30-100 days for “urgent missions,” including working with Afghan refugees and unaccompanied minors.
The email says the Office of Refugee Resettlement “provides a safe environment to children who enter the United States without immigration status and without a parent or legal guardian to provide for their physical and mental wellbeing. While in ORR care, a child receives food, clothing, a warm bed, an education, and recreational time.”
A spokesperson for HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Those with firsthand experience have painted a bleak picture of Fort Bliss, an Army garrison where temperatures can swing from sweltering hot in the day to freezing cold at night, with dust storms that blow sand into the flimsy tents. Leecia Welch, a lawyer who was part of a team that visited last year and interviewed several kids, called it a “hellhole,” where she found 900 boys crammed into a single tent, many in dirty clothes and smelling like they hadn’t showered.
Welch, deputy litigation director at the legal advocacy group Children's Rights, said “a huge number of children we spoke to were crying, distraught, and anxious.”
“In my opinion, Fort Bliss is not suitable even for short-term emergency care of children,” Welch said. “Despite improvements, it will never be OK to force hundreds, if not thousands, of traumatized children to live in soft-sided tents on a military base.”
More than 122,000 unaccompanied children, who mostly come from Central America, were processed by U.S. border agents and handed off to HHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement in the 2021 fiscal year, which ended last September. Responding to the influx, the Biden administration set up a network of emergency shelters in convention centers, warehouses, and other stopgaps like Fort Bliss. The facilities, intended as a temporary and more humane alternative to Border Patrol holding cells, have since been plagued by reports of mismanagement and dangerous conditions.
The whistleblowers represented by the Government Accountability Project are all career federal employees detailed to Fort Bliss between April and July of 2021. Hess still works at the EPA and she said nearly every federal agency was represented at Fort Bliss, including NASA.
The letter to Congress listed the whistleblowers’ allegations as bullet points, including:
• “Children held for weeks without basic needs such as clean underwear or bedding…”
• “Contractors with no experience or expertise in childcare regularly threatening children with deportation”
• “An unsafe environment for children including harmful noise levels, 24-hour lighting in sleeping areas, and sleeping arrangements that impeded supervision”
• “A culture of secrecy lacking any method to address numerous concerns in which bullying, rioting, and sexual harassment of children went unaddressed”
Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project, said in a statement to VICE News that it took “horrific, chaotic conditions” for multiple federal employees to speak out.
“Children were lost in faulty case management systems, contractors who had no experience working with children managed the operation, and children were held for months without their basic needs met in giant tents,” Gold said. “Our clients along with other federal workers are being asked to again volunteer to help HHS fulfill its duty to protect unaccompanied children, yet HHS has made no assurances that conditions have improved.”
More than 10,300 migrant children were in HHS custody as of April 4, with hundreds more coming into the system each day after crossing the border and hundreds of others leaving after being placed with relatives or sponsors across the United States, where they remain while their cases are resolved in court.
Hess says one of the biggest issues she encountered at Fort Bliss was kids not being promptly seen and tracked by case managers, who are supposed to monitor their status and ensure the vetting and placement process goes smoothly. Hess was assigned to escort kids from the tent where they slept to a tent where the case managers worked. She spoke little Spanish and mostly communicated using Google Translate on her phone, which tracked her walking over 400 miles in two months as she trekked across the sprawling compound. Hess says some case managers, which included many contractors, were seeing as few as three children per day.
“They were just producing very, very low numbers and there wasn't any push for them to try and work harder,” she said. “There were several kids who looked like they were in complete distress and crying and just not in a good state that went to the mental health tent after being seen with the case manager.”
Hess began taking notes on her phone, and eventually learned that the case managers were losing track of kids. Some slipped through the cracks and went weeks without a check-in, or worse, ended up being temporarily split up from a relative.
“We would notice that kids were marked as they had left the facility and they were still there,” Hess said. “We would catch siblings in the system who had gotten separated or who were about to get separated, or cousins. Every day it was a new thing.”
The average length of stay for unaccompanied children in federal custody fell from 102 days in 2020 to 37 last year, according to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, perhaps a sign that the case management system has improved, but there’s evidence that even short stays in the emergency intake shelters could be further traumatizing for young people who have often fled violence and endured the difficult journey to the border alone.
Earlier whistleblower complaints described cases of medical neglect, with sick kids failing to promptly receive care, including a young girl with “profuse vaginal bleeding.” The whistleblower reported not being allowed to immediately escort the girl out of the tent for medical attention, with help coming only after a dispute over the situation escalated up the chain of command.
Leaked audio recordings obtained last year by the publication Reason reportedly captured the person running a training session for federal employees saying kids were “dropping like flies” at Fort Bliss, and speaking candidly about the conditions in the tents.
“They're filthy,” the trainer was recorded saying. “They're dirty. There's food on the floor. There's wet spots all over the place. The beds are dirty. I don't know what's going on or who's responsible for ensuring that the dorms need to be clean, but we all need to be responsible for telling the minors to clean up after themselves."
Hess said she “had some crazy PTSD” after completing her assignment at Fort Bliss, and she would never consider volunteering at the border again. She still recalls how dark the situation became as kids who’d been stuck in the tents for weeks realized that not everyone who was allowed to leave was being reunited with relatives—some were being transferred to other facilities, where they would continue to be detained indefinitely.
“The tent would erupt in a clapping thing and the children wouldn't even flinch because they knew that they weren't going to a family member or sponsor,” Hess said. “Oftentimes we'd see kids crying as they were leaving. We got instructions back and forth that we should continue to clap. I just stopped. At one point I was just like, I can't keep doing this. This just seems so insane.”
Security forces have detained about 6,000 people since the state of emergency was approved in El Salvador last week. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we turn now to El Salvador, where concerns about human rights violations are growing as the government enforces a brutal 30-day state of emergency that temporarily suspends several constitutional protections. The Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said Monday that in the first nine days of the state of emergency, police have arrested more than 6,000 people accused of being in gangs. Salvadorans have taken to the streets to protest police abuse.
MARIA MATILDE SORIANO: [translated] It is a great injustice. In the case of my family, it was my niece who was unjustly taken from her home, without an arrest warrant or anything, because supposedly she is the partner of a gang member.
AMY GOODMAN: El Salvador’s judicial assembly approved a 30-day state of emergency, or state of exception, following reports of 62 homicides attributed to gangs on one Saturday alone at the end of March, the most violent day in El Salvador in at least two decades. Salvadoran lawmakers passed the decree at 3 a.m. — that’s 3:00 in the morning — following demands from President Bukele, whose government has been accused of abuse of power and human rights violations. This is Salvadoran human rights activist Celia Medrano.
CELIA MEDRANO: [translated] This is a narrative typical of authoritarian governments, which tries to deceive us and convince us that violating human rights of others is the only thing that guarantees that some good Salvadorans can live in peace.
AMY GOODMAN: Multiple constitutional rights have been suspended under the state of emergency, including the right to assembly. The decree also allows for extended administrative detention, increasing the period of detention without cause from 72 hours to 15 days. The president also ordered a 24/7 isolation and lockdown of accused gang members currently in prison.
For more, we go directly to San Salvador to speak with Nelson Rauda, reporter for the award-winning Central American independent online newspaper El Faro.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Nelson. Can you describe the state of emergency and what’s happening in the streets right now?
NELSON RAUDA: Thank you so much for having me in the show, Amy.
It really depends on where you’re standing in El Salvador. It’s become a tale of two cities. For one, if you have resources, if you’re living in a private residential compound or apartment or you have your own vehicle, you might go about this state of exception as if nothing is happening. Restaurants are open, discotheques, clubs, concerts, this kind of stuff. The president has emphasized that.
On the other hand, for I think the majority of the country, which comes from the lower-income population, it’s been difficult. It’s military checkpoints and police checkpoints and stop-and-frisk. And 6,000 detainees still have cells, 6,000 detainees in the last nine days, which will soon create a huge bottleneck in the judiciary system. It’s not a judiciary system that’s large or has grand capabilities. I was just looking at some stats, but we have like some four public defenders for every 100,000 inhabitants, and some eight judges and eight prosecutors for the same ratios.
So this will eventually create that bottleneck, but it also will retain a lot of people, maybe unfairly in prison if they haven’t had anything. We have scores of people who are on the streets looking for their relatives, looking for them in the places where the police has taken them. And a lot of them are saying, “My relative, my family member, my niece, my son is not a member of criminal gangs or a member of organized crime.” How can you know, though? Well, that’s how democracy should work. You have a judge. You have an opportunity to present your cases. You have the right to a defender. So, these are the rights that are suspended right now in El Salvador. The defense right is suspended. So it means that the majority or nobody of the 6,000 persons has had an access to an attorney or to a lawyer. They haven’t been presented to a judge, which the Constitution demands.
But, as you said, the Legislative Assembly passed the law at 3 a.m. on Sunday. We actually had 87 homicides on the weekend, between Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So, it’s a reaction from the government to what has been probably the worst violence crisis under Nayib Bukele’s term since 2019, but it’s also a response that goes back to what mostly every Salvadoran government has done since the end of the civil war: massive detentions of people and the huge bottlenecks in the judiciary system and the increasing of the incarcerated population — which has so far never solved El Salvador’s problem of violence, and which, before 2019, President Bukele himself believed wasn’t the solution. But it’s exactly what he’s doing right now, and showing his tougher side so far.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nelson, I wanted to ask you — this is not the first wave of major violence in El Salvador. Back in 2011, around there, El Salvador had the highest homicide rate in the world. And back then, former governments instituted the Mano Dura policy, the “strong hand,” again, cracking down on these gangs, many of which actually traced their roots to the United States, because for a long period of time the United States deported about 300,000 people to the Northern Triangle countries who had been convicted of crimes here in the United States. So, I’m wondering: What’s different about this particular situation and the way that Bukele is attacking the rise of violence?
NELSON RAUDA: The difference mainly is that — there is no difference in the ideas. It’s ironic, to say the least, because Bukele’s party is called New Ideas, and there’s nothing new about these ideas. This is exactly the same policies that have been implemented since the end of ’92.
There’s a little history lesson there, because El Salvador ended its civil war, which raged during the ’80s — it ended in 1992. And when that happened, the Clinton administration in the United States started deporting, as you said, a lot of gang members, gang members from L.A., from California. And so, they were sent to a country which had their institutions restructured, and it was barely entering the age of democracy. So, those gang members that came from the United States, they started to create this problem. But then it all worsened because all of the governments in El Salvador were unable to see what this would become.
The gangs are not only a crime problem, they’re a social problem. There’s only — the official number was 60,000 gang members a while ago. President Bukele said yesterday it was close to 84,000. But then you have to think about the social bases of the gangs — their families, their relatives, the people who depend on their economy — and their criminal economy, but depend on them nonetheless. So this is a social problem in El Salvador.
And there’s nothing new about this idea. Every country — every government in the country has implemented some sort of Mano Dura, from Calderón Sol, who implemented during the '90s some sort of death squad, parapolice forces, and then Mano Dura with Francisco Flores at the end of the ’90s and the turn of the century, then Super Mano Dura, which was the same advertising policy, which didn't really solve any of the problems during Tony Saca’s problem. And then we came to Mauricio Funes, and he did a truce with the gangs, which violently exploded in 2015, where we again were the world champion of homicides, and then, under President — under the former President Sánchez Cerén, which the judiciary — or, extralegal executions became systemic.
So, it’s almost a thing with trying to solve a fire with gasoline, and it’s always worked as you would imagine that it would work. It’s always worked increasing violence. And we have documented the negotiations between Mr. Bukele’s government and the gangs, but this is again what is happening. When those negotiations go sideways, we don’t know why and explain what went wrong. But definitely something went wrong. And —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Nelson, I wanted to ask you —
NELSON RAUDA: — we had that weekend. Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — in terms of Bukele himself, he’s been portrayed as a maverick, as a populist, as a right-wing populist, similar to Duterte in the Philippines. How popular is he in the population with these policies?
NELSON RAUDA: Extremely popular. El Salvador, like 40% of Salvadorans — according to a study from the Florida International University in 2017, 40% of Salvadorans support torture as a way of obtaining information from criminals, allegedly. So, these are not unpopular measures. And you have to understand that while the gangs are a social problem, they have caused a lot of pain to a lot of families. So, people, in a way, they like to see the police, you know, manhandling criminals. Or, recently, a video has gone viral about some policemen or soldiers stomping in their boots on the neck of a criminal. And this is not something that’s going to cause an outrage in the population, at least not in the majority. People think that it’s OK, because this is, I think, engraved in their culture, like the violence and maybe the impunity. So, this is popular.
But with the arbitrary detentions and these kind of things, I think he is doing some kind of damage to his bases. He has always been very popular with the lower-income neighborhoods. And I think some of that will change, at least individually or at least with some people, because they are seeing that these are the same crackdowns that we saw in previous governments, and they didn’t really do something to solve the issue.
AMY GOODMAN: Nelson, as we wrap up, Bukele is expected to be in Miami this weekend, attending a bitcoin conference. Bitcoin is a form of currency, of the legal currency in El Salvador. Can you talk about the president’s commitment to prioritizing bitcoin and investing in it, as opposed to other social issues, what this has meant for El Salvador and how it relates to the state of emergency?
NELSON RAUDA: It will be definitely interesting to see how President Bukele spins the state of exemption and the regime and the crackdown, while he promotes himself as a champion of freedom for bitcoin. It’s really strange for the bitcoin community, which, you know, posits itself to be freedom and separating money from the state, to be so encouraged and so enthusiastic about a government, a state.
But yeah, I think Bukele’s — and my take, having covered the bitcoin implementation since last year, is that there’s an endgame greater than bitcoin for Bukele — and he has shown and hinted at it — which is he’s really at odds with the Biden administration. He doesn’t get a loan from the IMF, which his government has searched for — or, has sought for since March 2021. So, there’s an interest of attracting foreign investment, promoting the country as a tourist destination, and also trying to find a way to finance the country without the IMF, without the Biden administration, without making compromises to things like democracy or human rights, which other organizations, such as, like, you know, the World Bank with us — for some billionaires in crypto, this is not as important, and so he’s trying to appeal to that crowd. And I think will be interesting. And I think what you will see from Bukele — I think he’s scheduled to speak on Thursday — is a sales pitch to appeal to this particular demographic.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. Nelson Rauda is a reporter for El Faro, the Central American independent online newspaper, speaking to us from El Salvador, the capital San Salvador.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. When we come back, a new report from the Poor People’s Campaign called the “Poor People’s Pandemic Report” shows poor people died from COVID at twice the rate of wealthy Americans. Stay with us.
A protest outside of EPA headquarters in Washington, DC during the previous administration on April 25, 2018. (photo: Chelsea Bland/AFGE)
Scientists are concerned that the agency’s redefining of PFAS makes these chemicals seem less toxic, and critics have noted that the update gives preference to chemical manufacturers and the U.S. Department of Defense over public and environmental health.
The EPA has already used the narrow PFAS definition in December 2021. It pointed to the definition and declined to take action on PFAS contamination found in North Carolina, as reported by The Guardian. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, North Carolina has the third-highest PFAS exposure of any state.
PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down. Yet they are found in thousands of products that people use or come into contact with every day, including furniture, clothing, and food packaging.
As the CDC noted, “Many PFAS, including perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), are a concern because they: do not break down in the environment, can move through soils and contaminate drinking water sources, [and] build up (bioaccumulate) in fish and wildlife.”
While more studies are necessary, there is research linking PFAS exposure to negative human health implications, including kidney and testicular cancers, weakened immune systems, changes to liver enzymes that lead to injury, and high cholesterol, among others.
Scientists are debating on how to properly define PFAS, but the mostly widely used definition is by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which defines PFAS as any chemical compound with one fluorinated carbon atom. That includes tens of thousands of chemicals.
The EPA now defines PFAS as “at least two adjacent carbon atoms, where one carbon is fully fluorinated and the other is at least partially fluorinated,” although this is considered a working definition for now. This definition would include about 6,500 chemicals, leaving out thousands of others.
Many of the chemicals left out by the narrower definition include chemicals found in pharmaceuticals, pesticides, some refrigerants and some PFAS gases, The Guardian reported. This remains even if the compounds are known to later become highly toxic to humans and the environment.
“How do you say something is not PFAS when it becomes PFAS after it is metabolized by the body or undergoes changes in the environment – that just doesn’t hold with me,” said Linda Birnbaum, former EPA scientist and head of the National Toxicology Program.
Birnbaum also noted that the new definition by EPA is more similar to industry’s PFAS definition rather than the scientific community’s.
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