09 May 22
Please Don’t Wait for, “Condition Dire”
The single biggest factor extending the length of these fundraising drives: Waiting until the situation is dire to chip in.
If you can afford a donation, put it in the hat early.
Sincere thanks to all.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
09 May 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
The senator thought unmediated access to an audience was a dream come true. Then, according to a new book, Facebook stepped in.
In February 2017, Donald Trump would deliver his first address to Congress. While the Democratic Party would have an official response, Bernie decided to do one of his own as well. We had a massive audience on Facebook and the ability to stream live from the studio on the sixth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building. And we knew millions of supporters from the 2016 campaign would want to hear what he had to say.
During Tom Daschle’s time as Democratic leader, he built a fully functioning television and radio studio for the caucus. The Senate has a facility that all members can use, but the one Daschle built is just for Democrats. The facility includes a full soundstage and a modern control room. Most members used it only to beam back into their local TV stations.
We would do something different. Following the Democratic response to Trump’s address, Bernie would offer remarks focusing on the issues he cared about. We would stream it on Facebook, in part as a test to see what type of audience we could attract. Convinced we could execute the broadcast technically, Bernie signed off on the plan.
Warren Gunnels, Bernie, and I spent the day in Bernie’s office writing his speech. We went back and forth over drafts, me sitting on a chair, Bernie reading the speech, and Warren pecking away at the keyboard, one key at a time. Bernie’s idea was to respond to Trump not by talking about what he did say but about what he didn’t, and we drafted a speech along those lines.
About 20 minutes after Trump finished, Bernie walked through the labyrinth of reporters outside the Senate chamber and made his way back to the office. It was clear that he was nervous. Despite having spoken countless times in front of millions of people, Bernie is still anxious in the moments before he steps up to the microphone. Once he is onstage— and paradoxically enough, especially with a large crowd— he finds his comfort zone. But until then, particularly in big moments, you can sense, even see, the tension. Speeches are often practiced repeatedly, with Bernie concentrating on every word, chasing a self-imposed standard of perfection he never seems to reach. The writing process, in fact, is more about him rehearsing the speech than it is about writing. Bernie fights for every word as if the fate of the world hangs on it. Speeches, regardless of audience, are serious matters, not something to be done casually. This speech was even more critical.
In many ways, this moment was a demarcation point for the country. The 2016 election was over. Donald Trump was now president. The first political battles of the administration were behind us— most notably, the lying about the number of people who attended his inauguration and the Muslim travel ban.
The loose movement that some called, at least on social media, #TheResistance, was coming together. Where would Bernie fit? Many of the Women’s March leaders had been prominent Bernie supporters in 2016, but many others were of course supporters of Hillary Clinton. Among a portion of her supporters, there was still a deep and abiding anger aimed at Bernie. They blamed him for losing the 2016 election, as did Hillary herself.
Now Bernie had to figure out where he fit into the party with Trump as president. It would mean working with people who had been a part of his movement as well as those who were deeply enmeshed in Hillary Clinton’s world. Bernie’s speech following Donald Trump’s address was Bernie’s first foray into positioning himself as a leader of the resistance.
In his office, Bernie began to rehearse the speech, making changes along the way. The process was slow- moving, and the minutes ticked by. We needed to head up to the television studio. Another staff member poked his head in and asked if Bernie was ready. “No,” he barked. He needed more time. But a few minutes later, he recognized he had to go. Bernie, in his usual refrain, looked at Warren Gunnels and me and said, “I wish I had more time.”
In the studio, the speech was already loaded in the teleprompter. Bernie sat down and proceeded to give the perfect version of his speech, like a great athlete rising to the occasion in a crucial moment. Nearly 10 million people watched Bernie’s livestream that evening— a staggering number, well beyond even our rosiest expectations. For Bernie, this moment indicated that he had a new medium through which to get the word out. Leaving the studio, Jane kissed him. “See, guys. That is what you get when you give a good speech,” Bernie said as we triumphantly headed back to the office. Jane’s performance reviews were critical to Bernie. She was his biggest supporter, but also would deliver a blunt and honest assessment of his performance. If he hadn’t done well, she would have let him know. Having seen Bernie speak thousands of times over the years, she also was one of his best judges— certainly the person whose views he took most seriously on this question (and every other).
At one point in working for Bernie, it occurred to me that he would have rather been a media mogul instead of a politician. This may sound odd, given his dim view of much of American media. But while his brief career making educational filmstrips ended when he became mayor of Burlington, he remained obsessed with the power of television and other media. As mayor of Burlington, he hosted a cable access show. During the 2020 campaign, Politico paid to digitize the program’s entire run so a historical record would be available. Politico was, of course, primarily trolling for embarrassing clips. While the production quality was not high, you can see a Mayor Sanders becoming Bernie, doing what he loved to do. He held conversations with real people, whether they were elementary school kids, small business owners, or punks hanging out at the local mall. Bernie is fundamentally a storyteller who is at his best when explaining complex problems and helping other people tell their own stories. That is what his TV show focused on. But now there was more to be done than TV shows.
From the livestream Bernie did on the day of Donald Trump’s budget address, we started producing a raft of videos and other content out of the Senate office. It was around that time that Armand Aviram joined Bernie’s Senate office. A huge Bernie supporter, Armand came to the office from NowThis, where he pioneered the techniques used to make viral political videos. Armand has no formal training in shooting or editing, but he had a real sense of what people on the internet like to watch and, more importantly, share, and he would skillfully hone Bernie’s message in these online videos.
Bernie Sanders had always dreamed about having a television network, and now he saw it manifest before his eyes. After a suggestion to a network anchor that they do a roundtable on Medicare for All was ignored, Bernie decided to produce his own town hall, which more than one million people tuned into. This became a regular occurrence, as we put on town halls on a variety of topics, from income and wealth inequality to foreign policy, with guests ranging from Michael Moore to Elizabeth Warren to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie treated these like television programs, and often we had a live audience of as many as 400 people, with millions more watching online. The shows demonstrated to him the power of livestreaming, and our staff acquired expertise in producing such events once the campaign began.
Bernie’s only disappointment was that other Democratic offices weren’t emulating what he was doing. We were stretching the boundaries of what a Senate office could do to communicate with the American people. Bernie hoped that other members of his caucus would see this as a new way to communicate with their constituents and the American people. It doesn’t seem like anyone did.
In 2017, as our online presence grew, Bernie took a personal interest in the distribution strategy behind our videos. He spent time each week thinking about the content he wanted to create and how many people were tuning in. At one point, we began to notice weird traffic patterns, with spikes and drops on Facebook that were seemingly unrelated to any obvious factors. Facebook was apparently out of sync with other social media platforms. While our audiences on other platforms were growing, all of a sudden people stopped “liking” our Facebook page. We quickly realized that the social network had changed its algorithm and was no longer serving our content. Later on, we recognized this happened to nearly all progressive outlets. The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported in October 2020 that Facebook had intentionally adjusted their algorithm to the benefit of conservative outlets over progressive ones.
Bernie demanded a series of meetings with Facebook executives. One involved a sit- down with Adam Mosseri, the head of Facebook’s newsfeed (and soon to become head of Instagram). He also had a phone call with the company’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. On the call, which took place in 2018, Sandberg was oddly obsequious, talking about how much she admired Bernie and inviting him to join her for coffee in Northern California. In these meetings and in public forums, the company always denied that it was doing anything to restrict progressive content, and that it was just serving its customers as best it could. During the meeting with Mosseri, it was revealed that Facebook had changed a setting on its back end that essentially shut off the pipeline of new subscribers to Bernie’s page. They could not come up with a reasonable explanation for the changed setting.
In the fall of 2018, during the lead- up to the election, we noticed a flurry of Facebook pages running ads claiming Bernie was encouraging people to vote against Democratic candidates in swing House districts. Believing these ads were violations of the company’s policies, we filed a complaint. The ads were initially taken down, but then they were put back up a few days before the election. A reporter from Vice looked into the ads’ origins but when he went to the listed address of the company that produced them, he found that the group that claimed to be running the ads did not exist there: according to the building superintendent, there was no tenant in the building that fit the description. Even when presented with this information, Facebook claimed the ads were legitimate and refused to take them down.
At a post- election meeting with Facebook in his Senate office, Bernie pressed Facebook representatives about how the company was making content decisions. A mid- level lobbyist told him he should be running specific types of content on particular subjects, perhaps changing how he talked about climate change or more prominently featuring AOC. Bernie asked if Facebook thought it should determine how he should communicate with his constituents. The Facebook staff said yes. Actually, as they saw it, it would be more effective for senators to simply outsource their constituent communications strategy to Facebook, which would decide who would receive his messages. Bernie got up and left the meeting at that point, leaving staff to talk.
The most junior Facebook employee in the room tried to make the case to me and other Bernie staff that we should shape his policy messaging around what Facebook thought would work on that platform. When we responded that that wasn’t going to happen, she replied, “That’s because your boss is a miserable old coot.” I immediately asked the Facebook representatives to leave and never come back. In apologizing, the staff member then said, “I used to work for Chuck Schumer. I think he is a miserable old coot too.”
This level of ego was what Bernie despised about the company. Yet we were also dependent on Facebook. Our campaign needed Facebook to communicate our message, even as they ultimately were trying to stand in our way. While we fully grasped the potency of social media platforms— they had the ability to stream hundreds of millions of views to the American people— Bernie saw something else: the ability for real people to use him as a vehicle to share their stories.
A giant 'Order of the Victory' installed for Victory Day in central Moscow. (photo: Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP/Getty Images)
Today, on Russia’s Victory Day, reimagined by Vladimir Putin as a showcase for his regime, the Guardian and other European outlets are publishing articles by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which has suspended publication in Russia because of censorship over the Ukraine war
The myth, celebrated today on Russia’s Victory Day, has become the essential narrative underpinning Putin’s plan to rule Russia eternally.
There came a point when Putin resolved to stay in power indefinitely. Elections would come and go, and he would lie that they would be his last, that he had no intention of changing Russia’s 1993-era constitution, which provides for a maximum of two consecutive terms. His first strategy for eternal rule was to allow citizens to become wealthy, as the country became richer than it had ever been in the second half of the 2000s. But when growth stopped, with much of the wealth captured in a few hands, he had to turn to propaganda. He began to invoke a sense of “traditional values” to augment the notion of his paramount importance to Russia – the indispensable leader who was the only defence for Russians against westernisation and dissolution in the sea of European peoples.
And Putin came to believe his own propaganda – that he now had a special historic mission to create a Greater Russia. Not quite a new USSR, because no one was about to rebuild Communism, or invent some new ideology or recolonise Central Asia so as to secure nice cheap labour for the Russian economy. Greater Russia fancied itself as the world’s third big power (along with the US and China). And if the rival US had the EU as its satellite then Greater Russia would need its own sphere of influence. Putin’s “traditional values” essentially boiled down to homophobia and the cult of military victory. It quickly became clear that persecuting gay people didn’t really amount to a durable strategy for the eternal rule of a strong leader. The cult of victory was all that was left.
The picture slowly took shape. The operetta of Russian militarism grew out of TV propaganda, where numerous “experts” began to speak of how we were the strongest in the world, no one could order us around, our rockets could circle the world several times and destroy anyone we wanted. It was ridiculous, but Putin’s speeches slowly began to sound more and more like those of the late neofascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. He spoke less and less about dull things like economic development, but really lit up when talking about new “unparalleled” types of weapons. “We can do it again,” became the main slogan of Putin’s Russia, a clear reference to the fact that Russians defeated Nazism in the second world war, and believe they can do it again.
Putin has won four presidential elections, but a fifth is looming in 2024. Covid took a heavy toll in Russia and the economy has slumped, so Putin’s options are few. In his mind, his best way to hold on to power is a repeat of the great victory. A symbolic march-past on 9 May would not be enough; they’d need to fill the image with blood.
And so they tried to “do it again”, orchestrating Europe’s biggest tragedy since 1945. The war is the world’s first to have been directly invented by TV. It also feels like the moment when the Soviet Union truly fell apart, because Russia, as heir to that empire, cannot come through this crisis with all those Soviet myths about victory still intact. We shouldn’t be surprised that most Russians have bought into this and are indifferent to the military crimes being committed in Ukraine. It’s not just that they don’t get the full picture because of the obliteration of journalism and social media. It’s that if you stop believing the propaganda, then you no longer can believe in a Russia of traditional values, a victory-day hero nation. All that is left is a wild person wandering through the ruins of a militarised kleptocracy, carrying a nuclear suitcase in his hand. And who wants to believe in that?
Who are we, and how did we let this happen? It’s scary to answer this question. Russians will hold on to their myths until the very last. In the meantime, they have their military parade, their victory day swoon, the opiate of the masses.
Mark Esper has written a book about the challenges he faced as Defense secretary in the Trump administration. (photo: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images)
Esper said he stayed in the administration because he worried that if he left, the president would more easily implement some of his "dangerous ideas."
The former Defense chief also said he hopes Trump does not seek the presidency in 2024.
"We need leaders of integrity and character, and we need leaders who will bring people together and reach across the aisle and do what's best for the country. And Donald Trump doesn't meet the mark for me on any of those issues."
Esper said he and other top officials were caught off guard by Trump's reaction to the unrest in the summer of 2020.
"The president was enraged," Esper recalled. "He thought that the protests made the country look weak, made us look weak and 'us' meant him. And he wanted to do something about it.
"We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Gen. [Mark] Milley and said, 'Can't you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?' ... It was a suggestion and a formal question. And we were just all taken aback at that moment as this issue just hung very heavily in the air."
As a young Army captain in the mid-1990s, Esper said he saw the office occupied by the Defense secretary as hallowed ground, a place he hardly dared imagine himself. Yet, there he was 21 years later, serving as President Trump's secretary of Defense; facing challenges he also never imagined.
He wrote about those challenges in a new book, A Sacred Oath: Memoirs of a Secretary of Defense During Extraordinary Times. In it, Esper describes Trump as a volatile, ill-informed leader obsessed with power and self image.
Esper also detailed in his book a campaign by the former president and his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to deny a promotion to Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whose congressional testimony led to Trump's first impeachment.
Vindman, a Ukraine expert and former official with the National Security Council, testified that he was present during a now-infamous phone call between the former president and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump tried to blackmail Zelenskyy for political dirt on Joe Biden and his family. That allegation helped ignite the impeachment effort against Trump.
Esper said he worries about the fallout from Trump's political tactics.
"It became much more than Alexander Vindman at that point when you have this behavior going on. It became a test of, were we going to allow political influence in our promotion systems and in how we assign people? And that's a hard red line for me and others in the Pentagon that we weren't going to allow that to happen, let let alone a vendetta against a single individual who was doing the right thing."
This interview has been edited and condensed.
When asked whether he thinks a prolonged conflict in Ukraine could weaken the NATO alliance:
I think [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is more committed to what he's doing in Ukraine than I'm afraid we [NATO nations] may be in the long run to standing up to Putin, and maybe he's calculating on that. But I also believe that the Ukrainians are far more committed to defending their country than Putin estimated. It's a major miscalculation, and one we should understand in the context of the fact that he invaded Georgia in 2008 and he invaded Ukraine in 2014. And in both cases, he really didn't get a stiff response from the West. It's not just Russia we have to worry about. Keep in mind that China is watching, too, and they are gauging Western resolve.
On whether the U.S. should be doing more to support Ukraine:
I said this [on] Day One of the invasion: We should be putting every possible sanction we can on the Russians. We should be providing the Ukrainians with all the equipment they're asking for. But we have to also continue unifying our Western allies. We now have two countries — Sweden and Finland — who are seeking NATO's membership or who we expect will seek NATO membership. That will strengthen NATO. And I think we should bring them in quickly and bring the umbrella of Article five protection under them equally as quickly.
On why he decided to stay in the Trump administration, despite wanting to leave:
I wrestled with this a lot. And at the end of the day, [it] came down to two things: If I left, I was very concerned about what would happen and would some of these dangerous ideas be implemented? And secondly, if I left, who would be who would replace me? And I was fairly confident that the president would replace me with an uber loyalist, who would do exactly what he wanted. And so I thought the right thing to do, the greater good my duty was to stay and serve the country.
On how he responds to critics who say he saved troubling, behind-the-scenes details of the Trump administration for a book deal:
I would say that I saw these things happen and did something. I stayed in the fight, in the game, and managed to avoid bad things happening. If you read the book, you'll see any number of cases where I was able to steer off or push back bad things from happening that I am convinced that if I had left, if I had resigned on the spot in protest – which by the way, would have been a whole lot better for me personally – I truly believe that these bad things would have happened. And my bottom line was I could do more good for the country, for the American people, if I stayed rather than if I walked away, particularly since I was so confident that President Trump would put in an uber loyalist who would do exactly what he wanted to do."
Melitopol on May 9. (photo: Ukrayinska Pravda)
Source: Mayor Ivan Fedorov on air, RIA "Melitopol"
Details: According to Fedorov, more than 60% of residents have left Melitopol, that is to say, 60,000-70,000 residents have left the temporarily occupied city.
People take a risk by leaving the city, as they are either fired on or prevented from getting through.
Quote: "Today there is great demand for evacuation and departure from Melitopol, but the Russians have not agreed a centralised evacuation for almost a month, and it is a real challenge for people [to leave the city by] private transport.
Those who were driving through Orikhiv to Zaporizhzhia yesterday spent 12.5 hours on the road and came under fire. Those people who left through Vasylivka have been standing at the Ruscist checkpoint for the third day, and they are not letting them [through] towards Zaporizhzhia. There are children, women and elderly people in this column."
Details: According to Fedorov, the Russians tried to conduct [a celebration] of 9 May in Melitopol, with preparations taking almost a month.
"They failed to conduct [the celebration] of 9 May. Last night they made a statement that it is dangerous to go out into the city today to celebrate 9 May because someone from Ukraine is planning to carry out some provocations. This is nonsense, of course, because the occupiers wanted to conduct these provocations and then accuse Ukrainian authorities of it," he said.
"I am grateful that our residents are not going out into the streets, and are not celebrating 9 May with the occupiers and collaborators," Fedorov added.
The local publication adds that while the Melitopol residents were leaving, the occupiers brought in residents of occupied Crimea, Luhansk and villages of the Melitopol district to the city on 9 May.
Russian Telegram channels showed that the "Immortal Regiment" march allegedly took place in Melitopol.
According to RIA "Melitopol", about 3,000 people were brought to the city to take part in the "Immortal Regiment" march.
According to local journalists, on 9 May "it was crowded only when the soldier's porridge was distributed" in the central city park of Melitopol.
Twenty internet providers, including companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, have committed to the the Affordable Connectivity Program, which will provide plans for no more than $30 for low-income Americans. (photo: boonchai wedmakawand/Getty Images)
The Affordable Connectivity Program will provide plans of at least 100 Megabits per second of speed for no more than $30. An estimated 48 million Americans will qualify.
"High-speed internet service is no longer a luxury — it's a necessity," the White House said. "But too many families go without high-speed internet because of the cost or have to cut back on other essentials to make their monthly internet service payments."
Twenty internet providers, including national companies like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, as well as regional companies, such as Hawaiian Telecom and Jackson Energy Authority in Tennessee have committed to the program.
"It's time for every American to experience the social, economic, health, employment and educational benefits of universal scaled access to the Internet," said AT&T CEO John Stankey.
Americans will soon be able to visit www.getinternet.gov to determine their eligibility and sign up for the program. Those who receive benefits, such as the Pell Grant, Medicaid or SNAP may qualify.
Agencies overseeing these programs will reach out to recipients of these benefits to see which households qualify for the ACP. Eligible households may also receive notifications from city or state agencies.
Organizations such as United Way and Goodwill will also assist with outreach and enrollment.
"Being connected is essential," said Daniel Friesen, the chief innovation officer of IdeaTek, a Kansas-based Internet provider. "Our mission for Internet freedom means we believe everyone should have access to fast, reliable Internet and the opportunities it provides — even when the budget is tight."
As of 2018, 85% of American households had access to broadband Internet, with lower rates generally being lower in rural communities, according to Census data.
People queue outside a polling precinct to cast their ballots, during the national elections in Tondo, Metro Manila, Philippines, May 9, 2022. (photo: Willy Kurniawan/ Reuters)
Top contenders in Monday’s vote are Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son of the Philippines’ late dictator, and the current Vice President Leni Robredo.
Polls opened across the Southeast Asian nation at 6am on Monday (22:00 GMT on Sunday), with a record-breaking 67 million people registered to cast their ballots. There will be no second round.
Elections Commissioner George Garcia told reporters early Monday that he expected a huge turnout.
“It’s a historic election, a very memorable one, simply because we’d be electing, at least in a pandemic situation, a new president and that’s why we’re expecting a high turnout of voters,” he said before the polls opened.
Polls were due to close at 7pm (1100 GMT), but election authorities said those waiting in line would be allowed to vote after the deadline.
The counting of ballots was supposed to begin right away, but unconfirmed reports on social media suggest that the election had been marred by delays and possible discrepancies.
Voting stations across the Philippines have reportedly been unable or slow to scan paper ballots, leading some Filipinos to fear that their votes will not be counted after they were told to leave them with officials. Others allege that vote-buying, manipulation and even violence have been used to sway voters.
Two-way race
Analysts have described Monday’s vote as the most significant election in recent Philippine history as the outcome could result in either democratic backsliding or in liberal reforms.
The contest has become a two-way race between Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr and the current Vice President Leni Robredo. The pair had previously faced off in the vice presidential race in 2016, with Marcos losing to Robredo at the time.
But opinion surveys show Marcos Jr leading this time. He is the son and namesake of his father who ruled the Philippines as a dictator until he was forced from office and into exile in a popular uprising in 1986.
On the campaign trail, Marcos Jr referred to “unity” but provided little detail on his policies. He has hailed his late father’s “genius” leadership, and avoided media interviews and debates.
Robredo, a lawyer who heads the opposition, has promised to form a more transparent government and reinvigorate the country’s democracy.
She threw her hat into the ring at a relatively late stage and has relied on a network of pink-clad volunteers to win over voters across the archipelago.
“This election is really a ‘good versus evil’ campaign,” University of the Philippines Diliman political scientist Aries Arugay told Al Jazeera. “It’s quite clear. [Marcos] represents dynasty, autocracy and impunity. Robredo stands for the opposite of that: integrity, accountability and democracy.”
Marcos Jr’s running mate in the election is the outgoing president’s daughter, Sara Duterte-Carpio. She is leading the race for the vice presidency, an election that is held separately.
Filipinos are also choosing members of the congress, governors and thousands of local politicians, including mayors and councillors.
Long lines
The excitement in the Philippines has been high since polls opened. By midday Monday, social media was flooded with posts by Filipinos showing a finger covered in ink – a sign they had voted – often accompanied by messages like “God Bless the Philippines.”
Many shared photos of long, hot queues at polling stations and the challenges they went through to vote, like waking up before dawn to stand in line or even flying home for the occasion.
Overseas Filipinos like Dada Docot, an anthropologist at Tokyo College in Japan, were also keen to participate in the vote after watching events unfold at home.
She told Al Jazeera she posted her ballot on May 2, and she hopes today’s election will overturn a three-decade political dynasty occupying the mayor’s seat in her hometown.
She is also deeply concerned about the future of the presidency.
“I’m feeling really anxious. I’m hoping for the opposition on both the local and national government level to win,” Docot said.
“I couldn’t vote in the last elections because of uncertainty in my overseas location for work, but I try to vote when I can. I feel more invested this time. We are scared of Marcos Jr coming back to power, especially paired with Sara Duterte,” she also said.
Elsewhere, overseas Filipinos cast their votes in person on Monday.
In Taiwan, Gino Lopez, a university student and volunteer poll watcher at the Philippines representative office, said approximately 75,000 Filipinos – many of them foreign workers – were registered to vote. The vast majority were expected to choose Marcos Jr, he said.
“I hope foreign media don’t get the impression that all Filipinos support Marcos, despite what the polls show,” Lopez said.
As a Robredo supporter, he attributed the popularity of Marcos among foreign workers to a combination of fake news, extensive image rehabilitation, and the family’s support for overseas workers’ assistance programs.
He also said the office had to disqualify a number of ballots on Monday that were either unsigned or appeared to have identical signatures.
Candidates square off
As a study in contrasts, Marcos voted early Monday in his father’s hometown of Buntac, while Robredo skipped the tradition of VIP treatment for candidates. Instead, the incumbent vice president queued for nearly two hours to vote in Magarao, a poor municipality outside Naga City in Southern Luzon, where her family owns property.
One voter at Robredo’s polling station told Al Jazeera they were voting for her because they are concerned about the future of human rights and democracy.
But for others, economic livelihood is their key priority. The area is frequently in the path of natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes, and residents are constantly rebuilding buildings and infrastructure.
Earlier on Monday in Naga City, polls opened with a prayer.
“Vote counting machine, please be good to us,” an election official said as she prayed before starting the machine that will be used to record and transmit the ballots.
Then, a bell rang to signal the opening of polls and the voters started coming in.
Outside the polling station, Maria Fe Cortes, 51, patiently waited in line for her turn.
“I’m voting for change. I hope the next president will help the poor,” Cortes told Al Jazeera.
Julie Tomaska, left, and her best friend Amie Muller, right, hold their children after returning home from Balad, Iraq in 2005. (photo: Julie Tomaska)
How the U.S. military’s toxic burn pits are poisoning Americans — overseas and at home
Located between the dusty beige tent where she slept and the runway-adjacent trailer where she worked, the burn pit sprawled across nearly 10 acres of Joint Base Balad, a U.S. air base 50 miles north of Baghdad. Plumes of noxious black smoke rose from the pile, which contained a long list of detritus from the base’s daily operations: Styrofoam containers from the dining hall, batteries, metals, plastics, paints, petroleum products, medical waste, amputated limbs, sewage, discarded food, ammunition, and more — all of it doused in jet fuel and kept smoldering 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“You couldn’t escape the smell. The taste in your mouth. The soot in your nose,” Tomaska said. “We would just joke around and say, ‘Well, this will come back to bite us later,’ not fully realizing what that meant.”
After that deployment, Tomaska’s life was never the same. Since returning home, she has struggled with permanent lung damage. “My chest, it feels like there’s a tight rubber band, like I can’t get a full breath,” she said. She’s not alone: More than 200,000 American service members who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan have reported health problems — such as asthma, debilitating lung diseases, and cancers — that they and medical professionals believe are connected to the burn pits. That number will likely continue to grow. The Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA, estimates that 3.5 million military members may have been exposed in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and Africa since 1990. These numbers do not include local civilians who breathed in the same smoke.
The devastating effects of open burn pits have been well documented by the military’s own experts since at least 2006, according to reporting by the Military Times, an independent news agency. Despite these warnings, the U.S. military continued to use the practice widely until 2013. The VA has denied about 75 percent of veterans’ claims for medical and disability benefits, downplaying the connection between the massive burn pits and the growing number of people falling ill.
But overseas bases aren’t the only place where the Department of Defense has burned hazardous waste in the open air — and veterans aren’t the only ones reporting health problems.
The Department of Defense currently operates 38 toxic burn sites in the U.S., mostly in low-income, rural communities. At these sites, the military collects excess, obsolete, or unserviceable munitions, including bullets, missiles, mines, and the bulk explosive and flammable materials used to manufacture them, and destroys them by adding diesel and lighting them on fire, or by blowing them up. Last fiscal year, the Department of Defense destroyed 32.7 million pounds of explosive hazardous waste on U.S. soil using these methods, known as open burning and open detonation.
The private sector operates an additional 23 open burning and detonation facilities, which handle a range of explosives, including munitions, fireworks, and car airbag propellants. Other government agencies, like the Department of Energy and NASA, operate six more.
While the materials destroyed in overseas burn pits and at open burning and detonation sites here in the U.S. are not identical, they do release many of the same harmful emissions: acidic gases, toxic metals, dioxins, furans, volatile organic compounds, fine particulate matter, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
For years, veterans have been fighting the VA in a battle to ensure that those exposed to smoke from the burn pits, primarily during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, receive the medical care and benefits that they earned. Now, they have reason to be hopeful that help is on the way. The VA recently added nine respiratory cancers to the list of illnesses it assumes are caused by exposure to burn pits, meaning veterans with those cancers will have an easier time getting benefits. Last month, President Biden dedicated a portion of his State of the Union address to the issue and called caring for veterans a “sacred obligation.” Members of Congress have vowed to pass legislation before the end of the year to further expand VA benefits for veterans suffering due to a range of toxic exposures. Veterans groups are pushing hard to make sure that actually happens.
In several ways, the struggles of frontline communities in the path of smoke from open burning and detonation sites mirror those of the veterans. Both groups have had to fight to prove their health problems are linked to the open burning of toxic waste, and both groups insist that the practice must end. But while the Department of Defense has largely discontinued the practice overseas — with some exceptions — the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, shows no signs of closing the 40-year-old regulatory loophole that allows open burning and open detonation to continue across the U.S.
In the meantime, frontline communities are suffering with little recognition — and no end in sight.
When Tomaska deployed to Iraq, first in 2005 and again in 2007, she worked in intelligence for an F-16 fighter jet squadron. Her task: to analyze grainy weapons systems video footage from jets dropping bombs and launching missiles, explosion after explosion.
If you were to trace the origins of those munitions, one path could lead you to Appalachia. You’d come to a valley in southwestern Virginia where the New River carves a horseshoe through the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, you would find the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, a sprawling, 4,100-acre complex commonly referred to as the Radford Arsenal. Despite the idyllic setting, the plant regularly conducts open burning operations, unleashing a slew of toxic pollution into the air.
Alyssa Carpenter didn’t know that when she first moved into a duplex less than a mile away from the facility in 2017, but she could tell that something was off. At the time, she was a college student at Virginia Tech, six miles northeast of the plant. “I remember every morning, when I would drive over the rolling hills into town, there would be a yellowish fog,” she said.
The Radford Arsenal is owned by the U.S. Army but operated by BAE Systems, Inc., an American subsidiary of a British multinational arms, security, and aerospace behemoth. It manufactures propellants for the Department of Defense, and in 2016, the unit’s commanding officer said that a whopping 90 percent of U.S. military munitions contain material produced there, according to the Roanoke Times.
The Radford Arsenal also generates explosive hazardous waste, which it burns in two incinerators and in the open air along the banks of the New River in burn pans — shallow, rectangular troughs made of clay-coated steel. The Radford Arsenal’s open burning permit, issued by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, allows it to burn up to 5,600 pounds of explosive hazardous waste per day for up to 183 days per year, over 1 million pounds annually. On a routine basis, plumes of toxic yellow- and orange-tinged smoke rise from the banks of the river and drift over the surrounding community.
The Radford Arsenal is the single largest polluter in Virginia. According to the EPA’s toxic release inventory, the facility discharged over 10 million pounds of toxic chemicals in 2020, more than the next four largest polluters in the state combined. Not all of that is released into the air — in fact, the vast majority is released into the water — but residents are particularly concerned about what they are breathing. In 2017, the EPA and the Radford Arsenal used a drone to measure the smoke plume above an open burn and found that it contained dioxins, furans, volatile organic compounds, hydrogen chloride gas, and metals, including arsenic and lead.
When Carpenter learned about the open burning, she co-founded a group called Citizens for Arsenal Accountability, along with other concerned students and local residents. Since then, they’ve worked to inform their neighbors about the danger and to end the practice.
In 2018, Carpenter graduated from Virginia Tech and moved back home to Roanoke, Virginia. She began working as a librarian — a dream job where she could help kids reach their full potential — but something was off. She felt fatigued and sick all of the time. About a year and half after she left the Radford area, she could see her thyroid gland bulging from the side of her neck. She got a biopsy, and the surgeon told her that she needed to have it removed immediately. Her entire thyroid was diseased, and if the nodules on it weren’t cancerous already, they could be soon, he said.
In the New River Valley, Carpenter had educated community members on the fact that perchlorate — a chemical emitted by open burning at the Radford Arsenal — can disrupt thyroid function. “I’d gone to community meetings. I’d met people who were very ill. And suddenly, that person was me,” she said.
It’s difficult to link individual health problems to environmental exposures, but Carpenter feels certain that her illness was caused by proximity to the plant. Since having her thyroid removed, she’s faced a stream of health problems and endured countless medical appointments. Now 28, she’s scared she’ll never fully regain her health. “This has left me in a state of chronic illness,” she said.
Other residents strongly believe that many of the health problems they are facing — including asthma, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, thyroid cancer, and other types of cancer — are linked to toxic pollution from the open burning site.
Virginia Public Media analyzed data from the Virginia Cancer Registry and found that in the city of Radford the rate of thyroid cancer is 15.7 cases per 100,000 people, which is slightly above the national average of 14.6, according to the National Cancer Institute. Carpenter pointed out that those numbers don’t account for other thyroid conditions, and that the data may not be capturing the full scope of the problem, since about 30,000 college students at Virginia Tech and about 8,000 students at Radford University are regularly cycling in and out of the area.
“These health conditions don’t just pop up out of nowhere,” Carpenter said.
BAE Systems maintains that open burning at the Radford Arsenal doesn’t pose a risk to human health or the environment. “As the operating contractor of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, BAE Systems continues to work closely with the U.S. Army and government agencies to comply with all environmental permits and regulations,” said Claire Powell, a spokesperson for the company. “The health and safety of our employees and our neighbors, along with the environmental stewardship of our workplace and the local community, remain our highest priority.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is planning to build two new incinerators for the facility, which are expected to be operational in 2026. They won’t eliminate the need for open burning, but they should significantly reduce the amount of material headed to the burn pans. Powell noted that the company has taken other steps to limit open burning and has reduced the amount of material open burned by more than 50 percent since 2018.
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality also argues the open burning is safe. Gregory Bilyeu, a spokesperson for the agency, referenced a health risk assessment that BAE Systems conducted in 2020, where it modeled emissions from the burn pans and toxic exposure levels at various distances. Based on that study, the hazards from the open burning site “are below regulatory thresholds of risk to human health and the environment,” said Bilyeu.
Though the study didn’t find any serious hazards, it has some significant gaps. For example, BAE Systems identified more than 150 chemicals released by the facility’s open burning that it deemed “compounds of potential concern,” but the company included fewer than 90 of them in its analysis. (BAE Systems argued in the risk assessment that the EPA has not published enough data on how the other compounds move through the environment or on their toxicity to include them in the evaluation.)
But BAE Systems also acknowledged in the report that “it is possible that the omission of these compounds from the quantitative evaluation may underestimate the total risk and hazard to studied receptors.”
Craig Williams, a Vietnam War veteran who won the Goldman Environmental Prize for compelling the Department of Defense to adopt safer destruction techniques for chemical weapons, thinks it’s pretty simple. “Look, burning shit — burning materials — is not really what I call a state-of-the-art disposal method,” he told Grist. “It’s 2022. We’ve had people on the moon. We’ve got smart bombs that can knock a cigarette out of somebody’s mouth at a mile and a half away. But we can’t figure out a way to do this that doesn’t consciously emit toxic material into the environment?”
Williams is now part of a coalition working to end open burning and detonation across the country at sites like the Radford Arsenal and the Blue Grass Army Depot, which is near his home in Kentucky.
“When the Army says that there’s no environmental or public health impact from this process, that’s just absolute nonsense,” he said.
When Tomaska first got back from Iraq in 2005, “I just wasn’t feeling right,” she said. Though she didn’t realize it yet, like many veterans, she had experienced irreversible health consequences from exposure to burn pits — and like many veterans, she would spend years trying to navigate the VA’s convoluted system.
Tomaska scheduled an appointment with her doctor and learned that she had an elevated heart rate, but the doctor chalked it up to the stress of transitioning back to civilian life.
Two years later, with another deployment under her belt, she went back to the doctor, this time struggling with chronic fatigue. “But not shocking when you have a toddler, right?” Tomaska said. She was also attending graduate school and working two jobs.
Tomaska’s health continued to decline, and in 2013, she reached a breaking point. She was fit and not even 40 years old, but walking up a single flight of stairs left her winded.
She tried to get help from the VA. “I was in there begging for a diagnosis, just begging to know what was wrong,” she said. Despite five years’ worth of appointments, tests, and scans, no one could tell her why she felt sick and exhausted all of the time.
She began to suspect that the cause of her health issues was the smoke from the massive burn pit she’d lived next to while deployed. But doctors with the VA and her civilian health care providers insisted there was nothing wrong with her. They told her that the problems were all in her head, that she was too young to be experiencing them, and that she was just out of shape. They pointed to Department of Defense air quality monitoring studies that said evidence linking exposure to the burn pits to long-term health issues was “inconclusive.”
It didn’t take long for the scientific evidence to catch up, though. In mid-March, Anthony Szema, a pulmonologist who has conducted multiple studies on the health implications of breathing smoke from burn pits, testified before a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee. Szema said that he has diagnosed “post-burn-pit-exposed soldiers” with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, constrictive bronchiolitis, carbonaceous burned lung, titanium lung, lung fibrosis, and pulmonary ossification, or bone in the lung. “As an expert in the field, I’ve concluded that these lung disorders are directly related to exposure to airborne hazards, including burn pits,” he said.
In 2018, against the advice of her doctors at the VA, Tomaska underwent a lung biopsy at the Center for Deployment-Related Lung Disease at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver, Colorado. What it revealed was not good news, but it did give her some peace of mind.
“I have constrictive bronchiolitis and scarring of my lungs, like pleural fibrosis, chronic pleuritis,” she said. “Basically, everything is scarred and inflamed.”
The surgeon who did the biopsy told her he could still see the soot coating her lungs. He also found fine metallic particles in her lung tissue.
Even with the results of the biopsy – which her civilian health insurance paid for – and a diagnosis from one of the top respiratory hospitals in the country, the VA denied Tomaska’s claims for medical and disability benefits. (Not all veterans are eligible for medical care through the VA, but veterans with service-related injuries and disabilities are.) Tomaska had to hire a lawyer and go through a nearly three-year process to force the agency to acknowledge that her lung disease was service-related and that she was entitled to benefits.
Tomaska has a unique perspective on all of this. She has a master’s in public health and a doctorate in epidemiology. For 10 years of her civilian career, she worked for the VA, conducting clinical research. If anyone should be able to navigate the system, it’s her.
For veterans who don’t have the same specialty knowledge, who aren’t healthy enough to endure invasive procedures like lung biopsies, or who can’t afford to hire their own lawyer, the process is even more of a nightmare.
On March 1, Tomaska tuned in to watch President Biden’s State of the Union address. She heard him highlight one of the dangers that American troops faced overseas: “Breathing in toxic smoke from burn pits.”
When Biden called on Congress “to pass a law to make sure veterans devastated by toxic exposures in Iraq and Afghanistan finally get the benefits and the comprehensive health care that they deserve,” Tomaska’s jaw dropped. “It was surreal,” she said.
Two years ago, Tomaska retired from the Minnesota Air National Guard after 22 years of service. Despite her lung disease and related issues, she considers herself lucky. She’s still able to work and to spend time with her two teenage sons. “I have lost so many young friends to ‘rare’ cancers that have no other explanation aside from the burn pits,” she said. Her best friend, Amie Muller, who also served in the Minnesota Air National Guard and deployed to Iraq with Tomaska, died from pancreatic cancer at age 36.
Tomaska is now a board member and the scientific committee chair for Burn Pits 360, a veterans group that has been the driving force behind recent legislation. They are part of a coalition encouraging Congress to pass the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics, or PACT, Act. The legislation would mandate that the VA expand which illnesses it assumes to be service-connected, meaning any veteran exposed to burn pits would be eligible for medical care and disability benefits for certain illnesses — without needing to go through a multi-year claim process. It would also expand benefits for veterans suffering from a host of toxic exposure injuries from past wars.
While the VA’s recent move to add nine respiratory cancers to its list of service-related conditions is a step in the right direction, Tomaska says much more is needed.
On March 3, the House of Representatives passed the Honoring our PACT Act. It faces stiff opposition from Republicans in the Senate, but lawmakers have vowed to pass some sort of legislation before the year is over.
“Words are one thing. We’re hoping to see some action,” Tomaska said.
Carpenter had a similar reaction to Biden’s State of the Union address. When she heard him bring up burn pits, she practically jumped out of her chair, shouting,“That’s what I’ve been saying! That’s what I’ve been talking about!” She was happy to hear that veterans may soon get the recognition and care that they deserve. She was also hopeful that the momentum will boost frontline communities’ efforts to stop the open burning of toxic waste in the U.S.
“If people can make the connection that this practice has harmful impacts on the health and safety of veterans, then they can also make the connection that it’s harmful to communities here, as well,” Carpenter said.
Realistically, the EPA doesn’t appear poised to end domestic open burning and detonation any time soon. In 1978, the agency proposed banning the burning of all hazardous wastes, including explosives. The Department of Defense and private companies objected, arguing that safer alternatives for destroying explosives weren’t widely available, and the agency created a temporary exception that was only supposed to be in place until new technologies were developed.
Since then, civilian groups have opposed open burning and detonation at sites across the country. In 2015, a campaign against a plan to open burn 15 million pounds of military explosives at Camp Minden, Louisiana — which would have been the largest open burn in history — brought disparate groups together to form the Cease Fire Campaign, a coalition of more than 60 organizations opposed to the practice. The organization successfully lobbied Congress to include language in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act to force the Army, which oversees the country’s military munitions demilitarization program, to commission a study analyzing alternatives.
In 2019, the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive report which found that there are viable alternatives for discarding “almost all” conventional munitions. The same year, the EPA released a similar report echoing those findings.
Last year, more than four decades after the EPA created the exception, the agency began a rule-making to update the regulations that govern open burning and detonation. In light of the recent reports, “we are taking a fresh look at the existing requirements,” said Carlton Waterhouse, deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management. This spring the EPA will issue a policy memorandum to clear up any confusion about existing permitting regulations. Later, through the rule-making, the agency intends to “further clarify” requirements for open burning and detonation facilities, Waterhouse said.
Frontline communities involved in stakeholder meetings with the EPA are deeply skeptical that the agency will significantly reduce the amount of hazardous waste being open burned and detonated in their backyards.
Carpenter hopes the agency will do much more to end the practice and the toxic pollution that it’s unleashing on communities like hers. “What I want people to know — what I need people to know — is that it’s not just happening other places. It’s happening here, too. It’s happening in our backyard. It’s happening to our neighbors,” she said.
“There is no safe way to burn toxic chemicals.”
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.