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“Here you have a group of people who have been starved of any personal contact with me for months,” he said. “I thought they would jump at the chance to get a little Elon in their lives again.”
Enumerating the benefits of spending time with him, Musk said, “For one thing, I’m incredibly charming and interesting. If you work in the office, you never know when I might drop by your desk and just start talking at you. Fifteen minutes later, you’ve basically heard a whole TED Talk. You don’t get that kind of quality content at home.”
Additionally, Musk said, “People love spending time with a disruptor like me. At home, you’re just doing what you’re doing all day with no interruptions. At the office, I might see what you’re doing, tear it all up, and tell you to start over. You can’t put a price tag on an experience like that.”
The Tesla C.E.O. said that, all in all, those who refuse to come to the office perplex him because “I’m extremely likable, cool, and fun to be with. Everybody loves me and finds me fascinating. What’s wrong with these losers?”
Children from the war-torn town of Lyman peer out the window of an evacuation bus in Raihorodok, eastern Ukraine, May 21, 2022. (photo: Anatoli Stepanov)
Tens of thousands of people remain caught in the crossfire as the bloody battle for the Donbas grinds on.
The tall, amateur equestrian turned volunteer paramedic jumped in his ambulance and hurtled down the road, past rocket craters and plumes of black smoke rising from the surrounding fields.
Holtsyev is one of dozens of volunteers who have been risking their lives day in and day out, zipping over some of the most treacherous roads of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region since Russia’s invasion in February. In April, when Moscow shifted its focus and military might to the east, the task grew more dangerous by the day. Now every dash into a beleaguered town here is a serious gamble.
“We managed to rescue 300 people yesterday, 500 the day before. But we’ve only taken 100 today because the fighting is very intense,” said an exasperated Holtsyev between evacuation runs one day last week. “It’s terrible. People are afraid to even move.”
As Russian forces pulverize everything in their path in a scorched-earth campaign to capture as much of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions as possible, eastern Ukraine has largely emptied out. Businesses are boarded up, traffic has disappeared and public squares are lifeless. But tens of thousands of people remain caught in the crossfire with nowhere to go as the battle for the Donbas grinds on. And they are paying a heavy price.
By midday, it had grown so dangerous in and around Lyman that authorities were ready to call off the operation. But Holtsyev and a handful of other volunteers, police officers, soldiers and bus drivers kept at it.
At Raihorodok, a small town on the outskirts of Lyman, they huddled quickly over coffee and cigarettes to discuss their route and confirm the addresses of people they needed to find. Artillery shells were exploding all around and drawing closer every minute. Then Holtsyev and the others jumped back in their cars and raced toward the city.
They arrived back in Raihorodok 40 minutes later with a couple dozen people. They would be the last evacuees of the day.
Among them was Nina Tykhomirova, 92, with lines drawn into her face like a map. In nearly a century of life, she’s endured a lot, including World War II and Soviet rule over Ukraine. Two large men carried her in a blanket from a van to Holtsyev’s ambulance. Her bright blue eyes and floral-patterned neck scarf betrayed the horrors she said she had witnessed: artillery shells crashing into her neighborhood, homes on fire, people cowering in fear in their vegetable cellars, bodies in the streets.
She was evacuated with nothing but a couple of sweaters wrapped around her fragile frame and a plastic bag with her personal documents that she gripped tightly in her left hand.
“Where am I going?” she asked, trembling.
“First, away from here, grandma. You will be safe,” Holtsyev said, closing the ambulance doors.
‘The city is already dead’
Under constant, heavy shelling, thousands of civilians in Ukraine’s east have been confined to the tenuous safety of basements and garden cellars for weeks or months. Time spent in the open means exposing oneself to weapons of war that figuratively and literally tear people apart.
Life under Russian assault is measured in minutes, steps and millimeters; the difference between life and death here has narrowed to a sliver. Those who try to flee do so at great risk to their personal safety; some interviewed by POLITICO during a week of reporting along the frontline described being forced to dash down contested roads while under fire or crawl through fields littered with landmines.
Others, like Tykhomirova, are too fragile to leave under their own power. Many more lack the means, whether money or a vehicle, to flee. Though disenchanted with the Ukrainian government for what some say is a lack of respect and attention paid to the eastern regions, almost no one wants to take their chance with the Russians.
Thousands have died while contemplating their meager options.
To be precise, between Feb. 24 and May 30, at least 4,149 civilians were killed, including 267 children, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The true numbers of civilian casualties are much higher but can’t yet be fully counted because of active fighting and lack of access to areas under the control of Russian forces, the organization added.
The deaths bring the total number of civilians killed as a result of Russian military aggression in Ukraine to more than 7,500 over the course of eight years. Prior to Feb. 24, 3,404 civilians had been killed in the war in the Donbas, which broke out in April 2014. A vast majority of those casualties occurred in the first nine months of the war, when the fighting was at its peak. Several ceasefire agreements that never fully materialized kept the fighting at a simmer, with each side trading pot shots from well-worn trenches.
Lyman, a once-quiet town surrounded by a forested nature reserve and the bone-white chalk mountains, was once home to 20,000 residents — more than 43 percent of which were ethnic Russians, according to local data — until people began spilling out in recent weeks. It had largely avoided hostilities, save for some street fighting with automatic rifles and grenade launchers in 2014.
Now it’s synonymous with Russia’s brutal new military campaign in the Donbas, demolished homes and shattered lives.
“We can never go back. There is nothing left there for us,” cried a woman brought to the Raihorodok staging area carrying several bags of clothing and possessions, her two young children in tow. “They are bombing everything. Our city is dying.”
Her husband interjected: “No, the city is already dead.”
The family, who declined to be identified, said their home had been partially destroyed in mid-May. They spent nearly two weeks living in a neighbor’s basement with little food and water, no toilet, electricity and gas until Holtsyev and the other rescuers came to pick them up. Everything they had to begin their new lives fit into four duffel bags. Asked about what they would do next and where they would go, the husband tried to speak but no words came out of his mouth; he just shook his head and shrugged.
Days later, on May 27, Russian forces declared Lyman captured.
No way to leave
Ukrainian authorities began urging civilians to leave the Donbas in April when Russia announced it was shifting its focus to the east after running into a wall in northern Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands heeded the warning. But not everyone was convinced that the fighting there would be as intense as it has become or would spill into the places where it has.
“Many of the people who have remained in their homes even as the fighting approached simply had no way to leave,” said Angelique Appeyroux, head of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Ukraine. The organization has managed to reach some of them and distribute food parcels, hygiene kits and blankets, and to resupply local hospitals with essential medical items.
Many stubborn residents have refused to leave their houses and their homeland behind. They argue there’s nothing waiting for them west of the Donbas, and they don’t trust that the government in Kyiv will help them rebuild their lives. Some feel abandoned by Kyiv and feel more affinity with Moscow.
One middle-aged woman who had accompanied her elderly neighbor to the evacuation point was catching a ride with rescuers returning to Lyman. She said she wouldn’t flee the town no matter what — her husband was buried in the cemetery there.
There are even some people who left the region weeks ago and have since returned. Kramatorsk Mayor Oleksandr Honcharenko said he has a “cabbage index” by which he and his staff can tell approximately how many residents are present in the city; the number of cabbages purchased is equal to a certain number of residents and their families. He noticed an increase in the past two weeks, suggesting, he said, “about 5,000 people returned.”
“Life on the run is immeasurably more expensive than at home, and people can quickly run out of resources,” Appeyroux said.
In the village of Mykolaivka, opposite Raihorodok and in the shadow of the Slovianska heat power station, Nina Strashko was surveying the remnants of her life, moments after an artillery attack destroyed her home.
The 83-year-old who walks with a cane had been enjoying a sunny May afternoon on her garden bench when a shell crashed into her cottage just 20 feet from her. Shrapnel sprayed everywhere, destroying a child’s swing in her neighbor’s yard and lashing the branches of the tree hanging over her. Yet somehow the razor-sharp pieces of Russian metal missed Strashko completely.
Luck or god or maybe both had saved her from death, said her son Ihor as he surveyed the damage.
“My home is gone. Everything is gone,” Strashko cried, laying her head on the shoulder of her granddaughter. The family was moving her to their house down the street — still in the line of Russian fire. The family said they couldn’t afford to leave and had no one elsewhere to ask for help.
And yet, they’re the lucky ones. Four of Strashko’s neighbors were much less fortunate. Two of them were killed and two more were badly injured by another shell in the same attack.
A train to somewhere
Twenty-five miles south, some of the 30,000 residents remaining in Bakhmut were in a similarly miserable situation. After Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk — which the Russian military is bombarding to the east — the city stands in the way of capturing the rest of the Donbas. In the past two weeks, it has been hit with several Russian airstrikes.
One of them struck the Horlivka Institute for Foreign Languages on central Vasylya Pershyna St. The institute had been relocated from a neighboring city after Russian forces occupied it in 2014. Faculty and students weren’t present when the building was hit last month; Ukrainian military forces had apparently been using its lower floor and basement as shelter. The missile took half of the roof and several upper floors clean off, leaving a 15-foot-deep crater in its courtyard.
The strike also badly damaged an adjacent apartment building housing hundreds of civilians. Days after, Yelena, 55, searched for her potted plant, a little green succulent, in the rubble. Her apartment was among dozens that were destroyed. Yelena and 38 other residents now share two rooms in the damaged building’s basement. It’s tight quarters with no ventilation; mattresses and cots lay side-by-side, covered in blankets adorned with floral and animal patterns.
There is no toilet for them underground.
“We can be killed just going to take a piss!” grumbled Vitaly, over the rumble of explosions in the distance.
Many complained that local authorities had not come to check on their well-being or offer any assistance. They had canned food and preservatives stacked on one side of the room, enough for the next few days. But they were short on bottled water, they said, although there was a well nearby.
Volunteers have started evacuating people from Bakhmut and surrounding towns and villages. Most are taken by car, bus, or ambulance to Pokrovsk, 80 miles to the west, where they board an evacuation train that carries them west, away from the fighting.
Last week, Kostyantyn, Yulia and their two children, including two-week-old Artem, were among 300 people on an evacuation train. Because the war had paused most local government services, Yulia said she hadn’t been able to secure a birth certificate for Artem yet. She said Toretsk, the frontline town from which they fled, had been without water for nearly three months and the electricity had been knocked out by shelling — which made giving birth especially difficult.
“We were sitting in our house and everything would just shake,” Yulia said. “I would wrap the baby in a blanket and run to the basement every time the shelling started.”
Yulia said that a shell that exploded on their doorstep was the final straw. They left with just a few bags and a stroller for their toddler.
“We will go to Dnipro,” Kostyantyn said, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city that has become a hub for humanitarian aid. “From there, we don’t know.”
Police outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. (photo: Getty)
By Texas law, cops must keep their bodycams on while working. But it's possible police will use the "dead suspect loophole" to keep anyone from seeing the footage.
The rest of us have been left to piece together the nightmarish chain of events with minimal information provided to the public by Texas officials. And there are still a lot of questions: the main one being, what could the police see and hear from the hallway they stood in for 78 minutes waiting for backup, while the gunman was barricaded into a classroom slaughtering kids?
In the absence of clear answers, some have hoped that video footage from the scene will shed light on the apparent lack of action from the nearly 20 cops who waited outside the classroom, even as fourth-grade kids were desperately calling 911 begging for help inside.
It’s highly likely that at least some of those officers, which included officers from Uvalde Police Department as well as the school district’s police department, were outfitted with body-cameras. (Neither Uvalde Police Department nor the Uvalde School District Police Department responded to VICE News’ inquiries).
Officers with the Uvalde Police Department first got bodycams in 2015.
In November 2020, they borrowed more than $13,000 from the city council to spend on state-of-the-art bodycams. According to an article in Uvalde Leader-News at the time, the plan was to get that money reimbursed by a grant from the Justice Department (there’s currently no record of the city of Uvalde receiving a DOJ grant since then).
They got 16 bodycams in total, manufactured by a California tech company, plus a sophisticated “evidence management system.”
Under a recently-enacted Texas law, officers in the Lone Star State whose departments have bodycams are required to keep the devices on whenever they are working. (The new rule was a provision in “Bo’s Law,” named for the Black man who was killed in his own home by a Dallas police officer who claimed she’d mistook his apartment for her own).
There are now at least two planned probes into the massacre underway, and any bodycam footage will be major assets to investigators. The DOJ announced Sunday that they were launching a “critical review” of law enforcement’s response to the shooting. The goal of the review, which will be conducted through its office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), is to provide an independent account” of police’s actions and “identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events.”
Separately, Texas’ Department of Public Safety is also conducting an investigation into the shooting itself, though it’s unclear how much Uvalde is cooperating in it.
Criticism of the police response to last week’s massacre has increasingly focused on Uvalde School district police chief Pete Arredondo, who was the on-scene commander while the shooting was happening. DPS Director Steven McCraw said last week that Arredondo made the determination that no children inside the barricaded classroom were “at-risk”—because he assumed they were all dead—and believed he had the luxury of waiting for back-up. Meanwhile, McCraw said, 911 calls were coming from inside the classroom from terrified children.
Several media outlets reported earlier this week that Arredondo, and Uvalde law enforcement, were no longer cooperating with DPS. But Arrendondo has since claimed that’s not true, and told CNN he’s spoken to investigators “every day” since the shooting.
A spokesperson for DPS told VICE News only that this was an ongoing investigation and referred further questions to Uvalde County’s District Attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee.
Regardless of their level of cooperation, Uvalde law enforcement will be obliged to preserve that bodycam footage for the purpose of investigators.
“Any bodycam footage, under state law, they’re going to have to preserve,” said JT Morris, a First Amendment lawyer based in Austin, Texas. “State law makes clear that if there’s bodycam footage related either to an officer's use of deadly force or an investigation or administrative proceeding related to an officer, that bodycam footage cannot be deleted or destroyed until any proceedings are done.”
Whether those videos (or other materials, such as audio recordings of 911 calls) are ever shown to the public really depends on Uvalde’s own policy, and the interpretation of Texas laws around releasing bodycam footage.
For “critical matters that are under investigation,” Texas law says police agencies should only publicly release bodycam footage if they believe releasing that information would somehow further a law enforcement purpose.
Otherwise, Texas law grants law enforcement agencies broad discretion to set their own policies for handling the public disclosure of bodycam footage.
Some law enforcement agencies cite what’s known as the “dead suspect loophole” when resisting the public release of materials. The logic of that loophole is that the suspect was killed in a police operation, and therefore cannot be convicted. Given that the 18-year-old gunman in Uvalde was ultimately killed by Border Patrol agents, it’s possible that Uvalde could try to use this loophole to avoid public disclosure of video and audio from the scene, said Morris.
Though the Uvalde police department and Uvalde School District police are receiving the bulk of public scrutiny, they were not the only police agencies present at Robb Elementary on May 24.
Little is known about the actions of the Border Patrol agents who arrived on scene and ultimately “breached” the classroom where the shooter had barricaded himself into. The shooter had initially locked himself into room 111, which was internally connected to room 112. The majority of fatalities were in room 111, but it’s unclear which room Border Patrol agents breached first.
Border Patrol rolled out a massive bodycam plan last year, saying they planned to outfit 6,000 officers and agents with the devices by the end of 2021 (with specific focus on those agents stationed in the southwest and at the northern border). They did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.
Questions about bodycam footage from the shooting are also being raised in the context of the gun debate. If they exist, the videos will undoubtedly show unimaginable horrors of children riddled with bullets from a high-powered weapon purchased days earlier by an 18-year-old. Since the shooting, some gun control advocates have asked whether the public and lawmakers need to be confronted with that kind of shocking imagery in order to drive change.
Democrats are heading into this year's elections without having tried even basic steps to balance the chamber, including ending the filibuster or admitting liberal Washington, D.C., as a state. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Democrats are heading into this year’s elections without having tried even basic steps to balance the chamber, including ending the filibuster or admitting liberal Washington DC as a state
For the first time since the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago, the Democratic party has the power to do what needs to be done. It controls the White House. It controls the House of Representatives. And it controls the Senate, where a bipartisan group of senators has talked in recent days about measures – from universal background checks to incentives for states to allow the confiscation of guns from threatening individuals – that probably would not have a prayer if Republicans were in the majority. But they still might not even now. While we will not have a clear sense of where everyone stands until the Senate returns from a fortuitously timed holiday, gun control legislation faces the same basic obstacles that have hobbled the rest of the Democratic party’s agenda – the filibuster and the rhetoric of consensus.
As many weary Democratic voters are now well aware, it effectively takes 60 votes in the US Senate, not the simple majority that Democrats hold, to break a filibuster and pass non-fiscal measures. And while rage at Republicans, the NRA and the gun lobby remains well justified, it is moderate Democrats who support keeping the filibuster – Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Democratic colleagues who might privately back their position – who are preventing the party from simply advancing gun control legislation on its own. Instead, they will need the support of at least 10 Republicans – a daunting hurdle Manchin and Sinema have defended on the grounds that major policy changes should win broad bipartisan support.
“It makes no sense why we can’t do commonsense things to try to prevent some of this from happening,” Manchin told reporters this week. “The filibuster is the only thing that prevents us from total insanity.”
As Manchin knows personally, the filibuster is actually the only thing preventing the Senate from passing the commonsensical reforms he putatively supports. In 2013, he and the Republican Senator Pat Toomey co-authored a bill expanding background checks to gun shows and gun sales over the internet. The majority of the chamber supported it – 54 votes, including four Republicans. But it needed 60 to overcome the filibuster. It died – a failure that gives lie to the canard that the filibuster actually facilitates bipartisanship. With an extremely modest bipartisan compromise on the table, the Senate instead passed nothing.
That same fate may await the bill Senate negotiators are piecing together now; there’s a plot in the graveyard alongside Biden’s other legislative priorities already waiting for it. And if it fails, the design of the Senate itself will bear most of the blame. The reality Democrats are loth to admit is that if the NRA and the whole gun lobby sank into hell tomorrow, the chamber would still disproportionately empower voters in the most sparsely populated and conservative states in the country – the voters most likely to vehemently oppose not only regulations on gun ownership, but most of the major policies that Democrats, backed by majorities of the American public, hope to pass. And while significantly altering or eliminating the Senate obviously will not be in the cards anytime soon, Democrats are heading into this year’s midterms and the potential loss of at least one chamber of Congress without having taken more basic steps to balance the chamber, including the elimination of the filibuster or the admission of liberal Washington DC as a state.
Instead, they have left the American public chained to a fantasy – the idea that the surest and most defensible route to meaningful change is bipartisan action, no matter how intransigent the Republican party proves itself to be. That’s a delusion pushed not only by moderate politicians who have an interest in constraining the Democratic party’s capacity to pass left-of-center policies, but by the mainstream press, which mourns these shootings with calls for the parties to set aside their differences and “come together” on the issue.
But there will not be a grand coming-together on guns. The modest reforms on the table, even if passed, would do little to change the outcome of a culture war one side has already won. For all the ranting and raving we have heard from the right in the last few months about the cultural power liberals wield, the values of rural and exurban conservatives plainly govern the country here. It matters not a whit what liberals in cities like Buffalo or Pittsburgh think about living in a country where people are gunned down in stores and synagogues with legal assault weapons. An inescapable reality has been imposed upon them – there are more firearms than people in the United States.
If recent history is any guide, the conversations we are having now about improving the situation at the margins will be drowned out and defeated by noise and nonsense in a matter of days. Arming schoolteachers, outfitting the nearly 100,000 public schools in this country with the kind of trip wires and traps you might see in the next Mission Impossible film – this is the blather of degenerates who know they have already succeeded, who know they have no need for arguments that might convince most Americans. The status quo they defend is being upheld by the deference of Democrats now in a position to upend it.
Movement Ink owner René Quiñonez wears one of his masks. (photo: J. Justin Wilson/Institute for Justice)
The U.S. Postal Service seized masks that read "Stop killing Black people" and "Defund police" that were meant to protect protesters from Covid.
The cloth masks, with slogans like "Stop killing Black people" and "Defund police," were purchased by the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and were meant to be shipped to D.C., St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by a police officer. But four boxes containing about 500 masks each were marked as "Seized by law enforcement" and their shipment was delayed more than 24 hours.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday and shared first with NBC News, accuses U.S. Postal Service and U.S. Postal Inspection Service officials of violating constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment by improperly seizing the boxes without probable cause, a warrant, or even reasonable suspicion. The lawsuit also raises the possibility that officials violated the First Amendment by seizing the masks because of their political messaging.
Movement Ink owner René Quiñonez, who owns the screen-printing business in Oakland, California, that manufactured the masks, told NBC News that his small family business had been impacted by the seizure.
"For us as an organization, as a company, and as part of our community, our intent was to support the many activities that were going on across the country," Quiñonez told NBC News.
Quiñonez, his family, and at least a dozen employees and volunteers "worked around the clock" to produce and pack the masks in the first week of June 2020, according to the lawsuit filed on his behalf by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning nonprofit law firm.
The lawsuit states that Movement Ink carved out a niche by building relationships "with activist movements, organizations, nonprofits, and individual organizers, who relied on René and Movement Ink for various screen-printing needs."
In an interview, Quiñonez said he had a jovial relationship with U.S. Postal Service employees, who knew he frequently mailed out clothing items with expedited shipping. Those relationships went cold after his items were seized, he said, as did some of his business relationships with activists.
"When there's an organization or a company that now has a reputation for being a target of law enforcement, people don't want to do business with them," Quiñonez said. "Even the people that are like-minded, that know that there are fundamental flaws in the way that we address things, they need to protect their interests. So we lost business."
The seizure of the masks “created a pall of suspicion, distraction, uncertainty, and confusion around René and Movement Ink,” the lawsuit states. The “baseless seizures and searches,” the lawsuit states, caused significant emotional and mental distress “not just because of his and Movement Ink’s financial and reputational hits, but because he and Movement Ink have been effectively shut out of a movement and a community that they spent (and continue to spend) years investing their time and energy in.”
“Instead of focusing on printing and shipping political Covid-protective masks and other apparel, René and Movement Ink had to waste time figuring out why their innocuous packages were in the hands of law enforcement, and how to get them released, while also fielding questions, concerns, and even accusations from partners, community members, and social media commenters,” the lawsuit reads. “René, Movement Ink, and their partners were left wondering why these Covid- protective political masks were in the hands of law enforcement officials instead of on the faces of political protestors.”
The Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a letter to Rep. Barbara Lee in June 2020, the Postal Service claimed that the parcels "were detained solely because the external physical characteristics of the parcels were consistent with parcels in other non-related instances that were confirmed to contain nonmailable matter, specifically controlled substances."
But the lawsuit claims that the "neatly taped, nondescript brown boxes" had clear labels, a category that includes "millions of packages shipped around the country every day." The lawsuit states that internal notes said that the boxes contained "BLM MASKS," although it is not clear when that note was added, whether it was when the masks were seized or after media reports on the seizure of the masks.
"It is not clear whether Defendants knew that the packages contained — in Defendants’ words — 'BLM MASKS' before seizing the packages," the lawsuit states. "If Defendants knew that the packages contained — in Defendants’ words — 'BLM MASKS' before seizing the packages, Defendants violated the First Amendment by seizing packages because of their political messages."
The seizure of BLM masks came in the chaotic weeks after Floyd's death, and days after police violently cleared protesters out of the area surrounding the White House and former President Donald Trump posed for photos with a Bible. Attorney General William Barr had vowed a crackdown on rioters, and even called in officers from the Bureau of Prisons to D.C., who fired pepper balls at demonstrators.
During the Trump administration, federal prosecutors took an aggressive approach to demonstrations, even bringing a case against a band member after he posted professionally shot promotional images of himself posing in front of a police vehicle with a fake Molotov cocktail.
Quiñonez hopes that Americans will be concerned about the seizure of the masks regardless of their political beliefs.
"The fact that our government can just seize private property — either because of just general suspicion or because they know its political commentary — that's a scary reality that we live in," Quiñonez said.
President Biden speaks from the South Court Auditorium in the White House complex in Washington, June 1, 2022. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
But the president told reporters Friday that he has ‘no direct plans at the moment,’ stressing instead the importance of engaging with Mideast nations
On Friday, Biden delivered remarks on the strong jobs report from May and faced questions about the upcoming trip. He declined to confirm it, saying, “I have no direct plans at the moment” and instead stressed the importance of a visit to the region.
“I have been engaged in trying to work with how we can bring more stability and peace in the Middle East. And there is a possibility that I would be going to meet with both the Israelis and the Arabs. Some Arab countries at the time, including, I expect would be Saudi Arabia to be included in that if I did go,” he said.
The president’s possible trip to Saudi Arabia follows broader efforts by his administration to build ties with the oil-rich nation to reduce the price of gas in the United States, which has been sharply higher in recent months.
A stop in Saudi Arabia is expected to be added to Biden’s overseas trip this month, when he will travel to Israel, Germany and Spain, the officials said.
The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia ruptured after the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and outspoken critic of the Saudi government. American intelligence has concluded that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto leader of the kingdom, ordered the killing of Khashoggi, which occurred inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
“We were going to in fact make them pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are,” Biden said of Saudi Arabia during a Democratic presidential candidates debate in 2019.
He added that there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Now Biden’s trip is likely to raise fresh doubts about the administration’s promise to keep human rights at the center of its foreign policy, given Saudi Arabia’s history of abuses, particularly toward women.
Pressed about his vow to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state, Biden said Friday: “I’m not going to change my view on human rights, but as president of the United States, my job is to bring peace. If I can, peace if I can. And that’s what I’m going to try to do.”
During the trip, the president is expected to meet with Mohammed, the officials said, a face-to-face visit that is the culmination of half a dozen discreet visits to the kingdom over the past two years by the president’s top Middle East adviser, Brett McGurk, and by his special envoy for energy affairs, Amos Hochstein.
The two men traveled again to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last week to advance a range of issues, including a presidential visit and an increase in oil production amid rising energy prices and inflation that have hampered the president’s approval ratings, said a U.S. official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic details.
The decision about whether the president should visit to the crown prince divided members of the Biden administration, many of whom preferred to keep the autocracy at a distance after former president Donald Trump’s remarkably close rapport with the kingdom, a relationship that infuriated human rights advocates.
But advocates for keeping close ties with Riyadh ultimately won out after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
The conflict’s impact on oil and gas prices exacerbated the Biden administration’s concerns about its relationship with Saudi Arabia, which had repeatedly rebuffed U.S. requests to increase oil production.
A meeting with Mohammed was eventually seen as a necessary act of realpolitik to lower energy prices and inflation, despite Biden’s campaign promise to further isolate Riyadh. Whether the move will substantially lower the price of oil is far from clear.
Asked about such a meeting, Biden said: “Look, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves here. What I want to do is see to it that we diminish the likelihood that there’s a continuation of this, some of the senseless wars between Israel and the Arab nations. And that’s what I’m focused on … doing enough on oil production.”
The member nations of OPEC+ announced Thursday that the group would increase production by 648,000 barrels per day in July and August, a modest acceleration of plans that were already in motion to reverse lower production related to the pandemic. The commitment to boost production came amid pressure from the White House for OPEC+ to do more to fill the gap created by sanctions on Russia. But the decision is seen by many energy analysts as having only a modest impact, and whether further production in creases will occur over the summer remains unclear.
Contaminated water - polluted by old, closed gold mines in Montana's Little Rocky Mountains - flows down the peaks toward the Fort Belknap Indian Community's reservation in September 2021. Cleanup costs at least $3 million annually. (photo: Katy Spence/Montana Environmental Info Center)
Indigenous tribes sound the alarm about a mining boom
He shows me battered metal contraptions marking long-shuttered mines. Active mines are gigantic, steep-sided craters; widely spaced bars cover their dangerously long airshafts. “We keep our kids close by in these areas,” Holley says. “They could easily fall through.”
The access road to one mine destroyed stands of medicinal plants cultivated by an ancient Western Shoshone doctor. A mine’s crew gouged a trench across a hill where tribal members seek visions. Centuries-old rock shelters and hunting blinds have been demolished.
Holley has long spoken out against the hundreds of mines — for gold, silver, copper, barite and other minerals — that have torn up much of his tribe’s ancestral landscape. He says mining is killing his people. “It’s taking away our culture. It’s taking away our places of spirituality.” He describes it as a slow death, occurring over generations.
These operations are called hardrock mines, which unearth metals and minerals other than coal and other fuels. In addition to damaging the land, the hardrock-mining industry is a major source of toxic waste in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Cyanide, arsenic, mercury, acids and other substances used to obtain and process ore seep into aquifers and rivers, foul the land and are carried on the wind. After a century-old copper-mining facility on the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona closed in 1999, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services found the mine had added enough arsenic to local drinking water to cause nausea — and skin, bladder and lung cancers.
The General Mining Law of 1872 set the stage for today’s profit-driven destruction by allowing hardrock miners — individual and corporate, foreign and domestic — to pay minimal fees to stake a claim, submit no royalties on their takings and do little or no cleanup afterward. Unlike coal miners, who pay the federal government between 8% and 12.5% of the gross value of what they have produced, hardrock miners have tendered no royalties on $300 billion’s worth of minerals extracted from public land over 150 years.
Passed by Congress in an era when miners used pickaxes and simple machines rather than today’s voracious industrial machinery, the General Mining Law dangled easy riches as a way to lure settlers across the continent and push aside the Indigenous inhabitants. It also includes no protections for land, air or water.
U.S. Rep. Katie Porter (D‑Calif.) calls the law a sweetheart deal for the hardrock mining industry.
Tribes and environmentalists want the law reformed, with requirements for mining companies to consult with local communities about minimizing harm and to clean up any mess. Mining firms have a different view. The Society for Mining, Metallurgy … Exploration, a leading industry group, supports streamlining regulations instead, noting it can take 7 – 10 years to get permits for a mine. According to the group, “America is hindered by a costly, inefficient and often redundant regulatory structure that thwarts domestic investment, expansion and job creation.”
Despite industry’s complaints, approvals of new hardrock mines have been progressing at an increasing clip over the past two decades. According to the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the Bureau of Land Management gave the go-ahead to 728 hardrock-mining operations between 1920 and 2018. A full 500 of these approvals have occurred since 2000, according to data from the GAO’s natural resources and environment team. The bureau, part of the Interior Department, oversees almost 80% of mines on federal land.
Much of today’s hardrock demand is driven by new technology. Copper and gold are critical to a range of modern technologies, and uncommon minerals, such as the lithium used in rechargeable batteries, will be essential to the transition to fossil-free energy. The United States currently has only three lithium mines, and the White House is advocating for more domestic production of lithium and other minerals that the U.S. Geological Survey identified as critical in a 2022 report. While the Biden administration emphasizes sustainable alternatives to mining, it has also opened the door to more extraction by invoking the Defense Production Act in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With a new mining boom looming, tribes and environmental groups are pushing alternatives, such as mineral recycling, and sounding the alarm about the patchwork of regulations that allow companies to stake claims without warning or consultation.
The Little Rocky Mountains, just south of the Fort Belknap Indian Community’s reservation in Montana, were once verdant, tree-covered peaks sheltering a lively array of wildlife. Today, they are a pale-yellow slash on the tribe’s southern horizon. For years, orange-tinged streams poured off the slopes onto the tribal land below. The contamination came from a gold mine that had operated in the mountains from the 1860s until 1998. The mine used cyanide to extract the gold. The process produced tremendous amounts of toxic runoff, which included not just cyanide but acids created when the rocks were exposed to air. That all made its way into local tap water.
In the late 1990s, the mine’s owners declared bankruptcy and decamped, punting cleanup costs to the American taxpayer.
The U.S. government then banned mining on federally owned land in the Little Rockies — which comprised most of the mine — and began remediation. After more than 20 years of cleanup, the tab is at some $77 million and counting, according to Bonnie Gestring, northwest program director of the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. The water flowing off the mountains is now treated for toxins, which must be removed in perpetuity at a cost of as much as $3 million each year, Gestring says.
Still, tribal members thought they had left behind the worst of a century and a half of damage — until October 2020. As the bans on mining on the land came up for renewal, the Trump administration’s scandal-ridden Interior Department caused a two-day delay in the bans’ publication in the Federal Register, a required step for them to remain in effect. This 48-hour gap left the federal land legally unprotected and, in those few hours, a mining company staked several claims.
Then, in 2021, the tribe discovered that another agency — Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ ) — had approved one mining-exploration project and was poised to greenlight yet another in an adjacent portion of the Little Rockies. This tract is not federally owned, so the state of Montana oversees related mining permits. The tribe was not brought into the decision-making, or even informed it was occurring. “We found out about this in the newspaper,” says tribal council member Dominic Messerly.
In a January 2022 online meeting with the DEQ, scores of Fort Belknap tribal citizens and supporters — Native and non-Native — expressed their adamant, heartfelt opposition to any mining in the Little Rockies. Tribal citizens described lives enhanced by fasting, praying and herb gathering in the mountains. “Those are our churches,” said Jeffrey Stiffarm, tribal chairman.
After the meeting, the DEQ took a step back and announced more study of the area was required and a mining permit would be subject to those investigations.
But, thanks to the 48-hour gap in the mining bans, the claims on the adjacent, partially remediated federal land remain in place. Al Nash, spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management’s Montana/ Dakotas office, which facilitates publication of the bans, tells In These Times the regulation gap was unintended, caused by “some unexpected delay in completing the process to publish the public notice.” Nash did not respond to questions about the possibility of correcting the delay and revoking the claims.
“The whole sequence is suspect,” says attorney Derf Johnson of the Montana Environmental Information Center.
Luke Ployhar, owner of the mining company — Bozeman-based Blue Arc LLC — says no backchannel communications tipped him off: He has private land in the area, had been watching the federal land for years, saw the opportunity and moved on it. Ployhar says that any mining that results from the exploration projects will result in jobs for the region.
The Interior Department has serious explaining to do about the 48-hour gap, according to Sen. Jon Tester (D‑Mont.). As spokesperson Roy Loewenstein tells In These Times, “Sen. Tester believes there are some places that just don’t make sense to mine. The Little Rockies have huge cultural significance for the Fort Belknap Indian Community, and they’ve already seen devastating impacts on water supply from irresponsible mining in the area.”
Steve Daines, Montana’s Republican senator, did not reply to repeated requests for comment.
Fort Belknap Indian Community has formally requested an investigation by the Interior Department and was joined in its bid by Earthworks, the Montana Environmental Information Center and environmental group Trout Unlimited. The Interior Department has only acknowledged receipt, according to Johnson.
The Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector General denied In These Times’ Freedom of Information Act request for more information, saying that the incident is under investigation.
Securing answers will be cumbersome at best.
In hardrock mining, there is no comprehensive nationwide accountability or transparency, says Talia Boyd, cultural landscapes manager for the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust. Multiple federal and state agencies oversee narrow slices of large, dangerous projects with extensive human and environmental impacts. The Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency, Forest Service, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, various state agencies and others may be involved in any particular project.
No agency has across-the-board oversight, or even across-the-board information. A 2019 analysis from the GAO found that a range of federal agencies collected varied arrays of data on existing and potential mining sites and minerals, with no clear picture of the industry as a whole.
“Who actually regulates any of this?” asks Boyd, a Navajo Nation citizen.
The Biden administration agrees. A White House memo noted in February, “There is no single federal agency with authority over domestic mining,” and laid out new “fundamental principles for domestic mining” to reform the General Mining Law of 1872. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland is forming a working group to refine these ideas — “to update mining policies to reflect our current realities,” as she puts it.
Derf Johnson is adamant: The 150-year-old law has to be scrapped and replaced with appropriate systemic change. If we do nothing more than alter rule-making, “It’s just eating around the edges,” he warns.
Hardrock mines have been required, since the 1970s, to reclaim damaged land and, since 2001, to post bonds to ensure they could pay for the reclamation. But bonds set by the state and federal agencies that permit the mines have generally been insufficient, according to the GAO. Moreover, responsible parties — such as the former mine owner in the Little Rocky Mountains — typically declare bankruptcy instead of doing the cleanup.
After a bankruptcy, Holley observes, mining companies tend to just “change their name, come back and start up all over again.”
The House’s 2021 budget reconciliation bill imposed mining royalties and set aside $2.5 billion for cleanup, but the provisions were stripped from the Senate version by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D‑Nev.), who said the use of a short-term budget process would create “uncertainty for the industry.” Roll Call reports the National Mining Association, which opposed the royalties, nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditures in 2021, to $2.1 million. According to data from the research group OpenSecrets, the industry’s total 2021 lobbying expenditures were $18.5 million.
The Native communities on the front lines of hardrock mining’s harms, like Fort Belknap, have far less money to advocate for themselves.
When the federal government first set aside tribal reservations, often in remote deserts and plains, they were thought of as worthless. After coveted minerals were identified in these areas, the federal government set about breaking treaties and diminishing reservations. Mines then proliferated in and around many tribal lands. Today, in the 12 western-most U.S. states, more than 600,000 Native people live within about 6 miles of hardrock mines for uranium/ vanadium, gold, copper and lead, according to a 2017 study in Current Environmental Health Reports.
Numerous tribal nations and their citizens are trying to warn the public at large about the dangers of hardrock mining, by speaking to the press, forming alliances with major environmental groups and bringing lawsuits.
Intense public interest in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s 2016 objections to an oil pipeline has created more appreciation of Indigenous issues and opinions, according to attorney Robert Coulter, Potawatomi citizen and executive director of the Indian Law Resource Center, in Helena, Mont. “The great victory of Standing Rock,” he says, was that the public “believed the Indians were right.” Coulter explains that the non-Native population came to understand that Indigenous people may not claim to own a river or the land around it but feel they have the obligation to protect them.
National media has responded with more reporting on the Indigenous struggle against hardrock mining, though coverage is uneven. The battles at Fort Belknap and by the Western Shoshones have received mostly local attention, for example, though a few fights have grabbed the spotlight and pushed the federal government into action.
One such case, covered by the New York Times, NPR and other outlets, is the years-long battle of the San Carlos Apaches to block an Arizona copper mine. In 2014, it looked like Oak Flat, a rugged desert landscape sacred to the tribe, would be handed over to a copper-mining conglomerate whose mine would produce a sinkhole about 2 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. Since then, tribal citizens and supporters — including some 40 tribal governments and 150 regional and national organizations — have rallied, marched and occupied the holy place.
In March 2021, President Joe Biden irked Republican members of Congress when he withdrew the Trump administration’s approval of the Oak Flat mine and called for further review. To achieve permanent protection, Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D‑Ariz.) introduced the Save Oak Flat Act.
Wendsler Nosie Sr., a San Carlos Apache activist and former tribal chairman, has been a leader in the effort to protect Oak Flat from what he describes as “total annihilation.” He offers a national perspective as well as a tribal one.
“The United States needs us Native people,” Nosie says. “Without us taking the lead on these issues, there would be chaos.”
The Biden administration is bringing Indigenous perspectives into federal decisions. Among Native appointees to top positions in the administration are Deb Haaland, secretary of the Interior, from Laguna Pueblo, and Charles “Chuck” Sams III, head of the National Park Service, from the Cayuse and Walla Walla tribes. Biden also reestablished the annual Tribal Nations Summit in Washington, D.C., and reinstated the advisory White House Council on Native American Affairs. And he has advocated for updating the General Mining Law of 1872, the source of so much damage to tribal lands.
Meanwhile, the administration has moved to protect a few places from mining that are especially important to tribes, such as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, in Utah, and the Boundary Waters Wilderness in northeastern Minnesota. Cleaning up the many abandoned mines in or near traditional homelands is also on the agenda, with $11 billion over 15 years in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The EPA warns, however, that $35 billion is needed to complete the work.
Congress is listening to Indigenous people as well. On Capitol Hill in March, the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on tribal/ federal co-management of public lands. Committee chair Grijalva has introduced a bill to strengthen federal requirements to consult with tribes on matters that concern them and, with Sen. Martin Heinrich (D‑N.M.), has introduced a bill to overhaul the General Mining Law.
Heinrich calls the 1872 law “antiquated.” Grijalva agrees, adding that modernizing the law isn’t extreme or anti-industry. “It’s just common sense.”
Earthworks’ Bonnie Gestring is heartened by these plans, saying they can lead to stronger safeguards against future travesties, such as the mining in the Little Rocky Mountains. As it stands, she says, the General Mining Law of 1872 fails “to provide even basic protections for our shared public lands and the communities that call those lands home.”
At the same time, Biden appears open to more mining. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led him, in March, to invoke the Defense Production Act in support of more domestic mining, ostensibly to reduce dependence on Russia and China for minerals. Grijalva and House Natural Resources Committee vice chair Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D‑Calif.) are dismayed. Job one, they told Biden, is reforming the General Mining Law.
Advocates say the transition to green energy makes reform even more urgent. “Our current mining law was put in place before we even knew what a car was, much less an electric one,” says Grijalva.
“Paradoxically, the energy transition is already causing an increase in global mining — even as we hopefully begin to leave fossil fuels underground,” says Thea Riofrancos, author of Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism (forthcoming from W.W. Norton). “That’s because ‘green’ technologies, like lithium batteries and solar panels — that allow us to harness renewable energy — are themselves made with metals that come from the earth’s crust.”
Riofrancos argues the only way to reduce mining’s damage is to reduce demand for it — to reduce our newfound reliance on lithium batteries for electric cars, for example, through expanded mass transit and to repair, reuse and recycle batteries and other technologies.
Earthworks offers data to support this. The group reports that recycling could reduce demand for lithium by 25% and cobalt and nickel by 35% by the year 2040. Some minerals are already substantially recycled — copper at a global rate of 45%, says Earthworks.
The Biden administration also supports the notion of recycling. One administration initiative will recover essential minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite — from used lithium-ion batteries. Another will capture industrially important minerals from coal ash and other mining waste, and another will extract lithium from geothermal brine. In the end, these projects may take the pressure off small tribes fighting installation of new lithium mines in culturally significant areas of Nevada and Arizona.
However, recycling will not meet the needs of the energy transition right away, says Riofrancos. Given the inevitability of more mining in the short term, she says it’s imperative to listen to tribes and their concerns.
While the nation is making its way toward its domestic-mineral goals — and approving mines as it does — the federal government could help tribes, especially smaller and more remote ones, in their battles to protect people and the land, according to Joseph Holley. “Get out here, see what’s happening, and give us some damn help,” he exclaims. “For us to hire a million-dollar lawyer, it’s not happening.”
In These Times lobbed Holley’s demand over to the Interior Department. Are the department and its agencies interested in supporting not just larger tribes but small, isolated ones? Richard Packer, of the Bureau of Land Management press office, says Haaland and Biden have “challenged” the bureau to take its consideration for tribal authority “to another level.” Packer says the bureau is “contemplating” ideas such as “co-management” and “the significance of treaties.”
Holley is not surprised at the ambiguous response. For years, Holley says, the Bureau of Land Management refused to hear his tribe: “They never listened, they never took notes, they never took us seriously.”
After Haaland was chosen to take over the Interior Department in 2020, the Bureau of Land Management “went bananas,” Holley says. “They sent letters, wanted you ‘to be a part,’ wanted you ‘to share.’ … It put fear in them because there was a Native in there.” But currently, on the ground in 2022, things are back to the old normal, he says.
Daniel Werk, a Fort Belknap tribal citizen and cultural liaison officer for his community’s Tribal Historic Preservation Office, took part in the January online meeting with Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality. There, he talked about how he’d prepared by reading documents from the 1990s, when reclamation was first considered for the Little Rockies.
“We’re just going in circles with you guys,” Werk said. He recalled that he was 11 when some of those documents were created. “Now my son is 12 years old, and he’s sitting here behind me listening. … When is it going to end?”
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