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The financial behemoth privately fears that regular people have too much leverage.
The memo, a “Mid-year review” from June 17, was written by Ethan Harris, the head of global economics research for the corporation’s investment banking arm, Bank of America Securities. Its specific aspiration: “By the end of next year, we hope the ratio of job openings to unemployed is down to the more normal highs of the last business cycle.”
The memo comes amid a push by the Federal Reserve to “cool down” the economy, informed by much of the same rationale — that high wages are driving inflation. This year, the Fed has increased interest rates for the first time since 2018. Historically, this has often caused recessions, and that is exactly what appears to be happening now: The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the gross domestic product has fallen for the second quarter in a row, indicating that a recession may have already begun.
Parts of the mid-year review, in particular its emphasis on a looming recession, received press coverage at the time of the memo’s release to clients. This is the first publication of the document in full.
What the memo calls “the ratio of job openings to unemployed” is generally calculated the other way around — i.e., the ratio of unemployed people to job openings. The more widely used ratio offers one measurement of the balance of power between workers and employers. The lower this number, the more options unemployed people have when searching for work and the greater opportunities employed people have to switch to jobs with better pay and conditions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this ratio stood at 0.5 as of May, meaning that there were then two job openings per unemployed person.
In 2009 — at the worst moments of the economic calamity that followed the collapse of the housing bubble during the end of the George W. Bush administration — the ratio climbed as high as 6.5, so there were more than six unemployed workers for each open job. It then slowly declined over the next decade, reaching 0.8 in February 2020 before Covid-19 lockdowns began.
This recent, unusual moment of worker leverage made Bank of America quite anxious. The memo expresses distress about “a record tight labor market,” stating that “wage pressures are … going to be hard to reverse. While there may have been some one-off increases in some pockets of the labor market, the upward pressure extends to virtually every industry, income and skill level.”
The memo recalls a previous Bank of America memo in 2021, which it says warned of “very strong momentum in the labor market, suggesting the economy would not just hit but blow through full employment. Fast forward to today, and these trends have been worse than expected.”
The memo is an uncanny demonstration that the economist Adam Smith was right when he described the politics of inflation in his famed 1776 work, “The Wealth of Nations.”
“High profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages,” Smith argued. “Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price. … They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
Thus, exactly as Smith would have predicted, Bank of America complains loudly about the bad effects of high wages in raising prices, but appears to be silent about the pernicious effects of high profits.
This is especially remarkable given the role that corporate profits have played in the recent increase in inflation. After-tax corporate profits stood at 8.1 percent of the economy at the beginning of 2020 but have since shot up to as high as 11.8 percent of the GDP. In an economy the size of the U.S., that equals an increase of more than $700 billion in profits per year. These higher corporate profits have been the cause of over 50 percent of recent price increases.
Instead, the memo is focused on the enticing prospect of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, slowing the economy, and bludgeoning workers back into line.
The perspective of working Americans would, generally, be exactly the opposite. For most of us, it’s fantastic to have lots of jobs available, with employers competing for you. A tight labor market is wonderful. Wage pressures are great. From this viewpoint, the key issue right now would be how to lower inflation while keeping employment and worker power high. Such a tack would include full-bore attempts to lessen supply chain issues and reduce the pricing power of big corporations.
Most interesting of all is that in Bank of America’s enthusiasm for the Fed going on the attack against working people, it gets the basic facts wrong: Wage pressures have turned out not to be, as its memo claims, “hard to reverse.”
“If you did see continually accelerating wage-growth, it would be a problem,” Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, told The Intercept in an email. “That would almost certainly mean a wage-price spiral with ever higher inflation. However, [nominal] wage growth has slowed sharply from around a 6.0 percent annual rate to just over 4.0 percent in recent months. … So, [Bank of America wants] the Fed to raise rates (and unemployment) to attack a problem (accelerating wage growth) that doesn’t exist in the world.”
The memo therefore tells us what we suspected all along: The most powerful economic actors in the U.S. — entities like Bank of America and its clients — do not like working people to have power. But it’s nice to have it in their own words. Harris, the author, was not available for comment.
A woman gets assistance fleeing from a civilian apartment complex that was bombed in Chuhuiv, near Kharkiv, Ukraine. (photo: Alex Lourie/Redux)
Ukrainian villagers accuse Russian troops of abuse, torture, and the murder of civilians as brutal war grinds on
“When I heard ‘Tanya, Tanya,’ I knew. Serhii’s body was frozen in this horrible pose: one of his hands in one direction, another in a different one. I rushed to him, he was cold. I lifted his clothes, he was all covered in blood. I asked, ‘How can we bury him?’ He wouldn’t fit in the coffin,” Tetyana recalls. The photos taken by the local doctor show signs of torture: a finger without a nail, peeled skin from the palm of his hand, and a fatal bullet hole in his chest.
Serhii had been seized when the Russians had first occupied the town and, according to multiple accounts from villagers, was tortured and executed during the Russian occupation this past March. Tetanya tells me this only days before what would have been his 60th birthday, when I went to the village of Lotskyne in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine. The couple were both retired teachers: She worked in the village school library; he used to teach IT, physics, and math.
The Bozhko case is far from an isolated one. Across Ukraine there have been reports of torture, disappearances and murder wherever the Russians have occupied. Human Rights Watch just released a report accusing Russian troops of apparent war crimes in multiple locales.
The Russians, including militia from occupied Donbas, were in control of Lotskyne for a week — they came on the 11th. Serhii Bozhko was taken from his house on the 17th by men in uniform. For two days, Tetyana says, she rode around the village on her bike, from one military position to another, trying to find her husband and bring him food and medicine.
“Make the life of your husband easier, tell us where is a machine gun!” she says the Russian soldiers shouted at her. “He has stolen our ammunition. He should have been dead.”
Tetyana still didn’t understand why any of this was happening. Serhii was not a soldier or partisan fighter. “I am ready to give anything to get my husband back, but which machine gun?” she pleaded. Tetyana thinks that the accusation of owning a weapon was just a pretext. On the first of two days of the detention, the soldiers brought Serhii home to search for something. He was already wounded, shot in the elbow, yet they didn’t bother to search the house properly or even find where he kept his hunting rifle.
Later, Tetyana was told that her husband was held because he was a former member of the infamous Azov Battalion, the military unit demonized by the Russians. But she insists Serhii had never served in the army and had no connection to Azov whatsoever. He was just vocal about his pro-Ukrainian position, an active member of the community, and had joined some villagers to man a checkpoint at the start of the war. The villagers, armed with hunting rifles, were not capable of confronting a professional army and dissolved as soon as the invading army neared their village.
In the end, Tetyana says Bozhko was one of thousands of outspoken Ukrainians who paid the ultimate price. According to the doctors and other witnesses, Serhii Bozhko was killed some hours before the occupiers abandoned the village. During the funeral, a neighbor told her that her son had also been detained and spent the first night with Serhii. The man decided not to talk to either Serhii’s widow or to journalists, but his mother told me, “He didn’t dare to speak to Tetyana. ‘What should I tell her? How they were torturing him?’”
What is striking about the story of Serhii Bozhko is how ordinary it has become. According to multiple eyewitness accounts, civilians like the Bozhkos have suffered terrible abuse and crimes at the hands of Russian forces. I have spent the past month reporting on the Russian occupation of southern Ukraine, hearing stories of terror and horror again and again, and encountering a civilian population traumatized after occupation and months of grinding war.
Tetyana’s grief is overwhelming. She’s a miniature lady, who wears a headscarf and looks shy, apologizing repeatedly because her yard is messy — Serhii had a tractor, some equipment, and she is not capable of keeping up their place by herself. Yet she becomes firm when explaining the death of her husband: “[The Russians] were small and weak and not able to fight against people with spirits as strong as his. So they tortured him. My only hope is that, knowing this, some people who maybe had doubts would know what the ‘Russian world’ is, and what sorrow and pain it brings.”
When the Russians invaded, political activists, human rights defenders, religious leaders, and former Ukrainian soldiers immediately understood that they should flee or face reprisals. What nobody was prepared for was that anybody who didn’t openly support the invasion — the majority — could become a target of persecution. From the early days of the war, attempts to negotiate civilian evacuation were not successful. In many cases, people were shot at checkpoints when trying to flee, and by the end of May, Russian authorities de facto stopped letting people out.
Despite this, it’s possible to know what’s happening in villages under Russian control. In Kryvyi Rih, the second-largest town in the Dnipro region, the birthplace of President Volodymyr Zelensky, there are now at least 40,000 people who were displaced from the province of Kherson. That’s where I meet Anna Shostak-Kuchmiak, a community leader in Vysokopillya, which is situated just 40 miles away from Kryvyi Rih. It consists of 22 villages in the northern part of the Kherson region, 14 of which are now under occupation.
Shostak-Kuchmiak meets me in one of the administrative buildings on the outskirts of the city, from where she has worked in exile since April. She is 58, was an MP for the village council for 20 years, and a mother of nine kids, seven adopted and some already adults. Vysokopillya was occupied on March 13th. Soldiers from the Russian-controlled Donbas were the first to come to her area. They were poorly dressed, with sneakers instead of military boots, and without helmets.
“Mother, we came for revenge!” one of them told Shostak-Kuchmiak, as the militia searched for former Ukrainian veterans. “Would you help us?”
Shostak-Kuchmiak has a son who serves in the army. She pretended she didn’t know any of the veterans in her community.
Her fellow villagers were complaining to her about drunk soldiers coming to their houses, abusing them physically, and rampant theft. “They were stealing in all the villages — where they were not able to kick the doors, they used military vehicles,” Shostak-Kuchmiak tells me. “And though their leader once organized demonstrative punishment for one looter, on another occasion he was overseeing computers being taken from the school. Something I saw myself.”
A few days after the occupation, the most senior Russian military leader in the area gathered 70 villagers in Vysokopillya. Two ladies were complaining that their family members were missing: The mother of an adult son, who has mental problems, was worried that something happened to him; and a wife was searching for her husband — he was a civilian and worked as a craftsman with wood. The soldiers did not respond to the villagers pleas for answers.
Overall, Shostak-Kuchmiak documented that at least 10 people in her community were missing. There were rumors that some of them were killed or kept in the house on the outskirts of the village. (In the already-liberated Lotskyne, where Bozhko was killed, I visited a similar house turned into a morgue.) Shostak-Kuchmiak went there to visit a man who lived nearby, but before she could speak, he said, “Please be quiet. I am afraid. They [the Russians] buried a few people in my yard, and nobody is alive in that house.”
For most of the occupation, Shostak-Kuchmiak says she was mainly ensuring that her people had food and medicine. She lived in a smaller village, Kniazivka, and was commuting to Vysokopillia on bicycle. On March 30th, the Ukrainian army liberated Kniazivka, and the front line was suddenly in front of her house. At first she stayed home despite being worried about two of her sons, just 17 and 18, before finally fleeing after her house was shelled.
Then her main task was to help the villagers escape from the fighting. Together with the head of the neighboring Novovorontsovka community, Volodymyr Marchuk, 10 buses and six ambulances were sent to evacuate civilians. But when they arrived at the checkpoint, the Russian militia seized Marchuk. His release was negotiated by the evening of the next day, but not before he says he was terribly abused by the Russians.
Volodymyr Marchuk is a large man, 46 years old. In the 1990s, he moved to the Kherson region from Sevastopol, in Crimea, where he was a policeman. While talking, from time to time he takes out a big bag with pills, and takes one. He says his doctors insist he is at risk of a stroke and should not be taking any chances. For this, Marchuk asks for forgiveness, but he refuses to quit working to help people escape the front lines and deliver supplies.
“The soldiers blindfolded me,” he tells me.” I heard shots in the air, and the column leave. One guy accused me of being a spy, threatened to shoot me, and pointed a gun. In a car, another younger guy said, “Father, what have you done, so you’d be killed today?” Then they bound my hands, restrained me. I couldn’t breathe.” He says they then drove for about 20 minutes; he understood he was in a village.
“Two people came, one told me if I moved, he’d put a knife to my head,” he tells me. “Then the interrogation started. They asked who I was.” Marchuk pauses and has to gather himself. “Otherwise I’ll be shaken,” he says. “It’s too hard for me to recall it again.”
When he continues, he says he was kept in a barn, where a man with a Russian accent continued interrogating him. “I had to ask to go to the toilet, “Marchuk recalls. “It was extremely cold, I wasn’t dressed well. In the morning, I felt strange after the water I drank. I don’t want to invent things, but later, doctors told me there could have been some drugs in it. I was praying all the time. That was the moment when I talked to God.”
Marchuk remembered two more people coming and warning him: “We should shoot and slaughter you. If we take off your blindfold and you move your head a knife will go inside it.” Hearing he was a leader of the community, they asked whether he was ‘organizing those fa—ts?’” He remembered himself hallucinating: “I was crying and couldn’t control myself. I was howling and wailing.”
Finally, after more questioning, Marchuk was reduced to babbling. Another man told him, “Volodya, you’ll be at home tonight. We want you to know that we’re good guys.”
“I was never a nationalist, but at that moment the only thing I wanted was to see the blue Ukrainian sky,” Marchuk says. “As one feels thirsty, I wanted to see that sky, and I asked them to let me see the sky before they would shoot me. They insisted they wouldn’t kill me. I was hysterical. But they said it was a goodwill gesture. The attitude changed. In the car they took away my blindfold, and I fainted.”
He was let go and brought back to the checkpoint, where he joined a family driving from the occupation. The fact that Marchuk was in the list of those allowed to leave helped the family to pass as well.
“At the last checkpoint, the soldiers were arguing after they stopped us. I told the driver: ‘Please, drive. Better they shoot me then take me into captivity again.’ When we were allowed to go to the Ukrainian-controlled area, the Russian told me he apologized on behalf of the Russian army.
When Shostak-Kuchmiak recalls that evacuation, she bursts into tears, but largely because the evacuation failed. “In the end, instead of 1,000, [up to] 500 to 570 left two villages a few days later. I rushed to meet them on our side. They were dirty, they walked by foot, some had such an empty gaze. Some asked, ‘Why have you left us? Why did you abandon us?’ People were using wheelbarrows for those who couldn’t move.” But she regrets that largely the most vulnerable, those who can’t walk, are sick or elderly, remained behind.
According to Ukrainian government reports, around 1,000 towns and villages were liberated, but 2,600 are still under occupation. The Association of Ukrainian towns counted at least 53 mayors who were detained at different times; but there are also hundreds of villagers and hamlet heads and representatives.
For 20 years, Russian television was dehumanizing Ukrainians as nationalists — and later, as Nazis. This partially created an environment in which Russian soldiers suspected anybody speaking Ukrainian of being anti-Russian. From talking to human rights defenders and officials across the country, as well as residents who lived through the occupation and volunteers, it’s clear that basic loyalty to the state could be enough to be considered the enemy.
What is important in the case of people like Serhii Bozhko, a teacher from Lotskyne, or a village leader like Anna Shostak-Kuchmiak is that they hardly understand what they are being accused of. “I am a typical Ukrainian lady, and if somebody comes to my house, I’d oppose it,” Shostak-Kuchmiak says. “If I know something evil is going on, I won’t succumb, and my kids are the same.”
To date, the Kyiv suburb of Bucha has become the greatest symbol of Russian atrocities. The chief of Kyiv’s regional police, Andrii Niebytov, told me that out of around 3,000 civilians who died, at least half of the victims weren’t killed in the shelling; they were shot. Parts of southern Ukraine have been under occupation for more than four months. But despite there being no access to the region, there are thousands of refugees who can tell the stories, including the relatives of people missing and hundreds of people, like Shostak-Kuchmiak, who stay in touch with the communities. They are cautious in mentioning names of people in the occupation, but there is enough data to get a picture of the horror of what’s going on.
In July, Ukraine’s President Zelensky announced plans to liberate the Kherson region as a top priority, and the government urged residents of frontline villages and towns to evacuate to avoid becoming trapped during a counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. Fierce fighting has recently started near Vysokopillya, with reports of Russian troops surrounded.
“I remember the happiness I felt when I gave birth to my sons. But there was never a moment in my life happier than when I saw Ukrainian soldiers fighting near my village,” Shostak-Kuchmiak tells me, tears running down her face. “My son is serving, and was wounded. Maybe I am a bad mother for letting him fight, but it’s his choice. We need to liberate our people from the horrors of occupation.”
An employee checks the chamber of an assault-style rifle at a shooting range. (photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
Democrats say measure is ‘crucial’ to tackling mass shootings, but it’s unlikely to secure the Republican support in the Senate needed to become law.
The legislation was approved on Friday by a 217 to 213 vote in the Democrat-majority House. All but two Republicans voted against it, joined by a handful of Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the bill a “crucial step in our ongoing fight against the deadly epidemic of gun violence in our nation”.
It would ban the sale, import, manufacture or transfer of certain semi-automatic weapons.
President Joe Biden hailed the House vote, saying: “The majority of the American people agree with this common sense action.” He urged the Senate, split 50-50 between each party, to “move quickly to get this bill to my desk” but the measure is not expected to get the approval it needs to become law.
Congress placed restrictions on the manufacture and sale of assault weapons in 1994, but the legislation expired 10 years later after politicians were unable to muster the support to counter the gun lobby.
The Biden administration said that while the ban was in place, mass shootings declined.
“When the ban expired in 2004, mass shootings tripled,” the statement said. Assault rifles have emerged as the weapon of choice among the young men responsible for many of the country’s most devastating gun attacks.
Changing mood
The latest effort at gun control follows two mass shootings in May that shocked the country – the shooting of 10 African Americans at a supermarket in Buffalo by a white supremacist, and the murder of 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, by an 18-year-old gunman.
Still, in the debate ahead of the vote, Republicans dismissed the legislation as an election-year strategy by Democrats, and stood firmly against limits on gun ownership.
“It’s a gun grab, pure and simple,” Guy Reschenthaler, a Republican from Pennsylvania told the House.
Andrew Clyde, a Republican from Georgia said: “An armed America is a safe and free America.”
Democrats argued the ban on the weapons made sense, portraying Republicans as extreme and out of step with a changing national mood.
Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said the weapons ban was not about taking away constitutional rights but ensuring that children also have the right “to not get shot in school”.
Congress passed a modest gun violence prevention package last month in the wake of Uvalde, with measures including expanded background checks on young adults buying firearms, and allowing authorities to access certain juvenile records.
That bipartisan bill was the first of its kind after years of failed efforts to confront the gun lobby.
A House committee, in a report released this week, said US gunmakers had earned $1bn in the past 10 years from sales of AR-15-style semi-automatic weapons.
“The gun industry has flooded our neighbourhoods, our schools and even our churches and synagogues with these deadly weapons and has gotten rich doing it,” Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat, said at a hearing attended by relatives of victims of gun violence.
“They are choosing their bottom line over the lives of their fellow Americans.”
Henry Cuellar. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Daily Beast)
Henry Cuellar, the conservative, antiabortion Democratic congressman — who Nancy Pelosi called a “fighter for hardworking families” — has shocked the labor movement with a radical bill seeking to eviscerate workers’ rights.
Cuellar’s bill bears a gaslighting moniker: the Worker Flexibility and Choice Act — joining the Clear Skies Act and the Class Action Fairness Act in the annals of bills whose names are the exact opposite of their actual intent.
Cosponsored with Trumpian Republican Congresswomen Elise Stefanik and Michelle Steel, the bill creates whole new ways for employers to get out of paying minimum wage and overtime, extending the gig economy’s stress and chaos to millions more workers. As employment law professor Veena Dubal of University of California Hastings Law put it on Twitter, this bill would “make earning a living nearly impossible” for workers without bargaining power.
Cuellar, who represents Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District, gets significant funding from Koch organizations. That’s not surprising, since he’s been working to destroy Americans’ already fragile workplace rights for years. The scandal is that the Democratic national leadership fought hard to help him get elected. They did this not in a general election — against a Republican who might well have been even worse — but in a primary against a challenger, Jessica Cisneros, an immigration rights lawyer backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Justice Democrats.
What’s even more confounding is that the Democratic leadership knew what they were getting with Cuellar. Not only is he the most antichoice Democrat in the federal government, as well as a favorite of the fossil fuel industry — Cuellar has made no secret of his anti-labor politics. Last year, Cuellar voted against the PRO Act, which would have made it easier for workers to organize unions.
Cisneros supported the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and the PRO Act. Sensibly, the most anti-worker forces lined up behind Cuellar, including the US Chamber of Commerce. Joining them were Nancy Pelosi, Jim Clyburn, Hakeem Jeffries, and Steny Hoyer.
Although unions too often back centrist incumbents over left challengers who are better on labor issues, this was not the case in Cuellar’s race against Cisneros. Even organized labor, not always the savviest critics of the Democratic establishment, knew Cuellar was bad news. This was Cisneros’s second challenge to Cuellar, and in the last two primary cycles, the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union backed Cisneros, as did progressive groups with labor backing, like the Working Families Party. This year, labor was especially incensed by his opposition to the PRO Act. The Texas AFL-CIO supported Cisneros. Other unions supporting her included the United Farm Workers, National Nurses United, and, on the local level, United Steelworkers District 13, UNITE HERE Local 23, and the San Antonio AFL-CIO Central Labor Council.
This loud and unified labor veto of Henry Cuellar didn’t sway the Democratic establishment. Although principled liberals like Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and Julian Castro joined Bernie Sanders and AOC in backing Cisneros, House leaders were willing to throw abortion rights, the environment, and even labor under the bus just to avoid expanding the Squad and prevent another Berniecrat from joining Congress.
The Democratic leadership proved that they didn’t care about workers in this race. Despite organized labor’s clear rejection of Henry Cuellar, and his own equally clear rejection of workers’ interests with his PRO Act vote, they not only endorsed him but worked extra hard for him. Nancy Pelosi continued to defend him as a “valued member of our caucus,” while distancing herself from his abortion position. Pelosi even recorded a robocall for him, calling Cuellar a “fighter for hardworking families.” House majority leader Steny Hoyer also stood up for Cuellar. House Democratic Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries, when asked, changed the subject back to himself and his own record. (House leaders did not have to defend Cuellar’s anti-labor politics to the press because, disgracefully, they weren’t asked about that.) House majority whip Jim Clyburn flew to Texas to campaign and rally with Cuellar against Cisneros days after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked.
Clyburn at the time said the party shouldn’t have “litmus tests” on abortion. This labor bill — and Cuellar’s anti-labor history — highlights the deceptive absurdity of such statements: candidates with reactionary abortion politics are almost always reactionary on labor issues, too, and Cuellar is no exception.
Cuellar’s bill is backed by an unsavory anti-worker lobbying group called the Center for Workforce Innovation (CWI), whose whole strategy is to strip as many workers as possible of labor rights by defining them as independent contractors. The group’s members are large retail, trucking, tech, telecom, and construction companies, including some of the worst employers in America, like Amazon, Walmart, Uber, and DoorDash. The CWI’s agenda is a radical assault on the legal concepts underlying employee protection, chillingly parallel to the Supreme Court’s recent napalming of reproductive choice, the environment, and voting rights. Cuellar’s bill would give the CWI much of what they are seeking, and the group has only been around since 2019.
Cuellar only beat Cisneros by 289 votes, so every bit of support from the Democratic establishment helped. It’s the Democratic leadership’s fault that he’s in office, not only standing in the way of legislation protecting women’s reproductive freedom but also eviscerating everyone’s rights on the job. Pelosi, Hoyer, and Clyburn should face career-threatening pressure to support the pro-worker candidate next time.
It's time to remove the Old Dinosaurs from office!
If they represent you, please contact them & speak out.
THE ANTI-DEMOCRACY VILLAINS WHO BETRAYED VOTERS & DESTROYED THEIR LEGACY:
US Chamber of Commerce. Joining them were Nancy Pelosi (CA), Jim Clyburn (SC), Hakeem Jeffries (NY), and Steny Hoyer (MD)
There's always a KOCH connection:
Cuellar, who represents Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District, gets significant funding from Koch organizations.
A prisoner. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
As tens of millions of people in the United States live under heat alerts this summer, we look at conditions faced by those in prisons and jails with poor cooling systems and lack of access to running water. “Although heat has been an ongoing issue in Texas, this year it’s exacerbated by a staffing crisis that’s been years in the making,” says Keri Blakinger, the first formerly incarcerated reporter for The Marshall Project. “This is a drastically underappreciated problem,” adds Dr. Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services.
As tens of millions in the United States live under heat alerts this week, we look at conditions faced by those in prisons and jails. Here in New York, two city councilmembers made an unannounced visit Monday to the Rikers Island prison complex and called it a “hellhole.” Tiffany Cabán’s district includes Rikers, and in a statement she described, quote, “New Yorker after New Yorker languishing in Intake for day after day with no air conditioning in the middle of a severe heatwave … and generally a persistent wave of what in the outside world would be seen as an emergency taking a week or two to address inside the facility.”
In the Pacific Northwest, a heat wave pushed temperatures in some areas above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. This is an immigrant held at the Northwest Detention Center, run by the private prison company GEO Group, in Tacoma, Washington, speaking to Maru Mora Villalpando of the immigration justice group La Resistencia.
IMMIGRANT DETAINEE: [translated] Right now it feels very hot. And the guards don’t want to switch the hours we go out to the yard. They take us out at 2:00, noon, 1:00, during the times when it’s extremely hot. … There is no shade, and they leave us out there for an hour.
MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: [translated] And when you go back inside, do the guards give you water?
IMMIGRANT DETAINEE: [translated] No, not at all.
MARU MORA VILLALPANDO: [translated] What if you ask them for water?
IMMIGRANT DETAINEE: [translated] There’s a water fountain outside, but the water comes out very hot. If we want to take a shower or freshen up, the water in the bathrooms and the shower comes out boiling hot.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as a new report by the Texas Prisons Community Advocates and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University finds 13 states do not have universal air conditioning in state prisons. This includes Texas, where most prisons are not fully air-conditioned. One Texas prisoner described the environment of extreme heat and the COVID-19 pandemic as a “living hell.”
For more, we’re joined from Austin, Texas, by Keri Blakinger, investigative reporter based in Texas covering criminal justice and injustice for The Marshall Project, where she’s their first formerly incarcerated reporter. We just interviewed her on her new memoir called Corrections in Ink. And she’s been documenting conditions during this latest heat wave.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Keri. What have you found?
KERI BLAKINGER: One of the things that was different this year is that, first of all, Texas prisons are far more understaffed than they have been in the past, so some of the basic things that would be done to mitigate the heat in past years aren’t available necessarily this year. There aren’t necessarily enough staff on hand to be letting people out for showers as much or letting them outdoors as much or, you know, doing things like providing ice and things like that. So, although heat has been an ongoing issue in Texas, this year it’s exacerbated by a staffing crisis that’s been years in the making.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about what that means, both when you don’t have enough staff — and give us examples in different prisons. I mean, we’re not talking about someone who can go take a cold shower whenever they want to. We’re not talking about someone who can move from, what, three-digit temperatures, over a 100-degree temperature, to a cooler place. These are incarcerated people.
KERI BLAKINGER: Right. And, you know, they’re stuck in their cells. And it’s been bad enough that this year I’ve actually had staff reaching out to me, giving me tips that — their tip is simply that they’re concerned about the prisoners. There was one who called me the other day and said that, you know, she had this hot tip for me. And her tip was “it’s inhumane.” Like, that was it. She just wanted to say it was inhumane, the way that the prisoners are being stuck in these conditions.
And I know that when I’m asked about this a lot of times, I’ll have people say, “Oh, well, there’s a lot of schools that aren’t air-conditioned.” And obviously, that’s significantly different. And I think that when people think about incarcerated people in the context of heat, a lot of people like to just sort blow that off as if it’s a frill, some extra offering, to give people air conditioning. But it is deadly. Twenty-three people have been documented to have died in Texas prisons since 1998 due to heat-related illnesses. And that’s almost certainly an undercount.
AMY GOODMAN: You tweeted this week about a facility in Gatesville, Texas, where the water went out for at least two days, while the temperature, the air temperature, was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Talk about this.
KERI BLAKINGER: Yeah, sure. A lot of our prisons are aging, and the infrastructure is aging, and some of them are in cities that don’t have great infrastructure to begin with. So it’s not uncommon for water to be going out in these facilities. But it’s alarming when it happens during such a heat wave.
And in Gatesville, the water — the city had a water main problem, and so one of the prisons, Hughes Unit, ended up with no water for about two days. And TDCJ, the Texas prison system, brought in water tankers and portable toilets and water. But this happens repeatedly. And every time that happens, afterwards, you know, we hear stories from incarcerated people about how they weren’t able to actually get access to enough water, or they weren’t actually being let out to use the toilets. So, you know, this is a solution that’s certainly better than nothing but has still historically been problematic.
And, you know, the other piece of it, when you have a city water outage like that, is that there’s usually a boil water notice during or after. And the other units in Gatesville, because there are several prisons in Gatesville, all had boil water notices, but no means to boil water.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in our other guest, Dr. Homer Venters, who is a physician, former chief medical officer for New York City’s Correctional Health Services. In a moment, we’re going to talk about monkeypox. But your response, as you travel this country and investigate prisons, on this issue of the heat wave?
DR. HOMER VENTERS: Yeah, I think — first of all, thank you for having me. Thrilled to be on with both of you.
This is a drastically underappreciated problem. And one of the most basic tools, which is to understand who are the heat-sensitive people who are in a jail or a prison or detention center, is almost never undertaken. So, when it gets over 85 degrees in a living space, the risk of death and serious illness from that high heat condition is different. But the medical staff, the medical services in these places know who are the people that are more likely to die or get sick. And they almost never identify people as being heat sensitive and focus on making sure they are OK, get them into air-conditioned settings. So, this is a problem all over the country as more and more places that historically don’t have high heat days do and aren’t prepared to take the mitigation efforts, on top of the long-standing problems in places that Keri was just talking about.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank Keri Blakinger for being with us. Again, her new book is called Corrections in Ink. She’s the first formerly incarcerated reporter at The Marshall Project.
A girl walks through the internally displaced persons' camp in Raan, northeastern Nigeria, months after a deadly airstrike. (photo: Stefan Heunis/AFP/Getty Images)
The 2017 bombing of a displaced persons’ camp was termed a “U.S.-Nigerian” operation, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.
A surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp, which housed 43,000 people and was controlled by the Nigerian military, before a jet arrived and bombed the area where people draw water from a borehole, survivors of the attack said. The jet then circled and dropped another bomb on the tents of displaced civilians sheltering there.
The Nigerian air force expressed regret for carrying out the airstrike, which also killed nine aid workers and seriously wounded more than 120 people. But the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.
Evidence suggests that the U.S. launched a near unprecedented internal investigation of the attack because it secretly provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian armed forces, a contribution hinted at by Nigerian military officials at the time. The U.S. inquiry, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was ordered by the top American general overseeing troops in Africa and was specifically designed to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendations for disciplinary action, according to the document.
Conducted as part of a long-running counterinsurgency campaign against the terrorist group Boko Haram, the January 17, 2017, attack on the camp, located in Rann, Nigeria, near the Cameroonian and Chadian borders, also destroyed at least 35 structures, including shelters for war victims who had been forced from their homes.
The Nigerian Air Force bombed the internally displaced persons’ camp — which had been set up by the Nigerian military — because “the location was not reflected in the operational map as a humanitarian base,” according to Maj. Gen. John Enenche, Nigeria’s director of defense information. “Hence, it appeared as a place that could equally be used for enemy activities.”
Nigerian human rights activists questioned how the military could be unaware of the camp and alleged a cover-up. The tents were visible from the air, according to satellite imagery. Last year, Agnès Callamard — then-United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions — noted the absurdity of the strike. “The military presence in Rann, its role in establishing the camp and their facilitation of the humanitarian distribution on the day, raise many questions,” she wrote in a 2021 report. “No independent investigation was carried out.”
Just days after the attack, U.S. Africa Command secretly commissioned Brig. Gen. Frank J. Stokes to undertake an “investigation to determine the facts and circumstances of a kinetic air strike (‘strike’) conducted by Nigerian military forces in the vicinity of Rann, Nigeria.” Its findings were never made public.
AFRICOM did not answer The Intercept’s questions about the results of Stokes’s investigation or the extent of U.S. involvement in the attack.
“Civilian victims, and the American and Nigerian publics, deserve answers about any U.S. role in this devastating strike” said Annie Shiel, senior adviser for the United States at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC. “What exactly was the United States’s involvement? What were the findings of the investigation — including findings of wrongdoing — and what kind of responsibility does the U.S. acknowledge for the grave harm caused?”
The formerly secret document directed Stokes — deputy director of AFRICOM’s directorate for strategy, engagements, and programs — to be “sensitive” regarding the assessment of materials “maintained within special access programs,” often referred to as SAPs. Sometimes called “black programs,” SAPs are highly classified with strictly enforced security measures and need-to-know access requirements. Certain SAPs are unacknowledged: their funding hidden within the federal budget and their existence formally denied.
Spokesperson Kelly Cahalan said that AFRICOM “was not involved” in the bombing of the Rann IDP camp, but secret and low-profile programs on the African continent can be carried out by the CIA or Special Operations forces under their own chains of command. While AFRICOM takes responsibility for drone strikes, for example, they are generally carried out by a Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, task force.
Retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, chief of Special Operations Command Africa at the time of the Rann strike, told The Intercept in 2018 that although JSOC was required to coordinate and deconflict through his headquarters, that didn’t always happen. “I get a phone call and someone will say, ‘What are you doing in that area when we weren’t aware you were there?’ and I’ll say, ‘I wasn’t in that area, so I don’t know,’” Bolduc said at the time. “Later, you come to find out it was a JSOC element doing something. That undermines trust. It’s not a good thing.”
U.S. surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations have often been employed near Nigeria, including a Predator drone flown from neighboring Chad, in addition to a longer-range Global Hawk and a manned, turbo prop plane, deployed over Nigeria beginning in 2014, ostensibly to search for children kidnapped by Boko Haram.
In neighboring Niger, the U.S. flew drones from bases in Dirkou and Niamey. In 2016, The Intercept reported on a secretive drone base in Garoua, Cameroon, near the Nigerian border, employing drones which could carry out 24-hour surveillance, allowing “U.S. intelligence analysts to gather detailed information about Boko Haram’s movements, bomb-making factories, and military camps.” Also mentioned were British, French, and U.S. intelligence units — based in Abuja, Nigeria; Maroua, Cameroon; and N’Djamena, Chad — serving as “clearinghouses for intelligence about Boko Haram.”
That same year, the process by which the U.S. provided information — like aerial surveillance photos — to aid Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram was streamlined from as many as two weeks to one hour, the New York Times reported, specifically noting that “drone photos” were provided to the Nigerian army. In 2017, The Intercept also revealed the existence of a drone base and torture center used by U.S. contractors in Salak, Cameroon, in the northern border region between Nigeria and Chad.
Cahalan, the spokesperson, insisted that AFRICOM had no “additional information” on the Rann airstrike but did not respond to a question of how this was possible given that then-AFRICOM commander, Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, had ordered a top AFRICOM officer to conduct a formal investigation that included “gathering accounts of the strike or information … from witnesses,” inspecting documents, and collecting “information which will support any subsequent reviews of the strike … and shape the manner in which any future coalition or partner nation operations are conducted.”
Redactions to the document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, make it impossible to ascertain the full extent of U.S. involvement in the 2017 airstrike, but Stokes’s official instructions suggest that the U.S. provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian military. “You will gather and preserve any background information that is relevant to a complete understanding of U.S.-Nigerian operations such as this strike,” reads the document. Stokes’s mandate included an inquiry into how the U.S. shares information with Nigeria’s military, protocols concerning its use, and “after action reporting procedures when shared information is used in a strike (e.g., battle damage assessment reports).”
The formal investigation of an African partner’s airstrike was rare, if not unprecedented, and indicates this was no ordinary Nigerian bombing gone wrong. A former Pentagon official with expertise in investigations of civilian casualty incidents, who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, said that he had never encountered a U.S. investigation of an ally’s airstrike.
In a 2017 special investigative project for Nigeria’s The Cable — a news outlet supported by the MacArthur Foundation — journalist Mayowa Tijani reported that the regional military commander, Gen. Lucky Irabor (now Nigeria’s defense chief), “admitted that he ordered the attacks in Rann, based on intelligence received.” While Irabor did not disclose the source of the intelligence, Tijani wrote that a “senior military source” suggested it had originated with “one of the powerful countries in the west.”
“It’s vitally important that the U.S. acknowledge and reckon with civilian harm caused in partnered operations,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and former legal adviser to the State Department, told The Intercept. “If U.S. forces were partnered with Nigerian forces or provided concrete operational support, they could have reason to be concerned about this strike.”
Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed how U.S. targeting assessments carried out for another allied military led to a 2015 airstrike on an ISIS bomb factory in Hawija, Iraq, that touched off secondary explosions, killing at least 85 civilians. In the wake of that Dutch airstrike, the chief of targets for U.S. Central Command insisted that the attack had been conducted by the book, including the pre-strike “collateral damage estimate,” or CDE. “This was a perfectly accurate CDE call,” he insisted, emphasizing that “CDE Methodology does not account for secondary explosions.”
No Americans were held accountable for the civilian deaths in the Hawija strike, in keeping with a litany of attacks from Somalia to Libya and from Syria to Yemen that the Pentagon has failed to investigate or reinvestigate despite civilian casualty allegations. Earlier this year, Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., asked whether the Defense Department was planning to revisit civilian harm allegations for cases in which new evidence has come to light.
“At this point,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin replied, “we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases.” (Austin is soon expected to sign a long-awaited Memorandum on Improving Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response which he ordered in the wake of civilian casualty scandals that buffeted the Pentagon last year.)
Regarding the Nigerian attack on the IDP camp, Stokes was instructed not to focus “on any person or organization which took part in this strike” nor to “make recommendations as to any disciplinary actions to be taken.” He was also officially handcuffed in terms of accountability. “You do not have any authority to compel potentially incriminating evidence from any Service member, civilian employee of the U.S., contractor personnel supporting U.S. operations, or foreign military personnel,” reads his mandate.
Prior to the airstrike on the Rann camp, during the Obama administration, the U.S. prevented Nigeria from buying attack aircraft due to concerns about the country’s human rights record. Less than a month after the bombing — and five days after Stokes was to have submitted his findings — President Donald Trump spoke with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and “expressed support for the sale of aircraft from the United States to support Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram,” according to a White House readout of the telephone call.
Later that year, the U.S. agreed to sell Nigeria 12 Super Tucano warplanes, including thousands of bombs and rockets, for $593 million, then the largest U.S. foreign military sale in sub-Saharan Africa. “These new aircraft will improve Nigeria’s ability to target terrorists and protect civilians,” Trump said during a 2018 White House meeting with Buhari.
“The timeline is striking,” Lauren Woods, director of the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, told The Intercept. “The strike on the IDP camp happened in January 2017, and already by August of the same year, the U.S. government had approved the sale of more aircraft — the Super Tucano aircraft and weapons — to the Nigerian government.”
Neither the weapons sales nor the killing of civilians were Trump-era anomalies. In April 2021, a Nigerian military helicopter reportedly launched indiscriminate attacks on homes, farms, and a school in an effort to strike at “bandits.” Last September, following an initial denial, the Nigerian Air Force admitted that it attacked a village in Yobe State, killing 10 civilians and injuring another 20. But this spring, the U.S. approved a possible $1 billion sale of 12 attack helicopters and related training and equipment to Nigeria.
“As the U.S. continues to deepen its security assistance to Nigeria, including through recent weapons sales, we also need far more transparency about what steps have been taken to prevent and respond to civilian harm using U.S. assistance,” said CIVIC’s Shiel. “So far, the U.S. government hasn’t provided satisfying answers. Congress should demand these answers publicly.”
This February, a Nigerian Air Force attack on more “bandits” just over the border in Niger reportedly killed 12 civilians, seven of them children. Earlier this month, the Nigerian Air Force also bombed civilians in Kakuna village, killing at least one person and injuring 13 others.
“The tragic Rann event, and more contemporary air strikes, underscore the need for the Nigerian armed forces to improve their targeting and air-ground coordination for air strikes to prevent civilian casualties,” said Will Meeker, Africa director at CIVIC. “CIVIC encourages the armed forces to adopt practices to mitigate, track, and respond to civilian harm, including by providing amends to the victims and their families.”
Despite a 20-year security partnership, during which the U.S. has armed and trained Nigerian troops, the West African country’s security forces have failed to defeat Boko Haram, which they’ve been fighting since 2009; an Islamic State affiliate; and various militarized “bandit” groups. The Nigerian military has also routinely committed grave human rights abuses, according to a report issued earlier this year by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, and InterAction.
“Nigeria has faced multiple setbacks in the last year, as ISIS-West Africa continues to confront security forces, seize materiel — including armored vehicles, weapons, and ammunition — and expand its operational reach,” incoming AFRICOM Commander Lt. Gen. Michael Langley recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “This has strained the Nigerian military’s readiness and capabilities.” Around 350,000 civilians have died as a result of the conflict in northeastern Nigeria.
Ryan Essman, deputy spokesperson at the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, said the U.S. “routinely engages with the Armed Forces of Nigeria to actively reinforce civilian protection and human rights practices through our security force professionalization efforts that seek to create a modern and effective force.” But the State Department’s most recent human rights assessment found credible reports of unlawful and arbitrary killings, forced disappearances, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, among many other crimes, by the Nigerian government.
Essman also insisted that the U.S. “was not involved” in the 2017 Rann bombing.
Exactly how many people were killed in the bombing remains unknown. Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur, was provided a list with the names of 127 victims, two-thirds of them children. Witnesses involved in the burial say 167 victims were interred in Rann cemetery, while a local government official put the number at 236 dead.
Witnesses described finding large numbers of ball bearings following the bombing. Photos of the dead and wounded, according to Callamard’s report, also “showed both massive and smaller wounds, consistent with firing of ball bearings-based ammunitions.” The allegations that such munitions were used are “extremely serious,” Callamard noted, and “should have been independently investigated.”
Experts say the U.S. government needs to come clean about its involvement in the Rann airstrike — and other similar instances around the world that the U.S. may be keeping secret.
“I think this example raises the question of, when the U.S. provides weapons and equipment that can be used for attacks, and when it provides intelligence that inform those attacks, what responsibilities should it have to make sure those capabilities and that information is used responsibly and carefully?” the former Pentagon official told The Intercept. “The U.S. provides more arms internationally than anyone and we provide training and advising on their use, but we still provide very little advisory support or capabilities to help partners to avoid harm to civilians.”
An indigenous anti-pipeline protest in Canada. (photo: Getty Images)
Internal documents explain why oil and gas interests would benefit from a key Indigenous declaration being ‘defeated.’
The Atlas Network partnered with an Ottawa-based think tank — the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — which enlisted pro-industry Indigenous representatives in its campaign to provide “a shield against opponents.”
Atlas, which has deep ties to conservative politicians and oil and gas producers, claimed success in reports in 2018 and 2020, arguing its partner was able to discourage the Canadian government from supporting a United Nations declaration that would ensure greater involvement by Indigenous communities.
The Canadian Parliament did eventually pass the legislation to begin implementing the declaration in 2021, but observers say the government has made little progress to move it forward.
Meanwhile, Indigenous groups linked to the Macdonald-Laurier Institutes’s campaign — including the Indian Resource Council — continue to appear at conferences, testify to federal committees, and get quoted in major media outlets to push the view that Indigenous prosperity is virtually impossible without oil and gas.
Hayden King, executive director of the Toronto-based Indigenous public policy think tank Yellowhead Institute, called the campaign “a contemporary expression of the type of imperialism that Indigenous peoples have been dealing with here for many, many years.”
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute directed questions about the reports to the Atlas Network, which did not respond to requests for comment.
The Atlas Network calls itself a “worldwide freedom movement” and has nearly 500 partners, including think tanks like the Manhattan Institute. Other powerful partners include the Cato Institute, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977, as well as the Heritage Foundation, which hosted a keynote speech by Donald Trump in April. Their influence on U.S. politics includes leading campaigns to make Americans doubt if human-caused climate change is real.
Atlas members have helped influence the views of Republican politicians, including George W. Bush. The Arlington, Virginia-based organization — which received more than one million dollars from the oil company ExxonMobil through 2012 and $745,000 from foundations linked to the Koch brothers through 2018, according to watchdog groups — has also exerted significant influence on conservative politics in the U.K. and Latin America.
Bob Neubauer, a researcher with a Canadian oil and gas watchdog organization known as the Corporate Mapping Project, said Atlas includes “a very significant number of the most influential right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations on the planet.”
“It should make people nervous,” he added.
Atlas and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute have for years been pushing back against attempts by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, a declaration Canada endorsed more than a decade ago. That could have codified Indigenous rights to reject pipelines or drilling, the Atlas Network feared, according to their strategy documents, which were shared with Floodlight by an investigative climate research organization called DeSmog.
That’s because the treaty contains clauses affirming Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over territories they’ve lived on for thousands of years. Implementing it would potentially make it harder for extraction companies to operate on those territories. At stake, the report explains, were Canada’s “monumental reserves of natural gas, hydroelectricity, potash, uranium, oil, and other natural resources.”
In recent years the Atlas Network has deepened its connections to Canada, setting up a Center for U.S. and Canada that “works with local civil society organizations on both sides of the border to create positive perceptions of the role of free enterprise and individual liberty,” according to its website.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is one of roughly a dozen Atlas Network partner organizations in Canada. It’s a relatively new organization, formed only in 2010, but its board members and advisors come from some of the top lobbying, legal, and financial firms in the country.
In 2018, the Atlas Network created a 13-page “think tank impact case study” report about a campaign being led by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute called the “Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy Project.” Atlas wanted to highlight this project at a training academy for its partners around the world.
The report is no longer accessible on the Atlas Network website but was recovered by DeSmog on an internet archive called the Wayback Machine.
“The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, its staff, and the authors affiliated with the Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy project were the only entities that worked on that project,” institute spokesperson Brett Byers wrote in an email.
“Questions regarding the content, nature, or interpretation of a report published by the Atlas Network are better directed toward the Atlas Network,” he added. The Atlas Network didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about its involvement.
The report claims that this project was started “at the behest of the Assembly of First Nations,” a national advocacy group for Canada’s Indigenous peoples, which “saw potential in the natural resource economy as a major driver of transformation in Indigenous opportunity.” The Assembly didn’t respond to a media request asking if this is accurate.
The Atlas report notes that a prime objective of this collaboration was removing barriers to the production of fossil fuels. It explains that as political momentum began building in 2016 for Canada to implement the U.N. declaration, this “concerned the team” at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
That was because the U.N. declaration contains a clause stating that Indigenous peoples have the right to give “Free, Prior, and Informed Consent” before governments make decisions that could have a large material impact on their traditional territories.
Some legal experts see this as a reasonable way to ensure that Indigenous communities are equal partners in decision-making. But the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Atlas Network appeared to interpret this to mean that those communities could effectively veto new oil pipelines, fracking operations, and other resource extraction projects.
“It is difficult to overstate the legal and economic disruptions that may have followed from such a step,” the report continued.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute with the support of Atlas embarked on “a sophisticated communications and outreach strategy to persuade the government, businesses, and Aboriginal communities on the dangers involved with fully adopting UNDRIP,” the report says.
Early success came that November, when then-Canadian minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, who is is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation, “offered her support to [the institute’s] view.” The report was referring to a 2016 speech where she said that fully implementing UNDRIP would be “unworkable,” creating doubt about the government’s commitment.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s “experts are always in regular communication with MPs, ministers, and government officials,” Byers wrote. Wilson-Raybould didn’t respond to a media request.
Meanwhile, an opposition party member introduced a new bill meant to enshrine UNDRIP in law. This effort slowly gained momentum and political support, but when the bill ended up before Canada’s Senate for approval in 2019, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute scholar named Dwight Newman submitted written comments that the legislation’s inclusion of “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” could “have enormous implications for Canada.”
“The bill was ultimately defeated,” Atlas explains on its website.
“There could be some truth to that,” said King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation. “The bill died in the Senate because Conservative senators delayed and basically filibustered the legislation.” And one of the senators accused of filibustering, Don Plett, quoted at length from a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report during a Senate debate about UNDRIP.
This was seen as a major victory by Atlas, which appears to have provided funding for the campaign. “Atlas Network supported this initiative with a Poverty & Freedom grant,” notes a 2020 document on the Atlas website. That document also identified First Nations allies “working directly” on the campaign, such as the Indian Resource Council and the First Nations Major Projects Coalition.
“That is inaccurate,” wrote a spokesperson for the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, referencing 2018 testimony its vice-chair gave in support of UNDRIP.
When the Trudeau government made yet another attempt to implement the U.N. declaration in 2021, Indian Resource Council president Stephen Buffalo told a standing senate committee that there should be language in the legislation preventing “special-interest groups” from being able to “weaponize” the declaration to block new pipelines.
“Whether or not you support the oil and gas industry, it is the right of the 131 nations of the Indian Resource Council of Canada to develop their resources as they see fit,” he said. The organization didn’t respond to a media request.
The Trudeau government successfully passed a bill starting the implementation of the declaration in June 2021. But it’s been a slow process since then. “There’s very little progress,” King said. “It’s bogged down in administrative morass.”
The Atlas Network appears to be moving into a new phase of advocacy. At a conference in Guatemala earlier this year, leaders “from freedom-minded organizations, many of them Atlas Network partners,” gathered to “sharpen their plans for the coming year.”
At this invitation-only event, Macdonald-Laurier Institute “workshopped a project to improve opportunities for native populations,” according to an Atlas Network write-up of the conference.
Macdonald-Laurier Institute wanted to apply what it has learned in Canada globally. “The goal of the project would be to promote Indigenous economic development across the world,” Byers wrote.
Dirty Energy works to undermine everyone's rights to control the Climate Crisis and destroy environments around the Globe.
There's always a KOCH connection that too many ignore, much of it concealed with dark money contributions to its tentacle of organizations.
The Arlington, Virginia-based organization — which received more than one million dollars from the oil company ExxonMobil through 2012 and $745,000 from foundations linked to the Koch brothers....
The Atlas Network calls itself a “worldwide freedom movement” and has nearly 500 partners, including think tanks like the Manhattan Institute. Other powerful partners include the Cato Institute, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977, as well as the Heritage Foundation, which hosted a keynote speech by Donald Trump in April. Their influence on U.S. politics includes leading campaigns to make Americans doubt if human-caused climate change is real.
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