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Trump never asked the FBI or the national guard to protect Congress. He rebuffed entreaties to end the crisis. That’s because he liked what he saw
“The mob was his people.” Trump never reached out to the military, the FBI, the defense department or the national guard to intervene. He rebuffed entreaties from Ivanka Trump, Mark Meadows and Pat Cipollone to end the downwardly spiraling situation.
Trump never walked to the press briefing room to say “enough”. He liked what he saw. His minions had taken matters into their own hands and brought Congress to a halt.
Trump struggled to record a message to disperse to his fans. He “loved” them; they were “special.” We heard this before. There were “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville.
Chillingly, the security detail assigned to the vice-president began to say “good-bye” to their families. If Mike Pence came to hang from makeshift gallows that was his problem. Trump thought he deserved it. Pence was his vice-president, he believed – with loyalty to him, not the US constitution. He was expendable.
The vice-president “folded,” he “screwed us,” according to the rioters. Trump’s tweet at 2.24pm blamed no one but his hapless running mate.
Sarah Matthews, Trump’s deputy press secretary, testified that her boss had given the rioters a “green light”. He “poured gasoline on a fire,” to use her words. “Rioters heard the president’s message”, to quote Rep Adam Kinzinger. In turn, they acted accordingly.
Senator Josh Hawley fled the Senate that day after earlier riling up the crowd with his outstretched arm and clenched fist. Cosplay can be dangerous to your health. Hawley reportedly harbors ambition for 2024.
The tumult of 6 January was not spontaneous. Trump knew that that the crowd was armed, but sought to accompany them to the Capitol. He wanted to obstruct the certification of the election with a phalanx behind him.
Carnage and destruction were OK. The ends justified all means.
Here, past was prelude. In 2016, Trump signaled that he might not accept the election’s results if they did not meet his expectations. As Covid descended in the spring of 2020, he began to refer to November’s upcoming ballot as rigged, months before a single vote had been cast. The events of 6 January horrify and shock, but they cannot be characterized as a surprise.
A recording of Steve Bannon evidenced that Trump’s reaction was premeditated. The prosecution has rested in his criminal case; he will not be taking the stand.
Trump’s standing slowly erodes, even as Trumpism retains its firm grip on Republicans. Hours before the committee’s eighth public hearing, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, announced that it would “suck” to nominate a presidential candidate who labored under criminal indictment. A poll of Michigan Republicans released earlier this week places Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, in a foot-race with the 45th president.
Still, the Republicans are no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln. On Tuesday, Maryland Republicans selected a novitiate of QAnon to be their gubernatorial candidate and a neo-confederate secessionist as their pick for state attorney general. Even as Trump loses altitude, the “Big Lie” – the false claim that he actually won the last presidential election – retains its vitality.
Also on Tuesday, Arizona Republicans censured Rusty Bowers, a Republican and leader in the state’s legislature, after he had testified last month before the committee and denied that Trump won Arizona. Fealty to “Dear Leader” remains a tribal litmus test.
Trump’s dream remains alive. That nightmare is now woven into America’s political tapestry. Our “very stable genius” continues to demand that state legislators undo the results of 2020 – as if they possess that power. This month, Robin Vos, speaker of Wisconsin’s state assembly, told of Trump recently asking him to do just that.
Beyond boosting DeSantis’s ambitions, the latest hearing won’t do anything to improve Republican chances of retaking the Senate. Despite inflation, rising crime and Joe Biden’s record-shattering unpopularity, Democrats are mild favorites to retain the upper chamber.
Trump’s antics exact a price. This was not the committee’s final hearing. After Labor Day, broadcasts will resume. The midterms will be less than two months away. By then, the justice department will likely be immersed in weighing whether to prosecute Donald J Trump.
Republicans have only DICTATORSHIP to offer beyond ending Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other socially beneficial program - just another Third World Country!
From Heather Cox Richardson:
Rising autocrats have declared democracy obsolete. They argue that popular government is too slow to respond to the rapid pace of the modern world, or that liberal democracy’s focus on individual rights undermines the traditional values that hold societies together, values like religion and ethnic or racial similarities. Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, whom the radical right supports so enthusiastically that he is speaking on August 4 in Texas at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has called for replacing liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which will explicitly not treat everyone equally and will rest power in a single political party.
In an attempt to slow Russia's advance, the foreign fighters were deployed to the village of Hryhorivka. (photo: Getty Images)
U.S. citizens Luke “Skywalker” Lucyszyn and Bryan Young were killed when they were ambushed during a special operation in eastern Ukraine, their commander said.
Ruslan Miroshnichenko, the foreign fighters’ commander, said Saturday that the Americans killed were Luke “Skywalker” Lucyszyn and Bryan Young. He said they were killed alongside Emile-Antoine Roy-Sirois of Canada and Edvard Selander Patrignani of Sweden on July 18.
The men were part of a special operations force within the Territorial Defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Miroshnichenko said. Their unit has been based near Siversk, a town in eastern Donetsk oblast that has been the target of Russia’s invasion force.
In an attempt to slow Russia’s advance, the foreign fighters were deployed to the village of Hryhorivka, two miles northeast of Siversk. There, Miroshnichenko said, “the guys were tasked to take their firing positions” and clear a ravine where Russian forces were working to cross a river.
“They did it successfully. But at the end of the mission they were ambushed by Russian tanks,” Miroshnichenko said. “The first shell injured Luke. Three guys, Edward, Emile, and Bryan, they immediately attempted to help Luke, to do first aid, and evacuate him from this spot. Then the second shell killed them all.”
The State Department spokesperson confirmed the deaths of the two Americans on Friday but did not name them. “We are in touch with the families and providing all possible consular assistance. Out of respect to the families during this difficult time, we have nothing further to add,” the spokesperson told POLITICO.
The Canadian and Swedish governments could not immediately be reached for comment.
Russian troops have used airpower, tanks, and heavy artillery to destroy entire cities and towns in their pursuit of capturing all of the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions, often referred to collectively as the Donbas. Siversk sits 20 miles north of the city of Bakhmut and along a highway that is key to moving troops and materiel to the front. Capturing those two places would give Russia’s army a significant foothold and control of roughly 80 percent of the Donetsk region.
The foreign fighters were dispatched to the area to reinforce Ukrainian troops and were tapped specifically because of their skills and experience, according to a situation report obtained by POLITICO that described the attack in more detail.
“We began preparations for clearing the ravine on the eastern outskirts of the Grigorovka village,” read the report, authored by a commander. “The preparation was carried out on the basis of the following information: At night, the enemy force crossed the river and entrenched themselves in a ravine, possibly digging in. There was a clear danger of creating a bridgehead and grouping a force to strike at the flank and rear of the grouping of our troops.”
“A group of professionals with relevant experience in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was created to carry out the task. Two scouts were checking the territory, they were supported by a machine gun and grenade launcher group in case of a combat encounter and the need to cover the departure of the reconnaissance group, as well as for the purpose of inflicting fire damage on the enemy.”
As the group pressed forward, the report said, “the cover group came under heavy mortar fire from enemy artillery of caliber 120 mm or more and cluster munitions.”
“Luke was wounded during the shelling. The rest of the group … provided appropriate first aid.”
“Taking advantage of the break between shelling, a decision was made to evacuate to the nearest shelter. During transportation, as a result of the direct impact of a tank shell, Brian, Edward, Emile, Luke received injuries incompatible with life.”
Another soldier named Finn, the report notes, “was injured in his left arm and leg.” Another soldier named Oskar “received numerous injuries [and] both moved to the evacuation point independently.”
Russian forces continued to bombard the group with heavy artillery “corrected by drones” for more than two hours, according to the report. Only several hours later did it ease up enough for a team to move in and recover the bodies of the foreign fighters.
The report said that at least six Russian tanks “were supported by 4 armored personnel carriers with up to 70 infantrymen.”
They were met by Ukrainian machine gunners and troops on armored vehicles who halted the Russian forces’ advance.
“As a result of two hours of intense fighting, the enemy retreated with heavy losses,” the report concluded.
In a post memorializing the four men, Miroshnichenko wrote: “Foreign volunteers are knowingly fighting this war against Mordor” — a term from the Tolkien books to describe Sauron’s evil realm that has been adopted in Ukraine to refer to Russia — “and I am honored to be their commander.”
“It hurts so much to lose the boys. Emotions are overwhelming and I can’t find the words right now for the post they deserve,” he continued. “I just want to say, they weren’t hiding, but they looked for every opportunity to be helpful, they all fully volunteered and did their combat duty on the front line till the end. Calmly and with honor. No pathos, like real soldiers.”
Miroshnichenko spoke to POLITICO from the city of Dnipro, where he said the men’s bodies had been taken. “I have to make sure the bodies of all my boys are repatriated,” he said.
Lucyszyn, an American of Ukrainian descent born in 1991, had worked as a police officer in the U.S., according to Miroshnichenko. “He had difficulty pronouncing his surname ‘Lucyszyn,’” he quipped, “but very much insisted on his Ukrainian roots: his grandmother had emigrated from Ukraine to the United States after World War II.”
Speaking about Lucyszyn’s call sign, Skywalker, Miroshnichenko said, “like in Star Wars, he challenged the Evil Empire itself on the side of the weaker but free.”
Miroshnichenko described Young, born in 1971, as an “American military man” who had been injured and moved to reserves. When the Russian invasion began, he decided to come to Ukraine because he “took an oath to protect the Free World.”
Sirois, Miroshnichenko said, was a paramedic with experience in the French Foreign Legion. Born in 1991, he recalled him “always smiling.”
Patrignani, born in 1994, had been a reserve lieutenant, economist and philosopher in Sweden who wanted to form “a platoon of Swedes,” according to Miroshnichenko.
POLITICO could not immediately reach the men’s families for comment.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy opened the doors for foreigners to come and fight for Ukraine in March when he announced the creation of an International Legion. Legion representatives told POLITICO Saturday that “thousands” of foreigners including “hundreds” of Americans streamed into Ukraine to join its fight against Russian invaders.
The Biden administration has repeatedly warned U.S. citizens about traveling to Ukraine and encouraged any of them in the country to leave immediately.
At least three other Americans have died since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. Two were killed in action. Two other U.S. citizens, Alexander Drueke and Andy Huynh, were captured by Russian forces while fighting in the eastern Kharkiv region and are currently in the custody of Russia-led forces in the occupied city of Donetsk.
'Kavanaugh's words could have come from the most ardent anti-Indian racist of a bygone era. Asserting state criminal jurisdiction over Native lands has been a primary tactic of legally eliminating Native people.' (photo: Samuel Corum/AFP/Getty Images)
In last month’s Oklahoma v Castro-Huerta, the court tore up centuries of legal precedent and Native sovereignty
Paradoxically, the court found that the very nation that waged wars of extermination and invasion against Native people also declared itself their sole guardian, protecting its “wards” from the “local ill feeling” of land-hungry whites flooding Native lands in the western states. And where the US constitution was lacking in language defining federal authority over Native nations, the court had invented it, for better or for worse.
That’s why the court affirmed in Kagama, like it has for nearly two centuries, that Indian country sat apart from states and was instead subject to congressional and federal authority. Put simply, states had no business in tribal affairs.
That decision and others like it – however imperfect and drenched in conquest they were – supposedly shielded Native people and their reservations from the arbitrary authority of states and hostile white settlers.
Last month, the supreme court tore up that decision and centuries of legal precedent with it. The 5-4 decision in Oklahoma v Castro-Huerta found that state governments have the right to prosecute non-Natives for crimes committed against tribal members on reservation lands. The decision weakens the effects of McGirt v Oklahoma, which found that most of eastern Oklahoma was still legally Indian Country, where many crimes were beyond the grasp of state law. But the court applied Castro-Huerta far beyond Oklahoma.
“A state has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country,” Brett Kavanaugh wrote, resting his argument on a false 10th amendment claim, which doesn’t authorize states to intervene in tribal affairs.
His words could have come from the most ardent anti-Indian racist of a bygone era. Asserting state criminal jurisdiction over Native lands has been a primary tactic of legally eliminating Native people. Chief Justice John Roberts’ court draws from a long tradition of violent conquest, going back to Cherokee removal in the 19th century and to the termination policies of the 20th.
The theory of state supremacy, supposedly enshrined in the final amendment of the Bill of Rights, has a sordid history of white supremacy and reactionary politics. The same reasoning found its way into the Dredd Scott decision in 1859 to keep Black people as white property in slave states. More recently, Kavanaugh cited the 10th amendment in his concurring opinion overturning Roe v Wade.
States, according to this extremist – and now dominant – view in the court, possess the authority to abolish and criminalize abortions, potentially curb voting rights and now abrogate treaties and redefine federal relations with Native nations.
Neil Gorsuch – who, like Kavanaugh, is a Trump-appointee and a proponent of the revanchist legal theory known as “originalism” – wrote the dissenting opinion for Castro-Huerta. “Unknown to anyone until today,” Gorsuch sarcastically wrote, “state law applied all along” to Indian country. While scathing in his rebuke, Gorsuch strangely didn’t touch Kavanaugh’s shaky 10th amendment claim.
State jurisdiction might seem like a trivial matter. But the very foundations of Indian law were forged in a tumultuous, and often violent, struggle between states and tribes.
In 1832, the Cherokee Nation sought legal relief against the invasion of their homelands by white settlers from the state of Georgia. The supreme court ruled in their favor in Worcester v Georgia, finding that states had no say in tribal affairs.
The decision was unequivocal in defining tribal sovereignty – the legal term for Native subjugation to Congress rather than states. Despite this protection, President Andrew Jackson did nothing to enforce it.
In 1838, troops with bayonets rounded up Cherokee families at dinner, men in the fields, and children at play. A “lawless rabble” followed on the soldiers’ heels to loot, pillage and burn – deracinating the Cherokee from the landscape and removing them to present-day Oklahoma.
“I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew,” a Georgia volunteer, later Confederate colonel, said.
Recalcitrant Indian hating, however, hardly subsided by the 20th century. A renewed push to end tribal sovereignty began at the end of the second world war with politicians from western states with large Indian reservations calling for an end of the “Indian problem”.
Congress passed termination bills in 1953. One law immediately extinguished federal recognition of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi and Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes, opening their lands for privatization. Another authorized states to assume criminal jurisdiction over Indian reservations. The results were devastating and in some cases irreversible.
Termination, argued the Lakota historian Edward Valandra, “made legal the overthrow of Native governments, the stealing of their lands and the extermination of Native Peoples and cultures”.
In the 1960s, a militant Red Power movement advocating treaty rights and sovereignty gained traction in the north-west during the so-called “fish wars”, resulting in violent, and sometimes deadly, clashes with white fishermen and state game wardens. The 1974 Boldt decision finally guaranteed Native fishing rights in the Pacific north-west.
Native movements weakened the termination agenda. Today, Native-led movements are the most confrontational arm of the climate justice movement. Opening Native lands for more state intervention and jurisdiction is backlash against the historic gains we’ve made as a people to protect our lands, sovereignty, and the future of this planet.
The supreme court ruling in Castro-Huerta has given termination a new life and is a foreboding sign for the court’s next term, when it will be deciding the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act in Brackeen v Haaland. The plaintiffs in that case are using tenth amendment claims and the arguments of terminationists that Native nations exist as race-based entities, not because of their treaty rights and inherent political sovereignty.
Conquest is the basis by which the supreme court has created law to dispossess and to protect Native nations. And it is time we move beyond the backwards, paternalistic legal paradigm that allows nine unelected judges in Washington DC to decide the fates and validity of the original people of this land, who have existed before the US constitution and the very states that try to destroy us.
While the Roe decision has inflamed many, the FEDERALIST FOLLIES have rendered numerous decisions that threatened the rights of others and before forming opinions, it's important to consider those decisions.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/21
Lists of United States Supreme Court cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases
A clinic escort outside WE Health Clinic in Duluth, Minn., awaits the arrival of patients, Thursday, July 7, 2022. The clinic escorts protect patients from protesters as they approach and enter the clinic. (photo: Derek Montgomery/AP)
Inside northern Minnesota’s only abortion clinic, patients from Wisconsin and Texas sit among Minnesotans
In the waiting room at WE Health Clinic in Duluth, patients from Wisconsin and Texas sit among Minnesotans — the leading edge of an expected uptick in out-of-state patients following the Supreme Court’s removal of the federal right to abortion.
“It’s just been really busy,” Laurie Casey, the executive director, said. “We’re trying to be as flexible as we can, especially with people coming out of state. A lot of our patients — even if they’re from Minnesota — travel one to three hours each way to get here. So we try to be as accommodating as we can.”
Even before Roe v. Wade was reversed, WE Health Clinic was the nearest abortion provider for some people in northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Today, the clinic’s employees are acutely aware of their state’s status as an island for legal abortion in the Upper Midwest. Abortion is now illegal or treated as such in Wisconsin and South Dakota. North Dakota is expected to follow suit in late July and Iowa’s Republican governor is asking the state courts to severely limit the procedure.
The clinic has raised its cap on patients from 16 to 20 on the one day a week when abortions are typically performed. Its staff try to schedule abortions on other days when necessary, and may set aside an additional half- or full day each week for abortion services.
“We haven’t overcome our capacity to serve patients yet. And we are working on efficiencies so that we’re ready if we do end up with a flood of patients,” said Dr. Judith Johnson, one of three doctors providing abortions at the clinic.
Johnson said the increased pressure began months before the Supreme Court decision, with inquiries from people in Texas and Oklahoma as those states introduced highly restrictive abortion bans.
The extra patient load at WE Health Clinic includes people who have struggled to get speedy appointments at some Minneapolis-area clinics, where five of the state’s seven abortion clinics are located, following the Supreme Court’s decision. The seventh clinic is in Rochester.
“The number of patients we serve has gone up, and the places they come from have gotten further away,” Johnson said.
And the clinic isn't able to help everyone who calls.
Cassidy Thompson, a patient educator and coordinator of the clinic’s volunteer patient escort program, recounted a call from a woman in Oklahoma who was “crying to me on the phone, saying, 'Can’t you help me? No other clinics can take me right now.'” That patient was hoping for a telehealth consultation that would allow her to stay in Oklahoma and still obtain a medication abortion from the clinic.
However, state law requires patients to have a Minnesota mailing address and to be physically in Minnesota when speaking with a doctor.
The “entire purpose of (my) career is to provide abortion care. And to tell someone we legitimately cannot help them with anything, and they are stuck with a forced pregnancy … is just a complete takeaway of power,” Thompson said. “If that would have been a Minnesota resident, we would’ve been able to give them an abortion, no problem.”
Most of the Minnesota patients at the clinic qualify for low-income assistance to help with the cost of an abortion, but it doesn’t cover the full cost of the procedure. Casey estimated that the clinic lost more than $60,000 last year by serving medical assistance patients, a deficit the clinic had to make up through fundraising and grants.
“A lot of doctors’ offices put caps on how many medical assistance patients they might see, but we don’t do that because we really want to provide for people that need it the most,” said Paulina Briggs, the lab supervisor and a patient educator at the clinic.
But out-of-state patients don’t qualify for Minnesota’s medical assistance program. Nor does the clinic help out-of-state patients with travel costs; it doesn’t have the resources, Casey said. All this contributes to financial strain for people traveling across state lines for abortion care.
“It’s just really sad to think about those people,” Briggs said. “Where they live is going to determine the kind of care that they’re going to get. And the people that are most in need of services are going to have the hardest time accessing it.”
Briggs said phones “have been crazy” with calls from people — including nurses, physician assistants and an attorney — wanting to volunteer, help or donate to the clinic, which also offers a range of non-abortion services such as birth control, and breast and cervical cancer screenings.
“The major challenge right now is just financial stability, making sure we have the financial resources to keep our clinic up and running,” Casey said. “It’s just really sad that when I started here in 1981, we didn’t have that many restrictive laws. And now we’ve just gone backwards.”
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz appears on Fox & Friends, 2019. (photo: Steven Ferdman/Getty Images)
The surprise union victories at Starbucks in recent months were an inspiration to millions around the United States. But Starbucks is now pulling out all the stops to engage in one of the most flagrant union-busting campaigns in recent memory.
Starbucks has almost nine thousand corporate-owned stores in the United States. It closes stores for all sorts of reasons. But the company just so happened to recently close sixteen stores for “safety” reasons, and has threatened that “there will be many more” in the midst of a successful union campaign.
Starbucks Workers United has now won two hundred elections over the past seven months, fifty-two of them unanimously. But it has also seen a ferocious and unlawful anti-union campaign. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has over two hundred open unfair labor practice cases against Starbucks, a number that most companies would take years to rack up, and Starbucks is currently facing a trial in which the NLRB says it committed over two hundred individual violations of labor law in Buffalo alone during the initial campaign last fall. Workers say Starbucks fired them, threatened them, spied on them, offered them unlawful benefits, and forced them to listen to hours and hours of group and individual anti-union meetings. And it closed stores.
The announcement of closures must be understood in the context of this anti-union crime wave. Workers already know that, individually and collectively, they risk negative consequences if they decide to organize. Starbucks’ anti-union campaign is based on fear and futility: fear of losing one’s jobs or benefits, fear of having your store closed, and the sense that even if workers vote to unionize, Starbucks will never give up its opposition to the union. This latest move by Starbucks HQ is intended to heighten that sense of fear and futility around organizing.
Closures Target Organizing Stores
To date, only about 3 percent of Starbucks stores have seen active organizing campaigns, but 30 percent of the stores slated for permanent closure allegedly have active union campaigns. Two of the five stores slated for closure in Seattle are unionized, and one store in Portland is awaiting its NLRB election, which is currently scheduled for its final day of business.
There’s no reason to doubt that Schultz would use the closures to send a message to workers who might be thinking of organizing. Workers at Starbucks stores have long raised concerns about safety issues rarely addressed by management. Workers who organize are also more likely to complain about unacceptable working conditions, such as health and safety issues.
Did Starbucks close the stores because of worker complaints? How many stores received worker complaints over safety concerns but were not closed? And why did Starbucks HQ not simply address the underlying issues instead of closing the stores?
Clearly Against the Law
The law is crystal clear that a company cannot close a workplace to send a message to workers in other outlets about organizing, and the NLRB will likely rule that Starbucks’ store closures are a violation of the federal law. The leading case in this vein is the 1965 Supreme Court decision Textile Workers Union of America v. Darlington Manufacturing Co. The court held that an employer is not engaged in an unfair labor practice when it permanently closes the entire business, even if the liquidation is motivated by vindictiveness toward a union, but a partial closing is an unfair labor practice under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act “if motivated by a purpose to chill unionism in any of the remaining plants of the single employer and if the employer may reasonably have foreseen that such closing would likely have that effect.”
Darlington closed one plant as a warning to workers organizing at another plant. The Court stated that a business justification for closing a facility, or going out of business, is a winning argument, even if motivated by anti-union animus — but not if closures create a chilling atmosphere around organizing among workers at other facilities.
Thus, if the decision were based solely on business considerations, Starbucks can close whatever stores it wants, but the NLRB can order it to continue operations in cases of unlawful closures. In the case of Starbucks’ recent announcement, the closures (and the announcement of many future closures in the works) will clearly have a chilling effect on workers considering unionizing. Fox Rothschild, a law firm that helps employers “thwart” union-organizing efforts, makes this clear: “An employer cannot close a facility due to union activity in order to inhibit unionization at other plants. . . . Where a decision to close is based on anti-union animus and aimed at employees at other locations, such a closing will be deemed to be unlawful.”
However, as always, the board’s processes are vulnerable to abuse by Starbucks and its union-avoidance law firm. If the NLRB were to rule against Starbucks and order it to reopen stores, considerations like dilatory tactics, appeals, and “proof of impossibility” could delay or even prevent enforcement. By then, the closures and threats of additional closures will already have served their purpose of scaring workers and disrupting the union campaign.
Attacking the Union With Store Closures
Starbucks HQ has repeatedly used store closures to disrupt the union campaign. Starbucks closed two unionizing stores during the initial organizing in Buffalo last fall. One of those stores, at Walden-Anderson, was changed into a “training center” for weeks, shortly after it petitioned for an NLRB election in September before reopening in November. At the time of the closure, it was the second-strongest union store in Buffalo.
But by November, the damage had been done.
Because of the impact of malicious closure, Walden-Anderson didn’t get its first NLRB election until March, which, against all odds, the union narrowly won. But this was followed by a recount with several additional votes. Because several ballots didn’t arrive in time, resulting in a tied vote with one vote contested, the NLRB subsequently ordered a revote, which also ended in a tied ballot with the outcome dependent on several challenged ballots.
When the history of the Starbucks campaign is finally written, the Walden-Anderson store will provide a case study in Starbucks’ wantonly unlawful union busting and the NLRB’s insufficient efforts to protect workers’ fair choice.
Starbucks also closed a second unionizing store, the Walden Galleria location, in Buffalo last fall, September 2, shortly after workers started organizing. In May, the Buffalo NLRB regional director ordered Starbucks to reopen the store in its sweeping complaint, listing over two hundred separate violations of federal labor law. Starbucks is contesting that decision before an administrative law judge, and likely also before the full NLRB, and the store remains closed. Starbucks also temporarily closed the Elmwood Village store during the organizing campaign, allegedly for “remodeling.” On December 9, Elmwood became the first ever store to vote to unionize with Starbucks Workers United. The Buffalo store closings were part of what workers say was Starbucks HQ’s all-hands-on-deck, desperate, egregious law-breaking effort to stop the campaign and make sure that it did not spread beyond Buffalo.
Prior to last week’s closure announcement, Starbucks also closed a unionized store in Ithaca, New York. In June, it announced the permanent closure of one of the three stores that had voted to unionize in Ithaca, the first town in the country in which Starbucks went entirely union, in early April. The actual letter on the closures was sent not from Starbucks but from Littler Mendelson lawyer Alan Model. It read, “Nice to meet you. This email is to let you know that today Starbucks will inform the College Ave. partners that it intends to permanently close the College Ave. store for business reasons.”
After voting 19-1 to unionize in April, workers at the Ithaca store (a busy store next to the Cornell campus) subsequently went on strike in protest against the long-standing problems with what workers say is a malfunctioning grease trap. Starbucks later used the grease trap issue— along with “staffing and attendance” issues, which workers say were a direct consequence of management cutting hours — as justification for closing the strongly pro-union store.
Other Starbucks stores have problematic grease traps — which are common occurrences and often easily remedied; YouTube has hundreds of videos on how to fix them — or other infrastructure issues that Starbucks could use as a justification for closing stores. Workers at several stores have complained about the infrastructure issues, and in many of these cases, Starbucks management has done nothing, which is the reason that many workers now believe that collective bargaining is the only way to address such problems.
Now, instead of fixing the underlying problems, Starbucks is closing the stores and sending a message to workers thinking of organizing: if your store has any problems that could justify Starbucks closing it down and you start organizing, you could be next. Thousands of stores likely fall into this category.
The Chilling Impact of Store Closures
Seattle and Portland have been strongholds for the union campaign. Starbucks is closely associated with the former, its hometown, and has done everything possible to undermine worker support for unionization there.
The flagship roastery in Seattle voted to unionize by 38-27 in April. Starbucks is still contesting the result, most recently claiming that the mail-in ballot had depressed turnout, even though two-thirds of the workers voted. In May, the company announced plans to restructure several stores in Seattle, combining the original store in Pike Place, the flagship store at 1st and Pike (where workers voted to unionize in June), and the store at 1st and University into a “Heritage Market.” Workers at the three stores were told to reapply for their jobs; many were unsuccessful or unable to make the application deadline.
Over the past few weeks, several unionized Seattle stores have engaged in strikes against unlawful union busting. Seattle workers view the five store closures in the city — including two unionized stores — as another unlawful union–busting tactic by an increasingly lawless company.
Starbucks HQ understands well what impact the threat of store closures will have on workers who are thinking of becoming involved in activism. Workers are already fearful of unlawful termination — over forty workers have been fired during the union campaign so far — and losing their benefits and wage increases. Now they will also fear that if they decide to organize, Starbucks management will find any excuse to close their store — because of “safety” reasons, because of a malfunctioning grease trap, or because of understaffing and scheduling issues. As one worker currently on strike at a unionized store near Boston University explained, “We are so understaffed, we’re being set up to fail every day.”
We don’t yet know what the outcome will be for the inspirational Starbucks Workers United campaign. But one thing is certain: Howard Schultz will now go down in infamy as one of the country’s most brutal, hypocritical, and egregious union busters.
Oseney da Costa de Oliveira, is led out a courthouse by military and civil police officers in Atalia do Norte, Amazonas state, Brazil, June 15, 2022, after his arrest and that of his brother Amarildo, as a main suspect in the disappearance of British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira. (photo: Edmar Barros/AP)
All are local riverine dwellers, and their motive was that Pereira asked Phillips to photograph them when they passed by in a boat, the statement said. The area is a hotspot for illegal fishing and poaching.
Phillips and Pereira had met with Indigenous people near the entrance of the Javari Valley Indigenous Territory, which borders Peru and Colombia, and were traveling along the Itaquai River back to the city of Atalaia do Norte when they were attacked. Their disappearance generated intense international outcry and pressure for action and, with the help of local Indigenous people, authorities located their bodies hidden in the forest.
Prosecutors presented their charges Thursday, outlining that two of the men — Amarildo da Costa Oliveira and Jefferson da Silva Lima — have confessed to the crime, while witness testimony indicates Oseney da Costa de Oliveira also participated, according to the statement.
Pereira had previous confrontations with fishermen when seizing their catch and had received multiple threats. He carried a gun with him, and had left the federal Indigenous affairs agency in order to teach local Indigenous people how to patrol their land and gather geo-tagged photographic evidence of criminality.
On the day they were murdered, Pereira was transporting such evidence to authorities in Atalaia do Norte, and he was shot three times. Phillips, who was conducting research for a book entitled “How to Save the Amazon,” was killed because “only because of being with Bruno, in order to ensure impunity for the prior crime,” the prosecutors’ statement said.
There has been speculation in the Brazilian press that their murder may have been ordered by the ringleader of an illegal fishing network. Police earlier this month arrested a fourth man when he presented false documents, believing he may have some involvement, but no charges have yet been filed.
Various specimens of bristlecone pine trees can be seen at the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of Inyo County, Calif. The forest also includes Methuselah, believed to be one of the world's oldest bristlecone pine trees, at 4,853 years old. (photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Until the day in 2018 when Constance Millar ascended the trail to Telescope Peak — the highest point in Death Valley National Park — and discovered hundreds of dead and dying bristlecones extending as far as she could see.
The trees’ needles glowed a flaming orange; their bark was a ghostly gray. Millar estimated that the damage encompassed 60 to 70 percent of the bristlecones on Telescope Peak.
“It’s like coming across a murder scene,” said Millar, an emerita research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who has studied bristlecone pines for the better part of 40 years.
In a study published this spring, she and fellow researchers showed that the West’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years had critically weakened the trees. Voracious bark beetles — a threat to which bristlecones were previously thought immune — delivered the death blow.
After outlasting millennia of disruptions and disaster, human-caused climate change is proving too much for the ancient trees to bear. Rising temperatures have caused an explosion in the populations of insects that threaten the trees and undermined their capacity to defend themselves, scientists say. Although Great Basin bristlecone pines are not considered at risk of extinction, cherished specimens and distinctive populations are struggling to survive.
The trees had stood for more than 1,000 years. Their sturdy roots clung to the crumbling mountainside. Their gnarled limbs reached toward the desert sky. The rings of their trunks told the story of everything they’d witnessed — every attack they’d rebuffed, every crisis they’d endured. Weather patterns shifted; empires rose and fell; other species emerged, mated, migrated, died. But here, in one of the harshest environments on the planet, the bristlecone pines survived. It seemed they always would.
Until the day in 2018 when Constance Millar ascended the trail to Telescope Peak — the highest point in Death Valley National Park — and discovered hundreds of dead and dying bristlecones extending as far as she could see.
The trees’ needles glowed a flaming orange; their bark was a ghostly gray. Millar estimated that the damage encompassed 60 to 70 percent of the bristlecones on Telescope Peak.
“It’s like coming across a murder scene,” said Millar, an emerita research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service who has studied bristlecone pines for the better part of 40 years.
In a study published this spring, she and fellow researchers showed that the West’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years had critically weakened the trees. Voracious bark beetles — a threat to which bristlecones were previously thought immune — delivered the death blow.
After outlasting millennia of disruptions and disaster, human-caused climate change is proving too much for the ancient trees to bear. Rising temperatures have caused an explosion in the populations of insects that threaten the trees and undermined their capacity to defend themselves, scientists say. Although Great Basin bristlecone pines are not considered at risk of extinction, cherished specimens and distinctive populations are struggling to survive.
‘Prehistoric jewels’
No organism on Earth is known to live as long as the Great Basin bristlecone pine. The oldest documented tree, a well-hidden specimen nicknamed “Methuselah,” after the long-lived biblical patriarch, was a sapling when the ancient Egyptians built their pyramids more than 4,500 years ago. Even the relatively youthful trees in Death Valley are older than gunpowder, paper money and the English language.
“Their presence and their stability and their fortitude stretches our own sense of time,” Millar said. “It just slows people down ... and reminds us of how things were before humans were here.”
The secret to their survival is their ability to withstand what others cannot. They exist at higher elevations than almost any other tree, thriving in the rocky, meager soils near rugged mountain peaks. Their branching root systems and waxy needles help them make the most of scant water. They produce a thick resin that traps insect invaders and quickly patches wounds. Their genomes, which are nine times as long as a human’s, contain a multitude of mutations that give them a better chance of adapting to changing conditions.
Few trees can take a beating like a bristlecone. They deal with crisis by sectioning off parts of their structures, enabling the rest of the tree to keep living while the injured limb is allowed to die. Their wood is so dense it rarely rots; the trunks of dead trees will remain standing for millennia.
The species needs all these strengths to exist in Death Valley — a forbidding environment even by bristlecone standards. The park is further south than any other bristlecone habitat, and hotter and drier than any other place in the United States.
Scores of other creatures benefit from the trees’ persistence, Millar said. Bristlecones provide shade to elk and bighorn sheep, and shelter chipmunks and jack rabbits from predators and fierce weather. They allow snow to cling longer to the mountains’ upper slopes, ensuring a supply of meltwater during the brutal summer months.
And their staying power makes them invaluable to scientists. Bristlecone tree rings have allowed researchers to reconstruct a record of Earth’s climate going back thousands of years; the field of research is known as “dendrochronology.” The rings reveal when volcanic eruptions occurred, how long droughts lasted, even when the surface of the sun became blotted by magnetic storms.
“By translating the story told by tree rings, we have pushed back the horizons of history,” the pioneering dendrochronologist Andrew Ellicott Douglass wrote in National Geographic in 1929.
He compared tree ring records to the Rosetta stone and called the ancient trees of the desert Southwest “prehistoric jewels.”
In preserving the planet’s past, bristlecones also have given humans a key to understanding our future. They capture the interactions between greenhouse gases, rising temperatures, shifting weather patterns and altered ecosystems, and they allow scientists to project what will happen as Earth continues to warm.
“It’s well spelled out that the loss of these trees would remove this natural archive,” Millar said. “I hope the general public will realize what a loss that would be.”
A death on our watch
After her grisly discovery atop Telescope Peak, Millar immediately contacted Barbara Bentz, a research entomologist for the Forest Service based at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Logan, Utah.
Just a few years earlier, Bentz had surveyed bristlecone populations across the West and found that few were succumbing to the bark beetle outbreaks that decimated so many other species. She felt confident that the trees would remain resilient even as rising temperatures caused beetle populations to explode.
Yet, when Bentz peeled a piece of bark off one of the Death Valley bristlecones, she found scores of tiny tunnels created by beetle larvae as the insects chewed through the tree’s living tissue.
“Oh, no,” Bentz thought to herself. “It really is beetles. Oh, no.”
She and her colleagues uncovered further evidence of insect damage in Utah’s Wah Wah Mountains, where young bristlecones were attacked by a small brown beetle called a pinyon ips.
In both cases, the beetles were unable to complete their life cycles inside bristlecone pines, Bentz said. Instead, it seemed that they were reproducing in nearby trees from a species different from the bristlecone. Higher temperatures — Inyo County, home to Death Valley, is already more than 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.9 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than in the preindustrial era — allowed the beetles to reproduce faster and caused their populations to swell dramatically. When the surplus spilled over into bristlecones, their defenses were overwhelmed.
The scientists think the trees had been so stressed by drought that they could not fend off attacks they once would have vanquished with ease. Climate analyses showed that 2020 soil moisture levels in Death Valley and the Wah Wah range dipped to their lowest levels in at least 40 years.
Millar said the discovery should raise alarms all over the West, where lakes are shrinking, snowpacks are declining and heat records are being set. The White Mountains — home to Methuselah and many more of the world’s oldest bristlecones — lie just 100 miles from Death Valley and have a similar climate. They could easily become the next site of a beetle attack.
“We don’t want Methuselah to die on our watch,” Millar said.
Although the species is not considered at risk of extinction, she added, the death of important subpopulations is still a reason to mourn. Each disappearance not only represents a loss for the landscape, but also is a sacrifice of the genetic diversity those populations contained.
Millar recalled another visit to Death Valley, when she hiked through an area called the Last Chance Range in search of a bristlecone pine cluster that was rumored still to exist there. By the time she found a single remaining tree, it was dead.
If the specimen had a gene that made it uniquely capable of surviving in that forbidding landscape, there was no chance of resurrecting it. No hope of collecting seeds for replanting, or taking a cutting in an attempt to produce clones. No opportunity to draw on the tree’s DNA to help the rest of the species survive.
“That, to me, is the dramatic element of watching a population go extinct,” Millar said. All of that unique genetic material, the product of thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution, is gone for good.
Arid forests around the globe have experienced a devastating loss of resilience in the past two decades, according to the analysis published Wednesday in Nature. Satellite imagery shows that these ecosystems are less able to bounce back after fluctuations in weather or periods of drought. Tropical and temperate forests — the steamy Amazon, the North Woods of Minnesota — are in similar decline.
The trend was seen in forests altered by human activities as well as those that remain almost untouched by direct human action — an indication that climate change, rather than local deforestation or pollution, is primarily at fault.
Indeed, 23 percent of untouched forests are approaching the point at which they could be pushed into an abrupt and irreversible transition, the scientists said. Rainforest could turn into grassland. Thick stands of pine might give way to shrubs and desert.
“It’s a strong warning, I think, for society,” said Giovanni Forzieri, a professor of sustainable development and climate change at the University of Florence and lead author of the Nature study.
He pointed out that most of the world’s climate plans count on forests to pull planet-warming gases out of the atmosphere. If these ecosystems collapse, humanity will find it difficult, if not impossible, to stave off catastrophic warming.
Averting extinction
To Murphy Westwood, the vice president for science and conservation at the Morton Arboretum in Illinois, each loss feels like a moral failing.
“It’s overwhelming and almost crushing,” she said, “the stark reality of the biodiversity crisis that’s on our hands.”
Last year, Westwood helped publish a sweeping assessment of 58,497 tree species worldwide that found that nearly 30 percent are at risk of being wiped out. At least 142 species have gone extinct in the wild.
It’s not just trees. With global temperatures already more than 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than in the preindustrial era, the Earth is losing species at a rate hundreds to thousands of times faster than normal.
If the world remains on its current warming track, as much as 29 percent of all creatures on land will face very high risk of extinction. In the ocean, the destruction will be even greater.
But humanity’s growing understanding of all we might lose, Westwood said, also offers us a chance to change course. We can conserve rare organisms and protect fragile ecosystems. We can reverse deforestation and stop burning the fossil fuels that cause the planet to warm.
“If we can see it happening in front of our very eyes,” she said, “then we know we have the tools and knowledge to prevent another extinction.”
She pointed to an expedition she helped direct this spring, which rediscovered a tree that scientists had believed to be extinct.
Rising temperatures and dwindling water over the past century had killed off every known specimen of Quercus tardifolia, an oak known for its fuzzy evergreen leaves. But Westwood and other scientists held out hope that the species still clung to existence somewhere.
After weeks of trekking through the canyons of Big Bend National Park in Texas, they stumbled upon a single tardifolia tree — scorched by fire and ravaged by fungal disease but undeniably, miraculously, alive.
The researchers plan to collect acorns and cuttings from the tree that can be used to regrow the species in botanic gardens and arboretums.
“We have a second chance to prevent a species extinction,” said Wes Knapp, the chief botanist for the conservation nonprofit NatureServe and another member of the expedition. “That’s really rare, to have a second chance in nature. It means we can move. We can act. That’s what we have to do now.”
Further west, Millar and Bentz plan to return to Death Valley this August to more thoroughly assess the state of the park’s bristlecone pines and then develop strategies for preserving the trees that remain. They are developing chemical repellents based on the trees’ natural defenses to protect “high-value trees,” such as Methuselah. And they are surveying all the nation’s bristlecone stands, searching for the genetic variations that might help the species survive.
Amid the challenges facing both trees and humanity, Millar said, the bristlecones offer lessons in how to hang on. Their tenacity is an antidote to despair. Their genetic diversity is a bulwark as they face the unknown.
“From a human standpoint, I think that translates into innovation and resilience,” Millar said.
To live like a bristlecone is to never let go of hope.
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