28 July 22
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Banks’ financing of coal, oil, and gas was higher in 2021 than it was in 2016, the year after the Paris agreement was adopted
There are many to blame for the climate crisis and its extreme weather impacts. Executives of fossil fuel companies bear the greatest responsibility. More than anything else, it has been their great deceit – their burying of climate science, funding of climate denial, and spending of billions to kill climate policy – that has prevented us from transitioning away from an economy powered by coal, oil and gas. Compromised politicians, including the entire Republican party and the Democratic coal baron Joe Manchin, deserve special condemnation, too.
In the cast of climate villains, however, another character rises to claim a special place on center stage: Wall Street.
On 12 December 2015, virtually every nation on earth adopted the Paris agreement. “Today, the American people can be proud – because this historic agreement is a tribute to American leadership,” enthused President Obama. But there were problems from the beginning. The most obvious was that the agreement was voluntary; it lacked a legally binding commitment to reduce emissions. Another major problem was that no one on Wall Street was paying attention.
Since the Paris Agreement, the six largest US banks – Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs – have provided $1.4tn in financing to the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, since that heralded day in the French capital, the world’s four largest funders of fossil fuel expansion have all been US banks. So much for “American leadership”.
It’s not as if Wall Street hasn’t been warned. The environmental group Rainforest Action Network started campaigning to get Bank of America to end coal financing in 2010. In 2016, Indigenous-led protests demanding that banks end their financing of the Dakota Access pipeline shut down bank branches across the country. Cities, including Seattle and San Francisco, committed to cutting ties with the banks funding the pipeline.
In more recent times, the outcry has spread from activists to customers and investors. This year, more than 38,000 customers joined a campaign urging their bank to end fossil fuel financing. Thousands more have pledged to cut ties with their bank altogether if there isn’t progress soon. At JPMorgan Chase’s 2020 shareholder meeting, 49.6% of investors voted in favor of the bank aligning its financing with the goals of the Paris agreement.
In response to this pressure, US banks have released a spate of climate promises, committing to achieve net zero by 2050 and reduce emissions by 2030. But the hard truth remains: Wall Street’s financing of coal, oil and gas was higher in 2021 than it was in 2016, the year after the Paris agreement was adopted. Last year alone, US banks provided $64bn in financing to the corporations most rapidly expanding their coal, oil and gas operations – never mind the fact that such development will lead to a level of climate change that will make today’s extreme heat seem like a breezy day in the park.
It would be bad enough if all Wall Street was doing was funding fossil fuel expansion, but it’s far from it.
When investors filed a shareholder resolution at Citi this year calling for the bank to take the actions the International Energy Agency has concluded are required to give us even a 50% chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, Citi’s CEO, Jane Fraser, vehemently opposed the resolution and mischaracterized it as an attempt to “shut down the fossil fuel economy overnight” .
After Putin launched his war on Ukraine, the CEO of Chase, Jamie Dimon, joined the CEOs of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to directly lobby President Biden to increase domestic fossil fuel production. A month later, Dimon used his influential annual letter to shareholders to further lobby on behalf of his oil and gas clients. “We also need immediate approval for additional oil leases and gas pipelines,” he wrote, despite the fact that newly approved oil and gas projects won’t come online for years and won’t help solve the current energy crisis.
As we swelter through these early days of the climate crisis, we should keep in mind that our banks are deeply culpable for climate breakdown and that they are often using our money to make it even worse. And once we realize that, the real question is: what are we going to do about it?
We need to reduce our addiction to FOSSIL FUELS.
Other nations are leading with innovation and new technology while the US lags behind due to Dirty Energy KOCH propaganda that took of tRumpdom.
The US should be leading but KOCH and Dirty Energy have prevented it.
Let's work together to protect our Planet from propaganda and the CLIMATE CRISIS.
We can do this.
WALL STREET ON PARADE - links to articles are on the link below:
Meet Marc Short, the Former Koch Exec Who Has Now Testified Before a Grand Jury Investigating the January 6 Attack
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 27, 2022 ~
Mainstream media has been abuzz over the past two days that Marc Short, the Chief of Staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, has testified under subpoena before a grand jury convened by the U.S. Department of Justice, which has now broadened its investigation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol to the masterminds. But is that really the headline?
We think the real headline is that Marc Short was previously an executive at the fossil fuels conglomerate Koch Industries, a private company run by billionaire Charles Koch who has been setting up political front groups for four decades. Short went on to become President of a Koch-related dark money group called Freedom Partners from 2011 to 2016. Freedom Partners plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into political operations in an effort to put fossil fuel friendly pawns in Congress and the White House.
Freedom Partners has shuttered its stealthy operations but when we looked at its Board of Directors in 2018, all but one of its 9-member Board was a current or former Koch company employee. The Board Chair at that time was Mark Holden, who served in the dual capacity as General Counsel of Koch Industries.
Dozens of individuals connected to Koch and/or Freedom Partners took up key positions in the Trump administration. That includes the 12 Jones Day lawyers who took their place in the Trump administration on his very first day in office. Jones Day had been outside counsel to Koch Industries. According to Public Citizen, two of the main hires from Jones Day, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Ann Donaldson, Chief of Staff to McGahn, both previously represented Freedom Partners.
Freedom Partners was not bashful about conveying its demands to Trump. And Marc Short served in the role of Director of Legislative Affairs for Trump (before becoming Chief of Staff to Mike Pence) to move that agenda along. According to a formal memo from Freedom Partners, it was demanding withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, massive tax cuts for corporations, and the gutting of federal regulations. Trump complied with those demands.
Freedom Partners was organized as a 501(c)(6) tax exempt organization. As such, it did not have to reveal its dark money donors to the public. Its Vice President, Nathan Nascimento, was a registered Federal lobbyist for issues near and dear to the fossil fuels industry. It had an affiliated Super Pac, Freedom Partners Action Fund, which also did not have to reveal its donors. Charles Koch and his trust donated at least $14 million to the Super Pac since 2014 according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The Super Pac ran TV attack ads against Democrats in election years. Time Magazine’s Philip Elliott reported in January 2017 that “In seven of the eight up-for-grabs U.S. Senate races last year, the Koch-backed candidate won. In all, Koch-backed candidates at all levels of races prevailed 96% of the time—a record any outside group would covet.”
After leaving the Trump administration, Mike Pence and Marc Short established their own dark money group, Advancing American Freedom. It was launched on April 7, 2021. This spring, Advancing American Freedom launched a $10 million ad campaign targeting 16 Democrats whom it apparently felt were not adequately on board the fossil fuels bandwagon or were too supportive of climate change science. In a statement announcing the big ad buy, Pence said he wanted the Biden administration to restart the Keystone Pipeline and restore oil and natural gas leases – presumably he meant on federal land.
On June 22, Pence appeared on the Kudlow Show on Fox Business, where he said his goals were to “unleash American energy; open up federal lands to permitting; open up the Alaskan National Wildlife region; begin again Keystone Pipeline; begin to develop the infrastructure necessary to move energy…”
Likewise, Marc Short has shilled for the fossil fuels industry on Fox News. Advancing American Freedom has a link to that video here.
The Ohio Attorney General’s registry for nonprofits lists the business address of Advancing American Freedom as 47 South Pennsylvania Street, Suite 201, Indianapolis IN 46204. That’s the same Suite number and street address as M/O Strategies, whose President is Marty Obst (M/O). The website for M/O Strategies indicates that Obst “currently serves as Senior Political Advisor to Vice President Mike Pence as well as Chairman of the Vice President’s operation of the Trump-Pence re-election campaign. You can read his full bio here.
Obst’s bio also indicates that his firm “provides strategic and grassroots advisory services to over two dozen major corporations, coalitions and associations.” We emailed him yesterday, asking if his clients include fossil fuel companies or related groups. He declined to answer our email.
The Vice President of M/O Strategies is Danielle Cleveland, whose bio indicates that “Most recently, she served as Deputy Executive Director of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).” RAGA’s dark money arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, was one of the “Coalition Partners” that turned out the hordes of people at the Capitol on January 6. According to IRS filings made by RAGA, it has received $511,400 from Koch Industries and a subsidiary since 2014. (See our in-depth report: The Money Trail to the Siege at the Capitol Leads to Charles Koch and Koch Industries.)
Let’s hope that the U.S. Department of Justice peels this onion all the way to its corrupt core – the unbridled Koch money machine — something that the January 6 House Select Committee has yet to do. As we wrote on July 1:
Imagine a country that allows a private fossil fuels conglomerate (or its billionaire boss, Charles Koch, the 17th richest person in the world according to Forbes) to get away with the following:
Meet secretly with big political donors twice a year to plot a coordinated strategy to put their chosen people in public office;
Meet at his private club with a sitting Supreme Court justice who will then rule on key legislation that benefits his interests;
Fund an organization that then sluices money to the wife of the Supreme Court Justice;
Run a highly sophisticated voter registration database, data mining and get-out-the-vote operation called i360, in order to pack Congress with people who will pursue an antiregulatory agenda;
Install dozens of its lawyers and operatives into the highest offices of the federal government;
Run a sprawling, opaque trading operation that could potentially be raising the prices of the fossil fuel products it sells via the futures market;
Continue to operate major factories in Russia, ignoring sanctions and a murderous regime waging an unprovoked war on Ukraine, until a pressure campaign forced it to say it will look for an exit strategy;
Fund a sprawling network of taxpayer-subsidized front groups to deny climate change and foment hate;
Provide funding to groups involved in sending a mob to attack the seat of government of its own home country on January 6;
Fund groups that use dark money and propaganda to put lifetime justices on the highest court to pass legislation friendly to the fossil fuels conglomerate.
If this sounds like some kind of dystopian novel, welcome to the United States of Koch, circa 2022.
Related Article:
The Glue that Connects Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Ginni Thomas, and the Guy Who Was Air-Dropped into the DOJ, Is Charles Koch’s Money
“Rather than risking more inflation with trillions in new spending, this bill will cut the inflation taxes Americans are paying,” Senator Joe Manchin III said in a statement on Wednesday. (photo: Pete Maravich/New York Times)
The West Virginia Democrat, a holdout on his party’s domestic agenda, said the package would reduce inflation, a concern he had cited in rejecting it just weeks ago.
The package would set aside $369 billion for climate and energy proposals, the most ambitious climate action ever taken by Congress, and raise an estimated $451 billion in new tax revenue over a decade, while cutting federal spending on prescription drugs by $288 billion, according to a summary circulated Wednesday evening.
The product of a deal announced by Mr. Manchin and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, it would reduce the federal deficit by about $300 billion, while seeking to push down the cost of health care, prescription medicines and electricity.
The plan falls far short of the ambitious domestic policy and tax package President Biden proposed last year, but Democrats, looking toward midterm elections that are likely to be shaped by voters’ concerns about soaring costs, pitched it as a targeted attack on the rapid price increases that have socked American consumers in the wallet this year, with inflation running at a 40-year high.
The announcement suggested that Democrats could move in the coming days to salvage a major piece of their domestic agenda, which only weeks ago appeared doomed given Mr. Manchin’s refusal to quickly sign on. Top Democrats released legislation on Wednesday evening, aiming for votes as early as next week.
“This is the action the American people have been waiting for,” Mr. Biden said in a statement, calling on both chambers to quickly pass the measure. “This addresses the problems of today — high health care costs and overall inflation — as well as investments in our energy security for the future.”
It was not clear what had changed Mr. Manchin’s mind since he said not even two weeks ago that he could not support such a package until he saw inflation numbers for July, which are not scheduled to be issued for two more weeks. But quiet negotiations had resumed between Mr. Manchin, Mr. Schumer and their staffs in recent days, according to a person familiar with the talks.
The abrupt announcement came only hours after passage of a huge industrial policy bill aimed at bolstering American competitiveness with China that Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, had said he would never support as long as Democrats continued their efforts to push through their marquee domestic policy bill over G.O.P. opposition. But that legislation still needs to clear the House, and Republican leaders in that chamber said they would instruct their ranks to oppose it after news of the deal.
With the Senate divided 50 to 50 and Republicans uniformly opposed, Democrats need unanimous support within their party and the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris to pass the plan under special rules that shield certain budget bills from a filibuster. Mr. Manchin’s resistance has been the primary obstacle to doing so all along, handing him effective veto power over its contents — and the final say over whether any measure could pass the Senate.
His embrace of the plan did not guarantee it would move forward. Several senators declined to comment on the deal upon hearing of it on Wednesday evening until they learned more about it. That included Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat who has been another holdout on her party’s domestic policy measure. (A spokeswoman said the senator needed to review the legislation.)
But by the evening, several key liberal Democrats were rallying behind the plan.
“By a wide margin, this legislation will be the greatest pro-climate legislation that has ever been passed by Congress,” Mr. Schumer declared in a separate statement, thanking Mr. Manchin for “his willingness to engage and his commitment to reaching an agreement.”
The tax increases included in the agreement would fall largely on multinational corporations and private equity firms, and would be accompanied by a crackdown on high-earning individuals and businesses that seek to avoid paying the taxes they owe.
One possible clue to Mr. Manchin’s change of heart came in a line of his joint announcement with Mr. Schumer that they had secured a commitment from both Mr. Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California that Congress would approve a separate measure to address the permitting of energy infrastructure, potentially including natural gas pipelines, before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
That could ease the way for a project in which Mr. Manchin has taken a personal interest, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which would transport Appalachian shale gas from West Virginia to Virginia.
Democrats said the Senate could take up the legislation by next week, although a number of parliamentary and procedural hurdles remain. It must adhere to strict budgetary rules since Democrats plan to move it under the arcane budget process known as reconciliation that allows certain fiscal measure to pass with only a simple majority.
The legislation “will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030,” Mr. Manchin and Mr. Schumer said in their joint statement. The two senators added that “we urge every member of the U.S. Senate to support this important legislation.”
Republicans balked at the announcement, reiterating their opposition to the Democrats’ plan.
“Democrats have already crushed American families with historic inflation,” Mr. McConnell said on Twitter. “Now they want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs. First they killed your family’s budget. Now they want to kill your job too.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, expressed disbelief that Mr. Manchin “is agreeing to a massive tax increase in the name of climate change when our economy is in a recession.”
“I hope that common sense will eventually win the day,” he added. “What I am hearing about the terms of this latest reconciliation deal make no sense.”
But in his own separate statement, Mr. Manchin cheered the agreement as good for the economy, the climate and people’s pocketbooks.
“Rather than risking more inflation with trillions in new spending, this bill will cut the inflation taxes Americans are paying, lower the cost of health insurance and prescription drugs, and ensure our country invests in the energy security and climate change solutions we need to remain a global superpower through innovation rather than elimination,” Mr. Manchin said.
He noted the bill is called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, making a clear distinction between it and the ambitious multitrillion-dollar domestic policy plan Mr. Biden proposed and Democrats in Congress spent most of last year toiling to pass.
“Build Back Better is dead, and instead we have the opportunity to make our country stronger by bringing Americans together,” he said.
Mr. Manchin also pre-emptively swatted away a lingering demand from some House Democrats to lift the cap on the state and local tax deduction as part of the final package, adding “our tax code should not favor red state or blue state elites with loopholes like SALT.”
The agreement falls far short of Mr. Biden’s initial proposals to vastly expand social safety net programs and pay for them by taxing corporations and high earners. But it is substantially larger than a package aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drugs and extending expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies that Democrats had reluctantly concluded was the most they could hope to pass this summer after Mr. Manchin privately told party leaders this month that he would not support any climate or tax proposals in the short term.
The two health care pieces would allow Medicare to directly regulate the price of prescription drugs for the first time beginning in 2023. It would also extend through 2025 an expansion of premium subsidies that Democrats first pushed through in 2021 as part of their $1.9 trillion pandemic aid bill, preventing a lapse at the end of the year.
The plan would raise most of its new tax revenue, an estimated $313 billion, by imposing a minimum tax on the so-called book income of large corporations, like Amazon and FedEx, that currently use tax credits and other maneuvers to reduce their tax rates below the 21 percent corporate income tax rate in the United States.
It would raise another $14 billion by reducing a preferential tax treatment for income earned by venture capitalists and private equity firms, which has long been a goal of Democrats.
It invests $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical minerals processing; $10 billion in tax credits to build clean technology manufacturing facilities; and $500 million to be used through the Defense Production Act for heat pumps and critical minerals processing.
The deal also includes a means-tested $7,500 tax credit to make new electric vehicles more affordable, and a $4,000 tax credit for used electric vehicles, according to a summary of the package. Both credits will be offered only to lower and middle-income consumers.
The measure also includes a methane fee that will start in 2025.
Also included will be $60 billion to address the disproportionate burden of pollution on low-income communities and communities of color, $27 billion for a “green bank” aimed at delivering financial support to clean energy projects and $20 billion for programs that can cut emissions in the agriculture sector.
The announcement of the deal stunned environmental advocates.
“I honestly don’t know what to say,” said Samuel Ricketts, co-founder and senior adviser of Evergreen Action, an environmental group. “We’re going to need to see the details, obviously, but people have been hard at work to salvage a deal. This has the opportunity to be an enormous breakthrough for climate progress.”
Mr. Manchin said the plan includes a “realistic energy and climate policy” that will “allow us to decarbonize while ensuring American energy is affordable, reliable, clean and secure.”
“As the superpower of the world, it is vital we not undermine our superpower status by removing dependable and affordable fossil fuel energy before new technologies are ready to reliably carry the load,” Mr. Manchin said in a statement, which highlighted investments in fossil fuel energy as well as renewable power.
Mr. Biden has vowed to cut U.S. emissions roughly 50 percent by the end of this decade, a target scientists say is critical to helping keep the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the danger of catastrophic heat waves, fires and floods rises significantly.
If the package is enacted, it could get the United States close to Mr. Biden’s goal, according to a summary of the deal put out by Democrats.
A rescuer walks among debris at a site of a residential area destroyed by a Russian military strike, as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues, in the town of Toretsk, Donetsk region, Ukraine July 27, 2022. (photo: Reuters)
Ukraine's campaign to retake the occupied Kherson region is "gathering pace", Western military sources say.
UK defence officials say the city is now "virtually cut off from other occupied territories".
However, senior Ukrainian figures warned that Russia was now shifting its forces to defend the southern area.
Strategically located west of the Dnipro river, the city was the first in the war to fall to Moscow's forces.
Ukrainian forces fired at Kherson's Antonivskiy Bridge using a Himars artillery rocket system on Tuesday which, according to Western military sources, has left the crossing "completely unusable".
Only a pockmarked wreck is said to remain of the half-mile long bridge, one of two key routes spanning the Dnipro river which have both now been hit.
Moscow relies on the crossings to resupply their troops stationed west of the river, and are now at risk of becoming isolated from the rest of Russia's occupying forces. A third bridge, over the Inhulets river to the north-east of Kherson city, has also been hit.
Military sources described Kherson as "politically the nearest Russia has to a jewel in the crown of its occupation" - and its loss, they say, "would severely undermine Russia's attempts to paint the occupation as a success".
In a daily intelligence update, UK defence officials said the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the region was "gathering momentum", adding that Kyiv's forces had likely established a bridgehead south of the Inhulets river, "which forms the northern boundary of Russian occupied Kherson".
Moscow was now "moving the maximum number of troops in the Kherson direction", said Oleksiy Danilov, who is secretary of Ukraine's National Security Council, on Wednesday evening.
The BBC has not been able to independently verify his remarks, however Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych agreed Russian forces were shifting their forces to the south in anticipation of a counter-offensive and changing their focus to strategic defence.
Meanwhile, Russian forces in the east said they had captured Ukraine's second largest power station - the Vuhlehirsk coal-fired plant. Mr Arestovych described it as a "tiny, tactical advantage".
Russian-installed officials in Kherson confirmed that a Ukrainian artillery strike had seriously damaged the Antonivskiy Bridge, forcing its closure to traffic.
Speaking to Ria news agency, deputy city leader Kirill Stremousov said ferries and pontoon bridges would now be used instead to maintain links across the Dnipro River with the rest of Russian-occupied territory.
For days the Ukrainian military has targeted the bridges using highly effective rocket systems supplied by the US.
According to Western military sources, the attack is part of a Ukrainian counter effort to isolate Russian troops, with the ultimate goal of recapturing the entire region.
If it proves successful the ambitious campaign would provide a much-needed boost for Kyiv by retaking from Russia the most significant population centre it has so far captured since the invasion began - the city of Kherson.
The southern city, which had a population of 290,000 before the war, is administered by Moscow-backed officials since falling early on in the war.
Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia's military focus was no longer only on eastern Ukraine but on its southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia too.
According to Russia's Tass news agency, officials in Kherson city have moved forward in recent days with plans to hold a referendum on formally joining Russia - with authorities forming an election committee in preparation.
The US has accused Russia of preparing to annex parts of occupied Ukraine illegally.
In his nightly Wednesday address President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed that Ukraine would eventually rebuild the Antonivskiy Bridge as well as other crossings in the Kherson region.
"We are doing everything to ensure that the occupying forces do not have any logistical opportunities in the country," he said.
Russia captured Kherson with relatively little resistance in the war's early days - and the failure of Ukraine's security service to destroy crossing points over the Dnipro river at the time is believed to have last week led to Mr Zelensky's dismissal of the agency's director Ivan Bakanov.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., speaks during an interview Friday, Nov. 12, 2021, in Seattle. (photo: AP)The King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office said Brett Forsell was charged Wednesday after additional evidence was gathered by police investigators.
Forsell was arrested July 9 after yelling obscenities and threats outside Jayapal's Seattle home late at night and booked into jail. He was released when prosecutors said there wasn’t enough evidence for a hate crime charge, though authorities noted the investigation would continue.
Police later forwarded the stalking case for consideration, prosecutors said.
In 2016, Jayapal became the first Indian American woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Democrat heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
As part of the felony stalking charge, prosecutors note Forsell was armed with a deadly weapon and that Jayapal was stalked in connection with her elected position.
Seattle police arrested Forsell outside Jayapal’s house in the Arbor Heights neighborhood at 11:25 p.m. on July 9 after she called 911 and reported an unknown person or people were near her home using obscene language and mentioning her name, probable cause documents said. She told a dispatcher her husband thought someone may have fired a pellet gun, the statement said.
Officers found Forsell standing in the the street with his hands in the air and a handgun holstered on his waist, the probable cause statement said.
Forsell told police he drove by Jayapal's house yelling obscenities multiple times since late June and on July 9 drove by, stopped, got out of the car and directed profanities at Jayapal, according to the probable cause statement.
He left after encountering her husband and then returned a short time later, knowing they were home, and was seen by neighbors and Jayapal's husband appearing to approach the house while yelling at Jayapal, documents said. A neighbor told police she heard a man threaten to kill Jayapal and believed the statements were made by the man arrested that night.
Police learned the man sent an email to Jayapal’s public account in January, saying he didn’t like her, documents said.
A temporary Extreme Risk Protection Order to require Forsell to surrender his firearms and concealed pistol license, citing concerns about escalating behavior toward Jayapal and increasing mental health struggles, remains in place.
Prosecutors said a judge approved a bail amount of $500,000. It didn't appear that Forsell had been booked into jail as of Wednesday evening. The Associated Press was unable to locate Forsell for comment and it was not known if he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
Jayapal said in a statement that the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office charging Forsell with felony stalking demonstrates that the justice system is doing its work.
“I am grateful to the King County Prosecutor’s Office for holding this man accountable for his dangerous actions, to the victim’s advocate for her assistance throughout the process, and to the Seattle Police Department, U.S. Capitol Police, and the House Sergeant at Arms for continuing to keep my family, me, and my staff safe," Jayapal said.
'States must craft policies to rein in unbridled police access to newborn blood samples.' (photo: Getty)
States must craft policies to rein in unbridled police access to newborn blood samples.
A public records lawsuit filed in New Jersey this month details how police subpoenaed a newborn blood sample to investigate a 1996 cold case. While law enforcement’s desire to use these blood samples in criminal investigations was always a possibility — and one the ACLU has opposed — the increasing use of Investigative Genetic Genealogy (IGG) has only increased the government’s interest in easy access to people’s DNA. While few have heard of IGG, many have heard of its application to cold cases: One high-profile example is the 2018 identification of the Golden State Killer as former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. In IGG, DNA is isolated from a sample left at a crime scene and a rich genetic profile is created and uploaded to a genealogy website in order to map out family trees. In just four years since IGG first became public, its documented use by police has rapidly grown to nearly 200 investigations.
The government has already gone to shocking lengths to obtain DNA samples without a warrant, including lying to a suspect’s family members to obtain their DNA — but the New Jersey investigation represents the first public instance of them turning to newborn blood samples. This threatens both privacy and public health. A failure to act now could mean widespread loss of genetic privacy at the hands of police.
DNA holds our sensitive personal information. Indeed, that’s why the newborn screening program exists: to detect inherited medical conditions from our blood sample that could lead to things like permanent intellectual disability and major health problems if not detected early enough. Allowing the government to access samples with such sensitive information for reasons other than public health would seriously threaten our privacy — particularly given that our DNA reveals such information not only about us, but also our family members.
This newborn screening system relies on public trust. It exists because public health officials agree that the good outweighs the bad — the temporary pain to the newborn and the cost to the parents are well worth the prevention of life-threatening medical conditions among the almost 1 in 300 newborns found to have a genetic disorder. But that delicate balance is thrown off when the government turns to that same data for other purposes, including criminal investigations.
There is no uniform national policy for how newborn screening is conducted. Each state sets its own policies governing which diseases it tests for and the length of time the sample is kept. Parent groups and other privacy advocates have long voiced concerns about these state screening systems. As a result of litigation that argued that keeping blood samples leftover from the screening tests violates privacy rights, some states destroyed samples en masse and have limited how long future ones are stored. Still, the range of storage for states varies from a few months to indefinitely.
And, perhaps most troublingly, “more than a quarter of U.S. states have no discernible policy in place regarding law enforcement access, while nearly a third may permit such access in at least some circumstances,” according to a recent Texas Law Review article. Police access to newborn genetic screening samples is a massive threat to privacy.
This is particularly true when police access is part of an IGG investigation. One study found that soon 90 percent of white Americans will be genetically traceable because of a family member uploading their genome to one of several genealogy websites. With the exponential growth of direct-to-consumer testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com, and a subset of companies like African Ancestry that market to communities of color, that percentage is expected to rise for all Americans. Newborn screening continues to be one of the most successful public health interventions in the U.S., but abuse of this system by police risks turning this public good into a system of mass genetic surveillance, allowing police to trace back centuries of familial ties for many Americans. This could cause a backlash in which states curtail their screening programs in an attempt to preserve citizens’ privacy, or deny the options to use these samples in critical medical screening research. Additionally, more parents may attempt to opt out of the system altogether or request their child’s sample be destroyed earlier than scientists recommend, risking a missed opportunity for early diagnosis.
To restore public trust and protect privacy, states should promptly seek to identify instances in which newborn screening may have been abused by police by surveying their state laboratories. And they must craft policies that restrict any use of the samples by police in criminal investigations. Iowa’s law appears to come closest, with a policy that explicitly prohibits law enforcement access to newborn samples. In addition, more states should implement limits on how long samples are kept—limiting them to the amount of time stated in medical best practices — and should require informed consent to the use of samples beyond the actual screening.
Visitors at the National Museum of Natural History in D.C. take in the exhibits.
The Smithsonian’s first update to its collections policy in 20 years proposes ethical returns and shared ownership. But will it bring transformational change?
The move was celebrated by Smithsonian leaders as the start of a new and more ethical era for the world’s largest complex of museums and research institutions, and it could have enormous influence on colleagues in the United States and around the world.
“The Smithsonian needs to lead morally as well as legally,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said on June 13, at a public hearing following the Board of Regents meeting when the works were deaccessioned, or removed from the collection, a legal step before their return to Nigeria. “The Benin Bronzes are really the first example of that.”
Bunch was referring to a new collections policy that requires Smithsonian museums to collaborate with the communities represented by their holdings and to return or share ownership of items that might have been previously stolen or acquired under duress. It directs them to make their collections publicly accessible and to fully vet future acquisitions to prevent items with questionable provenance from entering the collection. It also focuses on the treatment of human remains, some of which are subject to federal law and represent most of the institution’s past repatriation work. The policy requires human remains “be treated with dignity and respect, as those once living, and not objectified as a scientific resource.”
“Ethical returns and restitution aren’t just about a transfer of ownership. It’s about a reevaluation of authority and our role as a museum,” said National Museum of African Art Director Ngaire Blankenberg, who advocated for the deaccessioning. “It is very important because it’s about really challenging museological practices, which in the past were really justifying a whole bunch of, like, crappy behavior.”
But the 176-year-old institution’s roots in the 19th century, its 155 million-item collection and its unwieldy structure — siloed and bunkered with multiple leaders free to interpret the policy as they see fit — leave some in the museum world skeptical and pessimistic. Many look to the Smithsonian to forge a new path — one that fulfills the field’s 2020 pledges to increase diversity and root out racist practices — and they worry that the reality will fall short.
The Benin bronzes illustrate the challenges. As Smithsonian officials celebrated the deaccessioning of works held by its African Art museum, they ignored another 21 Benin sculptures in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History, including four — a commemorative head of a king, hip mask and two wall plaques that have been held by the Smithsonian since the 1960s — on view in its “African Voices” exhibition as recently as mid-May.
One floor above the African exhibit, which opened in 1999, the bones of Robert Kennicott, the famed Smithsonian explorer who once lived in the Castle, are on view. Nearby is an ancient copper plate of a birdman displayed as an example of creativity. The exhibit label notes the plate was from the Etowah mounds in Georgia, but it does not say that Smithsonian scientist John P. Rogan unearthed it in 1883 among “stone sepulchers containing the skeletal remains of several adults and children,” as detailed in the institution’s 2013 book, “The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects.”
Across the Mall, two 6th Century stone reliefs from the Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan, China are built into the walls of the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened in 1923. The gallery text identifies them as the first artworks purchased by the museum after the death of its founder, Charles Lang Freer, but it doesn’t say they were probably stolen from the remote cave.
And those are just some of the objects on view. The Smithsonian has thousands more items in storage, including medical collections of individuals who may not have consented to the use of their bodies for scientific research, objects dug up by American soldiers or seized by government officials, and more than 12,000 human remains.
“I had to chuckle … that the Smithsonian thinks they’re a leader in this. They are not,” said Tina Marie Osceola, an enrolled member of the Seminole Tribe of Florida and director of its Historic Preservation Office, which has been trying for 11 years to get the Natural History Museum to return the remains of 1,400 ancestors. “They are the best bad example we have in the country.”
Museums and high horses
Ethical considerations have been part of the American Alliance of Museums’ guidelines for collection management since 2008, and museums including the Museum of Us in San Diego and the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine, are among the leaders in the field. While not the first, the Smithsonian’s actions still resonate.
“It sends a bat signal because it’s one of the biggest power structures in the field,” said Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, former director of the Abbe Museum, who now leads the Illinois State Museum.
The policy reflects the evolution of the museum field. Members of the International Council of Museums have spent three years fiercely debating a definition of museums that would include language reflecting the field’s focus on human rights and knowledge-sharing. The social and racial justice movement that swept the country after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis have accelerated efforts to address perceived racism and helped to fuel the public pressure to return colonial-era artworks stolen from colonized countries. UNESCO announced in May that Greek and British officials have agreed to formal talks about the Parthenon marbles, perhaps the most high-profile example of issue of ethical returns. The pieces that had been part of the Parthenon in Athens were acquired by British diplomat Lord Elgin and have been in London for more than 200 years. The Greeks have long demanded their return.
The momentum has caused a steady stream of repatriations and returns. Last week alone, the Smithsonian held a ceremony with Australian officials to repatriate the remains of indigenous peoples, while dozens of looted antiquities recovered in an American criminal investigation were sent from New York to Rome to be displayed in the newly opened Museum of Rescued Art.
“Maybe museums want to get off their high horses. We are a perspective. Giving people a voice is important,” said Suzanne Hale, registrar/collections manager at the Colorado State University Museum who chaired AAM’s Collections Stewardship Committee from 2015 to 2017.
The Smithsonian’s first update to its collections policy in 20 years was adopted in April after a year of discussion. It outlines principles of ethical returns and shared stewardship and gives each museum six months to create plans for their application. The African Art Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian are among the front-runners in this practice. Chase Robinson, director of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sacker Gallery, which hold collections from Tibet, Cambodia, the Middle East and other areas that have benefited from recent repatriations, suggested a reporter check back “in a year’s time, or even better, 18 months.” Kirk Johnson, director of the Natural History Museum, said simply, “You’re never going to finish it.”
Newer units, like the American Indian Museum and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, were founded on these precepts; older ones will have to catch up, said Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History. “What is new is the entire Smithsonian are now holding themselves to these same standards,” she said.
Museum leaders applaud this approach, saying ethical actions are determined by specific details.
“We shouldn’t expect uniformity, because what is right in one situation might be different in another,” said Tracy Ireland, professor of cultural heritage at the University of Canberra in Australia and co-editor of the 2015 book, “The Ethics of Cultural Heritage.” “There’s a uniformity of process, but certainly not a uniformity of action.”
The updated policy does not require its museums to systemically review their collections, said Undersecretary for Museums and Culture Kevin Gover. Instead, staff will respond to requests and consider the ethical implications of works they encounter as part of their daily tasks. There have been no requests since policy was announced in April, and Gover predicted it will affect only a small percentage of its holdings.
“Our entire business is not going to be about ethical returns. There is a limitation to our capacity,” he said.
“We’re not going to be able to provide a lot of new money to museums to do this,” Gover added. “We have two new museums to build and that’s going to require a lot of attention.”
The lack of a mandate, funded or not, is a problem, critics say.
“You don’t know what you have but you’re going to say already that you don’t have much to give back? That’s weird,” said Erin L. Thompson, author and professor at John Jay College in New York who serves on the advisory committee for the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign. “Not providing a budget means it is not going to happen.”
A complete review would be a powerful gesture, Ireland said, even as she acknowledged the burden on staff and budget that it would cause. Without it, the Smithsonian remains in control.
“It means they are still in charge of the narrative,” Ireland said. “[A review] is important for source communities who simply do not know what’s in these collections, what’s missing, what has been buried away. Real ethical action puts the power back in the hands of the communities.”
‘There’s no tag that says “stolen” ’
Even without the requirement, Blankenberg plans to review and publicly share information about the National Museum of African Art’s nearly 12,000-piece collection, one of the Smithsonian’s smallest. Full transparency has to be the foundation of the effort to share authority, she said.
“The [Benin] bronzes are sort of easy in a way because it was one expedition in 1897 and everyone knew they were looted,” Blankenberg said. “But there’s so many ways that we could unethically have things in our collection. There’s unfortunately no tag that says ‘stolen.’ ”
A systematic review of the Natural History Museum’s holdings would be a challenge. With about 147 million items, it is the world’s largest natural history collection and represents more than 90 percent of all Smithsonian holdings, covering archaeology, ethnology, art and science. Its size and diversity create competing priorities, which Johnson cited as one reason he did not remove its Benins until May 18, six months after Blankenberg made international headlines by removing her museum’s works and one day after The Post inquired about them. The museum has not had a curator of African art and ethnology since August of 2019, when Mary Jo Arnoldi retired after 35 years.
“It’s a topic of growing interest and one of the many things we’re tracking,” Johnson said, noting that Nigeria is still developing the capacity to accept returns. The museum hopes to bring any of its Benin works connected to the British raid to the Board of Regents for deaccessioning at its next meeting in October. “The intention remains the same and the outcome is going to be the same.”
The Natural History Museum falls short of its colleagues at the National Museum of the American Indian in the repatriation of Native American remains, critics say.
“If you want to run the Smithsonian Institution where different players can do whatever the hell they want, then there’s your policy. But if you truly believe in repatriation, and working with origin and native communities, and building relationships with these communities, you have to be consistent throughout the institution. You can’t allow for that individuality,” said Association of American Indian Affairs chief executive Shannon O’Loughlin, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Without uniform requirements, tribal leaders see no reason the Natural History Museum will change.
“The NMAI’s true intent is to work with the tribes. The NMNH’s is not,” Osceola, the Seminole historic preservation officer, said. “The NMNH has a long history of treating the ancestors as if they belong them, as specimens in a lab and nothing more. They work very hard to make it as difficult as possible for tribes. The NMAI does not do that.”
“This is a war for our ancestors, and you don’t go into a war trusting the enemy,” Osceola said.
Johnson said he understands the frustration about what he called a complicated process, but he expressed surprise that the tribal leaders described the museum’s work as actively oppositional.
“That is not how we see it at all,” he said. “We feel we are working really hard to do the right thing. I’m looking forward to having more conversations with them to understand the pain points.”
He also said he has reached out to the American Indian Museum. “What do they do that’s different? If they are getting high marks and we are not, I want to know what those differences are.”
Since federal law began requiring the return of Native American remains in 1989, the museum has made available for repatriation about 6,600 human remains and is working on the return of 2,000 more (including the Seminole request). There are still another 10,000 in its care that could be claimed, officials said.
Repatriation is time consuming and difficult because some parts of the collection lack complete documentation and because there is only a small staff to handle the many requests, Johnson said. The museum recently completed an international repatriation involving the remains of people indigenous to Australia, an effort not mandated by law, Johnson said.
There are many other areas of concern. American soldiers that were part of General John J. Pershing’s “punitive expedition” in Mexico in 1916 illegally excavated hundreds of items and shipped them to the Washington institution. And there’s the skeleton of Kennicott, who died in 1866 of mysterious causes, which remains on view despite the new policy explicitly stating that human remains not be “objectified as a scientific resource.” Kennicott’s descendants donated his remains, Johnson said.
“There’s really nothing wrong with having human remains in museums and on display because it’s a big part of who we are,” Johnson said. “Just showing a skeleton isn’t an unethical thing.”
Gover did not express an opinion about whether the display violates the intentionally ambiguous ethical guidelines.
“We’ll see what Natural History decides to do,” he said. “It’s not a surprise that they are going to have different attitudes. Again, I don’t validate one belief over the other. It’s a great conversation to have.”
‘How do we be inclusive?’
It will take years, maybe even decades, to measure the effects of the new approach, but already there are small signs of change.
The National Portrait Gallery is focused on language justice and how it describes those depicted in its art and it is exploring ways to share authority with communities by asking their opinions.
“Are the categories sexist, ableist, racist?” National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet asked. “How can we be respectful of communities that have been hurt and continue to be hurt? How do we be inclusive?”
The American History Museum postponed a planned exhibition of its collection of Gullah baskets from South Carolina to have time to examine its past curatorial work on these objects and to improve their future interpretation.
“We can take the time to reconnect with the community in South Carolina and learn how did these baskets come into being. Who were the artists? What were their names? That’s ongoing work,” director Hartig said.
The Freer/Sackler has been doing provenance research and sharing its findings in gallery exhibits, public programs and online articles. But even these stories only go so far. Facts about the acquisition of the cave temple reliefs, for example, are outlined in the gallery, and more details are in a lengthy blog post. But neither mentions that “very early in the 20th century, the Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan suffered extensive damage and theft,” as the museum’s online provenance states. Maybe, in 12 or 18 months, that information will be more widely shared.
Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government’s capacity to plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres (1.7 million hectares) in need of replanting, officials said.
The U.S. Agriculture Department said it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation’s forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.
Much of the administration’s broader agenda to tackle climate change remains stalled amid disagreement in Congress, where Democrats hold a razor-thin majority. That has left officials to pursue a more piecemeal approach with incremental measures such as Monday’s announcement, while the administration considers whether to declare a climate emergency that could open the door to more aggressive executive branch actions.
To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) replanted last year to about 400,000 acres (162,000 hectares) annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle, the agency’s director of forest management.
Blazes have charred 5.6 million acres so far in the U.S. this year, putting 2022 on track to match or exceed the record-setting 2015 fire season, when 10.1 million acres (4.1 million hectares) burned.
Many forests regenerate naturally after fires, but if the blazes get too intense they can leave behind barren landscapes that linger for decades before trees come back.
“Our forests, rural communities, agriculture and economy are connected across a shared landscape and their existence is at stake,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement announcing the reforestation plan. “Only through bold, climate-smart actions ... can we ensure their future.”
The Forest Service this year is spending more than $100 million on reforestation work. Spending is expected to further increase in coming years, to as much as $260 million annually, under the sweeping federal infrastructure bill approved last year, agency officials said.
Some timber industry supporters were critical of last year’s reforesting legislation as insufficient to turn the tide on the scale of the wildfire problem. They want more aggressive logging to thin stands that have become overgrown from years of suppressing fires.
To prevent replanted areas from becoming similarly overgrown, practices are changing so reforested stands are less dense with trees and therefore less fire prone, said Joe Fargione, science director for North America at the Nature Conservancy.
But challenges to the Forest Service’s goal remain, from finding enough seeds to hiring enough workers to plant them, Fargione said.
Many seedlings will die before reaching maturity due to drought and insects, both of which can be exacerbated by climate change.
“You’ve got to be smart about where you plant,” Fargione said. “There are some places that the climate has already changed enough that it makes the probability of successfully reestablishing trees pretty low.”
Living trees are a major “sink” for carbon dioxide that’s driving climate change when it enters the atmosphere, Fargione said. That means replacing those that die is important to keep climate change from getting even worse.
Congress in 1980 created a reforestation trust that had previously capped funding — which came from tariffs on timber products — at $30 million annually. That was enough money when the most significant need for reforestation came from logging, but became insufficient as the number of large, high intensity fires increased, officials said.
Insects, disease and timber harvests also contribute to the amount of land that needs reforestation work, but the vast majority comes from fires. In the past five years alone more than 5 million acres were severely burned.
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