17 October 22
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Lawmakers want to ban abortion. Advocates are confident that Wyoming’s constitution protects access — and they’re fighting in court to prove it.
Burkhart had arrived in Casper, Wyoming, a day earlier to check on renovations to a new abortion clinic she was opening on East Second Street. The final cleaning in preparation for opening day was scheduled for the end of the week. That evening she’d done a walk-through; all looked good. But when she heard the voice of one of her contractors on the other end of the line, she knew something was wrong. “I was thinking there’s a plumbing issue,” she recalled. “‘There was a water break, right?’”
Burkhart has been involved with abortion care for decades. In 1991, she worked at a clinic in downtown Wichita, Kansas, which gave her a front-row seat to the infamous “Summer of Mercy,” when anti-abortion zealots swarmed the city determined to shut down abortion access. She later became a protégé of renowned Wichita doctor George Tiller — the main target of the 1991 protests — and worked with him up until his assassination in 2009 at the hands of a militant anti-abortion acolyte. After Tiller’s murder, Burkhart took over providing abortion care at the clinic he’d run and went on to open clinics in other states.
All of which is to say: Burkhart knows that providing abortion care can be a fraught proposition involving serious threats of violence. So when her contractor called that morning, Burkhart knew it wasn’t going to be good news, but she didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was. “‘Julie,’ he goes, ‘the building’s on fire.’ And I was like, ‘God, what the hell?’”
Burkhart had long eyed Wyoming as a prime candidate for expanding abortion access. At present, the state has one abortion provider, in Jackson, which only provides medication abortion, available up to about 10 weeks into pregnancy. Burkhart’s clinic, Wellspring Health Access, would provide medication and procedural abortion on top of a host of other health services. It would also expand abortion access in the broader region, where population centers are spread out amid a rural landscape — a swath of the country known as an “abortion desert.” In the fall of 2021, she secured the property just blocks from Casper’s bustling downtown drag and began renovations.
Although Wyoming has developed a reputation as a MAGA hotbed in recent years, its politics have always been more complicated, burnished with a live-and-let-live vibe that transcends political party. Wyoming is among a number of Western and Great Plains states that have progressive notions baked into their constitutions, including where equal rights and individual freedoms are concerned. Wyoming was the first territory in the country to grant women suffrage and led the way with a number of other firsts for women’s participation in civic and political life, earning it the nickname the Equality State.
For decades, abortion was legal in Wyoming with scant limitations up to the point of viability. Lawmakers rejected attempts to impose medically dubious restrictions that were proliferating across the country, and in the mid-1990s, voters roundly rejected a statewide ballot measure that would have banned abortion and defined life as beginning at conception.
Given that legal landscape, opening a clinic in Wyoming made sense to Burkhart. But not long after plans got underway, the future of abortion rights in the United States took a draconian turn. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court finished hearing oral arguments in the case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in December, it was clear that the justices were poised to topple nearly 50 years of constitutional protection for abortion. In the wake of those arguments, several states intensified efforts to pass laws banning abortion that would be triggered by the imminent court ruling. Among them was Wyoming, where lawmakers rushed through a near-total ban in early 2022.
Wellspring Health Access was slated to open in mid-June when an unidentified woman carrying a gas can broke into the clinic and set it on fire. The arson remains unsolved. Just a few weeks later, the Supreme Court ruled in the Dobbs case, paving the way for Wyoming’s new abortion ban to take effect. “This is a decisive win for those who have fought for the rights of the unborn for the past 50 years,” Republican Gov. Mark Gordon said.
Despite the setbacks, Burkhart and her allies are moving ahead. The Casper clinic is being rebuilt, and a mobile clinic is in the works. If it all sounds a tad optimistic given the bleak outlook for abortion access, that’s because while federal protections for abortion have been decimated, state protections, and specifically those found in state constitutions, have not. Abortion rights advocates in Wyoming are confident that their state’s founding document speaks clearly that abortion is a right, and they’re fighting in state court to prove it.
Circling the Wagons
On a hot evening in late August, Jane Ifland welcomed a group of women to the secluded patio of her home just north of downtown Casper. Longtime Wyoming residents from both sides of the political aisle, the women had formed a community advisory committee in the spring of 2021 to support efforts to open the Casper clinic. It was committee member Christine Lichtenfels, founder of the state’s sole abortion fund, who first reached out to Burkhart about coming to Wyoming.
The intent of the committee was to help Burkhart navigate the social and political dynamics of a state where even the biggest cities — Casper, the second largest, has roughly 59,000 residents — often feel like places where everybody knows your name. For the committee, this is a good thing; they know who to go to when things need to get done. “That’s how it works,” said committee member Deb Cheatham.
They had a full agenda. There was discussion of fundraising and getting Casper’s young adults more involved. There was talk about a secure place to store the new mobile clinic (handled) and a place to park it while in operation (good leads). And in the wake of the arson, there were issues of security to discuss — and speculation about who might have torched the clinic.
Around 3:30 a.m. that morning in late May, a woman wearing a dark hoodie and a surgical mask gained entry to the building. In surveillance video captured by a camera in the reception area, the woman can be seen carrying a gas can toward a hallway, where she squats, pulls down her mask, and struggles to open the can. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has posted a $5,000 reward for information relating to the crime.
After her contractor called to tell her the clinic was in flames, Burkhart threw on clothes and rushed to the scene. She spent the day camped out in the parking lot of a meat market across the street. Leslie Kee, a member of the advisory committee, kept her company. “I pulled my truck in there and we put the tailgate down and sat and drank coffee,” Kee recalled. “And she had to make a gazillion phone calls.”
It wasn’t until the following afternoon that Burkhart was allowed into the building. The destruction took her breath away. Furniture and equipment were charred; windows had been smashed; plastic-covered light fixtures had melted and warped; smoke lines snaked their way across the walls.
The arsonist had started the fire in an exam room, she was told. How she gained entry is, as Burkhart figures, “the $10 million question.” Investigators said it appeared that the woman had broken a front window and climbed into an entryway. Burkhart is skeptical. Flipping through her phone, she found a photo of the window in question, the edges punctuated by spikes of glass. She doesn’t see how the woman could have climbed through without cutting herself. Which makes her wonder: Could the arsonist have gotten the code to enter the building from someone on the inside?
Burkhart has other theories. She thinks the arsonist had an accomplice; in a 27-second video clip that police released, Burkhart believes the woman is talking on the phone, perhaps to someone waiting outside in a car. (During questioning, investigators asked Burkhart a lot about various cars.) Burkhart wonders if it might have been someone from out of state, maybe from neighboring South Dakota or Colorado. She acknowledges this would be a long way to travel to torch her clinic, but it would explain why no one in Casper has come forward with any intel.
Holly Waatti-Thompson, who founded the advisory committee, thinks it was someone from Casper, and that the city’s anti-abortion forces, centered in area churches, have circled the wagons to protect the perpetrator. “Unfortunately, their religious beliefs are interfering with their ability to reason and their ability to think,” she said. Other members of the committee agree. “Whoever knows is not talking,” Kee said. But she’s certain that “some people” around town know exactly who was responsible.
About a month before the fire, anti-abortion protesters began gathering outside the clinic on Thursday afternoons. At first it was just a quiet affair, Waatti-Thompson said, but it has since grown into something akin to “street theater.”
The protests are coordinated by Bob Brechtel, a former state representative who has boasted that the anti-abortion demonstrators come from 37 different churches and that he intends to keep protesting as long as necessary. “Rule of law is important,” he told Kaiser Health News, “but what’s more important is that we do have people who are accepting and understanding of our purpose to defend human life at all stages.”
Ironically, it is work Brechtel did while in the Wyoming Legislature that has buoyed the hopes of folks like Burkhart that abortion will remain legal in the state and plans for a brick-and-mortar clinic will be realized.
Back in 2011, Brechtel was a House sponsor of the state Senate’s “Health Care Freedom” resolution, which aimed to enshrine health care access into the state’s constitution. The resolution led with the broad promise that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.” Additional provisions included a right to pay for health care out of pocket and a commitment that the state would “act to preserve these rights from undue governmental infringement.”
The resolution was filed in reaction to Congress passing the Affordable Care Act. State lawmakers were dismayed by the notion that Wyomingites might be forced into purchasing health insurance and wanted to push back. Floor debates on the resolution were limited, and while some lawmakers pointed directly to the ACA as the reason for their support, others talked about health care — and government overreach — more broadly. “We don’t agree with government from the highest possible level enforcing something so intimate as the health care decisions that we make for ourselves and for our children,” then-state Rep. Amy Edmonds told her colleagues.
The resolution easily passed, and in November 2012, 73 percent of voters cast a ballot in favor of adding a new section to the state constitution. The right of health care access laid out in Article 1, Section 38 is now at the center of efforts to protect abortion rights in the state.
Health Care Freedom
In 1920, the town of Jackson, in Teton County, became the first in Wyoming to be governed entirely by elected women. The press dubbed the administration the “petticoat government.” In 1922, Mayor Grace Miller summed up their approach to governing: “We simply tried to work together,” she said. “What is good government but a breathing space for good citizenship?”
On July 25, Burkhart and five other female plaintiffs picked up that mantle and filed suit in Teton County seeking to block the state’s abortion ban, which was slated to take effect two days later. Burkhart’s clinic and Lichtenfels’s abortion fund joined two doctors, a pregnant emergency room nurse, and a third-year law student to argue that the ban, which contains only narrow exceptions, violated multiple provisions of the Wyoming Constitution, including the explicit guarantee of Article 1, Section 38.
If the law went into effect, they argued, “Wyomingites, and especially women, lose their right to decide whether and when to become parents; their right to determine the composition of their families; their entitlement to be free from discriminatory state laws that perpetuate stereotypes about women and their proper societal role; their right to bodily integrity and to be free from involuntary servitude; their freedom of conscience; their right to access appropriate health care and make private health care decisions; and their right to bodily autonomy and liberty.”
In response, the state has tossed a mishmash of arguments at District Judge Melissa Owens to explain why the Wyoming Constitution doesn’t protect abortion. Special Assistant Attorney General Jay argues that interpretation of the state constitution is somehow tethered to Supreme Court interpretations of the federal Constitution — in other words, that because the Supreme Court says there’s no federal protection for abortion, one can’t be found anywhere in the Wyoming Constitution.
As for concerns that the state’s ban is vague — and would leave doctors and patients unsure of the conditions under which abortion is legal, as has happened across the country — there is a simple fix, Jerde says: Just remove the ban’s exceptions for the health of the pregnant person and cases of rape and incest. “There’s nothing vague about this statement: ‘No abortion shall be performed,’” he told Owens during an August court hearing.
Then there are the state’s claims about why the protections afforded by Article 1, Section 38 simply don’t apply. For starters, the amendment only protects an individual’s right to choose among “health care services” that Wyoming politicians have decided are legal, according to Jerde; if the Legislature has decided abortion isn’t legal, then there’s no right to it.
And he argues that the point of the amendment was solely to protect Wyoming residents from having to pay for insurance under the ACA — that is, the promise to defend health care freedom from “undue government infringement” only applies to federal overreach, not state infringements.
To properly understand the amendment’s guarantees, Jerde argues, the court must determine what lawmakers intended in passing the resolution and what voters thought when they cast their ballots. And since the amendment doesn’t contain the word abortion, “no voter … could reasonably believe that, in voting to ratify section 38, she was amending the Wyoming Constitution to implicitly confer the right to abortion.”
Our Own Rights
To Sharon Breitweiser, executive director of Pro-Choice Wyoming, Jerde’s assertions are nonsense.
Breitweiser has lobbied in the halls of the state Capitol for decades, working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to keep abortion legal in the state. Her organization led the fight against the 1994 constitutional amendment that would have banned abortion and defined life at conception; in a landslide vote, the amendment was rejected. During debate over the health care resolution in 2011, she said it was “absolutely” obvious that the proposed amendment would include abortion. People came up to her and said, “Do they realize that they just protected abortion?” she recalled. In 2012, Breitweiser began adding information about the amendment’s protections to abortion fact sheets the organization provides to lawmakers. “Every single legislative session,” she said.
Legal experts say that the state’s interpretation, not only of the amendment but also the constitution more broadly, is just wrong. Wyoming’s constitution has robust protections for “personal autonomy and individual freedoms,” said Kenneth Chestek, a law professor at the University of Wyoming. “That is not a partisan thing, I don’t think. It’s something that everybody really can get behind who lives out here.”
Chestek says he thinks a lot of residents would be shocked by the notion that the Wyoming Constitution is somehow cramped by whatever the U.S. Supreme Court says about the federal Constitution. “Are you kidding me? The biggest sin that a politician can have in the state of Wyoming is to be beholden to people in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “We have our own power, our own rights, and we are not beholden to anybody, especially not the federal government.”
Where Article 1, Section 38 is concerned, he says the arguments about whether lawmakers or voters intended their rights to be limited to battling ACA mandates is inconsequential. Rules of statutory interpretation require that the law be enforced as written. “Whatever it says, you enforce it. And if it’s clear, you’re done.” He sees the amendment as unambiguously granting individuals the right to their own health care decisions. “Abortion is a health care choice for the woman. Absolutely. I can’t think of any argument to say that it is not a health care choice,” he said. The amendment is “directly applicable. There is nothing to interpret. We don’t care why it was adopted. It was adopted, it is clear, it is enforced.”
Robert Keiter, a former Wyoming law professor who literally wrote the book on the Wyoming Constitution, agrees. Although Jerde cited Keiter’s work for the proposition that the health care amendment should be cabined to the ACA, Keiter says it’s clear that its protections are much broader. “The language goes way beyond any immediate reaction to Obamacare,” he said. “I don’t know how you get beyond the language.”
Keiter also notes that the state constitution is explicit in granting equal rights for women. In 1869, when Wyoming was still a territory, it granted women voting rights, and women quickly gained positions of power and influence in broader civic life. When Wyoming codified its state constitution, it included “an explicit equal protection provision referring to gender,” he said, “which is highly unusual.”
“Since equality in the enjoyment of natural and civil rights is only made sure through political equality,” that section reads, state laws “shall be without distinction of race, color, sex, or any circumstance or condition whatsoever other than individual incompetency.”
Taken together, Keiter says, the constitution’s health care and equality amendments “recognize a fundamental right to reproductive choice on the part of a woman.”
In August, Owens, the district judge, concluded that the state’s abortion ban should be blocked during the pendency of the litigation. She noted that because the ban singles out those who can become pregnant and impermissibly “restricts” their health care rights, the plaintiffs would likely be successful on several of their constitutional claims. “Discrimination on the basis of sex is explicitly prohibited under the Wyoming Constitution,” she wrote.
Live and Let Live
When state Rep. Pat Sweeney joined the Wyoming House in 2017 as a Republican representing Natrona County, where Casper is located, he didn’t consider himself pro-choice. He’d spent years in the hospitality business, owning a hotel, bar, and steak joint in town. He worked around employees from all walks of life and saw abortion as health care, but he hadn’t really thought much more about it.
But after nearly 30 years of rejecting abortion restrictions, state lawmakers appeared on track to pass several that year. Sweeney sat on the Labor, Health, and Social Services Committee. He remembers listening to hours of testimony and thinking to himself, “What gives a bunch of older white men in the Legislature … the right to take these fundamental rights away from women?” After he voted no on one measure, he recalls being confronted by Brechtel, the former state representative behind the anti-abortion protests, and Frank Eathorne, now the controversial chair of the state GOP. “‘You claim to be a Republican?’” he says Eathorne asked. “Very insulting and very demeaning, he and Bob Brechtel … so that has stuck with me.”
That kind of nastiness has washed over the state Republican Party, said Sweeney — who voted for Donald Trump twice (his policies were good for the state’s extraction industries, he said) and recently lost his reelection bid — and was on full display during debates over the trigger bill in February. Sweeney recalled watching as a female colleague made an impassioned speech against the measure while the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, stared her down, “just won’t take her eyes off her, with a shit-eating grin. And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, do you have no respect for anybody except your point of view, and only your point of view?’” he said. “Just open your mind a little bit, would you? But she didn’t.”
Rodriguez-Williams, the executive director of a crisis pregnancy center in Cody, has now joined with Right to Life of Wyoming in an attempt to intervene in the lawsuit over the ban. In a brief filed in Owens’s court, lawyers with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a far-right Christian legal organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, argued that the state wasn’t putting on the kind of evidence needed to demonstrate the legality of the ban — including an assertion that abortion isn’t actually health care. Owens hasn’t yet ruled on their request.
In the meantime, Burkhart’s mobile abortion clinic is on track to open in November. A new round of renovations to Wellspring Health Access is well underway. The clinic still sees weekly anti-abortion protests, and the investigation into the arson is ongoing. With all the setbacks and legal wrangling, Burkhart says that people have asked her why she’s pressing forward. She’s motivated by the patients who need care and the memory of her mentor, George Tiller. “Tiller always said, ‘solutions, not problems.’”
Sweeney joined Burkhart for an abortion rights rally in Casper this spring, where he urged people to vote and run for office. He hopes that Wyomingites can return to talking respectfully to one another and to their live-and-let-live roots. Members of the advisory committee were at the rally too: Kee, Waatti-Thompson, and Ifland spoke. So did Riata Little Walker.
Back on Ifland’s patio in Casper, Little Walker, a native Wyomingite and “traditional Republican,” said that if you’d asked her a few years ago, she would’ve said she was pro-life, with exceptions for incest and rape. “That’s all that had ever been presented to me as an issue,” she said. “My perspective … was very narrow.” Then she got married and pregnant. “And everything was wonderful,” she said. Until it wasn’t. At 21 weeks, they found out the fetus was very sick. Little Walker had to travel to Denver for help, where she had a choice of termination or induced labor and delivery. She chose the latter. The couple held their daughter “and she died in our arms.”
The experience was transformative. Little Walker realized that the notion that all terminations were of pregnancies that would have developed into healthy babies was nonsense. She thought that discussing termination for medical reasons would be a “good bridge for the people who are uncomfortable with the whole abortion thing and thinking that you’re killing a perfectly healthy, innocent baby just because somebody doesn’t want it,” she said. “And we all know how absurd that argument is.”
She reached out to Breitweiser of Pro-Choice Wyoming and began testifying at the legislature. Her message: “It’s not black and white.” Her goal is to get people to think more deeply about the issue, and to understand that legislation like Wyoming’s ban takes choice and health care away from everyone in every situation, including the most dire. If you can “get them to start thinking about it,” she said, then “you can slowly get there.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty)
The ex-president essentially threatened Jews on social media for being unappreciative of his support for Israel. Try not to be shocked, but conservatives don’t care.
He regularly employs antisemitic tropes, essentializes Jews as a monolithic group, and entertains base stereotypes of Jews. He suggests that Jews are—or at least should be—more loyal to Israel than the United States. And yet, his defenders insist he can’t truly be antisemitic because his son-in-law is Jewish and his daughter converted to Judaism. Plus, he supports Israel.
Trump himself has said he is “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life.” But that, like most of the words that come out of Trump’s mouth—is a lie.
For American Jews, Trump’s anti-Jewish utterances are not necessarily surprising or unique. They are the kind of words that most of us have heard in whispered tones (or perhaps from clueless Gentiles) our entire lives. If, as Isaiah Berlin once joked, an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary, Trump rarely went too far beyond that line into Grammy Hall-territory—a “classic Jew hater.”
But on Sunday that changed, as he took his antisemitism to a new and much more dangerous place—implicitly threatening Jews. And, once again, his fellow Republicans said nothing.
On his social media site, Truth Social, Trump wrote this:
“No President has done more for Israel than I have. Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story – Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be P.M.! U.S. Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel – Before it is too late!”
Trump has made similar statements in the past. Last December he complained that “People in this country that are Jewish no longer love Israel.” He added that “evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country,” who according to the former president “either don’t like Israel or don’t care about Israel.” (For good measure, he threw in that classic antisemitic dog whistle—“Jewish people run The New York Times.”)
Trump says things like this because he views politics in a wholly transactional manner. In Trump’s mind, he’s been incredidbly supportive of Israel. As president, he moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and thus, American Jews should vote for him. It’s a quid pro quo.
It would never occur to him that America Jews might take into account other factors—like whether a presidential candidate regularly makes openly antisemitic statements, runs blatantly antisemitic ads, or helms a political movement that has turned a wealthy Jewish philanthropist into an antisemitic bogeyman.
It certainly would never dawn on him that the voting patterns of American Jews are driven by something other than a finite, definable good.
Indeed, American Jews have long been among the most loyal bloc of Democratic voters. That’s largely because, of the two major political parties, Democrats are consistent supporters of equal rights for minority racial and ethnic groups and are far less likely to give aid and comfort to antisemitic voices (though the party has not been as stalwart on this point as it once was). Quite simply, the values of the Democratic Party largely align with the values of the Jewish community in America.
The idea that American Jews’ political support could be informed by shared values—or a moral core—is as foreign to Trump as is the idea that values and morality are actual human attributes.
Indeed, Trump is likely unaware in his Sunday post that he gave voice to one of the more despicable and long-standing antisemitic tropes—that Jews are as loyal to Israel, as they are to America. Disloyalty is a charge that has been levied against Diaspora Jews for thousands of years, long before there even was a state of Israel. But Trump found a way to put an even worse modern spin on it by suggesting that “U.S. Jews have to get their act together…Before it is too late!”
Before what is too late?
Does that mean that if Trump comes back into power he will use the presidency to attack Jews for their lack of loyalty, or perhaps Israel for the supposed sins of their Jewish brethren in the United States? It’s not often that a potential presidential candidate demands votes by implicitly threatening an entire group of Americans, but here we are.
But if we dig deeper into Trump’s words, there’s an even more unsettling accusation. Unlike the usual charge of Jewish dual allegiance, Trump appears to suggest that Jews aren’t even loyal to America. According to Trump, the only real concern is the fate of Israel, which makes sense considering he once told a group of Jewish attendees at a White House Hanukkah event that Israel is “your country.” Our only true allegiance is, and apparently should be, with a country that is 5,000 miles away, not the place we call home.
Trump’s antisemitic slander is more than just another crude attack on Jews, it’s an assault on the very idea of what it means to be an American, particulalry for those of us from immigrant backgrounds, who maintain an affinity and appreciation for our home country.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s latest disgusting attack on American Jews received the same response it almost always does from his fellow Republicans: crickets. If you were searching social media to find a prominent Republican who criticized Trump’s threatening language you were out of luck.
This, of course, is the same political party that regularly castigates Democrats for not speaking out against antisemitic members in their own camp. Or as Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said earlier this month, in defending Kanye West after he tweeted out an explicit threat against American Jews, he can’t really be an anti-Semite since he 100 percent supports Israel—as if the latter somehow excuses the former.
As one exasperated Jewish friend texted to me on Sunday evening, “all you f***ers who tell me you can’t support the Democrats because Rashida (Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan) or Omar (Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota) are antisemites. Where the f** are you today?”
For years, Republicans have been more than happy to ignore Trump’s racism and misogyny—considering it politically useful to look the other way as he attacks minority groups as insufficiently American. But then again for Trump’s Republican enablers, unlike the Jewish-Americans he vilified on Sunday, their true allegiance is clear—and it’s not to America.
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The Russia-flagged vessel Volga River Taganrog oil tanker passes south through the Bosphorus Straits. (photo: Diego Cupolo/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
New markets and illicit tactics are part of Russia’s strategy for making up losses.
In the US, President Joe Biden issued an executive order prohibiting the import of Russian petroleum products, liquid natural gas (LNG), and coal products as of March 8, 2022. The European Union, a far larger market for Russian energy, will cease importing most Russian crude oil in December, and will stop importing refined Russian petroleum products two months later.
Overall, crude oil exports via cargo vessel trended downward in May, June, and July, with China, India, and Italy the top destinations for Russian crude oil, according to data from vessel trade analysis firm KPLER. During the first half of September, seaborne shipments of Russian crude oil continued to fall, by 314,000 barrels per day from the previous month, putting exports via ship at the lowest levels since the start of the war, according to S…P Global Insights.
However, petroleum isn’t the only energy source Russia produces, and the US and EU aren’t the only markets for those products. Petroleum shipments are still relatively stable for Russia, as nations like China and India have picked up some slack from EU countries weaning themselves off oil, and Russia still has LNG, coal, and nuclear energy to help the economy float, too.
In order to make petroleum products more appealing to customers like India and Indonesia, Russia has offered fairly steep discounts — an average of $30 per barrel — against Brent crude oil, which has also been a benefit for Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Cuba, all emerging economies struggling with inflation, as Business Insider reported. Although according to S…P the discounts on Russian crude oil are decreasing, some analysts believe they’ll persist, making Russian crude oil imports highly palatable for poorer countries.
“The first two Russian shipments arrived [to Sri Lanka] from Primorsk and Novorossiysk, ports located in the Baltic Sea and Black Sea, respectively,” Thanh-Long Huynh, chief executive of the data analytics firm QuantCube, told the Financial Times. “Since these ports historically served European ports, they indicate the development of new trade routes for Russian energy.”
Countries like China, India, and Turkey are proving eager partners for the Russian fuel industry, with Turkey doubling Russian oil imports this year and vying to become a hub for Russian LNG transfers into Europe after damage to the Nord Stream pipelines.
Between April and July, China — the world’s top energy consumer and biggest customer for crude oil — had purchased 17 percent more Russian crude oil than it had during the same period in 2021, according to Reuters. And despite major discounts, the price of oil is still much higher than it was in 2020, pre-coronavirus, allowing Russia to bring in more money from oil exports even though production is down, according to research by Frank Umbach for the Liechtenstein-based think tank Geopolitical Intelligence Services.
The Russian energy market is bigger than just oil
EU countries have struggled to disentangle themselves from Russian fuel overall, not just oil. Russian natural gas, pumped through avenues like the Nord Stream 1 pipeline which was damaged in September, provided about 40 percent of Europe’s natural gas prior to the invasion, according to Reuters. But even as Europe tries to turn away from Russian gas flows, investing in Norwegian fuel instead, Russian LNG is finding its way into European markets via cargo vessel, as Javier Blas wrote in Bloomberg earlier this week.
Even with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline out of commission — and setting aside the transfers to China, now Russia’s biggest natural gas buyer — European countries are importing record amounts of Russian LNG at market prices, according to Bloomberg. France has purchased about 6 percent more Russian LNG between January and September of this year than it did all of last year; Spain has already broken its record for Russian LNG imports this year, and Belgium is on track to do the same.
The stakes for natural gas imports are somewhat different than they are for Russian petroleum, in a number of different ways; for one, the EU hasn’t imposed sanctions against it as it has against petroleum products, though the bloc does intend to eliminate its reliance on Russian fossil fuels by 2027. Second, Russia has already used Europe‘s reliance on its natural gas as a weapon; Russia cut access to many European countries which refused to pay for LNG in rubles, and cut total output to Europe by 60 percent in June and by 80 percent in July, Reuters reported last month.
Asian markets, too, are in on the game; by July of this year, China’s Russian energy imports overall had grown 7 percent over 2019, according to Chinese customs data analyzed by Reuters. Between April and July, China purchased 50 percent more LNG and 6 percent more coal from Russia than it had during the same period in 2021, lured at least in part by lower prices. That mutual benefit appears set to continue; in a deal negotiated in February, China will get a new natural gas pipeline from Russia.
India, also, has become a major buyer of Russian energy, particularly oil, though in prior years it rarely imported Russian crude. Low Russian crude oil prices drove Indian purchases to a peak of 950,000 barrels per day in June, but price increases have since pushed that number down to about 477,000 barrels per day in September. India also picked up slack for Russia’s coal exports after an EU ban on Russian coal took effect on August 10. That ban halted all coal shipments to the bloc after a four-month tapering period, and also prevents EU-based insurers and financial firms from working with Russian coal exports, as Bloomberg reported at the time. That makes exporting Russian coal extremely difficult, since most financial institutions and insurance companies involved in global shipping are based in the EU, the UK, and Switzerland.
Though Russia is one of the world’s major coal exporters, with about 17 percent of the market share, coal exports account for only about one percent of Russia’s economy. Even though customers like India and China are importing large amounts at high prices, coal exports simply can’t make a significant dent in Russia’s economy.
Overall, Russia’s earned about 158 billion euros from fossil fuel sales from February to September, according to a report from the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air; half of that, about 85 billion euros, came from EU purchases. By the end of September, that amount had surpassed 100 billion euros — about 260 million euros per day — although CREA saw Russian exports dropping in September and Russia’s revenue from fossil fuel exports decreasing by about 14 percent. Globally, Russian revenues from fossil fuels were down 300 million euros per day in September compared to February and March of this year, according to CREA.
While fossil fuels get more attention, Russia is also a market leader on nuclear energy. Russian nuclear technology, as well as fuel, has thus far escaped significant bans from the EU, as CNBC reported Friday, despite calls from Ukraine to impose such restrictions. Russia continues to invest heavily in its nuclear technology, and nuclear facilities in many nations are dependent on Russian technology and cooperation to function, even if they’re not directly importing Russian nuclear fuel, according to a report by Robert Ichord for the Atlantic Council.
Russia has developed and borrowed methods of sanctions evasion
Not all of Russia’s energy exports are easily discernible; Russia has several illicit strategies to evade western sanctions on its energy products and financial system. Because these transactions are, by their nature, often difficult to track, it’s hard to know how effective and how widespread they are — not to mention how much the Russian economy is benefiting from them.
“As a general matter, I think that the most widespread sanctions evasion technique is for sanctioned Russian businesses to hide behind front companies that are not sanctioned and/or to conduct transactions through third party countries that do not present sanctions issues,” Thomas Firestone, co-chair of the white collar and internal investigations practice group at Stroock … Stroock … Lavan, told Vox via email. That can cause problems for companies doing business with such firms, causing them to perhaps unwittingly do business with sanctioned entities.
Russia has plenty of models on which to base illicit shipping transactions; according to a July article in the journal Strategic Comment, Iran developed methods like “multiple ship-to-ship transfers, temporarily disabling vessel-tracking transponders and using obscure sailing patterns” to hide shipments of its oil. Ships also have “complex ownership structures” to hide who controls them, or often sail under flags of countries with lax adherence to the rule of law, to obscure their origin with a lower chance of pushback. Some Russian tankers are reportedly shipping under the flags of St. Kitts and Nevis and the Marshall Islands.
According to Umbach’s research, “more Russian oil tankers ship without a reported destination,” with Russian state-owned shipping firm Sovcomflot declining to supply end-point information for one-third of its fleet in April, according to Strategic Comment. According to the Wall Street Journal, some 11.1 million barrels of oil were shipped that way in April, up from almost zero prior to the invasion. Without a set destination, the oil can undergo a ship-to-ship transfer to obscure its origins.
Another tactic sanctioned countries — now, including Russia — have used to obscure the origins of their petroleum products is to blend it with oil from other countries, “passing it off as Latvian or other foreign blends” like Lithuanian or Turkmenistani, according to Umbach. Royal Dutch Shell transported oil under this scheme as of April, with the reasoning that the company was obligated to do so under previous contracts, and that because the blend contained only 49.99 percent Russian oil, the whole product was no longer of Russian origin. Shell later promised to cease accepting refined oil with any Russian petroleum, and said it would continue with a planned phase-out of all Russian crude products.
As Russia becomes further estranged from the global market, these methods will only become more pronounced and more common, as they have in other sanctioned states like Iran and Venezuela — making the fuel for Russia’s war machine and the revenue it generates even more difficult to track.
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Jeff Bezos (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
As the Fed seeks to cut workers’ wages amid inflation, a new report shows corporate executives have seen a monumental surge in compensation.
Between 1978 and 2021, according to new research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), CEO compensation at the 350 largest publicly traded U.S. companies rose by an inflation-adjusted 1,460%, far outstripping the 18.1% pay increase that the nation’s typical worker saw during that period.
The trend of soaring CEO pay has continued during the coronavirus pandemic, which caused mass economic chaos and job loss among ordinary workers. EPI found that “while millions lost jobs in the first year of the pandemic and suffered real wage declines due to inflation in the second year, CEOs’ realized compensation jumped 30.3% between 2019 and 2021.”
“Typical worker compensation among those who remained employed rose 3.9% over the same time span,” note EPI’s Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra, the authors of the new report.
The findings come amid mounting fears of a global recession triggered by central banks’ attempts to fight inflation via increasingly aggressive interest rate hikes, a strategy aimed at crushing economic demand.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the world’s most powerful central banker, has been forthright about the primary goals of rate hikes: A weaker labor market and lower wages. According to the Fed’s own projections, rate increases could throw around 1.5 million people in the U.S. out of work by the end of next year.
“What we hope to achieve is a period of growth below trend which will cause the labor market to get back into better balance and that will bring wages back down to levels that are more consistent with 2% inflation over time,” Powell said last month.
When Powell voices his desire to “get wages down” — as he did during a May press conference — he’s not referring to the skyrocketing pay of top corporate executives or Wall Street bankers, who have seen their bonuses surge by 1,743% since 1985. As The Lever ’s Matthew Cunningham-Cook reported earlier this year, Powell’s Fed has “declined to implement a law to reduce the skyrocketing paychecks of his former colleagues on Wall Street.”
Bivens and Kandra write in their new analysis that the chief executive pay surge in recent decades is not the “result of a competitive market for talent but rather reflect[s] the power of CEOs to extract concessions.”
In 2021, the CEOs of top U.S. companies raked in nearly 400 times more pay than the typical worker.
“Some observers argue that exorbitant CEO compensation is merely a symbolic issue, with no consequences for the vast majority of workers,” Bivens and Kandra note. “However, the escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally, has fueled the growth of top 1% and top 0.1% incomes, generating widespread inequality.”
To begin reversing out-of-control CEO pay and bolstering wage growth among ordinary workers, EPI recommends “implementing higher marginal income tax rates at the very top,” which “would limit rent-seeking behavior and reduce the incentives for executives to push for such high pay.”
“Another option,” Bivens and Kandra write, “is to set corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation,” an idea proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in his 2021 Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act.
The bill, which garnered just three co-sponsors in the Senate and 22 in the House, never received a vote.
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ICE Field Office Director, Enforcement and Removal Operations, David Marin and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Fugitive Operations team search for a Mexican national at a home in Hawthorne, California, March 1, 2020. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The complaint details numerous obstacles attorneys face in attempting to communicate with detained people at the Laredo Processing Center in Laredo, Texas, including insufficient private attorney visitation rooms, onerous scheduling requirements for legal calls, and severe restrictions on arranging interpretation services, all of which negatively impact legal representation.
“Confidential and reliable communication between an attorney and their client is absolutely necessary,” said Bernardo Rafael Cruz, attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “These ICE detention centers make that almost impossible, obstructing a person's opportunity for a fair legal process and violating their constitutional rights."
Research shows detained people with representation are almost seven times more likely to be released from custody and 10 times more likely to win their immigration cases than those without. Yet, in at least four immigration detention facilities at which the legal organizations provide services — the Florence Correctional Center in Florence, Arizona; the Krome Service Processing Center in Miami, Florida; the Laredo Processing Center in Laredo, Texas; and the River Correctional Center in Ferriday, Louisiana – attorneys have encountered numerous obstacles to communicating with detained people, making representation extremely difficult and, sometimes, impossible.
“The focus of immigrant detention by ICE has never been the protection of the rights of the migrants and asylum seekers detained therein. There is very little interest in accountability, due process, and frankly, in treating migrants as humans. Rooted in the same racism and xenophobia as this nation's immigration policy, immigrant detention seeks to deter, punish, and criminalize the very legal act of seeking asylum,” said Javier Hidalgo, director of pre-removal services, at RAICES. “The current administration continues the pattern of presenting migrants with hurdles and barriers to seeking asylum. Denial of meaningful access to counsel in immigrant detention is a big piece of that pattern.”
The complaint is brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the American Immigration Council, the ACLU of Arizona, D.C., Florida, and Texas, and Saul Ewing Arnstein … Lehr LLP, and Millbank LLP on behalf of non-profit legal service organizations Americans for Immigrant Justice (AIJ), Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP), the Immigration Justice Campaign for the American Immigration Council (IJC), Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy (ISLA), and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES).
The complaint is online here: https://www.aclutx.org/sites/default/files/aij_v._dhs_dkt._1-complaint.pdf
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The arrests come on top of 16,000 that had already been made before the emergency powers were granted. (photo: Jose Cabezas/Reuters)
The crackdown continues as parliament extended emergency powers that allow authorities to arrest suspects without warrants.
“There have been more than 55,000 captures” of alleged gang members since March, when the government was handed emergency powers to arrest such suspects without a warrant, justice minister Gustavo Villatoro said on Friday.
His statement comes as the parliament decided to extend in the early hours of Saturday a state of emergency to combat gangs.
Under the emergency measures, civil liberties have been curtailed and police power expanded, triggering alarms from rights groups.
Translation: #Plenaria77 With 67 votes in favour, we extend the #ExceptionRegime to continue the #GangWar and ensure the wellbeing of the population.
“The gang war does not stop, this is a decisive step to gain the peace of mind that was stolen from the people for years and to build El Salvador that we all deserve. We are living true democracy, doing what good Salvadorans demand,” the justice minister said on Twitter following the vote.
‘Arbitrary arrests’
The emergency measures restrict free assembly, curtail the right to be informed of the reason for arrest and access to a lawyer, and allow for detention for up to 15 days without charges. Rights groups and residents say the detentions amount to arbitrary arrests, with many targeted based on their appearance or where they live.
In early May, Human Rights Watch and the Cristosal human rights organisation said they had “received credible allegations of dozens of arbitrary arrests, including some that could amount to short-term enforced disappearances, and of two deaths of people in custody”.
Meanwhile, legislation passed since the state of the emergency was first approved includes laws that allow the lengthening of sentences for gang-related crimes and reducing the age of criminal responsibility to 12.
They also include a law that authorises prison sentences of 10 to 15 years for news media that reproduce or disseminate messages from the gangs, a move that rights groups say hinders press freedom and gang-tracking groups.
The arrests come on top of 16,000 that had already been made before the emergency powers were granted. The wave of detentions is unprecedented in the country of 6.5 million people, which has suffered decades of violent crime driven by powerful gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18.
“We are winning the war (against organised crime) and we will continue to deploy thousands of police and soldiers every day to arrest these terrorists,” Villatoro, the justice minister, said.
Police and military forces have seized 1,644 firearms, 2,026 vehicles, 12,842 cell phones and $1.2m, he added.
To cope with an influx of inmates, El Salvador’s judicial authorities are building a huge prison for 40,000 suspected criminals in Tecoluca, a rural area in the centre of the country.
The jail is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
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Water flows in Coldwater Creek on Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021, behind a row of homes at Belcroft Drive and Old Halls Ferry Road in Missouri's St. Louis County. Environmental investigation consultants have found significant radioactive contamination at an elementary school, which sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek which was contaminated by nuclear waste from weapons production during WWII. (photo: Christian Gooden/AP)
The report by Boston Chemical Data Corp. confirmed fears about contamination at Jana Elementary School in the Hazelwood School District in Florissant raised by a previous Army Corps of Engineers study.
The new report is based on samples taken in August from the school, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Boston Chemical did not say who or what requested and funded the report.
"I was heartbroken," said Ashley Bernaugh, president of the Jana parent-teacher association who has a son at the school. "It sounds so cliché, but it takes your breath from you."
The school sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek, which was contaminated by nuclear waste from weapons production during World War II. The waste was dumped at sites near the St. Louis Lambert International Airport, next to the creek that flows to the Missouri River. The Corps has been cleaning up the creek for more than 20 years.
The Corps' report also found contamination in the area but at much at lower levels, and it didn't take any samples within 300 feet of the school. The most recent report included samples taken from Jana's library, kitchen, classrooms, fields and playgrounds.
Levels of the radioactive isotope lead-210, polonium, radium and other toxins were "far in excess" of what Boston Chemical had expected. Dust samples taken inside the school were found to be contaminated.
Inhaling or ingesting these radioactive materials can cause significant injury, the report said.
"A significant remedial program will be required to bring conditions at the school in line with expectations," the report said.
The new report is expected to be a major topic at Tuesday's Hazelwood school board meeting. The district said in a statement that it will consult with its attorneys and experts to determine the next steps.
"Safety is absolutely our top priority for our staff and students," board president Betsy Rachel said Saturday.
Christen Commuso with the Missouri Coalition for the Environment presented the results of the Corps' study to the school board in June after obtaining a copy through a Freedom of Information Act request.
"I wouldn't want my child in this school," she said. "The effect of these toxins is cumulative."
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