05 November 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
And why I testified against him in 2005
I do not expect this Court to uphold affirmative action, notwithstanding the clear precedent for doing so.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. -- the conservative least likely to champion dramatic change in the court’s precedents -- has for his entire legal career opposed what he has called the “sordid business” of dividing Americans by race, including affirmative action
As Special Assistant to the Attorney General in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts argued that affirmative action was bound to fail because it required the "recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."
Roberts also complained to the Attorney General that the Department of Labor and its Office of Federal Contract Compliance were promoting "offensive preferences" based on race and gender, and questioned the executive order on which the Office of Contract Compliance was based.
He criticized a Supreme Court decision barring states from eliminating public education for children of undocumented immigrants.
And he supported a narrow "program specific" interpretation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Later, while in the White House, Roberts sought to slow progress on combating discrimination in housing, arguing that the administration should "go slowly" on proposed fair housing legislation, claiming that such legislation represented "government intrusion."
Compared to the Trump justices, Roberts seems almost judicious. But on the issue of affirmative action and on several other key issues he’s as bad if not worse than his rightwing siblings on the Court.
Since he became Chief on September 29, 2005, the Roberts Court has done more to reduce the voting rights of poor people and Black people while enlarging the voting rights of rich people and corporations than has any court since Roger Taney was Chief Justice in the early 19th century.
In 2010, Roberts was the moving force behind “Citizens United v. FEC,” (in which he concurred), finding that corporations are people, entitled to the same First Amendment rights — and thereby opening the floodgates to big money corrupting American politics.
In 2013, Roberts wrote for the court’s conservative majority in “Shelby County v. Holder,” gutting the Voting Rights Act’s requirement of prior federal approval for voting changes in states with a history of discrimination. Roberts ignored the detailed record to make his own finding that racial discrimination was no longer a problem in the United States — thereby opening the floodgates to voter-suppression laws across the South and other states with Republican-majority legislatures.
In addition to affirmative action, this term the Roberts court will put at risk the Voting Rights Act’s bar on the “denial or abridgement” of the right to vote on account of race in the upcoming case of “Merrill v. Milligan,” where Alabama asserts that race can’t be used as a factor to design fairer voting districts.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is supposed to guard it as an institution — maintaining public confidence and trust in it. But Americans' confidence in the Court is now at a new low in Gallup's nearly 50-year trend. Only 25 percent of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in it — five percentage points lower than the previous low recorded in 2014.
Yet another reason why it is so important that Democrats keep control over the Senate.
***
Here’s my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005, in which I opposed Roberts’ Senate confirmation.
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee,
Social or religious values have been given much emphasis in these proceedings. I want to suggest that economic values are also at stake. It may seem strange to talk about the economy in moral terms but that's only because we often don't recognize that moral choices are involved.
A central moral problem for the American economy today is that, although it has been growing at a good clip and corporate profits rising nicely, most American paychecks have been going nowhere.
These trends are not new. They began thirty years ago but are now reaching the point where they threaten the social fabric.
Not since the Gilded Age of the 1890s has this nation experienced anything like the inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity we are witnessing today. A central moral choice is whether America should seek to reverse this trend.
Those who view our society as a group of self-seeking individuals for whom government's major purpose is to protect their property and ensure their freedom of contract would probably say no. Those who view us as a national community of with responsibilities to promote the well-being of one another would likely say yes.
Is the well-being of our society the sum of our individual goods, or is there a common good that must be addressed? The answer will shape the American economy and society of the twenty-first century.
Over the next decades, the Supreme Court will play important role in helping us make this choice.
Under the guise of many doctrines and rationales the Court will favor either property or community, depending on the economic values of a majority of the Justices….
As inequality continues to widen, the Court's choice between property and community will have larger consequences.
Americans are segregating by income into cities and towns that are ever more uniformly rich, middle class, or poor. Hence, questions will be raised about equitable provision of public services.
Do our poor and working-class children have the right, under the Equal Protection Clause, to as good an education as the children of our wealthier citizens?
A future Court that says yes presumably would deem unconstitutional much of our present system of primary and secondary education, in which spending per child largely is based largely on local property taxes that vary enormously depending on whether the locale is rich or poor.
The wages and benefits of women and minorities continue to lag substantially behind those of white men in our society. And blacks and Latinos comprise a substantial portion of the nation's poor. As overall inequality widens, inequities based on gender, race and ethnicity are becoming more visible.
The link between poverty and race was never more evident than it was weeks ago in the hurricane-ravaged tragedy of New Orleans and its surrounds.
A future Supreme Court will almost certainly be faced with issues of equal protection for women and minorities in public safety, public health, employment, law enforcement, housing, and health care.
How it balances the values of property and community will affect the moral cohesion of the nation.
The same balance underlies how the Court decides whether rules and regulations are authorized by law. Many such laws reflect the nation's intent to protect people who cannot protect themselves on their own, and to establish minimally decent living standards for all… These laws represent America's moral conviction about how we should treat one another as members of the same society - thereby offsetting inequities in wealth and power.
And as such inequities have widened, each set of protections has become that much more critical. Each has and can be enlarged or whittled down by a Supreme Court, intent either on strengthening our national community or protecting property.
As Secretary of Labor, it was my job to implement the Family and Medical Leave Act. We came up with what I considered common-sense regulations that reflected the unequal power of employers and employees. Among them was a rule that even if an employer didn't tell employees they were eligible for it, eligible employees could take the 12 weeks of unpaid leave anyway.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down that rule, saying it was inconsistent with the Act and, besides, it discouraged employers from providing more generous leave.
I've read the case several times, and I must say the logic escapes me. I don't believe it was a matter of pure logic. It was a matter of values, and in this instance, property won over community.
Antitrust laws also regulate the balance of economic power in our society, as do laws and rules affecting the financing of political campaigns. As wealth becomes more concentrated in fewer hands, both will become increasingly salient.
As America continues to merge with the global economy, immigration laws and constitutional claims involving the rights of immigrants, both documented and undocumented, will arise with greater frequency. Hence, Justices will be grappling with the very meaning of a national community.
The moral economic values of a single Justice can therefore affect the lives of millions of Americans.
One example is Justice Owen Roberts - no relation, I believe, to the current nominee - who in March of 1937 decided to join with four justices in upholding the minimum wage law of the state of Washington.
Up until then, Roberts had been on the other side - joining his four other brethren in striking down laws setting minimum wages and maximum hours, barring child labor, protecting workers from unsafe conditions, and establishing codes for worker standards in various industries.
They had defended their opinions in property terms: To them, due process was mostly about freedom to contract, liberty was a matter of accumulating personal wealth and doing whatever one wished with it, and the Commerce Clause sharply limited the reach of the federal government.
But after Roberts' switch, these justifications mostly vanished from Supreme Court majority opinions. It's commonly believed that Owen Roberts switched sides because of Franklin D. Roosevelt's threat to "pack" the Court by expanding its membership unless it upheld New Deal legislation. But in fact, Roberts' switch happened before any of the Justices knew of Roosevelt's plan.
The more likely explanation is that Justice Roberts switched because the realities of the Depression finally caught up with him. Community values were simply more compelling than property values. As the Court's new majority put it in the opinion Roberts joined:
"[T]he liberty safeguarded [in the Constitution] is liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morals and welfare of the people.... The exploitation of a class of workers who are in an unequal position with respect to bargaining power and are thus relatively defenseless against the denial of a living wage is not only detrimental to their health and well being but casts a direct burden for their support upon the community ... "
The challenge now facing America is different from what we faced in the 1930s, but the rapidly-widening inequalities of wealth, income, and opportunity confronting us pose no less a risk to the social fabric and moral integrity of the nation.
For all these reasons, the moral values John Roberts brings to bear on the economy are crucial for determining his fitness to be the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, as will be the economic values of nominees for other Supreme Court vacancies.
What are Roberts' economic values? … As Special Assistant to the Attorney General in the Reagan Justice Department, Roberts argued that affirmative action was bound to fail because it required the "recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."
He also complained to the Attorney General that the Department of Labor and its Office of Federal Contract Compliance were promoting "offensive preferences" based on race and gender, and questioned the executive order on which the Office of Contract Compliance was based.
He criticized a Supreme Court decision barring states from eliminating public education for children of undocumented immigrants.
And he supported a narrow "program specific" interpretation of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Later, while in the White House, Roberts sought to slow progress on combating discrimination in housing, arguing that the administration should "go slowly" on proposed fair housing legislation, claiming that such legislation represented "government intrusion."
He also indicated it was time to "reconsider the existence" of independent regulatory agencies, such as the FCC and the FTC, and instead place such power exclusively in the President's hands.
Viewed as a whole, the record suggests that Roberts is likely to place a higher value on property than on community, and is likely to view the Commerce Clause as hobbling the effective reach of the federal law and regulation.
As such, John Roberts may have more in common with his namesake before Justice Owen Roberts switched sides in 1937 than after that historic switch.
READ MORE
Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
The House committee said it would not alter the date of Trump's deposition, scheduled for Nov. 14. His attorneys have not said publicly whether he would comply with the subpoena.
The initial subpoena deadline was 10 a.m. ET Friday for any communications Trump may have had regarding extremist groups involved in the riot and any attempts in the past year to contact witnesses testifying before the Jan. 6 committee.
The Oct. 21 subpoena also called for Trump to provide testimony at the Capitol or by videoconference on Nov. 14.
In a joint statement Friday, the committee's chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said that while they were allowing additional time for the documents, they were not changing the date for Trump's deposition.
“We have received correspondence from the former President and his counsel in connection with the Select Committee’s subpoena," they said. "We have informed the former President’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for deposition testimony starting on November 14th."
A spokesperson for the Dhillon Law Group, which previously acknowledged service of the subpoena, did not respond to a request for comment.
David A. Warrington, a lawyer for Trump at the firm, previously said that the firm would look over the subpoena, but did not say publicly whether Trump plans to comply with it.
“As with any similar matter, we will review and analyze it, and will respond as appropriate to this unprecedented action," Warrington said in a statement at the time.
Trump has given signals that he's eyeing a 2024 announcement this month. Two sources familiar with his thinking told NBC News that he will likely announce another presidential bid this month, though the date could slide.
READ MORE
Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
Claims that the social media platform’s entire curation team was dismissed prompts fears content could become ‘more toxic’
Many employees spent the day tweeting their goodbyes, as Musk revealed brands had begun pulling their advertisements, leading to what he said was a “massive drop in revenue”. He tweeted late Friday the cuts were needed as “unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day”.
Audi, General Motors, General Mills and Pfizer were among those who halted advertisements, amid concerns Musk will scale back misinformation and security protections on the platform. Advertising accounts for 90% of Twitter’s revenues.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity appeared to confirm reports that 50% of the company’s global workforce of 7,500 was cut.
Just four days before the US midterm elections, in which hundreds of politicians are running for election, there were claims Twitter’s “entire” curation team had been affected, potentially jeopardizing the company’s ability to counter misinformation, with one moderator warning of a risk content could become “more toxic”. Reports indicate that the public relations team responsible for managing communications with journalists and other organizations has also seen deep cuts. Other groups that have been dissolved, according to members of those departments, include the company’s human rights team as well as the machine learning and algorithmic ethics teams.
Some staff awoke on Friday to find they were locked out of their laptops and their access to the company Gmail and Slack had been revoked. Chris Younie, who works for Twitter in entertainment partnerships in the UK, tweeted: “Well this isn’t looking promising. Can’t log into emails. Mac won’t turn on. But so grateful this is happening at 3am. Really appreciate the thoughtfulness on the timing front guys … ”
One employee told the Guardian that the platform could not “function as usual” on Friday because so many members of staff had been locked out of their employee work accounts.
The cuts come as the company’s new billionaire owner scrambles to turn a profit one week after he purchased the platform for $44bn, a far higher cost than it was valued. Last month, Musk had said he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”.
Meanwhile, organizers including the NAACP are pushing advertisers to consider pausing their spending, citing fears over content moderation and hate speech on the platform.
Several companies have already done so. Musk blamed “activist groups pressuring advertisers”, accusing activists of “trying to destroy free speech in America”. The trend, however, appears to have started with the advertisers themselves.
Musk also claimed there hadn’t been any changes to content moderation, despite internal sources reporting the curation team had been gutted. That team plays a key role in coverage of “civic integrity” events such as elections, breaking news and sports, ensuring users have vetted information presented as moments, trends and topics products. It is viewed internally as a key filter against misleading posts.
The employee added that flags from partner news organizations about possible misinformation on the platform were going unanswered. “The platform is likely to become more toxic with less healthy information to counter the disinformation or misinformation narratives,” said the employee, who was speaking on condition of anonymity.
Twitter’s policy on misleading content includes labelling contentious posts or flagging contextualizing information next to such posts. The employee said they had been informed by email that their position was under review.
Roth said the layoffs “affected approximately 15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our frontline moderation staff experiencing the least impact”. He added that most of Twitter’s “2,000+ content moderators working on frontline review were not impacted”.
“With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity – including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations – remain a top priority,” he said.
Musk later tweeted the company’s “strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged”. He later claimed – without evidence – that hateful speech declined on the site in recent weeks.
Staff had been informed in an email on Thursday they would receive word about their employment status by the following day.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce,” the email said. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
“Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack. #OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much. So sad it had to end this way,” tweeted one former Twitter employee.
The firings have already prompted legal action in the US. In the UK, union leaders compared Musk’s moves to the controversial firing of 800 P&O ferry workers this year and called for the government to act.
Mike Clancy, general secretary of Prospect, which represents tech workers, said: “Twitter is treating its people appallingly. The government must make clear to Twitter’s new owners that we won’t accept a digital P&O and that no one is above the law in the UK, including big tech barons.”
Musk has already fired the company’s top executives, including the former CEO Parag Agrawal. He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member.
The sackings come at a difficult moment for Musk, who paid $44bn for the company and last month said he was “obviously overpaying for Twitter right now”.
Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and his takeover has been celebrated by many on the right who believed Twitter’s former leadership was censoring them. Immediately after his takeover, trolls flooded the service with hate speech.
The sudden nature of the layoffs may also have fallen foul of California employment law and already looks set to land Musk in court.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (Warn) statute requires employers with at least 100 workers to disclose layoffs involving 500 or more employees, regardless of whether a company is publicly traded or privately held.
Barry White, a spokesperson for California’s employment development department, said on Thursday the agency had not received any such notifications from Twitter.
A class-action lawsuit was filed on Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.
The prominent trial lawyer Lisa Bloom said she had been in contact with many Twitter employees now facing redundancy. “Elon Musk has a history of violating California’s labor laws, as Tesla has been hit with a shocking number of sexual and racial harassment lawsuits. His workers are human beings who are all entitled to respectful treatment. This time a hard-hitting class-action lawsuit will finally educate him that even the world’s richest man is not above the law,” she said.
Musk claimed in a tweet that every employee laid off was offered three months of severance. But the New York Times reported that employees were given few details about severance.
Simon Balmain, a former senior community manager at Twitter, told the Guardian he was “shocked, but not surprised” at the sudden job cuts at the tech firm. Balmain, who had worked at the company for a year, said: “I had finished work but still had my laptop open and we all received an email from the company about a reduction in head count. An hour after that my laptop flashed and was wiped, I no longer had access to my apps.”
He said that the suddenness of removing such a large chunk of the workforce overnight didn’t come as a huge shock as he had heard “credible rumours” that job cuts were coming and that the staff were “braced for impact”. Balmain said Musk’s comments since he indicated an interest to buy the company had been “bad for morale” at the firm.
He added: “I’ve spoken to a few people in the same position as me and what is very apparent is we had a very good corporate culture and since the news people have been really looking out for each other, including a number of former employees who have reached out and offered their support.”
READ MORE
Refugees run from a large dust cloud at the Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab, near Kenya's border with Somalia. (photo: Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)
Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the climate crisis, but with the right support at Cop27 it can build a stronger, greener future
Though no corner of the globe is safe, Africa is more vulnerable than any other continent to this planetary crisis. There, it’s as if all the negative effects of global warming are amplified: Africa loses up to 15% of GDP growth a year to the destructive forces of climate change; extreme and erratic weather threatens human life, food, water security and the very foundations of economic development; and living off the land is increasingly untenable for a quarter of a billion people on the continent.
The UN warns the world is on trend to be 1.5C warmer within the next two decades than in pre-industrial times. For Africa, climate change is an irreversible reality. It’s too late to turn back the clock. But we have a very narrow window to put coping mechanisms in place. That is why we have two priorities for the coming UN Cop27 climate summit in Egypt: keep the 1.5C warming target within reach, so as to avoid even worse impacts of climate change, and to radically accelerate climate adaptation action in Africa and in all vulnerable developing countries across the globe.
Climate adaptation is also a growth agenda. It’s about harnessing nature to restore degraded ecosystems; introducing drought-resistant crops, accessible digital services for small holder farmers and weather-proofing infrastructure; and creating new green jobs for young people. In short, if climate-change mitigation is the only way to keep our planet livable, climate adaptation is an opportunity to forge a new climate-resilient development path for Africa – a path that is smarter, more effective, more efficient and more productive.
Africa has everything necessary to succeed. It has the youngest population of any continent, it has conquered innumerable challenges (including most recently Covid 19) and its nations are determined to transform the climate crisis into an opportunity.
Africa needs all hands on deck though, including support from the rest of the world to undertake this adaptation agenda. At Cop26 in Glasgow last year, developed countries agreed to double funding for adaptation to at least $40bn a year by 2025. International financial flows from developed countries are necessary to support developing countries, as part of the much-needed mobilisation of all sources of funding, international and domestic, public and private, for climate action. It has been estimated that Africa alone needs $52bn a year, and the increase of financial support from developed countries, through mechanisms such as the formation of Senegal’s Just Energy Transition Partnership with the G7 member countries, must contribute to enhancing the mobilisation of all other funding sources.
France and the Netherlands are among the leading countries in supporting adaptation in developing countries, and in Africa in particular. France is committed to providing €6bn (£5bn) a year for climate action in developing countries until 2025, a third of which is for adaptation. The Netherlands recently committed itself to increasing its annual climate finance to at least €1.8bn in 2025 and to doubling its public finance for climate adaptation. On top of that, it will continue to allocate more than half of its public climate finance to adaptation with a focus on Africa, and will co-host the UN 2023 Water Conference to drive this agenda forward.
It is urgent that all countries make good on climate finance pledges and get funds flowing to projects on the ground, such as the Great Green Wall initiative, which is fighting desertification by regenerating millions of hectares of degraded land, increasing food security, nutrition and farm productivity, and supporting rural jobs in 11 countries across the Sahel. The initiative has revived almost-forgotten traditional land management techniques and is proof that Africa has solutions to the climate crisis – in Senegal alone, more than 11m trees have been planted.
Building on this initiative, the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP) is a continent-wide, Africa-led and Africa-owned project to prioritise and scale up adaptation in agriculture, digital services, infrastructure, entrepreneurship and jobs for young people. The African Development Bank has already put up half of the $25bn (£22bn) it needs for climate adaptation until 2025, and it’s already showing results. The “African” Cop27 is an opportunity for all countries in a position to do so to step up to ensure full capitalisation of AAAP through the African Development Fund climate action window and the $250m AAAP Upstream Financing Facility. With support of the Global Center on Adaptation, AAAP has already guided more than $3.5bn of upstream investments in 19 countries, with every dollar spent influencing $100 downstream.
Adaptation is also about investing massively in the agricultural revolution that is needed in the context of climate change. In this spirit, the International Food and Agriculture Resilience Mission (Farm) launched by France together with its European and international partners is already providing for a comprehensive investment package to increase the robustness of African agricultural value chains. We call on all partners to increase their support to this critical initiative.
Cop27 is a vital opportunity for the world to support Africa in facing the impact of climate change and building pathways to resilience. It is also a chance to reset and renew the partnership between the world’s youngest and most hopeful continent and the global north. But for that to happen, the conference must generate a breakthrough on finance for climate adaptation and move from words to deeds.
Africa is not waiting passively for this to happen. With the full support of European countries such as France and the Netherlands, it is taking action, but it needs all funders – donors, private financiers and philanthropists – to get behind this agenda. If Africa wins, a stronger, greener, more prosperous, sustainable and resilient continent will be everyone’s gain.
READ MORE
A view of drones during a military exercise in an undisclosed location in Iran. (photo: Iranian Army/WANA/Reuters)
The statement by Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian comes after previous denials by Tehran that it had supplied Russia with weapons for use in Ukraine, saying it “has not and will not” do so. Amirabdollahian did not say if the drones that were supplied to Moscow were the type that carry explosives.
“Some western countries have accused Iran of helping the war in Ukraine by providing drones and missiles to Russia. The part regarding missiles is completely wrong. The part about drones is correct, we did provide a limited number of drones to Russia in the months before the start of the war in Ukraine,” Amirabdollahian told reporters in Tehran.
Self-detonating drones have played a significant role in the conflict since Russia launched its invasion in late February. They are capable of circling for some time in an area identified as a potential target and striking only once an enemy asset is identified.
Russia has launched a series of drone attacks across Ukraine in recent weeks, striking vital civilian infrastructure and sowing terror in Ukrainian cities far from the frontlines of the war. Ukrainian officials said last week that they had shot down more than 300 Iranian drones.
Officials from a western country that closely monitors Iran’s weapons program also told CNN that Iran is preparing to send more attack drones, along with surface-to-surface short-range ballistic missiles, to Russia to use in its war against Ukraine.
The last shipment of weapons from Iran to Russia included about 450 drones, officials said, which the Russians have already used to deadly effect in Ukraine.
Amirabdollahian claimed Tehran had reached an agreement with Ukraine to review evidence that Russia had used Iranian drones in the war.
“We agreed with the foreign minister of Ukraine to provide us with any documents they have that Russia used Iranian drones in Ukraine,” he said, adding that an Iranian delegation had planned to meet with Ukrainian officials in Europe to discuss the issue, but that the gathering was canceled by Kyiv.
“We had such an appointment two weeks ago in a European country, a military and political delegation went to that European country, but unfortunately at the last minute the Ukrainian delegation did not attend due to pressure from the US and some European countries, in particular Germany,” Amirabdollahian added.
The Iranian foreign minister said he spoke to his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba last week and they agreed to let Iran review any evidence Ukraine has in the coming days.
“Of course, if it is proven that Russia used Iranian drones in the war against Ukraine, we will not remain indifferent to this issue,” Amirabdollahian said.
“Our position regarding the war in Ukraine is to cease the war, return the parties to negotiations, and return displaced persons to their homes,” he continued.
READ MORE
A Honduran migrant trying to reach the U.S. with his sons talks to Guatemalan soldiers blocking a road to stop migrants from reach the Mexico's border, in Izabal, Guatemala. (photo: Reuters)
US government report urges agencies to better track alleged instances of military equipment misuse in Central America.
Between the US Departments of Defense and State, the US provided more than $66m in security assistance to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras from 2017 through 2021.
There were multiple allegations of equipment misuse in Guatemala but gaps in policies to record, track and investigate them, according to a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released on Wednesday.
“It’s incredibly important that agencies maintain a record of the allegations they’ve reviewed,” said Chelsa Kenney, director of international affairs at GAO, a non-partisan watchdog agency that works for Congress.
The Departments of State and Defense both initially told GAO they had only reviewed one allegation of misuse in Guatemala in 2018, recorded in their tracking spreadsheets.
However, in GAO’s review of documents, it found the departments had looked into at least five allegations and that the Department of Defense did take action based on a pattern of repeated misuse, said Kenney.
“Without recording those allegations, [the Departments of Defense] and State had an inaccurate picture of what happened in the past and that might affect how the agencies would respond if concerns were to arise again in the future,” she told Al Jazeera.
The findings came just three weeks after the US Department of Defense donated 95 vehicles to the Guatemalan army for use in border security efforts despite past misuse of US armoured jeeps donated to the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior for inter-agency use in border regions.
“This donation, which comes up in the context of this new report, is highly worrisome,” said Iduvina Hernandez, director of the Association for the Study of Security in Democracy, a Guatemalan non-governmental group.
“It seems that fundamental issues related to human rights in Guatemala are not of interest to the US Department of Defense.”
Allegations of misuse
The GAO report examined the US response to five reported incidents of misuse between 2018 and 2021 involving some of the 220 jeeps that the US Department of Defense provided to Guatemala between 2013 and 2018.
The most prominent case was on August 31, 2018, when then-President Jimmy Morales announced that Guatemala would not renew the mandate of CICIG, a UN-backed anti-impunity commission.
That same day, US-provided jeeps were used in the capital outside the CICIG offices and the US Embassy. “The US government viewed this as an act of intimidation, according to [Department of Defense] officials,” the GAO noted in its report.
In 2019, the US Department of Defense decided not to provide any additional equipment or training to the Guatemalan inter-agency task forces involved in that incident. That policy is still in effect.
Due to concerns related to human rights and the rule of law in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the US Congress has prohibited aid to the three countries under the Foreign Military Financing programme, the primary military aid programme, for the past two years. The Department of State still provides security assistance.
The vehicles donated to the Guatemalan army last month and the jeeps provided in the past, however, were provided through a section of the National Defense Authorization Act rather than the Foreign Military Financing programme.
Adam Isacson, director for defence oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a US-based non-profit focused on human rights in the Americas, said that “parallel programme” allows the Department of Defense to circumvent human rights and monitoring conditions.
“That is my main concern,” he told Al Jazeera.
“Assisting a military like Guatemala’s, which has such a huge history of human rights violations and such a huge history of really endemic corruption, and not having come up with a way to get around this bureaucratic doughnut hole that keeps them from actually keeping track of how it’s misused – it’s pretty shocking.”
Recommendations
The US Department of State agreed with GAO’s recommendation that it ensure end-use violation tracking guidelines, which are currently under development, outline how to record and track alleged incidents of US-provided equipment misuse.
“The Department of State takes its responsibility very seriously when it comes to monitoring the use of US-provided equipment, to ensure it is being used for legal and appropriate purposes,” a Department of State spokesperson told Al Jazeera, noting the department will standardise and bolster its procedures for tracking reports of such violations.
The GAO report also included four concrete recommendations for the Department of Defense, which agreed with two of the four in its official response, included in the report.
“Our report highlights some important concerns about [the Department of Defense’s] overall programme for monitoring and responding to misuse,” said Kenney.
“By law, the programme is supposed to provide a reasonable assurance that equipment is only used for intended purposes, but we didn’t see that they have structures in place to really do this thoroughly,” she said.
The Department of Defense “agrees with the GAO recommendation to evaluate our end-use monitoring program to ensure it provides reasonable assurance, to the extent practicable, that US equipment is only used for its intended purposes by recipient countries”, Department of Defense spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Devin T Robinson, told Al Jazeera.
In the meantime, human rights activists and analysts have concerns that the new vehicles donated last month will not just be used to combat contraband and trafficking.
The Guatemalan military has been periodically involved alongside police and immigration agencies along Guatemala’s southern border with Honduras in operations to halt the transit of migrants and asylum seekers who do not meet entry requirements.
“We are seeing that there is an irresponsible approach from the United States in making these donations without greater supervision,” said Hernandez. “The report that was just released highlights that approach and the limited possibilities of supervision and evaluation.”
READ MORE
The Stroock mill dam was torn down two years ago. Activists' demands to remove dams are catching on. (photo: Jess Dietz/Riverkeeper)
Derelict dams crisscrossing the country’s rivers and tributaries disrupt the paths of migrating fish and pose a flood hazard
The Quassaick, which flows through the small city of Newburgh, New York, and spills into the Hudson River, was unusually shallow after a summer with little rain. “It looks bucolic now,” Jackman said. “But it can be a raging torrent.”
For 300 years, that torrent had been contained by a small dam that once powered a nearby mill, where the Stroock Felt company turned out carriage blankets for the horse-and-buggy trade, and later army blankets and woollen uniforms during the first world war.
Farther upstream, other dams once generated power to run local candle and iron factories, woollens and paper mills – sites that made Newburgh a bustling industrial town in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Most of those factories have long since shut down, but their dams remained, and that has created an ecological problem that Jackman, who left his job as a New York City police lieutenant in 2005 to pursue a PhD in ecology, is determined to fix.
Tributaries like the Quassaick provide critical habitat for fish that swim upstream to spawn, such as river herring, striped bass and Atlantic sturgeon, and for species that do the reverse, such as American eels. Dams disrupt their ancient pathways, fragmenting habitat and interfering with the life cycles of these migrating species. Conservationists like Jackman, who works for the environmental group Riverkeeper, want to tear them down.
For him, the dams are an ugly reminder of a dreadful past. “This was a foul place,” says Jackman. When the dams powered nearby industries, he says, “there were no environmental laws. There were no child labor laws. There were no labor unions. There was no Clean Air Act, no Clean Water Act. This was a place of death.”
Jackman’s mission is to dismantle these “ghosts of capitalism”, as he calls the derelict structures, and bring the damaged ecosystems back to life.
He’s not alone: environmental movements in the US and Europe have been locking their sights on bringing down dams. In the Pacific north-west, Indigenous leaders have led the charge against the Gorge Dam, 100 miles north-east of Seattle. Last year, a record number of dams were removed from European rivers. And in New York state, activists’ demands are catching on, too. Two years ago, an excavator tore down the Stroock mill dam: a barrier that had blocked the path of migrating fish for centuries was gone in a week.
Riverkeeper wants to keep going, and is seeking funding to demolish the barriers upstream of the Stroock dam. “We are trying to return habitat to dispossessed organisms in long-term decline,” Jackman said.
It’s a matter of urgency, he said, not only because aquatic species are threatened but because the obsolete structures are failing. “If they were to breach in one big kinetic burst, some of these would endanger people’s lives.”
Before the dams were built, generations of river herring swam from the Atlantic Ocean into New York Harbor, up the Hudson River and into its many tributaries, following their instinct to search out cool stream beds where they could lay their eggs. But for the past three centuries, when the fish reached the Quassaick Creek, a journey of more than 50 miles from the harbor, they stopped short, blocked by the Stroock Felt mill dam and older dams before that. Their numbers began a steady decline.
Across America’s 3m miles of rivers, hundreds of thousands of dams built to power the factories of the early industrial era remain in place. In New York state, only half of the Hudson River’s 67 tributaries are free-flowing; the rest are blocked by as many as 2,000 low dams.
Dams fragment habitat, impeding the flow of sediment and nutrients, and degrading river ecosystems upstream and down. “With climate change, the waters are warming, so particularly for cold-water species, trapping them further downstream can be problematic for their survival rates,” said Serena McClain, the director of river restoration for the non-profit group American Rivers.
The dams are also a flood hazard: they were not built to withstand the stronger storms that have arrived with a hotter planet, and they are deteriorating. When they collapse, they can deluge bordering communities.
But these barriers are starting to come down. Since 1998 more than 1,500 dams have been removed across the country, according to American Rivers, including two large hydroelectric dams along the Elwha River in Washington state, which were imperiling wild salmon populations, and many more small ones such as the mill dams on the tributaries of the Hudson.
Some people have objected to dam removal projects on the ground that these remnants of America’s industrial heritage should be preserved. Others use the ponds the dams create for boating or swimming; property owners may fear draining the pond will leave an unsightly mud pit and ruin their waterfront view.
“Maybe they have a house, a dock, they fish there,” said Brian Rahm, the director of New York’s Water Resources Institute, which works on barrier removal. So Rahm works with landscape architects to sketch how the streams will look when the dams are removed and the shorelines restored and rewilded. “When they imagine change they can only see things going away; it’s hard to imagine the opportunity of what could be put there in its place.”
Farther upstream, Jackman hacked a path with a machete through a towering thicket of Japanese knotweed to reach the Walsh mill dam. The dam no longer powers the grist and sawmills that once stood nearby and is starting to crack, making it a hazard to its neighbors.
Just downstream is the Mullins Courtyard apartment complex, a housing development for low-income tenants that was built in the stream’s floodplain. The complex has been inundated during recent severe storms: after Hurricane Ida last September, the Mullins apartments flooded, and the playground was submerged under several feet of water. If the Walsh dam were to collapse in another hurricane the flooding could be calamitous.
To make matters worse, bordering the Quassaick is a sewer main – which if destroyed could inundate the area with human waste.
Such a flood could be financially devastating to the people of Newburgh, where more than twice as many people live below the poverty line as in the county at large. Low-income people are less likely to receive housing assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after a natural disaster, and when they do receive funds, they tend to get less.
Riverkeeper has submitted a proposal to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for funding to continue their work on the Quassaick, hoping for a portion of the $800m set aside in last year’s infrastructure bill for dam removal. And across the Hudson Valley, more projects are planned as well; by 2030 the state department of environmental conservation’s estuary program intends to dismantle dams to reconnect at least 25 miles of streams.
Ecologists say that when even small and seemingly insignificant structures are taken down, there is a cascading effect on the whole riparian ecosystem. Sediment that once collected behind the barriers flows freely again, forming riffles, mudflats and sandbars that provide shelter for various aquatic creatures, and creating tidal marshes that help protect the shoreline from violent storms.
When the natural flow of a stream is restored, “you get a richer population of bugs, and the bugs feed the fish, and the fish feed the birds, and the birds provide a wider web of services, and other animals come in,” Rahm said. “You get a more resilient ecosystem all around, and it just ripples out from the stream.”
The evidence suggests that migrating fish find their way to their cool-water spawning grounds, even when their routes have been blocked for many generations. A study published in the journal BioScience found that “upstream migration was evident within weeks or months” after small dams were demolished in the midwestern and eastern US, and “up to 95% of all species found downstream of the dams migrated upstream within 1-3 years”.
In some cases, the fish move in much quicker: when a dam was removed from the Wynants Kill near Troy, at the upper end of the Hudson River estuary, within days underwater cameras recorded thousands of silvery river herring swimming into the newly opened stretch of river.
Before heading back to his truck, Jackman stood at the side of the Quassaick and pointed to where the creek had started to meander from its old course in the two years since the dam was removed. Now that the dam is gone, “the river is taking its form again,” he said. “We need to let the water go where it has to go.”
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.