19 November 22
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After the midterm elections, more left-wing insurgents are going to the House, Bernie Sanders has two strong allies in the Senate and progressive ballot measures passed everywhere.
Resizing the Squad
The major top-line success for the Left this election is the addition of several new insurgent candidates who, like “the Squad” of 2018, were backed by progressive outside groups — notably the Working Families Party (WFP) and Justice Democrats — with little or no support from established party networks. The total of such members now rises to twelve, after four such insurgent candidates sailed to victory in safe blue seats for which they won primaries earlier this year. This year’s crop is Summer Lee (PA-12), Greg Casar (TX-35), Delia Ramirez (IL-03), and Maxwell Frost (FL-10).
This group is notable, among other things, for its seriousness commitments to left-wing policy.
Take the thirty-three-year-old Casar, a three-term Austin City Council member who this March romped to victory in a four-way race with more than 60 percent of the vote. Though hailing from an affluent family, Casar was politicized on the left in college and became policy director for the Austin-based Workers Defense Project, where, among other things, he helped mobile-home residents organize.
In his first few years on the Austin City Council, Casar successfully led the push to raise city workers’ minimum wage, and also authored ordinances that outlaw requirements for disclosure of jobseekers’ criminal histories and that mandate paid sick leave for workers. (The latter triggered years of furious business efforts to kill the measure, which finally succeeded in 2020, when the state supreme court struck it down.) He was particularly active in the fight over Austin’s notorious housing affordability issues, and successfully spearheaded measures to top up the city’s affordable housing fund, provide assistance to tenants thrown out of demolished rentals, raise subsidies for affordable housing, mandate units in new developments for low-income renters, and put in place a sixty-day eviction moratorium at the start of the pandemic.
In Illinois, housing affordability issues also loomed large for Delia Ramirez in her four years in the Illinois statehouse. Ramirez, thirty-nine, whose working-class upbringing as the daughter of immigrant parents partly drove her decision to run, had pushed for bolder action on the affordability issue from the beginning. In 2019, she called for a sixfold increase to the affordable housing funding proposed by Governor J. B. Pritzker, and she teamed with a Republican colleague to propose a tax credit for affordable housing construction. Ramirez’s emergency housing assistance bill, which temporarily stayed some foreclosures, sealed eviction records into 2022, and allocated money for renters and homeowners struggling during the pandemic. It was ultimately signed into law by Pritzker in May 2021.
Other successes included leading the charge in 2019 to codify abortion rights statewide, regardless of federal law, and spearheading a provision expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants, making Illinois the first state in the country to do so. In the primary for Illinois’s Third District, Ramirez ended up trouncing her nearest rival, a two-term alderman who racked up major endorsements, by a more than 40 point margin.
Similar issues animated Lee, the thirty-four-year-old two-term state representative who narrowly won a five-way race to become the first black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. Hailing from the former steel town of Braddock — which was governed for thirteen years by fellow Berniecrat and now senator-elect John Fetterman — Lee had already taken on the establishment twice and won. She’d knocked off a ten-term incumbent and member of a Pittsburgh political dynasty in 2018 to become one of four candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) to enter the statehouse that year, and put away an establishment-backed challenger to win reelection two years later.
Once in the House, Lee faced an uphill climb owing to more than a decade of GOP control of both chambers of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. In an unfriendly legislature, she protested and used her bully pulpit to get her political priorities on the table. These have included a COVID moratorium on evictions and police reform legislation. The latter was advanced during the 2020 George Floyd protests, when she used parliamentary pressure to force the GOP leadership to take up the measure. As a result, Pennsylvania now has a far from perfect but landmark misconduct database for police hiring.
The victories of these insurgent candidates are especially important in a house that will have a slim, possibly single-digit, majority, meaning Republicans and significant numbers of corporate Democrats will likely collaborate on a host of retrograde policies that will need to be blocked.
Squad-adjacent victories
The other major headline-grabbing victory for progressives was that of John Fetterman, who decisively won his Senate race in Pennsylvania with a populist campaign. True, he did move to the center on certain issues — most notably fracking, which he’d once deemed “a stain on our state,” calling for a moratorium — but flip-flopped in order to be competitive in a state that has been officially called “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.” Still, with maybe one exception, Fetterman appears to stand to the left of every other Democratic Senate candidate this cycle, backing sentencing reform, marijuana legalization, moving toward universal health care, raising taxes on the rich, and enacting a $15 minimum wage, among other things.
That one exception is Vermont representative Peter Welch, who easily won the race for the Senate seat vacated by retiring Senator Patrick Leahy. A Bernie Sanders ally since the Vermont socialist’s days as mayor of Burlington, Welch has long been, and remains, a full-throated advocate for Medicare for All and lower prescription drug prices, and cosponsored the Green New Deal resolution. Despite an outrageous scandal that saw Welch pushing to protect opioid makers’ interests while trading stocks in those same companies, his addition to the Senate, together with Fetterman, will help tilt the upper chamber somewhat to the left, and will give the usually isolated Sanders two progressive allies.
Also winning in Vermont, this time in a race for the US House, was the leader of its state senate, Becca Balint, who was endorsed by Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal en route to taking the House seat previously held by Welch. Balint likewise ran on backing Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, and has won plaudits for helping to codify abortion rights at the state level, negotiating a solution to a pension crisis with unions at the table, and working to end qualified immunity for police (though only a watered-down bill on the issue ended up passing). Balint also fought for years to raise Vermont’s minimum wage to $15 and to put in place paid family and medical leave, but both were repeatedly vetoed by the state’s Republican governor after passing in the legislature.
Fetterman and Balint were both endorsed by WFP, which had a particularly good election cycle after making its first concerted foray into races at the federal level. WFP knocked on an estimated four hundred thousand doors in Pennsylvania, as well as holding a thousand-person phone bank there on Election Day. Other major races it was involved in, like Karen Bass’s mayoral bid in Los Angeles, have also gone its way.
Success for socialists
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had a pretty good election night too. The group has consistently gotten more and more of its members elected at the local and state levels in every election since 2016.
This cycle, sixteen of DSA’s thirty endorsed candidates won their elections. Though three of those winners were House incumbents Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Rashida Tlaib, most of the losing candidates fell in primary elections earlier in the year.
DSA candidates Eunisses Hernandez and Hugo Soto-Martínez beat incumbents in the Los Angeles City Council seats they ran for, promising to deal with the city’s homelessness crisis through more affordable housing, and stressing preventive measures over incarceration to deal with crime. The organization estimated it knocked on more than thirty-five thousand doors to get Soto-Martínez elected in the primary and another fifteen hundred in the general. It continues the organization’s success in reshaping the city’s politics, with the DSA-endorsed Nithya Raman having already won a seat on the council two years ago.
Wisconsin is getting its first socialist state assembly members in more than three decades in the figures of Darrin Madison and Ryan Clancy, who similarly stressed public investment and mental-health funding as a solution to crime, as well as measures like boosting affordable housing, funding public transit, progressive taxation, and better wages and conditions for workers. Elizabeth Fiedler and Rick Krajewski will enter the Pennsylvania statehouse on similar platforms, including backing a ban on fracking.
Colorado likewise will see two more DSA-backed members in its statehouse: Javier Mabrey, an anti-eviction advocate who campaigned on tenants’ rights, and affordable housing in particular, and Elisabeth Epps, who, like Hernandez, is a prison abolitionist, and the founder of a nonprofit paying out cash bail for those too poor to afford bond in Denver. New York has likewise elected Sarahana Shrestha and Kristen Gonzalez and to its state assembly and senate, respectively, with the latter further entrenching socialists’ political influence in Astoria, Queens, where they have officials at every level of elected office.
Rounding out the list are Erika Uyterhoeven, who made treating affordable housing as a right rather than a commodity central to her reelection campaign for the Massachusetts House, Gabriel Acevero in Maryland, where he had waged a high-profile battle to allow the public to access police misconduct records, and Rachel Ventura, who heads to the Illinois’s state senate calling for a tax on stock trades while lowering property taxes and promising to reduce wealth inequality and invest in infrastructure and renewables.
Not on the DSA’s list but victorious was Anthony Quezada, who will sit on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and has promised to use the position to protect and expand the county’s public health system, its natural resources, and tackle homelessness. Quezada’s win builds on the significant gains the socialist movement has made in Chicago over the past half decade or so.
One clear theme running through all of these candidates is a focus on homelessness, tenants’ rights, and affordable housing, likewise a top priority for socialist slates in both New York and Chicago in recent years. While socialists may struggle to enact big-ticket priorities like universal health care at the state and local levels, housing is a policy area they can more easily intervene in directly. Given the surge in housing costs all across the country ― and, as we’ll see, the victories of ballot measures aimed at dealing with these crises ― this is clearly a potent and winning issue.
Progressivism on the ballot
Ballot measures were another front on which DSA saw success. Six of the fourteen votes the organization endorsed ended up going its way.
Voters defied the restaurant industry in Washington, DC, to pass Initiative 82, which mandates that tipped workers get paid the district’s minimum wage regardless of what they make in tips. The public also voted down draconian abortion restrictions in both Montana and Kentucky, and voted overwhelmingly in favor of Illinois’s Workers’ Rights Amendment (WRA), which would write into the state’s constitution a ban on right-to-work laws while guaranteeing the right to organize and collectively bargain. One wrinkle: the WRA at this point is just short of the 60 percent of votes on the measure that it needed to pass under one optional set of procedures; its fortunes now rest on getting 50 percent approval from everyone who voted in the election.
There were mixed results in Portland, Maine, where DSA had success passing progressive ballot measures in 2020, and where it pushed three ballot measures this year. Initiative B, which would have put restrictions on short-term rentals to halt the growth of Airbnb and similar businesses, lost with 55 percent of the vote going to the no side. Initiative D, which would have raised the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025 and let tipped workers get the same rate of pay as everyone else, only got 38 percent of the vote. But initiative C, which puts into place a ninety-day notice for lease termination and other tenant protections, passed with 54 percent of the vote.
Results were similarly mixed in California, where a Pasadena measure setting up rent control and eviction protections is narrowly winning, with votes still being tallied, and a San Francisco measure to move mayoral elections to presidential election years has passed, while another to tax owners of vacant residential units is currently lead in the count. An added property tax to fund the City College of San Francisco failed, as did a new business tax in the city to fund childcare for preschoolers, while an empty homes tax in Santa Cruz is currently trailing. It was a similar story in Colorado, where a tax on landlords to finance an eviction defense fund was sturdily rejected.
Looking beyond ballot measures pushed by DSA, affordable housing was everywhere, particularly in California, which is years into a severe housing crisis. Los Angeles passed a mansion tax, Berkeley passed an empty homes tax, and Oakland created an affordable housing fund. Beyond California, similar measures passed with sometimes huge majorities in Austin, Columbus, Kansas City, Palm Beach County, Charlotte, and Buncombe County, North Carolina ― places all situated in red states.
In fact, this election continued the trend of voters in red states expressing support for progressive politics. South Dakotans finally approved Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, becoming the seventh state to do so by ballot measure, two years after they voted to legalize recreational weed. (That last one was blocked by the courts afterward, though, and voters have now rejected it at the ballot box in a second vote.)
Nebraskans voted to raise their minimum wage from the current measly $9 and hour to $15 by 2026, two years after voters in Florida ― which just handed Republicans a major win ― did the same. Though more of a purplish state, 54 percent voters in Nevada similarly chose to raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2024 and eliminate the stipulation that lets employers pay workers less if they have health insurance, at the same time that they just threw out their Democratic governor and are close to doing the same to one of their Democratic senators.
Other high-profile measures that won were Arizona’s Proposition 209 (with 72 percent of the vote), which sets limits on the collection of and interest rates on medical debt, and Massachusetts’ Fair Share Amendment, which raises taxes on millionaires to pay for public investment. Meanwhile, Missouri voted 53 percent to legalize recreational marijuana, the only of four conservative states (Arkansas and the Dakotas being the others) to do so this year. With Maryland doing the same, weed is now legal in half of the United States, which should hopefully force some rethinking around the Biden administration’s so-far conservative approach on the substance. Colorado, meanwhile, has decriminalized psychedelics.
Relatedly, Tennessee, Oregon, and Vermont all voted with robust majorities to finally outlaw involuntary servitude for those convicted of crimes — thus closing an exemption that was written into the original Thirteenth Amendment of 1865, which abolished slavery in the United States. In fact, conservative Tennessee voted in favor of doing so by a much wider margin (a hair under 80 percent) than liberal Oregon (55 percent). Louisiana, meanwhile, voted firmly to keep it in place. And in Alabama, voters decided to ratify the state’s rewritten constitution, which, among other things, takes out racist language providing for segregated schools, poll taxes, and a ban on interracial marriage, which were invalidated by courts long ago.
No red wave
These results point to another notable trend. While Republicans and the Right more generally have seized on the issue of crime ― pushing liberal officeholders to the right on policing in the process, and fomenting genuine backlash against some left-wing candidates over the issue of cutting police budgets ― the midterms were far from a rebuke of progressive ideas on criminal justice.
Progressive prosecutors won all over the country, including in red states, despite a Republican messaging strategy going into the election that targeted them as stand-ins for Democrats’ supposedly soft-on-crime policies. Perhaps most head-turning was the win of Kimberly Graham, who ran for district attorney in Polk County, Iowa, on ending low-level marijuana convictions and eliminating cash bail for many nonviolent offenders. Graham trounced her Republican opponent, a thirty-year “tough on crime” incumbent, by 14 points, one of the few Democrats to survive a red wave that did come to Iowa.
Reformist prosecutors likewise won in Dallas, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and Minneapolis, where George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police had sparked the massive racial justice protests of 2020. There public defender Mary Moriarty likewise beat a “tough on crime,” police-backed Republican on a platform of launching a police accountability division, becoming the lead prosecutor for Hennepin County, in which Minneapolis sits.
Zooming out to wider Minnesota, Sanders ally and attorney general Keith Ellison survived a stiff challenge from a corporate lawyer and political novice who spent the campaign attacking him over crimes the Minnesota AG’s office largely isn’t responsible for prosecuting. Ellison, who had led the high-profile prosecution of the police officer who killed Floyd and was accused by his opponent of supporting defunding the police, presented himself as “the people’s lawyer,” stressing his record on consumer protection and corporate accountability, while also pointing to his prosecutions of violent crimes.
The new insurgent members-to-be all have records of standing up to law enforcement, whether Frost’s participation in the 2020 protests, Casar’s push to reallocate funding from the Austin Police Department, or Lee holding up the state legislature to get police accountability taken up. Meanwhile, despite being hammered on crime by Dr Oz, Fetterman narrowly won among those who saw it as their top issue — this for a candidate who has taken broadly progressive positions on marijuana, sentencing reform, and dealing with nonviolent offenders. Hernandez and Epps show that even candidates who self-identify as abolitionists can win races.
Socialist candidates often had a carefully crafted message on crime, running less on defunding the police than on police accountability, noncarceral sentences for nonviolent offenders, and promising to address the recent rise in crime rates through social investment. Of course, not every criminal justice reformer won. A reformist candidate lost in Plymouth County, Massachusetts; Alabama voters expanded the list of crimes one can be denied bail for; and scandal-plagued sheriffs still won reelection.
Crime remains a tricky issue for the Left. But broadly, progressive stances on criminal justice, particularly when it comes to treatment of low-level offenses and holding bad cops to account, clearly continue to have purchase among voters ― or at least aren’t automatically electoral poison.
Sacrificing Palestinians
Unfortunately, some left-wing victories came at the expense of the cause of Palestinian justice. Having watched another Sanders ally, Nina Turner, get both of her congressional campaigns sunk by a flood of outside spending from pro-Israel groups, several candidates moved to the center on Israel and Palestine.
Fetterman vowed to “lean in” on the US-Israel relationship, and said he was “not really a progressive in that sense,” saying he was “dismayed” by the Squad’s vote against Israeli missile defense funding last year. He was endorsed by Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), the group that defeated Turner, which put together a six-figure mail program to help him beat Mehmet Oz.
In Texas, Casar took himself out of the running for Austin DSA’s endorsement after upsetting members by publicly distancing himself from the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and pledging his commitment to US military aid to the country, prompting one AIPAC donor to remark it was “a very good example of how [the spending] is working.” In Florida, Frost disappointed the Palestinian activists he had stood with early on by modulating his position on the conflict, reportedly explicitly as a way to keep DMFI from entering the primary. Elsewhere, progressives Marie Newman and Andy Levin were defeated in their primaries thanks in part to DMFI money.
One notable exception was Lee in Pennsylvania, who overcame big AIPAC spending in both the primary, where a deluge of AIPAC-funded negative ads saw her massive early lead vanish, and the general election. But Lee only survived the first race thanks to an all-hands-on-deck intervention by progressive outside groups like Justice Democrats at the last minute, which depleted the resources they had to spend on other races. The organization’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, has pointed to this to stress the need for progressives to get serious about the money race, something that would not just help candidates win but prevent them from taking centrist positions for fear of being outspent.
A good result
The socialist movement has had to swallow its share of bitter losses in the electoral arena these past few years, like Bernie Sanders’s 2020 Democratic primary defeat and Buffalo mayor Byron Brown’s victory over India Walton. But the reality is that every election since 2016 has brought with it new, important victories for the Left.
Between Fetterman’s Senate win, the new insurgents in the House, and the spate of state and local wins around the country, the 2022 midterms have surely been one of the most successful elections for the Left over the past six years. Now the question is what those who have won elected office do with their newfound power and stronger numbers.
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Attorney General Merrick Garland. (photo: Susan Walsh/Press Pool)
‘Extraordinary circumstances’ require appointment of Jack Smith to determine whether charges should be brought, Garland says
The politically explosive move comes just three days after Trump announced he is running for the White House yet again, despite a disappointing Republican performance in the midterm elections, especially among candidates backed by the ex-president.
“Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election, and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel,” Garland told a press conference on Friday.
Garland named Jack Smith, a veteran prosecutor, to the post, which will deal with justice department investigations into Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election victory for Joe Biden, and also the discovery of confidential documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.
Trump attacked the appointment within hours, in an interview with Fox News’s digital arm.
“For six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it any more,” Trump said. “It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political.”
The appointment of a special counsel reflects the sensitivity of the justice department overseeing the two most hazardous criminal investigations into Trump, and an increased possibility of charges being brought over either matter.
Special counsels are semi-independent prosecutors who can be installed for high-profile investigations when there are conflicts of interest, or the appearance of such conflicts, and provide a mechanism for the justice department to insulate itself from political considerations in charging decisions.
“I strongly believe that the normal processes of this department can handle all investigations with integrity,” Garland said. “And I also believe that appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do. The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”
The attorney general added: “I will ensure that the special counsel receives the resources to conduct this work quickly and completely. Given the work done to date and Mr Smith’s prosecutorial experience, I am confident that this appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations.”
Smith, a graduate of Harvard law school, from 2010 to 2015 served as the chief of the public integrity section at the justice department, which handles government corruption investigations, a role not dissimilar to his new position as special counsel.
Since 2018, he has been a special prosecutor to The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, having joined the international criminal court from the US attorney’s office for the eastern district of New York in Brooklyn, where he helped prosecute a police brutality case that drew national attention.
During his time at the justice department in Washington, Smith oversaw the corruption cases against former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, ex-Arizona congressman Rick Renzi and New York assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, though convictions against McDonnell and Silver were later overturned.
He oversaw the prosecution of a CIA agent for disclosing national defense information and obstructing justice – crimes that echo potential charges against Trump.
And Smith has also investigated Trump before, in the 1970s, over potential fraud charges during his tenure as a prosecutor in New York. The roughly six-month investigation ultimately yielded no charges, after which Trump complained about the investigation.
Politico reported that Smith was registered to vote as a political independent, not a Democrat or a Republican.
In a statement released by the justice department, Smith said: “I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.
“The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”
The appointment of a special counsel will be a familiar dynamic for Trump, who was the subject of Robert Mueller’s investigation shortly after he took office, examining ties between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. Later, Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, appointed special counsel John Durham to investigate allegations of FBI impropriety in the Russia investigation.
Trump has already spent months since the FBI seized 103 documents marked classified from Mar-a-Lago accusing the justice department under Joe Biden of pursuing him for political reasons – a tension likely to become more biting as the 2024 election draws nearer.
It was to allay those concerns, Garland said at the news conference, that he chose to appoint Smith to run the investigations. “Appointing a special counsel at this time is the right thing to do,” Garland said. “The extraordinary circumstances presented here demand it.”
The appointment of a special counsel could indicate that the justice department has already accumulated substantial evidence of potential criminality by Trump and his allies. Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan law school professor and former US attorney, said: “One thing that is significant is this suggests that they think there’s a very real possibility of charges. If they were going to close the case, it would be closed by now.”
But some criticised the move as inadvertently buying Trump time and allowing an over-cautious Garland to duck responsibility. Jill Wine-Banks, a legal analyst and former Watergate prosecutor, tweeted: “Garland has named a Special Counsel to investigate Trump #MAL and parts of Jan6. I think it’s a waste of time and money, insults the prosecutors at DOJ and gains nothing. No Trump supporter will see anyone as independent or fair to Trump.”
The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “The announcement of a special counsel to investigate Trump in light of the abundance of clear and convincing evidence of his crimes unfortunately delays accountability. However, justice will come eventually & he will not be able to evade the consequences of his actions forever.”
The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said Biden had not been given any advance notice of Garland’s announcement. “No, he was not aware, we were not aware,” she said at a delayed press briefing. “The department of justice makes decisions about criminal investigations independently. We are not involved.”
Jean-Pierre added: “We were not given advance notice. We were not aware of this investigation.”
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A burned cot in a police station in Kherson on Wednesday. Kherson residents say Russians used the police station to detain and torture violators of curfew and people suspected of collaborating with Ukrainian authorities. (photo: Pete Kiehart/NPR)
"People didn't go into the streets," except to buy basics like food, says Maryna Zinevych, a 54-year-old who's lived in Kherson all her life. "We were under constant pressure, constant watch."
These were just some of the chilling accounts from residents in Kherson after 8 1/2 months under Russian occupation.
Today, Ukrainians are celebrating and singing patriotic songs in the main square, one week after Russian forces retreated. But from behind the carnival atmosphere, a picture is emerging of what citizens endured under Russian rule. They describe instances of detention and abuse amid a climate of terror and suspicion.
"We heard these crazy screams at night"
As Zinevych speaks to NPR in the city's Liberty Square, she wears a shimmering Ukrainian flag wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl. Residents all around her celebrate the Russian withdrawal. People are taking selfies with a plump watermelon — a symbol of Kherson.
The joyous scene would have been impossible just eight days ago, before Ukrainian forces took back control.
Zinevych says the Kremlin-installed authorities were constantly on the lookout for people they deemed "partisan" — anyone who might pass information to Ukrainian authorities that could undermine the occupation.
And in public, everyone had to speak Russian.
"For [speaking] the Ukrainian language or [showing] Ukrainian symbols, you could be taken to the basement and tortured," she says. By "basement" she means detention centers set up by the Russian forces.
One such facility was at a police station on the northern side of Kherson near the Antonivskiy Bridge.
Mariya Kryvoruchko, who lives a half a block from the police station, remembers some terrifying moments.
"We heard these crazy screams at night," Kryvoruchko says. "There were shouts from the jail of people being tortured at night. In the summer when you opened the window, we heard it very well."
As she speaks with NPR, suddenly an explosion rings out in the distance. Kryvoruchko doesn't flinch. "That's outgoing," she says, "don't worry!"
The 70-year-old says she doesn't know who was being held or tortured at the police station.
"When I passed the police station I was even afraid to look. [The Russians] were there with guns," she says.
He was suspected of being part of the underground
One man who says he was detained there is Maksym Negrov.
He has come back to the compound to find the cell where he was held from March until mid-April.
"The Russians arrested everyone who had a pro-Ukrainian position," Negrov says, standing inside the now-abandoned police compound. Three vandalized vans with their Ukrainian police emblems blotted out with red spray paint sit in the yard.
The Russian captors beat and tortured all of the detainees, he says, including him.
Negrov, 45, had served in the Ukrainian military when he was younger. "I was detained for suspicion of involvement in the resistance movement," he says. "But at the start of the war, I was just a businessman."
Eventually, he says, the Russians let him go.
Officials are investigating torture allegations
Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets says his office is investigating allegations of human rights violations and crimes against humanity by the occupying Russian military in Kherson.
"These include torture in basements, forced disappearances, hostage-taking of civilians, and extrajudicial executions," he said on the Telegram messaging app.
Investigators from the United Nations and human rights groups also say they are gathering evidence of torture and other abuses.
There's an underground resistance
Another man says he was part of what he calls the "peaceful" underground resistance in Kherson. The 25-year-old only gives his code name, Ivan, because he says he's still involved in covert operations.
"They were constantly trying to arrest us," he says.
Ivan is the coordinator of a group called the Yellow Ribbon Movement.
"We were putting up graffiti and yellow ribbons to remind people that Kherson is still Ukraine," he says.
His group also distributed leaflets and posted flyers trying to help people resist the Russian occupation. One key message: Do not take a Russian passport.
The Moscow-backed administration tried to give residents Russian passports, saying it would make them eligible for food aid and other assistance.
"They would try to force you to take their passport," he says. And for young Ukrainian men, he adds, "their passport, it's like a ticket to their army."
Hundreds of men from Kherson were conscripted into the Russian military, according to Ivan. There have been reports of Russia drafting Ukrainian men in occupied territories, but NPR has not confirmed how many.
As the Kremlin struggles to get recruits to the front line, Ivan says, "They want to have Ukrainians fighting against Ukrainians."
He says now that Kherson is freed its celebrations have been inspiring.
He is working with activists in Crimea and other Russian-occupied areas on guerrilla information campaigns and spreading the message that, no matter what the Kremlin says, those territories are still part of Ukraine.
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Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
ALSO SEE: Twitter Employees Quit in Droves
After Elon Musk's Ultimatum Passes
Musk also announced new content moderation rules and the restoration of some accounts, but not Donald Trump’s
Musk called employees who “actually write software” to the afternoon summit a day after the chaotic exodus of hundreds of employees who refused to sign a pledge to work longer hours and sought to take him up on an offer of three months’ pay as severance. As they assembled, Musk tweeted that Twitter would stop amplifying hate speech and restore a few controversial accounts, though not that of former president Donald Trump.
The series of emails and tweets underscored the personal nature of Musk’s oversight of a social media platform that has 237 million daily users, many of whom had tweeted their concerns in the previous 24 hours that Twitter was about to collapse — something experts said was a likely eventuality, though not necessarily imminent.
Major companies have paused advertising on Twitter, adding to the financial pressure on the debt-laden enterprise, and an on-again, off-again relaunch of paid verification marks has spawned pranks and scams while confounding loyal users.
Musk’s emails to engineers, however, suggested a realization that the worst may yet to come. The emails even went out to staffers who’d walked out Thursday rather than sign the pledge.
Musk also asked all recipients to send him screenshots of their recent code and explain what it had accomplished. While the initial email included no instructions for remote employees, a subsequent one said Musk would try to speak via video to them — but that employees were only excused if they have a family emergency or “cannot physically get to Twitter HQ.”
In a third email eight minutes later, he asked employees to fly to San Francisco, saying he would be at the office until midnight on Friday and back again Saturday morning. Yet another missive an hour later said flying “would be appreciated, but is not essential.”
The requests to help him “better understand the Twitter tech stack” struck many engineers as absurdly late, given that he had fired about half of what had been more than 7,500 employees two weeks ago and then issued an ultimatum on Wednesday that prompted a subsequent wave of departures.
Several critical teams essential to keeping the site functioning were cut to a single engineer or none by the departures Thursday, leaving the company partially on autopilot and likely to crash sooner or later, engineers said.
While there were no widespread reports of outages on Friday, “Every mistake in code and operations is now deadly” said a former engineer who departed the company this week. Those left “are going to be overwhelmed, overworked and, because of that, more likely to make mistakes.”
The team that runs the service Gizmoduck, which powers and stores all information in user profiles across the site, was entirely gone, according to a recent department head who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to detail the departures.
Even without a mistake, the system can run only for so long with so little upkeep, tweeted Ramin Khatibi, a site reliability engineer who left Twitter in 2019: “The fact that Twitter continues to work is a testament to the 1000s of engineer years spent building that reliability. But as engineers, we know that failure is coming without continued investment to protect against the next thing.”
It wasn’t clear Friday who was still employed and for how long. Access to internal systems had not been cut for many who walked out, though several people who did not sign the pledge said Twitter locked them out of their corporate laptops on Friday, the first confirmation that they had effectively resigned. Employees estimated that roughly 1,000 refused to sign the pledge Thursday.
Half the trust and safety policy team resigned, including a majority of those who work on spotting misinformation, spam, fake accounts and impersonation, according to two employees familiar with the team. Many of those who chose to stay did so to keep their health insurance or because they would be subject to deportation without a job.
Meanwhile, Musk plowed ahead with moderation decisions, announcing on Twitter that the company had reinstated accounts including those of comedian Kathy Griffin, who had mocked him, conservative humor site Babylon Bee, and right-wing self help guru Jordan Peterson. The Bee and Peterson had been suspended for anti-transgender posts.
Musk previously had said banning and unbanning would wait until a moderation council had been appointed and had drafted rules that would allow for consistent decisions. But there was no announcement that such a council of outside advisers had been appointed, drawing criticism from some of the civil rights leaders that had met with Musk shortly after he took over the site.
Jessica J. González, the co-CEO of media advocacy group Free Press, said Musk appeared to be going back on his promise to the civil rights groups that there would be an open process for decisions about account reinstatements.
“He said there would be a transparent, an open process before anyone was reinstated,” she told The Post. “I have not seen an announcement of an open and transparent process.”
“Should we suppose his tweet is his notice and now we’re supposed to comment?” said González, who had attended the meeting with Musk. She said the advocacy group had not yet heard anything more from Twitter about the company’s plans to create a content moderation council.
Musk also tweeted that hateful or negative tweets would be barred from algorithmic boosting, even though the team working on ethical artificial intelligence had been laid off. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” his tweet said. “You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically seek it out, which is no different from the rest of the Internet.”
In an opinion piece Friday in the New York Times, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, said he had resigned recently because it was clear Musk’s capriciousness would continue, making already complex decisions about content unworkable.
“A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.
Roth also warned that Apple’s and Google’s stores could boot Twitter’s app if they determined the company was not effectively filtering hate speech, pornography and other unwanted content.
Hate speech jumped after Musk’s takeover late last month, and civil rights groups complained in personal meetings with him afterward that the company was headed down a path that had led other social media companies to drastic reckonings and restoration of strong moderation policies.
As users and employees alike waited Friday to see how the resignations would play out on the platform, it wasn’t clear that there would be immediate technical failures because Twitter’s systems are so complex, said an employee who did not sign Musk’s pledge and spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the state of the platform.
The systems could suffer during the World Cup, typically a time when Twitter use surges, the person said. Aware of such predictions, Musk tweeted: “First World Cup match on Sunday! Watch on Twitter for best coverage & real-time commentary.”
The systems could also slowly degrade over time, the person said. Or it could take longer to make fixes to routine problems that arise following the departures.
Most risky of all, this person and another former engineer said, will be when staff try to implement one of the many new things Musk wants.
“Complex systems such as Twitter are most in danger of breaking when engineers attempt to make live changes to add features,” the second person said. “Any change is inherently risky. Twitter is a global communications utility. Change at our scale means even the smallest issues have huge impact.”
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President Joe Biden. (photo: Ryan Collerd/Getty Images)
The Department of Justice has announced it will stop opposing efforts to discharge student debt through bankruptcy — a victory for the advocacy groups who have continuously made this demand on the Biden administration.
The move represents an about-face from the Biden administration. Up to this point, Biden’s DOJ actually moved to appeal the rare bankruptcy cases where student debtors were successful in discharging their debt. The Justice Department dropped those appeals after the Lever reported on the cases.
But now, following pressure from senators, the public, and news outlets like the Lever, the Justice Department has announced a new stance.
“Although the bankruptcy judge makes the final decision whether to grant a discharge, the new process announced today provides Justice Department attorneys with clear standards for recommending discharge to the judge without unnecessarily burdensome and time-consuming investigations,” said a DOJ press release on the new guidance. “The new process will also help borrowers who did not think they could get relief through bankruptcy more easily identify whether they meet the criteria to seek a discharge.”
Unlike every other type of consumer debt, student debt cannot be eliminated through bankruptcy, unless the debtor can prove the obligation is causing “undue hardship,” which is a nearly impossible legal standard to meet.
The new guidance stipulates that Justice Department attorneys should support a discharge if a debtor is unable to meet their obligations because their expenses equal or exceed their income, when this inability to pay is likely to persist, and if the debtor has made “good faith efforts” to “earn income, manage expenses, and repay their loan.”
Advocates have long asked for this type of guidance, because without it, few people even seek to have their debt discharged, knowing that they will have to both fight the Justice Department and meet a high legal standard.
The new guidance drew praise from one advocacy group that has been pressuring the Biden administration to make it easier for student loan borrowers to eliminate their debt through bankruptcy.
“For far too long, the Department has stonewalled bankrupt borrowers who are already facing incredible hardship,” said Aaron Ament, president of the National Student Defense Legal Network, in a statement. “The new guidance will go a long way towards ensuring the Department is working with borrowers, not against them, as they navigate already-difficult circumstances. We look forward to the agency quickly implementing these reforms.”
Democratic Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime advocate for bankruptcy reforms who has pressured the Justice Department to stop fighting student debtors in bankruptcy cases, also welcomed the new guidance.
“The Biden administration has taken an important step forward to reform a deeply broken bankruptcy system that has made it nearly impossible for Americans to deal with student debt, even when they’re in severe financial stress,” Warren said in a statement to the Lever. “I look forward to working with the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to ensure that struggling student borrowers can access the relief these changes aim to deliver.”
Meanwhile, bipartisan Senate legislation to make student debt dischargeable through bankruptcy has not been brought for a vote by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York. Schumer previously told the Lever that he supported student debt being dischargeable through bankruptcy.
Saad Ibrahim Almadi and Ibrahim Almadi. (photo: VICE)
“I can’t imagine the pain my father is in right now,” Ibrahim Almadi, the son of US-Saudi dual national Saad Ibrahim Almadi, told VICE World News.
But his dad never made it out of the airport, as when he landed he was, in Ibrahim’s words, “kidnapped”.
“From my understanding, he had been held in a hotel for a few weeks then moved to Al Ha’ir prison,” Ibrahim told VICE World News, “where he went through the torture routine for Saudi citizens who practise their freedom of speech.”
Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old dual US-Saudi national, had been arrested for tweets criticising the Saudi government. He had sent them over the past few years while living in Florida. Things went quiet after his arrest but then earlier this year came the news that shocked his family – he had been sentenced to 16 years in jail.
“I can’t imagine the pain my father is in right now,” Ibrahim said, as he tries to raise awareness about his father’s case and keep his situation in the news.
Almadi’s case is the second known incident of the Saudi regime jailing people travelling back to the country over historic tweets. Salma al-Shehab, a UK-based PhD student, was jailed for 34 years over her Twitter activity.
Both cases went through notorious Saudi courts held behind closed doors that give judges the ability to pass long prison sentences and even the death penalty without any chance of appeal or fair trial.
Ibrahim says he’s in touch with the US embassy in Riyadh as well as the US Department of State, but neither have been able to make contact with his father to check on his condition since the 10th of August this year.
“My feelings and my family’s feelings can’t be described,” Ibrahim, 26, said. “There have been no updates yet.”
He says he’s had to cut ties with his family in Saudi Arabia due to safety concerns. He’s also had to pause his business career in order to continue the campaign for his father’s release.
Ibrahim wants US President Joe Biden to intervene and do something about his father’s case.
He says his father is his number one supporter and had always encouraged him to have hope, and so he continues to have hope that he’ll see him again. But should he lose him, “nothing matters after that”.
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A baby mountain gorilla in the Virunga National Park. (photo: Christian Kaiser/Greenpeace)
This Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership is meant to martial efforts to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030, as 145 countries pledged in the Glasgow forests declaration at COP26.
But one year on, countries are lagging behind the pace needed to reach the Glasgow goal, experts said. Most worryingly, the funding pledged to fight deforestation is far from enough and has often failed to arrive.
“Here at COP27 there’s no promise of financing,” said Ignace Monza Bonda, minister of environment and sustainable development of Mai-Ndombe in the Democratic Republic of Congo. With two-thirds of the country’s population in poverty, villages in the rainforest have little choice but to engage in logging or charcoal production to survive, he explained.
“The communities are the real custodians of those resources,” Bonda said. “When the forest as a resource can generate revenue income, these communities will have the potential to avoid this kind of harmful development. Then these communities won’t remain in the same eternal poverty.”
Weak COP27 cover text won’t save Congo
This week at COP27, Brazil’s president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva gave hope that the rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest would soon end, promising “zero deforestation and degradation” by 2030 and meeting with ministers from Norway and Germany about unfreezing $500 million in the Amazon Fund.
But while deforestation declined 6.3% globally in 2021, countries need to reduce it 10% every year from 2021 to meet the Glasgow goal, according to the recent Forest Declaration Assessment. COP27 offers the “last opportunity” for countries to set themselves up to reduce CO2 emissions from forest loss by 1 billion tons by 2025, and yearly after that, to reach the Glasgow goal, a UN Environmental Program report found.
One need look no further than the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest rainforest, to see the seriousness of the funding problem: Forest loss there increased 5% in 2021, and many fear that its rainforest could quickly become beset on all sides by slash-and-burn land clearing, as corporate concessions for timber, plantations and cobalt and copper mining increase.
The Congo’s forest is essential for tackling both the biodiversity and climate crises the world faces. It possesses the largest carbon sink in the tropics, removing over 600 million tons of CO2 equivalent a year, almost six times more than the Amazon. And together with the peat underneath much of it, it holds 8.1 billion tons of “irrecoverable” carbon that, if it were released, could not be recaptured in time to prevent dangerous climate impacts.
But the draft of the main COP27 cover text released this Friday morning failed to mention, among other things, protecting waterlogged forests and tropical peatlands like those found in the Congo.
“What are we doing here at these negotiations if they will remove this very important element to fight against the warming of the planet?” Ève Bazaiba, deputy prime minister for environment and sustainable development of the Democratic Republic of (DRC), told Mongabay and other journalists.
Instead, the draft text focused on the critical role of “healthy forests” in climate regulation, a general term forest campaigners say has been used to justify logging. The language should instead be about preserving “primary forests,” said Virginia Young of the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society, an NGO. Intact primary forest ecosystems absorb more carbon than logged forests or tree plantations, and are also more resistant to carbon-releasing fires and disease, which are on the increase due to climate change.
“What’s needed now is to recognize that the integrity of forests is really important, not this ‘healthy forest’ rubbish,” Young said. “It’s logging PR, it’s greenwashing.”
Important carbon sink
International funding measures already on the books are not near enough to stop global deforestation, and in some cases have not been paid out.
In announcing the Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership, Sunak said public donors have spent $2.67 billion of the $12 billion committed under the 2021 Glasgow pledge to protect and restore forests. But so far, only Germany has committed additional funding under the partnership, doubling its initial Glasgow contribution to 2 billion euros (slightly over $2 billion). Talks to replenish the UN’s Green Climate Fund, which has also funded forest work, have not yet been successful.
Funding to protect and restore global forests must increase by 200 times, to $460 billion, to meet the goals of the Glasgow pledge, a progress report found.
In DRC, one of the poorest countries in the world, forest will inevitably be leased for resource extraction, say experts, unless international funding makes it more profitable to conserve it. In July, the country announced the auction of oil and gas blocks in the rainforest, including in Virunga National Park, the world’s most important gorilla sanctuary.
When U.S. climate envoy John Kerry asked DRC President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi Tshilombo to stop the auctions at the pre-COP in Kinshasa in October, Tshisekedi pointed out that the US was still developing oil on its own territory, according to attendee Kevin Conrad of the Coalition of Rainforest Countries. “[Y]ou’re drilling oil in Texas, why are you coming here and telling me not to drill?’ Tshisekedi said, according to Conrad.
While the United States has promised to invest $9 billion toward conserving global forests by 2030 and formed a “working group” with the DRC to protect peatland and rainforest, it has not entered into a bilateral deal to commit funding to forest preservation in the country. When asked by Mongabay at COP27 if any such deal was in the works, John Kerry said “we’ll have to wait and see.”
At COP26, the UK and DRC also signed an agreement to drum up $500 million for the Central African Forest Initiative over the next five years to protect the Congo Basin. But a year later at COP27, Bazaiba said none of this funding had been delivered, explaining that “they’re still working on it.”
“We have the potential, we have the forest,” she told Mongabay. “Those polluting countries, they should put funding together, working together to preserve the environment, to save humanity.”
Glenn Bush of the Woodwell Climate Center, who’s been advising the DRC delegation, said the scale of funding so far was critically insufficient. With conservation costing $10 to $15 per hectare, the DRC would need at least $500 million dollars each year, not every five years, to effectively protect its primary forest.
“The scale of funding being pledged [internationally], although it sounds like a lot, actually isn’t a lot in terms of forest conservation,” he said. “This has to go into sustainable activities with tens of thousands of rural households. That’s usually expensive.”
Inoussa Njumboket Njumboket of WWF DRC said international funding for Congo rainforest preservation needs to be put on a stricter timeline. While the government has secured land tenure rights for local communities to more than 6 million acres, “Up to now there’s no implementation at the local level” to stop illegal logging and mining.
Are carbon markets the solution?
With big international pledges failing to deliver enough money to fight deforestation, some advocates see the answer in carbon markets: Countries and companies could pay tropical countries to avoid cutting their old trees down, and count the carbon emissions avoided against their net zero goals.
But if carbon markets are to work, more transactions are urgently needed to boost prices. In its report on the Glasgow target, the UN Environment Programme said the average price of carbon credits for deforestation emissions reductions needed to at least triple and reach $30 a ton for these kind of deals to regularly happen.
The LEAF Coalition, a group of public and private donors committed to buying carbon credits for avoided deforestation on voluntary carbon markets, said at COP27 it had increased its pool of money from $1 billion to $1.5 billion. While that’s good news, it “has to be multiplied by ten, and the payments have to get out of the door much, much faster,” said Gabriel Labbate of the UN Environment Programme.
Some policy experts raise questions about the standards being applied on voluntary carbon markets, wondering if existing rules can adequately protect primary forest from being logged and replanted.
“There is a conscious process of blurring between ‘forests’ and ‘tree cover’ … so you can sell carbon credits,” said Souparna Lahiri of the Global Forest Coalition. The risk is that carbon markets will not differentiate sufficiently between natural forests able to store large amounts of carbon, and plantation forests which don’t function nearly as well.
The UNEP report said voluntary carbon markets must develop mechanisms to deal with such “reversals and leakage,” such as when a carbon credit forest burns down — a likely scenario as the climate heats up.
Conrad, who helped devise the UN’s REDD+ standards to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, said the voluntary markets are still so small as to be “irrelevant” and companies should just buy carbon credits under the same REDD+ framework that countries do, something that is meeting with some success in Brazil. It’s also hard to hold the many international rainforest funding pledges accountable, he said. Only 4% of REDD+ emissions reductions have been paid for.
“We have a REDD+ mechanism, 90% of the world’s rainforests are already in it, they’re already agreeing to monitoring,” he said. “Why are you creating all these things outside the Paris agreement? Why don’t you just empower what you’ve already agreed to?”
Tree planting not the answer
With deforestation talks focusing on “High Forest, Low Deforestation” (HFLD) countries because of their vast carbon sequestration potential, it can easily be forgotten that high-income temperate nations are often degrading what little old-growth forest they have left.
In announcing Canada was joining the Forest and Climate Leaders Partnership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talked about planting 2 billion trees rather than halting his country’s deforestation. The mitigation benefits of tree planting are “negligible” in the current decade, according to the recent Land Gap Report.
Kate Hughes, director for international climate change in the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, told Mongabay that the partnership “will be about reducing deforestation and restoring forests, in that order.”
But Canada has been continuing to log old-growth forest in British Columbia, and the province’s forests now emit more carbon than they sequester. A Mongabay reporter recently witnessed clear cutting in old growth forests on Vancouver Island that were slated for protection. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested, but government is mostly silent.
Asked how it could conserve primary forests worldwide if it failing to do so at home, Natural Resources Canada said in a statement that “forest harvesting” is “not considered deforestation as affected forests will regenerate.” That statement is technically true, but by the time cut forests regrow, the world will likely be out of time to avoid climate disaster.
“Developed countries could lead by example. It’s not all about primary tropical rainforest. The most depleted forest biome is the temperate. And the boreal forest is absolutely critical,” to carbon storage, Young said. “We also need to protect and restore the integrity of our high-carbon ecosystems, and the forests are our most high-carbon ecosystem.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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