11 December 22
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Could an anti-Castro agent's files hold the key to a lingering mystery?
The story starts at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when an ambitious young South Carolinian named Charles Pinckney submitted a plan for a new government. We don’t know exactly what was in Pinckney’s plan, because his original document has been lost to history. The Convention records, however, reveal that the framers hardly discussed Pinckney’s plan and, at key moments, rejected his views during the debates. Those documents were sealed for decades following ratification. This created a vacuum in the historical record, into which Pinckney strode. In 1818, when the government was gathering records from the Convention for publication, Pinckney submitted a document that, he claimed, represented his original plan. It was uncannily similar to the U.S. Constitution.
It was no less than James Madison who first blew the whistle on Pinckney's attempt to shine himself up for future historians. From Mother Jones:
Years later, Madison discredited Pinckney’s fraud in writing, explaining the document contained language that had only been arrived at after weeks of debate and could not have been divined before the convention began. Madison, convinced it was a fake, detailed how Pinckney’s supposed draft contradicted a more contemporaneous account of the South Carolinian’s actual proposal. Academics would go on to agree that the plan Pinckney sent was a con. In 1911, when historian Max Farrand compiled his Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, he appended Pinckney’s document with a collection of countervailing evidence, concluding that “it is established beyond all doubt that this draft does not represent ‘Pinckney’s original plan with some additions and modifications.’ It does not even have Pinckney’s original plan as its basis.”
Again from Politico, an explanation for why the lawyers for North Carolina dug out this notorious fake to buttress their notoriously fraudulent constitutional theory.
The North Carolina legislators, however, would have the Supreme Court believe that, in assigning federal election administration to state legislatures, the framers intended to sweep aside the traditional checks and balances — preventing state courts, the governors and other authorities from policing partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression by the legislature. And they point to Pinckney’s fraudulent document as proof. The plan Pinckney released in 1818 assigned the administration of congressional elections to “each state.” Proponents of the independent state legislature theory argue that, if the framers deliberately changed the chosen election administrator from the “state” to “the legislature thereof,” they must have meant to eliminate other state actors from the process. That argument is premised on a 204-year-old lie[...]Debate in the Supreme Court is increasingly littered with bad history. But if you’re going to do originalism, at least use originals. Pinckney’s 1818 fraud simply isn’t one.
While listening to the arguments, it dawned on me that Ginni Thomas's meddling in the electoral count after the 2020 election was simply a rough version of the ISL theory. She wanted state legislators in contested states to appoint their own slates of electors, popular vote be damned. And it occurred to me that Justice Clarence Thomas was clearly disposed to favor the ISL, and it further occurred to me that some day next spring, it’s possible that Thomas will read an opinion that blesses the ISL, and at the conclusion of these realizations, it occurred to me that a great many people in high places will see nothing untoward about this at all.
In the world of people who study the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jefferson Morley is the real thing. He has pursued relentlessly all those CIA documents involving Lee Harvey Oswald that the CIA would rather not let the world see—a reluctance that has done more to spawn suspicions of a conspiracy than 100 movies by Oliver Stone.
This week, Morley delivered a grenade that might just be enough to jar those records loose. From the Daily Beast:
The CIA holds documents that show presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in an intelligence operation before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a prominent Kennedy assassination reporter alleged Tuesday. “We’re talking about smoking-gun proof of a CIA operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald,” reporter Jefferson Morley said. Morley claimed the CIA operation involving Oswald took place in the summer of 1963, three months before the assassination. The allegation from Morley, who has written extensively about the CIA in the 1960s, could shake up the history of the Kennedy assassination if it proves to be true. Kennedy investigators have long sought to investigate the extent of Oswald’s involvement with intelligence agencies, and whether that could reveal more about whether Oswald was the only person involved in Kennedy’s death. Despite decades of investigations from Congress and independent inspectors, the CIA has never disclosed any involvement with Oswald[...]Morley claimed that Oswald, a former Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States as a supporter of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro, was involved in a pre-assassination CIA operation meant to discredit American supporters of Castro. Morley’s allegations focused on files created by now-deceased CIA agent George Joannides, who was involved with anti-Castro exile groups. Morley said 44 documents in Joannides’s file are still being held by the CIA and could shed new light on the purported operation.
Judge John R. Tunheim, a federal judge in Minnesota, said it was time for the CIA to release its remaining documents. Tunheim previously served on the Assassination Records Review Board, which handled the release of assassination-related files. “It’s time to release all of the files,” Tunheim said.
Next week is the deadline set by the president for the agencies to give up the Oswald-related documents that remain in the files. I'll believe that when I see it.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Jonesin' For Alchemy" (John Hebert): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1924, is Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft, waddling down the street. It is described as Taft's "staying fit" for his duties on the bench. Everything was different then, I guess, and he did drop close to 100 pounds, mostly by walking three miles a day. Taft stayed on the bench until President Herbert Hoover assured him that Charles Evans Hughes would succeed him as chief justice. Taft was worried that Hoover was too much the progressive and might elevate Harlan Fiske Stone, whom Taft considered one of the "bolsheviki." History is so cool.
Hey, Science News, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
Many dinosaurs known as ankylosaurids sported a heavy, potentially microwave-sized tail club. This natural sledgehammer has long been considered by both scientists and artists as a defensive weapon against predators, says Victoria Arbour, a paleontologist at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada. Fossil evidence for tail clubs’ targets was largely lacking, until Arbour and her colleagues chipped more rock away from the same skeleton they used to describe a new armored dinosaur, Zuul crurivastator, in 2017 (SN: 6/12/17). The dinosaur had five broken spikes on its sides. The team’s statistical analyses showed the damaged spikes clustered in specific regions of the body. If a large carnivorous dinosaur made these injuries, says Arbour, they’d likely be more randomly distributed and include bite and scratch marks[...]"Ankylosaurs are often portrayed as stupid, loner dinosaurs," she adds. The findings "show that they probably had much more complex behaviors than we give them credit for."
Vindication for living tanks! There's a certain satisfaction in that for all of us who were slow in math class, for whom they lived then to make us happy now.
I'll be back on Monday as this Congress runs out the string before the Republicans turn the House of Representatives into the legislative equivalent of a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit.
Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake line. Wear the damn masks, take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, and spare a moment for the people of Ukraine.
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Oleksandr Breus, a Ukrainian and onetime French legionnaire, was killed next to his car during the Russian invasion. Oleksandr Holod, who says he witnessed it from his window, describes events as he rides his bike past the charred remains of the vehicle near Nova Basan, Chernihiv Oblast, Ukraine on June 28. (photo: Carol Guzy/NPR)
It was just a story, about a possible war crime, committed in the first days of the Russian invasion into Ukraine. The victim was a Ukrainian man, allegedly murdered by Russian soldiers and left dead in the street next to his blown-up car, near a place called Nova Basan.
At first the story about this man stood out because it was different. He'd apparently been a member of the French Foreign Legion at some point. And perhaps, I'd thought, that could mean clues and investigations — maybe even consequences — far beyond the tiny village where he died, 50 miles northeast of Kyiv.
But as I spoke with investigators and human rights advocates about this case and many others, I came to see, as they have, just how elusive justice could be for any of the 50,000 alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Giorgi Gogia, a Human Rights Watch investigator who first told me about the case, said he'd been documenting so many crimes he didn't have time to investigate this case any more.
And Oleksandra Matviichuk, who heads the Center for Civil Liberties, one of the recipients of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, said she had started thinking of war crimes as mere statistics.
"I started to use numbers instead of names," she said.
I wanted to focus on a name instead of a number, to put a face to all the apparent crimes but also to gauge whether justice is possible. If I could solve even one murder — learn about the victim, what happened, who was responsible — maybe it would reveal how likely accountability is for all of them.
To understand that story, I decided again to focus on just one — the story of the dead man in the street, near Nova Basan.
The villages of Nova Basan and Bobrovytsia
I first visited Nova Basan in May, about a month after Ukrainian forces liberated the village from Russian control. It was a small community, surrounded by farmland, with a population of fewer than 3,000.
Before the war, families would leave their homes in Kyiv to spend their summers there.
Now, the burned-out hulls of Russian tanks lined the road.
It wasn't hard to find the scene of the killing: Everyone in the village knew where it was. Two men standing near an abandoned tank gestured down the road to where the man's car still sat along the highway, like a memorial to the violence inflicted by the Russian invasion in late February.
The car, a French-made Citroen, was a sickly white color, badly burned, with incinerated parts lying haphazardly around. Much of the front of the car was gone, torn away by an apparent explosion. Rust had begun to set in.
And the man's body was no longer there.
We headed into the center of the village, past the destroyed local café and a looted supermarket, to the town hall to see local administrator Mykola Dyachenko. In his office, where the window still had a bullet hole from the fighting, he told me what he knew.
It wasn't much. The man was killed as Russian forces entered the village on Feb. 28, Dyachenko said. He had, indeed, been a French legionnaire at one point, but he'd served his contract and returned home to Ukraine before the war began.
Dyachenko didn't know the dead man's name, but he knew his mother, Oksana Breus. She lived in another village, Bobrovytsia, about a 30-minute drive away. She invited us over to discuss her son.
When we arrived, she welcomed us into her home and put a photograph of her son on the table between us as we sat in the kitchen.
Her son's name was Oleksandr, she said. Oleksandr Breus. He had been killed in the first week of the war at the age of 28.
"He was going to Kyiv to pick up his sister and his fiancé. He wanted to take them to France," Oksana told us. She didn't know the details about how he died, and said she didn't want to know. But she had a video of the scene, taken the day of Oleksandr's death, which had circulated on social media.
She played it for us, then started to cry.
The video showed the same burned-out car we'd seen earlier, with a large hole in the back door on the driver's side. The camera pans right to show a man's body on the ground by the car, his right arm curled across what remains of his head. It looks like an execution.
"The Russians drove through, damn it," said the man recording the video. "Poor thing."
Oksana was too distraught to continue talking and suggested that we talk to Oleksandr's sister for more details. As she showed us out, walking into the yard, she stopped to show us one more thing.
It's a German shepherd with sad eyes, sitting inside an enclosure — Oleksandr's dog, Clifford.
"Such a handsome dog," she said. "Do you see how much he misses him?"
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A police officer walks by the nose of a Pan Am plane that was blown up near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. (photo: Martin Cleaver/AP)
A spokesman for the Justice Department said Abu Agila Masud is expected to make his first court appearance in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, but didn’t say when. The former Libyan intelligence operative is accused of making the explosive device that destroyed a Pan Am jet on Dec. 21, 1988, killing all 259 people on board the Boeing 747 and 11 others on the ground.
The Justice Department charged Masud in 2020 with helping make the bomb. In announcing the charges on the 32nd anniversary of the attack, then-Attorney General William P. Barr said that the operation was ordered by the leadership of Libyan intelligence and that Moammar Gaddafi, Libya’s leader from 1969 to 2011, had personally thanked Masud for his work.
It was unclear how authorities took Masud into custody.
A spokesman for the Scottish Crown Office said Sunday that Scottish prosecutors and police, working alongside colleagues from the United States and United Kingdom, “will continue to pursue this investigation.” The office said it would not comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
Stephanie Bernstein, 71, a Maryland resident whose husband, Michael, was one of the victims, called the development “surreal.”
“It’s critical to hold people like this accountable, no matter how many years after the fact,” said the retired rabbi and vice president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group. “We have generations of people who have been working on this for 34 years. We’ll never stop. This is a critical milestone.”
The plane bound from London to New York “exploded into pieces almost instantaneously,” federal investigators said in a statement of facts filed in 2020. Everyone on board was killed, among them 190 Americans that included a group of Syracuse University students returning home for the holidays.
Masud was the third person charged in the case. In 1991, during Barr’s first stint as attorney general, he announced the first charges — against Libyan intelligence operative Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and his alleged accomplice Lamen Khalifa Fhimah. Libya refused to send them to the U.S. or Britain for trial, stalling efforts at prosecution and prompting sanctions.
In 1999, the Libyan government turned over the two to be tried in Scottish court on a former U.S. military base in the Netherlands. Fhimah was acquitted, while Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He was released in 2009 after a cancer diagnosis. He died about three years later.
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Shipping containers form the border wall on the frontier with Mexico in Cochise county, Arizona. (photo: Reuters)
Critics say Republican Doug Ducey’s scheme is illegal because makeshift barrier is being erected on tribal and federal land
Doug Ducey is driving a project that is placing double-stacked old shipping containers through several miles of national forest, attempting to fill gaps in Donald Trump’s intermittent border fencing.
The rusting hulks, topped with razor wire and with bits of metal jammed into gaps, stretch for more than three miles through Coronado national forest land, south of Tucson, and the governor has announced plans to extend that up to 10 miles, at a cost of $95m (£78m).
The area, with mountain ranges rising abruptly from the desert and a diverse environment of plants and animals, is federal land maintained by the US Forest Service.
Ducey had first experimented with a smattering of shipping containers in August in Yuma, in the south-west corner of the state, bordering California and Mexico, aiming to stop migrants and asylum seekers.
Since Donald Trump implemented the Title 42 rule in 2020 when he was president, which closed ports of entry to most seeking asylum in the US, people have sought gaps in barriers elsewhere in order to request asylum from border agents. The rule appears still to be on track to end later this month although a long legal battle is taking place.
Ducey issued an executive order in August to erect old shipping containers near Yuma, and 11 days later workers had installed 130 of what he described as “22ft-high, double stacked, state-owned, 8,800lb, 9x40ft containers, linked together and welded shut”.
In October, Ducey filed a lawsuit in which he claimed that the federal land along the border known as the Roosevelt Reservation actually belongs to the state, not the US government, and that Arizona has the constitutional right to protect itself against what he termed an invasion, citing “countless migrants” resulting in “a mix of drug, crime and humanitarian issues”.
US attorneys issued a withering response, refuting the claims.
The US Bureau of Reclamation and the Cocopah tribal nation said that Ducey was violating federal law by placing the containers on federal and tribal land there. In a letter, the bureau demanded that the state remove the containers. But the state has not, and has since been emboldened to embark on the larger project now proceeding apace more than 300 miles to the east.
The Cochise county sheriff, Mark Dannels, supports the new series of shipping containers being placed in his county, hoping “it will deter crime and stop criminal behavior”.
But as the line of metal boxes snakes west towards adjacent Santa Cruz county, the sheriff there, David Hathaway, told the Nogales International newspaper that if anyone tries to put the containers in his jurisdiction they will be arrested for illegal dumping.
Dinah Bear, an attorney and former general counsel for the council on environmental quality within the executive office of the White House said Ducey’s lawsuit was “shockingly bad” and “frivolous”.
“There’s just no question that this is federal property,” she added, as well as being public land, meaning “there’s no legal difference between the land they’re putting the shipping containers on and Grand Canyon national park.”
To block the project, she said US Forest Service agents “would definitely want a court order from a judge … They’re not going to go down to the border and have a shootout with state police or arrest the governor at the [state] capitol.”
Federal judge David Campbell, based in Phoenix, is presiding over the case, but no hearing has been called yet.
“The clock is ticking,” Bear said, with courts backed up and the holidays approaching.
The incoming Arizona governor, Democrat Katie Hobbs, who will assume office on 2 January after beating Republican candidate Kari Lake in the midterm elections, has said she will remove the containers.
Bear predicts Campbell will order the removal.
But before that happens, they are being laid down by a contractor called AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster remediation firm. A local media investigation found that Ducey’s announced $6m cost for the Yuma barriers had actually cost $13m.
Daily protests by locals alarmed at the project have slowed what was breakneck-speed installation, but not managed to halt it.
Meanwhile, Mark Ruggiero, the former Sierra Vista district ranger for the US Forest Service in Cochise county, said the shipping containers are a hazard that jeopardize a binational firefighting agreement with Mexico.
“I was shocked to see this barrier going in,” he said. “It’s an illegal action on public land.”
As a barrier for humans, the double-stacked boxes are not much of an obstacle, but they are an existential threat to endangered migratory species, especially jaguars and ocelots, as well as being an eyesore.
Emily Burns, program director for Sky Island Alliance, a binational conservation nonprofit that tracks wildlife in the Coronado national forest said: “There was no environmental review or planning or mitigation that was done.”
The Center for Biological Diversity was allowed to join the federal government as a defendant in Ducey’s lawsuit and has slammed the barrier as damaging and a political stunt.
Meanwhile, Burns noted that her organization has 70 wildlife cameras in this stretch of border and they rarely see migrants crossing there.
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A sign for BlackRock Inc hangs above their building in New York U.S., July 16, 2018. (photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
Companies say they want to acknowledge environmental impacts. Republicans are mad about that.
Republican leaders call the business world’s recognition of climate science a symptom of “wokeism.” In a white paper released this week, the Republican minority on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs recently called out the “big three” firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and States Street “as our new emperors,” taking issue with their involvement in a non-binding coalition that supports reaching a portfolio of net-zero emissions by 2050.
“The conclusions are built on flawed premises and risk harming millions of everyday investors that rely on mutual funds and exchange-traded funds to help them retire with dignity,” BlackRock said in response to the GOP’s report.
ESG may be the right’s new boogeyman, but it’s a misunderstood concept that has been around for a long time; in 2004, the UN secretary-general challenged financial institutions to better account for environmental, social, and corporate governance issues. But ESG gained visibility in the past few years, especially after BlackRock CEO Larry Fink penned a letter to CEOs in 2021 urging ESG as the future.
ESG is not a regulation or a set of rules, and it does not require any real action from a corporation. It’s mostly used as a catch-all term for any investment that considers social and environmental responsibility. In fact, what counts as ESG is so ill-defined and malleable it has been criticized as a way to “greenwash” corporate actions.
One of the defining ideas of ESG is that a company is better off accounting and reporting environmental and social risks to investors and clients, rather than being willfully blind to the world around it. This can include a broad swath of issues, such as a company’s reliance on oil, gas, and coal, or exposure to sea-level rise in coastal operations, human rights violations of the countries it operates in, and lack of board diversity and CEO transparency. A big part of the ESG movement, at least right now, is largely about disclosure of these potential bottom-line risks in the future, not necessarily doing anything differently in the present.
But Republican officials in West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and now Florida have withdrawn billions of dollars from BlackRock’s management. Proponents are planning to introduce a slew of bills in at least 15 states next year to divest pensions and boycott companies for considering sustainability as an aim. At the federal level, House GOP lawmakers are preparing antitrust investigations.
To get to the bottom of what is driving this, I spoke to one of the state officials leading the attack on ESG, Riley Moore, state treasurer of West Virginia. The way he sees it, “banks are coercing capital away” from coal, gas, and oil industries. He explains he doesn’t want the coal- and gas-reliant state to contract its financial services with a company that is “trying to diminish those dollars. They want less coal mining, they want less fracking.”
This is getting much bigger than BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, companies that used to be solidly at the right of corporate America. There are real stakes for pensioners, red-state taxpayers, and the wider economy if the GOP succeeds in scaring off financial institutions from pursuing climate targets.
ESG isn’t woke, but it is evidence of the free market at work
The backlash began early in 2021 when three events sent the signal that ESG was here to stay. The first was Larry Fink’s embrace of ESG, noting in his 2021 letter that “No issue ranks higher than climate change on our clients’ lists of priorities. They ask us about it nearly every day.” The second came in March, when the Biden administration proposed a regulation to require climate risk disclosure from publicly traded companies, parallel to rules being adopted by the European Union. The third and final was an unlikely coup staged at the annual Exxon shareholder board meeting.
Last year, Engine No. 1, a small hedge fund, earned enough votes to gain three Exxon board seats, despite the company’s recommendation against it. It wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Exxon’s three largest shareholders, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street voting, representing 20 percent of the voting share. The new board members’ mission was focused on understanding the risks climate change and regulation will pose to the company.
The win was the clearest sign yet that there was a realignment happening in financial markets and that even the fossil fuel industry couldn’t ignore the effects of climate change. Investors, as the Engine No. 1 win showed, are already clamoring for this kind of information. The assets BlackRock handles far outnumber what Republicans could divest. For example, two-thirds of BlackRock’s largest clients in its strategic partner program, representing assets over $3 trillion, support the energy transition, according to BlackRock. ESG isn’t going away — by 2025, global ESG assets are expected to make up a third of all projected assets under management — and it keeps growing. ESG funds are also now packaged for retail use, like for retirement savings.
On the left, ESG has for years come under criticism as a form of greenwashing, and ESG disclosure isn’t the same thing as corporate behavior. As Harvard Business Review noted, the funding in ESG is “dedicated to assuring returns for shareholders, not delivering positive planetary impact.” Many environmentalists think ESG is a distraction from the main issue they’d like to see traction on: companies disclosing the impact their products and investments have on the world around them, and accounting for that in decisions.
ESG doesn’t go this far. In no way will disclosure be enough to save the planet from climate change. There are no binding requirements, either. But what Republican critics of ESG really fear is that the financial world will realign with climate science and no longer see new coal plants and offshore drilling as viable projects to finance.
Many of the Republican attacks on ESG stem from a misrepresentation of what it actually means. It’s not always motivated by an altruistic climate or social agenda. ESG also helps banks and public companies meet their one goal by screening investments for various risks. “They’ve got a fiduciary duty to generate returns. So they’re not going to impose some agenda, whether it’s climate or social agenda, that’s going to get in the way of returns,” said University of Oxford business expert Robert Eccles.
As baseless as the attacks have been, the pressure could still work. Vanguard on Wednesday announced it is withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers coalition, in which companies voluntarily committed to reaching net-zero emissions in their portfolios by 2050. In an apparent nod to the ongoing GOP’s investigations, Vanguard said it withdrew “so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks — and to make clear that Vanguard speaks independently on matters of importance to our investors.”
The right’s baffling one-year campaign against ESG
After Engine No. 1’s coup, the attacks started to crystallize from the right, spearheaded by conservative advocacy circles. There have been two groups at the center of these attacks, both supported by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who led the right’s legal strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those groups, Consumers Research and State Financial Officers Foundation, are conservative nonprofits also funded by groups with anonymous funding.
These groups’ involvement suggests a deep-pocketed campaign. “This is an artificially created conversation topic that’s not being led by financial stakeholders. It’s political stakeholders that are driving this forward,” said Jacey Bingler, senior communications campaigner of the climate finance advocacy group Sunrise Project.
There have been four main prongs to the right’s strategy. Republicans plan to undertake antitrust investigations next year at the state and federal levels against these giant corporations. Just before the election, Senate Republicans sent a letter to top law firms warning of investigations around ESG, claiming they suspect collusion. The second is what states like West Virginia and Florida have already done: pulling their state operating funds from BlackRock and other banks’ management.
The final two prongs are considered potentially the most damaging to taxpayers and pensioners in red states. One is the model bill that is circulating in red states, called the State Government Employee Retirement Protection Act. It divests teachers, police officers, state-employed nurses, and other employees’ pensions from companies that are on a boycott list. Eventually, experts worry this ban could mean the pensions are overweighted in fossil fuels and less diverse, leaving the people depending on their retirement subject to more market volatility.
The final tactic is a boycott list, where the state only seeks contracts with financing from companies that do not consider climate change in their calculations. Practically speaking, that means if a state wants to build a highway and needs financing, it could wind up being charged higher fees because there is less need for those banks to compete with better deals.
The ESG backlash is an extension of the right’s ideological schism on climate change
It’s not clear what’s motivating this new front in the GOP’s culture wars. It’s not a winning political issue, given that most voters aren’t familiar with terms like ESG, nor is ESG a top priority of the climate movement.
There’s another theory, though. “It’s intended to delay climate action without having to admit that that’s what they’re attempting to do,” Sunrise’s Bingler said. “Republicans have essentially created a new installment in this culture war where they tend to pick relatively niche topics that don’t necessarily resonate with large parts of society without this artificial attempt to continue to fan the flames.”
For over a decade, the main plank of the GOP has ignored climate science, cycling through various excuses not to take action on greenhouse gas emissions. Most of the electorate thinks climate change is real and is concerned to some degree about it, and rising extreme weather is making it more undeniable.
But many Republican leaders don’t recognize that science. West Virginia’s treasurer, Moore, is one of them.
“You’re talking about climate changing, you know, in 100 years,” he said. “I mean, these folks are hedging on what the climate might look like in 100 years. Tell me, exactly, for a pension beneficiary, who is going to retire in the next 10 years, how carbon emissions is going to affect the financial outcomes and vitality of a given publicly traded company.”
“So what you’re telling me is you’re going to have sea levels rise by X amount of centimeters in 100 years, and that somehow is going to affect the profitability of a company?” he continued. “Not sure I follow that.”
Climate activists — and even some investors — have said that the GOP pushback against ESG is a political issue, not primarily an economic one. There’s also no clear anti-ESG consensus among typical allies of Republicans; the Kentucky Bankers Association in November sued the state attorney general for overstepping his authority by demanding documents related to ESG.
So the issue’s salience in the next two years will depend entirely on how it resonates with voters and potentially factors into the presidential election. Many experts were skeptical it could ever gain political relevance, but still worry what the endgame is. Does this mean a future of “blue banks” and “red banks”? Will financial behemoths be frightened into weakening already-weak climate targets? It’s too early to say.
But the right’s war on banks won’t necessarily drive a back-pedaling on climate goals. BlackRock has tempered its interest in climate publicly since the ESG attacks began, but other institutions have pushed ahead.
“Market participants will continue to demand ESG data and incorporate it in risk models,” said Ivan Frishberg, chief sustainability officer of Amalgamated Bank, a bank with a socially responsible mission. “That is capitalism doing what it does best: seeking more data for better client responsiveness and a more systemic view. The pushback on ESG is essentially a denial of capitalism. Ultimately, our clients are going to drive the products and approaches we take and guide how we respond as a firm.”
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The psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey in his home in Bethesda, Md. 'This is the largest single attempt to change the thing that we said we wanted to change,' he said. (photo: Shuran Huang/NYT)
The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has been advocating tougher involuntary psychiatric treatment policies for 40 years. Now it’s paying off.
Still, every morning when he reads the newspapers, he looks for accounts of violent behavior by people with severe mental illness, to add to an archive he has maintained since the 1980s.
His records include reports of people who, in the grip of psychosis, assaulted political figures or pushed strangers into the path of subway trains; parents who, while delusional, killed their children by smothering, drowning or beating them; adult children who, while off medication, killed their parents with swords, axes or hammers.
Dr. Torrey, who has done pioneering research into the biological basis of schizophrenia, has used these stories in service of an argument: that it was a mistake for the United States to shut down its public psychiatric hospitals without adequate follow-up care. And that to remedy this, the government should create systems to compel seriously mentally ill people in the community to get treatment.
For much of his career, Dr. Torrey was a lonely voice on this issue, disavowed by patient advocacy groups and by organized psychiatry. But his ideas are now animating major policy shifts, including the announcement by Mayor Eric Adams of New York last month that city officials would send people with untreated mental illnesses to hospitals, even if they posed no threat to others.
“This is the largest single attempt to change the thing that we said we wanted to change,” Dr. Torrey said.
“I think the stakes are large,” he added. “Because if it fails, if you have no improvement at all, I think people give up for another decade, just live with it for another decade before somebody else comes along with a new idea.”
Dr. Torrey’s influence on New York City’s policy is profound. The mayor’s adviser on this matter is Brian Stettin, who was thrust into mental health policy in 1999 when, as an assistant attorney general for New York State, he was asked to draft Kendra’s Law, named for a woman who was pushed in front of a subway train by a man with schizophrenia. The law allows a court to order a person with mental illness to comply with an outpatient treatment plan, risking involuntary commitment if the person refuses.
At the time, Mr. Stettin turned to Dr. Torrey’s organization, the Treatment Advocacy Center, for guidance and became such a believer that after leaving state government, he spent more than a decade as the group’s policy director. In an interview, Mr. Stettin described Dr. Torrey as “the single greatest influence on my thinking about the role of law and policy in ensuring the medical treatment of severe mental illness.”
Ira A. Burnim, the legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said that in the course of arguing for his ideas, Dr. Torrey had overstated the dangerousness of people with severe mental illness, changing the way they are viewed.
“Every time there was a sensational crime involving a person with mental illness, Fuller Torrey would be out there, saying this is what happens when you have our current civil commitment laws,” he said. “Among the outcomes of Fuller’s work is the fear of people with mental illness.”
He added that Dr. Torrey had been extraordinarily effective at building a consensus in favor of compulsory outpatient treatment. “That’s where Torrey wants to go — if you need treatment, you can be picked up,” he said. “We’ve lost. You’ve got to understand, we’ve lost.”
The education of a skeptic
It is, perhaps, no surprise that Dr. Torrey became an outlier in his profession. He was a sophomore at Princeton when his mother called to tell him something was wrong with his sister, Rhoda, who had just turned 18 and was due to start college in the fall. She was lying on the front lawn, shouting, “The British are coming!”
He accompanied his mother to meetings with eminent psychiatrists, who lectured them on the possible causes of his sister’s schizophrenia. The chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital suggested it was the trauma of his father’s death. The chairman of Columbia’s psychiatry department pointed to “family problems.”
“I knew it was nonsense from the beginning,” he said. “It made no sense whatsoever.”
Later, when he became a psychiatrist himself, Dr. Torrey fantasized about rounding up all the psychiatrists “who had these nonsense theories” and putting them on trial in a football stadium full of patients’ families. As a researcher, he plunged into the task of searching for biological causes for the disease. But it was too late for his mother, who took the Columbia chairman’s word for it.
“This was a very important man,” he said. “I think she died thinking it was true.”
In the 1970s, when the country was discharging hundreds of thousands of patients from public psychiatric hospitals, it was the era of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and the move was lauded as a forward-thinking reform. But Dr. Torrey warned that many former patients were being left wandering city streets untreated, describing them in his writing as “a legion of the inner-city damned.”
He recalled a woman he had encountered while treating patients at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. She struck him as familiar, so he pulled out her records: A decade earlier, while psychotic, she had been treated at St. Elizabeths, the public psychiatric hospital where he had worked, after attacking her daughter so brutally that the girl lost her arm. The woman had refused medication once she left the hospital.
“I said, ‘There’s something very wrong with this system,’” he said. “How is this woman allowed to be completely psychotic again?”
It was unusual for a psychiatrist to take such a blistering stance against deinstitutionalization, which been celebrated by liberals. Over the years that followed, Dr. Torrey said, his arguments found more support from conservatives, landing on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.
He went on to challenge all of the profession’s power centers. He lambasted the National Institutes of Mental Health for funding too little research on treatments for debilitating illnesses like schizophrenia. He fell out with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill over his advocacy of outpatient commitment. He refused to pay dues to his local chapter of the American Psychiatric Association — an act of protest over its spending on a lobbyist — and was expelled, he said.
“I’m a longtime friend and colleague of Fuller’s, but Fuller caused institutional psychiatry a big pain in the butt,” said Dr. John Talbott, 87, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association. He traced the friction to deinstitutionalization. “Fuller was one of the few people who said from the very beginning that it was a big mistake. In part, he said it because of his sister.”
After her diagnosis, Dr. Torrey’s sister never lived independently again, moving from a public hospital to a series of group homes. She died at 70. It wasn’t a good life, Dr. Torrey said, but someone was always looking after her.
He could not say the same of the former residents of public psychiatric hospitals, who, as a result of deinstitutionalization, dispersed to a more isolated, precarious existence in apartment buildings or nursing homes.
“Most of us who would be on the street would say, ‘Oh, we’d love to have our own place,’” he said. “I think a lot of these people don’t want their own place. They do better in a group home.” A few of them, he said, discovered a strategy that would send them right back to the state hospital: They set fire to their rooms.
An idea takes hold
Dr. Torrey’s tiny organization, the Treatment Advocacy Center, or TAC, set about changing laws with a twofold strategy.
His team sought out legislators who were sympathetic because they had relatives with schizophrenia or had worked with severely mentally ill people. And they pushed for legislation after acts of violence, using the window of public dismay to put forward bills, like Kendra’s Law, that allowed for mandatory outpatient treatment.
The group’s record has been striking. Forty-seven states now have laws on assisted outpatient treatment, 30 of them developed with the involvement of TAC. Federal funds began flowing into outpatient commitment programs in 2016, and TAC has received a federal grant to develop programs around the country.
In the course of this campaign, Dr. Torrey has used statistics selectively to send a simplified message that untreated mental illnesses are a major cause of violence, said Jeff W. Swanson, a sociologist at the Duke University School of Medicine who has researched dangerousness.
“Unfortunately, that doesn’t comport with what the epidemiological research says,” he said. About 4 percent of violent acts can be directly attributed to mental illness, and many of them are low-level assaults, he said, “things like pushing and shoving and slapping people.” But the fear that followed catastrophic incidents proved powerful, politically.
“Fuller is a communicator — he wants to put information out there that moves hearts and minds and policymakers,” Dr. Swanson said. He also worried, like other experts interviewed, that tougher commitment laws could work only if mental health services like psychiatric beds and clinical care were widely available, which they are not.
“It’s absolutely correct that we need to get severely mentally ill people off the streets and out of awful conditions and into some sort of care,” said Dr. Talbott, who served as superintendent at Manhattan State Hospital, which is now Manhattan Psychiatric Center. “But we have destroyed the care system in large parts. So I don’t know how to do it overnight.”
Dr. Torrey said he shared that worry and had little sense of whether New York was prepared.
“I think that Adams is brave to try it,” he said. “This is difficult. It’s going to be difficult.” He added: “Does it make me nervous that it might fail? Yeah. If I was 20 years younger, would I go up to New York and help them? I might.”
But policy is not the first thing Dr. Torrey thinks of when he wakes up in the morning. What he wants to know is why his sister got sick.
He was exuberant last week about new research that had found that wolves in Yellowstone Park made more risky decisions when they were infected with a parasite, toxoplasma gondii. His own research has found evidence that the same parasite plays a role in schizophrenia. He thinks he knows who passed it to Rhoda: the family cat, Butterball.
Dr. Torrey also knows that his time is limited. The tremor in his hand began just after his 77th birthday, and he knew right away that it was Parkinson’s. Since then, he has tracked the progress of the disease with close attention that verges, at times, on enthusiasm.
“I’ve tried to learn about the brain my whole life, and now my brain’s gone south,” he said. “I get to observe it! That’s exciting! The brain is fascinating! It is me! I am an N of one!”
He is now in his 12th year with the disease. By year 15, he said, 80 percent of people with the disease have developed dementia. This is something he wanted Mr. Adams to know.
“They better work fast in New York,” he said. “I want to know what happens. I want to see the results of this experiment before I become demented.”
A new report from the House Oversight committee found the oil industry misled the public about its clean energy efforts. (photo: Chelsea Stahl/NBC News/Getty Images)
A report issued Friday by the House Oversight Committee said oil companies had “greenwashed” their public image while continuing to invest in fossil fuels.
The committee said it found Shell, Chevron, BP and the American Petroleum Institute all made major investments in projects that would “protect and entrench the use of fossil fuels, long past the timeline scientists say would be safe to prevent catastrophic climate change” despite making climate pledges.
“They’re basically saying, ‘we’re going to increase production, we’re going to increase emissions, but we’re also going to be able to claim being this clean tech company, this green company, because we can take some symbolic actions that make it look like we’re in the climate fight,’” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., a member of the committee.
“The cynicism was breathtaking, and unfortunately, it was quite successful,” he said, “It’s been a successful PR strategy.”
The committee’s Democratic members all signed on to the report, but no Republicans put their name on it.
When reached for comment, a press representative for the Republicans on the committee pointed to statements Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., made during a hearing in October in which he said the investigation was “to deliver partisan theater for prime-time news.”
According to internal documents released to NBC News as part of the report, oil companies forecast sizable returns on their fossil fuel investments. One internal document from Chevron touts up to a $200 billion return over the next 40 years after upscaling oil production off the coast of Australia.
Exxon Mobil and Chevron recently disclosed plans to increase investment in oil projects.
The companies mentioned in the report did not return requests for comment.
The report also found that the companies intentionally misled the public about their plans and also attempted to “obstruct the Committee’s investigation and withhold key documents.”
“These documents demonstrate how the fossil fuel industry ‘greenwashed’ its public image with promises and actions that oil and gas executives knew would not meaningfully reduce emissions, even as the industry moved aggressively to lock in continued fossil fuel production for decades to come — actions that could doom global efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change,” the committee wrote in the report.
Internal documents also showed oil executives privately admitting that divesting, or moving around the accountability of emissions, will not have a meaningful impact on overall emissions levels. “What exactly are we supposed to do instead of divesting ... pour concrete over the oil sands and burn the deed to the land so no one can buy them?” one media relations person at Shell wrote in an email to a colleague.
The report went further to say that the big oil companies have avoided accountability and obstructed the committee’s investigation, which was originally launched in September 2021, after not complying with subpoenas for documents issued by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y, the chair of the committee.
“It was like pulling teeth,” Khanna said. Exxon blacked out complete pages of its documents and the Chamber of Commerce withheld internal documents, and the report did not provide any reasons for the redactions.
The report comes after Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, and with it the ability to direct House Oversight investigations. Khanna said the millions of documents acquired by the committee will be handed over to those with more resources who can act on the information.
“That’s the only way we’re going to have accountability,” he said. “You can’t expect a House subcommittee to go up against oil companies that have been misleading American public for 40 years and all of a sudden have accountability.
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