28 December 22
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Learning to live with them
This immutable truth has always shaped the tenuous relationship between our species and our environment. We are part of nature and thus are vulnerable to its capriciousness and extremes — droughts, floods, storms, diseases, and attacks from wild beasts. While our modern way of life means most of us are protected from the wild beast part, for all of our technology and science, the other elements of nature remain very much present.
And, let us not dodge the fact that our actions are making many natural extremes worse through climate change.
Winter is a time when the dangers of nature are readily on the mind. We have just witnessed brutal and deadly storms sweep the nation, especially in Western New York. It takes a lot to overwhelm a place like Buffalo. Fierce winter storms are to Buffalo and surrounding areas what hurricanes are to Florida, Texas, and the Gulf Coast: expected. People there are accustomed to extreme winter weather but now are dealing with a blizzard of historic proportions and the tragedy of dozens of deaths and mass dislocation. More snow has arrived, and our thoughts are with those who are suffering.
Meanwhile, in the West, the prayers are for more precipitation. The region's years-long drought has led to longer summer fire seasons and fights over how to share dwindling resources like the once mighty Colorado River. A life-giving force to several states, it is now shrinking at a rapid rate, putting agriculture and drinking water for millions of people at risk, not to mention causing widespread damage to ecosystems.
The disruptions of nature can have cascading effects in the short term, too. This holiday week has seen thousands of flight cancellations. These invariably result from a mixture of weather and human fallibility. We try to build systems that anticipate disarray, but sometimes nature’s interference is too severe to overcome, and sometimes we have been too limited in our thinking to anticipate all that could go wrong. Often it is a combination of both.
Just because we don’t want to think about nature’s destructiveness doesn’t make it go away.
Take the deadly COVID pandemic, which has disrupted life around the planet for years. Even as we crave a return to normalcy, the virus rages, still sending people to hospitals and premature deaths. In China, where they bought time with draconian measures, the lack of preparation for what would happen after the lockdowns — like vaccinating the elderly and stockpiling medicines — is leading to a humanitarian disaster. We don’t know how bad it is, because China is not forthcoming. Mass deaths and disease could add more fuel to the social unrest rising in that nation.
Back in this country, the politicization around COVID vaccines has metastasized into greater vaccine hesitancy, especially among those who identify as Republican. The Washington Post just ran a disturbing article on the rise in cases of measles and chickenpox as more parents choose not to vaccinate their children. What makes this trend particularly heartbreaking is that vaccines are among humankind’s most successful tools for mitigating nature’s attacks on our health and longevity.
In vaccines, however, we can also find an example of a hopeful path forward. Vaccines use our own immune system by marshaling our natural defenses. This makes them just as much a part of nature as the viruses they protect against. And now, in one of the greatest breakthroughs in our fight against cancer, scientists and doctors are finding ways to harness our own immune systems there as well.
We should not think of nature as good or bad. It both gives life and takes it. We can, however, learn from nature to protect ourselves and our planet. We can find ways to deploy the tools of nature to grow crops more efficiently, to protect our water supplies, and to produce energy more cleanly.
We can also find in nature important lessons in humility and a reminder that for all our vaunted wisdom and power to control our environments, we ultimately have our limits. We cannot only build walls, real or symbolic, to keep the ravages of nature at bay. We must build bridges, with each other and with our greater connections with the natural world. In social relationships we can find resilience. We can check in on each other and offer assistance. And by living in greater harmony with nature, we can build a more sustainable and equitable future.
Right now, the effort must be on helping those contending with the dangers nature is throwing at us. But we can also work to understand nature better, through investments in scientific research. And we can find ways to incorporate a healthy respect for nature into our policies at the local, national, and global levels.
Since we are part of nature, there is no other choice.
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Tamara Klimashenko, 61, and her husband Anatoly Klimashenko, 62, visit their damaged home in Lyman, Ukraine, on Dec. 18. (photo: Heidi Levine/The Washington Post)
Her husband, Anatoly Klimashenko, pointed to where the shells exploded: one near the cabbage patch; another where the strawberries grew; yet another on the garage he built.
Lyman was the site of fierce fighting in May, when Russian forces seized the city, and in the summer. The Russians occupied Lyman until Oct. 1, when they fled a fast-advancing Ukrainian counteroffensive.
But even amid the wreckage of their home — with the walls blown out and wood planks hanging from the ceiling — the Klimashenkos said they feared an even worse fate: another Russian invasion, potentially their third in eight years, as President Vladimir Putin’s self-assigned “main goal” of “liberating all of Donbas” yet again puts their city in the Kremlin’s crosshairs.
“They’re going to bring more destruction,” said Anatoly, 62. “And already there is nothing left to destroy.”
Like many others here, the Klimashenkos for about six months have slept in an underground storage unit to avoid the shelling, and now subsist on humanitarian assistance brought by Western aid groups.
Putin’s insistence that the war will continue until his objectives are met means that the fight for Lyman — or what’s left of it — isn’t over. The Russian president has doubled down on his illegal annexation claims in recent days, insisting that people like the Klimashenkos and their neighbors are now Russian citizens, who must be liberated from the Ukrainians who liberated them from the Russians in September.
This destructive, and seemingly pointless, cycle of conquest and liberation has been underway for nearly nine years — ever since the Kremlin began fomenting a separatist war with false claims that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were under threat from the pro-Western, pro-democracy protesters who rose up in fury after President Viktor Yanukovych, under pressure from Putin, broke a promise to sign expansive political and economic agreements with the European Union.
Lyman and many small cities, towns and villages nearby now lie in ruins.
In Lyman and Yampil, entire neighborhoods have already been leveled, with the tops of apartment buildings blown off by shells, massive craters left next to children’s playgrounds, and just a few dozen elderly people left and scarred from ceaseless shelling.
A visit to the town of Dolyna, formerly home to 21,000 people, found no inhabitants at all — only the sound of wind rustling against corrugated metal.
The majority of residents, save the most desperate and destitute, have fled — east for those who support Russia, west for those loyal to Ukraine. Years of war have both left the area a wasteland and also hardened its people against the Kremlin, making a mockery of Russian claims that their forces would be welcomed with open arms.
Putin falsely accuses Kyiv and its Western supporters of carrying out a genocide in Donbas, the wider territory that encompasses the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Ukraine’s Western supporters have imposed unprecedented sanctions aiming to punish Russia for invading and trying to annex Donbas, along with the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, in violation of international law.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pledged to reclaim all of the occupied lands. But an equally likely fate for these fought-over territories is the devastation visible in and around Lyman.
Larisa, 62, of Lyman, recalled counting as many as 200 shells exploding per day when she and nine neighbors were trapped in a basement between Russian and Ukrainian lines for five weeks in the early fall, in a suburban part of the city that used to be part of a resort destination.
One shell directly struck the kindly 70-year-old amateur beekeeper across the street, nicknamed Mikhalych, as he went to feed the stray dogs in the neighborhood. His body lay in the street, giving off a stench that his neighbors could do nothing about for five days because of the bombardment.
“It’s hell, Armageddon, and we’ve already lived through it,” said Larisa, who asked to be identified by her first name for fear of reprisal. As she spoke, she stepped around shattered glass, a child’s pair of goggles and a discarded Coca-Cola bottle. “Is this being liberated?”
Before she found her son’s body six days after his death, and before shrapnel shattered her walls and forced her to live for seven months in a basement, Tamara Kovalenko, 65, said she did not care much if her city was controlled by Russia or Ukraine — but that’s no longer the case.
“I’ve changed my views completely,” Kovalenko said, as she picked up a bag of donated food from a United Nations distribution point in the center of town. “In 2014, I didn’t hate the Russians.” With her aid package, Kovalenko returned to a home with no electricity, heat or running water.
Artillery shells exploded in the distance roughly every 30 seconds, and machine gun fire erupted every few minutes from the front lines about six miles away. “Now, we are so afraid of them coming back that we try not to think about it, not to even imagine it,” she said. “We are just terrified.”
After Russian proxies seized control of parts of Donbas in 2014, the pro-Kremlin authorities banned the Ukrainian language from being taught in schools and introduced the ruble as the official currency, according to Sergei Anatolyevich Garmash, a journalist and Ukrainian politician who was part of the failed negotiations to implement the Minsk II peace accords, a 2015 cease-fire agreement.
Combining the gains after 2014 with this year’s invasion, the Kremlin has taken control of roughly 75 percent of the Donbas region, according to Paul D’Anieri, a professor who studies Eastern European politics at the University of California at Riverside.
Capturing the city of Bakhmut, where heavy fighting is now taking place, would give Russia yet another foothold in its push to seize of all of Donbas, D’Anieri said.
And yet, many experts say, Putin’s repeated attempts to seize the territory have led to a surge in pro-Ukrainian sentiment. Studies conducted in 2014 and 2022 found that the region grew significantly more pro-Ukrainian in the aftermath of Putin’s invasions, D’Anieri said.
Even many who might have been inclined to welcome Russian troops now seem too exhausted to care.
Since shelling destroyed the staircase to her apartment building nine months ago, Lubov Gazhla, 62, has lived in a sordid storage closet underground, down a narrow maze of rusted pipes and exposed brick. A critic of the Ukrainian and Western governments, she expressed pride in her Russian roots and serenaded reporters with part of the epic poem “Ruslan and Ludmila,” by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin.
But Gazhla said that — above all else — she wants the fighting to stop.
“I don’t care if we’re ruled by the Africans at this point,” Gazhla said, showing reporters the small tin can she has used to go to the bathroom for the last nine months. “Who can live like this?”
In a ceremony at the Kremlin on Tuesday, Putin presented awards to the new governors appointed to lead the four regions of Ukraine he has claimed, illegally, to have annexed, including Luhansk and Donetsk.
But in some parts of Donbas, there is almost nobody for them to govern.
Several towns in Donbas with a few thousand people — Toshkivka, Novotoshkivske, Bilohorivka, Makiivka — have been entirely or almost entirely depopulated, according to Serhiy Haidai, the exiled governor of Luhansk, which is now almost entirely under Russian control.
In other cities in Donbas, where the population has been halved or reduced even further, the critical infrastructure is decimated. Across the region, almost every school has been destroyed by shelling, according to Haidai. The gas pipes in most cities are also “completely destroyed.”
In the city of Kreminna, close to the front lines, the water systems are demolished. In parts of Luhansk, residents of bombed-out buildings gather logs to heat their homes and shower in tents using outdoor buckets, Haidai said.
In Donetsk, Bakhmut has been annihilated by months of grueling warfare.
Many of the people remaining in the western cities of Donbas say life has improved a bit since Russians were forced to fall back in September and October. Western aid has begun arriving daily, providing a baseline of food and medical supplies.
Repairs have started on a handful of shattered roofs. In Yampil, the Bon Appetite convenience store reopened two weeks ago — the only open store in town — after being closed throughout the occupation.
But progress has been slow, and scars from Putin’s invasion remain ever-present.
In Lyman, Zoya Konstantinovna, 67, cried into a cloth as she described how missile fire tore into her former home, before showing reporters the sealed sack of water that she uses daily as her shower even now, more than three months after Ukrainian forces retook the city.
Roughly two dozen of the hundreds of people who once lived in her apartment complex now spend most of their days in the below-ground bunker, with the shelling still too present a danger to sleep elsewhere.
“We are like rats who live underground,” Konstantinovna said. “Politics — all that is very far from us. All I want is peace and health. We just want to not live like this anymore.”
Having already lived through two occupations, Victoria Svichinskaya said she goes home every night and listens to news from the front lines until her phone dies.
Russian soldiers turned her home into a military barracks for five months when Lyman was occupied. They looted her stove, ripped out a toilet seat and demolished a section of her home.
Formerly the owner of two clothing stores since destroyed by the invasion, she stood recently at an open-air market across from two homes destroyed by shelling, trying to sell a few dozen cans of Hell Energy, a soft drink, and sealed cases of kielbasa.
“The next time, if they come back,” Svichinskaya said, “they’re going to take our lives.”
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In the face of inflation and short staffing, we demanded bigger paychecks and more time for our lives outside of work. (photo: Genaro Molina/Getty)
The American labor movement remains weak. But from the sweeping Starbucks unionization drive to UAW reformers’ successful bid for union leadership, there were serious glimmers of hope in 2022 for a stronger, more assertive labor movement.
Whatever it was, workers were ready to throw down this year. In the face of inflation and short staffing, we demanded more money in our paychecks and more time for our lives outside of work. We organized; we even exercised our strike muscles. And crucially, union members stood up to demand more from their unions and their leaderships.
Workers overturned a lot of conventional wisdom in 2022.
Small shops are supposed to be nearly impossible to organize, yet it was just a year ago that Starbucks workers in Buffalo won their union election, followed by 266 other stores around the country — more than seven thousand workers. Slower than that breakneck pace but still fast by any other standard, the NewsGuild has organized 145 shops — another seven thousand workers — in the past five years.
Similarly, most organizers would say it’s foolish to hold a National Labor Relations Board election with less than 60 percent of the workforce signing union authorization cards (some would say 70 percent). But organizers of the Amazon Labor Union looked at the high turnover at their eight-thousand-worker Staten Island warehouse and decided to go for it after they got the legally required minimum, 30 percent. They sent Amazon corporate scrambling and sent shock waves through corporate boardrooms when they won in April.
Democratic reformers within their unions floored everyone — not least the sleepwalking incumbents. In the United Auto Workers, the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) caucus, formed in 2019, has notched amazing wins in its short existence.
Last December, UAWD activists won their one member, one vote campaign so that members could elect the top union officers. Then members used their new voting power to end the seven-decade tenure of the Administration Caucus, which was tainted by recent corruption scandals — not to mention the ongoing scandal of rolling over to concessions like two-tier contracts.
It’s not time for a victory lap yet — the presidency goes to a runoff in January. Reformers are gearing up for what could be a tough last mile now that they’ve lost the element of surprise.
We may see more of this soon. Members of the 1.3 million–strong Food and Commercial Workers are also demanding more from their international union. Reformers centered in the group Essential Workers for a Democratic UFCW will bring resolutions to their convention in April for coordinated bargaining and a $100 million investment in new organizing to counter low pay and fractured schedules for the union’s 835,000 grocery members.
They also want one member, one vote for top officers, like the Teamsters and now the Auto Workers have. Grocery companies are posting the highest profits since the 1980s, but apart from brief hazard pay during the height of the pandemic, store workers have seen few gains.
Last year’s big news in union reform was the victory of a reform slate in the Teamsters. The new leadership is gearing up for the UPS contract in the coming year, covering 340,000 workers.
Teamster locals are also retooling — one of the biggest just elected new leadership. Local 135 has 14,000 members, mostly in Indiana. Assisted by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, members tired of concessions organized to put up a slate of officers — “leaders that would mobilize the members to win the contract we deserve,” said UPS driver Corey Warren. The local now has two hundred members on strike at a MonoSol chemical products factory fighting forced overtime.
Meanwhile in Mexico, workers took some major steps forward in ousting the country’s long-dominant, corrupt “employer protection unions,” with autoworkers at a big General Motors plant in central Mexico forming an independent union in February. That win has inspired several other victories, including among 3M plant workers in San Luis PotosÃ, who make everything from Post-its to N95 masks, and workers at a VU Manufacturing auto parts plant on the border who produce armrests and door upholstery for Nissan, Tesla, and the Big Three.
Strikes Worked
The year started with Massachusetts nurses approving a contract at St Vincent’s Hospital, owned by the giant for-profit chain Tenet, after a ten-month strike. Tenet owns sixty hospitals and was testing its ability to permanently replace strikers and bust the union — spending an estimated $50 million on the effort — but the nurses held out and won guaranteed nurse-to-patient ratios, no concealed weapons in the hospital, and limits to “just-in-time” policies that had allowed managers to send nurses home mid-shift.
Minneapolis teachers struck in April and won a substantial raise for lower-paid educational support professionals. Like in many workplaces, the lower-paid staff are primarily people of color. They also won language to support retention of teachers of color, and increased hiring of counselors, nurses, and librarians, and they got class-size limits into the contract for the first time — though the caps are too high, teachers said.
In May, teachers in Brookline, Massachusetts, won after a one-day strike when a thousand descended on city hall. Striking is illegal for public workers in Massachusetts, though that also didn’t stop them — nor did it stop teachers in nearby Haverhill and Malden from walking out in October.
In September, Philadelphia Museum of Art workers struck after management had dragged its feet for two years. They won a first contract after a nineteen-day strike.
And in November, forty-eight thousand academic workers in the University of California system kicked off the largest US strike of the year.
A credible threat of strikes worked too. An illegal two-day strike by fifty-five thousand education workers in Ontario backed down the province’s premier from an egregious union-busting bill when many more unions joined in a plan for a general strike in November.
Work Fast, Work Sick
A common theme of labor struggles this year was dangerously long hours. Companies laid people off during COVID and never hired enough back to do the job.
Airlines used federal COVID relief money to buy out experienced pilots, and now they’re running so lean that, in the words of American Airlines pilot Dennis Tajer, carriers are “trying to sell tickets for flights [they] can’t rationally provide to our passengers.” Fatigue calls — where pilots refuse to fly because they’re too tired — are up fivefold, and on some days tenfold.
Railroad carriers slashed nearly a third of the workforce over six years, so it’s no wonder they’re fighting so hard against paid sick leave for those who remain. Every sick call disrupts their fragile scheduling regime. This is one reason the carriers pushed hard for the government to impose a contract that not only has no paid sick days but also allows managers to punish workers for calling in sick — an alarming policy.
“The railroad is not a place to work while you’re sick,” a recent Maintenance of Way (BMWED) statement noted. “It’s dangerous. It requires full concentration, situational awareness, and decision-making. Because carrier management decided to egregiously reduce [the] workforce, it’s more dangerous than ever, and the onus of that rests with them.”
Other workplaces were already understaffed, and the grueling schedules mean new hires won’t stick around. A leaked memo from Amazon this summer showed that management is worried that, in a couple more years, it will literally run out of people to hire. Every potential Amazon worker will already know how bad it sucks — cause they worked there and left.
Dangerously long shifts are also a factor at Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, where miners have been on strike since April 1, 2021. The company was requiring twelve-hour shifts, with no premium pay when the company took their weekends.
In California and Hawaii, therapists and social workers in the National Union of Health Care Workers struck in August to force Kaiser to hire enough staff to allow them time to actually help patients. Suicidal or addicted patients seeking help were waiting six to eight weeks for a follow-up appointment.
“After COVID, it’s so much. We’re gambling with people’s lives,” said Kim Hollingsworth Horner, a member of the bargaining committee. They won additional time with pediatric patients, while California’s legislature mandated no more than a ten-day wait for patients.
For teachers, the speedup takes the form of too large classes. Seattle Teachers struck for a week in September to try to get the classes down to a reasonable size (not forty-four students!).
The district tried to use its plan to integrate students with disabilities into general education classrooms — an equity goal the union supported — as an excuse to cut staff. Remaining teachers and paraprofessionals would be too overwhelmed to make it work. And while the district was talking equity, the strikers said, what about raising paraprofessional pay?
Tiers on Trial
Solidarity-wrecking two-tier was on trial this year. It’s hard to get new workers excited about the union when the contract puts them in a permanent second-class category, whether that be a lower tier of wages, no pension, worse benefits, or no overtime protections.
How would you like to work alongside someone with a better contract? How would you like to have a target on your back as a more expensive top-tier worker?
Yet unions have allowed two-tier to creep into postal contracts, higher education, manufacturing, and logistics. Employers love it because they know it saps our unity, it gives the union a bad name, and it’s only a matter of time before the whole workforce is on the second (or third) tier.
Last year, strikers at John Deere and Kellogg’s made it an issue. This year, the Auto Workers reform slate made rolling back two-tier concessions central to its winning election campaign.
And in June, 550 housekeepers at the University of Pennsylvania — 250 of them stuck on the bottom tier — organized to get everyone on the same scale and won! They’re members of Teamsters Local 215, but the leadership of the local wasn’t much help.
“They told us we would never get rid of the two-tier system: ‘It’s in all our contracts, shut up about it.’ But we abolished it in one shop,” said housekeeper Jawuan Thomas.
The big showdown on two-tier is coming next year at UPS, where the new Teamsters top leadership has vowed to fight to abolish it.
Inspiring Each Other
UAW members manufacturing Case and New Holland farm and construction equipment went on strike in May in Ohio and Wisconsin. They’re protesting a three-tier contract, along with excessive overtime. So far, the company is stonewalling. Strikers say the successful five-week John Deere strike inspired them.
Approval of unions in the United States, pollsters tell us, has gone from a low of 48 percent, in 2009, to 71 percent today, the highest since 1965. Something’s in the air.
Starbucks and Amazon victories have inspired new organizing at Trader Joe’s, REI, Target, Chipotle, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Apple stores.
After Buffalo Starbucks workers won their union election, “we just started getting flooded with emails and direct messages on social media saying, ‘We’re so inspired, how can we do it here?’” recalled Buffalo barista Casey Moore.
New organizing is inspiring more new organizing, and this is one reason corporate America is trying to avoid the next step: signing a contract.
Union members can help build this renaissance of new organizing by turning out for strikes and the like — but also, even more importantly, by fighting to make our own unions more militant and effective.
As Martha Gruelle and the late Mike Parker wrote in the Labor Notes book Democracy Is Power, “The union has to deliver in the workplaces of the already organized,” so the labor movement has, in effect, millions of organizers, “millions of workers who tell their friends . . . they’d be crazy not to join a union.” Labor has taken strides in that direction this year.
Then-white House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows speaks with reporters at the White House, Oct. 21, 2020, in Washington. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Cassidy Hutchinson told the House committee investigating Jan. 6 that her old boss burned documents around once or twice a week before the Capitol riot.
During a closed-door interview with the House committee investigating Jan. 6 in May, Cassidy Hutchinson said that she had seen Meadows throw documents into his office’s fireplace “maybe a dozen, maybe just over a dozen” times between December 2020 and January 2021, according to a new round of transcripts released Tuesday.
A personal aide to former President Donald Trump also testified he saw Trump destroy documents, according to other transcripts released by the Jan. 6 committee, which further adds to speculation about what those documents entailed and why White House officials were so eager to get rid of them.
Federal law requires that presidential administrations maintain original copies of records the president makes or receives and turn them over to the National Archives; Trump is currently under investigation for taking documents with him when he moved back to Mar-A-Lago, some of which were marked top-secret or classified.
Hutchinson, who’d previously testified publicly before the committee in an explosive hearing in late June, said she didn’t know what the documents were or if what Meadows did was illegal.
Politico previously reported that Hutchinson told the committee that Meadows had burned papers after a meeting with Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who helped lead the effort in Congress to overturn the election results.
But the recently released transcript of Hutchinson’s testimony shows that she told the committee that Meadows burned papers after meetings with Perry on multiple occasions, possibly as many as four times. Hutchinson said that Perry met with Meadows about “election issues,” specifically: “The Vice President’s role on Jan. 6.”
“| remember one time … [Meadows’] door was propped open. He put a few things in the fireplace. And there were a few people in the office with him,” Hutchinson testified. “Mr. Perry was in the office with him, but I don't remember who else was. Mr. Perry brought a few other people to meet with him.”
Hutchinson also testified that in late November or early December 2020, Meadows held a meeting with Oval Office staffers and stressed the importance of not letting information from meetings leak.
“Let's keep some meetings close hold,” Hutchinson recalled Meadows saying. “We will talk about what that means, but for now, we will keep things real tight and private so things don't start to leak out.”
Hutchinson also said during June 20 testimony that Trump aide Peter Navarro told her that QAnon adherents “point out a lot of good ideas” and suggested to her that Meadows read up on it. In both the May 17 and June 20 testimonies, Hutchinson mentioned that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up QAnon, including when Trump was in Georgia for a rally on Jan. 4, 2020.
“Ms. Greene came up and began talking to us about QAnon and QAnon going to the rally, and she had a lot of constituents that are QAnon, and they’ll all be there,” Hutchinson told investigators. “And she was showing him pictures of them traveling up to Washington, D.C., for the rally on the 6th.”
On June 20, Hutchinson said she recalled “Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing QAnon up several times, though, in the presence of the president, privately with Mark.”
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The lethal injection chamber at Holman correctional facility in Atmore, Alabama, pictured in October 2002. (photo: Dave Martin/AP)
Alabama’s corrections department has bungled the procedure on three recent occasions, with IV teams failing for hours on end, adding immense distress to a difficult situation
At 7.57pm on 17 November, prison guards entered the “death cell” at Holman correctional facility in Atmore, south Alabama, where Kenneth Smith was awaiting execution by lethal injection for the 1988 murder-for-hire of a preacher’s wife.
The guards put Smith in handcuffs and leg irons, then led him to the execution chamber and strapped him tightly to the gurney. As he lay there, he prepared himself for imminent death.
He looked up at the fluorescent lights and was struck by how they formed the shape of a cross. Over 33 years on death row he had found faith, and he sang quietly to himself, “I’m not alone.”
Two minutes before Smith was taken into the death chamber, the 11th circuit court of appeals had put a stay on his execution. The judges found reasonable grounds to suspect that the team in charge of setting up the intravenous lines for the lethal injections would have “extreme difficulty” in accessing the prisoner’s veins and that as a result he would be inflicted with “superadded pain”.
Despite a clear order to stop from one of the country’s highest courts, the execution team pressed on. According to Smith’s lawyers, who have relayed his account of events in court documents, “he believed that he would die soon and that there was nothing more that could be done”.
At 10pm, with the appeal court stay still in place, a three-person IV team, their identities obscured behind green, blue and red scrubs, respectively, entered the chamber, ready to inject the drugs that would kill Smith – midazolam hydrochloride, rocuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
Blue Scrubs tied a tourniquet around Smith’s upper arm and then stuck a needle into him. When Smith protested that he was stabbing into his muscle, Blue Scrubs replied: “No I’m not.”
After that attempt failed, Green Scrubs began slapping Smith’s right hand, then piercing it in several places. “With each jab, Mr Smith could feel the needle going in and out and moving around under his skin, causing him great pain,” the lawyers recorded.
When no workable veins could be found, Blue Scrubs instructed the prison guards to flip the gurney backward so that the prisoner’s feet pointed towards the ceiling while his head bowed to the ground. Smith now found himself, curiously for a man of religion, in an inverse crucifixion.
Then the IV team left the chamber, leaving him in that position for several minutes. On their return, they righted the gurney.
Red Scrubs, swathed now in face mask and shield to protect himself from splattering blood, produced a large-gauge needle. He began piercing it under Smith’s collarbone in search of a central line straight into his subclavian artery.
After five or six jabs, still with no success, a deputy warden moved Smith’s head to the side to provide a clearer run for the needle.
By now the condemned prisoner was in excruciating pain, according to his lawyers. When Smith protested, the deputy warden clasping his head reportedly told him: “Kenny, this is for your own good.”
What is it like to survive an execution attempt in the US? Normally, there’s no one to tell the tale.
But these are not normal times, especially in Alabama.
On three occasions in the past four months, Alabama’s department of corrections has bungled its lethal injections procedure. In each case, IV teams struggled for hours to find a vein through which to pour the lethal cocktail set out in the state’s execution protocols.
Two of those times, after hours of prodding and jabbing, piercing and stabbing, they were forced to admit defeat. The prisoners did – almost unthinkably – live to tell the tale.
A recent series of disturbing death chamber encounters, in Alabama and other states, following a troubling history, has put the spotlight back on lethal injections as the main method of capital punishment in the US. The confluence of stories has been so alarming that some observers have begun to wonder whether the narrative that has stood for more than half a century that lethal injections are a medically informed, dignified way for states to kill people is finally unraveling.
The procedure was first proposed by a medical examiner in Oklahoma in 1977 as a more civilized, painless alternative to the electric chair and firing squad. But from the start, it has been dogged by problems ranging from controversies surrounding the pharmaceutical drugs used in the cocktail to prolonged and potentially agonising deaths.
Not only have death penalty states struggled to acquire execution drugs under a global boycott by drug companies, but they have also found it hard to contract skilled medical practitioners to administer the IV lines. Both the American Medical Association and the American Board of Anesthesiology prohibit their members participating in executions.
As a way around these hurdles, many states have wrapped themselves in a veil of secrecy to avoid public scrutiny. In Alabama, the members of the execution team are kept strictly anonymous.
The establishing of IV lines is a process that occurs, literally, behind a closed curtain in the absence of media and other public witnesses. Under Alabama’s execution protocols the curtain over the window of the official viewing room is to be opened only after the IV team has completed its task.
As a result, the only people who know precisely what happened to Smith inside the death chamber are the prisoner himself and his unnamed executioners.
“The recent spate of disastrous lethal injection executions have shown that whatever the drug, whatever the protocol, condemned prisoners often spend their final hours in agonising pain and distress,” said Maya Foa, director of the human rights group Reprieve US. “With each gruesome scene in the death chamber, we are witnessing the consequences of persisting with a broken method of execution, in real time.”
In Smith’s case, the IV team’s labours failed. He was still in the chamber when the US supreme court gave its go-ahead for the execution, but shortly before midnight when the death warrant would expire the procedure was called off.
The prisoner, still alive but riddled with holes and profoundly traumatized, was returned to his cell. He had been strapped to the gurney for four hours.
Smith is one of only two people alive today who have survived an execution procedure in the US. His fellow member of this exceptionally small and undesirable club, Alan Miller, was subjected to an attempted execution by Alabama in September.
Miller has been on death row for 22 years for shootings that killed three co-workers in 1999. At 10pm on 22 September, he was taken into the death chamber at Holman and put through what his lawyers claim was physical and mental torture.
Miller’s attorneys described what happened in a court filing. He was repeatedly punctured over 90 minutes as he lay on the gurney.
Miller’s legal team had flagged up in litigation that doctors had struggled to gain access to his veins throughout his adult life. In fact, the prisoner was so worried that lethal injection would go horribly wrong that he opted – as was his right under Alabama law – to die by lethal gas, via nitrogen hypoxia.
Alabama ignored the request.
Miller’s IV team – Green Scrubs and Aqua Scrubs this time – proceeded to make what his lawyers described as a “tour” of the prisoner’s body. Left arm, right hand, left hand, inner left arm, right foot, left foot – each body part was pierced multiple times in an increasingly desperate, and ultimately futile, search for an accessible vein, sometimes with them both probing different parts with needles simultaneously.
Like Smith, Miller was also swung vertically, suspended in the crucifix position, albeit with his head up, for an estimated 20 minutes. By the time they lowered him, blood was leaking from his wounds.
Shortly before midnight, he was told: “Your execution has been postponed.” He spent the next several days curled up in the fetal position in his cell.
In a rare personal account, Romell Broom self-published a book, Survivor on Death Row, in which he described being poked for two hours by Ohio executioners in September 2009 before the procedure was aborted.
According to Broom, who was convicted of raping and murdering a child in 1984, he was probed more than 100 times all over his body by officials unsuccessfully seeking a vein.
After the failed execution attempt, the authorities kept at him, setting a new death warrant for June 2020.
When Broom objected that it would be unconstitutional to try and execute him twice, the state argued that an execution only begins once the lethal drugs are in your bloodstream. Broom said of this catch-22: “Once the chemicals enter your system, you’re as good as dead, so you would have no right of appeal.”
The pandemic forced a delay in Broom’s execution, but then he died in prison of complications from coronavirus in December 2020.
In recent months problems with IV lines have struck several death penalty states. It took Texas almost two hours to kill the convicted murderer Stephen Barbee on 16 November – the day before Smith’s ordeal in Alabama. Barbee was disabled and could not straighten his arms.
On the same day, Arizona struggled to insert IVs into the double murderer Murray Hooper and officials had to cut into his femoral artery. Hooper lifted his head off the gurney, looked through the glass at public witnesses and said: “Can you believe this?”
Back in Alabama Joe Nathan James was executed in July for the 1994 murder of his ex-girlfriend.
The authorities took almost four hours to kill James – the longest botched lethal injection in US history. Yet state officials insisted it was “nothing out of the ordinary”.
After that execution Joel Zivot, an expert on lethal injections, at Atlanta’s Emory University hospital, and Elizabeth Bruenig, a reporter from the Atlantic, were invited to attend a private autopsy of James. Zivot told the Guardian he saw multiple punctures on both James’s arms.
There was bruising around the wounds indicating James had been alive at the time. There was also a deep incision in a forearm, implying the IV team had attempted a “cutdown procedure” – a maneuver seeking a vein that Zivot said would rarely be used in a medical setting and would almost certainly have caused extreme pain.
Zivot linked Alabama’s repeated recent blunders to secrecy. “When things go wrong in industries that require safety – nuclear power, say, or the airlines – detailed reviews are conducted in full public view. But what Alabama did to Joe Nathan James, they then did to Alan Miller and Kenny Smith – and guess what, it failed both times.”
Another important factor, Zivot believes, is the composition and skill level of the IV team, noting that even Alabama’s heavily redacted execution protocols are confused about the role of trained medical professionals.
The first page of the protocols says that administering lethal injections “shall not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or pharmacy”. Yet the next page says that the condemned person “will see a physician [REDACTED] for an assessment of his vein structure”.
“So what is it then?” Zivot said. “Is lethal injection a medical act by physicians or is it not a medical act? The whole document is fraught with contradictions.”
Zivot is convinced from having inspected the cutdown incision that a physician was involved in James’s execution, as such a surgical step would probably be beyond the comfort zone of an EMT or nurse practitioner.
But “just because you’re a physician, doesn’t mean you can start an IV”, Zivot said. “Besides, what doctors learn in medical training does not necessarily translate to the death chamber – they are working in a totally different environment without the critical trust that exists between doctor and patient.”
Bernard Harcourt has also seen the results of a botched procedure in Alabama up close. A Columbia University professor and death penalty lawyer, Harcourt represented Doyle Hamm, who on 22 February 2018 became the first Alabama prisoner to survive attempted execution.
Hamm was terminally ill with lymphoma at the time, and died of his illness in prison three years later. The fact that he had terminal cancer did not deter the state from trying to kill him. Nor did several clear warnings made by Hamm’s lawyers in litigation that his medical condition, combined with years of drug use, would make it extremely difficult to locate a vein.
Harcourt went to see Doyle in prison the day after he had been subjected to a two-hour aborted execution during which he was punctured at least 11 times and his bladder pierced. As Doyle approached, Harcourt could hear his chains rattling and said it “was the slowest jangling noise I had heard in 30 years of prison visits”.
When he appeared, Harcourt said Doyle “looked like a ghost, a shadow of himself. He shuffled over, barely able to walk. He had been in such pain, he told me, that he had been praying they would get it over with and that he would die.”
Amid rising public concern about the string of events in Alabama, the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, last month ordered a temporary halt to executions to allow for an official review.. But in announcing it, she said: “I don’t buy for a second the narrative being pushed by activists that these issues are the fault of the folks at corrections or anyone in law enforcement. Legal tactics and criminals hijacking the system are at play here.”
That makes Zivot see red. “It’s like a joke, you know, except it’s not funny. I’ll be clear, terrible things happened here to the original victims, people were murdered. How we treat and punish prisoners is the measure of our civil society, it’s the test. Shame on us, and shame on them, for causing this to happen.”
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Mohammad Ghobadlou's death sentence was upheld by Iran's Supreme Court on Saturday. (photo: HRANA)
At least 100 people have now been sentenced to death or charged with capital offences in connection with the protests in Iran, a rights group says.
The real number of protesters facing the death penalty was believed to be far higher because families were being pressured to stay quiet, it warned.
Two men were executed this month after what activists said were sham trials.
Mohsen Shekari and Majidreza Rahnavard, who were both 23, were found guilty by Revolutionary Courts of the vaguely-defined national security charge of "enmity against God".
Iran has been engulfed by protests against the country's clerical establishment for just over 100 days.
They erupted following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was detained by morality police in Tehran on 13 September for allegedly wearing her hijab, or headscarf, "improperly".
Authorities have portrayed the protests as foreign-backed "riots" and responded with lethal force.
So far, at least 476 protesters have been killed, including 64 children and 34 women, according to IHR.
A report published by the group on Tuesday identified 100 individuals whose sentences or indictments have either been announced by officials or reported by their families or journalists.
All defendants had been "deprived of the right to access their own lawyer, due process and fair trials", it said.
"In cases where they have managed to make contact, or details of their cases [have been] reported by cellmates and human rights defenders, all have been subjected to physical and mental torture to force false self-incriminating confessions."
One of those at imminent risk of execution is Mohammad Ghobadlou, 22, who had his death sentence upheld by the Supreme Court on Saturday. He was convicted of "enmity against God" after being accused of driving into a group of policemen during a protest in Tehran in September, killing one of them.
His mother has said he suffers from bipolar disorder and that he was sentenced to death hurriedly at the first session of his trial without his chosen lawyers being present.
Amnesty International has said it is concerned that he was subjected to torture or ill-treatment in custody, citing a forensic report that pointed to bruising and injuries on his arm, elbow and shoulder blade.
The five women facing charges that carry the death penalty include Mojgan Kavousi, a Kurdish language teacher and human rights defender who IHR said had been charged with "corruption on Earth".
A prosecutor is said to have accused Ms Kavousi of "provoking people to depravity by publishing posts on social media" at the start of her trial in the city of Sari last week.
"By issuing death sentences and executing some of them, [the authorities] want to make people go home," IHR director Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam told the AFP news agency.
"It has some effect," he said, but added that "what we've observed in general is more anger against the authorities."
The UK said on Tuesday it was urgently seeking information from Iranian authorities about reports that the Revolutionary Guards had arrested seven British-Iranian dual nationals over their alleged involvement in the protests.
"We have always said that we will never accept our nationals being used for diplomatic leverage," a Downing Street spokesman said.
Meanwhile, authorities in France said they were investigating as suicide the death of an Iranian man who was found in the River Rhone in Lyon late on Monday.
Mohammad Moradi, 38, had said on social media that he was going to kill himself to draw attention to the crackdown in Iran.
Meanwhile, top Iranian chess player Sara Khadem took part in a tournament in Kazakhstan without a hijab for the second day running, in an apparent gesture of solidarity with the women-led protest movement.
Iran requires women to abide by its dress code when officially representing the country abroad.
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The findings underscore the reality that communities where people of color live often bear the brunt of 'contamination that they didn't cause.' (photo: Ben Hasty/Getty)
The findings, researchers said, underscore the reality that communities where people of color live often bear the brunt of "contamination that they didn't cause."
The findings, part of a study published in Nature Communications, noted that arsenic and uranium levels in drinking water were higher for Indigenous and Latino communities across the country. Among Black Americans, areas in the West and Midwest showed higher levels of those toxins.
Researchers attributed the water quality disparity to multiple factors, including utility systems that are unevenly regulated or that have fallen into disrepair as a byproduct of structural racism that typically leads to a poorer quality of life in communities of color.
“It’s not typically one mechanism that’s at fault, but it’s multiple ways in which structural racism is acting upon water, utilities and regulators that result in these types of inequities,” said Anne Nigra, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the university. “It’s rarely one person making a racist decision.”
Nigra said that when planning the study, she and her colleagues wondered whether the arsenic and uranium concentrations in regulated public drinking water could be associated with the racial and ethnic makeup of a community. The work by Nigra and her co-researchers is one of the first studies that evaluates this association between race and metal concentrations in water on a national scale.
For example, researchers found that a community with at least a 10 percent higher proportion of Latino and Hispanic residents compared to white residents was typically associated with 17 percent higher uranium in their public water systems than communities heavily populated by their white counterparts.
However, Nigra said, the picture becomes more complicated nationwide. Contaminants and racial and ethnic groups are spread out across America, so researchers decided to look closer at specific regions. When they did, they found the link between the higher arsenic levels in public drinking water and areas dominated by non-Hispanic Black residents in the western United States.
In order to bring this to light, Nigra said, she and her colleagues needed two things: A marginalized, racial, ethnic group to be prevalent in that area and the actual water contaminant to be present to some degree in the underlying geologic structure type.
“And when those two things overlap, that’s when we see big inequities,” she said.
Arsenic and uranium are carcinogens in humans. Nigra said the EPA set a standard of 10 micrograms per liter for arsenic and 30 micrograms per liter for uranium, but the goal for both is zero. A spokeswoman for the EPA said they will not comment on the study, but agency officials will review it.
“Studies like this are important because they’re highlighting the reality that our communities are already living in, which is often our low-income communities of color bearing the brunt of decades of contamination that they didn’t cause,” said Kelsey Hinton, a spokeswoman for the Community Water Center, a water justice organization that works with Hispanic farm worker communities in California. “And it’s something that we have to continue to take seriously.”
In a 2001 study, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council found that men and women who consume water containing 3 micrograms of arsenic daily have about a one in 1,000 increased risk of developing bladder or lung cancer during their lifetime, and at 10 parts per billion, the increase is greater than 3 in 1,000. The estimates are greater than those on which the EPA based its current standard.
Hinton said that in Tulare County, California, “there are really high incidences of contaminants found in the groundwater, including things like uranium or arsenic, both from agricultural discharge or industrial discharge.”
“This didn’t have to be an inevitable problem for the state, that communities of color were impacted by water contamination,” said Hinton.
There’s also the impact of climate change. Researchers say climate change will allow more contaminants into our drinking water because as groundwater levels decrease, the contaminants become more concentrated.
“My fear is that if climate change does further concentrate arsenic and uranium and other contaminants in underlying water sources, that these inequities across racial ethnic groups are going to be exacerbated,” Nigra said, “unless there is aggressive intervention, regulatory intervention, technical intervention and financial assistance.
Clare Pace, a scientist at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the health effects of environmental contaminants and published a September 2021 study examining inequities in drinking water in California. She said studies like hers and Nigra’s can help bring these issues to the table.
“At least my sense is that the most important thing is not just creating the data,” said Pace, who said her research developed a data tool that community members can use to get information about how to get their water tested and treated, as well as how to qualify for a bottled water program and how to get involved in their local water board. “It’s creating an opportunity for self-advocacy where communities can learn about the risks they face and can do something about it.”
The EPA is beginning to take another look at its cancer risk estimate for arsenic, according to a November notice. Still, advocates like Erik Olson of the Natural Resources and Defense Council believe that a new standard for arsenic in drinking water is likely many years off.
Olson hopes to see federal funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill used to address this problem. About $11.7 billion from the new law is designated for state investments into clean drinking water. He said the federal drinking water money “needs to be targeted towards communities that need it most.”
“Making something available specifically for these communities who need it most, having those communities at the table to talk about how that’s been implemented, that’s been really critical,” said Hinton.
Tommy Rock, a geologist at Princeton University, is uniquely positioned at the intersection of personal stakeholder and researcher.
He was reared on the Navajo Nation reserve in Monument Valley, Utah, and his main source of drinking water growing up was a natural spring.
As a child, Rock knew many members of the Navajo Nation who worked in uranium mining—several of whom died of cancer, including his grandfather. As an adult, Rock often wondered if the veins of uranium running under the soil might have contaminated the water that he and his fellow members of the nation drank everyday.
Although he was not a researcher on the study conducted by Nigra and her team, he said her group’s findings aligned with his years of research, which helped discover uranium contamination in the drinking water of the small community of Sanders in eastern Arizona. He’s also examined uranium and arsenic water issues on Navajo lands and testified before Congress on uranium mining contamination.
He said he hopes to see grassroots organizations playing more of a central role in addressing the lack of clean drinking water access in rural and native communities.
“It’s not surprising to see that there’s a big difference when it comes to people of color, minority folks, especially in [poor] socio-economic situations,” said Rock. “There’s a big discrepancy on access to safer public water across the nation.”
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