04 December 22
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In local, state, and federal elections, candidates square off — Democrats with the (D) next to their names and Republicans with the (R). We speak of red states and blue states, donkeys and elephants. We look back in history at a run of presidents from one party or another and who controls Congress. We tend to place the present into an ongoing narrative.
But it is an illusion — the momentum from the past still driving the train forward even though we are off the tracks. In the Republican embrace of Donald Trump, a large segment of the party has morphed into a cult of personality. Its leader has sought to subvert the democratic process rather than win fairly or lose responsibly, much less gracefully.
Many Republican politicians understand that this is weakening their electoral standing. Looking at the results in 2018, 2020, and 2022 is sobering — many races Republicans should have, or at least could have, won were lost. This is but the most recent manifestation of a process that has been going on for a while.
Much of the institutional power of the Republican Party relies on the peculiarities of our system of government. Only one Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote since 1988 — George W. Bush in 2004. But thanks to the Electoral College, Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, Republican candidates won the presidency (and the power to appoint Supreme Court justices) despite receiving fewer votes nationwide than their opponent. And Trump wasn’t that far off from doing it again in 2020 — a few votes shifting in a few battleground states could have given him the win, even though he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million. When you throw in partisan gerrymandering and how Senate representation is allocated, Republicans are often able to accrue power in Washington without being the more popular party.
Perhaps due in part to their systematic advantages, the Republicans have pursued an electoral approach that focuses more on exploiting the mechanics of elections than advocating for policy.
The foundational premise of our system is that political parties compete for votes according to policy and preference. There is an understanding that in some areas of the country, for social, historical, or other reasons, one party might be strong and another weak. These allegiances can shift over time, and often have.
But what we are seeing now is something different. And it begins with a fundamental question: For what does the current Republican Party stand? Tax cuts for the wealthy and the interests of big business are a given. But what else? We are not talking about the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan or John McCain, or even Barry Goldwater. One could love or abhor what the Republican Party in those eras stood for, but you could at least come up with a cogent set of policies.
In 2016, Republicans won both houses of Congress and the presidency. What legislation of significance did they pass? When Democrats had unified control after 2008, they passed the Affordable Care Act. The flurry of legislation of the Congress that is ending now is historic, especially when one considers Democrats had only 50 senators.
To note all this is not to say that the Democrats have all the answers or that their policies are perfect, or even anything approaching that. It is to say that they are acting like a typical political party, albeit one with a broad and sometimes fractious coalition. The Republicans are not.
This is a dangerous road we are traveling. It might not be popular to say with some, but we need a strong Republican Party, or something else to rise from its ashes.
Politics is predicated on the fact that not everyone is going to agree with each other on how we should run our government. That can be framed as a weakness, but it is more accurately a strength. We benefit from a competition for ideas. We benefit from having to persuade people that some ideas have more merit. We benefit from coalitions and consensus building.
None of that describes the modern Republican Party, or at least its actions on the national level. And America is far weaker because of it.
One gets the sense that many Republicans are among the most frustrated by what has transpired. Some, like Liz Cheney, have denounced those who peddle authoritarianism under the banner of a party she once helped lead. Many others have left the party entirely.
There are Republican politicians who are trying to chart a path of greater honesty and dedication to American ideals. They are mostly found at the state level, especially in blue and purple states where they have no choice but to work with Democrats. We also can find some kernels of hope in the recent Congress, where there have been a surprising number of bipartisan bills.
As we look at the incoming House of Representatives and a Senate with Mitch McConnell still as minority leader, however, the prospect of a Republican Party as a partner in governance seems like a pipe dream. This is not sustainable, for the Republican Party or the nation.
Sometime in the future, Americans may adopt some other completely different political system. But for the present, let us see clearly that a healthy policy- and values-driven two-party system is what our country needs just now. Not to have it is a danger.
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump at an Election Night event at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The former president is responsible for financial crime within his organization, a Manhattan prosecutor told jurors Friday
Joshua Steinglass made the accusation during the second day of his closing argument in the criminal tax-fraud trial against several of Trump’s companies. Steinglass referred jurors to a 2012 document autographed by the former president himself, where he approved a $72,000 salary reduction for Trump Organization chief operating officer Matthew Calamari.
The prosecution has contended that Trump and his companies were well aware that Calamari, former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, and chief financial officer Jeffrey McConney were engaging in practices to secure untaxed income for executives vis-a-vis benefits such as gratis pads.
Steinglass’ comment prompted the Trump companies’ defense team to object — one of the many times they opposed points during his closing — and judge Juan Merchan called them to the bench. When their contentious confab came to an end, Steinglass continued in this vein.
Steinglass pushed back against what he described as the defense’s “narrative that Mr. Trump was blissfully ignorant” of his executives’ wrongdoing — and that the controversial mogul was a victim of Weisselberg and Calamari’s deception.
“He is not on trial,” Steinglass said of Trump, “but that does not mean that you should believe the defense’s narrative that Allen Weisselberg and Matt Calamari went rogue.”
“There’s been a lot of back and forth in this trial about the involvement of Donald Trump and other Trump family members,” Steinglass said at one point, contending the corporations would be legally liable whether any company owners knew. “We don’t have to prove a thing about what he knew or he didn’t know.
“Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.”
Steinglass’ first day of closings went into similar territory, with him telling jurors Thursday: “The Trump organization … cultivated a culture of fraud and deception.”
“It’s not that the folks at the Trump Organization didn’t know what they were doing was illegal — it’s just that they didn’t care,” Steinglass also said.
This line of argument hearkened to prosecutor Susan Hoffinger’s opening, which closely linked Trump to an alleged illegal compensation scheme that purportedly lined the pockets of Weisselberg, his longtime moneyman, and other company honchos.
During defense closings on Thursday, two Trump company lawyers squarely placed the blame on Weisselberg while also casting him as a sort of tragic figure — a man whose admirable loyalty was no match for subsuming avarice.
“Mr. Weisselberg dedicated his life to the Trump family … to Fred, to Don, to Don Jr. He helped grow the Trump Organization into the company it is today,” said defense attorney Susan Necheles. “But along the way, he messed up, he got greedy — and once he started, it was difficult for him to stop.”
“Mr. Weisselberg admitted that during this long scheme, no member of the Trump family knew about his ongoing efforts to evade taxes. He was ashamed of what he was doing: You saw him on the witness stand, almost crying,” Necheles told jurors. “He knew he was doing something wrong and he was ashamed of it, and he kept it secret. When his wrongdoing came to light, the Trump family did not fire him, they did not kick him to the curb after nearly 40 years. How do you fire a member of your own family?” Necheles asked. But, “Mr. Weisselberg broke the law … Mr. Weisselberg is paying for his own wrongdoing.”
And while Weisselberg turned state’s evidence to save himself from a lengthy prison sentence — agreeing to testify in exchange for a shorter jail term — he didn’t say anything that implicated Trump’s companies in wrongdoing, Neceheles argued. “He’s atoning for his sins, but as part of the plea deal, the prosecution forced him to testify against the company he helped to build. Now the prosecution’s case rests on one thing: trying to convince you, the jurors, that Mr. Weisselberg’s actions were done in behalf of the company.” Weisselberg, Necheles said, said “they were done solely to benefit himself — and that is the critical issue in this case.”
Necheles stressed that the key point hinges on who Weisselberg wanted to benefit. He wasn’t trying to help his employer, meaning that the Trump Organization wasn’t on the hook for criminal liability, Necheles contended. “Over and over again, Allen Weisselberg and [Comptroller] Jeffrey McConney testified that Allen Weisselberg committed these crimes solely to benefit himself … in other words, no intent to benefit the corporation,” Necheles claimed. “That is the critical issue in this case.”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s 2021 indictment of several Trump companies, including his eponymous Trump Organization, alleged a 15-year-long tax-fraud scheme. The purported financial misconduct stemmed from alleged untaxed benefits to Weisselberg, in a “sweeping and audacious illegal payments scheme.”
Prosecutors said that Weisselberg — who for decades was Trump’s top moneyman — benefited greatly for his nearly five decades of fealty to the family. Beginning in 2005, Weisselberg lived in a free apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. The Trump Corporation, which had the lease on this pad, paid Weisselberg’s rent, as well as his utility bills and parking garage fees, the indictment claimed.
These benefits didn’t stop at gratis living: Trump’s company allegedly paid for the leases on two Mercedes Benzes that Weisselberg and his wife allegedly used as their personal rides. Several of Trump’s companies also gifted cash to Weisselberg during the holiday season, so he could provide “personal holiday gratuities,” per prosecutors’ previous statements. Altogether, these plum perks amount to $1.7 million in untaxed benefits.
Weisselberg pleaded guilty in August to a 15-count indictment involving these payouts. Weisselberg responded “yes, your honor” when Merchan asked whether he “engaged in a scheme” with the Trump Organization “to defraud federal, New York state, and New York City tax authorities.” Weisselberg’s bombshell admission seemed to directly implicate Trump’s businesses in criminal activity, such as tax fraud and falsifying business records. Weisselberg testified for the prosecution at trial; the plea deal stipulated that he had to “testify truthfully” if called to the stand.
Indeed, Weisselberg was the prosecution’s star witness. Over several days of testimony, Weisselberg tied Trump’s companies — and to some extent the ex-president himself — to illegal tax shenanigans. He said “the rent was authorized by Donald Trump,” when asked about the free apartment. Weisselberg also told jurors that the Trump Corporation paid his utility bills there. “It’s your understanding that was authorized by Mr. Trump?” Hoffinger asked. Weisselberg said: “That was my understanding, yes.” Weisselberg also testified that Trump paid his grandchildren’s private-school tuition. Prosecutors contend this constituted a benefit that also should have been taxed.
Weisselberg’s second day on the stand was far more dramatic, with him saying that he and other execs worked to scrub fishy financial practices from several Trump companies’ books when the real-estate mogul became president. “We were going through an entire cleanup process at the company after Mr. Trump became president so that everything was done properly,” Weisselberg testified. “When Mr. Trump became president and everybody was looking at our company at every different angle,” Weisselberg continued, they went through “all the practices we’d been utilizing over the years and … we corrected everything we had to correct.”
Weisselberg won’t be sentenced until after the trial concludes, “to ensure compliance” with his end of the bargain. He also has to pay about $2 million in unpaid taxes and penalties. With compliance, Weisselberg’s sentence would be five months in jail followed by five years probation. Notably, the arrangement is not a cooperation deal; Weisselberg had to provide testimony if asked, and wound up doing so.
Necheles also insisted that Weisselberg’s changing pay after Trump became president — he stopped taking untaxed benefits and, in 2018, got a real raise — did not indicate financial wrongdoing on the company’s part.
“After Donald Trump became president of the United States, the Trump Corporation and its employees went through some very tough times,” Necheles said. “They were overworked and understaffed.” They couldn’t hire people whom they didn’t know and trust. “Life had become very difficult for the employees,” Necheles said. “Jeffrey McConney told you it was no longer a fun job.”
Eric Trump, who was effectively running things at Trump Org, “was far more generous with raises than his father.” This — not wrongdoing — explained Weisselberg and McConney’s raises some four years ago.
Trump Payroll Corporation lawyer Michael van der Veen similarly blamed Weisselberg. “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg,” he said at various points during closings. At times, van der Veen struck the lectern to drive home his point with a loud noise. Weisselberg turned on the companies, he said, because he had no other choice. “The prosecutors had him by the balls,” van der Veen said.
While Necheles’ depiction of Weisselberg had a clear and familiar narrative arc — Icarus-meets-financial-crime, if you will — it’s unclear how this landed on jurors. Indeed, it appeared that two panelists were having some trouble keeping their eyes open.
Necheles did deserve credit, though, for recognizing the lugubrious nature of a trial where purported smoking guns take the form of ledgers and receipts. “It’s a tax case, and I know that some of the evidence, testimony has been deadly boring,” Necheles said while thanking jurors for their service. Several chuckled.
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Prylutskyi and Duchenko. (photo: Kyiv Independent)
wo 23-year-old friends, Volodymyr Prylutskyi and Denys Duchenko, were in front of their old school in Chornobaivka when they were shot dead at around 4 p.m. on March 4.
The southern village, located 10 kilometers west of Kherson, was already occupied by Russia.
Prylutskyi's father and grandmother went out searching for their son, heard the gunshots, and immediately got to the crime scene.
"They were covered (in blood), and Denys' head was gone. (His) head and eyes were blown off," Prylutskyi's father, Oleksandr Prylutskyi, told the Kyiv Independent.
Blood was everywhere on the narrow concrete sidewalk. They had been shot in the head.
"I immediately understood that it was our Vovochka (Volodymyr)" after recognizing the shoes and socks, his grandmother said, bursting into tears.
"The hole in the head was clearly visible," she told the Kyiv Independent.
Chornobaivka Mayor Ihor Dudar, who was patrolling the streets that day, witnessed a red car with the Russian war symbol “Z” leaving the scene. He said he had seen the same car earlier with two masked Russian soldiers sitting inside.
The murdered men were sitting and drinking wine from bottles when the car drove by them, the mayor said, citing a witness account. Russians may have mistaken the bottles for the explosives, known as Molotov cocktails, or "wanted to do it for fun," Dudar said.
Since the morgue was closed under Russian occupation, their relatives brought the body back home.
Oleksandr Prylutskyi wiped off the blood from his son’s motionless body and spent the entire night sitting next to it in the yard.
Their relatives buried Prylutskyi and Duchenko at a local cemetery the following day.
The village council filed a case to the Prosecutor's Office right after the murder, Dudar said.
Once an ordinary village with a pre-war population of some 10,000 people, Chornobaivka is now well known in Ukraine.
Home to the regional Kherson International Airport, the village was strategically important for Russia as a logistics hub for further operations aiming to capture Ukraine's entire Black Sea coast.
Multiple Russian attempts to land military aircraft at the airport were unsuccessful, resulting in its equipment and personnel getting destroyed by Ukrainian forces over and over again. Russia’s repeated failures in Chornobaivka became a well-known joke across Ukraine.
Still, Chornobaivka was occupied as early as late February, and those Russian troops that made it to the village terrorized the civilian population until its liberation in November.
Embattled airport
Residents, including the mayor, woke up to the explosions at the Kherson International Airport at around 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 24. There were no air raid sirens back then.
Those who decided to stay behind, particularly those living near the airport, began living in their basements due to the bombardment.
Russian troops immediately occupied the airport in late February when they got to the west bank of the Dnipro River, where the regional capital Kherson sits.
The large airdrome was attractive to Russians as an ideal storage site for equipment, including planes, helicopters, and weapons, brought from occupied Crimea.
Despite the airport's quick fall, Ukraine made it as difficult as possible for Russian forces to use the facility as they envisioned.
Starting on Feb. 27, Ukraine repeatedly bombarded the airport, destroying Russian equipment and weapons.
For Nadiia Nosovska, a resident of outer Kherson, watching the airport repeatedly get hit was almost like entertainment during difficult times.
She said she had a clear view from her garden.
"We counted up to 20 times, and then we stopped counting," Nosovska said, referring to Ukrainian attacks on Russian equipment at the airport.
As Ukraine continued its strikes and pressed deeper into occupied Kherson Oblast during the counteroffensive in the south, Moscow withdrew its equipment from the airport by late October, according to satellite images published by Ukraine’s Armed Forces.
Mounting tragedies
While Russians were losing on the battlefield, as everywhere else, they were targeting unarmed civilians in Chornobaivka.
Over half of the residents were able to flee elsewhere, and many of those who remained endured abduction and suffering.
At least 18 civilians were killed, and 28 were wounded in Chornobaivka during the eight-month-long occupation, according to village council data seen by the Kyiv Independent.
Most known deaths were due to projectiles flying into victims' homes. Of 3,500 houses in Chornobaivka, 300 were destroyed, according to the local authorities.
During the occupation, Russian military vehicles and soldiers crowded the main road between Kherson and Mykolaiv, where Chornobaivka sits.
In early April, Russian soldiers struck a civilian vehicle driving at night through Chornobaivka, according to Dudar.
The mother that was trying to evacuate her two children was killed on the spot, and the children were kidnapped by Russians and moved to occupied Crimea, he claimed.
The woman's burnt-out car was found near several other destroyed vehicles on the road.
The details about the incident remain unclear, but the 11 people eventually found dead in those cars were likely all civilians, according to Dudar.
Working under occupation
For over two months after Russian forces sacked Chornobaivka, the Ukrainian flag remained on the town council, and Mayor Dudar continued his work.
Even though the village was occupied, Russian soldiers didn't walk around the center and mostly drove by and only occasionally stopped in the town.
But at some point, Dudar knew that Russians would storm into the building.
In February, he said council officials were transferring computers with sensitive information and data, such as residents' files, to a safer location.
Dudar says he took extra precautions and never spent the night in the same place. "The start of complete Russian occupation," as locals put it, came on May 2.
Early in the morning, Russian soldiers broke into the administrative building and abducted Deputy Mayor Yevhen Rodionov.
The Ukrainian flag was replaced with a Russian one, and council officials' homes were invaded, including Dudar's.
Dudar had a heart attack that day and was hospitalized in Kherson.
"The start of complete Russian occupation" meant that armed Russian soldiers began patrolling the village, both on foot and by car. Many more raids were conducted, over and over again, at the mayor's house.
Rodionov was released from captivity in late May due to reasons unknown to local officials. Many council members fled Chornobaivka around the same time.
Council Secretary Tetiana Lisna said that after breaking into her house, Russian soldiers threatened "to do something" to her mother if she didn't collaborate with them.
Since then, the Ukrainian flag was nowhere to be seen until the liberation day came on Nov. 11.
Humanitarian crisis
Even after Ukraine's military recaptured Chornobaivka amid its months-long southern counteroffensive, life remains difficult in the village.
There is still no power, water, or heating, and the residents are running out of money since most people were jobless during the Russian occupation.
Trucks with humanitarian aid, such as large bottles of water and bread, are arriving. Still, locals are disputing who should or shouldn't be allowed to receive them depending on whether they accepted Russian-provided "assistance" during the occupation.
On Nov. 23, the Ukrainian government announced that residents of liberated territories would be able to receive one-time cash assistance of $32-60 from international organizations. To apply for it, people need to fill out online forms. Thousands have signed up for the program but when the assistance will be handed out is unclear.
Every day, residents come to the administrative office seeking immediate help to feed their families. They are especially worried as a cold winter approaches, and Russian shelling of liberated areas intensifies.
Residents in the line told the Kyiv Independent that their concerns are growing as they have no details about the financial assistance they may get.
Among them was a 61-year-old ex-pilot who refused to provide his full name due to security concerns. He said he had lived through the “scary” Russian occupation alone after his family fled to the west of Ukraine.
The pensioner said he was extremely worried about the cold winter because there were still no utilities at home and the village council’s humanitarian assistance was “disorganized.”
“We are now going into winter, but we don’t know what will happen with electricity, gas, and water,” he told the Kyiv Independent.
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Ashwini Kumar, 24, shows a photo on his phone of his brother Vinod, who died in October 2020 in Qatar, where he was one of the many migrant workers building World Cup stadiums. His family has heard conflicting stories about the cause of death — from a workplace accident to suicide. (photo: Lauren Frayer/NPR)
Watching them shout and cheer about their favorite soccer superstars – Ronaldo! Messi! – is painful for him. It reminds him of his big brother.
"We used to play soccer together almost every evening when we were kids, in a park just like this one," Kumar, 24, recalls. "We played and played until it was so dark you couldn't see the ball!"
As they grew up, Vinod's love of soccer grew. He even won some local tournaments. So he was thrilled, his brother recalls, when he got a job three years ago to work in Qatar, building stadiums that would one day host the 2022 World Cup.
But Vinod never came home. He's one of what Qatari authorities say is hundreds — and human rights investigators say is thousands — of World Cup workers who died there.
There's been a lot of controversy over how the tiny Gulf nation of Qatar is hosting the biggest sports event in the world, the World Cup. Some of it has centered on labor conditions. Like much of the Gulf, Qatar's economy relies heavily on migrant labor. (By some estimates, migrant workers make up 90% of the country's work force.)
Many of them are from South Asia, and they've returned home with stories of poor working conditions, cramped accommodation, broken promises about pay – and back-breaking work in 125-degree heat.
For them, the World Cup brings mixed feelings. Many are proud to have helped build Qatar's infrastructure. For others, the hype around the tournament only brings back trauma.
A series of calls from Qatar — but no clear explanation of a family member's death
The Kumar family never really got answers.
"I got a call from his colleagues. They used my nickname – chhote, the young one. It's something only my family would call me," Ashwini Kumar recalls that fateful phone call in Oct. 2020. "They said my brother was missing and hung up. Then they called back and told me he was dead."
Kumar says the family got various calls from coworkers and supervisors, who gave different explanations for Vinod's death: That he died by suicide. Or in a workplace accident. Ashwini does remember his brother saying he was forced to do tasks he wasn't trained for, like firefighting.
"He was sent there as a plumber but was made to do other work as well — like working as a fireman in tall buildings, and risky construction work where he had to climb on a pipe," he says. "Once we did a video call while he was working as a painter. And later he worked as a cleaner."
The company that hired him never sent home his stuff. Vinod Kumar was 28. He leaves behind a widow and a toddler. They're struggling financially and have moved in with Kumar's parents.
"The world should remember this, while watching our favorite teams in these air-conditioned stadiums," says Namrata Raju, an economist and labor researcher with Equidem, a global labor rights group that conducted an 18-month investigation into working conditions for migrant workers in Qatar, in the lead-up to this World Cup.
Raju says she and her colleagues interviewed nearly 1,000 migrant laborers.
"They alleged really worrying things: Nationality-based discrimination, wage theft was very common — and there were a lot of cases of overwork," she says. "Essentially, the conditions we found workers in were varying forms of forced labor or other forms of modern slavery. That's what we found."
The World Cup has brought scrutiny to the issue of migrant labor in the Gulf, which has concerned human rights advocates since well before Qatar won its bid, in 2010, to host this year's tournament.
Qatar defends itself
Qatar says it's faced unfair scrutiny and that its labor conditions have actually improved because of the World Cup.
"What the World Cup did was it allowed for a significant number of reforms to be accelerated," said the Qatari official in charge of World Cup infrastructure, Hassan Al Thawadi, at a think tank conference in October. "We always had laws and legislations that were in line with international standards. Yet the enforcement mechanisms — the oversight — was not to the standards that we were proud of."
"We recognized early on that the World Cup would create momentum that will push a lot of that reform," he said.
In 2017, Qatar overhauled its migrant labor laws. It added protections for live-in domestic workers and labor tribunals. Last year, it became the first country in the Gulf to introduce a minimum wage that applies to all workers, regardless of nationality.
Amnesty International says there have been "noticeable improvements" in labor rights in Qatar over the past five years. But "a lack of effective implementation and enforcement" still persists, the group says.
Migrant workers returning from Qatar say the same.
A Nepali migrant worker says he was misled about working conditions in Qatar
During his 33 months working construction in Qatar, Anish Adhikari never managed to get out of debt.
By phone from his native Nepal, he told NPR how he had to take out a loan to pay a nearly $900 recruitment fee to a Nepali agent, just to get a job in Qatar in the first place — with the Hamad Bin Khalid Contracting Company,or HBK — which is named after and owned by Qatar's royal family.
Officials from HBK did conduct safety inspections, Adhikari recalls. But he says his site supervisors rushed workers out of the half-built stadium ahead of the visits so that it wouldn't be as overcrowded. He blames contractors and sub-contractors for shoddy implementation of labor laws in Qatar – and the Qatari government for not policing its contractors.
He also believes that potential workers did not get an accurate picture of what to expect. "The recruitment company knows everything about the condition of migrant workers in Qatar. But they lie. They focus only focus on profits for themselves," Adhikari says. "They sell a dream that's not reality."
It took Adhikari nearly six months to earn back his recruitment fee, at his salary of about $165 dollars a month – about two-thirds of what he was promised. It was still more money than he could earn in Nepal though, he acknowledges.
But the conditions, he says, were back-breaking. "In Nepal, at least you're allowed to rest! In Qatar, they threatened to cut my salary if I took breaks," Adhikari says. "And the weather was up to 52 degrees [124F], so it was very difficult. It wasn't worth it for me."
Now he's back in the Nepali capital Kathmandu, looking for work.
Despite the hardships on the job, Adhikari says he is still proud that he helped build the shimmering gold Lusail Stadium, which will host the World Cup final on Dec. 18.
Will he watch that game?
He'd like to find a way, he says, but he's unsure. "I don't have a TV. I have to watch on my cell phone, but I don't have good wifi – and data is expensive," Adhikari explains. Money is tight even with his Qatar earnings. His family is still in debt.
Ashwini Kumar, who lost his brother, won't be watching either.
It was his brother Vinod who loved soccer, he says. And he died for it.
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Prison in Alabama.
After a parolee murdered three people in 2018, Alabama’s parole rate has dropped to just 10 percent. It’s causing overcrowding and violence.
“At the end of the day, there ain't nothing I can do about it but pray. If they do give me the chance to do right, they ain't never gotta worry about me coming back,” Goines told VICE News the night before his second parole hearing in September. The Alabama parole board denied him once before because he hadn’t served enough time.
Because of Alabama’s strict mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, the only shot of getting out of prison for many of the state’s more than 25,000 incarcerated people is parole. Four years ago, Goines would have had a 54 percent chance. But the state’s parole rate has dropped to unprecedented levels. So far this year, its parole board has denied 90 percent of eligible candidates, bringing the rate to a new low of just 10 percent. Those odds are even lower if, like Goines, you’re Black, with a mere 7 percent chance.
“It doesn't give you very much faith in the system. When you have somebody that's been in there 15 years and done everything you've asked them to do and they still can't get out,” Goines’ father told VICE News. “It makes no sense.”
“It doesn't give you very much faith in the system.”
The shift away from granting parole began in 2018, when a white man named Jimmy Spencer murdered three people, including a 7-year-old and his grandmother, eight months after being paroled. Although he was convicted and sentenced to death in October, the effects of his case are still rippling through the state’s tough-on-crime justice system.
Because Alabama has now all but stopped paroling incarcerated people, the state’s prisons are operating at over 160 percent capacity, leading to violence and inhumane conditions, and eventually a work-strike earlier this year. Meanwhile, the state continues to use inmate labor and build more facilities, leading to questions about its motivations for keeping so many people behind bars.
On the day of Goines’ hearing, not a single person was granted parole. He’s now being housed at Red Eagle Honor Farm, a minimum security work prison where he and his fellow incarcerated people make $2 a day to perform labor outside the prison gates under minimum supervision. Red Eagle’s mission statement, in part, is to “assist male inmates to reintegrate into society.” Parole at Alabama’s 11 minimum-security work centers like Red Eagle have dropped over 80 percent since 2019.
“They get cheap labor out of us, but they did that to the slaves back in the day. It's kind of like modern day slavery,” Goines said. He works most days cutting grass on what’s known as the Civil Rights Trail, a public route created in 2018 that crosses 15 states, including Alabama, where pivotal civil rights battles occurred.
Alabama’s parole guidelines include a nationally-recognized tool that’s supposed to determine whether an incarcerated person is likely to reoffend; it’s called an Ohio Risk Assessment. Back in 2018, Spencer was determined to pose “low to moderate risk for reoffending.” That apparatus has since come under fire, and in a private meeting in Oct. 2018, Alabama’s Republican governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall said to “stop letting anybody out,” according to Lyn Head, chair of the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles when Spencer was released.
“There is no one capable of predicting with any accuracy what a human being is going to do. So you have to rely on those tools,” said Head, who still stands by the Ohio Risk Assessment. “Just because of that incident doesn’t mean that those guidelines were wrong. It's a horrible tragedy, just like it would have been if he had committed it and had not been incarcerated beforehand.”
Head later resigned from the parole board. When asked about her alleged comments, Gov. Ivy’s office couldn’t confirm them. A spokesperson did say, however, that Gov. Ivey “does not have a vote on individual parole cases” but that “she is confident that the parole board shares her overriding concern for public safety.”
According to the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles’ own report, in the month of October, the board conformed to the guidelines just 26% of the time. They granted parole 8 percent of the time, despite the guidelines recommending it for 82 percent of the incarcerated people that appeared before the board.
VICE News obtained Goines’ board action sheet which showed the board denied him parole, in part, due to “the severity of his offence.”
“They're denying almost everybody,” Head said. “And that is whether the individual has a low risk assessment score or a high risk assessment score. They’re putting paramount importance on the details of the crime for which they committed and ignoring anything the individual has done since that time. And they’re not following their own guidelines.”
“They're denying almost everybody.”
When asked what she thought the state of Alabama stood to gain by denying so many incarcerated people parole, Head answered: “They get to build new ones [prisons].”
Alabama’s prisons are already under investigation by the Department of Justice for their inhumane conditions and extremely high levels of violence. In response, the state Legislature has allocated $400 million in COVID relief funds to build two new mega prisons to house their overflowing prison population.
“In Alabama, building prisons is considered economic development. For those areas of the state that we don't want to put any real investment into their infrastructure, roads, bridges or hospitals to be economic drivers for those communities, we build a prison instead,” said Chris England, a Democrat in Alabama’s Legislature fighting for more transparency and accountability for the parole board.
In February, Rep. England introduced legislation that would ensure the board follows their own guidelines, or at least explain why it’s refusing to do so. But the bill died. England believes that, by not following its own objective guidelines, the parole board has allowed its own unconscious bias to infect the decision-making process.
“It's almost like if you're a Black male, you're going to be denied. It doesn't matter what you did in prison. It doesn't matter if you become a better person. ‘Twenty-five years ago, you did this. Oh, and by the way, I'm not gonna say this out loud, but you're Black.’ The board does whatever they want.”
In September, thousands of incarcerated workers at all 13 of Alabama’s prisons went on strike and refused to work their prison-labor jobs. Their reasons for striking included unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, neglect, abuse, and rampant violence. But at the top of the list is the sense of desperation and hopelessness a broken parole system creates. Strikers allegedly faced severe retaliation by the Alabama Department of Corrections, including “bird feeding” striking workers, or cutting down their meals to just breakfast and dinner.
Goines didn’t participate in the strike. He was worried he’d have to go back to a higher security prison if he did. Now, he just has to get on with his life; he was hoping to get out in time to spend some precious final years with his mother, who’s in the fourth stage of kidney failure. He also wanted to start a family of his own, but those dreams are slowly dwindling.
“I’ve cried so many tears over the past 15 years. I don't have any tears left to cry,” Goines said.
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Zooey Zephyr, state Rep.-elect for the 100th district of the Montana House of Representatives, is the first openly trans woman to be elected in the state legislature. Zephyr poses for a portrait at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington D.C., on Dec. 2, 2022. (photo: Keren Carrión/NPR)
"The image of 'quote' trans women ruining the integrity of women's sports paints a false picture of life as a trans woman," she said in the House Judiciary Committee. "It incorrectly claims that we have a competitive advantage. And it misses why trans people transition in the first place – which is to lead a happier life," Zephyr added.
Then, this year, 34-year-old Zephyr became the first openly trans woman elected to the Montana legislature. Now, Rep.-elect Zephyr from Missoula, along with a record-number winning LGBTQ state legislative candidates across the country, will file into state capitols in January when many of their colleagues will likely propose anti-LGBTQ bills again.
A reason to run
"Watching bills pass through the legislature by one vote, I cried and I thought to myself, 'I bet I could change one heart, I bet I could change one mind. We need representation in that room. I'm going to try to get in there,' " Zephyr said in an interview while attending legislator orientation in Helena recently.
In January, she'll be joined by Rep.-elect SJ Howell, Montana's first trans nonbinary legislator elected to office.
While that's a win for Democrats, the same Montana GOP majority that passed the trans sports ban because of what they have said is fairness in competition – and another law that restricts how trans-Montanans can update their gender on birth certificates – secured even more seats in November ahead of the 2023 legislative session.
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's administration recently cracked down harder on birth certificate amendments after the newly enacted law restricting the process was challenged in court. The state health department halted all birth certificate amendments, saying there's a difference between biological sex and gender and that gender shouldn't decide what's placed on vital records. A judge required officials to reverse the rule while the lawsuit plays out.
This issue was top of mind for voter Christine Holmes in rural Deer Lodge, Mont. on Election Day.
"[The] governor passed that you can't have your gender changed on your birth certificate and I believe you should if you are who you think you are and know who you are," Holmes said, adding that she doesn't have much hope things will change.
Facing a Republican majority
Lawmakers have begun drafting legislation to bring next session, and a few Republicans have already requested proposals restricting health care for trans minors, prohibiting minors from attending drag shows, codifying in law the definitions of male and female and amending the state Constitution to define gender.
Zephyr is realistic about the challenges she'll face in pushing back against legislation she says is harmful to the state's LGBTQ community, but she is optimistic.
"Representation is not a guarantee that you can stop harmful legislation from going through, but it is the best defense we have against bills that hurt vulnerable communities."
She points to her election as proof that there is support for LGBTQ representation, underlined by the historic year LGBTQ candidates had in state legislatures across the country with 196 elected to office, according to the Victory Fund, a non-partisan political action committee that supports LGBTQ candidates running for office.
Zephyr says a top issue her constituents want her to prioritize is legislation to boost access to affordable housing. She plans to work across the aisle on that and other issues, and says she'll be able to find shared goals with Republicans, even those who disagree with her.
"It is the day in, day out, conversations with people. The humanizing effect of working with someone, and working with someone who over the course of the legislative session will get to know that I have a nuanced life and that I have genuine beliefs and so do they," Zephyr said.
Montana Democrats have found allies in moderate Republicans before, some who voted against the anti-trans rights bills last session. That also gives Zephyr hope.
She'll start work in legislation and bridge-building in earnest when she's sworn into Montana's 68th legislative session on Jan. 2.
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U.S. recyclables are often shipped abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about their fate. (photo: Liza Evseeva/Getty Images/NBC News)
Palo Alto found that some 60% of its recyclables got shipped abroad, with little transparency as to their fate.
Concerned citizens had seen dire headlines about plastic dumping in Southeast Asia, and they wanted to know if their waste contributed.
But the city’s investigations have not offered much clarity. Palo Alto’s best reckoning, today, is that about 40% of its recyclable material stays in North America, where it’s supposed to be processed according to strict environmental and labor standards. The other roughly 60% goes abroad, mainly to Asia, with next to no transparency about its fate.
Experts say cities and towns across the United States would probably have similar difficulty in determining how much of their recyclables are actually recycled.
“If you keep stuff out of landfill but just dump it in Laos, that’s not achieving a good goal,” said Martin Bourque of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, a group that advised Palo Alto in its pursuit of transparency. “That’s not what the whole idea was of recycling.”
The main obstacle that Palo Alto encountered was that the half-dozen companies that trade the city’s recyclables on world markets declined to name their trading partners, citing business reasons.
Unable to force disclosure, Palo Alto city staff concluded they are stuck.
“It is not possible to definitively determine whether the materials are being recycled properly or whether they may be causing environmental or social problems,” they wrote in a report published this year.
Driven underground
The lack of transparency globally has concerned some law enforcement officials, who fear that recently tightened international rules on the plastic trade have driven parts of the business underground.
In 2020, international police organization Interpol said it had noticed coordinated efforts to export plastic, particularly to Southeast Asia, in violation of national laws.
But investigators still struggle to track suspicious shipments, said Ioana Cotutiu, a project coordinator with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime who works on the trade in illegal waste.
“Very often there are a lot of intermediaries and we’re losing track of the waste,” she said in a webinar this year. “Once it reaches the destination country, we don’t know what happens after.”
The global recycling trade dates back at least 30 years, enabling rich countries like the U.S. to keep the cost of recycling lower for consumers by outsourcing some of it to developing countries.
In recent years the global plastic trade has shrunk amid new controls by rich and developing countries alike. U.S. plastic waste exports to Asia fell to 330 million pounds in 2021, according to government data, half their 2017 level.
But even these reduced volumes, environmental groups charge, can overwhelm developing countries that lack the facilities to manage them. Asia is a key danger zone: According to a World Bank estimate, only about 9% of waste in the East Asia and Pacific region gets recycled.
The balance goes to landfills and incinerators or into nature, with local and global consequences.
“Some in Laos see the imported waste as an opportunity,” said Serge Doussant, head of Green Vientiane, an advocacy group in the Laotian capital. “But Laos doesn’t have the necessary factories to treat the amount of plastic waste coming from wealthy countries.”
At one informal dump site in Vientiane, discarded water bottles, shredded plastic bags and shards of styrofoam were strewn across a 50-foot stretch of the bank of the Mekong River.
According to the World Bank, this is one of 149 known informal dump sites in Laos. Such sites can leach plastics into the 2,500-mile Mekong and — as it travels downriver through several other countries — into the sea. Research suggests countries in Southeast Asia rank among the top global sources of ocean plastic.
That issue came into focus in 2017, when China, which had long absorbed about half of plastic scrap traded worldwide, effectively banned all imports.
Imports to Southeast Asia surged the following year: more than tripling in Malaysia, doubling in Vietnam and growing nearly tenfold in Thailand, according to a report last year by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
The reception was mixed. In China’s exit, business and political elites in other countries saw opportunities to establish a new “green” industry in plastics recycling.
But environmental campaigners have also documented disastrous side effects: mountains of abandoned trash set aflame, dozens of bootleg recycling operations, and evidence of toxins in local soil and food.
Pursuing transparency — and hitting a wall
The headlines out of Southeast Asia stirred consciences in Palo Alto.
Concerned residents asked the city to require their trash hauler, GreenWaste, to annually report how and where their recycling was handled.
The city agreed, and GreenWaste complied. But as GreenWaste’s reports show, it could not establish full traceability.
A key reason, Palo Alto officials said, is that GreenWaste conducts some recycling through middlemen called brokers.
Brokers do not recycle goods, but instead buy and sell them like commodities. Industry participants say they play an important role in linking waste collectors, like GreenWaste, with recycling factories around the world.
But when GreenWaste asked its brokers to specify where and with whom they did business, they balked.
Revealing those relationships would show competitors his company’s cost structure “and how to compete against us,” said William Winchester, chief operations officer for Los Angeles-based Berg Mill, one of the companies that buys materials from GreenWaste.
“I understand their desire for transparency. But let me frame it differently. Should KFC reveal their original chicken recipe? Should Ben & Jerry’s tell us the secret sauce of how they make their ice cream?” he said. “It’s not a cover-up. It’s about protecting our relationships and how we get things done.”
Reshoring recycling
Palo Alto officials said they’ve taken two lessons from this saga.
First, they want to recycle more in the U.S. In May, city staff asked to divert some of Palo Alto’s waste streams to facilities in Louisiana and Southern California. The move would bump the city’s domestic recycling rate to about 60%, they said.
If made permanent, staff said, the change could increase the average citizen’s recycling bill by about $33 a year.
The second lesson, City Manager Ed Shikada said, is that Palo Alto can’t transform the global recycling system alone.
In March the city began talks with other interested California cities to discuss possible reforms at the local or state levels.
The group includes San Jose, the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and about a dozen other Northern California municipalities.
Shikada said they might seek to expand recycling capacity in California, for instance, or ask lawmakers to impose new transparency requirements on companies that export recyclable goods.
Winchester, of Berg Mill, said he attended a recent meeting but came away disappointed.
He said it felt like a missed opportunity to finally grapple with the “big societal questions” — the trade-offs — that come with recycling.
One question he thinks about: Shouldn’t developing countries get to decide, for themselves, how to balance environmental goals with economic gains — as China and the U.S. once did?
“If we want to say no waste gets exported, and it all has to get done here, not a bad concept, it’s just going to raise the cost a lot,” he said. “It goes back to what do we want as citizens? What do we really care about that we’re really ready to participate in with our money and time?”
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