07 February 23
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Forget diplomatic language—it’s a moment for some home truths.
He begins by saying, in a sentence typed in bold in the official transcript, “We must end the merciless, relentless, senseless war on nature.” That war, he continues, “is putting our world at immediate risk of hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature increase limit and now still moving towards a deadly 2.8 degrees.” Hence:
We need disruption to end the destruction.
No more baby steps.
No more excuses.
No more greenwashing.
No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.
He continues in the same vein, ending with this excoriation of the fossil-fuel industry, which has enjoyed record returns, in large part because of the war in Ukraine:
I have a special message for fossil-fuel producers and their enablers scrambling to expand production and raking in monster profits: If you cannot set a credible course for net-zero, with 2025 and 2030 targets covering all your operations, you should not be in business.
Your core product is our core problem.
We need a renewables revolution, not a self-destructive fossil fuel resurgence.
This is not the first time that Guterres has spoken so frankly. Indeed, for the past few years he’s been more outspoken than almost any other world leader about the fossil-fuel industry. In 2019, the Financial Times reported, major nations that continued to support the coal industry, which Guterres had taken a firm stance against, would not be invited to address the U.N.’s Climate Action Summit. Last year, in a speech to The Economist’s sustainability summit, he said, “Those in the private sector still financing coal must be held to account. Their support for coal could not only cost the world its climate goals. It’s a stupid investment—leading to billions in stranded assets.” A little later, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest study, he tweeted that it represented “a litany of broken climate promises. Some government & business leaders are saying one thing but doing another. They are lying. It is time to stop burning our planet.” A few months on, he returned to the theme: “It is immoral for oil & gas companies to be making record profits from the current energy crisis on the backs of the poorest, at a massive cost to the climate.”
Just to be clear, the U.N. Secretary-General is saying that the central problem with climate change is the fossil-fuel industry’s product, that the industry is immorally undermining climate action, and that, if it continues, it should be shut down. This is certainly the truth, but it too often goes unspoken. If Guterres’s courageous directness is unusual, it’s also hugely important. For one thing, he has spent a lot of time being briefed by scientific panels such as the U.N.-affiliated I.P.C.C.; he is clearly and rightly frightened, in a way few other world leaders seem to be. And, for another, Guterres has as much claim for speaking on behalf of the world as anyone. He is, after all, appointed by the representatives of the whole globe; his writ, such as it is, crosses borders. He appears to owe no particular allegiance to companies or tycoons, and he truly represents the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable places. He clearly understands that, in twenty or fifty or a hundred years’ time, the main thing humans will remember about this era is that it marked the moment when temperatures began to spike. What we do in response is the one decision, among the thousands of daily political battles over spy balloons and semiconductor sanctions, that will really matter for the deep history of the Earth.
Guterres is not entirely alone in this forthrightness. There’s Pope Francis, whose encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” now closing in on eight years old, remains the most important document of the millennium on the climate crisis, and indeed among the best critiques ever issued on capitalism, consumerism, and our strained and unequal modernity. It’s a long document, but, if you wanted to summarize it in one of the Pope’s sentences, you could do worse than: “The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
And then there’s Al Gore, a Nobel laureate and among the people most responsible for bringing news of the climate crisis to the world, with the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” The former senator and Vice-President (a man partly raised in a D.C. hotel, because his father was a senator, too) gave a talk at the Davos World Economic Forum last month that can more accurately be described as a rant—an absolutely correct and remarkably red-faced rant. Whenever there’s legislation proposed to deal with climate change, Gore said, “the oil-and-gas industry and the coal industry come in and fight it tooth and nail, and they use their legacy network of political influence and wealth to stop progress.” If we are ever to “stop using the sky as an open sewer,” Gore added, “we cannot let the oil companies and gas companies and petrostates tell us what is permissible.”
All of this straight talk and truthtelling is crucially important right now, not just because the world is enduring enormous and unnatural disasters but because these disasters coincide with a man-made flood of obfuscation. Much of that flood is the “greenwashing” that Guterres decries—the efforts of big banks and oil companies to pretend that they’re making progress on climate when they’re not—and some of it is the strange wave of nonsense washing over us in ever greater quantities since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Musk took control of the social-media platform just before the midterm elections, which were a small triumph for clear thinking, with voters seeming to reject, if by scarily narrow margins, lies about voter fraud. It appeared as if the country might be moving past one of the worst aspects of the Trump legacy: the dismissal of rational thinking as “fake news.” But, in the months since, Twitter has reinstated many formerly banned users, and recent studies have found that it has become more of a repository for precisely this kind of misinformation. As the Guardian reported, “the term #ClimateScam [is] now regularly the first result that appears on Twitter when ‘climate’ is searched on the site.” (Twitter did not respond to media requests for comment; a similar rise has been reported on other social-media platforms that have relaxed some of their filtering policies.)
Not long ago, I tweeted out a story about a study, from researchers at Harvard and Germany’s Potsdam Institute, detailing the global-warming predictions that Exxon scientists had made for the company’s internal consumption decades ago. (It turns out, according to the study, that the Exxon scientists were remarkably accurate in their forecasts—even better than some government research—but that didn’t stop the company, and the industry, from publicly doubting that climate change is man-made, or even real.) I have about four hundred thousand followers on Twitter, and presumably most of them believe that climate change is real—lots of them spread the story. But there was also page after page of posts insisting that the planet is cooling, that “your #ClimateScam is nothing but charlatanism and collectivist BS,” that it “sounds like Fauci,” that this information is “brought to you by lying soros and gates,” that “just FYI: You’re the bad guy in this story,” that “we all know you’re lying. Just stop. Another pandemic, only this time it’s the weather,” that “globull warming” is “just another power play by fascist liberal,” and that I should “move to a national forest never to return.”
Twitter, like all social media, has obviously had trolls since the start, but the volume of this response feels new—every climate scientist I’ve talked to has noted the same thing. I don’t know for sure that this tide of bilge matters. But, in time, I fear that the repetition of lies will do real damage. A poll released last week, for instance, found that a plurality of registered voters think that Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about the origins of COVID, and that “the funding that the United States is sending to Ukraine in its war with Russia is corrupt and needs to be audited.”
So we should relish truthtelling when we find it. Guterres, Gore, and the Pope have some things in common. They’re not likely to face another election, and, if they work at institutions, they are not ones dominated by corporate power. (The Vatican has its own bank, which Francis has been trying to clean up, and that makes it somewhat easier to speak truth to power.) They’re also older men—they rose to prominence in a different world, where the authority of science was mostly respected and where, perhaps, politics was conducted with a little less cage-match intensity. (Gore’s contested election, in 2000, was one of the signals of the change that was coming.) They speak, in some sense, for the past.
That is why it was notable late last year when another forthright truthteller wrote the single most popular tweet since Musk took over. Greta Thunberg, at the age of twenty, is at least half a century younger than the men I have mentioned, and she has been as direct as they have, if not more so: her description of the Glasgow climate conference as “blah blah blah” is just one example. As you’ll likely recall, Andrew Tate—a figurehead of the current conversational style, noted mostly for his misogyny (and now in jail on allegations including human trafficking, which he denies)—reached out to Thunberg to boast about his large collection of automobiles. “I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he tweeted, asking for her e-mail address. To the delight of, so far, 3.9 million people, the Swedish climate activist wrote back, “Yes, please do enlighten me. Email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.” It’s probably not quite how Guterres would have put it, much less Pope Francis, but the message is pretty much the same, and one that we need.
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A man runs along a street strewn with debris, in Hatay, southern Turkey, 7 February 2023. (photo: AFP)
Two of those who escaped with their families as their homes collapsed describe desperate aftermath in southern Turkey
Many more have been left homeless in freezing conditions by the disaster. Middle East Eye talked to two of those who survived the night with their families.
'I felt scared and helpless'
Burak Karacaoglu is a journalist working for Anadolu Agency based in Hatay.
We were asleep as the earthquake hit us. We were awakened by the tremor and the noise. Our apartment building was shaking like a crib.
My wife and I rushed to our two children. I don’t know how I thought about it but there was a place in the apartment where I figured we would be safer, and we all huddled there.
It was horrendous. You feel completely desperate in that moment. You can only live through it and wait.
I could only think about my wife and children. What else could I do?
We felt like the quake slowed down for a moment. But then a stronger tremor hit us, like the earth cracked open and there was a great rumble. This went on for a very long time.
Our house was badly damaged. The roof came down and the walls collapsed around us.
As the tremble ended, we rushed to the front door in the dark, feeling our way with our hands. But the door wouldn’t open because there was debris blocking it. We walked back towards the bedroom again in the dark, still unable to see as we searched for the back door leading to the stairs.
The quake had opened up a hole in the wall. I widened the hole using something I picked up, though I can't remember what it was exactly. I tried to pass my children through the hole onto the street. As I was doing so, our neighbours came to our aid. They took the children out and I was the last to leave the building.
We were finally out, standing in the street in our night clothes, and without shoes. It was raining and cold.
There were collapsed buildings around us. I was really scared and I felt totally helpless.
Somehow we managed to find some clothes for the children. Everyone was scrambling around, just trying to survive. IHH [the Turkish humanitarian aid organisation] has an aid centre in Hatay from where it distributes supplies to Syria, so we made our way there.
Am I bodily well? Yes - but I cannot say the same for my psychology and mental wellbeing.
Everyone is striving to stay alive. There are seriously damaged houses all around us. Ruined buildings. There were many people killed and injured in our neighbourhood.
Eventually we were guided to shelters determined to be safe by the Turkish disaster management agency, AFAD, such as gymnasiums and sites set up in the gardens of non-government organisations.
But the situation is still very bad.
'We were living only in that moment'
Yakup Alaca is an aid worker working for IHH, the Turkish humanitarian organisation, based in Kilis.
I have been working hard because the winter has been pretty harsh for people living in Syria. I was helping them. I didn’t think about anything else. I finished off my day and returned home to our flat.
My wife and I have a new baby. We spent the evening chatting and then we went to bed. Everything was normal and routine.
Then we were woken from our sleep by the tremor. It was very long, continuing for more than a minute.
I quickly grabbed my child. But we didn't know what to do because we were afraid of going out in case the house collapsed on top of us.
Instead, we went onto the balcony. I know it wasn’t very rational to go there. But you cannot think straight. My brain stopped working, as they say. We were living only in that moment.
We were on the ground floor of the building but the flat was above street level. I briefly thought of dropping my baby to the ground from the balcony so she could live. You lose sense of logic. You don’t know what you are thinking.
In the end, we just stayed there on the balcony, waiting.
The building continued to shake. Then it stopped.
We gathered ourselves together and started collecting our belongings. And then the tremor started again. I put the baby into the stroller and ran outside the building on bare feet. We waited outside and decided not to go back into the house.
I contacted the aid group I work for following the earthquake and I brought my family to the aid group’s coordination centre. Everyone else did the same. People were sheltering in shipping containers. Other survivors are taking refuge at mosques, funeral houses and gymnasiums.
But there are many people who are still on the streets. The weather is cold, do you understand?
You could only stand it for a night but after that?
At the centre where we are staying we can heat ourselves with electricity. But the ones staying in the streets are burning wood in barrels.
I’m a humanitarian aid worker. People are asking me everywhere, “Would you get us at least a cup of soup?”
They are also asking for blankets because it is very cold. They ask for food and covers. It is very hard. I don’t know what to say.
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A protester holds a photograph of environmental activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán outside Atlanta City Hall on 31 January. (photo: Erik S. Lesser/EPA)
Lawyers for climate activist killed by police say charges send warning: ‘If you stand in our way, we will take you out of our way’
Attorneys representing relatives of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán were speaking at a news conference Monday as a large number of officers, including heavily armed tactical teams, descended again on the site in Atlanta’s South River forest where the building of the $90m so-called Cop City is planned.
Paez was shot at least 13 times and killed there on 18 January while a minimum of seven other protesters were arrested and charged with criminal trespass and domestic terrorism.
At a press conference on Monday at the local county courthouse, Jeff Filipovits, attorney for the Paez family, said the Georgia bureau of investigation (GBI) agents looking into the shooting were not answering questions yet still sending a warning.
“The terrorism charges are meant to send a message, and that message is clear: ‘If you stand in our way, we will take you out of our way,’” he said.
“We will not tolerate this. There are plenty of other criminal laws that can be used if anyone has broken a law. There are plenty of crimes that can be charged against any individual who engages in acts of violence. We cannot ignore this worsening environment that started here in Atlanta, and that one day will be used against other groups.”
In addition to the charges against those arrested on the day Paez was killed, several senior Atlanta police officials have attempted to portray the protests against the training facility as terrorism, alarming civil rights analysts.
In comments to community stakeholders in December, Atlanta’s assistant police chief Carven Tyus appeared to suggest the charging of activists at a protest that month was based on geography.
“None of those people live here, they do not have a vested interest in this property, and that is why we consider that domestic terrorism,” he said, according to saportareport.com.
The police chief, Darin Schierbaum, echoed the view at a press conference last month after a protest in downtown Atlanta in which several windows were broken and a police car was set on fire.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an attorney to tell you that breaking windows and setting fires is not protest,” he said. “It’s terrorism.”
The GBI has so far not produced any video or audio evidence to back its claim that Paez first drew a handgun and fired at a state trooper – who was wounded – before Paez was shot by officers from multiple agencies.
Dozens of officers from the Atlanta police department, the Dekalb county police, the Georgia state patrol, the GBI and the FBI swept through the protest camp in what was described as a “clearing operation” on 18 January. Yet the shooting was not captured on any body camera worn by officers, prompting calls for an outside agency to review the case.
In a press release, the GBI said Paez legally bought a handgun in September 2020 “that was used in the shooting of a [state] trooper”.
Filipovits on Monday suggested the claim was selective. “It is a single fact without context that tells us nothing of the narrative of what happened, and how things unfolded on that day,” he said.
“It’s a justification that they want people to draw conclusions from, but that doesn’t tell us what happened.”
Another attorney representing the Paez family, Brian Spears, said the GBI had refused to meet with him or his clients and had refused to provide answers to any of their questions.
“Our goal is to get answers for Manuel’s mother and father and family,” Spears said. “We’re asking again for that meeting with the GBI, and we want the release of all audio and video recordings, including any drone footage of the shooting in the area in which he died.”
Paez’s mother, Belkis Terán, told reporters her son was a pacifist whose life was dedicated to preserving the environment.
“We are horrified by all that has happened,” she said. “Killing a person who was sleeping in the forest doesn’t make sense to me.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported on Monday that teams of law enforcement had swooped on the Cop City site during the morning, accompanied by construction crews with heavy machinery. No one was arrested, the GBI said in a statement.
Activists from a group known as the Atlanta Forest Defenders have occupied the site on mostly unincorporated land for months.
The Atlanta Police Foundation, which is helping to fund the construction, said the project will provide “the necessary facilities required to effectively train 21st-century law enforcement agencies”, including a practice course for high-speed vehicle chases, a helicopter landing pad, a mock village and a shooting range.
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A demonstrator holds up a sign that reads 'HANDS OFF OUR STATE COURTS!' during a December 2022 rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Late last week, the North Carolina Supreme Court — where Republican justices recently took over the majority after last year's elections — granted a request from GOP state lawmakers to rehear the case, which, at the state level, involves voting maps for both congressional and state legislative districts.
And depending on how and when the state court rules on the congressional map after its scheduled March 14 rehearing, the legal path ahead for this closely watched case at the U.S. Supreme Court could get messy.
Election watchers have been keeping their eyes on this case — known at the U.S. Supreme Court as Moore v. Harper — because it could have sweeping implications on upcoming federal elections. At its heart is the widely disputed idea called the "independent state legislature theory." It claims the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures a special kind of power of determining how federal elections are run without any checks or balances from state constitutions or state courts.
Republican state lawmakers used that theory to justify arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that the North Carolina Supreme Court, which previously had a Democratic majority, overstepped its authority by striking down a legislature-approved map of congressional districts for violating North Carolina's constitution.
The North Carolina Supreme Court agreeing to rehear the case has opened up the possibility that the state court's February 2022 decision against the legislature-approved map could be overruled.
That kind of reversal could make the case moot by resolving the legal dispute, which then may no longer require the U.S. Supreme Court's review.
But the country's highest court, which heard oral arguments in this case in December, could still move forward with its own ruling in this case by late June, when its current term is set to end, says Carolyn Shapiro, a law professor and co-director of Chicago-Kent College of Law's Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States.
"The timing matters. Even if the North Carolina Supreme Court ultimately says that the prior opinion was a mistake, if they do that after the [U.S.] Supreme Court rules in Moore v. Harper, I don't think it matters," Shapiro explains. "There's a little bit of a game of chicken."
And if the state court releases a new decision that overturns its earlier ruling before the U.S. Supreme Court rules, Shapiro says there could be an argument for the high court to weigh in this term during this offseason for major federal elections.
"In other types of cases, I think the U.S. Supreme Court would probably wait and see what the state court does. But because this case is of such significance in terms of how elections will operate going forward, there are good reasons for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide it now," Shapiro adds.
Another layer of complications could be introduced by how the North Carolina Republican state lawmakers and their challengers react to the state court's new ruling.
'State court elections matter'
And the flip-flopping in state court rulings that could come out of the North Carolina Supreme Court's rehearing for this case could become more common in other parts of the country, explains Robert Yablon, an associate professor of law who helps lead the University of Wisconsin Law School's State Democracy Research Initiative.
"As state supreme courts around the country are increasingly asked to address hot-button issues," Yablon says, "we may see more of these requests and we may see more shifting of doctrine in ways that we don't see quite as much of in the U.S. Supreme Court, where you don't have as much turnover as you sometimes see in state courts."
It's a reminder, Yablon adds, that "state court elections matter."
In an opinion dissenting from the North Carolina Supreme Court's decision last week to rehear both this case and another that had invalidated state voter ID requirements, the court's two Democratic justices noted that "in a single day, the majority has granted more petitions for rehearing than it has over the past twenty years."
The public's trust in the state court, wrote Justice Anita Earls in the opinion joined by Justice Michael Morgan, "depends on the fragile confidence that our jurisprudence will not change with the tide of each election. Yet it took this Court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public that our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench."
Regardless of how this North Carolina case turns out at the state court, the independent state legislature theory is likely to continue hovering around the U.S. Supreme Court's docket.
Many court watchers have noted the difficulty in answering all of the legal questions the disputed theory raises through this North Carolina case.
Republican state lawmakers from Ohio have already teed up another redistricting case about the theory that's currently waiting for the justices to decide whether to take on.
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A help wanted sign is posted at a restaurant amid a still-robust labor market on February 2, 2023, in Los Angeles, California. The jobless rate is at a 53-year low. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
An economist explains why it’s time to rethink popular assumptions about layoffs.
Given mounting fears that to combat inflation the Federal Reserve might push the country into a recession, experts described Friday’s report as definitely good news for the economy.
One outspoken voice was less surprised: Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of the upstart and influential advocacy group Employ America. For the past four years, Amarnath has been urging economic experts across the political spectrum to rethink their long-held assumptions that bucking inflation necessarily means raising unemployment. He has argued that the cure for inflation — higher unemployment — can be worse than the disease and that we should take the welfare benefits of keeping people in their jobs more seriously.
Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen talked with Amarnath about the latest jobs report, what he thinks it means for workers and interest rate hikes going forward, and how the American Rescue Plan should be judged in 2023. Their conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Rachel Cohen
There’s a very influential economic theory dating back 65 years that says, basically, inflation rises as unemployment falls. This relationship — known as “the Phillips curve” — has been strongly embraced by experts, including at the Federal Reserve, but you’ve been an outspoken skeptic of it for a long time. So to start off, where did your skepticism originate?
Skanda Amarnath
A model is ultimately good if it can give you reliable explanations and forecasts over time. I worked in the private sector for four years at a hedge fund and had the luxury to look at a lot of macroeconomic data, both over history and across countries.
There was a point in time, in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, when the US unemployment rate was falling. As it went down, some people started to warn of the risk of more inflation. At the time, I was more sympathetic to this. But then we saw inflation not rise between 2015 and 2019, despite low unemployment. And I started to build a model that looked at other countries and trends over time to see how well unemployment actually reasonably predicts inflation or wage growth.
And the answer is it’s not great. Obviously, if you torture the data enough you can get it to tell you the story you want, but it’s pretty damning that the unemployment rate fell in a lot of comparable countries, like Germany, Canada, Australia, and those low rates did not translate into nominal wage growth or even real wage growth. Inflation and unemployment were just not so neatly tied together.
I’m not going to say there is zero relationship between the two, but I think the trade-offs are often miscast. It’s not the level of unemployment that matters. What probably matters more is the whether it’s going down or up really quickly.
Rachel Cohen
Today we’re arguably watching this Phillips curve theory collapse in real time as inflation falls in wages and prices at the same time that unemployment is also falling. How do you feel? Vindicated?
Skanda Amarnath
It would be cheap to say I’m feeling vindicated, but I will say we’ve at least showcased that there is a possibility that there are outcomes other than what the Phillips curve would suggest. I expect more bumps in the road, I leave room for noise, and I expect that people who are really fond of the Phillips curve will probably have some future opportunities to claim the Phillips curve is still correct. But if you thought mechanically that when wage growth is high and inflation is high, the only way these things go down is through higher unemployment — well you have to actually acknowledge now that maybe there is a wider set of possibilities.
Rachel Cohen
Why do you think there hasn’t been more curiosity about other possibilities?
Skanda Amarnath
I think there’s a tendency among some in certain older generations that we need to be, like, these cynical hard-nosed adults in the room who will acknowledge the harsh realities of the world. A lot of this is informed by their experiences in the 1970s, but there are examples besides the 1970s when inflation spiked and it came down without unemployment rising. I was jarred in 2022 to see some of the rhetoric change so rapidly, to hear people in op-ed after op-ed insist why we definitely need higher unemployment.
Rachel Cohen
There was a recent Washington Post story about the shortage of hospitality and care workers, who have left for more stable, higher-paying work. As a result, the Post estimated there are nearly 2 million vacant hospitality and leisure jobs. Is this a problem? And if so, what’s the solution?
Skanda Amarnath
Ultimately, we’d like people to have the opportunity to be employed if they want to be employed. And from a macroeconomic perspective, ideally, you want activities to be tied to enhancing productivity over time, meaning either making jobs better or finding ways to get more output out. So one interesting thing is that even as food services employment has lagged post-pandemic, real food services consumption has more than recovered.
Now, there are certain sectors that really are essential. You can make a good case for child care, for health care, even for the production of actual food and energy. I don’t want to denigrate any one particular sector, but some sectors are clearly less essential than others.
Rachel Cohen
If I’m hearing you correctly, making sure that everyone has good jobs who wants one should be a higher priority than making sure all restaurants have waiters or busboys.
Skanda Amarnath
Yeah, the idea that “no ‘help wanted’ sign should ever exist” is not to me a sign of a healthy economy. The story for much of 2021 was like, “Where have all the workers gone?” and the suggestion was that it must be that people don’t want to work. But in actuality, there were some sectors that were really eager to hire — Amazon expanding its warehousing staff probably did put pressure on other industries looking to hire. But competing sectoral demand for labor is just very different from saying people don’t want to work.
Rachel Cohen
Where do you think immigration falls into all this? It doesn’t seem like it’s being seriously considered as a solution to some of these identified labor shortages.
Skanda Amarnath
So there’s two levels. On the slightly more technical macroeconomic level, we did have a real curtailment of immigration during the pandemic that’s now normalizing. But on the political level, the politics are just very corrosive and one party is clearly against increased immigration. But I think a lot of interest groups — from organized labor to the Chamber of Commerce — would like to see more immigration. So on the stakeholder side, I think there’s an openness to it, but as long as the Republican Party remains firmly in the camp of “immigration is bad,” we won’t see much. That might change. I think on a longer-term horizon, it could be slightly more optimistic.
Rachel Cohen
What do you think this new jobs report means in practical terms for workers’ wages and bargaining power? We’re clearly not seeing a wage spiral.
Skanda Amarnath
So in terms of the blowout job gains, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that normalized to trend, or revised downward. But one takeaway I think that’s worth highlighting is that a factor driving January’s gains is a reflection of businesses hanging on to their workers. Companies typically let go of workers from December to January, but there does seem to be an additional willingness among employers to keep their workforce attached, to not treat employees like a liquid asset and rather as something more worth caring for and hanging on to. This could be a recognition among employers that it might not be in your interest to have such a volatile workforce as we saw in 2021 and 2022. A lot of businesses saw the negative effects of that.
I think that also leaves more room for productive relationships between workers and employers. I think there are businesses trying to see things differently than the norms of the past, and from the standpoint of worker bargaining power, that’s a good thing.
Rachel Cohen
Some commentators have said, “Well, the reason we’re not seeing a wage spiral now is because, unlike in the 1970s, organized labor is so weak.” Do you buy this theory?
Skanda Amarnath
The notion of 1970s inflation being driven by unionization has become something of a little potted history that everyone imports subconsciously but I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of. I think unions had more power in the ’60s than in the ’70s, and a lot of the things that people say — like, “Oh, unions got these cost-of-living increases, and that increased wages, and that blew everything apart” — I think when you look at the data a little more closely, that theory is not very compelling. I just don’t think it checks out. If you look at how the total amount of wages and salaries grew, it wasn’t like it had some consistent positive connection with inflation.
Rachel Cohen
The Federal Reserve has raised interest rates from near zero a year ago to more than 4.5 percent today, with the latest increase happening just last week. But one of the Fed’s justifications for doing so was that real wages were falling. That’s less of the case today as inflation declines. Should the Fed continue to raise interest rates?
Skanda Amarnath
A lot of people talked about real wages declining being a reason for the Fed to take inflation super seriously, and we were not one of those people. I think “real wages” have real flaws as representative indicators of outcomes.
For us, Federal Reserve policy to reduce inflation works, causally, through the labor market. We see that as something that can be reconcilable, but you need to put some guardrails around it or else you’ll have a lot of collateral damage just for the sake of inflation, even though inflation may be driven by a lot of other forces than the labor market.
Wage acceleration is still running pretty strong in historical terms. We want non-inflationary labor market progress, but we really don’t want to have labor market backsliding, which is what we’re most obsessed about right now. The Fed right now is aiming for something singularly consistent with recessionary outcomes, and worse outcomes than what they’re letting on.
Rachel Cohen
What does that mean, “They’re aiming for something worse than they’re letting on”?
Skanda Amarnath
So in December, the Fed released what’s known as its Summary of Economic Projections, which are essentially quarterly projections FOMC members have about macroeconomic policy. It’s sometimes mistaken as a strict economic forecast, but it’s not. They’re projections under each Fed member’s view about optimal policy and trade-offs. And a vast majority of the FOMC projected in this report that they expect the unemployment rate in 2023 to go up by a percentage point — to 4.6 percent. But when unemployment goes up in a year by a percentage point, that’s not the last we hear about it. Typically, it gets a lot worse from that point, and the Federal Reserve loses control to rein it in. They have a terrible track record of being able to raise the unemployment rate just a little bit.
Rachel Cohen
Employ America puts a premium on employment and job growth. Why do you think the economic policy establishment has put less of a premium on that?
Skanda Amarnath
On the first level, we take the welfare costs of unemployment very seriously. Most economists wouldn’t disagree that labor market outcomes, in terms of unemployment and wages, are pretty critical for people’s well-being.
That doesn’t mean inflation isn’t a real problem or can’t be a real problem. But economists really struggle with getting rigorous about asking, “What is the welfare cost to inflation?” If wage growth and inflation are roughly in the same ballpark, what is the specific reason to be cooling down that process?
Maybe it’s because Congress says we want to have more stability — but that’s a political reason, not an economic explanation. So what is the economic reason for making inflation the all-important, all-centering issue? I don’t think there’s a good answer to that. Most of the answers end up boiling down to, well, we need to get inflation down now so that we don’t need to get inflation down later with even more unemployment. And I don’t think that’s a very good answer. What’s the independent reason that inflation is bad?
Rachel Cohen
Many pundits have blamed Democrats and Joe Biden for their robust pandemic stimulus, saying the American Rescue Plan (ARP) was too big and contributed to inflation. What do you make of that critique?
Skanda Amarnath
From a welfare perspective, we think the pandemic response was worth it. The design could be improved in maybe some ways, that’s usually the case with big policy measures, but by and large the scapegoating of the American Rescue Plan for all inflationary pressures has not held up well over time.
I’m much happier with the fact that employment rates — on an age-adjusted basis — have largely recovered. If employment levels were depressed for the sake of lower inflation, then it would have probably been harder to bring people back to the labor market. We have seen an employment recovery of the kind we haven’t seen before. The counterfactual that maybe if you did less fiscal policy then you’d have less inflation, well, it also seems to me that the fiscal policy efforts helped to support more employment, and that counterfactual needs to be more seriously engaged by ARP critics.
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The Dickson Mounds Museum in Lewistown, Illinois. (photo: Sky Hopinka/ProPublica)
For more than 800 years, they laid undisturbed, carefully buried inside a mound of earth overlooking a quiet valley and a slow river. Then in the 1920s, a chiropractor named Don Dickson dug open the mound, eventually exposing the remains of hundreds of Native Americans. He left them in place, and his family turned the excavation into a roadside attraction they called Dickson Mounds. They charged visitors 50 cents for admission.
In 1945, the state of Illinois purchased the site and later expanded it into a museum. The exposed human remains were used for decades to teach schoolchildren, visitors and local residents about what the museum presented as a long-gone culture of Illinois Indians.
The exhibit closed in the early 1990s, after Congress passed legislation requiring museums to begin returning Native American human remains and funerary objects to their rightful owners. Contractors installed cedar floorboards over the pit. They left no doorway, no hatch.
The remains at the Dickson Mounds Museum, which is a branch of the Illinois State Museum, account for a sliver of all the Native American human remains still in the hands of the state of Illinois. Federal records show the Illinois State Museum has reported that it holds the remains of at least 7,000 Native Americans. In three decades, it has returned only 2% of them — 156 individuals — to tribal nations who could claim them under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. That is among the lowest return rates in the country.
ProPublica found that the museum avoided repatriating any remains dating to before 1673, when European records of the area begin, which marks the start of what archeologists call the “historic era.” Museum leaders believed anything older than that could not be traced to living people and therefore could not be repatriated. Those decisions were based solely on geographic, scientific and historical evidence — including the maps and journals recorded by Europeans during their travels down the Mississippi River in 1673 — despite the law requiring institutions to also weigh linguistics, folklore and oral history. NAGPRA does not require absolute certainty in order to repatriate.
In its initial inventory, the museum declared 98.4% of the Native American remains in its collections “culturally unidentifiable,” and after completing required tribal consultations in the mid-1990s, it did close to nothing to advance repatriations for more than 20 years. Instead, ProPublica found, the museum prioritized the scientific study of Native American human remains over their return.
“The Repatriation Project,” an ongoing investigation by ProPublica and NBC News, has found that some of the nation’s most renowned museums have exploited loopholes in the law to hold on to Native American human remains and related items.
D. Rae Gould, executive director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University and a member of the Hassanamisco Band of Nipmucs of Massachusetts, said it’s common for institutions to say they can’t figure out who they should return remains and items to. Gould said such institutions often “use arbitrary analysis they call science to say there’s no cultural affiliation with modern day tribes.”
Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, who until her death earlier this month was the director of the Illinois State Museum, said that using the year 1673 to decide whether tribes have connections to the human remains and can reclaim them is “not OK.” Many museums, including ISM, “have been superb at avoiding the spirit of the law,” she said.
A new generation of leadership at the museum aims to reverse its abysmal repatriation record. Curator of Anthropology Brooke Morgan said the institution no longer privileges archaeological and historical evidence over tribal knowledge. She and Pappenfort hope to set a new precedent for how the museum handles repatriations — one that relies less on finding a scientific link to prove a tribe’s cultural connections to ancestral remains.
“Cultural affiliation is kind of a moot point,” said Pappenfort, who joined Dickson Mounds Museum as a curator of anthropology in 2021 and now serves as its interim director. “The reality is many tribes can lay claim to affiliation.”
Pappenfort is the first tribal citizen on the museum’s payroll and a member of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, which includes descendants of more than a dozen tribes that collectively were known as the Illinois.
Growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, Pappenfort said kids teased him when he would tell them he was Native American. He could not be an Indian, they would say, because Indians are extinct.
In college, he came across a photograph in a textbook of the exposed burials at Dickson Mounds Museum. He realized the kids who taunted him in grade school had something in common with the Dicksons: “They weren’t actually looking at my ancestors as people.”
That was on his mind as he drove across the state line into Illinois.
“My ancestors put me here,” Pappenfort said. “They came from Illinois, and it’s my responsibility to do everything I can to get them where they’re supposed to be again.”
The Land and Its History
High on a limestone bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, two painted monsters stared down at the Frenchmen below. Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette described them in his journal as having men’s faces, with horns on their heads, scales on their bodies and long tails that ended in fins.
“These two monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is their author; for good painters in France would find it difficult to paint so well,” Marquette wrote upon arriving in what he called the Illinois Country in 1673.
Marquette and fur trader Louis Jolliet had entered a land that Indigenous people had inhabited for more than 12,000 years. More than 30 federally recognized tribes can trace their ancestry or cultural connections to the land that is now the state of Illinois. At the time of the Frenchmen’s arrival, though, most of that land was under the control of nearly a dozen tribes — including the Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Michigamea, Peoria and Tamaroa — who lived along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers.
Some of these tribes accommodated Marquette and Jolliet as the pair traveled through the Mississippi and Illinois River valleys in the summer of 1673 aiming to introduce Indigenous people to Catholicism and expand the French trading empire.
Marquette and Jolliet would have passed what today is called Dickson Mounds. There, a winding little tributary called the Spoon River floods into the slow waters of the Illinois and transforms the prairie into a Midwestern Everglades, teeming with life.
Marquette and Jolliet left no records of people who may have lived or camped at that spot in 1673, but archaeological research indicates that between 1100 and 1350, thousands of people lived in the Central Illinois River Valley — many in a large town near Dickson Mounds and others in smaller communities nearby.
The burial mounds that remain are testament to their lives, explained Pappenfort. A massive network of Indigenous communities stretched from Florida to Michigan’s upper peninsula. They shared similar ways of life, such as trading and farming, and traditions that included burying the dead in large earthen platforms. The mounds were built by moving thousands of pounds of dirt, basket by basket, often over many generations, said Pappenfort.
Between 1350 and 1450, something changed. Groups began to move out of centralized communities, including the area around Dickson Mounds. About 150 miles to the south, Cahokia, a multicultural metropolis that’s sometimes called America’s first city, also experienced relatively fast population loss. Archaeologists have estimated that at its peak, around the year 1200, more than 20,000 people lived in Cahokia and its outskirts.
Recent research suggests a changing climate that made growing maize difficult might have forced people to leave Cahokia. But there’s no widely accepted explanation for why they left or where they went.
In the 1800s, a racist myth that the mounds were too sophisticated to have been built by the local Indigenous people led some to theorize that an extinct race of “mound-builders” had once inhabited the area. Though it was disproved as early as 1884, the remnants of that myth, in tandem with the unexplained depopulation of Cahokia, gave rise to an oft-repeated story that the people responsible for the mounds throughout Illinois had “vanished” or that their culture “ceased to exist.”
Then Marquette and Jolliet showed up in 1673. That summer, Marquette chronicled the locations and customs of various tribal groups, including the Peoria and Kaskaskia. Archaeologists and anthropologists rely on the information in Marquette’s journals, but the missionary didn’t record the histories of any tribe he encountered. More than 300 years later, in 1995, some tribes would tell the Illinois State Museum curators that their oral histories describe their ancestors as mound-building people. But because that history wasn’t written down, the museum dismissed it.
The year 1673 also marked the beginning of the end of tribally held lands in what is now the state of Illinois. By the 1830s, after Indigenous people were devastated by warfare and disease brought by Europeans — and after some tribes resisted ceding the land of their ancestors — the U.S. government gave Native people in Illinois two options: move or perish.
White settlers soon arrived in larger numbers. Some, like the Dicksons, dug up burial mounds and speculated about who had built them. Amateurs were later joined by professional archaeologists and anthropologists.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Fay-Cooper Cole and Thorne Deuel of the University of Chicago set up a field school just north of Dickson Mounds on land owned by Joy Morton, the founder of Morton Salt. Cole and Deuel lamented that many mounds had been leveled and looted in Fulton County. “Nearly every village had its local collection from the ‘Mound Builders,’” they wrote. “Mounds were looted and valuable data relating to the prehistory of the state were destroyed.” They still surveyed roughly 900 archaeological sites in the area, prompting their development of a cultural classification system that archaeologists still use today.
“Their field school at the Morton site is often referred to as the ‘Birthplace of American Archaeology,’” wrote a former Dickson Mounds Museum curator, Alan D. Harn, in a 2010 paper.
Federal records show that the remains of at least 15,461 Native Americans were excavated in Illinois, more than in any other state. Most are still in the state, and many are property of the Illinois State Museum.
When the Illinois State Museum opened its Dickson Mounds branch in 1972, an elevated pathway guided guests around Don Dickson’s excavation. Below, exposed and broken, were the remains of a fetus with a shell pendant on her chest; two men in their mid-40s lay beside her. A woman, about 20 years old, rested with her left hand on her pelvis. She once wore a necklace of shells, but at some point it was stolen. Someone misplaced her mandible. A man lay with two fishing hooks made of bone, and another had five arrows between his knees. A 2-year-old child was buried with a rattle made of mussel shells, but that, too, was lost.
Inviting Tribes Back to Illinois
In the fall of 1995, the Illinois State Museum invited tribes from across the Midwest to discuss the remains in its possession. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required institutions receiving federal funds to inventory their Native American holdings by the end of that year; they were then to consult with tribes about how to return the material to the appropriate groups.
Leaders of tribes in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa were invited to Dickson Mounds Museum. Some tribal members were returning to Illinois for the first time since their ancestors had been forcibly relocated.
Archaeologist Duane Esarey, who retired from the museum in 2021, said he remembers many on staff felt nervous before the meeting because it would be their first time speaking with the tribes.
Johnathon Buffalo, historic preservation director of the Sac & Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, was skeptical that the museum actually wanted to return anything to the tribes. Images of the Dickson Mounds burial exhibit and the controversy over its recent closure were fresh in his mind.
In early 1990, the museum’s leadership had recommended that the exhibit close, acknowledging changing norms and anticipating the passage of NAGPRA later that year. Illinois Gov. James Thompson agreed, then reversed his decision, claiming the closure would harm tourism while arguing that Native American tribes had no special say in the matter because they weren’t related to the ancient people who built Dickson Mounds. Protesters swarmed the museum, and some jumped into the pit with shovels to rebury the ancestors. The debacle, which drew the attention of national news outlets, ended in 1992, when a new governor, Jim Edgar, allowed the exhibit to close.
In his office at the tribe’s headquarters in Tama, Iowa, last summer, Buffalo flipped through a packet of information that the Illinois State Museum had given to tribal members during the 1995 consultations. He read off the names that the museum uses to divide up thousands of years of history — the archaic period, woodland period, Mississippian, prehistoric — and arrived at the number of human remains in the museum collection that it said were from the historic era, beginning in 1673. There were 88.
The museum had preemptively designated the rest of the remains — at least 5,450 ancestors excavated from at least 55 counties in Illinois — as culturally unidentifiable. All of them were dated to before 1673.
Bruce McMillan, director of the Illinois State Museum from 1977 to 2005, told ProPublica the museum did that because “it’s very difficult — regardless of what the NAGPRA regulations say — to trace things prehistorically,” meaning before there are written records. He said that during the prehistoric era, between roughly 1450 and 1673, many Native groups in the Illinois region were “fissioning, coalescing, and migrating” because of war and disease, and that they were constantly reorganizing.
“We wanted to make sure that if remains and associated objects prior to the time [were going to be repatriated], that we had some kind of written records,” McMillan said. “We wanted to make sure that they were going to the correct group or tribe.”
At least two tribes claimed during the 1995 consultations that oral histories traced their ancestry in Illinois to mound-building cultures. And Robert Warren, the museum’s curator of anthropology at the time, wrote in a report to the National Park Service that the museum was open to evidence that might counter its previous conclusions. But when the museum finished its four months of consultations with six tribal nations, curators did not change a single determination of cultural affiliation.
No tribe formally requested the return of remains that dated to before 1673. Many of the tribes invited to the museum viewed the ancestors as their collective responsibility. Connecting the remains to a specific tribe mattered less than ensuring they were reburied in the areas they’d been taken from. Every tribal leader told the museum that their ancestors should be reburied in Illinois.
The conversations did lead to the Illinois State Museum returning the remains of at least 117 ancestors to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. The museum also transferred ownership of more than 32,000 funerary objects to the tribe, though the museum continues to hold the objects on the tribe’s behalf. (At the time of the repatriation in 1997, the tribe lacked the resources to appropriately store the objects.) Those human remains and funerary objects had been excavated from several sites throughout the state, not including Dickson Mounds, and all dated to after 1673.
The Illinois State Museum submitted reports to the National Park Service and, with that, it had complied with the law. (The museum later submitted a grant proposal to the park service to help fund a reburial facility, but funding was denied.)
And even though every tribe had said during the 1995 consultations that they believed the human remains in the museum’s collections should be reburied in Illinois, the reburial has yet to take place.
“They show us their stuff — our stuff — but it’s a ‘look at it but don’t touch it’ kind of thing,” Buffalo recalled of those early consultations. “And then that’s it. When they close, we leave and we never hear from them again.”
Research Instead of Repatriation
In the late 1960s, the state excavated more human remains from Dickson Mounds to make way for the museum. Archaeologists found at least 10 burial mounds and two cemeteries, unearthing the remains of more than 800 people.
All of them were sent to Massachusetts. George Armelagos, a new assistant professor recruited by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to help start its anthropology Ph.D. program, had requested them for research.
Anthropologists hoped that the remains, which were on loan from the Illinois State Museum, would offer a window into how people who lived for hundreds of years in roughly the same spot adapted to the expansion of agriculture and population growth.
Over the next 20 years, Armelagos published at least 15 papers based on his research using the remains, and his students produced even more. Their work on the Dickson Mounds ancestors helped convince the field that Native American remains had scientific value (before then, many were kept in storage but not examined), and by 1990, the collection was dubbed by prominent anthropologists as “one of the most intensively studied skeletal samples in North America.”
“Unfortunately, in retrospect, I think there just weren’t many conversations about who were the likely descendant communities of these individuals,” said Alan Goodman, one of Armelagos’ students who now teaches biological anthropology at Hampshire College and previously served as president of the American Anthropological Association.
After the passage of NAGPRA, the museum continued to allow scientific research on human remains it had deemed culturally unidentifiable. The law does not prohibit it, nor does it require that tribes consent.
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Endangered Key Deer are pictured in a puddle following Hurricane Irma in Big Pine Key, Florida, U.S., September 25, 2017. (photo: Carlo Allegri/Reuters)
Everything from crayfish and cacti to freshwater mussels and iconic American species such as the Venus flytrap are in danger of disappearing, a report released on Monday found.
NatureServe, which analyzes data from its network of over 1,000 scientists across the United States and Canada, said the report was its most comprehensive yet, synthesizing five decades' worth of its own information on the health of animals, plants and ecosystems.
Importantly, the report pinpoints the areas in the United States where land is unprotected and where animals and plants are facing the most threats.
Sean O'Brien, president of NatureServe, said the conclusions of the report were "terrifying" and he hoped it would help lawmakers understand the urgency of passing protections, such as the Recovering America's Wildlife Act that stalled out in Congress last year.
"If we want to maintain the panoply of biodiversity that we currently enjoy, we need to target the places where the biodiversity is most threatened," O'Brien said. "This report allows us to do that."
U.S. Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat who has proposed legislation to create a wildlife corridor system to rebuild threatened populations of fish, wildlife and plants, said NatureServe's work would be critical to helping agencies identify what areas to prioritize and where to establish migration routes.
"The data reported by NatureServe is grim, a harrowing sign of the very real problems our wildlife and ecosystems are facing," Beyer told Reuters. "I am thankful for their efforts, which will give a boost to efforts to protect biodiversity."
HUMAN ENCROACHMENT
Among the species at risk of disappearing are icons like the carnivorous Venus flytrap, which is only found in the wild in a few counties of North and South Carolina.
Nearly half of all cacti species are at risk of extinction, while 200 species of trees, including a maple-leaf oak found in Arkansas, are also at risk of disappearing. Among ecosystems, America's expansive temperate and boreal grasslands are among the most imperiled, with over half of 78 grassland types at risk of a range-wide collapse.
The threats against plants, animals and ecosystems are varied, the report found, but include "habitat degradation and land conversion, invasive species, damming and polluting of rivers, and climate change."
California, Texas and the southeastern United States are where the highest percentages of plants, animals and ecosystems are at risk, the report found.
Those areas are both the richest in terms of biodiversity in the country, but also where population growth has boomed in recent decades, and where human encroachment on nature has been harshest, said Wesley Knapp, the chief botanist at NatureServe.
Knapp highlighted the threats facing plants, which typically get less conservation funding than animals. There are nearly 1,250 plants in NatureServe's "critically imperiled" category, the final stage before extinction, meaning that conservationists have to decide where to spend scant funds even among the most vulnerable species to prevent extinctions.
"Which means a lot of plants are not going to get conservation attention. We're almost in triage mode trying to keep our natural systems in place," Knapp said.
'NATURE SAVINGS ACCOUNT'
Vivian Negron-Ortiz, the president of the Botanical Society of America and a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the NatureServe report, said there is still a lot scientists do not know and have not yet discovered about biodiversity in the United States, and that NatureServe's data helped illuminate that darkness.
More than anything, she sees the new data as a call to action.
"This report shows the need for the public to help prevent the disappearance of many of our plant species," she said. "The public can help by finding and engaging with local organizations that are actively working to protect wild places and conserve rare species."
John Kanter, the senior wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Federation, said the data in the report, which he was not involved with, was essential to guiding state and regional officials in creating impactful State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs), which they must do every 10 years to receive federal funding to protect vulnerable species.
Currently $50 million in federal funding is divided up among all states to carry out their SWAPs. The Recovering America's Wildlife Act, whose congressional sponsors say will be reintroduced soon, would have increased that to $1.4 billion, which would have a huge impact on the state's abilities to protect animals and ecosystems, Kanter said, and the NatureServe report can act as roadmap for officials to best spend their money.
"Our biodiversity and its conservation is like a 'nature savings account' and if we don't have this kind of accounting of what's out there and how's it doing, and what are the threats, there's no way to prioritize action," Kanter said. "This new report is critical for that."
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