16 May 23
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At eighty-two, the folk singer has a new book of drawings and sleeps on a mattress in a tree.
Now eighty-two, and with twenty-five studio albums behind her, Baez has mostly retired from music, though she is still making poignant and unpredictable art. This spring, Baez released “Am I Pretty When I Fly?,” a collection of line drawings that she created by working upside down and sometimes with her nondominant hand. The results are abstract, quivery, weird, inscrutable, pure, and hilarious. In one piece from the book, a man dressed as an old-timey gumshoe, with elbow patches on his blazer and a Sherlock Holmes-style hat, holds a magnifying glass up to some spiders descending from a shelf. “Look Dierdra! Spidies!” In another, an older, bald head looks on as three young people of indeterminate gender embrace; one of the figures is smoking something. The caption? “Ohhhh shit.”
Baez has also continued her political advocacy. She was flying from Nashville to Newark recently when she encountered the Tennessee state representative Gloria Johnson and Johnson’s House colleague Justin Jones. Johnson and Jones, along with Representative Justin Pearson, became known as the Tennessee Three after leading protests advocating for gun reform, following the murder of three nine-year-olds and three adults at Nashville’s Covenant School. (Jones and Pearson were later expelled then reinstated; Johnson kept her appointment.) In the Newark terminal, while travellers scuttled past with their luggage, Jones and Baez held hands, and sang a few lines of “We Shall Overcome.” The performance, captured on a phone, is somehow both no-nonsense and wildly emotional. “When you get off the plane with the legendary Joan Baez you know it’s a movement of the spirit,” Jones said in a tweet posted later that day. Two days later, I sat down with Baez in her hotel room in New York City. She was dressed all in black, with a ruby-red manicure. Baez remains strikingly beautiful—as well as funny, frank, and generous. Our interview, which was continued over e-mail, has been condensed and edited.
You had an extraordinary moment at the airport recently.
I was getting ready to board my plane. I heard [my editor, Joshua Bodwell] say, “Wow, Joan, I think that’s Justin Jones.” I was, like, “Justin!” And he said, “Blessings, Joan Baez.” I didn’t realize that he’d written a book on nonviolent resistance. He was soft-spoken. Shy. He was not comfortable doing that video. I obviously wasn’t, either, because it sounded like shit. But it was just extraordinary.
Your new book is a wonderful surprise.
It surprises me, too! [Laughs.]
My mother was a high-school art teacher, but I’m sad to say that I’m not someone who draws—
Anybody can do it. You can’t lose upside down. Just keep going. Because when you’re trying to make it “right”—that’s when it gets all stiff. Sometimes I think about what I’d like to draw, but other times, like now, I just start squiggling the pen around. [She begins drawing on a piece of paper.] You never know . . . I mean, I know those are eyes. And I know that if I draw a certain way, a chin is gonna disappear. But when I turn it right side up, it’s a surprise. The expression is a surprise; the word “ew” is a bird. There are drawings all over my house, on napkins and tablecloths and stationery.
The book has such a great dedication: “To everyone who has ever made me laugh.” Is there someone or something in your life that has reliably made you smile?
The first person who comes to mind is [the folk singer and painter] Bobby Neuwirth. When my sister Mimi and I lived in Belmont, outside of Boston, she was struggling through school. I was pretending I was going to college, which was just awful. We were unhappy all the time. We would call Bobby Neuwirth, and he would come up there and make us laugh. He was just totally reliable. It was refreshing and renewed our lives.
You’ve got a blurb from Lana Del Rey, who calls it “entertaining, moving, ridiculously funny, insightful, and mysterious.” “Mysterious” feels like the exact right word. Childhood is also mysterious; when we’re small, we have a well-developed sense of wonder that seems to wane as we age. How do you stay in touch with that weird, goofy part of yourself?
Unfortunately, it’s probably not something you can hold on to. But again, because I’m drawing upside down, I’m free. I don’t really know what’s happening. Sometimes I say, “Oh, that’s a boy, and that’s a tree.” But when you turn it around there’s wonder. I have a drawing of a boy out in the springtime. Last night, for the first time, I realized he’s standing in water, and his shoes are floating around in the air. I didn’t think that people would get these drawings as much as they have. A little boy with a dead cat, taking care of it. When I show that picture, I hear “aww”—the whole audience, because they feel something. And that, to me, is a gift. That’s a wonderful thing. I think maybe part of the answer to your question is that something gets squashed out of you.
When you first started drawing, you used your left hand instead of your right hand; now you’re drawing upside down. An armchair psychologist might suggest that you do this to give yourself the freedom to be bad at something.
Hmm . . . I’m crappy at pretty much all that I do. [Laughs.]
Come on.
With the paintings, a lot of artist friends will say, “Loosen up.” If I really don’t like what’s happening, I drop the drawing in the swimming pool. If I’ve gotten too precise about it, the imperfection brings it to life. One of my friends said, “Tell me just one thing that will last. Make as many mistakes as you can.” When you’re trying to make it perfect, trying to make it exactly what you want it to be, then it’s time to drop it into the pool.
Right, because the very worst thing you can do to art is to suffocate it. Is this a practice you’ve prioritized in your music career? Nurturing the imperfection in things?
Probably not. When I was writing songs, I never thought they were terrific—I think some of them are very good. “Diamonds and Rust” is in a class of its own. I quit writing years ago. The words wouldn’t come anymore. I called Janis Ian and I said, “I have a block, what do I do?” She said, “You know, it’s simple: look around the room and pick anything. A lampshade. Write a song about a lampshade. Don’t try to be profound. Don’t try to write the perfect song. Just write about a fucking lampshade.” And I wrote a song called “Coconuts”: “Sitting in my hand / Reminding me of my island man / My island man sitting in his hut / dreaming about my coconuts.” You know? It’s a really good song. Took me an hour.
What a way to go out! In the same introduction, you say that sometimes you write words backwards “as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack.” Have you always had to manage panic attacks?
Yes. Though very few now. I needed to do deep therapy for [the panic] to up and go. I have a really good therapist who has helped me around it, over it, under it—but I knew that I was the only one who could say, “O.K., it’s time to do the it.” So, that changed everything. My life before was just, How am I gonna get from one panic attack to the next? I did anything I could to sustain myself. And I didn’t like school. I was a new kid; I was a brown kid; I was excluded. I was marginalized everywhere. So I didn’t know I was bright. I knew that I could draw—I could outdraw anybody in the school. That was a feeling that sustained me. The backwards stuff—part of that was out of boredom. Someone told me that real meditation is when you’re looking out the window at the leaves while the teacher’s talking. As a child, I was engrossed in what was going on outside, somewhere else. I have a granddaughter who loves school, and I keep trying to relate to that. I keep trying to think, How do I walk in those shoes? She’s got friends. I said, “Jasmine, I don’t really relate to this. I didn’t really have a group of friends surrounding me that I could count on the way that you have.”
You moved around a lot as a child—which can be disruptive.
We just kept moving.
Was there a place you liked the most?
When we finally calmed down and got to Northern California—which is where I still live—I liked it. It wasn’t as difficult. The really difficult one was Southern California. I’m of Mexican skin and name, and they didn’t know what to do with me. They thought the name was Spanish, so they put me in class with the Mexicans’ kids, whose families had crossed the border to come and pick oranges. It was assumed that was where I belonged. All of these sweet kids. But the lessons were not challenging in any way. Somebody finally caught on—I took an I.Q. test or something—and they said, “No, she belongs in this advanced class.” Then I came to life.
My father was born in Mexico. He emigrated when he was eight. His father left the Catholic Church and became a Methodist minister in Mexico. I don’t know what happened before that. But that’s a pretty hefty thing to do. They lived in Brooklyn. My father preached in that church for a while, when he was eighteen.
Your father studied mathematics and physics, eventually earned a Ph.D. from Stanford, and became a professor. Did you learn anything about performance from watching these men in your life preach, either to a congregation or a classroom?
That’s a really good question. I don’t know. I know my dad liked to be in front of people, talking. Unfortunately for him, he had three daughters and a wife who didn’t relate to science at all. [Laughs.] But he did like to be in front of people. He did like to talk. One of his favorite topics was standing waves. We’d hear it and groan. I don’t know why we were there, but one time he was giving a lecture about standing waves to a group of fifty people. He said, “Can anybody tell me what a standing wave is?” And my mother and sister went, “Yes!”
You write in the book that your subconscious “appears to be preoccupied with the white male ego and its contribution to darkness.” Some of the drawings in this section are very funny, and some of them are a little fucked up. When do you think you first became aware that, as a woman of color, you would always be pushing against ego, dominance, privilege?
I don’t think it was always obvious. What’s happening now is on a different level. We’re talking about fascism and white supremacy. I experienced a version of it, but no one I know from back then could have written the script for what’s going on now.
That’s hard to hear—I sometimes try to comfort myself by saying, “Oh, America has always been fraught and divided and violent; this is simply the latest version.” But, of course, it’s worse. It feels as though we’re tumbling backwards.
We are. I wouldn’t try to talk yourself down too much, because then you’d be lying. It’s worse than anything I could have imagined. It really is. And the rate, the speed. It’s about propaganda, it’s about lying, it’s about business, it’s about money, it’s about power. [The linguist and cognitive scientist] George Lakoff wrote a whole book about how liberals don’t know how to talk. “Build a wall,” “lock her up”—three words, and you remember them. Biden is lovely, he talks for an hour, and you don’t remember anything he’s saying.
The hopeful thing about Nashville now, about the Tennessee Three, is that it feels a little different to me. Although ever since George Floyd, each time one of these things happens again, you have to wonder, Is this really gonna change hearts and minds? For the movement to sustain itself, people need to organize around it. It won’t sustain on its own; it can’t sustain on its own. The Tennessee Three have already taken a risk. These kids who are lying out at the Capitol are taking a risk, and so are their teachers. So there are examples already. Somehow, if we can build on that—maybe it means mom-to-mom? Maybe women are the main part of this; I don’t know. But I would encourage anyone invested in any of these situations to find like-minded people and do something. The risk for you is to knock on a door and say, “Are you with me?” Maybe you think whoever answers is gonna say no, or think you’re an ass. But you have to do it. Pete Seeger embodied risk-taking and social change in music. He paid a high price. He wasn’t allowed on the radio or TV for years. Back then, there were a couple of radio stations and three TV channels; folk music was still countercultural. And then because of the times, because of civil rights and Vietnam, it became culture.
I have this vision of the sixties—maybe more of a fantasy—as a time when music could really change things. It coalesced social movements; it empowered and encouraged people to fight. Did it feel that way to you at the time? Does it feel that way to you now?
I was really young, but I was a little bit different from my cohort. My family became Quakers, so I was brought up with a mind-set that a lot of my friends didn’t understand. We’re talking about how human beings are more important than nationalism, more important than a flag. I had that as my foundation. I was smart enough to know that “We Shall Overcome” didn’t mean in my lifetime. You can’t expect that one march is gonna do it all. I have a memory of this young kid, sometime in the early eighties, saying to me, “Man, you had it all back then.” And it was idealized, you know? He almost said, “You had the war.” If he had been sixteen back then, his life would have been at stake. But he didn’t think of that—just the Beatles and Bob Dylan, you know? The most important thing he said was, “You had the glue, man.” A kind of glue that we don’t have now, or not yet—there’s a word for that meantime, when this thing happened, and you’re waiting for it to happen again. It’s like some little bud that has been underground, waiting to come up. We don’t know what that’s gonna be. It could be Nashville.
When little children are being shot and killed at school, you think, How could this not be it? How could this not be the glue?
They love their guns.
Was that young man referring to protest songs specifically, when he brought up the idea of glue?
No, he meant everything. You had the music, you had Woodstock, you had the war, you had civil rights. You had the glue. All these things. There was a ten-year period there where you had everything. Then people wondered, Who’s gonna write the next ‘Imagine’? Well, nobody. What are we gonna create to take its place? At some point, somebody’s gonna write something that we can hang onto in that way. It may not even be music. But what’s gonna create that feeling? We had that feeling when Obama ran for office. When he ran, not when he was in. You can’t do shit once you’re in office. But that was a moment where people felt an idea of what we had back then.
Yeah. It very briefly felt like we had made it somewhere. We had crossed a bridge.
We did. You can’t negate the bridges that we crossed, including Pettus Bridge. Because those are victories. And, yes, you slide afterwards. And right now everything has gone to hell. Back then, you sat at the lunch counters, you were an example for the world of what nonviolent action is. People saw it, and it moved them because we were brave. The children, mainly, and King’s folks, who took the front lines. I think courage is contagious. I think violence is really contagious. It’s easier than nonviolent action. It’s gotten so that if somebody shoots something up, well, the police shoot him, of course. They kill him, of course. It’s just a given. What kind of insanity is that?
Folk music has a reputation, deserved or not, as being overly sincere and therefore humorless, sexless, hushed, mannered. You don’t seem like any of those things. Did you ever feel stifled by your audience’s expectations of you, then or now?
Early on, I was a horrible snob. I thought a real folk song had to have been handed down from your granddaddy. So I wouldn’t touch anything but “pure” folk songs. That was my earnest stage. People didn’t understand—I was serious about things, but I wasn’t really serious about myself. I mean, I was upset about myself a lot, but I didn’t think I counted enough to deserve to be very righteous.
You’ve been open about the ways in which a lifetime of travelling and performing has affected you. Are there things you wish you could tell your younger self about how to stay healthy on the road?
Well, I was always disciplined when I was younger. I would tell myself to lighten up, but you can’t when you’re going from panic attack to panic attack. When I was light, it was wonderful; I had great capacity for silliness and enjoyment. But it couldn’t sustain itself. I can say this—I was living from one panic attack to another, always thinking, This could be the last one. I could be O.K. from here on out.
Kudos to my mom, who realized that something had to be done. Therapy was helpful from the first day—just that somebody was hearing me. I would encourage anybody to seek help as soon as you freak out, panic, think you can’t handle it. Or even if you handle it well, just talk to somebody.
Did you have the language for therapy at that age? Did you know that phrase, “panic attack”?
No. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. That was another thing—nobody else was going through it that I knew of. They could have been disguising it better. But, no, I felt very alone in that. I remember having a panic attack in the gym, and I grabbed onto the lady who cleaned up—she wasn’t even a teacher—and said, “Tell me I’m O.K.” And she says to me, “It’s all in your head.” Well, you don’t tell that to a kid who is suffering like that. She meant well, and she was right in a way—these are psychological problems. But that was the closest I got to suggesting to someone else that there might be something wrong.
Your drawings express a deep love for animals and for the natural world. These days, you live in Woodside, California. What’s your home like there?
I live surrounded by oak trees. I sleep in one of them, on a platform, twenty-two feet in the air. It’s closer to the birds. For me, a moment of ecstasy came yesterday. I was walking in Central Park. These birds were mating, so they weren’t paying any attention and flew right by my head. I felt them and I felt the wind. I mean, that, for me—you can’t get any better than that! That’s my idea of some kind of heaven.
You sleep on a mattress in a tree?
Yeah. I have one bird feeder on one side and one on the other side, so they’ll cross over my head. There’s that picture in the book with the woman gardening, a bird on her head, and she’s saying, “This is my church.” I got that love of nature from my mom. I deal every day with the sense of loss. I saw a potato bug the other day, and I started weeping! A potato bug . . . the ugliest thing in the world! I just thought, Where’s your family? And I feel it! I mean, there are no bugs left. I’d give anything to have my car windows splattered with bugs. That would mean that they were there. To make up for it, we have bird feeders everywhere. We have thirteen chickens. We used to have twenty.
Foxes?
Coyotes. There used to be a lot of deer. There aren’t very many left anymore. But there are big coyotes. Some woman lost three of her little dogs to coyotes. Her other dog wears a little jacket with spikes on it. [Laughs.]
Punk rock!
Totally, yeah. I was looking online for the thing you click to give your dogs a little shock when they’re three hundred feet away. It was all about bondage! [Laughs.] There were these pictures of women with dog collars around their necks. Somebody said, “Oh, you have to look up obedience.” I said, “That’s not gonna help at all.” [Laughs.]
There’s a lot of climate grief in the book.
It’s just always there. My practice is to be able to hear a bird, to really listen and to really enjoy it, and not to wait for the chorus. Down the hill from me, there’s a canyon and a creek. Thirty years ago, a cacophony of birds would start as soon as the sun was coming up. I have some of it on tape. It was bliss for me. But the birds are not there anymore. There’s a little peep here, a squawk there. It’s just not there.
How long have you been in Woodside?
Fifty years. Half a century, how does that sound? We moved so much when I was young; four years was the longest we ever stayed anywhere. When I moved to Woodside, I loved the place. And, after about four years, I was thinking, Well, I guess it’s time for you to move. Then I thought, I don’t have to! I love the place. One of my hobbies is just to make it nicer and nicer.
The last section of the book, “A Love Story,” recounts the journey of a man who is struck down by grief after his wife dies. He tries to deliver her a flower. It really moved me.
Me, too. It’s about my ex. He really loved his second wife. She died of cancer. I didn’t know what I was drawing, and then I turned it upside down, saw that old round head, and realized it was David. And the next drawings just came. It was a story. He wanted to get something to her.
There’s a lot of heartbreak in the book. The reaction has been lovely. It’s profound. It’s not a giggle book. You’d think it would be, but it’s not. You said you were really moved by it—it’s pretty deep. Somebody at one of the book signings said, “A question about forgiveness: When do you forgive, and does it last?” It was so sweet. I told them how a Buddhist friend of mine once said, “You don’t have to do it all at once.” A little bit of forgiveness at a time. The events have been fun. There are different characters in the audience. The one in San Francisco, it was so Bay Area—it was in Kerouac Alley, if that gives you a sense of it. A lot of weeping.
You must be used to people weeping in your presence by now.
Well, worse things can happen. [Laughs.]
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Protesters hold up cutouts of gerrymandered districts outside of the Supreme Court. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Washington Post)
South Carolina’s lawyers propose a rule that could make it virtually impossible to challenge racial gerrymanders.
In January, a federal court determined that South Carolina violated the Constitution’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering when it drew one of its congressional districts in the 2021 redistricting cycle. This case, known as Alexander v. South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, tees up the question of whether state lawmakers may use race to identify Democratic voters, and then draw district lines intended to diminish these voters’ ability to elect a candidate of their choice.
Should the Supreme Court permit this kind of gerrymandering, it would likely have profound consequences for voting rights throughout the nation — potentially shutting down one of the few remaining ways to challenge a gerrymandered map that violates the US Constitution.
Briefly, the lower court that heard Alexander determined that South Carolina’s mapmakers intentionally kept nearly 80 percent of the Black population of Charleston County out of the state’s First Congressional District in order to shore up the Republican vote in that district. The lower court rested much of its reasoning on the Supreme Court’s decision in Cooper v. Harris (2017), which held that a district is presumptively unconstitutional if “race was the predominant factor motivating the legislature’s decision to place a significant number of voters within or without a particular district.”
The evidence examined by the lower court, in other words, suggests that state lawmakers were driven by a desire to empower the Republican Party at the expense of Democrats, rather than by a purely white supremacist desire to prevent Black voters from electing their preferred candidates. But, regardless of why the state decided to exclude so many Black voters from the First District, the fact remains that, according to the panel of three federal judges that heard this case, the state sorted voters into districts based on their race.
Ultimately, the justices will likely need to decide whether such race-based sorting is allowed when it is purportedly driven by partisan and not purely racist goals.
Two types of gerrymandering, briefly explained
One reason why this case is needlessly difficult is that the Court has treated cases alleging race discrimination as largely separate from cases alleging partisan gerrymandering, even though these two concepts are frequently intertwined.
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of gerrymandering cases that are often heard by federal or state courts. “Racial” gerrymandering lawsuits allege that a state drew district lines in order to diminish the voting power of voters of a particular race. “Partisan” gerrymandering suits, by contrast, allege that a state drew district lines to benefit one political party over the other.
Although the Supreme Court’s precedents currently allow some racial gerrymandering suits to prevail in federal court, the Court held in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that federal judges may not hear lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders. Notably, however, Rucho did not hold that partisan gerrymanders are permissible — indeed, Rucho suggested that such gerrymanders are “incompatible with democratic principles” — it merely reached the (somewhat dubious) conclusion that federal courts have no way to determine which maps are excessively partisan. Many state courts still hear lawsuits challenging partisan gerrymanders within their state.
The dispute in Alexander, meanwhile, can fairly be characterized as both a racial gerrymandering case and a partisan gerrymandering case.
The lower court in Alexander determined that Black voters were unlawfully excluded from South Carolina’s First Congressional District, a one-time swing district that is currently represented by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), in order to shore up Republican control of this district. In 2018, the First District elected former Rep. Joe Cunningham, a Democrat. Mace barely defeated Cunningham in 2020 to regain this district for the GOP.
Specifically, the lower court found state Sen. George “Chip” Campsen, a key Republican lawmaker who championed the district’s current configuration, wished to include the entirety of Beaufort and Berkeley Counties in the redrawn district, and to also include much of Dorchester County. As the court explained, “all three of these counties were regarded by Senator Campsen as strong Republican performing counties,” and he wished to include them in Mace’s former swing district to “give the district a stronger Republican lean.”
But congressional districts must all be roughly equal in population within a state, and these three regions did not have enough residents to make up an entire district. That meant that mapmakers had to include at least some residents of nearby Charleston County. To ensure that these Charleston County residents did not shift the district toward Democrats, the lower court found that mapmakers gerrymandered 79 percent of the African Americans in Charleston County into a nearby district, thus producing a district that would favor Republicans.
This issue, where state lawmakers essentially used race to identify which voters are likely to support Democrats, arises all the time in racial gerrymandering suits. Because Black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic — in 2020, 90 percent of Black voters in South Carolina voted for Democratic President Joe Biden, according to CNN exit polls — lawmakers who wish to reduce the Democratic Party’s voting power can do so very effectively by targeting Black communities with tactics like gerrymandering.
Some of the Supreme Court’s racial gerrymandering precedents suggest that a state can defeat an allegation that its maps were racially gerrymandered by showing that the primary purpose of the gerrymander is to advance partisan goals. And these precedents take on much greater significance in a post-Rucho world, where it is no longer possible to bring a federal lawsuit challenging a gerrymander as too partisan.
In Easley v. Cromartie (2001), for example, the Court rejected a racial gerrymandering challenge to a North Carolina district, finding that district lines were drawn to achieve the partisan goal of creating a “safe Democratic seat,” rather than the racial goal of sorting voters into districts based on their race. In so holding, the Court emphasized that “race must not simply have been ‘a motivation’” for the state’s decision to draw a particular district, but rather it must be “the ’predominant factor’ motivating the legislature’s districting decision.”
But, if the Supreme Court ultimately determines that the South Carolina maps can be upheld in Alexander because race was not the “predominant factor” driving which district Black voters in Charleston County would be placed within, that decision could have profound implications in a post-Rucho world.
South Carolina’s defense of its gerrymander is completely shameless
Before Rucho, partisan gerrymandering suits were governed by Davis v. Bandemer (1986), which established that, at least in some extreme cases, a map drawn to intentionally benefit one party or the other could violate the Constitution’s guarantee that no one will be denied “the equal protection of the laws.”
Admittedly, in the interim period between Davis and Rucho, the justices were unable to agree upon a single legal standard that could govern partisan gerrymandering suits. As the Court said in Rucho, post-Davis decisions “struggled without success over the past several decades to discern judicially manageable standards for deciding [partisan gerrymandering] claims.” And Rucho’s GOP-appointed majority pointed to this struggle to justify its conclusion that federal courts simply should not hear partisan gerrymandering suits.
But Davis, at the very least, discouraged state lawmakers from being too explicit about what they were up to when they drew gerrymandered maps. For as long as Davis was good law, there was a real risk that the Supreme Court would strike down a partisan gerrymander. Now that this risk is gone, many states are quite open about the motives underlying gerrymandered maps.
In a brief to the Supreme Court explaining why the justices should hear the Alexander case, South Carolina is utterly shameless about its motivations. It admits that the challenged congressional district was drawn “to create a stronger Republican tilt.” And it even concedes that the state legislature “never would have enacted, for obvious political reasons, any plan that turned District 1 into a majority-Democratic district.”
It is far from clear why, even under Rucho, a state should be allowed to openly claim such a motive. Again, Rucho did not hold that partisan gerrymanders are permitted; it merely held that federal courts should not decide partisan gerrymandering cases because it is too difficult to determine which districts were created for partisan purposes.
But why should that reasoning apply to a case like Alexander, where the state admits in a filing before the Supreme Court that it engaged in partisan gerrymandering? It is exceedingly easy to determine that the map in Alexander was created for a partisan purpose when the state admits that the map was created for a partisan purpose.
Worse, if states can now openly confess to drawing partisan gerrymanders, it will be exceedingly difficult for civil rights plaintiffs to challenge many racial gerrymanders because race is so often a close proxy for partisanship. Mapmakers will potentially be allowed to draw maps that intentionally minimize the power of Black voters, then successfully defend those maps in court by claiming that their real purpose was to minimize the power of Democratic voters.
The reality is that race and partisanship cannot be so easily separated, and they are often so intertwined that there’s no meaningful distinction between a racial gerrymander and a partisan gerrymander.
At least according to the lower court that heard Alexander, the state’s goal was to produce a Republican district. But the method it used to achieve this goal was to sort Charleston County’s voters based predominantly on their race. That should be enough to invalidate South Carolina’s first district as an impermissible racial gerrymander.
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The suit includes allegations of sexual assault and harassment, as well as wage theft and discussions of plans to overturn the 2020 election. (photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
The suit includes allegations of sexual assault and harassment, as well as wage theft and discussions of plans to overturn the 2020 election.
In a 70-page complaint filed in state court in New York on Monday, Noelle Dunphy said that after Giuliani hired her in January 2019 he sexually assaulted and harassed her, refused to pay her wages and often made "sexist, racist, and antisemitic remarks," adding that she had recordings of numerous interactions with him.
Dunphy, who is seeking $10 million in compensatory and punitive damages, said Giuliani had hired her for $1 million a year in addition to expenses and pro bono legal representation for a domestic abuse case against a former partner. But after she was hired, Dunphy alleged, Giuliani kept her employment “secret” and paid her only about $12,000 and reimbursed some of her business expenses, owing her $1,988,000 in unpaid wages. She said she was fired in January 2021.
Giuliani denied the allegations through a spokesperson.
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani unequivically denies the allegations raised by Ms. Dunphy,” Ted Goodman said in a written statement. “Mayor Giuliani’s lifetime of public service speaks for itself and he will pursue all available remedies and counterclaims.”
Dunphy alleged in her suit that Giuliani talked about presidential pardons. She said Giuliani claimed to have “immunity” and told “her that he was selling pardons for $2 million, which he and President Trump would split.” The lawsuit did not suggest any pardons were sold.
Justin Kelton, Dunphy's attorney, said on MSNBC that there is not a recording of the pardon conversation. "We do expect that it will be corroborated in other ways." He noted that the complaint alleges that another person was present for that conversation — who Kelton said was Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate — and that Dunphy's attorneys would like to speak to Parnas about it.
A spokesperson for former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.
Hours before he left office in 2021, Trump pardoned 74 people and commuted the sentences of 70 others.
Giuliani, who has denied allegations that he sought a pardon himself, told Dunphy that she could refer pardon-seekers to him, so long as they did not go through “the normal channels” of the Office of the Pardon Attorney because they would be subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, according to the lawsuit.
Dunphy also alleged that Giuliani provided a glimpse into plans to overturn the election if Trump lost, telling her “that Trump’s team would claim that there was ‘voter fraud’ and that Trump had actually won the election,” the lawsuit says.
Giuliani’s New York law license was suspended in June after a state appeals court ruled that he made “demonstrably false and misleading” statements about voter fraud in the 2020 election. He sought to defend himself against other election-related claims made by an attorney disciplinary committee in Washington, D.C., in December, which said he “weaponized his law license” in a failed election fraud lawsuit in 2020.
Last year, attorneys for Giuliani were informed that he was a target of a criminal probe in Georgia looking into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results in the state. The prosecutor in that case has said charging decisions would be revealed this summer.
CORRECTION (May 16, 2023, 12:01 a.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated the nature of some conversations Dunphy said she had with Giuliani. She alleged that Giuliani said he was selling pardons and discussing plans to overturn the 2020 election but did not say those remarks were recorded.
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The Internal Revenue Service building in Washington. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Algorithms targeted filers who collected anti-poverty credits and did not report business income, researchers found
In a letter to the Senate Finance Committee, Werfel said the agency would review audit algorithms for certain anti-poverty tax credits to search for systemic racial bias.
Tax examiners do not know the race of the people they are auditing, but the algorithms the IRS uses to monitor fraud around the earned income tax credit — one of the U.S.'s largest social safety net programs — target filers that make errors on their returns and do not report business income. The result, the researchers found, is that the algorithms are more likely to identify Black taxpayers for audits.
There is no evidence that Black taxpayers perpetrate fraud at a higher rate than any other demographic.
Researchers from Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Chicago and the Treasury Department in January found that the IRS was at least three times as likely to audit Black taxpayers than other demographic groups.
“While there is a need for further research, our initial findings support the conclusion that Black taxpayers may be audited at higher rates than would be expected given their share of the population,” Werfel wrote.
The chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), also cited audit algorithms as a problem.
“The racial discrimination that has plagued American society for centuries routinely shows up in algorithms that governments and private organizations put in place, even when those algorithms are intended to be race-neutral,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. “This bias is completely unacceptable regardless of where it occurs, and we have an obligation to stamp it out.”
The IRS will devote “significant resources” to determine the scope of the problem, Werfel wrote.
The algorithmic shortcomings may have been a result of more than a decade of IRS budget cuts, some tax experts have suggested. Between 2010 and 2019, the IRS’s annual appropriation from Congress fell by an inflation adjusted $3 billion.
That led IRS leaders to consolidate resources and prioritize audits that are easy to complete. The IRS in recent years has grown more dependent on correspondence audits, or exams completed almost exclusively by mail. They are relatively inexpensive to conduct, according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, the IRS’s internal watchdog, and produce lucrative results.
But they also mostly fall on taxpayers who can’t afford to fight back by spending hours on the phone with the tax agency or hiring lawyers, turning the IRS’s prolific enforcement capabilities on the most economically vulnerable taxpayers.
“It’s not like it’s a conscious choice by the agency, it’s a resource driven constraint,” said Natasha Sarin, an assistant professor at Yale Law School and former deputy assistant treasury secretary in the Biden administration. “They couldn’t do the other work for more complicated audits.”
But the study also found a smaller but still statistically significant audit disparity between Black taxpayers and others who do not claim the earned income credit. That suggests there other biases in the IRS’s audit criteria, said Dorothy A. Brown, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.
“There are all kinds of choices that the IRS made that don’t necessarily make sense,” Brown said. “The fact that Black non-earned income tax credit claimants are more likely to be audited refutes the correspondence audit argument.”
Last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, one of President Biden’s chief legislative victories, included $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years to increase its audit rate of high-income individuals and business, and modernize its operations to better serve low- and middle-income taxpayers.
Administration officials in April said the IRS aimed to increase audits tenfold on taxpayers earning more than $400,000 per year.
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Brandon Johnson at an event on March 17, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois. (photo: Scott Olson/AFP)
In a conversation with Jacobin, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates, city councilor Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and editor Alex Han discuss how Chicago’s working-class movement elected one of its own as mayor and where that movement goes now.
Nowhere has the union’s power been on better display than the recent municipal elections in Chicago, in which the CTU won an incredible come-from-behind victory in the mayoral race, electing one of their own, a former middle school teacher, CTU staffer, and Cook County commissioner Brandon Johnson as mayor — first by making it to a runoff against a large pool of challengers and an incumbent, mayor Lori Lightfoot, in the first round of voting in February, and then by defeating former Chicago Public School CEO and austerity hatchet man Paul Vallas in the runoff.
The win was stunning. But in many ways, winning was the easy part. As he prepares to take office today as the executive of the United States’ third-largest city, Johnson has a wide range of challenges ahead of him.
This discussion was conducted on April 11, a week after Johnson’s victory, at the storied Chicago venue The Hideout, as an episode of the Jacobin podcast The Dig, guest hosted by Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht. He discussed the election and where Chicago’s working-class movement goes from here with Stacy Davis Gates, president of the CTU; Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, a socialist city council member representing Chicago’s 35th ward who was recently named mayor-elect Johnson’s floor leader on the council; and Alex Han, executive director of In These Times magazine, who worked for two decades as a union community and political organizer in Chicago.
You can listen to the episode here. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Before we get into Brandon Johnson’s victory, I want to set the scene. That victory would not have been possible without a decade and a half plus of organizing in Chicago. Stacy, how did we get to this crazy point where there is this social movement rooted in the Chicago Teachers Union that is electing Brandon Johnson mayor?
Stacy Davis Gates
I would like for CTU to be able to take a lot of credit. But that would not be an honest reflection of how this happened. I think about all of the people who came before us; the idea of organizing this boldly in Chicago is rooted into the fabric of Chicago, because it has had to be that. Chicago can be the greatest place on Earth — and it can be the worst place on Earth.
Chicago is a deeply segregated city that breeds generational inequity, trauma, poverty, pain. But what it has also generated is generational resistance. Now, it’s different in different iterations. This one is anchored by a labor movement. SEIU [Service Employees International Union] welcomed us into the labor movement, they told us things that we didn’t know when we came in the very first time. CTU has taken a lot of bold dances; we’ve drawn lines in the sand. And then we carried it out. I’m not taking anything from our membership or our coalition of parents of students or community groups. But it is good to have an anchor that has some money.
CTU does play that role. And we are daring other people to play that role with us by organizing every summer. Brandon Johnson went through the Chicago Teachers Union Organizing Institute. There should be a waiting list to get inside that institute this summer. Most of our key leaders who were a part of the campaign, or any action we do, go through the Organizing Institute.
I knew last Tuesday was possible. Ask anyone in this room that worked with me: I am not the one who came on the back of the wagon holding on to the muffler. I have seen the impact of [CTU’s organizing]. It is possible because we’ve built it to be possible.
The second thing that is going to be important in this season is acknowledging that everything is weird. I have never had the feelings that I’ve had in this last week where I wanted to both cry and laugh at the same time. Do not leave your heart and your spirit behind in your reflection of what you are experiencing right now.
This work is from our heart. It is an energy, a spirit, something that we almost can’t even control. That’s why I’d say that the most powerful radical tool that we have is love. Because that is what’s driving this. So what do you do with your heart right now? Because we don’t have the government that we need yet. He’s not walking onto a fifth floor that’s going to welcome the many.
Micah Uetricht
Carlos, it’s almost eight years to the day that we did a panel very similar to this one when you were first elected. Could you reflect on the electoral side as somebody who has been a champion of this movement “before it was cool” in the city of Chicago?
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
I know Stacy wants to be humble. I know she wants to say that CTU cannot claim this win. But there would be no Brandon Johnson as mayor, there would be no progressive movement that is bringing the people into city hall, without a fighting, militant, rank-and-file-led union. So props to the Chicago Teachers Union and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE).
In 2010, I was twenty-one and a Union Summer for Jobs intern with the AFL-CIO. As part of my internship, I wrote a blog post about Karen Lewis and a speech she gave about how a school is a community, and community is family. She talked about the school privatizers — how when you had an Arne Duncan or Paul Vallas saying that they were going to “turn the school around” and bring in Teach for America and de-professionalize teaching and privatize public education and bring in charter schools and bring in the business mentality that they were forgetting that a school is a community, and community is a family.
The other day I texted Stacy, “Isn’t it crazy that Paul Vallas created his own destruction?” I have been in politics long enough now to know that there are a lot of people who think they’re very smart and that one day they will be mayor of Chicago. You know for a fact that from the moment Vallas went to work at Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office as budget director, he was like, “I’m going to be mayor one day.” He went on to be the CEO of Chicago Public Schools [CPS]. And he went on a rampage, causing so much pain and destruction — not just in CPS, but in New Orleans, in Haiti and Chile, all across the planet.
It was here in Chicago that teachers said, “No. You are not going to de-professionalize our profession, you are not going to disinvest our schools. We demand the schools that our children and our city deserve.” It was that fightback that led to the election of Brandon Johnson as our mayor.
We can never ever, ever forget that this most recent iteration of our progressive movement is built around the infrastructure of a militant labor union that dared to take risks — dared to take a risk in supporting me against a twelve-year incumbent in 2015, that dared to take risks in sending Delia Ramirez to Congress, and dared to take the biggest risk of all this past April 4. So I’m eternally grateful for that.
I feel like we’re going through puberty now. This is uncharted terrain. I wish we had a book that was like, “There are going to be changes in your life.” We don’t have that book, but we do have each other. We have a community that is battle-tested, that has been in the trenches of our most important fights. There are growing pains right when you go through puberty, but it is part of the process of maturing, of growing and hitting your stride.
Alex Han
I think there are a lot of deep parallels between this moment right now and a lot of times in history. On March 30, In These Times sent our latest issue to print, and it included my first editorial as executive director, which assumed that Brandon Johnson would win the mayoral race. There’s a little story in there about this memory of Brandon rolling up on a busted hybrid bike in the fall of 2011 to a campout that we were having in front of the Board of Education, because at that point, that was what parents and teachers and community members had to do in order to have a chance just to make a public comment in the board meeting. We had to camp out overnight on the sidewalks of downtown.
It reminded me of a moment, ten years before then, at the first campout in front of the Board of Ed that I was at, where I met Jitu Brown from the Journey for Justice Alliance; where I met Amisha Patel, who has long been the director of the Grassroots Collaborative. We see these parallels; we see these people who have been engaged in struggle for a very long time, and we are finally able to see the fruit of that fight.
Walmart recently announced it is shutting down four stores in Chicago. I remember the struggle in 2006 and 2007, for a “big box” store living wage ordinance. We struggled to keep Walmart out of Chicago, but if they came in, we wanted the company to pay their workers a living wage. An enormous struggle was waged to shift the public perception of what was possible.
Action Now, a community organization based in Englewood and on the West Side, started knocking on doors and talking to people about a Walmart potentially moving in. At that moment, 80 percent of the residents of Englewood supported Walmart coming. They had no reason not to. They needed jobs. After we were done campaigning, a majority of those residents were against Walmart. Daley still let Walmart in, but that 2007 election that followed was the first kind of crack in the armor of the machine that is coming to fruition today.
I think of all of those struggles of the last twenty years, of decades before that. I think of the great immigrant rights march of 2006, with a million people in the streets. I think about what that inspired in the movement for undocumented people across the country. I think about how that inspired the takeover of the Republic Windows and Doors factory by the members of the United Electrical Workers in 2008. I can see a direct line that has led us to this place.
We’re not used to having power. People are not used to exercising power. We’re in such an amazing, generative place right now. We have to train ourselves to imagine what is possible. We have to train ourselves to lift our vision up from what is directly in front of our feet. Because we have a once in a generation opportunity, and we can’t let that go to waste.
Micah Uetricht
As far as I’m aware, there’s not really anything comparable to this situation in recent American history. Obviously, a figure like Mayor Harold Washington comes to mind. But Washington didn’t emerge from a militant, democratic labor movement in the same way that Brandon Johnson has.
Stacy, talk about how you all are approaching this transition. You’re going from the streets to city hall.
Stacy Davis Gates
We are going to have to stretch in this moment — sweet Jesus, we’re going to have to stretch. We have to acquire a more complex vocabulary. We are piloting the next level of this project. And we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t, just like we didn’t in 2010. But pay attention to where we are in 2023.
Alex Han
There is no other militant union organizer and leader who has been elected to an office of this scale in the United States, I don’t think. In Brazil, in South Africa, in other places of the Global South, we have examples of movement leaders of that kind of scale. I think about Brazil, which is a really interesting parallel to us as an extractive colonial state. In Chicago, we exist in that kind of extractive colonial economy. And we’re still trying to grapple with how we move out of that. How do we provide a place where people can take care of their families, take care of their communities, and do that with dignity? We have to look globally, because we don’t have examples.
I think this project has been one of expanding the tent, expanding the coalition. That coalition is going to require more expansion as it goes forward, for us to control majority power and be in a position where the majority of the people of Chicago see themselves reflected in that, so we can sustain and build on that power.
I have a great amount of trust in Brandon, in a lot of the people around him and the people who have helped him win this campaign, to do the right thing. Are they going to be perfect at every moment? No. And if that was an expectation, then we should just pack it up and go home. But I have a lot of faith, having watched this campaign, having watched the challenges that came onto this campaign, and the way that they were handled, the way that that coalition was expanded, I have a lot of confidence moving forward.
Micah Uetricht
What’s going on right now in this transition period?
Stacy Davis Gates
We do not have the government we deserve yet. We have the government that has been created by the people that forced us into survival. So what we should be doing is praying for our brother every night. That’s number one. Because that is not his space.
The next thing that we need to do is figure out how we hold onto the government we have. Because if we mess this up, they ain’t giving us nothing else. I’m sorry, they ain’t going to even let us fight to take something else. So how do you hold the government that we have, while working to transform it into the government that we deserve?
Because we don’t go in on day one with Treatment Not Trauma. [Editor’s note: Treatment Not Trauma is a proposal endorsed by Johnson that would expand mental health services in Chicago and respond to Chicagoans facing mental health crises with mental health professionals instead of police.] We go in day one powerful, but we don’t go in with the levers to change that right away. So this is where we get to stretch our thought process beyond movement while still holding movement. You see how this has gotten more complex for us? How do we continue to hold, cultivate, grow, expand, make our movement more powerful?
That movement is not the movement it was before Election Day. We have got to run to define this and fill this for the movement. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to be at the starting line, we’re going to be behind the starting line. And as my people know, I believe in all gas.
Number two, we can’t have an effed up government, y’all. Y’all done seen that for the last four years. So what does it look like for our brother to have a competent government? And what will that take? What are those decisions? And what would it look like if our project is being held by an incompetent administrator?
Micah Uetricht
We don’t quite have an exact road map. But there are many examples throughout the world of leftists getting elected to office, and then once they enter office, they have to focus all their attention on governing, and they demobilize their movement’s membership. This has caused problems for left elected officials throughout recent world history.
Stacy Davis Gates
I’m not asking anyone to demobilize. I am actually asking us to find a different gear, because we are on another plateau. This is not about demobilization — our organizer is organizing in another space. We still got to organize in our space.
How are we organizing on the South and West Sides to make sure that people like me, my aunts, my grandma, my mother — that they understand that they don’t have to have the only public service come from the Chicago Police Department? We have greater work to do, because now we have someone who won’t call us crazy. We won’t have someone that will deliberately lift the bridges. So how do we maximize that?
This is not about demobilizing. Let’s continue to evolve, though.
Micah Uetricht
How does that happen? How do you walk and chew gum at the same time, keep the social movements mobilized while also turning to this question of governing? Mayor Brandon Johnson is going to be up against a lot. The knives are going to be out for him on crime. We’re going to continue to hear from corporations that they’re going to leave the city. The head of the Fraternal Order of Police said there’s going to be “blood in the streets” if Johnson won and a thousand police officers would resign. Concretely, what is the role that the movement that delivered Johnson to this point going to look like under a Johnson administration?
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
United Working Families was founded in 2014, looking toward the 2015 municipal election. Alex spoke about the big box living wage fight; there were a lot of older aldermen who voted to pass the big box living wage ordinance in 2006–7. Then Daley vetoed it, and a lot of aldermen that had stood with labor turned around and voted to sustain the veto. That ordinance, which would have improved the lives of people who worked at corporations worth billions and billions of dollars, died. So labor invested a ton of money to get those who had voted against the ordinance out of office. They flipped a lot of seats in the city council for the first time in a very long time. Within a matter of months, those who had just been elected were all co-opted by the Daley administration.
From that lesson came the notion that we should have a progressive caucus, which was formed in 2011. Leading into the 2015 election, you have the notion that we need independent political power, that we need organization. That is where United Working Families comes from. I ran in 2015 as a UWF endorsed candidate.
I made a commitment that upon my election, I would form a ward-based independent political organization in my community. We have kept that commitment. We created United Neighbors of the 35th Ward. They keep me accountable. They fight to make sure that when I’m taking on big fights in city hall, I have people that are marching with me and people that are moving with me. They also worked to elect other people like 8th district Cook County commissioner Anthony Joel Quezada, who came out of our ranks. So that is what we need: organization.
I spent the past few days calling a lot of aldermen. Let me tell you, it is a lot easier calling them now than it was two weeks ago. But we’re still going to need organization. And we’re still going to need people in communities that are organizing for things like Treatment Not Trauma, that are pushing for things like Bring Chicago Home. [Editor’s note: Bring Chicago Home is a proposal endorsed by Johnson designed to fight homelessness and expand affordable housing, funded by a new tax on real estate transactions over $1 million.]
Because ultimately, that is our biggest strength. That is how a candidate with less money was able to make up the difference in the field on April 4. When it came to the Vallas campaign, a lot of these wards were ghost towns. Vallas had nobody, and the people he was paying to be out there getting out the vote for him — they were like, “We voted for Brandon. This is a paycheck.” There was this one guy, he was like, “Oh, you got to be out there for Brandon? I wanted Brandon. They stuck me with Vallas.”
It is going to be so good to have a mayor that is deeply committed to these issues, that was on the front lines of the fights to implement these progressive policies. That is a powerful organizing tool. But that is not the be-all and end-all. At the end of the day, we know that people power will power the type of change we want to see in city hall.
Alex Han
We should be talking about going beyond Chicago. How do we start these kinds of organizations, where you’re able to identify who are the allies in labor, who are working with parents, who are working in immigrant communities, who are working on police accountability — how do we build these kinds of organizations everywhere? Because we cannot succeed in Chicago if we are alone in Chicago, if we continue to be the only political project that looks and feels and walks and talks the way that we do.
Micah Uetricht
Carlos, I wonder if you could talk specifically about the city council and what the new openings are on the city council. The council has historically been a rubber stamp body for the mayor. That has changed in recent years. Coming out of this most recent election, it seems like a strong opportunity for the council to actually play a significant and powerful role in the city’s politics. And a large number of people have been elected to the council who are committed to this working-class agenda.
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
On April 4, there were a number of city council runoff races, and progressives swept those runoffs. There will be a net increase in the number of truly progressive members of the Chicago City Council. This is also the most diverse city council in the city’s history. It is younger, more female. In the Latino Caucus, we went from like six out of twelve progressives to now nine out of thirteen. That is a phenomenal shift. We went from having two Latinas to having six Latinas, and five of those six Latinas are progressive. We now have three people that are younger than me on the Chicago City Council. And we have Angela Clay, who will be joining the democratic socialist caucus.
Not only do we have a bigger, stronger Progressive Caucus, we now have a mayor that we can work with. And that is a huge change. We’ve been on the defense this whole time. Now we have an opportunity to go on the offense with our agenda.
It’s critically important that we have a council organization, with committees and committee membership roles, that will facilitate a government that can deliver for working people and deliver on the things that Chicagoans overwhelmingly want to see: taxing the rich; passing Bring Chicago Home so that we can get people off the streets and into permanent housing; and passing Treatment Not Trauma so we can have a network of mental health first responders and reopen our public mental health clinics.
Micah Uetricht
The CTU has had to fight against some of the mainstream currents in the Democratic Party since 2010. When CORE was elected office in 2010, the agenda of austerity, neoliberals, school privatization, and attacks on teachers unions was dominant in the Democratic Party. Through striking and other forms of organizing, the CTU has changed that. But there are still many powerful currents in the Democratic Party who are not on board with the CTU agenda. Mayor Brandon Johnson is going to come up against a lot of those forces. How will CTU confront those forces?
Stacy Davis Gates
I’m not afraid of that challenge. They’ve lost the argument on if school personnel get to have a say in [what goes on in schools]. But they still exist. They never go anywhere. So how do you coexist with them in a different capacity? Do they now agree that we need progressive revenue? Because schools have to be funded equitably. Can we get them to agree to that? Do they now agree that schools are communities and that you gotta anchor resources and agency and democracy within that design?
Alex Han
What Stacy just talked about made me think: What if we had had a fair tax campaign with a mayor who was willing to stand on his soapbox and shout from the rafters to vote? We would have won that [state-level] fair tax campaign [that progressives ran in 2020 to change the state of Illinois’s flat individual income tax]. We would have a different tax structure in the state of Illinois today.
We can’t sell ourselves short. On the Left, we’re used to being in a loser mindset. We’re used to losing. I’ve lost a million times over the last twenty-five years. I don’t even understand what it’s like to win. But now, I’m done with losing.
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
Well, I’ve been winning since 2015.
Micah Uetricht
Speaking of which, Carlos, the Northwest Side, where you are an alderman, really showed up for Brandon Johnson. Can you talk about that?
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
Long-term organizing. That is the key. And having a coalition of voters that believe that our government can do better for people, that we can invest in people. Brandon spoke to that.
Before we endorsed Brandon Johnson, I sat down with a lot of candidates who were running. I told them, “Look, when it comes to policing, the position is very nuanced. Voters on the Northwest Side don’t just want to hear that you’re going to add more police, they want to hear about what you’re going to do to invest in the community.” The only candidate who I did not have to tell that to was Brandon Johnson. He knew that already. Because that was his default position, based on his record as an organizer and as an elected official, based on the work he had already done on the county board. And voters rewarded him, because they heard a message that resonated with them, that spoke to their values.
We’re very proud of the work that we’ve done on the Northwest Side. First we have Illinois state representative Will Guzzardi, elected in 2014 with the support of SEIU and CTU; myself in 2015; in 2016, we have Illinois senator Omar Aquino beating a charter school lobbyist with the support of labor; in 2018, we have Delia Ramirez elected to the House of Representatives; and now we have the election of Brandon Johnson. We’ve had a string of wins.
What I’m most proud of, too, is that the city council passed an ordinance called Empowering Communities for Public Safety. That created sixty-six district councilors, three elected in each police district. We swept those elections on February 28. So now you have a democratic structure of community input when it comes to policing. And the vast majority of those police district councilors endorsed Brandon Johnson in the runoff.
Stacy Davis Gates
The youth turnout — they have to see a reflection of their values, too. Brandon, our mayor-elect, his youth, his ability to convey his experience as an educator in Cabrini was compelling. Our young people have a lot of thoughts about policy and impact. We don’t access that. There was deliberate outreach, there were people in the UWF universe who organize everything walking and talking and were able to bring in other voices.
Micah Uetricht
Where does this movement that’s been built in Chicago go from here?
Alex Han
The week after the teachers’ strike in 2012, Brandon Johnson came to speak to a group of workers that I was working with — restaurant workers, retail workers downtown on the Magnificent Mile. We were looking for somebody to talk about the strike to these workers. They’d been meeting every week for several months. Sometimes five, ten, twenty workers. The week after the teachers’ strike, the room was packed. These workers were eighteen to twenty-one years old. These were workers who had recently graduated from Chicago Public Schools, were trying to figure out how to work two jobs, take care of their family, bouncing from couch to couch, trying to get some credits at city colleges at the same time. And those workers saw that fight of the Chicago Teachers Union and were inspired.
Brandon Johnson came and spoke to them. And he told them about taking on a fight that seemed impossible, a fight that was for all of us — and winning. And so those workers set their sights higher and took on another fight that was for all of us.
What comes out of this? What are the next fights going to be? How do we expand? Who is a part of this project? How are we expanding that community? And how are we growing?
Carlos Ramirez-Rosa
Our movement must grow, and our movement must deliver. There are people who are fearful of walking down the block outside of their home; there are people who are struggling to make ends meet. We have to deliver for those people. And in the act of delivering for those people, we will win their trust, and we will see the ability of our movement to grow. And in order to deliver for those people, we have to have a governing coalition that grows.
We have done a lot of work over many, many years. We have won an elected school board, we have won a path toward community control of the police, and we have removed the carve-outs from the Welcoming City ordinance so that we can be a true sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. And now we have to win so much more.
As long as we stay true to our values, and as long as we continue to understand that it’s organization and unity that is the basis of our success, I know that we will be a shining example for this nation. People will want to replicate what they’re seeing in Chicago.
Stacy Davis Gates
I do want to honor Karen Lewis. Because she figured out in 2013 how to redirect our energy after a huge disappointment. Fifty school closings. Fifty. It still hurts, ten years later. But Karen got up the next day, and she gave our movement direction. It is so hard to give people something in a loss, because you ain’t even got it. She said, “We’ve tried at the negotiating table. We’ve gone to your Board of Education meetings.” And she said, “Look, you keep telling me to hold you accountable for everything. So we’re going to hold you accountable. We’re going to talk to voters.”
Remember, electoral politics is not something a movement usually does, because it betrays us. There is great trepidation and peril in this work. People suspended that. And I want to honor everyone who suspended that. We can have nice things. We deserve this.
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People walk among scattered objects in the market of el-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, as fighting continues in Sudan. (photo: AFP)
Women have taken to social media to call out, and warn others about reported rapes being perpetrated by soldiers.
Graphic details have been shared online as organisations and individuals grapple with internet connectivity issues to paint a disturbing picture of increasingly indiscriminate attacks on women as the war enters its fifth week.
The reports have been difficult to independently verify, but they suggested a broad pattern of behaviour in which women are being routinely targeted, in some cases in front of family members, and subjected to brutal acts of sexual violence.
According to Al Jazeera’s sources, who wish to remain anonymous, foreign women were initially targeted, but attacks on Sudanese women are now widespread.
Activists decry attacks as informal civilian networks offer support
Since the outbreak of war on April 15, civilian networks have rallied behind the most vulnerable, offering vital logistical information regarding checkpoints, escape routes, and sourcing and purchasing emergency medical supplies that are in desperately short supply.
In response to the reports of sexual violence, many women have taken to social media to report incidents. At the same time, medical professionals and psychologists have offered advice and support to those affected, including lists of numbers where survivors can receive urgent treatment based on their location.
The UN said (PDF), “There are critical shortages of supplies for the clinical management of rape and dignity kits, as the stocks are inaccessible.”
Amira*, a young woman from Nyala in South Darfur, told Al Jazeera that women are hiding indoors as reports of rape circulate. However, poor internet and phone connectivity have hampered communications.
“We try to share info of pharmacies and clinics that can provide help for rape victims, but again, that’s patchy as we rely on WhatsApp groups and contacts to give us the info,” she said.
Sudanese capital Khartoum and el-Geneina in West Darfur are said to be suffering the highest cases of sexual violence.
“Nyala is generally safer [but] el-Geneina is a horror story. What’s happening, there is far worse with the looting, kidnapping, continuous fighting and clashes and rape cases,” Amira said.
“There are confirmed reports that about 24 women and girls were kidnapped and raped from Otash IDP camp in South Darfur last month,” said Neimat Abubaker Abas, a senior programme adviser at Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA).
Abas added that they have been able to verify 30 cases of rape in South Khartoum.
She said that refugees and internally displaced women have been particularly targeted. There have been six cases of refugee women having been raped since the outbreak of the conflict, according to SIHA.
A history of sexual violence
Security forces have committed acts of sexual violence in Sudan before.
In 2019, reports emerged of the RSF and other troops raping dozens of women after they tore apart a sit-in camp in Khartoum, where protesters had been demanding for weeks that the military give up power.
The UN has said rape was used as a weapon of war in Darfur when fighting began in 2003 as mostly non-Arab rebel groups rose against the central Sudanese government, decrying the historical neglect that their region had suffered and the continuing exploitation of their resources by Khartoum elites.
“This isn’t new to us here in Darfur; we’ve experienced and been through this before,” Amira said.
In October 2014, 221 women and girls in North Darfur were mass raped, in many cases in front of loved ones, by Sudanese army forces in their homes and on the streets.
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Two 18-wheel tractor trailers carry fresh water to natural gas wells being drilled by hydrofracking in the Marcellus Shale Sept. 10, 2012, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. (photo: Robert Nickelsberg)
Advocates for both sides say public drinking water may be tainted by underground leaks of “produced water.”
They complied with his request, but the practice continues in many other places across the state, and threatens to taint its groundwater with radioactivity and a cocktail of other contaminants in the residue from natural gas drilling.
Water from the pond, downhill from the road where the salty waste was once spread, remains clean and drinkable, but that hasn’t stopped Kettler and other activists in Ohio from campaigning against a practice that has been used for years to de-ice roads in the winter and keep dust down in the summer.
They say that high levels of two kinds of radium in the waste, known as produced water, as well as its extreme salinity, is already damaging the environment where the brine is spread and will eventually find its way into underground sources where people get their drinking water.
In a related development, lawyers for two Ohio oil and gas companies filed suit in the spring of 2022 against the owners of wells where produced water from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia is being injected for long-term disposal claiming their business is being hurt by the leakage of waste into production wells. The suits were dismissed but are being appealed, adding to pressure on the fracking industry, and the State of Ohio, from an unlikely pairing of interest groups.
Millions of gallons of produced water from fracking in the region have been pumped into more than 200 underground injection wells—either purpose-built or reused oil and gas wells—as oil and gas production has surged in the Appalachian states, raising fears that the natural environment is being contaminated, and that public water sources are being poisoned.
“Putting our water at risk, especially in the area where there are known earthquake faults, just seems pretty wrong-headed,” said Kettler, who owns a wastewater business, and is a member of the Ohio Brine Task Force, an advocacy group that works to stop produced water from fracking from being spread on roads.
“The constituents of this wastewater are known to be toxic and radioactive. Putting that on the ground, especially where people use surface water for their domestic water supply, as I do—where runoff is inevitable—is a problem.”
Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources says about 22 million barrels of produced water from Ohio sources—924 million gallons—were pumped into injection wells in 2022, and another 12 million barrels—504 million gallons—came from out-of-state sources, including Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania recycled or reused about 93 percent of produced water from fracking in 2021, when it produced a record-high 7.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, underlining its position as the second-biggest U.S. producer of natural gas after Texas, according to its Department of Environmental Protection.
Produced water contains dozens of highly toxic chemicals along with naturally occuring poisons like arsenic and radioactive material like radium 226 and 228. It is far saltier than ocean water, which makes it deadly to most plants and freshwater life.
The Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group representing the Pennsylvania natural gas industry, said its wastewater policy protects water sources.
“Our members are minimizing the need for freshwater withdrawals while reducing truck traffic for disposal,” said the coalition’s president, David Callahan, in a statement. “Managing water and waste are key parts of developing natural gas responsibly.”
Pennsylvania has only 12 active injection wells for fracking waste because it does not have “primacy” over the wells, and so must obtain approval from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before issuing permits. By contrast, Ohio has primacy, and so has permitted many more injection wells. There are 234 now operating in Ohio plus “a few” applications pending, the Department of Natural Resources said.
Andy Chow, a spokesman for the department, said the state legislature is prevented by the U.S. Constitution from blocking interstate commerce, and therefore cannot restrict brine entering from other states. He said that since the start of the current program to allow produced water to be pumped into injection wells, “no water supplies have been impacted.”
But he said the state may investigate claims of water contamination from the oil and gas industry. “If any person believes their water well has been impacted by oil and gas activity, the [Division of Oil and Gas Resources’] environmental assessment team will conduct an investigation, which may include water well sampling,” he said.
Permits are required to drill a well for production or disposal, and the department has denied some applications, Chow said.
As a result of the availability of disposal wells in Ohio, trucks carrying fracking waste from Pennsylvania and West Virginia are arriving in Ohio “24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Bob Lane, an oil and gas operator who in May 2022 sued the owners of 11 injection wells near his production sites in two Ohio counties. He claimed the fluid pumped into injection wells has leaked into some of his wells and damaged his production.
Lane, president of Bethel Oil & Gas Co., based in Marietta, Ohio, said four of his 65 wells have been shut down by injection-well leakage while production has “significantly” declined in eight to 10 more.
“The more water they pump into the ground, the more they drive the natural resources under the ground away from our leases,” he said. “Even in some of my better wells, the production has gone bad because more and more of the formations down there are getting flooded. We have a smaller area to draw oil and gas from so your production starts tailing off.”
Despite the alleged damage to his business, Lane said the real worry is whether contaminated water in the injection wells will get into aquifers supplying drinking water to the public. That might happen, he said, via some disused oil and gas wells, where the produced water is now coming to the surface, or through a fault along the Ohio River Valley, where some injection wells operate.
“If it can get to the surface, there’s a lot of old wells drilled around here, and if it gets in the old wells, it is going to get out into the water,” he said.
He predicted that produced water will eventually contaminate aquifers with high levels of radioactivity and other fracking constituents, at which point those sources would be permanently lost for drinking water. “We haven’t had any subsurface water contaminated yet but it’s going to be,” he said.
Lane’s suit was dismissed by a judge last year on the grounds that he had not done enough to show that his wells had been damaged by the injection wells, said Zachary Zatezalo, his lawyer. But Lane appealed the dismissal, and the case is now due to be reheard by a three-judge panel.
Another Ohio oil and gas operator, Bob Wilson, sued injection well owners with the same complaint at the same time and that suit, too, was dismissed but is now being appealed, Zatezalo said.
In January this year, the impact of injection wells on nearby oil and gas operations was highlighted by an order from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources suspending operations at two Noble County injection wells that leaked brine. Between 2010 and 2021, four oil and gas wells were impacted by brine coming to the surface, the order said. This year, brine was reported spraying from the production casing of another oil and gas well, according to the Jan. 9 order from Eric Vendel, chief of the department’s Division of Oil and Gas Resources.
Vendel suspended operations by Deeprock Disposal Solutions of Marietta, Ohio, at its Warren Drilling and Travis injection wells, saying their continued operation “represents an imminent danger to the health and safety of the public, and is likely to result in immediate substantial damage to the natural resources of the state.”
The Department has also recognized high levels of radioactivity in brine from oil and gas production wells around the state. In a 2018 report, the DNR found that combined radium 226 and 228 in brine from 107 samples in 10 geological formations all sharply exceeded the state health standard for those isotopes in drinking water. They included three samples in Ohio’s part of the giant Marcellus formation, where the average radiological activity was 2,316 picocuries per liter, dramatically higher than the state and federal health limits of 5 picocuries per liter in drinking water. A picocurie is a commonly used measure of radiation in a liquid or gas. The EPA says the naturally occurring level of radium-266 in surface water is 0.1 to 0.5 picocuries per liter.
In October last year, the environmental law firm Earthjustice, representing local activist groups, asked the EPA to rule that Ohio’s permitting program allowing the use of injection wells does not prevent the practice endangering public water supplies, and fails to comply with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
In Athens County, where both injection and production wells operate, local leaders passed a resolution that calls on the state to end the spreading of frack waste on roads but they remain powerless to stop it, said Lenny Eliason, a county commissioner.
“The issue we have is the permitting and the lack of local involvement in the decision,” he said. “You can get a permit a lot faster in Ohio than you can in the states surrounding us, such as West Virginia and Pennsylvania. So we get a lot of out-of-state waste.”
The DNR’s findings on radiation levels and produced water leakage show the dedication of its staff but also the limitations of their power to curb the oil and gas industry, said Julie Weatherington-Rice, a geologist who volunteers for the nonprofit Ohio Brine Task Force.
“It doesn’t mean their heart isn’t in the right place; it just means they don’t have any power,” she said.
But she said the state is “insane” to allow highly radioactive fracking waste to be spread on roads and injected into the ground. “What idiot in their right mind would take something that hot and spread it around on the countryside?” she asked.
Chow of the DNR said in response that the department enforces laws passed by the state legislature. The Division of Oil and Gas Resources “continues to regulate Ohio’s oil and gas operations,” he said. “Through this regulation, the division works tirelessly to protect public health, safety, and the environment.”
While regulators have established the radioactivity of the produced water being dumped in the state, it is not yet clear what happens to the waste once it’s released underground or on public roads. The answer to that is being left up to citizen scientists like the Ohio Brine Task Force, and its affiliate, the Buckeye Environmental Network, said Weatherington-Rice, who works for an environmental consulting company and has a Ph.D. in soil science.
“We are very worried about the interconnection, subsurface especially, in areas where there are pathways nobody knows are down there,” she said. “It isn’t like it just goes down in a hole and disappears. It goes somewhere, and the ‘somewhere’ is the $64,000 question.”
Volunteers like Weatherington-Rice are doing their own investigation into the contents and pathways of the fracking wastewater, in the absence of work that they say should have been done by state officials.
“We are clearly spreading things that are hotter than the federal and state law permits, so then the question is: how much dilution occurs when it is spread, and where does it go?” she said. “Does it go into surface water? Does it go into the dust, into the soil, into the groundwater? Tracking down where it goes is the next big study that people are looking at here. We know it’s there, we just have to find it.”
In the state legislature, a bill that would ban the spreading of frack waste on roads was introduced last year by state Rep. Mary Lightbody, a Democrat. The bill failed to get a vote before the end of the legislative session but is expected to be reintroduced in the current session, advocates said. Lightbody did not respond to a request for comment.
Asked whether a new bill would have any chance of becoming law, Weatherington-Rice said that the state is “owned by oil and gas” and that its chances will depend on whether citizen scientists can find a smoking gun. “If we can prove that this stuff is getting loose into the environment, maybe,” she said.
The difficulty of finding evidence of water contamination from frack waste is compounded by the expense of private water testing, deterring many people from hiring a testing company, said Roxanne Groff, a member of Athens County’s Future Network, a nonprofit that fights the negative effects of fracking.
“If somebody was told they needed to shell out $1,500 to hire a private tester, they’re not going to do it,” she said. “They are going to carry water or buy a water buffalo. That’s just the way people are here. I think the reason we are not hearing any peeps is that nobody can afford to go out and test their own stuff. We all know the harm is happening but without proper measuring there’s no way to know the degree of harm.”
And even if grassroots groups pooled their resources to pay for water testing to look for contamination from injection wells and road spreading, any such report is likely to be ignored by a legislature that traditionally accommodates the oil and gas industry, Groff said.
“It would call attention for a short period of time that there’s a problem, but you still have to convince the lawmakers that laws are needed,” she said. “You’re not going to convince the right-wing Republican party to do that; it’s just never, ever going to happen.”
Grassroots groups are also faced with the oil and gas industry’s exemptions from several federal statutes including the Safe Drinking Water Act, as a result of the so-called Halliburton loophole, which means the EPA does not regulate the industry under those laws. The loophole is named after the oil and gas company that was headed by former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney before he came to office.
Despite the long odds stacked against them, activists like Kettler say they will continue to seek evidence that fracking waste is contaminating public water and the environment.
“It’s all self-taught citizen science,” he said. “It’s in the beginning stages because nobody has done this before, and we are having to teach it to ourselves. It’s up to us to get the evidence about fracking waste.”
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