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In February 2014, as the pro-Russian regime in Kyiv was killing protesters on the barricades of the EuroMaidan Revolution, thousands of Russian troops without insignia began occupying strategic locations and military bases in the Crimean Peninsula.
Within a month, Russia had illegally annexed Crimea on the back of a sham referendum at gunpoint, and unrest led by Russian-led militants had begun in eastern Ukraine.
The fact that Russia decided to launch its war against Ukraine in Crimea isn't surprising.
Crimea has long been a cornerstone of the Russian imperial narrative, with the country's centuries-long propaganda placing Russia as the "rightful historical owner" of the Ukrainian peninsula.
The annexation of Ukrainian territory was widely supported by those living in Russia, with Russian President Vladimir Putin's approval ratings skyrocketing to over 80% in the months after the start of the war.
Basic principles of territorial sovereignty and a rules-based international order make a strong case for Crimea to remain an inseparable part of Ukraine.
However, since annexation, Russian propaganda has successfully spread the narrative of Russia's "return" of a "historic Russian land" among the international public, with many Western leaders soon abstaining from asserting that Ukraine must get the peninsula back.
This chapter of Ukraine's True History will explore the historical context that led to Crimea as it is today and answer why Russia doesn't have a "historic right" to annex Ukrainian Crimea.
With its prime geographic position on the Black Sea, the crossroads between the Eurasian steppe, and the Mediterranean trading routes, the Crimean Peninsula has been inhabited by dozens of ethnic groups over its long history.
Several of Crimea's major cities today, including coastal cities Feodosia and Kerch, have origins in ancient Greek colonies established on the coast of the peninsula from the 7th-5th centuries BCE, eventually joining together as the Cimmerian Bosporan Kingdom, which would go on to become a client state of the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile, the interior of Crimea was populated by the nomadic Scythians, which resided in the vast steppes of what is now southern Ukraine and Russia.
Over the centuries, the peninsula would be occupied by many nomadic people who passed through the area, including the Goths, Cumans, Huns, and Khazars, and was later contested between the Byzantine Empire and the Grand Princes of Rus in Kyiv.
In the same cataclysm that brought about the fall of Kyivan Rus, the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 13th century also swept through Crimea. For two centuries, the Mongol successor state known as the Golden Horde ruled most of the peninsula, while the coastal settlements were colonized by Genoese traders.
It was during this time that a new nation began to form in Crimea in a process known as ethnogenesis. Descendants of the many different nations that inhabited the peninsula began to congregate, united by the Muslim faith and a Turkic language similar to that spoken by the Cumans and the Khazars.
When the power of the Golden Horde in Europe disintegrated in the 15th century, this new indigenous people group, who came to be known as the Crimean Tatars, quickly established their own state.
Ruled by the House of Giray from its capital in Bakhchysarai, the Crimean Khanate would come to be a formidable force in Eastern Europe, dominating the steppes of southern Ukraine and leaving tangible cultural heritage sites across the Black Sea coast.
Imperial conquest
The history of the Crimean Tatar nation is woven tightly with the history of Ukrainian proto-states, as the trajectories of both were defined by their encounters with larger, more powerful outside empires competing for land and resources.
During this time, the Crimean Tatars both competed and cooperated with the emerging Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a loose confederation of Ukrainian people that inhabited much of modern central and eastern Ukraine, conducting raids and military campaigns from their forts along the Dnipro River.
Although the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars often fought on different sides, they also traded extensively and sometimes formed alliances, such as when Cossack leader Petro Doroshenko allied with both the Crimean Tatars and the Ottomans against Poland and later the Russian Empire in the mid-17th century.
Ultimately, both the Crimean Khanate and the Cossack Hetmanate were annexed into the Russian Empire around the same time, in the late 17th century, during the conquering reign of Russian Empress Catherine II.
With Ukraine's neighboring great powers, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, significantly weakened, the counterbalance that had kept Russian expansion at bay was no more.
It was with the arrival of Catherine's Russia in 1783 that the erasure of indigenous Crimean Tatar history began, hand-in-hand with the repression of its people.
Assuming an image of the restorer of Western civilization in the area, Catherine founded completely new cities along the Black Sea coast, often opting for anachronistic Greek-sounding names such as Sevastopol, Odesa, and Kherson.
It was then that these Crimean Tatar lands, together with much of southern and eastern Ukraine, were dubbed "Novorossiya" ("New Russia"), a term used prominently by Vladimir Putin and Kremlin propaganda to justify the conquest of parts of Ukraine since 2014.
According to American historian Brian Boeck, "grafting 'New Russia' onto the Russian Empire required re-imagining this space as Russian, and the consolidation of tsarist authority relied on settlement."
In the century after their annexation, the indigenous Crimean Tatar lands were subject to a policy of active colonization and demographic degradation.
With tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian settlers and serfs resettled to the peninsula, Crimean Tatars were expelled from their lands and homes and marginalized from the new ruling government and society built from scratch in the Russian imperial mold.
These processes accelerated greatly after the end of the Crimean War between the Russian Empire and the alliance of Ottoman, French, British, and Sardinian troops in 1856. The Crimean Tatars were uprooted by the war from their homelands in the interior, and many of them ultimately fled permanently to the Ottoman Empire.
In a Russian Empire census carried out in 1850, Crimean Tatars still made up the vast majority of Crimea's population at 77.8%, but by 1897, this figure was down to 35.5%.
Thus began the only historical period of brutal Russian rule in Crimea.
Erasing a nation
For both the Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar nations, the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 allowed a brief window into which modern states could be founded.
In Crimea, this movement began with the first congress of Crimean Tatar Muslim leaders in March 1917.
In July, a new Crimean Tatar political party was formed, advocating for independence. By December, while the Bolshevik revolution was sweeping through Russia, the first sitting of a new Crimean Tatar parliament was held in Bakhchysarai, the old capital of the Crimean Khanate.
Known as the Qurultai according to the Turkic tradition, the body declared the formation of the Crimean People's Republic, complete with its own constitution and government structure.
Simultaneously, successive Ukrainian independence movements also exploited the power gap between Russia and Germany to found their own state projects, the most significant of which was the Ukrainian People's Republic.
With aligning goals of national self-determination and independence from the empire, the two fledging states recognized each other and held numerous negotiations during the early revolutionary period, with both sides open to further integration.
"The Ukrainians' federal approach and innovative emphasis on national minority rights could have led to closer cooperation, but a loose arrangement seemed fine," according to British historian and University College London professor Andrew Wilson, who authored a 2021 paper on the respective interpretations of Crimean Tatar history by Russia, Ukraine, and Crimean Tatars themselves.
Though control of Crimea changed hands several times during this time, ultimately, both the Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian states were once again swallowed by Russia, with the exception of parts of western Ukraine.
As with Ukraine, the early Soviet regime did give some support to Crimean Tatar culture and minority rights, but this was soon reversed under the Russification-driven policies of Joseph Stalin after he assumed full power in the late 1920s.
After years of famine and political repressions in the early Stalin era, by the outbreak of World War II, Crimean Tatars only consisted of 19.4% of the population, with almost half of the peninsula's 1.1 million residents by then being ethnically Russian.
Soon, in one of the most brutal episodes of ethnic cleansing of the war, the population of Crimean Tatars in Crimea was reduced to zero.
Soviet authorities, using contrived allegations of an entire people collaborating with Nazi Germany, forcibly deported the entire Crimean Tatar population of over 200,000 to Central Asia in 1944.
The collective trauma of the deportation and following decades, known to Crimean Tatars as Sürgünlik ("exile"), had a lasting impact on the people's attitudes toward Moscow.
Around 6,000 are understood to have died during the journey itself, and many tens of thousands more from the conditions in the settlements they were moved to, much akin to prison camps.
Estimates vary as to the exact figure, but even according to the estimates of the NKVD, Soviet Interior Ministry, 27% of the entire Crimean Tatar population died either from the deportation itself or from malnourishment, disease, or exposure in the years after arrival.
Upper historical estimates put the figure at closer to 46%.
From that point, Soviet historiography made a new concerted effort to minimize the Crimean Tatars' role in the history of the peninsula.
In this narrative, the indigenous status of Crimean Tatars was dismantled. Instead, the nation was depicted as only one in a series of conquering tribes that had settled in the area.
"The general line was now to fight against the 'idealization' of 'Tatar' history," says Wilson, "and assert that the Crimean lands, even in primordial times, belonged to the Slavs and the Russians and their ancestors, the Scythians."
In 1954, in a decision that has been decried as illegal by Russian propaganda narratives since 2014, Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev authorized the transfer of Crimea, including the naval city of Sevastopol, to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
This decision, formally marking the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav between Ukrainian Cossacks and Russia, was also motivated by economic rationality and was enshrined in law both by the Supreme Soviet and in the constitutions of both the Ukrainian and Russian SSRs.
Crimea and independent Ukraine
The path of Crimea towards being part of an independent, democratic Ukraine begins a few years before the end of Soviet rule, with the return of the Crimean Tatar people from exile in Central Asia to their homelands.
After decades of activism in a harshly authoritarian environment, Crimean Tatars began to return in the late 1980s after over four decades of being displaced.
At the height of Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing reforms, over 200,000 Crimean Tatars were able to return to the peninsula, but in most cases, they had no home to return to. The Crimean Tatar-owned land has long been expropriated by incoming Russian settlers, and many villages have completely been ruined and abandoned.
In late 1991, with the Soviet Union in its death throes, the Verkhovna Rada, which governed all of the Ukrainian SSR at the time with increasing independence from Moscow, declared Ukraine to be an independent sovereign state.
In a nationwide referendum conducted in December, Crimea voted in favor of Ukraine's declaration of independence, with 54% of Crimean voters supporting the move.
In a 1994 agreement known as the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia committed to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and sovereignty and refrain from using or threatening to use force against Ukraine.
In turn, Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal, the third-largest at that time.
The Budapest Memorandum commitments were violated together with the core principles of the United Nations Charter 20 years later.
Upon his election in 2010, Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych signed the Kharkiv Pact, extending Russia's lease on the base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea, in exchange for gas discounts for Ukraine.
Russia has quartered its fleet in Sevastopol since Ukraine's independence, with the existing lease permitting Russian troops to be stationed in the city until 2017. The troops weren't permitted to leave the city without Kyiv's consent.
In the winter of 2013-2014, Yanukovych ordered the beating and shooting of protesters on Independence Square in Kyiv in what became known as the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Meanwhile, there were also pro-Ukrainian protests in Crimea, particularly in the capital city of Simferopol, where the Crimean Tatar community played a large role. These pro-EuroMaidan protests were often met with counter-demonstrations by pro-Russian groups, resulting in tensions and occasional violence.
When Russian troops illegally occupied Crimea just a week after the end of the EuroMaidan Revolution, Russian propaganda began attempting to justify the war.
In a sham referendum in March 2014 that would come to be repeated in four more regions of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow reported 97% of the population in Crimea requested to join Russia.
The sham vote was condemned and declared invalid by the UN General Assembly later that month.
The referendum itself wasn't enough, though.
"For Russians, Crimea cannot be 'ours' without also being 'not theirs,'" writes Wilson.
With the annexation came a new wave of state-sponsored history, revising and minimizing the indigenous status of Crimean Tatars. Russian historian Sergei Cherniakhovskii called the annexation a "Reconquista" and denied that Crimean Tatars were a majority on the peninsula when conquered by Catherine II.
Having occupied Crimea, Russian authorities began a campaign of intimidation and harassment against Crimean Tatars, including arbitrary arrests, torture, and kidnappings.
Just as the Crimean Tatars were accused of being Nazi collaborators, now, many are imprisoned by Russia on fabricated charges of Islamic extremism.
Russian authorities have also targeted Crimean Tatar media outlets, shutting down television channels and newspapers and banning the Mejlis, the representative body of the Crimean Tatar people.
Simultaneously, Russia has followed two other key points in the Soviet playbook since annexation: demographic manipulation and distortion of history.
In addition to the many Ukrainian-identifying people who left Crimea after 2014, around 40,000 Crimean Tatars applied for the status of internally displaced persons, with the real number of those displaced likely significantly higher.
According to former Meijlis Head Mustafa Dzhemilev, between 850,000 and one million Russians moved into Crimea from Russia between 2014-2018.
Returning home
President Zelensky has repeatedly made it clear that Ukraine intends to liberate all occupied territories, including Crimea.
Nine years of Russian occupation, relentless revisionist propaganda, and the skewed demographic balance will make reintegrating Crimea one of the toughest challenges for post-war Ukraine.
Nonetheless, legally, Crimea belongs to Ukraine.
No amount of propaganda about historical lands, Soviet transfers, or the supposed "will of the people" can change the fact that forcibly annexing territory is illegal in all understandings of international law and completely unacceptable in the 21st-century world order.
But more importantly, Crimea's place as an integral part of sovereign Ukraine is a matter of historical justice for the Crimean Tatars, whose bloody and tragic experience of Russian colonialism has aligned their future path with Ukraine.
It is upon these two pillars that Crimea's status as a rightful part of Ukraine firmly stands.
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A shopper browses groceries at a supermarket in Sheffield, UK, May 19, 2023. (photo: Dominic Lipinski/Bloomberg)
There is mounting evidence that corporate profiteering is playing a key role in the latest wave of inflation, with profit margins soaring while real wages continue to fall. To fight inflation, we have to tackle corporate greed.
There is mounting evidence that such corporate profiteering is playing a key role in the latest wave of inflation. Ordinary people, hit by the biggest fall in living standards since records began, are paying the price for this corporate greed. As a movement, we need to step up our fight against greedflation.
Higher inflation since late 2021 has, of course, been affected by big problems in supply chains — a result of post-COVID trade disruption and Russia’s war on Ukraine. Climate change is also impacting food production and prices. But two excellent studies have highlighted how soaring profits are now having a big impact.
The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and Common Wealth think tanks have shown that profits were up 34 percent at the end of 2021 compared to pre-pandemic levels and that nearly all of this increase in profits was due to just twenty-five companies. As the IPPR recently said, “While families struggle to make ends meet, some companies continue to make higher profits from these price hikes. . . . It’s time for policymakers to look at ‘Greedflation’ and prioritise reining in corporate profits, instead of blaming workers’ wages for driving up inflation.”
Unite the Union, using the latest available figures for the largest 350 companies on the London Stock Exchange, recently showed that profit margins for the first half of 2022 were nearly double — 89 percent higher than the same period in 2019 before the pandemic. As Unite general secretary Sharon Graham correctly states, “Make no mistake, profiteering has resulted in the high prices we’ve all had to pay.”
Those organizations deserve great credit for bringing public attention to this debate. It is also very welcome that this focus on greedflation has gone well beyond the center left and is even openly discussed in the financial press, by investor bodies and by central bank officials.
One recent Financial Times article was headlined “‘Greedflation’: profit-boosting markups attract an inevitable backlash.” A Wall Street Journal headline asked, “Why Is Inflation So Sticky? It Could Be Corporate Profits” and went on to explain how “businesses are using a rare opportunity to boost their profit margins.” MoneyWeek, a popular UK financial, ran a piece titled “What should we do about greedflation?” that noted how “Companies’ price hikes have been driving inflation.”
Likewise, London economists and investment strategists are openly saying corporate profits are driving price hikes. Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale, one of the largest financial services groups in Europe, tweeted, “More Greedflation? When are government [sic] going to force a halt to this price gouging?” The chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, stated that “Much of the current inflation is driven by profit expansion,” adding, “Typically, one would expect about 15 percent of inflation to come from margin expansion, but the number today is probably about 50 percent.”
A quick search shows that there is a broad range of officials — from those at UBS to Unite the Union, from Goldman Sachs and the European Central Bank to the US Economic Policy Institute (EPI) — suggesting that over half of all the current price markup is to do with corporate profiteering.
The Tory government, however, refuses to engage in this debate. Instead, it is using this crisis to weaken workers’ wages. In the words of the Bank of England chief economist, people should just “accept they are worse off.”
But wages are obviously not driving inflation. Real wages were down by 3.4 percent last year and continue to fall. The flip side of such wage falls is that “profits reached record highs” during 2022 and “remain historically high,” according to the Financial Times. So, where are the calls from Tory ministers for profit restraint?
If corporations hiking their prices to maximize those profits is now a major cause of the inflation crisis, what should be done about it? In the words of Robert Reich, the prominent US economist and former US secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, “To control inflation, we must take aim at corporate profits, not working people.”
In Parliament, I recently organized a debate on greedflation. Below are the three key ideas I pushed to tackle it.
An Excess-Profits Tax
Firstly, the kind of tax we have seen on the superprofits of oil and gas firms should be extended to all the other sectors of the economy that are making excess profits from this crisis at the expense of ordinary people. That would send a clear message to these companies that their profiteering must stop.
There’s rightly been a huge focus on the eye-watering profits of energy firms, though the government’s windfall tax has failed to deal with this properly and is full of loopholes. But excess profits are evident in other sectors too. For example, the big five banks are reporting soaring profits as they take advantage of higher interest rates, while supermarkets, food manufacturers, and agribusiness have benefitted from profit spikes.
The Treasury should set up a special unit for this excess-profit tax that can go after those all companies that are blatantly profiteering, ripping off customers, fueling inflation, and deepening the cost-of-living crisis. It’s worth noting that even Tory chancellor Rab Butler imposed such a tax in his 1952 budget speech, where he stated that “At a time like this, sacrifices should be equally borne. We are not prepared to see excessive profits being made.”
Price Caps
The government’s Energy Price Guarantee introduced last year, despite its obvious flaw of not making energy prices low enough, was an important break with the idea that the government cannot interfere in market pricing to protect people. Such price controls should be extended to other sectors. It is very welcome that London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for powers to allow him to impose private rent controls in London. Other countries do this, so why not here?
On soaring food prices, the French government has secured a deal with some of the country’s major retailers to place a price cap on staple foods to ease the pressure of inflation on consumers. So when we have the price of popular brands of baby formula soaring by 45 percent, shouldn’t we do that too?
The public backs this. A poll last year showed that 71 percent of voters support price controls that “place limits on the prices that companies can charge for certain goods and services, such as energy, housing and other essential goods,” including on essential foods. This support even includes the overwhelming majority of Tory voters.
Public Ownership
Finally, hardly a day goes by when the effects of the privatization of our public services are out of the news, from the sewage scandal to rip-off rail fares and eye-watering energy prices. Every penny in profits that goes to lining the pockets of these scandal-hit companies is paid for by the public.
Returning energy, rail, water, and other key utilities to public ownership — where they can be run for people, not profit — is the best way of ensuring a permanent end to the profiteering that so many of these privatized companies are gratuitously engaged in.
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Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, who will receive his sentence on Thursday. Seven more Oath Keepers will be sentenced this week and next. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Prosecutors seek 25 years for group’s leader Stewart Rhodes in hearings expected to set standard for punishments to follow
Prosecutors will urge the judge on Thursday to put Rhodes behind bars for 25 years, which would be the harshest sentence by far handed down over the US Capitol attack.
Describing the Oath Keepers’ actions as “terrorism”, the justice department says stiff punishments are crucial.
“The justice system’s reaction to January 6 bears the weighty responsibility of impacting whether January 6 becomes an outlier or a watershed moment,” prosecutors wrote this month.
The hearings will begin on Wednesday with lawyers expected to argue over legal issues and the start of victim impact statements being read.
Rhodes, from Granbury, Texas, and the Florida chapter leader Kelly Meggs – who were convicted of seditious conspiracy in November – will receive their sentences on Thursday. Six more Oath Keepers will be sentenced this week and next.
Rhodes and Meggs were the first people in nearly three decades to be found guilty at trial of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a plot to stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Three co-defendants were acquitted of sedition but convicted of obstructing certification of Biden’s victory. Another four Oath Keepers were convicted of sedition in January.
Prosecutors are seeking sentences ranging from 10 to 21 years for the Oath Keepers besides Rhodes. The judge canceled sentencing scheduled this week for one defendant, Thomas Caldwell of Berryville, Virginia, as he weighs whether to overturn a guilty verdict on two charges.
Prosecutors are urging the judge to apply enhanced penalties for terrorism, arguing the Oath Keepers sought to influence the government through “intimidation or coercion”. Judges have so far rejected a request to apply the so-called “terrorism enhancement” in a handful of January 6 cases but the Oath Keepers case is unlike any others that have reached sentencing.
“The defendants were not mere trespassers or rioters, and they are not comparable to any other defendant who has been convicted for a role in the attack on the Capitol,” prosecutors wrote.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with crimes stemming from the riot. Just over 500 have been sentenced, more than half receiving terms of imprisonment ranging from a week to more than 14 years. The longest sentence came earlier this month, for a man with a long criminal record who attacked police with pepper spray and a chair.
The sentences for the Oath Keepers may signal how much time prosecutors will seek for leaders of the Proud Boys convicted of seditious conspiracy this month. They include the former national chairman Enrique Tarrio, perhaps the most high-profile person charged. The Proud Boys are scheduled to be sentenced in August and September.
Prosecutors made the case that Rhodes and his followers prepared an armed rebellion to keep Biden out of the White House. Over seven weeks, jurors heard how Rhodes rallied followers to fight to defend Trump, discussed the prospect of a “bloody” civil war and warned the Oath Keepers may have to “rise up in insurrection”.
Jurors watched video of Rhodes’s followers wearing combat gear and shouldering through the crowd in military-style stack formation before forcing their way into the Capitol. They saw surveillance video at a Virginia hotel where prosecutors said Oath Keepers stashed weapons for “quick reaction force” teams which never deployed.
Rhodes, who did not go inside the Capitol, told jurors there was never any plan to attack the Capitol and his followers who did went rogue. His lawyers urged the judge to sentence him to roughly 16 months already served. Attorneys argued that Rhodes’s writings and statements are “protected political speech”.
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'It's to make the general public across the nation fully aware of what's happening here in Florida,' the NAACP chair Leon Russell said. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/AFP)
Advisory about state’s ‘active hostility’ is beginning of campaign to engage voters ahead of DeSantis presidential run, leaders say
Leon Russell, chair of the NAACP, also told the Guardian that the group rejected calling for an economic boycott of the state similar to one that ended with South Carolina lowering the confederate flag in 2015.
“Very simply put, we questioned the effectiveness of a boycott,” Russell said. “In Florida, this is about the politics of the situation and so people need to buckle in and organize, and get themselves arranged to deal with elections and the consequences of the elections.
“It’s to make the general public across the nation fully aware of what’s happening here in Florida. The legislative actions that concern us cover a broad gamut, not just Black history, not just public education, but what we consider to be attacks on different groups of people who make up the state of Florida.
“We’re not saying, ‘Don’t come to Florida, don’t spend your money here,’ we’re saying if you are coming, come to an entertainment center that supports diversity, equity and inclusion, go to companies that support all groups of people, corporations that have spoken out in favor of human rights rather than trying to restrict them.”
DeSantis, who has signed into law a raft of legislation targeting African Americans, including an assault on Black voting rights, is planning to launch his long-anticipated presidential run on Wednesday night in conversation with the owner of Twitter, Elon Musk. Russell, however, said the timing of the NAACP advisory was coincidental.
“Whether it be immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, women and reproductive rights, or voting rights, there are any number of issues that the Florida legislature and the governor have taken up, and we believe that all of those things generally the public needs to be aware of,” he said.
“People have to talk about [DeSantis’s] record but they have to talk about the record of every candidate and compare everyone running for office, whether it’s at the primary level or way up.
“In 2024 is not just the presidential election, there are other elections, and we have really one party dominating all the politics in the state of Florida.”
Conservatives reacted swiftly to the NAACP’s advisory on Monday, with DeSantis’s spokesperson calling it “a stunt” and Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida Republican party, offering to help pay for Russell to move out of the state from his home in Tampa.
Russell called Ziegler’s offer “BS”. “Frankly, we didn’t tell anyone to leave,” he said. “We look at this as a way to build participation in the electoral process, and that we do it from the bottom up, not just presidential politics, but local politics as well.
“We said that we would take this into a civic engagement program, that we will collaborate with other groups on all of the issues that we’ve talked about, whether it’s redistricting, whether it’s women’s reproductive rights or whatever.”
The NAACP advisory follows a similar statement issued last month by the advocacy group Equality Florida, which warned of “the risks posed to the health, safety, and freedom of those considering short or long term travel, or relocation to the state” following various anti-LGBTQ+ legislation signed by DeSantis.
But overall, Russell said he is optimistic that voters around the country will take developments in Florida with them to the ballot box next year.
“Ron DeSantis’s campaign against wokeness has awakened the people, and is awakening the people,” he said.
“And that’s the whole point here, to make sure that people are aware, that they’re not asleep, that they’re not apathetic, that they understand the importance of the political process and clearly understand their role in that process.
“That’s our work, not to go out and campaign against Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump or anyone else, but to go out and clearly state what the issues are and what our position is.”
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Anti-abortion protesters march past a Planned Parenthood after a rally on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade in Bloomington, Indiana, in January. (photo: Jeremy Hogan/LightRocket)
Remember that guy who tried to ban mifepristone? He’s back.
Now, a new set of right-wing litigants has sought him out again. This time, an anonymous anti-abortion activist has brought a case that effectively seeks to fine Planned Parenthood hundreds of millions of dollars, and give an enormous chunk of that money to a central figure in the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group. This activist’s lawsuit is backed by Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton.
The case, known as Doe v. Planned Parenthood, alleges that Planned Parenthood and its affiliates in Texas and Louisiana engaged in a years-long scheme to defraud those states’ Medicaid systems. When you add up the money the reproductive health provider allegedly owes, plus the various fines and penalties they could be hit with, Planned Parenthood estimates that they could be ordered to pay as much as $1.8 billion, more than enough to bankrupt Planned Parenthood Federation of America — the national organization that unites Planned Parenthood’s local affiliates — and wipe out its affiliates in Texas and Louisiana.
The lawsuit is also entirely without merit, and it seeks to impose draconian penalties on Planned Parenthood for doing nothing more than expecting these two states to comply with a federal court order.
In 2015, Louisiana attempted to terminate Planned Parenthood as a state-approved Medicaid provider, meaning that it could no longer provide health services to Medicaid patients and be paid for those services by the state. Texas attempted to do the same in 2017. But both of these efforts to cut off Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding were blocked by federal court orders. And so Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas and Louisiana continued to operate as normal while those court orders were in effect.
Then, in 2020, the far right US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that these two states could terminate Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid provider status after all. That decision was joined only by Republican appointees, and its interpretation of federal Medicaid law is at odds with the decisions of five other federal appeals courts. Nevertheless, this 2020 decision meant that Texas could cut off funding to Planned Parenthood (Louisiana reached a settlement with Planned Parenthood which allowed it to continue to serve Medicaid patients).
The Doe lawsuit alleges that Planned Parenthood should have to repay all the money it received for providing care to Medicaid patients in Texas and Louisiana during the period those two states were legally bound to keep working with them — a dubious legal proposition. But that’s not all. They claim that Planned Parenthood is liable for three times the amount of money it received plus a penalty of up to $11,000 for each of the thousands of claims for payment filed with these two states. Hence the massive $1.8 billion figure.
No sensible judge would hold that a litigant can be bankrupted because it acted consistently with a federal court order while that order was in effect. But this case is being heard by Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’s spent his brief time on the bench acting as a rubber stamp for virtually any conservative litigant who comes to him seeking a court order.
A longtime opponent of abortion, birth control, and homosexuality, Kacsmaryk has handed down decisions attacking the right to birth control and attempting to nullify the federal ban on LGBTQ discrimination by health providers. His opinion trying to ban mifepristone faulted the FDA for failing to consider a “study” which found that 77 percent of women who submitted anonymous blog posts to a website called “Abortion Changes You” reported a “negative change.”
Kacsmaryk, in other words, seems to be uniquely incapable of distinguishing what the law actually says from what he wishes that it says. And now he will hear an attack on Planned Parenthood that only gets more ridiculous the deeper one digs into the Doe case.
This whole case arises out of an illegal sting targeting Planned Parenthood
The story of why Texas decided to expel Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program — or, at least, the pretext which the state offered to justify this decision — begins with a fake medical research company created by anti-abortion activists.
In 2013, according to a federal appeals court decision upholding a more than $2 million jury verdict against these activists, a group of longtime anti-abortion activists formed an organization called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). They also created a fake company, known as BioMax.
After a year or two attending conferences under the guise of working at this fake company, the anti-abortion activists secured meetings with a few Planned Parenthood officials, ostensibly to discuss obtaining fetal tissue from the abortion provider that could be used in medical research. It is legal for health providers to donate such tissue to researchers, so long as those providers comply with certain ethical constraints.
But, of course, BioMax is not a real medical research company. And the real purpose of these meetings was not to secure tissue for such research. It was to secretly video record these meetings in order to build a legal and public relations case against Planned Parenthood.
The anti-abortion activists obtained hours of footage. Many of their releases were edited, but the sting did obtain a few statements by Planned Parenthood officials that, at least when viewed out of context, seemed to suggest they were willing to engage in illegal activity. In the complaint filed in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom, for example, the lawyers behind Doe point to a statement where a Planned Parenthood employee seems to say that Planned Parenthood would be willing to alter how they perform abortions in order to ensure that the fetus is “intact” and therefore more likely to produce tissue useful to researchers.
Federal law requires abortion doctors who obtain tissue intended to be used in research to certify that “no alteration of the timing, method, or procedures used to terminate the pregnancy was made solely for the purposes of obtaining the tissue,” so if a Planned Parenthood physician actually did alter how they performed an abortion to ensure that fetal tissue intended for researchers would remain “intact,” that would be illegal.
In any event, after the CMP went public in 2015 with video clips that potentially implicated Planned Parenthood in illegal activity, officials throughout state and federal government launched a simply dizzying array of investigations into the abortion provider.
For the most part, however, those investigations found that the CMP’s evidence didn’t hold up.
In Texas, for example, the Harris County District Attorney’s office, the Texas Rangers, and the Houston Police Department all investigated the Planned Parenthood affiliate that serves Houston, and found no wrongdoing — indeed, a grand jury indicted two of the anti-abortion activists who produced the video, though charges were eventually dropped. Several other states also conducted their own investigations into their local Planned Parenthood affiliates, including red states such as Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, and Missouri, and determined that the abortion provider did not break the law.
In 2019, moreover, a federal court in California ordered the CMP to pay more than $2 million to Planned Parenthood, in part to compensate it for the increased security measures it had to implement because of the anti-abortion activists’ sting. This award was upheld almost in its entirety by a federal appeals court.
Nevertheless, both Texas’s Health and Human Services Commission and Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals pointed to the CMP’s video in their letters informing Planned Parenthood affiliates that they are terminated from those states’ Medicaid programs. Texas’s letter even states outright that “the basis for your termination and the termination of your affiliates stems from an extensive undercover video obtained by the Center for Medical Progress.”
Notably, the only federal judge to evaluate whether this letter offered a valid reason to remove Planned Parenthood from Texas’s Medicaid program, George H.W. Bush appointee Judge Sam Sparks, found that there is “no factual support in the record for the conclusion [Planned Parenthood] violated medical and ethical standards or would be willing to do so.”
The video, Judge Sparks wrote, “features unclear and ambiguous dialogue,” and many of the statements abortion opponents point to in the video to accuse Planned Parenthood of violating the law were made by an individual “who had no personal knowledge of abortion procedures.” With regard to the allegation that Planned Parenthood illegally altered the methods it used to perform abortions in order to yield more intact fetal tissue, Sparks credited the “uncontradicted testimony of Dr. Fine, an experienced OB/GYN who has performed numerous abortions, that it is always clinically desirable to remove the fetus as intact as possible to minimize entries into the uterus.”
Though the Fifth Circuit later reversed Judge Sparks, it did so in an opinion joined only by Republican appointees, and on the basis of a legal argument that was rejected by five other federal appeals courts.
Beginning in February 2021, Texas terminated Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. But that seemingly wasn’t enough of a victory for the CMP activists.
So what does this anti-abortion video have to do with the case in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom?
The name of the party suing Planned Parenthood is not identified in court filings — they filed under the pseudonym “Alex Doe” — but their complaint reveals them as a central figure in the Center for Medical Progress who “conducted an extensive undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood.”
Doe claims that Planned Parenthood violated the federal False Claims Act, a law that is typically invoked by whistleblowers with inside knowledge that a company is defrauding the federal government, as well as related federal and state statutes that target this kind of fraud. (For the moment, the Doe case is on hold, because a case involving the False Claims Act is is currently pending before the Supreme Court. But that case will likely be decided by the end of June, at which point the hold will lift.)
Briefly, the False Claims Act allows a private citizen, known as a “relator,” to sue on behalf of the United States to recover money that a company obtained from the government through fraud. (Texas and Louisiana both have similar statutes allowing relators to sue on behalf of their state governments.) To incentivize whistleblowers to bring such claims, a winning relator typically receives a cut of the money that the government recovers from the fraudulent company, potentially as much as 30 percent.
Thus, in the Doe case, a central figure in an anti-abortion group known primarily for its illegal “investigation” into Planned Parenthood, asks Matthew Kacsmaryk — arguably the most publicly anti-abortion judge in the entire federal judiciary — to seize a simply enormous amount of money from one of the nation’s leading abortion providers. And, should this activist prevail, a significant chunk of this money could go straight into their pocket.
Relators often sue health providers, alleging that these providers defrauded Medicare or Medicaid. Often these relators are doctors or other employees of a large health provider who catch their employer in a fraudulent billing scheme. But these cases typically involve allegations that a provider illegally billed the government for health services it did not actually provide.
Indeed, one of the many ways that the Doe case is unusual is that there is no allegation that Planned Parenthood did not provide the medical services it billed Texas or Louisiana’s Medicaid system for providing. Rather, the Doe relator effectively claims that Planned Parenthood should not have been paid for the services it provided to patients in Texas and Louisiana — and that Planned Parenthood must now pay extraordinarily high penalties because it sought payments from these two states that were explicitly allowed by a federal court order, and did not return that money after the court order was reversed by the Fifth Circuit.
Needless to say, there are quite a few problems with this legal theory. In a brief to Kacsmaryk, for example, Planned Parenthood cites an array of federal court cases establishing that, when a party complies with a federal court’s injunction, it cannot be forced to pay for that compliance if the injunction is later lifted.
As the Fifth Circuit said in In re: J.D. Jewell (1978), “unless a bond has been executed upon the granting of an injunction,” (a “bond” refers to a special court order that requires a party to post money in advance, in case an injunction is later invalidated), “the person enjoined can have no recovery against the moving party.” In other words, the only way Planned Parenthood would have had to return the money is if Judge Sparks initially required them to set aside funds when he issued the injunction against Texas. That didn’t happen.
This rule governs the Doe case because Judge Sparks’s injunction applied to the state of Texas (and a similar injunction from another court bound the state of Louisiana), and the Doe relator claims to be suing on Texas and Louisiana’s behalf, both of which are within the Fifth Circuit.
If Jewell weren’t sufficient reason to terminate this lawsuit, the Supreme Court’s decision in Universal Health Services v. Escobar (2016) also casts a cloud of doubt over many of Doe’s claims. That case held that certain False Claims Act suits may proceed if the “defendant submits a claim for payment that makes specific representations about the goods or services provided, but knowingly fails to disclose the defendant’s noncompliance with a statutory, regulatory, or contractual requirement.”
In such a case, “liability may attach if the omission renders those representations misleading.”
But the Doe relators do not claim that Planned Parenthood made misleading claims about the specific services they provided to Medicaid patients — services that are unrelated to abortion because Texas and Louisiana’s Medicaid programs generally do not cover abortion. At most, the Doe relators may have demonstrated that, while Planned Parenthood’s health providers were lawfully providing non-abortion related care to Medicaid patients, some other officials within Planned Parenthood may have said they would violate legal and ethical constraints on collecting fetal tissue for use in medical research. That’s not enough to prevail under Escobar.
Additionally, the False Claims Act requires a relator to show that a defendant “knowingly” made a false statement to the government in order to obtain a payment. But there’s no plausible allegation that Planned Parenthood knew it was seeking illegal payments when it sought money that it was entitled to under a federal court order.
It is very difficult to imagine, in other words, that this lawsuit would have legs if it were heard by a fair and impartial judge — a less biased judge would almost certainly hold that the case should be tossed out before it reaches a jury. But it is being heard by Matthew Kacsmaryk, and that means that Planned Parenthood could be ordered to pay a simply astonishing amount of money at trial.
Kacsmaryk will keep sowing chaos and distrust in the judiciary until a higher power stops him
You may wonder why Kacsmaryk, who is one of hundreds of federal district judges strewn about the country, hears so many cases involving abortion, sexuality, and similar lawsuits brought by parties who share his far-right stance on these issues. Federal judges, after all, often sit on the bench for years or even decades without hearing a single case about abortion.
The reason is, under a local order governing case assignments filed in Kacsmaryk’s Texas-based court, 100 percent of all lawsuits filed in Amarillo, Texas, are automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk. This means that right-wing litigants who want to ensure that their lawsuit will be heard by a sympathetic ear can guarantee this outcome simply by bringing their suit in Amarillo.
Worse, Kacsmaryk’s decisions appeal to the Fifth Circuit, which is dominated by Republican appointees who frequently use their authority to tear down institutions loathed by the political right.
That means that, when Kacsmaryk rubber stamps a court order requested by a far-right litigant, the defendant forced to comply with this order often has little recourse unless they can convince the Supreme Court to take up their case — and even if the Supreme Court wasn’t itself dominated by very conservative Republicans, the Court typically hears only about 60-80 of the over 8,000 cases brought to its attention each term.
The likelihood that a higher court will step in every time Kacsmaryk issues an error-laden order punishing a left-leaning litigant, in other words, is quite small.
And the cost of litigating a federal case, especially if the case is appealed to multiple higher courts, can be astronomical. In the California litigation that ended with a more than $2 million verdict against the Center for Medical Progress, for example, Planned Parenthood incurred nearly $13 million in attorneys’ fees.
Admittedly, the judge in that case ordered the CMP to pay for Planned Parenthood’s lawyers, so that bill will not be paid by the abortion provider. But there is obviously no guarantee that Kacsmaryk — or his conservative superiors on the Fifth Circuit or Supreme Court — will hand down a similar order if Planned Parenthood (or any other party forced to defend itself in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom) ultimately prevails in its lawsuit.
The fact that virtually any litigant can ensure their lawsuit will be heard by this biased judge, in other words, places a sword of Damocles over the head of pretty much any organization that is reviled by conservatives.
It should be noted that the Supreme Court could solve this problem at any time. The federal Rules Enabling Act permits the justices to write rules of procedure for all federal courts, so the justices could write a new rule that effectively requires cases filed in Amarillo to be assigned randomly to one of the many judges who sit on Kacsmaryk’s court, or that allows a party like Planned Parenthood to request a transfer of their case when they are the victim of this kind of judge-shopping.
So far, they haven’t bothered.
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Nette Reed checks on Desi Hurd, 62, near the Human Services Campus in Phoenix, where there are several major shelters, a medical center and respite centers. (photo: Caitlin O'Hara/The Washington Post)
Cities are building special shelters for the old, and shelters are hiring trained staff to handle a wave of aging baby boomers
Instead, the grandmother and former autoworker can be found most mornings in a food line, or seeking shade under the awning of a mobile street clinic. At night, she sleeps on a floor mat at a homeless shelter. She laments the odors of human waste outside and the thieves who have victimized her repeatedly.
“My wallet’s gone,” she said. “My purse was stolen.”
She hardly stands out from the dozens of seniors using wheelchairs and walkers at a complex of homeless shelters near downtown Phoenix, or from the white-haired denizens of tents in the surrounding streets — a testament to a demographic surge that is overwhelming America’s social safety net.
Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless in the United States during at least part of 2019, the most recent reliable federal count available. They represent a particularly vulnerable segment of the 70 million Americans born after World War II known as the baby boom generation, the youngest of whom turn 59 this year.
Advocates for homeless people in many big cities say they have seen a spike in the number of elderly homeless, who have unique health and housing needs. Some communities, including Phoenix and Orange County in California, are racing to come up with novel solutions, including establishing senior shelters and hiring specially trained staff.
“It’s just a catastrophe. This is the fastest-growing group of people who are homeless,” said Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and a vulnerable populations researcher at the University of California at San Francisco.
The largest shelter provider in Arizona, Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), is rushing to open an over-55 shelter in a former Phoenix hotel this summer with private rooms and medical and social services tailored for old people. The facility will open with 40 beds and eventually reach a capacity of 170, but that will barely begin to address the problem of keeping older people safe and healthy. CASS says it served 1,717 older adults in 2022, an increase in one year of 43 percent.
In Orange County, a Medicaid plan is creating a 119-bed, first-of-its-kind unit that essentially will serve as an assisted-living facility exclusively for homeless people, said Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director for the plan, CalOptima Health.
“The current shelter system cannot accommodate the physical needs of this population,” she said.
In San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Anchorage, seniors also are staying for months in respite centers that were meant to provide a short-term stay for homeless people to recuperate. In Boise, shelter operators are hiring staff with backgrounds in long-term care to help homeless clients manage their daily needs while living for long stretches in hotels.
The homeless population is famously difficult to count. People 55 and older represented 16.5 percent of America’s homeless population of 1.45 million in 2019, according to the most recent reliable data. Dennis Culhane, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said the population of homeless seniors 65 and older will double or even triple 2017 levels in some places before peaking around 2030.
“It’s in crisis proportions. It’s in your face,” Culhane said. “Average citizens can see people in wheelchairs, people in walkers, people with incontinence and colostomy bags making their living out of a tent.”
A devastating combination of factors is to blame for the rising problem. People in the second half of the baby boom, who came of age during recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, face distinct economic disadvantages, Culhane said. Housing costs are soaring in many cities. The nation’s system of nursing homes and assisted-living facilities is not equipped to handle the needs of homeless people, who suffer from high rates of substance abuse and mental illness.
Before Phoenix officials began clearing some streets of people this month, there were about 900 people living in a few square blocks known as “The Zone” and another 900 or so living in emergency shelters on the gated Human Services Campus in the same neighborhood, shelter operators said.
In Maricopa County, which encompasses the Phoenix metro area, an annual count in January documented more than 2,000 homeless people 55 and above, and nearly a third of those were 65 or older.
Living on the street ravages the human body, street doctors and advocates say. Homeless people contract chronic diseases and other geriatric problems much earlier than average. But long waits for housing and a lack of specialized care expose them to a continued onslaught on their health.
After treatment for an acute illness, hospitals often discharge homeless patients, who wind up back in shelters or even back into their sidewalk tents and makeshift lean-tos, in what health practitioners in Phoenix ruefully call “treat-and-street.”
The threat of relapses and rehospitalizations is large. Aid workers said seniors’ medicine is often stolen by younger homeless people on the streets. It is not unusual to assist clients with dementia.
Staff at CASS pass out adult diapers. Some unhoused seniors wait in the CASS shelter for a year or more while they wait placement in subsidized housing, assisted living or a nursing home. But CASS is not licensed to provide nursing-home-level care, and staff are not trained as nursing assistants. So patients cannot remain if they have advanced geriatric care needs and require help with activities of daily living such as dressing, eating and going to the bathroom.
“They need a higher level of care than the current shelter system can provide,” said Lisa Glow, chief executive of CASS. “There have been times here where we had to turn people away, where it’s really heartbreaking. They come in a wheelchair, late at night, and they can’t take care of themselves.”
In those instances, staff work to get an alternative space as quickly as possible, such as a hotel, she said.
In Phoenix, summer heat is on the way, which poses a particularly grave threat of dehydration, heat stroke and burns from bare feet — arms and legs coming into contact with blisteringly hot concrete and asphalt.
“Quite a lot of our patients have mobility issues,” said Mark Bueno, a primary care doctor who treats patients living on the streets from a mobile clinic run by Circle the City, a local homeless aid group. “I have patients in their 80′s out here.”
In years of researching homelessness, Kushel has catalogued the countless paths to sudden homelessness for older adults. It often involves the death of a spouse or parent, which means income is lost and rent and mortgages can no longer be paid, she said.
Other long-term, chronically homeless people are simply aging on the street.
Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, will only pay for a long-term nursing home or assisted living bed if someone is unable to care for themselves. Many elderly homeless people are not debilitated enough to meet that criteria.
“That’s where the gap in the system is,” said Regan Smith, long-term care ombudsman program director in Maricopa County.
A pinball effect takes hold, said health-care providers, shelter operators and advocates. Homeless people bounce from homeless shelter to hospital, then to a nursing home for a short-term recuperation stay. Once that short-term stay ends, nursing homes must decide if the person is infirm enough to qualify for long-term care. If the answer is no, they must leave the nursing home, starting the cycle over again.
In New Mexico, 69-year-old Steven Block, suffering from memory problems, ended up homeless in the lobby of a Coyote South hotel in Santa Fe this year after being evicted from a nursing home in Taos, Block’s family members said.
Block, a former reporter for a community newspaper in southern Colorado, abused alcohol and suffered a fall near his home in Raton, N.M, said Terrie Gulden, his brother in law. He suffered hip and shoulder fractures and was treated in an Albuquerque hospital, where doctors discovered he had dementia, Gulden said. He transferred to the Taos facility in June 2022 but was discharged with no notification to the family on the last day of January, Gulden said. Block, who had some socks and a change of underwear in a garbage bag, was unable to tell his family how he ended up in Santa Fe.
“I had no idea that was happening until I got a call from a Santa Fe hotel that he was in their lobby. He had no money, no papers, no discharge papers. He was just out on the street,” Gulden said. “I can’t believe that this stuff happens across the country. I know it does, but when it happens to you, it just floors you. It’s unbelievable."
After two weeks in a homeless shelter in Santa Fe, the local fire department gave Block a ride to the Albuquerque airport, Gulden said, so Gulden could pick up him up and bring him back to Minnesota to be near family.
He was lucky to have relatives who could whisk him to a safer environment. Block now resides in a subsidized apartment. He has family and paid help assisting him with meals and housecleaning.
For people in Block’s circumstances without family support, some shelters utilize special units called “respite" centers.
Respite centers now number about 150 around the country, up from 80 in 2016, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. They often are funded at least in part by local hospitals that want to avoid discharging homeless people back onto the streets.
They are designed to help homeless people recuperate for a few weeks after a health crisis. But with nowhere else to go, elderly people tend to stay far longer.
In Anchorage during the pandemic, shelter operators took over a hockey arena to provide socially distanced quarters for homeless people. But they quickly found that elderly people with wheelchairs and walkers could not get up the stairs from the arena floor up to the mezzanine, where food was served. It highlighted the need for a vastly expanded respite unit for homeless elderly and disabled.
Catholic Social Services has opened an expanded version of a respite center, what they call a “complex care” facility in a former hotel, where more than 65 percent of current residents are 55 and older.
Still, residents are free to come and go, which poses problems when caring for people with dementia. One man in his 70s walked out in January and was found at the airport several days later, facility staff said. He told police he was waiting for a flight. He didn’t have a ticket.
“He had a coat on. He had a beanie on. He was well-prepared for the weather conditions. But I have no idea how he got out to the airport,” said Jessie Talivaa, program coordinator for complex care at Catholic Social Services. He did not recognize Talivaa when Talivaa showed up to retrieve him. “I said, `How about we go get a cup of coffee?' and I got him a cup of coffee and brought him straight home.”
Now the man is on a waiting list for an assisted-living facility in Anchorage. Talivaa said he is hopeful the man will get into the new place within a few months.
Yet another problem arises, however, when people approach death while in respite care, said Kushel, the San Francisco medical school professor and advocate.
“Medical respite was not intended to be palliative care, hospice care, end-of-life care,” she said, “yet some respite programs are starting to provide that service because there is nowhere else for these folks to go.”
Phoenix street physician Mark Bueno said ambulances pick up a dead person from a tent in The Zone about once a week. Reasons vary, but the combination of aging bodies, brutal living conditions and drugs are often deadly. Nette Reed, an employee of the Human Services Campus, walks the streets early in the morning performing wellness checks on seniors.
Cheryl Sanders, 59, huddled in a pup tent, said she had returned to her spot on the street after being discharged from the hospital two weeks before, following what she said was a second heart attack. It was already hot out at about 8 a.m., and she was surrounded by heavy blankets. She appeared thin. She gratefully accepted water bottles.
She told Reed that she was ready to give up her tent and come inside a shelter, even though she said she has not gotten along with people in the shelter in the past.
“I’m tired,” Sanders said.
“You know I’ve been itching to get you off these streets,” Reed said.
Herron, in two interviews on consecutive days, said she has moved back and forth between her native Mississippi and Phoenix several times in recent years, traveling by Greyhound bus to be near family. Herron said she has endured sporadic homelessness for years.
She lived in an assisted-living facility for a time in 2022, she said, but even at the subsidized rate it consumed $600 of her $800-per-month Social Security payment. She moved in with a nephew, but that didn’t last and she wound up at one of several shelters at the Human Services Campus. Early this month she was waiting to move into a subsidized apartment that would cost her one-third of her monthly Social Security income.
It would probably leave enough for cable TV payments, she said.
For now, for diversion, she said she likes to ride the light rail cars that glide through downtown Phoenix. She enjoys hearing kids laughing on the train. She wears motivational wristbands; one says “Never Give Up,” the other says “One Day at a Time.”
Tears well near the surface. They overflow when talk turns to her adult children.
“They see me at Christmas,” Herron said, her voice quavering. “They call me Mama.”
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Ed and Clare Lahey at their home in Lee, Massachusetts, May 21, 2023. The Laheys suffer from several illnesses that they feel came from the PCB contaminants in the Housatonic River. (photo: Lori Grinker/The Intercept)
A proposed PCB dump site in the town of Lee has residents and town leaders seeking options to stop the plan.
Lahey has had bladder cancer twice, 15 years apart; her husband is wracked with illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease even though he never smoked. She believes that proximity to the river is to blame for their health problems, and she’s not alone: The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, warns that the river’s PCBs are likely to cause cancer in humans, and a Massachusetts Department of Public Health study on the cancer link is scheduled to be released this year.
“Why don’t we just move away?” Lahey asked. “Well, because he’s 85 and I’m 82, and we want to finish out our lives here.”
Lee is a working-class town in the heart of the Berkshires, a rural region near the New York border known for its scenic beauty. It’s also known, among locals, as a place polluted by PCBs, dangerous industrial chemicals manufactured by Monsanto and used by General Electric in the electric transformers the company manufactured and serviced. GE ran a plant in the county’s largest city, Pittsfield, and dumped PCBs into the local Housatonic River from 1932 to 1977, when Monsanto ceased production. In 1979, the EPA made PCBs illegal.
After decades of efforts by local and state leaders and federal agencies like the EPA, GE in 2000 began cleaning the river and nearby areas. But the latest round of dredging, expected to begin in the next few years, would put a dump site in Lee. Residents of the town as well as local leaders — including the Housatonic Environmental Action League and the Housatonic River Initiative, who are challenging the plan in the First Circuit Court of Appeals — are resisting the decision.
The town has filed a lawsuit against Monsanto as part of an attempt to find an alternative site outside of the region.
The lawsuit is asking for compensatory and natural resource damages and for a court order “that will require Monsanto to deposit funds awarded by a jury into an escrow account so that Lee has the funds to move the 2,000,000 tons of PCB soil and mud projected to be dumped in Lee to an out of state location.” Lee Select Board chair Bob Jones told The Intercept that the town doesn’t have a specific site in mind, “although there are certainly licensed sites in existence.”
“We’re hoping if we can show that Monsanto produced these toxic items, cancer-causing PCBs, that if we can come up with enough money to have that, we can then leverage GE taking the stuff out of the area and not having a waste dump in the town of Lee,” Jones said. “That’s really what we’re looking for.”
Bayer, the pharmaceutical giant that bought Monsanto in 2018, rejects the lawsuit completely. The company’s director of U.S. external communications, Nicole Hayes, told The Intercept in an emailed comment that Bayer believes the lawsuit “is meritless.”
“There is no legal basis for imposing liability on Monsanto for the lawful sale of PCBs into the stream of commerce more than four decades ago, over which Monsanto had no control,” Hayes said. “Furthermore, Monsanto ceased its lawful production of PCBs more than 45 years ago and never disposed of PCBs in or near the Town.” The lawsuit does not accuse Monsanto of dumping PCBs, only of manufacturing them, and makes clear that GE was the offending party for the chemical disposal.
Despite Monsanto’s claims, a memo published by the Poison Papers project in 2017 shows that the company was aware of the problems posed by PCBs at least as early as 1969, eight years before it stopped producing the chemicals. The memo shows that Monsanto knew that PCBs could have detrimental effects on people’s health and that the evidence for its persistence in the environment was “beyond questioning.” A series of potential solutions was offered, including immediate cessation of PCB production; the company, apparently, chose the “do nothing” option.
Lee isn’t the first municipality to take Monsanto to court over its production of PCBs that other companies later dumped. Similar efforts in Washington state, California, Missouri, and elsewhere have had varied levels of success: Some cases have been settled, some have resulted in the company being ordered to pay restitution, and others have been found in Monsanto’s favor.
“I feel like we have a good chance of winning because this is so clearly unjust,” Lahey said.
In 2016, the EPA made an agreement with GE and other nearby towns that GE would dredge the river and remove the contaminated soil out of the county. No sooner was the agreement made, Jones said, than GE went to court to change the parameters. That led to a mediated agreement, done in private with representatives from the affected towns — Lee, Pittsfield, Lenox, Great Barrington, and Sheffield — the EPA, GE, and environmental groups including the Berkshire Environmental Action Team, or BEAT, that resulted in the dump site being placed in Lee.
Jones and Lahey are among the Berkshire residents in and outside of Lee who feel that what they see as the secrecy of the process — former Select Board member Patricia Carlino was the town’s representative — did a disservice to the people of the town.
“To mediate, negotiate, and seal a deal without any knowledge or input from the general public is a failure of representative government,” Jones told The Intercept.
The agreement was signed by the Select Board after 18 months of closed-door sessions and without consulting the rest of the town, something that still angers anti-dump residents. Under the agreement with GE and the EPA, Lee will get $25 million from GE in exchange for the dump site. If the town rejects the site, the funding is off the table.
“A PCB dump was imposed on a town of only about 5,500 people, plus or minus, without their knowledge,” Jones said.
Jane Winn, BEAT executive director, agrees that Monsanto should be held responsible for its role in producing PCBs. She remembers a time when the river and surrounding wetlands were in far worse shape than they are today, due to the chemical’s corrosive damage. The river used to change color and catch fire, she said.
Despite Winn’s support for the lawsuit, she doesn’t think it’s likely to succeed. Winn, as BEAT executive director, was a signatory to the consent decree putting the dump in Lee. She told The Intercept that while she’d like to see a more permanent remedial solution, “the site they’ve chosen, if it has to be in the Berkshires, is a reasonable site.”
Winn said that the dump in Lee is a “downside” to the cleanup but that the trade-off of having low-level contaminant soil put in the town site is the compromise in order to get to that point. She understands that Lee feels it’s been treated unfairly but urged perspective: “They’re getting more sediment out of the river in Lee because of it.”
There’s some outright local opposition to Lee’s lawsuit. The Berkshire Eagle, in an opinion piece taking issue with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s written support for the Lee effort, questioned what the next move would be if the dump were stopped and endorsed the site as an imperfect but ultimately necessary solution to the river’s pollution.
“While the dump disproportionately affects Lee (and Lenox Dale), the fate of a comprehensive Housatonic cleanup plan matters to a much broader part of the Berkshire community,” the paper’s editorial board wrote in the unsigned opinion piece. “Whatever the intensity of the understandable hard feelings in Lee, it’s reasonable to ask what the procedural limits of reflexive opposition are here.”
It’s not lost on Jones that the site is in the poorest town of the towns involved in the discussions. “It’s a working-class town,” Jones said. “It was a mill town, but the mills are gone.”
“We’re the ones who have to bear the burden of it,” he added.
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