Harry breaks down the sentencing guidelines that will be determining how much prison time Donald Trump receives should he be convicted of the crimes laid out in the indictment unsealed late last week.
Saturday, June 17, 2023
Donald Trump Makes SMOKING GUN CONFESSION in New HIGHLY INCRIMINATING Posts
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FOCUS: Ben Hodges | How to Know Whether Ukraine's Counteroffensive Is Working
17 June 23
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Confusion is the only thing you can count on during a moment like this. During three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a brigade commander and a director of operations, I often had great difficulty visualizing and understanding what was going on in a fight, even with the latest command-and-control systems.
And I certainly was never involved in a fight as large, violent and disorienting as the battles underway in Ukraine. Reports from field commanders to their leaders are typically incomplete and confusing. Drones help, but technology will never fully succeed in lifting the “fog of war.”
Although Western audiences justifiably want to understand how the fight is going in real time, we should remember the axiom that first reports are never as good or as bad as they sound. I think the Ukrainians can and will win this fight. But the summer is likely to be long and difficult. We will not be able to judge how successful the counteroffensive has been for quite some time.
That said, here are some things to keep in mind in these early days.
First, you will know it when you see it.
While the counteroffensive has been launched, I do not think the main attack has yet started. The Ukrainian general staff will want to keep the Russians guessing about where it will take place for as long as possible.
So far, it appears that the Ukrainians are still probing for vulnerabilities they can exploit and reinforcing local tactical successes. As a result, a few villages have been liberated, and about 100 square kilometers of territory have been recaptured. We will know the main attack has started when we see large groupings of armored forces — two or three armored brigades attacking in one direction.
How large is a brigade? Ukrainian tank battalions usually contain 31 tanks, and armored infantry battalions have a similar number of armored vehicles. Each battalion will also contain additional armor carrying engineers, air defense and logistics. An armored brigade would have four or five tank and armored infantry battalions. A typical Ukrainian brigade therefore is likely to have at least 250 armored vehicles of different types.
To date, we have not yet seen these kinds of large armored formations hit the battlefield.
Second, watch the Russian lines.
The Russians have built hundreds of miles of trenches (of varying quality), minefields, antitank ditches and “dragon’s teeth” obstacle belts. These defenses will undoubtedly present challenges to Ukraine’s attack.
But defenses are only as good as the soldiers occupying those trenches and covering those obstacles. I’m waiting to see if the Russians fighting from them are more effective in defense than they were on the attack. The vicious infighting we see between the various Russian military leaders and mercenary bosses highlights the lack of cohesion on the Russian side.
I expect Ukraine to seek to exploit this. A breakthrough along any part of the line could end up being catastrophic for Russian forces as chaos sets in.
Third, don’t over-interpret Ukrainian losses.
Breaking through enemy lines is never easy. Ukraine will suffer setbacks. Images of at least one wrecked Leopard tank and several Bradley Fighting Vehicles got a lot of visibility on Twitter and subsequently in media outlets. Such images are not a reliable indicator of how the fight is going. But they are a reminder that a cakewalk victory is unlikely.
And fourth — perhaps the most vital metric of all — watch how support evolves in Western capitals.
Ukraine is in an existential fight. How long it takes and how many lives it costs greatly depends on what additional support the West offers. Ukraine will need to be resupplied as the war grinds on. The Biden administration announced earlier this week that it will provide an additional $325 million for air defense, artillery, antitank weapons and armored vehicles. This is good.
But longer-range weapons, such as the Storm Shadow missiles that Britain delivered earlier this year, would be even more useful as they would shorten the war. President Biden has been hesitant to send the similar MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS, pronounced “attack ’ems”) to Ukraine. I hope he reconsiders.
The Biden administration has said it has given Ukraine what it thinks it needs to succeed, suggesting it is up to Ukraine to make maximum use of what it has. This kind of stance can lead to a passive complacency — watching and waiting for battlefield results.
But what Ukraine needs right now are not spectators. It needs ATACMS.
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Andy Borowitz | Official Documents Mysteriously Missing From Miami Courthouse
15 June 23
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Harland Dorrinson, head of security for the federal courthouse, said that the documents were “safe and sound” in the morning but had “suddenly disappeared” in the afternoon.
“These documents belong to the court and cannot be legally removed from the court,” he said. “The person who did so has committed a serious crime.”
Dorrinson acknowledged that he and his team have “no leads whatsoever” as to the identity of the perpetrator and asked the public for their assistance in cracking the case.
“Whoever took these papers has no respect for the property of the federal government,” he said. “Who would do something like that?”
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Light illuminates part of the Supreme Court building in Washington, Nov. 16, 2022. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Nina Totenberg and Meghanlata Gupta | The Supreme Court Leaves Indian Child Welfare Act Intact
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Excerpt: "The U.S. Supreme Court, defying predictions, upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act on Thursday, though it left unresolved a key argument raised by the challengers."
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'Many people don't leave their homes just because the scumbags will make off with everything.' (photo: Gaelle Girbes/Getty)
“Many people don’t leave their homes just because the scumbags will make off with everything.”
Belgorod Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov got an earful about the “outrageous” behavior of troops Thursday in response to an update about everything local authorities are doing to help those who’ve fled certain villages in the region as the war spilled over into Russian territory, the independent media outlet Govorit NeMoskva reports.
“Soldiers of the Russian Federation are finding their way into many homes (even though an emergency regime has not been introduced and they have no right to enter private homes),” one woman who identified herself as a resident of Novaya Tavolzhanka wrote in response to Gladkov's post on social media. Independent media outlets report that they verified the woman as a local resident.
“They are living in our homes, leading an outrageous lifestyle, with alcohol and other things leaving behind garbage and filth, bathrooms and houses are fouled up, personal belongings and property are stolen,” she said.
“An ATV was stolen from our garage, which is now seen often around the outskirts of Novaya Tavolzhanka. In addition, people complained about a stolen trailer,” she wrote. “We don’t want our houses, which have already suffered from the actions of the armed forces of Ukraine, to now be a haven for the disgraces of our defenders!”
Another resident also chimed in to say many locals were afraid to leave their homes for fear of their belongings being stolen: “Many people don’t leave their homes just because the scumbags will make off with everything, even a hair straightener.”
Another resident wrote that he’d gone home for the first time on Wednesday only to find two houses broken into, with smashed windows and doors busted in.
“Everything was turned upside down, they were looking for small precious things, some of them were stolen, there were acts of vandalism in one of the houses, TVs were broken, furniture was ripped up. The soldiers are obviously living in the house, there are signs of [someone] living in the house,” he wrote. “The furniture is piled up, they are probably getting ready to take it. … Please protect our home from further looting.”
Several other residents fumed at the governor over not receiving the payouts promised by the government to relocate. Those who were ordered to evacuate from certain areas have complained that they were later billed by authorities for the evacuations.
Russian troops sent to Ukraine gained a reputation for looting from homes in the territories they claimed to be “liberating,” with some caught on camera carrying away toilets, household appliances, and electronics that they allegedly sold or gave as gifts to loved ones back home.
The independent media outlet MediaZona reported last May that in the first three months of the war alone, Russian troops sent 58 tons of goods home.
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Packages move along a conveyor belt at the Amazon.com Inc. fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey, June 7, 2018. (photo: Bess Adler/Bloomberg)
Working at Amazon is a nightmare, some workers say. It doesn’t have to be.
It really needs no introduction. Amazon is a corporate giant with 1.5 million employees, most of which are in the Teamsters’ bread and butter industry: logistics, meaning warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Only, these workers are almost entirely non-union. But the problem with Amazon is not just its own non-union pay and working conditions. Left unchecked, Amazon may just start a race to the bottom for the working class as a whole.
The Teamsters, alongside other unions and worker collectives, are trying to change that. And in April earlier this year, 84 of Amazon’s delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California joined Teamsters Local 396 and won a first contract. This is a huge deal, but it’s not an uncomplicated victory.
In this episode, you’ll hear from one of those Amazon drivers, Arturo Solezano, about their working conditions, and why he and his now-union siblings joined the Teamsters. We also spoke with Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine, who unpacked why Amazon is a threat that needs to be taken seriously by the Teamsters and the rest of organized labor.
Finally, you’ll hear an update on UPS contract negotiations from Greg Kerwood, a package car delivery driver from Teamsters Local 25 in Boston.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Teddy Ostrow: I’m gonna make this intro pretty quick because we have a lot of ground to cover. In this episode we’re unpacking the existential threat - to UPSers, to the Teamsters, to unions in general, and the working class as a whole: Amazon.
It really needs no introduction. Amazon is a corporate giant with 1.5 million employees, on pace to become the largest private sector employer in the country. And the majority of that workforce is in the logistics industry. Warehouse workers, delivery drivers. And surprise, surprise, they’re mostly unorganized.
But Teamsters, alongside other unions and worker collectives, are trying to change that. Indeed, the Teamsters has its own Amazon Organizing Division, with organizers around the country, which it launched a few years ago.
And in April earlier this year, 84 of Amazon’s delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California joined Teamsters Local 396 and won a first contract. Now, this is a huge deal.
For this episode, we spoke to one of those drivers, Arturo Solezano, about the working conditions at Amazon and why he and his now-union-siblings joined the Teamsters.
But before you hear from Arturo, we’re gonna zoom out with Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine, who is one of the key reporters covering Amazon workers’ conditions and organizing over the past three years. She’s gonna help us understand why Amazon is a threat that needs to be taken seriously by the Teamsters and the rest of organized labor. And she also recently wrote an excellent article about the UPS contract campaign that you should definitely read and I’ll put in the description.
Now, before we even get to Alex, it’s been a little while since we discussed the state of the contract campaign and negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters. I spoke to Local 25 UPS rank and file, Greg Kerwood, in Boston this past weekend about what’s been happening since negotiations at the national level started.
But we did speak before Monday, June 5, when the international called for an in-person strike authorization vote.
That means that UPSers at the gates of their hubs, at their union halls. will be voting on whether or not the union has the permission to call a strike in the event there is no new contract by August 1.
The results will be known June 16. The IBT is recommending UPSers vote yes.
Now, how this vote goes - what percentage of UPSers vote yes and what percentage of the workforce participates at all - it’s an important test of how successful the contract campaign has been over the past 10 months — how successful locals and rank and file around the country have been at organizing their ranks, educating Teamsters on the stakes of this contract, and why the threat of a strike is the greatest leverage any union has in bargaining.
Now, it should be clear from this show that many locals are more than prepared, but I think it’d be disingenuous not to note that it’s been clear in my reporting that there are also many out there that will have their work cut out for them between now and June 16.
We’ll have to wait and see just how ready the Teamsters are to take on UPS. And you better hope that they are. If there’s an episode that makes that any clearer, it’s this one.
Now for an update with Greg Kerwood.
Teddy Ostrow: Greg Kerwood, thanks for joining me on the upsurge.
Greg Kerwood: Thanks for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Teddy Ostrow: So I just wanna make clear to everyone, Greg is not speaking on behalf of the Teamsters National Negotiating Committee. He’s just an informed rank and file member of the International Steering Committee of the Teamsters for Democratic Union, also local 25 in Boston.
He’s a union activist and he does a lot of work organizing and educating his union siblings. So that’s why he’s gonna give us an update. and since we last reported on this podcast, the supplemental or the regional agreements, they weren’t going too well. They’ve since almost been completed entirely.
There’s two left. and of course all of them will have to be voted on by the membership. But Greg, can you bring us up to date? We’re, we’re speaking on the weekend right before negotiations. We’ll start up again. there was a week break, but perhaps you can summarize just how things have been going as far as we know since negotiations started at the national level?
Greg Kerwood: Well, so far, it seems to be a case of more of the same from the company. I know our committee put forth the elimination of the 22-4 position. I’m not sure how that worked out or what the company’s response was. They also spent a week discussing technology issues.
Again, I don’t really know for certain how the company responded or whether any of that was resolved. I know there is an agreement that came out this week, to limit some of the package flow into the SurePost system. Not too many specifics, but in general it seems to be very slow going.
There seems to be a lot of posturing on the part of the company. Not a whole lot of seriousness, still. So the clock is continuing to tick down. We’re down under 60 days at this point. So it’s really just, it seems to be more the same. I don’t think the company has really taken this seriously since the beginning of negotiations, and it appears as though they’re continuing down that path.
Teddy Ostrow: So we’re talking about some progress made perhaps on basic technology. On everyone’s mind, of course, are those inward facing cameras. SurePost, just so everyone knows, basically UPS is giving Teamster work away to the post office. And the big demands, 22-4’s, PVDs wages, those sorts of things, we’re gonna have to wait and see.
But given what’s happened so far, Greg, which doesn’t seem like very much, what’s your perspective on the possibility of a strike? We’re speaking eight weeks out from contract expiration. Is there a chance that you believe they’ll get to everything or. Are you guys barreling towards hitting the picket line?
Greg Kerwood: I would say that given the current pace of negotiations, a strike almost seems inevitable. Now obviously it’s in the company’s hands if they want to change that approach and come to the table and address issues in a more reasonable and more timely fashion. I haven’t seen any indication of them doing that.
Perhaps that will change and perhaps, you know, the laundry list of major issues that we have can be addressed, I believe. I think our proposals, to my knowledge, are all there and ready and waiting.
It’s just a question of whether the company wants to take them seriously and bargain in good faith. So it is still possible that that could be done, but if things continue at the current pace and with the current attitude of the company, I think it very likely that we will be on strike come August 1st.
Teddy Ostrow: Greg Kerwood., thanks for giving us that update and offering your perspective.
Greg Kerwood: My pleasure. Thank you.
Teddy Ostrow: Alex Press, thanks for joining me on the Upsurge.
Alex Press: Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Teddy Ostrow: So I wanna open with the threat of Amazon. Why should Teamsters, UPSers, but really the broader working class, be concerned about this one company?
Alex Press: Yeah, so I mean to say Amazon is just one company sort of downplays how big of a scale we’re talking about when we talk about Amazon as well as the different kind-of core functions Amazon has, different parts of its business. Amazon is a gigantic employer of warehouse workers as well as delivery drivers, though, you know, important caveat that we’ll get into, which is, those delivery drivers are not direct employees of Amazon. This is a gigantic workforce, the second biggest private employer in the United States, but you know, the joke I make is that Amazon kind of functions as a pacesetter of sorts, a vanguard of capital, if you will. What Amazon can get away with, other companies will then follow in that direction.
That often, quite literally, is true in that Amazon executives will go on to be hired as consultants, especially in human resources for other corporations, who will pay them gobs of money basically to implement and replicate Amazon’s model. Amazon’s model’s being squeezing workers, a very high pace of work, incredible use of surveillance technologies on the workforce. And this doesn’t just mean warehouse workers or say delivery drivers like UPS workers, but actually, white collar workers as well. Amazon is sort of exporting these technologies and this sort of way of squeezing workers in a way that really applies to all kinds of people, including those who think “I have nothing in common with an Amazon warehouse worker.” You do.
Specifically about UPS, I think it’s a pretty obvious argument here. You know, UPS has already existed as this sort of island of unionization within the broader, logistics industry, you know, they have fought very hard to have decent wages and benefits and a sustainable schedule for delivery, for example. Amazon exists to undercut that, right? That’s, if it’s not its aim, it’s its function. So Amazon famously will get something to your door within a few hours if you pay enough money for it.
That means that they have this entire gigantic network of both warehouse workers and delivery drivers who are being worked at all hours, who work seven days a week, who have a very high pace of delivery. The famous stories about how no one who’s delivering for Amazon has time to pee at all, you know, because there’s nowhere to go, right? You need to get your next delivery out immediately. I often say this to people where I’m like, “Have you ever really had a conversation with an Amazon delivery person who is delivering packages to your apartment building? No. They don’t have time for that.”
They, you know, even if you tried to stop them, you would actually be annoying them because they have a schedule to stick to. So that undermines the standards that UPS workers have fought for a very long time to get. I think the new leadership of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien recognizes that existential threat that you cannot exist forever with this growing behemoth constantly undercutting your standards, you know, UPS will use Amazon as kind of a wedge and say, “Well, we can’t agree to this in the contract because we’re gonna go out of business if we keep having these heavy labor costs.” And while that’s nonsense — UPS has an enormous amount of profits — it is a real argument that the Teamsters need to take seriously. The best answer to it would be organizing Amazon workers themselves.
Teddy Ostrow: You sort of began with this, but I do wanna take a step back. What even is Amazon? Is it a logistics company, retail tech? Can you give us a sense of the landscape?
Alex Press: Yeah. So it’s a surprisingly complicated answer. It’s all of those things. It is a logistics company. It is an e-commerce, retail company. It’s one of the largest e-commerce companies in existence. It’s also, importantly, the web infrastructure that other companies rely upon. So, you know, if you’re on a Zoom call, you’re using Amazon Web services or AWS, which is the company’s most profitable arm.
If you’re using Uber, you’re using Amazon’s computational power and space. There’s also smaller things like selling surveillance technology to law enforcement. Amazon is a major cultural producer. It is a member of the producer organization that is currently being struck by the Writer’s Guild of America.
They make television and films, and this is something Jeff Bezos really likes, you know, the cultural arm, the cache and glamor. It’s also importantly one of the biggest platforms for third party vendors. So other companies, small businesses use Amazon’s websites, as well as Amazon’s warehouses and delivery drivers to get their goods to customers’ doors.
So there are all these different arms going on. In the labor world, we speak the most about the warehouse workers and maybe to a lesser extent the delivery drivers, and rightly so — we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of workers. It is also all of these other things and they’re integrated together.
You need the computational power of AWS for the warehouses to function. Surveillance technology is tested in the warehouses and then exported not only to other companies, but to other countries as well. I think in trying to think about this, there are a couple of metaphors we could use.
One is that the company is in the company town: asort of private government, that functions kind of as an overlord of sorts, or a control mechanism, or, one metaphor I use a lot is kind of a toll collector. Amazon wants to be the thing you have to go through to get to everything else, whether it’s goods, whether it’s the internet and infrastructure, all of these things.
Amazon has been very good at warming its way into the middle of things, so that it gets a cut as a middleman from everything. There are all those different ways to think about it. Finally I would just say, thinking of it as a utility because it’s so kind of inescapable for all of the reasons I just mentioned, also can be kind of productive in starting to think about what regulation of Amazon would look like.
Teddy Ostrow: That’s a really interesting point to think of it as a utility. You did really great work covering the organizing at Amazon over the past few years. Could you give us a sense of how union organizing or organizing otherwise at the company has been going — what are people fighting for or fighting against and what are the different efforts we’ve seen, the obstacles, and the future of Amazon?
Alex Press: Yeah. So I often start to answer this question by sort of giving some perspective here in the form of an anecdote, which is that I was at the Labor Notes Conference, a biannual gathering of labor activists, rank and file workers and so on. I was there I think five years ago, and there was a sort of little secret side conversation going on, about salting Amazon.
Meaning, you know, purposely getting jobs at Amazon warehouses to then organize those warehouses. And this was a pretty controversial conversation. A lot of people were very negative on it. They thought this was a doomed strategy, that this was actually in fact sort of dangerous and that these efforts would fail.
Aren’t there so many other warehouses with kind of decrepit unions? You know, for example, UPS warehouses, that might have kind of less active locals that would be much better uses of young radicals’ time. if they really felt the need to kind of intentionally get a job, with the purpose of organizing.
It seemed very obvious to me at the time that that all was true, that none of these people were incorrect about the problems with this idea, but also these young people in particular were gonna do it anyway, right? Like this was exciting. This is on, you know, on pace to be the largest private employer in the United States, and so these efforts were going to start and we sort of saw them start to, you know, the outcome of those early efforts has been finally going public over the past couple of years. So you know, everyone’s heard about Bessemer, which, was the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to hold an NLRB election.
That was in 2021. It failed. There are endless back and forths about Amazon violating labor law during that election. But you know, as it stands, they did not vote to unionize that facility. I think it’s an interesting example in that even failed efforts leave a trace on the working class — if you speak to Chris Smalls, the founder of the Amazon Labor Union out in Staten Island, he’ll tell you that it was Bessemer and watching that failure that led him to decide to organize his own facility. It’s why he decided to go with an independent union. He felt there were certain failures that came from the existing union trying to do it, and that actually it would only be an independent union that could win, for reasons that I think are arguable.
But certainly he was proven correct at JFK-8. So that was the first and only Amazon warehouse to win an NLRB election. I think that was what, April of last year? April 1st. Cuz I remember it being a very funny April Fool’s joke that they had actually won.
And there are efforts at, at different different stages, in the works. So the ALU has tried to hold other NLRB elections at other Amazon facilities. They’ve yet to win any of those. There are other efforts underway. There’s a warehouse in North Carolina that’s being organized by a group that calls itself CAUSE, which stands for Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment. So their facility is in Garner, North Carolina, just outside of Raleigh, which is not where one would expect an Amazon effort to succeed. North Carolina has one of the lowest unionization rates in the country. but when you talk to the workers there, as I have, you know, they’ll tell you that it sort of just happens organically.
Racism is a huge issue in this warehouse, which you’ll hear from Amazon workers at just about every warehouse. It’ll often be a majority non-white worker population, and then management will be almost entirely white. That’s the case at this facility. And that’s sort of organically led to a certain kind of unrest in the warehouse that then led to this organizing effort that’s still underway. They have not filed for an N L R B election. And then there are other efforts, you know, in kind of earlier stages.
I think also just in closing it’s worth mentioning this warehouse in Minnesota that has been kind of a site of organizing by Somali workers in particular. So that’s just a short list. I mean, it’s very funny that at this point my head is full of all of these incredibly indecipherable to anyone else names of these warehouses. RDU1, JFK8. This is what Amazon calls its facilities, and now it’s, thank God the laundry list is getting really long. It used to just be JFK 8 that I would talk about. So that’s what’s going on as far as the warehouse organizing.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah. Thanks for going through so many of those efforts. I mean, you know, there’s also Amazonians United, the international efforts, the Make Amazon Pay campaign.
Alex Press: Yeah. I did wanna say, Amazonians United has been this interesting effort that preceded Bessemer and continues to exist in a sort of minority union, shop floor unionism, you know, where they don’t have the majority of the workers involved.
They’re not trying to build towards an NLRB election. They’re just functioning as a union on the shop floor. And they have actually notched some real victories around working conditions. I think anybody who’s interested in this topic really should also look into that because, you know, when it comes to Amazon, I often kind of explain to people, it’s just throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. You know, no unions up until these recent years have been able to breach the impenetrable fortress of Amazon. So there are all different approaches going on, and while there’s real disagreements and differences between these efforts, there is a sense in a larger kind of, meta view here that everyone is on the same page, that you just have to be willing to try some creativity, and that everyone kind of needs each other if anyone is gonna win at Amazon.
Teddy Ostrow: I think that’s a great perspective to bring. And now let’s, let’s dig into one of the efforts right now that is pretty unique, and exciting, especially for teamsters.
So 84 Amazon drivers and dispatchers, just recently unionized Teamsters, local 396, that’s out in Palmdale, California. That of course was super welcome, really, really exciting for labor folks. But it’s not an uncomplicated victory. This is because of something you hinted at, the structure of Amazon’s Last Mile Delivery Services, which poses barriers to unionization, certainly getting a contract.
Can you unpack why this is such a big deal, but also why it’s more complex than one would hope, such that this battle of the Teamsters in Amazon really is just getting started?
Alex Press: Yeah, so the most basic thing to mention is what I said at the top, which is these delivery drivers are legally, technically, not Amazon employees, which is absurd because as probably anyone listening to this show knows they drive in vehicles that are branded with Amazon branding.
They often wear Amazon branded uniforms. But Amazon very cannily set up this delivery service partner program to give themselves distance from the legal responsibilities of being an employer. So these workers have to petition their bosses for redress on all kinds of things, and their bosses are usually these small business owners who just started this company specifically to service Amazon. There are around 3000 of these companies nationwide, these delivery service partners or DSP’s. There are nearly, I think almost 300,000 drivers now who are driving for them at least part and full-time.
So that means under US labor law right now, until and unless Amazon is declared a joint employer, so also having the legal responsibility to bargain with these workers, right now, they have to petition, you know, just their small business, their DSP’s, which is what happened at that company, Battle Tested Strategies, in Palmdale.
When the news came out, not only that had they organized a union, but the owner of BTS had given them voluntary recognition — which is a sort of, while I think every boss should voluntarily recognize workers, it’s pretty unusual these days in the United States — it’s sort of displayed something that has since been kind of panned out in the reporting, which is that the owners of these DSP’s often have just as many problems with Amazon as their workers. There have been cases of these companies, their owners shutting down their companies in protest against Amazon’s expectations for them.
They work these drivers through the bone and often they’re not lying when they say “Amazon makes us do this”. So they have limited autonomy here. It’s very funny in that if Amazon has set up this, this totally arbitrary distance, to pretend that these drivers are not their workers, the owners of these companies are gonna realize that in fact, they too are just lower level managers for a workforce.
So it’s no surprise that they might end up kind of tacitly supporting unionization. The Teamsters announced that these workers had unionized, that they had gotten recognition, and in fact, they had voted and accepted a tentative agreement, so they have a contract.
Amazon immediately came out and said, “One, these are not our workers as laid out in the law. Two, we actually already told this guy who runs this company that he’s gonna have his contract canceled for poor performance. And this is just a kind of PR play on his part and on the Teamsters part.”
No one has gotten the documents really about when the timeline of Amazon’s contract cancellation happened. You know, if it happened after Amazon became aware of the union organizing, you could make the case that that was a violation of labor law. So that’s all gonna play out in the courts. I think the BTS owner himself is now kind of going along with trying to sue Amazon.
It is worth noting that the Teamsters have tried this before and Amazon has just canceled the contract with that DSP, because they have the right to do that. They do have total control over these DSP’s. The owner of a DSP is always instructed to fight any union efforts.
Amazon by every legal standing should be considered the employer, but they also, as it stands right now, can simply retaliate by canceling a contract, effectively making these workers out of work, come the end of that contract. So we’ll see what happens. I think it’s just worth noting as a last point on this, that the teamsters have kind of anticipated that this would happen.
In May, they did file a complaint with federal Labor regulators, saying that Amazon should be considered a joint or sole employer of the Palmdale workers. I am not in the prediction game, especially when it comes to extremely, untested unionization efforts at Amazon. I think Sean O’Brien, and all of the rank and filers who are sort of leading this organizing at the ground level really understand that they need to find a way to break through at Amazon, even though the legal structure of these delivery drivers’ employment makes for immense obstacles. So I’m very glad that they are, again, throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Teddy Ostrow: Well, I certainly won’t ask you to look into the legal crystal ball here, but I think it’s also worth just noting that while there is this complex, complicated barrier for these workers, what they want in their contract would be life changing, right? $30 an hour, the right to refuse unsafe delivery, which is a serious problem across delivery services. A number of things that we’ll see if they get it. A no no-strike clause. This is kind of transformational stuff, if it’s implemented.
Alex Press: I just wanna add that when you talk to those Palmdale drivers, a key impetus for the organizing was that just like Amazon warehouse workers, just like UPS drivers, heat on the job was becoming incredibly unsafe. They’ll say that one of these workers, I think last summer passed out and had to be taken to the hospital.
I think I read a quote from someone in the bargaining unit who said, it’s like being in a sauna. It’s completely unbearable. This has also led workers to organize across industries; these are very serious issues that Amazon certainly has proven it is not taking seriously and cannot be trusted to take seriously.
I know UPS workers similarly have been agitating not only for UPS to be responsible for regulating the temperatures both in the vehicles and in the buildings. The Amazon warehouse workers that I talked about earlier, often, that’s also a leading thing. You know, they want higher wages, they want better benefits and better schedules, they want less unsafe work in the sense of less of a strenuous quota on them, but they also often are passing out in these warehouses or having heat stroke. So this is again, a unifying kind of issue across the industry. No matter what type of logistics work you’re doing with rising temperatures, especially as summer approaches, you know, this becomes something that is not so hard to understand for anyone who works these jobs.
Teddy Ostrow: Let’s bring in the Teamsters UPS contract campaign. You wrote a great piece about it in Jacobin that I encourage everyone to read. You noted how organizing at Amazon as well as negotiating a better UPS contracts as central to Teamsters United, Sean O’Brien’s bid to the Teamsters general presidency. And I wanna try to thread these goals together.
What, what are the stakes of this contract campaign for the unionization of Amazon? And then what are the stakes of unionizing Amazon for the future of the Teamsters Union? And, you know, the greater working class.
Alex Press: Sure, sure. So it sounds complicated, but it really is not. So when you walk up, say you’re a UPS driver and you walk up to, whether it’s an Amazon warehouse worker who lives on your block or it’s an Amazon delivery driver who is parked outside of the same apartment building as you.
So you start chatting about unions, they’re gonna say, well, how’s your union contract? Like, what do you get? Not to to pretend that workers are only interested in that, but of course that’s what they want to know. and you know, I think it’s not a secret that the Teamsters negotiated a very weak contract in the last round of negotiations. So weak that it ended Hoffa Jr’s career and led to Sean O’Brien becoming the President of the Union. It has tiers. It has all these things that you’ve talked about on the show before. and so that is not something a worker can confidently approach an Amazon worker with and try to convince them that their union has their back, will never sell them out, will never abandon them, and is democratic.
None of those things were true in that last contract. A democratic vote was overridden by arcane union bureaucracy rules, you know, the classic kind of worst version of unionism. So it’s very important that Sean can go out there and actually win a strong contract; pay for part-timers will be part of that because Amazon workers are often part-time and they’re going to have more in common with the inside workers at UPS than they might have with the UPS drivers, as far as the direct Amazon warehouse workers. But similarly with delivery drivers at both companies, there needs to be this sense of victory that’s very rooted in real progress, including undoing concessions. So that’s on the one side, very practically, it’s almost like suicide to go tell your rank and file organizers, your best union militants to go pretend to another worker that you have a great contract when in fact they’re the ones who are most certain that they don’t have good contract.
So that is existential. And then on the flip side, I think I’ve kind of laid this out earlier: what does organizing Amazon do for UPS workers? Well, as I said, if they don’t organize Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers soon, they may just not exist as a union.
I mean, that’s like catastrophism that I’m saying. But Amazon has so much power, has so much growth and so much political control as well. I mean, with the lobbying arm and the tax breaks that they get, and the influential people in their realm. It’s hard to imagine how the UPS bargaining unit stays together going forward. They will be chipped away at every single contract round with UPS executives saying through their lawyers across the table, we can’t do it because there’s Amazon workers that are gonna undercut our business and they’re gonna take our business and we’re gonna go out of business unless you agree to concessions.
So these things are incredibly tied up with each other, and I think Sean O’Brien did a very good job of laying that out throughout his campaign. My understanding from speaking with the UPS workers who lead this Amazon organizing, sort of behind the scenes and on the ground, is that they really do feel like they’re being charged with trying what they can to organize certain facilities, to support things at legislative levels that gives a little more power to workers, that makes it a little easier to actually organize them in the first place. So, you know, my hope is that that vision continues to stay kind of connected in that integrated way that was laid out during the campaign.
Teddy Ostrow: And while I have you, the Amazon guru of labor journalism, is there anything else that we didn’t touch on on Amazon that you think is really important for the Teamsters listening for non Teamsters listening?
Alex Press: I’m sure it’s been said on your show before if Amazon has come up, but you know, as I tried to say, there are very different efforts going on among Amazon workers, right?
There has been, you know, formal organizing with RWDSU in Bessemer, and with the Teamsters, both among warehouses, workers and delivery drivers. There has been minority unionism like Amazonians United. There’s been independent use unionism like cause in North Carolina or the ALU. And again, like there are real tensions of course.
Before any of these efforts started many years ago, workers would say to me, “Our working conditions are so terrible. This work is so dangerous and detrimental to our bodies, and the pay is so low. Why aren’t unions helping us?” You know, there was a real sense of loss or betrayal or just confusion about, you know, isn’t the labor movement supposed to be here for us?
And so it’s very hard to just immediately undo that distrust. But I think I’ve seen, just in the course of my short five years since that opening anecdote about the Labor Notes Conference, there have been real ties being built across these efforts, across these divisions of strategy. I just think UPS workers, everyone I’ve spoke to already understands this, but I just wanna underline it, that everyone needs each other if anyone is gonna win.
Whether a Teamsters’ organized warehouse down the line is gonna win, whether the ALU is ever gonna win a contract, it requires every single person in this broader kind of ecosystem of organizing logistics to have each other’s backs, despite, and even with those differences. So that’s really the thing I try to say to people, you know, often I think people outside of the labor movement or outside of the left, want to play up the divisions and say like, “So do these people hate the Teamsters? Do these people hate the ALU?” And it’s like, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, everyone has each other’s phone numbers and they need each other. That is kind of the perspective I try to take. I certainly would hope UPS workers would take that kind of bigger view, whether it’s about organizing or about the fact that Amazon workers seem to undercut their job standards.
You know, everybody has the same enemies here. In fact, their enemies are like friends who hang out at dinners in DC; the CEO of one company or the other. I just never want people to lose sight of that.
Teddy Ostrow: Alex Press, thanks for joining me on the upsurge.
Alex Press: Thanks for having me.
Teddy Ostrow: Arturo Sono, welcome to the upsurge. So to start off, I just wanna hear about you — can you tell everybody about yourself? How did you come to the job, what exactly do you do, how long you’ve been doing it, uh, and where you are right now?
Arturo Solezano: I live in Hartsdale, California. I have a fiance, a baby on the way in August, it’s gonna be a girl. We are trying to plan a big future together. Before driving, I was actually at a fulfillment center, but the drive was too far from me and this was a lot closer.
Teddy Ostrow: So you’re a driver. How long have you been doing that?
Arturo Solezano: About two and a half years now.
Teddy Ostrow: And what, what exactly does that entail? Can you kind of explain on a day-to-day basis what you do?
Arturo Solezano: So, in the mornings we grab our pouches, we check the vehicles, make sure there’s like no nails, nothing damaged, line up, load of our vans and go get gas if we need to, and then just start our routes.
Teddy Ostrow: So it’s very similar, to what perhaps a, a number of other, so-called last mile delivery drivers do, like at FedEx, like at UPS, you pick up the packages, you drop ‘em off at people’s homes as I take it.
Arturo Solezano: Yes.
Teddy Ostrow: So I’m curious, around the country, we’ve been hearing a lot about some of the issues that drivers at Amazon deal with. Some of them are pretty similar to the issues at UPS, listeners of this show certainly know about those. Maybe you could get into some of those issues that you and your coworkers have with the workplace.
Arturo Solezano: In the summertime, those vans, they feel like saunas and they don’t have AC so all day we’re just sweating and being dehydrated and there’s only so much that water bottles can do for us; and then they get mad at us if we are trying to take our breaks cause it’s just so hot, we’re trying to recover.
I had a friend who actually had to go to the hospital cause she overheated. But thank God now she’s safe. But she had to leave the job because it was just too dangerous for her.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. So you guys don’t have air conditioning at, at all, or it doesn’t function or, and you guys have to deal with that in some sense?
Arturo Solezano: The air condition is supposed to work, but it is very light. Then we have like just the little fans, regular fans, but they just throw hot air.
Teddy Ostrow: Do you feel unsafe when you’re doing this; you’re in Southern California, right? So I assume it gets ridiculously hot.
Arturo Solezano: Yeah. So I try to, whenever I can just try to find somewhere with shade sometimes, I’m trying to protect myself.
Teddy Ostrow: Have you ever told your employer like, “Hey, look, it’s, it’s too hot out here.” What kind of responses do you get? Or is it not even worth going that far?
Arturo Solezano: We told ‘em and they told us like, “Amazon are the ones that set the routes.” Sometimes the, the temperature would read 130, 140 even. We had customers that come out there and look at us and they feel so bad they’ll rush back inside their house and get ice and stuff, cause they see how bad it is.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. That’s a major safety issue. As I understand it, that isn’t the only safety issue you guys have, right? Can you tell me about some of those other issues that have to do with your safety?
Arturo Solezano: Yeah. I actually got bitten by a dog once, it was hiding underneath the van, and as soon as I stepped out, it bit me. And it was a stray dog. There were other houses and none of them claimed it. So I ended up getting a tetanus shot.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. Do you ever feel like that might happen again? That you, you see a dog in a yard…
Arturo Solezano: Yeah, so now I don’t even feel safe to go into people’s yards to drop off their packages. Sometimes they’ll order heavy things and I don’t like to leave it on the sidewalk, you know? I’ll call ‘em and I’ll wait.
But I can’t stay there forever, cause Amazon is tracking my movements. They said you gotta do, you know, a certain amount by this time.
Teddy Ostrow: You know, UPSers for example, they can, if it seems like it’s unsafe, they’re generally allowed to say like, “Hey, this is an unsafe delivery. I’m not gonna make this delivery.” What would happen if you told your employer that, “Hey, this is too, this is too risky for me.”
Arturo Solezano: They’d rather have us try to risk it and deliver it anyway. Amazon will analyze us and then we end up losing days, you know, hours. And that’s money that we need to provide for our families.
Teddy Ostrow: Speaking of money, the pay I’ve heard is an issue. Can you talk about that? Maybe your personal experience, but also those of your coworkers. What, what is the pay like at Amazon? Is it enough?
Arturo Solezano: No, we feel like we’re getting underpaid. We should be getting paid at least the same as UPS, they get 40 or 30. We feel like we should get somewhere similar cause we’re doing the exact same thing as them. And our conditions are probably a lot less safe than theirs.
Teddy Ostrow: What is it like to not get enough money? I mean, you, you live in Southern California, I can imagine the cost of living is high, where you are. What does it mean to not make the same as other drivers for you? You mentioned you have a fiancée and child on the way.
Arturo Solezano: Yeah, on the side, I have to donate my plasma to make the extra money for anything that I can’t cover with my paycheck. On my days off I have to go do something to make sure I have that money for us to make sure we can get by.
Teddy Ostrow: Now, the last thing I wanted to touch on, because it seems like such a major issue, is these performance requirements that at times seem really extreme.
Can you talk about the pressure on you guys, and how Amazon is tracking you and wanting you to perform at a pace that is probably unsafe?
Arturo Solezano: So Amazon tracks our system through their van and our package count and they’ll say, “Hey, you’ve only done certain amount at this time. Ask them why they’re behind cuz they need to catch up.”
And when I tell ‘em, you know, we gotta wait for this, we gotta do that. Apartments, sometimes it takes forever to get in. Customers don’t wanna come out to get their packages cause their dogs are outside and they get mad at us and then we end up having to skip our breaks and stuff. Because we have to go and try to catch up.
Teddy Ostrow: Have people been disciplined or, or fired or cut? What kind of retaliation do you see?
Arturo Solezano: A couple of my friends have been let go. A lot of people have been cut their hours. They just like to monitor every little thing with us. they actually let go of someone, it wasn’t the BTS people, it was Amazon that let go one of our workers instead. I don’t know that much details about it.
Teddy Ostrow: Well, I’m glad you brought up that it was Amazon doing this. As I understand it, you drive an Amazon truck and you wear an Amazon uniform.
It seems like Amazon has a lot of control over your employment, but technically you don’t work for Amazon. I’m curious, what do you think about that? Is Amazon not really in control of you? Who do you really work for?
Arturo Solezano: Even though they say we’re not, we really are. Cause they get mad at us if we don’t wear their Amazon uniform. People inside the building, they wear their pajamas and whatever they want. But if we get something like that, wear different color shorts or jeans or something, they send us home. Even though we’re not really Amazon though.
But yet you’re still trying to send us home for not being with you guys.
Teddy Ostrow: So we actually have you on the show because you and your coworkers did something really exciting that everyone seems to be cheering you on for rightfully; you unionized, your DSP or delivery service provider.
It’s called Battle Tested Strategies. You guys unionized with the Teamsters Local 396. Um, That’s kind of a brave thing to do. I’m curious, why did you guys want to unionize with the Teamsters?
Arturo Solezano: We just wanted our fair pay and everything, and safety with this job. Cause being in those vans, it’s just extremely hot. Like a sauna. I’m doing this just cause I wanna be able to provide for my family. You know, my little daughter is on her way. I wanna make sure she’s taken care of growing up.
I feel like they’re the ones that are actually trying, that are actually looking out for me. They’re the ones that have my back a lot more than Amazon ever did.
Teddy Ostrow: Have you noticed any sort of retaliation from Amazon since you guys joined up with Local 396?
Arturo Solezano: Yeah. The very first day, they grounded my van for something so small that was an easy fix, but it took him an hour to clear it. And one of the Amazon people actually came up to me, kind of talked to me like, “Oh, are you gonna be able to finish the route?” I’m like, “Dude, we’re still working. You know, why? Why do you think we’re here? Of course I can deal with my route. It’s gonna take me a little longer now cause you guys are making me wait more, but I could still get it done.”
Teddy Ostrow: And you think this has something to do with organizing?
Arturo Solezano: Mm-hmm. Cause now they’re picking every little thing they can with us, with our vans. They’re cutting down our routes. Sometimes they’re very hostile towards us, and we’re just like, yo, we’re just here just to do our jobs too. Why are you guys even being hostile towards us?
Teddy Ostrow: So you guys not only unionized, but you won a union contract and as far as I understand, you won some pretty transformational stuff.
Some of it may not be enforceable yet, but nonetheless, can, can you talk about some of the things you guys won, in this contract?
Arturo Solezano: Yeah, we fought for the vans, so they’re now safer for us. We’re able to refuse deliveries that are actually unsafe that we can’t do. and we’re fighting for a bigger raise.
Teddy Ostrow: How much money do you guys win? It’s pretty high, right?
Arturo Solezano: It’s $30 a hour.
Teddy Ostrow: Is that gonna make a difference for you?
Arturo Solezano: Yeah, it’ll help me out so much to provide for my family.
Teddy Ostrow: One thing I’m curious about is how you’ve interacted with other delivery drivers or other logistics companies like UPS. Have you interacted with any UPSers?
Arturo Solezano: Uh, yes. Some of them actually come and help us picket. I’ll see someone on my delivery route and they’ll say, “Hey. Welcome to the Union brother. Congrats. This is what we’re here for.”
Teddy Ostrow: Arturo, thanks for joining me on the Upsurge.
Additional information
Kamau Franklin: I’ll back that up completely. I think Mariah’s completely correct. When we speak to folks in the community, there are folks who are informed, but there are a good amount of people who don’t know about it. And there are other folks who are carrying on with their day-to-day lives trying to survive, trying to make it out of here. But once you start talking about it, the innate reaction based on the conditions that people live in is like, well, why do we need that? We know that that means they’re going to just be in our neighborhoods and communities, arresting more people, taking away our young people that instead of providing centers for our folks to go to, providing other things and activities or improving the education system that they would rather spend again, not only just the 30 million that the city is supposed to be giving. And that number, again, is increasingly going higher once we do further investigation into how the money is actually getting to the Atlanta Police Foundation.
But the same corporations who several years ago were saying that they were on the side of Black Lives Matter, have now given 60 million dollars or close to 60 million dollars to fund a project like this. People see it on their face that these same corporations which underpay us or have enough money like Mariah mentioned earlier, to give to a project like this. So it’s not hard to convince people or it’s not hard to make it clear for folks what the purpose of a Cop City is and what the role is of police in their lives. And so when folks understand that and hear that, for the most part they have questions and they are opposed to the idea that this is the way the city should spend its money.
I will also say for the people who are working class, people who live adjacent to the forest, and it is mostly a working class black community that lives adjacent to the work to the Weelaunee forest, those folks were promised that the forest would stay intact and that it would be used for nature trails, for parks, for places for their kids to enjoy and understand nature and again, to continue to serve as a preventer of climate change.
That area’s prone to flooding. Clear cutting that’s already happening in that forest will only add to the flooding in that neighborhood which will impact working class black communities. Those communities overwhelmingly have said that they are opposed to the building of Cop City. That that was not what the promise was. The promise was for them to have an area where they can bring their kids to, where they can have a park and so forth. It was not to build a militarized training center, which is going to have shooting ranges where cops are practicing how to shoot day and night in that forest next to this working class community, that people understand that this is a targeted approach to dealing with working class communities as opposed to giving resources to these communities. They’re going to flood these communities with more cops.
Maximillian Alvarez: I’m going to lose my shit, man.
Mariah Parker: Does it not make you feel insane? It makes me feel so insane.
Maximillian Alvarez: I’m losing it.
Mariah Parker: It makes you feel so insane. And particularly they started clear cutting the forest a little bit earlier this year. And so photography and drone footage is coming out where there’s this scar on the earth where this beautiful forest used to be. Where I was at a music festival. There are people out there just vibing, enjoying music. There’s folks camping out, there are families, there’s children. They used to take children here to do field trips, to study the ecology of the forest. And now there is this, you see footage come out, they’re giving some journalists a tour of the forest today or what used to be the forest. And it drives me totally insane to see this. And I feel like speaking of common reactions of working class folks, that same shit of just being mind boggled and infuriated instantly is something I get all the time when I’m talking to people about this who haven’t heard about it before.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I know our task is to turn that into action, which again is why I’m so grateful to folks like yourselves and everyone else out there doing that unsung work, everyone listening to this who is also doing that work day in, day out. We need you guys always, and we need more folks doing that work even just to make sure that people know that this is happening in the first place, let alone building on that and talking about why we should be invested in the fight against it, what the future looks like if we don’t fight. And I think, yeah, it’s the point you both made is just so poignant and I really want folks listening to sit with it because in many ways you guys know this, but it does really bear repeating. The safest communities are not the ones with the most police.
They’re the ones with the most resources and the most kind of shared wealth access to things like drinkable water and a bed to sleep in, a house to live in, schools to send your kids to, grocery stores, not just dollar stores, so on and so forth. It’s not throwing more police at poor and working class neighborhoods, is not going to somehow magically make those neighborhoods safer. How do I know that? Because that’s what we’ve been fucking doing for the past half century or more. And it hasn’t worked, at least by the supposed goals of that approach to policing. But anyway, I digress. So because I know I only have you guys for about 10 more minutes, so I wanted to bring things back to, I think we’ve done a great job of communicating to people why the push to build Cop City, the construction thereof, the sort of shadowy government and industry forces behind it, why all of those are already an issue for working people that we should care about.
But then there’s also the draconian crackdown on the protestors against Cop City and it’s a fundamentally connected issue, but it is almost sort of an issue within itself that we and that the labor movement needs to have a serious discussion about, because that is also going to directly impact us. It’s not just that they’re all the other kind of aspects to labor, workers’ relationship to the police that we already know about when we’re on strike. Who are the ones beating picketers and clearing way for scabs to come through the picket lines? It’s the cops, right? So when coal miners in Brookwood, Alabama at Warrior Met Coal were on strike for two years, who was it who was escorting scabs past their picket lines? Who was it who was enforcing these business friendly rulings by local judges, these injunctions limiting the amount of people who could picket, how far away from the entrance they could picket?
It was the police. And so we already know that in terms of limiting workers’ ability to exercise their right to free speech, their right to assemble, their right to go on strike and to withhold their labor, the quote on quote, criminal justice system has a historically antagonistic relationship to working people expressing those rights. But it goes even deeper than that. And I hope that folks listening to this can sort of hear the resonances with the interviews that we’ve done with workers in different industries over the past six seasons. Just think about the railroad workers. They had their right to strike, stripped from them by the most, quote on quote, pro-labor union president that the US has ever seen, and a congress that happily went with that decision and they gave the bosses, the rail carriers, everything that they wanted. And so when workers have our rights to withhold our labor to speak up and to exercise those basic fundamental rights, the bosses win.
And also most people in this country can be fired without just cause. So it’s not even a question of do I have these rights at work? Most people fucking don’t. We already know that they don’t, you can’t speak up for shit without losing your job and potentially thus losing your home and if you lose your home and we live in a society that criminalizes poverty, so you’re going to get beat up by the police and shuttled into prison. So are you guys seeing the connections here?
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The Center of Countering Digital Hate released a report showing how the search engine is used to direct abortion seekers to anti-abortion organizations. (photo: Jeff Chiu/AP)
Study finds the search giant has profited since Roe was overturned from anti-abortion groups buying misleading search terms
The tech giant has taken in an estimated $10m in two years from anti-choice organizations that pay to advertise such centers alongside legitimate results on the Google search page, according to a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a non-profit group that conducts misinformation research. Its study, published on Thursday, estimates that the search results have reached and potentially misled hundreds of thousands of users.
Using the analytics tool Semrush, the CCDH estimated how much revenue Google has brought in from such advertisers between 1 March 2021 and 28 February 2023. It said Google’s lack of enforcement against these groups has enabled a multimillion-dollar “cottage industry” of anti-abortion marketing firms, which provide prepackaged promotional materials and websites to crisis pregnancy centers.
“This is fundamentally about Google permitting extremely deceptive behavior and doing very little to actually ensure that people are informed,” said Imran Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of the CCDH. “Its failure to plug the holes in their own rules has created a layer of exploitive marketing companies that provide services to further undermine sexual reproductive rights in America.”
Google and the rise of crisis pregnancy centers
Crisis pregnancy centers have been defined by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists as facilities that “operate unethically”, representing themselves as legitimate reproductive healthcare clinics while actually seeking to dissuade people from accessing abortion healthcare. They outnumber actual abortion clinics three to one in the US, with approximately 2,600 operating nationwide.
Reproductive rights organizations have raised the alarm about the growing power of crisis pregnancy centers in the US as access to legitimate care plummets following the reversal of federal protections of abortion rights.
“At the heart of these fake health centers – which are often misleadingly called crisis pregnancy centers – is nothing more than lies and misinformation,” said Ally Boguhn, a spokesperson for the reproductive rights organization Naral Pro-Choice America. “They are notorious for using deceptive mass messaging and coercive tactics to manipulate people to try to block them from accessing abortion care.”
Google Search is a leading source of information on abortion, with Americans making an estimated 102m searches for queries related to abortion each year. Google Search is now the top source of referrals to crisis pregnancy clinics, the study found by reviewing client intake data from a top anti-abortion marketing firm, surpassing word of mouth for means of getting pregnant people in the door.
The CCDH study showed such clinics pay for advertisements to appear in Google Search results related to more than 15,000 different queries about abortion, including “abortion clinic near me”, “abortion pill”, “abortion clinic” and “planned parenthood”. Further, 71% of clinics identified in the study used deceptive means of advertising, advancing false claims that abortions are linked to cancer and other diseases.
The allegations follow a separate study from the CCDH in June 2022, which found one in 10 Google searches for abortion services in US “trigger states” – where abortion was targeted immediately after the reversal of Roe v Wade – led to crisis pregnancy clinics.
Google policy requires any organization that wants to advertise to people seeking information about abortion services “to be certified and clearly disclose whether they do or do not offer abortions”, said Michael Aciman, a spokesperson for the company.
Aciman said that Google reviewed the 2022 CCDH report and took action against violating advertisements but found that advertisers named were not violating company policies. He added that, under Google’s policy, advertisers paying to appear under search queries directly related to getting an abortion (for instance, “abortions near me”) must disclose whether they provide abortion services, while those appearing under more general search terms (such as “planned parenthood”) don’t need to.
Despite the requirement that advertisers disclose whether they actually provide abortions, researchers say such text can easily be overlooked – especially if the website itself does not make its intentions clear. The CCDH study found that 38% of crisis pregnancy center websites studied failed to carry any kind of disclaimer on their homepages clarifying that they do not offer abortions.
‘Unproven and potentially unsafe’ treatment advertised on Google
After the 2022 study from the CCDH, Google pledged to ban all advertisements of “abortion pill reversal” – a controversial treatment that claims to reverse the effects of medication abortion that has been condemned by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists as “dangerous” and “not based on science”.
However, the research found 40% of crisis pregnancy centers advertising on Google also promoted the “abortion pill reversal”. The study estimated that Google had taken in $2.6m in search advertising revenue from websites promoting the unproven treatment.
Aciman said Google does not allow ads promoting abortion reversal treatments and prohibits advertisers from misleading people about the services they offer, stating that Google has “taken enforcement action on content that violates our policies related to abortion reversal”. Google did not respond to a request for comment regarding how many advertisers were affected by those actions.
Abortion misinformation ‘cottage industry’ thrives on Google search
Loopholes utilized by anti-abortion advocates on Google, as well as the tech giant’s failure to enforce some of its existing policies, has made the company “the lynchpin of a multi-million dollar fake clinic industry that works around the clock to mislead and misdirect Americans who are seeking access to abortion care”, the study said.
Companies named in the report claimed to have launched hundreds of crisis pregnancy clinic websites in recent years. One marketing agency mentioned in the study offers website templates with misleading narratives and branding, arranging for centers to obtain web addresses with misleading healthcare-related terms like “.clinic” and “.hospital”. For a cost of up to $600 a month, the firm will also create custom Google ad campaigns, the study found. Another firm outlines for crisis pregnancy center clients a deliberate strategy of targeting people who are already “abortion-minded” or “abortion-determined” and seeking to dissuade them.
This industry has only grown after the supreme court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion with the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last year. The previous CCDH study on abortion misinformation was published in 2022 – shortly before the right was overturned. In the months since, researchers at the CCDH say the online landscape has become more harrowing for people seeking abortion care.
“These new findings reflect the digital environment that now exists in a post-Dobbs America, where search engines are lifelines for those seeking care and information about their options – which are increasingly scarce,” the report said.
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Israeli border police officers take up position amid a raid in Jericho in the occupied West Bank, March 1, 2023. (photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)
Palestinian rights advocates call for US sanctions on Israeli unit involved in the killing of 80-year-old Omar Assad.
Early in 2022, Assad, who was 80 years old, suffered a stress-induced heart attack after he was arbitrarily detained, bound, blindfolded and gagged by Israeli forces, and then left out unresponsive on the ground at a cold construction site in the occupied West Bank.
The Israeli army said on Tuesday that it found no “causal link” between the way its soldiers treated Assad and the American citizen’s death.
The US Department of State, which often reiterates that the safety of Americans abroad is its top priority, said on Wednesday that it was looking into the Israeli findings.
“We’re aware of the conclusion of the investigation, and we’re at this time seeking more information from the Israeli government about it,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters. “We’re going to talk to them directly about it.”
Miller said Washington expected “full accountability” in the case early on.
“We have been clear about our deep concern on the circumstances surrounding Omar Assad’s death and the need for such accountability,” he added.
Leahy Law
Assad was one of two US citizens killed by Israel last year – the other, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, was fatally shot by Israeli forces while covering a raid in Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
Israeli authorities rarely ever prosecute abuses by their forces against Palestinians, but the US vehemently opposes Palestinians’ efforts to seek accountability at the International Criminal Court, including in the case of Abu Akleh.
Israel, accused of imposing a system of apartheid by leading human rights organisations like Amnesty International, receives at least $3.8bn of US aid annually.
President Joe Biden and his top aides often stress Washington’s “ironclad” commitment to Israel.
Adam Shapiro, director of advocacy for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), a US-based rights group, called for meaningful accountability for the killing of Assad.
He said the Biden administration should apply the Leahy Law, which bans American aid to foreign forces engaged in gross violations of human rights, to Israel’s Netzah Yehuda unit that was involved in the killing of Assad.
Shapiro added that the State Department has been looking at the case from the perspective of the Leahy Law after DAWN submitted a referral to the US government last October, which underscored that the blindfolding of Assad violated Israeli regulations.
“We believe that that process should not only continue, but that this closure of the Israeli investigation requires the State Department to now apply Leahy Law sanctions to the unit,” Shapiro told Al Jazeera.
He added that by blindfolding Assad, Israeli soldiers “took an action that was deliberate and intentional that was a violation of their own rules”. He said the Palestinian autopsy report on the death of Assad noted that the gagging and blindfolding of the elderly US citizen contributed to his heart attack.
“We have a direct line of causation from the deliberate illegal actions by the Israeli soldiers to the death of Assad,” Shapiro said.
‘Same message’
For his part, Osama Abuirshaid, executive director of American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), raised concern about the State Department statement on Wednesday.
“It’s the same message – ‘We’re following up; we’re in touch with our Israeli counterparts; we are demanding an investigation by the Israelis.’ But when the outcome of an investigation is released, and it does not meet the expectations, we don’t see an American response,” Abuirshaid told Al Jazeera.
In February 2022, Washington welcomed an Israeli report that said the death of Assad “showed a clear lapse of moral judgment” and announced disciplinary action against the commander of the Netzah Yehuda unit.
“The United States expects a thorough criminal investigation and full accountability in this case,” the State Department said at that time.
Abuirshaid said that if the Biden administration does not impose consequences on Israel for killing Assad, it would be abdicating its responsibility to protect US citizens.
“Our problem is not only with Israel and its mistreatment of American citizens, but our problem is mainly with our own administration – with our own government here – that allows Israel to continue its mistreatment of American citizens,” Abuirshaid said, also citing the killing of Abu Akleh.
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Lead plaintiff Rikki Held on her family's ranch in southeastern Montana. Behind her, a wildfire burns four miles away. In Summer 2022, this was one of 18 wildfires within 50 miles of her home. (photo: Richard Forbes)
For the plaintiffs in the first youth climate lawsuit to go to trial, finding their voice and inspiring others has been as much a salve for their climate grief as bringing their case to trial.
She’d been home at the ranch in southeastern Montana when she saw the plume. The land was parched, a dull red gravel road, sun beaten grasses, clustered trees lining the river, all within a one-mile-wide strip of irrigated land surrounded by rolling badlands. There was a haze in the air, but nothing like the smoky skies of previous summers.
Rikki called her father as soon as she saw the smudge on the horizon.
“Dad, did you see the smoke when you drove to town?” she asked.
“No, where’s it coming from?” he responded.
To find the answer, Rikki drove through the hills her family has ranched for five generations. This is where she learned to love living in the middle of nowhere.
It was August 20th, 2022. There were 25 fires within 50 miles of her home that summer—2,000 were recorded across Montana.
Spurred by the ever-increasing number of fires and other impacts of global warming on the state, Rikki and 15 other young people are suing the state of Montana for failing to protect them against climate change.
The first of the lawsuits brought by young people in the United States to go to court, their lawsuit hinges on Montana’s Constitution, which guarantees its citizens the right to a clean and healthful environment. Rikki and the other plaintiffs claim that Montana’s state energy policy (which was recently repealed, likely due to the lawsuit) and the state’s methods of environmental review are unconstitutional. The state, they claim, by prioritizing the extraction and use of fossil fuels despite the warnings of decades of science, is breaking its own laws. And to many observers, the Montana legislature’s actions in the lead-up to the trial show that the state is taking the plaintiffs’ suit seriously.
Over the last decade, youth-led legal actions relating to climate change have been filed in every American state. While Juliana v. U.S. is the best known, Held v. Montana, named after Rikki, was the first allowed to go to trial when its proceedings began this week.
Rikki and the other plaintiffs will appear in a courtroom in Helena before the First Judicial District Court. There will be no jury because judges decide constitutional issues. The lawsuit has stretched out three years already. Rikki, the oldest of the plaintiffs, was 18 when it began. She graduated from college last month.
Rikki was likely chosen to be lead plaintiff because her story is good, and she knows it. She’s a fifth-generation rancher in Powder River County, one of the most conservative counties in the state. Forty-seven percent of Powder River County residents believe that climate change is caused by humans, 10 percent less than the national average and 5 percent less than the rest of the state, according to Yale’s 2021 Climate Opinion survey.
Despite the area’s skepticism about humans causing climate change, wildfires and floods increasingly threaten the family’s 7,000 acres, which lie 20 miles outside Broadus, population 450. In many ways, Rikki is what everyone imagines a Montanan to be. She started riding horses and moving cattle when she was 4. But she’s also a recent college graduate, trying to understand her place in the world.
Rikki believes that if she shares her story effectively, she could change Montana’s energy policy, and through this, maybe the world. But it would come at a cost that she is already paying. Rikki’s story belongs to the case now. It’s her name on the lawsuit and her identity as a young rancher that helps keep the case from looking partisan. Her fears are the injuries around which the case was built. Now Judge Kathy Seeley will decide if her story is enough to give her the future she wants.
The case is also a gift. While Rikki has watched friends worry about not doing enough, she and the other plaintiffs already have a platform. When they want to be heard, they agree to an interview and soon they’ll see their names in print. They’ve already achieved their goal of making it to court. And if they win this case, maybe they’ll help change the American climate discourse, or at the very least, keep some carbon in the ground.
There are over 250,000 young people under the age of 20 living in Montana—more than a fifth of all state residents. The sixteen young plaintiffs in this lawsuit see themselves as representing the fears and anxieties of a generation.
Rikki and almost 70 percent of young adults globally are deeply concerned about climate change, according to a 2021 study published in the Lancet. They know that global warming is largely responsible for the record-breaking natural disasters unfolding year after year. They are told by some news outlets and adults in their lives that humanity is out of time to stop its worst impacts. Even if it’s not stated outright, young people hear that their generation must fix the crisis, and if they don’t, no one knows what will happen next, but it will be worse than anything they’ve experienced so far.
Humans have always co-existed with looming threats, but climate change is different. Nothing else has posed such an all-consuming threat to the world, nor caused such a constellation of disasters—surging wildfires, deadly heat waves, rising seas, intensifying storms, persistent drought, expanding vector-borne diseases, to name a few.
In the face of these threats, many young Montanans are frightened, angry and anxious, and are learning to use their voices to protect the homes and the state they love.
A Law Firm That Helps Youth
In 2010, Julia Olsen founded the nonprofit law firm Our Children’s Trust, based in Portland, Oregon, to help climate-concerned youth sue governments for not fulfilling their obligations to their citizens. According to Nate Bellinger, OCT’s lead attorney for the Held v. Montana suit, OCT works to identify effective legal strategies and to represent young people who want to participate as plaintiffs. They partner with local youth organizations, give presentations in schools and assemble legal teams.
OCT is currently collecting information about potential plaintiffs for an Alaska-based lawsuit, and their website asks, “Please tell us why you might be interested in joining a youth-led climate change legal action” and “How has climate change affected you, your family, your community?”
OCT conducts a rigorous onboarding process to ensure young people know what it means to be a plaintiff, understand the commitment involved and are not feeling pressured to be involved, Bellinger says. The attorneys then identify the applicants whose lives best support the lawsuit and work with them to draft a legal complaint in which the plaintiffs describe their lives and the ways climate change has and will harm them. The plaintiffs’ stories form the heart of the complaint. OCT supplies scientific and legal reasoning.
Kyler Nerison, spokesman for the Montana attorney general’s office, has said that the plaintiffs are being exploited by special interest groups. Ryan Busse, whose sons Lander, 18, and Badge, 15, are plaintiffs, scoffed at this.
“There’s nobody manipulating my two, including me. I wish we could manipulate them more when it comes to cleaning up their rooms,” he says. “If Lander and Badge didn’t know anything about [the case] and then they read [about it], they’d be climbing over the wall—how do I sign up?”
No Time to Waste
Grace Gibson-Snyder, 19, grew up with the Clark Fork River. When her mother was pregnant with Grace, she would walk the few blocks from her home to the river to swim. As a child, Grace and her parents would carry innertubes up the river, float back down and get pizza on the way home. She’s seen the river’s patterns change with the warming climate and felt the ever-worsening wildfire smoke catch in her throat every summer.
While other plaintiffs’ claims center on global warming’s physical effects on their land and ways of life, Grace describes how it harms her emotionally. She is terrified of the future, and living with that fear is hard.
“I’m fighting against something I can barely comprehend,” Grace says. “I’m spending all my time, and so much of my energy to prevent something from happening.”
Five years ago, she read that the world had eight years before climate change impacts would become irreversible. She’s living with that deadline even as she tries to make decisions about her future, like going to college.
“It doesn’t feel as if I have four years to waste,” Grace had said in the spring of 2022. “If I’m going to be part of the [climate movement], it’s on a tight timeline.”
A year later, she’d finished her first year at Yale. As a child, she dreamed of becoming a farmer like her father, or an artist. Now she plans to study energy policy.
Grace learned about climate change when she was 11 and began volunteering for environmental groups a few years later. During her sophomore year in high school, when she saw footage of Greta Thunberg asking world leaders “How dare you?” at the United Nations, Grace wept. “That was the first time I’d seen someone encapsulate the incredibly complex emotions that come with being a young person in this climate catastrophe,” she says.
A few months later, Grace learned about the climate lawsuit in her environmental club. Within six months, she was officially a plaintiff. She’s grateful to be included, but the fight has forced her to reckon with emotions most might choose to avoid.
A headline, returning wildfire smoke or a careless comment about the climate crisis, feels like a punch to the stomach, leaving her asking, “What am I doing? What are we doing?”
She can’t fix this. Her efforts seem futile. This “breathless loss of control” leaves Grace crying until she’s empty.
A cellist since she was five, Grace decided in eighth grade that she would play every day, and did so for five years. She only stopped for a gap year to work on climate and international policy. When her tears cease, she gets back to work.
She used to feel isolated in her grief, but all the plaintiffs are struggling with similar emotions, and it heartens her to be working toward a collective goal.
She’s become a de facto spokesperson for all of the plaintiffs, interviewed for over 15 stories in national news outlets. Grace sees the younger plaintiffs as providing the emotional backbone of the case, tugging at heartstrings with their innocence, while she’s the one who talks, who convinces, who represents all the young people of Montana.
After more than three years of interviews, Grace senses her relationship with her own story changing. Sometimes she feels desensitized; like she’s reading from a script in her head to keep the emotions at bay. But beneath the surface, it’s all still there—the fear and the loss. “It’s a hard little shell, and if I crack that open, it all comes right back out,” she says. “So, it’s not gone.”
“It’s infuriating,” she says, starting to cry. “My life’s work is to save your ass. It’s hard to see people disengage. Now I’m carrying your weight too.”
The fact that among those she’s trying to save are her adversaries in court presents yet another emotional dilemma.
“The attorneys for the state, the governor. The government is made up of people. And that’s who I’m trying to protect. Even if [they] don’t believe in climate change.”
Climate’s Psychological Impacts
Climate change presents a range of psychological challenges, from people’s willingness to accept it as real, to the ways it changes how they feel about the present and future. Mental healthcare professionals have begun recognizing these emotional impacts, but there’s varied guidance about how to respond.
According to a 2021 paper from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, climate change can cause psychological harm in a variety of ways. It directly stresses people with the traumatic events it causes, such as extreme weather. It worsens pre-existing mental health conditions—higher temperatures, for instance, can cause increased rates of self-harm and suicide. It can prompt ecological grief with climate-driven changes to landscapes. And climate anxiety, the persistent worry about the escalating impacts from global warming, can build to the point of being overwhelming.
All humans are experiencing each of these effects to varying degrees, the ISTSS reported, though they can be mitigated by privilege and access to resources.
Young people are specifically vulnerable to mental health issues driven by climate, says Rebecca Weston, a clinical therapist and co-president of the Climate Psychology Alliance, which supports mental healthcare providers whose clients struggle with climate change. She works with young clients and finds few who aren’t concerned about it.
“I don’t want to presume that every single youth is consciously aware that their futures are severely impacted,” she says. “But there’s a zeitgeist of dread and worry that overlays so much of young people’s experiences.”
Weston notes that anticipatory trauma can be hard to voice, but “the loss of your future, an apocalyptic future, this is a real loss. It counts.”
Dr. Caitlin Martin-Wagar, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Montana, sees similar impacts. Her clients are teenagers with eating disorders, and while she doesn’t specialize in climate-related issues, almost every client brings them up, alongside school shootings and other societal issues that make them feel powerless.
“These are large existential threats to safety and ability to thrive in this world,” Martin-Wagar says.
The inner lives of teenagers and the 18- to 22-year-olds psychologists call “emerging adults” are filled with questions, Martin-Wagar says. “How am I going to contribute to the world? How does the world impact me? How should I spend my time?” Climate change affects all these questions.
Speaking Up
Taleah Hernandes, 19, grew up at the foot of the Mission Mountains. “I’ve lived in this area my whole life,” Taleah says. “I grew up surrounded by forests, the best of Montana.”
Her father was born in Puerto Rico. Her mother was born in Alabama and raised in Butte. They ended up in Polson, on the Flathead Reservation, because her father loved that landscape. Her whole family works in conservation, and her older half-brother, Shiloh, a lawyer, helped begin the Held v. Montana lawsuit before moving to a different law firm.
Taleah knew she wanted to be involved as soon as her brother told her about it. She became a plaintiff at 15, though at first, she thought she might not be the right person. She’d grown up watching her family working to protect Montana, but thought she had to get older to help. She feared, like Grace and Rikki, that her climate stress wasn’t dramatic enough.
But in 2022, everything changed when she first visited Puerto Rico to see her father’s family, who are Taino—Indigenous Puerto Ricans. He hadn’t been back in 25 years.
While her extended family is safe for now, her relatives’ vulnerability was impossible to ignore. Five years after Hurricane Maria, Taleah walked along beaches and saw families rebuilding homes still buried in sand.
For three years, Taleah had been content with being a plaintiff and listening when others spoke. After Puerto Rico, she wanted to share her story.
She grew up in a conservative community where conversations about climate change often felt uncomfortable. In part to help her as a plaintiff, took a course in public speaking during her freshman year at Montana State University. Now she’s beginning to give interviews, trying to engage in a conversation with and for all Montanans, even if it’s frightening.
“I’m scared to say what I think sometimes,” she says. “I don’t know how much people are paying attention and I don’t want to say the wrong thing. I’m trying to balance so many things. But I’m trying to step into the lawsuit and climate advocacy more.”
Taleah isn’t alone. Over 60 percent of Americans are worried about climate change, but only a third of Americans discuss it with family or friends, according to a 2022 report released by Yale. Rebecca Weston worries that this silence perpetuates inaccuracies both about climate change and how someone’s neighbors and friends feel.
“People care far more than they’re allowed to believe,” Weston says. “There are so many pressures not to speak about climate change, but it’s the most important thing.”
Just as yelling “fire” provokes an urgent response, she believes communities can use their voices to inspire action. Weston says people are often slow to turn speech to action because they, like many of the plaintiffs in Held v. Montana, don’t think they have been hurt enough by climate change to have a voice.
That others may have it worse is part of what Weston sees as an ongoing conversation of privilege, but this does not mean that the privileged need to stay silent about the ways they’re affected.
“When others speak, it affects what you think is possible,” Weston says. “It literally changes your entire way of being in the world.”
A Student Finds His Voice and a Teacher Finds a Mission
Isaiah Hudson, one of the young Montanans represented in Held v. Montana, is a 14-year-old high school student in Missoula who learned about climate change years ago but never thought he could help. The worsening wildfires inspired him to try.
In January 2023, he volunteered to speak alongside other young people at a climate rally in Helena. Standing in a line immediately behind 14-year-old plaintiff Mica Kantor, Isaiah heard, for the first time, about how 16 people just like himself were suing to protect their state. Mica finished by inviting the crowd to attend the Held v. Montana trial. Then it was Isaiah’s turn at the mic.
He began hesitantly reading notes written only a few hours earlier but was encouraged by applause and found his rhythm. He finished looking out at the hundreds of people and raising his voice. “Now is the moment to act,” he said. “No more waiting. No more excuses. No more pointing fingers. The time is now.”
Now that he has recognized that he has power, he has an increasing sense of responsibility.
“I’m feeling the need, more and more, to act,” he says. “And I wish that I had felt this pressure earlier.” He stops.
“It doesn’t feel good to have this pressure,” Isaiah says. “I could have done more earlier. But I’m 14.”
The Climate Change Studies program at the University of Montana helps students learning to advocate for the environment find their voices. When Peter McDonough started directing the program five years ago, he assumed he’d be teaching and advising. but two months into the job, one of his students attempted suicide. Climate change was one of the drivers of her despair.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole,” he says. “How can I put mental health awareness into everything I teach?”
He isn’t a therapist—his degrees are in civil engineering and environmental studies—but now believes it’s his role to help his students stay healthy. McDonough feels that if a student comes out of his program without strategies for coping with the existential crisis of climate change, he’s failed them.
When students enter his Introduction to Climate Change course, they’re often overwhelmed.
“Our brains aren’t built for this,” he says. “We’ve never been forced to deal with this level of uncertainty. Every generation has its struggles, but it’s never been extinction.”
He hopes not only to help his students understand climate change, but to provide opportunities to take action, not because he believes this will save the world, but because he wants them to feel supported.
“That’s my job, to remind my students that anything they choose to do in the climate space, if they do it genuinely, and with their full attention, is worthwhile,” McDonough says.
The first step for everyone “is to do the next easiest thing,” McDonough says.
It doesn’t matter what that step is, so long as it’s achievable and builds momentum for the next one.
“I Don’t Have To Solve Everything by Myself”
Before the trial began Monday, Rikki Held, who graduated weeks earlier from Colorado College, spent as much time at her family home in Montana as possible—four days.
When she is worried about the future, she imagines being back on the ranch. She walks down an overgrown dirt road lined by sagebrush before dropping down to the sandy riverbank. She kicks her shoes off and sits on a fallen cottonwood smoothed by age. Her dog pants, the water rushes over rocks, a pheasant flushes from the brush. A soft breeze blows out of the west, fresh and earthy. She feels the river’s dampness on her skin.
The plaintiffs are represented by Nate Bellinger of Our Children’s Trust, Melissa Hornbein of the Western Environmental Law Center, and Roger Sullivan and Dustin Leftridge of McGarvey Law. In court, Rikki will testify before her lawyers, those defending the State of Montana and Judge Kathy Seeley. She wants everyone to see that she’s not just a story on a piece of paper but represents both the young people of Montana and the home she just left—the rivers, the buttes, the cattle, the grasslands, even the fires.
No matter how the trial ends, the lawsuit has helped her see her role in the climate story and taught her that she has a voice.
And she knows what comes next. She has a geology internship this summer, and then she’ll go to western Kenya to serve in the Peace Corps, teaching science. Then she hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in hydrology, to continue trying to understand climate change and to support her community, whether that’s in Montana or on the other side of the world.
“I don’t have to solve everything by myself,” Rikki says. “Anyone can make a difference in their own way. Solving problems is part of being human and you have to get through it and try to make things better. As much as you can.”
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