01 May 21
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Jesse Jackson | The Case for Statehood for the District of Columbia Is Clear
Jesse Jackson, Chicago Sun Times
Jackson writes: "Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state of the union. It finally would end the denial of voting representation to its more than 700,000 residents, the majority of whom are Black or Brown."
Making D.C. a state finally would end the denial of voting representation to more than 700,000 Americans, a majority of whom are Black or Brown.
ast week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 51, a bill that would make Washington, D.C., the 51st state of the union. It finally would end the denial of voting representation to its more than 700,000 residents, the majority of whom are Black or Brown.
The bill was passed 216-208, with Democrats voting unanimously and Republicans offering not one vote. That led the media to declare the bill dead on arrival in the Senate, where it could be passed by a majority but derailed by a filibuster that would require 60 votes. Republicans have announced that they are prepared to filibuster the bill and block the majority from passing it.
Once more, legislation guaranteeing basic civil rights is threatened by a minority employing the filibuster, the favored instrument used to block civil rights legislation and sustain segregation for decades. Only this time Republicans, once the party of Lincoln, have taken up the mantle of the plantation Democrats of the Old South.
The case for D.C. statehood is clear. The nation was founded in protest against taxation without representation. D.C. residents are denied voting representation in the House and Senate. The nation is shamed by military service without representation. D.C. residents have fought in wars going back to the Revolutionary War and yet have no representatives to vote in favor or against those wars. America, which claims to lead democracies across the world, denies the foundation of democracy to more than 700,000 citizens in the nation’s capital.
D.C. is not too small to be a state. It has more citizens than Vermont and Wyoming, and about as many as Alaska. Those states, of course, are overwhelmingly white. D.C. would have the largest proportion of African Americans of any state. There are no constitutional obstacles to making D.C. a state. The Constitution calls for Congress to control the seat of government. The new bill defines the seat of government as including Capitol Hill, the White House, the National Mall and connecting property, drawing the state from the remaining areas.
Historically, voting by D.C. residents — even for local officials — has been suppressed because of racism. In the 1870s, at the same time the South was beginning to suppress Black votes and construct what became the American version of apartheid, Southerners in Congress moved to strip District residents of the vote for fear of Blacks. This isn’t disputed.
As segregationist Sen. John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained in 1890, “In the face of this influx of Negro population from the surrounding States, [Congress] found it necessary to disenfranchise every man in the District of Columbia ... in order thereby to get rid of this load of Negro suffrage that was flooded in upon them. That is the true statement. History cannot be reversed. No man can misunderstand it.”
And racism propels the opposition today. Across the country, Republicans are mobilizing in state after state to make it more difficult to vote in ways that disproportionately impact minority voters. Rather than seeking to win the votes of Black and Brown voters, they choose instead to find ways to impede their ability to vote. Filibustering against D.C. statehood is simply the most extreme expression of this campaign of voter suppression.
Republican legislators toss out all sorts of objections to D.C. statehood — it’s too small, too urban, lacks manufacturing, doesn’t have a landfill. But their real objection is that it is too Black and Brown and likely will elect two Democratic senators and a Democratic member to the House. D.C. residents tend to be more affluent and better educated. You would think that they would be prime targets for Republican appeals. And they would be, except that the residents are disproportionately Black and Brown, and the modern-day Republican Party has made itself into the party of racial division.
The opposition to D.C. is mirrored in the opposition to statehood for Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, but, as a territory, have no right to vote. They too pay taxes and serve in the military. Puerto Rico, with 3 million citizens, is even larger than the District. Most Americans support Puerto Rican statehood. But Republicans fear that, since Puerto Ricans are largely people of color, they will tend to elect Democrats. Once more racism stands in the way of democracy.
In 1988 when I ran for president, I called for statehood for the District and for Puerto Rico. I also called for the U.S. to end its support for apartheid in South Africa and demand that Nelson Mandela be freed. Since then, Nelson Mandela was freed and became the leader of his country, leading a peaceful transition from apartheid. Historic change is possible. Yet in the U.S., the citizens of the District and of Puerto Rico remain deprived of representation. And the right to vote is once more under siege across the country.
This summer, the Senate will convene a hearing on D.C. statehood. The White House has strongly issued its support. If Republicans continue to employ the filibuster to block the vote, it is time for Democrats to suspend the filibuster, just as Republicans did to drive confirmation of their Supreme Court nominees to lifetime appointments. The tricks and traps of our segregationist past should no longer stand in the way of simple democracy for the citizens of the District of Columbia.
People take part in a May Day demonstration in Washington Square Park in New York. (photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images)
May Day Protesters Demand More Job Protections Amid Pandemic
Nicholas Garriga, Niniek Karmini and John Leicester, ABC News
Excerpt: "Workers and union leaders dusted off bullhorns and flags that had stayed furled during coronavirus lockdowns for slimmed down but still boisterous - and at times violent - May Day marches on Saturday, demanding more labor protections amid a pandemic that has turned economies and workplaces upside down."
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An immigrant detention center. (photo: ABC)
ICE Said to Transfer Women Out of Detention Center That Became Infamous Over Allegations of Forced Sterilization
Charles Davis, Business Insider
Davis writes: "An immigration detention center in Georgia where dozens of people alleged they were subjected to unnecessary medical procedures without their consent is no longer detaining any women, according a lawyer for some former detainees."
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Amazon workers protesting. (photo: Valérie Macon/AFP/Getty Images)
Amazon's Already Busted Out Its Anti-Union Playbook in Staten Island
Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo
Kimball writes: "A bootstrap Amazon unionization effort is underway in Staten Island, and lo and behold, Amazon is firing up the union-busting campaign early. We've heard allegations that it threatened Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse workers with shutting down the warehouse amid their attempt to unionize."
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Darryl Anthony Howard (middle) and his wife, Nannie Howard (right), leave the Durham County Detention Center with their lawyers and family. (photo: Chuck Liddy/Getty Images)
North Carolina Governor Grants Pardon to Man Who Spent 22 Years in Prison for Killings He Didn't Commit
Hollie Silverman and Jamiel Lynch, CNN News
orth Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Friday pardoned a man who was wrongly convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree arson in 1995, a news release from the governor's office said.
Darryl Anthony Howard can now file a claim for compensation for the years he spent in prison. In North Carolina, people wrongly convicted of felonies can receive up to $50,000 per year they were in prison, but no more that $750,000.
Amelia Green, an attorney for Howard, said: "We are pleased to have the State acknowledge what has been clear all along -- Darryl Howard never should have spent a moment in prison for these horrifying crimes, let alone over 22 years. Darryl is relieved to have this official recognition of his innocence as he moves forward to the next chapter in his life."
Howard has been a free man since a judge vacated his convictions in 2016.
In 2009, attorneys filed a motion on Howard's behalf requesting the victims' rape kits be DNA tested, the pardon said. According to media reports, Howard's attorneys argued that the DNA found in the kit of one of the victims implicated another man. Howard's DNA was not a match, the News & Observer of Raleigh reported in 2015.
In 2016 a judge in North Carolina ruled the new DNA evidence showed that Howard was innocent.
Days after the judge vacated the convictions, a district attorney announced he would not retry the case, according to media reports.
"It is important to continue our efforts to reform the justice system and to acknowledge wrongful convictions," the governor said in his statement.
43/Israeli police officers detain a Palestinian man. (photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters)
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"A Threshold Crossed": Israel Is Guilty of Apartheid, Human Rights Watch Says for First Time
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "A major new report by Human Rights Watch says for the first time that Israel is committing crimes of apartheid and persecution in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The international human rights group says Israeli authorities dispossessed, confined and forcibly separated Palestinians."
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A diver swimming over coral. (photo: JW Porter/University of Georgia)
Watching a Coral Reef Die in a Warming Ocean
Sam Purkis, The Conversation
Purkis writes: "The Chagos Archipelago is one of the most remote, seemingly idyllic places on Earth. Coconut-covered sandy beaches with incredible bird life rim tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from any continent. Just below the waves, coral reefs stretch for miles along an underwater mountain chain."
he Chagos Archipelago is one of the most remote, seemingly idyllic places on Earth. Coconut-covered sandy beaches with incredible bird life rim tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from any continent. Just below the waves, coral reefs stretch for miles along an underwater mountain chain.
It’s a paradise. At least it was before the heat wave.
When I first explored the Chagos Archipelago 15 years ago, the underwater view was incredible. Schools of brilliantly colored fish in blues, yellows and oranges darted among the corals of a vast, healthy reef system. Sharks and other large predators swam overhead. Because the archipelago is so remote and sits in one of the largest marine protected areas on the planet, it has been sheltered from industrial fishing fleets and other activities that can harm the coastal environment.
But it can’t be protected from climate change.
In 2015, a marine heat wave struck, harming coral reefs worldwide. I’m a marine biologist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, and I was with a team of researchers on a 10-year global expedition to map the world’s reefs, led by the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation. We were wrapping up our work in the Chagos Archipelago at the time. Our report on the state of the reefs there was just published in spring 2021.
As the water temperature rose, the corals began to bleach. To the untrained eye, the scene would have looked fantastic. When the water heats up, corals become stressed and they expel the tiny algae called dinoflagellates that live in their tissue. Bleaching isn’t as simple as going from a living coral to a bleached white one, though. After they expel the algae, the corals turn fluorescent pinks and blues and yellows as they produce chemicals to protect themselves from the Sun’s harmful rays. The entire reef was turning psychedelic colors.
That explosion of color is rare, and it doesn’t last long. Over the following week, we watched the corals turn white and start to die. It wasn’t just small pieces of the reef that were bleaching – it was happening across hundreds of square miles.
What most people think of as a coral is actually many tiny colonial polyps that build calcium carbonate skeletons. With their algae gone, the coral polyps could still feed by plucking morsels out of the water, but their metabolism slows without the algae, which provide more nutrients through photosynthesis. They were left desperately weakened and more vulnerable to diseases. We could see diseases taking hold, and that’s what finished them off.
We were witnessing the death of a reef.
Rising temperatures increase the heat wave risk
The devastation of the Chagos Reef wasn’t happening in isolation.
Over the past century, sea surface temperatures have risen by an average of about 0.13 degrees Celsius (0.23 F) per decade as the oceans absorb the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. The temperature increase and changing ocean chemistry affects sea life of all kinds, from deteriorating the shells of oysters and tiny pteropods, an essential part of the food chain, to causing fish populations to migrate to cooler water.
Corals can become stressed when temperatures around them rise just 1 C (1.8 F) above their tolerance level. With water temperature elevated from global warming, even a minor heat wave can become devastating.
In 2015, the ocean heat from a strong El Niño event triggered the mass bleaching in the Chagos reefs and around the world. It was the third global bleaching on record, following events in 1998 and 2010.
Bleaching doesn’t just affect the corals – entire reef systems and the fish that feed, spawn and live among the coral branches suffer. One study of reefs around Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific found that about 75% of the reef fish species declined after the 1998 bleaching, and many of those species declined by more than half.
Research shows marine heat waves are now about 20 times more likely than they were just four decades ago, and they tend to be hotter and last longer. We’re at the point now that some places in the world are anticipating coral bleaching every couple of years.
That increasing frequency of heat waves is a death knell for reefs. They don’t have time to recover before they get hit again.
Where we saw signs of hope
During the Global Reef Expedition, we visited over 1,000 reefs around the world. Our mission was to conduct standardized surveys to assess the state of the reefs and map the reefs in detail so scientists could document and hopefully respond to changes in the future. With that knowledge, countries can plan more effectively to protect the reefs, important national resources, providing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in economic value while also protecting coastlines from waves and storms.
We saw damage almost everywhere, from the Bahamas to the Great Barrier Reef.
Some reefs are able to survive heat waves better than others. Cooler, stronger currents, and even storms and cloudier areas can help prevent heat building up. But the global trend is not promising. The world has already lost 30% to 50% of its reefs in the last 40 years, and scientists have warned that most of the remaining reefs could be gone within decades.
While we see some evidence that certain marine species are moving to cooler waters as the planet warms, a reef takes thousands of years to establish and grow, and it is limited by geography.
In the areas where we saw glimmers of hope, it was mostly due to good management. When a region can control other harmful human factors – such as overfishing, extensive coastal development, pollution and runoff – the reefs are healthier and better able to handle the global pressures from climate change.
Establishing large marine protected areas is one of the most effective ways I’ve seen to protect coral reefs because it limits those other harms.
The Chagos marine protected area covers 640,000 square kilometers (250,000 square miles) with only one island currently inhabited – Diego Garcia, which houses a U.S. military base. The British government, which created the marine protected area in 2010, has been under pressure to turn over control of the region to the country of Mauritius, where former Chagos residents now live and which won a challenge over it in the International Court of Justice in 2020. Whatever happens with jurisdiction, the region would benefit from maintaining a high level of protection.
A warning for other ecosystems
The Chagos reefs could potentially recover – if they are spared from more heat waves. Even a 10% recovery would make the reefs stronger for when the next bleaching occurs. But recovery of a reef is measured in decades, not years.
So far, research missions that have returned to the Chagos reefs have found only meager recovery, if any at all.
We knew the reefs weren’t doing well under the insidious march of climate change in 2011, when the global reef expedition started. But it’s nothing like the intensity of worry we have now in 2021.
Coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine. Humans have collapsed other ecosystems before through overfishing, overhunting and development, but this is the first unequivocally tied to climate change. It’s a harbinger of what can happen to other ecosystems as they reach their survival thresholds.
s wildfires destroy millions of acres in California, Oregon, and Washington, and an unprecedented 
