09 March 21
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Michael Moore | Nobody Told Us That Oprah Was Going to Air a Special on White Supremacy
Michael Moore, Michael Moore's Facebook Page
Moore writes:
withering, devastating interview with Harry & Meghan via Oprah. The Kingdom which first brought slaves here 400 years ago had their current Royal racism outed in all its glorious brutality last night — just how black will her kids be? The Palace refused to provide security for her baby or her husband. Meghan, crushed, depressed, asked to seek help. The Palace — “The Firm” — blocked her from getting mental health services. Meghan, in despair, considered suicide. Harry frightfully saw the deja of this — it was the treatment of his dead mother all over again. So it was time to get out. His father wouldn’t return his calls. This airs today in the UK on Commonwealth Day - yes, that British Commonwealth, in which 40% to 60% of its inhabitants are people of color. None of this comes as a surprise those of color in the Commonwealth. The British press, when referring to Meghan, uses words like monkey, demon seed, straight outta Compton. It’s good to see where our original White Supremacy came from and how the Mother country embraces it to this day.
Nobody told us that Oprah was going to air a special on White Supremacy yesterday on the anniversary of the Selma March. Powerful. And the mental health/suicide discussion was so intense and so helpful, I’m certain it will save lives.
Meghan — observing your wedding in 2018, I remember thinking, oh god, she’ll pay for this. You and Harry conducted what racists saw as a “Black” wedding — complete with an incredible Black American firery preacher giving the sermon and a black gospel choir rockin’ it out. The Royals and the rich sat there stone-faced in the church through it all. I thought, she’s cooked. The press immediately went after you. I’m so sorry. Thank you for the good works you continue to do. Welcome home. It ain’t perfect here. Today the murder trial of the cop who killed George Floyd begins in Minneapolis. There is much for us all to do.
And on this International Women’s Day, congrats on the new baby girl you’ll soon be bringing into this crazy world.
Protesters march in Minneapolis on March 7. (photo: Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters)
ALSO SEE: The Murder of George Floyd: Officer Derek Chauvin
Trial Set to Begin as Feds Consider New Charges
Hundreds Protested on the Eve of Derek Chauvin's Trial for the Killing of George Floyd
Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed
Flores writes:
Jury selection for Derek Chauvin, who is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, is expected to start Monday.
day before jury selection in the murder trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer accused of killing George Floyd, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Minneapolis calling for justice and police reform.
Hundreds of people marched Sunday from Hennepin County Government Center through downtown Minneapolis, at one point stopping at an intersection to read the names of more than 400 people killed by police in the state of Minnesota. Organizers for the event, "I Can't Breathe" Silent March for Justice, asked people to wear black and bring flowers and signs.
Civil rights attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, who read the names of those killed by police, asked a group of volunteers to carry a white coffin that a member of the community had made to remind everyone that George Floyd was "lynched" on May 25 of last year.
"At the end of the day, we know that George Floyd died because of a knee being placed on his knee for nine minutes; you will never forget that," said Armstrong to the crowd. "We will continue to stand in solidarity, we will continue to stand strong, we will continue to demand justice."
Armstrong said that Black people and other people of color are living in an environment that can be hostile toward them.
"The way we change that is by standing together across all lines — racial, ethnic, religious, socioeconomic — and standing together as one demanding change," Armstrong said.
Jury selection in the high-profile trial is expected to begin Monday. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter. Three other officers charged in relation to Floyd's death are slated to stand trial in August.
Last May, a bystander video of Chauvin pushing down on Floyd's neck with his knee for about nine minutes sparked weeks of protests against racial injustice in Minneapolis and across the US. In the video, Floyd is heard repeatedly saying, "I can't breathe" — much like New York City's Eric Garner, another Black man who died at the hands of police — final words that have become a rallying cry for protesters.
The looming trial has put the city on edge, with Minneapolis officials and authorities preparing for possible civil unrest by barricading, fencing, and putting up razor wire in front of government buildings.
On Friday, just three days before Chauvin's trial was expected to begin, a state appeals court ordered Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill to reconsider the addition of a third-degree murder charge. The move could delay Chauvin's trial, but as of Sunday evening, no decision had been made.
On CBS's Face the Nation, Ben Crump, who is one of the lawyers representing Floyd's family, said it was his understanding that the trial would still start Monday.
"I know Attorney General Keith Ellison, the first African American attorney general for the state of Minnesota, is going to prosecute this case zealously," Crump said. "That's why they've moved for the third-degree murder charges to be instated, because they want to make sure that the jury has every option to hold Derek Chauvin criminally liable for the torture, the inhumanity, and the murder of George Floyd."
Asked what the message of Floyd's family was to protesters, Crump said, "Their message is thank you for standing up and exercising your First Amendment rights, but doing so in a peaceful way."
Bishop Richard D. Howell Jr. of Shiloh Temple led a prayer early during the march and asked that justice be served in the killing of George Floyd.
"Lord we thank you, we praise you, as this day has come among heaven as well as on Earth, that justice will roll down as water, and righteousness as a mighty spring," Howell said.
Fast food workers rally for better wages. (photo: Jim Weber/AP)
Rebecca Gordon | Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era: And My Own Looming Job Crisis
Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
Gordon writes: "A year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop."
Long ago, I first worked as a printer and, after that, a journalist for a small West Coast news service. In the years that followed, I’ve been a freelance editor and writer and would, for decades, be an editor at two publishing houses, Pantheon Books and Metropolitan Books (where I co-ran the American Empire Project). For the last nearly 18-plus years, I’ve also run the website TomDispatch, which turned out to be as close to a 24/7 job as I’ve ever had (though, unlike so many other jobs, a largely self-imposed one). And as I head for the age of 77 in July, I still can’t imagine the idea of “retirement.” Even if TomDispatch were to end, something I don’t expect anytime soon, I think — being a pack rat of the first order — I’d promptly head for the top of my bedroom closet. There, over these many decades, I’ve packed away letters and papers of every sort (including World War II-era documents from my parents). Up there, in garbage bags, are things I wrote from the age of 12 to relatively recently and that people wrote to or for me. There are letters by the hundreds (from the era before emails and texting), my unpublished novels, my earliest journalism, and god knows what else. Somewhere in that mass of material that undoubtedly won’t outlive me, I dream that I might find the inspiration for a new late-in-life career looking back and writing something. But retire? Not work (however I might define that word at any moment)? I truly can’t imagine.
Of course, I’ve had one great luxury most of my life that so many Americans haven’t had. I’ve generally been paid to do what was, to my mind, meaningful work that mattered if not to the world, then at least to my own small universe, the one I inhabit every day. That, I know, has been and remains a luxury of the first order in our American world, a reality the pandemic of the last year-plus has only made worse for so many of us, forced into unwanted, unfunded, unneeded “retirement” in a world from hell. Today, TomDispatch stalwart Rebecca Gordon looks at work itself in the pandemic moment and in the context of a society in which, when you work, with rare exceptions, someone is always making money off you — often to your detriment, often to your bitter disappointment and pain.
She takes up the very nature of work, a subject rarely addressed not just at this website but more generally in this country at a time when the issue of raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour is at least a major point of political contention (and when, for the first time in god knows how long, an American president has come out strongly in favor of union organizing). In a country where work is often hell and inequality at record levels (even as America’s billionaires made an extra $1.3 trillion in the pandemic period), this is certainly a time to consider, once again, the role of work in our lives. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Rethinking Employment in the Biden-Harris Era
And My Own Looming Job Crisis
year ago, just a few weeks before San Francisco locked itself down for the pandemic, I fell deeply in love with a 50-year-old. The object of my desire was a wooden floor loom in the window of my local thrift shop. Friends knowledgeable on such matters examined photos I took of it and assured me that all the parts were there, so my partner (who puts up with such occasional infatuations) helped me wrangle it into one of our basement rooms and I set about learning to weave.
These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that’s gripped me, and the pandemic that’s gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and its subset, paid labor) in human lives. During an enforced enclosure, this 68-year-old has spent a lot of time at home musing on what the pandemic has revealed about how this country values work. Why, for example, do the most “essential” workers so often earn so little — or, in the case of those who cook, clean, and care for the people they live with, nothing at all? What does it mean when conservatives preach the immeasurable value of labor, while insisting that its most basic price in the marketplace shouldn’t rise above $7.25 per hour?
That, after all, is where the federal minimum wage has been stuck since 2009. And that’s where it would probably stay forever, if Republicans like Kansas Senator Roger Marshall had their way. He brags that he put himself through college making $6 an hour and doesn’t understand why people can’t do the same today for $7.25. One likely explanation: the cost of a year at Kansas State University has risen from $898 when he was at school to $10,000 today. Another? At six bucks an hour, he was already making almost twice the minimum wage of his college years, a princely $3.35 an hour.
It’s Definitely Not Art, But Is It Work?
It’s hard to explain the pleasure I’ve gotten from learning the craft of weaving, an activity whose roots extend at least 20,000 years into the past. In truth, I could devote the next (and most likely last) 20 years of my life just to playing with “plain weave,” its simplest form — over-under, over-under — and not even scratch the surface of its possibilities. Day after day, I tromp down to our chilly basement and work with remarkable satisfaction at things as simple as getting a straight horizontal edge across my cloth.
But is what I’m doing actually “work”? Certainly, at the end of a day of bending under the loom to tie things up, of working the treadles to raise and lower different sets of threads, my aging joints are sore. My body knows all too well that I’ve been doing something. But is it work? Heaven knows, I’m not making products crucial to our daily lives or those of others. (We now possess more slightly lopsided cloth napkins than any two-person household could use in a lifetime.) Nor, at my beginner’s level, am I producing anything that could pass for “art.”
I don’t have to weave. I could buy textiles for a lot less than it costs me to make them. But at my age, in pandemic America, I’m lucky. I have the time, money, and freedom from personal responsibilities to be able to immerse myself in making cloth. For me, playing with string is a first-world privilege. It won’t help save humanity from a climate disaster or reduce police violence in communities of color. It won’t even help a union elect an American president, something I was focused on last fall, while working with the hospitality-industry union. It’s not teaching college students to question the world and aspire to living examined lives, something I’ve done in my official work as a part-time professor for the last 15 years. It doesn’t benefit anyone but me.
Nevertheless, what I’m doing certainly does have value for me. It contributes, as philosophers might say, to my human flourishing. When I practice weaving, I’m engaged in something political philosopher Iris Marion Young believed essential to a good life. As she put it, I’m “learning and using satisfying and expansive skills.” Young thought that a good society would offer all its members the opportunity to acquire and deploy such complicated skills in “socially recognized settings.” In other words, a good society would make it possible for people to do work that was both challenging and respected.
Writing in the late 1980s, she took for granted that “welfare capitalism” of Europe, and to a far lesser extent the United States, would provide for people’s basic material needs. Unfortunately, decades later, it’s hard even to teach her critique of such welfare capitalism — a system that sustained lives but didn’t necessarily allow them to flourish — because my students here have never experienced an economic system that assumes any real responsibility for sustaining life. Self-expression and an opportunity to do meaningful work? Pipe dreams if you aren’t already well-off! They’ll settle for jobs that pay the rent, keep the refrigerator stocked, and maybe provide some health benefits as well. That would be heaven enough, they say. And who could blame them when so many jobs on offer will fall far short of even such modest goals?
What I’m not doing when I weave is making money. I’m not one of the roughly 18 million workers in this country who do earn their livings in the textile industry. Such “livings” pay a median wage of about $28,000 a year, which likely makes it hard to keep a roof over your head. Nor am I one of the many millions more who do the same around the world, people like Seak Hong who sews garments and bags for an American company in Cambodia. Describing her life, she told a New York Times reporter, “I feel tired, but I have no choice. I have to work.” Six days a week,
“Ms. Hong wakes up at 4:35 a.m. to catch the truck to work from her village. Her workday begins at 7 and usually lasts nine hours, with a lunch break. During the peak season, which lasts two to three months, she works until 8:30 p.m.”
“Ms. Hong has been in the garment business for 22 years. She earns the equivalent of about $230 a month and supports her father, her sister, her brother (who is on disability) and her 12-year-old son.”
Her sister does the unpaid — but no less crucial — work of tending to her father and brother, the oxen, and their subsistence rice plants.
Hong and her sister are definitely working, one with pay, the other without. They have, as she says, no choice.
Catherine Gamet, who makes handbags in France for Louis Vuitton, is also presumably working to support herself. But hers is an entirely different experience from Hong’s. She loves what she’s been doing for the last 23 years. Interviewed in the same article, she told the Times, “To be able to build bags and all, and to be able to sew behind the machine, to do hand-sewn products, it is my passion.” For Gamet, “The time flies by.”
Both these women have been paid to make bags for more than 20 years, but they’ve experienced their jobs very differently, undoubtedly thanks to the circumstances surrounding their work, rather than the work itself: how much they earn; the time they spend traveling to and from their jobs; the extent to which the “decision” to do a certain kind of work is coerced by fear of poverty. We don’t learn from Hong’s interview how she feels about the work itself. Perhaps she takes pride in what she does. Most people find a way to do that. But we know that making bags is Gamet’s passion. Her work is not merely exhausting, but in Young’s phrase “satisfying and expansive.” The hours she spends on it are lived, not just endured as the price of survival.
Pandemic Relief and Its Discontents
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris arrived at the White House with a commitment to getting a new pandemic relief package through Congress as soon as possible. It appears that they’ll succeed, thanks to the Senate’s budget reconciliation process — a maneuver that bypasses the possibility of a Republican filibuster. Sadly, because resetting the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour doesn’t directly involve taxation or spending, the Senate’s parliamentarian ruled that the reconciliation bill can’t include it.
Several measures contained in the package have aroused conservative mistrust, from the extension of unemployment benefits to new income supplements for families with children. Such measures provoke a Republican fear that somebody, somewhere, might not be working hard enough to “deserve” the benefits Congress is offering or that those benefits might make some workers think twice about sacrificing their time caring for children to earn $7.25 an hour at a soul-deadening job.
As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently observed, Republicans are concerned that such measures might erode respect for the “natural dignity” of work. In an incisive piece, he rebuked Republican senators like Mike Lee and Marco Rubio for responding negatively to proposals to give federal dollars to people raising children. Such a program, they insisted, smacked of — the horror! — “welfare,” while in their view, “an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work.” Of course, for Lee and Rubio “work” doesn’t include changing diapers, planning and preparing meals, doing laundry, or helping children learn to count, tell time, and tie their shoelaces — unless, of course, the person doing those things is employed by someone else’s family and being paid for it. In that case it qualifies as “work.” Otherwise, it’s merely a form of government-subsidized laziness.
There is, however, one group of people that “pro-family” conservatives have long believed are naturally suited to such activities and who supposedly threaten the well-being of their families if they choose to work for pay instead. I mean, of course, women whose male partners earn enough to guarantee food, clothing, and shelter with a single income. I remember well a 1993 article by Pat Gowens, a founder of Milwaukee’s Welfare Warriors, in the magazine Lesbian Contradiction. She wondered why conservative anti-feminists of that time thought it good if a woman with children had a man to provide those things, but an outrage if she turned to “The Man” for the same aid. In the first case, the woman’s work is considered dignified, sacred, and in tune with the divine plan. Among conservatives, then or now, the second could hardly be dignified with the term “work.”
The distinction they make between private and public paymasters, when it comes to domestic labor contains at least a tacit, though sometimes explicit, racial element. When the program that would come to be known as “welfare” was created as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, it was originally designed to assist respectable white mothers who, through no fault of their own, had lost their husbands to death or desertion. It wasn’t until the 1960s that African American women decided to secure their right to coverage under the same program and built the National Welfare Rights Organization to do so.
The word “welfare” refers, as in the preamble to the Constitution, to human wellbeing. But when Black women started claiming those rights, it suddenly came to signify undeserved handouts. You could say that Ronald Reagan rode into the White House in 1980 in a Cadillac driven by the mythical Black “welfare queen” he continually invoked in his campaign. It would be nice to think that the white resentment harnessed by Reagan culminated (as in “reached its zenith and will now decline”) with Trump’s 2016 election, but, given recent events, that would be unrealistically optimistic.
Reagan began the movement to undermine the access of poor Americans to welfare programs. Ever since, starving the entitlement beast has been the Republican lodestar. In the same period, of course, the wealthier compatriots of those welfare mothers have continued to receive ever more generous “welfare” from the government. Those would include subsidies to giant agriculture, oil-depletion allowances and other subsidies for fossil-fuel companies, the mortgage-interest tax deduction for people with enough money to buy rather than rent their homes, and the massive tax cuts for billionaires of the Trump era. However, it took a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, to achieve what Reagan couldn’t, and, as he put it, “end welfare as we know it.”
The Clinton administration used the same Senate reconciliation process in play today for the Biden administration’s Covid-19 relief bill to push through the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. It was more commonly known as “welfare reform.” That act imposed a 32-hour-per-week work or training requirement on mothers who received what came to be known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It also gave “temporary” its deeper meaning by setting a lifetime benefits cap of five years. Meanwhile, that same act proved a bonanza for non-profits and Private Industry Councils that got contracts to administer “job training” programs and were paid to teach women how to wear skirts and apply makeup to impress future employers. In the process, a significant number of unionized city and county workers nationwide were replaced with welfare recipients “earning” their welfare checks by sweeping streets or staffing county offices, often for less than the minimum wage.
In 1997, I was working with Californians for Justice (CFJ), then a new statewide organization dedicated to building political power in poor communities, especially those of color. Given the high unemployment rates in just such communities, our response to Clinton’s welfare reforms was to demand that those affected by them at least be offered state-funded jobs at a living wage. If the government was going to make people work for pay, we reasoned, then it should help provide real well-paying jobs, not bogus “job readiness” programs. We secured sponsors in the state legislature, but I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that our billion-dollar jobs bill never got out of committee in Sacramento.
CFJ’s project led me into an argument with one of my mentors, the founder of the Center for Third World Organizing, Gary Delgado. Why on earth, he asked me, would you campaign to get people jobs? “Jobs are horrible. They’re boring: they waste people’s lives and destroy their bodies.” In other words, Gary was no believer in the inherent dignity of paid work. So, I had to ask myself, why was I?
Among those who have inspired me, Gary wasn’t alone in holding such a low opinion of jobs. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, for instance, had been convinced that those whose economic condition forced them to work for a living would have neither the time nor space necessary to live a life of “excellence” (his requirement for human happiness). Economic coercion and a happy life were, in his view, mutually exclusive.
Reevaluating Jobs
One of the lies capitalism tells us is that we should be grateful for our jobs and should think of those who make a profit from our labor not as exploiters but as “job creators.” In truth, however, there’s no creativity involved in paying people less than the value of their work so that you can skim off the difference and claim that you earned it. Even if we accept that there could be creativity in “management” — the effort to organize and divide up work so it’s done efficiently and well — it’s not the “job creators” who do that, but their hirelings. All the employers bring to the game is money.
Take the example of the admirable liberal response to the climate emergency, the Green New Deal. In the moral calculus of capitalism, it’s not enough that shifting to a green economy could promote the general welfare by rebuilding and extending the infrastructure that makes modern life possible and rewarding. It’s not enough that it just might happen in time to save billions of people from fires, floods, hurricanes, or starvation. What matters — the selling point — is that such a conversion would create jobs (along with the factor no one mentions out loud: profits).
Now, I happen to support exactly the kind of work involved in building an economy that could help reverse climate devastation. I agree with Joe Biden’s campaign statement that such an undertaking could offer people jobs with “good wages, benefits, and worker protections.” More than that, such jobs would indeed contribute to a better life for those who do them. As the philosopher Iris Marion Young puts it, they would provide the chance to learn and use “satisfying and expansive skills in a socially recognized setting.” And that would be a very good thing even if no one made a penny of profit in the process.
Now, having finished my paid labor for the day, it’s back to the basement and loom for me.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.
The words 'Solidarity with Bessemer' are painted on a car as demonstrators participate in a Tax Amazon car caravan and bike brigade to defend a payroll-based tax on big businesses. (photo: Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images)
Amazon Fights Aggressively to Defeat Union Drive in Alabama, Fearing a Coming Wave
Jay Greene, The Washington Post
Greene writes: "A worker who picks items from the shelves of an Amazon warehouse in the area here was recently inspired to unionize."
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Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela. (photo: AP)
Biden Administration Giving Temporary Protected Status to Thousands of Venezuelans in US
Tracy Wilkinson and Molly O'Toole, Los Angeles Times
he White House on Monday announced a temporary protected status decree that could allow tens of thousands of Venezuelans who fled their homeland to remain in the United States with legal standing.
The program marks a significant shift in U.S. policy from the Trump administration, which denied Venezuelans protection even as President Trump tried to overthrow the leftist government in Caracas. His administration also secretly deported Venezuelans despite clamor in Congress for protected status for the refugees.
Only on his last day in office did Trump issue an executive order deferring the removal of Venezuelans for 18 months, but not granting them temporary status and leaving them in limbo.
Fleeing poverty, hunger, disease and the brutal repression of President Nicolas Maduro, more than 4 million Venezuelans have left their country to date, according to the United Nations refugee agency, and more than 800,000 have sought asylum globally.
The protected status announced Monday will be issued through executive order rather than wending its way through Congress, and could benefit more than 320,000 people, administration officials said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity without providing a reason.
“The living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a statement. “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crises.”
Venezuelans who were physically present in the U.S. as of Monday were eligible and would have 180 days to apply, pay fees and prove their residence through bills or other documentation, according to a release from the Homeland Security Department and officials.
The action won praise in numerous circles.
“To keep deporting Venezuelans back to Maduro’s tragedy would be to tell them they are a burden on our communities, a menace to our national security, and an unwelcome guest in our country,” said Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), referring to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Menendez has long fought for Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Venezuelans.
“This is huge,” said Geoff Ramsey, a longtime Venezuela expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights advocacy group. “TPS has proven to be far more sustainable across administrations.”
Ramsey and others said they hoped Biden’s announcement foretold a clearer, broader U.S. policy on Venezuela.
So far, the Biden administration has offered few details on what it might do differently from Trump, whose policies neither restored democracy to Venezuela nor significantly eased the humanitarian crisis. “We are still waiting to see what’s new,” Ramsey said.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the U.S. would continue Trump’s recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful president of Venezuela.
Nor has the Biden administration agreed to talks with Maduro.
A second senior administration official also briefing reporters said the U.S. government remained “very clear-eyed” about how the Maduro government has used delay tactics in negotiations to crack down on opponents and consolidate power.
The administration officials also rejected suggestions that President Biden’s decision was a political ploy to appease southern Florida, where a hardcore Republican vote supportive of Venezuelan refugees probably contributed to Biden losing the state in the 2020 election.
“It is not at all” partisan, one of the officials said. “The suffering and ongoing turmoil that the Venezuelan people have endured is well documented ... and that’s neither Democratic or Republican.”
Over the decades the TPS program has been used in limited fashion to grant a form of refugee status to people whose nations have been ravaged by natural disaster, such as hurricanes and earthquakes in the case of some Central Americans and Haitians, and war. As its name suggests, the status is meant to be temporary, and critics have complained that too many beneficiaries of TPS have morphed into permanent residents.
This led the Trump administration, already sponsoring measures to reduce legal and illegal immigration, to end large parts of the programs.
Venezuelans were a peculiar case.
Even as the Trump administration railed against Venezuela’s leadership, it resisted a bipartisan push — including from Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, an avowed hawk on Venezuela — to grant Venezuelans the right to stay in the U.S. under TPS.
While the Trump administration worked to overthrow Venezuela’s government because of horrific abuses of its citizens, officials also secretly deported Venezuelans from the United States, removing them through third countries to mask their ultimate destination and skirt a 2019 law against flights to or from Venezuelan airports, according to a report by Menendez, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Yet on Trump’s last day in office, he issued an executive order deferring the removal of Venezuelans for 18 months.
In late January, senators again introduced legislation calling for TPS for Venezuelans.
In 2019, Senate Republicans blocked a similar House-passed measure. Biden said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he’d extend TPS for Venezuelans.
Since 2014, there’s been an 8,000% increase in the number of Venezuelans seeking refugee status, primarily in the Americas, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
And while many Venezuelans have sought protection closer by in the region, Venezuela in recent years has overtaken China as the top country of origin for asylum seekers in the United States, accounting for more than 25% of all asylum applications filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to the latest data. As recently as 2013, Venezuelans didn’t even rank in the top 10.
Many Venezuelans still fly to the United States — particularly those with more money and with family in Florida, which has a sizable Venezuelan expatriate community — and claim asylum upon arrival at U.S. airports or after, in a process known as affirmative asylum.
But a growing number have sought protection at the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico, too, has seen a dramatic increase in Venezuelans seeking asylum there, and most applications there are approved.
In the United States, Venezuelans confronted several Trump-era policies to restrict the ability to claim asylum. More than 50% of Venezuelan asylum claims are denied on average, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database of federal immigration statistics. Last year, of the nearly 2,000 Venezuelans who received a decision on their asylum claims, about 900 were denied in U.S. immigration court, putting them at risk of deportation.
Before Monday’s announcement, the Biden administration had yet to issue new TPS designations for any country, or restore TPS for those terminated by Trump, according to a letter from 314 state and national organizations urging Biden and Mayorkas to extend TPS for 18 countries, including Venezuela.
University students march on a main road during a demonstration in Mandalay, Myanmar, March 7, 2021. (photo: AP)
Myanmar Women Risk It All to Challenge the Junta
Tanyalak Thongyoojaroen, Al Jazeera
Thongyoojaroen writes:
Since 1988, women have been the backbone of the fight for democracy in Myanmar.
n February 1, the Myanmar military reopened a tragic chapter of its history by overthrowing the newly elected government and seizing power yet again in a coup d’etat. Hundreds of thousands of people have gone on strike or taken to the streets to denounce the murderous junta, and while people of all walks of life are participating, women are at the forefront.
During the first week of resistance against the coup, thousands of women garment workers walked out of factories to join the demonstrations, inspiring the masses.
“One of the first groups to protest were women’s labour unions and garment workers along with young women activists,” one protester told me. “People saw women workers from the garment factories protest in Yangon, so they did the same in the following days,” another protester added.
Women activists and politicians have also helped mobilise crowds to join the protests. Ei Thinzar Maung, one of the country’s youngest candidates for MP in the last election, nominated by the Democratic Party for a New Society, has been using her social media accounts where she has more than 360,000 followers to rally support for the demonstrations.
“Please come out peacefully from all places of Yangon and join the strike at Myanikone,” reads one of her posts. “Women at the front,” reads another post with a photo of herself and other women from different groups joining the movement.
The risks are high for those who take to the streets. The security forces have used excessive and lethal force in the crackdowns on protests, including high-pressure water cannon, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. On February 10, the police fatally shot 19-year-old Mya Thwate Thwate Khaing in the head during a protest in Naypyidaw.
The police and army have since murdered at least 60 more women, men, and children. They have also arrested more than 1,500 people, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners-Burma.
Describing the dangers of arrest for women, another Myanmar woman activist told me, “When arrested unlawfully, women face extra dangers of sexual harassment and violence from the security forces.”
Those fears are well-founded. For years, my colleagues at Fortify Rights have documented incidents of mass rape of women and girls by security forces.
However, the heavy-handed tactics employed by the army and the police have not dissuaded people from taking to the streets.
“I do not have any fear of being arrested,” said a woman human rights defender and member of the All-Burma Federation of Student Unions, a nationwide student organisation with a long history of pro-democracy activism in Myanmar. “I am fighting for justice. I am fighting for democracy. I am fighting for our generation.”
This is not the first time that women have played a leading role in Myanmar’s struggle for freedom. During pro-democracy protests in 1988, also known as “the 8888 Uprising”, university students, many of them women, led the charge and paid a steep price for their commitment to democracy. Security forces shot dead hundreds of women protesters and imprisoned dozens of others for participating in peaceful protests.
“My politically active grandmother was always under watch and imprisoned for many years [for participating in the 1988 movement],” said a Myanmar woman activist who is now actively involved in the protests. “Those were terrible times, and I felt I needed to play my part not to let history repeat.”
Women from Myanmar are also spearheading efforts to raise international awareness about the situation in Myanmar. For example, an ethnic Chin woman from Myanmar who now lives in the United States told me about her solidarity campaigns.
“When [the coup] happened, we got together to do some awareness advocacy campaigns. We organised peaceful demonstrations downtown where we live,” she said. “One of the things that we can do that will be most effective is having the global community become aware of what is happening and, at the same time, letting our community in Burma know that we are standing with them and that we are supporting them.”
As the battle for democracy in Myanmar rages on, women will continue to stand in the front lines like the generations of women before them. The international community must stand with them. On March 5, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) convened a closed-door meeting to discuss the rising death tolls and arbitrary detention as protests continue in Myanmar.
Over the years, the UNSC has released several statements in response to atrocities in Myanmar, none of which has led to any meaningful change on the ground. This time, the international community must take decisive action. The UNSC must impose a global arms embargo on the Myanmar military and ask the International Criminal Court to investigate its crimes.
The international community must recognise the courage of the women of Myanmar and stand with them in their fight for democracy.
Migratory white pelicans are seen along an oil-slicked shoreline in Barataria Bay, Louisiana, on Dec. 5, 2010, about eight months after the BP oil spill. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Biden DOI Reverses Trump Rule That Stripped Migratory Bird Protections
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes:
n Monday the Biden administration restored protections for migratory birds from accidental, industry-caused deaths.
In 2017 the Trump administration altered the interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) arguing that it only prohibited the direct hunting or killing of birds, not unintended deaths from wind turbines or oil spills, for example, EcoWatch reported at the time.
The change "overturned decades of bipartisan and international consensus and allowed industry to kill birds with impunity," Interior Spokesperson Tyler Cherry told The Associated Press.
Obama U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe warned that the change could lead to billions of bird deaths in subsequent decades, The Associated Press reported at the time.
Before Monday's reversal of this interpretation by Biden's Department of the Interior, the Trump ruling had already encountered legal challenges. In August, a New York federal judge deemed the new interpretation to be invalid.
"It is not only a sin to kill a mockingbird, it is also a crime," U.S. District Judge Valorie Caproni wrote in her decision. "That has been the letter of the law for the past century. But if the Department of the Interior has its way, many mockingbirds and other migratory birds that delight people and support ecosystems throughout the country will be killed without legal consequence."
The Trump administration moved forward despite the decision, and finalized the rollback during its last weeks in power.
However, Biden's administration delayed the new rule from taking effect and reopened it for public comments, HuffPost reported. Now that it has been jettisoned, Cherry said a replacement rule would be forthcoming.
"The department will also reconsider its interpretation of the MBTA to develop common-sense standards that can protect migratory birds and provide certainty to industry," Cherry told Courthouse News Service.
The 1918 MBTA resulted from overhunting and poaching of migratory birds, The Associated Press reported. The policy makes it illegal to pursue, hunt, kill, capture or possess migratory birds or their parts without a permit, HuffPost explained. Since the 1970s, the act has also been used to penalize companies when their actions accidentally harm birds.
For example, the act helped win a $100 million settlement from BP after the company's 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico killed about 100,000 birds, The Associated Press reported.
It's estimated that around 460 million to 1.4 billion birds die every year from human-made causes, including oil pits and glass buildings. Between 2010 and 2018, civil and criminal enforcement cases against companies led to $5.8 million in fines, excluding the BP settlement. However, most of those cases did not lead to criminal prosecutions since many companies were willing to implement bird protections.
While industry groups backed the Trump rollback, they also did not oppose the Biden reversal.
"We are committed to working with the Biden administration throughout their rulemaking process in support of policies that support environmental protection while providing regulatory certainty," Amy Emmert, American Petroleum Institute senior policy advisor, told Courthouse News Service.
Conservation groups said this general atmosphere of cooperation made the Trump rollback unwarranted.
"There really had been a lot of collaboration and a fair amount of consensus about what best management practices looked like for most major industries," Sarah Greenberger, senior vice president with the Audubon Society, told The Associated Press. "There was a lot of common ground, which is why the moves from the last administration were so unnecessary."
