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The settlement occurs more than two decades after Purdue began aggressively marketing OxyContin to an unsuspecting public and after more than 500,000 people died in the United States as a result.
Purdue will be bankrupt, but members of the multi-billionaire Sackler family – who were responsible for the decisions that led to these deaths and profited the most from Purdue’s opioid dealings – will gain near-total immunity from future litigation. By the time the settlement is paid out they most likely will be as wealthy as they ever were.
So where does personal responsibility come in?
Arthur M. Sackler made a fortune in the 1980s by being the first to directly market prescription drugs to physicians. Utilizing many of the same direct-marketing techniques, his brothers Mortimer and Raymond and nephews Richard and Jonathan, began pushing OxyContin, which had about 1.5 times the strength of morphine. Richard, while an executive and then president of Purdue Pharma, claimed repeatedly that opioids were not highly addictive. To increase company profits, he urged doctors to prescribe as high doses as were possible, even having Purdue measure its performance in proportion to the strength of the doses it sold despite allegedly knowing that sustained high doses of OxyContin risked addiction. As Paul Hanly, a leading attorney in the case, told the Guardian, “this is essentially a crime family … drug dealers in nice suits and dresses.”
Not just nice suits and dresses. The Sackler family also purchased fawning respectability from universities, medical centers, and museums to which they contributed a fraction of their billions. Even prestigious medical schools ostensibly dedicated to advancing the public’s health fell for the ruse. One example, from the Yale School of Medicine’s magazine in late 2009:
“It would be an understatement to say that philanthropy runs in the family of Richard S. Sackler, M.D., and his brother, Jonathan Sackler. The names of their parents, Raymond and Beverly Sackler, adorn cultural and scientific centers around the world, from the Sackler Galleries at the British Museum to the famed Sackler Wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, to the just-launched Raymond and Beverly Sackler Institute for Biological, Physical, and Engineering Sciences at Yale. … In keeping with their family’s long-standing generosity to Yale, the brothers’ respective foundations have now joined forces to donate a $3 million endowment establishing the Richard Sackler and Jonathan Sackler Professorship, expressly intended to be held by those appointed as director of Yale Cancer Center. Richard Sackler said, “My father raised Jon and me to believe that philanthropy is an important part of how we should fill our days.”
In America, shame and honor have become confused partly because institutions that bestow honors often have the ulterior motive of extracting as much money as possible from rich honorees while knowing as little as possible about how these donors obtained their wealth. In return for the donation, honorees are imbued with moral approval.
Richard Sackler and other family members involved in this tragedy deserve to be shamed. Institutions that took their blood money should remove the Sackler name from their centers, professorships, buildings, and pediments. If they won’t be held accountable in a court of law, they must be held accountable at least in the public sphere.
U.S. special operations personnel prepare to board a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a mission in Kunar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 25, 2012. (photo: U.S. Department of Defense)
A lacerating report this week was the 11th in a clear-eyed series that revealed the US failure to reconstruct Afghanistan over two decades. Why didn’t anyone heed the inspector general’s warnings?
he chaotic collapse of the Afghan military in recent months made starkly clear that the $83 billion U.S. taxpayers spent to create and fund those security forces achieved little. But a new report this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction also reveals the depths of failure of the United States’ entire 20-year, $145 billion effort to reconstruct (or construct, in some cases) Afghanistan’s civil society.
John Sopko, the special inspector general since 2012, has long chronicled the government’s miscalculations. In his latest lacerating assessment, he concluded that “the U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.” The U.S. effort was clumsy and ignorant, the report says, calling out the hubris of a superpower thinking it could reshape a country it didn’t understand by tossing gobs of money around.
The new report is a sweeping look back over America’s two decades in Afghanistan, which left 2,443 U.S. servicemembers and more than 114,000 Afghans dead. The watchdog agency has, for 13 years, consistently and accurately pointed out consequential flaws of the many reconstruction programs at play.
ProPublica also examined some of the same issues along the way in a series called “GI Dough.” In 2015, we decided to add up the waste and did an extensive analysis of the causes behind it. Our reporting found at least $17 billion in likely wasted taxpayer dollars at the time. (And that was just out of the small percentage of total spending SIGAR had scrutinized at that point.) To help put those squandered funds into context, we created a game readers could play to see what the money could have bought at home.
The efforts to create a new government and military from scratch were overly ambitious, ProPublica found in 2015. They failed to consider the needs and abilities of Afghans. There was a disregard for learning from past mistakes. (Take for example, soybeans.) And the goals were far too “pie in the sky” for one of the world’s poorest nations, a country still racked by violence. What was happening in Afghanistan was strikingly similar to the failures endured in Iraq just a few years prior.
For its part, SIGAR has dissected a wide variety of breakdowns in its decade-plus of tracking the Afghanistan effort. These reports are not just about a $25 million building no one wanted or would ever use, a $200 million literacy program that failed to teach would-be soldiers how to read, a $335 million power plant the Afghans couldn’t afford to run or even the $486 million spent on planes that couldn’t fly and ended up as scrap metal. What the reports often really highlight is that the underlying assumptions were wrong.
The SIGAR reports form a penetrating body of real-time analysis that reveals little appetite to change course and whose warnings seem to have gone unheeded. Adequately answering the questions SIGAR raised in each report would have forced a wholesale reexamination of the U.S. presence in the country. That never happened.
“This was not a matter of ignoring what was said as much as not wanting to come to grips with the issue, and it was a deliberate choice not to deal with the problems,” said Anthony Cordesman, a policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It wasn’t even a triumph of hope over experience; it was a triumph of political expediency over meaningful policy making.”
According to Cordesman, no one wanted to “preside over a very visible American defeat,” one that would undoubtedly leave behind a destabilized Afghanistan and potential national security disaster. There was, too, he said, a strong contingent of true believers who kept making the argument that success was almost in hand: “I think they were in a state of denial.”
Then there were the military generals and other top officials described in The Washington Post’s revelatory “Afghanistan Papers” in 2019, who were far more interested in spinning a tale of near victory to the public. In addition to assurances that the insurgency was on its heels, officials often trotted out statistics about lower infant mortality rates, increased life expectancy and vastly improved educational opportunities for girls. SIGAR acknowledged such “bright spots” in this week’s report, but concluded that those achievements were not worth the sizable investment and, more important, aren’t sustainable without a continued U.S. presence. In other words: It was all temporary.
SIGAR found that there was a persistent, troubling disconnect between what U.S. officials wanted to be true and what was actually happening. “By spending money faster than it could be accounted for, the U.S. government ultimately achieved the opposite of what it intended: it fueled corruption, delegitimized the Afghan government, and increased insecurity,” the report says. But officials pressed on with “reckless compromises,” including unrealistic timelines for progress, and “simply found new ways to ignore conditions on the ground.”
Diplomatic agencies more suited to the task of nation building were muscled aside by the Pentagon, which was better resourced but lacked the requisite expertise. The State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, SIGAR reported, didn’t have enough staff to “meaningfully perform that role.”
“If the goal was to rebuild and leave behind a country that can sustain itself and pose little threat to U.S. national security interests,” the report says, “the overall picture is bleak.”
SIGAR’s analysis of the future is equally forbidding. The U.S. is exiting Afghanistan, but history shows we’ll likely jump into nation building again. SIGAR’s report notes that it’s the “11th lessons learned report” in the series, but the heading for the report makes it quite clear that, if the U.S. government is the student, the message hasn’t sunk in. It’s called “What We Need to Learn: Lessons from Twenty Years of Afghanistan Reconstruction.”
Images and videos of the riot show individuals associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories. (photo: Getty Images)
Owen Shroyer unlawfully entered a restricted area at the west side of the Capitol during the deadly rampage that interrupted the formal congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, prosecutors said in court papers unsealed on Friday.
He hosts a talk show associated with Infowars, called “The War Room With Owen Shroyer,” streamed daily on an InfoWars platform, prosecutors said.
Shroyer faces two misdemeanor charges: violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, and unlawfully entering a restricted area.
The court papers included a photograph of Shroyer at the Capitol on Jan. 6 with Alex Jones, a right-wing media personality and the founder of InfoWars. Jones, who has not been charged in connection with the riot, participated in pro-Trump events in Washington on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6 and helped promote the former president’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud.
Shroyer led a crowd of people who marched from a park near the White House to the Capitol on Jan. 6, an FBI agent said in a court filing.
The agent said video footage showed Shroyer leading chants and telling the crowd: “Today we march for the Capitol because on this historic January 6, 2021, we have to let our congressmen and women know, and we have to let Mike Pence know, they stole the election, we know they stole it, and we aren’t going to accept it!” Pence was Trump’s vice president.
More than 570 people have been charged in connection with the riot at the Capitol.
Immigrant children in a detention center. (photo: Ross D. Franklin/Pool Photo)
“Then to have this traumatic experience of being essentially arrested by ICE and then put in an orange jumpsuit in a detention facility or jail — talk about layers of trauma."
t least five teenagers who were separated from their parents at the US–Mexico border by the Trump administration were taken from children’s shelters and sent to jail-like ICE facilities for adults shortly after turning 18, according to public records obtained by BuzzFeed News.
Two teens were sent to the Port Isabel Service Processing Center in Los Fresnos, Texas, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Three were sent to a detention facility in Houston. The records didn't provide any additional information on who they were or what happened to the teens after they were sent to ICE detention.
While some immigrant children who arrive without a parent or legal guardian end up being sent to ICE detention facilities if they age out of the shelters for minors run by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, these five teens did not come to the US alone. Under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, immigrants caught crossing the border were charged with illegal entry; if they were traveling with kids, they were separated while the adults faced the charges in federal court. The 3,913 children were taken from their families, listed as unaccompanied minors, and sent to HHS custody. Ultimately, in the cases of these five teenagers, they were then sent to ICE detention.
These five cases stand out because of the added trauma they likely experienced after being separated from their parents, said Kate Melloy Goettel, legal director of litigation at the American Immigration Council.
"Then to have this traumatic experience of being essentially arrested by ICE and then put in an orange jumpsuit in a detention facility or jail — talk about layers of trauma," Melloy Goettel told BuzzFeed News. "It wasn't just that single traumatic act of family separation; there were so many ripple effects that came after it, and this is one of them."
BuzzFeed News’ discovery of the five teens’ cases comes as the Biden administration tries to undo some of the harm caused by the Trump White House when it separated thousands of children from their parents at the border. As part of those efforts, Biden created a family reunification task force, charged with identifying children who were separated during the Trump administration and attempting to reunite them with their parents. Some of these separated families in recent months have been allowed to reunite in the US under humanitarian parole, which lasts three years, and have been given access to mental health services. They're also eligible for work authorization.
The Department of Homeland Security said children who were separated under the zero-tolerance policy and aged out of shelters for unaccompanied minors could request humanitarian parole to come back to the US if they were deported; their parents and immediate household members are also allowed to do so. For those still in the US, the task force is working on a system that would provide access to parole in place for the same three-year period.
"These individuals are considered to be traumatized and the Task Force is providing reunification and other support services," DHS said in a statement.
Melloy Goettel, who was one of the attorneys who filed a case against the US in 2018 for its practice of sending teens to ICE custody when they aged out of children’s shelters, said she's skeptical that only five teenagers separated from their families under zero tolerance were later sent to ICE detention centers. The lawsuit made clear the government kept poor records, she said.
"We learned that between 2016 and 2018 about one-third of age-outs were not tracked," Melloy Goettel said. "Meaning there is no record of what happened after they aged out of ORR custody; we don't know whether they were sent to ICE custody or released to a sponsor."
Court documents show that in June 2018, during the height of the Trump administration's family separations, 154 immigrant children in ORR custody were reported to have turned 18, and roughly 128 of those teens were sent to ICE detention.
In addition to the five teens who were sent to ICE detention, five others who aged out of ORR's shelters were not, according to records obtained by BuzzFeed News. Two were released on bond, one on their own, and two have "departure" listed as the reason for their release. The two released on "departure" appear to have been deported to Guatemala.
DHS's family reunification task force has also said the government's poor record-keeping of who was separated made their efforts more difficult.
A DHS spokesperson said that when unaccompanied children turn 18 and are still in the care of ORR, federal law requires they be transferred to ICE to determine whether they belong in custody. Under the law, ICE also has to consider placing the 18-year-old in the least restrictive setting, which could mean a sponsor, shelter, or releasing them on their own.
In 2018, however, the government was taken to court by immigrant teenagers over the practice, with attorneys including Melloy Goettel accusing immigration authorities of not placing them in the least restrictive setting available — in violation, they said, of a provision of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Attorneys representing the teens said ICE automatically placed many immigrants who aged out of the shelters into adult detention without even considering putting them in a less restrictive setting.
Last summer, a judge agreed with the immigrant children and found that ICE officers frequently failed to inquire about other options for teenagers who age out of ORR custody. US District Judge Rudolph Contreras said that not only did ICE not train its employees on proper decision-making for these cases, but it gave officers guidance that was contrary to what the law requires them to do. This left the choice about whether to even consider placing the teens somewhere other than adult detention up to ICE officers.
"Many officers choose not to take these steps, with the result that in many of ICE’s largest field offices, age-outs are detained nearly automatically," Contreras said. "In the most extreme cases, this means that ICE field officers refuse to release age-outs to organizational sponsors who have said they would be happy to take them in or to eighteen-year-olds’ own parents living in the United States."
Attorneys for the teens and the government are still in court fighting over how to create a better system for teens who age out of ORR's shelters.
Dr. Julie Linton, cochair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Immigrant Child and Family Health, said being sent from a shelter to an adult ICE facility can be extremely traumatizing and detrimental to a teenager's health.
"Detention facilities under the jurisdiction of ICE are known to be traumatic for people of any age, but it can be particularly traumatic to an 18-year-old," Linton told BuzzFeed News. “There is no arbitrary age by which a child suddenly becomes an adult.”
There's no difference between someone who is 18 and someone who is 17 years and 364 days old, Linton said, adding that the human brain is still developing up until a person’s mid-20s.
Coming face-to-face with the US immigration system can be severely painful and builds on trauma that children experience before even reaching the border, Linton said. Children leaving their countries to head to the US have likely seen or experienced trauma back home, she said, and are further exposed to suffering on the journey to the border.
"Then they're retraumatized again, beginning with conditions in CBP and then again in the case of separated kids, which was perhaps the most egregious thing that has ever occurred in my lifetime," Linton told BuzzFeed News. "For the children who were then sent to adult detention facilities as a final trauma, the compounding trauma is perhaps the greatest risk for long-term mental health risks in a child."
Linton said in the short term, children traumatized by detention can experience appetite loss, changes in sleep, and even bed-wetting. Children can become withdrawn or regress in their ability to speak as well as develop depression and anxiety. One study has shown a link between adverse childhood experiences and long-term health problems, such as cancer, heart disease, and liver disease, she said.
"It's certainly not difficult to surmise that being placed in an adult detention facility as an 18-year-old would be traumatic," Linton said. "Many of us in the immigration policy space have made a very clear connection between the [adverse childhood experiences study] and immigration detention."
Broward County Schools Interim Superintendent Dr. Vickie L. Cartwright greets students on August 16 at North Lauderdale Elementary School. (photo: Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
lorida officials are threatening to withhold funds equal to the salaries of school board members if school districts in two counties don't immediately do away with strict mask mandates as the state continues to battle through high hospitalization rates.
School boards in Broward and Alachua counties received a warning Friday from the State Board of Education giving them 48 hours to walk back their decisions to require masks for all students, only exempting those with a doctor's note. Broward County has the second-largest school district in the state.
"We cannot have government officials pick and choose what laws they want to follow," said Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran in an emailed statement. "These are the initial consequences to their intentional refusal to follow state law and state rule to purposefully and willingly violate the rights of parents."
Corcoran said the two districts are violating the Parents' Bill of Rights and a late July executive order by Gov. Ron DeSantis that prompted rules limiting how far districts can go with mask requirements.
The Republican governor has pushed for school districts not to mandate masks for all students, ordering the state's health and education departments to devise rules so that parents can choose. Corcoran was recommended to the post by DeSantis and appointed by the State Board of Education in 2019.
DeSantis maintains masks can be detrimental for children's development and that younger children simply don't wear masks properly. But board members in the counties of Broward, home to Fort Lauderdale, and Alachua, home to Gainesville, decided not to allow parents to easily opt out of the mandate as surging cases fueled by the delta variant began straining hospitals.
Florida on Friday surpassed 3 million total COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a weekly report from the state's health department. It also reported 1,486 new deaths in a week, significantly raising the seven-day average of reported deaths per day from 153 to 212 over the past week.
The state continued to have the highest hospitalization rates in the country, with 16,849 patients with COVID-19 — 3,500 of them in intensive care, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Several Florida school districts have adopted mask policies
Later Friday, Sarasota County became the sixth school district in the state to adopt a stricter mask policy. Two other school districts — Hillsborough and Palm Beach counties — had originally started the school year allowing parents to easily opt out of wearing masks, but tightened their measures this week. And the school board of the state's largest district in Miami-Dade County adopted the same policy of only allowing mask exemptions with a doctor's note.
Because of the size of the school districts' budgets, the cuts are more symbolic than harmful. According to the Legislature's Office of Economic and Demographic Research, school board members in Alachua County make $40,000 per year and in Broward County, $46,000. Alachua has about 30,000 students and a $258 million general fund budget. Broward County has about 270,000 students and a $2.7 billion general fund budget.
Corcoran's orders require that school districts provide information regarding the compensation of school board members who voted to impose strict mandates if they don't immediately reverse their decisions. It also outlines it will begin to withhold from state funds the amount equal to their monthly salary, prohibiting districts from cutting funds in other areas such as teachers pay or student services.
Federal pandemic funds could offset schools' financial penalties
U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona spoke Friday with the superintendents of the two school districts and told them they should use federal pandemic relief funds to make up for any financial sanctions. President Joe Biden later expressed his support on Twitter.
"We will do everything we can to support local school districts in safely reopening schools. American Rescue Plan funds can be used to backfill the salaries of the brave Florida school board members, superintendents, and other educators keeping our children safe," Biden said on Twitter.
Earlier in the day, DeSantis attacked the Biden administration's response, calling it "absolutely outrageous" and governmental "overreach."
"To have the federal government come in and overrule the rights of the parents as if they know better?" DeSantis said at a news conference Friday. "They want to kneecap the parents and empower teachers unions."
Broward school board President Rosalind Osgood stood by the board's decision, saying the governor was "overreaching his authority." In a statement, she said the district has asked its lawyers to explore legal challenges, promising a response to Friday's order within 48 hours as requested.
It's unclear what will happen with the state funds if a judge decides to block DeSantis' order regarding masks. On Thursday, a state judge cleared the way for a three-day trial next week on a lawsuit from parents challenging DeSantis.
In asking that the lawsuit be dismissed, attorneys for the governor contended that the governor's order simply upholds a law that gives parents the right to make health care decisions. The law makes no specific mention of masks.
Cubans protesting against the U.S. blockade. (photo: Minrex)
OVID-19 has brought economic and social crises to much of the world, and nowhere more than the Third World, where poor infrastructure, poverty, resource export dependence, inequality, and lack of accountability are endemic. Protests against scarcity, structural violence, police brutality, and corruption erupted everywhere from the United States to Colombia, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, just to mention a few. That unrest in Latin America rarely merited notice in the US news media — until it happened in Cuba.
In some ways, the protests in Cuba were similar to those elsewhere in the region. But in some ways, they were different. Cubans were protesting a government that the United States has officially declared an enemy and has been actively trying to overturn for more than sixty years. And the United States has actively promoted anti-government activity in Cuba with words, money, and arms. It’s not surprising that President Joe Biden, who had little to say about the dozens killed and hundreds injured by police during the protests in Colombia, other than to express his backing for Colombia’s right-wing president Iván Duque, gushed repeatedly about his support for Cuban protesters, with the obligatory denunciation of “Cuba’s authoritarian regime.”
Biden’s words were mirrored across the entire spectrum of mainstream US voices, the few exceptions being academics who actually know something about Cuba, like Louis Pérez and William LeoGrande. Regarding Latin American revolutions, liberal politicians and pundits have fallen right in line with the far right and Donald Trump, whose administration famously dubbed Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba a “troika of tyranny” and vowed to “end the glamorization of socialism and communism.” The New York Times obediently chimed in with Trump at the time, denouncing Bernie Sanders for his visit to Nicaragua in 1985. Even left media outlets joined the chorus.
A Legacy of US Subversion
After the July 26, 1959, revolutionary victory in Cuba, US officials pondered how to respond. Could they control this revolution in the interests of US corporations, as they managed to do in Bolivia in 1954? They worried especially about the larger impacts of a successful revolution. One State Department official wrote that “there are indications that if the Cuban revolution is successful, other countries in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere will use it as a model. We should decide if we wish to have the Cuban Revolution succeed.” Another, a few months later, warned that “our attitude to date [could] be considered a sign of weakness and thus give encouragement to communist-nationalist elements elsewhere in Latin America who are trying to advance programs similar to those of Castro.”
They evinced much less concern for “the Cuban people,” who, the US ambassador at the time said, “appeared united in idolizing” the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. “This is one-man rule with full approval of ‘masses,’” the ambassador concluded. Another, while committing the United States to establishing a “successor government” in Cuba, begrudgingly acknowledged “the impact that real honesty, especially at the working level, has made on the people” and “the fact that a great bulk of the Cubans . . . have awakened enthusiastically to the need for social and economic reform.”
One tool was the embargo. The goal, according to a State Department briefing paper, was to undermine Cuba’s economy, to “promote internal dissension; erode its internal political support . . . [and] seek to create conditions conducive to incipient rebellion.” The “only foreseeable means of alienating internal support,” the State Department offered, “is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. . . . Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba . . . [to deny] money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” While internal documents from recent administrations have not been declassified, the embargo continues to stand as a pillar of US policy, and it has been repeatedly strengthened and tightened.
Another tool, what the Clinton administration called “Track Two,” has been the cultivation and funding of potential opposition movements in Cuba. Even the notorious Helms-Burton Act, or “Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act,” of 1996, best known for its strengthening of the embargo, included plans to assist organizations that could form a potential “transition government” on the island. USAID continues to funnel millions every year to “democracy building” and “independent civil society organizations” on the island and convince them to oppose the Cuban government.
When Fidel Castro stepped down in 2008, the United States bemoaned the state of the Cuban opposition it was funding and supporting. “The traditional dissident movement is not likely to supplant the Cuban government. . . . We will need to look elsewhere, including within the government itself, to spot the most likely successors to the Castro regime,” read a leaked 2009 diplomatic cable signed by US Interests Section chief Jonathan Farrar. “We see little evidence that the mainline dissident organizations have much resonance among ordinary Cubans.” Instead, the cable looked hopefully toward “younger individuals, including bloggers, musicians, and performing and plastic artists” as potential leaders of an anti-government movement. “We believe we must try to expand our contacts within Cuban society . . . to facilitate and encourage the younger generations of Cubans seeking greater freedom and opportunity.”
Money continued to flow, much of it to unnamed NGOs and “civil society” organizations promoting these ends. Organizations claiming to support women, Afro-Cuban, and LGBTQ communities increased their prominence. Grant recipients like Development Alternatives Incorporated and Creative Associates International sent staff covertly into Cuba to “search for networking opportunities.” In 2010, Creative reported: “Our program assisted in the formation and development of an initiative seeking to establish bonds of collaboration and identity among cultural and community leaders. The project was created by a core of cultural promoters with a vision for a more participative society. A large number of cultural figures were enlisted to support the project.” Yet Creative still struggled to “counter apathy and stimulate civic engagement.” Creative Associates projects included “Stirring Afro Cuban Communities Into Action,” “Mapping Young Community Leaders,” and “Building Capacity for Peaceful Social Mobilization.”
On June 30, 2021, USAID published a new call for grant applicants, noting approvingly:
The past several months have served as a watershed moment for Cubans demanding greater democratic freedoms and respect for human rights. Artists and musicians have taken to the streets to protest government repression, producing anthems such as “Patria y Vida,” which has not only brought greater global awareness to the plight of the Cuban people but also served as a rallying cry for change on the island.
The objective of this round of grants was to “advance the effectiveness of independent civil society groups to advocate for greater human rights and freedoms.” The call noted that:
Many Cubans shy away from traditional forms of advocacy. Nonetheless, recent efforts by faith-based organizations, artists and other marginalized groups demonstrate the Cuban people’s burgeoning willingness to demand accountability, and greater respect for human rights. By incorporating a wider pool of groups as part of citizens’ demands, civil society can effectively expand its ranks, while also raising awareness of the Cuban government’s failings, which span both political and social rights. USAID seeks to support these groups in their demands for greater democratic rights and freedoms. [emphasis added]
In other words, the program urged Cubans to mobilize against the government, while also tacitly acknowledging that much of the population still lacked “awareness” of the government’s failings.
I do not believe that the Cubans who took to the streets on July 11 were simply responding to US government manipulation or hoping to obtain funding. They were motivated by real grievances, and they have every right to demand a government response.
How Should the Left Respond?
Hilda Landrove recently wrote a piece entitled “With Cubans Speaking Out, How Will the Left Respond?” Landrove lauded the protests against what she called the “long-standing totalitarian Cuban government” and accused the international left of “voluntary blindness” in its support for Cuba. She even, remarkably, claimed that the news media failed to question the Left’s false vision of Cuba as a socialist paradise. Since she does not cite a single source for any of this, readers have no way of knowing which “leftists” or “news media” she is referring to. But supposedly these unnamed leftists continually inform her that “Cuban’s lack of freedoms is the price that they pay for their sovereignty.”
I know a lot of leftists, but I don’t know any who correspond to Landrove’s caricature. A more common, and principled, response from the Left supports Cubans’ right to protest while also opposing US attempts to interfere in Cuba’s domestic affairs. We oppose US attempts to provoke Cuban dissent by devastating the country’s economy with the embargo, and we oppose US meddling that attempts to manipulate Cuban organizations into pushing for regime change.
While we oppose the Cuban government’s crackdown on the protesters, we also believe that the Cuban government’s alleged “paranoia” that sees the malevolent hand of the United States in every challenge to its policies is not really that far-fetched. The best way to promote space for Cubans to debate, protest, and seek solutions to their country’s crisis is for the United States to acknowledge Cuban sovereignty, cease its covert activities, end the embargo, and allow the pandemic and humanitarian aid that Cubans desperately need to overcome the pandemic and economic emergency afflicting the island.
A humpback whale. (photo: Live Science)
Like the Amazon rainforest, the planet’s whales play crucial roles as carbon captors. That’s just one reason to save them.
very spring, the Massachusetts and Cape Cod bays see some of the world’s finest carbon captors in action. North Atlantic right whales, bound for Canada or other summer habitats, come by, gorging on crustaceans known as copepods. Humpbacks, meanwhile, stay through the fall as they indulge on small fish: sand lance, menhaden, and herring. Thus nourished, the whales pack carbon in their massive bodies. And their waste fertilizes minute organisms called phytoplankton, which form a free-floating ocean forest in the sunlit surface waters. Phytoplankton, like terrestrial plants, conduct photosynthesis, releasing oxygen to the atmosphere and removing carbon dioxide. Take a breath, thank a tree, as the saying goes; take another breath and thank the ocean and the whales who tend its garden.
Of course, other marine animals contribute to the carbon cycle in similar fashion, but the whales’ size allows them to do so at unparalleled scale and efficiency. Even in death, their job as environmental engineers is not done. When they sink to the seabed as a “whale fall,” they take enormous amounts of carbon with them and give life to deep-sea organisms for decades. In the battle against climate change, whales are on the front lines. All of which makes the utterly preventable deaths of as many as 28 right whales and 77 humpbacks since 2017 not just tragic, but dangerous.
Policymakers are coming around to the idea that climate change is an existential threat, whether it’s creating droughts that trigger waves of migrants or causing waters to rise and eventually drown whole cities. Within the United States, addressing climate change is one of the rare points on which people across the political aisle are moving closer to one another, particularly younger voters. In 2019, the director of national intelligence’s statement of the Worldwide Threat Assessment noted that environmental degradation and climate change would probably “fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”
That assessment is shared globally. The World Economic Forum’s 2019 Global Risks Report listed extreme weather events and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation as the two most likely risks. They were also the second and third highest-ranked risks in terms of impact. The 2016 Paris agreement on climate change (from which the United States withdrew a year later) marked a worldwide recognition that something had to be done about the danger. The search for that something has focused on renewable energy and, to a lesser extent, on reforestation. But the role of whales in carbon sequestration, although known to biologists for a while now, has yet to gain the attention it merits among policymakers.
There are three good reasons for policymakers to change course.
First, the quest to limit global warming needs to proceed along all possible avenues. Divestment from fossil fuels and reforestation are indubitably important, but such efforts need reinforcement from healthy marine ecosystems pumping carbon out of the atmosphere. Just how effective an individual whale can be is hard to calculate—it depends on diet, longevity, habitat, and other ecological factors—but Andrew Pershing of the University of Maine and his colleagues have demonstrated that restoring populations of large whale species to pre-whaling levels (working with conservative estimates of what those levels were) would store carbon “equivalent to 110,000 hectares of forest or an area the size of the Rocky Mountain National Park.” In addition, he and his co-authors calculate that whale falls would bury carbon “equivalent to preserving 843 hectares of forest each year.” Those figures do not even account for the massive impact whales have by fertilizing the phytoplankton whose photosynthesis provides us with an estimated 70 percent of our oxygen and absorbs at least 30 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The second reason to focus on whales is that preventing whale deaths is not impossible. The required fixes—modifications to fishing and slowing down ships—are feasible if the world chooses to work toward them. For example, a seasonal speed restriction of 10 knots on certain ships implemented in 2008 along the east coast of the United States reduced ship strike mortality risk to endangered North Atlantic right whales by 80 to 90 percent. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service determined that a seasonal fishing closure in Massachusetts waters reduced entanglement risk to right whales there by at least 24 percent. However, such regulatory measures come with economic consequences and are therefore generally opposed by industries that must absorb those impacts, regardless of the ecological benefit they may create.
Finally, climate change is not a threat that we can address in one fell swoop and then move comfortably on from; it will require constant work. Limiting global warming and then keeping it limited is a task that will go well beyond 2100. It will rely on the oceans contributing to the carbon cycle as they have for so long—and, for that, letting whales thrive will be crucial.
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