20 August 21
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19 August 21
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s the wall of Senate Republican (plus Democrat Joe Manchin) opposition to the sweeping For the People Act (S. 1) voting-rights measure hardens, congressional Democrats are moving forward with narrower legislation.
Alabama congresswoman Terri Sewell on Tuesday introduced in the House the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act aimed at restoring the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to how it existed before the Supreme Court gutted its key enforcement provision in 2013. Standing in front of the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where Lewis and other civil-rights activists were brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers as the whole world watched, a moment that inspired the passage of the original VRA, Sewell hailed the “personal sacrifices of amazing foot soldiers, many known and unknown, right here on this bridge in my hometown 56 years ago.”
An earlier version of the bill passed in the House in 2019, but it was updated in part to reduce its vulnerability to another court challenge on the grounds of having outdated data on discriminatory voting practices, which was the basis for the 2013 Supreme Court decision. The revised bill was also worded to address a more recent SCOTUS decision that made the use of lawsuits against election officials under Section 2 of the VRA more difficult.
This bill would not deal systematically with many of the problems addressed in S. 1, such as campaign-finance abuses, partisan gerrymandering, or restrictions on voter registration and voting by mail. It would, however, in the covered jurisdictions, stop any changes in law and policy governing voting and elections (including redistricting maps) until they can be reviewed for possible dilution of minority voting opportunities or representation. As I noted earlier this year, it would at a minimum put an amber light on the implementation of many of the voter-suppression laws being passed by Republican state legislatures in the former Confederacy:
The John Lewis Act would simply stop future laws and procedural changes from taking effect without a Justice Department preclearance. It’s hard to know exactly which laws and procedural changes would and would not pass muster, and it’s worth considering that a future Republican administration might very well reverse pro-voting-rights guidance set down by the Biden administration.
But without question, the John Lewis Act would slow down, and might well inhibit, voter-suppression activity.
Unfortunately, the John Lewis Act has the same political problem as the For the People Act: a lack of the Republican support necessary to overcome a certain filibuster in the Senate. When Manchin made his version of the John Lewis Act the centerpiece of an attempted grand compromise voting-rights bill, Republican senators other than Lisa Murkowski shot it down quickly. But precisely because it simply reestablishes what was once the near-universally supported law of the land, it is likely a better vehicle than S. 1 to shame the GOP and rally stronger long-term support for enforceable democracy.
Sanders in Warren, Michigan, during his spring tour of battle ground states. (photo: Devin Yalkin/TIME)
S Sen. Bernie Sanders is leaving Vermont to pitch the Democrats' $3.5 trillion reconciliation package to Republican voters in Indiana and Iowa.
Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has called the proposal the "most significant piece of legislation... since the Great Depression."
Financed by tax hikes on the wealthy and large corporations, it would expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing. It would aso provide universal preschool and cap childcare costs for most families at 7% of their income, while guaranteeing paid leave from work for family and personal health obligations.
The package, which needs only 50 votes for final passage in the Senate, currently has no Republican support. But Sanders thinks GOP voters could like what they hear.
"Democrats, Independents, and working-class Republicans all over the country support our plan to finally invest in the long-neglected needs of working families," the senator said in a statement on Thursday.
Sanders will hold townhall meetings on August 27 and August 29: the first in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the other in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His office described both locations as "Republican strongholds," noting that former President Donald Trump got more votes in each the last time he ran, compared to 2016.
People wearing face masks line up to buy supplies from a shop during the coronavirus outbreak. (photo: Emilio Morenatti/AP)
The Republican Party has rather clearly marched itself into a minority position, from masks in schools to targeted vaccine mandates
arly in the coronavirus pandemic, mitigation was by and large a consensus issue. To be sure, there were those who balked at or even fought masking — most notably President Donald Trump, who eschewed wearing them — but the American people were generally on the same page. Three-fourths supported mask mandates.
A year and a half later, despite the resurgence of the pandemic amid the delta variant, there is no such consensus. Republican governors who once signed off on mask mandates are making fighting against them a cause celebre. Mandates in general are the issue du jour, with some calling for extending them to vaccines, even as large swaths of the public (and especially Republicans) refuse to get vaccinated.
There are certainly valid debates about what the government should require, morally speaking. But on the political front, the Republican Party has rather clearly marched itself into a minority position.
Mask mandates have fallen in popularity in recent months, apparently thanks in large part to vaccinated people who support the concept but thought getting the shots would absolve them of that responsibility, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially advised.
But on the central battleground — masks in schools — 69 percent of Americans support the mandate, per a new Axios/Ipsos poll. And when it comes to both vaccine mandates and the methods to fight mask mandates that some Republicans are floating, the verdict is also pretty strongly against the GOP.
The Economist and YouGov released a new poll Wednesday asking Americans whether they would support vaccine mandates for a number of groups. And in every case the survey asked about, there was majority — and often 2-to-1 — support:
- Medical providers: 65-21 in favor
- Teachers: 61-24
- Police: 60-25
- Military: 59-24
- Federal employees: 56-26
- College students: 55-27
The survey even tested K-12 students who were eligible for the vaccines, and Americans said 51-30 that they supported a vaccine requirement.
The finding on medical providers is particularly timely, given that the Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will direct all nursing homes to require vaccination or lose their Medicare and Medicaid funds.
That move also comes after Republican governors have sought to use government funding in another way — to fend off mask mandates — with considerably less public support.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) announced Tuesday that schools that require masks won’t be eligible for a $163 million school grant program providing $1,800 per student. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last week floated a similar idea — though his would have deprived school officials of their actual salaries — before backing off it.
Polls of such ideas suggest that however popular vaccine mandates might be — and however much people might have soured on mask mandates — the support simply isn’t there, or anywhere close to there. Opposition to withholding funds over mask mandates might actually be more unifying than any other proposal involving mandates. The Axios-Ipsos poll this week showed that fully 77 percent of Americans opposed withholding funding from school districts or local governments that require masks, as DeSantis proposed and Ducey is now pursuing.
The other state in which a governor’s decisions on mandates are playing out in real time is California. There, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is facing a recall election, and he has been among the most forceful governors in the country on vaccine mandates, requiring either them or weekly tests for teachers.
It’s too simple to say that whether he’s recalled next month is a referendum on this policy — given the dynamics of a highly unusual recall election — but his push for vaccine mandates while his political future is in the balance suggests he believes this is a popular idea. He comes from a state in which at least 54 percent of people are fully vaccinated, according to Washington Post tracking, while would-be Republican successors are promising to repeal vaccine and mask mandates.
Trump’s M.O. throughout basically the entirety of his presidency was to focus on his base, even if the things he was pursuing were broadly unpopular. This has created an emboldened and passionate GOP base, but it’s also created a situation in which Republicans — whether ambitious ones like DeSantis or simply those trying to respond to their supporters — feel pressure to play to that base. To have a seat at the table in the national GOP right now is to oppose vaccine mandates — which appear pretty strongly popular, and not just in the YouGov poll — and not just fight mask mandates — which many Americans oppose — but to push the envelope in the fight against them.
The problem is that there is little evidence that the broader American public is clamoring for that envelope to be pushed, nor does it oppose targeted vaccine mandates.
None of that means Americans will necessarily write off GOP politicians who support these policies. But it does reinforce the gamble at play: the brief base high followed by the unknown reaction from the broader public, which seems to be on quite a different page.
In other words: the Trump playbook that didn’t seem to work terribly well.
Demonstrators against the Republican tax reform bill hold a 'Peoples Filibuster to Stop Tax Cuts for Billionaires' protest rally outside the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP)
The 2017 tax cuts made it more attractive for certain company owners to be paid in profits instead of wages. Some cut their own wages, expanding a loophole that was already costing the U.S. billions.
n the months after President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017, some tax professionals grew giddy as they discovered opportunities for their clients inside a law that already slashed rates for corporations and wealthy individuals.
At a May 2018 conference of financial advisers, one wealth planner told the room that a key provision of the new law “leaves a gaping hole in the tax code.” As he put it, “The goal by the end of the presentation today is to make you guys the bus drivers, or the truck drivers, to drive right through that hole with your clients.”
Among the tax-saving opportunities offered by the law: Taxes on profits from certain types of businesses were cut dramatically, while the rate on salaries those businesses paid was reduced only slightly.
That created an alluring opportunity. People who were both owners and employees of a company could make the same amount of money but change how they label it, by lowering their salaries and in turn increasing the company’s profits, which they shared in. That would reduce their tax bill by moving money from a high-tax category to a lower one: Wages are taxed at a top rate of 37% plus an additional 3.8% Medicare levy, while profits, under the new law, are taxed at a top rate of 29.6% (with no Medicare tax). Proponents of this provision claimed it would foster increased investment in American businesses (economists say it’s too early to determine whether that’s true). But even before the bill passed, prominent tax academics warned, in an article titled “The Games They Will Play,” that the tax break would be abused.
Their fears appear to have materialized. Secret IRS data shows multiple instances in which salaries for top executives and owners suddenly and inexplicably dropped in the first year after the Trump tax cut, reducing their tax bills even as their companies appeared to thrive. The mysterious pay cuts played out across industries, from logistics companies to real estate firms to makers of bathtubs, and among executives of varying degrees of prominence. The salary for one construction firm executive dropped from more than $4 million in 2017 to $105,000 in 2018.
The wages for car accessory manufacturer David MacNeil, whose WeatherTech floor mats are featured in a Super Bowl ad each year, fell from $68 million in 2017 to $47 million in 2018.
The salary of Jeffrey Records, CEO of Oklahoma City-based MidFirst Bank, plummeted from $8.6 million to $1.8 million.
And the wages of Dick Uihlein, the Republican megadonor and chairman of shipping supplies behemoth Uline, sank from $5.1 million to $2.1 million.
It’s impossible to say how much money was reclassified as a result of the new law, but consider this: The loophole already existed, in much smaller form, before the Trump tax overhaul. A government report in 2009 estimated the U.S. Treasury was losing billions to this strategy. Back then, an owner could save the Medicare tax by counting a dollar as profits rather than salary. But after the Trump law, the tax savings roughly tripled, to about 11%.
The revelations about the wage maneuvers come from a trove of IRS records obtained by ProPublica covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans. Previous articles in “The Secret IRS Files” series have detailed how the wealthy avoid paying taxes legally, including a story last week exploring the massive benefits the Trump tax overhaul provided billionaires.
The sudden shifts in compensation revealed in the tax returns of wealthy business owners show how they may be gaming federal law to further slash their taxes. They also highlight how, unlike most Americans, whose taxes are automatically taken out of each paycheck, wealthy business owners have a menu of avoidance techniques afforded to them by the tax code.
The tax benefits of shifting wages to profits can be significant. MacNeil, for example, saved an estimated $8 million in the first two years, according to a ProPublica analysis of the IRS records.
MacNeil defended his wage drop and said he used the tax savings to create more jobs: “You want me investing in my country — my fellow Americans? Get out of my pocket.”
ProPublica analyzed years of wage and profit data and found that for each of the companies named in this story, company profits rose even as wages were cut.
Unlike publicly traded corporations, private companies are not required to publicly report profits, salaries for top executives or their rationales for compensation decisions. But experts who spoke to ProPublica said that, if audited, these executives would have to justify why the value of their labor plunged in a given year. The secret tax data does not answer that question.
Taking an unreasonably low salary in order to avoid taxes is illegal. But the IRS’ definition of “reasonable” is vague, and the vast majority of business owners will likely never have to justify the salary cuts. Only a tiny fraction of such companies have their salaries examined by the IRS. Karen Burke, a tax law professor at the University of Florida, said, “For a business owner, there’s every incentive to do this and every reason to believe you’ll get away with it.”
Salaries Fall While Profits Rise
After the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed in 2017, wages for some owners of S corporations dropped in 2018, even as their company profits increased.
David MacNeil enjoys being the boss. A table reserved for him at the cafeteria of his sprawling production plant has a placard that warns: “Don’t even think about sitting here.” He compliments one of his 1,700 employees about the company pickup truck he’s driving, then adds, “It’s mine.” As he walks among the whirring machines pumping out his custom car mats, he revels in the fact that he built a flourishing manufacturing empire without offshoring, creating hundreds of jobs.
“This is why they give us a tax break,” he said, “so we can make shit happen.”
After ProPublica contacted him, MacNeil invited two reporters for a daylong tour of his factory complex in Bolingbrook, Illinois. A former car salesman, he founded WeatherTech, a top U.S. manufacturer of car accessories, in 1989 and now regularly generates $100 million in annual profit. MacNeil owns a super-yacht, a private jet, a Florida equestrian estate and a collection of antique cars.
He describes himself as “the kind of man America needs, a man that believes in the great American worker.” As he led the tour of his plant, he took his phone out to read emails from employees praising his generosity and showed photos of himself removing trash from the ocean in his free time.
MacNeil backed Trump, donating $1 million to his inauguration and hundreds of thousands to Republican candidates and causes. Trump’s tax law would have cut the magnate’s taxes no matter what. But the IRS records indicate MacNeil may have taken steps to further boost those savings.
For 16 years, the records show, MacNeil’s wages climbed every year: from $1.1 million in 2008 to $10.1 million in 2012 and almost $68 million in 2017. But in 2018, that trend suddenly reversed. He cut his salary to $47 million. Then in 2019, he slashed it even more aggressively, bringing it down to $17 million — 75% lower than two years earlier.
MacNeil’s CEO title hadn’t changed. He hadn’t stepped back. “I bust my ass seven days a week,” he said.
As MacNeil’s salary fell, the company’s profits, which are taxed at a lower rate, surged. In 2018, after four years in which profits hovered around $100 million a year, they suddenly jumped to $121 million. The $21 million increase mirrored the amount that MacNeil lowered his wages that year.
With his (higher-taxed) wages dropping and his (lower-taxed) profits rising, MacNeil avoided an estimated $8 million in taxes.
MacNeil’s Wages Plunged After Trump Tax Law
His wages rose for more than a decade then plunged in 2018 despite rising company profits.
MacNeil first said he was unaware that his wages had been cut 75% until ProPublica asked him about it. “I had no idea,” he said, asserting the decision was made by his accountants. Later, MacNeil told ProPublica that his wage decrease stemmed from his decision to begin reinvesting almost all of his profits back into the company, leaving him less cash to pay himself in wages.
Experts told ProPublica that increased capital investments by an owner could help justify lower wages, if they result in the owner having less cash left over.
Still, the tax data shows MacNeil’s profits soaring during the years his wages dropped. The data does not indicate how much money MacNeil put back into the business. Asked to provide specific figures outlining his annual cash flow and reinvestment, MacNeil declined.
MacNeil also cited the vagueness of the IRS’ definition of “reasonable compensation.” Most important, he said, the estimated $8 million in taxes he avoided by dropping his wages allowed him to buy an $8 million machine that would generate many multiples of that in tax revenue in the years to come, because it would make his business more profitable.
In a series of text messages in the days that followed, MacNeil continued to defend himself, telling a ProPublica reporter that he didn’t understand “the real world” and “it’s time to grow up and get a real job.”
“Break it up anyway you want, you saw there was a half billion dollars in investment with your own eyes,” he wrote. “We’ve paid hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes since 2012. How much have you paid? Chump change for sure. Enjoy!”
MacNeil’s company, like all of the ones discussed in this article, is organized as a pass-through, a tax structure that is quite common but not popularly understood.
To understand pass-throughs, it’s first useful to know how their corporate cousin, the C corporation, is taxed. Most large publicly traded companies, the ExxonMobils and Nikes of the world, are C corporations. When these companies end the year, they must pay the IRS corporate income tax on any profits they have earned. Shareholders receive money, and then owe taxes, only if they decide to sell their holding at a gain or if the companies issue a dividend.
Most businesses in the U.S. are not C corporations, but pass-throughs. They include everything from a small corner deli to a hedge fund to a multinational construction company. Most are privately held. When one of these businesses makes a profit, they do not pay the corporate tax. Instead, that money “passes through” directly to the owner and is reflected on the owners’ personal tax returns. It is therefore taxed only once, and individual income tax rates apply.
One popular type of pass-through is called an S corporation, named after the section in the tax code. They were created in the Eisenhower era as an option for small businesses who wanted to face only a single layer of tax. Since then, many large companies have structured themselves as S corporations for the tax benefits they can bring.
The IRS requires that S corporations pay reasonable salaries — they “should not attempt to avoid paying employment taxes by having their officers treat their compensation as cash distributions” — but the agency has been vague about what those words mean. Factors cited for what makes a salary reasonable include the individual’s training and experience, job responsibilities and what comparable businesses pay for similar roles.
To offer more clarity, the IRS has publicly cited court cases it fought against business owners. In one, from 2001, a Pennsylvania veterinarian took all of his compensation as business income, paying himself no wages even though he spent more than 30 hours a week doing surgeries and other tasks. The veterinarian lost and was forced to pay back taxes.
In another case, an Iowa accountant was paid a salary of $24,000 a year, while taking profits of about $200,000. The accountant, David Watson, specialized in advising clients on tax issues involving pass-through companies. The court ruled against Watson, forcing him to pay back taxes and penalties, after it found that the market rate for his services at the time would have been over $90,000.
The issue has at times become a more public flashpoint. Former Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards was criticized for taking a small salary from the law practice he owned, and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich took heat for doing the same from companies he created that profit from his speeches and other appearances. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that Joe Biden exploited the tactic in the years before he became president with his book and speech income. Gingrich, Edwards and Biden have all defended their handling of their tax affairs.
A 2009 report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that in 2003 and 2004, about 13% of S corporations paid artificially low wages, resulting in about $3 billion in lost tax revenue. IRS officials complained to investigators that making the case that a salary is artificially low can be difficult and time consuming. From 2006 to 2008, the IRS examined only 0.5% of S corporations, and in less than a fourth of those cases was compensation looked at. By 2019, the audit rate for S corporations had fallen even lower, to 0.2%.
As the Trump tax cut was being hammered out, lobbyists for industry groups and specific companies pushed to make sure they were eligible. Engineering, real estate and manufacturing were granted the deduction. Lawyers and companies performing “financial services,” for example, were not.
Despite that, banks lobbied successfully to be eligible for the deduction. One of the banks that pushed for that eligibility was MidFirst. That year, even as the CEO’s salary dropped from $8.6 million to $1.8 million, his share of the profits jumped more than $16 million. In 2019, Records’ salary rebounded to $6.5 million, but it remained lower than it had been in the year before the Trump tax law.
Representatives for Records declined to answer questions for this article.
Dick and Liz Uihlein also appear to have benefited. The co-founders of Uline gave millions to support Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who became the champion of the pass-through provision in the Trump tax overhaul.
Before the law passed, the salaries for the Uihleins had fluctuated. But in 2018 they dropped dramatically, from a total of $10.5 million to $4.2 million. Their wages had not been that low in more than a decade.
The business reasons for the pay cut are not clear from the available records, and a spokesman for the Uihleins declined to answer questions from ProPublica. Dick remained chairman, and Liz was president. Liz Uihlein said publicly in 2020 that the couple was still heavily involved in running the company.
Their business was booming in the year their wages fell. Profits rose from about $721 million in 2017 to $937 million in 2018, ProPublica’s analysis of the company’s tax data shows. The company remained North America’s leading distributor of shipping and packaging supplies. “Business is great,” Uline’s Chief Human Resources Officer Gil De Las Alas told the Kenosha News in November 2018. “We just keep growing, growing, growing.”
The Federal Trade Commission has accused Facebook of stifling competition when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. (photo: Lionel Bonaventure/AP)
he Federal Trade Commission is taking another swing at Facebook after a judge tossed out its initial effort in June, with a new complaint accusing the social media giant of illegally maintaining a monopoly by squelching competitors.
The social network "resorted to an illegal buy-or-bury scheme to maintain its dominance," the regulator said in a news release Thursday about its new filing.
It accused Facebook of buying up-and-coming rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to protect its dominance and of luring other would-be competitors with access to its platform and data and then cutting them off when they became threats.
"After failing to compete with new innovators, Facebook illegally bought or buried them when their popularity became an existential threat," Holly Vedova, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, said in a statement.
Facebook has until Oct. 4 to respond. The company said on Twitter it was reviewing the amended complaint and "will have more to say soon."
The FTC first sued Facebook in December in tandem with a separate lawsuit from 48 attorneys general making similar allegations that Facebook crushed competition.
But Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the FTC's complaint in June. Boasberg said the agency failed to give enough evidence for its argument that the company holds a monopoly in social networking. But he also gave the FTC 30 days to refile the suit, a deadline that the court later agreed to extend to Aug. 19.
The judge also dismissed the states' case against Facebook, saying they had waited too long to challenge the purchases of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. The states said they plan to appeal the ruling.
The FTC's new complaint is nearly 30 pages longer than the original. It makes similar arguments about Facebook's alleged anti-competitive strategy of buying up or blocking companies it perceived as potential threats, but it also gives more backing for its claim that the social network is a monopolist in an attempt to address the judge's concerns.
Facebook "has been the dominant and largest personal social networking service in the United States since at least 2011," the complaint alleged. It cited data about how many people in the U.S. use Facebook and Instagram each month and how much time they spend on the apps. (The exact figures were redacted from the filing.)
It said Facebook's share of U.S. internet users and the amount of time its users spend on its apps outstripped other social networks. "No other personal social networking provider in the United States remotely approaches Facebook's scale," the suit said. Snapchat is the next closest, it argued, "but its user base pales in comparison," with tens of millions fewer users a month than either Facebook or Instagram.
The FTC said Facebook's market power is also evident in the fact that even when the company has gone through crises — such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which user data was harvested without people's consent — "Facebook does not lose significant users or engagement to competitors."
Facebook's outsize profits and trillion-dollar market cap are also evidence of its entrenched position, the complaint alleged.
The revived lawsuit opens the next chapter in Washington's battle with Big Tech, which kicked off under former President Donald Trump and has accelerated during the Biden administration.
The FTC's new chair, Lina Khan, is one of the most prominent voices calling for curbs on the dominance of big companies, especially the Silicon Valley giants that have gained so much power in recent years.
In Khan's early weeks in the job, she has signaled a more aggressive approach toward potentially anti-competitive behavior — and has drawn criticism from the companies she's tasked with regulating. Both Facebook and Amazon have petitioned the FTC for Khan to recuse herself from involvement in cases involving the companies, citing her previous criticism of them.
On Thursday, the FTC said it had "carefully reviewed" Facebook's recusal petition and dismissed it. "As the case will be prosecuted before a federal judge, the appropriate constitutional due process protections will be provided to the company," the agency said.
The five FTC commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines to bring the complaint against Facebook, with Khan joining the two other Democrats in support.
The invasive 'two-finger' examination was long condemned by rights groups as degrading and traumatic. (photo: Hotli Simanjuntak/DPA)
The Indonesian army says it will no longer conduct the "two-finger" tests on women applying to join the forces, but there are worries that the ban might not last long.
he chief of staff of the Indonesian army, General Andika Perkasa, recently announced that the army will no longer conduct virginity tests on women applying to join the forces.
He was referring to the invasive two-finger examination that was conducted to determine whether female applicants' hymens were intact.
The practice, used in the past by the military to determine recruits' morality, was long condemned by rights groups who called it degrading and traumatic.
The army chief's announcement was welcomed by women's rights activists and female cadets.
But there are also worries that the ban might not last long as the army hasn't so far released any guidelines to make it permanent.
Trauma lingers even after years
Irawati Harsono, a veteran female police officer who personally underwent the test when she signed up to become an officer in 1964, welcomed the decision.
"Of course, I am grateful (for the decision) even though I think it comes too late. It's absurd and ludicrous to think that in this day and age, there is still a virginity test to determine whether a female recruit passes a professional examination," she told DW.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has repeatedly urged countries worldwide to stop the virginity tests, saying that they are unscientific, harmful and a violation of women's and girls' human rights.
The presence of the hymen is not a reliable indication of vaginal intercourse, let alone someone's moral dispensation.
The test, however, had been carried out in the Southeast Asian country for decades, and was even extended to the fiancées of male soldiers as a prerequisite to receiving their commanding officers' written approval for the marriage.
Feeling disturbed and resentful
Andreas Harsono, a researcher at the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch Indonesia (HRW), explained that not only are these tests embarrassing, but that they could also have long-lasting psychological effects that reduce women's self-esteem.
Andreas described the case of a veteran air force officer he has spoken to, who said she was traumatized by the test. Years later during her honeymoon in Bali, she said she froze up and cried inconsolably for an entire night.
The test also lessens the trust that female recruits have in Indonesia's legal system, say activists. "They became apathetic towards the legal system, and distrust that it can be fair towards women," Andreas told DW.
Irawati, the veteran police officer, knows all too well about this injustice. In 1964, she endured a virginity test at Kramat Jati Police hospital as a prerequisite in the recruitment process.
Even though it's a long time ago, she still feels disturbed and resentful when remembering the unfairness that she had to endure to become a police officer.
"Already at the very beginning I felt angry and questioned why I was treated unfairly, since the male recruits did not have to undergo a virginity test," she said.
"Why didn't they just do a psychological test that applies to both female and male recruits? Why do female recruits need to show their moral standards, while the male recruits do not?" she pointed out.
Calls to make the ban permanent
Although the virginity test ban has been put into effect, some remain doubtful that it will last long without any legally binding decree.
Irawati pointed out that there was a period when the discriminative virginity test was banned by a high-ranking officer in the police force in the 1980s. However, the ban only lasted for two years before the practice was reinstated without reason.
Andi Yentriani of the National Commission on Violence Against Women is urging the army chief to take a firm stance and put a permanent end to the practice.
"The army chief's instructions are verbal commands. We hope there will be written guidelines and a decree on the virginity test ban that will serve as a reference for all military branches," she said.
Genital testing in military recruits' health screening
The army chief also instructed that there shouldn't be any discrimination between male and female recruits when it comes to health tests.
It means all candidates, both male and female, must undergo a careful genital examination procedure to determine whether they are fit to undergo a strenuous basic training process.
"Genital testing is still needed for female and male candidates. This means that men also must undergo a careful health screening to leave out anyone who has a sexually transmitted disease," Irawati said. She added that she agreed to such testing if it is applied to both male and female recruits and for medical reasons.
Meanwhile, the chairwoman of the National Commission on Violence Against Women, Andy Yentriani, is of the opinion that genital health examination must be done responsibly and should only be carried out to determine if someone is pregnant, suffering from cancer or has a sexually transmitted disease.
Unlike Irawati and Andy, Andreas Harsono from HRW said the genital testing can be scrapped altogether as he believes it is unnecessary for the female recruits to take unless they specifically mention a health problem related to their reproductive organs.
Migizi (Red Lake Nation) stands in front of a police line during a ceremony and demonstration for the water at an Enbridge drill site on the Red Lake River, August 3, 2021. (photo: Chris Trinh/Indigenous Environmental Network)
Standing with Indigenous groups, physicians call on Biden to revoke Enbridge’s permit.
edical professionals around the country rallied on Tuesday against the expansion of Enbridge’s Line 3 crude oil pipeline, calling it a threat to human and planetary health.
“The health of Minnesotans is at risk,” said Teddie Potter, director of planetary health at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing, addressing a crowd in St. Paul, Minnesota. “Tar sands oil threatens the health and wellness of future generations; we must stop the line.”
The events were part of a nationwide day of solidarity against the project from Enbridge, a Canada-based oil and gas company. In cities from Augusta, Maine, to Los Angeles, health professionals united with environmental groups and Indigenous water protectors to express their opposition to the firm’s controversial Line 3 replacement, which is already under construction. If completed, the upgrade would double the pipeline’s capacity, transporting vast amounts of tar sands oil from Edmonton, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin — traveling over sacred Anishinaabe territory in Minnesota in the process.
Enbridge has said the upgrade is needed for safety reasons, to reduce maintenance needs, and to “create fewer disruptions to landowners and the environment.” But opponents from the medical community disagree. According to Health Professionals for a Healthy Climate, or HPHC — the advocacy group that organized Tuesday’s nationwide protests — the project poses both immediate and long-term threats to Minnesota communities and Indigenous peoples, whether from an oil spill or from the pipeline’s contribution to climate change.
Vishnu Laalitha Surapaneni, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who helped organize the rally in St. Paul, told Grist she is particularly worried about the pipeline’s potential impact on water quality. “We’re in the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” she explained, using Minnesota’s unofficial nickname. “This is not something that is compatible with healthy water.”
In the case of an oil spill, Surapaneni and others have raised concern about the tar sands oil that will be transported through Line 3, a heavy kind of crude oil known as bitumen. To facilitate its flow through pipelines, Enbridge mixes bitumen with a diluent — a proprietary concoction whose specific ingredients are a trade secret. But if Enbridge’s diluent is anything like other companies’, HPHC says it likely contains a mixture of carcinogens such as benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene, collectively known as BTEX. Enbridge’s response to Grist’s request for comment did not name the ingredients in its diluent.
There may also be threats from spills of drilling fluid, the substance that Enbridge has been using to lay new sections of pipeline into the ground across Minnesota. Already, Enbridge is under investigation by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency for having spilled drilling fluid 28 times at 12 river crossings. Although Enbridge has said that the drilling fluid is nontoxic and that the spills had “no impacts to any aquifers nor were there downstream impacts,” geologists and environmental experts remain concerned. Spills elsewhere in the country — albeit larger than those in Minnesota — have polluted wetlands and drinking water, and can harm river and wetland ecosystems.
Surapaneni also stressed that the rallies on Tuesday were executed in solidarity with Indigenous water protectors, who have led the fight against Line 3 and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Environmental advocates say that Enbridge’s construction on Anishinaabe territory threatens Indigenous sovereignty and violates Native treaty rights, in part by jeopardizing healthy ecosystems that support tribes’ abilities to fish, hunt, and cultivate wild rice.
“I see it as my responsibility to take a stand,” said Taysha Martineau, a water protector from the Fond du Lac Reservation who spoke at the St. Paul rally. “If they build Line 3, they might as well bury me beneath it. … I will do everything in my power to make sure that no oil flows through that pipe.”
Martineau and many of the health professionals also raised the problem of gender-based violence at construction sites. According to the website for the movement against Line 3, the so-called “man camps” that are built to house pipeline construction workers — most of whom are male — put Indigenous women at a heightened risk of sexual violence and other violent crime. “It is an everyday nightmare for Indigenous mothers all across Turtle Island,” Martineau said, using an Indigenous name for North America. “We don’t know which one of us is next, and it’s a fear we face every day.”
One of the most common refrains from Tuesday’s rally in St. Paul, was that the expanded Line 3 pipeline would hurt public health by contributing to climate change. If the project were completed, the greenhouse gas emissions associated with Line 3 would be equivalent to those produced by 38 million cars — a massive amount of carbon that would require a forest more than twice the size of California to sequester. The planet-warming consequences of these emissions, physicians at the rally warned, would exacerbate health problems for Minnesotans and the broader U.S. population — but especially for lower-income and nonwhite communities.
“I’ve already seen it impact my patients,” Kelly Morrison, an obstetrician and state representative for Minnesota who was invited to speak at the St. Paul rally, told Grist. She cited increasing rates of asthma in Minnesota, as well as cardiovascular and pulmonary issues that have been made worse by wildfire smoke. This year, smoke from fires in Canada — fueled by climate change — has brought some of the worst air quality that the Twin Cities have ever seen.
Morrison noted that Tuesday’s demonstrations were emblematic of a growing willingness within the medical profession to highlight the connections between human and planetary health — “a real sea change for the good,” she said. The Lancet, a leading medical journal, has called climate change the “greatest global health threat facing the world in the 21st century,” with the potential to erase recent decades of health gains from economic development. According to the World Health Organization, global temperature rise may cause a quarter of a million deaths between 2030 and 2050 due to increased heat stress, malnutrition, and diseases like malaria.
While physicians, Indigenous leaders, and policymakers addressed the crowd in St. Paul, a delegation of health care professionals led a short march to the Army Corps of Engineers’ office. They intended to deliver a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, urging him to revoke federal permits for Line 3, but were denied entry to the building. Other groups around the country also attempted to deliver letters to their local offices.
“As a health professional, I see it pure and simple: Climate change is a public health issue,” Surapaneni said. “We need health professionals out of our clinics, out of our hospitals and labs, out in the community and raising our voices.”
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