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January 6th capitol. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Getty Images)
Ali Alexander, fellow rally organizer Nathan Martin, and Stop the Steal LLC have been subpoenaed by the Select Committee investigating the attack on the Capitol
Announcing the subpoenas in a statement Thursday, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said the committee is interested in speaking with the people who helped plan and fund the rally that fueled the insurrection. “The rally on the Capitol grounds on January 6th, like the rally near the White House that day, immediately preceded the violent attack on the seat of our democracy,” Thompson said said in a statement. “Over the course of that day, demonstrations escalated to violence and protestors became rioters. The Select Committee needs to understand all the details about the events that came before the attack, including who was involved in planning and funding them.”
Alexander bragged on live streams last December that he and Trump-supporting Republican Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) were working on a plot to exert “maximum pressure on Congress” during the vote to certify Joe Biden’s electoral victory. The day before the attack, Alexander allegedly led a group in a “victory” or “death” chant at a rally, the committee said. During the events at the Capitol, Alexander filmed a video of himself looking over the crowd from afar and saying, “I don’t disavow this. I do not denounce this.”
Following the events of January 6th, Alexander allegedly went into hiding and, as The Daily Dot reported, frantically tried to erase his affiliation with numerous Stop the Steal web domains he owned. Alexander was kicked off of major social media networks soon after January 6th, but re-emerged in a video posted to Telegram this past June in which he promised to “return” to political activism “soon.”
“Gather together once again to fight, as the remnant, for our republic,” Alexander said, according to Forbes.
The Select Committee gave the rally organizers a deadline of October 21st to hand over documents and has scheduled depositions for October 28th and 29th. It has subpoenaed 11 others who are connected to the rally that preceded the Capitol attack, including close Trump allies former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, former Pentagon official Kashyap Patel, and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon. According to the committee, Bannon and Patel will testify on October 14th, followed by Meadows and Scavino on October 15th.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. (photo: Kent Nishmura/Getty Images)
While the expanded child tax credit has been a win-win for families and the economy, conservative Democrats in Congress are still finding ways to undermine it.
This year there was a small glimmer of hope that such a trend might be halted and even reversed. Democrats, using their razor-thin control of the Senate and marginal control of the House, passed an expanded child tax credit (CTC) in March 2021 as part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan that not only increased the tax refund received by families with young children but also began sending them a monthly advance instead of making them wait until they filed their annual tax return.
By any measure, the funds being sent to families are embarrassingly modest and only offer an increase from the previous tax credit of $1,000 to $1,600 over the entire year. Families whose incomes are low enough to qualify and have children aged 6 through 17 are now receiving $3,000 a year instead of $2,000, while those with children younger than 6 are getting checks that add up to $3,600 a year.
Still, putting cash, however small an amount, into the hands of ordinary Americans is a win-win proposition for everyone but the most conservative pundits. As the 2020 CARES Act’s enhanced unemployment benefits—amounting to a $15 an hour wage—demonstrated, the economy as a whole is buoyed when people have more money in their pockets to spend on basic necessities. And, just as importantly, the benefits helped the most vulnerable, particularly Black and Latino workers, to stave off financial ruin.
Now, the monthly CTC payments are already showing similar promise. The Center on Poverty and Social Policy (CPSP) at Columbia University documented “a notable drop in child poverty” after just the first month of payments. Additionally, the benefits are particularly helpful for Black and Latino children, who the CPSP estimates have twice the poverty rate of white children. Yet, because the CTC relies on tax returns filed in the previous year, white children actually benefited more than children of color as their families were “more likely to have filed taxes.”
The U.S. Census Bureau also found that after just one month of payments, food insecurity among vulnerable families dropped significantly, and families receiving checks also had less difficulty paying for weekly expenses. So convincing are the expanded CTC’s proven benefits that nearly 450 economists wrote an open letter to Congress urging them to extend the program.
The CTC payments benefit roughly 39 million American families who are currently receiving monthly checks of up to $300 per child, per month. Meanwhile, the cost of child care in the United States is exorbitant, averaging about $1,300 per month for infants and nearly $900 per month for preschool-aged children. For families with multiple children and parents in low-wage jobs, child care is simply out of reach, and the modest CTC payments don’t even come close to covering the costs.
At the same time, child care workers are so underpaid that in the wake of the pandemic, more than 120,000 have simply quit their jobs. Even the U.S. government is so concerned that the Treasury Department issued a report admitting that “the existing child care system in the United States, which relies on private financing to provide care for most children… fails to adequately serve many families.”
This is not a new problem. In a 2014 speech at the White House Summit on Working Families, former President Barack Obama acknowledged that, “in 31 states, decent childcare costs more than in-state college tuition,” and that “there are other countries that know how to do childcare well.”
Child care is such an important factor for families with young children that the latest Harris Poll survey found that 76 percent of working parents felt that child care decisions were a major factor in their employment decisions.
The cost of raising a child is estimated to be nearly a quarter of a million dollars—a sum that is wildly out of reach for low-income families. Combined with persistent wealth and income inequality, it’s no wonder that, as per a recent CDC report, 2020 was “the sixth consecutive year that the number of births [in the U.S.] has declined.”
One 2009 study concluded that cheaper child care is the key to reversing falling birth rates. There are two simple ways to make child care cheaper: heavily subsidize the child care industry (the U.S. government, after all, subsidizes fossil fuel and agricultural industries), or put more money into the hands of parents with children.
The expanded CTC benefits are currently valid only for a year, and some Democrats want to make them permanent. But President Joe Biden wants them extended for only four years via a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill called the Build Back Better Act. Meanwhile, some conservative Democrats want to roll back the expanded benefit right away. The watchdog group Account able .US identifies nine House Democrats and two Senate Democrats opposing the extension of an expanded CTC. Of these 11 naysayers, eight are millionaires.
In spite of its clear benefits, the CTC is in very real political danger of being rolled back. Sen. Cory Booker (D‑N.J.), who is one of its biggest proponents, said, “There’s nothing bigger than this… if you just want to look at the impact on a child’s life, this is the biggest thing that we’re doing.” Indeed, it’s hard to argue against helping vulnerable American children, but some Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (D‑W.V.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D‑Ariz.) are managing to do so as they stand in the way of the current iteration of the CTC.
Manchin, in particular, has adopted a posture far closer to the Republican way of thinking: that benefits aimed at wealthy interests are good for the nation, while benefits to vulnerable individuals are effectively “entitlements.” Using Republican-favored buzzwords, Manchin recently said that while he supports the CTC in theory, “anything that can be added should be means tested,” and that it is important that the United States not turn into a so-called “entitlement society.” One critic, MSNBC’s Hayes Brown, explained that “‘Means testing’ is just a nicer way to say, ‘We want people to jump through more hoops, so fewer people can get help.’”
The West Virginia senator exudes such hubris in opposing his own party that in a New York Times interview earlier this year, he essentially dared Democrats to try to oust him, saying, “What are they going to do, [are] they going to go into West Virginia and campaign against me? Please, that would help me more than anything.” With friends like Manchin, Republicans can sit out the discussion and simply take no clear policy position on the matter.
With many progressive Democrats working to protect the expansion of the CTC, some are going on the offensive in trying to get money into the hands of low-income and middle-income Americans by other means. In July, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.) introduced a guaranteed income bill that would ensure individuals making up to $75,000 a year receive $1,200 monthly checks. The SUPPORT Act, backed by progressive stalwarts such as Reps. Cori Bush (D‑MO) and Pramila Jayapal (D‑Wash.), includes running a pilot program to prove that monthly payments would have a positive impact on families.
Such approaches embody the opposite of the trickle-down economic model long championed by many establishment economists, in the face of progressive opposition. Now, the trickle-down model is so discredited that even Biden has explicitly rejected it. Rather than infusing the top tiers of society with money, tax breaks and subsidies, based on a fantasy that those riches will eventually reach the bottom tiers, policymakers are beginning to get on board with direct benefits to vulnerable Americans. But, due to conservative opposition, whether or not the CTC survives Washington’s political wrangling remains to be seen, even as tens of millions of Americans rely on it.
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen speaks during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Oct. 5. (photo: Jabin Botsford/Getty Images)
Dissidents within the company endured personal and professional setbacks for their criticisms of the powerful social network
That employee, Brian Waismeyer, who like Haugen was a member of the company’s integrity unit, broadcast his displeasure in a farewell post on the company’s internal message board — a familiar venue for expressing the mounting dissent within a company whose own employees have become a formidable force for criticism. He said the social network made it “uniquely difficult” for people with jobs like his — reformers within a growth-focused social media service — “to the point that it impedes progress and burns out those who grapple with it.”
The overall picture portrayed in these scathing farewell missives, many of which have been obtained by The Washington Post, echo accounts from dozens of current and former employees interviewed in recent days and over the past several years: Facebook is obsessed with growth, unwilling to undertake systemic reforms in the face of documented harms and ready to accommodate the politically powerful, especially President Donald Trump in the years before he was banned from the platform after the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol.
The rising volume of such complaints has brought Facebook to a perilous moment in which it’s being pilloried on a bipartisan basis in Washington and scrutinized by regulators across the world. A company that has endured a relentless string of controversies over its 17-year history while becoming ever-bigger, ever-richer now faces a broadening consensus that the time for self-regulation is long past; only forceful governmental action — in the United States and elsewhere — can curb the company’s penchant for allowing content that undermines democracy and harms individuals.
Some saw Haugen’s testimony — and the troves of documents she has shared with reporters and lawmakers — as steps toward that goal.
“I’m glad that these documents prove what many have been saying: Facebook’s leadership prioritizes growth and political power over the public good — and anyone who tries to change that continuously hits a wall,” said Yael Eisenstat, a former Facebook executive who has testified in Congress about how she battled senior leadership over an unwillingness to fact-check misinformation in political ads.
The former employees interviewed by The Post described their own painful journeys, from initial optimism that they could play a role in fixing the service to frustration at what they saw inside the company, and ultimately, to resignation that Facebook was unable to transform itself from within. In a handful of cases, they spoke out publicly, in Congress, or spirited away sensitive documents — sometimes the criticism made them persona non grata in the tech industry.
But most frequently they used the company’s internal message board, called Workplace, to sound alarms to the company’s 60,000 employees, in missives that were generally not available to the public. They spoke of the demoralization that arose after believing that they were on the front lines of protecting people from hate and online harm, only to see years’ worth of internal projects cast aside by management. At least 10 members of the integrity division where Haugen worked now work in a similar division at Twitter.
“Selecting anecdotes from departing employees doesn’t tell the story of how change happens at Facebook. Our integrity team is full of incredible professionals who make our platform better,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne said. “Projects go through rigorous reviews and debates exactly so that we can be confident in any potential change and its impact on people. In fact, we did end up implementing variations of many of the ideas raised in this story — and we’re grateful to everyone who has worked on these complex issues.”
Some internal critics have mixed feelings about Haugen. While they welcome reforms that could come from airing so much dirty laundry, those still in the trenches feel it could become harder to execute change from within, according to three of the people. Some also felt that Haugen exaggerated her understanding of issues on which she did not work directly and research that she did not conduct; Haugen on several occasions during her testimony told senators that she could not respond to questions because she did not have direct knowledge.
Concerns that conditions could become more difficult for would-be reformers were bolstered by the reaction to Haugen’s testimony of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in the past routinely apologized for the company’s missteps but has taken a more defiant stance this time. In a blog posted Tuesday night, he said that when corporate research is mischaracterized to the public it dissuades companies from examining their problems. “If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we’re effectively sending the message that it’s safer not to look at all, in case you find something that is held against you,” he wrote, noting that the company was still committed to its research.
Though few of these former Facebook employees have spoken as publicly and potently as Haugen has, many have sat just offstage for months, sometimes years, roiling over what they saw while working at Facebook. Many contacted by The Post declined to speak or to speak only on the condition of anonymity to protect their current jobs or out of respect for former co-workers. When reached for comment, Waismeyer confirmed that he had written the note and that the description of his experience was accurate, but said he would decline to comment further “out of respect for the many wonderful people still fighting the good integrity fight” at Facebook.
When Waismeyer resigned in March, he had been one of the longest serving researchers in the company’s integrity division, which came to encompass several subunits such as civic integrity and community integrity. During his more than three years in the integrity division, he had spent more than a year working on a project to help victims of revenge porn report such posts to the company, according to his final post and another person familiar with the situation. The project was abruptly dropped during an internal reorganization and was never executed, upsetting the entire team.
In his farewell post, Waismeyer wrote that people who work in integrity face particular burdens in their jobs. The value of their work is always weighed against potential PR and legal risks, as well as whether it would hurt the bottom line or diminish the amount of time people spend on the platform, he said. In addition, the work can be emotionally damaging because of the repeated exposure to harmful content or contact, via interviews or surveys, with people who have been harmed or who have harmed others on social media.
Another former employee — who like Weismeyer had worked in integrity — described discovering serious problems in Facebook’s private groups, which operate beyond the public eye and have harbored hateful and other problematic content. This former employee hoped to help Facebook remedy such problems but repeatedly ran into barriers within.
“They were just zero percent interested in stuff that I brought them,” this former employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “It was raised all the way up … and was consistently stopped.”
In November 2020, another integrity researcher, Lindsay Blackwell, wrote a long resignation letter on the company’s chat system. Blackwell’s project, called WoW, or the Worst of the Worst, was an effort to refine the company’s hate speech detection algorithms after internal research found that users want Facebook to police some very harmful forms of hateful speech, such as attacks on Muslims or LGBTQ people, more rigorously than others, according to a person familiar with the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. After the team spent more than a year engineering a solution to reorient the algorithms, managers and senior leaders dramatically redefined the project, arguing that prioritizing the safety of marginalized groups would be too political, the person said. Blackwell declined to comment.
Others described particular frustration at what they characterized as a pronounced rightward tilt of Facebook’s policy office as Trump emerged as the Republican nominee for president in 2016 and, even more so, after he won the White House. Several former employees have described how a group of leading Republicans at the company’s Washington office, led by former George W. Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president for global public policy, consistently resisted efforts to more aggressively combat misinformation, hate speech and incitement of violence for fear of alienating Trump and his supporters. The Post previously reported that Kaplan objected to some efforts to police false news reports on the grounds that they would “disproportionately affect conservatives.”
Another former data scientist said executives resisted researchers’ calls to identify the Proud Boys as a hate organization for at least four months before the company actually did so, out of concern that the Proud Boys had backing in the Republican Party.
“The Republicans on the public policy team, they made every single decision to avoid upsetting Trump,” one former employee said. “They would just think of ways to make him happy so he wouldn’t unload on them.”
Employees have departed Facebook over policy issues before. Waves of resignations followed the company’s decision not to take down a racially divisive post by Trump, in May 2020, that appeared to endorse violence against people protesting the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was murdered in the custody of Minneapolis police. Still more people resigned after learning of the company’s role in promoting groups and content that led to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6.
But for people who work in divisions specifically designed to mitigate societal harms, particularly a subunit called civic integrity, where Haugen worked, people have left because they felt their work was undervalued or stymied.
Another person who worked in integrity said a team had discovered that it could make a significant dent in the amount of harmful speech on the platform if the algorithms meant to detect that speech were allowed to overcorrect — essentially, remove content that was suspected to be hate speech without being 100 percent sure of it. But executives canceled the effort, leaving the team demoralized. They made the call that they did not want to risk censoring people unfairly, even if doing so could significantly reduce hate speech and harm overall, the person said.
Several other people familiar with the work of the integrity unit said that teams were reorganized numerous times during a single year, and, ultimately, parts of it were disbanded, causing widespread frustration and leaving projects incomplete.
“We didn’t join Facebook because we were big fans of the company,” said one of the people. “We joined because — rather than shouting about how something sucks you think you can make it better. But over time, you realize that the leadership is either indifferent or ignorant. Sometimes they don’t prioritize the work. Other times they don’t understand the logistical complexity, so they under-resource it until it goes into the void.”
Herman Lindsey was exonerated after spending more than a year on Florida’s death row for a murder he didn’t commit. (photo: Witness to Innocence)
How corrupt policing, racial bias, and federal law sends innocent people to death row at alarming rates, Josh Marcus writes
In 2006, he was sent to death row for a murder-robbery he didn’t commit. Investigators believed they had cracked a 12-year cold case, even though they had no evidence tying Mr Lindsey to the scene of the crime. Once he was on the inside, Herman withdrew into pain and depression, declining to see his family, watching his fellow inmates get executed. He began losing hope his appeals would ever work out, even though he knew he didn’t kill pawnshop owner Joanne Mazzola in 1994.
“It’s like you’re tied up and you’re about to die for something you didn’t do, and you have to sit there and wait, and you have to depend on the same people that actually put you there to get any kind of relief,” he told The Independent. “You don’t have too much confidence that this person that tied you up and is going to kill you is going to let you go. They’re not trying to let you go.”
Not that he had lived his life believing the odds were in his favour, especially in the criminal legal system. Growing up, he knew good cops and bad ones. Multiple friends were killed by police. Mr Lindsey came from a poor family and sold drugs to make ends meet, but he wasn’t a murderer. It didn’t seem to matter in court, however, who he really was, that he had started figuring things out, running his own car detailing business, with a son on the way. He felt the legal system was never going to trust someone coming from a background like his.
“I put myself in a bad place, which makes it easier for the police to get a conviction because society says, ‘You did this before. You’ve been arrested for this before. You’re a criminal and you can’t be trusted, and you won’t tell the truth,’” Mr Lindsey said. He was first arrested when he was 14. “Society believed that. It makes you an easy victim.”
In 2009, however, the Florida Supreme Court considered an appeal in his case, ruling unanimously that there wasn’t enough evidence to find him guilty of any crime, and that overzealous prosecutors had so inflamed the jury that he didn’t get a fair trial. He was only the 23rd man let off Florida death row in the state’s history. And believe it or not, despite spending years on death row as an innocent man, Mr Lindsey, who is now 48, was one of the lucky ones. Not everyone who is innocent gets out.
In the modern era of the death penalty, American has executed more than 1,500 people. But a staggering number of those on death row have done nothing wrong. Since the mid-1970s, about 1 in 9 people sentenced to death were found to have been wrongfully convicted, according to a groundbreaking analysis from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). To understand how that happens is to take a journey into one of the strangest and darkest corners of the justice system. On death row, sometimes even those who confess are innocent.
“The number of people who have given false confessions in these exoneration cases is a lot higher than most people would think,” according to legal expert Jeff Newberry of the University of Houston, who supervises the school’s Death Penalty Clinic and has represented numerous inmates bound for death row. “Most people say, ‘Well if he confessed then he must be guilty.’ It’s just a tremendous amount of pressure. I think the average person has no idea of how coercive these environments are.”
Capital suspects, almost always poor and often young men of colour, can be interrogated for hours by police without proper legal representation until they break. Former Chicago police commander John Burge and his officers allegedly tortured more than 100 suspects, including eventual capital defendants, until they were made to confess to whatever investigators wanted. (Burge was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for lying under oath in suits related to the torture claims, and died in 2018 after being let out for good behaviour.)
Death penalty appeals often take decades, meaning that ongoing cases are the result of the worst retrograde policing and prosecutorial practices of the past.
During the penalty phase of Mr Lindsey’s trial in Florida, prosecutors were supposed to ask him holistic questions about his life circumstances and what led up to the alleged crime, before a jury decided on whether he deserved the death penalty. Instead, a government lawyer asked, ‘’Why did you put a gun to her head and pull the trigger?’’
A Florida Supreme Court Justice later wrote that the “prosecution’s comments were not only improper but were also prejudicial and made with the apparent goal of inflaming the jury.’’
Even in death row cases where someone else has out-and-out confessed to the underlying crime, people awaiting execution face Kafka-eqsue legal odysseys to secure their freedom. They become mired in a legal appeals process so confined to technical questions that the overall question of innocence can seem to fade away.
Tyrone Noling, who is currently on death row in Ohio, has been fighting for his freedom since being charged for a gruesome 1990 double-murder in rural Portage County. Lawyers from the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP) believe he has a compelling case.
Following the brutal shooting deaths of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, both 81, in the small village of Atawater Township, police struggled to find immediate suspects. “It’s a big scandal there wasn’t an immediate arrest,” said Brian Howe, a University of Cincinnati law professor who works with the OIP. “As the investigation drags on and on, there’s more and more pressure for law enforcement to come up with something.”
Eventually, after multiple attempts to charge Mr Noling failed, police returned Mr Noling and his associates in 1995, after the man had admitted to a series of robberies in a nearby town, using a gun of the same .25 caliber that killed the Hartigs. (Ballistics tests, however, showed that the two weapons weren’t a likely match.) Investigators called in a child psychologist who convinced the youngest member of Mr Noling’s circle, just 16-years-old, using hypnosis that he had memories of the crime that he had repressed. Police then offered the teen and three others deals to testify against Mr Noling.
One of these individuals recanted before the trial even began, and the others did later. Another man, Dan Wilson, who was executed in 2009 for burning a woman alive, allegedly confessed the killings to his foster brother, who reported the confession to police. Investigators ignored other key suspects, according to OIP. The jury that sent Mr Noling to his death was informed of none of this.
“Tyrone’s case is one that just sort of makes me want to just scream sometimes,” Mr Howe said. Mr Noling has been engaged in a tortuous appeals process since, marred by lost files, deeply wonky procedural denials, and most recently, the Ohio Supreme Court’s 2018 refusal to DNA test evidence from the scene. “It’s always a very dry, technical, piece of the story. At any given point, that’s usually what’s in front of the court,” Mr Howe continued, “I don’t understand how it’s possible that this person is still in prison, much less on death row.”
The adoption of DNA testing in the late 1980s opened the doors of death row just a crack to overturning wrongful convictions, but many cases don’t have DNA evidence. The world of capital cases is rarely as neat and tidy as an episode of CSI.
In place of such hard evidence, human factors like bias, class, politics, and geography often decide who goes to and dies on death row, rather than true guilt or innocence.
Black men, especially those allegedly involved in crimes with white victims, are vastly overrepresented on death row—and in those few who are exonerated. Eyewitness testimony, which has been shown over and over again to be unreliable, often forms the bedrock of capital cases.
Luck is just as much a factor. Though 27 states, largely in the US South, still have the death penalty on the books, the largest numbers of death sentences come from a small number of jurisdictions like Oklahoma County, home to Oklahoma City, and Harris County, Texas, home to Houston.
“Zip code really does matter a lot and that results in a very arbitrary system of justice,” said Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a non-partisan advocacy group. “And then of course we know that the death penalty has always been racially biased and continues to be. Racial bias permeates the system from top to bottom.”
Structural barriers have played a role as well. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act limited the ability of death row inmates to make appeals in federal courts. Prosecutors are allowed to screen potential jurors to make sure they are, in the strange argot of capital punishment, “death-qualified”—that is, to serve in a capital case, jurors must not be fundamentally opposed to the death penalty. Public support for the death penalty has been declining for decades to near record lows, yet those more likely support the death penalty, who tend to skew white and conservative, end up most likely to be weighing the life and death of the people of colour most likely to be executed.
Despite these serious questions, the death penalty remains because of its political saliency in a certain number of conservative jurisdictions, according to Mr Newberry of the University of Houston.
“I don’t think the average person thinks about the death penalty at all,” he said. “The reason we still have it is that prosecutors feel the need to be ‘tough on crime.’ They think that if this is removed, if legislation takes away death as a sentencing option, if prosecutors are not going to seek death, they’re going to look weak.”
Change at the national level remains unlikely with a gridlocked Congress, though President Biden’s Justice Department instituted a moratorium on federal executions this summer. (Previously, after a 17-year pause, Donald Trump restarted federal executions, and 13 were killed during the second half of 2020, the most federal inmates put to death under one president in the last 120 years.) The president campaigned on opposing capital punishment, and has the power to commute all federal inmates’ sentences with the stroke of a pen, but so far hasn’t taken any concrete action beyond stopping the killings.
Still, despite these odds, anti-death penalty advocates have nonetheless made gains in recent years, as an increasingly bipartisan coalition of legislators, advocates, faith leaders, racial justice activists, and exonerees like Mr Lindsey have gotten capital punishment outlawed even in unlikely places like Virginia, which ended executions earlier this year, the first Southern state to take such a step.
And even if every one of the more than 2,500 people on state and federal death row were free, those who have survived a capital conviction will still be putting together the pieces of their life.
Mr Lindsey, who still lives Florida, and is a board member of the exoneree-led advocacy group Witness to Innocence, says he’s now serving a “public life sentence.” His name has been cleared, but he’s struggled to find work or obtain health insurance.
He still battles anxiety, and he never received compensation for the years he was mistakenly put behind bars.
What gives him hope, however, is that the pain he has experienced in his life has also made people take heed of his voice. He’s spent his time on the outside campaigning against the death penalty and mentoring youth. Something so simple as truly being heard becomes a great luxury when you’ve been wrongly imprisoned and sentenced to die.
“When I speak up, as someone who’s been on death row, it’s like I get full attention. I looked at how powerful I could be if I used myself as a tool to educate people,” he said.
The way he sees it, the criminal legal system has never wrongfully convicted anyone, including him: the process worked the way it was designed to, and individual people, knowing what they did, made the choice to send him to death.
But there’s a flip side to that understanding: human beings set up the system, and human beings make it work, so that means those same human beings can be convinced, after thousands are killed, to build a system that does something different.
The conflict erupted in 2014 when Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led military coalition to intervene in support of the government. (photo: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters)
Rights groups criticise the move with Dutch ambassador Peter Bekker saying the Council ‘has failed the people of Yemen’.
The 47-member council voted against renewing the mandate of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen (GEE) on Thursday, which in August 2018 reported evidence of possible war crimes committed by all sides, including a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been in the past accused of attempting to shut down the investigation, with Human Rights Watch in September 2018 saying Riyadh was making a “blatant attempt to avoid scrutiny” of its conduct in Yemen.
The Human Rights Council in 2017 agreed to send a group of “eminent experts” to Yemen to investigate abuse nearly two years after the Saudi-led coalition launched a devastating military offensive in support of internationally recognised President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was toppled by the Houthi rebels.
The Saudi-led coalition has been accused of bombing schools, hospitals and other civilian targets while the Houthi rebels, who control much of northern Yemen, were also accused of major violations.
Catherine Shakdam, former Security Council consultant on Yemen, told Al Jazeera that the vote was not a surprise.
However, she added, “A lot of people will be disappointed because it is a failure on the part of the UN, but from a political perspective … finding a real solution to the ongoing crisis in Yemen, pointing fingers may not be the right way to reaching a peaceful resolution to the conflict.”
First draft resolution rejected
This is the first time the United Nations’ top rights body has ever rejected a draft resolution since its foundation in 2006, a spokesman for the council told AFP.
The draft resolution seeking to extend the GEE’s mandate for a further two years was brought forward by several European nations and Canada.
Some 21 countries voted against the draft resolution, 18 voted in favour, seven abstained and Ukraine did not register a vote at all.
Those voting in favour included Argentina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and South Korea.
The countries voting against included Bangladesh, China, Cuba, India, Indonesia, Libya, Pakistan, the Philippines and Russia.
Japan was among the abstentions.
Saudi lobby
The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) said the vote amounted to “a blatant attempt by Saudi and its allies to ensure blanket impunity for themselves after having been linked to war crimes and other grave violations of international law in the country”.
Rights activists said this week that Saudi Arabia lobbied heavily against the Western resolution.
The kingdom is not a voting member of the UN Human Rights Council and its delegation did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
During the debate, Bahraini ambassador Yusuf Abdulkarim Bucheeri said that the international group of investigators had “contributed to misinformation on the ground” in Yemen.
‘Grave failure’
Yemen’s grinding conflict has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions, resulting in what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
About 80 percent of Yemen’s 30 million people are dependent on aid.
The conflict erupted in 2014 when Houthi rebels seized the capital Sanaa, prompting a Saudi-led military coalition to intervene the following year in support of the government.
Jeremie Smith, director of the CIHRS Geneva office, said: “Today’s vote represents a grave failure – one that will inevitably lead to more violence and suffering in Yemen.
“States who voted against the renewal or abstained have chosen to appease Saudi Arabia instead of protecting the lives of millions.”
Dutch ambassador Peter Bekker said the vote was a major setback. “I cannot help but feel that this Council has failed the people of Yemen,” he told delegates.
“With this vote, the Council has effectively ended its reporting mandate, it has cut this lifeline of the Yemeni people to the international community.”
Speaking earlier before the council, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said there was no peace in sight in Yemen.
“Parties to the conflict have continued to act with little regard to their obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law,” she said.
“Numerous attacks targeting or disproportionately impacting civilians or civilian objects during the past year may amount to war crimes.
“Parties to the conflict also continue to commit extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture, child recruitment and forced displacement, among other violations and abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
She said urgent funding was needed to avert large-scale famine in the impoverished country.
A protest against greenwashing during the Covid-19 pandemic. Shell, Johnson & Johnson and IKEA are among the corporates that have been accused of using misleading green claims this year. (photo: Michael Fornton/Flickr)
Apple and Amazon are among dozens of companies whose lobbying groups are fighting to stop the Democrats’ reconciliation package.
But corporate opposition has been fierce. In recent months, powerful lobbying groups have unleashed a storm of advertisements, reports, and targeted donations meant to stop the package from passing. And while many of these efforts have been spearheaded by the usual suspects — Koch Industries front groups, for example — others have been quietly backed by the U.S.’s largest and ostensibly greenest companies.
Disney, AT&T, Deloitte, United Airlines, and some of the country’s biggest tech firms — including Apple and Microsoft — are among dozens of the country’s most powerful corporations helping to block the passage of President Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation, according to a new report from the corruption watchdog group Accountable.US. Their contributions to groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — which is fighting tooth and nail against the reconciliation package — are undermining what many advocates have called our “last shot” for meaningful climate policy during this decade.
“It’s very disappointing to have so many major corporations in this country — who claim to be shoulder-to-shoulder with people in the fight against climate change — backing these groups,” said Karl Frisch, a spokesperson for Accountable.US.
The report highlights the discordance between companies’ public-facing climate commitments and the actions of their lobbying groups. Amazon, for example, in 2019 unveiled plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions 10 years before the Paris Agreement deadline of 2050, and later renamed a Seattle hockey arena after its ostentatious “climate pledge.” But its CEO, Andy Jassy, sits on the Business Roundtable, a group that has called the budget bill’s tax provisions “troubling” and has mounted what it calls a “significant, multifaceted campaign” to oppose them. Apple, Google, and Microsoft also have CEOs on the Roundtable.
Much opposition targets the package’s tax policy, including proposals to increase the corporate tax rate to 26 percent from its current 21 percent, and to increase the capital gains tax rate from 20 percent to 25 percent. According to the Chamber of Commerce, such tax increases — which Democrats want to use to fund the expansion of the social safety net and allow for a substantial rise in climate-related spending, including a program to incentivize utilities to transition to clean energy sources — would “halt America’s fragile economic recovery.” The Business Roundtable agreed, adding that it would “dramatically” increase inflation.
David Arkush, director of the nonprofit Public Citizen’s climate policy program, said he suspected that the fossil fuel industry was driving these groups’ advocacy. “Industry association positions are often set by the highest bidder,” he wrote in an email to Grist, adding that “taxes are just a neutral-sounding excuse.” ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron are among the companies represented by the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable.
In response to a request for comment on Accountable.US’s report, the Chamber of Commerce referred Grist to a blog post calling the reconciliation package an “everything but the kitchen sink collection of bad policies.” The post reiterated the Chamber’s support for market-based climate policies like a border carbon adjustment mechanism. The Chamber did not respond to a question asking whether fossil fuel interests are driving its policy positions.
Joshua Bolten, CEO of the Business Roundtable, told Grist that all of the group’s members support climate action but that there was “no policy reason to link strong action to address climate change with unrelated, harmful tax policy,” which he said would make climate investments more difficult. Bolten’s statement did not address the fossil fuel industry’s alleged influence over the organization’s policy positions.
This isn’t the first time that leading companies have been criticized for the chasm between their actions and their public-facing climate pledges. In January, a report from the nonprofit InfluenceMap found that the so-called “Big Five” tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft — had spent only 4 percent of their 2020 lobbying dollars on climate-related policy at the federal level, despite significant rhetorical commitments to sustainability. The tech companies’ advocacy for climate policy has actually dropped off since January, according to a September update from InfluenceMap, meaning that some of the world’s most powerful companies are doing even less to realize the climate-safe future they have so heavily advertised with their pledges to go “carbon neutral” and “carbon negative.”
Bill Weihl, executive director of ClimateVoice, an initiative asking tech companies to use 20 percent of their lobbying dollars to advocate for climate-related policies, said he’s noted the trend with deep concern, especially amid efforts to scuttle the reconciliation package.
“We’re in the middle of a political battle over major federal climate legislation,” he said. Although he appreciated statements made over the weekend by Amazon and Microsoft expressing their support for some of the bill’s climate policies, he said their ongoing lobbying group memberships undermine their statements. “We need them to really step up and repudiate what their trade associations are doing, and lobby really hard for bold policy,” he said. So far, Apple is one of the only major companies to have ever left a trade organization — the Chamber of Commerce — for its stance on climate change.
Neither Apple nor Google responded to Grist’s request for comment. Microsoft referred to its blog post on the spending package, and an Amazon spokesperson said the company supported the package’s investments “to lower emissions in key sectors like energy and transportation,” and that it would be willing to pay a higher corporate tax rate.
With a vote on the spending package now subject to negotiations between the White House, progressives in the House of Representatives, and centrists in the Senate, advocates want companies to seize the opportunity to demonstrate their support for transformative climate policy.
“If these companies are legitimately concerned about the climate crisis, as they say they are, they should have no business being members of the Business Roundtable or Chamber,” Frisch said, “or any of these groups that are fighting the bill.”
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