25 October 21
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Biden said Thursday during a CNN town hall that it would be a “reach” for the spending bill to include the Medicare expansion due to opposition from moderate Democrats Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Krysten Sinema (Ariz.).
Both Manchin and Sinema hold significant sway in a 50-50 Senate — Democrats need all 50 of their party's lawmakers to pass their social spending package through a process called reconciliation.
“The expansion of Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision is one of the most popular and important provisions in the entire reconciliation bill,” Sanders tweeted on Saturday.
“It’s what the American people want. It’s not coming out,” he added.
Biden said during the town hall he supports the idea but is just not sure if it will get done.
“That’s a reach and the reason why it’s a reach — I think it’s a good idea and it’s not that costly in relative terms especially if you allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices,” Biden said. “But here’s the thing — Mr. Manchin is opposed to that as is, I think, Sen. Sinema.”
He explained Manchin was opposed to the expansion of Medicare because he “doesn’t want to further burden Medicare … because it will run out of its ability to maintain itself in X number of years.”
Democrats have been negotiating for weeks to get an agreement on the spending bill that includes provisions to extend an expansion of a child tax credit, address climate change, provide universal pre-K, and funding for public housing, among other things.
Manchin balked at the original $3.5 trillion price tag, and the party's leaders have scrambled to come to an agreement on a pared-down package, which may wind up in the $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion range.
However, Democrats — particularly progressives including Sanders — have grown frustrated with Sinema over her opposition to key proposals in the bill.
In particular, Sinema is opposed to raising the corporate tax rate and empowering Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, according to lawmakers briefed on talks.
“It is beyond comprehension that there is any member of the United States Congress who is not prepared to vote to make sure that we lower prescription drug costs,” Sanders told reporters Thursday.
“I would say that Sen. Sinema, every Republican and every person in the House do what the American people want, and they want us to lower the outrageous costs of prescription drugs,” he added.
Protesters take part in the Women's March and demonstrate against Texas's S.B. 8, a near total ban on abortion, in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 2, 2021. (photo: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images)
The majority of Americans support legal abortion. Redistricting has allowed extremism to flourish without fear of repercussion
In this dangerous moment, supporters of legal abortion must understand that raising our voices is not going to change anything unless we also push for major, immediate democratic reforms including ending the filibuster, enshrining federal voting rights, expanding the supreme court and establishing fair redistricting.
I understand why those goals may simultaneously seem too wonky to follow and too ambitious to achieve. But we cannot fight for abortion rights without first repairing our democracy, because we will continue to lose.
The conservative movement and its ideological and corporate patrons have locked in structural power at nearly every level of government, and our lawmakers don’t need to be responsive to public opinion or even long-enshrined civil and human rights. If we’re going to have any chance of protecting ourselves and each other, on numerous urgent fronts, we need to agitate for immediate, ambitious democratic reforms that will ensure that our courts uphold our rights, and our elected officials are responsive to the will of the people. Otherwise, our rallies are collective screams into the void.
Many abortion rights supporters have moved away from calling themselves “pro-choice” and instead have embraced the reproductive justice model, which defines itself as a movement to ensure the human right to bodily autonomy and to parent or not parent in a safe and sustainable community. Current threats to our democracy make crystal clear that the struggles for reproductive freedom, voting rights and economic, racial and climate justice are inextricably linked.
When I first began reporting on abortion, in 2013, when I’d ask abortion rights advocates why extreme anti-abortion state lawmakers seemed unafraid of running afoul of the majority of the American public, which supports legal abortion, they would answer, “gerrymandering”.
As I soon learned, because Republicans have gerrymandered districts in states across the nation, it no longer matters whether their policies defy most voters’ beliefs and needs, because incumbents’ seats are safe almost no matter what.
What we’re seeing now accelerated after the 2010 election, which had existential ramifications for our democracy only now becoming visible. Ahead of that election, during an all-important redistricting year, the Republican party and conservative and corporate donors heavily invested in state-level elections so that they could gerrymander and give themselves a competitive advantage for a decade. It worked. They flipped legislative chambers across the country, and states started ramping up their envelope-pushing anti-abortion bills, as well as voting restrictions designed to make it more difficult for voters to throw them out of office.
In 2020, Democrats failed to flip a single state-level chamber. Republicans now control 30 legislatures during yet another redistricting year, jeopardizing any chance of a progressive agenda in many states as well as Democratic control of Congress next year.
As states begin passing ever more extreme abortion restrictions and even bans, there’s little reason to believe that the courts will stop them unless Congress gets serious about reforming the court system.
During the Trump administration, Republicans installed an unprecedented number of federal judges, many of them open ideologues with little experience on the bench, reshaping the judiciary for a generation. And, in case you’ve forgotten, McConnell blocked Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, changed the Senate rules for confirming justices to push through Neil Gorsuch, ushered through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh despite credible accusations of sexual assault against him, and rushed through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett while voting in the 2020 election had already begun.
The radical takeover of the courts was not a random fluke but the result of careful plotting and hundreds of millions of dollars investment by rightwing ideologues and billionaires – the same kind of long-term strategizing to change the rules of the game their allies used to gerrymander states and congressional districts.
In other words, the same movement of extreme, partisan donors and strategists behind the ever-more radical state laws has also installed federal judges and supreme court justices who are poised to uphold those laws. The issue isn’t whether expanding the supreme court will throw into doubt the court’s legitimacy. The supreme court is already partisan and ideological and therefore illegitimate. What’s needed now is a major and swift corrective.
That brings us to Congress. What about a federal law enshrining abortion rights? To achieve that – and so much more, including expanding the supreme court – Congress needs to end the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 members of the Senate to pass legislation instead of 50. Our current Senate delivers nothing close to fair representation, which, as I write this, is on painful display as Republicans have filibustered yet another urgently needed voting rights bill, while two Democratic senators representing small states have killed provisions in the Build Back Better package that are “pro-life” in the most literal sense – in support of healthcare and a viable planet. To have any chance of achieving reproductive justice in this country, we need to agitate for our members of Congress to end the filibuster now.
It’s time to re-examine what we consider pragmatic. Sticking with the status quo means surrendering to the profound irony that a movement that branded itself as “pro-life” has helped usher in a ruling class committed not only to stripping away the social safety net but also doubling down on fossil fuels and imperiling the very existence of life on Earth.
Trying to advocate for reproductive justice without also demanding that our lawmakers immediately reform our voting laws, Congress and the courts that have been rigged by corporate and authoritarian interest groups isn’t practical or hopeful – it’s misguided if not delusional. Instead, supporters of abortion rights must join the chorus calling to end the filibuster and expand the supreme court.
Despite rising employment, US households are finding it harder to pay their bills. (photo: Getty Images)
Things may not be trending in the right direction for workers in the United States.
There have been several “waves” of this survey, and response rates and questions have varied between them, complicating longer-term comparisons. In most of what follows, I’m going to look mainly at responses since May 2021. I will say that in the months leading up to May, households found it progressively a little easier to get by than they did last summer. For example, in August and September 2020, about 44% of households said they were having no difficulties paying their bills. That rose to around 50% in May 2021. The share describing it as “very difficult” fell from about 14% to 10%. The share drawing on savings, running up the credit cards, or borrowing from friends and family fell.
That all began turning around in May. Graphed below are the changes in households’ experience paying their bills since then. In May (averaging that month’s surveys), 49.9% of households said they had no difficulty paying their bills. In early October, that fell to 47.7%, a decline of 2.2 points. The share reporting it “a little difficult” rose slightly, and those reporting it “somewhat difficult” rose a bit more — but those reporting it “very difficult” rose from 10.4% to 12.2%. Combine “somewhat” and “very” and it rises from 26.6% to 28.6%. These are not massive changes, but they’re not what you’d expect in a period when employment rose by 2.6 million jobs.
And, as the next graph shows, there are some distressing changes in where the money’s been coming from. There’s been a rise in those reporting “regular, like pre-pandemic,” which is what you’d expect in a period of rising employment. But there’s also been an increasing reliance on borrowing, liquidating assets, and government aid (other than unemployment insurance, which has been deeply cut, and stimulus payments, which are a fading memory). It’s good the government aid is there, but given the cheesiness of the US welfare state, there’s typically not much of it.
These are not enormous changes — a few percentage points (though every percentage point shift represents about 2.5 million adults). But they’re mostly in the wrong direction.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, told Congress last year that the company faces 'significant competition.' (image: Politico/AP/iStock)
Documents collected by whistleblower Frances Haugen could give the company "a lot to regret" in its fights to prove it's not a monopoly.
But internal documents show that the company knows it dominates the arenas it considers central to its fortunes.
Previously unpublished reports and presentations collected by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen show in granular detail how the world’s largest social network views its power in the market, at a moment when it faces growing pressure from governments in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. The documents portray Facebook employees touting its dominance in their internal presentations — contradicting the company’s own public assertions and providing potential fuel for antitrust authorities and lawmakers scrutinizing the social network’s sway over the market.
The internal metrics show that 78 percent of American adults and nearly all U.S. teenagers use the company’s services— and that while competitors like TikTok and Snap have made inroads with 13- to 17-year-olds, they lag behind Facebook and its photo app Instagram on core values like sharing and community.
“We do not have the number-one product for all use cases in all markets,” the employees wrote in one newly obtained presentation from 2018, which said “Facebook-the-company” was doing “okay” but not yet “great” with teens worldwide. “But we do have one of the top social products — with growing market share — almost everywhere.”
Facebook’s goal, employees said in a 2021 presentation, is to be a “super app” that consumers use for everything from sharing life moments with friends and building community to reading the news and watching entertaining videos.
The records are among a pile of disclosures that Haugen’s legal counsel has made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided in redacted form to Congress. A consortium of news organizations, including POLITICO, has obtained the redacted versions of thousands of documents.
Haugen’s disclosures, along with her role in a series of Wall Street Journal investigative articles and her appearances in a recent “60 Minutes” interview and Senate hearing, have set off Facebook’s most serious political crisis in years, while potentially adding momentum to efforts in Congress to toughen antitrust enforcement against U.S.-based tech giants.
The disclosures related to Facebook’s competitive landscape also could aid the antitrust lawsuit that the Federal Trade Commission launched against the company last year, which seeks to force it to split off Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp. The FTC has struggled in court to define key elements of the case, including what a social network is and how Facebook dominates that market. The new documents could help the agency fill in those blanks.
Facebook’s public filings to the SEC offer less detail on its users than its internal documents provide, including data broken down by age groups. Facebook also does not publicly provide data broken down for WhatsApp and Instagram — but these documents do.
“This is very, very strong support for the core story underneath” the FTC’s case, said a former agency staffer who reviewed the documents for POLITICO and spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid influencing the agency’s litigation. “There’s a lot to regret in these documents if you are Facebook.”
But in court papers filed this month, the company accused the FTC of cherry-picking data to portray Facebook as a monopoly abusing its power. The government’s claims, Facebook’s lawyers wrote, are “a litigation-driven fiction at odds with the commercial reality of intense competition with surging rivals like TikTok.”
And the documents Haugen provided only support Facebook’s argument, company spokesperson Christopher Sgro said in an interview Friday.
"Far from supporting the government’s case, the documents presented to Facebook firmly reinforce what Facebook has always said: We compete with a broad range of services for people’s time and attention, including apps that offer social, community, video, news and messaging features,” Sgro told POLITICO. “Consumers freely switch among these features — both within Facebook and outside it — and the FTC’s artificially narrow market definition ignores this obvious reality."
Facebook’s users are ‘hard to lose’
An estimated 162 million U.S. adults over age 30 use the social network each month, or 78 percent of that population, according to a March 2021 presentation created for Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox. Just about all 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. also use Facebook, they said.
All told, Facebook has 174 million daily active users in the U.S., according to the internal data. By comparison, Google-owned YouTube has 122 million, while Snapchat has 87.3 million and TikTok has 50 million, according to publicly available estimates. Worldwide, Facebook has more than 2.7 billion users.
While fewer U.S. teens use Facebook’s main social network, nearly all of them use Instagram; the company estimated that 22 million American teens use the service. Instagram also has reached that same high rate of usage with the under-35 crowd in France, Great Britain and Australia.
Once users sign up, they rarely leave, another presentation found.
"Social apps often stop growing but rarely shrink," the research concluded based on data from nearly a dozen apps including Facebook, Twitter, Snap, South Korea’s Kakao and Japan’s LINE messaging app. “Once you get a user on your app, it’s hard to lose them.”
Facebook’s enormous reach is central to the FTC’s suit, which alleges that Facebook holds a monopoly on “personal social networking services” — online services with a joint social space to maintain relationships and share experiences with friends, family and acquaintances.
Facebook and Instagram are “the digital equivalent of a town square,” the FTC quoted CEO Mark Zuckerberg as saying in a public Facebook post, while a messaging service like WhatsApp is “the digital equivalent of [a] living room.” The suit accused Facebook of engaging in “buy or bury” strategy for crushing the competition, citing among deals its $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012.
But the case hit a surprise setback in June, when a federal judge threw out the suit on the grounds that the FTC hadn’t done enough to explain how it concluded that Facebook has a monopoly.
Social networking “services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes [social networking] — i.e., which features of a company’s mobile app or website are included in that definition and which are excluded — are hardly crystal clear,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said in his June opinion.
For example, he asked, when an Instagram user watches a video, is that time spent on social networking?
In August, the agency filed a new version of the suit, estimating that Facebook controls 80 percent of the market when measured by the time users spend on its various apps, along with data on how many people use Facebook or its services daily and monthly. The judge has yet to rule on whether the new complaint passes muster.
Such nitpicking about markets is important in monopolization suits because the government must explicitly define what services or products it thinks a company dominates, said Vanderbilt Law School professor Rebecca Allensworth, who specializes in the intersection of tech and antitrust.
Big companies often operate in dozens of markets, some more dominantly than others. But one textbook move by a monopoly is to leverage the power it has in one market to make headway in another, Allensworth said. That’s part of what the FTC alleges Facebook has done: Used its dominance in the social networking realm to advance into video and messaging.
Facebook, which has asked Boasberg to throw out the FTC’s newest case, says the agency still has failed to provide the data the judge demanded.
For example, the company’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, the FTC offered no information on how much of the time that people spend on Facebook is devoted to social networking versus other activities. And while the numbers the agency proffers might seem high, individuals use more than one service, they said, mentioning YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Twitter as rivals.
Where’s the competition?
Facebook often publicly cites the existence of other popular apps as proof that it isn’t a monopoly. Zuckerberg told Congress last year that the company faces “significant competition.”
"The most popular messaging service in the U.S. is iMessage," Zuckerberg said, referring to Apple's messaging service. "The fastest-growing app is TikTok. The most popular app for video is YouTube.”
All those statements are true. But when Facebook surveyed users last year on which app they rank as the best for various activities, it got a more precise picture of the niches it rules.
Across age groups, users ranked Facebook or Instagram as the best for things like sharing photos or video, discovering others with common interests and connecting with family, companies or celebrities. “Instagram excels among teens and young adults, leading the competition in several areas,” the presentation said.
The only areas where other apps surpass Instagram and Facebook were messaging and entertainment, the survey found. Teens and young adults were more likely to use regular texts (30 percent) or Snapchat (24 percent) for messages than either Instagram or Facebook Messenger (14 percent each), another survey found. All ages said they were more likely to watch videos on YouTube or TikTok than on Facebook and Instagram.
Those surveys are important for the FTC’s case, the former official said, because it demonstrates that Facebook knows it offers various services and dominates on only some of them.
“Consuming content created by others — the kind of thing you go to YouTube and Spotify for — is very different from the personal social sharing that you do with friends and family,” the person said. “When Facebook says, ‘But we compete with YouTube,’ they are not wrong, but it’s not really responsive. Of course Facebook is not a monopolist in everything it supplies.
“The central theme of the materials is that Facebook understands the competitive landscapes are different from one market to another,” the person added, “and the key to its power is the bundle of personal social networking services where its monopoly power is clear.”
Individuals familiar with Facebook’s legal arguments, however, argued that the documents on teens’ declining usage of Facebook’s main platform could weigh in the company’s favor. Because teens are more likely to use multiple services, Facebook needs to compete with the likes of YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok for their time and attention, the person said.
On the other hand, the documents also show that not all the services Facebook offers are necessarily central to its mission.
That’s true of the market for entertainment, said the March 2021 presentation, which noted that YouTube is particularly popular among teens and adults looking for that type of content.
"If we think of ourselves as being in the same consumption market as YT [YouTube], then they are unquestionably winning that market in almost every country” the 2018 presentation said. “They set a high bar for success (note that we usually do not think of ourselves as being in the same market)."
Still, some warning signs for Facebook
Several of Facebook’s reports home in on the teen and young adult market because advertisers often target those age groups for campaigns. Employees also said in the documents that they hope many teens who use Instagram will "age up to Facebook” and help maintain that platform, an area of focus for Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer.
Young adults who have grown up using social media aren’t attracted to Facebook’s “super app strategy” and tend to "use single apps for specific, strategic purposes,” researchers said in a May 2021 presentation exploring why 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. use Facebook less than other older Americans.
Some documents include some red flags for Facebook’s tendency to copy rivals’ successes.
Many of the internal Instagram presentations have focused on the dangers TikTok poses, particularly with the teen demographic. In August 2020, the company introduced Instagram Reels to let users create 15-second video clips similar to TikTok videos. The product has had slow pickup. An internal study from April found that one in five Reels creators also had a TikTok account and were recycling those videos.
In another study, Facebook asked teens and young adults to watch either TikTok or Reels for 10 to 15 minutes per day and keep a diary of their reactions. After five days, the users switched to the other platform.
Reels users said they sometimes stopped the sessions early, finding it hard to hit the 10 minutes required because the videos were “stale, boring or repetitive,” while TikTok users self-reported using the app for hours a day beyond the study. The Reels users also found that Facebook’s algorithm didn’t stop showing them content they weren’t interested in, and rarely showed videos made by people of color to white viewers.
At the end of the study, most of the participants preferred TikTok — even the ones who had started off as Reels users.
One of the most damning things revealed by the FTC’s suit, Allensworth said, was how little faith Facebook has in its own product being able to withstand challenges from rivals.
“Zuckerberg doesn’t think he can compete on the merits,” she said. “That’s the fear that comes through in his emails on competition: The need to make sure it doesn’t happen.”
In 2010, Carlos Rojas was among a group of fathers campaigning for more Swedish men to take parental leave. Five years later, Sweden added a third month of paid leave for fathers, in part to increase gender equality. (photo: Casper Hedberg/International Herald Tribune)
The U.S. is one of six countries with no national paid leave. The Democrats have cut their plan to four weeks, which would still make it an outlier.
But it would still be an outlier. Of the 185 countries that offer paid leave for new mothers, only one, Eswatini (once called Swaziland), offers fewer than four weeks. Of the 174 countries that offer paid leave for a personal health problem, just 26 offer four weeks or fewer, according to data from the World Policy Analysis Center at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Four weeks would also be significantly less than the 12 weeks of paid parental leave given to federal workers in the United States, and less than the leave that has been passed in nine states and the District of Columbia.
In this frame taken from video people gather Monday during a protest in Khartoum, Sudan. Military forces arrested Sudan's acting prime minister and senior government officials Monday, disrupted internet access and blocked bridges in the capital Khartoum, the country's information ministry said, describing the actions as a coup. (photo: AP)
ALSO SEE: Sudan Army Kills Three Anti-Coup Protesters, Wounds 80
Security forces opened fire on some of the crowds, and two protesters were killed, according to the Sudan Doctors' Committee, which said 80 people were wounded.
The takeover comes more than two years after protesters forced the ouster of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir and just weeks before the military was supposed to hand the leadership of the council that runs the country over to civilians.
After the early morning arrests of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other senior officials, thousands poured into the streets of the capital, Khartoum, and its twin city of Omdurman. They blocked streets and set fire to tires as security forces used tear gas to disperse them.
As plumes of smoke filled the air, protesters could be heard chanting, "The people are stronger, stronger" and "Retreat is not an option!" Videos on social media showed large crowds crossing bridges over the Nile to the center of the capital, while the U.S. embassy warned troops were blocking off parts of the city.
Pro-democracy activist Dura Gambo said paramilitary forces chased protesters through some neighborhoods of Khartoum. She said the sporadic sound of gunshots could be heard in many parts of the capital.
In the afternoon, the head of the military, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, announced on national TV that he was dissolving the government and the Sovereign Council, a joint military and civilian body created soon after al-Bashir's ouster to run the country.
Burhan said quarrels among political factions prompted the military to intervene. Tensions have been rising for weeks over the course and the pace of the transition to democracy in Sudan, a nation in Africa linked by language and culture to the Arab world.
The general declared a state of emergency and said the military will appoint a technocratic government to lead the country to elections, set for July 2023. But he made clear the military will remain in charge.
"The Armed Forces will continue completing the democratic transition until the handover of the country's leadership to a civilian, elected government," he said. He added that the country's constitution would be rewritten and a legislative body would be formed with the participation of "young men and women who made this revolution."
The Information Ministry, still loyal to the dissolved government, called his speech an "announcement of a seizure of power by military coup."
White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said the the United States was "deeply alarmed at reports of a military takeover" and called for the immediate release of the prime minister of other officials, as did the African Union.
The U.N. political mission to Sudan called the detentions of government officials "unacceptable," and EU foreign affairs chief Joseph Borrell tweeted that he was following the events with the "utmost concern."
Since al-Bashir, who remains in prison, was forced from power, Sudan has worked to slowly rid itself the international pariah status it held under the autocrat. The country was removed from the United States' state supporter of terror list in 2020, opening the door for badly needed foreign loans and investment.
But Sudan's economy has struggled with the shock of a number economic reforms called for by international lending institutions. U.S. Sen. Chris Coons, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee and a close ally of President Joe Biden, warned in a tweet that the U.S. could cut aid to Sudan "if the authority of PM Hamdok … the full transitional government is not restored."
In recent weeks, there have been concerns that the military might be planning a take over, and in fact there was a failed coup attempt in September. Tensions only rose from there, as the country fractured along old lines, with more conservative Islamists who want a military government pitted against those who toppled al-Bashir in protests. In recent days, both camps have taken to the street in demonstrations.
Amid the standoff, the generals have called repeatedly for dissolving Hamdok's transitional government — and Burhan, who leads the ruling Sovereign Council, said frequently that the military would only hand over power to an elected government, an indication that the generals might not stick to the plan to hand leadership of the body to a civilian sometime in November. The council is the ultimate decision maker, though the Hamdok's government is tasked with running Sudan's day-to-day affairs.
As part of efforts to resolve the crisis, Jeffrey Feltman, the U.S. special envoy to the Horn of Africa, met with Sudanese officials over the weekend, and a senior Sudanese military official said he tried unsuccessfully during his visit to get the generals to stick to the agreed plan.
The arrests began a few hours later, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief media.
In recent weeks, the military has been emboldened in its dispute with civilian leaders by the support of tribal protesters, who blocked the country's main Red Sea port for weeks. The most two senior military officials, Burhan and his deputy Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also have close ties with Egypt and the wealthy Gulf nations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The first reports of a possible military takeover emerged before dawn, and the Information Ministry later confirmed them hours later, saying Hamdok and several senior government figures had been arrested and their whereabouts were unknown. Internet access was widely disrupted and the country's state news channel played patriotic traditional music.
Hamdok's office denounced the detentions on Facebook as a "complete coup." It said his wife was also arrested.
Sudan has suffered other coups since it gained its independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956. Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 in one such takeover, which removed the country's last elected government.
Among those detained Monday were senior government figures and political leaders, including the information and industry ministers, a media adviser to Hamdok and the governor of the state that includes the capital, according to the senior military official and another official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share the information with the media.
After news of the arrests spread, the country's main pro-democracy group and two political parties issued appeals to the Sudanese to take to the streets.
The Communist Party called on workers to protest what it described as a "full military coup" orchestrated by Burhan.
Mangatas Togi Butarbutar together with the local community show the location of the grave of their ancestor, Ompu Ondol Butarbutar, which is around the land that the BPODT will build into a luxury resort area. (photo: Yudha Pohan/Mongabay)
Though the area had long been claimed by his Indigenous community, known as the Pomparan Ompu Ondol Butarbutar, construction of a government office building was in progress. Heavy machinery could be seen on newly opened roads. Signs reading “The Caldera Resort” indicated that the location would be developed into a luxury tourism destination.
“This is our ancestral land where we have lived for eight generations, but now we have been intimidated with eviction,” Mangatas said.
Indonesia is a vast archipelago replete with beaches, mountains, rainforests and scores of distinct ethnic groups. Yet despite its natural and cultural riches, the country lags many of its Asian neighbors in tourism revenue. To change that, President Joko Widodo has announced a plan to establish 10 new tourism hubs, dubbed “10 New Balis” after the nation’s most famous tourist destination.
One of these hubs is Lake Toba, a giant volcanic crater lake in North Sumatra province to be ringed with new tourism developments, including the Toba Caldera Resort in Sigapiton. That project will feature a five-star hotel, a luxury shopping mall, an amusement park and a golf course, among other facilities.
Mangatas says his people have inhabited the area for the past two centuries, since before Indonesia existed as a nation. Now, they have been plunged into conflict with the Lake Toba Tourism Authority, known by its Indonesian acronym BPODT, the government entity established to manage the project. According to Mangatas, who is leading the Pomparan Ompu Ondol Butarbutar’s legal pushback against the project, members of his community have been evicted from their homes and had their farmland destroyed to make way for it.
Like the vast majority of Indonesia’s hundreds of Indigenous groups, the Pomparan Ompu Ondol Butarbutar’s land claims aren’t recognized by the state. With the help of NGOs, some communities have obtained formal recognition of their land rights under a process established several years ago, but they remain few and far between. The process remains murky and can take years to navigate, and many communities are unable to do it successfully.
Lacking formal recognition of their claims, groups like the Pomparan Ompu Ondol Butarbutar are legally considered to be squatters on state lands, with little recourse when officials earmark their territory for development.
Nurpeni Butarbutar is a community member who says her land was grabbed by the project developers. Late last year, plots of corn and coffee she tended were razed by a bulldozer.
“They said it was for road construction. All my corn and coffee was destroyed, the BPODT destroyed it,” said Nurpeni, 52, sobbing.
The conflict in the name of developing “world-class tourism” adds to the long grief caused by the customary land conflict in Sigapiton that has flared since 1952, when the government requested the community’s land for reforestation.
In 1975, the district forestry service came again, asking the descendants of Ompu Ondol Butarbutar, the ancestor of Mangatas, Nurpeni and dozens of household heads, to hand over of their land.
Their land was then planted with pine trees, but by the 1990s, they were logged for timber and paper production, leaving it barren. Seeing that, the community retook control of the land and planted crops there.
In 2013, the forestry service returned and said the community could farm on the land but had to sign a statement declaring their status on the land as borrowers, because the land was state forest area. The villagers were shocked and refused. “How can we borrow our own customary land?” Mangatas told Mongabay. “Since when did this [our ancestral land] become a [state] forest area?” He says the community submitted a formal request to the nation’s forestry ministry asking for the area to be rezoned, but never received a response.
New problems arose in 2016, when the government formed the BPODT to manage the tourism project in Sigapiton and two neighboring villages. Asserting their historical claim to the area, villagers began to protest, followed by dozens of village meetings and demonstrations.
Petitions they sent to the forestry ministry and the BPODT were discussed at two meetings in Jakarta chaired by Indonesia’s chief investment minister, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, and attended by other officials and some representatives of Indigenous groups, including Mangatas, in mid-2018. But their efforts were ultimately in vain. After that, Mangatas said, “We waited and waited but we got no response at all.”
The BPODT continued the development of the tourism project. While waiting for the results of the 2018 meeting, villagers began to receive threats of eviction from the agency, and their farmland land was razed with bulldozers.
The following year, when the BPODT built a road to another development within the larger tourism megaproject, called The Caldera–Toba Nomadic Escape, dozens of Indigenous women clashed with police during a demonstration in which they removed their clothes to the point of almost being naked in protest at the project.
The BPODT has reported some villagers, including Mangatas and Nurpeni, to the police for various offenses, accusing them of illegally cultivating land, burning land within the development area, and stealing pine resin. Some residents have been detained and imprisoned. Residents have also received letters of eviction, forcing them to vacate their houses.
“We don’t want to be removed from here for tourism development,” Nurpeni said. “If our fields are destroyed, where will our livelihoods come from?”
A pitch to China
Luhut, the investment minister, has reportedly sought to court Chinese backing for the broader tourism initiative in Lake Toba.
In December 2020, while the land dispute in Sigapiton was ongoing, he invited the Chinese ambassador to Indonesia, Xiao Qian, to visit The Caldera–Toba Nomadic Escape, which is already built on a hilly area with a view of the lake. In January, he met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in the same spot to pitch him on investing in Lake Toba’s tourism sector. Luhut also sought to attract Chinese investment in Indonesia’s tourism sector during his own visit to China in June.
At least 23 Chinese companies have already invested in North Sumatra as part of the country’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), according to data from Indonesia’s Investment Coordinating Board, or BKPM, including a power plant project near Lake Toba. Some of these projects, like a zinc mine to the west of Lake Toba and a hydropower project being built in the only remaining habitat of the Tapanuli orangutan, have drawn criticism for threatening the environment and Indigenous communities.
Shohibul Anshor Siregar, a researcher at Muhammadiyah University of North Sumatra, said the BRI and other development projects would cause problems if they went ahead without respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples. To avoid potential social conflicts, he suggested the Indonesian government involve communities as shareholders in projects involving foreign investors.
“Let’s say from the calculation that each family head sells their land for Rp 1 billion [$71,000], half of which is invested as shares in the company that will operate. That way, people will own the company and enjoy its benefits,” he said in an interview.
“Even if the government involves Chinese investment in Sigapiton, the community should be involved and become actors, not spectators in their ancestral lands,” he added.
Neither the investment ministry’s communications chief, Khairul Hidayati, nor
Development for whom?
With their demonstrations and efforts to obtain formal recognition of their land rights going unanswered, the people of Sigapiton have turned to the courts.
In September 2019, the Pomparan Ompu Ondol Butarbutar sued the BPODT and the head of the district land management agency at the Medan State Administrative Court in the provincial capital. However, their claim was rejected. The judges considered that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing as a community with rights to their customary land to file a lawsuit.
This past April, the community again sued 12 parties, including the Coordinating Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Investment and the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning at the Balige District Court. The lawsuit is still ongoing.
This failure to recognize the existence of the Sigapiton Indigenous community, based on a study by the Community Initiative Study and Development Group, an NGO concerned with the issue of Indigenous peoples’ conflict in the Lake Toba area, indicates that investment interests are forced through without first addressing community rights.
“The government is more likely to side with investment without seeing the Indigenous peoples whose living space is there,” the group’s director, Delima Silalahi, told Mongabay.
BPODT director Jimmy Panjaitan declined to be interviewed for this article, though he did respond to some questions sent in writing.
“Basically, BPODT is very open and ready to synergize with all parties to accelerate the development of the Toba Caldera Resort (TCR), [through] both domestic and foreign investors, including China,” he said in a statement.
Panjaitan did not respond to questions about Chinese investment in the Lake Toba tourism project.
Roganda Simanjuntak, chair of the Tano Batak region for the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), the country’s largest advocacy group for Indigenous rights, said the Sigapiton community was a sovereign Indigenous people with rights over their customary lands. The group is also recognized by Indigenous peoples in other villages, he said, making their position as a community strong. The BPODT, he said, should have identified and verified the presence of Indigenous peoples from the start instead of developing their territory without their consent.
Instead of expelling them from their lands, “the BPODT should instead encourage local governments to issue laws recognizing and protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples,” Roganda said.
According to Panjaitan, the BPODT has indicated that if there are problems or land disputes with the community, the settlement approach is still carried out in a traditional and “familial” manner. “But if there is no agreement, then the legal route is the last resort or step to obtain legal certainty between the disputing parties,” he said.
In 2020, the BPODT offered compensation of $350 per plank house and $1,400 per concrete house, which the community refused. It also offered compensation for land, but the community refused that too.
“We are not anti-development — if our rights are fulfilled as an Indigenous community we will agree,” Mangatas said. “However, if development will actually drive us away, it is better not to have tourism development here.”
Mangatas says the community want their land returned and hope the government acknowledges their rights to their land.
“I heard that the president once said that customary land should be returned to the community,” he said, referring to Widodo’s remarks when he met with dozens of Indigenous leaders at the State Palace in Jakarta in 2017.
“I hope they were not empty promises.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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