02 October 21
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The woman who spoke of Henry remembered a few lines of a song I wrote about him, “His picture’s on the piano in a silver frame and his family weeps if you speak his name. In ’68 he went off to the war and now he’s forever 24.”
And then that evening I opened my phone to find a picture of twin baby girls born the night before in Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, to my nephew Jon and his wife, Hieu, two sleeping infants tightly wrapped with little skullcaps, arrived by C-section. Each of them has two names, a Vietnamese and an American, and the plan is that they’ll have a Vietnamese childhood and then come to America to start school. Vietnam is in lockdown to control COVID and so their American grandma can’t go see them but she can study them on FaceTime all she likes.
It was too much for one day, so I sat and wept, remembering that I was not a good father — I never wanted to be one — I only wanted to go down to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I asked was a tall ship and a star to steer her by. But Suzanne took me down to her place by the river and the sight of her turned my brain matter to Jell-O and I touched her perfect body with my mind and instead of the white sail’s shaking and a grey dawn breaking suddenly I was eating breakfast with a lady with a basketball under her nightgown who was nauseous and held me responsible.
A lot for one day, to see up close the ravages of old age and remember the tragedy of Henry Hill and then to see these beautiful sleeping infants in Saigon, the center of one of our country’s two disastrous wars of my era, children of parents born after that war ended, and all this coming at a time when I, along with most people I know, am fearing for the future of our beloved country for which Lieutenant Hill’s life was taken: the heart breaks, it simply does.
Henry is remembered not for his athleticism so much as his openhearted friendship with everyone he knew. He was a Black kid in a very white school and kindness was in his nature. He would’ve been an excellent daddy, but he put on the uniform and followed orders and was killed soon after arrival. And now these two infants lie sleeping who someday will come to America and pledge allegiance and learn to play basketball, maybe ice hockey, and maybe they’ll come to love jokes and cheeseburgers and one day sit beside the Mississippi and if I’m still around, I’d sing “Shall we gather at the river where bright angels’ feet have trod” and then maybe “I got a feeling called the blues, oh Lord, since my baby said goodbye. Lord, I don’t know what I’ll do, all I do is sat and sigh” so they get to hear both sides.
I looked up the song I wrote long ago; the last verse is:
I’m older now and bitter today
At how our country has lost its way
But the young ones coming, I hope they will
Redeem the faith of Henry Hill.
It’s a large responsibility to put on two infant girls and their parents but I do. My classmates and I are united by our mortality and the young are united by possibility. We have learned nothing from history; the little girls will grow up free of our history and I pray they find their way to the shining river that flows by the throne of God.
Charles Koch. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/WP/Getty Images)
The dark-money network is spending tens of millions to undermine Democrats’ effort to protect the climate and shore up the social safety net
The Koch network is one of the most extensive and well-funded political and policy operations in the country, having pledged to spend more than a billion dollars in the past four election cycles. The web of nonprofit groups funded by or affiliated with the Koch network — dubbed the “Kochtopus” by critics — broadly promotes an anti-government, libertarian-style vision for American life. In most cases, the donors who bankroll the network’s groups remain anonymous, playing a central role in the spike in dark-money spending in American politics.
Koch-backed groups fiercely opposed Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and his cap-and-trade climate bill, successfully weakening the former and helping to kill the latter. The network’s groups have different mandates and focuses, including foreign policy, health care, and energy. At times, their libertarian leanings have found them making common cause with progressive groups — including by pushing to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and to criticize government-mandated bans on racial-justice curriculums. But with a Democrat back in the White House, the Koch network of late has largely unified behind a push to stop Biden‘s agenda.
Koch-aligned groups are together spending millions of dollars on advertising, targeting moderate Democratic lawmakers, and pushing their influence in the halls of Congress to whittle down or outright kill the sweeping policy package, which would represent the largest expansion of the social safety net in the past 50 years and the biggest step toward addressing climate change in U.S. history.
“Fighting the reconciliation bill is a top priority for Charles Koch’s surrogates,” says Connor Gibson, founder of the corporate watchdog organization Grassrootbeer Investigations, who has spent years tracking Koch influence in the United States. “This is a viable threat for his network, and we can see that all the tentacles of the Kochtopus are out in full force trying to stop it from passing.”
This lobbying blitz comes at a critical moment for Biden’s agenda. Democratic leaders in Congress have pushed for a two-track strategy to pass a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill paired with the much larger $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act, which contains many of the signature policies Biden campaigned on as a presidential candidate. Those policies include hundreds of billions of new spending on universal prekindergarten, major expansions to child-care and home health-care programs, free community college, and the biggest-ever investments in renewable energies, electric cars, and other climate-focused policies. But for the larger bill to pass, it’ll need to get through a closely divided House and get unanimous support from the 50 Senate Democrats, including centrists such as Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
While the Koch network refused to support Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, the dozens of groups who receive funding or support from the network spent heavily to elect Republican governors, House members, and U.S. senators. AFP Action, the Super PAC affiliate of the Koch network’s flagship group Americans for Prosperity, spent $47 million last year, all of it to elect Republicans and defeat Democrats in high-profile races. The PAC tied to the Libre Initiative, a Koch affiliate focused on Hispanic Americans, spent $1.3 million in other key races across the country, often to great effect.
After the Democratic Party took control of the House and Senate, albeit by slim majorities, the Koch network set its sights on the pillars of Biden’s policy agenda. Just days after the two Georgia Senate runoff victories, Koch operatives held a private conference call to strategize about how to kill a top Democratic policy priority, the For the People Act, the most ambitious election-reform bill since Watergate. As the New Yorker reported, an official with Stand Together, a Koch-backed nonprofit, conceded that the bill’s provision requiring greater transparency of dark money was so popular that the Koch network and its allies couldn’t mount a public-pressure campaign to stop — instead, they would have to play the inside game, mounting a lobbying blitz targeting members of Congress if they wanted to stop the bill. Now, the Koch network has an even more sweeping piece of legislation in its sights, the centerpiece of Biden’s domestic policy agenda, the Build Back Better Act.
The tip of the spear for the Koch network in this pressure campaign is Americans for Prosperity. Led by longtime Koch operative Tim Phillips, AFP is spending seven figures on TV and digital ads opposing not only Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act but also the bipartisan infrastructure deal awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives.
AFP has adopted another tactic aimed at making Biden’s domestic agenda unpopular — hitching Biden’s plans with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a progressive leader, while claiming that the Build Back Better package is the biggest spending bill in American history. One AFP ad says Biden’s policy package is “the last thing we need to recover from this pandemic,” adding, “Tell Congress to stop the Biden-Sanders spending spree.” The ads appear on Facebook, Google platforms (including YouTube), and on TV stations across the country.
The Koch-backed LIBRE Initiative is running ads against the reconciliation package in Texas, Florida, and Arizona “to inform Latinos about the negative effects of overspending and overtaxing.” The group’s president, Daniel Garza, explains in a release that he intends to “mobilize our grassroots army of volunteers and activists to hold our elected officials accountable.”
Yet another group with long-standing Koch network ties, the 60 Plus Association, has launched a multimillion-dollar ad blitz focused on the prescription-drug-reform policies in the Build Back Better Act. Founded in 1992, 60 Plus was originally conceived as the conservative movement’s answer to the AARP; over the years, it’s taken millions from Koch nonprofit groups and been used to attack Obamacare and Democratic candidates for office. Indeed, almost two decades ago, 60 Plus lobbied to eliminate Medicare’s ability to negotiate with drugmakers during a previous battle over drug prices.
In its new ad blitz, 60 Plus claims that the provisions included in Biden’s plan to allow for greater drug-price negotiation in Medicare would cause benefits for Medicare recipients to be slashed and make medication harder to obtain for doctors. Like AFP, 60 Plus describes the Biden plan as an “out-of-control spending spree.” However, PolitiFact slapped this claim by 60 Plus with a “False” rating, citing health care experts who said giving the government the ability to negotiate with drug companies shouldn’t lead to reduced access to key drugs for Medicare patients.
All told, these and more than 100 other similar groups, many of them linked to Koch, are mobilizing to fight the spending bill. “As your committee begins marking up the $3.5 trillion reckless tax-and-spend reconciliation proposal,” this large right-wing coalition said in a letter earlier this month to top congressional Democrats, “we write in opposition to any effort to raise taxes on American families and businesses.”
The threat comes not only in the form of corporate tax increases — although the financial impact could be substantial, given that Trump-era tax cuts potentially saved the Koch brothers up to $1.4 billion, according to estimates from the group Americans for Tax Fairness; many of the Koch-backed groups fighting Biden’s spending package are also deeply concerned about the ambitious climate provisions the package contains.
Proposed policies include expanding tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as provisions pushing utilities to use clean energy instead of fossil fuels. Add up all the climate impacts, and this could reduce America’s carbon footprint by nearly 1 gigaton worth of greenhouse gas emissions, the research firm Rhodium Group estimates. This would represent some of the most significant action ever taken on climate change in the U.S.
But what’s good for the planet is potentially terrible for Koch’s bottom line. The Koch Industries subsidiary Flint Hills Resources, for instance, operates the largest oil refinery in Minnesota, capable of processing more than 300,000 barrels per day of crude oil, predominantly from the Canadian tar sands. The refinery is fed by a Koch-owned pipeline network spanning more than 500 miles.
“Charles Koch has so many different layers of interest in fossil fuel and petrochemical production that the Biden administration’s bill could cause the costs of his businesses to increase, and therefore his profits would drop,” Gibson explains.
Fighting climate action has for this reason long been a top policy priority for Koch’s network — and it’s animating dark-money opposition to the current $3.5 trillion spending package.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation calls the spending package’s climate provisions “incredibly expensive and harmful anti-energy policies that will cripple our economy, increase our dependence on foreign oil, and increase cost of living, especially for the poorest Americans.” The Austin-based think tank has received at least $3.6 million from foundations linked to Koch since 1998, the watchdog group Desmog calculates.
One of the signatories of the coalition letter opposing the plan is Myron Ebell, a Koch-linked energy pundit and professional climate-change skeptic. As recently as 2016, Ebell said that while he now acknowledges climate change is real, he doesn’t think it’s a “rapid or a serious problem.”
The Koch crew is also stoking fears of inflation and skyrocketing prices for consumers if the bill passes. “Prices are rising everywhere, from the gas pump to the grocery store,” AFP recently tweeted.
Opponents of Biden’s Covid-19 relief measures and his domestic policy agenda have raised fears of inflation as a result of so much government spending. But earlier this month, a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists published an open letter that argued inflation wasn’t nearly as big of a concern. More important, they wrote, was “reversing years of disinvestment in public goods and addressing the country’s long-term needs — including building toward sustainable and inclusive growth and facilitating our clean energy transition.”
The dark-money groups mobilizing against the plan don’t seem to care. The country might have problems — including soaring inequality and a collapsing climate — but, for the Koch empire, that’s just the cost of doing business.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (right) speaks at an event with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar (left) outside the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
In the byzantine parliamentary politics surrounding the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, progressives have more cards to play than in past policy fights. But corporate-backed Democrats like Kyrsten Sinema are still standing in the way.
The next package of reforms was split in two: a bipartisan infrastructure bill championed by some moderate Democrats, and a much larger suite of reforms progressives hope to pass using the reconciliation process. Breaking her months-long pledge to keep the two bills linked together, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week signaled her intention to de-link them — raising the prospect of a complicated showdown between different factions of the Democratic coalition.
The Intercept’s DC bureau chief Ryan Grim is a veteran of complicated congressional wrangling, having had a front-row seat for previous major policy fights, including the infamous debate over the Affordable Care Act. Yesterday, Grim sat down with Jacobin’s Luke Savage to discuss the fluid legislative and political dynamics now at play — and why the congressional left is better equipped to fight its corner than it was in the Obama years.
LS: To begin, let’s lay out the backstory. It begins, I suppose, immediately after the passage of Biden’s big stimulus bill, the American Rescue Plan Act. What were the origins of this two-track strategy, where the rest of Biden’s agenda was split into two separate bills — the stuff the progressives wanted and the infrastructure stuff that the moderates said they could support?
RG: Chuck Schumer claimed he was the progenitor of it. And I think that’s plausible. As early as June — and I don’t think it was very public at that time — there were already hints that that seemed to be the direction that it was going.
What appealed to me about it was that it gave progressives actual leverage, for the first time almost ever, because it connected to something that centrists actually wanted. With Obamacare, the centrists could take it or leave it. With Wall Street reform, they could take it or leave it. So any bluffs that progressives tried to throw out — “we’re going to take this down!” — the centrists were like, alright, whatever, take it down, we’re happy not doing anything.
But once the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which sucks and is actively bad — was tied to the reconciliation bill, finally a progressive threat to vote no was real.
As long as there’s something fairly decent in a bill, progressives have a hard time making a credible threat. For example, you want Medicare for All? Well, we’re going to expand Medicaid to a million people. We know you want Medicare for All, but we can’t have Medicare for All. You can either expand Medicaid to a million new people, or you can have nothing. And ninety-nine out of a hundred times, progressives in that situation will say, okay, fine. We’ll expand Medicaid to a million people. And leadership knows that, and that’s how they’ve driven them into the ground so many times in the past.
But they don’t totally want the bipartisan bill. It’s fossil fuel heavy. It has a bunch of gross stuff in it. There’s plenty of decent stuff in it, too — rural broadband, etc. But in order to get the progressives to vote for it, they’ll need to give them the reconciliation package. So it’s an actual negotiation.
LS: In the past few days, there’s been a lot of movement on this story. Nancy Pelosi has announced that she intends to hold a vote on the bipartisan bill as early as Thursday. Can you bring us up to speed on what’s been going on this week?
RG: Josh Gottheimer and eight other business-friendly Democrats blocked the reconciliation bill from moving forward in the House, and Pelosi could not get them off of that position. So as a concession, she said, fine, you can vote on this bipartisan bill on September 27. So they thought they had managed to de-link the two.
Now, as I and a bunch of other people immediately pointed out at the time, he only won the promise of a vote. He didn’t get the promise of a victory. So progressives, to their credit, started organizing. The American Prospect, the Daily Poster, and the Intercept jointly did a whip count and found that more than twenty progressives are publicly ready to vote no. Last Monday they were saying privately that they had as many as fifty no votes. Some of them don’t want to be public because saying that you’re going to oppose a bipartisan infrastructure bill is fine in a blue district, but in a swing district, you can imagine months of campaign ads saying so-and-so threatened to destroy our effort to, like, fix these potholes.
So on Sunday night Pelosi says, I don’t have the votes, and she pulls it off the floor. And as a concession, she says, we’ll deal with this later this week. Then in a private caucus meeting yesterday, she says, we’ve got to vote on this on Thursday. We can’t keep saying that we’re going to put it off.
But today the Congressional Progressive Caucus met privately and two-dozen-plus members said, we’re not voting for this. One after the other, not a single member of the Progressive Caucus said, look, guys, we need to just take a “W” here and move on.
Meanwhile, Republicans are saying, “Pelosi, you’re on your own.” If you get 218 votes, then we’ll release our members and we’ll make it bipartisan because it’s popular and they want to be on the record supporting it. But they’re not going to help her pass it. So that means Pelosi can only lose, say, seven votes — and twenty-five or so just today on the call were nos.
So Pelosi has said two things: (a) I’m going to hold a vote on Thursday; and (b) I will never put a bill on the floor without having the votes. Those two things are in conflict. So I don’t think she’s going to put the bill on the floor on Thursday.
On the call, Ilhan Omar, who’s the whip for the Progressive Caucus, said that she had just been speaking with Bernie Sanders right before the call. She said he had urged them to stand strong, said that he would have their back. He also told them, look, if you let the bipartisan bill go through, you’re not going to get the reconciliation bill out of the Senate; they’re going to walk away with your money.
And a couple of front-liners — members who serve in swing districts — also spoke and said, look, we need the reconciliation bill. We need the “Build Back Better” stuff in order to run for reelection. Like, forget everything else — you try going into reelection without extending the child tax credit, letting all this stuff expire when the alternative would be to run on universal pre-K, universal childcare benefit, extending the child tax credit to 2025, lots more broadband, and climate change stuff? This stuff polls through the roof. Swing districts are no longer these right-wing rural areas. These are suburbs, and this stuff polls well.
So what’s unusual about this political alignment is that you have these swing-district Democrats standing firm with Bernie Sanders, saying, no, we actually have to do something.
LS: In your most recent piece in the Intercept, you compare the current dynamic to the one that prevailed during the Obamacare debate, which you covered very closely. Why does the current dynamic seem to be a little more favorable to the progressive wing of the Democratic party than something like the Affordable Care Act debate?
RG: For one, the Progressive Caucus was not as progressive. You know, Nancy Pelosi was an original member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the early ’90s. All you had to do to join the Progressive Caucus back then was be willing to call yourself progressive, which in practice was risky, unless you were representing a place like San Francisco.
So, it wasn’t that progressive. It also wasn’t well organized. Raúl Grijalva, who was its cochair at the time, described it to me as a Noam Chomsky book reading club. It wasn’t organized to be an actual force.
The other problem was the structural one that I alluded to earlier, which was exacerbated by what happened in Massachusetts after Ted Kennedy’s death, when Scott Brown won his shock victory and took the Senate majority down from sixty to fifty-nine.
Now all of a sudden, this was the bill. They didn’t have sixty votes anymore so they couldn’t go to conference and negotiate it and then put it back through the Senate, because they only had fifty-nine votes. And they didn’t have the will to blow up the filibuster. So it was a take it or leave it moment.
Something like sixty progressives in the House had signed a letter saying they would never support health care reform that didn’t include a robust public option. But that public option was not in there. They did actually get slightly more Medicaid expansion in exchange for caving on that. So they were faced with this choice: Do we take this crappy half a loaf or do we do nothing? And the choice was obvious for them.
I don’t think anybody voted against it from the Left. There may have been one no vote from the Left, depending on how you count, but certainly sixty members did not vote against it.
I’ve actually spent a lot of my time since then thinking about that moment and about what it was that they did wrong, what the structural obstacles were that prevented them from using their leverage, what the organizational obstacles were, and how they could change that the next time they had a majority.
So, organizationally they’re much stronger. Financially, they’re now much less dependent on corporate money than they were in 2009. Because even to this day, a ton of those Progressive Caucus members take corporate PAC money.
And then this time you have this unique situation where the centrists sort of own themselves in a way, because they only put this bipartisan bill together in the hopes that by doing so they would take enough energy out of the broader push that they could kill it. But that didn’t happen; there’s still enough energy on the Left to say no, we need all this other stuff too.
LS: When it comes to the opposition to the reconciliation bill, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have obviously emerged at the forefront of the media coverage. What would you say accounts for their opposition to the reconciliation bill, especially since it’s the core of the administration’s agenda?
RG: I think Manchin is mostly just being Manchin. He puts on this massive show of being obstructionist to the Democratic agenda, being at odds with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and at war with Schumer and Pelosi. And then he uses that back home to say, look, I’m at war with the Democrats, I’m fighting for the people of West Virginia and what’s best for them. And his pattern the last couple years has been to create as many new cycles as he can for himself where he’s in conflict with Democrats and then in the end he’ll vote with Democrats.
So he’s an easier beast to understand. His intense opposition to climate measures are also easy to understand. He’s buddies with all the coal barons and he is himself a coal producer — he owns a company that has made him like $4.5 million since he’s been in the Senate, as Dan Boguslaw reported for us in the Intercept. (He says he put it in a blind trust.) When your self-interest and your class’s self-interest have been part of your politics for so long, that ultimately fuses into an ideology. So in that sense, it’s ideological for Manchin.
With Sinema, it just feels like corruption. She is very tight with a lot of very rich people and is carrying their message, which is that they don’t want any tax increases.
And that’s what this is really about. It’s about them not wanting the corporate tax increase. They don’t want this surtax on people making more than $5 million. They don’t want personal income taxes raised for the wealthy, and they don’t want anything to happen to the carried interest loophole for private equity and hedge funds. And if Sinema holds the line on that, then it’s all screwed as far as I can tell.
I think the same is true on the House side with the Josh Gottheimer types. The New Democrat types, or the caucus inside the House that represents them — they’re all on board for this. Suzan DelBene, who’s the chair of the New Dems, is the most outspoken advocate of the child tax credit there. And they’re on board for all these tax hikes. It’s a bizarre situation.
So that leaves straight-up corruption, in the sense of very particular interests that have very particular goals in this bill, acting largely through No Labels, a dark money group, and only needing to find a very small handful of Democrats in the House to try to screw things up.
LS: So what are the conceivable scenarios going forward? Could the bipartisan bill somehow be passed on its own? Is that in fact the scenario that the establishment is hoping for at this point?
RG: One way for Manchin to get the bipartisan bill through could be to say, “I’m out of reconciliation, forget it. It’s not happening. It’s dead. I hate the progressives, they’re being mean.” Then it’s over. And then Pelosi picks up like fifty Republicans or something and passes the bipartisan bill. That’s one potential path forward.
It’s very, very hard to imagine fifty Republicans, though. So it becomes a question of whether the progressives can muster more no votes than the Republicans can muster yes votes.
If the progressives can muster enough votes, it comes down to the question of how much Manchin wants this bipartisan bill, and how much Sinema wants it. Because Sinema has been running around Arizona telling everyone who will listen about her achievement — it validates her entire bipartisan brand that she was able to bring together these senators and hash out what she calls a $1.2 trillion bill (which is actually a $550 billion bill), that fixes all of these problems that we have in the country. So the question is how much does she need that for her brand? If she does need it, then things are back on track. But that’s the way it falls apart.
LS: And what about the consequences politically? What’s the potential fallout for both Biden and the progressives if the reconciliation bill doesn’t get through?
RG: Well, it’s funny, we’re sort of talking about marginal consequences because people are assuming that they’re going to lose the House no matter what they do right now.
There’s a chance that they run on all of this awesome stuff and they hold the House by running ads saying, “look what we did.” That hasn’t really worked in the past — voters don’t really respond to that.
But no party has ever really tried it, so maybe it could work. That would literally be a novel, not-since-the-New-Deal strategy, to run on something, deliver it, and then win on having delivered it. That’s never been tried, really, at least not since political scientists started measuring midterm effects and such.
The consequences for Sinema of losing her bipartisan bill could be serious. The consequences for Manchin could be significant if he’s even running again in 2024. The consequences for Gottheimer and other Democrats associated with killing Biden’s presidency could also be significant. The front-line Democrats who needed something to run on in the suburbs are properly screwed as a result of it.
All the progressives and deep blue districts will get reelected, but they’ll have to serve in the minority, which — what’s the point of that?
LS: So your prediction for this Thursday is that you don’t think Pelosi will go forward with this vote?
RG: She’s not whipping it. Biden has said there’s no rush. Manchin, in comments with reporters outside the Capitol said, we’ll get it done by November 2022. So where’s the pressure coming from? And more than two dozen progressives on this call said they’re pledged against it. So I think a lot could change.
I’ve had a couple members say that things are moving really fast, that there could be some type of a deal by Thursday. And if that happens, that could change the calculation. But it’s Tuesday already. When Manchin was asked what he and Joe Biden were talking about, he said, we were talking about what it means to live in a society and what do we want our country to be. Well, it’s a little late for these philosophical discussions.
LS: So, in short, it’s probably pretty important for progressive Democrats to stick to the line that they’ve been taking if they want the reconciliation bill to have any chance of passing?
RG: That’s what Bernie thinks, and he’s in the room with these folks. And if you watch Sinema and Manchin, they don’t seem terribly enthusiastic about this reconciliation deal. So if they don’t have to do it, and you’re just relying on their sense of civic virtue, you’re probably going to be disappointed.
Attorney Steven Donziger speaks to his supporters as he arrives at Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in New York. (photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Steven Donziger has spent more than two decades battling oil giant over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest.
United States District Judge Loretta Preska sentenced Donziger on Friday after finding him guilty in May of “willfully” defying court orders, including by refusing to turn over his computer and other electronic devices.
The charges stem from a lawsuit brought against Donziger by the oil giant.
“It seems that only the proverbial two-by-four between the eyes will instil in him any respect for the law,” Preska said.
Donziger’s lawyers and Chevron did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters news agency.
His sentencing is the latest twist in a legal saga stemming from his representation of villagers in Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region who sought to hold Chevron liable for water and soil contamination by Texaco between 1964 and 1992. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2000.
Donziger won a $9.5bn judgement against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court in 2011.
But in 2014, a US court rejected the multibillion-dollar judgement, ruling that it had been fraudulently obtained through bribes and corruption.
Reporting from outside the New York City court on Friday, Al Jazeera correspondent Kristen Saloomey said Donzinger and his team tried to place the case “in the greater context of his efforts to bring justice for people in Ecuador”.
But the judge agreed with prosecutors, who had argued Donziger consciously disobeyed court orders to turn over his devices and documents.
Lawyers for Donziger had in May painted a different picture, saying the court had initially been unclear about what it wanted him to hand over.
“The reason I’m locked up is because we were successful,” Donziger told Al Jazeera in an interview before his sentencing.
“I, with other lawyers, helped Indigenous peoples in Ecuador win a historic $9.5bn pollution judgement against Chevron for the deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste into the Amazon,” Donziger said.
“That’s an historical fact. That case has been affirmed on appeal by 28 appellate judges, including the highest courts of Ecuador and Canada for enforcement purposes. So why am I the one being locked up? I helped hold them accountable.”
Donziger, who has been held in home confinement for two years, plans to appeal Friday’s decision, Reuters reported.
A panel of human rights experts commissioned by the United Nations said on September 30 that Donziger’s home detention violated international civil rights law and recommended that he be released.
Claire Finkelstein, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and academic director of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, said charging and sentencing a lawyer for a criminal contempt violation is “rather rare”.
“In this case, the judge felt there was an element of willfulness involved, and that explains the results,” Finkelstein told Al Jazeera.
Indigenous protesters and supporters gather at the Black Hills, now the site of Mount Rushmore. (photo: Micah Garen/Getty Images)
As the Native American population grows to the largest in modern history, groups say it’s vital that they organize to make sure they’re not left out of the redistricting process
Speaking to a largely white, male Republican committee of lawmakers, she explained what Native American communities stand to lose with redistricting if the legislature decides to draw legislative boundaries that split Native American communities or create areas that have at-large representation, instead of single-member districts.
Brown had come “to demand that the North Dakota redistricting committee listen to tribal input and hold redistricting meetings and tribal consultations on reservations,” she said during the hearing. “The right to vote is a fundamental right in our democracy and Spirit Lake will vigorously defend that right of its members.”
Data from the 2020 census, released last month, show that the US Native American population grew by 27.1% over the last decade to the largest size in modern history. Still, advocates say that number represents an undercount because the census count had tight deadlines and reaching Native populations, many of whom live in remote rural areas, was difficult during the pandemic.
For that reason, Native groups say it’s vital that they organize to ensure they’re not left out of the redistricting process and do not end up with districts that dilute their power. Without fair representation, they worry they won’t have influence on pressing policy concerns, like suppressive voting laws or high joblessness and incarceration rates on reservations.
For the first time ever, the Native American Rights Fund (Narf) has launched a project called Fair Districting in Indian Country to empower their communities to take action to help draw fair maps.
“Given the history of gerrymandering, the dilution of the Native vote, we thought it was vitally important to ensure going forward that Indian country is aware of the process and why it’s so important and that they make their voice heard,” said Matthew Campbell, a staff attorney with Narf.
As North Dakota gears up to redraw the state’s lines and determine how its citizens will be represented, Native groups are advocating for fair representation of people who live both on and off reservations. They want tribes to be included in the same districts to maximize their potential representation and they are pleading for the state redistricting committee to consider input from Native Americans in redistricting meetings.
“They don’t include Native voices in the process,” said Nicole Donaghy, the executive director of North Dakota Native Vote, who was also at the committee hearing. “They don’t reach out to the tribes.”
North Dakota is one of 33 states where the legislature plays the dominant role in redistricting. Donaghy says that makes it more difficult for Native groups to have a say, explaining that there’s a “gross imbalance of power” favoring the party in charge, currently Republicans, in the state’s redistricting process and that there are few Native people serving in state government.
“Our communities are historically forgotten and so it’s hard to get people engaged in that process, especially when we’re not welcome or made to feel not welcome there,” she said. “We don’t know how to traditionally engage into that system.”
In other states, tribal leaders and groups representing Native people are also getting involved in the redistricting process. In New Mexico, tribes are preparing to propose maps aimed at greater representation in future elections. In South Dakota, Native advocates are pressuring the redistricting committee to hold meetings on tribal land and with tribal governments.
In Montana, the population grew enough over the last decade that the state has been apportioned a second congressional district for the first time since 1993. Ta’Jin Perez, deputy director for Western Native Voice, said the group’s priority this year is ensuring that the independent redistricting committee considers input from Native groups.
He said that redistricting can be complicated for the average person and it’s even more difficult for Native people to figure out how they can take part in the process.
“So far with this process, we’ve been engaging with tribal governments to make sure that their voice is being heard,” he said.
Perez said the eight tribes in Montana have not reached a consensus about what the ideal maps would look like and how to cluster Native communities to achieve optimal representation, but Narf will help them to determine what is most beneficial.
Because the Native population is disproportionately represented in Montana’s prison system, Western Native Voice is also involved in debates over prison gerrymandering, advocating for incarcerated people to be considered residents of their home district instead of where they are incarcerated.
Montana will draw its state legislative districts next year, and Perez said he hopes that by then the Native communities will be fully vaccinated and ready to provide public comment to the commission or show up at hearings. Because of the pandemic’s toll on Native people, “that’s something that’s just not feasible for us right now, unfortunately”, he said.
“We’re dealing with two crises – the pandemic crisis as well as the lack of representation crisis,” he said.
Migrants, mostly Haitians, shelter in Acuña, Mexico, Sept. 25, 2021. (photo: Verónica G. Cárdenas/The Intercept)
U.S. Border Authorities Failed to Prepare for Influx of Haitian Migrants Despite Weeks of Warnings
Four years ago, Republicans and Democrats linked arms with residents from both sides of the border to form a human chain across the bridge in a show of “unity,” yet in recent weeks Del Rio has become a theater for a dramatic show of violence and force, as mounted Border Patrol agents charged at Haitian migrants while twirling their reins like whips. Some 2,300 law enforcement officers, said Mayor Bruno Lozano, had been dispatched to Val Verde County, home to roughly 49,000 residents.
“I don’t feel it’s in anybody’s best interest to come in mass movement like that,” he said, adding that it creates security vulnerabilities elsewhere. “If this is going to continue to be our response, it’s not a good precedent.”
Outside a shelter operated by the Val Verde Humanitarian Border Coalition, a local man carrying a holstered firearm said he was providing security to protect Haitians from hostile residents and outsiders. When Rev. Al Sharpton attempted to hold a media event near the border wall in solidarity with the Haitian migrants, he was shouted down by men who accused him of spreading racism. Volunteers in Del Rio collected donations and set out refreshments and snacks — for state troopers.
“Overwhelmed” was the word repeatedly used by federal, state, and local officials to describe Border Patrol agents, who officials said were caught by surprise and unable to address the influx of Haitian migrants.
But the arrival of Haitians was anticipated, and much of the chaos that ensued seemed preventable with basic planning and logistics. But in the scramble to contain the media crisis, the U.S. employed tactics that set off a cascade of repression and violence on both sides of the border. By allowing the situation to reach critical levels, federal officials created conditions that made a militarized crackdown seem inevitable, making criminals out of people asserting their right to seek asylum.
Almost 30,000 migrants, mostly Haitians, “were encountered” in Del Rio after September 9, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a briefing, and more than 12,000 will have their cases heard by an immigration judge. But more than 5,000 of those asylum-seekers have been deported to Haiti, just weeks after the U.S. extended and expanded temporary protected status to the country. As Mayorkas stated in May, “Haiti is currently experiencing serious security concerns, social unrest, an increase in human rights abuses, crippling poverty, and lack of basic resources, which are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“The arrival of vulnerable asylum-seekers is not a crisis,” said Wade McMullen, an attorney at RFK Human Rights who traveled to Del Rio. “The militarized response and lack of preparation — that’s the crisis.”
Days after Border Patrol agents on horseback charged at Haitian migrants, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made four requests of the mayor to authorize state troopers to enter the city property to arrest the Haitians for criminal trespassing, Lozano told me. “It would have caused mass chaos,” he said during an extensive interview. A spokesperson for Abbott did not answer questions about the governor’s request to conduct arrests. Lozano said he stalled, telling the governor he was staking his faith on the immigration system to process the asylum-seekers.
After a massive deployment involving the Coast Guard, Texas National Guard, state troopers including air and marine support, and Customs and Border Protection, on September 24 officials announced that Haitians were no longer under the bridge. After weeks of a growing encampment and worsening conditions, everyone had been cleared out in mere days.
The aggressive response in Del Rio underscores an immigration system that prioritizes the spectacle of force over an investment in the construction of systems needed to process asylum-seekers to conform to obligations dictated by international and U.S. law. Officials left little doubt that the aggressive deployment was designed to send a message of deterrence to others who might also seek aslyum.
“What we start doing to Haitians tends to spill over to everyone else,” said Yael Schacher, an immigration historian and senior advocate with Refugees International. In the 1980s, after the U.S. had experimented with imposing detention on Haitians, the policy was expanded to Central Americans fleeing U.S.-backed wars.
County Judge Lewis Owens, the top administrator of Val Verde County, described the state and federal law enforcement deployment as “amazing.” “We want to lean on law enforcement to stop flow,” he said, adding, “that said, there has to be a process to ask for asylum.”
Warning Signs
Despite claims that border officials were caught off guard, signs of the impending arrival of a large number of asylum-seekers were not hard to find. In the Del Rio area, the number of encounters with migrants had increased in 2021 over the prior year, with the numbers spiking over 1,000 percent by May, according to Customs and Border Protection data.
In May, Lozano, a Democrat, met with congressional Republicans and appeared on Fox News, complaining about “illegals” in town and criticizing the Biden administration for a lack of response at the border. “Unfortunately, at the time it was only right-wing media groups like Fox that were telling the story,” he told me, adding that “the policy needs to be reformed so ports of entry have to take them in legally and not be criminally charged.”
Two months later, Border Patrol agents detained hundreds of people from various countries under the bridge in Del Rio. Meanwhile, a video that captured Mexican immigration officials brutalizing Haitian migrants who were headed north circulated online. The Spanish newspaper El PaÃs reported that Haitian claims for asylum in Mexico had reached a record high. By September, Mexico had received 19,000 petitions for asylum, higher than any other nationality, following a trend of Haitians transiting through Mexico that began two years ago. Even so, U.S. officials repeatedly claimed that the arrival of Haitians on the border was a surprise.
Given that the Biden administration has continued the Trump administration policy of closing the traditional route of asking for asylum at ports of entry, asylum-seekers took to the river, setting the stage for compelling video footage of large groups of immigrants turning themselves in at the border fence in Del Rio, exciting viewers of Fox and Newsmax. In early August, Jorge Ventura, a contributor to the right-wing Daily Caller interviewed Del Rio residents about the “crisis.”
Around this time, said Owens, the judge, county authorities were informed that “caravans” of some 25,000 people were expected to arrive on the border.
Weeks later, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recorded a video at the bridge in Del Rio, using Haitians suffering miserable conditions as a prop to talk about border chaos. Gesturing toward a crowd of what he said was 10,503 people, Cruz claimed the number had increased tenfold in one week after the Biden administration announced a pause to deportation flights following a devastating earthquake in Haiti. According to Cruz’s version of events, the hundreds of Haitians who had been camped in Del Rio sent word to friends and family in South America who arrived in one week.
Texas state police later posted images of troopers and their vehicles positioned with Haitians in the background, a show of force meant to deter other migrants. By that time, 700 troopers had been deployed to the county, a number that ultimately grew to 1,000.
The longer the Haitians were under the bridge, the more currency was extracted from their presence. An editorial in the newspaper Zocalo stated, “Someone has made a business from the issue of the migration crisis in the border state of Coahuila.”
About 1,000 Haitians arrived in Del Rio in early September. When Lozano visited the camp on September 13, the number had doubled to more than 2,000. The local CBP port director called Lozano and said, “’Mayor, this is it, it’s happening now. There’s 30 buses coming this way.”
The worsening situation was apparent even to diners of La Cabañita, a taqueria along Acuña’s main tourist drag, where the television is permanently tuned to a live feed from the international bridge. A restaurant manager said he first noticed the growing crowd two weeks before state and federal agents flooded the region.
On September 15, with nearly 4,000 people under the bridge, Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz informed the mayor that construction of necessary infrastructure to process people would take 10-14 more days. “And I said, in a more colorful tone, ‘You don’t have 10 to 14 days,’” Lozano told me. “You had plenty of frickin’ time to fix this out.” Two days later, the number of people had increased to 14,000. Ortiz told a reporter he expected to clear the camp within a week.
“I don’t believe these capacity arguments anymore. It’s not a lack of resources but a lack of priorities of screening asylum-seekers,” said Schacher. “What I wish, is that people would be honest and say, ‘We are deliberately not devoting resources to asylum-seekers to send a deterrent message.’”
With the equivalent of a third of the population of Del Rio living under the bridge, Lozano posted a video stating that the local processing center was at capacity and asked: What was the Border Patrol supposed to do with the 20,000 who were projected to arrive?
The answer to Lozano’s question soon became clear. After the deplorable conditions made national headlines, immigration officials removed thousands of people from the camp within days. Deportation flights to Haiti began almost immediately. During one night, nearly 3,000 people were bused out. U.S. officials shut down the border and mobilized air support, the Coast Guard, state troopers, and the deployment of an additional 600 CBP agents and officers to the area.
Shortly before the camp was cleared, Owens posted a video describing the situation as “bat-shit crazy” and blaming the Biden administration for the arrival of the migrants, saying, “I’m going to go ahead and throw rocks at [Biden] because it’s his fault.”
When I asked about the lack of preparation or readiness, Owens said that county officials knew 45 days earlier that the projected caravans would arrive on the Acuña-Del Rio border. “What I’ve been told is that nobody expected it,” said Owens. Why there was no response or preparation? “I don’t have an answer,” he said, “I’m not going to throw rocks at Border Patrol.”
U.S. Border Patrol referred requests for comment to Customs and Border Protection, which referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security. Those questions went unanswered.
For his part, the massive government response within 48 hours left Lozano speechless. “Makes you wonder,” he said. “I don’t know how they explain it.”
For McMullen, the attorney at RFK Human Rights, the situation represents “a lack of transparency.” “They said they are overwhelmed,” he said. “Either that’s a lie or they don’t know how to treat migrants. It’s either gross incompetence or blatant lies.”
Fleeing From Texas
As word of the U.S. deportations spread through the camp, thousands of Haitians who had waited under the international bridge for processing fled back across the river to Mexico and took refuge in Parque Braulio Fernández Aguirre, a large park along the riverbank. U.S. authorities had closed the port of entry, and with the bridge closed, commerce ground to a halt between the U.S. and Acuña, home to at least 50 factories, many of which ship goods across the river. The U.S. told Mexican authorities that the bridge would be reopened once the Haitians were removed from the park. Meanwhile, the business community in Acuña demanded that Mexican officials do whatever was necessary to appease the Americans and reopen the bridge.
Mexican immigration authorities, backed by local police, rode through the city in caravans waging nightly raids. Agents abducted people from hotels, apartments, and even off the street. Haitians were loaded into buses and sent to Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, and Villahermosa in the Yucatán. The operations were reminiscent of the tactics regularly used by security forces a decade ago under President Felipe Calderón during Mexico’s “drug war,” when agents routinely grabbed people off the street and during traffic stops.
Andrés RamÃrez, director of Mexico’s commission for refugees said in an interview with El Diario that Haitians should not be returned to Haiti because the country has been “absolutely devastated” by recent disasters, including an earthquake and presidential assassination. Less than a week later, the Mexican government announced the start of deportation flights to Haiti, which it termed “humanitarian returns.”
Thirty-year-old Jean was among those who joined the exodus from Del Rio. “It feels like a humiliation,” Jean told me. “I came from far for help and they rejected us.” Two of his friends had been deported to Haiti from the U.S.
When I met Jean, he had recently left Aguirre Park and moved to the Fandango, a nightclub with a massive courtyard that had been converted to a shelter. The relocation was not his choice. “They told us that they couldn’t reopen the bridge until we were gone,” he said.
We met at nightfall when hundreds of families and single men were settling into the Fandango. Tents had sprung up inside atop the old dance floor and along an enormous elegant bar. Volunteers unfurled more tents outside where armed soldiers with the Guardia Nacional roamed around. In the middle of the courtyard, children soon found spaces to play, and women rummaged through huge bags of donated clothes.
Jean wore a bright smile on his weathered face and said he had traveled to the U.S. from Chile through Panama’s treacherous Darién Gap, through Guatemala along the Atlantic coast and into Tampico before arriving in Acuña and crossing into Del Rio. Five years ago he had fled Haiti, embarking on long journey that included studying Spanish in the Dominican Republic, where he also learned English. He then migrated to Chile where he worked in the hotel and tourism industry and became a bodybuilder.
Nearby, Rev. Marco Rivera, the pastor of World Harvest Church Mexico, checked in on new arrivals. Rivera had intervened at the park to persuade people to move to the refuge, telling them it had been established for them. But they had reason to be distrustful of Mexican officials and were reluctant to leave.
“They were promised certain things and they broke their promises,” Rivera told me while he toured the Fandango. “For example, that they were safe there at the camp. Then about three days ago, at 3 o’clock in the morning, they came with cars and three buses; they filled them up and sent them away.” The next day Rivera combed the city for Haitians who had gone into hiding, to try and persuade them off the streets into the shelter where they wouldn’t be alone.
The chaotic response by the U.S. resulted in confusion and misinformation that left Gaby and her partner DeYoung feeling deceived. “They said pregnant women could stay,” said Gaby, who is six months pregnant. But with the announcement of deportation flights, such exemptions to rapid expulsion went unstated. Some 44 percent of Haitians deported this week were women and children. “I am not certain of anything,” she said, adding that she has been too stressed to even think about baby names.
Seated next to her, James, a tall man with dreadlocks piled high on his head retorted, “Name the baby Del Rio.” His suggestion stirred withering laughs from others nearby. To describe how he felt, James pulled up a meme of two images: an 1830 engraving of the slave trade depicting a man gripping a whip, next to the photo of Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing people who hail from the first country in the hemisphere that successfully revolted against slavery.
The next day the shelter courtyard looked like a tailgate party. Mexican families from the city to the small farm communities had piled up food and clothes to share with the Haitians. A Mexican toddler queued up to kick a soccer ball while a Haitian boy played defense.
Two sisters, Susana and Leticia Reyes, served dishes of pureed potatoes, salad, and chicken from their van. The meals represented the combined efforts of five family members plus a cousin in San Jose, California, who sent the funds to cover the ingredients. They were also motivated to help after watching the treatment of the Haitians. “We had never seen raids like the ones done to Haitians,” said Susana. “We thought it was a type of persecution.” For two years they had noticed Venezuelans, Cubans, and Haitians living in Acuña, but they had not heard about any raids.
Across the courtyard, Yesenia Castro and her family and friends had traveled to Acuña from a nearby rural community with their van loaded down with meals prepared by seven families. They too were moved by the plight of the Haitians, saying they had all experienced tough times when a meal was nothing more than a tortilla with beans. And they were motivated by indignation over ads warning Mexicans that it was a crime to give the Haitians a ride.
The fate of the Haitian asylum-seekers remained uncertain, and fear was pervasive. Jean and others were anxious about an impending visit by immigration officials that could result in their removal to the Guatemalan border. Twenty-eight-year-old Christela decided to pass the anxious moments by weaving an intricate and beautiful braid for one of the volunteers who had donated food. She didn’t want to think about the possibility of deportation, and she feared the bandits who were known for violence. The journey to Texas had been marked by fear and trauma; thieves robbed migrants and raped women. But for a few minutes, surrounded by people admiring her handiwork, she experienced an unfamiliar feeling: She felt content.
Two days after the camp was cleared, after thousands of Haitians had been deported to Haiti or bused from Acuña, two Haitians, one in red shorts and a red hat and another wearing a gray polo shirt, waded into the Rio Grande and turned themselves over to the Border Patrol as state troopers looked on, a military utility truck cruised by, and a CBP helicopter hovered closely.
"While the dimming of the Earth may seem like a curiosity, it could actually be part of a harmful climate feedback loop." (photo: PickPik)
The paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters last month, found that there had been a significant drop in Earth's reflective capacity, or albedo, in the last three years of records.
"The albedo drop was such a surprise to us when we analyzed the last three years of data after 17 years of nearly flat albedo," lead study author and New Jersey Institute of Technology researcher Philip Goode said in a press release.
The new research is based on measurements of a phenomenon called earthshine. This is something it is actually possible to witness yourself, as NASA explains:
A new Moon occurs when all of the Sun's light is reflected away from Earth, and the side of the Moon facing Earth is barely visible, as illustrated in the above figures. Sometimes the dark face of the Moon catches Earth's reflected glow and returns that light. The dark face of the Moon has a faint shine, a ghostly version of a full Moon. The phenomenon is called earthshine.
The brightness of earthshine is determined by the earth's albedo, or reflective ability, NASA details further. Albedo, and therefore earthshine, tend to increase when there are more clouds to reflect sunlight.
Researchers have been measuring earthshine data from the Big Bear Solar Observatory in Southern California from 1998 to 2017, the press release said. During this time, they observed that Earth's brightness decreased by half a watt per square meter, with most of this decline occurring in the final three years of data measurements. This amounts to a 0.5 percent decrease in Earth's albedo.
Earthshine can also be influenced by the brightness of the sun, but the researchers found that the sun's brightness did not change at the same time as the effects they observed. Instead, they think the change is due to the warming of the ocean.
"The recent drop in albedo is attributed to a warming of the eastern pacific, which is measured to reduce low-lying cloud cover and, thereby, the albedo," they wrote.
They found that their falling earthshine measurements corresponded with a decrease in low-lying clouds over this part of the ocean, as measured by NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project, the press release explained. The area has been heating because of the reversal of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which in turn has been associated with climate change.
While the dimming of the earth may seem like a curiosity, it could actually be part of a harmful climate feedback loop. A less reflective planet absorbs more sunlight, which means more heating. The study's observations therefore contradict one theory that a warmer planet would also be a cloudier one, and that this might help to put the breaks on even further warming.
"It's actually quite concerning," University of California at Riverside planetary scientist Edward Schwieterman, who was not involved with the study, said in the press release.
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