22 October 21
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The author activist on overcoming defeats, her new role at UBC, the future of climate justice and more.
The author of This Changes Everything and other bestsellers, Klein is a major critic of global capitalism, has helped articulate its effects on the environment and climate change and supports transforming society in ways that improve the lives of people and protect them from its worst and unequal effects.
The Canadian journalist, author and activist was involved in drafting the 2015 Leap Manifesto — a plan for transitioning to a clean energy economy — which was the centre of much debate within the federal New Democratic Party and amongst its supporters, including in these pages.
In recent years she’s been involved with climate justice movements in the U.S. and Canada pushing for a Green New Deal and was even a surrogate for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Now Penguin has decided to package excerpts from her previous writing for a volume in its Green Ideas Series.
Surely that counts as success, right? Well, as she pointed out to The Tyee in an interview last week, after a near decade of advocating for a range of climate goals, “We haven’t gotten any of those things.”
A 2016 NDP resolution based on the Leap Manifesto passed, but party leadership has since distanced itself from it. Klein’s spouse, filmmaker and climate activist Avi Lewis, ran in the 2021 federal election but ultimately lost his bid to become the NDP MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country.
Below the 49th parallel, Bernie Sanders didn’t win the Democratic nomination to run as president. None of the various Green New Deal bills in the U.S. have passed.
And when we talked to Klein last week, citizens of the country where she’d spent the last couple of years living and organizing had been agonizing over whether significant legislation to address climate change would make it through the Senate, thanks to two centrist democrats.
And on a grander scale, not much has changed. Many countries, including Canada and the U.S. — two of the largest per capita emitters — continue to drag their feet and have yet to hit their commitments to cut emissions.
All this Klein would readily admit. But she’s far from ready to declare defeat. As in chess, even among the losses, there is the fight for a fighting chance. And in the long run, every move matters.
The author, who’s studied and long been involved in climate justice movements, says she won’t “indulge” in climate doom-ism. She still believes this moment has quite a bit of potential.
“We have locked in a very, very rocky future, but it is not too late for us to avert truly, unlivably catastrophic warming,” she said.
In September, Klein joined UBC’s geography department as a professor for climate justice, along with her spouse Lewis.
She’s also involved in building the university’s new Centre for Climate Justice. The goal, she says, “is to be useful on the timeline of the climate emergency, and very much to take leadership from the most impacted constituencies.”
Klein talked to us about her new role, the recent Canadian election, and the “infrastructure of care.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: How are you settling into your new role as professor of climate justice at UBC?
Naomi Klein: It’s been a whirlwind month and a half since I started at UBC, and there’s a group of us who are figuring out what this Centre for Climate Justice is going to be and what its scope is going to be. So it’s very much not launched yet; we’re in a broad process of figuring out how we can be both useful and how we’re going to be different from work that’s already taking place, because there’s so much great climate research happening at UBC.
Which is a big reason why I wanted to join the faculty there, because there’s just fantastic climate leadership, and the institution passed this landmark climate emergency declaration a couple of years ago. And what makes it really significant is that it includes language that centres social justice and calls on the university to take action in the face of not only climate breakdown, but also social and economic inequality.
It’s an exciting time to figure out what that actually means, because, of course, everybody has passed these emergency declarations. The City of Vancouver, the Trudeau government and various institutions. And I think at UBC it was, it was kind of interrupted by the pandemic. It passed in 2019, and like everything else has been a bit behind schedule.
So a lot of what I’ve been doing in the past month and a half is talking to the people who made the resolution happen and finding out what work has already happened and what people really hope to accomplish. And then we’ve put together this great steering committee group of scholars who are doing climate justice research, engage with scholarship already.
And then I’m giving a talk later this week on some of the areas of research that we see as very urgent, and one of the things that I’m looking at personally is the intersection of housing injustice and climate. And I think particularly after what happened during the heat dome, it’s really clear this is not an abstraction. If you were a renter in Vancouver and didn’t have control over whether or not you could have a fan in your apartment… even these really extreme cases where one landlord was blasting heat during the heat dome. And there was just such an unequal impact of this extreme disaster.
What is the deadliest weather event in Canadian history happened in June in this province, and I think the full implications of that have yet to be metabolized. I think this is an area where the academy with its research skills and capacity really can step up. There’s a group of us who are looking at doing research that might be useful in shaping emergency responses going forward and building codes and so on.
Trying to broaden the work that already currently exists, and just add to it and supplement it.
Yeah. Just from the discussions we’ve had so far, there’s a few things that I think we can expect. One is that this is really community-engaged research. Yes, research will be published in journals, but the goal of it is to be useful on a tight timeline, to be useful on the timeline of the climate emergency, and very much to take leadership from the most impacted constituencies.
And that means actually asking people, “What sort of research would be useful to you?” Some of that is data gathering and some of that may be more like planning. There’s a great planning school at UBC. There are architecture students, film students.
What interests me, and some of the work that I was doing in the States, was really at the intersection of the academy, movements and policy. Thinking about the kinds of work that was coming out of [the University of Pennsylvania] with Daniel Aldana Cohen’s work on housing. He was part of a team that helped draft the Green New Deal for public housing. And then the Green New Deal for public schools, legislation that was just brought forward by Jamaal Bowman. And Ilhan Omar brought forward the Green New Deal for public housing. But this is very much engaged in practical research that is feeding into policy and is engaging with communities and saying, “What does the just transition mean for you? What does it mean to rapidly decarbonize in a way that significantly improves daily life for people?”
That’s the essence of climate justice — the recognition of the unequal impacts of climate breakdown, but also the extractive industries, and it seeks to redress that in our climate policies. You can’t be engaged in climate justice in an ivory tower. It has to be a more humble stance from the academy and one that is more following rather than leading.
What other urgent areas are emerging as important to focus on?
Looking at what post-fire reconstruction should look like and also fire response is another that’s on the minds of people who are involved in this. Another area where I could see some important engaged research happening is an intervention in these discussions around tree planting as a climate solution.
One of the areas where UBC leads is in critical Indigenous studies, and UBC has just a huge number of excellent Indigenous scholars, and an Indigenous strategic plan as an institution, as well as the climate emergency declaration. And the climate emergency declaration calls for a focus on climate policies that are in line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
What does it mean to have governments now calling for these huge tree-planting programs, without talking about Land Back, without foregrounding Indigenous land rights and Indigenous knowledge, and so thinking about what that would mean, what it would mean to look at an entirely new lens for conservation that is not about creating tree museums for carbon sequestration, but really, about returning land.
How do you kind of take stock of all your work advocating for the Leap Manifesto, the Green New Deal and electoral politics in general in the last few years?
I think that the climate justice movement has shifted the conversation, and I think that you see that in the way politicians have changed the way they talk, and that’s true of Biden and it’s true of Trudeau. But changing the way politicians talk is not the goal. I think changing the discourse makes the goal of actually enacting the change more possible, but obviously it isn’t enough. And I think it also can be confusing when politicians are saying the right things but not doing enough.
When you’re up against a climate denier like Donald Trump or Stephen Harper, you understand that you’re dealing with leaders who are sort of gleefully letting the world burn. It’s more confusing when you have leaders who are positioning themselves as climate leaders, whether at the federal or provincial level, and showering subsidies on fossil fuel companies, and allowing old-growth logging.
So, it’s a confusing moment for people, where we’ve been through a federal election where the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens and even the Bloc were competing over who was more of a climate leader and, the day after, it’s really unclear whether that’s going to translate into the kinds of bold policies that they were promising.
I guess I’m a little old-fashioned in that I really don’t think things change without a very mobilized population, that doesn’t only mobilize around elections but is co-ordinated, strategic and quite bold on an ongoing basis.
And I think minority governments in a first-past-the-post system are much preferable to majority governments, because minority governments can’t just slam the door on public opinion and just govern however they please. They have to worry about their government falling. Certainly, I think the Trudeau government has heard loud and clear that Canadians don’t want another snap election anytime soon and that’s quite a fertile political environment for organizing and calling on parties to co-operate based on a clear set of goals.
We should have a climate emergency government right now. But unfortunately, we have a habit of demobilizing after elections. Obviously, people have a lot on their plates right now, but I think where we’re at in Canada actually holds a fair bit of potential, because it is a minority government and because of those grand promises that were made during the election.
People often talk about Trudeau squandering a once-in-a-generation chance and so much political will on climate change when he first came to government in 2015. What do you think of that chance now?
I mean, I think Trudeau has shown us who he is, which is somebody who likes campaigning more than governing and is better at giving the speech than enacting the policies. So I don’t hold out hope for Trudeau as a transformative leader. But I do believe in a kind of balance of power where his government is fragile. He has a minority government; he can’t just govern however he pleases, the government can collapse if the opposition parties decide to collapse it, and I think that Trudeau really likes power. That’s why he held a completely unnecessary election, to try to get a majority. And he can’t do that again; he just used his last trick.
So I think this is a moment where the electorate has a pretty high level of power. Because you have a government that doesn’t want to have an election, that wants to hold it together, and so it can’t really afford to ignore pressure. I think in a moment like that there’s a huge responsibility for people to pressure this government to be the kind of government that it needs to be. So I would just depersonalize it from Trudeau and just look at politics as a bit of a chess game.
The NDP provincially, as well. And the Vancouver city council just now with their vote on parking. I mean, this is not just about Trudeau.
Are there monumental, hopeful policies that you can point to and say, “Hey, this is the good thing. Do more of this.”
What I would like to see is some kind of governing agreement of the kinds that we did see in B.C. between the Greens and the NDP agreeing on a few points and taking the strongest elements of the various climate plans and out of that, emerging a climate emergency platform for all the parties.
I don’t think that a carbon tax is enough on its own. It would have to be much higher, and nobody is talking about introducing a carbon tax that would be high enough to really be a game changer. And we also have to be very aware that climate policies that put the economic burden unto already overburdened, working people can very easily lead to backlash and losing ground, which is what we’ve seen in different [jurisdictions]. Carbon taxes have to be progressive, which means the wealthy have to pay a much larger share. And it means that the people on the lower end of the income level actually get more in rebates.
The NDP carbon plan got beat up for lack of specificity, and I agree with that criticism. But one thing it did have — which I think Canada’s climate policies lacked for far too long — is carbon budgeting, and not just setting these lofty goals decades into the future. We need to be inside a tight carbon budget right now, and we need to audit ourselves so we know how we’re doing, and we need outside experts playing that kind of auditing role. So I think that that would be very, very important.
But thinking more locally and more specifically, I think that after the fatalities from the heat dome and understanding that Vancouver, and B.C. more broadly, is in a climate emergency and a housing emergency and these things intersect in ways that are absolutely fatal, I would really like to see a focus on green, affordable housing of many different kinds, social housing, co-op housing, different ways that people can live, but non-market housing.
Because the other thing, and this is an area that I’ve been following more in the States, is what happens when you have disasters like wildfires — and we saw some of that with Lytton — just wiping whole communities off the map. And then people are moving internally and looking for housing in an already very overheated housing environment. And we have spikes in people who are unhoused, and then criminalization, and these really, really negative spirals. So I think we’re in a moment, which really, really calls for a very ambitious, green affordable housing plan. And that has to involve all levels of government.
The mantra is that every beat is becoming a climate beat. Climate is pervading through every single aspect of our lives. The switch to this understanding in the last few years has felt kind of sudden. How have you seen the development of this understanding in the last few years, particularly in journalism?
Well, I think, honestly, I think it was a huge breakthrough. It was after the IPCC report in 2018. The Sunrise movement occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined them. So this was right after the 2018 midterms. And I think the laying out of the Green New Deal, which was really a collaboration between social movements from below, the climate justice movements that have spent many years developing this framework. And then there’s this sort of shot of energy from a youth movement like Sunrise.
And at the same time, the climate strikes around the world. And then this new infusion of insurgent politicians picking it up and bringing it into the halls of power and laying out this vision for climate action that sounded very unlike anything that most people had heard before.
Mostly what they’d heard [was] about carbon taxes and cap and trade, sort of eyes rolling back in your head. And here was a plan that was about infrastructure, that was about schools, that was about health care, that was about job guarantees. And I think that was the moment where a whole lot of people got the signal, that this wasn’t somebody else’s issue, that it wasn’t too complicated for them to get involved, that it had the potential to touch whatever sector they were involved in and passionate about. And so I think that was just a welcoming moment. That really changed the discourse, and it changed the policy debates as well.
You asked me to point to examples of places and things that I’m excited about, and I guess the answer is there’s not enough. I mean, there’s good talk. But I do think that at the subnational level, there are some examples in the States like, there’s a coalition called New York Renews that has managed to get some really important climate justice legislation through the New York legislature.
And I think that there is now a series of laws that have been drafted, there’s a series of pieces of legislation that I mentioned, the Green New Deal for public housing, the Green New Deal for schools, the Green New Deal for cities and towns that Cori Bush introduced, that are starting to flesh out what this would actually look like, how it would bring resources to towns and cities and tribes, for them to design their own Green New Deal plans. A real emphasis on affordable housing on frontline communities.
I hope that this is the stage before the breakthrough. Because a lot of this was an expanding and redefining of infrastructure and climate readiness as including the care sector, which was totally absent just a few years ago in the discussion and really understanding that we have to invest in mental health care, in home care and think about these disasters that we’ve been talking about.
We don’t have, by the way, nearly enough data about what happened during the heat dome, but we do know that the most impacted were elderly people who were living alone without social networks.
So it was not just about heat, it was about a failure of social care. And we see this again and again after disasters. So we need to see nurses and home-care workers as frontline climate workers. And think about how we reimagine these sectors to be green jobs, low-carbon jobs. And of course, this is also a feminist issue, it’s also a racial justice issue because whose work is discounted? It’s overwhelmingly women and overwhelmingly women of colour.
I think it’s very, very exciting work, and pieces of it did make it into this infrastructure bill that they’re fighting about endlessly in the Senate but haven’t given up on yet, this expanded definition of infrastructure and pieces of the Green New Deal for schools proposal. So these pieces of legislation, though they haven’t been passed in full, are impacting the Biden agenda. It’s just hard to feel optimistic when we’re all being held hostage by Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, names I wish I never had to speak again.
How are you feeling going into COP26 in Glasgow next month?
If I’m honest, I’m not holding out too much hope for the COP. I don’t have a very good answer for that.
I just don’t think that there are any signs that this is going to be any kind of a breakthrough agreement. I think honestly, it’s probably more significant from a public discourse perspective in terms of the fact that climate is going to stay in the news, even though it’s a little bit cooler in our world. And we tend to think about climate change when it’s impacting us directly.
There’ll be more coverage. These are moments when the core injustice of the climate crisis maybe gets a little bit more attention, in the sense that this is a crisis that was overwhelmingly created in the global north, and the worst impacts are still overwhelmingly being felt in the global south. And so questions around climate financing are going to come up very strongly.
But I guess the reason why I don’t hold out too much hope is just that I’ve seen too many of these. And I think right now with where we’re at, in American politics, the biggest problem with these agreements is that they’re non-binding. And the reason why they’re non-binding is because to make them binding, it would have to be passed by the U.S. Senate.
In past years, this has been a key point where things really come to a head in these agreements, it’s whether or not this is just going to be a bunch of pledges that we hope people keep, or whether or not this is going to be more and more like a trade agreement, where there are consequences for going back on what you’ve pledged. And the reason why these are not treaties, is because if they were, they would have to be ratified by the U.S. Senate. The U.S. has always blocked this despite an overwhelming majority of countries wanting a binding agreement.
The reason why I’m not holding out hopes that this is going to be the COP where everything changes is that given what we’re seeing now in the U.S. Senate, with the problems getting through an infrastructure bill, it’s clear that this Senate is not going to ratify a binding climate agreement, even though the Democrats have a majority, a one-vote majority. So that limits what’s possible.
It sounds like there’s a lot of constraints. There’s a lot of interesting things that we can do, but we’re basically playing small ball with climate change. Every single action matters right now, but the most consequential actors are just dragging their feet.
Yeah, and I think it’s the same problem that I’m pointing to in Canada. This can’t be a sort of hope for the best situation. We need to make commitments and we need measures for holding ourselves to those commitments, and there needs to be consequences for breaking those commitments. And we’re not doing that on a national level, and we’re not doing it on an international level.
I would say for us in Canada, the first stage is figuring out how we do it at the national level. How we put ourselves within a carbon budget and keep ourselves to it. And I think that once we start doing that on a national level, there’s a much better chance that we will get to it at an international level because we will want other countries to do the same or else it’s not fair to us.
How are you, as a person who studies this and follows this, not just bummed out all the time?
I would be lying if I said that I feel very rah-rah and optimistic about this. I think that anyone who has been engaged with this issue for a couple of decades now is going to have had their hopes raised a few times and have gone up and down that roller coaster.
I don’t indulge in sort of climate doom-ism of just like all is lost, let’s just engage in sort of hospice care at this point because, and I’ve said this before, there are degrees of bad and we have locked in a very, very rocky future, but it is not too late for us to avert truly, unlivably catastrophic warming.
And the reason why I emphasize the importance of the investments in the social sphere — affordable housing, the infrastructure of care, valuing care workers, recognizing that care work is climate work, that affordable housing is climate policy — is that when we make these investments in our societies that build schools that value everyone, where people have the basics taken care of, “Yes, you will have a home. Yes, you will have food. Yes, there will be water.” This will serve us extremely well as these shocks hit.
It isn’t only that we can do these things in a way that bring down emissions. And we can: When we invest in the care sector as opposed to the extractive sector, we are enacting climate policy, we are changing our economy in a way that’s going to lower emissions if we do it well and we do it smartly. But from what I’ve seen from covering disasters now — since Katrina, but including Hurricane Maria, including Hurricane Sandy and the fire that burned down Paradise, California — what I know is that what makes these disasters really cataclysmic and what is responsible for the highest death toll, is very rarely the disasters themselves.
Like Maria, it was less than 50 people who died as a direct result of falling debris in the storm. But 3,000 people died because of a failed health-care system and a failed electricity system and a failure of care in the months that followed. More than 1,000 people died in New Orleans after [Hurricane] Katrina. Also, it was not because of the force of that storm. The reason people died was because of systemic racism, it was because of a government that just abandoned the city.
And so these investments in what I’m broadly calling the “infrastructure of care” are going to save lives in the millions in the rocky future that is headed our way and these shifts in values, and you could call it eco-socialism, you could call it whatever you want, are going to be what keep us from turning on each other when things get stressful, when we’re tested by shocks. So it’s not that I’m rosy and hopeful and optimistic. It’s just that I think that this is how we hold on to our humanity in the future to come. And that this is not a luxury.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Getty Images)
Biden was asked by the host Anderson Cooper: "When it comes to voting rights, just so I'm clear though, you would entertain the notion of doing away with the filibuster on that one issue, is that correct?"
"And maybe more," the president replied.
Under the filibuster rule, legislation can be blocked indefinitely unless backers of a bill can find 60 votes to overcome the opposition. And in a Senate deeply divided along partisan lines, it effectively means Republicans have been able to block key aspects of Biden's legislative program.
Among them is a bill that would offer federal protections for voting rights amid a push by GOP state legislatures to tighten access to voting.
A compromise voting rights bill brokered by Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat, was defeated by a Republican filibuster in the Senate on Wednesday. A broader bill, the For The People Act, was blocked by Senate Republicans in June.
Another bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, is to be voted on next week and is also likely to face a Republican filibuster. It was not clear which voting rights legislation Biden would support removing the filibuster to pass.
Biden also expressed support for a "talking filibuster," under which senators talk continually on the Senate floor in order to stall a bill.
"We're going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster," Biden said, adding that it "remains to be seen exactly what that means in terms of fundamentally - on whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up."
However, he said that engaging in a debate in the filibuster at this point could endanger his economic agenda, with Sens. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, another centrist Democrat, both having said they were opposed to changing the rule.
"I lose at least three votes right now to get what I have to get done on the economic side of the equation, the foreign policy side of the equation," said Biden.
The support of all 50 Democrats in the Senate will also be necessary to pass his sweeping reconciliation bill, which includes funding for climate change measures and social programs.
Biden had previously signaled being open to reforming the filibuster to overcome Republican opposition and prevent a disastrous US debt default. Republicans ultimately agreed to a stopgap funding measure in early October after weeks of disputes.
Biden again raised the issue of the debt ceiling standoff on Thursday, saying it could provoke some opponents of filibuster reform to shift their positions. Issues such as voting rights and the US debt were too important to be subject to blocking tactics by the minority party, he said.
"I think you're going to see - if it gets pulled again - you'll see an awful lot of Democrats being ready to say, 'Not me. I'm not doing that again. We're going to end the filibuster.' But it still is difficult to end the filibuster beyond that," Biden said.
Only senators can change the rules of the upper chamber, and getting rid of the filibuster rule - even temporarily - would require the support of all 50 Democratic senators.
Twitter's home feed promotes right-wing tweets over left-wing tweets, according to new research. (photo: iStock)
Home feed promotes rightwing tweets over those from the left, internal research finds
The social media platform examined tweets from elected officials in seven countries – the UK, US, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Japan. It also studied whether political content from news organisations was amplified on Twitter, focusing primarily on US news sources such as Fox News, the New York Times and BuzzFeed.
The study compared Twitter’s “Home” timeline – the default way its 200 million users are served tweets, in which an algorithm tailors what users see – with the traditional chronological timeline where the most recent tweets are ranked first.
The research found that in six out of seven countries, apart from Germany, tweets from rightwing politicians received more amplification from the algorithm than those from the left; right-leaning news organisations were more amplified than those on the left; and generally politicians’ tweets were more amplified by an algorithmic timeline than by the chronological timeline.
According to a 27-page research document, Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany. Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach. On this basis, the most powerful discrepancy between right and left was in Canada (Liberals 43%; Conservatives 167%), followed by the UK (Labour 112%; Conservatives 176%). Even excluding top government officials, the results were similar, the document said.
Twitter said it wasn’t clear why its Home timeline produced these results and indicated that it may now need to change its algorithm. A blog post by Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s director of software engineering, and Luca Belli, a Twitter researcher, said the findings could be “problematic” and that more study needed to be done. The post acknowledged that it was concerning if certain tweets received preferential treatment as a result of the way in which users interacted with the algorithm tailoring their timeline.
“Algorithmic amplification is problematic if there is preferential treatment as a function of how the algorithm is constructed versus the interactions people have with it. Further root cause analysis is required in order to determine what, if any, changes are required to reduce adverse impacts by our Home timeline algorithm,” the post said.
Twitter said it would make its research available to outsiders such as academics and it is preparing to let third parties have wider access to its data, in a move likely to put further pressure on Facebook to do the same. Facebook is being urged by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to distribute its research to third parties after tens of thousands of internal documents – which included revelations that the company knew its Instagram app damaged teenage mental health – were leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen.
The Twitter study compared the two ways in which a user can view their timeline: the first uses an algorithm to provide a tailored view of tweets that the user might be interested in based on the accounts they interact with most and other factors; the other is the more traditional timeline in which the user reads the most recent posts in reverse chronological order.
The study compared the two types of timeline by considering whether some politicians, political parties or news outlets were more amplified than others. The study analysed millions of tweets from elected officials between 1 April and 15 August 2020 and hundreds of millions of tweets from news organisations, largely in the US, over the same period.
Twitter said it would make its research available to third parties but said privacy concerns prevented it from making available the “raw data”. The post said: “We are making aggregated datasets available for third party researchers who wish to reproduce our main findings and validate our methodology, upon request.”
Twitter added that it was preparing to make internal data available to external sources on a regular basis. The company said its machine-learning ethics, transparency and accountability team was finalising plans in a way that would protect user privacy.
“This approach is new and hasn’t been used at this scale, but we are optimistic that it will address the privacy-vs-accountability tradeoffs that can hinder algorithmic transparency,” said Twitter. “We’re excited about the opportunities this work may unlock for future collaboration with external researchers looking to reproduce, validate and extend our internal research.”
Lyft said there were 4,158 reports of sexual assault on the app from Jan. 1, 2017 to Dec. 31, 2019; this included 360 reports of rape. (photo: Getty Images)
Ride-hailing company’s first safety report came nearly 2 years after Uber released a similar set of data for its app
The company released its safety report on Thursday — nearly two years after rival Uber released a similar set of data for its app — which tabulated five categories of sexual assault in an effort to make clear the extent of the dangers on the ride-hailing app. It included data for nonconsensual kissing or touching of sexual body parts; nonconsensual kissing of nonsexual body parts; and attempted and nonconsensual sexual penetration.
In total, Lyft said there were 4,158 reports of sexual assault on the app from Jan. 1, 2017 to Dec. 31, 2019; this included 360 reports of rape. Lyft said its definitions were overly broad to collect as wide a data set as possible.
“We recognize that sexual assault is chronically underreported, and it can sometimes be months or years before a survivor is ready to come forward and report what happened — if they choose to do so at all,” the company wrote. “Knowing this, Lyft included any incident reported in 2017, 2018 and 2019, regardless of when the incident was reported to have occurred. Lyft intentionally uses broad definitions … to classify instances of sexual assault.”
Lyft initially committed to releasing its safety report three years ago following pressure on rival Uber on the safety of its app and transparency around the issue of sexual assault.
Uber, a larger ride-hailing company that has the majority of the U.S. market share, released its report in late 2019, disclosing there were around 6,000 total reports of sexual assault in 2017 and 2018.
Lyft indicated its report would follow shortly after Uber’s, but only released it Thursday covering a period through 2019.
Lyft did not immediately provide comment on the report or the timing of its release.
Lyft has come under scrutiny for its treatment of sexual harassment and misconduct on the app. The company won over many passengers in the wake of repeated scandals on Uber that led to the #DeleteUber movement, capturing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. market share as it approached its 2019 initial public offering. But The Washington Post reported in 2019 that some found Lyft’s response to reports of misconduct inadequate and dismissive, feeling their concerns were not seriously addressed.
The Post spoke with nearly a dozen women who decried Lyft’s response to allegations of sexual harassment at the time.
Lyft has pledged to improve its safety practices over the years, noting the issue is a work in progress. Like Uber, Lyft noted that the overwhelming majority of rides ended without incident.
For both companies, the problem appeared to grow worse by year — as the companies’ businesses grew over the period encompassed by the reports and the issue rose in prominence. For example, Uber logged 3,045 reports of sexual assault in 2018, the latest full year covered in its report. Lyft logged 1,807 reports in 2019, the latest year in its report.
“The safety incidents referenced in this report account for 0.0002% of all trips,” Lyft wrote in its safety report. The company defined “safety incidents” in the report as “motor vehicle fatalities, fatal physical assaults and five subcategories of sexual assault.”
But the problem of sexual assault went beyond numbers, the company wrote, and it was releasing the data in an effort to shine light on the extent of the issue. The issue of sexual assault on ride-hailing platforms has gained attention as the companies have grown and the issue of pairing riders with strangers in their personal vehicles has gained attention on social media and among law enforcement.
“This report details the frequency of some of the most serious safety incidents that are reported to Lyft, which are statistically very rare,” Lyft wrote. “But behind every number, there is a person who experienced that incident. Put simply, even one of these incidents is too many. That is what drives our relentless work to continuously improve safety for riders and drivers.”
Of the five subcategories of sexual assault defined in the report, the most common on a yearly basis was nonconsensual touching of a sexual body part.
Lyft collected 598 such reports for 2017, 661 for 2018 and 1,041 for 2019, it said.
Lyft said it does not automatically report such incidents to law enforcement, deferring to the wishes of the person who makes the report. The company provides support services, it said, including information on how to reach organizations providing counseling and crisis intervention, in addition to emotional support and ways to reach law enforcement.
“Generally speaking, individuals who are accused of committing the types of incidents detailed in this report will be permanently removed from the Lyft community, preventing them from riding or driving in the future,” Lyft wrote.
The company said it would work to protect its passengers.
“In putting the safety of its community members as its top priority, Lyft takes all reported incidents seriously and thoroughly investigates each one,” wrote Jennifer Brandenburger, Lyft’s head of policy development and research, in the report. “Lyft’s Safety Specialists are trained to approach each case with respect and care. Doing so helps protect drivers and riders and makes the Lyft community safer for all.”
SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (photo: Getty Images)
New data shows that Elon Musk's fortune grew by 750% during the pandemic. It's not because he worked 750% harder than the rest of us.
In this regard, newly released data from the Institute for Policy Studies offers remarkable clarity as to the scale of the billionaire class’s COVID-19 windfall in America — the top-line numbers almost beggaring belief. In short, the combined wealth of the country’s billionaires has risen by 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic, jumping from just under $3 trillion to roughly to over $5 trillion as of late last week. This spike in concentrated wealth has also seen many millionaires become billionaires, with the ranks of the class as a whole swelling by 131 — from 614 in March 2020 to 745 today. To put that in perspective, as the institute’s Chuck Collins notes, $5 trillion easily exceeds the $3 trillion currently held by the poorest 50 percent of America’s households — meaning that well under a thousand individuals now own almost 70 percent more wealth than half the country combined.
Though many have seen their fortunes skyrocket during the pandemic, such increases have been quite unevenly distributed. Elon Musk, for example, has seen the paltry $24.6 billion he owned in March of last year grow to $209.3 billion — a spike of more than 750 percent. For comparison, the country’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, has added a mere $80 billion to his fortune, while Bill Gates has gained $34 billion. Whether taken together or examined in isolation, the numbers are dizzying (a full list is available here), and the policy solutions are obvious. The average billionaire pays an effective federal income tax rate of only 8 percent, and, thanks to various loopholes, exemptions, and jurisdictional gaps, most billionaire wealth simply eludes taxation altogether.
In many ways, the billionaire class’s pandemic windfall is simply a reminder of what most of us intuitively knew already: American society is deeply unequal, the rich are getting richer, and extreme concentrations of money badly need to be taxed. But it’s also arguably the best occasion in years to call into question the deeper axioms of wealth and wealth creation used to sustain and legitimize the existence of billionaires — and to underscore the simple reality, obscured by decades of ideology and propaganda, that extreme wealth has nothing to do with hard work or even innovation. Elon Musk hasn’t produced 750 percent more social or economic value since March 2020. Bill Gates didn’t work 35 percent harder or invent some new gadget and reap the rewards through sheer moral desert.
A few pandemic profiteers happen to belong to industries that have been able to capitalize on lockdowns or other COVID-era policies. But the single and simplest reason for the massive spike in billionaire wealth over the past nineteen months is that central banks have injected trillions into the global economy. And, as the Financial Times’ Ruchir Sharma writes: “Much of that stimulus has gone into financial markets, and from there into the net worth of the ultra-rich.” While those central bank policies may have been unavoidable, given the abdication of elected governments in the face of economic crisis, it shows once again how little the wealth of the billionaire class — and, correspondingly, its entire existence — is linked to innovation, invention, or broad social value, and how much it is to the vagaries of asset valuation (to say nothing of inheritance, which is the sole reason many millionaires and billionaires are filthy rich).
This matters for intrinsic moral reasons, but it also matters because the billionaire mythos leans so heavily on a fraudulent narrative of individual Prometheans creating wealth and opportunity for all by way of personal grit and exceptional creativity. While this has always been a fiction, the pandemic is a stark reminder that the traditional capitalist formulation of creators and scroungers is, in fact, a precise inversion of reality. Capitalists don’t create wealth, but they do own plenty of it — and that wealth invariably begets even more.
An agent of the National Institute of Migration (INM) gives instructions to Cuban migrants coming from the United States and queuing to renew the permit that allows them to remain in Mexico while US authorities handle entrance requests. (photo: Herika Martinez/Getty Images)
The report offers a rare window into the behind-the-scenes dysfunction and confusion surrounding the so-called Remain in Mexico program, which is set to come back.
These were among the people forced into a controversial Trump administration program that aimed to stop the flow of asylum-seekers from crossing into the US via the southern border, according to a January internal government report obtained by BuzzFeed News that was addressed to senior leaders at the Department of Homeland Security. Some were later able to get out of the program and enter the US while others were not.
The report offers a rare window into the behind-the-scenes dysfunction and confusion surrounding the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP) — also known as “Remain in Mexico” — which have long been criticized by immigrant advocates as a cruel and illegal way to keep asylum-seekers from entering the US. It documents how investigators believed that border officials, at times, appeared to not comply with the agency’s “guiding principles.”
From 2019 to 2021, the government forced tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico as they waited for their day in a US court. The immigrants were often left with nowhere to go but squalid camps in Mexican border towns, and human rights advocates reported cases of immigrants being kidnapped, raped, and tortured while waiting there.
The document’s existence, revealed by BuzzFeed News, comes at a particularly important time: The Biden administration is on the verge of restarting the Remain in Mexico policy after a federal court judge ordered officials to do so this summer. While advocates have pushed the administration to ignore the order, the DHS has said it is ready to implement it by mid-November if Mexico agrees.
In sum, the document highlights a series of problems the Biden administration could face as it seeks to revive the program: inconsistent policies, incomplete training, and confusing guidelines. The discoveries made by the investigators show how vague policy guidelines can lead to life-altering decisions for those seeking to enter the US.
“The information contained in the memo is incredibly concerning and demonstrates why restoring a humane approach to migration is so critical," a spokesperson for the DHS said. "The administration is currently under a court order requiring it to reimplement MPP in good faith, which it will abide by even as it vigorously contests the ruling. Pursuant to that order, the department is working to re-implement MPP in a way that protects vulnerable individuals, including but not limited to, those with known physical and mental conditions and others that might be at risk — something the Government of Mexico also identified as a key concern. As stated previously, the Department will soon be issuing a new memo explaining and reaffirming its decision to terminate MPP.”
The Trump administration implemented the controversial program in early 2019 amid a surge of families crossing the border and seeking asylum. In the early days of the policy, which was one of multiple efforts to restrict asylum, the US was seeing upward of 100,000 border crossings a month. Despite legal challenges, the program was maintained throughout the Trump administration.
The report, written by officials from the DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) Office, documents a dozen findings during the course of a 2019 investigation of the policy and analyzes whether agency officials followed “guiding principles” issued in January 2019 that described who could and could not be placed into MPP. The CRCL investigators pored over emails and documents from the various agencies involved, including US Citizenship and Immigration Services and Customs and Border Protection.
CBP officials said they could not comment on leaked documents. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
CRCL officials found that, although those with “known physical/mental health issues” were prohibited from being placed into MPP, this was not well explained to border agents. Indeed, the investigators explained that border officials created a standard of whether an immigrant was “medically cleared” for travel to determine whether they could be returned to Mexico.
They also said CBP officials were not complying with the language of the principles set out by DHS for people who, despite their medical issues, were cleared for travel.
“With regard to the application of that amenability guideline, it is unclear to CRCL how circumstances such as cognitive disability, glaucoma, epilepsy, cervical metaplasia, uterine cancer, heart conditions, ’crippled’ legs, chicken pox, AIDS, and diabetes, do not qualify as ’known physical/mental health issues,’ yet CBP emails and records confirm that individuals with these conditions, known to CBP, have been returned to Mexico under MPP,” the report states.
In one case, investigators looked into an allegation that a 6-year-old girl from Honduras was returned to Mexico despite having advanced cerebral palsy. The CBP records the investigators reviewed indicated that she, her parents, and her brother were placed into MPP on May 20, 2019. A DHS form the investigators reviewed indicated “CRIPPLED LEG, LEFT” and “CRIPPLED LEG, RIGHT” under a section reserved for “scars, marks, and tattoos.”
There were no other records relating to her health.
“The note by CBP that she had two crippled leg[s] indicates that CBP was aware that the child had a disability at the time it placed [the girl] into MPP and returned her to Mexico. Although the records do not substantiate the allegations of advanced cerebral palsy, CRCL has concerns that CBP violated the MPP Guiding Principles by making amenable to MPP a 6-year-old identified as having two ’crippled leg[s],’” the report states.
Asylum officers periodically raised concerns about why certain people with medical issues were placed into the program as well, according to the report.
“In one October 2019 email exchange, asylum office staff alerted CBP that interview testimony indicated that an 11-year-old boy in MPP had severe epilepsy, with convulsions leading to loss of memory and vomiting,” the report states. “The response from CBP indicated that CBP was aware of the child’s condition and that he had gone through two prior medical screenings while remaining in the MPP program.”
In an email referring a family to asylum officers for an assessment on their fears of remaining in Mexico, CBP officials told USCIS staff about a 4-year-old child in MPP, who had been found to have chickenpox, and his young sister, who had been sexually assaulted. Elsewhere, an asylum officer told border officials that a woman with uterine cancer who had been separated from her husband had been placed into MPP.
In November, the Texas Civil Rights Project sued the Trump administration, claiming that DHS had sent back asylum-seekers with disabilities.
The group located several plaintiffs who had been pushed into MPP despite their health conditions, including a 34-year-old woman who had a pituitary tumor that pressed against her brain, a 13-year-old child with only one functioning lung, and an 8-year-old boy who had a urethral malformation that required surgery.
“The ’Remain in Mexico’ policy is inherently unfit and violent for any asylum seeker, but it is particularly dangerous, and unlawful, for those living with disabilities,” said Erin Thorn Vela, senior attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, at the time of the filing.
It’s unclear how medical conditions and disabilities would be handled under a new version of MPP, but a court filing this month indicated that Mexican officials had wanted improvements to the program. Blas Nuñez-Neto, a senior DHS official appointed by President Biden, said Mexican officials had told the administration that they had concerns about “particularly vulnerable” individuals being turned back to Mexico.
“In particular, the GOM [government of Mexico] raised concerns about certain populations being enrolled in MPP, including particularly elderly or sick individuals, as well as other populations, such as LGBTQI individuals. GOM made clear that it expects the reimplementation of MPP to address these concerns,” Nuñez-Neto wrote in a court filing.
In December, CBP issued additional guidance explaining that immigrants who are medically cleared for travel, including those who have preexisting conditions or have a significant disability but are with family, can be forced to remain in Mexico. The additional guidance seemed to clear the way for individuals with medical conditions to be turned back at the border. The investigators wrote in their report that such a standard was insufficient.
In the internal report obtained by BuzzFeed News, investigators also substantiated allegations that families had been separated during the MPP process.
“In emails provided to CRCL by CBP, CBP personnel state that it is USBP procedure to separate one parent from the rest of the family and only maintain family unity for the other parent and children,” the report states.
CRCL officials wrote that “married couples and children with their parents or legal guardians should be processed together and scheduled for the same hearing in immigration court. Failing to do so may not only impact the family’s safety and well-being while waiting for their immigration court hearing but may also impact any claims for relief filed by the family.”
In one case, a Guatemalan man who spoke an Indigenous language and limited Spanish had said that he was separated from his son when he was forced into MPP despite the fact that he had a birth certificate. DHS records reviewed by the investigators showed that there was no mention that he was accompanied by his son, but an “addendum” in the database indicated that he was later released in the US to be “re-united with his child.” There was no explanation for the separation in the records.
Unaccompanied immigrant children, according to the report, were also subject to the policy, despite agency guidelines prohibiting such a decision. “Documents provided to CRCL by ICE [Enforcement and Removal Operations] indicate that CBP has at times placed [unaccompanied immigrant children] into the MPP program, in violation of the MPP Guiding Principles,” the report states.
Elsewhere, investigators found that medical screenings were not consistently documented, and DHS lacked a centralized system to track cases of individuals forced to remain in Mexico.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration rescinded the policy and began to allow thousands of people caught up in Remain in Mexico to come to the US. Now the administration is faced with the prospect of restoring the program to its original form, as ordered by US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk and held up by the Supreme Court. DHS officials told staffers in August that the agency was taking steps to reimplement and enforce MPP in good faith. It also said the agency was working with the State Department and the Mexican government to ensure the “expeditious reimplementation” of Remain in Mexico.
The potential reimplementation of the plan has been met with criticism by immigrant advocates. On Saturday, a group of advocates left a virtual meeting with Biden administration officials over the future of the program. They said they would not have conversations with the Biden administration due to the continuance of policies enacted under Trump.
Then, this week, a group of immigration attorneys and advocates sent a letter to lead Biden officials saying they wanted no part in helping start the program back up. This comes as the administration works to improve access to attorneys for those stuck in Mexico in anticipation of reinitiating the program.
“We refuse to be complicit in a program that facilitates the rape, torture, death, and family separations of people seeking protection by committing to provide legal services,” the letter read.
Some of the issues found by CRCL, including those surrounding language access, echo those discussed in a separate DHS report released internally and obtained by BuzzFeed News in 2019.
Dry lakebed in Colombia. (Photo: Raul Arboleda/Getty Images)
Eleven countries in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East are especially at risk from instability driven by climate change, says a U.S. intelligence report.
The reports paint a dire picture of growing risks caused by radical changes in the world's climate as countries compete for dwindling water and food supplies while facing waves of migration across borders.
The Biden administration released the reports as world leaders plan to meet in Glasgow, Scotland, next month for crucial talks to combat climate change.
A new National Intelligence Estimate on climate, the first of its kind, warned that climate change would fuel global tensions, naming 11 countries that are especially at risk from climate change if trends continue: Afghanistan, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia and Iraq.
"We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge," according to the National Intelligence Estimate issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"Intensifying physical effects will exacerbate geopolitical flashpoints, particularly after 2030, and key countries and regions will face increasing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance," it said. National Intelligence Estimates reflect a consensus of all of the country's intelligence agencies.
Apart from the 11 countries cited, the intelligence report also said climate change was likely to ratchet up the risk of instability in Central Africa and small island states in the Pacific, which it said were "two of the most vulnerable areas in the world."
A decline in revenue from oil and other fossil fuels is likely to further strain countries in the Middle East that are expected to suffer from extreme heat and longer droughts, the report said.
Although the U.S. is in a relatively better position to respond to the effects of climate change, the report said "the impacts will be massive even if the worst human costs can be avoided."
A Pentagon report said rising temperatures could aggravate factors that lead to migration and even cause governments to collapse. The report said that "in worst-case scenarios, climate change-related impacts could stress economic and social conditions that contribute to mass migration events or political crises, civil unrest, shifts in the regional balance of power, or even state failure."
A White House report said migration fueled by climate change could put more pressure on America's allies and partners, as migrants are likely to seek refuge in democratic, stable countries that adhere to international conventions on asylum.
The assessment also said Russia, China and other adversaries could seek to exploit the effects of climate change to drive migrants to the U.S. and U.S. allies.
"Climate change related migration could cause greater instability among U.S. allies/partners and thereby cause a relative strengthening in adversary states," said the White House report on the impact of climate change on migration.
"In addition, adversaries could incite or aid irregular migration to destabilize U.S. allies/partners," it said.
Without an effective strategy from the U.S. and Europe, China, Russia and other governments could seek to gain influence by delivering support to countries struggling to address political unrest related to migration, it said.
"Russia also sees some benefits in the destabilizing effects of large-scale migration to the EU, particularly as it relates to the rise of xenophobia and political parties skeptical of the European project and the broader liberal order," the report said.
Although Russia will face difficulties from climate change, including flooding and more forest fires, Moscow could benefit overall, as it will have more land opened up to cultivation and resource extraction, along with new sea routes in the Arctic that were previously inaccessible, according to the White House report.
Over the past decade, U.S. intelligence agencies and senior military leaders have issued repeated warnings about the effect of climate change on global security, saying it could cause wars over water or other scarce resources.
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