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30 December 21
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Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our discussion with world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky. Nermeen Shaikh and I recently spoke to him. He was at his home in Tucson, Arizona.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam, you have called the Republican Party the most dangerous organization in human history. You’ve also called the political leaders a gang of sadists. I was wondering if you could elaborate on this. But also, in all of your 93 years, have you ever seen such an anti-science, anti-fact trend in this country before? And then, if you can talk about how it links up with other such movements around the world and how it should be dealt with?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, it’s a fact that there has been a strain of anti-science sentiment in significant parts of the United States for a long time. This is the country that had the Scopes trial. There’s an unusual power in the United States of evangelical, anti-science extremism.
But as a political movement, it’s — has nothing been like what it is in the contemporary period. The Republican Party, under Trump, and his minions — he basically owns the party — they have been in the lead of trying to destroy the prospects for organized human life on Earth, not just unilaterally pulling out of the Paris Agreement, but acting with enthusiasm to maximize fossil fuel use, to dismantle the systems that somewhat mitigated their effects, denial of what’s happening, reaching a huge number of loyal almost worshipers, partly through their media system, in other ways.
When the United States is the most powerful, important country in world history, when it races to the precipice, has an impact on others. Other things that are happening are bad enough, but with the United States in the lead and marching to destruction, the future is very dim. And it’s our responsibility here to control it, to terminate it, to turn the country back to sanity — don’t even like to say “back” — turn it to sanity on these issues, before it’s too late.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Chomsky, you’ve warned of a severe threat from a resurgent proto-fascist right here in the U.S. and spoken out — you’ve spoken out against the general right-wing shift across the political spectrum in the U.S. If you could explain what you think is behind that, and if you see any prospects in the near future for its reversal?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, we have been through a 40-year, 45-year assault on the general population within the framework of what’s called neoliberalism. And it’s had a very serious impact. There are even some measures of it. So, the RAND Corporation, super respectable, did a study recently of the, what they politely call, transfer of wealth from the lower 90% of the population — that’s working-class and middle-class — the transfer of wealth from them to the very rich during the last 40 years. Their estimate is on the order of $50 trillion. They call it transfer of wealth. We should call it robbery. There’s plenty more like it, keeps being exposed. The Pandora Papers that came out revealed another aspect of it. That’s not small change. CEO salaries, management salaries have skyrocketed. A large part, probably a majority, of the population by now is basically surviving paycheck to paycheck, very little in reserve. If they have a health problem or something else, they’re in deep trouble, especially with the lack of social support in the country.
Even trivial measures that exist everywhere are very hard to implement in this country. We’re seeing it in Congress right now, measures like maternity leave, which is everywhere. I think there are a couple of Pacific islands that join the United States in not having paid maternity leave. Go to the second-largest country in the hemisphere, hardly a site of enormous progress, Brazil, women have four months guaranteed paid maternity leave, which can be extended a couple of months, paid for by the Social Security system. In the United States, you can’t get a day. And it’s being — it’s right at Congress right now. The Republican Party is 100% rock-solid opposition to this and other measures, including some weak but at least existing measures to mitigate the climate crisis, 100% Republican opposition, joined by a couple of Democrats, the coal baron from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, the leading recipient in Congress of fossil fuel funding, dragging his feet on everything, joining the 100% Republican opposition, Kyrsten Sinema from my state, huge recipient of Big Pharma, other corporate funding, also dragging her feet. Even the simplest things, like what I mentioned, are very hard to get through in a country that’s been poisoned by right-wing propaganda, by corporate power. It goes way back, but it’s expanded enormously in the past 40 years.
You look up “neoliberalism,” the word “neoliberalism,” in the dictionary, you find bromides about belief in the market, trust in the market, fair — everyone’s got a fair shake, and so on. You look at the reality, neoliberalism translates as bitter class war. That’s the meaning of it, everywhere you look, every component of it. The RAND, the $50 trillion robbery is just one sign of it.
When Reagan and his associate Margaret Thatcher on the other side of the Atlantic, when they came in to power, their first acts were to attack and undermine, severely undermine, the labor movement. If you’re going to have a sensible project, if you’re going to carry out a major class war attacking workers in the middle class, you better destroy their means of self-protection. And the great — the major means are labor unions. That’s the way poor people, working people can organize to develop ideas, to develop programs, to act with mutual aid and solidarity to achieve their goals. So that has to be destroyed. And that was the major target of attack from the beginning, many others. What we’re left with is a society of atomized people, angry, resentful, lacking organization, faced with concentrated private power, which is working very hard to pursue the bitter class war that has led to the current disastrous situation.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you how January 6th, how you see it playing out. Do you see it as really not so much the birth but continuation of a proto-fascist movement? You’re in Arizona, the recounts over and over again of the votes, questioning Democratic votes all over the country. Where do you see the U.S. going? And do you see President Trump becoming president again?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very possible. The Republican strategy, which I described, has been successful: Do as much damage as you can to the country, blame it on the Democrats, develop all sorts of fanciful tales about the hideous things that the communists, the Democrats, are doing to your children, to the society, in a country which is subjected to social collapse, to atomization, to lack of organized ability to respond in ideas and actions that can be successful. And we’re seeing it right now. So, yes, it’s very possible that the denialist party will come back into power, that Trump will be back, or someone like him, and then we’ll be simply racing to the precipice.
As far as fascism is concerned, there are some analysts, very astute and knowledgeable ones, who say we’re actually moving towards actual fascism. My own feeling is, I would prefer to call it a kind of proto-fascism, where many of the symptoms of fascism are quite apparent — resort to violence, the belief that violence is necessary. A large part of the Republican Party, I think maybe 30 or 40%, say that violence may be necessary to save our country from the people who are trying to destroy it, the Democrat villains who are doing all these hideous things that are fed into their ears. And we see it in armed militias.
January 6th was an example of — these are people from basically petit bourgeois, moderately affluent Middle America circles, not — there were some militia types among them who really feel that it’s necessary to carry out a coup to save the country. They were trying to carry out a coup to undermine an elected government — it’s called a coup — and came unfortunately close. Luckily, the — and they’re now taking — the Republican Party is now taking sophisticated measures to try to ensure that the next time around, it will succeed.
Notice they are treating the January 6th coup activists as heroes: “They were trying to save America.” These are signs of massive social collapse, which show up concretely in the fact that people literally do not have enough financial reserves to put themselves through a crisis. And, of course, it’s much worse when you go to really deprived communities. Like, household wealth among Blacks is almost nothing. They’re in severe problems. All of this in the richest, most powerful country in the world, in world history, with enormous advantages, unparalleled, could easily lead the way to a much better future.
And it’s not a utopian dream. Let’s go back to the Depression. Happens to be my childhood, can remember it well. Severe crisis, poverty, suffering much worse than today, but a hopeful period. My own family, unemployed, at first immigrant, working-class, were living with hope. They had the unions. My aunts, unemployed seamstresses, had the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, cultural activities, mutual aid. You could go on a week’s vacation. A hope for the future, militant labor actions, other political actions, sympathetic administration led the way to social democracy, inspired what happened in Europe after the war. Meanwhile, Europe moved to fascism, literal, hideous fascism. The United States, under these pressures, moved to social democracy. Now, with supreme and bitter irony, we’re seeing something like the reverse: The United States is moving towards a form of fascism; Europe is barely holding on to functioning social democracy, got plenty of their own problems, but at least they’re holding onto it — almost the reverse of what happened in the past. And we can certainly go back not only to the ’30s, but something much better than that.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Chomsky, could you — you’ve spoken, of course, now about the Republican Party. Could you give an assessment also of the Biden administration so far? You spoke earlier of the climate crisis. Earlier this year, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued its report, after a decade, which the U.N. secretary-general called “code red for humanity.” And just days after, as you’ve mentioned, Biden called on OPEC to start increasing production of oil. So, if you could comment on that, Biden’s policies on climate, but also on other issues?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s a mixed story. His domestic programs are, frankly, considerably better than I anticipated. But they’re being — they’ve already been sharply cut back. The Build Back Better bill, that’s now being debated and, without enormous public pressures, not likely to be passed, is a sharply pared-down version of what first Bernie Sanders produced, Biden more or less accepted and cut it back somewhat, now cut back much more sharply, may not even get through in its pared-back form.
As I said, the Republicans are 100% opposed to allowing what their own constituents very much approve of, and managing the propaganda system so that their constituents don’t even know about it. Remarkable results showing up in polls about the Build Back Better bill. If you ask people about their particular provisions, strong support. You ask about the bill, mixed feelings, often opposition, feeling the bill, which contains the provisions they want, are likely to hurt them. Furthermore, turns out they don’t know what’s in the bill. They don’t know that it contains the provisions that they approve of. All of this is a massive successful indoctrination campaign of the kind that Goebbels would have been impressed with. And the only way to overcome it, again, is by constant, dedicated activism.
Take the climate program. Biden’s climate program was not what was needed, but it was better than anything that preceded it. And it didn’t come from above. It was the result of significant activist work. Young activists [inaudible] got to the point of occupying senatorial congressional offices, Nancy Pelosi’s office. Ordinarily, they’d be kicked out by Capitol Police. This time they got support from Ocasio-Cortez, joined them, made it impossible for the police to throw them out, got further support from, as I mentioned, Ed Markey. Soon they were able to press Biden to develop, to agree to a climate program that was a big improvement on anything from before it — in fact, even by world standards, one of the best. Well, the management of the Democratic Party didn’t like that, wasn’t having it. They actually cut it out of their webpage before the election and tried to block it. And it’s been reduced by them and by the solid Republican opposition demanding that we move as quickly as possible towards disaster. Well, it’s now cut sharply back.
You go to Glasgow. Lots of nice words, including from President Biden. Take a look at what’s happening in the world outside of the halls in Glasgow. Different picture. Biden came home from Glasgow and opened for lease the largest giveaway in U.S. history of petroleum fields for exploitation by the energy corporations. Well, his defense is that his effort to stop it was blocked by a temporary court decision, so he had no choice. Actually, there were choices. There were other options. But the message that it sends, stark and clear, is that the institutions of the society, the federal institution, the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judiciary, those institutions are incapable of recognizing the severity of the crises that we face, and are committed to a course which leads to something like species suicide.
The only force that can counter that was actually present at Glasgow. There were two events at Glasgow. There was the pleasant talk but meaningless verbiage inside the halls. There were the tens of thousands of demonstrators outside the buildings, young people mostly, calling for measures, real measures, to allow a decent, viable society to develop, not be destroyed. Those are the two events in Glasgow. The question of which one prevails will determine our future. Will it be heading towards disaster, or will it be moving towards a better, more livable world? Both are possible. The choice is in our hands.
AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, the 93-year-old world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. When we come back, we’ll talk about Julian Assange, Joe Biden’s foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. Stay with us.
Alan Dershowitz appeared on the BBC to talk about the conviction of Ghislaine Maxwell, despite being linked to the case. (photo: Twitter)
Shortly after Maxwell was convicted Wednesday of sex-trafficking charges for assisting Epstein in abusing young girls, BBC News brought on Dershowitz to analyze the guilty verdict of Epstein’s longtime paramour. But the network failed to mention that Dershowitz not only previously served as Epstein’s attorney but that he is accused of having sex with Virginia Roberts Giuffre when she was as young as 16. Dershowitz has denied the allegations.
Dershowitz used his time on the “BBC World News” to slam Giuffre for supposedly not being a credible witness in the Maxwell case — claims that went unchallenged by the show’s anchor. He also claimed the case from Giuffre against him and Britain’s Prince Andrew, who has also been accused of sexual assault and has denied the allegations, was somehow weakened after Maxwell’s guilty verdict.
“The government did not use as a witness the woman who accused Prince Andrew, who accused me, accused many other people because the government didn’t believe she was telling the truth,” he said. “In fact she, Virginia Giuffre, was mentioned in the trial as somebody who brought young people to Epstein for him to abuse. And so this case does nothing at all to strengthen in any way the case against Prince Andrew.”
BBC interview Alan Dershowitz over Ghislaine Maxwell - a new low BBC, a new low. pic.twitter.com/dapu03gkAl
— Steve E Ennever (@MusicMiscreant) December 29, 2021
The appearance was denounced on social media by public officials and legal experts as “totally inexcusable,” with many calling on the BBC to explain why Dershowitz came on air. Dershowitz also appeared on Fox News on Wednesday, but that network specified his connection to the case.
“Fox News at least acknowledged Dershowitz’s connections with Epstein,” wrote journalist Aaron Rupar. “Unfathomable that the BBC thought this was a good idea.”
The network announced Thursday that it was investigating why Dershowitz appeared without noting he was implicated in the case.
“Last night’s interview with Alan Dershowitz after the Ghislaine Maxwell verdict did not meet the BBC’s editorial standards, as Mr Dershowitz was not a suitable person to interview as an impartial analyst, and we did not make that background clear to our audience,” the network said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We will look into how this happened.”
A spokesperson with the broadcaster told The Washington Post that the BBC has “nothing further to add at this time.”
Statement on interview with Alan Dershowitz pic.twitter.com/MlXkqdJI8u
— BBC News Press Team (@BBCNewsPR) December 30, 2021
Dershowitz told The Post in a statement that he “made full disclosure of Virginia Guffre’s false accusation against me before expressing my opinion about the prosecution’s wise decision not to vouch for her credibility by using her as a witness in the Maxwell case.” (The statement misspells Giuffre’s name.)
“The media has repeatedly interviewed alleged victims of Epstein and Maxwell regarding the Maxwell case,” he said in the statement. “It is entirely appropriate for the media to interview a victim of Guffre’s perjury as long as there is full disclosure and [no] one is misled.”
Attorneys for Giuffre did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.
The news comes at the end of a trial focused on what types of enabling conduct — including befriending young girls and teaching and scheduling them to massage an older man — should be considered criminal. Maxwell, 60, was accused of recruiting teenage girls to massage Epstein at his homes in Palm Beach, Fla., New York, New Mexico and elsewhere between 1994 and 2004.
Epstein allegedly paid the girls hundreds of dollars in cash for the massages, which involved sexual touching and which he expected three times a day. He died by suicide in August 2019, while awaiting his own trial.
The New York jury found Maxwell guilty on five of six counts, including conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking of an individual under 18. She was found not guilty of enticement of one individual under 17 with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity.
Maxwell faces up to 65 years in prison. No sentencing date has been set.
Giuffre has said that Epstein and Maxwell forced her to have sex with public figures, such as Dershowitz. She asserted to the Miami Herald and the New Yorker that she had sex with Dershowitz at least six times in Epstein’s various residences. In denying her claims, Dershowitz, who represented Epstein and helped negotiate a lenient non-prosecution agreement for his client in 2008, called Giuffre a “prostitute” and a “bad mother” to her children.
Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation in 2019. He countersued Giuffre, claiming she had made false claims about him so that she could extort money from a member of Epstein’s inner circle.
On the BBC, Dershowitz, who was introduced solely as a “constitutional lawyer,” mentioned the accusation himself when he said that Giuffre had falsely implicated him. He applauded the prosecution for not calling Giuffre to the stand for Maxwell’s trial.
“They deliberately didn’t use the main witness, the woman who started the whole investigation, Virginia Giuffre, because ultimately they didn’t believe she was telling the truth,” he said. “They didn’t believe that a jury would believe her and they were right in doing so. So it was very smart on the part of the government.”
On Fox News, host Pete Hegseth told viewers that the lawyer had connections to people close to the case. Dershowitz went on to suggest, without evidence, that Giuffre could be guilty of sex crimes.
“Yes, there are victims, but there are also perpetrators. And some of the people could be both victims and perpetrators,” he told Fox. “Giuffre could be a victim at one point, but then she became a perpetrator and a perjurer at another point.”
But what one critic called the “utterly bizarre” appearance on BBC received most of the attention.
“Huge error by the BBC,” wrote Adam Wagner, a human rights barrister. “All the BBC had to do was Google him.”
British member of Parliament Nadia Whittome said that by having Dershowitz on to talk about the verdict, the BBC was “trying to silence victims following Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction.”
“I can’t believe this needs to be said but the BBC should not give a platform to people accused of child sexual abuse,” she tweeted. “We have a responsibility to believe people when they disclose sexual abuse and to create conditions in which they can in the first place. All details of Epstein’s network should be published and all victims/survivors are owed justice. This is clearly the tip of the iceberg.”
A fast-moving conveyor moves packages through a scanning machine on their way to delivery trucks at Amazon's fulfillment center in Robbinsville, New Jersey. (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
Workers say Amazon’s ‘excessively rapid work pace’, surveillance and disciplinary systems have created a dangerous environment
Roberson, 21, chose to go to the emergency room rather than Amazon’s on-site medical clinic, Amcare, and was referred to a sports medicine doctor who diagnosed her with a dislocated patella (kneecap). Her initial recovery was 10 weeks of physical therapy followed by a steroid shot, but she was later scheduled for surgery on 28 October to repair her knee.
“While all of this is going on, I’ve been having to fight Amazon for time off and money,” said Roberson. “They refused workers’ compensation, as I had a dislocated patella when I was 14 years old. I’m 21 now so I don’t see how it’s related.”
Roberson and her wife have struggled to cover bills while recovering from her injury and battling Amazon. “I have not had a single day that I haven’t been an absolute sobbing mess because of the stress Amazon continues to put me through,” added Roberson.
Reports of high injury rates and high turnover rates at Amazon warehouses around the US as a result of immense productivity pressures and quota rates on workers have been documented by numerous media outlets and organizations over the past several years and confirmed by OSHA logs. Amazon shareholders have recently called for an independent safety audit of the company.
A May 2021 report published by the Strategic Organizing Center found Amazon’s injury rates were double the injury rate in the warehousing industry and 80% higher than the industry average for serious injuries in 2020.
Jerald Crowley worked at an Amazon distribution center in Greenville, South Carolina, for six months before he resigned on 3 November due to a wrist injury he sustained on the job, as he is deaf and couldn’t afford to lose use of his hand to communicate in sign language with his children.
His rate for stacking boxes on pallets was 40 boxes an hour, and he cited the rate as the reason for his injury.
“I suffered a high sprain on my right wrist when I was attempting to bring a box in the back of the pallet,” Crowley said. “Their safety rules are that I’m supposed to report it and they will bring it down, but their rate is 40 boxes an hour. I was trying to get credit for the box – if I did not, they could let me go simply because I did not meet the rates, so safety was basically out the window when they chose rates over safety.”
On 1 January 2021, the state of Washington increased workers compensation premiums for Amazon due to higher injury rates at Amazon warehouses compared with other warehouses in the state.
In December 2021, the National Employment Law Project released a report on injury rates at Amazon’s six warehouses in Minnesota, revealing those facilities have injury rates twice as high as rates for other warehouses in the state, and more than four times the average for all industries in the state.
An Amazon spokesperson said in response to the report: “While we know we’re not perfect, this report ignores the perspectives of the vast majority of our employees in Minnesota, who tell us that they’re proud to work at Amazon and feel supported in their roles.”
Mustafa Omar started working at Amazon in 2016, but left in 2017 and returned in 2018, and has worked there for the past three years. He picks and loads items that weigh up to 80lbs, typically working on six or seven different stations. He has experienced back pain due to the repetitive motions and lifting heavy items involved in his job.
In early November 2021, Omar fell back onto a pallet, injuring his back. He flagged down a senior manager to get his station covered so he could go to Amcare. Omar said he felt like he was in trouble when he asked the manager to take him to the clinic, where he was given ice and ibuprofen.
“At this time, I’m thinking ‘oh my God, if I say that I have an injury, that I’ve hurt myself, I might lose my job.’ Because they already instilled fear in me about me being the one that was getting in trouble. I’m thinking about my family, my pregnant wife, my kids, about all the bills that I have and worrying about not being able to work because I’m the breadwinner in my house,” said Omar.
Once at Amcare, he downplayed the pain he was feeling so he would be sent back to work, and continued working for a few weeks while visiting Amcare about twice a day for ice and ibuprofen. Eventually he couldn’t tolerate the pain any longer and visited his own doctor, who recommended physical therapy, pain medication and light duty accommodations.
When he brought his doctor’s forms to Amazon, Omar says he was told he couldn’t attend the recommended physical therapy because it wasn’t approved. He is still waiting to hear back about getting medical treatment approved by Amazon and his workers’ compensation claim approved and paid out.
“I’m still in pain today,” Omar added. “All of us want to come home safely, and when people get injured they should be treated like human beings and taken care of.”
Irene Tung, senior researcher and policy analyst at NELP, and Debbie Berkowitz, worker health and safety director at NELP, coauthors of the report, explained Amazon’s high injury rates are a result of rapid work paces, surveillance and disciplinary systems. They added that workers have to operate under constantly changing rules and metrics, regulatory agencies are underfunded, and worker protections are inadequate.
“None of these measures that Amazon have taken have really got to the core of the problem, which is the excessively rapid work pace and how it’s enforced through their very distinctive disciplinary system that combines intensive electronic surveillance with very frequent discipline and termination. They have not addressed that and that is the fundamental driver of these injuries,” said Tung.
Berkowitz added Amazon’s time-off task disciplinary technology cultivates a climate of fear among workers and drives them to push their bodies in a way that creates high rates of injuries.
“Workers are measured by the second and they’re punished by the second,” said Berkowitz. “It basically creates an environment where if they’re not constantly moving, then they might be fired.”
Several workers who spoke with the Guardian described delays and other obstacles in applying for workers compensation or receiving medical treatment after sustaining an injury on the job at Amazon.
Natalie Monarrez, age 52, has worked as a ship dock worker at Amazon in Staten Island, New York, for about four years. During the pandemic, she lived in her car outside the Amazon warehouse while working a lot of overtime – 12-hour shifts, five to six days a week – as many workers took unpaid leaves in the first few months of the pandemic.
Monarrez said several months into the pandemic, the grueling nature of her job and long hours began taking their toll on her body.
“Swelling in my left ankle had just reached a point where I couldn’t even fit it in a shoe. I had trouble walking. I had trouble standing,” said Monarrez. “As my job is sorting, I have to stand in the same spot for my entire shift. We’re not allowed to sit down and I was lifting heavy packages the entire time and rotating the upper half of my body. But I couldn’t take it anymore and I knew that it was because of work.”
She filed a workers’ compensation claim in August 2020, though she said she received pushback from managers while trying to file the claim until she took off her shoe, showed them her ankle, and insisted on filing the claim and being sent to an Amazon-approved doctor.
Once she filed the claim, Monarrez said she has experienced several problems in contacting Amazon’s workers’ compensation insurer, Sedgwick, to correct her pay above the weekly minimum and getting medical treatments and a medical boot for her ankle approved. She took a couple months off work, but returned to work because the compensation she was receiving, about $400 a week, was much lower than her usual weekly paychecks.
“At this point, I went to Walmart and Target and I literally bought my own braces for my ankle and my foot, and I elevate my foot every night after work,” said Monarrez. “I never had health issues before working for Amazon.”
Amazon did not comment on complaints about workers’ compensation and deferred to a blog post by CEO Dave Clark on time-off task surveillance and disciplinary systems.
In regards to injury rates, a spokesperson for Amazon said in an email: “The safety and well-being of our employees is always a top priority. We recognize that helping employees stay safe in physical roles takes a lot of focus and investment, which is why we’re investing hundreds of millions in safety in many different ways, from people – we now have a team of nearly 8,000 dedicated safety professionals – to training, to tools and technology.”
Alyssa Davis, a mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told ProPublica she gave up on the state's humiliating process for applying for public assistance: "I guess I just wasn't desperate enough to keep putting up with everything they put you through, as a mother. It's just not worth it." (photo: Adria Malcolm/ProPublica)
A ProPublica series has found that in Nevada and neighboring states, boom times hastened the demise of cash assistance for the poor — but not poverty.
George Miller, then the welfare director in neighboring Nevada, volunteered to do a dry run for Reagan, proposing to purge his smaller state’s welfare rolls of alleged welfare cheats. It would be the first effort of its kind in the nation, he said.
Miller cut Nevada’s aid program by close to 75%, stripping thousands of moms and kids of desperately needed survival assistance.
Ruby Duncan, a self-described “welfare mother” on Las Vegas’s Westside, was incensed.
Duncan had grown up in Tallulah, Louisiana, in the 1930s, chopping and picking cotton on a plantation. When her uncles joined the Great Migration out of the South and headed to Vegas to work on New Deal projects like the Hoover Dam, she followed, becoming a maid at still-segregated casino hotels and a house cleaner for wealthy entertainers at the height of the city’s Rat Pack glory days.
She worked from sunup to sundown for decades, and only reluctantly received minimal government help after she literally broke her back on the job. (Duncan permanently injured her spine when she slipped while carrying overloaded trays of food to customers at the Sahara hotel.)
In March 1971, in response to Miller’s welfare cuts, Duncan organized a series of marches down the Las Vegas Strip, a protest movement dubbed “Operation Nevada.” Thousands of welfare mothers, children, priests and nuns, union members, students and well-known activists including Jane Fonda and Ralph Abernathy succeeded in blocking the way into Caesars Palace and other casinos, threatening the bottom line of the city’s wealthiest.
“It was very exciting,” Duncan said. “The fancy people were grabbing their furs and closing their cash registers.”
The marches received national news attention. Duncan followed them up with several “eat-ins,” in which she and her fellow organizers instructed dozens of children left hungry by the welfare cutbacks to walk into luxurious casino dining rooms, order steaks, and then walk out without paying, telling the restaurant managers to bill the state welfare department instead.
Within weeks, a federal judge ordered that the moms and kids whom Nevada had slashed from public assistance would have their benefits reinstated.
In the following years, Duncan expanded her political advocacy and won more victories, including getting Nevada to provide food stamps (it was the last state in the nation to do so) and helping to popularize the idea of a universal basic income, a guarantee of a survival level of income for all.
Other Black women nationwide had also started to do this work, connecting the words “welfare” and “rights” for the first time in American history as part of the National Welfare Rights Organization. It seemed like Reagan’s thesis was being defeated, and that the idea had taken hold that poor single mothers do work hard and strive, and are in many ways the backbone of this country.
Today, Duncan, months away from turning 90 and now largely unable to walk due to that workplace injury from so many decades ago, is less optimistic. She’s still living in West Las Vegas, and still occasionally getting to engage with young single mothers. (She adores young people.) And she’s still holding out some hope that President Joe Biden’s child tax credit will become law in the new year and create a better safety net for Nevada’s families, though it faces a tough road to passage in the U.S. Senate.
But Duncan has a long view on the history of cash assistance in the U.S., and she has been souring on its prospects ever since Reagan reached the White House and vaulted Nevada’s revanchist attitude toward the working poor into national politics. (Miller, the Nevada welfare director whom Duncan thought she had fought and defeated, joined Reagan’s presidential transition team.)
Then, President Bill Clinton took Reagan’s notions to their apotheosis in his 1996 welfare reform law, which Clinton said would fulfill his promise to “end welfare as we know it.”
In the 25 years since, welfare as we knew it did end, but not because the reform was lifting people out of poverty as promised. Federal welfare funding, which the law froze at 1996 levels, was soon decimated by inflation and demographic shifts — with rapidly growing Nevada faring worst of all, now less able to help poor children than ever. States were also given great discretion over how to spend the money, and many have since used it less to assist families than to backfill budget holes, in turn allowing them to maintain tax breaks for the wealthy.
In the process, welfare, which the new law renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, has gone from serving 4.4 million families in 1996 to just 1 million today, despite the U.S. population increasing by 60 million over the same period. Yet child poverty hasn’t budged: Just as was true when the legislation passed, today nearly one in five American children are living below the poverty line, twice the average rate in other developed countries.
“I know from young women talking to me that they’re facing practically the same thing that went on back when I first started,” said Duncan, who was so despondent and physically ailing by the time the Clinton bill was enacted that, she said, she had to go on bed rest. “Poor women throughout America,” she said, “we tried to make everything better for us, and we ended up with this.”
Welfare Reform’s Legacy in the Desert West
This year, the 25th anniversary of welfare reform, happened to coincide with a substantive debate in Congress over a new sort of welfare: the child tax credit, which has been providing low- and middle-income families nationwide with $250 to $300 per child per month during much of the pandemic, but is set to expire Friday. (Biden and most Democrats in the Senate have said they will try to get it extended permanently with a vote as soon as January.)
ProPublica has taken this moment to examine the present state of cash assistance in the U.S., focusing on the Southwest, where massive population growth and a surging cost of living for low-income parents have collided with the region’s libertarian attitude toward government help for the poor.
What ProPublica discovered is an abundance of overlooked stories of bizarre — and mean-spirited — practices on the part of state governments, which were handed near-complete responsibility for welfare under the 1996 law.
And at the root of them all was that same closefistedness toward poor Americans that Reagan conceived of 50 years ago in Nevada.
In New Mexico and other states, single mothers applying for public assistance are forced to identify the father of their child (and his eye color, and his license plate number) and recall the exact date when they got pregnant. In Utah, families seeking aid are subtly pushed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where they’re pressured to get baptized or perform other religious activities, like reading aloud from the Book of Mormon, in order to get help. And in Arizona, poor moms who could have benefited from welfare are instead investigated, at nationally unparalleled rates, by a child services agency funded by welfare dollars.
These practices exist primarily to save money for the states, and by extension their wealthiest taxpayers. The questions that mothers in New Mexico are forced to answer about their child’s father? Those are asked so that the state can go after the dads for child support — most of which the government then pockets. (In 2020, nationally, more than $1.7 billion in child support meant to go to kids instead was taken by federal and state governments.) Utah, meanwhile, has gotten out of spending more than $75 million on public assistance over the past decade by having a private agreement with the LDS Church saying that the state can “count” much of the church’s charitable work as the state’s own. And Arizona balances its budget by diverting more than $150 million annually in welfare funding intended for low-income families — a majority of the money that the state is provided for direct aid to the poor — to its Department of Child Safety, which then uses the dollars to surveil and sometimes separate many of those same families.
Finally, ProPublica revealed, states have hit upon yet another way to skimp on welfare: simply not spending large amounts of their welfare funding at all. Across the nation, more than $5.2 billion in federal funds that are supposed to be going toward fighting poverty are instead sitting unused in state bank accounts, while the women and children whom Duncan has fought for all her life continue to struggle.
Unlike George Miller’s sudden 75% cut to welfare in Nevada in the 1970s, which prompted such immediate, dramatic collective action from the community, what has happened over the past 25 years has been a relatively slow demise.
In other words, it is precisely welfare reform’s unhurried, creeping approach that, in the end, has made it so successful in dismantling cash assistance.
The Slow Smothering of Welfare in Nevada
These failures of welfare reform, ironically, have reached a kind of end stage in Las Vegas, the capital of capitalism and arguably the birthplace of Reagan’s efforts to relegate welfare to the ash heap of history.
That’s because the 1996 law also locked in the amount of federal welfare funding provided to states at ’90s levels, regardless of inflation, population changes or economic downturns. And Nevada, due both to immigration and an overwhelming influx of tech companies and other transplants from California, has transformed demographically more than any other state, with much of that change occurring in Clark County. (Ever the landing place for newcomers, the state is now home to more adults from California than native Nevadans.)
As a result, the per-person value of Nevada’s fixed “block grant” of welfare funds has declined more than anywhere else in the country.
Between 1997 and 2015, the Silver State’s population skyrocketed, by roughly two-thirds, and its housing prices and cost of living shot up as a consequence. In turn, the number of kids living in poverty here more than doubled, from 67,852 to 143,407. That translated to a percentage decline in the actual value of the state’s welfare dollars, per poor child, that was twice the national average.
Now, Nevada gets the smallest population-adjusted grant of federal money in the nation for addressing child poverty: $63 per child, according to 2019 statistics. By comparison, California receives $409.
Former Nevada Gov. Richard Bryan, who became a U.S. senator and was in Congress during welfare reform, said in an interview with ProPublica, “I liked the idea of a block grant because it gave governors flexibility” over how to spend the welfare fund. But, he said, “it didn’t take into account differences between Nevada and slow- or no-growth states.”
The drop in value of Nevada’s federal welfare dollars has been especially devastating because the state has no income tax, which means that despite all the glitzy wealth here, the state government has little ability to provide its own funding for public assistance. Instead, the Legislature relies largely on sales taxes, much of which come from the tourism industry. As a result, state revenue varies season to season and plummets every time there’s an economic crisis, exactly when welfare is most needed.
The Legislature did increase welfare benefits in 2018 — by $3 a month.
Danielle Frolander, of Minden, Nevada, has felt the decline of TANF in a personal, almost literal way. A dental assistant, she applied for help earlier this year after leaving an abusive relationship and struggling to support her kids on her own, she said. Her rent has ballooned amid an influx of Californians that she said has jammed the town’s two-lane roads with “L.A.-type traffic.”
At first, Frolander said, she was receiving over $200 a month from the program, but the amount quickly started decreasing, just like the value of Nevada’s welfare funding overall. (The reason is that the state has a complex formula for weaning families off cash aid over time.) Now she only gets $50, and soon it will be $0.
“It’s kind of silly, these amounts,” she said. “It goes into my gas tank to get to work, and that’s about all.”
Where Welfare Goes From Here
In the final congressional debate before the 1996 law was passed, then-Sen. Joe Biden said, “We should not fool ourselves: There will be people, many of them children, who will fall through the cracks because of this bill.” But he voted for the legislation anyway, citing a “culture of welfare” that was allegedly the cause of stagnation among America’s poor. (Biden has declined to say whether the vote was a mistake; a spokesperson for his presidential campaign in 2020 told NBC News that he tried to make the bill more progressive but faced a bipartisan coalition in favor of the overhaul.)
For years, the harshness and inefficiencies of TANF were not lost on Biden and other Democrats, according to a review of their past comments on the issue, but they sidelined the problem in part because the window of what seemed possible hadn’t shifted since the Reagan era. Even mentioning welfare, for most of the past 25 years, has been a political third rail.
But the tide began to turn, on the left, starting with social science research suggesting that direct cash aid to households with low incomes is the most effective way of alleviating poverty, as seems intuitive. Studies showed that the simple fact of a family having more money leads to kids eating more nutritious food, going to the doctor more often, experiencing lower household stress (which in turn improves their brain chemistry), scoring higher on academic achievement tests, being more likely to go to college, earning more as adults, avoiding crime and living longer.
Research also revealed that the old narrative that most women receiving welfare don’t want to work is, simply, false. These single moms are typically working multiple low-wage jobs, like Duncan was in the ’60s, that don’t pay them enough to support a family.
Duncan said she would prefer welfare be replaced with universal child care, as well as jobs in communities like hers that aren’t make-work and that provide wages that match what things cost, plus an education system that actually prepares people for those jobs. Only then, she said, would the slogan of the Clinton law, “welfare to work,” become more than hollow rhetoric.
But an improved cash assistance program, she said, “would be a start.”
Last year, amid mass layoffs caused by the pandemic, Democratic politicians and members of the media seemed to latch on to all of this. Presidential candidates, including Biden, won plaudits for talking up the idea of direct cash transfers to, or even a universal basic income for, low-income parents and children bearing the brunt of hard economic times.
That conversation led to the child tax credit in Biden’s proposed Build Back Better bill, which differs from welfare mainly by going out to parents and kids with no strings attached. TANF, on the other hand, requires single moms to fill out reams of paperwork attesting to all their assets in order to prove they are poor enough to qualify, and to sit through a host of seemingly extraneous programs, often including parenting workshops and seminars on healthy relationships with men.
Many women feel they spend so much time just managing their participation on TANF that they drop off the program, because it’s not worth it for the extremely minimal amount of aid offered.
Continuing the direct tax credit to these families “would be just such a better way to do it,” said Sheila Leslie, a former Nevada state legislator who focused on TANF issues while in office. “It would take away all the tracking of the supposed ‘worthiness’ of poor families, and the stigma of being ‘on welfare’ would be gone,” she said, in part because most middle-class families, not just the poorest of the poor, would be receiving the assistance too.
According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank, child poverty in Nevada could be reduced by 41% if the credit were made permanent. That’s 44,000 kids potentially lifted out of poverty statewide.
Yet there is a strong chance that the child tax credit will die this year, due to the resistance of Republican and some Democratic lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Those two and several others have been explicitly saying that the plan would take the country backward to the days before welfare reform — when welfare checks, they say, fostered idleness and dependency and disincentivized poor families from striving for the American Dream.
“That’s the Real Welfare”
Duncan, a Black woman, a mother and a community organizer, isn’t exactly John Wayne, a hero on horseback, alone. Yet she is the embodiment of the community building and cooperation that actually won the West.
No one could have survived this brutal desert by going it alone. Native Americans certainly didn’t. And the early European settlers made it across the Rockies not on their own but by circling their wagons, and then they engaged in collective efforts to build dams and irrigation systems so that the region could continue to grow.
But the fairy tale of “rugged individualism” still has great influence over American public policy. This time it’s the Elon Musk type claiming to reach new frontiers not as part of a community but as an individual striver, on a rocket ship, alone. (Tesla recently moved to Nevada, lured by tax incentives.)
“The guys going to the moon, the tax cheaters, that’s the real welfare,” Duncan said. “Give it back so somebody else can climb, holy Jesus.”
Musk has responded to ProPublica’s reporting on his tax avoidance by saying he pays his fair share.
There is so much money in the U.S. and in Las Vegas specifically, Duncan argued, that surely there could be a system in which the people working such long hours in those casinos and other factories of wealth could share in that prosperity.
But Duncan has also borne witness to nearly a century’s worth of deteriorating ideas about public assistance in this country. “I sit here and look through the lens of my mind,” she said, “and there is just so much we could have done differently.”
Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies set up a barrier to block to protect the Sheriff's Department station as protesters gather in the wake of Dijon Kizzee's killing on Sept. 9 2020. (photo: App Gomez/AFP)
Police departments nationwide are hiding records of police misconduct
On Jan. 1, a new law takes effect in California expanding how long police departments have to keep files on cops’ behavior and what the departments have to make public. In the meantime, the ACLU has been fighting to gain access to use-of-force reports and other data from the department since 2019. Now, the Los Angeles Times reports that a judge issued a temporary order banning the Inglewood Police Department from destroying any records.
From the Los Angeles Times:
The ruling comes three years after the city was thrown into controversy over its handling of law enforcement documents.
In late 2018, the city of Inglewood destroyed hundreds of police records in the weeks before Senate Bill 1421 went into effect. The law expanded public access to police use-of-force, misconduct and disciplinary records for departments across the state. Critics argued Inglewood sought to destroy years of investigative records involving police dating to 1991 just ahead of the new law, a claim city leaders rejected.
“This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts Jr. said at the time.
Since 2019, the Inglewood Police Department has not produced a single document under SB 1421, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in a lawsuit filed Dec. 23. On Dec. 14, the Inglewood City Council adopted a resolution to purge more police records, including all internal affairs investigations dated through Dec. 31, 2016, and all use-of-force reports and pursuit reviews dated through Dec. 31, 2019.
Police departments around the country are notorious for skirting open records laws, potentially keeping the public from knowing which officers have patterns of dangerous behavior. Dozens of departments in New York state, for example, didn’t respond to a newspaper’s request for cops’ disciplinary records even after the state of New York changed the law in 2020 to require disclosure.
New Hampshire just opened its so-called “Laurie List” of cops with questionable credibility to the public on Wednesday. Such lists are important because prosecutors could be required to disclose cops’ record of dishonesty or misconduct to defendants. A reporter in Oklahoma had to call a legal hotline for help getting police records on a shooting death by the Glenpool Police Department, after the department denied an open records request for documents. The victim’s family had been given no information by the department.
Not to be outdone, the LA County Sheriff’s Department hid a list of deputies with histories of misconduct even after the California Supreme Court ordered them to release the info. That list was finally made public this year under the same law that Inglewood police have been trying to get around, and the information on it is nothing short of ugly.
Gladys Radek on Highway 16 in Terrace, British Columbia. (photo: Amber Bracken/Al Jazeera)
When the RCMP abuses Indigenous women and girls.
From Gladys Radek’s kitchen window, the view is of towering mountains skirted by a thick forest. A trickle of sunlight pierces the low-lying clouds as if to tease winter with its warmth.
Gladys grips a cup of hot coffee and looks outside. “I get to see this every day,” she gestures to the window and smiles.
Her one-bedroom home is about 20 feet long and 10 feet wide (about 6 metres by 3 metres). It is run-down and cluttered, but to her, it is a place of peace in a life that has been anything but tranquil.
Indigenous artwork adorns her walls. One - a striking painting depicting Highway 16 and an Indigenous woman crying blood-red tears - was painted by Wade Raw Eater, a Vancouver-based artist and former partner of Georgina Papin, a Cree woman who was murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton sometime after she disappeared in 1999.
Indigenous music plays on a continual loop - a steady beat of drums and melodic singing. Gladys keeps it on 24/7 so as to be saturated by the sounds of her culture. It helps to keep her driven, she says. And she must stay driven considering the mission she has taken on - lives depend upon it.
For almost two decades, Gladys has lobbied governments and organised rallies and other events to bring attention to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).
The 65-year-old is a member of the Wet’suwet’en Nation located about an hour’s drive north of Terrace. Not only is she a leading advocate for MMIWG, but she is also a mother, a grandmother and a survivor.
“I managed to live to tell about it,” she says, explaining that she relies on prayer to help her through the various abuses and hardships she has endured.
“There’s a Creator up there who has answered my prayers ... but my story is by far not unique because it’s happened to so many of us.”
'A house of evil'
When Gladys was five, she and her three siblings were taken from their mother - victims of what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. During this mass removal of Indigenous children from their families by the child welfare system, thousands of Indigenous children from across Canada were “scooped” up and placed into mostly white families where they were displaced from their culture and often abused.
After living with a non-Indigenous family, who Gladys says treated her well, for a couple of years, she was sent to live in Terrace with relatives.
It was a house of evil, she says, stopping to take a drag of her cigarette as her pet and best friend, a border collie called Tess, walks to her side at the kitchen table. Gladys pets Tess and continues.
“There were lots of beatings. I was raped every weekend.”
Her foster parents were residential school survivors. The notoriously abusive state and Church-run schools often inflicted severe physical, sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse on the Indigenous children who were forced to attend them.
Gladys says her foster parents never recovered.
“A lot of our people were damaged by residential schools. So, they took it out on us,” she says, describing a perpetual cycle of addiction and violence.
When Gladys was a teenager, she started running away - eventually ending up in a reform school for girls in Vancouver, more than 1,500km (932 miles) south of Terrace.
“I was labelled incorrigible,” she chuckles and shakes her head in disapproval. “I hated it there, so I ran away.”
When she was 16, she found solace on the streets of Vancouver’s notorious east side. Soon she was drinking and gave up hope for a better life.
“I just didn’t care any more. At that point, I didn’t give a s*** what happened to me. I was so angry,” she says.
'Don't bother reporting this'
With her indifference came a fearlessness and she says she would often hitchhike to get around.
She knew to play it cool when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) flagged her down, because she was a young runaway and they could be on the lookout for her. But she had also heard rumours about police officers hurting Indigenous girls - offering to let runaways go in exchange for sexual favours.
It happened to Gladys - twice.
The first time was just outside the city of Chilliwack in British Columbia’s southern interior. Gladys was trying to make her way to Calgary, in the neighbouring province of Alberta, to visit friends. It was a 1,000km (621 mile) journey and Gladys was walking along the highway when, at about 11.30pm, a police car pulled up beside her. The officer began questioning her.
“He told me I looked like a girl that was wanted. He mentioned my name and I denied it,” Gladys recalls, explaining that she had a fake ID.
The officer told her to get in the back seat of his cruiser, that she was not supposed to be hitchhiking. He drove down the highway. Gladys thought he was taking her to jail.
But then he pulled off onto a side road.
“He turned around and got into the back of the car and he raped me … we’re talking about an 80-pound [36kg] girl; I wasn’t even a woman yet. There was nothing I could do,” she says.
There is a look of sadness in her eyes and then anger - but the emotions quickly fade. Talking about the trauma she has endured is routine and she says it “toughened her up”, but she has cried many tears of healing over the years.
“He had his way with me and just left me there. He told me ‘don’t bother reporting this because I’m a police officer and no one is going to believe you anyway’.”
About a year later, Gladys was hitchhiking along Highway 16, near Prince George in northern British Columbia. She was on her way to visit her mother in the port town of Prince Rupert several hundred kilometres west.
It was winter, dark outside, and she was 16 and alone.
An RCMP officer pulled his cruiser over and told her it was too cold to be hitchhiking. He offered to take her back to Prince George where he would find her a warm place to stay.
“Of course, we went down one of those nasty roads - a logging road - and he raped me,” she says. “Then I was expecting to be taken to a shelter or a room after, but I ended up staying in a jail cell that night. He took me to jail.”
She says she was released early the next morning and hitchhiked to Prince Rupert.
There was nowhere she could turn for help and no one she could tell, she says.
“That’s like me going to my abuser asking for help - it’s not going to happen. They’re the cops. It was the same with residential schools. All those preachers and nuns that were abusing our girls and boys - they were their own entity and they were going to take advantage and abuse as long as they can.”
Souls in the underworld
A 2013 Human Rights Watch report, titled Those Who Take Us Away, highlighted abusive policing and failures to protect Indigenous women and girls in northern British Columbia. Among the disturbing allegations of abuse by RCMP officers documented in the report were that of rape and sexual assault.
Indigenous women are hesitant to trust the RCMP due to their violent experiences with law enforcement, Gladys explains, and there has been criticism of how law enforcement have handled the cases of Indigenous women and girls going missing or being murdered along Highway 16, or the Highway of Tears as it is commonly called.
When questioned about RCMP officers sexually assaulting Indigenous women and girls, representatives from the E-PANA investigative unit, established to investigate a series of unsolved murders and disappearances along the Highway of Tears, said they take the allegations seriously.
“Well, we have reports on E-PANA like that [rapes by RCMP officers],” says constable Wayne Clary, a veteran homicide investigator with the RCMP. “We look at them. I’m dealing with a gentleman right now that’s talking about a retired policeman. We’ve got DNA from police officers.”
The E-PANA unit was created in 2005. "Pana" is an Inuit word for the God who cared for souls in the underworld. The purpose of the task force is “to determine if a serial killer, or killers, is responsible for murdering young women travelling along major highways in BC [British Columbia]”.
There are 18 women on the E-PANA investigation list - 13 homicides and five missing people’s investigations dating back to 1969. Despite Indigenous Peoples making up just 5.9 percent of the population in British Columbia, as of 2016, 10 of the women and girls on the E-PANA list are Indigenous.
Wayne and E-PANA Team Commander Sergeant Ron Palta flew to Prince George from E-PANA headquarters in Surrey, British Columbia, to meet Al Jazeera for an interview. They explained that on more than one occasion they have taken DNA samples from RCMP officers to compare with the DNA found at crime scenes. Police do not get special treatment if there are suspicions about them, they say.
“We would get DNA samples for crime scene purposes. There’s the odd time when we’re concerned and will approach a police officer to provide DNA,” explains Wayne.
Ron says they understand the fears victims - particularly those from marginalised and racialised communities - may feel reporting crimes committed by police officers.
“We encourage them to come forward and to give us their story. It absolutely will be investigated. How dare we ignore any piece of information? We’ve seen it through the history of Canada, and in other cases of people committing murder when they’re in positions where they’re supposed to be taking care of society,” he says, adding: “Find someone you trust. We want to know if this happened then these people need to be brought to justice. We don’t want that within our organisation or within our ranks.”
A ray of light
One former RCMP police officer-turned-private investigator poured his heart and soul into trying to solve the Highway of Tears cases.
Before he died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 69, Ray Michalko, the author of Obstruction of Justice, had dedicated years of his life to helping the families of MMIWG in northern British Columbia.
One of the things that particularly concerned him were the ways victims were portrayed by the RCMP - as drug addicts, prostitutes and runaways, even when they had called family members to tell them their whereabouts before they went missing.
He felt the RCMP was often indifferent to the families of the victims and described their efforts to “stonewall, discredit, and intimidate” him during the 10 years he spent investigating the cases. This culminated in the force threatening to charge him with obstruction of justice if he continued.
For Claudia Williams, whose sister Alberta Williams was found dead near the Highway of Tears on September 25, 1989, the grey-haired investigator was her ray of light during the dark years that followed her sister’s death.
“I phoned Ray anytime,” Claudia says in a phone interview from her home in Vancouver.
“Ray was an investigator, but more of a really good friend. He took the time and cared - he kept his word.”
Alberta’s murder is still unsolved. The loss of her sister was devastating to Claudia and knowing the killer has not faced justice torments her.
But Ray helped her persevere.
“Ray gave me more comfort and hope. He made the time and he handled things more compassionately than other police organisations.”
She remembers the last time she saw him. He called to ask her to meet up for coffee in Vancouver. Like countless times before, he picked her up from her home and the two conversed for hours; some of that time was spent discussing updates in Alberta’s case, some was just two friends talking about their lives and hobbies, punctuated by laughter.
That day when Ray dropped her back off at home, he presented her with a gift.
“He gave me a big smile and said 'I have something for you' … I think he knew it was the last time I’d see him. He went to his trunk and got his book; it was wrapped all nice. ‘This is for you,’ he said, and he signed it. I said, ‘thank you!’”
A week later, Ray died. Claudia says she cried when she heard.
There will never be anyone like him, she explains.
“I care for that book so much. I thank him all the time - he gave me his business card and I keep it ...” she pauses, her voice breaking. “I miss you, Ray, you put so much effort into helping us. It’s an example of how it should be done.”
Gladys went on to have three children and struggled on and off with an addiction to alcohol until 2001.
That is when she went back to school and earned her high school diploma with honours. Not long after, she moved back to Terrace after laying criminal charges against one of her childhood abusers.
“When I graduated, I got a voice. Felt confident. My identity came back on who I was. I wanted my voice back. I figured one way to start was by addressing my abusers.”
One of her greatest supporters during the two-year trial was her niece, Tamara Chipman.
“She’d come over every morning before court, with her big Rottweiler dog, a big smile on her face and encourage me. She always had a smile on her face,” Gladys says.
When Gladys moved back to Vancouver following the sentencing of her abuser, Tamara was sad. But Gladys invited her to stay with her anytime and to call whenever she needed to.
Then in 2005, Tamara disappeared.
Heartbroken
Tamara, a Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, was 22 when she was last seen hitchhiking on the outskirts of Prince Rupert on September 21, 2005.
A few weeks later, Gladys found out about Tamara’s disappearance when her sister-in-law called to say the story would be on the evening news. Gladys says she was heartbroken.
She made missing posters and plastered them around Vancouver’s east side where she lived. She joined the search. Eventually, she moved back to Terrace. She has not stopped looking ever since - or raising awareness about Tamara and the other missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.
She honours Tamara by remembering her light and laughter. “She was funny, liked fast cars and the outdoors. I think about her all the time,” she says.
Tamara is one of the 18 women and girls on the official E-PANA list. The criteria for E-PANA investigations are that the victim was female and engaged in one or more “high-risk” behaviours, such as hitchhiking or prostitution, that they went missing or their body was found near Highway 16 (the Highway of Tears) from Prince Rupert to Hinton, Highway 97 from Merritt to Fort Nelson, or Highways 5 and 24 connecting Valemount and 100 Mile House, and that the evidence suggests a stranger attack.
There are dozens of women and girls who have gone missing or been found murdered on these highways who do not meet these criteria and the crisis is one that spans provincial and federal borders.
In Canada, Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or go missing than non-Indigenous women and girls. In the United States, Indigenous women and girls are 10 times more likely.
Standing behind Indigenous women and girls
Two years after Tamara vanished Gladys started the Walk 4 Justice, walking from British Columbia to Ottawa. She covered 4,556km (2,831 miles) in three months.
She has completed the walk several times, despite having lost her right leg below the knee after a motorcycle accident when she was in her early 20s.
She has advocated for survivors, volunteering countless hours and sharing her own testimony with the National Inquiry into MMIWG. But after all these years, and with more women turning up dead, Gladys’s outlook is sombre.
“Nothing’s changed. The women are still disappearing,” she says, slapping her hand on her knee and biting her lip.
But that doesn’t stop her. Still, she perseveres.
The tenacity of grassroots activists and the loved ones of those missing or murdered is what encourages her to keep fighting.
“I see in our young women and girls, their resilience. And they’re p***** off because they want change. I know I’m not getting any younger - I’m running out of gas,” she laughs, her eyes alight with conviction.
“I’m still going to persevere and stand behind our young women and girls. Because if people understand where we are coming from and take the time to build a relationship after 500 years of colonial abuse. If they take the time to understand how precious our women and girls are and how we’re needed to continue our society ... then I have hope.”
African forest elephants, and thousands of other species, could cease to exist within a few years, the WWF said. (photo: Roger De La Harpe/Damita Delimo)
More plants and animals than ever before are on a global list of threatened species, with the World Wildlife Fund Germany warning that more than 1 million species could go extinct within the next 10 years
The stark warnings came as WWF Germany released its "Winners and Losers of 2021," an annual list of animals whose existence is now acutely under threat — as well as conservation victories.
Facing a mass extinction event 'within the next decade'
There are currently 142,500 animal and plant species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — 40,000 of which are "threatened with extinction."
It is the largest number of species to be included on the Red List since it was established in 1964, according to WWF Germany.
"Around one million species could go extinct within the next decade — which would be the largest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaur age," the organization said in a statement.
WWF Germany director Eberhard Brandes said decisive environmental protection policies were urgently needed, particularly in the fight against climate change.
"Species conservation is no longer just about defeating an environmental problem, but is rather about the question of whether or not humanity will eventually end up on the Red List in an endangered category — and thereby become a victim of its own lifestyle," he said.
Polar bears and other species on thin ice in 2021
Among the animals most acutely threatened — and among the "losers" on this year's WWF list — are the African forest elephant, whose population has declined by 86% within just 31 years.
Polar bears made the list as well, as the rapid melting of pack ice in the Arctic Ocean is making it impossible for the animals to adapt. Experts estimate the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice-free in the summer of 2035, WWF Germany said.
The familiar green faces and loud summer chirping of Germany's tree frogs and toads are also under threat — with 50% of Germany's native amphibian species currently listed as endangered on the national Red List. Unabated construction is limiting their habitats while roads have become death traps.
Grey cranes and migratory fish that move on land also earned a spot on the 2021 "losers" list, as well as the noble pen shell — the largest clam in the Mediterranean Sea.
Lucky Bustards and other 2021 animal 'winners'
The WWF noted that there were some "rays of hope" in the world of environmental conservation this year.
One of the rarest big cats in the world, the Iberian lynx, saw a "successful comeback" in Spain and Portugal. In 2002, only 94 of the lynx were found. The population has grown more than tenfold, with the most recent count in 2020 showing over 1,100 are currently alive.
The population of great bustards in Germany saw significant progress in 2021, with their population reaching the highest level in 40 years. Researchers counted 347 of the birds this year — compared with just 57 birds in 1997.
The WWF also logged a success in efforts to conserve the Indian rhinoceros population in Nepal. As part of a cooperation with the government, stricter protection measures were implemented — which have helped the rhino's population grow by 16% since 2015.
Bearded vultures, blue whales and crocodiles in Cambodia also saw their population numbers grow.
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