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Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox | The Path to a Livable Future: Or Will Corporations Trash the Planet?
Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox, TomDispatch
Excerpt: "This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe."
To the best of my memory, I first met Noam Chomsky in 1970. No, admittedly not in person, not then. But I “met” him through his remarkable essay “After Pinkville,” his look, in the midst of the Vietnam War, at a world of My Lai massacres. (The hamlets that included My Lai had been known to the U.S. military as “Pinkville.”) As he wrote at the time, grimly enough, “The world’s most advanced society has found the answer to people’s war: eliminate the people.” I was then a printer at the New England Free Press, a “movement” print shop, and though his essay appeared initially in the New York Review of Books, we printed up our own little edition for the bookshelf of movement literature we were then widely distributing. I was overwhelmed by the power of the piece and by the thinking of the man who wrote it.
I would, in fact, eventually meet Noam in person and edit and publish two of his books (Hegemony or Survival, America’s Quest for Global Dominance and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy) while launching the American Empire Project series with Steve Fraser at Metropolitan Books. Then, unexpectedly finding myself producing what became TomDispatch, I would end up publishing 20 of Noam’s pieces at this website between 2003 and 2016. You won’t be surprised to learn that I felt honored. In these years, quite honestly, Noam Chomsky has been something like a force of nature, a single mind that has continually taken in the world in a way few others could. And so, I find myself proud indeed to be publishing an interview scientist Stan Cox has just done with him about the ultimate issue on this planet when it comes to our lives and those of our children and grandchildren: Can we make it?
Cox himself is the author of a new book, The Path to a Liveable Future, as well as The Green New Deal and Beyond, that Chomsky wrote a forward to (a recommendation in itself). Check both of them out and, in the meantime, consider the thoughts of the man who has, for more than half a century, grasped and highlighted our problems in a unique fashion. You can count on one thing: whatever he does in the years to come, it won’t include, like 90-year-old William Shatner, heading into space with Jeff Bezos and crew. In a sense, Chomsky has been in space all along, looking down on this woebegone planet of ours and absorbing it in a way few others have done. It’s a record for the ages.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century’s end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far, the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it’s too late.
For the past several decades, Noam Chomsky has been one of the most forceful and persuasive voices confronting injustice, inequity, and the threat posed by human-caused climate chaos to civilization and the Earth. I was eager to know Professor Chomsky’s views on the roots of our current dire predicament and on humanity’s prospects for emerging from this crisis into a livable future. He very graciously agreed to speak with me by way of a video chat. The text here is an abridged version of a conversation we had on October 1, 2021.
Professor Chomsky, now 92, is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. His critiques of power and advocacy on behalf of the political agency of the common person have inspired generations of activists and organizers. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.
— Stan Cox
Stan Cox: Most of the nations that will be meeting in Glasgow for the 26th UN Climate Change Conference on October 31-November 12, 2021, have made emissions-reduction pledges. For the most part, those pledges are wholly inadequate. What principles do you think should guide the effort to prevent climate catastrophe?
Noam Chomsky: The initiators of the Paris Agreement intended to have a binding treaty, not voluntary agreements, but there was an impediment. It’s called the Republican Party. It was clear that the Republican Party would never accept any binding commitments. The Republican organization, which has lost any pretense of being a normal political party, is almost solely dedicated to the welfare of the super-rich and the corporate sector, and cares absolutely nothing about the population or the future of the world. The Republican organization would never have accepted a treaty. In response, the organizers reduced their goal to a voluntary agreement, which has all the difficulties that you mentioned.
We’ve lost six years, four under the Trump administration which was openly dedicated to maximizing the use of fossil fuels and dismantling the regulatory apparatus that, to some extent, had limited their lethal effects. To some extent, these regulations protected sectors of the population from pollution, mostly the poor and people of color. But they’re the ones who, of course, face the main burden of pollution. It’s the poor people of the world who live in what Trump called “shithole countries” that suffer the most; they have contributed the least to the disaster, and they suffer the worst.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As you write in your new book, The Path to a Liveable Future, there is indeed a path to a livable future. There are ways to have responsible, sane, and racially just policies. It’s up to all of us to demand them, something young people around the world are already doing.
Other countries have their own things to answer for, but the United States has one of the worst records in the world. The United States blocked the Paris Agreement before Trump eventually got into office. But it was under Trump’s instructions that the United States pulled out of the agreement altogether.
If you look over at the more sane Democrats, who are far from guiltless, there are people called moderates like Senator Joe Manchin (D–WV), the leading recipient of fossil-fuel funding, whose position is that of the fossil-fuel companies, which is, as he put it, no elimination, just innovation. That’s Exxon Mobil’s view, too: “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you,” they say. “We’re a soulful corporation. We’re investing in some futuristic ways to remove from the atmosphere the pollution that we’re pouring into it. Everything’s fine, just trust us.” No elimination, just innovation, which may or may not come and if it does, it will probably be too late and too limited.
Take the IPCC report that just appeared. It was much more dire than previous ones and said we must eliminate fossil fuels step by step, every year, and be free of them completely within a few decades. A few days after the report was released, Joe Biden issued a plea to the OPEC oil cartel to increase production, which would lower gas prices in the United States and improve his position with the population. There was immediate euphoria in the petroleum journals. There’s lots of profit to be made, but at what expense? It was nice to have the human species for a couple of hundred thousand years, but evidently that’s long enough. After all, the average lifespan of a species on Earth is apparently around 100,000 years. So why should we break the record? Why organize for a just future for all when we can trash the planet helping rich corporations get richer?
SC: Ecological catastrophe is closing in on us largely because, as you once put it, “the entire socioeconomic system is based on production for profit and a growth imperative that cannot be sustained.” However, it seems that only state authority can implement the necessary changes in ways that are equitable, fair, and just. Given the emergency we face, do you think that the U.S. government would be able to justify imposing national-resource constraints like rules for resource allocation or fair-shares rationing, policies that would necessarily limit the freedom of local communities and individuals in their material lives?
NC: Well, we have to face some realities. I would like to see a move towards a more free and just society — production for need rather than production for profit, working people able to control their own lives instead of subordinating themselves to masters for almost their entire waking life. The time required for succeeding at such efforts is simply too great for addressing this crisis. That means we need to solve this within the framework of existing institutions, which can be ameliorated.
The economic system of the last 40 years has been particularly destructive. It’s inflicted a major assault on most of the population, resulting in a huge growth in inequality and attacks on democracy and the environment.
A livable future is possible. We don’t have to live in a system in which the tax rules have been changed so that billionaires pay lower rates than working people. We don’t have to live in a form of state capitalism in which the lower 90% of income earners have been robbed of approximately $50 trillion, for the benefit of a fraction of 1%. That’s the estimate of the RAND Corporation, a serious underestimate if we look at other devices that have been used. There are ways of reforming the existing system within basically the same framework of institutions. I think they ought to change, but it would have to be over a longer timescale.
The question is: Can we prevent climate catastrophe within the framework of less savage state capitalist institutions? I think there’s a reason to believe that we can, and there are very careful, detailed proposals as to how to do it, including ones in your new book, as well as the proposals of my friend and co-author, economist Robert Pollin, who’s worked many of these things out in great detail. Jeffrey Sachs, another fine economist, using somewhat different models, has come to pretty much the same conclusions. These are pretty much along lines of proposals of the International Energy Association, by no means a radical organization, one that grew out of the energy corporations. But they all have essentially the same picture.
There’s, in fact, even a congressional resolution by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey which outlines proposals that are pretty close to this. And I think it’s all within the range of feasibility. Their cost estimates of 2% to 3% of GDP, with feasible efforts, would not only address the crisis, but would create a more livable future, one without pollution, without traffic jams, and with more constructive, productive work, better jobs. All of this is possible.
But there are serious barriers — the fossil-fuel industries, the banks, the other major institutions, which are designed to maximize profit and not care about anything else. After all, that was the announced slogan of the neoliberal period — the economic guru Milton Friedman’s pronouncement that corporations have no responsibility to the public or to the workforce, that their total responsibility is to maximize profit for the few.
For public-relations reasons, fossil-fuel corporations like ExxonMobil often portray themselves as soulful and benevolent, working day and night for the benefit of the common good. It’s called greenwashing.
SC: Some of the most widely discussed methods for capturing and removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would consume vast quantities of biomass produced on hundreds of millions or billions of acres, thereby threatening ecosystems and food production, largely in low-income, low-emissions nations. A group of ethicists and other scholars recently wrote that a “core principle” of climate justice is that “the urgent, basic needs of poor people and poor countries ought to be secured against the effects of climate change and of measures taken to limit” climate change. That would seem to clearly rule out these “emit carbon now, capture it later” plans, and there are other examples of what we might call “climate-mitigation imperialism.” Do you think that the world may be faced with more and more of this sort of exploitation as temperatures rise? And what do you think about these proposals for bioenergy and carbon capture?
NC: It’s totally immoral, but it’s standard practice. Where does waste go? It doesn’t go in your backyard, it goes to places like Somalia that can’t protect themselves. The European Union, for example, has been dumping its atomic wastes and other pollution off the coast of Somalia, harming the fishing areas and local industries. It’s horrendous.
The latest IPCC report calls for an end to fossil fuels. The hope is that we can avert the worst and reach a sustainable economy within a couple of decades. If we don’t do that, we will reach irreversible tipping points and the people most vulnerable — those least responsible for the crisis — will suffer first and most severely from the consequences. People living in the plains of Bangladesh, for example, where powerful cyclones cause extraordinary damage. People living in India, where the temperature can go over 120 degrees Fahrenheit in summer. Many may witness parts of the world becoming unlivable.
There were recent reports by Israeli geoscientists condemning its government for not taking account of the effect of the policies they are pursuing, including developing new gas fields in the Mediterranean. They developed an analysis that indicated that, within a couple of decades, over the summer, the Mediterranean would be reaching the heat of a Jacuzzi, and the low-lying plains would be inundated. People would still live in Jerusalem and Ramallah, but flooding would impact much of the population. Why not change course to prevent this?
SC: The neoclassical economics underlying these injustices lives on in economic climate models known as “integrated assessment models,” which come down to cost-benefit analyses based on the so-called social cost of carbon. With these projections, are economists seeking to gamble away the right of future generations to a decent life?
NC: We have no right to gamble with the lives of the people in South Asia, in Africa, or people in vulnerable communities in the United States. You want to do analyses like that in your academic seminar? OK, go ahead. But don’t dare translate it into policy. Don’t dare to do that.
There’s a striking difference between physicists and economists. Physicists don’t say, hey, let’s try an experiment that might destroy the world, because it would be interesting to see what would happen. But economists do that. On the basis of neoclassical theories, they instituted a major revolution in world affairs in the early 1980s that took off with Carter, and accelerated with Reagan and Thatcher. Given the power of the United States compared with the rest of the world, the neoliberal assault, a major experiment in economic theory, had a devastating result. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Their motto has been, “Government is the problem.”
That doesn’t mean you eliminate decisions; it just means you transfer them. Decisions still have to be made. If they’re not made by government, which is, in a limited way, under popular influence, they will be made by concentrations of private power, which have no accountability to the public. And following the Friedman instructions, have no responsibility to the society that gave them the gift of incorporation. They have only the imperative of self-enrichment.
Margaret Thatcher then comes along and says there is no such thing as society, just atomized individuals who are somehow managing in the market. Of course, there is a small footnote that she didn’t bother to add: for the rich and powerful, there is plenty of society. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, ALEC, all kinds of others. They get together, they defend themselves, and so on. There is plenty of society for them, just not for the rest of us. Most people have to face the ravages of the market. And, of course, the rich don’t. Corporations count on a powerful state to bail them out every time there’s some trouble. The rich have to have the powerful state — as well as its police powers — to be sure nobody gets in their way.
SC: Where do you see hope?
NC: Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they’re doing. “How dare you,” she said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone’s consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.
We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be. If we’d come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the U.S. hadn’t been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don’t have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works, translated into scores of languages. He has been institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1976. His most recent books are Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance, with Marv Waterstone, and Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, with Robert Pollin and C.J. Polychroniou.
Stan Cox, senior scientist at The Land Institute, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, just published, and The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, featuring a forward by Noam Chomsky.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
Sen. Bernie Sanders Says 'the Very Fabric of American Democracy Is in Danger' if Progressive Priorities Are Left Out of Biden's Social-Spending Bill
Bryan Metzger, Business Insider
Metzger writes: "Sanders said progressive priorities in the 'Build Back Better' plan were crucial to US democracy."
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the progressive firebrand and chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said on Wednesday that American democracy would be imperiled if key progressive priorities were left out of the "Build Back Better" reconciliation bill, which is central to President Joe Biden's domestic agenda.
Sanders made the comments to a group of reporters at the Capitol as Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema met with White House officials in a nearby room. Following questions from reporters about the status of various provisions in the bill that are vulnerable to cuts, Sanders emphasized his stance on the issues.
"Let me just say a few words," Sanders said. "Sometimes, when we're inside the beltway, we lose track of reality and where the American people are.
"So let me repeat. The American people are very clear about what they want their government to do."
He then listed progressive priorities like lowering prescription-drug costs; expanding Medicare to cover vision, hearing and dental health; taxing the rich; and addressing the climate crisis.
"The challenge that we face in this really unusual moment in American history is whether we have the courage to stand with the American people and take on very powerful special interests," Sanders said. "And I'm going to do everything that I can support the president's agenda and make sure that we do just that."
Sanders then raised his voice.
"If we fail - in my view, if the American people do not believe that government can work for them and is dominated by powerful special interests, the very fabric of American democracy is in danger," he said. "People will no longer believe have faith that their government represents them. That's what this issue is about."
Democrats had hoped to pass both the Build Back Better bill and the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill this week before Biden traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, on Thursday for the UN's COP26 climate-crisis conference, which appears unlikely.
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Black Lives Matter protesters call for justice for George Floyd. (photo: Getty)
'I Had a Big Gasp': George Floyd Jurors Speak on the Trial, the Video and the Verdict
Gloria Oladipo, Guardian UK
Oladipo writes: "Jurors in the landmark George Floyd murder trial spoke about the life-altering case and how the experience still affects them."
In a CNN interview, seven jurors reflect on the trauma of seeing the cellphone recording and how they arrived at their decision
Jurors in the landmark George Floyd murder trial spoke about the life-altering case and how the experience still affects them, in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
Seven jury members, out of a total 12, sat down with CNN’s Don Lemon for their first and only interview since the trial, where Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in April 2021.
“It is definitely in my spirit and it will always be there,” Sherri Belton Hardeman said of the video depicting George Floyd’s death.
Another juror, Nicole Deters, added: “We got here because of systemic racism within the system, right, because of what’s been going on. That’s how we got to a courtroom in the first place. But when it came down to all three verdicts, it was based on the evidence and the facts 100%.”
International protests against racial injustice and police brutality erupted after the murder of Floyd, a Black man, by Chauvin, a white police officer, was recorded on a cellphone camera and shared widely. Chauvin had pinned Floyd to the ground with his knee for more than nine minutes outside a grocery store after police responded to a claim that Floyd had tried to spend a fake $20 bill.
Many of the jurors recounted their experience watching the video in court, the first time some of them has seen the footage.
“It bothered me so much,” said Jodi Doud who became withdrawn from family and friends while she served as a juror on the Chauvin trial. “How could somebody do that to someone else? And it was a slow death. It wasn’t just a gunshot and they’re dead.
“It still, to this day, is having effects on me,” added Doud.
“I had a big gasp,” said Belton Hardeman. “I’ve never experienced anything like that before. I don’t think any of us have. It was very, very traumatic. And it just hurt – just hurt my whole soul, my whole body. And I felt pain for his family.”
In the interview, the jurors revealed more information about their deliberation process, which lasted more than 10 hours over two days, after jurors heard about three weeks of testimony.
“The first thing we did was, one, we took off our [face] masks and then we exchanged names,” said Deters.
“Some of us felt a little bit eager because we had been holding all this in for three and a half weeks,” noted Brandon Mitchell.
After casting a first round of what would be many votes, jurors began going through the different arguments on both sides, using a whiteboard to organize their thoughts.
During deliberations, as group members were still debating testimony that they had heard, the group had what they described as a “lightbulb moment”, when Doud asked jurors if the intended act of harm could also be the fact that Chauvin failed to provide life support to Floyd after he became unresponsive.
“This is not what he did but more or less what he didn’t do,” Doud added, referring to Chauvin. “He did not provide life saving measures for George Floyd when he knew that the guy was in pain or needed medical attention.”
Belton Hardeman said she had been affected by the Minneapolis police department’s slogan she heard in court: “In our custody, in our care”.
“George Floyd was in their custody,” she said. “He was never in their care. And that for me … it just hit hard. I don’t feel like they ever cared for him,” she said.
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America's billionaires saw their collective fortunes soar more than 70% to more than $5 trillion during the pandemic. (photo: AP)
Billionaires' Wealth Has Soared 70% in the Pandemic. That's One Reason Why Democrats Wanted to Tax Them.
Tami Luhby, CNN
Luhby writes: "Already massively wealthy, America's billionaires saw their collective fortunes soar more than 70% to more than $5 trillion during the pandemic."
Already massively wealthy, America's billionaires saw their collective fortunes soar more than 70% to more than $5 trillion during the pandemic.
That's one reason why congressional Democrats were zeroing in earlier this week on this elite group of roughly 700 people to help pay for their massive social spending package. They abandoned the proposal after facing resistance from several moderate party members.
The skyrocketing stock market has helped push billionaires' net worth up by more than $2 trillion since the start of the pandemic through mid-October, according to a recent report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality, which analyzed Forbes data.
Their windfall came at the same time as Covid-19 wreaked financial havoc on tens of millions of Americans, particularly those in the lower-income tiers.
Billionaires' wealth gains over the past 19 months alone would be enough to pay for President Joe Biden's proposal to bolster the nation's social safety net, said Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness.
"And they'd be as rich as they were beforehand," he said.
The number of US billionaires also rose during the pandemic to 745, up from 614 in March 2020, according to the review of Forbes data by the left-leaning groups.
Topping the list is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and the wealthiest American. As of Thursday, his net worth had soared more than 1,000% to nearly $274 billion from March 18, 2020. The entrepreneur amassed his fortune through his Tesla shares and his majority stake in the privately held SpaceX, which he also leads.
Next up is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $197 billion, up more than 74% since the start of the pandemic.
And rounding out the top 3 is Microsoft founder Bill Gates with a $38 billion fortune that has increased 39%.
Taxing billionaires
The Democrats briefly turned to the billionaire tax after Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema scuttled their initial plans to pay for the budget reconciliation package by raising the corporate tax rate and the top marginal individual income and capital gains rates.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, released on Wednesday the details of the complicated and controversial plan that he's been working on for at least two years.
The proposal would have taxed billionaires on the gain in value of certain assets every year, instead of only at the time of sale, as is currently done. The rich often borrow against these holdings to build more wealth and fund their lifestyles, while avoiding adding to their annual income tax tab.
The tax would have only hit roughly 700 people -- those with more than $1 billion in assets or with reported income of more than $100 million for three consecutive years.
For tradable assets, such as stocks, billionaires would have paid capital gains tax, currently 23.8%, on the increase in value and taken deductions for losses annually.
Non-tradable assets, such as real estate and interest in businesses, would not have been taxed annually. Instead, billionaires would have paid capital gains tax, plus an interest charge, when they sold the holding.
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U.S. Border Patrol agent Carlos Rivera guides migrants to be processed after they attempted to cross the border from Mexico into Sunland Park, N.M., September 17, 2021. (photo: Paul Ratje/Reuters)
"Shadow Units": How Secretive Border Patrol Teams Shield Agents From Accountability
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "A human rights network of 60 organizations working along the U.S.-Mexico border released a letter to Congress on Wednesday urging them to investigate 'shadow police units' that have helped cover up beatings and killings by Border Patrol agents for more than three decades."
A human rights network of 60 organizations working along the U.S.-Mexico border released a letter to Congress on Wednesday urging them to investigate “shadow police units” that have helped cover up beatings and killings by Border Patrol agents for more than three decades. The shadow units, identified in the letter as “Border Patrol Critical Incident Teams,” are said to possibly be “the largest and longest standing shadow police unit that is operating today in the federal government.” New details came to light when attorneys investigating the 2010 Border Patrol killing of Mexican father Anastasio Hernández Rojas found a secretive special investigative unit tampered with and even destroyed evidence in the case to shield the agents involved. Investigative journalist John Carlos Frey, who reported on the case and helped uncover the shadow groups, says agents “tampered with evidence, they obstructed justice, and they violated the law,” adding that Border Patrol is being permitted to “investigate itself without any oversight.”
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.
Human rights advocates are calling on Congress to investigate how “shadow police units” along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped cover up beatings and murders by Border Patrol agents for more than three decades.
New details came to light when attorneys investigating the 2010 Border Patrol killing of Mexican father Anastasio Hernández Rojas found a secretive special investigative unit tampered with and even destroyed evidence in the case to shield the agents involved. Rojas was beaten and shocked to death by the agents after he tried to cross the border to return to San Diego, California, where he had lived for 25 years, to be with his five children. Rojas lay on the ground handcuffed at the San Ysidro Port of Entry as agents beat him with batons and shocked him with a stun gun. He died at the hospital several days later. The San Diego Coroner’s Office classified Anastasio’s death as a homicide, concluding he suffered a heart attack, as well as, quote, “bruising to his chest, stomach, hips, knees, back, lips, head and eyelids, five broken ribs, and a damaged spine.”
After the assault, Border Patrol never notified San Diego police of the incident. Instead, it’s now clear that it had its own Critical Incident Team — that’s CIT — control witness lists, remove language in a report that described Rojas as being compliant during his arrest. Agents were also at the hospital directing doctors who treated Rojas before he died.
Democracy Now! spoke with Anastasio Hernández Rojas’s brother Bernardo in 2016.
BERNARDO HERNÁNDEZ ROJAS: [translated] Anastasio was murdered, he was tortured, on the 28th of May, 2010. Five years have elapsed, and we’ve not found justice. During these five years, we have been fighting for justice, and they have not paid attention to us. … During these five years, we have also met other people who have gone through the same thing, and many very similar things continue to happen at the border. We want this to stop. We want them to stop these injustices. And we want a response from the government as to what’s happening with my brother’s case and why have they not responded with good news.
AMY GOODMAN: With the new details in this case and others now brought to light, on Thursday the Southern Border Communities Coalition sent a letter to Congress to, quote, “sound the alarm on the dangerous overreach of the illegal operation of U.S. Border Patrol’s unlawful Critical Incident Teams.”
For more, we’re joined in Los Angeles by award-winning investigative journalist John Carlos Frey, who’s reported extensively on human rights abuses at the U.S.-Mexico border, author of Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the case we just went through, in light of the new information that you’re uncovering about these shadow police units within U.S. Border Patrol?
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Yes, of course. It’s good to be with you, Amy. And, you know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and it is shocking.
Within the actual agency of the U.S. Border Patrol, there is an investigative body called CIT, the Critical Incident Team. They are tasked with investigating incidents that involve Border Patrol, and it can be anything from a car accident to, in this case, an individual who’s killed at the hands of the U.S. Border Patrol.
In this particular case of Anastasio Hernández Rojas, Border Patrol agents deleted video. They collected evidence at the scene. They were present in the hospital when Anastasio was being treated. They were present at the autopsy. They fudged reports. They deleted reports. They coached their own agents on what kind of testimony they were to give. They were present at every one of the depositions. They made sure that they were the victims in this case. And when I say that, what I mean is that Border Patrol agents — CIT team agents make sure that Border Patrol agents are looked at as the victims in any sort of an incident, meaning that they are allowed then to use lethal force, if a Border Patrol agent has rocks thrown at them or, in the case of Anastasio, they allege that Anastasio was violent and that he was kicking and punching, and he needed to be subdued. If we take a look at the videotape, that’s not actually what happened. He’s handcuffed. He’s prone on the ground. His face is down. Agents are on top of him. But if you read the reports in this case that were prepared by CIT, Anastasio was a violent man and needed to be subdued.
So, anywhere from the beginning of the investigation to the end of the investigation, CIT team members tampered with evidence, they obstructed justice, and they violated the law, not just because of what they did with the actual evidence in the case, but they don’t even have an authority to exist. There is not a police agency, whether it’s a municipal police agency or a federal police agency, that gets to investigate itself without any oversight. And that’s what the Border Patrol is doing right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what has been uncovered and what exactly the group on the border — the letter that has been sent to Congress.
JOHN CARLOS FREY: Yeah. I was actually — you know, it’s something that a reporter doesn’t usually do — working with nongovernmental organizations like the Southern Border Communities Coalition, but I had handed them evidence, because they would like to get a congressional hearing off the ground.
One of the pieces of evidence that I had uncovered was a PowerPoint presentation that was actually produced by the U.S. Border Patrol about these secret police agencies or investigative bodies within the Border Patrol. And in that PowerPoint, prepared by the Border Patrol, it’s very specific as to what these CIT team members are supposed to be doing at an incident or where a Border Patrol agent is involved. They are there to “mitigate” litigation. That is a quote. Border Patrol agents who investigate an incident are there to mitigate litigation. They’re not there to collect evidence. They’re not there to make sure that they are looking at the facts. But they’re there to make sure that Border Patrol agents are not prosecuted. That’s one of their primary goals.
They’re also there, as I said earlier, to make sure that Border Patrol agents look like they were the ones that were accosted or that they themselves are the victims, so that any use of force is warranted. They are there to make sure that Border Patrol get the right spin and make sure that they get their message out properly. This is in the PowerPoint presentation prepared by Border Patrol. Their own critical investigative teams are there to mitigate any sort of liability that makes the Border Patrol look bad or brings any kind of charges against them. So, I’m not sure how objective they are out in the field. And as we were talking about in the case of Anastasio, it is rife with corruption.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the case of 16-year-old José Antonio Elena Rodríguez, who was killed in Nogales, Mexico, by U.S. Border Patrol agent Lonnie Swartz, who fired his gun from the U.S. side of the border through the wall. The teenager, who was unarmed, died face-down on the sidewalk just a couple of blocks from his home. After nearly five years of legal delays, José Antonio’s mother, Araceli Rodríguez, and his grandmother brought Swartz to trial for second-degree murder in 2017. A Tucson, Arizona, jury acquitted him and were deadlocked on manslaughter charges. In a second trial in 2018, Swartz was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. During the court proceedings, it was revealed a local Border Patrol special investigative unit had collected all the evidence for the FBI. We were with José Antonio’s mother, Araceli, in Nogales in 2019, in Sonora, at the site where her son was murdered.
AMY GOODMAN: The Border Patrol agent said he feared for his life. He would have been standing, oh, 30 feet above your son walking here on the sidewalk. Can you respond to the agent saying he feared for his life?
ARACELI RODRÍGUEZ: [translated] That Lonnie Swartz lied the whole time. He tried to defend something indefensible. There was a video, because there’s a camera right there. There was a video that was allegedly lost where it showed Lonnie Swartz murdering my son. What he says about his life being in danger is not true. Everyone who comes here and sees the height of this wall realizes that Lonnie Swartz was lying about my son throwing rocks. His own co-workers at the trial said that his life was not in danger, that he could have stepped away. It was never proven that José Antonio was throwing rocks.
AMY GOODMAN: And there is Antonio’s mother, Araceli, in Nogales, Sonora, in 2019 at the site where her son was murdered. She’s standing right in front of a picture of her son, as we investigated this case at the time. John Carlos Frey, this case, among others, is referenced in the letter to Congress. Can you talk about the information that came out around the CIT units and what they did in covering this up?
JOHN CARLOS FREY: It is a very disturbing case and a very disturbing trend here — a 15-year-old boy shot in the back, unarmed, standing in Mexico, while the U.S. Border Patrol agent is standing in the United States, found not guilty, basically.
Lonnie Swartz is the only Border Patrol agent prosecuted for misfiring his weapon in the entire history of the U.S. Border Patrol. That’s the only person who’s been prosecuted. There were a couple of other agents who were prosecuted in Texas during the Bush administration for firing their weapon at a drug dealer — they hit him in the back — but this is the first time in U.S. Border Patrol history that anybody has been prosecuted for the death of an individual. In the past 15 years, over a hundred individuals have been killed at the hands of the U.S. Border Patrol at the border, and not one of them has been brought to prosecution.
That is what CIT is doing. They are preparing evidence. They are doctoring evidence. They are tampering with evidence. They are deleting evidence. They are making sure that agents themselves look like they are firing their weapons properly, that everything they do is on the up and up, and there’s nothing to see here.
In the case that we’re talking about, there was an unarmed boy who was shot in the back. There were two surveillance video cameras that are anchored right on the top of the border fence. They’re pointed right where the incident occurred. That video is missing. We don’t know what happened to it, because CIT prepared the investigation. The Border Patrol prepared that investigation. So, you know, if we’re talking about making sure that they defend themselves against civil liability, well, of course, they’re going to delete that video.
AMY GOODMAN: John Carlos Frey, we want to thank you for being with us, award-winning investigative journalist, reported extensively on immigration, author of the book Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border.
Coming up, what does the late great Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison have to do with the Virginia governor’s race? Stay with us.
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Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, seen during a news conference in Brasilia last week, has insisted that he is innocent of the charges proposed against him. (photo: Evaristo Sa/Getty)
Brazil's Senate Recommends Charging Bolsonaro With Mishandling Pandemic
Scott Neuman, NPR
Neuman writes: "Brazil's Senate has voted to recommend charging President Jair Bolsonaro with 'crimes against humanity' over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 600,000 people across the country."
Brazil's Senate has voted to recommend charging President Jair Bolsonaro with "crimes against humanity" over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 600,000 people across the country.
That charge and several others were backed by lawmakers and forwarded for possible indictment. They come at the conclusion of a six-month investigation of the government's handling of the pandemic. The president has insisted that he is innocent, calling the panel's work a "joke," and it appeared unlikely that the country's prosecutor-general, Augusto Aras — a Bolsonaro appointee — will take up the recommendation.
The 11-member Senate panel voted 7-4 on Tuesday to recommend the charges, which also include inciting an epidemic, as well as violating health protocols, falsification of private documents, irregular use of public funds, violation of social rights and breach of presidential decorum, according to The Associated Press.
"The chaos of Jair Bolsonaro's government will enter history as the lowest level of human destitution," Sen. Renan Calheiros said, according to Reuters. Brazil, with a population of about 213 million, has recorded more than 606,000 deaths from COVID-19 — second only to the U.S.
As the toll has risen, Bolsonaro's popularity has waned. His management of the crisis has frequently appeared cavalier and dismissive, with his repeated comparisons of the deadly virus to the flu and an insistence that claims of its danger are "exaggerated." The president has also derided governors and mayors as "criminals" for imposing lockdowns and restrictions to control the spread of the virus.
Like former U.S. President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro contracted COVID-19, but subsequently recovered. Also like Trump, he touted an unproven remedy, hydroxychloroquine, as a prophylactic and treatment for the virus.
One of the charges forward by the Senate panel is "charlatanism" for Bolsonaro's promotion of the dubious drug.
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An Indigenous farmer shows his stunted corn on his Hopi Reservation plot. A lack of water for irrigation was due to a drought combined with coal company Peabody Energy pumping water from an ancient aquifer beneath Hopi & Navajo lands, in 2001. (photo: William F. Campbell/Getty)
Dispossession, Forced Relocation Left Indigenous People to Suffer Ravages of Climate Crisis, Study Confirms
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "A major research project published Thursday in Science confirmed and quantified what Indigenous peoples have long believed to be true: ethnic cleansing by European settlers and the U.S. government forced tribes onto marginal lands, resulting in Indigenous peoples across what is now the U.S. being disproportionately exposed to the climate crisis."
A major research project published Thursday in Science confirmed and quantified what Indigenous peoples have long believed to be true: ethnic cleansing by European settlers and the U.S. government forced tribes onto marginal lands, resulting in Indigenous peoples across what is now the U.S. being disproportionately exposed to the climate crisis.
Researchers assembled and assessed the historic lands and dispossession of 380 tribes spanning a period from the 1500s through the 19th century. The total land holdings were obliterated. White settlers dispossessed Indigenous tribes of 98.9% of their total lands.
Today, federally- or state-recognized tribes hold just 2.6% of their historical lands. "Whether it's within the U.S. context or in other parts of the world," Kyle Whyte, an author of the study, environmental justice professor at the University of Michigan, and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, told Grist, "Indigenous people are calling for recognition that the reason why they are often facing more severe climate threats than other populations is because of the impact of land dispossession."
Forced relocation hundreds of miles from their ancestral homes also exposed tribes to extreme weather far beyond what their historical lands experienced. Possibly the most extreme, the Hopi reservation in what is now northeastern Arizona endures 57 days above 100°F per year, compared to just 2 days per year on their historic lands which included higher elevations.
More extreme heat harms human health and drives up energy costs. "In the past, we used to go to the high country, where we had our summer camps. That's where we would cool off," said Nikki Cooley, co-manager of the Tribes … Climate Change Program at Northern Arizona University and a citizen of the Diné (Navajo) Nation, in what is now northern Arizona. "We don't have that, because all of the high-elevation communities are off the reservation."
While legislation currently being negotiated in Congress includes $216 million for tribal climate resilience and adaptation, of which $130 million would help Indigenous communities leave dangerous areas, the study's authors say giving the land back would go further to reparing the unknowable historic harms — echoing a long chorus of calls by the LANDBACK movement.
"There are really meaningful, deep connections that people have to place," Paul Berne Burow, one of the paper's authors and a doctoral student at Yale, said. "Returning dispossessed lands is one of the best things that can be done to begin to address these inequalities."
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