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The Wall Street Journal reports that Prince, who faces U.N. sanctions over his sketchy work in Libya and whose Blackwater guards were convicted of murder in 2014 while providing security for Americans in Iraq, told the WSJ he is charging upwards of $6,500 a seat on a private charter out of Kabul. The paper was not able to confirm whether Prince even had the capabilities to carry out private evacuations.
Other private entities are offering over ground travel despite increased checkpoints on the way to the Pakistan border. Meanwhile, efforts have stepped up to evacuate as many Americans, green card holders and eligible Afghans before the hard deadline. On Tuesday, the U.S. military began its own withdrawal preparations to be ready to remove all staff and equipment by next week.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-NJ, walks to the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the Capitol on Aug. 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo:Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
n January 2017, when Rep. Josh Gottheimer was a first-term Democrat representing a wealthy northern New Jersey district, he had an invitation to the 80th birthday party for a senior member of his state’s delegation. The region Rep. Bill Pascrell represented abutted Gottheimer’s, but it couldn’t have been more socioeconomically different, containing the working-class city of Paterson and a stretch of the Jersey Shore. Pascrell was hosting the party at a favorite hometown bar in Paterson, something of a dive on the outskirts of town called Duffy’s.
Paterson wasn’t the type of area where Gottheimer spent much time, but it wasn’t an actively dangerous spot. Not only was the bar a regular haunt of the local congressional representative, it was owned by Terry Duffy, a town freeholder, the state’s version of a city council member.
Gottheimer agreed to brave the journey to Paterson to celebrate his colleague. But when he arrived, it was clear that he’d taken a confounding set of precautions: Gottheimer was accompanied by an off-duty police officer and showed an unusual amount of bulk under his shirt.
“Are you wearing a bulletproof vest?” Pascrell asked his first-term colleague. Gottheimer acknowledged that he was but went on to say, by way of explanation, that he had been doing a ride-along earlier with the officer and had worn the vest as a result. The explanation, even were it true, failed to explain why he was still wearing the vest at the party. A round of heckling and wisecracking ensued, drawing the attention of Terry Duffy.
The freeholder was not amused. He threw Gottheimer out of his bar.
Gottheimer’s foray into Democratic caucus politics this week wasn’t much better thought out and didn’t end much differently than his foray into Paterson. After Senate Democrats approved both a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill on August 11, along with a budget resolution instructing Senate committees to write a $3.5 trillion package that would be passed using the rules of reconciliation — meaning that Republicans couldn’t filibuster it — Gottheimer announced a demand for an “immediate” vote on the infrastructure bill. That day, he got eight other Democrats to join him in signing a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlining the demand. The dark-money organization No Labels, funded by a bipartisan set of billionaires and millionaires with opaque policy interests, soon began calling them the “unbreakable nine.”
On Monday night, Gottheimer succeeded in holding together his rebellion and even gained another dissident in Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. This forced Pelosi to pull a vote on the resolution, which was bundled with a procedural vote on the infrastructure package and a voting rights measure. But by Tuesday morning, the resistance was broken. The demand for an immediate vote was placated by a promise of a vote by September 27.
The jockeying by Gottheimer was the latest effort by conservative Democrats to regain leverage over a process that has gotten away from them. The first effort to do so was the bipartisan deal itself. Though that legislation, which picked up 19 Republican votes in the Senate, is heralded as evidence that the Senate can still work despite the obstacle of the filibuster, it was the threat of passing a major piece of legislation via reconciliation — requiring a margin of 50 votes only — that galvanized the bipartisan crew to get to a deal. The hope was that the latter deal would drain support for the former. That didn’t happen, and Democrats pushed ahead with their $3.5 trillion project.
In an interview with Punchbowl News, Gottheimer said he wanted to pass the infrastructure bill quickly to get “shovels in the ground,” but his real motive became clear as negotiations unfolded. Pelosi offered the Gottheimer rebels a vote on the infrastructure bill by October 1, and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, suggested that the House could finish work on its final reconciliation package by then. It would be a tall order, but not impossible. Seeking to win back the leverage the conservative faction had recently lost, the Gottheimer group then shifted its demand to sometime earlier in September.
Gottheimer and his allies’ true motivation for insisting on an earlier vote was always baffling, according to Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. “I honestly really don’t [know] because we cannot spend infrastructure money until after the new fiscal year,” said Schakowsky, who serves in the Democratic Party’s leadership as senior chief deputy whip. “I’m mystified,” she said. “I can’t figure this out.”
Earlier on Monday, Democratic leaders painted a bleak picture of the consequences if enough lawmakers were to side with Gottheimer against the rest of their party. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland warned the caucus that defections would result in “mutually assured destruction.” That could be disastrous for the party’s agenda, because if Democrats lose their majority in 2022, they may not get it back “for 40 years,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.
The $3.5 trillion bill is the legislative vehicle that Democrats are using to pass President Joe Biden’s most ambitious goals: a Medicare expansion to include hearing, vision, and dental; paid family leave; universal preK3 and preK4; an extension of the child tax credit to 2025; and billions of dollars for clean energy and other climate initiatives. With Republicans in stark opposition, Democrats are relying on the budget reconciliation process that allows Congress to pass spending and revenue measures with a simple majority.
Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Pelosi can hardly afford any desertions since Democrats hold a slight majority in the House and Senate. Anticipating hesitation from centrists, they devised a two-track strategy to attach the $3.5 trillion package to a smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill that funds new projects for roads and bridges that moderates have long championed.
While Gottheimer may have won a face-saving victory by securing a date, his win didn’t change the underlying dynamic that gave progressives leverage in the first place: Pelosi can promise Gottheimer a vote, and might even deliver on it, but she can’t promise enough votes to pass the bill. Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have pledged to oppose the infrastructure bill if reconciliation isn’t ready, and many of them reiterated those promises on Tuesday, even as members of Congress filtered off the House floor, having just approved the procedural motion 220-212.
Following the vote, the Chamber of Commerce, an ally of No Labels and Gottheimer during the fight, applauded the crew for having “decoupled” the infrastructure bill from reconciliation by winning the promise of the vote.
Liz Morrison, co-executive director of No Labels, echoed that sentiment in a memo (italics in the original) that the group circulated privately to allies, obtained by The Intercept. Wrote Morrison:
Speaker Pelosi has now guaranteed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill by no later than September 27. This means the infrastructure bill will likely be voted on first and before any vote to pass a reconciliation bill. This is not what Pelosi wanted as both she and the Progressive Caucus had previously insisted that the Senate vote to approve the full reconciliation bill before the Speaker would bring the infrastructure bill to the floor.
The Unbreakable Nine have now broken this link as Pelosi can no longer use the infrastructure bill as leverage to force Democratic moderates to vote for a reconciliation bill. It will now rise or fall on its own merits. This is why Politico Playbook—which is the most read political newsletter in DC—just wrote that Pelosi “grossly underestimated” the Nine and that they “planted a flag in the ground for the fights to come.”
BUT, the Nine had to give up something too. They agreed to vote yes on the budget resolution that authorizes debate to begin on reconciliation. This is essentially the same thing all 50 Senate Democrats did a few weeks ago. It is just a vote to begin debate and in the end, any of the Nine can still vote against a final reconciliation bill.
But have “the Nine” really decoupled the two measures? If progressives still have the votes to sink the infrastructure bill without the accompanying reconciliation package, then the bills are not decoupled. That’s not a fundamentally different dynamic than prevailed last week.
“It has to be both, they have to be together,” said Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Intercept that the caucus’s insistence on coupling the two measures had not changed. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., agreed. “The bills will only move together,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., chair emeritus of the CPC, saying the caucus has “a strong chunk of members who will see to it.”
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, one of the “unbreakable nine” — who became 10 before being broken — told The Intercept that he wasn’t worried about progressives voting down the infrastructure bill if it broke onto its own track on September 27, because he expected to pick up Republican votes. “We’ve got at least 10, 12 Republicans,” he said, and the progressives will fall in line. “They’re going to support the president, I feel very confident.”
Gottheimer had felt equally confident. In an interview with The Atlantic, he explained that his move was an attempt to fulfill Biden’s agenda and that the White House was supportive of the effort. Asked if that was the case, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said simply: “No.”
Amazon worker. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/Getty)
arlier this year, Amazon revealed plans to install high-tech surveillance cameras in its fleet of delivery vans that are now ubiquitous in neighborhoods across the United States. The cameras watch drivers as well as the road and provide real-time audio feedback. While many of these drivers work in Amazon Prime–branded vehicles, they are not Amazon employees, but rather are employed by third-party contractors called delivery-service partners (DSPs) — an arrangement that, among other benefits, limits Amazon’s liability when accidents occur.
The surveillance technology comes from Netradyne, a California-based company that uses cameras to analyze driver activity so as to provide instant direction (“please slow down,” for instance) while also storing that data to evaluate performance in line with company metrics. In a video about Driveri, Netradyne’s platform, Karolina Haraldsdottir, a senior manager of the last-mile delivery operation at Amazon, emphasizes that the cameras are meant as a safety measure, intended to reduce collisions.
The company has cited a pilot roll-out of the cameras from last year, which they say saw accidents drop by 48 percent. The installation of Driveri is in keeping with Amazon’s roll-out of similar camera monitoring among its long-haul trucking operation.
While drivers already use Mentor, an app that tracks their activity, Driveri adds cameras, which can offer additional data for metrics. Some DSPs have told drivers to turn off Mentor because they could not meet Amazon’s productivity quotas without violating safe-driving practices. There have now been several cases of DSPs shutting down entirely after finding Amazon’s demands and conditions to be “intolerable, unconscionable, unsafe, and most importantly, unlawful,” as a letter from an attorney for one such DSP put it.
Indeed, Amazon’s policies are startlingly exacting, dictating that DSPs impose the company’s standards on details as minute as the state of drivers’ fingernails. Such is Amazon’s business model: exacting surveillance and exploitation of workers, limited liability for the company.
“Our intention in introducing this technology is to set up drivers for success,” says Haraldsdottir in the video. As she explains, certain behaviors trigger Driveri to upload recorded footage and emit an audio alert to a driver: failure to stop at a stop sign, following someone too closely, speeding, and distracted driving (there are another twelve behaviors that will trigger uploading, but no audio warning — U-turns and driver drowsiness among them). The cameras record 100 percent of the time, and can only be manually disabled when the ignition is off.
So, how is the roll-out of Driveri going?
“My direct supervisor mentioned that ‘a bunch of people’ said they were going to quit when the cameras were installed,” says one delivery driver based in Washington state. His DSP has just begun introducing the cameras into their fleet.
Should that happen, it would be far from the first case of drivers quitting over the installation of the technology.
“I think the cameras are needlessly invasive and completely unnecessary, especially given the other layers of surveillance and scrutiny placed upon us by Amazon,” he says. “Most, if not all, of my coworkers feel the same way.”
The drivers at the company were asked to sign a video-technology agreement earlier this year to pave the way for the cameras. The form appeared on Flex — the app Amazon drivers use to scan packages and follow GPS routes — without warning or discussion about it from the company.
Drivers’ concerns about the technology are multiple. First, there is the lack of privacy. Drivers cannot turn off the cameras while the ignition is on, meaning Driveri can see everything they do in the vehicle.
One driver told Business Insider that she wears adult diapers — an inability to find time to use the restroom is a frequent issue among Amazon’s delivery workforce — and worries about the camera capturing her changing into another one during her shift.
Then there are the practical concerns. Some of the workers drive step vans, which are particularly loud vehicles — a noisy engine, rattling doors. They say it’s hard to hear the device over the noise, and note that hard-of-hearing drivers won’t receive Driveri’s feedback either.
Additionally, there is the matter of new metrics for evaluating drivers’ performance. The data collected by Netradyne will help rank drivers, but that data will be released weekly, by which time it is hard for workers to correct suspected errors.
As one driver told Business Insider, “I get a ‘distracted driver’ notification even if I’m changing the radio station or drinking water.”
Drivers mention the difficulty of factoring unique situations — an animal sprinting into the road and causing them to slam on their brakes, for example — into the scores. They say such incidents are penalized on Mentor, and that there is little reason to suspect Driveri will be any different.
“I am now driving around with an inscrutable black box that surveils me and determines whether I keep my job,” says the delivery driver in Washington. While he says he sees how, in theory, some of the metrics are justifiable — “you don’t want your drivers Tokyo Drifting through neighborhoods” — in reality, aggregated on top of the layers of surveillance to which drivers already feel subject, it is “stifling, unnecessary, and ridiculous.”
“We’re all just out here trying to do our best, but we also have to contend with knowing that each week, computers spit out metrics for us which require multiple pages to properly display, and a drop in those abstract numbers could lose us jobs,” he says. “All I want to do is deliver my damn packages and go home, man.”
Roland Harris, Jacob Harris's father, holds his son's learner's permit, which he keeps in his wallet. It's the one item belonging to Jacob that wasn't taken by the police, he said. (photo: Jesse Rieser/BuzzFeed)
hortly after midnight on Jan. 11, 2019, Phoenix police pulled over a car filled with four people suspected of committing an armed robbery earlier that evening. Three seconds after one of them, Jacob Harris, hopped out and started running, officers Dave Norman and Kristopher Bertz opened fire, fatally striking him in the back.
The officers didn’t face any consequences for the shooting. Instead, prosecutors laid the blame on Harris’s three friends in the car. Even though none of them had fired a single shot, 19-year-old Sariah Busani, 20-year-old Jeremiah Triplett, and 14-year-old Johnny Reed were charged with first-degree murder. More than two years later, they remain in jail awaiting trial.
Prosecutors charged them under a legal provision unavailable in most of the country. Most states have the “felony murder” rule, which dictates that a person can be held liable if, while they are committing certain felonies, someone dies as a result of their actions or those of a coconspirator. But in at least 13 states, including Arizona, liability for deaths under the felony murder rule is extended even further: A person can be tried for the fatal actions of a third party, such as a police officer, if the death is deemed a reasonably foreseeable outcome of the crime. In Harris’s shooting, prosecutors argued that the four young adults were fleeing an armed robbery, establishing a chain of events that led to the death. Since 2010, at least 22 people nationwide have been charged with felony murder for deaths directly caused by police, according to a BuzzFeed News review. At least 13 have been convicted.
In recent months, in the aftermath of racial justice protests seeking accountability for police officers who kill, some defense attorneys and victims’ advocates have called for an end to this expanded application of felony murder law. One state, Illinois, eliminated it earlier this year. To those who oppose the practice, holding people liable for deaths caused by third parties allows prosecutors to look past the decisions and actions of law enforcement agents in fatal shootings — and lets officers who have killed people get away with minimal scrutiny.
“Charging the co-felons in these cases all too often provides police officers with cover in cases where the shootings are in violation of departmental policies or are otherwise unjustified,” said Steve Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University’s law school. “The laws are used to justify decisions not to discipline police officers.”
Five years before he opened fire on Harris, Norman fatally shot another man, Craig Uran, whose girlfriend was then arrested for felony murder.
“It helps the state cover up its own atrocities,” said Will Knight, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney in Phoenix.
In cases around the country, fatal police shootings for which no officers are charged have led to murder charges against civilians who in some cases were unarmed or not even present when officers arrived.
In 2012, 23-year-old Kody Roach was charged with murder after a stray bullet fired by police during a confrontation with him killed a bystander in Orlando. He pleaded no contest to carrying a concealed firearm in exchange for the dismissal of the murder charge and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Masonique Saunders, 16, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter in 2019 and was sentenced to three years after she was arrested for setting up a robbery that ended in an undercover Columbus police officer fatally shooting her 16-year-old boyfriend, Julius Tate. She was initially charged with felony murder even though she was not at the scene when Tate was killed.
Wyatt Cheatham, a 17-year-old, was charged with murder in December of last year when Oklahoma police killed Stavian Rodriguez after they had allegedly robbed a convenience store. Both teens had fled the store, but Rodriguez returned and was exiting a second time with a pistol when five officers shot him.
Lakeith Smith was 15 when he participated in a home robbery in Millbrook, Alabama, that ended in a shootout between a police officer and his friend, A’Donte Washington, who was killed. Smith and three other boys were charged as adults with burglary, theft, and felony murder in 2015.
Smith, who didn’t fire any shots and was attempting to flee at the time of the shooting, declined a plea deal for 25 years and decided to fight the murder charge. At trial, he was convicted and sentenced to 65 years, though an appeal reduced his sentence to 55 years. Now 21, he has been incarcerated the entirety of his 6-year-old daughter’s life.
“To turn around and charge the guys who’s running from the cops that’s shooting ... and try to say that they foresee this kind of thing happening at 15 or 16, like they’re psychic, that’s kind of crazy,” his mother, BronTina Smith, told BuzzFeed News. “The time should match the crime. He should have got time for what he done. Absolutely. But 65 years? No way.”
The 13 states where civilians can be charged with felony murder in police killings, according to an analysis by legal scholar and author of Felony Murder, Guyora Binder, are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Illinois, which was previously among those states, changed its law in February as part of a sweeping criminal justice reform bill that narrowed its felony murder rule to prohibit first-degree murder charges in cases where a third party, like a police officer, causes the death. A 2016 investigation by the Chicago Reader found at least 10 such cases in Cook County between 2010 and 2016.
However, the bill did not apply retroactively. Among those imprisoned under the previous felony murder statute is Tevin Louis, who participated in the robbery of a restaurant in Chicago’s South Side with his cousin, 19-year-old Marquise Sampson, in 2012.
Chicago police officer Antonio Dicarlo shot and killed Sampson as he was running away. Sampson was carrying a gun. Louis, who was then 19 and unarmed, had left the scene earlier and wasn’t present during the shooting, but was arrested and charged with felony murder.
“There is only one killer, and it is the officer,” said Femi Soyode, Louis’s lawyer. “What normally would have been an armed robbery for Mr. Louis turned into a murder.”
The Chicago Police Department confirmed that Dicarlo is still employed by the department but declined to comment on Sampson’s shooting.
Louis was sentenced to 32 years for armed robbery and an additional 20 years for murder. Dicarlo received a Superintendent's Award of Valor after the shooting, according to the Citizens Police Data Project.
“This application does nothing to deter crime and does nothing to prevent these sorts of tragedies,” said Shobha Mahadev, a professor at Northwestern University’s law school. “What it does do is hold people responsible for acts they do not commit instead of the acts they do.”
Filing felony murder charges can give prosecutors leverage in efforts to negotiate plea bargains with defendants. To proponents of the doctrine, it is a helpful tool to warn against the consequences of violent crimes.
Rick Romley, who headed the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office from 1989 to 2004, said the provision is necessary but that prosecutors should exercise judgment about when it’s appropriate.
“You’ve got to be very, very selective when you enforce the felony murder rule,” Romley said. “Even in the traditional cases — you know, bank robbers kill somebody in their getaway car — you still have to be real careful when you utilize it because it’s an extraordinary remedy.”
But many legal scholars and criminal justice advocates have criticized felony murder laws — particularly in cases when its application diverts accountability from officers.
“When police officers use unreasonable force and kill someone in the course of the felony,” this way of interpreting felony murder “allows prosecutors to shift blame onto the felons,” said Binder, professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law. “Prosecutors work with police every day and have to depend on them as witnesses. So we might suspect that when police make bad decisions, prosecutors feel pressure to deflect blame onto the felon.”
In March 2014, Norman, the Phoenix officer, arrived at the denouement of a police pursuit that began when 26-year-old Craig Uran stole a truck and pointed a gun at a detective, according to a police report. Jessica Hicks, Uran’s 23-year-old girlfriend, was in the passenger seat. The two ditched the vehicle, carjacked an SUV from a parking garage, and attempted to flee before an armored police vehicle rammed them, the report states. When Uran accelerated in an attempt to evade police, Norman fired his assault rifle, striking and killing him.
Hicks was charged with felony murder. Following two years in pretrial detention, she took a deal, pleading guilty to auto theft and armed robbery, and got out on supervised probation.
Investigators cleared Norman of any criminal wrongdoing, and he remained on the Phoenix police force.
On Jan. 11, 2019, he was among the officers pursuing Busani, Triplett, Reed, and Harris. Phoenix police had been surveilling them for about six hours after a string of suspected robberies, when the four pulled up to a Whataburger in Avondale, west of Phoenix, according to police records. Officers watched as Triplett and Reed climbed through the store’s drive-thru window and let Harris in the front door. With a pellet gun, they demanded the cashier open the safe in the back, police alleged.
They left the Whataburger, tailed by unmarked police cars and a fixed-wing aircraft. Norman stopped their car using a grappling device on his cruiser. An officer threw a flash grenade. That’s when Harris got out of the car and ran. Officers Norman and Kristopher Bertz opened fire, hitting him in the back. Though the police report from that night said that Harris turned around and pointed a gun at officers before he was shot, prosecutors later retracted this statement in court but maintained that Harris did have a gun.
He was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later.
A Phoenix Police Department spokesperson declined to comment on Uran’s and Harris’s shootings, citing pending litigation. Bertz is still employed by the department, the spokesperson said. Norman retired in 2020, according to a disability claim he filed with the city.
Norman didn’t respond to BuzzFeed News’ questions regarding his career and record of killings. But on July 18 of this year, he appeared on an episode of Blue Line Millennial, a podcast about law enforcement hosted by an unnamed Phoenix police officer, to reflect on his 23-year career on the force.
“When you’re out being proactive, that’s when you get your big uses of forces; that’s when you get involved in your shootings,” Norman tells the host. “But we were young, dude, and I didn’t always do it right.”
During his years with the department, Norman shot four people, killing three. Bertz fatally shot two people, according to a police shooting database compiled by the Arizona Republic.
“The majority of my career, you get an officer-involved shooting and get three days off. So you kind of hope it’s on your Friday,” Norman jokes on the podcast.
Norman now runs a company that provides tactical training to law enforcement officers.
Meanwhile, Busani, Triplett, and Reed remain incarcerated, facing charges that could put them in prison for life.
In the two years since the shooting, Harris’s father, Roland Harris, said he has refused to help county attorneys prosecute the case.
“Why would I want to participate in you guys convicting innocent kids instead of going after the people that did it?” he told BuzzFeed News. “Call me when you’re convicting the police officers.”
Harris is currently suing the city of Phoenix for alleged civil rights violations in his son’s killing. The lawsuit claims that the city is liable because both Norman and Bertz were involved in previous shootings and were neither trained nor disciplined properly. Of the more than 240 police shootings in Phoenix since 2011, only once has the county attorney charged an officer with a crime. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced an investigation into use of force by the Phoenix Police Department.
Jennifer Liewer, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, said that the current county attorney, Allister Adel, takes a different approach than her predecessor, Bill Montgomery, who oversaw the charging of Busani, Jeremiah, and Triplett: “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” Liewer said of Adel’s position on the use of felony murder charges.
However, while dismissing the charges against them would be within the discretion of Adel’s office, Liewer said that would be “a pretty drastic move” and declined to comment on whether the county attorney was considering doing so.
Harris’s father said he will continue to call for the officers who shot his son to be charged.
“They took my son’s life away. I’m not going to stand by idly and watch them take away the life of three other kids,” he said. “Not in my son’s name.”
Gavin Newsom greets volunteers who were working the phone banks in support of voting against the governor's recall at Hecho en Mexico restaurant in East Los Angeles. (photo: Genaro Molino/LA Times)
hen Gavin Newsom was first elected governor of California in 2018, he captured a greater share of the vote than any other Democrat in state history. And he has remained broadly popular, despite a global pandemic, economic catastrophe, and a scandalously ill-timed visit to the Michelin-starred restaurant the French Laundry.
But with California’s gubernatorial recall election under way, Newsom is fighting for his political life. The Democratic governor of a deep blue state could narrowly lose his seat to a fringe rightwing radio host – in large part due to inertia and apathy among voters.
Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one in California – but while the former are distracted and disengaged this year, the latter are riled up, political strategists and pollsters say. By voting at higher rates, Republicans could capture the governor’s seat for the first time in a decade.
Only 36% of all registered voters want to oust Newsom, but that number rises to 47% when polling likely voters, according to a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. And a recent CBS News poll found that 72% of Republican voters were “very motivated” to participate in the recall, while just 61% of Democrats felt the same.
“Turnout is likely to be far higher among Republicans than Democrats and ‘no party preference’ voters. And, since nearly all Republicans favor Newsom’s ouster, a larger proportion of likely voters are voting yes,” said Mark DiCamillo, the poll’s director.
Newsom spent the past few months characterizing the recall effort as a fringe, Republican “distraction” and kicked off his “Vote No” recall campaign in earnest just one month before the 14 September deadline to return ballots. Now he and the Democratic party are scrambling to mobilize voters. “People, we implore you: please vote,” he pleaded at a recent campaign event in Los Angeles.
“Newsom doesn’t have to worry about the Democratic base voting for the recall,” said Dan Schnur, a politics professor who has advised Republican candidates. “He has to worry about them not voting at all.”
The dynamics of the race are in part due to California’s peculiar recall system. The ballot asks two questions. First, should the governor be recalled? And if so, who should be governor? If more than 50% vote yes on the first question, the candidate with the most votes on question two becomes governor. That means that if 49.9% of voters support Newsom’s staying in office, he could be replaced by a candidate earning far fewer votes, such as the Republican frontrunner and rightwing radio host Larry Elder, who leads the polls among replacement candidates with just 18% support.
“They’re hoping that Democrats are just not interested enough,” said James Lance Taylor, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco, of the crowded Republican field. “That not enough Democrats will return the ballots, allowing Elder to sneak in the back door and become governor of California.”
Democrats up and down the state are growing increasingly nervous about that possibility.
“I’m very concerned by the close poll numbers and very concerned with the fact that folks seem distracted or unaware,” said Sydney Kamlager, a Democratic state senator and vice-chair of the California legislative Black caucus who has been urging constituents to vote against the recall.
Amid a still-raging pandemic and devastating wildfires, many Californians are too preoccupied to pay attention, said Christian Arana, a vice-president of the Latino Community Foundation. And that’s especially true for the Black and Latino voters who help propel Democrats to power year after year. Polls suggest that white, conservative voters will dominate the recall, while voters of color stay home.
“Latino communities are still being affected by this virus, especially with a Delta variant going on. We’ve continued to see deaths within our community,” Arana said. “This recall election is just not on our mind, because we’re so busy dealing with the pains and traumas of this virus, and its economic consequences as well.”
Latinos account for 39% of the population, and about 28% of registered voters. While Latinos voted for Newsom by an almost 2-1 margin in 2018, the CBS News poll found that among likely voters, about half of Hispanic voters would vote to recall Newsom.
So now Governor Gavin Newsom is crisscrossing the state to make his case, meeting with a small business owner in San Diego’s Barrio Logan and with supporters at a Los Angeles Mexican restaurant. He’s made an appeal to progressives alongside the US representatives Karen Bass of Los Angeles and Barbara Lee of Oakland. And this week, he’s having Kamala Harris join him on the campaign trail in the hope that the vice-president can energize voters.
“The stakes of this election couldn’t be higher,” he said in a statement announcing the vice-president’s arrival.
So far, Newsom and Democrats have focused more on those “stakes” than almost anything else – characterizing Elder’s ascent as a worst-case scenario. “Why is it important to focus on Larry? Well, to put in perspective what’s at stake here,” Newsom said at a campaign event. “Some say he’s the most Trump of the candidates. I say he’s even more extreme than Trump.”
But among an electorate that is burned out on fear and trauma, the tactic could backfire, political strategists said. “Campaigns need to provide a message of hope,” said Arana. “A reason for communities to stand with them.”
At least half a million children under the age of five are in danger of being acutely malnourished, the UN says. (photo: Tsiory Andriantsoarana/WFP)
Madagascar is on the brink of experiencing the world's first "climate change famine", according to the United Nations, which says tens of thousands of people are already suffering "catastrophic" levels of hunger and food insecurity after four years without rain.
he drought - the worst in four decades - has devastated isolated farming communities in the south of the country, leaving families to scavenge for insects to survive.
"These are famine-like conditions and they're being driven by climate not conflict," said the UN World Food Programme's Shelley Thakral.
The UN estimates that 30,000 people are currently experiencing the highest internationally recognised level of food insecurity - level five - and there are concerns the number affected could rise sharply as Madagascar enters the traditional "lean season" before harvest.
"This is unprecedented. These people have done nothing to contribute to climate change. They don't burn fossil fuels… and yet they are bearing the brunt of climate change," said Ms Thakral.
In the remote village of Fandiova, in Amboasary district, families recently showed a visiting WFP team the locusts that they were eating.
"I clean the insects as best I can but there's almost no water," said Tamaria, a mother of four, who goes by one name.
"My children and I have been eating this every day now for eight months because we have nothing else to eat and no rain to allow us to harvest what we have sown," she added.
"Today we have absolutely nothing to eat except cactus leaves," said Bole, a mother of three, sitting on the dry earth.
She said her husband had recently died of hunger, as had a neighbour, leaving her with two more children to feed.
"What can I say? Our life is all about looking for cactus leaves, again and again, to survive."
Improve water management
Although Madagascar experiences frequent droughts and is often affected by the change in weather patterns caused by El Niño, experts believe climate change can be directly linked to the current crisis.
"With the latest IPCC report we saw that Madagascar has observed an increase in aridity. And that is expected to increase if climate change continues.
"In many ways this can be seen as a very powerful argument for people to change their ways," said Dr Rondro Barimalala, a Madagascan scientist working at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Viewing the same atmospheric data at Santa Barbara University in California, director of the Climate Hazards Center, Chris Funk, confirmed the link with "warming in the atmosphere", and said the Madagascan authorities needed to work to improve water management.
"We think there's a lot that can be done in the short term. We can often forecast when there's going to be above normal rains and farmers can use that information to increase their crop production. We're not powerless in the face of climate change," he added.
The current drought's impact is now being felt in larger towns in southern Madagascar too, with many children forced to beg on the streets for food.
"The prices in the market are going up - three or four times. People are selling their land to get some money to buy food," added Tsina Endor, who works for a charity, Seed, in Tolanaro.
Her colleague, Lomba Hasoavana, said he and many others had taken to sleeping in their cassava fields to try to protect their crops from people desperate for food, but this had become too dangerous.
"You could risk your life. I find it really, really hard because every day I have to think about feeding myself and my family," he said, adding: "Everything is so unpredictable about the weather now. It's a huge, huge question mark - what will happen tomorrow?"
The vulnerability of meat industry workers was laid bare by the pandemic, campaigners say. (photo: Angus Mordant/Getty)
oth the planet and US politics have heated up in tandem over recent decades, but few sectors have stewed in controversy quite like America’s beef industry. Four super-powered meatpackers control more than 80% of the US beef market, an extraordinary concentration of market power that the Biden administration is not happy about.
A recent executive action signed by the president aims to increase competition in the beef industry, with the White House noting that, over the past five years, “farmers’ share of the price of beef sales has dropped by more than a quarter – from 51.5% to 37.3% – while the price of beef has risen”.
But how were the big four meatpackers able to capture so much of the US beef processing capacity? They had help.
When explaining the history of consolidation in US meatpacking, it is normal to begin in the age of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. In the wake of Sinclair’s muckraking exposé on the industry of the time, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act, aimed at cleaning up the meat supply for consumer health and challenging the nearly unrestricted power of these players.
Josh Specht, an environmental and business historian, offers another interpretation of this starting point. “These acts accepted the state of the meatpacking industry as of 1906,” he writes in his book, Red Meat Republic. “Big meatpacking was no longer questioned, it was regulated.”
A third act, passed in 1921, the Packers and Stockyards Act, was specifically intended to break up the vertical integration of the big companies by forcing them to sell off their interests in businesses that owned, for example, railroads or refrigerated trucks.
This did much to check the power of big packers, Specht says, though labour movements of the 1940s and 50s were just as important. But eventually the industry would revive the old playbook of earning steep profit through immense scale and labour exploitation, and today, all four of the largest beef processors of Sinclair’s time are still around in some form.
Today’s big four – Tyson, JBS USA, Cargill and National Beef – are more than just the heirs to the American meatpacking legacy. They are also multinational giants, two of which are majority-owned by Brazilian companies. In fact, in 2020, many packers were criticised for the amount of meat that was exported at a time when processing was limited due to Covid outbreaks in processing plants, driving up prices and creating shortages at grocery stores that affected US consumers.
But today’s big four didn’t grow into behemoths overnight. In the mid-1970s, they controlled as little as 20% of the meatpacking market. What changed? The answer, in part, lies beyond the meatpacking sector, with corn farmers and grocery stores.
It’s no accident that the 1970s marked the re-ascendance of a concentrated meatpacking industry. The early and mid-70s were a period of explosive growth and high demand for agricultural products, when farmers across the country were experiencing some of the highest relative incomes seen in US agriculture, before or since.
During this time, farmers and ranchers with cash to hand and access to cheap financing were looking to make investments in their agricultural businesses that would improve cashflow. Especially in the Great Plains, cattle feedlots were just the ticket, requiring relatively limited amounts of land. These years witnessed a boom in the number and size of feedlots, along with advances in antibiotics, feed and cattle genetic technologies.
By the late 70s and early 80s, market conditions led to a dramatic oversupply of grain, and though many farmers suffered historic losses, those who had invested in feedlots were able to buy cheap feed to fatten cattle in their new or expanded confined animal feed operations. These factory-like facilities did what they were meant to do – they helped their owners avoid the downside risk of producing seasonal and weather-dependent crops.
In 1979, grain-fed cattle accounted for a quarter of the US’s total beef production, but that number has shot up over the past 40 years to more than 60% today.
The feedlots that found the most success tended to be in the Great Plains, from the Dakotas to Texas, located in a sweet spot between the midwest’s feed grain abundance and the intermountain west’s supply of feeder cattle (young cattle weighing 500–600lb, which are brought to market weight in a feedlot).
Meatpackers followed behind these feedlots, which also trended towards consolidation, though not as dramatically as packers. Today, less than 5% of feedlots control 80% of the fed cattle market, most of which are located in just five states.
As the number of cattle suppliers that a given meatpacker had to work with declined, the number of meat buyers also diminished, and their average size grew.
By the 90s, consolidation in the US grocery sector was already well under way, with the top 20 food retailers in the country selling nearly 40% of all retail groceries. By 2019, the top four food retailers were capturing that same 40% of sales, according to the USDA, while in metropolitan areas, their share was over 70%. Grocery’s big four – Walmart, Target, Albertsons and Kroger – are able to exert a surprising amount of power over their suppliers, even over the big four meatpackers.
“It’s what we call the power of the purchase order,” says Errol Schweizer, former vice president of grocery for Whole Foods, now an industry adviser. “Retail buyers have a lot of say over the supply chain in terms of their ability to send a purchase order or withhold the purchase order.”
The power of the purchase order is significant, as contracts with major retailers are both extremely competitive and lucrative. The biggest and most centralised meatpackers are usually able to offer the lowest prices to supply retailers with vast and reliable quantities of familiar meat cuts daily, and the fewer meat suppliers a grocery chain works with, the lower their costs of doing business. In this way, as fewer and fewer grocery chains own more and more of the market, they turn to the fewest and biggest meatpackers, further entrenching a system of mega-players all the way through the beef system.
But the clout that comes with being a mega-buyer has its limits, as has been witnessed with continuously climbing beef prices. These increases are a result of Covid-related slowdowns in meatpacking, caused mainly by outbreaks in meatpacking plants that led to thousands of workers falling ill and hundreds dying. Packers passed price increases through to their retail customers, who in turn passed them on to consumers.
The feedlot-packer-grocery mega-group might be showing signs of fraying. In 2020, Walmart made a small step towards taking over some of its own meat processing by opening a new facility in Georgia to make “case-ready” cuts of meat, not unlike Costco’s 2019 opening of a poultry plant in Nebraska. This seems to be a sign that big retailers are looking to take back some margin from meatpackers, though currently on a very small scale.
However it happens, many believe that reducing the consolidated power of these big players is critical, not only to keep consumer prices low and ranchers in business, but to protect US food security. The global pandemic is not the only event to reveal just how fragile the current consolidated system is – the recent cyber-attack on JBS, which cost the company an $11m (£8m) ransom, halted one-fifth of the US’s meat processing capacity for days, with the effects felt up and down the supply chain.
Advocates say that if one of the aims of reducing consolidation is to improve protections for workers, particularly the vulnerable meatpacking workers who sickened and died from Covid-19 at rates well beyond the average, the pressure must be on the whole food system, not just meatpacking companies.
“Not one grocery retailer said, ‘Hey, this isn’t right’,” Schweizer says of retail meat buyers when reports of illness and death related to plants surfaced. Instead, he says, retailers prioritise having meat in stock no matter what, as it’s an important driver of customer loyalty for grocers. But it was well within their power, he says, to withhold or slow down purchases to pressure meatpackers to improve conditions and protect workers.
As pandemic-driven changes to the food system continue to play out, experts will be carefully watching how the Biden administration attempts to tackle consolidation in the meatpacking sector. Austin Frerick, a Yale-based competition and antitrust expert, is optimistic that some meaningful steps will be taken soon, but says what he’s seen so far does not break with the historical trend.
“The state of play for the last 40 years,” Frerick says of political efforts to break up the big meatpackers, “has been empty words. This is a question of political courage.”
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