28 December 21
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World-renowned author, activist and professor Angela Davis talks about navigating the pandemic and an inadequate two-party political system during a time of racial uprising in the United States. She also talks about imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Biden presidential campaign and the protests that erupted from the police killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Speaking of reflection, you’ve been on Democracy Now! to talk about President Obama, you’ve been on to talk about President Trump, and then the Biden campaign, as well. And you said in 2020, “I do think we have to participate in the election,” but noted that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. So, here we are now one year into the Biden presidency, the battles over these various — huge stimulus program concluding now, Build Back Better. The progressives are battling over what they should do if the Build Back Better program is further eviscerated. Your counsel to radicals and progressives about how they should deal with the Biden administration?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, you know, those of us who voted for Biden and Harris did not do so because we expected to follow them as leaders in our struggle. We could have predicted this moment now. But I think that what we have learned, especially since the mobilizations of the summer of 2020, is that history does not change because a few leaders here and there decide to take particular positions or decide to pass bills. And, of course, I am not at all trying to minimize the importance of electing progressives and radicals both to Congress and to local office. I’m not at all disparaging that. But what I am saying is that in order to make real, lasting change, we have to do the work of building movements.
It is masses of people who are responsible for historical change. It was because of the movement, the Black freedom movement, the midcentury Black freedom movement, that Black people acquired the right to vote — not because someone decided to pass a Voting Rights Act. And we know now that that victory cannot simply be consolidated as a bill passed, because there are continual efforts to suppress the power of Black voters. And we know that the only way to reverse that is by building movements, by involving masses of people in the process of historical change. And that holds true for the current administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Angela, we’re still in the midst of the pandemic, and I’m wondering how it affected you over this past year and a half. As you talk about movements, so often it’s people gathering, whether we’re talking about the Critical Resistance conferences, the mass protests in the streets after George Floyd was murdered by the police. There were mass protests in the streets even during the pandemic, of course. But if you can talk about, just personally, what this meant for you and if you feel like we’ve learned something, everything from respecting science — and that goes not only from talking about vaccines but to climate change — the issue of vaccine inequity in the world, emphasizing those who have and those who don’t have in so many ways, but then also, personally, how you got by?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, Amy, I am actually very fortunate in that I live in California. I live in Oakland. And I have access to the kind of technology that puts me in touch with people all over the world. So there are some things that I found really exciting about this terrible pandemic that claimed the lives of so many people, particularly Black and Indigenous and people of color and poor people, more broadly. What I might say was a kind of gift that was offered us in the midst of all of this sadness and tragedy was the fact that we can communicate with people all over the world. And so I participated in conversations that never would have happened had I been compelled to travel in order to be involved in these conversations — for example, a conversation in the Amazonas in Brazil that involved Afro-descended Brazilians, Indigenous Brazilians and people who are active in the struggle against police violence. So I think that there are some ways in which we consolidated our internationalism — of course, not consolidated, but we were able to engage in the kinds of practices that allowed us to recognize how important those ties are.
You know, on the other hand, of course we all need human community. We all need the closeness and the touch of human beings. And that has been so difficult.
I would also point out that I don’t know whether we would have achieved this kind of awareness of the nature of structural racism. And I don’t know whether so many people would have gone out into the streets, at their own peril, of course, because in the summer of 2020 we were not really clear about the ways in which the virus is transmitted. But I don’t know whether so many people would have felt compelled to go out and protest, if we had not become aware as a country — and I’m talking about a good majority of the population in the country — of the realities of structural racism. And the impact of the virus taught as about the nature of structural racism, as it had an impact on the healthcare system, as it claimed — as the virus claimed the lives of disproportionate numbers of Indigenous and Black people and people in the Latinx community. And that awareness helped to condition the response to the police lynching of George Floyd.
And so, as tragic as this period has been, as difficult as it has been to live without the closeness of our community, as terrible as that has been, it has also offered us some gifts. And I don’t know whether we would have experienced a situation in which more people than ever before in the history of this country went out in the streets and marched and protested and said no to racism.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Angela, I wanted to ask you — you mentioned earlier on Mumia Abu-Jamal. In our early years on Democracy Now!, we were knocked off the air in a bunch of Pennsylvania stations as a result of airing his commentaries. I knew Mumia personally because we worked together as journalists in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. I’m wondering — he has continued to be in prison, turned 67 in April, is 40 years now in prison. He’s had COVID, heart surgery this year. Could you talk about his importance? He’s one of the most famous political prisoners in the world. He has continued to have amazing commentaries and writings throughout his time in prison. Mumia’s impact on the radical movement in America? And if you could talk about the pressing need to continue to demand his release?
ANGELA DAVIS: Yes. Thank you so much, Juan. I don’t think we would be where we are today without the consistent and dedicated participation of Mumia Abu-Jamal in our struggles. Well, first of all, I would say that Mumia is known all over the world. There are streets named after him in Germany and in France. He became the second person in the history of France, after Pablo Picasso, to receive an honorary citizenship in the city of Paris, and so that his importance is recognized elsewhere in the world. But because of the ways in which the police and the police benevolent order, the Fraternal Order of Police, because of the ways in which they have misrepresented Mumia and mobilized the entire police community all over the country against Mumia, he remains in prison, after having served time for more than 40 years, including much of it on death row.
What I would say now is that precisely because we have succeeded in making public critiques of the police — and, of course, we see them now trying to reconsolidate their power all over the country, but because there are these fissures in the power of the police, we should take advantage of that to intensify the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. I was just communicating the other day with Julia Wright, the daughter of Richard Wright, who has been so important in France in developing the campaign to free Mumia. And she and people all over the world want to see us bring the case of Mumia to the fore, especially now, considering the fact that David Gilbert, who has been in prison almost a half a century, was released on parole recently, two weeks ago. We have to claim that victory and recognize that this is precisely the moment to demand more releases, to demand the release of Leonard Peltier, who has been in prison even longer than Mumia, and all of the political prisoners who remain behind walls.
AMY GOODMAN: People can go to Democracy Now! and see our interviews with Leonard Peltier. I know we have to wrap up, and it’s very hard for me and Juan to stop this conversation, but — and we’re going to talk to you again on Democracy Now! Your book is coming out again, it’s being reissued, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, which astoundingly was edited by Toni Morrison. We talked to you on Democracy Now! when Toni Morrison died. We talked to you when Aretha Franklin died. We tracked you down, I can’t remember where. And it’s amazing, because while people talk about Aretha’s great artistry, what people didn’t realize is that she was involved with offering to post bail for you when you were in prison, saying, “Black people will be free.” And I’m wondering if you can reflect — we’ll go much more extensively into this when your book comes out — on these relationships you have had and what gives you hope for the next generation of artists, writers, scholars and activists, all of which you are, rolled into one.
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, you know, I think that having — I think that having lived this many decades and having experienced what I have in the context of movements against racism and against heteropatriarchy, against imperialism, I am more committed than ever to using what talents I might have to developing movements for radical change.
And you mentioned Aretha Franklin and the fact that she offered to post bail for me. That was a very moving moment in my life, and I have come to recognize how absolutely essential the role of artists has been and will be for our movements. This is a period during which musicians and visual artists, poets, writers are all using their talents collectively to create more possibilities for the kinds of conversations that will bring people into movements for justice, for freedom, for equality.
And let me say one more thing, which, unfortunately, we haven’t discussed during the course of this wide-ranging conversation, and that is the power of global capitalism. And I still see that we need — I still think that we need artists to show us the way toward a very different organization — economic, political, social organization — of our worlds, and capitalism has to fall.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Angela Davis, we want to thank you so much for being with us. And I want to ask you, finally, about the issue of independent media, of people shaping their own narratives. I mean, I think that’s the power of the corporate media, is they tell a story, whether it is true or not, brought to you by the weapons manufacturers every five minutes or the drug industry every 10 minutes, you know, the commercials, as you talk about capitalism. If you could talk about a different kind of media in, perhaps, if you want to imagine this, a post-capitalist society and what that would offer, since it’s the way people can communicate with each other all over the world?
ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I think it’s so important now, Amy, to imagine new worlds. We cannot fight for those worlds unless we know how to imagine them. And independent, progressive media, like Democracy Now!, help to inspire us in that project of collective imagination to allow people to tell their own stories. And, of course, you go where the movements are unfolding. I’ll never forget watching your arrest at Standing Rock and how that campaign helped to galvanize a more holistic understanding of what it is we’re struggling for, the freedom that we’re fighting for, that we have to save this planet. And Indigenous people, the stewards of this land for so many millennia, have taught us that the struggle for the environment has to be central to our work. And you present their stories. So I thank you and Juan and all of your colleagues for the work that you continue to do. And I’m sure we’ll be speaking to each other in the near future.
AMY GOODMAN: World-renowned abolitionist, author, activist and professor Angela Davis.
Joe Biden. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“I can’t say I’m unhappy about this extension,” one woman told BuzzFeed News about Biden delaying the student loan payment deadline, “but it’s hardly enough for the millions of borrowers suffering.”
But the pandemic continued — and got worse. Daile, then an assistant manager at Dairy Queen, relocated to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, to be near family in September 2020. They transferred to another Dairy Queen location, working the same position for less pay. The 24-year-old switched jobs a few more times before finding their current position at Kay Jewelers.
Because they did not graduate, Daile wasn’t able to get their loans deferred, and going back to school isn’t possible without taking out even more loans. Their payments are up to $750 per month — over half of their paycheck. They want to resume their education, but the risk of taking on even more debt severely limits their options, Daile told BuzzFeed News. Now their goal is to return to school by 2025, if they are able.
Student loan debt is an overwhelming burden shared by over 40 million Americans. It can follow people throughout their lives and lock them out of significant milestones like buying a home or, in Daile’s case, obtaining a degree.
Under the CARES Act, student loan repayments were paused, and the federal student loan interest rates were set at 0% as of March 2020. In August this year, a month before the pause was set to expire, President Joe Biden pushed the deadline to resume payments to Jan. 31, 2022.
As COVID cases surged this past month, the president on Wednesday announced that he would extend the pause to May 1, 2022. But Biden — who promised on the campaign trail to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower — has not indicated that he will cancel student debt outright, as progressive lawmakers have demanded, a move that would provide immense financial relief to millions of Americans.
In his announcement of the extension, Biden acknowledged the difficulties that over 40 million borrowers have faced during the pandemic.
“Now, while our jobs recovery is one of the strongest ever — with nearly 6 million jobs added this year, the fewest Americans filing for unemployment in more than 50 years, and overall unemployment at 4.2 percent — we know that millions of student loan borrowers are still coping with the impacts of the pandemic and need some more time before resuming payments,” Biden said in his Dec. 22 statement.
Biden also promised that the Department of Education would offer support programs in the meantime and to help borrowers make payments come May 2022. But many borrowers told BuzzFeed News the extension doesn’t remotely solve the dire financial issue of $1.7 trillion owed in US student loan debt (including federal and nonfederal loans).
“I just wish that it could help those who cannot afford to finish their education and those with private student loans because it was their only choice,” Daile said. “Adults in [the] upper-middle class and upper class can survive, but lower-middle class to low class, we are barely surviving with our payments.”
Welp, another 3 months of me PAYING my student loans because I don't qualify for this. I didn't graduate, I stopped going to college because of covid, and since I stopped because of the pandemic, I don't have a cosigner anymore who is willing to cosign loans/consolidation. https://t.co/YZq6z14RTh
— Ginger Daile (@Ginger_Daile) December 22, 2021
Student loan debt is just not a problem for millennials, according to Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org, a group that advocates for total cancellation. More than half of all borrowers are over 35 years old, according to Department of Education data from 2020. Older people owe more than younger people, even though they may have borrowed less money initially years ago, Collinge said in the group’s response to Biden’s extension this week.
BuzzFeed News reached out to members of the “Student Loan Justice” Facebook group, where borrowers share their stories and support one another. Many of them reacted to Biden administration’s recent extension with deeply personal stories.
Kristina Allen, 52, lives near San Francisco and has one more online class to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Regis University. She initially took loans out when she began studying to become a registered nurse as her twin daughters attended college. She graduated in 2008.
“I was a single mom in poverty, and I desperately wanted my twins and their little sister to have a better life,” Allen said, adding that her three daughters are all college graduates now. “My granddaughter doesn't know what hungry is, so the cycle of poverty stopped.”
Over the years, Allen has paid off $90,000 in loans but still owes about $75,000; her initial loan was less than half that amount. Between 2015 and 2016, around her third year of the bachelor’s program at Regis, Allen defaulted on her federal loans and was charged exorbitant interest and fees. She‘s also subjected to a wage garnishment, which means a percentage of her disposable income is being withheld until her loan is paid off or considered not in default. One-quarter of her pretax income has been garnished since 2017 until the first pause in loan repayment came during the Trump administration, she said.
Biden’s announcement of a loan repayment extension came as a relief. But once payments restart in the spring, Allen believes she’ll have to “drop her dream” of a master’s degree to focus paying off her loans with the wage garnishment.
“Retirement? A home of our own? Not even a thought,” Allen, who said she has lupus and a related blood clot disorder, told BuzzFeed News. The repayment pause has given her a much-needed financial break to afford care for her husband, who has end-stage cancer, as well as address her own health issues she’s neglected. But, Allen said, she can’t afford to move closer to family and friends in New England; she needs her current work-provided health insurance to pay for her husband’s chemotherapy, support herself, and pay the loans.
“I'd like to work less and take care of my own health, but I can't, because of my loans,” Allen said.
Like Allen, Michael Goolsby, a 56-year-old who works at a Walmart in Fernley, Nevada, said Biden’s new deadline will postpone his wage garnishment; he told BuzzFeed News that, since 2019, 15% of his paycheck has been withheld to pay off his loans. Goolsby has a bachelor’s and master’s in history from Colorado State University; when he finished his master’s in 1991, he had $25,000 in student loan debt.
The following year, he was told he faced a default. As a result, his school would not release his transcripts to potential employers, he said. He accepted an offer in early 1994 to consolidate his debt under a Sallie Mae program, which required him to take out a $36,000 loan. But multiple payment deferments and defaults only compounded his debt, causing him to fall behind no matter how much he worked, he said, ultimately leading to a wage garnishment. He said he’s trying to keep other debts down so he can eventually declare bankruptcy.
His student loan debt now stands at more than $100,000, he said.
“I did many things over time for a job, from driving a truck, managing a fast-food restaurant, working on an assembly line, being a paralegal for a San Francisco law firm for six years, working in IT doing technical support for 15 years, and then driving a cab and leaving California for Reno, Nevada, because that's where the jobs are nowadays as I work towards retirement, which may not even be on my 65th birthday in 2030,” Goolsby said. “But here I am.”
Justin Schanck, 43, a teacher in Macon, Georgia, said he owes $80,000 in loans from his combined graduate and undergraduate degrees.
“I went to grad school to try and better my life and increase my income, only to add on more loans,” he told BuzzFeed News. Schanck said he blames himself for not thinking about the cost of a graduate degree, “but this predatory lending system certainly did not help.”
Not using his hard-earned money to pay off his loans during the pandemic has allowed his family to “reinvest” in his community, he said. They put a new roof on their house to stop a ceiling leak and have been determined to shop from local businesses.
“Once the payments start again, that money will essentially be taken away from the local economy,” Schanck said.
Yirzely Villanueva, 27, of Canyon Country, California, said she feels both “relieved and stressed'' by the extension. She told BuzzFeed News she has over $40,000 in debt from a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Southern California. She said she’s happy that interest is paused for now and she can pay back “exactly” what she borrowed.
“My loan is 60% of my savings and so I'm stuck,” she said. “I either pay off my loan and stay broke, or wait and be in debt indefinitely.”
As a Mexican American woman, Villanueva said she feels like the “deck is already stacked” against her when it comes to taking out loans for a home or a car. “With my luck, I'm scared once I hit ‘pay’ [my student loans] will be canceled.”
She said the extension makes her wonder why borrowers aren’t being allowed to just pay back their loans without interest.
“I feel like I'm just stuck in a horror movie waiting for the ‘interest monster’ to get me,” she said.
Like others, Lyndsey Summers, a 31-year-old in Portland, Oregon, said the extension is not enough. “I can’t say I’m unhappy about this extension, but it’s hardly enough for the millions of borrowers suffering,” Summers told BuzzFeed News.
She said she owes nearly $75,000 from her bachelor’s degree in communication media from Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. She’s had trouble qualifying for public loan forgiveness and said she “struggles to get by” given her loans and her salary as a journalist. She said it’s been difficult trying to talk to the government and her loan servicer, with long hold times on the phone.
“It is the servicer who works with borrowers, and when you ask them for specific information, they point to the school,” Summers said. “The schools don’t have to keep records, by the way, for longer than 5 years — at least according to my institution. I wanted to see an itemized receipt for how my loans were applied to my education. I have no idea if I’ll get an answer. It would have been nice to be notified that records would be destroyed.”
Although state schools are “supposed to be more affordable,” Summers pointed out, it wasn’t for her. “I just want to be able to buy a home and get ahead.”
Amy (who asked that BuzzFeed News only use her first name for privacy), 55, is a former teacher in Louisiana. She said she originally borrowed $46,000 when she started her undergraduate degree in 1997; after “faithfully” paying off the loans for nearly two decades, she still owes $30,800.
“I owe almost as much now as I borrowed, even after 20 years of payments!” Amy told BuzzFeed News. “I have resigned to the fact that I will never in my lifetime be able to pay them off. I will take them to my grave.”
Amy said she has applied for teacher forgiveness programs in the past but has always been denied. “I really thought President Biden would follow through with his promises to help Americans such as myself that have been taken advantage of by a predatory loan system,” she said. “It looks like I was wrong.”
Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them…”
In his recently published memoir, Peter Navarro, then-President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, details how he stayed in close contact with Bannon as they put the Green Bay Sweep in motion with help from members of Congress loyal to the cause.
But in an interview last week with The Daily Beast, Navarro shed additional light on his role in the operation and their coordination with politicians like Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“We spent a lot of time lining up over 100 congressmen, including some senators. It started out perfectly. At 1 p.m., Gosar and Cruz did exactly what was expected of them,” Navarro told The Daily Beast. “It was a perfect plan. And it all predicated on peace and calm on Capitol Hill. We didn’t even need any protestors, because we had over 100 congressmen committed to it.”
That commitment appeared as Congress was certifying the 2020 Electoral College votes reflecting that Joe Biden beat Trump. Sen. Cruz signed off on Gosar’s official objection to counting Arizona’s electoral ballots, an effort that was supported by dozens of other Trump loyalists.
Staffers for Cruz and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment. There’s no public indication whether the Jan. 6 Committee has sought testimony or documents from Sen. Cruz or Rep. Gosar. But the committee has only recently begun to seek evidence from fellow members of Congress who were involved in the general effort to keep Trump in the White House, such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA).
This last-minute maneuvering never had any chance of actually decertifying the election results on its own, a point that Navarro quickly acknowledges. But their hope was to run the clock as long as possible to increase public pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to send the electoral votes back to six contested states, where Republican-led legislatures could try to overturn the results. And in their mind, ramping up pressure on Pence would require media coverage. While most respected news organizations refused to regurgitate unproven conspiracy theories about widespread election fraud, this plan hoped to force journalists to cover the allegations by creating a historic delay to the certification process.
“The Green Bay Sweep was very well thought out. It was designed to get us 24 hours of televised hearings,” he said. “But we thought that we could bypass the corporate media by getting this stuff televised.”
Navarro’s part in this ploy was to provide the raw materials, he said in an interview on Thursday. That came in the form of a three-part White House report he put together during his final weeks in the Trump administration with volume titles like, “The Immaculate Deception” and “The Art of the Steal.”
“My role was to provide the receipts for the 100 congressmen or so who would make their cases… who could rely in part on the body of evidence I'd collected,” he told The Daily Beast. “To lay the legal predicate for the actions to be taken.” (Ultimately, states have not found any evidence of electoral fraud above the norm, which is exceedingly small.)
The next phase of the plan was up to Bannon, Navarro describes in his memoir, In Trump Time.
“Steve Bannon’s role was to figure out how to use this information—what he called ‘receipts’—to overturn the election result. That’s how Steve had come up with the Green Bay Sweep idea,” he wrote.
“The political and legal beauty of the strategy was this: by law, both the House of Representatives and the Senate must spend up to two hours of debate per state on each requested challenge. For the six battleground states, that would add up to as much as twenty-four hours of nationally televised hearings across the two chambers of Congress.”
His book also notes that Bannon was the first person he communicated with when he woke up at dawn on Jan. 6, writing, “I check my messages and am pleased to see Steve Bannon has us fully ready to implement our Green Bay Sweep on Capitol Hill. Call the play. Run the play.”
Navarro told The Daily Beast he felt fortunate that someone cancelled his scheduled appearance to speak to Trump supporters that morning at the Ellipse, a park south of the White House that would serve as a staging area before the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol building.
“It was better for me to spend that morning working on the Green Bay Sweep. Just checking to see that everything was in line, that congressmen were on board,” he said during the interview. “It was a pretty mellow morning for me. I was convinced everything was set in place.”
Later that day, Bannon made several references to the football-themed strategy on his daily podcast, War Room Pandemic.
"We are right on the cusp of victory,” Bannon said on the show. “It’s quite simple. Play’s been called. Mike Pence, run the play. Take the football. Take the handoff from the quarterback. You’ve got guards in front of you. You’ve got big, strong people in front of you. Just do your duty."
This idea was weeks in the making. Although Navarro told The Daily Beast he doesn’t remember when “Brother Bannon” came up with the plan, he said it started taking shape as Trump’s “Stop the Steal” legal challenges to election results in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin fizzled out. Courts wouldn’t side with Trump, thanks to what Navarro describes in his book as “the highly counterproductive antics” of Sydney Powell and her Kraken lawsuits. So instead, they came up with a never-before-seen scheme through the legislative branch.
Navarro starts off his book’s chapter about the strategy by mentioning how “Stephen K. Bannon, myself, and President Donald John Trump” were “the last three people on God’s good Earth who want to see violence erupt on Capitol Hill,” as it would disrupt their plans.
When asked if Trump himself was involved in the strategy, Navarro said, “I never spoke directly to him about it. But he was certainly on board with the strategy. Just listen to his speech that day. He’d been briefed on the law, and how Mike [Pence] had the authority to it.”
Indeed, Trump legal adviser John Eastman had penned a memo (first revealed by journalists Robert Costa and Bob Woodward in their book, Peril) outlining how Trump could stage a coup. And Trump clearly referenced the plan during his Jan. 6 speech, when he said, “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so… all Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people.”
When Pence certified the electoral votes instead, he became what Navarro’s book described as “the Brutus most responsible… for the final betrayal of President Trump.”
Although the bipartisan House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6 has demanded testimony and records from dozens of Trump allies and rally organizers believed to be involved in the attack on the nation’s democracy, Navarro said he hasn’t heard from them yet. The committee did not respond to our questions about whether it intends to dig into Navarro’s activities.
And while he has text messages, phone calls, and memos that could show how closely an active White House official was involved in the effort to keep Trump in power, he says investigators won’t find anything that shows the Green Bay Sweep plan involved violence. Instead, Navarro said, the investigative committee would find that the mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol building actually foiled their plans, because it incentivized Pence and other Republicans to follow through with certification.
“They don’t want any part of me. I exonerate Trump and Bannon,” he said.
The committee is, however, engaged in a bitter battle with Bannon. The former Trump White House chief strategist refused to show up for a deposition or turn over documents, and he’s now being prosecuted by the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress.
Navarro said he’s still surprised that people at the Trump rally turned violent, given the impression he got when he went to see them in person during an exercise run that morning.
“I’m telling you man, it was just so peaceful. I saw no anger. None. Zero,” he said.
American Red Cross blood donation center with wide spaced beds for social distancing. (photo: Dennis Drenner/American Red Cross)
Nearly minimum wage pay, chronic understaffing and proposed healthcare cuts leave employees disgruntled
“The morale is at an all time low in my 23 years of history here,” said Darryl Ford, a collection technician at American Red Cross in Warner Robins, Georgia, and president of local union branch USW L254.
He described Red Cross’ response to the pandemic as business as usual, as the non-profit ramped up blood drives anywhere they were able to hold them, since many typical blood drive sites closed when the pandemic hit.
Ford also criticized the American Red Cross for doing little to nothing to clarify to the public that the blood donation drives were just testing for Covid-19 antibodies, not performing Covid-19 testing and providing inadequate PPE to workers.
Due to the low pay, scheduling problems and working conditions, Ford noted that American Red Cross in his region experienced workers leaving throughout the pandemic.
“People are quitting,” added Ford. “It’s a slap in the face to the employees for management to say ‘we’re going to cut your healthcare and not pay you anything, while we’re going to work from home and be safe.’”
The Coalition of American Red Cross Unions, which represents about 4,900 workers from 11 international unions at American Red Cross across the US, is bargaining with the American Red Cross over the national addendum to the unions’ contracts, which expires on 31 March 2022.
The unions are pushing for wage increases, to preserve existing healthcare plans and for solutions to address chronic staffing shortages around the US.
The American Red Cross reported a revenue of more than $2.8bn in the 2020 fiscal year and the CEO of the non-profit received a salary of more than $700,000.
The majority of its revenue, approximately $1.73bn, went toward biomedical services, the part of the organization that collects blood donations and sells them to hospitals and healthcare providers. The American Red Cross provides about 40% of the nation’s blood supply.
Workers who collect and manage blood donations for the non-profit continued working throughout the Covid-19 pandemic as essential workers.
Alexis Zebrowski, a member of CWA Local 1118, worked as an aide specialist at the branch in Albany, New York for one year before quitting in November 2021 over the low pay around minimum wage, understaffing and working conditions through the pandemic.
As an aide specialist, she collected platelet, plasma and blood donations, conducted medical physicals of donors and took patient histories and helped run blood donation drives, which she noted were consistently understaffed and resulted in work shifts that went at least one hour or longer past her scheduled ten-hour shift without being able to take breaks.
“I can go work at any fast food restaurant and make more money,” said Zebrowski. “I was sick of the pay and all the constant bargaining and everything. The contracts still keep getting pushed out because they don’t want to give us a raise or even acknowledge anything we do for the company. It’s a slap in the face to work for the amount of money we are working for.”
She said the low pay and forced overtime led to worsening understaffing through the pandemic, with management rushing new hires through training and blaming existing staff when errors were made as a result.
“When we’re working, we’re expected to work at 100%, but we never have 100% in return,” added Zebrowski. “We’re always forced to come into work no matter what, sick or not, we were expected to be there. Otherwise, we’d be fearing for our job because we’d be too worried about being written up for attendance.”
Bobbie Terrell, a collections technician and member of AFSCME Council 31 at a branch in Peoria, Illinois, criticized American Red Cross for responding to chronic staffing shortages in her area by offering $1,500 sign on bonuses for new hires and paying them higher wages, while the only appreciation or benefit that longtime employees have received is pizza.
“The people they’ve hired since November are significantly making more money than the staff who have been here for years,” said Terrell. “That’s a major slap in the face to the current staff that have worked through this whole pandemic and not been offered anything but pizza.”
She also expressed frustration with American Red Cross’s proposal to cut the employees’ health insurance benefits, saying she is concerned that cutting healthcare will worsen staffing problems. She also criticized the organization for not paying workers to quarantine after being exposed to donors or coworkers who test positive for Covid-19.
“Staff are being sent home for 10 to 14 days at a time, unpaid,” added Terrell. “We’re on the frontlines doing the job for them of collecting these life-saving products and basically they’re telling us that it’s at our own risk.”
A spokesperson for American Red Cross claimed the non-profit plans to offer wage increases and retention bonuses to existing employees. But the spokesperson added that the group has not yet reached an agreement with unions on the terms and how the raises will be implemented, in addition to ongoing negotiations over healthcare.
They noted employees were provided with pay to quarantine in Spring 2020 and from 21 November 2020 to 2 April 2021.
“Across the country, many employers are facing staffing shortages as a result of pandemic employment trends and vaccination requirements, which have exacerbated the challenges to recruit and retain staff,” said the spokesperson. “Over the past few months, the Red Cross actively recruited to fill vacancies on our biomedical services teams and have made significant investments in additional resources and tools to seek out and attract candidates, including new hire bonuses.”
The spokesperson added: “Our intention is to reach a fair and amicable agreement with the Coalition of Red Cross Unions and all of our local unions.”
A disabled veteran. (photo: Getty Images)
Conservatives have long worked to dismantle the American welfare state. They’ve been so successful that some are even turning their sights on a formerly sacrosanct group: combat veterans returned from war.
Since 2015, billions of dollars have been diverted from VHA care to private doctors and hospitals who treat veterans in costlier and less effective fashion. This cannibalization of the VHA budget began under President Barack Obama, escalated during the Donald Trump era, and continues under Joe Biden.
Up until now, few Republicans, or their allies like the Koch brothers–funded Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), dared to attack the VA-run Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA), a sacred cow even for conservatives. Nearly six million veterans currently receive payments for service-related medical conditions that left them partially or totally impaired; among them are 1.3 million men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their total compensation, plus pensions, costs the public about $110 billion per year.
Publication of a new book, touted by Trump’s last VA secretary, signals that any ceasefire over veterans’ benefits has ended inside the Beltway. In Wounding Warriors: How Bad Policy is Making Veterans Sicker and Poorer, Daniel Gade, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel and former Trump administration official, has teamed up with an ex–Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Huang, to demand major “entitlement reform” at the VBA.
The authors — who are definitely not critics of the military-industrial complex — denounce what they call a “disability-industrial complex.” They argue that monthly checks from the VBA foster a costly and unhealthy culture of dependence among veterans — and should be sharply restricted, not expanded.
Robert Wilkie, the Republican operative who helped expand VHA outsourcing while serving as VA chief until last year, has joined the call for benefit cuts from his own new perch at the Heritage Foundation. At a Veterans Day event with Gade in November, Wilkie accused his former agency of being overly “focused on getting veterans checks and not getting them well and getting them back into society.” Like Gade, he claimed that veterans service organizations encourage former military personnel “to play disability” — with the result being that too many noncombat veterans are getting undeserved compensation.
In Wounding Warriors, Gade and Huang argue that VA disability ratings have been “misapplied to mental health disorders like PTSD, which have been repeatedly demonstrated to improve with effective therapies.” In their view, such ratings are “an appropriate designation” only “for veterans with disabilities that are truly static and unlikely to improve — amputations, spinal cord injuries, etc.” The “only veterans for whom employment is not a reasonable option are those few whose brain injuries are truly devastating and impossible to overcome.” As for the rest, including those who may be suicidal, “we pay veterans to be sick and then we wonder why we have so many sick veterans.”
In other words, some on the Right are looking to castigate a new class of “welfare queens” — and have found their target in the form of combat veterans.
A Decision to Thrive
Gade himself earned two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and the Legion of Merit during twenty years of service, which included combat duty in Iraq. In 2004, he was so severely wounded that he spent a year in a military hospital recovering and lost his right leg. As one bootstrappy account of Gade’s career explains, “While his new, serious disability was life-changing, he decided to thrive.” While still in the military, he earned both master and doctorate degrees in public administration and spent six years on the faculty at West Point before retiring in 2017. He’s now a professor at American University’s School of Public Affairs in Washington, DC.
In his book, Gade displays little sympathy for poor and working-class soldiers who didn’t get the taxpayer-funded educational or job opportunities he enjoyed as an officer and, subsequently, faced a harder transition to civilian life. According to Gade, too many veterans who lack a “truly static” disability liked his own amputated limb “are diverted from paths of self-sufficiency and shuffled down paths of dependency and dysfunction.”
Such criticism of his former comrades, as greedy parasites draining public coffers dry with unworthy demands, has multiple historical echoes from the last two centuries. As Richard Severo and Lewis Milford note in their book The Wages of War, hundreds of thousands of demobilized Union soldiers had great difficulty supporting themselves and their families after the Civil War. Only the severely disabled were eligible for care in a few newly created soldiers’ homes.
Nevertheless, the Army and Navy Journal, a military publication, advised veterans to avoid becoming “dirty loafers” if they wanted to succeed in civilian life. Those who developed “new muscular habits,” rather than succumbing to personal despair and reliance on charity, would eventually find jobs and housing; those who sought any special help would end up fatally dependent on it.
In 1890, soldiers who served in the Grand Army of the Republic were finally awarded pensions not tied to death or disability resulting from active duty. But this legislative victory was not universally applauded. Even the Nation magazine bemoaned the fact that “the ex-Union soldier is . . . a helpless and greedy sort of person, who says that he is not able to support himself and whines that other people ought to do it for him.”
Of course, back then, there was hardly any social safety net for poor or disabled persons, other than private charity or local “poorhouses.” Throughout the twentieth century, as the United States finally developed a modern welfare state (meager though it was) that better protected its most vulnerable citizens, conservatives have seized on any instance of fraud or abuse, real or imagined, that might discredit public assistance and trigger calls for benefit cuts.
By the 1970s, no domestic bogeyman was more popular on the Right than the proverbial “welfare queen.” Echoing welfare fraud exposés in the mass media, California governor Ronald Reagan made tall tales about such grifters a staple of his presidential campaigning in the 1970s. During one oft-repeated speech, he claimed that a single female defrauder — never identified by name or race, of course — was raking in $150,000 worth of Social Security, Medicaid, food stamp, and welfare benefits every year, creating an enduring myth that has been weaponized by the Right and even some austerity-minded Democrats ever since. (According to Reagan, this welfare queen was also collecting veterans benefits on “four nonexisting deceased husbands.”)
During Gade’s 2020 campaign for the US Senate in Virginia, his Reagan-like stance against handouts to the undeserving drew 44 percent of the vote. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in addition to supporting Social Security privatization and “entitlement reform” of VA disability pay, Gade strongly opposed universal health coverage, free higher education modeled on the GI bill, and student loan forgiveness (as “an immoral transfer of risk”). Gade thinks veterans are undeserving of publicly funded programs — it should go without saying that the rest of the population is, too.
A New Mission
After his failed electoral bid, Gade formed the New Mission PAC to support other Republicans who want “to better serve our nation’s veterans.” In Georgia, his PAC did voter turnout among veterans for incumbent senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who were defeated a year ago by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, respectively. Among Gade’s many reasons for opposing Warnock and Ossoff was that they’re part of a “political left . . . deeply invested in the VA’s system of ‘enlistment-to-grave’ care as a prototype for single-payer healthcare.”
Sadly, most liberals and leftists actually pay little attention to the VA as a positive model for broader health care reform. The same can’t be said of Gade and Huang. In Wounding Warriors, the authors’ main target has to be the veterans service organizations (VSOs) that seek improved VA benefits for their membership.
The VSOs function much like associations of injured workers and unions have throughout US labor history. At the local level, they help individuals pursue claims for compensation and health care, while seeking legislative changes benefiting larger classes of veterans like victims of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War or post-9/11 veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Gade and Huang argue that this membership service and related lobbying makes the VSOs “enablers” of a “victim mentality” among former military personnel.
Longtime advocates for veterans like Steve Robertson and Paul Sullivan reject this characterization of their work. These VSO members are hardly leftist firebrands. But they have dedicated themselves to defending the publicly funded health care and benefits provided by the VA. They strongly oppose slashing VA budgets on the grounds that beneficiaries of its programs are “undeserving.”
Robertson is an Air Force veteran and a forty-year member of the American Legion who served as its national legislative director. During Bernie Sanders’s tenure as chair of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, he was the committee’s staff director. He remains active in American Legion Post 290 in Stafford, Virginia, where he serves as benefits officer.
Robertson supports efforts by the VA’s inspector general to deal with any benefit fraud or abuse. But in his experience, the real problem is that
generations of seriously disabled veterans didn’t want to go to the VA for benefits because they felt they weren’t as badly off as some other veterans and didn’t want to take money away from someone they considered more deserving. The VSOs don’t help them get benefits they don’t deserve; they help vets get the benefits they have definitely earned.
Paul Sullivan served as an Army cavalry scout in the 1991 Gulf War and now belongs to the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Disabled American Veterans. As past executive director and now national vice chair of Veterans for Common Sense (VCS), he has been a key advocate for former soldiers exposed to toxins in Middle Eastern war zones over the past three decades.
Between 1990 and 1991, an estimated 697,000 service members developed what’s known as “Gulf War illness” or “Gulf War syndrome” after being exposed to widely used pesticides and/or releases of the nerve agent sarin. As described in one VA advisory committee report, “This complex of multiple concurrent symptoms typically includes persistent memory and concentration problems, chronic headaches, widespread pain, gastrointestinal problems, and other chronic abnormalities not explained by well-established diagnoses.” According to the report’s authors, “No effective treatments have been identified for Gulf War illness and studies indicate that few veterans have recovered over time.”
As Sullivan notes and VCS argued in a report to Congress last year, the “VBA routinely and improperly denies 80% or more of the veteran disability claims for toxic wounds, thus blocking entry to urgently needed healthcare at the VHA.” Sullivan has personally assisted many such frustrated claimants, who fill out multiple forms and provide detailed medical evidence to claims processors and doctors who often work for outside contractors, not the VBA itself. Too many veterans experience what he calls “an adversarial, complex, and burdensome claims nightmare.”
Between 2007 and 2020, the VBA approved only 2,828 burn pit–related disability claims out of 12,582 filed. Under pressure from Congress and the VSOs, the VA announced last August that it would consider asthma, rhinitis, and sinusitis as being presumptively related to exposure to particulate matter from burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries.
By Veterans Day, 2021, in response to further lobbying from VSOs, members of Congress and public figures like Jon Stewart, a champion of burn pit victims, the VA announced that it was piloting a “comprehensive military exposure model” to consider more possible links between active-duty environmental hazards and later medical conditions.
VA secretary Denis McDonough declared:
We are seeking more information from veterans, more evidence from more sources, and looking to take every avenue possible to determine where a potential presumptive illness based on military service location may exist in a more expedient and holistic manner.
He further encouraged all veterans “who may have been impacted to file a claim even if it was previously denied,” a remedial step considered necessary but insufficient by burn pit compensation campaigners. To overcome a growing number of backlogged claims — more than 600,000 to be exact — the Biden administration has hired and trained two thousand new VBA employees.
None of these steps will be cheered, of course, by the authors of Wounding Warriors, whose thesis is that veterans without visible proof of the costs of war shouldn’t be adding to them by filing claims for physical or mental disabilities.
Gade and Huang are the tip of the spear for a new wave of right-wing attacks on one of the few models of public health care provision that we have, the VA. Their book is indicative of a new willingness on some parts of the Right to go after a once sacrosanct group in American society, veterans and their families. Not content with trying to gut welfare state programs that benefit nonveterans, they’ve set their sights on former soldiers, who are often poor or working class and dependent on publicly funded services.
The Left should pay attention to these attacks — and speak up against them. Conservative opponents of veterans’ benefits are right to recognize the kernel of a future system of publicly provided goods like physical and mental health treatment in institutions like the VA. We should, too. If the VA model is to be expanded to cover everyone rather than being undermined by privatization and denied additional resources, we’ll need to defend it.
A young girl joins gun reform advocates holding a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., April 14, 2016. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Coming back from lunch on November 22, the date of the defendants’ deadline to respond, the Mexican lawyer-diplomat found that the companies had done exactly as he expected, arguing that a 2005 law that the National Rifle Association considers one of its greatest legislative achievements, which grants “broad immunity” to gun companies in gun violence lawsuits, is not bound by borders. It extends everywhere, they argued, including Mexico. The companies’ message, as Celorio read it, was simple: “’We don’t care what we’re doing. We don’t care if others don’t like the way we’re doing it. We’re gonna continue to do it.’”
The “veil of impunity,” as Celorio called it, was expected. What did catch his attention, however, was a potential seepage of politics into what Mexico insists is an apolitical legal challenge. The manufacturers, holding companies, and distributors accused in Mexico’s 139-page complaint include Smith & Wesson, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Beretta U.S.A., Beretta Holding, Century International Arms, Colt’s Manufacturing Company, Glock, Glock GES.M.B.H., Strum, Ruger & Co., Witmer Public Safety Group, and Interstate Arms. In a joint filing urging the court to dismiss the suit, the firms representing the companies — among them one of the largest law firms in the world, Jones Day, which represented President Donald Trump in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election — argued that “at bottom, this case implicates a clash of national values.”
“Our reading is that they’re going to try to politicize this,” Celorio told The Intercept. “They’re already increasing the political cost to the judge to rule in favor of Mexico. They’re saying, ‘You’re an American. If you let this litigation pass, you don’t hold dear to your heart the American values.’”
More than two years in the making, the story of Mexico’s lawsuit against U.S. gun companies is unfolding on multiple levels at once. The litigation itself tests whether legal protections inscribed in the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, or PLCAA, which President Joe Biden urged Congress to repeal in his national strategy to prevent gun violence earlier this year, extends to foreign countries. Should the challenge succeed, it would deal a historic blow to U.S. gun manufacturers. With limited exceptions, PLCAA has provided a near-impermeable shield to the U.S.-based small arms industry. For the gun companies, the law represents a vital bulwark against potentially industry-ending lawsuits. For gun control advocates, who point to instances like the victims of the Aurora, Colorado, theater massacre who were ordered to pay $203,000 to an ammunition dealer after losing a lawsuit on PLCAA grounds, it is the epitome of a deeply American brand of gun company impunity.
The legal fight is also taking place against the backdrop of a dramatic historical moment in the U.S.-Mexico security relationship. In the year before and the year after PLCAA was passed, two key events took place. First, in 2004, Congress permitted a federal assault weapons ban in the U.S. to expire. Second, in 2006, the Mexican government announced the deployment of the military into the streets in a “war” on drug trafficking. The Bush administration threw its support behind the campaign with a multibillion-dollar security aid package known as the Mérida Initiative, beginning an era of unprecedentedly close binational collaboration in the drug war’s most violent front.
With the shifts in law to the north and the declaration of war to the south, the stream of military-grade weaponry flowing into Mexico, legally and illegally, became a surging river of iron. In the past decade and a half, Mexico has weathered its worst period of violence since its revolution more than a century ago, with more than 400,000 people killed and paramilitary-style criminal groups building U.S.-sourced weapons arsenals capable of inflicting significant damage on government forces. Each year, according to Mexico’s complaint, an estimated 500,000 U.S.-made firearms are illegally trafficked over the border into a country with just one legal gun shop, owned and operated by the army, and some of the strictest gun laws in the Western Hemisphere.
“We have at least 10 million guns in Mexico that shouldn’t be here because we don’t sell them in Mexico,” Celorio said. Criminal organizations, he added, “have a certain degree of impunity, not because Mexico doesn’t want to prosecute them, but because of their firepower.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, came into office in 2018 vowing to undo the militarization of his predecessors. He declared an end to the drug war, replacing it with “abrazos, no balazos” — “hugs, not bullets” — a suite of social initiatives aimed at directing young people away from crime while rolling back the military’s presence in the streets. With violence still at record-high levels, some López Obrador critics say the president is naively ignoring a metastasized public safety threat and needlessly abandoning the progress made through years of joint security initiatives, while others point to the fact that the military’s role in the public security operations has in fact expanded under the current administration, particularly in the realm of immigration enforcement. The tenuous binational relationship came to a head in 2020, when U.S. authorities arrested, and subsequently released, Salvador Cienfuegos, the former head of the Mexican army, on drug trafficking charges. In response, an outraged López Obrador passed a law limiting U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operations in Mexico. Last month, after Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard announced that the Mérida Initiative was “dead,” top Biden administration officials — including the heads of the departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security — met with their Mexican counterparts to hammer out a new bilateral security framework.
“Both sides are kind of tailoring their messaging to what they want to pressure on and the message they want to project for their own public,” Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico and Migrant Rights at the Washington Office on Latin America, told The Intercept. The Biden administration, Brewer argues, overwhelmingly approaches the binational relationship through the prism of stopping migration to the north. “This is the major challenge right now facing U.S.-Mexico security cooperation and relations more broadly: the disproportionate weight and also very counterproductive form and direction of U.S. immigration policies, border policies specifically.”
By focusing so much energy on migration, Brewer contends that progress on other key issues in the binational relationship, such as the steady flow of weapons south, has suffered. While the two countries’ new “Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities” does touch on arms trafficking, Brewer said, “there’s no revolutionary change in approach there.” Given the enormous power of the U.S. gun lobby and the protections in law granted to gun companies, Brewer is doubtful that the Mexican government’s legal challenge will bring about official change either. “The gun lawsuit is a very powerful and I think really relevant action,” she said. “But its ultimate impact might be symbolic rather than legal.”
Mexico’s legal complaint is careful to make clear that its targets are private entities engaged in allegedly negligent business practices — not the U.S. government nor the legitimacy of the Second Amendment. “It’s a tort law case,” Celorio said. Still, it is no secret that the litigation is one piece in a broader effort to reframe the country’s relationship to Washington on matters of violence and security. On November 22, the same day that the gun companies filed their responses, Ebrard appeared before the U.N. Security Council to present a proposal for an international strategy to combat small arms trafficking. The foreign minister explicitly connected the proposal to the lawsuit.
“The Mexican government would never try, attempt, or give a signal that we want a change in domestic law in the U.S. We respect that sovereignty,” Celorio said. “But we’re dying. We cannot wait until things happen. So that’s why we’re resorting to other actions.”
From El Paso to Black Thursday
The genesis of Mexico’s lawsuit was August 3, 2019, when a gunman walked into a Walmart busy with back-to-school shoppers in El Paso, Texas, and murdered 23 people while wounding 23 others.
Eight of the victims were Mexican nationals. Many of the others were Mexican American. The youngest victim was 2 years old. The oldest was 82. Not since the early 1900s, when posses of vigilantes and border lawmen lynched and murdered them by the hundreds, had people of Mexican descent in the Texas borderlands sustained such a bloody and targeted terror attack. Authorities said the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Wood Crusius, bought his GP WASR-10 semiautomatic rifle and 1,000 rounds of ammunition online, then drove all night from his home in Allen, Texas, with an explicit plan to murder Mexicans and repel the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Facing 90 federal charges, including 45 for hate crimes, Crusius pleaded not guilty in the case. A trial date has not been set.
Celorio was in Mexico City when the news broke, having returned from a five-year posting at Mexico’s embassy in Washington, D.C., where he was section head of Hispanic and Migration Affairs. Inside the AMLO government, career officials worried that El Paso could be the beginning of something even worse. “August 2019, remember where we were in terms of white supremacism and white nationalism,” Celorio said. “We were thinking that there were going to be copycats because he basically called on others to grab their own weapons and stop the invasion.”
Ebrard tasked Celorio with finding a way to hold the shooter accountable and prevent further bloodshed. He encouraged his legal adviser to be “inventive,” in Celorio’s words, and “courageous.” Celorio traveled to El Paso and spent days meeting with prosecutors, reviewing video of the killings, and speaking with survivors. He contacted Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel and vice president of legal at Brady Legal, the litigation arm of the Brady Campaign, the country’s most prominent gun control organization. Celorio also spoke with Steve Shadowen, a Texas-based civil rights attorney who he had gotten to know through litigation involving Border Patrol agents fatally shooting Mexicans across the border. Both Lowy and Shadowen are now co-counsels in the suit against the U.S. gun companies.
Together, the lawyers discussed what it was about El Paso that Mexico hoped to address. For Celorio, part of the motivation was rooted in “the fact that someone inspired by white nationalism” could so easily acquire the means to bring their murderous fantasies to life. Early ideas for a legal response included suing Crusius, Walmart, or the city of El Paso. The problem, Celorio explained, was legal standing. “The government of Mexico wasn’t there,” he said. “You can sue representing all Mexicans, but it’s difficult.”
Two and half months after the El Paso attack, events in the Mexican state of Sinaloa prompted the government to widen its approach to the gun issue.
On October 17, 2019, Mexican security forces, reportedly operating under heavy Trump administration pressure, arrested Ovidio Guzmán Lopez, son of the famed Joaquin “El Chapo” Loera Gúzman, in the Sinaloan capital of Culiacán for extradition to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges.
What happened next would go down in local memory as “Jueves Negro” — Black Thursday. Hundreds of gunmen, including some who were drawn by social media calls for paid volunteers and then outfitted with guns, mobilized a blindingly swift counteroffensive. They rolled into the capital in armor-plated vehicles mounted with .50 caliber machine guns. They cut off entry and exit points into the city, staged a successful jailbreak, burned vehicles and homes, then surrounded a housing complex for the families of Mexican soldiers, effectively taking the wives and children inside hostage while they demanded Guzmán’s release. Video of the siege showed parents hiding behind cars with small children while gunfire rang out, and civilians evacuated businesses and sheltered in restaurant kitchens. Several weapons manufactured by the companies that would become defendants in Mexico’s gun lawsuit were observed at the scene, including Colt’s AR-15 platforms, Beretta and Glock handguns, and a Barrett M82-series anti-material sniper rifle, a behemoth weapon designed to disable and destroy battlefield equipment at long distances. By the day’s end, the Mexican military announced that it was terminating operations in the city, and Guzmán was free. Fourteen people were dead. The citizens of Culiacán were left to pick up the pieces after the traumatic ordeal.
Black Thursday’s binational implications were stark: a criminal network whose financial power is derived from U.S. customers used U.S.-made weapons to terrorize a state capital and thwart a U.S.-based extradition effort. Other touchstone events soon followed. Less than three weeks later, on November 4, 2019, a three-vehicle convoy was ambushed on a desert highway in the Mexican state of Sonora. The attackers disabled the vehicles with a deluge of gunfire, then set them on fire. The victims who died, three women and six children, were members of a Mormon community that has lived in the area for years. They were all dual U.S.-Mexican citizens, making the massacre a kind of grim reversal of the attack in El Paso, with Americans now gunned down on Mexican soil. Eight months later, the spectacle of extraordinary violence landed on the very doorstep of the country’s most powerful officials. As dawn broke on June 26, 2020, an estimated 50 gunmen carrying assault rifles, .50 caliber sniper rifles, and grenade launchers attacked the head of Mexico City’s police, Omar García Harfuch, while he was driven through the capital. Harfuch’s vehicle was shot more than 400 times. Both of his bodyguards were killed. Harfuch was shot three times but survived.
Together, the events in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Mexico City crystalized a realization for Celorio and his colleagues: The phenomenon Mexico hoped to address was bigger than El Paso. “The common factor in all of them was the firepower,” he said. What happened in Texas reflected what Mexico has been living through for years, with the key difference being that in Mexico, the guns fueling the violence are the illegal product of massive and illicit cross-border trade.
With Ebrard’s support, Celorio began coordinating a legal strategy that would target the flow at its source. His team researched the contours of gun violence and the illicit arms trade in Mexico. They found that between 70 to 90 percent of all guns recovered at crime scenes in the country are U.S.-made, with firearms produced by six manufacturers — Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt, Glock, and Ruger — turning up most often. While previous government estimates put the number of firearms illegally trafficked into Mexico annually at around 200,000, the complaint Mexico filed in August alleged that “between 342,000 and 597,000” of the companies’ guns are trafficked into the country every year.
The legal team observed what drug war trackers have long known, that in an illicit industry that generates an estimated $250 million annually, Barrett’s powerful .50 caliber sniper rifles stand out as both a tactical asset and a status symbol. In 2016, the government noted, gunmen in the state of Michoacán used a Barrett to shoot down a helicopter belonging to the state attorney general, killing the pilot and three officers on board. “Barrett knows that its dealers sell these military guns to traffickers, often in bulk, to arm the cartels that use them to battle Mexican military and police who are trying to stop the drug trade,” the government alleged. According to the complaint, Mexican soldiers recovered 227 of the company’s .50 caliber rifles from 2010 to 2018.
Barrett wasn’t alone in appealing to organized crime, though. With its patent on the hugely popular AR-15, Colt’s guns turned up at more crime scenes than any other manufacturer’s weapons, Mexico told the court, with more than 2,000 weapons recovered between 2006 and 2018. “Colt does not even try to hide its pandering to the criminal market in Mexico,” the government complained, pointing to three .38 caliber pistols — “El Jefe,” “El Grito,” and the “Emiliano Zapata 1911” — as explicitly marketed to Mexican buyers. A Zapata pistol, named after the Mexican revolutionary and inscribed with the words, “It is better to die standing than to live on your knees,” was used to assassinate Mexican investigative journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea in 2017, adding another name to the grim tally that makes Mexico the most world’s most dangerous country for journalists.
Mexico couched its argument for damages in history, describing how the 2004 expiration of the assault weapons ban in the U.S. altered life for the worse. Prior to the expiration, from 1999 to 2004, murders in the country were on the decline, the complaint said. Once the ban expired, the defendants ramped up their production and distribution of military-grade weapons. “Border-state gun dealers now sell twice as many guns as dealers in other areas of the country,” the complaint said. According to the government, in the years immediately following the expiration, illegal gun ownership per capita in Mexico increased tenfold and the homicide rate increased by 45 percent: “No nation other than Mexico experienced a similar homicide surge during this period.” In 2003, there were fewer than 2,500 homicides committed with a gun in Mexico. By 2019, there were more than 23,000.
“The magnitude of these deaths is so extensive that, beginning in 2005, it significantly affected the life expectancy of all Mexicans,” the government said, noting that while the life expectancy in the country increased by approximately six months from 2000 to 2005, “it decreased by about the same amount from 2005 to 2010.” Today, Mexico is home to the third most gun-related deaths in the world, and even though the country has less than half of the population of the U.S., a Mexican is more likely to be killed with a U.S.-made gun than a U.S. citizen. Murder is the leading cause of death among Mexican teenagers and young adults, the complaint said, and last year more than 40 percent of Mexicans under the age of 18 reported frequently seeing or hearing gunfire in their day-to-day lives. Citing the Institute for Economics and Peace, an international think tank, the government said that the financial impact of the violence in 2019 alone was $238 billion, more than 20 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product.
At the core of Mexico’s claim is an argument that the gun companies could make any number of changes in their business practices to help stem the violence — examples the government cited included “limiting sales of multiple guns,” “mandatory background checks for secondary gun sales,” “curbs on straw purchasers” (individuals who are paid to purchase weapons for a third-party buyer), and “a restriction on assault weapons sales” — but that in the interest of making money, they deliberately chose not to. As part of its legal challenge, Mexico is seeking internal records detailing what measurers the gun manufacturers are currently taking to limit the flow of their products into criminal hands. If successful, the release of such information could offer a rare window into the gun industry’s mechanisms for tracing products that turn up at crime scenes — thanks to the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment, another NRA lobbying achievement, those records have been shielded from public review for nearly two decades.
As for PLCAA, Mexico argues that the law is a nonissue in the case. The Supreme Court “has repeatedly held that where conduct in one nation causes injury in another the ‘default rule for tort cases’ is that ‘the local law of the state where the injury occurred determines the rights and liabilities of the parties,’” the government said in its complaint. When “U.S.-based corporations cause injury abroad to foreign sovereigns, the U.S. Constitution and statutes allow those sovereigns to sue for ‘violations of their own laws and to invoke federal diversity jurisdiction as a basis for proceeding in U.S. courts.’” In other words, because the harms happened in Mexico, Mexican law applies. Rendering PLCAA even more irrelevant, Mexico argued, was the fact that the legislation was clearly passed to address alleged harms on U.S. soil alone: “Every aspect of PLCAA confirms that the U.S. Congress enacted that statute with only U.S. domestic concerns in mind.”
While the U.S. is free to chart its own course in balancing “the financial interests of the gun industry and the rights of victims within its jurisdiction,” the Mexican government argued, Mexico has the right to do the same: “Just as defendants may not dump toxic waste or other pollutants to poison Mexicans across the border, they may not send their weapons of war into the hands of the cartels, causing repeated and grievous harm, and then claim immunity from accountability.” It is not as though the companies “live on another planet in which they are sheltered from news of their corrupt dealers, the trafficking of their guns into Mexico, and the devastating damage suffered by the government and its people,” the complaint said. “They simply choose to act as if they are blind — willfully blind — to those facts.”
By increasing the production of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, marketing to criminals, and using distribution networks known to feed into their armories, the gun manufacturers have made a deliberate choice to “maintain their supply chain to the cartels,” Mexico argued. The companies have “refused calls for reform because, from the perspective of their bottom lines, their distribution systems are huge successes,” the government alleged. “Their supply of guns to the criminal market in Mexico is a feature, not a bug.”
Pandora’s Box
A month after Mexico filed suit, Steve Shadowen, the Texas-based co-counsel, was feeling confident. “This case is rock solid,” Shadowen told The Intercept in September.
While outside legal analysts have described Mexico’s lawsuit as a long shot, Shadowen, a tort law expert, believes the defendants have the scope of PLCAA all wrong. “Yes, the U.S. has a statute, OK, but Mexico does not have that statute. Instead, it has tort law,” he said. “We will prove that the tort law of Mexico says that Mexico should be able to recover here. This PLCAA statute is an outlier in the world, generally, and it certainly does not reflect the social policy or the law of Mexico.”
The veteran attorney predicted that his team would have “a big battle with the defendants” over the legislation. The 58-page joint motion for dismissal that the gun companies filed last month indicates he was right.
“Unable to control cartel violence within its own borders,” Mexico is attempting to shift the blame, the companies argued. “The Mexican government wants firearms, all firearms, out of Mexico,” they said. “Taking the necessary steps — improving border security, rooting out corruption, and adequately funding police and military, for starters — would require time, resources, and the political will to take responsibility for a massive social problem.” Instead of taking responsibility, Mexico is trying to circumvent an ongoing diplomatic dispute by appealing to the courts, the companies said. “By seeking to bankrupt U.S. gun makers, this gambit not only threatens America’s constitutional freedoms, but also the careful balance of firearms regulations set by Congress and state legislatures,” they argued. “This Court need not play along.”
To prove its case, Mexico relied on an “attenuated chain” of events, the companies said, that ran from production by the gun manufacturers, to the wholesaler, to individual gun stores, to straw purchasers, to cartels, to violence in the streets, to damages incurred by the government. The defendants argued that the Mexican government did not and could not prove all those steps, but even if it could, the defendants would still be shielded from liability. “In 2005, Congress enacted the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to prohibit precisely the type of claims asserted in this case,” they said. And even if the companies did know that some weapons would be sold to dealers who would then sell them to criminals, they were still be protected: “After all, car companies know their cars will be used for reckless driving, knife companies know their knives will be used to hurt others, and beer companies know that minors drink, but none of this knowledge makes those companies liable for resulting harms.”
Mexico’s “real hope,” the companies alleged, “appears to be convincing the Court that the PLCAA does not apply at all to protect U.S. firearms companies against foreign plaintiffs.” The claim had “no merit,” they said: “By its plain terms, the PLCAA applies to all suits brought in U.S. courts against U.S. defendants for conduct in the U.S., regardless of where the alleged harms occurred.” If Mexico prevailed, the companies argued, it would open a Pandora’s box of legal challenges, blowing a “gaping hole” in the protections PLCAA was designed to provide.
“The history of firearms law in the United States is a history of legislation and regulation continually calibrated to protect Americans’ constitutional rights while also protecting people from a potentially dangerous product; the Court should not allow that incremental evolution to be upended by a lawsuit filed by a foreign power,” they said. “Under bedrock principles of international law, a foreign nation cannot use its own law to reach across borders and impose liability based on conduct in another country that was lawful when it occurred there. By trying to do so, Mexico is effectively seeking to impose its own gun control policies on U.S. firearms companies in disregard of the choices made by domestic legislatures and embedded in the federal and many state constitutions.”
Political Animals
The gun company immunity that Mexico is contending with can be traced to a man with deep ties to the border. Born in 1913 and raised in Laredo, Texas, Harlon Carter followed his father into the U.S. Border Patrol, eventually becoming chief and overseeing “Operation Wetback,” one of the largest deportation operations in U.S. history. A lifelong pistol shooter, Carter joined the NRA’s board of directors in 1951. At the time, the NRA’s primary mission was marksmanship education and supporting hunting and sport shooting. Carter would change all of that.
By 1965, Carter was president of the NRA. Ten years later, having secured a lifetime position on the organization’s executive council, he became the NRA’s chief lobbyist. By that point, a contentious rift had developed among members who supported the group’s original mission and those who believed it should shift focus to unrestrained weapons access and militant gun control opposition. Carter was an ardent supporter of the latter. “We can win it on a simple concept,” he wrote in a letter to NRA leadership. “No compromise. No gun legislation.”
In 1977, Carter and his supporters made their move, seizing control of the NRA at a dramatic annual meeting in Ohio. The former Border Patrol chief’s militancy became the ethos of the NRA. It wasn’t until 1981 that his personal relationship to firearms was fully illuminated, when the New York Times reported that the NRA pioneer was convicted of murdering a Mexican boy 50 years prior. The victim was 15-year-old Ramón Casiano. In 1931, a 17-year-old Carter confronted Casiano and his friends while carrying a shotgun. Carter’s mother suspected the boys might have information about the theft of the family’s car. Carter ordered them to come with him for questioning. The boys refused. Casiano pulled out a pocketknife. Carter asked Casiano if he believed he wouldn’t shoot. Casiano said he wouldn’t. Carter pulled the trigger. Though he claimed self-defense, Carter was convicted of murder and sentenced to three years. The case was vacated two years later, after a court ruled that the jury had been given improper instructions.
Carter died in 1991, but his legacy lived on. That same year, Wayne LaPierre assumed the role of executive vice president of the NRA. LaPierre was firmly in Carter’s camp during the NRA’s 1977 leadership coup and later took over his old job as the organization’s chief lobbyist. Two days after Carter’s passing, LaPierre eulogized his predecessor as “our champion and fiercest warrior.” PLCAA was arguably LaPierre’s greatest tribute to Carter’s legacy, a historic piece of legislation resulting from years of heavy lobbying. LaPierre, by then the NRA’s chief executive, told the New York Times that it was the most significant victory for the gun lobby in nearly 50 years.
In the mid-2000s, as violence in Mexico surged, LaPierre developed a punchy line for deflecting criticisms that U.S. gun policy might have some relationship to the violence, particularly when those criticisms suggested a reinstatement of an assault weapons ban: “Our rights are not what’s wrong.”
Arturo Sarukhán was the Mexican ambassador to the U.S. at the time, serving under then-President Felipe Calderón. “When I arrived as ambassador, I sent Wayne LaPierre a letter saying, ‘Look, I’m not here to challenge the Second Amendment. That’s a sovereign decision of the American people. It’s in the Constitution in its amendments, but what I am convinced of is that the Second Amendment wasn’t written to allow Americans to buy armor piercing ammo to hunt deer or to illicitly traffic guns across an international border. So why don’t we talk?’” Sarukhán recalled in an interview with The Intercept. LaPierre never replied. “We called this office three times to follow up on the letter,” Sarukhán said. “They didn’t even pick up the call.”
In 2012, a paper published by researchers at New York University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that the expiration of the assault weapons ban contributed to “substantial increases in homicides” in Mexican border communities. The following year, the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute estimated that without gun trafficking to Mexico, roughly 47 percent of federally licensed firearms dealers would “cease to exist.” For Sarukhán, the relationship between the weapons, the violence, and the money was obvious. “The sunset clause of the assault weapons ban coincides with the exponential growth of seizures of assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons in Mexico,” he said. “There’s a direct correlation.” Doing something about the issue, then and now, was another matter. “We all know that there won’t be an assault weapons ban anytime soon in Washington,” Sarukhán said. The former Mexican ambassador is likely right. Though Biden renewed his calls for an assault weapons ban in the spring, the prospect of Congress passing significant gun control legislation is considered unlikely.
Sarukhán is a staunch critic of the AMLO administration’s security policies. “López Obrador’s ‘hugs and bullets’ are creating more homicides than Calderón’s militarization of the war against drugs,” he said. Sarukhán argues that by pushing away U.S. involvement in shared problems, Mexico only hurts itself. Still, his criticisms of the administration’s broader posture aside, Sarukhán supports the government’s lawsuit. He pursued a similar project as ambassador, he said, albeit focused on gun shops rather manufacturers, but ran out of time before the changing of administrations. “I think the Mexican government does right in doing this,” he said. “It’s an important shot across the bow.”
While the national gun conversation tends to focus on issues within U.S. borders, a report to Congress in February revealed significant holes in the government’s system for stopping the flow of weapons south. The Government Accountability Office told lawmakers that the top U.S. federal agencies tasked with stopping illicit cross-border trafficking — the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, or ATF; Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations; and the State Department — routinely fail to communicate with one another or monitor the efficacy of their efforts.
“None of the agencies have fully developed performance measures for their efforts to disrupt firearms trafficking to Mexico, and thus they have limited ability to assess progress,” the report said.
Keith Heinzerling had an up-close look at U.S. efforts to curb the flow of guns south, serving two tours as the ATF’s country attaché in Mexico before retiring in 2016. While he pushed back on some of the depictions of the impact U.S. gun policy has had on the country — Heinzerling believes the expiration of the assault weapons ban had little relationship to violence, for example, and he suspects Mexico’s lawsuit is little more than “smoke and mirrors” — the retired ATF agent acknowledged that there are indeed major issues impeding the interdiction of southbound weapons.
In Mexico, U.S. federal agents lack the sweeping authorities they enjoy stateside and as a result are encouraged to work very closely with ostensibly vetted partners. “When you work hand in hand, you’re worried about issues of corruption and information maybe going the wrong direction,” Heinzerling told The Intercept. As an example, he pointed to the case of Genaro García Luna, the former Mexican public security chief once considered Washington’s greatest drug war ally who is now facing federal drug trafficking charges in New York.
Some of the biggest problems, however, are not on the border, Heinzerling argued, but in Washington. In a move straight out of the Harlon Carter playbook, the NRA has waged a multidecade campaign wherever possible to undermine the ATF, which LaPierre once referred to as “jack-booted government thugs.” As a byproduct of those efforts, the agency hasn’t had a confirmed director since 2013. Biden’s pick to head the organization, David Chipman, a 25-year ATF veteran who worked as policy adviser for gun control groups, faced heated Republican pushback in a Senate hearing earlier this year, with Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley equating his appointment to putting “antifa in charge of the Portland Police Department.” According to Heinzerling, the absence of leadership has had a devastating impact on morale that trickles into important missions like cross-border weapons trafficking.
“It’s a political animal — the NRA,” he said. “All the people in ATF want to do the right thing, believe me, but we can’t even get a director confirmed because it’s all politics. It’s insane.”
The Never-Ending Arms Race
Ieva Jusionyte, an associate professor of international security and anthropology at Brown University, has spent years studying gun trafficking to Mexico at the ground level, spending her days with Mexican purchasers of illegal U.S.-made weapons, observing Mexican government gun buyback programs in action, and interviewing rank-and-file members of Mexican organized crime for a forthcoming book.
Attempts to understand the U.S. and Mexico strictly as two separate countries with their own separate laws obscures the ways in which those laws inform conditions on the ground, she argued. “This is a regional political economy of violence where different laws on both sides create opportunities for various criminal activities that increase violence,” Jusionyte told The Intercept. Rising violence, she added, creates economic opportunities for U.S. gun companies. “Insecurity in Latin America — in Central America, in Mexico — is a big market for U.S. gunmakers because they equip both sides,” Jusionyte said. “They sell the guns to the police forces and security forces and then they allow their guns to illegally supply those organized crime groups that security forces then fight against. So it’s a big win for gunmakers.”
Jusionyte’s observation points to one of the great ironies of Mexico’s lawsuit: While one arm of the Mexican government is supposedly attempting to bankrupt the U.S. gun industry, another is feeding it millions of dollars a year.
Over the past decade and half, the Mexican military has become one of the biggest government purchasers of U.S.-made weapons in the world. From 2015 and 2017 alone, legal U.S. guns and ammo exports to Mexico surged to nearly $123 million, more than a dozen times what it was from 2002 to 2004, making the Mexican military the largest Latin American buyer of U.S.-made arms by far. As sales have skyrocketed, some U.S. lawmakers have grown increasingly concerned at the repeated evidence of U.S.-made guns flowing to Mexican security forces with abhorrent human rights records. Scores of Colt rifles, for example, were sent to municipal police in the city of Iguala both before and after the police there were implicated in the 2014 disappearance of 43 college students, one of the most infamous crimes in Mexican history.
The effect Mexico’s lawsuit might have on the multimillion-dollar exchanges between the military and U.S. gun companies remains to be seen. Three of the companies currently being sued by Mexico — Colt, Glock, and Barrett — have sold weapons to the Mexican military in the past. So far, Celorio said, his office has received “no pushback at all” from its military colleagues.
Despite its stated commitment to demilitarizing Mexico, the AMLO administration is currently presiding over the largest deployment of troops in the streets in recent history. The continued reliance on the military in public security, and in particular for U.S.-backed migration crackdowns, has drawn fierce criticism from human rights advocates. Celorio is attuned to the critiques. To draw down the military’s presence in the streets, he argued, “the criminal gangs, their firepower has to decrease.”
“There’s a spiral of violence that is escalating because of the illicit traffic of guns,” Celorio said. “We always talk about the wholesale of guns, the big shipments, and how Saudi Arabia shouldn’t divert their weapons to Yemen,” he said. “But what about what is happening in the stores in Laredo?”
Celorio said those who might doubt the sincerity of Mexico’s current efforts are mistaken. “We’re doing this for real,” he said. The litigation, he argued, is evidence of a changing Mexico. “It’s a Mexico that believes in itself, saying, ‘We’re no more, we’re no less than any other country, but in the equality of rights, we’re Mexico, and if we need to defend ourselves, we’ll do it,’” he said. “That’s a Mexico that is transforming.”
Reef fish swim above recovering coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia. Scientists and tourism operators are using unique technologies to spurn coral growth which has been hurt by climate change. (photo: Lucas Jackson/Reuters)
From new protected areas to ozone layer gains, this year saw some positive trends, even as myriad problems persist.
But amid a year of worsening environmental stress – including mostly ineffective international climate negotiations in Glasgow, locust plagues ravaging crops in East Africa, and an entire town being destroyed by fire in western Canada – some small shoots of hope have emerged.
When it comes to the state of planet Earth, scientists and conservationists have highlighted five of the most important good-news stories from 2021:
1) The ozone layer is healing
It was one of the key environmental causes of the 1980s: trying to prevent the hole in the ozone layer, which protects the planet from harmful UV rays, from getting any larger. Activists mobilised street protests and politicians held summits.
And change is happening, according to a recent study by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): Because of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a global deal to regulate nearly 100 man-made chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, 443 million Americans will likely be spared from skin cancer through the end of this century.
The hole in the ozone layer remains enormous – about the size of North America – but it is recovering at a rate of one to three percent every 10 years, according to the UN. The hole over parts of the northern hemisphere is expected to heal completely by the 2030s, with full repair over the southern hemisphere and polar regions expected by the 2060s, according to UN data.
Global action on the problem via the Montreal Protocol has prevented more than 99 percent of potential health effects that would have otherwise occurred from ozone destruction, NCAR reported.
Environmentalists hope the relative success in the movement to protect the ozone layer can be replicated in the fight against climate change; so far, that has not happened.
2) ‘Coral IVF’ aids Australia’s Great Barrier Reef
The world’s largest living structure is under threat from rising ocean temperatures linked to climate change, which have caused coral bleaching.
This year, however, has seen some recovery on the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists have been using man-made pools in a process comparable to in vitro fertilisation (IVF), moving eggs from areas of the reef where coral has been growing. These are then transferred in an effort to regenerate areas hit by bleaching or destruction from storms.
The process of assisted spawning, dubbed “coral IVF”, aided the birth of billions of new coral babies this year, in an explosion of colour. The reef is still facing substantial dangers, but scientists and conservationists hope these types of technologies can spur broader recovery in the world’s reefs, home to roughly a quarter of marine life.
3) China’s giant pandas no longer ‘endangered’
Home to more than 1,800 giant pandas living in the wilderness, China reported in July that the iconic bears are no longer officially “endangered”. Thanks to conservation efforts, they are now classified as just “vulnerable”.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature, an independent tracking group, made a similar assessment several years earlier.
Partial credit for the improvement in the giant panda population can be traced to an expanded network of protected areas in the world’s most populous country, covering about 18 percent of China’s landmass, according to Chinese authorities.
4) Renewable energy generation hits all-time high
Despite supply chain problems stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, 2021 was expected to set an all-time high for new renewable energy production capacity.
With new solar installations, wind farms and other technologies, the world added 290 gigawatts of renewable power production capacity this year, according to a report published this month by the Paris-based International Energy Agency. By comparison, that is twice as much as Canada’s total electricity generating capacity of about 145 gigawatts.
Based on these trends, renewable energy capacity could exceed the current global capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026. Globally, more than 90 percent of new electricity generating capacity in the next five years is projected to come from renewables. The pace of growth, however, is still not fast enough to reach the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
5) Protected area expands around Galapagos Islands
In the 19th century, amazing animal life on the remote Galapagos Islands inspired Charles Darwin to pen On the Origin of Species and pioneer the theory of evolution.
This past November, Ecuador’s president announced that a marine-protected area around the Galapagos would be expanded by 60,000sq km (37,282 sq miles).
Home to giant tortoises, marine iguanas, penguins, sea lions and frigatebirds, among other species, the area is under threat from climate change, illegal fishing and other challenges. Environmentalists hope expanding the protected area will help preserve its unique natural beauty and wildlife.
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