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And what it will take to rescue democracy from a Supreme Court and a GOP hell-bent on dismantling it
n the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.
As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.
John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.
Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.
The final two opinions of the most recent Supreme Court term put this phenomenon on full display. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that California’s requirement that charities disclose their biggest donors to state regulators was unconstitutional. Critics of anonymous political spending say the decision will fuel future challenges to transparency laws and empower anonymous donors at a time when American politics is awash in dark money from Democratic and Republican groups alike. “We are now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy, and securing an upper hand for dark-money influence in perpetuity,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement reacting to the decision.
In the second decision, Brnovich v. DNC, the Roberts court knee-capped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Brnovich decision, legal experts say, will give greater leeway to state governments when they craft voting rules, and makes it much harder to prove that a voting law is discriminatory. “This is the rewrite of Section 2 that John Roberts couldn’t get in 1981,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s going to be extremely difficult now (to bring Section 2 challenges) except for the most egregious forms of voter discrimination.”
Combined, the AFPF and Brnovich decisions continue the Roberts court’s decade-plus track record of undermining the hard-fought voting laws enacted during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-corruption reforms passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. And with a six-vote conservative majority on the Supreme Court in place for years — if not decades — to come, that trend shows no sign of ending soon. “As long as there’s a strong conservative majority on the court, any hope that the courts will do anything to rein campaign spending or states’ efforts to restrict the vote or tilt the playing field is indeed a hollow hope,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.
In the face of the Roberts court’s agenda, reformers in Congress and in state legislatures as well as election-law scholars say the need for new policies tailored to survive the high court’s scrutiny. Coming at a time when Republican state governments are seeking to restrict access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court’s latest decisions are “yet another affront to Americans’ right to pick their elected officials and know who is working to influence the democratic process,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tells Rolling Stone. “This further underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote and ensure that our democracy works for the people, not for special interests and billionaires.”
Before surveying the options under consideration by reformers, it’s worth better understanding how far-reaching and potentially damaging the Supreme Court’s last two decisions were.
In the AFPF case, the court struck down California’s requirement that large donors to charities must be disclosed to the state government so that the state can root out possible fraud related to those donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch-backed group, and the Thomas More Law Center challenged that requirement, saying it violated the group’s freedom to associate in private. They also cited the risk of harassment if the private donor information became public (as had happened in the past when some donor information was leaked).
The case harkened back to the influential NAACP v. Alabama decision in 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP didn’t have to disclose members who feared facing retribution in the Jim Crow South. In AFPF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and other civil-rights groups invoked that earlier case in a friend-of-the-court brief that argued for the right to associate in private and urged the court to reach a narrow decision that would have struck down California’s rule without broader implications for transparency in civic and political life.
Instead, the majority’s opinion, written by Roberts, has broad implications for politics and activism. Before, the Supreme Court had made clear that disclosure was important enough to preserve even if it led to some nastiness or vitriol as a result. In his AFPF opinion, Roberts tossed that out the window. The mere possibility of a chilling effect on association was enough, he wrote in his opinion, to justify getting rid of certain disclosure requirements.
Roberts’ decision does more than wipe out California’s law, experts say. Under this reasoning, it opens the door to future challenges to longstanding laws on the disclosure of campaign donations put in place after Watergate, when untraceable money flooded into American elections and led to corruption. “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the AFPF case.
In Brnovich, the voting-rights case, the Roberts court took the opposite stance toward a state’s authority to set the rules. This time, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court deferred to the states to set their own voting rules and raised the bar almost impossibly high to challenge those laws for alleged discrimination, voting-rights advocates say. The majority’s opinion makes it so that a state can justify voting changes (cutting early voting, restricting absentee voting, reducing polling places) if it did so in the interest of preventing possible fraud, even if such fraud is vanishingly rare. The majority’s Brnovich ruling also takes as its benchmark the year 1982 — the year when Congress last passed major updates to the Voting Rights Act — for gauging the discriminatory nature (or not) of voting changes.
Rick Hasen, the election-law expert, describes the practical effect of the decision like this. Imagine that a state offered a week of early voting, he says, and there was evidence that a large number of African American voters used the Sunday before the election to do Souls to the Polls drives to get people to vote right after church. Then imagine that, post-Brnovich, the same state got rid of Sunday early voting and the evidence suggested the state did so to blunt African American turnout.
Under the Roberts court majority’s approach, Hasen says, this would likely not run afoul of Section 2. In his opinion, Alito says the benchmark for measuring whether a voting change is discriminatory is how it compares to the voting rules when the VRA was last reauthorized — in 1982. His test also implies that as long as a state can point to other voting opportunities, it can fairly justify cutting something like Sunday early voting. “For one reason, in 1982 there were very few early voting opportunities, so eliminating early voting can’t be a Section 2 violation because that wasn’t the norm in 1982,” Rick Hasen says. “For another thing, you have to look at the election system as a whole, so long as there are other ways to vote, then it’s not discriminatory under this court’s ruling.”
So what can — and what should — Congress do?
Lee Drutman, the New America political-reform expert, says the For the People Act, aka H.R. 1 and S. 1, contains a number of provisions that could repair some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s two most recent decisions. That bill — which was recently filibustered in the Senate but Democrats have vowed to revive — would increase disclosure of dark-money donations, mandate paper ballots, and give the federal government more latitude to expand access to the ballot box.
But Drutman acknowledges that many of the most popular pieces of the For the People Act — which has a slim change of passing in the first place — will face challenges by conservative and libertarian legal groups. “Republicans are going to litigate the hell out of it,” he says.
As pressure builds inside the American democratic system because of hyper-partisanship, the nationalization of politics, and many other factors, what’s needed are release valves, Drutman says. He supports reforms that might break the “two-party doom loop,” as he puts it. Those include Alaska’s model of a top-four primary election and ranked-choice voting like in New York City but applied to, say, the U.S. Senate. “I think you’d see opportunities for more political parties and new coalitions forming,” he says. “You’d get the release valves.”
Rick Hasen says lawmakers should focus for now on the most immediate threat to American democracy: election subversion. He says the country narrowly avoided such a disaster in the 2020 election despite Trump’s attempts to pressure state and local election officials, like when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to give him the victory in Georgia. But with the Trumpist wing of the GOP in full control, and Republican state legislatures moving to pass laws that empower partisans to dictate how elections are run and counted, subversion remains a threat, whether it’s the prospect of a state legislature selecting a rival slate of electors, a president pressuring election workers to change the count, or members of Congress disrupting the certification process in Washington, D.C.
Hasen says the universal use of paper ballots, tougher penalties for anyone who interferes with the election-counting process, and reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act could all help prevent a future attempt to overturn or change an election outcome. It’s also a more narrowly tailored solution that, he says, could win over 10 Senate Republicans.
“We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion,” Hasen wrote this spring. “That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now.”
Supporters react as U.S. president Donald Trump holds a campaign rally. (photo: Leah Millis/Reuters)
As well as grabby headlines about Hitler, Michael Bender of the Wall Street Journal shows us how millions have been led astray
n election night in 2016, Donald Trump paid homage to America’s “forgotten men and women”, vowing they would be “forgotten no longer”. Those who repeatedly appeared at his rallies knew of whom he spoke. Veterans, gun enthusiasts, bikers, shop clerks. Middle-aged and seniors. Life had treated some harshly. Others less so.
Some had voted for Barack Obama, only to discover hope and change wasn’t all it was advertised to be. Regardless, the Democratic party’s urban and urbane, upstairs-downstairs coalition didn’t mesh with them. Or vice-versa. Politics is definitely about lifestyles.
In his new book, Michael Bender pays particular attention to those Trump supporters who called themselves “Front Row Joes”. They attended rallies wherever, whenever. It was “kind of like an addiction”, Bender quotes one as saying.
No longer did they need to bowl alone. Trump had birthed a community. Their applause was his sustenance, his performance their sacrament.
One Front Row Joe, Saundra from Michigan, was a 41-year-old Walmart worker. On 6 January, in Washington DC, she made her way up the west side of the US Capitol.
“It looked so neat,” she said.
She also said she and other Trump supporters who stormed Congress did not do so “to steal things” or “do damage”. They had a different aim.
“We were just there to overthrow the government.”
The next day, Saundra flew home. Trump’s wishes, real or imagined, were her command. Later in January, two days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, Senator Mitch McConnell declared that the mob had been “fed lies” and provoked by Trump.
Bender covers the White House for the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, We Did Win This Election is his first book. It is breezy, well-written and well-informed. He captures both the infighting in Trump’s world and the surrounding social tectonics.
Trump goes on the record. The interview is a solid scorecard on who is up or down. He brands McConnell “dumb as a rock”. The loathing is mutual – to a point. The Senate minority leader has made clear he will back Trump if he is the nominee again.
Liz Cheney occupies a special spot in Trump’s Inferno. The Wyoming representative, daughter of a vice-president, now sits on a House select committee to investigate 6 January. But to most of Trump’s party, six months after the insurrection, what happened that afternoon is something to be forgotten or at least ignored.
Mike Pence dwells in purgatory.
“I don’t care if he apologizes or not,” Trump says of his vice-president presiding over the certification of Biden’s win. “He made a mistake.”
Once before, in their second year in office, the two men reportedly clashed over a political hiring decision. Back then, Trump reportedly called Pence “so disloyal”.
Pence still harbors presidential ambitions. Good luck with that.
Bender’s book is laden with attention-grabbing headlines. He reports Trump telling John Kelly, then White House chief of staff, that Hitler “did a lot of good things”. Trump denies it. Kelly stays mum. More than 30 years ago, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, let it be known that he kept a copy of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Everyone needs a hobby.
Bender writes of Trump urging the military to “beat the fuck” out of protesters for racial justice, and to “crack their skulls”. The 45th president’s asymmetrical approach to law enforcement remains on display. “Stand back and stand by” was for allies like the Proud Boys. Law and order was for everyone else. Political adversaries were enemies.
Trump now embraces the supposed martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt, an air force veteran who stormed Congress on 6 January and was killed by law enforcement.
“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt,” he said this week. “Boom. Right through the head. Just, boom. There was no reason for that.”
To say the least, that is highly contestable.
Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, cowered behind the doors Babbitt rushed. Hours later, the bulk of the House GOP opposed certifying Biden’s win. The party of Lincoln is now the party of Trump.
Focusing on the 2020 election, a contest under the deathly shadow of Covid, Bender conveys the chaos and disorganization of the Trump campaign. After a disastrous kick-off rally in Tulsa, Trump began looking for a new campaign manager. Brad Parscale’s days were numbered. He was a digital guy, not a major domo.
According to Bender, Trump offered the job to Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee – and niece of Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, 2012 nominee and, in Trumpworld, persona decidedly non grata. Her reply: “Absolutely not.”
Trump also sent word to Steve Bannon, his campaign chair in 2016. He declined too. Bannon was banished from the kingdom for trashing Trump and his family. But he understood the base better than anyone – other than Trump himself.
There was a reason Saturday Night Live spoofed Bannon as the power behind the throne, and that he appeared on the cover of Time. There was no return to court but Trump did pardon Bannon of federal fraud charges. Not a bad consolation prize.
Parscale was demoted and kicked to the curb. Within months he appeared in the news, shirtless, barefoot, drunk and armed. His successor, Bill Stepien, brought Trump to within 80,000 votes of another electoral college win.
Bender makes clear that Trump is neither gone nor forgotten. His acquittal in his second impeachment, for inciting the Capitol attack, only reinforced his desire to fight another day.
“There has never been anything like it,” Trump tells Bender. So true.
Texas Democrats hold signs denouncing voter suppression at rally at the state capitol in Austin on 20 June. (photo: Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock)
Texans from across the ideological spectrum flocked to testify in person at public hearings convened by governor Greg Abbott
ailee Mouch woke up at 2am Saturday morning so she could drive to her state’s capital city of Austin and testify at two competing public hearings on Texas’s restrictive voting bills.
She knew she had to return to the Dallas area to be at work by 6am Sunday. But she was determined to stay as long as possible to tell state lawmakers how their proposals would hurt democracy in the small city where she goes to college.
“It shouldn’t be scary to vote,” she said. “And I worry that this will make it scary to vote.”
Mouch was among the crowd who flocked to the state capitol on Saturday, when committees in the state House and Senate held overlapping hearings on highly controversial voting legislation during their rapid-fire special session.
By 6am local time on Sunday, public testimony in the House was still ongoing. The overnight hearing paralleled actions during the legislature’s regular session, when lawmakers advanced elections bills while most Texans were sleeping.
“We have packed snacks, food, and everything, and we’re prepared for another 22-hour marathon if that’s what God’s calling us to do. We love our state. This is it. We don’t have anywhere else to go,” said Lori Gallagher.
Texas governor Greg Abbott convened the special session – effectively legislative overtime for no more than 30 days – starting 8 July, after Democrats killed a restrictive voting bill during the regular session with a historic walkout from the House floor.
“We feel like our ‘electeds’ are really trying to beat us down and trying to run out that, like, that urgency that we have and that commitment that we have,” said Lexy Garcia, a regional field coordinator for Texas Rising and Texas Freedom Network about the battle against voting restrictions.
Abbott announced his special session agenda on Wednesday, and the public received very little notice before they had to appear for Saturday’s hearings.
But Texans from across the ideological spectrum still filled multiple overflow rooms and sat patiently on hallway benches, preparing to wait all day and night to testify in person at the sessions.
At around 6.30pm Saturday, seven and a half hours into the Senate’s public hearing, former presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke addressed the committee. He testified again for the House committee early on Sunday morning.
“Some of you are Republicans. I’m a Democrat. But I think we want to win these contests on the merits of the argument, and the ideas, and the vision that we offer,” O’Rourke said at the Senate hearing.
“We don’t want to win because we’ve excluded effectively and functionally millions of our fellow Texans from participating in these decisions that will impact all of our lives for generations to come.”
Texas is one of the country’s most bitter battlegrounds for voting rights, with a deeply divided electorate and a reputation as the hardest place to cast a ballot nationwide.
Now, Republicans are endorsing provisions that would ban 24-hour and drive-thru voting, expose public officials to state felonies for soliciting or distributing unrequested vote-by-mail applications, empower partisan poll watchers and otherwise significantly rollback voter access.
Voting rights advocates warned for months that those changes could disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color and people with disabilities, a concern Republican lawmakers in Saturday’s Senate hearing shrugged off.
“Every provision in this bill applies to every voter equally, regardless of where they live, or the color of their skin, or their political party,” said state senator Bryan Hughes, the Senate bill’s author. “We don’t register and state what our race is, or our religion.”
“I don’t believe there’s any voter suppression. I know there’s no ‘Jim Crow 2’ era law in this bill. And I’ll tell you that I know there’s not a poll tax in this bill,” said state senator Paul Bettencourt.
Some Texans think the new bills don’t go far enough, however, to establish what opponents call voter suppression but the governor calls “election integrity”.
Melinda Roberts, a poll watcher who said she was denied entry to a polling location in 2020, initially thought the Senate had butchered and overly diluted its legislation – though she later expressed support.
She ultimately wanted felony charges for election officials who restrict poll watchers’ access, but had little sympathy for anyone finding it too difficult to vote.
“I would like to ask them, ‘who has told you that you can’t vote?’” Roberts said. “I have an elderly mom. She votes in every election. Nobody has said she can’t vote. I have a son that’s a double amputee. He votes in every election. If you want to vote, you can vote. No one is suppressing you. No one.”
Betty Weed disagreed. She said she’s opposed to the bills because they would make voting “nearly impossible for many people”.
Weed volunteers with a group that provides free rides to voters, and she’s assisted Texans are blind and who, because of her help, are finally able to vote, after decades of being disenfranchised.
“The entire bill is my concern,” she said. “Pretty much everything about the bill will make it just so much harder to vote.”
The conservative-dominated US supreme court earlier this month upheld voting restrictions in Arizona, against a blistering liberal dissent, in a ruling that dealt a major blow to the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 civil rights law designed to prevent voting discrimination, and with far-reaching implication in other states.
Model homes and for sale signs line the streets in Zelienople, Pa., in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic. (photo: Keith Srakocic/AP)
Housing costs could eventually boost inflation by as much as 2 percentage points by the end of next year, though the effects could be felt sooner, according to a forecast from Fannie Mae.
all Street investors have bought into the Federal Reserve’s assurances that higher inflation won’t last, but a looming trend will test their composure over the coming months: soaring home and rental costs.
With home prices already up about 15 percent from last year and rents soaring at nearly triple their normal rate in just the first six months of 2021, there’s growing concern that housing costs could soon begin to nudge inflation higher. Since shelter makes up about one-third of a key inflation measure, that could undermine the Fed’s message that recent price spikes, which have showed up in everything from airline tickets to ride shares, will slow.
Housing costs could eventually boost inflation by as much as 2 percentage points by the end of next year, though the effects could be felt sooner, according to a forecast from Fannie Mae, the government-run company that stands behind half the country’s mortgages. A gradual buildup beginning later this year could spook markets and feed calls for the Fed to push borrowing costs higher, a move that could choke off economic growth as Democrats fight to hold onto control of Congress.
Officials at the Fed and in President Joe Biden's administration say they expect the supply-chain bottlenecks that have stoked inflation to begin to ease later this year as the economy fully reopens. But housing-driven inflation could also start to rise as higher rents slowly cycle into the official tracking of price increases, a process that may have been delayed because leases are traditionally annual.
“The outlook for rents is key,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management. “With rents going up as the economy reopens, we will continue to see more upward pressure on overall inflation.”
For now, financial markets have shrugged off the recent spurt in inflation, given signs that it is tied to temporary factors that will subside as the country emerges from the pandemic. Instead, investors have grown more worried about long-term growth with the emergence of contagious variants of the coronavirus.
But they're also keeping a wary eye on the housing market. Home prices have spiked over the last year, as social-distancing guidelines and remote work led to an increased awareness of space constraints at home. That unleashed enormous pent-up demand years in the making, as the massive millennial population began to reach peak home-buying age.
At the same time, the Fed’s easy-money response to last year’s economic crisis drove mortgage rates to rock-bottom lows, just as a glut of young adults sought to ditch cramped urban quarters for spacier homes in the suburbs. Those high prices can prevent would-be homebuyers from being able to afford a new house, leading to an even more dramatic increase in rents, which were unusually low for much of the pandemic.
Sales of existing homes were up 45 percent in May over the previous year, according to data compiled by the National Association of Realtors, which recorded a 24 percent increase in home prices over the same period. Frenzied demand led to the typical home lasting just 17 days on the market, with 89 percent of them being sold in less than a month in May.
There were just 1.2 million homes for sale in the U.S. as of the end of May, down 21 percent from last year. And the share of people between the ages of 18 and 34 living with their parents is roughly double that of 20 years ago, so demand is also high for rental units.
Supply, meanwhile, is historically low. The 2008 financial crisis put the brakes on new home construction, leaving the country today with at least 5.5 million fewer houses than needed, according to an analysis prepared for the realtors' association by the Rosen Consulting Group last month.
“This disconnect [between supply and demand] has been under way for a long time,” said Doug Duncan, chief economist at Fannie Mae. “We’re finally seeing it flow into some of the inflation numbers.”
The imbalance is so strong that even slight moderations to supply when the federal bans on evictions and foreclosures expire at the end of the month aren’t expected to make much of a difference.
“Whether it’s a foreclosure or an eviction, I think we’re going to see an uptick in both of those activities,” said Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. “But I don’t think they will play a major role in changing the overall inflation and housing-cost story, which is fundamentally about the number of households and the amount of housing stock available to house that population.”
Even as the country gets beyond the health crisis, housing economists warn that high costs due to that imbalance will persist, thanks to demographic pressures. For one thing, the biggest share of millennials isn’t expected to reach peak home-buying age for another couple of years.
That could boost inflation as measured in two government data series: the Consumer Price Index, an important gauge for financial markets, and Personal Consumption Expenditures, which is more closely monitored by the central bank because it measures a broader range of spending.
Shelter makes up a significant chunk of both CPI and PCE, though inflation data don’t directly include the purchase price of homes, which are considered assets rather than the type of consumer costs that the government aims to track. Rather, they look at rents and what’s known as owners’ equivalent rent, which measures how much someone could charge to rent out their home.
“The assumption is that if the price of the house that you’re buying rises, the rent that would be required to rent that house would also rise,” Duncan said.
But the extent to which owners’ equivalent rent will actually spike is hard to predict, as home prices themselves are much more volatile than so-called imputed rent, so some of the lurking threat might never fully materialize in the inflation data.
“I wouldn’t bet the farm on a big persistent upturn in the [housing component of CPI] based solely on asset prices for homes,” said Joel Prakken, chief U.S. economist at IHS Markit.
He also said the rise in house prices could slow down by the end of the year, as more homes are built and as already-high costs dampen demand.
“Rents are catching up to a very substantial increase in house prices,” said Donald Kohn, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former vice chair at the Fed. “If house prices continue to rise at a reasonably rapid clip, you could see this rental component of inflation persisting for quite some time, but I don’t think we know that.”
For its part, the Fed will be watching closely to see whether price increases, as a result of rent spikes or dynamics in other sectors, lead to changes in inflation expectations. Spending habits, wages and prices are all tied in part to the psychological phenomenon of whether people expect inflation to pick up.
Some Fed officials have also suggested acting soon to slow the pace at which they’re buying mortgage-backed securities, a process that bolsters the housing market even as prices soar, though they see those purchases as helping keep longer-term rates low beyond just mortgages. That debate is expected to intensify later this year.
Meanwhile, the price of lumber is elevated, and builders have for years reported struggles to hire skilled laborers after the construction pause in the wake of the 2008 crisis drove many workers out of the industry.
Both factors, paired with lingering supply-chain issues from the pandemic, cause delays as builders look to ramp up housing supply, said Joel Kan, associate vice president of economic and industry forecasting for the Mortgage Bankers Association.
“In an environment where there is still housing demand, that’s causing a much more rapid pace of home price inflation than we’ve seen in previous years,” Kan said.
Sri Lanka’s garment workers are currently caught between production targets and destitution, sickness and increasing authoritarianism. (photo: War on Want)
Sri Lanka is home to some of the biggest garment manufacturers in the world, and while clothing exports have risen, so have COVID-19 infections among workers. We talk to people who face the daily choice of disease or impoverishment.
itting alone in a room containing two narrow beds and a small table, Priyangika is sick with COVID-19. She fell ill after the virus spread through the garment factory where she works in the vast Katunayake Free Trade Zone outside Colombo, Sri Lanka.
“When I called the owner of the boarding house to say I tested positive for coronavirus, he scolded me, saying that we bring filthy diseases,” said Priyangika, whose name has been changed to protect her anonymity.
Sri Lanka is home to some of the largest garment manufacturers in the world. Its central bank has reported a 183 percent rise in exports since April 2020 — largely attributed to the apparel sector. But even as wealthy nations in the West begin to open back up thanks to plentiful vaccines and hospital capacities, the island nation is currently experiencing a deadly third wave of COVID-19 and recently reported its highest single day of fatalities. In a globalized world of both virus transmission and clothing production, Sri Lanka’s garment workers are currently caught between production targets and destitution, sickness and increasing authoritarianism.
While Sri Lanka’s apparel industry has a hard-earned reputation for being safer than many other countries’, garment factories have stayed open during recent lockdowns with the Public Health Inspectors Union now saying most COVID patients are in the clothing sector. In a statement, Amnesty International noted apparel production continuing despite limited testing and inadequate quarantine or care facilities for sick factory workers, as well as a lack of vaccine prioritization for those garment workers.
As factories continue to churn out jeans, T-shirts, bras, and sportswear, unions and labor rights campaigners say workers’ rights in Sri Lanka have deteriorated. Ashila Dandeniya is a former garment worker who founded the Stand Up Movement to represent garment workers in Sri Lanka and has spent the pandemic distributing over six thousand emergency food parcels to quarantining workers.
“There were a lot of unfair terminations — maybe someone was five minutes late to work, or they were unable to meet production targets, or they were just terminated because they’d been working in the factory for less than six months,” Dandeniya says.
According to Dandeniya, the belief that extreme measures were needed to get factories “back on track” has in turn normalized draconian behavior from management. Even measures intended to protect workers have led to deeper exploitation. Social distancing, for example, means factories are reducing the number of workers who clock in each day. “Before it would be fifteen to twenty people doing one operation; now it is five people. Five people to do the work of fifteen to twenty,” Dandeniya says. “No matter how difficult or physically straining it is, if workers say they can’t do it, they are asked to leave.”
Roshani, whose name has also been changed, spent most of the pandemic as a temporary “manpower” worker earning 900 LKR ($4.50) per day. Her job consisted of sitting on the floor surrounded by machines and snipping loose threads off clothes, then packaging them into bundles so heavy she could barely drag them across the factory floor. Managers set harsh targets and anyone who failed to meet them was not asked back the next day.
Being a temporary worker came with an additional stigma: “Permanent staff think about manpower workers as spreaders of corona, as we work in different factories each day,” Roshani says. “They don’t talk much with us, and they treat us as inferior. When we walk, they give us a wide berth.”
In March 2021, Roshani secured a permanent position at a factory, but found it no less exhausting. Manpower workers were bused to and from factories, but, as a permanent worker, she had to make her own way across the Free Trade Zone.
“Some days I had to leave the house around 5 AM. There are no buses at that time, so I walked. I did overtime until 7 or 8 PM. There was no time for me to use the washroom or drink water.” That month, Roshani earned 23,000 LKR ($116).
Factory Infections
The link between Sri Lanka’s garment factories and COVID-19 infection rates is a controversial subject. In November 2020, Reuters reported that a thousand workers at the Brandix factory in Minuwangoda had tested positive for COVID-19. With factories in multiple countries, Brandix is one of the world’s biggest garment manufacturers, making clothes for Gap, Victoria’s Secret, and Marks & Spencer, among others.
Three official reports have investigated the Brandix outbreak, which scientists have linked to Sri Lanka’s second wave. One report was commissioned by the Sri Lanka’s labour minister, one by the attorney general, and one by Brandix itself, which says it was not responsible for the outbreak and has been unfairly targeted. None of the reports have so far been made public.
In the aftermath of the Brandix outbreak, the Labour Ministry recommended factories set up bipartite COVID-19 safety committees consisting of employers, workers, and trade unions. Yet these committees have still not been setup in the vast majority of Sri Lanka’s garment factories.
“The right to information on health issues is a workers’ right. Employees must have the right to refuse work which is detrimental to their health,” says Anton Marcus, joint secretary of the Free Trade Zones & General Services Employees Union (FTZ&GSEU). “We explain [to employers] that COVID-19 is not an occupational disease. COVID-19 is a pandemic and therefore the measures to prevent the spreading of the virus should go beyond the factory to include living conditions for employees and transport.”
The FTZ&GSEU is currently negotiating the creation of a union at Next Manufacturing Ltd, a factory in Sri Lanka owned and run by British clothing firm Next plc, after workers voted to form a branch in January 2021. Next Manufacturing Ltd is one of the factories where there is currently an outbreak of COVID-19. In May, a spokesperson for Next told Jacobin that while safety is a top priority, 143 workers had tested positive at the factory. The FTZ&GSEU believes this figure was well over two hundred and set to increase.
British campaign group War on Want believe factories’ reluctance to create COVID-19 bipartite health committees has a simple explanation: “They want to drive production forward as much as possible with minimal disruption or expense to preserve their profit margins,” Ruth Ogier at War on Want told Jacobin. “This is why proper safety measures and proper monitoring have not been put in place. The result is a rapidly rising number of cases in garment factories and communities.”
Back in her tiny room in the boarding house, Priyangika shares a bathroom with five other women. Her salary is too small for her to afford her own room, though her roommate moved out after Priyangika tested positive for Coronavirus. Cooking items have been placed in her room and a quarantine sign put on her door.
Far from the family her salary helps to support, Priyangika is unable to say whether she will be paid for the time she is sick off work. “I don’t know whether they will pay me or not. I do not know what they will pay me until I get the salary.” She is, however, still expected to pay full rent and electricity costs at the boarding house.
She hopes things will not get as bad as during the second-wave lockdown when she stayed inside for six weeks: “I was mentally broken down,” Priyangika says. “I was restricted to the four walls of the boarding house and I couldn’t go back to my village.” During this time, she also went hungry: “I didn’t have food during this time. I ate rice sprinkled with salt.”
Throughout the pandemic, Sri Lanka’s garment workers have continued to stitch clothes for some of the biggest brands in the world. Sri Lanka’s factory owner association, the Joint Apparel Association Forum (JAAF), lists H&M, Calvin Klein, Hugo Boss, Levi’s, and Uniqlo amongst its clients. A collective of women’s rights groups in Sri Lanka, including the Stand Up Movement, are calling for fashion buyers to pay a premium for production during lockdown or restricted periods, and for this premium to be given directly to workers as hazard pay.
But instead, the fashion industry’s response to COVID-19 has seen brands cancel billions of dollars of orders, placing a huge strain on manufacturers. JAAF recently published an open letter stating brands were telling factories to airlift clothing orders to make up for delays. “Due to the global inequity in vaccine distribution, you and the countries you reside in are starting to ease restrictions and go back to what life looked like pre COVID-19 while we have been crippled by yet another wave that has seen COVID-19 cases rise by over 130 percent in two months,” the statement read.
JAAF told Jacobin that they are “working very closely with the government authorities to ensure the safety of employees and the community whilst keeping the industry operating,” and that a national rollout of the vaccine is crucial to getting the situation under control. Campaigners want the government to vaccinate all Free Trade Zone workers within two weeks. But there is no sign that garment workers have yet to be prioritized.
Despite this, experts say Sri Lanka’s garment factories are safer than those in neighboring countries like Bangladesh and India: “In many ways the sector is ahead of the game — especially with regards to the built space and work conditions within the factory floor,” explains Dr Kanchana Ruwanpura at the University of Gothenburg.
But there remains an overarching ethical issue facing Sri Lanka. “There isn’t enough global recognition for Sri Lanka that it is also a militarized regime in a sense,” says Dr Ruwanpura, whose forthcoming book tackles the presence of a powerful military. She points out that Sri Lanka’s COVID-19 task force is entirely made up of military officers. Many of these officers have exceptionally brutal records. The head of the national operations center for COVID-19 prevention is army commander Shavendra Silva, the target of a US-imposed travel ban for war crimes committed during the final stages of the conflict against the Tamil Tigers in 2009, when up to seventy thousand Tamil civilians were killed. And Sri Lanka’s current leader, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, served as defense secretary during the vicious counterinsurgency.
Large sections of the garment workforce are young women who migrated to Free Trade Zones from once-war-torn rural areas. As well as creating a dangerous atmosphere in which dissent over labor rights abuses leads to intimidation, the creation of an army-led COVID response has seen garment workers forcibly moved to quarantine centers.
While she was still working as a temporary manpower worker, Roshani received a phone call with the news that army personnel had taken the inhabitants of her boarding house, including the owner, to a quarantine center 100 km away after one of the boarders tested positive. She spent the next twenty-one days hiding alone in the boarding house, keeping the lights off and fearing that soldiers might return.
“The apparel sector needs to start thinking about what [a militarized regime] means for claims around ethicality,” Dr Ruwanpura concludes. “Everybody accepts Myanmar is militarized, but they are not realizing what is happening in Sri Lanka.”
Portraits of missing persons, victims of Operation Condor during the Paraguayan dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. (photo: AP)
Initially, the judges were analyzing accusations against 20 criminals. During the process, however, the Court found that three defendants had already died and asked to clarify the situation of three Peruvians.
The judges revalidated the judgment of the Rome Court of Appeal issued in July 2019 against these human rights violators. As of Thursday, the accusations against 20 criminals were being analyzed.
However, the Court found that three defendants had already died and asked to clarify the situation of three Peruvians: former President Francisco Morales and the military German Ruiz and Martin Martinez.
Due to the above, the sentences issued on July 9 only affect 11 Uruguayans and 3 Chileans. Given that the case of those Peruvians will be studied in another trial, the investigation into Operation Condor has not ended.
So far, three Chilean citizens have been convicted for the disappearance of Italians: Pedro Espinoza, a member of the secret police, the military man Daniel Aguirre, and the former official of the Investigative Police Carlos Luco.
The Uruguayans who were sentenced to life imprisonment were Jose Arab, Juan Larcebeau, Pedro Mato, Ricardo Medina, Ernesto Ramas, Jose Lima, Jorge Silveira, Ernesto Soca, Gilberto Vazquez, and Juan Carlos Blanco. Among the defendants who died of old age before hearing the verdict are Bolivia's former President Luis Meza and his Interior Minister Luis Arce Gomez.
Among the torturers sentenced to life imprisonment is also the Uruguayan military officer Jorge Troccoli who lives in Italy after escaping his country in 2007. This Friday, however, he did not attend the hearing.
Water. (photo: Texas Tech University/Texas Tech Today)
Members of Congress from Western states are pushing for $750 million to turn wastewater into pure water. Here’s how that works.
ake Mead, which provides water for 25 million people in the American West, has shrunk to 36 percent of its capacity. One rural California community has run out of water entirely after its well broke in early June. Fields are sitting fallow, as farmers sell their water allotments instead of growing crops, putting the nation’s food supply in peril.
As the West withers under extreme drought, legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives have introduced HR 4099, a bill that would direct the Secretary of the Interior to create a program to fund $750 million worth of water recycling projects in the 17 western states through the year 2027. (The bill, which was introduced at the end of June, is currently before the House Committee on Natural Resources.)
“This is beginning to be our new normal — 88 percent of the West is under some degree of drought,” says Representative Susie Lee, who introduced the bill. “Lake Mead is at the lowest level it has been at since the Hoover Dam was constructed. And the Colorado River has been in a drought for more than two decades.”
All the while, the population and economy in the western U.S. have been booming, putting tremendous pressure on a dwindling water supply. “We have, I guess, more people — one. And there’s an increase in the agricultural area —two,” says Representative Grace Napolitano, who introduced the bill. “And then climate change is exacerbating the problem.”
Part of the solution, the legislators say, is to fund the construction of more facilities that can recycle the wastewater that flows out of our sinks, toilets, and showers. You may think that’s gross and preposterous, but the technology already exists — in fact, it’s been around for half a century. The process is actually rather simple. A treatment facility takes in wastewater and adds microbes that consume the organic matter. The water is then pumped through special membranes that filter out nasties like bacteria and viruses. To be extra sure, the water is then blasted with UV light to kill off microbes. The resulting water may actually be too pure for human consumption: If you drank it, the stuff might leach minerals out of your body, so the facility has to add minerals back. (I once drank the final product. It tastes like… water.)
The recycled H2O can be pumped underground into aquifers, then pumped out again when needed, purified once more, and sent to customers. Or it may instead be used for non-potable purposes, like for agriculture or industrial processes.
Basically, you’re taking wastewater that’d normally be treated and pumped out to sea — wasting it, really — and putting it back into the terrestrial water cycle, making it readily available again to people. “Part of what makes it so important as an element of water supply portfolios is its reliability,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. “To the extent that urban centers exist and produce wastewater, it can be treated. It gives a reliable source of additional water supply — even in dry years when supply is limited and developing alternative sources would be difficult or impossible.”
Recycled water is also bankable, in a sense: Injecting it underground to recharge aquifers stores it up for use during droughts. This is likely to be particularly important in the American West, because climate change is both making droughts more punishing and futzing with the dynamics of rain. Modeling from climate scientists shows that future storms will be more intense, yet arrive less often. And by the end of the century, the mountain snowpack—which normally banks much of the West’s water until it melts into the spring runoff—is predicted to shrink by about half.
“Our hydrologic cycle is going to get more unpredictable,” says Rafael Villegas, program manager of Operation NEXT at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has been recycling water since the 1970s for non-potable reuse. “Coupled with population growth, not only here in California, but where the water comes from — Nevada, Arizona, and Northern California — you can expect that there’s going to be additional demand on those systems. So we’re at the end of the straw, right? We have to then start thinking, how do we become more efficient with the water that we do have?”
Currently in California, about 10 percent of wastewater in municipal and industrial usage is recycled. The goal of Operation NEXT is to upgrade the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant so that it recycles 100 percent of its wastewater by 2035, producing enough purified water to sustain nearly a million households in LA.
The technology is there—it’s just a matter of deploying it all over the West. “This isn’t a moonshot, if you will,” says Brad Coffey, water resource manager at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which has partnered with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts on a water recycling demonstration facility. “This is really putting the building blocks together that have been tested and proven in many other facilities, and applying it to a regional scale.”
While water recycling is not a newfangled technology, it’s not a simple or cheap process, either. It takes time to retrofit a wastewater facility for efficient recycling, and the tab for building one from scratch can run into the billions. And once a facility is up and running, it takes a good amount of energy to push all that water through the filtering membranes and other equipment, which is also expensive.
Still, says Villegas, the bigger cost would be running out of time. “If we wait to act, we’re going to be too late,” says Villegas. While the bill would fund $750 million for projects over the next six years, it will take longer to actually build those facilities and bring them online. “A program like this is going to take multiple decades,” he continues. “So if you react a couple of decades later, then you’re already behind the eight ball.”
Water recycling is only one strategy for adapting the American West to a climate emergency that has created a water emergency. Since the 1980s, per capita water use in Southern California has plummeted by 40 percent, thanks in large part to changes in building codes, but also to behavioral changes among residents, like replacing lawns with drought-tolerant native plants. Cities are also adapting. For example, the LA Department of Water and Power has been experimenting with turning medians and roadsides into green catchment zones that direct stormwater into tanks underground, so LA doesn’t have to import as much water from Northern California and the Colorado River.
While these individual and local efforts help reduce demand and increase supply, $750 million from the Feds would be a huge stimulus for building out the recycling infrastructure that’ll help the West survive climate change. “The magnitude of changes that we’re seeing with climate change, and with long and persistent droughts—that’s not about how many gallons per flush a toilet is,” says Coffey. “It’s really a broader issue that we have to attack from the supply side as well.”
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