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Showing posts with label INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label INDIGENOUS RESISTANCE. Show all posts

Friday, October 8, 2021

RSN: Charles Pierce | Amy Coney Barrett Is the Product of a Corrupt and Politicized Supreme Court Nomination Process

 

 

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Judge Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Getty Images)
Charles Pierce | Amy Coney Barrett Is the Product of a Corrupt and Politicized Supreme Court Nomination Process
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "The justice is a little bit tardy in her concerns around the Court's credibility."

The justice is a little bit tardy in her concerns around the Court's credibility.


Well, now we have a good idea of how the division of labor on the Supreme Court works: the newest justice has the job of locking the barn. From the AP (via the Minneapolis Star-Tribune):

Justices must be "hyper vigilant to make sure they're not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too," Barrett said at a lecture hosted by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center. Introduced by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who founded the center and played a key role in pushing through her confirmation in the last days of the Trump administration, Barrett spoke at length about her desire for others to see the Supreme Court as nonpartisan. Barrett said the media's reporting of opinions doesn't capture the deliberative process in reaching those decisions. And she insisted that "judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”

"To say the court's reasoning is flawed is different from saying the court is acting in a partisan manner," said Barrett, whose confirmation to the seat left open by the death of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cemented conservative control of the court. "I think we need to evaluate what the court is doing on its own terms.”

Considering that she owes her present (lifetime) position to a process that McConnell personally corrupted, that she is the product of an utterly politicized vetting process, and that she was appointed by the most singularly corrupt president in the history of the republic, I’d say that Barrett is a little bit tardy in her obviously sincere concern for the Court’s credibility. After all, she is merely the most recent, high-profile product of a federal judicial system that McConnell and the conservative intellectual chop-shops have turned into something approximately as non-partisan as McConnell’s own frontal lobes. She’s ascended to her current eminence under a dark and lucky star. She should be grateful for that and stop talking obvious nonsense of which she is a walking refutation.

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House Democrats' Plan to Tax the Rich Leaves Vast Fortunes UnscathedSenator Ron Wyden of Oregon. (photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News/Getty Images)

House Democrats' Plan to Tax the Rich Leaves Vast Fortunes Unscathed
Jonathan Weisman and Jim Tankersley, The New York Times
Excerpt: "House Democrats on Monday presented a plan to pay for their expansive social policy and climate change package by raising taxes by more than $2 trillion, largely on wealthy individuals and profitable corporations."

The House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal to pay for trillions in social spending leaves wealth gains and inheritances largely alone. It focuses instead on a more traditional target: income.


House Democrats on Monday presented a plan to pay for their expansive social policy and climate change package by raising taxes by more than $2 trillion, largely on wealthy individuals and profitable corporations.

But the proposal, while substantial in scope, stopped well short of changes needed to dent the vast fortunes of tycoons like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, or to thoroughly close the most egregious loopholes exploited by high-flying captains of finance. It aimed to go after the merely rich more than the fabulously rich.

Facing the delicate politics of a narrowly divided Congress, senior House Democrats opted to be more mindful of moderate concerns in their party than of its progressive ambitions. They focused on traditional ways of raising revenue: by raising tax rates on income rather than targeting wealth itself.

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Senate Democrats Close to Agreement on Voting Rights CompromiseSen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) helped craft a compromise version of the For The People Act that he will now seek to pass the Senate. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty Images)

Senate Democrats Close to Agreement on Voting Rights Compromise
Paul Blumenthal, The Huffington Post
Blumenthal writes: "Senate Democrats are nearing an agreement on a compromise version of their sweeping voting rights bill, the For The People Act, to be able to secure the support of Sen. Joe Manchin, the lone Democrat to oppose the original bill."

The bill is being crafted by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who opposed the original bill, and a group of Democrats.

Senate Democrats are nearing an agreement on a compromise version of their sweeping voting rights bill, the For The People Act, to be able to secure the support of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the lone Democrat to oppose the original bill.

The coming agreement comes after months of negotiations to craft a compromise version of the bill, called S.1 in the Senate. The new deal is being crafted by a group of Democratic senators led by Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), along with the bill’s original co-sponsors Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Sens. Raphael Warnock (Ga.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), Angus King (Maine), Tim Kaine (Va.) and Jon Tester (Mont.).

“The compromise on a new S. 1 is pretty close to being fully baked,” said a senior Democratic congressional aide with knowledge of the bill.

The compromise bill trims the original For The People Act to meet the outline of compromise legislation Manchin put forward in June, according to sources. It includes most of the voter access expansions and election administration provisions in the original bill, including mandatory early voting, automatic voter registration and other key voting rights elements that were originally taken from the late John Lewis’ Voter Empowerment Act. It also includes provisions limiting partisan gerrymandering, banning undisclosed “dark money” in elections and newer provisions on addressing so-called election subversion, among other, as yet undisclosed elements.

While the bill largely hews to Manchin’s original outline, including a loose form of voter identification, it will maintain some other elements from the original bill that were not included in Manchin’s June compromise outline, according to sources with knowledge of the negotiations. Still, this new bill is now Manchin’s to sell and pass, as he has taken the lead on it.

The imminent announcement of a compromise bill comes ahead of the Senate’s return from its August recess break on Sept. 14 for a promised focus on voting rights. The steady passage of voter restrictions by Republicans in multiple states, all on the basis of Donald Trump’s election fraud lies that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, has made action on voting rights an imperative for most Democrats. The passage of the latest anti-voter law by Republicans in Texas on a party-line vote has intensified the push for federal voting rights legislation by Congress.

With the announcement of an agreement on the bill, the push to pass the For The People Act enters its final phase. The bill first passed the House in May on a near party-line vote, with one Democrat voting no. Republicans filibustered a vote to begin debate on the bill in June after Manchin first reached an agreement with Schumer to develop a compromise proposal to win his support. This solidified all 50 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus in support of some version of the bill.

Immediately before the Senate went on break last month, Schumer sought to bring up the For The People Act for a vote only to be blocked for a second time by Republicans. Voting rights would be “the first matter of legislative business when the Senate returns to session in September,” Schumer said at the time.

After the first Republican filibuster of the bill, activists and state lawmakers from states where Republicans were passing new restrictions on voting mounted a nonstop campaign calling on the Senate to pass the bill and to change the Senate’s filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to both begin and end debate on most legislation, in order to do so. Democratic lawmakers from Texas flew into Washington to temporarily block their state legislature from passing onerous restrictions on voting. They were joined at rallies at the U.S. Capitol and in the halls of the Senate lobbying for voting rights bills by state lawmakers from other states like Arizona, Georgia and more. That advocacy will now kick back into gear, with a rally scheduled for Sept. 14 at the Senate.

The final push to pass the For The People Act, or whatever name Manchin’s compromise bill takes on, will begin in earnest when the Senate returns.

Manchin is reportedly already shopping his compromise proposal to Republicans in an attempt to bring ten of them along to break a filibuster, according to Politico. He has consistently stated that he believes Republicans can support a voting rights bill that looks like the compromise draft he put forward in June, especially since it includes a national voter identification requirement, something Republicans have long sought. The likelihood of Manchin finding any Republican support is, to put it lightly, low.

Schumer is likely to file for cloture on the compromise bill soon after the Senate returns, setting up a floor vote. Republicans will then be given the opportunity to block the bill for a third time. But this time, they will be blocking Manchin’s bill.

Once his compromise bill is blocked, the debate over the filibuster that has been boiling all year long will really begin. That will mean confronting the opposition to changing the filibuster rules publicly expressed by both Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Manchin stated this year both that he would never weaken the filibuster rules and that he would back a so-called “talking filibuster.” Sinema also stood by her opposition to changing the filibuster rules all year, but also stated her support for a caucus-wide debate on it in a Washington Post op-ed in June.

The question voting rights activists raise about Manchin is whether he would invest so much time and effort into crafting a compromise bill only to let his own opposition to changing a procedural rule destroy all the hard work. Why play the role of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) giving the thumbs down to tank his party’s top priority legislation when he co-wrote the bill? Less is known about Sinema’s position, but she is a co-sponsor of the bill and a vocal supporter of its policies.

The answer to that question is expected to come in October or even November, as the ongoing infrastructure and social program fight intervenes in the leadup to the Sept. 27 reconciliation deadline. But the full-fledged fight over voting rights, with the parties on opposite sides, one for voting rights and the other opposed, and whether a minority can filibuster to block the protection of those rights will now be had.


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Apple Releases Patch for Israeli iPhone HackApple products, including iPhones, have been vulnerable since at least March. (photo: Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images)

Apple Releases Patch for Israeli iPhone Hack
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Guardian UK
Kirchgaessner writes: "Security researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered an exploit that they believe has been used by government clients of NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company, to silently hack into iPhones and other Apple devices since February 2021."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Apple is belatedly releasing a patch for the Israeli zero-click text message hack that allowed authoritarian governments to spy on dissidents. While that addresses a huge security vulnerability, it comes only days before the release of the new iPhone operating system, iOS 15, which effectively ends end-to-end encryption and invites government oversight of all handheld computing devices. So while Apple may have locked the front door, they have created a back door that is open 24/7/365. — MA/RSN


Discovery was shared with Apple, which on Monday released a patch to fix the vulnerability

Security researchers at Citizen Lab have discovered an exploit that they believe has been used by government clients of NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company, to silently hack into iPhones and other Apple devices since February 2021.

The discovery, which was made as the researchers were examining the mobile phone of a Saudi activist, was shared with Apple, which on Monday released a patch to fix the vulnerability.

Researchers said the speed with which Apple was seeking to fix the vulnerability to its operating system, which in effect has allowed the latest iPhones and operating systems to be vulnerable to attack by NSO Group’s government clients, underscored the “absolute seriousness” of their findings.

“Today is going to be a rough day at NSO because the lights are going to go out on one of their most productive exploits,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior Citizen Lab researcher.

When it is successfully deployed against a target, NSO Group’s spyware, called Pegasus, can silently hack into a phone, collect a user’s personal and private information, intercept calls and messages, and even turn a mobile phone into a remote listening device.

NSO Group has said that its spyware is only meant to be used by licensed law enforcement agencies to target criminals and terrorists. But investigations – including the recent publication of the Pegasus Project by the Guardian and other outlets – have revealed ways in which the spyware has been used by government clients to target journalists and human rights activists around the world.

Asked for comment, NSO Group issued a statement saying: “NSO Group will continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life-saving technologies to fight terror and crime.”

Citizen Lab said it was able to make a “high-confidence attribution” that the exploit had been created by NSO Group because they observed “multiple distinctive elements” in the spyware. An exploit is a technical vulnerability that allows spyware to infect a phone, and the code of the exploit discovered by Citizen Lab contained a specific bug that the researchers had only ever associated with NSO Group’s Pegasus in the past.

“We believe that the bug is distinctive enough to point back to NSO,” Citizen Lab said in a blogpost.

The researchers also found that the spyware, which they have called FORCEDENTRY, used multiple process names – identifying features of the malware code – including one that was used in a previous attack that used NSO Group spyware on an Al Jazeera journalist in July 2020.

NSO Group has said it cannot reveal the identity of its clients. But the Guardian has previously reported that NSO Group dropped Saudi Arabia as a client in the wake of Citizen Lab’s report that the kingdom was the likely culprit behind dozens of attacks against Al Jazeera journalists in 2020.

The development marks more bad news for Apple. Forensic examinations of mobile phones conducted both by Citizen Lab and Amnesty International’s security lab have found that even the most up-to-date iPhones, using the most up to date operating system, have been vulnerable to attacks by Pegasus.

Ivan Krstić, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in a statement to the Guardian: “After identifying the vulnerability used by this exploit for iMessage, Apple rapidly developed and deployed a fix in iOS 14.8 to protect our users. We’d like to commend Citizen Lab for successfully completing the very difficult work of obtaining a sample of this exploit so we could develop this fix quickly.”

He added: “Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”

Citizen Lab said in its statement that the company was releasing a fix for the exploit on Monday, and urged all Apple users to update devices as soon as possible, including all Apple devices that use iOS versions prior to 14.8.

The exploit discovered by Citizen Lab is known as a “zero-day” vulnerability, which allows users of the spyware to infect a phone without the user having any idea that their mobile phones have been hacked. In this case, the FORCEDENTRY exploit used a weakness in Apple’s iMessage function to silently send corrupt files to a phone that appeared to be GIF extensions, but were actually Adobe PDF files containing malicious code.

“Our latest discovery of yet another Apple zero-day employed as part of NSO Group’s arsenal further illustrates that companies like NSO Group are facilitating ‘despotism-as-a-service’ for unaccountable government security agencies,” researchers said.

Bill Marczak, who first discovered the exploit at Citizen Lab, said the findings also highlighted the importance of securing popular messaging apps, which were increasingly being used as a target by sophisticated threat actors.

“As presently engineered, many chat apps have become an irresistible soft target. Without intense engineering focus, we believe that they will continue to be heavily targeted, and successfully exploited,” Citizen Lab said.


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Guantánamo Must CloseRazor wire tops the fence of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

Guantánamo Must Close
Miriam Pensack, Jacobin
Pensack writes: "Two decades after 9/11, the US prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds detainees who have been charged with no crime. The crimes of Gitmo must end and the base must be returned to the Cuban republic."

Two decades after 9/11, the US prison at Guantánamo Bay still holds detainees who have been charged with no crime. The crimes of Gitmo must end and the base must be returned to the Cuban republic.

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn has lost many things over the course of the disastrous US “war on terror.” As one of the thirty-nine remaining detainees in Washington’s extralegal prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he has lost touch with the outside world for nearly two decades.

Presumably, too, he has lost some sense of well-being, and not merely for the psychological and physical distress that imprisonment provokes by design. He was the first prisoner to be subjected to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program at an agency black site, making his legacy distinctly sinister among his cohort.

His case is thus notorious among the 780 men and children who have been held at Guantánamo. He was the first to be waterboarded, subjected to forced nudity, deprived of sleep for days on end, and held in a box no larger than a human coffin for long stretches of time.

The same fate befell countless others, but his case, detailed at length in the 2012 Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture, is perhaps especially haunting for the precedent that it set. When al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn entered CIA custody following his capture in a US-Pakistani raid in March 2002 in Faisalabad, Pakistan, he still had his left eye. By the time he was transferred from a black site to Gitmo four years later, he had lost that, too.

Mistaken Identity

At the time of his torture, the CIA believed al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, whom they referred to as Abu Zubaydah, to be the number-three-top-ranking leader of Al Qaeda. As with so many pretenses and declarations that the US government has conjured since September 11, 2001, the agency was incorrect. Allegations of his connection to Al Qaeda have been discredited by both the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the UN Security Council.

The roots of such claims are likely to be found in his role facilitating the travel of a number of militant Islamic fighters in Afghanistan during the early 1990s, after the guerrilla force known as the Mujahideen had purged the country of Soviet forces. The United States had spent over $2 billion arming the Mujahideen, making Washington and al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn allies of sorts, however opaque the nature of that coalition.

On July 15 of this year, I sat in a conference room at the Pentagon and watched fifteen minutes of his most recent Guantánamo Periodic Review Board (PRB) hearing, which was beamed in live from the base in eastern Cuba. For many years, the PRB referred to him as Abu Zubaydah, but at this hearing they used his legal name in lieu of the wartime moniker. Revealing the simultaneously patronizing and intimate relationship that the national-security state has with its remaining Guantánamo detainees, the board ultimately came to call him by his first name, Zayn.

Zayn is perhaps most physically identifiable for the eyepatch that has for many years covered the space where his left eye used to be. On the day of his hearing, however, the eye patch was absent. There was an elegance to him as he waited in the courtroom, flanked by a government-appointed personal representative on one side and an Arabic-language translator on the other. His white shirt was pressed, his beard and hair trimmed neat. He sat taciturn, gazing downward through a pair of round glasses, passing prayer beads between his thumb and forefinger.

Understandably, he was trying to make the best possible physical impression on the Board, which was convened somewhere in Virginia and composed of officials from the departments of Defense, Justice, State, and Homeland Security, as well as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the opening of the unclassified portion of the hearing, which journalists were permitted to observe from the Pentagon, a PRB official reiterated the entity’s primary function.

They were not assembled to determine the “lawfulness of Zayn’s detention,” the official stressed, but rather to decide whether, nineteen years after his capture and total disconnection from the outside world, he still posed a threat to US national security. Should the board consider a detainee a “continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” his ongoing detention would be deemed necessary.

The hearing’s opening qualification — that the legality of his detention is not up for decision — should hardly be considered startling at this point, however disturbing such tacit acceptance might be. Zayn is one of countless men still held at Guantánamo who has never been charged with a crime.

Legal Limbo

A month to the day after the hearing, images streamed out of Kabul as the Taliban reclaimed the Afghan capital. The “war on terror” was ostensibly drawing to a close, with the seemingly interminable and devastating US intervention in Afghanistan as its longest and perhaps most flagrantly failed instantiation. At least 240,000 Afghans have died in the conflict, a large number of them civilians, and Washington ultimately replaced the Taliban with the Taliban.

Yet even as the forever war meets its nihilistic denouement, the illegal detention at Guantánamo forges on, a bleak national-security plight of Washington’s own making. Barack Obama never made good on his campaign promise and 2009 executive order to close the prison, and while one of the forty men who was being held there when Joe Biden took office has since been transferred to his home country of Morocco, it is unclear how the current administration will contend with the thirty-nine men who remain.

The military commissions war court established at the base to adjudicate the fates of those facing charges is currently handling the cases of twelve men — three facing proposed charges, seven facing active charges, and two who have been convicted. Another ten of the remaining so-called enemy combatants are still held in law-of-war detention without facing charges at all. They are now recommended for transfer to another country, which will oversee the relevant security measures.

The last seventeen neither face charges nor have been recommended for transfer or release. At this point in the prison’s history, this last category may be the most extreme state of legal limbo a Guantánamo detainee could face. It is also the category in which Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn finds himself.

Despite Washington’s flagrant bypassing of international law in the decades after September 11, war is by no means a lawless paradigm. And as scholar Nasser Hussain has argued, Guantánamo is not the lawless place some imagine it to be; rather, it is a space in which emergent laws proliferate to fit the needs of a belligerent government seizing upon a state of exception.

The legal status of the men still held at Gitmo is murky by design, not only because it is unlawful to indefinitely detain a person without charging him with a crime, but because the judicial apparatus at the base seeks to try civilians within the framework of a military court.

Enemies at the Gates

The way that such practices were implemented is itself a vestige of US invasions long past. The United States coercively obtained a lease to the territory on which Guantánamo sits as part of the agreement ending its first military occupation of Cuba in 1902 — another two US military interventions would storm the island before long. The lease had no termination date and could be annulled only with the agreement of both governments. When the agreement was renegotiated in 1934, following a period of tumultuous regime change on the island, it once again cemented a lease of the Cuban territory in perpetuity.

An overseas military presence with no termination date sounds not unlike “forever war,” but the connection is deeper still. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the Bush administration added Cuba to its “Axis of Evil” list, it began kidnapping and illegally detaining men and boys on territory that it claimed was under Cuban jurisdiction and therefore not subject to US law.

This is more than mere historical rhyme. There is a troubling conclusion to be drawn from the 120 years that the United States has coercively occupied the base at Guantánamo. The potential culmination of Washington’s post-9/11 forever wars hardly marks the end of the propensity for unceasing extraterritorial militarism. Much like the resistance that a long history of US economic, political, and military intervention provoked in Cuba before and after the island’s 1959 revolution, the destabilization and antipathy that US empire sows rarely comes to a peaceable and tidy conclusion.

An empire needs enemies beyond its gates, and Washington has proved exceptionally skilled at making them. As historian Ada Ferrer notes in her new book, Cuba: An American History, Alberto Mora, the Cuban American general counsel for the US Navy, described Guantánamo as one of the greatest causes of US combat deaths in Iraq, “as judged by [its] effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat.”

The US government is remarkably adept at forging the conditions by which it justifies its interventions. In December 2001, US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld refused a negotiated peace deal with the Taliban. Instead of accepting a settlement with a government that itself hoped to rid Afghanistan of Al Qaeda and was concerned with gaining recognition from Western governments, Washington engaged in twenty years of warfare that caused unimaginable loss of life. This was not because wresting Osama bin Laden from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan by other means was unfeasible. Washington wanted a war.

As recent images of the humanitarian crisis that US intervention wrought in that country have underlined, Washington’s global crusade against terror has certainly not made the world a safer place. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the trauma and devastation that do not end when US combat boots leave Iraqi or Afghan soil, constitute America’s legacy for the people it promised to liberate.

Incommunicado

Where does this leave Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, who never swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, and whose purported links to Al Qaeda have been debunked by the US government itself? Whatever connections or intelligence he was suspected of possessing at the time of his capture and torture are now, like the war on terror itself, two decades old. He has no network to facilitate and no information from the outside world to withhold.

His representatives believe that the PRB’s decision to categorize al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn as an ongoing national-security threat, and therefore unfit for transfer or release, is a matter of self-preservation. As his attorney wrote in his most recent PRB statement:

The CIA has a great deal of reason to want Abu Zubaydah to be held incommunicado for the rest of his life. That is because the fabrication of the facts used to justify the creation of the torture program would no longer be held incommunicado.

While the UN National Security Council argues that he was never affiliated with Al Qaeda and is unlikely to affiliate with the organization in the future, it is understandable if a man kidnapped, tortured, and illegally imprisoned for almost two decades might harbor some antipathy towards the United States.

Ultimately, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn is a danger to US interests because his release might allow him to enumerate, in his own words, what the CIA did to him at its black sites all those years ago. If that is a threat to American safety, it is most certainly one of Washington’s own making.


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Across Latin America, Abortion Restrictions Are Being LoosenedThousands of pro-choice activists, including feminist groups from the U.S. and Chile, wave their iconic green handkerchiefs outside Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Feb. 19, 2020. (photo: Natacha Pisarenko/AP)

Across Latin America, Abortion Restrictions Are Being Loosened
Patrick J. McDonnell and Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times
Excerpt: "The vast majority of women in the region still lack access to legal abortions, but restrictions have now been lifted or relaxed over the last 15 years in at least half a dozen countries."

A historic ruling by Mexico's Supreme Court last week is the latest in a series of victories for abortion rights advocates in Latin America, a largely Roman Catholic region that has long had some of the world’s most restrictive laws against the procedure.

The vast majority of women in the region still lack access to legal abortions, but restrictions have now been lifted or relaxed over the last 15 years in at least half a dozen countries.

“This is a long fight, it takes a lot of time and work to change minds and perceptions,” said Cristina Rosero, legal advisor for Latin America and the Caribbean for the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group based in New York. “But I think we are reaching a turning point.”

The shift in Latin America comes in contrast to the United States, where several conservative states have passed antiabortion laws in recent months, and the Supreme Court seems poised to at least trim the constitutional protection the procedures currently have. Both in the U.S. and in Latin America, powerful opponents of legalization include the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical Christian denominations and conservative politicians.

But advocates for abortion rights have been buoyed by a wave of feminist activism that has swept across Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years, shaking historically male-dominated power structures.

Through political pressure campaigns organized on social media and sometimes violent street protests, the movement has succeeded in bringing reproductive rights — along with the issues of workplace equality, female political representation and crimes against women — to the forefront of the political agenda.

Marchers from Chile to Mexico demanding equality for women now brandish the green handkerchiefs that abortion rights demonstrators in Argentina have waved as symbols of their signature movement.

In January, Argentina formally legalized abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, following Senate passage of a law allowing the procedure.

Argentine lawmakers acted despite an appeal from Pope Francis — their revered countryman — to reject expansion of abortion rights.

“Is it justice to eliminate a human life to solve a problem?” the pontiff asked in a letter sent to former students as the abortion bill was being debated in Buenos Aires. “Is it justice to hire an assassin to solve a problem?”

In Mexico, the Supreme Court threw out a statute in the state of Coahuila — which borders Texas — that imposed prison terms of up to three years for women who had abortions and for anyone who assisted them.

The court's president, Arturo Zaldivar, called the decision a precedent-setting “watershed” for the country.

Until the changes in Argentina and Mexico, only smaller nations — Cuba, Uruguay and Guyana — had decriminalized abortion.

In another potential landmark case, the Colombian Constitutional Court is expected to rule in coming weeks whether to dramatically expand abortion rights.

As in many Latin American countries, the only exceptions there currently are cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal impairments and threats to the health of the mother.

Before the seismic shifts in Argentina and Mexico, change in regional abortion law has generally been incremental.

In April, justices in Ecuador decriminalized abortion in all cases of rape. Previously, only rape victims with mental disabilities could qualify.

In Chile, activists inspired by the change in neighboring Argentina hope to utilize an ongoing constitutional-rewrite process to broaden access. Until 2017, Chile largely banned abortion outright. The 2017 legislative change permitted the procedure in cases of rape, unviable fetuses and to save a mother’s life.

The loosening of restrictions in Latin America comes as the debate over abortion in the United States reaches a new level of contentiousness.

This month in a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to void a Texas law that prohibits abortion after six weeks — before many women know they are pregnant — even in cases of rape or incest.

The justices made clear they were not deciding the constitutionality of the law, which could still be struck down. But the decision raised the specter that the court's new conservative majority could eventually overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 decision that guarantees a woman's right to abortion.

In Latin America, abortion rights advocates have turned to courts as well as legislatures to advance their cause.

Activists have often stressed health concerns in an effort to dodge moral imponderables. They argue that because women will seek abortions regardless of legality — backdoor terminations kill hundreds of women each year in Latin America, according to the World Health Organization — it is better that they have access to a safe, lawful process.

“We put the focus on how women from the most vulnerable communities — they live in poverty, suffer from discrimination, probably don’t have access to resources or education — are most in need,” Rosero said.

While mostly underground, abortion is widely available in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based research group that supports abortion rights, estimated that between 2010 and 2014 nearly a third of all pregnancies in the region ended in abortion.

The biggest stage for the abortion debate in Latin America is Brazil, home to the world's largest Catholic population.

The issue bolted into the headlines in Brazil last year when a 10-year-old girl from Espírito Santo state was found to be pregnant, the result of rape by her uncle, according to Human Rights Watch. Though she was legally entitled to an abortion, one hospital initially refused to perform the procedure.

She eventually had the abortion, but antiabortion protestors — who published the girl's name — blocked the entrance of the hospital where the procedure was performed. The girl, holding two stuffed animals, had to enter hidden in a minivan.

On the legal front, a case that could potentially lead to broader decriminalization has been pending before Brazil's high court since 2017, but experts don't expect a decision anytime soon.

"The situation in Brazil, unfortunately, appears to be the opposite of that in Mexico," said Juliana Cesario Alvim, an abortion rights activist and professor of human rights at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. "We have a very conservative federal government that is vocally opposed to reproductive rights and women's rights."

Advocates have pinned their hopes on the possibility that President Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, can be defeated in elections next year.

In the meantime, he has vowed to prevent any loosening of restrictions and denounced the historic shift in neighboring Argentina.

“I mourn for the lives of Argentine children, now subject to being ripped from the bellies of their mothers with the consent of the State,” he tweeted after the Senate vote in Buenos Aires. “If it depends on me and my government, abortion will never be approved on our soil. We will always fight to protect the life of the innocent.”

Other opponents are also hunkering down.

Lawmakers in Honduras — which suffers from one of the world’s highest rates of sexual violence — passed a constitutional amendment in January designed to block any future effort to legalize abortion, even for rape victims.

Honduras is among at least six nations in the region — the others are El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Suriname — with blanket prohibitions on abortion, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Still, abortion rights advocates have been able to get some jailed women sprung or their cases dismissed, notably in El Salvador.

Sara Rogel, a Salvadoran woman, was released from jail in the Central American nation in June after serving nine years of an initial 30-year sentence for terminating her pregnancy. Her lawyer said she had fallen and suffered a miscarriage and should never have been prosecuted.

In Mexico, where the leftist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has maintained public neutrality on the abortion question, the Supreme Court decision Tuesday will not change things overnight.

Legal abortions within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy are currently only available in Mexico City and the states of Oaxaca, Veracruz and Hidalgo.

Broad implementation of the court ruling could take many months if not longer. The decision voided the law in the state of Coahuila but did not strike down restrictive abortion statutes still on the books in 28 other states.

Activists vowed to go “state to state” in a bid to pressure local lawmakers to comply with the high court ruling, filing lawsuits if necessary.

“We’re going to keep on working so that the penal codes are changed in the states — and then we can talk of a decriminalization of abortion in Mexico," said Isabel Fulda, an abortion-rights activist in Mexico City. “That is the next step.”


READ MORE


Indigenous Resistance Blocked 400 Coal Plants' Worth of Climate PollutionNo DAPL Protest March at Standing Rock in 2016, after the infamous usage of attack dogs by DAPL security upon water protectors. (photo: Dallas Goldtooth/Indigenous Environmental Network)

Indigenous Resistance Blocked 400 Coal Plants' Worth of Climate Pollution
Climate Nexus
Excerpt: "Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada has prevented or delayed the equivalent of one-quarter of those countries' climate warming pollution, a recent report says."

Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada has prevented or delayed the equivalent of one-quarter of those countries' climate warming pollution, a recent report says.

The analysis from the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and Oil Change International finds Indigenous efforts have staved off more pollution than all the cars on the road in the U.S. and Canada, and about equal to 400 new coal-fired power plants.

"From an Indigenous perspective, when we are confronting the climate crisis we are inherently confronting the systems of colonization and white supremacy as well," Dallas Goldtooth, an IEN organizer, told Grist. "It's more than just stopping fracking development and pipelines and it's more than just developing clean energy, it's about actually fundamentally changing how we see the world itself."

As reported by Grist:

The report and data analysis by Goldtooth, Alberto Saldamando, and Tom Goldtooth of IEN and Kyle Gracey and Collin Rees of OCI, is meant to dispel the myth that land defenders and those on the frontlines of the struggles against fossil fuel projects are not making an impact. The work is cause to celebrate, Goldtooth says.

"When you take a step back and look at the work that Indigenous peoples have put in over the years and decades, it really goes to show that we collectively are making a tremendous impact for the benefit of this planet," Goldtooth told Grist.

"It backs up what we've constantly been saying," he added, "recognizing Indigenous Rights protects the water, protects the land, and protects our futures."

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Thursday, September 16, 2021

RSN: Charles Pierce | I'd Like to Hear Christopher Wray Explain Why the FBI Used This Memo to Avoid Investigating Brett Kavanaugh

 

 

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Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. (photo: Getty)
Charles Pierce | I'd Like to Hear Christopher Wray Explain Why the FBI Used This Memo to Avoid Investigating Brett Kavanaugh
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Pierce writes: "I know I've been writing a lot about various hearings as Congress clatters its way toward passing whatever it's going to pass, with the debt-ceiling vote and god knows what else looming in the distance."

It looks like Senator Sheldon Whitehouse will see to it that he does.


I know I’ve been writing a lot about various hearings as Congress clatters its way toward passing whatever it’s going to pass, with the debt-ceiling vote and god knows what else looming in the distance. But I will be watching with interest later this week when FBI Director Christopher Wray goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee to be questioned about the shake-and-bake investigation that the FBI did into Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against then Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh back in 2018. The FBI interviewed neither Ford nor Kavanaugh in the course of that largely ad hoc exercise.

Heretofore, Wray and the FBI have relied upon a now 11-year-old Memorandum of Understanding that they said limited the Bureau’s ability to conduct such an investigation. But, as The Guardian reports, this cover may be a threadbare one.

The FBI said in its letter to two senators – Sheldon Whitehouse and Christopher Coons – that the FBI did not have the authority under the 2010 MOU at the time to “unilaterally conduct further investigative activity absent instructions from the requesting entity”. In other words, the FBI has said it would have required explicit instructions from the Trump White House to conduct further investigation under the existing 2010 guidelines on how such investigations ought to be conducted.

But an examination by the Guardian of the 2010 MOU, which was signed by the then attorney general, Eric Holder, and then White House counsel, Robert Bauer, does not make explicitly clear that the FBI was restricted in terms of how it would conduct its investigation. The MOU, which was released in court documents in 2019 as part of Freedom of Information Act litigation brought against the US government by Buzzfeed, also does not explicitly state that the White House had the power to set the process parameters on any investigation. The MOU does seem to suggest that the White House had the authority to limit the FBI to investigate particular issues and questions.

One of the senators bulldogging this issue is Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who’s interested in a number of unresolved issues regarding the Kavanaugh confirmation—including, intriguingly, the questions surrounding the evaporation of Kavanaugh’s heavy personal debts. Whitehouse is pretty clearly out of patience with Wray and with the FBI.

In a statement to the Guardian, Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island who has led Democrats’ demand for answers on the investigation, said: “In its years-late response to our questions, the FBI leaned hard on the notion that this MOU limited its authority to be the FBI and investigate wrongdoing. Now that we have the MOU, it’s even harder to understand the Bureau’s excuses for ignoring credible information it received. Director Wray ought to be ready to answer my questions about this episode – I won’t stop asking until he does.”

There’s still a lot that’s hinky about that whole process. It was a fair demonstration, on the part of all concerned, of the concept of protesting too much, especially on the part of the nominee and of the then-Judiciary chairman Senator Lindsey Graham. Unless it gets bogged down on the micro-issues of what the MOU really means, this could really be a show.

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A Colorado Investigation of Elijah McClain's Death Alleges Racially Biased PolicingDemonstrators march over the death of Elijah McClain in Aurora, Colo. (photo: David Zalubowski/AP)

A Colorado Investigation of Elijah McClain's Death Alleges Racially Biased Policing
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A civil rights investigation begun amid outrage over the death of Elijah McClain has found that the Aurora Police Department has a pattern of racially biased policing, Colorado's attorney general said Wednesday."

A civil rights investigation begun amid outrage over the death of Elijah McClain has found that the Aurora Police Department has a pattern of racially biased policing, Colorado's attorney general said Wednesday.

Attorney General Phil Weiser said the investigation found the department has long had a culture in which officers treat people of color — especially Black people — differently than white people. He said the agency also has a pattern of using unlawful excessive force; frequently escalates encounters with civilians; and fails to properly document police interactions with residents.

"These actions are unacceptable. They hurt the people that law enforcement is entrusted" to serve, he said.

Weiser urged the police department to commit to recommended reforms in officer training, its policies on use of force and especially stricter standards for police stops and arrests. If it fails to do so, he said his office will seek a court order compelling the department to do so — but he noted that the department fully cooperated in the investigation.

Police stopped McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist, as he walked home from a store on Aug. 24, 2019, after a 911 caller reported a man wearing a ski mask and waving his hands who seemed "sketchy."

Officers put McClain in a chokehold and pinned him down. Paramedics injected him with 500 milligrams of ketamine, an amount appropriate for someone 77 pounds (35 kilograms) heavier than McClain's 143-pound (64-kilogram) frame, according to an indictment. He fell unconscious, was pronounced brain-dead at a hospital, and was taken off life support.

The state civil rights probe, announced in August 2020, was the first of its kind under a sweeping police accountability law passed in Colorado the month before amid protests over the killings of McClain and George Floyd.

Weiser said his office wants a state agreement with Aurora, called a consent decree, to be submitted to a court. The decree would specify what the city and department must do to fulfill his investigation's recommendations.

Sheneen McClain, the single mother who raised Elijah, said she participated in the state investigation, welcomed its findings and urged the police department to work with Weiser's office.

"It's just terrible that it takes my son's death for Aurora police to change what they've been doing for a long time in this community," she said. "Front and center: Elijah would still be here if the system was operating like it should. My son's death was preventable and it's really sad that it took all this to get justice done and make sure it won't happen to someone else."

"The report confirms what many Aurora residents already know: Aurora's police department has a longstanding culture of violence and bias," said Sheneen McClain's attorney, Qusair Mohamedbhai.

The Colorado police accountability law made it unlawful for police officers or other employees of government agencies to deprive people of their constitutional rights and gave the attorney general the power to enforce it.

Under the law, if the attorney general finds an agency has "a pattern or practice" of violating people's rights, the attorney general must notify the agency of the reasons for that belief and give it 60 days to make changes. If the agency does not make changes, the attorney general can file a lawsuit to force them.

Weiser's office is also prosecuting three police officers and two paramedics on manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and assault charges in McClain's death. He convened a grand jury to decide whether to file criminal charges after being ordered to take another look at the case by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis amid last year's protests.

The grand jury indicted all five.

The Aurora Police Department also faced criticism when officers put four Black girls on the ground last year and handcuffed two of them next to a car that police suspected was stolen but turned out not to be.

And an officer was charged with assault in July after being captured on body camera video pistol-whipping and choking a Black man during an arrest. Another officer was charged with not intervening as required under the new police accountability law.

McClain's parents have filed a lawsuit alleging that police treatment of McClain was part of a pattern of racially biased policing that has involved aggression and violence against Black people.

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Betsy DeVos Is Still Undermining Public Schools. Next Target: Los Angeles.Betsy DeVos listens during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House on March 27, 2020. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Getty)

Betsy DeVos Is Still Undermining Public Schools. Next Target: Los Angeles.
Betsy Long, Jacobin
Long writes: "In Los Angeles, Betsy DeVos is using the chaos of COVID-19 to push a voucher scheme that would force public schools to compete for students to stay open. After conquering LA, DeVos and friends aim to take the plan nationwide."

In Los Angeles, Betsy DeVos is using the chaos of COVID-19 to push a voucher scheme that would force public schools to compete for students to stay open. After conquering LA, DeVos and friends aim to take the plan nationwide.

The funding plan currently before the Los Angeles School Board goes by two names. Supporters call it “Student Centered Funding,” while union educators and parent advocates know it as “the Betsy DeVos voucher scheme.”

Not content to retire from the school privatization business, Donald Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has teamed up with the American Legislative Council (ALEC) to pilot a new school voucher scheme in Los Angeles. The plan would send funds directly to school sites instead of ensuring a centrally enforced foundation of programs, educators, and staff at every school. This restructuring of allocations would set a precedent that could be duplicated across the nation.

If the Los Angeles School Board passes the plan at its meeting tomorrow, funding for each school would be determined by calculating a specific dollar amount for every student in the district, with differing dollar amounts assigned based on individual student characteristics such as disability and language status. Wherever the student attends, their “backpack of cash” would go with them. Under-attended schools would thus be vulnerable to underfunding and closure.

Currently, schools receive a baseline of staff, programs, and supplies that ensures the school can stay operational and provide adequate educational services. If DeVos’s plan passes, they would primarily receive money based on enrollment instead. Like privately owned businesses competing for customers, schools would have to compete for students in order to stay afloat. Schools struggling with enrollment numbers would have to make cuts to educational programs, and/or eventually close. After implementation of Chicago’s school voucher plan, the number of school librarians in the city plummeted from 460 to 123 in less than ten years.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) would be the first and only district in the nation to bundle their federal funds into these unique “backpacks of cash,” but the nonlocal actors pushing the plan are hoping it won’t be the last. The potential passage of the plan in Los Angeles therefore has implications for the future of public education nationwide.

When Chicago enacted its version of a school voucher system, the scheme shuttered neighborhood public schools left families to fend for themselves.

“This is an attack on kids of color and minority communities,” said Chicago Public Schools student Styles Avant Pinkston in conversation with the organization We Are Public Schools. “You never hear about schools in wealthy white neighborhoods shutting down — they invest in those schools. Schools can be turned around if they want to. If they see value in doing that. They just don’t see the value in those communities. The way to change this, you have to fund. You don’t hear about white schools closing. If it’s struggling, they get resources. They aren’t allowed to fail.”

Textbook Disaster Capitalism

In Los Angeles, proponents of the DeVos-backed voucher scheme are bringing it for a vote while LAUSD teachers, staff, students, and families are navigating challenging school reopenings in the midst of the Delta variant surge. The pandemic has been devastating and disorienting for many LAUSD families and educators, which has created an opportunity for privatizers to advance the Student Centered Funding (SCF) plan without much notice.

It’s a standard technique. In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein describes the process of private interests taking advantage of natural disasters to push their agendas, a phenomenon she calls “disaster capitalism.” While working-class people are at their most vulnerable and disorganized, privatizers are able to drain tax dollars out of public goods and funnel them into the private sector with minimal opposition. Within a year of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, for example, all traditional neighborhood public schools were closed, and it became the most privatized school system in the United States. Charter schools now dominate New Orleans.

LAUSD’s democratically elected school board has not made a decision on the plan, but looking at the district’s website gives a different impression. The district appears to present SCF as an active policy, rather than a proposal pending passage by the school board. The board of the second largest school district in the country appears to have already lined up behind the plan and is shirking transparency at best.

Los Angeles public schools are already under heavy fire from education privatizers. One of the nation’s most proactive and effective proponents of charter schools, the late billionaire Eli Broad, was a Los Angeles resident and routinely pressed his thumb on the scale of local education policy. As of last year, Los Angeles had 277 charter schools, more than any school district in the nation. In addition to taking funds from neighborhood public schools, which serve predominantly working-class students and families of color, charters have a history of mismanagement of public dollars, lack of accountability to taxpayers, and are shown to increase racial segregation in schools.

Now it appears that privatizers are swiftly advancing on another frontier in their war on neighborhood public schools — and their opposition is disorganized. The voucher plan is being pushed at a time when pediatric hospitalizations have reached new heights, especially since children under the age of twelve cannot get vaccinated, causing fear and confusion for students, parents, and teachers. Meanwhile, families that depend the most on traditional neighborhood public schools have been focused on navigating the economic realities of the pandemic, including an increase in the cost of living, job loss, impending evictions, and the difficulties of securing safe childcare.

The city’s teacher’s union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), is calling on teachers and parents to oppose the voucher scheme. Last Friday, parents, teachers, and students held a press conference at Monroe High School to call on school board president Kelly Gonez to vote no on SCF.

“It threatens everything that makes our school work,” said an LAUSD parent named Felicidad who spoke at the press conference. “Title-I programs would be at risk. My child is not a backpack full of cash. My child and every student deserves a well-funded school.”

Betsy DeVos and friends are hoping that Los Angeles parents and teachers won’t be able to muster enough opposition to compel the school board to vote down the plan. But if any city can overcome the odds to beat back disaster capitalism, it might be Los Angeles, which has a recent history of militancy in defense of public education.

Fifty thousand educators, parents, and supporters flooded the streets during the 2019 Los Angeles teachers’ strike. For the sake of public education in Los Angeles and beyond, opponents of the voucher plan will need to harness some of that fighting energy again.


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'Treating Us Like Criminals': Texas Abortion Ban Creates Chilling Effect Across StateProtesters march from city hall to the federal court house in protest against the new state abortion law, in Houston. (photo: Reginald Mathalone/Shutterstock)

'Treating Us Like Criminals': Texas Abortion Ban Creates Chilling Effect Across State
Jennifer Gerson, The 19th
Gerson writes: "On 31 August, there were 17 abortion providers serving at the four locations of the Whole Woman's Health clinics in Texas. On 1 September - the day that the nation's most restrictive active abortion law went into effect - there were just eight."
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In California, a Women-Led Coalition Is Fighting for the Passage a New Anti-Sweatshop LawA worker in front of her sewing machine at the Nana Atelier factory in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, 14 June 2021. (photo: Noemie Taylor-Rosner)


In California, a Women-Led Coalition Is Fighting for the Passage a New Anti-Sweatshop Law
Noémie Taylor-Rosner, Equal Times
Taylor-Rosner writes: "Maria, who is undocumented, has been working for 30 years in the fashion district of Los Angeles, the capital of the United States' garment industry, which employs more than 40,000 people, the vast majority of them immigrants."
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Study: Indigenous Resistance Has Staved Off 25% of US and Canada's Annual EmissionsIndigenous-led Standing Rock pipeline protest. (photo: Robyn Beck/AFP)

Study: Indigenous Resistance Has Staved Off 25% of US and Canada's Annual Emissions
Adam Mahoney, Grist
Mahoney writes: "A recent report by Indigenous Environmental Network, or IEN, and Oil Change International, or OCI, found that Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada over the past decade has stopped or delayed an amount of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions."

That's the pollution equivalent of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants.


A recent report by Indigenous Environmental Network, or IEN, and Oil Change International, or OCI, found that Indigenous-led resistance to 21 fossil fuel projects in the U.S. and Canada over the past decade has stopped or delayed an amount of greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.

This is despite an onslaught of attacks against Indigenous activists over the past few years. Over the last few years, victories won against projects through direct actions have led to more than 35 states enacting anti-protest lawsjail time for protestors, thousands of dollars of fines, and even the killing of prominent activists.

In the face of criminalization and demonization of those fighting to move beyond fossil fuel use, Indigenous resistance can show us a way out, says Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer with IEN, an alliance of Indigenous peoples who believe in adhering to Indigenous knowledge and natural law.

“Our movements are stronger when we connect the dots,” he told Grist. “What Indigenous peoples are providing is a roadmap for our allies and supporters to adopt as a way to address the climate crisis.”

Indigenous rights and responsibilities, the report explains, “are far more than rhetorical devices — they are tangible structures impacting the viability of fossil fuel expansion.” Through physically disrupting construction and legally challenging projects, Indigenous resistance has directly stopped projects expected to produce 780 million metric tons of greenhouse gases every year and is actively fighting projects that would dump more than 800 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year.

The analysis, which used publicly released data and calculations from nine different environmental and oil regulation groups, found that roughly 1.587 billion metric tons of annual greenhouse gas emissions have been halted. That’s the equivalent pollution of approximately 400 new coal-fired power plants — more than are still operating in the United States and Canada — or roughly 345 million passenger vehicles — more than all vehicles on the road in these countries.

“From an Indigenous perspective, when we are confronting the climate crisis we are inherently confronting the systems of colonization and white supremacy as well,” Goldtooth said. “In order to do that, you have to reevaluate how you relate to the world around you and define what your obligations are to the world around you. It’s more than just stopping fracking development and pipelines and it’s more than just developing clean energy, it’s about actually fundamentally changing how we see the world itself.”

The report and data analysis by Goldtooth, Alberto Saldamando, and Tom Goldtooth of IEN and Kyle Gracey and Collin Rees of OCI, is meant to dispel the myth that land defenders and those on the frontlines of the struggles against fossil fuel projects are not making an impact. The work is cause to celebrate, Goldtooth says.

“When you take a step back and look at the work that Indigenous peoples have put in over the years and decades, it really goes to show that we collectively are making a tremendous impact for the benefit of this planet,” Goldtooth told Grist.

“It backs up what we’ve constantly been saying,” he added, “recognizing Indigenous Rights protects the water, protects the land, and protects our futures.”

Deliberately the report highlights both major fights, such as the victory against the Keystone XL pipeline and the ongoing fights against the Dakota Access and Line 3 pipelines, and lesser-known battles taking place against the Mountain Valley Gas Pipeline in West Virginia and the Rio Grande liquified natural gas export terminal in Texas.

“The ultimate hope of the report was to show folks that we are winning, and we can win,” Goldtooth said, “and these struggles are connected and onto themselves are an ecosystem that is paving the way for a better world.”

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Climate Change, Logging Collide - and a Forest ShrinksBlaine Cook, a retired US Forest Service management scientist, is seen walking through a logging site in the Black Hills National Forest. (photo: Matthew Brown/AP)

Climate Change, Logging Collide - and a Forest Shrinks
Matthew Brown, Associated Press
Brown writes: "Looking down a hillside dotted with large stumps and nearly devoid of trees, a pair of retired U.S. Forest Service employees lamented logging policies they helped craft to deal with two harbingers of climate change - pine beetles and wildfires."

Looking down a hillside dotted with large stumps and nearly devoid of trees, a pair of retired U.S. Forest Service employees lamented logging policies they helped craft to deal with two harbingers of climate change — pine beetles and wildfires.

Timber production dramatically ramped up two decades ago in the Black Hills National Forest along the South Dakota-Wyoming border, as beetles ravaged huge expanses of forest and worries grew over wildfires.

The beetles left, but the loggers haven’t — and they're now felling trees at twice the rate government scientists say is sustainable. That means the Black Hills forests are shrinking, with fewer and smaller trees.

Timber sales from federal forests nationwide more than doubled over the past 20 years, according to government data. In Washington, D.C., Republicans and Democrats alike have pushed more aggressive thinning of stands to reduce vegetation that fuels wildfires.

But critics of federal forest management say that in their fervor to do something about climate change, officials are allowing the removal of too many older trees that can actually better withstand fire.

In the Black Hills, stands of century-old ponderosa pines were thinned over the past two decades, then thinned again. In some areas, most of the remaining older and larger trees are being cut, leaving hillsides almost bare.

“Eventually you’re not going to have any big trees on the whole forest,” said Dave Mertz, who worked as a government natural resources officer overseeing Black Hills logging until retiring in 2017. “The timber industry is pulling the strings now. The Forest Service has lost its way.”

DIRE PREDICTIONS

Across the western U.S., more trees have been dying as climate change dramatically alters the landscape and leaves forests more susceptible. Wildfires, insects and disease are the top killers, researchers say.

A sweeping government review of forest health surveys since 1993 found that the rate of trees dying increased this century and outpaced new growth in all eight states examined — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Timber harvested from Forest Service lands over the past two decades also increased.

In the Black Hills, those two trends have collided. With more trees being logged and even more killed by beetles and fires in recent years, government scientists say the forest can’t grow fast enough to keep up.

The timber industry and allies in Congress are pushing back against that conclusion. Timber company representatives predict dire economic consequences if forest managers sharply reduce harvest levels. And they say wildfires and beetle outbreaks would get worse.

One of the region's seven mills closed in March, eliminating 120 jobs in Hill City, South Dakota. Owner Neiman Enterprises said a recent slowdown in timber sales meant it wouldn't have enough logs.

"These companies aren’t tech startups. They are multi-generational family companies that want to be there for the long term.” said Ben Wudtke, director of the Black Hills Forest Resource Association of saw mills and logging companies.

FIGHTING FIRE

To counter growing havoc from western wildfires, Biden's administration wants to double the forest acreage thinned or treated with prescribed burns to 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) annually — bigger than New Hampshire.

One method to reduce fire risk is to remove dense stands of small trees and thick underbrush that accumulated for decades as wildfires — a natural part of the landscape — were suppressed.

It’s expensive, labor-intensive work, and there’s little market value in small trees. When sworn in this summer, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said combating climate change will require making it worthwhile to harvest smaller trees, such as using the vegetation as biomass to generate electricity.

“It doesn’t pay for itself and we don’t have markets that seem to be increasing quickly enough," he said.

The service's former deputy chief, Jim Furnish, criticized the agency as too focused on timber production and too slow to react to climate change, to the detriment of the forest.

There are signs of change under President Joe Biden, including the administration’s move last month to end large-scale commercial logging of old-growth trees in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

But other projects that include old-growth removal are pending, including in Montana's Kootenai National Forest along the Canada border, the Kaibab National Forest just north of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and Idaho's Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest.

“The Forest Service’s approach to date has been to attack this as a management problem: ‘We need to cut more trees,'” Furnish told The Associated Press. “You can’t cut your way out of this problem.”

Moore, the agency's chief, acknowledged the warming planet was forcing changes, but said he hoped to find a “sweet spot” between the environment and industry — while removing enough vegetation to reduce wildfire risk. In the Black Hills, officials said they would consider the latest science alongside economic impacts as they seek to make logging sustainable.

“We need the industry to help us,” Moore said, referring to climate change. “It’s not really about timber sales or cutting large trees.”

“BEAT TO HELL”

The Black Hills played an outsized role in the early formation of the nation's timber policies. In the 1890s, excessive logging to feed demand for timbers for a nearby gold mine helped spur creation of the national forest system. The first regulated logging sales in forest service history took place there in 1899.

When artist and environmentalist Mary Zimmerman bought property within the Black Hills in 1988, neighboring public lands where that first timber sale took place had regrown so successfully that huge branches overhead “were like a cathedral.”

The site was thinned in 1990, removing some big trees but leaving many. It was thinned more in 2016. Then logging crews returned last year and took out the remaining big trees. Cattle now graze the area.

“It’s just beat to hell,” said Zimmerman.

Her account was confirmed by Blaine Cook, forest management scientist for the Black Hills for more than two decades until his 2019 retirement.

EARLY WARNINGS

Cook said his monitoring began to show last decade that the forest’s growth rate wasn’t keeping up with aggressive logging that was a response to the pine beetle outbreak that began in 1998. The high harvest rate continued after the outbreak peaked in 2012 and even after it ended in 2017.

Cook said his warnings that the forest was being damaged were rejected by superiors who faced political pressure to provide a steady supply of logs to sawmills in South Dakota and Wyoming.

Disagreement within the agency over whether there was too much logging culminated in a report this April by scientists from the forest service’s research branch that was unequivocal: Black Hills logging needs to be cut back by at least half, possibly more, to be sustainable.

The problem is that the forest changed but logging rates have not, said Mike Battaglia, one of the lead authors.

“In the late 90's, you had twice as much volume” of trees in the forest, he said. “To take out the same amount now, you're taking too much."

Forest industry representatives criticized the government’s multi-year study for including only parts of the forest, saying that created an incomplete picture of how many trees are available to harvest.

They estimated up to 80% of the region’s timber industry jobs would be lost if the forest service reduced logging to recommended levels. If that happens, they said the agency would have difficulty finding companies willing to do less profitable thinning work for wildfire protection.

“You have to have somebody around to do it," said the forest industry's Wudtke. “It's really critical that we keep these companies going."

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"Look Me In The Eye" | Lucas Kunce for Missouri

  Help Lucas Kunce defeat Josh Hawley in November: https://LucasKunce.com/chip-in/ Josh Hawley has been a proud leader in the fight to ...