19 December 21
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At 93, Noam Chomsky is the most important leftist intellectual alive. At 32, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of our most important leftist elected officials. The two recently spoke about our prospects for winning a better world.
To discuss our new environment, left-wing writer and broadcaster Laura Flanders sat down earlier this year with both MIT professor emeritus, author, and public intellectual Noam Chomsky and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York’s 14th congressional district. What follows is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. A portion of the discussion is available on The Laura Flanders Show’s YouTube channel. You can subscribe to the show here.
LF: I believe this is the first time you have actually met. Is there anything you want to say to each other?
NC: I’ve been greatly admiring what you’ve been doing, AOC, and following it closely. So it’s a real pleasure to be with you.
AOC
Likewise, it’s such an honor and a culminating moment to be able to engage with the one and only Professor Chomsky.
LF: Noam, you and I have talked on and off for about thirty years. In that time, there have always been, as you put it, a long list of unthinkable thoughts in America. Yet I recently read in our newspaper of record, the New York Times, that workers have real power, but the economy just might need some sort of planning — and that, just possibly, leaving so many things to markets isn’t the best idea, especially when it comes to the environment and health care.
Is something shifting? And when you think of the “unthinkables,” what’s changed and what hasn’t, in your view?
NC: We should, first of all, recognize that we’ve been living through about forty-five years of a particular socioeconomic political system, neoliberalism.
Some people think that “neoliberalism” means a completely marketized society. But that’s never really been the case.
What we’ve really had for forty-five years is what so many economists have called a “bailout economy.” We have the obvious consequences, financial crisis after financial crisis. And every time it comes, there’s a taxpayer-funded bailout.
The TARP [Troubled Assets Relief Program] agreement under George W. Bush, for example, had two elements to it. One was to bail out the perpetrators of the crisis — the people giving out predatory loans. And the other was to provide support for the victims of the crisis — people who had lost their homes, lost their jobs.
You can guess which one of the two was actually implemented.
LF: But Noam, years ago, you couldn’t even say the word “neoliberalism,” let alone “socialism.” We didn’t talk about systems in relation to our economy. Today we are.
NC: We also did sixty, seventy years ago. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was not known as a flaming liberal, said that anyone who doesn’t accept New Deal policies, anyone who doesn’t believe that workers have the right to freely organize without suppression, doesn’t belong in our political system. That was the 1950s. It changed a little bit with Jimmy Carter, then broke with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Since then, we’ve been living in the kind of system that you described, a one-sided class war: markets for the poor, protection for the rich.
LF: I want to come to you on this, AOC. I’ve interviewed you before, when you were just running for office, for a program about young people in politics. I recall with chagrin that even I, a confirmed optimist, ended that interview by saying, “But if you don’t win this time, will you run again?” I thought it likely that you might not be victorious against powerful Joe Crowley that first time, but you were, and you’re not alone. Has a dam broken, do you think?
AOC
I do think that there is a dam breaking, in electoral politics but also in organizing beyond our electoral system, like what we’re seeing with strikes, on a scale that really has not been seen in many years. It’s a bit of an emperor-has-no-clothes type of situation for our political establishment and our capitalist system. People are beginning to realize that we can name these systems and describe them, that this water that people have been swimming in actually has a name, and that there are alternative ways of doing things.
After I won, there was such a large, concerted attempt by the media to marginalize my victory as a fluke. You had then governor of New York Andrew Cuomo saying, within days, that this was a complete accident. You had every major elected official and Democratic Party member trying to dismiss what happened.
And the thing is, that didn’t stop it. There would be a case for it if mine was the only victory that occurred. But that simply wasn’t the case. We had the election of other people also naming systems and talking about what was previously, extraordinarily, politically taboo — the election of individuals like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley. Then again the next cycle with Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones. It really seems as though there is a crack. We’re starting to see this with people recognizing the true power in techniques like withholding their labor or shutting down streets during the racial uprisings last year.
LF: Noam, what do you think? When the congresswoman was elected, you called it “spectacular” and “significant.”
NC: Very much. It’s a sign that the one-sided class war of the last forty years is becoming two-sided. The population is actually beginning to participate instead of just accepting the hammer blows.
It’s worth remembering that Reagan and Thatcher both understood that when you’re going to launch a major attack on working people who are minorities and others, you have to eliminate their defenses. That was done in many ways. The first moves of Reagan and Thatcher were to severely attack the labor movement by illegal means and open the door for the corporate sector to do the same. That’s eliminating the main way in which people can defend themselves. Labor has always been at the forefront of defense of the population against attack.
We are now having a huge strike wave, in which workers are simply saying, “We’re not going to go back to the rotten, oppressive jobs, the precarious rotten circumstances, no health care . . .” They’re just not going to accept it. That’s a major factor in the economy now.
LF: We’re seeing this in the health care industry. Congresswoman, what are you seeing on that front?
AOC
When we talk about systems that are being named, this is not just about open critiques of capitalism but also about open critiques of white supremacy — not just as racist social clubs of people donning hoods but actually as a system that has interacted with the development of the United States. So many of these essential labor forces are dominated by women and women of color, whether it’s fast-food workers or nurses or childcare and teaching professionals. I would say that what this capitalist class calls a labor shortage is actually a dignified work shortage, concentrated overwhelmingly by working-class people, a multiracial working class, but also in professions that are dominated by women and women of color.
LF: Noam, when I first began talking with you in the early ’90s, there was a miserable and acrimonious backlash, even on the Left, against what was dismissed as annoying identity politics. What I’m hearing now in every corner is that people are getting it, as the congresswoman just said: unless we address white male supremacy, we’re not going to get the changes that we need. Do you agree that it’s been a shift on that front?
NC: We should recognize that white male supremacy is a deep current in American history. It’s not going to go away immediately. But there have been dents, significant ones. So, for example, even in the mainstream, when the New York Times ran the 1619 Project, that couldn’t have happened a couple of years earlier. And it’s because of changes in general consciousness and awareness. Of course, there was an immediate backlash, and you’re going to expect that — white male supremacy is a deep part of American history and culture. So extirpating it is not going to be easy.
LF: Both of you are very focused on the struggle for survival of the human race on the planet. AOC, your first piece of legislation was the Green New Deal resolution. We’re already a few years into that decade. Noam, your latest book is called The Precipice. Are we still at a point where we can avoid going over that precipice? Is it too late?
NC: It’s getting close. I should say that the resolution Congresswoman AOC recently reintroduced is absolutely essential for survival. I’d actually like to know what you think the prospects are for moving it forward. Either something like that resolution will be implemented, or we’re doomed. It’s that simple.
We still have time, but not a lot. The longer we delay, the harder it gets. If we had begun to take the necessary steps ten years ago, it would be a lot easier. If we hadn’t been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol in the early ’90s, it would be far easier. The longer we wait, the harder it gets.
LF: AOC, what are the chances we can get real change? I want to say “in our lifetime,” but we actually need it much, much sooner than that.
AOC
What is incredibly encouraging is the mass adoption of this blueprint. Once it was released and submitted to the House of Representatives and made publicly available, we started to see movements across the United States — that were not covered by media — in municipalities and states across the country that started to adopt these targets on municipal levels: the City of Los Angeles, the Austin City Council introduced it, the state of Maine, New York City. And they started to adopt more aggressive targets then, and they weren’t waiting for federal action on legislation.
But we can’t underestimate what we are standing up against. So much of Congress is captured by big money, dark money, Wall Street, and special interests. But it is so important to recognize that our systems and our avenues for action are not just limited to electoral action. When we engage as far as we can the limits of electoralism, we also reengage our capacities outside our electoral system, whether it’s withholding labor or other sorts of grassroots actions, because there is also a point of collective action that becomes too difficult for the ruling class to ignore, because it then starts to threaten their legitimacy.
LF: Noam, where does that radical change come from, given the capture that the congresswoman’s described?
NC: It comes from where it’s always come from — the population — from the victims, the part of the class war that has been stilled. It’s very interesting what’s happening.
Take West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, the leading recipient of fossil fuel funding, standing in the way of moving forward on climate change and many other things. His position is basically that of ExxonMobil. His words: no elimination, just innovation. That’s called greenwashing: keep pouring fossil fuels into the atmosphere and hope that maybe someday, somebody will figure out a way to get rid of some of the poisons.
Well, take a look at the people of West Virginia. United Mine Workers recently agreed to a transition program, which would move coal miners in West Virginia away from [coal mining’s] destructive activities and toward renewable energy, better jobs, better communities. Many of them are moving in this direction. That’s not a big surprise.
LF: AOC, this must be one of those moments where it is hard to be an activist and also be in government. It must be hard not to have your hair on fire in Congress. But in Congress, you do need to get things done to stay elected and to get reelected, and the changes that we’re talking about take a long time.
AOC
There’s an extraordinary contradiction in the day-to-day life of a person with an understanding of these systems. Even with contempt for the way a lot of these systems work, you have to operate within them. One of the things that is inherently contradictory is that so much of our activism involves not a rejection of electoral systems but a demand that electoral systems alone are insufficient, that there is a requirement of organizing and mobilization that goes beyond elections and beyond just our electoral systems.
Electoral politics is a part of this larger mobilization. It is not the sum of it. As an elected official, I understand that so much of what happens in Congress is a result of an enormous amount of mobilization of pressure before legislation even meets the floor of the House. And, in fact, the decisions about what gets to the floor of the House is a result of external mobilization. It is either a mobilization of capital or a mobilization of people.
LF: You recently described literally being in tears during one vote in which you voted “present” on a bill that was going to support more weapons to Israel. Can you talk about that moment?
AOC
My job is to be held accountable and responsible by the communities that I represent. It’s very difficult to discuss publicly the human toll and the human cost of being in such a position. And, you know — especially, I think, in digital spaces and mass media spaces — the reduction of people to their jobs or to their positions is quite normal. But the threats to our lives are very, very real. And in the sequence of that week, at the beginning, Democratic Party leadership attempted to slip in an additional $12 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system in routine legislation — a continuing resolution — whose intent is to continue funding our current operations the way that they have been funded as we negotiate the budget. They attempted to slip additional funding into a continuing resolution. So I worked along with several others to strip that funding at the beginning of the week.
We then saw this very militant media mobilization that, in my view, started to extend far beyond the normal anti-Palestinian mass media rhetoric into rhetoric that was direct[ly] threat[ening] the lives of members of Congress. In fact, even Haaretz, a supposedly “progressive-leaning” newspaper, ran an extraordinarily racist depiction of me and other members holding Hamas rockets and aiming fire at Jerusalem.
I can disclose this now, but I couldn’t then: I was assigned and was riding around in a twenty-thousand-pound armored vehicle because there was an extremely serious credible threat that had been intercepted.
Take all of that and combine it with the fact that, after we had successfully removed that funding, Democratic leadership decided they were going to force a singular vote on this one funding piece, the same week that we were voting on the National Defense Authorization Act. They decided to roll out a narrative that was incredibly misleading, that this was the funding for the Iron Dome — which was a lie. This was supplemental to the full funding that Congress had already authorized.
That created an extraordinary amount of panic among our Jewish community that has been experiencing extremely targeted antisemitic attacks, along with our Muslim brothers and sisters in the community.
They had scheduled to vote that morning, and the vote was set to be called within an hour. I worked very hard to not just vote my conscience but to organize our community in support of those votes. This was an instance where our community, as well as I, were caught on our back foot. The calls that we received to our office were overwhelmingly, I believe, reactive to this misleading narrative. And we did not receive mobilization in our office in the way that we should have for the community to understand.
I’ve beaten myself up a great deal over it, but I also think that in the larger scheme of things, this was a battle in a larger context, in a larger struggle for the dignity and human rights of Palestinians and all people.
LF: Noam, your thoughts?
NC: What AOC has brought up, both in this comment and the preceding one, is the interaction between mobilization and political action in Congress. As she pointed out, the main part of politics is activism and mobilization. That was a very interesting phenomenon concerning mobilization on this funding. The funding was for replenishment of the Iron Dome, and there were very eloquent statements from people in Congress [asking], how we can take away defense from people who are under attack? Notice what’s happening. Did anybody get up and say, how about some defense for the people who are being attacked? The people who are being attacked are people in a prison, an open-air prison, in Gaza — two million people, a million children, under vicious attack, constant attack. This particular case was just an escalation of the attack that goes on every day with US weapons, tech weapons.
They’re to the point where they literally don’t have water to drink. Children in Gaza are dying because they can’t drink water. Sewage systems are destroyed. The power system was destroyed — constant attacks, blockade, can’t move. How about some defense for that?
LF: I don’t want to focus solely on you as individuals, but the other thing that I heard in the congresswoman’s account was about the level of vitriol, to the point of feeling one’s life is under attack. You, Noam, are a great example of surviving decades of attacks. Can you talk about that?
NC: I could give you a long story about having to have police protection, even at my own campus, but that’s not important. There’s great passion about defending the perpetrators from retaliation but not a word about defending the victims from massive attack. That’s very much like the system of markets that we were talking about before: you defend markets for the poor, not for the rich. The rich have to be protected from the ravages of markets.
Going back to the most important point: the interaction between mobilization and political action in Congress. As AOC pointed out, the main part of politics is activism and mobilization. What happens in Congress is an ill reflection, but it is a reflection. The Sunrise Movement is at the forefront of activism on climate. They got to the point of civil disobedience, occupying congressional offices, occupying Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding change, or they’d just be thrown out by the Capitol police. They weren’t this time, because one person from Congress came and joined them — AOC came to join them. That’s what led to Joe Biden’s climate program. It’s not great, but it’s better than anything before. That’s an illustration of the point. AOC was making popular activism, interacting with supportive people in Congress. This is an old lesson we should learn.
LF: AOC, you did that action that Noam just described in the first moments after your election victory. You’ve sometimes said that part of your job is to retain that sense of outsiderism and freshness in Washington. How would you say you’re doing on that front? And what is your vision of the progressive agenda on the domestic side as well as the foreign policy side? What are your biggest priorities?
AOC
One of the things that we’ve been figuring out how to navigate is, how do you go from pushing an opposition party under a neofascist administration to essentially acting as the minority party within a governing party? How do you manage the tensions within activism, and how do you expand the power and the potential of mobilization under those two different kinds of regimes?
One of the things that we’ve been successful at was this most recent showdown in Congress around the reconciliation and infrastructure fight, because, historically, the Progressive Caucus in Congress has been basically toothless. It has essentially been more of a social club than a political caucus that can exert real power. Because of that dynamic, this neoliberal and conservative corporate wing of the party has dictated the Democratic Party’s agenda, essentially without any sort of internal resistance for a very long period of time, save for a handful of people that didn’t quite have the numbers.
But what we experienced was a real transformative event in the history of the Progressive Caucus within Congress, where, for the first two years that I was in office, it was essentially me and three other women. Maybe we could get five others and have . . . ten people in the last Congress to be able to break with the party. In this most recent fight, the Progressive Caucus, which is ninety-five members out of the 218 needed to pass any legislation, was galvanized. They were willing to withhold their votes in order to ensure that the package with the greatest number of benefits for most people — from labor, health care, childcare, and educational protections to climate — was prioritized.
I think that came as a shock to the party. It came as a shock to mass media. They didn’t know how to cover it. Many of them continue to try to adopt this tired narrative that a handful of progressives are troublemakers in the party. But the fact is, it’s the very pro-corporate wing — a handful of people — that is pursuing a path of obstruction. And they’re tying themselves into knots to not say that.
I think that it is a precipitating event. We are going to see if the Progressive Caucus takes this exercise of discovered power for working people and applies it in its strategy moving forward.
It is so important that we tell working-class people, “You have more power than you think you do. Your essential labor withheld has more of an impact than you think.” And I think sometimes even members of Congress take their own power for granted, because so much of what happens feels like it’s at the whims of these larger social forces of capital, of Wall Street, of the party’s leadership. Rank-and-file members of the Democratic Party sometimes forget their own power. And they have discovered it in a way that I don’t think many have felt before.
LF: We’ve often heard the phrase “Another world is possible.” We try on this program to actually name the moments in which that other world seems to us to be not just possible but palpable. Somebody you met, something you did, something you witnessed or were involved in, something gave you that feeling that these huge changes that we’re talking about can happen — are happening, perhaps. Noam, what leads you to think we can get there?
NC: It started in the 1930s. I’m old enough to remember it. My family was first-generation immigrants, working-class, mostly unemployed, but very hopeful. It was not so much like now in absolute terms — much worse than now — but in psychological terms far different. There was a sense that we’re working together. We can get out of rotten conditions, but we’re together. We have the ability. We have labor action, political organizations, we have our groups, associations working together with a somewhat sympathetic administration. We can get together and fight our way out of this. And they were right.
Take this example: around 1960, a couple of black kids sat at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, at a segregated lunch counter. Of course, they were immediately arrested and thrown out. That could have been the end. Except the next day, a couple more came back. Pretty soon, you had people coming from the North to join them. Pretty soon, you had Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee workers driving freedom buses through the South, trying to encourage a black farmer to take his life in his hands and go to register to vote. Soon, you had a huge movement.
Always, it’s the people who make things happen. We should really honor the countless unknown people; they’re the ones who are inspiring. They’re the ones that we should honor and respect.
AOC
It is a transformation of our understanding of how history happens, how change happens — as [being made by] a number of notable individuals, negotiating on behalf of everybody else, to the more accurate depiction of history, which is about mass mobilization. That’s often erased and underdiscussed, precisely because of how powerful and effective it is.
Arundhati Roy wrote that another world is not only possible, it is already here. Finding the pockets where this world is alive is what gives me hope. The Bronx has one of the highest per capita rates of worker cooperatives in the world. That is a new economy in our borough of millions of people.
Whether it’s that, whether it is discussions around mass incarceration, abolitionists — not just asking what it means to dismantle a jail but what it means to reorganize the society so that we do not have people engaged in antisocial behavior on such a scale that we have today, or that we don’t have antisocial systems. These are not just theoretical conversations that people are having; there are communities that are actively experimenting and developing solutions. Also in the Bronx, we have anti-violence intervention programs, where we’ve taken people who were once incarcerated, and they are paid to mentor young people who are at risk of committing a crime that will put them in our system to be incarcerated for life. And we have reduced recurrence of violence by more than 50 percent. It’s more effective than any police intervention that we know of.
What I work on is not “How do we find solutions” but “How do we scale the solutions that we’ve already developed to transform our society?” And that is work that breaks our cycles of cynicism.
Cynicism is a far greater enemy to the Left than many others because it is the tool that is given to us to hurt ourselves. Hope creates action, and action creates hope. And that’s how we scale forward.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). (photo: Patrick Semansky/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Bernie: Senate Should Vote on BBB
So Manchin Can Show 'Why He Doesn't Have the Guts'
"I cannot vote to continue with this legislation. I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there"
He made the comments on "Fox News Sunday" in its first week without longtime host Chris Wallace, telling fill-in anchor Bret Baier that he "cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation."
"I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there," he added.
Manchin's announcement comes following a heated week of wrangling in which the Democratic Party made a number of last-minute changes in an attempt to appease the conservative West Virginia Democrat. Tempers flared at one point over his opposition to the inclusion of a permanent child tax credit — something insiders suggested he wanted to "zero out," according to CNN.
"I've always been for child tax credits. We voted for it many times," Manchin said when asked about his opposition to Build Back Better on Wednesday, before unloading a series of expletives at reporters.
"This is bull----. You're bull----," Manchin reportedly said to HuffPost political reporter Arthur Delaney.
Unless Manchin changes his mind, it appears the Build Back Better bill is effectively dead.
The Democrats have some time to plead their case as they push the measure to the backburner, however — party insiders suggested to NBC this week that they would reconsider the legislation as late as March of next year.In the meantime, they plan to focus on a voting rights bill that looks equally futile in the face of Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's continuing refusal to alter Senate filibuster rules to pass the legislation.
Watch Manchin's interview below:
“I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation.” — Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) says President Biden’s Build Back Better plan “is a no.”
— The Recount (@therecount) December 19, 2021
“I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there.” pic.twitter.com/HsgXgYms3e
'It all begins and ends, for her, with love.' (photo: Karjean Levine/Getty Images)
She was able to touch so many people, at so many levels, across so many boundaries, because she was a brazen truth-teller and willing to be vulnerable
bell hooks (AKA Gloria Jean Watkins), feminist writer, radical thinker and teacher, died on Wednesday, 15 December at the age of 69, at her home in Berea, Kentucky. She was the daughter of working-class parents born in a small town in the Jim Crow South. She eventually went to Stanford University on scholarship and worked as a telephone operator to cover her other expenses. Borrowing her nom de plume from her outspoken great-grandmother, hooks went on to become one of the foremost feminist intellectuals and radical writers of her time. Her writings spanned the spectrum from capitalism and imperialism, to education, masculinity, beauty and love. Her influence is vast and her death leaves a painful void for those who knew and loved her. The outpouring of respect and tributes are testimony to the reach, in breadth and depth, of her work and the power of her legacy.
hooks was as prolific as she was provocative. She wrote or co-wrote over 40 books ranging from children’s books to accessible theoretical texts. The titles of her books say a lot about her political message and her intellectual framework. In Feminist Theory: Margin to Center (1984), one of her most influential texts, she challenges us to embrace a feminist politic that is holistic, democratic, anti-capitalist and inclusive of all genders, including masculine ones. She rejects bourgeois white feminist writers that re-inscribe other hierarchies of power and domination in their politics and practices. These messages are reinforced in her related text, Feminism is for Everybody. Her works – including Teaching to Transgress, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Intellectual Life (co-written with Cornel West), and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work- all speak to her love of books and ideas as tools for radical social change. “My writing is a form of activism,” she once told me.
hooks was a feminist through and through, but she was not a congenial feminist. She was a critic, a provocateur, and an interrogator. “Do we have to call every woman sister?” she wondered in one essay, suggesting that sisterhood and feminism were not about biology or essentialist notions of group identity, but about politics and values, and struggle. Instead of the more academic term, “intersectionality”, hooks preferred to name “imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” as the interlocking systems that needed to be combatted. There is a power in naming the problem and l she did not shy from that. She also did not shy from critiques of other women, including Black women, when their politics and views did not align with hers – from self-promoting mainstream academics to popular pro-capitalist pop stars.
hooks was a theorist, a rigorous thinker and a brazen and eloquent writer, whose books are taught in college classrooms around the world. However, what was most important to her was accessibility and relevance. She wanted her ideas to engage diverse and grassroots audiences, and they did: from kitchen tables to book clubs to prison yards. One of the most powerful testaments to hooks’s influence and ability to reach people in unexpected places is the feminist study group started by a group of incarcerated men in the California prison system to explore and root out assumptions and practices that underly toxic forms of masculinity. Their project was feature in a 2018 documentary called The Feminists in Cell Block Y. Their syllabus featured the writings of bell hooks. Her words, according to them, transformed their lives.
hooks was able to touch so many people, at so many levels, across so many boundaries of difference, because she was a brazen truth-teller and willing to be vulnerable and transparent about her own life, pain and contradictions. “I was in an abusive relationship,” she confessed in one interview. In her writings she talked openly about a difficult childhood and a tyrannical father who could also at times be protective and kind. She opened up, especially in her later writings, about her own personal struggles, her rages and disappointments, her traumas and her fears.
Sometimes theoretical writers distance themselves from the topics they write about with a feigned bloodless objectivity. hooks did the opposite. She invited us to care, to feel, and to experience the world through her lens. It all begins and ends, for her, with love. “The moment we begin to love, we begin to move against domination,” she once wrote. But not everyone loved her back when she spoke truth to power. hooks told her truths wherever she went and was not afraid of opposition. As a college commencement speaker in Texas, a year after the 9/11 attacks and the launch of George Bush’s so-called “war on terror”, hooks experienced a chorus of boos from parents and graduates as she loudly condemned war, violence and racism. She could never be accused of being a fair-weather radical. She took her Black left feminist politics with her wherever she went.
hooks had an unconventional career path, by choice. She made her own road, spoke her own truths, and won the hearts and minds of many along the way. The social media tributes to her since her death speak to the ways that her vast body of work changed lives, launched activist careers, affirmed values and saved others from isolation and despair. In addition to fans and followers, she also had a handful of devoted lifelong friends.
The following touching memory of hooks was shared with me by my dear friend and hers, the Black feminist pathmaker Dr Beverly Guy-Sheftall: “Loving my feminist friend/comrade for 40 years – unconditionally and deeply – enriched my life in ways that I am only now grasping. We gathered at Spelman, Oberlin, the New School and of course Berea College. We talked about books, politics, shopping, partners, the lives we crafted, the friends we shared, our dreams and disappointments. When I saw her at her home in Berea on November 25, I thought it might be the last time. I told her I would always love her and her writings …”
She is forever a foundational force in Black feminist thought and praxis, and in the work of all movements that are attempting to take us beyond, to paraphrase hooks, imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy. Rest in power, dear sister, your work is done and we are better for it.
FBI Director Christopher Wray speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. (photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
The FBI once acknowledged the existence of surveillance NDAs. Now it won't.
In a lawsuit filed this week in Manhattan federal court, the ACLU accuses the FBI of violating the nation’s freedom of information law by refusing to even acknowledge the existence of any documents that contractually prohibit police from disclosing information about stingrays. Should there be any doubt, these documents do, in fact, exist. I should know. I’m staring at several of them right now.
We human beings must find, Bertrand Russell once wrote, “in our own purely private experiences, characteristics which show, or tend to show, that there are in the world things other than ourselves and our private experiences.” (Characteristically, these documents are still warm from my printer.) From Democritus, first to posit the existence of atoms, to Descartes, who believed in a malice-free God who would never deceive him into believing in that which consists of nothing, the question of what, if anything, exists beyond ourselves has been keeping philosophers up at night for more than two millennia.
That is over now. These documents are definitely real. I am touching them. With my hands.
These non-disclosure agreements, dozens of which police departments have (intentionally or not) already made public, can be described as explicitly prohibiting police from discussing the use of stingrays in the broadest sense. An agreement prepared by the bureau for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department in 2012, for instance, bars police from telling anyone they acquired a stingray, including the public, the press, and “other law enforcement agencies.”
In plain English, the agreement instructs police to try to convict people of crimes using the data collected from such devices while also concealing the existence of the devices themselves from judges, defendants, and juries. Lastly, it asserts the FBI holds the right to seek the dismissal of any charges brought against a suspect if the case is likely to result in the public learning “any information” about the devices or their capabilities.
The FBI publicly acknowledged the existence of these agreements to the Washington Post years ago. Perplexingly, it is now refusing to do so a second time. Although, in 2015, an agency spokesperson told the Post that “nondisclosure agreements do not preclude police from discussing the equipment’s use.” The agreements themselves contradict that statement, and maybe the FBI now prefers silence rather than continuing to live a lie.
While the Freedom of Information Act allows the FBI to withhold certain information from the public based on the idea that doing so would compromise “techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions,” the ACLU is arguing that the agreements themselves are not covered under this exemption.
Here are 26 of them, compiled by Mike Katz-Lacabe at the Center for Human Rights and Privacy. I’m not a lawyer, but feel free to judge for yourself.
The ACLU said on Wednesday that it launched its effort to gather copies of the non-disclosure agreements 11 months ago after Gizmodo discovered the primary company responsible for providing law enforcement stingrays, the Harris Corporation, had decided it would no longer sell them directly to local police. As Gizmodo reported, police agencies are now turning to other manufacturers, including one in Canada whose patents lean heavily on the work of engineers overseas.
“The public lacks information about whether the FBI is currently imposing conditions on state and local agencies’ purchase of cell site simulator technology from these or other companies,” the ACLU’s complaint says.
“In response to our request, the FBI issued a ‘Glomar response,’ meaning they refused to confirm or deny the existence of any responsive records,” the ACLU said. “Glomar responses are only legal in rare situations where disclosing the existence (or non-existence) of the requested records would itself reveal information that is exempt from disclosure under FOIA.”
“In this case, the FBI’s Glomar response doesn’t come close to passing the sniff test,” the lawyers said, calling the bureau’s refusal to “confirm or deny” if it even has records about secrecy agreements “ironic indeed.”
“The fact of whether the FBI has continued to impose nondisclosure agreements and other conditions on local and state police isn’t a secret law enforcement technique or procedure,” they said. “It’s basic information about whether the government is evading foundational transparency requirements we expect in a democratic society.”
The FBI declined to comment.
The use of stingrays—so named for one of the most popular models of IMSI-catchers, a technology that’s used to track the locations of cellphones by mimicking legitimate cellphone towers—is not controversial exclusively due to the secrecy surrounding it. But it is a major factor. Authorities have gone to extreme lengths to conceal their existence. Prosecutors have been known to drop cases against criminal suspects because officers will flat out refuse to be questioned about the use of stingrays in court. U.S. Marshals once notoriously raided a Florida police department to seize any documents related to stingrays; an effort to keep the department from disclosing them under the state’s own public records law.
In an apparent effort to confuse judges authorizing their use, the U.S. Justice Department once circulated a template for warrant applications that misleadingly affiliated the devices with other phone tracking technologies regularly employed for over half a century. Defendants have gone to court and been convicted of crimes without the vaguest understanding of how police gathered evidence against them. To hide stingrays, police have employed a controversial law enforcement technique known as “parallel construction,” which seeks to create, as one Wired reporter put it in 2018, “a parallel, alternative story for how it found information.”
“For decades, law enforcement agencies across the country have used Stingrays to locate and track people in all manner of investigations, from local cops in Annapolis trying to find a guy who nabbed 15 chicken wings from a delivery driver, to ICE tracking down undocumented immigrants in New York and Detroit,” the ACLU said. “But until a few years ago, even the existence of this technology was shrouded in near-complete secrecy.”
We now know what’s real, even if the FBI is free, for now, to pretend otherwise.
First responders surround an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Edwardsville, Illinois, on December 10, 2021, after it was hit by a tornado. (photo: Tim Vizer/AFP/Getty Images)
Grief, anger, and demands for answers after tornadoes kill at least 14 U.S. workers.
A candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky was totally destroyed after sustaining a direct tornado hit with 110 workers inside. At least eight people died and dozens more were severely injured. At the same time, an Amazon delivery station in Edwardsville, Illinois was also hit by a tornado during a shift change, causing the roof to fly off and part of an exterior wall to collapse, killing six workers ranging in age from 26 to 62.
As search-and-rescue teams sifted through the rubble the next morning, Amazon founder and world’s second-richest person Jeff Bezos was celebrating another successful rocket launch by his private spaceflight company Blue Origin. Meanwhile, Amazon was unable to say for sure how many of its workers were trapped inside the devastated delivery station.
“While a tornado is a rare and extreme event, we know that Amazon’s disregard for workers’ safety is unfortunately a chronic pattern that puts workers at risk every day,” said Tommy Carden, a lead organizer with Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ), a worker center based in Joliet, Illinois.
Indeed, this past year alone, Amazon has faced repeated criticisms for expecting employees to continue coming to work even in the midst of extreme weather events like deadly heatwaves and floods, illustrating how many of the same frontline workers who have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic are also vulnerable to the impacts of climate change-fueled disasters.
“No Room for Humanity in Amazon”
According to local authorities, the first tornado warning for Edwardsville, Illinois was issued around 30 minutes before the deadly twister formed. Workers report being told to take shelter in bathrooms. At least one bathroom was hit by the tornado, killing 26-year-old driver Austin McEwen as he took refuge there.
Larry Virden, an Amazon driver and father of four, told his girlfriend in a text message shortly before the tornado that “Amazon won’t let me leave.” He also died in the disaster.
“Requiring workers to work through such a major tornado warning event as this was inexcusable,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) — which has been leading a high-profile campaign to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. “This is another outrageous example of the company putting profits over the health and safety of their workers.”
“The site got tornado warnings between 8:06 and 8:16, and site leaders directed people on site to immediately take shelter. At 8:27, the tornado struck the building,” an Amazon spokesperson told In These Times. “The majority of the team took shelter in the primary designated location. There was a small group who took shelter in a part of the building that was then directly impacted by the tornado, and this is where most of the tragic loss of life occurred.”
The company declined to comment on Virden’s text message about not being allowed to leave.
“Whether during a tornado, hurricane, or heat wave, mgmt [management] treating workers like numbers puts our lives at risk,” tweeted Amazonians United—a movement of Amazon workers across the country who have been organizing for higher pay and improved safety since 2019.
Members of the Amazonians United in Chicago said that at their South Side warehouse, “We’ve had a fire, power outage, [and] flood,” yet were told each time to “keep working.”
“They set up systems to keep place the running, but there’s no room for human judgement. There’s no room for humanity in Amazon at all,” said an East Coast Amazon warehouse worker who wished to remain anonymous.
The worker, who is a member of Amazonians United, told In These Times the company has “no real policy” when it comes to having employees come in during extreme weather events.
“They very, very rarely tell you whether to come in or not, so you just have to judge it for yourself. It’s sort of this subtle way of getting you to come in even if you are not really feeling safe,” the worker explained. “They abdicate responsibility for everything and put it all on us, and it’s ridiculous.”
Amazon workers around the country say they have never received emergency training, according to The Intercept.
The lack of training is perhaps related to Amazon’s reliance on contractors and temps, a practice that helps the company evade liability for work-related accidents. Out of 190 workers at the Edwardsville delivery station, only seven were full-time employees of the company.
Amazon workers have also raised concerns about the company’s traditional ban on personal cell phones inside warehouses, as it can restrict them from accessing warnings about severe weather or other emergencies. The ban was temporarily lifted in the pandemic, and the company has said it was not in place at the Edwardsville facility.
Meanwhile, the Amazon Labor Union—an independent union of Amazon workers at a facility on Staten Island, New York — blasted the company after Friday’s tornado.
“The needless deaths were a reminder of Amazon keeping shifts going during other disasters, such as at the Staten Island facility during Hurricane Ida,” the union said. “Even as water poured in to the lobby of that warehouse, safety-conscious workers who refused to work that night were terminated.”
The Amazon Labor Union’s leader, Chris Smalls, said in the wake of the tragedy, the company should immediately recognize their union “as a matter of public health and a matter of reparations.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has opened an investigation into the disaster at the Evansville delivery station, but Warehouse Workers for Justice is demanding state hearings into Amazon to establish protocols around the construction of new warehouses.
“We’re calling on state legislators to step up to review the processes on how these warehouses go up,” said Marcos Ceniceros, WWJ’s interim executive director. “These warehouses are popping up all over the place very quickly. We need to take a second to pause to make sure this is happening responsibly with the workers and communities in mind.”
“Unnecessarily Put into a Dangerous Situation”
The non-union candle factory destroyed in Mayfield, Kentucky belonged to the family-owned Mayfield Consumer Products (MCP), a major employer in the region. The company makes scented candles sold at retailers like Bath & Body Works.
The first tornado alarm in Mayfield sounded nearly three hours before a twister reduced the plant to rubble, killing at least eight. Five factory employees who survived told NBC News that in the critical hours and minutes leading up to the tragedy, supervisors threatened to terminate them and their coworkers if they left the factory.
An MCP spokesperson called the allegations “absolutely untrue.” The company also claims there were regular emergency drills at the plant, but employee Jarred Holmes told the Associated Press there were no drills in the months he has worked there.
“We are very sorry for the loss of life that occurred. At the same time, we are really appalled that the opportunity probably existed for folks to be sent home or away from the factory, where they may have been able to shelter,” said Bill Londrigan, president of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.
“The workers were unnecessarily put into a dangerous situation,” Londrigan continued. “There were numerous reports of impending strikes by tornadoes moving through the area and it didn’t seem like those warnings were adequately heeded. Threatening to fire workers for being concerned for their safety is not acceptable.”
The husband of Janine Johnson-Williams, one of the factory workers who was killed, told the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting: “I just wish they had called and said, ‘No one come in till it’s over, till we see what’s going on. Till it’s passed over.’”
Production at the candle factory was reportedly going “24/7” to meet demand for the holidays. In the days before the disaster, the company was seeking to hire more workers, offering a starting pay of $8 per hour and noting that “mandatory overtime will be required frequently.”
MCP had recently made an agreement with the nearby Graves County Jail to bring incarcerated people to work at the factory for an undisclosed amount of pay. Seven incarcerated people were working inside the factory when the tornado struck — all made it out alive, but a sheriff’s deputy who was monitoring them perished. Unlike the candle factory, the jail was “completely evacuated” before the tornadoes came through.
Londrigan noted that the incarcerated workers “didn’t have the option to leave” the candle factory amid the tornado warnings. “It’s indicative of the possibility of coercion and exploitation of those workers being leased out to the employer. The fact that a deputy had to be there raises questions about the use of taxpayer dollars for supervising inmates at private facilities that are profiting from their work.”
MCP has also sent representatives to Puerto Rico to recruit people to come work at the Kentucky factory for $10 to $12 an hour, including a man who sued the company in 2019 alleging he was fired for being overweight. The lawsuit, which was later dismissed by a judge, included a screenshot of a text message apparently sent by MCP’s chief financial officer stating: “We are working diligently to clean up the epileptic, obese, pregnant, and special needs issues.”
After Friday’s tornado, Kentucky’s state Occupational Safety and Health Program is launching an investigation into the candle factory, and at least three survivors are suing the company.
Workers and organizers stressed that the disasters at both the MCP factory and Amazon facility should prompt serious improvements to workplace safety.
“We don’t want to see this again,” said Ceniceros. “There should be protections for workers to be able to speak up for themselves without fear of retaliation, and they should be able to organize as well. Workers have that right. We need to hold Amazon and all these other companies accountable.”
Palestinian farmer Jibrin Abu Aram clears a path for his tractor while preparing a field in the Southern Hebron Hills, in the West Bank, Dec. 7, 2021. He said he had feared coming to the spot that day, having been attacked there recently by stone-throwing Jewish settlers who told him to leave. (photo: Heidi Levine/CS Monitor)
The Palestinian farmer says he had feared coming to the field after having been attacked there recently by a group of Jewish settlers throwing stones.
“They told me to leave, to go to Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but I said, ‘I’m from here,’” says Mr. Abu Aram, who lives in the nearby village of Qawawis.
It was not the first time, he says, that he’s been attacked by settlers, and mounting tensions have him so distressed that he says he barely sleeps at night. So this time he asked pro-Palestinian Israeli activists for protection.
A pair stands close by, keeping watch, a video camera at the ready.
Over the last two years, violence perpetrated by settlers against either Palestinians or their property – uprooting olive trees, burning crops, stabbing sheep – has spiked by some 150%, according to Israeli Defense Ministry figures.
It was not the first time, he says, that he’s been attacked by settlers, and mounting tensions have him so distressed that he says he barely sleeps at night. So this time he asked pro-Palestinian Israeli activists for protection.
A pair stands close by, keeping watch, a video camera at the ready.
Over the last two years, violence perpetrated by extremist settlers against Palestinians or their property has spiked by some 150%, according to Israeli Defense Ministry figures. The settlers’ intention, say observers, is to take over Palestinian land by intimidation.
The attacks reportedly are carried out mostly by residents of unrecognized settlement outposts. The extremists are emboldened by a radical interpretation of religious nationalism that preaches the land is their biblical birthright to seize, even by force. In their view, the state and even mainstream settler leaders have not been hard-line enough and have lost their moral standing.
Why We Wrote This
How does a centrist government respond as elements of society turn increasingly extreme? Israel is struggling for an answer as radical settlers in the West Bank step up their attacks on Palestinians.
The increased violence, and that extremist settler mindset, have set up a contentious issue for Israel’s broad new government, which includes a prime minister who was once a settlement movement leader, and left-wing and Islamist members.
Talia Sasson, a former chief state prosecutor, says the government’s response to the violence has fallen short and that despite declarations from some key ministers, no security crackdown has followed. She says the ideological conflict between Jewish Israelis for and against settlements puts army commanders in a difficult spot.
“This job puts them in the middle of the conflict,” she says, “and they don’t want to be there.”
South Hebron Hills, West Bank
On a rock-strewn slope, on land his family long has cultivated, Jibrin Abu Aram pushes a boulder to clear a path for the tractor plowing the chestnut brown earth.
The Palestinian farmer says he had feared coming to the field after having been attacked there recently by a group of Jewish settlers throwing stones.
“They told me to leave, to go to Jordan or Saudi Arabia, but I said, ‘I’m from here,’” says Mr. Abu Aram, who lives in the nearby village of Qawawis.
Why We Wrote This
How does a centrist government respond as elements of society turn increasingly extreme? Israel is struggling for an answer as radical settlers in the West Bank step up their attacks on Palestinians.
It was not the first time, he says, that he’s been attacked by settlers, and mounting tensions have him so distressed that he says he barely sleeps at night. So this time he asked pro-Palestinian Israeli activists for protection.
A pair stands close by, keeping watch, a video camera at the ready.
Over the last two years, violence perpetrated by settlers against either Palestinians or their property – uprooting olive trees, burning crops, stabbing sheep – has spiked by some 150%, according to Israeli Defense Ministry figures.
Palestinian farmer Jibrin Abu Aram clears a path for his tractor while preparing a field in the Southern Hebron Hills, in the West Bank, Dec. 7, 2021. He said he had feared coming to the spot that day, having been attacked there recently by stone-throwing Jewish settlers who told him to leave.
The settlers’ intention, say observers, is to take over Palestinian land by intimidation. The attacks reportedly are carried out mostly by residents of unsanctioned settlement outposts, who say the violence has been overstated. The real threat, they say, is from Palestinians trying to steal state land for themselves, and also that when settlers have resorted to violence, it’s usually in self-defense.
The settlers conducting attacks act largely with impunity. Although key government ministers have vowed a more forceful response, noticeable change on the ground has so far been absent, according to analysts and Israeli human rights groups. And the challenge to the fragile young government has become increasingly open and divisive.
New settler ideology
In the windswept, scrubby landscape of the Southern Hebron Hills, the extremist settlers are emboldened by a radical interpretation of religious nationalism that preaches the land is their biblical birthright to seize, even by force. In their view, the state and even mainstream settler leaders have not been hard-line enough and in turn have lost their moral standing.
“If your entire worldview is organized around religious concepts that say the entire Land of Israel is in the hands of Jews because God wanted it this way, then there is not much space for Palestinian land rights,” says Perle Nicolle-Hasid, a doctoral student at Hebrew University researching radicalism in Israel.
The ideology of those living on unsanctioned outposts and hilltops departs from that of the settlement movement’s founders, who viewed “the State of Israel as holy, so one cannot raise a hand against a soldier, and one is obligated to participate in the state as much as possible,” she says.
Outpost settlers “will tell you the State of Israel is relinquishing the Land of Israel, so it’s not as holy as they thought, and this further justifies their position regarding the Palestinians.”
The increased violence, and that extremist settler mindset, have set up a contentious issue for Israel’s broad new government, which includes a prime minister who was once a settlement movement leader, and left-wing and Islamist members.
Hiyam and Wedat Nawaja prepare lunch at their home in the Palestinian village of Susiya, in the southern West Bank, Dec. 7, 2021.
Fractured government response
Coalition frictions were on display this week as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett appeared to join right-wing critics of Public Security Minister Omer Barlev, of the center-left Labor party, who said he had discussed the rising settler violence with a visiting American diplomat.
West Bank settlers are “the defensive bulwark for all of us, and we must strengthen and support them,” Mr. Bennett said Tuesday. “There are marginal elements in every community, and they should be dealt with using all means, but we must not generalize about an entire community.”
Last month, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a centrist, called an emergency meeting of security chiefs to coordinate more forceful action to protect Palestinians. In videotaped footage of recent settler clashes with Palestinians, soldiers can be seen failing to intervene. “Hate crimes are the root from which terror grows, and we need to root them out,” he said.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, Mr. Bennett’s principal coalition partner who is in line to take over as prime minister in 2023, described a particularly violent incident in September as “terror” and called for the “violent and dangerous fringe” perpetrating such attacks to be brought to justice.
Yet Talia Sasson, a former chief state prosecutor, says this government’s response has fallen short and that despite the declarations, no security crackdown has followed.
The Jewish West Bank settlement of Maon at nightfall, in the Southern Hebron Hills, Dec. 7, 2021. A half mile away, in the smaller and unsanctioned outpost Havat Maon, one resident boasts that his community has no fence, saying, "We don’t want to have a feeling we’re closed in."
She says army commanders don’t want to be caught in the middle of an ideological conflict between Jewish Israelis for and against the settlements: “This job puts them in the middle of the conflict ... and they don’t want to be there.”
On Wednesday it was reported that Mr. Gantz and Mr. Barlev had agreed that hundreds of soldiers would be assigned policing duties in the West Bank so as to free police to tackle the settler violence.
For Lior Amihai, director of Yesh Din, an Israeli advocacy group, Mr. Gantz’s previous words felt empty. “The state plays a role here because it does not enforce the law on settlers. Instead it rewards them and is largely silent (about the violence). Investigations, arrests of settlers are rare – indictments even more so,” he says.
Havat Maon
Residents of the outposts, beginning with a handful of radical youth pitching tents on scattered hilltops across the West Bank in the early 2000s, have evolved into families living in hardscrabble farming villages.
Aware of their reputation as fringe elements in Israeli society – including among mainstream settlers – they have tried in recent years to rebrand themselves as embodying the ideals of Israel’s pioneer generation, sacrificing comfort to fortify the frontier. A Facebook page features advocacy posts and videos.
Havat Maon, an outpost of some 20 families, has a counterculture vibe. Wind chimes dangle on porches, children dance to thumping techno music, and residents describe themselves as artists and musicians who also work the land, herding goats and tending vineyards. The men typically have beards and long hair; the women cover theirs (per religious custom) in colorful scarves.
On a porch across from a sheep pen, a few friends in their 20s are hanging out. One, Alon, says he moved here seven years ago, drawn by the opportunity to build a meaningful life in a pastoral setting.
“See how quiet it is here?” he asks, gesturing toward the view of hills edging into a forest below. Unlike mainstream settlements, there is no fence, he boasts. “We don’t want to have a feeling we’re closed in. We want things to feel open and free.”
He says his friends do not engage in violent encounters, but when incidents occur, he blames the Palestinians, often instigated by Israeli leftists. He says it’s important to recognize the outpost population is itself diverse – some are messianic and disconnected from mainstream Israel, others, including himself, are not. But they do, he says, share a basic ideology that Jews have a right to live here.
The most severe recent violence took place nearby, when dozens of settlers, masked to shield their identity but reportedly from Havat Maon and Avigayil, swarmed the Bedouin village of al-Mufaqara, after clashes between villagers and settlers.
Videos show them throwing stones into houses – one of which hit a 3-year-old boy, leaving him unconscious – and smashing car windows. Some Palestinians retaliated with stones. Reportedly there were injuries on both sides.
Alon said in incidents like this, one sees the videos but not what happened before. Citing past attacks in nearby settlements by Palestinians, including killings, one of his friends adds, “There’s too much trauma” to seek reconciliation.
Yaakov Nagen, a settler who does outreach with Palestinians and believes that is the way forward, has had a very different reaction to the surge in violence, as, he says, have other mainstream settlers. “Personally, all the acts of violence have horrified me,” he says.
Rabbi Nagen says traumas suffered by both Jews and Palestinians from decades of tension and aggression have led to “a demonization of the other,” which facilitates violence.
Nasser Nawaja, a Palestinian human rights activist, and his 11-month old baby, Elaf, at his home in Susiya in the Southern Hebron Hills, in the West Bank, Dec. 7, 2021.
Susiya
Last month, a new playground in the Bedouin village of Susiya was taken over by settlers who said it was built illegally. Soldiers followed and blocked residents from entering, declaring the whole village a closed military zone.
“As Palestinians you feel constantly threatened here that our lives can be taken over not just by settler violence but by the state itself, which lets the violence continue,” says Nasser Nawaja, a Susiya resident and field researcher for B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group.
Noting the Israeli volunteers who come daily to protect Susiya, some in his home as he spoke, he says: “Settlers have attacked them as well. We are all in this battle together.”
A dusting of snow on a Christmas decoration on Dec. 16, 2020, in Leesburg, Va. (photo: Mark Miller/WP)
Rising temperatures have been eating away at the chances for snowfall for Santa in much of the United States, and the forecast is for mild weather again.
Exceptionally mild weather dominating the Lower 48 this month shows little sign of meaningful change through the Christmas holiday. This means rather underwhelming chances for a white Christmas in many parts of the United States, a state of affairs to which we probably should become accustomed.
Our warming climate appears to be eating away at white Christmas chances, newly available data shows.
This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released white Christmas probabilities across the United States, basing them on the most recent 30 years of climate data that revealed broad decreases compared to just a decade ago. The changes “are consistent with the reality of long-term warming,” NOAA wrote.
The observed changes have been rather subtle, but “more areas experienced decreases in their chances of a white Christmas than increases,” the agency said. NOAA’s criterion for a white Christmas is one inch of snow on the ground on the morning of Dec. 25.
How have white Christmas chances changed in our nation’s cities in the past decade? We analyzed NOAA’s white Christmas data in the 25 biggest cities, from Seattle to D.C., and, unsurprisingly, found declines in most of them:
- 18 of the 25 cities saw their chance of a white Christmas decrease; Denver and Columbus saw the largest drops (six percentage points). D.C.’s odds of a white Christmas plummeted from around 8 percent to just a little over 4 percent.
- Four cities’ chances were unchanged (Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Portland and Dallas)
- Three saw their chances increase, but only by one or two percentage points (New York, Philadelphia and Raleigh)
(Boston — which was among the 25 cities — had incomplete snowfall data, so we substituted Providence, R.I.)
Our results are consistent with an analysis from CNN, which found 64 percent of the 2,000 locations in NOAA’s database exhibited decreases in their white Christmas chances.
The Associated Press, using an analysis from the University of Arizona, also described a marked falloff in Christmas snow between the 1980s and 2010s. In the 1980s, 47 percent of the country had snow on the ground on Dec. 25, with an average depth of 3.5 inches. But, by the 2010s, the snow cover extent was just 38 percent, with an average depth of 2.7 inches.
Maps from NOAA help illustrate the white Christmas decline in parts of the country by comparing the periods 1981-2010 and 1991-2020.
“The easiest one [decline] to spot with the naked eye is the expansion of the dark gray area, where the chances of a white Christmas are less than 10%,” NOAA wrote. “The gray area shifted noticeably northward across the South, and upslope along the ocean-facing slopes of some of the West Coast mountain ranges.”
Rising temperatures are the probable reason for the most noticeable declines in southern areas because that circumstance increasingly favors rain rather than snow.
The Lower 48 has already seen three bouts of record-breaking warmth this month, with many areas on track for their warmest December on record. Accordingly, snow cover is considerably below normal across the country. As of Saturday, about 29 percent of the nation has snow cover compared to a more typical value of 37 percent. Only four years since 2003 have had less extensive snow cover than this one.
Computer models for the period around Christmas project a fourth burst of warmth that will probably greatly limit snow potential and melt away previous snow cover in a number of areas.
While the specifics are subject to change, the temperature forecast for Christmas over the Lower 48 looks much like it has so often this month. Model simulations show a high likelihood of milder than average weather over much of the country, with abnormally warm weather in the central states, especially the Southern Plains. Chillier-than-normal conditions are isolated to the very north central U.S. and perhaps parts of California.
The European modeling system’s simulation of snow cover on Christmas morning only shows at least an inch of snow in northern New England, the northern Great Lakes and Upper Midwest, and Mountain West. The Mountain West will, by far, be the most wintry part of the country, especially in the Cascades and Sierras, where a succession of storms will have unloaded massive amounts of snow.
A number of places that typically have white Christmases, such as large parts of Iowa, Wisconsin and even southern Minnesota, which recently experienced tornadoes, may well awaken to bare ground on Dec. 25.
Welcome to the new normal.
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