But you'll note the American money power is mostly absent—maybe because they're already taxed so low under the law.
And speech the herald of the gods put in/and named the maid
Pandora/since all those who hold Olympian homes had given gifts to her/sorrows for hard-working men.
– Hesiod, Works and Days
The money power is rarely visible. At its strongest, it operates unseen and largely unheard. Often, we see only what it produces: an unqualified dumbass gets elected to Congress, a national economy “mysteriously” collapses, a village is destroyed by a chemical spill or a town finds out that its drinking water is a chemistry set. And after we discover that the dumbass is fronting for some Kansas billionaire, or that a congressional committee has allowed the financial-services industry to engage in a crime spree, or that some autocrat prime minister or grasping mayor has been sublet by God knows who. Nothing much happens, and the money power grinds on, unseen and largely unheard.
Over the weekend, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists partnered up with 150 news outlets to drop the results of its study of 11.9 million-with-an-M corporate documents. This tremendous exercise in actual reporting outlined what can legitimately be called a worldwide shadow economy that benefits all manner of autocrats, alleged democrats, and outright criminals.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists obtained the trove of more than 11.9 million confidential files and led a team of more than 600 journalists from 150 news outlets that spent two years sifting through them, tracking down hard-to-find sources and digging into court records and other public documents from dozens of countries.
The leaked records come from 14 offshore services firms from around the world that set up shell companies and other offshore nooks for clients often seeking to keep their financial activities in the shadows. The records include information about the dealings of nearly three times as many current and former country leaders as any previous leak of documents from offshore havens.
It’s an economy built on secretive offshore banking, private money-laundering empires, and elaborate schemes to loot entire nations and stash the profits in treasure chests made of pixels, and mattresses made of deceitful paperwork.
The secret documents expose offshore dealings of the King of Jordan, the presidents of Ukraine, Kenya and Ecuador, the prime minister of the Czech Republic and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The files also detail financial activities of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “unofficial minister of propaganda” and more than 130 billionaires from Russia, the United States, Turkey and other nations. The leaked records reveal that many of the power players who could help bring an end to the offshore system instead benefit from it – stashing assets in covert companies and trusts while their governments do little to slow a global stream of illicit money that enriches criminals and impoverishes nations.
Indeed, in a fashion that would seem comical if it weren’t so perverse and destructive, the leak, now called The Pandora Papers, exposes a remarkable number of politicians who got elected on “anti-corruption” platforms who then proceeded to grab things with both hands and a gunnysack as soon as they assumed office.
A $22 million chateau in the French Riviera – replete with a cinema and two swimming pools – purchased through offshore companies by the Czech Republic’s populist prime minister, a billionaire who has railed against the corruption of economic and political elites.
Which is not to minimize the purely parasitical.
Three beachfront mansions in Malibu purchased through three offshore companies for $68 million by the King of Jordan in the years after Jordanians filled the streets during Arab Spring to protest joblessness and corruption.
Ah, you may be thinking, what does this have to do with the World’s Oldest Democracy? The Pandora Papers have something for us, too. It seems that South Dakota has turned itself into the Cayman Islands with snowplows. From the Washington Post:
The files provide substantial new evidence, for example, that South Dakota now rivals notoriously opaque jurisdictions in Europe and the Caribbean in financial secrecy. Tens of millions of dollars from outside the United States are now sheltered by trust companies in Sioux Falls, some of it tied to people and companies accused of human rights abuses and other wrongdoing.
Perhaps the most troubling revelations for the United States, however, center on its expanding complicity in the offshore economy. South Dakota, Nevada and other states have adopted financial secrecy laws that rival those of offshore jurisdictions. Records show leaders of foreign governments, their relatives and companies moving their private fortunes into U.S.-based trusts.
In 2019, for example, family members of the former vice president of the Dominican Republic, who once led one of the largest sugar producers in the country, finalized several trusts in South Dakota. The trusts held personal wealth and shares of the company, which has stood accused of human rights and labor abuses, including illegally bulldozing houses of impoverished families to expand plantations.
OK, considering that if it weren’t for shadow ownerships and money-laundering, the history of Nevada would be that of a zinc mine with poisonous snakes, that was no real surprise. But Lord, it’s been a tough month for South Dakota. First, the state attorney general kills a guy with his car and pretty much skates. Then Governor Kristi Noem’s national ambitions take a hit because the AG got back to his office in time to start looking into how Noem’s daughter got a license to be a real-estate appraiser. And now it stands revealed as a place where who knows who can stash their money.
And, finally, here’s one of the saddest revelations of all.
The United States’ wealthiest citizens — including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post; Tesla founder Elon Musk; Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates; and billionaire investor Warren Buffett — do not appear in the documents.
Financial experts said the uber-rich in the United States tend to pay such low tax rates that they have less incentive to seek offshore havens. But their absence from the files also may mean that very wealthy Americans turn to different offshore jurisdictions — including the Cayman Islands — and different companies than those represented in the Pandora documents.
We can only hope that’s true. I’d hate to think that our plutocrats don’t need to stash their cash because their tax rates are too low. That’s too depressing to contemplate.
So that’s probably keeping him up at night, or it would if he weren’t completely delusional.
In the year 2021, it’s basically a full-time job keeping up with the many lawsuits, civil inquiries, and criminal probes against Donald Trump, which, if you can believe it, surpass the number of times a human woman has agreed to marry him. On the lawsuit front, as of March, the ex-president was facing more than two dozen, which normal people who haven’t spent their entire lives suing or being sued thousands of times consider a lot. When it comes to civil cases, the New York attorney general is currently looking into whether the Trump Organization manipulated the value of its assets for loans and tax breaks, and recently won a major victory in court. Then of course there are the criminal investigations, which are probably at the top of Trump’s mind considering they could result in his going to prison. Obviously, there’s the one being led by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which has already produced numerous charges against Trump’s business and longtime CFO, with more indictments expected. On top of that, he’s also under criminal investigation by the D.C. attorney general for inciting the attack on the Capitol, while in Fulton County, Georgia, the D.A.’s office is looking at his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. And according to legal experts, the latter situation may end very badly for him!
In a new 109-page report, D.C. think tank the Brookings Institution analyzed publicly available evidence concerning Trump’s and his allies’ efforts to pressure Georgia officials to “change the lawful outcome of the election,” concluding that the 45th president could be charged with multiple crimes. Obviously, one of the least helpful things Trump has going for him is his infamous phone call to Republican secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 3, during which Trump told the guy to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state. “There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said numerous times throughout the call, though of course he did. “There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
The report also notes that Trump both publicly pressured and personally contacted a number of Republican officials in the state, including Attorney General Chris Carr and Governor Brian Kemp, to get their help in declaring him the victor. (The men did not go along with the plot, which might explain why Trump pretended to endorseStacey Abrams for Georgia governor over the weekend.) The report, penned by Norman Eisen, Joshua Matz, Donald Ayer, Gwen Keyes Fleming, Colby Galliher, Jason Harrow, and Raymond P. Tolentino, notes that the then president called Carr and Kemp in December to beg them to go along with “his increasingly desperate plans to decertify his loss.” The authors warn that criminal liability could extend to Trump allies as well, including Rudy Giuliani.
Among the charges Trump himself could be hit with, the authors believe, are “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud; intentional interference with performance of election duties; conspiracy to commit election fraud; criminal solicitation; and state RICO violations,” in addition to violations of more than a dozen other Georgia state statutes. “We conclude that Trump’s post-election conduct in Georgia leaves him at substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes,” the report states.
Referencing the fact that Trump would likely claim that everything he did was just part of his job as president, the report declares: “Stated simply, soliciting and then threatening senior state officials to alter the outcome of a presidential election does not fall within any reasoned conception of the scope of presidential power.”
A spokesman for Fulton County district attorney Fani WillistoldThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week that the investigation is “active and ongoing” but declined to reveal any details. Prosecutors have reportedly appeared before a grand jury seeking subpoenas for witnesses and documents; hired the state’s top experts on racketeering and conspiracy laws; interviewed at least four of Raffensperger’s closest advisers; and started coordinating with the congresspeople probing the events surrounding January 6.
Trump’s advisers have reacted to the Georgia probe exactly how one would expect if one paid attention for the last five years. “This is simply the Democrats’ latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump, and everybody sees through it,” Jason Miller said in a statement following the launch of the investigation in the spring.
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Nothing to see here, just the governor of South Dakota seemingly abusing her position of power to get her daughter a real estate license
Just days after a South Dakota agency moved to deny her daughter’s application to become a certified real estate appraiser, Governor Kristi Noem summoned to her office the state employee who ran the agency, the woman’s direct supervisor, and the state labor secretary. Noem’s daughter attended too. Kassidy Peters, then 26, ultimately obtained the certification in November 2020, four months after the meeting at her mother’s office. A week after that, the labor secretary called the agency head, Sherry Bren, to demand her retirement, according to an age discrimination complaint Bren filed against the department. Bren, 70, ultimately left her job this past March after the state paid her $200,000 to withdraw the complaint.
According to the AP, Peters applied to become a certified residential appraiser, which would result in a substantial increase in earnings, in September 2019; in late July 2020, the program that Bren directed moved to deny the license, which reportedly occurs when “an applicant’s work samples don’t meet minimum compliance with national standards.” On July 26, Bren received a text telling her to be at the governor’s office the following morning to discuss “appraiser certification procedures.”
Besides Noem and Peters, Bren said the meeting included Labor Secretary Marcia Hultman; Bren’s supervisor; the governor’s general counsel; and, participating by phone, the governor’s chief of staff and a lawyer from the state’s Department of Labor and Regulation.
Bren alleged in her complaint that one day before Peters received her certification, Hultman called her to discuss “concerns about the Appraiser Certification Program,” and demanded her retirement several days later, citing an alleged “inability to change gears.”
Though it’s not entirely clear what occurred during the July 2020 meeting, ethics experts (and anyone who has any sense) say it’s obvious this was a conflict of interest, as Noem should have recused herself from talks concerning an agency at which her daughter was applying for certification and clearly not allowed her daughter to sit in on a meeting with said agency. Noem declined an interview request from the AP, while her office declined to answer a list of detailed questions regarding the meeting. In a statement that has basically become boilerplate language for conservatives accused of wrongdoing, a spokesperson for Noem told the AP, “The Associated Press is disparaging the governor’s daughter in order to attack the governor politically—no wonder Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low.” On Twitter, Noem wrote: “Listen I get it. I signed up for this job. But now the media is trying to destroy my children. This story is just another example of the double standard that exists with the media... going after conservatives and their kids while ignoring Liberals #AskTheBigGuy.” Which is rich considering this October 2020 tweet:
You’ll never believe it, but it turns out Lauren Boebert doesn‘t know how COVID, vaccines, or Tylenol work
Republicans’ new 1/6 defense: It never happened
Sure, it unfolded on live TV, but whom are you going to believe, the GOP or your lying eyes?
A data scientist named Frances Haugen has revealed herself to be the whistleblower behind a massive exposure of the inner workings at Facebook.
Prior to appearing on 60 Minutes on Sunday, Haugen, a former employee at the social media giant, kept her identity a secret after sharing thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents to the media and federal law enforcement.
Haugen's planned testimony this week, as well as the information she shared so far, suggests the company deceived the public and its investors about its ability to deal with hate speech and misinformation on its platform.
"Facebook over and over again has shown it chooses profit over safety," she said during the interview on Sunday.
Haugen's document dump, her testimony scheduled in front of Congress this week, and an ongoing investigative reporting series into the company are potentially pushing Facebook into its biggest crisis yet. The negative spotlight also comes as Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill are increasingly scrutinizing Facebook's actions.
The Facebook Files reveals major issues
Hours before Haugen's interview aired, Facebook issued a lengthy statement from director of policy communications Lena Pietsch titled "Missing Facts from Tonight's 60 Minutes Segment."
Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal had already put Facebook in the spotlight. Haugen shared thousands of Facebook documents with the newspaper that went into the creation of the Facebook Files series.
So far the newspaper has revealed how anti-COVID-19 vaccine information flourished on Facebook. It also reported how separate rules allegedly apply to celebrities and politicians on the site. Facebook allowed VIP users to, for a time, avoid penalties for bad behavior, according to the report.
Haugen has also detailed how she says Facebook quickly disbanded its civic integrity team — responsible for protecting the democratic process and tackling misinformation — after the 2020 U.S. election. Shortly afterward came the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, in which organizers used Facebook to help plan.
"I don't trust that they're willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous," Haugen told 60 Minutes.
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
Facebook started in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm. Now it's estimated to be worth $1 trillion. As it has grown, so too have its controversies.
The company faced massive blowback from users, politicians and regulators following the Cambridge Analytica debacle more than three years ago.
A whistleblower named Christopher Wylie went public in 2018 exposing how millions of Facebook users' personal data was accessed, without the users' consent, by the U.K. firm Cambridge Analytica. The now-defunct company used this information to attempt to influence several elections around the world, including the U.K.'s Brexit vote on leaving the European Union.
Three years later, Facebook, which has maintained no liability in the Cambridge Analytica dealings, walked away from the entire episode relatively unscathed. As part of a deal reached with the U.K. government, Facebook paid a £500,000 (about $643,000) fine.
In 2020, Facebook was criticized yet again for how it regulates political ads and misinformation on its platform, but no regulatory changes came of the criticism.
Lawmakers talk regulations
After the Haugen interview aired on 60 Minutes, Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal shared on Twitter, "Facebook's actions make clear that we cannot trust it to police itself. We must consider stronger oversight, effective protections for children, & tools for parents, among the needed reforms."
For years, Congress has been stuck in an ongoing debate over how best to regulate Big Tech — even as Facebook says its welcomes updated regulations.
In June, House lawmakers introduced sweeping antitrust reforms aimed at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The House Judiciary Committee approved the bills, but they have not been brought for a floor vote.
The scrutiny Facebook now faces could push lawmakers to act.
During a hearing last week, lawmakers examined allegations that Facebook's own internal research showed its platforms are negatively affecting the mental health of millions of mostly teenage girls.
"This is your company's reporting. You knew this was there. You knew it was there, but you didn't do anything about it," said Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the subcommittee's ranking member, referring to internal documents about the prevalence of sex trafficking on Facebook.
Facebook has said the research was taken out of context.
Haugen contacted state officials and the SEC
Other regulatory agencies aren't waiting for Congress.
In December 2020, the Federal Trade Commission filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company. In August, the commission amended that complaint to demand that the company sell Instagram and What'sApp.
With these latest allegations, Facebook could soon be facing heat from other regulators.
Haugen and her attorney John Tye shared that she has filed at least eight complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
These complaints focus on the prevalence of hate speech on Facebook, misrepresentations about the site's role during the Capitol insurrection, and the dangers children face on the site.
Tye, who spoke with NPR, said those allegations involve the difference between what Facebook knew about its platform and what it said publicly. He said misleading investors is a crime under U.S. securities law.
Haugen's documents have also been shared with the state attorneys general for California, Vermont, Tennessee, Massachusetts and Nebraska, Tye told The New York Times.
It's unclear whether the SEC or those state attorneys general plan to address Haugen's complaints.
The political battle in one Texas county where Trump got 81% of the vote offers a rare view into the virulent distrust and unyielding pressure facing elections administrators.
Michele Carew would seem an unlikely target of Donald Trump loyalists who have fixated their fury on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.
The nonpartisan elections administrator in the staunchly Republican Hood County, just an hour southwest of Fort Worth, oversaw an election in which Trump got some 81% of the vote. It was among the former president’s larger margins of victory in Texas, which also went for him.
Yet over the past 10 months, Carew’s work has come under persistent attack from hard-line Republicans. They allege disloyalty and liberal bias at the root of her actions, from the time she denied a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump network One America News entrance to a training that was not open to the public to accusations, disputed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, that she is violating state law by using electronic machines that randomly number ballots.
Viewing her decisions as a litmus test of her loyalty to the Republican Party, they have demanded that Carew be fired or her position abolished and her duties transferred to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.
Republican politicians and conspiracy theorists continue to cast doubt on the election process across the country, particularly in areas where President Joe Biden won. They have demanded audits in states like Arizona, where the results of a Republican-led review in Maricopa County confirmed Biden’s victory. They have also moved to restrict voting in multiple states, including Texas, which passed sweeping legislation that has already drawn lawsuits alleging the disenfranchisement of vulnerable voters.
Last week, Trump issued a public letter demanding an audit in Texas. Hours later, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced that it had begun a “comprehensive forensic audit” in four of the state’s largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Biden won three of the four.
But Hood County stands out nationally and within Texas because it offers a rare view into the virulent distrust and unyielding political pressure facing elections administrators even in communities that Trump safely won. The county also represents the escalation of a wider push to replace independent administrators with more actively partisan election officials, said David Kimball, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
“Going back to the 2020 election, by and large, we saw election officials at the state and local level stand up to and resist efforts by Trump supporters to overturn the results,” said Kimball, who is also a ballot design and voting equipment expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab. “And now this seems to me like part of the next move: Remove officials and put in somebody else who’s more to their liking.”
Kimball said such efforts can be dangerous given the power of elections administrators to control the number and location of polling places, the use of mail-in ballots and compliance with state and federal laws. In Mesa County, Colorado, for example, elected County Clerk Tina Peters, who has fueled the false narrative that Trump’s victory was stolen, allowed an unauthorized individual to copy the hard drives of voting machines, according to a lawsuit against Peters filed by the Colorado secretary of state’s office. Sensitive security information, including passwords, later appeared on far-right media sites and on social media, the lawsuit states. Peters’ attorney has denied that she did anything wrong.
Carew’s case is particularly troublesome because it “smells of political bullying” and reflects a wider rift in Texas among different factions of the GOP that has grown more pronounced since the election, said Carlos Cascos, a Republican who served as secretary of state for two years under Gov. Greg Abbott before leaving in 2017.
“They’re in power, they get somewhat cocky and they start eating their own. That’s what I’m seeing happening with the Texas GOP,” said Cascos, who this year helped form the Texas Republican Initiative, a group that was created to combat intraparty attacks led by former GOP Chairman Allen West, who is now running for governor.
Similar fissures have cropped up in Hood County, where far-right conservatives who preach allegiance to Trump have split with more establishment-aligned Republicans in demanding that Carew’s duties be placed under elected County Clerk Katie Lang, who has espoused Trump’s stolen-election theory. Lang made national headlines in 2015 after refusing to issue a marriage license to a gay couple following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
She frequently shares “Stop the Steal” and “Impeach Biden” memes and videos, including those produced by Blue Shark Media, a popular local far-right Facebook and YouTube show that has claimed the presidential election was stolen, vigorously opposed mask mandates and repeatedly called for Carew’s ouster. The show’s founder is Mike Lang, her husband, who as a former state representative chaired the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.
Aside from saying that she would abide by the Constitution, Katie Lang declined to talk with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune about how she would approach elections management if given the role. Mike Lang did not respond to a request for comment.
The attacks have confounded Carew, 47, whose job is nonpartisan, but who has voted in Republican primaries for the past 11 years, according to public records.
Stress now invades her sleep, waking her up at night as her mind replays the barrage of accusations against her, she said in a recent interview.
“I had no idea what I was getting into.”
“God’s Will Is Being Thwarted”
The heart of the argument against Carew is as basic as the way she numbers voter ballots.
Hood County represents a growing number of areas that have begun shifting from electronic-only machines to more secure hybrid models, which provide paper ballots and are intended to help guard against fraud. A new state law requires all counties to move to voting systems that produce paper ballots by 2026. Like many elections officials in the state’s largest counties, including nearby Tarrant and Dallas, Carew uses the machines to randomly number ballots in accordance with guidance from the Texas secretary of state.
But critics such as Laura Pressley, a self-proclaimed elections expert and favorite of hard-line Republicans in the county, accuse Carew of purposefully ignoring an obscure provision of state law that calls for paper ballots to be consecutively numbered starting with one. Pressley argues that ballots cannot be audited without such numbering, enabling the possibility of election fraud. She has stopped short of claiming any wrongdoing in Carew’s handling of the 2020 election.
“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” Pressley, a failed Austin City Council candidate turned critic of electronic voting machines, told county commissioners in April. Dave Eagle, a county commissioner and critic of Carew’s, invited Pressley to speak at the meeting.
The push for consecutive numbering has become so potent in Hood County that commissioners in May asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to weigh in on the dispute.
The pending decision could put Paxton, a Trump supporter who unsuccessfully sued to overturn presidential election results in battleground states, at odds with the Republican-led secretary of state’s office. The office has defended Carew, arguing in a July letter to Paxton that electronic voting systems must number ballots randomly so as not to violate privacy rights. It also has said that the consecutive numbering provision was intended for paper ballots, not electronic voting machines.
As state and local officials battle over how to number ballots in Hood County, experts worry that Texas’ constitutional numbering requirement is outdated and doesn’t reflect a broader shift toward protecting voter privacy.
J. Alex Halderman, an election security expert at the University of Michigan, said that over the years states have outlawed the numbering of ballots, adding that “Texas’ policy is at the other extreme.”
Colorado law explicitly states that paper ballots cannot be marked in any way that allows for voter identification. Numbering of Election Day ballots is not allowed in Illinois or North Carolina, and election laws in states including Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi and New York don’t call for the numbering of ballots.
“Where I really worry is for voters who feel socially vulnerable for one reason or another, because they are themselves members of minority groups or are in the political minority,” Halderman said. “They are going to be the ones most worried that, ‘Oh gosh, the people running the election can figure out how I voted,’ and that can deter people from voting at all or being less likely to cast a dissenting vote.”
The law dates back to a time when legislators believed that numbering ballots and voter lists would allow for easy identification and help to catch fraud. Over the years, the law was challenged by candidates who worried that it could dissuade voters from participating in elections; by 1947, the League of Women Voters was pushing for a secret ballot in Texas.
“The Texas system originally was devised so that, in case of an election contest, any voter’s ballot could be identified and the court could determine whether it had been changed,” stated a 1947 McAllen Monitor editorial supporting the shift toward more privacy at the ballot box. “But this precaution is so little needed in contrast to the far more prevalent danger of checking up on timid voters that the cure has done more harm than the original malady.”
Since then, historians have pointed to the numbering system as a facilitator of election fraud. Douglas Clouatre wrote in his book “Presidential Upsets: Dark Horses, Underdogs, and Corrupt Bargains” that George Parr, a longtime political boss in South Texas, used numbered ballots, in combination with poll lists, to identify and bribe voters to choose Democratic candidates and reject Republican ballots. Parr’s scheme is credited with helping John F. Kennedy win Texas in 1960.
Seven election experts and administrators told ProPublica and the Tribune that consecutively numbering ballots is out of step with best practices in election security and is not required to conduct effective election audits.
“In an audit you’re counting the ballots in a particular precinct to see if they match the totals that you’ve already got, and so the order of the ballots doesn’t matter as long as you are counting all of them,” said Kimball, the ballot design expert.
“Injecting Chaos”
A 14-year veteran of county elections administration, Carew left a job in Aransas County on the Gulf Coast to be closer to her ailing parents, children and growing grandchildren in north Texas.
Having grown up in Weatherford, just 25 miles away, Carew said she was proud to be running elections in Hood County. She had garnered nothing but praise from Republican leaders in Aransas County who tapped her in 2015 to be their first elections administrator.
“I can’t imagine anyone not giving anything but A-plus as a grade. She’s that good,” Ric Young, the Aransas County Republican Party chair, said in an interview. “People have to realize her credentials are impeccable and she knows what she is doing.”
More than four decades ago, Texas lawmakers passed a measure allowing counties to create an independent administrator position. Aimed at insulating elections administrators from political pressures, the law calls for them to be appointed by a bipartisan elections commission rather than by county commissioners. Elected officials are prohibited from directing the activities of administrators.
In proposing the legislation, lawmakers said the move was a step toward professionalizing elections, but they made such a switch voluntary. Of the state’s 254 counties, about half — which make up roughly 80% of registered voters — have appointed an independent elections administrator. The others are run by elected local officials, usually county clerks, who are also expected to avoid partisanship.
“There has been a consistent trend in Texas to move toward the fairer, less politicized administration of elections,” said Jeremi Suri, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “In the last year, we are starting to see people try to reverse that in ways that are discouraging.”
Across the country, elections officials are increasingly feeling pressure to prioritize partisan interests over a fair democratic elections process, according to a June study issued by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice and the Bipartisan Policy Center. The study, which interviewed more than three dozen elections administrators, found that 78% believe misinformation and disinformation spread on social media has made their jobs harder, with more than half saying the position has become more dangerous.
In a September news release announcing a lawsuit challenging Texas’ new elections law, the Brennan Center pointed to the negative effects it would have on elections administrators. In direct opposition to measures that made voting easier in Houston, the state’s largest city, legislators banned drive-thru polling places and 24-hour voting across the state. They also banned the unsolicited distribution of applications for mail-in ballots to eligible voters, such as the elderly, and created new criminal penalties for election workers accused of interfering with expanded powers given to poll watchers.
“These new penalties are one example of a troubling new trend of state laws that target election officials and poll workers,” the statement said. “Laws like these rub salt in the wounds of election workers, many of whom faced unprecedented threats and intimidation last year for simply doing their jobs.”
Texas’ new voting restrictions, a recent push by GOP activists to seize control of local party precincts and efforts to delegitimize the elections process in places like Hood County could have a greater chilling effect that drives out a generation of independent elections administrators, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that seeks to increase voter participation and improve the efficiency of elections administration.
“This is an incredible delegitimization of American democracy when it comes right down to it,” said Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who helped oversee voting rights enforcement under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. “It is a security threat that is injecting chaos and partisanship and doubt into our election system.”
Carew entered Hood County in the summer of 2020, when Trump was already raising the specter of election fraud. Deep-seated divisions among the local Republican Party had already started to form with the selection of the next elections administrator.
A five-person commission that hires and fires elections administrators in the county was split between Carew and another candidate, Zach Maxwell, who had previously served as chief of staff to Mike Lang. According to his resume, Maxwell had never been employed by a county election office, but Katie Lang, who sits on the commission, said she believed he was committed to elections and praised his work ethic.
Republican County Judge Ron Massingill argued that the county needed someone with experience to deal with an expected “turbulent” presidential election. He eventually sided with the Hood County Democratic chair and the Republican county tax assessor in a 3-2 vote to hire Carew in August 2020, making him a target of hard-line party leaders who have framed the decision as a betrayal.
In one of her first presentations to the commissioners court a month before the election, Carew asked them to approve a $29,000 grant from the Center for Tech and Civic Life for items that included election supplies, voter education material and mail-in voting support. She told them that the grant gave elections officials discretion when using the money.
Eagle, an artisanal cheesemaker and former Tea Party leader, questioned the more than $350 million the nonprofit organization had received from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, saying the social media company had stifled conservative voices on its platform.
“This is just one more assault, in my opinion, by the progressive left to completely destroy this election cycle,” Eagle said during the meeting. He argued that by giving to nonprofits, private donors were attempting to sway local elections in favor of Democrats, and pointed to a lawsuit seeking to prevent counties from accepting such grants. The suit was later dismissed after a U.S. district judge refused to issue a temporary restraining order blocking the grants.
Hood County commissioners voted against the grant, which was accepted by 101 other Texas counties, including 85 that voted for Trump. Texas Republican lawmakers have since passed legislation that would require written consent from the secretary of state’s office for private grants exceeding $1,000 to election departments, arguing that they seek to tilt the balance of elections in favor of Democrats.
Days after the November election, Blue Shark Media alleged voter fraud in the national election and said voters should not accept the results. Mike Lang, the former state representative, and his co-hosts praised local elected officials, including Eagle, Katie Lang and Constable John Shirley, a former high-ranking member of the far-right paramilitary Oath Keepers, for attending a “Stop the Steal” rally in front of the county courthouse.
“Those are your GOP Republicans that they’re for Trump, they want Trump in there. They’re not part of the establishment that are like, ‘Oh, no, Trump’s not going to win,’” Lang said during a show posted on Nov. 8.
He did not raise concerns about the management of the local election. But since then, the show has repeatedly attacked Carew, even resurfacing her failed request for the nonprofit grant and calling it nothing more than an attempt to draw unsolicited mail-in ballots.
“We need to not only look at who we elect, but we need to look at who our elected officials hire,” Lang said during a show that month.
Calls for Carew’s Ouster
The demands for Carew’s ouster have grown so vigorous that critics have threatened political action against Massingill, the county judge, for his support of the elections administrator.
Massingill, who is quick to point out that he is a recipient of Trump’s Order of Merit for loyalty and service to the Republican Party, said the attacks on Carew from his own party are unwarranted.
“I don’t think it is fair. I really don’t. She is following the law,” Massingill said in an interview. “We want somebody in that office that is neutral and unbiased. We can’t have the Democratic Party or the Green Party or the Republican Party telling her how to run the election.”
Days before an April commissioners court meeting, Blue Shark Media aired an episode calling for Carew’s removal. The show had spent months criticizing Carew for a host of perceived slights, including her connection to the League of Women Voters, which honored Hood County and 53 others for their “outstanding” election website. Critics in the county have argued that the voter education and advocacy group is biased because it called for Trump’s removal from office after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In another example that Carew was not ideologically pure, the show’s hosts pointed to a report that she had denied Christina Bobb, a former Trump administration official who works for One America News, access to a private training held at a conference of the Texas Association of Elections Administrators. Dominion Voting Systems, one of the country’s largest election system vendors, filed a defamation lawsuit against the network and Bobb in August, alleging “false and manufactured stories about election fraud.” The lawsuit stated that Bobb crossed “journalism ethical lines” by raising money through a nonprofit to fund a partisan review of its voting machines in Arizona’s Maricopa County. Bobb and OAN did not respond to requests for comment.
In a two-and-a-half minute report that aired in March, Bobb said that she was able to attend the first day of the conference after identifying herself as a member of the public.
On the second day, Carew, then the president of the state association, barred Bobb, saying she attempted to attend an elections certification training that was not open to the public or to members of the media. Carew said Bobb failed to inform organizers that she was a reporter. She said the Katy-based National Association of Election Officials, which puts on the training that costs several hundred dollars to attend, asked her not to allow Bobb inside.
“She was dishonest with us as to who she was with,” Carew said.
But for Mike Lang, the incident was further evidence of Carew’s bias.
“The fact is that Michele Carew, the president of the association, kicked her out, and is that election integrity and transparency? Not a bit,” he said during a Blue Shark show in April.
Two months later, Blue Shark obtained an application that Carew submitted for a position in Travis County. The application, they said, suggested that Carew was committing fraud because she stated that she was still working for Aransas County.
“How can you have any type of integrity or honesty when you can’t fill out an employment application?” Mike Lang asked on a June 21 show as he displayed portions of the application.
Carew, who said she applied for the job after months of attacks in Hood County, told ProPublica and the Tribune that she mistakenly submitted an older version of her standardized employment application. She said she was shocked to learn that critics had gone as far as to track down the application.
“Let’s have a commission meeting and let’s find another elections administrator,” Lang said during the June show in which he demanded that Massingill take action against Carew.
Despite concerns from some Republican precinct chairs about a lack of evidence, the Hood County Republican Party Executive Committee in July passed a resolution threatening a social media campaign against Massingill if he didn’t convene the county’s elections commission to discuss Carew’s termination.
“The resolution makes several big claims, but only uses hearsay to back them up,” Mark Shackelford, a precinct chair, wrote in internal Hood County GOP emails obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune. Shackelford later told ProPublica and the Tribune that he believed that without more robust evidence the resolution would be perceived as sour grapes within the county. “And it was,” he told ProPublica and the Texas Tribune in an email.
When Massingill refused, Katie Lang, the vice chair of the elections commission, stepped in and called a meeting. Aside from opponents, the meeting drew poll workers, election judges and former officials in Aransas County who defended Carew.
In the end, the elections commission voted 3-2 not to terminate Carew, marking the same split as when it hired her to be the elections administrator. David Fischer, Hood County’s GOP chairman who along with Lang voted to fire Carew, said the vote had not ended the effort against her.
The next step, Fischer said during the meeting, should be for the commissioners court to schedule a vote to dissolve the office and place elections under Lang. The move would make the office more accountable to the county’s majority Republican voters, said Fischer, who declined an interview request.
Commissioners have not said whether they plan to abolish the position.
In the meantime, Eagle and Pressley have continued their claims that Carew is flouting the law. In August, the pair addressed City Council members in Granbury, the largest city in Hood County, where Eagle advised them against contracting with Carew for its November 2021 election.
Instead, Eagle told officials, the city should hire a private company to run its election.
“I Felt Alone”
Carew has struggled to withstand the personal attacks and the accusations that she violated the law. She worries she has grown less trusting and more cynical.
“I felt alone to tell you the truth,” she said in an interview. “The worst part was being dragged through the mud over something they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
Carew said she has tried to find solace in discussions with other elections administrators, the only people who really know what she has been going through.
She feels as if she’s somehow let them down. That her experience in Hood County has overshadowed more than a decade of service as an elections manager. And she worries that she will only be known for the claims lodged at her by those trying to remove her from the role.
But Carew is sure of one thing. She has already told her husband that Hood County will be her last elections administrator position.
“I don’t feel like I am the same person I was a year ago,” Carew said. “This county has ruined me.”
Oil is seen on the sand in Huntington Beach, California on October 3, 2021, after a pipeline breach connected to an oil rig off shore started leaking oil, according to an Orange County Supervisor. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
More than 120,000 gallons of oil that spilled into the Pacific Ocean has reached the Southern California coastline, closing parts of the beach as officials warn residents to stay away from the slick.
Federal, state and local agencies are racing to determine the cause of the spill, which is at least 13 square miles in size, and mitigate its impacts.
"The ramifications will extend further than the visible oil and odor that our residents are dealing with at the moment. The impact to the environment is irreversible," Orange County Supervisor Katrina Foley said in a statement on Saturday.
"We must identify the cause of today's spill, and for the greater good of our cities, beaches, and coastal ecological habitat we need to understand how to prevent these incidences moving forward," she added.
The cause of the spill remains under investigation, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Saturday. It announced that it was working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Office of Spill Prevention and Response, local agencies and Beta Offshore, an oil production company, on the response.
The city of Huntington Beach reported "substantial ecological impacts" on its beach and wetlands from the spill, and urged residents to steer clear of the area "due to the toxicity of the spill." Local officials closed part of the ocean and cancelled the third and final day of the Pacific Airshow to facilitate clean-up efforts and to protect the health of attendees.
According to the Coast Guard, trained spill response contractors were working to clean up the slick and public volunteers were not needed.
Ecological damage has been reported
The damage caused by the spill could be substantial, public officials and environmental advocates said.
"The hundred-thousand of gallons of oil that spilled into the ocean near Huntington Beach provide a stark and dark reminder that oil is dirty, dangerous, and can make our air and water too toxic for life," Laura Deehan, state director of Environment California, said in a statement.
"The oil from the spill has already washed up onto Huntington Beach and the Talbert Marsh wetlands, an area that's home to vibrant birdlife, including great blue herons, pelicans and endangered California least terns, which migrate up the Pacific Coast. The coast is also the habitat for myriad non-avian marine life, from fish that we eat, such as tuna and sea bass, to sea turtles, dolphins and whales," Deehan added. "This spill threatens all of them."
Foley tweeted early Sunday morning officials had already started to find dead birds and fish in the wake of the oil slick.
She added that she had spoken with Newport Beach Mayor Brad Avery, who told her that while he was returning on his boat he saw dolphins swimming through the oil.
"It sounds worse than the information slowly trickling in," Foley said.
California officials encouraged residents not to approach "oiled wildlife" but rather to report any animals impacted by the spill to the Oiled Wildlife Care Network by calling 1-877-823-6926.
The records from 2020 and 2021 also reveal a chaotic organization with hundreds of people demanding to cancel their memberships.
In the days after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the Oath Keepers gained notoriety almost overnight as a symbol of right-wing extremism in America.
Images of members in battle armor pushing their way into the Capitol went viral, clips of the group’s leader challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election surfaced, and within weeks FBI agents began arresting members of the Oath Keepers as part of the largest and arguably most important conspiracy case to come out of the insurgency.
Some active police officers and members of the US military apparently liked what they saw. In some cases ignoring strict policies prohibiting their membership in such groups, many reached out to the organization seeking information, according to leaked emails from the group.
“I was wondering what was required to become an oath keeper,” one soldier wrote to the group’s main email address on Jan. 19. He noted that he was “active duty army, 7 years in” and stationed at Fort Hood, Texas.
“I’m not liking what the world is coming to and have a growing concern for our nation,” the person added. “Please let me know how I can get involved.”
On Feb. 4, scarcely a week after three members of the Oath Keepers were indicted for their role in the Capitol riots, an email came in from someone identifying himself as Scott Langton, “a current Washington State Police Officer looking for information,” who added that he was “not looking to be on some Liberal hit list.”
Records confirm that there is a Scott Langton currently serving in the Ferndale, Washington, police department, and that he has been sued at least twice for allegedly committing civil rights and use of force abuses while in uniform. One of those cases was settled, and the other is currently pending in federal court.
Two weeks later, someone named Benjamin Payne wrote to the Oath Keepers, identifying himself as “active LEO” — or law enforcement officer — and a “lifetime member” of the group. He said he was trying to get in touch with Louisiana leadership for the group. Records and social media confirm there is a Benjamin Payne who works for the Denham Springs, Louisiana, police department; he was sued last week in federal court for alleged civil rights violations. That suit is pending.
Throughout 2021, as federal cases against members of the Oath Keepers continue to grow, interest among some in law enforcement or the military has not appeared to wane. In June, for example, someone calling themselves “active duty LE” in South Carolina wrote to the organization, asking, “how do I join?” And just over two weeks ago, someone claiming to be a Navy yeoman stationed in Fargo, North Dakota, inquired about getting involved with the group.
“Greetings, I am active duty Navy,” the person wrote under the name Ray Triboulet. “I love what my country is supposed to be and this tyrannical idiocy is crushing the freedom out of me and mine. Any opportunity y’all have for me to do something please let me know.” Navy records show there is a Ray Triboulet currently stationed in North Dakota.
None of these police officers or service members responded to requests for comment, and it is unclear what came of their inquiries or whether they ended up joining the group.
According to spokesperson Patricia Kreuzberger, the Navy “does not and will not tolerate supremacist or extremist conduct.” Any reports of misconduct will be investigated, she said, noting that the Department of Defense policy “prohibits military personnel from actively advocating supremacist, extremist, or criminal gang doctrine, ideology, or causes.”
An Army spokesperson said that under its policies “all credible allegations of Soldiers who actively participate in any type of extremist activity will be investigated.”
Ferndale Police Chief Kevin Turner said the department prohibits membership in groups such as the Oath Keepers. “Joining or participating with extremist organizations is not tolerated,” he said.
The Denham Springs Police Department did not respond to a request for its policies on extremist groups.
The emails were obtained by BuzzFeed News after an anonymous group claimed to have hacked the Oath Keepers’ servers and released the records to a group called Distributed Denial of Secrets, which posted much of the data publicly and shared some additional files with journalists and researchers.
Although the hacked Oath Keepers data does not appear to be complete, it provides an unprecedented glimpse inside the workings of the secretive organization, which was founded in 2009 by former Army paratrooper Stewart Rhodes and gets its name from the oath to uphold the Constitution sworn by all law enforcement and military personnel.
Rhodes did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the leak.
He and others in Oath Keepers leadership have long claimed that the group includes members drawn from law enforcement and military personnel, but because membership rolls were not public, the scope of such involvement was not known. In May, BuzzFeed News analyzed data from the Oath Keepers website indicating that some 3,000 people appeared to have been added to membership lists in the last two months of 2020, compared to 1,650 members in the first three months of 2021.
BuzzFeed News’ analysis of the newly leaked data, which includes membership lists, emails, and group chats, found more than 500 people associated with the organization who were identified in internal files as military or law enforcement personnel or whose email addresses indicated they may be or previously were employed by the military, state or local police, sheriff’s departments, or federal law enforcement. The leaked membership data does not appear to have been updated past mid-2020; many of the memberships appear to date back at least a decade, and some seem to have been inactive for years.
The group has previously inserted itself into moments of civil unrest, from disaster relief to Black Lives Matter demonstrations, but the events of Jan. 6 brought a higher degree of scrutiny to its activities. Rhodes, who frequently appears on Infowars and other far-right platforms, encouraged members to go to Washington. He was there in person on Jan. 6, and although he did not enter the Capitol, evidence in federal court shows he was in close touch with multiple members of the Oath Keepers during the siege of the building.
To date, 21 people associated with the group have been charged in federal court for alleged crimes on Jan. 6, including Jeremy Brown, a former Green Beret who was arrested this week. Four have pleaded guilty.
The leaked records — which include chat logs, membership rolls, donation receipts, and other information about the Oath Keepers — are largely limited to data from the past 15 months. Between March 2019 and July 2020, for example, the Oath Keepers appear to have received just over $66,000 in donations, with one donor in Texas giving exactly $1,776 — presumably in reference to the date of American independence.
Emails and chats sent in the wake of Jan. 6, meanwhile, reveal hundreds of people demanding that their memberships be canceled or their names removed from Oath Keepers' mailing lists. Two members of the Oath Keepers handling the group’s IT in that period saw their inboxes swamped by members complaining that they couldn’t log in or had other technical problems.
Collectively, the records paint a picture of organizational chaos slowed by technological snafus, poor communication, and a fragmented, aging membership unsure in many cases of what the group is up to.
The records also reveal significant anti-government sentiment from the Oath Keepers' members, unwillingness to accept the results of the presidential election, and sustained interest from active duty police and military service members.
A separate review by Gothamist found “dozens of names” connected to police, court, and corrections officers in New York state, spurring Mayor Bill de Blasio to open an investigation into the matter.
BuzzFeed News could not determine the current status of all the individuals it identified. Dozens appear to have purchased lifetime memberships to the Oath Keepers, which can cost upward of $1,000; others appear to have stopped paying dues and are listed as “expired,” while email communications indicate that some may have died and their family members asked for their names to be expunged from the group’s mailing lists.
When contacted by BuzzFeed News, some on the email rolls acknowledged having been members of the Oath Keepers in the past but said they had since left the group.
A deputy with the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office in Northern California, for example, said he had joined the Oath Keepers years ago because the idea of supporting the Constitution appealed to him, but he “started getting some weird stuff and let it go.”
He said he “never even thought about it after [he] quit getting emails” and hasn’t heard from anyone associated with the group in years.
An active officer for the Department of Defense Police reached out to the Oath Keepers via email just two weeks after Jan. 6, describing himself as “very pro-Trump and committed to defending the Constitution of the United States” and asking for more info on the group.
But the man, who said he has since retired, told BuzzFeed News he decided not to join the group after the person who called him in response to his email struck him as strange. The man described his decision not to follow through as akin to looking at a product on Amazon and deciding not to buy it.
A woman in Kansas has had to recount her rape story to strangers and collect hundreds of signatures to get the legal system to take her seriously
Could an obscure 19th-century law change how rape is charged?
Here’s a fun fact about consent: once you say “yes”, you can change your mind! Saying “yes” at the beginning of a sexual encounter doesn’t mean you give blanket permission for someone to do whatever the hell they like to you. Consenting to sex with someone doesn’t mean you automatically consent to being violently choked.
I shouldn’t have to say that, should I? That should be obvious to anyone with a brain. However, it seems the US legal system, which is supposed to be at home with complexity, has a problem understanding the fact that consent isn’t simply a matter of a one-off “yes” or “no”. The latest infuriating example of this being the case is that of Madison Smith, a former student at Bethany College in Kansas.
Back in 2018, Smith hooked up with a classmate called Jared Stolzenburg. To begin with, the sex was consensual. Then, Smith alleges, Stolzenburg started to choke her. “I tried to initially pull his hands off of my throat, and he squeezed harder every time,” Smith said in a court hearing reported by the Washington Post. “He would strangle me for 20 to 30 seconds at a time, and I would begin to lose consciousness. When he would release his hands from my neck, the only thing I could do was gasp for air.” She couldn’t, in other words, clearly announce that she was immediately revoking consent.
Smith reported what happened as a rape. The county prosecutor, Gregory Benefiel, decided that, actually, it was an “immature” sexual encounter. Benefiel told Smith’s mother in a recorded conversation that the case was complex because Smith didn’t verbally withdraw consent; Smith pointed out that she couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. Stolzenburg, for his part, has denied raping Smith, and said he was just trying out a “sexual kink” he’d seen on the internet. “I thought it would be something to try, and I was stupid to try it,” he told the BBC. In the end Benefiel did not file a sex charge against Stolzenburg but charged him with aggravated battery. In 2020 Stolzenburg was sentenced to two years’ probation and required to pay $793 to a victims’ compensation board.
Unsurprisingly, Smith wasn’t happy with the decision not to file a rape charge. She wasn’t happy with the fact that the prosecutor was essentially saying that you can’t be charged with raping someone if you make sure to shut them up first. What sort of precedent does that set? What sort of message about consent does that send?
Smith refused to give up. The traditional legal system had let her down so she turned to a 134-year-old Kansas law that allows citizens to petition for grand juries when they think prosecutors are neglecting to bring charges. Only six states in the US have a law like this; it has been used sparingly and this is believed to be the first instance it has been used in a sex crime charge. The jury can’t decide whether someone is innocent or guilty; they can just decide whether charges should be brought.
Convening a grand jury isn’t easy: you need to gather hundreds of signatures in support just to kick the process off. So Smith had to stand in a hair salon parking lot, tell strangers her story, and get them to sign a petition. On Wednesday, the grand jury convened for the first time. The case is being watched closely and could set a precedent for others to convene grand juries as a way of bringing rape charges.
While it’s not clear what the grand jury will decide, Smith’s legal battle has drawn attention to the abysmal way in which the legal system fails sexual assault survivors. In much of the world, rape is the easiest violent crime to get away with. In the US, only 19% of reported rapes and sexual assaults lead to arrests; only around 6.5% end in a conviction. It’s a similar story in the UK: in the year up to March 2020, just 1.4% of rape cases recorded by police resulted in a suspect being charged. The victim’s commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, has noted that the level of prosecutions in England and Wales has gotten so low that “what we are witnessing is the de-criminalisation of rape”.
Smith shouldn’t have had to recount her trauma to strangers in a parking lot to get the legal system to take her seriously. She shouldn’t have had to dredge up old laws that her mum had heard about on a podcast in order to have her day in court. Whatever the grand jury decides, one thing is very clear: the criminal justice system badly needs a feminist overhaul.
Amman plans to mine in the Dana Biosphere Reserve, the country’s largest and most diverse protected region.
At dawn, blue and pink rays start to break over Dana’s mountain ridges. Birdsong and rustling leaves are the only sounds in the valley.
Spread over 300sq km (116sq miles) from towering sandstone cliffs to desert plains, the Dana Biosphere Reserve is Jordan’s largest and most diverse protected region but its days of quiet and natural beauty may be numbered.
The Jordanian government, claiming there are an estimated 45 million tonnes of copper in Dana, says it’s going to mine in the area.
The prospect of seeing his beloved hills blasted to extract copper and the valleys turned into a mound of waste rock fills Abdulrahman Ammarin with dread.
“The excavations will ruin the area we were protecting for so many years,” he told Al Jazeera.
For the past 20 years, he has worked as a ranger with the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN), a non-governmental organisation running Jordan’s reserves. But his Bedouin tribe has guarded this rugged landscape for centuries.
Ammarin, who lives near the reserve, worries not only about the irreversible damage the mining might cause to his region, but also the impact it could have on his family and community. “The pollution will affect all of us,” he says.
Pointing to a nearby desert acacia, Jibril Ammarin, also a ranger from the region, starts listing the diverse types of trees and vegetation that can be found in the reserve. “We have junipers, oak and pistachio trees, date palms,” he says.
Established in 1989, the reserve is home to more than 800 different species of plants and 215 species of birds, representing about one-third of Jordan’s plant species and half of all the bird species. Some are considered threatened and a few of them can only be found in Dana.
The rangers say a mining project would destroy the land, drive away animals, and could contaminate the water and soil.
Widespread criticism
In August, the government tasked the environment ministry with carving out a portion of the reserve to allow copper prospection and extraction on – and to form a committee to look for new land to replace the areas that would be mined.
The exact area to be expropriated, said to range anywhere between 60 to 106 sq km, is still under negotiation but the plan has sparked outrage and has been heavily criticised by conservationists and environmental activists.
RSCN condemned the government’s decision, rejecting any modification to the reserve’s boundaries, and saying it would take all legal measures to protect it.
“It’s a very diverse area with four different bio-geographic zones, and it also has important archaeological sites. Its biodiversity and heritage need to be protected,” says Fares Khoury, a professor of animal biology and co-founder of the NGO Jordan Birdwatch.
He told Al Jazeera several threatened birds, such as the Syrian serin and the sooty falcon, depend on the reserve for survival. “The area is very sensitive. If the [mining] project goes ahead, it will leave only destruction.”
Muna Hindiyeh, a professor of environmental engineering and an expert on water management, says mining requires a lot of water and poses a serious threat to the region’s extremely scarce water resources.
“There is a great chance that heavy metals will reach groundwater and pollute it,” she says. According to Hindiyeh, mining would also increase soil erosion and result in loss of biodiversity, so she says the negative impact of the project would need to be carefully assessed.
But so far, no environmental impact studies have been made public.
“We need complete studies on the exact cost of copper extraction and the environmental impact it would have on the region,” RSCN’s chair Khaled al-Irani told Al Jazeera.
Conservationists say the numbers presented by the government are only estimates, and serious independent studies were not carried out. “There is no transparency in the process,” says Khoury.
Jordan’s ministries of environment and energy and mineral resources did not respond to Al Jazeera’s interview requests.
In addition to concerns that mining will cause irreparable environmental harm, many are also worried about how it could affect the area’s archaeological sites that span from the Palaeolithic to Roman and Islamic periods.
The reserve is under consideration for UNESCO World Heritage site status, a position that experts worry will be threatened by the mining project. Jordan’s International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) said the decision to open the reserve “for intrusive and destructive mining investments is short-sighted, ill-advised and sets a dangerous precedent”.
Concerned Jordanians have also launched online petitions and have flooded social media with the hashtag #Save_Dana.
Economic development vs sustainability
Despite the public outcry, the government has defended the mining project, arguing it would create 1,000 jobs and bring investment to the region, especially since demand for copper is increasing exponentially.
In 2016, the government gave the Jordanian Integrated Mining and Exploration Company a licence to mine for copper in the reserve. The company is owned by Manaseer, a group with investments in oil, gas and mining, and by the Jordanian military.
According to Manaseer, the mining project would “support the national economy” and create job opportunities in a country where unemployment rates have reached an alarming rate of 25 percent. Tafila, the southern governorate where Dana is located, has been particularly hard-hit by poverty and unemployment.
At a government-organised press tour to parts of the reserve, Manaseer spokesperson Samer Makharmeh said the mine would not affect the environment.
“What environment? There are no animals, there are no trees, nothing at all here,” he said, gesturing towards a rocky part of the reserve, which also contains archaeological ruins.
“The sad thing is that they [Manaseer officials] can’t see,” says Mohammad Asfour, a campaigner for environmental protection and expert on green economy. “They can’t see the beauty, they can’t see the wildlife. They see nothing but short-term profit.”
The mine would be open for about 20 years but would leave behind a scarred landscape that could take centuries to recover.
“It’s more important to focus on sustainable solutions, not mega-projects that benefit only a few,” says Asfour. Since most of the mining jobs offered would be low-paid and short-lived, Asfour argues tourism would be a better investment, and the economic benefits of mining would be outweighed by its negative impact.
Praised as an example of sustainable development and conservation, and recognised internationally with ecotourism awards – including being in Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 greatest places – Dana attracted 80,000 visitors a year before the pandemic.
The reserve is staffed and managed by people from the region. According to RSCN, it provides about $3m annually to the local community and employs 85 local people in different sustainable tourism projects across Dana.
Ghazia al-Khasaba is one of more than a dozen women employed by RSCN in Dana’s production of jams, herbal infusions, candles and handmade crafts.
“I’ve been working here for 24 years to support my sick husband and my daughter,” she says, adding that her job at the reserve is her family’s only source of income.
“If the mining project goes ahead it will affect tourism here, so it will affect my source of income,” she adds.
Outside the reserve and the region’s main touristic attractions, however, residents are split over the copper mine. While many say the environmental damage is too great a risk, others welcome the job opportunities the mining industry could offer them.
Musa al-Saedeen, who is from the nearby town of al-Qraiqreh and works in the public sector, acknowledges the value of the reserve and the benefits it brought to local communities but says work opportunities in the region remain limited.
“For the people who are not benefitting from tourism, it’s their right to demand jobs and better opportunities,” he says.
But for al-Khasaba, what is at stake goes beyond her job. Her house and agricultural land are so close to the planned mining site she worries about the noise, the dust and the pollution. And beyond that, she worries about the next generations.
“[The mine] will affect our future, and our children’s future,” she says.
