06 November 21
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The former senator, now a leader with the dark-money group No Labels, is still proud of himself for killing the public option.
At a recent event promoting his new book, Lieberman reflected proudly on his actions from over a decade ago, when he worked to kill the public option during the Obama-era Affordable Care Act legislative debates. The move stopped what would have been a small but important step toward establishing universal health care.
“I stepped out on it because I felt strongly about it,” Lieberman said. “The White House did take it out as a result of my position.”
The former senator made the remarks Friday during a long, wide-ranging conversation with public radio network WAMC’s Joe Donahue on his new book “The Centrist Solution: How We Made Government Work and Can Make It Work Again.” During the chat, Lieberman discussed his role in ACA negotiations and his work with No Labels, which has sought to constrain the Build Back Better bill. The current makeup and hyperpartisan politics of the Senate give members of the ruling party outsize power in shaping legislation, but the razor-thin Democratic majority means that the party needs every member on board. “For people, let’s say on a more progressive or liberal side of the party, if they want to get anything done, they’ve got to get Manchin and Sinema,” Lieberman said.
There’s precedent. In 2009, as the pivotal 60th vote to defeat a filibuster, Lieberman was sought after by Democrats as an ally in the fight for the ACA. The Connecticut independent, who caucused with Democrats but had endorsed GOP Sen. John McCain for president in 2008, was a pivotal swing vote in a divided Senate that favored Democrats by a 60-40 margin by the summer of 2009. Republicans tried to turn Lieberman to their side in the wake of the 2008 election, but he ultimately rebuffed the attempts.
With Republicans pledging to filibuster any health care bill from Democrats and the ruling party unready then as now to blow up the procedural relic, it fell on the White House and Senate leadership to convince holdouts to vote for the bill. To Lieberman, the inclusion of a public option made the bill a “budget buster,” and not one he was willing to support.
Ultimately, Lieberman won the concession from the Obama administration and solidified his position as a villain of the liberal left in the late George W. Bush and early Obama years. “When it comes down to it, I like to think that I was the 60th vote that enabled the Senate to adopt Obamacare and get it done,” Lieberman said last week.
“But I did oppose the public option because to me, it was an attempt to get the foot in the door for national health insurance, which I thought would compromise the quality of health care in America,” he added.
In 2014, a year after leaving the Senate, Lieberman joined the centrist dark-money group No Labels, for which he now serves as co-chair. The group has fought to curtail the size and scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending bill and has called for it to be separated from the bipartisan infrastructure bill — a move that would strip progressives of their leverage to pass the ambitious social spending legislation. “It looks like now they might adopt it,” Lieberman told WAMC of the infrastructure bill, “maybe this week or next week, and then move on to a compromise bill on the bigger one. And I think that would be the beginning of a breakthrough.”
On Monday, the No Labels official website echoed that message in a blog post recapping the state of play in Washington, stopping just short of calling to scrap the $1.75 trillion domestic spending plan completely. Instead, the group endorsed a two-track solution that pushed infrastructure forward and left Build Back Better spinning its wheels.
“The House can and should get infrastructure done,” the group wrote. “Both houses should take time to think about the rest.”
It’s a message that will run into trouble with progressives like Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the Congressional Progressive Caucus whip. After Manchin threw up yet another hurdle to the process, declaring that he had not signed off on the framework of the social spending bill, Omar made it clear that her patience was at its limits. “We are not playing Manchin’s games anymore,” she tweeted Monday.
No Labels has been an enthusiastic and prominent supporter of right-wing Democrats working to stymie, if not outright kill, the social spending bill. In August, the dark-money group cut an ad celebrating the intransigence of nine House Democrats who attempted to force the vote on the infrastructure bill. While the tactic was a strategic failure — the bill still hasn’t come to a floor vote, more than two months after the group demanded immediate action — it paid off in a more literal sense. The cohort’s leader, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., has since raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from No Labels-linked donors, as have several of his allies.
Comparisons between Lieberman during the Obama administration and Manchin and Sinema during the Biden administration have become somewhat of a cliché in recent weeks as the two right-wing Democrats have relentlessly cut the social spending bill down to a top line of $1.75 trillion, less than half the already compromised $3.5 trillion price tag. Lieberman told WAMC that because “sometimes all it takes is one or two votes” to get legislation passed, Manchin and Sinema should do what they can to affect the bill’s final form as much as possible.
It’s not advice they needed to hear — Sinema and Manchin have both worked to water down the bill and protect their respective pet interests. In Manchin’s case, that means a focus on providing continuing opportunities for fossil fuel extraction and harsh means testing for social programs. For Sinema, as near as anyone can tell, that means keeping wealthy Americans from paying more in taxes and ensuring that the bill does as little as possible to disrupt the rapacious capital interests that pour money into her campaign coffers.
The behavior of the two senators has members of their own caucus tearing out their hair. Any compromise is still a moving target with demands and declarations from the pair changing by the day and often contradicting one another.
But for Lieberman, a cheerleader for the pair and for the kind of line-in-the-sand negotiation style they’re deploying, the tactic is just as valid now as it was in 2010. The back-and-forth over the ACA would consume the first two years of Barack Obama’s presidency. Democrats would not hold both chambers of Congress and the White House again until January 2021.
“The centrists are going to play a bigger role — if they want,” Lieberman said. “And everybody else just has to accept that if they want to get something done.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accompanied by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) speaks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington, on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
ALSO SEE: House Passes $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill,
Putting Social Policy Bill on Hold
The House of Representatives passed a bipartisan infrastructure package on Friday night
Thirteen Republicans sided with Democrats, while a number of progressives — including Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The vote was 228 to 206. The bill will now move to Biden’s desk.
The House is additionally scheduled to vote to approve the rules of debate on the Build Back Better Act on Friday night. As part of the compromise progressives and moderates made to get the bill passed, moderates released a statement vowing to vote for the social spending bill if the Congressional Budget Office estimates of the legislation’s cost matches White House projections. Moderates have been insisting on waiting for the CBO score before voting on the act, but that could take days or weeks for CBO to complete, according to The New York Times. In the statement, moderates agreed to pass the bill by Nov. 15, although it is unclear that the CBO score will be ready by then.
Democrats have been engaged in months of negotiations over what should be included in the 10-year, $1.85 trillion Build Back Better bill, which features many of Biden’s domestic policy priorities including funding for child care, universal preschool, and the continuation of an expanded child tax credit.
The party’s advantage in House is narrow, though, meaning Pelosi could only afford to lose a few Democratic votes and still pass the bipartisan bill. Getting Republicans to vote for it gave her the chance she needed to get the bill passed.
Progressives, meanwhile, have prioritized the Build Back Better bill, with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) contending on Friday that it’s worth passing even if it means losing control of Congress in 2022. “What’s the alternative, to do nothing?” she said, according to The Hill. “I mean, that’s not gonna that’s not gonna get us anywhere … part of what we have to do is really understand the economic frustration that people have right now. And I think that is really important for us.”
The House originally planned to vote on both bills Thursday, but negotiations continued into Friday before party leaders announced that a vote on the Build Back Better bill would be delayed.
The infrastructure bill provides $40 billion in funding for bridge repairs and replacement, $39 billion for transit, $65 billion for broadband internet, and $74 billion toward power and clean energy, among other initiatives.
The Build Back Better legislation includes measures targeted at expanding education access and affordable housing, lowering the cost of health care and child care, introducing new taxes for large corporations and the wealthy while giving working families tax breaks, lowering Medicare drug prices, and mitigating the impact of climate change.
To help pay for some of the programs, the bill proposes strengthening the IRS so it can recover unpaid taxes. Large corporations would be subject to a 15 percent minimum income tax and a one percent surcharge on corporate stock buybacks. A surtax for millionaires and billionaires in the bill would close a loophole that lets wealthy Americans skirt a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on their income.
Some other proposals, including allowing two years of free community college and expanding Medicare to cover dental and vision, were dropped because moderates were concerned about the cost of such programs. Other provisions were decreased during negotiations, including 12 weeks of paid family leave getting shortened to four weeks, causing an outcry from progressives.
If and when House Democrats do pass the Build Back Better bill, it would then move to the Senate, where it would need the support of two reluctant moderates, Sens. Kirsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), to have any hope of reaching the president’s desk.
The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (photo: AP)
The committee has sent subpoenas to ex-Trump strategist Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, ex-White House deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino and Kash Patel, who was chief of staff to then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, among others.
Although Bannon was not part of the Trump administration on Jan. 6, he refused to cooperate on the grounds of executive privilege, a legal shield used to protect presidential conversations and records. The committee disagreed, and as a result the House referred him for a criminal contempt charge, which is now before the Justice Department.
Also, the panel — alongside the National Archives agency – is in the midst of fighting a lawsuit from former President Trump seeking to block the release of certain records.
The panel has delayed most of its scheduled depositions for witnesses engaged in talks with the committee. In addition, some named and unnamed witnesses have already turned over records and taken part in interviews or depositions, but the committee is declining to publicly name those cooperating for now.
"We're seeing robust cooperation from a lot of witnesses, most people are really participating and understand the legal and civic duty, nature, of the discussion, so that's good," Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and a member of the committee, told NPR said in late October. "There have been dozens of interviews, as well as depositions."
The committee has also issued orders to 35 tech companies to preserve records, plus document requests to eight federal agencies and 15 social media companies.
Members of Jacob Blake's family at a rally calling for justice in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (photo: Sean Krajacic/Kenosha News)
Civil rights activists report a ‘cozy’ relationship between Kenosha law enforcement and rightwing vigilantes
The muted scene around the courthouse stood in stark contrast to the chaotic scene that played out in the Wisconsin city on the night of 26 August 2020. And it belied the enormity of what is at stake for Rittenhouse, his victims, and their family members, and for America as a whole, as it faces yet another legal reckoning over racism, rightwing politics and policing.
“The past year has been a living hell for the family,” said Justin Blake, the uncle of Jacob Blake, who in August 2020 was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer and left paralyzed from the waist down.
“To see your loved one, someone you helped raise and take to the ballpark and make a good young man out of, to see the video of him shot like that, it takes your breath away. I can’t even watch it anymore,” Blake said from the steps of the courthouse.
While Rittenhouse stands accused of six criminal counts, including homicide, much more is on trial in the court of public opinion: the police shooting that set off the protests, selective enforcement of laws, and a justice system that incarcerates Wisconsin’s Black residents at a higher rate than any other state in the nation.
Racial justice advocates say any verdict will not resolve long-simmering racial tensions that boiled over last August. But Kenosha as a community must find a way to move forward regardless of the outcome.
For Blake’s family, the past year has in some ways been framed by gunshots and two videos depicting two wildly divergent responses from police. In one video, Blake, who carried no gun, was shot multiple times in front of his children.
In another, Kyle Rittenhouse, now 18, is seen trotting past police, assault rifle slung over his shoulder, as bystanders identified him as the shooter. Police did not intervene as Rittenhouse left the scene.
Last month, the US Department of Justice announced that the officer who shot Blake, Rusten Sheskey, will not face any federal criminal civil rights violations. By then, Wisconsin prosecutors had already cleared Sheskey of state criminal charges.
Adelana Akindes, a 26-year-old activist who grew up in Kenosha, said she’s not surprised by the response from authorities in the wake of the police shooting and the ensuing protests.
She describes Kenosha, a majority-white rust belt city of 100,000 that sits between Milwaukee and Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, as the kind of place where drivers of color are profiled by police and the sheriff calls for lawbreakers to be “warehoused” for life so “so the rest of us can be better”.
“It’s a racist place,” she said. “Not always outwardly so. But you can look at the people in power and see it,” pointing to the sheriff’s comments.
The night of the deadly protest, former Kenosha city council member Kevin Mathewson put out a call on Facebook asking the Kenosha Guard and other armed civilians to protect lives and property. Within minutes, the Kenosha Guard lept into action.
Akindes, who identifies as Black, said activists in Kenosha had historically been slow to mobilize, but when video emerged showing police shoot Blake in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, people took to the streets.
“Everyone had a very visceral reaction,” she said. “This type of uprising doesn’t usually happen in Kenosha, but it was an escalation of the tensions that were already building. It was amazing to see how many people turned up to support Blake.”
Akindes said the night of 26 August, she and several other activists were on their way to join a larger demonstration when two unmarked cars swerved into her path. Officers bound her hands, arrested her, and took her to a detention center for violating curfew. She wasn’t released until the next day.
Akindes is a named plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in federal court that alleges law enforcement targeted demonstrators protesting police brutality. More than 150 peaceful protestors were arrested over the nine days of demonstrations, according to the suit – not a single one of them pro-police or members of armed militias.
“In Kenosha, there are two sets of laws,” reads the complaint. “One that applies to those who protest police brutality and racism, and another for those who support the police.”
Videos that surfaced after the night of protests reinforced that perception. One video captured police on patrol the night of 26 August providing water and expressing support for armed militia members. “We appreciate you guys, we really do,” one officer said.
Rittenhouse became a cause célèbre in some rightwing circles, with Fox News host Tucker Carlson hailing him as someone who “had to maintain order when no one else would”. Fundraising generated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his defense fund. A data breach revealed a list of donors who contributed, including public officials and Wisconsin law enforcement officials.
“Stay strong brother,” wrote one donor whose email account was connected to a law enforcement officer in Pleasant Prairie, seven miles west of Kenosha.
Kim Motley, an international human rights and civil rights attorney, said she sees a disturbingly “cozy” relationship between police and armed militia groups that led to selective enforcement laws the night of 26 August.
Motley is representing Akindes in a class action lawsuit that accuses Kenosha law enforcement of constitutional violations. In asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit, the city said its enforcement helped curb “rioting, mayhem and attacks” during the uprising and were thereby justified.
Separately, Motley is representing Gaige Grosskreutz, who Rittenhouse shot in the arm, in a suit that alleges law enforcement officials condoned the efforts of white nationalists to use violence against those protesting police brutality.
The attorney representing Kenosha county and Sheriff David Beth said in a statement that the allegations against his clients were false and failed to “acknowledge that Grosskreutz was himself armed with a firearm when he was shot and Grosskreutz failed to file this lawsuit against the person who actually shot him.”
Motley said she sees a real “us-versus-them mentality” from law enforcement in Kenosha.
“I’m from this part of the world. And there has always been a real warrior mentality with the policing that I see in Kenosha County,” she said. “It seemed like police were giving a wink and a nod to militia members that night. I don’t think they wanted anyone to die, but certainly I think there was implicit support for people like [Rittenhouse] to act like law enforcement and to impose punishments as they saw fit.”
Motley said the complicity that appeared to exist between police and militia members set the stage for what was to come.
“Frankly, I feel like Kenosha was training for what happened at the US Capitol.”
With so many issues converging in one case, the concept of justice depends on the perspective of victims. But at the very least, she said, it would include an accounting for the actions taken that night. And it would involve attempts from the city and police to reach out to the community to begin the healing process.
“At the end of the day, there’s only so much police can do. And there’s only so much community members can do. But if neither side is willing to reach across the aisle, it’s just going to be worse,” she said.
Kenosha councilman Jan Michalski, who represents the Uptown neighborhood that experienced much of the damage from the protests, said the city has taken steps toward healing through listening sessions the mayor has led and efforts to support activists that can serve as violence disruptors across the city.
Many of the Uptown storefront windows are still boarded as the community worries over the reaction to the coming verdict. But Michalski said people have come together to rebuild the area and neighborhood development plans are underway.
“The trial has divided folks, certainly. And it’s been hard to tamp down the anger with all the publicity we’ve gotten. But the city of Kenosha is full of good people. People want to feel safe from crime, and also safe from police. And I think that’s a reasonable position,” he said.
For Bishop Tavis Grant II, who accompanied Justin Blake to the courthouse, the verdict in the Rittenhouse trial is only the beginning of a longer march toward justice.
“When we talk about people who don’t have access to capital, access to health care, people who don’t have access to the American dream, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
“In all reality, this is not an answer or panacea. No matter what the verdict is, we’ve still got a hell of a lot to fight for, and fight about.”
A man holds foil containing fentanyl. (photo: Jessica Christian/The Chronicle)
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which played a key role in creating America’s opioid crisis, has dissolved. But the crisis rages on, lives are still in danger, and the profits are still flowing — now to street dealers who manufacture synthetic drugs.
Writing about the book The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth had offered me an opportunity to ask about her current intake, a topic she usually avoids. I was particularly interested to know about her use of opioids.
“Well, I just took an opioid,” she said with bemusement. The term sounded alien spilling from her lips. She usually calls them “headache pills,” rendering harmless the pharmaceuticals that rest permanently on her bedside table. She imagines them as the equivalent of everyday aspirin, rather than addictive substances that have altered her mind and body over time.
At sixty-nine years old, my mom is a shadow of her former self. She suffers from early onset dementia and exists in a foggy mental state, as if permanently stuck waking up from a nap. She’s too drowsy and weak to leave her couch except for about twenty minutes a day to use the bathroom and bathe. She spends most of her time sitting in the dark and watching television. The only time she’s left the house in the last two years was via a stretcher, as EMTs hauled her into the back of an ambulance, to drive her to the hospital to treat her COVID-19 infection.
Opioids have taken away her pain from arthritis, but they’ve also taken away nearly everything else. It’s a Faustian bargain.
Not that she agrees. No argument ever persuades her to stop, and cutting her off has proved an impossible task, especially after my dad died. She was first prescribed opioids for a three-month period. She’s now in her second decade.
“I don’t really think addiction is a big deal if it’s for the right reasons,” she told me. “If it helps me, so what?”
“That sounds exactly like something an addict would say,” I replied. She sighed and fell silent.
A Waking Nightmare
For most of this century, silence reigned as the default American attitude about opioid addiction. When Los Angeles Times journalist Sam Quinones first pitched The Least of Us’s precursor, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, to book publishers, he couldn’t find any takers. Addiction to painkillers is hardly a sexy topic, and few understood then just how widespread they’d become.
Quinones’s first book, finally published in 2015, was worth the wait. Dreamland is a riveting account of the United States’ secret addiction that weaves through the complex history of the painkiller industry, both legal and illicit, and documents the major players behind the labs, corporations, and cartels.
Dreamland also narrates harrowing personal stories like my mom’s — stories of ordinary people with chronic pain problems who were overprescribed heroin-like painkillers by their doctors, who themselves were getting pumped and primed by Big Pharma’s army of pill influencers.
The cruel cycle was good business for Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, and its owners, the plutocratic Sackler family. As their wealth grew exponentially, so did the number of people who got hopelessly addicted or died from an overdose. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 500,000 died from opioid overdoses over two decades starting in 1999.
Dreamland and other exposés helped wake Americans up to the fact that opioids were ruining individual lives, families, and whole communities — especially in blue-collar towns and rural areas already ravaged by corporate consolidation, globalization, and capital flight in the neoliberal era.
The term “opioid crisis” was becoming part of the lexicon by the time Donald Trump was elected in 2016. The president declared it a public health emergency a year later, noting that overdoses had joined gun violence and car crashes as a leading cause of death. The sweeping opioid bill he signed in 2018, the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, promised $1.8 billion in state grants to help address the crisis, including provision of more evidence-based treatment for addicts.
State and local governments, hospitals, and individuals targeted Purdue Pharma with thousands of lawsuits over its role in the epidemic. The company pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for obscuring OxyContin’s addictive properties and for soliciting high-volume prescribers. In September, a bankruptcy court finally dissolved the company and negotiated a settlement worth billions that will compensate 130,000 people who suffered from addiction or whose loved ones died from an overdose.
But it’s all rather cold comfort considering the staggering scale of the crisis that, in addition to the human toll, has cost the country trillions of dollars, including funding for law enforcement, treatment, and social services. The bankruptcy deal also shields the Sacklers from further financial liability. They’re still among the richest families in the United States.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s SUPPORT bill strengthened the crackdown on doctors who prescribed opioids and began funding draconian prescription drug monitoring programs. These days doctors, fearing penalties, are beginning to outsource their decision-making to automated programs like NarxCare — a set of databases and algorithms that automatically assigns each patient a unique, comprehensive Overdose Risk Score. (Picture the predictive crime-fighting strategy from the movie Minority Report, but for prescribing legal drugs.) But users are already hooked, and many are turning elsewhere.
A “Street Dealer’s Magic Dust”
The Least of Us is a painful sequel, because it’s an admission that we haven’t beaten the national opioid addiction. Far from it. Quinones makes the convincing case that the problem has simply moved underground, changing locations from the doctor’s office to back alleys, or to the internet, where users purchase drugs from shady Mexican or Chinese chemical providers.
Opioid prescriptions have fallen by at least 60 percent from a decade ago, but demand didn’t suddenly end with the lack of supply. Those seeking similar effects are increasingly turning to the highs of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. These street drugs are ubiquitous because they deliver a wallop to the body and are cheap to make. Starting a few years ago, traces of fentanyl started showing up in meth, cocaine, and heroin to make those drugs stronger — what Quinones calls a “street dealer’s magic dust.”
The new crop of synthetic street drugs themselves are especially harmful to the human body. Quinones argues that they’re currently ravaging the nation’s brains, leading to a rise in mental illness and a steep uptick in homelessness. Users of synthetic P2P meth, which is produced with a clear liquid called phenyl-2-propanone, are getting hallucinations and delusions, even long-term brain damage. Fentanyl is even more deadly because of its sheer potency. If the manufacturer botches the recipe at all, a small amount can easily kill its users. It’s no wonder that of the 50,000 people who died in opioid overdoses in 2019, nearly 73 percent of the cases involved synthetic drugs.
The death toll has exploded even more since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. For many, the quarantine and social distancing have exacerbated feelings of anxiety, isolation, and alienation. Over 90,000 people died of a drug overdose last year, according to the CDC, and for the twelve months ending on October 3, 2021, that number was nearly 100,000.
My twenty-two-year-old nephew, who lives with my mom, is both a user and dealer of various synthetic drugs — mostly the former, which is why he’s stolen thousands of dollars from my family over the last few years and racked up a long rap sheet: robbery, assault, counterfeiting, DUIs, possession of illegal firearms, and more. There’s currently a warrant out for his arrest for skipping his trial for a meth possession felony, but the police don’t seem to be in a hurry to take him into custody. The prosecutors tell me that there are too many cases like my nephew’s to handle, and there are bigger fish to fry.
Maybe so, but in the meantime, he quietly partakes of illegal opioids in the back bedroom of my childhood house while my mom ingests the legal kind in the living room.
Who’s to Blame?
It’s natural to want to find someone or something to blame for this new iteration of opioid dependency. But now that the Sacklers are out of the picture, choosing a singular villain is harder.
Accordingly, Quinones struggles to definitively assign blame. Throughout The Least of Us, he takes aim at a variety of targets: our weak pleasure-seeking brains, a consumer society inundated with mass marketing that “primes us for addiction,” and our society’s selfishness. “Our epidemic of opioid addiction was just an extreme expression of a culture in which, in so many ways, Me won the Battle over Us,” he writes.
Least convincingly, he doesn’t find fault with capitalism. Not really. He’s nostalgic for the capitalism of yore, which has “lost its competition” in the post–Cold War period. Now, “Capitalism has bent towards the agglomeration of profit and power in the hands of relatively few,” Quinones writes. In truth, that’s part of capitalism’s origin story — it didn’t change after the Soviet Union fell.
In fact, The Least of Us doubles as an illustration of capitalism’s endurance and ability to pivot and nimbly adapt to perverse new market incentives. Case in point: Once Purdue Pharma was out of the picture, a new, deadlier version took its place in the form of a loose, scattered network of traffickers who are cooking up meth and fentanyl-laced substances on the cheap in Magic Bullet blenders.
“Fentanyl disrupted the traditional drug world just as Amazon and Uber upended retail and taxis and was a boon to traffickers and street dealers. Anybody could be a fentanyl kingpin,” Quinones writes. In other words, the opioid market is now largely the domain of the petty bourgeoisie rather than big corporations. But a few are still profiting while the rest suffer.
The Least of Us is correct when it argues that the United States needs less individualism, more tight-knit communities, a more comprehensive healthcare system, and innovative drug treatment programs. But to get there, we also need to work to create a political and economic system that puts people over profits.
It won’t be easy because capitalism, as it turns out, is one hell of a drug.
A man rides a bicycle past a lot of felled African palm trees in Los Laureles, Honduras, on July 22, 2021. (photo: Seth Berry/The Intercept)
GarcÃa knew the message was serious. Rumor had it he’d been placed on a kill list of five land rights activists in Honduras. The first of the five, his friend Juan Manuel Moncada, had been assassinated just four days earlier.
At around 10 o’clock that night, the presumed messengers made good on their threat: Four or five men with balaclavas, bulletproof vests, and AK-47s rolled up on motorcycles and surrounded GarcÃa’s property, where they proceeded to chat and smoke cigarettes while looking over the barbed wire fence into his adobe-walled house. GarcÃa lay inside, paralyzed with fear.
He said they looked like soldiers. But they weren’t. They were paramilitaries who, in a resurgent campaign of violence and aggression that began this summer, have been targeting a land rights cooperative trying to protect land it retook from a corporate palm oil giant.
“When you see a soldier show up in front of your house,” GarcÃa said of the July encounter, “you realize they aren’t a soldier, they’re there to murder you.”
Honduras’s Hot Zone
GarcÃa lives in the community of Panamá, in the Bajo Aguán Valley, a “hot zone” notorious as one of the country’s most militarized regions. Land conflicts in the Aguán date back to the early 1990s, when Dinant, a Central American transnational and consumer goods corporation specializing in African palm oil production, began buying off collective farmlands, ultimately obtaining a majority of farmlands in the region. The purchases were carried out in an environment of killings, disappearances, and death threats against campesino or rural leaders and were contested by human rights workers, journalists, and the farmers themselves.
After a 2009 U.S.-backed military coup, many campesinos reoccupied the farms — spurring a campaign of largely targeted assassinations by private security guards and Honduran security forces that left over 150 farmers dead. In 2014, international pressure momentarily put the brakes on the killing spree by disparate armed actors, opening a new era of conflict in which well-organized paramilitary groups became the main drivers of violence. Leading the two largest groups were a former soldier and a private guard who previously provided security for Dinant, with other former soldiers, police officers, and private security guards among their ranks.
The paramilitaries’ strategy begins with infiltrating social movements, killing off key members, and then installing armed groups inside communities to terrorize their residents into exile or silence, according to eyewitness testimony, interviews with more than a dozen local residents, and affidavits made on behalf of asylum-seekers in the U.S. If successful, the armed groups will extinguish land rights movements and seize back control of the palm oil lands Dinant claims as its own.
Residents of the Aguán valley say the military is complicit in the paramilitary violence. Some residents claim that the military has armed the paramilitaries, while others argue that the military, given its omnipresence in the region, is at minimum aware of the paramilitary units and has done little to stop their violence.
Those suspicions were inflamed after photos began circulating on social media of a paramilitary leader at an event with Honduran soldiers in the Aguán this spring: “The context of the photos is what we’ve been submitting complaints [to the authorities] about already,” said Hipólito Rivas, a local activist who’s faced death threats from the armed group, “that as the head of the paramilitary group, we confirmed that he has support from the Army.”
Honduran special forces had already been entangled with a paramilitary group that infiltrated a farmer organization in the village of La Confianza in the mid-2010s, according to an affidavit from a human rights worker that two Hondurans submitted as part of their applications for asylum in the U.S. The affidavit details how a former special forces officer, Celio RodrÃguez, joined land rights movements, including MUCA (“Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán,” per its Spanish acronym), and then rose to a leadership position under the pretense he’d protect communities from violence. But he turned out to be organizing a paramilitary death squad. The members of Grupo de Celio, as it is known, were frequently seen in contact with an active-duty special forces commander named German Alfaro, who was the head of the Xatruch, an elite military police task force, and then later FUSINA, another special forces unit active in the Aguán, according to the affidavit. Grupo de Celio was also seen doing military training on a palm plantation with soldiers and a well-known assassin named Osvin Caballero, now in prison on account of several high-profile murders.
The Intercept was not able to independently confirm the existence of a relationship between the Honduran military and the paramilitary forces, and a Xatruch official interviewed by The Intercept declined to comment on the subject of paramilitarism in the valley. In 2016, the Xatruch were accused of death squad activity. The Xatruch is one of several Honduran military units that has received extensive U.S. military training over the last decade. The Pentagon describes these partnerships as part of an effort to “combat transnational crime.”
Such training occurred as recently as July, when the Xatruch representative told The Intercept that his unit was being trained by members of the U.S. Army from Joint Task Force-Bravo, from the nearby base in Puerto Castilla. “Right now, they’re giving us training on how to conduct operations and fight delinquency,” he said. “The training already began this week.” The Pentagon and State Department did not respond to questions about the recent Xatruch training.
Dinant, too, has ties to the Xatruch. Up until 2018, Dinant had loaned a shed on its property to the Xatruch for the purpose of patrolling the area, according to a company spokesperson and an April 2015 document the company filed with the International Finance Corporation — the private lending arm of the World Bank, which supported Dinant with millions of dollars in loans. “Dinant briefly granted temporary basic shelter for taskforce members patrolling the communities around the plantation,” the spokesperson, Roger Pineda Pinel, told The Intercept.
Residents are suspicious of Dinant, which has relied numerous times over the last decade on the military and police to crack down on campesinos occupying lands claimed by the company.
The company has previously been implicated in violence against land defenders: In a 2017 civil lawsuit against the International Finance Corporation, families from the Aguán accused the IFC of funding human rights abuses by funneling World Bank money to Dinant and stated that “Dinant also hired (and continues to hire) paramilitary death squads and hired assassins.” Dinant’s spokesperson was dismissive of the allegations at the time. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report, which investigated 29 killings in the valley (out of over 100 that had taken place), suggested “the possible involvement of private security guards” in 13 of the deaths. Dinant issued a lengthy response to HRW investigators, denying responsibility for the violence. Asked about it by The Intercept, Pineda said that Dinant “has a zero tolerance policy for abuses” and it “conducts its business in a just and lawful manner.”
Pineda said that Dinant is the rightful owner of the contested lands in the Aguán and that the company has no connection to “so-called paramilitary groups.”
“The allegations that you raise have long been discredited by even our most ardent critics. As we have stated before, over the last decade Dinant has been the subject of a number of credible and independent inquiries and investigations,” Pineda wrote in a statement, pointing to the IFC’s monitoring of Dinant’s activities, an International Criminal Court report on Honduras, and a review by Foley Hoag, a corporate law firm commissioned by Dinant. “Without exception, these have found no evidence that Dinant ever conducted illegal activities, used inappropriate force, or conspired against any person or organization.”
Pineda added that “a more accurate article on the Aguan would describe how more and more armed criminals are invading private farms, damaging business, stealing produce, and threatening local people and jobs; how some farms have been occupied continuously by criminal gangs for over three years without punishment; and how the constant threat of violence is damaging local economies, increasing unemployment, and forcing hard-working families to migrate out of desperation.”
Last spring, paramilitaries began targeting activists from the Movement for the Refoundation of Gregorio Chávez, named for a land defender whom other activists say was killed by Dinant private security guards in 2012. (Dinant has denied the claim.) The movement has occupied about half of the Dinant-run Paso Aguán palm plantation near Panamá since Chávez was killed. The leader of the paramilitary group accused of the recent violence, Santos Torres, was a private security contractor who worked on Dinant properties and joined the land defender collective in 2012, then broke off to form an armed group several years later.
In La Confianza, residents told The Intercept last month that they have recently seen uniformed policemen and a local politician visit the homes of known gunmen and affiliates of Grupo de Celio. On October 10, Oscar Javier Pérez, a witness to two highly publicized murders by the paramilitary group was himself assassinated at home in a village adjacent to La Confianza.
The paramilitary units in Panamá and La Confianza are notorious in the Agúan, where armed groups have entered a number of other communities: A 2019 Honduran media report about a group of armed men that had appeared in the community of Trinidad noted that “this group has the same characteristics of those operated in La Confianza by Celio RodrÃguez and in Panamá by Santos Torres.”
State authorities typically blame the land defenders themselves for the violence being inflicted on them, said Jaime Cabrera, an activist in the community of Panamá, who has been threatened by armed groups and who was also named on the kill list. “The government discourse,” he said, “has always been that the campesinos are just killing each other.”
“He Never Did Anything Wrong”
Ever since he began receiving the messages, their taunting invective almost identical to the texts sent to the other men on the kill list, Juan Manuel Moncada knew he’d be murdered.
“Amor, they’re going to kill me,” his wife Esmilda Rodas recalled him telling her in the weeks before his death. Rodas and other friends recall Manuel Moncada as bright and easy-going, but the last weeks of his life were filled with despair. On July 6, he was gunned down by two men at a crowded bank in downtown Tocoa.
“He never did anything wrong,” his wife said, pain still in her voice, speaking beneath the canopy of banana and guava trees at their adobe house in Panamá. Fearing for the safety of her oldest son, Rodas has since sent him to the United States without legal documents — one of many young residents to leave home in recent months, including two leaders of the land rights movement in Panamá.
On paper, Manuel Moncada should have been protected from such an act of violence: He was one of at least eight members of the Gregorio Chávez movement who’d been granted protections in 2019 by Honduras’s National Protection System (SNP, by its Spanish acronym) — a government program to defend imperiled activists — after leaders of the movement compiled and presented evidence of systematic violence against them. He was supposed to be able to call the police when he felt his life was in danger. But his wife and friends recall that the police never showed up when he called. “He had protective measures,” said GarcÃa, “but only to say they had them, because he never benefited from them.”
Amid that security vacuum, the Grupo de Torres has been targeting land defenders in Panamá, residents said. The group, residents told The Intercept, is based on a Dinant-owned section of the adjacent Paso Aguán plantation known as “the Ocho,” several kilometers from Panamá and accessible via two roads through the plantation. Satellite imagery from August 2020 shows a collection of huts on a part of the plantation consistent with the location described by residents. Pineda, the Dinant spokesperson, said that the company has no way of knowing whether Grupo de Torres is based on the plantation, because the company has been unable to enter the property since it “was illegally seized by lawless criminals who also murdered a guard in the process in 2018.”
Residents say the Torres paramilitary group patrols the town on motorcycles, usually in the late afternoon or evening, on an almost daily basis. They come in groups of two to four motorcycles, each with two men armed with AK-47s or AR-15s and bulletproof vests. Witnesses say the armed men often saunter around town’s narrow rutted backstreets, lingering in front of the houses of people they’ve threatened to kill with their weapons brandished.
Jasmin Hristov, a sociologist who has researched paramilitarism throughout Latin America for 15 years and has conducted fieldwork in the Aguán, said the model of planting armed groups within the community constitutes part of a much larger strategy: “It’s not unique to the Aguán or Honduras,” she said. “It’s definitely a strategy that dates back to the Cold War and counterinsurgency tactics. It’s a way to gather intelligence, to divide and break the community, to create fear and terror among people. It means people can’t act together against their common enemy.”
The Grupo de Torres is responsible for killing at least eight people since 2018, residents say, though some believe it’s likely an undercount. While many of the victims are connected to the land rights movement, others had attracted the paramilitaries’ attention in different ways. Santos Anselmo Molina, a former farmer turned Dinant security guard, was ambushed and killed by three gunmen in June 2020. He had been accused by the paramilitary group of passing information about the whereabouts of the group to members of the community, said a family member who declined to be named due to safety concerns.
The specter of murder isn’t an end, residents say, but rather the most extreme tool in a larger arsenal of intimidation, which also includes firing random gunfire at community events, following people to their homes and lingering outside, and death threats. They believe that the goal of the armed group is to get rid of the cooperative and shake its partial control of the Paso Aguán plantation.
“We’re living in terrorism in this community,” said Bertulia Castro, a resident of Panamá whose house was surrounded by the squads of motorcycle gunmen twice in July. When the paramilitaries come through the village, she said, they’re so well-equipped that it’s difficult to tell them apart from soldiers.
False Positives
Santos Marcelo Torres Ruiz, the head of Grupo de Torres, was feared by land rights activists throughout the Aguán. Santos Torres had provided security for Dinant in the mid-2000s. He joined the Gregorio Chávez cooperative after its formation in 2012 and quickly became a spokesperson for the movement.
With time, however, he became alienated from many in the movement because of his authoritarian leadership tendencies.
By 2014, Santos Torres was widely rumored by residents to be in dialogue with Dinant, even as evidence emerged suggesting that guards contracted by Dinant had been killing land rights activists. (Dinant has denied involvement in the killings.) Castro, who helped harvest palm fruit as an employee for Dinant from 1999 to 2017, said that she saw the paramilitary leader show up at meetings between managers and employees on a regular basis until the end of her time there. (In 2015, at the same time that Santos Torres was rumored to be talking to Dinant, a team of investigative journalists asked the company about its involvement in violent land conflicts, and the palm oil giant produced radio clips of then-movement spokesperson Santos Torres saying that, if necessary, he would “fill the streets with blood” to retake the Paso Aguán.)
In 2018, Santos Torres announced at a public meeting in Panamá that he had nothing to do with the Gregorio Chávez movement and was withdrawing with his supporters to the back of the Paso Aguán farm, owned by Dinant. “I don’t want any of you to come through there,” he was reported to have said. Later that year, villagers began to see Santos Torres and other armed men patrolling the community.
Pineda, the Dinant spokesperson, said Santos Torres never worked directly for Dinant but may have worked for Orion, a now-defunct security company that had a contract with Dinant prior to 2014. Pineda said he met with Santos Torres in 2013, when he was a part of the Gregorio Chávez movement, but that Dinant “did not have any direct relationship with Mr. Torres at any time.”
On June 26, Santos Torres was murdered while attending a church service in Panamá. The attack was captured on video by a security camera at a house across the street. The video showed eight men with high-caliber rifles, bulletproof vests, and balaclavas approaching the facade of the small squat church building, half in military uniforms, with others clad in all black, according to someone who viewed the video several times before it was seized as evidence by the Technical Agency for Criminal Investigations (ATIC, by its Spanish acronym). Two of the armed men walked inside where, out of view of the camera, they shot Santos Torres dead.
A spokesperson for the Public Ministry, the umbrella agency that runs the special unit of the ATIC in the Aguán, declined to discuss the circumstances around the killing. The spokesperson added that the killings of both Santos Torres and Manuel Moncada were under investigation.
“The army is getting rid of the paramilitaries with the worst reputation,” said a longtime land rights activist in the Aguán who asked not to be named for security reasons. “But at the same time they are taking advantage of this to criminalize defenders and cause hatred [against them] and make actions against them. In effect, they’re doing false positives.”
After he was killed, Honduran media outlets described Santos Torres as a “campesino leader” — reflecting a well-established narrative that depicts the violence as occurring within campesino movements, rather than being directed against them by outside actors.
Criminalization Campaigns
Members of the Gregorio Chávez movement in Panamá have submitted written complaints about Grupo de Torres to the authorities for years. The reports, several copies of which were shown to The Intercept, described in detail the death threats, unsolved killings, and the armed motorcycle patrols through their village. Residents said that authorities had done little in response.
That apparent indifference changed when Santos Torres was killed.
Jaime Cabrera said he received a call from a police officer whose name he recognized in Tegucigalpa, across the country, on the night of the killing. “I hear there’s been a murder in the countryside,” the officer said. “Do you know about it?”
Cabrera, whose house is about a half a mile down the road from the church, and who said the rain made it hard to hear much outside, said he was unaware that someone had been murdered. “I didn’t even know that he’d been killed yet,” he told The Intercept. The officer hung up before explaining how he already knew about the killing.
Around mid-July, ATIC agents separately detained Daniel GarcÃa and another member of the Gregorio Chávez cooperative and interrogated them about Santos Torres’s killing. (The second member asked not to be named, citing concerns for their safety.) It was an ominous sign: Operatives of the investigative unit, which was created with support from the U.S., have been accused of tampering with evidence, infiltrating social movements, and carrying out extrajudicial executions. Both said the ATIC agents offered them protection — and a visa to the U.S. or Europe — in exchange for testifying that two leaders of the Panamá cooperative, Hipólito Rivas and Jaime Cabrera, were the masterminds behind the paramilitary leader’s killing.
“I see you’re young, and I see a different life for you,” GarcÃa recalls one of the agents telling him. “I can take you out of the country, I can get you money.”
The offer would be tempting to many, considering the astronomical increase of people fleeing Honduras since 2018. But the two refused to betray their friends and instead fled Honduras, undocumented, on the perilous route north to the United States.
A Perpetual Cycle
Despite the specter of paramilitary infiltration and criminalization, campesino groups in the Aguán continue organizing to retake their land.
Since April 1, farmers from the San Isidro sector of Tocoa have occupied the Los Laureles plantation, which Dinant acquired in 1992. The activists say the sale was approved by only three out of 44 members of the landowners’ collective. Dinant, which maintains that it is the rightful owner of the land, has characterized the occupation as trespassing and called on the authorities to remove the occupants. A similar, larger occupation began at the Camarones plantation in August.
The day the occupation at Los Laureles began, the Honduran police arrived in full force. But they did not disperse the crowd because the campesinos provided documents that they said evidenced their ownership of the farm, copies of which were shown to The Intercept. “They believe we are armed,” said Pedro Antonio Vindel, the president of the Laureles. “But we aren’t because we don’t need them. The weapons we have are documents. And with those documents they haven’t been able to get rid of us because they know they have no argument to do so.” (Pineda said that Dinant has not seen those documents and that the land defenders have not challenged the company’s ownership of the land in court.)
Now the plantation is surrounded by Honduran police and private security guards contracted by Dinant, who travel in joint patrols in the same trucks. Drones hover overhead at all hours of the day and follow the land defenders around the plantation, their soft, hornet-like whine audible from the ground. Multiple members of the occupation, upon leaving the rusted metal gate with their cargo of harvested African palm, have been arrested by police.
On a July evening, activist Yoni Rivas gave a speech to a crowd carrying machetes at the ramshackle store they’d set up beneath the palms. “They’re trying to find the weak among you, to pay them off, to arm them and have the campesino movement destabilized from within.”
But residents say they’ve already seen three young men going out at night and meeting with people they believe to be Dinant security guards on a regular basis. In October, five bruised and bloodied corpses, including one of a man whose hands were tied behind his back, were discovered in three communities that have been the site of land conflict, including Los Laureles and Panamá, sparking fears from land rights organizations of more violence to come.
“The conflict has already started,” said Abraham Leon, the secretary of the Los Laureles cooperative. “We’re afraid. I don’t feel safe in the cooperative anymore.” The paramilitary infiltration of Laureles, Leon said, is already beginning.
The sharp-tailed grouse is native to the northern prairies of the U.S. (photo: DNR)
The Great Plains are being torn up at a ferocious rate – with frightening implications for biodiversity and carbon storage
“The solitude out there is incredible, and there’s enormous bird diversity in grasslands, the sounds that they make if you’re there in the spring,” says Ledlum, a scientist with the World Wildlife Fund’s northern Great Plains program. “It’s just this natural, incredible chorus and a lot of the species that you see on grass, and you don’t see anywhere else in the world.”
Grasslands used to cover a large swath of North America before European settlement. When Europeans arrived, they quickly plowed up about half of the grasslands on the continent and converted them to agricultural use, growing corn, soybeans and wheat. And today, new research shows the rate that the ecosystem is being lost has been increasing.
Lendrum led a research team that released a report in September showing that from 2018 to 2019 an estimated 2.6m acres of grassland were plowed up, primarily to make way for row crop agriculture – an area larger than Yellowstone national park.
For a few years, the rate of grassland loss was decreasing. But then in 2018 and 2019, the number started to increase again, Lendrum says. “That’s an alarming trend.” It’s also a huge blow for efforts to fight the climate crisis and represents a little reported unfolding environmental disaster in the US.
There are a web of reasons why more grasslands are turning into crops. Farmers and ranchers make decisions based on global commodity prices. There’s an increased demand for crops for human food, livestock feed and fuel. Biofuels like ethanol boomed in 2009 or 2010 and that increased demand.
“Grasslands are mostly used for grazing of livestock and when that balance gets out of line, and crop agriculture becomes more profitable, that’s when we see the resurgence of the tillup,” says Tyler Lark, an researcher at the University of Wisconsin who has studied grasslands for the past decade.
Urban sprawl also plays into it: Lark is researching the ways that croplands are being turned into housing – so the total amount of cropland isn’t expanding that much, but it’s being developed for residential use, and crops are being pushed to the periphery. “It’s almost a cascading effect, as we look at future urban expansion,” he says.
Lark’s research shows grasslands lost in the past years have been considered marginal, less productive land than other places where farmers could grow crops. At the same time, these marginal areas contain some of the highest-quality habitats – nesting sites for breeding birds and habitat for monarch butterflies.
There are enormous implications for climate change when people dig up grasses that have been intact for hundreds of years, because grasslands store tons of carbon in their soils. Native prairie grasses have deep roots that stabilize the soil and prevent erosion.
When people plow it up, it releases carbon into the atmosphere. It also exposes the soil to the air, which increases erosion and can also lead to nitrate leaching.
People often think of forests as natural ecosystems that store huge amounts of carbon, Lark says. But grasslands store immense amounts as well, out of sight, under the ground. “When we plow those up, a lot does become lost. If we can reduce the conversion, that will go a long way in lowering emissions.”
Once grasslands have been destroyed for agriculture, Lendrum says, it can take decades or even centuries to restore them. The WWF is working with landowners to convert croplands back into grasslands, but the process is slow and expensive. “Once that piece of grass is initially tilled, it’s very difficult to restore those ecosystem benefits,” says Lendrum. “Carbon in particular, it’s a slow process.”
Grasslands can seem like uncharismatic open land waiting for human activity. Everyone knows about the destruction of the Amazon, but grasslands are off their radar, in “flyover country”, Lendrum says.
Additionally, people need to eat, and there’s been a long history of moving west and growing crops in the prairies – American history is full of stories of expansion into the middle of the continent to farm food. And that need to generate crops has economic benefits but has to strike a balance with the ecological realities. Lark says the future is really about using the croplands we have already in the most efficient manner, and improving yields. “There is lots of room to expand production without expanding cropland area – it’s just easier to expand area than work on innovation.”
There is also an opportunity for leadership in the private sector and corporations, as consumers increasingly take notice. Just as increased attention to rainforests and savannah led to protecting them globally from deforestation, the same level of awareness could be applied to grasslands. Lark says he could see campaigns around native ecosystems, conversion-free supply chains, and products that aren’t contributing to the loss of grasslands.
Ben Turner, a natural resource management scientist at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas, says he sees the seeds planted for a more active future: there is a renaissance of research in grasslands. And consumers are becoming increasingly interested in where their food comes from, how animals are cared for, and how the land is managed.
“We’re not going to reclaim even a small percentage of all the grasslands we’ve lost,” he says. But farmers can make cropland as functional as grasslands used to be, by diversifying crop systems, integrating livestock with crops, and finding ways to value ecosystem services like pollinators and migratory birds. “What needs to change is the public will to actually see changes happening – and that’s longer-term.”
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